Iran's Financial Hub, The UAE, May Freeze Billions In Assets Over Retaliatory Strikes

Massive Life Support By Benjamin Picton, Senior Markets Strategist At Rabobank Massive Live Support “On massive life support” was Donald Trump’s characterization of the US-Iran ceasefire yesterday. This followed Sunday’s rejection of Iranian terms for peace that Trump described as “totally unacceptable”. In a boy-who-cried-wolf-style sign of growing market insensitivity to Presidential prognostications, Brent was only up 2.88% to $104.21/bbl and WTI crude remains below $100/bbl. Dated Brent rose by 0.6% yesterday to $105.62. This even as the Wall Street Journal reports that the UAE has been “secretly” carrying out attacks on...

Whistleblower Says CIA Hid 2020 Election Threats To Help Biden For years, Democrats and the mainstream media treated 2020 as settled history: the system worked, the election was secure, and accusations of fraud were conspiracy theories. However, a newly declassified intelligence memo, paired with fresh whistleblower allegations, points in a less convenient direction.  Behind the scenes, U.S. intelligence warned well before the 2020 election that core election systems were more exposed than the public was told, especially the vast digital repositories that hold voter registration data. Making matters worse, according to former...

Wyoming's Helium Empire Ascends As Qatar Gas Goes Flat Readers have already been well briefed, see here and here, that roughly one-third of global helium supply has been disrupted, setting the perfect storm of chaos to spread across high-tech industries, particularly semiconductors. The shock is being driven by shipping restrictions through the Gulf and the shutdown of output from top producer Qatar, where damage to the Ras Laffan complex could keep supplies constrained for years.  As the U.S.-Iran conflict enters its second month, one of the clearest second-order effects of...