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West Virginia Parents Seeking Religious Exemptions To Vaccine Requirements Win Reprieve
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West Virginia Parents Seeking Religious Exemptions To Vaccine Requirements Win Reprieve Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), A judge on July 24 granted a reprieve to West Virginia parents whose children were being blocked from attending school because they had not received the required vaccinations. West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey in Washington, in an undated file photograph. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images West Virginia Circuit Judge Michael Froble issued a preliminary injunction for three sets of parents who sued the state Board of Education over its directive to school districts not to allow children with religious exemptions to attend school. The directive contradicted an executive order from the governor. “The court believes that the compulsory vaccination law is not valid without a religious exemption, that constitutional law and constitutional review indicate that statute itself is not constitutional and is invalid without a religious exception,” Froble said from the bench during a hearing in Beckley, the Parkersburg News and Sentinel reported. The state’s law requiring school children to receive certain vaccines states that medical exemptions must be permitted, but does not mention religious exemptions. In the lawsuit, parents requested that the court find the law violated another state law, approved by lawmakers in 2023, that says in part that no action from the state may “substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless it is essential to “further a compelling government interest.” West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, said in a January order that officials were refusing to let children with religious exemptions attend school, which “substantially burdens the free exercise of religion.” He directed state officials to permit religious exemptions. The West Virginia Board of Education, in a directive to districts, said that they should continue excluding children without the required vaccines from schools unless they had medical exemptions, prompting the lawsuit. “Big victory for religious liberty in West Virginia!” Morrisey wrote on X on Thursday. “We will continue to defend our 2023 Equal Protection for Religion law so that no child in the state is denied an education based on their religious beliefs.” Aaron Siri, an attorney who is helping represent the parents, said on X that he was pleased with the injunction. “We rest when every family has this freedom,” he said. In a statement to news outlets, the West Virginia Board of Education said it was disappointed by the ruling and that members would decide on the next steps soon. “This injunction is limited in scope and applies only to those named in this lawsuit. It will have no impact on other students in Raleigh County or throughout the state,” the board stated. “As students prepare for the upcoming school year, families are encouraged to comply with West Virginia’s compulsory vaccination laws.” The ruling came one day after a different judge in the state dismissed a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia that challenged Morrisey’s order on religious exemptions. That suit, lodged in May, said that Morrisey lacked the power to require officials to grant religious exemptions. The judge said that the plaintiffs in the case failed to notify the defendants at least 30 days ahead of time before suing, violating a requirement in state law. Tyler Durden Fri, 07/25/2025 - 22:35
Is Private Equity A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing?
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Is Private Equity A Wolf In Sheep's Clothing? Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvce.com, In July 2007, just before the financial crisis erupted, Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince summed up Wall Street’s dangerous exuberance: “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.” Eighteen years later, Wall Street is dancing again, and the rhythm feels disturbingly familiar. Private equity (PE), once a niche strategy reserved for sophisticated endowments and mega-pensions, is being aggressively marketed to everyday investors. It’s creeping into 401(k)s, target-date funds, and retirement accounts under the seductive promise of higher returns and diversification. But for investors who’ve forgotten history, or worse, were never taught it, the risks are mounting. What Is Private Equity & How We Got Here Private equity refers to investments in companies not publicly traded on a stock exchange. Instead of buying shares of companies like Apple or Microsoft, private equity firms purchase entire companies, or large stakes in them, using a mix of their own capital and large amounts of borrowed money (leverage). Once they take control, they often restructure the company, cut costs, increase debt, and aim to “flip” it for a profit within a few years. This can be done by selling it to another company, a PE firm, or publicizing it via an IPO. The pitch? Higher returns. The reality? Higher risk and lower transparency. PE’s ascent began after the 2008 financial crisis when near-zero interest rates pushed institutional investors out of traditional bonds and into “alternatives.” As I’ve written, institutional FOMO (fear of missing out) drove billions into private markets with questionable due diligence. So they turned to alternatives: private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and real estate. In 2019, Ben Meng, then-CIO of CalPERS (California’s massive public pension fund), epitomized the mentality when he said, “We need private equity, we need more of it, and we need it now.” And Wall Street delivered. The results were predictable. With cheap credit abundant, deal volume exploded, topping $3.1 trillion globally in 2021. Valuations were detached from reality. According to McKinsey, buyout multiples surged from 6.5x EBITDA in 2009 to 12x in 2022, nearly doubling in just over a decade. But this boom was built on artificially low interest rates and easy liquidity. That means PE firms paid twice as much for companies as a decade ago. The reason is simple: They could borrow more cheaply and charge investors higher fees. However, with rates normalized and liquidity tightening, private equity’s structural weaknesses are surfacing. Therefore, as sophisticated investors become more risk-averse to the deals they take on, Wall Street is turning to a new source of capital: unsophisticated retail investors. What Makes Private Equity Risky for You Let’s break down some key concerns the average investor should understand before allocating capital—directly or indirectly—to private equity. 1. Illiquidity Is a Feature, Not a Bug PE funds lock up investor capital for 7-10 years, sometimes longer, depending on extensions and follow-on investments. This means that investors lose the fundamental flexibility that public markets provide, namely, the ability to liquidate assets in response to life events, market downturns, or better opportunities. For example, if you invested in PE through the COVID-19 market shock, you couldn’t reallocate capital even as public markets sharply corrected and rebounded. This rigid illiquidity is especially dangerous for retirees or individuals who may require access to funds unexpectedly. 2. Opacity Masks Risk In public markets, pricing is determined every second by the forces of supply and demand, providing price discovery and transparency. However, private equity relies on subjective valuation models that are updated quarterly or less frequently. This allows PE funds to “smooth returns,” creating the illusion of low volatility. For instance, during market sell-offs like 2022, many PE funds reported negligible markdowns while public equities fell double digits. This masks the true underlying risk, potentially misleading investors about the health of their portfolios and delaying the recognition of losses until forced asset sales or fund closures 3. Fees Are Devastatingly High PE funds follow a “2 and 20” fee structure: a 2% annual management fee plus 20% of profits above a specific hurdle rate. Over a decade-long lock-up, even in mediocre-performing funds, fees can erode a substantial portion of gross returns. For example, on a hypothetical $100,000 investment, you could pay $20,000 in management fees over ten years, excluding performance fees. Compared to passive investment vehicles like S&P 500 ETFs costing 0.03%-0.10% annually, the fee drag in PE is enormous. Academic studies, such as those by Ludovic Phalippou at Oxford, have consistently shown that net returns after fees in PE barely exceed, and often underperform, simple public index strategies. 4. Leverage Amplifies Fragility Leverage is a double-edged sword in private equity. While it can amplify returns in bull markets, it dramatically increases financial fragility during downturns. PE buyouts frequently involve debt levels of 5-7 times EBITDA, far exceeding leverage ratios typical of public companies. This dependence on cheap debt made sense in a zero-rate world, but is becoming a liability as borrowing costs rise. For instance, companies acquired at peak valuations in 2020-2021 face refinancing risks as interest coverage ratios deteriorate. Reports of loan covenant breaches and distressed sales are already emerging across sectors like healthcare, retail, and infrastructure, previously touted as “safe” plays in the PE world. But while these issues are important, there are seven “red flags” that signal trouble ahead. Seven Red Flags That Signal Trouble Ahead The CFA Institute recently highlighted seven red flags signaling serious trouble brewing in private markets—risks magnified for retirement savers who lack the tools and resources to properly evaluate these risks. For retail investors, each of these red flags represents a significant warning that could impact long-term financial outcomes, especially when embedded within retirement plans like 401(k)s and target-date funds. 1. Declining Deal Quality With record amounts of capital flowing into private equity, more money is chasing fewer high-quality investment opportunities. This leads to PE firms lowering their standards and investing in weaker companies or more speculative ventures. For retail investors, this means exposure to riskier businesses with less predictable cash flows. For example, during the 2021 SPAC boom, many companies that would have traditionally struggled to access public markets instead found their way into private portfolios, leading to high-profile failures post-acquisition. The chart below from S&P Global shows the number of private transactions terminated between 2020-2023. 2. Inflated Valuations PE managers often base valuations on future projections rather than tangible market transactions. As a result, portfolios can appear healthy on paper even when underlying fundamentals are deteriorating. For retail investors, this creates the illusion of stability, where portfolio statements show steady or appreciating values while the true market value could be significantly lower. A prime example occurred during 2022, when public tech stocks corrected sharply, but many PE tech holdings barely adjusted, delaying loss recognition and masking portfolio risk. To that point, you should realize that most private equity investments (65%) either fail or return the initial investment at best. Yes, private equity can be very lucrative. Depending on the deal you invest in, it can also be very harmful. 3. Fee Pressures = Riskier Deals Institutional investors are increasingly pushing back on high fees, which puts pressure on PE firms to maintain profitability. This can lead to riskier behavior, such as over-leveraging or engaging in more aggressive cost-cutting at portfolio companies to boost short-term returns. For retail investors, this translates into an even worse alignment of interests: high fees remain in place, while portfolio risk quietly increases. Worse, retail channels often lack the negotiating power to secure fee reductions, leaving them exposed to premium costs for subpar investments. 4. Frozen Exit Markets An essential part of private equity returns depends on the ability to sell portfolio companies at a profit. However, the current environment of rising interest rates and lower public market valuations has led to a sharp decline in IPOs and M&A activity. This creates a backlog of unsold assets, commonly referred to as an “exit overhang.” For retail investors, this means delayed distributions, longer-than-expected lock-up periods, and an increased likelihood of forced sales at discounted prices. Recent data from secondary market platforms show private equity interests trading at significant discounts, clear evidence of deteriorating liquidity. 5. Discounted Secondaries When existing investors seek to exit PE investments early, they often turn to secondary markets. Today, these interests are commonly trading at 20-40% discounts to their stated net asset values (NAVs). This is a stark warning sign: even sophisticated investors are willing to accept steep losses to exit PE positions early. Retail investors, who often lack access to these secondary markets or the liquidity to exit early, are particularly vulnerable to being locked into declining assets with no realistic way out. 6. Rising Borrowing Costs The foundation of many PE deals is built on cheap debt. With interest rates at multi-decade highs, borrowing costs have surged, eroding profitability across PE portfolios. Companies acquired during 2020-2021 at high multiples are now facing refinancing cliffs, where new debt comes at significantly higher rates. For retail investors, this increases the risk of portfolio companies defaulting or entering distressed restructurings, outcomes that can wipe out equity holders while still rewarding debt financiers higher in the capital structure. 7. Dry Powder FOMO Private equity firms are sitting on record amounts of unallocated capital, or “dry powder.” While that may sound reassuring, it creates pressure to deploy capital quickly, often leading to questionable investment decisions and inflated deal pricing. For retail investors, this means being funneled into PE funds at the tail-end of a market cycle when managers are most desperate to deploy funds and least disciplined in underwriting. Historically, vintages raised during peak fundraising years, such as 2007 or 2021, have produced the worst returns. When you see multiple red flags flashing across a sector, it’s time to reassess. What the Average Investor Should Do As discussed in “Why Am I So Lucky,” individuals hear tales of how high-net-worth investors (the smart money) own private equity in their allocations. As shown in the chart below from Long Angle, roughly 17% of their allocations are to private equities. These reports don’t generally tell you that their allocation to “private equity” often tends to be their personal businesses. Nonetheless, individual investors frequently see this type of analysis and think they should be replicating that process. But should they? Before investing in private equity, significant differences must be considered between the vast majority of retail investors and high-net-worth individuals. The underlying risks of private equity investments can define these differences. However, with the right knowledge and proactive steps, investors can avoid the most common pitfalls and protect their long-term financial security. 1. Know What You Own Start by reviewing your retirement plan allocations, especially if you are invested in a target-date fund or managed account solution. Many of these funds now include allocations to private equity or private credit, often buried deep within the prospectus. Request a detailed holdings report if necessary. For example, some widely used TDFs from major asset managers have added “private market” sleeves that investors are unaware of, effectively exposing them to higher fees and illiquidity. 2. Prioritize Liquidity Liquidity provides optionality, especially during volatile markets or personal financial emergencies. If your retirement funds are locked up for years, you lose the ability to rebalance, take advantage of market dislocations, or fund unexpected needs. Favor investment options that allow for daily liquidity, such as low-cost index funds and ETFs. Remember, having access to your capital is a risk management tool in itself. 3. Focus on Transparency and Fees Insist on clear, net-of-fee performance reporting. Avoid products with opaque valuation methodologies or excessive fee layers. As a rule of thumb, compare fees: if a private investment costs 2-3% annually versus 0.10% for an S&P 500 index fund, it must deliver dramatically higher returns to compensate, which few consistently achieve. 4. Stay Simple, Stay Diversified Decades of evidence show that a well-diversified portfolio of simple, liquid public investments outperforms most complex alternatives after fees and taxes. Don’t be lured by “fancy” strategies with marketing sizzle but structural drawbacks. Final Thoughts: Don’t Dance Just Because the Music Is Playing Private equity may have its place in a diversified, institutional portfolio, but even then, it demands scrutiny. For the average investor, the risks are magnified by a lack of transparency, long lock-ups, and a fee structure that often benefits managers more than investors. Wall Street has a long history of selling the newest shiny object to Main Street just as the trade begins to sour. If the music stops at this private equity party, you don’t want to be the last one still dancing. When in doubt, stick to the core investing principles: transparency, liquidity, low costs, and discipline. Complex products are often designed to enrich the seller, not the buyer. Safeguard your financial future by keeping your portfolio simple, transparent, and aligned with your long-term goals. For more in-depth analysis and actionable investment strategies, visit RealInvestmentAdvice.com. Stay ahead of the markets with expert insights tailored to help you achieve your financial goals. Tyler Durden Fri, 07/25/2025 - 15:45
Mexican Beer Sales Go Flat, American Brands Fizz As Trump Tightens Border
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Mexican Beer Sales Go Flat, American Brands Fizz As Trump Tightens Border While the Biden administration was letting tens of millions of illegal aliens into the country, Mexican beer - specifically Modelo Especial - became the best-selling beer in the United States. Now, as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducts arrests amid a mass deportation push, sales of Mexican beer, including Modelo, Pacifico and Corona, are plummeting as US brands are back on the rise. In April, Constellation Brands (which owns said Mexican beers) CEO Bill Newlands said that Hispanic consumers are spending less due to their concerns over Trump's immigration policies and possible job losses in industries which have high Latino employment. In fact, during an earnings call earlier this month, Newlands specifically noted that ICE raids are making it difficult to predict consumer behavior. To wit, Constellation missed on both earnings and revenue estimates in the 2nd quarter - which said that roughly half of their beer sales come from Hispanic shoppers. Meanwhile, shares in Constellation fell over 20% just weeks before President Donald Trump took office. "The fact is, a lot of consumers in the Hispanic community are concerned right now … And what does that do? That has tended to mean that the consumer has pulled back on spending on a number of categories … As you know, Modelo is over 50% Hispanic in terms of its demographic base. So, this decline in efforts to go to restaurants, to have social fatherings, things that are very much beer occasions have softened in the more recent term," Newlands said during the April call. Right now, Walmart and other retailers have Modelo on sale for up to 30%. American Beer Gets Hoppy Meanwhile, America's oldest brewery, Yuengling - which partnered with Molson Coors in 2020 to expand to the West Coast outside of their traditional 22-state footprint, plans to expand to Michigan in August after entering Illinois earlier this year. Kaitlyn Willeford pours a Yuengling beer from the tap on Wednesday, Jan. 29, 2025, at DR McKay’s Bar & Grill in Bloomington. CLAY JACKSON, LEE ENTERPRISES Meanwhile, Michelob Ultra - owned by Anheuser-Busch, saw 34% revenue growth in Q1 2025. Earlier this month, Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe (R) signed a bill into law slashing taxes on American-made beer in his state, aimed at strengthening "the beer industry and the manufacturing sector within Missouri and across the United States." And in May, Anheuser-Busch announced a $300 million investment in manufacturing operations across the United States. This follows nearly $2 billion in investments in the company's 100 facilities across the country in order to enhance operations and technology. Tyler Durden Fri, 07/25/2025 - 13:25
Coke's Cane-Sweetened Soda Launch This Fall Could Strain US Sugar Supplies
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Coke's Cane-Sweetened Soda Launch This Fall Could Strain US Sugar Supplies President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s crackdown on the ultra-processed food industrial complex has triggered a seismic shift in the beverage world. Coca-Cola is reformulating select sodas with cane sugar, and PepsiCo's CEO has indicated similar moves. The pivot away from high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS-55), a sweetener long associated with America's obesity and metabolic health crisis, marks a major victory for the "Make America Healthy Again" movement. Bloomberg points out that the move to shift soda products via various top brands from HFCS-55 to cane sugar could strain the nation's sugar supply chain... The push means the U.S. may need to import more expensive sweetener from Mexico and Brazil — particularly if other companies follow suit. The move threatens to worsen an already stressed supply chain, exposing American companies and consumers to higher prices just as they are facing market upheaval from Trump's tariffs. U.S. raw cane sugar futures are trading at record highs, with U.S. contracts now more than double the price of global benchmarks, widening the cost gap to an all-time record. Coke plans to release the soda offering infused with cane sugar in the next several months. This could be a boon for U.S. farmers who grow the crop across Louisiana and Florida at a time when demand has been sluggish. Bloomberg expanded more about the potential of strained cane sugar supply chains... The problem is that the U.S. doesn't grow a great deal of cane, making up about 30% of overall American sugar supplies, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The rest comes from imports — about 2.2 million metric tons for the 2025-26 season — or American-grown sugar beets that perform better in colder climates. If Coke's cane-sweetened version is a success, if would likely put a dent in those U.S. supplies. The higher demand could require more imports, especially from Mexico, which has historically been the U.S.'s biggest sugar supplier, and top sugar producer Brazil. The other challenge with using healthier ingredients is the increased cost. USDA data shows that refined cane sugar costs more than 52 cents per pound in June, or about 12% more than high-fructose corn syrup. Related: White House Unveils Sweeping MAHA Changes In Nation's Food Supply Chain Trump Says Coca-Cola Agreed On Major Reformulation To Use Real Cane Sugar Pepsi Exec Floats Switch To Sugar After Trump Coca-Cola Announcement MAHA must sharpen its messaging to consumers by making one thing clear: healthier food will cost more than the garbage on store shelves today, but not nearly as much as a cancer treatment later in life. After all, what's the actual price you put on your health? Tyler Durden Fri, 07/25/2025 - 04:15
The Myth Of 'Equality': Is Europe Stuck In A Disastrous, Failing Marxist Trap?
