Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

While it is not allowed to have statues of Thomas Jefferson or Teddy Roosevelt, among others, in New York City, a 12 ft bronze statue of a random fat black woman just standing there is certainly permitted.

The new statue in Times Square is named Grounded in the Stars. The puropse of it, according to it’s creator Thomas J Price, is to be a “stark contrast” to two statues in Duffy Square of Father Francis Duffy and George M. Cohan, and a way of “disrupting traditional ideas” of what a “triumphant figure” is.

“In a culture that increasingly encourages a faster pace, Grounded in the Stars is an introspective meditation on humanity,” the artist’s website states, claiming the statue should “instigate meaningful connections and bind into an emotional state that allow for deeper reflection around the Human condition and greater cultural diversity.”

How does this statue erected in time square “confront preconceived notions of identity and representation”

It’s just some obnoxious looking overweight black woman, it’s reinforcing those preconceived notions. pic.twitter.com/LejvmBxnUH

— AlphaFo𝕏 (@Alphafox78) May 7, 2025

The Roosevelt and Jefferson statues were removed last year. After all, what did they ever do in contrast with this overweight fictional woman whose nipples are showing through her baggy t-shirt?

Random fat black woman statue in NYC ✅
Thomas Jefferson statue in NYC ⛔️
Teddy Roosevelt statue in NYC ⛔️ pic.twitter.com/rdKPatzh0k

— m o d e r n i t y (@ModernityNews) May 7, 2025

Is this supposed to champion black women?

How about something that looks less like someone complaining their “order wasn’t right”?

— The CEO Guy (@The_ceo_guy) May 7, 2025

This is a fictional black woman.

A fat, sloppy, slouchily dressed, black woman.

Couldn’t even find an ACTUAL black woman to represent.

No Harriet Tubman.
No Daisy Bates.
No Maya Angelou.

Just a fat fucking black woman.

Are people ok with this?? pic.twitter.com/JAnZUU7tyi

— Amiri King (@AmiriKing) May 7, 2025

If I was black I’d be pissed. So this is supposed to represent black women? Obese and cheap with Walmart clothes? 🤦🏻‍♀️

— Cynical Latina (@CynicalLatina) May 7, 2025

It’s a sloppily dressed, overweight black woman who is not wearing a bra. Is that the impression black women want to project?

— Truth Junkie 🇺🇲 (@Truth_Junkie2) May 7, 2025

Cut the BS, lets say exactly what this is.

If you’re referring to this as a ‘statue,’ you’re mistaken. This isn’t merely a statue, the purported purpose of which is to “confront preconceived notions of identity and representation,” it is a Marxist monument to critical race theory (CRT). More specifically, it is a monument… https://t.co/vgdW34wFVe

— Darrell B. Harrison (@D_B_Harrison) May 7, 2025

It’s part of the pursuit of uniformity, the dismantling of vibrant, diverse aesthetics, to be replaced with a sterile monoculture of sick modernity that prioritises ideology over beauty.

In fact, this exact thing with statues of obese random black women is a thing all over the world.

Rotterdam as well. Already for a few years. An uninterested looking girl in sweatpants and sneakers. pic.twitter.com/HUL3CgqBuG

— Henri (@road2nowherex) May 7, 2025

Without even realising it the people making these things and those sanctioning their placement in public are literally erecting a monotonous, homogenized cultural landscape, all the while proclaiming they’re promoting ‘diversity’.

Similar statues installed recently in Florence, San Francisco, Rotterdam, & New York – all by the same (!) grifter-artist, “Thomas J Price,” all with high levels of federal, municipal, private funding. Need to gut these bureaucracies, banish this artist, retake cities. https://t.co/gX3V64QDHP pic.twitter.com/fP1I28IjsG

— golden age waitress ☀️ (@spaceagewtress) May 7, 2025

The objective ugliness of these things is stifling the human spirit, while claiming to be the exact opposite.

Brixton station, London. pic.twitter.com/KE04bQvUxd

— White Stoat (@Ermine_RC) May 7, 2025

Hardly Michaelangelo’s David are they.

*  *  *

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Nintendo’s first sales forecast for its highly anticipated Switch 2 console came in at 15 million units for the fiscal year ending March—falling short of Bloomberg’s analyst consensus of 16.8 million. The miss may reflect growing trade uncertainty and mounting macroeconomic headwinds souring consumer sentiments. The console is slated for release in June.

