Trump Mulling New 'Limited' Strike Package, After Iranian Attack On Jordan Base Summary

• Trump vows retaliation, mulls more 'limited' strikes after Iran's own 'retaliatory' missile attacks on US bases in Jordan.
• Eight Iranian missiles were intercepted by Jordan amid the first major tit-for-tat military strikes in a month.
• US forces struck Iranian missile launchers on Larak Island, reportedly killing two people.
• Iran threatens further retaliation, while regional tensions reignite across UAE, Qatar and Red Sea.
• Global oil prices rose Monday in wake of the overnight renewed fighting.

//--> //--> Strait of Hormuz traffic returns to normal by October 31?
Yes 11% · No 90%
View full market & trade on Polymarket

* * *

Trump Mulling New 'Limited' Strikes (Again)

New reporting from Axios: "President Trump and his senior aides have been considering waging limited strikes in the Strait of Hormuz to prevent Iran from reconstituting its radar and missile capabilities to attack ships, according to three U.S. officials."

This suggests that once again when US 'bad options' tighten related to Iran and the Hormuz crisis, there is still this (bad) idea among decision-makers that the Pentagon can just 'bomb its way out' of a crisis that's of Washington's own making. Such an assumption has already been tried and tested several times before, amid what is now six months into the war.

"The plan, which was developed over the past week by U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and supported by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, had not been approved by Trump ahead of this weekend's exchange of fire with Iran," Axios continues. "But he could greenlight it after the new escalation."

And still this reported new potential escalation is being presented by Axios as if it's somehow the US fully in the driver's seat, when in reality this continues to be a "bombing campaign in search of a strategy". More from Axios:

• One U.S. official said the idea behind the plan is to reduce the risk of Iranian attacks on oil tankers, U.S. Navy ships and Air Force aircraft — to "mow the lawn," as this person put it.
• A White House said: "The President retains all options at his disposal. The Iranians want to make a deal, but they are always a day late and a dollar short."

This comes as some top generals have taken the ultra-rare action of leaking their views of this to the press. "Several U.S. military leaders have advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the U.S. homeland, according to people familiar with a recent assessment prepared for the Pentagon chief," wrote the Washington Post on Sunday.

More latest from Trump (via Newsquawk):

US President Trump says Iran strikes will be limited; Strait of Hormuz is in extremely good shape; A lot of oil coming out of Hormuz; Ships came through Hormuz last night with Navy assist.

The Iranians meanwhile appear to be ready for the possibility of renewed dialogue, but they also certainly don't appear to be "begging" - as Trump has maintained. "The US must return to its commitments and abide by the terms of the memorandum; only then can we exit this situation," Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said on Telegram Monday.

Vance: I believe that Trump was sending a message to Iran through his post about Kharg Island. https://t.co/y3HZjRhjEE

— barry with the NED (@bonzerbarry) August 31, 2026

"The solution is clear and unambiguous: the US must return to its commitments and to the agreement its own president signed" - and, he continued, "Should that happen, everything can be put back on track." The Iranian top diplomat said, "All countries share the concern that the war must end as quickly as possible."

Trump Vows US will Respond to Iranian Attacks

President Trump has continued teasing possible 'retaliation' on Kharg Island after an Iranian overnight ballistic missile attack on American bases in Jordan. Trump says the US will respond to the Iranian attacks, according to Fox. According to further context via Newsquawk: 

• Note, the remarks from US President Trump were broadcast as part of a interview on Fox on "Sunday Night In America".
• Follows the US hitting Larak Island on Sunday. In response, Iran fired on US bases within Jordan.
• Reports since indicate that Iran's retaliation did not cause any significant damage.
• Modest upside seen in energy benchmarks and downside in the risk tone in proximity to this remark.

Iran state media is meanwhile reporting that two were killed in the CENTCOM attack on Larak Island late yesterday, which triggered this fresh round of fighting.

"During the attack on Larak Island late Sunday, two people were martyred and several others were injured. The injured in the incident are receiving medical services and their treatment is ongoing," the official IRNA news agency said.

Also, the Iranian foreign ministry stated: "The Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran will have no hesitation in exercising their inherent right to self-defense and will respond decisively, as appropriate, to any military aggression by the enemy."

The Jordanian government has meanwhile confirmed the Iranian ballistic missile attack: 

The Jordanian Armed Forces said Sunday it intercepted eight missiles that had entered the country's airspace, according to Jordan's Al-Mamlaka TV broadcaster.

A spokesperson for the military said all eight missiles were destroyed before they could do any damage, according to the broadcaster.

Military Strike Tit-for-Tat Resumes After Weeks 

Brent crude futures climbed back above $90 a barrel, while West Texas Intermediate topped $86 after the US and Iran exchanged strikes for the first time in about a month. Tehran also claimed that an unidentified supertanker was struck by naval mines in the Strait of Hormuz.

Meanwhile, diesel crack spreads are approaching $100 a barrel again, suggesting an increasingly severe shortage across refined-product markets as the summer draws to a close. 

US Central Command said American forces struck Iranian rocket launchers that were preparing to deploy anti-ship mines in the critical waterway. The US has touted the Oman shipping corridor as open for business and moving crude and other energy products. Tehran's inability to halt tankers passing through that part of the strait may suggest that its offensive capabilities have been degraded.

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said it retaliated by targeting US air bases in Jordan, while the United Arab Emirates intercepted an Iranian drone over its territorial waters.

Trump: 'Failed Nation'

Trump on Monday morning issued a Truth Social declaring Iran a "failed nation":

The US military (CENTCOM) has said it did not target Kharg Island in the overnight strikes. According to a summation of there things stand:

The latest U.S.-Iran escalation appears increasingly centered on control of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran has been using small boats to monitor and identify commercial vessels transiting the Strait using Omani waters for an undetermined period. The boats can blend into civilian maritime traffic, making them difficult to distinguish from ordinary vessels. This comes amid sporadic Iranian attacks and attempts to restrict ships transiting Hormuz without Iranian permission.

The U.S. then struck Iranian missile launchers on Larak Island after assessing they were preparing to deploy sea mines into the Strait. Iran responded with missile attacks targeting U.S. bases in Jordan, with eight missiles reportedly intercepted. Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar was also reportedly targeted, though that remains unconfirmed.

The pattern suggests Iran is attempting to reassert control or disrupt maritime traffic through Hormuz, while the U.S. is acting to prevent Iran from closing or mining the waterway. Various reports indicate transits through the strait of Hormuz have declined. What remains to be seen is whether the strikes from both sides tonight will continue in the coming days.

Crude Transit Opening?

"Brent crude is firmer at $90.48/bbl, up 2.5%, as tensions around the Strait of Hormuz support the geopolitical risk premium," UBS analyst Dharmesh Gangaram wrote in a note.

Gangaram continued, "Overall, the desk sees a cautious, risk-off start to the session. Geopolitical developments and lower European liquidity are likely to remain the key drivers, with particular attention on the resources complex amid broad-based weakness in precious metals."

Despite the overnight tit-for-tat attacks, an estimated 6 million to 8 million barrels per day of crude, primarily from US-allied Gulf producers, continues to move through Hormuz.

We previewed this in a note last week titled:

• "Dark" Tanker Fleet Shatters Iran's Hormuz Stranglehold As Gulf Oil Exports Top Two-Thirds Of Pre-War Level

"The key is to watch the barrels, and as long as they continue to flow through the Strait of Hormuz, the buying appetite in the market remains muted for fear of being caught out," Ole Hansen, head of commodity strategy at Saxo Bank, wrote in a note.

Last week, the top US commander for the Middle East said American forces had cleared Iranian mines from the Hormuz waterway, declaring the shipping lanes open.

With its missile batteries, drone launchers, naval units, surveillance networks, or command infrastructure degraded, Iran appears to be shifting from conventional sea denial toward a lower-cost asymmetric strategy.

Weekend Developments

•  US attacked two missile launchers of the IRGC on Larak Island on Sunday, which were said to be on standby to launch missiles with sea mines toward the Strait of Hormuz, while there were later reports of explosions heard near Larak Island.
• US Central Command said IRGC claims of US aggression in the Strait of Hormuz are false, but added the US conducted limited precise action against IRGC minelaying forces that posed an imminent threat in the Strait of Hormuz.
• Iran’s Revolutionary Guards warned the US strike on Larak Island would be met with a response and punishment, while it said several soldiers and civilians were killed and wounded in the assault.
• Iran's Revolutionary Guards later announced that they retaliated with missiles and drones against two US bases in Jordan and warned that any attack against them will be met with a more devastating response, although a US official cited by Fox News stated no major damage in Iranian attacks on US forces in Jordan and that all missiles were intercepted.
• Iran's Press TV noted reports of Iran firing missiles towards US vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, and there were reports of explosions heard in the UAE and in Qatar, while Iran's army later said it launched tens of drones at the Al Minhad air base in the UAE.
• IRGC said a supertanker caught fire and was halted after being struck by two naval mines in the Strait of Hormuz, while it added that the tanker was attempting to pass illegally through the Strait of Hormuz and that ships must comply with its rules for passage. IRGC separately announced that it shot down a US MQ-9 drone over the Strait of Hormuz.
• Iran's Foreign Ministry said it will respond decisively to any further enemy military aggression, and stated that the US and parties supporting its military actions bear full responsibility for consequences of escalation.
• US President Trump reiterated in a pre-recorded Fox News interview that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon and said the Iran blockade has been unbelievable, while he also commented that the US had to intervene in the Middle East to prevent Iran from using a nuclear weapon against Israel and other countries in the region and possibly against the US.
• US President Trump posted a generated video with the caption "Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!!"
• US Treasury Secretary Bessent said the US Treasury plans to impose more Iran secondary sanctions every week, starting with banks. He also stated that they are telling banks it's not okay to have Iranian money and to aid the Iranian regime, and they will probably just sanction a bank outright next time, after the US imposed curbs on an Egyptian bank's United Arab Emirates branches.
• Iranian President Pezeshkian said they are not looking for war, but will give a decisive response to the aggressors, while he added that instability and unrest in the region are not in the interest of any countries and will create challenges for everyone.
• Iran's President said on Friday that Iran is ready for cooperation and understanding with regional countries, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, while it is to open its route if four commitments are met. He also stated that Iran is to increase gasoline prices, and that exports and imports have decreased by up to 35% because of US sanctions and the blockade.

Overnight Developments

• US officials said they are monitoring the Strait of Hormuz and will strike any forces that threaten navigation in the waterway, Al Arabiya reported.
• Iran's IRGC Navy said compliance with regulations issued for the Strait of Hormuz is mandatory and warned against being “misled” by the US, Press TV reported.
• Yemeni armed forces reportedly targeted Saudi ships in the Red Sea, ISNA reported citing Yemeni media reports.
• UAE Ministry of Defense denied reports that Al Minhad Air Base was targeted by missiles, calling the claims unfounded and saying it remains on high alert and fully prepared to respond to any threats.
• Iranian oil operations are continuing on Kharg Island, and the oil sector there has not stopped, Al Hadath reported.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 15:15

Rickards: The Dollar's Not Dying

Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

Last week's financial media was full of apocalyptic headlines: "$40 trillion in national debt!" "U.S. debt in a doom loop!" "The end of the dollar is near!"

Gold and bitcoin soared in lockstep with the dollar doom and gloom. If you took the headlines at face value, one would assume the dollar was already toast and U.S. Treasuries were worth no more than digital confetti.

The truth is that the dollar's position as the leading reserve currency is not in jeopardy. Of course, foreign exchange reserves are not simply piles of currency. They are largely held in liquid financial assets, including U.S. Treasury securities denominated in dollars.

Dollar-denominated assets will dominate global reserves for decades to come.

The reason is simple. There are few sovereign bond markets with the size, liquidity and depth of the U.S. Treasury market. Other large government bond markets, including Japan and major European markets, do not offer the same combination of scale and liquidity. King dollar will remain king.

This does not mean interest rates won't rise or inflation won't increase. Both are likely. But neither means the end of the dollar. It just means the Treasury pays more to borrow and you pay more at the gas pump and grocery store.

So, there are problems in the dollar bond markets, but debasement-trade hysteria is not a useful way to understand them.

BESSENT GOES AFTER THE BOND MARKET

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has just announced a plan to address higher interest rates in U.S. Treasury securities markets and, by extension, mortgage and credit card markets. It has both long-term and short-term components.

One short-term component involves U.S. support for Japan's efforts to prop up the yen, including joint currency intervention and potential greater use of the Federal Reserve's FIMA Repo Facility. That facility allows Japan to borrow dollars against its U.S. Treasury holdings rather than selling those securities outright.

In turn, that could take pressure off U.S. interest rates. Japan is the world's largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasuries, with about $1.12 trillion as of June.

Another short-term component is for the Treasury to purchase longer-dated Treasury securities, specifically those in the 10- to 30-year sectors. The Treasury recently announced that it will at least double the size of certain scheduled buyback operations from $2 billion to $4 billion, with the possibility of going higher.

Treasury has also relied heavily on short-term maturities such as one-month, three-month and six-month Treasury bills in its overall financing mix. These Treasury bills generally carry lower interest rates than longer-dated notes and bonds. Greater reliance on shorter maturities can lower U.S. interest expense, at least in the short run.

Treasury bills are also prized by dealers and hedge funds because they are highly liquid and are widely used as collateral in financial transactions. Supporting liquidity at the long end while maintaining a large supply of short-term Treasury securities makes sense. Why it is causing such hysteria in the media is a bit of a mystery.

BESSENT'S 3-3-3 GAMBIT

The longer-term component of the Bessent Plan is sometimes referred to as the Three Arrows.

The first arrow is to keep annual deficits at 3.0% or less of GDP. The second arrow is to achieve GDP growth of 3.0% or more. The third arrow is to increase U.S. energy production by the equivalent of 3 million barrels of oil per day.

That's where the shorthand 3-3-3 comes from: a 3% deficit, 3% real GDP growth and 3 million additional barrels of oil equivalent per day.

Since oil output does not directly impact fiscal policy, we can leave that to one side in our analysis. The deficit and GDP growth targets, however, are critical.

The metric that really matters in terms of whether investors have confidence in U.S. Treasury securities is the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio. It's silly to hyperventilate about $40 trillion as the U.S. national debt unless you put that number in the context of the GDP available to finance and roll over the debt.

Right now, gross U.S. federal debt is roughly 123% of GDP. That's the result of approximately $40 trillion of debt divided by roughly $32.5 trillion of annualized nominal GDP. That ratio is near the highest levels in U.S. history.

High debt-to-GDP ratios can be a drag on growth and leave governments with less room to respond to crises. A ratio of 60% is much more comfortable. A ratio of 30% is more comfortable still. The previous postwar high was reached around the end of World War II.

The annual deficit will not go down to zero. That's a fantasy. The level of U.S. national debt will also not go down anytime soon. That's another fantasy.

But that doesn't matter.

What does matter is whether the debt-to-GDP ratio goes down.

The way to do that is to grow the economy faster than the debt. If you can do that, the ratio goes down even if the debt goes up. That's Bessent's plan. That's what he meant when he said the U.S. could "grow its way out" of the debt problem. In theory, he was right.

For example, let's say annual deficits are $2 trillion so that a year from now the national debt will be $42 trillion. That's a 5.0% increase in the national debt.

