Zero Rss

New Images Reveal China's Stealth Drone At Secretive "Area 51" Base

Aviation researcher Andreas Rupprecht posted footage on LinkedIn that appears to show China’s next-generation high-altitude intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance drone, an aircraft he estimates is “comparable in size to the US Air Force’s B-21 Raider.”

Rupprecht wrote on LinkedIn that the WZ-X drone was spotted at a secretive air base in China’s Xinjiang region, known to some as China’s version of Area 51:

Two new images of the PLAAF’s latest and largest intercontinental HALE ISR #UAV, provisionally referred to simply as the #WZ-X, have been leaked, apparently showing the aircraft somewhere in Xinjiang. The UAV was first spotted on satellite imagery in May 2025 at the PLAAF’s UAV test centre at Malan Air Base in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of northwestern China.

Rupprecht continued:

In recent years, Malan/Uxxaktal (ZWML) has developed into the PLAAF’s main test centre for trialling UAVs and UCAVs of all types, while also serving as the base of the 178th UAV Brigade. Satellite imagery from 2022 onwards shows extensive expansion of the base’s infrastructure, including new hangars, taxiways and facilities likely linked to the previously unknown, very large flying-wing UAVs WZ-X and the similarly mysterious UCAV GJ-X, both of which are roughly comparable in size to the B-21 Raider. As such, the base, much like the second secret air base at Lop Nur, which is likely focused more on manned systems such as the J-36, J-XDS and, eventually, the H-20, is often compared to the US Area 51 because of its remote location and its role in testing next-generation weapon systems.

Based on the few, often blurry, images available, the WZ-X appears to be a twin-engined flying-wing design similar in configuration to the US RQ-180, but considerably larger. Rough estimates suggest a wingspan of about 52 m and a length of roughly 14 m. Its two engines, of unknown type, are reportedly fed by a central top-mounted intake, allegedly covered by a conformal mesh to reduce radar cross-section. Apart from its very wide span, the design appears to feature a relatively spacious central fuselage section and a dorsal SATCOM antenna. Its range is estimated at more than 20,000 km, with a normal cruising altitude of 18-20 km and a cruising speed of Mach 0.5-0.65. As for the manufacturer, some sources claim it was developed by Nantong University (NTU), located in Nantong, Jiangsu province.

The WZ-X could help Beijing locate warships, map air defenses and relay targeting information to China’s massive arsenal of long-range missiles, as well as hypersonic weapons, in the event of a conflict over Taiwan

Last week, a new report from Taiwan’s leading English-language daily newspaper, the Taipei Times, revealed that China had deployed a record 244 coast guard, research and other government vessels around the island.

Technical details about the WZ-X remain scarce, and claims about its capabilities remain unverified. However, the expanding infrastructure at Malan and repeated sightings suggest that the aircraft is undergoing flight testing.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 21:35

US Sanctions Turkish Bank Over Alleged IRGC Transfers In Latest Action

Via The Cradle

The US Treasury announced sanctions on Friday on a Turkey-based bank and two of its subsidiaries, accusing them of moving tens of millions of dollars on behalf of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and facilitating Tehran's movement of funds across the international banking system. 

“"Financial institutions continue to find out the hard way that we are serious about Operation Economic Outcast," US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said. "We know who you are, we know where you are, and we will continue to take action together with our allies and partners until we have buried the head of the Iranian snake."

The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) named Golden Global Yatirim Bankasi Anonim Sirketi, alongside its two Istanbul-based units, Golden Global Varlik Kiralama Anonim Sirketi and Golden Global Portfoy Yonetimi Anonim Sirketi.

OFAC alleges the bank was created to help Iranian oil revenues reach Turkey from China, where exchangers converted the funds into cash and gold, and accuses it of opening correspondent banking to Iranian institutions through accounts under Quds Force control. 

The sanctions come as part of Washington's Operation Economic Outcast, a campaign to economically asphyxiate Iran by cutting off its remaining revenue and severing the channels it uses to move money abroad. 

Bessent told Reuters on August 30 that fresh secondary sanctions would follow every week, with banks first in line. He said the Treasury was telling lenders it was not acceptable to hold Iranian money or assist the government in Tehran, and indicated the next escalation could mean severing an institution from the dollar system altogether.

Days earlier, the Treasury barred the UAE branches of Egypt's Banque Misr from dollar access over alleged Iranian links. 

Speaking ahead of the G20 finance meeting in Asheville, North Carolina, Bessent threatened ministers and central bank governors to break their economic ties with Iran or face secondary sanctions of their own, warning that no leakage would be tolerated.

The sanctions come as part of Washington’s "Economic D-Day," an economic strangulation campaign launched after Washington failed to achieve its military objectives against Iran. 

"In the Second World War, D-Day marked the historic beginning of a campaign with our allies to target and drive the enemy from its positions, including those in third countries.  Today, in that same spirit, we are launching an economic onslaught against Iran’s financial connections around the globe. Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone," Bessent had said.

"President Trump has taken action that his predecessors have long deferred. Under his leadership, America is no longer managing the Iranian threat. We are ending it. Those who stand with the United States will reap the rewards of our partnership. Those who tether themselves to Tehran should expect to share in the isolation of a withering regime," he had also said.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 21:00

Meanwhile In Ceuta...

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

Viral footage out of the invaded Spanish enclave of Ceuta shows a bottlenose dolphin calf came in close to the sand at Playa del Trampolín in Ceuta this week, disoriented and still alive. A group of men who entered illegally in the July surge pulled it from the water, hoisted it like a prize, and - according to local reporting, a conservation complaint, and Telecinco - one of them bludgeoned it in the head with a stick.

An Ecoservicios worker in high-vis tried to stop the handling. Voices on the clip can be heard shouting "No! No! You can't eat it! It's a dolphin!" The animal was killed. Some of the men then moved off toward the breakwater with the body.

The conservation group DAUBMA took photographs, clips and social-media stills to the Guardia Civil and asked for animal-cruelty and protected-fauna charges. Alvise Pérez's Se Acabó la Fiesta filed at Ceuta's court on the same facts. A petition by Nadia García Gómez put it in writing: the calf was "brutally pulled from the water... handled as if it were an object and violently struck on the head."

?? "NO! NO! YOU CAN'T EAT IT! IT'S A DOLPHIN!"

A video from Ceuta shows a group of migrants pulling a dolphin calf from the water as a man desperately tries to stop them.

The group reportedly found the calf near the shore at Playa del Trampolín, pulled it from the water, and...

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) September 4, 2026

Spanish citizens must now share their city with savages who treat a dolphin like a piñata.

The illegal migrants in Ceuta pulled a baby dolphin out of the sea today and clubbed it to death for fear fun.

Get them out of Europe immediately pic.twitter.com/4ERzMgH8kC

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) September 3, 2026

They likely have a lower IQ than the animal they pulled out of the sea and bludgeoned. They are predatory scum acting solely on chemical instinct, completely lacking in empathy, judgement or respect for anything other than their own worthless existence.

El Trampolín is not a postcard cove anymore. It is the same strip that has held thousands of arrivals since late July, when more than 70,000 people crossed from Morocco into a city of roughly 84,000.

Madrid still talks as if most of them "went home," yet the reality is that reed shacks, rotting food and human waste have sat on that shoreline for weeks. The calf swam into that hell and couldn't escape.

One of the men in the circle was filming the spectacle on what looks like an iPhone 17 Pro Max. The "destitute asylum seeker" kit keeps getting more expensive.

'Asylum seeker refugee' in Ceuta filming the dolphin bludgeoning with his iPhone 17 pro max and brand new braces. pic.twitter.com/1AJdc6vsuI

— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) September 4, 2026

DAUBMA says the calf reached the shallows alive, was dragged out, was struck, and shows a bleeding wound under one eye while people on the tape try to wipe the blood. It called the case "extrema gravedad ambiental" and asked the environmental prosecutor to take it. Bottlenose dolphins are protected under Spanish and EU law.

A day earlier the animal-rights party PACMA shared a clip showing a migrant in Ceuta immobilising a park goose, bagging it, legs bound, a fish already in hand. A bystander intervened and the bird was dropped. The man left the scene.

?Esto ha ocurrido en Ceuta hace escasas horas.

?Un hombre ha pillado a otro inmovilizando y embolsando a una oca de un parque público para llevársela. Se desconoce el objetivo, pero nada bueno.

?La bandera que ampare al maltratador es total y absolutamente irrelevante para... pic.twitter.com/Jle5dirVlY

— PACMA (@PartidoPACMA) September 3, 2026

PACMA issued a statement condemning "any act of violence, capture or manipulation of an animal, regardless of who commits it, their nationality, origin or administrative situation," while adding that there is "not enough information to affirm that the incidents with animals were motivated by hunger."

As we highlighted in mid-August carers who feed Ceuta's street-cat colonies said sites by the desalination plant and in Huerta Téllez, Carmelitas, Príncipe, Sidi Embarek and Punta Blanca had emptied after the migrant camps spread over the same ground. Volunteers described dead cats found cut or missing half a body, and pigeons and gulls half-eaten near the settlements.

Conservative influencer Eva Vlaardingerbroek points out that while everyone is rightly disgusted over the dolphin incident, European children are being raped and killed by migrants relentlessly, and it's beginning to become little more than background noise.

"It took a dolphin calf," she wrote. "That says something about the way our society views the value of human children." She also pointed to the Lindsay Clancy case in the United States - a mother who strangled her three children and was immediately wrapped in feminist excuse-making. Murder a dolphin instead, Vlaardingerbroek noted, and that chorus disappears.

Everyone is rightfully outraged over migrants in Ceuta beating a baby dolphin to death, but European children are raped and killed by migrants on a daily basis and we barely see this level of fury.

It took a dolphin calf. That says something about the way our society views the... https://t.co/WyETEIjWcO pic.twitter.com/rv3LkwGy2W

— Eva Vlaardingerbroek (@EvaVlaar) September 4, 2026

The situation in Ceuta remains dire. Playgrounds that used to hold Spanish children are smeared with excrement. Beaches that held families have become open latrines. Mothers cannot let their daughters outside without a male escort.

Ceuta's chief prosecutor, Silvia Rojas, told Spanish media that 23 sexual assaults - nine of them against children - had been recorded since the late-July surge, almost one case a day. Police unions speak of women and girls clinging to vans near the CETI because stepping away results in assault, and being dragged into the hills.

Locals have had enough. In late August residents tore beach camps apart, threw gear into the sea and chanted that if the men would not leave, Ceuta would throw them out. Police put a cordon between Spaniards and the shacks and used rubber bullets on the people who live there.

The revolt did not stay inside the enclave. Marches spread across the peninsula.

Sánchez went to Congress and called it "absurd to think that the government knew and did nothing." He boasted of returns "within 72 hours" and a €309 million emergency package. Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares has claimed "practically the entirety" of those who entered have gone back to Morocco.

Video from El Trampolín a month later still shows tents, wrecked shoreline and a city that looks sacked. Tent camps billed for 1,500 cannot accomodate 5,000 to 10,000 people.

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

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 20:11

DHS Seeks Faster Dismissal Of Some Asylum Claims

Authored by Timothy Frudd via The Epoch Times,

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is seeking to move quickly to dismiss more asylum cases found legally insufficient.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Department of Homeland Security in Washington on Feb. 17, 2026.(Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times) (The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Department of Homeland Security in Washington on

"If an asylum claim is facially deficient, you don't need an evidentiary hearing. We are done wasting time and government resources indulging sham asylum claims." DHS general counsel James Percival wrote in an X statement on Sept. 3.

Evidentiary hearings, also known as merits hearings, allow asylum applicants and DHS officials to present evidence regarding asylum claims. They also give immigration judges an opportunity to hear arguments from both sides and review the evidence submitted.

The department's push to expedite the dismissal of asylum claims deemed legally insufficient follows multiple actions by the Trump administration to crack down on asylum fraud.

In his social media post on Thursday, Percival shared a Fox News report that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE's) Office of the Principal Legal Advisor's attorneys had been instructed by DHS to seek the dismissal of legally insufficient asylum applications.

