Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Western governments have put themselves in mortal danger.

They are actively doing things that are destroying their countries: (1) replacing their native citizens with unassimilable foreigners; (2) centralizing government power in unelected and unaccountable bureaucracies; (3) censoring and criminalizing public dissent; (4) offshoring industrial and manufacturing jobs; (5) exacerbating energy costs and general inflation by demonizing hydrocarbons and pushing “global warming” delusions; (6) increasing taxes, government spending, and public welfare in unsustainable ways; (7) demolishing their nations’ historical identities, traditions, beliefs, and common cultures; (8) providing foreigners with “free” homes, food, and educations, while accusing native citizens of being “racists,” “xenophobes,” and “white supremacists”; (9) discouraging healthy marriages and stable families; and (10) indoctrinating the youngest generations to believe that war, “climate change,” overpopulation, and economic collapse will prevent them from ever having happy, hopeful, purposeful futures.

Those are just ten ways that Western governments are hurting their citizens. There are many more. But a reasonable person should be able to read the above paragraph and understand that nations cannot survive under such a destructive barrage of harmful policies.

Western governments are waging wars against their own nations. The progress of these wars may look a little different in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Australia, Canada, and the United States, but what happens in one country soon enough spreads to all the rest. It is as if Western leaders got together many years ago and agreed that their countries would drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid and take long dirt naps.

Perhaps they formed this suicide pact during an “elite” gathering of the World Economic Forum, the World Health Organization, or the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Perhaps they chanted, “Build back better,” in unison while voting to euthanize the West.

Adversarial political parties ostensibly compete for control of Western governments, but, in reality, the party system is kabuki theater wherein the same special interests own the politicians on both sides of the aisle. Until so-called “populist” parties emerged in the West, voters were given merely the illusion of choice.

After all, the Conservative Party held power in the United Kingdom for fourteen years, and despite repeated promises to do so, its leaders failed to secure Britain’s borders from foreign invasion or to extract the kingdom from regulatory enslavement to the European Union.

In the United States, President George W. Bush calls President Bill Clinton his “brother” and Hillary Clinton his “sister” and once described Michelle Obama as his “best friend.” Establishment Republicans such as lame-duck senators Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, and Thom Tillis spend more time attacking President Trump and the 95% of Republican voters who support his MAGA policies than they do warning Americans about the growing number of communists in the Democrat Party.

Western nations have political Establishments that pretend to fight in front of the public but largely conspire behind closed doors and agree about most everything. We know this to be true because we have witnessed how these political Establishments work together to prevent “outsider” political candidates from reaching higher office or holding power.

In Europe, the political Establishment enjoy enforcing so-called “cordons sanitaire,” or “firewalls” meant to hinder the leaders of “unacceptable” political movements from obtaining power. In the Netherlands, the political Establishment have blocked Geert Wilders from becoming prime minister because of his opposition to mass immigration, Islamic supremacy, and the European Union and despite the fact that the party he leads has significant public support. In France, the political Establishment have done the same thing to Jean-Marie Le Pen, his daughter Marine, and their National Rally because of the party’s pro-national-sovereignty and anti-immigration policies. In the United Kingdom, the political Establishment have blocked Brexit stalwart and Reform UK chief Nigel Farage from leadership roles in parliament. In Germany, the political Establishment have attempted to delegitimize the popular anti-immigration party, Alternative for Deutschland, by defaming its members as “domestic terrorists,” “Russian agents,” and anti-constitutional “national security threats.”

In the United States, Establishment Democrats and Republicans did everything they could to prevent President Trump’s election and then to remove him from office after he soundly defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016. The Republican Party’s 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, actively campaigned against Trump in 2016. So-called “conservative” political pundits, such as Bill Kristol and George Will, repudiated Republican voters and supported Hillary Clinton’s candidacy. Even though Republicans controlled Congress, former Speaker of the House Paul Ryan advanced the Clinton-Obama-Intelligence-Community operation to frame President Trump as a Russian spy. Senator Romney twice voted to remove Trump from office. Democrat prosecutors spent years trying to imprison Trump for life, and Establishment Republicans worked desperately to keep Trump from becoming the party’s presidential nominee once again in 2024. America’s political Establishment tried to remove Trump from ballots, bully him with investigations, and paint him as a “dictator” in an incitement campaign that encouraged would-be assassins to seek his death.

What have these widespread Establishment efforts across the West to undermine elections and silence public dissent accomplished? Western institutions – government agencies, universities, news media, banks, corporations, and NGOs – have never been more distrusted. That makes sense. Western institutions are hostile to Western citizens.

While ordinary Westerners are proud of their countries, Western institutions tell them that they should be ashamed of their ancestors and their nations’ histories. While ordinary Westerners wish to work, buy homes, and have families, Western institutions support mass immigration policies that replace Western workers, increase demand on housing, and make it much more difficult for Westerners to support and protect their families. When Western citizens object to the political Establishments’ open borders, Western news media demonize them as “racists” and “white supremacists.” When Western citizens organize around their national flags and march peacefully down city streets, the political Establishment demonize them as “fascists,” “right-wingers,” and “Nazis.” When Western citizens try to protect themselves from violent foreign nationals, Western law enforcement agencies condemn the Westerners and defend the violent foreigners.

The West’s political Establishments would rather allow foreigners to burn down churches, town halls, stores, schools, and private homes than take action to protect Western citizens from the deadly consequences of Establishment policies. The U.K. Establishment allowed Islamic supremacists to rape tens of thousands of British girls without any consequence. The French Establishment allowed Islamic supremacists to hunt police officers, loot stores, set buildings and vehicles ablaze, and terrorize French citizens without any consequence.

In Germany, 87% of suspects with open arrest warrants are foreigners. Despite all evidence to the contrary, London’s police commissioner, Sir Mark Rowley, says that it is critical to replace merit-based hiring with preferential treatment for black and Muslim applicants (and calls criticism of his “diversity” policies “toxic”). Western NGOs preposterously claim that capitalism and “climate change” should be blamed for Islam’s penchant for sex slavery and child marriages. In the U.K., 80% of jobs go to foreign immigrants. In the U.S., Democrat Senator Elissa Slotkin promises to politically prosecute President Trump’s supporters in order to “deter” them from opposing Establishment policies.

Even as Western governments attack Western citizens, however, they still expect those citizens to sacrifice their lives in a looming global war. The head of the British Army, General Sir Roland Walker, recently told soldiers: “Very soon, the political leaders of this country will start to have a frank conversation with the citizens of this country about just what is going on.” At that time, citizens “have got to consent to sacrifices to prioritize defense and security.”

Nearly half of military-aged Brits say there are “no circumstance” in which they would defend the United Kingdom. That’s no surprise. Why would Western citizens defend governments that abuse them? If the West already “belongs” to foreigners, what else is there to defend?

Western governments’ cascading failures are leading to their demise. Citizens owe them nothing.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

Authored by Milan Adams via Preppgroup,

At a glance

• Existing-home sales have run roughly a third below their pre-2020 level for three years, while the median price has repeatedly set records – a combination that ordinary market logic does not predict.

• A large majority of outstanding mortgages carry rates below 5 percent. Selling means trading a cheap loan for an expensive one, and the households with the strongest finances are the least willing to make that trade.

• The housing shortage is a permission problem as much as a land problem. Reforms that legalize construction take three to five years to produce occupied houses, which is longer than most political cycles.

