At The Money: Blurring the Lines Between Public and Private Investments with Dave Nadig, ETF.com (May 20, 2026)

There used to be a clear distinction between public and private companies. Firms would take years or even decades to grow, build their revenue and profits, and eventually tap the public markets to go national or even global. This is no longer how it works.

Full transcript below.

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About this week’s guest:

Dave Nadig is President and Director of Research at ETF.com, and he shares with us how investors should navigate all of these new products. Dave helped design and market some of the first exchange-traded funds. He is the author of  “A Comprehensive Guide to Exchange-Traded Funds” for the CFA Institute.

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Find all of the previous At the Money episodes here, and in the MiB feed on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, and Bloomberg. And find the entire musical playlist of all the songs I have used on At the Money on Spotify

 

 

 

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Barry: There used to be a clear distinction between public and private companies. Firms would take years or even decades to grow, build their revenues and profits, and eventually tap the public markets to go national or even global. That doesn’t seem to happen anymore as endless amounts of capital slosh through the system. More and more companies are staying private, but there’s a group of private investors that are accessing public capital through various wrappers, including ETFs.

To help us unpack all of this and what it means for your portfolio, let’s bring in Dave Nadig. He’s president and director of research at etf.com, and he shares with us how investors should navigate these public-private hybrids. Dave is also the author of the book A Comprehensive Guide to Exchange Traded Funds. So Dave, there was once a very bright line between public and private markets. Has that line disappeared, or has it simply moved into wrappers that investors don’t fully grok?

Dave: I think it’s more the latter. The rules haven’t really changed — that’s important to point out here. It’s not like we passed a law that said everybody can get in. What’s changed is that there’s a willingness by the issuers of product to get a lot more aggressive in what they’re positioning as retail-appropriate vehicles. So there’s not a new wrapper here. What there are are new ways of stretching the edges of wrappers that had been around for almost a hundred years at this point.

Barry: So let’s put some numbers on that. Since 2010, private credit has raised something like $1.8 trillion. Every major firm — Blackstone, Apollo, KKR, Ares, Blue Owl — is building retail channels. There were 314 interval funds and tender offer funds with $277 billion in assets as of January of this year, 2026. A lot of chatter that private is going after the 401(k) market next. What does all this capital mean to investors?

Dave: You know, the thing investors need to realize is that if you are the one being offered a product, you need to ask yourself why. If somebody’s coming to you and saying, “I want to give you access to private credit or private equity,” it’s very smart to say, who is selling this to me, and why are they selling it to me now? And unfortunately the real answer here is — look, we’re in this incredible bull market, let’s just be really honest. Things have been going up for a very, very long time.

And because of that, there is a lot of money looking for exits. At the end of every cycle in my career, it is retail that is looked at to be the exit. Whether that’s buying Beanie Babies, used cars, or stocks, it doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, the retail investor is the one that the quote-unquote smart money, the big institutional money, is looking to unload their positions onto.

So it’s not surprising to me that we’re seeing a lot of discussion around quote-unquote democratizing private investing — whether it’s venture capital or private credit, it doesn’t really matter. It’s all the same thing. We just have to accept that we are going to be marketed these products, and for the most part, I think investors are not well served by them. But that’s worth poking at.

Barry: So we should all take some advice from that great alternatives investor, Groucho Marx: I don’t want to be a member of any club that would have me.

Dave: Exactly.

Barry: So let’s talk a little bit about how this used to look. In the old days, historically, companies would go public to raise growth capital. Today it seems like a lot of the best-known private firms can stay private indefinitely, and those that do go public seem just to be reaching for liquidity for insiders. Is that what’s happening with these various ’40 Act funds in all sorts of new wrappers?

Dave: Yeah, there are two things going on here. On the one hand, eventually these private companies go public, and there’s a lot of effort to get investors involved in those IPOs. That’s the end state of what we’re talking about. I want to focus a little bit more on the beginning state, which is how the actual money in private equity gets there.

Historically, how that money ends up in a private company is pretty simple. There’s some pool of assets — generally an LLC or a limited partnership — and it collects a billion dollars of money from a bunch of rich people, endowments, institutions, and financial advisors. That money goes into a pool, which then makes a bunch of small investments in, say, 15 different startups in Silicon Valley. The idea is that one of those hits big, and then the payout from that is either that company gets bought or it goes IPO, and all the investors in that limited partnership get a big check.

That’s the structure. How that little pool of private money gets managed can really vary. It’s very common for it to be literally a limited partnership. But the problem with that is you can only get so many investors into it.

When you want to get a lot of investors, you have to go to some sort of regulated vehicle, and then you end up in usually a closed-end fund of some kind — whether it’s a traded closed-end fund, a non-traded closed-end fund, an interval fund, or a tender offer fund. They’re all versions of the same thing. They’re funds that are roach motels: money goes in, money never comes out.

Barry: Define those various things. What’s the difference between a tender offer fund, a closed-end fund, an interval fund — for people who may not be hip to all these different acronyms? Go through the whole list.

Dave: So really the main structure is the closed-end fund, or the CEF, which is part of the ’40 Act — just like an open-ended fund, which is an ETF or a mutual fund. Same rules, same laws, very similar structures at the very high level. The biggest difference is a closed-end fund is basically subscribed to once, like an IPO. You go out, you say, “I want to raise a billion dollars.” You see if you can get a bunch of people to give you that billion dollars.

Now that is a closed pool of money. And whether or not money ever comes out of that pool again depends on how the rules are written for that fund. In the most investor-friendly version, it tends to be a traded closed-end fund, meaning you can go to the NYSE and get a bid for it, and it may be trading at a discount or not. That’s the version that, for instance, Pershing Square just launched. Pershing Square just filed PSUS, which is a fairly traditional closed-end fund. They raised a bunch of money.

Now it trades in the open market, and much to Bill Ackman’s dismay, it’s trading at a 20% discount to what it’s actually worth. That’s pretty common in closed-end funds, because there’s no liquidity. You can only buy it or sell it from other people who happen to want it or own it.

Barry: And to clarify, PSUS — are the holdings private or public, or both?

Dave: At the moment that’s really going to be public equities. I think what people are trying to buy there is Bill Ackman’s high concentration, use of some leverage to get better exposure, special-situations kind of investing. That was a specific offering that he’s tried — I think this is his third tilt at this windmill — and finally got this one to close, albeit not with the pricing he probably would’ve hoped for. But that’s actually a pretty traditional closed-end fund.

You raise a bunch of money, you trade it back and forth with your friends, maybe it throws off dividends, maybe it throws off a capital gain someday if they have a big win. But you’re never expecting to get your money out. You can do the exact same thing and not have it ever be traded — and that’s a non-traded private equity fund.

That’s a pretty common thing. BREIT, a really well-known REIT fund, is one of those non-traded closed-end funds, and we’ve had a bunch of those launched recently also really targeting private equity. So that’s another very common version of it.

Barry: And full disclosure — what I’m about to talk about is something I own. Boaz Weinstein has an ETF, CEFS, that looks for closed-end funds that are trading at a discount to NAV. He buys them and then either agitates for the manager to buy back enough stock so it’s trading at NAV, or to break it up and just sell all the pieces and return the money or give the stock back to the investors. Why do so many of these closed-end funds trade at such a discount that activists are haranguing management for what essentially is a dollar trading at 75 cents?

Dave: Well, the discount comes because of what you just said. There’s no liquidity in it. There’s no way to ever extract real value from the fund. It’s permanent capital, largely from the perspective of the issuer.

That’s why the issuer loves it. They’re just like, “I have a $2 billion portfolio. I never have to worry about providing liquidity. I’m fine.” So if it trades at a discount, that manager really doesn’t care. They’re still getting paid based on NAV — often paid on NAV that’s been goosed by a bunch of leverage.

So they still get paid. The end investor is the one sitting here going, “Why am I sitting here at a discount?” So arb-ing out of the discount is a classic tale. People have been doing that since the sixties.

Barry: But that’s a —

Dave: — story for closed-end funds.

Barry: Right? With ETFs, the arb means there’s no discount, because you could always buy it, open the wrapper, and sell the stock. So it just seems weird that closed-end funds don’t have the same response to arb.

Dave: It’s like an appendix on regulatory structure, right? It’s this vestigial piece of flesh that’s attached to the ’40 Act. And that’s why, as you mentioned at the top of the show, there are only a couple hundred of these things. Generally people only use the closed-end fund structure when they have one of a couple of problems to solve.

One is they’re buying stuff they literally can’t sell. So in the case of USVC — the one that AngelList’s Naval just launched, I’m still trying to get my money into — the whole idea there is that buying stakes in SpaceX and private companies like that, you can’t just liquidate. They need to be able to close the liquidity gate. That’s usually reason number one.

Reason number two is usually leverage. If you’re trying to do some sort of levering up bonds to try to get 15% returns out of them — those kinds of portable alpha strategies, or risk parity strategies where you really need to be able to go long and short and get lots of leverage — you can do that in the closed-end fund structure where you can’t in a traditional mutual fund or ETF. So it does solve a problem.

The issue is, it’s very rarely a problem the normal investor has.

Barry: So you mentioned PSUS, and I remember that fee was not five bips. What was the fee on PSUS?

Dave: I think it’s 2% out of the gate.

Barry: Oh, that’s a chunk of cash. But no 20 — it’s not a two-and-twenty hedge fund. It’s just a two.

Dave: Yes, exactly.

Barry: And what about products like USVC? By the way, I love that these all have the name “US” in them. I guess the plan is they’ll do an overseas version one day as well.

Dave: Look, all of these funds are generally pretty expensive. Something like USPE, which is the one that’s come from Tap — that’s basically just going to buy a bunch of private stuff that they get access to — is charging 2%, but what they’re buying is other funds. So you get a lot of acquired fund expenses. It’s not uncommon to see these expenses creep up toward 3 or 4% when you start rolling all this stuff together.

Barry: Because it’s fees on fees?

Dave: It’s fees on fees. I should point out, though, that USVC is the one that made a big splash lately because they’re basically saying the limit’s $500 — get your money in now. They’re structuring that as a bit more of an interval fund, where once a quarter they’re saying, “We’ll give 5% liquidity to people who want to get out.” That’s, again, a fairly common structure, although none of those things are written in stone. They can say they’re going to do that and then not do it, and there’s no recourse.

Barry: And USVC does not trade on any —

Dave: It won’t trade anywhere. It’s non-traded. So the only way you’ll ever get your money out of it is either they make a distribution because something big happened in the fund, or you sign up for one of these quarterly windows where you can get 5% of your money out.

Barry: So some of these are private and hold non-liquid assets. Some of these are public and hold public assets. Are there public versions of these that hold private assets?

Dave: Well, the equivalent to that would be something like USPE, which is the one coming from Tap. The idea there is that it’ll be trading on the exchange — no, it’s not an ETF, it’s still a closed-end fund, but it’ll be a traded closed-end fund. So it’ll have its big discounts.

The other version of this is you can take an ETF and use the 15% illiquid bucket that all mutual funds are technically allowed to have, and you can try to use that aggressively. There are ETFs doing that. XOVR is the big one — it has a 15% SpaceX chunk in it. Ron Baron’s fund, BRONB, has a big chunk of SpaceX in it right now. So there are more ETFs and mutual funds trying to do that, but it’s obviously fraught with peril. You don’t want to go too far down that road and then have a giant pile of redemptions you can’t meet.

Barry: So here’s the obvious question. USPE — or even better, Pershing Square PSUS with Bill Ackman — these funds convinced savvy institutional investors and others to put a bunch of money in. They launched at a couple of billion dollars. “Wait, I could buy me some Bill Ackman at a 20% discount.” How come more people don’t see this and say, “Oh, I get to buy a premier hedge fund manager at a discount to NAV”? What’s the disconnect? Why haven’t people themselves just said, “I want some of this”? Is the expectation that, hey, if you want to be in Pershing Square, that’s where all the good stuff has taken place, but the PSUS closed-end fund isn’t going to have the same juice?

Dave: Interestingly, part of the reason Ackman had such a hard time getting this capital raise done over the years was exactly that argument. People were like, “I want to be part of the management company. I don’t want to own this garbage fund.” So what they actually floated was the combo platter, where for every — I think it’s every four or five shares of the fund you get one share of —

Barry: One —

Dave: — of the management company, the big GP, the main vehicle.

Barry: So you’re both an LP and a GP. If this was a hedge fund, you’d be an LP and a GP at the same time. Which is a very clever way to do it. How much of the overall GP did Ackman allow outsiders to buy? Or is it just built into the fund?

Dave: It’s built into the structure of the fund. I don’t know exactly —

Barry: Because you’re not getting 20% of the GP.

Dave: Well, you’re certainly not getting a hundred percent of it.

Barry: You’re getting one out of — well, if you’re buying it, you’re only getting one out of five shares or whatever it is. But he could say, “Oh, we’re going to have a hundred million shares and I’m going to put a million into this,” or whatever the float is.

Dave: Right. This is part of the problem with these kinds of funds. You ask why people aren’t storming the gates to try to get into this thing — well, you don’t know that much about it. You’re not getting regular reporting; it’s not super transparent. You don’t really know what the marks are. Obviously if they’re only holding public securities, you can impute the marks yourself, that’s fine. But on anything that’s private, you’re just kind of guessing and taking their word for it.

So yeah, it’s trading at a 20% discount to what you think it’s worth. But is that really even what it’s worth? And how do you value the GP component of this in that 20% discount? So I think the combo platter of lack of transparency and lack of liquidity is enough to scare most rational investors out of something like this.

Barry: So those are the downsides. There obviously has to be an upside. If someone like Bill Ackman is saying, “I have an idea,” and $2 billion worth of smart money theoretically threw some cash into that — what’s the upside?

Dave: The upside is Bill Ackman could be right. He runs high-concentration, somewhat levered portfolios of, I don’t know, a dozen stocks. That’s a high-conviction bet. If he gets those dozen stocks right, he could absolutely blow away the market. I’ve fully acknowledged that there are investors out there —

Barry: And his track record over the years is not bad. Lights out, right?

Dave: Exactly.

Barry: Not necessarily consistent, but mostly pretty good years and a handful of spectacular ones.

Dave: Some flashes of genius, right? So that’s why people are buying into these things — because they believe, in this case for Pershing Square, in Ackman and his prowess and his access to insight, quote-unquote, that other people aren’t getting. In the case of something like USVC, I think what they’re counting on is, “Oh, those are the AngelList guys. They’re getting to see all of this deal flow from Silicon Valley way before everybody else. USVC is going to get these nice little slugs of whatever the next SpaceX or the next big IPO is way before anybody else.”

That’s not insane. I mean, I have some private investments of my own. I’ve chosen to be much more careful and pick exactly what I want to do, but I’m not going to sit here and tell people private investing is a terrible idea. Lots of people have made lots of money doing it. So that’s the allure: hey, USVC — once they finally let people’s money in and start investing, maybe they will in fact carry the whole tailwind of everything going on in Silicon Valley venture, and your $500 becomes $5,000. It’s not impossible.

Barry: Here’s the math on private investing that I think a lot of people overlook. The median fund does okay — doesn’t do great. You’re better off in the S&P. It’s expensive and illiquid versus the S&P. But a top-decile fund does really well — diversified, non-correlated, and very often outperforms the index. The problem is, unless you get into that — I’ll be generous and say top-quartile — fund, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. I love that expression. So given all of that, how do you think regulators should be treating this private exposure in these various public wrappers?

Dave: So my two big issues are liquidity and transparency. I think we should enforce the liquidity rules. Which means that if you’re sticking something in like an ETF, you should not be able to violate the 15% — if you cannot trade it and get a price on it intraday, it is not liquid, and you should not count it as liquid. So step one: we should actually enforce those liquidity rules.

Barry: Intraday meaning once a day, or anytime throughout the day?

Dave: Well, you’ve got to at least be able to do it once a day. And I would argue, holding an intraday-priced vehicle, you should probably be holding most of your assets in intraday-priced securities.

Barry: 85%.

Dave: 85%, right? So that seems pretty rational. That’s the liquidity side of it.

And then the transparency side. Look, the problem in private equity and private credit — as everybody who’s played in any of this knows — is that the marks don’t matter. We’ve all seen those pitch books that say, “Look, you should invest in privates. They’re so stable, they hardly ever go up or down.”

Barry: I love — Cliff Asness calls that “volatility laundering.” It’s a perfect phrase.

Dave: Right. So you’re taking what would obviously be wildly volatile assets, you’re marking them once a quarter, and you’re marking them based on a lower-vol metric — on what their comps did. So of course those are ridiculous and stupid marks. That would be the next thing I would focus on: independent valuation agents for anything that is going to touch the public hand. If you’re going to touch the 1940 Act, we should have independent verification, and we should at least publish valuation rules. That’s the other big one — they don’t tell you how they value any of these things. The board values whether or not your private thing is worth X or Y. I don’t like that. I would like to know the rules. Why do you think SpaceX is worth $185 instead of $500?

Barry: Really fascinating. Last question: five years from now, how do you think this public-private distinction — these public wrappers around private investments — I love the phrase “liquid alts.” It kind of reminds me of the George Carlin word routine: jumbo shrimp —

Dave: Military intelligence.

