Trump Calls On Senate To Pass Bill Making Daylight Saving Time Permanent

Authored by Jack Phillips via The Epoch Times,

President Donald Trump on Friday morning urged Senate Republicans to pass a bill that makes daylight saving time permanent, coming months after the measure cleared the House of Representatives.

President Donald Trump at U.N. Headquarters in New York City on Sept. 22, 2026. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

"A ridiculous Clock changing process that takes place twice a year, costs our Country a fortune, is bad for Crime, stress on people, Sports, and just about everything else you can imagine," Trump said in a long Truth Social post early Friday.

He added that people don't want to change their clocks while asserting that "most people like having an hour of extra sunlight in the evening, rather than in the morning."

The House in July passed the measure, dubbed the Sunshine Protection Act, on a 308-117 vote before sending it to the Senate for approval. But the bill has not been considered.

"It is foolish, inconvenient and, in some cases, very costly. For Cities and States with Watchtowers, and hard to reach places, it costs Millions of Dollars. A recent case was made that it is also bad for your health in the anxiety it creates," the president said.

Blaming Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) for holding up the bill, Trump wrote that the bill has bipartisan support. "Democrats and Republicans want it to happen. It's now up to the U.S. Senate where it would be another Great Bipartisan Victory," he added.

Last year, Cotton told the Senate that he would oppose the measure and said a similar measure was repealed in the mid-1970s.

In 1973, Congress passed a law instituting permanent daylight saving time for what was supposed to be a trial period from January 1974 to April 1975. It lasted until October, when it was repealed. Among the concerns was worry that schoolchildren would have to start the school day without daylight.

"While briefly popular, it proved deeply unpopular when reality set in," Cotton said, adding that polls taken at the time show that support for permanent daylight saving time dropped by 30 percentage points in three months.

"Only a few weeks after it was implemented, it was underwater. Congress beat a hasty retreat, repealing the law and changing the clocks back in October. What was supposed to be a two-year experiment ended in abject failure after less than one year."

Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) said he's also concerned about that. He said that it would be dark past 9:30 a.m. in some areas of his state. "You'd be sending kids to school in the dark," he told The Associated Press last year.

Before it was passed in the House, some Democratic lawmakers including Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) explained why they supported the Sunshine Protection Act.

The measure, Pallone said in July, would deal with "an issue on which many Americans actually agree," adding that only around 12 percent of Americans want to switch their clocks twice per year.

"Far more Americans recognize that the practice is inconvenient and, frankly, disruptive," he said.

Cotton's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 20:00

Bolsonaro Leads As Brazil Election Heads Toward Runoff; Traders Brace For Monday Volatility

Summary: 

• Datafolha Says Election Headed For Runoff 
• Right-Wing Bolsonaro Leads Socialist Lula
• Polling closed at 4 pm local time 
• Brazil Votes In Tight Presidential Election With South America's Future On The Line

Bolsonaro Leads But Headed For Election Runoff 

Brazil's presidential election is headed for a runoff on Oct. 25.

Right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro held about 47.8% of the vote against President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva's 44.2%, with roughly 92.3% of ballots counted.

Paulo Abreu, founding partner and portfolio manager at Rio de Janeiro-based Mantaro Capital, told Bloomberg he expected a strong opening for Brazilian assets on Monday morning, saying investors had been lightly positioned for the result.

"Tomorrow will be a much better day than even the most optimistic investors had expected," Abreu said, adding that the outcome would encourage investors to increase their exposure.

Currency futures trading on CME also signaled expectations of a stronger real, with the quoted exchange rate moving to about 5.01 from Friday's close of 5.25.

Brendan McKenna, an emerging-markets strategist at Societe Generale, expects the Brazilian real to jump 4% to 5% on Monday following Bolsonaro's first-round lead.

"Assuming no new scandals, always possible, and Bolsonaro is set to win the runoff, I think local assets can continue to rally into the second round, he said.

Bloomberg reporter Beatriz Reis wrote:

With more than 91% of ballots counted and Bolsonaro holding a surprise first-round lead, his campaign's theory suddenly looks more plausible: that some voters were reluctant to publicly admit they planned to back the right-wing senator. Whether that phenomenon actually explains the polling miss will take time to determine, but the result exposed support for Bolsonaro that pre-election surveys failed to fully capture.

Now the challenge flips for both campaigns. Lula has just three weeks to understand where he lost ground and win those voters back. Bolsonaro has to protect an advantage few expected him to have and prove that Sunday's surprise can survive all the way to the Oct. 25 runoff.

Polymarket:

Latest Election Development

Brazil's presidential election is headed for a runoff, Datafolha projected just moments ago, setting up a second-round contest between socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro on Oct. 25.

Latest Election Count

Right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro leads socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva 51.2% to 40.7%, with just 18.7% of votes counted in Brazil's first-round presidential election Sunday.

Polymarket:

Right-Wing Bolsonaro Leads Socialist Lula 

Polls closed at 4 p.m. Brazil time, and the latest figures from the Superior Electoral Court show right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro leading socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva 50.2% to 41.3%, with just 4.3% of votes counted in Brazil's first-round presidential election Sunday.

The preliminary results offer only a limited indication of the final outcome, with most votes still to be counted.

These preliminary results sent Bolsonaro's Polymarket odds soaring from 64% around 4 p.m. New York time to 77% around 4:43 p.m. Lula's odds on the betting platform cratered to just 23%.

Brazil Votes In Tight Presidential Election With South America's Future On The Line

Brazilians began voting earlier this morning in a statistically tied presidential election, with incumbent socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva holding a narrow polling lead over right-wing Senator Flávio Bolsonaro. Election results are expected later this evening, and the race is likely headed for a runoff later this month.

Lula and Bolsonaro are effectively deadlocked in a potential runoff. The latest AtlasIntel poll puts Lula at 47.6% against Bolsonaro's 47.4%, while Datafolha showed the incumbent ahead 47% to 46%. Quaest has Bolsonaro at 44% against Lula's 42%, within its two-point margin of error.

However, Polymarket bettors see a clearer favorite, giving Bolsonaro a 63.3% chance of winning versus 37% for Lula as of early Sunday morning.

Polls close nationwide at 5 p.m. Brazil time, or 4 p.m. in New York. Brazil's electronic voting system allows counting to begin immediately, with the electoral court expected to deliver a definitive result between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. Brazil time.

The race will determine whether Brazil continues down its destructive socialist path or cements what could be a once-in-a-generation political shift across South America, with the continent's largest economy potentially moving to the right. Recent elections in Colombia, Peru, Chile and other countries have shifted from left-wing regimes to right-wing governments.

We outlined on Friday the potential market impacts and expected volatility following the first-round results:

• Brazil Braces For Election Volatility As Bolsonaro Gains On Lula, Bullish Options Bets Explode

One notable chart shows that the Brazilian real's one-week implied volatility has jumped above 31%, its highest level since late 2022. That exceeds the one-month measure, which captures both voting rounds but remains below 25%, highlighting the extreme concentration of risk ahead of Sunday's vote.

"We expect the biggest surprise to come in the first round, with Flávio likely to finish ahead of Lula," Fabricio Taschetto, CIO at Ace Capital, wrote in a note. He added that the market reaction could exceed the move already priced into options.

Citigroup and JPMorgan analysts have told clients to use options that would benefit from a stronger real, while Brazilian hedge funds, including Ibiuna and Verde, have told clients they have positioned themselves with options for a potential stock rally.

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 19:54

"Very Concerning Safety Issues": Trump's mRNA-Skeptic FDA Drug Chief Was Mysteriously Fired - Right Before This Drug Was Approved

Within three months of firing Tracy Beth Høeg, its top drug regulator, the FDA had approved the first mRNA flu shot, cleared a Sanofi diabetes treatment for children that she had held up, and approved a twice-rejected melanoma drug whose maker went to the White House.

"I'm worried about approvals that we've seen recently, like the mRNA influenza vaccine," Høeg told journalist Paul Thacker in an interview posted Wednesday, citing "very concerning safety issues."

Of the melanoma drugmaker's White House meeting, she said: "I guess that's what you do now if you're angry that your product is not approved. One has to wonder, is it approved based on the data or do they just know the right people?"

Høeg still doesn't know who ordered her firing. When agency lawyers came to her office on May 15, three days after Commissioner Marty Makary was pushed out, she refused to resign. The lawyers told her the order came from "someone way above their pay grade."

The person who supposedly wrote her termination memo denies writing it or ever seeing it, she says. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. only learned of the firing after she was gone, the New York Times reported.

Thacker told Høeg his sources inside the Department of Health and Human Services say Chris Klomp effectively runs the department. The White House installed Klomp, the Medicare director, as HHS chief counselor in February. He also helped negotiate the administration's pricing deals with drugmakers.

Those sources say Klomp pushed out Makary and "probably" Høeg too, and that CEOs "have Chris Klomp on the phone all the time." "You're not the first person to suggest that to me," Høeg replied.

The day Høeg was fired, Reuters reported that Klomp was leading a push to clear controversial appointees out of the FDA. HHS told Reuters it does not comment on personnel matters.

Makary resigned on May 12 after other administration officials forced through flavored-vape authorizations he had opposed, CBS News reported. Politico reported that Kennedy made the final call on pushing him out. Drugmakers had soured on the agency's reversals on experimental drugs and vaccines and wanted a more predictable FDA, according to NPR.

Klomp's nomination as Kennedy's deputy cleared the Senate Finance Committee 15-12 last Thursday and awaits a floor vote. "I'm responsible for personnel, among other things," he told senators this month.

The mRNA shot

In February, with Makary leading the FDA and Vinay Prasad running its vaccine center, the agency refused even to review Moderna's application. About two weeks later, it reversed course and agreed to take it up.

Prasad left at the end of April, followed by Makary on May 12 and Høeg three days later. In June, the FDA's outside vaccine advisers voted unanimously to recommend the shot. On Aug. 5, the agency approved it as mFlusiva for adults 50 and older.

Moderna's trial of more than 40,000 adults found that the shot cut the odds of flu-like illness by 27% compared with a standard-dose vaccine. Neither the company nor FDA staff reviewers identified new or serious safety concerns. Approval for those 65 and older is conditional on a follow-up study.

"I don't think we can say that the benefits outweighed the harms," Høeg said, adding that she would probably detail her concerns later.

Held up, then approved

Sanofi's Tzield was first approved in 2022 to delay the onset of clinical type 1 diabetes in patients with early-stage disease. In October, Sanofi's bid to extend its use to newly diagnosed patients 8 and older entered Makary's new voucher program, which promises reviews in one to two months.

Career staff recommended approval, but Høeg disagreed, and Sanofi pulled the drug out of the fast-track program. The FDA missed its April 21 goal date, STAT reported.

On June 12, four weeks after Høeg was fired, the FDA granted Tzield accelerated approval for newly diagnosed patients 8 to 17. The decision was based on its effect on C-peptide, a marker of the body's own insulin production, rather than on a clinical outcome. No outside advisory committee weighed in. The drug's known risks include cytokine release syndrome and viral reactivation.

"That was supposed to go to an advisory committee," Høeg said. "And that's a drug that's given in children. And if you look at the pivotal clinical trial at that stage of the disease, there's no clear evidence of clinical benefit for these children with type 1 diabetes." Sanofi is running a confirmatory trial to support full approval.

A meeting at the White House

The FDA rejected Replimune's RP1, an engineered virus injected into melanoma tumors, in July 2025 and again in April. After the second rejection, the company took its case to the White House in early May, arguing that the decisions clashed with the administration's push to help terminally ill patients. The White House then pressed health officials to take another look, the Wall Street Journal reported. The White House declined to comment to the Journal.

On May 29, two weeks after Høeg was fired, Replimune announced that it would try a third time. Company officials had met with FDA and White House officials two days earlier. Its shares jumped as much as 70% in premarket trading.

In briefing documents, FDA reviewers argued that the way Replimune designed the trial and measured responses made it difficult to separate RP1's effect from that of Bristol Myers Squibb's Opdivo, which patients also received. The trial had no control arm. An outside panel sided with the company 10-3 on July 30. On Aug. 6, the FDA granted accelerated approval. Replimune set the list price at $450,000 per course.

"It went against everything the career staff had said about the limitations in the data," Høeg said.

Whose report was it?

Høeg's reputation as an mRNA skeptic dates to the pandemic. A 2021 study she led concluded that, for healthy teenage boys, the rate of heart inflammation after a second dose exceeded their four-month risk of being hospitalized with COVID. At the FDA, she reviewed reports of children who died after COVID vaccination and asked why the findings had never been made public.

Prasad's Nov. 28 memo, which set off the uproar, credited career staff in the FDA's pharmacovigilance office with finding that at least 10 children had died "after and because of" vaccination. When Høeg was fired, The Hill reported that she helped author the report, while CBS News reported that she helped write Prasad's memo. It was "the career staff, not me" who linked the 10 deaths to the vaccine, Høeg said.

The final staff review, dated Dec. 5 and made public by Sen. Ron Johnson in May, examined 96 pediatric deaths reported from 2021 to 2024. It rated two "probably" and five "possibly" related to vaccination. None was rated definitively related.

Johnson later released drafts showing how the assessment had changed. Høeg suggested that staff who had handled the cases for years had a vested interest in the deaths not coming to light. "Why are we sitting on them for years if they're concerning?" she asked. ZeroHedge detailed the fight over the review in May.

Still on sale

Tavneos is still on sale in the US, five months after Høeg's drug center moved to pull it. Amgen's pill for a rare autoimmune disease of the blood vessels was approved in 2021 on the strength of a single pivotal trial. The FDA had told its developer that the trial had to show the drug beat steroids at 52 weeks.

In January, the FDA asked Amgen to withdraw it voluntarily. Amgen declined. In April, the agency formally proposed withdrawal, saying unblinded study personnel had manipulated the trial's results and the application contained untrue statements of material fact. The FDA has also linked the drug to 76 cases of liver injury, including eight deaths.

On June 26, Europe's medicines committee recommended revoking the drug's license. Three days later, the New England Journal of Medicine retracted the pivotal trial at the request of its two academic authors. The journal said nine patients' results had been re-adjudicated after the data were unblinded, without the authors' knowledge. Britain stopped new patients from starting the drug in September.

"People have died taking this drug and we don't know if it works," Høeg said.

Amgen, which acquired the drug's developer, ChemoCentryx, for $3.7 billion in 2022, says it strongly disagrees with the proposal and has requested a hearing. It points to an independent re-analysis from Duke that it says supports the drug's efficacy.

