Oracle and TikTok are overshadowing the problems at Bari Weiss’ CBS News this week.
Larry and David Ellison are attempting to create a massive multi-channel media empire with reach across multiple demographics and the scale and synergy to build something more than the sum of its parts.
Larry Ellison’s database behemoth, Oracle, provides the financial foundation beneath the aspiring media empire.
TikTok is the shiny new acquisition that gives the Ellisons’ hasbara-enforcing empire its reach into the Zoomer demographic and its algorithmic influence over what that demo sees… and perhaps thinks.
Combined with the Paramount TV network and Hollywood studio empire that Père Larry bought for fils David, Oracle’s 15% share in the American version of TikTok was supposed to make the Ellisons kingmakers and resistance breakers.
But, as I’ve posted before, empire building ain’t easy. This week, financial problems at the foundational level and technical problems at TikTok are vexing the imperial Ellisons.
Ed Zitron Goes for the Kill
In the latest premium-subscriber-only edition of his newsletter Where’s Your Ed At?, Ed Zitron argues that “the AI bubble means that every single participant, without exception, is operating on borrowed time.”
Most of the issue is spent explaining how doomed OpenAI is, the way GPU accountancy guarantees the hyperscalers (Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Google) will be facing massive depreciation write-downs (and possibly even impairments) for the foreseeable future, and outlining various scenarios explaining what may happen if and when OpenAI fails.
But he saves a big passage at the very end for Oracle.
Yet the biggest loser, I believe, will be Oracle – a company saddled with debt and hundreds of billions of dollars of long-term obligations due to its participation in the AI bubble, and a software business that’s rancid and decaying. https://t.co/tAWxEv0NzD pic.twitter.com/fRMEnoE3Lc
— Ed Zitron (@edzitron) January 23, 2026
Some key quotes:
I cannot express how stupid Oracle is.
It signed a $300 billion deal with OpenAI back in September of last year that requires 4.5GW of capacity that Oracle does not have, and has taken on $248 billion in lease obligations on top of it. Oracle does not have the cash to support these operations. It had negative $13 billion in cash flow last quarter, raised $18 billion in bonds, that $38 billion debt package for Stargate Shackelford and Wisconsin has yet to close, and Blue Owl — the loosest legs in data center funding — pulled out of Stargate Michigan in December, with nobody else stepping up to the plate as of writing this sentence.
Here’s the thing: for any of this to work, OpenAI has to become profitable within the space of two years, and do so at a scale where it is able to afford $30 billion or more a quarter in compute costs. To give you some context, Microsoft Azure makes around $75 billion annually, and AWS $115 billion. OpenAI, in its best-case scenario, made around $13 billion this year, and Oracle will be charging it at least $25 billion in the next year if any of this compute is actually made available.
…Every quarter, Oracle’s debt expands. It paid $1.057 billion in interest in its last quarter, up from $933 million in the one before, and $892 million the quarter before that.
In the middle of 2024 (its Q1 FY2025) — just before NVIDIA’s Blackwell GPUs started shipping — Oracle had $23 billion in PP&E. As of its latest quarter, it had $67.875 billion, likely almost entirely made up of NVIDIA’s GB200 racks, which The Information reported had negative 100% gross margins, specifically on Oracle Cloud.
This is not a situation where Oracle “works it out.” GPUs are destroying its gross margins just as its software business begins to contract, and its largest customer for this unprofitable business segment is OpenAI, the company that does not have any money and in fact loses it all.
The longer the AI bubble inflates, the more it seems like Oracle is in threat of actually defaulting on its loans and collapsing.
This December chart from Manu Invests shows why Oracle is the most vulnerable of the (would-be) hyperscalers:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) January 26, 2026
This goes a long way toward explaining the 25% drop in Oracle’s share price over the past six months:
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) January 26, 2026
The financial research and technology platform Trefis tried to explain Oracle’s share-price decline to Forbes readers:
Oracle (ORCL)’s stock plummeted by 37% in the last three months, even with a modest increase in revenue and better margins. The reasons for the decline include cautious Q2 earnings, diminished enthusiasm in AI, reductions in analyst price targets, and insider selling—all contributing to a significant drop in investor confidence. What’s truly behind this rollercoaster?
