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The transcript from this week’s, MiB: Mike Pyle, BlackRock’s Portfolio Management Group, is below.

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (video), YouTube (audio), and Bloomberg.

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[00:00:16] Barry Ritholtz: This week on the podcast—wow, this is another banger. Strap yourself in. Mike Pyle, Deputy Head of BlackRock’s Portfolio Management Group. They oversee about $5 trillion in client assets, not only in systematic and discretionary investment strategies, but he also oversees the BlackRock Investment Institute as well as their hedge funds. You may not know BlackRock globally is one of the top 10 hedge fund portfolio managers, about $94 billion. One little note: we are recording this on Tuesday, April 7th. Supposedly, something is happening tonight at eight o’clock. You’ll know what happened by the time you hear this; we won’t. We don’t know if something terrible is happening or if it’s another Taco Tuesday, but we’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, with no further ado, my conversation with Mike Pyle, Deputy Head of BlackRock’s Portfolio Management Group. Before we get into both your market and government experience, let’s take a look at your background. You graduated Summa Cum Laude in economics from Dartmouth. You get a JD from Yale and then a master’s, an LLM, from Cambridge. What was the original career plan?

[00:01:34] Mike Pyle: So I’d maybe go back before higher education. I am from a little town in the Midwest, 600 people in the middle of Illinois, no stoplights in the little town where I grew up. And I had a sense from a pretty early age that I wanted to do something out beyond the horizon, out past the fields. I was lucky enough when I was in high school, there was this competition sponsored by the local community college called Running the US Economy, where you could set monetary policy, you’d set government spending levels, you’d set taxation rates—basically the big tools of monetary and fiscal policy. And over a 10-year period, you’d set those variables and you’d see what came out the other side in terms of GDP growth, in terms of unemployment, in terms of the stock market. For me, I had never really grappled with a more interesting set of problems than that when I was 14, 15, 16 years old. And I didn’t really have the words to express what it is that would take me to, but I knew that problems at the heart of economic policy, what that meant for ordinary people, what that meant for markets, were the most fascinating things I’d ever encountered and how I wanted to spend my career.

[00:02:52] Barry Ritholtz: And how you’ve spent your career is moving back and forth between government and the private sector. You have two long stints at BlackRock, including the current one. You were in the Obama administration, you were in the Biden administration. How do you shift back and forth between these two worlds, and how does working in government affect how you perceive investing risk and policy from the private side?

[00:03:20] Mike Pyle: Yeah, so I’d say I try to view my time in government and my time as an investor at BlackRock really as two sides of the same coin. The job in government, at least as I understood it, was—whether through economic policy or national security policy, had the pleasure to work on both of those through the years—to provide a predictable, stable foundation for prosperity for the US and hopefully the world beyond. And to recognize that the job in government is to provide that stable foundation so businesses, so families, so individuals can live their lives, make their choices economically, can take risks in the economy to build businesses, expand businesses, invest and grow, knowing that there’s some basic stability and predictability that they get from government. And so for me, that time in government was one side of that coin; that time as an investor is the other side of that coin. How do you try to take that output from policymakers and make sense of the world, make sense of the economy, make sense of markets, and then make sound choices for clients?

[00:04:36] Barry Ritholtz: We’re gonna talk a little later about the state of government policy. I want to just stick with your background before we get into the nitty gritty. So you were at the Treasury and the White House from 2009 to 2013, really the midst of the great financial crisis recovery. Tell us about that experience. What was that like?

[00:05:02] Mike Pyle: So it was a pretty extraordinary thing to be a part of. I had a chance to learn from, be seasoned by, a set of extraordinary, in my judgment, policymakers, whether that was Secretary Geithner, Lael Brainard, Peter Orszag, Jason Furman, others—folks that early in my career, I just learned a lot about what it meant to make sound policy choices, to consider policy choices in the midst of crisis. I think one of the things I also took away from that experience is this recognition that there’s no other room—that these are very accomplished policymakers making choices with imperfect information, with not enough time, with incredibly high stakes. And there’s no other room where the hyper-confident people who know everything and have the luxury of time are. There’s just the human beings sitting in front of you, and you’ve gotta do your role to support them in the way you can. And for me that was a very empowering experience or recognition: that from an early stage in my career, I needed to take responsibility. I needed to offer my best day in and day out because, like I said, there’s no other room with the hyper-competent people. There’s just the role you get to play with people acting with not enough time and not enough information to make high-consequence judgments.

[00:06:34] Barry Ritholtz: So let’s talk about those judgments. What do you think policymakers got right? And what was the biggest mistake? What did we get wrong as a nation?

[00:06:45] Mike Pyle: So I think one of the principal lessons coming out of the global financial crisis is that in the face of a large economic shock—a shock that impacts the balance sheets of households and businesses—the government needs to act speedily and with size to prevent the labor market damage, the economic damage, from being an overhang that lasts for a long time. And I think one of the things that a lot of policymakers concluded coming out of the GFC is we just didn’t do enough, quickly enough. And as a result, we had a very slow recovery that didn’t last just a couple years but 10, 12 years, and had labor market damage that lasted for longer than it needed to because we didn’t act with the force and speed that we needed to.

[00:07:44] Barry Ritholtz: So when you say we didn’t do enough, the Fed was at zero, every type of credit alphabet soup of organizational government entities came into effect. Are you referring to the fiscal side? Because it felt like the fiscal stimulus was very, very modest. About a third was temporary tax cuts, a third was temporary extension of unemployment, shovel-ready stuff was $180 billion. It almost seems like we overcompensated in the start of the pandemic and went huge to make up for that. But I’m assuming you’re talking about a very underfunded fiscal stimulus.

[00:08:28] Mike Pyle: I think that’s principally yes. I mean, one thing I would highlight here is, in some ways, the United States only got out of the doldrums post the GFC during the first Trump administration, when President Trump and that Republican Congress passed the 2017 tax bill. Now, coming from where I come from, I wouldn’t necessarily have signed off on every particular of that bill, but I think what you saw was fiscal stimulus at size going through the economy as a result of that tax bill. And as a result, an economy that at long last began to see full employment, began to see that higher velocity, began to see really the US get out of those post-GFC doldrums. Again, not how I would’ve necessarily designed the fiscal stimulus myself, but I think the fact that that’s really perhaps the moment when we came out of the doldrums highlights that that fiscal lever was one that perhaps we should have pulled sooner and at a greater size earlier post the crisis.

[00:09:38] Barry Ritholtz: Really interesting. So let’s talk about some of your other roles within government. You were a law clerk for Merrick Garland—that’s fascinating. Tell us about that experience.

[00:09:51] Mike Pyle: Yeah, so Judge Garland was my very first boss in Washington. In some ways the perfect way to begin a career—somebody that I continue to regard as the model public servant. I learned three things from the judge. I learned what it meant to love the law. I learned that I didn’t love the law the way the judge did. And three, I needed to find something that I loved as much as Judge Garland loved being a lawyer, being a judge. And so that brought me back to what I’d done—I was talking about a moment ago in high school when I really fell in love with economics, economic policy, the impact on people and markets, what I’d studied as an undergrad and in graduate school. And so what I really took away from that experience is I wanted there to be a strong public service component to what I did, and also that I needed to put myself to work in a space that I really loved and felt passion for. And that was the space of economics, domestic economic policy, international economic policy, and working to make the US and the world a more prosperous place.

[00:11:01] Barry Ritholtz: So you were the President’s personal envoy to groups like the G7, the G20, APEC summits. When you look around the world and see US-China relations, Russia’s war in Ukraine, Israel and America’s war with Iran, AI, and just energy security, trade and investment, tariffs—all these things—it seems like it’s just an overwhelming amount of things taking place. How effective are these global organizations? What do they actually accomplish? It just seems like the fire hose is so overwhelming, it’s impossible to know where to even begin.

[00:11:47] Mike Pyle: Yeah, so I worked for two years as President Biden’s Deputy National Security Advisor. I think President Biden started from the place of believing that the United States acts with greatest impact in the world when it acts alongside our closest allies and partners. And I think that’s part of the reason why the G7 during the years I was serving was perhaps at the height of its impact and influence across time. I think of two things that really highlight this. One was after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, really acting with force, with one voice—not just as the United States, but as a set of allies—to put a historic set of sanctions on Russia, to put historic economic pressure on Russia. And to do that in a way that made sure that it wasn’t just the United States acting, but all of our allies and partners together around the world acting in concert, delivering a stronger force of policy than the United States, for all of its power and might, could have delivered by itself.

[00:13:00] Similarly, with respect to a different type of problem—thinking about the United States’ competition with China in domains such as technology and artificial intelligence, the type of thing that’s very front of mind today—a lot of our European allies came to that with more skepticism. They have a different perspective on their relations with China than we had in the United States, both across the Trump administration and the Biden administration. And it was the hard diplomatic work day in, day out, week in, week out, persuading skeptical allies to join us in some of the policy steps that we thought were important to protect our technologies, to protect the national security applications that they offered, to protect our economic wellbeing against that competitive threat. And bringing those allies along through, like I said, the hard work of diplomacy, through the hard work of persuasion, day in, day out, week in, week out—I think was ultimately quite fruitful. And something that was an important part of how I spent those years.

[00:14:10] Barry Ritholtz: So given all that policy experience and being in the room where it happens, how does that affect how you look at markets and investing? Did your government experience affect how you think about risk, uncertainty, and various opportunities?

[00:14:30] Mike Pyle: Yeah, so I would say a couple things there. One, I do think that investing and policymaking are different exercises and need to be kept separate. Policymaking is an exercise of attempting to make the world as you want it to be, or at least as the people’s elected representatives want it to be. Investing is an exercise of taking the world as it is and making sound judgments about how to invest client capital—that is their capital, that is their savings—on their behalf, so as to help them achieve what they’ve set out to achieve. And so to me, the framework I’ve used to think about investing kind of comes back to some of the blocking and tackling of active management. I think about my mentor at BlackRock, Ron Kahn, one of the authors of literally the bible of quantitative investing and the fundamental law of active management.

[00:15:38] And it’s really all about making forecasts that are right about the world, having a wide set of those forecasts so you can build a diversified portfolio, and then translating those insights efficiently into portfolios through the assets you own. So again, for me, these exercises overlap to some degree, but I really try to keep them distinct because one’s about the world as you might hope it to be and the other is about the world as it is. And being sure that you don’t confuse those two things is really part and parcel of what it means, I think, to do the job you’re meant to do at each.

[00:16:13] Barry Ritholtz: I like that framework between the two. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Mike Pyle, Deputy Head of BlackRock’s PMG, discussing the Portfolio Management Group. I’m Barry Ritholtz, you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You are listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest today is Mike Pyle. He is the Deputy Head of BlackRock’s Portfolio Management Group. The group oversees $94 billion in hedge fund assets and another $394 billion in systematic investments. So let’s talk a little bit about the Portfolio Management Group. Tell us about the various strategies you oversee. What does the Deputy Head of PMG actually do?

[00:17:23] Mike Pyle: Yeah, so the Portfolio Management Group, as you talked about, is really the organization within BlackRock that oversees our active investing strategies in public markets. We’ve been entrusted with just about $5 trillion in client assets to manage through those strategies. It really spans asset classes—fixed income, equities, multi-asset—spans styles, as you say, both discretionary and systematic, spans both long-only as well as long-short hedge fund and liquid alternative strategies. So really it’s that full umbrella of active strategies in public markets. In terms of what do I do? Well, I directly oversee what we do on the hedge funds and liquid alternative side, directly oversee our efforts in fundamental equities, and directly oversee our internal think tank, the BlackRock Investment Institute. But what does that mean day to day? It’s a mix. With some share of my time,

[00:18:24] I am working with our portfolio managers, working with our lead researchers, to try to offer what I can to help them frame what’s happening in the world, to help them—as we talked about—understand the world as it is and what that might make for markets, and help them think about the choices they’re making in portfolios on behalf of clients. But really the lion’s share of my time is about making sure we’ve got the right portfolio managers and teams, the right strategies, the right investment process and research process sitting beneath those teams so that we can deliver for clients. In a lot of respects, it’s a lot more about being the GM or the coach than being the player. And I think that’s a pretty exciting mix of things that I get to do as a result.

[00:19:12] Barry Ritholtz: So I think everybody understands what hedge funds are. What are liquid alternatives? Explain that a little bit.

[00:19:18] Mike Pyle: Yeah, sure. So maybe to take a step back. If I think about the challenge that investors face today—and this is true whether we’re talking about the most sophisticated large asset owners on the planet or mom-and-pop investors saving for their retirement—it’s: where can they find diversification? Obviously one of the core precepts of investing is the free lunch of diversification, the value of diversification. And yet it is increasingly hard to find out there. I think that’s true in a couple of ways. Traditionally we think about government bonds being an important hedge against stocks in a portfolio—when stocks go down, bonds go up in value. That’s not what we saw in 2022; that’s not what we saw in March of this year.

[00:20:12] And so finding tools that can help diversify portfolios in a world where bonds aren’t perhaps serving that role as well as they have at different points in history. And secondly, on the equity side, facing markets that are increasingly concentrated—we see what a large share of indices those big mega-cap tech names are today. That means that when you own the index, you’re owning a less diversified equity portfolio than has historically been the case. So what does that mean about where a liquid alternative steps in? I think one of the ways in which investors can find diversification is by having exposures that are neutral to broad markets, neutral to those betas in stocks and bonds that drive the lion’s share of portfolios. And being neutral to the markets means having strategies that can be long and short in an asset class, that can be long individual stocks, can be short individual stocks—the same on the bond side—in order to generate alpha and investment return that is independent of the movements in the broad markets.

[00:21:27] Liquid alternatives are vehicles that have exactly those types of strategies. They’re very similar in this respect to the types of strategies that we deploy in our direct hedge funds and offer similar types of uncorrelated return. Now, an important difference between something like a direct hedge fund and a liquid alternative: these are different types of vehicles meant for different types of investors. They offer daily liquidity, as opposed to hedge funds which have different liquidity terms. That means running strategies that at their core are the same across liquid alts and hedge funds but are designed to be in daily liquid vehicles, designed to be run with much less leverage, to recognize the types of clients and the types of needs that those clients have—which are for greater diversification, but also liquidity, transparency, and availability that is different from an institutional hedge fund clientele.

[00:22:29] Barry Ritholtz: So from your seat, what sort of trends are you observing, either in hedge funds or liquid alts? What kind of strategies are resonating with investors?

[00:22:40] Mike Pyle: Yeah, so I think exactly as we were talking about, what’s resonating is the availability of diversification—of diversifying the diversifiers, meaning—

[00:22:52] Barry Ritholtz: Beyond just 60/40, beyond just stocks and bonds.