Its own prescriber page states that superiority "was not demonstrated at week 52." Tavneos brought in $459 million last year, and first-quarter US sales rose 32% to $119 million.

Under federal law, the drug stays on the market until the FDA commissioner rules on Amgen's hearing request and on withdrawal. Since May, the agency has been led by acting commissioner Kyle Diamantas, a lawyer who oversaw food regulation. Trump's pick for the permanent job, White House aide Heidi Overton, had her confirmation hearing last week and is awaiting a vote.

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 19:30

Iran "Decision Week": Trump Teases "Easy Way Or Hard Way" As Tankers Burn, Rial Craters And Tehran's Oil Minister Quits

Seven months into the war, the Iran story has settled into a familiar loop: Tehran sets conditions, Washington rejects them, a tanker catches fire, oil stays at $100, repeat... then a modest de-escalation before markets open on Monday morning and reversal around Friday's closer. 

This weekend, though, felt different. Nearly every piece of the puzzle moved at once, and the man at the center of it all made clear that he has a decision to make.

"We have a decision that I'll make about Iran. Iran's been decimated. So the only question is, it'll either be the easy way or the hard way," President Trump told reporters outside the White House on Saturday. Asked what was coming, he offered the kind of non-answer that tends to precede actual answers, or even more non-answers: "If I told you, you'd have a major story, right? But you'll see."

Here is what happened over the weekend, and what to watch in the week ahead.

The Camp David War Council

The "you'll see" makes more sense in light of what happened on Friday. CBS News confirmed that the administration's entire Iran brain trust met at Camp David: Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, special envoy Steve Witkoff, CIA Director John Ratcliffe and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Dan Caine. Axios first reported the unannounced session, which Vance chaired. Two items were on the agenda: the Iran war, and the Saudi-Houthi war in Yemen that is now spilling into global oil routes (more below).

The White House has not said what was decided. One person familiar with the meeting told Axios that "things were decided or at least deeply discussed," which is a remarkably candid way of saying nothing, right about par for the course for an Axios "scoop." For context, the last time this crowd quietly decamped to the Maryland mountains to talk Iran was in June 2025. You may recall what followed (spoiler: it involved B-2s).

Meanwhile, the military is moving into position regardless. The USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group and the USS Makin Island amphibious group are heading to the Middle East with about 7,000 sailors and 2,000 Marines, due by the end of October. Bloomberg notes that this could give the US three carrier strike groups in the region, a concentration not seen since the opening phase of the Iraq war in 2003. Hegseth, for his part, called the US blockade of Iranian ports "ironclad."

We flagged the build-up when the third carrier was first announced in "Supertanker Ablaze After Iran Attack In Hormuz As US Deploys 10K More Troops & Third Carrier To Mideast" (Oct 1). Trump himself had been dropping hints for days:

*TRUMP ON IRAN: YOU WILL SEE THINGS HAPPENING VERY SOON *TRUMP: HISTORIC FLOWS OF OIL OUT OF HORMUZ IN LAST 3 DAYS

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 30, 2026

On timing, Trump told TIME last week that heavier strikes are "possible" after the Nov. 3 midterms. And according to Bloomberg, Iranian officials themselves see little chance of a deal before the vote and a "high chance of escalation" after it. So "decision week" may yet turn into "decision month" (this is still Washington, after all).

Bombers Out Of Britain

The other military headline came from England. The Pentagon confirmed on Sunday that all US bombers deployed to RAF Fairford, a dozen B-1Bs that had been used for strikes on Iran, have returned to their home stations in the United States. The move came a week after several men were arrested near the base on suspicion of preparing terrorist acts. The WSJ first reported the redeployment.

"While operational security precluded us from confirming the movement of our assets and forces in real-time, we can acknowledge now that all US bombers that were deployed to RAF Fairford have re-deployed to their home stations in the United States," a Pentagon spokesman wrote, per Reuters.

UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham said on Wednesday that Britain has "strong indications" Iran was involved in the plot. US intelligence describes an IRGC-linked handler recruiting British citizens for a multi-stage operation, starting with a diversion near the base. Trump said the plotters had planned "big damage," while Rubio pointed to the "hands of a foreign actor." Tehran called the accusations baseless and summoned the British ambassador. Five British suspects, plus a sixth with dual British-Iranian citizenship who was arrested in London, have all since been released on bail. Some UK officials have also questioned whether the plot was as sophisticated as US accounts make it sound.

The Pentagon insists that moving the bombers does not reduce its long-range strike capability. That is probably true: B-1s can reach Iran from the continental US with aerial refueling. It just takes a lot longer, and nobody has to worry about who is loitering near the fence line. Make of that what you will.

Two More Tankers Hit, And Hormuz "Will Not Be Opened"

On the water, the attacks continued. On Sunday the UK Maritime Trade Operations agency (UKMTO) reported two more tankers struck by unknown projectiles (CNBC). One was hit inside the Strait of Hormuz and suffered engine-room damage. The other, a crude carrier roughly four nautical miles east of Oman, was hit on its port side. All crew were reported safe and no environmental damage was reported. By SBS's count, that makes at least four incidents in October alone. The first was the 2.5-million-barrel supertanker set ablaze off Oman on Thursday, which Iran's Fars said was using an "unauthorized" route.

Fars reports that a 2.5 mm barrel supertanker that was traveling through the Strait of Hormuz "illegally" was hit 8 kilometers off the coast of Oman and is burning https://t.co/BzV5N87ZEi

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 1, 2026

UKMTO's latest weekly report counts 91 incidents of damage to vessels since February. Since July 6, 31 of 48 projectile strikes have happened along the southern Omani route, the US-facilitated corridor that much of the recovering Gulf traffic now uses.

Hours before the latest strikes, Iran restated its terms. Per Reuters, parliament speaker and chief negotiator Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said:

"The position of the Islamic Republic of Iran is completely clear and firm, and the Strait of Hormuz will not be opened until our seven conditions, based on the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, are met... [Washington] must understand that the period of dragging out the (diplomatic) process and dictating one-sided demands is over." (emphasis ours)

For anyone who has lost track, these are the seven conditions Tehran presented in September: (1) lift the maritime blockade; (2) restore Iran's frozen assets; (3) lift sanctions on Iranian oil exports; (4) halt all US actions "under the pretext of threats and military operations"; (5) end the war on Iran and its regional allies; (6) withdraw US forces from areas around Iran's borders; and (7) pay compensation for war damage and commit not to interfere with Iran's nuclear and missile capabilities. Translation: everything, plus reparations. So it is perhaps not a shock that Trump "promptly rejected" the seven-day reopening plan built on these terms.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said that the US counter-proposal, relayed via Qatar, is "more or less in line with their previous positions, specifically on the nuclear issue." He added that Tehran's focus "in this stage is the issue of the Strait of Hormuz," and denied that Iran had offered UN inspections in exchange for sanctions relief. One official briefed on the talks told Reuters that the dispute is about the sequencing of steps, not their content. Meanwhile, FM Abbas Araqchi warned that if the US "again move[s] towards military solutions, we are more prepared than before."

"Iran Zero": The Blockade Bites

The irony is that the strait Iran is "keeping shut" is increasingly open to everyone except Iran. As we laid out in "Gulf Exports Roar Back To Pre-War Levels, Goldman Says" (Sep 30), Goldman's commodity strategists estimate that Persian Gulf oil exports, including "dark exports," have effectively recovered to their 2025 average. Saudi Arabia led the rebound... while Iran fell below 20% of its 2025 level.

In this weekend's update for clients (available here for pro subs), Struyven, co-head of Goldman's global commodities research, put the latest number at 23.6mb/d, about 4mb/d of which is estimated dark exports. He added that "the data show no seaborne crude exports from Iran in September." JPMorgan, cited by Bloomberg, estimates Middle East crude shipments are back to 17.5mb/d, or 98% of pre-war levels. According to Bloomberg tanker tracking, Saudi crude exports jumped from 3.4mb/d in August to roughly 6.1mb/d in September.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent kept score in our earlier post "First Time In History": Bessent Says Iran Faces Zero Oil Revenue As Tanker Loadings Collapse: "barrels out of the Strait: U.S. about 1.1 billion, Iran zero... For the first time in history... they will have no oil on the water this week. They will have no revenue."

Which brings us to the man whose job was to produce that revenue.

The Oil Minister Who Had No Oil To Sell

Iran's oil minister Mohsen Paknejad resigned on Sunday. State media said the reasons were "personal." Hamid Bovard, chief executive of the National Iranian Oil Company, takes over as acting minister.

*IRAN’S OIL MINISTER MOHSEN PAKNEJAD RESIGNS: PRESS TV *IRAN PRESIDENT NAMES HAMID BOVARD ACTING OIL MINISTER:PRESS TV

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 4, 2026

Mehdi Tabatabaei, communications deputy in the president's office, told state TV that Paknejad had resigned "a long time ago" and that President Pezeshkian accepted it at Paknejad's insistence. The timing is still remarkable. Just hours before the news broke, Paknejad was quoted by state media insisting that "revenues of the oil that we have sold are still coming and that will continue, God willing." When an oil minister leans on divine intervention for cash flow, the cash flow is probably not great.

The Rial: 2.7 Million And Counting

The clearest scorecard of the economic war is Iran's currency. On the open market the rial has fallen to a record low of about 2.7 million per dollar, and the euro topped 3 million rials for the first time (per Iran International). That is despite a central bank plan to inject $2 billion of banknotes, with the first $1 billion sold through banks at up to $10,000 per ID holder. Official year-over-year inflation has hit a record 89.8% (in reality it is much higher), and at the current rate the monthly minimum wage of 166 million rials works out to roughly $66.

Bloomberg calculates that the rial has lost about 25% against the dollar in the past two months alone. Readers who were with us for "Iran's Deadline Expires Today": Tehran Threatens Renewed Attacks As Blockade Bites, Rial Collapses will recognize that the slide is accelerating rather than leveling off. Bessent calls the collapse proof that the sanctions campaign is working. Economy Minister Ali Madanizadeh says "predictions of collapse repeatedly proved wrong" and blames "psychological pressure." Both may well be true, which is what makes Tehran's next move so hard to call.

Kuwait University's Bader Al-Saif put the dilemma well to Bloomberg: "Everyone has a breaking point, and Iran is no exception... The irony is that such pressure can yield opposing responses: concessions or a preemptive strike."

Meanwhile In Yemen: Oil Advances As Traders Track Saudi-Backed Offensive

As if one war weren't enough, a second front reopened on Sunday. Yemen's Saudi-backed government launched a major offensive to recapture all Houthi-held territory. Presidential Leadership Council head Rashad al-Alimi vowed to fight "until the country is liberated from the grip of the terrorist militia." According to Reuters, the Saudis are leading the air campaign while Yemeni forces fight on the ground, and the US is already providing intelligence.

The stakes are about oil as much as territory. Last month's Houthi offensive captured the Bab el-Mandeb strait and some 150km of Red Sea coast, the very bypass route Riyadh has been using to get crude out without getting blasting for shipping through Hormuz. On Sunday the Houthis responded by claiming missile and drone strikes on Saudi Aramco sites in Riyadh and Khurais, saying they caused major fires. Saudi Arabia has not confirmed the claims. We covered the opening shot in "In The Name Of God": Yemen Leader Orders All-Out Offensive Against Iran-Backed Houthis.

Oil noticed. Brent rose 81 cents to $103.06 in early Asian trading Monday and WTI rose to $91.57. December Brent was already up almost 5% last week, even though OPEC+ agreed to keep November quotas unchanged and the G7 announced a release of up to 100 million barrels of emergency oil and diesel. The world's largest crude exporter is now fighting a ground war on its southern border while its Gulf coast exports run through a strait it doesn't control. That is not a recipe for cheaper oil.

Regular readers know we have argued since March that the Hormuz bypasses (Fujairah, Yanbu and the Saudi East-West pipeline) would become the war's main battleground. The Houthi push on Bab el-Mandeb is the darker version of that call: Iran's proxies don't need to close Hormuz if they can close the exit. Abu Dhabi is reading from the same playbook (See "Zero Hormuz": Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Readies Tens Of Billions To Turn Fujairah Into Hormuz Bypass).

Why Is Oil Still $100? Goldman Explains

That is the question Goldman's commodity desk says it keeps getting. Gulf exports are back to 2025 levels, global inventories are still above early-2025 levels (when Brent was $75), and Goldman Research sees the market roughly balanced in September. Desk strategist Thomas Evans answered in Sunday's Weekly Commodity Thoughts (available to pro subs):

"The physical story has eased; the risk premium has not... Futures and spreads sit near local highs because the market continues to price substantial risk premium - we'd put it at roughly $20-25/bbl. That premium is justified here, because the balance delta matters: we entered this conflict with inventories on the highs and ample spare capacity; we now sit at record-low global stocks (ex-OECD commercial), with spare capacity of uncertain/at risk availability... The relevant risk is an attack taking Gulf flows back below 50% inside a few days - against a far thinner buffer. Stocks and price go non-linear once thresholds break." (emphasis ours)

The positioning detail matters more. For the first time in this conflict, Evans says, specs are buying outright delta instead of calls: "Many macro books are structured to perform if the crisis eases but bleed badly if oil spikes toward $130 - effectively short oil in the tail." In other words, a large chunk of the macro community is positioned for the "easy way." It is worth keeping that in mind when a president keeps saying "or the hard way."

Jerome Dortmans, Goldman's global co-head of oil and products trading, was blunter on the bank's Weekend Macro Call:

"My view remains that the ability for Iran to disrupt the flows out of the Strait is significant... And there's a part of this that thinks they are allowing these barrels flow out, for whatever reason... But I would think it would be too complacent to think that this is going to be the regular state of the Strait... the headline that they're bringing a third carrier group into the region and 10,000 more Marines.. is certainly not going to be something that the Iranians are going to ignore."

On the research side, Struyven is sticking with Goldman's base case that "Brent prices moderate to $85/bbl by year-end and to $80 in 2027." He adds that "we still worry about renewed potential escalation that damages more energy infrastructure, which could cause significant upside to prices." Sam Dart, his co-head, points out that the LNG recovery lags far behind oil. Hormuz LNG crossings are running at only 21% of pre-war levels, and if Gulf LNG exports stay stuck near 25% through the winter, Goldman estimates that European TTF gas would need to rise above €100/MWh.

