by Michael Snyder
The Economic Collapse Blog
It appears that the people running our system have decided that it is time for a wave of consolidation in the banking industry. A key program that was keeping U.S. banks afloat was allowed to expire last month, and everyone knew what that would mean. On Friday, the FDIC quietly announced that Republic Bank had been seized and a sale to Fulton Bank had already been arranged. Have you noticed that they often try to announce bad news like this on Friday? By the time news of the failure of Republic Bank broke, many people had already started their weekends. And the FDIC probably assumes that most people will have forgotten all about this by the time Monday morning rolls around. But this was a big deal, and it is inevitable that more dominoes will soon start to fall.
At the time it was seized, Republic Bank had 32 branches in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York. The following comes directly from the FDIC announcement that was issued on Friday…
Behind the facade of normalization, even high-income lifestyles have been ghetto-ized.
According to this morning’s dismal publication from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, US GDP growth crashed to just 1.6%, while inflation keeps rising at a 3.4% rate.
(Bloomberg) — Former President Donald Trump’s economic advisers are considering ways to actively stop nations from shifting away from using the dollar — an effort to counter budding moves among key emerging markets to reduce exposure to the US currency, according to people familiar with the matter.
The gold stocks’ latest earnings season is just getting underway, and should prove fantastic. The miners are set to report their most-profitable quarter in years, primarily driven by much-higher gold prices. These companies have also mostly forecast holding the line on costs, helping earnings amplify gold’s breakout surge. This sector’s strong-and-improving fundamentals should increasingly attract back institutional investors.
President Joe Biden, 81, implemented a new strategy of walking to and from Marine One with multiple aides to “draw less attention” to his physical ailments, Axios’ Hans Nichols and Alex Thompson reported Friday.
The release of 1st quarter 2024 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on April 25th surprised virtually all forecasters. The first three months of 2024 were characterized by a notable deceleration in US economic growth, marking an almost two-year low. The same data release revealed that inflation, as measured by US GDP Personal Consumption Core Price Index (quarter-over-quarter), accelerated 3.7 percent, ahead of an expected 3.4 percent, disrupting a brief period characterized by robust demand and subdued price pressures. Those conditions previously fostered optimism for a so-called soft landing.
After the California Assembly’s Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee recently voted 11-0 to support a far-reaching, speech-quelling, lawsuit-promoting bill in the name of protecting “the children,” Assemblymember Joe Patterson (R–Rocklin) posted this on X: “The most simple bill ever and I was pleased to support it after a lot of heartburn. All the bill says is companies are liable if they don’t ‘exercise ordinary care or skill towards a child.’ Do you disagree?”
I’ve been hearing a lot of commercials on my favorite local conservative radio station from BP about their Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects (CCUS for “underground” storage), so my natural curiosity got aroused and decided to investigate it.
Video has emerged of a drag queen leading children barely older than toddler age in chanting “Free Palestine” during a so called “Queer Storytime for Palestine” event in Massachusetts.
The United States is facing a catastrophic situation, plus are they going to eliminate private property rights in the US?
Are the financial markets headed for trouble? There was quite a bit of panic on Wall Street on Thursday after more bad economic numbers were released. But honestly I simply do not understand why the financial markets responded with such surprise. By now it should be apparent to everyone that we have a “Weekend at Bernie’s economy” that is being propped up by unprecedented levels of government spending. If we actually tried to live within our means, we would immediately plunge into a depression. Our politicians definitely do not want that, and so about every one hundred days they are adding another trillion dollars to the national debt, and the vast majority of that borrowed money goes directly into the veins of the corpse that we call the U.S. economy.