Mark Spain

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

I've given this more thought and I'm now fully convinced: this is by far one of the most consequential geopolitical developments of the 21st century.

I mean think about it. As the saying goes “the economy is energy-transformed” so it's easy to understand that the situation in which we are right now, with China going all-in on renewable energy while America bets on "Drill, Baby, Drill" isn't just about energy - it sets both superpowers on very divergent paths that will fundamentally reshape everything.

Just take AI for instance. As OpenAI's Sam Altman recently told Congress (https://t.co/mK63eoi45h): “Eventually the cost of intelligence, the cost of AI, will converge to the cost of energy”. I think he's right and what this concretely means is that there is no “winning” in AI without first winning in energy.

It means that energy is truly the master key to technological supremacy - whoever controls the cheapest, most scalable energy infrastructure will unlock immense advantages in every sector that matters.

Now of course this leads us to the obvious question: in this unprecedented energy strategy divergence between the U.S. and China, which approach may ultimately prove superior?

I've just spent 2 days thinking through this question to write my latest article (link in next tweet).

If you don't want to read it, its title might give you a clue as to the conclusion I arrive at: "Is America's Energy Strategy the Greatest Strategic Blunder of the 21st Century?"

[Mark Spain @markwspain]

https://t.co/Fl82mOIemJ

[Chris Hedges @ChrisLynnHedges]

https://t.co/ILBoNqfqQ7

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

I'm normally not a fan of Piketty (what kind of person calls their book 'The Capital' but simultaneously badmouths Marx and says he "never managed really to read" the original "Das Kapital"?)

But, credit when credit is due, this is a genuinely fascinating study.

It is in fact - somewhat ironically - the data-driven and unequivocal proof that Marx was correct when he said that capitalist wealth accumulation in Western imperialist countries was fundamentally based on exploitation and unequal power relations rather than fair market exchange.

Let's look through the paper.

First of all, a key value of the work is that Piketty and Gastón Nievas (a PhD student) base their study on a new database that they put together (which you can access here: https://t.co/rCYWhDT6u6) that systematically reconstructs global trade flows and balance of payments for the entire world over more than two centuries (1800-2025).

This is genuinely groundbreaking work. No one - to my knowledge - has ever before created such a comprehensive database that tracks not just the "visible flows" of goods trade, but crucially the "invisible flows" of services, foreign income, and foreign transfers across the entire world - covering 48 major countries individually plus 9 residual regions that together achieve complete global coverage of population and GDP over more than 2 centuries.

What makes this database particularly valuable is that it allows us, for the first time, to see the complete picture of how wealth actually flowed between regions since 1800.

And not just what was officially traded, but the colonial transfers, tribute payments, "home charges" from India to Britain, debt impositions on Haiti and China, and all the other mechanisms through which the West extracted wealth from the Global South.

What the data shows is what everyone in the Global South knew instinctively but was contradicted by the dominant economic narrative: the West's wealth was built not through superior productivity or "free trade," but through systematic extraction, forced transfers, and colonial plunder on a scale that dwarfs anything previously quantified.

Take this extraordinary metric for instance: the authors' simulations show that a mere 20% increase in primary commodity prices over the 1800-1914 period, which the study says "corresponds to an absolute lower bound estimate of the value of unpaid forced labor in the export production of cotton, sugar, grain, etc. over this period," would have left Europe with foreign debts equivalent to 160% of its GDP, completely reversing global wealth patterns.

Put another way: had Western imperialist powers actually paid for what they took instead of extracting it through colonial violence and unpaid forced labor, the "developed" world would have been the "developing" world, and vice versa.

What’s also extraordinary is that this system of extraction very much continues to this day.
------------

Read the rest on my new Substack (link in next tweet)

[Chris Hedges @ChrisLynnHedges]

https://t.co/VyOQl0gwVE

[𝘊𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘦 @OopsGuess]

🚨 Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis just dropped some hard truths about the real reason behind the 🇺🇸U.S.-🇨🇳China trade war. And no, it’s not about “fair trade” — it’s about survival. 🧵

1/
The U.S. doesn’t fear China because of “cheap labor” or “IP theft.”
What it truly fears is China’s capacity to undermine the U.S.-led global financial order — the very system that allows America to print dollars and buy the world.

2/
Wall Street’s aging financial architecture is losing its grip.
It can’t control crypto flows.
It can’t keep up with new financial ecosystems.
China — with its digital yuan, vast industrial base, and rising global influence — is the first real threat to this system.

3/
Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs” were never about balancing trade.
They were a desperate attempt to slow down China’s rise and protect the dollar system from collapse.
Because if China succeeds, the U.S. loses its magic weapon: monetary dominance.

4/
Today, Trump is laser-focused on America’s financial core:
• The Treasury bond market (America’s lifeline)
• The stock market (America’s wallet)
Both are fragile. And any external pressure could trigger a chain reaction.

