Some U.S. airports may be forced to close down if lawmakers fail to reach a deal to fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and end the partial government shutdown, a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) official said on March 17.
Acting Deputy TSA Administrator Adam Stahl told Fox News that the TSA has “fully depleted” its available workforce from the National Deployment Office to cover staffing shortages at airports.
“So at this point, we’re fully stretched. Frankly, there’s not much else we can do,” he told the news outlet. “As the weeks continue, if this continues, it’s not hyperbole to suggest that we may have to quite literally shut down airports, particularly smaller ones.”
Stahl said the government shutdown has placed financial strain on TSA workers living paycheck to paycheck, with some sleeping in their cars and drawing blood to pay for expenses.
“If there’s not action taken, particularly from Senate Democrats, this is going to get worse,” he said. “It’s not going to get better, and there will be significant pain for passengers as well. Three [to] four-hour wait time at select airports.”
Funding for DHS lapsed last month after Congress failed to strike a deal on immigration reforms sought by Democrats following the fatal shooting of two U.S. citizens by federal immigration agents during operations in Minnesota earlier this year.
The partial shutdown has left about 50,000 TSA officers working without pay. More than 300 officers have quit from the agency during the shutdown, according to DHS.
The department said that just over 10 percent of TSA officers were absent from work on March 15.
The CEOs of major U.S. airlines wrote a joint letter on March 15 urging congressional leaders to come together immediately to negotiate a deal to fund DHS and end the partial government shutdown.
In the letter, the CEOs said it is unacceptable for TSA workers to go without pay, noting that it is “difficult, if not impossible, to put food on the table, put gas in the car and pay rent” when they are not getting paid.
“This problem is solvable, and there are solutions on the table. Now it’s up to you, Congress, to move forward on bipartisan proposals that will get federal aviation workers—including TSA officers, U.S. Customs clearance officers at airports and air traffic controllers—paid during shutdowns,” the CEOs said.
The previous government shutdown last fall lasted 43 days, causing widespread flight disruptions and forcing the Federal Aviation Administration to order 10 percent reductions at major airports nationwide.
Jacob Burg and Reuters contributed to this report.
Chinese State Bankers Face Bonus Cuts Of At Least 30%
Senior bankers at China’s state-backed financial institutions are preparing for bonus cuts of at least 30% as Beijing presses ahead with sweeping pay reforms across its $69 trillion financial sector, according to Bloomberg.
At two major state-owned banks, senior managers — including department heads — saw their 2025 bonuses reduced by 30% to 50%, according to people familiar with the matter. At a mid-sized national lender, division chiefs experienced roughly a 40% drop in variable pay last year.
The cuts are part of a broader campaign by Xi Jinping to promote “common prosperity” and curb what officials describe as the extravagant lifestyles of top bankers.
Regulators are also trying to address a pay imbalance in the industry. In many Chinese financial firms, mid-level managers have historically earned more than top executives, whose compensation is capped due to their status as Communist Party officials.
Bloomberg writes that late last year, the Ministry of Finance asked major state-backed institutions to submit plans to overhaul compensation structures. While many firms are still waiting for approval, some have already implemented retroactive pay cuts. Bonuses are the main target because variable pay typically makes up 50% to 70% of managers’ total compensation.
Meanwhile, international banks with a large presence in Asia, such as HSBC Holdings and Standard Chartered, increased their bonus pools by about 10%.
The belt-tightening extends beyond banks. A major state-owned insurer also reduced 2024 bonuses for mid-level managers by at least 30%, according to a person familiar with the decision.
Chinese banks posted combined profits of 2.38 trillion yuan ($346 billion) last year, up 2.3%, despite shrinking margins and non-performing loans remaining near record highs.
The bonus cuts reflect tighter government control over a sector once known for generous pay. Alongside compensation reforms, authorities have stepped up anti-corruption efforts, leading to several high-profile investigations and harsh penalties.
Even so, parts of the industry are beginning to stabilize. A recent rise in dealmaking has prompted some Chinese brokerage firms to rebuild investment banking teams by hiring dozens of junior and mid-level staff. Some firms have also moved to raise base salaries closer to pre-crackdown levels to stay competitive for talent, though bonuses remain closely monitored by regulators.
In 1980, when the Iran-Iraq war disrupted global oil supply, the volume lost was around 4 million barrels per day.
Painful. The world went into recession. Volcker raised rates to 20% to kill inflation. It nearly killed the economy in the process. We called it a crisis and we meant it.
The current Hormuz blockade is running at roughly 20 million barrels per day.
The futures market, in its infinite wisdom, is pricing a quick resolution.
Trump says the war is “basically over”.
His Defence Secretary says it’s “only just the beginning”.
One of them presumably has read the intelligence reports.
Even in the most optimistic scenario – ceasefire tomorrow, everybody shakes hands – the Maersk CEO noted it takes at least ten days after a ceasefire for tanker insurance to clear. Then mine-clearing: Iran has been laying mines in the Strait, and removing them will take weeks to months. Then tankers reposition, loads getting secured, and finally the flow resumes.
The oil futures curve is pricing step five as if it follows step one with a 48-hour lag.
It cannot physically happen on that timeline.
And Iran isn’t just shooting wildly at targets. Yesterday, Fujairah – the world-class bunkering hub sitting outside the Strait, the bypass everyone assumed would soften the blow – has been deliberately targeted. Tehran isn’t just closing Hormuz. It’s also closing the workarounds. One by one. Iran got fed up and decided to take down the imposed sanctions one way or another. And USrael just gave them the ultimate excuse.
If you’ve been reading my silver papers, you know there is a gap. A gap I call “PvP”… No not the gaming term. The Paper vs Physical.
And oh boy. Is it screaming!! Brent futures in New York closed Friday at $104. Elevated but ok-ish. Dubai crude – you know, the real physical oil, real barrels, real buyers – was trading around $127-140. Normally Brent commands a premium over Dubai. Now Dubai is $37 above the paper. And that’s just crude. Bunker fuel in Singapore hit $140 per barrel this week. In Fujairah, $160. High-grade marine fuel, $175. Ships burning fuel right now are paying those prices regardless of what the futures strip says in New York.
