Zero Rss

Supreme Court Again Rejects Missouri Congressional Map Backed By Republicans

The Supreme Court on Friday refused to let Missouri Republicans run November's House races on the 2025 map that would have given them a 7-1 edge in the state's delegation, leaving in place the 2022 lines, which split the eight seats 6-2.

The Supreme Court in Washington on Sept. 14, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

The court's unsigned, five-page opinion in People Not Politicians v. Onder drew no dissents. "In short, as a matter of state law, the 2022 map - not the 2025 map - must be used in the 2026 congressional election," the justices wrote.

The fight has run through three courts in a month. Missouri's Aug. 4 primaries, run by Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, were held on the 2025 lines. On Sept. 3, the Missouri Supreme Court unanimously ordered the 2022 map for November, and county clerks began mailing military and overseas ballots on it. On Sept. 21, an Eighth Circuit panel ordered the 2025 map restored, ruling that holding the general election on different districts than the primary would violate the Constitution. People Not Politicians, the group opposing the 2025 map and seeking a referendum on it, asked the justices to step in the next night.

As The Epoch Times notes further,

In the high court's new opinion, the justices summed up the legal theory argued by the federal plaintiffs - Rep. Bob Onder (R-Mo.), Republican congressional nominee Rick Brattin, and two Republican voters.

Their argument was that three parts of the U.S. Constitution - Article I, Section 2, which establishes the fundamental rules governing the U.S. House of Representatives, the Elections Clause, and the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment - combine to forbid Missouri from using different congressional maps in the primary and general elections.

The justices did not reject Onder's constitutional theory. Instead, they said they did not have to rule on it.

"On the merits, the Court's precedents have not previously stated that Article I, Section 2 requires a state to use the primary election map in a general election, and given that the equities heavily favor staying this late-breaking intervention, it suffices that the merits are not entirely clearcut."

In other words, the justices did not hold that using different maps in the primary and general elections is constitutional. They held that the claim was too unsettled - and the election too far along - to justify an injunction.

The justices then turned to the Purcell principle, the doctrine that federal courts should not change a state's election rules close to an election. The justices said the principle "applies with even greater force here" because the election "is not merely upcoming; it has already started."

Local election officials told the courts it was "practically impossible to revert" to the 2025 map. "At this late date, ordering reversion to the 2025 map in the midst of an ongoing election would usher in electoral chaos. Purcell protects against such disorder."

The Eighth Circuit argued the opposite: that Purcell favored the 2025 map because that was the map used in the August primary, and that the Missouri Supreme Court's Sept. 3 ruling constituted the last-minute disruption.

The justices said that federal courts' interpretation of Purcell was incorrect because Purcell constrains federal courts, not states.

"Even though federal courts should not impose changes close to an election, States are free to decide for themselves whether last-minute changes to an election are in their best interests," the justices said, quoting Allen v. Milligan (2023).

The Missouri Supreme Court, the justices added, was not the source of the late change. In opinions issued in May 2026 - months before the primaries - the state high court had already said the 2025 map would not take effect unless voters approved it in a referendum, as long as the petition calling for it was legally sufficient.

Hoskins "was well aware that conducting the August primary election with the 2025 map carried significant risks," the justices said.

"The Secretary nonetheless chose to proceed with the 2025 map for the primary."

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2026 - 16:55

Almost Half Of Americans Now Hold Positive Views Of Socialism

Authored by Jonathan Turley via JonathanTurley.org,

Karl Marx believed that "Democracy is the road to socialism." Socialists seem to have found a generation of dupes to buy their ahistorical, fanciful pitch. A new poll shows 43% now have a positive view of socialism. An astonishing 65% of Democrats have a positive view. Socialism is now the rage on the left.

Like clothing styles, if you wait long enough, socialism tends to come back into style with generations with no memory of past failures. However, it is an astonishing trend in one of the most prosperous nations on Earth that outlasted a history cluttered with the broken failures of socialist and communist systems.

A new slick packaging of socialism has emerged with leaders such as Zohran Mamdani offering to teach people of the "warmth of collectivism." The Democratic Socialists of America are enticing voters with narratives like "Imagine the end of capitalism." Those words promise voters that there is a brave new world without landlords, debt, mandatory work hours, and "food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation... are common goods and utilities."

What is incredible is that many are buying this pitch.

It is also ironic that this is happening not just on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence but also on the 250th anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

As I write in Rage and the Republic:

"While he never visited the United States, his theories seemed quintessentially American to many of his generation. For a revolution that was triggered by tariffs and fueled by events like the Boston Tea Party, Smith's general principles read like an economic version of Common Sense. It was a type of declaration of independence not just from the British policy of mercantilism (emphasizing British exports over imports) but from economic controls over individual productivity and self-determination....

In summary, Smith was first and foremost viewed as a political theorist, and his economic theories were closely tied to his views on the natural liberties of humanity. He saw capitalism as a liberating system for individuals to allow them the wealth and resources to pursue their own chosen paths. Conversely, he saw government controls and subsidies as forms of control and potentially forms of suppression of the human will. If people are to be truly free, they must have the resources to pursue that freedom. The government dole can become a type of servitude or at least a subterfuge for citizens. If they are dependent on the government, they are never truly free."

The book compares many of these proposals to identical policies of the Jacobin movement in the French Revolution. Both the American and French revolutions arose during the same period, but one became the world's oldest democracy while the other became the blood-soaked "The Reign of Terror."

Notably, the Jacobins pushed for the same unicameral system that the socialists are now advocating as well as attacks on the wealthy.

The DSA is the direct descendant of the Jacobins in seeking to tear down moderating institutions and replace the president and justices with democratically elected figures by a Congress composed only of the House of Representatives.

As with the original Jacobins, those demanding these changes are not the working class but professors, pundits and young college-educated voters.

Pushing this analogy to a more menacing level, another poll shows that roughly 60 percent of Democrats now would support a military coup to remove President Donald Trump.

The return of socialism is like the reappearance of low-rise jeans. You are left mystified by anyone who believes that this is a worthy theory to emulate after consistent and catastrophic failures. Long forgotten is the disaster of the socialist government of François Mitterrand in France.

Most recently, Prime Minister Andy Burnham condemned the privatization policies of Margaret Thatcher: "The country surrendered control of the essentials - housing, water, energy, transport - and left people exposed to higher costs." What he does not mention is that she followed the collapse of socialist policies under Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan in 1977-78 during the so-called "winter of discontent," which I also discuss in the book.

Perhaps Marx was right after all: "History repeats itself, first as a tragedy, second as a farce."

Jonathan Turley is the best-selling author of "Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution."

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2026 - 16:20

Xi Will Return And Put His Foot On The Pedal To Develop Better Chips, Better Models, And The Energy To Drive That Compute

We came into this week with a list of things to think about with the Fed Behind Us, and a SITREP focusing on the Houthis vs Saudi Arabia. We also kicked off the week with a preview on CNBC. Our “official scoring” was stocks did well, Bessent faced setbacks on bonds and the yen, and for the world, well, not as much clarity as we could have hoped for. I was going to go with i instead of ? but √−1 seemed overly complex vs ? even if it is more reflective of the current complex state of the world!

We weighed in on some possibilities in Let’s Make a Deal: NYC Style. We started off with a bang, with the Greenland deal and a pre-summit trade “status quo” extension, but finished the week with a lot of wasted opportunities. The confusing messaging with Ukraine and Russia (confusing on everything except a desire for diesel prices to go lower). The contradictory messaging with Iran: public threats, closed door meetings allegedly leading to a deal, the terms of which seemed to be rejected by the President on Friday after the close. The summit had a lot of pageantry, some amazing moments, some awkward moments, but little seemed to come out of it in terms of concrete proposals.

We ended the week on Bloomberg TV (click play, as we kick off Friday’s show) where we get to review what happened and preview what’s next. I’m sure I got some of the military details incorrect, but I lay out a case (explained more thoroughly in last weekend’s report), why the admin might be pushing to frame the midterms as a re-launching point, rather than an artificial constraint on U.S. activities (fortunately, Friday’s messaging from the admin is consistent with that view). So far, the admin has not proceeded with a diesel export ban, which I think would backfire in a relatively short period of time.

If you haven’t heard Academy’s latest Around the World Podcast (Academy Podcasts, iTunes, and you can also find on Spotify) I highly recommend it. We cover:

• Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Houthis
• Cuba
• Russia/Ukraine War
• Greenland Deal
• The Trump / Xi Summit
• Macro Impacts

Recently retired Air Force General Kruse joins Spider, Maria, Bret, and me to run through the variety of topics, with some pretty interesting takes.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Intelligence

Who knew that was a word that not only appears in the Oxford English Dictionary, but also in spell check?

According to a Truth Social post, the President and Xi agreed to rename Artificial Intelligence as Super Intelligence. As you might guess, the number of memes is growing exponentially (with the aid of AI). My favorites so far are the Terminator ones where AI Terminator is BAD, Super Intelligent Terminator is GOOD. Never one to doubt the power of marketing, but this name change doesn’t seem likely to address the questions, domestically, internationally, and geopolitically around the development and deployment of AI.

Trump: "A big day with President Xi of China. Super Intelligence (SI) will be a big topic of discussion, but I want to leave it exactly where it is." pic.twitter.com/QYEWYMQlLF

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 24, 2026

But if we are going to go for “super,” why not supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? You’ll always sound precocious. (I am scared of what small percentage of readers will recognize the song, but for those who do, it isn’t a bad song to have stuck in your head, getting ready for another long week).

But seriously, by the time you are done saying Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Intelligence, you will have forgotten what you are arguing about!

Stocks did quite well this week, with the Nasdaq up 2% and the SOXX index up 6.3% (though, depending on the index you track, most of the gains came on Monday’s rip-roaring rally!). Also, the Russell 2000 was down on the week.

As many have pointed out, the lack of breadth remains an issue. We continue to have a “compute” economy, which funnels into semiconductors (a sector with a disproportionate number of large sector and single stock leveraged ETFs).

ZeroHedge has been focused on this more than most and pointed out on Friday that we had 9 days in a row of more 52 week lows in the S&P 500 than 52 week highs. 

The market has given up: there is no more breadth - 9th day in a row of more 52 week lows than highs pic.twitter.com/fUeIqlXfZ9

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 25, 2026

The “mechanical” nature where $1 of new money triggers activity in ETFs (and leveraged ETFs), along with other fears around “faux liquidity” (a market driven by algos and machines, that is incredibly liquid for small moves, but prone to gaps on larger moves), are growing concerns for me. Trying to dig deeper into this, but some of the experts in the area are arguing (persuasively to me) that depending on the sector, the market impact of that $1 in new money can create much larger market cap changes (hence the fixation on leveraged ETFs in particular).

Short term, markets are swinging around with oil, but longer term, it is the compute build and spend that will drive markets and the economy.

A lot of positive vibes, but not sure what was really accomplished or not this week on the AI front, especially with China. Much Ado About Nothing is the likely case there, as I expect whatever was said, Xi will return home and put his foot on the gas to develop better chips, better models (using distillation if need be), and I would say the energy to drive that compute, but on that front, they seem to be ahead of the U.S. where braggawatts remains a concern.

At its most simple, since last year in Geneva, if not before then, I think the simplest way to frame every meeting with China is that after they go back to their respective countries, each side has one specific agenda:

• The U.S. must continue to maintain or increase its lead in compute, while working on being less dependent on China in sectors where we need to be truly resilient (ProSec). Processing, refining, and smelting rare earths, critical minerals, and even basic commodities is a part of that, but it goes far beyond those industries (more on this later).
• China needs to grow its compute and chip industry (in terms of size and quality) faster than the U.S. can catch up on things that the U.S. is currently over-reliant on China for.

Both sides have improved their hands (or cards) since the Geneva meetings, but my nagging concern is that China is more fixated on its goal and better organized in terms of achieving it, hence my repeated concerns for markets AND National Security, on Cheap Chinese Compute.

The House Doesn’t Always Win

10-year Treasury yields jumped to 5.2% this week. A 20 bp move. The part of the move that seemed to be triggered by S&P PMI data seemed particularly unusual (it is rarely such a market moving event).

Bessent of I am the House Now and 6 Billion Dollar Man fame, is not getting his way on bond yields, nor on the yen.