The attorneys were instructed by DHS to file motions to pretermit in immigration court, according to the report. Pretermit motions formally request that immigration judges deny asylum applications prior to full merits hearings.

Asked about the new guidance, a DHS spokesperson told The Epoch Times that a pending asylum application did not "confer legal status" in the United States.

"America's asylum system was never intended to be used as a de facto amnesty program or a catch-all, get-out-of-deportation-free card," the spokesperson said in an emailed statement on Sept. 3.

President Donald Trump and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin have reversed the previous administration's "catch and release" border policy. The policy allowed many illegal immigrants to be released into the United States instead of detaining them until their immigration cases were resolved.

"All illegal aliens receive due process. We are applying the law as written by Congress," the DHS spokesperson said.

The Epoch Times reached out to ICE about the new guidance but did not hear back before publication time.

Administration's Broader Asylum Measures

The department's U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) previously announced an interim rule change in late July to expedite asylum applications.

The interim rule change allows USCIS to refer asylum applications to immigration judges without interviewing asylum applicants in advance. The change was implemented to reduce the backlog of asylum applications.

When the asylum application rule change was announced in July, Percival said it would improve efficiency and fulfill Trump's immigration mandate.

"One of the greatest barriers to effective immigration enforcement is intentional delay by illegal aliens and the open borders attorneys who represent them," he said.

In May, DHS directed ICE to crack down on fraudulent asylum claims by taking action against attorneys who file false asylum claims in immigration court.

On Sept. 3, the spokesperson added that the department has worked for months to recruit new immigration judges who will "ensure the rule of law and restore integrity" to the immigration system in the United States.

The DHS directive came after Trump issued a presidential memorandum in March in response to what he described as "rampant fraud and meritless claims" in America's immigration system. The memorandum called for lawyers and law firms to be held accountable for misconduct.

Homeland Security Investigations later announced in July that it was seeking to impose a fine of more than $470,000 against an immigration attorney who allegedly filed false asylum claims for clients.

Trump's memorandum was criticized by the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) as a "chilling directive" targeting immigration attorneys, law firms, and the immigration bar.

"It seeks to delegitimize the work of resolute professionals who ensure that immigrants - many of whom are fleeing persecution and are contributing to their new communities - have access to fair legal representation," AILA President Kelli Stump said at the time.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 19:50

COSCO Denies US Claims Its Container Ships Serve As Beijing's Global Spy Network

China's state-owned shipping giant COSCO rejected a report published last week alleging that the company had concealed advanced surveillance equipment aboard its cargo ships to monitor US military communications near the coastlines of target nations, including the US.

Reuters quoted COSCO on Friday as calling the allegations "totally unfounded" and false.

What Reuters reported on Tuesday:

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the U.S. assessment of the Chinese program, said COSCO has a decades-long intelligence-collection partnership with Beijing. The arrangement allows China to collect communication signals from vessels and aircraft operating across Europe, North America and Asia, they said.

The advanced equipment aboard the ships is intended to enable China to gather information about "military communications technologies and encryption developments," one of the officials said.

The world's fourth-largest container carrier also told the outlet:

COSCO SHIPPING has always adhered to market‑oriented operations and compliance practices across all our global businesses

All communication, navigation, safety and operational equipment installed on our vessels is used solely for legitimate ‌commercial ⁠purposes, including navigation safety, ship-to-shore communications and emergency response. 

The allegations surface just weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping's expected Sept. 24 visit to Washington for talks with President Trump.

If substantiated, COSCO's alleged use as a signals intelligence operations would fit a broader pattern of Chinese gray-zone activity in which commercial infrastructure and civilian technologies are leveraged to advance state objectives.

Dr. Ryan Clarke of the CCP BioThreats Initiative wrote in a book last year that Beijing's strategy increasingly combines next-generation weapons with irregular and nonkinetic tools, including synthetic narcotics such as fentanyl and cannabinoids, what he characterized as biological weapons involving COVID-19, psychological influence through platforms such as TikTok, and other instruments of unconventional warfare.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 19:15

"Experiencing A Psychotic Episode...": First 'Clancy Copycat?' Mom Hangs 2-Year-Old Son

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

A horrific copycat Lindsay Clancy murder of a child has been committed by a woman in Frankfort, Illinois.

Prosecutors say Corie Walsh hanged her 2-year-old son, Barrett, from a basement rafter on Tuesday, then tried to kill herself with a knife. She told police she did it because the boy was the "devil" and the "anti-Christ."

Witnesses said she had become "very invested" in the Lindsay Clancy trial and was still texting friends about it hours before her son was found.

HORRIFIC: An Illinois mother, Corie Walsh, hanged her 2-year-old son in the basement before trying to kill herself in what appears to be a Lindsay Clancy copycat. She told police she did it because the little boy was the "devil" and the "anti-Christ."... pic.twitter.com/aK2j2FuFjM

— RedWave Press (@RedWavePress) September 4, 2026

Just after 4pm on Tuesday, Frankfort police were called to the 22700 block of Brook Stone Court. A neighbor was already on the floor doing CPR on 2-year-old Barrett Walsh. The neighbor told investigators she had found the boy hanging from a device attached to a basement rafter, a ligature around his neck, his feet off the ground. An autopsy's preliminary finding was asphyxia from ligature compression of the neck.

Upstairs, the same neighbor found Corie Walsh in a bathtub with a knife. Court papers describe Walsh fully dressed, surrounded by bloody water, with cuts to her wrists and thigh.

Walsh later told officers she "did this to her baby because he was the 'devil' and the 'anti-Christ.'" In the hospital she described how she killed him. Those statements, prosecutors said, matched what was found in the house.

?? BREAKING — New details emerge about Corie Walsh, the mother who KILLED her 2-year-old son in Frankfort, Illinois.

She allegedly HUNG the 2-year-old child from the rafters in the basement...

Investigators said she called the child the "devil" and the "anti-Christ." A... pic.twitter.com/Jc5qWsbJCc

— The Patriot Oasis™ (@ThePatriotOasis) September 4, 2026

Another infant was found at the home unharmed. Two school-age children returned around the time the body was found. Walsh's husband was out of state on business and flew home that night.

Prosecutors are asking a judge to deny pretrial release, writing that Walsh poses "a specific, real and present threat to her husband and her living three children."

They say she spoke of harming the remaining children and her husband.

Walsh, charged with three counts of first-degree murder on different theories of intent, was held for medical treatment and booked into the Will County jail. Her first court date is set for Tuesday, September 8.

Her lawyer, Andrea Lyon, issued the line the Clancy fandom has been rehearsing for weeks:

"This is a tragedy, for the Walsh family all of whom are mourning the loss of this child. It is also a tragedy in that Corey herself was experiencing a psychotic episode at the time this happened."

Prosecutors added the detail that turned a suburban homicide into a national alarm. Witnesses told police Walsh "had recently become very invested in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial." She had been "actively discussing the case via group text message with her friends" until about 12:30 p.m. Tuesday - three and a half hours before Barrett was found. The Clancy jury was already deliberating in Plymouth when those texts went out.

Questions clearly have to be asked regarding the media coverage of support for Clancy and the fallout from it.

...

While the jury sat, Clancy's supporters gathered outside the courthouse in pink. They screamed at the district attorney as he tried to speak. One of the lines captured on video: "You only cared when the kids were dead! Why don't you care about the mother?!"

? WTF?! DERANGED Lindsay Clancy fans are SCREAMING at the District Attorney while he attempts to give a press conference

These people need to be INSTITUTIONALIZED

"You only cared when the kids were dead! Why don't you care about the mother?!"

Just VILE. pic.twitter.com/aPimy7EG4l

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) September 4, 2026

That is the moral inversion this case has been selling for weeks. The children are the backdrop. The mother is the victim. The system is the villain. The man who will not play along is the problem.

Joe Rogan earlier noted that If the women in pink could see the crime scene - "those dead kids with their vacant eyes staring up because their mother took their life, the last thing that they saw was their mother standing over them, choking them to death" - he said, "I don't think they would feel so bad."

He added that if a father had done this he would not get a fan club, and if Clancy walks, "her supporters should have to let her babysit."

Bill Maher, no MAGA mascot, asked the question the pink shirts treat as blasphemy: "What I don't get is why does she have fans?" He compared the courthouse crowd to the women who turned Luigi Mangione into a folk hero. Frustration with systems is one thing. Building a following around a woman who ended three young lives is another. He also noted the wider cultural permission structure: not many women kill their children, "but a lot of them are not afraid to say, 'I don't like being a mom.'"

White liberal women are identifying with a child murderer. Courthouse pilgrimages have been framed as sisterhood. "I could have been her" essays written with living children in the next room.

Rep. Brandon Gill pointed out that mental illness is not a license.

"She's anything but brave." "I have an enormous amount of sympathy for the three kids who were slaughtered. I don't for Clancy."

"You don't get a license to murder your children or anybody else because you have health problems," He stated, adding "We've gotten into the habit of medicalizing evil." When Will Cain asked whether medicalizing a crime lets people dodge accountability, Gill answered: "It's a lack of recognition that evil exists."

Brandon Gill is absolutely right.

Mental illness is NEVER an excuse for killing children.

GILL: "She's anything but brave."

"I have an enormous amount of sympathy for the three kids who were slaughtered. I don't for Clancy."

"You don't get a license to murder your children or... pic.twitter.com/MyLed6vjqg

— Overton (@overton_news) September 4, 2026

Prosecutors in Massachusetts never denied Clancy was severely ill. They said she still understood what she was doing: she cleared her husband out of the house on an errand, she completed three killings with a method that worked, she chose a different method for herself that failed. The jury never reached the question of sentence. One man would not sign off on the idea that doubt about her mind erased the crime.

In Illinois, the first apparent copycat did not wait for a verdict. Her lawyer is already reaching for the same word: psychotic episode. The remaining three children and the husband who was out of town are now, in the state's filing, people she may still try to harm.

Jury service is not a support group. It is the last brake in a culture that has spent a generation teaching women that their distress is the main character and other people's bodies are scenery.

Eleven jurors, on the defense account, were prepared to treat three strangled children as a tragedy that happened to their mother. One juror would not.

Contagion is not a metaphor when a mother in Frankfort is discussing a live murder trial until lunchtime and a neighbor is cutting a toddler down from a rafter the same evening.

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

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 18:40

'Not Simple': Witkoff, Kushner Meet Putin For High-Level Peace Talks Under 72-Hour Ukraine Air Truce

Summary: 

• Putin Tells Witkoff and Kushner that Ukraine War "Not Simple" 
• Putin Meets Witkoff and Kushner for Peace Talks 
• US Envoys Witkoff, Kushner Land In Moscow For Peace Talks As Putin Halts Attacks On Kiev

New details have emerged about the meeting between US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier today. The meeting began hours after Putin ordered Russian forces to suspend strikes on Kiev for three days.

Bloomberg reports that Putin opened talks with Witkoff and Kushner by describing the situation they were seeking to resolve as "not simple."

Putin asked them to convey his best wishes to President Trump.

The outlet continued:

Expectations for the visit are low, though, according to people close to the Kremlin. Multiple previous trips to Moscow by Witkoff and Kushner failed to achieve progress and there's no reason to believe they're bringing acceptable proposals now, the people said.

Putin is ready to stop the war only on his own terms, and Moscow's demands are getting tougher because it believes it has the military edge over Ukraine, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters.

People familiar with the thinking in Kyiv said Ukraine is also pessimistic about making meaningful progress around the Witkoff-Kushner visit. The US envoys are expected to push previous ideas like making Donbas an economic free zone, which Russia has already rejected, the people said.

Putin meets Witkoff and Kushner for Ukraine peace talks.

Putin meets Witkoff and Kushner for peace talks. pic.twitter.com/NqqAelwuEG

— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 5, 2026

More footage from the meeting:

Steve Witkoff to Putin:

President Putin, thank you so much for having us.