But if GDP grows from $32.5 trillion to $34.5 trillion, that's a 6.2% increase. The debt-to-GDP ratio drops from roughly 123% to 121.7%. That's still high, but it's lower than the year before.

That's all the so-called bond market vigilantes need to see. As long as the debt-to-GDP ratio is coming down, bond investors have reason to retain confidence in U.S. Treasuries and the U.S. dollar.

The U.S. has done this before. The gross federal debt-to-GDP ratio reached roughly 119% in 1946 and was down to about 31% by 1980. That process took more than three decades and occurred under both parties using a combination of fiscal and monetary policy, strong nominal growth and inflation.

During that period, the national debt increased substantially. But GDP increased by more than 1,000%. And that was the key. If GDP grows faster than debt, the ratio comes down and America's fiscal position improves.

HERE'S THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

So, that's the plan. But there's a dirty little secret that Bessent has not emphasized.

When the government computes debt-to-GDP ratios, it's using nominal numbers, not numbers adjusted for inflation.

In the example above, GDP grew by about 6.2% while the national debt grew by 5.0%. That lowers the ratio, but it does not reveal how much of the GDP growth was real and how much was inflation.

The 6.2% nominal growth could have been 4.2% real growth plus 2.0% inflation. That's fairly healthy. But it could have been 2.2% real growth plus 4.0% inflation.

At 4.0% annual inflation, the purchasing power of the dollar is cut roughly in half in about 18 years and cut in half again over the next 18 years. That kind of inflation can destroy your net worth and income if you're not prepared.

So, how much inflation is included in the Bessent Plan? Secretary Bessent didn't say.

Investors should assume the worst.

The U.S. has had difficulty sustaining real growth of more than about 2.0% per year on average since the global financial crisis. If we need roughly 6.0% nominal growth to outrun the growth in debt and if we can only produce 2.0% real growth per year, then the difference has to come from inflation.

That could mean 4.0% inflation.

That's not a policy preference. It's just fifth-grade math.

In describing how the U.S. lowered its debt-to-GDP ratio dramatically between the end of World War II and 1980, I conveniently omitted the fact that consumer prices rose about 50% between 1977 and 1981.

That's one way the U.S. government took care of the debt problem.

I lived through that period. It was a fun time if you owned gold or real estate, if you used leverage and if you had a job that gave you a raise every few months.

It was not a fun time if you depended on fixed-income streams like annuities, insurance policies, pension plans or Social Security.

Which side of that trade are you on?

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 15:00

'You Will Only Have Yourselves To Blame': Trump Warns Anti-Data-Center Crowd Not To 'Kill The Golden Goose'

Despite recent polls showing that 70% of Americans oppose building AI data centers in their area (including 60% of Republicans), President Trump on Monday warned that communities that don't embrace them will "end up being backwards and poor."

"The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign."

And if people "kill the Golden Goose" by successfully resisting AI data centers, "you will only have yourselves to blame," Trump continued, adding "China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can't believe it is happening!"

According to a Gallup poll published in May, 71% of Americans oppose building AI data centers in their local area, including 48% 'strongly opposed' - and only about a quarter in favor. Opposition crosses party lines: Gallup's breakdowns showed 63% of Republicans strongly or somewhat opposed to a data center where they live, while a July Fox News poll found that 60% of Republicans and 53% of self-described "MAGA Republicans" oppose data centers where they live.  

At the same time, Beijing structurally benefits from anything that slows US compute (and according to X, are amplifying the outrage).

Some observations

• Eighteen months ago, American frontier models from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI had virtually no competition - and the entire AI bubble (circle-jerk) was based on already-insane revenue projections. 
   
• Then, Chinese labs began rolling out open-weighted AI models that are up to 90% cheaper per token, for around 95% the same performance as US frontier models. Suddenly, the American AI buildout thesis that led the market to all-time highs this year, was pricked - and companies are migrating towards these cheap Chinese models they can run on their own infrastructure. Chinese providers went from under 2% of OpenRouter tokens a year ago to over 45% of weekly volume by April 2026, and Chinese models surpassed US models in weekly token volume for the first time in February. An a16z partner estimated roughly 80% of US startups build on Chinese base models.
   
• The July tape made it official: chip stocks shed more than $1 trillion as investors began asking whether AI infrastructure spending is peaking faster than expected - even as the hyperscalers, undeterred, still guide to roughly $660-690 billion in 2026 capex, nearly double last year's.  
   
• Chinese AI firms are also starting to run proprietary chips - a workaround to years of banning Nvidia's top of the line AI chips. Beijing's Cyberspace Administration barred major tech firms from buying Nvidia chips in September 2025, and state-backed data centers now require domestic silicon. Domestic suppliers are projected to capture nearly 90% of Chinese AI accelerator sales this year. That said, Huawei's Ascend still trails Nvidia on raw performance and software, and its flagship CloudMatrix cluster draws roughly four times the power of Nvidia's comparable system - a trade Beijing happily makes, because China is substituting electricity (which it has) for chip quality (which it doesn't).
   
• China is also able to rapidly expand both data centers and electricity generation because the CCP gives zero fucks about NIMBY Chinese 'having a say' over whether they plunk a loud data center or power generation facility next to their house. Instead, provincial officials are rewarded for building, the grid is state-owned, and the new Five-Year Plan explicitly treats data centers as a demand sink to soak up surplus renewable generation. In China, data centers are the solution to too much electricity. In America, they've become the cause of expensive electricity.

China Is Loving This

Trump isn't wrong that Beijing benefits from anything that slows the US buildout. But the astroturf version of the argument was quickly dispelled: data center investor Kevin O'Leary claimed China was behind the protests, admitted he had no evidence, and is now being sued for defamation by two Utah groups. And the polling is real too - Heatmap asked the identical question about data centers in Americans' backyards four times in 12 months and watched a 33-point collapse, from a 43/42 split last August to 75% opposed now. Public opinion doesn't move like that because of foreign bots. It moves like that because of utility bills.

The grievances have receipts. PJM's independent market monitor found data centers responsible for 63% of the capacity auction spike - $9.3 billion recovered from ratepayers in a single year, with measured bill impacts of $21/month in DC, $18 in western Maryland, $16 in Ohio. Total PJM capacity costs went from $2.2 billion to $14.7 billion to $16.1 billion in two years - and the latest auction only stopped at $329.17/MW-day because of a price cap Pennsylvania's governor demanded. Gallup's own open-ended data shows what's actually driving opposition: half of opponents cite resource consumption - 18% each naming water and energy - plus noise, pollution, and traffic. Not anti-AI ideology. Bills.

And when the industry had the chance to carry its own costs, PJM members voted down all 12 proposals to shift them in July. Ratepayers remain the unpaid sponsors of the buildout. Meanwhile, dozens of companies – including Meta, Amazon and Google - have signed onto Trump's "ratepayer protection pledge" to cover increased energy costs. You don't create a ratepayer protection pledge against an imaginary grievance.

Meanwhile this is about as bipartisan as it gets: Greg Abbott has frozen new data centers in Texas, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee - Senate Republicans' own campaign arm, warned in an August memo that the campaign against them "will expand far beyond Ohio," where the issue has Jon Husted in a dead heat with Sherrod Brown - a Democrat Ohio voters fired statewide just two years ago.

And what Trump fails to see, apparently: the CCP would entertain exactly none of this. There is no mechanism in China for citizens to oppose infrastructure - and what the no-veto model produces isn't just speed. Many local-government data centers run at 20-30% utilization, Beijing is now planning a national scheme to resell the surplus compute, and even SMIC's own chairman warned the rushed buildout "has not been fully thought through." The people of Licking County get a say. The people of Gansu get a ghost data center.

Trump says China "can't believe" the anti-data-center movement is happening. Of course not - there is no version of it available to Chinese citizens.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 14:40

Amazon Shares Tumble Amid News Of FTC 'Advertiser Deception' Lawsuit

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is about to drop a lawsuit on Amazon today alleging that the e-commerce platform manipulated prices paid by businesses to advertise on its retail platform, which made the company tens of billions of dollars over a seven-year period, WSJ reports, citing agency officials. 

According to the report:

The lawsuit, joined by a bipartisan group of more than 20 state attorneys general, will allege that Amazon deceived advertisers by secretly raising the minimum price advertisers had to pay to place ads promoting their products, FTC officials said.

The case, to be filed in a Seattle federal court, will become the consumer-protection agency’s third major case against Amazon, which agreed to pay $2.5 billion last year to settle an earlier suit alleging it tricked people into signing up for its Prime service and made it hard to cancel the subscription. Another lawsuit alleging that Amazon engaged in illegal monopolization is headed for trial next year. -WSJ

Amazon's digital advertising platform is the third-largest in the world, behind Alphabet's Google and Meta - earning $68 billion in ads in 2025, according to the report - which claims that advertisers suffered billions of dollars in harm by paying higher prices for ads. Some states may attempt to claw some of the money back. 

Shares shot sharply lower on the news.

Every time a shopper searches for a product on Amazon, merchants compete to offer different types of ads to get in front of consumers. According to the FTC, Amazon began changing its ad auction strategy in 2018 - raising prices on advertisers in a way they wouldn't notice. 

The way this worked was through a mechanism called a "soft reserve": 

The company had historically run a special type of auction, popular in Silicon Valley, designed to attract more bids and protect winners from dramatically overpaying. That formula tended to reduce the price a merchant paid to advertise.

To raise the price, Amazon began entering its own bid, known as a “soft reserve,” which was higher than the price of the runner-up bidder, the FTC will allege. Under the rules of the auction, that raised the price paid for an ad. Amazon knew the merchants’ competing bids and didn’t disclose its new practice, officials said.

Amazon’s ad executives tracked the “surcharge” they earned from the strategy and sought to limit how much others knew about it, FTC officials said. The executives initially deployed the strategy only on popular shopping days when companies would think higher ad rates resulted from intense competition for shoppers’ attention, the officials said. -WSJ

According to the FTC, Amazon's goal was to capture more of the value of each retail sale connected to a successful ad - in recent years intervening in auctions to raise the minimum price 70% - 80% of the time. 

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 14:20

"Prepare For More Severe Scenarios": Bank Of England Chief Warns Of AI Threat To Global Financial System

As the world marches towards open-weight, efficient, unrestricted frontier AI models out of China, Western leaders are starting to panic over the lack of guardrails. Most recently, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey suggested that the threat posed by AI could lead to a chaotic correction in global financial markets, as frontier models are now showing "increasingly sophisticated autonomy and problem-solving abilities, as well as threat capabilities."

Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey addresses the media during a press conference concerning interest rates, at the Bank of England, in London, Britain, November 2, 2023. HENRY NICHOLLS/Pool via REUTERS

"Financial institutions, financial market infrastructures, and technology providers will therefore need to strengthen vulnerability management, response and recovery capabilities, and prepare for more severe scenarios involving simultaneous disruption across multiple firms or shared technology dependencies," Bailey wrote in a two-page letter published Monday to G20 finance ministers and central bank governors in his capacity as chair of the Financial Stability Board - an international body that coordinates international policy and provides recommendations to national authorities. 

Bailey says the cyber risk posed by AI is "the most immediate concern" for the global financial system. 

"Frontier AI may have the ability materially to alter the speed, scale and economics of cyber risk, which could undermine market confidence system-wide, especially due to highly concentrated third-party service providers," he wrote, adding. "Recent developments have also highlighted to me that many jurisdictions do not have the protocols in place to manage the development, release, and deployment of advanced frontier AI models, heightening risks for the financial sector and beyond." 

Bailey's warning comes one month after the Bank for International Settlements warned that the AI bubble itself is one of three of the most alarming threats to global prosperity at this time. 

"Disappointment in returns could trigger a sudden pullback in financing and turn the capex boom into a protracted investment bust, with potential knock-on effects on financial conditions," the BIS said, before observing that "a major equity-market correction could have larger macroeconomic consequences today than in the past."

Officials highlighted vulnerabilities linked to funding, including complex arrangements such so-called “circular financing” deals that can mix equity and debt with supplier-client contracts (as discussed here "The $1.8 Trillion Off-Balance Sheet Time Bomb At The Heart Of The AI Supercycle"). 

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 14:15

Lake America Name Begins Appearing On Google Maps In US

Authored by Tom Gantert via The Epoch Times,

Google Maps has updated its site to include Lake America in place of Lake Ontario, following the direction of President Donald Trump's executive order renaming the Great Lake.

"It's official! LAKE AMERICA on Google Maps," Steven Cheung, assistant to the president and White House director of communications, posted on X on Aug. 30.

It’s official! LAKE AMERICA on Google Maps. pic.twitter.com/CotsXetERJ

— Steven Cheung (@StevenCheung47) August 30, 2026

Google released a statement on the changing of the name of the body of water.

"The U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) has formally changed the name for 'Lake Ontario' to 'Lake America' in the United States," the company said.

Since it updates Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, people using the application in the United States will see "Lake America," Google said.

In Canada, users of Google Maps will continue to see "Lake Ontario," and those outside of the two countries will see both names, the statement reads.

Trump signed an executive order on Aug. 27 directing the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to update federal records to identify Lake Ontario as Lake America.

The president said the change recognizes the United States' role in protecting and maintaining the Great Lakes. The order cites nearly $4 billion in U.S. spending on the Great Lakes ecosystem during the past decade and said the U.S. Coast Guard operates nine of the 11 icebreaking vessels serving the lakes.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected the change, saying that Canadians would continue calling it Lake Ontario. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has also said the state will retain the lake's traditional name.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced on May 9 that her government had sued Google over the company's decision to label the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America after Trump changed the name of that body of water.

Google made the change for U.S. users after Trump's executive order directed the federal government to adopt the new name. Users in Mexico continued to see the Gulf of Mexico, while users elsewhere saw both names.

Sheinbaum had threatened legal action in February, arguing that the United States could rename only the portion of the gulf under its jurisdiction, not the body of water. She disclosed the lawsuit during her briefing but provided no details about where it was filed or what relief Mexico was seeking.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 13:40

Lindsay Clancy And The Political Weaponization Of Mentally-Ill Women

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us

After the publishing of George Orwell’s 1984, communist governments and organizations around the world condemned the book as “anti-Soviet slander” and “capitalist propaganda.” Orwell died only eight months after the book’s release and his personal feelings on the details of the story are limited to a few personal letters to friends and publishers.

Orwell was a Democratic Socialist, but even he was disturbed by the path that socialist movements had taken in light of genocidal far-left governments. His criticisms of Stalinist politics were treated by leftists as a betrayal.

However, it was Orwell’s depiction of women within authoritarian systems that angered the political left most of all. They have attacked 1984 for decades as “misogynistic”and “blind to gender oppression”. But as time passes, Orwell’s views on leftist women have proven more and more prophetic and they were written well before second wave feminism became a reality. In 1984, the character of Winston Smith described them thus:

“He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy…”

“She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none, that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her…”

The women in Orwell’s Stalinist world were a key tool in controlling society. They are easily brainwashed to serve “Big Brother”, turning them into affection-less robots. Their ability to nurture a family is conditioned out of them and if they are allowed to have children, they have no care for them. The children immediately become property of the state.

It’s not just women’s biological habit of following the dictates of the herd, it’s also their inherent desire for chaos that makes them destructive to society at large. Nearly every civilization from the beginning of recorded history has understood this problem and sought to keep it contained. Only in the modern west in the past century have we abandoned reason for madness.

