Former Goldman Sachs commodities chief and current Real Macro head Jeff Currie joined CNBC earlier Thursday to discuss all things commodities, warning that the latest Brent crude rally above $107 a barrel is becoming harder to dismiss as a temporary shock, with renewed Chinese buying and soaring refining margins (US diesel crack spread now $110 a barrel) signaling deeper pressure across physical commodity markets.

Currie warned that traders are underestimating an inflation cycle driven by years of underinvestment in the capacity to produce and deliver essential raw materials, echoing his summer warnings about scarcity in physical markets.

“The old economy is taking its revenge,” Currie said. “You see it in the rates markets. You see it in the commodity markets.”

Asked whether the latest flare-up in the Gulf conflict explained the jump in Brent crude this week, Currie pointed first to demand returning from Asia (read here). 

“Actually, I put a bigger weight on China coming back to the market,” he said, citing strong buying interest after returning from Singapore and Hong Kong.

China had contributed to the refined-product squeeze by reducing refinery operations and exports as access to crude tightened earlier this summer, Currie explained. But exceptionally high diesel margins created a massive incentive to restart those those refineries, bringing renewed crude demand into an already strained market.

He cited diesel crack spreads of $110 a barrel, exceeding the price of crude itself. That figure refers to the refining spread, rather than the outright diesel price.

“That’s a pretty big profit,” Currie said. “They start chasing it, brought those refineries back online, and it was just like an earthquake going through here.”

The rally in Brent is showing signs of greater staying power, he pointed out, with equities and longer-dated oil prices beginning to reflect a more persistent disruption.

“People are starting to go, ‘This is not transient,'” Currie said. “It has a different flavor to it.”

Thank you to @KellyCNBC and the @CNBCTheExchange team for having me on today.

The old economy is taking its revenge.

We are dealing with higher structural inflation after years of underinvestment in the ability to supply and deliver hard assets.

There are two trades happening…

— Jeffrey Currie 🆔++ (@CommodMkt) September 10, 2026

Complimenting Currie’s bull thesis on commodities, HSBC chief economist for global commodities Paul Bloxh warned in a note this week that a “super-squeeze” has begun (read report). 

Authored by Toby Young via The Daily Sceptic,

When I think of Michael Gove perusing the latest PISA league tables, proving yet again that his education reforms have transformed the life chances of English schoolchildren, a line from Broadcast News, the 1987 romcom, comes to mind.

“It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you’re the smartest person in the room,” says a veteran television news man to a young female producer.

“No,” she replies. “It’s awful.”

When it comes to teaching and learning, the man who ran the Department for Education from 2010 – 14 really does know better. As he has pointed out, a natural experiment has taken place in Great Britain over the last 16 years – longer, if you date the beginning of the reform programme to the Labour and Skills Act 2000 – with England implementing a raft of educational reforms and Scotland and Wales stubbornly sticking to the same old failed formula. The results in the just-published 2025 PISA data are there for all to see.

English 15 year-olds scored 492 in maths, 497 in reading and 516 in science – 29, 36 and 34 points respectively above the OECD average. England now sits comfortably in the upper reaches of the developed world, having climbed into the top 10 in all three subjects.

Wales, by contrast, has fallen below the OECD average, its maths score declining a full 10 points since 2022. Scotland, though still nominally above the international average, has flatlined since its own dismal 2022 showing and now trails England by roughly a year’s worth of learning. Just think about that: in Scotland, the average child is a year behind his English counterparts. (In Wales, they are two years behind.)

So Lord Gove has been vindicated. But knowing he was right won’t be much comfort, given the resistance to his reforms in the devolved nations. No free schools, no academies, no ‘comprehensive grammars’. No phonics, no spelling and grammar tests, no maths mastery, no EBacc, no Progress 8. Just the same old romantic dross – ‘problem solving’, ‘transferable skills’, ‘child-centred learning’ – that has failed Scottish and Welsh schoolchildren for decades.

Instead of replicating Westminster’s knowledge-rich curriculum, Edinburgh and Cardiff rolled out a skills-based “curriculum for excellence”. Even today, in spite of the overwhelming evidence of its failure, the SNP Education Secretary, Màiri McAllan, is still defending this rag-bag of progressive clichés.

