AI Beats Human Research Teams At Crunching Medical Data

Whether you think AI is on the cusp of replacing millions of jobs, or an overblown Google search designed to agree with you, one thing is sure: people whose job it is to analyze complex medical data might want to pay attention...

For years, biomedical research has had a problem: too much data, not enough people who know how to wrangle it - or simply that it took months to do so. Modern health studies generate oceans of molecular information - gene expression, DNA methylation, microbiome profiles. Turning that into useful predictions about disease risk or pregnancy outcomes typically requires teams of data scientists, months of coding, and endless debugging.

Now, according to a new study in Cell Reports Medicine, some AI systems can do much of that work in minutes - and in at least one case, they did it better than humans.

The Test: AI vs. the Crowd

Researchers at UC San Francisco and Wayne State University took eight large language models - the same class of AI that powers systems like ChatGPT - and dropped them into a serious biomedical competition. The team used data from three previous international DREAM Challenges, where more than 100 research teams had built predictive models tackling reproductive health questions such as:

• Can you predict gestational age from blood gene expression?

• Can you estimate the biological age of the placenta from DNA methylation?

• Can you detect risk of preterm birth from vaginal microbiome data?

So this is modern AI creating modeling code in Python vs. human-coded predictive models, not humans manually processing the data (to be clear). 

One dataset included around 360,000 molecular features. Another required parsing genomic data from public repositories. In the original competitions, human teams spent up to three months developing and tuning their models.

The AI systems were given a carefully written prompt describing the dataset and the task. Then they had to generate executable R or Python code from scratch. Researchers ran that code and measured how well the resulting models performed on unseen test data.

No special hints. No iterative coaching. Just one shot.

The Results: Faster, Sometimes Better

Four of the eight AI systems successfully generated working code and usable prediction models.

One of them - OpenAI’s o3-mini-high - completed nearly all the tasks and scored the highest overall.

But here’s the part that surprised even the researchers: on the placental aging task, one AI-generated model outperformed the top human team from the original challenge. The difference was statistically significant.

In other words, the AI built a more accurate predictor of placental gestational age than the best human competitors had.

And it generated the code in seconds to minutes.

By contrast, the human teams had months to refine their approaches. Some built complex multi-stage random forest systems and leveraged additional clinical information. The AI, using a relatively straightforward ridge regression model, still won.

Across the other tasks, AI models generally matched the median performance of human participants - solidly competitive, though not always beating the top experts.

Why This Matters

Preterm birth affects roughly 11 percent of infants worldwide and remains a leading cause of neonatal mortality. Clinicians still lack reliable predictive tools for many pregnancy complications.

Better models could mean; earlier identification of at-risk pregnancies, more precise timing of interventions, and reduced long-term complications for children - among other things. But building those models is slow. - requiring extensive writing, debugging, and standardizing analysis pipelines.

And this is where the LLMs kick ass - given that they're especially strong at generating structured, reproducible workflows: loading data, splitting training and test sets properly, fitting models, calculating performance metrics, and even producing plots. Notably, none of the successful AI systems accidentally “leaked” test data into training - a surprisingly common human mistake that can inflate results.

That said, AI is still in its infancy and it wasn't all a slam dunk. In fact, half of the tested models failed outright - often due to basic coding issues like referencing nonexistent packages or mishandling data formats. R code proved more reliable than Python in this setting.

Even the top models were stochastic: run the same prompt multiple times, and you might get slightly different modeling strategies or results.

And there’s a deeper concern. If many researchers rely on similar AI systems, they may converge on similar modeling approaches. That standardization could improve reproducibility - but it might also reduce methodological creativity.

Where is this Going?

Large language models are already showing promise in reading medical records, generating radiology reports, and assisting in pathology analysis. What’s new here is that they’re moving beyond language tasks into hands-on data science, writing actual code. 

The authors emphasize that human oversight remains critical. AI models can hallucinate, misunderstand instructions, or silently make errors. Advanced API-based systems also come with cost and privacy considerations, particularly in clinical contexts.

The question is; will AI in 1, 3, 5 years from now be error free? No hallucinations and generally considered reliable? 

h/t Capital.news

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 19:40

Is China Really Dumping US Treasuries?

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

“China is dumping US Treasuries to get out of the dollar.” This claim has been circulating the mainstream feeds lately, with the narrative that the “end of the dollar is near,” or “the US will lose its funding base” and the “bond yields will surge.” But are those claims valid? Such is what we will explore in more detail.

Let’s start with the chart that has everyone concerned. As shown, China’s holdings of US Treasury bonds have fallen from nearly $1.2 trillion to $600 billion, or a 50% decline. On the surface, you can certainly understand the reasons for concern, as the decline in holdings over the last decade supports a clean storyline.

However, the problem is the step between observation and conclusion. A lower line item for “China, Mainland” does not equal a forced sale, it does not prove intent, nor does it prove a structural exit. What it does show is a lack of understanding about the dynamics of reserve currency management, and, in the case of China, the need to protect those reserves.

Let’s start with the Treasury Department, which states that the holdings tables are built “primarily on the basis of custodial data.” That phrase matters. Custodial data records where securities are held for settlement and safekeeping. Critically, the custodian is not the same as the beneficial owner, and that distinction undermines the headline narrative.

The Treasury’s own FAQ is the most important in this particular narrative:

“If a Treasury security purchased by a foreign resident is held in a custodial account in a third country, the true country of ownership will not be reflected.”

Read that sentence again.

The system is designed to track where the bonds sit, not whose balance sheet carries the risk. This is crucially important when it comes to the narrative that China is dumping its bond holdings and moving away from the dollar.

For those jumping to that conclusion, they did not take the time to ask the right question: “Where did the custody shift to?” That question matters for investors because it changes the risk assessment. If China were liquidating, you would expect pressure across Treasury auctions, persistent stress on dealer balance sheets, and visible strain in dollar funding markets. While those episodes occur from time to time, often tied to Fed policy or risk shocks, there is no clear connection to the “China dumping” storyline.

A better way to approach the claim is to follow the settlement trail, which takes us to the Belgium and Luxembourg connection.

The Belgium and Luxembourg Connection

Over the last decade, geopolitical risk has been rising. Heavy sanctions have been imposed on Iran and Russia, assets frozen or seized, and political pressure brought to bear. If you are a country with significant US dollar reserves and face the risk of sanctions or seizure, what measures could you take to limit that risk? Here is a good example:

“Policymakers [in Beijing] are mindful of the precedent set in 2022, when the US and its allies froze about $300 billion of Russia’s central bank reserves after the invasion of Ukraine. The worry is that if tensions were to escalate, the US could — in an extreme scenario — restrict access to China’s state and privately held dollar assets in a similar fashion.” – Bloomberg

It is critical to understand the two main economic reasons that China buys and holds US Treasuries. The most important reason is that China wants its currency, the yuan, pegged to the dollar, a practice common among many countries since the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944. A dollar-pegged yuan helps keep down the cost of Chinese exports, particularly to the US, its largest customer, which the Chinese government believes makes it stronger in international markets. Secondly, dollar-pegging adds stability to the yuan because the dollar is still seen as the safest currency in the world. To conduct trade on a global scale, they hold their reserves in US Treasuries, gold, or the dollar itself.

However, just because China owns U.S. Treasuries does not mean it must have custodial holdings in the U.S. Look at the same holdings table and focus on Belgium and Luxembourg. In the November 2025 snapshot, Belgium shows about $481 billion in Treasury holdings, and Luxembourg shows about $425 billion. Those are massive totals for very small countries that are not building reserves at that scale.

