The Big State Monetary And Fiscal System Is Over

Authored by Daniel Lacalle via dlacalle.com,

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

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

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

That illusion is over.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big corporations do not increase prices; governments do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This will be a massive mistake... Again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Developed economies need a policy reversal based on four principles.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bessent Emerges As "AI Czar" Frontrunner

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

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

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

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

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

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

— CNBC (@CNBC) September 21, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

Authored by Kimberly Hayek via The Epoch Times,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reuters contributed to this report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Via American Greatness,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI & The Same Old Politicized Hysteria

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

The midterm elections are six weeks away.

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

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

Bedlam followed.

Weaponizing AI

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

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

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

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

The familiar political script followed.

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

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

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

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

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

A Litany of Political Panics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What ended the panic?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then the George Floyd frenzy abruptly subsided.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have You Seen The Surge In US Rough Rice Futures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authored by AG News Staff via American Greatness,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAHA Leaders Warn Trump, RFK Jr. Over Inaction On mRNA Vaccines

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

Some leaders in the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement on Sept. 21 warned President Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over their inaction regarding messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccines, including vaccines against COVID-19.

"While the centerpiece of the MAHA and health freedom agenda has been removal of mRNA shots, you have failed to take decisive action on this front despite overwhelming credible evidence to the harm of this technology," the activists said in an open letter to Trump and Kennedy.

"Instead, your policies related to mRNA technology are neutered and self-defeating, putting pregnant women and children at risk, misleading parents and eroding their rights, and failing to help those harmed by vaccines."

They added, "If you continue to ignore our central issue of removing the mRNA platform, the MAHA and health freedom movements will withdraw their support of you, and you will face the political consequences."

The letter came after Kennedy told supporters that it takes time to make change inside the government, and that officials under him are carrying out vaccine safety studies that will inform future developments.

Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, a Texas doctor, organized the letter. She has criticized several actions by Kennedy and the officials he oversees since he became health secretary in 2025 and heads Americans for Health Freedom.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), and commentator Tucker Carlson, all one-time Trump allies who have fallen out of favor with the president, signed the letter.

Other signatories include Dr. Joe Varon, president and chief medical officer at the Independent Medical Alliance; Dr. Robert Malone, who was chosen by Kennedy to advise the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines; Leslie Manookian, founder and president of the Health Freedom Defense Fund, which has fought vaccine and mask mandates in court; and Dr. Joel Wallskog, who was injured by a COVID-19 vaccine and serves as co-chair of the vaccine injury advocacy group React19.

The coalition took exception with how mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, which Kennedy once described as the deadliest vaccines on the market, remain available for Americans. They also raised concerns about how the administration recently cleared an mRNA vaccine against influenza even though it was not tested against a placebo, which ran counter to a promise made by Kennedy that no new vaccines would be approved absent placebo-controlled trials. And they said there has been an "absence of meaningful help for those injured from the mRNA shots."

"The man who spent years warning America about mRNA vaccines now presides over a department that has approved another one," Malone and his wife, Jill Glasspool Malone, wrote in a blog post on Monday.

That is not a minor detail. It is the sort of contradiction that the medical freedom movement once would have torn apart."

Proponents of mRNA vaccines, including CDC Director Dr. Erica Schwartz, say data show they are safe and effective.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told news outlets in a statement that Kennedy "has been clear that he believes mRNA products warrant heightened scientific scrutiny."

The spokesperson added: "HHS continues to support mRNA research where the science shows promise, including for hard-to-treat cancers. At the same time, HHS wound down investments in mRNA vaccines for upper respiratory viruses because the technology does not effectively protect against infection from rapidly mutating viruses such as COVID and flu."

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 14:25

Goldman Warns Nightmare Refining Crisis Could Prolong Diesel, Gas Price Pain Through 2027

Goldman energy analyst Nikhil Bhandari warned in a note on Monday that the global refining system is too stretched to support a full recovery in fuel demand while inventories rebuild. This suggests that fuel prices will remain elevated into next year.

Bhandari told clients that refining margins must remain elevated to restrain consumption and limit restocking, keeping demand within the industry's ability to supply diesel, gasoline and jet fuel. 

On an ex-China basis, Bhandari expects 300,000 barrels a day of refining capacity additions in 2026 to be offset by 600,000 barrels a day of closures, leaving another year of net capacity losses. 

Bhandari said if demand rebounds to 1% above 2025 levels while buyers attempt to replace half of this year's inventory draws, refinery utilization would have to reach unprecedented levels. This is a territory that he said, "We do not view as operationally realistic."

