Trump Announces Military Coalition With Latin American Leaders To Eradicate Cartels

Authored by Emel Akan and T.J.Muscaro via The Epoch Times,

U.S. President Donald Trump on March 7 welcomed his Latin American allies to Florida for a summit focused on addressing regional issues and announced a new military coalition to combat drug cartels in the Western Hemisphere.

“On this historic day, we come together to announce a brand new military coalition to eradicate the criminal cartels plaguing our region,” Trump said as he began his remarks at the summit.

He said that the new partnership, called the Americas Counter Cartel Coalition, will leverage military resources, including the possible use of missiles, to combat the cartels.

The heads of state of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, and Trinidad and Tobago attended today’s summit, the White House said.

The event, called the Shield of the Americas Summit, is taking place at Trump National Doral Club in Miami and is the first such regional meeting to bring together, as the State Department described, “like-minded allies” in the Western Hemisphere.

“We’re going to be doing some incredible things together,” Trump told the leaders.

All countries in attendance are governed by right-wing or center-right parties, while left-leaning governments such as Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico did not participate in the summit.

On March 5, Trump announced that outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem will lead the effort as special envoy for the Shield of the Americas.

During his remarks, Trump criticized previous U.S. administrations for abandoning the Western Hemisphere.

“They went so far away. They went to these faraway places where they weren’t even wanted,” Trump said.

The Donroe Doctrine

In its national security strategy released in November 2025, the Trump administration made the Western Hemisphere its top priority, stating that it was a “great American strategic mistake of recent decades” to allow “non-Hemispheric competitors” to take hold in the region.

The Trump administration compared its new policy to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, a U.S. policy that told European powers to stay out of the Americas.

After that, some media outlets began calling it the “Donroe Doctrine,” and the Trump administration adopted the term.

“It is a doctrine we will not allow hostile foreign influence to gain a foothold in this hemisphere that includes the Panama Canal,” Trump said without citing China during his speech.

Over the last two decades, China has become a dominant force in Latin America and the Caribbean, with trade surpassing $500 billion in 2024. In countries such as Brazil and Peru, China has replaced the United States as a key trading partner.

In recent years, more than 20 Latin American and Caribbean countries have joined Beijing’s Belt and Road initiative. As a result, China has secured hundreds of infrastructure projects, gaining control of assets, including ports, throughout the region.

In January, U.S. forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in Caracas, effectively ending Venezuela’s relationship with China. Last week, Trump suggested that Cuba might be next.

“Cuba’s at the end of the line,” Trump said at the event, adding that the regime in Havana is negotiating with him and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“But, our focus right now is on Iran,” Trump said.

The summit comes amid a tense geopolitical backdrop, with the conflict in Iran entering its second week.

On Feb. 28, Iran’s Islamic leader, Ali Khamenei, and dozens of top leadership figures were killed in the U.S.–Israeli joint military operation. Since then, Tehran has launched a series of retaliatory attacks across the region.

The Hezbollah terrorist group, an Iran proxy, has networks in Latin America and, for years, used the Western Hemisphere for money laundering, fundraising, and terrorism.

US Offers Military Training

During the event, Trump signed a proclamation formally launching the new military coalition.

“Every leader here today is united in the conviction that we cannot and will not tolerate the lawlessness in our hemisphere any longer,” Trump said.

“You have some great police, but they threaten your police, they scare your police,” Trump added, referring to drug cartels.

“You’re going to use your military. In many cases, our forces have already been working closely with yours, and the United States looks forward to deepening and expanding that cooperation in the months ahead.”

U.S. Southern Command announced recently that Ecuadorian and U.S. military forces conducted joint operations against “designated terrorist organizations” in Ecuador as part of the U.S. effort to fight narco-terrorism.

The proclamation states that the United States will train and mobilize the militaries of partner nations to help dismantle cartels.

According to the proclamation, the United States and its allies should prevent external threats, including malign foreign influences from outside the Western Hemisphere.

Seventeen countries are signatories to this partnership.

The leaders attending the Miami summit are Javier Milei, president of Argentina; Rodrigo Paz Pereira, president of Bolivia; Jose Antonio Kast, president-elect of Chile; Rodrigo Chaves Robles, president of Costa Rica; Luis Rodolfo Abinader Corona, president of the Dominican Republic; Daniel Roy Gilchrist Noboa Azín, president of Ecuador; Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador; Mohamed Irfaan Ali, president of Guyana; Nasry “Tito” Asfura, president of Honduras; José Raúl Mulino Quintero, president of Panama; Santiago Peña, president of Paraguay; and Kamla Persad-Bissessar, prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/07/2026 - 16:15

Stablecoins And The Rebasement Of The Dollar

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

The “fiat is dying” argument has become a catchphrase narrative among digital asset bulls, gold bugs, and cryptocurrency advocates. That narrative’s core is that central banks have printed vast amounts of money. The “money printing” has led to currency debasement and rendered the U.S. dollar obsolete. We discussed this “debasement” narrative previously.

The narrative is seductive: inflation is out of control, the government is printing money, and the dollar is on its last legs. But while there are real risks to watch, most headlines sell fear rather than fact. It’s striking, and those selling gold, silver, or other doomsday assets often use it to scare individuals into taking action. One of their favorite charts used to make the “debasement” case is the classic graph showing that the U.S. dollar has lost 90% of its purchasing power since 1966.”

But here’s the thing: that chart doesn’t show debasement. It only reflects inflation, a well-understood and largely expected outcome in a growing economy. Prices rise over time because demand increases due to population growth, rising incomes, and growing consumption. This is especially true in a post-industrial, service-driven economy that incentivizes credit expansion and capital investment. In other words, it’s not the dollar losing value; it’s the economy expanding.

What those promoting the “debasement” argument misunderstand is how economics and modern inflation work. What the chart shows, in today’s economy, is only the loss of purchasing power of idle, or uninvested, dollars. Dollars that sit uninvested lose value relative to inflation over time. That is not a collapse of fiat currency. It is a signal to put capital to work. While the “gold bugs” argue that gold protects against debasement (i.e., inflation), which is true, so do 3-month T-bills and US Treasury bonds on a real, inflation-adjusted, total return basis. However, that same $1 invested in the S&P 500 index was by far the best protector of the purchasing power of the U.S. Dollar

Most importantly, the term “debasement” does not refer to the collapse of currency. It is only a “reflection of inflation on uninvested dollars.” Inflation erodes purchasing power if income and returns do not keep pace. A $100 bill in your pocket today buys less than it did in 2010, only because the general price level of goods and services purchased in an expanding economy rises over time. That effect is real, but it is a natural consequence of economic activity and monetary policy interacting with growth, not a structural collapse of confidence.

In reality, the dollar remains dominant. As we discussed in depth in “The Dollar’s Death Is Greatly Exaggerated:”

• Roughly 80 percent of global transactions use the U.S. dollar as the unit of account or settlement.

• The U.S. dollar still accounts for nearly 60 percent of global foreign-exchange reserves held by central banks.

• There is no alternative currency or asset with the depth, liquidity, and institutional trust of the U.S. dollar.

These facts contradict the idea that the world is abandoning fiat currencies or the U.S. dollar. The narrative that the dollar is dying ignores the overwhelming evidence of continued international demand and use, which is why foreign buying of US Treasuries has surged to a record.

The Illusion of Escape

Individuals who argue that investors are buying gold or Bitcoin by clinging to the “debasement” narrative are either intentionally trying to deceive others or are ignorant of how the monetary system, and the fundamental unit of pricing, exchange, and settlement, works in the modern economy.

We absolutely agree that investors should invest their “idle” dollars into “risk assets” like bonds, gold, stocks, or Bitcoin to protect their savings from inflation over time. However, the gains in those assets that rise in nominal terms only reflect shifts in relative valuation, not an abandonment of the dollar itself. Furthermore, while those buying into “debasement” fears, mostly due to headlines rather than the facts, seek so‑called “safe havens,” by buying Bitcoin or gold, thinking they are abandoning “fiat” money.

However, such is not the case as these assets are still priced and settled in dollars. Bitcoin trades in USD pairs, and gold’s global market price is quoted in dollars. When holders want to spend or transact outside the digital asset context, they must convert back into the dollar system. The belief that one can truly escape fiat is a philosophical idea. In practical terms, value transfer and utility still revolve around dollars. As shown above, the absolute best way to protect your purchasing power from “debasement” has been the US stock market.

While the “debasement” narrative often claims that US Treasuries are undesirable relics of a failing system, the reality is the opposite. US Treasuries remain the most liquid, trusted financial instruments on the planet. They are central to global interest rate benchmarks, risk‑free rate calculations, collateral markets, and international reserves.

Furthermore, a new development in today’s economy is about to make the US Dollar even more dominant: USD Stable Coins.

USD Stablecoins and Why They are Needed

As explained, the US Dollar is, and will remain, the backbone of global finance. That won’t change in the near or distant future, primarily because there are no realistic alternatives. However, the rise of USD stablecoins will likely cement that dominance even further.

