Fred Standefer

Two headlines, same day. Cost to provide healthcare to illegals in Colorado has exploded - 6x the original estimates!!! Colorado out of money. $1.5B budget shortfall. Here is an idea. Stop taking taxpayer dollars to fund services for people who shouldn't be here!!!!

🔸Hormuz: crude quality matters more than quantity 🔸Asia hit hardest with loss of Qatari LNG 🔸US crude and petroleum product exports are up! 🔸Hormuz danger/insurance: Navy escorts are meaningless 🔸Iran’s fee threat: It’s a joke! 🔸China’s Saudi imports: No surprises 🔸Russia gas pipeline attacks: Who is attacking? 🔸Asia coal is back: Coal remains king 🔸Propane spike: Shortages everywhere 🔸Petrobras refining: It’s a mitigation, not a solution Daily Energy Report open.substack.com/pub/afalhajji/…

A super super majority of House Democrats voted NOT to deport foreigners who commit criminal welfare fraud against the American People.

@US_OGA Pretty sure Galt had to relocate from Colorado as well

Atlas is shrugging. In Miami.

There will never again be a free and fair election in Europe so long as the EU can pick every country’s winners and losers by using its Digital Censorship Act to rig every election in favor of the candidate race it wants to win.

The media in DC are useless. How can they let Chuck Schumer say 20 million Americans will be disenfranchised if the federal government requires them to have an ID to vote - and yet also claim there are next to no cases of illegal voting incidents?! The American people are laughing at the Washington crowd.

Breaking: America versus the Globalists No candidate in modern American history has faced what Donald Trump has faced. Not opposition. Obliteration. The full weight of institutional power was deployed against a single political figure because he could not be controlled. Look at Europe. Those leaders were selected. Trump was elected. Three times. While European citizens watched their sovereignty handed over quietly to Davos and the UN, Americans refused to follow. That difference is everything. They had the same plan for America, and the American people rejected it at the ballot box. This is not politics as usual. This is good vs evil. @realDonaldTrump @JDVance

“Sex” is chromosomally determined at conception.

No it doesn’t. It clearly allows fees on income. You’re just trying to trick voters. But thankfully, we are here to tell every Coloradan about this! #copilitics #coleg

Illegals are voting. Illegals are getting free food. Illegals are getting free childcare. Illegals are getting free education. Illegals are getting free tax credits. Illegals are getting free healthcare. Illegals are getting free housing assistance. Illegals are getting free legal representation. Illegals are getting free mental health services. Illegals are getting free college tuition in over a dozen states. It is the most insane scam ever perpetrated on the American people.

@gnoble79 Thank you, excellent advice and summary. We learned nothing from 2008 and other similar periods

