Thursday, October 16, 2025
Treasury Secretary Bessent says we have to stop the rigged Chicom economy by abandoning free market principles just like them
Trump administration will set price floors across range of industries to combat China, Bessent says
... “When you are facing a nonmarket economy like China, then you have to exercise industrial policy,” Bessent told Sara Eisen at CNBC’s Invest in America Forum in Washington, D.C.
“So we’re going to set price floors and the forward buying to make sure that this doesn’t happen again and we’re going to do it across a range of industries,” the Treasury secretary said, without naming specific industries the administration was looking at beyond rare earths. ...
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” the Treasury secretary said when asked about additional equity stakes. “When we get an announcement like this week with China on the rare earths, you realize we have to be self-sufficient, or we have to be sufficient with our allies.”
The Trump administration will not take stakes in nonstrategic industries, Bessent said. “We do have to be very careful not to overreach,” he said. ...
Equity performance relative to gold in 2025 is seventh worst of all time but notably unique
2025, 2008, 2002, 1979, 1977, 1974, 1973.
... all the other instances of gold outperformance happened in bear markets for stocks or during major economic crises. ...
Buh bye stablecoin, gold rallies to a fresh record high on Thursday lol
Gold extended its rally to a fresh record high on Thursday ... Earlier in the session, bullion touched a record high of $4,241.77, climbing for a fifth consecutive session. ...
More.
ROFLMAO: Paxos, blockchain partner of PayPal, mistakenly mints $300 TRILLION PYUSD, world's sixth largest so-called stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the U.S. Dollar with market capitalization of only $2.6 BILLION
J. P. Morgan explains gold's rise as having something to do, in part, with "waning confidence in fiat currencies." 😏
Why should anything pegged to fiat be more confidence inspiring, especially involving PayPal?
People who've been permanently banned by PayPal this morning are probably saying, "Couldn't have happened to a finer company".
This event should be good for fiat, and really good for gold, which won't suddenly be minted by anyone to the tune of $300 trillion, at least not until Elon Musk lassoes one of them thar asteroids.
PayPal’s crypto partner mints a whopping $300 trillion worth of stablecoins in ‘technical error’
Paxos, the blockchain partner of PayPal, mistakenly minted $300 trillion worth of the online payment giant’s stablecoin on Wednesday in what the company called a “technical error.” ...
Transactions on Etherscan showed that the mistake had been fixed after about 20 minutes.
PYUSD is advertised as a dollar-pegged stablecoin that is fully backed by U.S. dollar deposits, U.S. treasuries and similar cash equivalents. Therefore, PayPal says the tokens are always redeemable for U.S. dollars on a 1:1 basis.
However, the technical error highlights that the dollar peg is guaranteed by PayPal and its independent third-party attestation reports, rather than intrinsically tied to the minting of a stablecoin. ...
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
New gold high: $4,217.95
... Spot gold rose 1.3% to $4,193.39 per ounce after hitting an all-time high of $4,217.95 earlier. ... Silver climbed 1.7% to $52.31, following Tuesday’s record high of $53.6. ...
More.
Updated:
Total Information Awareness is closer than ever
cnbc
Walmart deploys millions of new sensors in retail's first large-scale deployment of IoT tech
Bob Violino
Walmart is deploying millions of ambient Internet of Things battery-free sensors throughout its massive supply chain in the U.S.
The retail giant is using technology from Wiliot in what the IoT vendor is calling the first large-scale deployment of ambient IoT in the retail sector and one of the largest such implementations to date.
Ambient IoT is a class of IoT devices mainly powered by harvesting ambient energy from radio waves, light, motion, heat, or other viable ambient energy sources. It’s an evolution of legacy IoT and radio frequency identification technologies that promise lower costs and high scalability.
Walmart will be using the IoT sensors to track pallets nationwide by the end of 2026. “Expansion to other global markets is under consideration, but the immediate focus is the U.S. rollout,” Cathey said.
The company will now have real-time insights into inventory management, knowing exactly where merchandise is located and whether it’s owned by the retailer, at any moment, and covering an estimated 90 million pallets of inventory when at full scale.
The ambient IoT sensors Walmart uses capture signals about temperature, location, humidity, and dwell time. These signals are linked with the company’s advanced artificial intelligence systems, enabling the company to dramatically improve supply chain efficiency, inventory accuracy, and cold chain compliance.
“We expect to be active in about 500 Walmart locations by the end of the year, with plans for national expansion in 2026,” said Greg Cathey, senior vice president of transformation and innovation at Walmart. The rollout will cover 4,600 Walmart Supercenters, Neighborhood Markets, and more than 40 distribution centers, generating high-resolution supply chain data that feeds into Walmart’s AI systems, he said.
“This data provides proof of delivery, improves replenishment decisions, and lets us know where our items are in real time,” Cathey said. “By combining continuous sensing with AI, we’re moving from probabilistic predictions to precision decision-making.”
Greater visibility into supply chain
What makes the addition of ambient IoT sensors significant is it provides a new stream of data into AI systems, enabling them to be even more effective in giving Walmart greater visibility into supply chain operations.
The technology initiative is already making a significant impact by eliminating some manual tasks and providing automated alerts, Cathey said. “Associates no longer need to perform time-consuming checks to locate items,” he said. “Automated alerts now flag this information in real time, allowing associates to act faster and dedicate more time to serving customers.”
The enhanced visibility into the supply chain is also helping to resolve inventory discrepancies, allowing improved customer experiences.