…
- Q2 FY26 Earnings: EPS exceeded expectations, but increased capital expenditure and negative free cash flow caused concerns among investors.
- AI Infrastructure Bet: Substantial investments in AI data centers led to significant debt increases and pressure on the balance sheet.
- Analyst Target Cuts: Several firms decreased their price targets due to concerns regarding AI strategy implementation and valuation.
- AI Market Sentiment: Worries about an ‘AI bubble’ negatively impacted ORCL, resulting in a 30.5% drop in Q4.
- Insider Stock Sales: Notable executives sold shares in late October 2025, potentially indicating a lack of confidence.
Bears should be warned that financial seer and CNBC talking head Jim Cramer calls Oracle a “linchpin stock” for the AI boom:
Jim Cramer: I wanted to be fatuous just in keeping with the news that I read which makes me feel like, are you kidding me? Come on, are you kidding me? Are we really supposed, what are we supposed to sell Oracle off of this?
But even Cramer jawboning the stock wasn’t enough to turn the tide.
That took some news about Oracle’s 15% share of American TikTok becoming official.
Controlling TikTok Bumps Oracle’s Share Price
A new internal memo from TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew however, has Oracle shares rising in price today.
Key highlights:
Today, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC has been established in compliance with the Executive Order signed by President Trump on September 25, 2025, enabling our US users to continue to discover, create, and thrive as part of TikTok’s vibrant global community and experience.
…
TikTok’s growth in the US nicely sets up the Joint Venture for strong future success. The majority American owned Joint Venture will operate under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for US users.It will be led by Adam Presser who, today, has been chosen by the Joint Venture’s Board of Directors for his impressive track record with the company leading large-scale teams in the areas of Trust & Safety and Operations.
The New York Times has more details, including who owns how much of this new beast:
Investors including the software giant Oracle; MGX, an Emirati investment firm; and Silver Lake, another investment firm, will own more than 80 percent of the new venture.
…
Adam Presser, TikTok’s former head of operations, will be the chief executive for the U.S. TikTok.The deal is intended to loosen TikTok’s ties to China and address national security concerns that Beijing could use the app to surveil or manipulate its more than 200 million users in the United States.
…
Under the new arrangement, Oracle, MGX and Silver Lake will each own 15 percent of TikTok’s U.S. operations. ByteDance will own just under 20 percent.
…
The majority of the seven-member board for the new U.S. TikTok will be American, according to a December memo to TikTok employees. Mr. Chew has a seat on the board.The new venture will moderate content in TikTok’s feed, deciding which posts to leave up and which to take down.
Note that Oracle’s main partners in the new venture are an Emirati investment firm and Egon Durban’s Silver Lake.
The UAE Is All-In on Israel’s Hasbara Agenda
Forgive me for a brief detour, but it’s important to point out the political and geo-strategic context in which the UAE is a key shareholder in American TikTok.
The UAE is currently isolated in the Middle East after falling out with Saudi Arabia. The latter is building a Sunni block that includes “Qatar, Oman, Egypt, Turkey and Pakistan” while the UAE is openly aligned with Israel and India, per the SCMP.
The UAE has been pushing reactionary narratives in the west since the end of the Arab Spring, but now it stands exposed as an open ally of Israel.
From The Washington Post last week:
…the rupture between the two oil-rich monarchies is already rippling beyond Yemen as Saudi Arabia, alarmed by what it sees as aggressive military and foreign policy moves by its much smaller neighbor, works to counter the deep web of influence Abu Dhabi has spent years building in the Horn of Africa and around the Red Sea.
…
Riyadh’s sudden, more assertive stance has countries in the region trying to navigate the rift. For years, Saudi Arabia and the UAE worked largely in tandem, backstopping other autocrats amid the Arab Spring uprisings and joining forces to counter the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen.In recent days, however, Saudi Arabia has shored up other alliances to curtail its rival and is in talks with both Egypt and Somalia to expand security cooperation between the three countries, according to a senior Somali security official. Somalia’s federal government also said it was canceling its defense agreements with the UAE, which maintains commercial ports and military bases in at least three areas — Somaliland, Puntland and Jubaland — where the government in Mogadishu has little presence or influence.
…
Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at King’s College London’s School of Security Studies, has described the UAE’s regional network as an “axis of secessionists.”
