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Sunday, November 30, 2025

2025-11-30

 **** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)


Economic and Market Fare:

Why wouldn't my opinion?

..................... Now the question becomes: Does this turn into the sustained year-end rally?
The early signs point that way.
Because when the underlying trend is up and the market gets a chance to break and doesn’t, that’s usually your tell.
This week wasn’t about one stat or a specific “thrust threshold.”
It was about the speed and intensity of the reversal.
Fast reversion from fear is one of the most bullish behaviors you can see inside an uptrend.


A systematic approach for analyzing labor data within the full Business Cycle Sequence.

 

....................... Today, the unemployment rate sits at a touch over 4.4% and in the FOMC Summary of Economic Projections, a move above 4.5% is not expected by a vast majority of committee members (highlighted in blue). 
It’s highly likely the unemployment rate exceeds the 4.5% level, given the sequence of deterioration (starting with the cyclical sectors), the throttling of labor intensity in the form of less full-time and more part-time work, and the trending momentum that already exists in the U3 rate.

For an FOMC that has clearly shown a preference or bias for labor over inflation, further adjustments lower in the Fed Funds rate should be expected.



Albert Edwards, the outspoken global strategist at Société Générale—a figure who even refers to himself as a “perma bear”—is certain that the current U.S. equity market, driven largely by high-flying tech and AI, is experiencing a dangerous bubble. (Société Générale, to be clear, does not hold the view that U.S. stocks or AI stocks are in a bubble, noting that Edwards is employed as the in-house alternative view.) While history often repeats itself, Edwards warned recently that the circumstances surrounding this cycle’s inevitable collapse are fundamentally different, potentially leading to a deeper and more painful reckoning for the economy and the average investor.

“I think there’s a bubble but there again I always think there’s a bubble,” Edwards told Bloomberg’s Merryn Somerset Webb in a recent appearance on her podcast Merryn Talks Money, noting that during each cycle there is always a “very plausible narrative, very compelling.” However, he was unwavering in his conclusion: “It will end in tears, that much I’m sure of.”

Edwards told Fortune in an interview that previous theories about a bubble were “very convincing in 1999 and early 2000; they were very convincing in 2006–2007.” Each time, he said, the “surge in the market was so relentless” that he just stopped talking about bubbles, “because clients get pissed off with you repeating the same thing over and over again and being wrong,” only to change their tune after the bubble bursts. “Generally, when you’re gripped by a bubble, people just don’t want to listen because they’re making so much money.” ...................................................

 “You’ve been around the block a few times, you just do become cynical,” he said, before correcting himself: “That’s not the right word. You become extremely skeptical of the full narrative.” ........................

Beyond equity valuations, Edwards has been highlighting two other major underlying risks that point to systemic vulnerability. First, Edwards emphasized the long-term risk of inflation in the West, driven by “fiscal incontinence.” Despite short-term cyclical deflationary pressure emanating from China—which has seen 12 successive quarters of year-on-year declines in its GDP deflator—Edwards said he believes the path of least resistance for highly indebted Western politicians will be “money printing.” At some point, the mathematics for fiscal sustainability “just do not add up,” forcing central banks to intervene through “yield curve control” or quantitative easing to hold down bond yields.

This is where Edwards’ long-held thesis about Japan comes in, what he calls “the Ice Age.” Around 1996, he said, he started thinking that “what’s happening in Japan will come to Europe and the U.S. with a lag.” He explained that the bursting of the Japanese stock bubble led to all kinds of nasty things: real interest rates collapsing, inflation going to zero, bond yields going to zero. Ultimately, it was a period of low growth that Japan still has not been able to break out of. The difference with the U.S., he added, is that Japanification actually started happening in 2000 with the dotcom bubble bursting, but “the relationship broke” between the economy and asset prices as the Fed began “throwing money” at the problem through QE. The U.S. has essentially been in a 25-year bubble since then that is due to burst any day now, he argued—it’s been due any day for a quarter-century. ...........



The data released over the past forty-eight hours in the USA paint a picture that is no longer compatible with the idea of a soft landing.


Parts of the America's economy are already in deep trouble, and the weakness could drag the whole country into a recession.

.............. Major employers in industries like homebuilding and restaurants are looking shaky, and they offer ominous signs about the direction of the overall economy. By getting a sense of what sectors and industries are struggling, you can get a forward-looking sense of the economy's trajectory and a clearer-eyed view of the possibility of recession.

The problem with relying on broad bundles of data is that things typically appear placid on an aggregate level right up until things go wrong. 


Takeaway: Gold is a core asset allocation that lasts through every cycle.

................... Gold consistently performs in Quad 1, Quad 3, and especially Quad 4, where slowing growth and falling inflation create its most powerful setup.



................. The raw numbers of the most liquid markets are breathtaking. The Bank for International Settlements recently published its latest three-yearly survey of trading in foreign exchange and interest rate derivatives — which are vital in keeping financial markets moving. Trade in interest rate derivatives this year is averaging $7.9 trillion per day. ‘Twas not ever thus. In 1998, when the BIS did its first triennial survey, it was $265 billion. 

Trading in currencies is $9.6 trillion per day — roughly double Germany’s gross domestic product, or all that it produces in a year. Despite all the talk of the retreat of globalization and the decline of trade, this is triple the FX volume that the BIS recorded in the spring of 2007, on the eve of the GFC.


How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America


For our economy to provide a nice life for all we will need structural reform. How bad is it? This bad.

................. Trump owns the economy now. Voters just told him they’re still broke and they’re blaming him for it.

But here’s what matters more than any election. From Tennessee to New York, voters are asking the same question. Why can’t I afford to live well?

This is why Trump won twice. Why we elected Barack Hussein Obama promising hope and change, twice. Obama’s efforts were too little too late, and that led us to the Obama/Trump voters. We kept looking for hope and change in increasingly desperate places. Like an addict searching for our next fix, Americans are going to more and more dangerous places out of sheer desperation. 



Japan Fare:

Japan is easily the most interesting macro market (for now anyway)

While I concentrated on the risks in private credit last week, movements in Japanese bonds and currencies made some people worried.

One very widely spread post made some crazy predictions. Be warned, my ranting response is below (nothing too new for long-time Charts & Notes readers). .............

........... These effects are very technical and apart from providing some education on how the yield curve twists and turns with all of these macro happenings, it is mostly designed to show how prices and yields moving aren’t the end of the world.



QOTW:


Rate cut, no rate cut…maybe a rate cut? Everyone watching their portfolios swing wildly while trying to figure out if this is the start of something worse or just noise. And that’s the problem with discretionary trading during times like these. You’re making decisions every single day based on incomplete information, headlines that contradict each other, and your own emotional state



Bubble Fare:


............. This split is normal. Every major innovation cycle creates a divide between skeptics who see overvaluation and optimists who see a new era of growth. The challenge for investors is not to take sides, but to understand what bubbles do, why they’re so hard to identify in real time, and how to benefit from them without being destroyed by them.

Yes, we may be in the second market bubble of this century. Alternatively, the market may be pricing in a shift as fundamental as the transition to either electricity or the internet. Either way, investors must think clearly, act deliberately, and avoid the kind of blind speculation that turned past booms into bloodbaths.

....................... Understanding that a bubble can be beneficial involves recognizing two key points.
  1. You don’t dismiss the boom simply because it is speculative. You acknowledge that capital is being deployed and that it will have future positive implications.
  2. You accept that risk is inherent during such periods. From one angle, the bubble looks reckless. However, from another, it seems like the stage where breakthroughs become possible. By appreciating the positive aspect, you gain clarity about what is happening and why it matters for investors.
You should treat a bubble not as a spectacle to be ignored, but as a phenomenon to be studied. Market bubbles are periods where capital loses discipline, but that loss of discipline funds the future. The value created during inflation often matters more than the value destroyed during the burst.

............. Calling a market bubble too early can be just as costly as calling it too late. As Howard Marks wrote:
“Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.”


AI:


Nvidia’s narrative took a major hit this week due to multiple factors including the emergence of a credible rival, OpenAI’s struggles, and a trade war pincer that has them caught between Trump and China.

Is a Government Backstop the Bull Case?

Nvidia’s narrative, which it kicked off with the launch of Ampere architecture and A100 chip in 2020, subsumed any competing story-lines in the post-pandemic American stock markets in 2022, and engulfed the entire American economy under Trump.