Private credit didn't blow up because of Blue Owl or bad software loans or AI disruption. Those were SYMPTOMS. The disease is the same one I've seen 3 times in 45 years on Wall Street: Too much money, too much leverage, too little discipline, and a financial product sold as "safe" to people who didn't understand what they owned. Private credit grew to $3 trillion on a simple lie - that you could earn 9-10% yields with "semi-liquidity" on assets that have no liquid market. That's not investing. That's volatility laundering. And the Street dressed it up beautifully. "Private credit." Sounds so exclusive, so sophisticated. Illiquid loan sharking would be more accurate. And don't get me started on "private equity", another Wall Street rebrand designed to make LEVERAGED BUYOUTS sound like fine wine. They changed the name because the old one scared people. The risk didn't change. Just the marketing. Wall Street has always been brilliant at one thing: rebranding risk as exclusivity and selling it to people who don't know what they're buying. Now add oil at $113 a barrel and watch the whole thing come apart. The Strait of Hormuz is shut. The IEA is calling it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. The Fed held rates steady yesterday and the market just RIPPED AWAY expectations for even a single cut this year. Oil is the fuse. But the TNT was packed years ago. Oil above $100 means inflation stays sticky. No rate cuts. Every overleveraged borrower inside these private credit portfolios gets squeezed harder every single month. Interest coverage ratios deteriorate. Defaults tick up. Valuations get marked down. And when valuations drop, the leverage stacked on top of that leverage (the "back-leverage" that banks provide using those same loans as collateral) starts to unwind. And JPMorgan already started. They marked down software loan collateral and restricted lending to private credit funds. When the biggest bank in America pulls back, that's a SIGNAL. High-yield spreads just surged to 470 basis points. The widest in years. Credit markets are screaming what equity markets haven't fully heard yet. I've watched this exact pattern before. - Junk bonds in the '80s - Dot-com leverage in 2000 - Structured mortgage products in 2007 The product changes every time but the architecture never does: Wall Street creates something complex, sells it as safe, layers leverage on top, markets the yields to retail investors, and collects enormous fees on the way in. Then something breaks and the gates go up. The people who built the machine are fine - they already got paid. The people who bought the brochure are trapped behind locked doors. $265 billion in market cap already wiped from the major PE firms. I don't think we're close to done. And you know what? That's FANTASTIC. Perhaps we'll finally get some real price discovery. Just say no to mark to model. Holders of this fine merchandise will get the returns they deserve. The pension funds, endowments, and insurance companies that piled into this garbage should take the hit. No bailouts. NONE. This nonsense has gone on far too long and moral hazard is the predictable result. The only way to end this insanity is to let Mr. Market operate. Allow price discovery. Allow bankruptcy. No more money printing. No more crony capitalism. No more extend and pretend. Blow it all up. That is the only way. "But what about the individuals who get hurt!" Better to take the hit now and reset than continue down this road. Hyper-financialization is destroying our economy and enriching the fortunes of the few. This must stop. NOW. But I have little confidence it will. We'll get more of the same: Rule changes. Special accommodations. The inevitable big ease will come. Count on it. AND BUY GOLD

Then consider that democrats don’t want them locked up where they can’t inflict further harm on children.

‼️‼️The state is nearly $1 billion in the hole in the current year, and budget actions have now pushed that shortfall to almost $1.5 billion for next near. ‼️‼️ You cannot spend recklessly, ignore the warning signs, and then expect taxpayers to clean up the mess

@MichaelCLFields @BellPolicy Per Grok: bottom 50% of Colorado Income tax filers - $50-$60,000 AGI paid 5.2% of total state income taxes Top 20% - (over $200,000 AGI) paid - 55% Top 0.5% paid 19.4% Gross tax before credits totals $10.45 BILLION THEY HAVE PLENTY OF MONEY- they just want to steal more

What @BellPolicy won’t tell you is that this $2.7 billion tax hike measure also allows the legislature to put “fees” on everyone’s income. All Coloradans will end up paying more! #copolitics #coleg

Many years ago I used to trade chemical fertilizers and can’t overstate the importance of the Gulf region as a producer and shipper.

Speaker McCluskie may feign surprise at the huge cost overruns hitting Cover All Coloradans, but these cost overruns were predicted early on and she is up to her neck in this fiscal fiasco. Cover All Coloradans is her baby. She co-sponsored the 2022 bill that created this sanctuary state program, which funnels public funds to undocumented immigrants. She now blames cost overruns on "unanticipated impacts,” but that's revisionist nonsense. Republican critics of the bill at the time predicted that it would cost many times what initially was predicted. And they were correct. The iron rule of entitlement programs is clear: they always grow, in size, enrollment, and cost over time. Especially ones with open-ended eligibility, no federal match for key groups, and no hard caps. Critics warned in 2022 about long-term fiscal risks and unsustainable pressure on the general fund. As a lead sponsor and former budget writer, McCluskie was in the room when those laughably low initial cost projections were accepted. This isn't a surprise — it's the predictable outcome of a policy she helped launch. Colorado taxpayers are now paying the price for decisions that ignored the basic math of how these programs expand. When will Julie and other Statehouse Democrats own the overruns, instead of shrugging them off as "unanticipated"? #copolitics #coleg @GovofCO @jmccluskie @McCluskieforCO

Colorado is a major drug trafficking pipeline. #3 in the country for drug use and addiction. x.com/BroomfieldPD/s…

CO Dems have continually said they’ll rather protect illegal immigrants than innocent children. Vote them out this November!

China spends more on computer chips for AI than they do importing oil. The AI race will decide our world order for centuries to come. @wynton_hall's book Code Red details the impending threat and how we must respond to it.

Remember, if the big banks are "offering" you a way to make money, you're the exit liquidity.