We were sitting outside just now, me, Jared, Kirill, Yuri, and we were talking about, when we retire, we will have all these incredible stories and memories, and yours will be right at the top of it all. pic.twitter.com/r4OVAZSaST

— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 5, 2026

Putin to Kushner and Witkoff:

The quality of the mediation and the trust placed in those carrying it out are, of course, very important.

I want to tell you that we are comfortable working with you, and that the level of trust on our side throughout this process is quite high. pic.twitter.com/EimtFxf6Eh

— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 5, 2026

For now, the optics suggest that the Trump administration is reactivating high-level diplomacy in an effort to end the 4.5-year war, a grinding conflict that continues to impose severe human and economic costs on both sides. The renewed push also comes as Trump and Republicans enter the final two months before the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

After Moscow, Kushner and Witkoff plan to travel to Ukraine on Sunday, marking their first trip since the war began. 

US Envoys Witkoff, Kushner Land In Moscow For Peace Talks As Putin Halts Attacks On Kiev

Roughly 11 days after CIA Director John Ratcliffe unexpectedly traveled to Moscow and reportedly floated a trilateral summit involving President Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Moscow on Saturday morning.

"Dmitriev was deep in conversation with Witkoff and Kushner as they stepped onto Russian soil for key Ukraine talks," Russian media outlet RT wrote on X, accompanying the post with footage of the US delegation's arrival.

Dmitriev deep in conversation with Witkoff and Kushner as they step onto Russian soil for key Ukraine talks https://t.co/eC8u8gbJVe pic.twitter.com/DIksgrUj54

— RTRussia (@RT_Russia_) September 5, 2026

Russian outlet Sputnik reported that Putin had ordered a three-day pause in strikes on Kiev just as Witkoff and Kushner arrived in Russia for peace talks.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated:

• The pause in strikes on Kyiv is linked to preparations for and the holding of meetings with American negotiators there.
• The Russian president will meet US negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner at the Kremlin later Saturday.

Putin orders halt to strikes on Kiev for three days, starting from midnight today - Kremlin

Other statements by Dmitry Peskov:

🔸The pause in strikes on Kiev is linked to the preparation and holding of meetings with American negotiators there

🔸The Russian president will meet… pic.twitter.com/MJ0g4pWizr

— Sputnik (@SputnikInt) September 5, 2026

Witkoff and Kushner are scheduled to meet Putin before traveling to Kyiv on Sunday, marking their first visit to Ukraine since the war began.

Bloomberg reports that expectations for a breakthrough peace deal to end the war remain low.

The Kremlin said there was "no talk of new ideas," while describing Moscow's negotiating position as "unshakeable." Russia continues to demand that Kiev surrender the entirety of four regions claimed by Moscow and abandon its NATO ambitions, conditions that Kiev rejects.

The diplomatic push comes as intensifying attacks by both sides around the Black Sea raise the risk of a global food crisis next year. Meanwhile, Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy infrastructure, combined with disrupted Persian Gulf flows, are pushing the global refined-products market toward crisis, creating twin food and energy risks.

The visit merely suggests an intensifying Trump administration campaign to reopen high-level negotiating channels ahead of the midterm elections in the US and end the Russia-Ukraine war after more than four years of costly fighting.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 18:39

Citadel Eyes US Shale As Oil Trading Moves Closer To The Wellhead

Authored by Julianne Geiger via OilPrice.com,

Citadel is shopping for U.S. oil production assets, including a previous bid for WildFire Energy before Magnolia Oil & Gas agreed to buy the Eagle Ford producer for $4.06 billion.

Reuters reported Friday that the hedge fund and commodities trader has held talks with several private-equity owners of oil-weighted exploration and production companies in recent weeks.

WildFire would have given Citadel roughly 53,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day of production, about 70% of it oil, plus 810,000 net acres in South Texas. Magnolia ultimately won the auction in July.

Citadel already trades oil, natural gas, power, and other commodities. It also already owns natural gas production. The firm bought Paloma Natural Gas from EnCap Investments in 2025, renamed it Apex Natural Gas, and added more assets from Comstock Resources and Azul Resources.

Oil would give Citadel another physical position behind its commodities trading business.

U.S. shale has become particularly attractive this year because its barrels do not need the Strait of Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb or another overseas chokepoint to reach Gulf Coast refineries and export terminals. Middle East disruptions have kept crude prices elevated and pushed U.S. producers to some of their strongest earnings in years.

That geography is something Citadel founder Ken Griffin was already worried about months ago. In April, Griffin warned that a six-to-12-month Hormuz closure would push the global economy into recession. His concern was straightforward: sustained oil shortages would raise energy costs, inflation and transportation costs across the global economy.

Owning U.S. production gives a commodities firm direct exposure to the barrels that become more valuable when overseas supply gets disrupted.

Citadel would hardly be alone. Vitol built and later sold its VTX Energy Partners shale business. Gunvor has been pursuing more than $1 billion of Haynesville gas assets.

Private-equity-backed shale producers have traditionally been sold to larger drillers looking for acreage and scale. Citadel's interest adds another class of buyer: firms that already make money trading the price of oil and increasingly want ownership of the oil itself.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 17:30

DeepSeek's 160,000 Huawei Order Is A Real Threat To Nvidia In 2027

Roughly 350 kilometers northwest of Beijing, in the city of Ulanqab, DeepSeek is constructing a data center measured in gigawatts. Running at full capacity, the site would draw enough power to supply 750,000 homes. On Friday, Bloomberg reported that DeepSeek intends to fill a portion of this massive footprint with at least 160,000 of Huawei's newest AI processors, the Ascend 950DT. Once operational, it will stand as the largest known cluster of Chinese-made AI silicon in the world.

Yet, Huawei's processors have a notoriously poor track record when it comes to the heavy lifting of training AI models - a limitation DeepSeek experienced firsthand with the previous chip generation. Instead of building models from scratch, the Huawei chips will be relegated to inference: running DeepSeek's finished models to generate answers for end users. That is not the consolation for Nvidia it sounds like. Inference is the larger pool of compute, the faster-growing one, and increasingly the one that pays - and Huawei has just taken the biggest inference order in China.

What The Chips Won't Do

Every AI model leads a double life. The first phase is training: a grueling, months-long process where tens of thousands of chips work in perfect synchronization, digesting vast swaths of the internet to learn how to predict the next word. The second phase is inference, which encompasses everything that follows - answering chatbot queries, writing code, or summarizing documents. Training determines who holds the technological crown, but inference drives the sheer volume of compute and, increasingly, the revenue.

When Huawei laid out its roadmap last September, it positioned the 950DT as a dual-threat capable of both training and inference. However, Bloomberg's sources indicate DeepSeek has zero intention of using it to train. Last year, buckling under pressure from Chinese authorities to adopt domestic hardware, DeepSeek spent months attempting to train its R2 model on older Ascend chips with on-site Huawei engineers. According to the Financial Times, the effort failed to yield a single successful training run. DeepSeek ultimately reverted to Nvidia for training, keeping Huawei strictly for inference. A year later, and a full hardware generation newer, Friday's report confirms that division of labor remains intact.

This means China's premier domestic chip has successfully captured the inference market, but remains locked out of the training arena. Ironically, this is precisely the boundary U.S. export controls were designed to enforce. Four years of restrictions were intended to block China from training frontier models; Washington never actually set out to prevent them from running finished ones.

What Nvidia keeps in China, meanwhile, barely counts. Its remaining Chinese training demand is fueled by rented overseas compute and alleged smuggling routes, and neither pipeline shows up on Nvidia's balance sheet as legitimate Chinese revenue. The segment Huawei has taken is the one that books.

Huawei Can't Fill It

One issue - Huawei simply cannot manufacture these chips fast enough. According to Bloomberg, severe shortages of top-tier memory will bottleneck 950DT production to the low hundreds of thousands this year. Huawei is actively juggling DeepSeek's massive order against other domestic clients and a fledgling export initiative, meaning it could take well over a year just to fulfill this single contract. DeepSeek has even petitioned Beijing to pressure Huawei into accelerating deliveries.

The root of this bottleneck lies in a component often overlooked in AI coverage. An AI accelerator is only as fast as the high-bandwidth memory (HBM) stacked alongside it. The companies that matter here are South Korea's SK Hynix and Samsung, and the U.S.'s Micron. When Washington severed China's access to advanced HBM in December 2024, Huawei had to pivot to developing its own. The 950 series is the first Ascend generation to feature this in-house memory, and Bloomberg's sources confirm it is exactly what is crippling output.

China's national champion is having its flagship chip rationed by the state, while the nation's most prominent AI lab waits in line begging for a larger allocation. To put this in perspective, Bloomberg reported last year that Huawei's entire 2026 production target is roughly 1.6 million Ascend dies - enough for about 600,000 of the older 910C chips and a scattered mix of newer silicon. Furthermore, the 950DT is generally considered to be on par with Nvidia's Hopper generation (the H100s that fueled the 2023 AI boom). By the time DeepSeek's cluster is fully operational in late 2027, more than a year from now, Nvidia will be two full generations ahead in training - a race Huawei is no longer running.

A Fraction Of The Site

The bigger open question is scale. Bloomberg emphasizes that 160,000 950DTs will constitute "only one chunk" of the gigawatt-scale facility in Ulanqab. What will occupy the rest of the site remains a mystery.

When Elon Musk's xAI activated its initial 100,000 Nvidia H100s in Memphis in 2024, the cluster required roughly 150 megawatts of power. Applying that ratio to 160,000 Hopper-class Huawei chips yields a footprint of about 250 megawatts - roughly a quarter of DeepSeek's planned gigawatt, or perhaps a third if the 950DT proves more power-hungry than Nvidia's hardware (a metric Huawei keeps under wraps). Regardless of the exact math, the vast majority of the gigawatt site is unaccounted for.

Washington has its own theory regarding the missing hardware. In February, a senior Trump administration official claimed that DeepSeek trained its latest model on Nvidia's Blackwell chips - current-generation hardware strictly banned from entering China - and suggested these chips are likely housed at the Inner Mongolia facility. "We're not shipping Blackwells to China," the official stated, though they declined to elaborate on how DeepSeek procured them. DeepSeek did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment at the time. While Washington has repeatedly accused both DeepSeek and Moonshot of relying on smuggled Nvidia silicon, Bloomberg notes it hasn't independently verified these claims.

The Huawei order is the narrative Beijing wants public, while the Blackwell smuggling allegation is the narrative Washington wants public - and neither explains the true scale of the Ulanqab facility. 

Beijing Is The One Saying No

In December, the Trump administration cleared Nvidia to sell its H200 chips - the crown jewel of the Hopper generation - to vetted Chinese buyers, provided the U.S. Treasury received a 25 percent cut. The Commerce Department formalized this rule in January, and Bloomberg reports the administration was ready to authorize the export of up to a million chips. Beijing has approved a fraction of that volume.

Given the options, Chinese tech giants still prefer Nvidia. Both Alibaba and Tencent placed massive orders the moment U.S. restrictions relaxed, and Chinese firms continue to rent top-tier Nvidia compute by the hour from unregulated overseas data centers. The true blockade is being orchestrated in Beijing - as the Chinese government is aggressively weaning its domestic labs off foreign silicon, restricting Nvidia imports, and forcefully pivoting the industry toward Huawei.

So - Huawei is not winning Chinese inference on price and performance. It is winning on quota - which makes the threat to Nvidia a policy instrument rather than a product, and a far harder thing to compete against. 

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has warned for years that U.S. export controls would inevitably forge a self-sufficient Chinese chip industry. His prophecy is now being fulfilled - by the Chinese government itself. Regardless of what Washington permits, Beijing acts as the ultimate gatekeeper, utilizing import quotas to force its most critical AI labs to adopt Huawei hardware for their fastest-growing workloads.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 16:55

With Its War On Prediction Markets, The Gaming Lobby Plays A Bad Hand

Authored by Dean Heller via RealClearMarkets,

There's a saying in Vegas, the house always wins. I represented Nevada in Congress for more than a decade and I can attest to the truth behind that phrase. But what I learned is that it's rarely a fair fight. The gaming industry works to stack the odds against competition, whether it's at the tables, in courtrooms, or in the halls of Congress.