To keep utilization near the highest level seen this decade, the analyst says one possible combination would require demand to remain 1% below 2025 levels and no inventory rebuilding in 2027.

In other words, an uncomfortable reality is setting in: fuel prices need to stay high enough to keep consumption subdued. 

He provided clients with three scenarios spanning different recovery paths for refinery operations and global oil demand but warned global refined-product inventories could fall even more by the end of the year, possibly to 2015 levels measured in days of consumption during the fourth quarter of 2026. 

Bhandari expanded on his refining supply-demand framework: 

Scenario 1 assumes global refinery runs back to normal levels by March 2027, followed by the resolution of Middle East refinery outages by June 2027 and Russian disruptions by December 2027, paired with a robust 2.9 mb/d recovery in global oil demand in 2027.

Scenario 2 models a prolonged disruption, delaying the normalization of global refinery runs to October 2027. Under this scenario, Middle East and Russian refinery outages remain elevated at 5.0 mb/d above seasonal norms through the remainder of 2026 and 2027, paired with a sluggish global demand growth of 0.5 mb/d. 

Scenario 3 mirrors the refinery runs and outage normalization timeline as Scenario 1, but assumes a more modest global oil demand growth of 1.5mb/d. 

Across all 3 scenarios, we assume refinery utilization of the operating fleet returns to the highest 3-month average seen over the past 5 years post refinery runs normalization (Exhibit 4-Exhibit 5). 

We note total global product inventories could fall below the lowest days-of-use levels since 2015 in 4Q26 across all 3 scenarios (Exhibit 6), and OECD product inventories (inclusive of strategic reserves) in 2Q27 could fall below their historical minimum days-of-use level last seen around 2003 (Exhibit 7).

For refiners with access to steady crude flows, tight global refining capacity could create perfect conditions of strong margins and substantial cash generation. Bhandari highlights Valero and Marathon Petroleum in the US, S-Oil and Thai Oil in Asia, and Repsol, Neste and Helleniq Energy in Europe as potential beneficiaries.

Diesel and jet fuel remain at the epicenter of the global supply squeeze. Bhandari's warning of a global refining system "stretched for longer" suggests those favorable refining economics could come alongside elevated fuel costs that would pinch consumers' pocketbooks. 

Last week, Goldman commodity experts Yulia Zhestkova Grigsby and Daan Struyven warned that the diesel crisis is setting up the next squeeze: gasoline. 

Professional subscribers can read the full note here at our new Marketdesk.ai portal. 

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 14:10

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

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

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

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

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

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) September 22, 2026

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

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

Pacing, it turns out, is a team sport.

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

— Claude (@claudeai) September 22, 2026

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

20%, 40% Or 60%?

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

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

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

The Race To The Bottom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About That "Pacing"...

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

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

But then...

Anthropic, Sept. 22:

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

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

— Claude (@claudeai) September 22, 2026

'Pacing' indeed.

The Fine Print (shit to know)

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

Your Move, Sam

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

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 13:55

Libya's Largest Oilfield Hit By New Armed Group Blockade

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

Crude oil production at Libya’s largest oilfield, Sharara, has slumped over the past day after an armed military group closed a valve on the pipeline that carries crude oil from the field to the Zawiya port for exports, in yet another global supply scare amid ongoing disruptions in the Middle East.

An armed group has closed Valve n.7 on the pipeline, Libya’s National Oil Corporation (NOC) said, adding that the closure caused a pressure buildup within the crude oil pipeline, leading to a significant reduction in production at the Sharara field.

The field is operated by Akakus Oil Operations, and its production is being shipped through the pipeline to the Zawiya port for exports.

The Libyan state oil firm warned that “the continued closure of Valve No. 7 will inevitably halt production, transportation, and export operations at the Sharara field.”

If the shutdown continues, NOC said it may be compelled to declare force majeure on Sharara output and exports.

“This would directly harm the national economy by reducing state revenues, especially given rising global oil prices, and would expose the oil transport system and its facilities to technical and operational risks,” NOC said.

The Sharara oilfield is estimated to have produced about 340,000 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil before the incident.

Following the closure of the valve and the forced reduction of production, crude output at Sharara has now slumped to about 120,000 bpd, according to various estimates.

Libya’s fresh supply scare comes amid squeezed global oil supply as shipments through the Strait of Hormuz remain uneven and uncertain, and the Yanbu exports out of Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea coast are still offline, following the drone attack on the East-West pipeline on September 10.