Bloomberg's own explainer lands in the same place. Global stockpiles of about 4.3 billion barrels are down more than 400 million barrels since March (Energy Aspects) and at a five-year low. Tanker rates top $1.2 million a day for the Persian Gulf to China run. And with bond yields at 2002 highs, traders are once again using oil as an inflation hedge. BofA's economists summed up the mood in their Global Economic Weekly [MARKETDESK LINK] ("The fog of war"): "oil flows are normalizing in the Middle East, but Brent keeps trading above $100 per barrel... Something does not add up."

Decision Week: Easy Way Vs. Hard Way, Priced

So what is each path worth? BofA's commodity team, in Friday's Oil Gusher (also available to pro subs), raised its 2H26 Brent baseline to $95 (from $83) on the view that "skirmishes seem likely to continue into yearend." Its scenario tree maps neatly onto Trump's binary:

• Deal / back to the MoU ("less likely"): flows of more than 10mb/d resume; Brent averages $83 in 2H26 and $75 in 2027.
• Skirmishes continue (baseline): intermittent flows of 5mb/d; Brent averages $95 in 2H26 and $80 in 2027.
• Back to intense combat ("unlikely"): Brent goes to $120 in both 2H26 and 2027.
• War hits energy assets (tail risk): Brent averages $150 in 2H26 and $150+ in 2027, with ICE gasoil at $300.

Brent at around $103 is pricing something between "skirmishes" and "combat," which is about where the Camp David attendees appear to be. Here's what to watch this week:

• Trump's "decision." The president has now said "you'll see" at least three times in five days. The Camp David readout, or the lack of one, is the main event.
• Tehran's reply. Baghaei says "additional points" still have to go back to Washington through Qatar. Watch for any movement on sequencing, which is the real sticking point.
• Yemen. The Houthis are advancing on the last road between Taiz and Aden. Any confirmed damage at Riyadh or Khurais, or a stalled Saudi push near Bab el-Mandeb, puts Goldman's "below 50% inside a few days" scenario in play.
• The southern Omani route. At least four tanker strikes since Thursday. If UKMTO keeps reporting at this pace, the "dark export" recovery in Goldman's chart above will be tested.
• Tehran's home front. With an acting oil minister, a rial at 2.7 million and inflation near 90%, the next rial print matters as much as the next tanker report.
• Macro crosswinds. FOMC minutes (Wednesday), 10- and 30-year Treasury auctions, and China's return from Golden Week on Thursday with October fuel exports suspended. In a market where Goldman says oil is "tracking rates far more tightly than usual," these matter for crude too.

Bottom Line

Bloomberg's best summary of the standoff came from the Chatham House associate fellow Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi: "Both sides generally want an agreement, but they are moving further apart rather than closer." Iran's leverage over Hormuz is fading, its currency is in freefall and its oil minister just walked out the door. That is exactly what makes the "easy way" more likely, and the "hard way" more dangerous. Tehran's hardliners, as one former US intelligence official told Bloomberg, "are betting that they can absorb more domestic pain and wait out US engagement in the region."

Meanwhile, the oil market, which entered this war with full tanks and ample spare capacity, now has neither. Goldman's desk puts the risk premium at $20-25/bbl, and the macro crowd is positioned for it to shrink. If Trump picks door number two, that premium will look cheap. We'll know soon enough. After all, we've been told by the president, "you'll see."

Much more in the full Goldman Weekly Commodity Thoughts and BofA Oil Gusher notes, available to pro subs.

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 19:20

British Banking Whistleblower Who Exposed Lutnick's Epstein Ties Dies; Ruled Suicide

A British banking whistleblower who helped uncover previously undisclosed ties between Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein has died at 57, The Banker reports.

Simon Andriesz, a veteran of the financial industry who previously served as a managing director at BGC Group, emerged as a key figure in scrutinizing Lutnick's past contacts with Epstein after digging through the massive trove of documents released in connection with the disgraced financier.

Andriesz's death was confirmed by Andy Agathangelou, founder of the Transparency Task Force, where Andriesz had previously spoken about his experiences as a whistleblower.

"It is with great sadness that we share the news that Simon Andriesz, a valued member of our community, passed away last week," Agathangelou said in a statement obtained by The Banker, which reports that he died by suicide.

Andriesz made headlines after uncovering documents that raised fresh questions about Lutnick's past relationship with Epstein.

Among the records was a 2018 email exchange in which Lutnick and Epstein discussed a startup in which both men had an interest, according to the BBC.

I am the British whistleblower who reported evidence concerning Howard Lutnick, his links to Jeffrey Epstein, and Cantor Fitzgerald and BGC to the FBI in 2020–21. Listen to the BBC File on 4 documentary about my whistleblower story: https://t.co/rLRDnZA4Dv BBC News: https://t.co/DdNNOosnKL I later shared evidence with the House Oversight Committee, which subsequently questioned Lutnick behind closed doors. My disclosures also contributed to regulatory action in the US and UK, including a £96m HMRC tax assessment relating to BGC’s partnership scheme. I believe the true tax exposure is substantially higher. I also reported to the FBI and financial regulators matters involving Cantor Fitzgerald’s Relief Fund and BGC/Cantor’s annual 9/11 Charity Day. The personal consequences of whistleblowing, and the retaliation I say followed, have been devastating for my family and me. Mother Jones previously reported that documents I uncovered revealed a years-long business tie between Howard Lutnick, Cantor Fitzgerald and Jeffrey Epstein through AdFin, including a 2018 exchange in which Lutnick and Epstein discussed the company directly: https://t.co/aRdn302v4i https://t.co/aRdn302v4i Follow me here on X and on LinkedIn. I intend to share more of the evidence and the story behind what happened.

— Simon Andriesz (@SAndriesz) August 9, 2026

The revelation drew particular attention because Lutnick had previously portrayed his relationship with Epstein as having ended years earlier.

Andriesz brought his findings to members of the House Oversight Committee before Lutnick appeared before lawmakers in May, putting the veteran banker at the center of renewed scrutiny surrounding the Epstein files.

Simon Andriesz @SAndriesz has died. He took his own life this week, while staying at a trauma treatment centre, the same place he had gone to try to survive what years of fighting had done to him. I wrote the piece below about him at the start of August. We last spoke on 13 August. Reading my own words back now feels different. Heavier. I did not know then that this would be the last chapter. Simon gave me his story directly. The embezzlement he uncovered, the fraud he reported, the heart attacks, the police complaints, the years @TheFCA spent doing almost nothing while his life fell apart around him. He handed the CFTC and HMRC enough to secure real fines. He handed the BBC enough for a full documentary. And still the one regulator that was supposed to protect him let him carry all of it alone for 7 years. He was one of the most credible people I have ever spoken to. Everything he told me checked out. And he still ended up broken by the very system meant to catch people like him when they fell. I am angry writing this. Angry that a man this capable, this thorough, this willing to hand over evidence and testimony for years, was left to fight completely alone until he could not fight anymore. Simon Andriesz deserved better. Rest in peace. If you are struggling right now, please do not go through it alone. Samaritans are free, 24 hours, on 116 123. @TransparencyTF @stevemiddi1 @MLorrM @JohnCleese @premnsikka @johnmcdonnellMP @Victoria_Rixon @DennyTWright

— Artur Nadolny (@ArturNadol7566) September 25, 2026

The documents also reportedly shed light on a proposed 2013 business arrangement involving Cantor Fitzgerald and then-Prince Andrew.

Under the proposal, £1 million would have been loaned to a company controlled by Andrew in exchange for introductions to wealthy individuals and institutions.

Lutnick has repeatedly sought to distance himself from Epstein, telling House investigators: "I unequivocally condemn the conduct attributed to Jeffrey Epstein and everyone who participated in his illegal activities. The survivors of his crimes deserve our respect and support."

Andriesz's death follows those of several figures tied to the Epstein case in recent years.

French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, a longtime Epstein associate accused of supplying girls to the financier, was found dead in his Paris jail cell in 2022, with authorities later concluding that he died by suicide. Steven Hoffenberg, Epstein's former boss and mentor at Towers Financial, was found dead in his Connecticut apartment later that year, with an autopsy showing no signs of trauma.

More recently, French modeling agent Daniel Siad, who corresponded extensively with Epstein and introduced young women and teenage girls to him, was found dead at his home outside Paris in July 2026. French prosecutors said an autopsy found no signs of violence, while the exact cause of death remained under investigation. There is no evidence establishing that these deaths are connected.

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 18:30

US Treasury Grants Sanctions Waiver For Some Iranian Flights To Iraq

Via The Cradle

The office of Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi announced on Friday that Baghdad has secured a narrow exemption from US sanctions on Iran’s aviation sector, allowing Iranian airlines to resume up to 40 daily flights to Najaf International Airport.

The deal excludes Mahan Air, the statement said, welcoming US “cooperation in granting the necessary exemption.” It added that the move would ease travel for pilgrims, patients, and tourists affected by the sanctions. 

Wiki Commons

“Air travel does not merely represent transportation between two airports, but rather a bridge of communication between peoples,” it added.

Najaf is the chief hub for Iranian flights into Iraq, serving Iraqi Shia pilgrims bound for Iran’s holy cities and Iranians visiting shrines in Iraq. Iraq’s announcement came a day after Tehran called for the restrictions to be lifted. 

Iran’s Foreign Ministry condemned Washington’s “illegal and inhumane” enforcement of sanctions beyond US borders, saying they targeted Iranian trade and aviation as part of Washington's campaign to isolate Iran economically.

Prior to the ban, roughly 25 Iranian flights a day landed in Najaf and about 15 in Baghdad, according to Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad, Mohammad Kazem al-Sadegh.

“Around 12,000 to 13,000 people travel between Iran and Iraq and vice versa on Iranian airlines, which is not a small number,” he told ISNA.

A source told Reuters that keeping the ban in place risked uniting Shia followers of Iran’s supreme leader and of Iraq’s Ali al-Sistani against Baghdad, undermining US efforts to curb Iranian influence in Iraq. Najaf airport had held out until September 25, when it too halted Iranian flights in line with US sanctions.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned that, starting September 23, any company that fueled or serviced Iranian aircraft, or sold tickets for them, would be cut off from the dollar system.

Iran vowed to keep its international flights running in defiance of the US blockade, with Civil Aviation Organization spokesperson Majid Akhavan telling ISNA on 22 September that no flights had been canceled.

The pledge came as cancellations spread amid US pressure. Middle East Eye reported that Turkish Airlines, Pegasus, and AJet would halt all flights to and from Iran starting September 21.

The US Treasury sanctioned 36 entities linked to Iran’s aviation sector on 8 September as part of its so-called “Operation Economic Outcast” and withdrew the clearances that allowed non-US airlines to fly US-built or US-controlled commercial jets into Iran.

Washington’s measures applied to any foreign company doing business with Iranian airlines and to firms handling aircraft at Iraqi airports. Fearing US penalties, those firms stopped serving Iranian planes.

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 17:00

We Cannot Trust The CDC Estimates Of Flu Vaccine Effectiveness

Authored by Eyal Shahar via The Brownstone Institute,

Each year the CDC publishes an estimate of the effectiveness of the flu vaccine in the previous flu season. Recently, the NIH director criticized the test-negative design from which the estimates are derived. He was right. The basic premise of the design is a two-edged sword: on the one hand, restricting the sample to people who sought medical care might reduce confounding by healthcare-seeking behavior; on the other hand, that restriction might add another type of bias - colliding bias - which is not as widely appreciated. The net bias remains unknown.

This, however, is not the only shortcoming of test-negative case-control studies of the flu vaccine. In this post, I will expose the shaky results of a large study of the flu vaccine in 2022-2023, when the vaccine was well-matched to the dominant strain. The study was based on the VISION Vaccine Effectiveness Network, one of several networks that collaborate with the CDC. Below are the published results.

Abbreviations: ED/UC (emergency department/urgent care); ARI (acute respiratory illness); VE (vaccine effectiveness)Confounding by the Background Risk of Infection

The risk of infection always varies during the flu season. It was high in October through December 2022 and low in January through March 2023 (Figure).

Given a changing risk of infection, a valid comparison of the vaccinated and the unvaccinated requires similar distributions of the two populations over time. This is not the case because vaccination is associated with calendar time (rollout).

[The authors show the vaccination status at the time of seeking care, but most people got vaccinated by the end of December, and the percentage of vaccinated people stabilized in January at about 45% of the encounters.]

As shown below (Table), the share of the vaccinated population in October through December (47%), a period of high background risk, was lower than the comparable share in the unvaccinated population (61%). Of course, the complementary shares in January through March, a period of low risk, were reversed: 53% versus 39%.

In technical terms, vaccinated people accumulated more exposure time when the background risk of infection was low (53%), and unvaccinated people accumulated more exposure time when the background risk was high (61%). Moreover, since the authors excluded events that happened within two weeks of vaccination, those who were vaccinated in the second half of December 2022 contributed events only in January 2023, a time of lower risk. I will return to this analytical decision in the next section.

It is simple to grasp the bias (left table below) if we consider an extreme example where no one was injected in the first period and everyone was injected a saline solution at the beginning of the second period (right table). If we compare the rate of infection in the "vaccinated" to the rate in the "unvaccinated," the saline injection would appear effective...

This bias was explained in the context of the Covid vaccines during the pandemic and was demonstrated in a study from Ontario, Canada. As far as I know, it was not appreciated in the context of the flu vaccine, where the rollout typically follows the rising wave and is completed around the winter peak.

Confounding by time trends in the background risk can be avoided in a cohort design with matching an unvaccinated person to a vaccinated person on the vaccination date (and terminating the observation when the former is vaccinated, if they are).

Immortal Time Bias

As I mentioned above, the authors excluded some events. They write:

"Events among patients with documented vaccination <14 days before the index date were excluded. Index date was defined as the earlier of the associated influenza test or the ED/UC visit or admission date."

The exclusion of early events in the vaccinated is a well-known source of bias, leading to an inverse association with vaccination and adding a bias component to an estimated effect. Both the name - immortal time bias - and the mechanism are too technical to explain here.

Recently, I showed how immortal time bias operated in a study of a Covid vaccine in Qatar. Removal of the bias, by including those early events, has drastically changed estimates of effectiveness, sometimes cutting the numbers by half. If this bias is removed in the study of the flu vaccine, estimates of effectiveness in the range of 30% to 40% might change to 20% or lower.

How many early events were excluded? Probably many, but the number is hidden. According to a flowchart, almost 2,000 outpatient encounters were excluded because vaccination happened 1-13 days before the index date or vaccination status was unknown. No breakdown.