It was never a fair fight, which is why the gaming industry is so worried about prediction markets. Prediction markets are far from perfect, but they're fair. There is no house. It's no wonder the gambling industry is working overtime to stop them. Recently, the American Gaming Association tried to join a lawsuit in Wisconsin against the CFTC, and its lobbyists went to Congress this week asking for an outright ban on sports event contracts.

While representing Nevada, I sat on the Senate Finance and Banking committees, and whipped votes to protect our gaming industry from anything that smelled like competition. When Sheldon Adelson wanted a federal ban on online gambling, I backed the Restoration of America's Wire Act and warned that internet gaming would be "a final nail" for brick-and-mortar casinos. Looking back, I was probably being a little dramatic. The bill failed anyway, in large part because opponents argued it would cost states an economic boost and push bettors toward unregulated offshore sites.

So when I watch the gaming lobby go to war against prediction markets today, I recognize the play. I ran it.

The industry has launched a multi-state litigation campaign, fired off cease-and-desist letters to stop sports event contracts, and cheered as 41 state attorneys general urged the CFTC to cede jurisdiction over these markets to the states. In certain states, lottery and gaming agencies are colluding with the American Gaming Association. When your state gaming agency and the casino lobby are copying each other's homework, it's fair to ask who's actually regulating whom.

Here's what makes the crusade hard to take seriously. While the casinos lecture Washington about consumer protection, a lawsuit in Philadelphia is showing the country how the sportsbook business actually works. A gambler named Terry Thompson wagered roughly $18.5 million on FanDuel and lost more than $1.5 million. He was a "VIP." His reward for all that losing? His FanDuel host arranged a personalized Cameo video from Phillies star Bryce Harper, who says he never consented and thought he was recording a holiday greeting. Thompson is now suing FanDuel for feeding his addiction, and the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board is reviewing sportsbooks' use of celebrity messages to keep high rollers betting.

Think about the business model that produces that story. Sportsbooks make money when customers lose. So the customers losing the most get the white-glove treatment, and the ones who win too much get shown the door.

There's a reason prediction markets can be straight with their customers in a way sportsbooks can't. An exchange collects a small fee on every trade, win or lose, so no revenue rides on anyone's losing streak. When a platform's paycheck doesn't depend on a customer going broke, it can step in at the signs of trouble, the repeat losses and the chasing, without touching its own bottom line. And instead of fighting oversight, this industry keeps asking for more of it.

Some of these markets, like Kalshi and NADEX, are federally regulated, based in the United States, and volunteering to pay state taxes. North Carolina just passed a law recognizing federal oversight and taxing prediction market revenue, which was smarter than burning taxpayer money in court and inconvenient for the claim that these platforms cost states money. New Jersey came close to taxing prediction markets this year, and the loudest opposition came from the union representing Atlantic City's own casino workers, who argued that taxing prediction markets would "legitimize" a competitor to their industry. They'd rather forgo the tax revenue than admit prediction markets are here to stay.

My advice to my old friends in gaming is the advice I wish someone had given me during the Wire Act fight: innovate, don't litigate. The knee-jerk lawsuits didn't stop sports betting, tribal gaming, or the internet, and they won't stop this. I love Las Vegas. It's one of my favorite places on earth, and there's plenty of room for everyone. Let consumers decide.

After all, this is the town that will take a bet on anything. Funny that the one wager it won't touch is a fair fight.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 16:20

Under-The-Radar Oklahoma Bitcoin Mining Site Condemned After Leaking 3 Million Gallons Of Water

A massive water leak in El Reno, Oklahoma has brought new scrutiny to a Bitcoin mining operation that city officials say had been operating without required approvals and in violation of multiple building and safety codes, according to KFOR 4. Three million gallons of water were leaked, according to KOCO ABC. 

The facility, operated by Athlon BT LLC, had largely escaped public attention until the leak was discovered. City officials say the company had also installed a fire hydrant without their knowledge, while questions remain about how water was being used at the site.

Athlon originally applied for building permits in 2022. By 2023, however, El Reno had issued a stop-work order after the permits expired and officials identified multiple fire and life-safety code violations. The company was given until December 2023 to address the problems, according to the city.

Instead, officials say Athlon continued construction and eventually began operating the facility despite lacking the inspections and final certificate of occupancy required by the city. Officials have cited problems involving electrical systems, drainage and other areas of the property.

“They really weren’t in compliance at all,” city spokesperson Lyndsay Bayne said.

The discovery came as a surprise not only to residents but also to local officials, who said the Bitcoin mining operation had attracted little attention before the leak, according to KFOR 4.

Athlon had previously described the structures on its website as “mobile data centers.” The operation, however, differs considerably from the large hyperscale data centers proposed in communities such as Yukon and Piedmont, which have generated debate over their potential demands on local infrastructure and water supplies.

The KFOR 4 report says that El Reno officials say Athlon told the city its equipment was air-cooled and therefore should not have required water for cooling. According to the city, the water line involved in the leak was supposed to serve only a fire hydrant.

That hydrant itself has raised additional questions. Officials say Athlon installed it behind the property without notifying the city, and it did not appear on municipal records. The hydrant was also reportedly concealed beneath a large pile of brush.

KFOR later observed above-ground piping that appeared to connect the mobile data center units and extend toward the hydrant. Athlon’s website, before becoming unavailable, also referenced what the company called “hydro-cooling technology.” Those details have prompted questions about whether the water line may have served a purpose beyond fire protection.

Photo: KOCO ABC

KFOR reported that its attempts to obtain an explanation from Athlon have gone unanswered. Calls and emails to the company received no response, and its website subsequently displayed a maintenance notice.

After the water leak was discovered, El Reno condemned the property.

The episode is unfolding amid a broader debate over data center development in Oklahoma, although city officials have stressed that Athlon’s Bitcoin mining operation should not be confused with the much larger data center projects being proposed elsewhere.

“El Reno doesn’t have any large data centers or any plans to have any large data centers,” Bayne said. “This was completely under the radar.”

The city has since strengthened its rules governing future data center developments. A recently adopted ordinance requires proposed data centers and large artificial intelligence facilities to undergo greater scrutiny and provide an opportunity for public comment before they can move forward.

For residents concerned about the strain such facilities could place on local resources, the Athlon controversy has added urgency to calls for stronger oversight. The unresolved questions surrounding the company’s permits, infrastructure and water use are also likely to keep the Bitcoin mining operation under scrutiny as city officials determine how the facility was able to operate for so long without full compliance.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 15:45

FICO Crashes As Trump Housing Chief Pulte Cracks Mortgage-Score Monopoly

"Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion have been overcharging Americans for far too long," Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte wrote on X late Thursday.

The Trump administration's campaign against the cost of credit scores and reports used in the mortgage industry sent shares of Fair Isaac, the company behind FICO scores, as well as Equifax and TransUnion, tumbling on Friday morning.

Pulte continued: "This will end soon. We are seriously considering bi-merge, and stronger solutions (SAFER and SOUNDER). We will not allow companies to take advantage of American consumers. No more."

Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion have been overcharging Americans for far too long. This will end soon. We are seriously considering bi-merge, and stronger solutions (SAFER and SOUNDER). We will not allow companies to take advantage of American consumers. No more.

— Pulte (@pulte) September 4, 2026

Pulte's warning was accompanied by a Reuters report that mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will allow all lenders to use VantageScore, a competing credit-scoring model, expanding a rollout across 50 lenders.

The move to lower costs for homebuyers and boost competition in the mortgage credit-scoring market, which FICO dominates, is seen by the market as a direct challenge to FICO's long-standing dominance.

Ashish Sabadra, an equity-research analyst at RBC Capital Markets, provided clients on Friday morning with more details about the industry implications following Pulte's X post:

Assessing the Impact on Credit Bureaus (EFX/TRU/EXPN) and FICO

Our view: Tweet from FHFA Director Bill Pulte suggests the agency is seriously considering permitting bi-merge credit reports for conforming loans. If fully adopted across the mortgage market, this shift could negatively impact up to one-third of mortgage inquiries. Beyond volume loss, the move would also introduce greater competition in mortgage credit reporting, a dynamic we will monitor closely for signs of pricing pressure.

Regarding bureau-level impact, EFX carries the greatest mortgage exposure given its mortgage solutions and income and employment verification businesses, though these same assets also present meaningful bundling opportunities. However, with the remaining third-party resellers estimated to control 75%+ of the market, these players may preferentially gravitate toward TRU and EXPN. EXPN has the least mortgage exposure among the three bureaus and would likely face the smallest revenue headwind from this potential regulatory change.

Separately, Bill Pulte also tweeted that, effective immediately, he is instructing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to approve all lenders to use VantageScore. VantageScore adoption has already gained meaningful traction, with VS4 market share reaching approximately 25% at UWM and ~34% at Rocket through August 25th. However, while 50 lenders participated in the pilot program, Fannie Mae data indicates that only four mortgage lenders were actively issuing VantageScore loans. Pulte's directive to open adoption to all lenders would therefore represent a significant broadening of the program. 

Mortgage exposure: In 2025, Mortgages represented ~21% of EFX's revenues, with mortgage credit reports and mortgage solutions collectively accounting for ~11% of total revenues, or 32% of USIS revenues. For TRU, mortgage exposure stood at ~13% of total revenues, representing ~35% of US Financial Services revenues. EXPN has comparatively limited exposure at ~4% of total revenues.

Background. FHFA Director Bill Pulte announced last night that effective immediately, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have been instructed to approve all lenders to use VantageScore as an eligible credit scoring system. The directive follows a successful initial rollout in which 50 lenders delivered loans using VantageScore under the program.

In a separate post, Pulte stated that EFX, TRU, and EXPN are overcharging American consumers and that he is seriously considering a bi-merge credit pull requirement for conforming loans, as well as structural reforms.

Fair Isaac crashed as much as 21%, its sharpest intraday decline since March 2020 if losses sustain through close. Equifax and TransUnion each tumbled as much as 11%.

Separately, TD Cowen analyst Jaret Seiberg told clients that Pulte's attack on ​​​​​​mortgage-related costs could support the administration's affordability message ahead of the midterm elections this fall.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 14:35

The Soft Antichrist Of The AI Age: What Everyone Is Missing About The US-China Arms Race

Authored by Patrick Feeley via Substack,

I. The word

Peter Thiel spent the back half of last year giving private lectures on the Antichrist, and the word has been loose in the discourse ever since. His political reading is the old one. The Antichrist is not a cartoon devil. He is the figure who arrives offering peace and safety, and who uses the fear of catastrophe to install one universal order. In Thiel's telling that figure is a regulator. He stops technology in the name of survival. The price of the peace is stagnation.

I want the frame. I do not want his conclusion.

The more probable figure is not the one who promises safety. It is the one who promises growth. Most of the world does not lie awake about existential risk from machine intelligence. It lies awake about electricity, logistics, credit, tax collection, and a median citizen who is twenty four and needs work. To that world the universal offer is not a moratorium. It is a stack. Cheap. Financed. Hosted. Present. Already attached to the handsets, the ports, and the power.

That is the soft Antichrist. It does not arrive with a speech about ending history. It arrives as the only AI that can grow your GDP.

I am not writing theology. I am writing underwriting.

II. The comforting story

The market is telling itself a story. The AI race is a contest of models. America builds the best systems. China copies. Europe regulates. Capital therefore clusters around closed labs, chipmakers, and hyperscale cloud. The scoreboard is a benchmark table.

That story is not false. It is incomplete in a way that misprices power. It treats the richest customers as the only customers that matter. It treats evaluations as destiny. It treats national power as a software demo.

I disagree.

The race will be decided by who becomes the default operating system for the economies that still have the most growth left. Those economies will not adopt AI as a lifestyle product. They will adopt it as a growth tool. They will take the stack that is cheap, present, financed, and attached to what they already run. If that stack is Chinese, Beijing does not need to conquer anyone. It only needs to become expensive to leave.

