-- CNBC
Showing posts with label CNBC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label CNBC. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 1, 2025
Monday, March 31, 2025
Marine Le Pen's jail sentence will be an electronic tag lol, which lends credence to the charge that this is merely political and unserious
Reported here:
... Le Pen was also given a four-year prison sentence — two years
suspended and two wearing an electronic tag — and fined 100,000 euros,
although these will not be implemented while any appeals processes are
under way. The ban from public office is immediate, however. ...
Le Pen and 24 other members of her political party, Rassemblement National, were accused of diverting over 3 million euros ($3.3 million) of European Parliament funds to pay staff based in France instead.
Le Pen and her co-accused had denied the charges, while the party describes the trial as a politically-motivated witch hunt. ...
Friday, March 28, 2025
Just as 9.7 million of 43 million student loan borrowers become past due again, cars they can't afford to buy anyway soar in price due to tariffs, a one-two punch alienating the youth vote from Trump
Over 9 million student loan borrowers past due after bills restarted, Fed estimates
... A new student loan delinquency can cause a borrower’s credit score to drop more than 150 points, the Fed warns.
... The tariffs will kick in at midnight on April 3, and Trump has said they will be “permanent.” ...
... A spokesperson for Klarna acknowledged to NBC News that people needing to pay for meals on credit is “a bad indicator for society.” ...
The new Axis of Evil: Putin and Trump are tag-teaming to carve up the world
Russia’s Putin says it would be a ‘profound mistake’ to dismiss Trump’s push for Greenland
“In short, the United States has serious plans regarding Greenland. These plans have long historical roots, as I have just mentioned, and it is obvious that the United States will continue to consistently advance its geo-strategic, military-political and economic interests in the Arctic,” Putin said.
Thursday, March 27, 2025
Russia repeatedly violates ceasefire on Ukrainian energy infrastructure
Zelenskiy says Russia hit Ukraine’s power infrastructure, US should react
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Thursday Russian artillery had
damaged Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in the front-line city of
Kherson, two days after the U.S. announced that each side had agreed to a
truce on energy strikes. ...
Russia, which launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and now holds about 20% of the country, contends that it has observed an energy strike truce since March 18. Ukraine says Russia has attacked eight Ukrainian energy facilities since that date. ...
Gold made another new record high price today at $3,059.30, the 17th new high of the year
According to CNBC here.
An earlier version of the story incorrectly stated a futures price as the new high spot price.
Wednesday, March 26, 2025
The Atlantic calls Trump's bluff and publishes full Signal thread sent to its editor by mistake by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz
The Atlantic publishes full Signal thread with Hegseth, Waltz after Trump says texts not classified
... Goldberg in Wednesday’s report wrote: “If this text had been received by someone hostile to American interests—or someone merely indiscreet, and with access to social media—the Houthis would have had time to prepare for what was meant to be a surprise attack on their strongholds.”
“The consequences for American pilots could have been catastrophic,” he wrote. ...
Saturday, March 22, 2025
Acting Social Security commissioner Leland Dudek is a lying sack of shit typical of the Trump administration who should be fired immediately
Dudek's reasoning below is the same level of ridiculous we saw when Trump said he wouldn't recall the deportation flights ordered by Judge Boasberg because they were already in international airspace and were therefore not subject to the order. Trump ordered the flights in the dead of a Friday night/Saturday morning a week ago to avoid detection and court intervention.
Republicans playing chicken with the lifeline for over 73 million Americans wasn't what people voted for last November, but that's what they are getting.
... Dudek said the court order [from Judge Hollander] is so broad that it could apply to any Social Security employee, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
“My anti-fraud team would be DOGE affiliates. My IT staff would be DOGE affiliates,” Dudek told Bloomberg. “As it stands, I will follow it exactly and terminate access by all SSA employees to our IT systems.”
However, in a March 18 letter to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Dudek said there are only 11 DOGE-affiliated individuals at the Social Security Administration. ...
Dudek assumed the role of acting commissioner in February when then acting commissioner Michelle King stepped down due to DOGE privacy concerns. ...
Reported here.
Friday, March 21, 2025
Thursday, March 20, 2025
Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander rebukes DOGE for hiding their own identities while scouring Social Security for ours, stops Elon Musk's fishing expedition for immigrants
A federal judge Thursday issued a temporary restraining order barring Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency team from having access to personally identifiable information from the Social Security Administration.
Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander in a scathing ruling accused DOGE
of launching a “fishing expedition” at the Social Security agency and
failing to provide any reason why it needed to access vast swaths of
Americans’ personal and private data. ...