Scotland’s education system, she said in response to the latest PISA figures, looks at “artistic expression, problem solving and moral education” so it produces “well-rounded individuals who are ready and capable to be resilient in this world”. Not so ready and capable, Màiri, if they can’t read, write or add up. As Gove rightly concluded, there’s no evidence schools can teach artistic expression, problem solving or character traits like resilience, so it’s better to focus on what they can teach.

The unions have a lot to answer for. In England, it was a standing joke among education reformers in the early 2010s that the ‘n’ in the NUT stood for ‘no’ because England’s largest teaching union had blocked every reform for the last 50 years. Gove and his trusted lieutenants like Nick Gibb faced down the NUT and drove through his reforms in the teeth of ferocious opposition. But his Scottish and Welsh counterparts weren’t so robust, quickly abandoning any effort to overhaul their failing schools when the unions objected.

Some of this can be explained by not wanting to copy what the hated Tories were doing down south. But even when the OECD recommended Scotland reproduce some of the measures that were clearly succeeding in England – a pared-down academic core, greater headteacher autonomy, stricter behaviour management policies, more rigorous assessment – the EIS, Scotland’s largest teaching union, threw up its arms in horror. Each time Scottish education ministers have so much as gestured towards reform, the union has treated it as an act of war.

All of which must be profoundly depressing for Lord Gove. What more do you need? he must be thinking. Worse, the current Labour Government is in the process of dismantling the Gove reforms. Incredibly, Bridget Phillipson and now Lucy Powell have looked at the PISA data and concluded that England’s education system should be more like that of Scotland and Wales – less school autonomy, no more free schools, continuous assessment instead of rigorous exams, toothless behaviour policies, and a neutered Ofsted. At the heart of Labour’s new national curriculum, we’re told, will be ‘sustainability’ and ‘decolonisation’.

The blob is back and the smartest man in the room must be reluctantly concluding that no amount of evidence will convince his opponents he was right.

Supertanker rates on the Baltic Exchange’s benchmark Middle East-to-China shipping route have surged to a staggering $800,000 a day. With US forces having destroyed five Iranian-linked tankers and Tehran threatening further escalation in recent days, prospects for near-term stabilization remain limited.

The freight surge signals that crude oil and refined products continue to flow but are becoming increasingly costly to transport out of the Gulf region to global markets.

According to Bloomberg, US Gulf-to-Asia shipments on very large crude carriers average about $29.5 million per voyage, equivalent to $15 a barrel before any additional war-risk charges or unexpected delays.

Kpler expects VLCC earnings to remain above $100,000 a day into early next year, compared with historical levels that exceeded $45,000. Morgan Stanley analysts point out that two-year leasing rates could surge another 20% to 30%.

Manu Sehgal, vice president of strategy and feedstock supply at Indian refiner HPCL-Mittal Energy, told Bloomberg that “crude volume is there. What’s hampering it is the transit; what’s hampering it is the shipping.”

A fleet of tankers conducting ship-to-ship transfers in the Gulf of Oman is helping keep barrels flowing through the Hormuz chokepoint. Vitol’s CEO estimated earlier this week that roughly 10 million barrels a day were crossing the waterway, while Goldman analysts put that figure at around 15 million.

The Baltic Exchange’s new Gulf of Oman-to-East Asia benchmark has surged 85% since inception, reaching almost $386,000 a day this week.

This means surging tanker rates add another layer of inflation pressure for global central banks. Those costs can filter through to gasoline, diesel, freight, and ultimately consumer goods on store shelves. 

Via Remix News,

Austria’s new nationwide ban on “traditional Muslim” head coverings, including hijabs and burqas, for girls under 14 in both public and private schools, has now taken effect as of Sept. 7, 2026. in Vienna, Lower Austria, and Burgenland.

The start date coincided with the start of the new school year.

Austria’s remaining states will follow with a ban next week as well.

The measure, framed by the government as a child-protection and gender-equality policy, immediately faced visible resistance from Muslims and the first formal legal challenge.

At an Islamic primary school in Vienna, reporters from Austrian news outlet Heute observed young girls arriving to school still wearing headscarves accompanied by their mothers. One child wore a pink hijab coordinated with her dress; two slightly older students entered in simple hijabs without parents. School officials did not immediately clarify how they would apply the ban on private Islamic institutions.

The law requires schools to start with conversations involving the student and her legal guardians. Repeated violations trigger involvement of child-protection services, with fines of €150 to €800 possible for parents as a last resort. Teachers, already under strain, must initiate these talks. There are now fears of real conflict arising in the coming months.

