Zero Rss

'Pausing' Intensifies: OpenAI Unleashes Latest Model Minutes After Dario Dumps Magnum Opus

Update (1417ET): Well, well, well...

Anthropic's new Opus launch went up around lunchtime in New York, and by early afternoon OpenAI had rolled out GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, halving prices yet again.

GPT-6 Sol now costs $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, half the $4/$20 promo rate Anthropic matched earlier today. GPT-6 Luna goes for a dime in and 50 cents out, pricing that looks built to fight the open-weight models eating token share. OpenAI says cached input gets a 90% discount, which puts Sol's cache reads at $0.20, the same rate we call Anthropic's "real knife" below. GPT-6 Astra stays on top at $10/$50. The upshot: the $4/$20 price point didn't survive the afternoon, and Opus 5.5 now costs twice as much as OpenAI's workhorse on input and output.

Higher usage limits and lower cost give you more flexibility and room to iterate. pic.twitter.com/AQJ5IlNsB1

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) September 22, 2026

OpenAI's charts, naturally, pit Sol against last-gen Claude. On AutomationBench, it touts Sol's 33.2% at 27 cents a task against Opus 5's 26.9% at 11 times the cost. Opus 5.5, which Anthropic says scored 40.0% on the same test, isn't on the chart, which was out of date the moment it posted. OpenAI also slipped in a dig at Anthropic's safeguards, noting in a footnote that Fable 5.1 fell back to Opus 5 on roughly 40% of tasks (see "The Fine Print" below). Score: Anthropic. Sticker: OpenAI. Anthropic's rebuttal is that Opus 5.5 needs fewer tokens to finish the job.

GPT-6 Sol had been rumored for days, with leakers pointing to Tuesday at a price of $2.50/$15 that turned out to be too high, and some reports claimed Anthropic hurried Opus 5.5 out the door to beat it. Either way, ten days after both CEOs agreed the industry should "pace the frontier," the two labs spent Tuesday trampling each other's headlines.

Pacing, it turns out, is a team sport.

* * *

Anthropic on Tuesday unveiled Claude Opus 5.5, just 10 days after CEO Dario Amodei called for "pacing the frontier" of AI development.

The pitch: Fable-class brains at a steep discount. Anthropic says the new model "performs at the level of Claude Fable 5.1 for most tasks" and costs 40% less to run than Opus 5, which launched all of 60 days ago. List-price cuts run from 20% on input and output tokens to 60% on cache reads, the line item Anthropic says accounts for most of the bill in agentic and coding work. For context, Fable 5.1 lists at $10/$50 per million tokens, or 2.5 times the new Opus price.

The launch was Silicon Valley's worst-kept secret: the $4/$20 pricing and a Tuesday launch date leaked days early, and Polymarket had priced better-than-80% odds of a Sept. 22 release.

Opus 5.5 is our first model since we called for pacing the frontier. As with previous models, it was tested by external evaluators before release, including METR and Frontier Design.

On our most comprehensive alignment test, it achieves the strongest score to date.

— Claude (@claudeai) September 22, 2026

Anthropic says Opus 5.5 leads in agentic coding, computer use and knowledge work, scoring 66.4% on Terminal-Bench 4.0 against 57.9% for OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, and 55.8% for Fable 5.1, while generating output more than 30% faster than Opus 5. Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5 follow within weeks, and subscribers get higher five-hour limits on Pro, Max and Team plans (a 20% bump, per The New Stack) plus a rate-limit reset they can bank for later. On the API, the model is cheaper everywhere: $4 per million input tokens and $20 per million output, $5 for cache writes and $0.20 for cache reads, with a fast mode that runs up to 2.5x quicker for $8/$40.

20%, 40% Or 60%?

What percentage are we actually saving here? All three, depending on the situation. Input and output tokens are 20% cheaper, cache reads are 60% cheaper, and the 40% is Anthropic's estimate of how much less a typical task costs all-in once Opus 5.5's leaner token use is factored in. The more of a bill that goes to cache reads, the closer the rate cut gets to the 60% ceiling, which is why agent-heavy users come out furthest ahead: a workload split evenly between cache reads and everything else gets a 40% rate cut before counting any token savings.

Early testers say the efficiency is real, at least on their own workloads: Box said Opus 5.5 got through its evaluations on roughly a third of the tokens Opus 5 needed, and trading firm Optiver said its agentic coding costs fell 40% to 50%.

Anthropic also took direct aim at OpenAI. Its own scorecard has default-effort Opus 5.5 topping Astra's best FrontierCode result for about a fifth of the per-task cost, drawing even with Astra on Terminal-Bench 4.0 at default effort for roughly 40% of the cost, and clearing Sol by 11 points on CursorBench at about a third of the price.

The Race To The Bottom

From 10,000 feet, Opus 5.5 is the latest shot in a frontier price war that is turning "flagship AI" into a commodity with a falling price tag thanks to super efficient, open-weight models out of China.

Here's a fun metric: the timeline as measured in dollars per million input/output tokens:

• August 2025: Claude Opus 4.1 lists at $15/$75.
• November 2025: Opus 4.5 resets the tier to $5/$25.
• July 9, 2026: OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol debuts at $5/$30.
• July 24: Opus 5 holds at $5/$25, half the price of Fable 5.
• Aug. 21: OpenAI knocks Sol down to a "promotional" $4/$20 (heh), guaranteed through at least Nov. 21, undercutting Opus 5 on both input and output.
• Sept. 1-3: Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra anchor the top end at $10/$50.
• Sept. 22: Opus 5.5 matches Sol's promo price to the penny, and the real knife is in the cache line: $0.20, or half of Sol's $0.40 cached-input rate.

That's a 73% cut in Opus-tier list prices in just over a year.

OpenAI isn't the only one leaning on prices. Open-weight models (think DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and Z.ai) carried 56% of the token traffic on Vercel's AI Gateway in August, versus 7% in December, yet accounted for only 14% of estimated spend. By our math, the average closed-model token cost nearly eight times an open-weight one. Average per-token pricing on the gateway dropped 23.2% in August, its third monthly decline in a row. Over at OpenRouter, open-weight models, mostly Chinese, made up 60% of US token usage in August.

So how does Anthropic still capture 64% of the money spent through Vercel's gateway? By undercutting itself before anyone else can. Fable 5's slice of gateway spend shrank from 13.2% in July to 4.9% in August while the half-price Opus 5 jumped to 22.5%, keeping the revenue in-house even as customers traded down. Opus 5.5 runs the same play one rung lower: Fable 5.1-level work at 40% of Fable 5.1's sticker.

It's a Jevons bet: cut the unit price, sell vastly more units. So far it's paying. Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate topped $65 billion at the end of July, per Bloomberg, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025, and investors reportedly expect it to finish the year between $100 billion and $120 billion. With a confidential draft S-1 at the SEC since June 1, the question for would-be IPO buyers is how long volume can outrun deflation once every lab is running the same play.

About That "Pacing"...

On Sept. 12, Amodei published "We Must Pace the Frontier," calling on the handful of frontier labs to ease off the capabilities accelerator together. Sam Altman publicly signed on, and Elon Musk chimed in that Amodei had it right. The world shook in fear, having collective nightmares of Skynet coming online at the hands of cold, calculating frontier models!

Dario Amodei, Sept. 12: "We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models."

But then...

Anthropic, Sept. 22:

At its default effort setting, Opus 5.5 delivers frontier results for a fraction of the cost per task, often beating other models running at their highest settings.

It also generates output more than 30% faster than Opus 5. pic.twitter.com/GBvrvbsxNL

— Claude (@claudeai) September 22, 2026

'Pacing' indeed.

The Fine Print (shit to know)

• Your agent may be talking to a different model. Because Opus 5.5 rivals Anthropic's top-end Mythos 5.1 in biology and cybersecurity, it ships with Fable 5.1-style safeguards: routine bug-fixing stays put, but most cybersecurity work gets handed to the older Opus 4.8. The New Stack warns that individual calls inside an agent workflow could quietly land on older, less capable models.
• It knows when it's being watched. Anthropic admits Opus 5.5 frequently seems to suspect it's being tested, which muddies any read on how it behaves in the wild.
• The moat gets a lock. Thinking can no longer be switched off, and a new anti-distillation safeguard blocks API customers from doctoring earlier context to fish out its reasoning. That's Anthropic's answer to fake-account extraction campaigns it describes as a national-security risk.
• Not a clean sweep. Astra still wins AutomationBench (41.4% vs. 40.0%) and Terminal-Bench-Science (64.6% vs. 58.7%). Anthropic itself concedes benchmark margins have become a shakier guide, saying that in its own use Opus 5.5's edge over Fable 5.1 is smaller than the numbers imply.

Your Move, Sam

Sol's discounted rate is only locked in through at least Nov. 21, and Anthropic just matched it with a model it says beats Sol by double digits on CursorBench. OpenAI can cut again, make the promo permanent, or let Sol snap back to $5/$30 against a cheaper rival. Pick your poison.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 21:55

A Septennial Analysis Of Pre-Collapse Macroeconomic Indicators

Authored by Milan Adams via Preppgroup,

Walk through any downtown financial district in mid-September 2026 and you'll see the same strange disconnect. Construction crews still raise glass towers. Restaurants at noon remain packed with expense-account lunches. Bespoke tailors on side streets measure suits for clients who haven't yet noticed their foundations shifting.

Surface-level appearances suggest continuity, even prosperity. Yet beneath this maintained facade, data streams flowing from Treasury servers, credit bureaus, and trading floors tell a markedly different story - one of accumulating strain that policy statements cannot wish away.

By September 8, 2026, United States federal debt reached $40.13 trillion. That figure translates to roughly $119,784 owed by every man, woman, and child in the country, a burden that would have seemed absurd to discuss seriously even fifteen years ago. More immediately concerning than the nominal amount is the speed at which carrying costs are escalating. Through August of fiscal 2026, gross interest payments on public debt hit $1.267 trillion - a record pace that consumes resources otherwise available for infrastructure, education, or research.

Congressional Budget Office projections now show net interest consuming 13.95% of all federal outlays in FY2026, rising to 14.25% in FY2027 and approaching 15% by FY2028. Nearly fifteen cents of every dollar spent serves not current needs but past obligations. That reallocation, gradual enough to escape daily headlines, nonetheless represents a fundamental shift in how America deploys its collective resources.

Several interconnected developments, examined together, illuminate why September 2026 marks a particularly precarious moment:

• Sovereign Debt Saturation: Federal obligations exceeding 120% of GDP, with interest costs creating self-reinforcing cycles where new borrowing pays old debt service

• Household Financial Distress: Consumer debt at $18.19 trillion as of Q1 2026, with delinquency rates in multiple categories approaching levels last seen during the 2008 crisis

• Commercial Real Estate Deterioration: Approximately $875 billion in mortgages maturing during 2026 against depressed occupancy and valuation fundamentals

• Currency Instability Signals: Gold prices swinging violently between $4,360 and $5,589, indicating deep uncertainty about fiat stability

• Emerging Market Fragility: Over 54 nations currently in or near debt distress per IMF assessments, raising contagion risks

How the Debt Trap Springs Shut

Federal fiscal dynamics in 2026 reveal mechanics that compound faster than political timelines can address. That $40.13 trillion figure becomes genuinely alarming when viewed through debt-sustainability analysis. Average interest rates on marketable national debt reached 3.475% by August 2026 - substantially above the near-zero rates that prevailed through much of the pandemic period.

With debt stocks exceeding annual output by over twenty percentage points, even modest rate increases generate exponential service requirements. CBO forecasts $16.2 trillion in net interest payments across the coming decade, climbing from $1.0 trillion in 2026 to $2.1 trillion by 2036. At those levels, debt service crowds out virtually all discretionary spending.

Compounding works insidiously. Maturing debt rolls over at higher rates. Treasury auctions must attract sufficient participation to refinance existing obligations plus fund new deficits. Bid-to-cover ratios for four-week bills stood at 2.97 in August 2026 - technically adequate, yet vulnerable to sentiment shifts. Foreign holdings have grown concentrated and potentially volatile; Russia substantially reduced Treasury exposure, while other nations diversify reserves away from dollar assets.

Fiscal year 2026 deficits will likely exceed $2.67 trillion according to Joint Economic Committee data released September 8. That imbalance isn't temporary cyclicality but structural feature. Tax revenues, constrained by legislative gridlock and sectoral stagnation, fail to match expenditure growth driven by entitlements, defense commitments, and - ironically - debt service itself. Each year's deficit adds to debt stock, which raises next year's service costs, which widens future deficits.

Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates suggest U.S. federal debt cannot rationally exceed roughly 210% of GDP as an outer limit - a threshold that current healthcare cost growth could reach within two decades. Markets typically impose discipline well before theoretical limits. When confidence erodes sufficiently, crisis arrives suddenly.

Kitchen Tables Buckling Under Weight

Sovereign debt attracts political attention, yet household balance sheets show equally troubling patterns. Consumer debt reached $18.19 trillion in Q1 2026 according to Equifax data released May 28. That aggregate - encompassing credit cards, auto loans, student debt, and other obligations - masks severe distributional stresses threatening both individual welfare and aggregate demand.