In reality, Luxembourg and Belgium are “hosting custody” for China. Just for reference look at the chart of US Treasury holdings of China and Belgium. Over the same period, while China’s holdings fell by $600 billion, Belgiums rose by $500 billion.

This is why the Treasury’s FAQ points directly to this issue and calls out “major financial centers,” such as Luxembourg and Belgium, as the source of “custodial bias.” The chart below adjusts China’s treasury holdings for its “custodial” accounts, showing that its holdings of US Treasuries are essentially the same as in 2011.

This is not a conspiracy. It is plumbing. One of the primary reasons that China uses Belgium for custodial purposes, besides avoiding geopolitical risk, is that the Euroclear Bank is based there and sits at the center of cross-border settlement and collateral mobility. Clearstream’s international depository is based in Luxembourg and serves the same global institutional client base. When a central bank or a state institution wants to hold a large Treasury portfolio with flexible settlement and collateral options, these hubs help address operational challenges.

With this understanding, it should be clear that the “China is dumping bonds” narrative is incomplete. However, it is the problem that arises when individuals seeking to spin a narrative for headlines, clicks, or views focus on one line item and ignore the framework.

Brad Setser at the Council on Foreign Relations has repeatedly made the point that the reported data understate China’s dollar bond exposure due to offshore custodians and portfolio shifts across dollar instruments. In his words, “China isn’t shifting away from the dollar or dollar bonds.”

That leads to the next question: why would China shift custody at all?

Why Is China Using Other Countries to Buy and Hold Treasuries

We already touched on avoiding geopolitical risk, but there are four practical reasons for China to shift custodial holdings, none of which requires an exit from US bonds.

1. Settlement efficiency and scale: Large reserve portfolios require scale, operational redundancy, and deep settlement connectivity. European custody hubs provide that. Euroclear’s work on US Treasury DVP repo settlement is a signal of where institutions want improved collateral movement and repo settlement workflows. When the infrastructure improves, demand follows. Holding through a hub often reduces friction.

2. Collateral mobility and financing optionality: Treasuries are collateral. They are not only an investment. They are a financing tool. A portfolio held at a hub links more easily into repo markets, securities lending, and collateral transformation. That matters for institutions managing liquidity. If you want the option to raise dollars quickly against Treasury collateral, the custody venue matters.

3. Risk management after sanctions shocks: Following the freezing of Russian reserve assets in 2022, reserve managers began reassessing legal and operational exposures. The Financial Times has reported extensively on Euroclear’s central role in the custody of frozen Russian assets and the policy debates surrounding them. The lesson for global reserve managers is straightforward. Jurisdiction, legal perimeter, and operational touchpoints matter. Shifting custody and settlement routes is one response.

4. Data optics and portfolio composition: The Treasury table is widely quoted. It is also widely misunderstood. A shift from direct custody into a third country changes what the table shows. Some investors read the table as a loyalty scoreboard, but that interpretation is wrong. There is also a composition component. A holder can reduce Treasury holdings while raising exposure to other dollar assets, such as gold, agency debt or deposits, while staying inside the dollar system. That can reduce the “Treasuries only” line item without reducing dollar exposure.

So when you see “China, Mainland” drift lower, the right response is to think in layers: 1) Custody, 2) Instrument mix, 3) Funding and collateral function, and 4) Geopolitical risk management.

Put those together, and the incentive to use Belgium and Luxembourg is clear. The goal is not a panic move to “dedollarize” the US, which would harm the Chinese economy. Rather, it is to gain operational efficiency and optionality in a world where finance and politics collide more often.

Now step back and ask the investor question: What does this mean for you and your portfolio?

How Investors Should View US Treasury Bonds in Portfolios

Investors should treat Treasuries as a tool, not a referendum on geopolitics. However, it is critical to your portfolio outcome to understand the entire context of how the “financial plumbing” operates.

As such, investors should start with the role Treasuries play in global markets. US Treasuries:

• Anchor dollar risk-free pricing.

• Sit at the core of repo and collateral systems.

• Serve as a settlement asset during stress.

Those functions do not disappear because one country adjusts custody venues.

Secondly, focus on the real drivers of Treasury returns. The return of US Treasuries is driven by expectations for economic growth and inflation over time. Federal Reserve policy drives the front end of the interest rate curve. Economic growth and inflation drive the long end. The chart shows a strong correlation between the composite of GDP, inflation, and interest rates. Those factors matter more than headlines about one foreign holder.

Next, as an investor, you should build your Treasury investment exposure based on objectives, rather than narratives. If you need:

• Liquidity and drawdown control hold more short to intermediate-term Treasuries, which often serve as portfolio ballast during equity stress.

• Income with controlled volatility, a ladder across the front-to-intermediate curve, helps manage reinvestment risk.

• To adjust for inflation uncertainty, blend nominal Treasuries with TIPS.

Lastly, avoid the common mistake of basing bond decisions on some misguided narrative. However, US Treasuries are not risk-free in price. As such, investors must focus on the risks that matter for their bond holdings.

• Duration risk

• Inflation risk

• Policy risk

The “China dumping” narrative is not a risk worth worrying about.

Focus on what matters by aligning duration and inflation sensitivity with your time horizon and risk tolerance. Treat headlines as noise, and Treasuries as a portfolio instrument built for cash flow, liquidity, and risk control. If you do that, you will be much better off.

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 17:40

"The World Is In Peril": Anthropic's Safety Boss Quits

Authored by Kay Rubacek via The Epoch Times,

Most people have never heard of Mrinank Sharma. That is part of the problem.

Earlier this month, Sharma resigned from Anthropic, one of the most influential artificial intelligence companies in the world.

He had led its Safeguards Research Team, the group responsible for ensuring that Anthropic’s AI could not be used to help engineer a biological weapon.

His final project was a study of how AI systems distort the way people perceive reality. It was serious, consequential work for humankind.

His resignation letter was seen more than 14 million times on X.

It opened with the words, “the world is in peril.”

And it ended with a poem and by announcing that he was leaving one of the most consequential jobs in artificial intelligence to pursue a poetry degree. Yes, you read that right: peril and poetry.

The poem he quoted is, “The Way It Is,” by the American poet William Stafford.

It speaks of a thread that runs through a life—a thread that goes among things that change, but does not change itself. While you hold it, you cannot get lost. Tragedies happen. People suffer and grow old. Time unfolds, and nothing stops it. And the final line: you don’t ever let go of the thread.

Although he didn’t state it explicitly, I argue that that thread is morality. It is the enduring sense that some things are right and some things are wrong—not because a law says so, and not because it is profitable, but because human beings, at their best, have just always known it.

Sharma spent two years watching that thread being let go under pressure, in rooms the public is never shown.

His letter said:

“Throughout my time here, I’ve repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions.

“I’ve seen this within myself, within the organization, where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most, and throughout broader society, too.”

He wrote that humanity is approaching a threshold where “our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences.”

He wanted to contribute in a way that felt fully in his integrity and to devote himself to what he called “the practice of courageous speech.”

A man who built defenses against bioterrorism concluded that the most important thing he could do next was learn to speak with honesty and courage.

That is a major signal about what is happening behind closed doors in AI research and development.

Many experts have compared the development of AI to the development of the atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project was built in total secrecy. The public had no knowledge of it, no voice in how it was used, and no say in what came after. When it was over, some of the scientists who built it spent the rest of their lives in anguish. Several walked away during the project itself.

