Authored by Christina Comben via CoinTelegraph.com,

The Ethereum Foundation has begun staking part of its treasury, turning one of Ethereum’s most influential entities into a direct economic participant in network consensus.

1/ The Ethereum Foundation has begun staking a portion of its treasury, in line with its Treasury Policy announced last year.

Today, the EF made a 2016 ETH deposit. Approximately 70,000 ETH will be staked with rewards directed back to the EF treasury.

— Ethereum Foundation (@ethereumfndn) February 24, 2026

Among the most important foreign policy statements of President Trump's during his annual State of the Union address to a joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives Tuesday night came in discussing his Iran red lines.

"We are in negotiations with them. They want to make a deal, but we haven't heard those secret words: 'We will never have a nuclear weapon.'" This 'challenge' underscores that at this point it may not matter at all what Iran actually says or does, as Washington is on the war path. See the words of Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi issued before Trump's speech - he laid out precisely this pledge using the "secret words" several hours before the world knew what Trump would say... 

Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk.com,

Ponder a $44,000 insurance bill. This does not count as inflation in the CPI.

Dysfunction in California’s Insurance Market

The Wall Street Journal reports A $44,000 Bill Shows the Dysfunction in California’s Home-Insurance Market

Billionaire natural resources investor Rick Rule, legendary short-seller Bill Fleckenstein, and veteran oil trader Erik Townsend join ZeroHedge this evening at 7PM ET to give their outlooks on three key commodities sectors: Gold, Oil, and Uranium.

Authored by Michael Lebowitz via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

The recent rotation from growth to value is well documented. While the return divergences between, for instance, technology stocks and materials or industrials stocks are significant, they do not tell the whole story. There are also extreme return differentials between broad industries and their sub-industries.

As usual, the opposing party was ready with a rebuttal to the President's State of the Union address last night. 

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

A majority of voters say immunity for pharmaceutical firms should be removed in cases where the companies’ vaccines cause injuries, according to a new poll.

Sixty percent of voters responding to the poll agreed that vaccine manufacturers should be stripped of immunity in such cases, including 33 percent who strongly backed withdrawing the immunity.

Oil prices are sliding this morning following as an over-supplied market (API reported a huge 11.4mm barrel build last week) beats the geopolitical risk premia (with the US poised to attack Iran).

"Iran, rather than backing down and agreeing to all and any term [U.S. President Trump] is placing on the table (as he had expected), is instead daring him to attack.

"Just you try it and you will see what you will get!" is kind of what Iran implicitly said to Trump when it held military drills in the Straight of Hormuz last week," Bjarne Schieldrop, chief commodities analyst at SEB Research, wrote.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

New revelations from the Stop The Harm Database expose a grim reality: between 2019 and 2023, thousands of American children were subjected to life-altering surgeries, hormone treatments, and puberty blockers in the name of transgender ideology.

Update (2320ET): While predicted to be '2 or 3 hours,' President Trump's State of the Union was just 109 minutes - though it was still the longest on record since at least 1964. Trump emphasized border security, energy production, and tax policies while throwing Democrats under the bus over the economy and unchecked illegal immigration.

David Tepper, the billionaire behind Appaloosa Management, blasted Whirlpool’s board in a sharply critical letter, accusing the appliance maker of eroding shareholder value and demanding a strategic reset, according to CNBC, who viewed the letter.

Authored by Eva Sun-Wai via BondVigilantes.com,

The dollar’s slide last year looks less like a sudden break and more like the culmination of pressures that have been gathering for a while. The fading of US exceptionalism has sat quietly in the background, and once the narrative started to normalise, the cracks became clearer: softer growth expectations, slower capital inflows, and valuations that had been leaning heavily on the idea that the US could keep outperforming indefinitely. The currency came into the year heavily owned and reliant on that growth premium, and when it began to erode, the dollar suddenly felt far more exposed to shifts in sentiment and positioning than it had for some time.