• Insurance premiums, climate exposure and condominium assessments now shape the monthly cost of owning a home at least as much as the purchase price does – and they vary enormously from one ZIP code to the next.

Introduction

American housing has spent three years doing the strangest thing a market can do: nothing.

Not collapsing, not recovering, not clearing. Sales fell by roughly a third from their pandemic peak and then stayed there, year after year, while prices kept grinding upward and the number of homes changing hands in a twelve-month window dropped to a level last seen in the mid-1990s, when the country had some seventy million fewer people living in it. Read only the median price and you would conclude that little has happened. Try to buy or sell a house and you would know better.

The standard vocabulary fits badly here. Bubble implies something inflating toward a pop. Correction implies a direction of travel. Crash and recovery both assume motion. What exists instead is a standoff between two groups with almost no reason to trade with each other. Owners sit on loans at rates that no longer exist, on houses that keep gaining value, in neighborhoods where the monthly cost of staying put is fixed and known. Buyers look at the same properties and see payments several hundred dollars a month higher than what the current occupant pays for the same roof. Neither side is in trouble. Neither side has an incentive to move first.

What that produces is a stall rather than a crash. Transactions thin out, the handful of houses that do sell are the best of a very small pool, and the steady flow of comparable sales that tells everyone what a home is worth slows to a trickle. Appraisers begin valuing against data months out of date. Agents leave the business because there are no commissions. Lenders cut staff because there are no loans. Aggregated into a national median, all of it can look almost like business as usual, which is part of why the situation has lasted this long without anyone declaring it.

Four forces built it, and only one is the interest rate. Cheap mortgages issued during the pandemic trapped existing owners in place. Rates that rose four percentage points in about eighteen months made those loans unrepeatable. A decade and a half of underbuilding left too few houses for the households that already exist. And a set of costs unrelated to interest – insurance, property taxes, maintenance, condominium assessments – climbed fast enough to make ownership harder to hold, not merely harder to enter.

The distributional consequence is the part that matters most and gets discussed least. The country is being quietly sorted by when people bought. Everyone who closed before 2022 sits inside the standoff, insulated, often better off every month than they would be starting fresh. Everyone else stands outside it, paying the price in rent, in down-payment years, in moves not made. That sorting does not show up in any of the numbers the market reports about itself.

A market that has stopped is harder to restart than one that has fallen, because a crash creates buyers and a standoff creates only patience. What follows is an attempt to separate what is measurable from what is inferred, and to say plainly where the evidence is thin.

1. A market that stopped moving

Volume is the first thing to go, and the thing almost nobody watches.

Existing-home sales ran above five million a year for most of the decade before 2020, peaked near 6.5 million during the boom, then fell by about a third and stayed down. New listings in most metros have spent three years below their 2015-2019 averages. Homes now sit on the market longer than at any point since 2012, even as prices rise – a pairing that would have looked incoherent to anyone who learned this market in the 1990s.

Why transaction volume matters more than it sounds

A home sale is not one event; it is a small industry. Appraisers, inspectors, title officers, escrow clerks, loan processors, movers, painters, locksmiths and furniture salespeople all eat from it. When a third of the transactions disappear, a third of that work disappears with them, spread thinly across thousands of small firms with no way to hedge. Businesses built for a market that moves slowly but never stops are not built for one that stops.

Prices, meanwhile, have not followed volume down. In an ordinary slowdown, falling sales eventually drag prices, because sellers compete for a shrinking pool of buyers. Here, supply fell at roughly the same rate as demand, and the ratio between them barely budged. That is the mechanical explanation, and it is worth stating precisely: the number of homes for sale and the number of households shopping for them both contracted, so the balance of bargaining power never shifted far enough to force concessions on price.

Some markets have moved anyway. Austin, where a construction boom added enough units to move both prices and asking rents, is the clearest counterexample, and worth holding onto because it shows the standoff is not a law of nature. It is a consequence of specific local decisions about how much gets built.

📊 The missing transactions. Economists at Fannie Mae and the Federal Housing Finance Agency have separately estimated that the lock-in effect suppressed something on the order of one to one and a half million sales a year. Both figures are model-based estimates rather than counts, and both depend on an assumed “normal” turnover rate, so they should be read as magnitudes rather than precise numbers.

A million and a half household decisions deferred annually does not sound like much against a population of 340 million. It compounds, though. A job not taken because a family could not sell in time. A school district not changed. A business not started in a cheaper city. None of it appears in a price index, and all of it accumulates in the form of a country that moves less than it used to.

2. Most mortgaged owners are sitting on a loan nobody will ever repeat

The foundation was poured in about eighteen months, and it was poured deliberately.

In early 2021 the average thirty-year fixed mortgage rate touched 2.65 percent, the lowest reading in the nearly fifty-year history of the survey. By late 2023 it had passed 7.5 percent. Somewhere between six and seven in ten outstanding mortgages now carry a rate below 5 percent, with a large share below 4. Most of those loans were refinanced in a wave, often more than once, by households doing exactly what the financial press told them to do.

The arithmetic explains a great deal. A household that borrowed $400,000 at 3 percent pays roughly $1,686 a month in principal and interest. The same household buying the same house today at 6.5 percent pays about $2,528. That is roughly $840 more per month, or $10,000 a year, for three decades, on a house that has not changed in any respect. Spread across a household budget, the difference is the entire reason the market stopped.

What makes this cycle unusual is who is refusing to transact. In a normal market, the financially strongest households trade most freely, because they can absorb the friction. Here they trade least. The people with the best credit, the most equity and the least risk are the least willing to surrender a loan that will never be offered again – and a market in which the best-positioned owners decline to participate does not clear, however many buyers show up.

The difference between the math and the mood

There is a temptation to treat this as purely arithmetic, and a corresponding temptation to treat it as purely psychological. Neither is sufficient.

The arithmetic is real: replacing a 3 percent loan with a 6.5 percent loan costs money, every month, for thirty years. But the arithmetic alone does not explain why a household with a growing family, a new job three states away, or a marriage ending would stay put. Those households still move. What has disappeared is the discretionary move – the upgrade to a bigger house, the relocation for a modestly better salary, the trade into a nicer school district – the transactions that used to make the market liquid.

Add transaction costs and the picture sharpens further. Commissions, title insurance, appraisal fees, transfer taxes and moving expenses routinely run into five figures, and they are paid in cash at exactly the moment a household is already absorbing the rate increase. A paper gain of $150,000 in equity is not $150,000 of usable money unless the household sells, and selling means spending real cash to unlock it.

⚖️ Two readings of the same fact. One interpretation holds that owners are trapped by arithmetic and would list if rates fell to roughly 5 percent. The other holds that a large share of them were never going to move, and are using rates as a socially acceptable reason. Both are plausible; surveys about hypothetical moves have a poor record of predicting actual behavior, and the honest position is that the split is unknown.

A wealth effect runs alongside the rate effect and pushes the same way. Owners who bought before 2022 have watched equity grow by six figures without doing anything, and a large unrealized gain is itself an argument against selling. Why trade an appreciating asset for a more expensive version of the same thing financed at a higher rate? For a household content with where it lives, the answer is usually: not now.

3. Almost nothing is for sale, and nobody has a reason to list

High prices are supposed to summon sellers. In this cycle they have not, for a reason almost too obvious to state: the seller is also a buyer.

