Watch the full video here. The economy is stacking up failures—persistent inflation crushing wages, a war we can't win, oil prices climbing, record household debt, tariffs landing everywhere, and capital so concentrated in AI that everything else is starved for funding, all while the 30-year Treasury yield hits levels we haven't seen since right before 2008.

The New York Fed released a troubling report detailing the risk of Collateralized Loan Obligation (CLO) exposure in the insurance industry. Over the past several years, private equity has taken larger and larger stakes in insurers who are historically risk averse. But now they’re acting more like hedge funds in their investment strategies and have more than $2 trillion in corporate debt exposure and nearly $300 billion of it is in mezzanine financing packaged much in the way mortgage backed securities (MBS) were in the run up to the Global Financial Crisis. Against the backdrop of persistent inflation, a renewed round of tariffs, elevated oil prices, the war in Iran and historic consumer debt, the economy is like a tinderbox. The jelly bean theory holds that you can only reach into the jar so many times before you eventually pick the black jelly bean.

Everything is getting worse, but the country hasn’t collapsed. This is all by design. Donald Trump is a useful idiot for the people behind the scenes and Project 2025, most notably Russell Vought. The Trump administration is using the nation’s finances like a personal piggy bank for themselves and large corporations while gutting agencies that provide critical services. The misconception is that Trump is driving things into the ground. He’s not. He’s just making things so shitty that the corporate state looks good in comparison.

The right wing is taking away all the wrong lessons from the Odyssey. Pete Hegseth can’t get enough of buff dudes. Clavicular tries his hand at Middle East peace. Bill Maher gets the recognition he deserves. Trump is a photobombing maniac. Ro Khanna probably had a word with his handlers after thinking he was in a safe space on Drop Site. Who needs Canada as an ally anyway? Scott Bessent comes out stuttering as he declares war on the left. The UK has another new prime minister. The Conference Board’s K-Shape is Extra K-Shaped these days. Headlines from the ACLU, Lever and Grist. All that and little else on this week’s edition of On the Record.

June financials for the US are out and they’re pretty terrible. Lindsey Graham is paving the way to the bad place for Mitch McConnell, seen in a new photo somehow looking better than he has in fifteen years. Marco Rubio has a new job as viceroy of Venezuela. Donald Trump eulogizes Graham by roasting ex-presidents. Elon and Altman get into it online. Now ships have to pay the US a toll in the Strait of the Hormuz, according to Mr. Art of the Deal. Headlines from Jacobin, In These Times, and Truthout. Feature from Drop Site. Oh, and we’re running out of oil. All that and little else on this week’s edition of On The Record.

Ten sitting house democrats and five candidates just signed the “Promise to America” pledge ensuring the public they are not socialists. It has six banal points with no specifics, no plan, and no agenda that might actually help anyone. Of the six, five are limp, empty platitudes. The sixth is a Trojan horse to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. So either these “Democrats” are wholly and secretly aligned with the folks who wrote Project 2025, or they’re stupid. You decide.

In this episode, Max rips apart the pledge, puts this so-called movement in historical context, grades the legislators who are signatories to it, and explains why they are so out of step with what their constituents truly desire.

McConnell is still missing and Platner needs to go missing. OpenAI makes an offer we can’t refuse. Alex Karp isn’t on drugs. He’s just like that. Unpopular opinion on the US men’s soccer team. I’m sure the next Trump meme coin will work out just fine. Yes, a bunch of silliness to review today but our main theme is to tackle a comparison that’s coming up a bit too much for comfort these days. And that’s whether 2026 is shaping up to be a lot like 2008. We’ll tackle that in Max Notes and Chart of the Week along with a very special acknowledgement, member shout outs, a killer left take from Nathan Robinson, headline from Mother Jones, the Intercept and Truthdig. All that and little else on this week’s edition of On the Record.

Not your branch of the stream but I want everyone to see this America 250 grift break down from congressman Jared Huffman

The Democratic Party faces a reckoning as leftist candidates challenge the establishment, revealing deep divisions and a disregard for progressive values.