Silver at a $12 premium to Shanghai? pffff Silver… Amateur hour compared to oil!
If you’ve read Strait to Brrrrr, none of this is surprising. Paper price is massaged. The New York futures desk is clearly on something the physical buyers aren’t.
However this started, this isn’t a military confrontation anymore. I’m even starting to doubt it ever was. The Strait stays closed, oil stays elevated. Oil stays elevated, inflation stays elevated. Inflation stays elevated, the Fed cannot cut. The Fed cannot cut, and $36 trillion in federal debt – already costing $880 billion a year in interest before the war added a billion dollars a day to the tab – gets rolled over at rates that make it progressively less serviceable. The dollar weakens under that strain. A weaker dollar makes the next barrel of imported oil more expensive in dollar terms. Which feeds back into inflation. Which keeps the Fed pinned.
It’s a loop. Iran just needs to keep the strait closed long enough for it to complete a few rotations. The bond market has noticed. Treasury yields are rising in the middle of a geopolitical crisis – not falling. Capital isn’t fleeing to bonds. It’s fleeing to gold. That is a verdict on the US fiscal position.
Trump knows the physical reality, which is why last week he called Putin. The country America has been sanctioning for four years. The one it branded an aggressor, a pariah, an enemy of the liberal world order. He called to ask for help. Then he went further and lifted Russian oil sanctions outright. A Democratic Senator responded with perhaps the best summary of the year: “Looks like we fought Iran and Russia won”.
What else? The IEA approved a record 400 million barrel reserve release. Bessent telegraphed futures market intervention to cap prices. Russian sanctions lifted. Each one a gesture. On my feed someone quoted: “The oil market is massively short of supply. The other options the administration has, other than ending the war, are actually pretty limited”. Woops.
That’s the pin. But actually, the pin in itself doesn’t matter. Really truly doesn’t matter. What does matter greatly however, is WHAT it pricked…
In 1980, US federal debt stood at 26% of GDP. Today it’s 120%. That’s the difference between the same shock hitting a healthy patient and hitting someone already on oxygen. The Volcker treatment that worked then is structurally unavailable now. But don’t worry! These are the same people who called inflation transitory. I’m sure they’ve got it. This time.
The interest bill on existing debt is already $880 billion a year, more than defence, more than Medicare. Rates at 20% on $37 trillion would cost more than the entire federal budget in interest payments alone. That lever doesn’t exist anymore.
What exists instead is $846 trillion in notional OTC derivatives. Up from $108 trillion in 2000. An eightfold expansion in 25 years, and mid ‘24 → ’25 was the largest growth rate at 16% since 2008.
To put that number in some kind of human context: $846 trillion is roughly eight times the entire global GDP. With 1% of it you could buy every company in the S&P 500 twice over. With 0.01% you could buy Warren Buffett. With a rounding error – 0.0001% – a superyacht, a sports franchise, and a small Caribbean island, and you’d still have 99.9999% left. Nobody has this money, of course. Nobody owns $846 trillion. It’s the notional value of bets stacked on top of bets – leverage and hedges and derivatives daisy-chained to other derivatives. It nets out in normal conditions. In abnormal conditions, “nets out” becomes “finds out”.
Buffett called them ‘weapons of mass financial destruction’ in 2003. The book was $85 trillion then.
The bulk of the current book – around $548 trillion – is interest rate derivatives. All of it priced on a world where oil is $70 and rates are roughly stable. Guess what just happened? Oil exploding (quite literally at times) make counterparties not being able to meet margin calls (guess why gold and silver are trembling so much) and that failure cascades through the chain.
The private credit system was already the weakest link before the war. I covered the gating wave in my previous article so I’m not going to repeat it here, but the language from people who are in the know got pretty alarming. Mohamed El-Erian reached for Bear Stearns 2007 as his reference point. Dimon started talking about cockroaches. Dimon… Talking about cockroaches… The Treasury Secretary himself said he was ‘concerned’ about private credit. When the man responsible for placing a trillion dollars per quarter in new debt publicly expresses concern about the credit system he depends on to function, well… I’ll leave it at that.
Think the gating’s bad? Let me reassure you *evil grin*. One in five companies in the Russell 3000 cannot service their debt from current income. Over half of all investment grade paper is a single downgrade from junk. $5 trillion in corporate debt rolls over in the next four years at current rates, into a war-driven inflationary environment the Fed cannot cut its way out of. The losses are in there. Just not visible yet. When they surface, the institutions holding private credit will face redemption pressure at exactly the moment public markets are offering their best entry points since 2022 /s. Nah, just kidding. They dump whatever they can. Anything, just about anything unrelated with their illiquid portfolio will be hit. You’ve seen this movie before. Gold fell when Iran struck. Silver fell. Same mechanics, a tad larger. Think ‘08 or ‘00 on steroids.
Now picture what happens when the equity markets start to move. The S&P 500 closed up 1% on Sunday night. The Dow gained 388 points. Meanwhile, fertiliser benchmarks are up 25-44% in seventeen days. Think food. Helium has doubled. Think chips – not the edible ones. Pharmaceutical feedstock pipelines are depleting. The wall between the financial “economy” and the real one is still holding. Walls do that, right until they don’t.
When people need cash fast, they sell what’s liquid. ETFs are the most liquid thing in the world. They sell indiscriminately – tech, gold miners, silver, and just about anything else. You don’t sell what you want to sell. You sell what has a bid. And passive investment? Volume wise, ETFs are like 60% of US equity markets (2024). In 1996 that was only 6%. Which means that when selling starts it’s mechanical. No analysis. No discrimination. Every ETF holder hitting the same exit through the same small door at the same time.
Think of “Liberation Day” as a test run. First-ever simultaneous crash in stocks, bonds, and the dollar – the thing that was supposed to go up when everything else went down.
Tie into that the 401k withdrawals that hit a record high this week. The passive investment machine is leaking from the bottom while demographics drain it from the top.
Feeling comfortable yet? *super evil grin*
Underneath all of this, slower than any war and more permanent than any crisis, is something the financial press doesn’t really mention:
People aren’t having any children.