I have said it many times in previous articles and I will repeat it here now: Feminism is by far the most destructive movement in the history of western civilization. In the US, almost every political and social crisis we face today can be linked directly or indirectly back to the rise of feminist ideology. The weaponization of mentally ill women is the single most effective attack on the foundations of our culture.

It’s not because women are particularly scary or dangerous. It’s because, as western men we have adopted principles of fairness; to care about elevating those who are weaker than us and value their contributions. Feminism is designed to exploit our love of fairness and our love of women and it turns our love into a weakness.

Compare the west to almost any other civilization in this regard and you will find undeniable differences. There is no such thing as fairness, equal rights or feminism throughout most of the world. Women are, at best, barely tolerated. At worst, they are chattel to be abused with impunity.

Often considered one of the greatest accomplishments of the First World (as opposed to the third world), men have ALLOWED women to rise to equal standing. In many cases, we have prioritized them and given them privileged status, and this is where we made a big mistake.

All of our problems with feminism are self created. Western men allowed the ideology to spread. Conservatives talk a lot about the dangers of “suicidal empathy” when it comes to liberals and mass immigration, but we suffer from suicidal empathy when it comes to women.

The early women’s suffrage movement had numerous ties to Marxist causes and the communists saw very early how useful women could be in destabilizing western nations. Marxists like Friedrich Engels argued that women’s oppression began with the institution of private property and class division, not biology.

This, of course, is pure nonsense – A great lie which requires us to ignore thousands of years of recorded history from every feudal monarchy and empire that existed previous to the 18th Century Enlightenment.

Because of their biology, women are naturally removed from the power dynamic except for influencing men to take actions in their favor. For women as a group to have power requires numerous artificial social constructs and laws be put in place.

Marxists also argued that the family unit must be targeted for deconstruction as a social pillar. They claim that the family unit is “how capitalism uses women as free labor to raise new workers for the system.” In reality, the family unit represents the atomic core of any civilization. Breaking it apart, and using women to do it, will inevitably destroy that civilization and make it ripe for conquest.

Leftists and their globalist cohorts do not care about women. Feminism does not care about women. The goal of these movements is to turn women into suicide bombers. Their goal is to radicalize women to forsake their biological and psychological imperatives, turning them into corrosive saboteurs willing to sacrifice their own happiness for the sake of the Marxist cult.

Millions of women have even been convinced that their grand mission requires them to kill their own children. Sometimes this is done in the name of freeing themselves from the “shackles” of the family unit. Sometimes it’s done as an offering to the collective feminist coven to prove they are “worthy.”

This is why a child killer like Lindsay Clancy, a woman who openly confessed to the crime, has attracted the full attention, adoration and protection of the liberal congregation. She didn’t just go to a clinic and abort a baby, she went the Full Monty; she murdered her own growing children in cold blood. She looked into their eyes when she did it, and the feminists are impressed and they want more.

What has followed is a sort of hysterical worship, a swirling vortex of dark-feminine chaos as the brood searches for ways to protect Lindsay Clancy from punishment while also rationalizing her crimes. The case has become a nexus point for the ever festering conflict between the champions of moral order and the terrorism of morally relative chaos.

In my recent articles I have talked about the eternal battle between the producer class and the pillager class, but this is only half the story. The other half is the battle between the champions of conscience and the purveyors of subjective nihilism. The political left has happily embraced nihilism.

We might find it bewildering, but this is why these people are defending a child murderer. If Lindsay Clancy can be glorified, even deified as a oracle of the feminist calling, then any evil can be justified. “Do as thou wilt” could become the prevailing ideal of a soulless age brought into being by female insanity.

All they have to do, in their view, is help Clancy to escape blame and responsibility for her crime.

The postpartum excuse is the most common strategy because it works. Around half of all female child murderers who use this defense get off with a jury decision of “not guilty by reason of insanity.” The concept ignores the fact that ANYONE who kills kids is mentally ill or broken in some way. Postpartum is simply a more acceptable excuse for diminishing the crime.

It’s a way to paint the killer as a victim; a more empathetic victim than the dead children.

If western women can be convinced that they can get away with murdering their offspring out of the womb, we would be setting a new and horrific precedent. The feminist mob will jump on every crime involving a woman in an effort to leverage them out of repercussions. The legal system already has so many double standards in favor of women, but we are getting dangerously close to a two tier system.

If Clancy escapes with a lesser charge or institutionalization instead of prison, leftist women will see this as political victory. That said, the case is opening the door to an awakening among men. Young men are using the case to “test” their girlfriends and wives. If these women show any inkling of sympathy for Lindsay Clancy, men are dumping and divorcing them without a second thought.

It’s a smart move and, for now, it’s the only strategy against the ongoing cancer of liberal female derangement. But it doesn’t solve the greater issue of feminism as a societal influence. In the meantime, families are not being built.

I would point out that there are men who kill their own children as well. It’s not as if this crime is exclusive to women. However, I can’t find a single instance in which a mob of men rallied together to defend a father who murdered his family. This is strictly female behavior.

The Clancy trial is nearly over, and regardless of what the jury decides to do there’s no denying that the event has reminded us, once again, that western men have ignored the single most poisonous problem in our society for far too long.

Liberal women are the most privileged, most entitled and most coddled people on the planet. No other group comes close. Their obsessive grasping for power by any means necessary is corrosive. Their rabid efforts to elevate their own egos as the focal point of politics, government and the social contract is sinking our nations one by one.

Perhaps this quest for power needs to end? Perhaps western men need to finally abandon the liberal experiment in equality or “equity” and bring our countries back to the models they were founded on? Or at the very least, we need to bring back certain limitations. Not all freedoms are good and we have seen where our current path leads.

If liberal women have been weaponized, then liberal women need to be nullified and controlled. Or, at the very least, their level of participation in institutions of power needs to be restricted. In other words, we would have to set aside our empathy, be the bad guys and TAKE power (and rights) away from the leftist cabal. We would have to fundamentally overturn every facet of feminism and erase it from our daily lives.

We have seen what these women do with liberty and we’re not impressed. The celebration and adoration of a child murderer is, in my view, the last straw. If their first inclination is to use their freedoms as a license to tear the world down instead of building things up, then they no longer deserve those freedoms.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 13:00

PG&E, California Utilities Crash As Wildfire Bill Spark Downgrade Wave

Shares of California's largest publicly traded utilities crashed on Monday morning after state lawmakers unveiled wildfire legislation that failed to provide the liability protections Wall Street analysts had hoped for.

PG&E plunged as much as 21%, its sharpest decline since 2020, while Edison International crashed as much as 24%, its largest drop since 2018. Sempra fell 5%.

The development sparked a wave of Wall Street downgrades tracked by Bloomberg. Mizuho Securities downgraded PG&E, Edison, and Sempra to neutral from outperform, citing the absence of meaningful liability reform, while also reducing its price targets.

BMO Capital Markets analyst James Thalacker, who downgraded PG&E to market perform from outperform, wrote in a note to clients that California's proposed wildfire legislation failed to provide durable liability protections.

Thalacker cut his price target to $21 from $28, writing that Senate Bill 492 "sets fire to hopes for meaningful reform."

Thalacker wrote:

Bottom Line:

We move to Market Perform following the release of SB492, which failed to address/improve upon key elements of the state's wildfire framework. The proposed legislation does nothing to ensure the wildfire fund's long-term solvency (and associated liability cap), which exposes investors to open-ended wildfire-related tail risk.

We currently do not see support to revisit this critical deficiency. Our $21 target now reflects assumptions for uncapped future wildfire liability post-2030. While management is expected to respond with a revised capital allocation strategy shortly, we do not see that response as sufficient to improve investor sponsorship.

Thalacker continued:

Although the state's iterative approach established a robust legislative wildfire framework via AB1054/SB254, the proposed SB492 in our view falls woefully short of codifying the elements necessary to ensure the wildfire fund's solvency and protect the state's investor-owned utilities (IOUs) from wildfire-driven bankruptcies. As such, we expect PCG to be down materially at the open tomorrow and, longer term, to find it incrementally harder to attract capital relative not only to its utility peers given investors' preference for accelerating, large-load-driven growth and aversion to significant wildfire-related liabilities, but also for generalist investors given the challenge of open-ended wildfire-related tail risk despite the company's low absolute valuation. Moreover, given the lack of progress this year despite a more wildfire-educated legislature, the CEA's third-party road map and clear message on "the cost of doing nothing," it is unclear if there will be sufficient political interest in 2027 to revisit the legislation (particularly absent Newsom's support for reform) to improve further California's wildfire framework, which is key to unlocking PCG's terminal value and associated upside.

Despite the significant relative discount to its utility peers, we are downgrading PCG to Market Perform and reducing our target price to $21 to reflect revised wildfire liability assumptions in our MTM/SOTP framework. While we still employ the framework that discounts the liability to PCG shareholders from future wildfires through 2040, we raise assumed liabilities above the 20% T&D liability cap for fires beyond 2030 to reflect a depleted fund/eliminated liability cap. While our revised target price still implies meaningful upside capital appreciation, without the visible prospect for a meaningful improvement to the state's wildfire framework, we believe PCG shares will struggle to find both dedicated and generalist sponsorship, leaving the stock range-bound despite its attractive absolute valuation (~8x).

Thalacker outlined a downside scenario that values PG&E at just $3 a share if wildfire claims exhaust the state fund and adverse regulatory outcomes follow. His upside case reaches $35 if lawmakers enact meaningful reform in 2027.

California Democrats need utilities to invest tens of billions of dollars in grid reliability, wildfire prevention, electrification, and power capacity for AI data centers. Yet, lawmakers have refused to provide the liability framework needed to attract new investment.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 12:40

Key Events This Week: Jobs, JOLTS, Beige Book And ISM

Following on the heels of Warsh’s speech at Jackson Hole last Friday, which was hawkish yet which also sent yields to multi-year highs thus refuting claims the Fed Chair regained some credibility, the data docket picks up this week with the main event being Friday’s August employment report. Regarding Warsh, he delivered a crisp message to market participants last Friday that resolved much of the confusion from his July post-meeting press conference. Indeed, Warsh went one step further and provided his own views on recent data trends. On inflation Warsh stated, “And while this summer's PCE and CPI readings were better than expected, they do not tell me that underlying trends have meaningfully improved.” It will be interesting to see if Governor Waller reinforces this message when he takes part in a moderated discussion on inflation this Thursday at Reuter’s Next conference.

On the labor market, Warsh noted that “When labor supply is barely growing, monthly job gains are naturally going to run low. There are always areas of concern in the labor market—for example, among recent graduates. In general, though, people who want to work, by and large, are holding or finding jobs. They may well be concerned about possible future labor disruptions, but as of now, I believe the labor markets are consistent with full employment.” In short, Warsh delivered a message that was bullish on the economy and hawkish on inflation, reinforcing our longstanding view that the Fed will hike rates at the September 16 FOMC meeting.   

Market participants will no doubt be trading upcoming data within the context of the views Warsh laid out last Friday. Though economists expect headline nonfarm payrolls to rebound (+65k forecast vs. -23k previously) due to payback from state and local education hiring, the private payroll forecast is somewhat more muted (+25k vs. +30k). Meanwhile, Bloomberg economists say there is a "decent chance" of a second consecutive negative print... and the Fed has never hiked after two negative prints.

I think next week’s payrolls print will disappoint, and has decent (though not our baseline) chance of being negative.

Supposed it is a negative print. There is no modern Fed era precedent of Fed hiking after two negative payrolls prints.

Still 50-50?

— Anna Wong (@AnnaEconomist) August 29, 2026

That said, with average hourly earnings (+0.4% vs. +0.1%) also expected to rebound following some unusually soft prints in specific sectors last month, the year-over-year growth rate of the DB payroll proxy for nominal income should remain around 4.0%. To be sure, Fed officials are likely to focus greater attention on the unemployment rate, which economists expect will remain unchanged at 4.1%, though there is some risk that it rounds up to 4.2%. However, even if the unemployment rate ticks up a tenth, it is unlikely to result in the Fed reappraising its labor market view, particularly given as Chair Warsh noted “Unemployment claims, on a four-week average—an empirically robust real-time indicator—are near their lowest level in decades.”

As DB notes in its weekly preview, there are a few data points ahead of Friday’s employment report print that could on the margin impact sentiment heading into the print. While Tuesday’s JOLTS data are somewhat dated given that they correspond to July, they will nonetheless provide the latest readings on the hiring, layoffs and quits rates. Broadly speaking, most of these rates are expected to remain unchanged from recent tight ranges – still painting the picture of a “low hiring / low firing” labor market environment that we’ve been accustomed to for the past three years. Wednesday’s ADP private employment survey (+44k exp) should reinforce the picture of a stable labor market, albeit at depressed levels of gains partly due to low labor supply growth that Chair Warsh mentioned. Our ADP forecast is consistent with the latest reading for their weekly series.

Lastly, Tuesday’s manufacturing ISM (55.8 vs. 55.6) and Thursday’s services ISM (54.1 vs. 54.1), while not directly impacting forecasters’ payroll expectations, will nevertheless provide a more forward-looking view from businesses on hiring trends. Note that while the employment component of the manufacturing survey has been trending up over the last three months, the employment component of the services series has been moving in the opposite direction and remains below 50.

In summary, should this week’s labor market data come in close to expectations, it will reinforce monetary policymakers’ view of a stable labor market that is consistent with their maximum employment mandate. As Chair Warsh emphasized “Inflation is running above our 2 percent target. So the Fed's predominant focus right now should be on prices.” As we noted in our Jackson Hole recap note, the specificity of Warsh’s comments and the uniformity of the color in a hawkish direction, has changed the setup for the September FOMC meeting. As long as incoming data do not surprise meaningfully to do the downside, Warsh’s speech has established a rate hike as the most likely policy outcome next month.

Here is a day by day preview courtesy of Rabobank

• Monday: sees German inflation numbers for August, starting with the regional states and followed later that day by the first estimate for the nationwide and harmonised gauge. Last week, data from France, Belgium and Spain already indicated that the rebound in energy prices would push inflation higher again following its easing trend since May. We expect the same in Germany. In the US, the main figure to watch is the (second-tier) Dallas Fed Manufacturing Activity survey for August.
• Tuesday: German retail sales (July), Italian GDP details (Q2) and UK money supply and credit (July) all feature in the morning session, but the key figures to watch are Eurozone headline and core inflation for August. In particular, a renewed rise in core inflation (not our base case, but a possibility) could trigger further rate hike expectations beyond the September meeting. No change in the Eurozone unemployment rate for July would only underscore those risks. In the US, we have the JOLTS (July) labor-market flows data. Normally not a market mover, it could nevertheless shed more light on the recent slowdown in job growth. Meanwhile, only a small fall in the US ISM manufacturing survey for August (as per the consensus) could be interpreted by the market as a sign that US, as well as global, manufacturing activity is recovering despite ongoing concerns over tensions in the Middle East.
• Wednesday: Australia releases its Q2 GDP numbers. Consensus expects quarterly growth to match Q1 at 0.3%. The Fed also releases its Beige Book, but Wednesday’s key event is likely to be the Bank of Canada’s interest rate decision, which investors may suddenly see in a different light since the eruption of the US-Canadian trade war. There are no signs that negotiations will resume anytime soon.
• Thursday: Australia releases July trade balance figures, while the US calendar includes the July trade balance and August ISM services survey. Final S&P Global PMI releases and country extensions are also due, including for Spain and Italy, alongside Eurozone PPI and German factory orders for July.
• Friday: The US nonfarm payrolls and unemployment figures are the highlight of the day. The street forecasts net job creation of 55,000 in August, following an unexpected dip in July. Although the jobs report is always a market mover, Fed Chair Warsh’s comments at Jackson Hole suggest the Fed’s focus is now on the near-term path for inflation rather than the labour market. Eurozone retail sales for July are expected to recover from a dip in June, but the underlying trend remains lacklustre as households face slowing real wage growth. The ECB’s Lane speaks in Dublin, but since –by then– the ECB’s pre-rate decision quiet period has commenced, he may not address current policy issues. 

