Almost 4,000 failed asylum seekers who have been issued deportation orders in Ireland over the past five years currently have an “unknown status” in the country, the latest figures have revealed.

The Fed’s actions to stem the banking crisis are beginning to accelerate the effects of QT, causing money velocity to drop and intensifying the tightening of financial conditions.

In an implicit acknowledgement that policy may have been overtightened, the Fed at its meeting Wednesday hiked rates by 25 bps, but gave the impression it is on the verge of stepping back from further raises.

The rescue of SVB et al has shifted the landscape and compromised moral hazard, and prompted a reorganization of how bank deposits and Fed reserves are spread through the system. Money has migrated to large banks from small ones as the credit risk of the latter is reappraised in the wake of recent lender failures.

Having enraged bondholders (who saw their entire AT1 debt tranche wiped out before the equity was fully impaired, violating every conventional liquidation waterfall):

Mark Dowding, chief investment officer at RBC BlueBay, which held Credit Suisse AT1 bonds, said Switzerland was “looking more like a banana republic”

“If this is left to stand, how can you trust any debt security issued in Switzerland, or for that matter wider Europe, if governments can just change laws after the fact,” David Tepper, the billionaire founder of Appaloosa Management, told the Financial Times.

“Contracts are made to be honored.”

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article on Substack on Wednesday that said the CIA was instructed to come up with a cover story for the Nord Stream bombings that was fed to The New York Times and the German newspaper Die Zeit.

The cover-up story was created to shift blame from the US after Hersh’s bombshell report published on February 8 that said President Biden ordered the attack on the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines, which connect Russia to Germany. "It was a total fabrication by American intelligence that was passed along to the Germans, and aimed at discrediting your story," Hersh was told by a source within the American intelligence community.

This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a new report. Unsurprisingly alarming, the report aimed to turn up the heat on governments, the business world, and every one of us to do more about the energy transition. Decarbonization, the report said, had to move faster and more dramatically. Yet that wasn’t the only document that made the headlines this week. Shell also released a report in which it detailed two different scenarios for the future to 2050. In those scenarios, the supermajor’s analysts pitted energy security against the energy transition – something the IPCC reports have never done. 

Yesterday, while attention was still focused on the US banking system and the ongoing botched response by the Fed and especially the Treasury's senile Secretary, who more than two weeks after SIVB collapsed, have still not been able to stabilize confidence in banks - thereby assuring the US is about to slam head first into a brutal recession, just as Biden ordered to contain inflation, as US consumer spending is now in freefall - we pointed out that something bad was taking place in Europe: the credit default swaps of perpetually semi-solvent banking giant Deutsche Bank were quietly blowing out to multi-year highs.

France is engulfed in turmoil following President Emmanuel Macron's controversial decision to raise the retirement age. Over a million people participated in nationwide protests on Thursday, transforming urban areas into scenes of chaos. These demonstrations, the largest in years, have triggered fuel shortages, hundreds of arrests, and even claims of "civil war." 

Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin told French media outlet CNews on Friday morning that more than 900 fires were reported in the streets of Paris on Thursday night -- in one of the most violent days of protests in a while. 

"There were a lot of demonstrations and some of them turned violent, notably in Paris," Darmanin said. He said more than a million people marched yesterday. 

Goldman Sachs' traders said they think the pain in European banks is "simply a function of market selling leveraged and opaque business models post CS, with some discomfort on what may roll out of 1Q IB earnings following the spike in rates vol. There’s also 7% of the loan book in CRE (EUR33bn), of which 51% in the US. Total office exposure is 34%, which is the market’s core area of concern, so could say the range for US office is EUR5.5-11bn"

The House GOP is now setting its sights on two former prosecutors who resigned from the Manhattan DA's office over the handling of his investigation into former President Trump. 

Attorney Mark Pomerantz and Carey Dunne sought to prosecute Trump in 2022 and resigned after Bragg rejected their legal theories. 

But Bragg has since reversed course -- last week Trump announced he expected to be arrested this week, which has not happened. 

There's been a number of new developments including tit-for-tat warnings and threats following the International Criminal Court's (ICC) last Friday issuance of an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The most blistering and alarming attack on the Hague-based court this week has been from former Russian president and current deputy chairman of the security council Dmitry Medvedev, who said any attempt to actually arrest Putin would be an act of war.

Amazon's palm-reading payment technology was first introduced at numerous Whole Foods locations in California, enabling customers to pay for their groceries by scanning their palms at checkout terminals rather than using cash or a card. Now Panera Bread is experimenting with Amazon's cashless payment system as the war on cash marches on.

On Wednesday, Panera Bread announced plans to roll out a "contactless payment method" to several stores with additional locations in the coming months. The bakery-cafe chain has over 2,000 locations, and its loyalty program has 52 million members.

Here is Technocracy: “one of the latest attempts by EU institutions to pull power away from member-states’ national governments.” Technocracy eschews nation-states and participation of ordinary citizens through traditional political processes. The “Chinafication of Europe” is well underway.

The total engineering of society must necessarily start with ubiquitous surveillance with data tracking, as in China.  ⁃ TN Editor

A European Parliament vote for bloc-wide digital IDs is the latest step towards the “Chinafication of Europe”, an MEP has claimed.

Cristian Terhes, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Christian Democratic National Peasants’ Party, has described the European Union’s latest push for cross-border digital IDs as another move towards the “Chinafication” of the bloc.

While elites around the world – those in political power and in control of top financial institutions – are very much rallying around the plans to introduce central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), in Florida, the state's governor has a different take on where things should be headed.

In fact, radically different – Governor Ron DeSantis thinks CBDCs should be banned.

Addressing a press conference from behind a podium that had the words “Big Brother's Digital Dollar” attached to it, DeSantis repeated what critics of the CBDC push keep saying.

And that is, that the centralized form of digital money controlled by governments is basically a powerful surveillance tool, and that this, rather than any convenience it might offer, could be the key reason it is getting so much support from some high places.

But according to the Florida governor, who is rumored to be considering running for president, CBDCs are “all about surveilling Americans and controlling behavior of Americans.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping concluded his Russian visit on Wednesday without much progress on peace in Ukraine. China, however, has pushed for deeper trade and investment links with its northern neighbor using its own currency. That suggests the path of least resistance for yuan internationalization now runs through Moscow instead of London or Singapore.  

China and Russia are committed to “significantly” increasing trade volumes by 2030 and pledged to steadily boost the proportion of local currency settlement, according to a joint statement released Tuesday. That might sound like cheap political talk, though a closer look at developments since the war in Ukraine shows the Chinese currency is already making major inroads in all walks of Russian financial life.

The US has offered Slovakia attack helicopters and Hellfire missiles as a reward for sending Ukraine Soviet-made MiG-29 fighter jets.

Slovak Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad said the deal would be for 12 Bell AH-1Z attack choppers, 500 AGM-114 Hellfire II missiles, and training. The sale is worth about $1 billion, and under the offer, the US would provide $660 million in financing, and Slovakia would pay $340 million.

The Censorship-Industrial Complex represents the greatest threat to free speech online in living memory, and Craig Newmark is bankrolling it.

The billionaire founder of Craigslist, Craig Newmark, is using his fortune to further shape journalism into partisan activism to help Democrats win elections. He is the nation’s leading financier of the “mis”- and “disinformation” industries and is now the largest private stakeholder in America’s legacy journalism schools.

The most recent Twitter Files released by Matt Taibbi add a deeply disturbing new layer to the story. They show Newmark is at the very heart of an incestuous web of government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and corporate media institutions operating in concert to censor political opponents on social media. Newmark is financing the largest coordinated assault on American free speech in living memory.