Barry: Right, exactly. That’s the exact routine. Listen, either it’s private and illiquid, or public and liquid. But private and liquid doesn’t really — at that point it might as well be public. It doesn’t make any sense. How do you think this distinction is going to show up in the minds of investors and/or regulators?

Dave: I don’t want to be Doomberg about this, but I feel fairly confident suggesting we’re going to have some event in the next couple of years that is going to pull the scales off our eyes around —

Barry: Haven’t we kind of had those sort of events already this year? We’ve had a bunch of privates kind of —

Dave: Oh no, very, very thin — like Blue Owl closing your BDC for redemptions. That’s course of business.

Barry: You’re talking not quite GFC, but in the same neighborhood?

Dave: Yeah, I think we’re going to have a few funds really have to either close — whether it’s a high-profile private equity fund unwinding, whether it’s some of the private credit stuff really coming home to roost. Initially it looks like we may have dodged some of that, like the private credit stuff. There was a lot of concern that that was going to blow up the world. We seem to be being a little more rational about that. On the private equity side, I think most of the money going into private equity is pretty high risk-tolerance money anyway. So until we actually cross that Rubicon of shoving this stuff in 401(k)s — which I think is still going to be a while out, I don’t think that’s happening tomorrow.

Barry: Good. I hope that’s very far out.

Dave: So I think we’ll have some high-profile blowups, but I think they will be good for investors in the sense that they will wake us up and we’ll be more skeptical — which is what’s happened with private credit. There’s not billions and billions and billions of dollars chasing private credit from retail right now. That’s a good thing. I think we dodged a bullet.

Barry: Well, there certainly were billions of dollars chasing it in ’24 and ’25. So to wrap up: for those of you interested in everything from liquid alts to interval funds to M&A funds to what have you — you have to be aware of the downside risks. These things tend to be expensive. They often trade at a discount, assuming they trade at all. They are not especially transparent. There is a lot of good faith in relying on management to tell you what these things are worth.

 

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Find our entire music playlist for At the Money on Spotify.

 

The post At the Money: Blurring the Lines Between Public & Private Investments appeared first on The Big Picture.

Hope And Reality

By Teeuwe Mevissen, Senior Macro Strategist at Rabobank

Since the start of the Iran war the market has had a tendency to view the likelihood of a peace agreement with a ‘glass half full’ attitude.

Once again, markets have found some comfort in encouraging remarks from both the US and Iran, even though both sides are making it clear that there are still major sticking points on critical issues.

US Secretary of State Rubio has suggested that there are “some goods signs” towards finding a resolution. This is despite Iran’s Supreme leader ordering that the country’s enriched uranium must not be sent abroad, which is a key objective of both the US and Israel. Rubio has also stated that any deal that involved Iran imposing tolls on shipping passing through the Strait of Hormuz would be unacceptable. This statement comes on the heels of this week’s news that Iran is looking to set up a new “Persian Gulf Strait Authority” to exert control over a maritime zone in the area and that the country’s authorities are also discussing with Oman how to set up a permanent toll system. Amid the confusion over the degree of progress towards peace, Brent crude prices have ticked higher this morning, though they remain in the lower part of this week’s range.

Reflecting movements in oil prices, US treasury yields are also trading in the lower part of this week’s range, though they remain at elevated levels. While asset prices continue to take their cue from speculation regarding the length of time that the Strait of Hormuz may be closed, economic data are increasingly reflecting the impact that the supply shock is already having.

Yesterday’s release of French preliminary May PMI data showed a plunge in the composite number to 43.5 from 47.6 the previous month, with weakness evident in both the manufacturing and the services sectors. The composite number, which is a 66-month low, would usually be associated with recession.

According to S&P Global, firms cited higher fuel and energy costs as reasons for lower output, with manufacturing firms citing material shortages.

The German PMI data was less of a shock but with a composite number reading 48.6, the economy is continuing to show signs of contraction. While this morning’s German IFO release was a little better than expected, it remains close to a 5-year low.

Yesterday’s release of the spring forecasts from the European Commission reflected the growing pessimism regarding the economic toll of the Iran war. GDP growth in the EU is now projected to slow to 1.1% in 2026, a downward revision of 0.3 ppts from the autumn forecasting round.

Growth for the Eurozone this year is now projected to be just 0.9%, while price pressures have been revised higher. The EC’s forecast for inflation in the EU has been revised a full percentage point higher to 3.1% in 2026. The forecast for the Eurozone stands at 3% this year up from an autumn forecast of 1.9%.

The data highlight the conundrum for the ECB. Price pressures are of clear concern, but weak activity data question whether the ECB needs to hike rates as much as markets have been expecting to rein back demand in the face of the supply shock. This morning the market is priced for a little more than two 25 bps ECB rate hikes on a 6-month view. Rabobank has pencilled in just one for now.

How weakening economic activity will impact central bank decisions has been a theme in many parts of the G10 this week. The releases of softer than expected UK and Australian labor data earlier in the week had a noticeable impact on rate hike expectations in their respective markets. Weak UK retail sales data this morning have further shone the spotlight on growth risks.

Cost of living pressures have been highlighted by UK voters as a primary concern and PM Starmer’s leadership continues to hang by a shoestring. In an effort to grapple back some control, the (current) Labour party leadership have this week announced steps to ease pressure on household budgets. This includes extending a freeze on fuel duty, cutting VAT on some hospitality services over the summer, and granting a 12-month road tax holiday for hauliers.

The package of measures will be funded by bringing forward changes to how oil and gas companies are taxed on overseas earnings. UK Chancellor Reeves’ adherence to her fiscal rules have won her some credibility in the gilts markets. Concerns that a leadership challenge would result in a swing to the left of the party and bring more spending pledges have unsettled the gilts market this month, though comments earlier in the weeks from Manchester Mayor Burnham that he would maintain the fiscal rules if he led the country have provided some reassurance.

Burnham may be the bookies’ favorite for the next leader of the UK’s Labour party, but he must win a seat in parliament before announcing a challenge. The most likely date for the Makerfield by-election is June 28. Reform will be fighting hard to win that seat ahead of Burham.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 09:45

Trump Sending 5,000 Additional Troops To Poland, After Same Number Reduced From Germany

President Trump announced in a post on Truth Social late Thursday that he will send 5,000 additional troops to Poland, which has raised a lot of questions and introduced some level of confusion, given this is precisely the same number of troops the Pentagon has announced it plans to pull out of Germany.

"Based on the successful Election of the now President of Poland, Karol Nawrocki, who I was proud to Endorse, and our relationship with him, I am pleased to announce that the United States will be sending an additional 5,000 Troops to Poland," Trump wrote.

Weeks ago, the White House began threatening a significant and historic force reduction from Germany, following Berlin officials' repeat criticisms of the US-Israeli war against Iran. This was initially presented in media reports as part of a broader drawdown from Europe, but now it appears US forces are just being shifted around, and with 5,000 to be placed closer to Russia.

All of this was first reported and confirmed by Punchbowl News' Briana Reilly, citing the words of House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL)...

HASC Chair Rogers said the 5k troops will be moved from Germany to Poland. This is separate from the delayed deployment of the Texas-based Army brigade. https://t.co/LTLsgSrDAe

— Briana Reilly (@briana_reilly) May 21, 2026

Rogers indicated that the 5,000 new troops for Poland will be in addition to the delayed deployment of 4,000 US Army soldiers to Poland.

As it stands, reports from a week ago suggest that the 4,000 has been paused or even canceled, with Pentagon commanders cited in media reports saying they were "blindsided" by the decision.

Some of this surprise and frustration was echoed in public, with Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, the former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, stating that the Army’s role in Europe "is all about deterring the Russians, protecting America’s strategic interests and assuring allies."

But it remains that "now a very important asset that was coming to be part of that deterrence is gone." He added: "The Poles certainly have never criticized President Trump, and they do all the things that good allies are supposed to do. And yet, this happens."

Trump's announcement that he's sending a separate contingency of 5,000 to Poland could be an effort to smooth over Pentagon fears, while keeping European allies happy, and seeking to demonstrate the US is not 'backing down' from Russia. 

Germany itself can't complain too loudly either, given it too has long been worried about Russia, and now more US forces are en route to NATO's 'eastern flank'. This move might have even been long in planning, with Washington trying to spin everything in terms of punishment and reward actions.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 09:15

Great Again: Blue-Haired Liberals Seen Enjoying Beautifully Restored DC Park Fountain

Authored by Steve Watson via modernity.news

Decline is a choice

Just weeks ago, Meridian Hill Park - also known as Malcolm X Park - stood as a graffiti-scarred reminder of neglect, overrun by vagrants, trash, and decay. Today, its iconic 13-basin cascading fountain flows powerfully once more, drawing families, dog walkers, and even those with blue hair who once might have sneered at such efforts.

The transformation is undeniable: clean pathways, flowing water, and people reclaiming public space in the heart of Washington, D.C.

It's the direct result of President Trump's determination to restore the nation's capital ahead of America's 250th anniversary. As one viral video captured, locals are visibly enjoying the revived park where needles and encampments once dominated.

You're listening to the sound of the Nation's Capital coming back to life. ??

Decline is a choice. @POTUS is choosing action, beauty, strength, and pride. pic.twitter.com/CsiVSLdJuJ

- US Department of the Interior (@Interior) May 20, 2026

President Trump has been clear about his personal investment in these projects. In a statement shared widely, he detailed the progress:

"So far, over 20 have been revitalized, and fixed, looking better than the day they were built, many years ago. We have some left, some were in very bad and difficult condition, but we will get them all done in a short time. D.C. is being reawakened as to its Beauty, Elegance, and Charm."

He continued on the grand prize:

"The "Granddaddy" of them all will be The Reflecting Pool - 2,500 feet long, and almost 200 feet wide, the biggest such structure ever built, but also, the most troublesome for many Administrations in that, from the time it was built in 1922, it essentially never really worked! It leaked from all angles, drew dirt, grime, and decay, was often filled with garbage, and wasn't at all representative of the two Great Monuments it connects - The Lincoln Memorial, and the Washington Monument."

? NOW: Liberals are LOSING THEIR MINDS after President Trump posted how beautiful the new USA flag blue Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool will look

They hate nice things - and preferred he let the algae and goose poop sit in the pool!

Trump nailed it: "Why would I bother taking… pic.twitter.com/NwJVVrG6PE

- Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 10, 2026

"I, together with Doug Burgum and the Department of Interior, am fixing it the right and proper way - It will last for many decades into the future," Trump added.

? JUST NOW: President Trump infuriates the Democrats by announcing he PERSONALLY made contributions to beautify DC, and dozens of fountains are starting to work again

BUILDER-IN-CHIEF.

The Reflecting Pool will be the biggest water project of them all ??

"So far, over 20 have… pic.twitter.com/UDUgdf8qpn

- Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 20, 2026

Trump further stated, "The Fountains are now working, and look magnificent as the Park is being entirely rebuilt, using far better and more beautiful materials than originally used. As the Entrance to the White House, it's got to be spectacular - There is no other way! Again, check out what's going on at Lafayette Park."

The historic cascading fountain at Meridian Hill Park in D.C. is flowing after a decade of disrepair and decay - all thanks to President Trump's relentless effort to make our nation's capital beautiful again.

REMEMBER - DECLINE IS A CHOICE! pic.twitter.com/IHLZt0rU4z

- Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) May 19, 2026

The fountain revival aligns with Trump's revived executive order promoting classical architecture for federal buildings - an order Biden scrapped in 2021 but Trump reinstated to prioritize beauty, tradition, and civic pride over modernist ugliness.

Meridian Hill Park before vs. after.

For years, homeless camps and drug addicts took over the park.

Now it's cleaned up and full of families again, thanks to @POTUS's executive order to make the capital safe and beautiful again. ?? https://t.co/CLsrqwSOkW pic.twitter.com/MSrIsuyWvm

- Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) May 18, 2026

Meridian Hill Park's cascading fountain, one of North America's longest, had been dry for years. Now it cascades with renewed vigor, part of a $54 million initiative restoring seven major D.C. fountains.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool - long plagued by leaks and grime - is undergoing a major overhaul with upgraded materials and a striking "American flag blue" finish for enhanced reflection and durability.

As Trump noted, Lafayette Park, right at the White House entrance, is also being fully rebuilt with superior materials. Additional fountains and public spaces across D.C. are in the pipeline, all timed for the 250th celebrations.

The most striking images show everyday Americans - including those who might not vote Trump - relaxing by the flowing water. Blue Haired liberals were even spotted enjoying the surroundings.

Blue Haired liberals in Washington DC are THANKING Trump.

This is Meridian Park, just North of the White House.

Beautiful. Clean. Safe.

Turns out people like living in a city that isn't a drug-ridden, lawless war zone. pic.twitter.com/rcDJt7hgqF

- Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) May 20, 2026

Crime in D.C. is dropping, encampments are cleared, and families are returning. Beauty and order draw people in; neglect repels them. Trump's approach proves that enforcing basic standards and investing in public spaces benefits everyone, regardless of politics.

Leftist critics can fume about "wasted" money or "gentrification," but the footage tells the truth: people love safe, clean, beautiful spaces. They always have. Decades of Democrat-led decay turned the capital into a embarrassment. Trump is reversing it.

The fountains are flowing, the parks are alive, and the capital is reawakening.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 08:55

Regulators Circle StanChart After CEO's AI Layoff Comments Spark Uproar

It has been a tumultuous week for Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters.

Winters appeared out of touch with the growing anxiety surrounding mounting white-collar AI-related job losses. He described the bank's AI adoption push as "not cost-cutting," but rather as "replacing lower-value human capital with financial and investment capital."

Such language ignited a firestorm for the CEO and the bank, and by the end of the week, regulatory scrutiny had descended on the firm.

Reuters reports that authorities in Hong Kong and Singapore have pressed the bank for clarity on Winters' comments and the scope of upcoming AI-related layoffs.

On Tuesday, StanChart began labor restructuring to cut 15% of its corporate roles (about 7,800 jobs) by 2030 as part of a broader efficiency push amid the adoption of AI.

Hong Kong authorities asked StanChart whether AI was being used as a pretext to reduce headcount.

By midweek, Winters scrambled into damage control following the "lower-value human capital" remarks. Early today, he apologized for his "choice of words" in a LinkedIn post.

"For that, I am sorry. I am therefore showing below a verbatim transcript of what I actually said, which I hope allows for a better understanding of the important point I was raising..."

Here's the transcript:"

“For example, this new core banking system in Hong Kong, which is a major, major accomplishment. This is not an everyday thing. It happens once in 40 years. And when it goes wrong, it's a disaster. It did not; it was practically perfect. That was a two and a half year programme, to get that right. The people that were gonna be affected, who were very important for helping us get to the right answer, knew that they were gonna be affected, and we began reskilling them at the earliest possibility. We're not long on talent in the markets where we operate, because these markets are growing fast. So the people that want to reskill, that want to carry on, we're giving every opportunity to reposition. And the people that say, yeah, you know, I've done my bit, I'm ready to do something else. I take a package at the end of the application migration. So this isn't, it's not cost cutting. It's replacing, in some cases, lower-value human capital with the financial and investment capital we're putting in. But almost always, with good clear notice going forward."

Beyond StanChart, corporate America is firing engineers and other white-collar workers as AI adoption accelerates. This era will likely be remembered as the great "white-collar purge," and the response may be continued backlash toward data centers.

Meta Platforms began firing 8,000 workers earlier this week, while leaked audio of CEO Mark Zuckerberg described how AI is monitoring highly skilled employees. According to X user Official Layoff, who leaked the audio: "AI is replacing the contractor. Then the employee trains the AI. Then the AI replaces the employee."

Take a look at Bloomberg story count data for "ChatGPT" and "layoffs" ...

Labor-market disruption for white-collar workers has arrived with the rise of AI adoption. In 2023, Goldman detailed just how many jobs AI may eliminate. That number is absolutely alarming.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 08:35

US Stock Futures Rise, Set For 8th Consecutive Week Of Gains

US equity futures are higher into the long weekend, with the S&P 500 gaining for an 8th consecutive week higher, its longest streak of weekly wins since 2023 with sustained momentum in popular thematics, thanks to a liquidity boost, supportive macro readings, solid earnings and hopes that the US and Iran are moving closer to a peace deal, not to mention unrelenting enthusiasm for artificial intelligence which is fueling a historic gamma squeeze.

