Zero Rss

David Ellison Debuts New Name For Merged Paramount, Warner Bros. Studios

Authored by Jill McLaughlin via The Epoch Times,

Paramount and Warner Bros. studios will be combined under one company named Skydance, company CEO David Ellison announced Oct. 2 on his newly opened X account.

David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance, speaks during the Paramount Pictures presentation at CinemaCon at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas on April 16, 2026. AP Photo/Chris Pizzello

"We have big goals for Skydance, and we intend to pursue them with passion, imagination, and a willingness to take smart risks," Ellison said.

"At the same time, we will honor what makes Paramount and Warner Bros. special - giving both studios the opportunity to grow, tell more great stories, and bring those stories to even broader audiences around the world, powered by the scale and capabilities of Skydance," he said.

Ellison said the company chose the name Skydance for a few reasons. The company will serve as an umbrella entity over Paramount and Warner Bros., bringing the iconic studios together under one roof while also preserving their "distinct identities, extraordinary legacies, and brands that have resonated with audiences for generations."

"We never wanted a new corporate identity to diminish, alter or overshadow either one," Ellison said in the post. "Instead, we wanted a name that would give the combined company an identity of its own while allowing Paramount and Warner Bros. - and all our extraordinary brands - to remain in the spotlight."

The company's assets now include Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures, Skydance Animation, Nickelodeon Animation Studio and Avatar Studios; CBS, Showtime, MTV, CNN, TNT, TBS, Comedy Central, Food Network, HGTV, Discovery Channel, HBO/HBO Max, Paramount Plus, and others.

Skydance also owns the film rights to at least 22 of the industry's biggest franchises, including Star Trek, DC Comics, Looney Tunes, Game of Thrones, Dora The Explorer, Mission Impossible, The Lord of the Rings, SpongeBob SquarePants, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and Transformers.

Ellison announced on Sept. 30 that Ynon Kreiz would serve as co-CEO of the merged company when it officially closed. He joins the company from Mattel, a leading entertainment company where he has served as chairman and CEO since 2018.

Kreiz will oversee the company's day-to-day operations and integration of the combined businesses, while Ellison will lead the strategy, creative, and technology aspects of the company, according to Ellison.

"I'm excited to partner with David to build the next-generation media and entertainment company - bringing together premium content and iconic brands at the highest quality and scale, serving global audiences across every entertainment vertical and distribution platform," Kreiz said in a statement.

Paramount Skydance settled a lawsuit with California and 11 other states on Sept. 21 that attempted to block the $111 billion acquisition, clearing a path for one of the largest media mergers in history.

The settlement was approved by a U.S. District Judge Sept. 30, paving the way for the merger to officially close on Oct. 6.

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Far-Left Riots "Tearing France Apart" Is Political Gift For Le Pen As Election Odds Soar

Riots that French officials blame on far-left groups have morphed into a political crisis, leaving hundreds injured and more than 100 high schools severely damaged. The social unrest appears to be a gift to right-wing presidential contender Marine Le Pen, whose Polymarket odds of winning next year's election have surged in recent days.

At least 65 school employees, including 40 principals, and roughly 170 students have been injured since the unrest began, Euronews reported Friday. Education Minister Édouard Geffray said at least 100 high schools had suffered severe damage.

🇫🇷 Mass riots escalating across France

Despite bans on gatherings outside closed lycées, clashes with police have continued since morning in Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Rennes, and other cities.

More than 400 schools are fully closed today over damage and threats to staff. Pupils… pic.twitter.com/tmadn01Cgm

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 2, 2026

Young second and third-generation migrants film a French firefighter after setting him on fire during the ongoing school riots pic.twitter.com/rqhC8rcoV2

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 2, 2026

France: 625 arrested. 83 cops hurt. 159 students and staff injured. Schools on fire. The mayor of Saint-Denis high-fived the riot and said violence can be legitimate.This is what open borders and muslims produce.pic.twitter.com/cHpC7y42Es

— Vitruvius Republic 🇺🇸 (@realMAG1775) October 1, 2026

🚨🇫🇷FRANCE is tearing itself apart❗️

Call it suicidal empathy or call it Western self-hatred.

2,000 arrests, but the police can't control it.

It started as a protest by "students," but as always, it's escalating into riots by immigrants and those born in France with a… pic.twitter.com/Zhcdre37v1

— The Lector (@TheXLector) October 2, 2026

🇫🇷 School fires and riots spread across all of France

Young second- and third-generation migrant rioters are setting high schools on fire.

In many of France's cities, riots are being propped up by far-left pro-migrationist LFI officials, who are physically present at the scene.… pic.twitter.com/DJpAe4NamN

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 1, 2026

The unrest began over overcrowded classrooms, teacher shortages, long school days, and deteriorating facilities. The government's proposed 2027 budget only offers a 1.7% increase in education spending, bringing the total to 65.53 billion euros.

French intelligence agencies told a government crisis meeting Thursday that radical politicians from the far-left France Unbowed party, known as LFI, had sparked the riots.

According to local outlet Le Monde, Geffray told reporters that far-left groups had taken control of the movement.

The broader security concern is that far-left groups exploit legitimate grievances, recruit younger and younger participants, and transform localized protests into opportunities to riot. The far-left-fueled riots that accompanied US protests in 2020 offer a cautionary tale about how these groups hijack movements, and Western governments are only now coming to their senses about this problem.

For Le Pen, these riots seem like a gift, as her Polymarket odds of winning next April's election have surged.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 13:25

Trump Announces One-Time $90 Payments To 20 Million Seniors In Medicare

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump announced on Oct. 2 that his administration would issue one-time $90 payments to more than 20 million seniors enrolled in Medicare.

A file photo shows a federal Medicare office. Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Trump said the payments were meant to help seniors cover Medicare premiums and would come from the Medicare Improvement Fund, which Congress has allocated $2 billion to improve Medicare's fee-for-service program but has never been used, according to a White House fact sheet.

"We are finally using this Fund, along with my Most Favored Nations Deals, to substantially lower costs for our Seniors," the president wrote in a Truth Social post.

Eligible Medicare recipients will receive the payment in early October by direct deposit or by check sent to the mailing address they registered with Medicare, the White House said.

Most Medicare Part B enrollees are eligible for the payments, except those whose premiums are already paid by Medicaid or who pay an income-related monthly adjustment amount, the White House said.

"With this action, President Trump is the first President to ever use the Medicare Improvement Fund to directly lower costs for senior citizens," it stated.

Medicare is federal health insurance for Americans 65 or older and some with disabilities. Medicare Part B covers doctors' services, outpatient care, and some preventive services such as flu vaccinations and diabetes screenings.

Trump said in his post that the $90 payments are separate from the $500 rebate checks his administration planned to send to nearly 1 million people who were overcharged for their coverage through the Affordable Care Act - President Barack Obama's healthcare law, known as Obamacare - under the previous administration.

The one-time payments for seniors, Trump said, also demonstrated his commitment to carry out a plan to give every American adult a $5,000 dividend check if Republicans retain control of Congress in the November election.

The president first announced the $5,000 payment during a Sept. 9 Republican event in Dallas, Texas, calling it the Trump dividend. He promised the payment if Americans return Republican majorities to both the House and Senate in the upcoming midterm elections on Nov. 3, which he said could be made possible by his tariff policies.

The Census Bureau's American Community Survey estimated that there were 245 million adult U.S. citizens in the country as of 2024, meaning the payouts would cost about $1.3 trillion.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told NBC News on Sept. 10 that, if implemented, the $5,000 dividend checks for citizens would not be paid for with taxpayer dollars. He said the administration could "earn the money that Donald Trump wants to pay out, not from the deficit and not from taxpayers."

Melanie Sun contributed to this report.

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US Again Rebuffs Riyadh's Yemen Plea As 100,000-Man Force Readies For War

Several reports have indicated that Saudi Arabia and Yemeni government forces are preparing for a major offensive against Houthi rebels in the coming weeks, which will mobilize a huge force with an aim to take back Yemen's Red Sea coast and to ultimately secure the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, amid an ongoing threat to global shipping in the Red Sea area.

Over 100,000 Yemeni pro-government troops could mobilize for the offensive,  Reuters has reported. Last month, the ease and quickness of Houthi gains proved humiliating for the Saudi coalition in Yemen.

White House file image

The report described, "The Saudis are considering two possible options for the assault, the Gulf and Yemeni officials said: Either a narrowly focused attack on ​the area around Bab el-Mandeb or a broader offensive that also includes other synchronized attacks on multiple fronts around Yemen, in the governorates of Al-Bayda, Marib, Taiz and Al-Jawf."

Parallel to the Reuters reporting, Axios said Friday that the United States will definitely not join the offensive in any direct way, short of possible intelligence or even targeting help.

The report cited US officials who say Riyadh again directly requested military help from Washington, but the kingdom has been rebuffed for the second time in a few weeks.

The Saudis are expected to focus on air cover for ground forces loyal to Sanaa, and reports suggest the Saudis wanted US warplanes in the air as well. 

Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid Bin Salman called Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth to brief him ahead of the operation and specifically requested US airstrikes as coverage for the ground operations. The request was rejected, US officials say.

An admin official was cited in Axios as saying the US "is not going to take kinetic action for now."It was just a week ago that President Trump was said to have been close to ordering US military support in the Yemen theatre, but that he decided against it at the last minute.

Sunni clerics denigrate Shi'ites of the region:

Speaking at a conference in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s top Muslim cleric said: "Houthis have no connection whatsoever to Islam.” pic.twitter.com/PY47Bmi99d

— HatsOff (@HatsOffff) September 30, 2026

US officials have said getting bogged down in the Yemen conflict would be a "distraction" at a moment US forces engaged against Iran and in escorting oil transit through the contested Strait of Hormuz.

There's also the fact that in prior years when the US was more directly supporting of the Saudis and UAE in coalition operations in Yemen, it did little to change realities on the ground, other than imposing misery and death on the broader Yemeni population.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 12:15

What Michael Milken Would See In AI Chip Financing

Authored by Patrick Feeley via Substack,

Very few people in the AI financing debate are reading the deals like a credit trader would. We have had a week of headlines about who is raising what. Amazon is moving $8 billion of chips off its balance sheet. Broadcom is lending $42 billion to its own customer. Nvidia is offering to backstop $125 billion of the debt people use to buy Nvidia. The coverage treats each number as a scoreboard. Hardly anyone asks the question that matters once the paper is sold, which is who is holding the risk and whether they know it.