Goldman gaming analysts Minami Munakata and Haruki Kubota said Nintendo executives typically provide “conservative” estimates before any new console launch. 

Here’s Munakata and Kubota’s first take on the weaker-than-expected sales forecast for Switch 2:

FY3/26 guidance calls for operating profits of ¥320 bn (+13.3% yoy), assuming shipments of 15 mn units for Switch 2 hardware and 45 mn units for software. This is well below GSe (¥483.6 bn) and the Bloomberg consensus (¥449.3 bn).

However, we would note that Nintendo’s guidance has tended to be conservative at the time of new hardware launches, with upward revisions then following over the course of the fiscal year (as was the case when the Switch was launched).

Management also said that its 15 mn volume assumption for the Switch 2 is a level it is targeting for year one, and that there are no supply constraints. Given strong demand, with around 2.2 mn customers registering for the Switch 2 ballot sale in Japan alone via the My Nintendo Store website, we think there is ample upside potential to guidance.

The analysts continued: 

It explained that while the Switch 2 has a higher selling price than the Switch, which could present a hurdle to early adoption, the Switch 2 offers platform continuity, including backward compatibility with existing game software, which could support penetration. The company also plans to offer bundled software. Management underlined that the 15 mn unit assumption does not reflect any supply constraints. Our conversations with investors have indicated expectations for shipments of 17-18 mn units, which we consider achievable given that Nintendo has confirmed no major supply constraints and that demand appears strong based on ballot sale registrations.

Separately, Pelham Smithers, managing director at Japan equity research firm Pelham Smithers Associates, noted, “You will have a good portion who will think management is being cautious, knowing that there’s little upside in being too bullish at this stage. However, you’ll also have a portion that will be concerned that Nintendo may look to keep the Switch 2 in short supply through this fiscal year.”

Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Nathan Naidu commented on the positive pre-order trends:

Nintendo’s softer-than-expected fiscal 2026 sales and profit guidance vs. consensus is in line with an historically conservative stance, which tariffs probably justify. Positive pre-order trends in Japan, the US and other key markets suggest the company might achieve the 15 million-unit sales goal earlier for its Switch 2 video-game console. The 45 million software-unit goal also seems beatable, with the strong lineup of third-party games — including Cyberpunk 2077 — and in-house ones helping activate or entice upgrades among Nintendo’s 366 million users.

Two weeks ago, we commented on the numerous reports from major retailers about the Switch 2 selling out…  

Nintendo Switch 2 Frenzy: “Selling Out” Across US Retailers As Tariffs Won’t Impact Pricing https://t.co/iGaSCMTxm1

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) April 24, 2025

Recall that the Goldman analysts are Nintendo bulls who have previously stated that Switch 2 (the successor to the Nintendo Switch) will “unlock dormant hardware and dormant users” and send “the number of active consoles to continue to renew record highs.” 

Maybe Goldman and other analysts are correct—management could simply be offering conservative estimates ahead of the highly anticipated Switch 2 launch in June.

Authored by Tom Ozimek via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from deporting illegal immigrants to Libya or any other country of which they are not citizens without first giving them notice and an opportunity to claim protection under U.S. law, after reports surfaced of an imminent military flight carrying detainees to the North African nation.

U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy, in a series of rulings issued on May 7 from the bench and in court filings, said that any effort to remove noncitizens without procedural safeguards would be a clear violation of an earlier injunction that he issued on April 18.

“If there is any doubt—the Court sees none—the allegedly imminent removals, as reported by news agencies and as Plaintiffs seek to corroborate with class-member accounts and public information, would clearly violate this Court’s Order,” Murphy wrote in his May 7 ruling.

Murphy’s April 18 order prohibits the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from carrying out a so-called third-country removal unless the detainee is first given written notice in a language he or she understands, a chance to request a reasonable fear screening, and at least 15 days to file a motion to reopen his or her immigration case if the screening is denied. That order effectively barred DHS from deporting an illegal immigrant with final removal orders to a country that is not his or her home country without first giving the immigrant a chance to raise claims that, if sent there, he or she would face persecution, torture, or death.