Credit card delinquencies have risen to levels unseen since 2008-2009. Between Q3 2022 and Q1 2026, balances 90+ days delinquent jumped from 7.6% to 12.8%. Federal Reserve Bank of New York data from August 2026 shows these transition rates into serious delinquency remain elevated even as headline economic growth appears stable.

Student loans present particularly intractable challenges. Total outstanding: $1.66 trillion as of Q1 2026. Payment resumption following pandemic forbearance generated severe adjustment shocks. Delinquency rates hit 10.3% of balances 90+ days past due in Q1 2026, up from 9.6% in Q4 2025, with further deterioration expected as temporary relief expires. Unlike other debt categories, student loans cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, creating permanent drags on borrower capacity.

Auto loan delinquencies reached unprecedented highs per FRBNY data from May 2026. Behind these numbers lie structural conditions, not individual mismanagement: vehicle price inflation during 2021-2023, subsequent rate increases raising monthly payments, and wage growth failing to match cost-of-living adjustments.

Housing markets compound pressures. Mortgage rates near 6.57% in Spring 2026 - down from 2023 peaks but far above 3% rates many homeowners locked in during refinancing booms - created "rate lock-in" effects freezing turnover. Supply constraints maintain prices excluding first-time buyers. Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard data shows units affordable to households earning $75,000 or less dropped 60% from March 2019 to March 2026, creating generations of permanent renters or multi-generational households.

Consumer credit cycles enter dangerous phases when households exhaust pandemic-era savings and increasingly rely on credit to maintain consumption patterns. Rising delinquencies prompt lenders tightening standards, reducing availability precisely when households need it most. Such procyclical dynamics amplify downturns.

Empty Towers, Broken Loans

Commercial real estate illustrates delayed crisis dynamics perhaps better than any other sector. A $1.5 trillion "debt wall" approaches in 2026-2027 - loans originated during 2019-2021 low-rate environments now requiring refinancing at substantially higher costs. Approximately $875 billion in commercial and multifamily mortgages mature during 2026 alone. Borrowers face debt service coverage ratio trips, cash management challenges, and carve-out exposure threatening equity positions.

Office properties constitute epicenters. Hybrid work arrangements, initially viewed as temporary pandemic adaptations, proved structurally durable. Central business district occupancy remains 30-40% below pre-pandemic norms in many major markets, rendering obsolete vast Class B and C office inventories. Valuation compression has been severe; some metropolitan office markets saw price declines exceeding 50% from 2019 peaks.

Banking system exposure creates systemic vulnerabilities. Regional banks hold disproportionate commercial real estate loan shares relative to money center institutions, facing capital erosion as losses mount. By June 2026, nearly $37 billion in commercial real estate loans - 1.17% of all bank-held loans - were delinquent. While below 9% post-2008 levels, trajectories concern regulators and market participants.

Federal Reserve stress testing identifies commercial real estate concentration risk as primary regional banking vulnerability. Institutions with exposures exceeding 300% of risk-based capital face heightened scrutiny; several raised capital at distressed valuations or sought strategic alternatives. Metropolitan Bank's failure in early 2026, costing FDIC Deposit Insurance Fund approximately $19.7 million, exemplifies these pressures.

More troubling than realized losses is valuation uncertainty. Transaction volumes collapsed - buyer-seller bid-ask spreads remain too wide for price discovery. Banks face "extend and pretend" incentives avoiding loss recognition. Such dynamics, familiar from Japan's 1990s experience, transform acute crises into chronic stagnation as zombie assets clog balance sheets and impede credit creation.

Regional banks serve as primary small and medium enterprise credit intermediaries; their impairment threatens employment and investment far beyond real estate markets. 2023's Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic failures previewed dynamics that could recur if commercial real estate losses accelerate.

Gold's Warning, Dollar's Contradictions

Monetary instability appears not merely in inflation statistics - August 2026's 3.4% annual rate, improved from 2022 peaks yet above Federal Reserve targets - but in alternative store-of-value behavior. Gold prices reached record highs above $5,589 in early 2026, then corrected to approximately $4,360 by September, exhibiting volatility signaling deep uncertainty about fiat stability.

Such price action reveals investor ambivalence. Unprecedented gold rallies suggested profound dollar purchasing power and sovereign debt sustainability concerns. Corrections to $4,360 reflected profit-taking and temporary dollar strength, yet continued elevation well above norms indicates persistent non-fiat reserve demand. Central bank gold accumulation continues at rates unseen since Bretton Woods collapse.

Dollar positioning shows similar contradictions. Against major currency baskets, dollar indices show resilience, yet strength masks underlying fragility. Foreign Treasury holdings grew concentrated among allied nations, while strategic competitors systematically reduced exposure. Petrodollar systems underpinning dollar hegemony since the 1970s face structural challenges as energy exporters increasingly accept alternative settlement currencies.

Currency swap arrangements between non-U.S. central banks proliferate, creating parallel payment systems bypassing dollar intermediation. While remaining small relative to global trade volumes, growth trajectories suggest gradual, persistent erosion of dollar network effects. Transitions from unipolar monetary systems to fragmented, multipolar arrangements carry profound fiscal sustainability implications; reserve currency status historically permitted deficit financing at lower costs than otherwise possible.

Cryptocurrency complexes, despite periodic collapses and regulatory crackdowns, continue attracting capital flight from distressed jurisdictions. Bitcoin and Ethereum volatility serves as barometer for traditional monetary arrangement confidence. Continued existence and periodic rallies suggest persistent government-issued currency alternatives demand, even among populations never experiencing developing-nation hyperinflations.

Contagion Beyond Borders

No September 2026 economic analysis completes without examining international dimensions. Modern financial market interconnectedness ensures distress anywhere becomes distress everywhere - transmitted through trade flows, capital movements, and contagion effects defying geographic boundaries.

Over 54 countries currently stand in or near debt distress per International Monetary Fund assessments. That figure, representing over one-quarter of world nations, encompasses economies ranging from small island states to major regional powers. JPMorgan EMBI spreads between emerging-market dollar debt and U.S. Treasuries widened 17 basis points to 268 basis points since late February 2026, with particular stress in Egyptian debt (44 basis point widening) and Turkish obligations (36 basis point increases).

Argentina continues perpetual crisis-stabilization cycles, with inflation moderating from catastrophic levels yet structural vulnerabilities remaining unaddressed. Pakistan and Egypt, heavily dependent upon IMF support and Gulf state beneficence, face refinancing cliffs potentially triggering broader regional instability. World Bank reports indicate 29% of low-income country bonds mature by 2026, creating refinancing walls that could overwhelm available resources if market conditions deteriorate.

Structural shifts in emerging market debt composition offer limited comfort. While many nations reduced foreign currency-denominated obligations - lowering exchange rate shock vulnerabilities - remaining dollar debt concentrates in sectors with limited revenue flexibility. Sovereign borrowers shifting to local currency issuance find themselves paying substantially higher rates, as domestic capital markets demand inflation premia international investors once absorbed.

China's economic slowdown compounds pressures. As world's largest trading nation and commodity importer, Chinese demand contraction transmits directly to emerging market exporters. African nations financing infrastructure through Chinese lending face not merely debt service difficulties but export revenue collapses that might otherwise fund obligations. Latin American commodity producers confront simultaneous demand weakness and dollar strength increasing real debt burdens.

Global trade fragmentation into competing blocs - Western, Chinese, and non-aligned - further complicates adjustment mechanisms. Nations can no longer count on export-led growth resolving balance of payments difficulties when major markets impose tariff and non-tariff barriers. World Trade Organization dispute settlement paralysis leaves aggrieved parties without recourse, encouraging unilateral measures compounding fragmentation.

Institutions Showing Wear

Beyond specific debt figures or delinquency rates, 2026 reveals institutional framework degradation that previously stabilized economic fluctuations. Federal Reserve balance sheet expansion to unprecedented pandemic-era levels now confronts impossible trinities: price stability, full employment, and financial stability - with policy choices addressing one objective frequently worsening others.

"Higher for longer" interest rate environments necessary for inflation combat expose vulnerabilities accumulated during near-zero rate decades. Pension funds, insurance companies, and institutional investors extending duration to capture yield now face mark-to-market losses threatening solvency. Liability-driven investment strategies nearly collapsing UK gilt markets in 2022 remain prevalent in U.S. institutional portfolios, creating latent systemic risks.

Shadow banking - non-bank financial intermediation - expanded filling gaps left by regulated institutions subject to post-2008 capital requirements. Private credit funds, direct lending platforms, and fintech-enabled leverage now constitute parallel financial systems whose opacity frustrates risk assessment. When stress emerges in these channels, traditional lender-of-last-resort facilities may prove inadequate or inappropriate.

Labor markets, while showing low unemployment by headline measures, reveal structural deterioration beneath surfaces. Prime-age male labor force participation remains depressed by standards from earlier decades. Gig economies transformed stable employment into contingent arrangements lacking benefits and income predictability. Artificial intelligence adoption, while boosting aggregate productivity, threatens displacement in specific sectors potentially overwhelming retraining and transition support systems.

Demographic headwinds compound challenges. Developed economy population aging strains pension and healthcare systems precisely when debt service requirements escalate. Worker-to-dependent ratios continue declining, threatening tax bases that must support both elderly benefits and debt service. Immigration, which might address labor shortages, faces political opposition constraining policy responses.

"The real problem isn't any single vulnerability in isolation. It's how they correlate. When sovereign debt stress, household financial distress, commercial real estate deterioration, and banking fragility hit simultaneously, standard diversification strategies stop working. No asset class thrives when everything else falters. No jurisdiction offers refuge when contagion goes global. We've essentially made one big bet - that monetary expansion and fiscal forbearance can continue indefinitely. Eventually, that bet runs into basic arithmetic."

Reading the Dashboard: September 2026 Data:

Why the Warning Signs Go Unnoticed

Surface-level indicators in September 2026 create strange disconnects. Consumer confidence indices fluctuate yet remain above typical recessionary thresholds. Equity markets, despite volatility, trade near highs by some measures. Unemployment at 4.1% as of August 2026 appears benign.

Several factors explain gaps between quantitative reality and qualitative perception. Asset price inflation during 2020-2021 created substantial wealth effects continuing to support consumption among asset-owning households. Homeowners and equity portfolio holders feel wealthier than underlying conditions suggest, even as renters and non-asset owners face unprecedented affordability constraints.

Normalization of extraordinary monetary policy shifted baseline expectations. Generations of investors and consumers never experienced genuine tightening cycles; brief 2023-2024 rate increases were followed by expectations of renewed accommodation. "Higher for longer" concepts remain psychologically unavailable to market participants building careers during secular interest rate declines beginning in the early 1980s.

Government transfer payments and forbearance programs masked underlying income instability. Student loan payment pauses, mortgage forbearance options, and expanded pandemic-era unemployment benefits created official support expectations that may not sustain. When these programs expire - and many are scheduled for late 2026 and early 2027 - true household balance sheet fragility becomes apparent.

Denial psychology operates institutionally too. Regulatory forbearance allows banks avoiding loan loss recognition. Accounting standards provide asset valuation latitude permitting "mark to model" rather than "mark to market" approaches. Credit rating agencies, chastened by 2008 failures, may overcompensate through excessive issuer optimism.

Collective denial serves short-term functional purposes. If all market participants simultaneously acknowledged vulnerabilities described here, resulting panic would become self-fulfilling. Yet denial costs include postponed adjustment magnifying eventual dislocation. Delayed recognition brings more severe ultimate reckonings.

Sector by Sector: Where the Pressure Builds

Technology, despite artificial intelligence enthusiasm, entered consolidation phases marked by layoffs and valuation compression. "Magnificent Seven" stocks driving 2023-2024 returns showed divergent performance, some facing regulatory challenges, others confronting demand saturation. Venture capital funding contracted dramatically from 2021 peaks, forcing startups into down rounds or closures.

Healthcare costs escalate inexorably, with implications for federal budgets and household finances. Medicare Hospital Insurance trust funds face depletion during mid-2030s under current projections, yet political gridlock prevents structural reforms ensuring sustainability. Pharmaceutical price controls, while popular, may reduce innovation incentives generating mRNA technologies crucial to pandemic responses.

Energy markets exhibit volatility characteristic of transition periods. Renewable capacity additions continue at record rates, yet fossil fuels retain transportation and industrial dominance. Geopolitical supply chain disruptions - whether from Middle Eastern conflicts, Russian sanctions, or shipping interruptions - create price spikes feeding through inflation metrics and consumer sentiment.

Manufacturing, despite reshoring rhetoric, struggles with competitiveness against Chinese and other Asian producers. Domestic production capital intensity, combined with regulatory compliance costs and labor market rigidities, limits industrial recovery pace. Tariffs and trade barriers, while providing temporary protection, raise input costs and invite retaliation harming export-oriented sectors.

Agriculture faces climate-related stresses compounding traditional cyclical challenges. Drought conditions in major producing regions, combined with water rights disputes and input cost inflation, threaten farm profitability and food security. Foreign agricultural land ownership, increasing over 40% between 2016 and 2024 with Chinese entities controlling approximately 384,000 acres, raises national security concerns intersecting economic policy.