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The Myth Of 'Equality': Is Europe Stuck In A Disastrous, Failing Marxist Trap? Authored by Drieu Godefridi via The Gatestone Institute, In a world where shifting economic forces are redrawing the global balance of power, the trajectories of the United States and the European Union over the coming decade (2025-2035) seem destined to diverge ever more sharply. By 2023, US GDP per capita had climbed to $82,770, exactly double the EU's $41,420. America's lead rested on average annual real GDP growth of 2.2% between 2010 and 2023; productivity gains of roughly 14%, and research-and-development spending equal to 3.4% of GDP. Add to that a remarkably flexible labor market, modest demographic growth (0.5% per year) and, since 2019, energy self-sufficiency. The EU tells a different story: average annual real GDP growth of barely 1.3%, a mere 7% rise in hourly productivity, a working-age population that shrinks by about one million a year, and an energy-dependence rate still hovering around 58%. "Ah, but...." retort the socialists of every political hue — and in Europe they exist in every political party — "you cite average income, not median income." Median income, the point at which 50% earn less and 50% earn more, is indeed lower than the mean in the United States. Inequality is more pronounced in the US than in Europe. Yet their reply, presented as though it settled the debate, is itself part of Europe's predicament. In Europe, inequality is generally treated as an evil, a moral abomination; therefore material equality, even if it means, as in the former Soviet Union, that no one (except senior party members) has anything, is elevated to the status of an ideal good. At 17, as first-year law student, I had the opportunity to interview André Molitor, former chief of staff to King Baudouin of Belgium. Molitor, a gracious left-wing Catholic, confided that the single thing he truly despised was inequality; his dream was for "fewer rich and fewer poor." True material equality is a myth. The "real equality" championed by communists and socialists of every stripe has simply never existed. Hand every European €100,000 today, and by tomorrow there would already be a handful of tycoons — perhaps even an Elon Musk or two — alongside those who squandered everything, with the vast majority scattered somewhere in between. Equality, as a moral value, has served largely as a pretext for socialism -- take from Peter and give to Paul -- all while funding a sprawling, parasitic apparatus of "redistribution" that provides little opportunity or incentive to succeed or to keep what one has earned. Europe's elevation of material equality may well be its most disastrous bequest to itself. With ironclad consistency, the continent advances toward greater equality — in increasing misery and squalor. The baseline projection for 2035 at current growth rates shows that if current trajectories persist — 2% annual growth in the United States versus 1% in Europe — the average American income will exceed $100,000 by 2035, while Europe's will remain around $50,000. Carriage drivers in New York's Central Park or dog-walkers in Beverly Hills will soon earn more than French physicians and German engineers — not metaphorically, but in cold cash. Even taking into account the differences in inflation and purchasing power between Europe and the US — the cost of living is lower in Europe — the transatlantic gap is immense and growing. Under alternative scenarios — a European technological renaissance, or conversely a severe geopolitical shock for the United States, the ratio rarely falls below 2:1. America's productivity growth, energy production and R&D investment remain decisive. Plainly stated: absent a political sea-change, Europe is on a path of swift decline, notwithstanding genuine strengths such as longer life expectancy. Per-capita GDP — imperfect yet inescapable — crystallizes a transatlantic chasm. Europe is becoming to the USA what Greece was to Rome: a charming open-air museum. Is it inevitable? Hauling Europe out of the mire of socialism, in all its guises, would demand two transformations so radical they verge on the unimaginable. 1. Re-creating dynamic capital There can be no "capitalism" without capital — without venture capital funds and mega investment rounds. When NVIDIA, TSMC and others invest hundreds of billions of dollars, those funds must first have been accumulated without being confiscated by the state at every turn, and their investors must believe that their pooled investment will at some point yield a worthwhile profit. Building such pools of investment private capital in Europe would entail abandoning the doctrine of material equality. Modern technological breakthroughs require vast sums no longer available among most Europeans. European savings exist, but they flow into property, life-insurance policies or — tellingly — U.S. investment markets. A shift toward private pension schemes instead of the current system of public pensions (paid from the general government budget) would at least nudge the continent in the right direction. For situations where private pensions are not an option, there still could be a government-provided safety net. 2. Dismantling the European Green Deal European energy already costs five times more than American energy. That single variable suffices to justify the exodus of European industry to markets with kinder energy markets, notably the United States. Measured against the self-inflicted energy crisis of Europe's "Green Deal," President Donald Trump's tariffs are just a small footnote. Let us nevertheless remain hopeful. History is now written at breakneck speed, and almost anything remains possible. Yet to believe that Europe will become anything more than an open-air museum while it continues to entrust its future to figures such as the weary mediocrity of its current leaders — and, above all, to the ruinous, outworn ideas that animate them — is folly. Tyler Durden Fri, 07/25/2025 - 02:00
Defending Dollar Supremacy May Be Next Phase Of US–China Trade War
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Defending Dollar Supremacy May Be Next Phase Of US–China Trade War Authored by Terri Wu via The Epoch Times, The U.S.–China trade war may be transitioning to a monetary standoff. As U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff policies kickstart a reshuffling of global supply chains and trade, Beijing is looking to another battleground: the Chinese yuan versus the U.S. dollar. Last month, Pan Gongsheng, head of China’s central bank, reiterated the regime’s interest in promoting the internationalization of the yuan, also known as the renminbi, at the Lujiazui Forum, a leading economic forum in Shanghai. Tune in to China Watch, a podcast on Chinese politics, technology, and business. The dominance of currencies, especially in the digital world, will be the next focus of the U.S.–China trade war, according to Mike Sun, a U.S.-based businessman with decades of experience advising foreign investors and traders doing business in China. He uses an alias to avoid reprisals from the Chinese regime. William Lee, chief economist at the Milken Institute, concurred. Lee told The Epoch Times that the fear of sanctions has spurred the regime to try to expand the use of the yuan in an alternative cross-border payment system. Now, China is concerned about potential sanctions before its digital currencies can gain traction and become more widely adopted, he said. The concerns that Lee mentioned are front and center for policymakers in Beijing. In a June speech in Shanghai, China’s central banker expressed concerns that the “traditional cross-border payment infrastructures can be easily politicized, weaponized, and used as unilateral sanction instruments” as the geopolitical tension escalates. Another prominent chief economist in China, Lian Ping, wrote in late May, “Financial sanctions and countermeasures will probably become a battlefield of U.S.–China competition in the next phase.” These economists are not just scholars, but a well-connected brain trust of senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials, Sun told The Epoch Times. Hence, these experts don’t make recommendations; they foreshadow and interpret the regime’s actions. Lian also warned that the United States might start imposing sanctions on a few Chinese entities, then expand the scope, eventually excluding China from the U.S. dollar-based system. As the world’s reserve currency and primary medium for financial transactions, the U.S. dollar is the linchpin of the U.S.-led global order. By exporting commodities to China and then buying electric vehicles from China, the member countries of BRICS can form an alternative trading system denominated in yuan, according to Lee. BRICS is a China- and Russia-led bloc designed to counterbalance U.S.-led Western democracies that also includes Brazil, India, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Iran. The “BRICS philosophy of dethroning the dollar” is a real and credible threat to the United States, and that’s why Trump is imposing extra tariffs on these countries, according to Lee. Heads of state and government from member, partner, and observer countries pose for a family photo during the BRICS summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on July 7, 2025. The China- and Russia-led bloc, seen as a counterweight to U.S.-aligned democracies, may play a key role in the growing currency rivalry between the Chinese yuan and the U.S. dollar. Pablo Porciuncula/AFP via Getty Images During its latest summit in Brazil, the BRICS member states issued a joint statement on July 6 criticizing tariffs without naming the United States. Shortly afterward, Trump said on Truth Social that “any Country aligning themselves with the anti-American policies of BRICS” would receive an additional 10 percent tariff. Days later, he threatened a 50 percent levy on Brazil, a founding member of BRICS, citing the ongoing trial of its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally. At a Cabinet meeting on July 8, the U.S. president said BRICS wants to “destroy the dollar so that another country can take over and be the standard.” “If we lost the world-standard dollar, that would be like losing a war, a major world war,” Trump said. “We would not be the same country any longer.” Winding Up Tariff Battles Tariffs were a “completely foreign language for most people” when the Trump administration launched global reciprocal levies, Lee said. “Now, the whole world has come to accept a minimum 10 percent tariff,” he told The Epoch Times. Lee said final tariff numbers aren’t as significant as the establishment of a new trade order. “What matters is we have a new building in place, and the new building is much more of a decentralized trading system, incentivizing capital inflow to the United States,” Lee said. “And that’s something that has been missing from the WTO.” At the beginning of Trump’s second term, the average tariff rate imposed by the United States was 3.4 percent, according to the World Trade Organization. The global trade system was characterized by low tariffs for exports to the United States, as well as significantly higher tariff rates or non-tariff trade barriers imposed by other countries. Currently, the administration has extended the deadline for tariff negotiations from July 9 to Aug. 1, with no further extensions. During the interim, baseline tariff rates remain at 10 percent. Trump has since issued tariff letters to dozens of countries, setting their rates at between 20 percent and 50 percent. Sun described this approach as a “blind box” method, meaning that the tariff rate is revealed only upon receipt of the letter. He said that in his view, such an approach is “very effective” with the “lowest cost.” Trump sends a message that he’s the decision-maker, and other countries can only provide input under his framework, according to Sun. “I think all countries will eventually agree with Trump’s framework, including China,” he told The Epoch Times. Yeh Yao-Yuan, a professor of international studies at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, said he views the trade negotiations as a prelude to a new cold war, resulting in the world being split into two camps: one led by the United States and the other by China. He noted that in the U.S.–UK trade framework agreement, the two countries agreed to enhance mutual economic security by addressing “non-market policies of third countries.” Although China is not named, it is known for protecting its state-owned enterprises with industrial policies and dumping its overcapacity into the global market. President Donald Trump, joined by (back L–R) Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, Vice President JD Vance, British Ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson, and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, speaks to reporters in the Oval Office on May 8, 2025. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images There’s little room left for tariff rate negotiations between the United States and China, the experts said in interviews with The Epoch Times. The ongoing discussions involve China trading its rare earths for U.S. chips and opening up its service industry, particularly banking and investments, to the United States. China has had a near-monopoly on rare earths for decades, mainly because of predatory practices that have driven foreign businesses out of the sector. Therefore, it has been using its leverage on these critical minerals as a trade weapon. However, the United States has made significant strides in removing this chokepoint through public and private partnerships, as well as by fast-tracking the permitting process. MP Materials, the company that owns the only active rare earth mine in the United States—located in Mountain Pass, California—announced on July 10 a $400 million investment and a $150 million loan from the Department of Defense. For 10 years, the U.S. government will also guarantee the purchase of the company’s rare-earth output at a minimum price and ensure a minimum profit margin. In effect, the public–private partnership ensures that a U.S. national champion will remain vital, regardless of what China does. The United States has a trade surplus with China on services. Last year, China’s giant trade surplus on goods of nearly $296 billion with the United States was offset by a service trade deficit of about $33 billion, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Beijing has been exploring further opening the service industry as a bargaining chip for its trade negotiations. Opening up China is a beneficial strategy to Beijing as well, according to Lian. He wrote in his article that opening up the financial market more would increase China’s “stickiness” and make it “too big to sanction.” However, according to Sun and Lee, the tariff battle will mainly focus on the currencies, as the United States has an oversized vulnerability: its nearly $37 trillion debt. Ramaco Resources plans to extract over 450 tons of rare earths from its 4,500-acre Brook Mine near Ranchester, Wyo., on July 11, 2025. China’s long-standing dominance in the sector, achieved through predatory practices, has enabled it to wield rare earths as a trade weapon. John Haughey/The Epoch Times Defending Dollar Supremacy Currently, the U.S. dollar’s status as the global reserve currency and the primary currency used in international trade allows the United States to borrow more at a lower interest rate. The U.S. debt level is so high now that the annual interest payment surpasses the nation’s defense spending. In fiscal year 2024, which ended on Sept. 30, 2024, the United States spent $882 billion on interest on its debt, compared with $874 billion on defense expenses, according to the Treasury Department. That makes the U.S. dollar’s role even more crucial because any diminishing or significant doubt of the currency could lead to the nation’s default. China holds $756 billion of U.S. Treasury bonds, according to the Department of the Treasury, which collects the data through U.S.-based brokers. Hong Kong has an additional $253 billion. Still, Sun believes that China is the top U.S. Treasury bond holder in the world—surpassing Japan’s $1.1 trillion—because of the unknown amounts that Beijing purchases through European institutions. An April report by J.P. Morgan Chase states that, contrary to common belief, “China has not reduced its holdings of U.S. Treasurys; the holdings are just more under cover,” according to a translation of the original Chinese text. So Beijing could potentially sell off U.S. Treasurys at a crucial moment when the market loses confidence in the U.S. dollar and force the interest rate to increase if no buyers can take in China’s dumping. If the reserve currency status of the U.S. dollar is shaken, it could also lead to the weakening of Washington’s borrowing power. The CCP is aware of this and has been working for years to replace the U.S. dollar with the yuan. In 2015, Beijing launched its own Cross-border Interbank Payment System, or CIPS, for transactions in Chinese yuan. Although CIPS is not comparable to the U.S. dollar-denominated global payment system—called the Clearing House Interbank Payment System, or CHIPS—in terms of scale and global reach, it’s getting bigger. A woman walks past the headquarters of the People's Bank of China in Beijing on July 9, 2024. The central bank recently warned that traditional cross-border payment systems risk being “politicized” and “weaponized” amid rising geopolitical tensions. Adek Berry/AFP via Getty Images Each month, the financial transaction volume through CIPS is approximately 700 billion yuan, nearly double the amount in 2021, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE). That scale is still trivial compared with the $1.8 trillion in daily transactions, or more than $50 trillion in monthly transactions, through CHIPS, according to its official website. And CIPS still largely relies on the U.S.-led SWIFT, or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, to send payment messages, according to the PIIE. The CCP also took notice that the digital currency world offers a new field for competition, and in 2022, China introduced its digital yuan. The current situation calls for the United States to find more non-China parties to hold U.S. debt and defend its reserve currency status in both the physical and virtual worlds, according to Sun. He said a type of cryptocurrency referred to as “stablecoins” are a “creative” response to the challenge. “Stablecoins can theoretically enable unlimited purchase of U.S. Treasurys,” he said. “The sky is the limit.” Stablecoins are digital money pegged to a fiat currency at a one-to-one ratio. The issuers guarantee holders that they can convert the money back at any time. Therefore, stablecoins can provide the decentralization and cost-effectiveness of digital money, combined with the stability of a traditional fiat currency. So far, 98 percent of stablecoins are pegged to the U.S. dollar, and 80 percent are issued outside the United States, according to the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank. Owners can bypass banks and even the unreliable currencies of their home country. For example, a coffee shop in Argentina or a small business owner in Vietnam can do business in the digital currencies directly pegged to the greenback. Last year, the transaction volume via stablecoins reached $27.6 trillion, 7.7 percent more than the combined transaction volume of Visa and Mastercard, according to crypto exchange CEX.io. Signage of the Chinese digital currency is seen near a coffee store in the New Actuation Fintech Center in Beijing on Feb. 17, 2022. Jade Gao/AFP via Getty Images Stablecoin issuers generate revenue by investing the dollars that they receive in exchange for the digital tokens, and they have already emerged as a significant holder of U.S. debt. They hold more than $120 billion in Treasury bills and are poised to hold more than $1 trillion in Treasurys by 2028, according to an April report by the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee. This means that stablecoin issuers may become the largest holders of Treasury bills, over China and Japan. Two months ago, Hong Kong passed stablecoin legislation, although it hasn’t issued its own stablecoins yet. Chinese conglomerates, such as Ant Group and JD.com, Inc., have announced that they will submit their applications to become issuers as soon as the legislation takes effect on Aug. 1, according to China’s state-run media. The U.S. Congress on July 17 passed a landmark crypto bill that establishes a regulatory framework for stablecoin issuers. The GENIUS Act, signed into law the next day, requires stablecoin issuers to back the digital tokens with either cash or U.S. Treasury bonds. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in June posted on X that “stablecoins can reinforce dollar supremacy.” By leveraging stablecoins, the U.S. dollar has extended its dominance from the physical to the virtual world and found more buyers of U.S. debt at a collective level comparable to China and Japan, according to Sun, who called the strategy “a genius move.” Tyler Durden Thu, 07/24/2025 - 23:25
India's Modi Has The Highest Approval Rating Among World Leaders, France's Macron The Lowest
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India's Modi Has The Highest Approval Rating Among World Leaders, France's Macron The Lowest Public opinion of national leaders can offer insight into the political pulse of a country. Every month, Visual Capitalist's Marcus Lu will be visualizing global polling data tracking how citizens perceive their heads of government. In this month’s edition, we compare world leader approval ratings for 24 countries as of July 2025. Data & Discussion The data for this visualization comes from Morning Consult. It tracks world leader approval ratings based on public polling data across respective countries. Ratings were collected from July 4-10, 2025, and reflect a trailing seven-day simple moving average of views among adults surveyed. 🇮🇳 Modi Maintains Dominance India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi comes out on top with a remarkable 75% approval rating. His recent re-election in 2024 reaffirmed domestic confidence, buoyed by strong economic indicators and assertive foreign policy. Only 18% of Indians disapprove of his leadership, reflecting sustained popularity over a decade in power (Modi’s premiership began on May 26, 2014). Polarizing Leaders In contrast, U.S. President Donald Trump holds 44% approval, with a 50% disapproval rate. Since returning to office in 2024, he has faced criticism over economic volatility and divisive policy shifts. Even worse off is French President Emmanuel Macron, posting one of the lowest ratings at 18% approval and 74% disapproval. This is likely tied to ongoing labor unrest and unpopular pension reforms. The Czech Republic’s Prime Minister, Petr Fiala, shares similar ratings as Macron. In June, his government survived a no-confidence vote triggered by a bitcoin donation scandal which saw Justice Minister Pavel Blažek resign. If you enjoyed today’s post, check out What the World Thinks About Israel in 2025 on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist. Tyler Durden Thu, 07/24/2025 - 23:00
Transparency
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Transparency By Molly Schwartz, Cross-Asset Macro Strategist at Rabobank Yesterday, G-20 finance ministers congregated in South Africa, though several delegates were noticeably absent, like Scott Bessent from the US. Bessent, of course, wasn’t playing hooky alone, as other truants included counterparts from Argentina, Australia, and France. That said, Bessent’s empty seat garnered special attention as the United States is not only the world’s largest economy, but is the source of global trade turmoil as Trump issues trade letters left and right. Given the absence of communique from the G20 (at the time of writing), markets have turned their attention elsewhere, like economic data. Retail sales data out of the US registered an increase in pace from 0.1% m/m to 0.6% m/m, which was accompanied by stable jobless claims. The markets were pretty resistant to this data, closing the day near the opens with some minimal choppiness around the time the data were released. It should be noted that retail sales are published in terms of value, not volume. That means that this print was impacted by the recent pick up in US inflation, but signals some resilience in the American consumer. In an environment clouded by uncertainty and obfuscation, we can look to none other than US President Trump as a source of transparency. Indeed, yesterday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said that “the President has been very transparent about his displeasure with both the policies and the management of the Fed.” While tactful, it may also be the understatement of the century. After the retail sales data release, Trump publicly pushed for rate cuts once again truthing “’Too Late:’ Great numbers just out. LOWER THE RATE!!! DJT.” The rates market was unconvinced by Trump’s plea, with investors still positioned for around 1.7 cuts by year-end, the same positioning as before the data were released. But while rates were unimpressed, equities marked new gains as the S&P 500 continued to climb upwards, setting new all time highs, breaking through $6,300. Meanwhile, USD also appeared to strengthen as the best performing G10 currency on a one-day basis, and maintaining its status as the best performing G10 currency month-to-date. On the other end of the spectrum, AUD made for a pitiful performance, depreciating 0.63% against USD after the Australian unemployment rate rose to 4.3% in June–the highest rate since November 2021. A cut at the August 12 meeting had already been largely priced in by the market, but the recent labor data drove investors to price in around 45 more bp worth of cuts by 2025 year-end. Elsewhere, yesterday was CPI day, with releases hot off the press in the Eurozone. Eurozone aggregate CPI inflation final June estimates printed at a steady 2.0% y/y, while prices increased at a rate of 0.3% m/m. As these were final estimates, markets had already priced in these CPI data and neither European rates nor EUR saw much action. Tyler Durden Fri, 07/18/2025 - 12:10
UMich Sentiment Surges Higher As Inflation Expectations Plunge
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UMich Sentiment Surges Higher As Inflation Expectations Plunge Following June's bounce, preliminary July data from UMich's Sentiment survey was expected to continue rebounding... and it did. The headline sentiment index rose from 60.7 to 61.8 (above the 61.5 exp) with a big bounce in Current Conditions (from 64.8 to 66.8) and a small rise in future expectations from 58.1 to 58.6. All better than expected and all at their highest level since February... Source: Bloomberg The spread between Republican and Democrat sentiment is back at record wides... Source: Bloomberg Most notably, inflation expectations tumbled from 5.0% to 4.4% (1Y) and from 4.0% to 3.6% (5-10Y)... Source: Bloomberg With Democrats and Independents finally realizing that their insane expectations for inflation were just that... Source: Bloomberg And the same picture emerges on the longer-term expectations. Source: Bloomberg Well, this puts more pressure back on Powell as 'inflation expectations' seem like they are back under control. Tyler Durden Fri, 07/18/2025 - 10:10
Renter Nation Returns: Surge In Multi-Family Unit Starts & Permits Saves US Housing Market
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Renter Nation Returns: Surge In Multi-Family Unit Starts & Permits Saves US Housing Market Despite homebuilder confidence in the toilet (and Pulte's daily calls alongside Trump for lower rates), US Housing Starts and Permits surprised to the upside in June. Housing Starts jumped 4.6% MoM (+3.5% MoM exp), rebounding from May's 9.7% MoM tumble. Building Permits rose 0.2% MoM (-0.5% MoM exp), also rebounding from May's 2.0% MoM decline. Source: Bloomberg Although in context, this lifts the Starts and Permits SAAR just barely off the lowest levels since the COVID lockdowns... Source: Bloomberg A surge in Multi-family unit starts and permits saved the month, while single-family home starts and permits were not pretty... Source: Bloomberg Will lower Fed Fund rates do anything to lower mortgage rates? Or will the implied curve steepening further crush affordability? Dear Mr. Trump, be careful what you wish for. Tyler Durden Fri, 07/18/2025 - 08:40
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
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What Could Possibly Go Wrong? New York Democrats—and the broader party in desperate need of a course correction—continue to double, triple, and even quadruple down on all things woke. They've now taken it a step further by openly cheerleading socialism and Marxism. This increasingly radical un-American direction, backed by a network of dark money-funded NGOs, has even drawn criticism from prominent figures like JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who recently described Democrats as "idiots ... with big hearts and little brains." Democrats "overdid DEI," Dimon said last week, adding, "I have a lot of friends who are Democrats, and they're idiots." Dimon isn't wrong—in fact, he's spot on. He sees clearly that the party has veered further down a toxic, increasingly un-American path at a time when the Overton Window shifted back toward the center-right after a decade of woke. Yet Democrats seem oblivious to this realignment of what is now socially acceptable in the eyes of the American people. Meanwhile, Democrats are testing the waters with socialist Bernie Sanders and Marxist New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, posing for a staged photo op. "The Oligarchs are prepared to undermine democracy & spend tens of millions to buy the election for his opponents," Sanders' social media team wrote on X, adding, "We will not allow that to happen. Stand with Zohran." Had a great meeting with @ZohranKMamdani and am deeply impressed by the grassroots campaign he is running. The Oligarchs are prepared to undermine democracy & spend tens of millions to buy the election for his opponents. We will not allow that to happen. Stand with Zohran. pic.twitter.com/wXTjs8AOJd — Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) July 16, 2025 However, Democrats remain trapped in the elitist mindset that anyone who didn't attend a liberal arts college is somehow unintelligent. Their supposed war on billionaires is pure political theater, especially given how deeply the party is supported by leftist billionaires through a massive web of dark money-funded NGOs and law firms. For instance, a New York Post's deep dive found that Zohran... The graph. 🚨 EXPOSED: Working Families Party ran a $2+ million elite-funded coordination scheme in NYC's 2025 primary while branding it as a "grassroots revolution" 🌱 - systematically violating campaign finance disclosure rules to hide the truth from voters. WFP had a documented playbook… pic.twitter.com/VpADYtl5my — Sam E. Antar (@SamAntar) July 16, 2025 And remember, earlier this year, when Bernie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were flying around the nation in private jets? Here's what X users are saying: Two Democrat Socialists walk into a bar. The bartender asks them what they are drinking. They each order the most expensive drink. When the bartender asks for the money for their drinks, they tell the bartender to charge it to everyone else in the bar. — General™️ (@TheGeneral_0) July 16, 2025 They keep saying “grassroots” which means he’s 100% being backed by billionaire oligarchs. 😂 — Leeleeliberty (@Leeleeliberty11) July 16, 2025 Yes. Stop Oligarchs like Soros from backing communist candidates! — Xi Van Fleet (@XVanFleet) July 16, 2025 All the Marxist-Leninist are lining up, sprinkled with some radical Islamists, what could possibly go wrong? https://t.co/JTtVSeFu1Q — Tony Seruga (@TonySeruga) July 16, 2025 . . . Tyler Durden Fri, 07/18/2025 - 06:55
The EU Depends On China & Russia For Rare Earths
