I was there in 1998 on an official mission from the Asian Development Bank, meeting senior gov't and central bank figures and managed to pull together how the Asian crisis was engineered by the central banks and the IMF. Published in 2000 by the ADB. I advised the Thai gov't to exit the IMF program early. They did after a delay.
Elon Musk just landed the most insane SpaceX IPO performance stock package in history!
The board is awarding him 1 BILLION Class B shares, vested across 15 tranches but they only unlock if BOTH of these requirements are met:
1. Massive market cap milestones from $500B all the way to $7.5 TRILLION.
2. If SpaceX builds a permanent human colony on Mars with at least 1 million inhabitants.
On top of that, the recent xAI merger replaces an earlier award with 302 MILLION Class B SpaceX shares
These require market caps from $1.065T to $6.565T plus the completion of orbital data centers delivering 100 TERAWATTS of AI compute per year.
These are straight-up insane next-level milestone targets, pushing space travel to the forefront of the AI race.
Yes, the United States has the most progressive tax system in the world. The top 1% pay 40% of taxes, the bottom 50% pay 3% of taxes. We can make it even more progressive by zeroing out taxes on the bottom half. It’s a small amount of the total tax revenue but very meaningful to people in this group.
🚨THE FBI CREATED A FAKE CRYPTOCURRENCY.. LISTED IT ON UNISWAP.. HIRED MARKET MAKERS TO PUMP IT.. THEN ARRESTED EVERYONE WHO SAID YES..
THIS IS THE CRAZIEST LAW ENFORCEMENT OPERATION IN CRYPTO HISTORY!!!
The FBI built an actual ERC-20 token on Ethereum called NexFundAI.. 100 billion token supply.. A professional website.. Whitepapers promising "passive income through AI-powered investing"..
It looked exactly like every other crypto project.. Because that was the point..
Undercover agents posed as the founding team.. Then reached out to professional market-making firms and said "we need you to fake our trading volume"..
Every single firm said yes..
Here's what they recorded..
Gotbit.. A firm run by a 26-year-old Russian who publicly bragged in 2019 that he built a business faking trade volumes.. His team kept internal spreadsheets with columns literally labeled "fake volume" vs "market volume"..
When asked how fast they could pump NexFundAI's volume to $1 million per day.. They said "6 hours.. It will cost about $200"..
$200 to fake $1 million in daily trading volume..
MyTrade.. Run by a guy who called himself "the mastermind".. He explained the exact psychology of the scam on camera..
"We make the chart look like a really nice roller coaster ride.. That's where people jump in.. We have to make them lose money in order to make profit"..
He said that on a recorded FBI video call..
CLS Global.. A Dubai-based firm.. Their bots generated 98% of NexFundAI's total trading volume.. When the FBI asked if they could sync fake volume spikes with fake news announcements.. They said absolutely..
ZM Quant.. Bots executing 10 to 20 trades per minute through dozens of wallets to look organic..
All of them knew it was fraud.. All of them did it anyway.. All of it was recorded..
And the clients were even worse..
Saitama.. A meme coin that hit $7.5 billion market cap.. The founders coordinated buys through private Telegram chats.. Sent "pump it" memes while manipulating the price.. Then dumped on retail investors..
$7.5 billion.. Built entirely on fake volume.. Every penny of real money came from retail investors who thought the momentum was organic..
One founder left Saitama and started Robo Inu.. Used Gotbit again.. Another launched VZZN.. Same playbook..
Lillian Finance.. Founder claimed to be a defense contractor who addressed Congress.. Marketed the token as funding children's hospitals.. Pocketed everything..
When the FBI shut it down.. They seized $25 million in one day.. 18 people indicted across the US, UK, and Portugal.. The CEO of Gotbit was arrested in Portugal and extradited.. Sentenced to 8 months plus $23 million forfeiture..
But here's the part that broke my brain..
Real people bought NexFundAI..
The FBI's fake token.. With zero utility.. Zero real developers.. Created solely to catch criminals.. Attracted real retail investors because the fake volume made the chart look bullish..
When the FBI pulled the liquidity to end the operation.. Those people lost real money.. On a government-issued token..
The FBI had to set up a restitution portal to pay them back..
And it gets worse..
Within 24 hours of the DOJ announcing the sting.. Someone cloned the FBI's exact smart contract.. Launched a copycat token.. Rode the viral momentum.. And made $127,000 in a single day..
Using the exact same manipulation tactics the FBI just arrested 18 people for..
Then in 2026.. The FBI did it again.. New token called Lexobit.. 10 more arrests.. Including operators extradited from Singapore..
IRS forensics showed that in one firm's trading.. 1,209 out of 1,221 consecutive transactions went straight back to wallets the firm controlled.. 99% circular..
The FBI proved what everyone in crypto suspected..
The volume is fake.. The charts are painted.. The momentum is manufactured..
And every time you buy a token because "the chart looks bullish".. You might be the exit liquidity.