Integration Minister Claudia Bauer of the conservative ÖVP described the headscarf as “a sign of oppression and a means of controlling girls from the earliest childhood.” Chancellor Christian Stocker has separately called for a constitutional ban on political Islam, saying he does not “want to live in an Islamic state.”

The right-wing Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), the most popular party in the country is known for its even harsher stance toward migrants and Islam in the country. FPÖ politician Ricarda Berger stated there is “no place for political Islam in Austria, and certainly not in our schools.”

The party wants a general ban on all headscarves and face coverings in schools for both students and teachers alike, which would cover all ages.

Education Minister Christoph Wiederkehr of the liberal NEOS acknowledged uncertainty about the law’s fate at the Constitutional Court, stating: “You can never be completely certain.”

He added that the government and education ministry “carried out very intensive consultations” to draft a constitutionally compliant text.

Only the Greens opposed the bill in parliament. Green politician Sigi Maurer accused Wiederkehr of “creating new conflicts and offloading them onto the teachers,” saying the minister wanted to “foist the role of police officers onto them.”

Teachers’ union chairman Paul Kimberger noted that some communities had already announced they would resist and that certain conversations with parents “will probably have limited success.”

The Islamic Religious Community in Austria (IGGÖ), the largest Islamic organization in the country, condemned the ban as discriminatory. Spokesperson Carla Amina Baghajati said, “We believe it unjustifiably restricts the fundamental right to freedom of religion and disproportionately affects Muslim girls. Rather than protecting children, it singles out a specific religious practice and risks excluding the very children it claims to support.”

The IGGÖ has pledged to support families challenging the law at the Constitutional Court. A request for annulment was filed on the first day of school.

A 2020 Constitutional Court ruling had struck down an earlier ban limited to children under 10, finding it violated Austria’s duty of religious neutrality. The court dismissed premature challenges to the new law in July because it had not yet entered force, but that procedural barrier is now gone. Left-wing student groups have called for protests. An 11-year-old girl demonstrated against the ban in February carrying a banner that, translated into English, read, “My headscarf, my decision.”

The Constitutional Court is likely to have the final word on the issue.

Read more here…

Authored by Karen Siegemund and Bradley A. Thayer via American Greatness,

As the Russo-Ukrainian war continues, Americans may blame Russian leader Vladimir Putin for starting “World War III.” It is correct that World War III has started, but its cause is the People’s Republic of China (PRC), not Russia.

The war did not start with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 or with the appeasement of Russia in the years before Putin’s foolish aggression. It started with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The

CCP has been at war with the U.S. since coming to power in 1949 and has employed many fronts in this war to undermine America and the West. The CCP’s May 2019 declaration of “People’s War” against the U.S. was CCP leader Xi Jinping’s call for a maximal effort against America. Not coincidentally, the COVID-19 outbreak soon followed. The CCP lied about COVID’s origins, refused to share information with the world, and used Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), as its willing accomplice. Another front is CCP election interference. President Trump has revealed the CCP’s interference in the 2020 U.S. presidential election in an effort to secure President Joe Biden’s victory. Biden’s open borders allowed many hundreds of thousands of military-age Chinese men into the United States – prepositioning a force to strike against the American people in their homeland. The sustained chemical warfare attack that is fentanyl is another avenue of attack, destroying American lives and families. The CCP’s success at buying American and European politicians and journalists to serve as its agents of influence is yet another, as is TikTok.

Putin is not the source of World War III. Putin is, in the scheme of World War III, a secondary player. It is Xi who is driving World War III. It seems that the common denominator for every manifestation of this global crisis, whether overt or covert, foreign or domestic, is that Xi Jinping and his CCP have either inspired or enabled them – or at least, stand to be the principal beneficiaries. Consequently, while some call this World War III, one might consider a more apt name to be “World War Xi.”

It was Xi who gave the green light to Putin to invade Ukraine when they met in early February 2022. Xi and Putin have met over 11 times since then, most recently in Bishkek, and on each occasion, Xi has evinced strong, public support for Putin’s war. While the Russo-Ukrainian war is not yet resolved – it has lasted longer than World War I – it already has a clear winner: the PRC. The PRC provides great assistance to Russia – diplomatic, economic, and “dual-use” military aid – all of which is important to sustain Russia’s war. Beijing is receiving a prodigious return that is helping Xi win World War III.