A homeowner listing in a strong market walks straight into the problem. The next house is expensive too, and the loan on it costs more than the loan being retired. So the seller nets a large gain and hands much of it directly back in the form of a bigger monthly payment, plus closing costs, plus the cost of making a new house habitable. For a household that likes where it lives, the trade is frequently a loss dressed up as a profit.

Active listings remain well below pre-pandemic norms across most of the Northeast, the Midwest and the West Coast. New construction has filled part of the gap, but mostly in the South and the exurbs, at prices first-time buyers struggle to reach. Roughly a third of listings have taken a price cut in recent months, which sounds like weakness until you notice that the cuts are small and the original asking prices were set high. A seller who prices optimistically and cuts twice is not under pressure. A seller who prices low and gets three offers in a weekend is in a different market entirely.

Months of supply – how long it would take to sell everything listed at the current pace – has hovered near four, against a long-run balanced figure closer to six. By that measure this remains a seller’s market, and on desirable houses it behaves like one: multiple offers, waived inspections, dropped contingencies. Yet buyers cannot really afford it, which produces the odd condition of a market that is tight and unaffordable at the same time, with the usual self-correcting mechanism refusing to engage.

Why the loop does not close

Tight supply should raise prices. Higher prices should thin the buyer pool. A thinner buyer pool should bring out more supply. The loop ought to resolve on its own.

It has not, for three years, and the reason is that the supply is not being held back by strategy or sentiment but by arithmetic. Sellers are not withholding houses to force prices up; they are declining to participate in a transaction that costs them money. That is a different kind of restraint from the one markets are built to correct.

Where the mechanism weakens is worth noting. Owners who must sell – because of a job, a death, a divorce, a medical need – sell regardless of rates, and they are the ones absorbing the cost. In markets with heavy in-migration, enough new households arrive to keep pressure on prices even as local owners sit still. In markets with flat or declining population, the same standoff produces visible weakness. The national aggregate averages these together and describes neither.

4. The first-time buyer is now forty

The entry point is where the standoff does its clearest damage, because the entry point is where a market renews itself.

The median first-time buyer is now forty years old, the oldest on record. In the early 1980s that buyer was twenty-nine. First-timers account for roughly a quarter of purchases, the lowest share since the survey began in 1981, and the median down payment has climbed past 10 percent of the purchase price, running considerably higher in expensive metros.

Three factors pushed the entry point out of reach, and only one is the mortgage rate. Price is the largest: the median existing home has spent the middle of the decade near or above $400,000, roughly double its level in 2012. The down payment is second, and it must be saved in cash while rent consumes an ever-larger share of income. Third is competition from buyers who need no mortgage at all and therefore do not care what rates do.

Two different kinds of unaffordability

This distinction matters more than it usually gets credit for. A household can be priced out of ownership in two separate ways, and the remedies are different.

Payment unaffordability. The household cannot cover the monthly mortgage, taxes, insurance and maintenance at current prices and rates. Lower rates or lower prices help directly. This is the constraint most discussion focuses on.

Capital unaffordability. The household could comfortably carry the monthly payment but cannot assemble the down payment and closing costs, because those require accumulated cash rather than monthly cash flow. Lower rates barely help; what helps is savings, family assistance, or a loan product requiring less cash up front.

A household in the second category can be perfectly solvent and still unable to buy for years, which is why affordability metrics built on payment-to-income ratios often understate how tight the entry point has become.

💡 Where the money actually goes. Roughly four adults in ten would need to borrow or sell something to cover an unexpected $1,000 expense. Half of renters are cost-burdened, spending more than 30 percent of income on shelter. Student loan payments, restarted after a three-year pause, compete directly with down-payment savings in the same monthly budget – and they win, because they are due whether or not a house is ever bought.

The result is a queue that moves at half speed. People who would have bought at thirty buy at forty. People who would have bought at forty are still renting at fifty. And behind them sits a cohort that has never known a market in which the arithmetic worked.

Two escape hatches exist and both are narrowing. Family assistance now funds a substantial share of first purchases, which quietly converts homeownership into a question of parentage. Longer terms do the rest – forty-year mortgages, interest-only products, adjustable-rate loans – stretching the monthly payment while raising total interest and shifting rate risk onto the borrower at the point in life when it is hardest to absorb.

5. Cash buys what a mortgage cannot

When transactions are rare, they go to whoever has the fewest constraints, and the fewest constraints belong to people paying cash.

All-cash purchases have run near a third of transactions, well above the historical norm. Roughly 38 percent of owner-occupied homes carry no mortgage at all – a figure that surprises people who assume debt is universal. Institutional buyers, largely absent from the headlines since 2022, have resumed purchasing in Sun Belt metros, and they buy the way institutions buy: in volume, quickly, and often below asking.

The market that results splits in a way the median price never captures. On one side sit households with equity, cash or family money, transacting almost normally and largely indifferent to borrowing costs. On the other sit households dependent on a mortgage at current rates, for whom the same house is a different asset at a different price. The median averages the two groups and describes neither.

Not all cash buyers are the same

Treating them as a single bloc obscures the mechanics. Three distinct groups pay cash, and they behave differently.

Equity-rich movers. Longtime owners rolling gains from one house into the next. They are indifferent to rates but sensitive to price, and they tend to buy the house they intend to live in for a decade.

Downsizers and retirees. Households leaving a larger home, often with no mortgage on either property. Their budgets are fixed and their patience is long, so they wait for the right house and rarely overpay.

Yield-seeking investors, individual and institutional. They buy against a rental return and are therefore sensitive to rents, insurance costs and property taxes – which means they pull back first when those costs rise, and return first when they fall.

The squeeze lands hardest on the entry-level segment: three-bedroom houses in decent school districts, the classic starter home. First-time buyers, cash-rich downsizers and investors all want the same property, and the first group has the least capital and the longest timeline.

6. Builders are building the wrong houses

New construction is the obvious escape valve, and it has not been wide enough to matter.

The country has added roughly 1.3 to 1.4 million housing units a year for most of the decade, against estimates of need running from 1.5 million upward. The cumulative shortfall, by the reckoning of the National Association of Home Builders and a range of independent economists, sits somewhere between three and five million units. Single-family starts turned down again mid-decade as builders worked through unsold inventory, narrowing the valve just as it was needed most.

Costs explain much of the gap. Land, permitting delays and impact fees add tens of thousands of dollars before a shovel touches dirt. Construction labor thinned after 2008, when roughly a million building workers left the trade and never returned, and those who remained are older. Tariffs on imported lumber and components raised material costs at the same moment financing did, squeezing margins from both ends.

Builders have responded rationally by building the product with the best margin: larger houses, further out, aimed at move-up buyers and retirees who can absorb the price. The starter home – small, plain, close in – has been the hardest to build profitably, and so it is the thing most missing. This is not a failure of imagination. It is what happens when land, labor and money all get more expensive at once and the only way to make a project pencil is to sell a bigger box.

A newer model has grown into the space. Build-to-rent subdivisions, in which whole neighborhoods are constructed and held as rentals, have moved from curiosity to a meaningful share of single-family construction. That solves a real problem by giving households a house without requiring a mortgage. It also means a slice of new supply never reaches the for-sale market – so a country that cannot build enough houses is now building some of them for the wrong tenure.

7. The neighbors hold a veto

The shortage is a permission problem as much as a land problem, and the permission is granted at the end of the street.