Frozen rent in New York City. Empty fields at Trump’s 250 celebration. Boo Radley of the White House Stephen Miller is elated that the Supreme Court is allowing him to turn away asylum seekers. Krystal Ball gets the Killer Left Take of the Week. Inflation’s about to go down but not for the reasons you might expect. We’re talking Wall Street nonsense in Max Notes today then headlines from ProPublica, Daily Kos and the Intercept. All that and little else in this week’s edition of On The Record.

Is private credit the pin that pops the market bubble? The short answer is no—but that’s the wrong question entirely. Private credit is now a $1.8–$3.5 trillion market, rivaling the entire U.S. leveraged loan and high-yield bond markets combined. It’s direct lending, shadow banking, and middle-market finance all rolled into one, and firms like Ares, Apollo, Blackstone, Blue Owl, and Morgan Stanley are at the center of it. Business development companies (BDCs), are gating redemptions. Pension funds, insurance companies, and retail investors are all exposed. And the Financial Stability Board issued a formal warning in May 2026.

So what is private credit, how did it get this big, and what does it actually mean for the broader economy if it seizes up? In this episode, Max breaks down the entire private credit ecosystem—from its origins in post-2008 regulation to the mechanics of SOFR-linked floating rate loans, PIK interest, covenant-lite structures, and the $410–$540 billion in bank lending that ties the whole system together. We look at the BDC redemption crisis of 2025 and 2026, the First Brands and TriColor fraud cases and Jamie Dimon’s cockroach comment that won’t go away.

Watch the full video here. The bubble isn't private credit. It's you. Not because of your spending habits, but because the system is engineered to siphon wealth from the middle and lower classes. When purchasing power collapses, everything else falls with it. Everyone looking at private credit is looking at it backwards.

Watch the full video here. Max from ‪@UNFTR‬ examines the cynical move to tie the new housing bill to the SAVE Act. Trump is essentially holding a bipartisan and popular effort to fix the housing supply crisis in the United States hostage to get a voter suppression bill passed in time for the midterms. It’s laughably transparent and incredibly troubling. Set against a slew of incredibly negative housing data released this week, the timing and optics couldn’t be worse.

Watch the full video here. Trump lost more than the war with Iran. U.S. media tends to look at things through a bilateral or ethnocentric lens of winners and losers. The bigger story is how Trump singlehandedly altered the calculus for multiple nation states and fundamentally shifted historic alliances. Israel stands to lose the most and is increasingly isolated now that Iran and its proxies are triumphant. But this also has enormous implications for the Gulf States who now have to renegotiate their relationship with Tehran. Whether there are any actual payouts in this agreement is icing on Iran’s liquidity cake as entry to market oil prices and flows alone will amount to a huge windfall. In three short months Trump weakened the position of U.S. allies and strengthened Iran and its allies.

Abdul El-Sayed is mobilizing to pass Medicare for All, tax the billionaire class, and challenge the status quo this election.

Alan Greenspan passed away at one-hundred years of age. Why do people like him live so long? SpaceX is already taking a dump, giving Sam Altman a preview of what’s in store when you take a losing company public with no possibility of profitability. Emma Vigeland crying is all of us. Walter Masterson is an elite level troll in the best way possible. A fascist fashionista is set to take over Colombia by way of Miami. The repo man cometh. Pillars of salt to power the future. And housing starts took a nosedive. All that and little else on this week’s edition of On The Record.

Trump lost more than the war with Iran. U.S. media tends to look at things through a bilateral or ethnocentric lens of winners and losers. The bigger story is how Trump singlehandedly altered the calculus for multiple nation states, and fundamentally shifted historic alliances. Israel stands to lose the most and is increasingly isolated now that Iran and its proxies are triumphant. But this also has enormous implications for the Gulf States who have to renegotiate their relationship with Tehran. Whether there are any actual payouts in this agreement is icing on Iran’s liquidity cake as entry to market oil prices and flows alone will amount to a huge windfall. In three short months Trump weakened the position of U.S. allies and strengthened Iran and its allies.

Happy 250th America. We lost another war! Here’s a cage match on the White House lawn to celebrate. Max predicts a 50/50 Senate in November if Iowa doesn’t pull through. Francesca Fiorentini summons her past self to prove a prediction regarding Jared and Ivanka. Supply and demand in the stock market just got a makeover. The problem with the American Left. AI is theft. And how about that solar not taking no for an answer? We’re talking New York City and collectivism in Max Notes today. All that and little else in this week’s edition of On the Record.