III. Where the mass actually is

When Sargasso maps AI adoption across emerging GDP rather than across model releases, the picture is not the one the market is priced for.

Start with the denominator. On purchasing power terms, IMF projections for 2026 put China at about $44.3 trillion against $32.4 trillion for the United States. India is near $18.9 trillion. Indonesia clears $5.4 trillion and Brazil $5.2 trillion. Turkey is at $4.0 trillion, Mexico $3.6 trillion, Saudi Arabia $2.9 trillion, Egypt $2.6 trillion, Nigeria $2.4 trillion. Nominal dollars still flatter America, and by a wide margin. China's nominal print is about $20.9 trillion against the same $32.4 trillion for the United States. Both numbers are true. They answer different questions. Nominal tells you who can buy foreign assets. PPP tells you how much physical and administrative activity there is to automate. For an adoption thesis, the second number is the one that matters.

Ray Dalio has been describing the political consequence in plain terms. He calls it a tribute system. A hierarchical order in which leaders travel to Beijing to acknowledge relative power in exchange for access and stability. He ties it to a growing view abroad that American security guarantees will not be honored under stress. I take the framing seriously. I do not treat it as scripture. Ports and rail were the first set of rails. Models will be the next set.

IV. The evidence is already in the download data

This part of the argument is no longer speculative.

Over roughly four years, the American share of model downloads on Hugging Face fell from about sixty percent to the mid teens by late 2025, according to reporting in The Wire China. Hugging Face's own one year review of the DeepSeek moment is blunt on the composition shift. DeepSeek R1 became the most liked model on the platform in its history. The top of that list is no longer majority American. Baidu went from zero public Hugging Face releases in 2024 to more than one hundred in 2025. ByteDance and Tencent raised their release counts eight to nine fold. Of newly created models under a year old, downloads for Chinese models surpassed any other country, including the United States. Western startups and researchers now routinely fine tune Chinese base models because those are the largest open weights available.

The Wire China's Southeast Asia reporting puts the commercial logic in local language. A Jakarta lab head said developers will always pick the cheapest one. A Malaysian founder said he wants the biggest model and there is no Western open source offering at that size. Chinese cloud providers were running thirty seven availability zones across six Southeast Asian regions against thirty across four for the Western field.

None of this shows up cleanly in a frontier benchmark table. All of it shows up in switching costs three years from now.

V. The institutional layer

Beijing is not leaving the volume layer to price alone. In July 2026 it stood up the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization in Shanghai, with twenty nine founding members. Public reporting names Russia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil, and a broader set spanning Africa and Latin America among the signatories. The five year commitments attached to the body, as reported by Caixin and The Diplomat, are unglamorous and therefore serious. Training placements. Joint application centers with regional blocs. A weather early warning system deployed into dozens of countries.

Read that list as an underwriter. Training placements create the administrators who will write the next procurement. Application centers create the reference deployments. Weather systems create dependency inside a ministry that cannot afford an outage. Standards get set that way. Not with a better model. With a bureaucracy that has already learned one.

VI. America is running the right play against the wrong clock

Washington understands the problem. Executive Order 14320, signed July 23, 2025, created the American AI Exports Program to push full stack packages abroad. Chips, models, applications, cybersecurity, cloud, and data centers sold together. Analysis from the Institute for Progress argues the contested emerging markets that should sit at the center of that effort include Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. That is the correct map. It is essentially the map in this piece.

The tension is that the same government running an export promotion program is running an export control program, and the second one moves faster than the first. The UAE's status was upgraded only in July 2026, and even then chip access was scoped to approved entities. Meanwhile Huawei has been shopping Ascend parts into the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand, and courting Egypt directly. Beijing has published a self sufficiency ambition on a near term horizon and is moving to expand domestic AI chip output.

Set aside whether the controls are correct on the merits. Underwrite the second order effect. Capability still flows outward through commercial relationships and distillation. American open efforts start constrained at home. The result is a one way street into the volume layer of the world economy, at exactly the moment when the volume layer is where the standard gets set.

Western discourse is spending its attention elsewhere. Alignment theater. Synthetic media. White collar displacement in rich cities. Those are real problems. They are also rich country problems. The quieter failure is dependency. Once an emerging state's logistics, credit, schools, and revenue collection run on foreign models, switching stops being a procurement decision. It becomes a sovereignty decision. Sovereignty decisions do not get made on price.

VII. The map I would force into any serious strategy memo

When we screen a country the way we screen a company, we are not asking which model it admires. We are asking what it has already installed, who financed the installation, and what it would cost to rip out.

Asia. India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka.

Middle East and Gulf. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Turkey, Iran.

Africa. Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, Angola, Ghana.

Latin America. Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia.

These are not equivalent cases. India can build its own. The Gulf can simply buy, and is buying from both sides. Vietnam and Indonesia industrialize and will take whatever shortens the industrialization. Nigeria and Ethiopia need administration and power far more than they need chat interfaces. Brazil and Mexico live between Western finance and Chinese trade and will hedge accordingly. Pakistan and Kazakhstan sit on corridors Beijing already financed once.

The common variable is growth urgency. Growth urgency selects the stack that shows up, and it selects it quickly.

VIII. The throat

Compute is the oil of this cycle, and the supply chain has a throat. Counterpoint Research put TSMC at seventy three percent of the pure play foundry market in the second quarter of 2026. Its position at the leading nodes is more concentrated than that headline suggests.

You do not need an invasion scenario to price the leverage. You need governments that come to believe only one counterpart can reliably keep the chips, the cloud, the handsets, and the financing flowing. That belief is cheaper to create than a fab and harder to reverse than a tariff.

IX. Two futures

In the first, America wins the cathedral. Benchmarks stay American. Safety papers multiply. Closed models remain impressive and expensive. Emerging economies still buy the stack attached to Chinese devices, Chinese capital, and turnkey Chinese infrastructure. Global token volume follows global GDP, which is to say it follows the parish. The United States keeps the prestige and loses the installed base.

In the second, America treats emerging GDP as the actual battlefield. Competitive open weights exist and are hostable by states that want an alternative to Beijing without becoming a tenant of a single American lab. Energy, chips, and cloud are treated as national goods rather than as line items. The public companies that can genuinely deploy AI into durable operations are valued above the ones that can only demonstrate it.

Markets are priced closer to the first future than the evidence supports. That gap is the part I care about.

X. This is the same thesis, widened

In Pilot Purgatory I argued that AI works and capital is available, and that the binding constraint is organizational. Companies cannot absorb what they have bought. Forty two S&P 500 companies captured 312 percent of the index's price return since ChatGPT while the other 458 captured 38 percent. Fifty eight percent of small and mid cap companies claim an AI strategy and under one percent describe implementation as mature.

That was a governance problem inside public companies. Widen the aperture by one order of magnitude and it is the same problem at the level of the state. Intelligence is being manufactured at declining cost. Absorption is the bottleneck. When Sargasso underwrites a company, the question is whether the organization can metabolize the technology it has already purchased. Run that question at the level of a country with weak administrative capacity and urgent growth targets, and the answer is worse. That is precisely why the party that clears the bottleneck earns something more durable than a product cycle. It writes the rails under the next order.

XI. What I would underwrite

If you underwrite AI as a feature race between rich country labs, you will be right about the models and wrong about the century.

Underwrite instead who owns the rails that India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Vietnam, Nigeria, Egypt, and Turkey will actually run. Underwrite who captures adoption where governance is thin and growth is urgent. Underwrite the closed labs and the national champions as though their real competitor is not the next chat interface, but a hierarchy that intends to make itself impossible to leave.

The AI race that matters is not who builds the smartest model in the richest city. It is who becomes the operating system for the economies that still have the most growth left in them.

This is not a recommendation. It is my map.

Sargasso Capital Management is a constructivist investment firm. This post is research and commentary. It is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or interest in any fund.

Sources

1. Fortune, "Peter Thiel is delivering 4 private sold-out lectures at a club in San Francisco, about the Antichrist," September 2, 2025. Link; Reason, "I listened to over 7 hours of Peter Thiel's leaked Antichrist lectures," October 14, 2025. Link
2. Visual Capitalist, "The World's Largest Economies in 2026, Nominal vs. PPP," using IMF World Economic Outlook projections. Link; IMF DataMapper, GDP based on PPP. Link
3. Fortune, "Ray Dalio says China's ascent ushers in era of 'tribute system,'" May 16, 2026. Link; Fortune, "Ray Dalio just finished a 10-day trip to China," June 24, 2026. Link
4. The Wire China, "Surrounding American AI from the South," June 21, 2026. Link
5. Hugging Face, "One Year Since the 'DeepSeek Moment,'" January 20, 2026. Link
6. Reuters, "Twenty-nine countries sign agreement to establish global AI cooperation body," July 16, 2026. Link; Caixin Global, "China Launches Shanghai-Based AI Governance Body With 29 Founding Nations," July 17, 2026. Link; The Diplomat, "With New AI Governance Organization, China Seeks to Formalize Its Global AI Influence," July 2026. Link
7. Executive Order 14320, "Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack," July 23, 2025. Link; Institute for Progress, "America's AI Exports Program." Link
8. Morgan Lewis, "BIS Upgrades UAE Export Control Status, with AI Chip Access Limited to Approved Entities," July 2026. Link
9. South China Morning Post, "Huawei eyes export of AI chips to Middle East, Southeast Asia to rival Nvidia," July 12, 2025. Link
10. Bloomberg via Free Malaysia Today, "Huawei pitches AI chips to Egypt in test of US tech diplomacy," August 26, 2026. Link
11. RCR Wireless, "China aims to triple AI chip output," August 28, 2025. Link
12. Counterpoint Research, Global Pure Foundry Market Share, Q2 2026. Link
13. Sargasso Capital Management, Pilot Purgatory, May 6, 2026. Link

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 14:00

Foldable iPhone Production Reportedly Limited Ahead Of Launch

Apple is expected to unveil its first, long-awaited foldable iPhone next Wednesday at its product event in Cupertino, California. Rumored to be called the iPhone Ultra, the device could start at more than $2,000, with MacRumors estimating that the new iPhone could cost as much as $2,499.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo expects the company to introduce the foldable alongside the iPhone 18 Pro lineup, although Nikkei Asia reports that manufacturing constraints could delay preorders.

Sources deep within Apple's supply chain told the Japanese outlet that production lines for the foldable iPhone are producing only a few hundred units per day as the company works to meet its extremely high quality-control standards.

"Apple has very high quality requirements and added an extra trial run in August ahead of actual production. However, production is ramping up slowly, with output currently at only a few hundred units a day in late August. That initial volume could be challenging to meet market demand," one supply-chain manager told the outlet.

The simple production math is absolutely brutal. Apple has reportedly targeted production of between 8 million and 10 million foldable iPhones this year. Even at 500 units per day, the current production rate would yield fewer than 200,000 phones over the course of a year.

The iPhone Ultra is now said to feature MagSafe charging after all.

Previous leaks suggested Apple was skipping this feature on their first foldable due to space constraints. pic.twitter.com/95EomHTV9c

— AppleTrack (@appltrack) September 2, 2026

Separately, Kuo expects manufacturing constraints to delay preorders until the fourth quarter. That would mirror the 2017 rollout of the iPhone X, which was unveiled in September but did not become available for preorder until late October.

Next week's unveiling will be the first major product showcase under CEO John Ternus, the longtime hardware chief who succeeded Tim Cook last Tuesday. Cook has moved into the executive chairman role after leading Apple for 15 years.

Late this week, Brandon Nispel, an equity research analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets, published a note to clients outlining what to expect at next week's launch event:

We think Apple's Sept. 9 iPhone launch event is likely a negative catalyst for shares where we likely learn the main unknown, iPhone pricing, neither of which we think hold positive implications. We think either: 1) a larger price increase can soften gross margin pressure, but likely will impact unit volumes and bring "sticker shock"; or 2) prices are raised more selectively, amplifying the focus on gross margins, and a possible need to raise prices again in the future; we don't think either is a great outcome. Apple's Sept. event is typically followed by modest negative reaction to shares.

