Authored by Kevin Stocklin via The Epoch Times,

Global sales of electric vehicles (EVs) in 2025 increased by 20 percent over the previous year, exceeding 20 million units worldwide, with much of the increase driven by Europe, where sales jumped by 30 percent, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

But even in a red-hot market, European carmakers are struggling to turn a profit on EVs.

50K LAYOFFS
Volkswagen, Europe’s largest electric vehicle maker, announced in September that it would lay off 50,000 workers.

Stellantis, Europe’s second-largest auto manufacturer, reported write-downs of 22.2 billion euros ($24.9 billion) as part of its EV “reset” in the second half of 2025, largely due to overinvestment in electric cars.

Operating profit margins at Volkswagen, Europe’s largest carmaker, fell to 1.8 percent in 2025 from 5.6 percent in 2024, and the company announced that it would lay off an additional 50,000 workers, amounting to 15 percent of its workforce.

Europe’s automakers are caught between two adversaries: Chinese automakers that are aggressively taking market share and undercutting profit margins, and their own governments, which have attempted to force a complete transition to EVs regardless of consumer demand.

In 2023, the European Union mandated a 100 percent elimination of tailpipe carbon dioxide emissions starting in 2035, effectively banning the sale of new internal combustion engine vehicles, though it recently revised that to a 90 percent emissions cut.

In response to these and other mandates, car companies invested in new EV production lines, with Volkswagen alone committing $193 billion in 2023 to electrify its fleet.

“I think that European auto manufacturers are paying the price for paying more attention to what regulators want than what their customers are asking for,” Jeff Degner, a research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, told The Epoch Times.

He calls much of the money spent on the EV transition “government-induced malinvestment.”

Volkswagen assembly workers perform final checks and corrections on electric cars in the paint shop at the Volkswagen electric car factory in Emden, Germany, on Feb. 24, 2026. Focke Strangmann/Getty Images

Overestimating Demand, Underestimating China

In announcing this year’s write-downs from its EV “reset,” Stellantis CEO Antonio Filosa concurred.

“The charges announced today largely reflect the cost of overestimating the pace of the energy transition that distanced us from many car buyers’ real-world needs, means and desires,” Filosa said in a February statement.

America’s largest auto manufacturers, Ford and General Motors, have been more cautious about going electric than their European counterparts and have pulled back faster as losses have accumulated.

“The number one trend in the auto industry so far this decade is just the explosive growth in Chinese auto exports.”
– Garrett Nelson, equity analyst, Center for Financial Research and Analysis

In January, General Motors announced a $6 billion write-down, shortly after Ford announced a $19.5 billion write-down, as both companies stepped back from their EV commitments.

“EV adoption hasn’t developed at the pace or with the economics many of those original commitments assumed, and at the same time, European automakers are facing a much more competitive market,” Stephanie Valdez Streaty, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive, told The Epoch Times.

After starting from virtually zero several years ago, Chinese autos made up 20 percent of the EU’s battery-electric sales by May 2026, Streaty said.

Chinese automakers have captured the majority of global EV sales, matching Western carmakers in quality and features and beating them on price. Some Chinese models, such as BYD’s Seagull, which sells for approximately $10,000 in China, are not only undercutting competitors on price but also delivering on quality, according to reviews by publications such as InsideEVs and Top Gear Philippines.

For European markets, BYD rebranded and upgraded the Seagull as the Dolphin Surf, which launched at a discount price of $22,400 but now sells for about $25,800. This falls under the price of comparable European-made models such as the Citroën ë-C3, which starts at about $26,200, but remains higher than budget models such as the Dacia Spring at $20,100 and the Renault Twingo E-Tech at $21,800.

“The number one trend in the auto industry so far this decade is just the explosive growth in Chinese auto exports,” Garrett Nelson, equity analyst at the Center for Financial Research and Analysis, told The Epoch Times. He estimates that China is now exporting more than 1 million vehicles per month.

“They’ve invested very heavily in infrastructure, in logistics, in order to be able to export so much more than they used to,” Nelson said.

China’s automobile exports rose by 53 percent in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier, while exports of new energy vehicles more than doubled, according to Chinese regime data.

“The European market is really being flooded with low-cost Chinese EVs,” Nelson said, and Europe’s 10 percent tariffs and other duties on Chinese cars have failed to halt China’s expansion.

Vehicles made by Chinese EV manufacturer BYD, at the Port of Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China, on Feb. 22, 2025. Pedro Pardo/AFP via Getty Images

China’s Competitive Advantages

The major Chinese auto brands are BYD, Geely, SAIC, and Changan. In 2025, BYD overtook Tesla as the world’s largest seller of EVs.

