SPEN 👍

Starting from scratch after they banned me for quoting Blackadder's Lord Percy and lost 800 or so followers. Work in IT for Logistics.

[SPEN 👍 @SpenTheReturn]

This got me a permanent ban @elonmusk - Several appeals later they wouldn't change their minds. No idea if it was an algorithm or a human making the decision. Lost 800+ followers but hey ho. Funny old platform 🤷

[Mads Christiansen @MadsC007]

The EU elite believes that Europe's lack of innovation and new emerging companies is caused by a lack of 'risk-willing capital'.

But they avoid to ask the more important question: Why is there so little risk-willing capital willing to invest in European companies in the first place?

That question is much more uncomfortable.

Capital goes where the expected return on taking risk is attractive. If entrepreneurs and investors face growing bureaucracy, regulation, taxation and increasingly anti-business rules, fewer companies will be started, fewer will scale in Europe, and less capital will be willing to finance them.

The lack of capital is not the root problem. It is a symptom.

Europe does not primarily need politicians to find more capital for European companies. It needs to make Europe a place where entrepreneurs want to build companies and investors are willing to risk their capital.

Fix the incentives, and the capital will follow.

[SPEN 👍 @SpenTheReturn]

Blessed are the Rent seekers?
👇

[Handre @Handre]

Rent seeking is the practice of extracting wealth from others through political manipulation rather than producing anything of value.

Gordon Tullock formalized the concept in 1967, and Murray Rothbard spent decades explaining why it corrodes civilization. The basic mechanics are simple: you lobby the state for a privilege, a license, a tariff, a subsidy, and then you collect returns without creating anything. You didn't build a better product. You bought a congressman.

Medieval European guilds perfected this centuries before Tullock named it. Guild masters lobbied city councils to criminalize unlicensed competition rather than outcompete rivals through innovation. English wool merchants did the same in the 14th century, securing crown monopolies that throttled foreign trade and kept domestic prices artificially high. Ordinary people paid more for cloth so that connected insiders could prosper.

Nothing has changed. The American sugar tariff system, which has been in continuous operation since 1789, forces you to pay roughly twice the world sugar price. This transfers approximately $3.5 billion annually from consumers to a handful of politically connected growers in Florida and Louisiana. You get poorer. They get rich. The state enforces the transaction.

The true cost exceeds even those numbers. Every dollar spent lobbying Congress is a dollar not spent on research, production, or genuine service. The entire lobbying industry in Washington (which hit $4.4 billion in 2024 alone) represents pure economic waste, resources consumed in the battle for political privilege rather than deployed to satisfy consumers.

The solution is simple: strip the state of its power to grant privileges, and rent seeking collapses immediately. No monopoly to buy means no reason to purchase politicians.

[Michael A. Arouet @MichaelAArouet]

This chart also explains the root of Germany’s demise quite well. Germans prefer “working” for the state over starting a business.

A country with such a left mindset simply can’t stay prosperous. The state doesn’t create wealth and prosperity, innovative entrepreneurs do.

[The Iran Watcher @TheIranWatcher]

🚨 The U.S. says the tens of billions siphoned out of Iran by the Islamic Republic’s ruling class are no longer safe, as it comes directly for the personal wealth they stole from the country.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the United States has mapped the offshore system used by senior Islamic Republic officials, IRGC figures and their families to hide enormous wealth abroad, and he is threatening to freeze it.

“We know where in the British Virgin Islands your accounts are at these trust companies. We know the $100 million houses you have around the world, and we are going to freeze those.”

Bessent has previously said the Islamic Republic’s inner circle was siphoning roughly $400–500 million out of Iran every month, equivalent to billions every year, while the IRGC may also be skimming a massive share of the country’s oil revenues.

And even figures from within the Islamic Republic are now undermining the regime’s constant claim that sanctions are responsible for Iran having no money. Iranian economist and former government adviser Saeed Laylaz put the scale of internal theft and capital flight far higher:

“$40–50 billion is being stolen from Iran’s economy every year, and you’re still focusing on sanctions? This is capital theft and massive capital flight out of Iran.”

The money is moved through offshore trusts, BVI shell companies, exchange houses, front traders, crypto wallets and family-controlled companies, before reappearing as luxury property and investments from London to Dubai.

Treasury has already gone after regime-linked financiers and networks tied to properties across the United Kingdom, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain, Cyprus and the UAE, while Bessent says roughly $1 billion in Iranian crypto assets has already been seized.

Now the pressure is becoming personal. Bessent says weekly bank sanctions are coming, while airline-leasing companies and businesses dealing with the IRGC are also being targeted as Treasury tries to choke the channels that move and replenish these fortunes.

The contrast is staggering. The Islamic Republic blames sanctions for Iran’s poverty while people connected to the system siphon billions out of the same economy, hide it offshore and accumulate enormous fortunes abroad as ordinary Iranians watch their wages and savings collapse.