What do we expect to be announced?

We expect 3 new iPhones: iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the iPhone Fold/Ultra.

iPhone 18 Pro

The iPhone 18 Pro is expected to maintain the same 6.3 inch display as the iPhone 17 Pro, while moving to an A20 Pro processor, vs. the A19 Pro chip in the 17 Pro. The A20 Pro should provide better performance and power efficiency when compared to the iPhone 17 Pro, while Apple's C2 modem is expected to improve battery life when using cellular data and improve performance in congested coverage areas. The smartphone is also set to be equipped with an upgraded variable aperture camera allowing users to adjust the amount of light passes through the camera lens. Additionally, the iPhone will have a 4,288mAh battery vs. 4,252mAh in the iPhone 17 Pro.

iPhone 18 Pro Max

The iPhone 18 Pro Max is expected to maintain the same 6.9 inch display as the 17 Pro Max, similarly moving to the A20 Pro processor, and includes a 5,567mAh battery compared to the 5,088mAh battery in the 17 Pro Max, which may increase the thickness of the iPhone. The Pro Max is also expected to include the new variable aperture camera.

iPhone Fold/Ultra

Apple is expected to release its first ever foldable iPhone, which is expected to have a 5.5 inch display when closed and a 7.8 inch display when opened. The Ultra may include the A20 Pro processor, C2 modem, a titanium frame, and the Company will bring back Touch ID on the side of the device rather than having Face ID. It is anticipated to be Apple's thinnest iPhone yet at ~4.5mm, coming in roughly 1mm thinner than the iPhone Air, which was launched at last year's event. However, the phone is expected to come with a camera downgrade compared to the other models, with two rear cameras and no telephoto lens. The Fold/Ultra is also rumored to include two batteries, which could make it the largest battery capacity in an iPhone.

We expect 2 new Apple Watches: Apple Watch Series 12 and Watch Ultra 4.

We expect new AirPods.

We expect timing of iOS 27 launch timing to be solidified.

What's the typical reaction to the event?

We believe given Apple is one of the world's most well reported on companies, announcements at the event rarely are surprising to investors and it doesn't pay to be bullish going into the event. In the past 5 years, Apple's average stock performance the day the iPhone is announced is -0.72%, and T+5 day performance is -1.22%.

What's our view?

At this point, we expect iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max builds of 73M in F4Q26/F1Q27, which compares to our estimate of 67.7M in the prior year, so on a like-for-like basis, we expect a higher number of iPhone 18 Pro/Pro Max builds vs. the iPhone 17. However, when including the iPhone 18 Fold/Ultra and the iPhone 17 base model, we see total iPhone 18 builds of 80M, vs. ~91M in the prior year, where we see declining unit volumes due to the lack of iPhone 18 base model. We suspect the decline in unit volume of ~12% is made up for with higher pricing due to mix as well as higher unit ASPs. We are factoring in iPhone Pro price increases of $150 to $1,249 and iPhone Pro Max price increases of $200 to $1,399, and assume a $2,199 price for the iPhone Fold/Ultra

Apple shares are up 17.7% year to date as of Friday's close.

The average 12-month price target among analysts tracked by Bloomberg is $329.91, representing roughly 3% upside from current levels.

Also next week, Chinese smartphone rival Huawei will release the latest generation of its trifold smartphone on Monday, just ahead of Apple's launch event.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 13:25

Thank You Rick Santelli, You Legend

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

It was announced this past week that Rick Santelli will be retiring next month.

So today I offer a tribute to perhaps the last man standing on CNBC with a functioning economics textbook, and one of the few figures in financial media who could simply tell you that one plus one equaled two without disappearing into an academic sounding, postmodern, jargon filled bullshit word salad that somehow ended with the conclusion that paying a quadrillion dollars a day in interest on the national debt while inflation ran at 10% was a sign of economic prosperity.

Santelli has been on CNBC for years, but his appearances, especially more recently, often seemed confined to a few precious minutes talking about Treasuries, yields, the Fed and the macro picture. But he never let the limited airtime limit the subject matter.

He used those short spots to shoehorn in a daily reminder that supply and demand had not been repealed, incentives still mattered, capital actually had a cost, debt was still debt, and governments had not discovered some previously unknown branch of mathematics in which borrowing and spending enormous amounts of money made everyone permanently richer.

What was supposed to be a quick update on the 10 year Treasury routinely became a five minute crash course in basic economics, usually delivered with the urgency of a man driving who desperately needs to piss and just learned the next rest stop is still 90 miles away.

That was what made him such a breath of fresh air. There was always a healthy Austrian school instinct underneath the commentary: skepticism toward central planning, respect for price signals, suspicion of artificially cheap money, and the old fashioned belief that markets contain information that policymakers might want to consider before deciding they know better.

None of this should have been particularly radical, but in modern financial media, suggesting that there might be consequences to borrowing trillions of dollars can occasionally make you sound like you arrived at the studio carrying a musket and a copy of The Road to Serfdom.

Santelli also had the irritating habit of asking what might happen after the thing everyone else was busy celebrating. If rates were going to stay at zero forever, perhaps there would be consequences. If Washington was going to spend another trillion dollars, perhaps somebody should ask where the trillion dollars came from. If the Fed was going to flood the system with liquidity, perhaps asset prices would cease to be entirely reliable indicators of underlying economic health. If inflation appeared after an extraordinary monetary and fiscal expansion, perhaps we didn’t need a team of PhDs to discover an entirely new explanation for it.

His real offense was refusing to participate in one of the great linguistic achievements of modern economics, where unpleasant concepts can apparently be eliminated simply by giving them nicer names. Debt became stimulus, government spending became investment, money printing became liquidity, bailouts became stabilization, intervention became support, and inflation became transitory.

Rick would sit there listening to all of this and eventually ask the embarrassingly unsophisticated question that everyone else had somehow managed to avoid: who is actually paying for all this shit?

You could almost feel the collective discomfort through the television. Somewhere a strategist had prepared seventeen slides explaining why an additional $2 trillion of government borrowing was bullish for equities, while Santelli was committing the social faux pas of wondering where the f*ck the money was actually coming from…

“Do you think I want to take a shower every hour? The last place I'm ever gonna live or work is D.C.” - Rick Santelli

That was the beauty of a Santelli segment. He could begin with the perfectly innocent observation that the 10 year yield had moved four basis points and, five minutes later, somehow be halfway through an impromptu seminar on central banking, fiscal policy, monetary debasement, moral hazard, government incentives, price discovery and the accumulated economic wisdom of several centuries…all while making a face like he was passing a bladder stone the size of a regulation size WNBA basketball.

And just as he was arriving at some crucial economic question upon whose answer the survival of free markets and Western civilization depended, someone would remind him that they had to go to commercial.

Most financial television can spend an hour producing five minutes of genuinely useful information. Santelli somehow had the opposite problem. He was perpetually trying to stuff an hour of economic common sense into the five minutes he had been allotted. You could practically sense the control room watching the clock while Rick attempted to explain why $30 trillion, then $32 trillion, then $34 trillion of debt might conceivably deserve more attention than whether the latest CPI print was one tenth above or below consensus.

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And whether you agreed with every Santelli rant was never really the point. I certainly don’t think you had to. What mattered was that somebody was willing to challenge the premise of the conversation rather than merely debate the approved range of conclusions. Maybe debt isn’t wealth. Maybe borrowing isn’t saving. Maybe government spending doesn’t become productive investment simply because somebody puts the word “investment” in the name of the bill. Maybe artificially suppressing the price of capital for years creates distortions. Maybe incentives matter more than intentions.

Most importantly, Santelli understood the concept that seems to disappear fastest whenever Washington or the Fed gets involved: tradeoffs. Every policy has a cost, every intervention changes incentives, every subsidy encourages something, every tax discourages something, every artificially cheap dollar of capital ends up somewhere, and every debt ultimately belongs to somebody.

There is no free lunch, even when Congress has renamed the lunch the American Prosperity and Strategic Lunch Affordability Act and the Congressional Budget Office has produced a chart showing that it pays for itself in 2047.

That perspective made Santelli unusual because financial media is generally very good at explaining what happened over the previous fifteen minutes. Rick was often more interested in what happens over the next fifteen years. He brought historical memory into conversations that sometimes seemed to assume economic history began at the previous Fed meeting, and he maintained an almost pathological attachment to the idea that economic principles continue to operate even when acknowledging them would be inconvenient.

A good Santelli rant was part economics lecture, part old school “go f*ck yourself” style Chicago trading floor, part ideological argument and part angry drunk uncle at Thanksgiving. Underneath the theatrics, though, the message was remarkably consistent. Markets matter because prices contain information. Incentives matter because people respond to them. Debt matters because eventually somebody has to service it. Interest rates matter because capital is not supposed to be free. Supply and demand matter because declaring something affordable does not create more of it.

Most of all, arithmetic matters because reality has an annoying habit of refusing to participate in whatever narrative happens to be fashionable at the moment.

Here’s some of my favorite Santelli rants for you to enjoy. His commentary on Obama’s mortgage plan:

Commenting on the US’s debt downgrade during Obama:

Destroying Steve Liesman on mortgages:

Laying bare that QE can never end:

Questioning why we can never get out of crisis mode:

And finally, Santelli taking Andrew Ross-Sorkin to task on restrictions when the debate had just started taking place during COVID:

Rick Santelli at his best was skeptical, argumentative, occasionally volcanic, frequently hilarious and stubbornly unwilling to pretend that changing the terminology changed the underlying economics. In a financial media culture that can sometimes confuse consensus with wisdom and complexity with sophistication, he remained attached to a handful of remarkably simple questions. What are the incentives? Where is the money coming from? What happens to prices? What are the unintended consequences? And, eventually, who pays?

The questions Rick asked weren’t especially glamorous, but they have survived every economic fad invented to avoid answering them. Just as Santelli’s legacy will do, no matter how many guest spots MSNBC gives to Elizabeth Warren, Paul Krugman, Jeremy Siegel and Zohran Mamdani in the future. Godspeed, Rick.

---

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Contributor posts, guest posts and curated posts have been hand selected by me, but have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author or reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

I cannot guarantee the accuracy of any or all facts and figures included in this article though I made an effort to get them right. I have been wrong before and will be wrong again, and encourage you to always double check, do your own research and speak to a licensed financial professional, which I am not.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things I’m bearish on. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions.

Starting in 2026, I have been attempting to no longer actively trade as much as I once did (read my story here). My goal is for my investing/saving to be done by recurring contributions mostly to sector ETFs and a few select equities, trusted third parties who oversee my accounts, and advisors. Such advisors or funds, through individual equities, options, index funds, mutual funds, ETFs, or other securities, may have positions in, exposure to, or holdings of names mentioned herein that I know nothing about. It is possible I could own, have exposure to, or not own anything, at any point. In an attempt to lead a healthier lifestyle, I’ve also excluded myself from fantasy sports, sports betting, online and in-person casinos and prediction markets.

Any of my positions can change immediately as soon as I publish, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier. Hence, why I am a writer.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. Many times I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour.

Also, again I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it multiple times because it’s that important you understand.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 12:50

NANO Nuclear Advances KRONOS With Baker Hughes, Adds Enveniam To Fuel Efforts

Three weeks after we noted that NANO Nuclear Energy's vertical-integration strategy was beginning to look more like a physical fuel cycle than a corporate slide deck, the company has delivered a pair of updates spanning both ends of the nuclear value chain.

NANO’s announcement from Thursday details ongoing progress for the design of a circulation pump for cooling their KRONOS reactor, and Friday's announcement describes the multi-prong agreement with a new engineering firm for developing their nuclear fuels business segment.

