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He's saving people's wallets, one fried chicken sandwich at a time.

If President Trump can make a comeback, why not Michael Cohen?

Red Sea Blockage Fears: Cargo Ship Attacked Off Southwest Yemen

A Red Sea disruption would be terrible timing for global shipping and energy markets, coming just as vessel traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has started to normalize in recent weeks.

An overnight report that a cargo ship was attacked by "armed assailants" in the southern Red Sea off Yemen is a reminder that the region's maritime-risk premium has not totally disappeared; it has simply shifted chokepoints.

"UKMTO has received a report of an incident 30NM southwest of Al Hudaydah, Yemen. A cargo vessel has triggered a distress alert stating that they are under attack by unknown armed assailants," the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations wrote in an alert published on X early Sunday morning.

If the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the southern gateway of the Red Sea that sits between Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula, begins flashing red again, the Suez-Red Sea maritime trade route could quickly become a major headache for global shipping companies, forcing more vessels around the Cape of Good Hope and reigniting pressure on freight rates, insurance costs, and energy-linked supply chains - thus fueling inflation.

Nomura's Chief Economist for India and Asia ex-Japan, Sonal Varma, recently outlined for clients the critical importance of the Red Sea:

Since the Houthi attacks in 2023, global trade via the Red Sea has fallen, but the Bal el-Mandeb Strait and Suez Canal still account for 9% of global maritime traffic, ~20% of global container traffic and ~8.7% of world oil supply (including the SUMED pipeline). The Cape of Good Hope is an alternative route that will be used, but it involves longer transit times, higher fuel costs and increased freight rates.

Why this matters for Asia:

Most of the crude oil and condensate shipped via the Red Sea is destined for Asia (~68% of total), especially India. Around 40% of Asia-Europe trade transited through the Suez Canal in early 2024, including manufactured goods (electronics, vehicles and textiles), intermediate inputs for supply chains (auto and electronic components) and agricultural products (wheat, rice, sugar and tea).

Implications for Asia:

With the Strait of Hormuz blocked, Red Sea disruptions would aggravate the supply crunch. The cost of oil and petroleum product imports would rise for the region overall, with a higher burden for India, owing to its dependence on Russian oil via the Suez Canal. Asia's exports to Europe could also be adversely affected, due to higher freight costs and longer transit times. The dependence of the European auto industry on component imports from Asia would also likely impact the auto sector.

Latest Gulf area news (courtesy of Bloomberg):

Khamenei Funeral Proceedings

• Iran began a mass funeral for Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday, July 4, with his body lying in state at Tehran's Imam Khomeini Mosalla mosque complex for public visits over the weekend

• Tens of thousands of mourners streamed to the Grand Mosalla religious complex in Tehran on Saturday to view the caskets of Khamenei and some of his family members

• Iranian authorities predict up to 20 million people will turn out over six days of funeral ceremonies beginning Saturday

• Khamenei's coffin, wrapped in an Iranian flag, was placed on a platform alongside the coffins of family members killed in the same US-Israeli attack on February 28

Khamenei's Death and War Context

• Khamenei, who ruled over Iran for 37 years, was killed along with several family members in a US and Israeli airstrike on the first day of the war in late February

• Iran feared it was too dangerous to hold funeral rites for four months, but is now proceeding shielded by a tentative truce and an America distracted by its 250th July Fourth celebration

Post-War Political Landscape

• Iran's new leadership is described as younger, savvier, ruthless and even more hard-line, contradicting Trump's claim of accomplishing "regime change"

• After surviving months of strikes by the US and Israel, the Iranian regime has emerged emboldened

Hormuz Tensions

• At least eight ships attempting to leave the Persian Gulf along the Omani coast turned back between Friday and Saturday, with some switching to a route closer to Iran

• The number of vessels sailing through the Strait of Hormuz along the Omani coast fell to a trickle on Sunday, after several made sharp reversals on Saturday