Nvidia’s narrative that Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini ARE the future of technology and the global economy has made them the world’s largest corporation by market cap.

The Trump administration may be all-in with Nvidia’s narrative and may be signaling its willingness to backstop the industry to prevent the AI bubble popping. ..........

........... 
Marcus and Zitron remain opinion leaders in the space, however.

Marcus is currently dealing with the emergence of a class of rival AI experts who’ve been on the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) bandwagon and are now getting off.

AGI is the patent nonsense that LLMs are just a few months away from creating super-intelligent, self-replicating machines.

Naturally, belief in AGI has been the conventional wisdom in Silicon Vally for the last couple of years and continues to be a big part of the bulls’ case for the Nvidia narrative.

Marcus has taken lots of heat for calling bullshit on LLMs as the road to AGI from the get go, and is now expressing mixed feelings about the big names who are joining him on the critical side.

Those names include Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever.

As for Ed Zitron, his latest “The Hater’s Guide To NVIDIA” is well worth the subscription price and the estimated 54 minute reading time. ............

Zitron cites pseudonymous finance poster “Just Dario” as someone who’s provided key insights into the workings of Nvidia and Dario’s latest piece on the company is worth reading in full, but the TL;DR explanation of Dario’s role in the larger Nvidia narrative wars can be grasped from glancing at these tweets about whether or not Enron is a valid comparison point for Nvidia: ............

Yahoo also quoted “Jim Chanos, who is famous for predicting the fall of Enron, (who) thinks the comparison between Nvidia and Lucent bears weight.”

“They’re [Nvidia is] putting money into money-losing companies in order for those companies to order their chips,” Chanos said.

As for “Big Short” Burry, his new Substack is a bit rich for my blood, although serious investors will likely find it a bargain, but his latest contribution to Nvidia’s narrative involves comparing Nvidia to Cisco before the dot.com bust: ............

The Mid-Wits Weigh In

No debate in 2025 would be complete without one of the Abundance bros weighing in.

Naturally Ezra Klein’s “Abundance” co-author Derek Thomas[pson] (co-writing with Understanding AI founder Timothy B. Lee is coming down in the middle with “Six reasons to think there’s an AI bubble — and six reasons not to” and shrewdly saves the bull case for its paying customers. Talk about knowing your audience.

The Real Bulls Include Jim Cramer and AGI Crazytown’s Finest

But I’ll leave the real bull case to the legendary CNBC commentator Jim Cramer ..........

But the far more entertaining bull case for the Nvidia narrative is made by Utopia believers like Tomas Pueyo ..... Admittedly, I have an immediate and utter disdain for anyone pitching imminent Utopia but a couple of gummies and Pueyo’s stuff becomes quite entertaining. ............


There are 12 statistics, factoids, and studies that dominate every discussion about whether artificial intelligence is a bubble. Here's a deep-dive into all 12 arguments



As the AI 'circle jerk' rages on, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, will need to raise at least $207 billion more by 2030 to simply keep the lights on, according a new analysis by HSBC which takes into account recently disclosed megadeals with Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle. 

Even with bullish assumptions that include 3 billion users, rapid subscription growth, and a giant slice of enterprise AI spending, the company's projected revenues are nowhere near its exploding bills for energy and chips, the bank says. ...........

While HSBC provides a sobering view of OpenAI, they're actually very bullish on AI as a concept ....


Or is pouring a pile of government money in just a coincidence?


The machine learning community is finally waking up to the madness, but the detour of the last few years has been costly.

........... Sutskever also said that “The thing which I think is the most fundamental is that these models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. And it’s super obvious. That seems like a very fundamental thing.”

Some of this may come as news to a lot of the machine learning community; it might be surprising coming from Sutskever, who is an icon of deep learning, having worked, inter alia, on the critical 2012 paper that showed how much GPUs could improve deep learning, the foundation of LLMs, in practice. He is also a co-founder of OpenAI, considered by many to have been their leading researcher until he departed after a failed effort to oust Sam Altman.

But none of what Sutskever said should actually come as a surprise, especially not to readers of this Substack, or to anyone who followed me over the years. Essentially all of it was in my pre-GPT 2018 article “Deep learning: A Critical Appraisal”, .... and/or in my 2022 “Deep learning is hitting a wall” evaluation of LLMs, which explicitly argued that the Kaplan scaling laws would eventually reach a point of diminishing returns (as Sutskever just did), and that problems with hallucinations, truth, generalization and reasoning would persist even as models scaled, much of which Sutskever just acknowledged. .........................

................ To be fair, nobody knows for sure what the blast radius would be. If LLM-powered AI didn’t meet expectations and became valued less, who would take the hit? Would it just be the “limited partners” like pension funds who entrusted their money with VC firms? Or might the consequences be much broader? Might banks go down with the ship, in 2008-style liquidity crisis,possibly forcing taxpayers to bail them out? In the worst case, the impact of a deflated AI bubble could be immense. ............................

The whole thing looks incredibly fragile.

To put it bluntly, the world has gone “all in” on LLMs, but, as Sutskever’s interview highlights, there are many reasons to doubt that LLMs will ever deliver the rewards that many people expected.


A skeptic’s pre-mortem

Three years ago, on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT was released. It’s been one of the fastest-growing consumer products in history, and gotten more press than God. But I think a fair case can be made that it is not what it has often been cracked up to be, and probably never will be.

Before I dive in, let me make four of my core beliefs, often misrepresented, absolutely clear:

I believe that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is achievable.

I believe that there is at least a chance that artificial general intelligence will be of large net benefit to society.

I just don’t happen to think large language models like ChatGPT will get us there. (I do think they have their uses, but I worry about their costs to society, around bias, cybersecurity, misinformation, nonconsensual deepfake porn, copyright theft, energy and water usage, the gradual enshittification of the internet, the severe hit to college education, and so on.)

I think that the recurring core technical problems that we have seen (as discussed below) with LLMs aren’t going way; instead they inherent to the technology.

In short, I am at least modestly bullish on AGI, but don’t think that large language models like ChatGPT are the droids we are looking for. And I certainly don’t think that ChatGPT has lived up to expectations. Increasingly, it appears that others are recognizing this as well.

Let’s review. ....................................

............... And worse, the economy itself has become so wrapped up in generative AI and its promises, that the economy itself is, by many accounts in serious jeopardy. (Early in the week a prominent person at the White House, David Sacks, warned of a recession, if generative AI were to go south, in a tweet that many people read as laying the groundwork for a potentially costly bailout of generative AI.)

If the economy goes down, ChatGPT will be at the center of the mess.

Nobody should be surprised if things play out that way. .....................



........... He continued, "We also now have all 7 preconditions for a bubble that we are not yet in (historically, the P/E at a bubble peak has been 45x-72x on 12-month trailing earnings for 30-43% of global market cap versus Mag 6 today on 33x)." 

Garthwaite pointed to a previous analysis in the UBS Global Economics and Strategy Outlook that shows today's market performance patterns are similar to those in March 1998. 

........... We think there is more justification for a bubble (which we are not yet in) to form than any of the many others we have seen owing to the uniquely quick adoption rate of Gen AI and the threat of monetisation of government debt .................


Google’s AI infrastructure chief tells staff it needs thousandfold capacity increase in 5 years.

While AI bubble talk fills the air these days, with fears of overinvestment that could pop at any time, something of a contradiction is brewing on the ground: Companies like Google and OpenAI can barely build infrastructure fast enough to fill their AI needs.

................. the aggressive plans for AI data center expansion reflect Google’s calculation that the risk of underinvesting exceeds the risk of overcapacity. But it’s a bet that could prove costly if demand doesn’t continue to increase as expected.


As I find the topic of Google TPUs extremely important, I am publishing a comprehensive deep dive, not just a technical overview, but also strategic and financial coverage of the Google TPU.



.............................. And that, of course, leads us to the famous alignment problem—the idea that to guard against the existential risk of AI taking over, we need to align AI with human values. The concept actually goes back to 1960 and the AI pioneer Norbert Wiener, who described the alignment problem this way: “If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot efficiently interfere... we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire.”

But there’s actually a larger alignment problem that goes much farther back than 1960. To align AI with human values, we ourselves need to be clear about the universal values we ascribe to. What are our inputs? What’s our model spec? What are we training ourselves on to be able to lead meaningful lives? 

These are the questions we need to answer before we decide what inputs we want AI to draw on. Even if we could perfectly align AI with where humanity is right now, the result would be suboptimal. So now is the time to clarify our values before we build a technology meant to incorporate and reflect them. ..............