Currently, nearly 99 percent of fiat‑backed stablecoins are pegged to the US dollar, as the US dollar dominates global foreign exchange reserves. The dollar’s share of global reserves continues to outweigh other major currencies combined, demonstrating that sovereign confidence in USD persists even amid inflation concerns. More notably, USD Stable Coins reflect the dollar’s strength, not its demise.

So, what are USD Stablecoins? They are digital tokens designed to maintain a 1:1 peg to the US dollar. Unlike volatile cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ether, which can swing wildly in price, stablecoins offer price stability by holding reserves of high‑quality liquid assets. The largest examples are Tether’s USDT and Circle’s USDC, which together account for over 90 percent of the USD stablecoin market. For context, as of late 2025, Tether (the issuer of the USDT stablecoin) held over $135 billion in U.S. Treasury securities, ranking it 17th globally among holders of U.S. sovereign debt. Tether’s holdings exceed those of South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Germany, and the UAE.

Here is why this is critical to the “death of the dollar” narrative.

USD Stablecoins operate on blockchain networks, enabling real‑time settlement and global transfer of digital dollars without traditional banking intermediaries. This capability is especially valuable for cross-border transactions, remittances, and markets with less developed banking infrastructure. The International Monetary Fund notes that while most current stablecoin turnover is tied to crypto trading, cross‑border flows are rapidly growing, suggesting future use in broader financial systems. As noted by Chainstack:

“Stablecoins have moved into mainstream finance, linking bank systems with digital asset networks. Dollar-pegged tokens already move volumes on par with major payment networks, with transactions rivaling those of ACH, Visa, and PayPal. In mid-2025, the supply of stablecoins crossed $250B, reflecting demand for quicker, always-on payments.”

While transaction volume still remains very small (about 1% of the current global cross-border payment volume, a $2 quadrillion annual market, there are several reasons why many expect the USD Stable Coin market to grow substantially in the future.

These use cases appeal to global finance as it modernizes payment systems. If USD Stable Coins realize broader adoption, they could become core infrastructure for digital money flows, making US Treasuries even more important to the global financial system.

How USD Stablecoins Could Make US Treasuries Even More Important

The presence of these assets in USD Stablecoin reserves underscores that the digital dollar infrastructure is intertwined with US sovereign debt markets rather than outside them. As the USD Stable Coin market grows, its relationship with US Treasuries could become more significant as issuers must hold liquid, low‑risk assets to maintain dollar pegs and meet regulatory and market expectations. Because short‑term Treasuries are widely accepted collateral and deeply liquid, they are a natural choice.

Regulatory developments, such as the GENIUS Act, passed in 2025, require stablecoin issuers to back their tokens with high‑quality liquid assets, such as USD or short‑dated Treasury instruments, increasing the likelihood that reserves remain closely tied to US sovereign debt. Furthermore, if and when the STABLE Act passes, it would impose additional requirements on stablecoin issuers to maintain safe, highly liquid assets as backing.

As such, Industry projections suggest the USD Stablecoin market could reach $2–$3 trillion by 2030, driven by clearer regulation and broader financial adoption. In that scenario, stablecoin reserve demand for Treasuries could become a meaningful incremental buyer in money markets, potentially supplementing traditional Treasury demand. Reuters reported that up to 80 percent of the existing stablecoin market’s reserves are in Treasury bills and repos, indicating that current reserve practices already lean heavily toward Treasuries.

Lastly, academic research suggests USD Stablecoin demand has already been large enough to influence short‑term yields. For example, one study found stablecoin purchases of Treasury bills correlated with measurable downward pressure on one‑month yields, highlighting how digital dollar reserve demand can affect real markets.

However, any discussion of USD Stablecoins must recognize the risks. Most importantly, this thesis assumes that USD stablecoins will become a broader global transaction utility. That is a “possible” future, not a certain one. Currently, high usage of USD stablecoins is concentrated in crypto trading and settlement, not in mainstream commerce or sovereign payments. Adoption depends on regulatory frameworks, institutional engagement, and global trust.

Custodial risk remains a valid concern. S&P Global Ratings recently downgraded Tether’s stability assessment, noting that only 64% of its reserves were held in short‑term US Treasuries and that transparency issues persist. This underscores the importance of clearer reporting, stronger governance, and more regulated custody solutions if stablecoins are to scale safely.

“Bitcoin represents 5.6% of USDT in circulation, exceeding the 3.9% overcollateralization margin associated with a collateralization ratio of 103.9%. A decline in the price of bitcoin or the value of other higher-risk assets could therefore reduce collateral coverage.” – S&P Global

There is also competition from central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). Governments might choose their own digital money rails, which could reduce the appeal of private USD Stable Coins in certain use cases; however, even if CBDCs gain substantial traction, they will likely also be backed by US Treasuries for the reasons listed herein.

Another risk is that as demand for Treasuries rises, yields will fall. However, while issuers of USD Stable Coins would likely shift reserve composition, the underlying assets remain dollar‑linked securities. This distinction is critical, as whether stablecoin issuers hold T‑bills, repos, or other short‑term dollar assets, the peg to the dollar persists. The system will continue to operate within the dollar monetary framework, not in an alternate monetary universe.

Finally, there is ALWAYS a risk that none of this materializes at the expected scale. Regulatory setbacks, technological barriers, or shifts in macroeconomic conditions could stall growth. While the future is never certain, the framework of USD Stable Coins and the current trajectory of technological developments suggest that how we currently transact business globally will change in the near future, and, most importantly, the US dollar will be at the center of it.

Conclusion and Investment Thesis

The narrative that “fiat is dying” is not supported by the data or reality. Inflation, while real, is not debasement in the historical sense. It’s the erosion of purchasing power on uninvested dollars in an expanding economy. The U.S. dollar remains the foundation of global finance, dominating in trade, reserves, and settlement. No alternative currency, asset, or system currently matches its liquidity, institutional trust, or market depth.

The illusion that one can escape fiat by moving into gold or Bitcoin misunderstands how the monetary system works. While those assets protect savings against inflation, they are not independent of the fiat currency system, as they are priced, settled, and used in U.S. dollars. Any claim of “escape” is more ideological than practical.

What’s emerging now is not the death of the dollar, but its “rebasement,” through the transformation of how it circulates, settles, and functions through digital infrastructure. USD Stable Coins are not a threat to the U.S. monetary system; rather, they are an extension of it. By facilitating real-time digital payments on blockchain networks while holding reserves in U.S. Treasuries and cash equivalents, USD stablecoins reinforce the dollar’s central role.

If USD stablecoins mature into a mainstream transaction utility, something that remains a forward-looking assumption, the demand for U.S. Treasuries could increase significantly. With a projected market size of $2–$3 trillion by 2030, stablecoin issuers could become significant buyers of US Treasuries. Such would deepen liquidity, support lower yields, and embed Treasury instruments even further into the plumbing of global finance.

But investors must recognize the risks. Stablecoin adoption is not a guarantee. Regulatory frameworks could stall. Custodial risks remain, particularly with non-transparent issuers. Central bank digital currencies may create competition. And if USD Stable Coins fail to expand beyond trading use cases, their impact will remain limited.

Still, the investment thesis is compelling:

• US Treasuries remain critical. Continued and diversified demand, from both traditional buyers and digital dollar issuers, supports their role as a core asset.

• USD stablecoin infrastructure offers opportunities for firms that provide custody, liquidity, and regulatory-compliant digital payment rails. (CRCL, COIN, PYPL, FI, V, and MA)

• Banks and fintechs positioned at the intersection of blockchain settlement and fiat compliance may become integral to the rebasement architecture. (JPM, BK, C, SQ, and Stripe)

The dollar is not dying. It’s evolving. Notably, USD Stable Coins may serve as the bridge connecting the analog financial world to its digital future. The regulatory and technological framework is evolving. And the future of USD Stablecoins has the full weight of U.S. sovereign credit behind it. For investors willing to bet on that evolution, the opportunity lies in understanding the future of the dollar.

It’s not its destruction, but the digitization of dollar dominance.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/07/2026 - 15:15

Companies Report Raging Inflation, Except In Wages & Rents

Authored by Wolf Richter via Wolf Street,

Manufacturers reported that the costs of health insurance for employees shot up by 14.2% on average; service firms reported an average increase of 12.9%, according to a report by the New York Fed based on a survey of companies in the New York-Northern New Jersey region.

These are averages, but “some firms reported increases of between 25% and 50% when they renewed their coverage,” the report said.

Manufacturers and service firms both reported that the costs of utilities jumped by about 8.5% on average. About one-fifth of the companies reported increases of 20% or more. “Indeed, sharply rising utilities costs in some areas have been tied to the explosive growth of AI-related data centers,” the report said.

For service firms, the third worst cost increases were in business insurance, which jumped by 6.8%. This includes liability, property, auto, and workers’ compensation insurance.

For manufacturers, business insurance increases were the fourth-worst, with an average increase of 7.4%.

Nearly one in ten of these companies reported massive spikes of 20% or more in business insurance costs.

For manufacturers, the third-worst increases were goods and material inputs, which jumped by 8.0%. They reported substantial increases in the costs of tariffed inputs, such as aluminum, steel, equipment, electrical supplies, auto parts, coffee, and cocoa, etc.

For service firms, cost increases of goods and material inputs averaged 5.5%.