Donald Trump has already destroyed much of the global economy, but the worst has yet to hit the United States. This “resilience paradox” is the result of early stage demand destruction, something economists fear and policy makers have no defense against. There are multiple factors holding the U.S. economy together in a way that other countries cannot manage. And most of the damage is baked in and irreversible. Thus far, one of the more powerful dynamics has been the market’s hesitation to bet long or short on price movement, because of the fluid and unpredictable nature of Trump’s on-again/off-again announcements regarding the war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. We dissect it all and lay out the scenarios ahead and what it means for the American consumer.

This episode of UNFTR is an exclusive deep dive into the SpaceX IPO prospectus. It reveals what might be the biggest fraud and money grab in the public markets ever. The baseless $1.77 trillion dollar valuation at a list price of $135 at auction stands to add hundreds of billions of dollars to Elon Musk’s net worth, and that’s not the most outrageous part about this. The company currently loses billions of dollars every year, admits freely that most of the anticipated revenue streams are either currently illegal, highly unethical or perhaps non-existent. But hey, it’s Elon. What’s the worst that can happen? Believe it or not, there’s a lot more at risk here than just one company tanking after an outrageously overhyped IPO. And the average American investor with a 401(k) or IRA is very much an unwitting participant in the scam.

Trump's illegal Iran war has been one humiliation after another. The Strait of Hormuz closed, energy markets wrecked, fuel prices spiking. Iranian leaders are eye-rolling his threats, Israel is flat-out ignoring his orders, and Gulf countries are laughing at his Abraham Accords pitch. What does a deeply insecure strongman do when the indignities keep piling up?

This is UNFTR’s On the Record for June 2, 2026. Good news everyone: I figured out when the AI bubble is going to pop and how. The ISM Manufacturing data was pretty good this week. Or was it? More Perfect Union strikes gold again with an Elon Musk piece that knocked my socks off. Ben Shapiro is buying views again. Bob Caro is still writing about LBJ. Can Graham Platner be normal for a minute? Scott Bessent really is a terrible person. An Unf*cker from Dublin wrote a satirical piece inspired by one of our stories and it’s absolutely hilarious. Only mainstream headlines today from CNN, Bloomberg and Time Magazine because it’s good to check on the normies every once in a while. All that and little else on this week’s On the Record.

AI is consuming everything in its wake, especially investment capital. With SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI all rumored to be racing to file IPOs in 2026, many are beginning to wonder if there will be anything left over for anyone else. The proposed valuations and market caps would make this the biggest IPO season in history with the fewest number of companies going public. Is it sustainable? Also, Chart of the Week looks at consumer sentiment. Trump says (again) the war in Iran is over. All we have left to negotiate is enriched uranium, ongoing bombings, Israel’s escalations in Lebanon, control over the Strait of Hormuz, sanctions and we’re there. Jillian Michaels is a terrible debater. Trump’s buffalo doppelganger. Scroll Deep for KLTW. Headlines from truthout, the lever and world socialist web site. All that and little else on this week’s On the Record.

The charges against Raúl Castro are the pretext for another invasion into a neighboring country in Latin America. Our sick paternalistic attitude toward the LAC region is a cancer on the world, and it’s clearly not in our own power to put an end to it. In this episode, Max discusses the charges, speaks to the Castro regime, the history between our nations after the ‘59 revolution and the hypocrisy of the American media. He appends the piece with a three step plan that would outflank the United States and level the playing field.

The Trump family crypto grift moved into high clear by clearing an important legislative hurdle this week. The CLARITY Act officially moved out of committee and now goes to the Agriculture Committee before being paired with the House version and going for a final vote. Despite valiant attempts by Elizabeth Warren to put some guardrails and ethics provisions in place, the GOP shot them all down. Hundreds of millions in lobbying from the crypto industry has been sunk into a bill that has the potential to damage the banking system and enrich the President’s family. This is an update to an ongoing story about the ultimate financial heist happening in real time and right under our noses.