Oil prices rose in Asian trade on Tuesday, following two days of declines, as the market weighs diplomacy hopes against supply-side risks.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 13:40

2Y Auction Tails As Foreign Demand Slides Despite Highest Yield In Over 3 Years

Ahead of today's auction, with yields sliding early in the day tracking the drop in oil tick-for-tick, some speculated that participants in today's sale of $69BN in 2 year notes would need a modest concession to show enthusiasm for the auction. And even though yields did push wider until the 1pm stop, it appears it was not enough and the auction was notably on the weak side.

Starting at the top, the high yield was 4.787%, a big jump from last month's 4.204% and the highest since June 24, largely thanks to last week's rate hike. To be sure, there is still some room before the 2Y takes out the generation high of 5.06% hit in 2023, but that was cold comfort to auction participants, and the auction tailed by 0.2bps the When Issued of 4.785%.

It wasn't all bad: the bid to cover was 2.627, better than last month's 2.599 and above the recent average of 2.606%. 

The internals were a touch weaker, with Indirects sliding from 66.01% to 57.79%, below the six-auction average of 58.6%. And with Directs rising to 29.0% from 23.1%, just above the recent average of 28.3%, Dealers were left with 13.2% of the auction, the highest Dealer allocation since March.

Overall this was an average auction, and while the internals were not too bad, the small tail suggested that the concession was not enough to inspire too much excitement.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 13:24

Turkish Airlines, Pegasus & AJet Cancel Iran Flights As US Sanctions Bite

Via Middle East Eye

Turkey's national carrier, Turkish Airlines, and budget airlines AJet and Pegasus have cancelled flights to and from Iran from September 21 as US sanctions take effect, a review by Middle East Eye indicates.

The Turkish Airlines and AJet websites have no flights to Iran until March, while Pegasus appears to have removed all flights to the country from its booking system for the foreseeable future.

via AFP

Iran International reported that a Turkish Airlines representative told the channel there was no guarantee flights would resume even after March 2027.

A person familiar with the issue told MEE that US Treasury sanctions on Iran's aviation sector were so severe that Turkish carriers had been forced to suspend their flights.

The person said that while restrictions on US-manufactured aircraft, such as Boeing planes, were understandable, the new sanctions also prevented Airbus aircraft from flying to Iran because they contained American-made components. The carriers had no other choice, the person added.

A Turkish official said that as of Monday, Mahan Air was the only Iranian carrier barred from flying to Turkey, leaving other Iranian airlines free to maintain services between the two countries for now.

Turkey and Iran have maintained a stable relationship and extensive energy and commercial ties despite successive rounds of US sanctions on Tehran.

However, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken a different approach since US President Donald Trump moved to tighten economic pressure on Iran.

Over the weekend, Turkey revoked the banking license of Iran's Bank Mellat, which had operated in the country for decades.

US sanctions from September 23 could cut Iranian airlines off from global aviation services, threatening flights, fuel access and airport support. https://t.co/U2USXZwjRV pic.twitter.com/2E6e57tF4F

— Gulf News (@gulf_news) September 21, 2026

Turkey's banking regulator also took over Golden Global Investment Bank last week after the US imposed sanctions on the institution for allegedly transferring funds to the Iranian government.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 13:10

Bank Stocks Slide On Resurgent Agentic Fears

It used to be software that was the first casualty of fears of AI disruption. Today, it's the banks.

In a generally flat (and higher for tech stocks) market landscape, banks are conspicuously underperforming today, prompting questions what's the reason for the underperformance.  

According to some traders, the reason is the market's newfound obsession with the latest shiny agentic models that are taking the world by storm.

As Goldman trader Gaelle Jarrousse writes, she is noting the agentic hit on bank and insurance stocks. She lays it out as follows: 

I took a close look at INSTINCT, the ready to use personal agent with simple chat interfaces incl what's app integration. The other one is MUSE in the US. You can ask INSTINCT pretty much everything you want from find a bottle of wine and buy it for you, gym class, restaurants bookings, travel bookings but also find an insurance products and buy it for you, ie this is a one step ahead vs Moneysupermarket for example as INSTINCT does everything for you (5 min process vs a few hours). It is like having a personal assistant. And it will find the best available deal on the market.

She notes that the pushback is do you trust it to give your email address and credit card details to buy things but as time goes by, trust will increase especially with arrival of Muse.

One month ago, the WSJ did a profile on Instinct, calling it the "Latest Viral AI Assistant Rocketing Across Silicon Valley."