Sharma was not alone. Numerous safety researchers have walked off AI projects from multiple companies. These departures may be the only signals we, the public, have, because almost everything else about AI development is happening beyond public view. The internal debates, the safety trade-offs, the negotiations over what this technology will and will not be permitted to do—none of it is being shared with the people whose lives it will most profoundly shape. We are not part of this conversation. We are being presented with outcomes and told to adapt.

John Adams wrote that the Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people, and is wholly inadequate for any other. George Washington warned that liberty cannot survive the loss of shared moral principles. The founders studied the collapse of republics throughout history and arrived at the same conclusion: The machinery of freedom requires a moral people to sustain it. Laws and institutions are not enough on their own. They depend on citizens and leaders who hold themselves to something that exists before the law and above it.

That is the thread of human society, and no AI system holds it. If people allow AI to replace the question of right and wrong with the measure of what is legal and permitted, the machine will carry that measure forward at a scale and speed that no previous generation has had to reckon with.

As Sharma ended his resignation letter, “You don’t ever let go of the thread.”

We are at a crossroads not unlike the one the atomic scientists faced.

Sharma’s resignation was a signal.

The wave of departures before and after it are signals.

The reported tensions between AI companies and government over where moral limits should be drawn are also signals.

Together, they are pointing at something the public has not yet been fully invited to consider: that the most important questions about this technology are being worked out without us, and that the thread of morality, which has always required people to hold it by choice, needs to be part of that conversation.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 17:00

As reported by the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry on November 3, 2025

Iran Strike Debate Erupts: Joint Chiefs Chair Allegedly Resists, Trump Fires Back

Military generals tend to be much more realistic about the potential negative consequences of going to war, as well as difficulties and challenges, over and against the often more hawkish policy-makers.

Currently, Pentagon generals appear to be belatedly speaking up, as Washington beats the drums of war on Iran. The Walls Street Journal reports Monday, "The Pentagon is raising concerns to President Trump about an extended military campaign against Iran, advising that war plans being considered carry risks including U.S. and allied casualties, depleted air defenses and an overtaxed force." This is increasingly looking like a military buildup in search of a political and strategic rationale.

United States Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine, via AP

Of course, also not too distant in the collective memory of top brass is the disastrous 2003 Iraq invasion, which led to two decade long extremely difficult and bloody occupation and quagmire. 

The Bush administration had essentially said it would be a cake walk, with then-US Vice President Dick Cheney famously telling NBC's Meet the Press in March 2003: "I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators."

Some remnant Neocons, who of course never learn their lesson - such as Senator Lindsey Graham - are currently trying to a paint a similar picture with Iran in 2026. Graham and even some within the Trump administration are arguing for full regime change. 

Removing the Ayatollah would more than likely require a ground invasion. But there will be significant hurdles with even just an air war, and it's no less than the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine issuing these dire warnings. According to a paraphrase and outline of what's being freshly reported by WSJ:

1) Caine warned that the war plans under consideration carry a high risk of significant American and allied casualties.

2) He cautioned that a multi-day campaign would exhaust air-defense munitions and other limited-supply items, which are critical for protecting regional partners like Israel if Iran retaliates.

3) An intensive operation against Iran could deplete stockpiles to a level that would complicate U.S. readiness for a potential future conflict with China.

4) He described the potential campaign as one that could "stretch the military thin" and leave forces "overtaxed".

5) Caine's gave "high likelihood of success" reassurances before the January 2026 mission to apprehend Nicolas Maduro, he has been unable to provide similar guarantees regarding a large-scale strike on Iran.

President Trump has not made up his mind, the report says, but also: "Officials say the issues raised by Caine, widely seen as a trusted aide by Trump, and others will be a factor in the president’s decision on whether to attack Iran and how."

Iran is prepared to make any strikes, however 'limited' they might be, into something costly for US forces. Already Tehran has said it would unleash ballistic missiles and drones on US bases in the region. Israel could come under fire too.

Iran's Foreign Ministry has said Monday that any American military action, even on a small scale, would be seen as an act of war and unwarranted aggression. "And any state would react to an act of aggression as part of its inherent right of self-defense, ferociously. So that’s what we would do," ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said at a briefing in Tehran.

Within hours after the WSJ report being out, President Trump slammed it as fake news, and has assured that if the decision to strike Iran is given by him as Commander-in-Chief, Caine will be fully supportive and ready...

Might Gen. Caine's arguments from a place of caution win out? There's a strong chance that he is speaking some sanity into Trump, who himself had repeatedly vowed on the campaign trail no more dumb regime change wars in the Middle East.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly has been quoted as saying: "General Caine is a talented and highly valued member of President Trump’s national security team. The president listens to a host of opinions on any given issue and decides based on what is best for U.S. national security." 

* * *

Meanwhile, Hegseth on the hilarious Pentagon/DOD activity 'pizza tracker' as an indicator of imminent war chances: "I've thought of just ordering lots of pizza on random nights just to throw everybody off."

PETER DOOCY: "There is an account on X that tries to forecast military action based on how busy the pizza places are around the Pentagon... Have you guys thought about maybe just going to the cafeteria?"

SECRETARY HEGSETH: "I'm aware of that account. I hadn't thought of just… pic.twitter.com/rLiA5bzMuT

— Vivek Sen (@Vivek4real_) February 22, 2026

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 16:40

"Weapons-Grade Mind-F**kery": A Campaign Of Bad Faith And Ill Will

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“The SAVE Act can pass today under existing procedure. The obstacle is not the filibuster. It is the habit of surrendering to a myth."

- Alex Muse on X

Lunacy proceeds from crime. In case you wonder why half the country has gone crazy, seek no further than Susan Rice’s stark warning to the other half of the country that is not crazy.

Ms. Rice was Barack Obama’s National Security Advisor and then “Joe Biden’s” Domestic Policy Advisor. She did a podcast last week with Preet Bharaha, former US Attorney in the SDNY, now a private lawyer with the Beltway law firm WilmerHale. Her message to Trump supporters: We’re coming after you when we’re back in power. “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

WEAPONIZATION: Susan Rice lays out her vision of a post-Trump America where supporters are rounded up and sent to reeducation camps or prisons. pic.twitter.com/IyEPXx4G9T

— @amuse (@amuse) February 20, 2026

It was an important signal and it got a lot of people’s attention. It telegraphed the fear running through the Lefty-left that their crimes against the country are being tallied, carefully catalogued, and presented to a grand jury in Florida.

The crimes are bundled as a multifaceted conspiracy to overthrow the US government.

Pretty serious.

Sedition and Treason.

Susan Rice knows what she (and others) did.

First, in the frantic days between Nov. 3, 2016 and January 20, 2017, Barack Obama’s White House cooked up the Russia collusion hoax with John Brennan’s CIA, James Comey’s FBI, and Loretta Lynch’s DOJ. Ms. Rice, who was in on it, notoriously wrote a CYA memo memorializing the meetings and planted it in her office desk to be easily discovered by the new Trump admin. The memo stated that “every aspect of this issue is handled by the intelligence and law enforcement communities ‘by the book’.” Of course, that was exactly the opposite of what really happened. The mischief emanating from it has run for ten years, crime upon crime upon crime.

Secondly, and surely less-known to the American public, was Ms. Rice’s role as Domestic Policy Advisor under “Joe Biden.” Her actual job from 2021 to 2023 was to serve as a conduit for Barack Obama to run “Joe Biden’s” White House, along with Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken. During those years, the public rarely (if ever) saw Susan Rice. She avoided the news media and did not make public statements or appearances at White House events. The news media were happy to ignore her. They knew exactly what she was up to.