[00:22:55] Mike Pyle: Exactly. And I think some work that my colleagues at the BlackRock Investment Institute did highlighted the type of world that we’re investing in now. They basically made the point—which goes to why we don’t see the diversification across stocks and bonds we have historically—that some of the macroeconomic and the macro underpinnings of markets have become unmoored in recent years. It is a less predictable framework, whether it’s around trends on growth or inflation, trends around monetary and fiscal policy frameworks, the geopolitical environment, and the like. And as a result, hedge funds and liquid alternative strategies provide tools that allow managers to navigate that environment. Like with my colleagues on the systematic side, running strategies that are not just market-neutral but neutral to broad market factors like momentum, like low volatility, like some of these other well-known factor exposures, and really focusing on true uncorrelated alpha. And also macroeconomic strategies, macro strategies where skilled managers are navigating a much more complicated macroeconomic environment to deliver alpha through that skillful navigation. Those, from our research, are the two types of strategies that are perhaps best poised to offer that different type of return, that different type of diversification. And that’s what we’re seeing not just within the firm but across the industry. The places that are attracting client interest are systematic strategies and macro strategies, and we think precisely because they best correspond to the opportunity set that markets are offering us.

[00:24:37] Barry Ritholtz: So let’s talk a little bit about that systematic approach. Your team began in 1985 with a grand total of three investment signals. You use more than a thousand investment signals. I’m kind of fascinated—this came along with the BGI acquisition in ’09, which everybody remembers for iShares, but this is still almost $400 billion. This is a substantial chunk of capital. Tell us a little bit about how the systematic team thinks about adding a signal, how they integrate all these various signals. And I’m legally obligated to ask: how is AI contributing to these signals?

[00:25:20] Mike Pyle: Yeah, so I’d say a couple things. One, this is a team that really is at the forefront of

[00:25:31] taking advantage of the fact that the availability of data in the world—structured data, unstructured data—is stepwise different than it has been ever before in history. And the techniques available to analyze, process, and identify consistent valuable investment signals from that data, given expanded compute, given the changes in techniques including around generative and agentic AI, to make sense of that data and bring order to it—this is really at the heart of what our systematic researchers do in building signals and portfolios. I’d add a couple of additional points. One, building on what you said, they’ve been at this for now 41 years, so they are not new to using data, using tools of AI, machine learning to generate alpha for clients. This is something they’ve been at—really defining the frontier—for four decades. They were doing natural language processing more than 10 years ago. They were doing portfolio optimization with machine learning more than 10 years ago. This is not a Johnny-come-lately story of the moment. This is a story of accrued excellence and expertise built over decades.

[00:26:36] The other thing I’d say—and maybe it’s funny to talk about it with respect to a quant team, a kind of hardcore systematic team—but I think one of the things that really sets it apart within BlackRock, within the industry, is the culture that they’ve built. This is a core set of investors and researchers that, as you say, have been together for decades, that have been together in many cases since before BGI became a part of BlackRock, became BlackRock Systematic. And so there’s that continuity, that legacy across time. And at the same time, they’re also every year adding young professionals, young researchers, fresh off their PhDs, with new perspectives, new innovative techniques, new ways of looking at the data, new ways of looking at AI. And I think that really special balance between experience, continuity, depth of knowledge built over decades, with new voices, new perspectives, new ways of solving hard computational and hard data problems—that’s what’s pretty special about the culture they’ve built as well.

[00:28:02] Barry Ritholtz: So you guys sit very much at an intersection between quantitative and fundamental investors. When you’re thinking about systematic signals, how do you manage when what comes out of the data conflicts with the fundamental narrative that seems to be driving most of the conversations? How do you contextualize that? Who wins that debate?

[00:28:35] Mike Pyle: So I think it’s a great question, and I’d say a few observations. One, at BlackRock, we believe in individual PMs and teams that are empowered to make judgments that they’re accountable for. And so it may be that our systematic investors are coming to a different view on markets or on a range of stocks than our fundamental teams are. That’s okay. We believe in empowered portfolio managers who are making the best decisions they can for our clients, but are armed with a common set of tools to come to judgments. But to abstract away from that further, I’d say I really do think that in some pretty important ways, what systematic investors do is just a different kind of thing altogether from what fundamental investors do. If I think about the work that our fundamental investors do, it’s really harnessing all potential sources of insight to go as deep as humanly possible, as technologically possible, with respect to understanding an individual company, an individual asset, and its likelihood of outperforming or underperforming the market in the years ahead.

[00:29:50] That’s different than the type of insight that our systematic investors tend to think about. They think about what they call high-breadth insights—insights that basically apply to a wide range of stocks, 300, 400, 500 stocks. We found an insight that we think, on balance, over time, across the universe of many hundreds of stocks, is going to outperform. That’s not about deep research in one company and coming to a highly convicted view on one company; that’s coming to a view about what is statistically likely to be the case across a full universe of stocks on balance across time. Now, where do I think these things can be complementary to one another? One, I would say is: these are just kind of pretty different sources of insight. And again, we’ve talked about diversification.

[00:30:42] Putting yourself in a place to put different types of insights into a single portfolio can be additive, can be diversifying, can mean that the alpha that you’re generating is more diversified and resilient. I’d say another thing—and this is something we’re spending a lot of time on with our fundamental teams—by virtue of what systematic investors do, insights that apply across many hundreds of stocks, packaging, as you talked about, many hundreds if not a thousand types of signals into one portfolio, they think a lot about portfolio construction. They think a lot about how do I take those different insights and size them versus one another to come up with a portfolio that is optimized to achieve client results. I think that taking some of those lessons of portfolio construction into the fundamental realm, with a set of investors that at the end of the day, I think, on balance, view themselves as having conviction about companies more than portfolios, and having them take some of those portfolio optimization frames of mind and apply it to how they build portfolios on the fundamental side—there, I think, is also a real source of complementarity and something we’re spending a lot of time on in PMG.

[00:31:50] Barry Ritholtz: And the BlackRock Investment Institute also sits under your umbrella. Tell us about what sort of research they produce. Who consumes the output of this? Is it internal? Is it external? Is it both? Give us a little color on the BlackRock Investment Institute.

[00:32:08] Mike Pyle: Yeah, it’s a really powerful tool at BlackRock. Maybe to take a step back, as I’ve been doing a couple times in this conversation: one of our observations about the asset management industry, the hedge fund industry, over the last 10 or 15 years is that 10 or 15 years ago people viewed hedge fund alpha, alpha more broadly, perhaps as the province of small niche players who understood some corner of the market deeper and better than anybody else. I think 10 or 15 years on, we’ve come to see that alpha is more the province of scale. This is the story of the rise of the multi-strategy hedge funds—of the Citadels and Millenniums—but we think it’s also true of the asset management industry at large: that there are a lot of benefits of scale that come from insight, that come from risk management, that come from trading and liquidity, that come from operational backbone.

[00:33:08] And a big piece of that is something like the BlackRock Investment Institute, that’s able to really dedicate itself to the question of how do we research and source valuable insight across a full platform and deliver that to our portfolio managers. And so the purpose of the BlackRock Investment Institute is, one, to inform those alpha research discussions, to really inform and drive the investment debate within the firm, but then also to open up the curtain and let our clients see and consume a lot of the research that our portfolio managers are using day in and day out to inform their own thinking and their own investment decision-making. So to answer your question, it’s a little both. It’s about driving the investment debate, driving the alpha discussion within the firm, but then saying: we’ve benefited from this, we want our clients to benefit from it too, and let’s produce work that, based on what we use internally, allows our clients to enjoy the fruits of that research as well.

[00:34:09] Barry Ritholtz: Really, really interesting. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Mike Pyle, Deputy Head of BlackRock’s Portfolio Management Group, discussing the state of the world economy and markets in an era of geopolitical uncertainty. I’m Barry Ritholtz, you’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

[00:34:44] Barry Ritholtz: I’m Barry Ritholtz. You are listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest today is Mike Pyle, Deputy Head of BlackRock’s Portfolio Management Group, responsible for, I don’t know, about $5 trillion in investor assets. So we are living through an era, especially under this administration, of seemingly challenging geopolitical turmoil and unexpected policy shifts. I wanna start with something positive, which was a quote from you: “US resilience is underestimated.” So tell us what that means. What does the market misprice about the US economy or the US markets? And we are recording this in the first week in April. Despite everything that’s happened—tariffs and war in Iran—markets are barely 5% off their recent highs. Tell us a little bit about US resilience.

[00:35:48] Mike Pyle: Sure. Well, first I would say, yeah, we’re taping this on Tuesday midday—eight

[00:35:54] Barry Ritholtz: o’clock tonight, who knows what’ll happen. Well, I think that—and for all we know, that’s a misdirection and it’s gonna start as soon as it gets dark. Who knows.

[00:36:01] Mike Pyle: We will all find out together. But I do think that this point about US resilience is an important one. We’ve seen it on display in many moments over the past number of years, including the last 12 months. The diversity, the breadth, the innovative potential of the US economy, the quality of our corporate sector—these are all things that are pretty extraordinary. I think one of the things that I would highlight in the here and now, with respect to what I think is fairly described as a historic energy supply shock—an energy shock the dimensions of which I think are gonna only become even more clear in the weeks and months ahead—we’re seeing physical supply disruptions in a way that, for example, we didn’t see in 2022 post Russia’s invasion. And this is a global shock.

[00:36:59] This is a global supply chain shock. It is going to have impacts on the United States, but I do think it’s fair to say that in a real economic sense, the US is relatively more insulated from the shock than other economies around the world—whether that’s in Europe, whether that’s in East and Southeast Asia, whether that’s in the emerging markets broadly. You can look at one number which I spend a fair amount of time looking at and marveling at in some respects, which is the price of natural gas in the US. If you look at a chart of the last three, four months of the natural gas contract in the US, it basically hasn’t budged. You would be hard pressed to identify where on that chart the military intervention in Iran began.

[00:37:45] And I think that highlights the extent to which this critical input to electricity production in the United States, this critical input to industrial production in the United States, this critical input to the way houses heat themselves and cook—all of this is basically untouched by what we’ve seen in the war over the last five weeks. Again, I think that’s in some ways the most dramatic data point, but it highlights the extent to which even in the face of this global shock, there are very important dimensions of the US that look different than other economies around the world and makes us, on balance, more resilient than those other economies as well.

[00:38:24] Barry Ritholtz: Right. Nat gas tends to be moved around by pipeline, and it’s more local.

[00:38:30] Mike Pyle: Yeah. Unlike oil, it is not a globally integrated market.

[00:38:32] Barry Ritholtz: Right. And right before we stepped in here, I checked—the price of crude was 113. So by the time this comes out, it’s either much higher or much lower, or maybe the same. But you mentioned supply. Let’s delve into that. We saw a giant supply chain shock during the pandemic. The war with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz moves are creating a new energy supply shock. This seems to be an ongoing issue. You would’ve thought by now we would’ve solved this problem, but it continues to be significant to the global economy. Tell us your views on this.

[00:39:09] Mike Pyle: Yeah. You asked about the role that the BlackRock Investment Institute plays. One of the things that they have done and built on over the last four years is a piece of work they did back in 2022 called “A World Shaped by Supply,” which basically talked about the ways in which the 2010s in particular is a world defined by aggregate demand. This goes back to the very start of our conversation when we talked about the struggles that the US and global economy had after the GFC because perhaps of the lack of a forceful fiscal policy lever being pulled. That’s a story about aggregate demand. That’s a story about there being insufficient demand in the macro economy to achieve full employment and inflation at target. The story post-COVID is not that—it’s a world, as they’ve said, shaped by supply.

[00:40:04] And that was true not just in 2021, 2022 after COVID, after Russia’s invasion. It’s true today as well. And I would draw attention to really two episodes that we’ve seen already in 2026 that highlight this point. One, and most obviously, is what we’ve seen in markets since the beginning of the military intervention in Iran and the world pricing, to a greater or lesser extent, a pretty traditional negative energy supply shock: higher inflation expectations, lower growth expectations, a pullback in risk really across different types of asset classes. But if you roll the clock back just a couple of weeks before the beginning of hostilities in Iran, you saw a market priced for a different type of supply shock—a positive technology supply shock from AI. We saw that disinflationary, even deflationary trend in the way government bonds were getting priced. We saw big cross-sectional moves in the equity market reflecting the potential disruption from AI around a range of business models. And so really 2026, I think, highlights both on the positive side and on the negative side, in terms of supply shocks, what it means to be living in a world shaped by supply.

[00:41:25] Barry Ritholtz: So abundance on the one hand, scarcity on the other, and logistical interruptions determining which way we go.

[00:41:34] Mike Pyle: Yeah. And the thing I’d need to—to put on my sort of policy observer hat, at a minimum—however hard financial problems are to solve, and they are hard to solve as the GFC and the Eurozone crisis made clear, they are fundamentally not engineering problems. They’re problems of political and policy will. Supply chain problems—those are a different beast entirely. This is about rewiring the way physical things, atoms, get produced, get transported, get consumed. And that is a much harder, much slower, much more difficult economic and market problem, a much different and harder policy problem. Again, I would highlight this is one of the ways in which I think the US has proven itself more resilient—again, the quality, the innovative capacity, the flexibility of the US corporate sector to solve through the supply chain problems that we’ve seen since the advent of COVID. That’s a genuine source of resilience for the economy, but also, I think, highlights that these are hard problems, and a different set of problems in kind than what we saw post the GFC.

[00:42:49] Barry Ritholtz: So let me have you put on your policy wonk cap and look out three years, five years. What is the result of this war gonna mean for things like alternative energy supplies? It turns out China is fairly insulated for different reasons than the United States. We have fracking and nat gas; they seem to have a ton of solar and wind and geothermal, which we’ve sort of neglected the past couple of years. What’s the end result of this war gonna be? I don’t mean in terms of military or political alignment—I mean in terms of global economy, in terms of energy consumption, things like that.

[00:43:35] Mike Pyle: Well, I’d say—you talk about three or five years out—to quote the potentially apocryphal story about Zhou Enlai: I think it’s too soon to tell. We’re gonna find out again together in the years, maybe even the hours and days ahead. But I will say, I think we’re spending a fair amount of time trying to think about some of these questions at BlackRock. What are the more durable economic themes going to be coming out of the shock? I might highlight three. One, I think energy security, which post-COVID, post Russia’s invasion, was already front of mind for countries, companies, economies around the world, is only gonna become more so. This is, I think, one of the important trends of our moment.

[00:44:34] Secondly, I think what we’re gonna see both from countries and from companies is increased focus on strategic stockpiling. Obviously we’re seeing economies make use of things like strategic petroleum reserves. I suspect that in spaces like energy, but much more broadly across a much wider set of critical inputs and raw materials, you’re gonna see companies and countries really turn to using resources to build stockpiles of those critical inputs. And that is—we’ve talked for a long time about the ways in which there’s been a turn in the world from just-in-time supply chains to resilient supply chains. That type of stockpiling behavior is what it means, in important ways, to be spending more resources than you otherwise would today for an efficient outcome today in service of greater resilience over the long term. And then the third is, I do think that countries and companies around the world are gonna be looking at their energy mix. And to one of the points we’ve made about investing: diversification is a really important precept in investing. It is perhaps the only free lunch that’s out there. And I would expect a lot of different players to be thinking, as they think about their energy security, as they think about how to build strategic stockpiles, what’s the right diversification to ensure that I’m not subject to choke points, to supply shortages, to disruptions, looking ahead.