• Iran's ambassador to Beijing said China and other friendly nations will be granted 'special considerations' when Tehran determines service fees for ships using the Strait of Hormuz

• Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister warned the UK and France against meddling in the Strait of Hormuz, stating it is not a military playground for extra-regional powers

International Naval Presence

• French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle will return to its home port in Toulon after a nearly two-month deployment near the Strait of Hormuz, while mine countermeasure assets will remain deployed 

Oil Market

• Major OPEC+ members agreed on Sunday to add 188,000 barrels a day to their output target for next month, adding to the prospect of more supply if a US-Iran peace pact can stick

• Flows of oil and natural gas have been returning to normal and prices have tumbled since an interim US-Iran accord was signed last month that pried open the Strait of Hormuz

Latest ZH Coverage:

• Ships Abruptly U-Turn Near Hormuz As Some Shift To Iran-Approved Routes

• Europe Capitulates, Sees Iranian Hormuz Fee Collection As 'Inevitable'

• Iran Runs Into Big Problem: No Buyers For Its Oil, As Full Tankers Pile Up Off China

• 'Gave Iran Week Off Because We're Nice': Trump References Ayatollah Funeral In Rushmore Speech

Professional subscribers can read more on energy markets and chokepoints here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal. 

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/05/2026 - 09:55

The Yankees will be on Peacock this afternoon.

We need Season 2 ASAP!

Wage Growth As A Leading Inflation Indicator

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

Wage growth peaked four years ago. Since 1985, it has led CPI by three to seventeen months in every single cycle. The May 4.2% inflation print is the noise. Watch the wages.

Headline CPI just printed 4.2% year-over-year for May. The highest reading since April 2023. The 10-year Treasury punched above 4.6% on the back of it, then pulled back recently. Energy ran +23.5% over the past twelve months on the Iran war, accounting for roughly 60% of the monthly all-items gain, and the doom crowd keeps pushing this is 1979 all over again with rate hikes ahead, a recession behind, and a cornered Fed. Here is why they are likely wrong.

After three decades of watching inflation cycles turn, I can tell you the variable that actually leads CPI peaks is wage growth. And wage growth peaked fifty months ago.

Wage Growth Leads. CPI Follows.

For decades, economists taught the Phillips Curve as if it were a law of physics. Tight labor markets push wages up. Higher wages push prices up. Inflation is born. That model worked through the 1970s. It hasn’t worked since.

Two things broke it. First, Paul Volcker pushed the funds rate to 19% in 1981 and held it there until the wage-price spiral snapped, and union density collapsed. COLA clauses vanished from labor contracts, globalization began pulling tradeable-goods prices toward the global marginal cost of production, and the entire institutional architecture that had transmitted wage gains into consumer prices through the 1970s came apart. By the mid-1980s, the relationship had inverted.

Second, the Fed earned credibility. Once households and firms believed the central bank would tolerate a deep recession to stop inflation, expectations re-anchored near 2%. Workers stopped pricing future inflation into today’s wage demands. I walked through the duration implications of this regime in my recent rising-rates piece, so I won’t relitigate the bond math here.

Here’s the inversion in plain terms. Before 1985, CPI ran first. Workers chased it with catch-up raises. Wages followed prices. After 1985, the causation flipped. Wage growth comes first because tight labor markets signal demand pressure before that pressure is transmitted to consumer prices. Wages aren’t reacting anymore. They’re forecasting.

That distinction sounds small, but it changes everything. It changes which indicator tells you something, and whether today’s CPI print is information or noise. It also changes how to interpret the current data, which the doom crowd is misreading.

Four Cycles, Four Times Wages Led

The chart below plots wage growth in black against CPI in red, from 1965 through May 2026. The gold-tinted section is pre-Volcker. The white section is post-1985.

Look at the pre-1985 stretch. The red line peaks first. The black line follows. In 1970, CPI peaked in February. Wages didn’t top out until May 1971, fifteen months later. In 1980, CPI peaked in March. Wages peaked in January 1981, ten months later. The 1974 oil shock is the only pre-1985 case in which wages and the CPI peaked together.