There is one person who would have asked. He went to federal prison, and he was also right about a version of this problem forty years before almost anyone else.

Berkeley, 1965.

In 1965 Michael Milken was an undergraduate at Berkeley when he came across an NBER monograph by W. Braddock Hickman, Corporate Bond Quality and Investor Experience, published in 1958. Hickman had gone through decades of corporate bond records, from 1900 to 1943, and reached a conclusion that should have been scandalous. Investors usually overestimated the risk in higher-yielding bonds. They treated the rating as the risk, and the rating was wrong often enough that the paper everyone feared tended to do better than its reputation.

Milken later wrote that he "was struck by the disparity between theory and reality." That is a modest way to describe what he saw, which is that a whole profession had confused a letter grade with a probability. Most people who find something like that write a thesis. Milken built an industry. He went to Wharton to study capital structure, joined the firm that became Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1969, and moved the high-yield desk to Beverly Hills in 1978.

The machine.

The numbers still look fake to me. Public junk bonds outstanding went from $8.5 billion in mid-1977 to $59.1 billion by mid-1985 and roughly $200 billion by early 1990. Between 1978 and 1985 Drexel underwrote 57 percent of every new-issue dollar in the market. One desk, and largely one man. The money built MCI, Ted Turner's empire, Steve Wynn's casinos and McCaw Cellular, and it funded T. Boone Pickens's raids on the oil majors, which readers of my last piece will recognize as an early chapter of the constructivist trade. By 1989 the Predators' Ball at the Beverly Hilton drew more than 3,000 people. Pickens was there.

Most people, including some who worked there, get the ending wrong. Drexel did not die of bad bonds. Drexel Burnham Lambert filed for bankruptcy on February 13, 1990, and the Los Angeles Times described the cause as "a staggering liquidity problem." The firm defaulted on roughly $100 million of loans, a small number against the market it had created, and the market lost its main dealer overnight. Most of the issuers were fine and most of the paper was fine. What disappeared was the one institution willing to take the other side.

Two months later Milken pleaded guilty to six felony counts and paid $600 million. He was sentenced to ten years and served 22 months. Weeks after his release he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and he spent the next three decades building the Prostate Cancer Foundation and FasterCures before his pardon in February 2020. As a former biotech person I would guess his second career did more good than his first did harm. That is a different essay.

The detail that belongs in this essay comes from 1987. That year, according to the GAO, insurers held more than 30 percent of all junk bonds outstanding. In April 1991 California regulators seized Executive Life, which had 62.7 percent of its general account in junk. The institution that failed was the marginal buyer of the paper, with long liabilities, a capital charge set by the rating rather than the asset, and a board that believed it owned bonds.

The skeptic.

The popular memory of Milken is a man who sold leverage to anyone who would take it. His own writing says close to the opposite. "Debt isn't good. Debt isn't bad. For some companies, close to zero debt is too much leverage." In the Wall Street Journal in 2009 he laid out six factors and warned that when they point toward rising business risk, "even a dollar of debt may be too much for some companies." In Bloomberg Businessweek in 2014 he named the industry. Stable, predictable revenue can carry debt. Technology, he wrote, "should finance growth primarily with equity."

Read that again and then look at what is being sold this week. I suspect the man who built the high-yield market would hesitate to lend against a GPU.

He also kept a short list of principles about credit. The first one is four words long. Rating is not credit. Most of what follows is an application of those four words.

The tape.

On October 2 the Financial Times reported that Amazon is pitching investors on a special purpose vehicle (a separate company set up to hold specific assets and borrow against them) that would own roughly $8 billion of already-installed Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips, raise debt against them, and lease the chips back to Amazon. The stated goal is a lighter balance sheet. The other effect is a rating. Investors expect the paper to come out investment grade on the strength of Amazon's double-A, which is what opens it to insurers and pension funds. Amazon says each series of chips will last at least five years. In the same article the FT noted that Grace Blackwell will soon be superseded by Vera Rubin. Both facts ran in one story, and I have not seen anyone comment on it.

A day earlier Reuters pulled a number out of Anthropic's IPO filing. Broadcom will lend Anthropic up to $42 billion in convertible notes, roughly a third of a $125.2 billion, five-year commitment to lease Google TPUs that Broadcom helps design. Anthropic's own filing flags the potential conflict of interest and warns that certain defaults could make "a substantial portion of its lease obligations immediately due." Bloomberg reported that banks are separately assembling $60 billion for Broadcom's chip financing, $42 billion senior and $18 billion junior, with Blackstone leading the junior piece. In August Nvidia set up a platform with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to bring in more than $500 billion of outside money, and Jensen Huang said Nvidia holds an option to backstop $125 billion of it.

CoreWeave remains the live experiment. In August it closed a $2.6 billion loan with a roughly five-year maturity against customer contracts that average about three years. Meta's Hyperion data center was financed with $27.3 billion of bonds through Blue Owl's Beignet vehicle, priced at 6.581 percent, rated A+, one notch below Meta, and kept off Meta's balance sheet. Pimco reportedly took about $18 billion of it, which is one firm holding two thirds of one deal.

All of this is being priced with the 10-year Treasury above 5.2 percent. It touched 5.34 percent on October 1, the highest since 2002. JPMorgan expects $4.1 trillion of AI-related debt to be issued through 2030. For scale, the entire junk bond market that Milken built peaked at around $200 billion.

How a trader reads it.

First, the rating is borrowed. A vehicle that owns depreciating silicon is being rated off Amazon, not off the silicon. That works for as long as Amazon pays the lease, and the lease is most of the trade. Strip the structure away and a buyer of that paper is long Amazon credit at some spread over Amazon's own bonds, plus a residual bet on what a 2026 GPU fetches in 2030. The first leg is easy to price. The second is hard to hedge, because I am not aware of any real forward market in used Blackwells. If the spread does not pay for the second leg, the buyer is being paid for Amazon risk and taking the chip risk for nothing. Milken would have asked about it in four words.

Second, the debt can outlive the asset. Five-year money on chips with three-year contracts and a successor generation already announced is a bet on renewal. The CoreWeave lenders said as much and described themselves as comfortable underwriting renewal risk. That may be a reasonable bet, but it is closer to a venture bet than a term loan, and I would expect it to be priced like one. Amazon trimmed the useful life of some servers from six years to five in 2025. Michael Burry spent his October 1 Substack arguing the real economic life is shorter still. I do not know the right number, and I doubt anyone does. What I do know is that the coupon is fixed and the collateral value is not, and if the collateral falls short, the lender holds the difference.

Third, the marginal buyer looks familiar. In 1987 it was the insurers. In 2026 it is insurers and pension money again, reached through investment-grade structures that look like corporate bonds and behave partly like equipment leases. Cliff Asness put it better than I can in March. "The lion doesn't care if the ostrich is first loss or higher up in the capital structure." Tranching sorts out who takes the first loss, and the size of any loss stays the same. To be fair to Asness, he has been careful to say he did not predict the timing of trouble in private markets, and I am not predicting it either. I am describing a structure.

There is a real counterpoint, and Milken would make it himself. Anyone with a contract from Anthropic or Amazon has absorbed every rate increase so far. One executive told CNBC last month, "If you have a deal with Anthropic, will 50 basis points really stop you?" Probably not. My guess is that trouble, if it comes, starts two tiers down, with the smaller neoclouds lenders have started turning away and the second-string chip lessors who priced their books when the 10-year was in the 4s. Credit cycles have a habit of starting where few people are looking.

The club.

There is one more pattern Milken would recognize, and it is the one I think about most as a public-market investor. In 1989 the Los Angeles Times described the Drexel network as a club whose members were lending to and borrowing from each other. Deals cleared because the same handful of balance sheets sat on both sides of the trade.

In 2026, Broadcom lends to its largest customer so that customer can lease Broadcom's chips. Nvidia offers to backstop the debt its buyers use to buy Nvidia. Several of the sponsors in the Nvidia platform also appear in the Broadcom financing. Each deal is defensible on its own. Taken together, the suppliers have become a meaningful source of their own demand, and the public is about to be invited into the arrangement through an Anthropic IPO that people close to it have put at up to $2 trillion.

To be precise, I think AI demand is real, perhaps the most real thing in the economy right now. My concern is narrower. When the junk market seized in 1990, the companies were mostly sound. The dealer that made the market walked away, and nobody else would take the other side. For AI credit, the chips will almost certainly get used. What I would want to know is who makes a market in GPU-backed paper in the quarter one of the large sponsors decides to sit out. Today, as far as I can tell, it is largely the sponsors themselves.

People.

The part of Milken I like most is the optimist. "People are the scarce resource," he said. "It's not buildings, it's not printing presses, and it's not factories." I did not expect to find him on chips, but he got there too. "For today's computer chips, it's less than two percent of the cost. Brainpower has become the 'raw material' for building companies."

Hold that up against this week. Borrowed money is going into the factory at a 5 percent risk-free rate, and very little is going to the people who have to make the factory pay. I would guess the return on AI accrues mostly to the operating companies that take the compute and turn it into margin, and many of them are small and mid caps that have not done it yet. They are sitting on the adoption gap.

Anthropic seems to see it the same way. It just committed $100 million to train 10,000 engineers to deploy its models inside customers. Read that as a signal. A model company is paying out of pocket to close the gap between buying compute and using it, which suggests the chips alone do not close it. The lenders are financing the supply side of a market whose bottleneck, I think, sits on the demand side, with people.

Six questions Milken would ask.

1. Does the debt pay down before the chips stop earning?
2. Should this business be financed with debt at all, or, as he put it, primarily with equity?
3. Whose credit is actually being rated, the chip's or the guarantor's?
4. Who owns the residual if a 2026 GPU is worth a fraction of book in 2029?
5. Is the seller financing its own customer, and who makes the market if the dealer steps back?
6. Who turns the compute into margin?

The sixth is the one I spend my days on, and it is the only one where the answer is a company rather than a structure. Milken liked to say the past is always triple-A and the future is always single-B. He meant it as encouragement, and I take it that way. The future is worth financing, as long as the people doing the financing know what they own. This week a good number of them will own Amazon credit with some used-chip risk attached, and I hope they are being paid for both.

