Once again, let me make the point that Joe Biden is in a heap of trouble. Not a new thought from me, but new evidence, virtually unequivocally, shows that his troubles are deepening. The mainstream media only wants to talk about Donald Trump’s indictments, but you can’t have parallel grand juries in different geographical locations, and then argue that the former president is not entitled to his First Amendment-protected free speech. That charge will never stick.

I’ll tell you what else you can’t have. You can’t have Joe Biden picking up the phone 20 or 25 times as vice president with all sorts of crooked oligarchs on the other end of the line – and actually tell the public you were just talking about the weather. Uh-uh. Ain’t gonna fly.

House Oversight Chair James Comer, who will be on this program tomorrow, just released a new batch of Biden business bank records, showing the Biden family business received over $20 million from Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan while Papa Joe was Veep.

I know Joe Biden has a relationship with The Weather Channel, and we’re going to get to that in a minute, but I don’t think anybody in the Veep’s office was really all that interested in the weather in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

HOUSE GOP RELEASE BANK RECORDS ON HUNTER BIDEN PAYMENTS FROM RUSSIAN, KAZAKH OLIGARCHS, TOTAL CLEARS $20M 

This is on top of the earlier Comer unveiling of two tranches of Biden business records, that came to at least $10 million from various schemes in Romania and China. The weather’s not that interesting in those places either. You have nine Biden family members getting paid from foreign business influence peddling.

$30 million bucks for exactly what product? Which service? Influence peddling – the family business! Devon Archer, a jilted former BFF, spilled the beans about the twenty-some odd phone calls and plenty of context and two dinners at Cafe Milano – not one dinner, but two dinners, full of foreign thugs meeting with Papa Joe.

Get ready for Eric Schwerin, another jilted BFF, who will soon testify before the House Oversight Committee about his 35 or 40 visits to the White House, to the Veep’s house, to all their houses. Joe Biden’s “I didn’t know anything about Hunter’s business” defense has been smashed, but now, with the bank records and the testimony of Biden insiders, there is no doubt that pay-for-play foreign influence peddling is a reality.

These are allegations, but now really turning into hard evidence. Let’s not kid ourselves. Provable crimes? We’ll see. Ethical violations? Absolutely. Bribery schemes? We’re still waiting on that Burisma story and the twenty audio tapes. Meanwhile, just as an aside, Joe Biden actually did an interview with The Weather Channel, but he didn’t talk about the weather in China, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Romania.

I mean, I thought he might unburden himself and explain to people his rabid interest in Chinese and Eastern European meteorology. I mean, maybe it’s some hidden hobby he’s had all these years? Nope! His real message was more ultra-liberal pap about his war against fossil fuels. 

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He says he wants to stop all drilling on the coasts and the Gulf of Mexico. But the courts got in the way. Actually, he just wants to stop all drilling. Period. In fact, Bidenomics is really just a ploy to destroy American energy.

If you think about it, Russia, China, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, who all contributed to the Biden family coffers, are all producers of fossil fuels: coal, oil and gas. Why not let them do it? That’ll help bury American national security altogether, wouldn’t it? All for $30 million bucks. It’s a pathetic story. You’re in a heap of trouble, Joe Biden.

This article is adapted from Larry Kudlow’s opening commentary on the August 9, 2023, edition of “Kudlow.”  

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Intense thunderstorms wreaked havoc on the U.S. in the first six months of the year, driving tens of billions of dollars worth of insured losses, according to a recently released Swiss Re report. 

Swiss Re said Wednesday that the amount of insured losses brought on by the U.S. storms, and the lightning, rain, hail and winds that accompany them, totaled $34 billion in that time frame. That marked the “highest ever insured losses in a six-month period,” according to the reinsurance company.

Out of all 50 states, Texas faced the most impact of severe storms, Swiss Re found.

A separate July report from BMS Group said the Lone Star State has faced more than $7.2 billion in insurance loss so far in 2023 from severe weather, above Illinois, Kentucky, Colorado, Tennessee, Arkansas and Missouri, which also saw losses in the 10 figures.

The U.S. has averaged six sets of severe thunderstorms that racked up at least $1 billion in losses a year for the past decade, the reinsurance company said. In 2023’s first six months, it saw 10.

PROPERTY INSURANCE GOING UP OR AWAY FOR MANY IN BREWING CRISIS

The insurance markets in some states, like Florida and California, have experienced difficulties in recent years with some insurers choosing to curb their coverage there, FOX Business previously reported.