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The EU Depends On China & Russia For Rare Earths Almost half of the European Union’s imports of rare earths came from China last year, according to the latest data from the European Union's statistical office (Eurostat). As Statista's Anna Fleck shows in the chart below, Russia followed in second place with a share of around 29 percent, while Malaysia was in third at around 20 percent. You will find more infographics at Statista In order to reduce dependence on China and other individual countries, the EU passed the Critical Raw Materials Act 2024. The aim is to extract 10 percent of rare earths in the EU itself and cover 15 percent of demand from recycling. In addition, no single third country is to cover more than 65 percent of demand. The 17 metals of the so-called rare earths are used in many of today's key technologies. Terbium is essential for the production of permanent magnets, important for wind turbine generators and electric vehicle motors. The rare earths cerium and lanthanum are also needed in the context of electromobility, for example, as components of catalytic converters as well as in hybrid vehicles’ batteries. Meanwhile, europium and yttrium are essential components of LED lamps and smartphone displays. The rarity of these elements is based on the fact that they occur in the form of oxides in a variety of rocks, but their concentrated occurrence in commercially exploitable deposits is rather rare. Tyler Durden Fri, 07/18/2025 - 05:45
Israeli Leaders Call For Syrian President's Assassination
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Israeli Leaders Call For Syrian President's Assassination Hardline and outspoken Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir has called for Israel to "eliminate" Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, following the latest escalation in sectarian violence this week. "The shocking images from Syria prove one thing: once a jihadist, always a jihadist," Ben Gvir said in a video statement on Wednesday. "Anyone who murders, shaves mustaches, humiliates, and rapes cannot be negotiated with, and the only thing that can be done is to eliminate al-Julani," he added, referring to the Syrian leader's previous nom de guerre, Mohammad al-Jolani. Times of Israel/Flash90 "I love the Druze citizens in the State of Israel, and I embrace them warmly, and I tell them: we must cut off the head of the snake," Ben Gvir added, essentially calling for Sharaa's assassination. Israel has been using the plight of the persecuted Druze minority in southern Syria as a pretext for expanding its military presence far beyond the occupied Golan Heights. Critics have accused Israeli leaders of 'divide-and-conquer' tactics, and have even allowed thousands of Druze who lived under occupied areas (in Israel) to breach the Golan border fence and flood back into Syria. The Syrian regime of Sharaa and his fanatical Sunni fighters of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham have stood accused of conducting entho-religious genocide, targeting Druze, Christians, and Alawites. This has been happening especially in the south this week. Israel on Wednesday for the first time ever targeted the sprawling Syrian Defense Ministry building with airstrikes, destroying it. This is not something that had been done throughout the entirety of the Assad family's rule. Meanwhile, Israel's Minister for Diaspora Affairs Amichai Chikli has joined Ben Gvir in calling for the overthrow of Sharaa. Chikli has called for his assassination, branding him a "terrorist" and a "brutal murderer." Chikli defended the stepped up Israeli attacks on Damascus, drawing comparisons between Sharaa’s government and Palestinian militant groups. "If it looks like Hamas, talks like Hamas, and acts like Hamas—then it is Hamas," he stated. Rather than the likes of Ben Gvir suddenly becoming concerned over human rights, something else is definitely going on here... Despite the official pretext of “protecting Druze minorities,” the reality is strategic absorption. Israel is executing the Yinon Plan’s second phase: not just fragmentation, but territorial annexation via sectarian alliance. The Israeli Air Force’s strikes on Damascus command… pic.twitter.com/RXWxcavtaI — Thomas Keith (@iwasnevrhere_) July 16, 2025 But curiously, these Israeli officials were silent when throughout the Syrian proxy war which targeted Assad, the Netanyahu government was openly helping hardline jihadists, including hosting wounded FSA and Nusrah Front (AQ) fighters in Israeli hospitals. Tyler Durden Fri, 07/18/2025 - 04:15
'Unacceptable': Von der Leyen's €2 Trillion EU Budget Blasted By Germany Amid Botched Rollout
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'Unacceptable': Von der Leyen's €2 Trillion EU Budget Blasted By Germany Amid Botched Rollout In a huge embarrassment for EU leadership, the day following European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen having presented an ambitious some 2 trillion euro, seven-year EU budget in Brussels, the government of Germany has made clear its firm rejection, calling the plan "unacceptable". "A comprehensive increase in the EU budget is unacceptable at a time when all member states are making considerable efforts to consolidate their national budgets," said Stefan Kornelius, spokesperson for Chancellor Friedrich Merz's government in Berlin late Wednesday. "We will therefore not be able to accept the Commission's proposal." The Commission proposed a central EU budget of €1.816 trillion (excluding COVID-19 borrowing repayments), for the period from 2028 to 2034, which marks a massive increase over the current running budget which was formalized in 2021. "Germany, as the EU’s biggest contributor, would be on the hook for about a quarter of that spending," Bloomberg underscores. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, via AP Von der Leyen hailed that this marks "a budget for a new era that reflects Europe’s ambitions" - and further she described "the most ambitious EU budget ever: more strategic, flexible, and transparent. We are investing more in our independence and in our capacity to respond," according to the statement. The European Commission has proposed three new taxes, specifically on electronic waste, tobacco products, and high-revenue companies - in an effort repay the EU’s post-Covid debt, which would require an estimated €25-€30 billion annually. "We do not support the additional corporate taxation put forward by the Commission," the German Chancellor's spokesperson continued from Berlin. Instead, Berlin is calling for the bloc to stick to the Commission’s existing reform agenda and maintaining a focus on strategic priorities within the EU budget. "This direction is the right one to strengthen Europe for the future," he added. German conservative leader Merz has all along been consistent on this. "We need to realign the priorities within the EU budget," Merz said in late June. “New responsibilities should not automatically lead to more spending… and that’s the real challenge we now face.” FT describes a horribly botched rollout, with members fed up with von der Leyen's secretive pressure tactics: Ursula von der Leyen’s plan for the EU’s biggest ever budget has sparked uproar inside the European Commission, with colleagues warning the president’s ultra-centralized style has already compromised the €2tn cash call. Prepared for months and largely kept secret from von der Leyen’s team of commissioners, the draft 2028-2034 budget plan prompted rare internal pushback that forced significant concessions in the hours before publication. The revolt has underscored the long-bubbling resentment at her “rubber stamp” approach towards the commission after years of walled-off decision-making that critics say has made Brussels inflexible and prone to mis-steps. “I have never seen it this bad,” said one senior diplomat from an EU member state who has worked on the past three budget negotiations. “Nobody knew what they were getting or what they were paying until the last minute.” As expected, the earliest pushback on Wednesday came from Hungary, with Prime Minister Viktor Orban stating on X, "A shocking new EU budget leak reveals a dangerous gamble: Ukraine would get a massive funding boost, while European farmers lose out. This plan risks sidelining rural Europe and threatening families across the continent. Brussels must not abandon Europe’s farmers to bankroll Ukraine." Countries like Hungary, as well as Slovakia and Poland - or other conservative/nationalist leaning populations, won't be comfortable with more 'rule of law' strings attached to funding as well: Another headline-making novelty in von der Leyen's proposal is her strong focus on the rule of law. Her first mandate saw her executive freeze billions in EU funds for Hungary and Poland over their democratic backsliding and continued legal breaches. The freezing, however, only covered a share of the allocated funds to the wayward countries, fuelling criticism that the Commission was carelessly allowing taxpayers' money to flow despite violations of EU law and fundamental rights. The disputes left a mark on von der Leyen: she now intends to make all funds, from farming subsidies to social policy, conditional on the respect for the rule of law. "The rule of law is a must for all funding from the EU budget," she said on Wednesday. "We will ensure responsible spending and full accountability, with very strong safeguards, and the right incentives. This serves the citizens." So clearly, there are plenty of roadblocks possible, given new proposal must be approved unanimously by all 27 EU member states and passed by the European Parliament in negotiations which would likely unfold over two years. The budget for 2028-2034 must be approved by the end of 2027- and a lot can happen between now and then, particularly regarding the Russia-Ukraine war. The European Commission plans to include a whopping €100 billion in funding for Ukraine as part of this new budget. Certainly President Trump has voiced wanting to see peace break out long before then, but these efforts haven't amounted to anything so far. Hungary and Slovakia will have much to say too. Tyler Durden Fri, 07/18/2025 - 02:45
Why Iran Fears A Syria-Azerbaijan Axis
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Why Iran Fears A Syria-Azerbaijan Axis Authored by RFE/RL staff via OilPrice.com, Syria and Azerbaijan pledged to deepen ties, including a landmark Azerbaijani gas export deal via Turkey. Iranian media warned of a potential redeployment of Syrian fighters into the Caucasus, heightening regional tensions. Reports of Israeli-Syrian contacts in Baku added to Tehran’s suspicion of an anti-Iran alignment involving Azerbaijan, Turkey, and Israel. Syrian interim President Ahmad al-Sharaa’s visit to Baku last weekend highlighted a dramatic shift in regional alliances, prompting a mix of concern, suspicion, and strategic recalculation across Iranian media. Official statements following Sharaa’s meeting with President Ilham Aliyev emphasized a new era in Syrian-Azerbaijani relations. Both leaders acknowledged past stagnation, directly blaming ousted President Bashar al-Assad’s “unfriendly policy” and pledged to restore and deepen cooperation. Notably, the visit yielded a deal to export Azerbaijani gas to Syria via Turkey, with officials hailing the agreement as a needed remedy for Syria’s chronic energy crisis. Meanwhile, various outlets, including Israeli media, claimed that Syrian and Israeli officials met on the sidelines of the trip. It’s unclear whether Sharaa attended the meeting, but the mere occurrence of such a meeting -- facilitated by Azerbaijan, Israel’s key ally in the region -- has further fueled concerns in Tehran. Sharaa, a former insurgent known under the nom de guerre Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, joined forces with Turkish-backed rebels and, in December 2024, led his Hayat Tahrir al?Sham (HTS) faction in a lightning offensive that ultimately toppled the Iran? and Russia?backed Assad government. Security Challenges A shared concern in Iranian media is what is seen as a shifting militant footprint from the Syrian battlefield to the Caucasus -- right on Iran’s doorstep. Arman-e Melli, a pro-reform newspaper, argued that one aspect of the budding relationship between Damascus and Baku will involve the transfer of Syria-based fighters through Turkey into bases in Azerbaijan -- a potential development it described as a “mission” for Sharaa. It is speculated that their presence is meant to destabilize areas along the borders of Iran and Russia and to carry out operations targeting the broader axis of China, Russia, and Iran. The conservative newspaper Farhikhtegan struck a similar tone, arguing that Sharaa sees the redeployment of his fighters to meet a US demand to expel foreign fighters from Syria. Under such a plan, the paper said, Azerbaijan would emerge as a strategic hub; either a staging ground for further infiltration into the Caucasus and Russia or a site for settlement in areas such as Karabakh. A ‘Message’ To Iran Israel’s i24NEWS network, citing an unnamed Syrian source, claimed that Israel and the United States had made a decision for Baku to host a meeting between Israeli and Syrian officials to “send a message to Iran.” Referencing the report, Iran’s state broadcaster-run Jam-e Jam newspaper charged that given Baku’s track record of alleged involvement in anti-Iranian operations over the years, and suspicions about its cooperation with Israel during last month’s war, this could well be taken as “clear evidence” that some neighboring countries are working with Israel against Iran. Jam-e Jam specifically named Azerbaijan and its allies, Turkey and Israel, as the countries involved in “shaping new dynamics that work against Iran’s interests.” The paper argued that ultimately Iran will need to safeguard its national interests with both diplomatic and security savvy, including strengthening ties with neighbors such as Armenia and Russia, and taking a firm stand against “Baku’s provocations.” Tehran has watched with growing concern as Azerbaijan forges ever?closer links with Israel. In recent years, the partnership has significantly expanded, highlighted by deepening defense collaboration and Baku’s decision to open an embassy in Tel Aviv in 2023 -- developments that have only heightened Iranian mistrust. Iran’s president, Masud Pezeshkian, last month pressed Aliyev to “investigate and verify” reports that Israeli drones, including micro-drones, had crossed into Iranian airspace through Azerbaijani territory during the 12-day war that ended in a ceasefire on June 24. Aliyev rejected the allegations, affirming that his government would never permit Azerbaijani territory to be used against Iran. Tyler Durden Thu, 07/17/2025 - 23:25
At Sotheby's Auction, $30 Million Dinosaur Skeleton Stuns As Martian Meteorite Sets Record
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At Sotheby's Auction, $30 Million Dinosaur Skeleton Stuns As Martian Meteorite Sets Record A 54-pound fragment of Mars, dislodged by a cosmic collision and hurled 140 million miles to Earth, became the most valuable meteorite ever sold at auction on Wednesday. But it was a rare young dinosaur skeleton that captured the spotlight - fetching more than $30 million in a frenzied bidding battle. A Martian meteorite, weighing 54.388 pounds, said to be the largest piece of Mars on Earth, is displayed at Sotheby's in New York City on July 9, 2025. Richard Drew/AP Photo The meteorite, named NWA 16788, sold for $5.3 million after fees at Sotheby’s auction of rare geological and archaeological objects. Described by Sotheby’s as the largest piece of Mars ever found on Earth, the rock was discovered in November 2023 by a meteorite hunter scouring the Sahara Desert in Niger. Pre-sale estimates had placed its value between $2 million and $4 million. “This Martian meteorite is the largest piece of Mars we have ever found by a long shot,” said Cassandra Hatton, Sotheby’s vice chairman for science and natural history, ahead of the auction. Measuring nearly 15 inches long, the meteorite accounts for nearly 7 percent of all known Martian material on Earth. But while bidding for the Martian rock unfolded in careful increments - often coaxed along by the auctioneer - the atmosphere shifted when a juvenile Ceratosaurus nasicornis skeleton took center stage. Only four Ceratosaurus skeletons are known to exist, according to Sotheby’s, and this specimen—the only juvenile among them—was fiercely contested. After opening at $6 million, the bidding surged in $500,000 and then $1 million increments, drawing gasps from the audience as six bidders drove the price to $26 million before fees. A mounted Juvenile Ceratosaurus skeleton, of the Late Jurassic, Kimmeridgian Stage, is displayed at Sotheby's in New York City on July 9, 2025. Richard Drew/AP Photo The official sale price, with premiums included, came to $30.5 million, making it the third-most expensive dinosaur skeleton ever sold at auction. The buyer, whose identity was not disclosed, plans to loan the skeleton to a public institution. Assembled from 140 fossilized bones unearthed in 1996 near Laramie, Wyoming, the juvenile Ceratosaurus stands more than six feet tall and stretches nearly 11 feet long. Its lineage dates back some 150 million years to the late Jurassic period. For comparison, adult Ceratosaurus specimens could grow up to 25 feet long—smaller than their more famous Tyrannosaurus rex cousins, which reached lengths of 40 feet. The skeleton’s dramatic sale reflects a growing appetite among private collectors and institutions for rare paleontological specimens. Last year, Sotheby’s sold a Stegosaurus skeleton nicknamed “Apex” for a record-setting $44.6 million. By contrast, the Martian meteorite’s record-breaking result unfolded with less spectacle. Two pre-auction offers, $1.9 million and $2 million, set the stage for a steady sequence of modest live bids. Final bidding stalled at $4.3 million, before fees lifted the total. Scientific analysis confirmed that NWA 16788 is an “olivine-microgabbroic shergottite,” a type of volcanic rock formed from slowly cooling magma beneath Mars’s surface. Testing by a specialized lab matched its chemical composition to Martian samples first analyzed by NASA’s Viking landers in the 1970s. The meteorite’s pitted glassy exterior - a result of superheating during atmospheric entry - offered the first clue that it was not, as Hatton said, “just some big rock on the ground.” Both the meteorite and the dinosaur skeleton now stand as trophies of scientific and natural history, as well as reminders of the market’s growing fascination with relics from Earth’s past—and Mars’s distant terrain. Tyler Durden Thu, 07/17/2025 - 23:00
NATO Top Commander: Patriots Must Move From European Allies To Kyiv 'As Quickly As Possible'
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NATO Top Commander: Patriots Must Move From European Allies To Kyiv 'As Quickly As Possible' NATO's top military commander, US Air Force Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, announced Thursday that efforts are underway to expedite the delivery of additional Patriot air defense systems to Ukraine, amid nightly waves of drone and missile attacks which are regularly in the hundreds. "We’re working closely with the Germans on transferring the Patriots," Grynkewich said during a major defense conference in Wiesbaden, Germany happening this week. "The directive I’ve received is to act as swiftly as possible." Grynkewich emphasized that timing and logistics are key concerns in getting the systems delivered to Ukraine. "As Secretary of State Marco Rubio pointed out, existing systems in Europe can be deployed faster than those coming off production lines," he explained. "Those new units can then replace the ones sent to Ukraine." Source: Stars and Stripes Last year controversy was unleashed among European allies when NATO command leaned hard on countries like Spain and Greece to give up their Patriot systems for the cause of Ukraine - and Greece immediately balked, given it sees itself as under constant threat from Turkey. Grynkewich did admit that it's still unclear how many Patriot batteries can be made available. "There’s more to come -we’re moving as fast as we can," the commander added. President Donald Trump has lately expressed disgust at the record numbers of suicide drones striking Ukrainian cities. While he has not approved long-range offensive weapons for Kiev, he has indicated readiness to ramp up anti-air defense systems. On Tuesday, Trump did confirm that some Patriots sourced from Germany were already en route to Ukraine. Following a meeting with US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth earlier in the week, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius signaled that a final decision on sending two additional US Patriot systems to Ukraine could be reached within days or weeks. Earlier in the conflict Berlin had already supplied three of its Patriot batteries to the Ukrainians. The Raytheon-made system is seen by Ukraine's military as the most vital system in its arsenal to protect against ongoing Russian aerial attacks. In another part of Grynkewich speech, he highlighted the possibility of a joint China-Russia attack meant to bog down European forces, as China takes Taiwan: The U.S.-led NATO alliance must prepare for the possibility that Russia and China could launch wars in Europe and the Pacific simultaneously, with 2027 being a potential flashpoint year, the top American commander in Europe said Thursday. “We’re going to need every bit of kit and equipment and munitions that we can in order to beat that,” Grynkewich said. If China’s President Xi Jinping makes a move on Taiwan, he likely would coordinate such an attack with Russian President Vladimir Putin, opening the possibility of a global conflict, he said. “That, to me, means that both of these things could happen together,” said Grynkewich, who also serves as NATO supreme allied commander. But there's an obvious contradiction present in a speech where he's on the one hand saying the West needs to get Ukraine all the defensive systems it needs as fast as possible, and on the other the West must be prepared for conflict with both China and Russia within a few short years. Despite the glaring policy contradictions, in the end, Raytheon and the major defense contractors will win again. Tyler Durden Thu, 07/17/2025 - 22:10
A Short History Of The Emoji
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A Short History Of The Emoji Emojis have become a staple of electronic communication since their inception in the 1990s and people of all ages and on all continents use them. While their number keeps on growing every year due to new releases by the Unicode Consortium, the pictograms are increasingly vying for users’ attention as other forms of visual communication – think gifs, stickers and avatars – are experiencing their heyday. With myriads of emojis released over the previous years, new batches have become somewhat smaller. As Statista's Katharina Buchholz reports, a recently suggested update that would grow the number of emojis to almost 4,000 next year contains 164 additional pictograms, but only nine completely new ones. While 2022 had seen the release of 112 new emojis, that number was just 31 in 2023. The figure rose again to 118 in 2024 due to emojis that allow users to pick different skin colors or genders (which are counted individually), before falling to an all-time low of eight in 2025. The number of non-customizable emojis has meanwhile decreased with almost every release. You will find more infographics at Statista New 2025 icons included the beetroot, the shovel and the flag of British Channel Island Sark – showing how emoji makers are seemingly running out of ideas (despite taking submissions from the public). The Unicode Consortium has recommended the orca, the yeti, the landslide and the ballet dancer, among others, for release in 2026, but the final decision is still outstanding. What emojis appear on people’s phones and on their social media platforms is not arbitrary but has been coordinated by the Unicode Consortium since 1995, when the first 76 pictograms were adapted by the U.S. nonprofit. The Consortium has been overseeing the character inventory of electronic text processing since 1991 and sets a standard for symbols, characters in different scripts and – last but not least – emojis, which are encoded uniformly across different platforms even though illustration styles may vary between providers. Despite the first Unicode listings predating them, a 1999 set of 176 simple pictograms invented by interface designer Shigetaka Kurita for a Japanese phone operator is considered to be the precursor of modern-day emojis. The concept gained popularity in Japan and by 2010, Unicode rolled out a massive release of more than 1,000 emojis to get with the burgeoning trend - the rest is history. Different skin colors have been available for emojis since 2015. The first regional flags came to the service in 2017. The first same-sex couples have been available since the major emoji release of 2010, but more versions were added in 2015. The 2017 release also included the rollout of the first non-binary options, while interracial couples first appeared in 2019. Tyler Durden Thu, 07/17/2025 - 18:10
US Spot Ether ETFs Post New Record Inflow As Altcoins Pump
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US Spot Ether ETFs Post New Record Inflow As Altcoins Pump Authored by Tarang Khaitan via CoinTelegraph.com, US spot Ether exchange-traded funds recorded an inflow of $726.6 million on Wednesday as altcoins rallied. BlackRock's ETHA also saw a daily inflow record, contributing $499 million to the day’s results, while Fidelity’s FETH fund saw the second highest net inflow of $113 million, according to Farside Investors. US spot Ether ETFs now collectively hold more than 5 million ETH, accounting for more than 4% of the circulating supply, according to Trader T. Spot Ether ETFs witnessed net inflows of almost $727 million on Wednesday. Wednesday’s inflow beats the prior daily net inflow record of $428 million on Dec. 5, 2024, by almost 70%, according to Farside Investors. In the past 24 hours, $6.74 million worth of ETH was issued by the network, while US spot Ether ETFs bought nearly 107 times the issuance on Wednesday, according to Ultra Sound Money. Altcoins rally over 24 hours ETH is trading at almost $3,346, up 7.2% in the past 24 hours, and has witnessed a 30% rally in the past 14 days, according to CoinGecko. Crypto analyst Matthew Hyland has stated that Bitcoin dominance has likely peaked if ETH continues its rally. On Saturday, Hyland said that altcoins will likely go up even higher if the Bitcoin dominance falls to 45%. Currently, Bitcoin’s market dominance stands at 61%. In the past 24 hours, XRP, BNB, Solana, Dogecoin, Tron, and Cardano have gone up by 7.6%, 3.4%, 5.2%, 6.9%, 3.2%, and 3.5%, respectively, whereas BTC has climbed just 0.7%. Corporations pile into ETH Corporate treasuries holding ETH now exceed $5.33 billion, accounting for nearly 1.33% of ETH’s circulating supply, according to Strategic ETH Reserve. Last month, corporations added over $1.6 billion in Ether alone, Cointelegraph reported. One of the biggest buyers has been SharpLink Gaming, which bought another $68 million in ETH over the past 24 hours. The firm has acquired $343 million worth of ETH in the past eight days, according to Lookonchain. ETH is significantly outperforming BTC in recent weeks Meanwhile, World Liberty Financial — backed by US President Donald Trump — purchased an additional $5 million worth of ETH at $3,266, above its average acquisition price between November 2024 and March 2025. BitMine Immersion Technologies, chaired by Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, announced that it now holds more than half a billion dollars worth of ETH in its treasury. Tyler Durden Thu, 07/17/2025 - 14:45
Yield Curve Control? Why Not...
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Yield Curve Control? Why Not... By Peter Tchir of Academy Securities There is a lot of chatter surrounding the Federal Reserve. The FOMC, etc. What the President will or will not do. What can be “successfully” done or not. Will Powell be fired? Today, Kevin Warsh is floating the idea of better aligning the Fed and Treasury, as has been the case in the past (so I’m told). Warsh: "we need another Treasury-Fed accord" The last time we had such an accord (in 1951), there was Yield Curve Control in the US. Clear what's coming. — zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 17, 2025 Most of the analysis about what may happen tends to fall along the lines of: Probably cannot “fire” Powell anyways. Even if Powell is “fired” it is a committee and the committee won’t do anything drastic. The front end might rally a bit, but “we” will lose control over the long end. Why not think more outside the box? There are a few things we know: The President thinks rates are too high. The President (and Bessent) are focused on the 10-year and believe that is also too high. The President has no problem (at least on tariffs) dictating specific numbers. Why would this administration only do something halfway? If you are going to do something radical – why not go all the way? Cut interest rates – by ensuring the Chair and Committee are on board with it. I cannot say that I’ve given any thought to how to reset the committee, but I’d be surprised if that was more difficult than making changes at the top of the house? And there are people on the committee who already have more rate cuts in their “dots” than is priced in. It may also be safe to presume that if the Chair was dovish, some people might move their dots, as a cut here or there is already probably too precise for all the guesswork involved. Align the Fed and Treasury. Seems strange, but is it really that wild? If rates out the curve don’t perform as expected (move significantly lower in response rate cuts) then why not just “set the curve”? The Fed has done QE (bought treasuries). The Fed has done Operation Twist (bought/sold treasuries to influence the shape of the curve). It isn’t the first time since the GFC that we’ve chatted about the potential for yield curve control: if the Fed is going to set rates in a world where longer term rates are likely more important than short term rates, why not set those too? Who knows if anything will happen. But presumably, by May of next year at the latest (and that seems like a lifetime away) we will see changes in how the Fed behaves. I’m not arguing against Fed independence and the dual mandate, etc., but you can see the appeal of going in a different direction. Set yields across the curve. Issue debt to take advantage of these yields. Save “trillions” in interest rate expense. There is no easier way to lower projected annual deficits than by reducing costs. That would actually help lower yields too. If long end treasury yields cannot bear the brunt of potential reckless Fed policy (because of yield curve control) then the dollar will likely be hit hard. Yeah, there is always “strong dollar” rhetoric, but imagine a world with higher tariffs AND a cheaper dollar? Imports look way more expensive and the U.S. exports start to look a lot cheaper. A materially weaker dollar may be viewed as a “feature” not a “bug” if your primary goal is more manufacturing in the U.S. 1985: Plaza Accord 2025: Powell fired — zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 16, 2025 Again, no idea how this will play out, but expecting only one “radical” move seems a little “naïve”? If you are going to reshape something (like monetary policy) why not reshape it all the way? In any case, maybe we should be spending less time thinking about “how much steeper will the yield curve go” if something happens to the Fed, to what would you do to ensure long end yields don’t rise? Just thinking out loud, but if we are going to get “radical” why wouldn’t we get really radical? Tyler Durden Thu, 07/17/2025 - 13:45
Trump Says Coca-Cola Agreed On Major Reformulation To Use Real Cane Sugar
