When Benita Chikaluma's husband died in 1994, her family could easily have fallen into desperate poverty. Chikaluma lives in Malawi, a poor country in southern Africa where women often have little control over their finances.

The CARES Act was signed into law on March 27. Congress earmarked $454 billion of that stimulus money to be distributed by the Treasury to the Federal Reserve to be used for emergency lending programs to save businesses and jobs during the pandemic and keep credit flowing to the U.S.

We warned last week that, despite The Fed's unlimited largesse, there is trouble brewing in the mortgage markets that has an ugly similarity to what sparked the last crisis in 2007. For a sense of the decoupling, here is the spread between Agency MBS (FNMA) and 10Y TSY yields...

A large drop in the price of ether (ETH) is testing the feasibility of Ethereum's entire system of lending and borrowing. MakerDAO is the largest and most important application in Ethereum's decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. Right now, it faces an emergency shutdown with $4 million of its dollar-pegged dai stablecoin not backed by an underlying crypto asset, according to a stakeholder call held Thursday.

By Greg Hunter's USAWatchdog.com (Early Sunday Release) Macroeconomic analyst Rob Kirby can sum up the massive Fed money printing it is doing each and every day. Kirby explains, "We are on a vertical curve where money has to be added to the system. . . .

Ever since the secured overnight repo rate (SOFR) spiked to 10% in September, there have been dire warnings that these exceptional movements show the financial system is fundamentally broken. The story goes that the post-crisis financial system is so dysfunctional that it is unable to operate without continual injections of money from central banks.

If the CEO of HSBC has been lending $400b USD to china to help them prop up their Monopoly money, that accounts for half of the reserves we have calculated that have already run. The chinese bank forward position on CNH is another $450 billion. Their currency is a HOUSE OF CARDS.