As of 7:30am ET, S&P futures are 0.2% higher, cutting overnight gains of 0.5% by more than half,  and Nasdaq future gain 0.1% with most Mag 7 banes higher pre market led by GOOG/L (+0.4%) and NVDA (+0.3%). Bond yields are 1-2bp lower led by the belly of the curve; the 10-year yield is down two basis points to 4.55%; the softer-than-expected Japan CPI drove 30Y JGB yield 3.6bp lower (now back below 4%), which supported global bond markets. The USD is higher, while commodities are mixed: WTI crude added $2.10 to $98.50 this morning; precious metals are lower; Brent rebounded 2.6% to above $105 a barrel, but remained lower for the week. Ags are higher. Economic data slate includes May final University of Michigan sentiment (10am) and Kansas City Fed services activity (11am). Fed speaker slate includes only Waller at 10am

In premarket trading, Mag 7 stocks are mixed (Alphabet +0.06%, Nvidia +0.2%, Apple +0.07%, Tesla +0.05, Amazon -0.2%, Microsoft +0.1%, Meta -0.2%)

• US-listed Chinese stocks decline after China’s securities regulator announced plans to penalize three cross-border brokerages, adding to investor concerns around Beijing’s stance toward internet firms. Among large-cap Chinese internet firms, Alibaba (BABA) -4% and Baidu (BIDU) -3%.
• Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH) rises 5% after the defense contractor forecast adjusted Ebitda for 2027 that beat the average analyst estimate.
• Deckers Outdoor (DECK) gains 2% after the parent company of both Ugg and Hoka reported revenue for the fourth quarter that beat the average analyst estimate.
• Estee Lauder Cos. (EL) climbs 10% after the collapse of a proposed combination with Puig Brands SA that would have created one of the world’s largest fragrance and skincare companies.
• IBM (IBM) rises 2%, GlobalFoundries (GFS) gains 3% and smaller quantum computing firms climb, putting them on track to build on Thursday’s rally that came after the US government awarded $2 billion to IBM and several other companies as part of an investment push to develop quantum wafer facilities.
• IMAX Corp. (IMAX) gains 15% after the Wall Street Journal reported the large-screen theater company is exploring a sale and has approached entertainment companies as potential buyers.
• Ross Stores (ROST) rises 4% after the off-price retailer boosted its comparable sales forecast for the full year.
• Sweetgreen (SG) gains 6% after JPMorgan raised its recommendation on the restaurant chain to overweight from neutral on new products and an improving balance sheet.
• Take-Two Interactive Software (TTWO) rises 2% after the video-game company reported fourth-quarter results that beat expectations and confirmed a Nov. 19 release date for Grand Theft Auto VI.
• Workday (WDAY) jumps 7% after the software company reported first-quarter results that beat expectations and gave an outlook that is seen as positive.
• Zoom Communications (ZM) rises 7% after the company raised its full-year forecast for both adjusted earnings and revenue. It also reported first-quarter results that beat expectations.

In other news, SpaceX delayed a critical test of its massive Starship rocket just seconds before launch after a pin holding the tower arm in place failed to retract. Polymarket has appointed a representative in Japan and is preparing to lobby for the authorization of prediction markets in the country.

Markets are heading into the weekend on a quieter note, shaking off worries that severe disruptions to energy flows from the Middle East could stoke inflation. Signs that neither Iran nor the US is looking to widen their conflict and growing appetite for a broader group of AI beneficiaries have kept volatility subdued despite conflicting reports around peace talks. A drop in the VIX to the lowest since early February is helping the mood, as are some chunky numbers on announced corporate equity purchases. These have already exceeded $1 trillion for 2026 across new stock buybacks and cash takeovers, according to EPFR data.  

Those looking for signs of economic resilience can point to the “US exceptionalism” that strategists at Evercore ISI saw in Thursday’s S&P PMI data. They lauded the contributions from domestic energy production, AI capex and wealth creation. Exceptional, too, is the performance by tech and AI since the start of the Iran War. A basket of stocks exposed to the Anthropic AI ecosystem has surged 56% since the start of March while the equal-weighted S&P 500 is flat. 

On the subject of AI, Bloomberg notes that talks between the EU and Anthropic over testing banks and companies for digital vulnerabilities have stalled. Lenovo jumped to 26-year highs in Hong Kong trading after AI-related sales surged 84% year-on-year. DeepSeek’s senior management is said to have told potential investors in its ongoing 70 billion yuan ($10 billion) funding round that the startup will prioritize groundbreaking AI research over short-term commercialization. 

“We’ve got the biggest capital spending boom since the financial crisis,” said Guy Miller, chief market strategist at Zurich Insurance.“That’s leading to record corporate profitability; we are in this virtuous circle where it’s generating profitability for other suppliers, other companies too.”

“The market is fully aware that headlines will remain volatile, and while oil needs to react for practical reasons, equities have probably moved on,” said Geoff Yu, senior macro strategist at BNY. “The lack of an agreement does not imply re-escalation, so the focus for now will stay with earnings and data.”

In politics, Alberta’s Premier said she’ll call a referendum on whether the energy-rich province should stay in Canada or start a legal process that could eventually lead to its independence. China imposed new export controls on some key chemical ingredients shipped to the US, Mexico and Canada, in a further sign of cooperation with Washington on curbing drug trafficking.

Away from stocks, treasuries gain for a third straight day after yields earlier this week tested multiyear highs. Investors said US authorities remain highly attentive to borrowing costs and that current levels will sharpen the White House’s resolve to find a resolution in the Middle East.

“The administration is well-focused on the bond market, even more than equities in my view, so they won’t allow the curve to steepen much further,” said Andrea Gabellone, head of global equities at KBC Securities.

In Europe, the Stoxx 600 rose for a fifth straight day, climbing 0.5% as the region’s semiconductor-linked stocks such as ST Microelectronics, ASML Holding and Infineon led gains.Here are the biggest movers Friday:

• Deutsche Post shares gain as much as 4.5% after being upgraded at Deutsche Bank, with analysts calling an end to the earnings downgrade cycle and saying recent fears over AI disruption and competition are overdone
• Softcat shares rise as much as 12%, hitting a six-month high, after the IT services firm lifted its annual underlying operating profit guidance. Analysts said a pull-forward in orders helped and expect consensus estimates to increase
• Brembo shares jump as much as 9.3% after the breaking systems maker announced the creation of a joint venture with Ningbo Huaxiang in China
• Games Workshop shares rise as much as 3.6% after the Warhammer owner said it expects full-year core revenue and pretax profit to be higher than the previous year
• Siemens Healthineers shares climb as much as 1.5% as Barclays analysts note the German medical equipment maker’s upbeat commentary on inflation at its European Leadership conference this week
• Puig shares slide as much as 15% at open, the most on record since its 2024 IPO, after the Spanish beauty firm’s merger talks with Estee Lauder collapsed
• Julius Baer shares dropped 10% following earnings update that analysts say was disappointing, with weak inflows. Shares had gained 9% YTD through Thursday
• Genuit Group shares drop as much as 6.1% after the developer of plastic piping systems warned its annual underlying operating profit will be toward the lower end of analyst expectations
• Amplifon drops as much as 3% after the Italian company sold shares to fund its acquisition of GN Store Nord’s hearing-aid business, announced in March
• Alerion Clean Power shares drop as much as 11% after the Italian renewable energy company’s board approved a €135.6 million capital increase, excluding pre-emptive rights, for up to 10% of its share capital

Earlier, Asian equities extended their advance, supported by sustained optimism in artificial intelligence and signs of progress in US-Iran talks.  The MSCI Asia Pacific Index climbed as much as 1%, putting it on track to recover losses from the previous week. Japan and Taiwan led broad advances in the region. Interest in AI stocks remained firm amid stellar results from companies. Lenovo Group was the best performer on the Asian benchmark after reporting strong growth in AI-related earnings. In Japan, tech shares led gains, while the Kosdaq gauge extended gains in South korea to a second day, driven by a new government-backed fund for tech firms. Japanese equities rose, “supported by lower interest rates and expectations for an end to the Iran conflict,” BofA Securities analysts including Masashi Akutsu wrote in a note. “From a medium-term perspective, we maintain a preference for AI-related names and a bullish stance on Japanese equities.”  Here Are the Most Notable Movers

• China’s hottest AI stocks may be among candidates for inclusion in Hong Kong stock gauges, opening access to trading links that may trigger billions of dollars in inflows.
• Zhipu shares surge as much as 23% in Hong Kong to a record, with analysts citing the Chinese AI company as a potential candidate for inclusion in the Hang Seng Tech Index.
• Lenovo Group Ltd. shares jumped to the highest in 26 years on Friday after reporting strong growth in AI-related earnings that offset difficulties from rising component prices.
• SoftBank Group shares surged for a second day, rising as much 13.9%, after the ADRs of its unit ARM Holdings rallied in the wake of earning results from AI chip leader Nvidia, which Jefferies sees as positive for ARM.
• Tongcheng Travel’s shares drop as much as 6.6%, after Citigroup cut its price target for the Chinese online travel agent, citing concerns over the greater-than-expected impact of oil price hikes on domestic Travel.
• Shares of NetEase rise as much as 5.8% in Hong Kong after the Chinese video games company reported better-than-expected results, thanks to strong game revenue growth and record-high margins after cost-cutting efforts.
• Lenovo’s shares rally as much as 11% in Hong Kong to their highest since March 2000, after the Chinese computer hardware maker reported fourth quarter revenue that beat estimates.
• Xiaomi’s Hong Kong-listed shares jump as much as 1.6% after the company introduced a performance version of its popular YU7 SUV, which Citigroup estimates could achieve monthly sales above 10,000 units.
• Shares of Guzman y Gomez surge as much as 21% after the Australian burrito restaurant chain exits the US market, a move that analysts say will improve future earnings.
• Tuas shares slide as much as 10% after the Australian telecommunications firm confirmed that the sale and purchase agreement for its subsidiary Simba to acquire M1 has been terminated.

The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index is up by 0.2% after closing +0.1% in a choppy Thursday session, Antipodeans lag amid the risk environment and shifting tightening bets. Conflicting reports from the Gulf whipsawed the Buck on Thursday. Traders circulated fabricated reports that a final US-Iran draft had been reached, attributing the report to Al Arabiya, though this was later denied by the outlet. Despite this, progress in talks appears evident, while gaps remain on key issues, uranium and Hormuz. Energy benchmarks have rebounded, and as such, DXY is a touch firmer. The index resides well above significant DMAs, and within recent ranges - today supported by 99.20.

• AUD is the worst G10 performer as domestic banks push back on RBA calls. Recent soft PMI, and labour market data which showed a surprise contraction in headline employment change, and an uptick in the unemployment rate prompted NAB and Westpac to push calls for tightening back to August, which both previously expected the first hike expected in June. AUD/USD resides within Thursday's ranges, remaining below 0.72 and supported by 0.71.
• GBP is unchanged against the Buck, and a touch firmer against the EUR. Retail Sales missed estimates, with the ONS noting that the poor figure was driven lower by fuel purchases. The PSNB figure also rose from April's print and overshot the OBR's forecast.
• EUR/GBP lower by 0.1% and within Thursday's broad ranges. Support around 0.8640. GBP/USD little changed, within recent ranges

In rates,  Treasuries gained for a third straight day after yields earlier this week tested multiyear highs. US yields are 1bp-1.5bp richer across the curve with intermediates outperforming, flattening 2s10s spread by almost 1bp; 10-year near 4.56% trails bunds and gilts in the sector by about 2.5bp. SIFMA has recommended a 2pm New York time close of trading for USD-denominated cash bonds ahead of US Memorial Day holiday Monday. IG dollar issuance slate empty so far. One offering was priced on Thursday, bringing weekly total to about 80% vs dealers’ $40 billion forecast. Focal points of holiday-shortened US session include University of Michigan sentiment data and speech by Fed’s Waller on the economic outlook.

In commodities, WTI crude futures are up around 2%, snapping a three-day decline, following latest Iran comments on uranium and the Strait of Hormuz.

Economic data slate includes May final University of Michigan sentiment (10am) and Kansas City Fed services activity (11am). Fed speaker slate includes only Waller at 10am

Market Snapshot

Top overnight News

• Oil rose as an Iran peace deal remained elusive. Iran’s recent attack on UAE’s nuclear power plant is seen as a “warning shot.” BBG
• Arabiya and Al Hadath exclusively report the text of the anticipated US-Iran agreement in case of its approval. The agreement includes: an immediate, comprehensive, and unconditional ceasefire on all fronts, a halt to military operations, ensuring freedom of navigation in the Arabian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Sea of Oman and establishing a joint mechanism for monitoring and resolving disputes.
• Trump said the US will send 5,000 more troops to Poland in a policy U-turn. Separately, Ukraine and its allies are growing confident Russia’s invasion is running out of steam. BBG
• China has launched an unprecedented campaign against illegal cross-border trading, threatening severe penalties against popular brokers and ordering existing non-compliant accounts to be liquidated within two years. BBG 
• China imposed new export controls on some key chemical ingredients shipped to the US, Mexico and Canada, in a further sign of cooperation with Washington on curbing drug trafficking. The targeted substances are primary building blocks used to manufacture illicit fentanyl. BBG
• China’s stock exchanges are scrutinizing recent stock rallies that have been fueled by artificial intelligence optimism, asking some listed companies and funds to give more details about their approach to the technology. Regulators have sent inquiries to managers of exchange-traded funds and other funds with heavy exposure to AI-related sectors, asking them to disclose their valuation methodologies and justify the assets they hold. BBG
• Japan’s key inflation gauge rose at the slowest pace in four years as the government continued to help ease the cost of living, creating difficult optics for the Bank of Japan to raise interest rates soon. Japan’s core consumer price index, which excludes fresh food, rose 1.4% in April from a year earlier. BBG
• The IMF approved the latest review of Argentina’s $20 billion debt deal to unlock about $1 billion, a vote of confidence in Javier Milei despite the country missing a program target. BBG
• UK government borrowing hit the highest level for any April in six years, as pressure on public finances mounts from the Iran war and domestic political instability. BBG
•  House Republican leaders canceled a vote on the war as GOP absences threatened a defeat for Donald Trump. BBG

Iran News

• Arabiya and Al Hadath exclusively report the text of the anticipated US-Iran agreement in case of its approval. The agreement includes: an immediate, comprehensive, and unconditional ceasefire on all fronts, a halt to military operations, ensuring freedom of navigation in the Arabian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Sea of Oman and establishing a joint mechanism for monitoring and resolving disputes.
• US Secretary of State Rubio said there has been slight progress on Iran. Iran is trying to create a tolling system in the Strait, and no nation should accept that. We will be continuing talks with Iran, and there is progress.
• "A Pakistani source says that cautious optimism is the prevailing sentiment in the ongoing discussions regarding the planned agreement.", Al Arabiya reported.
• Pakistan source said the US and Iran's insistence on raising the bar for their demand regarding uranium and the Strait of Hormuz has led to a "crisis in negotiations", Al Jazeera reported.
• Pakistani Interior Minister met again with Iran's Foreign Minister to study proposals for resolving disputes between US and Iran, Al Jazeera reported, citing the Pakistani Embassy.
• Pakistan's Interior Minister will remain in Tehran on Friday to continue consultations and meet with Iranian officials, while a high-level source said the Pakistani Army Chief would not travel to Tehran on Thursday night, according to Al Arabiya.
• Pakistan's Foreign Ministry spokesperson said China supports mediation efforts and has presented a 5-point initiative.
• Iranian National Security Commission member Rezei posted "These negotiations are probably also a hoax and the Americans have no desire for diplomacy"; says "instead of diplomats, send missiles to negotiate."
• Iranian Foreign Ministry said "Everything being circulated about the status of the negotiations is not accurate", Al ArabyTV reported.
• UAE official said there is a '50-50' chance of US-Iran Strait of Hormuz agreement, AFP reported.
• Unconfirmed reports of explosions in the UAE, Tasnim reported. Details of the explosions have not yet been released.
• Iraqi ports said search teams have been mobilised within territorial waters after contact was lost with two ships, while they did not receive any distress calls from the two Bolivian-flagged ships with which contact has been lost

A more detailed look at global markets courtesy of Newsquawk

APAC stocks were mostly higher following the positive handover from Wall Street, where all major indices gained and the Dow notched a record close on what was a choppy session, amid cautious optimism due to contradicting geopolitical headlines. ASX 200 gained with outperformance in the mining, materials and resources sectors, although the upside in the broader market was capped by weakness in telecoms, real estate and defensives. Nikkei 225 rallied amid continued tech strength, with SoftBank shares adding to the recent advances with another double-digit percentage gain, while the latest inflation data was softer-than-expected and could compel policymakers to think twice about a June rate hike. Hang Seng and Shanghai Comp were in the green with the Hong Kong benchmark led higher by tech stocks, including Lenovo and NetEase, as the former was boosted by its earnings results, which showed record FY revenue, while the mainland kept afloat after the PBoC upped liquidity efforts for a third day.

Top Asian News

• Chinese regulators and exchanges intensify scrutiny of AI-fuelled market frenzy, pressing listed firms and fund managers to justify valuations, Bloomberg reported citing sources.
• China CSRC and seven other departments said they will establish a routine collaborative regulatory mechanism to conduct comprehensive monitoring and inspections. CSRC plans penalties against Futu Holdings, Up Fintech’s Tiger Brokers and Longbridge Securities, including confiscating illegal gains.
• China's NDRC said regarding the question on investment from the US, that they never told Chinese tech firms they couldn't take foreign investment, while it added that foreign investment must follow Chinese laws and rules, and should not harm national security and interests. Furthermore, it is planning a policy support framework to accelerate AI commercialisation, and stated that prices are set to remain stable as the domestic supply demand outlook improves.