US fertility hit an all-time low in 2024. The general fertility rate is still falling. IMPLAN puts 1.4 million fewer Americans contributing to housing demand, retail spending, and service consumption in 2025 than trends would have predicted. To put that in numbers: $104 billion in GDP. Not exactly gone, not really disappeared. It just never existed in the first place.
It’s a vicious circle: housing is too expensive, so young people delay children. Fewer children means less future housing demand. Which should eventually reduce prices, except the lag is 20-30 years, and in the meantime housing stays expensive, so the people who couldn’t afford a house still can’t, still don’t have children, and the loop tightens at its own pace regardless of what the Fed does or what happens somewhere in the narrow waterways in exotic places.
Added: the boomers are saying bye sayonara.
The generation that inflated every asset class for 40 years through automatic 401k contributions is, somewhere around now, flipping from net buyers to net sellers. Of course it’s impossible to say like “March, 17: boomers start to cash out their 401ks”… Nope, the tide just turns. The same passive machine that provided an inexorable, automatic bid for equities and bonds and real estate – every payday, every year, for four decades – begins to redeem. Quietly. Continuously. For the next twenty-some years. Every asset they inflated on the way up faces a headwind on the way out. Not a crash. A long, grinding, demographically-inevitable ratchet.
Another angle I want to cover is the petrodollar. I covered this already in “The Bretton Whoops”. But the short version is: oil was priced in dollars, dollars were recycled into Treasuries, and the US military keeps the Gulf safe. It required two things – a reliable dollar and a credible security guarantee. The dollar’s reliability cracked in 2022 when Washington froze Russia’s reserves. The security guarantee cracked when the US started a war they cannot finish.
The dollar’s share of global FX reserves has since fallen to around 45%, the lowest since the 1990s. Gold’s share has quadrupled in twelve years. Gulf states are reportedly discussing pulling investment commitments from the US.
And now Iran has done something structurally interesting. It didn’t just close the Strait – it converted it into a tollgate. The toll isn’t money – yet. It’s alignment. Ten countries have been offered safe passage: China, India, Pakistan, Turkey, and others. The US isn’t on the list. This isn’t a military tactic. It’s economical.
Lots of people have the wrong framing. They think “petrodollar is dead, long live the yuandollar”. Right? Wrong frame entirely. China doesn’t want a reserve status. Couldn’t stomach it if it tried. Because a reserve currency means running a permanent trade deficits to pump your currency into the global system – America has been doing this for 50 years and the reward is a rust belt, a $37 trillion debt tab, and a bond market that needs foreigners to keep showing up or the whole thing seizes. China watched that happen and said: 不用了，谢谢. And opening the capital account enough to make yuan genuinely reserve-worthy would mean letting money flow freely across the border – ending the CCP’s ability to direct credit and control the financial system on Beijing’s terms. They’d sooner eat the wallpaper.
What the yuan-for-oil arrangement being implemented actually is, is an industrial policy dressed as currency diplomacy. You sell your oil into the permitted lane. You receive yuan. Now you’re sitting on yuan in a system with capital controls – you can’t just convert it and park it wherever you like. Your options are: buy Chinese goods, buy Chinese infrastructure contracts, invest in Chinese assets. That flow cycles straight back into Chinese factories and Chinese employment. China doesn’t have to stimulate its domestic consumption anymore. It exports the demand problem onto its trading partners and invoices it as a geopolitical arrangement. Three hundred million jobs – and unlike the US – no helicopter money required.
Those dollars that used to flow into Treasuries don’t just suddenly rush home. They just stop showing up at the next auction. Treasury needs to place roughly a trillion dollars every hundred days. Fewer buyers means higher yields. Higher yields mean the Fed is cornered. A cornered Fed means the printer runs. Same mechanism as demographics, same mechanism as the derivatives book, same direction.
My long-running conviction – and I’ve been saying this long enough that it stopped sounding contrarian and started sounding obvious – is that the world ends up back on a gold standard. Not the romanticised version where you rattle coins in your pocket. Though honestly, with modern payment rails, a gold-backed account is functionally identical to a dollar account. You’d never touch the metal. You’d just change the ticker from USD to XAU and carry on. The technology exists right now. The obstacle isn’t infrastructure. It’s that the people running the current system would rather light themselves on fire.
What happens first, before any grand declaration, is narrower: gold becomes the settlement layer between sovereigns who no longer trust each other’s paper. The US is apparently net-settling its trade deficit with China in gold – if that data holds up. In three of the last four months it seems that gold is flowing East. No Bretton Woods conference. No announcement. Just two countries quietly deciding that when the paper gets complicated, the metal clears the table. That’s how monetary systems actually change – not by proclamation but by practice, one bilateral settlement at a time, until enough of them are doing it that someone calls a conference to ratify what’s already happened. The Bretton Woods conference didn’t create the dollar system. It formalised what the war had already decided.
The next conference is coming. It just hasn’t been scheduled yet.
Silver. Because I can’t write a piece about systemic fragility without it, and because this week’s data is worth your attention even if the price chart isn’t.
The paper price looks terrible. Miners are trading like silver is heading back to $40. Silver Santa – one of the accounts I follow on Twitter (yeah, I’m old) – moved 40% to cash, describing “a strong pre-COVID feeling”. The technical picture is ugly.
But the crucial part: the physical reality didn’t get that memo.
The COMEX “run rate to zero” ticked down to 89 days as of Friday, from 93 days on Thursday. Four days burned in one. The SGE briefly stopped publishing silver inventory data mid-week, then quietly resumed. Shanghai is still paying a 13-17% premium over London. The same paper/physical divergence playing out in oil is running in silver at a slower pace with a much longer fuse.
But what does a draining vault have to do with your savings account?
More than most people think. The COMEX sets the global silver price. But if the COMEX increasingly doesn’t have the physical metal – and the run rate suggests it won’t for long – then the price it sets is a fiction. An unallocated silver account at your bank is a claim on that fiction. An ETF share is a claim on that fiction. When the fiction and the physical reality eventually converge, it won’t be because the paper comes up to meet the physical. It’ll be because the paper can no longer pretend.