How AI has encrusted our culture and social sphere in a sedimentary layer of slop.

One of the more perplexing things about the AI bubble is how relatively little we have to show for it. Mostly, it’s chatbots, some coding automation, and slop. A lot of slop.

You can spend hours reading through eye-popping Nividia earnings reports and lengthy columns expounding on the transformative powers of the technology and analysts’ takes on what may be the biggest bubble of our generation. That’s to say nothing of the breathless proclamations of tech executives, of course, or the federal government’s own enthusiastic overtures. But then you flip on Saturday Night Live and the first sketch they run after the monologue reminds you that a lot of the general public’s experience of AI is actually more like the one depicted here: .......



Everyone knows data centers use a lot of water. What’s less known is how they can poison the drinking water that remains. ........................

ICYMI: Our deep dives into AI
If you’d like to learn more about the full environmental footprint of AI and data centers—from climate impact to how communities are fighting back—here are three essential pieces from the HEATED archives.








China Fare:









Charts:
1: 
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(not just) for the ESG crowd:


So I need to get this off my chest. As I explained previously, there’s a disagreement among climatologists, who are roughly divided into two camps. The “climate moderates”, who think climate sensitivity is around 3 degree and the “climate radicals”, who think it is higher, with Hansen arriving at 4.5 or 4.8, depending on the method.

The question that’s on my mind is which of these camps is closer to the truth. When humans double CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, do we face ~3 degree of global warming, or ~4.8 degree? And why can’t the scientists arrive at agreement on which of these numbers is correct? ..............

............... But there’s the thing: Depending on the period you look at, a doubling of CO2 will have been from a different baseline. There’s no inherent reason why going from 180 parts per million to 360 needs to result in the same increase in temperature as going from 400 to 800 parts per million. 

.................... But anyway, to me the mystery is solved now. I expect global warming will continue to unfold much faster than the “climate moderates” anticipate.


The ocean is undergoing unprecedented, deep-reaching compound change

Earth's ocean, the planet's life-support system, is experiencing rapid and widespread transformations that extend far below its surface. A promising international study published in Nature Climate Change reveals that vast regions of the global ocean are experiencing compound state change, with simultaneously warming, becoming saltier or fresher, losing oxygen, and acidifying—clear indicators of climate change pushing marine environments into uncharted territory.


Deforestation and degradation have reversed the continent’s role as a carbon sink, shows study in Scientific Reports



As our economic, social and environmental problems worsen, nuclear energy has resurfaced as the way out of our planetary crisis. Its appeal is strong — high energy density and zero-carbon output. But its reality is far less reassuring.

I’m not opposed to nuclear power. It’s just far too expensive and scales too slowly to matter in any real window of climate or ecological urgency. ..................

The economics simply don’t work at those costs.  ...............

Small modular reactors (SMRs) don’t solve this; they just break the problem into smaller, still-costly pieces. ................

But if cost were not a factor, how fast could nuclear scale? .............

Technology won’t save us from the mess technology created. Nuclear may have a role but not the one its followers imagine.





Sci Fare:

We asked the world's foremost minds to highlight some of the game-changing scientific breakthroughs shaping our world since the year 2000





............ This is typical of our handling of all problems. We just pretend they don’t exist and won’t have serious consequences if we ignore them. 

............ It’s simple. We have the technology, and we aren’t doing it. Insanity.



U.S. B.S.:


The simplest measure of a government’s legitimacy is whether or not it works for the benefit of the people. Democrats also believe the government should be selected by the people.

America does not meet either criterion at this time. Yes, there are elections, but the duopoly means that voters tend to choose from a small slate, pre-selected by others. The most visible occasion of this was when Obama had every Democratic presidential nominee candidate drop out so that Biden could defeat Bernie Sanders. Year in, year out, most of the candidates put up for election are those chosen by party insiders. ........................

So first there’s a huge barrier to electing people who support outsider views, then most of them are co-opted. If there’s a real threat of an outsider taking the top seat, the establishment works hard against them. We saw that with Corbyn ...........

It’s fair to say that most Western countries don’t really have “government by the people.” The mechanisms still, partially, exist. The form is there, but the reality isn’t. They’re political oligarchies. (The EU is worse than the US.) ..................

These days the great opponent is China, and the one party communist state running a hybrid capitalist/socialist economy. And the problem for the West is that China’s government, while not “by the people” is definitely “for the people”. ..............

The problem for the West is simple: China is better governed than almost any (perhaps actually any) Western country. And that governance shows plenty of signs of being in the interests of the vast majority of Chinese, whose lives it has vastly improved. Democracy itself is in danger. If it doesn’t produce better results for ordinary people, and if it’s basically fake anyway, why keep it? ..........

Democracy, if it wants to survive as a major force in the world, needs real reform (all so-called reforms in the West over the past 50 years have been about hurting ordinary people to benefit rich people). If it isn’t re-aligned to work for the majority, its day as a major force in the world faces a bloody sunset.


War Without End in the Age of Permanent Crisis

Introduction to The Anatomy of Empire
We are living through a global conflict of connected crises—in Ukraine, Gaza, the South China Sea, Palestine, Iran, and Venezuela—and within the fraying social fabric of Western nations themselves. These are not isolated eruptions but the convulsions of an Empire consuming itself, driven by internal contradictions it can no longer hide.

Soaring national debt, decaying domestic infrastructure amidst unparalleled military expenditure, dependence on force to secure an economic order that long since lost its legitimacy—this crisis is the inevitable culmination of centuries of capital accumulation fused with the unbridled application of raw military power.

The Anatomy of Empire, tries to shed light on the path led us to this precipice. It is a history not of chance, but of design; not of isolated events, but of a systemic logic pursued with relentless determination. From the global collaboration with fascism to the architectural pillars of the neoliberal order, we trace the myriad secrets and open secrets that have propelled us forward.

In part one of Rise of the MIC we followed the conception, birth and rise to global dominance of the military industrial complex’ economic model of industrial destruction. Now, in the second part we will trace how the system mutated and metastasized; from emergence of neoconservatism as the militant voice of the MIC; to the cultural arsenal of Hollywood and the 24-hour news cycle manufacturing consent; to the outsourcing, privatization and financialization of organized destruction ..............



It’s a full-time job protecting your mental lucidity in this dystopia.

It was hard enough to form a clear perception of reality when all we had to deal with was the propaganda of plutocrat-owned media corporations and the indoctrination of our power-serving education systems. Now on top of those still-persisting obfuscations we’ve got things like Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, imperial information ops like Wikipedia, and an exponentially growing field of AI perception management to work through.

I remember watching Julian Assange give a talk way back in 2017 where he described a future in which artificial intelligence is able to harvest the data of individual internet users and then manipulate the information they see online in a custom-built perceptual prism designed to manipulate their thinking at a level far too subtle to be noticed. He compared it to the way a computer program can play chess with strategies looking 20 to 30 moves ahead at a level the human brain just can’t keep up with, saying that we’ll one day have artificial intelligence that can manipulate public perception with a similar degree of sophistication.

............ We’re on a trajectory where soon all our information will be stored and analyzed by artificial intelligence controlled by governments and billionaire megacorporations who can then use that information to surveil, manipulate and oppress us. All our medical and financial information. Whole psychological profiles based on what we view and say online. A far more thorough assessment of our personalities than we could ever create on our own.

.......... Our rulers see AI as an opportunity to recapture the degree of social control that was shaken by the arrival of widespread internet access — a loss of information hegemony we’ve seen oligarchs and empire managers openly complaining about with regard to how social media has spread public dissent on issues like Israel and Palestine.

Journalist Whitney Webb has flagged the fact that Google plutocrat Eric Schmidt co-authored a book with war criminal Henry Kissinger which envisions a future where the public becomes increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence to do our thinking and creative expression for us, allowing our consciousness to become further and further intertwined with these oligarch-owned technologies. 

............ These are the kinds of things we’ll have to do to preserve ourselves as we move into this strange new world, on top of the usual business of staying informed and learning to see through the propaganda illusions. Luckily these things are all good for us anyway; the path toward protecting our humanity also just happens to be the path toward becoming a healthier human being and making the world a better place. .......