$NNE NANO Nuclear and Howden, a Baker Hughes Business, Advance Engineering Collaboration for the KRONOS MMR™ Primary Helium Circulator to Detailed Design Phasehttps://t.co/ueOKR7DcOp

— NANO Nuclear Energy (NASDAQ: NNE) (@nano_nuclear) September 3, 2026

Development of the primary helium circulator was moved from preliminary engineering to detailed design. Howden, a Baker Hughes subsidiary following the acquisition of Chart Industries, is “building upon the reactor performance requirements established by NANO Nuclear.”

The helium circulator is one of the most critical components of high-temperature gas-cooled reactors like NANO's KRONOS design. It moves helium coolant through the reactor to transfer heat from the core and out to the secondary system.

Howden has established a “mature technical foundation” which allows for further optimization in manufacturing planning.

Jay Yu, Founder and Chairman of NANO Nuclear Energy, noted:

"each engineering milestone strengthens the industrial ecosystem supporting KRONOS while further positioning the program for future first-of-a-kind deployment and long-term commercial success."

The day after announcing progress with the circulator, NANO released a statement detailing a new agreement with Enveniam.

The MOU establishes a collaboration between the two companies addressing a wide range of operations across the nuclear value chain. The press release points to six principle workstreams under the combined effort:

• Nuclear fuel transportation
• Conversion and deconversion
• Microreactor commercialization
• Advanced manufacturing
• Domestic fuel supply chain
• Commercial energy markets

James Walker, Chief Executive Officer of NANO Nuclear Energy, highlights:

"Enveniam's capabilities closely align with our expertise and business plans across these critical workflows. We believe this collaboration can help us evaluate projects more efficiently, identify execution risks earlier and build stronger delivery plans as opportunities advance toward definitive agreements."

Most notably, this new work between NANO and Enveniam follows the announcement last year that Enveniam will be serving as Lead Project Integrator for LIS Technologies.

There, Enveniam will lead “the design, development, and construction of the LIST laser-based uranium enrichment facility.”

LIS Technologies and NANO Nuclear are working together to develop a vertically integrated fuel chain, with LIS fulfilling the enrichment stage. NANO is working on multiple other stages of the fuel chain, to include conversion and deconversion, fuel fabrication, and fuel transportation.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 12:15

Biden-Appointed Judge Dismisses DOJ Lawsuit Against New Jersey Law Restricting ICE Operations

Authored by Troy Myers via The Epoch Times,

A district judge ruled on Friday that New Jersey can continue restricting federal immigration officers from using state property for immigration enforcement-related purposes.

New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill is shown in this file photo. Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images

The Department of Justice (DOJ) had accused New Jersey in a lawsuit of violating the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, also known as preemption, which holds that federal law supersedes state law when the two are in conflict.

The agency alleged that an executive order New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed earlier this year blocked federal immigration operations from using state property, preventing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from carrying out its duties.

Biden-appointed Judge Georgette Castner of the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey disagreed.

"[The executive order] does not prevent the United States from carrying out federal immigration laws; rather, it declares that New Jersey will not provide its own resources to assist the United States in these efforts," said Castner.

The judge also dismissed DOJ lawyers' argument that adhering to federal immigration law, the Immigration and Nationality Act, specifically, was "impossible" because of the state restriction and prevented "the United States from accessing aliens."

"The Court finds this response unconvincing," Castner wrote. "The Court also finds no conflict preemption."

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

Under Sherrill's executive order, federal immigration officers are prohibited from using state property as a staging area, processing location for illegal immigrants, or operations base for carrying out enforcement.

The law also prevents any New Jersey executive branch departments or agencies from allowing federal authorities to use state property.

Sherrill included an exception in her order that allows access if authorized by a judicial warrant or order.

The governor welcomed Castner's decision in a Friday statement, criticizing federal immigration agents as "untrained."

"ICE is not making New Jersey's communities any safer," she said in a statement.

"My number one priority will always be to protect New Jerseyans, and I will continue to fight for safe communities for everyone in our state."

Although Castner conceded in her 30-page opinion that the federal government has an obligation to remove illegal immigrants from the United States, she wrote that "nothing in the [Immigration and Nationality Act] indicates that states are required to assist the federal government in meeting this obligation."

After the signing ceremony of her executive order earlier this year, Sherrill announced a website launch for New Jersey residents to report their interactions with ICE and upload photos and videos of officers.

Information submitted to the portal would be used by the state attorney general's office to potentially "hold the government accountable."

New Jersey has also adopted a mask ban on federal law enforcement officers and a requirement for them to show identification before making an arrest. The DOJ sued over that law as well.

The Garden State, and a few others, had already banned its local and state law enforcement agencies from cooperating with ICE, otherwise known as 287(g) agreements, prior to President Donald Trump's return to the White House last year.

Several more Democratic-led states have followed in outlawing such cooperation or attempting to do so since Trump, a Republican, began his second term and made it a priority to stop illegal immigration.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 11:40

AI Bears: Right About The Excess, May Be Wrong On The Trade

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

While the AI bears focus on concentration and circular financing, the last tech overbuild was financed with debt, and this one is being paid for in cash.

Before I discuss why I disagree with the “AI bears,” I want to state that I respect their opinions, have evaluated their concerns, and have simply derived a different set of conclusions. That is an important statement, because this particular group of “AI bears” includes some of the sharpest risk minds in the business, and they have been early to almost every warning that later mattered.

When people this good line up on one side of a trade, you go back and check your own work. That’s what I did, and this article is where I landed. As always, the reason I publish these articles is for accountability later, for you and our clients.

While this group of AI bears may indeed be right about the excess, they could still be potentially wrong about the trade. I care about the latter, and those are two different claims that the market keeps confusing.

The Bear Case Deserves A Hearing

Let’s start with the person I admire the most in the AI bear camp: Fred Hickey. Fred has run The High-Tech Strategist since 1987 and has made the cleanest version of the argument. He compares today’s datacenter mania to the fiber-optic overbuild that cracked in 2000, only far larger. To wit: he has called it a “more dire situation than the great fiber-optic capacity overbuilds.” 

He is not alone in this view, and that really is the point to address. Michael Burry has been circling the same plumbing, watching Nvidia’s credit-default swaps widen as the chipmaker turns into banker, landlord, and equity partner to its own customers.

But the AI bear roster doesn’t stop there. The Bank for International Settlements flagged roughly $1.65 trillion in off-balance-sheet obligations held by the largest hyperscalers, exceeding the amounts they carry on their books. Then Sequoia’s David Cahn put the annual gap between AI infrastructure spending and ecosystem revenue at nearly $600 billion. Furthermore, Allianz measured the capex-to-revenue divergence at about 46%, well past the 32% that marked the 2001 telecom bust. Then, lastly, in August, an MIT study suggested that most corporate AI pilots had produced no measurable revenue at all.

That is a very serious AI bear group making a very serious case, and you should only ignore it at your peril. When a strategist who has correctly traded five separate Nvidia collapses of 55% or more says a sixth is coming, and a Bank of America survey shows 54% of professional managers are now calling AI a “bubble,” you need to factor that into your thinking. As investors, we must work out precisely which parts are right and which parts are borrowed pattern-matching from a different era.

So, let’s start with where the AI bears are right.

Where The Bears Are Right

Yes, valuations are stretched, and by the measure that matters most for fragility, concentration is worse now than it was in 2000.

Notice how far the line has traveled in the chart above. The ten largest stocks now make up roughly 43% of the S&P 500, a record, and past the 27% peak the index touched at the height of the dot-com boom. By that single measure, the market is more top-heavy today than at any point in modern history. The equal-weight index has already begun to diverge from the headline benchmark, which is exactly the kind of internal crack that tends to show up before the megacaps wobble. Such is the setup the AI bears keep pointing toward, and on that point, they are correct.

Secondly, the circular-financing argument is real, too. When Nvidia takes an equity stake in a company that then commits to buying Nvidia chips, part of what gets reported as “demand” is the seller funding its own sales. Such is a genuine distortion of the signal, and it deserves the scrutiny that it has been getting. Add the depreciation math, where trailing capex of roughly $434 billion dwarfs the $149 billion of depreciation currently running through income statements, and you get a bill that arrives in 2027 through 2029, whether the revenue does or not. The AI bears did not invent any of this; they just read the corporate filings.

Where The Analogy Breaks

So, with all that stated, it seems to be obvious that you should just get out of the AI trade now before the next “Dot.com” crash occurs. Here’s the problem with that comparison. The comparison to the fiber-optic “boom and crash” is that it turns on the one variable that actually determined the outcome in 2000, and that variable does not read the same today: who is writing the checks.

Leading up to the 2000 overbuild, the financing came from companies that had no business borrowing what they borrowed. WorldCom, Global Crossing, and the upstart carriers that were stringing fiber on debt, and the vendor loans that Lucent and Nortel handed customers who could not pay them back. When revenue failed to arrive on schedule, those balance sheets could not cover the shortfall, and the structure collapsed into bankruptcy court.

Today’s buildout is a different animal on this exact axis. Roughly two-thirds of the 2026 capex is funded directly from the operating cash flow and equity of Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta, four of the most profitable enterprises ever assembled. The existing borrowing is investment-grade and still a minority of spending. The balance sheets carrying this cycle are not WorldCom’s, and that difference is close to the whole ballgame.

Revenue Is Real

Second, “no revenue” is not the same thing as revenue that simply hasn’t caught up to the spending yet. Inference now clears roughly 70% gross margins. Microsoft’s AI business is past a $37 billion run rate, Amazon’s AI revenue is growing in the triple digits, and Anthropic went from about $9 billion to a reported $47 billion run rate in a single year.

More notably, even Nvidia, the bears’ favorite “whipping boy,” has seen forward earnings climb so rapidly that its multiple has actually compressed as fundamentals caught up to what was believed to be overly exuberant expectations. That is the mirror image of Cisco in 2000, which peaked at nearly 30 times sales on earnings that then evaporated. The revenue trailing capex is a timing issue, not the zero-payback story the headlines imply.

Third, the AI bears predict a glut, yet the binding constraint right now is the opposite of a glut. Microsoft is sitting on something like $80 billion of Azure orders it cannot fill for lack of electricity, with GPUs idle in inventory waiting on power.

Today, more than 60% of the data center capacity planned for 2027 is not yet under construction. If or when datacenter demand is rationed by the power grid rather than by customers walking away, you do not have a capacity glut; you have a shortage. However, a fair objection at this point, and it is the strongest one the bears have: build two or three years’ worth of power and transmission, and today’s shortage becomes tomorrow’s oversupply. That is true concern, and it is the timeline risk worth watching closely, but it is also a 2028 question, not a 2026 one.

What The AI Bears Debate Means For Investors

Let me be clear. The AI bears have a real case, but no timing. This is the same problem we noted in “Debt Trap: A Crisis Without A Calendar.” I am definitely not arguing that investors should be buying the AI complex with both hands and closing their eyes. The question is NOT whether there is excess, because there plainly is. The real question is what a disciplined investor does with a genuine, extreme, but cash-funded overbuild.

Start with position sizing, because it is the one tactic that survives contact with a drawdown. NVIDIA has fallen by 55% or more on five separate occasions since 2000, and it has recovered to new highs after each. Investors who were sized to hold through the pain benefited tremendously. They did even better if they managed their exposure risk during those drawdowns.  Own your AI exposure at a weight where a 50 percent drawdown is uncomfortable rather than fatal. Sizing comes first.

Secondly, the rules are simple.

• Favor the self-funders over the borrowers, and
• Spread your exposure across the layers of the trade, the chips and the clouds, and the power underneath them, rather than staking the whole thesis on a single chip name.
• Always insist that the price you pay is backed by existing earnings and not by a total addressable market slide.
• Lastly, keep some dry powder (ie, cash), because the volatility in this complex is a feature rather than a defect, and a real correction turns into a gift the moment you have cash and a shopping list ready.

Where you take the risk matters as much as how much you take. Not all AI exposure carries the same danger, and the map below is how I would sort it.

