We know what’s coming and we are prepared.
🇪🇺 🇺🇸 🇨🇳 If China is rising and America stagnating, Europe is gambling with a steep, shocking decline into poverty and irrelevance. | Palladium Magazine
🔶️ Energy scarcity, aging workforces, and institutional paralysis don't combine to create social-democratic utopia but a closed, deindustrializing society:
🔶️ Europe has set itself up to lose the two most basic ingredients for industrial competitiveness and sustainability: cheap energy and cheap labor.
🔶️ You can maybe maintain an industrial society by offsetting one against the other, but to maintain one with neither is ludicrous.
🔶️ China has coal. America has fracking. But Europe's energy strategy is to install solar panels on the world's least sunny continent and build windmills that don't make sense anywhere in the world.
🔶️ This is almost explicitly the opposite of a strategy for cheap energy.
🔶️ European countries have banned fracking and failed to pursue oil and gas exploration opportunities, while the deal for cheap Russian gas has been exploded by war in Ukraine.
🔶️ Meanwhile, Germany shut down its nuclear plants and other countries are planning to follow.
🔶️ That some peripheral European economies like Finland, Poland, or Romania are pursuing new nuclear plants just underscores the problem of a future without nuclear in larger economies like Germany, Italy, and Spain.
🔶️ Except for Japan and South Korea, the world's oldest countries are all European. Nor are European fertility rates anything to brag about.
🔶️ There is no amount of immigration that can make up for such wide and deep aging of the workforce.
🔶️ Aging populations and social democratic entitlements might work with a growing economy, but without it, they just lead to a dysfunctional, extractive political economy where the old oppress the young.
🔶️ The resulting political gridlock and institutional paralysis is perhaps Europe's single biggest problem, because it makes solutions and reforms extremely hard to implement.
🔶️ Europe's energy crisis, for example, could be solved almost literally just with a few strokes of a pen.
🔶️ This looming European decline is not a cause for celebration in America or China. Europe is not a cautionary tale, but the canary in the coal mine for aging industrial societies that do not reform.
https://fxtwitter.com/palladiummag/status/1818979675034501428
🇺🇸 #Oklahoma high school principal (Kirk Moore) seen charging at and disarming a school shooter.
The suspect, identified as 20-year-old Victor Hawkins, was a former student who said he wanted to shoot up the school “like the Columbine shooters did.” While taking down the shooter, Moore was shot in the leg. He is expected to recover.
When the Principal woke up that day, he never thought he would be tackling a gunman.
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🇨🇳🛢 How much strategic oil does the world actually have in reserve?
Global strategic crude oil inventories stood at ~2.5 BILLION barrels as of December 2025, according to the US Energy Information Administration.
China holds by far the largest stockpile at 1,397 million barrels, more than 3 times the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve of 413 million barrels, which itself sits at only 58% of its full storage capacity of 714 million barrels.
China added an average of 1.1 million barrels per day to its strategic inventories throughout 2025, with preliminary data suggesting it continued building stockpiles in early 2026 ahead of the Iran War.
Japan holds the 3rd-largest reserve at 263 million barrels, followed by OECD European countries at 179 million barrels.
Meanwhile, the US is releasing 172 million barrels from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve to suppress oil prices, part of a broader 400 million barrel coordinated release agreed by 32 IEA member nations in March.
🔗 ...
🛢 JP Morgan Warns Oil Market Out of Balance, Prices Must Rise
🔸The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20% of the world’s oil flows, has removed 13.7 million barrels per day from global supply in April alone. A JP Morgan research note warns the market has no good way to replace it.
🔸Normally, spare production capacity in Saudi Arabia and the UAE acts as the market’s shock absorber. But that buffer has effectively been removed, eliminating the system’s first line of defense.
🔸With spare capacity unavailable, markets turned to inventories
➤ Global stockpiles are now being drained at ~7.1 mbd in April, an extraordinary pace, according to the note.
🔸Meanwhile, demand is collapsing because supply simply isn’t reaching users — “forced demand destruction.”The hardest hit sectors include:
▪️ Petrochemical plants across Asia are shutting down or slashing output as LPG, ethane, and naphtha flows from the Gulf collapse
▪️ Airline jet fuel ...
🛢⛽️ Global oil inventories are heading toward RECORD LOWS:
Global visible oil inventories have fallen -255 million barrels since the start of the conflict on February 27, to 7,864 million barrels.
Total estimated oil draws, including non-OECD refined products storage, have accelerated to 10.9 million barrels per day in April, the largest monthly draws on record since 2017.
Cumulative estimated draws since the start of the war now stand at 474 million barrels, with Hormuz flows holding at ~10% of normal, or 2.0 million barrels per day.
Meanwhile, even in an optimistic scenario where Strait of Hormuz flows begin recovering by late April, it is unlikely to prevent global visible inventories from reaching all-time lows, according to Goldman Sachs.
As inventories keep falling, physical oil markets are likely to require sharply higher prices for immediate delivery, since buyers cannot wait months for cheaper futures delivery when stocks are running critically low.
Goldman also warns...