Finally, looking at just the US, Goldman writes that the key economic data release this week is the employment report on Friday. There are several speaking engagements with Fed officials this week including events with Governor Barr on Tuesday and Governor Waller on Thursday. 

Monday, August 31 

• There are no major economic data releases scheduled. 

Tuesday, September 1 

• 09:05 AM Fed Governor Barr speaks: Fed Governor Michael Barr will speak about the economic outlook and financial inclusion at the Second Chance Lending Forum in Washington DC. Speech text and Q&A are expected. 
• 09:45 AM S&P Global US manufacturing PMI, August final (consensus 53.3, last 53.2)
• 10:00 AM ISM manufacturing index, August (GS 56.0, consensus 55.2, last 55.6): We estimate that the ISM manufacturing index edged slightly higher to 56.0 in August, reflecting a modest improvement in regional manufacturing surveys—our manufacturing survey tracker increased by 0.3pt to 56.3 in August—and a slight tailwind from residual seasonality.
• 10:00 AM Construction spending, July (GS -0.1%, consensus flat, last -0.1%)
• 10:00 AM JOLTS job openings, July (GS 7,300k, consensus 7,313k, last 7,359k): We estimate that JOLTS job openings edged down to 7.3mn in July based on the signal from online measures of job postings from Indeed and LinkUp.

Wednesday, September 2 

• 08:15 AM ADP employment change, August (GS +55k, consensus +47k, last +44k)
• 10:00 AM Factory orders, July (GS -0.2%, consensus +0.6%, last -0.3%)
• 02:00 PM Fed releases Beige Book, September meeting period: The Fed’s Beige Book is a summary of regional economic anecdotes from the 12 Federal Reserve districts. The Beige Book for the July FOMC meeting period noted that economic activity increased at a slight to moderate pace in all but one Federal Reserve Districts and that consumer spending edged up as higher prices, particularly for fuel, dampened sales in other categories. In this month’s Beige Book, we will mainly look for anecdotes related to how consumers and firms are responding to the increase in energy prices from the conflict in the Middle East, the evolution of labor demand, and firms’ expectations of activity growth for the remainder of the year.

Thursday, September 3 

• 08:30 AM Trade balance, July (GS -$91.1bn, consensus -$90.0bn, last -$73.3bn)
• 08:30 AM Nonfarm productivity, Q2 final (GS +1.4%, consensus +1.4%, last +1.4%); Unit labor costs, Q2 final (GS +1.1%, consensus +1.3%, last +1.3%): We estimate that nonfarm productivity growth will be unrevised at +1.4% quarterly annualized in the second release for 2026Q2. Since 2019Q4, labor productivity has grown at an annualized rate of 2.1%, a much stronger pace than the 1.6% average pace of the prior cycle. We estimate that unit labor costs—compensation divided by output—will be revised down by 0.2pp to +1.1%.
• 08:30 AM Initial jobless claims, week ended August 29 (GS 205k, consensus 205k, last 203k): Continuing jobless claims, week ended August 22 (consensus 1,787k, last 1,778k)
• 08:30 AM Fed Governor Waller speaks: Fed Governor Christopher Waller will speak in a moderated conversation at the Reuters Next event about the outlook for inflation, the U.S. economy more broadly, and the Fed's policy response;  
• S&P Global US services PMI, August final (consensus 56.8, last 56.8); 10:00 AM ISM services index, August (GS 54.1, consensus 54.1, last 54.1)  We estimate that the ISM services index was unchanged at 54.1 in August, reflecting a decline in our non-manufacturing survey tracker (-1.1pt to 53.5) but a tailwind from potential residual seasonality.
• 03:00 PM Cleveland Fed President Hammack (FOMC voter) speaks: Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack will give pre-recorded opening remarks at an event called Connecting Communities: When Every Dollar Counts: Worker Perspectives on the Economy. On August 27, Hammack said, "I think it’s appropriate for us to put some restraint there to help bring inflation back down to target... The longer inflation stays above our objective, the harder it will be for us to bring it back down."

Friday, September 4 

• 08:30 AM Nonfarm payroll employment, August (GS +40k, consensus +55k, last -23k); Private payroll employment, August (GS +40k, consensus +53k, last +30k); Average hourly earnings (MoM), August (GS +0.4%, consensus +0.3%, last +0.1%); Unemployment rate, August (GS 4.1%, consensus 4.1%, last 4.1%): We estimate nonfarm payrolls increased 40k in August, reflecting a softer signal from alternative data. Additionally, August payrolls have exhibited a consistent negative bias—particularly in initial prints—over the last decade. We estimate average hourly earnings rose 0.4% month-over-month in August, reflecting positive calendar effects. We estimate that the unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.1% in August, reflecting a stabilization in continuing claims.

Source: Rabobank, DB, Goldman

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 11:30

Bessent To Unveil Weekly Iran-Related Secondary Sanctions, After 1st Round Falls Flat

The US Treasury Department plans to roll out new secondary sanctions every week to intensify economic pressure on Iran, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent revealed Sunday.

"You're going to see a lot more of these every week," Bessent said ahead of a meeting of Group of 20 (G20) financial leaders in Asheville, North Carolina, confirming that announcements will come on a weekly basis.

The warning and threat follows on the heels of the US having sanctioned a couple UAE branches of a major Egyptian bank last week, after which some pundits called out the weakness and flimsiness of the action.

via Reuters

Treasury named the UAE branches of Egypt's Banque Misr, alleging financial ties to Iran and money laundering, cutting them off from the US financial system for obtaining dollars.

However, Banque Misr itself - which is Egypt's second largest financial institution - is at the moment not facing any direct Washington punitive measures. Treasury had made clear the new measures wouldn't apply to "Banque Misr operations in any other country."

What's more is that even the targeted UAE branches of the Egyptian institution appear to have an appeals window of sorts, and may be given a chance to rectify the matter over a period of 30 days. No other UAE bank has come under the same threats so far.

According to Al Jazeera:

Banque Misr UAE’s customers include “front companies used by Iran’s Ministry of Defence and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to evade US sanctions, as well as to launder money on behalf of Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei,” the Treasury said.

The US government’s proposed punishment is expected to come into effect in 30 days after a public comment period, and will not impact any other branches of the bank.

So much for 'Economic D-Day'...

And recall this scene from just a week ago:

Reporter: You describe this as an economic D-Day, but D-Day wasn’t a threat of invasion, and the U.S. didn’t give a timeline to Germany. Why not impose the sanctions today?

Bessent: Well, we are giving everyone the opportunity to remedy bad behavior. Why would I want to blow up the global financial system? We believe that it is important to level set, and give people a cure period, but they should know that will move very quickly and we are serious. Secondary sanctions are a very powerful tool.

Still, Bessent continues to talk tough, telling the AP in a Sunday interview, "This is going to be financial violence if we have to."

"We are showing people that we know who you are, you know who you are, and this has got to stop," he added.

Bessent further previewed his plan to reinforce the message to G20 finance ministers and central bank governors this week, stressing: "There can be no leakage. You're either with us, or you're with the Iranians."

Treasury is trying to thread an untenable needle. It wants to look like it's acting forcefully following its D-Day announcement, but has limited options without, as Secretary Bessent said, blowing up the global financial system. They also appear to want to avoid UAE banks for now

— Timothy E Kaldas (@tekaldas) August 31, 2026

Notably, the Trump admin has been relatively silent on whether it intends to target Chinese entities, with Beijing having long been in effect an Iranian economic "lifeline".

The whole 'weekly' secondary sanctions rollout seems intended to just keep kicking the can down the road, as the US administration appears still in frantic search of a strategy for dealing with a continually defiant Iran. The endgame remains perfectly unclear.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 11:20

Something Big?

By Elwin de Groot, head of macro strategy at Rabobank

Icelanders voted “no” to reopening EU membership talks in a referendum over the weekend, albeit by the fairly narrow margin of 2.8 percentage points. Against a backdrop of uncertainty over global trade and geopolitical ructions – including the Greenland crisis at the turn of the year – one intriguing conclusion is that the vote appears to have been driven by economic interests rather than security concerns. Iceland has no military and relies on its NATO allies for defense. Yet it already enjoys good trade relations with the EU, while some voters feared that membership would leave its large fishing industry vulnerable to EU policies. At the same time, Europe’s recent inability to project geopolitical power convincingly and collectively probably did not help sway voters towards the “yes” camp. In a response, PM Frostadóttir said that negotiations with the EU would not continue and that “[…] something big has to change in the next 24 months for this [EU membership] to be at the top of the agenda.” Perhaps she had an ‘Iceland crisis’ in mind?

Staying with European politics, the latest Elabe presidential poll – conducted on 29-30 August 2026 for BFMTV and La Tribune Dimanche – unsurprisingly shows a highly fragmented French political landscape with one dominant feature: Marine Le Pen is the clear front-runner for the 2027 presidential election. Across the scenarios tested, Le Pen (RN) attracts 34% to 35.5% of first-round voting intentions, putting her well ahead of every rival. The contest for second place is much tighter. Édouard Philippe currently appears best placed, polling at around 47.5% against 52.5% for Le Pen. The poll also suggests that Mélenchon has lost momentum and may find it harder to reach the run-off, while social-democratic candidate Glucksman appears to be consolidating support on the centre-left. Most strikingly, Le Pen wins every run-off tested by Elabe: she is the overwhelming favorite to reach the second round and, on current projections, to win the presidency.

For investors worried about fiscal profligacy under a Mélenchon presidency, these probabilities – though they could still shift considerably with more than seven months to go – may offer some comfort. For the EU, however, a Le Pen presidency would still create a more difficult environment. Although she no longer openly advocates leaving the euro or holding a referendum on EU membership, she continues to seek a reduction in EU powers over areas including immigration, budgetary decisions, trade policy, and judicial and constitutional sovereignty. The current discussion over an expansion of the EU budget for 2028-2034 to almost €2 trillion – which requires unanimity – could become a flashpoint should discussions be delayed into 2027.  

Le Pen’s stance broadly resembles the approach of parties such as Meloni’s Brothers of Italy: not seeking to leave the EU, but deeply sceptical of further integration. Meloni has pursued that strategy with surprising success in Italy (and without major consequences for the EU), but France’s fiscal position is considerably more fragile. Could something big still change the polls?

Turning to financial markets, Friday certainly delivered something big. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh appeared to rebuild some of his credibility as an inflation fighter in his first speech at the annual Jackson Hole Symposium, stressing that the Federal Reserve still has “work to do” to return inflation to its 2% target. The message marked an important shift from the communication strategy he had followed since taking office. After the 17 June FOMC meeting, the US yield curve steepened and Treasury term premia rose noticeably as investors concluded that Warsh’s tough rhetoric on inflation was not being matched by policy action.

Part of that unease reflected Warsh’s outspoken opposition to forward guidance. In his view, excessive guidance encourages investors to pay less attention to incoming data and underlying economic trends, while constraining the central bank’s policy flexibility. Markets, however, read the combination of policy inaction and limited communication as a sign that Warsh was content to let higher market interest rates do part of the Fed’s work by tightening financial conditions and containing inflation.

At Jackson Hole, Warsh sought to dispel that impression without abandoning his broader philosophy – or at least that is our reading. He emphasised that “price stability does not emerge on its own, nor does inflation automatically return to target. It is the Fed’s responsibility to deliver price stability.” More importantly, for the first time since becoming Chair, he explicitly expressed dissatisfaction with recent inflation developments and signalled that he was open to further rate hikes unless underlying inflation began to improve convincingly. As he put it: “We must be convinced that underlying inflation is moving toward our target clearly and at a sufficient pace. Otherwise, we still have work to do.”

Markets accordingly priced a greater probability of additional rate increases. Yet longer-dated Treasury yields fell, suggesting that investors saw Warsh’s remarks as reducing policy uncertainty and reinforcing the Fed’s commitment to restore price stability. Put differently, the reaction combined a slightly more hawkish near-term policy outlook with lower longer-term inflation and policy-risk premia.

So Warsh’s prepared remarks seemed designed to lift rate-hike expectations, rebalance the September debate towards the hawks and rebuild his inflation-fighting credibility after July’s “all talk, no action” criticism. Yet this creates a difficult balancing act, as the White House may oppose a hike so close to November’s midterms. On balance, we still think the FOMC is more likely to remain on hold for the rest of the year, but the upside risks to our forecasts have clearly rebounded, as our US Strategist and Fed watcher Philip Marey writes here.

Even so, Warsh delivered an important signal: the Fed is not relying on tighter financial conditions alone and remains willing to tighten further if underlying inflation stalls. The next round of data – especially the 4 September employment report and 11 September CPI – could therefore prove crucial for the Committee’s swing voters.

On inflation, medium- to longer-term gauges such as 5y/5y inflation swap forwards remain broadly consistent with central-bank policy targets – an observation also highlighted by Stephen Miran in a recent FT opinion piece. That is true in both the US and Europe. Yet these measures may not fully capture the upside risks, particularly as energy prices have continued to climb in recent weeks. Over the weekend, the US and Iran exchanged strikes for the first time in more than a month, as Iran launched a missile-and-drone attack on US air bases in Jordan early Monday in response to an American airstrike on Iranian rocket launchers on Sunday.

The weakening correlation between energy prices and inflation swaps could be reassuring: markets may simply trust central banks to keep long-run inflation anchored. But it could also indicate that investors view long-term inflation mainly through the lens of policy credibility and structural regime risks, such as a return of fiscal dominance. Such regimes rarely change gradually; they tend to shift suddenly. And that would take something big.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 11:00

Trump Says NBC's Kristen Welker Will Be Reported To FCC Over Endorsement Comments

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump said on Sunday that NBC News's "Meet the Press" host Kristen Welker will be reported to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).

Welker had "just stated that Donald Trump has 'mixed results' on his Endorsements of Candidates, when the recent WINS of Darline Graham and Mike Mazzei, stand at 100 percent for the U.S. Senate, and 98 percent for the U.S. House, recently and over the longterm," the president wrote on Truth Social.

Trump added: "How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given Public Airwaves? Results are attached. Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC for rebuke or punishment."

According to a transcript of "Meet the Press," Welker did not make the comment about "mixed results" on Sunday's program. Trump did not say in his social media post where he heard the comment.

Welker made the comment during a recent appearance on the NBC 4 Washington local affiliate station, reported Mediaite.