European bourses (STOXX 600 +0.5%) start the final day of the week entirely in the green, heading into an extended weekend for UK and US assets. This follows comments by US Secretary of State Rubio, via the FT, noting "some good signs" in the US-Iran talks, while Reuters reported, citing an Iranian official, that "gaps have been narrowed". More recently, Al Arabiya released the text of the anticipated US-Iran agreement, which includes an immediate and unconditional ceasefire. However, commentary out of Iran earlier in the morning continues to downplay negotiations, with the Iranian Foreign Ministry saying that everything that has been circulated about the status of negotiations is inaccurate. Sectors highlight the positive bias. Technology (+1.8%) leads, closely followed by Telecoms (+1.3%) and Industrial Goods & Services (+0.9%). To the downside lie Real Estate (-0.6%) and Energy (-0.7%). Chemicals (+0.7%) are eking out mild gains despite a flurry of downgrades within the sector (IMCD/Arkema/Evonik to underweight by JPMorgan).

Top European News

• The next EU-UK summit could be postponed until July at the earliest (vs initial June date), Bloomberg reported citing sources. The prospect that substantial deals won’t be agreed in time.
• US Secretary of State Rubio said President Trump is disappointed with some NATO allies. Meeting will set groundwork for NATO leader’s summit.
• German Foreign Minister said defence spending will reach more than 4% of GDP in 2026 and on the way to 5%

FX

• DXY is higher on the session after closing +0.1% in a choppy Thursday session, Antipodeans lag amid the risk environment and shifting tightening bets.
• Conflicting reports from the Gulf whipsawed the Buck on Thursday. Traders circulated fabricated reports that a final US-Iran draft had been reached, attributing the report to Al Arabiya, though this was later denied by the outlet. Despite this, progress in talks appears evident, while gaps remain on key issues, uranium and Hormuz. Energy benchmarks have rebounded, and as such, DXY is a touch firmer. The index resides well above significant DMAs, and within recent ranges - today supported by 99.20. Today sees the UoM final release for May.
• AUD is the worst G10 performer as domestic banks push back on RBA calls. Recent soft PMI, and labour market data which showed a surprise contraction in headline employment change, and an uptick in the unemployment rate prompted NAB and Westpac to push calls for tightening back to August, which both previously expected the first hike expected in June. AUD/USD resides within Thursday's ranges, remaining below 0.72 and supported by 0.71.
• GBP is unchanged against the Buck, and a touch firmer against the EUR. Retail Sales missed estimates, with the ONS noting that the poor figure was driven lower by fuel purchases. The PSNB figure also rose from April's print and overshot the OBR's forecast.
• EUR/GBP lower by 0.1% and within Thursday's broad ranges. Support around 0.8640. GBP/USD little changed, within recent ranges

Central Banks

• ECB President Lagarde said long term inflation expectations are broadly well anchored and are particularly attentive to second-round effects.
• ECB's Demarco said the ECB will probably need to hike in June. There is not much evidence of indirect inflation effects and the 2026 inflation outlook likely to be revised upwardly. Projections to show if one hike is enough or more is needed.
• Westpac pushes back its RBA rate hike call to August and September from a previous call of June and August.

Fixed Income

• Global benchmarks are firmer this morning, albeit modestly so. Action throughout the week has been at the whim of mixed geopolitical newsflow, which has led to choppy trade across the energy space. Today, oil prices are firmer (Brent Jul +3%), but reside towards WTD lows. As such, fixed benchmarks trade with tentative gains this morning as negotiation efforts continue.
• USTs are firmer by a handful of ticks, though the bias throughout the European morning has been choppy. Nonetheless, US paper remains in the green and within a 109-08 to 109-14+ range. From a geopolitical front, Al Arabiya obtained the text of the anticipated agreement between the US and Iran. All key details can be found on the board at 09:16 BST, but the next sticking points incl. the exchanging of text, and then the beginning of negotiation, which the text suggested should begin within 7 days. Ahead, focus will be on speak from Fed’s Waller, where he will touch on the economic outlook, whilst the final US Michigan Consumer Sentiment is also scheduled. Yields have been of great attention this week, with the US 10yr printing multi-month highs (4.68%), whilst the 30yr soared to levels not seen since 2007 (5.2%). As for today, the 10yr is hovering towards WTD lows (4.56%) as markets remain focused on continued negotiations.
• Bunds are firmer by c. 35 ticks, and trade within a 125.06 to 125.30 range. German paper has ultimately followed peers, but has had some domestic data to digest. Early this morning, Final German GDP (Q/Q) was unrevised, whilst the Y/Y metric was revised slightly firmer. Overall, indicative of a resilient economy, though external leads (PMIs) suggest that this may be short-lived. This theme is also seen in the latest Ifo survey, which has stabilised since the last month, though still does not indicate any material improvement in sentiment.
• Gilts started with slight outperformance, but now trade alongside peers. Strength followed peers, with outperformance stemming from a cooler-than-expected Retail Sales report. ONS noted the poor figure was driven lower by fuel purchases, suggesting motorists had full tanks, or had stopped stockpiling as fuel prices stabilised higher, given the length of the energy disruption. The PSNB was also published, which rose to 24.3bln (prev. 12.6bln, exp. 24.3bln). Gilts trade within an 87.56 to 87.86 range.

Commodities

• In terms of the latest on geopolitics, Al Arabiya/Al Hadath reportedly obtained a draft US-Iran agreement which, if approved, would see an immediate and unconditional ceasefire across all fronts. The draft also calls for a halt to military operations and media escalation, a commitment not to target military, civilian or economic infrastructure and guarantees for freedom of navigation in the Arabian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz and Sea of Oman. The agreement would take effect immediately once officially announced by both sides. Pakistan sources said the US and Iran's insistence on raising the bar for their demand regarding uranium and the Strait of Hormuz have led to a "crisis in negotiations”.
• WTI and Brent July futures are on a firmer footing heading into a weekend of risk, and with the sides reportedly hitting a crisis in talks amid raising the bar for demands regarding uranium and the Strait of Hormuz. WTI resides in a USD 96.92-99.43/bbl range while its Brent counterpart trades in a USD 103.77-106.36/bbl parameter.
• Spot gold and silver are softer amid the elevated crude prices. Spot gold trades within a narrow USD 4,507-4,546/oz range, while spot silver trades on either side of USD 76/oz in a USD 75.69-77.04/oz range.
• Base metal futures are mostly firmer amid the overall risk appetite across stocks amid ongoing headlines regarding Pakistani efforts to narrow the gaps between the US and Iran. 3M LME copper resides in a USD 13.56k-13.69k/t. Note that the LME is closed on Monday amid a UK bank holiday.
• China refined fuel exports (ex Hong-Kong) expected to rise slightly from May-June to around 550k MT, according to Reuters sources.
• Japan to receive first oil tanker to exit the Strait of Hormuz since US-Iran war began.
• Hungary's PM said an explosion took place at a MOL's Tiszaujvaros energy plant. One person dead and several injured.
• UAE Presidential Advisor said they were losing out in terms of production under OPEC, leaving it was under consideration for a three-year period.
• Barclays said they have maintained their Brent forecast of USD 100/bbl for 2026, with risks skewed higher.

Trade/Tariffs

• China adjusts drug-making chemicals export list to countries, reports suggest. Exports of relevant chemicals to the US, Mexico and Canada must apply for licenses in accordance with regulations.
• The EU has suspended customs tariffs on certain nitrogen-based fertilisers for one year

US Event Calendar

• 10:00 am: United States May F U. of Mich. Sentiment, est. 48.2, prior 48.2
• 10:00 am: United States Fed’s Waller Speaks on Economic Outlook

DB's Jim Reid concludes the overnight wrap

Morning from Helsinki. After a lot of travel recently, next week is mercifully quiet — though the price is one day off work at the end of it, on half-term childcare duty. Speaking of kids, this weekend I’m organising a U9 cricket festival for around 75 of them. Wish me luck. I’ve used AI to sort out all the complicated fixtures, so by next week I’ll know whether it’s the future of humanity or not.

If this had been written as Europe went home last night, it would have been all about the removal of optimism, higher oil, higher yields and weaker equities. However, optimism over a potential deal in Iran turned everything around before a slight pullback into the US close, as differences appeared to remain over nuclear questions and the future status of the Strait of Hormuz. In the end, this has left Brent at $104.30/bbl this morning, about a dollar below where it was at this time yesterday. The tentative optimism meant 10yr Treasuries (-1.4bps) and the S&P 500 (+0.17%) posted modest gains, with equity futures and Asian markets also moving higher this morning.

In terms of Iran developments, a multitude of contradictory headlines drove markets over the past 24 hours. Initially, oil prices fell in the European morning, as Iran’s ISNA reported that Iran was in the process of responding to a US text, with the report also saying the US text “has narrowed the gaps to some extent”. That initial optimism was soon reversed, as Reuters reported that Iran’s Supreme Leader had ordered that the country’s enriched uranium should stay in Iran. This drove a rebound in oil prices, given that the US had been calling for the removal of Iran’s uranium in the talks. However, Al Jazeera and other outlets later reported denials that such a new directive had been issued. Oil prices then saw a renewed decline amid social media reporting that the US and Iran may have reached a draft agreement that would leave nuclear talks for later, though the veracity of those reports was unclear. Optimism partially ebbed again as Iran’s President Pezeshkian suggested that “we will never back down” in talks. There were also questions over the status of the Strait of Hormuz under any deal, with Trump opposing efforts by Iran and Oman to establish a toll system, saying “we want it open, we want it free, we don’t want tolls”.

The increased optimism around potential movement towards a deal saw Brent crude decline from above $109/bbl early in yesterday’s US session to settle at $102.58/bbl (-2.32% on the day), before edging higher again to $104.30/bbl as I type. The moderation in oil prices helped Treasury yields reverse initial increases yesterday, with the 10yr yield down -1.4bps to 4.57% after trading as high as 4.63%. They are flat this morning.

That decline in long-term yields came despite more hawkish repricing at the front end, with 2yr yields up +2.8bps to 4.08% as the probability of a Fed hike by December moved up to 82%, its highest level so far this year. These moves came as US data remained solid, with the flash composite PMI stable at an expansionary level of 51.7 in May, while input prices rose at their fastest pace since November 2022 amid the energy shock.

For equities, improved optimism on Iran meant that US stocks erased initial declines, with the S&P 500 (+0.17%) advancing despite trading in the red for most of the session. This leaves the index just -0.74% below its all-time high and on track to post an eighth consecutive weekly gain, which would be the longest such run since 2023. Defensive sectors and blue-chip names led the advance, bringing the Dow Jones (+0.55%) to a new record high. Tech stocks were broadly stable, with the Nasdaq (+0.09%) and the Magnificent 7 (+0.03%) little changed, though Nvidia (-1.77%) fell after its results the previous evening. By contrast, IBM (+12.43%) surged on news that the US administration agreed to award the company $1bn to build a foundry for producing quantum computing chips. Meanwhile, Intuit (-20.02%) and Walmart (-7.27%) were two of the three biggest decliners in the S&P after soft earnings releases.

A positive mood has mostly continued in Asian markets overnight with the Nikkei (+2.29%) leading the way. Most other main markets are up around half a percent. S&P (+0.26%) and Nasdaq (+0.38%) futures are also higher alongside European Stoxx (+0.82%) futures.
This follows a less positive session in Europe yesterday, with several indices losing ground, including Germany’s DAX (-0.53%) and France’s CAC 40 (-0.39%). However, the STOXX 600 (+0.04%) eked out a fourth consecutive gain, supported by equity strength in other countries, including the UK and Switzerland. A similar story played out in bonds, with 10yr bunds (+0.3bps), OATs (+1.0bps) and BTPs (+1.1bps) seeing modest sell-offs, while 10yr gilts (-2.2bps) outperformed. Market sentiment in Europe was not helped by the May flash PMIs, which showed a deepening downturn in activity as the energy shock weighed. The Eurozone composite PMI fell to its lowest level since October 2023, at just 47.5. In France, the composite PMI fell to 43.5, its lowest since November 2020. Even in the UK, which had held up relatively better in April, the May composite PMI was also in contractionary territory at 48.5. Overall, there was a consistent theme of European weakness, raising fears that the energy shock was having a bigger impact than first thought.

Japan CPI came in softer than expected this morning but it hasn't really moved JGB yields. April CPI came in at 1.4% yoy (1.6% expected), with core the same (1.7% expected). Ex fresh food and energy it came in three tenths lower than expected at 1.9%. Base effects and efforts to shield consumers from the impact of higher oil seem to have helped. The probably of a hike in June has gone down from 82.5% to around 78% according to futures. See our economist’s review of the data here.

Finally, there were a few other US data releases that were generally on the positive side. Weekly initial jobless claims fell slightly to 209k in the week ending May 16 (vs. 210k expected), taking the 4-week moving average down to 202.5k, its lowest level since January 2024. US housing starts for April also fell by less than expected, to an annualised pace of 1.465m (vs. 1.410m expected). The exception was the Philly Fed business outlook, which saw a sharp drop to a five-month low.

Looking ahead, data releases include UK retail sales for April, the Ifo Institute’s business climate indicator for Germany in May, and the University of Michigan’s final consumer sentiment index for the US in May. Central bank speakers include ECB President Lagarde, along with the ECB’s Vujcic, Kazimir and Muller, and the Fed’s Waller.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 08:07

Hormuz Shock Raises Recession Risk As Retailers Sound Alarm On Consumer Stress

Oil market experts at Rapidan Energy Group warn that a prolonged closure of the Strait of Hormuz could trigger an oil shock severe enough to hit consumers hard and push the economy into a downturn on a scale approaching that of the 2008 Great Recession.

That warning was reinforced by a UBS analyst, who cautioned that sharper slowdowns for working-class households could emerge this summer as gasoline pump prices average north of $4.50 per gallon this week and collide with already stretched budgets.

Bloomberg cites a Rapidan note stating that its base case assumes Hormuz reopens in July, with Brent crude peaking near $130 a barrel and global oil demand falling by about 2.6 million barrels per day.

But if the Hormuz chokepoint remains heavily disrupted into late summer, between August and September, then the market would need demand destruction to offset the supply shock, potentially pushing global oil consumption into an annual decline in 2026, the analysts pointed out.

This would mean that if the average pump price of $4.50 per gallon for 87 octane is already high, then demand destruction, as we've outlined, would occur at or above $5, and the real consumer pain would only begin from there.

"The current macro setup is less extreme than the 1970s or 2007 to 08," Rapidan analysts said, citing economies that are less oil-intensive and more robust monetary policy frameworks.

They noted, "But that relatively stronger starting point doesn't neutralize the risk that continued oil price spikes would exacerbate financial and macroeconomic vulnerabilities."

A delayed opening of the Hormuz chokepoint would increase the third-quarter oil supply deficit to 6 million barrels per day as inventories fall toward dangerously low levels, the analysts warned.

Even an early-August restart would not bring immediate relief, as inventories would continue to slide into early fall while Gulf production and shipments normalize.

JPMorgan analysts recently warned that the world is spiraling toward a catastrophic cliff-edge shortage of crude oil if the maritime chokepoint is blocked through June.

In a separate note on Friday, UBS analyst Matthew Cowley warned, "The coming months could see persistent inflation risks expose the economy to sharper slowdowns in low- and middle-income household spending."

During earnings season this week, mega-retailer Walmart signaled that its customer base is already beginning to crack: "We see that in the most recent period, the number of gallons that customers fill up with when they come to our fuel stations fell below ten for the first time since 2022. That's an indication of stress."

Walmart's customer base is important to monitor because it functions as a real-time proxy for consumer sentiment, especially among low- and middle-income households.

Those comments from Walmart are particularly alarming when coupled with consumer concerns from Wayfair, Lowe's, and Home Depot this week:

• Wayfair CFO's Muted Home-Goods Demand Outlook Offers More Bad News For Realtors

• Lowe's CEO Warns Housing Market "Most Difficult" Since Financial Crisis As DIY Project Demand Crumbles

The early signs of stress are already emerging. Top retailers are flagging stress on low- and middle-income households, and the risk now is that a sustained fuel price shock could feed directly into demand destruction, persistent inflation, and broader growth weakness if the Hormuz chokepoint remains shuttered for the next couple of months.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 07:45

Starmer Government Doubles Down On Anti-Free Speech Policies

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

When hundreds of thousands of Britons joined the recent Unite the Kingdom rally, the government of Keir Starmer wanted them to know that they were being watched for possible arrest. By deploying facial recognition systems and invoking the United Kingdom’s anti-free speech laws, Starmer’s government made it clear that it would not tolerate anything it considered hateful or xenophobic, on the heels of its losses to Reform UK in council elections.

Under its Online Safety Act, the government removed posts from social media platforms such as TikTok, including statements about Reform UK’s immigration policies.

Among those impacted was Reform UK’s shadow home secretary Zia Yusuf who reportedly had “two videos removed from TikTok—one for a user report under the UK’s Online Safety Act and another for hate speech.” They were later restored.

Starmer’s government also reportedly prevented speakers from the rally from entering the county, citing concerns they might “incite” the crowd.

The Times reported last year that the government was arresting 30 people a day for speech crimes.

In the last two decades, free speech protections in the U.K. have been eviscerated.

The criminalization of speech has expanded exponentially as individuals and groups call the police to silence those who criticize them or advocate opposing views.

Even silent prayer or “toxic ideologies” can lead to arrest. Expressing concerns over Western cultural values is now treated as an admission of “right-wing ideology,” warranting investigation. A few years ago, a neo-Nazi living with his mother was found to have a room filled with hateful symbols and material.

