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Every week, The Post will bring you our picks of the best one-liners and stories from satirical site the Babylon Bee to take the edge off Hump Day.

Page Six previously reported the "Nashville" star was struggling with back problems before her tragic death.

Page Six previously reported the "Nashville" star was struggling with back problems before her tragic death.

Here's why Paloma Cinco looks so familiar...

Jeff Currie: Forget $91 Brent, The Real Crisis Is $170 Diesel

Brent at $90.94 looks almost civilized. Jeff Currie thinks that is exactly the problem: everyone is staring at crude while the real energy shock is already showing up in the fuels people actually buy.

As OilPrice reports, "Nobody on the planet earth consumes crude oil,” Currie told CNBC. Refineries do. Everyone else consumes gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, and those markets look considerably uglier.

European diesel was trading around $170 per barrel during the interview, Currie said, almost twice Brent’s current $90.94. WTI was trading at $84.94 Tuesday.

Historically, crude and refined-product prices moved closely enough that crude served as a reasonable shorthand for the broader energy market. Currie says that relationship has broken down.

Part of the disconnect came from roughly 100 million to 120 million barrels of crude trapped inside the Strait of Hormuz following a surge in supplies in late June and early July. China then cut refinery runs, which helped keep crude prices softer but made product supplies tighter.

In other words, China did not solve the shortage. It moved it downstream.

Currie also argues governments have spent decades creating an “illusion of abundance” during supply disruptions by releasing strategic reserves and talking markets down. That strategy has worked before. This disruption, he said, is different because of its scale, duration, and the increasingly tight product market.

The inflation implications are considerably less academic. CNBC noted that gasoline prices are about 30% higher than a year ago, while diesel is up 46%. Diesel feeds directly into trucking, shipping and industrial costs.

Currie expects the crude-product dislocation to eventually correct as refiners chase historically high margins and increase runs.

Until then, $91 Brent may be giving investors a comforting picture of an oil market that consumers stopped living in weeks ago.

Tyler Durden Wed, 08/19/2026 - 06:55

The most intriguing portion of the Jets roster is their rookie class after the team drafted three players in the first round this year.

Disengagement: Trump Vows New Strategy To 'Strangle' Iran Over Time Summary

• No talks: Trump confirms US-Iran negotiations are off, vows to 'strangle them' over time.
• Hormuz attack: Tanker hit, injuring a crew member.
• Houthis escalate: Attacks shut Yemen’s Mokha port.
• Diplomacy stalled: Qatar says not mediating until Oman-Hormuz deal finalized.
• Iran hardens: Tehran says it maintains an offensive posture.

//--> //--> Strait of Hormuz traffic returns to normal by September 30?
Yes 9% · No 92%
View full market & trade on Polymarket

*  *  *

Disengagement: Trump Vows New Strategy of Strangling Iran

The US administration has already said this many times and in many different ways. We suppose President Trump wants the world to know that talks with Iran are really really over this time, and the gloves are coming off (again):

US President Trump told top administration envoys to halt their conversations with Iran, according to CNN citing a US official

"White House officials have recently communicated to political allies that they are shifting their strategy — going from “hammer Iran ASAP” to “strangle them” over time.

While there have been no new bombs away just yet, the statement comes after earlier in the day the UAE government reported a rare instance of a pair of alleged Iranian missiles inbound in its territory. Iran subsequently denied that it was behind any attack. Earlier in the summer Kuwait and Bahrain were targets of frequent attacks, but the UAE was largely spared in the most recent salvos.

Trump is now not pursuing to revive talks at all, it appears, and this is being dubbed as a new 'disengagement' strategy. According to more from CNN: "And instead of claiming talks were proceeding well, and that a new deal was just around the corner — as he’s asserted repeatedly since the ceasefire signed in June fell apart — Trump announced there was no diplomacy underway whatsoever."

So this could finally mark the end of the fake and premature 'deal imminent' headlines which not infrequently marked earlier phases of the war.

UAE Under Missile Alert

While initial details and the precise nature of the threat remain unclear, the UAE has said it detected a missile threat targeting the country. "UAE air defense systems detected a missile threat targeting the county," the National Emergency Crisis and Disaster Management Authority said in a post on X. This has included Dubai residents receiving a UAE missile threat alert.