"He's going to loom large over these midterms," Welker stated, according to the outlet. "There's no doubt about that. He, of course, has endorsed a slate of candidates in the primaries. He's had some mixed results, but most recently, his pick of Senator Darline Graham, of course, the sister of the late Senator Lindsey Graham, was successful in her primary battle, so now she takes on Dr. Annie Andrews in South Carolina."

Graham defeated Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) in the GOP primary last week. Graham won with about 52.4 percent of the vote to Norman's 47.6 percent.

In his post on social media, Trump said that media outlets are "going out of their way to harass, demean, and libel anything 'TRUMP'" and that he has a "99% SUCCESS Rate on Endorsements, [and] 100% on Senatorial Endorsements."

"In actuality, it is, without question, the strongest Endorsement in the History of Politics," the president added. "If it were not, I would be the first to admit it. Darline Graham's run for the Senate was the biggest story in all of Politics, because she wasn't expected to win, and then, when I Endorsed her, and she easily won, the story of her Victory was hardly covered by anybody. Likewise, the future Governor of Oklahoma, who was behind in every Poll, I Endorsed him, he won, and the story was barely covered!"

Later, Trump wrote that he hopes that FCC Chair Brendan Carr and other commissioners in the agency will take the media's coverage of his endorsement record "very seriously."

NBC did not immediately respond to an Epoch Times request for comment Sunday.

A spokesperson for NBC said in a statement provided to media outlets that Welker "is one of the best in the business and we stand by her."

The comment comes roughly a year after Carr said that ABC host Jimmy Kimmel may have violated federal broadcasting regulations when Kimmel made comments about Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination. ABC suspended Kimmel's late-night show before he returned to the air around a week later.

And in June of this year, Trump abruptly ended an interview with Welker and said that "Meet the Press" was presenting a one-sided viewpoint.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 10:20

One Dead, 15 Missing After "Significant" Flash Flood Rips Through Grand Canyon

The National Park Service said flash floods swept through a section of Arizona's Grand Canyon, leaving one person dead and 15 others unaccounted for.

⚠️ UPDATE: Significant flash flooding in Bright Angel Canyon has closed Phantom Ranch, Bright Angel Campground, the entire North Kaibab Trail to Phantom Ranch, Black Bridge, Silver Bridge and the Colorado River to river traffic until further notice.

As of this morning, 62 people… pic.twitter.com/oohovKcax9

— Grand Canyon NPS (@GrandCanyonNPS) August 30, 2026

The flooding struck the Bright Angel Canyon and Phantom Ranch area at about 2:30 p.m. local time Saturday. Recovery crews found the body of a 46-year-old man near Crystal Rapids along the Colorado River on Sunday evening.

"As of this evening, recovery operations have been completed for a 46-year-old male near Crystal Rapids along the Colorado River. The Coconino County Medical Examiner's Office is currently onsite. There is no additional information to share at this time. We will provide updates as soon as available," the National Park Service wrote on X late Sunday.

August 30 Update — 6:30 PM:

As of this evening, recovery operations have been completed for a 46-year-old male near Crystal Rapids along the Colorado River. The Coconino County Medical Examiner's Office is currently onsite. There is no additional information to share at this…

— Grand Canyon NPS (@GrandCanyonNPS) August 31, 2026

Footage:

Hikers and campers scrambled for cover as a storm triggered heavy rain and flash flooding in the Bright Angel Canyon and Phantom Ranch regions of Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. The storm caused significant damage to nearby footbridges and trails, according to the National… pic.twitter.com/NRNmfdmmC1

— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 30, 2026

DRAMATIC NEW VIDEO!

Flash flooding led to a nightmare at Mooney Falls in the Grand Canyon on Friday resulting in a life-threatening situation. Waterfalls of rushing water forced hikers to take shelter in this cave until conditions improved.#azwx pic.twitter.com/ZY00ch2xv1

— WeatherNation (@WeatherNation) August 25, 2024

The flooding also damaged the Transcanyon Waterline, forcing the National Park Service to implement strict water restrictions across the area. The outage could affect drinking water supplies for visitors, as well as operations at hotels, restaurants, campgrounds, and even emergency facilities.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 10:00

Strategy Buys $370M Of Bitcoin In First Purchase Since June

Via Decrypt.co,

Strategy has started buying Bitcoin again after a summer spent selling it.

The Bitcoin treasury company picked up 4,603 BTC for $369.7 million in the week to August 30, at an average of $80,318 apiece, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That takes its stack to 845,050 BTC, bought for $63.73 billion at an average of $75,412.

It paid for the purchase by issuing stock. Strategy sold 4,531,421 MSTR shares through its at-the-market programme over the same week, raising $602.8 million net of commissions.

Bitcoin took $369.7 million of that, STRC buybacks $151.8 million, dividends on the same preferred stock $50.7 million, and $30 million went into its USD Cash account.

This is the biggest purchase since May 18th...

Selling low, buying higher

Strategy sold 6,948 BTC for roughly $432.5 million between May and August, working out at about $62,250 a coin. It has now bought back at $80,318, roughly 29% higher, leaving it 2,345 BTC lighter than before the selling started, with about $63 million of the difference retained in cash.

When STRC slipped below its $100 par value in June, a funding route Strategy had used to buy Bitcoin closed off, and the company built a Digital Credit Capital Framework authorising up to $1.25 billion of Bitcoin sales to cover dividends and buy back preferred shares at a discount. It resumed buying only once MSTR recovered enough to make equity the cheaper option.

The firm's dollar pots have grown alongside. The USD Reserve, ring-fenced for preferred dividends and debt interest, stood at $5.10 billion on August 30, with the unrestricted USD Cash account at $1.61 billion. Combined, the $6.71 billion puts net leverage at 0.0%, the company said.

Strategy also repurchased 1,557,177 STRC shares for $151.8 million during the week, leaving $364.8 million of the $1 billion digital credit repurchase authorisation. A separate $1 billion authorisation to buy back MSTR stock remains untouched.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 09:40

Michigan Senate Candidate El-Sayed Apologizes For Comments After Synagogue Attack

Authored by Jacki Thrapp via The Epoch Times,

Progressive Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, apologized on Aug. 29 for comments he made in March after an armed assailant drove into a Detroit-area synagogue and opened fire.

El-Sayed, who edged out establishment candidate Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) in the Democratic primary earlier this month, apologized to the state's Jewish Democratic Caucus for linking the local attack to Israel's actions in the Middle East.

"My comments may have been misconstrued to justify something I did not mean to justify," El-Sayed told reporters Saturday in Lansing.

"To anyone who feels like my comments might have been hurtful, I'm really sorry. That was not my intention."

The former Wayne County health director initially released a statement that attempted to link the actions of the shooter, Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, to events that impacted Ghazali's family in the days leading up to his attack.

"Ayman Ghazali lost family, including two children, in an airstrike in Lebanon last week," El-Sayed said in his statement back in March.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) stated that Ghazali's brother, who was killed in the Lebanon strike, was a Hezbollah commander.

In a March video statement, El-Sayed said: "Ayman Ghazali hurt people."

"There is no justification for what he did. It was wrong and he never should have done it. Hurt people hurt people. A week earlier, an airstrike killed his niece and nephew. Imagine if that had never happened. Imagine there was no war in Iran. Imagine if there were no airstrikes in Lebanon. Imagine if his family had never died. Imagine there was never an attack on Temple Israel. That's the world that we want to live in. That's the world we need to build for."

Ayman Ghazali died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after the synagogue attack. A security guard, who Ghazali hit with his car, was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.

At least 30 law enforcement officers went to the hospital for smoke inhalation caused by the burning car.

No children or staff were injured.

El-Sayed is running against Republican Mike Rogers, a former U.S. Representative, for the open U.S. Senate seat held by U.S. Senator Gary Peters, a Democrat, who did not run for reelection because he wanted to pass the job to the next generation.

"I always knew there would come a time to pass the torch to the next generation of public servants and allow them the opportunity to bring fresh energy and ideas to our nation's capital," Peters said when he revealed he was not running for reelection in January 2025.

"Our founding fathers envisioned members of Congress as citizens serving their country for a few terms and then returning to private life. I agree. After three terms in the House and two terms in the Senate, I believe now it's time for me to write a few more paragraphs in my current chapter and then turn over the reins.

The Cook Political Report has rated the race between El-Sayed and Rogers as a "Toss Up."

Five out of six polls taken in August show El-Sayed with a slight lead, while one poll from Beacon Research/Shaw & Company Research shows Rogers with a slight lead.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 09:00

Stock Futures Drop To Close Out August As Oil Jumps On Renewed Iran Hostilities

US stock futures dropped in thin trading with most traders out as summer draws to a close, while oil prices jumped after the US and Iran exchanged attacks for first time in weeks. Brent futures rallied almost 4% topping $90-handle and WTI contracts rise above $86 a barrel. As of 8:00am ET, S&P futures dropped about 0.2% and contracts on the Nasdaq 100 dipped 0.1% as most Mag 7 stocks drop while energy stocks rise (CVX +2%, XOM +2%) with as tensions resume in the Middle East. Europe’s benchmark Stoxx 600 equity index edged 0.2% lower, with UK markets closed for a holiday. Asian equities fall across the region. Nikkei sheds almost 1% while the Kospi closed flat, reversing an earlier loss. Hang Seng drifts 0.7% lower and ChiNext is down 1.3%. The dollar weakens against most FX majors. The yen strengthens back below 160/USD following Treasury Secretary Bessent’s BOJ remarks. Offshore yuan is 0.1% firmer after a small manufacturing PMI beat. Treasury 10-year yields are flat at 4.72% after Friday's post J-Hole blowout as the curve bull steepens despite higher energy prices. In commodities, the overnight Middle East attacks are driving oil prices higher with WTI above $85/bbl and Brent above $90/bbl. Elsewhere base metals are outperforming precious even as gold recovered from a $50 drop to trade unchanged around $4,460 an ounce. This week’s macro data include ISM / NFP with NFP one of 2 key prints (CPI) for the Fed to determine a Sept hike. Stronger ISM may boost the broadening portion of the rally. AVGO earnings may boost the Tech / AI theme.

• In premarket trading, Mag 7 stocks are mostly lower with the exception of NVDA which rises 0.6% after Friday's slide (Apple -0.3%, Meta -0.1%, Amazon -0.4%, Alphabet -0.5%, Tesla -0.6%, Microsoft -0.6%)
• BioMarin Pharmaceutical (BMRN) rises 4% after the company said it had entered into binding terms with Ascendis Pharma, resolving the patent and ancillary disputes concerning Ascendis’s Yuviwel.
• Energy stocks (CVX +2%, XOM +2%) rise with oil as tensions spiked in the Middle East, with the US and Iran exchanging strikes for the first time in about a month and Tehran claiming a tanker was hit by mines in the Strait of Hormuz.
• Kaiser Aluminum (KALU) rises 2% after UBS analyst Alex Stansbury raised the recommendation on to buy from neutral.
• PG&E (PCG) falls 15% and Edison International (EIX) declines 5.5% as California legislators introduced a bill that would update the state’s wildfire response without shifting liability away from publicly traded utilities.
• Pinterest (PINS) slips 3% after announcing Chief Financial Officer Julia Brau Donnelly will step down from her role on Oct. 30 after three years with the company.
• Science Applications (SAIC) rises 8% after the government IT services contractor boosted its revenue guidance for the full year.
• SLB (SLB) inches 1% higher after agreeing to acquire Kelvion, a firm that provides data center cooling solutions, from investors including Apollo Funds for $3.4 billion in cash.

In other corporate news Amgen’s Repatha (evolocumab) reduced the risk of death by 20% in high-risk adults without prior heart attack or stroke, versus placebo, in a pre-specified Phase 3 trial. SpaceX and NASA are delaying the launch of a planned mission to the International Space Station to fix an oxidizer leak in the Dragon spacecraft’s propulsion system. Shein Global Holdings Ltd. priced its IPO in Hong Kong. The fast-fashion retailer raised $1.7 billion, giving it a market value of $26 billion that’s a far cry from the $100 billion it once commanded. The shares fell as much as 17% in gray market trading.

US markets are set to open lower in the last trading session of a low-volume August as oil prices jumped on the back of renewed hostilities in the Middle East. A renewed rise in oil prices complicates the outlook for interest rates as investors digest Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh’s hawkish inflation comments at Jackson Hole. Traders boosted bets on a September rate hike after he spoke, although some market commentators expressed skepticism about such a move. That said, traders already have an eye on the month ahead, with cross-current signals from other assets including bonds, the energy complex and currencies, while conversations on AI capex are never far from earshot. 

A lot of weekend commentary was devoted to digesting the Warsh speech at Jackson Hole, with some commentators of the view that it wasn’t as epochal as the volume of attention suggests. Yes, the tone was hawkish, but some bond investors are voicing skepticism about Fed hikes. Warsh said financial conditions aren’t currently restrictive and described rates as the Fed’s “predominant tool” for achieving its mandate, while stopping short of signaling support for a hike in September. Even so, bond investors at ABN Amro Investment Solutions and Brandywine Global Investment Management are skeptical that higher rates will happen

The Federal Reserve Reform Act of 1977 lists three objectives: maximum employment, stable prices, and moderate long-term interest rates. The third receives remarkably little attention, with the first two hogging the limelight, notes Gary Paulin of Northern Trust Asset Management. “Could that objective become more important if the other two prove difficult to manage simultaneously?” Paulin thinks it could.

Meanwhile, real-world inflation remains in view: Brazil, the world’s biggest exporter of soybeans, cotton, coffee, sugar and orange juice, is about to kick off planting season facing a global diesel crunch colliding with a seasonal spike in demand for the fuel. Goldman Sachs stepped up warnings of tightness in global refining driven by wars in the Middle East and between Moscow and Kyiv, with the bank more than doubling its forecasts for profits from making diesel.

Additionally, the US-China AI funding divide remains a perplexing question for investors. While hyperscalers have gone from accounting for 2% of US nonfinancial investment-grade bond issuance in 2025 to 19% this year, China’s AI race is creating no such pressure on yields as its tech firms rely predominately on bank loans and equity financing rather than the bond market. But a resource-hungry AI revolution will require broader funding avenues over the long run. Speaking of AI, SK Hynix is studying the feasibility of a joint venture to make memory chips in Japan to meet surging AI demand while controlling production costs. And Amazon is expected to be the next hyperscaler to tap Australia’s debt market for billions of dollars in capital, according to the Financial Review. 

The VanEck Semiconductor ETF (SMH) has increasingly become an expression of semiconductor/AI FOMO, with investors chasing upside through long calls, creating a “vol up/spot up” dynamic at times this year before the recent reversal. And the semiconductor cohort that drove the early summer tech melt-up is giving way to other pockets in tech, as explored in today’s Taking Stock column. 

In geopolitics, this week’s G20 meeting in North Carolina is in focus. The US Treasury has excluded journalists from several media outlets, including Bloomberg News, from the gathering. Bessent is said to be pushing the G20 to rethink China trade terms, Reuters reported.  