First, by sustaining the war, the PRC occupies the U.S. and so diverts attention from its aggressive acts and preparations for war over Taiwan, which might include attacks against the U.S. itself. The U.S. intelligence community and military have only so much bandwidth, and the conflicts in Iran, Ukraine, and elsewhere in the Middle East are filling it. In addition, U.S. stockpiles are drained by the conflict in Iran and aid to Ukraine, including Patriot, ATACMS, and other missiles, and 155mm artillery rounds, all of which reduce the ability of the U.S. military to fight a high-intensity war with the PRC. In turn, a reduced U.S. arsenal hurts U.S. conventional deterrence in key theaters, like the western Pacific and Taiwan.

Second, the war cements Putin’s dependence on the PRC. Putin is Xi’s myrmidon, the supplicant in the relationship. Truly, Putin is Xi’s useful idiot. Xi drafted Putin to serve in his anti-Western alliance, which costs Putin his autonomy. Xi’s ultimate ambition is to overthrow U.S. power and position in the world and shackle the world to the PRC’s tyrannical ambitions. Putin’s interest would have been better served by emerging as the tertius gaudens of the conflict between the U.S. and the PRC. Now that he has tied Russia’s interests to the PRC, he will walk the path Xi requires of him. That requires Russia to accept diminished influence when Russia’s interests conflict with the PRC, such as in Central Asia, and to serve as an instrument of distraction for the U.S. and its NATO allies while China expands its military power and strategic ambitions. Putin must fear that once he has served his usefulness, Xi may overthrow him.

Third, Putin also serves as a lightning rod, attracting the world’s animus and attention for his acts while Xi’s genocide in Xinjiang remains too often unremarked and in the background. The PRC’s preparations for war against Taiwan and its increasingly coercive measures against the Philippines also do not receive the attention they deserve.

Fourth, as a result of the Ukraine war, Xi has secured his northern flank. Russian conventional and nuclear military power is now a tool to be employed in conjunction with or apart from the PRC’s military – but to serve Beijing’s interests. The U.S. has a “multiple front” war problem with which it must contend.

Moreover, Xi has secured his western flank in Central Asia. The Central Asian states perceive Russia as a threat due to the invasion of Ukraine and see Moscow as the junior partner in the Sino-Russian relationship. For Xi, this is a remarkable occurrence at the same time that China is committing genocide against Kazakh, Kyrgyz, and Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang or East Turkistan. The PRC’s western flank is as secure as it has been in recent years. With two flanks secure and Xi’s ability to project power expanding, it is no surprise that Xi is aggressing on the PRC’s southern and eastern flanks.

The bottom line is that the Russo-Ukrainian war greatly benefits the PRC. As the PRC gains in military might, this hurts the ability of the U.S. to defend its national security interests elsewhere, including in the western Pacific. In turn, this weakens the ability of the U.S. to deter aggression against Taiwan, the Philippines, and other states, as well as the ability to fight a war with the PRC, should deterrence fail.

The costs of the Russo-Ukrainian war are high in every respect. While Moscow may eke out a Pyrrhic victory, the true winner of the war is Beijing. The war continues because Xi wants it to, and his aid allows Putin to pursue his folly.

With its strategic position strengthened and its power projection capabilities expanding, the PRC is putting in place the conditions necessary for aggression. The U.S. and its allies should expect China to center its belligerency on its southern and eastern flanks. This aggression might be kinetic – indeed, at some point it will be so – against India on Beijing’s southern flank, against Taiwan on the eastern, and possibly even against Japan and the U.S. But the PRC will continue to employ all the tools of statecraft to bring its might to bear to cause the change it wants. Thus, the world should expect diplomatic, ideological, and economic pressure to be employed by the PRC against them, while Beijing also seeks to undermine the governments of India, Taiwan, Japan, and the U.S. We should also anticipate the continued expansion of the PRC’s domestic influence in those countries through the use of the PRC’s United Front Work Department to subvert them and other overt and covert efforts.

It is a new world. Soviet dominance over the PRC during the Cold War is now reversed. In World War III, the PRC calls the shots because of Putin’s strategic idiocy. Having the PRC’s northern and western flanks secured is a key step toward Xi’s greater belligerence. The CCP is employing many tools in this war, and the American people need to recognize the avenues of attack.

The U.S., its allies, and its partners must move beyond anticipating aggression to recognizing its certainty and the reality of World War Xi.