Geopolitical Fare:


The Trump administration has put forward the first peace proposal made since April 2022 that includes any of Russia’s demands for an end to hostilities in Ukraine. As of this moment, the US has presented the proposal to Ukraine, adjusted the proposal language in response, and the revised version will presumably be forwarded to Moscow. Meanwhile, European leaders have weighed in with a fantasy counter proposal that assumes that Europe has the money and weapons to keep the war going. It doesn’t.

The Western commenting class has been largely negative toward the proposal, claiming that it is an effort to trap Russia, and that the Russians will never accept it. The naysayers point to clumsy language used by the Americans regarding Russian funds that the Europeans have been trying to steal for a few years now. However, what I’m stuck wondering is what the Russians think of the deal? Using RT (Russia Today) as a proxy for the Russian view, RT seems quite appreciative of the initial proposal.

Part of what is strange in the response by Western advocates of an end to the war is that the initial proposal was intended to be a sketch, not a negotiated solution. Sure, it’s amateurish, but with between one and two million Ukrainians dead and nuclear tensions rising, who cares if it is scribbled in dog excrement? Some version of much of what the Russians are demanding is included in the sketch. It seems far more a basis for further negotiations than the tone-deaf twaddle that Donald Trump previously sent across. ...........

Whatever one might think of the Trump administration, as the Democrats are making clear, their return to power will mean permanent war. To state the obvious, the Republican policy to date has been more war. So, this isn’t to defer to the Republicans as the solution. It is to state that the West needs a better way. The current system makes a few Americans rich for slaughtering millions abroad. The phrase ‘perverse incentives’ doesn’t begin to describe the misanthropic horror show that this arrangement has produced.

Behind the peace proposal has been regular dialogue between the Americans and the Russians that has not been reported in the American press. This suggests that the Trump administration is aware that it faces internal opposition from Democrats and national security Republicans, many of whom have their campaigns funded by the MIC. Given Mr. Trump’s capricious nature and monumentally bad cabinet appointments, it would be foolish to claim progress until the needed signatures and enforcement mechanisms are firmly in place. .................

My take is that despite its flaws, the current proposal represents the best starting point for negotiations to end the bloody and pointless American-made slaughter in Ukraine. If I hadn’t been reading the Russian accounts of the negotiations, I might be closer to the position of the naysayers. But the Russians have been relatively upbeat about prospects for peace. And given that the Russians tend to be straightforward in a way that Americans aren’t, the hope might be sincere. ..............


Frontline events and peace narratives. Suicide bombers and suicide country. Methed-up press gangs and civil war.

Within a few months, the Russo-Ukrainian war will have lasted three years. Trump will have been trying to put an end to it for a year. And the longer things last, the more tiring is the repetition.

With Russia winning on the battlefield, the US presents Ukraine with a peace deal which represents Russian interests. The western media, in its infinite wisdom, is currently hard at work trying to demonstrate that Trump’s peace deal was ‘written originally in Russian and translated’. But were that were true, it wouldn’t matter.

Even if Trump’s envoys handed Ukraine a peace deal Putin wrote by hand and signed in Russian, it wouldn’t change the essence — that Ukraine, constantly retreating on the battlefield, isn’t going to get an appealing deal.

Anyway, faced with a bad deal, Kyiv decides not to accept it. With plenty of cheering from its wonderful western partners, of course. Zelensky and his men get to work presenting their ‘edited version’ of the deal they were given, a version that Russia will no doubt reject (assuming it even approved of the initial American deal).

Cue another few months or years of Ukrainian retreats, at which point they will be presented with a worse deal. I’ve seen this before…






............ Drugs come into the United States from numerous nations in Latin America, and it sure is an awfully interesting coincidence that the one they’re focused on regime changing to stop the drug flow just so happens to be the socialist country with the largest proven oil reserves on the entire planet.

Americans who’ve been rejecting the propaganda for wars in the middle east but now fully buy into it for regime change in Venezuela are the weirdest. That’s like managing to pull your head out of your ass, taking a deep breath, and then shoving it right back in there. 

US regime change interventionism is reliably disastrous, and is always justified based on lies. This would be true even if Venezuela really was a major drug trafficking threat and even if Maduro really was the world’s most evil dictator, neither of which are the case. Only idiots and sociopaths are clapping along with the war drums.


All the boring stuff after defeat in Ukraine.

Pundits are providing us with a lot of innocent amusement these days, and generating a lot of colourful controversy, by punditing about such issues as possible peace plans for Ukraine, possible coups in Kiev, alleged western attempts to replace Zelensky, the potential impact of corruption investigations, theoretical future deployments of western forces in Ukraine, and so on. This is all (mostly) harmless fun, and keeps pundits in need of audiences and money but without any political or military expertise harmlessly occupied. But nonetheless, most of it remains at the level of feverish speculation.

For several years now, on the other hand, I have been trying to encourage people to look at longer-term and more fundamental questions concerning the adaptations that the West is going to have to make to a Russian victory and to Russian military preeminence in Europe. Today I want to discuss an issue which so far as I know has not even been raised, let alone properly considered. If the post-Ukraine relationship between Russia and the West is going to be tense and adversarial, and if the possibility of actual open conflict is not to be excluded, then how do we even understand what that might mean, and how, if at all, can we prepare for it?

Some politicians and pundits already believe they have the answer, of course. Thus, fantasies of spending 5% of GDP on defence, wild schemes for bringing back conscription (or sort of), trying to rebuild a military production capacity, buying more of this or that type of equipment … surely the answer is in there somewhere? But it’s not. As I have stressed repeatedly, none of this makes any sense, and most of it is a waste of money, until you have done a great deal of thinking, and have a clear idea about what you are trying to achieve. ..............................................................

................................................................................

In other words, the “war” that politicians and pundits seem gleefully to anticipate, will not take place, because it can’t take place. There are a number of things that could happen, ranging from small-scale air and sea clashes, to massive and paralysing Russian attacks on one or more western countries, to very small-scale political deployments on the flanks. But not much more than that. The idea of massive armoured battles in the Baltic States is a fantasy, and let us hope that no western government ever actually takes it seriously. There are more important and more fundamental things to worry about just now.



The EU/NATO combo cannot but play the role of pathetic yapping chihuahuas. That’s the price you pay for a matrioshka of supreme stupidity.

............................. Russia, meanwhile, behaves like Lao Tzu surrounded by rabid stray dogs. The conditions for a negotiation have been set in detail by Putin since June 2024. These are non-negotiable, and would allow the negotiation to start



Knowing who to trust and who to distrust at this point in history is the most important quality for anyone who expects to maneuver their lives and those of their loved ones through the final years of this Fourth Turning. I trust people who base their opinions on facts, not some government approved narrative regurgitated by legacy media bubble headed bimbos and “expert” talking heads. Michael Burry, Ed Dowd and Edward Snowden are men whose opinion I value. ....................................

Catherine Austin Fitts has been warning about the coming digital gulag for years. We now have a state sanctioned bubble in AI, with the billionaire club cheering it on, knowing they will be bailed out again when it all goes to shit, like bubbles always do.



Other Fare:


.................. People ask me if I’ve read them all, to which I waggishly respond that I’ve opened all of them (mostly), but while there is the stereotype of the book collector valuing status more than knowledge, whether the fool in Brandt’s illustration or Jay Gatsby with his uncut volumes, for me these titles represent the knowledge I’m anxious to acquire but which mortality prevents me from ever fulfilling. 


‘Genuinely Hard Problems’ pilots novel approach to scientific education




Pics of the Week:

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Sunday, November 23, 2025

2025-11-23

**** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)


Economic and Market Fare:


I’m simply doing this to ‘vent’ and keep my own ‘head in the game’ — for all that are stumbling on this, well, god bless you … I certainly hope you find whatever it is you are lookin’ for.

Personally, I’m always and forever about the ‘adults’ of Global Wall — the bond market — and what they have to say about the direction of … well … everything. ....................