European stocks trade sideways at the start of the week with the Stoxx 600 down 0.1% as oil prices and bond yields rose amid simmering tensions between the US and Iran, and on low volumes, with London closed for a bank holiday.  Here are the biggest movers Monday:

• Engcon gains as much as 9.5%, the most since July, after Swedish business daily Dagens Industri named the construction equipment firm its stock of the week, recommending readers buy shares in the company
• InPost trades little changed after its stronger than expected 2Q profitability was overshadowed by a weaker outlook for the remainder of the year, with new EU customs rules on small parcels set to weigh on volumes in Poland
• Bakkafrost shares fall as much as 7.6%, the most since July, after the salmon farmer reported its latest earnings. SB1 Markets says another weak quarter in Scotland weighs on the result due to “significant” biological issues

Asian stocks recovered from earlier declines as South Korean shares swung to a gain, while regional financial companies also advanced. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index was little changed after earlier dropping more than 1%. Korea’s Kospi closed up 0.5%, led by gains in Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, while China’s CSI 300 Index rose 0.3%. Regional stocks had fallen at the start of trade after Fed chair Kevin Warsh sounded hawkish in his comments at Jackson Hole on Friday. MSCI’s regional equity gauge has risen 3.1% in August, snapping two months of declines.  A gauge of Asia’s bank shares led gains on expectations of higher yields. Energy and utilities stocks also rose on higher oil prices stemming from the US attack on Iranian rocket launchers that were preparing to send mines into the Strait of Hormuz. A gauge of Asia’s bank shares led gains on expectations of higher yields. Energy and utilities stocks also rose on higher oil prices stemming from the US attack on Iranian rocket launchers that were preparing to send mines into the Strait of Hormuz. Warsh had warned inflation isn’t meaningfully slowing and added policymakers must be confident that it is clearly moving to their objective. Otherwise, they “have work to do.”

Warsh’s remarks “were the clearest signal yet that the Fed sees inflation, not growth, as the bigger risk right now,” said Billy Leung, an investment strategist at Global X Management. “Markets have quickly repriced September hike odds.” “On the positive story, under the surface is that AI monetization is broadening out,” Leung said. “We saw enterprise software and cybersecurity names post some of their strongest moves of the year on earnings, which tells you the AI trade is no longer just about chips and hyperscalers.”

In FX, the dollar weakens against most FX majors. The yen strengthens back below 160/USD following Treasury Secretary Bessent’s BOJ remarks. Offshore yuan is 0.1% firmer after a small manufacturing PMI beat.

In rates, treasury 10-year yield eases a basis point to 4.71%. Australian yields are little changed. JGB futures inch slightly lower.

In rates, treasuries mixed with the yield curve steeper in thin trading conditions with UK market closed for a bank holiday. Front-end tenors outperform as investors continue to digest Federal Reserve Chairman Kevin Warsh’s hawkish comments on inflation last week in Jackson Hole, which spurred the biggest increase in 2-year yields since June 17 as additional tightening was priced in. Front-end yields are 1bp-2bp richer on the day, long-end tenors cheaper by about 1bp, steepening 2s10s by about 2.5bp, 5s30s by about 2bp, unwinding a small portion of Friday’s dramatic flattening move; 10-year yields are little changed around 4.72% Long-end tenors may benefit over Monday’s session from anticipation of buying related to the month-index index rebalancing at 4pm, which will increase its duration by an estimated 0.10 year.  Regarding Fed policy expectations, around 16bp of tightening remains priced in for the Sept. 16 decision; Barr, Waller and Hammack are scheduled to speak this week before the Sept. 5 start of the external communications blackout around that meeting. IG dollar issuance slate empty so far, and Treasury coupon issuance is on hiatus until next week’s 3- and 10-year note and 30-year bond auctions.

In commodities, oil benchmarks are up more than 3%, after tensions rose in the Middle East, with the US and Iran exchanging strikes for the first time in about a month while Tehran claimed a tanker was hit by mines in the Strait of Hormuz. Brent futures rally almost 4% topping $90-handle and WTI contracts rise above $86 a barrel. Gold falls more than $40 to near $4,410 an ounce.

US economic data calendar includes August Dallas Fed manufacturing activity at 10:30am; ahead this week are ISM manufacturing and services gauges, JOLTS job openings, ADP employment change and, on Friday, the August jobs report

Market Snapshot

Top Overnight News

• Iran and the United States traded attacks for the first time in over a month overnight into Monday. Iran fired missiles toward US military targets in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates in retaliation for a strike on Iranian rocket launchers that the US said were trying to launch sea mines into the Strait of Hormuz. The exchange of strikes came just days after President Donald Trump declared the Strait of Hormuz free from mines and is a break with Washington’s recent shift in focus to maximizing economic pressure on Iran rather than military actions. CNN
• Iranian leaders are acknowledging the economic toll of war with the U.S., with the supreme leader urging the government to address the hardship and the president saying foreign trade has shrunk by a third due to the American sanctions and blockade. Yet Tehran signaled no retreat on Saturday, ‌vowing to withstand U.S. pressure, pursue diplomacy and maintain what it said was control over the Strait of Hormuz. Reuters
• President Donal Trump said Friday night the United States has reached an oil agreement with Venezuela, a move he said will “more than double” American oil reserves, increase oil supply and lower gas prices. The deal is said to “secure majority control” of more than 65B barrels worth of oil reserves in Venezuela, or ~20% of the country’s total. CNN / FT
• U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Sunday he will encourage G20 members to re-examine terms of ‌trade with China to shrink global imbalances and press Beijing to rebalance its economy away from exports and toward domestic consumption. Bessent said in an interview ahead of a G20 finance leaders meeting that the current flood of exports from China was unsustainable, even though the U.S. direct trade position with China was "rapidly improving." Reuters 
• China’s official manufacturing PMI remained in contraction in August, suggesting that momentum has yet to rebound after July’s sharp downturn. BBG
• China will start checking the security of its military supply chains, joining other nations in ramping up self-reliance of their defense industries.
• Iranian authorities seized an unidentified bulk carrier for polluting waters in the Persian Gulf near Bandar Abbas, state-run Islamic Republic News Agency reports.
• SK Hynix is exploring a joint venture to make memory chips in Japan to meet surging AI demand, Chairman Chey Tae-won said. BBG
• South Korea’s industrial production for Jul came in ahead of expectations at +0.2% M/M (vs. the Street -0.5%). BBG
• Russia’s Defense Ministry said it is planning “massive strikes” on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, days after launching a devastating attack on a warehouse near Kyiv, amplifying fears of another winter assault. CNBC  
• September is historically the worst month for Wall St, and traders are preparing for volatility during the coming weeks, with the FOMC meeting on 9/16 potentially a major catalyst. Barron’s 
• A bipartisan US bill would permanently ban Chinese internet-connected vehicles, and target Chinese software and hardware in US autos: NYT 

Geopolitical Update

• US attacked two missile launchers of the IRGC on Larak Island on Sunday, which were said to be on standby to launch missiles with sea mines toward the Strait of Hormuz, while there were later reports of explosions heard near Larak Island.
• US Central Command said IRGC claims of US aggression in the Strait of Hormuz are false, but added the US conducted limited precise action against IRGC minelaying forces that posed an imminent threat in the Strait of Hormuz.
• Iran’s Revolutionary Guards warned the US strike on Larak Island would be met with a response and punishment, while it said several soldiers and civilians were killed and wounded in the assault.
• Iran's Revolutionary Guards later announced that they retaliated with missiles and drones against two US bases in Jordan and warned that any attack against them will be met with a more devastating response, although a US official cited by Fox News stated no major damage in Iranian attacks on US forces in Jordan and that all missiles were intercepted.
• Iran's Press TV noted reports of Iran firing missiles towards US vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, and there were reports of explosions heard in the UAE and in Qatar, while Iran's army later said it launched tens of drones at the Al Minhad air base in the UAE.
• IRGC said a supertanker caught fire and was halted after being struck by two naval mines in the Strait of Hormuz, while it added that the tanker was attempting to pass illegally through the Strait of Hormuz and that ships must comply with its rules for passage. IRGC separately announced that it shot down a US MQ-9 drone over the Strait of Hormuz.
• Iran's Foreign Ministry said it will respond decisively to any further enemy military aggression, and stated that the US and parties supporting its military actions bear full responsibility for consequences of escalation.
• US President Trump reiterated in a pre-recorded Fox News interview that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon and said the Iran blockade has been unbelievable, while he also commented that the US had to intervene in the Middle East to prevent Iran from using a nuclear weapon against Israel and other countries in the region and possibly against the US.
• US President Trump posted a generated video with the caption "Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!!"
• US Treasury Secretary Bessent said the US Treasury plans to impose more Iran secondary sanctions every week, starting with banks. He also stated that they are telling banks it's not okay to have Iranian money and to aid the Iranian regime, and they will probably just sanction a bank outright next time, after the US imposed curbs on an Egyptian bank's United Arab Emirates branches.
• Iranian President Pezeshkian said they are not looking for war, but will give a decisive response to the aggressors, while he added that instability and unrest in the region are not in the interest of any countries and will create challenges for everyone.
• Iran's President said on Friday that Iran is ready for cooperation and understanding with regional countries, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, while it is to open its route if four commitments are met. He also stated that Iran is to increase gasoline prices, and that exports and imports have decreased by up to 35% because of US sanctions and the blockade.
• US officials said they are monitoring the Strait of Hormuz and will strike any forces that threaten navigation in the waterway, Al Arabiya reported.
• Iran's IRGC Navy said compliance with regulations issued for the Strait of Hormuz is mandatory and warned against being “misled” by the US, Press TV reported.
• Yemeni armed forces reportedly targeted Saudi ships in the Red Sea, ISNA reported citing Yemeni media reports.
• UAE Ministry of Defense denied reports that Al Minhad Air Base was targeted by missiles, calling the claims unfounded and saying it remains on high alert and fully prepared to respond to any threats.
• Iranian oil operations are continuing on Kharg Island, and the oil sector there has not stopped, Al Hadath reported.

A more detailed look at global markets courtesy of Newsquawk

APAC stocks were mostly lower heading into month-end and after recent hawkish comments from Fed Chair Warsh at Jackson Hole, while tensions in the Middle East escalated over the weekend after the US and Iran resumed strikes for the first time in over a month. ASX 200 saw mixed price action and was initially kept afloat amid strength in the top-weighted financials sector and with gains also seen in energy, utility and consumer industries, although upside was limited and eventually reversed following disappointing Private Sector Credit and Company Profits data. Nikkei 225 gapped lower at the open to below the 66,000 level, although it was off today's worst levels as participants also reflected on stronger-than-expected Japanese Industrial Production and Retail Sales data. KOSPI retreated amid weakness in its tech heavyweights and with a report noting that day traders are abandoning Korean chip leveraged ETFs in large numbers, with leveraged ETFs targeting twice the daily returns of chipmakers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, on course for their first monthly outflow. Hang Seng and Shanghai Comp were subdued, with risk appetite not helped by the latest official PMI data, in which headline Manufacturing topped forecasts, but Non-Manufacturing disappointed and both remained in contraction territory.

Top Asian News

• Japanese government is to request JPY 143tln for the budget (general account) in FY27, Nikkei reported citing sources.
• South Korean President Lee nominated Lee Hyoung-il as the new finance minister and Kang Shin-chul as defence minister.
• China’s MOFCOM targets around CNY 60tln in total retail sales of consumer goods by 2030.
• New Zealand government cancelled fuel tax hike planned for next year.

European bourses are mixed to start the week, with Italy's FTSE MIB outperforming while Germany's DAX 40 lags. To note, UK markets are closed today for a Summer Bank Holiday. Little in terms of newsflow; however, the US and Iran exchanged strikes for the first time in around a month at the weekend, with the US targeting Larak Island while Iran struck two US bases in Jordan. Overnight, South Korea's KOSPI gapped lower and traded with losses as much as 3.6%, before reversing and closing with gains of 0.5%. Samsung Securities' Roy Lim explains this reversal by pointing to notable buying by pension funds, primarily in tech names. Lim said pensions bought KRW 120bln worth of shares over a 20-minute period heading into the close. Sectors are mixed. Chemicals top the sector pile, with Autos and Energy completing the sector outperformers. Tech is the laggard, with worries that the Fed hiking rates will drag yields higher and, in turn, weigh on tech. Real Estate and Industrials round out the sector laggards.

Top European News

• German North Rhine Westphalia CPI (Aug MM) 0.2% (Prev. 0.9%).
• German North Rhine Westphalia CPI (Aug YY) 2.9% (Prev. 2.7%).

FX

• Some USD weakness emerged this morning with DXY falling to a base around 99.50 which is the 50% Fibonacci retracement of the 99.19-99.72 rally seen after Warsh’s speech. Sell side commentary viewed the speech as hawkish, but Morgan Stanley said it was “not convinced it means hikes are coming” while GS said nothing is yet baked in and with focus on incoming data. Some also note algos reacted to Warsh’s use of “hike” within the context of “hikes on the trails”, in his use of a Kohn/Bernanke analogy. Note, month end may be playing a part in some of the moves seen this morning, where Barclays sees moderate USD selling.
• Action elsewhere paints the picture of the weaker USD, with all majors firmer vs. the Buck.
• JPY leads with earlier, modest losses accelerated around 160.00 where it fell to a 159.74 base. Data overnight showed better-than-expected Japanese Industrial Production and Retail Sales data, though nothing which moved JPY at the time.
• EUR keeps focus on French politics where PM Lecornu’s preview of the 2027 budget ruled out tax increases and de-indexing small pensions. In terms of the 2027 presidential election, an Elabe poll showed Le Pen victorious in every run-off tested, while Philippe (centre) currently appears best placed to challenge, polling at around 47.5%. On the left is Mélenchon, whose odds have ticked lower in recent days, perhaps a welcome development to EUR and EGBs. For now, EUR within a thin 1.1578-1.1606 with UK participants away on Bank holiday. To remind, Barclays sees moderate EUR buying vs USD.

Fixed Income

• A contained start to the week for fixed income. The European morning has been particularly quiet, owing to the fact that the UK is away on Bank Holiday. USTs are currently firmer by a few ticks, in 108-01 to 108-09 parameters; note, the initial low went below last week’s trough by half a tick, and any resumption of the move looks to 107-31+ from the last week of July.
• Overnight, USTs, JGBs and Bunds were all in relatively narrow ranges and ultimately didn't significantly differ from the unchanged mark. Broadly speaking, the main focus was the weekend’s geopolitical updates and particularly US action on Larak Island and then Iranian retaliation.
• Geopolitics aside, desks remain focused on the speech by Fed Chair Warsh last week, which had a hawkish skew and has contributed to the implied probability of a September 25bps hike increasing to just under 60% currently via CME, vs around 41% one week ago.
• Bunds reside in the red by a few ticks. Nonetheless, the benchmark holds at the upper-end of 123.43-60 parameters. No move to the German State CPIs, which saw the Y/Y tick up modestly from the prior, in-fitting with consensus for the 13:00BST mainland figure. On Tuesday, we get the Flash EZ HICP series, and given what we have seen so far the energy component may be the most pertinent.

