Rising inventory and dwindling demand have brought down home prices in many U.S. metropolitan areas this year, especially in those markets in the Sunbelt and the South which became overheated between 2020 and 2022.

At the national level, the vertiginous price growth that characterized the pandemic years has also slowed to a grind, with the median sale price of a home in October only 1.2 percent higher than a year ago, according to Redfin, at $439,701.

According to a new report from Zillow, 53 percent of all U.S. homes lost value over the past 12 months—the most since 2012.

While affordability has slightly improved, however, millions of Americans are still being kept on the sidelines of the housing market by higher home prices, property taxes, and home insurance premiums, as well as still-elevated borrowing costs.

“I think…we’re going to correct all the way to a point where household median income matches the home price, the median home price. And so that is going to be worse than 2008. This could devolve a lot faster than last time,” Wright said during an interview with Adam Taggart, host of Thoughtful Money, published on YouTube.

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I think there’s a lot of powerful people in this country who would like the story to begin and end with one monstrous man.

And when these emails were released, I decided, maybe against my better judgment, that I was going to read all of them. And it took me four or five days just going through one after another, making notes. And I was really curious about all these other people, right? And some of them are celebrities and bold-faced names like she was talking about. Some of them are utterly ordinary people no one’s ever heard of. Some of them are professors, others. But I was interested in this larger network, because these were the people that Jeffrey Epstein had, in effect, chosen to rehabilitate him socially and redeem him after he was a convicted sex offender trying to reestablish himself in society. And I was trying to understand how these relationships worked.

And what I found was that it’s very convenient for the American power elite to think about this as a story of one depraved man. But, in fact, what the emails show, if you actually read them, is that he had chosen this particular kind of social network, this American power elite, because he could be sure that it would be able to look away at what he did, because it was very gifted at looking away over a generation at so much else, so much else, so much other abuse and suffering, whether the economic crises members of that network often helped cause, the wars members of that network helped push fraudulently, the pain of technological obsolescence that members of that network pushed on the American public. So, this was a group of people well chosen by Jeffrey Epstein, because this American power elite, these circles that he moved in, if they have any superpower, it is the ability to hear the cries of people without power and close their ears.
[…]
Well, as I read the emails, it seemed to me there were a few different things going on. One, this is a group of people who are not really loyal to the communities they come from. They’re not — their loyalty is not downward to places and communities and even countries. This is a kind of borderless network of people who are more loyal to each other than to places. And that kind of network actually needs someone who is a connector. So, a lot of the emails are, “Hey, I’m landing in New York,” “Hey, I’m going to San Francisco.” And then Epstein would say, “Hey, you should meet this guy in San Francisco,” “Oh, you need an investor for your startup? Let me connect you with that.” It’s all about this kind of connectivity. And he was a very good connector.

Second, this is a network that thrives on information barter, and specifically nonpublic information. Again, why would they consort with this guy? Well, this guy ended up being — and not just his own information. He ended up being a kind of convener of these trades of nonpublic information. Investors want information that will help them, you know, make trades that other people don’t know about. You know, professors want insight about things. People in the business world want tips about things that will be the next big thing. So there was this kind of information network. Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary, wanted dating advice.

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ICIJ has published searchable databases from its major projects — including Offshore Leaks and Pandora Papers — that contain profiles of “power players” and “confidential clients” and link to original corporate records and legal filings. Many of these documents are also available on DocumentCloud, a widely used repository used by investigative centers.

Among open data tools, Cosic highlighted:

OpenCorporates, a key global company database that often gives the first overview of an oligarch’s corporate footprint.
Property and land registers, especially in jurisdictions favored by elites. Spain’s Property Cadastre, for example, allows name-based searches for a fee and helps map villas on the coast owned via offshore entities.
OCCRP’s Investigative Dashboard, which lists corporate, land, and court registries for many countries, and which is a good starting point when you do not know which authority holds a particular dataset.

She also recommended OpenSanctions, which aggregates sanctions lists from multiple jurisdictions and, crucially, all major spelling variants of sanctioned individuals’ names.

For politically exposed persons, Cosic mentioned specialized PEP databases she uses to double-check whether she has missed any companies tied to a target. And while commercial databases such as Sayari or Orbis can be costly, she urged newsrooms to negotiate temporary or discounted access, sometimes in exchange for credit in published stories.

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Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday released a study that found that artificial intelligence can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market, or as much as $1.2 trillion in wages across finance, health care and professional services.

The study was conducted using a labor simulation tool called the Iceberg Index, which was created by MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The index simulates how 151 million U.S. workers interact across the country and how they are affected by AI and corresponding policy.
[…]
The index treats the 151 million workers as individual agents, each tagged with skills, tasks, occupation and location. It maps more than 32,000 skills across 923 occupations in 3,000 counties, then measures where current AI systems can already perform those skills.

What the researchers found is that the visible tip of the iceberg — the layoffs and role shifts in tech, computing and information technology — represents just 2.2% of total wage exposure, or about $211 billion. Beneath the surface lies the total exposure, the $1.2 trillion in wages, and that includes routine functions in human resources, logistics, finance, and office administration. Those are areas sometimes overlooked in automation forecasts.

