Sergeant Pepper

[QuintusCurtius @QuintusCurtius]

This is pure joy.

Most cannot grasp this.

[Matt Barrie @matt_barrie]

Even the ATO doesn’t want to eat the surcharge

[Dylan Ratigan @DylanRatigan]

https://t.co/fbLJpTV3aD

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🇨🇳🇺🇸 The only country winning the Iran war has never fired a shot, and it started preparing for this exact moment back in 2012...

Peter Alexander has lived in Shanghai for THIRTY years, one of the last Western analysts still on the ground, and the picture he paints should stop Washington cold.

While America drains its reserves and its checkbook, China spent over a decade stockpiling above its needs, building the world's largest refining capacity, and finishing a railway from China into Tehran that went live one year before the bombs started falling.

The last empire that built a railway like that to reach Middle East oil triggered a world war, and Peter walks through that history like a warning label.

Then comes his forecast: China is preparing to do with Iran exactly what it did with Iraq after 2006, and what that means for the world's two oldest civilizations linking arms across Asia.

Plus the story of the morning his inbox flooded with furious emails about China's newest AI model, and what everyone missed 18 months earlier.

His parting line deserves to hang over every desk in Washington:

"Unipolarity abandoned the United States a long time ago."

@WeTheBrandon

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

Here's my full interview with CNBC, covering my bear case against generative AI, OpenAI's questionable finances, AI's lack of ROI, and how all of this is a symptom of the tech industry running out of hypergrowth ideas.

It's great to see the mainstream media discussing this.

[TOM PANOS @tompanos]

What I'm collecting now.

The older I get, the less interested I am in collecting things and the more interested I am in collecting moments. Dublin this morning was a reminder that the best part of travel isn’t the destination. It’s the human connection along the way. 🇮🇪🏃‍♂️❤️

#TomPanos #LifeExperiences #TravelTips

[Tom Cruise @TomCruise]

For the last 46 years, it has been my privilege to work alongside countless talented artists and crews to create these characters, stories, and films for you all.

I'm looking forward to seeing you at the movies! DIGGER. Only in theaters this October.

[Dr Helen Fry | WWII Historian @DrHelenFry]

In 1944, one of Hitler’s most decorated paratroop generals was captured in Brest and secretly brought to a grand English country house.

Hidden microphones recorded every word he said about the German war effort.

What he revealed still surprises historians today:
(🧵)

[Sergeant Pepper @sgtpepper7691]

@felixprehn Metals

[Sergeant Pepper @sgtpepper7691]

@gcanavan2 End of year sale!

[Ross Hendricks @Ross__Hendricks]

We're about to make 1970s-style energy shortages great again.

Few understand the history, but it wasn't the OPEC oil embargoes that created the infamous gas lines in the 1970s. The real cause was the price controls implemented by the federal government. The artificially suppressed price led to excess consumption relative to supply, which ultimately gave rise to physical shortages.

Today, we're repeating the same mistakes, albeit with a different mechanism. The coordinated market manipulation of SPR releases + Axios fake "deal" news headlines have artificially surpressed prices below the demand-destroying levels needed to ration supply.

In the absence of this natural market functioning that balances demand with increasingly thin supplies, we'll eventually hit tank bottoms across a whole range of energy products, with the same end result of economy-crippling supply shortages.

Bottom line: the inability of the Trump administration to tolerate higher prices today means supply shortages are all but guaranteed tomorrow.

[🦋 🌷Love Music 🎶 & Dance 💃🏻🕺🏻 @Tiana_Celine_23]

Rita Moreno performing "Fever" on the Muppet Show with Animal on drums which originally aired almost 50 years ago in the UK on September 12, 1976 and in New York on September 20, 1976 which earned her a Primetime Emmy Award.

[Sergeant Pepper @sgtpepper7691]

“A free society cannot survive on financial engineering, imported goods, inflated property values and digital monopolies. It needs productive strength.”

Craig Tindale nails it - yet again

[🇦🇺Craig Tindale @ctindale]

Central Bankers they don’t serve capitalism. They serve their own interests.

If capitalism were their aim, we would have built stronger industries, deeper productive capacity, and a broader class of owners, makers, engineers, farmers, builders and manufacturers.

Instead, the system was selected for deindustrialisation. It rewarded financial extraction over production, asset inflation over wages, imports over national capability, and dependence over sovereignty.

In the 17th century, a serf might work three days for the manor house. Today, many workers spend a similar portion of their lives working for the bank.

The name and firm have changed, but the system is familiar. The modern worker is chained to his shelter by debt, rent, mortgages, fees, inflation and financial claims created by institutions that contribute little to the real economy.

In a systemic sense, they are patristic; sure, they provide capital, though in this cycle, they provided capital to financialise the systems indentured workers.