Commodities

• Over the weekend, tensions between the US and Iran escalated after US forces struck IRGC missile and minelaying capabilities on Larak Island, prompting Iran to retaliate with missile and drone attacks against US and regional military targets. Further, Iran reported striking a tanker with mines, downing a US drone and targeting US vessels, while both sides exchanged warnings of further retaliation. President Trump reiterated that Iran cannot obtain nuclear weapons, while Washington is also intensifying economic pressure through additional sanctions. Despite the escalation, Iranian leaders said they do not seek war and remain open to regional cooperation, whilst also warning of a decisive response to further attacks.
• WTI Oct and Brent Nov futures gapped higher at the open after the US and Iran resumed strikes for the first time in over a month. The contracts are firmer by over 3%, with USD 84.11-86.53/bbl and USD 89.03-91.38/bbl ranges respectively. Dutch TTF surged by some 4% intraday and tested EUR 70/MWh this morning. “Tight supply entering the heating season leaves the market vulnerable to spikes higher later in the year”, ING says.
• Metals are flat/mixed with the complex somewhat cushioned by the softer USD despite the backdrop of higher energy prices. Spot gold moves closer to its 100 DMA to the downside (USD 4,370/oz) after dipping under Friday’s low (4,445/oz) to trade in a current USD 4,396-4,472/oz range. 3M LME copper trades in a narrow USD 14,223.68- 14,388.55/t.

Central Banks

• Riksbank Deputy Governor Jansson said Sweden’s inflation outlook has become more uncertain after unexpectedly high inflation readings this summer but the Riksbank's have scope to wait before adjusting monetary policy, even if there are some risks of elevated inflation going forward. Jansoon added that Sweden’s economic recovery could prove more persistent than expected but does not currently see signs that Sweden’s economy is at risk of overheating soon.
• New Zealand NZIER Shadow Board recommended the RBNZ hike the OCR by 25bps to 2.75% at its meeting this week.

Geopolitics: Ukraine

• The EU is to unveil "one of the biggest" Russia sanctions list in retaliation of hybrid threats, with the package to come alongside bilateral measures being prepared by Berlin, POLITICO reported citing sources.
• Ukrainian President Zelensky is to send top sanctions adviser to Capitol Hill this week in a bid to convince House lawmakers to drop their opposition to the Senate-passed Russia sanctions bill, Punchbowl reported.

US Event Calendar

• 10:30 am: Aug Dallas Fed Manf. Activity, est. 1.6, prior 1.3

 

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 08:39

Book-Sellers Alarmed As AI Giants Shred Millions Of Books

Authored by Autumn Spredemann via The Epoch Times,

Charlie Becker's family bookstore in Houston has been connecting people with literature for more than 30 years.

Becker said the family has "seen a lot of changes" since his dad opened the used and rare book store in 1993.

Charlie Becker, owner of Becker’s Books, in Houston on Aug. 8, 2026. Mark Felix for The Epoch Times

When he was 12 years old, Becker remembers his dad making one of the store's first larger purchases. Another local business planned to get rid of its collection of books, but first called Becker's father.

"It was in their [company's] last days, and they said my dad had to pick up the books. I went with him to the warehouse," he said.

Becker grew up with that story of rescuing books bound for a landfill with his dad. Over the years, he has watched the entire industry of acquiring and selling books change with the rise of the internet, digital cataloging, and the emergence of major sellers such as Amazon.

For generations, booksellers have worked to preserve humanity's writing. However, the recent revelation that millions of print books are being scanned to train artificial intelligence models and then destroyed presents an unprecedented challenge.

To make matters worse, book collectors and sellers say there's no easy way to make it stop.

The practice of what has been dubbed AI "book shredding" burst onto the scene after a 2025 court document revealed that AI tech giant Anthropic purchased millions of printed books, removed their bindings, then scanned each page into digital datasets. Afterward, Anthropic shredded and discarded the originals.

It was revealed that the project was part of an ongoing expansion of Anthropic's central library, which has an aim to collect "all the books in the world" and retain them "forever." The undertaking was called Project Panama.

Pages from Anthropic's website and the company's logo are displayed on a computer screen in New York City on Feb. 26, 2026. To train artificial intelligence models, the tech giant purchased and scanned millions of printed books, then shredded the originals. Patrick Sison/AP/File

The same document noted that Tom Turvey, former head of partnerships for Google's own book-scanning project, was hired to acquire material for the project. Turvey's team emailed "major book distributors and retailers about bulk purchasing their print copies for Anthropic's 'research library.'"

Court filings from the Bartz v. Anthropic lawsuit, unsealed in January, named retailers such as Better World Books and World of Books as vendors from which Anthropic acquired thousands of books.

Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.

"Sourcing books is a widely used approach for training large language models across the AI industry," an Anthropic spokesman told technology website Tom's Guide. "None of our data acquisition programs buy and destroy rare or antiquarian books."

While a federal judge ruled the destructive scanning of legally purchased books qualified as transformative fair use-alteration of an original work for a new purpose-the practice has sparked a growing wave of public outrage.

Concern is also growing among book dealers, many of whom say systematically shredding books means more than just losing words, but also cultural artifacts.

Between the Lines

"What I've been hearing is alarming. People are right to raise a red flag about it," Susan Benne, executive director of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America, told The Epoch Times.

The association has been a trusted source of rare and print books since 1949. Benne said the destruction of printed materials, even if they're not rare or antiquarian, strikes at the heart of something sentimental in most people.

"Just the attachment to maybe something you read as a child or in college, I think it's hard for a lot of us to see that kind of destruction," Benne said. She compared AI book shredding to a flood, a museum fire, or a similar disastrous event that wipes out a repository of human knowledge and culture.

"It hits the same nerve."

Books fill the shelves at Becker’s Books in Houston on Aug. 8, 2026. The book industry has changed dramatically since the store was founded in 1993, from the rise of the internet and Amazon to the use of books to train artificial intelligence models. Mark Felix for The Epoch Times

Becker agrees with this and thinks the practice of destructive book shredding, particularly to train AI, triggers something "visceral" in people. "I do think we lose something culturally when certain books are deemed as commodities or expendable," he said.

However, Becker said it's important to clarify that not all of the books being fed into the jaws of AI training were rare or out of print.

"A lot of people are upset because they have the idea that it's all these rare books like priceless works," he said. "But people need to keep in mind, a lot of times it can be stuff like an old GE refrigerator manual."

Benne concurred. "Just because something is out of print doesn't mean it's rare. From what we've heard, many [of the books] were common items."

However, she added, "That's not to say people shouldn't be worried."

Suspicious Orders

One of the greatest challenges to stopping this practice is a lack of transparency around who is buying the large volumes of books.

In July, a 404 Media report flagged the book database ISBNdb for promoting print book acquisition services that would keep buyer information confidential.

(Left) A sign for Becker’s Books in Houston on Aug. 8, 2026. Owner Charlie Becker attributes a recent spike in book sales to “AI book shredding,” the practice of buying, scanning, and shreding books to train artificial intelligence models. (Right) Books are stacked at Becker’s Books in Houston on Aug. 8, 2026. Mark Felix for The Epoch Times

ISBNdb has since changed the landing page on its website titled "Printed Books Sourcing for Your AI LLMs Dataset Needs." The website now states that the company was "exploring demand" and has "chosen to pivot away from that direction."

When questioned about this practice, a representative from ISBNdb reiterated the statement on the company's website. ISBNdb has never "purchased, scanned, or destroyed a book for AI training or anything else," the representative told The Epoch Times. "We have never bought or sold printed books for AI training: no orders, no purchases, no books."

But even if they had, that's just one aspect of the issue. Non-disclosure agreements can be involved when sellers are working with big buyers, Benne said. "It's not currently common practice to ask a seller, 'What are you going to use this book for?'"

The lack of available information is why Becker thinks it's important to know what books are being scanned for AI use and then destroyed.

"Literally no one knows; that's part of the problem," he said. "Somebody who cares about our literary heritage should be in that pipeline somewhere, but that's not what's happening."

Back in April, Becker noticed a sudden spike in book sales: between double and triple his usual weekly sales tally.

Working in the warehouse for his family's store, he said, "You kind of get a feel for what people order."

The warehouse holds about 300,000 titles, and when the sales volume began picking up, he dug into the orders.

"That's when I went online, and I saw a lot of people were talking about the same thing," he said.

"This is crazy. I counted, I looked deeper: The last 100 book orders we'd received, 95 were from the same buyer. For all the book orders to come in that way, it was very strange."

Read the rest here...

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 08:25

One Every Minute: These Numbers Are Unsustainable...

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

One migrant is now being granted settlement or citizenship in Britain every single minute, according to newly released Home Office figures.

In the three months to June 2026, 140,122 foreign nationals were given indefinite leave to remain or British citizenship - 1.07 people every 60 seconds. Across the full year, nearly 200,000 were handed indefinite leave to remain (ILR), a 16-year record and a 24 per cent jump on the year before. Another 245,520 were granted citizenship. Applications to become British hit an all-time high of 315,224.

This is the so called "Boriswave" arriving at the welfare office. The people waved in when salary and skills thresholds were slashed are now converting temporary visas into a permanent claim on housing, the NHS, benefits and, in time, the state pension.

'The numbers we see now are a huge increase on where they have been in the last few years.'

Research Director at the Centre for Migration Control reacts to Home Office data showing one migrant is being granted settlement or citizenship in Britain every minute. pic.twitter.com/k1PRUEofoH

— GB News (@GBNEWS) August 30, 2026

Robert Bates, research director at the Centre for Migration Control, put it without decoration: the numbers are unsustainable, and the damage will have to be undone.

ILR is not a courtesy stamp. It is the right to remain for life, to access the same welfare entitlements as a citizen, to apply for social housing, and, after a further year, to apply for a passport. Once that status is issued, reversing it is a political fight the Home Office has spent years refusing to have.

Bates told GB News the latest settlement totals are "a huge increase on where they have been in the last few years." In the year to June, he noted, Britain issued around 200,000 grants of settlement - a 243 per cent increase on 2017. Every one of those people, he said, can claim benefits, social housing and NHS care, "and they will all end up being pensioners drawing money from the state."

Full segment:

"Just one in five of those individuals are actually work main applicants," Bates said. "Over half are family members and dependants, and actually one in seven are refugees. So this idea that they're all going to be economic dynamite and aren't going to make use of Britain's welfare state is pie in the sky thinking."

Indian nationals led settlement grants, with Chinese grants quadrupling. The pipeline behind them is larger still. The Home Office's own earned-settlement consultation estimated that between 1.3 million and 2.2 million people will settle in the UK between 2026 and 2030, with a central forecast of 1.6 million and a peak year around 450,000 in 2028.

Health and care visa holders who arrived in the post-2021 surge become eligible in a cluster from 2027. That is not a trickle. It is a second population event, baked in before Shabana Mahmood's promised 10-year wait even takes effect.

Bates's warning was blunt. "If the Labour Government continues to drag its heels on its reforms to indefinite leave to remain, then we could be facing a catastrophe." Even "the Home Office's conservative estimates suggest a £10billion, or up to several hundred billion pounds." "This is something that simply a country's books cannot afford."

While the settlement machine stamps papers, the asylum machine prints invoices.

The asylum system cost the British taxpayer £4.3 billion in 2025/26. Official Home Office spending on asylum stood at £4.36 billion in that year. Centre for Migration Control toted up the last ten years at £25 billion spent accommodating, supporting and processing illegal arrivals and asylum claimants. Bates calculated that as £150 a year from every household, an eightfold rise on the bill a decade ago.

The asylum system cost the British taxpayer £4.3bn in 2025/26.

In the last decade a total of £25bn has been spent on accommodating, supporting and processing illegal migrants/ 'asylum seekers'.

This money should have been spent on British priorities. https://t.co/yXA9tSj3hf

— Centre for Migration Control (@migrationCtrl) August 28, 2026

Labour's answer is a press release about hotels. Hotel numbers have been cut. At the end of June there were 16,021 people in hotels, half the 32,041 of a year earlier and well below the 56,000 peak of 2023. Fewer than 160 hotels remain in use, against around 400 at the height of the Conservative mess. Thirteen more sites were handed back in August, with ministers advertising £51 million in savings from that batch and £224 million from this year's closures.

What they do not advertise is the relocation. 69,038 asylum seekers are now in houses, flats and bedsits - up 4 per cent in a year and double a decade ago. The North West, including Manchester, holds the largest share: 16,349 in dispersed private rentals, almost a quarter of the supported total. Bates wrote that some 73,000 people are now in non-hotel accommodation, up since the election. They are not going into detention. The detention estate has fewer than 2,500 beds. They are going into the street behind yours.

Andy Burnham's instruction to the country was that middle-class areas should "play their part" so the "poorest communities" do not take "the lion's share." In practice that means villages such as Piddington - population 350 - being lined up to host hundreds of unvetted arrivals. Hotels were a visible scandal. Houses in multiple occupation are a quieter one. The bill does not shrink because the sign on the door changes from "Holiday Inn" to "dispersal."

Mahmood's line is that control is being "restored." "A little over two years into office and the asylum backlog is down, the number of asylum seekers in hotels is falling, illegal working arrests are at record levels, and deportations and returns are up markedly," she said. "Small boats numbers are also now falling, but we are not complacent."

The small print tells a different story. 86,000 people claimed asylum in the year to June - down 21 per cent, but still far above the pre-2021 normal. 33,000 came on small boats. Detected illegal arrivals totalled 38,000. Returns of people with no right to be here rose to 41,000, including 6,000 foreign offenders. That sounds like movement until it is set against the stock. More than 210,000 people have crossed the Channel since 2018. Analysis of Home Office figures found 9,694 of those dinghy arrivals had been deported between 2018 and the first half of 2026. Fewer than 10,000 removed in eight years.

Bates's assessment of Labour's record on the only number that matters - removal - was savage. "Less than eight per cent of small boat migrants who have arrived under Labour have actually been removed, and this includes, of course, those who were sent to France before sneaking back into the country." He added, that "Since Labour took power, the Home Office has deported more Poles than it has individuals from the top five small boat nationalities combined."

The backlog at initial decision has been cut to around 40,000, the lowest since 2019. Appeals have exploded the other way. In March 2023 there were roughly 8,000 cases in the First-tier Immigration Tribunal. By March 2026 the figure was well over 87,000. Applications are being "waved through," Bates wrote, while the courts fill up with a second queue. Failed claimants stay. The boats keep coming because the people in northern France can see the same statistics. "Even if their asylum application is eventually rejected, the human rights framework of this country, along with the Refugee Convention, means they will never be removed."

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp accused ministers of shifting the problem, not ending it: "Labour are moving illegal immigrants out of hotels and into flats in your building, and now they are telling them to go and disappear without a trace." The Conservative offer is to leave the ECHR and "deport every illegal immigrant." Reform has gone further and talked about abolishing ILR as a category. Labour's offer is a longer wait, a £10,000 repayment levy for those who later earn, and another round of former barracks.

None of that touches the people already being stamped through at one a minute.

Settlement and the asylum bill are only half the ledger. The other half is what happens after arrival - and that is the file the government is in court to keep shut.

Ministers are spending public money to block the release of conviction data by nationality for England and Wales, the dataset the Centre for Migration Control requested under FOI and the Information Commissioner ordered out. Justice Secretary David Lammy sanctioned an appeal. Families of the dead and the raped asked him to drop it.

Alex Whyte, whose sister Rhiannon was stabbed 23 times with a screwdriver by Sudanese small-boat arrival Deng Chol Majek at the asylum hotel where she worked, told GB News she felt "sick, disgusted and completely let down." Anger, she said, "doesn't even cover what I feel, and it never will." Labour, she added, is "too afraid to admit" what open borders have done. "Open your eyes. You are so aware of what is happening, but you are too afraid to admit it."

The families' letter to the Justice Secretary stated "Imagine if someone you loved had been attacked, abused, or killed by a person who had entered Britain from abroad." Victims and the public "deserve transparency about the people who enter our country and the crimes they subsequently commit." Withholding the data "damages trust" and blocks "meaningful action."