This note is for research and discussion only. It is not an offer to sell, or a solicitation to buy, any security. Sargasso Capital Management may hold positions discussed or related instruments and may change those positions without notice.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 11:40

He Calls It Socialism; Marx Called It Communism's Last Stage

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

On Theo Von's podcast, Zohran Mamdani defined socialism as the government delivering whatever you need for a dignified life. That is Marx's rule for communism's last stage - and New York is already getting the invoice.

Von asked him to define socialism. Mamdani said socialism means you will have whatever you need to live a dignified life, and that it is the government's job to deliver on that. Housing. Childcare. Transit. The things, he said, that let you take a breath.

Karl Marx saved a version of that sentence for the end of the road. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme he split communist society in two. The lower phase still pays you for the work you do. The higher phase, once "all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly," gets a banner: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

THEO VON: "Will you define socialism for us?"

MAMDANI: "Socialism, to me, means that you will have WHATEVER YOU NEED to live a dignified life, and that it is the GOVERNMENT'S JOB to deliver on that."

I've heard a line like that before. It came from a famous book, and it was... pic.twitter.com/B9jKlJkVXH

— The Vigilant Fox ? (@VigilantFox) October 2, 2026

Mamdani skipped the abundance and kept the needs. He also skipped the part where the state is supposed to wither. In his version the state is the delivery service.

On CNN's Amanpour in September he said the model "will absolutely translate" nationally, because the only majority in the country is the working class, and its inability to afford housing, childcare, and transit "goes beyond any one city."

After the June primaries he had already said a democratic socialist can get elected anywhere, for any office. A late-July CNN poll found about a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults calling themselves democratic socialists. House Speaker Mike Johnson's read was blunter: the party had nominated some of the most radical candidates ever to run.

One example of this playing out came in February, when Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cut a Spanish-language ad for free 3-K and Pre-K. The script: if your child turns three or four in 2026, you can enroll in New York City, and any parent is eligible regardless of occupation, income, or immigration status.

The spot landed in the same season City Hall was warning of a budget crunch and a possible property-tax hike. "Whatever you need" did not come with a residency test.

City Hall has built a network of nearly 200 creators, grown out of the campaign's Creators4Zohran shop and run through a private Signal group, "NYC Creators Announcements," overseen by a new-media director salaried at $175,000.

It has paid some of them for agency campaigns, typically $5,000 to $20,000 a pop. The Department of Social Services spent more than $100,000 this year on a social push under a contract signed in 2025, before Mamdani took office. The Office of Mass Engagement sits at $54 million. The needs principle, distributed by group chat.

Sitting at a desk for the country's 250th birthday, Mamdani said the powerful have always treated America as "an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal," belonging to those with the right accent or shade of skin.

Patriotism, he said, is dissent. Love of country is the reason you refuse to leave it. Critics noted he was eight years a citizen, using the occasion to indict the country, after a $4 billion Hochul bailout for the agenda.

Bill Maher, of all people has called out Mamdani for exactly what he is. Maher pointed at the hire of tenant advocate Cea Weaver and her line about electing more communists. "That's a communist," Maher said. "You're allowed to believe it. You're allowed to vote for it. Let's just not pretend that that's not what this is."

Mamdani still says democratic socialist. The definition he gave Theo Von is the one Marx wrote for the higher phase of COMMUNISM, with one edit: the government stays, and it delivers the agenda.

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"Where Is The Onshoring?" UBS Questions White House Investment Boom As Foreign Money Flows Into Takeovers

President Trump recently said that over $20 trillion in foreign investment has flowed into the US so far in his second term.

“We have more money being spent from outside countries and companies. Over $20 trillion. That’s five, six, seven times higher than any country. Not just here, any country ever,” Trump said, adding that the total could climb to $25 trillion by the end of his term.

🚨 President Trump stuns the World by saying our Manufacturing is higher than ever and $20 Trillion dollars is being invested into America

"No country in HISTORY has ever been close”

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I VOTED FOR

Follow @mr_pool001 pic.twitter.com/qPr4i4INN2

— Mr pool (@mr_pool001) October 1, 2026

Yet UBS economist Arend Kapteyn wrote in a new note on Thursday that new foreign direct investment totaled $232 billion in 2025, roughly $30 billion below its 10-year average. He said that, adjusted for inflation, investment that year was below every pre-pandemic year.

“One way to assess whether manufacturing is being ‘onshored’ to the US is through foreign direct investment (FDI) data,” Kapteyn said.

Kapteyn’s findings clash with the White House’s narrative of the early innings of a durable manufacturing revival. The latest White House tracker lists trillions of dollars in announced US and foreign investments, with commitments from the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Japan, Saudi Arabia, India and South Korea alone exceeding $5 trillion.

Kapteyn continued:

Yet little of this is visible in the BEA's New Foreign Direct Investment data (chart below). 

New FDI totaled just $232bn in 2025, around $30bn below its 10-year average and, in real terms, lower than in any pre- pandemic year. There was a modest pickup relative to 2022-24, driven mainly by media/ telecoms and primary metals (within 'other manufacturing), but no broad-based investment surge. 

Also note that, 94% of new foreign investment took the form of acquisitions of existing US firms. Only 2% reflected the creation of new businesses and 4% the expansion of existing foreign-owned operations, suggesting that foreign capital is largely changing ownership rather than adding new productive capacity.

The gap between the data Kapteyn analyzed and the White House's announcements may partly reflect the lag between investment pledges and actual spending. The bigger question is how much of that money will ultimately finance new US production capacity, rather than acquisitions of existing businesses.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 09:55

UAE Says Omani Flydubai Co-Pilot Attacked Captain With Axe, Tried To Seize Israel-Found Jet For "Terror Act"

State news agency WAM quoted UAE Attorney General Hamad Saif Al Shamsi as saying the Flydubai Omani co-pilot accused of attacking the captain with a crash axe tried to seize control of the passenger jet bound for Israel and attempted to carry out a "terrorist attack."

Planning, attempted terrorist act behind flydubai flight FZ1073 incident: Attorney-General#WamNews https://t.co/OWxoZ9nWWR pic.twitter.com/JCE3NuGppa

— WAM English (@WAMNEWS_ENG) October 3, 2026

"Investigations into the incident involving flydubai flight FZ1073 found that the co-pilot had attempted to carry out a terrorist attack," Al Shamsi said.

BREAKING:

The Omani co-pilot who stabbed Captain Smit Machchhar and tried to crash Flydubai Flight FZ1073 on its way to Tel Aviv has been identified as Hamam Al Hamami.

Netanyahu stated today that it's becoming increasingly clear after the first interrogations that the attacker… pic.twitter.com/qXBS64D7W8

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 3, 2026

The aircraft operating flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv on Wednesday, about one week before the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks, plunged 18,000 feet during the attack as passengers and crew subdued the attacker.

Between 05:22:07 and 05:22:36 flight #FZ1073 dropped from 30,875 feet to 16,750 feet (-14,125 feet in just 29 seconds) pic.twitter.com/hHfnX7cKWI

— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) September 30, 2026

🇦🇪🇮🇱🇸🇦🚨 UPDATE: Damage visible on FZ1073 after emergency landing

Images from Tabuk appear to show significant damage to the upper tail of flydubai flight FZ1073 following this morning’s extraordinary incident.

Reuters reports, citing an Israeli official, that a physical… pic.twitter.com/AXKCqt5Qjx

— DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) September 30, 2026

The passenger jet, with 174 souls on board, diverted to Tabuk in northwestern Saudi Arabia for an emergency landing.

Al Shamsi said the investigation is under way "to uncover all the circumstances of the incident, its motives, and related connections, in addition to completing technical examinations and examining physical and digital evidence."

On Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel was investigating whether the co-pilot had acted under anyone's direction, warning that anyone involved in the terror plot would pay a "heavy price."

Flydubai halted all flights on the Israel route shortly after the terror plot was foiled, and Israel's El Al canceled its scheduled flights, stranding some Israelis in the UAE.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 09:20

Turkey's Fix For Its $20 Billion Hedge Fund Meltdown: Kindly Ask The Winners To Give The Money Back

Two weeks after a cluster of Istanbul asset managers stopped honoring redemptions, triggering a market-wide circuit breaker and the liquidation of 131 funds held by some 455,758 Turkish retail investors, Ankara has unveiled its plan to make everyone whole. Or at least, to make everyone a little bit less un-whole.

As Bloomberg reports, Turkey will start payments to investors caught in the fund crisis. The Capital Markets Board (SPK) approved interim payments of up to 1 million lira (about $20,400) per eligible investor in funds run by Tera, Pusula, Atlas and Hedef, calculated on each investor's "net investment" as determined by the Central Securities Depository (MKK). Below a million lira, you get your money back; above it, you get a million and a place in the queue. Money market funds get paid first, the rest in descending order of investor count, with A1 Capital, Bulls and Pardus funds slotted in afterward. The interim payments are advances against whatever the liquidation ultimately recovers, which is a polite way of saying nobody knows yet.

Emre Tezmen, chair of Tera Yatırım, was arrested early last Wednesday.

Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek, meanwhile, insists that "we are not talking about a systemic problem," pointing out that public debt is just 22% of GDP and the budget deficit is "roughly half the developing country average." All true, and also not much consolation to the investor who, as Turkish Minute recounts, sold her Istanbul home before moving to Portugal, parked the proceeds in stock funds as an inflation hedge, and has watched her account fall ~90% while being unable to withdraw even that. "It is melting away before my eyes, and I can't do anything about it."

The "please give it back" account

The payouts are the boring part. The truly bizarre part is how Turkey - long the biggest banana in crowded bus of capital markets banana republics - plans to refill the pot.

Alongside the interim payments, the regulator announced the creation of "Voluntary Return Accounts" at Birlesik Fon Bankasi "for individuals seeking to return excessive profits obtained from pre-liquidation share sales." Proceeds will be funneled to the fund liquidation estates and on to Ziraat and Isbank for distribution to investors. A separate "General Share Refund Account" has been opened for anyone who would like to hand back profits from speculative trading in listed stocks, and a new fund inside the deposit insurer TMSF will receive assets later determined to be proceeds of crime (details here).

To summarize: Turkey's plan to compensate 455,000 losers is, in part, to ask the winners nicely.

Bloomberg's Eric Balchunas summed it up best: "Turkey wants investors who made a lot of money in market to gift excessive returns to the other investors who lost $20b."

