Frist Republic shares extended declines Monday, and look set to open at an all-time low, following a second credit rating downgrade for troubled San Francisco-based lender over the weekend.

Standard & Poor's, which had lowered First Republic's credit rating into 'junk' status only last week, cut it by a further three notches tp B+ on Sunday, saying the bank continues to face "high liquidity stress with substantial outflows".

The ratings company also said the recent move by a consortium of 11 banks, lead by JPMorgan Chase  (JPM) - Get Free Report to add a collective $30 billion to its deposit base "may not solve the substantial business, liquidity, funding, and profitability challenges that we believe the bank is now likely facing."

 Atlanta-area prosecutors are considering bringing racketeering and conspiracy charges in connection with Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election in Georgia, according to a source with knowledge of the investigation.

Investigators have a large volume of substantial evidence related to a possible conspiracy from inside and outside the state, including recordings of phone calls, emails, text messages, documents, and testimony before a special grand jury.

Their work, the source said, underscores the belief that the push to help Trump was not just a grassroots effort that originated inside the state.

Biden is telling us in his own unique way that his handlers are panicking that 4 in 10 American households have guns. And once we get further down the road of the madness of an engineered economic collapse replaced by CBDCs and 15-minute cities, all hell is finally going to break loose.

Biden is also desperately bailing his corruption out of his sinking lifeboat, evidenced by Hunter’s last-minute legal attack.

The media can’t prop up this level of corruption for much longer. The hens have come back to roost.

So it is that the weakest President in US history, a Wilsonian progressive race-baiting compromised tool of the globalists, will make one last frail attempt to circumvent the 2nd Amendment to usher in a tyrannical dementia.

House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) and Congressman Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) are investigating misleading statements made by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas claiming that the vast majority of illegal aliens released from DHS custody passed an initial threshold credible fear screening for asylum. According to DHS’ own data, this statement is misleading and creates a false narrative for how the Biden Administration processes and releases illegal border crossers into the United States. In a letter to Secretary Mayorkas, Chairman Comer and Congressman Burlison are requesting all documents and information about DHS’ catch and release policies and its limited used of credible fear interviews. 

“This is the latest attempt by Secretary Mayorkas to spin the facts about President Biden’s border crisis. Under the Biden Administration’s watch, the Department of Homeland Security has gone back to failed catch and release policies. Only a fraction of those released in the U.S. are even screened for a credible fear. The Oversight Committee will continue to conduct much needed oversight of the Biden Administration’s policies that have created the worst border crisis in American history and hold Secretary Mayorkas and others accountable for their failure to secure the border,” said Chairman Comer.

New York City’s first Drag Story Hour Read-a-Thon officially kicked off on Sunday, hosted by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

The Drag Story Hour with James was attended by several other elected officials and LGBTQ advocacy groups. According to a press release from James' office, nearly 200 other guests, including families, "enjoyed four back-to-back Story Hours" at The LGBT Community Center.

James celebrated the occasion on Twitter, featuring pictures of herself alongside elected officials, New York families and drag queens.

Technically, the cutoff for SIFIs is $250 billion  in assets. However, the reason they are called “systemically important” is not their asset size but the fact that their failure could bring down the whole financial system. That designation comes chiefly from their exposure to derivatives, the global casino that is so highly interconnected that it is a “house of cards.” Pull out one card and the whole house collapses. SVB held $27.7 billion in derivatives, no small sum, but it is only .05% of the $55,387 billion ($55.387 trillion) held by JPMorgan, the largest U.S. derivatives bank.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is essentially using the same legal theory to potentially indict former President Donald Trump that Hillary Clinton’s campaign was fined for, argued former United States Attorney Brett Tolman.

Tolman asserted Saturday that Bragg’s legal theory that Trump tried to hide a campaign expenditure by using his then-lawyer to pay porn actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 in alleged hush money before the 2016 presidential elections would have applied to Clinton when her campaign hid a payment for the phony Russian pee dossier against Trump as “legal fees.”

Former New York City police officer and conservative pundit John Cardillo tweeted, “Bill Clinton paid Paula Jones $850,000 and no one cared.” Tolman tweeted in response, “And the Hillary Campaign was actually fined for hiding the Steele Dossier payment under ‘legal fees’ — essentially the same legal theory on the Stormy Daniels payment the DA is running criminal investigation of Trump.”

CBS reporter Robert Costa took to Twitter on Monday morning and uploaded a video that shows NYPD officers placing steel barricades all around the Manhattan DA’s office.

On Sunday, Costa made an appearance on Face the Nation and stated the DA of Manhattan Alvin Bragg has previously told his colleagues he will do everything to keep his colleagues safe so the barricades outside of Manhattan could be a request from Bragg himself.

Watch NYPD set up the barricades here:

All those things I’ve been telling you for years are finally starting to happen – right in time for the ten year anniversary of the Daily Stormer!

Basically, there is a looming crisis of the US dollar at the same time that the Chinese are taking their place as the dominant world power.

China is moving rapidly now, playing cards they’d been holding in their hand. The importance of the Iran-Saudi peace deal cannot be overstated. The US media is downplaying it, saying that this simply restores 2016 norms. In actual fact, if you read about the details of what has been agree to (which I just had the time to finally do today), this deal takes relations between these two countries to a level they haven’t been at since before Khomeini’s 1979 revolution.