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Trump Says Coca-Cola Agreed On Major Reformulation To Use Real Cane Sugar Just days after the White House released a list of massive corporate changes across parts of the processed foods industrial complex—including the removal of toxic synthetic dyes, seed oils, and dozens of harmful additives—President Trump posted on Truth Social that Coca-Cola will begin reformulating its U.S. products to use real cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. "I have been speaking to Coca-Cola about using REAL Cane Sugar in Coke in the United States, and they have agreed to do so," President Trump wrote in the post. He added, "I'd like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola. This will be a very good move by them — You'll see. It's just better!" Reuters cited a Coca-Cola spokesperson who said the Atlanta-based company will publish new offerings soon and that it appreciates the president's enthusiasm for its product. The current Coke formulation in the U.S. consists of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS-55) as its sweetener, carbonated water, caramel coloring, phosphoric acid, caffeine, and other ingredients. HFCS consumption has been linked to obesity, Type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. Cane sugar, on the other hand, has a slightly lower glycemic index. Still consume in moderation. While Coca-Cola had been using HFCS-55 since the 1980s in the U.S., by 2009, virtually all U.S. Coke products used HFCS-55 instead of cane sugar. This was primarily a cost-saving measure due to corn subsidies and sugar tariffs; however, it has also contributed to America's obesity crisis. According to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Alvin Tai, a reformulation of U.S. coke products could lift domestic sugar consumption by nearly 4.5%.... Here's more from Tai: U.S. sugar consumption could rise about 4.4% from the usual amount of around 11 million metric tons annually if Coca-Cola implements President Donald Trump's advice to use cane sugar in Coke beverages within the country, we calculate. Coca-Cola sold 4.36 billion liters of regular Coke in the U.S. last year, according to Euromonitor data. Using sugar would displace high-fructose corn syrup, creating an oversupply of corn and hurting ADM's corn-processing business. Wilmar's sugar business could gain. Also, here's the growing list of major Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) changes to the nation's food supply chain: Steak & Shake moved to 100% all-natural beef tallow and replaced its "buttery blend," which contained seed oils, with 100% Grade A Wisconsin butter. McCormick announced it will drop certain food dyes from its products. PepsiCo announced it will remove artificial ingredients from popular food items — including Lay's and Tostitos chips — by the end of the year. In-N-Out announced it will remove synthetic food dyes and artificial flavors from its menu items, and also transitioned to 100% beef tallow. Tyson Foods eliminated synthetic dyes in its food products. Mars removed titanium dioxide from its Skittles product. Sam's Club committed to removing 40 harmful ingredients — including artificial colors, additives, dyes, and high-fructose corn syrup — from its private-label products. Kraft-Heinz announced it will remove artificial dyes from its U.S. products. General Mills announced it will remove artificial dyes from its U.S. cereals and all foods served in K-12 schools. Nestlé announced it will remove all petroleum-based food dyes from its food and beverage products. Conagra Foods announced it will remove certain color additives from its frozen products, no longer offer products with artificial dyes in K-12 schools, and stop using artificial dyes in the manufacturing of its products. JM Smucker announced it will remove synthetic colors from its consumer food products. Hershey announced it will remove synthetic dyes from its snacks. Consumer Brands announced it will urge its members to remove artificial colors in food and beverage products served in schools. As we've previously stated, Americans must demand a complete overhaul of the toxic food supply chain—controlled by globalist corporations that prioritize profit over public health. The best way to protect your well-being is to reject all processed foods pushed by these companies and instead support local farmers and ranchers. Plant a garden, build a chicken coop, and take back control of the food supply chain. We're all in agreement that we don't want to eat bugs from the globalists. What's truly alarming is that it took President Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to force these long-overdue changes. It raises an important question: What if the Harris regime had won? Would these corporations still be pumping toxic ingredients into the food supply? At this point, it feels deliberate. Tyler Durden Thu, 07/17/2025 - 10:05
Trump: Sending Tariff Letters To More Than 150 Countries
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Trump: Sending Tariff Letters To More Than 150 Countries President Donald Trump told reporters Wednesday night that his administration will notify over 150 countries that their exports to the U.S. could soon face tariffs ranging from 10% to 15%. Trade letters have already been sent to major partners, including the European Union, Japan, and South Korea, which are set to take effect on August 1 unless new agreements are reached. Negotiations with China remain ongoing. "We'll have well over 150 countries that we're just going to send a notice of payment out, and the notice of payment is going to say what the tariff" rate will be, President Trump told reporters during a meeting with the Bahrain Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa at the White House. "It's all going to be the same for everyone, for that group," Trump said, adding that many of the countries that would receive the letters were "not big countries, and they don't do that much business. Not like the ones we've agreed with, like China, like Japan." All countries are currently subject to a baseline 10% tariff imposed by Trump in April. While the president had previously floated raising that floor to 15–20%, he did not specify the new rate or timing for the 150 countries during his remarks on Wednesday. Trump has already sent nearly two dozen letters to top trading partners, including the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Mexico, Canada, and others, informing them of new levies effective August 1, unless a deal can be struck by the deadline. Also on Wednesday, Trump spoke with broadcaster Real America's Voice, stating that the tariff rate for the roughly 150 countries would be "10 or 15%," adding, "We haven't decided yet." He said his administration was very close to a trade deal with India and that an agreement with Europe was in the works. Commenting on the new trade developments, Alicia Garcia Herrero, chief Asia Pacific economist at Natixis, told Bloomberg that "for much of the world — and Asia in particular, which faces among the highest levies — the rate announcement could be read as a positive, providing some certainty for smaller countries with a lower rate than initially threatened." She said the rate also signals "Trump is realizing that too high tariffs are disruptive." Goldman Sachs Chief Economist Jan Hatzius updated his U.S. effective tariff rate to a higher level, but with a slower rise... Related: Status Of Tariffs With 15 Top U.S. Trading Partners - What To Know So Far . . . Tyler Durden Thu, 07/17/2025 - 08:35
Hemispheric Defense In Focus: Q2 Earnings Preview For Aerospace & Defense Stocks
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Hemispheric Defense In Focus: Q2 Earnings Preview For Aerospace & Defense Stocks By now, readers have been tracking our key investment themes—uranium 'ESG' play from 2020, the "Next AI Trade," all things nuclear, Powering Up America, and rare earths, among others. One of the latest additions to this lineup is our emerging focus on the "hemispheric defense" theme. Back in March, we broke down what hemispheric defense actually means in the Trump era. Then, we highlighted several defense companies poised to benefit (L3Harris Technologies, ect...) as Pentagon priorities shift, and funding increasingly flows toward agile, tech-driven firms over legacy prime contractors. Here's the evolution of the Hemispheric Defense theme: Making Sense Of Hemispheric Defense In Trump Era Golden Dome Unleashes U.S. Hemispheric Defense Theme - And Goldman Finds One Firm Stands Out Goldman Flags Must-Own Defense Stocks Amid Pentagon's Shifting Priorities Goldman Cranks Up Bullish Tone On Hemispheric Defense Theme Hemispheric Defense Theme Accelerates As Hegseth Calls For Drone Dominance As Wall Street launches into earnings season, Goldman analysts, led by Noah Poponak, have offered clients a comprehensive note on the second-quarter earnings preview, with a focus on aerospace and defense stocks within their coverage. "Defense tech companies appear to be on the verge of receiving significant funding relative to their size as the DoD looks to procure more commercial derivative, lower-cost hardware and technology," Poponak told clients. The analyst stated that government IT bookings and revenue were at significant risk as DOGE gains traction within the DoD (read here). He said the top picks ahead of the earnings season include: TDG – TransDigm Group Incorporated (NYSE: TDG) CAE – CAE Inc. (NYSE: CAE; also trades on TSX as CAE) LHX – L3Harris Technologies, Inc. (NYSE: LHX) HII – Huntington Ingalls Industries, Inc. (NYSE: HII) Chart: L3Harris And noted the losers: BAH – Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corporation (NYSE: BAH) LMT – Lockheed Martin Corporation (NYSE: LMT) SAIC – Science Applications International Corporation (NYSE: SAIC) VVX – V2X, Inc. (NYSE: VVX) (formerly Vertex and Vectrus merger) Analysts outlined their key takeaways within the defense world: Aerospace OE: Boeing delivered 60 planes in June after delivering 40-45/month through the first five months of the year, indicating that product quality improvements are holding and production is successfully ramping (MAX production is at 38/month now). At the Paris Air Show, suppliers generally had positive feedback about Boeing - pulling consistent volumes of components, and has improved its communications with the supplier base. Despite recent improvements in BA production, demand remains far in excess of available supply, creating favorable economics for BA. Aftermarket: Aftermarket fundamentals remain strong. While there were some pockets of North American air travel weakness developing amidst tariff and trade uncertainty, demand signals look to be improving. Aftermarket has been growing in excess of global ASMs for the last 4 quarters, a trend we attribute to pricing power, aging fleet dynamics, and pent-up demand. We think OEs will under supply the market until ~2030, creating a favorable environment into which aftermarket companies will continue to sell. Business jet: Business jet leading indicators have slowed their rate of improvement or plateaued, meaning outperformance here may be more idiosyncratic going forward. Book to bills have trended between 0.8X - 1.2X for the biz jet OEs, although large orders have the potential to move the stocks. New production appears to remain disciplined, which should help retain pricing power, and the OEs are growing their aftermarket businesses, which are high quality, high margin revenue streams. Defense Tech: Recent DoD memos, executive orders, and the reconciliation bill are proof points that the DoD is beginning to focus on nimbler, non-traditional defense suppliers. We don't expect the reconciliation funding to have a large impact to numbers in the quarter, but expect it to be topical on earnings calls, providing investors with the ability to quantify opportunities, and begin showing up in backlogs in the next few quarters. We see a number of growth catalysts in the sub-sector going forward. Defense hardware: This year's defense request, when combined with Reconciliation, will be the largest on record, nearing $1.0 trillion. Despite that, we remain selective in defense hardware, preferring companies that have more exposure to the administration's stated (and funded) priorities like shipbuilding and golden dome. We think the Pentagon will continue to implement tougher terms of trade industry wide, and there is evidence the DoD is willing to consider cuts to large, established, and well-funded programs like F-35, creating some heightened uncertainty for the Primes going forward. Government IT & Services: We remain cautious on Gov IT as DOGE continues its work at the federal civilian agencies, and appears to have become more active within the DoD in recent weeks, with BAH and LDOS notching large contract cancellations. There are now multiple DoD memos indicating tougher terms for contracting Gov IT work, establishing DOGE contract reviews, and prioritizing implementation / services work from equipment manufacturers themselves. We think this will pressure book-to-bills industry wide in the quarter, and guidance from companies could be conservative. GS Aerospace & Defense earnings estimates versus consensus Options positioning heading into 2Q25 results Pro Subs can read the full note here, which outlines much more and earnings estimates. Tyler Durden Thu, 07/17/2025 - 06:55
FDA Commissioner Responds To Critics: 'Be Patient With Us' On COVID-19 Vaccines
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FDA Commissioner Responds To Critics: 'Be Patient With Us' On COVID-19 Vaccines Authored by Zachary Stieber & Jan Jekielek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours), The commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration is responding to critics of the agency’s recent approvals of COVID-19 vaccines, saying the FDA is involved in a process that takes time. Dr. Marty Makary, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, in Washington on May 5, 2025. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Dr. Marty Makary urged patience after disclosing that he was aware of research indicating COVID-19 vaccines may cause immune system deregulation and described databases with self-reported adverse events as inadequate to determine harms from vaccines. “I don’t want people to think that we’re blowing off the safety signal[s] that many people have described,” said Makary, who was speaking on July 14 on EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” in an interview that will be released soon. “I personally know of people who have been injured by the vaccine. I personally know of friends who have lost a loved one from the mRNA COVID vaccine. So I think it is reasonable at this time to say we want good, solid, definitive data, and the conditional, limited approval of the COVID vaccines is in that framework that we want to see a proper dataset come to us so we can take a good look at that data.” The Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines utilize messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology. The FDA has, for years, cleared updated COVID-19 vaccines on an annual basis despite there being scant or no clinical trial data demonstrating the effectiveness of the shots. Makary and another top FDA official, Dr. Vinay Prasad, announced in May that regulators would not be issuing new licenses for the vaccines for many Americans unless manufacturers ran trials based on clinical endpoints, such as the prevention of symptomatic COVID-19. They also said that testing showing the vaccines trigger antibodies would be sufficient for the elderly, as well as young people with at least one condition the government says places them at higher risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes. The FDA subsequently approved, in addition to Novavax’s vaccine, a new next-generation vaccine from Moderna and an updated version of Moderna’s existing vaccine, Spikevax, for the elderly and people with at least one risk factor. The latter approval also came for those at least 6 months of age who have at least one risk factor; previously, the vaccine was available under emergency authorization for younger children. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA’s parent agency, told The Epoch Times in an email that the approval was based on “a targeted review of the vaccine’s data, focused specifically on protecting children at highest risk” and that the approval “reflects a careful evaluation of the scientific evidence.” Moderna officials said the vaccines provide an important tool to protect people against severe disease and hospitalization. Critics said the FDA should not have cleared the vaccines. “This move puts America’s children at high risk and is a giant step backward for science-based healthcare,” Dr. Joseph Varon, president and chief medical officer of the Independent Medical Alliance, said in a statement, citing concerns about side effects such as heart inflammation, or myocarditis. Makary said in the EpochTV interview that “we have a situation whereby we would love these companies to run a proper randomized, controlled trial. And so if you do nothing—if you reject the COVID vaccines as they come to you for approval—then you have no leverage to be able to ask the company to do that, and those studies may never be done.” The FDA does not itself run trials, and trials are large and expensive, the commissioner said. He noted that the original trials ran several years ago and said new ones should be done to show parents whether their children really need an annual COVID-19 vaccine. Makary and Prasad wrote in a recent viewpoint that “the burden of proof must be high to vaccinate healthy people at low risk of severe disease” and that the FDA “authorizes specific indications for use only when there is substantial confidence that benefits outweigh risks.” While doctors can administer COVID-19 vaccines and other drugs for unapproved purposes, or off-label, they urged doctors who choose to vaccinate young males—the population at highest risk of myocarditis—to consider factors such as recent COVID-19 infection and the risk of myocarditis before administering the shots. Makary also said on EpochTV that there’s one stance for healthy people and another when it comes to people with a risk factor, such as people with cancer. “We are going to be OK with the COVID vaccines in high-risk Americans, which is a much more limited indication,” he said. He added later: “For people who think that we approved a COVID vaccine for, say, healthy children, that’s incorrect. That’s not true.” Makary also highlighted how the FDA just expanded the warnings for myocarditis for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, both of which utilize mRNA technology, based on a safety study the FDA completed. The updated labels state that the highest risk for myocarditis is in males aged 12 to 24, with 27 cases per million doses recorded within seven days of a vaccination. The FDA commissioner then turned to how he knows people who were injured by the COVID-19 vaccine, and knows of deaths among others. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says on its website that several factors explain reports of death after COVID-19 vaccination, including requirements that doctors report any deaths after vaccination to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database, regardless of the cause. The CDC has also said that the only post-vaccination deaths caused by the vaccines were from the now-discontinued Johnson & Johnson vaccine. According to an Epoch Times investigation, the CDC found evidence, such as autopsies, that the available vaccines caused other deaths while looking into deaths reported to VAERS. The CDC also says that certain side effects, such as myocarditis, are caused by the vaccines but that most side effects reported after COVID-19 vaccination are rare, and until recently, it recommended that all people aged 6 months and older receive an annual shot. The agency removed recommendations for healthy children and pregnant women to get a COVID-19 vaccine under orders from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Makary said he believes vaccine injuries are real and that some cases designated as long COVID, or lingering effects from a COVID-19 infection, were actually caused by vaccination. “I’m not saying that’s all of them. I don’t want people to read too much into that. But I would like people to be patient with us as we try to approach this methodologically, collecting the proper data,” he said. “It is easy to react. I was very angry when I learned that a friend’s father had died from the COVID vaccine. And look, we’re convinced it was causal until proven otherwise. You can always nitpick and say, ‘Well, this could have been a random event,’ but no, there are many reasons why we are confident that it was causal. Now, when I say we are not the FDA, but me and my circle of friends and loved ones who know this individual who lost their father. “So people have a right to be angry. They have been deceived on different aspects of the COVID pandemic. They have been ordered to march into a vaccine line even if they were healthy and low-risk and already had circulating antibodies. People have a right to be upset, but I would ask people to be patient with us as we do this the proper scientific way.” Tyler Durden Thu, 07/17/2025 - 06:30
These Are Richest People In Every US State
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These Are Richest People In Every US State From tech moguls to retail tycoons, the richest person in each U.S. state reflects the industries driving wealth across the country. Some are household names, while others have built quiet fortunes in their home states. This map, via Visual Capitalist's Kayla Zhu, shows the richest person in U.S. every state and their estimated net worth, as ranked by Forbes. Net worths are calculated as of April 25, 2025. Who is the Richest Person in Every State? Below, we show the richest person in each U.S. state, their estimated net worth, city of residence, and industry. Name State Estimated Net Worth (Billions) Age City Industry/Company Elon Musk Texas $388.0 53 Austin Tesla, SpaceX Jeff Bezos Florida $206.0 61 Miami Amazon Mark Zuckerberg California $189.0 40 Palo Alto Facebook Warren Buffett Nebraska $165.0 94 Omaha Berkshire Hathaway Steve Ballmer Washington $118.0 69 Hunts Point Microsoft Rob Walton & Family Arkansas $113.0 80 Bentonville Walmart Michael Bloomberg New York $105.0 83 New York Bloomberg LP Charles Koch & family Kansas $67.5 89 Wichita Koch, Inc. Jeff Yass Pennsylvania $59.0 66 Haverford Trading, investments Lukas Walton Illinois $39.0 38 Chicago Walmart Jacqueline Mars Virginia $39.0 85 The Plains Candy, pet food John Mars Wyoming $39.0 89 Jackson Candy, pet food Abigail Johnson Massachusetts $31.5 63 Milton Fidelity Phil Knight & family Oregon $29.0 87 Hillsboro Nike Miriam Adelson & family Nevada $28.6 79 Las Vegas Casinos Thomas Frist Jr & family Tennessee $26.8 86 Nashville Hospitals Daniel Gilbert Michigan $23.7 63 Franklin Rocket Mortgage Diane Hendricks Wisconsin $21.9 78 Afton Building supplies Steve Cohen Connecticut $21.3 68 Greenwich Hedge funds Harold Hamm & family Oklahoma $18.5 79 Oklahoma City Oil & gas Ernest Garcia II Arizona $17.3 67 Tempe Used cars Todd Graves Louisiana $17.2 53 Baton Rouge Fast food Philip Anschutz Colorado $16.9 85 Denver Energy, sports, entertainment Rick Cohen & family New Hampshire $11.5 72 Keene Warehouse automation David Steward Missouri $11.4 73 St. Louis IT provider Bubba Cathy, Dan Cathy, & Trudy Cathy White Georgia $10.7 71, 72 & 69 Atlanta, Atlanta, Hampton Chick-fil-A Harry Stine Iowa $10.2 83 Adel Agriculture Pierre Omidyar Hawaii $10.0 57 Honolulu EBay, PayPal Carl Cook Indiana $9.9 62 Bloomington Medical devices James Goodnight North Carolina $9.8 82 Cary Software Tamara Gustavson Kentucky $8.1 63 Lexington Self storage Les Wexner & family Ohio $7.8 87 New Albany Retail Dennis Washington Montana $7.4 90 Missoula Construction, mining John Overdeck New Jersey $7.4 55 Millburn Hedge funds Annette Lerner & family Maryland $5.5 95 Chevy Chase Real estate Robert Faith South Carolina $5.0 61 Charleston Real estate management Gail Miller Utah $4.4 81 Salt Lake City Car dealerships Susan Alfond Maine $3.7 79 Scarborough Shoes Jonathan Nelson Rhode Island $3.4 68 Providence Private equity Frank VanderSloot Idaho $3.2 76 Idaho Falls Nutrition, wellness products Thomas Duff & James Duff Mississippi $3.0 64 & 68 Hattiesburg Tires, diversified Glen Taylor Minnesota $2.9 84 Mankato Printing T. Denny Sanford South Dakota $2.1 89 Sioux Falls Banking, credit cards John Abele Vermont $2.0 88 Shelburne Healthcare Ron Corio New Mexico $1.7 63 Albuquerque Solar Jimmy Rane Alabama $1.5 78 Abbeville Lumber Gary Tharaldson North Dakota $1.2 79 Fargo Hotels Brad Smith West Virginia $0.9 61 Huntington Intuit Elizabeth Snyder Delaware $0.8 77 Wilmington Gore-Tex Jonathan Rubini & family Alaska $0.4 70 Anchorage Real Estate Leonard Hyde & family Alaska $0.4 68 Anchorage Real estate Elon Musk is the richest person in Texas, and the world, after moving to the Lone Star State from California in 2020. The Tesla CEO has an estimated net worth of about $338 billion. Other high-profile business leaders who are the richest individuals of their respective state include Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in California with an estimated net worth of $189 billion, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in Florida with $206 billion, and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett in Nebraska with $165 billion. Other notable tech leaders on the map include former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer in Washington with a net worth of $118 billion. He overtook his former boss, Bill Gates, after Forbes revised its estimate of the 2021 divorce settlement awarded to Gates’ ex-wife, Melinda French Gates. In all but three states (Alaska, Delaware, and West Virginia), the richest individual was at least a billionaire. Brad Smith, the retired CEO of Intuit and current president of Marshall University of West Virginia is almost at the billionaire mark, with an estimated $900 million net worth. To learn more about some of the richest areas of the U.S., check out this graphic that visualizes the top U.S. cities by number of centi-millionaire residents. Tyler Durden Thu, 07/17/2025 - 05:45
High Court Ends UK Govt's £7B Afghan Resettlement Cover-Up After Data Leak
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High Court Ends UK Govt's £7B Afghan Resettlement Cover-Up After Data Leak Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News, The High Court has lifted a super-injunction obtained by the UK government that had concealed a massive £7 billion secret resettlement program for thousands of Afghan nationals, following a damning judgment that accused ministers of suppressing democratic accountability and misleading Parliament. The injunction, originally imposed in September 2023, blocked not only media reporting on a major data breach involving thousands of Afghan collaborators with British forces, but also the very existence of the injunction itself. Now, nearly two years later, Mr. Justice Chamberlain ruled that the order must be discharged, citing “serious interference” with press freedom and a failure to justify continued secrecy. The leak, which occurred in early 2022, exposed personal details of tens of thousands of Afghans who had applied to relocate to the UK following the Taliban takeover. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) learned of the breach more than a year later, in August 2023, when names appeared on Facebook. Instead of acknowledging the error, the government initiated a covert admissions scheme to bring thousands of affected individuals — and their families — to Britain, while silencing any media inquiry under the cover of national security. With the approval of family reunification for all those affected, the true number of Afghans imported into Britain could be significantly higher than the number directly affected by the data breach. During closed hearings, Mr. Justice Chamberlain expressed alarm over the scale of the deception. At a behind-closed-doors hearing in November 2024, reported on Tuesday by The Telegraph, he remarked, “When you are dealing with public expenditure of that magnitude — £7 billion — it’s not possible to lose that amount of money down the back of the sofa.” He went on to highlight internal communications in which government officials discussed using a statement to Parliament as “cover” for the scheme, rather than providing full disclosure. “Am I going bonkers? This is a very, very striking thing,” the judge said. “The statement to Parliament will ‘provide cover’. It is a completely unprecedented situation.” The judge condemned the use of the courts to facilitate what barrister Jude Bunting KC called a deliberate effort “to mislead the public.” The super-injunction, Bunting argued, prevented public scrutiny on key political issues such as immigration and public spending: “It is corrosive of democracy. It prevents the public from being informed about the reason for billions of expenditure, at a time when immigration is at the forefront of debate.” Mr. Justice Chamberlain echoed this concern, saying the order had “the effect of completely shutting down the ordinary mechanisms of accountability which operate in a democracy.” He added: “It not only prevents public discussion of the full reasons for the government’s policy. It prevents the public from knowing of the very existence of the policy.” As reported by The Times, he told the government’s barrister at one of the secret hearings, “You’re going to have to say something about all of this, because you’re spending £7 billion and you’re letting in many thousands of people that you wouldn’t have been letting in before.” The U.K. newspaper noted: “Almost 24,000 Afghans affected by the breach have been brought to the UK already or will be in the future.” Despite the magnitude, the government had not informed the public, Parliament, or even many of the individuals whose data was leaked until now. The judgment published on Tuesday also criticized the way intelligence assessments had been used to justify the injunction. In a review that ultimately led to the order’s lifting, a retired civil servant concluded that the leaked dataset posed only marginal risk to individuals and that the Taliban were unlikely to use it to identify targets. The judge found this “fundamentally undermines the evidential basis” for continued secrecy. Super-injunctions, usually associated with celebrities, were never intended to shield vast immigration schemes from public oversight. “When the government obtains one,” Chamberlain said, “it is likely to give rise to understandable suspicion that the Court’s processes are being used for the purposes of censorship.” In the wake of the judgment, the government has been forced to admit that the data leak occurred in 2022 but was not publicly acknowledged until now; that it included a database of 33,000 records; that a new secret relocation program was launched in response, moving thousands of foreign nationals to Britain; and that the individual responsible for the leak has not been publicly identified or disciplined. In Parliament on Tuesday, Defence Secretary John Healey offered a “sincere apology” and confirmed that affected individuals were only informed this week, over three years after their data had been exposed. While the government has now applied for a narrower injunction to prevent publication of sensitive personal data, the broader secrecy has been irreversibly broken. As Mr. Justice Chamberlain concluded, “There is no tenable basis for the continuation of the super-injunction. This is particularly so given the serious interference it involves with the rights of the media defendants to freedom of expression and the correlative right of the public to receive the information they wish to impart.” Read more here... Tyler Durden Thu, 07/17/2025 - 05:00
Measles Cases In US Climb To Highest Number In 33 Years: CDC