The country has not actually been targeted much by Iran throughout the war. The UAE has in follow-up said the situation is currently "safe" after the missile threat. Air-defenses detected two inbound:

UAE Defense Ministry said it detected two ballistic missiles launched from Iran, one missile fell outside territorial waters, second fell inside.

Trump Confirms 'No Talks' - Says Hormuz 'Open & Operating'; Oil Slides

President Trump issued a new Truth Social post, within hours after posting a map depicting the Strait of Hormuz as a 'new US territory'. He affirmed there are currently no talks or conversations happening with the Iranians - nor is there so much as anything scheduled. However, he claimed the strait is "open and operating" - with water minds having been "removed or detonated".

A White House official tells me that Trump’s Truth Social post below is him calling off talks with Iran for the foreseeable future ⬇️ https://t.co/6dIvne1LqU

— Shelby Talcott (@ShelbyTalcott) August 18, 2026

Perhaps as intended, oil reacted to the claim of an 'open' and supposedly mine-free Strait of Hormuz, sliding on the statement...

Iranian Attack on Outbound Tanker in Hormuz

Yet another attack has occurred in the Strait of Hormuz, this time on a foreign tanker on an outbound transit route, which Iran and Oman claim to directly oversee and administer according to the terms of the Oman deal for managing the strait which is still being finalized.

UK Maritime Trade Operations says Tuesday that the unknown projectile caused engine-room damage and a crew casualty, with the remaining crew being rescued and assisted by the Omani Coast Guard.

Such attacks which mark enforcement of Iran's protocol and claim of control over the vital energy transit waterway have been steady, though not rapid, over the last several weeks. Oil prices have been on the rise this week, also as it continues to be clear that Washington and Tehran are digging in with their competing maximum demands.

Houthis Escalate in Red Sea

Hormuz isn't the only chokepoint still witnessing active conflict. Waters off Yemen and the Red Sea also continue to heat up, with the Iranian-allied Houthi rebels still escalating.

According to The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday, the group is "shutting down operations at a strategic seaport and pushing closer to the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, an important global shipping chokepoint."

The report cites Yemeni authorities to describe, "The militant group’s recent missile and drone attacks forced the closure of the port of Mokha, a key logistics hub for civilian shipping and for anti-Houthi forces operating along the coast."

According to more on the significance:

"This is the most significant escalation in quite a few years, maybe since 2020," said Adam Baron, a Yemen expert and fellow with New America, a policy institute in Washington.

Baron called the port of Mokha the key logistics hub for anti-Houthi forces on the Red Sea. The Houthis control mountainous terrain inland from the Bab al-Mandeb but not the coast along the crucial waterway, which is held by opposing forces. 

No Movement on Talks until After Oman Deal Signed: Qatar

On the question of finding a path toward broader US-Iran peace, there's still no movements on talks. Qatar is even openly saying that its direct mediation efforts won't resume until the Oman deal is finalized - which critics have complained gives Iran de facto control of operations in the Strait of Hormuz.

"Qatar’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Majed al-Ansari says during a news conference that countries mediating between Iran and the US are waiting for Iran and Oman to announce an expected agreement on transit through the Strait of Hormuz, before pushing Washington and Tehran to resume negotiations aimed at ending their war," Al Jazeera reports.

President Trump's latest rhetoric and social media activity is not going to help the cause of peace, or the two sides getting back to the negotiating table. After verbalizing Monday that the US should declare the Hormuz Strait a US territory, he posted the following to Truth Social on Tuesday:

All of this comes on the heels of the 60-day diplomatic window set by the MoU inked in June has expired. Tehran said it was already effectively dead anyway, and thus "irrelevant" - blaming Washington for having violated its terms on multiple occasions.

Rough Road to November

Trump is meanwhile ultimately sticking to the following as an ultimate goal of the Iran conflict: "The number one Goal is, and always will be, that Iran cannot have, in any way, shape, or form, a Nuclear Weapon. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP," he earlier stated on Truth Social.

The path to midterm elections in November continues to be a rough one for the US administration, and the pain is likely to continue for at least the time being...

President Donald Trump's approval rating fell to the lowest level of his presidency, ‌with an overwhelming majority of Americans concerned the US war with Iran will last a long time, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll https://t.co/364a3rlckM pic.twitter.com/UrDCYmf8m0

— Reuters (@Reuters) August 18, 2026

Not only has Iran not backed down, but its military is newly claiming to take an "offensive" posture and has reshuffled its command accordingly. If there are new tit-for-tat attacks, Tehran is in essence saying the next salvo will go bigger.