[00:46:10] Barry Ritholtz: I like the concept, the framework, of this shift that’s taken place in the 2020s in a lot of ways—where the regime today is so much different than the 2010s: more fiscal stimulus, higher rates that seem to be structural and built in, higher inflation rates, more geopolitical actions, more volatility. Does this decade require us to fundamentally rethink how we build portfolios, how we manage risk? How different are the 2020s from the 2010s?

[00:46:48] Mike Pyle: Yeah, I think this gets to some of the themes we were talking about earlier: that diversification is an extraordinarily important tool as an investor, and diversification is harder to come by today than it was in the 2010s and has been historically. Again, that’s true around the role that government bonds can be relied upon to play in portfolios—like in months such as March 2026, like in 2022. It’s also true, as we were talking about, in terms of equity markets and how concentrated equity markets, especially in the United States, have become. And so building portfolios means building portfolios that achieve diversification in a world where diversification is less available than it has been in the past through straightforward means like balanced 60/40 portfolios. What does that mean? My boss, Larry Fink, has talked about the role that private assets can play in building more resilient, more diversified portfolios.

[00:47:53] And as part of that, talking about the role that hedge funds and liquid alternative strategies can play in public markets, as we’ve done here—that role, that uncorrelated alpha that’s not exposed to broad market directionality, can play in portfolios. These are the types of solutions that I think investors of all types are gonna need to reach for to build those portfolios that are designed for a world shaped by supply, designed for a world of geopolitical shocks, designed for a world where diversification is harder to come by and the answer isn’t as straightforward as the traditional 60/40. The world is gonna have to be thought of in terms of that broader set of tools.

[00:48:36] Barry Ritholtz: So we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the Middle East. Let’s look around the rest of the world, starting with this attempt to sort of decouple from China. Is that achievable, or are these just political aspirations that don’t reflect economic reality?

[00:48:56] Mike Pyle: So I think that’s a very good question. I will say it is clear that President Trump and the administration have been working to achieve a stable economic footing between the US and China. I think that, if it were to be achieved, would be positive—again, from the perspective of the type of stability, the type of predictability that allows businesses, households, individuals to plan and make choices. I think that plays into—one of the things that I’ve been talking about last week, even with some of your colleagues, is—the summit between President Trump and President Xi is scheduled for May 14th and May 15th. I think that as we look about events in the Middle East, that’s a date that I have in my own eye as I think about when hostilities in the Middle East would likely need to be winding down. I think you’d be hard pressed to see how a summit happens—they’ve already rescheduled once—how a summit happens in the event of ongoing active hostilities in the Middle East. And I do wonder whether that’s a backstop around the Middle East, because I do think that there’s a strong priority from this president, I think from the Chinese side as well, to find that stability between the US and China. And I think the summit is meant to be the culmination of a lot of that work.

[00:50:29] Barry Ritholtz: So we have to talk about AI a little bit. What’s the potential there for a possible supply shock and impact on the labor markets, the ability to accelerate productivity and corporate earnings growth? How does BlackRock think about what AI is really doing across everything?

[00:50:52] Mike Pyle: Sure. I would say the uncertainty bands here are extraordinarily high. And so I think in some ways it’s hard to venture a forecast around what this means for productivity, what this means for the labor market, what this means for geopolitics one year from now, much less 5, 8, 10 years from now. What I might hopefully do is zero in a little bit within a domain that I know better, namely BlackRock. I think about what we are doing, and I’d make maybe a couple of observations. One, we’ve already talked about the work ongoing in the systematic platform. They really continue day in and day out to define that frontier of what technology, what AI, means in terms of how to manage portfolios and generate investment insight.

[00:51:48] I look across our active investment platform more broadly. We are very busily deploying tools that empower individual researchers to access more of the collective intelligence of BlackRock—to go deeper, to go broader, more rapidly—around researching individual securities, researching individual companies, researching macroeconomic trends, and come to more judgments, better judgments, more rapidly, in ways that we think can help drive investment performance. Third, one of the ways in which BlackRock continues to seek to provide solutions that make sense for our clients is to do what we call customization at scale—to be able to look at an individual investor, listen to their concerns, listen to their needs, and design a solution that’s customized for their particular circumstances. Again, whether that’s an institution or an individual, technology, AI, is opening up the prospect of being able to do that with more granularity, at greater speed, and allow us to get in front of our clients with solutions that are really oriented to their goals, their dreams, their ambitions, their concerns, in a way that’s different than before.

[00:53:03] Last one I’d make is: one of the cool things about being at BlackRock is it’s a big place filled with a lot of smart people, and a lot of the excitement is just giving tools to our researchers, to our professionals, and seeing organically what they come up with. A lot of the excitement of the moment is seeing so much innovation, seeing so much experimentation, seeing so many cool applications of this technology and our data to solve problems for clients. Now we’re at the stage where we’re kind of saying as a firm: okay, what are the handful of things that have bubbled up organically that we think can really move the needle for our clients, really move the needle for the firm, and think about what it means to put our shoulder behind those as an organization.

[00:53:50] Barry Ritholtz: So last question before I get to my favorites that I ask all our guests. Given all this geopolitical turmoil and market volatility and uncertainty, what do you think investors are not thinking about or talking about, but perhaps should be? What topics, assets, geography, policy, data point—what’s getting overlooked but shouldn’t?

[00:54:13] Mike Pyle: So there, I’ll offer an answer that puts on both of my hats and say: we’ve obviously been talking about AI, we were just talking about it as applied to BlackRock. I think that the investment implications of AI, as I said, have huge uncertainty bands around them—where value is gonna accrue, at what pace, what transformations to the macro economy, to the labor market, to geopolitics. These are all extraordinarily first-order questions for investors. I’d say one piece that I think is being underappreciated is the degree to which I think AI is gonna become a first-order political and policy issue in the quarters and couple of years ahead. We’re seeing the beginnings of that: talk about data center moratoriums, talk about things like chip access for China, something I worked on. But if you talk to pollsters, they would say AI is rocketing up the list of issues that voters are focused on in the United States more broadly. And I think an important dimension of what it’s gonna mean to invest in AI is understanding that this is gonna become a rising important political and policy issue, and an additional dimension of uncertainty that investors are gonna have to confront as we make choices around where impact is gonna be felt and value’s gonna accrue.

[00:55:41] Barry Ritholtz: Really, really interesting answer. All right, let’s jump to my favorite questions I ask all of my guests, starting with—and I really have to split this question into two—who are the mentors who helped shape your career, both from an investing standpoint as well as a government and policy perspective?

[00:56:00] Mike Pyle: Yeah, so I’ll offer a couple of thoughts here. The pair of Peters in my life: a guy, Peter Fisher, who’s responsible for bringing me into BlackRock as an investor. He had been a senior official in George W. Bush’s Treasury Department, a legendary Federal Reserve official, had led the fixed income platform at BlackRock, had really that type of career bringing together public and private, and is the person most responsible for bringing me into BlackRock, and somebody who’s been an important counselor to me through the years. I spent some time yesterday with my very first economic policy boss in Washington, Peter Orszag—part of President Obama’s cabinet as the director of the White House budget office, now the CEO of Lazard. Similarly, somebody to me who’s brought together public service with financial and commercial service as well.

[00:56:58] Somebody who’s, again, been an important source of counsel and advice. But I would say beyond that, my mentors both in government and at BlackRock—I’d really look into those organizations writ large. When I was in government, the career civil servants at the Office of Management and Budget, the career civil servants at the Treasury Department, they knew more about their corner of the federal government, their corner of the world, than anybody else in the world. And if you just sat down and listened, they had so much to share and offer. Similarly, at BlackRock, my attitude when I walked in as a kind of new investor in my mid-thirties, having never been in financial markets before, was: I’ve got as much to learn from the analysts and associates as I do from those Peters, as I do from the senior leadership of the firm. And being open to this idea that there is knowledge to be gleaned in all places in these organizations—that is how I think about how I’ve been mentored by these places, as much as individual people.

[00:57:56] Barry Ritholtz: Let’s talk about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading currently?

[00:58:00] Mike Pyle: So I’ve been revisiting a favorite of mine called The Wise Men by Walter Isaacson. I was listening to a podcast that Tyler Cowen did a couple weeks ago where he talked about AI, the geopolitical changes that we’re seeing, means that the world is gonna have to be reinvented anew, not unlike perhaps was the case after the Second World War. That’s a book about the group of Americans that really constructed the post-war world—constructed the security architecture, constructed a world built on American leadership and integrated global markets, and helped to build that 80 years of peace, of prosperity that we as Americans have enjoyed. And I think that revisiting that is a reminder of what it takes to rebuild a world, what it takes to invent a world anew. And I do think that Tyler’s right—that this is a moment that, because of technological transformation, because of changes in the world writ large, is gonna require that type of thinking again. And so revisiting that book and revisiting some of its lessons is something that’s been important to me in the past couple of weeks.

[00:59:12] Barry Ritholtz: You mentioned Tyler Cowen’s podcast. What else are you streaming these days—other podcasts or Netflix or Amazon-type stuff?

[00:59:22] Mike Pyle: Yeah, so I would put in a pitch for my friends Jake Sullivan and Jon Finer—their new podcast called The Long Game, about US national security and foreign policy. I’d say I like it for three reasons. One, I think they really try to offer a pretty just-the-facts perspective on the choices confronting policymakers here in the United States and more broadly. Two, it’s a real window into the craft of foreign policy. I think there’s a lot to be learned from the craft of how professionals—whether they’re policymakers or investors or business leaders—think about doing what they do, and this is a window into that. And third is a personal one. I spent two years of my life—spent many years on top of that—being in dialogue with both of those guys. And for me, once a week, to tune in for an hour and hear two familiar voices talking about stuff that I care about is a pretty comforting thing to get to do as well.

[01:00:19] Barry Ritholtz: So our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college graduate interested in a career in either investing or government policy?

[01:00:31] Mike Pyle: Yeah, so I’d say a mix of the timeless and the timely. On the timely side, it is clearly the case that working to be at the frontier of how the tools of technology, the tools of AI, are getting used to expand and augment the productivity of workers in finance and government is kind of table stakes. But I’d also emphasize the timeless. In investing, it is still gonna be the case that the net amount of alpha in the market, net of fees, is zero—or gross of fees is zero. It is still going to be the case that the fundamental law of active management—that mix of forecasting skill, breadth, and the ability to translate into the portfolio—is what’s gonna define active management. Being steeped in those timeless truths, I think, is valuable. Last point I’d make is: you can never emphasize enough what is always going to be human. Trust is hard to build. It is built on the back of relationships, and relationships across time. Spending time building your relationships, building trust, being seen as somebody who acts with trust and integrity—it’s not just a way to live a good life, it is also a pretty good piece of career advice as well.

[01:01:58] Barry Ritholtz: I like that advice. And our final question: what do you know about the world of investing today that might have been useful to know 30 years or so ago?

[01:02:08] Mike Pyle: Yeah. I would say we’ve talked a lot about diversification and portfolio construction across this conversation, and that to me, I think, is the piece that I’ve most climbed up a curve around, that I’ve been most struck by learning about during my time at BlackRock across the stints. In the prior one, what I expected to learn when I left government the first time was: okay, how do I do deep macroeconomic research? How do I take deep macroeconomic research and turn that into an insight that I can put on as an individual position or individual trade? What I hadn’t appreciated and came to really love learning about was: okay, how do you actually take five or six or seven of those insights, put them in a portfolio, understand how much return each can generate, understand how they’re correlated, how they move with one another, and then build a portfolio of those insights that is gonna deliver the right risk, the right return for clients? And that’s the art and science of portfolio construction, which to me is, at the end of the day, the art and science of what it means to be a good investor and to serve your clients well.

 

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The post Transcript: Mike Pyle, BlackRock’s Portfolio Management Group appeared first on The Big Picture.

The Iranian Regime's Crypto Shadow Arsenal

Authored by Tamuz Itai via The Epoch Times,

In 2025, Iran’s crypto ecosystem swelled to more than $7.78 billion, according to Chainalysis, marking a notable acceleration from prior years amid economic collapse and geopolitical turmoil.

For ordinary Iranians—roughly one in six of the population—crypto served as a vital lifeline. Facing relentless rial depreciation (down nearly 90 percent since 2018), chronic inflation of 40 to 50 percent, and frequent power blackouts or internet shutdowns during protests, citizens turned to Bitcoin and stablecoins like U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins (USDT) on the Tron network to hedge savings, facilitate remittances, and move value when traditional banking failed. Spikes in Bitcoin withdrawals to personal wallets often coincided with domestic unrest and regional conflicts.

Yet this parallel financial system has also become a powerful tool for the state. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) steadily tightened its grip on Iran’s crypto flows. IRGC-linked addresses received more than $3 billion in 2025—up from over $2 billion in 2024—with their share rising to more than 50 percent of total Iranian crypto inflows by the end of 2025. These figures represent conservative lower bounds based only on identified and sanctioned wallets.

The regime and its proxies used these funds to facilitate illicit oil sales, procure dual-use goods for missile and drone programs, finance regional militias such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, and sustain sanctions evasion operations. USDT on Tron (USDT-TRC20) emerged as the preferred rail for its speed, liquidity, and relative resilience. Iran’s Ministry of Defense even began openly offering to accept cryptocurrency for arms exports.

This dual-use nature of cryptocurrency echoes the history of Tor, the anonymizing network originally developed by U.S. intelligence agencies to protect spies and assets. Designed for secure communication, Tor now powers both legitimate privacy efforts and dissidents in repressive regimes, as well as the vast criminal ecosystems of the Dark Web. Just like Tor, the same technical features—such as decentralization, pseudonymity, borderless transfers, and resistance to single-point censorship—that help ordinary people escape tyranny also let regimes and bad actors bypass accountability.

The Procurement and Laundering Pipeline

Once oil proceeds or other regime revenues entered the crypto ecosystem, they moved through a sophisticated international pipeline designed to convert funds into usable military capabilities. Iranian oil—primarily purchased by Chinese “teapot” refineries—was shipped via shadow-fleet tankers and often settled through shadow-banking networks. Chinese “teapot” refineries are small, privately owned, independent refineries that process heavily discounted crude from sanctioned countries like Iran, thereby shielding major state-owned firms from sanctions risk.

Proceeds were then routed via front companies in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Hong Kong, where Iranian facilitators converted them into stablecoins, especially USDT on the Tron network.

