Raymond Frenken 🇪🇺🇺🇦

Writing about Europe’s economy, asset management and banking. Occasional ⚽ football finance @bronsgroenvtbl, Loonhal 💸 project and 🌿 nature observations.

[Rui Pinto @RuiPinto_FL]

Back in 2014, there was a man who was already aware of the irregularities involving Manchester City. That man now runs FIFA. The infamous Gianni Infantino, then UEFA General Secretary, abused his authority, shared confidential documents and, in short, outmanoeuvred the Investigatory Chamber, doing everything in his power to ensure that both Manchester City and PSG would merely receive a fine, avoiding a deeper investigation that could have led to a Champions League ban. All of these details were also revealed through Football Leaks.
Given his actions as UEFA General Secretary and, more recently, as FIFA President, I can only say, in my humble opinion, that Gianni Infantino has become a cancer on football and should have no place in the future of the game.

[Rui Pinto @RuiPinto_FL]

It's official. The statement released today by the Premier League ultimately confirms, unequivocally, the truth of everything that was revealed through Football Leaks. The Independent Commission is also particularly harsh in the way it characterises the actions taken by Manchester City executives, who, without a shadow of a doubt, acted with complete impunity, challenging everyone and everything. From the very beginning, they have demonstrated a complete lack of respect for the rules, for the bodies responsible for overseeing and regulating the game, for the integrity of the competition, for the other clubs and, above all, for the fans.
Years and years of cheating, lying and manipulation will finally have consequences.

[Nik Boyle @NikBoyle]

This absolutely wins hands down

[Bronsgroen Voetbal @BronsgroenVtbl]

Even voorstellen: Raymond Frenken, financieel journalist

Bleek bij De Limburger een goede basis te hebben voor een internationale carrière in de financiële journalistiek. Leest tegenwoordig jaarverslagen van Europese voetbalclubs en heeft uiteraard een seizoenkaart bij Fortuna.

[Raymond Frenken 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @RaymondFrenken]

@BronsgroenVtbl Leuk! Dit seizoen ga ik voor @brongsgroenvtbl de jaarverslagen van de Limburgse clubs extra goed in de gaten houden. De KNVB heeft zijn financiële eisen voor betaald voetbal dit seizoen aangescherpt. Daarover binnenkort meer.

[Klaas Meijer @klaasm67]

Highland Cathedral at the Ginkel Heath. #MarketGarden

[HFI Research @HFI_Research]

This is the JPM oil report everyone's talking about.

[Raymond Frenken 🇪🇺🇺🇦 @RaymondFrenken]

@alemannoEU Naive indeed. EU is moving forward full-throttle with its foot on the brake. It's unfortunately how the EU has been for the last decades. We need more, better and faster European cooperation and we need it now. National and technocrat interests remain too dominant.

[Alberto Alemanno 🇪🇺 @alemannoEU]

So, how was #SOTEU?

Another déjà vu: well-intentioned and naïve, as only we Europeans can be.

It offered incremental progress where the moment demands a quantum leap.

On security and political integration, Europe still hesitates to cross the Rubicon.

On the economy, it too often echoed industries fighting decline rather than remaining in existence and purpose.

On social media and the Israeli government's excesses, it seemed to follow public sentiment rather than a settled strategy.

Its ambition to escape toxic dependencies was welcome, even if the means remain modest.

Above all, it was silent on how the Union will pay for its ambitions: no new own resources, no common borrowing, only hope that private capital will follow.

The bombastic announcements could not disguise the familiar reliance on new instruments, packages and frameworks.

The proposed "Congress of Europe" recalled the Conference on the Future of Europe, another exercise in continental introspection.

Once again, a president unwilling to take political risks distils collective wisdom into technocratic fixes:

sensible, earnest, but not up to the times!

[Alberto Alemanno 🇪🇺 @alemannoEU]

The State of the Union was established to make Europe’s priorities more transparent and accountable, yet it has not yet fulfilled that democratic promise.

It should tell Europeans honestly what Europe can do, what it cannot, and where national governments are preventing it from acting #SOTEU https://t.co/mBegFeJE0E

[Rutger Bregman @rutgerbregman]

This is an insanely important report about how completely, utterly and totally unprepared Europe is for the arrival of transformative AI.

A single data centre in Malaysia will soon have a third of the AI computing power of *all* of Europe combined. Two data centres in the US will have more than our entire continent.