Policy Reset: How Fiscal, Monetary and Trade Frameworks Shape 2026

Executive Summary
• We look for U.S. real GDP growth of 2.3% (annual average) in 2026. The improved outlook reflects a more supportive fiscal policy environment, a less restrictive monetary policy setting and a tariff regime that is not characterized by near-constant escalation as it was this year.
• The resilient consumer continues to help shore up economic activity, though consumer spending is not poised to be an outperforming driver of growth in 2026. Tax policy changes in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) offer some relief in the year ahead, particularly for lower- and middle income households, where help is needed most.
• Business fixed investment has been, and will continue to be, sustained by the splurge on all things tech- and AI-related. Investment-friendly tax policy changes help on the margin, and so will lower rates and an anticipated decline in policy uncertainty next year. These factors should help support investment growth in more traditional capex categories, which have struggled of late.
• Tariff rates are not going back to 2024 levels anytime soon, but we think 2026 will show that 2025 was the peak for the U.S. average effective tariff rate. This in turn bodes well for U.S. economic growth in 2026 as trade policy becomes directionally less restrictive.
• Inflation has been stuck around 3% amid a tug-of-war between slowing services prices but a tariff-induced pickup in goods prices. We expect inflation to still be above 2% by the end of next year. That said, our base case forecast for core PCE inflation to be 2.6% on a Q4/Q4 basis in 2026 would mark a directional improvement, with the softer labor market, well-anchored inflation expectations and the prospect for some tariff relief next year helping lead inflation lower.
• Amid the blackout of government data due to the shutdown, alternative indicators paint a mixed picture of the jobs market: not clearly improving, but not falling apart either. Sturdier economic growth and reduced uncertainty should generate some improvement in hiring next year and keep the unemployment rate from climbing above 4.5%.
• Our base case remains for the FOMC to reduce the fed funds rate by 25 bps at its December meeting, although recent Fed speak makes it a close call as we go to print. For 2026, we look for two additional 25 bps rate cuts by mid-year, which would put the terminal rate at 3.00%-3.25%.
• While the global economy can continue to demonstrate resilience, the pace of global growth in 2026 is unlikely to match the rate of expansion achieved in 2025. Easier central bank monetary and fiscal support from select countries can put a floor under global growth; however, protectionist trade policies may restrain global activity.
• Select foreign central banks can lower interest rates, but rate reductions similar to 2025 are unlikely to be repeated. A monetary policy divergence theme should build in early 2026 that weighs on the dollar; however, once Fed easing ends, the dollar can rebound and discussions about the greenback losing its reserve FX status should diminish








.................................................................. The labor market stands at an important crossroads. Labor reports released through the end of summer revealed three key trends — none supportive of sustained payroll growth. First, cyclical sector employment is slowing, and the pressures weighing on the construction industry suggest that weakness in this key sector could persist. Second, payrolls in AI-related industries are also contracting — and because these sectors together are larger in size than traditional cyclical ones, their slowdown carries implications for the broader economy. Third, government employment may not provide the stabilizing offset it typically has during past recessions. There are already a handful of labor market characteristics that are typically only seen around recessions. None, taken individually, is reliable enough to be confident that the U.S. economy faces a recession. But they will be important to monitor as new payroll data is released. In the event the economy does slip into contraction, today’s elevated stock valuations could leave markets especially vulnerable to the kind of prolonged, volatile declines that have characterized previous recession-adjacent downturns.


Underneath the AI sheen, US unemployment is rising and households are burdened with debt

Lax risk management, an incurious Federal Reserve, credit rating agency shopping, greed and garden-variety stupidity. Welcome to what could be the next great financial crisis.

Perhaps the quote that will define the next Great Financial Crisis will be this one from an executive at a former lender to the $10 billion fraud known as First Brands.
“You’re not paid to do due diligence in this market.”
There have been three high-profile Private Credit (PC) blowups in the past month. All were due to fraud, and all had telltale signs of problems ahead if anyone bothered to look under the hood. However, in the mad rush to get the deals done and put investor funds to work to earn those sweet management fees, as the First Brands lender said, “You’re not paid to do due diligence in this market.”

The same was true leading up to the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. No one was looking under the hood of either the borrowers or the lenders. The game plan was to make your money, move on to the next deal, feign ignorance when it all blows up, get a bailout, and let others pay the price. ..................

We reported in July that Private Equity firms such as Apollo, Blackstone, KKR, and Brookfield were snapping up life insurance companies to get at their steady premium income and annuity businesses. They refer to their insurance company holdings as “permanent capital.” Life insurers have also been engaging in pension risk transfers, taking corporate pensions over, another rich vein of permanent capital. A good deal of this permanent capital goes into their PC funds. The insurance companies rely on rating firms to manage their risk, or perhaps more importantly, their regulators rely on the ratings to judge the creditworthiness of insurance companies. This is the “rating agency arbitrage” Colm Kelleher referred to. .......................

................. Large insurers have blown up before on bad financial product investments. Executive Life went under in 1991 after gorging itself on junk bonds. I have to imagine that a major blowup in the life insurance, annuity provider sector could snowball into something quite systemic.

Blunders followed by blowups followed by financial crisis, potentially followed by bailouts? I wouldn’t bet against it.



At this late stage of the earnings season, the (blended) revenue growth rate for the S&P 500 for Q3 is 8.4%. If 8.4% is the actual growth rate for the quarter, it will mark the highest revenue growth rate reported by the index since Q3 2022 (11.0%). At the sector level, all eleven sectors are reporting (or have reported) year-over-year revenue growth. Three sectors are reporting (or have reported) double-digit revenue growth for the quarter: Information Technology, Health Care, and Communication Services.

However, the Q3 revenue growth rate for the S&P 500 has been increasing over a longer timeframe. On June 30, the estimated revenue growth rate for Q3 was 4.8%. On September 30, the estimated revenue growth rate for Q3 was 6.3%. Today, the (blended) revenue growth rate is 8.4% ..................



Bubble Fare:


......... Once promoted as a high-growth play, an inflation hedge, and a portfolio diversifier, the world’s largest cryptocurrency now faces the prospect of ending the year in the red — without fulfilling any of those roles.

Gold — often dismissed by Bitcoin believers as outdated — is easily outperforming the token, which the crypto faithful have dubbed digital gold. So are long-term bonds and the Nasdaq, in a year defined by falling interest rates and shrinking risk appetite. ........................



................................. The question now is whether the slide to $81,569 was the full flush, or if more panic selling lies ahead as we head into the Thanksgiving holiday week.


First Victim of the Liquidity Squeeze

.............. Bitcoin trades like a speculative instrument. It rises when liquidity is abundant, credit is plentiful, and risk appetite is high. It collapses when financial conditions tighten, and liquidity evaporates. The behaviour is indistinguishable from high-beta tech stocks or leveraged risk trades. There is no anchor, no intrinsic value, no connection to the real economy, no link to any cash flow or asset base, and certainly no monetary function.

Gold, by contrast, continues to behave exactly as a store of value should even when liquidity tightens. It responds to real interest rates, fiscal dominance, geopolitical uncertainty, and long-term stability of the currency system. It is held by central banks, integrated into the global monetary architecture, and protected by thousands of years of history. Gold is an asset. Bitcoin is not. 

If the correlation breaks, if the regression shows no relationship, if the R² is zero, and if the coefficient is negative, then the conclusion is simple. Bitcoin is not a store of value. Bitcoin is not money. Bitcoin is a speculative, high-volatility instrument that depends entirely on liquidity cycles and investor sentiment. It is based on nothing and anchored to nothing. 





In pursuit of revolutionary advances in AI, tech companies are plowing billions of dollars into massive new facilities. The projects are straining power grids, environmental resources and, potentially, financial markets



Washington’s policy toward AI is currently in the hands of accelerationists—people who believe faster technological progress is just about always better, so government regulation is just about always bad. That’s why President Trump, having already shut down the minimal federal AI regulation installed by his predecessor, is now considering an executive order that would punish states that pass their own AI regulations. Trump’s billionaire Silicon Valley backers want this done, so Trump may well do it.

Given the stakes—given the many fronts along which AI will bring abrupt and possibly destabilizing change, and the various dystopian AI futures that various analysts see—it’s worth asking: Do these accelerationists deserve our trust? Are they smart people with sound judgment? Are they intellectually honest?

Let’s take a look. ..............

............. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a mere 1,000x increase meeting my personal energy needs, so I breathed a sigh of relief when Andreessen went on to add: “We should place intelligence and energy in a positive feedback loop, and drive them both to infinity.”

If there’s one thing all accelerationists agree on (aside from accelerationism) it’s that boosting productivity is a good thing—boosting productivity in the economy as a whole and boosting their own personal productivity. Among Andreessen’s personal productivity boosters, it seems, is authoritatively dismissing concerns about technology without wasting precious seconds coming to understand those concerns in the first place. .......................