Tyler Durden Wed, 08/19/2026 - 06:33

7 Federal Agencies & Big Pharma Quietly Built A Pandemic-Industrial Complex

Authored by Jon Fleetwood via substack,

Nearly 14 years before COVID-19, HHS created the Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise (PHEMCE) and centralized federal health, biomedical, regulatory, homeland-security, and military functions around a government-directed countermeasure pipeline.

Creating what this website refers to as the Pandemic-Industrial Complex (PIC).

PHEMCE centralized seven named federal agencies and components (ASPR, CDC, FDA, NIH, DOD, DHS, and VA) across four Cabinet departments: HHS, DOD, DHS, and VA.

Private industry was explicitly inserted into that structure.

HHS named pharmaceutical manufacturers, biotechnology companies, clinical research organizations, and private research organizations.

Then it proposed increasing industry access to HHS agencies, streamlining regulation, lowering obstacles to private investment, and applying liability protections.

The government’s own documents show the same apparatus stretching from threat detection and intelligence assessments through research, product development, regulation, procurement, stockpiling, deployment, and use.

The national-security conflict is obvious.

What happens when the government institutions helping define an alleged biological threat are centralized with the institutions funding research around it, determining what product should be made, regulating that product, buying it, and organizing its deployment?

And what happens if research financed or overseen within the wider biodefense ecosystem contributes to producing the very threat that activates that apparatus?

Congress, the White House, the Department of Energy, the FBI, the CIA, and Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service (BND) all acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic was “likely” the result of a laboratory incident involving engineered pathogens.

HHS itself warned in 2006 that laboratory-engineered organisms:

“might even be mistaken as naturally occurring emerging agents.”

That warning makes the conflict much harder to dismiss.

DARPA’s PROPHECY, ADEPT, P3 and PREEMPT programs provide a concrete example of what this PHEMCE architecture looked like inside DOD: military programs moved from predicting alleged viral evolution to sequence-based pharmaceuticals, compressed countermeasure timelines and animal-virus surveillance, while DEFUSE proposed applying that machinery specifically to SARS-related bat coronaviruses.

HHS Creates PHEMCE & Orders Government & Industry to ‘Align & Synchronize’

HHS’s September 8, 2006, draft PHEMCE Strategy states:

“HHS created the Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise (PHEMCE) in July 2006... The PHEMCE is a coordinated interagency effort led by HHS and charged with the responsibility to: (1) Define and prioritize requirements for public health medical emergency countermeasures; (2) coordinate research, early- and advanced product development and procurement activities to address the requirements; and (3) set deployment and use strategies for medical countermeasures held in the Strategic National Stockpile.”

HHS then defined the reach of the apparatus:

“The PHEMCE Strategy defines the principles and objectives that will guide our Implementation Plan for the entire PHEMCE-surveillance/detection of threats; research, development, acquisition, storage/maintenance, deployment and utilization of medical countermeasures.”

The government justified this concentration by citing alleged CBRN and biological threats, then demanded:

“unprecedented cooperation among all levels of Government, private industry, academia, international partners and the public.”

And under HHS leadership:

“we must align and synchronize efforts on the part of all key stakeholders involved in the PHEMCE.”

HHS also explicitly inserted private industry into the product-development system:

“Private research organizations, pharmaceutical manufacturers, biotechnology companies, and clinical research organizations already have many of the resources and the expertise needed to develop MCM but have been reluctant to make substantial investments in research and development because of market uncertainties.”

Then:

“HHS will work to streamline the regulatory process for medical countermeasures. HHS will facilitate private investment of time, energy and resources in MCM development by removing or lowering obstacles whenever appropriate, including the application of liability protections where appropriate.”

And one passage reveals what HHS itself counted as a “benefit”:

“As with the definition of costs, benefits also go beyond the simple definition of ‘curing disease’ and include concepts such as overall lifecycle of the medical countermeasure including storage, utilization and deployment.”

That is the conflict in plain language.

PHEMCE was not organized solely around whether a product cured disease.

HHS explicitly counted the product’s storage, utilization, and deployment as part of its “benefit.”

