Authored by Chris Macintosh via InternationalMan.com,

You’ve likely heard about peaks in markets often coinciding with magazine covers saying the opposite.

Well, this is simply a representation of zeitgeist.

Another representation of zeitgeist is advertising at the Super Bowl. For long-time readers, you may recall our selling Bitcoin way back before it nosedived. We highlighted that at the time there were crypto ads running wild at the Super Bowl. We even had Matt Damon shilling crypto. Remember that? Fun times.

Well, you know what dominated this year’s Super Bowl? AI. It was in fact the single largest concentration of AI advertising in television history. Ain’t that something.

16 tech companies bought Super Bowl ads: OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Meta, Anthropic, Genspark, Base44, Rippling, Ramp — and more.

Tech ad spending is double what it was during the 2022 “Crypto Bowl.”

And here we are again. Just with AI.

2000: The Dot-Com Bowl. 14 internet startups bought Super Bowl ads at $2.2 million per spot. Pets.com spent $1.2 million on that ridiculous but now-famous sock puppet commercial. Ten months later it joined Elvis. The stock went from $11 to zero. Eight of the 11 startups that advertised were bankrupt or sold for cents on the dollar within a year.

2022: The Crypto Bowl. FTX, Coinbase, Crypto.com, and eToro collectively spent $54 million on Super Bowl ads. Nine months later, FTX was bankrupt and Coinbase shares fell 70% within a year. By the time the next Super Bowl rolled around, crypto had zero representation.

So maybe this time is different. Maybe all these AI-related stocks — many of which are unprofitable, just like crypto and dotcoms — defy gravity and continue powering ahead. It is possible. But I would say improbable… despite the market thinking it not only possible but assured. And that is exactly why we have our hedge against a Nasdaq fall safely secured.

When Revolutionary Tech Needs a Marketing Budget

Alphabet is looking to issue a 100-year bond.

The last time this happened was Motorola in 1997 — the last year Motorola was considered a big deal.

At the start of 1997, Motorola was a top-25 market cap and top-25 revenue corporation in America. Never again! The Motorola corporate brand in 1997 was ranked #1 in the US, ahead of Microsoft. In 1998, Nokia overtook Motorola in mobile phones, and after the iPhone it fell out of the consumer eye entirely. Today Motorola is the 232nd-largest market cap with only $11 billion in sales.

Remember when Austria issued a 100-year sovereign bond? That pretty much bottom-ticked the bond market. But wait… there’s more.

Big Tech is dropping $700 billion on AI this year. Their cash flow? Circling the drain.

Amazon’s going into debt. Google’s free cash flow is cratering 90%. And they’re paying influencers $600K each to convince you AI is worth using. Nothing screams “revolutionary technology” quite like needing half a million per creator to sell it.

Then there’s the earnings carnage…

All four giants reported earnings at once, and Wall Street had a meltdown:

Amazon: $200 billion capex (largest in history). Stock: -9%. Free cash flow: -71%.

Google: $185 billion spend (vs. $120 billion expected). Stock: -5%. Free cash flow: headed to $8 billion from $73 billion.

Meta: $135 billion (double last year).

Microsoft: -17% this year, worst in the group.

Combined 2026 spend is projected to hit $700 billion. Morgan Stanley projects Amazon will burn $17 billion in negative free cash flow. BofA says maybe $28 billion. Amazon quietly filed with the SEC about needing to raise debt to keep building. Google already did a $25 billion bond sale. Their long-term debt quadrupled last year. They’re spending everything they have, borrowing more, then spending that too.

Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta are paying influencers $400K–$600K each to promote AI on Instagram and YouTube. AI platforms spent $1 billion on digital ads in 2025 — up 126%. Google and Microsoft’s AI ad spending: +495% in January alone. Anthropic’s running Super Bowl ads. OpenAI’s flying creators to private events.

When was the last time truly revolutionary tech needed a billion-dollar ad campaign?

Did the iPhone need influencer deals? Did Google Search need Super Bowl ads in 1998? Did email need this? No. People just used them.

You know what does need massive paid promotions? Pharma drugs. Crypto exchanges. Online gambling. MLM schemes. Products where adoption is hype, not utility. And now, apparently, AI.