Now look at the post-1985 stretch. The pattern flips.

In 1990, wages peaked in June and CPI peaked in October, a four-month lead. Then, in the 2008 cycle, wages peaked in February 2007 while CPI didn’t peak until July 2008, a seventeen-month lead. In the post-Great Recession cycle, wages peaked in May 2010, and the CPI peaked sixteen months later in September 2011. And in 2022, wages peaked in March, and CPI peaked in June, a tight three-month lead driven by goods inflation transmitting quickly through broken supply chains rather than the slower wage-to-services pathway that had run the previous three cycles. Same direction every time.

Over four different cycles, wages repeatedly led. The lead ranged from three to seventeen months, and the direction never broke.

When Real Wages Compress, Inflation Dies

The lead-lag pattern is the headline finding. The deeper mechanism runs through real wages.

Real wage growth is nominal wage growth minus CPI inflation. When workers’ wages outpace prices, they spend more. They sustain demand, and inflation has room to keep running. When prices outpace wages, workers cut back. Demand falls. Inflation rolls over within about a year.

I ran the correlation across every monthly observation from January 1965 through May 2024. The correlation between today’s real wage growth and the change in CPI over the following twenty-four months is +0.72 across 713 monthly observations. That’s an extraordinarily strong relationship in macro data, where values above 0.5 are rare.

When real wages compress to negative levels, the next two years see CPI deceleration. When real wages run hot, CPI accelerates over the following two years. The relationship holds in both regimes. The gold pre-1985 dots show it. The navy post-1985 dots show it.

Now look at where we are.

Real wage growth ran +1% to +1.5% through most of 2024. It’s now -0.6%. Workers are no longer outrunning inflation; they’re falling behind, and although this isn’t the four-percent compression of 1980 or the deep negative readings that preceded the 2008 demand collapse, the direction matters because every single time real wages have crossed below zero in the post-1985 sample, CPI has rolled over on a twelve-to-twenty-four-month lag. The pattern is clean.

2008, Re-Run

The closest parallel to the current setup isn’t 1979. It’s 2008.

In early 2007, wage growth peaked at around 4.1%. The labor market was strong. Unemployment was below 5%. Real wages were positive but compressing. Then oil prices rose from $60 to $147 in 18 months. Headline CPI followed the oil chart straight up. By July 2008, CPI was running at 5.5%, and every television commentator was warning of runaway inflation.

What happened next? Demand cratered. The real-wage compression had been working in the background for over a year. By the time CPI peaked, the consumer was already broken. Within twelve months, CPI was negative. The worry wasn’t inflation anymore. It was deflation.

I’m not predicting a 2008-style collapse. Bank balance sheets are stronger now, household leverage is lower, the labor market hasn’t started shedding jobs the way it did in late 2007, and the Fed has more room to act than it did when the funds rate was already at 5.25% on the eve of the financial crisis. But the inflation setup is structurally identical. We have a clean wage peak that led the cycle by years. We have an oil-driven CPI bump landing on top of decelerating wage growth. And we have a bond market still digesting, which signal matters.

Notice in the chart above how cleanly wages turned over in March 2022. CPI followed three months later. Since then, both have fallen. The May bounce on the red line is the Iranian energy shock. Wages didn’t bounce. That divergence is the tell.

What The Doom Crowd Needs To Believe

The bear case isn’t crazy. It needs two things to be true that aren’t true yet.

First, wage growth has to re-accelerate. The story goes that tariffs and immigration restrictions tighten the labor market, wages rise again, and a second wave of inflation ratifies the headline bounce. The problem is the data. Wage growth in May was 3.56%, the lowest reading of the entire current cycle. The deceleration has been monotonic from the 7.0% peak in March 2022 through every month of the past four years, and labor market indicators from the JOLTS quits rate to the Atlanta Fed Wage Growth Tracker continue to point in the same direction. No turn yet.