The 5-Signals

The self-funders and the power bottleneck are part of this trade that looks least like 2000. Conversely, the levered edges are the part that looks most like it. That levered part is where a revenue disappointment does the real damage, and those are the first positions to shed when the story starts to wobble. The profitable compounders funding their own buildout sit in a different bucket, and selling them because a bear called a top is how investors miss years of compounding while waiting on a crash that shows up late, or never.

Which raises the harder question. How do you know when the story is actually wobbling?

This is crucial, and the trap that most investors fall into. You do not need to call the top. What you need is a short list of signals that fire before the top is obvious to everyone, and the discipline to act on the list rather than argue with it.

Which brings me to the question I get most often: “Why not skip the stock-picking and just own the index?”

Here is my opinion. The index has quietly become the “bet.” With the ten largest names accounting for nearly 43% of the S&P 500, buying the market today is a concentrated wager on those same few companies, made passively, without anyone ever deciding it was a good idea. Owning the index is not a way to sidestep the AI trade, because it is the AI trade, whether you meant it that way or not.

Bob Farrell’s Rule #9 is always worth repeating here:

“When all the experts and forecasts agree, something else usually happens.”

Conclusion

With more than half of managers now calling AI a “bubble” and “long the Magnificent 7” ranked the most crowded trade on the Street for nearly two years, the consensus has already tilted bearish. That does not make the AI bear case wrong, but it does suggest the obvious crash may refuse to arrive on the obvious schedule.

One of my favorite quotes from Howard Marks is that, “being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.” When it comes to investing, timing is critical. Most importantly, notice that Hickey himself holds his AI-bear book at roughly 1% of his portfolio in puts, suggesting he treats it as a hedge rather than a conviction short. That is the posture worth borrowing. Own the compounders, hedge the tail, and let the revenue prove or disprove itself on the tape.

The AI bears will eventually be right about a drawdown, because everyone is eventually right about a drawdown. Whether they are right about the trade depends on a question their favorite analogy cannot answer:

“What happens when the richest companies on earth overbuild with their own money rather than borrowed money?”

Such is the question actually on the table, and that is the question you must answer before you sell.

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

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 10:30

2.3 Million Illegals Gone: America's Immigrant Population Plummets For First Time In A Century

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

The numbers the open-borders crowd swore were impossible are now in black and white.

A new Center for Immigration Studies analysis of the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey finds the illegal immigrant population has fallen by about 2.3 million since President Trump returned to office in January 2025. Another 600,000 legal immigrants have left. The total foreign-born population is down 2.9 million.

That is the first sustained drop in America's immigrant population in nearly a hundred years.

?? BREAKING — IT'S OFFICIAL: The illegal alien population in the United States has DROPPED by 2,300,000 under President Trump.

Another 600,000 LEGAL immigrants have LEFT the country, marking the largest reduction in the U.S. Immigrant population in a CENTURY!

"We are seeing... pic.twitter.com/xVkO8Y6OCk

— The Patriot Oasis™ (@ThePatriotOasis) September 4, 2026

CIS research director Steven A. Camarota and demographer Karen Zeigler tracked the government's monthly household survey from January 2025 through July 2026. The foreign-born total - naturalized citizens, lawful permanent residents, long-term temporary visitors and illegal immigrants - fell from roughly 53.3 million to 50.5 million.

Camarota's preliminary estimate puts the illegal population at 13.5 million in July, down from 15.8 million when Trump took the oath.

"We've never seen anything quite like this before," Camarota told The Washington Times. "This is big and sustained, as best as we can tell."

He added: "It is a fundamental change, and it's profound."

The same dataset shows what happened during the Biden years. From January 2021 to January 2025 the foreign-born population jumped 8.3 million - the largest four-year increase in American history.

Catch-and-release, mass parole, asylum abuse and a wide-open southern border did exactly what critics said they would do. The survey now shows that surge going into reverse.

CIS is not counting plane seats. It is measuring net change: new arrivals minus deportations, voluntary departures, legalizations and deaths. That is why the 2.3 million illegal decline can sit beside larger Homeland Security departure figures.

At the one-year mark of Trump's second term, DHS said nearly 3 million illegal immigrants had left the country, including about 675,000 formal removals and 2.2 million self-deportations. CIS is looking at who is still here after new arrivals are subtracted.

Latin American non-citizens who arrived in 1980 or later account for the entire drop in the foreign-born count. That group overlaps heavily with the illegal population. Naturalized-citizen numbers actually rose by about 680,000 over the same stretch. The collapse is among non-citizens who should not have been waved in.

Interior ICE removals more than tripled compared with the tail end of the Biden term. Voluntary departures tied to enforcement jumped as well. Camarota put it simply in the CIS release: "The best data we have shows an enormous decrease in the total foreign-born population, with most of the falloff among illegal immigrants."

He added, "Regaining control of the border and robust interior enforcement has partly undone the huge increase in the illegal immigration that took place during the border surge."

Only 44 percent of those who left were workers. That goes some way to explain why the national jobs numbers have not imploded the way corporate lobbyists predicted. U.S.-born employment has continued to rise even as immigrant workers in the household survey fell by a little less than 1.3 million. Some regional pockets - construction in South Texas is the example Camarota cited - have felt it. The country as a whole has not.

"It's nothing to panic about," he told the Times. "First of all, we're mostly losing low-income workers. But like anything else, it can create challenges. And it creates winners and losers."

Workers competing for jobs and housing are the winners. "On balance, I think it's a good deal for the country because I think most people are more worried about wages, housing prices, congestion and impact on schools and hospitals."

Census analysts had already flagged a "historic" drop in net international migration when they reported that overall population growth slowed to 0.5 percent from mid-2024 to mid-2025 - a window that captured only the first months of the new enforcement regime.

Camarota now says the country's total population is likely heading toward an unprecedented decline. That is what happens when an 8.3 million artificial surge is no longer being pumped through the border.

The media spent four years insisting the border was "secure" and that anyone who noticed otherwise was a bigot. Then Joe Scarborough, trying to score points on Trump's deportation totals, walked straight into the truth on his own show.

"They should know when to take the victory. They could have been campaigning on closed southern border this whole time!" Scarborough said. Then: "You're never going to get the [deportation] numbers that Joe Biden had, right? You're not going to get those numbers because Joe Biden and his administration were letting in so many illegal immigrants. It was very easy to sweep up 5,000 right on the border and send them back."

Nobody cornered him. He said it unprompted.

That is the whole scam in one clip. Biden-era "removals" were a revolving door at the Rio Grande. Trump closed the door. Crossings collapsed. The population inside the country started falling for the first time in a generation. The same networks that called that outcome "impossible" or "racist" are now reduced to quibbling over methodology while the survey they usually treat as gospel shows a 2.9 million decline.

The drop did not happen by accident. It happened because the new administration treated Temporary Protected Status as what it had become: a backdoor amnesty, not a temporary shelter.

A late Biden-era internal memo, exposed in July, laid out a plan to expand TPS in the final days of that presidency in a way that would have locked in de facto protection for more than 3 million foreign nationals and boxed the incoming administration into years of litigation. The scheme was designed to run out the clock through activist courts after voters had already chosen mass deportations.

Trump's team has been ripping that wiring out. The Supreme Court cleared the path to end TPS for Haitians and Syrians. Extensions that were never meant to be permanent are being terminated where the statute allows. The people who wrote that memo were not confused about the election result. They were trying to cancel it with paperwork.

Once TPS for Haitians lapsed, ICE moved from roughly one deportation flight a month to a weekly schedule. Internal documents reported by The New York Times described the ramp-up after the Court allowed the humanitarian program to be cancelled. Flights into Cap-Haïtien have already carried criminals alongside other removable aliens. DHS has publicly flagged deportees with records that include sex crimes involving children.

The press response was automatic. Outlets that spent years ignoring gang control of Port-au-Prince suddenly discovered Haiti the week shackled men appeared on a Homeland Security video walking onto a plane. The spin is always the same: enforcement is the crisis, not the policy that imported hundreds of thousands of people the statute never contemplated as permanent residents.

Haiti is violent. That is not an argument for turning Temporary Protected Status into a forever visa. It is an argument for not running a four-year parole-and-release machine that dumped the consequences on Springfield, New York, and South Florida while daring anyone to notice.

The same enforcement machine is now using third-country removals for people whose home governments will not take them back, or who have withholding orders that bar return to a specific country but not removal from the United States.

Over a ten-day stretch in late August, internal documents obtained by CBS News showed three ICE flights carrying more than 100 deportees to eight African countries: Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Liberia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. Nationals on those flights included people from Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, Nepal, Turkey and Venezuela - not just Africans being sent "home."

Liberia has publicly agreed to take a large number of third-country deportees. Equatorial Guinea has already received dozens. Rights groups and legacy outlets have filled pages with horror copy about Level 4 travel advisories and "chain refoulement." What they will not say is why these flights exist: years of catch-and-release created a population of people with final orders who cannot be dumped back on a country that refuses the plane.

If a judge bars return to Caracas or Kabul, that order is about that country. It is not a lifetime lease in Houston. The prior administration built the backlog. This one is draining it.

DHS, asked for comment on the Times piece, sent an earlier release on collapsed border crossings. That is the other half of the story. You cannot shrink a 15.8 million illegal population if 10,000 more people walk in every week. Trump stopped the inflow first. Then he started removing the stock.

For four years the line was that immigration was a force of nature. "Root causes." Climate. Violence. Poverty. Anything except the obvious: if you fly people in, parole them, hand them a court date years out and dare ICE to find them in a sanctuary city, they stay. If you seal the border, end the parole pipelines, revoke the TPS expansions and put officers in the interior, they leave.

Jim Jordan put the prior era in one sentence at a recent hearing: a systematic plan to open the border, park millions in sanctuary jurisdictions, and then starve the agency that removes them. Voters watched it. They voted against it. The CPS is now recording the result.

The remaining illegal population is still enormous. CIS's 13.5 million is a decline, not a victory lap. DHS has used higher starting estimates than CIS. Either way, millions of people with no right to be in the US are still there. The difference is that the direction of travel has changed for the first time since the Depression.

Employers who built business models on an endless supply of illegal labor will complain. School districts that padded enrollment will complain. NGOs that lived on the casework will complain. Networks that spent half a decade calling enforcement a moral panic will complain loudest of all, then run another Haiti-video segment and call it news.

The households competing for apartments, emergency-room beds and entry-level wages are not complaining. They are watching the first government in a generation treat the immigration statutes as if they were written to be enforced.

America is not a holding pen for the Western Hemisphere. It is not a third-country processing hub with a welfare office attached. The survey data now shows what happens when a president acts like that is true: the illegal population falls, legal inflows tighten, and the foreign-born total drops by millions in eighteen months.

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Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 09:20

Alarm Bells Ring As Global Food Prices Hit 2022 Highs, Perfect Storm Stokes New Inflation Shock

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's global food-commodity index climbed in August to its highest level since 2022, with the index now gaining momentum to the upside. The upside reinforces warnings from several major Wall Street desks, which we have covered extensively, that global food shortages could materialize next year.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's (FAO) Food Price Index, which tracks monthly changes in the international prices of a basket of globally traded food commodities, averaged 133.3 in August, up 1.9% from July, with every major category advancing. Sugar prices surged 11.9%, while wheat gained 2.6% and now stands 15% above year-ago levels.

The surge in global food prices comes as a perfect storm of factors emerges, from El Niño and higher fertilizer and diesel prices to disruptions in the Black Sea and the Strait of Hormuz, all of which could push the global food system toward another crisis.

Earlier this week, the Bloomberg Agriculture Spot Index (BCOMAGSP) posted its largest monthly gain since the chaotic days of the Arab Spring riots and is nearing a breakout above its 2023 highs, signaling a broad-based acceleration in agricultural commodity prices.

Latest coverage:

• Barclays Warns Next Commodity Shock Is Taking Shape: What You Need To Know
• Agricultural Commodity Prices Break Out As JPMorgan's Food Crisis Warning Gets Louder

With diesel at record highs to end the week, agricultural markets tightening, and global food prices accelerating, another inflationary impulse is quickly moving through global supply chains just as central banks decide whether interest rates are restrictive enough.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 08:45