“This will eliminate your job. Also please use it. Here’s $600K to tell your followers it’s cool.”

They need humans to sell a product designed to replace humans. They need creators to promote tech that makes creators obsolete. They need influencers to build trust in a system that eliminates influencer marketing.

Here’s a question: if $700 billion per year can’t produce a product that sells itself, when exactly does this make money?

$700 billion in spending, cash flow collapsing, stocks tanking, SEC filings about raising capital — and the best growth strategy is paying TikTokers to demo features.

Either AI is about to deliver the greatest economic transformation in human history (and they need influencers to convince you this)… or we’re watching the most expensive corporate Hail Mary ever thrown.

Look, I’ve no doubt that AI has its uses. We use it for research purposes amongst other things, and I think most people are now using it. That isn’t the point. There exists a mismatch between what we’re being told and what is actually happening. There is also a massive mismatch when it comes to the valuations ascribed to the related companies and their actual profitability.

*  *  *

The point is simple: when hype outruns reality, investors need to step back and look at the bigger forces driving markets.  We put together a free PDF report that does exactly that, breaking down the economic, political, and cultural shifts unfolding now, the risks they create for your money and freedom, and how thoughtful investors can stay one step ahead. You can get your free copy here.

Submitted by Criterion Research President, James Bevan, 

The geopolitical calculus underpinning global LNG supply through the early 2030s has shifted materially. Iranian drone strikes on Qatari LNG trains, delays to key expansion projects, and the indefinite closure of the Strait of Hormuz have created a compounding threat to Qatar’s LNG position that goes well beyond a construction delay. What had been framed as a two-horse race for global LNG market share now looks considerably more one-sided. The beneficiary is clear: U.S. Gulf Coast LNG. 

At Criterion Research, our outlook is for US LNG exports to nearly double by 2030, with further upside in the coming decade.

Qatar’s Gap Is Large and Getting Larger

While Qatar’s loss of 12.8 MTPA for 3 to 5 years due to Iranian strikes is a serious blow to Qatar’s 77 MTPA export capacity, it is not a global catastrophe on its own. What is worrying is that Iran has demonstrated the potential for further strikes, which means that even restored capacity cannot be treated as a stable floor. Even if onshore facilities are repaired and the Strait is nominally reopened, LNG tanker operators and their insurers are unlikely to resume normal transits until they have, over time, earned confidence that vessels are not exposed to strikes or mines. That confidence cannot be declared by a government. It has to be proven through sustained safety in a conflict environment with no clear resolution, a process that could take months or years, regardless of the physical state of Qatar’s terminals. Molecules that cannot move to market are effectively stranded, and the Strait of Hormuz shipping constraint is the piece that is hardest to resolve through engineering or diplomacy alone.

Beyond current Qatari volumes being impacted, Qatar’s three-phase North Field expansion program, encompassing NFE, NFS, and North Field West, was designed to lift total liquefaction capacity from 77 MTPA to 142 MTPA by 2030. Global LNG demand was counting on these volumes. All three phases now face indefinite delays, with no official revised timeline and no near-term path to resuming offshore construction. NFE’s first train had already slipped to a 3Q26 start before the suspension, and rumors say it was pushed to 2027 before strikes began. 

Taken together, disruption to the existing base and delay of the full expansion program represent a potential swing of well over 100 MTPA relative to what the market had been counting on through the early 2030s. No other supply source can replace that on a compressed timeline. 

The U.S. Fills the Void

The U.S. project queue was already moving aggressively before Qatar’s situation deteriorated. According to our data at Criterion Research, Golden Pass LNG is in active commissioning, CP2 Phase 1, Port Arthur, and Rio Grande LNG are all on track for first production in 2027, following, and CP2 Phase 2 reached FID. Post-FID US projects alone are expected to reach 39 Bcf/d by 2033. While the US cannot make up for the lost Qatari volumes before 2030, there is a strong pipeline of pre-FID projects for early 2030 and beyond that may now be pushed over the edge by new customer demand replacing Qatari volumes.

