Friday, June 26, 2026
Meanwhile others claim the Saudis are moving oil through the Strait of Hormuz
In a world where tankers routinely turn off their automatic marine identification systems to avoid identification and hide their locations, or use them to broadcast fake identities and locations, or even sail under false flags, it is difficult to know what to believe.
The oceans are still The Wild West.
Two examples today claiming Saudi use of the Strait of Hormuz:
The one big missing factor: Saudi Arabia reportedly has not used the Persian Gulf to ship anything
... Aristidis Alafouzos, CEO of Okeanis Eco Tankers Corp, a crude oil shipping company headquartered in Greece, said he doesn’t expect Thursday’s attack on a ship in the Gulf of Oman to “significantly change” the trend of transits through the waterway.
“We’ve seen a large increase, especially on the crude oil passages, and I think this is set to continue and maybe this one-off event isn’t enough to really disrupt the recent events of the large exports of Kuwaiti and Emirati crude oil from the Gulf,” Alafouzos told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” on Friday.
“The one big missing factor is the Saudis. For now, we haven’t seen them export almost anything from inside the Arabian Gulf and everything is coming from Yanbu in the Red Sea.” ...
Former Attorney General Bill Barr endorses Todd Blanche to run the Department of Injustice because Blanche is the only person who has a snowball's chance in hell of bringing Mad King Ludwig back to reality
But that's just Barr's cover story.
Bill Barr knows Blanche's only successes defending Trump as his personal lawyer relied on delaying tactics, both in the classified documents case and in the federal election subversion case.
Do we really want more of that in his official capacity as Attorney General?
Isn't that what the Justice Department was famous for under Bondi, who dragged her feet releasing the Epstein files?
C'mon man.
Other than that, Blanche lost the Manhattan hush money case and Trump was convicted of 34 felonies.
I see no reason for Todd Blanche to fail upwards, unless of course he's probably the best choice to have around if you want to delay what's coming for Trump after November.
Thursday, June 25, 2026
Middle East tanker traffic June 18-24, 2026: Strait of Hormuz 12.3/day, Bab-el-Mandeb Strait 16.9/day
SoH E: 6.6/day
SoH W: 5.7/day
BAM SE: 7.6/day
BAM NW: 9.3/day
The current economic growth rate continues to underperform the post-war compound annual growth rate to Reagan by 42%
1Q2026 real GDP in the third estimate today came in at an annualized rate of 2.1%.
The first estimate was 2.0%. The second was 1.6%.
The revision back up again and a little higher was "primarily reflecting a downward revision to imports", which are a subtraction from GDP.
Expect higher GDP in 2Q on the strength of oil exports.
The post-war economic growth rate to Reagan was 3.64% compound annual vs. 2.1% now.
The compound annual rate 2017-2025 was 2.48%.
Trump is even underperforming himself by 15%.
When will real personal income be great again?
Real personal income year over year in May 2026 fell 0.24%.
Are Obama and Biden still in charge?
Core pce inflation in May 2026 came in at 3.41% year over year
What in the Sam Hell is golden about this age?
Absolutely nothing.
There's nothing Greenspan about it either.
Alan Greenspan's core pce inflation averaged 2.46% year over year 1987-2006.
Well guess what, Speaker Mike Johnson apparently never presented the housing bill to the president, so the 10-day clock is not ticking for it to become law
Trump halts bipartisan victory lap on housing
... One potential wrinkle in that 10-day clock is that it doesn’t start until the enrolled bill has been officially “presented” to the president.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether that had happened yet as of Trump’s social media post at 10:26 a.m. But as the day went on it became apparent the bill still hadn’t been presented to the president, according to a top Democrat.
House Minority Whip Katherine M. Clark, D-Mass., laid the blame at Johnson’s feet.
“Mike Johnson could, right now, at any time, formally present this bill to the president and make the president choose: Will he veto it or will it become law in ten days?” Clark said at a news conference. “But Mike Johnson is not choosing that path. That is a betrayal of duty.”
Aides to Johnson didn’t respond to requests for comment. ...
Trump moves forward with U.S. Postal Service plan to interdict mail-in ballots and prevent voting by mail in states which won't give him voter data
This is not a joke.