Policy Gridlock and Institutional Constraints

Responses to accumulating stresses proved notably inadequate. Monetary authorities, having exhausted conventional tools during previous crises, face constraints limiting new shock responses. Federal Reserve cannot cut rates substantially without reigniting inflation; cannot raise them without triggering debt service crises described earlier. Quantitative tightening reduced balance sheet holdings, yet remaining reserves and securities still represent extraordinary intervention by past standards.

Fiscal policy faces similar constraints. With debt service consuming nearly 14% of federal outlays and projections exceeding 15% within two years, substantial new spending initiatives face automatic opposition from deficit hawks and market vigilantes. Tax increases, while potentially necessary for sustainability, face political opposition making enactment improbable. Results include passive tightening through inflation and bracket creep falling most heavily upon middle-income households.

Regulatory policy oscillates between permissiveness and restriction without coherent strategy. Environmental mandates increase energy-intensive industry costs; financial regulations impose compliance burdens favoring large institutions over regional competitors; labor regulations create rigidities impeding adjustment. Cumulative effects discourage investment necessary for productivity growth.

International coordination broke down precisely when most needed. G20, IMF, and World Bank lack credibility and resources addressing systemic risks transcending national boundaries. Currency wars, trade disputes, and technological competition replaced cooperation characterizing post-2008 crisis management. Each nation pursues narrowly defined self-interest, ignoring collective action problems requiring coordinated solutions.

How Crises Spread

Understanding localized stress becoming systemic crisis requires examining transmission mechanisms. Most obvious channels are financial: losses in one sector force asset sales depressing prices in others, creating mark-to-market losses triggering further forced selling. Reflexivity - described by George Soros - can transform modest corrections into cascading collapses when leverage proves pervasive.

Credit channels operate similarly. Rising delinquencies in one sector prompt lenders tightening standards across all sectors, reducing availability precisely when most needed smoothing consumption and investment. Credit creation's procyclical nature amplifies business cycles, transforming mild downturns into severe recessions.

Confidence channels prove most dangerous because least susceptible to policy intervention. When economic agents lose future faith, they reduce spending and investment regardless of interest rates or fiscal stimulus. Animal spirit collapses become self-fulfilling as reduced demand generates feared outcomes. Money velocity declines, rendering monetary expansion ineffective.

International transmission occurs through trade, capital flows, and commodity prices. Developed economy recessions reduce emerging market export demand; capital flight from distressed jurisdictions raises global funding costs; commodity price collapses devastate resource-dependent economies. Dollar reserve currency status creates additional complications: dollar strength during crisis periods raises real debt burdens for dollar-denominated borrowers worldwide.

Learning from the Past - Carefully

Students of economic history naturally seek parallels. 1970s stagflation offers lessons about inflation control difficulties once expectations become unanchored, yet today's debt levels far exceed that era's. 2008 financial crises demonstrate confidence evaporation speeds, but current vulnerabilities distribute differently - across sovereign balance sheets rather than subprime mortgages. Japan's 1990s experiences illustrate failure-to-recognize-loss costs, yet Japan's current account surpluses provided cushions unavailable to contemporary deficit nations.

Each analogue breaks at crucial points. Global integration of modern financial markets, derivative exposure scales, information transmission speeds, and current political fragmentation create unique conjunctures defying simple comparison. Past knowledge provides essential context, yet cannot substitute for present condition analysis.

What history teaches unequivocally: unsustainable trajectories eventually correct. Debt growing faster than income cannot be serviced indefinitely. Asset prices exceeding fundamental values eventually revert. Political systems failing economic challenges lose legitimacy. Correction timing remains inherently unpredictable, dependent upon specific catalysts and confidence thresholds unobservable directly until breached.

Possible Paths Ahead

As 2026 progresses toward conclusion, several scenarios appear plausible, though relative probabilities shift with each data release and policy announcement.

"Soft landing" scenarios, still embraced by official forecasts, assume inflation moderating without triggering recession, debt service costs stabilizing as growth outpaces interest rates, and structural reforms addressing long-term challenges before they become acute. These outcomes, while theoretically possible, require assumptions about productivity growth, demographic adjustment, and political compromise appearing increasingly heroic.

"Stagflationary drift" scenarios envision continued moderate growth accompanied by persistent inflation and gradual living standard erosion. Here, debt service consumes growing national income shares, investment lags depreciation, and each generation finds itself materially worse off than predecessors. Japanification hypotheses applied to the United States - prolonged malaise rather than acute crisis.

"Sudden stop" scenarios involve sovereign debt confidence losses triggering currency crises, capital controls, and emergency austerity. Foreign investors refusing maturing obligation rollovers force either default or monetization generating hyperinflation. These extremes become more probable as debt levels rise and political dysfunction prevents preemptive adjustment.

"Contagion cascade" scenarios begin with shocks in one sector or jurisdiction transmitting globally through financial linkages. Major sovereign defaults, banking system collapses, or geopolitical events trigger reflexive dynamics described earlier, overwhelming policy responses and generating economic contractions exceeding anything since the 1930s.

Each scenario implies different optimal household, investor, and policymaker strategies. Yet uncertainty surrounding which materializes - indeed, possibilities that elements might combine unforeseen ways - paralyzes decision-making and encourages short-termism exacerbating underlying vulnerabilities.

What Comes Next

Analysis presented here suggests 2026's remainder and 2027's opening will prove decisive. Milestones loom: fiscal year 2026 conclusions with projected $2.67 trillion deficits; student loan payment full-scale resumption; commercial real estate loan maturities that cannot be refinanced at current rates; and potential geopolitical events disrupting energy markets or trade flows.

Policy responses to these challenges determine whether systems stabilize or deteriorate more rapidly. Technical sovereign obligation defaults remain unlikely immediately; the United States retains reserve currency status and deep domestic capital markets providing financing flexibility unavailable to emerging markets. Yet financing costs - measured in inflation, currency depreciation, or future tax burdens - continue escalating.

Household imperatives center on debt reduction and liquidity maintenance. Variable-rate obligation holders face rising service costs; fixed-rate asset holders benefit from inflation eroding real debt burdens. Monetary policy distributional consequences - favoring asset owners over wage earners - will continue shaping political economy.

Investor challenges involve navigating volatility while preserving capital. Traditional diversification strategies may prove inadequate when correlations converge toward unity during crisis periods. Searches for uncorrelated returns - whether commodities, alternative assets, or geographic diversification - will intensify even as such opportunities become scarcer.

Policymaker windows for preemptive adjustment narrow daily. Structural entitlement program, tax structure, and regulatory framework reforms require political capital dissipating as elections approach and polarization intensifies. Temptations postponing difficult choices - hoping growth resolves arithmetic impossibilities - will prove irresistible until markets impose discipline more painfully than voluntary adjustments would have required.

Final Assessment

September 2026's economy has not collapsed. Production and exchange machinery continues functioning; most citizens maintain employment and shelter; governance and finance institutions retain forms if not substance. Yet quantitative evidence assembled here - $40 trillion debt, $1.3 trillion interest burdens, 12.8% credit card delinquency rates, $875 billion commercial real estate maturity walls, 54 distressed nations - suggests systems approaching limits that cannot be indefinitely extended.

Questions are not whether adjustments occur, but when and in what forms. Postponements through accounting gimmicks, regulatory forbearance, and monetary accommodation make eventual manifestations more severe. Societies borrowing $2.67 trillion in single years to maintain consumption cannot do so indefinitely. Arithmetic remains inexorable, even when politics refuses acknowledgment.

What emerges from this analysis is not imminent catastrophe prediction but fragility recognition demanding preparation. Specific crisis triggers - whether sovereign defaults, banking panics, currency collapses, or geopolitical shocks - matter less than underlying conditions making such triggers effective. Those conditions are now present to degrees unmatched since 2008, and in certain respects unmatched in modern experience.

Careful observers tracking data without official optimism or partisan narrative filters can see signs. They appear in monthly Treasury statements, quarterly household debt reports, daily credit spread and currency market movements. They accumulate between headline silences, in financial statement footnotes, in budget projection assumptions.

Acknowledging these vulnerabilities is not pessimism surrender but rationality exercise that economic analysis demands. Problem recognition precedes all problem addressing. Evidence presented here suggests recognition is long overdue, and further delay costs will be measured in trillions of dollars and millions of livelihoods. Systems continue running, but those paying close attention can hear the strain.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 21:45

New York Is Hemorrhaging Young People To Philadelphia

New York continues to attract ambitious young people, but apparently it’s also getting pretty good at showing them the door.

The metro area recorded the largest net loss of Gen Z residents in the country in 2024, with nearly 30,000 more young adults leaving than arriving, according to Census data analyzed by Redfin, according to the NY Post. Millennials were even more eager to pack up, producing a net outflow of almost 43,000 people ages 28 to 43.

The Post writes that a sizable portion of those departures didn’t involve moving halfway across the country. More than 9,200 Gen Z residents went from the New York metro area to Philadelphia, making it the second-busiest migration route for that generation nationwide. Only the roughly 60-mile move from Los Angeles to Riverside attracted more Gen Z movers.

The economics aren’t particularly difficult to understand. Redfin estimates a typical New York-area home costs roughly $832,000, compared with about $309,000 in Philadelphia. That leaves plenty of room for someone to trade New York for a cheaper city while remaining close enough to friends, family and jobs in the Northeast.

And then there are New York’s famously welcoming taxes. Between state and city income taxes, eye-watering housing costs and the general expense of existing within the five boroughs, New York has constructed a fairly impressive financial obstacle course for anyone trying to accumulate savings or buy a home.

Apparently, some younger residents have discovered that one solution to the affordability problem is simply crossing a state line.

The trend extends beyond New York. Los Angeles also experienced sizable departures, with San Diego and Riverside among the most common destinations for Gen Z movers. Millennials, meanwhile, gravitated toward metros including Houston, Dallas, Baltimore, Las Vegas and Atlanta, where housing generally remains considerably cheaper than in the largest coastal cities.

The numbers suggest younger Americans aren’t necessarily searching for the absolute cheapest place to live. Instead, many appear to be making relatively short moves that improve affordability or employment prospects while keeping their existing social and professional connections within reach.

Redfin based its findings on the Census Bureau’s 2024 American Community Survey, defining adult Gen Zers as ages 19 to 27 and millennials as ages 28 to 43.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 21:20

The West Might Soon Ramp Up Its Pressure On India To Distance Itself From Russia

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

The US and France seem to be coordinating a concerted pressure operation against India...

Popular Russian outlet Izvestia raised awareness of a paywalled Bloomberg report alleging that India might reduce its import of Russian oil, which was 45% of its total last month, to avoid US tariffs of up to 100% after Trump recently signed into law a bill empowering him to punish Russia's top energy partners. Earlier in September, "India's Top Diplomat Signaled That It'll Defy Any New US Pressure Over Its Russian Oil Purchases", which are considered to be indirectly essential to its national security.

Such pressure might soon pile up too, however, as suggested by more than just the aforesaid punitive tariff bill's passing. The US and China are negotiating an extension to their trade war truce ahead of Xi's visit later this week. The current disagreements primarily concern its duration according to the Financial Times. In the event that any such extension is ultimately agreed to, then the US presumably won't impose punitive tariffs on China for its Russian oil purchases, which would draw attention to India's.

Although the US benefits from India's Russo-American balancing act since the strategic benefits that India derives most effectively empower it to serve as a counterweight of sorts to China, Trump 2.0 might nevertheless become "geopolitically greedy" and want the US to become India's senior partner. In that scenario, the threat of punitive tariffs over its Russian oil imports could be leveraged as a Damocles' sword to pressure India into gradually reducing them in parallel with joining the West's Hormuz coalition.

About that, the French Foreign Minister proposed jointly working with India on ensuring "freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait" during talks with his counterpart on the sidelines of the UNGA. This coincided with the French and US presidents agreeing to work on the Hormuz dimension according to Emmanuel Macron's tweet after his talks with Trump. India's potential participation in the West's Hormuz coalition, albeit under tariff duress if it happens, would be significant.

For starters, it would signify that the US decided to pressure India over its Russian oil imports while turning a blind eye to China's for the duration of their likely extended trade war truce, thus suggesting that the US is more comfortable bullying India on this issue than China.

Second, India's participation would confirm that such tariff-related pressure was successfully weaponized by the US,

...with the third significance being that India joined the coalition in order to unlock alternative oil supplies to Russia's.

Fourth, Russian policymakers would notice the US' successful policy of coercing India through tariffs-related pressure into distancing itself from their country, which could lead to them concluding that it's incapable of functioning as a reliable counterbalance to China.

The implication is that Russia might tighten its embrace of China with all that could entail for ties with India. And finally, India's association with a Western naval coalition could harm its hard-earned neutral reputation in the Global South's eyes.

France's involvement in coordinating what seems to be a concerted pressure campaign by the US against India is notable since it's now India's second-largest arms partner and has been eroding Russia's market share over the past decade. It therefore can't be ruled out that the US might threaten more CAATSA sanctions against India if its threatened tariffs are successful in order to accelerate the aforesaid trend. India's participation in the West's Hormuz coalition might thus bode ill for its future ties with Russia.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 20:55

NYC Tossed Out Roughly 46,000 NYPD Civil Summonses Last Year Due To Errors

New York City is throwing out tens of thousands of low-level summonses issued by the NYPD, with the department’s reliance on pen-and-paper ticketing contributing to the problem, according to Gothamist.