Judge Peter Lodder dismissed free speech concerns over the defendant’s possessions with a truly Orwellian flourish: “I do not sentence you for your political views, but the extremity of those views informs the assessment of dangerousness.” Calling the defendant “a right-wing extremist,” Mr. Lodder said the contents of his room were evidence of “enthusiasm for this repulsive and toxic ideology.”

One of the most notorious cases has been dropped with a belated apology.  Last year, I wrote about how Graham Linehan became the latest comedian to be arrested as part of the global crackdown on free speech.

The co-creator of the U.K. sitcom “Father Ted” was arrested at London Heathrow Airport, allegedly over several social media posts criticizing transgender activists. The posts were not jokes, but political commentary.

Now, the Metropolitan Police has issued an apology that he should not have been detained by five armed officers at Heathrow Airport in September 2025. It took five months, but the Met Police apologized for how his case was handled and vowed to learn from the experience.

Met Police Inspector Matt Hume declared, “I apologize to Mr. Linehan for the shortcomings in this investigation. The Met Police remains committed to lawful, proportionate policing and to learning from failings when they arise. I accept that the service provided was not acceptable and recognize the distress and impact this matter has caused Mr. Linehan.”

The problem is that it is not clear why they concluded that they made a mistake but the laws are so sweeping in their language that the police can act in the most arbitrary and ideological fashion.

There will be no discipline of those who ordered the arrest, or apparently, further explanation of why this case, as opposed to hundreds of others, was viewed as improper.

The most that Hume would offer is that, while insisting that the arrest was entirely lawful, it was “flawed” because officers focused on the transgender criticism “rather than the alleged incitement to violence,” according to The Telegraph.

Linehan correctly noted in a post to X that “This, from the ‘apology’ I received from the police, doesn’t sound like an apology.”

That is because it is not a real apology.

It is an effort to spin and discard a high-profile controversy while reaffirming the very policies and laws that allow for such abuses to occur in the United Kingdom.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 07:20

Mortgage Rates Hit 9-Month High, Freezing Out Homebuyers In Peak Season

The average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage climbed to its highest level since August, threatening to derail the spring selling season as higher Treasury yields and renewed inflation pressure push loan costs higher and freeze more prospective buyers out of the market.

Freddie Mac data released Thursday show the 30-year fixed mortgage rate for the week ending May 21 jumped to 6.51% from 6.36%, the highest rate since Aug. 28, 2025.

Soaring mortgage rates stem from turmoil in the Gulf region, with the U.S.-Iran war driving up oil prices, inflation, and bond yields over the last three months. Rates on 10-year Treasuries hit their highest level in one year, while 30-year yields neared 2007 highs. 

Mortgage rates fell to around 6% in early February, lifting hopes for a housing market rebound after three consecutive years of depressed activity. Yet hopes for a robust selling season were dashed because the conflict in the Middle East began in late February, and once the Hormuz chokepoint closed, energy prices surged, followed by rates.

"Each uptick in rates narrows the pool of buyers who can make the numbers work," Realtor.com analyst Anthony Smith told News Corp.

The impact of higher rates is significant for buyers: Before the conflict, a buyer with a $2,500 monthly budget and 20% down could afford about a $400,000 home at a 6% mortgage rate, but only about $384,000 at a 6.5% rate.

Realtor.com analyst Jake Krimmel told Bloomberg, "We've been surprised so far that we haven't seen deterioration like we did this time last year." 

"May is where the rubber will meet the road because that's when things tend to really start picking up," Krimmel said. 

The end result of surging rates over the last few months was flat existing-home sales in April, well below Bloomberg Consensus expectations.

The continued housing market slowdown, which feels like an eternity for those in the industry, has pressured businesses tied to housing, such as furniture manufacturers, home builders, mortgage lenders, and real estate brokerages.

Home improvement retailers such as Home Depot and Lowe's warned this week that consumers remain reluctant to splurge on big-ticket home improvement items, as elevated mortgage rates, high home prices, energy inflation, weakening sentiment, and broader macroeconomic uncertainty weigh on demand.

Lowe's CEO Marvin Ellison warned analysts earlier this week that the housing market is the "most difficult" since the financial crisis. 

He continued:

I think overall this has been the most difficult housing market that I've faced in this business since the financial crisis. And as Brandon mentioned, it's almost exclusively or disproportionately on the DIY customer.

That's the majority of where our revenue comes from. And so I look at it from this perspective, you know, we've delivered four quarters of positive comps in an environment where the DIY has faced more economic pressure than I've ever seen before.

Housing affordability for first-time homebuyers remains at a four-decade low.

"Decisions made during the period of ultra-low interest rates coming out of the pandemic are still shaping behavior," said Torsten Slok, the chief economist at Apollo Global Management, citing the unwillingness of homebuyers with sub-4% rates to move. "The shift to higher rates has fundamentally changed the economics."

"If you're looking for relief on 30-year conventional mortgage rates, you're not going to get it anytime soon," said Kevin Flanagan, head of investment strategy at WisdomTree.

Nick Barta, a regional manager at Security First Financial, a Colorado-based mortgage company, told Bloomberg that the surge in rates because of the US-Iran war has had a chilling effect on the industry so far. 

"All you hear about is gas prices and higher interest rates," said Barta, who has worked in the mortgage industry for nearly four decades. "It freaks people out."

President Trump has directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to begin buying $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities to pressure mortgage rates lower.

"FHFA and the administration are actively evaluating a range of tools and policy options to improve affordability and expand access to homeownership for American families," Federal Housing Finance Agency Director William Pulte said.

Sarah Wolfe, a senior economist at Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, warned that higher mortgage rates continue to leave an entire generation of homebuyers stuck in rentals.

"They want the same things as the generation before them," Wolfe said, "and the bar to entry is getting higher and higher."

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 06:55

My end-of-week morning train WFH reads:

• What’s the Sticker Price of Exorbitant Privilege? A clean Substack walk-through of the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege” — what reserve status earns the US, what it costs, and what would actually shake it. The de-dollarization chatter usually skips the math; this one shows it. That raises the obvious question: what would it take for the US to lose its privilege now? Where is the tipping point? Is it just about the US fiscal and macro fundamentals? Carolin Pflueger (U Chicago) and Pierre Yared (Columbia) don’t think so. (The Two Cents)

• The Dangerous Brew That’s Rattling Bond Markets: The WSJ on the cocktail of fiscal deficits, sticky inflation, and central-bank cross-pressure showing up in the long end. Read with the WaPo piece on what those yields do to households. A mix of debt, inflation and populism has changed the interest rate landscape since 2020. A mix of debt, inflation and populism has changed the interest rate landscape since 2020. (Wall Street Journal) see also Trump’s war is wrecking Trump’s economy: The U.S. war on Iran has upended energy markets and gut-punched the global economy, especially countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. But the United States is not nearly as immune to the economic fallout from the war as U.S. President Donald Trump seems to think—and it is starting to show. There is a whole slew of economic indicators flashing “check engine” across the dashboard of the U.S. economy that show that the prolonged war in the Middle East is reigniting inflation, fouling supply chains, and dampening hopes of a tax-cut-fueled growth spurt this year. (Washington Post)

• SpaceX not the behemoth everyone thought: The prospectus shows just how much the IPO depends on expectations for future growth and investor servility to Musk — as opposed to the current underlying business. Axios on the leaked SpaceX financials that look a lot less Mag-7 than the secondary market implied. Read alongside the $15B Anthropic deal — both stories are about who is actually paying whom in this AI buildout. (Axios)

• Is Nvidia too big to fail? ‘You’re clearly at the centre of everything’ The global stock market has virtually become “One Big Trade”, according to Goldman Sachs. “AI Is Penetrating Every Corner of Financial Markets”, notes Apollo. Is it really just one big Nvidia trade though? (FT Alphaville free)

• Used EVs Are Now the Most Affordable Cars. Here’s How to Buy a Good One. With rising oil prices and more used EVs coming off leases, the total cost of ownership equation has flipped. The WSJ on the surprising flip: a three-year-old EV with most of its warranty intact is now often the cheapest car on the lot. Useful for anyone with a kid heading to college. Here’s How to Buy a Good One. With rising oil prices and more used EVs coming off leases, the total cost of ownership equation has flipped (Wall Street Journal)

• Why mortgages and car loans are getting more expensive: Yields for some Treasurys hit their highest level since 2007 — and consumers are starting to feel it. A clean WaPo explainer on the long-rate move and what it does to the household balance sheet. Useful for clients who only ever see the headline Fed Funds number. (Washington Post)

• FBI seeks US-wide access to license plate cameras, wants “data in near real time” FBI will pay vendors Flock and Motorola Solutions to help it track and search for vehicles nationwide. Ars on the Bureau quietly asking for a real-time feed from the country’s patchwork of private and municipal plate readers. The surveillance architecture has been built piecemeal for a decade; this is the centralization request. (Ars Technica)

• How the Bird Eye Was Pushed to an Evolutionary Extreme: The bird retina is one of the most energetically expensive tissues in the animal kingdom, yet it doesn’t use the energy advantage of oxygen. New research finally explains how this is possible. (Quanta Magazine)

• Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame: BBC Future on the postwar Japanese reforestation program — millions of cedars planted for timber, no follow-up plan, and now nationwide hay fever as the karmic dividend. A small parable on policy half-lives. A decision made 70 years ago to reforest vast swathes of Japan with just two kinds of tree has come back to haunt the country. (BBC)

•  Retrospective — The Entire Series of MB&F Legacy Machine Watches: Monochrome runs through every Legacy Machine MB&F has built since 2011. A satisfying tour of one of the few independent watchmakers doing genuinely new things rather than re-issuing the 1960s catalogue. (Monochrome Watches)

Video of the day: The Album That Rewired Modern Pop: Believe (1998)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Vimal Kapur, CEO and Chairman of DJIA component Honeywell International. The firm is in the midst of dividing into three companies: Honeywell Automation, Honeywell Aerospace, and Solstice Advanced Materials. The firm has fully integrated AI as the intelligence layer in all of its automation processes and products.

 

America’s Small-Business Boom Comes Without New Jobs

Source: Bloomberg

 

Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.

 

The post 10 Friday AM Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.

US Removes UN Gaza Rapporteur Francesca Albanese From Sanctions List

Authored by Owen Evans via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The United States has removed U.N. special rapporteur Francesca Albanese from its sanctions list, according to a May 20 notice posted by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control.

Francesca Albanese, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, attends a news conference during the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, on March 24, 2026. Denis Balibouse/Reuters

The notice said Albanese, listed as Francesca Paola Albanese, had been deleted from the Specially Designated Nationals list under an International Criminal Court-related sanctions program.

The sanctions barred her from entering the United States and banking there.

The move came a week after a federal judge temporarily blocked enforcement of the sanctions, finding that the Trump administration likely violated Albanese's free-speech rights by imposing the measures.

Albanese, an Italian lawyer based in Tunisia, serves as the "U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967."

She has repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, allegations Israel has rejected.

The United States had placed Albanese under sanctions in July 2025 under an executive order targeting people accused of assisting International Criminal Court actions against the United States or its allies.

"The United States has repeatedly condemned and objected to the biased and malicious activities of Albanese that have long made her unfit for service as a Special Rapporteur. Albanese has spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West," U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote at the time.

The sanctions barred U.S. persons from doing business with her and blocked any property or interests in property under U.S. jurisdiction.

Albanese has denied any allegations of anti-Semitism.

Albanese's husband and daughter, who is a U.S. citizen, sued the Trump administration in February this year, alleging that the U.S. sanctions are "effectively debanking her and making it nearly impossible to meet the needs of her daily life."

In October 2024, Albanese published a U.N. report titled "Genocide as colonial erasure," in which she argued that Israel's campaign in Gaza should be viewed within a broader "settler-colonial" framework.

"Since its establishment, Israel has treated the occupied people as a hated encumbrance and threat to be eradicated, subjecting millions of Palestinians, for generations, to everyday indignities, mass killing, mass incarceration, forced displacement, racial segregation, and apartheid. Advancing its goal of 'Greater Israel' threatens to erase the Indigenous Palestinian population," she wrote.

The "settler-colonial" framework is often associated with left-wing, postcolonial, and critical-theory scholarship.

Australian free-market think tank Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) explicitly calls settler-colonial theory an "unsettling Marxist ideology" as the academic field was founded by British-born prominent social anthropologist and historian Patrick Wolfe, who drew on Marxist theory.

In 2024, a United Nations watchdog called for an immediate probe into alleged ethical abuses by Albanese, which said that she had allegedly requested payments for work done in her official capacity, something it called illegal.

U.N. Watch filed a complaint with U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk, demanding that Albanese be removed from her role.

In a March 2025 response, the U.N. Coordination Committee did not remove Albanese or find a formal breach, but said the proposed honorarium arrangement was "inappropriate."

"The Committee was also satisfied by the confirmation from the Special Rapporteur that she has not and will not accept payment or honoraria of any kind for work done in her official U.N. capacity," it said.

In 2025, Israel withdrew from the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC), citing "ongoing and unrelenting institutional bias" against the Jewish state.

Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar, in a social media post announcing the withdrawal, cited U.S. President Donald Trump's decision announced the previous day to pull the United States out of the council.

"Israel joins the United States and will not participate in the UNHRC," Sa'ar wrote.

Trump announced in February 2025 that the United States would withdraw from the Human Rights Council and also would not resume funding of UNRWA, the U.N. agency that addresses Palestinians and is the largest employer in the Gaza Strip.

The United States previously froze payments to UNRWA in 2018, during Trump's first term. They were restored under the Biden administration but stopped again after it was alleged that at least 12 agency employees participated in terrorist group Hamas's Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.

Hillel Neuer, executive director of U.N. Watch, told a House Foreign Affairs committee in January 2024 that 1,200 of UNRWA's 13,000 Gaza employees belonged to Hamas and that 6,000 of them had family members in it.

Reuters, Dan M. Berger, and Aldgra Fredly contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 06:30

Chinese EV Makers Turn Abandoned Western Factories Into Global Launchpads

Chinese EV companies are rapidly expanding overseas by snapping up unused factory space from struggling Western automakers, many of whom are downsizing traditional gasoline-car production, according to Nikkei.

Stellantis recently opened plants in France and Spain to partnerships with Dongfeng and Leapmotor. At the same time, Geely is expected to restart an idle production line at a Spanish factory owned by Ford Motor Company. The trend reflects a broader shift in the auto industry: Chinese EV makers are expanding aggressively while many legacy manufacturers are cutting capacity.

UBS analysts predict Chinese brands could control 35% of the global auto market by 2030, up from 25% this year, helped by China’s low-cost battery supply chain. Their report warned that foreign automakers face “structural market share loss” as competition intensifies.

Nikkei writes that building cars locally has become a practical way for Chinese companies to avoid tariffs and satisfy governments pushing for domestic manufacturing. BNP Paribas analyst James Kan said the strategy helps local economies “feel that they’re getting a cut,” making expansion politically easier.

Europe has become a key battleground. After facing steep EU tariffs, Leapmotor said it would source many components within Europe for production at Stellantis facilities. The company also plans to begin manufacturing in Brazil, where tariffs on imported EVs are set to increase again this summer.

But owning overseas factories brings new complications. Citigroup analyst Harald Hendrikse joked he was “a little amused” watching Chinese firms buy European plants because they are about to learn “how difficult it is to do business” there. Labor costs, regulations, and local sourcing rules could significantly raise expenses.

BYD has already faced setbacks abroad. After renovating a former Ford plant in Brazil, the company became embroiled in controversy over alleged “slavery-like” labor conditions tied to construction work. Even so, BYD is still exploring additional factories in Latin America and Europe.

Many Chinese automakers prefer acquiring dormant facilities instead of building new plants from scratch, which one industry executive described as requiring “tons of extra preparation work.” Companies are carefully comparing costs, efficiency, and demand before making investments.

Meanwhile, European manufacturers are struggling with underused factories. Volkswagen plans to reduce global production capacity by millions of vehicles this decade. CEO Oliver Blume acknowledged the company still has too much unused capacity in Europe, though he later said there are “currently no plans or discussions” with Chinese manufacturers.

For some executives, these partnerships could solve problems on both sides: Chinese EV makers gain faster access to foreign markets, while Western automakers find new uses for factories that would otherwise sit idle.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 05:45

Elon Musk Offers To Fund Lawsuit Against UK Police In Henry Nowak Stabbing Tragedy

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

Elon Musk has stepped forward to hold UK police accountable in what appears to be one of the most disturbing policing failures to emerge from Britain in years.

The tech mogul publicly offered to bankroll a wrongful death lawsuit against officers who allegedly prioritized an attacker's claims of "racism" over saving the life of 18-year-old Henry Nowak.

Musk's intervention comes as harrowing bodycam footage from the scene plays out in Southampton Crown Court during the ongoing murder trial of Vickrum Singh Digwa, the 23-year-old man of Indian Sikh heritage accused of stabbing Nowak four times with a 21cm blade.

This poor boy was running away from someone who stabbed him & stole his phone, but the police in the UK attacked him instead of his murderer! https://t.co/SwnHHYec1d

- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2026

He followed up with another pointed question: "Has any action been taken against the police officers who handcuffed this boy and made him bleed to death in the street? Who are they?"

Has any action been taken against the police officers who handcuffed this boy and made him bleed to death in the street?