The prime concerns of this cabal were to protect the image (cover up the crimes) of Barack Obama and his associates, to cover up the criminal degeneracy of the Biden family, and to get the Democrat Party back in power by utterly destroying Donald Trump and the populist revolt he headed.

Everything done in “Joe Biden’s” name during those years was to guarantee his party’s return to power, especially the deluge of illegal aliens across the border to pad the census for congressional districts and provide millions of future voters indebted to the party for letting them in (and giving them tons of freebies when they got here. . . phones, housing, food, walking-around money).

Meanwhile, the Democrats erected an immense scaffold of NGOs to funnel taxpayer money into salaries for their corps of political activists — outfits such as Stacey Abrams’ empire of grift in Georgia, the national networks of Antifa and BLM street-fighters, and the matrix of Somali social service fraud in Minnesota and Maine.

This created a huge parasitical patronage class, basically a national racketeering operation.

Eventually all the NGO grift became an end in itself — the Democrats animating principle: grift for grift’s sake, power to just keep it all going and continue to cover up the crime behind it.

The vital component to all this was weapons-grade mind-fuckery to produce a fog of war that would keep the American public utterly bamboozled, unable to comprehend what was happening amid gales of hoaxes, ops, and scams. The Covid-19 caper was the doozy. We still don’t know definitively if the mRNA vaccine program was a deliberate depopulation project, but it kind of looked like it, while plenty of messaging from global institutions — from the Gates Foundation to the WEF to the UN — was pretty explicit about getting rid of useless eaters. On top of all that, throw in the trashing of Western Civ’s industrial economies with “green” trickery, adding another layer of anxiety onto a sore-beset citizenry.

Of course, despite their best efforts — and it was a mighty crusade of bad faith and ill will — the Democrats failed to vanquish Mr. Trump, a strange miracle itself suggesting some sort of divine intervention. The question now is, will Mr. Trump be able to vanquish them? It begins to look like he might, with plenty of help from the Democrats themselves, who have reached a pitch of madness rarely seen in human societies.

Their latest prank: a boycott of the State of the Union speech to Congress.

So far, seven senators and nine congresspersons have promised to bail on the speech, led ostensibly by Senator Adam Schiff of California, a liar so prodigious and fertile that it can be truly said he never uttered an honest word including “yes,” “no,” and “maybe.” This faction will gather on the mall instead and hurl objurgations at the Capitol rotunda.

All that’s needed to finish them off, really, is passage of the SAVE Act so that voters will be required to prove their identity and citizenship, and absentee ballots will be restricted to the old rules about being too sick to get to the poling place, or else out of the country.

Last week, staffers behind the walking mummy, Mitch McConnell, prevented the bill from reaching the Senate floor with some procedural rigmarole.

Mr. Trump must call them out, and call out Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), too, for dragging his feet on whatever’s necessary to pass the SAVE Act.

The country demands honest elections, and one way or another they’ll get them.

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 16:20

As ordered reported by the House Committee on Natural Resources on February 11, 2026

As ordered reported by the House Committee on Natural Resources on February 11, 2026

As ordered reported by the House Committee on Natural Resources on February 11, 2026

As ordered reported by the House Committee on Natural Resources on February 11, 2026

AOC's Ignorance Is No Laughing Matter

Authored by Stephen Soukup via American Greatness,

Over the past week or so, many on the political Right have understandably enjoyed a laugh or two at the expense of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D, N.Y.). AOC went to the Munich Security Conference to provide “balance” to the Trump administration’s presence and to burnish her own credentials on the global stage. Instead, she mostly just made a fool of herself. Not only did she stutter, stammer, and offer a Kamala Harris-esque non-answer when asked about American interests in and obligations to Taiwan, but she also demonstrated a comically poor grasp of geography and a righteously ignorant understanding of history. In an effort to rebut and embarrass U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, AOC embarrassed only herself, showing that historical facts mean far less to her than identity-inspired fiction.

But while it’s inarguably fun to chuckle at and mock the ignorance of the smug congresswoman and presumed presidential aspirant, it is also important to acknowledge that her historical and political illiteracy extends beyond the superficial and touches on matters of real and critical importance. Notably, this purported champion of the working class does not know the history of working-class politics, does not understand the reasons for the collapse of the working-class-centered ideology, and, as a result, has never contemplated the dangers inherent in attempting to resuscitate that failed doctrine.

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez has long emphasized her biography and working-class roots to enhance her political status—and justifiably so. Her childhood may not have been quite the struggle she pretends it was, but she nevertheless endured economic hardships—especially after her father’s death—and was unable to find employment commensurate with her education. She was, famously, a bartender and a cocktail waitress before her election to Congress and, as a result, has long fashioned herself a champion of the working class and its purported priorities.

Indeed, on her trip to Munich, AOC emphasized her affinity with the working class and admonished democratic nations to erect a bulwark against totalitarianism by focusing on workers, workers’ rights, and worker-centered politics. “It is of utmost urgent priority that we get our economic houses in order and deliver material gains for the working class,” the congresswoman said, “or else we will fall to a more isolated world governed by authoritarians that also do not deliver to working people.” She railed against large corporations and especially billionaires, insisting that they had to be stopped from “throwing their weight around” in domestic and international politics. In short, the good congresswoman used her trip to Munich to urge the workers of the world to unite, because, as she sees it, they have nothing to lose but their chains.

There’s only one little problem with AOC’s exhortation: it’s ridiculous. Indeed, it’s been tried . . . and tried . . . and tried. It doesn’t work. And when I say that, I don’t mean that socialism doesn’t work or that communism has been tried countless times before and failed every time. That much is obvious by now. Rather, what I mean is that the workers of the world don’t care about the rest of the workers of the world. They don’t like the idea of being divided into classes, and they don’t have any particular affection for their fellow laborers. They don’t dislike other workers necessarily, but they don’t see themselves as a monolithic federation sharing the same interests, needs, or political predilections. Truth be told—and this is the key to understanding the silliness of the whole “global proletariat” nonsense—even the Marxists long ago gave up on uniting the workers of the world. In fact, in the United States, the most prominent Marxist theorists actually gave up on workers altogether as allies in the fight against capitalism.

One of the most pervasive bits of common knowledge about World War I is the idea that the ruling classes of Europe did not expect it to last very long or to be particularly destructive. Kaiser Wilhelm infamously predicted that Germany’s troops would be home “before the leaves fall.” What is less well known is that this “short-war illusion” was shared and embraced even more unequivocally by the era’s Marxist agitators. They believed, as Engels in particular predicted, in the inevitability of a “new man,” who would evolve from the working classes and would never harm his fellow new men. Just two years before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, the Manifesto of the Second International Socialist Congress in Basel in 1912 declared that war between working men was a virtual impossibility:

It would be insanity for the governments not to realize that the very idea of the monstrosity of a world war would inevitably call forth the indignation and the revolt of the working class. The proletarians consider it a crime to fire at each other for the profits of the capitalists, the ambitions of dynasties, or the greater glory of secret diplomatic treaties.

Of course, things didn’t exactly go as planned—either for the ruling classes or the Marxists. World War I did many things to Europe, most of them awful and ugly and demoralizing. It did many of the same things to Marxism. Although the war did incite revolution in Russia, that was far less than the Marxists had hoped for. Russia’s revolution was led by the educated classes and animated by peasants. Proletarian “workers” were largely non-existent. In the industrialized parts of Europe, workers flat out rejected appeals to class unity, choosing instead to fight for God and country. German workers saw themselves not as workers but as Germans. French workers saw themselves not as workers but as Frenchmen. And so it went.