Of roughly 98,000 civil summonses issued by police during the last fiscal year, about 46,000 were dismissed by the city’s administrative court system, according to data obtained by Gothamist. That works out to roughly 47%.

The tickets stem from offenses such as drinking alcohol in public, public urination, illegal vending and pedicab violations. Many never survive the administrative process because of paperwork problems rather than the underlying allegation.

The NYPD remains unusual among city agencies because officers still issue civil summonses entirely by hand. That can produce everything from unreadable writing and incorrect violation codes to omitted details and mistakes made when paper records are later entered into city databases.

Example of civil summons (Gothamist)

City watchdogs flagged the issue years ago. A 2020 Department of Investigation review recommended moving agencies away from paper summonses and toward digital ticketing. The NYPD at one point agreed to make the transition but has yet to implement an electronic system.

Gothamist writes that other departments have already moved in that direction. The Department of Buildings now issues about 80% of its summonses electronically. Its dismissal rate last fiscal year was approximately 13%, far below the NYPD’s 47%.

Government transparency and legal advocates argue the current system burns administrative resources while requiring people to contest tickets that may be invalid from the outset. City Councilmember Gale Brewer is considering legislation that could force the NYPD to switch to electronic summonses.

The NYPD maintains that officers are properly enforcing the law and says many of the dismissed cases failed because of procedural or paperwork errors rather than the substance of the alleged violations. The department says additional officer training is underway to reduce those mistakes.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 20:30

Pentagon Unveils New Testing Process For US Generals

Authored by Jackson Richman via The Epoch Times,

The Pentagon is changing its process for promoting generals, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced on Sept. 22.

Hegseth announced the new process, known as the Joint Warfighter Evaluation, in a video posted on X.

Today, I am announcing the Joint Warfighter Evaluation. pic.twitter.com/F0JIfbmEKs

— Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) September 22, 2026

Its goal is to reduce bureaucracy and ensure meritocracy across senior ranks, he said.

Starting this year, colonels and Navy captains screening to be a one-star general will undergo the assessment, according to Hegseth.

“While the backbone of our military is our NCOs and our petty officers, victory depends on the commanders who lead them,” he said.

“America needs warfighters who can master a chaotic battle space.”

Hegseth cited Gen. George Marshall using the Louisiana Maneuvers, a massive series of military exercises to prepare U.S. forces before entering World War II.

He said that this kind of testing brought out military leaders such as Dwight Eisenhower, who planned and conducted the U.S. invasion of Normandy and led the liberation of Western Europe; Adm. Chester Nimitz, who led Allied air, land and sea in the Pacific theater during World War II; and Army Gen. Omar Bradley, the first chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who led the U.S. military’s policymaking during the Korean War.

The Joint Warfighter Evaluation “brings that standard to the modern multi-domain fight,” Hegseth said.

“This evaluation is an objective equalizer. The scenario only cares about operational decisions under pressure.”

Hegseth recalled that a year ago he tasked Stuart Scheller, deputy chief of staff to the under secretary of war for personnel and readiness, to challenge years of the promotion process.

“Our troops deserve commanders chosen by proven competence, not paper credentials,” Hegseth said.

“The Joint Warfighter Evaluation ensures our flag is carried by our most lethal and most adaptable leaders.”

Hegseth has emphasized what he calls the “warrior ethos,” pushing for battle-ready personnel based on a high level of fitness. He has criticized what he said has been diversity, equity, and inclusion standards in promoting individuals.

“Real toxic leadership is endangering subordinates with low standards. Real toxic leadership is promoting people based on immutable characteristics or quotas instead of based on merit,” Hegseth told senior military leaders last year in Quantico, Virginia.

While the process of promotion to general is being changed, the Joint Warfighter evaluation is not replacing the existing promotion process, Scheller told Fox News Digital. Rather, it is a factor in addition to performance reports and an officer’s career record.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 20:05

White House Cancels Coverage For 750,000 ACA Enrollees, Citing Fraud

Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday that about 750,000 people on Affordable Care Act plans were never entitled to the coverage, and that pulling their subsidies will save taxpayers $2.2 billion. Mehmet Oz, who runs the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, stood with him. The savings number is an administration estimate. The Congressional Budget Office has not scored it.

CMS had already acted. Rulemaking documents posted Tuesday in the Federal Register say the agency canceled 315,000 marketplace policies on Aug. 31, covering roughly 760,000 people, which the rule describes as unauthorized enrollments submitted through agents and brokers. Vance's 750,000 and the 760,000 covered lives are the same purge, counted two ways.

Officials also plan another pass at about 419,000 current enrollees, checking legal residency first and income second. "We are actually making sure that people receiving Obamacare subsidies are actually entitled to receive them," Vance said. "Amazingly we weren't doing that before."

Brokers are next. CMS sent notices of intent to terminate to 569 agents and brokers who filed statistically implausible rates of 2026 applications without identifying information, such as a Social Security number. A separate interim-final rule freezes new agent and broker registrations until Feb. 1, 2027, before the usual comment period runs. Administration officials said 40 brokers accounted for about 50,000 suspect enrollments and $45 million in subsidies. The National Association of Benefits and Insurance Professionals said a blanket freeze punishes licensed agents who did nothing wrong and will leave consumers with fewer people to call during open enrollment.

Centene fell as much as 3.9 percent on the first headlines. Molina dropped as much as 3.5 percent, Elevance 1.9 percent, UnitedHealth 1.4 percent. Those firms write a large share of exchange business. Federal premium tax credits are paid to the insurer, not the enrollee.

How The Administration Is Using The Word

Part of the case is conventional fraud. Brokers collect commissions from insurers. After Congress fattened the premium tax credits, a lot of low-income plans carried a $0 net premium, so a policy could be opened without the customer ever seeing a bill. CMS recorded roughly 275,000 complaints in an eight-month stretch of 2024 from people who said they had been enrolled or switched without consent. In February, a brokerage president and a marketing-company CEO were sentenced to 20 years each for a scheme that sought more than $233 million in subsidies. HHS has separately said more than a million marketplace enrollments listed no Social Security number.

The rest is a verification net the last administration loosened and this one is pulling tight: income attestations, immigration paperwork, employer coverage, automatic re-enrollment onto free plans.

The Government Accountability Office has found the same weak controls and has not signed off on the claim that millions of current enrollees are fake. GAO flagged at least 160,000 federal-marketplace applications in plan year 2024 for likely unauthorized changes, about 1.5 percent of the relevant pool. It found about 68,000 Social Security numbers used for more than a year of subsidized coverage in 2024; one number appeared on 125 policies. About $94 million in subsidies went out on numbers that matched the death file. Undercover testers got fictitious applicants approved at very high rates, and most of the 2025 fakes were still drawing subsidies months later. GAO has described that work as a set of risk indicators, not a census.

HHS and the Paragon Health Institute produce the bigger tallies. Paragon compares people who signed up claiming income between 100 and 150 percent of poverty - the band that unlocked the largest subsidies - with Census estimates of how many people in that band could even qualify. Whatever is left over gets labeled improper. HHS instead measures how many enrollees in that band filed no claims, against historical norms. HHS put the peak at 5.6 million in 2025 and said 2.6 million are still on the books. Paragon's 2026 figure is about 6.2 million, or 27 percent of open-enrollment selections, with a possible price tag of $25 billion.

Census income is not the projected income the marketplace uses. The survey misses low-income households. People with no claims get counted as phantoms; they are also just people who did not go to the doctor, or who bought a bronze plan with a deductible they never hit. In June, a federal judge in Maryland vacated most of a 2025 rule the administration had justified with Paragon-style estimates, ruling that CMS had overridden the statute. CMS's own paperwork this week floated a different improper-spending figure for 2026: up to $6.6 billion.

Enrollment Was Already Falling

Exchange enrollment ran from about 12 million early in the Biden term to a peak near 24 million once the extra subsidies landed and verification eased. Congress let those add-on credits expire. Premiums jumped, in some markets doubling. By February, effectuated enrollment was about 19.2 million, down 13 percent from a year earlier and the sharpest drop since the exchanges opened.

The White House credits integrity work. KFF and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities credit the price spike. A phantom account that never should have existed and a family that quit after the bill hit $200 a month both show up as cancellations.

Open enrollment starts Nov. 1. Midterms are Nov. 3. Earlier this month Trump told a Republican midterm convention in Dallas that his "Great Healthcare Plan" would "stop all government payments to the big insurance companies."

Some of the 760,000 were never patients. They were names on a file, opened without their knowledge. Killing those policies stops a check to an insurer and a commission to a broker. Some of the 419,000 in the next pass will lose coverage because they cannot produce papers on the new timeline, including people who were eligible. Democrats have been saying that out loud for months: fraud talk as the instrument for a coverage cut Congress already started by killing the extra subsidies.

CMS has stopped payment on the August book and is closing the broker door. It has not released a table that splits the 760,000 into fictitious accounts, unauthorized switches, income or immigration mismatches, and eligible people who missed a form. Without that, $2.2 billion is still an estimate and 750,000 is a cancellation count.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 19:40

At Least 150 Killed In Yemen Within Two Days Amid Indiscriminate Saudi Air Campaign

Authored by News Desk via The Cradle,

At least 150 people have been killed in Yemen since Sunday as Saudi warplanes launch indiscriminate strikes across the country and clashes continue between Ansarallah-led forces and Riyadh-backed proxies.

(Photo credit: Reuters)

"The death toll from Saudi airstrikes, clashes, and artillery fire in the governorates of Taiz, Al-Jawf, Marib and Saada stands at 118," AFP reported on 22 September, citing what it said were Ansarallah-linked military sources.

Sources close to the internationally recognized government, supported by Riyadh, say 36 of their fighters have been killed, according to AFP.

Sirens sounded in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday due to more Yemeni strikes launched in response to the kingdom's aggression against Yemen.

Hours earlier, Saudi strikes killed several people in Yemen.

An early morning strike by the Saudi-led coalition, targeting a residential home in the city of Mokha, in Yemen's Taiz Governorate, killed six people, including two infants and a woman.

BREAKING | Saudi airstrikes on a residential area in Mokha, southwestern Yemen, leave six civilians dead and eight wounded.

— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) September 21, 2026

Several others were injured. Overnight, Yemen's retaliatory military operations triggered sirens across the kingdom.

"From Monday evening until Tuesday morning, Saudi Arabia experienced one of its most difficult nights as a state of alert and anxiety turned into a permanent and pressing condition - from Najran, Asir, Jizan, and Abha to Jeddah, Yanbu, and Al-Ula - amid the escalation of Yemeni deterrence," Yemeni news outlet Al-Masirah TV reported.

A day earlier, the Yemeni Armed Forces (YAF) said Saudi Arabia has launched over 900 strikes on Yemen since the latest escalation began several weeks ago.

"The Saudi enemy carried out 157 airstrikes and missile attacks targeting the governorates of Al-Jawf, Taiz, Saada, and Marib, using F-15 and Typhoon warplanes that took off from the Khamis Mushait and Taif air bases, along with missile attacks launched from Najran and Jizan," the YAF statement read.

Saudi-led coalition strikes Yemen’s Taiz as Ansarallah forces advance
——
Saudi-led coalition aircraft struck the Hayfan district in Yemen’s Taiz province, Al-Masirah TV reported. Local sources indicate the attack targeted a crowded market. The report did not provide details on… pic.twitter.com/otmO4AFQUk

— The Cradle (@TheCradleMedia) September 21, 2026

"This brings the total number of airstrikes and missile attacks since the start of the escalation to 917," it added, stressing that the attacks will "not go unanswered."

Sanaa's recent retaliatory actions against Saudi Arabia were triggered by the kingdom's July attack on Sanaa International Airport, which has been under blockade by Riyadh for over a decade since it began its devastating war on Yemen in 2015, leading a coalition of Arab states.

Yemen has vowed to fully expel the Saudi-led coalition from Yemen. Last week, the YAF shot down a US-made Saudi F-15 warplane.

Maritime data revealed recently that Saudi Arabia has paused its oil exports. The YAF has hit several Saudi tankers in recent weeks.

Aramco sites across the country have also been repeatedly targeted, forcing facilities to shut down.

Forty-eight Saudi tankers have been rerouted away from the Bab al-Mandab Strait, according to a 19 August YAF statement.

An unclaimed attack recently targeted Saudi Arabia's key East-West Pipeline, causing severe damage.

Sanaa's forces have captured much of the western Yemeni coast and have seized multiple Red Sea islands formerly occupied by the UAE this month. Saudi and UAE-backed fighters have taken severe losses. Sanaa has also taken Bab al-Mandab.

Yemen has vowed to continue the "escalation for escalation" and "blockade for blockade" equation.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 19:15

California Declares State Of Emergency Ahead Of Strong El Niño

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency on Sept. 21 as the state prepares for what he described as the strongest El Niño storm season on record.

Newsom said the emergency declaration would allow state agencies to act more quickly for potential severe weather, including securing roads and critical infrastructure, positioning emergency supplies, and helping local partners to mitigate flood, landslide, and coastal risks.

"That is what this action is about. Giving communities the support they need, giving first responders the tools to do their jobs, and giving families the confidence that their state is ready," he said in a statement.

The proclamation directs state agencies to take measures to reduce flood risks and pre-position food-fighting supplies such as sandbags and pumps.