The banks don't support the economy. Too often, they sit above it. They create credit, expand asset prices, collect interest, and then claim they are the indispensable engine of prosperity.

But when finance grows too large, it stops funding production and starts feeding on it. We stopped funding production decades ago.

Which is the cycle? Every time banks and financial interests overstep, they become too greedy. Every time they become too greedy, they distort the economy. Every time they distort the economy, the political class eventually protects them instead of the public. Then the technocratic class arrives to justify the arrangement with complicated language, models, forecasts and moral lectures.

But the outcome is fewer real industries, fewer independent producers, fewer competitive markets, and more dependence on a narrow class of financial and technological gatekeepers.

Hamilton understood the importance of productive industry. Eisenhower warned against concentrated power and the military-industrial machine. Robert Menzies understood that national strength required more than consumption and financial speculation.

Leaders of the past, whatever their flaws, often understood something many modern leaders have forgotten: liberty is not built on debt, dependence and imports. Freedom rests on the ability of a people to make things, defend themselves, feed themselves, power themselves and not be permanently beholden to foreign suppliers or domestic financiers.

A nation that cannot produce is not truly sovereign. A nation that cannot manufacture becomes strategically weak. A nation that sells off its productive base and calls the result “efficiency” is not modernising, it is dismantling its own state.

When production and finance fall out of balance, rivalry becomes inevitable. Nations that lose their industrial base become insecure. Nations that dominate supply chains become aggressive. Financial elites profit from instability, while ordinary people pay the price through inflation, unemployment, debt and war.

Central banks and financial institutions may not print ammunition directly, but they create the conditions that make conflict more likely. They inflate assets, punish workers, reward speculation, and push nations into dependency. Then, when the imbalance becomes dangerous, the same class that caused the instability presents itself as the only class capable of managing it.

Real capitalism requires competition, productive investment, broad ownership, failure for the incompetent, reward for the capable, and markets that are not permanently rigged in favour of insiders. But most of the modern economy is not that. It is dominated by duopolies, monopolies, cartels, too-big-to-fail banks, captured regulators, and technology platforms that behave more like private governments than companies.

Capitalism exists as an ideal, and at certain points in the economic cycle, it briefly appears. But it rarely remains pure for long. Power concentrates. Finance captures politics. Corporations eliminate competitors. Banks socialise losses and privatise gains. The productive economy gets hollowed out while everyone is told this is progress.

A free society cannot survive on financial engineering, imported goods, inflated property values and digital monopolies. It needs productive strength. It needs industry. It needs skilled workers. It needs competition. It needs national independence. Above all, it needs a system where money serves the real economy, not the other way around.

Once finance becomes the master rather than the servant, liberty begins to disappear. And once a nation forgets how to make things, it eventually forgets how to defend itself.

[Chartrader @Chartrader1]

12month investment scenario….do not buy banks, property, retail or discretionary spending stocks. Dividends cannot be trusted, and PE ratios even less so, they will be cut back to historical averages.Hold gold stocks, along with coal and gas.
Accept 5% returns in cash and bonds

[Sergeant Pepper @sgtpepper7691]

“When someone like Tony Blair-who played an instrumental role in invading Iraq-comes back years later and tries to sell the public the need for digital IDs, I see him as an employee, a middle manager, implementing… projects of superiors whose names we rarely see on the screen.”

[Kevork Almassian @KevorkAlmassian]

https://t.co/ZA1GSso3c8

[Mitch Presnick 柏力 @mitchpresnick]

Great post and largely right, with one important elaboration.

When China targets an industry, it competes collectively, at scale, and on timelines most competitors struggle to match. Profit maximization at the individual firm level is often secondary to long-term sector positioning.

Separate from planning and execution quality, that collective structural orientation, vertical integration and unified command make it exceptionally difficult to compete against.

This isn’t new. From southern Chinese merchant networks that built tightly integrated, capital-pooled trading systems across Southeast Asia — often operating as closed commercial ecosystems controlling finance, distribution, and supplier access — to today’s advanced manufacturing and technology push, coordinated scale and endurance have been the recurring edge.

The structure prioritizes collective staying power over individual margins. That cold effectiveness has generated resentment and strategic pushback for centuries — from SEA regional rivals in the Tang–Ming eras to modern policymakers in Washington such as Lutnick.

[Luke Gromen @LukeGromen]

ABSOLUTE MUST READ👇

"The global economy is experiencing a structural breakdown in the conversion of financial claims into physical output. I define this failure as the Hard Bifurcation: the separation of the monetary economy from the physical economy…"

"The West faces an adversary who understands that the Financial Ledger is subordinate to the Material Ledger. While the West financializes deficits, rivals industrialize surpluses..."

"The country possesses the money to buy the sword. It has lost the fire to forge it."

[Football Tweet ⚽ @Footballtweet]

1970 Brazil in 4K is quite the experience. 🇧🇷