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June 1982. A powerful Italian banker tied to the Vatican is discovered hanging beneath London’s Blackfriars Bridge—pockets weighted with bricks, cash on him, and a passport under an alias. Was it suicide or an execution tied to one of Europe’s wildest finance scandals?

This video breaks down the fall of Banco Ambrosiano, the Vatican Bank’s entanglement, the secret P2 lodge, mafia allegations, and how multiple inquests shifted the “suicide” narrative toward murder—yet no one was ever convicted

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In a 2015 interview with Yahoo News, Carpenter said that They Live is “a documentary. It’s not science-fiction.” Conceived during Reaganomics, the story examines a society obsessed with consumerism and greed. The villains are aliens from another planet and represented the Reagan Republican government and greedy bankers of the 80s.

According to Carpenter, it has only gotten worse. “It’s morphed into something really bizarre. The same problem – unrestrained capitalism – still exists. Everything is built to make a profit.”
[…]

When Nada puts on the special sunglasses, he is bombarded with subliminal messages hidden within the pages of magazines, on billboards, and in other forms of advertisement. Nothing is left to the imagination when humans are subliminally told to Consume, Obey, Buy, Conform, Stay Asleep, Do Not Question Authority, No Independent Thought, and Money is Your God!

Carpenter created They Live as a warning against greed and propaganda. While filming, Carpenter was surprised by people not noticing or paying attention to the props with subliminal messages. As if it was normal.

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Privatisation in Nigeria’s utilities has been a cautionary tale. Since the 2013 electricity sector reforms, tariffs have skyrocketed, blackouts persist, and jobs have dwindled – leaving millions without affordable access. Similar patterns in water and waste sectors exacerbate inequality, particularly for low-income and rural communities. The summit’s discussions revealed how these policies, often backed by global lenders, undermine worker rights and public accountability.

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The United Nations has warned that Gaza faces a “human-made abyss” and that rebuilding the territory could cost more than $70 billion over several decades, The Guardian reported. A report by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) highlighted that Israel’s military operations have “significantly undermined every pillar of survival” for Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, leaving the population in “extreme, multidimensional impoverishment.”

UNCTAD noted that Gaza’s economy contracted by 87% between 2023 and 2024, reducing GDP per capita to just $161, among the lowest in the world. The West Bank has also suffered from economic decline, attributed to violence, settlement expansion, and restrictions on worker mobility. The report added that withholding of fiscal transfers by Israel has limited the Palestinian Authority’s ability to provide essential services or invest in recovery, at a time when urgent rebuilding and crisis response are needed.

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The effort appears mostly driven by national security concerns, particularly a desire for the government to prop up strategic industries and lessen America’s reliance on foreign countries like China for key resources. Some officials are hopeful the equity stakes will generate a windfall for taxpayers, but the likelihood of that is unclear. Many of the companies are facing financial headwinds, and some could take years to become profitable.

The unusual government intervention into the private market is fueling some concerns, including the opacity of the process, the potential for favoritism, corruption and market distortions, along with the possible loss of taxpayer funds should the investments fail.

Aaron Bartnick, a fellow at Columbia University and a former Biden White House official, said there were serious questions about whether the government role in private industry would address national security vulnerabilities and deliver a return on taxpayer dollars.

“In the absence of a clearly articulated strategy,” he said, the concern was that “this could just devolve to arbitrary deals that favor friends or disfavor foes.”

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The Whitlam government’s removal took place amid immense worldwide political instability that triggered ruling class fears of social revolution, including in Australia.

The period from 1968 to 1975 was marked by the most convulsive uprisings of the international working class since the aftermath of World War II. Not only was US imperialism facing opposition at home and internationally to its barbaric neo-colonial war in Vietnam. Workers internationally were on the offensive, demanding higher wages and better conditions.

In May-June 1968, France was convulsed by an indefinite general strike that brought the government of President Charles De Gaulle’s regime to its knees and it only survived with the assistance of the Stalinist Communist Party. In Italy, a wave of strikes erupted in what became known as the “Hot Autumn” of 1969. In 1970, the social democratic-Stalinist “Popular Unity” coalition Allende government was elected in Chile on the basis of a raft of populist promises to ameliorate social conditions.

In 1974, workers’ struggles erupted in Britain, culminating in the bringing down of the Heath Conservative government. In the same year, President Richard Nixon was forced to resign in 1974 as US imperialism and its puppet government plunged toward final defeat in Vietnam in April 1975. In Europe, military and fascist dictatorships fell one after another in Portugal, Greece and Spain from 1974 to 1976, amid mass popular opposition.

These political upheavals were fuelled by a deep crisis of the profit system internationally, as the post-World War II boom was coming to an end. The ability of US imperialism to stabilise global capitalism based on its own overwhelming economic domination and the betrayals by Stalinism of the post-war, working-class upsurge was ending. International trade and financial arrangements had been underpinned by the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, which made the US dollar a world currency convertible to gold at the fixed rate of $35 per ounce.

In August 1971, facing inflation at home and a looming international run on gold, Nixon ended the gold backing for the US dollar, destabilising the global monetary system. That gave rise to stagflation—soaring inflation and unemployment—intensified by the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973–74 and the worst worldwide recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

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