Key brokers, including Iranian nationals Alireza Derakhshan and Arash Estaki Alivand, both of whom were sanctioned by the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control in September 2025, coordinated the purchase of more than $100 million in cryptocurrency tied directly to Iranian oil sales between 2023 and 2025. They operated networks of UAE- and Hong Kong-based front companies, including entities like Alpa Trading–FZCO, to layer transactions, obscure origins, and settle payments for dual-use goods.

These funds financed procurement of critical components for Iran’s drone and missile programs—electronics, semiconductors, batteries, and unmanned aerial vehicle parts—sourced mainly from suppliers in China and Hong Kong. Goods were frequently mislabeled and transshipped to evade export controls, ultimately reaching the IRGC-Qods Force and Iran’s Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics.

For years, Dubai served as the central hub for these operations, leveraging its existing free zones, money changers (sarraf), and informal networks. However, in early 2026, UAE authorities arrested dozens of IRGC-linked money changers, shut down associated offices, and weighed broader asset freezes—delivering one of the most significant disruptions yet to Tehran’s sanctions-evasion architecture. Even so, the underlying networks demonstrated resilience, adapting to new routes as pressure mounted.

The Enablers: Chinese Money Laundering Networks

The final leg of the pipeline relies on a powerful new layer of professional criminal infrastructure: Chinese money-laundering networks (CMLNs), whose recent rapid development appears to be an unforeseen consequence of the imposition of capital controls in China, including a sweeping crypto ban and a strict $50,000 annual foreign exchange limit.

These sophisticated, profit-driven operations—frequently built around Telegram-based guarantee/escrow platforms, money mule networks, informal over-the-counter desks, and layered wallet structures—functioned like a full-service “Amazon for criminals.”

In 2025 alone, CMLNs processed an estimated $16.1 billion in illicit crypto funds, accounting for roughly 20 percent of all known global crypto money laundering activity. Operating through more than 1,799 active wallets, they moved the equivalent of about $44 million per day.

Broader Chinese-language escrow and underground banking networks handled even larger volumes, with TRM Labs estimating more than $100 billion to $103 billion in adjusted crypto flows in 2025. These services offered reliable “laundering-as-a-service,” converting tainted stablecoins (especially the above-mentioned USDT on Tron) into usable fiat currency, like the U.S. dollar, goods, or clean assets, while minimizing risk for clients.

CMLNs served a wide clientele, including scam operators, ransomware groups, and sanctioned state actors. They helped launder proceeds from North Korean hacks (including the record 2025 Bybit theft), supported Russian sanctions-evasion flows, and enabled Iranian/IRGC networks to off-ramp oil-related crypto and settle payments for dual-use goods. These networks provided the essential “last mile” that turned raw illicit crypto into operational funding for weapons programs and proxies. 

Despite enforcement actions—such as the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network’s 2025 designation of the Cambodia-based Huione Group as a primary money laundering concern—the networks demonstrated remarkable resilience, quickly migrating to new platforms and services.

While seemingly not under direct operational command and control by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), CMLNs have grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry with conspicuous longevity. Given the CCP’s tight grip on China’s financial system, internet, and capital flows, and its aggressive crackdowns when it perceives threats to financial stability or political control, such large-scale, cross-border activity would be extremely difficult to sustain without, at the very least, tacit tolerance from Beijing.

Enforcement and Outlook

The Trump administration’s strongly pro-crypto domestic policies—including the creation of a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve—stand in contrast to its aggressive enforcement against adversarial use of digital assets. On-chain intelligence sharpened U.S. focus on IRGC procurement networks, Russian stablecoin flows, and North Korean thefts.

Under its “maximum pressure” campaign, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sanctioned entire crypto exchanges in January 2026, including the UK-registered Zedcex and Zedxion, for processing large volumes of IRGC-linked funds, including more than $94 billion in total transactions on Zedcex.

Crypto had evolved into an important battleground: a lifeline for civilians in sanctioned economies and a tool for rogue regimes and criminal financing. As evasion networks adapt and migrate, the long-term success of disruption efforts remains to be seen.

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/14/2026 - 08:05

Texas AG Probes Lululemon Leggings For "Forever Chemicals"

Shares of Lululemon Athletica fell as much as 4.5% in late-morning New York trading after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an investigation into whether the company, known for its leggings, misled consumers about potential "forever chemicals" in its apparel.

Paxton's probe of Lululemon's athletic apparel centers around leggings that may contain PFAS, or "forever chemicals," and whether the company misled consumers about the safety, quality, and health impacts of its products.

The attorney general's office will also review the company's restricted substances list, testing procedures, and supply chain practices to determine whether its products actually meet the stated safety standards.

Paxton stated, "I will not allow any corporation to sell harmful, toxic materials to consumers at a premium price under the guise of wellness and sustainability. If Lululemon has violated Texas law, it will be held accountable."

Supply chain analysis platform Sayari provides the latest shipment data on Lululemon: 

Meanwhile:

• Lululemon Founder Blasts Board Again Amid Stock Collapse

• Another Pair Of Lululemon Leggings Fails The Squat Test

Paxton has been widening his investigations tied to the "Make America Healthy Again" movement, which is linked to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. His recent actions include probing WK Kellogg over artificial food colorings in Froot Loops and pressuring food companies to remove synthetic dyes from cereal and other products. He has also targeted toothpaste makers over fluoride.

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/14/2026 - 07:45

First Humanoid Robot With Embodied Intelligence For High-Risk Jobs Enters Service

Authored by Mriogakshi Dixit via Interesting Engineering,

In the dizzying heights of a chemical storage facility, a new kind of worker is punching in. China has reportedly deployed its first “embodied” intelligent humanoid robot designed for high-risk industrial operations. 

Embodied AI robot can be seen working on the wall of a large chemical storage tank in testing.CCTV PLus

This isn’t just a fixed machine; it’s a 90-kg (198-pound) robot that can climb walls and work where humans can’t.

Interestingly, the multi-purpose system is intended to replace human workers in hazardous conditions, such as chemical storage tank construction.

According to reports, this machine uses a magnetic chassis to stick to walls, allowing its humanoid upper body to operate on any metal surface.

The robot could be used to execute core industrial tasks, including precision welding, rust remediation, and routine inspections.

15 degrees of freedom

Compared with earlier wall-climbing robots that were limited to a single repetitive function, this new system is said to be a multitasker. 

It moves beyond basic cleaning or inspection by leveraging advanced AI to adapt to its environment and handle a wide range of complex industrial tasks.

With 15 degrees of freedom and dual arms, the robot mimics human flexibility to safely multitask on scaffolds, performing precision tasks such as simultaneous welding and grinding. 

According to CGTN, this physical agility is driven by a massive AI brain trained on 100,000 hours of data, enabling it to navigate complex environments with ease.

This “embodied intelligence” allows the robotic machine to perceive its surroundings, adapt to complex real-world scenarios, and improve its performance through ongoing experience.

Moreover, it uses a tethered cable system to eliminate the power limitations that usually hold mobile units back. 

This constant supply of energy allows for nonstop, 24/7 operation, ensuring the machine stays productive without the downtime required for recharging.

Built for the danger zone

Tested at a large chemical storage site, the 90-kilogram robot uses a wheeled, magnetic chassis to move steadily across vertical metal surfaces. 

Its powerful electromagnetic adhesion enables it to perform complex operations while supporting additional weight, ensuring it remains mobile and secure even on steep walls.

In the future, entire fleets of these robots could maintain shipyards and refineries. It could lead to a new era where heavy infrastructure can essentially take care of itself.

Prior to this, China reached another milestone by integrating an embodied intelligent robot into SAIC Motor’s electric vehicle division’s mass production line.

The humanoid robot, known as “Nengzai No. 1,” has officially joined the battery assembly line for the Buick Electra E7 at SAIC Motor.

This move is a major step for the Shanghai-based carmaker as it starts combining smart, human-like robots with its regular factory machines.

China’s dominance in the humanoid sector is backed by massive state support, with over 140 companies focused specifically on humanoids and $26 billion in dedicated investment.

Even Elon Musk has acknowledged China’s lead in this “priority industry,” which benefits from extensive supply chains and government subsidies.

By 2050, the global market for these robots could reach $7.5 trillion, and China is positioning itself to lead that charge by deploying humanoids in factories and private homes.

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/14/2026 - 07:20

My mid-morning Plane reads:

• The Era of Free Seas Is Unraveling—and Now Everyone’s Going to Pay: Three centuries of open maritime commerce are buckling under geopolitical pressure. Iran’s toll booth at the Strait of Hormuz is just the beginning of a much more expensive world. (Wall Street Journal)

• The country that can’t say no to Trump: The FT on a U.S. ally trapped between economic dependence and political humiliation. Trump’s foreign policy is a stress test for everyone’s sovereignty. Tokyo is in need of a plan B to dependence on the US. There may not be one. (Financial Times) see also The Iran War Is Hitting California Harder Than Any Other State: California imports roughly 75% of its crude oil, almost one-third of which comes from the Middle East. (Wall Street Journal)

• These Retirees Are Thriving. What Are Their Secrets? How to handle your money, spend your time and get the most out of post-work life. (Bloomberg)

• Trump wants you to invest your 401(k) in crypto and private equity. Should you bite? Trump is opening the door to risky ‘alternative investments’ such as crypto and private equity in 401(k) plans. But employers have had good reasons to keep them out of their plans. (Los Angeles Times)

• What Are Stablecoins Used for Today? Estimating the Distribution of Stablecoins: Uncovering where stablecoins are held and how they are used in the financial ecosystem provides three key insights: stablecoins are rarely used for payments, stablecoin infrastructure lacks interoperability, and the stablecoin ecosystem is still predominantly tied to crypto finance. (Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City)

• Private credit has calmed the credit cycle: The reason the IMF, BIS, and various major central banks have been focusing on private credit is because they see it as new and untested, opaque, with the potential to amplify monetary transmission and contribute to financial stability risks. Private credit is absorbing what banks used to handle — which sounds calming until you realize the stress is just hidden, not gone. (Financial Times)

• How the Internet Broke Everyone’s Bullshit Detectors: Our cognitive defenses evolved for face-to-face lies, not algorithmic deception at scale. From AI-generated images to restricted satellite data, the systems used to verify what’s real online are struggling to keep up.  Wired on why even smart people are falling for dumb things in 2026. (Wired)

• Meet Peter Magyar, the Man Who Ended Trump Ally Viktor Orbán’s 16-Year Rule: “We won not small but big—very, very big,” Magyar told a crowd of cheering supporters, celebrating the fact he toppled Orbán’s Fidesz Party by gaining 138 of 199 seats. “Together we changed the Orbán regime, together we liberated Hungary, we took our homeland back.” He pledged to spend the next four years striving for a “free, European, functioning, and humane Hungary.” The playbook for defeating entrenched autocrats might be more replicable than we thought. (TIME) see also Hungary Just Ousted the Unoustable: Viktor Orbán had support from Moscow and Washington, but not from his own people. His defeat proves autocrats aren’t invincible — they’re just good at gaming the margins until they’re not. Lessons here for every country watching its own democratic backsliding. (The Atlantic) see also New data suggests Trump’s assault on democracy may be stalling out: Three new reports give some surprising reasons for optimism. Democracy indexes show the damage may have plateaued. Not recovered, but plateaued — which is more than most analysts expected at this point. (Vox)

• ‘This Was the Real Thing’: Meet the Woman Who Alerts the World When an Asteroid Could Hit: A profile of the UN official responsible for warning humanity about asteroid impacts. The most important job nobody’s heard of. (The Guardian)

• The US small town coffee shop that created a viral drink: ‘I still don’t understand how it went so far’ A palate cleanser: a small-town coffee shop accidentally invents a TikTok-famous drink. The modern economy in miniature — scale, virality, and the limits of local. The raspberry danish latte is making its way around the world after its inventors decided to share the recipe. (The Guardian)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Mike Pyle, Deputy Head of BlackRock’s Portfolio Management Group (PMG) and member of the Global Executive Committee. He helps oversee $5 trillion in client assets across systematic & discretionary strategies as well as directly overseeing PMG’s hedge funds platform. He also heads the  BlackRock Investment Institute.

 

Which states have the highest and lowest income tax?

Source: USA Facts

 

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The post 10 Tuesday AM Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.

Irish Patriots Are Fighting Back

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

So you say you want a revolution?  Well, take a look at what’s happening in Ireland right now.  Tens of thousands of farmers, truckers, and other fed-up “normies” are taking to the streets of Dublin to protest fuel taxes, mass immigration, and poverty-inducing “climate change” policies.  For the most part, corporate news propagandists in both Europe and North America are intentionally ignoring the combustible situation.  Just when I had begun to think that all the “fighting Irish” had moved to America, the Old Country has started to show signs of life.  Perhaps there are still a few irascible pugilists willing to bash heads and take on the globalist empire after all.

Speaking of irascible pugilists, Irish slugger Conor McGregor issued a bit of an ultimatum to the ruling class after the government mobilized the military and sent tanks to intimidate the protesters: “One wrong move by government here, and you will see, at the very least, 250k Irish people descend on the capital in a blink.  They must step down, there is no other way.”  Declaring war against ordinary Irishmen isn’t a good look for an Irish Deep State that can’t be bothered to guard its borders from hordes of invading foreigners.  While McGregor and his compatriots are out feeding protesters in the streets, the Irish government is hiking taxes on those who can least afford to pay them.  “One wrong move” could spark a revolution. 

Perhaps that’s why — after an initial show of force — Ireland’s globalist government appears to be trying to settle things down.  Reports on the ground say that police officers have remained friendly with protesters.  Some have suggested that Irish authorities are wary of following in the footsteps of Canada’s former prime minister, Justin Trudeau, when he exercised martial law powers to seize the bank accounts of and jail “Freedom Convoy” truckers protesting coercive COVID “vaccination” mandates.  On the other hand, a lot of the Irish protesters have also described a sense that many of the law enforcement officers patrolling the streets appear to be on their side.  If that’s the case, then Ireland’s political class may be worried about the effectiveness of siccing the military on a broadly-backed citizen uprising.  

Although few people saw the present brouhaha coming, Ireland makes a natural “ground zero” in the war between Big Government globalists (aka, the “international rules-based order” club of World Economic Forum totalitarians) and ordinary citizens willing to defend their nation’s sovereignty and their own personal freedoms.  For two decades, the globalists have been taking over Ireland and stripping it for parts.  As a country that once took pride in its meaningful traditions, customs, family loyalties, and Catholic heritage, Ireland has been one of the globalists’ favorite targets for conquest.  If the “multicultural” atheists could convert Ireland into another globalist outpost devoid of religious or civilizational allegiances, they knew that they would collect a valuable scalp in their war against the West.  Sadly, the globalists have been largely successful.  By transforming a conservative, staunchly pro-life, Catholic nation into a “woke” re-education zone embracing abortion, “trans” surgeries for children, open borders, Islamic supremacy, and the fetishization of “diversity,” the World Economic Forum’s “Borg” hive mind gutted one of the most culturally rich nations on the planet and mounted Ireland’s head on globalism’s wall of slaughtered states.  