“A greater exposure to tariffs may be part of the reason manufacturing firms faced a sharper increase in goods and materials costs” than service firms, the report said.

These are very serious cost increases.

The Producer Price Index (PPI), which track prices paid by companies, has also shown sharply accelerating cost increases across a wide range of industries, with big price increases for both services (which dominate the PPI) and goods. The price increases in goods were driven by companies shuffling the costs of the tariffs around to each other, but they’re having trouble passing them on to consumer-facing companies, which are having trouble passing them on to consumers without losing sales.

But wages increased by only 3.4% at both service firms and manufacturers, amid indications that soaring employee health insurance costs – average annual premium for employer-sponsored family health insurance rose to about $27,000, according to the NY Fed – were putting downward pressure on wage growth.

“Businesses providing insurance to their workers indicated that absent these cost increases, they would have raised wages by roughly an additional percentage point, on average, (so an overage by 4.4%), suggesting that rising health insurance costs resulted in a drag on wage growth for workers at these firms,” the report said.

But increases of rent & lease payments were relatively modest at 2.2% for service firms and 1.8% for manufacturers – thanks to the depression in Commercial Real Estate.

This chart shows the cost increases by category for service firms. Note, business insurance in third position (+6.8%):

This chart shows the cost increases by category for manufacturers. Note, goods & material inputs in third position (+8.0%), and business insurance in fourth position:

The report also pointed out that service firms and manufacturers were impacted differently by these cost increases:

“For example, utilities and materials inputs would represent a larger share of costs for manufacturers compared to, say, a consulting firm, where labor costs would have more of an impact. Thus, cost increases for any category could have more of an effect on some firms than others.”

Costs overall for service firms jumped by 7% in 2025, an acceleration from the 5% increase a year earlier.

Costs overall for manufacturers jumped by 8.5%, a hot acceleration from the 5% increase a year earlier.

These are just indications based on companies in the New York and Northern New Jersey region, and not national indications. Firms in other parts of the US may experience cost factors that are somewhat different, such as the average increase in the costs of utilities, which are the newest hot button in many places.

So inflation is raging beneath the consumer-level surface again. It has also shown up in the GDP inflation adjustments: The Price Index for Gross Domestic Purchases, which reflects inflation adjustments in GDP except for imports – so a measure of overall domestic inflation for consumers, businesses, and governments – jumped by 3.7% in Q4, the worst in three years.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/07/2026 - 13:15

 

 

This week, I speak with Ed Perks, president of Franklin Advisers, Inc. and chief investment officer of Franklin Income Investors. We discuss income based investment compared to equities, along with overall portfolio strategy. We also discuss the evolving pitch for private credit.

Ed explains how he became interested in finance when he took his first investment class with the legendary David Swensen of Yale’s endowment.

A list of his current reading is here; A transcript of our conversation is available here Monday.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (video), YouTube (audio), and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

 

 

 

Current Reading/Favorite Books

 

 

Books Barry Mentioned

 

 

 

The post MiB: Ed Perks, Chief Investment Officer, Franklin Income Investors / President, Franklin Advisers appeared first on The Big Picture.

The post Bad Jobs Report: Blame It on the Weather appeared first on CEPR.

U.S. Military-Industrial Complex Agrees To Quadruple Bomb Production As Operation Epic Fury Rages On

U.S. Central Command said late Friday on X that U.S. forces struck 3,000 IRGC targets with air-delivered munitions during the first week of Operation Epic Fury, signaling that the campaign is only intensifying as it moves into next week.

U.S. forces have struck over 3,000 targets in the first week of Operation Epic Fury, and we are not slowing down. pic.twitter.com/Nqn30feTQA

— U.S. Central Command (@CENTCOM) March 7, 2026

President Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday that he would not accept a negotiated end to the war with Iran, suggesting the conflict could drag on for some time. "There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!" he said.

We have reported that U.S. inventories of some critical munitions are running low, with U.S. forces scrambling for supplies of key air-defense interceptors as IRGC missiles and drones continue to target American and allied bases across Gulf states.

Dwindling supplies of critical munitions are being amplified by Ukraine's continued need for interceptors amid relentless Russian missile and drone barrages, a major problem that likely prompted President Trump to host top U.S. defense manufacturers to discuss accelerating missile and bomb production.

"We just concluded a very good meeting with the largest U.S. Defense Manufacturing Companies where we discussed Production and Production Schedules," Trump said on Truth Social late Friday afternoon.

Trump said the CEOs of BAE Systems, Boeing, Honeywell Aerospace, L3Harris Missile Solutions, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon were all in attendance and "agreed to quadruple" weapons production.

"They have agreed to quadruple Production of the 'Exquisite Class' Weaponry in that we want to reach, as rapidly as possible, the highest levels of quantity. Expansion began three months prior to the meeting, and the plants and Production of many of these Weapons are already underway," the President said.

"We have agreed to quadruple critical munitions production," LMT wrote on X shortly after the meeting.

We have agreed to quadruple critical munitions production. As a result of President @realDonaldTrump's leadership, we began this work months ago with @SecWar Hegseth and Deputy Secretary Feinberg. https://t.co/TPypJRQhEq

— Lockheed Martin (@LockheedMartin) March 6, 2026

As the conflict is set to drag on for weeks and weapons production ramps up, the Goldman Sachs index for U.S. defense firms is primed for a breakout. One reason the breakout could occur is USCENTCOM's X post, which reads "We Are Not Slowing Down."

Our defense pick since May 24, 2025, has been L3Harris, another defense firm that attended the meeting. Nearly a year ago, we outlined that L3Harris was a play on the "U.S. Hemispheric Defense Theme." Since then, the stock is up more than 50%.

What is clear to traders is that the moment Trump signals Iran is prepared to surrender, defense stocks and crude are likely to plunge as war risk premiums implode.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/07/2026 - 11:05

British Lawmaker's Husband Arrested On Suspicion Of Spying For China

Weeks after China's mega-embassy opened in London (the one that's right next to all of their tappable communications cables), the husband of Labour Party whip Joani Reid was arrested over Chinese espionage concerns, prompting the lawmaker to step aside amid ongoing probes.

A member of the Metropolitan Police patrols the Oxford Street retail district in London on Oct. 2, 2025. Leon Neal/Getty Images

Reid's membership in the party is now under suspension while she remains an elected lawmaker, as her husband, 39-year-old David Taylor, was one of three men arrested on Wednesday under the National Security Act. The men allegedly assisted a Chinese intelligence agency. 

In addition to Taylor, former Labour Party press officer Matthew Aplin and former Welsh government special advisor Steve Jones were identified as the other two who were arrested.  

As the Epoch Times notes further, Reid stressed that she’s not under investigation and that neither she nor her children are involved in her husband’s business activities.

“I have done nothing wrong. I ⁠love ​my country,” she said in a statement, noting she has not seen anything to make her suspect her husband has “broken any law.”

She described the suspension as voluntary.

“This week ​has been ​the worst ⁠of my life,” she said.

Chinese espionage concerns have grown in the country recently, with domestic intelligence agency MI5 warning the country’s politicians that they are targets of Chinese agents. On the same day of the trio’s arrests, two other men—a Hong Kong police superintendent and a UK border official—went on trial on charges of spying on the Hong Kong diaspora in the country.

The constituency offices of Joani Reid, the Scottish Labor MP for East Kilbride and Strathaven, in East Kilbride, Scotland, on March 4, 2026. Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Authorities on March 4 also raided the house of a veteran British journalist over the latest spying case.

The journalist, Martin Shipton, described loud banging that woke him up early in the morning.

In a piece for Nation.Cymru, a Welsh news service, Shipton recalled going on an all-expense-paid trip with Taylor to Hong Kong at Taylor’s invitation. The trip happened about three years ago and lasted around a week, funded by a Chinese think tank that advised the top Chinese leader on international relations, he said. He emphasized that he was not under arrest and that he voluntarily gave a statement to the police about the trip.

At the House of Commons chamber, UK Minister of State for Security Dan Jarvis expressed alarm over “an increasing pattern of covert activity from Chinese state-linked actors targeting UK democracy,” whether it be gathering intelligence on policymaking or active interference in governance.

British officials have raised strong concerns with their Chinese counterparts in both London and Beijing, he said.

Multiple local lawmakers took the occasion to highlight security risks they saw with plans of a new, expanded Chinese embassy that their government greenlit in January.

“The Chinese only represent strength, and for them everything is transactional,” Conservative lawmaker Edward Leigh said.

He called on the UK authorities to summon the Chinese ambassador over the “intolerable” actions.

“You cannot build this mega-embassy in just about the most sensitive site in London while you behave like this,” he said.

In the United States, Chairman of the House Select Committee on the CCP Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) echoed the view.

He noted another Chinese spy trial in London last fall, which collapsed before it began because the government failed to provide evidence that China represents a national security threat.

“The British government’s failure to properly prosecute alleged spies last fall, coupled with its approval of China’s mega embassy, only emboldens the CCP’s espionage activities in the UK,” Moolenaar said.

He urged the UK to rescind the Chinese mega embassy approval and prosecute the cases thoroughly.

“As one of our closest security partners with access to American intelligence on China, the UK’s commitment to protecting sensitive information must be beyond doubt,” he said.