Same mechanism as Dubai crude. Same mechanism as the derivatives book. Just a slower fuse.
When $68 trillion in US equity markets eventually moves – and it will – and the indiscriminate ETF selling hits everything, and the margin calls cascade through a derivatives book built on assumptions that no longer hold, and zombie companies start defaulting, and the boomer redemptions add their steady mechanical pressure, and 401k hardship withdrawals accelerate – the question of where capital goes becomes very concrete. Bonds? Already struggling to absorb a trillion per quarter. Cash? In which currency? Real estate? In a demographically challenged market with rising yields?
Gold has a structural bid from central banks who drew their conclusions in 2022 and have been buying ever since. Silver has vaults on an 89-day countdown and a paper price that hasn’t caught up yet.
I’m buying the dips. Have been. Will continue.
(A small aside: I’m considering opening a dedicated Substack to document my trades in real time – with a ten-minute lag – for those who want to follow the positions, not just the analysis. The analysis stays here, free.)
None of this is hidden.
None of it requires a security clearance or even a Bloomberg terminal. It’s all there, in the vault data, the yield curves, the fertility statistics, the derivatives book, the bunker fuel prices. The information exists. The pattern is legible.
The question was never whether this would happen.
The question was always who would be holding paper when it did.
Each crisis gets a fresh name but the same printer… TALF, TARP, BTFP, BTFD, YOLO, CTRLP.
There is an interesting article in the Telegraph by a psychotherapist called Jonathan Alpert, called ‘There’s a reason the Left seems more psychologically distressed than the Right’ (you can read it here).
This is how he opens:
In my clinical practice, one pattern has become increasingly difficult to ignore. Among a subset of patients on the political Left, hostility toward political opponents goes beyond dislike or even hatred.
It sometimes takes the form of moralised fantasies about an opponent’s death, disappointment that Donald Trump’s shooter did not have better aim, or statements that certain public figures ‘deserve’ to be eliminated for the greater good. These remarks are rarely presented as literal intent. But they nevertheless offer a revealing glimpse into emotional regulation and psychological wellbeing.
It appears that the Left-leaning patient is quick to express his or her distress in aggressive ways:
What stands out is not only the content of these expressions, but their tone. They are often delivered with intense anger and no shame, as though such thoughts are an understandable or even justified response to the political moment. At no point does the patient see these reactions as excessive or out of control.
Similar behaviours can be observed in real life, too. I was walking around New York City in the summer after the ‘No Kings’ protests. I was looking at a heaping high pile of anti-Trump signs and a woman came up to me and said: “Aren’t these great?” My response: “I kinda like some of what Trump has done.” Her response: “WELL F— YOU THEN!”’
Conversely, those on the Right are more restrained:
Conservative patients tend to behave somewhat differently. I routinely hear strong dislike, contempt and anger toward political leaders they oppose and it’s not uncommon to hear a patient say they disliked President Biden or strongly disagreed with his stance on the border. Many patients viewed Kamala Harris as incompetent and not at all prepared to be president. Some even described her as “dumb”.
But in my experience, this hostility rarely crossed into wishes of annihilation. Political opponents might be seen as wrong, corrupt or dangerous, but they are still human. From a clinical perspective, that distinction matters.
Later in the piece, Alpert explains this different in more detail:
On the Right, by contrast, there has long been a tendency to emphasise emotional restraint. Stoicism is admired. Complaining is viewed with suspicion. Personal struggle is expected to be managed privately. I have found that conservative patients are far less likely to describe their distress in therapeutic language or frame discomfort as pathology. That does not mean they suffer less. It means they express suffering differently.
Political anger on the Right more often appears as cynicism, resentment or disengagement rather than vulnerability or victimhood. Many conservative patients view politics as important but ultimately secondary. Their primary sources of meaning might be family, work, faith and local responsibility. When elections are lost, they tend to return to careers, marriages, children and routines. Politics frustrates them, but it does not typically dominate their life.
On the Left, political identity can often become inseparable from selfhood. When politics is experienced as an all-encompassing struggle between good and evil, emotional intensity escalates. Opponents are no longer merely wrong, but dangerous. Disagreement becomes existential threat. Loss becomes catastrophe.
What Alpert doesn’t apparently consider is the extent to which this difference might be attributable to age. After all, younger adults are more inclined to be attracted to the monochrome politics of the Left, their brains as yet unsaddled with the complications, provisos and more balanced considerations of a longer life. Older adults are inevitably more inclined to the ‘seen it all before’ form of cynicism.
Another way of looking at the issue is that people who are anxious and inclined to distress, and therefore perhaps more liable to explosive outbursts of rage, are more easily attracted to Left-wing politics, as explained in an online article published by two academics on Cambridge University Press, in this instance looking at people’s attraction to Left-wing economic policy as a means of escaping their sense of social exclusion.
Right-wing beliefs function as a salve for people who are chronically anxious and fearful, at least according to one of the oldest and most influential theories in political psychology. Yet recent research shows that liberals, not conservatives, are more prone to negative emotions. The link between mental health and ideology has generated much interest, sending journalists and pundits scrambling to figure out why liberals are so “depressed, anxious, or otherwise neurotic compared to conservatives”.
American adults who identify as politically liberal have long reported lower levels of happiness and psychological well-being than conservatives, a trend that mental-health experts suspect is at least partly explained by liberals’ tendency to spend more time worrying about stress-inducing topics like racial injustice, income inequality, gun violence and climate change.
Now a team of Columbia epidemiologists has found evidence that the same pattern holds for American teenagers. The researchers analysed surveys collected from more than 86,000 12th graders over a 13-year period and discovered that while rates of depression have been rising among students of all political persuasions and demographics, they have been increasing most sharply among progressive students — and especially among liberal girls from low-income families.