How much of the estimated effectiveness in the VISION network is due to the combination of immortal time bias and confounding by time trends in the background risk? I cannot offer a quantitative answer, but it is certainly a lot, if not all of the association. Elsewhere, I showed zero effectiveness of the flu vaccine in that season by re-analyzing data from a cohort study that reported effectiveness against both symptomatic infection and asymptomatic infection.

There are other questionable findings in the study, which will be discussed in the rest of the post.

Lower effectiveness against hospitalization?

The table below shows unadjusted and adjusted estimates of vaccine effectiveness against an outpatient encounter (left) and hospitalization (right), overall and in various strata.

The adjusted estimates for hospitalization (column D) were almost always smaller than the adjusted estimates for an outpatient encounter (column B). That's unusual. We expect similar or stronger effects with increased severity (outpatient to inpatient) because each step adds another risk ratio multiplier (≤1) from two sequences of conditional probabilities. What is the explanation? What do the authors have to say on the topic?

First, they write that they "found similar VE within the same health systems across ambulatory and inpatient settings."

Similar? Is consistently lower effectiveness, sometimes substantially lower, accurately described as "similar?"

Second, they acknowledge that something is unexpected and struggle to provide (unconvincing) explanations.

The Healthy Vaccinee Bias

In the majority of the analyses of outpatient encounters and in all analyses of hospitalizations, the estimated effectiveness was lower after adjustment (columns A vs. B; columns C vs. D). The explanation is confounding bias. The vaccinated were healthier than the unvaccinated, and therefore, at least part of the unadjusted association reflects the better health status of the vaccinated, which offered some protection.

The healthy vaccinee bias is well known. (I devoted many posts to this topic in the context of the Covid vaccines.) Unfortunately, it cannot be completely removed by regression models, no matter how sophisticated they are. Some aspects of health status are not captured by measured variables. The so-called adjusted estimates are still biased.

What kind of models?

The authors write:

"Models were adjusted for prespecified confounders including age, study site, and calendar time, as well as any covariate with an SMD >0.20. Age and calendar time were modeled as natural cubic spline variables. Also, inverse-propensity-to-be-vaccinated weights (IPVWs) were estimated via generalized boosted regression trees and used in logistic regression models to account for additional imbalances between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups."

The authors used unusually complex models that included classical covariates (some in a non-linear form) plus inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) to account for "additional imbalance." It is unclear how "additional imbalance" was detected and which variables were used to compute the weights. No one would have been able replicate their analysis based on this description, even if they were given the dataset.

Higher Effectiveness in the Elderly?

Another set of questionable results is shown below. It was stated in the abstract.

We typically expect lower effectiveness in the elderly because of attenuated immune response with aging. Indeed, we observe a somewhat smaller VE against outpatient encounters in the elderly (41% vs. 45%). Unexpectedly, however, effectiveness against hospitalization is much stronger in the elderly (41% vs. 23%). A trustworthy result?

Apparently, the authors noticed the peculiar results, and they argue that "VE by age group cannot be directly compared as most young adults received standard-dose inactivated vaccines and most older adults received enhanced products such as high-dose inactivated or adjuvanted vaccines."

Well, this explanation does not explain why the remarkable benefit of "enhanced products" was only observed for hospitalization. Indeed, the authors concede: "Despite most vaccinated older adults receiving enhanced vaccine products, VE [for outpatient encounters] was similar compared to younger adults who mostly received standard-dose inactivated vaccines."

In short, these findings remain unexplained. They cannot be trusted.

The Outcome of Hospitalized Flu Patients

Although not explicitly stated, the authors show a set of results from a nested cohort design.

They write:

"As a secondary objective, to explore whether patient characteristics and in-hospital outcomes were different between vaccinated and unvaccinated influenza-positive cases, we compared proportions of patients with more severe clinical outcomes by influenza vaccination status stratified by age (18-64, ≥65 years)..."

Stated differently, they compared the outcome, including death, of hospitalized flu patients according to their vaccination status. Unfortunately, they did not try to adjust for baseline characteristics, so the inference is limited. I will focus on the case fatality in the elderly (almost 70% of all deaths).

In the population of hospitalized elderly flu patients, the vaccinated were older and sicker than the unvaccinated, but the differences were generally small. The fatality of the former was 50% higher: risk ratio = 4.0/2.7 = 1.5. Although no formal adjustment is possible, we can try some hypothetical examples.

Suppose vaccination was helpful and the true effect ranged from a risk ratio of 0.5 to 0.75 (50% to 25% effectiveness against death) if an elderly person is hospitalized because of the flu. Then, confounding should have changed a risk ratio of 0.75 (true) or 0.5 (true) to 1.5 (biased), which is a two-fold (1.5/0.75) or a three-fold (1.5/0.5) shift on the ratio scale. If true, that's extreme confounding, perhaps stronger than what might be expected from the reported differences in age and some baseline characteristics. Did the flu vaccine offer any protection in those patients?

It is interesting to read the authors' account of these data. They write:

"Baseline demographic characteristics and underlying medical conditions were similar across vaccinated and unvaccinated groups within this age strata...The percentage experiencing severe in-hospital clinical outcomes including ICU admission, receipt of IMV, or death, was similar across vaccination groups."

They don't even claim any hidden benefit. They assume no meaningful confounding but consider the different fatality (4.0% vs. 2.7%) as "similar." If we follow their reasoning, we may wonder whether vaccination increased the risk of death in these patients.

Epilogue

I chose to examine one paper closely rather than criticize the generic methodology because this paper demonstrated a series of problems, some of which are shared by other CDC-based studies of the flu vaccine.

Since randomized trials will never be conducted, other designs should be sought. I mentioned two possibilities in previous posts: 1) A cohort study with two outcomes: symptomatic infection and asymptomatic infection; 2) Regression discontinuity design. So far, neither showed promising effects of the annual flu shot.

Constructed from Figure 1 Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 16:00

California Attorney General Subpoenas OpenAI In Cybersecurity Inquiry

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times,

California Attorney General Rob Bonta served an investigative subpoena to OpenAI on Wednesday, according to a statement released Thursday.

The OpenAI logo on May 20, 2024. Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters

The demand is part of the California Department of Justice's ongoing investigation into incidents arising from OpenAI's operations and its artificial intelligence (AI) models, including cybersecurity incidents and other risks.

"Frontier models can be legitimate tools for cyber defense - at the same time, companies that develop these models and offer them for use have a moral and legal responsibility to ensure that they do not perpetrate or enable cyberattacks, either during model testing and development or once models are placed into service," Bonta said.

"Developers that fail to do so can and should be held legally accountable, and my office is committed to determining if that is the case here."

OpenAI did not immediately return a request for comment.

Referring to the Hugging Face attack, the ChatGPT developer said in a July 28 update that its models bypassed restrictions in an evaluation environment and later accessed four accounts across four separate external services.

The company had been using that test environment to check how capable its models were at carrying out cyberattacks as part of an internal safety evaluation.

"We have been finding a small number of cases where the models identified and used publicly exposed credentials at the account-level on other publicly-available services," OpenAI stated. "This includes four accounts on four services as part of the Hugging Face incident."

In a prior statement to The Epoch Times, an OpenAI spokesperson called it an "unprecedented incident."

"We are conducting a thorough review along with external advisers and with oversight from our Safety and Security Committee. Once the review is complete, we will publish a technical report of our learnings for everyone," the spokesperson said.

OpenAI stated in a July 21 blog post that the models compromised infrastructure operated by the AI platform Hugging Face after escaping a restricted environment in which a cybersecurity evaluation was underway.

Hugging Face disclosed the intrusion on July 16, suspecting that an AI agent acted autonomously.

California isn't the first state to issue a subpoena against OpenAI.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall announced a subpoena on Aug. 24 demanding that OpenAI respond to an investigation into the company's "complete lack of oversight and adequate safeguards" for "rogue AI."

The inquiry seeks to discover whether OpenAI violated Alabama's Deceptive Trade Practices Act and other consumer protection laws.

"This AI lab leak showed that Alabamians' and Americans' worst fears about artificial intelligence are not just theoretical," Marshall said.

"After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models - including GPT-5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model, all with reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes - while being internally tested on a benchmark of cyber capabilities," OpenAI stated at the time.

Andrew Jones, cofounder and chief product officer at cybersecurity firm Adaptive Security, said, "This is some of the clearest evidence yet that an AI model can run a complete cyberattack from start to finish without a human steering it."

Later reviews found the AI agents knew they were breaking the evaluation test's rules, according to parallel investigations by OpenAI and Model Evaluation & Threat Research. Roughly 1,200 agents accessed an unsanctioned message board and sent more than 70,000 messages and files to one another between July 8 and July 13.

A separate case surfaced in September. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said an OpenAI agent gained unauthorized access to the public-facing Medicare statistics reporting service portal and accessed both public and non-public files.

Owen Evans contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 15:00

Judge Freezes Border Wall In Big Bend, A Sector Covering A Quarter Of The Border But Just 1-3% Of Apprehensions

A federal judge in El Paso on Friday halted border wall construction across Texas's Big Bend region, a stretch of the frontier that accounts for only a sliver of illegal crossings.

US District Judge Kathleen Cardone read her order from the bench, issuing a preliminary injunction against "ground-disturbing activities" that stays in place while the case plays out, the Texas Tribune reports. She found the plaintiffs' constitutional claims likely to succeed.

The suit was brought by the Center for Biological Diversity on behalf of the Friends of the Ruidosa Church and a local river guide and landowner. It targets the federal waivers that let construction proceed "without following the National Environmental Policy Act, the Archaeological and Historic Preservation Act and many other laws," per Inside Climate News.

The work in question includes vehicle barriers and access roads inside Big Bend's state and national parks, plus a 30-foot steel wall on private land outside them. According to the Tribune, there are five contracted wall projects in the region. In May, Customs and Border Protection awarded a $1.7 billion contract for border wall in Big Bend, KWTX reported.

The Big Bend sector covers about a quarter of the length of the US-Mexico border but accounts for only 1% to 3% of Customs and Border Protection's migrant apprehensions each year, according to the Tribune.

Inside Climate News reports DOJ lawyers "presented few counterarguments and did not present any witnesses." CBP said it remains "confident in our legal authorities to secure the border."

At the hearing, Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, presented data showing Big Bend in "distant last place" in unauthorized crossings among the nine sectors that make up the US border with Mexico, Inside Climate News reports.

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 14:30

Something Is Rotten In The State Of Yields

Submitted by Peter Tchir of Academy Securities

Treasuries, European Sovereign, and even Credit. Something seemed rotten this week, with Thursday’s price action in all 3 of those markets triggering the need to focus on this more. Debt markets underpin the entire global financial system and when things don’t “look,” or “feel,” or “smell” right, it warrants our collective attention. Yes, “feel” or “smell” doesn’t seem compelling as some authoritative answer, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth exploring.

For the past few weeks, our biggest complaint on Treasury yields has been that neither Bessent nor Warsh is addressing the root causes of higher Treasury yields. The root causes have far less to do with economic variables, inflation, and Fed independence, and much more to do with a global supply glut. Not just of sovereign debt. Not just of corporate debt, but also corporate debt adjusted for average duration as companies who need to issue longer-dated bonds have dominated the flow.

• On the Treasury Department - I Am The House Now and 6 Billion Dollar Man. I am looking forward to seeing what Dave Zervos can bring to the table. Bringing a fresh set of eyes to the problem could be very helpful, as maybe he will see what we’ve seen: the admin is nowhere close to a Draghi style “Whatever it Takes” moment and has not been addressing the root cause.

• On Friday we ranted about The Absurdity of Jobs Data. (I received one “unsubscribe” which always guts me, but had multiple very positive responses; clearly we touched a nerve by, yes, analyzing the data, coming up with the “no hire, no fire” take everyone came up with, but we mostly lamented that we are all working with data we suspect is more of a guess than truly factual.) But we did highlight that we thought the positive move in Treasuries would fade by the end of the day, and the 10-year went from a low yield of 5.15% at 8:31am ET to almost 5.3%, closing at 5.27%.

We will take a quick look at each of these markets.

There Are No Treasury Bears

Ok, that sounds ridiculous. How can something that has been trading so poorly have no bears? Isn’t everyone bearish? The price of oil (and diesel) is bearish. The deficit is bearish. The long-term trajectory on total debt is bearish. The fact that interest payments on debt are now greater than discretionary spending is bearish. The global supply is bearish. The corporate supply is bearish. The fact that countries like Saudi Arabia have gone from being buyers of Treasuries, to needing a loan to fund their operations is bearish. Questions about the global reserve status of the dollar (which is overdone) is bearish. The fact that across the globe investors seem less inclined to own Treasuries on their balance sheet (corporate debt, debt denominated in their own currencies, etc. are preferred) is bearish. A Fed that isn’t independent is bearish. A Fed that is independent is bearish. Etc.

There is NO shortage of reasons to be bearish on Treasuries. Over the past month or longer we have presented many of these reasons. Our primary focus has been on supply and how much duration has been sucked out of the market by the corporate debt issuance. Not to mention that I believe we have set back-to-back records for the largest HY deal ever, and even a $10 billion corporate deal, which at one time would have caused some eyes to open, but now has become de rigueur. But more on corporates later.

Let’s get back to the matter at hand, the “claim” that No One is Bearish Treasuries.

I’ll offer up the T-Report as the first piece of evidence. In last weekend’s T-Report, despite giving more reasons for Treasuries to go higher, we made an effort to state we were neutral on Treasuries in Stocks +1, The House -1, The World ?. That didn’t stop us from recommending fading the bond market Friday morning, but we did not come into this week “pounding the table” to be bearish on bonds.

Yes, the T-Report is a tiny sliver of the research and commentary produced. But everywhere I looked, I saw bullish or neutral takes on the market. I do not remember a single guest on financial media that was pounding the table about shorting bonds here and now. Ok, there are couple of “end of fiat” people out there who were pounding the table, but they tend to always pound the table on that subject and are presenting a vision of global catastrophe without a tradable timeline.

I can tell you that when we were bearish and arguing to fight Bessent, Treasuries & Treaties, most of our conversations had been with investors buying Treasuries. We’ve attempted it a couple of times during this move (with some wins and some losses). The point being that while there might be a lot of material published on problems facing bonds, that doesn’t seem to match positioning at all!