The Demand Caveat

The bull case is real but not unconditional. Whether demand materializes at the volumes required to absorb the full U.S. buildout depends heavily on price, and the infrastructure required to convert price-sensitive demand into actual imports remains well behind schedule. Across South Asia and Southeast Asia, the buildout of regasification terminals and downstream gas distribution that was supposed to undergird the bullish demand case for the 2030s has been repeatedly delayed by a combination of high prices, fiscal constraints, and the improving economics of competing renewable alternatives. The regas infrastructure that is not built in the late 2020s cannot absorb volumes in the early 2030s, and that pipeline of delayed or canceled projects represents a real ceiling on how quickly emerging-market demand can respond, even if prices fall to attractive levels. Paradoxically, a supply shock of this magnitude could push prices high enough to further delay that infrastructure buildout, suppressing the very demand growth that would otherwise absorb U.S. volumes. The structural demand from Europe and Northeast Asia, anchored by long-term contracts and supply security mandates, is likely to hold regardless. But the incremental emerging-market demand that was supposed to keep the market balanced through the mid-2030s now appears considerably more uncertain than the pre-conflict consensus assumed. 

The Structural Conclusion

Seldom has a supply disruption of this magnitude aligned so cleanly with a competing exporter’s buildout window. The U.S. has a well-financed project pipeline, while its most capable competitor is facing key expansion delays, operational damage, and a shipping constraint that may outlast both. LNG dominance for U.S. LNG looks increasingly certain. Whether that translates into strong project economics across the board depends on which demand pools ultimately clear, and at what price.

Argentina’s much-touted turnaround under Javier Milei may be losing momentum, with fresh labor data pointing to a weakening jobs market, according to Bloomberg.

By the end of last year, unemployment had climbed to 7.5%—the highest rate for a fourth quarter since the Covid era—reflecting a deterioration in employment conditions before the government pushed through its landmark labor overhaul.

New figures show that joblessness in the formal sector increased for the first time in three quarters, while the share of workers in informal roles remained largely unchanged at roughly 43% of total employment.

Bloomberg writes that since Milei took office, Argentina’s formal private sector has shed more than 200,000 salaried positions—around 3% of its workforce.

Although the government has also eliminated thousands of public-sector jobs, the overall unemployment rate hasn’t surged as sharply as expected, partly because more people have turned to freelance or informal work to make ends meet.

In February, Milei secured a major political win when Congress approved a scaled-back version of his labor reform, designed to reduce hiring and firing costs and introduce broader flexibility into the labor market. Investors welcomed the move, but economists caution that it is unlikely to deliver immediate job growth.

With economic activity sluggish, consumer demand still weak, and labor-intensive sectors under pressure as the economy opens up, any employment recovery may take time to materialize.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

This time last year, it seemed like we were just about finished with the terrible inflation of the Biden years that had trimmed at least 25 percent from the purchasing power of the dollar.

The hope has been for a year that the massive increases in money printing over the COVID years were finally done. As some put it, the snake had finally digested the golf ball.

All along we’ve worried that the experience of the 1970s would repeat: three clean waves.

After each, monetary authorities presumed that the problem was over and that life could go on as normal.

Each time, inflation fired back up again, until it culminated in an inflation of the late seventies that changed life in America fundamentally.

After that, two household incomes were more common than not, if only to maintain living standards.

We could only hope that we would not repeat that experience. Indeed, history does not repeat but it does rhyme. Authorities tend to relax in vigilance once a crisis seems to have abated.

The 2021–2024 inflation was devastating for real wages and salaries. Official data reports that they have been mostly flat and then somewhat rising. Maybe, but I personally cannot think of anyone who earned raises that have kept up with inflation over four years. That’s anecdotal, to be sure, but you are welcome to check my intuition against your experience.

We don’t seem to see moves today from the Federal Reserve that would suggest a concerted effort in the direction of easing. Money supply has not taken off and the Fed is holding interest rates rather tight for fear of igniting inflation.

It appears that the existing pricing pressures stem not from monetary sources but supply shocks. Of all the changes in goods prices that could impose the largest shock to the general economy worldwide, oil ranks near the top. Is that happening? Yes. Not only that: price trends were not heading the right way even before the war shock.

There is really bad news from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It concerns the Producer Price Index, which registers wholesale prices in a range of goods and services. It is generally more reliable than the index for consumer prices because prices are more uniform and accessible. What the PPI does today shows up in consumer prices in a matter of months, depending.