Who are they?

https://t.co/EkfCZcFNYD

- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2026

In a further post, Musk declared: "Unconscionable. I am happy to fund a wrongful death lawsuit against these disgusting excuses for law enforcement. They damn well better have been fired."

Unconscionable.

I am happy to fund a wrongful death lawsuit against these disgusting excuses for law enforcement. They damn well better have been fired.

- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2026

Nowak, a first-year accountancy and finance student at the University of Southampton from Essex, was walking home from a night out with university football teammates when he was attacked. Prosecutors say Digwa stabbed him four times after Nowak tried to escape.

When police arrived, bodycam footage captured Nowak leaning against a wall, supported by Digwa's father. The father told officers: "He keeps dropping down, so I am just trying to keep him up."

Nowak repeatedly said "Can't breathe" and told them he had been stabbed. Instead of rushing medical aid, officers handcuffed the bleeding teenager while arresting him for suspected assault - based on claims from Digwa's family that Nowak had racially abused them. One officer responded to his desperate pleas about being stabbed with: "I don't think you have, mate."

Henry then passed out and died, drowned in his own blood.

Digwa's brother told the emergency call handler: "We just got attacked racially by some white person... Physically attacked my brother, we're Sikhs, we wear turbans, and he attacked my brother."

Videos shown to jurors captured Digwa and his brother accusing Nowak of a racial attack. Nowak denied it. Digwa was heard saying: "No one stabbed you bro, you're up. You're drunk." Digwa's father added: "He's pretending, a minute ago he was talking to you guys. Now he's trying to get up and going to leave."

Incredible how they're going with the defence of 'he said some mean words' (no evidence of any racial slurs anyway) as if this somehow justifies stabbing him four times then lying about it. https://t.co/KHOrS8R2cW

- Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) May 18, 2026

Digwa openly carried the large 21cm shastar - a ceremonial Sikh blade - in public, along with the smaller religiously mandated kirpan. Prosecutors noted questions over why the larger weapon was present.

Digwa denies murder. His mother, Kiran Kaur, faces charges of assisting an offender by allegedly removing the knife from the scene.

Musk's offer has ignited fury over what critics call two-tier policing - where accusations of racism against a native Brit appear to override clear medical emergencies. No officers have been named or disciplined publicly. As of today, no action has been confirmed against those involved.

This case has drawn parallels to failures where authorities appear more concerned with perceived slights than protecting life. Nowak was a young British student simply walking home. Digwa's legal team argues self-defence in the "heat of the moment" following the alleged verbal exchange.

Yet the bodycam evidence, now public through court proceedings, paints a picture of a dying teen ignored while his attacker's narrative took precedence.

Musk's willingness to fund a civil suit underscores a growing frustration with institutional inaction. The trial continues at Southampton Crown Court. Digwa denies the charges.

Henry Nowak's death should force a reckoning. When police treat a stabbed British teen as the aggressor based on unverified claims from the attacker's family - while he bleeds out saying he can't breathe - something has gone fundamentally wrong with priorities in law enforcement.

Religious exemptions allowing large blades in public, combined with a policing culture that appears to elevate certain accusations above immediate life-saving duties, leave ordinary citizens vulnerable.

Musk's intervention shines a light where so-called mainstream coverage has lagged. Justice for Henry Nowak demands more than a trial verdict - it requires naming those officers, holding them accountable, and ending the failures that let a young man die in the street while pleading for help.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 05:00

Shipping Turmoil Remains Largely Contained To Gulf, For Now

The world's most critical maritime energy chokepoint has now been closed for 12 weeks, leaving seaborne energy supply chains heavily disrupted. Still, one UBS analyst points out that the shock has yet to meaningfully spill over into broader global shipping outside the Gulf area, suggesting the disruption remains largely contained for now.

"It looks like non-energy related global shipping traffic is running just 4% below normal in May - a bit better than April," UBS analyst Arend Kapteyn wrote in a note to clients Thursday morning titled "The State Of Global Shipping Disruption."

Kapteyn continued:

Limited signs of spillovers to non-energy shipping (so far)

In our April 30 note, we showed how global oil/gas shipping traffic had fallen by 13% from pre-Middle East conflict levels—closely matching the disruption through the Strait of Hormuz—and how the various regions were trying to reroute ships to find alternative energy supplies. Today's chart examines whether that energy shock is spilling over into broader shipping activity. A key question is whether fuel shortages are beginning to weigh on overall trade flows, providing an additional transmission channel to global supply chains. PMI delivery times have already lengthened by around 1¾ standard deviations, but it remains unclear how much reflects product shortages versus shipping constraints.

The chart shows our "momentum" measure of global shipping traffic—defined as tonnes of cargo multiplied by nautical miles traveled per day. We've aggregated the daily data at a monthly frequency (May is the average of the daily data month-to-date), and standardize using z-score over the full sample. Oil and gas shipping has continued to deteriorate, now around 4 standard deviations below normal. By contrast, non-energy shipping weakened through April (-2 standard deviations) but has partially recovered in May (now around -0.7 standard deviations). In level terms, non-energy related shipping/cargo traffic fell 5% in March (vs the prior 12m average) and 13% in April but is now back to just 4% below normal. In Asia—where energy shortages appear most acute—non-energy volumes were 10% below normal in April but are now running slightly above normal. In the Gulf, however, non-energy shipping remains severely disrupted (around 83% below normal), reflecting the broader impact of the Strait of Hormuz bottleneck on both energy and non-energy flows.

Meanwhile, Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc recently warned on CNBC that a "new wake-up call" for global trade nears if the Hormuz chokepoint remains shuttered through June.

Then there was a note from UBS analyst Pierre Lafourcade last week that said, "Supply chain stress is rising at its fastest pace since the early pandemic."

The full note can be read by Professional subscribers here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal.

Signs that energy-flow disruptions are spreading into the broader shipping complex remain limited for now, with the stress still largely contained to the Gulf region.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 04:15

Authoritarianism Doesn't Arrive With A Coup... It Arrives With A Login

Authored by Sam Lowry via dailysceptic.org,

Authoritarianism doesn’t usually arrive with a coup. It arrives with a login, a compliance form, a penalty notice for keeping records in the wrong format. It comes with a quietly extended electoral term, a cancelled bank account, a prison sentence for a social media post. Each measure has a reasonable-sounding justification. The problem is the direction — and how far it has already travelled.

Power is migrating from the visible arena of democratic politics to the less visible world of systems — compliance regimes, regulators with elastic mandates and an expanding mesh of rules governing more of daily life than most people have yet registered. No single measure looks like tyranny. The problem is the cumulative direction and the speed at which it is moving.

None of what follows was in any manifesto. All of it is happening.

Regulating what you may own, burn and keep

Consider what it now means to own a home in Britain. From 2030, landlords will be prohibited from letting properties that fail to meet the government’s Energy Performance Certificate band C standard, with fines of up to £30,000 for non-compliance. These are not derelict or dangerous buildings. They are perfectly habitable properties rendered unlettable not by any structural failure but by the Government moving the regulatory goalposts around them. The Government is consulting on extending the same requirements to owner-occupied homes by 2035, at which point the state would decide whether you may sell or mortgage your own home without first spending thousands on ‘improvements’ it has specified.

The reach does not stop at the front door. In Smoke Control Areas covering much of urban England, a council officer can issue you a £1,000 fine for burning the wrong fuel in your own fireplace. Since October 2024, keeping a single backyard chicken requires formal registration with the Animal and Plant Health Agency — home address, species, numbers, declared purpose — on pain of a £2,500 fine. The state now maintains a database of hen keepers and their motivations. The Government does not confiscate your property. It makes non-compliance progressively unaffordable until the choice becomes theoretical.

Regulating what you may drive, eat, drink and smoke

The same logic has been applied with equal enthusiasm to how you move and what you consume. The Zero Emission Vehicle mandate requires 80% of new car sales to be electric by 2030, transferring the cost of Net Zero directly onto buyers.

For those who cannot yet afford an electric vehicle, Ulez zones, congestion charges and Vehicle Excise Duty rates designed to penalise older vehicles have quietly converted a private choice into a regulated privilege — with the bill adjusted according to how closely your car aligns with current Government policy.

Food and drink have followed. The sugar levy compelled manufacturers to reformulate products using artificial sweeteners — aspartame, sucralose, acesulfame K — whose population-wide, long-term effects remain a matter of active scientific debate, the Government compelling the switch without accepting any liability for unintended consequences.

Calorie counts are now mandatory on menus, multi-buy promotions on unhealthy foods are restricted, alcohol duty has been reformed and the tobacco generation ban makes it illegal to sell cigarettes to anyone born after 2009. Each measure has a plausible justification in isolation. Together, they describe a state that has decided your lifestyle is a policy variable to be optimised without your consent.

Regulating what you may say, think, and joke about

Britain has no formal censorship, but it has developed something nearly as effective. The Worker Protection Act 2023, in force since October 2024, places a duty on employers to prevent harassment by third parties, including customers, producing a wave of conduct policies across the hospitality sector that effectively outlaw the kind of informal, occasionally ribald conversation that has characterised the British pub for centuries. The landlord must now consider whether his regulars’ banter creates a legal liability.

The Online Safety Act hands an unelected regulator the power to remove content deemed ‘legal but harmful’ — a category whose boundaries are left to Ofcom, an organisation that cannot be voted out. The same regulator’s approach to broadcast media tells you something about how it exercises that discretion. Ofcom has opened more than a dozen investigations into GB News since the channel launched, fining it £100,000 and placing it “on notice” for repeated impartiality breaches — including, in one instance, for failing to sufficiently challenge a guest who called climate change a hoax.

The BBC, by contrast, broadcast a Panorama documentary one week before the 2024 US Presidential election that edited Donald Trump’s January 6th speech in a way its own former editorial adviser later described as “a blatant distortion” — giving a wholly misleading impression of what Trump had actually said. The BBC’s internal standards committee was alerted in January 2025 and took no decisive action for 10 months. The director general and head of news eventually resigned. The BBC Chair issued an apology, describing the edit as “an error of judgement”. Ofcom opened no investigation. The regulator that pursues GB News across a dozen probes for technicalities around impartiality found nothing in the BBC’s year-long concealment of a deliberately misleading edit worth examining.

The Metropolitan Police’s Live Facial Recognition programme scans faces on public streets in real time. The Investigatory Powers Act requires internet providers to retain every subscriber’s full browsing history for 12 months, available to government agencies without a judicial warrant. You are observed when you walk down the street and when you go online — and what you say about either is subject to a speech regime that Freedom House formally downgraded in 2025 for the “proliferation of criminal charges and convictions concerning online speech, including speech protected under international human rights standards”.

According to Freedom of Information data from 39 of 45 police forces, cited by the Times in April 2025, police were making roughly 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages. Those arrested are not, for the most part, dangerous extremists — they are childminders, pensioners and tradesmen whose posts, in any previous decade, would have been considered unremarkable expressions of frustration. Some received prison sentences. Others were investigated for months before charges were quietly dropped, a process that served as its own punishment. As MPs noted in Parliament last November, Britain is now more willing to imprison someone for a social media post than for a rape — a remark that lands rather differently when you recall that the Prime Minister overseeing all this was, as director of public prosecutions, the man who declined to pursue the grooming gang cases later documented by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

This selective enforcement extends to political opponents with a consistency that is difficult to attribute to coincidence. Nigel Farage — leader of a party that received four million votes at the last election and has since topped every national opinion poll — was simultaneously debanked by Coutts and subjected to smears about foreign state funding made under Parliamentary privilege, beyond the reach of defamation law. An independent investigation found he had been treated unfairly.

This week, the Commons standards watchdog opened a formal investigation into a £5 million personal gift he says he received to fund private security — security he required because the Home Office, under the previous government, had cut his state protection by 75%, leaving the leader of a major political party to fund his own safety. Reform UK argues the payment, made before Farage became an MP and intended solely for personal protection, falls under the Parliamentary exemption for purely personal gifts. Both Labour and the Conservatives, whose own MPs and peers have faced a quiet succession of expenses investigations and misconduct probes that have attracted a fraction of this scrutiny, are pressing the investigation.

The pattern — exhaustive pursuit of the opposition leader, institutional indulgence of the establishment — is by now entirely familiar.

Meanwhile, a recent survey found one in five British teenagers avoids sharing political opinions for fear of being cancelled, and nearly a quarter said they had been asked to stop voicing their views at school. A democracy that teaches its young that silence is the safest course is not building citizens. It is building subjects.

The anti-democratic march goes on

Sitting beneath all of this is a surveillance infrastructure that no one was asked to approve. This week’s King’s Speech confirmed the Government is pressing ahead with legislation to support digital ID, with the stated intention of making it available to those who want it by 2029. This formulation papers over the fact that, as a condition of employment, it will in practice be unavoidable.

The scheme — a single Government database linking your right to work, immigration status, tax record, health data and right to rent — was opposed by Big Brother Watch and three million petitioners, and promoted most energetically by the Tony Blair Institute, whose principal backer, Oracle, holds over £1 billion in UK Government contracts and is considered the frontrunner for the infrastructure work itself.

The King’s Speech also confirmed the European Partnership Bill — legislation to realign parts of British law with EU standards across food regulation, energy trading and carbon emissions. The mechanism is ‘dynamic alignment’: the UK must transpose and implement EU law in relevant areas, while having no vote on that law and no seat in the legislative process that produces it. In other words, the Government intends to bind this country to rules made in Brussels by people we did not elect, in pursuit of a relationship the British public voted to leave. It was not in Labour’s manifesto, it has not been put to the country, it is simply being done.

When ministers then announced in May 2025 that they intended to postpone elections in around 30 councils — extending their own terms without a public vote — and were forced to reverse course only after a judicial review by Reform UK and legal advice that the plan would likely be ruled unlawful, the instinct being revealed felt consistent with everything else: that democratic constraints are inconveniences to be managed rather than principles to be upheld.

It would be tempting to lay all of this at Labour’s door, but that would be too easy and not entirely honest. The Investigatory Powers Act was Theresa May’s. Rishi Sunak introduced the Online Safety Act. Making Tax Digital, the ZEV mandate, minimum EPC standards, the sugar levy and the Covid surveillance infrastructure, including vaccine passports, were all Conservative creations. The party that styled itself as the guardian of British liberty spent 14 years building much of the machinery that a Left-wing Government is now operating at full throttle.

The lesson is not that the Tories were secret socialists. It is that expanding state power has become the default response of any government seeking to appear purposeful — and the machinery, once built, does not ask about the politics of whomever operates it next.

The collapse of institutional trust

This Government has proved itself neither cautious nor neutral. It has used lawfare against dissidents and opponents with a brazenness unthinkable under any previous administration, directing the apparatus of state — police, prosecutors, regulators, quangos — consistently against those who dissent from the approved programme. Trust in the institutions that were supposed to remain above politics — the courts, the civil service, the BBC, the police — has collapsed accordingly, and not without reason.

A foreign power has not captured them; they have been captured from within, by a professional class that regards the management of public behaviour as its primary function and the instincts of ordinary citizens as a problem to be corrected.

Systems outlast governments. The toolkit remains when the party changes — which is what makes the question of succession so consequential. Angela Rayner, widely regarded as a leading contender should a Labour leadership contest emerge, has spent her career to the Left of Starmer on every question that bears on the relationship between citizen and state. Starmer, for all his Government’s record, may yet prove to have been the restraining hand. The Conservatives built much of this machinery. Labour is operating it at full throttle. Whoever comes next may remove the restraints entirely.

Recovery looks a long way off. Whether it is possible at all depends on whether enough people recognise what is being lost before the machinery becomes too entrenched to reverse. Free societies are not lost in a single dramatic moment. They are lost in the accumulated weight of a thousand reasonable-sounding justifications for why, just this once, the state knows better than you do.

We are well past the thousandth.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 03:30

From ISIS To Finance Bro: Syria's Sharaa To Attend G7 Summit In France

Syria continues stepping out of the geopolitical wilderness, now apparently onto the highest-stakes stage in international finance. Or rather, the reality is that Washington's post-Assad Al Qaeda in suits makeover of 'former' terror leader Ahmed al-Sharaa has reached its peak.

According to a Reuters report on Thursday, self-appointed Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa (Jolani) is set to lead a national delegation to the G7 summit in France next month.

HTS leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa, now self-declared President, also known as Abu Mohammed al-Jolani

The invitation marks the country's first-ever participation in the summit since the elite forum was founded back in 1975.

Citing three sources familiar with the matter, the agency confirmed that an invitation was officially hand-delivered to Syrian Finance Minister Mohammed Yisr Barnieh while he was attending the group's preparatory financial talks in Paris earlier this week. The main G7 summit is set to run mid-June, from the 15th through 17th in Évian-les-Bains, southeastern France.

A Syrian official speaking Reuters described that Damascus plans to heavily pitch its geography to the G7. This will likely center on leveraging the country's role as a "potential strategic hub for supply chains" amid the Iran war and Hormuz Strait crisis. 

"After the closure of the Hormuz Strait, pretty much all the neighboring countries in the region knocked on our door to get access to our Syrian ports," stated Mazen Alloush, the director of local and international relations for Syria's borders and customs authority. "They are making Plan B's in case the crisis goes on longer."

The over decade-long proxy war to oust Assad, which heavily involved the CIA and Gulf states, as well as Israel, has long been discussed as part of the 'pipeline wars' theme, and has for years been an open secret.