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

Authored by Jeremy Lott via The Epoch Times,

The terror attacks 25 years ago this week had enduring costs for America’s commercial aviation sector.

Today’s domestic fliers are on balance worse off for it, with higher costs, fewer choices, and more delays.

That’s because, on Sept. 11, 2001, men who were part of the al Qaeda Islamist terror network bought tickets and boarded four passenger planes out of Boston, northern Virginia, and Newark, New Jersey.

Once airborne, the 19 terrorists hijacked those planes and managed to fly two of them into the World Trade Center towers and one into the Pentagon.

The remaining plane, United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark to San Francisco, was brought down by a revolt of passengers and crew who had pieced together what was happening with the other planes.

The Boeing 757 crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, instead of its intended target, which the National Park Service identified as the U.S. Capitol.

At the World Trade Center, more than 2,700 people died that day.

When Flight 93 went down in Pennsylvania, all 44 people, including seven crew members and 33 passengers, including the four hijackers, died on impact.

At the Pentagon, where American Airlines Flight 77 from Washington Dulles Airport to Los Angeles crashed, 189 people died, including 125 people in the building, six airline crew members, 53 passengers, plus the five hijackers.

Airlines in the Red

For the airlines, the financial impact was awful and bordered on existential.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded all flights for several days. Once the planes were cleared for takeoff, many would-be passengers were jittery about being airborne. After all, they had just watched domestic planes slam into skyscrapers on their television sets, over and over.

These planes had long been seen as mechanical marvels that shortened long trips and brought the world closer together. The al Qaeda hijackings turned them instead into visible instruments of previously unimaginable destruction on U.S. soil.

Looking back at that day, the International Air Transport Association did not sugarcoat it.

“On September 11, 2001, the world changed forever,” Willie Walsh, former director general of the air travel trade group, said in a fact sheet for the 20th anniversary of the day.

“Those of us old enough to understand what was happening at the time still remember where we were when we heard the horrific news. Indeed, for many, it probably still feels like yesterday.”

The attacks were not only “assaults on the United States of America,” as far as the world of aviation was concerned. Those weaponized planes were also aimed straight at the “global air transportation system – a facilitator of peace and freedom,” he said.

Financial fallout from the attacks was swift and severe. Revenues and profits nosedived.

U.S. passenger airlines had posted profits of $2.2 billion in 2000. They lost $8 billion in 2001, and revenues did not climb back to 2000 levels until 2004.

Those losses contributed to the bankruptcies of several air carriers, most notably US Airways and United Airlines in 2002. United stayed aloft, but US Airways eventually was absorbed by American Airlines.

Airport Security Costs

An act of Congress created the Transportation Security Administration, popularly known as the TSA, in November 2001 to help address security concerns. The TSA took over screening at most airports.

The Aviation and Transportation Security Act also greatly expanded a previously existing air marshals program to put many more armed, hidden officers on flights to thwart future would-be hijackers.

Costs for U.S. fliers grew higher, in part to pay for the new, slower airport security. U.S. taxpayers are paying for it as well. The amount spent on the TSA has varied from year to year. At present, the yearly price tag is in the $11 billion range.

Gary Leff, proprietor of the popular View from the Wing website, is not happy about that.

“It’s not clear what we’ve gotten spending over $10 billion annually,” he told The Epoch Times.

TSA oversaw the formalization of what some critics have called security theater, with belts and shoes off, liquids limited in size, passengers subjected to various scanning devices, and lots and lots of plastic tubs.

Bill McGee, a senior fellow for aviation at the American Economic Liberties Project, says he still believes that TSA security beats the alternative.

“It’s really easy to beat up on the TSA, and I’ve done it quite often myself. In fact, there’s an entire chapter on TSA criticism in my book ‘Attention All Passengers,'” he told The Epoch Times.

At the same time, he said, it’s important to remember “what airline and airport security was like prior to 9/11,” when “security was the responsibility of the airlines, and it was often non-existent.”

“I think we can all agree that the airlines’ efforts in outsourcing airport security on 9/11 was a spectacular failure,” McGee said, adding that TSA’s existence indicates “that aviation security is taken seriously enough that it’s the responsibility of the federal government.”

He said he would not want to have such a “vital function that is so intrinsic to national security be outsourced to the lowest bidders again.”