The latest PPI print covering the month of February is sobering. The index for final demand rose 3.4 percent for the 12 months ended in February, the largest 12-month advance since increasing 3.4 percent in February 2025. That is double the forecasted increase. The most eye-popping number concerns prices for final demand goods. They increased 1.1 percent for the month.

Annualize the number and you get an incredible 13.6 percent, the hottest in more than 3 years. This is double-digit, which itself gets us into a strange psychological place. It kicks off panic buying and hoarding.

A longer-term look, again from February before the oil price spikes, shows the worst annual rate of change in goods prices in two years. This will feed into consumer prices through the summer, even if the crisis ends now.

That’s a number roughly equivalent to 1979-level inflation. So far it is only hitting wholesale prices but those are passed on to the retail level. And keep in mind that these February numbers were assembled before the Iran war throttled shipping traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, causing a huge price spike in oil that quickly folded into a gas price increase that you likely know all too well.

The oil price spike has profoundly affected people the world over. We are looking at nearly a doubling of the price since the war began. And the problem is getting worse, not better.

Gasoline is rising now at a pace not seen in more than 30 years. It also seems to be accelerating. My back of the envelope calculation over the last four years suggests it is rising 2 cents per hour.

This isn’t just about the ways this price affects your driving. It hits every form of transportation from trains to planes to trucks. Tickets are already soaring in price but this also bleeds into goods prices at the stores, especially food. Anything that travels to retail outlets by truck is being hit hard now, as you already see in the rising cost of coffee.

None of these are good signs.

Yes, it could all flip the other direction if the war ends today but it will be months before prices settle down again even under the best of circumstances.

Now let’s turn to real-time numbers as calculated by Truflation. It’s become very apparent that the good trends have already reversed in the other direction. From a low of 0.6 percent, we are now running 1.51 percent. More telling is the real-time number on good inflation. That is running 3.4 percent, the highest in 3 years.

At this point, there is no avoiding the results of the inflation that already exists.

How likely is a full blown energy crisis of the sort we saw in the 1970s? As we should all realize, that crisis was not only one of prices. It was the attempt to keep the price low with forced caps that caused the widespread shortages and gas lines. There is no question that this would happen again should the Trump administration pursue price controls on gasoline.

In 1971, Richard Nixon imposed wage and price controls. He did not want to do that. He never imagined conditions would ever arrive in which he would push that button. But for him, it was a necessary expedient, the least bad of all possible choices. Moreover, he knew that it would not work but believed that the public needed to see him doing something to show that he cared and was acting on the problem. Trump might be drawn into something similar.

One hopes that the Trump administration would not do that. But one cannot know for sure, sadly. It is the nature of any government to panic with falling poll numbers, parabolically rising energy prices, and a profound sense of a loss of control. All these factors are happening right now.

I never watch mainstream media but a couple of days ago, I caught a broadcast on television that had nonstop messaging about gas prices. This is for obvious reasons related to politics but there is also something real going on here. For all the tax and regulatory cuts in the second Trump administration, the inflation pressures threaten to wipe out any and all income gains. Indeed, this inflation puts the entire second term at risk in ways the White House surely understands by now.

Again, the cause of the price increases are a combination of factors but this one, unlike the last one, seems to be pushed by a supply shock rather than monetary factors. In a practical sense, for businesses and consumers, the impact is the same. It means that money buys less and that balance sheets are put under extreme pressure.

I’m sorry for the bad news and I try to avoid apocalypticism. Wishes aside, and regardless of one’s views of this Iran war, the reality is before us and it is undeniable.

We could be seeing a second wave of effective inflation kicking off that will create some serious economic disruption in all directions.

One of the biggest takeaways in global energy markets this week is the growing fragmentation. Brent crude in Asia has surged to over $150 a barrel, with demand destruction already emerging, and China and India facing the greatest pressure given their heavy reliance on Gulf crude. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has moved to release barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to help cap WTI prices below triple digits, with US crude currently trading around $94 a barrel.

And now we have three oil markets: Asia (Oman oil at $167), Brent ($113) and US (WTI $97) https://t.co/uHmMD24E9G pic.twitter.com/41a4BhKOIA

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) March 19, 2026

The Iran-driven energy shock is hitting Asia the hardest so far because much of its crude and LNG is imported and shipped through the Strait of Hormuz.