You can read the Columbia epidemiological paper here. Another paper, available on Researchgate, concluded from research that:
There is a strongly elevated risk for mental illness among the extreme liberals (+150%), a small increase among the liberals and slightly liberals (+29-32%), and somewhat lower rates among conservatives and extreme conservatives (–17-24%). Breaking the pattern, slightly conservatives had a marginally increased rate (+6%). A variant of this analysis was also carried out by including the happiness metrics reverse-coded. This produced materially the same pattern, but was weaker since the happiness items had a weaker relationship with political ideology than the mental illness variables.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue has a piece analysing aggression in Left-wing politics, while also acknowledging its presence on the Right. But the Left has some strong defining features:
Drawing on our own definition of extremism and this crucial distinction, we suggest that Left-wing extremism should be defined as a belief system that:
Dogmatically claims the absolute moral superiority of communist or socialist political values,
That separates political actors into binary moral categories accordingly, and
That aspires to gain a monopoly of control over society.
Left-wing extremists commonly reject key tenets of liberal democracies, among them the separation of powers, universal human rights and political pluralism. They frequently express sympathies for authoritarian regimes and the conspiracy theories spread by them.
Of course, a common characteristic of the Left is to blame everyone else in a fog of febrile and desultory grievances, and that’s just as applicable to aggressive and angry speech. Trotsky exonerated such behaviour: “Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation and disrespect for human dignity, one’s own and that of other people.”
Looking up ‘Righteous Anger’ on AI produced this explanation:
Anger makes you feel righteous by functioning as a moral disinfectant, transforming feelings of powerlessness into a sense of superiority, vindication and justified control. It acts as a ‘power’ emotion that reinforces self-worth and confirms your moral standards against perceived injustice, offering a comfortable sense of being ‘right’.
Nothing could have described an angry and distressed Left-wing activist better.
Jonathan Alpert’s piece in the Telegraph is worth reading in full.
Democrats began laying a trap the moment that President Trump announced during his State of the Union that Vice President JD Vance would lead a new “war on fraud,” salivating at the possibility of political liability and dubbing the MAGA heir apparent the “fraud czar.”
“It will be blocks of cement around his ankles,” a senior Democratic official told RealClearPolitics last month after the speech to Congress. Another operative predicted that, come 2028, the new role “will be an albatross around his neck.” A third liberal strategist said, “It will be incredible to watch – it’s like he just needed a job but can’t have foreign policy.”
Special responsibilities for vice presidents can later become campaign stumbling blocks for candidates. They provide a measuring stick for the opposition to argue about promises left unfulfilled. Democrats are already accusing the administration of hypocrisy, specifically of targeting their political enemies while turning a blind eye to the alleged fraud originating in the Oval Office. They remember how Republicans pilloried former Vice President Kamala Harris for failing to live up to her billing as “border czar.”
That was a role that Harris rejected outright and never requested. Vance, however, has embraced the brand. When RCP asked the VP about the title during remarks in the Oval Office, Trump interjected, “It’s a good title. I like it.” Moments later, during an exchange that could define him during the next presidential election, Vance followed suit.
“So, I like fraud czar. It’s certainly what we’re going to do. And look, we have to do it,” the vice president told RCP as he described the new job as central to the health of the republic.
“As the president said, this is a problem that has festered in this country for far too long, and far too few people have wanted to do anything about it. That’s what makes this administration different, is that we actually tackle the problems the American people have been confronting,” Vance added.
“I’m very happy about it,” he concluded.
The White House knows the role comes with occupational hazards.
Elon Musk, a former senior advisor to the president, became Public Enemy No. 1 in the minds of liberals as his Department of Government Efficiency made a long march through federal bureaucracy in search of waste, fraud, and abuse to eliminate. The DOGE effort began with lofty ambitions of finding enough savings to balance the budget. But after thousands of relatively small cuts and a few shuttered government agencies, it ended without making much of a dent in the deficit.
Trump was not cowed by that experience. With Vance at his side Monday afternoon, the president predicted that Vance could find “the kind of money” that would be “country changing,” envisioning a balance sheet where so much fraud had been cut that the federal government could “lower your taxes substantially for people.”
He predicted that his vice president would succeed where the last one faltered. “This will not be like a Kamala, where she was put in charge of the border,” Trump said, “and she never went there.”
“You promise,” Trump asked as he turned to Vance.
“I promise,” replied the vice president in a clip that Democrats could soon cut for a 2028 ad.
Contrary to Republican barbs, Harris was never deputized to stem illegal immigration. Former President Joe Biden tasked her, instead, with getting to the bottom of “the root cause” of the phenomenon. Aware of the optics, she still held the issue at arm’s length and only visited the southern border twice during her tenure, a fact that provided the Trump-Vance campaign with endless election fodder.
Now Democrats are preparing to run a similar kind of play, albeit with a twist for the Trump era.
“JD Vance’s first job as ‘fraud czar’ should be investigating Trump and his family for the billions of dollars they have made off of the presidency, the favors, pardons, the government positions bought by Trump’s wealthy friends, and the dropped investigations into corporate bad actors after receiving massive donations,” Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin told RCP.
“The American people, regardless of party affiliation, want our government to take on real fraudsters,” Martin continued, “not abuse the office of the presidency to enrich themselves and go after their political enemies.”
The White House insists that the audit will be apolitical and nationwide. Vance and company will search out waste like the Medicare abuse that ran rampant in Minnesota and captured the attention of the nation. And while Trump has already singled out California, his administration says publicly that they will put red and blue states under the same microscope.
Good government experts cautiously point to an early, positive sign: the call to root out fraud among durable medical companies known to be particularly susceptible to overbilling Medicare and Medicaid. The Department of Health and Human Services has already enforced a nationwide moratorium on new suppliers, a move that affects at least one deep red state immediately: Florida ranks high in Medicare per-beneficiary spending overall.
Some in Congress are still befuddled by the idea that fraud has become a partisan issue. “Tackling waste and grift is bipartisan. We must make the case that government can be good and effective,” Rep. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat who plans to introduce legislation calling for a full audit of all 50 states, told RCP.
Republicans argue that the best way to inoculate Vance is simply to run up the score. The more dollars the vice president can save, the less of a talking point Democrats will have at their disposal.
“Honest, tax-paying Americans are terrified by the thought that Minnesota’s fraud is just one case in a nationwide pandemic of scams,” said John Ashbrook, a Republican strategist close to the vice president. “And Vance is in the perfect position to uncover and root it out everywhere.”
