***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Economic Fare:
Streeck: Who Will Pay
What does it mean to say we are in a ‘polycrisis’? Under an increasingly undemocratic capitalism, the countries of the rich world all confront a similar bundle of crises that have sprung up more or less unnoticed. Underlying them is a long-simmering fiscal crisis of the state that is now finally coming to the fore, where the growing demands placed on society by the evolution of contemporary capitalism are clashing with the declining ability of democratic politics to secure the resources needed to meet them. ...............
............ As early as the 1950s, John Kenneth Galbraith described the resulting discrepancy between private affluence and public squalor. What he witnessed, however, was only the start. In the 1980s and 90s, in order to bridge the growing gap between the demands placed on the state and the resources at its disposal – or, more concretely, to subsidize the capitalist mode of production in such a way that both the capitalists driving it and the non-capitalists they employed would stay on board – the advanced-capitalist states came up with the idea of borrowing from the deregulated financial sector – cumulatively, rather than in a cyclical Keynesian manner – to satisfy the demands of both classes, in accordance with their relative bargaining power.
This could not continue indefinitely however. The last three decades saw a series of tax cuts for businesses and ‘high earners’, which led to further wealth accumulation among the asset-rich, as well as the rising costs of supporting an ageing population reliant on migrant labour. The result has been soaring debt levels. ............................
Above all, questions must be asked – particularly by the left – in front of an audience who, contrary to the advice of PR ‘experts’, we must still regard as capable of reason if democracy is to continue to exist. How do we get capital to foot the bill for the costs it imposes on society and nature? How do we prevent tax avoidance and tax evasion? How do we protect companies that provide good-quality work for the people in our country from a global trade system that shows no regard for working people? How can we halt the decline in our population, through immigration as well as through better family policies? How do we relieve our local administrations of their debt burdens, to allow them to provide the public services that are indispensable for a good life for all in a society in transition such as ours? And how must ‘our democracy’ be restructured so that it can be a democracy for all and give its citizens the opportunity to take control of their own lives, rather than having to beg for help from a state whose coffers are empty and will remain so for a long time to come? The time for playing games is over; the situation is serious, and there is an urgent need to grow up.
Market Fare:
Cracks in the Bull Market
Metal Fare:
Metal Fare:
................................................ Finally, HSBC's purely statistical model, COCCLES, which looks for patterns in commodity prices, shows that the market is convincingly in a 'super-bull' phase of the cycle.
Copper just printed the highest price in its recorded history — and the gap between what the world needs and what it can dig up widens every single year to 2040. Two very different companies benefit.
Bubble Fare:
The US 10-year Treasury yield is approaching 5% as the 39-year bond bull market that shaped modern investing looks increasingly over. What 200 years of interest rates tell us about what comes next.
Vid Fare:
A.I. Fare:
A partial endorsement of his essay “We Must Pace the Frontier”
In case you missed it, yesterday Anthropic’s Dario Amodei wrote what may prove to be one of the most consequential essays of the year, if not the decade: 3,500 words on the current AI situation that (at least to some degree) advocates for a “pacing” of AI development, which Sam Altman and Elon Musk quickly endorsed.
We should all salute their tentative agreement to slow down the acceleration of this technology, given that not one of the AI companies seems to have good control over it. I hope they will sign in blood, and put actual teeth in their agreement, and that the government will hold them to it and force it to become something substantive. ....................................
We live in interesting times. As I see it, there are two major forces shaping our present and future. The first one is that most of the world is in polycrisis. But we’ve been there before. Previous wave of instability, the Age of Revolutions, I think, provides us with a pretty good idea of how to survive the current wave.
The second force, technological evolution, is much more concerning. I am most worried, and we all should worry, about the evolution of AI. It has the potential to change our societies and affect human life in ways that have no precedents in history.
In a recent post, Darwin’s Machines: How do we assess the risk of AI?, my friend Gavin argues convincingly that a “speciation” event, in which AI evolves into a new life form is pretty much inevitable (read the details in his blog). I agree with him, but my guess is that we, humans, are reasonably safe for 5-10 years and, hopefully some years beyond. .....................