Second, long-run inflation expectations have to de-anchor. That’s the 1970s playbook. It’s also where the Fed’s credibility lives. Currently, there is little risk of that as the 10-year breakeven inflation rate sits near 2.4%. The Cleveland Fed’s 5-year forward rate expectations are near 2.5%.

What This Means For Portfolios

Three implications. First, the duration sell-off looks overdone. When the 10-year is above 4.5%, it is pricing structural inflation. However, wage growth is telling you the structural force runs in the opposite direction, the breakeven curve is barely budging from its 2.4% base, and the bond market’s ten-basis-point rally on the Iran peace headline told you exactly what the marginal buyer thinks is driving the recent move. I made the broader case for owning duration into a wage-led disinflation in my recent rising-rates piece, and nothing in the May print changes the view.

Second, the trade is asymmetric. If wages keep decelerating, 10-year yields will fall meaningfully over the next 12 months. If wages re-accelerate, the monthly prints will tell you in time to adjust. The cost of being wrong is small. The cost of missing the move is high.

Third, the equity tilt favors quality compounders and long-duration growth over commodity producers. Disinflation expands multiples but compresses cyclical earnings. The 2008-2009 pattern was multiples up, EPS down. A milder version of that setup tilts the same way.

Inflation isn’t a single print. It’s a regime. Regimes are determined by what leads, not what follows.

The doom crowd is staring at a coincident indicator being pushed around by an oil shock and calling it a trend, when the actual leading indicator, the one that’s worked in every single post-Volcker cycle, the one with a +0.72 correlation against the path of CPI over the next two years, is wage growth, and wage growth peaked fifty months ago, sits at 3.6%, and is dragging real wages into compression. That setup forecasts disinflation. NOT acceleration.

I’m not saying inflation is dead. I’m saying the burden of proof has shifted. Until wages turn up and expectations de-anchor, watch the wages

Frequently Asked Questions Why does wage growth lead CPI after 1985 but lag it before?

In the pre-Volcker era, inflation expectations were unanchored. Workers and firms priced wages today based on expected future inflation, so wages tracked CPI. After Volcker broke the wage-price spiral and the Fed established credibility, expectations stabilized. Wages now reflect labor-market tightness rather than expected inflation, meaning wage growth signals demand pressure before it shows up in consumer prices.

If wage growth peaked in March 2022, why did CPI peak only three months later?

The 2022 cycle was unusual because the CPI peak was driven heavily by goods inflation from supply-chain disruptions and the oil price spike driven by the war, which quickly translated into higher prices. In more typical cycles, such as 2008 or 2011, the lead time stretched to 16-17 months. The current setup more closely resembles 2008, where an oil shock layered on top of an already-decelerating underlying trend.

How do you measure real wage growth, and why does it matter?

Real wage growth is nominal wage growth (AHETPI YoY) minus CPI YoY. It measures whether workers are getting richer or poorer in real terms. When real wages are positive, consumers sustain demand, and inflation has room to keep running. When real wages turn negative, consumers cut back, demand falls, and inflation tends to roll over within twelve to twenty-four months. The May 2026 reading is -0.6%, the lowest of this cycle.

What would change your view on this thesis?

Two things. First, a sustained re-acceleration in wage growth, meaning the labor market is tightening again rather than slowly normalizing. Second, a meaningful rise in long-run inflation expectations, particularly the 10-year breakeven rate above 3% or the Michigan 5-10-year survey above 4%. Either would shift the probability distribution. Until then, wage growth continues to point toward disinflation.

Why is the 10-year Treasury elevated if wages are pointing to disinflation?

The bond market is reacting to the May CPI print and the renewed oil shock, both of which are coincident or backward-looking signals. The 10-year breakeven sits near 2.4%, meaning most of the yield rise reflects higher real rates and term premium rather than higher inflation expectations. That’s a different story from 1979. Yields fell roughly ten basis points the day the Iran peace headlines hit, which tells you the market knows the inflation bump is energy-driven.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/05/2026 - 09:20

A famed New York Times podcaster ignited a social media firestorm for railing against the dozens of military flyovers roaring across DC's skies and what became a record-breaking fireworks show.