If the war on fraud is prosecuted properly, it could pad the vice president’s resume. “If I am JD Vance, and I do a super job of identifying fraud, finding it in all 50 states, and end up saving not just federal taxpayers but state taxpayers lots of money,” said Matt Weidinger, a scholar focusing on welfare at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, “well, when someone calls me ‘fraud czar,’ I’ll take it.”
The new job comes at a moment when Vance finds himself in a potentially precarious position. After years of building a political reputation grounded in opposition to foreign intervention, the vice president has backed a new war, this one against Iran. The White House has batted down speculation that there is any daylight between Trump and his deputy, despite Vance’s many past statements expressing skepticism of American involvement in the Middle East. Trump previously dismissed the idea that Vance required any convincing, telling RCP during a brief interview last week that his vice president “did not take persuading.”
When RealClearPolitics put the question directly to Vance in the Oval, he bristled that the press was “trying to drive a wedge between members of the administration, between me and the president. What the president said consistently, going back to 2015, and I agreed with him, is that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon.”
Asked specifically about his current support for war with Iran in light of his past condemnation of the Global War on Terror, Vance, a former Marine who deployed to Iraq, replied, “One big difference is that we have a smart president, whereas in the past we’ve had dumb presidents. And I trust President Trump to get the job done, to do a good job for the American people, and to make sure that the mistakes of the past aren’t repeated. Absolutely.”
Trump has promised a speedy end to the conflict in the Middle East. His war on fraud, meanwhile, is expected to continue all the way until he leaves office, when Vance is expected to mount his own bid for the presidency.
Ready For War? New B-21 Raider Activity Spotted Over Mojave Desert
There has been increased activity of the B-21 Raider stealth bomber, suggesting the Department of War is on an accelerated path to bring the next-generation bomber platform into service, with the USAF targeting an operational date in 2027.
Earlier this month, plane spotters appeared to capture the highly secretive B-21 refueling behind a KC-135R tanker over the Mojave Desert.
Nice! You spotted the new baby B-2, the B-21 Raider!
There was no confirmation that the latest sighting was from earlier this month or on Tuesday, but it is certainly notable given everything unfolding in the Middle East (read here).
Questions over the integrity of the 2020 election continue to linger after the revelation that analysts inside the U.S. intelligence community sought to conceal evidence of Chinese interference from then-President Donald Trump.
Never before reported upon comments found in a January 2021 report written by analytic ombudsman Barry Zulauf show that intelligence analysts downplayed evidence of China’s meddling because of their disdain for Trump and a desire to undermine policies toward China that they did not support.
According to Just the News, credible evidence exists that Chinese government-linked cyber hackers and Chinese social media troll farms took aim at the U.S. presidential election in 2020 and sought to undercut Trump during his run against Joe Biden.
The FBI found evidence of China interfering in the 2020 election, “Fake driver’s licenses and fake ballots so they can help Joe Biden win”
“What does the FBI do with that one? — We’re gonna throw it in the garbage can”
Zulauf, a longtime intelligence officer, explained in his 2021 report: “China analysts appeared hesitant to assess Chinese actions as undue influence or interference. These analysts appeared reluctant to have their analysis on China brought forward because they tended to disagree with the Administration’s policies, saying in effect, I don’t want our intelligence used to support those policies.”
One analyst was quoted by Zulauf during an interview later that year as having essentially said, “I don’t want my analysis going to the White House where that vulgarian . . . in the White House will use it to pursue policies toward China with which I personally disagree.”
Dr. Zulauf also pointed to differences in the way that analysts of Russia and China examined their targets with China analysts appearing “reluctant to have their analysis on China brought forward because they tended to disagree with the Administration’s policies.”
The review by Zulauf also showed that some analysts treated allegations of Russian and Chinese election interference by differing standards writing in his report: “Due to varying collection and insight into hostile state actors’ leadership intentions and domestic election influence campaigns, the definitional use of the terms ‘influence’ and ‘interference’ and associated confidence levels are applied differently by the China and Russia analytic communities.”
The ombudsman concluded that “the terms were applied inconsistently across the analytic community” and that “failing to explain properly these definitions is inconsistent with Tradecraft Standards.”
According to Just the News, the revelation of Chinese infiltration of voter data in the 2020 election is likely connected to fake IDs seized at a Chicago airport, fake ballots found, and software companies, election machine parts, and the servers around the globe tied to China.
HUGE: China infiltrated voter data in the 2020 election according to Biden-era intelligence. This goes hand in hand with the fake IDs seized at a Chicago airport, the fake ballots found, and the software companies, election machine parts, and the servers around the globe tied to… pic.twitter.com/XYV9hYqKaG
‘Worst Disruption To Oil Flows Ever’: Oil Surges After Iran’s Oil, Gas Assets Attacked
Energy headlines summary:
Iran says oil and gas assets are under attack
Iraq reroutes flows through Ceyhan Pipeline to Turkey
Iran reiterates new rules in place for Hormuz transit
“The blockade is now the worst disruption to oil flows ever. Real barrels are now disappearing from global oil markets, which can lead to demand destruction in the weeks to come.”
* * *
Update (0748ET):
WTI crude futures are surging after Iranian state TV reported that part of the South Pars gas field in the Persian Gulf area had been hit by an airstrike.
South Pars is the backbone of Iran’s gas system and part of the world’s largest natural gas field, which Iran shares with Qatar, where the same reservoir is called the North Field.
Most of Iran’s gas production comes from South Pars, making it central to power generation, industrial feedstock, petrochemical production, and winter heating demand in Iran.
WTI futures quickly surged to $95/bbl on the news.
Operation Epic Fury appears to have shifted toward targeting the IRGC’s funding lines. This was evident last week with strikes on the Kharg Island export hub.
* * *
Brent crude futures were directionless overnight, oscillating between $100 and $103 per barrel after news broke that Iraq had found a workaround for the Hormuz chokepoint by restarting exports through Turkey’s Ceyhan port.