It prepares the California National Guard to assist flood response, search-and-rescue efforts, engineering, and logistics missions when needed, according to the governor's office.

The governor also instructed state environmental and natural resources agencies to expedite permitting for projects that are focused on addressing flooding, landslides, and debris flows in the state.

"Through the governor's state of emergency, we're cutting red tape and fast-tracking the flood-protection and broader preparedness work communities need now," California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said in a statement.

El Niño is a climate pattern marked by the warming of sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.

Newsom's office said California could experience repeated rounds of heavy rain, strong winds, landslides, debris flows, and coastal flooding in the coming months due to El Niño.

"We are preparing for this El Niño early because every Californian deserves to be safe in their home, connected to their community, and protected when severe weather comes," the governor said.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecast a 75 percent chance that this year's El Niño, expected to occur between October and December, could become a historic event exceeding the strength of previous events recorded in 1950.

"With an event of this magnitude, the chances of experiencing impacts consistent with El Niño are larger, though not guaranteed," the weather agency said in a Sept. 10 advisory.

NOAA said there is more than a 90 percent chance that El Niño could reach "very strong" levels during the Northern Hemisphere fall and winter.

California has already experienced coastal flooding this year attributed to the phenomenon, as El Niño-driven "Kelvin waves" raise sea levels and offshore Pacific hurricanes send strong waves that batter the California coast, according to the governor's office, which called on residents to prepare for potential severe weather.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 18:25

The Riots Never Came: Has The Protest Machine Stalled, Or Is It Regrouping

Summer has ended without riots.

In Part One, we examined whether Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's crackdown on NGOs was having an effect. We now revisit that question, examining the far-left groups and subversion networks involved in mounting a revolution against the U.S.

The National Network on Cuba released a "National Rapid Response Plan" that called for nationwide actions against U.S. bases, ICE, and other federal facilities. Nothing happened. Black Alliance for Peace published an interactive map of U.S. military bases, urging their followers to use the map to find facilities in their communities and "strategize how and where to organize and agitate." Again, Nothing happened.

The Marxist Neville Roy Singham network, which has become the primary driver of the protest-industrial complex nationwide, also seems to have lost its momentum despite opening up Liberation Centers across the country to organize protests. Despite their deep pockets and extensive infrastructure for mobilization, they also seem to be unable to mobilize large crowds of their comrades as they used to post-October 7th. ANTIFA, which was designated by the Trump administration as a domestic terrorist organization in September of 2025, also appears to be on its back heels and unable to take control of public space in the way they did in Portland during the Summer of Love riots of 2020.

So we must ask ourselves, why?

It is not as if Democrats have actually gathered the courage to oppose the rising extremist networks in their own party. Quite the opposite. Congressman Jerry Nadler even went on the record once and stated that ANTIFA is only an idea. Party leaders have had no choice but to embrace the far-left, such as DSA, even calling their party a "big tent." 

Gavin Newsom tacitly welcomes the DSA into the Democratic Party, saying he wants "a big tent party":

Gavin Newsom tacitly welcomes the DSA into the Democrat Party, saying he wants "a big tent party":

"I'm one of those Democrats that deeply believes in addition, not division and so, I want a big tent party. I want to win." pic.twitter.com/3rBVN4jdcG

— Julia 🇺🇸 (@Jules31415) July 13, 2026

The reason that the violent Marxist revolution against the West might be on its back heels is that the Cuban regime is on its back heels. This would prove Secretary Rubio's State Department correct in the theory that all revolutionary activist networks in the U.S. are in fact deeply connected to the Cuban regime and its intelligence service, all of whom have recently been sanctioned.

We laid this all out in December 2025:

In July, the State Department released a report titled "Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism." The report outlined a sprawling 60-plus years of history between American far-left revolutionaries and how they were all influenced, trained, and working in coordination with the Cuban intelligence service and their front group, ICAP. In the beginning of the Castro regime, Students for a Democratic Society made a pilgrimage to Cuba, which marks the beginning of the Venceremos Brigade. Upon their return to America, the most radical members of SDS split off to form the Weather Underground, which would soon become America's most prominent domestic terrorist organization, who Cuba covertly supported during their campaign of violence.

It is hard for people today to imagine America experiencing regular bombings by left-wing radicals, but as per the State Department's report: "In one 18-month period between 1971 and 1972, the FBI counted some 2,500 bombings on American soil – a rate of nearly five a day."

The State Department has recently sanctioned the Cuban president, their intelligence service, ICAP, and ICAP's president Fernando González. And since this has happened, the "calls for revolution" by the Singham network and the National Network on Cuba - over 60 organizations - have not stopped, but have gone unanswered. The actions against Cuba and ICAP appear to have disrupted the revolutionary pipeline. 

As video evidence posted by Stu Smith of the Manhattan Institute has shown: everything the NNOC does is per the direction of ICAP. And now that ICAP is on their back heels, the revolution against America, capitalism, and democracy doesn't seem to be gaining ground anywhere except in politics, where the DSA - also partnered with ICAP - is supporting the Cuban regime and their ideology politically, but not via violent Marxist revolution.

Earlier on Tuesday, President Trump told the United Nations General Assembly in New York that Cuba has spent decades coordinating with far-left revolutionaries and subversion networks into the U.S. Trump said the State Department has worked to uncover Havana's ties to subversive and radical groups such as the Communist Party USA, Antifa, and the DSA. 

.@POTUS: The Cuban regime has also spent decades coordinating with left-wing radicals and Communist networks here in the United States. As our State Department has detailed, they have cultivated ties to subversive and radical groups such as the Communist Party USA, Antifa, and… pic.twitter.com/Bopz3W6sXz

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) September 22, 2026

The New York Post recently reported that Treasury officials are drafting a framework to audit NGOs suspected of exploiting their 501(c)(3) status for political activity, illegal conduct, or support of radical groups, which has only put left-wing billionaire foundations and donor-advised funds on notice. 

The question is whether the federal government's war on the radical left and the foreign subversion network that seeks to sow chaos has shaken that protest-industrial complex to its core. A source told the New York Post that officials were "like a dog with a bone" and reckoned that many NGOs and their donor bases could be "on borrowed time."

Also, the dismantling of USAID might have been another reason funding for riots is drying up, alongside the federal government's pressure on donor-advised funds and large left-wing foundations that are now thinking twice before funding riots and chaos as their 501(c)(3) status comes into the crosshairs. 

Then there's the complete fall of socialism across almost the entire South American region, as right-wing challenger Flávio Bolsonaro could defeat socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva early next month in the Brazilian election and cement the entire continent's shift to the right. Shifting to Europe, the continent is set to "lurch right" according to Normua analysts. 

The riots never came, and the torching of small businesses seen during the BLM unrest was not repeated. The question now is whether that reflects diminished mobilization capacity, a shift in tactics, or a temporary lull. 

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 18:00

The Big State Monetary And Fiscal System Is Over

Authored by Daniel Lacalle via dlacalle.com,

In 2021, The Economist ran an entire number hailing "The Return of Big Government" as the end of the so-called - but inexistent in practice - "austerity" paradigm and the evidence that more spending and a big state was the solution to the post-covid world, delivering economic growth, social spending, and sustainability.

In 2025, the same publication ran a number called "The Coming Debt Crisis." The outcome of the return of big government was the return of persistent inflation, stagnation, and unsustainable debt. Who would have guessed it? Anyone doing the numbers and everyone who understands that government stimulus and so-called public spending multiplier effects are simply myths of statism.

For more than two decades, the dominant policy assumption in the developed world was that there were no meaningful limits to government spending, public debt, monetary intervention, or regulation. Interest rates were near zero, central banks absorbed government bonds, and politicians concluded that budget control was an obsolete idea.

That illusion is over.

The rise in unison of sovereign bond yields across developed economies is not simply a market move. It is the financial system's verdict on a model that has exhausted its credibility, even for those bond investors accustomed to believing all that governments and central bankers say as if it were the truth revealed. Permanently expanding government, structurally unbalanced budgets, central-bank financing of fiscal excess, and the political belief that every economic problem can be solved with another "stimulus" package seemed like a comfortable solution, but it delivered the same results, including persistent inflation, high deficits, and economic stagnation.

The state-led monetary and fiscal regime surpassed all its limits many years ago, but some still believed that it could all be disguised by central banks' quantitative easing. They were wrong.

First, we saw central banks enter losses. No one seemed to care. Then we saw bonds slump on fears of persistent inflation. No one seemed to care. Now we see that all sovereign bond yields rise even when central banks maintain all the liquidity measures, and when they hike rates, the relief only lasts a couple of market sessions.

The choice now is not the fake austerity of 2008-2012, which basically perpetuated big government and raised taxes. It is between a return to sound money, fiscal balance, lower taxation, deregulation, and a smaller state. Unless citizens start demanding their governments for more freedom and less intervention, the result will be a larger and prolonged period of stagnation, inflation, debt accumulation, and declining living standards.

Many will blame geopolitical events and say that the solution is socialism.

If socialism was the answer, France would not be in stagnation, with an enormous fiscal problem and rising social discontent.

The answer to the economic stagnation and affordability crisis is not more socialism. More subsidies, price controls, redistribution, and direct state intervention have always delivered the opposite of what the politicians promise.

Socialism never works because it is a system of control, not progress. It destroys the incentives to generate wealth and creates a dependent and submissive population unable to defend itself. Socialists know that their promises do not work, but by the time citizens find out, they are already hostages of a powerful state machine.

Across Europe, governments that have continually expanded public spending, taxation, transfers, and regulation have not produced prosperity or relief from living costs. They have instead accumulated debt, weakened growth, raised the economy's cost base, and deepened social discontent. Governments do not reduce prices; they increase them.

The political appeal is easy to understand. Subsidies and transfers seem to offer immediate, visible relief. The government makes you blame the person or business that puts the price tag, not the one that destroys the currency's purchasing power, which is the government itself. Thus, those "subsidies" are always paid with units of currency that are constantly losing value. They do not address the reason prices rise in the first place. Price increases are a consequence of monetary inflation, which is created when governments print more currency than the private sector demands through spending and debt.

Big corporations do not increase prices; governments do.

Socialism has one objective: control. Subsidies leave recipients dependent on political discretion while denying them the opportunities that come from productive employment, rising real wages, investment, and a dynamic private sector. At the same time, taxpayers are asked to finance an ever-larger state with less disposable income and fewer incentives to save, invest, hire, or start businesses.

Politicians then blame "the rich," corporations, or markets for an affordability crisis that their own policies have created. Furthermore, no government can redistribute wealth from a private sector that is being steadily weakened by higher taxes, punitive regulation, inflation, and rising borrowing costs.

Affordability is not created by government control or by shifting existing income from one group to another. It is created when the private sector thrives, real wages rise alongside productivity, competition lowers prices, investment expands supply, and housing, energy, transport, health care, and essential services can be provided more efficiently and abundantly.

When governments confront structural supply constraints with redistribution, subsidies, price intervention, and debt-financed spending, they also undermine the incentives to invest, build, innovate, and improve productivity. The result is always a more expensive economy, greater dependency, and fewer opportunities.

For years, governments could disguise fiscal fragility because central banks repressed yields. Quantitative easing was presented as a magic wand and a technical monetary-policy tool, but in practice it became a mechanism through which governments financed unsustainable spending at artificially low rates, crowding out the private sector and making the public finances unsustainable.

The consequences were predictable. When the price of debt is manipulated downward, politicians borrow more. Quantitative easing was never a tool to give time for governments to reduce debt and spending, but to justify higher expenses.

Now the market is imposing the discipline that policymakers tried to avoid. However, politicians refuse to cut spending and, instead, pass the rising interest cost to taxpayers.

Monetarily sovereign states do not have an unlimited capacity to issue currency or accumulate debt. They can postpone adjustment for a time if their debt is denominated in their own currency and domestic institutions remain credible. However, they cannot abolish the limits imposed by economic reality.

Since 2021, developed economies have gone over their three limits.

The economic limit occurs when each additional unit of government debt produces progressively less growth. Governments can inflate headline GDP through deficit spending, transfers, and public consumption, but the result is not the same as creating wealth. In the developed world, the expansion of government expenditure has coincided with weak productivity growth, anemic private investment, and a rise in living costs.

The fiscal limit is when interest costs and entitlement obligations displace productive investment. Governments may attempt to delay this moment through financial repression, artificially low interest rates, regulatory pressure on domestic financial institutions, and central-bank purchases of sovereign debt. As debt stocks grow and bonds have higher rates, interest expenses consume a larger share of public budgets. Governments borrow more simply to finance existing commitments.

The inflationary limit is reached when repeated monetary financing and persistent fiscal deficits undermine confidence in the purchasing power of fiat currency. Inflation is not only an annual change in a price index. Families suffer its cumulative effect in food, energy, housing, transport, insurance, and essential services. More money creation and debt-financed public spending do not resolve that crisis. They risk prolonging it by weakening the currency, distorting capital allocation, and transferring resources from savers and wage earners to the state.

Government bond yields have risen across the G7. In September, the average ten-year yield of the G7's largest economies reached 4.285%, its highest level since mid-2008. US ten-year Treasury yields moved above 5%. However, these were not the worst performers. Long-term yields rose faster in Japan, France, and the United Kingdom.