Where TSA Can Improve

Yet there are downsides to having the TSA as it is currently organized. Instead of scrapping the agency, however, McGee suggested, “Let’s think instead about how Congress can fix the TSA for all of us.”

The federal government funds the TSA. When government shutdowns happen, as they do periodically, this creates problems for airport screening. TSA still functions during government shutdowns but not well.

Agents go unpaid, sometimes for long stretches. They have a statutory guarantee of back pay once the government is funded again. Yet overtime is discouraged, and absenteeism rises. This leads to longer screening times and missed flights.

That is what happened during the 76-day partial government shutdown of agencies under the Department of Homeland Security earlier this year.

Ha Nguyen McNeill, acting TSA administrator, testified in late March that the “cost of coming to work [was] becoming more untenable for the workforce.” The agency’s daily call-out rates had increased from 4 percent to 11 percent and at some airports were greater than 50 percent.

This reduced screening capacity was hiking wait times to “over four and a half hours at certain airports, raising major security risks and missed flights for passengers,” McNeill said in prepared remarks.

In contrast, a handful of airports participate in the Screening Partnership Program. This allows private contractors to do the screening, under TSA regulations and nominal supervision, with a different line of funding.

The largest airport in the program is San Francisco International Airport (SFO). At roughly the same time that McNeill was sounding the alarm before Congress, the airport was reassuring fliers that they could enjoy their spring break travels.

“While we’ve seen and heard about the long security checkpoint lines over the last few weeks at major airports around the country, SFO is NOT experiencing this issue,” the airport announced on social media.

During the partial government shutdown, the airport’s screener-contractors were “being paid without interruption,” and screening was “operating as usual.”

The San Francisco airport regularly posts its security checkpoint wait times. For Sept. 6, waits ran between one and nine minutes for general boarding and between zero and four minutes for fliers with TSA PreCheck authorization.

The San Francisco example illustrates the gap between what TSA might be and what it actually is, Leff said. “Instead of regulating security provided by others,” he said, the screening agency “largely regulates itself, which has led to a lack of accountability.”

For instance, border agencies frequently operate what are called red teams, whose job it is to try to get contraband through a checkpoint.

TSA ran red teams for years. They found that TSA screeners are very bad at catching items that have been flagged as dangerous.

“After a series of embarrassing disclosures about their failure rates detecting dangerous items at checkpoints [with] failure rates over 90 percent a decade ago, they simply stopped releasing information on their effectiveness publicly,” Leff said.

As the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11 approaches, Leff said that the response to the attacks has had bad effects for both fliers and would-be fliers.

“For travel, it’s meant that trips take longer. That means fewer trips by air than there’d otherwise be. It likely means more car trips, which are far less safe, and more loss of life as a result. But we never examine second- and third-order effects,” he said.

Last year, 64 people on commercial airlines died in the United States. All of the deaths came when an Army Black Hawk helicopter collided with a small commuter plane over the Potomac River near Reagan National Airport on Jan. 29. Three people in the helicopter also died.

Over that same period, 36,640 traffic fatalities were reported on American roads.

Progress and Innovation

Former International Air Transport Association boss Walsh saw one bright spot at American airports in the first 20 years following Sept. 11.

He thought that TSA PreCheck, where frequent fliers trade more information about themselves and a small fee for expedited screening, was worth celebrating.

Walsh acknowledged that “extraordinary measures” were probably necessary to get things flying again, post Sept. 11, but he made the case that the need for many of these measures had long-since passed.

Future American airport security could “move beyond the one-size-fits-all, rules-based model that still … governs passenger security screening” and establish “firm deadlines” to sunset unnecessarily stringent rules, he said. These changes would make sure that “what we are doing is relevant.”

James Fallows is a journalist, a small craft pilot and the author of several books, including a few on aviation.

“Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel,” was the original title of one of those books, published only months before Sept. 11, 2001.

Fallows saw the beginnings of something new taking shape. He observed smaller craft playing a bigger role in transportation and thought that would grow into a somewhat decentralized air-taxi system in the future.

The Epoch Times asked him about how the terror attacks had affected that development, and how he sized up its prospects today.

“So much has changed in the 25 years since the 9/11 attacks,” Fallows said. For several years, “dramatically tightened security rules limited private air travel of all sorts.”

However, that was not the whole story.

“The increasing congestion of airlines, and the ongoing progress in aircraft and engine design, has led to steady growth in private jet travel – for those who can afford it.”