Reid’s office didn’t respond to a query from The Epoch Times by publication time.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/07/2026 - 10:30

Russia Warns 'Vulnerable' Finland As It Moves To Lift Ban On Hosting NATO Nukes

The last thing the world needs at this moment of raging war in Iran and the Persian Gulf region is another round of nuclear saber-rattling related to that other raging hotspot - the Ukraine conflict, but that's precisely what is happening again this week.

The Kremlin is warning that Russia could respond if Finland moves forward with plans to scrap its longstanding ban on the transit and storage of nuclear weapons, framing the proposal as a direct security threat on its border.

The alleged nuclear discussions come after reports that NATO could look for alternatives to Washington providing Europe with NATO's 'nuclear shield' - as has always been the case since the Cold War. Finland is a new NATO member, having only just formally joined the alliance, abandoning historic neutrality, in April of 2023.

On Thursday, the Finnish government confirmed it will seek amendments to the country's Nuclear Energy Act and Criminal Code, removing legal barriers that currently prevent the import or hosting of nuclear weapons for defense purposes.

Source: Yle

Officials suggest the legislative changes could be implemented as soon as the summer, effectively clearing the legal path for deeper integration with NATO's nuclear posture.

Moscow has predictably reacted swiftly, with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov telling reporters Friday that such steps risk escalating tensions across Europe.

"Such decisions lead to an escalation of tensions on the European continent," he said, before issuing a blunt warning: "By deploying nuclear weapons on its territory, Finland is beginning to threaten us. And if Finland threatens us, we take appropriate measures." Peskov noted further that Helsinki's rhetoric only increases Finland's own vulnerability.

And of course, Russia and Finland share an over 800-mile border which has been increasingly militarized in the wake of the start of the Ukraine war over four years ago.

Finnish officials, however, are attempting to manage the fallout and reassure their nuclear-armed super power neighbor, with President Alexander Stubb insisting the legislative move does not signal plans to host nuclear arms, saying, “Finland does not want to have nuclear weapons on its territory, and there are no such plans in NATO.”

The Defense Ministry echoed that position, arguing the amendments are meant to remove legal obstacles rather than pave the way for direct deployment, allowing Finland to fully participate in NATO's defense framework. Moscow is unlikely to buy any of these arguments, seeing in the change a clear precedent for further escalation.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/07/2026 - 08:45

Britain Is Trying To Censor Americans... But Washington Is Fighting Back

Authored by Daniel Lü via The Daily Sceptic,

Ofcom has confirmed it is referring 4chan to a final enforcement decision under the Online Safety Act. The target is a Delaware company that runs an entirely anonymous imageboard from the United States, with no offices, staff, servers or assets in Britain.

The demand: install age-verification systems and content filters so that British children cannot access the site or face daily fines levied from London on an American platform.

This case is not an outlier.

It is the clearest real-world demonstration of what the new generation of “online safety” laws requires: private companies must build automated filters that decide, in advance, which legal speech is too harmful for minors to see. The question the regulators never quite answer is simple: what exactly does the filter catch?

In the early 2020s, a political consensus formed on both sides of the Atlantic: social media is harming children and something must be done. The result in Washington was the Kids’ Online Safety Act (KOSA); in Westminster, the Online Safety Act (OSA), which received Royal Assent in October 2023 and began enforcement in 2025. The political appeal of both measures is genuine. Adolescent mental health deteriorated in the 2010s, parents are alarmed and platforms have appeared indifferent. But good intentions do not make good law, and the form these interventions took is constitutionally and morally indefensible. Both KOSA and the OSA rest on a duty-of-care model: platforms must take “reasonable measures” or implement “proportionate systems” to prevent minors from encountering content associated with depression, anxiety, eating disorders, self-harm and suicide. This is not a regulation of conduct. It is a mandate to suppress speech based on its topic and its predicted emotional effect on a reader: the very definition of content-based regulation.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stated the constitutional problem plainly in its July 2023 letter opposing KOSA: the bill “is a content-based regulation of constitutionally protected speech” that “will silence important conversations, limit minors’ access to potentially vital resources and violate the First Amendment”.  Under Reed v. Town of Gilbert, a law is content-based if it “applies to particular speech because of the topic discussed or the idea or message expressed”. Content-based regulations are “presumptively unconstitutional”.

The ACLU identified three specific constitutional failures.

First, the speech targeted is protected. The Supreme Court has never permitted government to suppress legal speech simply because a legislature finds it unsuitable for children. In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the Court was unambiguous: “Speech that is neither obscene as to youths nor subject to some other legitimate proscription cannot be suppressed solely to protect the young from ideas or images that a legislative body thinks unsuitable for them.” Creating a “wholly new category of content-based regulation” permissible only for speech directed at children would be “unprecedented and mistaken”.

Second, these regimes fail strict scrutiny because they are not premised on demonstrated causation. As the ACLU wrote, KOSA “is not premised on a direct causal link, but instead is based on correlation, not evidence of causation”. This is a decisive legal and moral point. In Brown, the Court struck down California’s video game restriction on exactly the same grounds: the state had produced only correlative data. A law that restricts the speech of millions of people must show that the restriction will actually prevent the harm it identifies. Neither KOSA nor the OSA can clear that bar.

Third, these regimes are both under- and over-inclusive. They leave news media, books, music and magazines entirely unregulated while targeting social media platforms. And they will, inevitably, sweep up beneficial speech alongside harmful speech: 92% of parental control apps have been found to incorrectly block LGBTQ+ content and suicide-prevention resources alongside material that is genuinely harmful. Congress, the ACLU concluded, may not rely on unproven future technology to save the statute.

The empirical premise of both regimes is that social media causes mental illness in adolescents. This claim is contested by a substantial body of peer-reviewed research. In a widely noted book review in Nature, Candice L. Odgers, a psychologist specialising in adolescent mental health at UC Irvine, wrote that the graphs produced by Jonathan Haidt in his work The Anxious Generation, which align the rise in teen mental illness with smartphone adoption, “will be useful in teaching my students the fundamentals of causal inference, and how to avoid making up stories by simply looking at trend lines”. Hundreds of researchers, Odgers wrote, “have searched for the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt. Our efforts have produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations. Most data are correlative.” The direction of causality may run the other way: distressed and isolated adolescents gravitate toward online community; social media does not necessarily create the distress.

The practical implication is stark. Existing criminal law already covers the most serious harms comprehensively: child sexual abuse material (CSAM), terrorist content, incitement to violence and harassment are all criminal in both jurisdictions and all designated “priority illegal content” under the OSA’s Schedules 5-7. The genuinely novel element of both regimes is the duty to suppress legal speech about mental health, gender identity and emotional distress. That element is what fails both the First Amendment and basic proportionality analysis.

The most immediate and documented casualty of the OSA’s implementation has been LGBTQ+ communities. This is not an implementation error. It is structural: the content filters platforms deploy to comply with age-assurance obligations cannot distinguish between content that causes harm to LGBTQ+ youth and content that protects them. Following the July 2025 enforcement rollout, Reddit moved significant LGBTQ+ community content behind age-verification barriers on the logic that queer content is “adult content” and therefore, under the Act, presumptively harmful to children. As OpenDemocracy documented, content creators who are “queer, trans or racialised”, or whose content focuses on these communities, have been “disproportionately targeted, with anything ‘queer’ indiscriminately labelled as ‘adult’”. For trans people, the harm is compounded by the identity documentation problem. Age verification requires users to produce government-issued identity matching their legal name and sex. In 2018, fewer than 5,000 trans people in the UK held a Gender Recognition Certificate, out of an estimated 200,000-500,000. For those without legal gender recognition, age verification is not a minor inconvenience, it forces them to out themselves to a commercial third party as a condition of internet access, creating a permanent record linking their legal identity to spaces they may be using precisely to explore their identity in safety. The moral stakes here are not abstract. For LGBTQ+ young people who cannot be open at home or school, online community is not a convenience but a lifeline. Stonewall has warned that anonymity-reduction measures create a “chilling effect” that puts LGBTQ+ people in genuine danger, particularly in the 12 countries where being LGBTQ+ carries the death penalty. As Stonewall’s Director of External Affairs wrote: “The UK’s Online Safety Bill could become the playbook for countries looking to use digital surveillance to identify and persecute their LGBTQ+ citizens.” The US State Department’s 2024 Human Rights Practices Report criticised the OSA for pressuring US social media platforms to “censor speech deemed misinformation or hate speech”.