Turkey wants investors who made a lot of money in market to gift excessive returns to the other investors who lost $20b in funds w ponzi like schemes that are being liquidated. Wow. pic.twitter.com/Aw7RVn6DJQ

— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) October 1, 2026

Which raises a question that every holder of Turkish assets, foreign ones included, will now be asking: if realized gains can be deemed "excessive" after the fact, at what point do they become yours?

For those who don't feel like volunteering, there is the stick, or rather a discounted stick: under a leniency provision, anyone who pays twice their gains (minimum 500,000 lira) within 15 days of a criminal complaint gets a reduced penalty. Note where that money goes: not to the stranded investors, but to the Treasury and Finance Ministry. Market manipulation as a revenue line.

So who exactly made the "excessive gains"?

Here the honor system runs into a few practical problems. According to a detailed timeline of the probe, Pusula chairman Muhammed Yariz wired roughly 2.89 billion lira (~$15 million) to Edmond de Rothschild in Switzerland on September 1, two weeks before his firm defaulted; Pusula Holding chairman Serdar Turhan sent ~1.2 billion lira (~€25 million) to the same Swiss bank on August 24. Both have since been arrested. One suspects the Birlesik Fon Bankasi "voluntary return" desk is not their first call.

Then there's Cengiz Avci, a major shareholder in Odine Solutions, a stock that rose 987% this year to a peak 366 billion lira valuation before collapsing 94%. Prosecutors allege he booked ~15 billion lira in gains and converted 12 billion lira (~$244 million) into cash. There is an arrest warrant. He "had not returned and was not located." Presumably the voluntary return form got lost in the mail.

And then there's the politics. Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya, deputy chair of Erdogan's ruling AKP and a former family minister, resigned after the opposition alleged she bought shares in shipbuilder Ozata Denizcilik, a navy contractor whose valuation was ramped to $5 billion (above Ford Otosan) while Tera's brokerage reportedly controlled 95% of its shares, for about €1.1 million in April and sold for €23.3 million just before the September 16 crash. Kaya has not directly addressed the allegations, which remain unproven in court. A 21x return in five months: if that isn't "excessive," we'd love to know what is.

It doesn't stop there. As Middle East Eye details, one Erdogan adviser sat on Tera Portfolio's board until January, another former presidential adviser stayed on until the crisis erupted, and an Ozata board member arrested this week is the son of a former banking regulator and the son-in-law of a sitting deputy finance minister. Tera chairman Emre Tezmen, arrested on charges of running a Ponzi-like scheme, previously served on the board of the MKK, the very central depository now tasked with calculating each investor's "net investment" for the payouts.

Freeze, unfreeze, arrest the tweeters

The enforcement response has been equally on-brand. On a Friday, the Justice Minister announced asset freezes on 46 companies, 18 funds and 42 individuals. By Sunday, the freezes on 45 companies and 19 funds were lifted after the CMB conducted "a new assessment," with Simsek explaining that "protecting investment, employment, production and exports was a priority." Restrictions on the 42 individuals remain. Meanwhile, prosecutors in Bakirkoy arrested 16 people for social media posts deemed to be market manipulation and blocked access to 246 accounts "spreading speculative panic." It's always the tweets.

Officials have now identified 217 suspects across 26 manipulated stocks, with 56 detained as of September 30. The mechanics of the scheme were hardly sophisticated: funds piled into illiquid, low-float stocks, and with nobody on the other side, prices went vertical. Prosecutors allege some prices were inflated nearly 100x. Then the regulator tightened concentration rules in late August, the funds were forced to sell into a market with no bid, and retail rushed for the exits on the TEFAS platform. The ones who got out first were, inevitably, the ones closest to the funds.

The numbers tell the story: Pusula's funds shrank from 115 billion lira to under 8 billion, with 107 billion lira withdrawn before the doors closed. Money market funds, supposedly the safe end of the spectrum, saw 456 billion lira pulled in a single week (from 2.14 trillion to 1.68 trillion). In other words, those who knew ran, and those who trusted a "state-supervised system," as one law graduate who invested with her mother put it, are now waiting for a $20,000 interim check.

What Goldman is telling clients

As the crisis erupted, Goldman's EM credit desk wrote on September 17 that the equity market's 6% plunge was due to the "near-collapse and redemption default of asset manager Pusula Portfoy, precipitated by the regulator's clampdown on concentrated 'fund-chain' positions," followed by Tera "failing to meet redemption requests." The central bank responded with bond buybacks (you know, "NOT QE"), bigger repo auctions and lower discount rates, while Simsek spent the day "defending current policy mix and committing not to deviate from the anti-inflation track despite elections." Turkey CDS widened 10bps intraday before closing +6.5bps; Turkish bank perps fell as much as 65 cents. 

We were more laconic: Turkey was getting "Leopolded" we reported late on Sept 16 when first news of the fund meltdown emerged.

Turkey getting Leopolded pic.twitter.com/vZYZqcPT24

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 17, 2026

By that weekend, Goldman's EM credit team was calling it a "systemic liquidity squeeze" in which "the liquidation of approximately $20 billion in local funds, sparked by redemption failures, dragged the BIST 100 down 6% and pushed external sovereign debt and CDS as much as 15bps wider midweek." Yet the bank's key takeaway was that "Turkey's move was technical rather than credit-driven, with a domestic fund liquidation transmitting into external debt before local buyers and short covering reversed most of it."

Goldman CEEMEA sales trader Ashwin Sharma went further, noting that the crackdown targeted a speculative boom that index provider MSCI had described as "co-ordinated trading," and that reining it in, "given threats of possible MSCI demotion (to Frontier)," was "a clear positive for me." His conclusion: "Despite near-term redemption-driven volatility, I continue to see Turkey as an attractive buy-on-weakness story," with banks pointing to further rate cuts and NIM expansion into 2027, and an energy price shock (Turkey is a net oil importer) the biggest risk. The bank's GIR EM strategists echoed the theme in their weekly kickstart, flagging Turkey's 5% weekly drop on "regulatory action on select investment funds."

The carry crowd hasn't left either. In a September 29 note, Goldman's EM SSA desk said Turkey remains a carry trade "GIR continues to favour and where we continue to see client allocation," with clients extending out the curve into paper like the EBRD 27.5% 2029s, which yield ~200bps above the 2027s. Then again, as of this morning, the bank's credit desk reported that in the Turkish corporate complex "risk was still available and offered with corps feeling particularly abandoned."

Which is, in a nutshell, the Turkish trade: the high-30s lira yields and the orthodox finance minister are real, and so is the system in which an AKP deputy chair allegedly makes 21x on a navy shipbuilder ramped by a fund whose chairman sat on the board of the securities depository, while the regulator's answer to the losers is a $20,000 advance and a bank account for the winners' conscience.

Been here before

Readers will recall the last time Turkish markets needed a marketwide trading halt, after the arrest of Erdogan's top rival Ekrem Imamoglu sent the lira to a record low ("All Hell Breaks Loose In Turkey"). And in May we noted that Turkey had sold nearly all its US Treasuries, dumping holdings from ~$16 billion to $1.8 billion alongside gold to defend the lira after the Middle East war erupted. The buffers, in other words, are thinner than the macro tables suggest.

As for the gated funds, the playbook should be familiar to anyone who followed the private credit redemption mess earlier this year: illiquid assets, daily liquidity promises, and a "screen price" that only exists until someone tries to sell. As one local analyst put it, whether the till "will have the money to pay it is unclear." The interim payments come out of what's left in the funds; the rest depends on the liquidators finding buyers for stocks that, by prosecutors' account, had been inflated as much as 100-fold, and on the winners volunteering to give back their winnings.

We wouldn't hold our breath. But we would watch the precedent: in Turkey, a realized gain is now only yours until the government decides it was excessive.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 08:45

"One Month Until Drawdown": UBS Sounds Alarm On Europe's Thin Gas Buffer As Winter Looms

UBS energy analyst Nayoung Kim warned about a growing vulnerability in Europe's natural gas market on Thursday: with less than a month before seasonal withdrawals begin, storage levels remain well below historical norms for this time of year, leaving the continent with a smaller buffer against winter demand and supply disruptions.

Kim wrote that despite optimism this week over improved Hormuz flows (read the Goldman report), which has kept energy prices in check, top LNG exporter Qatar shipped just four cargoes in September, compared with 25 a month before June 2025 and an average of around 30. Force majeure has also been extended into November or early December for some buyers.

The final countdown to Europe's NatGas drawdown period is underway, with EU gas storage standing at just 71.50% full as of the end of the week, well below the 15-year average of around 88% for this time of year.

Weekly injections slowed to 1.3 billion cubic meters from 1.6 billion, with Norwegian maintenance and higher industrial demand offsetting an increase in LNG arrivals.

"We expect storage to reach 74% by winter, below last year's 84% and the five-year average of 90%, before falling to around 25% by the end of winter," Kim wrote in the note.

Meanwhile, Asian buyers are stepping up purchases. Weekly LNG inflows into Asia rose 12%, led by Northeast Asia, while combined arrivals into Japan and South Korea jumped 33% from the previous week.

Europe will have to pay up to keep cargoes coming before the Northern Hemisphere winter arrives. Asia's JKM benchmark is trading at a premium of more than $1.50 per million British thermal units to Europe's TTF, potentially forcing European buyers to raise bids for spot supplies, according to the analyst.

For Europe, the reality is clear: its benchmark Dutch TTF natural gas price will have to stay elevated through the winter, and buffers will remain unusually thin.

All it will take is one cold shot, renewed disruption to Gulf shipments, or sustained Asian buying for the Europeans to panic.

Beyond low NatGas supplies, Europe is also facing a fuel crisis, as the Trump administration has asked France and Germany to begin releasing emergency diesel supplies.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 07:35

Far Left UK Green Party Wants The Words 'Mother' And 'Father' Erased

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

The Green Party is going to war against language, having decided the words "mother" and "father" are no longer fit for its members.

Ahead of its conference in Brighton this weekend, Zack Polanski's party has circulated an 'Inclusive Terminology Guidance' telling activists to drop "mothers and fathers" for "parents and carers", and warning that the wrong vocabulary can create "unwelcoming or exclusionary" environments and feed into bullying and harassment under the party's own code of conduct.

The Telegraph reports that the document, already in use as equalities training, brands a run of ordinary English "unacceptable", then tells members what to say instead. 'Sexual preference' is out because it "implies that attraction is a choice". 'Transsexual' is out because it "does not encompass non-binary people". 'Homosexual' is discouraged for the same reason.