The next step is to bring that experience to more people. Many companies are working to create an “air taxi model” that people of modest means can afford to hail, Fallows said.

The global diesel market – already trading at record prices – is set to further tighten in the coming months and keep fuel prices high, raising the prices of all goods and threatening the inflation targets of the central banks.

Industry officials, who gathered at the APPEC petroleum conference in Singapore this week, warned that the market has not seen the worst of the diesel crisis yet. Analysts say the real stress in oil markets is in the diesel market right now, OilPrice reported.

Global fuel markets are very tight and inflexible, despite the higher crude oil flows out of the Persian Gulf in recent weeks, Russell Hardy, chief executive of the world’s biggest independent oil trader, Vitol Group, said on Tuesday.

“We’re still not running enough refining capacity to prevent those draws, and we keep eating into the surplus that exists around the world,” Hardy said at the event, as carried by Bloomberg.

Despite the uptick in flows from the Strait of Hormuz, only 1 million barrels per day (bpd) out of an estimated 10 million bpd outbound flows are refined products, the rest is crude.

Refinery capacity is constrained in the Middle East, due to Iranian strikes on refineries and the trickle of fuel flows through Hormuz.

Moreover, refinery capacity in Russia is also severely restricted by nearly-daily Ukrainian drone strikes at Russian refineries, while Russia has banned diesel exports until at least the end of September.

Refineries in the United States and elsewhere have been running at maximum capacity this summer, having delayed maintenance. But they are unlikely to continue operating at these elevated utilization rates for much longer.

If the global refining system can sustain these processing rates until the end of this year, “it is going to be an achievement,” Shaikh Khaled Ahmad Al Sabah, managing director for international marketing at Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC), told Bloomberg.

“I think we’re going to see a very difficult winter coming in Northwest Europe,” the executive said. “This is only the beginning.”

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

Oil tanker rates have jumped to record highs as escalating risks to shipping in and out of the Middle East are prompting traders and tanker operators to undertake inefficient and more expensive trade routes.

While the crude oil supply is actually there, shipping it through the Strait of Hormuz remains a very risky endeavor, especially in light of the escalating U.S.-Iran tanker war in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, while Saudi Arabia has started to move crude cargoes out of the region through the north of the Red Sea and from Egypt’s Mediterranean ports.

The much longer workarounds are tying tankers and supertankers for longer with the shippers, tightening the market of available vessels so much that rates are skyrocketing to all-time highs. 

For example, the benchmark daily rate for a very large crude carrier (VLCC) to ship oil from the Middle East to China has hit a record high of almost $800,000, per data compiled by Bloomberg.

The price of chartering a supertanker to ship crude from the U.S. Gulf Coast to Asia has now hit a lump-sum fee of $29.5 million per run, and that’s not even factoring in fees for additional war risks or unexpected delays. 

“The VLCC positions list is now so tight that no one would be too surprised if we see the WS 400 mark breached for a Fujairah/East run off a prompt-ish position before long, crazy as it may sound,” shipbroker Fearnleys said in its latest weekly report for the week ended September 9.

“The oil still needs to get out through the Strait of Hormuz, and Iranians have increased efforts to stop that from happening. It’s a fragile state of affairs,” the shipbroker added.

“There’s quite a few bottlenecks all at the same time,” Alex Grant, Equinor’s global head of crude, products and liquids trading, told Bloomberg on the sidelines of the APPEC petroleum conference in Singapore.

“The market is quite stressed with all of that, and that’s showing up in the shipping rates.”

Authored by Irina Slav via OilPrice.com,

Pakistan is about to get some energy relief with tankers carrying Qatari LNG set to arrive in the country this month. The first cargo is seen arriving as early as Thursday, Bloomberg reported, citing ship-tracking data.

Pakistan has been struggling to keep the lights on after Qatar declared force majeure on its exports following Iranian strikes that caused damage to its Ras Laffan LNG hub. Since then, Pakistan has been forced to turn to spot LNG markets and pay hefty premiums for the occasional shipment. Qatar was the biggest supplier of liquefied natural gas to the South Asian nation, under long-term contracts.

The country has issued several prompt liquefied gas delivery tenders over the past three months, consistently paying $20 per million British thermal units and more-a tender earlier this month ended without an order, after Pakistan’s state gas company only received one offer, whose price was $27 per million British thermal units. This is three times higher than pre-war LNG prices that Pakistan was paying.