Bessent says the objective is to “economically asphyxiate this regime.” That increasingly means not only cutting Iran’s oil and banking revenues, but finding the billions accumulated by the people running the Islamic Republic and freezing the accounts, trusts and luxury properties where they thought their money was safe.

[Faytuks News @Faytuks]

Germany blames Russia for hybrid attack on Leipzig airport & announces new measures:

- Summoning the Russian ambassador
- Russian consulate in Bonn to be shut
- The "russian house" in Berlin will be shut
- New sanctions
- New entry restrictions for Russian citizens

[SPEN 👍 @SpenTheReturn]

💯

[MAKS 26 🇺🇦👀 @Maks_NAFO_FELLA]

🇪🇺🇺🇦 Kallas: "We know that some countries have interceptor missiles whose expiration dates will soon expire. It would be very good if they were transferred to Ukraine so that it could use them to protect its people."

[SPEN 👍 @SpenTheReturn]

👀

[WarMonitor🇺🇦🇬🇧 @WarMonitor3]

The Jänschwalde power plant has reportedly been hit by homemade rockets whilst more explosives have been found by a nearby PowerPlant in Brandenburg Germany which are being defused.

This looks like a major attack attempt…

[SPEN 👍 @SpenTheReturn]

And herein lies the key problem with British politics. A lack of competency.
👇

[James Price @jamespriceglos]

The Tory Shadow Chancellor, @griffitha, has more private sector experience than the entire Labour Cabinet….combined.

Wild.

[SPEN 👍 @SpenTheReturn]

🙄

[Eyal Yakoby @EYakoby]

The population of Jews in Poland in 1939 was 3,300,000. Six years later, it was 300,000.

The population of Palestinian in Gaza in 2023 was 2.1 million. Three years later, it's 2.2 million.

[Shaun Pinner @ShaunPinnerUA]

It’s always been about Russian Imperialism and the Genocide of Ukrainians

It’s good we are seeing this word used more…..

GENOCIDE, because that’s what it is.

[SPEN 👍 @SpenTheReturn]

👍

[Ukraine News 🇺🇦 @Ukrainene]

🇺🇦🤜🇷🇺Moscow’s main "gas station" is officially OUT of service! 🛑

Russia’s YANOS refinery—a giant processing 15M+ tons of oil annually—has ground to a halt. This is a crushing blow to the Kremlin’s fuel supply for Moscow and the Central Region. While they claim "technical issues," the reality of "unplanned explosions" is impossible to hide. 💥

[Simon French @Frencheconomics]

That’s a fair observation - although whether breakevens are a pure read on expectations given what a range of survey measures are telling us is an issue I have pondered for some time. I would agree that the move across all sovereigns is more term premia driven, but the UK spread to other sovereigns (and how that has moved over last 4y) does look heavily influenced by inflation data/outlook.

[Simon French @Frencheconomics]

This morning the 20-year Gilt - one of the market-derived assumptions used for the OBR forecast - is 70bp above where it was assumed to going to be at the Spring Forecast, at 5.8%. Applied across the curve that is a £6bn increase in debt interest by 2029/30 - or put another way, five times the annual funding gap in the defence investment plan

[Wolfgang Munchau @EuroBriefing]

One of the reasons for the Icelandic No vote is that the pro-EU campaign made the same errors as the pro-Remain campaign in the UK did 10 years ago. They reduced the debate to silly economic arguments. In the Icelandic case it was the ludicrous assertion that joining the euro would lower inflation.
https://t.co/xhrTyJS1Hq

[Jay in Kyiv @JayinKyiv]

After doubling world oil prices and cutting Ukraine's air defenses, Trump isnt giving up on his attempts to force Ukraine's surrender.

[Michael MacKay @mhmck]

Putin puppet Trump is doing everything he can for the russian fascist invaders:

–blocking the sale or licensing of ballistic missile interceptors to Ukraine
–blocking the use of Starlink over russian territory
–blocking Congress-mandated assistance
–threatening Europe and Canada

[🪖MilitaryNewsUA🇺🇦 @front_ukrainian]

❗️Elon Musk does not object to the use of Starlink terminals on Ukrainian drones for strikes against targets in Russia, including ballistic missile launchers up to 200 km from the border, but the final decision must be made by the White House. The Financial Times reports this, citing sources: Zelenskyy previously asked Musk for such permission.

[Kate from Kharkiv @BohuslavskaKate]

It’s interesting that the article says the quiet part out loud. Putin thinks he will end up like the Romanovs if the war ends without the complete defeat of Ukraine, which is why no peace talks are possible. He is simply uninterested.

Although, it gets wrong the "Donbas" part. The goal is to occupy Ukraine, not one of its regions.

[Jake Wallis Simons @JakeWSimons]

I know this is no longer a trending thing to say but: FREE IRAN

[SPEN 👍 @SpenTheReturn]

Quite

[Anonymous @YourAnonCentral]

Nazi Germany voted away its democracy, Britain voted away its prosperity, and US voted away both. Propaganda kills & troll farms are a weapon of war. Half measures and civilian online defence isn’t enough. We can’t win a war against an enemy that controls our minds.