In the aftermath of the war, Marxists were forced to confront two massive and related problems: the workers’ refusal to unite and the rise of profound and entrenched nihilism. In order to save their ideology, these Marxists had to revise it and explain its failures. As any schoolboy knows, they did so by concluding that the workers of the world did not understand their own interests or even their own natures. Workers were dissociated from their interests by the institutions of society, especially the institutions of cultural transmission: the Church, the schools, the media, art, entertainment, and so on. Therefore, to enable workers to see their real interests, those institutions had to be taken over, destroyed, and rebuilt along ideological lines. And thus began the Gramsci, Lukács, and Frankfurt School-led “long march through the institutions,” which largely killed economic Marxist theory, creating what we know today as “cultural Marxism.”

In 1964, Herbert Marcuse—a latecomer to the Frankfurt School who became America’s most prominent Marxist theorist—essentially gave up on the workers as the stimulators of revolution. As I have noted before in these pages, “Marcuse conceded that the capitalist system was simply too good at providing goods and services that made the masses comfortable and happy. It therefore deprived them of ever knowing or caring about their true oppressed consciousness. Workers had become one-dimensional consumers, distracted from their fate by their egos and the creature comforts of capitalism.” In turn, Marcuse laid the foundations for “identity politics,” which would, he believed, enable the rise of a new revolutionary class, motivated by new perceptions of oppression.

Long story short (if that’s possible any longer), over the course of the last century, Marxists gave up on workers and even on economics, deciding instead to focus on culture and identity-based grievances.

Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t appear to know any of this, of course, which means that she also doesn’t know that appeals to working-class unity have tended to end in tragedy, followed by massive, civilization-destroying revisionism. Most notably, because she doesn’t know that revisionism was necessary in Marxism, she also doesn’t know that the other stream of post-World-War-I Marxist revisionism ran through Rome and Berlin and resulted in authoritarianism on a scale previously unimagined.

AOC’s ignorance isn’t just about cowboys, in other words. It’s also about the greatest and most profound tragedies in world history. Her ignorance is dangerous.

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 14:45

IBM Plunges After Anthropic's Latest Update Takes On COBOL

After disrupting countless Software/SaaS/finance/real estate/broker sectors, Anthropic's Claude is now going after targeted companies. 

A little before 2pm ET, Bloomberg sent out a headline that Anthropic's Claude has found yet another skillset:

• *ANTHROPIC SAYS CLAUDE CODE CAN AUTOMATE COBOL MODERNIZATION

A herd of panicked IBM longs flooded to the Claude blog to read more on what is happening. Here's what it found (excerpted): 

COBOL is everywhere. It handles an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the US. Hundreds of billions of lines of COBOL run in production every day, powering critical systems in finance, airlines, and government.

Despite that, the number of people who understand it shrinks every year.

The developers who built these systems retired years ago, and the institutional knowledge they carried left with them. Production code has been modified repeatedly over decades, but the documentation hasn't kept up. Meanwhile, we aren't exactly minting replacements—COBOL is taught at only a handful of universities, and finding engineers who can read it gets harder every quarter.

Given these roadblocks, how can organizations modernize their systems without losing the reliability, availability, and data they’ve accumulated over decades? And without breaking anything?

* * * 

How AI changes COBOL modernization

AI excels at streamlining the tasks that once made COBOL modernization cost-prohibitive. With it, your team can focus on strategy, risk assessment, and business logic while AI automates the code analysis and implementation.

* * * 

Start your COBOL modernization

The approach outlined above works for COBOL systems of any size. Tools like Claude Code can automate much of the exploration and analysis work described, giving your team the comprehensive understanding they need to plan and execute migrations confidently.

Start with a single component or workflow that has clear boundaries and moderate complexity. Use AI to analyze and document it thoroughly, plan the modernization with your engineers, implement incrementally with testing at each step, and validate carefully.  This will build organizational confidence and surface adjustments needed for your systems.

In kneejerk reaction, IBM stock, already down sharply on the day, and tumbling 20% from its all time highs just earlier this month, plunged $15 to the lowest level since Liberation Day, briefly dipping below $230...

... as the market realized that it is the latest target of the Claude disruption train. You see, Common Business-Oriented Language (COBOL)  is a high-level, English-like compiled programming language developed specifically for business data processing, via IBM. As such, anything that disrupts this lucrative ecosystem created by IBM (code COBOL, then sell consultancy contracts to adjust the code which virtually nobody knows how to use), would immediately smash IBM stock... and that's precisely what happened. 

Which begs the question: after various Claude updates caused hundreds of billions in market cap damage in the past 3 weeks, is the company's strategy to keep rolling incremental disruption updates becoming Antrhopic's self-funding strategy. After all, if Dario Amodei had bought puts on IBM, and the dozens of companies that have plunge dmore than double digits in recent weeks, he would have made billions, certainly enough to fund his company for months if not years. 

And if not Anthropic, when will OpenAI - which needs capital much more badly than its enterprise-focused peer - do the same? 

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 14:25

CBO estimates that the Hospital Insurance Trust Fund's balance is exhausted in 2040. The balance generally increases through 2031, but spending begins to outstrip income in the following year.

Judge Says Jack Smith's Final 'Mar-a-Lago Docs' Report On Trump Can Never Be Released

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

A federal judge on Feb. 23 said that the final report on President Donald Trump compiled by a former special counsel shall not be released.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is based in Florida (and was appointed by President Trump), said in a 15-page decision that she was granting requests from Trump and his co-defendants to keep part two of the report from former special counsel Jack Smith shielded from the public.

Cannon said that Smith wrongly forged ahead with investigating Trump and others for allegedly violating federal law by gathering and retaining sensitive documents even after she ruled his appointment was unconstitutional and threw out the case.

“Rather than seek a stay of the Order, or clarification, Special Counsel Smith and his team chose to circumvent it, for months, by taking the discovery generated in this case and compiling it in a final report for transmission to then-Attorney General Garland, to Congress, and then beyond,” Cannon said.

“The Court need not countenance this brazen stratagem or effectively perpetuate the Special Counsel’s breach of this Court’s own order.”

She added later:

“While it is true that former special counsels have released final reports at the conclusion of their work, it appears they have done so either after electing not to bring charges at all or after adjudications of guilt by plea or trial. The Court strains to find a situation in which a former special counsel has released a report after initiating criminal charges that did not result in a finding of guilt.”

The Department of Justice (DOJ) had appealed Cannon’s ruling, but dropped the appeal after Trump won a second term in office.

The department also released part of Smith’s report just before Trump began his second term.

The other part, which has not been made public, was not to be released, according to a January 2025 order from Cannon.

Cannon announced in December 2025 that her injunction was set to expire in February this year.

Trump and co-defendants said in filings on Jan. 20 that Cannon should permanently block the release of the other part of Smith’s report. Lawyers for Trump said Smith was illegally appointed, and all acts he undertook were thus void, so the release “would constitute an irreversible violation of this Court’s constitutional rulings in the underlying criminal action and of bedrock principles of the separation of powers.”

DOJ officials backed that position.

“Put simply, Smith’s tenure was marked by illegality and impropriety, and under no circumstance should his work product be given the full weight and authority of this Department,” they said in a brief, adding later that making the second part of the report public would “lead to the public dissemination of sensitive grand jury materials, attorney-client privileged information, and other information derived from protected discovery materials, raising significant statutory, due process, and privacy concerns for President Trump and his former co-defendants.”