The 2007 Plan Turns PHEMCE Into an ‘End-to-End’ Threat-to-Product Pipeline

The April 2007 implementation plan described the centralized structure this way:

“The HHS Public Health Emergency Medical Countermeasures Enterprise (PHEMCE) has taken a holistic, end-to-end approach that considers multiple aspects of the medical countermeasures mission including research, development, acquisition, storage, maintenance, deployment, and guidance for utilization.”

It then names the agencies:

“HHS PHEMCE is a coordinated, intra-agency effort led by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) and includes three HHS internal agencies: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Additionally, HHS PHEMCE collaborates with its ex officio members: the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and other interagency stakeholders as appropriate.”

The plan then lays out the threat-to-product sequence.

HHS said medical-countermeasure requirements would incorporate:

“subject matter expert evaluations, domestic and international intelligence information”

and immediately moved to:

“Identify and prioritize near-, mid-, and long-term development and acquisition programs”

for products potentially covering:

“the entire U.S. population.”

Government procurement could then be sized to:

“drive industrial development of the medical countermeasure.”

NIH was ordered to align its research with PHEMCE priorities:

“NIH will align research and development efforts with the PHEMCE priority medical countermeasure programs.”

And HHS wanted:

“a sustainable, continuous stream of promising medical countermeasures in the pipeline that are aligned with top priority HHS PHEMCE requirements for future acquisitions”

The same plan sought technologies permitting:

“rapid identification and characterization of novel threat agents”

followed by:

“rapid production of new vaccines.”

That is the architecture.

Threat designation → intelligence → product requirement → research → industrial development → acquisition → deployment.

Bottom Line

The two HHS documents confirm PHEMCE centralized seven named federal agencies and components across four Cabinet departments while explicitly inserting pharmaceutical and biotechnology interests into the same government-directed countermeasure structure.

HHS ordered participants to “align and synchronize,” proposed streamlined regulation, lower barriers and liability protections for private developers, contemplated government financing through clinical trials, and said government purchases could “drive industrial development.”

NIH was ordered to maintain a “sustainable, continuous stream” of products aligned with “future acquisitions.”

And HHS itself acknowledged that laboratory-engineered organisms could be “mistaken as naturally occurring emerging agents.”

In all, the documents reveal the central conflict of the Pandemic-Industrial Complex: the same broader government system can help define an alleged biological threat, finance research around it, determine the product requirements, integrate private industry, influence regulation, create the market through procurement, purchase the resulting products and organize their deployment.

That conflict is no longer merely hypothetical.

A laboratory incident involving coronavirus research is itself a mainstream hypothesis under consideration for the origin of COVID-19.

If COVID-19 resulted from research connected to the same wider U.S.-funded biodefense and pandemic-preparedness ecosystem represented inside this apparatus, the implications would extend far beyond public health: a government-connected research ecosystem could be implicated in causing an international biological catastrophe while interconnected institutions within that wider system possessed roles in assessing its origin, controlling relevant information and intelligence, and directing the resulting countermeasure response.

Who independently investigates the system when the system itself may be implicated?

And if a government-connected research ecosystem can potentially contribute to producing the biological catastrophe, while the wider apparatus can then define the threat, finance the response, create the product requirements, “drive industrial development” and organize deployment, does the resulting emergency expose the system—or give that same system more money, authority, and power?

Tyler Durden Wed, 08/19/2026 - 06:30

Juan Carlos Amorós announced in June that he would be taking paternity leave from coaching women's soccer champs Gotham FC, following the birth of his second child.

A Dior executive and her film producer partner were killed in a head-on car crash in France.

It is all new for Jaxson Dart. His footwork. Where his eyes should be focused. His reads. The routes by the receivers. What the plays are called. How the plays are designed.

 A Ukrainian man was arrested Wednesday in Croatia in relation to undersea explosions that damaged the Nord Stream gas pipelines between Russia and Germany in 2022, Germany’s federal prosecutor said.

Gov. Kathy Hochul considers her congestion-pricing scheme a huge success, but the city Health Department just exposed the scam by blowing up one of the main supposed benefits.

While excoriating insurance companies may be good politics, forcing everyone into a government insurance monopoly would be disastrous policy.

“I recently failed a drug test in Mallorca after testing positive for cocaine,” he wrote.

Saudis Offer To Sell Oil Near Oman, A Sign They're Sailing Dark Through Hormuz

Saudi Arabia spent weeks finding ways around the Strait of Hormuz. Now it is starting to send tankers straight back through it.

