🇨🇳 China just launched a shipping route that skips the Suez Canal and the Strait of Hormuz entirely.
A Chinese container line, started its regular "Ice Silk Road" service through Russia's Northern Sea Route this week, running almost the whole way along the Arctic coastline.
The first vessel, Dubai Tower, carries 1,740 TEU, tiny next to a modern mainline containership running 20,000-plus TEU.
The crossing takes about 20 days, versus roughly 40 days via Suez, half the transit time on paper.
Rosatom, Russia's state nuclear company, issues the Arctic navigation permits and supplies the nuclear-powered icebreakers that keep the route open in ice season.
Rosatom is already calling this the next step toward regular seasonal Arctic shipping, not a one off...
Strategically this matters more than the ship size suggests.
It's a Europe-Asia corridor that sidesteps Suez, Hormuz, and the Red Sea, all the chokepoints this account has covered all week, and gives China a shipping lane that doesn't run through anyone else's waterway.
One small ship doesn't reroute global trade but pair this with everything else running this week, the Yanbu to Sidi Kerir reroutes, Oman's Duqm bypass hub, and now a functioning Arctic corridor, and the pattern is the same everywhere...everyone's building a way around the chokepoints that used to be unavoidable.
Pablo Pledgescobar
This dude was a Dean’s List accounting major at Penn State who kept a blog talking about his “passion for numbers and financial storytelling” and how he wanted to be at the forefront of the financial landscape.
He also cut his frat brothers’ hair on the side for extra cash.
Meanwhile he’s allegedly the top of the entire cocaine chain for the campus, running kilos out of Sigma Chi and Delta Upsilon houses, making regular supply runs to Philly and New York, and using actual pledges to cut and bag the product as their official “indoctrination.”
There’s even a photo from one of the deals where pledges are helping package 500 grams he just sold for $18k. Later deals hit full kilos.
He kept selling after he graduated.
Unreal.
Shutting the Strait of Hormuz means the Gulf States can't sell oil.
If they can't sell oil, they default on their loans and that ends up going into a banking crisis that leads right to London.
“My guess is he is preparing to offset a boatload of carried interest income. If you own a sports team, done correctly, you can get a deduction against income. The goal in acquiring a sports team is to setup a ‘non-passive’ deduction.” https://t.co/7vIenZdifF