Current status of the Hormuz chokepoint…

“The countries that are exposed to that supply disruption are not so much in Europe, or in the Americas, they’re actually really in the Asia region,” Michael Williamson of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific told AP News.

The energy shock across Asia has had cascading effects on economic activity throughout the region. One behavioral shift among those who can afford to move away from petrol-powered vehicles has been a surge in activity at Chinese EV maker BYD Motors.

Bloomberg reports that BYD dealerships in the Philippines have already logged a full month’s worth of orders in just two weeks as consumers react to the energy price shock and the cost of filling up gas tanks.

Vietnam’s VinFast automotive company has seen 4x showroom traffic and is selling about 80 EVs per week, about double 2025 levels, following the surge in energy prices. Across Thailand, New Zealand, and Southeast Asia, dealers report sales increases of 20% or more and even inventory shortages.

What’s key here is that a rapid surge in gasoline and diesel prices across Asia has accelerated EV adoption in recent weeks, and if the crisis persists, adoption rates are only set to increase in the weeks and months ahead.

“Higher oil prices always help the transition to electric vehicles,” said Albert Park, chief economist of the Asian Development Bank. “It creates economic incentives to accelerate the green transition.”

Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Joanna Chen noted that one headwind for the EV market has always been “affordability and charging.” She added, “Outside of China, the upfront price of EVs is still generally more expensive than gasoline cars.”

The energy price shock is a welcome sign for the auto industry around the world, which made a terrible bet on EVs over the last year, as increased demand can help offload inventory into fearful consumers who have been forewarned about what may be the largest energy shock to hit the modern economy.

Authroed by Vance Ginn via the Daily Economy,

Artificial intelligence has become the latest excuse for reviving one of the oldest bad ideas in economic policy: a universal basic income. Recent pieces in Newsweek, the LSE Business Review, and Fortune have all helped push the idea that AI may soon wipe out so many jobs that Washington will need to send everyone a check.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

That makes for a catchy headline. It also makes for terrible economics.

The right question is not whether AI will disrupt work. Of course it will. The right question is this: after more than 100 local guaranteed-income experiments, what have we actually learned?

The answer is much less flattering to UBI than its promoters would like.

What 122 UBI-Style Pilots Show

A new AEI working paper by Kevin Corinth and Hannah Mayhew gives the best recent overview of the evidence. Per their study, there were 122 guaranteed basic income pilots across 33 states and the District of Columbia between 2017 and 2025. Those pilots allocated about $481.4 million in transfers to 40,921 recipients, with 61,664 total participants including control groups. The average recipient got about $11,765, the average pilot lasted 18.4 months, and the average monthly payment was $616.

That sounds like a mountain of evidence. It is not.

Of those 122 pilots, only 52 had published outcomes. Only 35 used randomized designs. Only 30 reported employment outcomes. So the case for UBI is not being built on some giant pile of clear, clean evidence. It is being built on a much smaller stack of studies, many of them weak, limited, or badly timed.

And here is the kicker. Among the 30 randomized pilots with published employment results, the average effect was a 0.8 percentage-point increase in employment. UBI fans will rush to wave that around. They should slow down.

AEI shows that the bigger and more credible studies tell a very different story. Among the four pilots with treatment groups of at least 500 participants, which together account for 55 percent of all treatment-group participants, the mean effect on employment was minus 3.2 percentage points. AEI also estimates a mean income elasticity of -0.18, which is consistent with standard labor-supply economics. 

In plain English, when people receive more unearned income, work tends to fall at the margin. Shocking, I know. Economics still works.

Credit: American Enterprise Institute

Why the Evidence Is Weaker Than the Hype

The AEI paper is useful not just for what it finds, but for how bluntly it describes the weaknesses in the evidence.

The average treatment group among those 30 studies was just 359 people, and the median was only 151. That is not exactly ironclad evidence for redesigning the American welfare state. Among the 26 pilots for which attrition could be measured, the average attrition rate was 37 percent. That is a giant warning sign. If enough people drop out, the reported results can become badly distorted.