............ I don’t think Andreessen is dumb. And I doubt he’s consciously dishonest. But I do think Upton Sinclair was onto something when he said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”





It's disgusting how much OpenAI ignores Gross Profit. GP was the bedrock of Economics as I was taught it, but Technomics hits the crack rock of ignoring it. On the street, if coke costs 9 and cutting it costs 1, you need to sell crack for 10 or else you're done. If you lose money on each rock, you're not a dealer, you're a crackhead, or a narc. On Wall Street, however, if compute costs $5 billion and you sell it for $4.3, that's somehow a galaxy brain idea. Those are actualish OpenAI numbers, check the FT, and they're actually retarded.

OpenAI is just a money laundry for Microsoft and NVIDIA and other evil there. The business never even beings to break even, according to their own projections, and yet they're writing promissory notes worth trillions for decades into the future, as if they're building pyramids. They're pyramid scheming. As the FT says in their reporting, this is not a serious chart and these are not, as Logan Roy said, serious people.

To put it in street poetry, OpenAI is violating the 4th Crack Commandment as laid down by the Notorious BIG in '97. Never get high on your own supply. The supply chains of the US of AI are disgustingly incestuous. Microsoft is OpenAI's client for AI and their supplier for compute. OpenAI gives 20% to Microsoft, and Microsoft gives 20% of some Azure and Bing revenue to OpenAI. Is it really a business if you're moving promissory notes from one pocket to another? What are we even talking about? These guys are smoking their own supply and it doesn't just violate economics, it violates Crackanomics.

Early techlords like Google could violate Crackanomics because they still respected basic economics. But OpenAI is not Google. Google's marginal cost of serving you a webpage was marginal, while OpenAI's costs on inference alone are astronomical. Every instance of ChatGPT has to reincarnate fully, which is really expensive folly. It's comically and karmically expensive. It's like rubbing a genie bottle to do the dishes. At some point, just you run out of wishes. And I, for one, am here for it. The crash of OpenAI will be delicious, and if we're lucky, it takes the whole US economy with it.

Now that AI has to ravage a rainforest to return a brainfart, Capitalism has reached terminal velocity, straight down. It cannot get stupider than this. The business model accounting for 99.9% of American growth is 99.9% a pyramid scheme. ....................


What do you get when you combine Anthropic, Microsoft, and Nvidia? A bubble that blows itself

It wouldn't be a week of tech news without more circular exchanges of billions of dollars between AI firms. This time around, it's a $45 billion back-scratching session involving Microsoft, Anthropic, and Nvidia, announced during Redmond's Ignite conference. ............



....... Three years after ChatGPT's debut, investors are increasingly uneasy that the AI boom has outrun fundamentals. Some business leaders have noted that circular deals - where one partner props up another's revenue - add to the bubble risk.



.............. Nvidia’s earnings beat didn’t just meet expectations; it crushed them on nearly every metric. ............

Importantly, Nvidia’s numbers were more than a sentiment boost. They were confirmation that capital expenditures in AI, particularly by the largest tech platforms, remain robust. Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta are all spending aggressively on AI buildouts, and Nvidia sits at the center of that spend. That’s why the stock’s move matters: it’s not just about one company, it’s a read-through on the entire AI supply chain. ..................


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MMT Fare:


Yves here. This Richard Murphy recap of Stephanie Kelton’s The Deficit Myth is an opportunity to introduce friends and colleagues to Modern Monetary Theory, or alternatively, to try to put a dent into hysteria about federal deficits. ......

Having said that, perhaps as a result of framing his series around questions posted by important economic thinkers, he skips over why deficit paranoia has been so widely embraced. Again, we urge you to read the seminal 1943 Mikhail Kalecki essay on the barriers to achieving full employment for an answers. ...................

Stephanie Kelton has done something very rare in modern economic debate: she has taken a basic accounting fact, that sovereign governments create the currency they spend, and shown how its denial has warped our politics, our public services, and our imagination. In The Deficit Myth, she does not offer ideology but clarity: governments that issue their own currency are not like households; public deficits are someone else’s income; and the true limits to public spending are not financial, but real.

Kelton’s argument is as simple as it is destabilising. If the government cannot “run out of money,” then the entire narrative of scarcity that has justified austerity, privatisation, wage suppression, and the abandonment of public purpose begins to collapse. The question she poses is therefore profound, not technical.

Hence, the Stephanie Kelton Question: If a monetarily sovereign government can always afford to mobilise the resources it actually has, why do we continue to run societies around the fiction that public spending is financially constrained? ...........................



(not just) for the ESG crowd:


.......... I feel like explaining something. Long ago, there was a debate about climate sensitivity: When the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles, how much does the Earth warm? There have always been widely varying estimates, but the scientific consensus eventually settled at 3 degree Celsius, with a large uncertainty bar.

Since then, it’s been starting to look like the field of climatology in general has been stuck on an erroneously low estimate of climate sensitivity. Sabine Hossenfelder explains it in this video: ..............

The Earth’s real sensitivity, is likely well above 4 degree Celsius. James Hansen estimates it at 4.5, or 4.8 based on paleoclimatology. He wrote at the beginning of this year, that 2025 will tell us what the answer really is: Are the lower estimates of 3 degree Celsius correct, or are we looking at something much higher? .................

It’s increasingly looking like global warming has accelerated. ................

It’s hard to say what the real climate sensitivity number is, because we don’t really know how much warming is currently being hidden by toxic air pollution. If a lot of warming is currently being hidden, then sensitivity is high. Nobody quite knows for sure how much the air pollution contributes to the formation of clouds that block sunlight thereby keep the Earth cool.

Yes, that’s basically what determines what our future looks like. ................




........................ The only way humanity has a chance of avoiding a climate disaster will be through a global plan based on common ownership of resources and technology that replaces the capitalist market system. Meanwhile, the cop-out continues.



............ One implication of the increased growth rate of GHG forcing in the last 15 years is that the goal to keep global warming under 2°C is now implausible. IPCC defined a GHG scenario (RCP2.6) intended to provide a 66% chance of keeping global warming below 2°C. Actual growth of GHG forcing has diverged dramatically from that scenario (Fig. 1), with reality being close to the extreme RCP8.5 scenario.

...... RCP2.6, in fact, was never plausible, as it relied on assumption of large-scale biomass-burning at powerplants with carbon capture and permanent storage of the captured CO2, a scheme that would ravage nature and threaten food security.[5] We scientists must share the blame, if we allow policymakers to believe that such scenarios provide a realistic projection of climate change. .....................


*** Berman: The Long Twilight of Growth

The International Energy Agency made headlines last week by admitting that oil demand isn’t peaking. That got everyone’s attention but the agency’s outlook was nearly identical to last year’s version: fossil fuels have and will continue to dominate energy consumption.

According to the IEA’s own data in Figure 1, wind and solar make up less than 3% of global energy consumption. Every year, the IEA shows that the renewable rocket is about to launch—next year. Somehow it never does.

This is a symptom of Renewable Derangement Syndrome: the belief that an “energy transition” is well underway, despite clear evidence to the contrary. It’s the conviction that solar panels and wind turbines are replacing fossil fuels at scale when, in fact, renewables remain a rounding error in global energy supply.  ...............

........ It sounds precise, but it’s mostly fiction. ....................

The implications are profound. We’re approaching structural, economic, or physical limits to demand. This isn’t caused by war or pandemic—it’s business-as-usual. As Ray Dalio points out, we’re in the late stage of a long-term global cycle marked by debt, disorder, and institutional decay. History offers clues about what follows, but the outcome depends on whether societies choose cooperation or confrontation. Right now, it looks like the latter. ......................



Three years ago, the United Nations Environment Assembly adopted a resolution to negotiate a legally-binding treaty to regulate plastics pollution. Representatives from 184 countries were tasked with participating in a series of five rounds of negotiation to advance towards a binding agreement. When the delegates failed to arrive at an agreement during the fifth and final round, which took place in November 2024 in Busan, an overtime session was scheduled for the following summer. In August of this year, delegates met once again, this time in Geneva, and once more failed to secure an agreement. Another meeting is scheduled for early 2026, but will be restricted to administrative matters; there are currently no plans for how and when negotiations on regulation will resume. ..................




U.S. B.S.:


.................... But we’ve also had plenty of attractive evil. Reagan. Bill Clinton (not his wife, she has the charisma of dead flounder). Obama, the purveyor of hopium. Clinton and Obama were energetic, smart and charismatic. Reagan was stupid, but charismatic, with a folksy charm that made people think he cared about them, when all he wanted to do (other than an admirable hatred of nukes) was hurt everyone who wasn’t rich


............................ Havenstein recommends (among other excellent pieces) this 2010 Charles Ferguson take down of Summers from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Some highlights:

…rarely has one individual embodied so much of what is wrong with economics, with academe, and indeed with the American economy.