“Abu Dhabi is comfortable operating below the threshold of formal statecraft, building influence through a web of commercial vehicles, logistics access, security assistance, intermediaries and local armed partners,” he said.
Notably the WaPo piece avoids any mention of the Israeli-UAE alliance.
Dr. Krieg spells it out more clearly on his X account:
Saudi has convened an impressive coalition of states with immense depth that includes Turkey (who disagree with the UAE over Somalia, Libya and Sudan), Egypt (who see themselves confronted by UAE statecraft in Ethiopia, Sudan and Libya) and the rest of the GCC, plus Pakistan as a… https://t.co/lTJoQ8Lbxi
— Dr Andreas Krieg (@andreas_krieg) January 23, 2026
I should also mention that Silver Lake is a primary owner of Ari Emanuel’s WME Group, the company that owns a majority of TKO, parent company of the UFC and WWE.
Emanuel played a key role in the Ellisons’ securing Trump’s approval to buy Paramount, and also reportedly helped the Ellisons secure financial backing from the UAE, Qatar, and Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth funds for Paramount’s (so far) unsuccessful bid for WBD.
I doubt that same constellation of investors could be assembled today, after the falling out between the Saudis and the UAE.
But let’s get back to TikTok.
Adam Presser’s Fight Against ‘Anti-Semitism” Drawing Attention
New CEO Adam Presser has been outspoken about his plans for the platform.
Here are some key points from Presser’s talk at last year’s World Jewish Congress (via Chris Menahan on X.com)
LONG CUT: Adam Presser, TikTok's new CEO under the Larry Ellison takeover, told the World Jewish Congress last year,
• They made "Zionist" a "proxy for a protected attribute" to designate it "hate speech" if used in a negative light (the WJC lobbied for this change).
• TikTok… https://t.co/TDnsfVvMqn pic.twitter.com/zkaHy7WLCL
— Chris Menahan 🇺🇸 (@infolibnews) January 25, 2026
- They made “Zionist” a “proxy for a protected attribute” to designate it “hate speech” if used in a negative light (the WJC lobbied for this change).
- TikTok *tripled* the number of accounts they were banning for “hateful activity” “over the course of 2024” (i.e., post-Oct 7th).
- TikTok is “especially” focused on fighting “anti-Semitism”—and it’s personal to Presser as “a member of the American Jewish community.”
- While banning critics of Israel for “hate,” they also partnered with Israeli creators (and some non-Israeli creators) to produce positive hasbara content.
- They have over two dozen Jewish organizations “constantly” feeding them “intelligence” on “violative trends”—which includes the WJC—and such groups help inform them on “what is hate speech.”
- They “spend a lot of time” with Jewish/Israeli creators to find out “what other tools they might look for” in fighting anti-Semitism.
So far it looks like the new moderators are operating with a heavy hand.
Here’s how one American alt-media outlet is faring under the new regime:
UPDATE: TIKTOK IS COOKED. Our @tiktok_us videos went from tens of thousands to 0.
(seemingly a direct result of Trump & Bibi’s friends taking over) pic.twitter.com/XHMR1oW3Yp
— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) January 26, 2026
Tough Transition
It’s not just heavy-handed moderation that’s troubling TikTok’s first days under new management.
The Verge headlined their piece on the platform’s issues “TikTok USA is broken.”
Key points:
Many in the US have found it impossible to upload videos over the last day or so, which are sitting “under review” indefinitely. One video we uploaded from a US account last night has yet to go live, nearly 12 hours later, while a video uploaded from the UK is published — but it’s only visible to our editors who aren’t in the US. Similarly, accounts for pages like the BBC and The Guardian only show new uploads for those of us who live outside the US, while viewing the same account from the US shows only videos uploaded before Sunday morning.
Issues that thousands of people have reported and we’ve been able to confirm include difficulty logging in, the inability to upload or publish videos, a For You Page algorithm that isn’t personalized, problems loading comments, as well as errors flashing for other features, and problems with the CapCut video editor.
Given the timing, many drew a link between TikTok’s issues, its US operation’s new Trump-friendly owners, and this weekend’s anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis, exacerbated by the killing of a second local resident, Alex Pretti, by federal agents. The combination of publishing errors and previously political For You Pages that are suddenly filled with generic content has led many to assume the worst when their videos about ICE wouldn’t publish, but at the moment, the problems appear to be much more extensive.