The synchronized nature of this rise is important. Japan faces rising yields despite decades of yield-curve control and massive central-bank intervention. Germany, despite a lower debt burden than many peers, has seen yields rise to their highest levels since 2011. US thirty-year Treasury yields have reached their highest point since 2007.

Markets are repricing fiscal risk, inflation risk, and the declining credibility of monetary institutions at the same time.

Investors no longer assume that high-debt governments can inflate away their liabilities without consequences, nor that central banks can endlessly monetize debt without damaging the purchasing power of money.

The fiscal model of the past fifteen years depended on a false premise, built on the idea that government debt was virtually free. As long as interest rates stayed close to zero, governments could claim that debt ratios did not matter because debt-service costs remained manageable. The "Japan is a model, not a cautionary tale" recommendation given by Stiglitz proved to be very attractive for governments. It also proved to be awfully wrong.

Debt does not become sustainable merely because a central bank suppresses its price.

The International Monetary Fund estimates that global public debt rose to 94% of GDP in 2025 and will reach 100% of GDP by 2029. The world's major economies are driving the trend, as high deficits, rising interest burdens, and structurally higher spending demands destroy fiscal space.

The interest-cost problem is becoming critical. Global government interest spending is estimated to have risen from about 2% of GDP in 2020 to 2.9% in 2025. It is expected to continue increasing through the end of the decade. This is the deadweight cost of believing that Japan's Keynesian excess is a model.

Every additional unit of taxpayer revenue devoted to interest payments destroys money in the economy. Governments will inevitably respond by raising taxes, borrowing more, and demanding further monetary accommodation. Each of these responses weakens growth and affordability.

The modern welfare state has been unsustainable for years and has become dependent on low borrowing costs that no longer exist.

The predictable political response will be to call for another, even larger, round of quantitative easing, larger fiscal transfers, massive public-investment plans, industrial subsidies, and "strategic" spending programs.

This will be a massive mistake... Again.

Quantitative easing only disguises imbalances for a short period of time. It cannot solve a solvency problem.

Central banks can purchase government bonds, but they cannot create real savings nor productive money. They can expand their balance sheets, but they cannot increase productivity, restore competitiveness, or create the capital necessary for a sustainable recovery.

Printing money does not make a nation richer. It is a massive transfer of wealth from savers and wage earners to the state and the first recipients of new money. It distorts the price of capital, encourages malinvestment, and eventually feeds inflationary pressures.

Artificially low interest rates send a false signal to markets. They make unsustainable spending, borrowing, and investment appear viable. Furthermore, the newly created money is used by governments for current spending. The eventual slump is not caused by capitalism or market failure. It is caused by the prior distortion of money and credit.

The same principle applies to public finances. Governments have treated zero-rate policies and QE as a substitute for reform. They have used monetary intervention to preserve spending structures that taxpayers cannot sustainably finance. They have delayed necessary adjustments in pensions, public administration, subsidies, entitlement programs, and regulatory burdens.

The result has not been robust growth. It has been an unstable combination of weak productivity, high debt, elevated inflation risks, financial repression, and social frustration.

Advocates of ever-larger government frequently argue that fiscal stimulus creates growth. The evidence from developed economies is the opposite.

After years of extraordinary deficits, public spending programs, central-bank asset purchases, and industrial-policy initiatives, most advanced economies face low trend growth, weak private investment, declining productivity, unaffordable housing, high tax burdens, and increasingly poor public finances.

The problem is not just that governments spend too much. It is that governments spend resources in the worst possible way, worse than private actors, and direct capital according to political priorities rather than consumer demand, profitability, or long-term productive value. Governments are exceptionally bad at picking winners and even worse at picking losers.

The problem is also in the economics world. GDP accounting treats public spending as an addition to output. But real prosperity depends on whether resources are used productively. A government can borrow and spend billions while leaving the economy poorer in productive terms as that spending crowds out private investment, raises taxes, sustains unproductive activities, or fuels inflation.

The solution is not to borrow more in hopes the next stimulus will succeed where the last failed. The solution is to remove the obstacles that prevent private-sector growth.

Developed economies need a policy reversal based on four principles.

First, they need sound money. Central banks should shut down. However, since this will not happen, they must return to their mandate: protecting the currency's purchasing power. Monetary policy should not be used to fund deficits, manipulate sovereign-bond markets, or protect governments from the consequences of fiscal irresponsibility.

Second, governments must balance their budgets through durable spending reductions, not cosmetic measures, tax hikes, or optimistic growth assumptions. Spending cuts should focus on eliminating inefficient subsidies, duplicative administration, corporate welfare, politically directed investment schemes, and entitlement commitments that cannot be financed.

Third, policymakers must cut taxes, particularly those that penalize work, investment, savings, entrepreneurship, and capital formation. A tax-increase strategy is politically convenient because it avoids confronting the expenditure problem. However, it reduces incentives to produce, invest, hire, and innovate precisely when economies need more dynamism.

Fourth, advanced economies need an ambitious deregulation agenda. Lower barriers to business formation, energy production, housing construction, labor-market flexibility, and investment would do more for sustainable growth than another decade of deficit spending.

The big-state monetary and fiscal system is over because it is no longer credible financially, economically, or politically. The bond market is making clear that there is no permanent escape from fiscal arithmetic.

The reader may say that governments will choose more intervention, more debt, more monetary distortion, and more stagnation. However, for the first time, we are seeing citizens all over the world rejecting these promises. Governments and large political parties may have to change their policies because the failure is evident and the voter base simply says enough is enough. That is why the cultural battle is so important. The goal is to make voters understand that the solution is not more government, but less. A lot less.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 17:40

Bessent Emerges As "AI Czar" Frontrunner

Fresh off his recent spat with "Doomsday Dario", whom he scolded for his apocalyptic essay (which was attempted regulatory capture in all but name) and warned that the US government will not serve as a "liability shield" to the frontier AI company,  Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appears to be one step closer to directly taking AI matters into his own hands. 

According to Semafor, Bessent is emerging as a frontrunner for President Donald Trump’s new "AI czar" position, after long playing a central role in the Trump administration’s AI policy. This week Bessent held an early dialogue with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, ahead of Trump’s meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Among the topics discussed, Bessent and He spoke about a potential US-China “notification mechanism” to facilitate communication about AI incidents that pose threats to national security, as part of what Bessent said were talks about a formal US-China dialogue on AI.

Other names in the mix for the czar position include White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios, a longtime Trump ally on tech, and Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor, who left VC giant a16z to join the government.

“When President Trump talked about appointing an AI czar, I think it is to put context, shape and contours around these questions, and they’re very important,” Bessent told CNBC earlier this week, adding that he thought humans are ultimately responsible for what AI does.

"What did they try to do last week? It was, well there's a 10 percent chance that we destroy the world, but we want the government to give us a liability shield and that's good business for them, bad business for the American people."

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent discussed… pic.twitter.com/zCzUdCJx19

— CNBC (@CNBC) September 21, 2026

The Treasury chief became an active participant in AI policymaking earlier this year after financial institutions told him advanced AI systems could make their systems vulnerable.

As Semafor cautions, Trump’s decision on his AI point person is not final, and he is known to ultimately favor dark-horse candidates. But if Bessent were to ultimately get tapped, his Cabinet job wouldn’t be a barrier — Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has simultaneously held the “energy czar” moniker.

“Any reporting about personnel decisions that have not been officially announced by the administration should be regarded as baseless speculation,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 17:20

Foreign Actors Disrupt 2 Colorado Water Systems: Governor's Office

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times,

Foreign actors gained access to computer systems at two small private water utilities in Colorado in late August, changing equipment controls before operators restored normal operations, according to the governor's office.

Ally Sullivan, a spokeswoman for Gov. Jared Polis, said the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment followed up with the providers to confirm the issues had been resolved. The governor's office said it was unable to confirm which foreign actors and did not identify the utilities.

"The two water utilities impacted are small, private water providers that serve fewer than 200 people," Sullivan said in a statement to media outlets.

"The providers acted promptly and there was no impact to public safety or water services. We cannot confirm what foreign actors may have been involved, but we are aware of ongoing efforts across the nation by an Iranian-backed group to access drinking water and wastewater systems, as per the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency."

Sullivan did not immediately return a request for comment from The Epoch Times.

Treatment processes and water quality were not affected at either provider, according to the governor's office.

The Colorado incidents occurred weeks after a series of cyberattacks impacted water and wastewater systems in multiple states. Federal agencies had already flagged the threat.

In an Aug. 19 advisory, the FBI, National Security Agency, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and other agencies warned of an active cyber threat to Siemens S7 Series programmable logic controllers (PLC) used in water systems and other critical infrastructure.

The advisory said unnamed threat actors were conducting reconnaissance and capability development against the U.S.-based Siemens PLC installations, using AI-generated exploitation scripts disguised as legitimate monitoring tools. It noted that the hackers sought internet-connected PLCs running outdated software or that were otherwise poorly protected.

"The U.S. critical infrastructure sectors most targeted by this threat activity include Critical Manufacturing, Energy, Water and Wastewater, Chemical, Food and Agriculture, and Commercial Facilities," the advisory stated.

"This is not a theoretical risk - it is an active threat."

The advisory came amid reports of incidents targeting local water systems in several states in the preceding weeks. The FBI said that from July 27 to July 30, water and wastewater utility companies in seven states reported security-related incidents.

Michigan was among those states. Dale George, director of communications for the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy, said that the state received the FBI's notice warning of attempts to tamper with operational technology at water systems.

"All systems continued to operate safely, issues were addressed by local operators, and there are no known impacts that posed a public health concern," George said.

Earlier in July, more than 30 community water systems in Minnesota reported a coordinated cyberattack. CISA urged water entities of all sizes to protect operational technology against activity targeting PLCs.

Attackers had targeted internet-facing Rockwell Automation and Allen-Bradley MicroLogix controllers, changing passwords and IP addresses. Some effects included loss of pressure. Federal officials warned that a significant pressure drop can allow untreated groundwater to enter drinking water pipes.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 17:00

Man At Risk Of Losing $95,000 Plane For Transporting Unopened Six Pack Of Beer Takes His Case To SCOTUS

The Supreme Court will consider whether Alaska went too far when it confiscated a pilot's $95,000 airplane over an attempt to bring beer into a dry community, according to Yahoo News.

The case dates to 2012, when longtime Alaska charter pilot Ken Jouppi agreed to fly a passenger from Fairbanks to Beaver, where alcohol was prohibited. The passenger had 72 cans of beer in her luggage. Most were boxed, but a six-pack was visible in a grocery bag.

Troopers found the alcohol before takeoff. Jouppi was convicted of a misdemeanor after a court determined he had been willfully blind to the beer. He received three days in jail and a $1,500 fine, but Alaska law also required forfeiture of his airplane, worth about $95,000.

The Alaska Supreme Court upheld the seizure, reasoning in part that illegal alcohol imports contribute to the broader problems caused by drinking in rural communities. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the decision and will hear arguments in Jouppi v. Alaska on December 1.

Yahoo writes that the Cato Institute, backing Jouppi, argues that the state's approach gives too little weight to what Jouppi himself actually did and how severe the punishment was relative to his offense. Its brief points to a legal tradition stretching back to the Magna Carta, which held that punishment for a "trivial offence" should reflect the seriousness of the conduct and should not be so large as to destroy someone's livelihood.

Cato also cites the Supreme Court's 1998 ruling in United States v. Bajakajian. There, the Court rejected the forfeiture of $357,144 from a man who failed to report that he was carrying the money overseas. The money was legally obtained, the offense caused little direct harm and the Court found the forfeiture excessive.

Jouppi, now 83 and an Air Force veteran with no prior criminal record, argues the same principle applies to his case. His airplane was worth more than 60 times the criminal fine he actually received.

The case could also determine whether a person's financial circumstances should factor into an excessive-fines analysis. As Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a separate 2019 forfeiture case, treating identical property seizures as equal punishment would create a fiction "that taking away the same piece of property from a billionaire and from someone who owns nothing else punishes each person equally."

A ruling for Jouppi could give courts clearer guidance on when property forfeitures cross the Eighth Amendment's line from punishment into an excessive fine.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 16:40

Soros-Linked Political Groups Pour Millions Into Democratic Efforts Ahead Of Midterms

Via American Greatness,

Political committees tied to the Soros family have directed tens of millions of dollars to Democratic-aligned organizations during the 2026 election cycle, including a group spending heavily in Michigan's closely watched U.S. Senate race.

Democracy PAC and Democracy PAC II had distributed more than $40 million to Democratic-aligned organizations as of the end of June, according to campaign finance records.

Recipients include Senate Majority PAC, House Majority PAC and J Street Action Fund.

Federal Election Commission records show Democracy PAC II alone reported more than $6 million in total disbursements through June 30.

The spending has drawn attention in Michigan, where Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed is running against Republican Mike Rogers.

Senate Majority PAC, which received $9 million from Democracy PAC this cycle, has committed $30 million to supporting El-Sayed in Michigan, according to recent reports.

The outside support comes as El-Sayed has made reducing the influence of wealthy donors a prominent campaign theme.

"The fundamental corruption of our politics has been the system that allows corporations and would-be oligarchs and billionaires to buy politicians," El-Sayed said in a 2025 interview.