The DOJ and Trump did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Cannon’s ruling. Smith’s law firm did not return an inquiry by publication time.

Two outside groups, American Oversight and Knight First Amendment Institute, recently requested to intervene in the case because they wanted the second part of Smith’s report disclosed.

Cannon declined to allow the requested intervention.

In an appeal, the groups said that because the government had aligned with the defendants in the case, unless they were allowed to intervene, the hidden portion of Smith’s report would be buried or destroyed.

“There is no good reason for withholding this report from the public,” Scott Wilkens, senior counsel at the Knight First Amendment Institute, said in a Feb. 9 statement. “The public has a right to the report under the First Amendment and common law, and the Freedom of Information Act requires its release as well.”

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 12:45

 

 

Soon after the Supreme Court dropped its IEEPA decision Friday morning, I wrote up a post on who the IEEPA decison Winners were. Today, as promised, we review the losers. Spoiler alert: there are a lot of them.

In broad strokes, the winners were the large companies that filed for refunds or sued the US, the dollar, consumers, the separation of powers, the US Constitution, and the Supreme Court. The losers are a bit more nuanced: some are obvious, many are not.

My analysis of who won and who lost is based on both the immediate reaction to the tariffs being found unlawful, and the longer-term results of this case. As always, the world is complex and not black-and-white, with much nuance to be found.

Let’s jump right in:

LOSERS

• Consumers:  On Friday, my immediate reaction was that US consumers would have a lower tariff burden. But the President added a 10% (150-day) global tariff, and then raised it over the weekend to 15%.

15%. This regressive Trump Tax will be borne by every consumer on a wide range of imported foodstuffs, manufactured parts, and finished goods. It is much less of a victory than I originally believed due to the latest tariffs POTUS imposed.

• U.S. Equities: What should have been a clear victory for US equities has turned into a muddled mess. (See chart at top). Blocking the president’s power to arbitrarily tariff any country any amount is a significant win; it was offset by the President’s immediate use of Section 232 to impose 10% 15% tariffs for 150 days. While Markets rallied right after the decision, they reacted negatively to the president’s actions over the weekend.

¶ Commodities (especially Gold & Silver): If the dollar was the big winner Friday, then anything priced in dollars is the loser. As noted, 2025 – just like 2017 before it – was a bad year for the dollar What’s been driving the dollar lower has been frustration from our trading partners, the repatriation trade, and a spreading concern that the United States is no longer the reliable ally it once was.

• Domestic automakers: Ford and GM have seen their stocks rise over the past year, but they have been underperforming the industrials and the broader market lately. Aluminum & Steel tariffs have made their cars more costly; other non-IEEPA tariffs1 affecting automobiles were not before the Court.

• Bonds & Deficits: If you believe that the bond market does not like unfunded spending, then it’s hard to see how bonds are not at least modest losers post SCOTUS decision. Tariffs are taxes that raised nearly $200 billion. While nobody here wanted a VAT tax, it did affect government revenues.

On a related note, in the first year of his second term, President Trump added $2.25 trillion to the national debt. His claim was that tariffs would help balance the budget, notwithstanding the Constitution – and that claim is no more.

 

….I am a Tariff Man. When people or countries come in to raid the great wealth of our Nation, I want them to pay for the privilege of doing so. It will always be the best way to max out our economic power. We are right now taking in $billions in Tariffs. MAKE AMERICA RICH AGAIN

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2018

Tariff Man: Trump has largely defined his presidency by promoting the benefits of tariffs. Alongside tax cuts and deportations, it is this administration’s signature policy. It’s not surprising that the Supreme Court’s rejection has sparked a wide range of reactions. At one end, Hakeem Jeffries called the tariff ruling a “crushing defeat for the wannabe King”; at the other, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer described tariff policy as “unchanged.”

The truth lay somewhere in between.

It was a frustrating defeat for POTUS, one that led him to lash out at Justices, Democrats, trading partners, and others. (Tomorrow night’s State of the Union address could become unhinged). Regardless, it was a significant loss with consequences that have yet to be fully determined.

• Tariff benefits:

The other thing we learned was that none of the promised benefits of tariffs have materialized:

“It’s the most beautiful word in the dictionary, and it’s my favorite word. It will make our country rich. Tariffs cost Americans nothing, it’s not going to raise our inflation. If I’m going to be president of this country, I’m going to put a 100%, 200%, 2,000% tariff. We’re going to generate hundreds of billions in tariffs; we’ll become so wealthy we won’t know how to spend that money.” 2

Every economist not named “Navarro” had previously forecast this…

• Foreign Policy: The single biggest hammer the president had has been taken away: His ability to single out specific countries and then impose unlimited tariffs (100%) is no longer.

The NYTimes blew this one: “They Did Deals With Trump to Get Lower Tariffs. Now They Are Stuck.”

A naïve headline that is laughably wrong. Nobody who was strong-armed into a deal based on unlawful tariffs is going to honor those deals. (Good luck enforcing them in the court of international trade).

These deals will be slow-walked, empty-gestured, let-me-get-back-to-you, and ultimately ignored.

• Congress: While the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the separation of powers were victors on Friday, the subtle loser in our system was Congress. They had the ability – indeed the obligation – to push back on the executive branch’s power grab. The failure to stand up to the President’s overreach was a self-own. Their timidity allowed the bully to take what was rightfully theirs: the power to tax.

• Sycophants: There are numerous people who have thoroughly embarrassed themselves throughout the tariff regime3 but one stands out above them all: Brett Kavanaugh.

I could criticize Gorsuch’s concurring opinion as an unneeded performative treatise running 46 pages, only to ultimately agree with Chief Justice Roberts.4

But really, it is Kavanaugh whose dissent will be remembered. It fell somewhere in between embarrassing and sycophantic, fluffy and nonsensical.5 He spends 61 pages telling President Trump he won: “Although I firmly disagree with the Court’s holding today, the decision might not substantially constrain a President’s ability to order tariffs going forward, because numerous other federal statutes authorize the President to impose tariffs and might justify most (if not all) of the tariffs at issue in this case.”

Then Kavanaugh – and let me remind you, this is a sitting Supreme Court Justice, and not a junior lawyer in State or DOJ – helpfully lists the alternative statutes (Section 232, 122, 201, and 301 of the Trade Act) as a roadmap for the administration to use to reinstate tariffs in other ways. (Which they did)

The supposed intellectual heir to Scalia brand of conservatism was revealed as neither. Legally incoherent, intellectually indefensible, and blatantly partisan, Kavanaugh did not write a dissent, but rather, a very long op-ed, or if you want to be less charitable, a loyalty oath dressed up in judicial robes.  It will likely haunt the rest of his judicial career.

 

Previously:
Winners & Losers of SCOTUS Decision Striking Down Tariffs (February 20, 2026)

 

 

__________

1. Passenger vehicles, Light trucks, Medium‑ and heavy‑duty vehicles, and buses are all covered by a separate Section 232 tariffs, as are auto parts, including engines, transmissions, key electrical components, etc.