Two months ago, free speech defenders Lorcán Price and Graham Linehan testified before the House Judiciary Committee concerning the mass censorship operation being run through the expanding Big Tech enclave in Dublin.  There are over 32,000 NGOs in Ireland receiving billions of dollars in U.S. and E.U. grants meant to help shape public opinion.  These organizations — one for every 155 Irishmen — represent the “information warfare” army that supports Europe’s globalist policies.  Over 70% of Irish legislation is copy-and-pasted from bureaucratic edicts originating in the European Union.  These laws include special incentives for illegal immigrants who arrive on Ireland’s shores.  They also include “hate speech” laws that have been used to criminally prosecute Irish citizens who object to foreigners raping and murdering their children.  The NGO-E.U. takeover of the Irish political system this century has drastically reshaped the country.

Once Christian Ireland now has constitutional protections for gay “marriage” and abortion up to a baby’s birth.  Two years ago, Ireland’s globalist cabal nearly succeeded in removing all mentions of “women” from the national constitution, as well as nearly redefining “family” as a “durable relationship.”  The Irish government continues to attack Ireland’s Catholic history, going so far as to depict Catholic saints as pagan goddesses in shameless acts of historical revisionism.  Globalists continue to rename historic institutions due to ludicrous accusations that Irish clergymen and scholars had ties to slavery and “white supremacy.”  As Irish writer Roger Berkeley sorrowfully observes, “Ireland shows what happens when elites, bureaucracies, and ideology override national identity.”

Wherever they conquer, modern globalists prefer to implement blunt-force “divide and conquer” tactics that pit parts of society against each other.  Women versus men.  Young people versus families.  “Green energy” fanatics versus small businesses.  Islamic supremacists versus Christians.  “Multiculturalism” versus Western civilization.  Non-whites versus whites.  Globalists succeed wherever they are able to stir up so much domestic strife that nobody pays attention to the cultural, economic, and political agendas being enforced upon the invaded countries.  After targeting Ireland for destruction and subverting its traditional culture, globalists appeared to have taken over the island for good.  

However, when an outside force conquers a nation, there’s always an inherent risk that forced subjugation sparks a rebellion.  When those being gradually enslaved begin to believe that they have nothing else to lose, the ruling class has real problems.  Despite the corporate news media’s best attempts to cover up what is going on in Ireland, the current protests against “climate change” taxes and mass immigration suggest that the natives are growing restless.  What happens next isn’t entirely clear.  

What is clear is that ordinary people in nations across the West are becoming aware of the information war that has long been waged against them.  For decades, they have been conditioned to believe false things: “Diversity is our strength.”  “Islam is a religion of peace.”  “Trans-women are real women.”  “Sex is a social construct.”  “Man-made climate change is killing the planet.”  “New taxes will save the planet.”  “Christianity is hate speech.”  “Hate speech is a violent crime.”  “Free speech requires government-moderated censorship.”  “National sovereignty is fascist.”  “Families promote white supremacy.”  “Merit is white supremacy.”  “Math, home ownership, mowed lawns, and punctuality are all forms of white supremacy.”  “Equal rights require ‘Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity.’”  “Unelected bureaucrats protect democracy.”  “NATO must protect non-NATO Ukraine.”  Et cetera ad infinitum.  

Perhaps globalism’s lies have become too numerous for the average Westerner to ignore.  Or perhaps globalists’ hubris has grown too grating for the average Westerner to tolerate.  Either way, there is a growing movement of people dedicated to defending Western civilization from the pernicious cancer of godless, multicultural, “woke,” and totalitarian globalism.  Because globalists control the corporate news media, these people are disparaged as “populists.”  In truth, they are Western citizens committed to national self-determination, the preservation of individual rights, and protections for personal liberty.  

Globalists call the will of the people “populism” and the will of bureaucrats “democracy.”  But when enough people decide to fight back against the bureaucrats, the spirit of revolution hangs in the air.  Perhaps that’s what we’re seeing right now in Ireland — a fresh reminder of Thomas Jefferson’s observation that no “country can preserve its liberties” if its “rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance.”  After all, the “tree of liberty must be refreshed ... with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is its natural manure.”

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/14/2026 - 06:30

Latest Global Sportswear Supply Chain Read-Through Remains Bearish

The S&P 500 Textiles, Apparel & Luxury Goods sub-industry index (S5TEXA Index), which includes names such as Nike, Lululemon, Deckers Outdoor, Ralph Lauren, and others, is down 15% year-to-date and roughly 65% from its late 2021 peak. With the index now hovering around Covid-era lows, Goldman analysts have published their latest read on textiles, apparel, and footwear, which explains why sentiment across the global industry remains so bleak. 

Analysts led by Michelle Cheng reported that major Asian sportswear OEM March orders were mixed, with Eclat outperforming peers, while Makalot and Yue Yuen delivered in-line first-quarter results despite holiday-related pressure in Indonesia. Feng Tay continued to report year-on-year declines in orders, and Huali reported muted first-quarter orders.

Cheng said the latest earnings season and outlook for apparel this year appear mixed. She noted that geopolitical tensions are beginning to cloud demand and ordering patterns, while higher raw material costs could increasingly pressure OEM margins in the second half of the year if input prices remain elevated.

She said competitiveness among brands may also limit suppliers’ ability to pass those costs through, particularly if brands push part of the burden back onto manufacturers. Nike’s slower-than-expected reset is another major headwind for the industry.

"Most players said March orders were unaffected; but select players have noted lower forward order visibility from brands due to rising costs and concerns over demand," the analyst said.

She said that on the demand side, US conditions in March appeared resilient, based on commentary from Levi Strauss, PVH, and Nike, as well as high-frequency data - likely because the energy shock has yet to fully hit household budgets. Europe, the Middle East, and Africa were more uneven, she said, adding that sentiment across developed markets deteriorated after the outbreak of the US-Iran conflict.

Cheng said, "Sentiment worsened across developed markets following the start of the Iran war, but we will watch for data post the recent two-week ceasefire. At a brand level, we see negative read-across from Nike but positive from Fast Retailing." 

She pointed to Pou Sheng International, a major Chinese sportswear retailer for Nike, Adidas, PUMA, and Converse, whose March sales fell 6% from a year earlier, reflecting a typical post-holiday slowdown. First-quarter revenue declined 1%, which was broadly in line with expectations.

As of March 26, the latest read of sportswear supply chains is largely bearish:

As for when the S5TEXA Index will finally bottom, that likely depends on a reversal in consumer sentiment. President Trump suggested on Sunday that elevated gasoline prices could persist through the second half of the year, reinforcing the risk that pressure on household budgets may continue into the summer.

Professional subscribers can read the full "Asia Pacific Textile, Apparel & Footwear" note here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/14/2026 - 05:45

ECB Backs Tokenized EU Capital Markets (With Strict Guardrails)

Authored by Christina Comben via CoinTelegraph.com,

The European Central Bank (ECB) set out a cautious path toward tokenizing Europe’s capital markets, saying the technology can deliver efficiency gains only if it remains anchored to central bank money, infrastructures remain interoperable, and regulation is “robust and supportive.” 

In its latest Macroprudential Bulletin published on Monday, the ECB said distributed ledger technology (DLT) could help deepen the European Union’s savings and investments union, but warned that benefits will depend on interoperable infrastructure and policymakers keeping pace with new risks. 

The central bank’s stance highlights a push to modernize market plumbing in the bloc without loosening control over settlement or financial stability.

The ECB said that tokenization and DLT are “moving from concept to early-scale deployment,” but the benefits will “only be realised safely if European policy action keeps pace.”

ECB maps conditions for tokenized capital markets

One article in the Bulletin lays out how tokenized assets could rewire the issuance-to-settlement chain, cutting operational frictions and potentially improving secondary market liquidity. By moving securities and cash onto compatible ledgers and automating corporate actions, the authors argue, tokenization could streamline processes that today rely on multiple intermediaries and legacy systems. 

Digital assets landscape. Source: ECB

The analysis underlines, however, that efficiency gains hinge on avoiding a patchwork of incompatible platforms and ensuring that central bank money, not just commercial bank money or privately issued tokens, can be used for settlement in tokenized markets.

A further piece drills into the nascent market for tokenized bonds, finding early evidence that they can already lower borrowing costs and tighten bid-ask spreads compared with traditional formats. 

The authors attribute this partly to operational efficiencies and partly to improved transparency and programmability around settlement and collateral management. Still, they frame these benefits as tentative and conditional, cautioning that technology, legal and liquidity risks remain and that policymakers will need to monitor whether advantages persist once tokenization scales beyond flagship deals and highly selected issuers.

Tokenized MMFs and euro stablecoins under the microscope

The Bulletin also takes a hard look at tokenized money market funds and euro-denominated stablecoins, treating them as parallel experiments in onchain cash-like instruments.

One article stresses that tokenized money market funds (MMFs) largely replicate familiar liquidity and run risks but layer on new operational vulnerabilities, raising questions about how they would behave under stress alongside stablecoins.

Comparison between balance sheet and asset-backed model. Source: ECB

Another argues that Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA) compliant euro stablecoins could reshape demand for sovereign bonds and act either as a liquidity buffer in turbulent markets or a new channel of bank contagion, depending on how issuers meet deposit and reserve requirements. 

Across the five pieces in the Bulletin, the ECB’s stance is clear: Tokenization can support its vision of an integrated capital market, but only if policy, prudential rules and central bank infrastructure evolve in lockstep.

Cointelegraph reached out to the ECB for comment, but had not received a response by publication.

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/14/2026 - 05:00

US-Sanctioned Tanker Signaling Chinese Ownerships Test Trump Blockade With Hormuz Crossing

Following news that two tankers, one of which indicated China as its destination, had turned around earlier in the day after the Trump blockade of the Straits of Hormuz had kicked in, one of them - a tanker linked to China - is making its way through the Strait of Hormuz, testing President Trump’s naval blockade, Bloomberg reported.

Rich Starry, a 188-meter medium-range tanker earlier known as Full Star, was blacklisted by Washington in 2023 for helping Tehran evade energy sanctions. It was not clear on this occasion whether it visited Iranian ports before its transit, or is carrying cargo. 

This exit from the Persian Gulf is a second attempt for the carrier in less than 24 hours. Just as the blockade came into effect, the Rich Starry was making its way into the narrow waterway near Iran’s Qeshm Island and turned back, as reported earlier, only to restart its exit just hours later, broadcasting that it has a Chinese owner and crew. While this is a safety mechanism frequently used by vessels not to attract Iran's attention, it will now test US resolve to challenge vessels tied to the world’s largest oil importer.

Rich Starry is owned by Full Star Shipping Ltd., which shares the same contact details as Shanghai Xuanrun Shpg. Co. Ltd., maritime database Equasis shows. A call made to Shanghai Xuanrun did not get through, while the company didn’t immediately respond to an emailed request for comment. The Shanghai-based entity is also sanctioned by the State Department.

Another tanker, the Elpis, headed into the Gulf of Oman via the strait just as the blockade began. Ship-tracking platforms Kpler and Vortexa indicate that Elpis had docked at an Iranian port in the gulf before attempting to pass through Hormuz.  Elpis’s owner is Chartchemical SA that uses its manager, IMS Ltd.’s contact details. A call made to Malaysia-based IMS failed to connect. IMS did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

No vessels with their transponders on have been seen sailing into the Persian Gulf since the blockade came into effect.

The global shipping community and energy traders have been on edge since Trump announced a naval blockade of Iran beginning on Monday at 10 a.m. New York time, leaving them scrambling to understand the fine print. Most of those reached by Bloomberg across the Middle East and Asia said they would pause moves until the detail of the US blockade, which is meant to restrict Iran’s capacity to sell its oil to China, was clear.

According to unconfirmed reports earlier on Monday, China’s Defense Minister Dong Jun reportedly sent a message to the Trump administration and the U.S. Navy emphasizing Beijing’s intent to continue operating in the Strait of Hormuz and uphold its agreements with Iran. “Our ships are moving in and out of the waters of the Strait of Hormuz. We have trade and energy agreements with Iran. We will respect and honor those agreements and expect others not to interfere in our affairs" adding that “Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz and it is open for us.”

Whether this was true or not, we are about to find out what happens when an "Iran-friendly" ship tried to penetrate Trump's blockade which according to the WSJ counted more than 15 ships - including an aircraft carrier, multiple guided-missile destroyers, an amphibious assault ship and several other warships in the Middle East - in place to support the blockade. These ships have the ability to launch helicopters that support boarding operations, and some are capable of marshalling commercial vessels to specific areas to hold them in place.

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/14/2026 - 04:28

From Fiestas To Ferraris, Britain's Fuel Shock Has Rich And Poor Stealing Petrol

Across the U.K., motorists face record-breaking fuel costs at the gas pump as the Gulf energy shock ripples around the world. One of the clearest second-order effects now emerging is a surge in petrol station thefts, spanning from organized crime gangs to even drivers in exotic cars simply filling up and driving off.

British newspaper The Times cited new data from 500 UK filling stations showing that the daily value of stolen fuel jumped 27% from February to March. The spike coincided with the start of the U.S.-Iran conflict, which sent energy prices sharply higher. This means around £1.2 million worth of fuel is now being stolen every week across Britain.

What stands out in the report is that folks stealing fuel are not just desperate working poor folks or criminal gangs, but in fact, some petrol station owners report that even drivers of Ferraris and Mercedes are filling up and zooming off without paying.

Research firm Forecourt Eye, which helps petrol stations detect, track, and recover unpaid fuel bills, said that current theft levels across the UK have exceeded those of the early days after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Michelle Henchoz, managing director of Forecourt Eye, said:

With someone taking fuel you think that you'd have a vision of what they look like but they aren't what you think. They are driving supercars.

One came up yesterday and the car was a Mercedes AMG GT and they did a drive-off at one of our petrol stations. I checked online what the value of the car was. It was beautiful. I was thinking, how can they drive off? The fuel energy crisis in 2022 wasn't as bad.

What we're seeing is not just more fuel theft, but a different kind of behaviour that shows a clear increase in first-time offenders and in people who aren't attempting to flee, but instead are declaring they cannot pay.

Henchoz noted:

The data suggests this may reflect growing financial pressure, with more drivers filling full tanks rather than taking small amounts. Career criminals continue to do it but now ordinary people do it too because they can't cover the cost of fuel.

Goran Raven, who runs a petrol station in Essex, told the outlet that fuel thefts are noticeable and alarming:

You'll see everything from a crappy Fiesta going to a Ferrari. It really depends. The people who do it are brazen. They don't worry about covering up their faces, they will even wave at cashiers.

On one occasion we had an Aston Martin and Ferrari drive off within 30 seconds here. It was just short of £300 for two cars.

I'm sure there are people on the breadline who are desperate, that must be the case, but I reckon that would be single-digit percentage of people committing these crimes out there.