The regulatory pressure on US platforms is not confined to Ofcom. On February 24th 2026, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s independent data protection regulator, issued Reddit, Inc. a £14.47 million fine for unlawfully processing children’s personal information: the largest penalty the ICO has ever imposed for breaches of children’s privacy. The ICO found that Reddit, despite prohibiting users under 13 by its terms of service, applied no robust age assurance mechanism from May 2018 until July 2025, and therefore had no lawful basis for processing the personal data of under-13s under the UK General Data Protection Regulation. Reddit’s omission to carry out a data protection impact assessment (DPIA) focused on the risks to children before January 2025 separately breached Articles 5, 6, 8 and 35 of the UK GDPR. Reddit has announced its intention to appeal, calling the ICO’s requirement to collect identity information from users “counterintuitive and at odds with our strong belief in our users’ online privacy and safety”. The ICO acted under its Age Appropriate Design Code (the ‘Children’s Code’) rather than the OSA, but the two regimes are coordinated: the ICO has openly admitted that it works in partnership with Ofcom, as the ICO stated in its December 2025 children’s privacy progress update, “to ensure efforts are coordinated”. The fine is legally distinct from OSA enforcement but functionally complementary to it: where Ofcom targets platforms’ content-governance duties, the ICO targets their data-governance failures, and the same underlying conduct of allowing age-unverified users to access content triggers liability under both regimes simultaneously. The ICO is now conducting a broader review of at least 17 platforms popular with children in the UK, including Discord, Pinterest and X. Reddit’s objection also surfaces another contradiction the ICO has not resolved: the age verification it effectively mandates creates a permanent record linking users’ legal identities to their platform activity, held by third-party age verification processors entirely outside the platforms’ own systems, and the data practices of those processors are, as the ICO’s own enforcement demonstrates, largely beyond the regulator’s concern.

The contrast between the ICO’s vigour against American social media platforms and its passivity toward British police forces is, on its face, a study in selective enforcement.

The same week that John Edwards announced the £14.47 million Reddit fine and spoke at the IAPP UK Intensive, the story of Alvi Choudhury was making national television. Choudhury, a 26 year-old British Bangladeshi software engineer, had been arrested at his home in Southampton in January 2026 by Thames Valley Police, who suspected him of committing a £3,000 burglary in Milton Keynes: a city he has never visited, 100 miles away. The arrest was triggered by a retrospective facial recognition match against Cognitec software that runs 25,000 searches per month against approximately 19 million custody photographs held on the Police National Database. Choudhury was held in custody for nearly 10 hours before officers examined the alibi evidence he had been offering since his arrest. When he eventually saw the CCTV footage that had identified him, he told the Guardian the suspect looked approximately 10 years younger, with lighter skin, a bigger nose, no facial hair and different eyes and lips. His own mugshot had been on the police system in the first place only because he was wrongly arrested in 2021 after being the victim of an assault; his DNA was subsequently deleted, but his custody photograph was not. Thames Valley Police’s response was, on its own account, revealing. The force acknowledged the arrest “may have been the result of bias within facial recognition technology”, but an officer told Choudhury that “as the use of facial recognition is already subject to review at a strategic level”, he did not feel the need to raise the matter for wider organisational learning. The force’s public statement went further, reframing the failure entirely: the arrest, it said, was based on the investigating officer’s own visual assessment after the algorithmic match, and therefore “was not influenced by racial profiling”. The position that a human officer confirming a racially biased algorithmic result absolves the institution of responsibility for racial bias merits no extended comment. This is not an isolated incident. In January 2026, another force paid damages to a black man wrongly arrested using the same technology. Home Office research, suppressed until December 2025 when it was published deep within a consultation document by Liberty Investigates, found that the algorithm generates false positive matches at a rate of 5.5% for Black faces and 4.0% for Asian faces, compared with 0.04% for white faces: a disparity of more than 100 to one.

When Edwards took the stage, he explained the ICO’s enforcement philosophy: the regulator must “very deliberately choose our focus”, concentrating on “AI and biometrics, children’s privacy and online tracking”. Police facial recognition involves all three. But the ICO has conducted audits, expressed concern through its Deputy Commissioner, and asked the Home Office for “urgent clarity” and stopped there. The Equality and Human Rights Commission has been more forthright: it was granted permission in August 2025 to intervene in a judicial review of the Metropolitan Police’s live facial recognition programme, arguing the deployments are unlawful for want of a clear legal basis. A comment made at the time about the ICO’s posture proved apt: the regulator had “stressed the need for FRT deployment with appropriate safeguards” while sitting “on the fence” as others sought judicial determination of whether current use is “strictly necessary”. The juxtaposition is instructive. The regulator charged with protecting personal data finds £14 million worth of urgency in Reddit’s failure to age-verify its users, and no comparable urgency in a biometric surveillance system that its own deputy has called “disappointing”, that the government’s own research shows discriminates against minorities by a factor exceeding 100, and that has produced wrongful arrests of racial minorities on the basis of a technology the operating force itself concedes may be racially biased. The filter, as always, catches what the filter is not intentionally designed to catch.

All of this would be a domestic British problem if the OSA’s reach were confined to British soil. It is not. Section 3 of the OSA applies to any service with “links with the United Kingdom”, which Ofcom has interpreted to include any platform with a significant UK user base regardless of where it is domiciled, incorporated or operated. In March 2025, Ofcom wrote to 4chan Community Support LLC, a Delaware LLC with no offices, staff or assets outside the United States, to inform it that it was a regulated service because approximately 7% of its traffic came from UK IP addresses and must therefore provide information regarding its illegal content risk assessment and its qualifying worldwide revenue. 4chan refused to respond to either request. In October, Ofcom issued escalating demands, investigations and a £20,000 fine plus a penalty of £100 per day for up to 60 days for non-compliance with information requests, all served by email to US addresses. 4chan again refused to pay. In August 2025, 4chan and Kiwi Farms (Lolcow LLC) filed a federal lawsuit against Ofcom in the District of Columbia, alleging violations of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments, pre-emption by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and conflict with the SPEECH Act. Ofcom responded by asserting sovereign immunity under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, claiming both the right to issue binding censorship orders to Americans on American soil and immunity from any American legal response.

Ofcom’s enforcement action against 4chan did not end with the October 2025 information-gathering fine. On February 12th 2026, Ofcom issued a second Provisional Decision against 4chan, proposing both a single penalty and a daily rate penalty for contraventions of sections 9, 10, and 12 of the OSA: its substantive duties to conduct a suitable illegal content risk assessment, to set out adequate user protections in its terms of service, and to implement age verification to prevent children from encountering explicit content. Counsel for 4chan, Preston Byrne, replied the same day: “Increasing the size of a censorship fine does not cure its legal invalidity in the United States.” The deadline for representations having passed without compliance, Ofcom confirmed on February 27th that it was referring the matter to a final decision maker under its Online Safety Enforcement Guidelines. The progression is systematic: from information requests under section 100, to a confirmation decision imposing penalties, to a second provisional decision targeting the Act’s substantive content-safety and age-verification duties. Each escalatory step expands the scope of demanded compliance and raises the potential penalty exposure. For an anonymous platform operating exclusively in the United States, age verification for an anonymous imageboard is not a technical requirement: it is an existential one.

The domestic British appeals framework for these decisions is itself still being constructed. On February 26th 2026, the Tribunal Procedure Committee (TPC) opened a consultation on amending the Upper Tribunal Procedure Rules to accommodate the new rights of appeal created by the OSA. Under section 168 of the Act, any person with a sufficient interest may challenge Ofcom’s confirmation decisions, penalty notices and technology notices before the Upper Tribunal. The TPC provisionally proposes a three-month window for permission-to-appeal applications by interested persons who are not the direct recipients of an Ofcom notice, departing from Ofcom’s own preference for one month. On costs, the TPC agrees with Ofcom’s proposal to displace the usual no-costs rule, recognising that the tribunal should have broader discretion to award costs in OSA cases given the likely complexity and evidence-heavy nature of such appeals, and that the existing rule would leave Ofcom unable to recover costs even where it successfully defends a decision. Ofcom is a regulator with the power to fine companies hundreds of millions of pounds, funded by fees levied on the very industry it regulates, and it is now asking for the right to make anyone who challenges it in court pay Ofcom’s legal bills if they lose. The consultation closes May 21st 2026.

This structural asymmetry is what the GRANITE Act directly addresses. Conceptualised by Byrne and introduced in the Wyoming Legislature as HB 70, the ‘Guaranteeing Rights Against Novel International Tyranny and Extortion Act’ passed the Wyoming House of Representatives 46-12 on February 23rd 2026. It strips foreign sovereigns of immunity in US state courts when they attempt to enforce censorship orders against US persons and creates a private right of action with minimum statutory damages of $1 million per violation, or 10% of the defendant’s annual US-related revenue, whichever is greater. It also prevents Wyoming courts from recognising any foreign judgment that infringes constitutionally protected speech, extending the model of the SPEECH Act (28 U.S.C. §§ 4101-4105) from defamation to the full range of First Amendment-protected expression. If censoring an American exposes a foreign regulator to a sufficiently significant civil judgment, the cost-benefit calculation changes dramatically.

A separate American legal theory operates through the Sherman Act and does not depend on overcoming FSIA immunity at all. Ofcom’s sovereign immunity defence may insulate the regulator itself from direct suit, but it extends no protection to the private actors who shaped the OSA’s regulatory design. The OSA imposes identical nominal obligations on all regulated services, but its fixed compliance costs fall proportionally far harder on smaller platforms than on large incumbents with existing legal, technical and compliance teams that can simply be redirected to satisfy new requirements: a pattern antitrust economists describe as raising rivals’ costs. For example, where well-resourced incumbents privately coordinated with regulators to embed compliance standards they could more easily satisfy than their rivals, the resulting framework may reflect competitive preferences rather than independent regulatory judgement. Under Continental Ore Co. v. Union Carbide & Carbon Corp., routing an anticompetitive scheme through a foreign governmental apparatus does not immunise the private actors who designed it. The Noerr-Pennington doctrine, which ordinarily protects petitioning activity, rests on First Amendment foundations that protect the right to petition American government; the stronger legal argument is that it does not extend to petitioning of foreign regulators. Where the factual record supports coordination beyond ordinary advocacy, Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act remain available tools even where the regulatory mechanism is British.