The judge’s emergency ruling on May 7 came hours after the plaintiffs in the class-action case filed a request for a temporary restraining order, citing news reports and attorney declarations indicating that DHS and possibly the Department of Defense (DOD) were preparing to deport several Laotian, Vietnamese, and Filipino nationals to Libya without those protections in place.

“This motion should not even be required as it blatantly defies this Court’s preliminary injunctions,” attorneys for the plaintiffs wrote, while describing Libya as a country “notorious for its human rights violations.”

In two electronic orders issued later on May 7, Murphy reinforced the scope of his prior injunction and indicated that deportations carried out in coordination with the DOD may also fall under the court’s scrutiny. He scheduled expedited discovery into the role of both the DHS and DOD in recent removals and requested a briefing on whether the Pentagon should be formally added to the case as a defendant.

In their emergency motion, attorneys for the plaintiffs cited a reported flight plan involving a U.S. Air Force C-17 departing from Kelly Field in Texas to Misrata Airport in Libya, along with accounts that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers had allegedly instructed detainees to sign documents agreeing to removal to Libya or face what amounted to solitary confinement.

According to filings in the case, some plaintiffs had previously been granted protection from removal to their home countries under the Convention Against Torture but were later told they could be sent to third countries not included in their original orders.

A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.

The case comes amid the Trump administration’s broader effort to expand its deportation program and explore new destination countries for foreign nationals ordered removed from the United States.

President Donald Trump recently questioned whether individuals who entered the United States illegally are entitled to the same due process rights as citizens.

In an interview that aired on May 4 on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump said that such a requirement would require having “a million or 2 million or 3 million trials,” suggesting that a fast-tracking of deportations of proven illegal immigrants may be the most appropriate solution.

The president added that his administration’s lawyers “are going to obviously follow” U.S. Supreme Court rulings.

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix news,

The European Commission announced on Wednesday that it is referring five member states to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for failing to properly implement the Digital Services Act (DSA), Brussels’ flagship legislation aimed at regulating online platforms.

The countries facing legal action are Czechia, Spain, Cyprus, Poland, and Portugal. According to the Commission, these member states either failed to appoint a national Digital Services Coordinator (DSC) or failed to empower those bodies with the authority required to enforce the DSA.

Additionally, none of the five countries has established penalties for violations of the regulation, as mandated by Brussels.

“The DSA required member states to designate one or more competent authorities for the supervision and enforcement of the DSA, and to designate one of them as their national DSC by Feb. 17, 2024,” the Commission said in its press release. 

“Member states are also required to empower their DSCs to enable them to carry out their tasks under the DSA.”

Poland is singled out for not appointing or authorizing a national coordinator at all, while Czechia, Spain, Cyprus, and Portugal appointed such bodies but did not grant them the legal powers necessary to fulfill their responsibilities.

The European Commission insists the DSA, which came into force in 2022, is designed to create a safer and more transparent online environment by requiring large platforms and search engines to combat illegal content, protect user privacy, and address public safety risks.

Critics, however, argue that it risks overreach by incentivizing platforms to over-remove content, potentially stifling free speech; imposes disproportionate burdens on smaller platforms, reinforcing the dominance of Big Tech; and compromises user privacy through mandated data access for regulators.

Disapproval of the regulation has been met by both libertarian politicians in Europe and by Republicans in Washington, DC.

In February, United States House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan sent a letter to the European Commissioner for Technology Henna Virkkunen expressing his “serious concerns with how the DSA’s censorship provisions affect free speech in the United States.”

He argued that overregulation from Brussels would effectively create a “de facto global censorship standard” as social media platforms generally use one set of content moderation policies for consistent implementation worldwide.

X owner Elon Musk has also weighed in on the bureaucratic nature of the DSA and its overzealous approach to content moderation, while U.S. President Donald Trump himself also called fines imposed on U.S. tech companies by Brussels for failing to adhere to the DSA a “form of taxation.”

In Europe, Alternative for Germany (AfD) MP Maximilian Krah has argued that the DSA is designed to suppress dissenting viewpoints, claiming the legislation “is intended to prevent unorthodox and creative ideas from being shared on the internet,” while Sweden Democrats MEP Jessica Stegrud claimed an overfocus on combating disinformation and “harmful content” could undermine freedom of speech.