The judge also ordered the DOGE team members and affiliates to delete all non-anonymized personally identifiable information in their possession or control that they have accessed “directly or indirectly” since Jan. 20. ...
Hollander, noting the affiliates of DOGE have kept their identities hidden, wrote, “ironically, the identity of these DOGE affiliates has been concealed because defendants are concerned that the disclosure of even their names would expose them to harassment and thus invade their privacy.”
“The defense does not appear to share a privacy concern for the millions of Americans whose SSA records were made available to the DOGE affiliates, without their consent,” the judge wrote. ...
Wednesday, March 19, 2025
Government belt-tightening theatre at CNBC: Social Security new proofing procedures requiring in person visits are a joke, a costly upheaval designed to stop a puny problem
As the Social Security Administration seeks to curb identity fraud, more people will now be required to visit an office to prove their identity for new benefit claims and direct deposit changes. ... The changes are aimed at helping to avoid the fraudulent redirection of benefit checks, which the agency has been warning about for years. ... SSA estimates the agency is now losing more than $100 million per year due to direct deposit fraud. ... The change may require foot traffic to Social Security offices nationwide to increase by about 75,000 to 85,000 more in-person visitors per week, according to reports on an internal Social Security Administration memo. ... The AARP, an interest group that represents Americans ages 50 and over, urged the Social Security Administration to reverse the decision.
In fiscal 2024 Social Security paid out $1.35 trillion in benefits. $100 million is 0.0074% of that!
I predict that the costs of this silliness will exceed the savings.
15th record high for gold this year
Bullion surged to an all-time high of $3,045.24 earlier in the session, marking its 15th record peak this year.
More.
Monday, March 17, 2025
Sunday, March 16, 2025
Multiple job holders hit what only looks like a new high in Feb 2025 at 9 million not seasonally adjusted
But as a percent of civilian population, the 3.3% current level still doesn't come close to the 1996 peak at 4.2%.
The United States consumed 20.25 million barrels of oil per day in 2023, 3.88 million of which come from Canada and 3.38 million from Alberta lol
What could possibly go wrong?
... Canada is the fourth largest oil producer in the world and Alberta is
the country’s biggest producer. Some 97% of the country’s 4 million bpd
of oil exports went to the U.S. in 2023 with several European nations
and Hong Kong taking the remainder, according to Canada’s energy regulator. Alberta supplied 87% of the oil exported from Canada to the U.S. in 2023. ...
[Alberta Premier Danielle] Smith said Canada is looking at three different pipeline proposals to its West Coast, at least one pipeline into the Northwest Territories, one into Manitoba, one to the Hudson Bay, and one into Eastern Canada.
“Those are conversations we were not having three months ago,” [provincial energy minister Brian] Jean said of the pipelines. ...
More.
Friday, March 14, 2025
LOL, 8 Senate Democrats were Yea before they were Nay: 9 Senate Democrats and 1 Independent broke their own filibuster to advance the House Republican continuing spending resolution to a floor vote against which 8 of them then voted as it passed on a simple majority
8 Democrats: "See, we voted against it!"
The Senate filibuster is indeed a magical, wonderful, horrible, no good thing. It makes you collect 60 votes to end debate, but then you can vote to make yourself look good right after you betrayed your friends.
Senate passes GOP funding bill to avert a government shutdown
The Senate passed a six-month funding bill Friday to avert a government shutdown hours ahead of the midnight deadline, sending it to President Donald Trump to sign into law.
The vote was 54-46, with two Democrats joining all but one Republican in voting yes. Earlier Friday, the bill cleared a key procedural hurdle with the help of 10 Democrats in a 62-38 vote. Sixty votes were needed to defeat a Democratic filibuster.
The votes came after a dramatic 48-hour period during which Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., broke with most House and Senate Democrats, announcing he would support moving forward on the bill one day after he declared it didn’t have the votes. Schumer ultimately voted no on final passage of the legislation.
The cloture motion roll call 62-38 is here showing the nine Democrats and one Independent vote Yea to defeat their own filibuster.
The final passage roll call 54-46 is here showing eight of the ten, all Democrats, voting their phony Nays: Cortez Masto, Durbin, Fetterman, Gillibrand and Schumer, Hassan, Peters, and Schatz.
Peters, who voted Yea and then Nay, isn't running again next year, and neither is Shaheen, who really didn't care and voted Yea both times with King the Independent.
Rand Paul voted Nay Nay!
Nay Nay is good.
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