According to OilPrice.com, Saudi Aramco resumed crude loadings from its Ras Tanura and Juaymah terminals inside the strait last week, ending a three-week gap in activity at the ports, according to Kpler and Vortexa data cited by Reuters.

Three VLCCs -- Malaysia Prosperity, Algeria Prosperity and Singapore Prosperity -- each loaded roughly 2 million barrels between August 12 and August 16. Six more VLCCs could load Saudi crude from inside Hormuz later this month, provisional Kpler data showed.

The next round may involve Saudi Arabia’s own ships. According to Bloomberg, Saudi Arabia is offering to sell oil from off the coast of Oman, a sign that the kingdom may be following the United Arab Emirates in shuttling more barrels through the Strait of Hormuz.

Saudi Aramco is offering cargoes on a so-called ship-to-ship basis from locations including Sohar in the Gulf of Oman. The grades being marketed are Arab Medium and Arab Heavy, something that means it’s highly likely the barrels came from inside the Persian Gulf.

For now, the offers are only being made to some Chinese refiners, Bloomberg sources said. Many of the nation’s processors prefer the heavier and relatively sulfur-rich grades produced by Aramco, which are more suited to their complex refineries.

Middle Eastern producers have been pressing ahead with shuttling large volumes of crude out of the Persian Gulf, helping keep a lid on oil prices and assuaging fears of an energy-driven inflation spike. Aramco’s trading arm shuttled some supplies through Hormuz in May, but the kingdom’s ability to divert exports to its Red Sea port of Yanbu made it less reliant on the waterway.

Over the past several weeks, even those diverted Red Sea flows have come under threat after Yemen’s Houthi militants declared a maritime blockade on Saudi Arabia.

There have been recent signs of a pickup in cargo activity from Saudi Arabia’s facilities inside the Persian Gulf. According to satellite imagery, vessels with at least 9 million barrels of transport capacity have loaded at or near the country’s giant Ras Tanura export installations over the past week.

Saudi Arabia has also amassed a large cluster of oil supertankers just outside of the gulf. Seven VLCCs operated by Saudi-based Bahri were sitting off the UAE and Oman on Tuesday, while another two were heading toward Fujairah, according to LSEG shipping data. Traders told Reuters that Aramco could use Saudi-controlled tankers for future Hormuz transits in addition to vessels operated by South Korea’s Sinokor.

That is a notable shift after Aramco halted sales from inside the strait for weeks following attacks on its tanker fleet during last month’s escalation in the U.S.-Iran conflict. 

It does not mean Saudi exports are back to normal.

Aramco is still offering Arab Medium and Arab Heavy crude to Asian refiners through ship-to-ship transfers off Fujairah, allowing buyers to collect Saudi barrels without sending their own vessels through Hormuz.

Its other escape route has problems of its own. Saudi Arabia diverted exports toward Yanbu on the Red Sea earlier in the war, only to face a Houthi blockade there. Aramco has since offered crude from Egypt’s Sidi Kerir terminal, but only about 670,000 barrels per day is expected to load there for Asia this month, versus roughly 4 million bpd previously exported through Yanbu.

Longer voyages and higher freight costs have made that workaround a tough sell.

Tyler Durden Wed, 08/19/2026 - 05:45

The latest study used national data from more than 12 million death certificates that included information about occupations.

Here are five takeaways from another action-packed primary night.

CBP seized the Volkswagen, but officers did not discover the animals until they inspected it the following morning.

Sovereign Debt Crisis: The French Left Wants To Simply Burn The Debt

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe

For economic illiterates, socialists and social-state engineers, the world consists of one fundamental problem: Where does the credit come from that is supposed to turn the visions of central planners into a new reality? Once that question has been answered and the shaky financing is in place, the work can begin.

Ideally, socialists operate in a zero-interest-rate world in which even the most nonsensical projects, from the nuclear phase-out to the construction of wind turbines in forests, debt-financed arms deliveries to the Donbas, or even billion-dollar subsidies for the NGO industry, can be financed.

It is magical: The costs of this artificial credit, this nonsensical government demand, which ultimately has to be paid for through inflation and higher taxes, are concealed behind massive state propaganda and a delayed fiscal response. Cause and effect of government demand are thus separated from one another. Citizens find it difficult to understand why their economy is no longer growing while the state apparatus, meanwhile, is assuming Kafkaesque features.