Most American residential land is zoned for detached houses on generous lots, and most decisions about what gets built are made by local boards answerable to the people already living there. The arrangement produces stability, predictability and remarkable visual consistency. Over several decades it also produces a systematic shortage of everything except detached houses. Nobody set out to create a shortage. It emerged from a million small decisions, each defensible on its own.

The reforms that worked are instructive precisely because they are unglamorous. Minneapolis eliminated single-family-only zoning and saw rents in affected areas rise more slowly than in comparable cities. Austin approved large volumes of multifamily construction and became the rare metro where prices and asking rents fell. California legalized duplexes and lot splits statewide, then limited local discretion over small apartment buildings near transit. Montana, a state with a rural self-image, passed reforms allowing more units in its cities.

Permission is not the same as completion

This distinction is routinely blurred in policy arguments, and it decides whether reform should be judged a success.

A zoning change produces legal capacity, not houses. The houses arrive three to five years later, financed by a developer who must still secure land, permits, labor and a loan, and who will abandon the project if the arithmetic stops working halfway through. The benefits therefore show up first as slower rent growth rather than lower prices, which is why reforms are so often declared failures in year two and vindicated in year seven.

Opposition, meanwhile, is rarely to density in the abstract. It is to a specific project, a specific parking situation, a specific shadow across a specific garden. That is why the reform that works best tends to be the one that removes discretion rather than the one that wins an argument.

8. An insurance letter can end a mortgage

There is a second front, and it arrives in envelopes.

In Florida, California, Louisiana and parts of Texas, the cost of insuring a house has risen faster than the cost of the house. Premiums in some coastal counties doubled within three years. Carriers withdrew from entire states after strings of bad loss years. Insurers of last resort – Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corporation and California’s FAIR Plan – expanded from backstops into major players, with Florida’s state-backed carrier becoming the largest property insurer in the state.

The chain from there is short and mostly automatic. A mortgage lender requires insurance. Where insurance becomes unavailable or unaffordable, the loan becomes harder to obtain, and a house that cannot be financed cannot easily be sold. Owners in the worst-exposed areas increasingly pay cash or go without coverage, which is tolerable until the first storm and then becomes a personal balance-sheet event rather than an insurance one.

Several states have responded with catastrophe funds, faster claims rules and limits on litigation. Those measures have slowed the increase rather than reversed it. Insurance is repricing a risk that was underpriced for three decades, and repricing does not stop because the risk is real and widely acknowledged.

What makes this corrosive to a housing market is its geography. Insurance does not rise evenly. It rises in bands – in floodplains, in fire corridors, along particular coastlines – drawing visible local boundaries between insurable and nearly insurable. A market already sorted by when people bought is now being sorted again, this time by where.

9. Water, fire and heat have entered the appraisal

For a century, appraisal treated climate as a footnote, and for most of that century it was right to.

Flood maps are being redrawn, and the new maps put more houses inside hazard zones. Wildfire models now reach into suburban hillsides long considered safe because they had never burned. Extreme heat, which for most of history never appeared in a valuation, is showing up in insurance loads and utility bills and, increasingly, in whether a buyer will consider a place at all. Non-renewal notices cluster, and where they cluster, closings slow.

Two slower effects follow. Municipal bond markets have begun pricing the tax bases of towns whose exposure is concentrated, which matters because a town that loses ratable value loses services, and a town that loses services loses residents. And a migration has started toward cities with water, mild summers and low hazard – Buffalo, Duluth, Cincinnati, Rochester – none of which currently has the housing supply to absorb a wave, and all of which remain comparatively cheap.

Keep three mechanisms separate

They interact, but they are not the same thing, and confusing them leads to bad conclusions.

The 2025 Los Angeles firestorm and a run of Gulf hurricanes accelerated all three. When thousands of structures burn in one event and insurers absorb losses in the tens of billions, the next round of premiums is decided by arithmetic rather than by regulators. In exposed areas this shows up first as longer time on market rather than lower asking prices, because a seller with a 3 percent mortgage can afford to wait, and waiting is cheaper than conceding.

10. The condominium bill arrived in the mail

A separate mechanism began with a collapse, and it is still running.

On June 24, 2021, Champlain Towers South in Surfside, Florida, came down at one in the morning, killing 98 people. Investigations pointed to decades of deferred structural maintenance and to reserve funds kept deliberately thin because owners voted for low dues, cycle after cycle, in buildings that looked fine from the outside. Florida responded with legislation requiring milestone inspections and, critically, full funding of reserves for structural items rather than the minimum that would pass a vote.

What followed was an avalanche of special assessments – one-time charges levied on unit owners by the association to cover work the regular dues never funded. Buildings across South Florida, and increasingly elsewhere, were handed six-figure per-unit bills for roofs, facades, plumbing, elevators and concrete restoration. Owners who had bought a condo for $250,000 were asked for $80,000 in cash, on a deadline, in a building they had chosen partly because the dues were low.

Why an assessment breaks a sale

An assessment damages a condo market twice. First, it raises the effective purchase price for any buyer who must reserve cash for a future bill, and lenders increasingly ask about reserve studies before approving a loan. Second, it can force a sale: an owner with modest savings who cannot pay the assessment in cash must borrow, and an owner who cannot borrow must sell into a market where every other unit in the building is facing the same bill.

Older condominiums are the cheapest route into ownership in many cities, which makes this more consequential than it first appears. If the cheapest route becomes expensive to hold, the last affordable rung of the ladder starts to disappear – and it disappears for precisely the households the standoff is already squeezing.

11. Rents have stopped running

For three years after 2020, renting was the pressure valve. Households priced out of buying could rent instead, at a price, and the rental market absorbed the overflow.

That is changing. Multifamily completions reached their highest level in decades, with hundreds of thousands of units delivered in a single year. Asking rents flattened and then declined in many metros, particularly the Sun Belt cities that had seen the sharpest increases, and concessions reappeared in markets that had not offered them in years.

Two consequences follow, and they pull in opposite directions. If rent growth stops, the financial case for buying weakens, because the gap between a rent check and a mortgage payment narrows less than the down payment suggests. And if landlords can no longer raise rents, some sell, adding supply to the for-sale market. Both effects are real and both are small relative to the size of the standoff.

A surplus that is temporary

The rental surge is worth distinguishing from a lasting improvement, because the two are often conflated.

The current wave of completions reflects projects financed in 2021 and 2022, when money was cheap and rents were climbing. Multifamily starts collapsed once construction costs and interest rates rose, so the pipeline empties toward the end of the decade and a brief surplus becomes a renewed shortage. Build-to-rent subdivisions sit in the middle of this, offering a house with a lease instead of a mortgage – an attractive product for households that have given up on buying, and supply that never becomes ownership.

The implication is uncomfortable: the ownership rate can fall even while construction booms.

12. Nobody is moving

The most under-discussed damage is geographic, and it compounds slowly.

In 2023, fewer Americans moved than in any year since the Census Bureau began tracking the figure in 1948 – roughly one in thirteen. Job quits fell to their lowest rate in a decade outside the pandemic. Interstate migration flattened among homeowners while staying high among renters, which is a way of saying that the people with the most to gain from moving are the ones who can least afford to.

When workers cannot move, employers in growing metros struggle to hire, wage convergence between regions stalls, and productivity growth slows in ways that are hard to attribute but real. Local economies built on relocation – moving companies, storage, furniture, home services – shrink. Whole industries lose their customer base without anyone writing about it, because the decline is spread across thousands of small firms rather than concentrated in one visible collapse.