The Commission first launched infringement proceedings against the five countries in 2024. Letters of formal notice were sent to Czechia, Cyprus, Poland, and Portugal in April, and to Spain in July. After the member states failed to comply, the Commission escalated the matter to the EU’s highest court.

If the Court of Justice rules against them, the countries could face financial penalties and be required to act swiftly to meet their legal obligations.

Read more here…

The minerals deal is now official and legally binding for Ukraine as on Thursday Ukraine’s parliament voted in favor of ratifying the controversial resources agreement with the United States. This was a final key step in its adoption.

The Zelensky government is hoping this will more firmly secure future military assistance from Washington. The vote was unanimous: 338 Ukrainian lawmakers approved of ratifying it, and none opposed.

“The Ukrainian Parliament has ratified the historic Economic Partnership Agreement between Ukraine and the United States,” First Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko announced on X.

“This document is not merely a legal construct — it is the foundation of a new model of interaction with a key strategic partner,” Svyrydenko added.

Critics have warned that this could be a big resource grab by the United States, but since it’s signing was accomplished in Washington last month, Trump administration rhetoric toward Kiev has softened. For example, Trump is no longer demanding that Ukraine quickly move toward holding new presidential and parliamentary elections.

Meanwhile, Moon of Alabama has highlighted that there’s still a fight on as well as confusion over some suppressed details of the deal, citing Strana, which reported (machine translation)…

The opposition already accuses the authorities of concealing the main points about the deal. The fact is that the agreement on the creation of the fund, signed last week and already made public, is being submitted for ratification, and there are very few specifics in it. This is essentially a framework agreement. For all the main points in the text of the agreement, there are references to another document – the Limited Partnership Agreement. There is also a third document – the Foundation’s charter.

A number of deputies claim that all three documents have actually been signed (or agreed upon). But they showed only one-the least important and most abstract of them, from which it is not even clear what the Foundation will do in general.

The government denies this, saying that only one document has been signed, and the rest will still be discussed.

Trump has indicated the US could just walk away from efforts to mediate peace, if neither side is a willing partner. The White House has not said whether this means it would halt arms for Ukraine’s military, or intelligence-sharing. 

But the minerals deal means the US is indeed very likely to continue arming Kiev. After all, the White House now has more of an interest in protecting US ‘investment’ now and into the future.

Still, it is a very long-haul agreement: “Two supplements would spell out the details and would be published at a later date, officials have said about the deal which might not see a payoff for a decade or longer,” France24 notes.

Authored by Andrew Korybko via substack,

Historical revisionism and nostalgic nationalism typify modern-day discussions of World War II…

Trump announced that he’s “hereby renaming May 8th as Victory Day for World War II and November 11th as Victory Day for World War I”, adding that “We won both Wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance, but we never celebrate anything — That’s because we don’t have leaders anymore, that know how to do so!” He also claimed that “we did more than any other Country, by far, in producing a victorious result on World War II.”

He posted this less than a week before the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, which is celebrated in the West (and Ukraine since 2023) on 8 May and in Russia on 9 May, but the larger context concerns the trend of historical revisionism towards that conflict and nostalgic nationalism. World War II has taken on an almost mythological status in the West and Russia due to their brief wartime alliance, the war’s unprecedented carnage, and the way in which it shaped the world that everyone lives in today.

80% of the Wehrmacht’s casualties occurred on the Eastern Front and the USSR ultimately captured Berlin to end the war, but not before the Nazis killed 27 million Soviet citizens, all of which Russians remember on this sacred day. The West’s contribution to victory wasn’t insignificant, nor was the number of their people who were also killed by the Nazis, but the Soviets’ were still much greater.

This isn’t to downplay the West’s role and suffering but simply to remind people of the facts.

In recent years, however, the Baltic States, Ukraine, and others like Poland have led the European effort to present the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was analyzed here, as proof that the USSR shares equal responsibility with Nazi Germany for starting World War II. They then built upon this allegation to detract from the Soviets’ contribution to victory, refocus attention on their own people’s suffering, and in the Baltic States’ and Ukraine’s case, downplay large-scale local collaboration with the Nazis.