President Trump, who helped put Sharaa in power, and vouched for him when they first met in Saudi Arabia, is expected to attend the G7 summit.

But despite Damascus under Sharaa now being a willing puppet of Washington, economic relief for the war-ravaged Syrian population has remained illusory, as one Middle East outlet underscores:

Because Syria had been under crushing sanctions since the start of the 14-year war that began in 2011, many expected the economic situation to improve after Sharaa toppled former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's government and western nations began easing sanctions.

However, “attracting foreign investment and restoring normal banking ties ⁠have ​proven slower and more difficult than ​many officials had hoped,” Reuters noted. More than 90 percent of Syrians live below the poverty line and have suffered from major increases in the price of fuel, electricity, and food in recent months.

Gas prices have risen by nearly 50 percent in the past month, while the value of the Syrian currency has fallen against the dollar amid volatile price swings. In the past week, the Syrian pound depreciated from 13,400 liras per dollar to more than 14,700 liras per dollar, before ending at 14,000 liras per dollar.

The irony. Syria gets invited to the G7 while former member Russia is still banned. https://t.co/ca8rFPL1on

— David S. (@DavidS_Liberdad) May 21, 2026

All the while, looming large in the background is the fact that the Syrian government is now full of Sunni extremists, who have repeatedly targeted Alawites, Druze, and Christians for being "unbelievers". 

Thousands have died at the hands of ISIS-style Syrian government-linked military members, who have sought to cleanse the country of its ancient Christian and Alawite communities. 

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 02:45

Irrelevant Europe

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Europe is the ‘jungle’ now. No garden left to speak of.

Josep Borrell is a Spanish socialist who held several high-ranking positions in the European Union.  Until 2024, he was a vice-president of the European Commission and the high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy.  In that capacity, he ran Europe’s External Action Service, which is the diplomatic body that executes Europe’s foreign policy decisions around the world.  He remains a man with a great deal of influence over European perspectives.

In 2022, Borrell created a bit of an international incident when he described Europe as a “garden” and the rest of the world as a “jungle.”  

“We have built a garden,” he told aspiring European diplomats in Bruges, Belgium.  “Most of the rest of the world is a jungle.  The jungle could invade the garden.  The gardeners should take care of it.”

As the head of the European Defense Agency, Borrell’s comments made strategic sense.  As he said in that same speech, “The jungle has a strong growth capacity…Walls will never be high enough to protect the garden.  The gardeners have to go to the jungle, Europeans have to be much more engaged with the rest of the world.  Otherwise, the rest of the world will invade us, by different ways and means.”

Borrell’s speech came seven years after German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to open her country’s borders to millions of Islamic immigrants.  Originally touted as a humanitarian policy designed to temporarily shelter refugees from war-torn Syria, Germany’s generous welfare programs quickly became a magnet for young men across the Middle East and North Africa.  When Merkel declared on August 31, 2015, “We can do this,” she initiated an all-of-society “welcome culture” that quickly produced a full-blown migrant crisis for the whole continent.  Over ten years later, the influx of millions of Muslims into Europe has transformed school demographics and local politics, unleashed an explosion in sex crimes and anti-European violence, strained Europe’s hospital services and social safety nets, and exacerbated government debt.

Speaking after the “jungle” had already successfully invaded Europe’s “garden,” Borrell knew there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle.  Merkel’s fateful decision to “welcome” Middle Easterners to Europe transformed cities and towns across Europe into the Middle East.  Borrell also knew that the European Union’s patchwork defense agency did not have the requisite military and espionage assets to effectively protect the continent.  So he tried to fashion his corps of young diplomats into a network of information and persuasion agents who could do Europe’s bidding around the world.

Borrell’s message got lost in the ensuing international kerfuffle over his “garden” / “jungle” division of the world.  From Russia to Canada, Africa to Southeast Asia, every self-described “foreign policy expert” took umbrage at Borrell’s bluntness.  Perpetually offended virtue-signalers hadn’t gotten so worked-up since President Trump had called Haiti a “shithole country” four years earlier.  Just as Conan O’Brien felt compelled to white-knight for Haiti’s dystopian, cannibal gangland by visiting a heavily guarded resort in the Caribbean country and recklessly encouraging vacationers to join him, legions of politically correct snobs from around the planet recorded social media videos from their country estates in which they turned tsk-tsk-ing into a veritable lingua franca for the vicariously aggrieved.

All the “very best people” denounced Borrell for promoting a scarcely disguised restoration of European imperialism, colonialism, fascism, and genocide.  Young international students enjoying university scholarships and living in Europe for free made sure to remind Borrell that “diversity is our strength.”  Borrell’s socialist comrades beat him over the head with Europe’s prime directive: multiculturalism über alles.  Mohammadbagher Forough, a random research fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies, publicly reprimanded Europe’s foreign minister thusly: “This kind of comment puts a serious dent in the enterprise of European strategic autonomy.  It upsets, at the most profound level, countries in the rest of the world, because of the history of colonialism.”

In other words, Europe’s “ruling class” and auxiliary straphangers condemned Borrell for daring to defend the beneficiaries of Western civilization.  He was encouraged by threat of high-culture social banishment to follow Chancellor Merkel’s example in supplicating before the migrant hordes.  The message was clear: Europe’s minister of defense cannot properly “defend” Europe unless he allows non-Europeans to take over the continent.  It was further proof that Europe is irreparably lost.

Since his departure from the European Union’s foreign policy perch at the end of 2024, Borrell has spent most of his time in public lambasting President Trump’s global leadership.  A staunch supporter of Ukraine who once threatened to “annihilate” the Russian army, Borrell has frequently defended the honor of Volodymyr Zelenskyy by claiming that Ukraine’s holdover president is leading “the resistance” and “deserves respect.”  After President Trump described Zelenskyy as a “dictator without elections,” Borrell called the “accusation” the “height of dishonesty.”  When President Trump and Vice President Vance took offense to Zelenskyy’s sense of entitlement and disregard for American taxpayers who have paid the salaries and pensions of Ukraine’s government workforce, Borrell screamed on X, “Trump and Vance have put on a disgraceful show.  I am ashamed of that behavior.”

In response to Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference last year during which the vice president excoriated Europe’s crackdown on free speech and political dissent, Borrell lectured his erstwhile colleagues: “This is a declaration of political war against the European Union.”  Going further, Europe’s former defense minister declared, “Europe must stop pretending that Trump is not an adversary and assert its technological, security, and political sovereignty with clarity and strength.”

As much as I find Borrell’s socialist-globalist politics abhorrent, I respect his impulse to defend his fellow Europeans.  The problem is that the European Union is a governmental monstrosity — bureaucratically lethargic, ideologically suffocating, foolishly regulatory, unmoored from its stated principles, opposed to public debate, enamored with its empires’ past glories, and increasingly oppressive.  Eurocrats such as Borrell believed they could reconstitute European centrality in the world by constructing a “rules-based international order” and forcing every other nation in the world to bend to Europe’s will.  Brussels has long desired to rule the world through rule-making.

It turns out that depending on the United States for security, the Russian Federation for energy, and communist China for critical imports is not a blueprint for European strength.  To his credit, Borrell understands Europe’s dilemma.  He knows that the European Union “was not designed for the world in which we live today.”  Forced to watch President Trump remake the world without showing any deference to Europe’s globalist prerogatives, Borrell openly laments, “We are not very relevant to international politics.”

Can you imagine how difficult of an admission that is for Borrell to make?  He has been weaned on the notion of European superiority all his life.  Even as parts of the European continent careen toward civil war, Borrell still believes that Europe is the world’s idyllic “garden” and everywhere else remains wild “jungle.”  From Borrell’s perspective, not only is Haiti a “shithole country” but also the United States is, too.

Borrell finally realizes, however, that Europe survives only because the rest of the world permits it to endure.  When you depend upon the United States, Japan, India, China, Russia, and the Middle East to produce everything that Europe’s dying empire needs, then you have no leverage or real power in the world.  European imperialism is dead because Europe has no armies or navies to enforce its “rules-based” edicts.  European imperialism is dead because sane nations refuse to impoverish themselves in the name of carbon credit tyranny.  European imperialism is dead because Europe opened its doors to an Islamic invasion.

Europe is the “jungle.”  The “garden” is gone.  European hubris sealed its fate.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 02:00

Fake Wars & Higher Prices: What A "Multipolar World Order" Really Means

Authored by Kit Knightly via Off-Guardian.org,

The world is changing. The once dominant imperial power of the United States is faltering, hollowed out by corruption, over-extended by hubris, eaten away by the cancers of hatred, nationalism and greed.

Even according to its own propaganda outlets, America has “become the villain”, is “Officially an Empire in Decline”, and we are witnessing its “final act”.

And, as we await the titan’s inevitable fall, the world is considering the future. Everyone is talking about the “multipolar world order” just over the horizon.

From “Pax Americana to Pax Multipolaris”.

This “Multipolar World” has been a political talking point for a long time, but it has been building momentum over the last few years, and noticeably accelerating since the beginning of Donald Trump’s second term.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been calling for this multipolar order for years, and did so again last week. China’s Xi Jinping regularly does the same, most recently during his trip to South America in February. North Korea’s Kim Jung Il echoed these sentiments in April.

Xi and Putin signed a joint declaration on “building a multipolar world” this morning.

Two weeks ago, in a talk at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called for “a post-imperial world [and] a resilient rules-based order in a new era of multipolarity”.

In a speech during his trip to China last month, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called for “embracing a multipolar world order”:

“What is happening today is not a transfer of hegemony, but an increase in multipolarity — in both power and prosperity,”

Outside of politicians speechifying, the multipolar world order has become the main focus of the international think-tank circuit as well.

“Multipolarization” was the main topic of the Munich Security Conference Report in February 2025.

In December, the Tony Blair Institute partnered with the JPMorgan Chase International Council to publish a report called “World Rewired: Navigating a Multi-Speed, Multipolar Order”, which concludes in the foreword (written by Blair himself and Jamie Dimon of JPMC):

The world still offers enormous potential for those willing to engage constructively—to build coalitions, invest in innovation, and help shape the rules of the next era rather than simply react to them.

And then in March, the World Economic Forum published an (exceedingly dull) report titled “The Future of Materials Systems: Cooperation Opportunities in a Multipolar World”, which uses sentences like this…

In a multipolar world, agile interest-based cooperation will be decisive in shaping resilient, productive and sustainable materials systems.

That’s the traditional circle in which “multipolarity” is most discussed. Reports for alphabet agencies and non-profits, market predictions and risk assessments. Academic language that camouflages meaning in layers of surplus verbiage.

But multipolarity is not just the pet subject of presidents and thinktanks, it is a regular talking point across the media landscape.

America Can’t Escape the Multipolar Order

…said Council on Foreign Relations publication Foreign Affairs, in December.

The European Times headlines “From unipolarity to multipolar reality – A new world order is fast emerging”, and is rather more measured:

Multipolarity itself is neither inherently dangerous nor inherently beneficial. Its ultimate impact will depend on how nations choose to exercise power, uphold international law, and cooperate in addressing common challenges.

In an interview with Politico titled “What the next world order looks like”, British author Rana Dasgupta says:

If we’re entering a multipolar world, that’s not very unusual. That’s the normal state of the world.

As you can see, the potential fall of our modern Rome isn’t terrifying to many of those who owe their money and position to that Empire, rather it is energizing or maybe “the normal state of the world”.

The US/Israeli war with Iran has been blamed for and/or credited with accelerating this long-awaited Imperial decline.

Two weeks ago, The Tehran Times headlines:

How the Iran conflict is catalyzing a multipolar world order

A report from The Middle East Council on Global Affairs frames the war in Iran as the US trying to stop the multipolar world from breaking free:

What is unfolding in Iran is not simply a war over the regional balance of power or nuclear containment. It is an attempt to rupture the geographic core of an emerging multipolar order designed to bypass Western dominance

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published this…

The Iran War Shows the Limits of U.S. Power – If Washington cannot adapt to the ongoing transformations of a multipolar world, its superiority will become a liability.

In many parts of the independent media there is an almost feverish anticipation.

America’s Empire will fall, and a shiny multipolar new world order will rise in its place, and it’s definitely going to be A Good Thing.

That’s the story.

But that’s all it is, a story.

What is the “multipolar world order”, really?

What multipolarity really means

The cultivated image of a multipolar world – minus the quotes – is that of global cooperation between free-and-equal sovereign nations, each pursuing the interests of their people without living under the cloud of Imperial hegemony.

“Equal and orderly […] inclusive, universally beneficial economic globalisation”, as Xi Jinping said in a February speech.

This was echoed, in greater depth, by Professor Wang Yiwei, who wrote a briefing titled “The Chinese Philosophy of an Equal and Orderly Multipolar World Order”, and describing how different the world would be under Chinese leadership – or rather, non-leadership:

China advocates an equal and orderly multipolar world and inclusive economic globalization. Among these, the core of an equal and orderly multipolar world is to adhere to the equality of all countries, big and small, oppose hegemonism and power politics, and effectively promote the democratization of international relations.

A less utopian view predicts a multipolar world districted into blocs or spheres of influence, but still more dynamic and potentially fair for being out of the Empire’s shadow. That was the original meaning of the phrase when it was first floated in the late 90s.

But neither of these reflect the looming reality, or the true intentions of the powerful people feeding the word to their talking heads.

That might be multipolarity, but it’s not “multipolarity”.

It’s amazing the difference a pair of quotation marks can make, isn’t it?

The powers-that-shouldn’t-be and their soulless meat puppets in the corporate, academic and political spheres have created an entirely euphemistic linguistic phraseology defined by the need for quotation marks.

Words and phrases that don’t mean what they pretend to mean.

“Climate change”, “hate speech”, “public health”.

“Terrorism”, “misinformation” and “sustainability”.

In our political landscape, these have ceased to be words with meanings and become both camouflage and conditioning.

A dishonest cross-breed of programming language and hypnotic suggestion; phrases designed to obfuscate reality on the one hand, and either mechanically call pre-programmed responses or elicit powerful conditioned emotional reactions on the other.

“Multipolarity” is one of those words. And it should always be put in quotes.

The truth behind the word is simple: A global franchise for an old system of control.

Party Politics Goes Global

Defenders of the “multipolar world order” narrative will often argue along the lines “surely a multipolar world is better than US Imperialism? Shouldn’t we welcome resistance to hegemony?”

That same argument has been deployed by climate change supporters, who claim “even if the climate isn’t changing, protecting the environment is still a good thing, isn’t it?”

The flaw in this argument is a failure to question the underlying assumptions and official definitions of these phrases.

Just because something adopts a nice-sounding name doesn’t mean that thing is nice.

Labour don’t support workers. The Democrats hate democracy.

State-backed corporate “environmentalism” is not about planting trees or saving animals, and globalist-backed corporate “multipolarity” is nothing to do with increasing national sovereignty or offering independence from a global authority.

The reality of a “multipolar world” will be a system of intertwining corporate and state institutions implementing authoritarian, anti-human policies and disguising an ideologically monolithic power structure behind an illusory veneer of “choice”.

We in the collective West are more than familiar with this model – it is the way our “democracies” function.

Two major teams, with near identical ideologies and taking orders from the same unelected powers, fiercely battling it out over the tiniest sliver of uncommon ground.

They pitch electoral battles over differences of iconography, phraseology or fractions of percentage points to distract from the fact they agree about everything that really matters, have no real power at all, and are at best replaceable widgets in a vast influence machine.

The point of these battles is to convince people that democracy exists, that they have a choice, and can affect change.

This lie works, and has done for decades.

“Mutlipolarity” is an expansion of that model – the control mechanism of fake binary left-right, red-blue, Coke-Pepsi partisan politics rolling out world-wide.

It’s the same exact method employed to the same exact end: Tribalism as a path to cognitive dissonance, thought termination and the death of objectivity.

Why This? Why now?

It’s worth remembering this faux-antagonistic version of “multipolarity” was not part of the long term plan.

It was obvious, almost from the very start, that the Covid “pandemic” was intended to be a great global unifying moment.

We were all supposed to realise how silly these disagreements across ethnic, national or religious lines were, and come together to beat back the common enemy. A threat to the world that untied the world, like in Independence Day.

We were meant to be using digital currency under a globally implemented social credit system by now. Owning nothing and being happy.

But it didn’t work.

The moment they attempted to remove the horizontal divisions created to control society, they only drew attention to the much greater vertical divisions. People suddenly became more aware of the centralized, unified nature of global power structures.

The grand plan to get Global Government through the gates inside the Covid trojan horse not only failed, but backfired spectacularly.

There was a need for a re-adjustment. A new approach.

International unity didn’t work and doesn’t sell, but an international binary might.

That’s the “multipolar world order”.

The Momentum of Real Division

None of this is to deny the existence of real divisions, or whitewash historic crimes. Obviously there are deeply felt, and entirely justified, anti-Imperial sentiments across the developing world, and within the dissenting circles of the developed world.

The USA has been an Imperial power for the best part of two centuries, and a global hegemon for almost forty years, and in that time it has carried out monstrous acts of colonial aggression, and destroyed millions of lives. We have covered many of them.

In pursuit of oil and gold they cut a bloody swathe across the Middle East, and churned South and Central America into political chaos over and over again.