A new AI assistant is rocketing across Silicon Valley.

Months after OpenClaw, the viral AI-powered assistant, captured the attention of the technology industry, a company called Instinct appears to be gaining traction among early-adopting techies.

The startup began testing Instinct in private beta in February and quickly generated substantial interest among venture capitalists, who are among its earliest users. Its popularity surged earlier this month, as users began posting about what they saw as a highly capable AI assistant that worked fairly seamlessly, a goal technologists have long considered a holy grail.

Users of Instinct can call or text the AI bot and ask it to respond to emails, manage calendars, book a ride to the airport, arrange a handyman and more. Some users have reported using it to shop for homeowners insurance or order custom merch for a wedding.

“We saw someone buy a house on the platform. A lot of our younger users are using it to find apartment rentals,” Shinn said. “It’s a one-stop shop to do almost everything.”

Going back to Goldman, Jarrousse writes that we saw some early sell off in Telcos on the theme at the end of last week and we are seeing US banks and insurers down on the same theme today.

"I will pay attention to this and i started to get questions yesterday as a potential trigger for some profit taking in insurance esp when looking at the high valuation of Allianz which is a sector proxy."

She shares some additional color below: 

See table below, which is our best estimates based on company data, of Motor and non-motor exposure. The Nordics screen the highest on P&C exposure with Sampo, Tryg and GJEN at the top of the table. Admiral is the one of the pure play on the theme although we can argue that the UK is already very competitive. Amongst the multi liners Generali is at the top given retail P&C exposure followed by Allianz.

Looking at banks, KBC is the biggest P&C with about 20% of insurance revenues. Caixa and Intesa have 3-4% of P&C insurance exposure and I would argue that Italy and Spain are ripe for disruption on other products as well from deposits to asset management given high upfront fees, low betas. Historically the Irish have been weak each time agentic/ deposits competition kicks in and ING can come in the debate too given high L/D, deposits structure, positioning and NII expectations.  Outside of agentic, I am also bearish on Caixa given risk of short term NII disappointment due to deposits repricing vs time lag in asset repricing and a valuation at 2.5x P/TE. So overall I will be cautious on rates sensitive banks here  and Greece and Lloyds/ Natwest are now my only longs. On the Platforms, we have some constructive feedback from Italian trip and Munich conference on FINECO and FLATEX (see below) and I feel less concerned about those from an agentic disruption angle as they are the disruptors to incumbents and cash sitting on those platforms is meant is to be deployed/ invested. 

Goldman's US Financials specialist, Christian Degrasse, also confirmed that while he was seeing plenty of debate & inbounds coming in on sectors where price action is more muted today, a common starting point appears to be interaction with the consumer... with AGENTS are the primary focus...

...largely on businesses with Consumer Touch points as the market prices in risk that agents narrow the ability for companyies to monetize the consumer, and also change the landscape re lead generation & marketing .. this all comes amidst greater excitement around Muse + other agent products - and GS' Consumer Inertia basket (GSXUSWCH) is one of our most actively traded baskets in recent sessions .. 

There was some chatter yesterday on personal insurance (ALL), with focus today broadening out to Personal Insurance peers (PGR, TRV etc), Lead generators (investors have pointed to a couple of small cap insurance lead generators down HSD % - LDD %), Insurance Brokers (GSHD u/p peers 2 days in a row), Wealth Managers & Retail brokers (SCHW LPPA AMP RJF).. Banks are also trading heavy, and feedback here is debated – but focus does remain on banks with business mix geared towards the Consumer (Consumer deposits, wealth management) – which may explain from a high level the relative outperformance in smid banks (which in aggregate have less fee businesses like wealth + greater mix in commercial deposits) vs large banks – though positioning & liquidity may also potentially playing a part in todays volatility.

Payments … entered today where convos were very comfortable around V MA’s positioning on Agentic, and how integrated card was into present agent capabilities … Some questions here around whether the late morning underperformance is either 1) flow of funds driven (ie selling of liquid & owned financials) or 2) any worries around more direct wallet integration following announcement of a PYPL partnership (most feedback thinks #1 so far but welcome to views)

