1st Amendment Praetorian

War/Military:
-The IDF has begun launching artillery attacks against Syrian military infrastructure located in the Golan Heights, which they claim violates the 1974 Disengagement Agreement between Israel and Syria

-Taiwan is again experiencing a surge of Chinese aircraft around the island after Beijing’s recent military drills involving the Shandong aircraft carrier

-The US is sending 16 F-16s to UKR, with the first 6 already on their way

-Zelensky is trying to get Poland to set up a no-fly zone in Western UKR by signing an agreement to shoot down any RUS missiles that traverse over that part of the country. Wise observers see it as merely a ploy to try to get to a NATO Article 5 invocation.

-A rundown of the Kyiv children’s hospital debacle (it was hit by a missile this week):
--RUS launched attacks against the air defense systems surrounding Kyiv.
--They then launched an attack on military (manufacturing) infrastructure in Kyiv.
--They successfully landed 3 missiles on the targeted building.
--A children’s hospital was hit, and UKR claimed it was a RUS strike.
--Photos of the missiles don’t align with the RUS hypersonics (used against air defense) or subsonics (used against the building). They do, however, look just like UKR air defense missiles that went off target and hit the children’s hospital - like the one that landed in Poland but UKR blamed on RUS.

-India’s PM Modi visited Putin at his summer villa this week, and the pair exchanged public bromancey words.
Zelensky began to attack Modi publicly.
--Zelensky, however, met with Modi and had his chance a year ago, but Modi walked away from that meeting feeling as he had been insulted by Zelensky.
--This is why you don’t put actors and comedians in positions that need diplomacy.

-RUS has reportedly now taken Volchansk.
--It seems UKR was taking troops from Volchansk to buttress its lines in Toretsk, but that opened lines in their defensive positions in Volchansk.
--RUS crossed the Volga River, and UKR had to abandon the “high rise” positions they had wanted to maintain.

-The EU/NATO apparently overstated their ability to produce artillery by 3x. They had forecasted 1.5mm production this year, reality looks more like 500-600k.
While officially named an anti-terror exercise, China and
-Belarus began joint military exercises in Belarus this week.

Markets/economics:
-BOJ had to implement 2 emergency interventions to save the USDJPY pair this week. While nowhere near the previous intervention, it looks like somewhere around $20-30bn may have been injected. It did successfully bring the price below $160 (for now).

-Annualized interest payments on US Federal debt has now reached $1.14 tn, which is more than double that from 2022 when rate hikes began.

-The US Producer Price Index (PPI) soared at the fastest pace in 15 months as service costs soar to keep up with inflation. Link in the show notes.

-Around 25mm Americans are behind on credit cards, auto loan, or personal loan payments, according to Moody’s and Equifax.

Business:
-John Deere is facing criticisms and whistleblowers who are shining light on some incredibly woke policies from HQ, as the company is laying off US workers to shift production to Mexico.

-News came out this week that AT&T had a massive breach of all phone calls & text messages of its customers.
--It seems it wasn’t AT&T itself that was hacked, but rather a 3rd party vendor called Snowflake that had access to AT&T’s data.

-Luxury brand Burberry has announced plans to cut hundreds of jobs this week.

-Intuit has announced that it is laying off around 2,000 employees.

-The Biden Administration is giving GM and Stellantis $1bn to stop plant closures and prod them to continue building EVs.

-GE Appliances, based in Kentucky, will be laying off 4% of its global workforce.

Science:
-In a blow to those who say that the moon landing was fake, an Indian space rover passed over the moon and sent back pictures of the original US spacecraft that landed on the moon.

449 views02:51