Previously popular TikTok anti-genocide advocate Guy Christensen has been urging his followers to migrate to a new platform called UpScrolled with the sales pitch that “It’s led by a Palestinian and promises no censorship from billionaires.”
I have to assume that TikTok will sort out its technical issues, but as with the Ellisons’ CBS News it is unclear if they will be able to create a controlled platform that retains enough popularity to be influential.
It also remains unclear what the impact of the much anticipated AI bust will be on the Ellisons’ plans for global info domination.
Related Posts:
- Trump Makes an Example Out of Paramount
- Larry Ellison + Oracle + AI + Paramount + Trump = Total Info Control
- Delusion, Deception and Dipshittery: Hasbara on the 8th Front
- Tony Blair and Larry Ellison Make One HELL of a Partnership
- Pyrrhic Victory Drives Dystopian High Tech Drive for Control
- Bari Weiss Will Run CBS News for the Ellison Hasbara Empire
- Hogs at the AI Slop Trough, Gulf States, UFC Edition
- Hasbara Ain’t Cheap, Musk, Ellison, Saudis, All Tapped
- Informational Force-Feeding Divides and Distracts
- Bari Weiss’ CBS Not an Auspicious Beginning to Total Info Control
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Just FYI, Oracle also owns and runs Cerner systems. The EHR company. Second only to EPIC in its use in America. Since I am old enough to have used them all in the past, I can very much assure you that it is the biggest disaster in the field. Colleagues who are still forced to use it now have told me that literally it has caused all kinds of mayhem up unto death in its latest configuration. My feeling is that Oracle bought Cerner about 2-3 years ago or something like that. They immediately got the VA involved in their product, and the VA began to have disasters like it has never had before.
Am I the only one bothered by the fact that we have these big leviathan like computer companies like Oracle and Amazon ( most all of them are run on AWS in the background) with their mitts all over everyone’s personal data?
I am not sure what would happen to the EHR field if something as big as Cerner goes under – but it sure would be fun to watch.
Ellison claims that Oracle’s access to private data is its hole card in the rapidly commodifying AI space.
I’ll look into Cerner & Oracle’s acquisition thereof. Thanks!
Oracle announced the acquisition of Cerner in December 2021 with the formal purchase occurring in June 2022…so around 4 years ago. Purchase price was $28.3B. Cerner was based in Kansas City and had a weird office location policy… basically a few large office towers in radically different parts of the KC metro area. They also bounced employees from one location which was a big source of frustration. Now, most of those old office towers are in desperate need of tenants. I’m not in medicine, but I also have heard that Epic is better than Cerner although that might be a low bar to clear.
Not sure if you saw OpenAI’s recent ChatGPT health announcement. I believe Anthropic announced something similar shortly after. It will be pervasive. The new season of The Pitt (emerg show) has a commentary on it.
I haven’t had first-hand experiences with Oracle’s offerings as much as IBM’s (another company that’s really good at rotting software it acquires from within like a parasitic wasp). What I am specifically familiar with is that, beyond everything else, Oracle has a definite reputation in the open-source community.
I think it’s largely from the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which was probably as close to a spiritual opposite of Oracle as an American software company could be. Funny enough, IIRC it worked out kind of like Oracle’s recent business moves; tons of developers & engineers quickly jumped ship, and core contributors created independent forks of anything Sun had open-sourced (which was much of their IP because that’s how Sun rolled). And a lot of the customer base just went with them.
So I totally believe you that Oracle could turn an EMR system into a dumpster-fire in under 5 years.
Sun Solaris used to be a big deal but don’t hear much about it these days. I guess Java and Android are kind of joined at the hip, but not sure what that means for Oracle.
I feel like a dupe for not knowing this. I work in public health and several of our partner facilities use cerner – and have been, for nearly 2 years now, borderline nonfunctional and mostly noncompliant vis a vis their reporting requirements to the municipal health department. The reps from cerner proper are overwhelmingly useless, although from my perspective it’s hard to tell if that’s a fundamental problem with the product or just those guys in particular – but we don’t have these issues with anyone using epic or in house solutions.