The studies also varied widely in payment size, duration, sample composition, and even how outcomes were measured. The mean annualized payment was $7,177, equal to an average income boost of about 39.5 percent relative to baseline household income in the studies. Some pilots relied heavily on self-reported survey data. Some were conducted during or right after the COVID period — when labor markets, safety-net programs, and personal decisions were anything but normal.

AEI’s conclusion is appropriately cautious: these findings may not generalize to a permanent, universal, nationwide UBI under current or future conditions. That alone should cool off a lot of the AI-fueled policy hysteria.

AI Will Displace Jobs. It Will Also Create Them

None of this means AI will be painless. Some jobs will shrink. Some tasks will disappear. Some workers will need to retrain, relocate, or rethink their careers. That is what happens when productivity rises and technology changes how goods and services are produced. It happened with mechanization, with computers, and with the internet. It will happen with AI.

But displacement is not the same thing as permanent mass unemployment. That leap is where the UBI argument falls apart. Economies are not fixed piles of jobs. They are dynamic systems of discovery, adaptation, and exchange. When costs fall and productivity rises, resources move. Businesses reorganize. Consumer demand changes. New occupations emerge. Old ones evolve. Some disappear. That churn is real, but so is the adaptation.

The answer to technological change is not to pay people for economic resignation. The answer is to make adaptation easier.

UBI Fails the Economics Test

There is a reason Ryan Bourne at Cato has argued that UBI is not the answer if AI comes for your job. It confuses a transition problem with a permanent income problem. Worse, it assumes that writing checks can substitute for the incentives, signals, and institutional conditions that actually create opportunity.

UBI also crashes into the budget constraint. As Max Gulker at The Daily Economy has noted, UBI is often sold through small pilots and vague moral language, but the national arithmetic is ugly. And as Robert Wright in another AIER piece points out, “universal” quickly means sending money to many people who are not poor while piling enormous costs onto taxpayers. (Bear in mind, the national debt is already rapidly approaching $40 trillion.) 

That is before getting to the public-choice problem. In theory, UBI supporters sometimes imagine replacing the welfare state with one simple cash transfer. In reality, government programs rarely disappear. Bureaucracies defend themselves. Interest groups protect carveouts. Politicians promise more, not less. So a UBI would likely be stacked on top of much of the current welfare state, not substituted for it. That is not reform. That is fiscal delusion with better branding.

A Better Answer: Remove Barriers to Work

If AI means more labor-market churn, then policy should focus on mobility, flexibility, and self-sufficiency. That means less occupational licensing, lower taxes, lighter regulation, fewer benefit cliffs, less wasteful spending, and more room for entrepreneurship and job creation. The government should stop making it harder for people to pivot.

It also means reforming welfare the right way. My proposal for empowerment accounts is not a UBI. It would be targeted to people already eligible for welfare, not universal. It would include a work requirement for work-capable adults, not detach income from effort. And it would consolidate fragmented programs into a more flexible account that families control directly, reducing bureaucracy and lowering spending over time as more recipients move toward self-sufficiency.

That puts it much closer to the classical liberal insight behind replacing bureaucratic control with direct support, while avoiding the fatal error of turning the entire country into a permanent transfer state. As Art Carden reminds us at The Daily Economy, there is a long intellectual history behind cash-based assistance. But today’s UBI politics are not really about shrinking the state. They are mostly about expanding it because elites fear AI.

Don’t Make Bad Policy Out of Fear

The UBI revival tells us less about AI than it does about politics. New technology arrives, uncertainty rises, and too many policymakers reach for the federal checkbook as if it were a magic wand. It is not.

After 122 local experiments, the case for UBI is still weak. The best evidence does not show a jobs renaissance. The larger studies show employment declines. The broader evidence base is riddled with small sample sizes, high attrition, and limited generalizability. That is a flimsy foundation for a permanent national entitlement.

AI will change work. It will not repeal economics. The best response is not fear-driven universal dependency. It is a freer economy with stronger incentives to work, save, invest, adapt, and prosper.

Another fast-food institution is fighting for its life as Byron’s Kitchen files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection amid a brutal wave of restaurant closures and restructurings sweeping the food industry, according to The Street.

The Chicago-based chain, a beloved local staple since 1975 and now marking over 50 years of slinging dogs, officially sought bankruptcy relief on March 16 in the Northern District of Illinois. Owner Mike Payne and the team behind Byron’s Kitchen Incorporated are using the filing to restructure crushing financial obligations while keeping the grills firing at their two remaining locations.