In an interview with Les Nouveaux Médias, French socialist Jean-Luc Mélenchon revealed his political secret for overcoming the debt crisis. His recipe is socialist, simple and one-dimensional. The French government should simply continue piling up debt, without any controls whatsoever. The European Central Bank could then serve as a kind of bond landfill and purchase surplus securities from the market once saturation has been reached.

This is followed by the unsubtle and predictable trick: The bonds thus neutralized could simply be burned on the balance sheet. They would virtually disappear from the memory of politicians, the public and the bond market. The debt ratio falls as well – the perfect digital money printer, a socialist paradise of unlimited possibilities.

Why has nobody thought of this before? Because the fact is: Which politician has any interest in public controversy and in recognizing that our world does not have unlimited resources, that a genuine problem of distribution exists? The credit pump could solve all problems in this simple world. Nobody would have to give anything up; prosperity would simply be printed into existence. That is how simple it is.

But haven’t we already reached this state long ago? In essence, the European Central Bank has been pursuing precisely such an infantile policy of illusion since the great sovereign debt crisis of a decade and a half ago. And now, once again, the new Transmission Protection Instrument (TPI) stands ready as a vehicle that, if necessary, is supposed to allow bond purchases without a pre-defined quantitative ceiling. Should the bond market give the thumbs-down to the mountain of debt accumulated by Europe’s club of debtors, the deficits will be closed with the credit pump.

Central-bank policy always creates the impression of extreme complexity and absolute control over market events. Bond markets are quantitatively deep, particularly at the so-called long end, the longer maturities of government bonds. It is by no means the case that a central bank could control this market even remotely. Its power unfolds at the short end, which is consequently where market manipulation is concentrated.

Mélenchon then presents his second brilliant idea: common bonds issued by the European Commission and likewise stabilized by the European Central Bank within a specific interest-rate corridor. Germany’s creditworthiness, still the anchor of the EU’s entire debt system, could also have a beneficial effect on interest rates in France, which is over-indebted at around 120 percent.

Mélenchon reveals staggering economic incompetence in an interview. Here is another sample:

Ultimately, according to his conception, this amounts to a triangular transaction: France participates in the Eurosystem through the Banque de France and is therefore indirectly involved in the European Central Bank. If the ECB purchases French government bonds, Mélenchon argues, this amounts to a kind of purchase of its own debt. France would ultimately owe itself credit and could therefore cancel these liabilities itself, provided the bonds were first parked at the ECB.

Only socialists or statists can devise such economic nonsense: borrowing without limits, then simply wiping the mountain of debt out of existence and leaving the people to deal with the inflation created in the process. This is a catastrophic breach of trust and the end of any civilized policy of government.

And consider what kind of policies are being implemented with the state credit pump: from financing the conflict in Ukraine and climate policy to the never-ending mass migration into the welfare state, which, like the pension system, must also be kept liquid with ever-increasing amounts of borrowed money.

Credit as a great political illusion. Credit that relieves the growing pressure for reform from narrow political shoulders in order to stabilize a system that has long since exceeded its economic limits.

Mélenchon is looking at new borrowing of 5.7 percent this year and knows exactly what is happening: The political stalemate in Paris prevents any form of fiscal consolidation.

The political camps are marching hand in hand toward sovereign bankruptcy. And German politics, too, apparently knows what is coming: Eurobonds, a consolidation of debt under the umbrella of the European Commission.

The first major test run: Next Generation EU, the €750 billion common-bond project that Brussels placed on the market during the COVID lockdowns – with German liability and ECB liquidity support, primarily to finance the gigantic deficits of Italy and Spain.

Common debt, known as Eurobonds, will be the inevitable next step in European integration. There can be little doubt about that. The construction of a European military sector alone will consume enormous amounts of resources, just as we have seen with the green command economy. This process is forcing German policymakers to waste seven percent of GDP on subsidies. The state is crowding out the private sector, while its bureaucracy consumes an ever-larger share of the slowly shrinking economic pie year after year: As a result, unemployment rises while private-sector investment is crowded out. The state has no other way to cope than through massive tax increases.

We are watching a financial crash in slow motion. Its final chapter will bring us the usual bailout policies, capital controls and financial repression. Thankfully, Mélenchon has given us some insight into the political mind games – and they are deeply alarming.

* * * 

About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a German graduate economist, has worked for over 25 years, he has worked as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.

Tyler Durden Wed, 08/19/2026 - 05:00