The Private Equity deal machine is in trouble, so of course it’s time to bring back perhaps the most idiotic product Wall Street has ever produced. Bloomberg News reported last week that Goldman Sachs, after a 2022 self-imposed ban, is getting back in the SPAC underwriting game. Back in…
The Third World War has ended, yet it continues – such is the paradox confronting us today. The situation regarding the ceasefire in the Middle East remains deeply unclear due to a flood of contradictory information. On one side, Donald Trump rushed to announce that an agreement had been…
Last night President Donald Trump announced a “Complete and Total CEASEFIRE” between Israel and Iran. Trump seemed exuberant. “This is the end of the war,” he told Axios’s Barak Ravid. “It is a great and wonderful thing for Israel and the world.” Asked how long the ceasefire would hold, Trump …
For the first time in more than 50 years, more immigrants may leave the United States than enter. The economy is slowing, but the unemployment rate is steady because the number of foreign-born workers is declining. According to data from the Department of Labor, there are a million fewer foreign-born…
If you don’t think Washington is in the maws of a Fiscal Doomsday Machine, think again. And the place to start is with the 30-year CBO projections, expressed as the dollar increase from the current $29 trillion level of publicly held US Treasury debt. If Washington does nothing except leave…
When I saw Brian Wilson and his band at Jones Beach Theater, at what proved to be one of The Beach Boys leader’s last shows, he barely made a sound except to sing the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby,” the Phil Spector-produced pop masterpiece that inspired and obsessed him since…
I was on R.B. Ham’s “Beyond the Pale” podcast recently, when I said that it looked like Donald Trump was giving us another of his ingenious head fakes, and was pulling back from Iran. Literally at that moment, R.B. put the breaking news up on the screen. It brought…
One of the things ignored about the outbreak of war between Iran, Israel and the United States is that it brought the great religions into conflict. The prior wars in the region have been mostly Israel against one of the Muslim countries or the United States against one of…
Whatever happened to the Donald Trump and Elon Musk visit to Fort Knox? You’ll recall the buzz from earlier this year. Trump and Musk loudly announced they were going to visit the U.S. bullion depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky to make sure the U.S. gold was actually there. The…
When the warden doesn’t like the way the Paul Newman character talks to him, he beats him, then proceeds to project his own weakness and insecurity in the famous ‘failure to communicate” speech. Cool Hand Luke is a 1967 anthem to the resistance of prisoners to the moral inferiors who hold…