Green Party members have been told to replace terms such as "mothers and fathers" with gender-neutral terminology under new guidance on inclusive language ??https://t.co/s1W0OR75Ob pic.twitter.com/onYLGHsaFj

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) October 1, 2026

'Lunatic' and 'nutter' are non-compliant because they "reinforce negative stereotypes and stigma about mental health". 'Elderly', 'youngster', 'able-bodied', 'sex-change', 'female politician' and 'lady doctor' are all on the discouraged list. Gendered job titles go too: 'chair', not 'chairman'; 'police officer', not 'policeman'.

The race section is the same project in different clothes. Members are steered toward "global majority", described as an umbrella for people of Black, Asian, Brown, Indigenous and Latin American heritage, on the grounds that these groups are most of the world's population and are "often minoritised" in countries such as the UK.

'Brown' should be "used with caution," while "racially minoritised" is preferred because it "emphasises that minority status is created by social and power structures, rather than being inherent". "Black, Asian and minority ethnic" is to be handled carefully, because "many people are uncomfortable with grouping diverse experiences under a single label".

'The party wants to legalise drugs and ban mother and father. What planet are you on?

Martin Daubney and Ben Smoke discuss the 'inclusive terms' set out for the Green party conference. pic.twitter.com/g9Av86IsyM

— GB News (@GBNEWS) October 1, 2026

A section titled "What if I get it wrong?" tells members "it's OK to make mistakes from time to time", provided they are trying to be more "inclusive". The approved response is to apologise, thank the person who corrected you, and "adjust your language moving forward". Then the stick: "repeated or deliberate behaviour may be considered harassment, which is unlawful".

A Green Party spokesman told the Telegraph and the Daily Mail: "This is an existing and standard equalities training document, similar to those found in other organisations that also take equalities seriously. It is a guide and nothing else." The spokesman did not say when it was published.

The Free Speech Union called it "absolutely mental":

This is absolutely mental. When will this madness end?

The censorious Green Party is back to policing what we can and cannot say.

This time, rather than turning its sights on the press, it has published an Orwellian language guide telling delegates which words and phrases are... pic.twitter.com/sFKr2Tc7tp

— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) October 1, 2026

Conservative Party chairman Kevin Hollinrake said: "The Greens are obsessed with policing people's language and thoughts in the name of their increasingly bizarre crusade against ordinary Brits. Last week they were dictating who people spend time with and what jokes they make. Now they're attempting to prohibit perfectly normal words like 'mother' and 'father'."

He added, "This extraordinary obsession with censoring how people speak and behave in their everyday lives is made even more nonsensical by Polanski's inability to get a grip of the vile antisemitism within his own party." He added that Polanski should "look closer to home before lecturing others about what they can and cannot say."

JK Rowling answered in the only register the document deserves. "Speaking as the elderly mother of three youngsters, who hasn't had a sex change and knows many homosexuals, it is my able-bodied and sexually-preferred opinion that the Greens are turning into total nutters."

Speaking as the elderly mother of three youngsters, who hasn't had a sex change and knows many homosexuals, it is my able-bodied and sexually-preferred opinion that the Greens are turning into total nutters. pic.twitter.com/omMjs7Nxbb

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) October 1, 2026

None of this arrives in a vacuum. Polanski took leadership of the party in September 2025. Membership has since jumped from about 68,000 to 200,000 by March 2026, with 441 new councillors elected in May, a haul swollen by left-wing activists who left Labour under Sir Keir Starmer after Polanski put Palestinian activism and transgender rights ahead of anything resembling environmental policy.

A YouGov poll this week found Britons now rate the Greens "weak, out of touch, incompetent and serving their own interests", with net favourability sliding from plus five to minus 19 on his watch. He is standing in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election on 8 October, against Labour's Sagal Abdi-Wali.

The language guide is the internal version of positions the party has already taken in public. Last year, on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Polanski was asked if a woman can have a penis and answered yes. He called biological sex "not necessarily" binary, described gender as a "spectrum", and claimed he knew better than the UK Supreme Court, whose April 2025 ruling in For Women Scotland had defined sex under the Equality Act as biological sex at birth.

By March 2026 a leaked Green dossier was proposing a Department of Migration that would work with education authorities to "disseminate knowledge" in classrooms about "the situations from which those seeking asylum and resettling refugees are fleeing, and the need for and moral obligation of asylum and humanitarian protection."

In May, Scotland's loosened rules produced Green MSP Dr Q Manivannan, a transgender Tamil immigrant on a temporary student visa, without British citizenship or permanent residence.

The victory speech introduced "a transgender Tamil immigrant" whose pronouns are "they/them", and included the claim that "Transness is Blackness. Transness is womanhood. Transness is disability." A party that will not say mother and father had already elected someone for whom every category is interchangeable.

In July, two weeks after Reform's Ann Widdecombe was killed in a hammer attack at her Dartmoor home, Polanski shared an Instagram post of a man in a T-shirt bearing a guillotine and the line "We're only making plans for Nigel." Reform UK reported him to the Metropolitan Police for incitement. He later unshared it.

A party spokesman said he "unequivocally does not support this type of dangerous message" and had accepted the collaboration "without realising there was more to it." Nigel Farage said: "If I was to post anything as inciteful then I would expect to be arrested, and so should Polanski."

The same week as the language guide, the Mail on Sunday reported Green training that told members to police friends' jokes, log "what happened, including dates, times, locations", and audit the race of their closest friends to fight "affinity bias".

The attempt to retire "mother" and "father" flattens a biological relation into an administrative one.

The Communist Manifesto treats the charge of wanting to abolish the family as a boast as much as an accusation, and answers it by declaring that the bourgeois family vanishes with capital. Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, cast the monogamous household as a property arrangement whose job was to produce heirs, and looked forward to its supersession once private property was abolished.

Later Western Marxism kept the target and dropped the economics. The family became the workshop in which "oppressive" norms, sex roles, and authority were said to be reproduced.

Erasing words is how that is done without a manifesto. "Mother" names a woman who carried a child. "Father" names the man who fathered one. "Carer" names a function anyone can be assigned. Once the specific words are marked as harmful, the specific institution becomes harder to defend, because the defence has to be made in the replacement language.

This is exactly what George Orwell warned of in 1984.

A party that already tells children they owe a moral debt to asylum policy, that already treats sex as a spectrum, and that already elevates identity over citizenship, has every reason to want "mother" and "father" filed under unacceptable. The family is the rival loyalty. Marxism has always understood that. The Green guide is the HR version.

Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 07:00

Putin: Ready To Use 'All Weapons' Including Nuclear, If Kaliningrad Attacked

Now it's no longer just high-ranking Kremlin officials saying it, but Russian President Vladimir Putin has now directly weighed in amid the ongoing nuclear threat tit-for-tat involving European officials.

Speaking at the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow on Thursday, he warned the Western allies to cease their escalation in Ukraine, stressing he's willing to use "all weapons" in the Russian arsenal in the scenario that Russia's exclave of Kaliningrad comes under attack.

"The drills in the Baltic Sea, following one another… Then the attempts to arrest our ships and vessels. All this is an escalation. And then we began to hear statements regarding the Kaliningrad region," Putin said.

Kremlin file image/via Fox

"If it comes to direct attack against the Russian Federation, in this case on Kaliningrad and possibly some other territories, of course the issue of using all weapons in our country’s arsenal will inevitably and unavoidably emerge on the agenda. This is unavoidable," he asserted in a warning that includes nuclear weapons.

NATO held recent military drills near Kaliningrad which were broadly described as deterrence operations, which Putin referenced in the remarks.

Rhetoric has been running particularly hot over the exclave which is sandwiched between NATO members Poland and Lithuania all week, as Associated Press earlier described:

The warning sent to NATO echoed statements issued by several Russian embassies in Europe this week which said that Moscow has "information that NATO is preparing (an) air and naval blockade of Kaliningrad and Kaliningrad region."

The embassies in the U.K. and Ireland posted their statements on their Telegram channels, and the embassy in Belgium released it to the Tass news agency.

The ratcheting accusations from the European side have also centered on charges of a Russian sabotage campaign targeting the Baltics as well as Germany.

Moscow at the start of the week took the rare step of submitting a formal letter to NATO leadership in Brussels.

The letter accused NATO of an "unprecedented escalation of the military-political situation around Russia's region of Kaliningrad accompanied by highly provocative public statements by NATO Allies' officials."

"This dangerous and reckless course entails high risk of the outbreak of a direct armed conflict with the possibility of Russian strikes against decision-making centers of the alliance's member states right from the outset of the conflict," the letter said.

NATO was especially incensed and alarmed at this key line of Moscow's letter:

"Russia will be ready to use the entire arsenal of forces and capabilities at its disposal, including nuclear weapons, in order to defend its territory, should NATO countries undertake any attempt aimed at isolating the Kaliningrad region from the rest of the country."

Apparently this most recent tense back-and-forth over Kaliningrad was initially triggered by a television show which recently aired in the UK this month.

Preview of the provocative UK series The WarGame which started airing this month. The Kremlin has vehemently condemned it, and sees in it some clear messaging and an ominous threat:

Michael ‘The Gover’ Gove and ‘Bad Penny’ Mordaunt are loving their scripted roles in WarGames - just like the scripted parts they played for years in our Parliament.
This drama - documentary simulates an attack on the UK by Russia and was filmed 3 years ago.
Why do you think… pic.twitter.com/JYE8u5U8jH

— Andrew Bridgen (@ABridgen) September 22, 2026

Newsweek described, "The statement follows a miniseries aired by British broadcaster Sky News last week, The Wargame, which traces a hypothetical Russian attack on the U.K. and how the country might respond—including by authorizing operations against the Baltic territory of Kaliningrad."

    OCTOBER ONLY.$10 OFFYOUR NEXT ORDER.$30 min. Ends Oct 31. One per customer.GET MY $10 OFF →Signs you up for ZeroHedge Store emails. Can't be combined. Every order helps support ZeroHedge. Tyler Durden Sat, 10/03/2026 - 04:30

Failing Canada And Britain Blame Trump, Putin, And 'White Supremacy'

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Commie Canada and the dis-United Kingdom should be renamed the "Dumb and Dumber" of the British Commonwealth.

King Charles III's North American prime minister, Mark Carney, ran to The New York Times last week to talk about his military combat preparations against the United States in the event that President Trump crosses Lake America and liberates Canada from its delusional leaders. What a showboating dunce. The U.S. singlehandedly sustains Canada's economy and national security, yet the tiny central banker huffed and puffed in a hilariously Napoleonic display of fake strength.