As we move into the afternoon – price action is somewhat indicative of investors in fins broadly pulling back & getting incrementally more defensive (with positioning starting to play a greater role in dispersion) … Signs = CBRE & JLL underperforming peers by ~2% (two popular names in real estate among Financials specialists), 2) large/liquid & defensive names viewed as (per feedback) having good tech (JPM) and/or well positioned on agentic (V MA), or more weighted towards commercial exposure (ie insurance brokers) trading heavy, 3) choppy underperformance across various sectors without direct agent reads (ie exchanges) ... In our view, this is all indicative of 1) the market pricing in a ‘uncertainty discount’ as investors potentially try to get up to speed on implications (risk/reward) on fundamentals, and 2) the market’s cognizant that in past choppy tapes that dealt with AI, it was better to be more patient rather than defending day 1 …

on that note, Mitola highlights volumes are High and we’re seeing 1) an uptick in thematic trading and a willingness to press names where an "agentic economy" presents a potential headwind & 2) a complete buyers strike with no signs of defense across the sector, similar to previous episodes YTD (AI risk, Perpetual Futures, etc) .. 

For now software, where shorts got badly burned after the recent surge, is insulated but as agents make a fresh push for attention - and disintermediation of traditional applications, how long before the pain returns? 

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 12:55

Texas Governor Orders Halt To New Data Centers Weeks After Issuing Moratorium

One month after Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered a pause on Texas data center approvals pending an audit, overnight the governor doubled down and ordered the state’s environmental watchdog to withhold permits for new data centers until an audit of risks to the power grid is complete.

No authorizations can be given until the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or Ercot, completes its review, Abbott said in a statement on Monday.

Gov. Abbott directed the TCEQ to halt any new permits authorizing data center projects until ERCOT completes its audit.

No state agency shall move forward with approvals related to the development of data centers until that information is acquired. pic.twitter.com/MG2s0EKf8x

— Governor Abbott Press Office (@GovAbbottPress) September 21, 2026

This matters a lot for the US data center rollout because as the chart from Apollo below shows, Texas is home of one-fifth of the US’s data center pipeline in terms of IT power capacity, by far the largest of any single state.

In his statement, Abbott said that data center projects must prove they can cover all electrical infrastructure costs, use no water needed by local communities, and result in lower bills for households. The governor also said he would work with state legislators to eliminate any financial incentives for the hubs.

The governor is doubling down on an effective moratorium on new AI hubs amid concern that the vast sites are compromising the state grid and water resources. The proliferation of data centers is set to be a key issue in midterm elections in November, with President Donald Trump’s enthusiasm for expansion coming up against mounting public concern, mostly due to soaring power bills.

The permitting halt comes amid growing opposition to data centers across the US. Some 45 projects, worth $68 billion, were blocked or delayed by local pushback between April and June, according to research group Data Center Watch. Trump, meanwhile, has sought to drive the industry forward, warning that a slowdown could offer China an advantage in the AI race.

Texas, the biggest US energy powerhouse, has until now been at the forefront of the AI boom, but it has also struggled to connect data centers to the grid. As we reported at the time, Abbott last month ordered Ercot, along with the Public Utility Commission of Texas, to audit all data centers in the grid queue before issuing further approvals. Regulators subsequently set a mid-December deadline for project reviews.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 12:40

Ed Dowd: The Fed Hiked Interest Rates Into A Supply Shock

Authored by Ed Dowd: Beyond the Narrative via Substack,

September FOMC Meeting: First Rate Hike Since July 2023

The FOMC did what the front end of the Treasury market (3-month T-bill) had been telegraphing for two weeks prior. On September 16 they voted unanimously to raise the fed funds rate 25 basis points to 3.75-4.00 percent. Kevin Warsh's press conference was short, blunt, and deliberately light on forward guidance. He said economic activity is expanding at a solid pace, job gains are keeping up with the workforce, unemployment is little changed around 4.1 percent, and inflation remains elevated. He argued the hike "will support a timelier return" to the 2 percent goal and "This Committee will deliver price stability." He did not submit his own dot. The rest of the Committee's median projection for fed funds now sits at 4.1 percent at year end and stays there through 2027. They mentioned inflation risks are to the upside and that labor risks are roughly balanced. Geopolitical shocks and commodity prices got a mention, but they hiked anyway.

Why Did They Hike?

The day before the meeting I posted on X that starting September 2 the 3-month T-bill yield had moved above our simple Fed-funds-rate/T-bill model. Historically the Fed follows the market more than the market follows the Fed. The signal pointed to a minimum 25 basis-point move, with 50 not being out of the question. Politics could have intervened, after all this is right before the midterms, but the Committee chose to follow the tape. They chose 25 but the T-bill market yield of 4.09 said 50 would have been the cleaner signal. The market two weeks before the decision, in my opinion, was starting to discount the energy and commodity shock as something more durable than a temporary disruption. The war is not wrapping up on a convenient political calendar. The Iranians have little incentive to resolve it before November. A war sold as a two-week excursion will be 8 months old by the beginning of November. When a supply shock starts looking structural, the front end prices a higher terminal rate even if the underlying demand picture is deteriorating. That is exactly what happened. Essentially the market priced in a very high probability that there is almost no chance of a deal until after November with energy prices remaining higher and going up.