Goran Raven, who runs a filling station in Essex, said the first fortnight of the conflict resulted in a "definite and noticeable increase" in theft. Source: The Times

The energy shock is taking longer to materialize in the U.S. because of robust domestic energy supplies and President Trump's continued push for "drill, baby, drill." While there are no indications that fuel theft is surging at gas stations across the country, there are early signs that consumers are starting to look at EVs again, given that the national average price for regular 87-octane gasoline is trending above the politically sensitive $4-per-gallon line.

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/14/2026 - 04:15

Jury Trials Are Vital To The Constitutional Order

Authored by David Thunder via 'The Freedom Blog' substack,

The Labour-led British government is currently attempting to hollow out an ancient pillar of English constitutionalism, trial by jury.

Under their planned reforms, trial by jury would survive in England and Wales for certain types of crimes, but its use would be significantly curtailed. For example, according to a government press release issued earlier this month, new “Swift Courts” will assign cases “with a likely sentence of three years or less” to be heard by “a Judge alone.”

The campaign against jury trials, one of the most free-spirited and universally lauded institutions bequeathed to us by the common law tradition, would be baffling in a healthy constitutional regime. But sadly, it is predictable enough in a regime whose political leaders have developed the habit of tinkering with civil liberties as though they were trimming their lawn.

Being an ancient institution that evolved gradually over a millennium, a significant restriction of jury trials would have unpredictable effects on the justice system. We simply do not know with any confidence how, in the long run, such a move would alter the incentives of prosecutors, change the pattern of convictions for different crimes, or alter public perceptions of the justice system.

What we do know is that it would constitute a dangerous and completely unnecessary constitutional experiment, eroding one of the most time-honoured bulwarks of civil liberty. Furthermore, it is worth noting that according to an analysis published by the Free Speech Union, drawing on Ministry of Justice data, overall acquittal rates are much higher with juries than with magistrates’ courts (21.6% vs. 11.4%), and this difference also holds specifically for speech-related offences (27.6% vs. 15.9%). Assuming these figures are accurate, citizens will likely be much more vulnerable to prosecution and conviction if the use of jury trials is thrown out or significantly eroded.

Trial by jury has been lauded by generations of learned and respected scholars of law and democracy as a cornerstone of a free society. Alexis de Tocqueville, whose 1835-40 volume Democracy in America offers one of the most incisive of reflections on the pros and cons of modern democracy, opined that “the jury... is the most energetic means of making the people rule, [and] is also the most effective means of teaching it how to rule well.”

An eminent 17th-century English jurist, Sir Edward Coke, insisted that no Englishman could be lawfully condemned “but by the lawful judgment of his peers.” The esteemed 18th-century legal commentator, Sir William Blackstone, likewise described trial by jury as “the glory of the English law” and “the most transcendent privilege which any subject can enjoy,” emphasising its role as a shield between the individual and arbitrary power.

Budding constitutional reformers would do well to pay heed to Lord Patrick Devlin’s warning that “the first object of any tyrant... would be to make Parliament utterly subservient to his will; and the next to overthrow or diminish trial by jury, for it is the lamp that shows that freedom lives.”

If marginal gains in the duration of trials are deemed an adequate justification for tinkering with this bastion of the legal order, then we might as well just go ahead and subject the whole constitutional order to an “efficiency” test: if we can shave a few days or weeks off this or that legal procedure, then why not engage in a bit of constitutional engineering?

But this is a cheap and shallow argument. To begin with, we should not be so sure of our own understanding of the mechanics of such a complex and evolved order, nor should we be so confident that we can predict the short- and long-term impact of our well-intentioned meddling.

Equally importantly, those who bring a revolutionary pick-axe to the constitutional edifice destabilise public expectations about the basic “rules of the game.” In doing so, they open the door to political opportunists who would happily overturn the rules and conventions that keep citizens free in order to advance their own careers or curry favour with party bosses or the fickle tides of public opinion.

These constitution-wreckers have bought into a reckless form of positivism that views the legal system as the handiwork of each new generation of human lawgivers rather than as a hallowed constitutional inheritance, and conceives the legislator as an ambitious constitutional reformer, ever poised to introduce “enlightened” reforms in the longstanding customs of liberty, whether in the name of “efficiency” “progress,” “social justice,” or some other ostensibly noble end. While the seeds of positivism and its contempt for the common law have been in place for centuries, its bitter fruits are now on full display.

The outcome of happy-go-lucky constitutional engineering is that citizens are perpetually vulnerable to political fanaticism. And not just any old fanaticism, but the sort that dismantles or radically alters fundamental constitutional rights such as privacy, freedom of speech, or the right to be tried before one’s peers.

Sadly, the move against jury trials is not an anomaly. Rather, it reflects a growing trend among modern governments and legislators – not only in the United Kingdom, but in many other places – to assert their own authority over the constitutional order in exaggerated and destructive ways.

Instead of recognising that they are standing on the shoulders of giants and acting as humble stewards of an ancient tradition of ordered liberty, whose inner workings have evolved gradually over countless generations, legislators and government ministers have gotten it into their heads that they are can stand majestically above the constitutional order and remake it at will, as one might re-arrange one’s bedroom.

Unfortunately, the citizenry of Western societies, or at least a large portion of it, is in a state of moral stupor and has become complacent about the risks of governmental tyranny. Many are no longer well equipped to distinguish between the arbitrary utterances of a legislator and the longstanding rules of humanity and decency.

The idolisation of positive law and the downgrading of the customary liberties of Western societies came to a head during the pandemic: people were happy to go along with laws that made life hell for their unvaccinated neighbours, just because they were unvaccinated; large segments of the public acquiesced in, or actively supported, these measures, looking on approvingly while police suppressed public protests in the name of “public health”; and people reported their neighbours for the “offense” of having social gatherings in their homes.

Legal systems are meant to set us free, by providing a framework of public order and reaonable expectations within which we can get on with our lives. But they can only do this if they are beholden to a higher law, of the sort that is discovered rather than made by human fiat.

This is the sort of law that binds the King and cannot be unmade by the King, as the Magna Carta famously recognises.

Only if citizens believe passionately in a moral code superior to the say-so of legislators and politicians can they find a firm foothold for resisting egregiously unjust and tyrannical laws. But belief in a morality that transcends the will of the legislator is not easy in a culture saturated with moral relativism. We need to recover our confidence in a higher moral law, if we are to reverse the current drift toward legal and political authoritarianism.

Tyler Durden Tue, 04/14/2026 - 03:30

The 5 Places In America You Don't Want To Be When Society Collapses…

Authored by Milan Adams via preppgroup.home.blog,

There’s a strange kind of comfort people have when they think about disaster. Not the dramatic kind you see in movies, but something quieter, almost subconscious—the belief that if something really bad were to happen, there would still be time to react. Time to think. Time to leave. Time to make the right decisions.

The problem is, history doesn’t really support that idea.

When things begin to fail on a large scale, they don’t do it in a clean or predictable way. Systems don’t politely warn you before they collapse. They stall, they glitch, they slow down—and then suddenly, they stop. And in that moment, when what people assumed was permanent turns out to be fragile, the real danger begins. Not from the disaster itself, but from the reaction to it.

People don’t like uncertainty. And when uncertainty turns into fear, fear turns into something much harder to control.

Most conversations about collapse focus on causes. People argue about what would trigger it—a massive cyberattack, a coordinated terrorist event, an EMP that wipes out electronics, or an economic crash that spreads faster than anyone can contain it. All of those are possible, in their own way. But they all share one thing in common: they don’t need to destroy everything to create chaos. They only need to disrupt enough of the system for people to realize that normal life isn’t coming back anytime soon.

And when that realization spreads, it spreads faster in some places than others.

The uncomfortable truth is that the places most people feel safest today—the big, powerful, resource-rich cities—are often the ones that would deteriorate the fastest. Not because they’re weak, but because they are so heavily dependent on constant flow. Food, energy, transportation, law enforcement, communication—everything has to keep moving. And when it doesn’t, even briefly, the cracks start to show.

At first, it looks manageable. Maybe a power outage. Maybe empty shelves in a few stores. Maybe delayed services. Nothing that feels like the end of the world. But then the pattern becomes harder to ignore. Supplies don’t come back. Information becomes inconsistent. People start noticing the same small problems everywhere they go. And slowly, quietly, a kind of tension builds in the background.

It’s not panic yet. Not openly. But it’s there.

And once it reaches a certain point, it doesn’t stay contained.

That’s when the environment around you starts to matter more than anything else.

Because not all places break the same way.

Some collapse quickly, almost violently, as if the system holding them together was under pressure for too long. Others decay more slowly, stretching the crisis out over days or weeks until people wear down mentally and emotionally. But the outcome tends to be the same: resources become scarce, movement becomes difficult, and trust between people starts to erode.

When that happens, the difference between a survivable situation and a dangerous one often comes down to location.

Population density plays a bigger role than most people realize. In highly concentrated areas, everything accelerates—shortages, frustration, conflict. A grocery store that might serve a small town for weeks can be emptied in hours in a major city. Roads that seem efficient under normal conditions become completely unusable when everyone tries to leave at the same time. Even basic services, like access to clean water or medical care, can become limited far faster than expected.

But density isn’t the only factor. There are other, less obvious risks that tend to overlap in the worst possible places: dependence on external supply chains, limited natural resources, high living costs that leave people with little financial buffer, strict regulations that limit self-defense, and geography that works against you rather than for you.

When several of these factors exist in the same place, the result is something that looks stable on the surface—but is extremely vulnerable underneath.

And there are a few places in the United States where that vulnerability is hard to ignore.

1. New York City, New York — A System That Can’t Afford to Stop

New York City has always had a kind of energy that’s difficult to describe unless you’ve experienced it. Everything moves quickly, constantly, almost as if the city itself doesn’t really rest. There’s an underlying assumption built into that rhythm—that things will keep working, that the systems behind the scenes will continue to function no matter how much pressure they’re under.

But that assumption is exactly what makes the city so fragile in a crisis.

New York doesn’t produce what it consumes. It relies almost entirely on continuous inflow—food shipments arriving daily, fuel being transported in, goods moving through a tightly coordinated network that leaves very little room for disruption. Under normal conditions, that system works so efficiently that most people never think about it. But in a collapse scenario, efficiency becomes a liability.

If those supply lines are interrupted, even briefly, the effects would be immediate. Not catastrophic at first—just noticeable. Stores would still have food, but less of it. Certain items would disappear faster than others. People would begin to buy more than usual, not necessarily out of panic, but out of instinct. That instinct alone would accelerate the problem.

Within a very short period of time, the situation would shift from inconvenience to scarcity.

And scarcity changes behavior.

* * * Ahem...

In a city as densely populated as New York, even a small imbalance between supply and demand becomes amplified. There are simply too many people relying on too little space, too few resources, and too many assumptions about how things are supposed to work. When those assumptions break down, the psychological impact can be just as dangerous as the physical one.

Another factor that often gets overlooked is movement—or more accurately, the lack of it. People tend to believe that if things get bad, they can just leave. It’s a comforting idea, but in a place like New York, it’s not realistic. The city’s layout doesn’t allow for easy evacuation under pressure. Bridges and tunnels act as bottlenecks, and highways leading out can become congested within hours, if not sooner.

Once traffic stops moving, it doesn’t gradually improve—it locks in place. Cars become obstacles instead of transportation. And when people start abandoning them, the situation becomes even more chaotic. Movement shifts from organized to unpredictable, with thousands of individuals trying to find their own way out at the same time.

At that point, the city changes in a way that’s difficult to reverse.

It becomes quieter, but not in a peaceful sense. The usual background noise—traffic, conversation, music—fades, replaced by something more irregular and harder to interpret. Distant sounds carry further. Small disturbances feel larger. And the sense of anonymity that normally defines the city begins to disappear, replaced by a heightened awareness of everyone around you.

That’s often when the real tension begins.

Because once people understand that the system isn’t coming back quickly, priorities shift. Survival becomes more immediate, more personal. And in a place where millions of people are facing the same realization at the same time, even small conflicts can escalate faster than expected.

New York doesn’t need a catastrophic event to become dangerous. It only needs a disruption that lasts long enough for people to lose confidence in the system.

And once that confidence is gone, it’s very difficult to restore.

2. Los Angeles, California — Distance Becomes a Problem

If New York’s vulnerability comes from density, Los Angeles presents a different kind of risk—one that isn’t immediately obvious because it’s spread out over a much larger area. At first glance, that might seem like an advantage. More space, more routes, more options. But in reality, that distance is exactly what makes the city difficult to navigate in a crisis.

Los Angeles is built around movement. Not just casually, but fundamentally. Daily life depends on the ability to travel—often long distances—between home, work, and essential services. Without reliable transportation, the city doesn’t function the way it’s supposed to. It fragments.

In a collapse scenario, that fragmentation would happen quickly.

Fuel shortages alone would be enough to disrupt the entire system. Even before fuel runs out completely, the perception that it might become scarce would trigger a rush. Long lines at gas stations would form almost immediately, and within a short time, availability would become inconsistent. Some areas might still have access, while others would not, creating uneven conditions across the city.

That unevenness is where problems begin to grow.

Because when people don’t have equal access to resources, tension increases—not just between individuals, but between different parts of the same city. Movement becomes restricted, not by official barriers, but by practical limitations. And when people can’t move freely, their options start to narrow.

Water is another critical factor that adds pressure to the situation. Los Angeles depends heavily on imported water, transported from distant sources through a complex infrastructure system. If that system is disrupted, even partially, the consequences wouldn’t be immediate collapse—but a steady, escalating problem that becomes harder to manage over time.

Unlike food, which people might ration early, water tends to become urgent more quickly. And once access becomes uncertain, behavior shifts in a way that’s difficult to control.

What makes Los Angeles particularly concerning in a long-term scenario is the way time works against it. The city doesn’t necessarily break all at once. Instead, it deteriorates in stages. At first, people adapt. They adjust routines, conserve resources, find temporary solutions. But as the situation continues without resolution, those adjustments become harder to maintain.

Fatigue sets in.

And fatigue changes how people think.

Decisions become shorter-term, more reactive. Patience decreases. Cooperation becomes less reliable. And as more people reach that point, the overall stability of the environment begins to decline.

By the time the situation becomes openly dangerous, it often feels like it happened gradually—even though the underlying causes were present from the beginning.

Los Angeles doesn’t collapse in a dramatic way.

It wears down.

And by the time people realize how serious the situation has become, many of the options they thought they had are already gone.

If the first places on this list feel dangerous because of people, the next ones are different in a way that’s harder to ignore. Here, it’s not just density or infrastructure that works against you, but the environment itself—geography, climate, and the kind of risks that don’t wait for society to weaken before they become a problem. In these places, even in normal times, there’s already a quiet tension beneath the surface, a sense that things are being held together with more effort than most people realize.

And when that effort disappears, the situation doesn’t just become unstable—it becomes unforgiving.