On bond yields, the data isn’t helping him. The war isn’t helping him. At the same time, the supply (just not in size but in average maturity) from the corporate market isn’t helping him. Neither are bond yields that are higher globally than they have been in a long time. Treasuries just aren’t that exciting, which is one of the messages the 5-year bond auction seemed to send.

The buybacks left a lot to be desired. The Treasury continues to only help buy back some illiquid bonds, even then only at yields in the context of the market.

Bessent Plays Hardball With "Bloomberg Bros": Yields Spike As Treasury Accepts Just 68% Of Maximum Buyback Offers https://t.co/c4WFUI7Cej

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 24, 2026

Some “don’t bet against the Fed (or Treasury)” positioning was likely wiped out this week on that move, meaning it should be more difficult to push yields higher. But to get yields much lower, we need peace in either Russia/Ukraine or the Middle East (which we didn’t seem to get) or something akin to the “whatever it takes” moment Draghi unleashed on the Euro.

The yen move hasn’t been quite as bad as the move in yields, and the yen diligently responded to more chatter about intervention (and maybe some actual intervention), but look for a weaker yen to remain a talking point, for both the admin and markets. To some degree I’m not sure why it is so front and center, especially as I’m not a big believer in the yen carry trade, but it is, and markets need fewer rather than more distractions.

The World

I’ll admit, I was kind of optimistic about the UN convening in New York City with so many opportunities to address so many potential issues. NYC is where Trump is really in his element.

My main takeaway from this week is that I’m convinced that Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, was on the cusp of saying ProSec™ during his interview with Annmarie Hordern on Thursday.

He wasn’t comfortable talking about trade (that was for the politicians), but he had no problem lamenting the lack of refining capacity in Europe.

Rather than rehashing our thoughts on this subject, we can just direct you to our longer pieces:

ProSec 2026 (our start of the year kick-off piece).

Is ProSec The New ESG? What sounded preposterous even in the U.S. when we first started touting this concept seems to be turning into the norm. Look at investment committees. Look at recent ETF launches. Look at Canada and Australia, who seem to be contorting themselves to this reality. And finally, while Europe isn’t quite there, it seems a growing part of the population, including leaders like Rutte, is starting to face that reality that “true” sustainability requires real world resiliency.

Our Mid-Year ProSec Update and first real attempt to introduce the concept of Vertically Integrated Nations.

While investing in ProSec has been mixed outside of the compute/semiconductor/energy side of the concept (including the companies that make the equipment to build out compute), I think it is time to

add to some of the ProSec sectors that have lagged (nuclear for one, rare earths and critical minerals as another) and also to start moving allocations more aggressively into Global ProSec!

Bottom Line

Difficult to be bearish rates after the big moves. Even on oil and diesel and the wars, the “surprise” would seem to be a solution rather than ongoing problems (though by no means have markets priced in bad cases, let alone worst cases, for global energy distillate supplies). Let’s call rates “neutral” here, maybe playing for a bounce in prices (lower yields).

TLT (long-dated Treasury ETF) dropped 2.4% on the week, while LQD (long-dated IG) dropped only 1.4%. Some of that is linked to a shorter duration, but I continue to want to combine my credit risk with my duration risk and own longer-dated corporate bonds, with an emphasis on the compute build bonds (which make up a large part of the end of the curve anyways). Any slowdown in compute build (which was off the table this week) will be incredibly good for all-in compute bond yields.

Energy, energy, and more energy. While rare earths and critical minerals (especially the processed and refined versions) are important, they don’t resonate with the public the way higher energy prices do (or god forbid, actual shortages). What the public wants, the public often gets, so continue to be skewed heavily to energy and energy production in all forms (electricity, LNG, diesel, etc. are at the top of your investing list). Yes, the sector will sell off on any resolution of today’s oil price problems, so be careful there (plenty of profits to be taken already), but look to reload on any sell-off. If Canada and Australia can start addressing their self-inflicted energy wounds, and Europe can at least admit they might have a problem, there is a lot more opportunity in this space!

Good luck and I cannot help but feel a bit disappointed that this week’s opportunity in the U.S. didn’t seem to create much real momentum that markets or the economy could latch on to. On the other hand, it is difficult not to smile with supercalifragilisticexpialidocious running through your head on repeat. If you haven’t heard it, look up the word and Mary Poppins and give it a shot; it can’t hurt!

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2026 - 15:55

Iran 'Fully Prepared' To Resume War, We Don't Trust Trump: Iran FM

The two big weekend Iran war developments are 1) President Trump has rejected Tehran's seven day ceasefire roadmap proposal, and reportedly plans to resume bombing Iran - likely after the November midterm elections; 2) the Iranian government announced Sunday its forces have struck 19 ships in the Strait of Hormuz over the past two nights, per Fars News Agency.

The Fars report indicated the Iranians hit 12 vessels Friday night and 7 more Saturday - though Western sources have been slow to report or confirm this, and the Pentagon has not initially commented.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has meanwhile once again emphasized in the wake of Trump's rejection of the latest proposal that on the one hand Tehran stands 'ready' for renewed fighting and won't back down - and on the other has not yet abandoned diplomacy.

JPost/Getty Images

"We are fully prepared for the war to be resumed. We stand firm in the face of any new aggression, even if it comes to a doomsday war," Araghchi told NBC News Meet the Press on Sunday.

He was specifically asked about the Friday Wall Street Journal report which strongly suggested Trump is ready to resume bombing the Islamic Republic after the midterms.

But Araghchi offered the key caveat and opening: "At the same time, we stand ready for diplomacy. It is up to President Trump to choose," he said.

The top Iranian diplomat further make clear his country is not backing off its initial conditions to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz:

Our proposal is very clear. We are ready to open the strait if certain things are done by the U.S. And these certain things are not new, have not come from the space. These are our rights, that we want to be respected. First of all, we want to end this war of aggression. They started this war eight months ago with the hope that in two, three days, you know, they can win the war. It's now eight months. And we want it to be ended. We want our money, our assets, which are illegally frozen, to be released. We want, you know, to be able to sell our oil. So we want certain things that the U.S. has already committed itself to in the previous, you know, deals.

The main conditions can be summarized as the end of the war on all fronts, the release of frozen assets and the end of the naval blockade.

The NBC show host tried to hold Araghchi down on Iran's insistence that its funds be unfrozen and returned - which is proving a tall ask from a White House which has unleashed its 'Economic D-Day' campaign seeking to totally isolate Iran.

The interview transcript is quite illustrative of the main impasse:

KRISTEN WELKER: But Mr. Foreign Minister, the ambassador's point was the United States is not going to unfreeze assets on the front end. It's not going to lift sanctions on the front end. Is it possible to negotiate a new peace plan at this juncture? Or has diplomacy failed?

FOREIGN MINISTER ABBAS ARAGHCHI: Well, why aren't they ready to release our money? It is our own money. It is not, you know, any other's money.

KRISTEN WELKER: Because they want to see some actionable items from Iran, like opening the Strait of Hormuz, before they do that. Has diplomacy failed, Mr. Foreign Minister?

FOREIGN MINISTER ABBAS ARAGHCHI: Well, there is always hope for diplomacy. But to be honest with you, we have no reason to come back to diplomacy and engage with this administration once again, because of how they've behaved in the past two years. You know, in 2025 they offered negotiations...

And so clearly the situation is back to square one in terms of the stalemate that's been on from the beginning, and has persisted for seven months, as Washington finds itself in yet another quagmire in the Middle East.

🔺 Iran says it struck 19 ships in the Strait of Hormuz over the past two nights, Fars News Agency reported Sunday, after Kpler reported over 20 million barrels of crude and products exiting the US blockade line as 7-day average.

Iranian forces hit 12 vessels Friday night and 7… https://t.co/UnVeYf99k0 pic.twitter.com/LP8tZknZqo

— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) September 27, 2026

Regional analyst and editor of Amwaj.media, Mohammad Ali Shabani, concludes of weekend events: "The next phase of the war will likely revolve around destroying Iran's economic infrastructure. The method is collective immiseration until desperate Iranians with nothing to lose will do the regime change."

This of course sets the US on a trajectory of yet another 'forever war' in the region. Trump, it seems, may also opt for bombing in search of a 'better deal' - though this will simultaneously ensure a more hardline resistance will be entrenched in decision-making centers in Tehran.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2026 - 15:45

Tech CEO Found Guilty In $2 Million Ponzi Scheme

Authored by Naveen Athrappully via The Epoch Times,

Michelle Bisnoff, the CEO of wearable tech company Esos Rings Inc., was convicted of running a nearly $2 million Ponzi scheme.

Michelle Bisnoff

Bisnoff tricked investors into believing she owned patents for "smart rings" payment technology that rightfully belonged to her former employer, according to a statement by the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Friday. Of the $2 million scammed from investors, the victims lost roughly $1.4 million.

Bisnoff, 59, from Boca Raton, Florida, was hired by United Kingdom-based company McLear Ltd. to develop a market in the United States for its near-field communication wearable payment rings, which embedded credit card information. McLear received a patent for this "smart ring" technology in 2016.

In addition, Bisnoff fraudulently obtained $150,000 in COVID-19 pandemic business relief loans. Instead of using funds for business expenses as initially claimed, Bisnoff used some of the money to pay for personal expenses.

In 2017, Bisnoff formed Esos, and as part of bringing investors into the company, she falsely represented that Esos owned patents for its smart rings, which were actually patents owned by McLear, according to an August 2024 complaint filed in the case.

According to the DOJ, Bisnoff deceived investors, saying that Esos was profitable, had made use of investor money for expanding manufacturing capabilities and inventory for meeting demand from major retailers like Target and Walmart, and received large infusions of capital from tech companies such as Apple and Roc Nation.

"She also falsely claimed to be on the cusp of a licensing arrangement with Middle Earth Enterprises (MEE), which controls The Lord of the Rings brand," the DOJ said.

However, Esos had no agreements with Target; sold only six smart rings on Walmart.com, out of which three were returned; generated little revenue; did not finalize any licensing agreement with MEE; and did not secure investment from Roc Nation or Apple, the department said.

Bisnoff was found by the jury on Thursday to be guilty on various counts of wire fraud, securities fraud, money laundering, and identity theft. Her sentencing hearing is scheduled for January.

According to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), there are several red flags that help identify a Ponzi scheme. One is the promise of high returns with little to no risk. People should be suspicious of any investment opportunity claiming to generate guaranteed returns.

On Sept. 15, the House passed the Tax Relief for Fraud Victims Act. Under current law, the federal government can tax victims of financial fraud on the money that is stolen from them, according to a Sept. 16 post on X by Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio). This bill seeks to rectify this issue, said Miller, who introduced the bill.

Specifically, the bill allows taxpayers to elect to claim a tax deduction for losses that occur due to fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation.

"Victims of financial fraud should not face an additional tax burden after already suffering significant financial losses," Dale Brown, the CEO of the Financial Services Institute, said in a statement on Sept. 16, urging the Senate to take up the bill.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2026 - 14:00

The DOE Demands Faster Uranium Enrichment Buildout. Who's Answering The Call?

DOE officials told Reuters they are pressing Centrus Energy, General Matter, and France's Orano to accelerate their new build programs.

The start of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2022 sent prices soaring across the nuclear fuel chain, as the start of the war was also followed by the US implementing a ban on importing Russian enriched uranium.

The panic of fuel for the US commercial reactor fleet not showing up evaporated almost immediately, as waivers were granted to any and all importers (mostly Centrus and US reactor-owning utilities). But, those waivers are set to expire at the start of 2028, and DOE's Michael Goff says there are no plans to extend them.

To solve the enrichment capacity gap, Washington is doing what they do best: throw as much money as they can at the problem. Earlier this year, money was getting thrown around at almost $1 billion per handful.

“If we are going to have this nuclear renaissance, we are not going to be able to do it without fuel,” Deputy Energy Secretary James Danly said.

The government has started by awarding $900 million apiece for Centrus Energy, General Matter, and Orano. 

Centrus Energy traces its roots back to the Manhattan Project, when the US invented uranium enrichment technology to fuel the bombs that were dropped over Japan. With the last domestically owned enrichment facility being shutdown over 10 years ago, Centrus has since served as an enriched uranium broker, supplying reactor-owning utilities in the US and abroad with imports from Europe and Russia.

Orano is the state-backed uranium enrichment company from France. The company has been supplying the massive French fleet for decades and has previously tried to expand in the US but failed for lack of support in the post-Fukushima era. The company is now attempting a second run at a project in Tennessee to assist the US in replacing Russian imports.