Was Hiking The Right Move?

Hiking into a supply shock is rarely the right medicine. Rate policy cannot produce more oil or more shipping capacity. It can only crush demand. The Committee knows this...Warsh even said they cannot control individual relative prices. They hiked anyway because they decided they were not yet confident that underlying inflation was moving toward 2 percent "clearly and at sufficient speed." Fair enough as a credibility statement. The problem is the data they are using to measure the other side of the mandate.

Payroll numbers have been inaccurate for years. We have been documenting this. BLS initial prints systematically overstated job growth; the QCEW and subsequent revisions have been carving hundreds of thousands of phantom jobs out of the record. The composition of the remaining "gains" is even more telling. Healthcare has been doing the heavy lifting while manufacturing, information, finance, professional services, and retail have been losing ground. That is not a robust, broad-based labor market. That is an economy being papered over by one sector and by earlier distortions that are now fading.

Housing is already rolling over. Starts and permits plunged again in August. Homebuilder confidence is near COVID lows. Months of supply are sitting near the 2006 peak. Real house prices are declining, led by multi-family. The border tightening removed a floor that illegal inflows had put under rents and home prices. Housing is a huge chunk of CPI and of household balance sheets. It does not look like a strong demand story. Layer on the AI complex: AI and AI-adjacent names are now 40-45 percent of S&P market cap, with massive public and private debt issuance behind the buildout. Institutional investors cannot diversify away from it. Private credit is growing its defaults in the dark and seeing outflows. Enterprise buyers are starting to ask about ROI. The MSM is starting to notice all the risks. Finally China is another risk sitting in plain sight with construction output collapsing, decades of housing supply, fixed-asset investment falling, and no clean export valve left. That does not stay contained.

The Table Is Set

So we now have a Committee that just removed a dose of accommodation into a supply-driven inflation impulse while the demand side of the economy is already softer than the headline payrolls suggest. Housing is weak. The AI trade is crowded and levered. China is an acute problem. That combination has a name: policy error. Not because they raised 25 instead of 50 but because they are treating a supply shock as if it were a classic overheating demand problem and they are doing it with lagging, revised, and compositionally misleading labor data. The market has provided false signals in a rate cutting cycle before and in my opinion the Fed should have looked through the supply shock and past the blatant unwillingness of the Iranians to come to the table before the midterms. They will likely hike again another 25 bp but holding rates steady and waiting would have been more prudent.

The cycle has not changed. Easy-money periods juice activity...sometimes with genuine investment and sometimes with fraud. Tightening and then the eventual easing cycle is when the previous juice gets exposed. We have seen the movie. The current episode has its own flavor: government deficit spending, labor-force distortions, an unprecedented illegal alien sugar high, speculative AI capex boom, an opaque private credit shadow banking complex and now a geopolitical supply shock layered on top. The Fed is late, as usual. Once they reverse course and start cutting again it will be into an accelerating slowdown. It will be too late as anything they do from here will take 12-18 months to hit the real economy. The next year is going to be tumultuous.

Ultimately rates are coming down, not because Warsh suddenly turns dovish, but rather because the real economy is already weaker than the official series admit and the lagged effects of tighter policy will show up in employment, housing, and credit. When that happens the Committee will discover, yet again, that they were fighting the last war with the wrong map.

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Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 12:20

All 10 ActBlue Witnesses Take The Fifth As GOP Says Probe Is "Far From Over"

All ten ActBlue employees and board members deposed by House investigators have invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions about the Democratic Party's dominant fundraising platform. Five of the ten are board members, all deposed in the past five weeks, and the three committees running the probe say they are not done. Their third report, released last week, alleged ActBlue accepted a substantial volume of foreign and fraudulent donations with minimal scrutiny.

ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones prepares to testify before the House Administration Committee in June. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call/Getty Images)

The investigation's third report, released last week, alleged ActBlue accepted a substantial volume of foreign and fraudulent donations with minimal scrutiny.

It builds on the first report, released in April 2025, which found that ActBlue skipped standard verification steps such as CVV checks, identified at least 22 significant fraud campaigns, and documented 237 prepaid-card donations from foreign IP addresses in a single month before the 2024 election.