If you care about children’s mental health and safety online, there are three new bills in Congress that are worth knowing about: the SAFE Act, the ECCHO Act and the Stop Sextortion Act (collectively known as the James T. Woods Act). Together they address real, documented harm in ways that KOSA and the UK’s Online Safety Act, simply do not.

The package addresses three documented gaps in federal law.

• The SAFE Act repeals outdated CSAM sentencing provisions and directs the US Sentencing Commission to develop updated guidelines reflecting modern patterns of dangerous conduct. Right now, federal sentencing rules are outdated and largely ignored: fewer than one in three cases are sentenced within the existing guidelines. This bill would clear the way for the US Sentencing Commission to write new, updated rules that reflect how online abuse works today.

• The ECCHO Act creates a new federal crime targeting networks, most notoriously Network 764, that use online group chats to coerce emotionally vulnerable children into self-harm, suicide and violence, with penalties up to life imprisonment where a victim dies or attempts suicide.

• The Stop Sextortion Act explicitly criminalises sextortion for the first time under federal law, responding to a 33% rise in financially motivated cases in 2024 and more than 40 child deaths linked to these schemes. Unlike KOSA or OSA, the James T. Woods Act does not try to police what people say online. They target what predators do: coercion, blackmail and the deliberate manipulation of children into harm. That is a meaningful distinction, and it is why this package has earned support from more than two dozen organizations across the political spectrum, including the FBI Agents Association, RAINN, the National District Attorneys Association, the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children and Thorn.

The moral case against both the OSA and KOSA is not that children’s wellbeing is unimportant. It is that suppressing protected speech is both the wrong instrument and a dangerous one. The wrong instrument because the science does not establish that social media causes the harms these laws address, and because the content filters that implement these regimes cannot distinguish beneficial from harmful speech. A dangerous one because the same mechanism that blocks, for example, pro-anorexia posts will also block access to eating disorder recovery communities; the same filter that catches self-harm instructions will catch trans youth support forums; and the same regulator empowered to define ‘harmful’ content today may be led by someone with very different ideas about what speech is harmful tomorrow. Above all, it is dangerous because the machinery of protection, once built, does not confine itself to its original target: Japanese Americans were interned after Pearl Harbour; Muslims were surveilled, infiltrated and placed on no-fly lists after September 11th, some rendered to CIA black sites abroad and others tortured at Guantanamo Bay without charge or trial; McCarthyite loyalty boards destroyed careers on the basis that association predicted subversion; and the FBI’s COINTELPRO program turned the apparatus of domestic security against the civil rights movement, monitoring Martin Luther King Jr. as a threat to national security on the pretext of alleged communist infiltration. In each case, the instrument was constructed in good faith to address a genuine fear; in each case the stated rationale was correlation dressed as causation; and in each case the same institutional machinery, once normalised, was available for use against the next group a future administration found threatening.

Ofcom’s attempt to extend this regime to American soil raises the stakes further. It asserts, in effect, that British regulators may determine what Americans are permitted to say on the American internet and that American law has no recourse. That is not a tenable position under the First Amendment, under any established principles of international jurisdiction or under any defensible conception of democratic self-governance. The GRANITE Act is the beginning of the American legal system’s answer.

A brief postscript. I recently sent a prior version of this article to a member of the House of Lords who had asked to read it. Parliament’s email filter blocked it. Repeatedly. The peer could not open the attachment because the system flagged it as suspicious. The article, with working title ‘What the Filter Catches’, was itself caught by a filter. I could not have asked for a better illustration of the argument. Sometimes the world just does the work for you.

Note: The author has submitted Freedom of Information requests to the US Department of State, the Department of Justice, the National Security Council, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Trade Commission, the UK ICO as well as Ofcom itself seeking documents relating to Ofcom’s extraterritorial enforcement strategy. Those requests remain pending.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/07/2026 - 08:10

Mind-Numbing Irony: US Asks Ukraine's Help To Shoot Down Iran's Shahed Drones In Gulf

In the ultimate irony of ironies, Financial Times is reporting US officials are discussing the purchase of Ukrainian-made drone interceptors to counter Iranian drones, which some analysts say have proven harder to stop than expected.

Patriot missile interceptors used by US allies cost more than $4 million each, while the Ukrainian systems are significantly cheaper and designed to defeat the same Shahed-type drones used by Russia.

Image source: Come Back Alive Foundation

Supplies are dwindling and costs are soaring, after approaching a full week in to Iran's retaliation on Gulf nations hosting American bases, given that Patriots have remained the interceptor of choice to defend Gulf cities as well as foreign bases, with a single Patriot interceptor possibly running over $13.5 million.

So Ukraine's experience in facing down Russia's significant aerial war over four years of conflict could provide for a cheaper alternative.

The Financial Times describes, citing sources familiar with the discussions, that "Ukrainian drone interceptors are proving they can take down Shaheds at a fraction of the cost."

However, officials have also stated that any export of Ukrainian systems would need Ukrainian government approval, even if assembled abroad.

This might prove a tall order given that Ukraine is already desperate to get more defense weaponry from the West, and in reality is the last country that can just spare some major weapons systems, or even parts and ammo.

The US has formally asked for Ukraine’s help to shoot down Iran’s Shahed drones, President Zelensky confirms.

The mind numbing irony. https://t.co/u2kgkipQu6

— Tom Newton Dunn (@tnewtondunn) March 5, 2026

But President Zelensky, who has clearly expressed concern that the globe's attention is fixed squarely on the Iran war, has affirmed he's in talks with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

"Ukraine’s expertise in intercepting Shahed drones is among the world’s most advanced," Zelensky has said. "Any cooperation must not compromise our own defenses."

Across the Gulf, there has remained a situation of steady Iranian missile and drone attacks on US Gulf allies. Below is a breakdown of overnight and Friday morning attacks, via Newsquawk:

Saudi Arabia

• Intercepted ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones, including strikes targeting the Prince Sultan Air Base and areas near Riyadh and Al-Kharj.

Qatar

• Intercepted a drone targeting Al-Udeid Air Base, the largest US military base in the region.
• Residents received emergency alerts instructing them to avoid open areas.

UAE

• Intercepted 9 ballistic missiles and 109 drones in a single day.
• Three drones fell inside the country.
• Since the war began: 3 killed and 112 injured in UAE attacks.

Bahrain

• Iranian drones were intercepted over Manama, with debris reportedly damaging buildings, including a hotel.

Broke: We need to arm Ukraine

Woke: We don’t need to arm Ukraine

Bespoke: We need Ukraine to arm us https://t.co/tc8NBa3Hpe

— Martin Skold (@MartinSkold2) March 5, 2026

Meanwhile, this sarcastic observation sums up the awkward situation perfectly: 

Broke: We need to arm Ukraine; Woke: We don’t need to arm Ukraine; Bespoke: We need Ukraine to arm us.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/07/2026 - 07:35

Germany Is Now Officially A Planned Economy

Authored by Eduard Braun via Mises Institute,

Germany’s push for a social-ecological market economy rests on far-reaching state interventions in energy and industry, including a government-driven hydrogen strategy. In a recent report Germany’s Federal Audit Office explicitly describes the policy as a planned economy and highlights fundamental problems. At the same time, it doubts that the government will reach its own targets, indicating that these climate-policy experiments are likely to fail even on their own terms.

Germany’s “social-ecological transformation” is the political program of turning the existing social market economy into what the government calls a “social-ecological market economy.” In practice, this means that climate and environmental targets are placed above the spontaneous outcomes of markets, and the state increasingly directs investment, production, and consumption through detailed regulation, bans, subsidies, and new bureaucratic structures.

The federal government has committed itself—through the Paris Agreement, the EU Green Deal, the EU Climate Law, and Germany’s own Climate Change Act—to achieving greenhouse-gas neutrality by 2045. On this basis, it is pushing a comprehensive restructuring of the entire energy and industrial base. Fossil fuels are to be phased out and replaced by renewable energy sources and new technologies. To enforce this, Berlin is tightening emissions limits, introducing sector-specific reduction paths, and expanding carbon pricing. At the same time, it is rolling out large-scale subsidy programs and support schemes aimed at “climate-friendly” investments, ranging from energy-intensive industries to housing, transport, and agriculture. According to the Scientific Service of the German Bundestag, the transformation will cost about 13 trillion euros (roughly 15.3 trillion dollars).

Central to this transformation is not merely setting general framework conditions, but steering concrete technological choices: the government explicitly promotes certain technologies (such as hydrogen, battery-electric mobility, and “green” industrial processes) and discourages or prohibits others. It also relies on binding planning instruments and long-term “transformation roadmaps” for entire sectors of the economy. Officially, this is presented as a modernization strategy that will preserve prosperity while making Germany climate-neutral. In reality, it increasingly replaces decentralized entrepreneurial decisions and price signals with political targets and administrative plans.