Then, there’s General Matter. The secretive, Peter Thiel-backed startup led by former SpaceX engineer Scott Nolan.

The nuclear industry has been mostly devoid of any details on the uranium enrichment startup, with only traces of their business being seen in some of the prep work for a facility in Paducah, Kentucky, and discussions of operations in California, Utah, and Washington State.

Finally, though, it seems Politico found a way to squeeze some details out of the silent company.

Politico’s reporter Francisco Camacho notes a diversified team of outsiders and nuclear veterans, as well as some backstory and the plans ahead. He also brings particular attention on a couple of occasions to the barbed relationship between Centrus Energy and General Matter.

First, when Founders Funds' Scott Nolan was first looking for how to go about entering the enrichment industry. Camacho describes Nolan as looking to initially find an existing company he could invest in. Nolan reportedly concluded the centrifuge design used by Centrus was not commercially competitive.

Second is when Camacho shed some light on the details of discussions between the enrichment companies and the DOE when competing for the $900 million awards earlier this year.

“One person familiar with the DOE contracts said [General Matter] offered 355 metric tons of HALEU annually for the $900 million. With its $900 million, Centrus said it would initially deliver 12 metric tons annually and subsequently scale up.”

Equal taxpayer dollars for almost 30 times the annual capacity ambition is painfully difficult to ignore. The reporting doesn't explicitly state that the goal is 355 MTU annually right off the bat when the company anticipates starting in 2029. But, the difference, as printed, is significant.

Centrus also expects its first new capacity in 2029, while February guidance placed the full 12-ton annual rate after 2030. With the DOE posturing that no further extensions of the ban are going to be affected in 2028, it's understandable why Reuters is reporting the DOE’s desire for companies to start moving faster.

Centrus does deserve credit for being the only facility in the US licensed by the NRC to produce HALEU-level uranium. The company has also been producing the higher-enriched uranium for almost three years, giving them time to improve operations and centrifuge designs.

Centrus has tried to demonstrate some additional concrete offtake agreements with recent supply contracts being signed with advanced reactor development companies Radiant, X-energy, and Antares, with target deliveries by the end of this decade.

Details about General Matter were also revealed in the Politico article, as the company apparently also signed contracts with X-energy and Antares, as well as an unnamed utility.

Based on the numbers provided in Politico, only one of the enrichment companies is actually targeting enough supply capacity to make these deliveries happen in commercial quantities.

We previously highlighted Centrus's $560 million manufacturing expansion for good reason. The company holds preference with the US government over foreign-owned enrichers such as Centrus, Orano, and GLE. But, if Centrus wants to keep its position as the leader of American-owned and operated enrichment capacity, the build times need to drop dramatically and goals need to be raised significantly.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2026 - 13:25

The Easy Money Fairy Tale Is About To End...Violently

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

For the better part of the last couple years, I have wondered whether financial markets are permanently broken. Not simply overvalued or temporarily irrational, but actually broken at the mechanical level and permanently distorted. I’ve written about it.

The basic process that is supposed to make capitalism work goes like this. Capital flows toward good ole’ fashioned productive uses (like the George Foreman Grill™) and away from flashy hot-shit stupid ones (like the Apple Vision Pro). Good businesses eventually outperform bad ones. Fraud eventually gets exposed. Making money is the point of a business. Price is a rationing mechanism and is determined by free markets. This system appears to have been dead for the last 10 years, at least.

Nowadays, we function under a derivative of capitalism (hereinafter referred to as “crony capitalism snorting bath salts, operating under policies so disorganized they’d make a Jackson Pollock painting look like the blueprints for a nuclear reactor”) where trillions of dollars can be created overnight, governments and central banks focus obsessively on a handful of key numbers, and preserving the nominal value of stocks and other financial assets has become the priority.

Everything else in the economy is then forced to adjust accordingly, and if you don’t like it, or it causes the price of your Whopper Jr.™ to go to $57, f*ck you…that’s just how money works nowadays.

We’ve spent most of the last 20 years systematically removing consequences from the financial system. Rates went to zero and stayed there for years. The Fed expanded its balance sheet by trillions. Every major crisis was met with an intervention, liquidity facility, bailout or assurance that policymakers stood ready to keep the machine running. Capital was forced to become extraordinarily cheap, and investors eventually became conditioned to believe it would remain that way. We laughed off our country’s credit downgrades. Economists and analysts turned into total pussies and cowards, crumbling into bits every time the market sold off 5%. Financial projections have turned into Hunter Thompson-esque 3AM drug induced astral projections.

And we turned into the real life version of Idiocracy for markets.

When money costs almost nothing, the hurdle rate for stupidity also approaches nothing. Businesses that never should have existed could raise billions of dollars. Venture capitalists could fund companies whose principal innovation was taking an existing business, attaching an app to it and losing money faster. Private equity could lever mediocre companies into supposedly brilliant investments. Private credit could convince investors that illiquid loans were somehow less volatile because nobody bothered marking them every afternoon.

SPACs could raise billions before investors even knew what they were buying. Crypto tokens created out of thin air could acquire enormous valuations. Meme stocks became religions. Companies substituted adjusted EBITDA for profits, stock based compensation for salaries and “community” for customers. Entire industries emerged whose economic purpose sometimes appeared to consist primarily of raising money from the previous industry.

None of this ever had to end because the one thing that normally kills financial stupidity, the cost of capital, had been put into such a deep coma it made Mitch McConnell look like Jackie Chan in Rush Hour 2.

Jim Chanos, who shares my view that the AI buildout may have overshot the mark, has called this period a “golden age of fraud,” and I think there is an important connection between that description and the monetary environment that produced it.

Cheap money does not merely inflate asset prices. It extends the expiration date on bullshit.

A company burning $500 million a year does not necessarily have to confront reality if somebody will hand it another $2 billion. A commercial property does not need to be marked down if its owner can refinance it. A private equity sponsor does not have to admit an acquisition was terrible if it can amend, extend, refinance and wait. A venture fund does not need real price discovery if the next financing round can establish a higher valuation. A struggling public company can survive for an astonishing amount of time if equity investors remain willing to finance it.

The fundamental question has gradually changed from “Does this business work?” to “Can we keep financing it?” Those are completely different questions, and for an extraordinary period of time the answer to the second one was yes.

That environment also allowed narrative to become a substitute for analysis. Investors learned that understanding the story could be more profitable than understanding the financial statements. It’s what powers IPOs for unprofitable companies with grandiose visions at 100x sales. TAM became more important than margins. Growth became more important than returns on capital. Adjusted numbers became more important than GAAP numbers. Momentum became more important than valuation.

The market increasingly rewarded understanding what everybody else was going to believe next instead of determining what an asset was actually worth. Traditional fundamental investors either adapted or got carried out. You could identify deteriorating economics, ridiculous accounting, absurd multiples and terrible capital allocation, then watch the stock triple because management said “AI” on an earnings call.

And now we may be approaching the point where the environment starts adapting back. (Read: Bonds Just Killed The Easy Money Era For Good)

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If the post 2008 assumption of structurally cheap money is actually dying, then I think markets are about to rediscover something they have not had to consistently deal with in decades: truth.

The reason is simple. Higher rates restore consequences. When investors can earn meaningful returns in Treasury securities and other relatively safe assets, they no longer need to finance every revolutionary dog walking blockchain SaaS platform that comes along. Junk bonds have to offer genuinely attractive yields. Private credit has to compete against liquid alternatives. Venture investments have to offer enough potential return to compensate for years of illiquidity and enormous failure rates.

Suddenly, the hurdle rate exists again.

Companies burning cash discover that capital has a price. Companies dependent on refinancing discover that lenders have alternatives. Private equity firms discover that an acquisition financed with cheap debt looks considerably less brilliant when that debt has to be refinanced at twice the rate. Commercial real estate owners discover that capitalization rates matter. Governments discover that deficits carry interest expense. Investors discover that earnings expected fifteen years from now are worth substantially less when the discount rate is no longer zero.

Fraud becomes harder…because fraud loves liquidity. It needs it for sustenance. Liquidity buys time, and a questionable business can survive as long as somebody keeps funding it. Once capital becomes scarce, the runway shortens and the questions become considerably less philosophical. Where is the cash? Who owes whom? What is the collateral actually worth? Can you refinance this? Why does EBITDA never turn into free cash flow? Why are you issuing stock every quarter? Why does every supposedly temporary adjustment show up again next year?

Why, exactly, does this multi-billion dollar company make no f*cking money?

If this really is the beginning of a structurally different monetary environment, the psychological adjustment is going to be enormous because almost an entire generation of investors has never experienced markets operating this way. Imagine telling someone who started trading in 2020 that a company can beat revenue estimates and still fall because it loses enormous amounts of money. Imagine telling a venture capitalist that the value of a company might eventually be determined by the cash it distributes to its owners rather than the valuation assigned by the next venture capitalist. (Read: This Next Market Crash Will Break Our Fragile Brains)

For years, every serious skeptic eventually ran into the same argument: look at the stock price. It’s what has fooled people into thinking Tesla is worth paying 350x ttm earnings for. It is, to the best of what I can tell, the entire premise of most of the crypto world. The price itself became the evidence.

If the stock went up, management was brilliant. If the valuation expanded, the business model was validated. If investors continued supplying capital, concerns about profitability could be dismissed as antiquated thinking from people who simply “didn’t get it.”

But price and truth are not the same thing. They just looked similar while money was nearly free.

And we may currently be witnessing the final spectacular expression of that era. Speculative narratives remain enormous, apparent financial engineering is everywhere, private markets have exploded in size and investors have spent so long being rewarded for ignoring valuation that valuation itself can sometimes feel like an obsolete concept. Add a more hands off regulatory environment to the mix and you have about as permissive a backdrop for financial excess as I can remember.

Higher rates will not make markets perfectly rational either. Markets have been doing stupid things for hundreds of years and will presumably continue doing stupid things long after all of us are dead. But the environment in which stupidity operates matters enormously. Cheap capital subsidizes mistakes. Expensive capital exposes them.

If rates remain structurally higher, investors may rediscover a collection of supposedly obsolete concepts: balance sheets, interest coverage, free cash flow, return on invested capital, dilution, debt maturities, liquidation values, accounting quality and, God forbid, valuation.

Mark the Q-man’s words: there are tons of businesses, funds, loans and assets whose health depends on nobody forcing price discovery. There are probably losses buried throughout private markets that have not become losses yet simply because nobody has been required to transact.

And when those losses finally have to be recognized, it could be incredibly ugly. But that is not a bug in capitalism. That is the mechanism. Creative destruction requires destruction. Price discovery requires prices to occasionally discover something unpleasant. Capital allocation requires bad allocators to eventually lose access to capital. Markets cannot distinguish good businesses from bad businesses if everybody gets unlimited time and unlimited financing.

For twenty years, we increasingly tried to engineer those consequences out of the system. Chanos called what emerged the golden age of fraud. Einhorn eventually concluded that markets were fundamentally broken. Countless investors who continued trying to apply common sense watched narrative repeatedly bulldoze arithmetic.

Maybe markets were not permanently broken. Maybe money was simply too cheap for truth to matter.

If the cost of capital is finally normalizing for good, we are going to find out. After two decades of narratives, adjusted earnings, financial engineering, extend and pretend financing, imaginary valuations, unprofitable bullshit and seemingly endless supplies of money, we may finally get to see what is actually standing behind the curtain.

I suspect some of it is going to be horrifying. But after spending two decades drowning in excess, hubris, decadence and Dan Ives’ outfits, at least it will be real.

--

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. 

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2026 - 12:50

FDA Commissioner Nominee Says Every Vaccine On US Market Is Safe, Effective

The doctor nominated by President Trump to lead the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) told senators this week that vaccines available in the United States are safe and effective.

Dr. Heidi Overton, the nominee, said that if confirmed, she could use her scientific training and clinical background to describe to the American public what is currently known about products that fall under Food and Drug Administration oversight.

"And what is currently known is that the vaccines that have been approved by the FDA meet the standards for safety and efficacy," she said.

Overton, 37, also endorsed the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine, saying it is not lethal and that it is the best tool in the public health response to measles outbreaks that are ongoing in the United States.