Bloomberg reports that North Oil Co.’s oil pipeline to Ceyhan port, with an expected initial export capacity of 250,000 barrels, has begun operation. That is in addition to 210,000 barrels per day from Kurdistan through the northern pipeline, according to Oil Minister Hayyan Abdul Ghani.
Ceyhan exports crude from the Kurdistan and Kirkuk fields (Iraq) to the Mediterranean port, effectively bypassing the chaos at the Hormuz chokepoint and in the Gulf region.
Disruption of tanker flows in the critical waterway forced Iraqi oil production to plunge to about 1.4 million barrels per day, roughly one-third of pre-Hormuz closure levels.
Three weeks into the US-Iran conflict, tanker activity on the waterway has slowed to a crawl, at just about 400,000 barrels per day, compared to the pre-Hormuz closure average of 14 million barrels per day.
Kpler oil analyst Muyu Xu warned, “The blockade is now the worst disruption to oil flows ever. Real barrels are now disappearing from global oil markets, which can lead to demand destruction in the weeks to come.”
Iraq is following Saudi Arabia’s playbook of shipping crude through pipelines rather than through Hormuz as IRGC drone and missile threats persist. Saudi Aramco shifted its crude flows through the East-West pipeline to export terminals at Yanbu and Al Muajjiz on the kingdom’s Red Sea coast.
Meanwhile, Iran-linked vessels accounted for 35% of the 20 crude tankers that made outbound Hormuz transits in the first week of the conflict, according to Kpler. About a week later, that number rose to five of the eight tankers that left the region, suggesting that Iran’s control of the critical waterway has significantly increased.
On Tuesday, the conflict escalated further with the confirmation of the killing of Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council.
According to Aaron Stein, president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, “The Larijani killing is a big deal, and may make Iran more desperate to disrupt oil flows.”
“Trump is obviously being pressured to escort tankers, so we’re in for the possibility of very tense US operations in ways I’m certain the Navy would like to avoid,” Stein said.
On Wednesday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told Al Jazeera about new rules that should be imposed on the critical waterway.
“We need to design new arrangements for the Strait of Hormuz and the way ships pass through it in the future after the war so that peaceful navigation through this waterway can be permanently maintained under clear regulations with consideration for Iran’s interests and the interests of the region,” Araghchi said.
He said, “It should guarantee that safe passage through the strait takes place under specific conditions,” adding that conditions should “ensure peacefulness. We do not want to witness another war in the region and we do not want to see the strait closed again.”
Goldman analysts, led by Yulia Zhestkova Grigsby, showed clients on Tuesday that shipping traffic through Hormuz remains down 98% from normal levels (4-day moving average).
The estimated total hit to oil flows from the Persian Gulf stands at 15 mb/d, 15 times larger than the peak April 2022 hit to Russian oil production.
Iranian crude exports dominate the Strait.
“With no end in sight to hostilities, shut-ins rising on a daily basis, and the Strait technically closed, we remain of the view that Brent is set to remain in a new, higher $95-to-$110 range,” Westpac Banking analyst Robert Rennie wrote in a note.
“Were we to see a major refinery plant hit or confirmation of additional mining of the strait, we would expect that range to extend higher by another $10-$20,” Rennie added.
The takeaway here is that Gulf countries, such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia, are rerouting crude flows from tanker transit through the waterway to pipelines out of the hostile region, as Iran remains largely in control of the Strait, necessarily (and dramatically) reducing global energy supply (for longer).
The Strait of Hormuz situation won’t return to its pre-war status.
— محمدباقر قالیباف | MB Ghalibaf (@mb_ghalibaf) March 17, 2026
…and now he is reportedly dead (among many other Iranian leaders).
Crewless Russian Fuel Tanker A ‘Ticking Time Bomb’ In Mediterranean After Likely Ukrainian Attack
A damaged Russian LNG tanker is drifting uncontrolled in the Mediterranean after what Moscow says was a Ukrainian drone attack, triggering alarm across Europe over a potential ecological disaster in the heart of EU waters, as the stricken tanker is somewhere between sunny Malta and Italy’s beautiful resort town Lampedusa.
The carrier Arctic Metagaz was reportedly attacked east of Malta earlier this month, and is in a deteriorating state, raising fears of a major spill. A letter cited by Reuters outlines the alarm raised by Italy, France and several other EU states, who have told Brussels that the situation poses an “immediate and serious risk” to both maritime safety and the environment.
“The unstable condition of the vessel, combined with the nature of its specialized cargo, creates an immediate and serious risk of a major environmental disaster in the very center of the EU maritime space,” the document laid out.
The crisis actually highlights a “double problem” – per officials – namely containing the environmental issue while also navigating EU sanctions on Russian energy exports. Or in essence, Europe wants to look the other way while Ukraine engages in the high-risk behavior of targeting so-called dark fleet Russian tankers.
Moscow is in turn highlighting the contradictions and irony here, pointing the finger squarely at Kiev for creating the crisis, and as ‘blowback’ on the EU.
Russia’s Transport Ministry has said, “The tanker was traveling with cargo, issued according to all international rules, from the port of Murmansk. The attack on him was carried out from the coast of Libya by unmanned boats of Ukraine.”
So this appears a rare or even unprecedented instance of the Ukrainians using a foothold on the Mediterranean to attack Russian interests.
Malta has meanwhile confirmed the vessel is drifting without crew and remains “in an uncontrolled state” – with Italy now coordinating monitoring efforts as it floats within Malta’s search-and-rescue zone. Ticking time bomb?
Surveillance footage shows the 277-meter Arctic Metagaz smoldering and listing heavily to one side with a massive gash in its port hull. The vessel, identified as part of Moscow’s sanctions-evading shadow fleet, is a floating powder keg carrying approximately 900 metric tons of diesel and over 60,000 metric tons of liquefied natural gas (LNG).
The ship was reportedly struck by maritime and aerial drones on March 3 in neutral waters about 168 nautical miles southeast of Malta while en route from Murmansk to Egypt. The 30-person crew abandoned the burning vessel and were rescued by the Libyan Coast Guard, according to CNN.