.................. Summers didn’t just lay the groundwork for the economic crash of the 2000s, he actively mocked those who warned it was coming:

.................. But the punchline came when Summers was put in charge of the Obama administration’s response to the very crash his policies created:

.................... Could it be any clearer that the Democratic party and all its policy apparatchiks are enemies of the people and must be completely purged from the party for it to have any chance on delivering positive results for the American people? .............



Geopolitical Fare:


Ninety-five-year-old Richard Falk—world renowned scholar of international law and former UN special rapporteur focused on Palestinian rights—was detained and interrogated for several hours along with his wife, legal scholar Hilal Elver, as the pair entered Canada for a conference focused on that nation’s complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“A security person came and said, ‘We’ve detained you both because we’re concerned that you pose a national security threat to Canada,’” Falk explained to Al-Jazeera in a Saturday interview from Ottawa in the wake of the incident that happened at the international airport in Toronto ahead of the scheduled event. ...............

Falk, who is American, has been an outspoken critic of the foreign policy of Canada, the United States, and other Western nations on the subject of Israel-Palestine as well as other issues. He told media outlets that he and his wife, also an American, were held for over four hours after their arrival in Toronto. They were in the country to speak and participate at the Palestine Tribunal on Canadian Responsibility, an event scheduled for Friday and Saturday in Ottawa, the nation’s capital.

The event, according to the program notes on the website, was designed to “document the multiple ways that Canadian entities – including government bodies, corporations, universities, charities, media, and other cultural institutions–have enabled and continue to enable the settler colonization and genocide of Palestinians, and to articulate what justice and reparations would require.” ......................


.................................. As we show below, Johnson and other Russia-sympathetic commentators have described in detail this proposal will be unacceptable to the Russian side. Even before getting to the outline, the elephant in the room is that it is now obvious that Russia will win and can decide how far to go in territorial acquisition. So why should they concede anything, particularly since Europe is just about guaranteed to behave as badly as it is no matter how the war concludes

......................... Oliver Boyd-Barrett adopts a suitably dismissive stance:

As I worried yesterday, none of this is serious. There is no reason whatsoever why Russia, winning on the battlefield, with Putin’s June 2024 terms long outdated by battefield advances, amidst a forever stream of evidence that confirms that the US is agreement-incapable, would want to pick up on this insane mishmash, let alone why Ukraine or Europe would sign it either. Note that it is only “expected” that NATO will not expand. Yes, Ukraine would have to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join NATO and NATO would agree a statute prohibiting acceptance of NATO as a member, but Ukraine would retain the right to EU membership.

Once again, after four miserable years of comparable US stupidity, the whole thing is being framed as Mr. Nice USA sorting out a playground scruffle between two equally pugnacious little boys. The Washington mindset, in other words, is a fantasy of benign hegemony. ................


............... A rich land indeed.

Or rather those who own the land are rich and it (mostlly) aint Ukrainians.

40% of Ukrainian arable land is controlled by three corporations: Cargill, Dupont, Cargill, ADM, Oaktree Capital Management and Bunge Limited Bayer (through its acquisition of Monsanto in 2018) . And , of course, BlackRock.

....................... Years of corruption have undermined the title to huge swathes of land held by Ukrainian investors tied to the present Kiev Regime, including many, if not most, oligarchs. They chose the wrong side.

One consequence of winning a war is that you don’t have pay much attention to those who financed the war against you when you win. No Blackrock— you won’t get your money back.


Europe bays for blood. The future of Zelensky. Another '12-15 years' of war?
“Somoza may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”
— President Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1939, supposedly referring to US-aligned dictator of Nicaragua Anastasio Somoza Garcia
How goes things for our son of a bitch in the east? ..................

.............. But what are the forces standing behind this show? What are the stakes of this theatre?

First, there’s one thing that isn’t at stake — corruption. ......................

............... It isn’t corruption in question. More important matters are at play — war and peace. ..................

Strategically, Zelensky is largely preoccupied with survival. He knows that any peace deal signed now would be horrific ...................

Peace isn’t an option, but the war is also going worse than ever. ......................

.......................... If there’s anyone more bloodthirsty than European elites, it’s their allies in Ukraine. The glorious ‘liberal opposition’.


Analyzing the 28 points of the joint US-Russian draft framework peace proposal

The war in Ukraine has now lasted as long as the massive one between the USSR and Germany in WW2. This fact shocks no one today, but if you predicted in 2022 that it would have lasted this long you would have been laughed out of any room where you said this out loud.

Punditry is one of the casualties of this brutal war. Who could have predicted that Russia would launch an invasion with a relatively light touch in terms of force? Who could have envisioned the war lasting as long as it has already? Who would have thought that the Russian economy would hold on this long in the face of a very punishing sanctions regime? There’s no shame in admitting that you made bad calls, and I certainly concede that I did not see the ‘light touch’ coming.

One prediction that I made only moments after the Russians attacked on February 24, 2022 still holds up…at least in my opinion. I think the facts as they exist now support the following:

Big Winner: USA

Small Winner: Russia

Small Loser: EU

Big Loser: Ukraine

There are two wars being fought simultaneously. In the war of attrition between Russia and Ukraine, the Russians clearly have the upper hand, and the tempo of their advances is noticeably increasing month over month. In the larger war between the USA and Russia, the Americans won on the first day of the invasion because Moscow finally opted to choose one of the only two possible routes to counter US/NATO designs in Ukraine. The Russians could have not invaded and permitted NATO to set up shop in their neighbour to the southwest and accept a strategic defeat, but instead they chose to invade to forestall such an outcome and have been forced to accept a bloody war, a divorce from Europe, and sanctions package after sanctions package.

The net effect of this ongoing conflict will be the agreement as to where the new border between Russia and the Transatlantic alliance (read: US Empire) will be. What we can be certain of is that whatever remains of Ukraine will definitely be in the western orbit, meaning that Russia will lose an important piece of real estate. Compensation for this loss will be some Ukrainian territory and possibly an agreement that Kiev will never be permitted to join NATO. Barring a complete collapse of Ukraine’s defense that permits Russians to stroll into Kiev and points further west, this is about as good an outcome as Moscow could hope for. For Ukraine, it’s a disaster.

For the Americans, it’s a victory. They clearly knew that Ukraine could not win this war, as even Obama conceded that Russia has “escalation dominance” and that for Moscow this conflict is an existential matter, unlike for the USA. Russia has been bled out to a fairly significant degree, it has been separated from Europe for the time being, and Europe’s entire economy has been reoriented to service the USA. The only problem that the Americans have is how to wrap this conflict up (so that they can move their primary focus to containing and strangling a surging China) without losing face. The Ukrainians have done a remarkable job in defending their country, something that the Americans have strategically benefited from. But at what cost to Ukraine? .................

Russia’s predicament is even more complex: Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has described the USA as “agreement non-capable”, but at the end of the day it too needs to end this war, and to accomplish this it must come to a deal with the Americans. Not only that, but any deal requires iron-clad guarantees that cannot be undone by a future US administration. How does one agree on such an important matter with an opposing party they perceive as 100% untrustworthy? The Kremlin looks at any peace offering from the USA with justified suspicion, a fact that makes any real peace deal all the more difficult.

All of the points mentioned above must be factored into the equation when looking at the joint US-Russian framework peace deal proposal that US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll presented to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky yesterday. This is a 28 point plan to end the war and keep it from breaking out again in the future. It merits a closer inspection not just because of its content, but especially because it is a joint draft. This means that there is buy-in from the two major belligerents (Russia, USA) even if it is not a “take it or leave it” document. ..................


Trump officials are said to be preparing to justify strikes on Venezuela by invoking the “Cartel of the Suns." History shows that the same network once operated inside a CIA-run anti-drug program.

.................... We’ve been here before. In 1989, U.S. forces invaded Panama to remove Manuel Noriega, a former CIA collaborator who had become a drug-running dictator and, in the words of a Senate investigation, built “the hemisphere’s first narcokleptocracy.”

But the origins of Venezuela’s Cartel of the Suns tell a different story, one the U.S. government would rather not revisit.  ........ The same institutional framework the CIA helped build, the same military networks it empowered, now form the basis for a cartel the United States may be preparing to go to war against. ..........................