She said that mifepristone, an abortion pill, was safe and effective because it had been approved by the FDA. Overton wrote in a 2023 article that chemical abortion through products such as mifepristone was "dangerous to women," drawing criticism from Democrats in the Senate.

As Zachary Stieber reports further for The Epoch Times, Overton would take the helm of an agency that has been under acting leadership since Dr. Marty Makary stepped down in May.

While signing an executive order in August that encouraged breaking up the measles combination vaccine, Trump told reporters that the vaccine is possibly "quite lethal" and that separate shots for measles, mumps, and rubella appeared to be "not at all lethal but just very effective."

When asked after the signing, the White House declined to provide any citations for Trump's description of the vaccine.

Leaders in the Make America Healthy Again movement recently called for removing vaccines containing messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), an outspoken vaccine proponent, has been asking people whom Trump nominated to serve in high-level health positions about Trump's comments, as well as other questions about vaccines, during their confirmation hearings before the Senate Health Committee, the panel he chairs. Chris Klomp, selected to be the top deputy to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., recently voiced support for vaccines in response to Cassidy, as did Dr. Nicole Saphier, tabbed to become surgeon general.

Cassidy said on Sept. 24 that Kennedy, whom he voted for, made him guarantees but later backtracked on those promises, citing directives from the president.

Kennedy's department did not return a request for comment.

Cassidy asked Overton how she would handle it if she made guarantees and the president then directed her to go against them.

"I've had robust discussions with the president," said Overton, who was part of Trump's first administration.

"I would give him my best advice, and I would follow the statutory requirements for the role of FDA commissioner regarding individual product determinations for safety and efficacy, and that would be what would guide every decision if confirmed to this role."

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2026 - 12:15

Consumer Credit Stress: What The Data Really Shows

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

A viral stat claims credit card delinquencies just hit their worst level since 2008. However, the New York Fed’s own data shows the opposite, and the real consumer credit stress is hiding exactly where the headlines aren’t looking.

A number has been making the rounds all year, and it’s misleading. The claim: roughly 13% of credit card balances are 90 days or more past due, the worst since 2008. Here’s the twist. That number is real, and it comes straight from the New York Fed. It just doesn’t mean what the scary charts say it means.

Sorting the real signal from the viral one matters because one of them belongs in your portfolio decisions and the other belongs in the trash.

Where The Scary Number Comes From

Let’s start with the Q2 2026 Household Debt and Credit Report, released August 11. Total household debt actually fell $13 billion on the quarter, a rounding error of 0.1%, to $18.8 trillion. Credit card balances rose $21 billion to $1.26 trillion, up 1.7%. So far, nothing that looks like a crisis.

However, this is the point where you are hit with the delinquency rate that everyone screenshots. The share of card balances 90 days or more past due has climbed from 7.6% in late 2022 to 12.8%. That is a real figure from the Fed’s data, and it’s the source the viral posts were reaching for without knowing it. Here’s the problem with reading it as a crisis. The Fed published a companion piece the same day, and its own economists took the number apart.

Crucially, they draw a very clear distinction between a “stock” measure and a “flow” measure. The stock measure simply counts every delinquent dollar remaining on a credit report, including old charged-off debts that lenders keep reporting for years. The flow measure counts how much debt newly goes bad each quarter. The flow indicates how households are actually doing, and it has been roughly flat since 2024. It rose from 6.93% to 6.97% year over year. That’s not an acceleration. That’s noise.

The obvious question is: “Then why is the stock number climbing?”

The answer is that lenders now report charged-off debt to the bureaus far longer than they used to. From 2004 through 2012, only about 40% of charged-off balances were still reported a year later. By 2024, that figure had doubled to 80%. Strip those stale balances out, and the stock delinquency rate falls right back in line with the flow. As usual, when everyone agrees on something, something else is usually going on. In this case, the crowd agreed on a chart that the people who built it were quietly warning you not to trust. I’ve made the same point before about the gap between what the data says and what the tape feels like, in the consumer sentiment disconnect.

(The “stock” delinquency measure that went viral reads 12.8%, but it counts years of stale charged-off debt. The “flow” of new delinquencies, the honest read on current stress, sits at 6.97% and has been flat since 2024. Source: New York Fed, Q2 2026)

“When the question is ‘how are households doing right now?’ the flow delinquency rates provide a more accurate view of current consumer repayment behavior. By those measures, the pace of credit card delinquency is elevated but has been largely stable since 2024.” – Lee, Mangrum, Scally, Sinha and van der Klaauw, New York Fed Liberty Street Economics

The Consumer Credit Stress That’s Actually Real

Dismissing the meme doesn’t mean the consumer is fine. Parts of the consumer are cracking. The stress is REAL. It just isn’t spread evenly across the system, and the aggregate delinquency chart hides that. Dig below the surface, and you find a household sector splitting in two, with the top half spending comfortably and the bottom half running on fumes.

The savings data gives us the clearest read into what is actually happening. In July, the personal saving rate fell to 3.0% of disposable income, with total personal saving of $712.0 billion, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Put that in context. For most of the decade before the pandemic, households saved 7% to 8% of income. The rate spiked above 16% in 2020 when stimulus landed, and there was nowhere to spend it. It has bled lower ever since. A 3.0% print is near the lowest reading in 20 years.

Notably, a thin savings rate isn’t a crisis on its own. There are plenty of households that carry very little cash and never miss a payment. However, it does change the math on resilience. When the family car breaks down or a parent’s work hours get reduced, a family saving 8% of its income can absorb the hit. Conversely, a family that only saves 3% of its income reaches for a credit card more quickly. That’s the mechanism, and it’s why the delinquency increases we have seen are showing up first among subprime and lower-income borrowers, while prime credit performance has barely moved.

The Two-Speed Consumer, In One Table

The cleanest way to see the gap is to line up the viral claim against what the primary sources report. Almost every week, someone sends me a chart or a screenshot from somewhere, showing the consumer on the edge of collapse. The data, however, continues to tell a more specific story.

That split is the whole story, and it shows up in spending, too. The top 10% of earners now drive 49.2% of all consumer spending, the highest share since Moody’s began collecting data in 1989, up from about 36% three decades ago. Meanwhile, spending by households earning under $175,000 has barely grown in real terms since the pandemic. One consumer is fine. The other is the one filling up the subprime delinquency buckets.

The top decile drives 49.2% of all consumer spending, the highest share since 1989 and up from about 36% three decades ago. The bottom 80% has barely grown their spending in real terms. That’s the two-speed consumer in one picture.- Source: Moody’s Analytics, 2025

“Consumer credit stress is real. It’s just wearing a name tag that says subprime, and the headline chart keeps reading it as systemic.”

Where The Bears Are Right

I readily admit that the bearish case has a valid point. They state that aggregate data lags current realities. Therefore, by the time the Fed’s quarterly report confirms a broad deterioration, the damage is already done. Furthermore, a 3.0% savings rate means the marginal household has no shock absorber left.

If you then layer on a labor market that ran soft through the summer, with June and July payrolls revised down to 31,000 and 21,000 before August rebounded to 162,000, you have the setup for spending to roll over faster than the smoothed data will admit.

Those are all valid points. However, here’s the problem with treating it as today’s reality. It’s a forecast about tomorrow, not a reading of the current tape. The same case was made in 2023 and again in 2024. Each time, behavior beat feelings and spending held firm. I’m reasonably confident the low-end consumer market will continue to deteriorate from here. I’m far less confident it will drag down the aggregate over the next two quarters, because the prime borrower, who does most of the spending, is still in good shape.

What Consumer Credit Stress Means For Investors

So what do you actually do with this information?

1. Stop trading off the scary screenshot. A K-shaped consumer calls for a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. The businesses exposed to the bottom third of the income distribution, dollar stores, subprime lenders, buy-now-pay-later names, and lower-end restaurants, are where the stress shows up first and hits margins hardest. That’s a real and specific risk you can underwrite.
2. Respect the split rather than betting the whole book on one side. Higher-end consumer names and companies serving households with intact balance sheets are a different animal. Positioning for a total consumer collapse has been a losing trade for three years running. So has assuming everything is fine. The trade is the divergence itself.
3. Lastly, keep the real watchlist in front of you. Not the meme number. Watch the savings rate, the subprime delinquency trend, the quarterly New York Fed report, and retailer margin guidance through earnings season. We covered the deeper split between what households say and what they do in our look at the consumer sentiment disconnect, and in the piece on record retail inflows. The through line is consistent. Behavior beats feelings, and primary data beats viral charts.

The bottom line is this. The consumer credit stress story deserves your attention, but only the true version. A 3% savings rate indicates the cushion is thin, and the low end is exposed. The New York Fed data tells you this is a distribution problem, not a solvency crisis, at least for now. The moment the prime borrower starts slipping in the quarterly print, the calculus changes, and that’s the number that will tell you when to lean out.

If this raises questions about how your own portfolio is positioned for a two-speed consumer and a softening labor market, that’s the conversation we have with investors every day. Our process starts with your complete financial picture, not just your investment account. Schedule a complimentary portfolio review, and let’s pressure-test your exposure together.

Questions This Article Answers

Are credit card delinquencies really the worst since 2008? Only by one measure. The New York Fed’s “stock” delinquency rate, which counts all reported balances 90+ days past due, hit 12.8% in Q2 2026. That measure is inflated by old charged-off debt that lenders now report for far longer. The “flow” of new delinquencies, a better read on current stress, has been roughly flat since 2024 at just under 7%.

What’s the difference between stock and flow delinquency? The stock measure is the share of all outstanding balances currently marked delinquent, including stale charged-off debt. The flow measure is the amount of debt that goes bad each quarter. The flow tells you how households are doing right now, and the Fed’s own economists say it’s the more accurate gauge of current repayment behavior.

Is the U.S. consumer actually in trouble? Part of it. The stress is concentrated in subprime and lower-income households, where the 3.0% saving rate leaves no cushion. Prime borrowers, who account for most spending, are still in good shape. It’s a K-shaped consumer, not a system-wide credit event.

What should investors watch instead of the viral chart? The flow delinquency rate, the subprime delinquency trend, the quarterly New York Fed report, the personal saving rate, and retailer margin guidance. Those tell you when the stress is spreading from the low end into the prime borrower, which is the turn that actually matters for portfolios.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2026 - 11:40

DHS Ends Biden-Era Solicitation Of Donations For Illegal Aliens In Custody

Authored by Catherine Salgado via PJ Media,

Under the Biden administration, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) was asking for and accepting private donations for illegal aliens in federal custody. The Trump administration just realized it had never officially ended that directive, so it did so this week to remove any lingering confusion.

CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott confirmed to Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin on Wednesday that he issued a memo officially axing the policy. Scott offered as an excuse for its creation that the "elevated number of aliens encountered, processed and held in our facilities" during the Biden-Harris era necessitated private supplements to the billions of taxpayer dollars spent on trafficking criminal foreigners into America.

But times have changed, thank goodness.

"This order is no longer needed or appropriate. With the significant decrease in encounters and apprehensions, CBP no longer requires private donations or gifts for distribution to aliens in custody," Scott observed.

"Additionally, this order does not align with the Trump administration's enforcement posture at our borders. For these reasons, I am withdrawing CBP from DHS Delegation 07107, effective immediately."

John K. Tien, Joe Biden's deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, inaugurated the controversial policy in May 2022. CBP told Melugin that agency leadership did not recall that the policy existed until a recent reminder. That's probably partly due to changes in top leadership since Donald Trump took office.

The Biden Administration manufactured a crisis at our southern border - allowing millions of unvetted criminal aliens to flood our towns and neighborhoods. With our southern border now secure thanks to President @realDonaldTrump, @CBP and @DHSgov, ICE will continue to remove these illegal aliens from the interior. Our work to Defend the Homeland continues.

— U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (@ICEgov) February 17, 2026

Even the title of the newly terminated policy is so obviously Democrat: "Delegation to Solicit, Accept and Utilize Gifts Related to the Care of Undocumented Noncitizens in CBP and ICE Custody."

Calling illegal alien criminals "undocumented" is a favorite Orwellian term among wokies, as if the aliens innocently forgot to complete some unnecessary paperwork.

What Joe Biden and the Democrats did to our country is unforgivable: "Fed Reserve working paper suggests Biden illegal immigrant wave caused 30% of home price increases" https://t.co/d1RnUOESRk

— White House Press Office (@PressSec) July 8, 2026

Watchdog estimates indicate that the Department of Health and Human Services - responsible for trafficking over 320,000 children - alone spent some $22.6 billion on illegal aliens during the Biden era. In early 2024, Newsweek reported that illegal immigration was costing the U.S. $150.7 billion annually across federal, state, and local governments.