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Measles Cases In US Climb To Highest Number In 33 Years: CDC Confirmed measles cases in the United States have hit the highest number since 1992, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the United States, so far in 2025, 1,288 cases have been recorded as of July 8, the CDC said in an update on Wednesday. That’s the highest number in one year since 1992, when 2,126 cases were logged. Zachary Stieber reports that spokespersons for the CDC and its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said in emails to The Epoch Times that HHS “continues to support community efforts in dealing with the measles outbreaks” while the CDC “continues to provide technical assistance, laboratory support, and vaccines as requested.” Officials say they’ve sent nearly 12,000 mumps, measles, rubella (MMR) vaccine doses to states since cases began appearing in January. Measles was marked as eliminated from the United States in 2000. That designation means measles was not spreading within the country and that new cases only cropped up when individuals contracted measles in other countries and returned to the United States. The United States is likely on the way to losing the elimination status, Dr. Monica Gandhi, professor of medicine at the University of California–San Francisco, wrote on social media platform X. The previous annual peak of case numbers since the elimination was in 2019, when 1,274 cases were confirmed. That number was primarily driven by an outbreak that occurred in New York. Cases this year have been recorded in 38 states. More than half of the cases happened in Texas, where an outbreak broke out and spread among Mennonite communities, according to health officials. The source of the outbreak has not been identified. Of the Texas patients, 5 percent had received at least one dose of the MMR vaccine. Nationwide, 8 percent of patients have a confirmed vaccination history. The remaining patients are either unvaccinated or have unknown vaccination status. Three patients have died in the United States in 2025. None of them had received a vaccine. Measles has also been spreading in other countries. Canada, which has a much smaller population, said this week that nearly 3,400 measles cases have been confirmed there this year. “The risk of measles infection is low for the overall U.S. population, with a case rate of less than 0.4 per 100,000 people—lower than peer developed countries including Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and Italy,” the CDC and HHS spokespersons said. “Measles risk is higher in U.S. communities with low vaccination rates in areas with active measles outbreaks or with close social and/or geographic linkages to areas with active measles outbreaks. CDC continues to recommend MMR vaccines as the best way to protect against measles. The decision to vaccinate is a personal one. People should consult with their healthcare provider to understand their options to get inoculated and should be informed about the potential risks and benefits associated with vaccines.” The Partnership to Fight Infectious Disease, a nonprofit whose advisory board members include pharmaceutical company officials, said in a statement that the measles case count “represents an alarming low in today’s fight against vaccine-preventable disease” and called on health leaders and lawmakers “to encourage people to protect themselves and others through vaccination.” The CDC on its website recommends two doses of the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine for all children beginning at 12 months of age. The vaccine is required for school attendance in every state. Coverage with many childhood vaccines has decreased in recent years. For the MMR vaccine, coverage among kindergartners dropped from 95.2 percent during the school year that started in 2019 to 92.7 percent during the school year that began in 2023. Coverage is even lower in the counties with the most cases in Texas. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the head of HHS, has said that people should get a measles vaccine. He has also noted the vaccine has side effects and said that its protection wanes “very quickly.” Some studies have found a waning of MMR vaccine protection or antibodies among some recipients, including a 2007 paper from the United States and a 2023 paper. The CDC estimates that one dose of the vaccine is 94 percent effective against measles and that two doses bring the effectiveness to 97 percent. The estimates are drawn from a 2013 paper analyzing studies that were performed more than a decade ago, a CDC spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email. The immunity provided by the vaccine is “long-term and probably lifelong in most persons,” the agency states on its website. “Some studies indicate that waning immunity may occur after successful vaccination, but this appears to occur rarely and to play only a minor role in measles transmission and outbreaks.” It also says that approximately 2 to 7 percent of children who receive one dose of the MMR vaccine, and less than 1 percent of kids who receive two doses, do not develop antibodies against measles. “The secretary has been very clear, it’s his priority to stop the measles outbreak,” Susan Monarez, President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the CDC, told senators during her recent confirmation hearing. “He has been very clear that the MMR vaccine is a critical component to stopping this outbreak.” A Senate panel on Wednesday advanced Monarez’s nomination. The full Senate has yet to take up the matter. People exposed to measles can contract the illness, particularly unvaccinated individuals, according to the CDC. Symptoms typically start appearing seven to 14 days after infection, and include a high fever, coughing, and red eyes. There are no medicines approved by federal regulators specifically for measles. Doctors are encouraged to provide supportive care and focus on relieving symptoms. Some doctors administer vitamin A, as recommended by the World Health Organization. Kennedy has promoted other treatments such as steroids and cod liver oil. Tyler Durden Thu, 07/10/2025 - 22:10
Trump To Impose 35% Canadian Tariff, But USMCA Goods To Stay Exempt
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Trump To Impose 35% Canadian Tariff, But USMCA Goods To Stay Exempt Trump issued another letter late on Thursday, saying he will levy a 35% tariff on some goods coming into the US from Canada, in a blow to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s bid to avoid punishing levies on goods sold to the US. The tariff level would take effect from August 1. “Fentanyl is hardly the only challenge we have with Canada, which has many Tariff, Non-Tariff, Policies and Trade Barriers, which cause unsustainable Trade Deficits against the United States,” Trump said in a letter to Carney posted Thursday. "Tariffs to our Dairy Farmers - up to 400% - and that is even assuming our Dairy Farmers even have access to sell their products to the people of Canada." Trump did allow that he would “consider an adjustment to this letter” if Canada worked with him to stop the flow of fentanyl. But he criticized Canadian authorities for their existing tariffs on US dairy products and said the government had “financially retaliated against the United States.” The announced rate will be an increase from the current 25% tariff on Canadian imports not covered by the trade deal negotiated between the US, Canada and Mexico, which do not and will not face additional tariffs. That exclusion would remain unchanged, Bloomberg reported citing an unnamed government official. Trump is also leaving in place a lower 10% tariff on energy related imports as well as his increased levies on key goods including metals, the official said. The situation remains fluid and the legal order has not yet been drafted, they cautioned. In order to not shake up the market, which has once again emerged as the only true barometer of Trump's actions, that formula would be a far more modest change to the trading relationship than an across-the-board 35% rate, and would preserve exceptions for closely integrated sectors like the auto industry. While most Canadian exports were shielded from Trump’s tariffs thanks to the trade agreement, known as USMCA, the president had imposed a 25% tariff on many goods citing the threat of fentanyl. Metals, including steel and aluminum, were already subject to a 50% tariff. Still, Bloomberg notes that the letter suggests Trump is intent on ratcheting up rather than scaling back his trade war with the US’s northern neighbor (which he has mused publicly should consider becoming the 51st state) despite furious efforts by Canadian officials to broker a deal. Trump’s letter came after he told NBC News Thursday he is eyeing blanket tariffs of 15% to 20% on most trading partners, adding that the exact levels are being worked out now. The current blanket tariff rate is 10%. Taken together, the moves signal no retreat from his flagship economic policy, with Trump noting to NBC the recent rise in US equity markets even as Trump plans higher tariff rates on major trading partners that would start within weeks. US stock futures briefly slumped, before recovering some losses when it became clear that USMCA goods would remain exempt. Almost as if Trump wants to keep imposing tariffs while watching the stock market hit record highs day after day: since the two are mutually exclusive, either Trump has to TACO on tariffs, or watch as markets tumble once more a la Liberation day. The greenback climbed against major peers in Asian trading. The Canadian dollar led losses among Group-of-10 currencies, followed by risk sensitive Australian and New Zealand dollars in fear a further disruption to trade may impact global growth. Trump’s Canada announcement came after officials in Ottawa already moved this week to denounce US plans to impose a 50% import tariff on copper. “We are waiting for the details of this decision by the White House and by the president, but we’ll fight against it, period,” Canada Industry Minister Melanie Joly said earlier Thursday. The talks between the US and Canada had already shown signs of stress. Last month, Trump cut off negotiations temporarily after Canada moved to impose a digital services tax, only for the Canadian government to drop the initiative just hours later. Tyler Durden Thu, 07/10/2025 - 21:37
Doug Casey On Why The Military-Industrial Complex Always Wins
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Doug Casey On Why The Military-Industrial Complex Always Wins Via InternationalMan.com, International Man: During the recent Iran–Israel war, the US used up to 20% of its global stockpile of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) ballistic missile interceptors, each costing over $18 million. THAAD isn’t effective against hypersonic missiles, which both Iran and even Yemen’s Houthis now possess. What do you make of this? Doug Casey: War, in the long run, is a matter of economics. If you can’t afford to fight a war, you’ll lose the war. Missiles are now the preferred weapon for taking out enemy targets, and the only effective counter is anti-missile missiles. The problem is that both are brutally expensive. Can the costs be kept down, so war is more… affordable? Generals, politicians, and “defense” contractors, however, love expensive high-tech toys. But if you’re going to afford a war, the most cost-effective weapon is an ignorant teenage boy—something the Third World, especially the Muslim world, is awash in. They’re cheap and stealthy delivery systems, far more effective than multi-million-dollar missiles. There’s an endless supply of them, and they can be employed in a myriad of ways. From an economic point of view, it makes no sense for technologically advanced countries (like the US) to use ultra-expensive weapons to attack primitive countries, as we’ve done for the last 75 years. Regardless of the weapons used, the thing to remember is that war amounts to setting wealth on fire. Missiles are about taking real goods, manufactured at great expense, and using them to blow up other real wealth; there can be a perverse logic to it. However, despite their rhetoric to the contrary, I’m not sure governments are too concerned about lots of young men dying. A surplus of unemployed young males is destabilizing, especially in poor countries. Even a large country like the US will eventually collapse under the weight of war. That’s much more true of the Ukraine. And vastly truer of Israel. Israel will further bankrupt itself shooting down missiles with ultra-expensive anti-missiles. With a gigantic debt load, enormous war expenditures and losses, living on welfare from the US, and no prospect of things getting better, the prognosis isn’t good. About a million (it’s said) of Israel’s seven million Jewish citizens have recently made the chicken run, and those who remain aren’t allowed to leave. I think Israel has a near-insoluble problem. Giving them more money and missiles won’t help. International Man: President Trump recently unveiled a plan to build a “Golden Dome” missile defense shield over the US, modeled loosely on Israel’s Iron Dome. Critics question its feasibility, effectiveness, and cost. Independent analysts estimate the long-term price tag could reach $800 billion. What’s your take? Doug Casey: Almost every major weapons system ends up fighting the last war, and that will be true of the so-called Golden Dome. It strikes me as a criminally stupid idea, further ensuring the bankruptcy of the US government and the US itself, while serving no real useful purpose. If you want to attack the US, you don’t want to use missiles. First, we don’t have a major military threat. The US is insulated from hostile powers by two very large oceans. Should someone launch a nuclear missile attack—which is what the Golden Dome is supposed to defend against—we would know exactly where those missiles came from. The enemy could expect massive retaliation from the American nuclear triad, which makes the attack pointless. That alone makes the Golden Dome redundant and unnecessary. Apart from that, if an enemy wanted to launch a nuclear attack, it would be more effective with pre-positioned nukes, or nukes delivered surreptitiously with cargo ships and planes. Nuclear war via missiles scared everybody 70 years ago. But today it’s not a practical threat. The likely threats, I think, are from more subtle areas—cyber war, bio war, or a new type of guerrilla war. WW3 will have a huge cyber element. Everything runs on computers: the banking system, the monetary system, the electrical grid, the communications grid, the transportation grid, and utilities. A successful cyber-attack would turn almost everything we use or need into a brick overnight. It would be cheap and effective, cause widespread chaos and mass casualties, without kinetically destroying very much. If the enemy is really serious, though, they’ll use bioweapons. Viruses and bacteria can zero in on, or exclude, certain populations. Why have a nuclear war when you can neatly kill the people who are the real problem? And both cyber and biowar offer a great deal of plausible deniability. The third option was demonstrated on September 11, 2001. The attack with commercial airliners was ultra cheap, super effective, and hard to counter. I suspect we’ll see numerous mutations of that theme. It’s a new type of guerrilla war. Millions of military-age males—cheap teenagers—have infiltrated the US over the last decade or so. For all we know, many may be organized as informal guerrilla armies to be activated whenever. They could surreptitiously wreak havoc. There’s no real defense against these types of attacks. But the real enemy is not some foreign power, but the fact that the US has turned into a dysfunctional multicultural domestic empire, which is likely to suffer serious financial, economic, social, and political problems over the next years. Spending a trillion dollars on a useless Golden Dome is an insane distraction. Who comes up with these idiotic ideas? International Man: The F-35 is the most expensive weapon system in human history, with lifetime costs projected at over $1.7 trillion, according to the US Government Accountability Office (GAO). Is the F-35 worth the price tag—or is it a military-industrial complex boondoggle? Doug Casey: The F-35 is a perfect example of fighting the last war, like having cavalry regiments before World War 1 or battleships before World War 2. Aircraft carriers and high-tech fighter planes are their WW3 equivalents. What is the F-35 built to fight? Other fighter planes? But the next generation of fighter planes will be pilotless, highly sophisticated, and much cheaper. They’ll be drones run by artificial intelligence, which won’t need to drag around a heavy, expensive, and limiting pilot. The F-35 is a dinosaur. The real enemy here, however, isn’t Russian or Chinese fighters. The real enemy is US military contractors—the so-called defense companies. They’ve learned to fight wars by hiring lobbyists instead of engineers. They take decades to build planes like the F-35, which are already obsolete by the time they’re in production. It amazes me that during World War 2, the P-51—one of the most effective fighters of the war—went from blank paper to production in six months and was turned out at $50,000 per copy, which is about $600,000 or so in today’s money. The F-35 has taken 30 years to put into production; it got underway in 1995. And it costs—who knows, because the numbers are floating abstractions, buried under mountains of phony accounting and corruption. But somewhere between $100 and $200 million per plane. Enough money that you almost can’t afford to lose one. And that doesn’t count the huge direct and indirect maintenance costs. International Man: Recently, Israel and Ukraine used relatively cheap drones smuggled into Iran and Russia to bypass advanced air defenses and hit strategic targets with ease. How are drones changing warfare and its economics? Doug Casey: Drones are totally changing the entire nature of warfare. The next generation of drones—which are already being manufactured—are the size of bumblebees or even houseflies. They can be produced by the millions and released onto a battlefield or into a city. Moving up from there, you’ll have quadruped drones like the BigDog, and of course, real, true-to-life Terminators. Tesla anticipates manufacturing AI-powered bipedal robots for as little as $10,000 apiece. Oscar Wilde didn’t know how right he was when he said that life imitates art. I would not want to be a soldier fighting drones of all descriptions. Human soldiers are dead meat on the battlefield in the next generation of military technology, which is already here. International Man: It seems the US military-industrial complex is more focused on producing ultra-expensive hardware than on building systems that actually win wars. What are the investment and geopolitical implications of this trend? Doug Casey: Everybody’s familiar with Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex. That was 65 years ago—a lifetime—and it’s mutated and grown like a cancer since then. Today, any movie with a modern military theme is probably propaganda for the government or the companies that manufacture its weapons. Anyway, Congressmen don’t think in terms of the effectiveness of weapons; they think in terms of the number of dollars that will be spent in their home district and the number of people that weapons manufacturers can employ. Innovations, however, are made by small companies or individual inventors, not by giant companies run by administrators and suits. You don’t want to own the Lockheeds or General Dynamics. You want to own small outfits, run by innovators, not suits. It’s funny that after World War 2, the War Department changed its name to the Defense Department. It’s odd because the Defense Department has nothing to do with defense. It’s a complete misnomer. The US hasn’t had any wars defending the US, or “freedom”, a word they always throw in there, in living memory. As America transformed into an empire, very much like ancient Athens in many regards, its many wars have been offensive, not defensive. They’ve been wars of words and lies as well as wars of weapons. In any event, the best defense for the US, or any country, is economic strength and liberty, not a giant military/industrial bureaucracy. In addition to economic strength, successful countries have a citizenry that shares common values and loves their culture. Those things pretty much disappeared as the US mutated into a welfare-warfare state. * * * As the cracks in the global economy deepen, it’s becoming clear that a major upheaval isn’t just possible—it’s likely. Inflation, debt, and geopolitical tension are converging into a perfect storm. If you wait until the collapse is official, it may already be too late to act. That’s why we’re offering an a free special report: Guide to Surviving and Thriving During an Economic Collapse. Inside, you’ll discover practical strategies to protect your assets, secure essential resources, and position yourself to come out stronger on the other side. Click here to get it now. Tyler Durden Thu, 07/10/2025 - 20:55
Iron Ore Soars As China Pledges Crackdown On Industrial Overcapacity
1752193800 from ZEROHEDGE
Iron Ore Soars As China Pledges Crackdown On Industrial Overcapacity Iron ore futures in Singapore surged toward $100 a ton — the highest since May — fueled by renewed pledges from the Chinese government to curb overcapacity in key industrial sectors. Beijing's comments have boosted sentiment across ferrous markets. Singapore futures jumped as much as 3.6% during the session, marking the largest daily gain since September. Iron ore futures have traded in a tight range between $90 and $110 a ton for more than 18 months. Futures on the Dalian Exchange — which are more influenced by the Chinese market — closed at their highest level since April. "Iron ore has gained more than 5% in two weeks, having recovered a third of its early year tariff related loss in just the last 10 sessions. Lead is up almost 4% in the last three weeks," UBS analyst Simon Penn wrote in a note. "Many industries are currently caught in a wave of anti-overcapacity, leading to rising prices," after top officials pledged to tackle the problem, said Steven Yu, a researcher at Mysteel, who Bloomberg quoted. He was referring to iron ore's month-long slide of almost 10% from mid-May. He noted that "ferrous prices were kept low during the previous decline, making the rebound particularly strong." Here's more from Bloomberg: The rebound has been spurred by vows from the Chinese government to crack down on excessive competition and supply in core industries including steel. President Xi Jinping visited a valve manufacturer in industrial heartland Shanxi province this week, where he stressed that the nation's traditional industries remained vital and shouldn't be abandoned. . . . The renewed demand has also been seen in futures of Dalian coking coal — a key ingredient in the steel-making process — which surged more than 4.5% on Thursday and topped 900 yuan ($125.40) a ton, the highest since May, before paring some gains. Meanwhile, data from Mysteel showed rebar steel inventories are still declining, despite stockpiles usually beginning to accumulate around this time of year. Hot-rolled steel has only seen a slight buildup, which indicates better-than-expected demand. Separately, rumors of policy support sent Chinese property equities higher in the overnight hours. The Bloomberg Intelligence index of the nation's real estate stocks jumped 11%, while Goldman's China-H Real Estate basket gained 7.4%. Individual stocks, Logan Group Co. skyrocketed 85% in Hong Kong, and Sino-Ocean Group Holding Ltd soared 37%. It appears Beijing is finally stepping up with more decisive policy measures to stabilize the economy. This may signal a move by the government to suppress mounting economic dissent. Tyler Durden Thu, 07/10/2025 - 20:30
California Might Stop Making Necessary Debt Payments For 2 Years
1752192300 from ZEROHEDGE
California Might Stop Making Necessary Debt Payments For 2 Years Authored by John Moorlach via The Epoch Times, It’s July. The California State Legislature has successfully met the budget submission deadline of June 15, and it was signed by the governor. There was one small fly in the ointment: how to cut $12 billion in spending? All while trying to provide $750 million in tax credits annually to one specific industry: Hollywood. Go figure. One massive spending reduction strategy that Gov. Gavin Newsom is negotiating is nonpayment for two years of the state’s unfunded actuarial accrued liability for retiree medical benefits. This nearly $85 billion debt would not be paid down by Sacramento and its employees, causing this languishing debt to increase from interest costs, for this unique lifetime benefit rarely seen in the private sector. The wrong way to address the obligation of future costs is the “pay as you go” method, which deals with the immediate and not the upcoming higher bills on the horizon. Known as an “other post-employment benefit,” or OPEB, paying these retiree medical bills is a future cost that should be addressed systematically with an “annual required contribution,” or ARC, every year. Not doing so fits the definition of “kicking the can down the road.” Not paying the ARC, or a higher amount, each year is a technique being pursued by what I would refer to as bottom-dwelling states that can’t afford to honor their commitments. It’s July. It’s also backpacking season. And camping etiquette 101 is “Leave your campsite better than you found it.” But Sacramento, over the last decade, has failed to leave California’s balance sheet in better shape, even in flush economic times when this would have been a smart money move to make. Reducing liabilities with higher payments helps to reduce the annual minimum payment, like with a credit card balance. But California leaders did not renegotiate or aggressively pay down the retiree medical liabilities. I reminded both the Brown and Newsom administrations of this every year I served in the California State Senate, from 2015 to 2020. Not to toot my own horn, but I was vocal every budget cycle, to no avail. Here is what I stated during my first State budget experience in June of 2015 in the Sierra Sun Times: “The state is at a critical juncture, ‘an inflection point,’ where the state begins to seriously address its unrestricted net deficit and unfunded liabilities or continue to hire more state employees who will pay more dues to the unions that appear to be running California. This budget before us departs from Governor Brown’s call for greater fiscal restraint. Instead, it takes the most fiscally optimistic revenue estimates and spends up to that line. And many expenditures are also optimistic, if recent trends continue. Staying on this current course will lead to a fiscal implosion. The time to change course is now.” In June of 2016, The Bond Buyer provided the following quote from me: “I’m thankful that Governor Brown has worked to model out a softening economy and a budget agreement that grants a $2 billion increase for the rainy day fund; however, we still have much work to do to constrain spending and address our ever increasing debts and liabilities.” In June of 2017, the Orange County Breeze provided my thoughts: “Governor Jerry Brown has openly stated that a recession is coming and that budget cuts are inevitable. So I began my comments on the final budget acknowledging the uncomfortable fact that—at $125 billion—this is California’s largest general fund budget ever. It is difficult to reconcile the fact that a future deficit is a foregone conclusion while we quickly ramp up spending. Now would be the prudent time to put a little extra to the side and draw down our debts.” In June of 2018, The Associated Press reported: “Republicans praised the focus on savings but said the budget doesn’t do enough to pay down debt and irresponsibly increases long-term commitments that will hamstring the state in the future. Sen. John Moorlach, a Republican from Costa Mesa in Orange County, said the state isn’t doing enough to address growing obligations for pensions and retiree health care. “‘In a year when one enjoys a bumper crop, one must set aside cash and pay down the credit card balance,’” Moorlach said. “‘We’ve got to get ahead of this mess.’” In June of 2019, The Epoch Times would communicate my concerns about California’s balance sheet: “When asked as to whether this provision would add to the debt, Senator Moorlach pointed out that Betty Yee, the state’s Controller, highlighted the significant increase in the state deficit for this fiscal year. “‘In the middle of the budget conference committee meetings, the State Controller, Betty Yee, released the comprehensive annual financial report for the year end of June 30th 2018. It was finally completed in the middle of June, a year later. [The report] will show you that the retiree medical liability for health benefits for state employees has increased by $44 billion and our unrestricted net deficit went up from $169.5 billion to $213 billion. The state not only this last week approved the largest budget in its history, but it’s also been notified that its unrestricted net deficit is also the largest in its history as well,’ he said.” And in June of 2020, Amanda Carroll of KFBK AM 1530 stated my position: “We’re not making any systemic corrections or fixes. We’re not addressing pension plans. We’re not addressing retiree medical. And so those costs will increase in future years.” So here we are in 2025, and Californians are burdened with even greater debts. And now the governor wants to skip making payments on liabilities that he has ignored during his tenure, allowing them to grow by the high 7 percent interest costs. Worse, he’s also risking that those benefits may not be fully funded when state retirees will need them. State leaders were warned to improve the campsite, to no avail. Now, California’s ever-increasing debt is a fiscal train wreck in slow motion. And it’s one that lawmakers and officials should have avoided. Now the Golden State is reaping the results of prior poor financial management, and the next governor is going to be very disappointed with the mess the prior campers left. Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge. John Moorlach is the director of the California Policy Center's Center for Public Accountability. He has served as a California State Senator and Orange County Supervisor and Treasurer-Tax Collector. In 1994, he predicted the County's bankruptcy and participated in restoring and reforming the sixth most populated county in the nation. Tyler Durden Thu, 07/10/2025 - 20:05
Three Choices, None Good
1752189300 from ZEROHEDGE
Three Choices, None Good Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog, The moral rot of unlimited debt looks "free" but it's unaffordable in the end. We like to think we're special and this moment in history is special, but alas, we're still running Wetware 1.0 which was coded between 300,000 and 60,000 years ago, when the last "out of Africa" migration finally got traction. Since then, the code has been tweaked a bit here and there (adults can now digest dairy products, etc.), but we're running the old code, and so we make the same mistakes and follow the same emotional pathways as individuals and as groups. Which leads us to our current predicament, which is not unique: we're living on debt, "money" borrowed from the future, a future we're assuming will be so over-supplied with energy and other goodies that we'll be able to pay all the interest we're piling up with ease. All the charts below are shouting "parabolic," as in crazy-unsustainable increases. There's the federal debt, $36 trillion, up 4X from the 2008 spot of bother, there's TCMDO, total public and private debt (McMansions, university degrees and SUVs all paid for with debt), student loans from zero to $1.5 trillion, Medicare and Medicaid, now 1/3 of the federal budget, and so on. How did we get here? Let's start with what's not taught in Econ 101: primary surplus. Every economy--from households to empires, meaning this is scale-invariant--generates a surplus from its production of goods and services, or it runs a deficit, meaning it has to get more money from somewhere to support its consumption. The question then becomes, how is the primary surplus being spent? (Or put another way, how is it being distributed across the economy and society?) There are only three options: 1) consume it, 2) invest it and 3) save it / hoard it. Without making a conscious choice, the US has chosen to "invest" most of its primary surplus in moral rot, unproductive frauds, skims, scams, monopolies, cartels, regulatory capture, grift and graft. This is the problem with giving an irresponsible teenager a no-limit Platinum credit card with an easily ignored admonishment to "stick to a tight budget, pay the balance off every month." Uh, right. Since the US can borrow unlimited trillions on its credit card, we can "afford" to burn our surplus on grift, graft, inefficiency, cronyism, profiteering, etc. Since our surplus was squandered on moral rot, we have to borrow trillions to pay for what the citizenry wants and what politicians must promise to get re-elected. Wetware 1.0: we like windfalls and free stuff, and so every program becomes a "third rail" politically: touch it and you don't get re-elected. But if you borrow a few "free" trillions a year, you get re-elected. We love windfalls and free stuff and hate hard choices, but that's all we have now. We have three choices in how we deal with our dependence on parabolic debt to sustain our profligate lifestyle: 1. Run the debt up to the point that nobody is dumb enough to lend us more, and then default on the debt / go bankrupt. All our creditors are wiped out. The problem here is all debt is an asset to the wealthy entity that owns it as an income stream. Since the wealthy run the status quo in a manner that serves their interests, they're unlikely to be thrilled with debt jubilees that zero out their assets and income or messy defaults that end up doing the same thing. So nix that option. The wealthy want to keep their wealth and income streams, and since they own US Treasuries, they're not going to approve defaulting on that debt. 2. Inflate the debt away with sustained high inflation. So we borrowed $1 when $1 bought a lot of stuff, and now we've inflated everything so it takes $10 to buy what $1 bought back then. Now we can pay back the $1 with a fraction of the earnings it took back when we borrowed it. We've already taken that step--what once cost $1 now costs $10. So the next step is to do another 10X reduction in the debt via inflation. In previous eras, authorities reduced the silver content of coinage to near-zero, effectively devaluing the money, i.e. inflating away the debt. What cost one mostly-silver denarius in the good old days soon cost 100 devalued denarius. This looks like some pretty easy hocus-pocus to pull off, but there's a catch: Catch-19, which is devaluing the money devalues trust in the leadership, social contract and the future, all of which leaves the economy and society a hollowed-out shell awaiting a stiff breeze to push the whole system off the cliff. The problem here is inflation is distributed asymmetrically, along with the primary surplus. The wealthy, powerful elites skim off the surplus, and they're equally adept at distributing the "inflation tax" to the middle and working classes, which soon meld into a single class, the impoverished. A funny thing about Wetware 1.0 is we're hard-wired to take note of rampant unfairness and eventually we respond in a destabilizing fashion, for example, uprisings, revolts, revolutions, etc. 3. The third option is to root out all the moral rot that's consuming the economy's surplus and our future, scrap all the programs designed in the bygone eras of 50+ years ago (defense, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, higher education, etc.) and start from scratch with new programs whose expenses are limited to what the economy generates as surplus. In other words, go Cold Turkey on our addiction to living on debt. Yes, I know: ain't gonna happen, because the moral rot is too deep, it's now normalized to the point that we don't even recognize the reality that there's nothing left but a flimsy facade we paint with gaudy colors to hide the rot. Everyone assumes the empire is forever and can endlessly fund any amount of grift and graft with borrowed money. But this is a self-serving fantasy, not reality. Every empire of debt implodes. These charts are merely facts. If we find them depressing, that response says something about our refusal to be accountable and responsible for our choices. Who's going to cut up the unlimited Platinum card? The federal government's Platinum card balance: The US economy's Platinum card balance: Student loans Platinum card balance: Medicare, which has an unlimited Platinum card: Medicaid, which also has an unlimited Platinum card, though this is obscured by phony "reforms": There are only three options, none easy, and not making a choice is a greased slide to collapse. The moral rot of unlimited debt looks "free" but it's unaffordable in the end. * * * Check out my new book Ultra-Processed Life and my new fiction/novels page. Become a $3/month patron of my work via patreon.com. Subscribe to my Substack for free Tyler Durden Thu, 07/10/2025 - 19:15