According to Degner, BYD’s production costs are 20 percent to 30 percent lower than those of European carmakers for similar models. But European regulators, even as they pushed domestic auto companies to switch to EVs, simultaneously passed mandates that made manufacturing in Europe significantly more expensive.

This included a state-mandated transition away from coal and other fossil fuels in favor of wind and solar power, resulting in Europeans now paying some of the highest energy and electricity costs in the industrialized world, multiples of those in China.

“The Chinese have a competitive advantage, but that competitive advantage was created because of the high cost that European regulators are imposing,” Degner said.

Europeans are now paying some of the highest energy and electricity costs in the industrialized world.

“I would say that the Europeans only have themselves to blame as they have put into place, whether at the national or international level in the EU, the kinds of regulations that are making life more difficult for the [auto] industry as a whole.”

In addition, over decades, China has built a global infrastructure for mining and shipping raw materials for batteries, including graphite, lithium, and cobalt. The majority of these materials are also refined, processed, and manufactured into batteries in China.

And Chinese companies benefit from scale and an enormous domestic market.

An employee works on batteries for electric vehicles at the Leap Energy factory, in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, China, on April 26, 2026. Adek Berry/AFP via Getty Images

Of the 20 million EVs sold worldwide last year, more than 13 million were sold in China, and more than half of worldwide sales were Chinese-made vehicles, according to the IEA.

In addition, a February report by the Rhodium Group states that Chinese automakers benefit from extensive vertical integration of the manufacturing process, as well as state grants, tax incentives, and preferential financing.

Lessons for US Carmakers

Is Europe’s EV adventure a cautionary tale for the United States?

The Trump administration believes that it is. The administration eliminated federal tax breaks for EV buyers and canceled the tailpipe emissions and fuel efficiency regulations imposed by the Biden administration that would have effectively phased out many gasoline-powered models.

And there is reason to doubt that most Americans want electric cars.

While EV sales surged in Europe, the United States went in the opposite direction, with electric car sales plummeting by 45 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025 compared with the fourth quarter of 2024. America’s annual EV sales in 2025 ended up slightly lower than in 2024, at about 1.5 million vehicles.

EVs remain a niche market in the United States, where driving distances are often longer and the charging infrastructure remains sparse enough to give EV owners “range anxiety” on longer trips. Beyond this, there is the concern that EV demand has been highly dependent on government mandates and subsidies.

According to the IEA, the increase in European sales was partially driven by political mandates, specifically the tightening of the EU carbon dioxide emissions limits that came into effect in 2025, targeting a 15 percent reduction from 2021 levels.

Conversely, the sharp decline in U.S. sales coincided with the Trump administration’s cancellation of the $7,500 tax credit for EV purchases.

“Once that expired, the demand went from about 12 percent of the U.S. auto market down to 6 percent within a year, and so I think that is an indicator that the overall consumer taste for EVs is still not where regulators would like to see it,” Degner said.

EVs remain a niche market in the United States, where driving distances are often longer.

Having a market so dependent on government incentives creates a significant risk for carmakers when deciding on corporate strategy and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in capital investments. Even Tesla, which has been selling EVs profitably, reported in July that its operating income fell by 57 percent.

However, outside of the United States, EVs are expanding rapidly throughout North America and South America.

While to date, trade barriers have largely kept Chinese cars out of the United States, America is being encircled, with Chinese carmakers making rapid inroads in Brazil, Mexico, and Canada.

Electric and gas-powered vehicles are parked in a lot at the Tesla factory in Fremont, Calif., on July 26, 2025. Gary Wang/The Epoch Times

BYD began selling EVs in Brazil, South America’s largest market, in 2022. By 2025, Chinese carmakers produced 85 percent of EVs sold in Brazil, according to an IEA report.

Recent trade deals among China and Mexico and Canada have opened those markets to Chinese carmakers, and sales of Chinese cars surged in Mexico last year, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

“This is very concerning for U.S. automakers,” Nelson said. “You’re seeing trade groups raise red flags and sound the alarm regarding what this might mean.”

Finding Ways to Compete

Could U.S. automakers compete in the EV market if they wanted to? Some analysts say yes, with conditions.

“In the U.S. market, in light of rising gas prices right now, we’re seeing a decline in EV demand, but a significant increase in the demand for hybrid engines, which do have, of course, some electronic and battery components,” Degner said.

“By cutting red tape and access to those kinds of technologies, and certainly those kinds of natural resources, there’s ample evidence that the U.S. could compete with BYD if those barriers were removed.”

America could match China’s access to essential raw materials, but mining prohibitions and other regulations have held up this development, Degner said.