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Australian PM Anthony Albanese got loose during a whiskey-fueled new podcast interview, even name-dropping his celeb crush.

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If you can stomach the Mets, Nolan McLean has at least been a beacon of hope for the inured faithful. 

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The UK's Latest "Debanking" Scandal Should Give Everyone Pause

Authored by Nick Corbishley via NakedCapitalism.com,

UK-based readers may recall the moment almost exactly three years ago when the word “debanking” entered the mainstream British English lexicon. The prestigious London-based private bank Coutts had just decided to close Nigel Farage’s bank account due to his unsavoury political views and alleged Russian connections. That decision turned out to be very costly.

Almost immediately, Farage did what Farage does best: he whipped up a massive media frenzy. In next to no time two senior banking scalps had been claimed: those of Dame Alison Rose, the CEO of Coutts’ parent bank and “Big Four” lender, Natwest (formerly known as the Royal Bank of Scotland) and Coutts’ chief executive Peter Flavel.

Within a month, Natwest’s share price had slumped 8%, wiping £1 billion off its market cap, much of which was being propped up with public funds, and generating juicy returns for short-selling hedge funds. As we reported at the time, the resulting scandal drew much-needed public attention to a long-standing but accelerating trend — the “de-banking” of people and organisations with politically inconvenient views:

[T]his is hardly a one-off event: as I reported a couple of weeks ago, banks on both sides of the Atlantic are increasingly debanking their customers, often without explanation. I gave the example of California-based writer, activist, and social and political commentator Elad Nehorai, whose political views and ideals could not diverge more from those of Nigel Farage. Yet he, too, had his account at Bank of America, his bank of many years, summarily closed with no apparent warning or explanation…

Without a bank account, it is almost impossible to participate in the economy. And it is getting more difficult as cash becomes harder and harder to access and use. As Alex Lo writes for South China Morning Post, “Banking is a fundamental utility like water and electricity, and that’s precisely why democratic societies are increasingly turning to its use as a method of censorship and repression.”

However, the resulting government inquiry concluded that customers were not being “debanked” for political reasons. As a result, not only has debanking continued but debanked customers now face the prospect of being blocked from setting up new accounts at other banks, as the Telegraph reported on Monday:

Banks are planning to block “debanked” customers from setting up accounts with other lenders, potentially leading to innocent people being effectively locked out of the financial system, The Telegraph can reveal.

Lobby group UK Finance is developing a platform that will allow banks to share data on their customers where they detect “markers of economic crime”.

Lloyds, Barclays and Revolut have already started sharing data about customers, leading to accounts being frozen or closed, The Telegraph understands, following a pilot in 2024.

The data-sharing platform will build on that pilot to make a UK-wide system, which could automatically bar people from opening another account.

But concerns have been raised that thousands of innocent customers and businesses who have been debanked unfairly could be barred from opening up an account with another bank, effectively leaving them locked out of the financial system.

The latest victim of the debanking trend is the left-wing news website The Canary, which has accused the Lloyds Banking Group of “withholding a substantial amount of our money”  after nearly a decade of use. The news outlet — which brands itself as “radical working-class media” — says “Lloyds has not explained why it has taken this action… despite multiple communications from us”.

In a statement on Tuesday, the Canary speculated about the possible reasons behind Lloyds’ decision, including its anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine stance:

Whilst we do not currently know the reasons behind our debanking, we cannot afford to be naive about this.

We do know that multiple other politically engaged people have suffered similar actions by other banks in recent times. It is not lost on us that powerful banks are able to restrict the financial activity of anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine organisations and individuals.

It is an outrage that the Canary has been unceremoniously dropped into financial instability with no notice or explanation from Lloyds.