Housing used to be the American answer to a hundred different problems. It let people chase wages, leave a bad marriage, follow a child’s school, retire near family, start over somewhere cheaper after a business failed. A market transacting at half its normal rate withdraws that answer, quietly and without ever announcing it. The country does not lose mobility all at once. It loses it one household at a time, and each household concludes, reasonably, that moving is not worth it right now.

13. The machine underneath

Beneath all of this sits a plumbing problem most borrowers never see, and it explains why mortgage rates no longer fall the way they used to.

The spread between the thirty-year mortgage rate and the ten-year Treasury yield has run far wider than its historical norm, because lenders price in the risk that borrowers refinance the moment rates fall – a risk unusually large when so many loans were written at historic lows. Nonbank servicers, which now handle most of the country’s servicing, carry that prepayment risk on thin capital. Origination volumes fell by more than half from the 2020-21 peak, and lenders cut staff accordingly. Every firm that survives the trough must rebuild capacity before it can handle a refinance wave – which means the industry is structurally slow to respond to the very event everyone is waiting for.

The practical result is that mortgage rates no longer follow the policy rate down in step. A one-point cut in the federal funds rate historically moved mortgage rates by less than half of that, and the transmission has slowed further as the spread widened.

🔎 A self-reinforcing loop. High rates suppress transactions. Suppressed transactions weaken the lending industry. A weaker industry prices loans more expensively. Expensive loans keep the market stalled. Nothing in the loop corrects itself, and it runs in the direction of less activity rather than more.

14. Delinquency without disaster

The obvious worry is that a stalled market eventually breaks the way 2008 broke. So far it has not, and equity is the reason.

FHA and VA delinquencies have crept up from pandemic lows while remaining well below 2009 levels. The typical mortgaged homeowner holds several hundred thousand dollars of equity, and total homeowner equity sits in the tens of trillions. Foreclosure starts, after a long pause, normalized at modest levels. In 2008, owners owed more than their houses were worth and were forced to sell into a falling market. Today they owe far less and are choosing not to sell.

Equity is not the same as cash

This distinction explains why a household can look wealthy on a spreadsheet and still feel squeezed.

Home equity is the difference between the market value of a house and the debt secured against it. It is large, it grows, and it is entirely illiquid unless the owner sells or borrows against it.

Liquidity is the cash available in a given month. It is small, it does not grow with house prices, and it is what pays for a new roof, a medical bill, or a car repair.

A household can hold $300,000 of equity and still fail to cover a $3,000 furnace replacement without a credit card. That is why the equity cushion prevents foreclosures without preventing hardship – and why delinquency and distress can rise together even as balance sheets look healthy.

Stress is showing up where you would expect it if the problem were affordability rather than leverage: auto loan delinquencies are at their worst since 2010, credit card balances have risen steadily, and some owners are borrowing against equity to cover ordinary expenses, converting a housing asset into a spending account at the moment it is the only thing appreciating.

15. Two markets sharing an address

By now the shape is clear, and it is less a single market than two sharing an address and a postal code.

Inside sit households that bought before 2022, holding cheap loans, large equity and fixed housing costs. Their situation is stable and, on paper, improving. They are insulated from the thing everyone calls a housing crisis, and many do not experience it at all. Outside sit everyone else: renters saving against rising rents, first-time buyers aged forty competing with cash offers, families stuck in two bedrooms, workers who cannot relocate, retirees who cannot downsize, divorced households maintaining two residences because neither party can absorb the transaction cost.

Both groups read the same median price as two different facts, and they respond to the same interest rate in opposite directions. A rate cut helps the outsider and tempts the insider, which means policy that helps one usually does so at the expense of the other. Making buying cheaper also makes holding more valuable, and holding more valuable reduces the supply of sellers.

The distributional effect is the part worth carrying forward. A market that transacts at half its normal rate distributes opportunity unevenly across cohorts in a way that will outlast the rate cycle. Households that entered before 2022 begin accumulating equity a decade earlier than those behind them, and equity compounds. The gap does not close when rates fall; it widens, because the people inside the market are the ones who benefit from its recovery.

16. How a standoff ends

History offers two exits, and they look nothing alike.

In the 1980s, mortgage rates touched 18 percent, transactions collapsed, and the market stayed quiet for years. Nominal prices barely fell; real prices were ground down by inflation while owners sat still. The standoff ended when rates came down, which took most of a decade. The mid-2000s produced no standoff at all, because credit was loose enough that everyone transacted until the whole thing broke. The similarity to the 1980s is meaningful – a long, quiet, inflation-eroded plateau. The difference is that today’s owners carry far more equity and far better credit than their 1980s counterparts, which makes forced selling less likely and a long plateau more likely.

What could change the trajectory

A rate cut to 5 percent would unlock a meaningful share of owners who say they would move at that level, and would do more than any policy currently on the books. Income growth outpacing prices would repair affordability slowly, without a dramatic moment. Zoning reform, construction and condo repair would help on a five-to-ten-year horizon, which is longer than most political cycles. Insurance and tax policy would determine where recovery happens rather than whether it happens.

The likeliest path is a slow thaw rather than a break – but it is a forecast, not a certainty. It assumes rates fall without a recession, that incomes keep pace, and that insurance costs stabilize. If any of those fails, the plateau simply extends.

Closing

What makes this situation unusual is that it is nobody’s fault and everybody’s doing. Millions of households made individually sensible decisions – refinancing at 3 percent, staying put, holding an appreciating asset – and those decisions aggregated into a national paralysis.

The market has not broken. It has stopped. That difference matters because a crash creates buyers, and a standoff creates only patience – and patience, unlike a crash, has no natural end point.

🔭 What to watch next. Four indicators would confirm or challenge this analysis: the share of outstanding mortgages below 5 percent (falling means the lock-in is decaying); months of supply (rising above five means sellers are capitulating); insurance premium growth in coastal metros (slowing means the cost shock is easing); and the Census Bureau’s annual mover rate (recovering means the geographic damage is repairing). None of these turns quickly, and all four would need to move together for the picture to change.

The signs are quiet, and easy to walk past. A street where two houses sold in three years. A thirty-eight-year-old on a good salary who still cannot assemble a down payment. A condo board meeting where the agenda is a roof and the number has six figures in it. A moving truck parked for a single day on a block where ten families used to come and go.

The impact of El Niño weather conditions appears to be bearish for US natural gas futures, as the fuel used to heat homes and power industry posted its largest weekly decline in eight months last week.

Temperatures in the 70s this November in the East? Seems possible 🌡️ https://t.co/2iISBbKWiX

— Ben Noll (@BenNollWeather) October 24, 2026

The November contract fell 5.6% on Friday to settle at $2.64 per million British thermal units, bringing its weekly loss to 15%, the largest since early February.

Weather forecasts for the Lower 48 show above-average temperatures through the end of the month and into early November.

This has depressed heating demand.

Commodity Weather Group expects October and November combined to be the third-warmest period since records began in 1950, reinforcing expectations for a mild winter driven by El Niño.

BOK Financial Securities’ Dennis Kissler said that NatGas production cuts may be needed to stabilize prices if warmer weather trends persist across the Lower 48.

Across the Atlantic, European NatGas prices, as measured by the TTF benchmark, reached their highest levels since 2022, at around 93 euros per megawatt-hour on Friday, amid supply fears stemming from ongoing disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz.

Beyond maritime chokepoint fears, Europe is entering the colder months with NatGas stockpiles well below seasonal averages…

… and the withdrawal season has already begun.