Postmaster general confirms plan to hold back mail ballots in states that won’t share voter data
Postmaster General David Steiner told lawmakers Wednesday that the U.S. Postal Service will no longer deliver mail-in ballots in states that refuse to provide sensitive voter data to the federal government, in line with a proposed rule from the Trump administration. ...
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
As long as Trump doesn't veto the damn thing, the Uniparty's housing bill will become law in 10 days without his signature
But he will be remembered negatively for it in November either way.
Democrats who want to impeach the president will include it prominently in their campaigns against him.
Throwing a fit over this is about as smart as attacking Iran without a plan to keep the Strait of Hormuz open.
We call that just another Wednesday in America
France suffers major power outage as Europe sizzles in record-breaking heat
... A heat-related incident left around 68,000 homes without electricity in western France, according to the prefecture in the coastal department of Finistere. ...
This housing bill will not help people become homeowners by freeing up existing supply
House passes affordable housing bill, sends it to Trump’s desk
The U.S. House voted Tuesday night 358-32 in favor of a sprawling housing package designed to lower costs for homebuyers and increase supply. ...
The broad bi-partisan support for the bill tells you it won't do much for very many people anytime soon.
But expect the politicians to brag on it as silly season ramps up.
A key provision of the bill caps institutional investor ownership of single family homes at 350 from here on out.
Investors already owning single family homes, however, at whatever level, are grandfathered in. Blackstone, for example, owns approximately 58k such homes. It is thus prevented from buying number 58,001 under the bill.
That means that the approximately 530k+ homes currently owned by institutions, which is only about 4% of the single family housing rental pie, will not be forcibly sold into the market.
About 87% of the pie is individual investors who own in the neighborhood of 1-5 homes. There will be no change mandated there either, which is where most of the available single family housing stock is.
There are 46.4 million renter-occupied housing units in the United States in the first quarter. Of those, approximately 11.3 million are single family homes. That means that the number of owners of those rental homes ranges roughly between 9.8 million and 2 million individual investors, probably living in a rich suburb right near you.
The bill does prevent umbrella companies from owning multiple small entities created by individual investors to beat the 350 cap, with stiff penalties, so that is good.
The problem is this bill entrenches the status quo of the rich preying on both ends of the housing spectrum.
Mobile homes in parks are not considered single family homes under the bill. They are considered multi-unit commercial real estate. Private equity investors are notorious for buying up these parks full of affordable housing and jacking up lot rents on approximately 4.3 million homesites to the moon. Up to 12 million mostly low income Americans live in such parks.
The bill eliminates the mobile chassis rule for new manufactured homes, marginally reducing their cost. But imagine parking one in one of those parks and being unable to move it while the landlord holds a rent gun to your head. There are other provisions in the bill to help these existing park owners, and the mobile home owners who live there to borrow more to pay the greedy bastards.
11.3 million hostages to the rich on the front end, 12 million on the ass end.
The bill had passed in the U.S. Senate 85-5 on Monday.
Since the beginning of the 21st century in the United States, growth of renter-occupied housing continues in the ascendant while growth of owner-occupied housing continues south.
We still live with the deleterious effects of the Great Recession, when more than 6 million residences were completely foreclosed in the United States, and this is the best our elected representatives can do almost two decades on.
Congress is already getting Mamdanied as this goes to Trump for his signature.
When electing a socialist mayor has weightier consequences than many people had first imagined
Three New York Democrats backed by Mamdani win House seat primaries; 2 incumbents lose
... Brad Lander defeated incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in the 10th District; Darializa Avila Chevalier bested Rep. Adriano Espaillat in the 13th District; and Claire Valdez won the primary for the 7th District, where Rep. Nydia Velázquez is not seeking reelection. ...
The Democratic Socialists of America organization backed Chevalier and Valdez.
A year ago, the DSA’s efforts helped Mamdani stun the local and national political world by soundly defeating former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the Democratic mayoral primary, and months later in the general election.
“It’s not just a question of electing more Democrats. It’s a question of electing better Democrats,” Mamdani said Tuesday, according to The Associated Press. ...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)