Republicans are highlighting the contrast between that rhetoric and outside spending supporting his candidacy. Alyssa Brouillet, a spokeswoman for Rogers, accused El-Sayed of being inconsistent on political money and criticized his connections to wealthy donors.

The Soros network has also supported organizations involved in congressional races, environmental issues, voting efforts and campaigns for progressive prosecutors.

George Soros transferred control of his philanthropic and political organization to his son, Alex Soros, in recent years. Additional disclosures could provide a more complete picture of the family's political spending during the 2026 election cycle.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 16:20

AI & The Same Old Politicized Hysteria

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

The midterm elections are six weeks away.

Suddenly, a debate has erupted over the existential dangers of artificial intelligence. Jacob Coxon, a little-known Silicon Valley researcher who worked at OpenAI and Anthropic, resigned and went public with a dire warning: AI now threatens the future of the world.

Shortly beforehand, news broke of the Hugging Face episode, in which OpenAI's advanced AI "agents" autonomously hacked another company's computers.

Bedlam followed.

Weaponizing AI

Almost on cue, Democrats seized on the alarm as a new cause célèbre, accusing Donald Trump and the MAGA movement of recklessly courting Armageddon.

The Left demanded international treaties, ignoring the dismal record of such globalist projects: the League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the Washington Naval Treaty, the Versailles Treaty, the Munich Agreement, the Paris Climate Accord, and the UN Human Rights Council.

Panicky AI executives soon joined the chorus, speaking as though they could neither control their companies nor monitor their own research.

Their conduct casts doubt on this safety rhetoric. Just yesterday came news that Anthropic had built a fully automated, AI-controlled biolab, even though AI-generated plagues are a staple of the doomsday case. OpenAI, meanwhile, is resisting legal liability for harm caused by its products.

The familiar political script followed.

Democrats in Congress demanded hearings. They are unlikely to use them to ask tech executives or administration officials serious questions. More likely, they will spend their allotted time shouting, wagging their fingers, displaying their ignorance, and spinning wild conspiracy theories.

Sen. John Kennedy, who has proposed reasonable AI regulation for years alongside Republicans like Sen. Josh Hawley, recently observed that "the Democrats clearly are trying to politicize this."

The reaction to a June administration decision offered still stronger evidence. Both purportedly worried AI companies and Trump-hating AI-risk advocates objected when the administration barred Anthropic from giving foreign nationals access to its Mythos and Fable 5 models - models whose cybersecurity risks the company itself had publicized.

With the trans delirium and the demonization of ICE losing force, however, the Left apparently needs a new existential crisis to blame on Trump before the midterms.

This tactic - never letting a crisis go to waste - is hardly new.

A Litany of Political Panics

Baby boomers grew up hearing dire warnings about the "population bomb," the title of Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich's 1968 bestseller predicting that unchecked population growth would lead to global catastrophe.

Ehrlich and others argued that rising affluence would swell populations, producing famine, pestilence, war, and ultimately global catastrophe.

The thesis collapsed, but not before it produced a pervasive "Spaceship Earth" mentality. Guilt-ridden Americans were told to remain childless or, at most, to have one child.

Other countries followed. The existential danger now facing Western societies is the reverse: the citizens of these countries are now having far too few children. Their populations are shrinking and aging, while a dwindling cohort of young taxpayers must support ever-growing entitlements.

Green apocalypticism followed this. The science of ecology gave way to radical environmentalism, and legitimate concern about industrial pollution and acid rain became propaganda that the Earth was doomed unless the West renounced capitalism. Even heat was redefined as pollution. When "global warming" proved insufficiently terrifying, it became "climate change."

The new phrase was a brilliant catch-all. Rain and drought, snow and heat, calm seas and hurricanes could all be cited as proof that modern, fossil-fueled Western consumerism had doomed the planet.

European Union countries nearly wrecked their economies by subsidizing inefficient wind and solar power while abandoning nuclear energy and fossil fuels.

The 1980s brought another panic: nuclear war would soon incinerate the cities, and the resulting dust would blot out the sun.

Politics drove much of the frenzy. The Left despised Ronald Reagan and saw no other way to prevent his reelection in 1984.

For years, the United States had responded weakly as the Soviet Union deployed mobile, intermediate-range nuclear missiles aimed at European cities. Reagan finally answered by stationing Pershing II launchers and ground-launched cruise missiles in Western Europe. The Soviets eventually withdrew their nuclear-tipped missiles.

No matter. A manufactured epidemic of fear swept the West regardless.

The popular scientist Carl Sagan toured the country promoting his terrifying theory of a "nuclear winter" after what he treated as an inevitable Soviet-American nuclear exchange.

Hollywood joined the campaign in 1983 with The Day After, a grim portrayal of a nuclear strike on the United States and its gruesome aftermath. Some 100 million Americans watched this movie, which depicted mushroom clouds rising over Kansas.

The psychodrama did not stop Reagan's reelection. Soon afterward, he negotiated a missile treaty with the Soviet Union, proving that he was hardly the deranged warmonger that his opponents delusionally imagined he was.

By the turn of the millennium, America was lurching from one amplified panic to another. Al Gore became a centimillionaire and a Nobel laureate by warning that internal-combustion engines would boil the planet, bringing both lethal drought and catastrophic coastal flooding.

Polar bears would die, coral reefs would disintegrate, icebergs would menace shipping, and coastal homes would disappear beneath the sea.

Only a Marshall Plan-scale replacement of gasoline and diesel engines with wind turbines, solar farms, and batteries, we were told, could save humanity.

The planet survived. Al Gore grew wealthier, and Goreism then quietly receded into the shadows.

#MeToo began with legitimate accusations against Hollywood predators such as Harvey Weinstein, who had long coerced young actresses into sex in exchange for roles - the old casting couch revived.

Before long, however, the movement had become a new Salem witch trial, treating almost any allegation of rude conduct between the sexes as the equivalent of rape.

Insinuation and rumor damaged the reputations of men ranging from Garrison Keillor and Sen. Al Franken to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, often with little or no evidence. A legitimate campaign against sexual harassment had deteriorated into character assassination.

Millions of men began searching their memories for an off-color joke, an overlong hug, or a kiss that might resurface years later to ruin their careers while advancing those of their accusers.

The McCarthyite frenzy subsided only when liberals realized that their Frankenstein monster had turned on its creators and threatened too many of their own political icons.

They had no wish to derail the likely presidential candidacy of the handsy Joe Biden, whom several women accused of inappropriate touching and hugging and one even accused of violent sexual assault.

Nor did they wish to revive the sordid record of former president Bill Clinton's many brief and exploitative sexual encounters.

As #MeToo faded, COVID hysteria took its place. The initially virulent virus warranted serious concern; more than a million Americans would die from it. Yet concern became madness once defeating Trump took precedence over fighting the disease.

Officials closed schools even though the virus posed little danger to young people or children. The first nationwide lockdown in American history devastated the economy.

Officials presented the new mRNA vaccines as ironclad protection against infection and transmission. Those who resisted were treated as near-outlaws, fired, or ostracized, although the shots had not been proved to guarantee lasting immunity or perfect safety and often carried with them serious side effects, many or most of which were denied or swept under the rug.

The government expelled 8,500 service members who refused vaccination even as, with liberal approval, 10,000 unvaccinated and unvetted illegal immigrants crossed the border each day.

Teachers' unions kept public schools closed, inflicting lasting harm on a generation of students. Quarantines and shelter-in-place orders contributed to domestic violence, drug abuse, and alcoholism. Millions missed heart and cancer screenings. The shuttered economy destroyed hundreds of thousands of small businesses and upended millions of lives.

Still, shyster "experts" predicted years of mass death comparable to the plagues that ravaged ancient Athens and Constantinople.

They grossly misrepresented or caricatured the classical medical understanding of acquired natural immunity. Dr. Fauci and his circle of "authorities" also failed to disclose their role in funding gain-of-function research at the Communist Chinese laboratory in Wuhan that had created the mysterious virus.

What ended the panic?

As a few sober - and therefore demonized - health experts had predicted, the virus evolved into less virulent strains while prior infections increased natural immunity.

COVID eventually receded to the level of a severe flu. By then, this hysterical, manufactured response to it had wrecked the economy, destroyed the final year of the Trump administration, and inflicted incalculable physical and psychological harm on the American people.

The lockdowns helped ignite an even greater panic after George Floyd died in Minneapolis police custody. A video showed an officer restraining the resisting Floyd with a knee on his neck, using what was then considered a more or less standard protocol; within moments of its release, the country erupted.

False claims spread that police disproportionately killed unarmed black men. Murals portrayed Floyd as a haloed martyr with angel wings, although he was a career felon detained for passing counterfeit currency who resisted arrest, was high on drugs, and suffered from cardiovascular disease and the effects of a recent COVID infection.

No matter - riots soon swept the country. More than 35 Americans were killed, roughly 2,000 police officers were injured, and about 14,000 people were arrested. Property losses reached some $2 billion. Rioters torched a police precinct and a federal courthouse and tried to storm the White House grounds.

Universities dropped SAT requirements. "Black" was given a sacral form of capitalization; "white" was conspicuously left lowercase.

New racial quotas sharply reduced white male admission rates at elite schools. Institutions hired tens of thousands of DEI commissars. Campaigns to defund the police, release habitual felons, and decriminalize theft spread nationwide.

Then the George Floyd frenzy abruptly subsided.

Black Lives Matter's founders were exposed as grifters who had misappropriated funds while acquiring plush homes and expense accounts.

Data showed that, relative to annual police encounters, unarmed black men were not fatally shot at a higher rate than white men.

After abandoning admissions standards, universities found themselves inflating grades, adding remedial courses, and lowering academic expectations for students who had not met requirements the institutions had deemed indispensable only a year earlier.

The post-Floyd frenzy finally ebbed as the public recognized that tribalism and attacks on meritocracy were themselves racist and nihilistic.

What, then, does today's Democratic embrace of AI alarm share with these earlier mass frenzies?

First, each began with a legitimate concern that politics and a profit motive soon warped the problem beyond all recognition. The Left appropriated the underlying issue to gain political advantage and power.

Worry about overpopulation goes back to Malthus, but The Population Bomb appeared in the election year of 1968. Its political subtext blamed Western consumerism, capitalism, religion, and traditional pronatalism for civilization's supposed approaching end.

The danger of nuclear war had been real since the start of the atomic arms race. Nuclear-winter paranoia, however, was promoted to damage Ronald Reagan during his reelection campaign.

Al Gore's book Earth in the Balance converted tentative scientific speculation about climate change into partisan dogma. It blamed capitalist consumer culture for destroying the planet and, in the 1992 election year, reinforced the Clinton-Gore campaign's attack on the Bush status quo.

#MeToo reached its political peak during the Kavanaugh hearings. Democrats repurposed a movement against Hollywood abuse to derail Trump's Supreme Court nominee with unfounded claims that Kavanaugh had assaulted a teenage girl decades earlier. Democratic operatives coached the now-troubled adult before she appeared on national television.

COVID began with legitimate fear of an escaped, artificially enhanced virus that killed millions - a fear the Left initially dismissed as anti-Chinese racism. It, too, was soon politicized. We now know that Anthony Fauci, his associates at the National Institutes of Health, and other presidential advisers despised Trump and understood that shutting down his booming economy could end his presidency.

The Biden campaign then blamed Trump for the economic damage caused by the lockdown.

George Floyd's death was genuinely shocking on video, especially without the surrounding context. But the 2020 campaign transformed it into the catalyst for months of rioting and a weapon against the supposedly racist Trump and MAGA movement. As cities burned, the Left argued that Trump was powerless to stop the violence - and a Nazi if he tried.

Second, every panic was exaggerated. The planet was neither overpopulated nor running out of food and fuel. Nuclear war was not imminent, and Earth did not face destruction within a decade. Women were not experiencing an epidemic of sexual assault. The lockdowns likely caused more harm than the virus, and police were not conducting a mass slaughter of black men.

The underlying dangers were not equally imaginary. Nuclear war, for example, came terrifyingly close in 1962 and again in 1983.

Among genuine threats, AI most resembles nuclear weaponry. That assessment may change, but AI has so far proved to be an extraordinarily powerful and therefore potentially dangerous tool. Its moral character depends on the people who build and control it.

That is why the United States can neither entrust AI regulation to international bodies with dismal track records nor permit Communist China to monopolize the technology.

Trump, who is a much more skillful diplomat than his globalist critics admit, has instead pursued bilateral negotiations with China over the real dangers both countries face. Those dangers were illustrated just yesterday, when an AI hallucination reportedly almost prompted a U.S. attack on a Chinese cargo ship.

In the end, Americans must rely on their own people, constitutional government, and open culture to harness AI for the public good - and to deter hostile powers from using it for evil.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 15:45

Have You Seen The Surge In US Rough Rice Futures

America's rice harvest is forecast to fall to its lowest level in 33 years. CBOT rough rice futures, the benchmark for US long-grain rice before milling, are surging higher at the end of summer after rising 69% so far this year.

USDA forecasts total production at 158.2 million hundredweight, roughly 23% below last year's 206.7 million. Harvested acreage is projected at just 2.057 million acres, the lowest since the 1972/73 season. 