Partial figures already out explain the panic. Foreign nationals accounted for 14.1 per cent of sexual offence convictions in 2025. They made up about 9 per cent of the population and 26.1 per cent of sexual-offence arrests - 3.5 times the British rate. On the railways, CMC's British Transport Police data showed foreigners were 79 per cent of theft arrests in 2025, 40 per cent of drug-offence arrests, 37 per cent of sexual-offence arrests and 36 per cent of violent-crime arrests. Across England and Wales, foreign nationals were arrested 172,889 times in the year to March 2025 - one every 183 seconds.

That is why the Ministry of Justice is in a tribunal instead of a press conference. They know a nationality breakdown, published in full, would not produce a seminar. It would produce a reckoning. They know it would trigger mass unrest. So they fight the Information Commissioner with the same Treasury that cannot find an extra nurse and can find £4.3 billion for a system Bates described as "perma-chaos."

Net migration has come off the 2023 peak of 944,000. The year to December 2025 was estimated at 171,000. Work visas are down. Study visas are down. Labour waves those charts as proof the fever has broken.

Settlement is the delayed charge on the same account. You can slow the inflow and still lock in the stock. You can close a hotel and open a house. You can cut the initial backlog and watch the appeals list triple. You can talk about "earned settlement" while stamping 140,000 grants in a single quarter.

Bates's line on the student route captures the wider fraud. Around three-quarters of a million visas are still being issued, with students the largest slice. "We are seeing an increasing trend now of the student visa route being increasingly used not just actually to come and study at a world-beating university, but as a back door into Britain and a long-term migration route."

He further noted that more than 60 per cent of people arriving on student visas were still here more than three years after their courses ended. "So there is huge, huge pressure that is being piled already on the British welfare state."

That pressure is not an accident of weather in the Channel. It is a policy choice repeated by two governments: admit first, process later, settle always, remove almost never, and treat the public's demand for numbers by nationality as a public-order risk rather than a democratic right.

Mahmood says fairness is being restored. Burnham says nicer postcodes must take their share. The Home Office says the hotels are emptying. The stopwatch says otherwise. One grant a minute. Two hundred thousand settlements in a year. A quarter of a million new citizens. A record citizenship queue.

A forecast of up to 2.2 million more settlers before the decade is out. Four billion and more on asylum this year, twenty-five billion across ten. Nine thousand-odd Channel arrivals removed from more than two hundred thousand who came.

These numbers are unsustainable. The people running the system know it. That is why the crime file stays in the vault, why the hotels become HMOs, and why settlement is being issued faster than the country can absorb, house, police or afford it.

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 Mon, 08/31/2026 - 05:00

Google Retreats On 'Parasite SEO' Crackdown In Europe To Head Off EU Antitrust Fine

Alphabet's Google said on Friday that it has changed how it enforces its spam rules in Europe, following concerns from EU regulators that the policy could unfairly hurt news publishers and other websites that carry content from commercial partners.

The Google logo outside the company's offices in London on June 24, 2025. Carlos Jasso/Reuters

The dispute centers on Google's policy against "site reputation abuse," a practice often called "parasite SEO." It occurs when a third party publishes content on a well-established website primarily to benefit from that site's strong reputation in Google Search and gain higher rankings than the content might receive on its own.

Google introduced the policy to target arrangements in which outside companies use trusted websites mainly as vehicles for boosting their search visibility.

European regulators, however, raised concerns that Google's enforcement was too broad. They found that the policy was also reducing the search rankings of legitimate publishers simply because their websites contained material produced with, or supplied by, commercial partners.

Google said that from August 30, manual actions taken under the policy will no longer apply to users in the European Economic Area - the 27 EU states plus Iceland, Norway, and Liechtenstein. The policy remains unchanged everywhere else. The policy does not apply to ZeroHedge, as Google explicitly distinguishes editorial syndication from “site reputation abuse.” This is different from "parasite SEO" where an outside company places unrelated content on a trusted domain in order to exploit that site's Google ranking strength. And - since Google search algos still hate us with the white hot passion of 1,000 suns, the 'ranking strength' aspect would be moot anyway. 

Google has now adjusted its approach in Europe in an effort to address those concerns and avoid a potential antitrust penalty. DMA breaches carry fines of up to 10% of global turnover.

The two sides are describing the same climbdown differently. "We welcome the repeal of this policy, which unfairly penalised publishers and other business users of Google Search," Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier said, adding that "thanks to the DMA, Google Search will no longer demote press publications solely for hosting third-party content." Google, for its part, called it an adjustment to "our enforcement approach" - and warned that "an overbroad application of the DMA could prevent us from addressing real threats to the integrity of our search results."

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 04:15

No Whites Allowed, Britain's MI5 Tells Applicants

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Britain's domestic intelligence service is once again telling White university students they are not wanted.

For the 2027 Summer Intelligence Internship, MI5 has confined applications to people from a "black, Asian, mixed heritage or ethnic minority background" who also come from a "socially or economically disadvantaged background."

White British candidates - including those from the poorest homes - cannot even submit an application. The agency calls this a response to "underrepresentation." Critics call it what it is: racial exclusion.

The rule sits on the official careers page in plain English. Final and penultimate-year students may apply for the 2026/27 academic year only if they tick the approved ethnic boxes.

MI5's own wording is blunt: "We're confining the applications for this internship to those within this demographic due to a current underrepresentation in our workforce."

This is not a fringe outreach day. The placement is billed as a serious introduction to national security work. Interns are promised "unique insight" into operations and "meaningful contributions to real projects," not a seat on the sidelines.

The MI5 stint is expected to run from Monday 28 June to Friday 20 August 2027 across sites in Central and West London. Successful candidates are paid £4,849, with accommodation covered if they cannot reasonably commute. GCHQ is running a parallel scheme on similar racial terms.

MI5 accused of 'flagrant racism' as white candidates told not to bother applying for summer internshiphttps://t.co/wqPUXiNKrn

— GB News (@GBNEWS) August 27, 2026

Applicants must be British nationals, normally resident in the UK for seven of the last ten years, and able to survive the usual vetting. They still face a competitive sift. The racial gate comes first.

The listed groups include Asian or Asian British, Black or Black British, mixed-heritage combinations, "other ethnic minority," and a narrow "White other" category covering Romany Gypsy, Scottish Travellers or Irish Travellers. White British is not on the list.

The socio-economic test is equally specific. At age 14 the main household earner must have been in technical, craft, routine or semi-routine work, or unemployed and seeking work - or the applicant must have been eligible for free school meals. A White student who meets that poverty test is still barred. An ethnic-minority student who meets it is invited in.

What happened to getting a job on merit?

Shadow home secretary Chris Philp called it "flagrant racism from MI5 & GCHQ." He wrote: "White applicants for summer 2027 internships - including from disadvantaged backgrounds - can't apply. The scheme must be scrapped. Applications should be merit-based and colour blind. Working class white boys are among the most disadvantaged - yet are ignored."

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage put the charge in institutional terms. "Yet again, taxpayer funds are being used to fuel a culture of anti-white prejudice across the public sector. It's racism. It's wrong. Only Reform will bring meritocracy back to our institutions. We'll ensure that nobody is discriminated against based on the colour of their skin."

This is not a one-off. The Summer Intelligence Internship has been running across MI5, MI6 and GCHQ since 2023. Every cycle has produced the same argument and the same official shrug. The agencies say the programme exists to "increase diversity within our organisations." Ministers treat the Equality Act 2010 as cover.

In July, Conservative MP Ben Obese-Jecty asked the Cabinet Office why White candidates were ineligible. Dan Jarvis, minister of state for security, answered that the internships are "designed to provide insight" to people "from demographics and backgrounds under-represented within UKIC," and that "this is a lawful measure (as set out in the Equality Act 2010) used to encourage people from under-represented demographics to consider national security careers."

He added that anyone later applying for a proper job would face "fair and open competition, with selection based on merit."

That last line is doing a lot of work. The paid summer placement is itself the pipeline: mentors, projects, a foot in the door, a chance to apply afterwards with the agency already knowing your name. Excluding the country's majority from that pipeline is not a neutral "encouragement." It is a racial filter on the first rung.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission's own guidance on positive action is narrower than the agencies pretend. Employers may encourage under-represented groups to apply. The Commission says that if they do so, "the advert should clearly state the employer is seeking applications from everyone but wishes to encourage applications from people with a particular protected characteristic."

Confining applications - telling one racial group not to bother - is a different creature. "Positive action" was sold as outreach. This is a closed shop.

Claire Coutinho has been making that point for years. When the scheme returned in 2025 she said: "Deciding who can do a summer internship scheme based on the colour of their skin is bad enough. To bar patriotic white Britons who want to serve their country, but allow white Irish people, is utterly mad."

She added: "To make matters worse, the security services will also shut you out if you're a child of a nurse, a cabbie or your dad ran a corner shop, while the child of an £80,000-a-year train driver is eligible. This is state-sponsored discrimination. We should just choose the best people for the job."

In the Commons she asked the obvious question: "What message does it send to our young people when they are told there are some job opportunities they cannot apply to solely based on the colour of their skin?" Equality, she said, "must mean equality of opportunity, not putting some people in society on a pedestal above others."

Jacob Rees-Mogg charged that "MI5 is institutionally, publicly racist against white people." He noted that the policy "discriminates against 92.6% of my constituents in Somerset."

Toby Young of the Free Speech Union gave the thought experiment that every defender of these schemes refuses to answer. "Imagine if it was the other way around, and the intelligence services were saying only white people can apply for our summer internships. There would be absolute uproar."

There would. If the advert had said "no Blacks," the building would be surrounded by cameras before lunch. Because it says, in effect, no ordinary White British applicants, the official class calls it inclusion.

The security services are not improvising. They are copying a model that British policing has already normalised.

West Yorkshire Police, one of the country's largest forces, has run a two-track application system for police constable roles. Black, Asian and minority ethnic candidates have been able to apply year-round. White applicants from British, Irish and Eastern European backgrounds have been told to wait for specific recruitment windows.

An internal whistleblower told The Telegraph that minority applicants were treated as "gold" and White candidates as "bronze." The whistleblower said: "The process restricts progression opportunities for White British candidates, while individuals from other backgrounds are swiftly advanced through recruitment stages."

Ethnic minority candidates, the same source said, were regularly "shortlisted, sifted, assessed and invited to an interview before White candidates can even apply."

The force's own website made the hierarchy official: "We are currently accepting applications for the two police constable entry programmes (uniform and detective) from people from our under-represented groups... If you are not from one of these groups, please keep checking this page for future recruitment opportunities."

West Yorkshire dressed this up as Positive Action under the Equality Act. A spokesman said ethnic minority representation among officers was around 9 percent against a local minority population of 23 percent, and that early applications were merely "held on file" until a window opened for everyone.

The whistleblower's account was that the holding file was a fiction: the favoured group moved while everyone else waited outside.

At Thames Valley Police the ideology went further than the application form. Officers were put through mandatory "equity training" on "white privilege," "micro-aggressions" and the difference between being "non-racist versus anti-racist."

This followed an employment tribunal finding that the force had positively discriminated against White officers by appointing an Asian detective inspector without considering White candidates who had served 19 to 26 years.

Former assistant chief constable Kerrin Wilson, who led an independent review, recorded "strong feelings of frustration." "As white males they felt disadvantaged and ... they had the perception that unfairness was allowed for minority groups but not for majority populations," she wrote.

The review warned that the training "can often be seen as demonising white people and therefore building barriers to the learning." White officers' response was "very strong, at times bordering on aggressive." They felt "they have no support within the force." There was "a tangible feeling of being overlooked."

Minority staff were not grateful either. Some said they would not seek promotion because "even if they did succeed in securing promotions their efforts would not be accepted by some as genuine." Some described the force as a "hostile environment."

Former government adviser and ex-officer Rory Geoghegan said officers "deserve far better from their leaders than to be crudely categorised by skin colour and subjected to reductive, divisive ideologies." The review, he argued, failed to confront "the unthinking acceptance of critical race theory - a deeply political framework that has no place in an impartial police service."

That is the culture now being imported into the agencies that handle terrorism, hostile states and domestic subversion. First the police. Then the Bar. Now MI5.

The legal profession built the same wall and called it progress. A paid internship linked to the Bar Council and the 10,000 Interns Foundation offered London Living Wage work experience while restricting eligibility to specified ethnic minority backgrounds. White applicants were excluded outright.

Sophie Corcoran applied anyway. She is now suing. In her own account of the case she wrote that the central issue is simple: "should organisations operating in Britain be permitted to deny opportunities to people purely because they are white? I believe the answer must be no."

She draws the distinction the agencies keep blurring. Encouraging under-represented people to apply is one thing. "Outright excluding others from opportunities on racial grounds" is another.

She further noted, "The Equality Act was never intended to create a hierarchy of races where some groups are protected from discrimination while others are expected to tolerate it, but this is exactly what these schemes do."

The schemes also flatten every other kind of hardship into a racial cartoon. "A wealthy privately educated applicant from an affluent background can qualify for some race-based schemes, while a working-class white applicant from a struggling town cannot."

White working-class pupils have been the lowest-attaining major ethnic group at GCSE level for more than a decade. Corcoran herself grew up with epilepsy, hearing difficulties and dyslexia and attended a failing state school. None of that counted. "Just because someone is black does not automatically mean he or she is disadvantaged. Equally, just because someone is white does not mean he or she is not disadvantaged."

Rupert Lowe called the Bar scheme "vile, anti-white racism." Corcoran urged "everyone knows that if the races were reversed, such policies would never be considered acceptable. Equality cannot operate on a double standard."

The intelligence agencies' own socio-economic test makes the double standard sharper. They admit class exists. They even try to measure it by the parent's job when the applicant was 14, and by free school meals. Then they add a racial veto.

National Audit Office internships have run on a similar exclusionary logic, limiting places by sex, "black heritage" or lower socio-economic status and shutting middle-class White men out of a taxpayer-funded programme.

Transport for London has run placements reserved for BAME, disabled or disadvantaged candidates. The pattern is no longer a few over-eager HR departments. It is how the British public sector now allocates opportunity.

Intelligence work is not a diversity seminar. It is judgment, languages, technical skill, nerve and loyalty. The agencies' public line is that "a diverse organisation is vital to ensure diverse insights." That sentence has become a mantra. It is used to justify shutting the country's largest ethnic group out of the training ground.

A security service that filters the next generation by race is telling the public something larger than a recruitment statistic. It is saying the majority population is surplus to the pipeline. It is saying competence will be balanced against a demographic target. It is saying the Equality Act now functions as a permission slip for the one form of racial discrimination institutions are eager to practise.

The other way around remains the test. A Home Office page that read "no Blacks" would end careers by nightfall. A police force that labelled White applicants "gold" and everyone else "bronze" would be in special measures. A Bar scheme that barred African and Asian students would be treated as a national scandal. MI5's page does the reverse, year after year, with ministerial cover and a press office that talks about underrepresentation.

Merit is not a right-wing hobby. It is the only honest way to staff an intelligence service. Britain's problem is not that too many White working-class students are bursting through the gates of Thames House. It is that the people who run the gates have decided some citizens are the wrong colour to knock.

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Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 02:00