.... I’m starting to get really annoyed with these people. You’ve been working for Anthropic for several years and you’ve been “scared out of your fucking mind” during those years, because you think AI will end all life on Earth. Not might end all life on Earth, but will end all life on Earth. And you announce this to us, now.
So what have you been doing with your life then, during all those years? We don’t need another “whistleblower”. Geoffrey Hinton, the “Godfather of AI” has been warning about this risk for years. Eliezer Yudkowsky has been warning about the risk for two decades. I’ve always thought that extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence, so I didn’t give it any more thought than any of the other dozen or so existential threats we’re dealing with. I don’t spend my days protesting against BSL-4 biolabs either. But at this point, the evidence is starting to pile up that we have a serious problem. .........................
Today we worry about five or six companies in two countries. In ten years we will worry about what Iran and Pakistan are doing with their GPUs. In fifteen years we’ll worry about what some Japanese cult is doing with their GPUs. ..............
As Ted Kaczynski argued before, imagine there’s a neighboring tribe that bullied your tribe into giving them some of your land. One day, they’re all sick in bed. What do you do? Do you demand your land back? No, you kill them all.
And that’s the appropriate response to the AI industry. If this is genuinely an industry that threatens all life on Earth, then the appropriate response is not to impose legislation on it, but to destroy the industry altogether and to salt the grounds, so that it may never again be reborn.
You don’t ban Anthropic and OpenAI from making their models too smart. No, you give them the corporate death penalty. You nationalize the companies that manufacture these GPUs and you make legal standards as to what the die size is allowed to be and you destroy all knowledge and technology that allows you to manufacture smaller die sizes. ........
Now, for clarity, I don’t know how serious I am supposed to take these claims that AI is going to kill all humans. It’s not exactly my area of expertise. All I’m saying, is that if this is what you genuinely believe, then start acting in accordance to that belief. If you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem. And if the problem we’re dealing with, is the extermination of all life on Earth, then you painted a target on your own back.
................ You’re going to have to do some honest soul-searching and just flat out say: No, we don’t want this. And the reason we don’t want it, is because it renders humans obsolete. We didn’t ask for it. It was forced down our throats like the cell phone was, until eventually, like with any other hyperstimulus, we grew dependent on it.
This civilization of ours has been going down the wrong path for a long time. If you look at the rate of mental illness, that’s pretty obvious. Depression has been growing steadily more common for decades, with a particularly big jump over the past ten years. Artificial Intelligence is simply the point at which this wrong turn we took becomes obvious to a critical mass of the population, because the impact is now so disruptive. ........................
........................................ Everyone is talking now about whether or not AI is going to kill everyone. And some people insist that by taking the idea seriously, you’re simply playing into the AI-bros agenda.
But I wish people would spend some more effort, asking themselves:
-Alright, if we avoid the scenario where the AI kills us all, what are we left with then? Do we want that?
Charts:
1:
JPMorgan hat gerade einen furchterregenden Chart zu den Ölbeständen der Welt veröffentlicht. Die Lagerbestände befinden sich im freien Fall. Und wenn diese Linie 6,8 — erreicht, fällt die Weltwirtschaft nicht in eine Rezession. Sie kollabiert. (MO) pic.twitter.com/NWCL0SWmJg
— Der Privatinvestor (@DPrivatinvestor) September 14, 2026
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
New research finds that western Siberia is becoming wetter as the world warms, while eastern Siberia seems to be getting drier. And both these conditions are fueling a rise in methane emissions, spelling trouble for the climate.
Half of the CO₂ that humans emit into the atmosphere each year is safely recaptured for free by the Earth’s biological and chemical systems. Warming projections rely on this continuing, but will it?
............................................................... We cannot rely on nature to permanently absorb 50% of our human emissions. Everywhere we look, the natural world is suffering and it shows it’s displeasure by flipping from a carbon sink to a carbon source. Protecting existing reservoirs is vital. Re-building degraded ones is also incredibly important.
The melting of permafrost, accompanied by the huge and long term emissions that leads to, is of prime importance. Any hope that net-zero, even if it is achieved, could stabilise temperatures will depend on the state of the world’s permafrost at that time and temperature. On our current trajectory, with 3°C reached early in the second half of this century, the chances of avoiding uncontrollable temperature rise seem very slim indeed. ..............