“As of 2025, the company maintains active operations at two primary locations situated at 1701 W. Lawrence Ave and 1017 W. Irving Park Rd,” RK Consulting reported on X.

The chain even recently poured money into upgrades like new indoor heated seating, a clear sign they’re betting on survival rather than surrender.

“Byron’s goes a step further than [the] classic Chicago style hot dog where you have mustard, relish, tomato, onion, pickle, hot peppers, and celery salt,” Payne said of Byron’s. “We take it a few steps further with lettuce, cucumber, and green peppers to the classic ingredients of the Chicago-style hot dog, and that’s how we came up with the Byron’s hot dog. We call it a meal on a bun.”

The filing comes against a grim backdrop of big-name fast-food chains slashing locations left and right this year.

Wendy’s is gearing up to shutter 298–358 U.S. locations in the first half of the year alone after sales slipped, while Pizza Hut plans to close around 250 underperformers. Further more, Papa John’s is targeting roughly 200 locations this year as part of a broader cull.

“Restaurants that exist today may not exist in five years. They’ll be off the map,” bankruptcy attorney Daniel Gielchinsky told Fox 4. Additionally, consumers will “see a lot of restaurants with a decreased footprint. Small restaurants and mom-and-pop restaurants are going under too.”

*  *  * Click link, buy knife, save dog… 

Authored by James Howard Kunstler,

“Europe’s own regulatory architecture turned off Europe’s own energy supply. And America. . . on the other side of the Atlantic with a full tank of gas, watched it happen.”

– Jeff Childers

Let’s pause for a moment amid all the excitement to address an abiding mystery of these times: why does the news media seem to be rooting for American failure in the Iran operation? Or more generally, how did the media become handmaiden to the Lefty-left and all its ancillaries? How were they lured into their Cloward-Piven bunker of crypto-Marxian “resistance”?

It’s unlikely that the network executives, news producers, and editors are communists outright. That would take you into a simpleminded John Birch Society fantasyland. Or did they just read too much Antonio Gramsci on campus back in the day?

If they’re merely whores pandering to an audience, it’s a dwindling one as the Woke mass formation dissolves and the insanity of its agenda stands naked.

(Why not pander to the growing demographic that yearns for a restoration of normality?)

Is the news controlled by the so-called Deep State? Do cadres in the CIA send headlines to the Washington Post newsroom?

Many think so. I don’t pretend to know one way or the other.

The problem with lying, of course, is that you have to keep lying to protect your previous lies.

Does the rise of alt-news across the Internet provoke them to lie harder in the face of better narratives?

Or is it just plain old group-think, fear of stepping out-of-sync with tribal certainties and shibboleths?

Which is to say, are they merely cowards and cads?

Do they really believe in the totalizing bad faith of the Democratic Party in its naked racketeering and power-seeking?

That’s a sinking ship — the party that is now battling to obstruct simple straightforward election reform in the US Senate. Here’s a headline from today’s New York Times:

What will The New York Times do when bona fide, convincing evidence from material seized in recent FBI raids in Georgia and Arizona shows that recent elections were arrantly and knowingly rigged?

It’s going to happen, you know.

And if the procedural delays in the Senate drag out for weeks over the SAVE Act, the truth is likely to emerge while the bill is still in process, and will slam the whole country in the face, like thirty inches of re-bar.

Will the newspaper print an apology to its readers?

We’re in a season of whacking great change in global and national affairs.

“Epic Fury” in Iran will neutralize a regime dedicated to terrorizing the region and reorder the world’s energy flows to the disadvantage of America’s adversaries.

China will lose its deep discount on imported Iranian oil just as in Venezuela a month ago. It already lost control of the Panama Canal as well.

All its inroads around the western hemisphere have been nullified in this first year of Trump 2.0. China has to play nicer with America now.