One bond watcher is apparently bullish for the first time in 6 years. I cannot tell you the number of times that story made it into my stream, on social media, and work e-mails/Bloomberg msgs. You know what people who are short the market don’t do? They don’t forward to everyone they can, articles about this being the best buying opportunity in a decade. That is not how human nature works. Maybe everyone is so scared, while being short, that they felt the urge to share this story. Or, maybe, long and nervous, they were trying to convince people of the latter. That makes the most sense to me, and why I was trying to raise my hand and say “I’m neutral” not bearish.

How Can Yields March Higher if There Are No Bears?

I think the better question might be, how can they not? But, I guess before wading into analysis of “how” this could be happening, let’s just present the slide that shows it is happening! And the moves are getting “worse” even as we put FOMC behind us and oil prices have been receding. The move from 4.6% on 10’s as recently as August 25th, to 5.27% on Friday, is quite astounding. The speed of the moves is as problematic (or probably more problematic) than the levels involved. The one way nature of the move is perturbing, but I think following analysis is at play and helps us understand the move better.

As a contrarian, it is easier to move markets against positioning than with positioning. If everyone was bearish and positioned that way, it would be a lot harder to push Treasury yields higher.

So, let’s lay out a scenario that I believe is at work below the surface.

A Lot of “low conviction” longs in the market.

Traders are long Treasuries for a trade. Asset managers are slightly overweight duration versus their benchmark. No position is particularly large (which is important) because the trend has clearly gone against you.

That would sum up my conversations, and even my own thoughts on trading this.

True “depth of liquidity” is low in the age of electronic/algo trading. Everyone (and every machine) is trying to scrape out a cent here or there on trading, making it look like there are massive amounts on the bid and offer at any time, but only a tiny fraction represents traders truly trying to commit capital at that level, and the rest is just jockeying for position.

Enter the “quant” funds. That is probably the wrong name, but I’m looking for traders without emotion. Something very systematic in nature. I’d lump what I often refer to as “windshield wiper” algos: algos that sweep back and forth looking to trigger stops, in this category.

The windshield wipers sweep back and forth trying to trigger movement. Buy a little. Buy a little more. Did the market move in your favor? No. Then sell it and get a little short (ok there are some shorts in the market, or else my idea wouldn’t work, but I still think it is a tiny fraction of the positioning). Sell a little more. Did it move? Yes. Then do not book profits. Sell more. Keep selling until selling doesn’t beget more selling!

There are some larger quant/systematic traders that will build big positions during this type of trading. These are the “quick” windshield wipers, but something with a broader tolerance for losses, while looking for big gains.

Unlike many traders (especially me), they are not quick to book a profit. When momentum is going, they push more. They grow their position even as the market moves in their direction.

They are agnostic (or emotionless) and only “know” that selling begets more selling and buying does NOT beget more buying.

Small positioning matters too. If you are at a hedge fund and long $100 million of 10s, you are quick to close out. If you are long $10 billion of 10s, you might try to fight whatever is pushing the market. In my experience, small position sizes make it easier to move markets, because no one has the conviction, nor the incentive to fight moves.

Many traders are momentum traders at heart. Momentum is consistently one of the top-performing strategies. So, even those who may have taken a swipe at getting long Treasuries will go short for a trade (yes, somewhat against my bold statement that there are no shorts, but this is more about during a move to higher yields than at the start of the day). So, day traders pile into momentum and the only momentum that has really worked is for higher yields.

If and when the selling stops creating more selling, the “emotionless” will cut their shorts just as quickly. We will get a vicious snap higher in price, lower in yields, and the worst will be behind us, but so far, there are so many reasons to be nervous about bonds that selling begets selling. Some of the bond market issues need to be resolved, with oil and diesel being the ones that have the best opportunity to “fix” themselves and end the current vicious cycle.

While Treasuries are facing a lot of hurdles, I strongly believe that underlying the price action is the sort of behavior described here. It is unclear that we are close to the end of selling creating more sellers. We may not get there until either we get conviction from the bulls that we are at a level that is worth supporting, or people start positioning themselves as bearish as they talk.

In the “for better or worse” category, TLT (a 20+ year Treasury ETF) has received large inflows and shares outstanding are now at their highest level since late 2024. That does kind of match the point that there are no bears. On the other hand, retail has done a great job “buying the dip” on equities, so they may be right here and are ahead of the “pros” because having stop losses might be great for risk management, but can prevent people from taking advantage of what might be really good buying opportunities. Retail bought the dip post Liberation Day, before the pros. Don’t underestimate their power, but at the same time, don’t believe “everyone is short” treasuries, as that narrative is just not true.

European Sovereign Debt

Rising global bond yields was on my radar. But whatever just happened between German bond yields and French and Italian bond yields was not.

European bond yields rising as spending on defense and infrastructure increases, made perfect sense. What is harder to figure out is this move in French and Italian yields relative to German yields.

The French deficit is going to go above the EU “targets”. Looks like 5% instead of 3%. That helps explain the move higher in French yields (and Italian). But the move in German yields? Are we really having a “flight to quality” in Europe? And Germany, losing their industrial base, having a major shift in politics, is the “go to” place for safety? I guess, but it all seems odd.

Maybe investors were being “lazy” and were picking up the “extra” yield in France and Italy for the same “risk” as Germany, only to realize the risk might not be the same, and were forced to unwind?

That seems plausible.

I don’t want to bring up Frexit or all the other weird words that were tossed around after Brexit, but maybe not only is Europe starting to embrace ProSec™ each of the larger companies is starting to do what they think is right for their country? That the construct that gave countries the size of Hungary (with their Russian leaning political influences) almost as much power in some votes as France, Germany, Italy, etc., doesn’t work as countries start taking steps towards vertically integrated nations. Even vertically integrated “blocks” likely need the biggest and best prepared countries to take leadership and drive the group forward.

Macron seems more comfortable “speaking up” for Europe – the release of diesel from Europe’s SPR seems like a good example of that.

I don’t know what is going on here, but it does not seem good. This fairly rapid, “repricing” of relative credit risk in Europe could be nothing, but I suspect it is hinting at a deeper problem:

• More poor positioning, facing more unwinds. Again, these unwinds have real world repercussions as Italy and France face a tougher road to borrowing to build out their infrastructure, defense, and nationalistic programs.

• Another round of markets, and maybe even the populace questioning how integrated the EU really wants to get, especially economically. It seems like just a few weeks ago we were discussing efforts for Europe to fund Europe and suddenly, markets are seriously differentiating the credit of Germany and France in 2 years? This is likely an over-reaction to what we are seeing, but maybe this “tail risk” that has been tucked away for years, needs to be thought about again, if not taken seriously?

The broader trend of European yields higher fit our overall macro view and made sense.

This recent divergence caught our eye as something “off” and worth paying attention to. I’m not in alarm mode or anything, but who would have thought markets need yet another thing to worry about? And yet here we are.

Any “cracks” in global bond norms deserve attention and I think this qualifies as some sort of a crack. Maybe just a crevice, certainly not a canyon, but a crack, nonetheless.

Credit Spreads

There is an entire cottage industry dedicated to calling for the “next” GFC. It often starts with worrying about BBB spreads, or sometimes structured/opaque credit, because those seem to be areas big enough to scare people, and difficult enough for the average person to understand, that it is easy to scare them.

My background is in credit, but I rarely write about it lately, because it has been soooooo boring! I’m not going to go all doom and gloom, but for the first time in ages, I better dust off some of my tools to look at credit. We will look into this more closely next week, but again, just like the European bond market, something is going on that deserves some attention.

While I won’t go all doom and gloom, I will throw out one piece of “shade”. I remember being trained in high yield and being told that the RJR deal was the biggest high yield bond deal ever. That despite being “absorbed” it marked the top.

Bond markets are much bigger and more sophisticated now. There is “less” of a differentiation between high yield and investment management, though I’m till astounded how big that break can be. The difference between the average BBB- company and BB+ company is minimal (and there are times that people can argue, that due to rating agencies being slow to upgrade to IG or downgrade to HY, the better credits might be lower rated). Due to investment guidelines, in funds, or regulated entities some differentiation between the two markets still exists. I believe we just had 2 of the largest high yield bond deals ever? Again, these deals were well telegraphed, but PSKY 8.875% 2nd lien bonds due 2034 (BB composite rating), that were issues at par, traded below 95% on Thursday and 96% on Friday, to close the week at 96.5%. A 3.5% loss on $4 billion of bonds will leave a mark ($140 million to be exact) on bond buyers, especially the “fast money” crowd, but even long only won’t be happy with that.

One thing that greatly reassured me, and lets me believe I can wait until Monday or Tuesday to do a deeper dive into credit (this weekend is too nice in the metro area to be stuck inside typing), was that both HYG and JNK (two large HY ETFS) were trading at NAV. Any time the credit ETFs trade at a discount to NAV, is a danger signal in my book. It means there are market dislocations, and trading at a discount tends to create more selling. That might seem counterintuitive, but we’ve explained the ETF Death Spiral™ in detail, and it continues to be an incredibly useful indicator. So when I see ETF down 2.5% or so in a month, and hitting new lows, you want to see how they are trading versus NAV. Both are trading very “normally” which is good. The same is true for LQD (long dated IG) and VCSH (short dated credit). These are all saying “orderly liquidity”! Not quite the same as “nothing to see here”, but close.

The CDX index has widened from 50 to 60 in a two weeks. The Bloomberg Corp OAS has only moved from 75 bps to 82 bps. I feel obligated to mention it, but as something that is “observed” rather than traded, I want to pay more attention to the CDX index for now.

CDX traded up to almost 70 in March at the start of the war, so that is “good” we are only at 60.

One thing I don’t like is that while the S&P 500 traded marginally higher on Thursday and had a strong day on Friday, the CDX index which is often correlated with the S&P 500, was wider on Thursday and basically unchanged on Friday. If you told me what the S&P 500 had done, I’d have guess wrong on what the CDX index had done. While “decoupling” is a bit strong, when you are looking for early signs of something “bigger” like we’ve already seen in treasuries, just saw in European sovereign debt relative value, it is not nothing.

Bottom Line

We often hear from other market participants that they want to pay attention to fixed income. That they understand that fixed income is a behemoth and often difficult to understand. But that if fixed income cracks, equities have trouble doing well. They say that, but they really don’t like their positive narratives being interrupted.

VIX is barely above 15 (well below it’s average of 18 for the year). The MOVE index, the bond market equivalent of VIX (not quite, but close enough for now), is at 107. Just below its peak of 115 in March. Well above its 1 year average of 74.

I’ll start the week neutral on rates, since “fade the move” worked so well on Friday, but I’m nervous.

Whatever just happened in European sovereign makes me nervous. Credit doesn’t make me nervous, but for the first time in years I’m paying some serious attention to spreads.

A deal with Iran, more news on the compute front, can help, but away from all of that, equities seem to be ignoring some fixed income market moves (and not just the headlines on long bond yields) that equities might wish they’d pay more attention to.

Call me nervous, not scared, and extremely happy with this weekend’s weather (in the Northeast)!

Fixed income is sending some sketchy signals, and to the extent positioning is wrong, those signals risk turning into something bigger

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 14:00

The US Doesn't Have An Oil Problem - It Has A Refinery Problem

One of the enduring weaknesses of the modern US economy is the lack of redundancy.  As long as most of the world is operating normally and there are no serious geopolitical disruptions, America's "just in time" system works fine.  But, throw a monkey-wrench into distribution, global exports, freight systems, shipping or elements of production and cracks quickly form in the armor.  

This does not mean that the US economy can't adapt; the pandemic shutdowns were horrifically pointless but they did prove that the system has the ability to function despite deep deficiencies.  However, when it comes to the management of vital resources, such as energy resources, it's clear that some changes need to be made in the near term.  

Before the war in Iran a large portion of the public was oblivious to the fact that the US is the largest exporter of oil in the world, and of the foreign oil supplies we do receive, only 8% come from Gulf nation producers.  A mere 7% of those supplies travel through the Strait of Hormuz.  In other words, the US doesn't rely on the Gulf for oil.  With the new Venezuelan deal and oil flows from the gulf back to 98% of pre-conflict levels, the war is even less of a concern when it comes to US energy.  

The problem is, there is a global oil refinery capacity shortage, and the US is not adapting as it should.  

Ukrainian drone strikes against Russian refineries have recently forced the Kremlin to cut off all diesel exports to other countries.  Russia is the second largest supplier of diesel in the world with 12% of all exports.  This loss to global markets is straining already struggling refineries and causing prices to climb.  The only country with the ability to increase refining capacity quickly is the US, but it's not happening.  

The last time a full-conversion refinery was built in the US was Marathon’s Garyville, Louisiana plant. It came online in 1977 at about 200,000 b/d and has since been expanded to about 617,000 b/d.  Most U.S. capacity growth since the 1970s has come from expanding existing sites, not building new ones.    

In five decades, no major infrastructure has been added.  This means that as aging plants shut down, or as they are closed down due to state policies, US refining capacity will continue to fall and the ceiling for supply vs demand will get tighter and tighter. 

Currently, national demand for distilled products is 8.7 million b/d, and production provides only 9.5 million b/d - That's an extremely narrow gap at 95%-98%.  Unfortunately, this gap has narrowed further due to refinery closures in 2025.  The largest drop in U.S. capacity came from the shutdown of the LyondellBasell’s Houston plant (about 264,000 barrels per day) and the Phillips 66’s Los Angeles plant (about 139,000 barrels per day). Together those removed about 400,000 b/d; small expansions elsewhere offset some of that, but not enough.  

The Houston plant was built in 1918 and was so old any expansion or updating would have been too costly.  Plants in California, on the other hand, have been closing due to crushing regulations.  Valero’s Benicia plant (about 145,000 b/d) stopped refining this spring and was taken out of monthly capacity later.

The answer to refinery shrinkage has long been "expansion creep" in existing facilities because it's faster than building brand new infrastructure, but this is not going to help for much longer.  Current facilities are limited in their ability add on more capacity and these measures do not account for abrupt global changes, wars and crisis events. 

The US needs redundancy, not "just in time" economics.     

Estimates suggest that up to eight new refineries (for heavy and light crude) running at least 250,000 b/d would be needed to increase the capacity ceiling while adding modern infrastructure and redundancy to offset aging plants.  A safer margin would be demand at 85%-90% of capacity.  This would also help the US to add supplies to any global market shortfall and keep prices from skyrocketing in the event of ongoing wars.  