Wisconsin Supreme Court Votes 4–3 To Invalidate State Abortion Law
1751479200 from ZEROHEDGE
Wisconsin Supreme Court Votes 4–3 To Invalidate State Abortion Law Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times, The Wisconsin Supreme Court voted 4–3 on July 2 to strike down the state’s 176-year-old almost-total ban on abortion. Justice Rebecca Frank Dallet wrote the majority opinion. “We conclude that comprehensive legislation enacted over the last 50 years regulating in detail the ‘who, what, where, when, and how’ of abortion so thoroughly covers the entire subject of abortion that it was meant as a substitute for the 19th century near-total ban on abortion,” Dallet wrote. “Accordingly, we hold that the legislature impliedly repealed [Section] 940.04(1) as to abortion, and that [Section] 940.04(1) therefore does not ban abortion in the State of Wisconsin.” The new ruling came three years after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Dobbs overturned Roe v. Wade (1973), holding that the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee a right to abortion. The rule returned the regulation of the procedure to the states. The Dobbs ruling prompted a blizzard of state-level legislation either to restrict or preserve abortion access. Planned Parenthood, along with several women using pseudonyms, asked the court in February 2024 to invalidate Wisconsin’s current abortion law. They argued that it violated the rights of patients and medical doctors under the state’s constitution. The Wisconsin Supreme Court agreed in July 2024 to hear two lawsuits challenging the state’s 1849 abortion law. The statute states that anyone “other than the mother, who intentionally destroys the life of an unborn child is guilty” of a felony. “In granting this case, this court is doing what many other state courts have done, both before and after Dobbs v. Jackson—considering a state constitutional challenge to an abortion-related statute,” Justice Jill Karofsky wrote in the court order a year ago. “Deciding important state constitutional questions is not unusual - it’s this court’s job.” Tyler Durden Wed, 07/02/2025 - 14:00
Not Just The EPA: Despite Warnings, Biden's Energy Department Disbursed $42 Billion In Its Final Hours
1751474400 from ZEROHEDGE
Not Just The EPA: Despite Warnings, Biden's Energy Department Disbursed $42 Billion In Its Final Hours Authored by James Varney via RealClearInvestigations, In its last two working days, the Biden administration’s Energy Department signed off on nearly $42 billion for green energy projects – a sum that exceeded the total amount its Loan Programs Office (LPO) had put out in the past decade. The frenzied activity on Jan. 16 and 17, 2025, capped a spending binge that saw the LPO approve at least $93 billion in current and future disbursements after Vice President Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election in November, according to documents provided by the department to RealClearInvestigations. It appears that Biden officials were rushing to deploy billions in approved funding in anticipation that the incoming Trump administration would seek to redirect uncommitted money away from clean energy projects. The agreements were made despite a warning from the department’s inspector general, urging the loan office to suspend operations in December over concerns that post-election loans could present conflicts of interest. In just a few months, some of the deals have already become dicey, leading to fears that the Biden administration has created multiple Solyndras, the green energy company that went bankrupt after the Obama administration gave it $570 million. These deals include: Sunnova, a rooftop solar outfit that thus far had $382 million of its $3.3 billion loan guaranteed, filed for bankruptcy this month. The company did not respond to a request for comment. Li-Cycle, a battery recycling facility, had a $445 million loan approved in November, but since then, the company was put up for sale and has filed for bankruptcy. The Energy Department said no money has been disbursed on that deal. Li-Cycle did not respond to a request for comment. A $705 million loan was approved on Jan. 17 for Zum Energy, an electric school bus company in California, and its “Project Marigold.” At $350,000 and more, electric school buses currently cost more than twice as much as their diesel counterparts. So far, Zum has received $21.7 million from the government, according to usaspending.gov. The company did not respond to a request for comment. A $9.63 billion Blue Oval SK loan on Jan. 16 was the second largest post-election deal, topped only by a $15 billion loan the next day to Pacific Gas & Electric, with most of that for renewables. The Blue Oval project in Kentucky – a joint venture between Ford Motor Co. and a South Korean entity – has been dealing with numerous workplace complaints, and construction of a second EV battery manufacturing plant there has been delayed. More than $7 billion has been obligated on that deal, according to the Energy Department. Blue Oval did not respond to a request for comment. The money and the hasty way in which it was earmarked have drawn the attention of the Trump administration. “It is extremely concerning how many dozens of billions of dollars were rushed out the door without proper due diligence in the final days of the Biden administration,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement to RCI. “DOE is undertaking a thorough review of financial assistance that identifies waste of taxpayer dollars.” The enormous sums came from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which injected $400 billion into the LPO, a previously sleepy Energy Department branch originally intended to spur nuclear energy projects. That total represented more than 10 times the amount the LPO had ever committed in any fiscal year of its existence. Prior to the post-election blowout, the office’s biggest fiscal year was 2024, when it committed $34.8 billion, records show. Even with the rush to push billions out the door in its last months, close to $300 billion of the Inflation Reduction Act money remains uncommitted by the LPO. Trump administration officials have already nixed some smaller deals. Secretary Wright recently urged Congress to keep the money in place as the LPO now aims to use it to further the Trump administration’s energy policy, particularly with nuclear projects. That unprecedented gusher of cash from the LPO echoes the efforts of the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency to push $20 billion out the door before it left office. As RCI has previously reported, the EPA – which had never been a consequential grant-making operation – was tasked with awarding $27 billion in Inflation Reduction Act funding through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and Solar For All programs. It did so in less than six months in 2024, including an unorthodox arrangement in which Biden officials parked some $20 billion outside the Treasury’s control. That money was earmarked for a handful of nonprofits, some of which had skimpy assets and were linked with politically connected directors. The LPO’s post-election bonanza was put together in even less time. The Energy Department deals, however, involve mostly for-profit enterprises, which raises questions about whether the Biden administration was propping up companies that would not have survived in the private marketplace. Should any of the companies hit it big in the future, shareholders could get rich, while taxpayers will receive only the interest on the loan. “The loan office should not be in the virtual venture business,” said Mark Mills, executive director of the National Center on Energy Analytics. “But in a few cases, it could make sense to serve as a catalyst or backstop for viable and important projects from a national security or policy perspective.” RCI spoke with several Trump administration officials who declined to comment on the record, given the extensive ongoing review of both the LPO’s post-election arrangements and other Energy Department projects linked to Biden’s climate agenda. “They wanted to get the billions to companies that probably wouldn’t exist unless they could get money from the government,” one current official said. “The business plans, such as they were, were ‘how do we secure capital from the government?’” During Biden’s tenure, the office was run by Jigar Shah, who on June 17 was named to the board of directors of the nonprofit Center for Sustainable Energy. Bloomberg News reported last month that Shah “helped select roughly 400 companies with development plans to receive grants and loans upwards of $100 million each.” In response to the Trump administration’s pushback on green subsidies, Bloomberg reported that Shah is working to help some of the companies he bankrolled shift operations to Europe. The Center relies chiefly on government contracts instead of donations, and it saw that revenue jump from $274.1 million in 2023 to more than $500 million in 2024, according to tax records. The center did not respond to a request to speak with Shah. Thus far, no entity has received the entire amount of the deals the Biden administration struck since last November, according to the Energy Department and usaspending.gov. In a handful of cases, companies have come to the current administration and opted out of the deals. Still, millions of taxpayer dollars have already been distributed, in some instances, to deals the department listed as “conditional commitments.” Wright has said there are “reasons to be worried and suspicious” about the post-election binge, and vowed some of the deals will be scrubbed. In 2023, the Biden administration made subtle changes to the LPO’s regulations, cutting strings and stipulations that traditionally attach to loans. Consequently, the office cut deals after the election on terms more favorable to the recipient than the taxpayer, and in several cases, making a “conditional commitment” the same as a loan, according to Trump officials. The changes also moved money that a later administration could have cut into “obligated” silos, making the deals harder to cancel, according to the current Energy Department. “Essentially, they had the Loan Program Office operating like a graveyard energy venture capital fund,” one Trump official told RCI. “This was all tied to the religious fervor for any green energy project in the prior administration, and the goal was not to get the government repaid but to advance the ‘green new deal.’” The $93 billion under review represents a separate “green bank” from smaller Biden administration deals that the Energy Department has already canceled. Last month, the Government Accounting Office said the department was not on track to “issue loans and guarantees before billions of dollars of new funding expires.” As part of the review, Wright issued policy guidelines in May that he said offer more protection to taxpayers. The department may now require significantly more information from loan recipients and applicants, such as “a project’s financial health, a project’s technological and engineering viability, market conditions, compliance with award terms and conditions and compliance with legal requirements, including those related to national security.” The department declined to provide the terms of specific deals, again citing the ongoing review. Trump administration officials claim the business plans for many of these deals were threadbare, that term sheets were essentially tossed out, and the entire process could be described, in the words of a Biden EPA official in December, as “throwing gold bars” off the Titanic “as an insurance policy against Trump winning.” Despite these dubious outcomes and the alleged removal of taxpayer protections that accompanied the deals, Trump administration officials said they remain committed to the LPO. The office has a valuable role to play in fulfilling energy policy goals, which include nuclear projects, strengthening the nation’s power grid, and limiting the U.S. reliance on Chinese supply chains for key minerals and elements. “It’s as if you went away and the kids threw a rager in the house,” one official told RCI. “You may need some new furniture and the like, but it’s still a really nice home. The Office can be a critical resource for the manufacturing base of this country, and our goal is not to end the LPO but to improve it.” The Trump administration could face some of the same financial issues if it rejiggers the LPO along lines that support its energy policy goals, particularly within the nuclear industry. Projects there have been marred by unprofitable plants and massive cost overruns and delays in construction, making federal loans to the section inherently risky. Prominent voices – and investors – like Bill Gates have also encouraged the government to back new sources of energy and minerals. Geothermal projects are one such field, and there appears to be bipartisan support in Washington for capital that will shore up U.S. energy independence. On Jan. 15, the Biden administration approved a $1.2 billion “conditional commitment” with a subsidiary of EnergySource Minerals LLC (ESM), which hopes to extract lithium from geothermal brine. A deal with ioneer Ltd. appears to match some of the professed goals of the Trump administration, but it has also been plagued by financial setbacks since Biden’s LPO approved it in its final days. The company's deal grew from an original $700 million "conditional commitment" in 2023, to the $996 million approved on Jan. 17, 2025." The Rhyolite Ridge project is a mining and manufacturing center in Nevada to produce lithium and boron. Those elements have implications for defense and national security in addition to energy, according to ioneer Vice President Chad Yeftich. “Ioneer believes government policy should encourage projects if we want critical minerals developed domestically,” Yeftich said. “Time is the key risk for development as China continues to provide financial support to its critical minerals industry and dump critical minerals into the market thereby depressing the price.” Yeftich noted Rhyolite Ridge has secured $200 million in private capital, but in February, its chief private equity partner broke ties with the project. Finance professionals familiar with big deals told RCI that such a rupture so close in timing to the loan would likely deep-six the arrangement, but Trump officials said Biden’s LPO stripped such boilerplate language from many of the post-election deals. Secretary Wright told RCI that these maneuvers suggested the previous administration was more interested in disbursing funds than protecting taxpayers. “Any reputable business would have a process in place for evaluating spending and investments before money goes out the door, and the American people deserve no less from their federal government.” Tyler Durden Wed, 07/02/2025 - 12:40
Trump Announces Trade Deal With Vietnam; Includes 20% Tariffs, 40% Tax On Transshipping
1751468685 from ZEROHEDGE
Trump Announces Trade Deal With Vietnam; Includes 20% Tariffs, 40% Tax On Transshipping With just one week left until the July 9 trade deal deadline, which some suspect could have a similar adverse impact on markets as the first Liberation Day - even if stocks are completely oblivious to the risk - moments ago Trump gave a stark reminder just how high the trade stakes are when he announced that the US has made a trade deal with Vietnam. According to the terms, Vietnam will pay the United States: 20% Tariff on any and all goods sent into our Territory, 40% Tariff on any Transshipping, which is squarely aimed at China which uses Vietnam as a reshipment/tolling hub. Of the two, one can argue that the transshipment clause is more important because in recent weeks China had threatened that any country that makes a deal with the US at its expense would make it very angry. Which means that Xi is now terribly vexed. In any case, in return for the tariffs, Trump said that "Vietnam will do something that they have never done before, give the United States of America TOTAL ACCESS to their Markets for Trade. In other words, they will “OPEN THEIR MARKET TO THE UNITED STATES,” meaning that, we will be able to sell our product into Vietnam at ZERO Tariff." Which is hardly a big deal, since the US barely exports to Vietnam. what does matter is that a deal has been struck however, and now many other Asian countries will scramble to do the same, even if it is at terms that antagonize China (like in this case). Amusingly, Trump said that as a result of the deal, US SUVs will be a "wonderful addition" to various product lines within Vietnam. It is my opinion that the SUV or, as it is sometimes referred to, Large Engine Vehicle, which does so well in the United States, will be a wonderful addition to the various product lines within Vietnam. Dealing with General Secretary To Lam, which I did personally, was an absolute pleasure. While stocks initially dipped on seeing the 20% print, they have since rebounded and recovered all losses, and trade at session highs, as algos remain completely oblivious that behind the scenes, huge tension is once again building up between the US and China, which is negotiating deals that Beijing will view as offensive, making the odds of an actual trade deal with Beijing much lower than most expect. Tyler Durden Wed, 07/02/2025 - 11:04
'Teary' UK Chancellor Reeves Is Safe For Now But The Gilt Market Maybe Not
1751461182 from ZEROHEDGE
'Teary' UK Chancellor Reeves Is Safe For Now But The Gilt Market Maybe Not Ten-year gilt yields just spiked by more than 10 bps on rumors that UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves was about to resign or be ousted. The pressure on Reeves comes after Starmer — in a dramatic climbdown on Tuesday — abandoned controversial plans to restrict benefit payments to some disabled people, a reform pushed by the chancellor which would have saved some £5 billion ($6.9 billion), and was key to meeting her self-imposed budgetary rules at her spring statement in March. Bloomberg reports that the welfare reform package was widely opposed by Labour MPs, with more than 120 originally threatening to vote against the policy in parliament. Even after the last-ditch decision to drop the most contentious changes, 49 Labour MPs still voted against the bill on Tuesday, a sign of the scale of discontent. The rebellion and U-turn are a serious blow to Starmer’s political authority as he approaches the first anniversary of Labour’s election win last July. The decision to ditch the welfare reforms also leaves Reeves facing a widening fiscal hole of more than £6 billion to fill, including the need to fund a separate about-turn on a plan to cut winter fuel payments to pensioners. As Bloomberg further reports, Starmer’s press secretary, Sophie Nazemi, quickly clarified his position to reporters after PMQs, saying that Reeves was going nowhere. “She has the prime minister’s full backing,” Nazemi said. “He’s said it repeatedly.” The combination of Starmer’s failure to back his chancellor, and Reeves’ tears, prompted speculation about her position until the Treasury clarified that the reason for her demeanor was a personal issue. “It’s a personal matter, which - as you would expect - we are not going to get into,” the Treasury said in a statement. “The chancellor will be working out of Downing Street this afternoon.” A tear just rolled down the Chancellor’s cheek at #PMQs as the PM refuses to answer whether or not she’ll stay in her job. Hayfever, or something else? pic.twitter.com/HPXXQlDNo9 — Paul Brand (@PaulBrandITV) July 2, 2025 But, as Bloomberg's Simon White notes, the rapidity of the move shows the precariousness of the UK’s debt situation. The government had planned a series of cuts to welfare and sickness benefits, but had to drastically scale them back in the face of huge opposition from backbench MPs. The watered down changes are estimated to deliver no savings overall. A new chancellor might drop Reeves’ commitment to not borrow more for day-to-day activities, or increase spending, justifying a deepening concern for the gilt market. Cable tumbled... Yields are still near their day’s highs, while a risk measure for the UK, based on asset swaps, country bond spreads and basis swaps, has widened notably. Keep watching. Tyler Durden Wed, 07/02/2025 - 08:59
Centene Crashes After Pulling 2025 Guidance On Unexpected Risk Adjustment Results
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Centene Crashes After Pulling 2025 Guidance On Unexpected Risk Adjustment Results Centene shares crashed in premarket trading after the health insurer withdrew its 2025 guidance due to weaker-than-expected trends in the Affordable Care Act Marketplace and ongoing Medicaid cost pressures. The health insurer warned of a $1.8 billion earnings headwind, prompting downgrades from Wall Street. Centene, one of the largest health insurers in the U.S., disclosed on Tuesday evening new data from an independent actuarial firm, Wakely, covering about 72% of its ACA Marketplace membership, revealed significantly worse-than-expected results. Wakely's data reveals: Lower-than-expected market growth and Much higher aggregate morbidity than Centene had assumed for its risk adjustment revenue. As a result, Centene now preliminarily estimates a $1.8 billion reduction in its net risk adjustment revenue for 2025, translating into a $2.75 hit to adjusted diluted EPS. According to FactSet data, Wall Street analysts had expected full-year adjusted earnings of around $7.28 a share. "The Company does not have information or estimates for its remaining seven Marketplace states, but anticipates, due to the morbidity trends observed in the 22 states, an additional reduction to its net risk adjustment revenue transfer expectation with a corresponding adjusted diluted EPS impact," Centene stated in a press release. Another industry bellwether, UnitedHealth, recently slashed its full-year guidance and replaced its chief executive. Higher-than-expected medical costs have sparked broader concerns across the entire insurance sector. Analysts were full of gloom, with UBS cutting its rating on Centene to neutral, citing significantly weaker near-term earnings. Here are first takes from Wall Street (courtesy of Bloomberg): UBS (neutral) UBS cuts Centene to neutral from buy immediately following the withdrawn guidance; broker now sees 2025/2026 EPS at $3.25, representing a 55% decline "With the unexpected risk adjustment results in Marketplace and persistent Medicaid cost trends, the company's risk near term earnings has been significantly reduced" JPMorgan (neutral) Analyst John Stansel cuts to neutral from overweight following news; says new price target of $48 from €75 reflects estimated ACA headwinds as well as "incremental" Medicaid pressure, "assuming that CNC is able to reprice at least a portion of its book into 2026" Says any information on Centene's approach to the ACA Marketplace in 2026 and recent regulatory changes will be key when company reports earnings on July 25 Barclays (equalweight) Analyst Andrew Mok calls ACA update "materially negative;" says it comes after recently-received industry data that showed Centene's cited membership growth was lower than expected, "likely driven by integrity rules" Adds that implied morbidity was "significantly higher" than Centene's expectations, driving an earnings headwind of as much as $1.8 billion for 2025, representing a $2.75 EPS impact Jefferies (hold) Analyst David Windley says Centene's move confirms Jefferies fears that the prior-year 2025 risk pool is "deteriorating and plans have mispriced the risk pool" with firms assuming healthy growth "Investors should remember that CNC's risk adjustment is moving unfavorably because others' books are feeling claims pressure," Windley flags Centene shares plunged as much as 27% in premarket trading in New York, hitting levels last seen in 2017. As of Tuesday's close, the stock was down roughly 6.5% year-to-date. . . . Tyler Durden Wed, 07/02/2025 - 07:45
These Are The 40 Best Countries In The World, According To People
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These Are The 40 Best Countries In The World, According To People The best country in the world is the one you live in. Or… not? This infographic, via Visual Capitalist's Pallavi Rao, spotlights the 40 countries that the world perceives to be the “best.” Like most efforts to quantify a qualitative measure, this ranking reflects public perceptions, not hard data. However, countries did have to meet certain GDP, tourism, and FDI thresholds to be included in the race. Data for this infographic is sourced from U.S. News & World Report in partnership with Wharton and WPP. They asked more than 17,000 people to judge 87 nations across 73 attributes grouped in 10 subrankings. ℹ️ Their survey was conducted between March 22nd–May 23rd, 2024. Skip to the last section to read the full methodology breakdown, or visit the source’s explanation page here. This Small European Country is the Best in the World From its snow-capped peaks to its powerhouse financial sector, Switzerland has secured the public’s vote as the world’s best country in 2024. Rank Country Region 1 🇨🇭 Switzerland Western Europe 2 🇯🇵 Japan Eastern Asia 3 🇺🇸 U.S. Northern America 4 🇨🇦 Canada Northern America 5 🇦🇺 Australia Oceania 6 🇸🇪 Sweden Northern Europe 7 🇩🇪 Germany Western Europe 8 🇬🇧 UK Northern Europe 9 🇳🇿 New Zealand Oceania 10 🇩🇰 Denmark Northern Europe 11 🇳🇴 Norway Northern Europe 12 🇫🇷 France Western Europe 13 🇳🇱 Netherlands Western Europe 14 🇸🇬 Singapore South-Eastern Asia 15 🇮🇹 Italy Southern Europe 16 🇨🇳 China Eastern Asia 17 🇦🇪 UAE Western Asia 18 🇰🇷 South Korea Eastern Asia 19 🇪🇸 Spain Southern Europe 20 🇫🇮 Finland Northern Europe 21 🇦🇹 Austria Western Europe 22 🇮🇸 Iceland Northern Europe 23 🇧🇪 Belgium Western Europe 24 🇮🇪 Ireland Northern Europe 25 🇶🇦 Qatar Western Asia 26 🇬🇷 Greece Southern Europe 27 🇱🇺 Luxembourg Western Europe 28 🇹🇭 Thailand South-Eastern Asia 29 🇵🇹 Portugal Southern Europe 30 🇧🇷 Brazil South America 31 🇹🇷 Turkey Western Asia 32 🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia Western Asia 33 🇮🇳 India Southern Asia 34 🇲🇽 Mexico Central America 35 🇪🇬 Egypt Northern Africa 36 🇷🇺 Russia Eastern Europe 37 🇵🇱 Poland Eastern Europe 38 🇲🇾 Malaysia South-Eastern Asia 39 🇲🇦 Morocco Northern Africa 40 🇿🇦 South Africa Southern Africa Survey respondents ranked Switzerland highly for business (#2), quality of life (#3), social purpose (#7) and cultural influence (#8). For the hard data enthusiasts, Switzerland ranks third by GDP per capita, ($105,000), boosted by its enormous banking sector known for its secrecy. It’s fourth by GNI per capita ($95,070), which removes the effects of outside financial flows entering the country. Economic Might Still Matters However, Japan (#2) and the U.S. (#3) remain fixtures near the top thanks to their outsized GDPs, deep innovation pipelines and global brands. Business friendliness weighed heavily: they’re top five for entrepreneurship, while the U.S. ranks #1 for agility and power. Meanwhile, high investor confidence and strong currency reserves help each nation offset middling scores on cost of living and income equality. Together they illustrate how sheer economic heft continues to sway public perception—even in an era generally more focused on sustainability and social values. Middle East and Asia Make Inroads in Global Perceptions The UAE (#17), Qatar (#25) and Saudi Arabia (#32) showcase the Middle East’s growing soft-power ambitions. Targeted investment in tourism, green energy, and cultural projects burnishes their brand beyond the somewhat disparaging “petro-state” label. Likewise, South Korea (#18), Singapore (#14) and China (#16) leverage advanced manufacturing and technological prowess to climb the ranking. Their rise hints at a more multipolar world where Western dominance over “best country” narratives is steadily eroding. Determining the “Best Countries” in the World U.S. News designed its “Best Countries” ranking around 73 attributes grouped into 10 thematic subrankings, such as quality of life, power, and entrepreneurship. To reiterate, these rankings reflect public perceptions, not hard data. To gather this, the survey is distributed globally to about 17,000 respondents, including business leaders, informed elites, and general citizens. Each participant is shown a random subset of countries (that must meet GDP, tourism, and FDI thresholds) and asked to rate how strongly they associate those countries with each of the 73 attributes. These individual attributes are pre-assigned to categories by researchers, and scores are normalized on a 0–100 scale. Category scores are then averaged for each country. Finally, respondents also rank how important each category is to them. These rankings determine the weights assigned to each category. A country’s final score is calculated by combining its weighted category scores, producing the overall rankings seen in this graphic. If you enjoyed today’s post, check out The World’s Richest Countries Across Three Metrics on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist. Tyler Durden Wed, 07/02/2025 - 05:45
Monaco Tops Japan As The World's 'Oldest' Nation