Germany’s Federal Audit Office (“Bundesrechnungshof”) is an official state institution, not a libertarian think tank. It reports to parliament and examines whether the federal government uses public funds lawfully and efficiently. Precisely this body, in its October 28, 2025 report on Germany’s national hydrogen strategy, delivers an unusually clear verdict on the economic character of current climate policy.

The report states that hydrogen is supposed to play a “key role in the energy transition,” yet “there is a lack of supply, demand, and infrastructure” (p. 2). In other words, the government is trying to build an entire market around a product that is scarcely available, scarcely needed under current conditions, and cannot be traded at scale because the necessary pipelines and facilities are missing. The Audit Office further emphasizes that “hydrogen is significantly more expensive than energy sources used to date. The Federal Government is supporting the ramp-up of the hydrogen economy with several billion euros annually, following a planned economy approach” (p. 2, emphasis added). Here, the central term—“planned economy approach”—comes directly from an official oversight body describing government policy, not from its critics.

Despite this massive use of subsidies and dirigiste steering, the Audit Office concludes that the government remains “far from reaching its goal of establishing a hydrogen economy by 2030” (p. 2). In short, the watchdog authority finds that Berlin is using a planned economy method, paying far higher costs for hydrogen than for existing energy sources, and still failing to come close to its own targets.

From the perspective of Austrian economics, none of this should be surprising. Ludwig von Mises argued that once governments move from a market order to a system of political planning, they inevitably undermine the very mechanisms—prices, profits, and losses—that coordinate economic activity. Central planners cannot know the relative scarcities, preferences, and technological possibilities that millions of entrepreneurs discover only through free exchange. The result is misallocation of capital, persistent shortages and surpluses, and a gradual erosion of prosperity.

Germany’s “social-ecological market economy” is a textbook illustration of this dynamic. The state declares hydrogen and other favored technologies to be the “future,” pours billions into subsidies, and attempts to construct markets by decree. Yet even an official body like the Federal Audit Office now describes this as a “planned economy approach” and doubts that the government will reach its own goals. In all likelihood, Germany is about to confirm once again what Mises showed in theory a century ago: planned economies do not deliver their promised outcomes. Instead, they generate rising costs, failing projects, and increasing chaos—while making society poorer in the process.

Tyler Durden Sat, 03/07/2026 - 07:00

The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:

• The Iran War’s Most Precious Commodity Isn’t Oil: Forget crude—the real strategic resource at stake in the Middle East is water, and nobody’s talking about it. (Bloomberg free)

• Capital Group’s Weird Passive Bravado: The giant active manager is trash-talking index funds while quietly borrowing from their playbook. (Financial Times) see also The attention economy is coming for investment research: FT Alphaville on how the same forces that destroyed journalism and music are now eating Wall Street research — virality over rigor, engagement over accuracy. (FT Alphaville / Substack)

• How Do We Deal with the Catastrophe of Uninsurability?: Whole regions of the world are becoming uninsurable, bringing radical uncertainty to the economy. As climate risk makes more and more properties uninsurable, the financial system faces a reckoning it hasn’t priced in. (Aeon)

• The US Had a Big Battery Boom Last Year: Despite Donald Trump’s unrelenting attacks on renewable energy, there’s a quiet revolution happening on US grids. (Wired)

• GLP-1 Drugs May Fight Addiction Across Every Major Substance: A massive study of 600,000 people suggests Ozempic and its cousins might be the most important addiction treatment breakthrough in decades. (The Conversation)

• The New Miami Gold Rush: The ultrawealthy are vying for a limited number of exclusive properties on the islands and shorelines of South Florida. (New York Times) see also What Is a City When Its Wealthiest Leave? The stickiness that once anchored people and capital to great cities is gone. It is not coming back. (Wall Street Journal)

• 6 Takeaways From Citrini’s Viral AI Doomer Article (and a Bunch of Rebuttals): The Citrini AI doomsday report went mega-viral. Read Trung breaks down the key claims, the strongest counterarguments, and what investors should actually take away from the noise. (Read Trung)

• Apocalypse No: How Almost Everything We Thought We Knew About the Maya Is Wrong: The collapse narrative is a myth, and the real story is far more interesting than the doomsday version. (The Guardian)

• Pentagon Eyes Ukrainian Interceptor Drones to Counter Iran: Kyiv pioneered cheap, mass-produced machines to battle Russian Shaheds—now the U.S. military wants in on the action. (Financial Times) see also Iran’s Underground ‘Missile Cities’ Have Become One of Its Biggest Vulnerabilities: U.S. and Israeli aircraft are circling over the subterranean bases, destroying missile launchers as they emerge to fire (Wall Street Journal)

• Scrubbing Back In: The Scrubs reboot is happening. The Ringer goes inside what Zach Braff, Bill Lawrence, and the original cast are planning — and whether lightning can strike twice. (The Ringer)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Ed Perks, president of Franklin Advisers and chief investment officer of Franklin Income Investors. He serves as lead portfolio manager of Franklin Income Fund, as well as Franklin Managed Income Fund. He is a member of the Franklin Templeton executive committee, a small group of the company’s top leaders responsible for shaping the firm’s overall strategy.

 

Korea’s Kospi: From cheap to world beating to expensive…

Source: Jim Reid, Deutsche Bank

 

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Peter Schiff: Printing Money Is Not the Cure for Cononavirus



In his most recent podcast, Peter Schiff talked about coronavirus and the impact that it is having on the markets. Earlier this month, Peter said he thought the virus was just an excuse for stock market woes. At the time he believed the market was poised to fall anyway. But as it turns out, coronavirus has actually helped the US stock market because it has led central banks to pump even more liquidity into the world financial system. All this means more liquidity — central banks easing. In fact, that is exactly what has already happened, except the new easing is taking place, for now, outside the United States, particularly in China.” Although the new money is primarily being created in China, it is flowing into dollars — the dollar index is up — and into US stocks. Last week, US stock markets once again made all-time record highs. In fact, I think but for the coronavirus, the US stock market would still be selling off. But because of the central bank stimulus that has been the result of fears over the coronavirus, that actually benefitted not only the US dollar, but the US stock market.” In the midst of all this, Peter raises a really good question. The primary economic concern is that coronavirus will slow down output and ultimately stunt economic growth. Practically speaking, the world would produce less stuff. If the virus continues to spread, there would be fewer goods and services produced in a market that is hunkered down. Why would the Federal Reserve respond, or why would any central bank respond to that by printing money? How does printing more money solve that problem? It doesn’t. In fact, it actually exacerbates it. But you know, everybody looks at central bankers as if they’ve got the solution to every problem. They don’t. They don’t have the magic wand. They just have a printing press. And all that creates is inflation.” Sometimes the illusion inflation creates can look like a magic wand. Printing money can paper over problems. But none of this is going to fundamentally fix the economy. In fact, if central bankers were really going to do the right thing, the appropriate response would be to drain liquidity from the markets, not supply even more.” Peter explained how the Fed was originally intended to create an “elastic” money supply that would expand or contract along with economic output. Today, the money supply only goes in one direction — that’s up. The economy is strong, print money. The economy is weak, print even more money.” Of course, the asset that’s doing the best right now is gold. The yellow metal pushed above $1,600 yesterday. Gold is up 5.5% on the year in dollar terms and has set record highs in other currencies. Because gold is rising even in an environment where the dollar is strengthening against other fiat currencies, that shows you that there is an underlying weakness in the dollar that is right now not being reflected in the Forex markets, but is being reflected in the gold markets. Because after all, why are people buying gold more aggressively than they’re buying dollars or more aggressively than they’re buying US Treasuries? Because they know that things are not as good for the dollar or the US economy as everybody likes to believe. So, more people are seeking out refuge in a better safe-haven and that is gold.” Peter also talked about the debate between Trump and Obama over who gets credit for the booming economy – which of course, is not booming.