Goldman Sachs commodities expert Daan Struyven warned earlier this week that EU natural gas prices could soar to 150 euros per megawatt-hour if Gulf LNG exports remain at just one-quarter of normal levels and a more severe winter boosts heating demand. The full report can be read here.

Natasha Kaneva, JPMorgan’s head of global commodities research and a managing director, offered some good news for Europe: “The impact of El Niño is potentially bearish for natural gas through lower heating and power demand, given warmer, wetter and windier weather conditions.”

European elites in Brussels who pushed climate crisis propaganda for years had better hopes for warmth, because a couple of cold snaps could dangerously draw down supplies, forcing EU traders to compete more aggressively with Asian buyers on international markets for LNG cargoes and bid up prices.

Amazon, Canadians, and the U.S. Navy all showed up in Indiana this past week with reactor plans.

On Monday, AEP, X-energy and Amazon unveiled a 960 MW nuclear proposal in Sullivan County, and Canada’s AtkinsRéalis signed on to study up to eight CANDU reactors. On Tuesday, Radiant said the Navy had picked it to put a microreactor at Naval Weapons Station Crane.

That’s as many as 21 reactors floated in two days, in a state that has never had a commercial nuclear power plant. Its most serious attempt, Public Service Indiana’s Marble Hill, was abandoned half-built in 1984 after roughly $2.5 billion had been spent.

This time, the state is doing a lot of the courting itself. Since Gov. Mike Braun took office in 2025, Indiana has passed laws that let utilities recover most of the cost of developing small modular reactors before one is ever built and give a 20% tax credit to companies that manufacture them in the state.

In April, Braun signed a letter of intent with hometown drugmaker Eli Lilly to explore putting reactors at Lilly sites, and this summer the state launched a program to certify communities as “Nuclear Ready.”

Reactor startup First American Nuclear moved its headquarters from Washington state to the Indianapolis area last year, promising more than $4 billion in investment. 

Amazon picks up the tab

AEP and X-energy signed a joint development agreement to evaluate 12 of X-energy’s 80 MW Xe-100 reactors at the former site of the Breed Generating Station, a long-retired coal plant.

What sets this one apart is Amazon. Too many new nuclear projects are being announced with no buyer and/or no money attached. This one finally has both, with Amazon supporting as both financier and customer.

Amazon is funding the project’s development, and it intends to buy the power under a long-term contract “covering the costs of the facility and its operations for the duration of the contract,” according to AEP.

“Our agreements with Amazon and X-energy will provide all necessary capital protections and financial safeguards that we have said are essential for any potential nuclear project to move forward,” said AEP CEO Bill Fehrman.

So, the plan is for Amazon, not Indiana ratepayers, to carry the bill. Amazon’s Josh Weissman said the company will “pay our full costs without passing them to others,” the same promise Amazon made when it signed the White House’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge in March.

Indiana Michigan Power expects its Indiana peak load to jump from 2,800 MW to more than 7,000 MW by 2030, with Amazon’s $11 billion data center campus near New Carlisle among the new loads.

Amazon also led X-energy’s Series C-1 round in 2024. Indiana is the pair’s second project, after Energy Northwest’s Cascade plant in Washington.

X-energy shares, which priced at $23 in April’s IPO, closed Friday at just over $10.

A heavy water rival for Ramaswamy

Also on Monday, at Purdue’s nuclear summit in Indianapolis, AtkinsRéalis signed an MOU with the state and Hoosier Energy, a rural power co-op, to evaluate “a campus of up to eight CANDU nuclear reactors” with as much as 6 GW of capacity.

CANDU is Canada’s heavy water reactor. Heavy water lets it run on natural uranium, skipping enrichment entirely, and it refuels without shutting down.

Sound familiar? Two weeks ago, we covered Atlas Atomics, the startup Vivek Ramaswamy cofounded, after it raised about $400 million at a roughly $1.9 billion valuation to build an improved heavy water reactor.

That makes AtkinsRéalis, the exclusive licensee of Canada’s CANDU technology, Atlas’s most direct competitor.

AtkinsRéalis has also started the NRC licensing process, as we noted then, while Atlas, still in stealth, has yet to show a design.

The Navy goes inland

The Navy selected Radiant Nuclear to design, build, and deliver a microreactor power plant at Crane, the world’s third-largest naval installation by area, more than 500 miles from the nearest ocean.

The Pentagon said in September that Crane would host the Navy’s first shore-based advanced microreactor, installed by September 2028. Radiant’s Kaleidos is a factory-built, 1 MW, helium-cooled unit that runs up to five years between refuelings and needs no cooling water.

The project runs through the Army’s Janus program, which picked Radiant and four others in August. Radiant’s share, up to $750 million for 15 reactors starting at Fort Benning, Georgia, was the program’s largest award.

In April, the Air Force chose Radiant for Buckley Space Force Base in Colorado.

Add the Navy, and Radiant becomes the first reactor company to land all three services at once. It now bills itself as “the only company partnered with the Army, Navy, and Air Force.”

The @USNavy has selected Radiant to deploy our Kaleidos microreactor at Naval Weapons Station Crane, Indiana. With this selection, Radiant is now the only nuclear microreactor company with partnerships across the Army, Navy and Air Force. The Navy has more than 70 years of safe reactor operations. It wrote the playbook on reactor safety. Earning its confidence is powerful independent validation of Kaleidos. This milestone moves us closer to our goal: reliable, resilient nuclear power wherever the mission demands. Through our work with all three branches, we’re building a clear path from military deployment to nuclear energy at scale for government and commercial customers. Read more details here: https://t.co/LQ3MXZgTMH

— Radiant (@RadiantNuclear) October 20, 2026

Kaleidos itself is now at Idaho National Laboratory’s DOME test bed, and as we noted earlier this month, Radiant could announce criticality by year end.

If the Pentagon hits its 2028 deadline, Indiana’s first nuclear power, more than four decades after Marble Hill, will come from that 1 MW Navy reactor, likely years before either of the big plants could be finished.

Authored by Larry Johnson via Sonar21.com

Good news, everyone. The war is over, at least in the United Arab Emirates. That is the only conclusion you could draw from this month’s headlines. On October 14, Bloomberg reported the International Energy Agency’s estimate that UAE oil supply hit a record 5.3 million barrels a day in September. Fujairah, the port the Emirates built so they would never have to worry about the Strait of Hormuz, loaded a record 2.62 million barrels a day. The giant Ruwais refinery was declared back at full capacity at the end of August. Pop the (non-alcoholic) champagne.

Then Karl Miller sent me his October 22 assessment of the UAE’s oil and gas system, and spoiled the party. The Emirates have indeed recovered their crude exports. What they have not recovered is everything else. The gas business is still limping, the petrochemical plants are starving for feedstock, and the fuel reserves that are supposed to carry the country through the next attack have been drained to about a third of their prewar level. The UAE is setting production records with its gas light on.

The safe haven that wasn’t

For years the UAE sold itself as the Switzerland of the Gulf: stable, diversified, insulated from the region’s chaos, a place where hedge funds and oil majors could sleep soundly. Then came 2026. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, UAE crude and condensate production fell from about 4.0 million barrels a day at the start of the year to an average of 2.4 million in March through May. A 40 percent collapse. Switzerland, it turns out, is within drone range of Iran.

