Recession Signal As Consumers Struggle To Pay Bills

75 Gulf Energy Assets Damaged In U.S.-Iran War As Supply Shock Intensifies International Energy Agency (IEA) Executive Director Fatih Birol was interviewed by the French newspaper Le Figaro earlier on Tuesday and warned that the Gulf energy shock "is more severe than those of 1973, 1979, and 2022 combined" because it is affecting oil, gas, food, fertilizers, petrochemicals, helium, and global trade all at once. Birol said in the interview that more than 75 energy sites across the Gulf region have been attacked, with about a third severely damaged, suggesting tens...

Wall Street Bonus Pool Hits Record Despite "Domestic And International Upheavals" As the K-shaped economy rages on, gasoline and diesel prices at the pump spike, and risks of food inflation later this year mount, Wall Street's bonus pool surged to a record in 2025, even as the Trump administration insists the inflationary shock is temporary. On Thursday, New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli released a new report showing that the Wall Street bonus pool surged to a record $49.2 billion in 2025, up 9% from the previous year, while the average...

We Want One Solution, But One Solution Can't Solve Our Polycrisis Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via Substack, Whatever the problem, our minds seek one solution--preferably a simple one--to escape the trackless wilderness of complex, inter-connected problems. Problem-solving boils down to identifying the key problem and finding a fix that’s easy to understand and straightforward to apply. Our minds rebel when confronted with polycrisis, a knotted mess of inter-connected problems, and so we apply solutions we already have in hand. As I explained in previous Musings, this leads us to modify our...