And yet, despite all that, CBP says it still needed supplementation from private funds.

That is the scale of the mass illegal alien invasion of our country during the Biden administration.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2026 - 10:30

"Coming Monday": Trump To Roll Back Costly 'Green' Rules To Drive Down Car Prices

All this "green" technology embedded in vehicles over the last two decades, such as automatic stop-start, cylinder deactivation, turbocharging, advanced transmissions, hybrid systems, and other forms of electric assistance designed to reduce fuel consumption and improve miles per gallon, has made the upfront cost of purchasing a new vehicle unaffordable. 

The average price of a new car has exploded to $50,000, making it unaffordable for many working-class folks. Automakers have to abide by Obama-era and Biden-era "green" climate rules because these climate alarmists supposedly sought to heavily regulate the industry under the guise of saving the planet. In fact, overregulation has driven the cost of driving and maintaining these complex machines to unaffordable levels.

The DEF systems for diesel engines pushed during the Obama era have also added repair costs, maintenance requirements, and costly downtime. Many diesel owners have been infuriated by overregulation of these engines. Talk to any Ford Powerstroke or Dodge Cummins owners; they are no fans of DEF. 

To fix the mess of overregulation and what can only be described as an increase in the upfront cost of new vehicle ownership, as well as thousands of dollars in maintenance bills and headaches, President Trump announced on Saturday that his administration plans to release new fuel-efficiency mandates that roll back costly green mandates.

Trump wrote on Truth Social:

BIG DAY FOR AMERICAN AUTO WORKERS AND CAR BUYERS! I have just approved new Fuel Economy Standards that TERMINATE Sleepy Joe Biden and Pete Boot-EDGE-EDGE's ridiculous EV Mandate. The Dumocrats cost our Great Auto Manufacturers $Billions, forced Americans into cars they never wanted, and wasted Billions on Chargers that were never built.

These new Standards will take the waste out of building cars in America. That means LOWER PRICES, saving families thousands on a new, beautiful, and safe car — Far better than the Environmental Monsters that we were building heretofore. Every Manufacturer, from General Motors to Ford to Stellantis, has called me wanting to build here, and now they can!

Under my Administration, over $ 100 billion is being invested in American Autos, and that's just the beginning.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy quoted Trump's Truth Social post on X and responded, "A major victory for America's auto workers is COMING MONDAY."

A major victory for America’s auto workers is COMING MONDAY 👀 pic.twitter.com/JB79NVufds

— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) September 26, 2026

Bloomberg noted, "If the final rule follows December's proposal, the projected fleetwide fuel-economy average for 2031 would fall to 34.5 miles per gallon from approximately 50.4 mpg under the Biden standards. The final requirements have yet to be released."

An NHTSA report from last December estimated that the proposed rule could lower upfront vehicle costs by $930, assuming manufacturers pass along the savings. 

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2026 - 09:55

Mamdani: Socialism "Will Absolutely Translate" Nationwide

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has stopped pretending his socialist vision is just a local experiment.

On CNN International's Amanpour, the Democratic Socialist was asked whether America is ready to elect people on the hard left - and whether the 2026 midterms will be a referendum not only on President Trump, but on the Democratic Socialists of America.

"I think this will absolutely translate on a national level," Mamdani said.

.@NYCMayor Mamdani says socialism will take over national politics:

"[Socialism] will absolutely translate on a national level. And the reason that I believe that is while we are an exceptional city. As the greatest city in the world, we also know that the struggles that New... pic.twitter.com/CaNc02evFq

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 26, 2026

Amanpour noted that other Democrats still believe national races reward moderates, and that local energy is one thing, but winning the country is another. Mamdani answered by recasting New York's cost-of-living crisis as a national mandate.

"While we are an exceptional city, as the greatest city in the world, we also know that the struggles that New Yorkers are facing are the struggles that working-class Americans are facing across the country," he said.

He continued, "I often say that there's only one majority in this country, it's the working class. And their inability to afford housing, childcare, even public transit, that is something that goes beyond any one city."

Mamdani then pointed to the New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt, arguing that people said the same thing then: it could never work nationally. In his telling, the Democratic Party was once "synonymous with workers" and popular because of it. The implication is obvious. He wants that party back - or rather, a DSA-shaped version of it.

He also claimed New Yorkers care less about how he labels himself than "whether there's room for them in that description," accused House Speaker Mike Johnson of talking about him to dodge "current federal policy," and said "to find ambition in the Democratic Party, we often have to look to history books."

This is the same argument Mamdani has been making since his slate smashed New York's Democratic establishment in June. After candidates he backed knocked out incumbents and seized safe House nominations, he told ABC's Jonathan Karl that a democratic socialist "can get elected anywhere across this country for any position."

He talked then about "a hunger that is not just felt by New Yorkers, but, frankly, by Americans from coast to coast." The June winners - including DSA members Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, plus progressive Brad Lander - ran on tax-the-rich politics, attacks on Israel, and, in several cases, abolishing ICE. In deep-blue New York districts, that was enough.

Republicans have already treated the results as a gift. Johnson said after the sweep: "The Democratic party, the socialists, the Marxists, have nominated some of the most radical candidates to ever run for office, and they're running for Congress. The insurgent left is on the rise."

Mamdani now wants that rise treated as proof the rest of America is waiting for the same program.

A CNN poll in late July found about a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults now identify as democratic socialists. They skew younger. They are more eager to yank the party left. They are nearly twice as likely as other Democrats to want that shift on policy. Nearly half of them would be enthusiastic about a candidate who wants to cut U.S. support for Israel, compared with 20 percent of non-socialist Democrats.

Among those expressing an opinion, nearly all viewed Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez favorably. Most Democratic-aligned adults said they would at least be "OK" with nominating a democratic socialist. The center of gravity inside the party has moved. Mamdani is not inventing that. He is trying to nationalize it.

Moderate leftists, such as Bill Maher, are warning that the far left has completely taken over the Democratic Party.

"We already know what he is because it's in his own statements and the people he hires," Maher said. He pointed to tenant advocate Cea Weaver, who said "let's elect more communists." Maher's verdict: "Look, this is not like something you have to really figure out. 'Elect more communists.' That's a communist."

"Communism. It's a political philosophy. It's an economic philosophy," Maher added. "You're allowed to believe it. You're allowed to vote for it. Let's just not pretend that that's not what this is."

Americans have already heard what Mamdani thinks the country is. On the 250th anniversary of the United States, the Ugandan-born mayor used the occasion to lecture the nation that gave him office.

"America, in their view, is an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal," he said of "the powerful." He claimed it "belongs only to those with the right accent or the right shade of skin." He accused the Trump administration of running a country "that persecutes those seeking asylum."

The rest was a familiar grievance list: hungry children and "the world's first trillionaire," "oligarchs who buy elections," "masked agents terrorizing our streets," ICE that "invades our neighborhoods," health insurers who "exploit the sick," "corporate landlords," and tax dollars spent "on bombs and bailouts."

That is the worldview he now says will "translate." Not just free buses and city grocery stores. A politics that treats immigration enforcement as an invasion and American history as a story of supremacy waiting to be rewritten.

The sales pitch does not run on speeches alone. An investigation this month found City Hall has cultivated a network of nearly 200 online creators to push administration material. Much of it moves through a private Signal group called "NYC Creators Announcements," overseen by Emilia Rowland, City Hall's $175,000-a-year Director of New Media and Cultural Communications. Communications Director Anna Bhar makes $260,000.

The network grew out of the campaign-era Creators4Zohran operation. Columbia Journalism Review did not find creators being paid simply to praise Mamdani. It did find that some influencers in that ecosystem have received taxpayer-funded pay for city advertising and public-messaging campaigns.

This is what "ambition" looks like in Mamdani's Democratic Party: a socialist mayor, a growing DSA bench, a third of Democrats now comfortable with the label, and a taxpayer-adjacent content army to make it sound like common sense.

Mamdani keeps saying there is only one majority in America - the working class. The wager he is making is that those voters want New York's socialist experiment exported. The rest of the country get a vote on that in November.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2026 - 09:20

Hormuz Oil Flows Rebound To Two-Thirds Prewar Level As Iran's Grip Erodes, Attacks 19 Ships

Rory Johnston, a Toronto-based oil analyst and the founder of Commodity Context, an independent oil market research firm, wrote on X this weekend that oil shipments through the Strait of Hormuz have recovered to roughly two-thirds of prewar levels, driven by a surge in Saudi exports. This suggests that Tehran's leverage over the critical maritime chokepoint has eroded.

"Hormuz oil flows can't possibly be above 13 MMbpd bc crude is over $100," Johnston wrote in the post on Saturday, citing Kpler data.

He added, "Brother, if you had told an oil analyst in January that Hormuz flows were still down 7 MMbpd after >200 days of war, with the East-West pipeline hobbled, and oil was ONLY $100 they'd have looked at you like."

“Hormuz oil flows can’t possible be above 13 MMbpd bc crude is over $100!”

Brother, if you had told an oil analyst in January that Hormuz flows were still down 7 MMbpd after >200 days of war—with the East-West pipeline hobbled—and oil was ONLY $100 they’d have looked at you like pic.twitter.com/e8TmiScFMQ

— Rory Johnston (@Rory_Johnston) September 26, 2026

Saudi Arabia is driving the recovery. The kingdom's crude exports averaged 5.28 million barrels a day during September's first 23 days, the strongest pace since the conflict began, according to Bloomberg ship-tracking data. About 3.4 million barrels a day were loaded at Gulf ports, reversing the near-total retreat from those terminals earlier in the war.

Courtesy of Commodity Context ... 

"Hormuz is no longer behaving like a chokepoint under effective Iranian control. Hormuz oil flows are now above 13.5 mb/d on a 7-day average," energy analyst Art Berman wrote on X, quoting Johnston's post.

Berman said, "The biggest increase is Saudi Arabia's Gulf loading surge. That changes the strategic picture. Iran can still attack ships, raise insurance costs and make the strait dangerous. But danger is not the same as control. The more oil that clears Hormuz, the more Iran's leverage shifts from blocking flows to merely imposing costs."

Doha-based QNB Financial Services wrote in a note to clients earlier today that "Qatar has ramped up liquefied natural gas tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz to the highest in more than two months, a sign it’s becoming more comfortable moving ships through the waterway." 

Hostilities in the narrow strait continued for a second night, according to Bloomberg, citing reports from the semi-official Fars news agency that Iranian armed forces had targeted 19 ships attempting to use authorized routes in the waterway over the preceding 48 hours.

On Saturday morning, President Trump told reporters on the White House lawn that he had rejected an Iranian proposal for a seven-day ceasefire and was open to resuming attacks on the Islamic Republic after the midterms.

Reporter: Will you strike Iran after the midterms?

Trump: I'm rejecting their deal. They want to make a deal where they open the Strait immediately because they're losing so badly.

They want to make a deal, and I think that's fine. I like making a deal, too, but that deal would… pic.twitter.com/87rKbDySLN

— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 26, 2026

By Sunday morning, Bloomberg reported that Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi was still waiting for a definitive US response through mediators Qatar and Pakistan, despite Trump's public dismissal of the seven-day plan.

The one major escalation risk that may emerge after the midterms is a renewed US bombing campaign, potentially accompanied by cyber operations against Iranian energy infrastructure such as Kharg Island. For energy markets already strained by a global refining crisis, the post-election period warrants close attention.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2026 - 08:45

How Many Ministries Of Truth Does One Country Need

How many Ministries of Truth does one country need? With Andy Burnham announcing yet another, Prof Michael Rainsborough points out that Britain’s "narratives of decline” arise because the country is, in fact, declining...

Authored by Michael Rainsborough via The Daily Sceptic

In previous essays I have sought to describe the political condition into which Britain and other Western democracies have been drifting by offering various analogies.

At first, I tried being serious. My initial forays drew comparisons with the post-totalitarian societies of late communist Eastern Europe, where the widening distance between official propaganda and observable reality produced an ever-greater institutional effort to enforce the official world view. Later essays pursued the analogy more directly, asking whether Britain was becoming increasingly Sovietised, with some of the same characteristics of a political order in severe decline becoming recognisable. With the supply of serious comparisons running low, and the ironies apparently passing unnoticed, there seemed little left to do except laugh.