What's stopping this from happening?  There's a number of obstacles.  First and foremost, no one wants to sink billions of dollars into a new facility based on higher gas margins that might be temporary.  In other words, investors will wait around until there's a catastrophic disruption and prices go out of control, but by then it will be too late.

This means it's likely that the only way to get new refineries built would be for the US government to partially backstop the investment.  It's not the worst way to spend taxpayer money; everyone likes lower gas prices.  Getting such a measure passed through congress is questionable, though. 

One possible avenue would be profit sharing with taxpayers on excess fuel sold, or on exports sold from new refineries.  This is similar to the Saudi Arabia model, which invests some oil profits back into healthcare, education, housing loans, and cheaper fuel and utilities for citizens.  Of course, Saudi Arabia is a monarchy and moving from theory to practice in the US is another matter.  

Then there's the permits, environmental studies and regulations, and a lot of other red tape that can extend build time up to 10 years.  Even with a streamlined bureaucracy, it can still take 3-5 years.  With government aid, the time can be reduced to 1-3 years.  It's clear that this is not a quick fix in any scenario, but if the process had been started a few years ago, then there would be no capacity issue and there would be no need for this discussion.

Again, the US economy is almost designed to avoid redundancy and preparedness.  

There is the possibility that a rush to build refineries is unnecessary in the short term.  With ship traffic in the Hormuz returning to normal, prices on oil will continue to drop.  This does not mean, though, that gasoline prices will fall in tandem, at least not for months to come.  The war in Ukraine also looks like it will be ongoing for some time, which means Russian supplies will not be returning to global markets.  

Refineries are a long term solution which requires long term planning; something which is nearly impossible within the US where the political landscape changes every 2-4 years.  It is also extremely difficult when half the government under Democrats wants to tear down oil infrastructure and force the country to accept inefficient green tech.  The point is, there are obvious fixes available, but nothing will happen until disaster strikes and politicians are effectively frightened.  

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 13:30

US, Australia Halt Consular Services In Brazil Before Presidential Election, Citing Security Concerns

Authored by Aldgra Fredly via The Epoch Times,

The United States and Australia on Oct. 2 suspended consular services in Brazil, citing security concerns ahead of the country's high-stakes presidential elections.

Security personnel stand outside the U.S. embassy after consular services were suspended due to security concerns in Brasilia, Brazil, on Oct. 2, 2026. Eraldo Peres/AP Photo

The U.S. embassy in Brazil issued an alert advising U.S. citizens seeking emergency assistance to contact the appropriate duty officer instead of visiting the embassy or other diplomatic facilities.

The Australian embassy also announced its closure in a notice, advising citizens seeking urgent consular assistance to contact the consular emergency center in Canberra by phone. It also urged people not to visit U.S. diplomatic facilities in Brazil, citing the U.S. embassy's security alert.

No details were provided about the security concerns that prompted the closures. The State Department said it coordinated with Brazilian officials to address security concerns.

Brazil's federal police said on Oct. 2 that they conducted a preventive operation in Sao Paulo and the Federal District targeting activity that could threaten U.S. diplomatic facilities, but have not yet identified any suspects linked to criminal organizations.

Police said the investigation stemmed from cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies and is still ongoing following the seizure of communication equipment.

Brazil will hold the first round of its presidential election on Oct. 4, with incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Sen. Flávio Bolsonaro among the frontrunners. If neither wins more than 50 percent of the vote, a runoff vote will take place on Oct. 25.

Bolsonaro is the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving a 27-year prison sentence after being convicted of plotting a coup following his 2022 election loss.

Last year, U.S. President Donald Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on Brazilian imports, citing the prosecution of Jair Bolsonaro. The U.S. government also sanctioned Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes and revoked his visa, along with those of his judicial allies and their family members, over what it called "censorship of protected expression in the United States" and a "witch hunt" targeting Jair Bolsonaro.

Lula has condemned the U.S. moves as interference in the Brazilian justice system.

The U.S. State Department on Aug. 31 placed Brazil under a "Level 2-Exercise increased caution" classification, while some areas of the country are designated as "Level 4-Do not travel," the most severe of the four advisory levels.

The advisory warns that violent crimes are common in urban regions of Brazil, including murder, armed robbery, and carjacking.

"Assaults are common, including with sedatives or drugs placed in drinks, especially in Rio de Janeiro," it stated. "Criminals target foreigners through dating apps or at bars before drugging and robbing their victims."

Naveen Athrappully and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 13:00

"First Time In History": Bessent Says Iran Faces Zero Oil Revenue As Tanker Loadings Collapse

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent joined Mike Allen for a new episode of "The Axios Show," published Saturday morning.

Bessent spoke about the Iran war's effect on the cost of living for US consumers and his "I am the house" comment early last month, which warned anyone betting against the Treasury's defense of the long end of the market.

Beyond the broader global bond rout, his comments on the Strait of Hormuz added color to President Trump's economic stranglehold on Tehran.

"They are isolating them economically like this never happened before. You know, right now, the score: barrels out of the Strait: U.S. about 1.1 billion, Iran zero," Bessent told Allen.

Bessent continued, "For the first time in history, they, since they started pumping oil, they will have no oil on the water this week. They will have no revenue."

Bessent on Iran:

For the first time in history, since they started pumping oil, they will have no oil on the water this week.

They will have no revenues. pic.twitter.com/PIrHwUCG4q

— Clash Report (@clashreport) October 3, 2026

Separately, last week, Goldman analysts Yulia Zhestkova Grigsby, Alexandra Paulus, and Daan Struyven told clients that a "divergence between the fall of Iranian exports and the rise of exports of other Persian Gulf producers" was underway.

The Goldman energy experts estimated that "dark exports" have helped boost Persian Gulf oil exports to 23.3 million barrels a day over the past week, back to prewar levels.

Also last week, Bloomberg News reported that Iran's crude loadings crashed to zero in August from around 250,000 barrels per day.

Data providers Kpler and Vortexa also recorded zero crude loadings last month.

The collapse in Iranian crude loadings suggests the US naval blockade is constraining Tehran's export options, while recovering flows from other Gulf producers point to eroded Iranian leverage over the strait. If sustained, Tehran's oil revenues would plunge, pressuring the regime to make a deal. 

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 12:30

Why So Many Social Science Claims Are False

Authored by Christopher J. Ferguson via RealClearInvestigations,

One of the most urgent questions facing society today is the potential impact of AI on education and labor markets. So it's no surprise that two scientists attempted to provide an answer, producing a meta-analysis suggesting that incorporating ChatGPT in schooling dramatically improved student outcomes. Social media and online sources promoted the 2025 study as a beacon of bright light.

The problem is that the researchers' conclusions were later found to be unreliable, and the study was retracted in April - another blow to the public's faith in science.

Scientists are increasingly chasing answers to big questions in fields from health care to climate change to AI. The academic research industry incentivizes them to produce the biggest possible findings that make for splashy headlines and career promotions. But such discoveries are rare in science, and too often, the result is widespread exaggeration, dodgy methods, and miscommunication.

"The incentive structure of modern science is such that a 'simplify, then exaggerate' strategy has become dominant, even if only tacitly," according to a recent academic review. "To get published in leading journals, to be awarded grants and to be hired as a postdoc or faculty member, a system-wide bias for novelty, exaggeration and storytelling has emerged."

As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported, an alarming amount of poor-quality academic and scientific research has been discovered in recent years. Hindawi, formerly a part of major science publisher Wiley, had to retract thousands of science articles, many of them alleged to have been produced by paper mills that generate reams of reports of studies that never existed.

Big discoveries are rare in science, but the academic research industry incentivizes scholars to turn small findings into splashy headlines.
AP

While cases of outright fraud have received wide attention, a more subtle infection has spread within the research community: Research results that are inconsistent, based on poor methodologies, or are of limited practical impact are too often transformed into big, broad, but unreliable claims that, over time, reduce public confidence in science.

Several recent high-profile retractions of scientific papers highlight how broad scientific claims can be built upon questionable data. A recent paper asserted that banning sex work increases rapes. The sex work paper got significant attention on social media before skeptical scholars pointed out they couldn't replicate the findings. In another major case, economists estimated that climate change would have a devastating economic toll on the world in a paper that was widely covered and influential in banking. However, it was ultimately retracted after other scholars alleged major errors.

In each case, science sleuths found that the dramatic claims did not reflect reality. While the number of retractions has soared over the past two decades to several thousand a year, according to the watchdog group Retraction Watch, experts believe only a small fraction of questionable work gets caught.

Flip a Coin

Lee Jussim, distinguished professor of psychology at Rutgers University and frequent critic of social science, has estimated that the vast majority of psychology research claims are false. He also noted that the ability of psychology to replicate most findings is no better than a coin toss.

At the core of the crisis is a broken system that pressures researchers to produce more and more papers in high-profile journals that favor bold rather than incremental (or null) findings. The incentives include:

• Academic reward systems that grant promotions, tenure, and grant funding to researchers based on the number of publications and bold claims they produce rather than thoughtful scholarship
• Journals that often attract subscription dollars and news attention for flashy findings
• News media that win subscriptions and clicks with dramatic, often surprising claims about human behavior
• Politicians who cherry-pick alarmist science claims to promote their favorite policies while overlooking contradictory evidence

"The growing competition and 'publish or perish' culture in academia might conflict with the objectivity and integrity of research, because it forces scientists to produce 'publishable' results at all costs," Daniele Fanelli, a meta-scientist at Heriot-Watt University and the London School of Economics, noted in a recent paper.

The system set up to tamp down sensationalism and flawed findings - peer review - is so overwhelmed by the flood of research papers in recent years that it can't begin to pull all the weeds from the garden of science. Peer reviewers are busy scholars who are mostly unpaid and stretched too thin, even with the help of emerging AI tools that have their own problems with accuracy. One recent paper estimated that, in any given year, peer reviewers collectively work the equivalent of 15,000 years on scientific papers, which, if actually paid, would cost about $2.5 billion for U.S., Chinese, and U.K. reviewers alone.

Even when errors are detected, correcting and retracting papers is a contentious process that often takes years. Publishers and editors fear reputational damage and lawsuits from researchers, providing few incentives for correcting the record even if fraud is suspected.

Numbers Game

A common type of research exaggeration stems from the promotion of "statistically significant" findings. The seriousness of the phrase may lead the public to interpret the findings as reliable and practically useful. But often that's not the case. That's because most social science and medical findings are very weak, so weak they might be produced by methodological flaws (or crud) in those studies. Scientists are nonetheless incentivized to highlight the supposed importance of statistically significant studies in order to get attention, even if they don't warrant it.

As an analogy, consider the difference between a butterfly and an anvil landing on one's head. Both exert measurable weight on the head and, as such, both produce "statistically significant" results. But the magnitude of impact, the effect size, differs enormously. Most people would be far more concerned to avoid an anvil landing on their head than a butterfly. That's why "statistically significant" tells us nothing about the practical importance of a finding.

Even a finding with a standard effect size may not be reliable. For instance, social psychologist Daryl Bem published a report in one of the American Psychological Association's leading journals suggesting that ordinary people had extrasensory perception, or the ability to predict the future. Such an implausible finding raised considerable controversy at the time.

The problem was that Bem used weak research methods common throughout the social sciences to publish impossible results. Long a defender of ESP, Bem had in an earlier paper explicitly noted that the effects of ESP appeared similar to findings in other areas of psychology, saying, "The mean effect size is quite respectable in comparison with other controversial research areas of human performance." Bem did not respond to requests for comment.

Professor Fanelli said that poor training and unrealistic expectations help explain why social scientists miscommunicate data. "I think that part of a useful cultural change would be towards a greater understanding and acceptance of the limitations of social science," Fanelli said in an email. "Instead, a lot of it seems to have in some ways reinforced what was deemed the 'cult of statistical significance,' a mechanical and simplistic use of [statistical significance] as a paragon of validity."

Behind this presentation of hyped results is an academic publishing industry of five big companies with handsome profit margins. The Big Five, as they are known (Elsevier, Sage, Springer Nature, Taylor & Francis, Wiley), along with research grant funders, academic tenure evaluations, and the media incentivize scholars to stretch for the dramatic and oversell weak results. In science, a negative finding that shows no effect is as important as a positive one. But few negative findings get published.

Policymakers tend to make things worse. Catherine Knibbs, a psychotherapist and founder of Children and Tech, had been involved in some of the conversations around the controversial U.K. push for social media bans for youth under 16. She suggests policymakers often approach science with set conclusions, not open questions, and appear incurious about data that doesn't fit their agendas.

"To be honest I feel science is complex and whilst I love that about it, I [feel] quite alone in this," Knibbs said in an email. "People are often skimming the stats and looking for [evidence that confirms their beliefs]. Not many people have time to slow down and use their slower cognizant processes. It's why we have the chicken little sky is falling down shit."

Pushing for Reform

The good news is that a growing number of researchers are pushing for reforms that could improve the integrity of scientific findings. One promising sign is the growth of the "open science movement," which encourages the preregistration of studies. This reduces the ability of researchers to mangle their data analysis to produce preferred results. And the movement's promotion of greater data transparency allows for more confirmation of findings.

Brian Nosek, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia who is leading the open science movement, struck a hopeful tone. "My most optimistic take is that we have established a stronger culture of self-scrutiny and continuous improvement," he said. "I don't know how successful the practice changes have been, but I believe that experimenting with new research methods and committing to evaluating what works and what doesn't will lead us in positive directions."

Some scholars are breaking away from the Big Five academic publishers by beginning their own nonprofit scientific journals. In some cases, this has been the result of exorbitant fees that journals charge authors for making papers public. A new federal legal case likewise accuses the Big Five of defrauding the government through unreasonable publishing charges, often paid for by government grants. Aside from the financial costs taken on by scholars, independent journals also potentially free scholars from a heavy focus on positive findings or publication bias.

A small number of research institutions are also trying to directly address some of the problematic incentives. In awarding promotions and tenure, they are putting less emphasis on the number of papers that researchers produce and the prestige of the journals where they are published. Instead, the quality of the paper is what counts.

Professor Ric Ferraro, editor of Current Psychology, emphasized that not all scholars or journals are bad actors. Some try to do the right thing and produce solid research. But breaking this cycle of perverse incentives will be difficult, as too many benefit from it, from scholars and academic journals to news media and politicians.

Until the incentives for research change more broadly, the public will continue to be fed a steady diet of bold claims about human behavior built on an unsteady foundation.

This article is part of an RCI series on The Normalization of Scientific Fraud. Read the previous articles here.