Investigators found that skipping those checks opened the door to smurfing, the practice of dressing up one illegal mega-donation as a parade of small contributions filed under real people's names. ActBlue's much-touted "passport verification" process appears to have checked nothing against any government database. Fraud analysts inside the company faced pressure to wave through foreign-flagged donations, in one case clearing a donor on the strength of a LinkedIn profile.

House Oversight, House Administration, and House Judiciary are still working the case now, and none of them show signs of backing off. "Whether it's allowing fraudsters to steal taxpayer dollars or accepting illegal foreign donations through ActBlue, Democrats have proven themselves to be the party of fraud," Oversight Chairman Rep. James Comer told Fox News Digital. "Our investigation into ActBlue is far from over. We expect more documents and testimony in the weeks ahead."

Republicans have complained about ActBlue's verification standards for years, and the company insists it has tightened those safeguards since the investigation began. That claim falls apart against the committees' own findings. The report says ActBlue took "a more lenient approach" to fraud prevention in 2024, after Steil first questioned its practices in October 2023, and the internal records released last week show employees approving donations despite unresolved red flags about the money's origins.

ActBlue still denies wrongdoing and has given no indication it plans to return any flagged contribution.

"ActBlue's own admissions raise serious questions about its fraud prevention practices, including a so-called passport verification process that did not actually verify or check entries against any government database," Committee on House Administration Chairman Rep. Bryan Steil told Fox News Digital on Friday. "All options are on the table to ensure we get to the bottom of what is going on at ActBlue."

A spokesperson for Judiciary Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan confirmed to Fox News Digital that the panel "will continue aggressive oversight of ActBlue, including additional depositions."

Co-founder Matt DeBergalis was among the ten who took the Fifth, and CEO Regina Wallace-Jones did the same during a public hearing. In a letter to Steil cited by the report, she claimed donors with non-U.S. addresses must submit a passport number to get verified. The GOP report picked that claim apart, noting the system only confirms the number contains the right count of characters, not that it belongs to an actual passport.

In one internal ActBlue memo, a donation with a Hong Kong IP address was described as a "great accept," reasoning that none of the donor's other signals raised eyebrows. Another argued a previously denied contribution should have gone through because the name, email, and billing address all lined up, even though it was a foreign contribution. A supervisor waved through a donation that had set off a lot of alarms because the donor deserved the benefit of the doubt. In one case involving a Missouri billing address with every sign pointing to Canada, an analyst approved the donation because "Twitter seems to confirm that they are a real person."

Now the National Republican Congressional Committee wants House Democrats to cut ties with ActBlue. "House Democrats cannot claim ignorance while continuing to rely on a fundraising platform facing serious allegations," NRCC spokesman Mike Marinella said. "The National Republican Congressional Committee officially calls on every House Democrat to cut ties with ActBlue and return any illegal contributions funneled to their campaigns through the platform." Asked whether it would return any donations, ActBlue pointed back to its own statement instead of answering the question.

"There's nothing to see here," ActBlue said, arguing a third-party forensic analysis had undercut a central GOP claim and accusing Republicans of "orchestrating another political stunt before rushing out of town weeks early to go campaign." That review of ActBlue's 2023 data found 99.99% of contribution dollars came from donors who gave a U.S. address or a passport number, according to the company's release, though it did not test whether either was genuine. The company framed the entire affair as an effort "to silence organizations they believe threaten their agenda."

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Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 12:00

Socialist Candidate Says Stealing From Taxpayers Makes Her "More Qualified" For Office

It sounds crazy, but this kind of scenario is absolutely the norm for Democratic Socialist candidates:  Being convicted of blatant criminal embezzlement is a badge of honor, not a disqualifying mark on their record.  The complete inversion of moral standards is unsettling and it reinforces the need to prevent far-left activists from entering positions of local government.

Denver mayoral candidate, Shontel Lewis, stole thousands of dollars in EBT funds while working in the state food-stamp office in 2008.  She says that the experience actually makes her "more qualified" for the job of mayor, ostensibly because this makes her more attuned to the needs of "struggling Denver citizens".  

But maybe struggling Denver citizens should not be the deciding factor in who runs the city?  Perhaps electing a thief to office will make their lives worse, not better.

Investigators identified seven benefit accounts Lewis accessed over five months while working at the state food-stamp office. She reissued EBT cards from other people’s accounts and gave the funds to her roommate (and used some herself). She originally faced felony charges, pleaded guilty to misdemeanor theft, served 18 months of probation, and later said she paid restitution in full.    