3. New Orleans, Louisiana — A City That Can Disappear Overnight

There’s something about New Orleans that feels different even on a normal day. It’s not just the culture or the history, but the awareness—subtle, almost unspoken—that the city exists in a place where it probably shouldn’t. Much of it sits below sea level, protected not by natural elevation, but by systems that have to work perfectly to keep everything in place. Levees, pumps, barriers—structures that hold back something much stronger than themselves.

And as long as those systems function, life goes on.

But in a collapse scenario, the assumption that those systems will keep working becomes a risk in itself.

Unlike other cities where failure unfolds gradually, New Orleans carries the possibility of sudden, overwhelming change. A major storm doesn’t need much warning, and without reliable infrastructure or coordinated response, even a manageable event can escalate into something far more destructive. Water doesn’t negotiate. It doesn’t slow down out of consideration. When it comes in, it takes space immediately and completely.

What makes the situation more unsettling is how quickly familiar surroundings can become unrecognizable. Streets turn into channels, neighborhoods into isolated pockets, and movement becomes not just difficult, but dangerous. Even small changes in water levels can cut off entire areas, making escape routes unreliable or nonexistent.

In a functioning society, emergency services, coordinated evacuations, and resource distribution help manage these risks. But without that structure, individuals are left to navigate conditions that are constantly changing and increasingly hostile. The difference between a safe area and a dangerous one can shift in hours, sometimes minutes.

There’s also a psychological factor that often goes unnoticed until it’s too late. When people are surrounded by an environment that feels unstable, their sense of control begins to erode. Decisions become reactive rather than planned, and the margin for error becomes smaller with each passing hour. In a place like New Orleans, where the line between stability and disaster is already thin, that loss of control accelerates everything.

It’s not just about surviving the initial event. It’s about what comes after—limited clean water, damaged infrastructure, reduced access to supplies, and an environment that doesn’t return to normal quickly, if at all. Recovery, even under ideal conditions, takes time. Without support, that time stretches into something much more uncertain.

New Orleans isn’t just vulnerable.

It’s exposed.

4. San Francisco, California — When the Ground Itself Isn’t Stable

San Francisco presents a different kind of unease, one that doesn’t come from water or distance, but from something far less predictable. The ground beneath the city isn’t as stable as it appears, and that fact alone changes how you have to think about long-term safety. Earthquakes aren’t constant, but they don’t need to be. The possibility is always there, quiet and invisible, waiting for the right conditions.

In everyday life, it’s easy to ignore that risk. Buildings stand, roads function, and the city moves with its usual rhythm. But in a collapse scenario, the ability to respond to a major seismic event becomes severely limited. Infrastructure that might otherwise be repaired quickly remains damaged. Services that would normally be restored in hours or days stay offline indefinitely.

And when that happens, the city doesn’t just pause—it fractures.

San Francisco’s layout adds another layer of complexity. It’s a dense urban environment built on uneven terrain, with limited space and a high dependence on external resources. There’s very little room for expansion, very little flexibility in how the city can adapt under pressure. When systems fail, there aren’t many alternatives.

A significant earthquake in an already unstable situation wouldn’t just cause physical damage. It would disrupt everything that people rely on to maintain order—transportation, communication, access to basic necessities. Roads could become impassable, not just from debris, but from structural instability. Bridges, which connect the city to surrounding areas, could become unusable, effectively isolating large portions of the population.

Isolation, in that context, becomes more than just an inconvenience.

It becomes a serious risk.

Another factor that makes San Francisco particularly challenging is its cost of living. In normal times, that translates into economic pressure. In a collapse scenario, it means many people have fewer reserves—less stored food, fewer backup resources, less margin for unexpected disruption. When the system fails, there isn’t much of a buffer.

And then there’s the atmosphere itself. San Francisco often feels enclosed, not in a physical sense, but in a psychological one. The combination of dense development, surrounding water, and limited escape routes creates a subtle sense of containment. In normal conditions, it’s part of the city’s character. But in a crisis, that same feeling can become something else entirely.

Something more restrictive.

Because when movement becomes limited and the environment becomes unpredictable, the sense of being able to leave—of having options—starts to disappear.

And once that happens, people begin to act differently.

San Francisco doesn’t just face the risk of collapse.

It faces the risk of being cut off in the middle of it.

By the time you get to this point, a pattern starts to form. Not the kind that’s obvious at first glance, but something deeper—the realization that collapse doesn’t look the same everywhere, yet it always leads to the same kind of silence. Not peace, not calm… just the absence of what used to be normal.

And sometimes, the most unsettling places aren’t the ones that fall apart suddenly, but the ones that already feel like they’re halfway there.

5. Detroit, Michigan — When Collapse Isn’t Sudden… It’s Familiar

Detroit is different from the other places on this list in a way that’s difficult to ignore once you think about it long enough. It doesn’t rely on a single point of failure, or one overwhelming risk that could trigger everything at once. Instead, it carries something slower, something that has already been unfolding for years—a gradual weakening of systems, a steady loss of structure, a kind of quiet erosion that doesn’t attract attention until it becomes impossible to reverse.

In some areas, that process is already visible. Entire neighborhoods that feel disconnected from the rest of the city, buildings left empty long enough that they no longer look temporary, streets where movement is limited not because of traffic, but because there’s simply less reason for people to be there. It creates an atmosphere that’s hard to describe unless you’ve experienced it directly—something between absence and tension, as if the space itself remembers what used to exist there.

And that’s what makes Detroit unsettling in a collapse scenario.

Because when something is already weakened, it doesn’t take much to push it further.

Unlike cities that depend heavily on constant inflow, Detroit’s risks are tied more to what’s already missing. Economic instability, reduced infrastructure in certain areas, and a long-standing struggle to maintain consistency across the city create conditions where recovery is already uneven. In a full-scale collapse, that unevenness becomes more pronounced.

Some areas might hold together for a while. Others might deteriorate quickly.

And the gap between them becomes harder to navigate.

There’s also a psychological weight that comes with being in a place where decline isn’t entirely new. People adapt to difficult conditions over time, but that adaptation can work both ways. It can build resilience, but it can also normalize instability. When the line between “temporary problem” and “permanent change” has already blurred, it becomes harder to recognize when a situation has crossed into something more serious.

In Detroit, a collapse wouldn’t necessarily feel like a sudden break.

It would feel like a continuation.

A deepening of something that was already there.

And in some ways, that’s more dangerous than a rapid collapse, because it doesn’t trigger immediate action. It doesn’t create a clear moment where people decide to leave or change course. It lingers, stretches, and slowly removes options until there are very few left.

By the time it becomes undeniable, it’s often too late to react effectively.

Final Thoughts — The Places You Choose Matter More Than You Think

There’s a common idea that survival in a collapse scenario depends mostly on preparation—having supplies, having a plan, knowing what to do when things go wrong. And while all of that matters, it overlooks something more fundamental.

Where you are when it begins matters just as much, if not more.

Because no amount of preparation fully compensates for being in the wrong environment.

What all of these places have in common isn’t just risk. It’s dependency—on systems, on infrastructure, on conditions that have to remain stable for everything else to function. When those conditions disappear, the transition isn’t smooth. It’s abrupt, uneven, and often unpredictable.

New York shows how quickly density can turn pressure into chaos, how a system that feels powerful can become fragile the moment it stops moving. Los Angeles reveals how distance and dependency can isolate people, turning space into a barrier rather than an advantage. New Orleans stands as a reminder that nature doesn’t need permission to take over, and that some places exist on borrowed stability. San Francisco highlights how invisible risks—like the ground beneath your feet—can become decisive when there’s no capacity to respond. And Detroit, in its own way, demonstrates that collapse doesn’t always arrive suddenly. Sometimes, it’s already there, waiting to deepen.

The unsettling part is that none of these places feel dangerous in everyday life.

That’s what makes them so easy to overlook.

Because collapse doesn’t announce itself clearly. It doesn’t give you a perfect moment to act. It begins quietly, spreads unevenly, and only becomes obvious when enough has already changed that going back isn’t simple anymore.

And by then, your options are limited by where you started.

That doesn’t mean the situation is hopeless. It just means that awareness matters more than comfort, and realism matters more than assumption. The idea isn’t to live in fear, but to understand how different environments respond under pressure, and to think about what that means before it becomes necessary.

Because when everything else becomes uncertain, the one thing you can’t easily change… is your location.

And sometimes, that’s the difference between adapting to a situation—and being trapped inside it.

Tyler Durden Mon, 04/13/2026 - 22:35

Marjorie Taylor Greene Predicts GOP "Slaughter" In November

After six years as one of Donald Trump's most reliable foot soldiers, Marjorie Taylor Greene has made it clear that she's done - not just with Trump personally, but with what she believes the Republican Party is about to become, and is pretty much predicting disaster for them.

“Republicans are going to get slaughtered in the midterms," Greene told Politico in a new interview, warning the party stands to lose the House and possibly the Senate. She says she's been making that prediction since early 2025, but that nobody wanted to hear it then. 

Greene resigned from Congress in late 2025, following a rather public break with Trump over the administration’s mishandling of the Epstein files. Reports also surfaced that Trump privately urged her not to pursue a Senate bid - something she denies. 

Whatever the backstory, the relationship between her and Trump has soured, and she now counts herself among Trump's most persistent critics, often sounding more like a Democrat than a Republican.

Trump’s recent rhetoric on Iran appears to be the latest flashpoint.

When the president posted on Truth Social that "a complete civilization could perish tonight, never to be restored," Greene reacted with alarm rather than applause. "I was so shocked by his statement of taking out an entire civilization of people," she said. "To me, that displayed a severe mental state." She went further than most - calling the rhetoric "evil and madness" and joining many in the Democratic Party expressing openness to invoking the 25th Amendment.

Trump's approach, however, did produce results: Pakistan announced a two-week ceasefire in the aftermath. Whether that justifies the language is a matter Greene has already settled in her own mind.

Her critique extends beyond Iran. Greene argues that "MAGA" has become whatever Trump personally declares it to mean - a shifting standard with no fixed ideology. 

She describes the Republican base as fragmented, divided among "America First" voters, traditional conservatives, self-described MAGA Republicans, and more moderate voters increasingly disoriented by a party they no longer fully recognize. 

"I'll say this: This pro-war, the neocon, whatever this new gross version of MAGA is, it's not going to last because the younger generations just don't support it,” she claimed. 

The polling doesn't yet support the civil war narrative — certainly not on Iran specifically.

CNN's early-March survey found that 59% of all Americans disapproved of the Iran strikes. Democrats came in at 82% disapproval, and independents at 68%. Republicans, by contrast, approved at 77%. Among MAGA Republicans specifically, the numbers are even more striking — 30 points more "strongly approve" than non-MAGA GOP voters, 34 points more confident the strikes will neutralize Iran's threat, and nearly 50 points more certain that Trump was right to use force. 83% of Republicans say they trust that Trump has a plan. That is a coalition holding together, not fracturing under the weight of Greene's discontent.

In almost every way, Greene seems intent on amplifying Democratic Party messaging on various issues, even those not directly related to Trump, in the recent special election in Georgia for her former seat, which Republican Clay Fuller won by 12 points, a margin 25 points smaller than the one she had won by in 2024. She even suggested that Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) could survive reelection. 

Whatever her intentions, Greene has become the left's favorite Republican — not because they respect her, but because she's useful. When your sharpest attacks on a sitting Republican president are getting amplified by CNN and Democratic strategists, the label writes itself.

Tyler Durden Mon, 04/13/2026 - 22:10

New York Versus The Nuns: The Dominican Sisters Face Penalties For Refusing To Yield On Religious Values

Authored by Jonathan Turley via jonathanturley.org,

New York has been a godsend for gun rights in passing a series of unconstitutional limits on Second Amendment rights only to result in major adverse rulings. It may soon do the same for the free exercise of religion. New York is now going head-to-head with a group of Dominican nuns over a law challenged as unconstitutional. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state are being sued over a law that forces religious organizations to adhere to LGBTQ policies.  

Mother Marie Edward, O.P., explained to Fox News Digital that they will not set their faith aside under the threat of fines, loss of licensing and even jail time. She noted that they ask nothing from the state and ask to be allowed to offer charity without abandoning their religious principles:

“We are consecrated religious Sisters and have one mission. It is to provide comfort and skilled care to persons dying of cancer who cannot afford nursing care. We do not take insurance or government funds or money from our patients or families. The care is totally free…

We are supported by the goodness of our benefactors. We do this without discriminating on the basis of race, religion, or sex. We do it because Jesus taught us that, when the least among us are sick, we should care for them, as if they were Christ himself.”

The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, who run Rosary Hill Home in Hawthorne, New York, objected that the law requires them to assign rooms by gender identity, not biological sex; allow access to opposite-sex bathrooms and coerce speech recognizing identities and relationships that violate Catholic values. It would also require staff training on gender ideology and the posting a public notice stating compliance with these demands.

According to a press release from the Catholic Benefits Association, the  New York State Department of Health sent the first in a series of “Dear Administrator” letters to the Hawthorne Dominicans’ Rosary Hill Home demanding compliance despite their religious objections. The nuns note that they have never had a single complaint filed over the treatment of its residents.

If they do not comply, the nuns face fines up to $2,000 per violation that increase up to $10,000 as well as the loss of licensing and up to one year in prison.

Hochul remains committed to compelling the nuns to comply — a position that may prove costly with Catholic voters in the upcoming election.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly struck down anti-discrimination laws compelling speech or conduct in violation of religious values.

For example, in Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania (2020), the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of the Little Sisters of the Poor, allowing the Catholic nuns to refuse to provide contraceptive coverage in their health plans.

Tyler Durden Mon, 04/13/2026 - 20:55

Masters Prize Money Soars To Record High: Here's What Golfers Actually Earned

The 2026 Masters delivered golf’s richest payday yet, with a record-shattering $22.5 million purse at Augusta National. This year’s champion, Rory McIlroy, scored a career-highlight $4.5 million, the largest winner’s share in tournament history, as the total prize fund rose $1.5 million from last year and a remarkable $7.5 million since 2022, according to Fox Business.

Rory Mcllroy

Runner-up Scottie Scheffler took home $2.43 million. Even deeper in the field, players who made the cut but finished outside the top 50 earned at least $55,250, with payouts tapering from there. Those who missed the cut still walked away with a guaranteed $25,000 each, Fox Business reported.

McIlroy finished at 12 under par for a one-stroke triumph at Augusta National, adding another major title to his growing legacy and cementing his place among the game's elite. President Donald Trump quickly offered high praise, posting on Truth Social: “Congratulations to Rory McIlroy on another Great Championship, The Masters! He performed tremendously under intense pressure, something which few people would be able to even think about doing. With each year, Rory is becoming more and more a LEGEND!”

pic.twitter.com/ArUiUMoVj1

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 12, 2026

Trump then pointed to McIlroy’s next stop, saying he’s eager to see him compete at Doral in Florida.