A plug-in hybrid vehicle in Irvine, Calif., on Nov. 28, 2023. A plug-in hybrid drives like a fully electric car for short trips, but operates like a gasoline or hybrid vehicle for long-distance travel. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

Japanese automakers Toyota, Honda, and Nissan have largely sidestepped the battery-electric vehicle market, focusing instead on hybrids, in addition to traditional gasoline-powered cars.

Regarding cost advantages, a Rhodium Group report titled “Why Are Chinese EVs So Cheap?” disputes that Chinese carmakers are more efficient, stating that, measured by revenue per employee and despite high levels of automation, Chinese auto companies “significantly underperform Western peers,” including Tesla, whose employees generate more than six times more revenue than BYD employees.

Instead, the report states that Chinese carmakers win through vertical integration, control of their supply chains, an enormous domestic market, and generous financing from suppliers.

Chinese carmakers win through vertical integration, control of their supply chains, an enormous domestic market, and generous financing from suppliers.

Matching China’s cost structure, the Rhodium report states, would require Western firms to develop similar supply chains, particularly in mineral mining, refining, and processing, to expand automation, reduce labor head count, and even build factories in China, where labor and energy are cheaper.

“Europe’s experience shows the importance of maintaining flexibility as the market evolves,” Streaty said.

“EV adoption continues to grow, but we’re also seeing manufacturers adjust their strategies and maintain a broader mix of powertrains.

“That flexibility allows automakers to continue investing in electrification while responding to what consumers are buying today.”

Of all the people who could end up on a US sanctions list for bankrolling stolen Google AI technology, a former Microsoft executive hand-picked by Sam Altman to run Y Combinator’s China arm was probably not on many bingo cards. And yet here we are.

On Monday, the State Department blacklisted Shanghai Zhisuan Technology, the AI startup founded by convicted ex-Google engineer Linwei Ding, along with MiraclePlus, the Chinese venture firm founded by ex-Microsoft AI scientist Lu Qi, and three MiraclePlus-managed funds, for providing seed financing to Zhisuan. According to Bloomberg, the measures may include freezing US assets and banking restrictions.

The best part of the story is Lu’s resume, which reads like a tour of every major tech power center of the past 20 years: the stuff corporate espionage movie scripts are made of. Per Bloomberg:

Lu, a former Microsoft executive, was recruited in 2017 by Baidu Inc. to oversee the Chinese search leader’s AI efforts, only to quit a year later citing personal reasons. In 2018, Lu – recruited by then-Y Combinator President Sam Altman – joined the US firm to help create YC China.

When Y Combinator abandoned the expansion a year later, Lu and his team simply kept going under the MiraclePlus brand. That’s the same MiraclePlus that, according to the State Department, gave a Chinese startup seed money in exchange for equity after its founder showed up touting his inside knowledge of Google’s AI infrastructure.

“An Important Missing Piece Of Our Puzzle”

Some quick background on Lu Qi (who also goes by Qi Lu, depending on which side of the Pacific is writing the press release). After rising to executive vice president of engineering at Yahoo, Lu was personally recruited by Steve Ballmer to Microsoft, where he ran Bing, Office and Skype and later helped shape Satya Nadella’s AI and bots strategy. In January 2017, Baidu poached him as group president and COO to run its AI push. He lasted 16 months, leaving in May 2018 for “personal and family reasons” and which, as CNBC reported at the time, really meant he just wanted to spend more time in the US.

Three months later he had a new job. In August 2018, Altman’s Y Combinator announced Lu would lead YC China (as well as YC’s research arm and a new research center in Seattle), with Altman (who just like Ballmer, personally recruited Lu) calling China “an important missing piece of our puzzle.”

Well, the puzzle didn’t stay assembled for long. In November 2019, in the middle of the trade war, YC pulled the plug on China. Lu spun the team out as MiraclePlus (Qiji Chuangtan in Chinese), which has since become one of China’s busiest early-stage investors: it writes $300K checks for 7% stakes and runs two cohorts a year. Its portfolio includes some of China’s hottest AI names, among them AI inference platform SiliconFlow and robotics maker AgiBot, both of which are considering Hong Kong listings (and both of which now have a sanctioned backer, which is probably not the line the bankers wanted in the prospectus).

“Replicate Google’s Technology… To Fit China’s National Conditions”

So how did a Beijing incubator end up on the same list as the guy who walked out of Google with its AI supercomputer blueprints?

According to the State Department fact sheet, Ding applied to MiraclePlus’s incubation program on behalf of Zhisuan, “touting his experience with and knowledge of Google’s technology and internal systems” and claiming Zhisuan could replicate Google’s “super intelligence” infrastructure technology. State says Ding used the program to pitch his ability to replicate Google’s technology to fit China’s national conditions, and that “MiraclePlus gave seed capital in exchange for an ownership stake in Zhisuan.”