Starmer’s Last Attack

It would hardly come as a surprise the attack was in response to The Canary’s pro-Palestine sympathies. The UK government has done everything within its not inconsiderable powers to criminalise pro-Palestine, anti-genocide activism, including by scrapping the ancient right to trial by jury. Through its new National Security Law, the outgoing Keir Starmer government seeks to bulldoze literal thought crime legislation into law — in Orwell’s native United Kingdom.

I need to explain something very important to you.

The law that the govt used to arrest me, Section 12(1A) — the first ever use against a journalist — is a very short line. It is vague on purpose. And that is the exact line they have copied into the new "National Security Bill"

— Richard Medhurst (@richimedhurst) July 1, 2026

You can say something that is 100% factual, but if it paints what they deem a "proscribed organization" — even one that has never harmed the UK — in a "good" light, you can get 14 years in prison. (That's also copied from the Terrorism Act).

Anything you say can be twisted.

— Richard Medhurst (@richimedhurst) July 1, 2026

An article in The Canary explains just how dire a threat the new National Security Law poses to journalism and political dissent, describing it as “one last power grab” by Keir Starmer’s outgoing government:

As I am sat here writing this, there’s a sense of terror kicking in. I’m a journalist. It’s my job to be in the know about foreign affairs. At the Canary we pride ourselves on bringing people the news that the mainstream doesn’t dare. But this terror is absolutely nothing compared to what other people must be feeling.

This radicalised weaponisation of new legislation will hit marginalised communities so first and hardest. Journalists and community workers with direct, lived and painful connections to global conflict zones are facing a massive legal trap. If a reporter so much as quotes an entity that the home secretary has designated as a threat, they face immediate prosecution.

Civil liberties groups warn that the law will grant the Home Office absolute power to decide who is allowed to speak. And by leaving the definition of ‘assisting a designated body’ vague, the state has created a total monopoly on the narrative. It’s very much going to be, follow their way and toe the line, or go to jail, it seems.

Indie media outlet Zeteo warned of the severe danger of this new power-grab. The outlet warned that journalists face immediate arrest simply for conducting public interest interviews with banned groups. People will only get one side of the story. There will only be one narrative fed to us… and it will be the government’s.

The timing of Lloyds Bank’s debanking of The Canary is also curious, coming just two months after it announced the launch of a daily left-wing print tabloid — and what’s more, one that defends Palestinian rights. Following an injection of cash last year from used car and property website founder Cecil Hetherington, Canary director Steve Topple hailed the new tabloid as an alternative to the corporate press.

After its debanking, the Canary says it is now in a “financially precarious situation” and does not know when “money that Lloyds is holding will be returned” or how it will affect “our ability to get another bank account in the future”.

“The immediate effect has been that we have been unable to pay any staff or contractors,” Topple told Novara Media. “We have a large team, and all of them are now extremely distressed and in limbo. Many of them are marginalised people and it has hit them very hard. We are trying our best to mitigate the situation and have so far received much-appreciated support from members of the public.”

Lloyds’ actions have already triggered a storm of protests from across the political spectrum.

This is a disgraceful move by @LloydsBank

Be under no illusion, it's an attack on all independent media in UK that doesn't tow the government line

If Lloyds doesn't sort this immediately, a widespread boycott campaign should ensue https://t.co/VbdqcKcI9i

— Matt Kennard (@kennardmatt) July 1, 2026

Corbyn told the Canary that the anti-democratic attempt to silence an independent news site was "a very dangerous road"

Via @skwawkbox https://t.co/rgxQhu6HmI

— Canary (@TheCanaryUK) July 2, 2026

The Canary has been debanked by Lloyds.

Debanking is one of the most pernicious forms of cancellation that an individual or organisation can face — something the FSU is only too familiar with.