Once the absurdities become difficult to describe with a straight face, parody is the logical next step. The difficulty now has been making the exaggeration last until publication. Institutions and bureaucratic inventions for comic effect have acquired real-world counterparts before the joke has had time to land.

WISDOM escapes into the wild

A few weeks back my satirical turn took the form of 'The Spy Who Came in From the Consensus', a John le Carré spoof in which the machinery of the contemporary British state deployed its formidable powers of information gathering to confirm what it already believed. At the centre of the story was WISDOM, the Whole-of-Institution Strategic Data and Outcomes Management system. Created to defend Britain against foreign disinformation, it soon graduated to monitoring "harmful narratives", "problematic nostalgia", declining trust and negative sentiment about immigration. A genuine photograph of migrants arriving on a beach was flagged for "decontextualised visual framing". Requests for original sources and factual corrections became possible indicators of hostile interference.

Having begun by investigating Russia, China and Iran, WISDOM eventually discovered that the most troublesome source of misinformation about Britain was British people's stubborn attachment to feeling British. WISDOM's final diagnosis of the country's deteriorating social cohesion was commendably concise: "The problem isn't the problem, the problem is the people noticing the problem."

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Andy Burnham stood before the United Nations and announced the creation of a National Centre for Information Defence. Barely had WISDOM escaped onto the page before reality began catching up with the satire.

According to Burnham, NCID will detect, attribute and disrupt hostile-state information attacks. He cited Russian bots masquerading as British citizens, fake websites, fabricated reports, forged newspaper branding and covert interference. Most insidious of all, naturally, was the amplification of "far Right narratives". Russia, Burnham said, was creating a narrative of British decline. Britain, he claimed, had surrendered too much ground to those promoting such an account.

Burnham insisted that the "negative" and "corrosive" narrative about life in Britain "bears no resemblance to reality". A few moments later in the very same speech, Burnham described people struggling with the "cost of living", lives that were "not improving", young people outside employment, education or training, widening inequality and a society vulnerable to division. Making life more affordable, he then announced, would lie at the heart of a new "10-year plan" for Britain.

The narrative of decline therefore bears no resemblance to reality, although reality apparently requires a 10-year plan.

Burnham began his speech alleging that Russian agencies had forged BBC branding, faked websites and used bots to "stoke tension", "spread lies" and "play on people's fears". There is nothing inherently implausible about any of this. A fake newspaper article is false. A Russian bot pretending to be Derek from Wolverhampton is not Derek from Wolverhampton. No doubt Russia conducts information operations against its enemies, as does nearly every other major nation. It's part of statecraft. It always has been.

However, contentions about whether Britain is declining, its economy is struggling, its institutions are failing or its social cohesion is deteriorating are not in themselves acts of deception. Arguments about the condition of the country do not become disinformation because somebody in Moscow presses the retweet button. For all the concern about foreign deception operations, Britons are perfectly capable of looking at their country and coming to what the Government perceives as the "wrong" conclusions without Russian assistance.

WISDOM would have understood the problem and known what to do. It would recommend the immediate establishment of a National Centre for Information Defence.

The irony is that Whitehall already has an expanding bureaucracy operating across this field. Britain has units dealing with misinformation, hostile states, strategic communications, cyber interference and influence operations. Having concluded that these arrangements are fragmented and overlapping, Whitehall has reached for its traditional instrument of administrative simplification: another organisation.

Maybe the Russians should be warned that Britain now has so many organisations watching for hostile information that any Kremlin operative attempting to penetrate them risks dying of old age during the induction process.

Why, exactly, does Britain need another one?

The Department of Additional Departments

The case for another organisation becomes less obvious once the existing machinery is examined. Most obviously, there is the National Security Online Information Team, formerly the Counter Disinformation Unit, which already leads the Government's operational response to online information threats. Its remit covers misinformation and disinformation affecting national security and public safety, online narratives and attempts artificially to manipulate the information environment. A foreign power conducting the activities Burnham described at the United Nations would therefore fall comfortably within its field of interest.

Should the threat be more obviously the work of a hostile state, the Joint State Threats Assessment Team within MI5 provides cross-government analysis of hostile-state activity. The Home Office also has its now infamous Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU), concerned particularly with extremist propaganda and counter-narratives. The National Cyber Security Centre deals with cyber threats, while the Armed Forces possess 77th Brigade and its expertise in what the Army calls "information manoeuvre".

The Foreign Affairs Committee identified the resulting fragmentation in March. Britain's work against foreign disinformation, it concluded, was dispersed across government and insufficiently coordinated. Its proposed remedy was a statutory, public-facing National Counter Disinformation Centre to bring the disparate effort together. The Government initially agreed only to consider the proposal; the committee duly welcomed Burnham's announcement when it came.

The remedy has an unmistakable Whitehall logic. Faced with too many bodies doing related things without sufficient coordination, the Government has created another body. By July, seven ministers were responsible for disinformation, prompting the Foreign Affairs Committee Chair to observe that this meant nobody was responsible for it. NCID will now have the unenviable task of bringing order to the organisations created to bring order to the information environment.

Quite how it will do so remains unclear. Its organisation and powers have yet to be specified, as has the practical meaning of Burnham's promise that it will "disrupt" hostile-state information attacks.

The more consequential question concerns its remit. New bureaucracies acquire officials, definitions, reporting requirements and, sooner or later, things to report. NCID is being created as the Government's language about information threats extends beyond fabricated stories and covert foreign operations towards the stories Britons tell themselves about Britain.

The question is where countering hostile information ends and policing political interpretation begins.

Your narrative has been marked incorrect

A foreign power doesn't have to invent Britain's difficulties. It can select them, exaggerate their significance and distribute them for hostile purposes. None of that alters the underlying facts. If Moscow circulates a photograph of a British pothole, its reasons for doing so have no bearing on whether the pothole exists. Filling it would also deprive the Kremlin of the photograph.

Burnham's description of a narrative of British decline as "corrosive" therefore raises a different question from whether the claims themselves are true. "Corrosive" describes an effect. A hostile actor may assemble the evidence and promote the bleakest possible account of the country, but neither its involvement nor its purpose settles whether that account is false.

Information defence then begins to move beyond establishing what is true and who is responsible for spreading it into judging which conclusions drawn from the facts are damaging. A false claim can be tested; a covert foreign operation can be investigated and attributed. Whether Britain's institutions are failing, its social cohesion is deteriorating or the country is in decline cannot be settled in the same way. These are political judgements made from evidence over which citizens are entitled to disagree.

Disagreement over those conclusions is the ordinary stuff of politics. Governments marshal statistics, advertise successes, blame their predecessors and assure the country that recovery is under way; oppositions inspect much the same landscape and announce national ruin. Newspapers offer further diagnoses, while citizens remain obstinately free to believe whichever account best accords with what they can see around them. None of this requires an official referee to determine which interpretation of Britain has passed the national resilience test.

A foreign power can promote an account of British decline for hostile purposes without making that account either true or false. Russian propagandists can describe Britain as declining for hostile purposes; a Briton can reach the same conclusion after waiting six weeks for a doctor's appointment. That they reach the same conclusion proves nothing about whether it is correct. Still less does Russian endorsement render it false. Otherwise, any genuine grievance can acquire the taint of disinformation once Moscow notices it.

Conflating hostile provenance with the truth of what is being said changes the purpose of information defence. A government concerned about foreign manipulation has every reason to identify covert networks, expose fabricated material and attribute hostile operations. Once attention turns to the political conclusions citizens draw from genuine conditions, however, the object has changed. Information defence is no longer simply protecting the public from deception. It is deciding which descriptions of reality the public should distrust.

When dissent becomes a security problem

Britain has some experience of what happens when official categories created to identify security threats expand into lawful political argument. William Shawcross's Independent Review of Prevent found that RICU analysis intended to identify the extreme Right had extended into centre-Right debate, populism and lawful Right-leaning commentary with no meaningful connection to terrorism. Mainstream conservative books appeared among supposedly significant ideological texts, while a former Conservative minister, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, and writer Douglas Murray surfaced in analysis of figures associated with far-Right sympathetic audiences.

The Government accepted Shawcross's recommendation to reset the threshold, acknowledging that RICU had exceeded its remit by failing to distinguish clearly between mainstream conservative commentary and the extreme Right.

The problem that Shawcross identified was that once lawful political dissent enters analysis intended to assess security threats, monitoring dissent becomes part of the work of institutions created to protect the state. The distinction between identifying threats and scrutinising political disagreement begins to blur.

The National Security Online Information Team provides another example. Big Brother Watch reported, on the basis of subject access requests and other material it obtained, that government counter-disinformation systems had recorded or analysed statements by MPs, journalists, academics and campaigners. Those caught in the machinery included MPs David Davis and Caroline Lucas and journalists Peter Hitchens and Julia Hartley-Brewer, whose comments encompassed lockdown policy, vaccine passports and other contentious political questions. Public statements are obviously available for governments to read; the question is why lawful political criticism should enter an analytical system concerned with misinformation in the first place.

The concern does not depend upon NCID itself acquiring a wider remit. The day after its announcement, Chi Onwurah MP, Chair of the Commons Science and Technology Committee, welcomed the new centre but pointed out that it would not address domestic dis- and misinformation. She urged the Government to revisit her Committee's recommendations, including measures against the algorithmic amplification of "legal but harmful content". NCID is intended to counter hostile-state information attacks, but its creation sits within a wider policy debate about government intervention in the information environment that already encompasses domestic speech and lawful content considered harmful.

RICU, NSOIT and NCID have different purposes, and while Chi Onwurah was not proposing that NCID should assume responsibility for domestic speech, the problem exposed by RICU is clear: once the state moves beyond identifying unlawful conduct or demonstrably false information, officials must make judgements about the meaning and effects of lawful expression. A "hostile-state information attack" identifies an adversary and an activity. Burnham's "corrosive narrative" introduces a judgement about the effect an account of Britain has. 'Legal but harmful content' places lawful expression itself within the field of possible intervention. The question therefore ceases to concern only what hostile states are doing to Britain. It extends to which lawful ideas circulating among Britons the state considers harmful.

Reality has failed to meet Government expectations

The late-stage communist experience in Eastern Europe becomes more instructive at the point where the discrepancy between official claims and observable conditions became a political problem in its own right. Bad news could be dismissed as hostile propaganda, dissidents accused of blackening the reputation of the state and foreign broadcasters jammed because they supplied information that contradicted the official account. The worse conditions became, the greater the effort required to protect the state's description of them. Humour acquired much of its political force from the same discrepancy: people needed no elaborate theory of government when they could compare what they were being told with what they could see.

Western governments now parrot the bureaucratic language of resilience, information integrity, harmful narratives, strategic communications and protecting the information environment. A failure of government can therefore produce a second problem alongside the failure itself: people notice what has gone wrong, draw conclusions from it and lose confidence in the institutions responsible.

Fixing the conditions that produce discontent is harder. Hospital waiting lists have to be shortened, houses built, infrastructure renewed, living standards raised and immigration brought under political control if that is what governments have promised. Fraying social cohesion cannot be repaired by a communications strategy. These things require choices, money, administrative competence and, in some cases, a willingness to confront interests that benefit from the status quo. Explaining that hostile actors are exploiting public anger about them only requires a strategy, a communications team and a meeting.

Once governments become concerned with the conclusions people draw from their failures, political discontent itself begins to acquire the characteristics of a security problem. Declining trust becomes vulnerability to manipulation, anger at political failure becomes an opportunity for hostile actors, and pessimism about the country becomes a "corrosive" narrative against which society must be made resilient.

The danger is always that government starts devoting as much ingenuity to managing the consequences of failure as to correcting its causes. If people believe their country is declining, government can devote greater effort to persuading them that they have misunderstood what they are seeing.

Alternatively, it could actually try to give them less decline to notice.

The Ministry of Too Many Ministries

George Orwell gave us the forbidding image of the Ministry of Truth, a single institution imposing the official version of reality. Terry Gilliam's 1985 dystopian film Brazil offered a more recognisably bureaucratic version of authoritarianism: a world of forms, malfunctioning computers, incomprehensible departments and officials arguing over which department was responsible for what. The boot stamping on the human face had become entangled in an interdepartmental dispute over who was authorised to wear it.