🇺🇸Hedge funds now own around $2.5 TRILLION of U.S debt, more than DOUBLE what they held in 2022.
The geniuses fund it through taking out short-term debt backed by U.S Treasuries. That’s right, they use U.S Treasuries as collateral to buy more U.S Treasuries.
Why this matters: Annual U.S deficits are around $2 trillion, rapidly piling on to the $39 trillion national debt total with interest costs alone reaching $1 trillion a year.
Guess what the U.S does? That’s right, they issue more Treasuries to finance it.
So, the U.S is making money out of thin air to finance its deficit, and hedge funds borrow against Treasuries to buy more.
You don’t need clairvoyance to realise that at some point this all explodes.
If you thought the 2008 financial crisis was bad, when this one goes sideways, it’ll look like that was the warm-up act.
Source: Fortune, @GlobalMktObserv
⚡️The global financial system is running a controlled demolition of fiat currency purchasing power and almost everyone in it knows but nobody is allowed to say it out loud.
The numbers in this chart are not a warning sign that something is about to go wrong. They are evidence that something has already gone wrong and the response is to keep the appearance of normalcy by issuing more debt every year regardless of conditions. The 2026 numbers are not a forecast of an upcoming crisis. They are the operating procedure of a system that is already in crisis but has chosen to manage it through gradual erosion rather than acute correction.
Every central banker knows this. Every treasury official knows this. Every senior financial executive knows this. They cannot say it because saying it would accelerate the thing they are trying to prevent. The system depends on confidence in the currency. If the people running the system publicly acknowledge that the currency is being systematically debased to manage debt obligations that cannot be paid in real terms, confidence collapses faster. So they manage the debasement quietly while publicly maintaining that everything is fine.
This is the actual social contract of late stage fiat. The people running the system know what they are doing. They know it produces a wealth transfer from savers to asset holders, from wage earners to capital owners, from the middle class to the wealthy. They do it anyway because the alternative is worse. The alternative is acute crisis, banking collapses, sovereign defaults, and political upheaval that could end the system entirely. Slow debasement is the lesser evil from their perspective. They choose it knowingly and they refuse to discuss it publicly because public discussion would prevent it from working.
The middle class is being quietly liquidated to keep the system functioning.
That is not a controversial statement among people who actually understand monetary policy. It is the operating reality. The wealth that the post war American middle class accumulated through wages and home ownership is being slowly transferred to asset holders through inflation and debt expansion. The mechanism is invisible to most people because it operates through the gradual reduction in purchasing power rather than through any visible confiscation. But the effect is the same. The middle class gets poorer in real terms every year while the wealthy get richer in real terms every year.
This chart is one more piece of evidence of the mechanism running.
The wealthy understand this and position accordingly. They hold scarce and productive assets. They borrow at low rates to buy more of those assets. The debt they hold gets inflated away while the assets they hold appreciate in real terms. The math is simple and it produces the wealth concentration that everyone notices but few people understand the mechanism behind.
The mechanism is the monetary system.
It is designed to transfer wealth from those who hold currency to those who hold assets.
That is the function. Not a bug.
People don’t really understand how obscenely large the oil and gas industry actually is.
Worldwide oil revenue is $4 trillion per year.
Every year the oil industry collects more money than the US government. Not the US military, the entire US government.
Every year the oil industry allocates $850 billion of capex to new projects, and those new projects increase the oil supply by about 1.8%. It costs half a trillion dollar a year, for every 1% of growth.
Meanwhile, people think the $500 billion datacenter buildout is “unprecedented”.
A year with $500 billion capex means a downturn and mass layoffs in the oil industry.
It’s just a different scale.
The same industry sells $2 trillion a year of gas.
So $6 Trillion of revenue in 2025, and projected $8 trillion of revenue for 2026.
There is a reason that the world has multiple “petrostates” with huge sovereign wealth funds, but no other type of mono-economy country with giant trillion dollar liquid funds.
Many countries, such as Saudi Arabia produce oil and gas at 70% profit margins. So huge volumes and huge margins. That’s how you build multiple multitrillion dollar sovereign wealth funds that own a meaningful chunk of all global equities.
These countries make huge equity returns in times of stability and huge oil returns in times of volatility.
My point here, is that the datacenter capex can go much higher. It’s currently $6-700 billion, but for a major boom it could be double this.
And the “oh noe! We need lots more datacenter plumbers!” is just a complete joke, when there’s an industry 10X bigger that literally does nothing but lay pipes everywhere.
Embarrassing ignorance.
Hyperscalers are still only using cashflow, and still each sitting on $100 billion cash reserves. They need to get off the pot and go and build some stuff, because it’s difficult to take them seriously watching them flap about in “hardware” aka heavy industry, for their fourth year.
The US job market has been stagnant for years beneath the surface:
Since January 2024, the healthcare and social assistance sector has added +1.7 million jobs.
Over the same period, all other industries combined have lost -56,000 jobs.