Lloyds has provided no explanation for its decision and has not told The Canary when… https://t.co/Y2YKbFC1wu

— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) June 30, 2026 A Growing Phenomenon

The first major target of debanking in the UK, well over a decade ago, were members of the British Muslim community, particularly those involved in Pro-Palestinian activism. But unlike with Farage, their plight was met with total radio silence in the mainstream media, as the veteran journalist Peter Oborne recounts in the video below.

Peter Oborne Exposes Nigel Farage Banking Bigotry @OborneTweets pic.twitter.com/sir2vSAPlq

— Double Down News (@DoubleDownNews) July 11, 2023

By the time Farage had lost access to Coutts’ banking services, in the summer of 2023, banks in the UK were closing nearly one thousand accounts daily, with just over 343,000 closed in 2022, compared to about 45,000 in 2017.

Following the Farage affair, the Financial Conduct Authority conducted an investigation into banks’ debanking practices, the conclusion of which was that banks had not been closing customers’ accounts for political reasons. Farage described the outcome as “farcical”.

In the US, recent victims of debanking include Scott Ritter, the former United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspector who is a prominent critic of US and Western imperialism. In January, his bank of 26 years, Citizens’ Bank, closed all of his accounts, including his and his wife’s joint accounts with their daughters, without offering an explanation, as he recounts in the first minutes of the following interview with Judge Napolitano:

In a letter to Ritter Citizens Bank apparently that not only was it under no obligation to divulge the reasons for closing his accounts but that Citizens’ policy actively prevents any disclosure of any information concerning the decision to close the account. As Cato Institute notes, this silent treatment often has to do with confidentiality laws:

However, these are not laws meant to protect the financial privacy of customers. Rather, this confidentiality is to prevent citizens from finding out they are under criminal investigation. For example, reports filed under the Bank Secrecy Act are restricted so heavily that banks cannot share the details of the reports or even admit that a report exists.

While Ritter does not know the exact reasons for his debanking, he suspects that someone in the FBI, fully armed with the “totality of [his] banking transactions”, had “tipped off” Citizens Bank about “suspicious activity” that resulted in Citizens Bank issuing an SAR [Suspicious Activity Report].”

Ritter believes that donations he had received and subsequent cash withdrawals before his three trips to Russia in 2025, which thanks to US and EU sanctions is disconnected from the Western economy, may have triggered the move. According to Ritter, the “purpose of “de-banking” is to harass a targeted individual,” even in the absence of evidence pointing to any criminal activity.”

The reasons for an account closure, while often a mystery to the customers affected, often include operational reasons. Put simply, a financial institution chooses to close the account of a customer because the reputational risks of being associated with that client are simply too high. However, political or ideological motivations appear to play a part in some prominent cases.

The most clear-cut example of this was the Canadian government’s decision, in February 2022, to invoke the emergencies act to compel banks to seize the accounts of the freedom convoy protesters who had blocked several key border crossings. According to the minutes of a meeting between Canada’s Economy Minister, Vice President and WEF board member Chrystia Freeland and senior bank executives the day before the act was invoked, one CEO flagged concerns that if banks were forced to close accounts, it could be seen as the sector “being used as an arm of the government” or even “a political weapon.”

In 2022, Paypal banned the accounts of the UK-based Free Speech Union, its founder Toby Young and his online publication, the Daily Sceptic, for purportedly breaching its policies against hate speech. Worse still, the fintech giant surreptitiously slipped a line into its terms of service granting itself the right to fine customers $2,500 for spreading misinformation. When the news got out, provoking a huge public backlash, PayPal claimed it had all been a big mistake.

Of course, as NC readers EssCetera and Rev Kev pointed out in comments to a previous post, Paypal has a long, storied history of doing this sort of thing, going all the way back to its freezing of Wikileaks’ account in 2010. And banks in the US have been closing down the accounts of workers in the porn industry since at least 2014 as part of “Operation Chokepoint”, which targeted certain undesirable but legal business sectors (h/t Michaelmas).

From “Debanking” to “Civil Death”

If there’s one fate worse than being debanked, it is suffering through the ordeal of “civil death”. Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Palestinian occupied territories, became subject to US sanctions roughly a year ago that cut her and her family off not only from US banking but also travel and tech.