While Cathey did not disclose specific figures such as cost savings, Walmart is anticipating gains from higher supply chain efficiency, improved inventory accuracy, reduced manual tasks for associates, and the ability to get items on shelves more quickly. “Customers [will] benefit from better product availability and consistency,” he said.
“AI system performance is predicated on its training data. The better the data, the better the AI performance,” said Julien Bellanger, president of Wiliot. “Supply chain AI has long been fueled by inherently out-of-date data — or forecasted data that represents projections rather than reality.”
Ambient IoT is changing this model, Bellanger said, by fueling AI with data that reflects what’s actually happening throughout the supply chain.
“We have been here before; Walmart was an early adopter of RFID back in 2004 when it was supposed to provide much the same functionality,” said Bill Ray, distinguished vice president, analyst and chief of research at research firm Gartner. “However, this time the cost of the tags is much lower, and that will be a tipping point.”
Ray says it’s important to note that the value of such IoT systems is already known. “The business models have been well studied and evaluated, when RFID was first touted as the solution to supply chain problems,” he said. “RFID has had an enormous impact, but the cost of the tags prevented the transformation it had promised. The industry has been able to integrate the new, lower-cost tags into the same value models, and come up with positive answers.”
Gartner has been tracking Wiliot for a long time. “The question was never if the technology could deliver on its promise. The question was if Wiliot could reliably scale production without compromising tag performance or price, and if it could integrate with existing supply chain systems. This announcement tells us that Walmart is convinced it can, now Wiliot will have to prove it,” Ray said.
“Ambient IoT just works,” Cathey said. “It doesn’t require wanding or scanning. It lets our associates do what they do, and they can focus on doing their jobs safely and efficiently while providing continuous, real-time visibility into our supply chain.”
Ambient IoT got a boost earlier this year when a new business alliance was created to develop and promote an open, multi-standard ecosystem for ambient IoT manufacturers, suppliers, integrators, operators, users, and customers, based on next-generation, battery-free ambient IoT standards.
By focusing on advanced communication technologies, the alliance is seeking to overcome the limitations of traditional battery-powered IoT devices, promoting more sustainable and efficient products.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/15/walmart-deploying-millions-of-internet-iot-sensors-across-us.html
Tuesday, October 14, 2025
It's hard to keep up with ever-record-setting gold and silver: $4,179.48 and $53.60
... Spot gold rose 0.5% to $4,128.49 per ounce, as of 0805 GMT, after hitting a record high of $4,179.48 earlier in the session. ... Spot silver fell 0.1% to $52.27, after hitting a record high of $53.60 ...
More.
Updated:
Flight to safety in September or just rebalancing?
401(k) plans saw ‘flight’ to cash, bonds in September, analysis finds
... Bond funds captured 39% of fund inflows, while 25% of net investor money flowed to stable value and 18% to money market funds, Alight found. ... The shift to bonds may indicate investors are rebalancing to keep their asset allocations from getting too stock-heavy, Austin said.
VBTLX was up 1.05% in September vs. 1.93% in the 3-months ended September 30th. The fund was up 6.10% year to date on September 30th.
Monday, October 13, 2025
Democrats are aghast at the lack of coordinated pushback from their GOP colleagues against the Trump administration's aggressive incursion into the power of the purse
The GOP wants autocracy, and boy are they ever giving it to us, in the name of cutting duly authorized spending of already appropriated funds.
It's pure madness, a complete abnegation of the constitution, brought to us by the GOP.
It would be unpatriotic to ever vote for them again.
... “I believe that we don’t have a choice about reducing spending,” said Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-Louisiana), a member of the committee. “The only time I’ve seen us reduce spending from the 10 years I’ve been here is through a rescissions package.”
The administration’s “aggressive” incursion into the power of the purse follows decades of members of Congress ceding their authority to the executive on other matters like tariffs and war powers, according to Molly Reynolds, an expert at the center-left think tank the Brookings Institution. But the appropriations process — although messy and increasingly partisan in recent years — had remained generally free from the reach of the executive branch. ...
More.
Of course the deal with Hamas was too good to be true, as is the case with every deal involving Donald Trump
Hamas releases names of only four deceased hostages to be returned Monday
The Hostages and Missing Families Forum called for all aspects of the ceasefire with Hamas to be suspended until all of the slain hostages were returned to Israel
IDF Chief Spokesman Brig. Gen. Effie Deffrin confirmed on Monday afternoon earlier rumors that only four deceased hostages would be returned by Hamas on Monday evening. ...
In response, the Hostage Families Forum called for an immediate suspension of Israel's agreement with Hamas until every deceased hostage was returned. ...
Deffrin initially provided no information about the other 24 deceased hostages ...
... in a briefing on Sunday night, IDF sources had not hinted that the number of returned deceased hostages would be so low on the first day.
... most observers were expecting a more significant number of hostages to be returned on the first day and the majority to be returned within a few days, with only a small number of unresolved cases. ...
Gold hits record $4,083.42, silver hits record $51.70, Bank of America forecasts $5,000 and $65
Gold, silver hit record highs as Trump threatens fresh China tariffs
... Spot gold was up 1.64% to a record $4,083.42 per ounce. ... Spot silver jumped 2.22% to $51.39/oz, after hitting $51.70/oz, driven by similar factors as gold alongside tightness in the spot market. ...
Bank of America on Monday raised its price forecasts for precious metals, lifting its 2026 outlook for gold to $5,000 an ounce and for silver to $65/oz. BofA is the first major bank to raise its gold price forecast to $5,000/oz for 2026.
On a technical basis, gold’s and silver’s Relative Strength Index stands at 80 and 83, respectively, indicating the metals are overbought. ...
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