Britain's information-security machinery has acquired something of the same bureaucratic character. Responsibility for hostile states, misinformation, extremist communications, cyber threats and information operations is already distributed across a collection of units, teams, agencies and military organisations, with NCID now joining them. Somewhere inside Whitehall there must be an official whose job is to know which acronym is protecting us from which other acronym's definition of a harmful narrative.

The British road to authoritarianism was never likely to feature torchlight parades. A cross government steering committee was always more plausible, followed by a consultation exercise, an independent review and a procurement contract large enough to require another independent review. If freedom is finally phased out, there will presumably be a mandatory feedback questionnaire.

Adding a National Centre for Information Defence to an already crowded institutional field brings another remit, another set of responsibilities and another definition of the threat. As responsibilities overlap, accountability becomes harder to locate: one department collects, another assesses, another coordinates and another arrives to coordinate the coordination.

Reality has been referred for review

The problem for information defence begins when Britain's adversaries start telling the truth. A hostile purpose does not make truthful information false, and foreign amplification does not invalidate conclusions Britons draw from conditions they can see for themselves. Once government becomes concerned with those conclusions as well as the truth of the information from which they are drawn, information defence starts to acquire a different purpose.

That was the absurdity behind WISDOM. Three weeks later, the Government unveiled NCID.

The danger lies in the steady expansion of what government considers an information problem. Declining trust becomes a question of resilience, political disaffection a vulnerability to hostile influence and criticism of national decline a corrosive narrative. Eventually the state is concerned not only with whether information is true, but with what people conclude from it.

A free society leaves that judgement to its citizens. Governments can counter lies, expose foreign manipulation and prosecute unlawful conduct. They cannot expect a monopoly over the interpretation of reality, especially when their account of the country conflicts with what people can see for themselves.

And if the discrepancy becomes sufficiently absurd, some people will laugh. Others will decide to do something about it.

Michael Rainsborough is Professor of Strategic Theory and Director of the Centre for Future Defence and National Security, Canberra.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2026 - 08:10

Saudi Arabia Could Use Trump Deal To Get A Nuke: Intel Assessment

A classified US intelligence assessment's conclusions have been reported in The Washington Post at the end of this week, and the report says that Saudi Arabia has not ruled out developing nuclear weapons.

The report comes as Congress is scrutinizing President Trump's controversial nuclear cooperation agreement with Riyadh, which was signed by Energy Secretary Chris Wright in July. The classified intel has not been released by the Post - but the publication says the assessment was presented to Congress as part of the nuclear deal review.

via Reuters

The landmark (what is supposed to be) civil 30-year nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia could be worth tens of billions of dollars and put American companies at the center of the kingdom's nuclear buildout

A Section 123 agreement creates a legal framework for peaceful use, safeguards, and nonproliferation. The admin's reasoning goes that American involvement also gives Washington more influence over Riyadh's program than it would have if Saudi Arabia turned to China or Russia.

However, according to the Washington Post, Congressional leaders are alarmed at lack of appropriate safeguards and significant departure from precedent.

A group of Democratic senators led by Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Jeff Merkley of Oregon have made their deep unease known in a letter submitted to Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday.

They are raising the alarm over a process "that is all but certain to allow Riyadh to acquire the means to enrich uranium and possibly develop nuclear weapons."

Sen. Markey has been most outspoken, calling the arrangement "bogus as hell" - as he sees Washington as acquiescing to Saudi demands which point to a secret intentions to keeping open a path to a nuke. He also alleges some insider quid pro quo involving unelected officials close to Trump.

"If they’ve given up the intent to develop a nuclear weapon, then they’d give up domestic enrichment and reprocessing power, right? They'd accept massive inspections from the IAEA," the lawmaker from Massachusetts said.

The senators are also worried that this will only affirm Iran's defiance, especially if they decide to covertly develop a nuclear weapon. Tehran will feel more justified amid a potential Middle East atomic arms race.

"It is very clear that as this war in Iran continues to unfold, that the Iranians are going to fiercely defend their ability to develop a nuclear weapons program, and as a result, any action that we take in Saudi Arabia will only further accelerate a fallout nuclear arms race in the region," Markey said additionally.

As for the letter from the Democratic senators, it hit out hard at shady dealings with the Saudis by Trump's family and inner-circle.

If the Saudi Arabian dictatorship does try to develop nuclear weapons, as US intelligence reports suggest, does that mean the US should start a war against them and try to regime-change them based on the view that "Saudi Arabia must not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon"? https://t.co/NtaxaEZU1H

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 25, 2026

"Jared Kushner, for example, accepted a $2 billion investment from a Saudi sovereign wealth fund after leaving the White House at the end of the first Trump Administration," the letter says.

"Westinghouse Electric, meanwhile, stands to make tens of billions of dollars if this agreement moves forward. Westinghouse’s majority owner is closely associated with Newmark, the real estate firm run and owned in part by the sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick," it also says.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2026 - 07:35

Is Putin Caught In An "Escalation Trap"? The Long War In Eastern Europe

Authored by Larry Johnson via Sonar21.com

Yves Smith of Naked Capitalism has flagged a recent interview that Professor Robert Pape did with Mario Nawfal. During the interview, Pape argued that Vladimir Putin is caught in an "escalation trap." In his telling, Russia launched a preventive war in February 2022 to seize Kyiv and roughly 60 percent of Ukraine. That plan collapsed, and the fallback, betting that NATO would break, is now producing the European counterbalancing coalition Moscow most feared. It is a tidy theory. It also rests on a premise about Russian intentions that the record does not support, and once that premise goes, the trap goes with it.

What the force tells you about the objective

Start with arithmetic, the kind any planner of military operations does before anything else. Russia invaded with roughly 150,000 to 190,000 troops, including separatist forces. The standard rule of thumb for occupying a hostile population, from James Quinlivan’s RAND work, is about 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants. For a country of more than 40 million, even occupying 60 percent of the territory would require several hundred thousand troops, several times what Russia sent. Moscow’s General Staff can do this arithmetic. A force that size is a coercive instrument, not an occupation army.

The pattern of the operation fits coercion. Russian forces approached Kyiv from the north but never attempted to assault or encircle a city of three million. The pressure was aimed at the government, not at taking the capital block by block. Talks began within days, in Belarus on February 28, and moved to Istanbul in March. Pape's supporters point to the airborne assault on Hostomel as proof of a plan to seize the capital. But a failed coup de main against an airfield is not evidence of an intent to occupy 60 percent of a country.

Istanbul: the objective was achieved

The strongest evidence against Pape is that the coercion worked. By the end of March 2022, meetings in Belarus and Turkey, together with video conferences, had produced the Istanbul Communiqué, a framework for a settlement. Ukraine accepted permanent neutrality in exchange for security guarantees from the United States and its allies, with Russia also as a guarantor. Russia, for its part, agreed to a process to settle the Crimea dispute diplomatically.

via IISS

That was the core of what Moscow wanted, and the Ukrainian side confirmed it. David Arakhamia, who led Ukraine’s delegation, later said Russia was prepared to end the war if Ukraine accepted Finland-style neutrality and committed not to join NATO. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov confirmed to me, Judge Napolitano and Mario Nawfal directly that the talks produced a tentative agreement, and that its terms were brought to the table by the Ukrainian delegation, not imposed by Moscow.

As a gesture of goodwill, Moscow withdrew its forces from north of Kyiv. Western commentary treats that as a retreat forced by battlefield failure. It is at least as consistent with the claim that the pressure had served its purpose.

How the deal died

Then the politics changed. Boris Johnson arrived unannounced in Kyiv on April 9, 2022, and according to Arakhamia told the Ukrainians not to sign anything with Russia and to “just fight.” Two days earlier, Lavrov had already complained publicly that Ukraine’s new draft departed sharply from the key provisions agreed at Istanbul on March 29. Washington and London had decided Russia was weaker than they had thought and that it could be bled. Ukraine walked away.

This is the point Pape’s framework cannot absorb. If Russia’s goal was a neutral Ukraine obtained through negotiation, the war did not go on because Moscow’s plan failed. It went on because Russia’s adversaries rejected the settlement.

No plan B, but a fast pivot and a new army

With hindsight, Russia clearly had not prepared a plan B for Ukraine walking away. That was a real planning failure. But the Russian military adjusted quickly. It concentrated on the Donbas and the land bridge to Crimea, and the fall of Mariupol in May gave it the first major result of that phase.

The bigger adjustment came in September 2022. After a large number of contract soldiers left the army in August and the Kharkiv counteroffensive exposed how thin Russian lines were, Putin ordered the mobilization of 300,000 reservists. That was the start, not the end, of Russia’s response. From that point Moscow set about building a much larger army, as the Russian officers I have interviewed have described in detail, including Gen. Apti Alaudinov, Gen. Evgeny Buzhinsky, Gen. Andrei Gurulev and Col. Eduard Basurin.

The mobilization was followed by a sustained recruitment campaign and an expanded annual draft. By Medvedev’s count, more than 452,000 men signed military contracts in 2023. Roughly 450,000 followed in 2024, and more than 422,000 in 2025. Year after year, Russia has added at least 350,000 new soldiers. Putin’s decrees tell the same story: authorized military strength rose from about 1.15 million in 2022 to 1.32 million in December 2023, then to 1.5 million effective December 2024. By 2026, according to my sources, Russia’s army had reached that 1.5 million active-duty figure.

That is not the behavior of a state that expected a quick war and is now improvising its way out of a trap. It is the behavior of a state that decided in the autumn of 2022 to fight a long war, and built the force to do it.

Why the timeline matters

The goals never changed. Putin announced them on February 24, 2022: the demilitarization and “denazification” of Ukraine. What changed after Istanbul was the method, from coercion toward a negotiated settlement to attrition. Moscow has never attached a timeline to that effort.

Pape’s trap depends on the assumption that Russia needed a quick victory and is now stuck with worse and worse options. An attrition strategy with no deadline, backed by an army that has grown every year since 2022, is not a trap. It is a choice. Moscow's theory of victory since late 2022 has been to exhaust Ukraine’s manpower and the West’s willingness to supply it, not to break NATO by a specific date. Four and a half years later, Russian forces are still advancing, and Ukraine’s reserve and mobilization problems are structural, not temporary.

Pape’s answer is European counterbalancing, backed by an EU economy he puts at about eight times Russia’s. That ratio only holds at market exchange rates, which badly understate what Russia’s economy can actually produce. On purchasing power parity, the measure that matters in a war of production, Russia is the fourth largest economy in the world: about $6.9 trillion in 2024 by the World Bank’s count, behind only China, the United States and India, and ahead of Japan and Germany. The EU as a bloc is still larger, but on that basis the gap is roughly half of Pape’s figure.

GDP understates Russia’s position in another way. Russia has a resource base that Europe cannot match, from oil, gas and coal to metals and fertilizer, and a defense-industrial base that Europe has let wither for thirty years.

Artillery shells, the basic currency of this war, show what that means in practice. Russia produced an estimated 400,000 122mm and 152mm artillery rounds in 2022. By 2025, estimates put its annual output at about 4.2 million. A 2026 Estonian intelligence report goes further, estimating that Russian factories produced about seven million artillery, mortar, tank and rocket rounds in 2025. On top of that, Russia has received millions of rounds from North Korea.

Europe started from almost nothing. At the beginning of 2024, according to Rheinmetall’s own internal estimate, all Western European manufacturers together could produce about 550,000 shells a year. NATO's own assessment was that Russia produced as much ammunition in the first three months of 2024 as the entire alliance did in a year. The EU pledged to reach a capacity of two million 155mm shells a year by the end of 2025, a target, not proven output. Even adding US production, which is aiming for about 100,000 rounds a month in 2026, allied programs might yield about three million shells this year, still less than Russia’s estimated output in 2025.

That is the real measure of the balance Pape is counting on. A bloc whose economy is several times Russia’s is still being outproduced in the one commodity that decides an attrition war. Balance-of-power theory may be right that Europe will eventually arm itself. It says nothing about whether that happens in time to change the outcome in Ukraine.

Russia sent a force too small to occupy most of Ukraine, negotiated within days, and reached a framework agreement within five weeks. When the West persuaded Kyiv to walk away, Russia shifted to an open-ended war of attrition and spent four years building an army to fight it. That is not a state trapped by the failure of a plan to conquer 60 percent of a country. It is a state that tried coercion first, adapted when it failed, and is fighting on its own timeline.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/27/2026 - 07:00

The Socialist Indoctrination Machine: Schools Are Teaching Young People To Embrace Big Government, Hate Capitalism

Authored by Ken Buck via The Epoch Times,

A recent headline from a well-respected news outlet caught my attention: "Could socialism make America happy again?"