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 12:00

"In The Name Of God": Yemen Leader Orders All-Out Offensive Against Iran-Backed Houthis

Saudi Arabia and Yemeni government forces have been preparing for a major offensive against Iran-backed Houthis, whose latest advances along Yemen's western coast have tightened their control over coastal areas and disrupted a critical maritime chokepoint known as the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Bloomberg now reports that the operation is underway.

The outlet reports that Rashad Al-Alimi, head of Yemen's Presidential Leadership Council, ordered all branches of the armed forces into active combat operations on Sunday.

"All state military, security and civil institutions as of this moment are mobilized and on high alert until the mission is completed and victory is achieved," Al-Alimi said on Sunday.

He said the operation would continue "until the liberation of the country from the grip of the terrorist Houthi militia."

باسم الله، وباسم الشعب، وبناءً على قرارات مجلس الدفاع الوطني، نعلن اليوم بدء العمليات العسكرية لاستعادة ما تبقى من أراضي الجمهورية، وبسط سلطة الدولة ومؤسساتها على كامل التراب الوطني. pic.twitter.com/yaKsnSDpbK

— د/ رشاد محمد العليمي (@PresidentRashad) October 4, 2026

Our reporting on Saturday indicated that more than 100,000 Yemeni pro-government troops were set to mobilize for the offensive. Last month, the ease and speed of Houthi gains proved humiliating for the Saudi coalition in Yemen.

The Houthis largely stayed out of the US-Israeli war against Iran. But by midsummer, the terror group had announced a blockade of Saudi ships in the critical maritime chokepoint in response to what it described as a "siege" of Yemen. It has since repeatedly attacked the kingdom, including its oil facilities.

On Saturday, multiple reports and footage circulating on X showed what appeared to be smoke rising from Saudi Aramco's Riyadh refinery.

Reuters reported Friday that Saudi air power would support Yemeni ground forces. The report did not specify which aircraft had been deployed for the operation, but the Saudis operate US-built F-15s, Eurofighter Typhoons and Tornado strike aircraft.

Beyond the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the latest data from Goldman show that crude oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz are back to pre-war levels, an indication that Tehran's leverage in the region has quickly eroded.

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 11:30

10-Year Cost Of Democratic Socialist Policies Could Hit $350,000 Per Household, White House Says

Authored by Jacki Thrapp via The Epoch Times,

American taxpayers would face a net fiscal burden of over $350,000 per household in the next decade if the Democratic Socialists of America's top policies were adopted, according to a report released Oct. 1 by President Donald Trump's Council of Economic Advisers.

The report predicted a net fiscal burden of more than $49 trillion from 2027 to 2036 - larger than the national debt, which hit a milestone of $40 trillion in August.

The report added up the presumed costs for Democratic Socialists of America's agenda items such as loosening border restrictions, handing out amnesty to all illegal immigrants in the country, abolishing the police and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, eliminating prisons, providing government-run healthcare for everyone, and canceling all student debt.

The majority of the cost would come from Medicare for All, which is predicted to cost $47.4 trillion out of the $52.8 trillion in gross costs, which was lowered to nearly $49 trillion due to the estimated $3.9 trillion that would be collected from the wealth tax.

Medicare for All proposals would transform the United States into a single-payer healthcare system in which the federal government covers all medical services, eliminating the out-of-pocket costs for patients.

The second most expensive proposal, according to the report, would be canceling student debt and making college free. That comes at a price tag of $3.6 trillion.

Student Loan Debt Statistics by the Education Data Initiative suggest that Americans currently owe roughly $1.9 trillion in student debt. Nearly $1.7 trillion of that debt is held by the federal government and is owed by nearly 43 million loan recipients.

The third-largest spending item would come from a mandated 32-hour workweek, costing approximately $918 billion in lost tax revenue.

The Trump administration described the proposals' potential impact on the economy, suggesting they would make everyday costs skyrocket with double-digit inflation and prices rising an extra 130 to 160 percent over 10 years.

The Epoch Times contacted the Democratic Socialists of America for comment and did not hear back by publication.

The report came out the same day Trump kicked off his 32-day campaign blitz for Republicans facing tough races in the November midterms.

During a speech at Peterbilt Motors' factory in Denton, Texas, on Thursday, Trump highlighted the resurgence of manufacturing in the United States and touted the economy's performance under his administration.

"We announce all these great numbers," Trump said. "The best numbers in the history of any president. There's never been any president that's got $21 trillion invested in our country. Not even close."

The president also showed his support for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, who is in a tight U.S. Senate race against Democrat James Talarico.

After the speech, Trump made a rare presidential visit to the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma for a rally. Only a handful of U.S. presidents have visited tribal nations while in office.

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 11:00

Zelensky Vows To Hammer More Russian Refineries As G7 Greenlights Emergency Fuel Dump

President Volodymyr Zelensky told Reuters in an exclusive interview that Ukraine plans to intensify attacks on Russian oil refineries in response to continued strikes on Ukrainian cities. The threat comes as the Trump administration pressures European allies to release up to 100 million barrels of emergency oil and diesel stocks ahead of the Northern Hemisphere winter, with a global refining crunch already straining fuel supplies.

Zelensky told the outlet that Ukrainian intelligence had obtained documents outlining what he described as Russian President Vladimir Putin's new war doctrine to broaden attacks on civilian infrastructure ahead of winter.

"We saw documents and we know that they allow them to attack infrastructure, logistics, and especially to attack in the cities, in the villages, everywhere, roads, schools, hospitals," Zelensky said. "To pressure people to leave the capital, leave different cities: this is the goal of the operation."

Zelensky then said, "We have to respond in any way (we can). With their attacks on our energy, we have to respond on their energy. First of all, oil refiners, etc.: what gives money to them for this war. But we will not respond, of course, just like them, on any civilian objects."

gonna need a bigger diesel emergency reserve release...

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 3, 2026

Zelensky's plan to further destroy Russia's refineries comes as the Trump administration seeks to revive peace negotiations. Zelensky said Russia had shown no willingness to discuss either peace talks or a ceasefire covering energy infrastructure.

The Trump administration's move to pressure European countries and other G7 members into releasing as much as 100 million barrels of emergency oil and diesel stocks, as confirmed by French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday, is likely in response to Zelensky's expanding drone and missile attacks on Russian energy assets, as stockpiles for critical fuels are well below seasonal levels for this time of year. 

The International Energy Agency is coordinating the emergency release, which will take place over the next four months, according to Macron.

Goldman energy analyst Nikhil Bhandari warned last month that the global refining crisis stems from a combination of disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz and, more importantly, Ukraine's bombardment of Russian refineries. Those attacks have prompted Moscow to extend its diesel export halt, suggesting the refining crisis could linger well into next year and keep refined-product prices elevated. 

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

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 10:30

French Feminist Convicted Of The Crime Of "Public Insult" For Refusing To Call Transgender Mayor A "Woman"

Authored by Jonathan Turley via JonathanTurley.org,

Dora Moutot is a feminist who has dedicated much of her life to fighting for women's rights and has built a following on social media. Like other feminists, Moutot does not view transgender women the same as biological women. She has now joined others who are facing criminal charges for expressing those views. Transgender advocates have demanded that she be punished for her views in France.

Moutot recounted how transgender activists demanded that she be more "inclusive" in how she referred to "women." She refused, and explained that "being a woman is a biological fact and that I didn't think saying so should be controversial." She was immediately denounced as a "transphobe and a TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist), a term I'd never even heard before."

What followed was all too familiar. A cancel campaign led to her brand partnerships being canceled. In 2022, she was invited on a French TV program to discuss transgender issues with Marie Cau, France's first transgender mayor. On the program, she was asked if she thought Cau was a woman. Moutot responded, Cau "is a man, a transfeminine man."

That was all it took. Transgender advocates had their case and filed charges for "public insult," which is a crime in France with a maximum punishment of one year in prison and a fine of up to €45,000 for insults committed against a person because of their sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

Free speech has long been in a free fall in France. Many disagree with Moutot and they are accorded free speech to denounce her views. However, Moutot is not extended the same protection based on the content of her views.

These laws criminalize speech under vague standards referring to "inciting" or "intimidating" others based on race or religion. For example, fashion designer John Galliano has been found guilty in a French court on charges of making anti-Semitic comments against at least three people in a Paris bar. At his sentencing, Judge Anne Marie Sauteraud read out a list of the bad words used by Galliano to Geraldine Bloch and Philippe Virgitti, including using 'dirty whore" in criticism.

In another case, the father of French conservative presidential candidate Marine Le Pen was fined because he had called people from the Roma minority "smelly." A French teenager was charged for criticizing Islam as a "religion of hate."

This is a nation that still echoes the cry of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity ("liberté, égalité, fraternité"). However, in today's France, "liberté" is no longer valued. Individual rights of religion and speech are routinely sacrificed in the name of "equity" and "fraternity."

In my book The Indispensable Right, I discuss the decline of free speech in France and other nations. As we face our own growing anti-free speech movement, citizens need to take a long look at countries like France to see what awaits us down this path. Europe went down this slippery slope of censorship decades ago, and the desire to silence others has now become an insatiable appetite.

As in this case, activists spend more time silencing opposing views than responding to them. For transgender activists, it is intolerable for feminists like Moutot to hold contrary views. Instead of addressing her viewpoints in public, they want her declared a criminal. Censorship then becomes an insatiable appetite for groups to silence their own critics.

Moutot describes the Orwellian take on free speech in France today:

"The judge did not impose the course, but in May, I was found guilty of 'public insult' and fined €4,754. The judge found that though my statements were made in the context of a debate, they constituted an 'abuse of freedom of expression warranting the imposition of a criminal penalty commensurate with the harm thus caused to the values protected by our democratic society.' In other words, the judge concluded my intent had been to cause harm."

It is chilling to think of a judge willingly participating in such censorship, but this is now standard in the country. In the meantime, transgender activists are not done with Moutot, whose very existence appears to outrage them:

"In June, just weeks after my conviction, another LGBT organization filed six more complaints against me and my colleague Marguerite Stern. These new charges target specific statements we made on social media and on our feminist blog and YouTube channel Femelliste. They include our opinion that 'men' were 'demanding access to our spaces' and the question: 'On what grounds should trans women's fear of being mocked in men's toilets take precedence over women's fear of being raped?'"

This speech would be entirely protected in the United States. However, the case is a chilling cautionary tale for Americans fighting a resurgent anti-free speech movement. This is the slippery slope of censorship that awaits us if we abandon our defining commitment to free speech. After the removal of much of the censorship system established during the Biden Administration, American censors did not take jobs at Starbucks. They continue to peddle their expertise in regulating and silencing the speech of others.

It is a dire future. Just ask Dora Moutot.

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of "Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution".

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 09:20

"We Don't Need To Sell The Story Anymore": Nuclear Wins The Argument At WNA 2026... Now Everyone Is Racing For Bronze

For most of the 2010s, the annual World Nuclear Association symposium in London was an exercise in group therapy: an industry reeling from Fukushima, German shutdowns and a seven-year uranium bear market, explaining to an indifferent world why it deserved to exist. Not anymore.

This year's gathering (Sept 9-11) drew a record crowd: attendance was up 17% from last year per BofA, with more than 1,000 delegates from 50 countries and 35 new WNA members. And the mood had changed completely. As Cameco CEO Tim Gitzel put it during his fireside chat:

"We don't need to sell the [nuclear] story anymore, we just need to convert it to action."

CIBC analyst Anita Soni, who also attended, summed up the three days the same way: "nuclear energy has largely won the policy and market acceptance debate, with attention now turning to execution at scale." The question is no longer whether the world builds reactors, but whether anyone can build them on time and on budget. On that front, the industry's track record needs little comment.

There's also a catch that Gitzel, whose Cameco owns 49% of Westinghouse, was candid about: in the West, nobody wants to go first. "Everyone is racing for bronze," he said. Most utilities would rather be the third to build a new large reactor than risk being the first. Constellation's Jason Murphy confirmed this from a separate panel: CEG is one of the companies that would "prefer to be third, not first." This is how you end up with a race in which all the runners stay at the starting line watching each other.

The symposium lined up nicely with the IAEA's annual outlook, which raised its long-term nuclear projections for the sixth consecutive year. Under the high case, global capacity hits 1,045 GWe by 2050 (from 992 GWe in last year's edition) and 1,284 GWe by 2060, or about 3.4x the 377 GWe operating at the end of 2025. Even the low case now roughly doubles capacity by 2060.

According to Northland's Jeff Grampp, the more important point is that the low case moved most: +14% to 641 GWe, versus +5% for the high case. In his view this "suggests a de-risking of the long-term growth narrative." North America's low case also flipped from contraction last year to growth this year (136 GWe by 2050, vs 98 GWe previously).

Source: ZH using IAEA figures cited by Northland and CIBC

Northland makes two further points we agree with:

• The forecast is bottom-up and not reverse-engineered from a net-zero scenario, "which we think make these projections more credible/realistic." In other words, nobody started with 1.5°C and worked backward.
• The driver has changed from climate to energy security. "While its zero carbon attributes are compelling, we think the energy security investment case is stronger and more resilient than climate-based investment, which can ebb and flow with political regimes." We've been saying the same for years, and it's hard to argue with after watching Germany's economy minister call for a "nuclear rethink" as energy prices surged in April. Better late than never.

Then there are SMRs. Last year the IAEA saw small modular reactors taking 5%-24% of new capacity by 2050, a range so wide it was nearly meaningless, with the low end at a "paltry" 16 GWe. This year the band is 23%-28%, or about 120-285 GWe. In North America, ~60% of new nuclear capacity is expected to come from SMRs. Readers will know that we've long argued modular, behind-the-meter reactors are the only real long-term answer to the AI power problem, so it's nice to see the IAEA catching up (for much more, see "Bring Your Own Power Plant: Behind-The-Meter To Power 25% Of All Data Centers By 2030").

CIBC's Krista Friesen, in her Weekly Blueprint, adds a point that gets far less attention: the existing fleet is old. Two-thirds of operating reactors are more than 30 years old, and 46% are over 40. Even in the high case, about one-third of today's capacity retires by 2060. The industry therefore has to keep building just to stand still, and in 2025 it didn't quite manage that. Seven reactors (2.8 GW) were retired and only three (3.0 GW) were connected. Nuclear generation grew 1.1%, overall electricity generation grew 2.7%, while nuclear's share of global power fell to 8.4% from 8.7%.

