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Life in Ukraine in Feb 2026 fourth year of war and another winter without heat.

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Ted Cruz is seen as the most pro-Israel candidate for the Republican nomination. In this story by Flegenheimer in the NYT Cruz visits a Hasidic bakery in Brooklyn, New York, as children roll out matso dough right in front of Cruz.

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Calls by SEC's Cox and New York Fed's Geithner in Congressional testimony for more oversight by the SEC and the Fed over investment banks and brokerage firms.

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Spotlight on Bernanke Fed and crisis management. What is different about this crisis and what is the Fed doing about it, and the role of Treasury under Paulson, to restore investor and markets confidence while continuing good macro policies such as the focus on inflation and longer term financial goals.

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Years of conflict between two quarreling camps led to Yoon declaring martial law on December 2 2024 which was opposed by the ruling party and the opposition party in parliament leading to it being withdrawn within 24 hours. A tense situation prevailed outside parliament as it met to vote against martial law powers of the president.

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The Fed's balancing act in cutting rates but at the same time seeing an orderly decline in the dollar and no sharp decline. Can it get the ECB to cut rates also? The situation after the Fed's rescue of Bear Stearns and the three quarter point cut in March 2008.

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The problems in Chase bank's Investment Office unit were first reported in the WSJ April 5, 2012. Large positions were taken by Mr Michael Iksil, a trader in the London office that ruffled credit markets. Iksil reports to Achilles Macris, head of the European operations of the Investment Office unit, and Macris reports to Ms. Drew. At the time CEO Dimon and other executives reviewed trading positions and made no changes in strategies. After April 13 earnings call losses increased to $200 million a day, and review teams assigned to look into this found errors in the way the hedges were conducted. In early May Chief Risk Officer John Hogan and Europe head Daniel Pinto monitored the situation. The hedges were designed to reduce risk in the eurozone financial crisis, but the complex transactions based on relationships between a number of derivative indexes for investment grade and junk grade corporate bonds in U.S. and Europe worked in ways that led to large losses, and were so complicated that they were poorly understood....

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Ted Koppel, managing editor of ABC's "Nightline" news program from 1980 to 2005, says it brings sadness to see the television networks drowning viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their entrenched biases. Its good financially for the networks, he says, but not good for the American republic. He acknowledges the realities of today's journalism- scores of media options, a million or more clusters of consumers, who are harvesting as he puts it, information and news from like-minded providers. That is the way news and information is served up nowadays. And as he points out the shift of news from a public service to a profitable commodity is irreversible. At the same time talk is cheap, and the tendency for strongly held but unsubstantiated views is very prevalent. And yet the need for clear unobjective reporting is greater today than ever before. Covering news in other countries is now more needed than before, but foreign bureaus are expensive and such news harder to collect. As a result many foreign bureaus have seen severe cuts or were closed. Koppel cites Daniel Patrick Moynihan's observation that "everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."...

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Paramount bid for Warner Discovery including cable channel CNN, new offers expected Feb 2026 to exceed one by Netflix.

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Meltzer argues against a supervisory role for the Fed, at a time when Secretary Paulson is increasing the supervisory authority of the Fed as it becomes more involved in helping the financial markets recover and in doing so working with investment banks, and with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. He sees the Fed as having failed in most of the crises of recent years in exerting its supervisory authority in a timely and appropriate way. He allows for some time for the financial markets to get back to normal after which he thinks it best to return to strict capital standards which if not met would lead to management being replaced, shareholders taking losses, followed by a temporary takeover by regulators.

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Gregory Mankiw would like to see the Fed's Ben Bernanke and his colleagues and staff do the job they are doing and not see Congress intervene with fiscal stimulus or other intervention. The Fed and the ECB are led by a good team of economic risk managers and they should be allowed to take care of the economy as it enters 2008 through rate cuts and other moves to help restore growth and overcome the housing and mortgage crisis.See the link to December 6, 2007, BW for an interview with Martin Feldstein. Feldstein thinks a tax cut may be necessary in 2008 and takes a much more serious view of the current situation.

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A description of Ben Bernanke's style at the Fed and how its different from Greenspan's. Bernake has brought a more open and cooperative style with lots of questions asked of other experts of all ages and experience and in different parts of the world, with lots of discussion, testing assumptions, and looking for creative ways to and creative solutions to address the problems. Its more collaborative mode. As one Fed staffer puts its more like a seminar room at Princeton. Description from insiders on how the Fed met with advisors on August 9, a day after the ECB had acted on the mortgage crisis, and how the response by the Fed was developed on that day in a collaborative cooperative mode with a lot of participation and discussion on the Fed's next move, calming the markets and reassuring them while making sure that the Fed's actions were well thought out in all aspects for a series of moves over the next couple of months. Involvement of NY Fed's Geithner, of former Treasury Secretary Rubin and Wall Street bankers, sought out for advice by Bernanke....

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How Ukraine protects rail infrastructure in Feb 2026- protective armor and running more trains at night, using drone jamming tools.

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S.o far in Feb 2026 12 seats added for Democrats and 12 for Republicans in redrawing seats for Congress. 

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Kathryn Ruemmler and connection to Epstein in Epstein files- her resignation as legal counsel to Goldman Sachs in Feb 2026.

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The different opinions of Fed Governors of Kansas City and Boston show the divergence of opinion that is being heard by the Fed chairman Jay Powell as he plans smaller interest rate increases in 2023. Susan Collins of the Boston Fed is concerned about the effects on unemployment. Kansas City Fed's Esther George is concerned about the Fed not staying in the fight against inflation long enough. Powell says "We wouldn't ... try to crash the economy.. and then cleanup afterwards. I wouldn't take that approach at all." The difficult aspect of the interest rate increases is that it takes about 1 year to know the full effects of rate increase.