“The international LNG price is around $23.18 per MMBtu, whereas the bid received was $26.969 per MMBtu. The price was considered too high, so a fresh tender has been issued,” a senior Pakistan LNG Limited executive said, as quoted by Pakistani media earlier this month. Following the failure of that tender, Pakistan LNG issued a new one.

The Qatari cargoes would go some way towards alleviating the energy crisis in Pakistan, where power generation costs have soared due to the gas crunch and rolling blackouts have become a fixture of life, sometimes lasting for 24 hours in some parts of the country. As of July, these were 38% higher than a year earlier and since then have likely one even higher as LNG on the spot market has also trended higher while QatarEnergy announced an extension of its force majeure.

Swedish freight company Einride’s announcement last month that it plans to deploy 500 Tesla Semis on US roads, the largest publicly announced commitment to electric Class 8 trucks, suggests a shift toward fleet electrification. It also brings the next phase of trucking technology into focus: the gradual commercialization of autonomous freight.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has targeted late 2026 or early 2027 for self-driving capabilities to begin working on the Semi. That remains a Musk target, not a confirmed commercial rollout. Any version requiring a human operator would be supervised automation, like FSD on Tesla sedans, SUVs, and the Cybertruck.

NEWS: Google announced a major electric trucking project in Texas featuring Tesla Semi.

Google, Nevoya and Center for Green Market Activation will deploy:

• 25 electric semi trucks.
• Dedicated charging infrastructure
• An all-electric freight route between Houston & Dallas. pic.twitter.com/ZxSbFIJk5C

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) September 9, 2026

Needham analysts Chris Pierce and Mackenzie Holleran see a broader industry inflection point approaching in 2027, as factory-integrated autonomous trucks begin reaching fleets in greater numbers. Their note to clients says automation in trucking will lower operating costs, while longer operating hours could accelerate deliveries and shift market share toward larger carriers.

The analysts said that driverless trucking is already moving beyond technical demonstrations as developers expand routes, remove onboard safety observers and secure carrier commitments. The next test is whether carriers enter a mass-adoption supercycle to automate their fleets and drive down labor costs.

“We believe the debate has shifted from ‘can autonomous trucking work?’ to ‘how quickly can it scale?'” the analysts said.

They continued, “We see compelling benefits for early adopters and eventual trucking industry consolidation, underwritten by the increasing rate of adoption as industry participants see autonomy as a driver of share gain tilting the capacity playing field to lower cost providers capable of driving longer routes in shorter timeframes better satisfying customer demand.”

The analysts identified Aurora as the industry leader, citing expanded routes and operating conditions, customer contracts and the removal of safety observers from certain trucks in July. Kodiak targets observer removal by year-end, with Plus AI targeting driverless operations in 2027.

They noted that long-haul freight “represents the earliest commercial opportunity for autonomous trucking.”

Here’s how much carriers will save: 

Higher asset utilization… Autonomous trucks are not constrained by fatigue or federal hours-of-service regulations. The 10 hour Dallas to Phoenix route can be completed in 10 hours leveraging autonomy, vs human drivers facing an 8 continuous driving hour burden, and autonomous trucks have unlimited patience to wait out inclement weather as needed. Outside of fueling, charging, loading and maintenance, autonomous trucks can operate nearly continuously, with AUR citing a potential more than 2x increase in asset utilization for carriers.

… and lower operating costs... Early autonomous per mile rates cited by AUR and The American Transportation Research Institute show autonomous to be meaningfully cheaper than human drivers, with labor the single largest operating expense for most carriers. Cost savings are compounded by improved fuel efficiency and fewer at fault accidents reducing insurance costs, creating a secondary economic benefit beyond first order labor savings.

While solving for a structural labor problem…The American Trucking Association estimates the current US. truck driver shortage at over ~82k drivers, a growing gap due to rising freight demand and average driver age and retirement rates, with industry sources emphasizing that the challenge is increasingly one of driver quality and retention rather than simply the number of licensed drivers. 

For Tesla, the first step toward automation would likely be Semi trucks running supervised FSD with a human operator. The broader industry opportunity is fully driverless Class 8 adoption, which could begin next year as carriers seek to reduce driver labor costs and increase fleet utilization.

The pace of adoption will depend on safety and production of lidar, radar, and the computing needed for each truck.