In the same interview with the failing Times, Con-man Carney outlined his intent to integrate Canada's economy with that of China and the European Union and to replace the U.S. Dollar with a China-linked global reserve currency. Rhetorically defending Canada's sovereignty while insulting his U.S. benefactor, Little Mark Carney explained how he would subjugate his socialist nanny-state to Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping and unelected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Mark is the global mascot for "educated" idiots everywhere.

Not to be outdone by not-so-Great Britain's Canadian cousin, U.K. Prime Minister Poindexter (er, I mean Andy Burnham) informed the United Nations General Assembly last week that his government was constructing yet another speech-police organization (this one given the august name, "National Centre for Information Defence," which should not be confused with the "Research, Information, and Communications Unit," the "Government Communication Service," the "Counter Disinformation Unit," the "Defending Democracy Taskforce," the "Information Threats and Influence Directorate," the "Rapid Response Unit," the "National Cyber Force and Social Cohesion Taskforce," the "Media Monitoring Unit," or any of the other information-control agencies already mobilized across totalitarian Britain) to protect the British people from scary thoughts and words. Burnham blamed the Russians for spreading "a narrative of decline, stoking division, and sowing despair" in the U.K. (and definitely not Westminster's promotion of decline, division, and despair!) and promised to counteract this "information warfare" by censoring Britons' public speech and feeding his collapsing country a steady diet of State-sanctioned propaganda. In order to beat back the Russians, Dilapidated Britain must have its very own digital Iron Curtain! Two cheers for democracy! Hip hip...who cares.

The British people are screwed. On average, their government grants settlement or citizenship to an illegal alien every single minute. These foreign nationals receive more welfare from British taxpayers than ever before. The third-world invaders (I mean, "newcomers") use Britain's streets as public toilets. Rather than securing the kingdom's borders, the Home Office hands out a nine-page booklet informing mostly-Muslim men of military age that it is illegal to rape women and children while they conquer the islands. In the last two years alone, the number of illegal immigrants (and future citizens!) arriving by boat has exceeded the size of the entire British Army! But if these outrageous facts disturb you enough to publicly express your feelings on social media, you will most likely join the roughly 65,000 Brits who have been arrested for "speech-related offenses" over the last five years. Foreign invasion? Good! Free speech? Very bad!

Apparently, the British police state also plans to imprison anyone who would rather not fight WWIII against the Russian Federation. During a recent episode of former cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg's "State of the Nation" on GB News, one leftist-globalist commentator in favor of mass conscription argued, "We would have to lock a few people up...some of the pro-Russian voices, people saying there isn't a threat, don't fight for your country, don't go to war for Burnham, we'll have to lock 'em up." Rather than responding with horror at the suggestion that his fellow Britons should be imprisoned for opposing a catastrophic war, Rees-Mogg pedantically replied, "Well, we suspended habeas corpus during the Napoleonic Wars...indeed, yes." In another interview, Rees-Mogg nonchalantly remarked that British citizens have a "duty" to "die" for Britain in a war against Russia.

In Burnham and Rees-Mogg's Britain, the only way to "defend democracy" is to imprison anyone who disagrees with the British Establishment and to sacrifice everyone else to the killing fields! The British Isles might as well be renamed the "Gulag Archipelago."

Interestingly, GB News - which leans conservative - discovered last week that Britain's media regulator, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), had covered up data showing that viewers trust GB News more than the BBC. GB News, in fact, is ranked above all other networks with regard to viewpoint diversity and impartiality. British authorities apparently did not want the public to know these inconvenient truths because the BBC is treated as an objective, trustworthy, and premier source of news (fact check: false!). In an effort to control the public's perception of the BBC, Ofcom restricted what information the public was permitted to know. P.M. Burnham takes the "defense of information" very seriously!

How seriously? Burnham and the British government force citizens to pay for the BBC's awful dreck whether they watch it or not! Every household in the U.K. must fork over a £180 license fee to the BBC each year. Because more households are refusing to pay the license, the government is considering the imposition of a mandatory £11-a-month Internet tax in order to keep the BBC's fake news funded. The BBC says that the "fee is essential for maintaining the quality and diversity of public broadcasting in the UK."

What does "quality and diversity" look like at the BBC? Two "reporters" just did a major exposé describing how women who don't polish their nails perpetuate "white supremacy." No joke! "Nail art's historical and creative roots are linked back to black, Latino, and Asian communities and the suggestion that bare nails are now a sign of high status could stigmatise bold manicures," the BBC "reports." "They are often called elegant or tasteful, and these are often usually euphemisms that perpetuate white supremacist standards of beauty." Yes, Burnham, force Britain's working-class to pay for this race-baiting propaganda posing as hard news!

Earlier this year, British authorities announced that YouTube and other social media platforms would be forced to manipulate their algorithms and push BBC "news" to the top of feeds in order to counter "disinformation." In other words, Whitehall steals money from British citizens to pay for State-run TV and then forces them to watch it. During the Cold War, we called that Soviet-style propaganda. Yet if you ask the fake "reporters" at the BBC, Canada's publicly-funded CBC, or America's NPR or PBS, all these propagandists would insist that they have nothing in common with the Soviet Union's Pravda or the Russian Federation's RT (Russia Today) News. In the West, State-funded media are somehow not State media. Does that sound more like propaganda or breaking news?

Britain's State-imposed "narrative control" is utterly totalitarian. Dismissing the "narrative of decline" and "despair" in Britain as a "corrosive narrative...which bears no resemblance to reality" and a "distorted and untrue narrative about Britain," P.M. Burnham casts all public dissent as "far-right narratives." As military historian Professor Michael Rainsborough mocks, "The problem isn't the problem, the problem is the people noticing the problem." Rainsborough points out that right after Burnham rebranded "decline" as "disinformation," the prime minister laid out a "10-year plan" to fight inflation, housing costs, hopelessness, inequality, and division. "The narrative of decline," in other words, "bears no resemblance to reality, although reality apparently requires a 10-year plan."

Both Canada and Britain are failing. The public has noticed. Carney and Burnham wish to whitewash reality with fake "narratives." The worse things become, the more difficult it will be for their ministries of truth to succeed. Expect the BBC to blame Trump, Putin, and "white supremacy."

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/02/2026 - 23:25

"Are You An FPV Pilot": Pentagon Calls On Drone Operators For Next "Gauntlet" Showdown

The Department of War has put out a request for service members with "FPV experience" to participate in testing events called “Gauntlets” and fly Category 1 drones in field training exercises to accelerate drone development and prepare the US for the next conflict, where drones, robotics, and automated kill chains dominate the modern battlefield.

"Are you an FPV pilot? We want to hear from you!" DoW asked on X on Friday morning.

"The Drone Dominance Program is recruiting service members with FPV experience who would like to be considered as pilots for future Gauntlets and related efforts," the request said.

Are you an FPV pilot? We want to hear from you! The Drone Dominance Program is recruiting service members with FPV experience who would like to be considered as pilots for future Gauntlets and related efforts. Interested? Visit https://t.co/dlfuzlu2c0 to learn more: https://t.co/AyOAxjw9jt

— Department of War Innovation Unit (@DIU_x) October 2, 2026

The Drone Dominance Program is the DoW's answer to purchasing large quantities of drones across every category, from 1 to 5, and building out a domestic supply chain of components free from dependence on conflict areas and countries such as China, which can easily weaponize supply chains to hinder procurement.

Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth revealed that Autonomous Warfare Command, dubbed "AutoWarCom," is set to accelerate the DoW's purchases across all categories of drones, robotics, and AI.

What's key is that drone procurement will be a massive part of the rearmament supercycle and provide tailwinds to drone companies, such as heavily shorted Ondas, whose Ultra drone could very well see ramped-up orders by the military as it's seen as an MQ-9 Reaper alternative for ISR missions. 

"Once we apply sustained budget to changed doctrine, we will outperform the world," said Owen West, a former Marine, assistant defense secretary, and Goldman Sachs trader who has been tasked with leading the DoW's Defense Innovation Unit. "And by snapping in AI, we will be ahead of the world, because we are the leaders in AI."

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/02/2026 - 23:00

The Tyranny Of One Man's Opinion

Authored by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano via LewRockwell.com,

Thomas Cromwell was the Lord Chancellor of England for much of the reign of King Henry VIII. He engineered the convictions and executions of many whom Henry wanted out of the way, including his two predecessors in office - one of whom was St. Thomas More - and even the king's second wife, Queen Anne.

When Cromwell's son Gregory, who became sickened as he watched his father devolving from counselor to monster, learned that an executioner for the queen had been sent for from France a week before her trial, he asked his father what the purpose of her trial was if the king had preordained the queen's guilt and prepaid the executioner. Cromwell replied that the king needed a jury to give the appearance of legitimacy to her conviction and prevent the public perception of "the tyranny of one man's opinion."

In America, we have a Constitution not only to prevent the perception but also the reality of the tyranny of one man's opinion. The Constitution's Fifth Amendment makes clear that if the government wants life, liberty or property, it cannot take it by executive command, but only by due process - a fair jury trial and all its constitutional protections; and Article I makes it clear that if the government wants war, it cannot commence it by executive command, but only by congressional declaration.

We have a Constitution also to assure the separation of powers in the federal government. Congress writes the laws, appropriates the taxpayers' money and funds borrowed in their names and declares war when the United States is in danger of imminent foreign threat. The president enforces the laws, spends money as Congress directs and wages the wars Congress has authorized. The judiciary decides what the Constitution and the laws mean and, if properly challenged, determines if the president and Congress or the states have exercised their duties lawfully and constitutionally.

The central constitutional question is not whether a president sincerely believes that his policies are necessary. It is whether the Constitution permits personal liberty and limited government to depend upon the opinion of one man. That is the danger of executive government without effective legislative and judicial checks.

A fair reading of the Constitution begins with a truism: Presidential power is not whatever the president believes it to be. It is only what the Constitution and laws actually confer.

Consider the administration's attacks on alleged drug-trafficking boats. President Donald Trump says he has directed military forces to strike narcotrafficking vessels and describes the operation as part of his campaign against fentanyl and cartels. But the constitutional question is separate from the president's characterization of the targets. A person suspected of being a drug trafficker - or even a mass murderer - does not thereby become condemned to death. Criminal guilt always requires accusation, evidence and adjudication according to law, before punishment.