In Albanese’s case, it was clear to her why she was being put under constraints normally reserved for narco-barons and terrorists: she had just published a UN report denouncing the more than 60 (largely Western) multinational corporations that are allegedly complicit in, and profiting from, Israel’s military occupation of Gaza.

“This fury [came] because I poked the bear,” she said. “Not in one eye, in both eyes.”

👉 “The moment I pointed to the fact that there are businesses who are profiting from it, yes, I get sanctioned.”

The first UN expert in 80 years to be sanctioned by the U.S. explains why she now faces a U.S. travel ban, frozen accounts, no ability to bank anywhere, cancelled… https://t.co/ia3WLhmyV7

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) December 11, 2025

In the clip below, Albanese explains (in French), as she fights back tears, the extent to which she has been barred from participating in basic civil life since the imposition of US sanctions against her:

“I can’t make payments with my working credit card nor can I do transfers; my health insurance has been cancelled, I can’t make hotel reservations… I’m being treated as if I were Pablo Escobar. “

UN official Albanese described financial and insurance restrictions imposed on her following her public statement characterizing Israeli actions as genocide.

"I can't make payments with my working credit card nor can I do transfers; my health insurance has been canceled, I can't… pic.twitter.com/zAH7paGjxm

— HatsOff (@HatsOffff) June 30, 2026

Other victims of civil death, this time at the hands of EU authorities, include the German journalist Hüseyin Doğru and Jacques Baud, a retired Swiss colonel and former senior strategic analyst for NATO. In both cases, the justifications were openly ideological. Baud was accused of of acting as a “mouthpiece” for pro-Russian propaganda and disseminating “conspiracy theories” about the war in Ukraine while Doğru was targeted due to his reporting on Gaza.

In the case of Doğru, both his wife and mother were also targeted with sanctions (h/t vao). In neither case were criminal charges imposed, and because the sanctions are defined as an administrative measure within the EU’s bureaucracy, neither Baud nor Dogru can appeal to a court of law in their respective countries of residence (Belgium and Germany). This is the very definition of Kafkaesque.

Worse still, these sorts of processes could soon be automated almost across the board, as I warned in my 2022 book Scanned:

Combining [central bank] digital currencies with digital IDs while phasing out, or even banning, the use of cash would grant governments and central banks the ability not only to track every purchase we make (and made in the past) but also to determine what we can and cannot spend our money on. They could also prevent certain “undesirable” people from buying anything. Anyone with a blocking notice attached to their digital identity would “thus be unable to do many of the most basic things independently,” says [German financial journalist Norbert] Häring.

Incidentally, the digital euro has already become a de facto legal reality, after the European Parliament (EP)’s economic and monetary affairs committee gave a green light to the eurozone central bank digital currency (CBDC) last week. Presumably, even many members of our highly informed readership will have been unaware of this fact since it all occurred against a wall of near-total media silence.

Tyler Durden Sun, 07/05/2026 - 08:10

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Eliezer Alfonzo had waited a lifetime for the call he got Friday. So, too, had his 16-year-old little sister. “One of her dreams was watching me play in the big leagues,” the Dodgers’ new backup catcher said. “And today I have the opportunity to be here, being part of a big-league team.” Eliezer Alfonzo Sr.’s...

"Dave is an axe to grind person and he'll never give it up," a source in the know told Page Six, while admitting that Cooper and Franklyn were "extremely difficult from the jump."

"Dave is an axe to grind person and he'll never give it up," a source in the know told Page Six, while admitting that Cooper and Franklyn were "extremely difficult from the jump."

Ideology is ironically trumping science in the heat wave cooking Europe. America's progressives should take note.

Millie Bobby Brown, Kevin Hart, Kit Connor, and Joe Locke lead the way in movies, specials, and live events streaming on Netflix in July, so be sure to see them thrive in the terrific titles dropping throughout the month.