Skin substitute fraud scheme billed taxpayers $1 million per patient and paid for a $594,000 Ferrari, Dr. Oz's CMS says.

ECB President Christine Lagarde says she will step down on 7 February 2027, after seven years leading the bank.

The New York Times reports that Alice Huang, an executive at Singapore AI firm Megaspeed with close ties to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, was allegedly passing information to Beijing as a Chinese intelligence asset. US intelligence reportedly briefed Trump more than a year ago. Per the Times, he chose not to act, to avoid hurting Nvidia sales or antagonizing China. Megaspeed was already under scrutiny over whether it helped route about $2 billion in Nvidia chips to China. The claims rest on anonymous sources and are unproven.

Cashu now has a physical tap-to-pay card. Offline ecash payments backed by Bitcoin. No internet required at the point of sale.

Cashu Card | Experimental NFC ecash protocol

Wallets load ecash onto the card. Terminals can accept a tap offline, then settle with the mint when connected.

Samsung just posted roughly $80 billion in quarterly operating profit, the first Korean company ever to clear ₩100 trillion in a single quarter. The stock fell 4.1%.

In 1985, a typical US home cost 3.7 years of full-time pay. By 2025, it was 6.4. In Canada, it went from 4.1 years to 11.4.

Big quarter for BPI. President Trump endorsed their Data Center Dividends proposal, which would return surplus data center tax revenue directly to local households. Their research on foreign influence operations targeting US AI infrastructure led to congressional testimony and a formal investigation request from two House committee chairmen. The State Department named BPI a founding partner of its Freedom Tech Excellence Program alongside Palantir and Anduril. Their open letter calling on frontier AI labs to give security defenders model access got 40+ signers including Coinbase, Block, and Strategy. Both OpenAI and Anthropic responded with new programs. 2,275 media hits in a single quarter.

BPI Quarterly Report - Q3 2026 | Bitcoin Policy Institute

Bitcoin Policy Institute’s Q3 2026 report covers Freedom Tech DC, our State Department partnership, congressional testimony, and Data Center Divi...

"They'll hate you if you don't." Charlie Munger's advice on giving your kids their inheritance now.

"The first company to stop training new models would actually be the winner because their costs would collapse. The data suggests someone should have done that already. It's not happening." Paul Kedrosky on why the AI race dynamic traps everyone.

National Guard units in all 50 states are reportedly mobilizing for next week's elections, per journalist Ken Klippenstein NSPM-7 Compliant. His Substack report cites anonymous military sources. The mission reportedly includes supporting federal cybersecurity, observing ballot drop boxes and polling places, and safeguarding critical infrastructure. The Pentagon, the National Guard Bureau and state governments have not confirmed it. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine has said there are no plans to send federal military personnel or federalized Guard to polling places.

"I pitched 35 or 40 banks. None of them were a buyer. Then Buffett buys NetJets for $750 million and I just happened to be the guy who saw the banks last." Kenn Ricci to David Senra on how he landed $300M in financing.

"My dogs bark at the mailman, he leaves, and they think 'I did it.' No, you have a bad causal model. The mailman always leaves." Paul Kedrosky on why AI capex is masking a weak economy and fooling policymakers.

"They're making money from issuance, not from holding. They're not keeping the debt. They're making money from fees." Paul Kedrosky on why capital markets keep fueling AI spending that now exceeds every buildout in 150 years except highways and WWII.

"I think we're going to get a strong GDP number for the third quarter. Atlanta Fed is well over 3%." Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pushing back on the idea that further rate hikes would be a policy mistake.

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh says the Fed will cut rate-decision meetings from 8 a year to 6 by 2028. From fall 2027, one meeting drops the rate vote. By 2028, two of the eight will be strategy-only.

"The Dow Jones Transports is a vestigial remnant of the railroad bubble. You can see prior financial bubbles fossilized in the indices themselves." Paul Kedrosky on why your index fund is actually a concentrated AI bet.

The Fed held rates at 3.75-4.00% in a 10-2 vote. Two dissenters, Cook and Hammack, wanted another quarter-point hike. The statement says inflation "remains elevated" but the committee needs an "accumulation of more information" before acting. Translation: they hiked in September for the first time since 2023 and now they are sitting on their hands watching tariff-driven price distortions they cannot distinguish from real demand. Meanwhile productivity growth is strong, capital investment is robust, and job gains are keeping pace. The economy looks fine on paper because AI capex is masking weakness everywhere else. The Fed is flying blind and they know it.

Bitcoin Core just disclosed two memory exhaustion vulnerabilities, both rated medium severity. Fixes are live in versions 29.5, 30.4, 31.2, and 32.1. The first allows a malicious peer to cause unbounded memory growth by pretending not to support BIP31 nonced pings. Affects all platforms. The second lets an attacker send TCP urgent data to bypass backpressure limits and crash any Windows, macOS, or BSD node. Linux is not affected. Both were discovered by Project Loupe, an LLM-based code scanner built by Elias Rohrer at Spiral. Update your nodes.

Bitcoin Core

CVE-2026-117349 - Slow unbounded memory growth on paused pre-BIP31 peers

CVE-2026-117349 - Slow unbounded memory growth on paused pre-BIP31 peers

Bitcoin Core

CVE-2026-117350 - Unbounded memory growth through TCP urgent data on non-Linux systems

CVE-2026-117350 - Unbounded memory growth through TCP urgent data on non-Linux systems

"This is the first one that has all four. A great technology story, a real estate angle through data centers, very loose credit, and a government telling us we must win an existential battle with China." Paul Kedrosky on why this cycle is uniquely dangerous.

Defeated Brazilian presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro and his family have landed in Miami after fleeing Brazil. The Trump administration granted them US visas a day earlier.