These boat killings are unlawful extrajudicial executions. In the language all Americans can understand, they are murders.

The same principle applies to Iran. The Framers deliberately divided the war powers. Article I gives Congress the power to declare war, authorize military force, regulate the armed forces and control appropriations. Article II makes the president commander in chief. The distinction matters. The president commands forces; Congress determines where and under what circumstances the president does so.

Trump has openly declared an American blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and said that the United States controls which ships pass through it. He has also imposed sanctions which deny food, medicine and currency stability to millions of innocent Iranians. He even threatened to murder all Iranians - beyond the thousands he has already killed - if a peace agreement is not soon reached.

Those statements highlight what the Constitution was designed to prevent one individual from addressing alone: Whether the United States should wage military and economic hostilities against the population of another nation.

Congress has repeatedly resisted treating the Iran conflict as a matter solely for presidential discretion. Just two weeks ago, support for Trump's war failed to muster majorities in both houses of Congress.

Nor can the president's personal assessment of Iran's nuclear intentions settle the matter. In 2018, his State Department's compliance report said Iran was fulfilling its nuclear-related non-proliferation commitments and U.S. intelligence had assessed with high confidence that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003.

In 2020, his State Department again said that Iran was not then engaged in key activities associated with designing and developing a nuclear weapon. In 2025, his Director of National Intelligence testified that the entire U.S. intelligence community continued to assess that Iran was not building nuclear weapons.

Those facts alone establish something constitutionally important: The president's personal belief - whether informed or uninformed - is not evidence or law or a substitute for congressional authorization.

The same textual principle reaches domestic spending and taxation. Article I provides that only Congress can impose taxes, and money may be drawn from the Treasury only pursuant to appropriations made by law. Even though the Supreme Court has invalidated Trump's tariffs, he continues to impose them. Even though Congress has not authorized funds for Trump's vanity projects, he continues to spend tax dollars on them.

The Constitution does not grant any branch of government carte blanche. It has separated powers precisely because legislators, presidents and judges can all succumb to the corruption of power - and can all be wrong.

That is the deeper meaning of the tyranny of one man's opinion. The danger is not merely that one president might be wrong. It is that a constitutional system becomes meaningless if one man's conclusions about war, crime, taxation, spending, foreign threats or national security become the sole basis for government actions - particularly actions that kill innocents.

The Founders separated the sword from the purse and divided governmental power because they understood a truism: Personal liberty and limited government cannot long survive when entrusted to one man's opinion.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/02/2026 - 22:35

NASA Wants To Resurrect The SR-71 Blackbird

Earlier this month, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman fueled speculation about the agency's high-speed flight research plans by unveiling a mysterious aircraft silhouette on a slide titled "Rebuilding our X-plane portfolio."

Asked whether the image on the slide depicted the famed SR-71 Blackbird, Isaacman denied it was a Blackbird but signaled renewed ambitions for high-altitude, high-speed flight, saying NASA was getting back into the business of "flying high and fast again."

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman showed a mysterious aircraft during the portion of his All-In Summit presentation on rebuilding NASA’s X-plane portfolio ✈️

• Isaacman showed a dark silhouette resembling a next-generation SR-71 Blackbird while discussing 'radical airframe and… pic.twitter.com/VNEDExk8K0

— Latest in space (@latestinspace) September 22, 2026

This brings us to an Aviation Week report saying NASA is working to return a Blackbird to flight after nearly three decades in retirement.

The agency has approached retired Blackbird engineers about restoring Tail No. 844, a 59-year-old aircraft removed earlier this year from an outdoor display at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in California.

The aircraft was moved into a former Space Shuttle hangar, where crews have been working on it, former NASA and Air Force test engineer Mike Relja revealed to the aviation news website. 

However, as the outlet shared, there is one major problem:

The Air Force and NASA destroyed a $600 million supply of spare parts for the Blackbird fleet in 2007. The move came long after it seemed unlikely, if not impossible, that an SR-71A would return to operational service.

That decision could lead to significant restart costs. In addition to all of the consumable spares that must be in regular supply, NASA would need to restore access to the Blackbird's unique JP-7 fuel blend, the triethylborane ignition chemical, engine oil and hydraulic fluids, Relja adds. A hodgepodge of bespoke ground equipment also no longer exists, leaving the current effort without vital, if unheralded, pieces of equipment.

"To raise the wing, you need a cart," he says. "To get the engine out, you need a cart. You need equipment to pull the [engine] spikes, pull the [ejection] seat. All that stuff is gone."

When Relja raised all of these issues with Ash, the NASA manager assured him it would not be a problem, without going into details about their solutions.

"Every time I threw one of these things out there, he says, 'Oh, engineering will take care of that [and] engineering will take care of that,'" Relja recalls.

At the same time, he does not dismiss a return to flight as impossible, especially if NASA has enough resources to make it achievable.

"If you got a ton of money, maybe you can make it happen," he says. "They went to the Moon, you know."

Why NASA wants to restore the SR-71 to flightworthy status remains unclear. Reports over the years have pointed to Lockheed Martin's development of the SR-72, dubbed the "Son of Blackbird," for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. Yet no flight tests have been publicly confirmed. 

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/02/2026 - 22:10

Mystery Gunmen Slaughter Seven People On Bus In Syria's Homs

Via Middle East Eye

Gunmen in Syria killed seven people and wounded four others after opening fire on a civilian bus in western Homs province on Wednesday evening.

The bus was carrying company employees returning home from work when it came under fire as it crossed the Masyaf Bridge in the western Homs countryside, according to the Homs Health Directorate.

Downtown Homs. Wiki Commons

Security units were immediately deployed to the scene to secure the area, while criminal investigators began collecting evidence to identify those responsible and determine the motive, according to Homs Internal Security Forces commander Brig Gen Bassem Mohammad Shaaban.

The injured were taken to hospitals across the governorate, while security forces began an investigation.

Maan Mahmoud Fahd, director of the Homs Grand Hospital, told Sana that four individuals were declared dead upon arrival, after suffering from severe gunshot wounds to the head and chest.

No group has yet claimed responsibility, and authorities have not named any suspects. Shaaban vowed to pursue those responsible, saying the attack would not go unpunished.

"We view this cowardly attack as an attempt to undermine security in Homs and destabilise the stability we have worked to consolidate," Shaaban said.

"We will not allow criminals to threaten the security of our people or undermine the stability the city is experiencing," he added.

The ambush was one of several recent attacks to raise security concerns in Syria since the fall of Bashar al-Assad's government in December 2024.

Brigadier General Munir al-Hariri, a Syrian military analyst, told Syria TV that former Assad loyalists were most likely behind Wednesday's attack, which he said aimed to destabilize security in the country. [ZH: We should note the presence of the literally hundreds if not thousands of jihadist groups, many of them foreign, unleashed on Syria during the height of the CIA/NATO/Gulf-backed proxy war to overthrow Assad].

In August, a bus carrying members of the internal security forces was targeted near Damascus, while an explosive device exploded on a passenger bus in Jaramana, southeast of the capital, wounding 14 people earlier that month.

Gas pipeline blast

The bus attack was one of three major security incidents to hit Syria on Wednesday. A gas pipeline explosion at the Tishreen thermal power plant in Syria's Damascus countryside on Wednesday evening forced three power stations out of service, the Syrian Electricity Company said, warning that the shutdown would cause longer scheduled power cuts.

The blast triggered a large fire and injured two people, according to state broadcaster Alikhbaria. The explosion hit a pressure-reduction station at the plant entrance and damaged the two gas lines that supply it, the Syrian Petroleum Company said.

The loss of gas supplies shut down the Deir Ali and Nasiriyah plants, along with Tishreen, which lies about 36km from the capital.

Abdul Hamid Salat, director of the energy ministry's media department, said the interruption to gas supplies had also affected water-pumping and treatment stations, disrupting services for hundreds of thousands of people across Damascus and its countryside, Daraa, Sweida and Quneitra.

Speaking at the site late on Wednesday, Energy Minister Mohammad al-Bashir said the fire was brought under control overnight. Al-Bashir added specialists would inspect the site once civil defense teams finished cooling it, to determine "the causes and circumstances precisely".

The Homs microbus that was targeted, via SANA

Authorities have not yet established whether the explosion resulted from a technical fault, a deliberate attack or sabotage.

Israeli incursion

Israeli forces fired three artillery shells at the area around al-Mantara Dam in Syria's southern Quneitra province on Wednesday. No immediate casualties or damage were reported.

On Thursday morning, Israeli forces also entered the village of Saida al-Golan in southern Quneitra with around 12 military vehicles as students were making their way to school. The forces later withdrew towards villages in the Yarmouk Basin, with no reports of arrests or house searches.

Reports from Al-Araby News outlet indicate that there was an assassination attempt on a Ministry of Defence officer in the city of Sanamen, situated to the north of Dara.The shelling came amid continued Israeli military activity in southern Syria.

On Tuesday, Israeli forces carried out incursions in Quneitra, including an operation in which soldiers questioned and assaulted shepherds, according to Syrian state media.

The latest developments also come days after Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa said talks with Israel on a security framework had reached nearly 90 percent agreement before Israel withdrew or introduced additional conditions.

Speaking at an Atlantic Council panel in New York last week, al-Sharaa said several rounds of negotiations had taken place over the previous year with US involvement and that the talks were continuing.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/02/2026 - 21:45

DOJ Won't Defend Suppressor Registry In Court After Congress Killed The $200 Tax

The Justice Department has now made it official: it will not defend part of the 92-year-old National Firearms Act in court, confirming what we reported in August.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer told Congress that "the Department of Justice has determined not to file an appeal" in Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF, the case in which a federal judge ruled that NFA registration requirements for suppressors and short-barreled rifles and shotguns are unconstitutional now that the tax behind them is gone. The letter, addressed to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and dated Sept. 24, was made public this week.

The NFA has required owners of suppressors and short-barreled guns to pay a $200 tax and register with the federal government since 1934. President Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill eliminated that tax for suppressors and short-barreled rifles and shotguns, but left the registration requirement in place. Gun rights groups sued, arguing that a registry justified by Congress's taxing power can't survive once there's no tax to collect.

On Aug. 5, U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the Northern District of Texas agreed, finding the challenged provisions could no longer be sustained under Congress's taxing power and rejecting the government's fallback argument that the interstate commerce power could save them. The case was consolidated with Jensen v. ATF.

