Yes, the Latest Bank Bailout Is Really a Bailout, and You Are Paying for It.

G-7 Leaders Reject SPR Release Plan, But 'Stand Ready' After Initial Jawbone Efforts Fade Update (1055ET): G-7 finance ministers used headlines in Asia, including calls for a meeting to discuss an SPR release, as a purely performative attempt to calm chaotic energy markets. Now that the emergency meeting is over, the group of leaders failed to agree on releasing crude supplies. Those headlines briefly hit Brent down from around $119/bbl to near $100, but once again, it appears to have been little more than a circus act as world leaders stare directly...

The 5 Places In America You Don't Want To Be When Society Collapses… Authored by Milan Adams via preppgroup.home.blog, There’s a strange kind of comfort people have when they think about disaster. Not the dramatic kind you see in movies, but something quieter, almost subconscious—the belief that if something really bad were to happen, there would still be time to react. Time to think. Time to leave. Time to make the right decisions. The problem is, history doesn’t really support that idea. When things begin to fail on a large scale, they don’t...

Trader Makes $23 Million In One Day With Massive S&P Call Purchase Hours Before Ceasefire A trader who made a large bet on a stocks rocketing in the coming weeks is up about $23 million in paper profit today, according to Bloomberg. The unknown trader spent $12 million premium on 6800 lots of 6950 S&P 500 Index Options (SPX) calls for May 8 expiry, when the index was at 6556.21; the trade was executed around 10:20 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday, just hours before Trump's announcement of a 2-week ceasefire which sent...