Globally, $35 billion worth of insured losses in the first half of 2023 resulted from severe thunderstorms, according to Swiss Re. That made up nearly 70% of the insured natural catastrophe losses posted overall in the time frame.

“With severe thunderstorms as the main driver of above-average insured losses in the first half of 2023, this secondary peril becomes one of the dominant global drivers of insured losses,” Swiss Re Head of Catastrophic Perils Martin Bertogg said in a statement. “The above-average losses reaffirm a 5-7% annual growth trend in insured losses, driven by a warming climate but even more so, by rapidly growing economic values in urbanized settings, globally.”

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For the first six months of 2023, insured losses caused by natural catastrophes came in at $50 billion, marking a $2 billion jump and a more than 4% increase year over year, according to Swiss Re. Compared to the 10-year average of $38 billion, the reinsurance company said they have widened 42%.

The first half of 2023 has beat out all others apart from one – 2011 – in how high its global natural catastrophe insured losses reached, per Swiss Re. That year, insured losses were $104 billion worldwide, largely caused by Japan and New Zealand both getting hit with major earthquakes, according to the reinsurance company.

TROPICAL STORM IAN INSURANCE LOSSES PROJECTED TO REACH $40 BILLION

Some other events that caused insured losses in the first half of the year included flooding and severe weather in New Zealand, flooding in Italy, and earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, Swiss Re said.

Those earthquakes created $5.3 billion in insured losses, according to the report. Tens of thousands of people were killed in the disaster.

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The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) announced that the federal government’s budget deficit more than doubled through the first 10 months of the current fiscal year compared to a year ago.

In its latest budget review released Tuesday, the CBO found that the federal deficit was $1.6 trillion in the first 10 months of fiscal year 2023 — a significant increase over the $726 billion deficit the federal government incurred in the same period last year. 

The CBO noted that federal spending was 10% higher during the reporting period than it was a year, while tax revenues came in 10% lower, which combined to cause the deficit to widen. As a result, the CBO now expects the federal deficit for FY2023 will be about $1.7 trillion — or $200 billion larger than the forecast it issued in May.

HOW DOES BIPARTISAN BUDGET, DEBT LIMIT DEAL IMPACT SPENDING, DEFICIT?

Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said in a statement, “With just two months left in the fiscal year, we’ve now borrowed $5.3 billion per day and have already surpassed all of last year’s deficits. The deficit this year and next year are on track to be 50 percent larger than before the pandemic, despite the fact that the pandemic is over and the economy seems to be growing at a steady clip.”

A federal budget deficit of $1.7 trillion would be one of the largest on record, and it comes even as many COVID-19 pandemic relief programs have concluded, which caused the largest deficits in U.S. history due to the elevated spending and reduced economic activity that diminished tax revenues.

BIDEN TOUTS ‘BIDENOMICS’ BUT AMERICANS REMAIN WORRIED ABOUT INFLATION, SOARING FOOD PRICES

The U.S. ran a record-setting deficit of more than $3.1 trillion in FY2020 after Congress approved trillions of dollars of new spending on temporary COVID-19 programs on a bipartisan basis, including those under the CARES Act in the early weeks of the pandemic-induced lockdowns. 

Many of those programs continued into the following year when Biden took office and Democrats used their majorities in Congress to enact the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act along party lines. Those factors combined to keep the FY2021 deficit over $2.7 trillion.

JANET YELLEN DOUBLES DOWN ON CRITICISM OF FITCH’S US CREDIT DOWNGRADE

The deficit narrowed further to nearly $1.4 trillion in FY2022 as more pandemic spending came to an end, although that was still the fourth-largest annual deficit in U.S. history — trailing only the two prior years and an FY2009 deficit that narrowly exceeded $1.4 trillion amid the financial crisis.

The CBO’s updated deficit projections come after Fitch Rating’s recent decision to downgrade the U.S. government’s credit rating from ‘AAA’ to ‘AA+’ which could increase the government’s borrowing costs.

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Fitch cited an “erosion of governance” characterized by partisan standoffs over fiscal policies and the debt limit as a contributing factor in its downgrade decision, in addition to an “expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years.”

Fitch noted that it expects the federal government’s deficit to rise to 6.3% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2023 and 6.9% of GDP in 2025, driven by weak economic growth and higher interest costs associated with servicing the more than $32 trillion U.S. national debt. 

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