The damage list reads like a sightseeing tour of Emirati industry. The Ruwais refining complex caught fire on March 10 and shut down. The Shah sour-gas plant, built to process 1.28 billion cubic feet a day, burned on March 16. The Habshan gas complex, the beating heart of the UAE’s gas system, was hit on April 3 and, in case anyone missed it, again on April 8. Borouge’s petrochemical plant was damaged on April 5. The Emirates Global Aluminium smelter went dark on March 28. And on May 17, a drone hit an electrical installation supporting the Barakah nuclear power plant, which is the sort of sentence nobody in Abu Dhabi ever wanted to read in a Security Council transcript.

Then there is Fujairah, the bypass port, the whole point of which was to keep UAE oil flowing no matter what happened at Hormuz. Reuters counts at least 19 attacks on it since the war began. In the week of March 16, loadings fell to 440,000 barrels a day. After a strike on May 4, refined-product exports essentially stopped for a month, with exactly one product tanker leaving between then and June 1. One. The insurance policy turned out to need insurance.

Available, just not working

Crude came back. Gas did not. ADNOC Gas’s second-quarter numbers compared with a year earlier: domestic gas production down 32.5 percent, export liquids such as LPG and naphtha down 54.5 percent, the company’s share of LNG down 63 percent. Export liquids sales fell from 252 to 117 trillion British thermal units. LNG sales fell about 71 percent. Revenue fell 39 percent, EBITDA 47 percent, net income 52 percent. That is $2.3 billion of revenue that evaporated in one quarter, at one company.

But my favorite statistic in Miller’s entire deck is this one. ADNOC Gas proudly reported that its assets were 99.9 percent available in the second quarter, better than the year before. Its actual asset utilization, meanwhile, fell from 80 percent to 54 percent. The plants were ready, willing and able. They just could not run, because the feedstock, the storage and the export routes they depend on had been knocked out. It is the corporate equivalent of announcing that your car is in perfect condition while it sits on blocks without wheels.

The recovery since then has been real but partial. Habshan’s gas supply was 85 percent restored as of August 10. Borouge had fixed its plant by the end of June, then discovered it had nothing to feed it, and ran at 60 percent utilization. The aluminium smelter had restarted a quarter of its pots by late August and now expects to finish the job sometime in early 2027. Repairs, as it happens, are faster than recoveries.

Running on fumes

Here is the number that should ruin a European energy minister’s weekend. On October 19, Fujairah held 7.25 million barrels of refined products. Before the war it held about 20.7 million. That is a 65 percent drop. Gasoline and naphtha stocks are down 87 percent. Fuel oil is down 53 percent. Diesel and jet fuel are down 23 percent, and fell 18 percent in a single week this month, just in time for winter.

Fujairah is not a corner gas station. It is one of the world’s great bunkering and product-trading hubs, the place where ships refuel and traders park cargoes between Asia and Europe. With a third of its normal stocks, it has about a third of its normal ability to absorb a shock. Miller’s arithmetic is unforgiving: lose a million barrels a day of export outlets with 10 million barrels of usable storage to fill, and you have roughly ten days before the oil fields have to shut in. Ten days. That is not a strategic reserve. That is a long weekend.

A bypass for a third of the traffic

The UAE’s answer to a closed Strait of Hormuz is the ADCOP pipeline from Habshan to Fujairah. It is designed to carry 1.5 million barrels a day, maybe 1.8 on a good day. ADNOC claims 4.85 million barrels a day of production capacity. So the escape hatch fits about a third of the passengers. A second pipeline is planned, for 2027, which will be a great comfort to anyone planning to hold this war in 2028.

And that record September? Some of it reflects genuine repairs. Some of it reflects the UAE’s exit from OPEC, which conveniently ended its production quotas in May. And some of it, by the IEA’s own account, came from drawing down inventories that were already at a record low. Selling your savings is a fine way to post record income for a month. It is not a business model. Meanwhile, across the region, refined-product shipments in September were 1.9 million barrels a day against 4.7 million before the war, and LPG shipments were 670,000 barrels a day against 1.5 million. The recovery is real for crude tankers. For everything else, it is a press release.

One more round, anyone?

To be fair, and Miller insists on being fair, nobody can prove that 30 to 40 percent of the UAE’s energy system is still destroyed. There is no complete public register of damage and repairs, and he gives full credit to the recoveries at Ruwais and in crude output. But the shape of the problem is plain. The UAE has rebuilt its ability to ship crude. Its gas business, its petrochemical feedstock and above all its fuel reserves remain badly depleted.

Which brings us to Washington’s latest bright idea: another round of strikes on Iran. Iran has already demonstrated, at least 19 times at Fujairah alone, that it can reach the UAE’s export system. The last time the Emirates absorbed a blow, they had 20 million barrels of products in Fujairah to soften it. Next time they will have about seven. Record output and empty tanks is not resilience. It is a country standing on the edge of a cliff and posting about the view.

Summary:

• French PM Asks Telecoms To Prepare For Nationwide Social Media Blackout 
• Far-Left Unrest Spreads to Albania, Spain, Brussels, and Italy
• Despite France Deploying Extra Police, Far-Left Riots Continue 
• EU’s Far-Left Uprising Is a National Security Concern 
• Riots Begin In France, Spread To Brussels 
• France Deploys 70,000 Police As Cities Brace For Far-Left Chaos  

It’s a Communist Revolution

Student grievances may have sparked the unrest, but one communist protester explained the turmoil in the streets is part of a broader revolution against “Macron and capitalism.” 

French Communists explaining why they are protesting. @DrKarlynB I guess it’s Muslims and Immigrants Right? https://t.co/C0FcCTr07V

— Wilson Law (@WilsonLaw) October 24, 2026

Prepare For Nationwide Social Media Blackout

By late Saturday evening, French authorities had detained almost 1,000 people during demonstrations and riots that drew at least 400,000 participants, while far-left uprisings spread across other parts of Europe. 

About 110,000 people demonstrated in Paris, according to the Interior Ministry. The government deployed about 70,000 officers across major metro areas.

Michael Shellenberger reports: 

France’s Prime Minister asked telecom companies to prepare to block social media platforms. “I wish to have the ability to temporarily suspend access to these services in case of a repeat of urban violence.”

Just in: France’s Prime Minister asked telecom companies to prepare to block social media platforms. “I wish to have the ability to temporarily suspend access to these services in case of a repeat of urban violence,” he wrote. @blast news broke the story. https://t.co/gh9Cy26m8r

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) October 24, 2026

Separately, far-left unrest emerged in Albania, Spain, and Brussels, as well as in Italy’s cities of Naples, Rome, and Milan.

Footage from across Europe today, as communists stage a broader revolutionary movement: 

BREAKING: Riots and looting in Barcelona tonight. Mass-looting has now been reported from France, Belgium, Italy and Spain within the past week. https://t.co/vDjzOxYKDf

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 24, 2026

BREAKING: Rioters are setting fires in Lyon. Residents are struggling with smoke filling their apartments https://t.co/ziCTCmlgvj

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 24, 2026

Paris under attack. CRS unleash the water cannon on protesters. Masked rioters, Palestinian flags in the street. This is France today. https://t.co/URfE0k80Nd

— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) October 24, 2026

French riot police moving in to make arrests in Paris now. Lots of rioters and vandals still out on the streets https://t.co/YPvOd4TG3F

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 24, 2026

La protesta “contra el sistema” al centre de Barcelona s’estén a la Ronda Universitat. Imatges de l’atac a una botiga de tecnologia https://t.co/NQZAd0sIAF https://t.co/swSm6Cxuif

— 3CatInfo (@3CatInfo) October 24, 2026

The countdown to social media blackouts has begun.