The crisis has demonstrated that the US can’t depend on its NATO allies — who either refused to send ships to assist, or dawdled over it — which can allow the US to step away from the enormous expense that NATO imposes on us, and also from the tarbaby known as Ukraine. The truth is, we are ideologically more aligned with post-Soviet Russia than we are with France, Germany, and the UK under their current regimes. Ironically, the Russians, with Hungary, Poland, and the Czechs, are the last earnest defenders of Western Civ. Europe has apparently elected to go medieval, anyway. They like to pretend that they can maintain a high standard of living without oil or natgas, a formula so obdurately stupid that only the most awful hardship might avail to change their policies.

This month, the US leaped to create a maritime insurance alternative to Lloyd’s of London, meaning the UK banks can no longer impose a 20-percent cost premium on Persian Gulf oil, which thunders through the global system and affects everyone. We’ve already stepped away from the UN-backed international Net Zero carbon pricing scam on tanker and container ships.

The economics of oil are going through a quick and decisive readjustment.

With an end to Iran’s threats to world peace, the US can eventually leave policing of the Persian Gulf to the nations that depend on its oil (we do not).

Meanwhile, the US will continue pounding Iran until it can’t launch so much as a distress flare. They will have no nukes, no navy or air force, no more missiles and drones and payloads, and no ability to manufacture any more of them. And if they try, we will blow them up again.

That’s real politics, not performative diplomatic jive.

Sooner or later, the Revolutionary Guard regime will disintegrate and someone else will have to step up.

The Iranian people deserve a chance to live in the sunlight after what they’ve been through for a half century.

But it’s really up to them to make it happen.

It’s pretty obvious that the American President and his people understand that.

Moscow has been accused by top officials in the White House and in Congress of expanding its intelligence-sharing with Iran amid the now three-week-long war involving the US and Israel. Russia has even been accused of handing over targeting information, allegedly assisting in Iranian ballistic missile attacks on US bases and radar sites as well as sensitive assets in the region.

Russia hasn’t confirmed that it is doing this, and has issued a meager official denial – but it also hasn’t taken serious steps to convince Washington otherwise. The Kremlin is perhaps relishing in the idea of doing to the US in Iran precisely what the US is doing to Russia in Ukraine – making the operation harder, more costly, and setting up for potential quagmire. 

On Friday Politico is reporting on a possible quid pro quo offer: “Moscow proposed a quid pro quo to the U.S. under which the Kremlin would stop sharing intelligence information with Iran, such as the precise coordinates of U.S. military assets in the Middle East, if Washington ceased supplying Ukraine with intel about Russia.”

Getty Images/CNN

“Two people familiar with the U.S.-Russia negotiations said that such a proposal was made by Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev to Trump administration envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner during their meeting last week in Miami,” the report continues.

The sources indicated the US side rejected the offer. Of course, the US has long been very deep into the Ukraine crisis, and significant intel-sharing has stretched back for many years into the Biden administration and even before, in connection with the Donbass conflict of 2014.

Politico underscores, “Nevertheless, the sheer existence of such a proposal has sparked concern among European diplomats, who worry Moscow is trying to drive a wedge between Europe and the U.S. at a critical moment for transatlantic relations.”

Assuming the fresh report is accurate, it raises some serious questions regarding US policy at this very sensitive moment of two major raging wars. 

The sources here are “two people familiar with the U.S.-Russia negotiations.” That could also mean two people familiar with leaking propaganda. https://t.co/Q29DmlQIHT

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) March 20, 2026

For starters, much of Trump’s base of support has already long been skeptical of Ukraine policy. There is a segment also not happy about the US launching another ‘war of choice’ in the Middle East, contrary to Trump’s pledges on the campaign trail. There are also issues of ‘overreach’ and overextension in terms of American involvement in no less than two huge global hotspots – one of which Washington is the direct initiator (alongside Israel).

If Trump did actually cease intel-sharing with Kiev, there would be many Republicans which would be quite OK with this. Even J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth have appeared cold on the idea of too much support for Ukraine.

KING: Can you update us on Russian intelligence sharing with Iran?

GABBARD: If it’s going on, that answer would be appropriate for a closed session

KING: It’s been in the press. Is it occurring?

GABBARD: What I can tell you is that according to the Dept of War, any support… pic.twitter.com/zR5GibrDmT

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 18, 2026

Whether the alleged offer from Moscow will remain on the table or not is another question. But it seems clear Russia is ready to leverage events in Iran to its advantage related to Ukraine – even at a moment peace talks are clearly on indefinite pause.