Ed Zitron tweeted that Oracle may sell Cerner to pay for AI data centers.
I’m starting to think of AI as a modern version of the old Golem mythology.
per wiki:
In modern popular culture, the word has become generalized, and any crude automaton devised by a sorcerer may be termed a “golem”.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem
Steve Balmer once said the great thing about Windows was that you could keep selling the same piece of intellectual property over and over again. You were selling it while still owning it. Louis B. Mayer said the same about the movie business.
So isn’t all this investment in energy sucking data center hardware a violation of the grift that made Bill Gates the titan (/s) he is today? Clearly karma tells us that an Ellison bankruptcy is devoutly to be wished–perhaps at the same time that Trump is impeached and Netanyahu ushered into his Israeli jail cell.
The difference is MS was selling something with $0 cogs. All the AI people are trying to to sell stuff with massively negative margins.
This is why some of us believe in the jolly roger.
Perhaps some people will wise up & learn to limit what personal info they put on these platforms; then again…
The Ellisons seem to think Robber Baron = Media Mogul
They are not the same, supposed “business acumen” does not translate from “regular” business to Media Empire.
Rupert Murdoch chased his White Whale of DirectTV for years, and finally caught it. Then the phone hacking case in the UK threatened to take down the whole empire, but as Harry Shearer lampooned on Le Show almost every week during Trump 1.0, Murdoch (allegedly) had a hotline to the White House.
Trump has thrown the Ellisons under the bus, not a good look for aspirational Media Moguls, especially when their primary portfolio is upside down. We’ll see how many billions of dollars being a poodle for Israel is worth.
How has Trump thrown them under the bus?
throwing shade / cold water on the Skydance/WB merger Variety
Trump’s kicked them in the teeth multiple times. There’s this gem from my piece last week:
I’m not sure his actions CBS were suing so much as a shakedown. “Sure you can have your merger but I want a cut. I’ll sue you and you’ll settle for this ampunt and then it can go ahead.” If he is threatening it again he is probably deciding he wants another cut. That’s what happens when you give in to bullies.
I am an occasional “user” of TikTok, and the double entendre is intentional given its toxic effect on dopamine. This weekend, it was quite interesting after the murder of Alex Pretti as the for you page knew I was interested in the topic. The quality varied.
Today, the for you page has been gutted after I finally accepted the new terms and conditions for a U.S. user. It’s unclear if these are handover snafus or an intentional effort at corporate censorship.
Well, the Ellison’s can create a hedge. Set up an industrial bank like Ford and General Motors. Given the infinite malleability of the FDIC, Oracle should be able to finagle guarantees for large portions of its fictitious capital. With Ari Emmanual as one of Donnie’s favored bag-men it should be a slam dunk…only a question of price.
Oracle has very deep ties with the state it emerged from, they can do any wrong and will be left unmolested.
They certainly own the subsidiary of the the TBlair foundation that is the current government in the UK.
OT but does anyone here find that firefox has degraded markedly over the last 3/4 months?
“Oracle has very deep ties with the state it emerged from, they can do any wrong and will be left unmolested.”
The suite of software marketed by Oracle is now so widely used and so inextricably embedded in the business processes of a myriad of corporations, including many large ones, that the company may be considered Too Big To Fail, leading to the possibility that the State will do everything necessary to keep it afloat in case of a bankruptcy-threatening trouble.
A friend is interviewing for a company who provide a SaaS platform for customers dependent on Oracle to point their ERP applications at a new “Oracle” server that is really a open-source DB…. :-)
Goodbye Big Red!
OT but does anyone here find that firefox has degraded markedly over the last 3/4 months?
Not overall but Firefox is not loading some images in a posting. Among others, I have had to move to Opera to load some images in a Simplisimus post. I am not seeing any real pattern but I have not been keeping close track. I’ll have to start.
Here I see a second layer to the recent DRAM price increases. If OpenAI could likewise restrict the supply of GPUs, it’s possible they or datacenters could artificially raise the prices and argue for appreciation of their assets, to keep the whole gaming going for a few months more. Given the accounting games already being placed in the AI space, I can see something like this coming.
They could raise prices to who?
AI does not seem to be delivering anything worthwhile beyond the platforms who desire free, ad-fertile content, perverts who can manifest their wildest fantasies and (pace another article here), slothful administrators who somehow feel they fully deserve their place in The Shitshow.