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Monaco Tops Japan As The World's 'Oldest' Nation Much of the Western, industrialized world is worrying about falling birth rates and aging societies. While reaching 65 is still a privilege in most parts of the world, social security and welfare systems typically rely on a growing working-age population to support dependent groups (children and seniors). When this balance shifts due to aging populations, countries face increased pressure on healthcare, pension systems, and economic productivity. This visualization, via Visual Capitalist's Pallavi Rao, ranks countries by the share of their population aged 65 and over, along with their total numbers. The figures are estimates for 2025, made under the medium variant projection in the UN World Population Prospects (2024). Ranked: Countries With the Most Seniors Monaco has the highest share of older adults in its population, at 37%. However, second-place Japan stands out with 30% of its population aged 65+, totaling nearly 37 million people. On top of ranking second by percentage, it’s fourth by total senior population (after China, India and the U.S.). Rank Country Share of Population, 65+ (2025) 65+ Population (2025) Total Population (2025) 1 🇲🇨 Monaco 36.8% 14.0K 38K 2 🇯🇵 Japan 30.0% 36.9M 123.1M 3 🇲🇶 Martinique 26.5% 90.0K 340K 4 🇵🇷 Puerto Rico 25.3% 818.0K 3.2M 5 🇮🇹 Italy 25.1% 14.8M 59.1M 6 🇲🇸 Montserrat 25.0% 1.0K 4K 7 🇵🇹 Portugal 24.9% 2.6M 10.4M 8 🇬🇵 Guadeloupe 24.6% 92.0K 374K 9 🇬🇷 Greece 24.4% 2.4M 9.9M 10 🇫🇮 Finland 24.2% 1.4M 5.6M 11 🇮🇲 Isle of Man 23.8% 20.0K 84K 12 🇩🇪 Germany 23.7% 19.9M 84.1M 13 🇭🇰 Hong Kong 23.7% 1.8M 7.4M 14 🇭🇷 Croatia 23.6% 909.0K 3.8M 15 🇸🇲 San Marino 23.5% 8.0K 34K 16 🇧🇲 Bermuda 23.1% 15.0K 65K 17 🇷🇸 Serbia 23.1% 1.5M 6.7M 18 🇧🇦 Bosnia & Herzegovina 22.9% 718.0K 3.1M 19 🇻🇮 U.S. Virgin Islands 22.6% 19.0K 84K 20 🇫🇷 France 22.5% 15.0M 66.7M 21 🇱🇮 Liechtenstein 22.5% 9.0K 40K 22 🇧🇬 Bulgaria 22.2% 1.5M 6.7M 23 🇸🇮 Slovenia 22.2% 470.0K 2.1M 24 🇱🇻 Latvia 22.2% 411.0K 1.9M 25 🇬🇬 Guernsey 21.9% 14.0K 64K 26 🇪🇪 Estonia 21.8% 293.0K 1.3M 27 🇪🇸 Spain 21.6% 10.4M 47.9M 28 🇨🇿 Czechia 21.2% 2.2M 10.6M 29 🇭🇺 Hungary 21.2% 2.0M 9.6M 30 🇩🇰 Denmark 21.1% 1.3M 6.0M 31 🇦🇹 Austria 21.1% 1.9M 9.1M 32 🇧🇪 Belgium 21.0% 2.5M 11.8M 33 🇸🇪 Sweden 20.9% 2.2M 10.7M 34 🇳🇱 Netherlands 20.9% 3.8M 18.3M 35 🇵🇱 Poland 20.8% 7.9M 38.1M 36 🇱🇹 Lithuania 20.7% 586.0K 2.8M Japan’s demographic profile has long raised concerns over labor shortages and economic growth. Policymakers are responding with automation and immigration strategies to adapt. Japan has been under the spotlight for its aging society, but it’s not the only one with a growing senior demographic. In fact, many European nations are also seeing a significant uptick in older adults. Europe: The Oldest Content by Median Age Of the 36 countries on this list, 28 are in Europe. They include Italy (25.1%), Germany (23.7%), and France (22.4%), all major European economic powerhouses. This growing population of older adults reflects Europe’s low birth rates and increasing life expectancy. With a median age of 44, Europe faces unique challenges in sustaining its welfare and pension systems. For example, many European countries already have some of the highest tax-to-GDP ratios, leaving little room for increased taxation to create more revenue room. This demographic shift is also influencing political and economic priorities across the continent, including unrest over increasing retirement ages. Small Territories, Big Senior Shares Smaller territories like Monaco (36.8%), Martinique (26.5%), and Montserrat (25.0%) have disproportionately high senior shares. These places often attract retirees or have low birth rates, skewing their demographic makeup. While their overall populations are small, their needs for senior-focused healthcare and services are growing fast, which may force governments to shift priorities away from education, or other services for younger demographics. If you enjoyed today’s post, check out Ranked: Cities With the Largest Working-Age Populations on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist. Tyler Durden Wed, 07/02/2025 - 04:15
What Parents Wish Their Children Could Grow Up Without
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What Parents Wish Their Children Could Grow Up Without With the technological advancements of the past two decades, a lot of new challenges have emerged for parents of young children. As they try to navigate the ever-evolving media and device landscape, it’s as difficult as it is important to strike the right balance between giving kids the chance to learn how to use technology and protecting them from the potential harm that early (over)use of smartphones and social media can doubtlessly inflict on a child’s development. Given the complexity of the task at hand and the lack of past experience to draw from, it’s understandable that many parents are uncertain how to manage their children’s device use, screen and social media time. And while they acknowledge the potential benefits of smartphones and social media, a sizeable share of parents would like to turn back the time for their children’s sake, according to a recent Harris Poll. As Statista's Felix Richter reports, when asked which things they wished had never been invented thinking about their child’s experience growing up, more than half of the surveyed parents said they wished for their kids that social media didn’t exist. You will find more infographics at Statista More specifically, 62 percent of respondents wished that TikTok had never been invented, 62 percent said they would have liked to spare their kids the toxicity of X (formerly Twitter) and 56 percent wished that Instagram didn’t exist. As the chart shows, the one thing parents wanted gone most for the sake of their children is online pornography, which more than 7 in 10 respondents hoped wouldn’t exist. Tyler Durden Wed, 07/02/2025 - 02:45
Control, Crisis, & Compliance: Endgame Logic Of Late Capitalism
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Control, Crisis, & Compliance: Endgame Logic Of Late Capitalism Authored by Colin Todhunter via Off-Guardiam.org, It must be made clear from the start that, drawing on the work of sociologist Max Weber, capitalism is an ‘ideal type’ concept. An ideal type is a conceptual tool that highlights certain key characteristics of a phenomenon by accentuating some elements while omitting others. It is not meant to perfectly correspond to any specific real-world instance but serves as a construct to analyse and compare social or economic phenomena. This framing is critical: while capitalism is often described as a system of free markets and voluntary exchange, in reality, it frequently relies on collusion, corruption and state-corporate coercion and violence. Having stated this, as an economic system, capitalism inherently requires constant growth, expanding markets and sufficient demand to sustain profitability. However, as markets saturate and demand falls, overproduction and overaccumulation of capital become systemic problems, leading to economic crises. When capital cannot be reinvested profitably due to declining demand or lack of new markets, wealth accumulates excessively, devalues and triggers crises. This tendency is linked to a long-term decline in the capitalist rate of profit, which has fallen significantly since the 19th century. Neoliberalism’s playbook Capitalism in the form of neoliberal globalisation since the 1980s has responded to these crises by expanding credit markets and increasing personal debt to maintain consumer demand as workers’ wages are squeezed or they are made unemployed. Other strategies have also been deployed. These include financial and real estate speculation, stock buybacks, massive bailouts, public asset selloffs, regulatory ‘reform’ and subsidies using public money to sustain private capital and boosting militarism, which drives demand in many sectors of the economy (one reason why Germany and other European countries are following in the footsteps of the US by boosting their spending on militarism and creating bogeymen as a justification). These financial manoeuvres are not isolated tactics but part of a broader neoliberal agenda that also involves deregulating international capital flows and exposure to global capital markets, resulting in the obsession of maintaining ‘market confidence’ to hedge against capital flight and surrendering economic sovereignty to finance capital. We also see the displacement of production in other countries in order to capture foreign markets. This global expansion of neoliberal capitalism is a form of imperialism, where powerful corporations and financial interests impose structural adjustments and policies that undermine local economies, especially in the Global South. The capture of new markets abroad is essential for capital accumulation and offsetting potential declining profitability at home. This imperial dynamic is particularly visible in the agricultural sector. For instance, the process involves the destruction of indigenous rural economies, the imposition of chemical-dependent industrial agriculture and transformation of food systems to benefit global agribusiness oligopolies. Think too of the profit-driven technofixes being rolled out by Big Tech and Big Ag: the ultimate commodification and corporate capture of knowledge, seeds, data and so on under the crisis narrative of impending Malthusian catastrophe. And this alludes to the fact that capital seeks ideological cover for its financial ambitions. The climate emergency narrative is being used to legitimise new financially lucrative instruments such as carbon trading and green investments, schemes designed to absorb surplus wealth under the guise of environmentalism. This reflects a broader pattern where perceived (or manufactured) crises are exploited to create speculative markets and investment opportunities that maintain capital accumulation. COVID and Ukraine This logic reached a new intensity during the COVID event, which provided a stark and recent illustration of how the ongoing crisis of neoliberal capitalism is exploited and managed, serving as a critical phase in its evolution. This event and associated lockdowns amplified structural inequalities and reshaped the dynamics of capital and control. COVID was used as a strategy of ‘creative destruction’, accelerating the destruction of millions of livelihoods globally and pushing small businesses towards bankruptcy. Rather than providing genuine aid to the public, COVID policies and massive government spending primarily benefited large corporations—boosting their margins while forcing smaller enterprises to the brink and consolidating corporate power. At the same time, COVID was used to justify unprecedented restrictions on freedoms, increased surveillance and digital control mechanisms. More on this later. Lockdowns helped reshape capitalist accumulation patterns by externally imposing economic shutdowns that monetary policy alone could not achieve. They created conditions for increased indebtedness for households, small businesses and (Global South) nations, corporate bailouts and the imposition of new forms of control, thereby managing the contradictions of capitalism through non-market means. According to Prof. Fabio Vighi of Cardiff University, financial markets were already collapsing before lockdowns were imposed; lockdowns did not cause the market crash in early 2022 but were imposed because financial markets were failing. Lockdowns effectively turned off the engine of the economy—suspending business transactions and draining demand for credit—which allowed central banks, particularly the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, to flood financial markets with massive emergency monetary injections without triggering hyperinflation in the real economy. Looking at Europe, investigative journalist Michael Byrant says that €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the financial crisis in Europe alone in 2020. This strategy was designed to stabilise and restructure the financial architecture by halting the flow of economic activity temporarily, enabling a multi-trillion-dollar bailout of Big Finance and large corporations under the guise of COVID relief. A bailout that dwarfed anything seen during the 2008 financial crisis. Lockdowns not only destroyed small businesses and accelerated corporate consolidation, but—unlike the 2008 bailouts—this process faced little opposition, as it was justified as a public health necessity. While COVID marked one phase of crisis management, the subsequent war in Ukraine has further accelerated these dynamics. It has served to redirect flows of energy, finance and industrial capacity. The destruction of Europe’s energy ties with Russia—via sanctions, decoupling and sabotage—engineered a forced dependency on high-cost US liquefied natural gas, delivering record profits to American fossil fuel firms (in 2022 alone, US LNG exports to the EU more than doubled—from 22 to 56 billion cubic metres—making up over half of all US LNG exports). As European industries faltered under the weight of inflation and energy instability, the US subordinated its allies through enforced dependency while securing new opportunities for accumulation at home. Dollar supremacy was reinforced, compliance internalised and capital relocated under the banner of war. In this scenario, Europe has become both a very junior partner and collateral damage with its economic sovereignty sacrificed on the altar of transatlantic profit realignment. The state, crisis and control This brings us to a broader understanding of the state’s role in maintaining the economic system. The state and ideology are crucial for maintaining capitalism’s economic base, with the state intervening through financial support and strategic market expansion. At the same time, ideology shapes public perception and legitimises actions by re-framing individual freedoms and exploiting crises like COVID and Ukraine to manage dissent and uphold elite power. This ideological reconfiguration aligns with technological transformation. The rise of artificial intelligence and advanced automation technologies—such as robotics, driverless vehicles, 3D printing, drone technology and even ‘farmerless farms’—will reshape the traditional mass labour force that underpins capitalist economic activity: it is being profoundly transformed and, ultimately, significantly reduced. Looking ahead, as economic activity is restructured through these technologies, the entire social infrastructure built to reproduce labour—mass education, welfare, healthcare—will be rendered increasingly unnecessary because fewer workers are needed to sustain production and services. This transformation alters labour’s classical role as a seller of labour power to capital, fundamentally changing the dynamics of the labour-capital relationship. The question is: if labour is defined in terms of its relation to capital and is the condition for the existence of the working class, why bother with maintaining or reproducing labour? In this context of social erosion, neoliberalism has already weakened trade unions, suppressed wages and increased inequality. And now the message is: get used to being poor or on the scrapheap, and dissent will not be tolerated. From surveillance to subjugation The so-called ‘Great Reset' anticipates a fundamental transformation of Western societies, resulting in permanent restrictions on liberties and mass surveillance. The World Economic Forum (WEF) has speculated about a future where people ‘rent’ rather than own goods (as seen in the widely circulated ‘you will own nothing and be happy’ video), raising concerns about the erosion of ownership rights under the rhetoric of a ‘green economy’, ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’. Climate alarmism and the mantra of sustainability are about promoting money-making schemes. Beyond this, these narratives also serve to cement social control. Neoliberalism has run its course, resulting in the impoverishment of large sections of the population. But to dampen dissent and lower expectations, the levels of personal freedom we have been used to will not be tolerated. This means that the wider population will be subjected to the discipline of an emerging surveillance state. To push back against any dissent, ordinary people are being told that they must sacrifice personal liberty in order to protect public health, societal security or the climate. Unlike in the old normal of consumer-oriented neoliberalism, an ideological shift is occurring whereby personal freedoms are increasingly depicted as being dangerous because they run counter to the collective good. In the 1980s, to help legitimise the deregulation-privatisation neoliberal globalisation agenda, government and media instigated an ideological onslaught, driving home the primacy of ‘free enterprise’, individual rights and responsibility and emphasising a shift away from the role of the ‘nanny state’, trade unions and the collective in society. We are currently seeing another ideological shift. As in the 1980s, this messaging is being driven by an economic impulse. This time, the collapsing neoliberal project. The masses are being conditioned to get used to lower living standards and accept them. At the same time, to muddy the waters, the message is that lower living standards are the result of mass immigration or supply shocks that both the Ukraine conflict and ‘the virus’ have caused. The net-zero carbon emissions agenda will help legitimise lower living standards (reducing your carbon footprint) while reinforcing the notion that our rights must be sacrificed for the greater good. You will own nothing, not because the rich and their neoliberal agenda made you poor, but because you will be instructed to stop being irresponsible and must act to protect the planet. Decreased consumption (your poverty) will be sold as being good for the planet by coopting the concept of ‘degrowth’; something to be imposed on the masses while elites continue to accumulate. This contrasts with genuine ecological or socialist degrowth proposals that would target elite consumption and redistribute resources. Meanwhile, the framework is in place to ensure that huge corporations and the super-rich continue to rake in near-record profits through militarism, an energy transition, a food transition, speculative finance schemes involving land, carbon trading, data monetisation, surveillance capital, pharmaceuticals, green bonds, commodities and agribusiness, real estate and climate risk derivatives. And there is always money available for Ukraine and various destabilisations around the world to further ensure the bottom line of giant corporations. India as global microcosm To illustrate global dynamics and the real-world impact of neoliberal policies, we can examine the case of India’s agricultural sector. Structural adjustment programmes imposed by institutions like the IMF and World Bank or bilateral agreements with the US have forced countries like India to radically transform their agricultural sectors. Subsequent directives have demanded dismantling public support systems such as state-owned seed supply, subsidies and public agricultural institutions, while promoting export-oriented cash crops to earn foreign exchange. This shift is part of a neoliberal agenda to further integrate agriculture into global capital markets, reduce the role of the public sector and open up the sector to foreign direct investment and multinational agribusiness corporations. The outcome in India thus far has been devastating for millions of small-scale farmers and rural dwellers. Neoliberal reforms have led to spiralling input costs, dependency on proprietary seeds and agrochemicals and the erosion of traditional farming systems. This has resulted in widespread indebtedness, economic distress and a decline in the number of cultivators—millions have been pushed off the land, many driven to suicide, and hundreds of millions face jobless growth and rural displacement. This restructuring facilitates the capture of agriculture by large agribusiness corporations and financial investors. These entities dominate global commodity trading and are increasingly consolidating control over seeds, inputs, logistics and retail. The public sector’s role is reduced to a facilitator of private capital, enabling the entrenchment of industrial, GMO-based commodity crop agriculture suited to corporate interests rather than local food security or ecological sustainability. Contrast this with agroecology, a means to free farmers from dependency on manipulated commodity markets, unfair subsidies and food insecurity. Agroecology prioritises local food sovereignty, ecological sustainability and farmer knowledge, opposing the reductionist, industrial agriculture paradigm promoted by capitalist agribusiness. In India, the policy of population displacement compels displaced rural workers to migrate to urban areas in search of precarious, low-paid employment or remain unemployed, swelling the ranks of a surplus labour force. This reserve army of labour is not accidental but serves a strategic function within global capitalism. It helps suppress wages and weaken the bargaining power of workers and trade unions both in India and internationally. By maintaining a large pool of cheap and insecure labour, capital can discipline workers through competition and insecurity. Moreover, many of these displaced Indian workers are absorbed into offshore factories and global supply chains, effectively acting as a tool to undermine labour rights and conditions in wealthier countries. This analysis reflects the country’s incorporation into the global capitalist system, where rural displacement and labour ‘flexibility’ are central to maintaining capitalist dynamics. There is a historical comparison to be made between the displacement of people from the land in England during the Industrial Revolution and the contemporary displacement of the peasantry in India under neoliberal capitalism. Just as the enclosure movement in England forcibly removed peasants from their land, pushing them into cities to become a labour force for emerging industrial capitalism, a similar process is unfolding in India today. Benign language This displacement is not simply a byproduct of ‘development’ but a deliberate process tied to capitalist accumulation and imperialist restructuring of agriculture, where local food systems and rural livelihoods are subordinated to corporate interests and global markets. Global communications and business strategy company APCO Worldwide is a lobby agency with firm links to the Wall Street/corporate US establishment and facilitates its global agenda. Some years ago, following the 2008 financial crisis, APCO stated that India’s resilience in weathering the global downturn has made governments, policy makers, economists, corporate houses and fund managers believe that the country can play a significant role in the recovery of global capitalism. Decoded, this means global capital moving into secure control of markets. Where agriculture is concerned, this hides behind emotive and seemingly altruistic rhetoric about ‘helping farmers’ and the need to ‘feed a burgeoning population’ (regardless of the fact this is exactly what India’s farmers have been doing). APCO talks about positioning international funds and facilitating corporations’ ability to exploit markets, sell products and secure profit. And the state has been actively obliging. The plan is to displace the peasantry, create a land market and amalgamate landholdings to form larger farms that are more suited to international land investors and export-oriented industrial farming. For instance, an MoU was entered into by the Indian government in April 2021 with Microsoft, allowing its local partner, CropData, to leverage a master database of farmers. CropData was to be granted access to a government database of 50 million farmers and their land records. As the database is developed, it will include farmers’ personal details, profiles of land held, production information and financial details. The stated aim is to use digital technology to improve financing, inputs, cultivation and supply and distribution. The unstated aims are to impose a certain model of farming, promote profitable corporate technologies and products, encourage market (corporate) domination and create a land market by establishing a system of ‘conclusive titling’ of all land in the country so that ownership can be identified and land can then be bought or taken away. Globally, the financialisation of farmland accelerated after the 2008 financial crisis. From 2008 to 2022, land prices nearly doubled throughout the world. Agricultural investment funds rose ten-fold between 2005 and 2018 and now regularly include farmland as a stand-alone asset class, with US investors having doubled their stakes in farmland since 2020. Meanwhile, agricultural commodity traders are speculating on farmland through their own private equity subsidiaries, while new financial derivatives are allowing speculators to accrue land parcels and lease them back to struggling farmers, driving steep and sustained land price inflation. As far as India is concerned, it is becoming a fully incorporated subsidiary of global capitalism. Displaced farmers and farm workers are pushed into urban sectors like construction, manufacturing and services, despite these sectors not generating enough jobs. This displacement facilitates the replacement of labour-intensive, family-run farms with large-scale, mechanised monoculture enterprises controlled by a few powerful transnational agribusiness corporations and financial institutions. Moreover, India is being directed to rely increasingly on its foreign exchange reserves to buy food on the international market as it is forced to eradicate its buffer food stocks. This process is driven by pressure from global agribusiness and finance capital, which seek to dismantle India’s public food procurement and distribution systems, including the Food Corporation of India (FCI) and the Public Distribution System (PDS). These state-backed mechanisms have historically ensured food security by maintaining strategic grain stocks and providing fair prices to farmers. Eliminating these buffer stocks would mean that India would no longer physically hold and control its own food reserves. Instead, it would have to depend on volatile global markets to procure essential food supplies, using foreign currency reserves. This shift would make India vulnerable to price fluctuations, speculation by investment firms and manipulation by multinational corporations dominating global commodity markets. The massive farmer protests in India were, in part, a resistance to these policies. Without buffer stocks, India would effectively be paying corporations such as Cargill to supply food, perhaps financed by borrowing on international markets. Resistance and refusal The narrative presented here reveals a deeply systemic crisis within capitalism—one that cannot be understood through isolated events, personality politics or short-term policy shifts. From financialisation, predatory practices abroad and speculative markets to state-backed bailouts, war and digital surveillance, capitalism continually reinvents mechanisms to prolong its accumulation cycle. This article exposes the underlying logic of an economic system marked by the increasing convergence of state and corporate power—a trajectory that points towards a shift away from ‘capitalism’, possibly towards a technocratic or even techno-feudalist system where e-commerce platforms, algorithms, programmable centralised currencies and monopolistic entities determine how we live. Such developments raise urgent questions about the future shape of society and, crucially, how a mass movement might resist without being co-opted or subverted. Yet, recognising these dynamics is the essential first step in fostering informed debate and effective resistance. However, the hegemonic class and its media and NGOs continue to divide the population along lines of race, religion, identity politics and immigration. They do anything and everything to sow division or sedate courtesy of gadgets, games, entertainment, infotainment and sports. Their media will do all it can to keep people in the dark about what is really happening and why. But even when people do manage to see through the smokescreen, they will try to promote apathy, convincing people that nothing can be done about any of it anyway. They will try anything to fragment opposition and suppress movements for systemic change. That is not to say resistance is absent—far from it, especially in the realm of food and agriculture (discussed in my books on the global food system linked to at the end of this article). The fightback against emerging digital authoritarianism is already underway and takes many forms: rights groups are challenging mass surveillance laws and practices in the courts; campaigns are mobilising to block or roll back digital ID schemes, facial recognition and mass data retention. Mass mobilisations against surveillance infrastructure are growing, as are acts of refusal in the form of non-compliance with digital ID requirements, opt-outs and public data obfuscation campaigns. There is also a burgeoning movement to build and promote peer-to-peer, federated or blockchain-based social networks and communication tools and to develop grassroots internet infrastructure that bypasses state and corporate control. International solidarity is crucial, too, to expose and resist the export of surveillance technologies and the global harmonisation of repressive policies. Meanwhile hundreds of millions endure poverty and many more face declining living standards and welfare cuts. At the same time, the super-rich have stashed an estimated $50 trillion in hidden accounts (as of 2020) and have only grown wealthier in recent years. And here lies the crux of the matter—economic power. While resistance to the surveillance state and digital authoritarianism is vital, the deeper struggle is against the concentration of wealth and control in the hands of a global corporate and financial elite. Across the world, workers, peasants and communities are organising through strikes, land occupations, agroecology, seed and food sovereignty movements, debt resistance and the fight to reclaim public goods. The task is to build movements capable not only of resisting but of transforming the structures of economic power that underpin the entire system. For further insight into all the issues discussed here, readers can access the author’s open-access books which can be read or downloaded on Figshare (no sign in or sign up required). Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge. Tyler Durden Tue, 07/01/2025 - 23:25
Trump Says Israel Agrees To 60-Day Gaza Ceasefire, Urges Hamas To Accept
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Trump Says Israel Agrees To 60-Day Gaza Ceasefire, Urges Hamas To Accept President Trump said Tuesday that Israel has agreed on terms for a 60-day ceasefire in Gaza and warned Hamas to accept the deal before conditions worsen. Trump announced the development as he prepares to host Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for talks at the White House on Monday. The US leader has been increasing pressure on the Israeli government and Hamas to broker a ceasefire and hostage agreement and bring about an end to the war in Gaza. “My Representatives had a long and productive meeting with the Israelis today on Gaza. Israel has agreed to the necessary conditions to finalize the 60 Day CEASEFIRE, during which time we will work with all parties to end the War,” Trump wrote, saying the Qataris and Egyptians would deliver the final proposal. “I hope, for the good of the Middle East, that Hamas takes this Deal, because it will not get better – IT WILL ONLY GET WORSE,” he said. Trump’s promise that it was his best and final offer may find a sceptical audience with Hamas. Even before the expiration of the war’s longest ceasefire in March, Trump has repeatedly issued dramatic ultimatums to pressure Hamas to agree to longer pauses in the fighting that would see the release of more hostages and a return of more aid to Gaza’s civilian populace. Israeli Minister for Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer was in Washington on Tuesday for talks with senior administration officials to discuss a potential Gaza ceasefire, Iran and other matters. Dermer was expected to meet with US Vice-President J.D. Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and special envoy Steve Witkoff. Earlier on Tuesday, Trump repeated his hope for forging an Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal next week. Asked if it was time to put pressure on Netanyahu to get a ceasefire deal done, Trump said the Israeli prime minister was ready to come to an agreement. “He wants to,” Trump said of Netanyahu in an exchange with reporters while visiting a new immigration detention facility in Florida. “I think we’ll have a deal next week.” Talks between Israel and Hamas have repeatedly faltered over a major sticking point – whether the war should end as part of any ceasefire agreement. About 50 hostages remain captive in Gaza, with less than half believed to be alive. The development came as over 150 international charities and humanitarian groups called on Tuesday for disbanding a controversial Israeli- and US-backed system to distribute aid in Gaza because of chaos and deadly violence against Palestinians seeking food at its sites. The joint statement by groups including Oxfam, Save the Children and Amnesty International followed the killings of at least 10 Palestinians who were seeking desperately needed food, witnesses and health officials said. Meanwhile, Israeli air strikes killed at least 37 in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, according to Nasser Hospital. “Tents, tents they are hitting with two missiles?” asked Um Seif Abu Leda, whose son was killed in the strikes. Mourners threw flowers on the body bags. Tyler Durden Tue, 07/01/2025 - 23:00
Why Couldn't The SCO Defense Ministers Agree On A Joint Statement?