The injunction protects the plaintiffs and their "current and future members and customers," not the general public. The covered groups include Gun Owners of America, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, FPC Action Foundation and the Texas State Rifle Association, according to Bearing Arms. Machine guns, destructive devices and the NFA's special occupational tax are not covered at all.

The result is a two-tier Second Amendment. If you hold the right membership card, the federal registry no longer applies to your suppressor. If you don't, nobody in Washington will say. "The DOJ has yet to release any guidance about how the court's decision will impact the NFA's registration requirements for those who fall outside the protection of the injunction," Bearing Arms' Cam Edwards wrote.

The court granted DOJ a 10-day extension, to Oct. 12, to respond to nine plaintiff states asking whether the injunction covers all of their residents or only members and customers of the plaintiff groups, and ATF Director Robert Cekada has said guidance on transfers and interstate travel is coming "within weeks."

Republicans on the Hill want the department to go further. In August, Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia led 46 House members and 8 senators in urging Attorney General Todd Blanche not only to skip the appeal but to apply the ruling nationwide through rulemaking, warning that "an appeal would prolong regulatory uncertainty for law-abiding gun owners and businesses and would consume DOJ resources."

Whether the nationwide relief they asked for arrives, in the Oct. 12 filing or ATF's promised guidance, will decide whether gun owners outside the covered groups are still committing a federal felony by skipping paperwork for a tax that no longer exists.

* * *

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/02/2026 - 21:20

When Regulation Changes Who Becomes Rich

Authored by Shahid Islam via RealClearMarkets,

Economic debates about inequality usually begin with a familiar question: Who has how much income?

It is an important question. But perhaps it is not the only one we should be asking.

A society can change who becomes rich without substantially changing how unequal the society is. Regulation can weaken one economic elite while creating opportunities for another. Entrepreneurs and investors may lose relative influence while lawyers, compliance specialists, lobbyists, consultants and regulatory experts gain it.

The Gini coefficient may barely notice.

Income distribution and income-source distribution are not the same thing.

Regulation does more than redistribute income. It changes the relative returns to different kinds of knowledge and human capital. And when those returns change, talented people respond.

Elite Substitution

Imagine an economy in which high returns come primarily from producing things consumers voluntarily buy. Entrepreneurs search for new products, engineers improve production and investors search for promising companies.

Now introduce an increasingly complex regulatory system.

Those activities do not disappear. But another set of skills becomes more valuable: interpreting regulations, satisfying disclosure requirements, obtaining government permissions, anticipating political decisions and influencing the rules themselves.

The relevant question is not simply whether regulation reduces inequality. It is what happens to the return from creating economic value relative to the return from navigating political and regulatory institutions.

If intervention reduces the return to one form of economic power while increasing the return to another, we may get what I call elite substitution.

The elite does not disappear. Its composition changes.

Sarbanes-Oxley and the Fixed Cost of Complexity

Consider the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.

Following Enron and WorldCom, Congress sought to strengthen financial reporting and restore investor confidence. But compliance costs are not necessarily proportional to firm size.

A large corporation and a small public company may both need auditors, lawyers, internal-control systems and compliance personnel. The large company can spread those expenses across billions of dollars of revenue. The smaller company cannot.

GAO research has found that Sarbanes-Oxley compliance costs, although generally higher in absolute terms for larger companies, are proportionately more burdensome for smaller companies. GAO also found that companies moving from exempt to nonexempt status experienced a median increase of about $219,000, or 13 percent, in audit fees in the year of transition.

Sarbanes-Oxley did not cause the rise of private equity by itself. But increasing the fixed cost of public ownership changes the relative attractiveness of public and private organizational forms.

That matters because public markets allow ordinary investors to participate directly in corporate growth, while many private-market opportunities have historically been concentrated among institutional and accredited investors.

Regulation intended partly to protect ordinary investors can therefore inadvertently encourage some activity to migrate toward markets to which those same investors have less access.

Who Can Afford the Maze?

I saw another version of this phenomenon while working in the wealth-management industry before 2008.

I remember a rule of thumb concerning sophisticated offshore trusts: they generally became economically worthwhile only for estates of roughly $75 million or more. The precise threshold varied, but the economics was straightforward.

Lawyers, accountants, trustees and other specialists were expensive. Below a sufficiently large asset level, the cost could exceed the benefit.

That experience taught me something important:

Complexity has a fixed cost.

A $100 million household can economically justify sophisticated legal and tax strategies whose professional costs would make little sense for an ordinary household.

The same principle applies to businesses. A small company may struggle to employ one regulatory specialist. A multinational corporation can maintain entire departments of attorneys, accountants, lobbyists and compliance professionals.

Rules may formally apply equally while imposing very unequal economic burdens.

This creates a paradox. Regulation intended to constrain powerful economic actors can sometimes increase their relative advantage because they possess the resources necessary to navigate the resulting complexity.

We have not necessarily eliminated privilege. We may simply have changed its technology.

Dodd-Frank and Yesterday's Crisis

The same issue appears in banking.

After the 2008 financial crisis, Dodd-Frank increased the importance of compliance officers, attorneys, risk specialists, consultants, programmers and regulatory analysts. A Government Accountability Office study found that community banks, credit unions and industry associations reported increased staffing, training, employee time and compliance-system expenditures associated with selected Dodd-Frank rules.

The obvious defense is that this activity may prevent another financial crisis. If so, its social return could be enormous.

But that argument contains a difficult knowledge problem.

Major financial regulations are often responses to observed failures. Sarbanes-Oxley followed Enron and WorldCom. Dodd-Frank followed the financial crisis.

But the next crisis need not resemble the last one.

Financial institutions adapt. Capital moves. Technology changes. New products appear and risks migrate. The Federal Reserve's financial-stability framework itself acknowledges that shocks are inherently difficult to predict and therefore focuses primarily on monitoring vulnerabilities rather than predicting particular shocks.

This does not mean regulation produces no benefits. Higher capital, greater liquidity and improved risk controls may make institutions safer.

But the costs are relatively visible: compliance departments, legal expenses, reporting systems and management time. One of the largest claimed benefits - the crisis that did not happen - is much harder to observe.

The economic question is whether the marginal resources devoted to regulation make the financial system sufficiently safer to justify their opportunity cost.

The ACA and the Value of Political Knowledge

The Affordable Care Act illustrates another side of the same phenomenon.

The ACA changed subsidies, insurance rules, reimbursement arrangements and government-financed coverage. These changes affected expected revenues and profits throughout the healthcare industry.

Economists Mohamad Al-Ississ and Nolan Miller examined Scott Brown's surprise 2010 Massachusetts Senate victory, which reduced the perceived probability that the pending healthcare legislation would survive in its expected form.

They found striking differences. Managed-care firms experienced abnormal returns of about 6 percent, pharmaceutical companies about 2.8 percent, while healthcare facilities experienced abnormal losses of about 3.5 percent.

This does not prove that these gains and losses were political rents. A hospital could become more valuable under expanded insurance simply because more patients could pay their bills.

But it demonstrates something important:

Government rules can change expected private cash flows sufficiently that political events become capitalized into asset prices.

Once the government determines reimbursement formulas, subsidies and eligibility rules, understanding government becomes part of business strategy.

Political knowledge acquires economic value.

And when political decisions can create or destroy substantial corporate value, firms rationally devote resources to anticipating, navigating and influencing those decisions.

What the Gini Coefficient Cannot See

Imagine two economies with identical income distributions.

In one, high incomes depend primarily upon success in markets. In the other, they depend much more heavily upon successfully navigating political and regulatory institutions.

The Gini coefficient could be identical.

The economies would not be.

This is why inequality statistics tell us only part of the story. We measure how much income people receive but rarely ask enough about what activities generate that income.

None of this establishes that regulation necessarily makes society poorer. Preventing fraud, improving disclosure or correcting genuine externalities can create social value. Elite substitution and a smaller economic pie are separate propositions.

But every society has unusually talented and ambitious people. The important question is what institutions reward them for doing.

Do they receive the highest returns from inventing products, building companies and allocating capital successfully?

Or increasingly from mastering the rules governing those activities?

People respond to incentives. Economists have understood that for centuries. There is no reason the principle should stop operating when the government enters the picture.

Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank and the Affordable Care Act addressed very different problems and may have produced important benefits. But all three raise a question conventional discussions of inequality often overlook:

When the government changes the rules, does it eliminate economic privilege - or merely change who is best positioned to capture it?

And when talented people discover that navigating the rules offers greater rewards than creating value outside them, we should ask one final question:

Did we redistribute the pie - or did we also make it smaller?

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/02/2026 - 20:55

US Squeezes China's Jet Parts Supply As Rare Earth Showdown Escalates

If you want an indication that resource nationalism and Beijing's weaponization of critical material exports to gain leverage over the US in high-stakes trade negotiations are accelerating, a new report Thursday afternoon says the Trump administration is planning to slow shipments of commercial jet parts to China.

Reuters cites several people familiar with the Commerce Department's moves to slow export licensing and limit the quantities of jet parts approved for shipment to China's state-owned planemaker COMAC to prevent stockpiling.

Officials have also explored new licensing requirements covering aviation hydraulic fluid and rules that could make it easier to restrict landing gear and other components.

The report stated:

The slowdown has taken several forms. The Commerce Department slowed export licensing for airplane parts bound for China in recent weeks, two other sources told Reuters.

Officials have also expressed interest in issuing an export regulation that could make it easier to restrict landing gear and other aircraft parts to China, two sources said. A draft version included a new licensing requirement on aviation hydraulic fluid shipped by US suppliers like ExxonMobil, one of the people said.

And the Commerce Department has been ⁠limiting the number of parts licensed to be shipped to China's state-owned planemaker, COMAC, to keep the company from stockpiling, another source said.

What this suggests is that last month's Trump-Xi meeting in Washington produced no resolution on rare earths, only now an increased willingness by Beijing to tighten restrictions on critical material exports to the US and the West even further. 

This has produced shortages of gallium, germanium, tungsten, and other critical materials essential to the looming defense rearmament supercycle, and in return, we've launched our "own the bottlenecks" theme. 

In early 2025, China ramped up restrictions on critical material exports to the US, while the Trump administration sought a level playing field and has choked off China's access to cheap crude, whether from Cuba, Venezuela, or through the Strait of Hormuz.

Tyler Durden Fri, 10/02/2026 - 20:30