Furthermore, healthcare and social assistance has added ~855,000 jobs since December 2024, while the rest of the private sector has lost -322,000.
In other words, the private sector, excluding healthcare, has lost an average of -21,500 jobs per month over this period.
Meanwhile, senior care roles have grown +18% since January 2020, compared to just +4% for all other industries.
Strip out healthcare, and the US labor market has been shrinking for years.
Singapur no es un trofeo socialdemócrata, es la refutación más prolija que existe de todo lo que la socialdemocracia predica.
Cuando los progresistas europeos citan a Singapur como ejemplo de «Estado fuerte que funciona», omiten el dato incómodo:
Gasto público en torno al 15% del PBI, sin impuesto a la ganancia de capital, sin impuesto a dividendos, sin salario mínimo nacional durante décadas, sin subsidio de desempleo al estilo europeo, y una alícuota máxima de ganancias personales que durante años fue la mitad de la francesa.
El Heritage Index lo ubica sistemáticamente entre las dos economías más libres del planeta (aunque sea deficiente).
Eso no es socialdemocracia, es lo opuesto exacto.
Lee Kuan Yew entendió algo que el progresismo occidental se niega a procesar: la prosperidad no se decreta, se acumula.
Y se acumula cuando hay derechos de propiedad blindados, apertura comercial radical, moneda dura y un marco institucional que castiga el parasitismo.
El célebre programa de vivienda del HDB no fue redistribución, fue capitalización forzada vía cuentas individuales de ahorro (CPF), propiedad privada titulada y un mercado inmobiliario donde el residente termina siendo dueño, no inquilino del Estado.
¿Hubo dirigismo? Sí, y ahí es donde Singapur es interesante también como advertencia. Las partes planificadas de su economía son justamente las que arrastran las ineficiencias clásicas que Mises describió en 1920.
El milagro no ocurrió por el dirigismo, ocurrió a pesar de él, sostenido por una base de libertad económica que ningún país socialdemócrata se atrevería a tolerar quince minutos.
Singapur tiene un Estado pequeño, predecible y enfocado en proteger contratos, no en redistribuir ingresos.
Lo que los socialdemócratas admiran de Singapur es precisamente lo único que jamás estarían dispuestos a copiar.
El milagro de Lee Kuan Yew es el milagro del capital acumulado bajo reglas duras.
Quien lo cite para defender más Estado, o no leyó los números, o cuenta con que vos tampoco los leíste.
The only major countries in Europe richer than the US:
1. Norway with oil & gas
2. Switzerland with banks
3. Ireland with corporate tax evasion schemes
The rest of Europe is throttled by heavy regulations, overtaxation & left redistribution mindset. Will this ever change?
$MSTR looks like it's ready to enter the next leg down.
The question is, how low can Michael Saylor go before his entire Ponzi of a Ponzi implodes like 2001?
LATEST: ⚡ AI data centers generate up to 8x more revenue per MW than Bitcoin mining, prompting miners to shift toward AI and raising questions about network security, says Ran Neuner.
The world is a market. Dubai’s stock was flying and needed a pull back. Cost of living + doing biz will dramatically decrease, many will have left, new comers will be enticed by the government. The pull back will give a discounted entry to Dubai. In other words, this a buy the dip opportunity.
US Oil surged to $91 as Qatar's energy minister warns oil prices could rise to $150 within two weeks.
Back in July 2008, oil skyrocketed to $147 a barrel which completely shutdown the U.S. economy. This helped trigger the stock market crash 60 days later.
The US private credit market is heading in the wrong direction:
The median listed Business Development Company (BDC) is now trading at just 0.73x its net asset value (NAV), the lowest since 2020.
BDCs are publicly traded firms that lend to small, mid-sized, and distressed US businesses, offering retail investors access to private credit markets.
In other words, they are priced at 73% of their claimed worth.
The median listed BDC price-to-NAV has been consistently declining over the last 18 months.
To put this into perspective, the ratio collapsed to ~0.35x in 2008, meaning the market valued BDCs at just 35 cents on the Dollar.
This comes as concerns are growing that AI will disrupt business models of software firms and make it harder to refinance debt, with the average BDC holding ~20% exposure to the sector.
The private credit industry is under heavy pressure.
Investors are hedging against a credit market crash at an accelerating pace:
Put option open interest in US large credit ETFs, $HYG, $JNK, $LQD, and $BKLN, is at a record ~11.5 million contracts.
The total number of outstanding contracts on these funds has DOUBLED over the last 12 months.
By comparison, the 2022 bear market high was 10.0 million contracts.
Meanwhile, tech high-yield credit spreads surged to 556 basis points, surpassing the April 2025 highs and reaching the widest level since October 2023.
By comparison, the all sector high-yield spreads stand at 361 basis points, the highest since November 2025.
This means tech junk bonds are now trading at a +195 basis point premium to the rest of the market, the highest in at least 3 years.
The credit market selloff may just be getting started.