“I look forward to watching him compete in two weeks at Doral. The quality of Professional Golfers today has become extraordinary, each and every one of them. They should all be proud of the way they played at The Masters this weekend!”

Trump and McIlroy's relationship goes back over a decade. The president was on hand when the Irshman appeared at the 2016 World Golf Championships-Cadillac Championship at Trump National Doral Blue Monster Course in Doral.

 

Tyler Durden Mon, 04/13/2026 - 20:30

Hong Kong And The Quiet Rewiring Of The Dollar System

Authored by Peter C. Earle, Ph.D,

Hong Kong’s decision to move forward with its first stablecoin issuer licenses may prove to be about far more than digital payments. With HSBC and a Standard Chartered-led venture among the first approved issuers under the Hong Kong Monetary Authority’s new framework, the city is placing major regulated banks at the center of the next phase of monetary technology. Stablecoins remain overwhelmingly USD- and US Treasury-denominated, with more than 90 percent of the market’s roughly $300 billion capitalization tied to the US Treasury by one or the other, but the more important long-term story may be Asia’s role in transforming stablecoins from simple crypto settlement tools into the foundation of a real-time, on-chain foreign exchange and collateral ecosystem. In monetary terms, this is one more step in the migration of fiat liabilities from legacy banking rails onto programmable bearer-like instruments, a development with potentially profound implications for currency competition, reserve demand, and the future topology of the international monetary order.

The immediate effect of Hong Kong dollar stablecoins is easy to see: faster, cheaper, and programmable movement of HKD liquidity across exchanges, wallets, and cross-border commercial networks. The more consequential implication is that Asia may become the proving ground for blockchain-native FX and eurocurrency-style offshore liquidity markets, but in tokenized form. The region already hosts the world’s densest trade, remittance, and supply chain corridors, making it the natural venue for the next generation of synthetic money markets. Once local currency stablecoins begin operating under credible legal frameworks - HKD today, possibly Singapore dollars, offshore yuan proxies, and other regional currencies tomorrow - firms could increasingly swap tokenized fiat claims instantly on shared rails instead of relying on correspondent banks, delayed settlement windows, and multiple layers of intermediary fees. Economically, this reduces transaction frictions, compresses spreads, and lowers the velocity drag traditionally imposed by cross-border settlement risk.

Yet this is what makes Hong Kong’s move strategically significant: Hong Kong’s currency board peg to the US dollar gives an HKD stablecoin an unusual dual identity. It remains a local currency instrument that borrows much of its credibility from its dollar link. That makes it a natural bridge between the existing dollarized stablecoin universe and a more plural currency architecture. Hong Kong is not really challenging dollar stablecoin dominance so much as creating a regulated side door into it, while also building optionality should regional trade blocs increasingly seek invoicing diversity. Because the HKD already trades in a tightly managed band against the greenback, an HKD token can function akin to a dollar settlement instrument – a quasi-dollar - for Asian commerce while preserving local currency denomination. In the larger dedollarization trend, it’s less about displacing the dollar as reserve money than about disaggregating the mechanisms through which dollar liquidity is accessed, transferred, and rehypothecated.

A more interesting take is that Asia may not be driving dedollarization so much as a competitive fiat pluralization under “shadow dollar” pricing. Dollar stablecoins such as Tether and USD Coin succeeded because users in emerging markets wanted a portable, digitally native dollar substitute - effectively a market response to weak domestic monetary institutions. What Hong Kong now points toward is the next evolutionary step: using the same blockchain infrastructure not merely to store dollars, but to exchange among currencies continuously, cheaply, and at near-instant speed. That could make foreign exchange itself – paradoxically, one of the world’s largest and most liquid but still infrastructure-heavy markets - more programmable, accessible, and dramatically faster. In that sense, stablecoins increasingly resemble a privately intermediated digital version of the classical gold exchange standard’s layered settlement logic: local claims circulating atop a trusted reserve anchor, except the anchor today is fiat credibility rather than specie.

There are, as always, risks. HKD stablecoins inherit not only the strengths but also the vulnerabilities of their native Hong Kong peg. Any future reassessment of the linked exchange rate system, however unlikely in the near term, would immediately raise questions about reserve composition, redemption certainty, duration mismatch, and collateral quality/sufficiency. That is precisely why Hong Kong’s emphasis on high-quality liquid reserves, segregated accounts, and bank-led issuance matters so much. The intent is clearly to make stablecoins an extension of trusted monetary plumbing rather than an exogenous, arguably speculative, parallel system. For sound money observers, the key issue is whether these instruments remain genuinely redeemable claims on short-duration, high-quality assets, or whether they gradually become another layer of maturity transformation disguised as digital certainty.

The larger point is that Asia’s real comparative advantage in stablecoins may not lie in issuing yet another dollar token. It may lie in building the first credible internet-native foreign exchange market, where local currencies, dollar proxies, and trade settlement instruments move across the same interoperable rails. Viewed this way, Hong Kong’s recent action is less a crypto story than a primal blueprint for how Asia could modernize the foreign exchange architecture of global commerce while subtly reshaping the channels through which dollar dominance is exercised. This is one important piece of the broader reserve currency puzzle: not the end of dollar primacy, but the emergence of new transactional layers beneath it.

A more provocative angle is that the future of stablecoins in Asia may not be about replacing the dollar, but about forcing a competition between fiat systems, gold-linked alternatives, and dollar proxies on rails where settlement quality, collateral transparency, and convertibility matter more than empty rhetoric or hopeful economic projections. In that sense, Hong Kong’s move is only the latest in an ongoing global search for a post-Bretton Woods III monetary architecture; one in which trust is increasingly measured not by sovereign declaration alone, but by the quality, liquidity, and auditability of the assets standing behind digital claims.

Peter C. Earle, Ph.D is Director of Economics, AIER

Tyler Durden Mon, 04/13/2026 - 20:05

Federal Judge Dismisses Trump's Defamation Lawsuit Against The Wall Street Journal Over Epstein Birthday Letter Report

A federal judge in Miami dismissed President Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal (and related defendants including its parent company Dow Jones and Rupert Murdoch) on April 13, 2026, ruling that the complaint failed to adequately plead the “actual malice” standard required for public figures.

President Donald Trump departs the White House on March 11, 2026. Madalina Kilroy/The Epoch Times

U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles issued a 17-page order dismissing the case without prejudice, meaning Trump’s legal team can file an amended complaint by April 27, 2026. The judge emphasized that the original filing relied on “conclusory” and “formulaic” allegations of malice and fell short of the high legal bar established by New York Times v. Sullivan.

Trump’s Response on Truth Social In a post on Truth Social shortly after the ruling, President Trump stated:

“Our powerful case against The Wall Street Journal, and other defendants, was asked to be re-filed by the Judge. It is not a termination, it is a suggested re-filing, and we will be, as per the Order, re-filing an updated lawsuit on or before April 27th.”

A spokesman for Trump’s legal team echoed this, saying:

“President Trump will follow Judge Gayles’s ruling and guidance to refile this powerhouse lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and all of the other Defendants. The President will continue to hold accountable those who traffic in Fake News to mislead the American People.”

Background on the Lawsuit Trump filed the roughly $10 billion lawsuit in July 2025, shortly after The Wall Street Journal published its July 17, 2025, article. The story reported on a leather-bound birthday album compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003. It included a sexually suggestive letter - allegedly bearing Trump’s signature and featuring a drawing of a naked woman - that reportedly contained typewritten text ending with “Happy Birthday - and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Trump has consistently denied authoring or signing the letter, calling it fake. White House officials, including press secretary Karoline Leavitt and deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich, publicly rejected the story in September 2025 after additional materials surfaced.

Judge’s Reasoning Judge Gayles noted that The Wall Street Journal had sought comment from Trump (who denied involvement), the Justice Department (no response), and the FBI (declined to comment) before publication. The article itself included Trump’s denial. The judge wrote that these facts undermined claims that the newspaper ignored contradictory evidence or acted with reckless disregard for the truth—the core elements of actual malice.

The court declined at this stage to rule on whether the statements in the article were actually true or false, calling those factual disputes better suited for later proceedings if an amended complaint is filed.

A Dow Jones spokesperson told multiple outlets: “We are pleased with the judge’s decision to dismiss this complaint. We stand behind the reliability, rigor and accuracy of The Wall Street Journal’s reporting.”

The case remains ongoing pending any amended filing. This dismissal is procedural and does not resolve the underlying factual dispute over the authenticity of the 2003 letter.

Tyler Durden Mon, 04/13/2026 - 19:40

Biden FDA Knew About COVID Vaccine Stroke Risk And Kept Americans In The Dark

Senate investigators spent months reviewing roughly 2,000 pages of federal records. What they found is damning. FDA and CDC officials under the Biden administration identified a significant stroke risk tied to Pfizer's COVID-19 bivalent booster in seniors - and never breathed a word to the public.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), chairman of the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, sent a formal letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. laying out the evidence. He wasn't speculating. He was citing the government's own files.

"HHS records show that as early as October 2022, federal health officials identified a potential connection between the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 bivalent booster and ischemic stroke for individuals over the age of 65," Johnson wrote.

An ischemic stroke means a blockage of blood to the brain. Between November 2022 and March 2023, seven separate analyses of incoming data flagged the same stroke signal — specifically in adults over 65. CDC data cited by Johnson shows 226 stroke cases reported between August 2022 and February 2023, with additional cases surfacing throughout 2023 and 2024.

Despite the risk, the Biden administration issued no formal warnings. No Health Alert Network message. No changes to booster recommendations for seniors. Nothing.

Instead, in February 2023, HHS quietly hired a private contractor, Lukos LLC, to conduct a deeper internal investigation, dubbed "The Stroke Project." Publicly, officials kept insisting the vaccines were safe.

"From the initial detection of the safety signal in late 2022 … health officials continued to say the vaccine was safe while simultaneously searching for evidence to support that assertion,” Johnson said.

It gets worse. Federal officials drafted a communications plan about the stroke risk that included a "Tough Questions and Answers" section prepared for President-ish Biden and his White House team. During final edits, the description of the stroke signal was quietly changed from "moderately elevated" to "slightly elevated." Who made that change? Nobody knows. The language softened, the edit went unattributed, and the public remained in the dark.

The pattern is consistent. Senate investigators previously established that Biden officials also downplayed the risk of vaccine-induced myocarditis and kept that from the public. This wasn't a one-time failure. It was a system.

Here's what makes this cover-up even more infuriating. The Biden administration showed it was more than willing to pull the plug on a vaccine when it wanted to. 

In April 2021, officials paused the Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) vaccine due to blood clot concerns. The controversial move was pitched as proof of the administration’s commitment to safety. At the time of the pause, six cases of severe blood clots had been reported out of nearly 7 million doses administered. So when 226 stroke cases surfaced tied to Pfizer's bivalent booster in the most vulnerable seniors, the same administration did nothing. That double standard wasn't accidental; it was deliberate.

The fallout from that kind of institutional betrayal is hard to overstate. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, fewer than half of all Americans now trust the CDC and FDA to operate free from political or special-interest influence. 

Tyler Durden Mon, 04/13/2026 - 18:50

The Case Against Public-Sector Unions

Authored by Aaron White via RealClearPolicy,

America’s public-sector unions have a problem they can’t explain away: Workers are leaving.

Ask a public employee when they joined their union and most couldn’t tell you. Because they didn’t join. The dues just started coming out of their check.

That’s not a membership, and for decades nobody told workers they could opt out.

That changed in 2018, when the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed in Janus v. AFSCME that no government employee can be forced to join or pay dues to a labor union.

Hundreds of thousands opted out the moment they found out— the Freedom Foundation alone has helped more than 265,000 workers exercise their First Amendment rights since the ruling was issued.

Union leaders don’t talk about that number.

For decades, public-sector unions ran on automatic - automatic dues collection, automatic membership, automatic political spending - whether the worker wanted it or not.

The National Education Association confiscated $390 million in dues revenue during the most recent fiscal year from nearly 2.9 million members - most of it seized directly from taxpayer-funded paychecks before the workers could even see it.

In California alone, public education unions are estimated to collect more than $800 million per year. That money doesn’t come from convincing workers the union is worth it. It comes from a system designed so workers never had to be asked.

When the Supreme Court exposed their scheme in Janus, unions had to find other ways to keep the cash spigot open — including literally criminalizing their opposition.

Oregon, for example, effectively passed a law last year making it illegal to send public employees a mailer explaining their right to opt out. In theory, the law only bans marketing materials whose sender attempts to deceive the recipient into believing it was sent by their union. But in practice, the legislation is written so broadly that a left-leaning judge could easily construe nearly any outreach to union members as such an impersonation, subjecting the sender to potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.

To be clear, the law is specifically intended to thwart the Freedom Foundation, which has helped thousands of public-sector union members in Oregon opt out of their union. And other blue states are following suit.

New York lawmakers are currently considering an identical bill. In Hawaii, a similar measure has already cleared its second legislative committee.

The bills use the same language because the same people are writing them. Union-backed legislators, coordinating across state lines, are abusing their power to impose laws designed to prevent workers from understanding their First Amendment rights.

If you have to pass a law to stop people from finding out they can leave, you've already lost the argument.

This is Big Labor’s playbook. Unions are forging worker signatures on membership applications, signing people up without asking them, then taking dues from their paychecks. When workers try to resign, the union hands them documents they'd never seen, let alone signed.

Chaquan May, a California caregiver and mother, described what happened when she first encountered SEIU 2015 representatives at an orientation for newly hired in-home healthcare providers. “They locked us in a room,” she said. “One of the head union workers hovered over me at the table and stood there and told me, ‘What are you waiting for? Just sign it.’ I honestly felt scared and just went ahead and signed it out of fear.”

The Freedom Foundation has filed a class-action lawsuit against SEIU 2015 on behalf of May and a dozen other workers like her.

Meanwhile, the NEA’s president pulled in more than $514,000 in salary last year — a pay raise of $80,000 since she took office.

The union reported more than $51 million in disbursements for political activities and lobbying in the same period. The NEA and the American Federation of Teachers have together put $43.5 million into political organizations since 2022.

This is what the dues are for. Not the worker, the machine.

The reforms are commonsense:

• make re-enrollment annual and affirmative — if a worker wants to belong, they sign up every year
• end automatic payroll deductions so dues are a visible, conscious transaction
• require unions to disclose political spending the same way corporations have to 

These are exactly the kinds of reforms Oregon, New York and Hawaii are working to prevent — not by defeating them in debate, but by making it illegal to tell workers such options exist.

Unions that fight every one of those reforms are telling you the membership numbers don't hold up if workers get a real vote. The hundreds of thousands of workers who left after Janus proved it.

The fight now is making sure that choice stays real, and that the people trying to take it away don’t succeed one forged signature, one locked room and one state legislature at a time.

Aaron Withe is the CEO of the Freedom Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting workers' rights and advancing employee freedom across America.

Tyler Durden Mon, 04/13/2026 - 18:25