As these narratives proliferated across the West, leading countries like the US, the UK, and France then exploited them to exaggerate their contribution to victory, which led to the West as a whole developing a warped perception of exactly what happened during World War II.

Trump appears to be one of those who fell for this revisionist framing seeing as how he falsely claimed as fact that “we did more than any other Country, by far, in producing a victorious result on World War II” when it was actually the USSR.

Whether he knows the truth or not, his counterfactual assertion aligns with the trend of Western politicians taking advantage of the aforesaid narratives’ proliferation across their societies to stoke nostalgic nationalism, which sometimes translates into political dividends for them. 

In Trump’s case, he wants Americans to remember their country’s military greatness that contributed to varying extents to its victory in the two World Wars, ergo his decision to rename both anniversaries accordingly.

Russians and others who know the historical facts about the Soviet Union’s unparalleled contribution to victory in World War II will understandably object to his historically revisionist claim, but it shouldn’t have surprised them given the trend of the times. 

If anything, it was surprising that it took this long for the US to finally catch up with its Western peers in this respect, but unlike them, Trump might seek to emphasize the US’ wartime alliance with the USSR in order to legitimize his envisaged “New Détente”.

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

There is a social contract of sorts among all governments of the world to share economic data on prevailing conditions. Behind that practice is a collegial contest to see which nation has the healthiest system, which in turn serves the capital markets by helping to direct resources where they are needed.

Sometimes the data is inaccurate. Sometimes there are lies. But in general, there is at least an attempt to play along with the expectation. This allows agencies and investors to make better assessments and prognostications, plus assist policy makers and central bankers in particular to make better judgments.

There is a general rule in operation. The more transparent governments are with the data they collect, and the more freedom of speech that is permitted to interpret the data in different ways, the more credible it is. It is also likely that governments which share and discuss also have numbers of which they can feel pride.

Rarely do nations go entirely silent on the market, as in turning off the switches and making the data rooms go dark. It is an ominous sign.

This is precisely what has happened in China.

Starting the last several months, and, in some cases, dating back several years, China has gone dark in reporting the following: land sales, foreign investment, unemployment numbers, business confidence, numbers of investors in financial markets, real estate valuation, retail sales, and even vital data on cremations so that health authorities have no idea what is going on. The bureaus have simply stopped reporting.

With the second largest economy, and widespread doubt about the country’s economic health, this is gravely concerning.

Close watchers have long raised doubts about China’s GDP data. We are told that the economy grew 5 percent last year, which would be extremely impressive. But such huge measures are subject to manipulation in every country but especially in one that has made the promise of extreme economic growth central to the power and permanent control by the CCP. Experts have suggested that growth rates have been exaggerated by 2 to 3 percentage points.

This past December, a highly regarded Chinese economist, Gao Shanwen, was visiting Washington, D.C. colleagues at the Peterson Institute and sat on an expert panel. Thinking that perhaps he should speak his mind, he said very plainly that no one knows for sure what the growth rates in China are. He speculated that they might be about 2 percent.

“My own speculation is that in the past two to three years,” he said, “the real GDP number on average might be around 2 percent even though the official number is close to 5 percent.”

No one in the room thought anything about it. The speaker seems to have temporarily forgotten that he is not an independent actor and was in no position to offer his objective assessment.

But word got out immediately in Beijing. He was immediately disciplined and silenced. He no longer holds a job in his old securities firm. His comments have been scrubbed from any sites accessible within China. He has lost his license to speak about economic affairs. Meanwhile, the Securities Association of China has instructed all people who speak about China’s economic health only to say nice things.

We can gather from the above that the data that was once routinely reported is not saying nice things. It’s one thing to silence the economists but to silence the underlying data only ends in raising alarm bells.

And those alarms have been rung, and now observers are considering the worst. There might be a hidden real estate crisis, and a major problem with unemployment added to it. Investment might be collapsing and government finances might be in major trouble.