In the information age, it is difficult to make sense of events. Endless amounts of information do not necessarily coalesce into a coherent narrative with explanatory meaning. The breakdown of the international order is precipitating the emergence of different narratives that engender competing truths.

The German writer Goethe said: “When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but, on the other hand, when matters are ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective. Each worthy effort turns its force from the inward to the outward world.”

If we look at our present time through the lens of this statement, we could say that we are in the midst of a changing epoch. ................

...................... There was a shared reality created by a narrative which offered, to those who bought into it, a common objective truth.

This narrative included statements such as: democracy is the fairest political system, capitalism the best economic organization, science the arbiter of truth, morality an individual choice, and human rights an international truth. Reigning above and looking after them was the State, with a capital S. These were non-negotiable truths.

Now they are not. The hegemonic state that enforced them – every right requires a sovereign – has lost its power and is itself undergoing a narrative change. Other sociopolitical narratives, ones that were competing for space before, no longer feel the need to mutate, even if just linguistically, to appear acceptable to an international consensus.

The discourse now is of multipolarity, of civilizational states with different values. It could be said that nations are becoming subjective, that each nation is forming its own narrative and its own truth. This, according to Goethe, would indicate an epochal change.

We have multiple examples of this. Ukraine is one, Palestine another, Venezuela and Taiwan others. In all these cases there are competing narratives wanting to shape information into truth. Not only are conflicts being shaped by different narratives, but so too are social values and political organizations.

To be clear, I am not passing a value judgement on either tendency, only trying to point out a dynamic of change. The U.S. power structure is morphing on the back of national conservative movements that are impacting the social fabric and rewriting social values. The Western world is following.

The collective West is where this inertia is more prevalent because it was the leading order and therefore the most affected by the disorder. But other nations are also ditching Western values and institutions, favouring indigenous ones. China, Russia, India and Türkiye are clear examples.

Media, both mainstream and alternative, has become a field of battle. What before was a conspiracy now is mainstream. ....................

However, under all this apparent narrative change, one thing seems to remain unquestioned: the monetary system. Not the economic distribution – this too is open to modification – but the very basis of our financial organization: fiat currencies and the banking system. This appears to be the only thing upon which almost everyone agrees.

Out of this narrative collapse, another world will emerge. The question is whether, as Tancredi put it, everything is changing in order to stay the same.



Other Fare:

Aurelien: Living Backwards
We've been here before. Unfortunately.

Take a random sample of a hundred western pundits writing about the western political system today, and you’ll find a fairly wide consensus that things are not going well. Depending on where the individual situates themselves politically, this could be because Our Liberal Democracy is threatened by “authoritarianism” or “populism” (sometimes curiously presented as the same thing), it could be because the system has been bought by the “globalist elite,” it could be because politicians are out of touch with the wishes and aspirations of ordinary people. Traditional political parties are collapsing and the political divisions between them are now hard to make out. Frightening echoes of the 1930s are everywhere. Et cetera. Given the very different diagnoses, it’s unsurprising that the potential solutions—where they are even offered—are very different. Yet almost nobody except those currently in power (and not even all of them) are actually prepared to defend the way the current system is working.

Is all this actually a surprise, though? Should it not have been anticipated at least a generation ago? Where does the pervasive sense of disappointment, anger and helplessness originate? Why do fringe parties and leaders rise, sometimes threaten to take power, sometimes even succeed, and then fade away? Is this a bug in the system or is it, as I will suggest, a feature, even if one that for decades people have refused to acknowledge? Several years ago, the right-wing theorist Patrick Deneen argued that Liberalism, which is the motor of our current political system, was a victim not of its failure, but of its success. Once Liberalism was allowed to become fully itself, it began to produce the social, economic and political wasteland we see around us. I think the same criticism could be made from the Left, not least because the lazy identity between Liberals and the Left assumed in some quarters ignores the fact that the Left has always been about the collective good, whereas Liberalism is at bottom nothing more than rationalised individual selfishness. Indeed, the Left has always argued that individuals cannot flourish anyway except in a properly organised and fairly managed society. So nothing that we see now should be a surprise. But how did we get here?

Let’s dispose first of the idea that the current situation was “planned,” or that it suits the ultra-rich who in some mysterious sense brought it about. (Yes, there were a certain number who wanted this situation, but wanting something doesn’t simply make it happen, as many children learn around Christmas.) The tremendous concentration of wealth in a tiny number of hands does not, in the end, benefit anyone very much. The rich have more money than they can spend, but they are generally loathed and detested, and they are not even very skilful at parlaying that wealth into political power, assuming that is what they want. A society collapsing around them can no longer provide them with the mundane requirements of everyday life: it’s hard to get cleaners and gardeners and chauffeurs and even helicopter pilots when they can’t afford to live nearby, and in most big cities restaurants close early, or don’t open every day because they can’t get staff, or because security is getting worse with unemployment and poverty increasing and reductions in local and national government services. In a deeply unequal society everybody, including the rich, suffers from worse health and lower life-expectancy. ............

But if the current situation wasn’t simply “planned,” but rather the result of a series of actions, variously stupid, ill-informed, greedy and ideologically-driven, sometimes at cross-purposes with each other, then that makes it both harder to get a grip on, and much harder to imagine a way out of. But can we first of all set out, quite simply, what is wrong with the political system today, and make some assessment about where the problems came from? It depends, obviously, what you think the purpose of politics actually is, or even if it has one, a subject I’ve touched on before. It’s traditional to invoke Aristotle at this point, who certainly thought that “politics” (the management of the community) had the purpose of maximising that community’s happiness and general good. The managers, or rulers, were like craftsmen designing laws and constitutions to make these outcomes possible, and modifying them when the need arose. And the important decisions were taken directly by citizens, in a way which would seem unnervingly radical and populist if it were practiced today. Oh, and speaking of today, the Chinese Communist Party certainly expresses its priorities in terms of the well-being of the population: it promises to do things, and it generally delivers. .......................................................

.......................... As in so many areas, the triumph of Liberalism has not produced Progress, but Regress. For the last thirty years, at least, our western political systems have been moving backwards to the pre-democratic era, to a type of entrepreneurial political behaviour common before the age of universal suffrage and mass political parties. Liberalism, which eats away at everything from the inside, has hollowed out the political system, such that it is no more now than a sordid game played between unscrupulous and not very bright careerists. ........



For a long time after the Industrial Revolution, many thinkers believed that automation would lead to us living lives of leisure. Twenty hour work weeks, or even less, and many people wouldn’t need to work at all, but would still live good lives.

It never happened.

Economists will tell you this is because there’s always more work to be done, but economists are the priesthood of capitalism, not scientists, not even social scientists.

Most of us are well aware that many jobs are, in David Graeber’s memorable phrase, bullshit jobs. They either don’t really need to be done or are actively harmful. Everyone working in private equity. All the engineers optimizing ads. Almost everyone who works on Wall Street or in shadow banking. Most bankers, for that matter. The jobs which are actually necessary, “essential workers”, are badly paid and treated, but if they don’t show up, as we find out in a garbage, nurse, transit or teamster strike, disaster ensues.

If the janitors don’t show up, everyone’s in shit. If the CEO doesn’t show up, life continues and most people don’t care ..................

................ Capitalism might (or might not) have been necessary for industrialization. But it is a set of leg irons weighing all of us down now, and threatening to destroy the very conditions required for life to continue on Earth.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, and the task of the next generation of leadership is to figure out how to run modern societies without it, without wasteful over-consumption and without destroying the environment, while making sure everyone has what they need and can live fulfilling lives: lives they choose, where most of their time is their own to do with as they would, not as some boss desires.

May it be so. The other options are far, far worse, likely catastrophically so.


This is deranged.


The tyranny of online life

We live in an age of hive minds: social media, yes, of course, but so too is an LLM a kind of hive mind, a “blurry jpeg” of all human culture.

The existence of these hive minds is what distinguishes the phenomenology of the 21st century from the 20th. It is the knowledge inside your consciousness that there is a thing much bigger than you, and much more destructive, and you are entertained by it, and love it, and yet you must live to appease it, and so hate it.

.............. But what if our fractious hive mind were… nice? What if it didn’t try to destroy you all the time, but make you happy? Endlessly, ceaselessly, forever happy. This is the driving question of Pluribus, the new sci-fi show by Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad. .................




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