It is incredible that this was effectively a kind of surprise announcement. The US has been taking the alliance with Saudi Arabia as a given, even though it has been collapsing ever since the American media made such a massive deal about Saudis killing one single terrorist-supporter journalist. After the US put those lunatic sanctions on Russia, it was obvious that the relationship was over – but somehow, the US didn’t act as though they understood that, just as when they did the sanctions, they didn’t act as though they understood that China and India would refuse to sign on to them.

Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Moscow today for a three-day state visit.  The two powers will discuss the War in Ukraine, strengthening ties, and the emerging global world order.

The two are expected to announce solidarity against Western hegemony.

The current lack of US leadership on the international stage opened the door for this Russo-Chinese alliance.

A leading Republican on Sunday issued a warning to President Joe Biden after his committee says it has discovered more evidence of ties between the first family and China, on the heels of news that former President Donald Trump may be indicted this week by a Manhattan grand jury.

During an interview with Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures,” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, provided an update on the panel’s inquiry into the Biden family’s business dealings.

He disclosed that the House is scrutinizing the bank records of the family’s business associates and cautioned that evidence from Hunter Biden’s laptop could spell trouble for the White House, as it has revealed a connection between the Biden family and China.

“Well, we know that when the president was vice president in the Obama administration, he made several trips to China. He brought his son and some of these associates with him,” Comer told Bartiromo.

“They met in different places with some of these people that the president claimed he never met with. So we know the president hasn’t been truthful about his involvement when he was vice president. But from talking to former associates that were involved with Hunter Biden, what we know the Biden family had agreed to help China do was get their foot in the door,” he continued.

In spite of the financial market losses and crashes of 2022, government agencies kept assuring us that the banking system was in good shape. Until it wasn’t. Then they were citing “systemic risk” as the reason for a bailout. Surprised again!

The Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failed on March 10 with great fanfare, as befitted the second largest bank failure in U.S. history. It failed, it turns out, with the balance sheet mistake of borrowing very short and investing very long, a mistake so elementary as to display remarkable financial incompetence.

SVB’s failure was preceded by the collapse of Silvergate Bank, and followed by the failure of Signature Bank (the third largest bank failure), by lines of customers making withdrawals from First Republic Bank, and pressure on banks known to have large unrealized losses on their investments. As always happens in a banking crisis, the government intervened. In this case, it guaranteed the uninsured deposits at the failed banks—and presumably all banks—and created a special Federal Reserve loan facility backed by the U.S. Treasury that will lend on an under-collateralized basis to banks which have large market value losses on their bonds and mortgage-backed securities.

Major vaccine companies are preparing avian flu vaccines if the H5N1 virus that has killed millions of animals mutates to infect humans.

Vaccine makers GSK, Moderna, and CSL Seqirus have begun developing new human shots to target the rapidly spreading strain of the virus. Others such as Sanofi have vaccines for H5N1 virus in stock that could serve as a base for producing shots tailored to the currently circulating strain. 

Epidemiologists maintain that the risk to humans is low, but the specter of another pandemic upending hundreds of millions of lives worldwide has kicked scientific investigation into high gear.

Webmaster addition:

What in the world was she thinking?  When a bailout was hastily arranged for uninsured depositors at Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, the implication was that the same thing would be done for uninsured depositors at any other banks that failed.  But now U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is telling us that is not actually what will happen.  She just admitted that depositors at a failed bank will only be protected if officials determine that a “failure to protect uninsured depositors would create systemic risk and significant economic and financial consequences”.  So that means that depositors at big banks are likely to be protected and that depositors at small banks are much less likely to be protected.  In other words, Janet Yellen just poured lighter fluid on every small bank in America.

"So I've seen rumors swirl," DeSantis said. "I have not seen any facts yet, and so I don't know what's gonna happen. But I do know this, the Manhattan District Attorney is a Soros-funded prosecutor. And so he, like other Soros-funded prosecutors, they weaponize their office to impose a political agenda on society at the expense of the rule of law and public safety."

"He has downgraded over 50% of the felonies to misdemeanors," DeSantis continued. "He says he doesn't want to even have jail time for the vast, vast majority of crimes. And what we've seen in Manhattan is we've seen the crime rate go up and we've seen citizens become less safe."

"And so you're talking about this situation with, and look, I don't know what goes into paying hush money to a porn star to secure silence over some type of alleged affair," he added. "I just, I can't speak to that, but what I can speak to is that if you have a prosecutor who is ignoring crimes happening every single day in his jurisdiction, and he chooses to go back many, many years ago to try to use something about porn star 'hush money' payments, you know, that's an example of pursuing a political agenda and weaponizing the office.'

President Vladimir Putin said Monday that deepening ties between Russia and Africa was a key goal for the Kremlin, as Moscow seeks to expand its influence on the continent.

He added that Russia would continue supplying the continent with grain if Moscow exits a landmark agreement with Ukraine to allow exports from the country's Black Sea ports.

"Let me emphasize that our country has always given — and will continue to give — priority to cooperation with African states," Putin said in a televised address at a conference on Russian-African relations.