Both Italy and Malta have reportedly sent tugboats and anti-pollution assets to monitor the vessel, also enforcing a strict five-nautical-mile exclusion zone as it drifts with not steering or control. Here’s more from the Kremlin:
“Notably, the attack occurred in close proximity to the shores of an EU member state, yet none of the European nations have condemned the incident to date,” Zakharova said while calling the incident as “a flagrant violation of international law”.
❗️According to Italy’s RAI, the Russian shadow fleet gas tanker Arctic Metagaz is currently drifting off the coast of the island of Lampedusa after explosions on March 3. On board were about 60,000 tonnes of LNG and 900 tonnes of diesel fuel. pic.twitter.com/ugH8cUkye7
The whole episode and potential further ecological disaster serves to underscore how the Ukraine war continues to spillover into the heart of Europe. NATO’s role in the war has meanwhile only deepened.
Europeans are committing demographic suicide and the tools used to managed migration are failing at every level, said Rodrigo Ballester, the head of the Center for European Studies at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium. He made his remark at a recent Ordo Iuris Institute event in Warsaw, Poland, which saw European politicians, policymakers, and other important players gather to discuss a groundbreaking paper: “Taking Back Control from Brussels. The Renationalization of the EU Migration and Asylum Policies.”
“As Europeans, we are committing demographic suicide. We are a continent of old rich people, facing a continent of young, hungry, and determined people — ambitious people. We’re still trying to manage migration with hopelessly outdated tools, using conventions from a century ago. They have completely lost their meaning today. In practice, I’m talking about the Geneva Convention. This is the ‘sacred cow’ we should get rid of,” Ballester emphasized.
Many of the speakers discussed various aspects of Europe’s ongoing immigration crisis, including the sharply differing trajectories of pro-immigration countries such as Poland versus Germany.
Polish Prof. Zdzisław Krasnodębski, a former MEP, spoke to the large audience who had gathered, where he compared the impact of immigration on the Polish city of Warsaw to the German city of Bremen where he lived and worked for a long time.
“How did it happen that such a process, which is suicidal, was supported by societies for years? I can tell you that I know two such cities well. One was poor and large, and people were moving away from it. It was Warsaw. Warsaw was also White, if I may use that term. The other city (Bremen) was well-off, middle-class, also White. In 2025, one is almost a ruin. It used to be a prosperous, medium-sized town. Meanwhile, this big, great city we’re in right now has become one of the wealthiest cities in Europe,” he pointed out.
Krasnodębski underlined the trajectory of Warsaw, which is economically booming while still maintaining a strong White majority and rejecting the diversity seen in many other Western cities. Meanwhile, Bremen has been labeled the “most dangerous city in Germany,” where an incredible 73 percent of crime suspects are non-German. The situation has deteriorated so greatly in Bremen that even left-wing politicians in the city have admitted that “massive immigration” has sparked a housing and crime crisis.
However, other speakers warned that not all is well in Poland, either.
Jacek Saryusz-Wolski—a former Polish Minister for European Affairs and Member of the European Parliament, currently President Nawrocki’s main advisor for European affairs — took the floor.
“Looking at the statistics, you can see that in most of Western Europe, immigrant communities make up a percentage in the teens, or even over 20 percent, of the population. It’s not like that here (in Poland) yet, but we too face the risk of an open-borders policy starting here. We will then, after a certain delay, share the same fate,” noted Saryusz-Wolski.
Saryusz-Wolski further warned that the EU is taking more and more power away from nation-states in order to dictate an open borders policy.
“Migration policy is not among the European Union’s exclusive or shared competencies. This is only an area, the third category of cooperation, within which the Union institutions may assist, encourage, and advise the member states, but they cannot legislate. And that is the origin of this great usurpation,” the politician emphasized.
Another speaker, Róbert Gönczi, an analyst at the Hungarian Institute for Migration Research and at Mathias Corvinus Collegium, warned that policies in other countries, such as Spain, which is working to legalize hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants.
“Today we are witnessing a huge surge in migration that Europe is grappling with, and let’s not forget that we are all part of the European Union; it affects us all, and we all bear the consequences,” the analyst emphasized.
He also drew attention to the problem of numerous migrants not being registered in European countries’ systems.
“There are millions of people we can’t track down. We don’t know where they are, we don’t know what they’re doing, we don’t know where they came from, and we don’t know what to do about it. This places a very significant burden on the European system, on the European Union, and it is one of the reasons why we find ourselves in a serious economic crisis,” he noted.
Deputy Speaker of the Sejm, Krzysztof Bosak, emphasized that in addition to illegal immigration, mass legal immigration is also a problem.
“The discussion about legal immigration — its scale, rules, and criteria — is no less important, if not more important, because the transformation of Western Europe was largely the result of large-scale legal immigration, and only as a result — or in parallel — did illegal immigration begin to arrive,” he said.
The politician also noted that the European Union treats different countries unequally when it comes to assessing their migration policies. He pointed out that this area has already been partially “renationalized,” but he warned against a possible hardening of the stance toward countries that continue to firmly protect their borders.
“Please note that very few of our Border Guard’s decisions — whether during the Law and Justice government or now under the Civic Platform-led government — have been seriously challenged by any EU bodies. However, I’m not saying that this won’t happen at any moment now. It can happen. It depends solely on where the ‘Eye of Sauron’ from Brussels, from Luxembourg, turns its gaze, and which regulations, which practices it chooses to scrutinize. Such arbitrariness, it seems to me, has been taking place in the European Union for years with regard to the practice of so-called pushbacks — that is, what I call sending illegal migrants back to the proper side of the border,” said Bosak.
“Taking Back Control from Brussels. The Renationalization of the EU Migration and Asylum Policies” report discusses the possibility for European Union member states to regain greater control over migration and asylum policy without the need to adopt new EU treaties. The authors show that the key competencies concerning border protection, security, and deciding on the admission of foreigners still belong to nation-states, and that any limits on them result more from legal interpretation than from actual legal provisions.
The publication critically assesses the EU migration pact, indicating that it may facilitate mass migration and the forced relocation of migrants. The report also proposes specific legal measures that would enable EU countries to strengthen their own migration policy under existing European and international law.