2. A few assorted dates of quotes:

The word tariff is the most beautiful word in the dictionary” -2018
“[They]will make our country rich” -2019
“Tariffs cost Americans nothing.” -2019
“The word ‘tariff’ to some people, and not very smart people, but to those people tariff is a dirty word. To me it is not a dirty word, it’s the most beautiful word there is.” Sept 15, 2024 (KNTV‑13, Las Vegas interview):
“It’s not going to raise our inflation.” -2024
“To me the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff. And it’s my favorite word.”-2024
“If I’m going to be president of this country, I’m going to put a 100%, 200%, 2,000% tariff. They’re not going to sell one car in the United States.”  -2024
“The higher the tariff, the more you’re going to put on the value of that piece, those goods, the higher people are going to pay in shops.”  -2024
“Tariffs are going to make us rich as hell, it’s going to bring our country’s businesses back that left us.” -2025
​“We’re going to generate hundreds of billions in tariffs; we’ll become so wealthy we won’t know how to spend that money.” -2025

​3. Lots of sycophants deserve at least a footnote:

Robert Lighthizer: U.S. Trade Representativewho was the key architect and executor of Trump’s tariff strategy

Peter Navarro: The one economist in the country who thought this wasa good idea.

Kevin Hasset: The uniquely unqualified adviser, who, despite multiple sources that correctly identified consumers as shouldering the burden for the Trump Tax, threatened NY Fed researchers for using data toshow the same. Thus, the author who wrote Dow 36,000, the most embarrassing financial book ever written, has another bit of ignominy to add to his resume.

4. Gorsuch: “Whatever else might be said about Congress’s work in IEEPA, it did not clearly surrender to the President the sweeping tariff power he seeks to wield.” WTH dude, 46 pages for THAT?

5. I don’t want to spend too much time on the structural issues with Kavanaugh’s dissent, but here are 3 problems.

1) He simultaneously argues the president has this power under IEEPA, but that the major questions doctrine shouldn’t apply in foreign affairs, and even if the court disagrees, the president has alternative authorities that make the decision moot. That’s not a coherent jurisprudential position — it’s kind words to an upset client.

Second, 61-pages?

Third, and most damning is that Kavanaugh, who supposedly is committed to judicial restraint and textualism, advocates in his dissent for (a) maximally expands executive power against the clear weight of the statutory text, (b) gave explicit political cover to route around the ruling,

 

The post Part II: IEEPA Tariff Ruling’s Losers appeared first on The Big Picture.

Core US Factory Orders Better Than Expected In December

While sentiment is sagging to multi-year lows, 'hard' data is helping support growth forecasts (GDPNOW) and holding stocks at record highs.

This morning we get a fresh glimpse at America's manufacturing segment - hard data - with Orders data (which is expected to drop MoM in December).

After surging higher in November (+2.7% MoM), analysts expected US Factory Orders to drop 0.6% MoM in December but the actual print disappointed, dropping 0.7% MoM

Source: Bloomberg

Interestingly, Core Factory Orders rose 0.4% MoM - better than expected

Source: Bloomberg

The final December prints for Durable Goods Orders fell 1.4% as expected (and in line with the preliminary data).\

New orders non-defense, ex-air - a proxy for spending - rose 0.8% MoM (better than expected).

The bottom line is this data is overall supportive for GDP guesstimates (and earnings).

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 10:06

EU To Freeze Trade Deal With US After Supreme Court Overturns Trump Tariffs

Update (9:40am ET): In response to the EU's decision to freeze ratification of Trump's landmark deal, the US president has come out swinging and on Truth Social threatened any countries that "play games" with the supreme court decision that they "will be met with a much higher tariff." It just isn't clear what the procedure for these much higher tariffs - aside from Section 122 which is limited to 150 days - will be now that IEEPA has been ruled unconstitutional.

Earlier:

In the aftermath of Friday's SCOTUS decision to reverse Trump's tariff policy, one lingering question is what happens to the bilateral trade deals Trump struck with various countries (and which supposedly would lead to hundreds of billions of fresh investment into the US). Well, in the case of the EU we no longer have to wonder:

The morning, the European Union said it would freeze the ratification process of its trade deal with the US and was seeking more details from the Trump administration on its new tariff program. Zeljana Zovko, the lead trade negotiator in the European People’s Party group on the US deal, said in an interview with Bloomberg that “we have no other option” but to delay the approval process to seek clarity on the situation. 

The main political groups in the European Parliament say they’ll suspend legislative work on approving the trade deal on Monday, days after the US Supreme Court struck down Trump’s use of an emergency-powers law to impose his so-called reciprocal tariffs around the world.

The center-right EPP, which is the largest political bloc in parliament, will be joined by parties including the Socialists & Democrats and the liberal Renew group to back freezing the process. 

According to Bloomberg, Bernd Lange - chairman of the parliament’s trade committee - called an emergency meeting later Monday to reassess the EU-US trade accord. He said over the weekend that parliament should delay work on the trade accord until the EU receives more clarity on the new tariffs. EU ambassadors will also meet Monday afternoon to discuss the US trade relationship.

Trump’s announcement following the court decision to impose a 10% global tariff, which he then increased to 15%, left many questions unanswered for American trading partners, stirring up more economic turbulence and uncertainty about the US policy.

As a reminder, the deal struck last summer between Trump and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen would impose a 15% tariff rate on most EU exports to the US while removing tariffs on American industrial goods heading into the bloc. The US would also continue to impose a 50% tariff on European steel and aluminum imports. The bloc agreed to the lopsided deal in the hopes of avoiding a full-blown trade war with Washington and retaining US security backing, particularly with regards to Ukraine. Parliament had been aiming to ratify the agreement in March.

The trade deal had already faced a rocky path to ratification. After the initial agreement, the US expanded its 50% metals tariff to hundreds of additional products, angering EU lawmakers and European officials. Trump’s Greenland threats amplified that frustration, leading some to call for the deal to be canceled.

EU lawmakers froze the approval process once before, after Trump threatened to annex Greenland. After Trump backed down from his push to annex Greenland, a Danish territory, EU lawmakers briefly restarted the trade deal ratification process. But they also introduced changes such as a sunset clause, meaning that even if parliament ultimately approves the agreement, it will have to go back to other EU institutions for further negotiations. 

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 09:36

"Worst-Case Scenario": Novo Nordisk Plunges After Next-Gen Obesity Drug Falls Short Of Lilly Rival

Shares of Novo Nordisk A/S plummeted again on Monday after the company reported trial results showing its next-generation obesity shot, CagriSema, delivered 20.2% weight loss at 84 weeks, compared to 23.6% for Eli Lilly & Co.’s tirzepatide (Zepbound).

Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Michael Shah explained, "This outcome is the worst-case scenario for Novo and heightens the need for M&A with Novo’s other GLP-1/Amylin drug."

Shares of Novo in Copenhagen plunged as much as 16.5%, breaking below a support level that had held since August 2025. The stock is now down about 75% from its 2024 peak and is near its 2021 low.

The result is yet more trouble for Novo’s new leadership, led by Mike Doustdar, following Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen's recent exit, along with board turnover linked to disagreements over a turnaround plan to regain GLP-1 market share. There’s also the copycat GLP-1 compounding issue involving the telehealth firm Hims & Hers.

Novo’s strategy revolves around CagriSema as Wegovy and Ozempic face longer-term patent pressure; it combines semaglutide and another gut hormone called amylin. Early studies have shown mixed results, and at least one large trial failed to meet Novo’s targeted weight loss.

Another CagriSema trial, due later this year, could yield better results because it aims to move patients to the highest dose.

“Clearly this weakens Novo Nordisk’s competitive stance in the obesity market - especially if the obesity market develops into a ‘winner takes it all’ market,” Danske Bank Credit Research analyst Brian Borsting wrote in a note. “That said, we continue to believe that Novo Nordisk’s product portfolio in the obesity market is diversified and solid although we see today’s news as credit negative.”