Colorado's constitution restricts anyone convicted of "embezzlement of public moneys, bribery, perjury, solicitation of bribery, or subornation of perjury” from holding “any office of trust or profit in the state.”  However, Lewis has been snaking past these rules for years.  Similar concerns were raised when she ran for the Regional Transportation District board in 2018.  

At that time she lawyered up and successfully obtained a position on the board from 2019 to 2022.  Keep in mind, Colorado is a deep blue state run by progressive fanatics, and this was the era of DEI and BLM supremacy.  Lewis has continually blamed her circumstances for the theft, claiming she was spurred on by "trauma".

“I believe my eligibility should be based on the voters, not on a series of poor decisions I made over a decade ago at a time of trauma in my life,” she said in a statement to The Colorado Sun. 

Lewis is now a member of the City Council.

This is a typical strategy for leftists, apologizing for a crime while not truly taking accountability and blaming circumstances.  Millions of people go through "trauma" and hardship everyday, and they don't steal.  The fact that the thefts occurred while Lewis was working in a state office makes her continued presence in government all the more concerning.  She used her trusted position to gain access more easily. 

Her theft record and socialist politics also bring up the question of how she will handle crime in Denver? 

Lewis talked in circles when asked whether she would defund the police to pay for pricey proposals like youth programming and city-owned affordable housing. She criticized the cuts Denver mayor Mike Johnston made to a wide range of services to bridge a $200 million deficit in the latest budget, cuts she said could have come from the Denver Police Department (DPD). 

"Yes, cuts did need to be made, but I think there's an opportunity for us to always prioritize the people when we're talking about our budgets....We missed an opportunity to go back to those that were represented with DPD, with our Department of Safety, where we didn't actually see any cuts coming from the department."

Typically, far-left politicians refuse to enforce prosecution standards and tend to impede law enforcement operations at every turn.  In some cases, these city leaders have even been caught manipulating stats in order to hide rising crime.  They don't have to commit crime themselves; all they have to do is make crime easier for other miscreants. 

It's not surprising that many socialist candidates tend to come from the national underbelly - DSA and their Democrat allies openly celebrate criminality as a lifestyle choice, and view morality as purely relative.        

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 11:20

Putin Urges Immediate Yemen Ceasefire In Call With Saudi Crown Prince

Russian President Vladimir Putin held a Monday telephone conversation with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (who is also the prime minister) - wherein the two leaders focused on broad bilateral issues.

Referring to the "Saudi National Day", a TASS readout indicates "The Russian leader congratulated the Saudi Crown Prince on the upcoming national holiday - the day marking the founding of Saudi Arabia - noting that a century ago, the Soviet Union was the first foreign nation to recognize the Saudi Kingdom."

Aside from the usual boilerplate expressing satisfaction on the bilateral relationship on multiple fronts, the two addressed the ongoing crisis in the Middle East, where the Iran conflict has spilled over into Yemen this month.

Per the readout, MbS and Putin agreed that that there is "no alternative to political and diplomatic efforts aimed at normalizing the current crisis, while duly taking into account the interests of all parties."

Putin urged every effort to achieve a ceasefire, and to avoid escalation:

"In light of the deteriorating military-political situation in Yemen, the need for an immediate cessation of hostilities and the creation of conditions for launching a constructive intra-Yemeni dialogue under UN auspices was reaffirmed. At the same time, the importance of ensuring the safe and unhindered passage of vessels through international waterways in the region - including the Strait of Bab al-Mandeb Strait and Strait of Hormuz - was emphasized," the Kremlin said.

Moscow and Riyadh agreed continue communication at various levels, and work on stability in the region.

While Russia is not involved in the Yemen conflict, it does provide military supplies and conducts trade with Tehran, and so may have some leverage in terms of pushing the Islamic Republic to get the Shia Houthis to the peace table.

The Yemen conflict could yet spiral into something more serious, and could draw in especially the Pakistanis after Riyadh and Islamabad inked the Mecca Defense Pact this summer.

Earlier this month: Saudi Arabia is learning a lesson that money and American weapons could never erase: you cannot buy your way out of geography.

This week, the Houthis expressed openness to a comprehensive ceasefire deal, but have also emphasized that the Saudi siege of Houthi-controlled areas must halt for this to be a possibility. The Yemen war and threat to Saudi oil infrastructure has only served to increase Iran's leverage over global energy, amid the ongoing Strait of Hormuz crisis and standoff with US forces.

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/22/2026 - 10:45