French Riots Begin

By late afternoon, riots had spread to multiple cities, and France had deployed 70,000 police officers across major metro areas nationwide.

Here’s where police are deployed to counter far-left groups trying to overthrow capitalism and the government while sparking chaos across the West.

Updated Map of where Riot Police is deployed in France 🇫🇷 pic.twitter.com/qpwz9xBrO9

— NS Stat-Mapper (@ns_statmapper) October 24, 2026

The New York Times cited Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez, who estimated turnout at 35,000 by midday nationwide, well below the level recorded at the same point last Saturday. More than half a million people had demonstrated by the end of that day.

Footage from this afternoon:

BREAKING: A mob of rioters is smashing windows in central Grenoble, France https://t.co/6YvxpHpXIT

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 24, 2026

Nantes in TEAR GAS haze! – Riot police chase protesters as France’s unrest rolls into a second weekend https://t.co/5fVXovbEJ2

— Viory Video (@vioryvideo) October 24, 2026

#manif24octobre #Toulouse premiers heurts avant le pont des Catalans https://t.co/r9gwpJnqR2

— L Écho du Bitume bis (@PatNice31) October 24, 2026

Far-left riots spreading to Brussels:

BREAKING: Riots have broken out in Brussels: The rioters are building barricades on the streets that they are likely to set on fire https://t.co/yUBGAsy4QN

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 24, 2026

Europe has a far-left extremism crisis, something we’ve outlined. We’ve also reported that high-level US State Department officials met with their European counterparts over the summer to discuss the matter.

The riots are embarrassing for the European progressive experiment, as lefty corporate media outlets run cover for the left. BBC News described the riots as “mostly peaceful” last week, while other left-wing outlets downplayed the chaos. 

One has to wonder why this surge of highly coordinated unrest by far-left groups has accelerated now and whether it reflects a pressure campaign toward the rising right wing, from Germany to France, where Le Pen leads the polls. Nomura analysts also anticipate a rightward shift during Europe’s election cycle over the next year and a half.

France Deploys 70,000 Police As Cities Brace For Far-Left Chaos  

France deployed as many as 70,000 police officers across major metro areas on Saturday morning to prevent another far-left uprising, as the Macron government is plagued by a growing list of crises, including social unrest, financial turmoil and unfettered mass migration.

The deployment, reinforced by military troops, armored vehicles, drones and helicopters, is centered on Paris, Marseille, Lyon and other cities. Several municipalities banned downtown protests, and authorities maintained curfews into the weekend. 

🇫🇷 The Arc de Triomphe CLOSED as the Gendarmerie (French police) prepare for HUGE riots expected to hit the streets of Paris tonight. https://t.co/jRzNCB3gtc

— VoxPopuli (@vpopulimedia) October 24, 2026

Rioting last week resulted in more than 2,500 arrests, nearly 1,000 injured police officers and over 3,000 looted stores. The unrest has disrupted business activity and prompted Paris retailers to board up their storefronts.

Self-described anti-communist analyst Karlyn Borysenko provided her analysis of the highly coordinated uprisings by the far left:

The riots in France started as a student uprising. There were certainly students from immigrant communities involved in the uprising. The uprising was facilitated by by their teachers, just like what happens in the United States. It was caused by leftist indoctrination in schools, with teachers training the students to be activists – that is the cause. 

Following the start of the student movement, it expanded to include teachers, university students, the major labor unions and the antifa/anti-capitalist groups. All of it is grounded in far-left ideology. They are explicitly calling for the communist overthrow of the government and now it is bleeding into other countries in the region. That is what all the evidence says. And I’ve collected primary source evidence from multiple groups, including recordings you refuse to look at. 

The communists in France are saying explicitly it’s not a protest. It’s about overthrowing the capitalist French government and installing a worker’s government. The uprising in France is a communist revolution. They don’t mention Muslims or Islam once @RealAlexJones. https://t.co/3cJHxDw6ZC

— Karlyn Borysenko, anti-communist cult leader (@DrKarlynB) October 23, 2026

Earlier in the week, Fox News’ Asra Nomani released a report that identified the dozens of groups behind the unrest, in which her team found: 

Of the 54 organizations identified in the October protest ecosystem, 16 — or only about one in three — are student or youth organizations, including communist youth groups and a Muslim student association. The remaining 38 include adult-led communist groups, labor unions, political parties, revolutionary-left organizations, advocacy groups and international propaganda outlets.

FIRST ON FOX: France is bracing for another weekend of protests involving nearly 300 organizations, including 50 self-described Antifa groups. @AsraNomani reports that a Fox News Digital investigation identified 287 groups and 649 planned protest actions, with organizers coordinating transportation, fundraising and protests. The network extends far beyond student groups, including communist and socialist organizations, labor unions and other activist groups. Only 27 identified groups are student or youth organizations, despite the protests originally focusing on education concerns. See how the groups are coordinating ahead of this weekend’s protests: https://t.co/IcspQdDArt

— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 23, 2026

Footage from Saturday morning shows some of the protests are already turning violent.

🚨🇫🇷 PAU : Les manifestants sont dispersés par les forces de l’ordre à l’aide de grenades. https://t.co/ZtMcM2YocD

— Cpasdeslol (@cpasdeslol_X) October 24, 2026

BREAKING: Riots have broken out in Lyon, France. The riot police are deploying large quantities of pepper spray https://t.co/pN8UgYyRKw

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 24, 2026

Nomani highlighted the spread of protests and riots across multiple countries. One possible view is that far-left groups are attempting to turn local grievances into a broader revolutionary campaign. 

RED PROPAGANDA: It’s global. Don’t fall for it. Read the handle for this account: @ProudSocialist. This account is part of the pro-communist propaganda machine that is making the world blow up right now with fake grassroots protests. What you can see in these videos and images from Albania to India and France in between is the AGITATION PROPAGANDA of socialists, communists and far-leftists. Inoculate your brain. Don’t fall for the BRAIN WASHING. What you’re seeing is a concentrated communist campaign supported by the propaganda arms of a transnational network funded by American-born communist tech tycoon Neville Roy Singham. They deny their are TROJAN HORSES for malign foreign influence. What do you think?

— Asra Nomani (@AsraNomani) October 23, 2026

Beyond weeks of social unrest in France and the Macron government still struggling to squash this movement, Moody’s on Friday spared the country from a credit ratings downgrade. 

“The Aa3 rating assumes that a deficit-reducing budget for 2027 will be adopted, while financing costs and social tensions will abate somewhat in the next few months,” Moody’s said in a statement.

France’s OAT-Bund spread closed around 167.4 bps on Friday, approaching levels seen at the height of the eurozone sovereign debt crisis.

Review the latest:

• OAT-Bund Spread Hits EU Crisis Level Highs
• France’s Debt Crisis Is No Longer The Story… Contagion Is

Lefty corporate media has run cover for the far left, with the BBC calling riots “mostly peaceful.” One assessment is that the far left views sustained disruption as a way to get concessions as the government discusses reducing the budget deficit, which would certainly impact handouts. These groups are also resisting a potential Le Pen presidency. 

And of course, these groups also have anti-capitalist ambitions and aim to destroy the Western world. One immediate risk is that instability could drag on into the months ahead.