We are living in crazy times. I have a hard time believing that most of the general public is not awake, but in reality, they are. We've never seen anything like this; I mean not even under Obama during the worst part of the Great Recession." Now the Fed is desperately trying to keep interest rates from rising. The problem is that it's a much bigger debt bubble this time around , and the Fed is going to have to blow a lot more air into it to keep it inflated. The difference is this time it's not going to work." It looks like the Fed did another $104.15 billion of Not Q.E. in a single day. The Fed claims it's only temporary. But that is precisely what Bernanke claimed when the Fed started QE1. Milton Freedman once said, "Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program." The same applies to Q.E., or whatever the Fed wants to pretend it's doing. Except this is not QE4, according to Powell. Right. Pumping so much money out, and they are accusing China of currency manipulation ? Wow! Seriously! Amazing! Dump the U.S. dollar while you still have a chance. Welcome to The Atlantis Report. And it is even worse than that, In addition to the $104.15 billion of "Not Q.E." this past Thursday; the FED added another $56.65 billion in liquidity to financial markets the next day on Friday. That's $160.8 billion in two days!!!! in just 48 hours. That is more than 2 TIMES the highest amount the FED has ever injected on a monthly basis under a Q.E. program (which was $80 billion per month) Since this isn't QE....it will be really scary on what they are going to call Q.E. Will it twice, three times, four times, five times what this injection per month ! It is going to be explosive since it takes about 60 to 90 days for prices to react to this, January should see significant inflation as prices soak up the excess liquidity. The question is, where will the inflation occur first . The spike in the repo rate might have a technical explanation: a misjudgment was made in the Fed's money market operations. Even so, two conclusions can be drawn: managing the money markets is becoming harder, and from now on, banks will be studying each other's creditworthiness to a greater degree than before. Those people, who struggle with the minutiae of money markets, and that includes most professionals, should focus on the causes and not the symptoms. Financial markets have recovered from each downturn since 1980 because interest rates have been cut to new lows. Post-2008, they were cut to near zero or below zero in all major economies. In response to a new financial crisis, they cannot go any lower. Central banks will look for new ways to replicate or broaden Q.E. (At some point, governments will simply see repression as an easier option). Then there is the problem of 'risk-free' assets becoming risky assets. Financial markets assume that the probability of major governments such as the U.S. or U.K. defaulting is zero. These governments are entering the next downturn with debt roughly twice the levels proportionate to GDP that was seen in 2008. The belief that the policy worked was completely predicated on the fact that it was temporary and that it was reversible, that the Fed was going to be able to normalize interest rates and shrink its balance sheet back down to pre-crisis levels. Well, when the balance sheet is five-trillion, six-trillion, seven-trillion when we're back at zero, when we're back in a recession, nobody is going to believe it is temporary. Nobody is going to believe that the Fed has this under control, that they can reverse this policy. And the dollar is going to crash. And when the dollar crashes, it's going to take the bond market with it, and we're going to have stagflation. We're going to have a deep recession with rising interest rates, and this whole thing is going to come imploding down. everything is temporary with the fed including remaining off the gold standard temporary in the Fed's eyes could mean at least 50 years This liquidity problem is a signal that trading desks are loaded up on inventory and can't get rid of it. Repo is done out of a need for cash. If you own all of your securities (i.e., a long-only, no leverage mutual fund) you have no need to "repo" your securities - you're earning interest every night so why would you want to 'repo' your securities where you are paying interest for that overnight loan (securities lending is another animal). So, it is those that 'lever-up' and need the cash for settlement purposes on securities they've bought with borrowed money that needs to utilize the repo desk. With this in mind, as we continue to see this need to obtain cash (again, needed to settle other securities purchases), it shows these firms don't have the capital to add more inventory to, what appears to be, a bloated inventory. Now comes the fun part: the Treasury is about to auction 3's, 10's, and 30-year bonds. If I am correct (again, I could be wrong), the Fed realizes securities firms don't have the shelf space to take down a good portion of these auctions. If there isn't enough retail/institutional demand, it will lead to not only a crappy sale but major concerns to the street that there is now no backstop, at all, to any sell-off. At which point, everyone will want to be the first one through the door and sell immediately, but to whom? If there isn't enough liquidity in the repo market to finance their positions, the firms would be unable to increase their inventory. We all saw repo shut down on the 2008 crisis. Wall St runs on money. . OVERNIGHT money. They lever up to inventory securities for trading. If they can't get overnight money, they can't purchase securities. And if they can't unload what they have, it means the buy-side isn't taking on more either. Accounts settle overnight. This includes things like payrolls and bill pay settlements. If a bank doesn't have enough cash to payout what its customers need to pay out, it borrows. At least one and probably more than one banks are insolvent. That's what's going on. First, it can't be one or two banks that are short. They'd simply call around until they found someone to lend. But they did that, and even at markedly elevated rates, still, NO ONE would lend them the money. That tells me that it's not a problem of a couple of borrowers, it's a problem of no lenders. And that means that there's no bank in the world left with any real liquidity. They are ALL maxed out. But as bad as that is, and that alone could be catastrophic, what it really signals is even worse. The lending rates are just the flip side of the coin of the value of the assets lent against. If the rates go up, the value goes down. And with rates spiking to 10%, how far does the value fall? Enormously! And if banks had to actually mark down the value of the assets to reflect 10% interest rates, then my god, every bank in the world is insolvent overnight. Everyone's capital ratios are in the toilet, and they'd have to liquidate. We're talking about the simultaneous insolvency of every bank on the planet. Bank runs. No money in ATMs, Branches closed. Safe deposit boxes confiscated. The whole nine yards, It's actually here. The scenario has tended to guide toward for years and years is actually happening RIGHT NOW! And people are still trying to say it's under control. Every bank in the world is currently insolvent. The only thing keeping it going is printing billions of dollars every day. Financial Armageddon isn't some far off future risk. It's here. Prepare accordingly. This fiat system has reached the end of the line, and it's not correct that fiat currencies fail by design. The problem is corruption and manipulation. It is corruption and cheating that erodes trust and faith until the entire system becomes a gigantic fraud. Banks and governments everywhere ARE the problem and simply have to be removed. They have lost all trust and respect, and all they have left is war and mayhem. As long as we continue to have a majority of braindead asleep imbeciles following orders from these psychopaths, nothing will change. Fiat currency is not just thievery. Fiat currency is SLAVERY. Ultimately the most harmful effect of using debt of undefined value as money (i.e., fiat currencies) is the de facto legalization of a caste system based on voluntary slavery. The bankers have a charter, or the legal *right*, to create money out of nothing. You, you don't. Therefore you and the bankers do not have the same standing before the law. The law of the land says that you will go to jail if you do the same thing (creating money out of thin air) that the banker does in full legality. You and the banker are not equal before the law. ALL the countries of the world; Islamic or secular, Jewish or Arab, democracy or dictatorship; all of them place the bankers ABOVE you. And all of you accept that only whining about fiat money going down in exchange value over time (price inflation which is not the same as monetary inflation). Actually, price inflation itself is mainly due to the greed and stupidity of the bankers who could keep fiat money's exchange value reasonably stable, only if they wanted to. Witness the crash of silver and gold prices which the bankers of the world; Russian, American, Chinese, Jewish, Indian, Arab, all of them collaborated to engineer through the suppression and stagnation of precious metals' prices to levels around the metals' production costs, or what it costs to dig gold and silver out of the ground. The bankers of the world could also collaborate to keep nominal prices steady (as they do in the case of the suppression of precious metals prices). After all, the ability to create fiat money and force its usage is a far more excellent source of power and wealth than that which is afforded simply by stealing it through inflation. The bankers' greed and stupidity blind them to this fact. They want it all, and they want it now. In conclusion, The bankers can create money out of nothing and buy your goods and services with this worthless fiat money, effectively for free. You, you can't. You, you have to lead miserable existences for the most of you and WORK in order to obtain that effectively nonexistent, worthless credit money (whose purchasing/exchange value is not even DEFINED thus rendering all contracts based on the null and void!) that the banker effortlessly creates out of thin air with a few strokes of the computer keyboard, and which he doesn't even bother to print on paper anymore, electing to keep it in its pure quantum uncertain form instead, as electrons whizzing about inside computer chips which will become mute and turn silent refusing to tell you how many fiat dollars or euros there are in which account, in the absence of electricity. No electricity, no fiat, nor crypto money. It would appear that trust is deteriorating as it did when Lehman blew up . Something really big happened that set off this chain reaction in the repo markets. Whatever that something is, we aren't be informed. They're trying to cover it up, paper it over with conjured cash injections, play it cool in front of the cameras while sweating profusely under the 5 thousands dollar suits. I'm guessing that the final high-speed plunge into global economic collapse has begun. All we see here is the ripples and whitewater churning the surface, but beneath the surface, there is an enormous beast thrashing desperately in its death throws. Now is probably the time to start tying up loose ends with the long-running prep projects, just saying. In other words, prepare accordingly, and Get your money out of the banks. I don't care if you don't believe me about Bitcoin. Get your money out of the banks. Don't keep any more money in a bank than you need to pay your bills and can afford to lose.











The Financial Armageddon Economic Collapse Blog tracks trends and forecasts , futurists , visionaries , free investigative journalists , researchers , Whistelblowers , truthers and many more













The Financial Armageddon Economic Collapse Blog tracks trends and forecasts , futurists , visionaries , free investigative journalists , researchers , Whistelblowers , truthers and many more

The FBI released a summary of its file from the Hillary Clinton email investigation on Friday, showing details of Clinton's explanation of her use of a private email server to handle classified communications. The release comes nearly two months after FBI Director James Comey announced that although Clinton's handling of classified information was "extremely careless," it did not rise to the level of a prosecutable offense. Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced the next day that she would not pursue charges in the matter. "We are making these materials available to the public in the interest of transparency and in response to numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests," the FBI noted in a statement sent to reporters with links to the documents. The documents include notes from Clinton's July 2 interview with agents, as well as a "factual summary of the FBI's investigation into this matter," according to the FBI release. Throughout her interview with agents, Clinton repeatedly said she relied on the career professionals she worked with to handle classified information correctly. The agents asked about a series of specific emails, and in each case Clinton said she wasn't worried about the particular material being discussed on a nonclassified channel.