Surely, the article must be satirical, I thought. Who in their right mind would believe that the most oppressive form of government, responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths, horrific living conditions, and the elimination of personal freedoms, would make anyone "happier"?

It wasn't a joke. Nor are the slew of articles these days proclaiming that "Socialism's moment is here" and similar findings that show socialism's popularity is quickly climbing, especially among young people.

America has a socialism problem - or a socialism perception problem. A great swath of our country has bought into the lie that socialism can somehow provide a better quality of life, and it owes largely to progressives' success transforming our education system into an indoctrination machine.

It's no secret that higher education has long been a bastion of liberalism. In one recent poll, half of college professors at four-year schools self-identified as liberal, compared to only a quarter who identified as conservative. Conservative faculty were considerably more likely to hide their political affiliations for fear of being fired or retaliated against.

Likewise, a survey in 2020 found that nearly 40 percent of conservative college students did not feel comfortable expressing their political views because they worried their peers might file a complaint against them.

One might think that our country's institutions of learnings would actively seek to educate young people about the dangers of socialism. There are, after all, numerous examples from recent history. Instead, they preach the evils of free-market competition, which has made the United States a global beacon of hope and freedom for over 250 years.

An annual study this year found that nearly 40 percent of students said that their college classes and activities negatively affected their views of capitalism, compared to less than 10 percent who said their experience improved it. That shouldn't be a surprise. The same report two years earlier found that faculty were "more often positive toward socialism and negative toward capitalism."

Today, 46 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 have a favorable opinion of socialism - more than twice as many compared to those who had a negative opinion of it.

Sadly, the left's indoctrination program now starts well before college. Students are steeped in the immorality of capitalism and the romanticization of socialism beginning as early as primary grades.

In 2016, a now-often-cited survey found that one-third of millennial and Gen Z students believed more people were killed under former President George W. Bush than by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Almost one in five students did not know who Stalin was.

U.S. civics education hardly seems to be trending in a better direction. A poll by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in 2019 found more than seven in 10 Gen Z students and over six in 10 Millennials said they did not learn about communist regimes throughout their K-12 careers.

In 2022, our country's National Assessment of Educational Progress scores in U.S. History, which measure students' knowledge of the subject "in the context of democracy, culture, technological and economic changes," fell five points from 2018, and 14 points below 2014 averages.

In 1997, following the publication of "The Black Book of Communism" - which estimated that nearly 100 million people died under communist and socialist regimes in the 20th century alone - the late historian and political commentator Tony Judt, himself a staunch liberal, wrote in The New York Times:

"No one will any longer be able to claim ignorance or uncertainty about the criminal nature of communism, and those who had begun to forget will be forced to remember anew."

But Americans, particularly young people, have forgotten. Or, more appropriately, they have been presented a whitewashed, untrue depiction of socialism that omits the ugly realities and fabricates false comforts. Not surprisingly, they have largely accepted this blissful but ultimately make-believe narrative.

That doesn't change the truth: Socialism as a system of government has never worked, and it will never work.

It's time to flip the script in our schools and start teaching our children the truth.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/26/2026 - 23:20

California Has Highest Personal Income Tax Rate, 8 States Have None...

Where you live can make a major difference in the state income tax rate applied to your earnings, with systems ranging from no individual income tax to top marginal rates above 10%.

This map, via Visual Capitalist's Gabriel Cohen, compares U.S. states based on their top marginal individual income tax rate in 2026 using Tax Foundation data. Both local and federal income tax rates are excluded.

Which States Have No Individual Income Tax?

Eight states levy no individual income tax: Alaska, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming.

New Hampshire is a relatively recent addition to the list, having repealed its tax on interest and dividends in 2025.

The table below lists all U.S. states and Washington, D.C., alongside their top marginal income tax rate and tax system.

State Top marginal tax rate in 2026 (%) Income Tax System Alabama 5 Graduated-Rate Alaska 0 None Arizona 2.5 Flat Arkansas 3.9 Graduated-Rate California 13.3 Graduated-Rate Colorado 4.4 Flat Connecticut 6.99 Graduated-Rate Delaware 6.6 Graduated-Rate Florida 0 None Georgia 5.19 Flat Hawaii 11 Graduated-Rate Idaho 5.3 Flat Illinois 4.95 Flat Indiana 2.95 Flat Iowa 3.8 Graduated-Rate Kansas 5.58 Graduated-Rate Kentucky 3.5 Flat Louisiana 3 Flat Maine 7.15 Graduated-Rate Maryland 6.5 Graduated-Rate Massachusetts 9 Graduated-Rate Michigan 4.25 Flat Minnesota 9.85 Graduated-Rate Mississippi 4 Flat Missouri 4.7 Graduated-Rate Montana 5.65 Graduated-Rate Nebraska 4.55 Graduated-Rate Nevada 0 None New Hampshire 0 None New Jersey 10.75 Graduated-Rate New Mexico 5.9 Graduated-Rate New York 10.9 Graduated-Rate North Carolina 3.99 Flat North Dakota 2.5 Graduated-Rate Ohio 2.75 Flat Oklahoma 4.5 Graduated-Rate Oregon 9.9 Graduated-Rate Pennsylvania 3.07 Flat Rhode Island 5.99 Graduated-Rate South Carolina 6 Graduated-Rate South Dakota 0 None Tennessee 0 None Texas 0 None Utah 4.5 Flat Vermont 8.75 Graduated-Rate Virginia 5.75 Graduated-Rate Washington* 9 Graduated-Rate West Virginia 4.82 Graduated-Rate Wisconsin 7.65 Graduated-Rate Wyoming 0 None D.C. 10.75 Graduated-Rate

*Washington rate only applies to capital gains income above $278k.

Having no individual income tax does not mean residents avoid taxes altogether. Each of these eight states levies other taxes to raise government revenue.

Texas, for example, has some of the highest property tax rates in the country, while Tennessee’s high combined state and local sales tax shifts more of the tax burden toward consumer spending.

Some states also benefit from revenue generated by specific industries. Nevada collects substantial gaming taxes, while Alaska taxes oil and gas companies operating in the state.

How Flat Income Taxes Work

Another 15 states use a flat individual income tax, applying a single statutory rate to taxable income rather than progressively higher rates as income rises.

States with flat income taxes include major Midwestern economies such as Illinois (4.95%) and Michigan (4.25%), as well as Mountain West states including Colorado (4.4%) and Utah (4.5%). Idaho’s 5.3% rate is the highest flat individual income tax rate in the country.

Individual tax bills can still vary based on deductions, exemptions, credits, and other state-specific rules. Efforts to replace flat taxes with graduated systems have also failed in some states. In Illinois, for example, voters rejected a 2020 proposal to allow a graduated income tax.

Where Top Marginal Tax Rates Are Highest

Most states instead use graduated income tax systems, in which higher portions of taxable income are subject to higher rates, similar to the federal tax system. Washington, D.C., also uses a graduated system, with a top marginal rate of 10.75%.

California, the largest state economy in the country, has the highest top marginal rate at 13.3%. This rate applies only to taxable income above $1 million for single filers. California is followed by Hawaii at 11% and New York at 10.9%, which also rank among the states with the highest overall tax burdens nationwide.

Top marginal rates do not tell the whole story. The income threshold at which each rate takes effect can significantly affect how much tax a person ultimately owes. In Virginia, for example, the state’s top rate of 5.75% begins above just $17,000 in taxable income, while California’s 13.3% top rate applies above $1 million for single filers.

To compare personal income tax rates around the world, check out Global Personal Income Tax Rates on Voronoi.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/26/2026 - 22:45

USAF More Than Doubles Ondas' ULTRA Drone Contract As Potential MQ-9 Reaper Alternative Emerges

Thursday's Department of War contract update signals increased US Air Force investment in long-endurance surveillance drones that could complement the MQ-9 Reaper and help fill intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance mission gaps following reported heavy losses in the US-Iran conflict.

The USAF more than doubled the value of its contract with DZYNE Technologies, now part of Ondas, bringing the total to about $85.6 million.

As we noted last week, DZYNE's ULTRA platform represents a potential lower-cost Group 5 drone that could complement the MQ-9 Reaper and eventually assume some of its ISR missions.

DoW's contract update:

DZYNE Technologies LLC, Fairfax, Virginia, has been awarded a $46,087,217 modification (P00003) to a previously awarded contract (FA8691-26-C-B007) for Operational Assessment of Uncrewed Long-Endurance Tactical Reconnaissance Aircraft. This modification brings the total cumulative face value of the contract to $85,643,057 from $39,555,840.

Work will be performed stateside and at overseas locations and is expected to be completed by March 26, 2031. Fiscal 2025 research, development, test, and evaluation funds in the amount of $12,288,390 are being obligated at the time of award. The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center, Dayton, Ohio, is the contracting activity.

Our read here is that DoW's aircraft description fits DZYNE's ULTRA surveillance-drone program, developed with the Air Force Research Laboratory. The meaningful boost to the contract shows how urgently the USAF needs to replenish its Group 5 drones, given the reported Reaper losses (upwards of 25% of the fleet) in the US-Iran conflict so far.

2024 image of American MQ-9 Reaper UAV brought down in Yemen’s Marib. ClashReport/X

Another signal that DoW is likely to boost DZYNE's ULTRA orders even more came at the Air & Space Forces Association's Air, Space & Cyber Conference earlier this month, when the USAF's Troy Meink commented on the need to upgrade the US military's unmanned aircraft fleet over the next six years.

Meink told the audience:

And this is not the only class of autonomous aircraft we are aggressively pursuing. As we saw in Epic Fury, ISR strike platforms have been essential. We have used MQ-9 and even now the ULTRA aircraft to great effect.

Building on these lessons, we are developing a family of low-cost multi-role strike platforms called the Mass Modular Aircraft, or MMAs.

MMAs will provide affordable, attritable, long-range strike, and we will be able to field them at scale. Our intent is to field 100 MMAs in 2029 at even a lower cost than the CCAs and a fraction of the cost of manned aircraft we build today. Then by 2032, 500 of these platforms will join our force operational fleet.

Follow-on orders would likely depend on available funding, with the Trump administration's proposed record defense budget potentially providing a runway for a lot more orders if passed.

Ondas, the company that acquired DZYNE earlier this year, closed around $7.64 on Friday and has a staggering 41% short float.

Any significant contract news on ULTRA orders, coupled with Wall Street waking up to the fact that this Group 5 drone can replace the Reaper for ISR missions, could spark a squeeze.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/26/2026 - 21:35

Southeast Asia Keeps Building Gas Plants Despite Hormuz LNG Shock

Authored by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,

Countries in Southeast Asia are still building natural gas-fired power plants despite the price inflation in gas caused by the Middle East war. Asian countries are also building more LNG import capacity, Global Energy Monitor reported.

The net-zero think tank said there was some 100 GW in new gas-fired power generation capacity under construction across the region and 70 GW in LNG import capacity.

"The continued expansion of LNG import infrastructure risks deepening exposure to the same supply disruptions and price volatility the crisis has brought to the fore," Global Energy Monitor said. The outlet noted that Southeast Asia could boost its domestic natural gas production to reduce dependence on imported liquefied gas but warned that this would take time.

"GEM identifies at least 20 fields that could add around 62 bcm/y of production capacity by 2035, but new supply takes years to develop and may not even supply domestic power markets," the think tank said.

Asia is the biggest buyer of liquefied natural gas and gas been ramping up related infrastructure for years, motivating the surge in planned production capacity as well. Yet gas prices were lower for much of that period, making such plans commercially viable. The war in the Persian Gulf led to a sharp drop in available liquefied gas supply, pushing prices significantly higher, sapping some Asian importers' appetite for LNG.

Global Energy Monitor argued in its report that the war is putting Southeast Asia's gas expansion to the test, noting that "much of the remaining planned expansion rests on three assumptions: that LNG will remain reliably available, that it will remain affordable enough to compete with alternatives, and that domestic gas can provide a fallback when imports are constrained." Whether these assumptions have a sound basis is yet to be determined as the war extends into its seventh month.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/26/2026 - 21:00