For decades, China has developed a stable system for economic growth that relied on five main pillars:

1. Lower-cost manufacturing to compete and ultimately displace manufacturing in the West;

2. U.S. consumers hungry to get ahead of their own falling wages and salaries with cheaper consumer products and intermediate goods;

3. Central bank credits for business development built on large holdings of U.S. denominated debt;

4. A domestic currency trading far below the trade-weighted average of the U.S. dollar, the world reserve currency, thus favoring exports over imports;

5. State-directed and funded infrastructure development that calibrated investment based on national goals.

It was never the free market that pundits imagined that it would become in the 1990s and beyond. But it was also helped by a loose regulatory environment that minimized the litigation overhang that vexes Western economies, and its agency impositions were tolerant of enterprise insofar as it never threatened political priorities.

Crucially, China was able to benefit from the presumption that the global system of trade would never raise foundational questions about low tariffs and cross-border investment.

That last presumption has dramatically changed. The first Trump administration began the process of reevaluation. This was in 2018 and the result was a documented decline in U.S. imports from China. This was reversed two years later with the pandemic onset that called upon China to provide vast goods back into the United States. Mass numbers of Americans found themselves mandated to wear masks, for example, most of which were imports from China.

Five years later, the push to decouple the United States from dependence on China’s manufacturing sector is back on. The second Trump administration has wholesale reversed 80 years of U.S. precedent in trade policy with a turn toward tariffs. The hope is that these will help settle accounts, boost U.S. manufacturing, and provide a revenue stream to reduce reliance on high income taxation.

Whether and to what extent this dramatic shift has this effect domestically in the United States, it has likely had a major impact on China’s economic prospects, simply because it challenges a long-running assumption that the U.S. would forever serve as China’s consumer marketplace.

We should pause to consider the great irony of this whole situation. For centuries, businessmen have fantasized about the sheer size of China as a consumer, and imagined ways to invent products and services to sell.

“A pair of shoes for every Chinese foot;” “China’s market will make us rich;” “A market of 400 million customers”—these slogans were bandied about for a century.

But when it came right down to it, and herein we find the essence of the unpredictability of economic affairs, it was not China as consumer but China as manufacturer that dominated the landscape for decades following its opening.

Only now do we see full consciousness dawn in the United States concerning the implications for U.S. manufacturing.

What is to be done? A better path than protectionism is mass deregulation, a dollar more powerful at home and more competitive abroad, and lower costs of doing business through a renewal of the American entrepreneurial spirit. This will need to come one way or another. Trade barriers alone cannot hold back the tide.

Meanwhile, China suddenly faces its own grave economic challenges, which could grow so substantially as to threaten even the political stability of the country. Right now, outside observers have been largely blinded as to how serious the situation has become. We just don’t have the data.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

In today’s environment, buying a new car has become a stretch for many households – fueling demand in the used-car market. 

But not all used vehicles are created equal, and reliability plays a major role in long-term ownership costs.

For buyers looking to avoid expensive repairs down the road, brand reputation is more important than ever.

In this graphic, Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu ranked the best used-car brands of 2025, using data from Consumer Reports.

Data & Methodology

To come up with these reliability scores, Consumer Reports asked its members to report how many problems they’ve had with their vehicles over the past 12 months.

This analysis focused only on cars from the 2015 to 2020 model year, with a sample size of over 150,000 vehicles.

From this data we can see that Japanese brands are generally the most reliable when buying used, with the lowest ranked Japanese brand being Subaru, in ninth place. Toyota and its luxury arm, Lexus, hold the top two spots, while Honda and Acura come in fourth and fifth.

Brands like Lexus and Toyota have a history of conservative redesigns, incrementally improving their entire product line rather than introducing many all-new systems. Our data consistently shows over time that cars from those brands are reliable when new, and they continue to be reliable as they age.

Steven Elek, Senior Automotive Data Analyst at Consumer Reports

Top Used-Car Picks in 2025

​Consumer Reports has released its latest list of top used-car picks, all of which offer good reliability, safety, and value across various price points. These selections are based on comprehensive road tests and owner satisfaction surveys.

For more detailed information and additional recommendations, visit the full article on Consumer Reports.

If you enjoyed this post, check out our ranking of the most reliable new-car brands based on data from J.D. Power.