Israel likewise – whether you consider them the power behind the US throne, or Washington’s catspaw in the Middle East – is a brutal apartheid state, that has torn up and spat out international law a thousand times over.

These are all true facts, and the multipolar narrative finds utility in them.

Just as domestic party politics parlays very real economic issues into shallow class-based resentments, or understandable concerns over uncontrolled immigration into reactionary xenophobia – so too does the “multipolar world” narrative prey on historical trauma and the desire for vengeance to embed partisan thought that erodes critical thinking.

The narrative harnesses the momentum of historical hatred to push itself forward.

Indeed, as I have previously said in interviews, the enthusiasm for this new model from the political classes in Russia, China et al. is entirely understandable. It is far better, from their point of view, to have a seat at the globalist table than be living with Uncle Sam’s nuclear gun at their temple.

It’s possible many of the people involved truly believe that a fake “multipolar world order” really does prevent a nuclear war, and is for the best.

Ironically, in their minds, “war” really does mean peace.

The Role of War

War is vital to the development of this multipolar model, in two main ways:

1. It disguises, discredits and/or distracts from, the revelation of globalist cooperation highlighted by the Pandemic.
2. It furthers, by other means, the “great reset” agenda.

It has other supplementary functions as well.

If “Multipolarity” is the global franchise of fake democracy, then war can be seen as a replacement for the ballot box.. We don’t have global elections (yet); so their role in the system is assumed by geopolitical struggles; trade deals or staged/limited “wars”.

Global unity government was and is a very unpopular idea, so its creeping implementation has to be disguised. Nothing disguises unity of purpose so well as armed conflict.

The sheer number of people who repeat some variant of the argument “how can they be on the same side, they’re shooting at each other!” is testament to the effectiveness of this strategy.

Nothing brings a populous together so well as a perceived external threat. History is replete with rulers who, faced with discontent at home, started a war to garner support. A state of being at war tends to unite people behind the government.

It’s the natural extension of this known tactic that two governments would agree to go to war in order to mutually benefit from this group-think dynamic.

This is international geo-political game theory, as explained in A Beautiful Mind. They both win if they agree not to truly compete.

Both sides have corrupt political classes, both sides have arms manufacturers keen to profit from chaos, both sides crave “emergency war-time powers” to crack down on domestic dissent.

So, we can see how the “war” individually benefits the rulers of each side in the short term. But, more importantly, the supra-national powers have a larger, longer-term agenda (see below) that is also served by the war.

War drives up prices, consumes resources, lowers the standard of living, justifies shortages and manufacturers scarcity.

These factors combine to a make a state of being – or appearing to be – at war vital to the planned breakdown and reconstruction of society.

This is not a new idea, the state has used the framing of war, or at least the threat of war, to boost national unity and increase state powers for centuries.

The new twist is that these “wars” are not real, they are – to one extent or another – staged.

All the wars a stage

We are living in the age of the unreal – The Perfidious Unreality of the New Normal – as we discussed with all those quotation marks.

We regularly live through “terrorism” that is no such thing, we hold “elections” where the voting is irrelevant, and we just had a worldwide “pandemic” without a disease.

It is only natural that warfare should be folded into a propaganda control system that increasingly relies on simply making stuff up.

Just as Western domestic “democracies” need “elections” to maintain the illusion of the system, so too does a “multipolar world” need “wars” to create the appearance of conflict.

These wars are not real.

Or perhaps “real” is not the best word to use – if you want we could say these wars are not honest, not true, not sincere.

But what does staged war mean?

Does it mean no bombs are being dropped or people killed?

No, as we have said many times: Be it in Ukraine or Gaza or Iran, there likely is death and destruction taking place – but that does not necessarily mean war.

As Catte says in her 2024 article:

Death isn’t the definition of war. Conflict is the definition of war.

Do a few air strikes or a thousand dead civilians mean the US and Iran are really enemies locked in an ideological struggle for survival? No. Of course not.

We know these governments and agencies do not care about their own people, let alone each other’s.

People were disposable when they were being nailed inside their houses, given illegal DNR orders or injected with toxic Pfizer goo, and they’re just as disposable when they’re being blown up.

It’s like a psychopathic, murderous sport. The players are real – maybe they’re playing to win or maybe paid to lose – but it doesn’t really matter, since the struggle is controlled by a league which sets the terms.

Numbers, times, places, rules and limitations are all agreed on beforehand.

And, just like sport, the fans cheering hate each other far more than the players playing do, everyone gets paid no matter who wins, and the whole thing is owned by a handful of billionaires who all go to the same parties.

What would a staged war look like?

Well, that’s a more complicated question.

The simple answer is “coordination”. Any kind of coordination – especially of scale or scope – means we can infer a certain amount of fakeness. After all, if the two sides can agree to have a limited war, they can agree not have a war at all.

There are a few more specific signs to look out for.

For example, both sides calling ahead to tell each other where they plan to bomb (or not bomb), so that people can be evacuated accordingly.

Or one army making it to the enemy capital inside a month, then turning around and leaving again for unknown reasons.

Or maybe pausing hostilities to carry out a polio vaccination drive.

Or perhaps vague or ever-changing victory conditions.

Or a pattern of airstrikes hitting empty or condemned buildings in such a way that aligns with pre-existing renovation plans.

Or repeated self-defeating or self-sabotaging behavior that seems to artificially halt progress or extend the conflict.

Or sudden, contradictory developments in the narrative that don’t logically follow.

Or apparent collaboration from combatants on strategies that further a globalist agenda.

…that kind of thing.

This is the logical extension of pre-existing modus operandi. The inevitable intersection of the war-for-profit model that is centuries old, and the age of simulacra described by Baudrillard in the 1980s.

What is the benefit of staged war?

The benefit of a staged war vs a real war is much the same as a fake pandemic vs a real pandemic – control.

A coordinated “war” can last as long as it needs to, pause or resume on command, kill as few or as many as necessary, and can’t ever accidentally result in nuclear annihilation.

George Orwell described it almost perfectly eighty years ago. Super-continents locked in eternal, and maybe even fictional, conflict. Warfare becoming “a purely internal affair”, not meant to be won but meant to be continuous.

An endless game and permanent chaos is how they win.

That’s our state of play, grumbling wars with vague victory conditions that neither army ever loses but both sides constantly claim to be winning.

Meanwhile, the price of energy is only going up, we’re being warned of fertilizer crises and food shortages and higher taxes.

Different Paths, Same Destination

Just as in domestic party politics, vociferous or violent disagreements between the parties belie a shared agenda pushed by the power that controls both sides of every apparent divide.

Even as their mutually-beneficial “wars” play out, reports and think-tanks talk up the need for “limited cooperation” or “regional multilateral projects”.

As they bash their soldiers together on one side of the world, they share technology, cooperate on environmental issues or buy gas and oil from each other.

And agree on major policy documents.

The whole world (minus the US, currently) has signed the Pandemic Treaty, or signed up to the United Nations “Pact for the Future”.

The BRICS nations all have globalist ties – recall BRICs was a term coined in a Goldman Sachs report in 2001 – and they all signed the Kazan Declaration in 2024. Supporting, among other things, the IMF, the WHO, Agenda 2030 and “sustainable development goals”. (Read Riley Waggaman’s great break down here)

The Kyoto Protocols, the Paris Climate Agreements, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are all backed by every one of our multiple poles.

Everyone on any of the supposed sides believes in the same things and shills the same foundational globalist lies such as climate change and Covid.

And, quirks of implementation or nomenclature aside, they all want the same things and push the same familiar shopping list of policies:

• Programmable Digital currency
• biometric Digital ID
• ending online anonymity
• Cashless society
• Censorship
• “Sustainable development goals”

The unspoken endgame of this collective horror show is easy to summarize: Techno-authoritarianism.

Hrvoje Moric has written about how multipolarity, as a model, is a form of global government.

A dystopian society where the state and mega corporations merge into a Thing-like monstrosity that has constant, real-time access to any and all data for pretty much everyone on the planet. That has the ability and facility to monitor – or control – every transaction, every journey, every message or phone call.

“Multipolarity” disguises this truth, and uses partisan thinking and ideology to draw fake or surface-level distinctions.

BRICS vs NATO, the US vs China, Israel vs Iran, Europe vs Russia, Belt and Road Initiative vs the India-Middle East-Europe Trade Corridor.

Pick a flag and wave it. Fake Wars & Higher Prices, all in the service of The Great Reset.

That is its purpose, and that is what “multipolarity” really means.

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 23:25

Pentagon Delegation's Beijing Visit Held Up Over Gargantuan US Arms Package For Taiwan

China is using a Pentagon itinerary as structural leverage, and Taiwan remains front and center as the key geopolitical snag in bettering communications and relations between Beijing and Washington.

According to a Financial Times report published Thursday, China is actively holding up a proposed visit by Elbridge Colby, the Pentagon's under-secretary of defense for policy. The move is a transparent effort to pressure President Trump over a looming $14 billion weapons package for Taiwan.

Elbridge Colby, left.

While Colby had been actively discussing a summer trip to Beijing with Chinese officials, China has effectively frozen the process and logistics. Sources familiar with the talks report that Beijing has signaled it "cannot approve a visit until Trump decides how he will proceed with the arms package."

Trump admin officials have been quick to point out that Trump has approved "the sale of more weapons to Taiwan than any other US president." And so it appears that such bravado should come with a cost, in Beijing's apparent thinking.

And yet, Trump has repeatedly publicly touted his personal relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping as "amazing" - though his recent Beijing trip did nothing to ultimately produce a breakthrough.

Trump, upon returning from his trip earlier this month, stated that he "has not decided whether to proceed with the major weapons sale," injecting a fresh wave of strategic ambiguity over US support for the self-ruled island.

He also in an interview with Fox News' Bret Baier had stated that he doesn't want "to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war" over Taiwan.

"I'm not looking to have somebody to go independent and, you know, we're supposed to travel 9,500 miles to fight a war," Trump told Baier. "I'm not looking for that. I want them to cool down. I want China to cool down."

Taiwan remains critically important to Washington because it is not only a semiconductor production supernode, but also a geopolitical fortress against China and a potential flashpoint in US-China relations. But China hawks have questioned Trump's resolve and where he stands, related to the scenario of potential direct Chinse aggression against Taiwan.

Trump's rhetoric on Taiwan before and after his summit with President Xi has raised eyebrows in Washington...

Absolute betrayal. When asked about consulting Taiwan on weapons deals, Donald Trump completely dismisses them as a mere problem.

He immediately pivots to showering Chinese President Xi with massive praise. Washington will casually throw any ally under the bus for leverage. pic.twitter.com/JVhLGAydVl

— Furkan Gözükara (@FurkanGozukara) May 20, 2026

Geopolitical risk analyst Ian Bremmer has also lately weighed in. He has speculated: "This is Trump's perspective: the only thing that matters about Taiwan is the chips. Very different from the view of U.S. allies in the region: Japan, South Korea, and Australia."

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 23:00

Trump Admin Targets States' Medicaid Fraud Units

Authored by Tom Gantert via The Epoch Times,

Vice President JD Vance said during a recent press conference that he was intensifying attempts to counter Medicaid fraud by investigating state-level units responsible for oversight.

States such as California and Hawaii seemed to lag behind others in combatting fraud, said Vance, whom the president picked in March to lead an anti-fraud task force.

“Now, we have red states and blue states that go after fraud aggressively, but we also unfortunately have some states, mostly blue states, unfortunately, that do not take Medicaid fraud very seriously,” he said.

In response, Vance said the administration would withhold $1.3 billion in Medicaid-related payments to California and also consider withholding from other states.

The administration put each of the 50 states on notice with recent letters signed by Health and Human Services Inspector General Thomas “March” Bell. It focused on state-level Medicaid Fraud Control Units (MFCUs), which receive federal funding.

Letters also went to the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Here’s what to know about the units and Vance’s efforts.

Federal Grants at Stake

The letters threatened to take away all federal grants provided to a state’s Medicaid program if the state was not fulfilling its duties.

“It has become clear ... that many MFCUs have been happy to rake in taxpayer dollars without fighting fraud,” Bell stated in the letter. “And for too long, there has been a lack of leadership at HHS that has allowed billions of our fellow Americans’ dollars to flow out to State capitals to fund MFCUs to supposedly fight Medicaid fraud without any real oversight.”

He said that the units must comply with certain requirements to receive funding. Federal law requires the units to investigate and prosecute fraud, investigate patient abuse and neglect in Medicaid-funded facilities, and recover overpayments.

The units must operate statewide, employ investigators, auditors, and attorneys, and remain separate from the state agency that administers Medicaid. The law requires the units to either possess prosecutorial authority or formally coordinate with prosecutors.

Bell told the attorneys general that “your failure to do your job as head of the MFCU has put all of your State’s Medicaid funds in jeopardy.”

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office told The Epoch Times that the administration wrongly accused the state.

“That the new HHS-[Office of Inspector General] would send such a letter to all 53 MFCU’s in the nation, writing that ‘your failure to do your job as head of the MFCU has put all of your State’s Medicaid funds in jeopardy,’ is inconceivable and completely disconnected from the performance record of Michigan’s MFCU and the tremendous reporting our office makes in compliance with the federal government’s oversight,” Danny Wimmer, Nessel’s press secretary, told The Epoch Times.

“While some states have been, over the last year, singled out by the federal government for purported performance issues, Michigan has never been among them."

The federal government covers most of the costs for MFCUs for each state.

For example, the attorney general’s unit for Michigan received a $5.5 million federal grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that covers 75 percent of its funding. The state picks up the remaining 25 percent, or $1.8 million.

In 2024, the total cost of all these state-based units was $396 million, of which $297 million was picked up by the federal government.

Wimmer said Michigan’s MFCU went through a “rigorous” recertification process every year in which the HHS’s Office of Inspector General determined whether it was in compliance with regulations.

How Do Fraud Control Units Work?

The Social Security Act requires each state to operate an MFCU.

Cases usually start as referrals from other organizations, third parties, or from MFCU staff members who detect potential fraud from data mining.

MFCU staff review referrals to determine the potential for criminal prosecution and civil action. Besides fraud, abuse and neglect are also investigated.

In 2025, about 1 in 5 cases investigated by MFCUs nationwide were for abuse and neglect. There were 3,019 investigations nationwide into abuse and neglect compared with the 12,902 investigations into fraud.

For example, Pennsylvania’s MFCU this year investigated a case involving a 50-year-old woman who was convicted of failure to renew a resident’s medications, which led to a fatal seizure in 2021.

About 4 in 10 fraud convictions from 2015 to 2024 involved Personal Care Attendants, nonmedical professionals who provide daily living assistance to people with disabilities or chronic illnesses.

Wimmer said Michigan’s unit “submits extensive questionnaires and produces significant accountings and reports on various aspects of their operations, such as investigative efforts and fiscal operations.”

He added that HHS “conducts very thorough weeklong on-site audits every 5-7 years on state MFCUs, including ours, wherein they send a team of approximately 10 inspectors to audit the fraud control unit.”

Ed Haislmaier, an expert in health care policy at The Heritage Foundation, said that although licensed providers were involved in fraud cases, fraud on an “industrial scale” appeared to occur more often in non-specialized areas of health care where professional licensing is not required.

Those sectors often included providers who could receive approval for government funding without undergoing background checks.

“The lower the barrier to entry for a type of provider, the more likely you are to see this kind of fraud,” Haislmaier said.

Targeted States

While the administration reached out to every state, Vance highlighted three—Hawaii, California, and New York—that he said were not taking fraud seriously.

During his press conference, he noted how Indiana had many more prosecutions than New York.

Vance said it was “absurd” to think that the people of Indiana were just more likely to commit Medicaid fraud than the people of New York.

“What is happening is that the leadership in New York are just not taking the fraud issue seriously,” Vance said. “They are not using these antifraud control units to actually investigate and indict the fraud.”

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.

HHS data revealed that Indiana had 951 investigations in fiscal year 2025 with 42 indictments and 32 convictions.

California, a top target for the Trump administration, had 1,052 investigations with 83 indictments and 43 convictions.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office criticized Vance on social media.

Newsom’s office said in-home support services have grown because California is keeping seniors and people with disabilities out of the more expensive nursing homes—the cost of a nursing home was $137,000 a year compared with $30,000 a year for in-home support services.

Newsom said the approach saved taxpayers money.

Hawaii’s Medicaid investigative unit had 484 total investigations in fiscal year 2025 but not a single indictment or conviction, according to federal data.

Hawaii’s state data showed that from 2021 through 2025, the state conducted a total of 2,779 investigations into fraud and abuse that resulted in just five convictions. All were reported in 2021. That would mean Hawaii has conducted 2,104 fraud and abuse investigations from 2022 through 2025 without a single conviction.

Hawaii Attorney General Anne Lopez rejected Vance’s characterization of her state as not taking fraud seriously.

“Our Medicaid Fraud Control Unit has secured or helped secure more than $14 million in judgments, settlements and recoveries since 2021, filed recent criminal charges—and is actively working with federal and state partners to strengthen investigations and prosecutions,” Lopez said in a press release.

“We welcome accountability, but we will not allow the work of this unit to be mischaracterized as doing nothing.” 

Tyler Durden Thu, 05/21/2026 - 22:35