Meanwhile, Goldman analyst and Novo super bull James Quigley provided clients with an update on the CagriSema trial:

This morning (23rd February), Novo announced that CagriSema did not achieve the primary endpoint of non-inferiority in REDEFINE-4, with weight loss of 23% for the CagriSema arm vs. 25.5% for the tirzepatide 15mg arm, after 84 weeks of treatment. Previously, we had said that in a non-inferiority scenario, taking the PoS of CagriSema down to 0% in obesity, leaving $5bn in sales only for cagrilintide monotherapy, would lead to a -12% impact to our DCF, all else equal, but noted that investor expectations were likely lower for CagriSema. These data points could further reduce market expectations for CagriSema, even ahead of the REDEFINE 11 trial (1H'27), and while we continue to expect approval for CagriSema and likely some use by physicians as part of a portfolio approach in obesity, investors are not likely to give credit here until the sales start to come though post approval. Novo is looking to explore higher doses of CagriSema with a Phase 3 trial planned for 2H26 - although we believe investors are unlikely to give any credit until the sales trajectory is seen. Therefore, given our expectations noted above, the share price reaction at the time of writing of c.-12% appears in line, as any residual potential for CagriSema moves out of the expectations built in for the stock. Continued momentum for the launch of the Wegovy pill is even more important, we believe, as shifting volumes to the oral market could be advantageous, given Novo has a more competitive profile on weight loss.

• CagriSema failed to meet the primary endpoint of demonstrating non-inferiority vs tirzepatide on weight loss at 84 weeks. On an efficacy-estimand basis, 2.4mg/2.4mg CagriSema showed -23.0% weight loss at 84 weeks, vs 25.5% weight loss with 15mg tirzepatide over the same time period. On a treatment-regimen estimand basis, CagriSema showed -20.2% weight loss at 84 weeks vs -23.6% with 15mg tirzepatide. As a result, REDEFINE-4's primary endpoint of CagriSema demonstrating non-inferiority on weight loss vs tirzepatide was not reached.

• CagriSema showed a well-tolerated safety profile, per Novo. While no tolerability data was given, in the release Novo said that overall CagriSema appeared to show a well-tolerated and safe profile, with the most common AEs being GI AEs. Of these, the vast majority were mild to moderate and improved over time, which was consistent with other drugs in the GLP1 agonist class.

• In terms of next steps, Novo anticipates a decision from the FDA on CagriSema by y/e 2026. This is following the company's submission to the FDA in December 2025 based on data from REDEFINE 1 and 2. Novo also expects to initiate an additional Phase 3 trial of higher dose CagriSema in 2H26, and expects the readout from REDEFINE 11 of 2.4mg/2.4mg CagriSema in 1H27 (longer term trial looking at the full weight loss potential of CagriSema in obesity).

Not surprisingly, Quigley's continued "Buy" rating on the stock even as it has collapsed 75% from the peak and nears 2021 lows. "We are Buy rated on Novo Nordisk," he said.

Related:

• Novo Nordisk CEO To Step Down Following Brutal Bear Market

• "Big Miss": Wall Street Disappointed After Dismal Novo Nordisk GLP-1 Sales Outlook, Shares Plunge

• GLP-1 Feud: HIMS Fires Back At Novo Nordisk, Slams Lawsuit As "Blatant Attack" By Big Pharma

• GLP-1 Anti-Obesity U.S. Drug Market In Four Charts

Bloomberg data shows 17 "Buy" ratings, 14 "Hold" ratings, and 3 "Sell" ratings on Novo. The average 12-month price target among Wall Street analysts is 353 kroner.

How many Goldman clients are furious with Quigley's Novo coverage?

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 09:25

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Obama's 'Gift' Sticks Taxpayers With $200M+ Bill As Chicago Hides True Costs Of Presidential Library

When former President Barack Obama announced plans for his presidential center on Chicago’s South Side, he described it as a privately funded investment in the city that would give back to the community that shaped his political career.

Former President Barack Obama is pictured next to construction of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, a project facing delays, soaring costs and mounting scrutiny over its finances. (Scott Olson/Getty Images; Reuters/Vincent Alban) via Fox News

And while construction of the brutalist eyesore itself remains privately financed through the Obama Foundation, taxpayers are footing the bill for massive infrastructure costs. 

A review by Fox News found that state and city agencies have not produced a unified accounting of total public expenditures tied to the project’s surrounding infrastructure. While individual agencies have disclosed partial figures, no single office has reconciled those totals or clarified how they overlap.

At the time the project was approved in 2018, public infrastructure costs were projected at roughly $350 million, to be split between the State of Illinois and the City of Chicago. Those estimates covered roadway modifications, utility relocations and related improvements necessary to accommodate the 19.3-acre campus in Jackson Park that nobody asked for. 

In July, the Illinois Department of Transportation said that approximately $229 million in state-managed infrastructure spending had been committed to the project. That total includes about $19 million for preliminary engineering, $24 million for construction engineering and $186 million for construction activities. A department spokesperson described the earlier $174 million figure as a preliminary 2017 estimate.

Now, Chicago’s most recent 2024–2028 Capital Improvement Plan lists more than $206 million allocated to roadway and utility work associated with the project. However, much of that funding is labeled as “state,” and neither state nor city officials have clarified how the figures relate to one another or whether they represent overlapping commitments.

A map graphic shows the footprint of the Obama Presidential Center inside Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side along Lake Michigan. (Fox News)

Fox submitted records requests to several agencies, including the Illinois Department of Transportation, Chicago’s Department of Transportation, the city’s Office of Budget and Management, the mayor’s office and Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s administration - yet, not one provided a consolidated, up-to-date accounting of total public infrastructure spending. The Illinois Attorney General’s Public Access Counselor is reviewing whether agencies complied with state transparency laws in responding to the requests.

The Obama Foundation defended the project, reiterating that the center’s construction - whose cost has grown from early projections of roughly $330 million to at least $850 million, according to its 2024 tax filings - is being financed by private donations. In a statement to Fox, foundation spox Emily Bittner said the organization is “investing $850 million in private funding to build the Obama Presidential Center and give back to the community that made the Obamas’ story possible,” adding that the project is intended to catalyze economic opportunity on the South Side. Bittner, of course, didn't address the infrastructure costs - which have been extensive. 

Chicago’s 2024–2028 Capital Improvement Program lists $206,078,058 for "Obama Presidential Center & Jackson Park – Infrastructure Improvements," with most funding labeled as state sources. (City of Chicago Capital Improvement Program)

Cornell Drive, a four-lane roadway along the eastern edge of Jackson Park, was removed and traffic rerouted farther west. Utilities, including water mains and sewer lines, were relocated, and new drainage systems were installed. City and state officials have said the changes were necessary to manage anticipated traffic and visitor demand.

The center occupies 19 acres of public parkland transferred under a 99-year agreement for $10, a decision that prompted legal challenges arguing that the arrangement was not in the public interest. Courts ultimately dismissed those lawsuits.

Though often described as a presidential library, the Chicago complex will not function as a traditional library operated by the National Archives and Records Administration. Former President Obama’s official records will be maintained by the federal government at a facility in Maryland, while the Chicago site will be operated privately by the Obama Foundation.

The foundation also pledged to establish a $470 million endowment intended to protect taxpayers in the event the project encounters financial difficulty. According to previous reporting by Fox News, that fund has received $1 million in deposits.

Who didn't see this coming?

Tyler Durden Mon, 02/23/2026 - 07:45