5/
The U.S. is now panicking over who’s selling off U.S. Treasuries.
China? Japan? Others?
Trump reportedly wants to punish any surplus country that dumps Treasuries — with tariffs, of course.
This is not about trade. It’s about a dying empire trying to stop the bleeding.

6/
In short, America is no longer confident in its own financial fortress.
And China is no longer playing by the old rules.
This isn’t just a trade war — it’s a war for the future of global finance.

[Matt Kennard @kennardmatt]

Truth.

He would have been 100 today.

We need him more than ever.

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

Been thinking about this Zappa quote a lot lately.

[Sony Thăng @nxt888]

🇺🇸JEFFREY SACHS:

"Tariffs are going to lower living standards.

They're going to wreck the US economy, and they're being put on for unbelievably bizarre and mistaken reasons that are completely fallacious.

Let me explain.

The United States runs a large deficit in its trade in goods and services — what's called the current account of the United States — and that deficit is about a trillion dollars.

Trump says, 'Oh, that's because other countries are ripping off the United States.'

I can't even begin to say how absurd that line is.

[The word is childish.]

Running a current account deficit means — and it means precisely — that the United States is spending more than it's producing. That's what leads to a deficit. You spend more than you produce.

And we spend more than we produce because we have very low saving in this country. We have an enormous budget deficit.

So the government is like the national credit card — it runs on credit.

It transfers money, pays for wars, pays for Israel’s wars, pays for military bases in 80 countries around the world, pays for that more than a trillion-dollar-a-year military establishment, and hundreds of billions more of associated spending on the military-industrial complex.

And it gives tax cuts for the richest Americans.

It allows for tax evasion by the richest Americans — and I mean evasion, because it doesn't do audits, and it guts enforcement of the tax laws.

So we hemorrhage deficits and have rising public debt.

And because of all that, the spending of our country is much larger than our national income.

It’s a trillion dollars more than national income.

It is exactly the imbalance of our imports of goods and services over our exports of goods and services.

All of this is to say that what Trump calls a 'ripoff' is just the absolute irresponsibility of the political class in Washington.

It's a corrupt, plutocratic gangsterism that gives away the taxes and tax cuts to the richest people and goes on war after war — on credit.

And that leads to these large deficits that Trump then blames on other countries.

Now he's going to correct these deficits, he thinks, by raising tariffs.

And of course, it's going to do nothing of the kind.

The deficits are going to continue because they come from the profligacy of Washington.

They don't come from the fact that other countries are ripping us off.

So he'll raise the tariffs. Americans will shift their spending, say, from an imported automobile to domestic automobiles. That's true. They'll pay higher prices for those domestic automobiles. And our auto industry will export less abroad.

So yes — there will be fewer imports and fewer exports, and the balance won’t budge.

And none of it's going to change the fiscal recklessness.

Because what's Trump’s highest aspiration? It is to continue tax cuts for the richest Americans, which is going to cost another $4 trillion over the next 10 years in the budget.

Because these tax cuts are supposed to end, but he says, 'No, no, no — these are taxes for my rich donors, so they're going to continue.'

So he's not going to solve the budget crisis.

He's not going to solve the trade deficit — because that comes from the budget crisis.

But what he's going to do is lower the living standards of our country and the world.

Because trade is beneficial in living standards — it's called gains from trade.

We buy more cheaply. We sell goods that we have a comparative advantage in. And both sides gain from trade.

Of course, we overdo it, because we overspend — but that’s a completely different thing.

No one’s ripping off the United States by these numbers.

I don’t know whether it's just rhetoric or ignorance or confusion, but it's unbelievably bad economic policy.

It will come to no good.

And incidentally, you mentioned rightly that tariffs are, of course, a tax. So who’s supposed to have authority over taxes?

[Congress.]

And Congress has nothing to say in this. This is a one-person show.

What did we become in this country? Even King George wouldn't levy taxes without the British Parliament in the 18th century.

So what happened to this country? Trump just says, 'Oh, it's an emergency,' and now we have one-person rule — and one-person rule on completely fallacious premises that don’t pass the first day of study of what a trade deficit is.

I taught that for more than 20 years at Harvard University — what is a trade deficit, how does it relate to the excess of spending over production, how does it relate to the excess of investment in a country over a low saving rate?

Well, none of this seems to register.

No one asks a question.

There isn’t a day of hearings.

There isn’t any analysis.

It’s a one-person show based on economic fallacies that are going to wreck our economy, wreck the world trading system.

And I can tell you — all over the world, because I am talking with leaders all over the world, and recently in Asia — the words to describe this, you can’t say in polite company."

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Except that's pretty much a direct continuation of what China has been doing for decades. Hasn't worked too badly so far...

It's genuinely amazing to see the scorn and condescension people always have for China's initiatives. Feels like the definition of insanity: an extraordinary track record of success in governmental industrial policy yet any new effort is always predicted as a failure...

Which actually doesn't hurt China - it's in their interest to be underestimated. But it very much hurts the West who systematically wakes up years later and is like "wait how could China be dominating this industry now? We never saw it coming!", when China actually wrote that it was their plan years beforehand but people at the time reacted like Graham now does, with scorn...