An informal collective who are notoriously reluctant to stick a hand into their personal pocket.
Good stuff, NWT.
I also paused to wonder how many are loudly hyping in the press and to investors, while quietly prepping for something different to happen.
I’m going under the idea that if Orace’s dodgy finances blow up in their face, that the US government will ride in to bail them out because they are Too Important To Fail and it is all about national security, dontcha know. What should happen is that entire edifice should be broken up and sold off.
Yep thats exactly what will happen. We all know the AI bubble is going to pop and leave a giant mess behind, but I doubt any regular readers here will be shocked when the oligarchs end up being bailed out by the working class yet again.
Another way to look at OpenAI is that every company cutting deals with it is fully assuming (or 100% recklessly insouciant) as to its imminent bankruptcy.
The counter-parties are in a bidding war with one another for control of the OpenAI estate in bankruptcy and trying to hasten it (before they have to fund their own obligations). MS and Oracle each need an AI stack. Once the VC money dries up and AI providers raise prices for profitability, NVidia could resell the GPUs / datacentres to the survivors.
OpenAI is worth more dead than alive to every partner it has. It is turning out like Murder on the Orient Express!
When OpenAI dies, Microsoft gets everything, they essentially own all of OpenAI’s IP.
@Nat Wilson Turner – interesting article, thank you for writing it but, if one small subedit us allowed, the wonderful Omanis are not Sunnis but Ibadis. They are considered apostates by the Sunnis, just like the Shia are, but the Omanis are polite and humble and Oman is cut off by mountains and sea from the rest of Arabia and so they survive like a Switzerland of the Middle East….
Ah, thanks for pointing that out. My ignorance is as deep as my knowledge base is shallow.
If I understand this joint venture correctly, Oracle just paid Bytedance a few billion sheckels to do content moderation on the Tiktok platform? There’s no business there, it’s all loss. This is insane. Accenture, Wipro and the other big IT outsourcing services make billions off Bytedance for doing this in the rest of the world. It’s actually setting money on fire to lock down content that all you need is a VPN to see.
Good article, thanks!
I would like to add that the spike – up 50% – in Oracle’s stock price came the week after its deal with OpenAI where Oracle will deliver compute it doesn’t have, powered with power it doesn’t have, in exchange for money OpenAI doesn’t have. Mr Market is quick to reward playing into bubbles.
Something that I started wondering thinking about Oracle’s debt, and the AI bubble in general: Is this a big part of why Trump wants interest rates down, to keep the AI bubble growing? I have mostly seen speculation on it being his background in property or generally inflating the economy. But he is awfully close to the tech billionaires, and they are probably aware of the need for low interests to blow their tech bubbles.
Maybe someone has written about this, and I have just missed it. Or maybe there is some solid reason to think this isn’t the case.
Being a nerd, I’ve paid some attention to the WB bidding war. It never made sense to me how Warner Brothers is worth … 100 billion? Really? In this case the Ellison’s may be saved from themselves.
Excellent article by the way, it convinced me that we’ll be looking at massive bailouts soon. I wonder if they’ll be public.
Regarding interest rates, agreed. A return to ZIRP would be tossing Ellison a lifeline. Are there dots to be connected here? Pretty much every billionaire would benefit from ZIRP, so there’s probably a line.
Adding to the TikTok angle: according to Kyle Kulinsky and Kristal Ball, who tested it, now you can’t do a direct message on Tiktok if it contains the word “Epstein”.
Being a nerd, I’ve paid some attention to the WB bidding war. It never made sense to me how Warner Brothers is worth … 100 billion? Really? In this case the Ellison’s may be saved from themselves.
Excellent article by the way, it convinced me that we’ll be looking at massive bailouts soon. I wonder if they’ll be public.
The Fed will likely engineer what many will consider hyper-inflation in order to bailout the big debtors such as private equity, the tech bros, an so on. What else can they do in order to avoid a economic collapse? Free money is the only way the party can continue. When things get really ugly there may well be a smorgasbord of actions taken – bank bail-ins, quantitative easing, ZIRP, massively expand the Fed’s balance sheet, and the outright theft of other nation states assets – gold, various minerals, oil, USD holdings.