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
Ukrainian forces have begun training and testing exoskeletons for battlefield use. Soldiers from the 147th Separate Artillery Brigade are using them in the Pokrovsk sector for both logistics and frontline operations. The goal is to reduce physical strain, especially when loading heavy artillery shells into howitzers without automatic loaders. Artillery crews can handle up to 1200 kg of ammunition per day, and early tests show that exoskeletons help them work faster and with less fatigue Above all, by improving the conditions for those soldiers on the front lines who handle such heavy loads, plus the stress of work. Seeking to reduce overall fatigue in the troops
:
🇮🇷🇮🇱 - 14 wounded in Iranian missile strike in central Israel, according to Israeli media.
🇬🇧🇮🇶 - A drone struck British Castrol oil warehouses in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan, causing extensive damage.
🇮🇷🇮🇱 - Iran launched 9 missiles towards Israel this morning alone, with at least 3 of them being cluster missiles.
🇱🇧🇮🇱 - Over the past 12 hours, Hezbollah launched counterattacks in Khiam and Qantara, in the Nabatieh direction, southeast Lebanon. Hezbollah recaptured northern Khiam, with fighting ongoing for the south of the town. Hezbollah units also re-entered Qantara; frontline sources reported clashes in the center of the town last night.
🇱🇧🇮🇱 - 48 IDF soldiers have been wounded in clashes with Hezbollah over the last 24 hours in southern Lebanon, according to the Israeli Army.
🇱🇧🇮🇱 - "The Israeli army is barely catching its breath in southern Lebanon, and its resources are less than in the previous round of fighting," - Haaretz....
🇺🇸 Blue Owl Capital just disclosed that investors tried to pull 40.7% of one fund and 21.9% of another in a single quarter, and both funds gave the same answer, you can only have 5% back, and everyone else waits in line.
This is a bank run, not a normal withdrawal.
Wall Street spent the last decade selling millions of investors on something called semi-liquid private credit, higher yields, steady income and the promise you could get your money back every quarter if you needed it. What they buried in the fine print was what happens when too many people try to leave at the same time.
Analysts who have covered private credit for decades say nothing on this scale has ever been reported before at any major private credit manager.
These funds do not hold stocks you can sell on a Tuesday afternoon, they hold private loans to mid sized companies that cannot be liquidated quickly without destroying the price for every investor still trapped inside.
This product was originally designed for ...
🇺🇸 President Trump wants to switch to war economy in 2027 with massive increase in military spending and massive cuts to healthcare and other domestic agencies
Once a deficit hawk — he said in 2016 that he thought he could balance the budget in five years — Trump ended his first term with $7.8 trillion in added debt. His 2027 proposal is expected to give an update on 10-year deficit projections currently estimated at around $16 trillion.
The GOP's message for the Midterms will be focused on the "need" for a massive defense build up while the Democrats' message will be focused on affordability.
The fiscal 2027 budget will be the first time Trump puts his second-term governing agenda into one comprehensive document — with the numbers to back it up. The budget he released last year lacked detailed line-by-line spending targets and the economic assumptions necessary to project the long-term cost of his proposals.
Investors in US Treasuries will be looking to see if the debt and ...