By Vincent Lanci

Summary: This report explores gold’s reemergence not merely as a store of value, but as a strategic monetary tool for circumventing sanctions, supporting trade diplomacy, and conducting debt management. Drawing upon historical precedent, contemporary developments, and theoretical frameworks such as Stephen Miran’s Mar-a-Lago Accord, this essay proposes that the United States is positioned to reengage in a sovereign-level gold trading for purposes of reducing debt, rewarding trade partners, and restoring the US manufacture-export base. This mechanism, once dominated by bullion banks and now emulated by sanctioned states, enables the monetization of gold without outright liquidation. Gold-forward hedges provide the United States with an opportunity to strategically weaken the dollar as a component of its need to remain competitive in export driven global economies, reduce debt obligations, and support trade-partner allies through targeted currency support. This report argues that gold’s transformation under Basel III, coupled with a shift in U.S. monetary strategy, marks a return to gold’s core geopolitical function.

I. Introduction. Gold is a store of value; it is money. With its immutable physical properties, universal recognition, and lack of counterparty risk, gold serves as a uniquely effective asset in sovereign monetary operations. This paper explores how the U.S. can operationalize gold as a monetary instrument to manage debt, influence foreign exchange dynamics, and pursue geopolitical leverage in a deglobalizing world.

II. Historical Foundation: The Bullion Bank Carry Trade. Beginning in the 1990s, bullion banks employed a gold carry trade model that enabled monetization without sale. This involved:

• Holding physical gold owned or on loan from another party (spot position)
• Selling that gold forward (creating a future potential liability)
• Investing the proceeds in higher-yielding assets (e.g., Treasuries, stocks, or foreign bonds)

This trade structure provided income while keeping physical reserves intact and suppressed upward pressure on gold prices. It became a cornerstone of central bank expectation management strategy and a projection tool of a stable, reliable USD.

III. The Mar-a-Lago Accord. Stephen Miran’s Mar-a-Lago Accord offered a blueprint for leveraging gold to manage U.S. debt and trade imbalances. That proposal involved:

• Selling U.S. gold reserves
• Using proceeds to purchase foreign currencies with higher yields
• Reducing the effective interest burden on U.S. liabilities

Though politically toxic, the ESF and similar tools had already historically been used in currency stabilization crises. While Miran’s Accord was publicly shelved, some of its core mechanisms remain feasible.

IV. Gold and Sanctions Evasion. The Russia-Iran Model Sanctioned states such as Russia and Iran have leveraged gold to access dollar liquidity via trusted counterparties. By holding and hedging gold through countries like China, they generate liquid proceeds in local or global currencies that are ultimately converted to dollars. This allows them to fund operations while avoiding SWIFT and U.S. financial enforcement.

The oil-for-gold arrangement between Russia and China first described by this paper’s author in 2017. set a precedent. Initially dismissed as rumor, it gained traction when later acknowledged by credible banking analysts. Most recently, an offshoot of its success was announced between China and Saudi Arabia in which the Saudis would receive payment for their oil in RMB with gold optionality attached. The gold would be held by China as it had been for Russian deals. This shows that gold can function as a sanctions-neutral reserve and transfer mechanism while simultaneously being a monetary bridge (mBridge) to the USD or other currencies if needed.

V. Structural Shifts in the Gold Market: The macro and regulatory backdrop has shifted:

• Basel III reclassifies gold as a Tier 1 asset
• Recent OCC Gold derivative reclassification at Banks
• These banks held over 90% of U.S. gold derivative exposure
• BRICS countries now prioritize gold over Treasuries for trade reserves

Together, these changes signal a revaluation of gold within both private and sovereign balance sheets.

VI. A New U.S. Strategy: Gold-Backed Trade Diplomacy. The U.S. can now pursue a sovereign gold carry trade:

• Forward-sale gold to trusted banks
• Use proceeds to buy foreign currencies or EM debt
• Prop up allied currencies, reduce dollar strength
• Execute monetary stimulus while avoiding inflation mismanagement

This framework allows integration of trade and monetary policy. As part of bilateral trade negotiations, the U.S. can offer to stabilize emerging-market currencies, reducing resistance to tariff reform and strengthening political ties.

VII. Conclusion. Gold is returning to center stage as a versatile tool for 21st-century financial statecraft. By adopting carry trade mechanisms pioneered by bullion banks and mirrored by adversarial regimes, the U.S. has the opportunity to align debt management, currency strategy, and trade diplomacy. The convergence of regulatory changes, gold repatriation, and geopolitical fragmentation makes this moment uniquely ripe for gold’s strategic reintegration.