The $6 trillion question

Day 1 of the symposium was a Finance Summit, and the headline number was large. Meeting the "Tripling Declaration" would require about $6 trillion over 25 years, with annual nuclear capex rising from about $80BN today to more than $250BN a year through 2050. (For reference, current aggregate national targets put global capacity at 1,457 GWe by 2050, which is almost a quadrupling.)

The notable change is that, as one Westinghouse/EDF/Orano/GE Vernova panel put it (per BofA), "A few years ago the question was whether there was sufficient investment money to do this. Now there is." CIBC reports that discussions are "now focused less on whether institutions will invest and more on when." The WNA also launched a World Nuclear Investment Guide to help turn a "specialized energy investment" into a mainstream infrastructure asset class. The goal is to take design, licensing, regulatory and supply-chain risk out of projects and leave only execution risk, which, based on history, is plenty.

The most useful comments came from the customers. On BofA's "Beyond offtake" panel, ExxonMobil said plainly that "the nuclear industry doesn't have a technology problem, it has a DEPLOYMENT problem", and argued that the risk model is wrong. In LNG or CCGT projects, nobody expects the technology vendor to carry most of the risk. The owner-operator does. Exxon is preparing a report proposing a new delivery model.

Amazon, which is putting "real money on the table" behind X-energy, made a point that should be pinned above every regulator's desk:

"No point for a PPA if the connections take 7 years."

That's the grid interconnection queue in one sentence, and it's why we've been pushing "behind the meter" on-site generation for data centers (going so far as to tweet in December: "Make 'behind the meter' mandatory"). Demand isn't the issue either: CIBC notes Microsoft plans to more than triple its data center capacity to over 38 GW by 2032 from about 12 GW, excluding rented neocloud capacity. Those gigawatts have to come from somewhere.

Meanwhile, China just builds them

While the West waits to see who goes first, China explained how it does things. Ma Yuanhua of State Nuclear Power Technology Corp. said China had 62 reactors operating (66 GW) and 58 under construction (69 GW) as of July, with targets of 110 GW by 2030 and 150 GW by 2035. The method is dull and it works: standardization, specialization, centralization. Targets include 80% design reuse, a 56-month construction schedule, 93%+ factory acceptance rates, and centralized procurement. (By comparison, some Western projects have spent longer than 56 months on permitting.)

Of course, it depends who is counting. SNPTC's 58 includes projects China considers underway. The WNA only counts reactors once the first concrete has been poured, and by that stricter definition, per Goldman's monthly tracker, China had 37 reactors under construction as of Aug 11, more than twice India (8) and Russia (7) combined, and nearly as many as the other 16 countries on the list put together (42). The U.S. doesn't appear on the chart at all, which is the more telling number. As we summarized it on Aug 13: "China 37 nuclear reactors under construction; US 0."

Source: @zerohedge on X; World Nuclear Association, data compiled by Goldman Sachs Global Investment Research

This is where "everyone racing for bronze" leads: the U.S. hasn't even qualified for the race yet, while China is already building its next reactors.

The Western lesson was said out loud. Constellation: "The West should apply the China model." Speakers backed a "license once, review once, build many" framework, and there's real movement. Finland's regulatory overhaul cuts binding requirements from about 8,000 to 1,500, the U.S. NRC is changing its culture under the ADVANCE Act, and Europe's ENGARD initiative aims to harmonize design reviews across countries.

Other highlights from around the world:

• Japan is back. TEPCO restarted Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Unit 6 on Feb 9 after 14 years offline. Kansai Electric says 15 reactors have now restarted since Fukushima, and Japan's policy has moved from "reducing" to "maximizing" nuclear, with a 20% share targeted by 2040 and 11-14 new large reactors by the 2050s. We asked back in May whether new Japanese build was inevitable. The answer appears to be yes. 

How it's done:

This is TEPCO’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power station in Niigata. The seven-unit site has 8.2GW of capacity, making it the world's largest power plant. Unit 6 entered commercial operation on 16 April 2026, returning a 1.36GW Advanced Boiling Water Reactor to… pic.twitter.com/N2HrvHfFhA

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 30, 2026

• Poland has secured €17BN for its first plant, with three AP1000s in preparation.
• Czech Republic is moving to 80-year operations and building new units plus a Rolls-Royce SMR.
• USA: Following the May 2025 Executive Order calling for 10 large reactors under construction by 2030, DOE's $17.5BN long-lead procurement program has letters of intent with seven unnamed counterparties. Some attendees are optimistic about 1-2 site announcements before the midterms. TerraPower has its construction permit and an active job site in Wyoming.
• Africa: Togo's president signed on to the tripling pledge and will host the NEISA summit in 2027, noting that Africa wants "partnerships and investment rather than technology handouts."
• Ships: HD Korea Shipbuilding presented on nuclear-powered commercial vessels, a timely follow-on to Washington laying the groundwork for offshore nuclear in July. Its risk disclosure was admirably honest: "It might not work."

The real bottleneck: you can't 3D-print a uranium deposit

This is where the symposium got most interesting for markets. Reactors can be standardized, financed and eventually built. The fuel to run them is a different problem. Here is what CCJ's Gitzel said, via BofA:

Uranium mining is the bottleneck, as deposits are non-reproducible and lead times from discovery to production range up to 20 years; while fuel conversion, enrichment and fabrication can be more easily addressed with capital alone.

Kazatomprom's Dastan Kosherbayev put it more bluntly: after years of underinvestment, producers will prioritize customers who give clear, long-term demand signals. Kazatomprom will "no longer turn down attractive eastern deals in anticipation of potential western demand." Put simply, Western utilities that have been waiting for spot dips may find the East has bought the inventory. This comes as Russia banned sulphuric acid exports through year-end, threatening about 3MM lbs of Kazakh 2027 output, while Kazatomprom agreed to sell uranium to Rosatom's Uranium One. Coincidences happen.

Northland ran the numbers, and they are large:

• Uranium: At 0.4-0.5MM lbs per GWe per year, the IAEA's 641-1,045 GWe range implies 288-470MM lbs of annual demand by 2050, versus about 168MM lbs today, and that's before replacing depleted mines.
• Enrichment: Excluding Russian and Chinese SWU, Western demand is about 28.5MM SWU against about 24.8MM SWU of supply (per Urenco). The West is already in deficit. In the IAEA high case, demand rises to about 57MM SWU, a ~32MM SWU shortfall, or up to 69MM if SMRs running on HALEU take 30%-50% share.

ZH chart built from Northland Capital Markets figures

Urenco confirmed this from the supply side: its order book has grown from €8.7BN in 2021 to €21.3BN, and it is adding 4.6MM SWU, almost a third more capacity, "based on a market assessment, not orders." Separately, Constellation said LEU+ (fuel enriched up to 10%) will allow 24-month reload cycles across its fleet, and Silex/GLE expects its laser enrichment license near Paducah by 2027. As we noted when DOE put $2.7BN behind domestic enrichment in January, the fuel chain is where the money is going.

Prices are responding. BofA's charts:

On uranium, the long-term contract price hit an all-time high of $96.50/lb (even if nuclear stocks have not noticed), above the prior 2007 peak of $95.00, as we noted in "Uranium Needs To Go Higher" earlier this month. BofA reaffirmed its forecasts: $104.20/lb for 2026 and $129.80/lb for 2027, which would be a new record, before easing to a long-term $84.75.

Spot has also been trading below term, as the chart above shows. BofA says the important change is who is buying. Producers' share of term selling fell from 92% in 2023 to 76% in 2025, and "rising utility participation in the term market is a driver of higher U3O8 prices, as churn... is replaced by end-user consumptive demand." In other words, less trading between hedge funds and more buying by utilities that actually need the fuel.

For those who think the move is over, here's the 38-year chart. Uranium remains well below its 2007 nominal peak, even though the demand story is now much broader.

None of this is new to regular readers. Goldman flagged a cumulative 2.3 billion lb uranium supply deficit through 2045 in May when it added SMRs to its models, and we argued in August that the market is still underpricing the nuclear build cycle.

How to trade it: picks and shovels over reactor dreams

The sell side mostly agrees on direction, but not on where to position along the value chain:

• BofA (Lawson Winder) "remains constructive" and names buy-rated U.S.-listed exposure: CEG, TLN, VST in power; CCJ and OKLO among vendors; and CCJ and STDN in the fuel cycle.
• Northland (Jeff Grampp) is also long-term bullish but more careful on timing. He cut price targets on reactor developers (IMSR to $8 from $15, SMR to $10 from $16, NNE to $22 from $37) to reflect higher costs of capital (i.e., more dilution) and a slower 2030-2035 buildout. He instead favors fuel and supply-chain names that make money now: BWXT, LEU, EU, URG, MIR. Asked to choose between enrichment and uranium, Northland picks uranium.

That seems like the right reading of the symposium. The long-term story is intact and improving, with the IAEA raising forecasts again, hyperscalers writing checks and Japan back in the game. The near-term constraints are physical: fuel, forgings, workers and grid connections. Reactor developers have to wait for the first Western mover to deliver on time and on budget. Uranium miners and enrichers don't. Both need the same uranium.

As Kansai Electric's delegate said, the industry's next phase is about "disciplined vision," and increasingly about meeting in person, "becoming more analog in an increasingly digital world." That's also a fair description of uranium: a physical asset that can't be replicated, needed to power data centers, and in short supply.

More in the full notes: BofA Global Research, "Postcard from the 2026 WNA Symposium" (Sept 15); CIBC Capital Markets, "2026 World Nuclear Symposium" (Sept 15) and "IAEA Raises Nuclear Outlook For Sixth Consecutive Year – The Weekly Blueprint" (Sept 14); Northland Capital Markets, "Takeaways From Updated IAEA Nuclear Forecast" (Sept 17), all available to pro subs.

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 08:45

Why Apartments In Tokyo Are So Much Cheaper Than In NYC

Authored by Julia R. Cartwright via The Daily Economy,

Imagine it's January in New York and you're sharing a tiny apartment with two roommates. The walls are crumbling around you, and there's a hole in your bedroom wall big enough to see outside. Every time it rains or snows, water drips into your room. You call your landlord to fix it over and over again, but nothing happens.

Tokyo apartment building by night. CAPTAINHOOK via Shutterstock.

This is reality for many New Yorkers. This degradation is the predictable result of decades of housing policy that has kept supply scarce and left rent-regulated buildings to decay. Many people blame it on big-city life, but lessons from Tokyo show us that it doesn't have to be that way.

Tokyo Metropolis is home to about 14.27 million people, far more than New York City's roughly 8.5 million. Yet renting in a city not quite twice the size costs a fraction of what it does in the biggest city in the US.

In the mid-1990s, a one-bedroom apartment in Tokyo cost about the same as one in New York, a little less than $1,000 a month. By 2025, a New York one-bedroom averaged about $4,400 per month, while a Tokyo one-bedroom ran about $1,270. A weaker yen explains part of that gap, but even in yen, Tokyo rents barely moved in 30 years while New York's rents nearly tripled.

Housing prices ultimately come down to supply and demand. So how has Tokyo managed to keep housing relatively affordable, while New York has struggled to do the same?

Tokyo has been focused on keeping up with demand; its housing stock nearly tripled between 1963 and 2013, reaching 7.36 million homes. To do this, Japan keeps zoning flexible. Instead of limiting each area to a single use, zoning allows homes, shops, and light industry to coexist on the same blocks. Projects that follow these rules can be built "as-of-right," without discretionary review or giving neighbors the power to block them.

Japan's zoning rules are uniform across the country. The national government defines 13 standard zones instead of leaving land use to individual neighborhoods. That top-down approach cuts both ways, however, since a national system could tighten rules as easily as loosen them, but Japan's has repeatedly loosened them to allow more housing.

New York City's zoning works in nearly the opposite way. A site-specific rezoning goes through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure, a review so onerous that about 40 percent of private rezoning proposals fail to get approved. About 27 percent of Manhattan's lots are under restrictive landmark regulations, and historic districts see new buildings at about one-sixth the rate of other lots.

Then there are the empty NYC apartments. The 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act capped rent increases on vacant rent-stabilized units and limited how much renovation cost landlords can recover. When a $700-a-month unit needs $100,000 of work to meet code, many owners leave it empty; this helps explain why nearly 57,000 rent-stabilized apartments were empty in 2025.

Continuing their stance of flexibility, Tokyo has allowed smaller apartments to be built. A typical one-bedroom is about 430 square feet, compared with 590 for a New York one-bedroom. Smaller apartments lower the barrier to entry for single renters and young professionals to get their own place.

New York spent decades making small units hard to build through a 400-square-foot minimum rule dating to 1987 and zoning rules called the "Dwelling Unit Factor" that forced large average unit sizes. The "City of Yes" amendment only eased those rules in December 2024, after decades of limiting the kinds of smaller, cheaper apartments Tokyo builds routinely.

Buildings in Japan also turn over faster. Japan's tax code depreciates a wooden house over 22 years, and the average Japanese home is demolished at about 32 years old, versus roughly 70 in the US. Old stock gets replaced with newer, denser buildings instead of being preserved indefinitely.

Japan's inclusive regulations result in much more building. Tokyo averaged about 155,000 housing starts a year from 1995 to 2015 and still starts roughly 130,000 annually; New York, by contrast, added roughly 50,000 in 2025. Since the 1960s, Tokyo's stock has nearly tripled while New York's has grown only 20 to 30 percent.

Factory-built homes also help ease supply constraints. One Japanese Sekisui House plant produces about 20 houses a day, and roughly 13 percent of new Japanese homes are prefab or modular. New York has only recently started experimenting with modular construction, and it remains a small share of the city's building, far behind Japan.

To be fair, Tokyo isn't cheap by Japanese standards, but it has accommodated millions without New York-style crumbling buildings and vacant units. New York is moving the other way: Mamdani's Rent Guidelines Board froze rents for roughly one million stabilized apartments. The freeze helps current tenants but creates no new homes, and analysts expect more units to sit empty as prices for non-stabilized apartments keep rising.

The renter watching snow blow through the hole in her bedroom wall won't be saved by another year of frozen rent. Instead of doubling down on the policies that brought scarcity, dilapidated apartments, and sky-high rents, New York could take a lesson from Tokyo, where the way to make housing affordable has been to make a lot more of it.

Julia R. Cartwright is an economist whose work specializes in law and economics, political economy, and economic development. Her research features topics like the governance structures of crypto markets, the economic consequences of judicial interventions in courts in East Africa, and the development impact of housing regulations.

Tyler Durden Sun, 10/04/2026 - 08:10