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Why Couldn't The SCO Defense Ministers Agree On A Joint Statement? Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack, India refused to sign the document since it didn’t condemn late April’s Pahalgam terrorist attack... India found itself at odds with the SCO once again less than two weeks since it clarified that it didn’t participate in the group’s joint statement on the Iranian-Israeli War. This time its Defense Minister refused to sign the joint statement that was supposed to conclude last week’s meeting with his peers in Qingdao ahead of the leaders’ summit in Tianjin this autumn. The reason was that the document didn’t condemn late April’s Pahalgam terrorist attack even though it condemned terrorism in Balochistan. As this year’s chair, China has extra influence over the SCO’s workings during the events that it hosts, so it therefore follows that this might have been a deliberate provocation meant to signal support for Pakistan while snubbing India. To add insult to injury, Pakistan blames India for terrorism in Balochistan, which is why it was even more unacceptable from Delhi’s perspective for that issue to be mentioned while no mention was made of the Pahalgam terrorist attack to balance everything out. India’s conventional retaliation against Pakistan in the aftermath sparked the latest Indo-Pak Conflict between these two SCO members, however, so China or at least its supporters in the media might claim that omitting any mention of Pahalgam was meant to avoid further dividing the group. Be that as it may, it would have been predictable that this would result in India refusing to sign the SCO Defense Ministers’ joint statement, but that might have actually been what China was aiming for all along. To explain, a perception has taken root among some members of the Alt-Media Community and even some experts that India is the so-called “weak link” in the SCO, with the reason allegedly being its close economic and military ties with the US. Adherents ignore China’s much closer economic ties to the US, the Central Asian Republics’ growing military ones with the West in general (especially NATO member Turkiye), and the US’ attempt to subordinate India, however. It’s therefore an agenda-driven narrative. Nevertheless, this analysis here from early June argued that it was precisely this perception that accounts for why Russia lent credence to Trump’s claim that he personally stopped the latest Indo-Pak Conflict despite Delhi’s repeated denials, which hyperlinks to related pieces over the preceding month. The gist is that a pro-BRI policymaking faction comprised of anti-Western “hardliners” is rising in the Kremlin at the expense of the establishment’s balancing/pragmatist faction that currently calls the shots. Although the pro-BRI faction hasn’t been able to effect any tangible shift in policy towards (or rather, away from) India due to Putin being part of the balancing/pragmatist faction, that scenario would be of grand strategic importance for China. Russia and India would no longer jointly accelerate tri-multipolarity processes, thus making it more likely that a form of Sino-US bi-multipolarity could one day be restored. Russia would therefore become China’s “junior partner” while India would become the US’ in that event. Thus, China might have sought to provoke India into refusing to sign the SCO Defense Ministers’ joint statement so as to craft optics that could lend more credence to the claim of it being the SCO’s “weak link”, hoping that this can strengthen the influence of Russia’s pro-BRI faction. Russian Defense Minister Andrey Belousov effusively praised India during the summit though so no changes are expected under Putin, but if a member of the pro-BRI faction succeeds him, then this can’t be ruled out in the future. Tyler Durden Tue, 07/01/2025 - 21:45
CA Republicans Urge Amnesty For Illegal Immigrants
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CA Republicans Urge Amnesty For Illegal Immigrants Authored by Kenneth Schrupp via The Center Square, Six California Republican state lawmakers sent a letter to President Donald Trump urging Immigration and Customs Enforcement to avoid “sweeping raids” and create “a path to legal status” for “non-criminal undocumented immigrants.” “We have heard from employers in our districts that recent ICE raids are not only targeting undocumented workers, but also creating widespread fear among other employees, including those with legal immigration status,” wrote the lawmakers. “We urge you to direct ICE and DHS to focus their enforcement operations on criminal immigrants, and when possible to avoid the kinds of sweeping raids that instill fear and disrupt the workplace.” Signatories included state Sen. Minority Leader Brian Jones, R-San Diego. Jones authored a bill that failed in committee that would have required the prisons and jails in California to provide requested release dates to federal immigration officials for individuals convicted of serious or violent felonies or wobblers — crimes serious enough to be prosecuted as either a felony or a misdemeanor. Under existing state law, such cooperation is prohibited except in limited cases involving some serious or violent crimes. “We also call on your leadership to modernize our immigration process to allow non-criminal undocumented immigrants with longstanding ties to our communities a path toward legal status,” the letter continued. “America needs a system that reflects both compassion and lawfulness — one that upholds sovereignty while recognizing the reality on the ground.” “The last President to successfully tackle this issue was Ronald Reagan nearly 40 years ago, and it is long past time to modernize our immigration policies,” the lawmakers wrote. Reagan’s 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act allowed approximately three million undocumented immigrants who had continuously resided in the United States since before Jan. 1, 1982, to secure legal status. The last time a Republican presidential candidate won California was 1988 when Vice President George H.W. Bush was elected president. “Finally, we urge you to expand and reform the H-2A and H-2B visa programs to authorize more legal guest workers across the entire economy, and to streamline the process to make it easier for vital industries to get the workers they need,” wrote the lawmakers. “From construction to hospitality to food processing, California’s employers are struggling to fill positions.” According to the American Farm Bureau, the federal government authorized 384,900 H-2A temporary agriculture visas. The H-2B visa program for temporary non-agricultural workers is capped at 66,000 per year. The state’s latest jobs report found 5.3% of Californians, or 1.1 million, were unemployed in May. The latest federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data on California found there were 659,000 job openings in March 2025, suggesting there may be nearly two unemployed Californians for every open job. The letter’s signatories included primary author Sen. Suzette Valladares, R-Santa Clarita, along with Sens. Jones, Rosilicie Ochoa-Bogh, R-Yucaipa, and Assemblymembers Heath Flora, R-Ripon; Diane Dixon, R-Newport Beach, and Laurie Davies, R-Laguna Niguel. Tyler Durden Tue, 07/01/2025 - 20:55
New Mexico Is The Most-Dependent State On The Federal Govt, New Jersey The Least
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New Mexico Is The Most-Dependent State On The Federal Govt, New Jersey The Least How reliant is your state on Uncle Sam’s wallet? Every year, billions in federal tax dollars are redistributed to the 50 states and the District of Columbia through grants, contracts, and benefit programs. Visual Capitalist's Pallavi Rao ranks the states to see who benefits the most from the flows so readers can see the fiscal winners and losers at a glance. Data for this visualization comes from MoneyGeek, which uses Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis figures. Their dependency score blends two metrics: the state’s return‐on‐taxes ratio and the share of state revenues coming from federal sources. ℹ️ Return on taxes measures how much state residents—including businesses—receive in federal payments for every $1 paid in tax to the federal government. Importantly, this data does not include Medicaid payments. Finally, a state’s political affiliation is based on its voting history in the past five presidential elections. Ranked: States That Need the Federal Government the Most New Mexico tops the 2024 list for states most dependent on the federal government, with a perfect score of 100. Its residents receive $3.42 for every tax dollar they send to Washington, while the state covers nearly a third of its budget with federal funds. Rank State Political Affiliation Dependency Score Return on Taxes % of State Revenues From Federal Funding 1 New Mexico Blue 100 $3.42 30.7% 2 West Virginia Red 95 $2.91 27.0% 3 Alaska Red 94 $2.65 29.0% 4 Mississippi Red 91 $2.66 25.9% 5 District of Columbia Blue 88 $1.71 32.2% 6 Alabama Red 86 $1.90 26.7% 7 Kentucky Red 84 $1.68 30.1% 8 Arizona Red 80 $1.62 28.5% 9 Montana Red 80 $1.43 31.8% 10 Maine Blue 79 $1.78 23.3% 11 Hawaii Blue 77 $1.94 20.6% 12 Louisiana Red 76 $1.33 29.8% 13 Maryland Blue 76 $1.79 21.2% 14 Virginia Blue 72 $1.91 18.2% 15 South Carolina Red 64 $1.60 19.5% 16 Idaho Red 61 $1.15 21.8% 17 Michigan Blue 60 $0.99 22.9% 18 North Dakota Red 60 $0.96 26.6% 19 Oklahoma Red 60 $1.30 20.7% 20 Wyoming Red 58 $0.91 28.9% 21 Pennsylvania Blue 55 $0.92 24.0% 22 Indiana Red 55 $0.92 25.7% 23 Oregon Blue 50 $1.21 17.5% 24 Vermont Blue 49 $1.50 12.8% 25 Connecticut Blue 49 $1.09 17.6% 26 New Hampshire Blue 44 $0.90 21.0% 27 Arkansas Red 42 $0.85 22.7% 28 North Carolina Red 42 $0.88 21.5% 29 South Dakota Red 39 $0.97 15.0% 30 Iowa Red 38 $0.97 15.5% 31 Rhode Island Blue 35 $0.76 25.7% 32 Tennessee Red 35 $0.81 20.9% 33 Kansas Red 31 $0.89 16.8% 34 Texas Red 29 $0.75 22.9% 35 Utah Red 29 $0.79 18.7% 36 Florida Red 28 $0.79 18.9% 37 Nevada Blue 28 $0.88 16.4% 38 Wisconsin Blue 26 $0.85 17.5% 39 Georgia Red 26 $0.78 19.1% 40 Colorado Blue 21 $0.78 17.5% 41 Ohio Red 19 $0.66 21.0% 42 Delaware Blue 19 $0.46 26.3% 43 Illinois Blue 18 $0.76 17.5% 44 Massachusetts Blue 17 $0.60 22.5% 45 Missouri Red 16 $0.70 18.7% 46 Nebraska Red 11 $0.65 18.1% 47 New York Blue 8 $0.65 17.7% 48 California Blue 8 $0.73 14.5% 49 Minnesota Blue 7 $0.71 14.6% 50 Washington Blue 0 $0.59 16.5% 51 New Jersey Blue 0 $0.51 17.2% Note: The tax return ratio was given double-weight in the final score. West Virginia, Alaska, and Mississippi follow closely, each exceeding $2.60 in returns and relying on federal transfers for more than a quarter of state revenues. The outlier is the District of Columbia: despite a lower tax return multiple ($1.71), 32% of its revenue comes from the federal government. This is unsurprising given its role as the nation’s administrative hub. Federal Dependency: Red vs. Blue States MoneyGeek’s ranking reveals a partisan tilt: seven of the states with the top 10 dependency scores are red, including conservative strongholds such as Alabama, Kentucky, and Montana. Meanwhile, 11 of the 20 net tax recipient states have voted Republican in at least three of the past five presidential elections. Yet political color is not destiny. Deep-blue New Mexico and D.C. also sit near the top. MoneyGeek’s analysis points to economic structure rather than ideology: energy extraction, military installations, and a high share of retirees often correlate with greater federal inflows. The Big List of Donor States At the opposite end, New Jersey and Washington score zero, receiving roughly half a dollar back for every dollar paid their residents pay in taxes. California, New York, and Minnesota also run sizable “deficits,” each collecting less than 75 cents on the dollar. These donor states tend to have large, diversified economies and higher-than-average household incomes, boosting tax receipts while limiting eligibility for certain federal aid programs. Their contributions effectively subsidize public services elsewhere—fueling perennial debates over tax fairness and redistribution. For more insights, cross-reference this post with Visualizing $29 Trillion Economy by State on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist. Tyler Durden Tue, 07/01/2025 - 20:30
UPenn, Trump Admin Reach Deal To Strip Trans Swimmer Of Past Titles & Awards
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UPenn, Trump Admin Reach Deal To Strip Trans Swimmer Of Past Titles & Awards Authored by Aaron Gifford via The Epoch Times, The transgender swimmer who won an NCAA Division I crown in the women’s category in 2022 was stripped of that championship medal and all records as a female competitor at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) under the school’s recent agreement with the Department of Education, officials announced. The resolution agreement signed by UPenn administrators requires the school to prohibit males from competing in female athletic programs or occupying women’s bathrooms or locker rooms. It must also make a personal, written apology to every female swimmer who competed against the transgender athlete, Lia Thomas. “Today is a great victory for women and girls not only at the University of Pennsylvania, but all across our nation,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a July 1 news release. “The department commends UPenn for rectifying its past harms against women and girls, and we will continue to fight relentlessly to restore Title IX’s proper application and enforce it to the fullest extent of the law.” President Donald Trump issued an executive order earlier this year prohibiting males from competing in women’s sports. He cited the Title IX laws of 1972 that protected women’s sports. In April, the Trump administration suspended $175 million in federal aid to UPenn and said the school would lose additional federal funding unless Thomas’s titles were relinquished. The NCAA previously complied with Trump’s executive order and prohibited males from women’s sports. Thomas won a Division I NCAA women’s swimming championship in the 500-yard freestyle event in 2022 after competing on the men’s team from 2017–2020. Riley Gaines, a former Kentucky women’s swimmer who competed against Thomas, and Paula Scanlan, a former teammate of Thomas who had to share a locker room with the transgender athlete, have lobbied against male participation in women’s sports. “From Day 1, President Trump and Secretary McMahon vowed to protect women and girls, and today’s agreement with UPenn is a historic display of that promise being fulfilled,” Gaines said in a press release. “This administration does not just pay lip service to women’s equality: it vigorously insists on that equality being upheld.” UPenn released a statement acknowledging the agreement and Title IX obligations. “Penn remains committed to fostering a community that is welcoming, inclusive, and open to all students, faculty, and staff,” UPenn President J. Larry Jameson said in a July 1 news release. “I share this commitment, just as I remain dedicated to preserving and advancing the university’s vital and enduring mission. “We have now brought to a close an investigation that, if unresolved, could have had significant and lasting implications for the University of Pennsylvania.” Tyler Durden Tue, 07/01/2025 - 20:05
Rubio Announces USAID Has 'Officially' Ceased Operations
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Rubio Announces USAID Has 'Officially' Ceased Operations Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times, Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed on Tuesday the shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), which had been rapidly dismantled earlier this year by the Trump administration. In a blog post on the State Department’s website, Rubio wrote that foreign assistance provided by USAID had failed to deliver results for Americans and also said that the agency was part of the “globe-spanning NGO [non-governmental organizations] industrial complex” that was funded by taxpayers. “USAID has little to show since the end of the Cold War,” Rubio said. “Development objectives have rarely been met, instability has often worsened, and anti-American sentiment has only grown. On the global stage, the countries that benefit the most from our generosity usually fail to reciprocate.” Rubio wrote that as of July 1, the agency “will officially cease to implement foreign assistance” and that only assistance programs that align with the Trump administration’s priorities will be facilitated. Democrats and a union representing foreign service workers have strongly pushed back against the dismantling of USAID, claiming that cuts to the agency would lead to a reduction in aid to poor countries and would ultimately put lives in danger. But Rubio said in the blog post that USAID pushed anti-American ideas across the world along with “censorship and regime change operations” overseas and that it collaborated with NGOs that were “in league with Communist China and other geopolitical adversaries.” On the day of Rubio’s announcement, the American Foreign Service Association union, which has filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, said in a statement that USAID’s closure would cause the United States to lose its standing in the world and would impact the government’s capacity to wield “soft power.” “Rather than engage in constructive conversations to lessen the devastating impact of these layoffs, the administration chose instead to inflict maximum pain and hardship through a barrage of questionable—and likely illegal—policies, accompanied by dismissive and dehumanizing rhetoric, all delivered with little thought to implementation or human consequences,” the American Foreign Service Association stated. A new "analysis" published Monday in The Lancet, a once-reputable medical journal that disgraced itself during the COVID-19 pandemic, made the absurd claim that "14 million people could die over the next five years" because Donald Trump and the Trump administration cut funding to USAID. This "analysis" also claimed that from 2001-2021, per NBC News, that "USAID-funded programs prevented nearly 92 million deaths across 133 countries." Some Republicans in Congress welcomed Tuesday’s announcement. “America First: Every Dollar, Every Diplomat. Thank you, President Trump and Secretary Rubio, for your leadership,” GOP members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee wrote in a post on social media platform X. This comes just three weeks after Rubio ordered U.S. embassies around the world to proceed with a directive to fire all remaining staffers with USAID. A federal judge had temporarily blocked an executive order by President Donald Trump for mass firings at multiple federal agencies, including the State Department, and plaintiffs have argued that Rubio’s reorganization plan appears to violate that court injunction. The Trump administration said the plan was already underway when the order was issued. Earlier this year, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had made USAID one of its first targets to dismantle as part of a Trump administration initiative to reduce what it said was fraud, waste, and abuse within the federal government. At one point earlier this year, Rubio had served as the acting head of USAID while it was being dismantled. Tyler Durden Tue, 07/01/2025 - 19:15
Productivity Gains From Using AI
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Productivity Gains From Using AI As AI tools become increasingly integrated—and in some cases, even mandated—into professional workflows, their real-world impact on productivity is becoming more evident. This chart, via Visual Capitalist's Niccolo Conte, compares the average time it takes U.S. adults to complete 18 common work tasks with and without the use of generative AI, based on a December 2024 survey of 4,278 respondents conducted by Stanford University and the World Bank. Generative AI Improves Productivity by Over 60% Across all tasks, using generative AI reduced the average time taken to complete them by more than 60%. Here’s how much time using generative AI saved across 18 common work tasks, in average number of minutes: Task Time With GenAI (avg. minutes) Time Without GenAI (avg. minutes) Time Reduction Writing 25 80 -69% Active Learning 26 76 -66% Critical Thinking 27 102 -74% Troubleshooting 28 115 -76% Judgement and Decision Making 28 79 -65% Management of Material Resources 28 92 -70% Mathematics 29 108 -73% Time Management 29 77 -62% Complex Problem Solving 30 122 -75% Instructing 31 93 -67% Operations Analysis 31 98 -68% Systems Analysis 31 87 -64% Managament of Personnel 32 103 -69% Programming 33 129 -74% Equipment Maintenance 34 124 -73% Quality Control Analysis 36 103 -65% Management of Finances 38 106 -64% Technology Design 39 142 -73% Some of the largest gains came from highly technical or analytical tasks. For example, troubleshooting saw a 76% reduction in time, while critical thinking, programming, and technology design all showed over 70% time savings with generative AI. Interestingly, even human-centric tasks—such as instructing, judgment and decision-making, and management of personnel—benefited from AI tools, with time reductions ranging from 60–70%. Accelerating Work With AI While AI is often framed as a replacement for human labor, this data shows that human workers empowered by AI can do the same tasks far more efficiently. Writing, for example, dropped from an average of 80 minutes to just 25 minutes with generative AI. For complex cognitive functions like mathematics, systems analysis, and operations, AI reduced the time taken to complete tasks by over an hour. Furthermore, AI adoption is increasing rapidly. According to the survey, LLM adoption at work for respondents aged 18 or older increased from 30% in December 2024 to over 43% as of March/April 2025. If this trajectory continues, AI-driven productivity gains could scale from individual tasks to entire organizations, and potentially reshaping broader economic outcomes. AI is transforming how we work and live online, but which companies are leading this new era of technology? Find out in this infographic on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist. Tyler Durden Tue, 07/01/2025 - 18:00
FATF Warning On Stablecoin Crimes Is Not Anti-Crypto, Intel Firms Say
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FATF Warning On Stablecoin Crimes Is Not Anti-Crypto, Intel Firms Say Authored by Yohan Yun via CoinTelegraph.com, Cryptocurrency regulations are increasingly aligning with global standards; 73% of eligible jurisdictions have now passed laws to implement the Financial Action Task Force’s (FATF) Travel Rule. The Travel Rule mandates crypto service providers to collect and share users’ transaction data, similar to traditional finance requirements. On June 26, the FATF released its annual report that outlines how recent regulatory moves by jurisdictions are converging with its global Anti-Money Laundering (AML) framework. This is a direct result of a years-long campaign by the FATF to bring cryptocurrencies in line with traditional AML and Counter-Terrorist Financing (CFT) standards. The FATF spotlighted stablecoins and decentralized finance (DeFi) for the second consecutive year, highlighting their rising use in illicit finance, including by North Korean actors. The organization said it plans to release targeted papers on stablecoins, offshore crypto platforms and DeFi by next summer, hinting at where global crypto regulation may head next. FATF’s AML/CFT priorities are treated as a checklist by regulators to avoid getting isolated. Source: Joshua Chu How the FATF became the backbone of crypto regulation The FATF’s Travel Rule was extended to cover cryptocurrencies and exchanges in 2019 as part of the organization’s standards on AML/CFT. It was added to Recommendation 15 (R.15) — one of FATF’s 40 recommendations — as an interpretive note. Out of 138 jurisdictions, only one has achieved full compliance with R.15 in 2025. Meanwhile, 40 jurisdictions were assessed as “largely compliant,” up from 32 in 2024. Three jurisdictions were removed from the noncompliance category. The Bahamas is the sole jurisdiction to achieve full R.15 compliance at the time of writing. Source: FATF Compliance means a jurisdiction has enacted laws requiring the licensing or registration of virtual asset service providers (VASPs) — such as cryptocurrency exchanges and trading platforms — or has identified the legal persons conducting VASP-related activities. The licensing requirements across jurisdictions are “very similar,” including in regions vying to be labeled as “crypto hubs,” such as Singapore, Dubai and Hong Kong, Joshua Chu, co-chair of the Hong Kong Web3 Association, told Cointelegraph. The Monetary Authority of Singapore, the city-state’s central bank, recently issued a warning to crypto exchanges engaging in regulatory arbitrage by avoiding a local license and relying solely on overseas customers. The exchanges were advised to either get licensed or exit by the end of June. The move sparked debate over whether Singapore truly aims to become a powerhouse for digital assets. Some in the industry speculate that Hong Kong could benefit most from its regional rival’s crackdown on unlicensed exchanges. Chu warned that those looking for greener pastures in competing crypto hubs may end up disappointed, as all are adhering to the same FATF requirements. In fact, Singapore has issued more crypto licenses than Hong Kong. “Regulators are also deadline fighters. So, they will make last-minute announcements (probably knowing the [FATF] draft of the report by that point) to see how they can improve their position before the formal report comes out,” Chu said. “As a result, many jurisdictions have accelerated efforts to tighten controls, improve risk assessments and enforce the FATF Travel Rule. The FATF’s June 2025 report reflects this urgency, showing that while progress has been made, significant gaps remain in risk assessment, licensing and enforcement.” Hong Kong has also been sprinting to roll out additional crypto rules. In May, its upcoming Stablecoin Ordinance passed the Legislative Council. The city then released an updated policy statement in tandem with FATF’s report. The FATF said an increasing number of jurisdictions have now decided how they want to regulate their respective crypto sectors, with 82% of 163 respondents stating they’ve identified their preferred regulatory approach. There are two main directions jurisdictions can take: to permit or to prohibit, with prohibitions ranging from partial to blanket bans. Prohibition is becoming more common among Middle East and North Africa Financial Action Task Force and Eastern and Southern Africa Anti-Money Laundering Group members. However, the FATF warns that jurisdictions should consider this approach carefully, as full prohibition can be resource-intensive and difficult to enforce. “When jurisdictions choose to prohibit rather than regulate, they do not eliminate the presence of crypto within their borders. Instead, they relinquish oversight, enforcement leverage and visibility into illicit flows,” Hedi Navazan, chief compliance officer of 1inch Labs and vice chair of the Digital Asset Task Force of the Global Coalition to Fight Financial Crime, told Cointelegraph. “Let’s be real, crypto is borderless,” she added. China, an FATF member, has partially prohibited cryptocurrency-related activities, such as transactions and mining. But the decentralized nature of blockchain technology still makes cryptocurrencies largely accessible to the public. Although Beijing has banned Bitcoin mining, Chinese mining pools continue to control the majority of the network’s hashrate. Stablecoins and DeFi under the FATF spotlight Stablecoins and DeFi got their own sections in FATF’s report for the second consecutive year in the latest update. Stablecoins, in particular, have been among the biggest stories in crypto in 2025 so far, with major jurisdictions advancing legislative proposals for stablecoin licensing, including the GENIUS Act in the US, which opens doors for tech firms to launch private stablecoins. The European Union has pushed further with Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) Regulation, which sets rules for stablecoin issuers. But stablecoins have also been increasingly tied to illicit activities, including reliance by North Korean actors suspected of financing the state’s weapons program, with industry estimates suggesting 63% of illicit transaction volumes were denominated in stablecoins. The industry saw $30 trillion in stablecoin volume between May 2024 and 2025. Source: Visa/Allium “Stablecoins, especially USDT on the Tron network, have basically become the go-to tool for illicit actors. From North Korean hackers to scam networks… this isn’t just a niche problem anymore,” said Navazan. Despite growing regulatory attention, most jurisdictions are still struggling to apply FATF standards to DeFi. According to the FATF’s 2025 report, nearly half of the jurisdictions that have implemented or are working on the Travel Rule say that some DeFi platforms should be licensed as VASPs, but most haven’t identified any such entities in practice. Only four jurisdictions have formally registered DeFi entities, while just seven have taken supervisory or enforcement action. Source: FATF Out of 47 jurisdictions that claim DeFi can fall under VASP regulation, 75% have yet to find or license a single DeFi platform. Ignoring FATF standards can isolate an economy The FATF’s influence is embedded within the United Nations framework, with multiple UN Security Council resolutions urging member states to implement FATF standards. “This means jurisdictions face strong, concrete incentives to align their laws with FATF’s evolving standards, not merely out of goodwill but to avoid severe consequences,” Chu said. Gray listing serves as a powerful enforcement tool for FATF, as it places a jurisdiction under increased monitoring, resulting in economic and reputational consequences. Budding crypto hub Dubai was formerly on the gray list before the United Arab Emirates was removed in 2024. “While FATF does not make the law, you would be foolish to ignore it. When FATF speaks, regulators around the world listen. That’s how it’s always worked,” said Navazan. “If your country doesn’t align with those standards, it doesn’t just risk a poor rating — it risks becoming isolated.” The FATF’s statements, including its annual updates on crypto, offer a preview of where global regulations are headed. With stablecoins and DeFi emerging as key areas of concern in 2025, the FATF’s planned research into these sectors is expected to shape the next wave of compliance measures. Tyler Durden Tue, 07/01/2025 - 17:00
Family Of Karmelo Anthony Asks For Millions In Donations After Murder Indictment
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Family Of Karmelo Anthony Asks For Millions In Donations After Murder Indictment Things are not going well for Karmelo Anthony compared to a couple months ago. Despite confessing to the stabbing that led to the death of athlete Austin Metcalf at a track event on April 2, 2025 in Frisco, Texas, Anthony was given greatly reduced bail and allowed to remain under house arrest by a progressive activist judge. Anthony's family posted a public fundraiser on GiveSendGo which ultimately raised over $500,000 for legal expenses. Many of the donations included racially charged messages calling for Karmelo to be "protected" regardless of his crime simply because he is black and his victim was white. The stabbing has been represented as an act of self defense, but also as "payback" against white people. The call for donations was then amended to include money needed for "relocation" (a new home) after the family claimed they received threats. Karmelo was allowed by Texas courts to leave the state for an "undisclosed location" until his trial, a highly unusual accommodation. Furthermore, the Anthony's have engaged in a press bonanza which has turned the case into a circus. The family continues to assert that the stabbing of Austin Metcalf was an act of self defense, but video evidence might suggest otherwise. Reporters have been allowed to view footage taken of the incident (footage that will not be released to the public) and there are no reports of Metcalf attacking Anthony. Though accounts of the video are vague, there appears to be no evidence so far that Anthony was acting in self defense. Not long after reporters were allowed to see the video, a Grand Jury issued an indictment for Karmelo Anthony. The charge is murder. The Anthony's are now asking donors for even more money, to the tune of $1.4 million. The outcome should not be surprising given the known facts of the incident. Anthony admits to stabbing Metcalf. He admits to bring deadly weapon to a school track meet. He admits to invading the tent of another team and witnesses say that he refused to leave when asked. There is no report of Austin Metcalf having a weapon when he was stabbed by Anthony and deadly force cannot be legally used against another person unless a defender has a reasonable fear of mortal harm. Anthony and his family have exhibited no signs of remorse over the death of Metcalf. In fact, they have leaned into the racial undertones of the case. Dominique Alexander, founder and president of the Next Generation Action Network (NGAN) who has been representing the Anthony family in public, warned: "To the racists, the bigots, and those filled with hate who’ve targeted Karmelo, his family, and even myself – you do not intimidate us. We are not backing down." "This case is yet another example of what it means to be Black in America, where even our self-defense is questioned, scrutinized and politicized. My involvement – like many others — came as a direct response to the overwhelming hate, threats and outside influence that have surrounded this case since day one." He then asked Anthony's supporters for prayers, to support due process, and to "stand with us in the fight against white supremacy." The Anthony case is yet another reminder of progressive efforts to paint every minority criminal incident as a product of "racial inequality". Taking responsibility is absolutely out of the question, even in clear cut incidents of theft, rape, violence and murder. American society can no longer play the equity blame game in which minority criminals are given special treatment because of supposed historical grievances. When people are not punished for their trespasses, it inspires others to do the same under the assumption they will be able to get away with it. When an entire minority group thinks they can get away with criminal actions under the guise of social reparations or racial "revenge", then the danger of civil breakdown become very real. It's not just about minority criminal being emboldened, there is also the danger that the rest of society will take matters into their own hands to exact justice where they believe the court system will not. Tyler Durden Tue, 07/01/2025 - 16:40