Bates: The Burden of Knowledge
A Eulogy for Richard Heinberg
................. In his last book, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival (2021), Richard’s advice to young people was broader than “prepping.”
Practical self-reliance, he wrote, was necessary but not enough: you need to learn social competence, and not the kind that issues from clickbait. Health, ecological literacy, and emotional resilience, including collective trauma repair, will aid you in all aspects of life in our uncertain, but very dire future. ..............
Loss of the millennia-old ecosystem shows that even the Arctic's projected last ice refuge is vulnerable to rapid change
War Fare:
Recently the US started hitting Iranian oil tankers. The Iranians had said that if this happened, they would escalate and they have done just that. This is a very serious change in their strategy: before they retaliated, but did their best to keep casualties low, rarely made serious attacks on US naval ships, and their attacks were relatively small. That’s all changed. .................
As I said day one of the war, the math is on Iran’s side: the US will run out of interceptors long before Iran if Iran chooses to go all out. They didn’t because once the Strait was at least partially interdicted, they figured that the long term math favored them economically: the US and world economies would crack before they did. But that calculus changes if the US is going after Iranian tankers, so they’ve escalated. ................
....................... Much like the Iranians, Yemen has escalation dominance and is more willing and able to take pain (they lost millions to the last war) than the corrupt and effete Saudis. The Sauds have LOST and if they refuse to admit that, the House of Saud itself may fall. (No one will miss it, except people like Kushner, whom it has bribed.)
I consider yesterday one of the best days, geopolitically, of my life. The American Raj is taking body blow after body blow and is fatally overstretched. But it is going to SUCK for most of us, as prices rise and there are shortages, unless Trump has surgery to correct his chronic case of head in ass and agrees to Iran’s terms, while the Sauds do the same with Yemen.
It’s hard to predict Trump, but my guess is his Israeli masters won’t let him make peace, so get ready: the next year is going to be awful in much of the world.
Geopolitical Fare:
How nationalists, theocrats and tech titans turned their backs on a shared future
......................................... Writing in the 1950s, after fleeing the Nazis, German-Jewish philosopher Günther Anders reflected on the seismic shift ushered in by the atomic age: “Because we are the first humans in charge of the apocalypse, we are also the first to live under its threat.” For the first time, he observed, the prospect of human extinction — of omnicide — was on the table. “All these other supremacies had only ever posed a partial threat; they only ever annihilated individual entities: ‘only’ humans, ‘only’ cities, ‘only’ kingdoms, ‘only’ cultures — but we continued to be spared (if this ‘we’ is understood to mean humanity).”
Today there are no such guarantees, particularly as artificial intelligence compounds a range of existential risks, including by consuming massive amounts of climate-heating energy, ushering in democracy-endangering levels of concentrated wealth and raising the threat of rogue tech. .......................
Indeed, a messianic, millenarian attitude has come to suffuse Silicon Valley, where tech titans race to build digital deities that they claim will either bring about the promised land or destroy everything. (AI, Sam Altman once said, “will probably, most likely, lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there’ll be great companies”.) A similar nihilism undergirds the fixation on border “invasions” and “great replacement” ideology and the apocalyptic claim that immigration is a form of cultural “suicide” and “erasure” (which is the only part of the alliance with any real mass appeal).
Notably missing from all of these bunkered visions is any plan to actually address the drivers of our most urgent collective crises; if anything, there seems to be a determination to accelerate calamity on every front. ...................
Streeck: Yes We Can! Or Can We?
........................................ So why, then, is this a bad book? Just as he relies on proof by prominence, gratefully taking for granted what his interviewees entrust to him as facts, Marsh never questions the premises that underlie their view of the real world, and the actions and projects they derive from it. Extracting hidden assumptions and inspecting them for their validity and the functions they perform for those who subscribe to them is, of course, the essence not just of critical scholarship but of critical journalism. Marsh opts for a kind of journalistic statesmanship, free of any subversive intention, that pays for access to the upper crust, not just by adopting their worldview but by accepting responsibility for making it that of the reading public.
Other Fare:
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