EVs is a great example: China introduced EV technology as a priority science research project already in its 2001 Five-Year Plan, and continuously prioritized it since. Yet the West somehow only noticed China's efforts in the past 2 years, more than 20 years after the fact, when the EV race was basically over already, won by China 🤷‍♂️

All this to conclude: instead of being condescending, you'd better pay a lot of attention and put a lot of serious thoughts into the matter when China says it'll invest 1 trillion into some industries...

[Lord Bebo @MyLordBebo]

🇺🇸🇪🇺🇷🇺🇮🇱 MUST WATCH: “You don’t provoke your neighbor!”

Jeffrey Sachs speech in front of the EU parliament is astonishing!

He explains:
- the US foreign policy
- Netanyahu’s wars
- The Ukraine war
- The EU weakness
- The EU warmongering

“Just behave like adults!”

[Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil @ivan_8848]

Stop the WARMONGERING‼️

Don't Beg to Be at the Table With the United States.

Jeffrey Sachs to European PUPPETS The Extremely Corrupt, Arrogant, Queen Warmonger #frauGENOCIDE Ursula von der Leyen, Kaja Kallas, President Costa

European Security is On The Table

I know Minister Lavrov for 30 years. I regard him as a brilliant foreign minister.

[Chris Hedges @ChrisLynnHedges]

I explain on @AJEnglish how the Cold War liberal eviscerated the Left, and deformed the liberal class into a woke, superficial group that never confronts the mechanisms of oppression.

[Glenn Diesen @Glenn_Diesen]

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs at the EU Parliament:
- The EU's decades-long subservience to the US has left it with absurd war narratives rather than a foreign policy

[Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil @ivan_8848]

MUST WATCH, Bookmark & Keep

🏆 Jeffrey Sachs Should Be A Nobel Prize Winner

Jeffrey Sachs: Bill Clinton’s Shadowy Deep State Project

Jeffrey Sachs one of the few voices of sanity in the US

***Russian President Putin says the current crisis in Ukraine is a direct result of years of aggressive NATO policies and he is right about NATO.

[Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil @ivan_8848]

🏆 Jeffrey Sachs Should Be A Nobel Prize Winner

Do you agree?

Share please‼️

[Mambo Italiano @mamboitaliano__]

🚨 What’s happening in Sicily - Italy 🇮🇹 is absolutely extraordinary

Mount Etna is erupting with its summit covered in snow

Here are some explorers skiing between snow and fire!

Unprecedented

[Oyindamola🙄 @dammiedammie35]

This is absolutely !nsane man 🤯🏓

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

You can always count on the Palantir tech bros to have the worst takes on just about anything and this is no exception, with here the company's CTO Shyam Sankar arguing that the Deepseek lesson is that AI is an "winner-takes-all arms race"
https://t.co/Plp6kW2se2

The lesson is actually the exact opposite.

If it was a arms race, why on earth would Deepseek release its model in open source under MIT license so that anyone in the U.S. can use it freely? When you're in an "arms race" and you develop a new and better "weapon", do you hand it to your adversary together with all the manuals on how to manufacture and use it? 🤔

And if it was 'winner-takes-all', then how come DeepSeek managed to match OpenAI's performance while spending orders of magnitude less? Their success proves that smaller players with limited resources can challenge the giants of the field. That's the exact opposite of winner-takes-all - it shows the playing field is actually becoming more level.

This guy, and Palantir in general, is in the business of fearmongering and driving up hostility because that is literally their business: they commercialize software for the military, so they benefit financially from framing everything through a militaristic, zero-sum lens.

When what China is actually proving with Deepseek is that the "winner-takes-all arms race" approach, which is largely the approach taken so far by U.S. tech giants (Palantir included!), is foolish and that AI development should rather be treated as a global collaborative endeavor. It's about pushing for an alternative vision of AI as a democratized commodity that anyone is empowered to make theirs, as opposed to a closed and scarce resource controlled by a handful of oligarchs.

The most worrying aspect of this discourse is that this vision of AI as a "weapon" is extremely telling of what's to come if tech bros like this guy win the battle of ideas: we'll end up in a self-fulfilling prophecy where treating AI as a weapon actually turns it into one, or more generally a tool of domination and control as opposed to a force developed for the benefit of humanity.

It's important to wake up about the sheer irresponsibility of this. We're speaking about a technology that all the top experts agree has the potential to outsmart us all. Why on earth would we want to go out of our way to ensure we view and shape it as a weapon or a tool of control? It's positively insane and will result in making us all collectively less secure, maybe even existentially so.

If there's one technology that has to be developed openly and transparently, by all of us collectively as humans with a shared stake in its trajectory, it's AI. The real choice here isn't between winning or losing an arms race - it's about whether we want an AI created by humanity for humanity, or an AI shaped by the cycles of conflict and domination that we need to move beyond. We should all be extremely thankful to Deepseek for enabling the former.

[Wolf of X @WolfofX]

Japan 🧵

1.