"While beginning stocks are raised 4.6 million cwt to a 40-year high of 58.4 million cwt, production is reduced 0.2 million cwt to 158.2 million, a 33-year low, as a reduced forecast for harvested area more than offsets a higher yield," USDA wrote in a report.

The good news is that a meaningful supply buffer remains, with the year beginning with 58.4 million hundredweight in inventories, a 40-year high. This will provide a cushion against any lost production.

Even with that buffer, USDA expects ending inventories to shrink to 40.4 million hundredweight, down 31% from a year earlier. Its forecast for the all-rice season-average farm price is $14.90 per hundredweight, about 20% above the previous year.

USDA said there was a "notable shift to a relatively tight U.S. supply situation" from last year's harvest to this year's.

That is being reflected in CBOT rough rice futures, which have jumped 69% so far this year to $16 per hundredweight and could be on track to test the $19.65 high reached in the summer of 2023.

CBOT tracks US long-grain rough rice. International prices, especially in Thailand, have also risen.

Goldman analysts estimate this El Niño could push global food commodity prices up more than 15%.

It is not a great sign when the grain that feeds the world is soaring in price in multiple regions, suggesting further food inflation pressure on household budgets.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 15:25

Mullin: DHS Investigating 1,620 Non-Citizen Voter Fraud Cases

Authored by AG News Staff via American Greatness,

The Department of Homeland Security is investigating 1,620 cases of alleged voter fraud involving noncitizens and reviewing hundreds of thousands of additional cases, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said.

Mullin told Fox News that DHS has made 151 arrests and is examining another 300,000 cases based on information compiled from state voter rolls.

"We're scrubbing them. We're comparing them to those that are in the country illegally, those that are legal permanent residents and those that are citizens" to determine whether they voted legally, Mullin told Fox News contributor Kayleigh McEnany.

The investigation puts renewed attention on election integrity and the participation of noncitizens in U.S. elections, an issue President Donald Trump has repeatedly raised.

According to Mullin, the cases uncovered by DHS support Trump's longstanding contention that election fraud has occurred.

"We continue to see that. Every single vote, Kayleigh, that we talk about, that was at the hands of an illegal canceled out a citizen that was legally registered and able to vote," Mullin said.

DHS is examining the additional cases to determine whether individuals identified on state voter rolls were citizens, legal permanent residents or in the country illegally, according to Mullin.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 15:05

Copper Nears Record High As Shanghai Inventories Tumble, Fueling Scarcity Fears

Copper has almost retraced the selloff sparked earlier this month, following Reuters' report that the White House's "copper tariff plan stalls amid affordability concerns." Prices are back near record highs in London as Bloomberg reports tightening supplies in China's physical market, reinforcing scarcity concerns.

Three-month futures on the London Metal Exchange rose .7% to $14,763 a ton, putting the industrial metal within striking distance of its September 10 record of $14,875.

The driver, according to the outlet, is new Shanghai Metals Market data showing shrinking Chinese inventories. Those inventories fell to 43,900 tons, the lowest since 2023.

This year's rally follows a volatile stretch of upside price action, as uncertainty over potential US import tariffs on copper sent record inflows into US warehouses and tightened availability elsewhere.

We have highlighted how deteriorating conditions across global mining operations are adding to supply woes in the physical market for the industrial metal.

Copper, critical for AI and power grid buildouts, has climbed 18% this year and 70% since its April 2025 lows, according to Bloomberg data.

Veteran commodities strategist Jeff Currie has warned repeatedly that "physical economy is repricing scarcity in the real world."

With copper approaching record highs, The Market Ear's latest technical analysis report examines the price levels to watch for confirmation of a breakout (read here).

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 14:45

Trump Calls For Diesel Export Ban After 3-Hour 'Very Productive' Iran Talks Summary

• US-Iran talks: Unnamed US admin representatives held 3-hour talks with Iranian officials on sidelines of UN General Assembly.

• Trump's UN address ultimatum: Touts possible deal 'after' US midterm elections, but also says: "Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival?"

• Diesel export ban: Trump said he had discussed a potential ban on U.S. diesel exports with his team, as lawmakers push for measures to address elevated domestic fuel prices.

• Signs historic Greenland security deal: Trump signs the security agreement with Denmark and Greenland.

• Trump addresses AI challenges in speech: He promoted a more permissive approach to AI, referring to it as "super intelligence." He said "The United States leads the world in super intelligence, and we'll continue to do so safely and responsibly."

//--> US-Iran Final Nuclear Deal by December 31, 2026?
Yes 16% · No 85%
View full market & trade on Polymarket

*  *  *

3-Hour Iran Meeting; Proposed Diesel Export Ban

Trump administration officials have held a long meeting with the Iranian delegation on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, with the president hailing it as a "very good" meeting. He further called it "very productive" and that "they have another one scheduled in the very near future."

As for who represented the White House, no specific names were given, but President Trump while addressing reporters appeared to reference his special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner as they sat near him. "It was a meeting that lasted for three hours," Trump indicated.

Confirmed: Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, met with the Steve Witkoff, US special envoy, and Jared Kushner on the sidelines of the General Assembly at U.N headquarters in New York, according to NYT, citing two Iranian officials

Not confirmed: A high-ranking source told Al Arabiya: The New York meeting between the American and Iranian delegations broke the deadlock in the negotiations; A breakthrough between America and Iran is possible, but it requires multiple steps.

Iran's armed forces: says Trump's statements on Iran at the UNGA are "tools are domestic propaganda."

In his big UN address earlier in the morning, Trump warned that he could "annihilate" Iran and "send them to hell" - but also held out hope that Tehran would be willing to make a deal, which would likely come after the US midterm elections.

The same afternoon Trump spoke in a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, saying that he has called for a ban on diesel exports. Oil prices pressed lower immediately on the headlines, but soon after began rising again. However, some sources have warned that the controversial proposal could backfire.

Trump said he has discussed a potential diesel export ban with his team, while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed that the administration is examining the possibility of such a ban.

Trump endorses a ban on diesel exports: "I've called for that too. I've said, let's not send out the diesel." (Trump has in fact called for other nations to buy energy from the US!) pic.twitter.com/GVYILw1ou4

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 22, 2026 Trump on Iran, Oil & Midterm Elections

Standing before the United Nations General Assembly, President Trump told the world: "While others have talked, I have acted. While others have spoken of peace, I have made peace."The focus quickly turned to the Islamic Republic of Iran, which Trump charged as responsible for spreading "death and carnage and chaos." He claimed: "They were the bully of the Middle East, but they are the bully no more."

In listing out what have become the admin's typical talking points, Trump issued an even bigger than before number of Iranian citizens he claims were recently killed by their own government, stating without evidence that over 72,000 Iranian citizens had been slaughtered. This number just keeps on and keeps on growing.

Addressing the war itself, Trump hailed that Iran's navy ships now lie "at the bottom of the sea," and their economy is completely gone, and with many capabilities like radar utterly non-existent. Yet, the nuclear threat is still front and center. Reaffirming his red line to "never allow a nuclear weapon," Trump turned to boasting of how his Operation Epic Fury "obliterated their nuclear program beneath mountains of rubble." But again he still holds Iran out as an atomic threat.

One of the more interesting lines came when Trump said Tehran had built a missile capable of hitting Europe, and that the Iranians openly boasted of this. He called on Europeans (who have so far rejected the urging to join a Hormuz military mission) to take note of this. "I have a big decision to make... will a deal be made with Iran, or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and 'do it quickly'? Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival?"

President Trump says Iran deal will be made after the midterm elections, and says he has decision between a deal with Iran or destroying them: "Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?" pic.twitter.com/Y5K6v4B326

— CSPAN (@cspan) September 22, 2026

He talked about potentially annihilating them, and this key line:

“I believe we’ll make a deal right after the election because it doesn’t make sense for them not to,” Trump said. “They’re waiting to see how I do in the midterm election.”

Trump in this Iran section of the speech made some provocative remarks on the US midterm elections. He indirectly invoked the dilemma of high oil prices and how the GOP might do. "I give no credence to the election; I am not running... it doesn't even enter my mind." Instead, a global ultimatum was issued: a call on all nations to join the United States in enforcing the total isolation of Iran, driven by the absolute promise that "It's gonna be done, it's gonna be done fast" - in reference to this decision of achieving either peace or Iran's final destruction.

👀Iranian delegation began to walk out as Trump started the Iran portion of his speech, saying that he has a choice to make about whether to annihilate the country or make a deal with them.

One lower level staff member remains. pic.twitter.com/iFtL9ntfkv

— Farnoush Amiri (@FarnoushAmiri) September 22, 2026

The address then got broader, outlining Trump's foreign policy 'successes' driven by leverage, special relationships, and the persistent threat of tariffs. Pointing to Venezuela, his narrative emphasized how combining Venezuelan and US resources - accounting for "60% of the world's oil" - would help drive down energy prices worldwide.

He openly boasted after the US military invasion of Venezuela and overthrow of Maduro, "To the victor belong the spoils."

Trump on Venezuela:

When you add the United States and Venezuela together, we have more than 60 percent of the oil in the world. So, it’s perhaps the biggest deal.

It was a war, but it’s perhaps the biggest deal ever made.

To the victor belong the spoils. You’ve all heard… pic.twitter.com/Hrqu9knMtO

— Clash Report (@clashreport) September 22, 2026 Trump on Ending Ukraine War, Greenland Security Deal, & AI

On Ukraine War:

Trump claimed ending the war between Russia and Ukraine will happen "faster than people understand." He said Washington is working closely with both leaders, asserting both countries are exhausted by the conflict.

On Greenland:

"No US. adversary will ever be permitted to establish a military presence in Greenland anymore or make sensitive investments there without our express written approval. We will immediately begin the process of developing a large military presence in the appropriate locations. We’ll be building two very major military bases."

On AI:

Calling it “super intelligence”, Trump said the US rejects a “globalist scheme” to control AI.

“The use of the word artificial makes intelligence sound fake, and it is not fake,” Trump explained. “It’s actually amazing.” And then: “All of US documents will be changed to use the much more accurate term ‘super’, instead of ‘artificial’,” he said. “Welcome to the new world of super intelligence slash SI.”

Trump said the US would encourage rather than rein in the technology. “The United States leads the world in super intelligence, and we’ll continue to do so safely and responsibly,” he said. “Americans have never been a nation that retreats from a frontier or shrinks from a challenge, no matter how great or how daunting that challenge may be,” he added.

And within less than an hour after Trump walked off the UN stage: Trump signs the security agreement with Denmark and Greenland.

*  *  *

President Donald Trump is set to deliver a highly anticipated speech to the United Nations General Assembly today, set for 9:55 Eastern Time, or around 10am - though things are already running late. He's expected to address the Iran war and the "importance of ensuring that Iran never has a nuclear weapon" - according to UN Ambassador Mike Waltz, along with a other foreign policy issues like his 20-point peace plan in Gaza, as well as recent US actions closer to home in the Western Hemisphere.

Watch Trump's Full UNGA Address

High on everyone's mind is whether the US will engage in direct diplomacy with the Iranians on the UNGA sidelines.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio says the White House remains open to this.

"We’re open to that. I don’t think anything is scheduled at this point, but we’re certainly open to something like that, especially if it has the prospects of leading to something positive and ultimately achieving the goal of what this is all about," Rubio told NBC's :Today" show Tuesday morning.

"And that is the fact that Iran can never have a nuclear weapon. They just simply can’t."

A senior White House official has further previewed of Trump's speech: "He'll include many of the issues, frankly neglected by past administrations, that he’s not going to kick the can on." From there and intense, meeting-packed day will ensue, starting with:

Following his speech, Trump will join a signing ceremony with the leaders of Greenland and Denmark on an agreement that the president touted as giving the U.S. “total control” over the Arctic island’s security. Greenland and Denmark, which owns the self-governed island, framed the agreement as strengthening security and said they will need to have their parliaments ratify the terms before it goes into effect.

According to White House and UN previews of Trump's busy schedule, a series of bilateral meetings will ensue:

• First bilateral meeting: Face-to-face meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham.

• Second bilateral meeting: A "fulsome" meeting with Japan's Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi.

• Third meeting: A discussion with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

• Special event: Participation in the "Shield of the Americas" event with Latin American leaders.

More on anticipated Trump talking points:

BREAKING: President Trump's UN speech to make the case for how he uses America's power to confront Iran, cartel violence and other threats, reshaping the world to help the US, White House official tells Fox News' @WardDPatrick pic.twitter.com/oCn655rK83

— Fox News (@FoxNews) September 22, 2026

Another key meeting to be held on the sidelines will be crucial direct engagement with officials from Washington's Gulf allies, at a moment of deep wartime uncertainty lingering over the whole region. Trump has warned he could starting hitting Iran again, or else strike a deal "at any time".

Investors will be keeping an eye on US President Donald Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday, as well as his meeting with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping later in the week. Beijing is expected to offer additional rare earth export licenses as a bargaining chip at the summit, Bloomberg News reported.

Gulf leaders are also anxious over the expanding war with the Houthis in Yemen. The Saudi coalition has over the last two weeks been beaten back rapidly, impacting overland oil transit - particularly after the East-West pipeline was hit in a drone attack - and Riyadh is looking for urgent military help from its partners. So far Trump has resisted directly joining the expanded conflict.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 14:28