COVID Origins, Lab-Leak Accountability, And The Next Pandemic Threat

It's Past Time To Privatize The Post Office Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance A new piece from the Cato Institute lays out how bad things have gotten at the post office, arguing that the United States Postal Service is facing a severe and worsening financial crisis. According to the article, USPS has been losing billions of dollars annually for well over a decade and is now at a point where it cannot realistically fix its problems without major structural changes. I could have told you this after the horror show I lived through at the...

The Passive Aggressive Market: Bogle's Warning Came True Authored by Michael Lebowitz via realinvestmentadvice.com, Since the pandemic, the line between passive investing and aggressive speculation has blurred. The current bout of speculative fervor extends beyond financial markets. For instance, we see the same impulse in the explosion of sports betting and the surge in event-betting sites like Kalshi and Polymarket. In the investment arena, margin debt is at record highs (as shown below), and zero-day-to-expiry (0DTE) stock options now account for approximately 50 percent of all options volume. Furthermore, the number of...

Open Sesame Submitted By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities This week’s market behavior had a mythical, almost magical tone to it. In Arabian Nights, Ali Baba was able to open a cave of riches by uttering the phrase “Open Sesame.” Markets responded to any and every sort of connotation of “The Strait is Open” by rewarding participants with riches. We started this week bright and early, kicking off Bloomberg TV, and then moving on to Bloomberg Radio, and Tom Keene’s Best Ideas. At the time we were all trying to understand what “Blockade” meant....