And that's just page one...

More than 60 of Europe's top minds (including two Nobel laureates) have just published "A Transformative AI Strategy for Europe", an independent report about how dire the situation is. As the world gets darker, we risk being squeezed and trampled by the US and China. On the current path, the report warns, even Europe's richest economies could slide toward middle-income status in a world run from Silicon Valley and Beijing.

Here's where we are right now:

→ The EU hosts just 5% of the world's AI compute. The US: 75%.
→ Not one of the ten most valuable AI companies in the world is European.
→ And this year, Europe got locked out of the world's most powerful AI model, twice, by American export rules. The EU's own cybersecurity agency had to negotiate for weeks to get in, and still doesn't have the latest version.

For years the comfortable story was: America innovates, Europe regulates. Well, that story is dead. You can't regulate what you can't access. And you can't protect 450 million people with second-rate cyberdefence against first-rate attackers.

The good news is that we have some leverage: Europe holds the single biggest chokepoint in the global chip supply chain (ASML). And this report sketches a plan to increase our leverage massively. Here's what we need to do:

1. Build a member state alliance for supply chain security – Netherlands, Germany and France at minimum – founded before the end of 2026.

2. Recruit many more frontier AI experts inside European governments ASAP.

3. Aim for at least 15% of global AI compute on European soil by 2030, built so local communities actually benefit.

4. Make Europe the world leader in AI assurance: hardware that can prove how AI is being used.

5. Prepare for crises and emergencies, such as engineered viruses and highly advanced automated cyberattacks.

It's too late to catch up with the US and China. But it's not too late to build leverage .

Read the full report here --> https://t.co/Byi5WYC8yW

[Carl Bildt @carlbildt]

” Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet(potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails. ” https://t.co/QqJjiruLEv

[Robin Brooks @robin_j_brooks]

What's amazing about the global bond sell-off is how many people are saying rising yields are about strong growth. Seriously!? You think rising yields in Japan, France, Italy or UK are about growth? We're in a global debt shock. Not a global growth shock.
https://t.co/jYf8dyylvD

[Department of National Defense - Philippines @dndphl]

MAHIYA NAMAN KAYO | Secretary of National Defense Gilberto C. Teodoro, Jr. responded to a note from the Chinese side during the Seoul Defense Dialogue (SDD) 2026 in Seoul, Republic of Korea.

#DNDPHL #DiKaPasisiil #SDD2026

[Jacob Coxon @hilbertspaess]

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

[Carl Bildt @carlbildt]

What would happen if Xi Jinping posted a map where 🇨🇳 has taken over all of East Asia, and Putin one of 🇷🇺 having absorbed all of Western Europe? It would have been seen as either insane or dangerous - or both.

[Emmanuel Macron @EmmanuelMacron]

L’Allemagne a établi la responsabilité de la Russie dans les graves incidents survenus à Leipzig début août.

Ces attaques hybrides se multiplient en Europe. Elles ne peuvent rester sans réponse.

La France est pleinement solidaire de l’Allemagne et soutient l’adoption de nouvelles sanctions européennes contre la Russie.

Face à cette escalade, nous devons être unis, déterminés et renforcer notre soutien à l’Ukraine. La France continuera d'y prendre toute sa part.

[Robin Brooks @robin_j_brooks]

Global bond markets are on fire. Every day yields rise in one place or another. Biggest mover today is Japan, where 10y10y forward (red) is up 10 bps. That spills over to everywhere else and pushes yields up globally. We're witnessing a global sell-off...
https://t.co/GRXneqxjUD

[Kaja Kallas @kajakallas]

Russia is hitting Europe with a wave of increasingly kinetic hybrid attacks.

With this, Putin wants to scare us away from supporting Ukraine.
He will not succeed.

To the contrary, we will increase our support and invest in our own defence. We are also planning the most far-reaching sanctions against Russia yet.

This is the best way to stop Putin.

My press conference with @HMcEntee following today’s meeting of Defence Ministers ↓

[Kyang Thang རྐྱང་ཐང་ @Kyangs_Thang]

1) Understandably many are confused where so much water came from with no lakes. We need to understand the scale of this. 🧵

> The glacier face that collapsed is ~1.5 kms wide & 1.4 kms deep. That height alone is nearly twice that of Burj Khalifa.