That pitch will sound familiar to regular readers. When we first covered Ding’s arrest back in March 2024, the indictment quoted a WeChat promo for his Shanghai startup, in which he bragged:

“We have experience with Google’s ten-thousand-card computational power platform; we just need to replicate and upgrade it—and then further develop a computational power platform suited to China’s national conditions.”

In other words, the business plan was the stolen goods. You’d think a seasoned VC might have asked one or two follow-up questions about where the “experience” came from.

MiraclePlus, for its part, denies investing in Zhisuan at all. In a statement on Tuesday, the firm said the sanctions were imposed without any prior communication, and that it is in talks with relevant parties to have them lifted and expects the matter to be resolved through “candid communication.” Which, coming from a firm called MiraclePlus, may take a miracle of its own.

The penalties were imposed under the Protecting American Intellectual Property Act (PAIPA), signed into law in January 2023 to go after foreign beneficiaries of US trade-secret theft. In addition to Zhisuan and MiraclePlus (formally Qiji Chuangtan Beijing Investment Management), the list includes MiraclePlus’s Phase I and Phase II venture funds and an entity wholly owned by Phase I. Put differently, Washington went after the money too.

Apple Notes, A Borrowed Badge And A One-Way Ticket

As for the man, the Ding saga has been a long one. Between May 2022 and April 2023, the Google software engineer uploaded more than 2,000 pages of confidential AI trade secrets to his personal Google Cloud account, covering the architecture of Google’s custom TPU chips, its GPU systems, the software that orchestrates thousands of chips into a supercomputer, and a custom SmartNIC used for high-speed networking. In other words, the crown jewels of Google’s AI stack.

The method was low-tech to the point of comedy: Ding copied the data into the Apple Notes app on his Google-issued MacBook, converted it to PDFs and uploaded those. He also had a colleague scan his access badge so it looked like he was working from Google’s US office while he was actually in China. He secretly affiliated himself with two China-based AI companies while still on Google’s payroll, applied to a Shanghai government “talent plan” promising to help China build “computing power infrastructure capabilities that are on par with the international level,” and downloaded more files less than two weeks before resigning in December 2023. Then he booked a one-way ticket to Beijing.

When the charges first dropped, we couldn’t resist pointing out the obvious problem with stealing from Google in the Gemini era:

An ex-Google engineer was charged with stealing artificial intelligence technology while secretly working with two companies based in China. So China’s AI is now racist, woke and wrong about everything

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) March 6, 2024

The case later became Exhibit A in what Meta’s AI chief Alexandr Wang called China’s “open secret” tech-theft operation (Jun 14, 2025), in which Wang argued that China is on par with the US on algorithms “because of large-scale espionage.”

Fourteen Convictions, One Year

On January 29, a San Francisco jury convicted Ding on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of trade secret theft, which on paper carried a maximum of 15 years and 10 years per count, respectively. Then the case started to deflate.

In August, Judge Vince Chhabria tossed all seven espionage convictions, ruling there was insufficient evidence Ding intended to benefit the Chinese government (as opposed to just Chinese companies, which apparently is a different thing). And on September 1, he was sentenced to 12 months minus one day, plus two years of supervised release, about $198,000 in restitution to Google and a $2,500 fine. Prosecutors had asked for 70 months; the defense wanted three months of home confinement.

“The idea of a non-custodial sentence is very hard to swallow for me,” Chhabria said, which tells you how close Ding came to serving his time from the couch. For context, $198,000 in restitution for the blueprints of Google’s TPU stack, which is precisely what anyone trying to build an AI supercomputer without access to Nvidia’s best chips would want, is what one might call a bargain.

Which is probably why Washington is now going after the money instead. If the courts won’t make the penalty sting for the engineer, the State Department can at least make it sting for whoever funded him.

Beijing, naturally, is not amused. On Tuesday China’s commerce ministry expressed “firm opposition” to the sanctions, urged the US to “correct its erroneous practice,” and threatened unspecified “necessary measures.” The ministry also insisted China’s AI achievements are the result of long-term basic research and open cooperation, and have “nothing to do with the so-called ‘stealing of trade secrets.'” Sure.

Altman’s China Problem, Then And Now

None of this is Altman’s fault, of course: he hired a Microsoft and Baidu veteran with a sterling resume in 2018, and YC exited China a year later. MiraclePlus’s alleged Zhisuan deal came four years after that. Still, the irony is hard to miss.

The same Altman who once called China the “missing piece” of YC’s puzzle spent last month lining up with Dario Amodei and Elon Musk to ask Washington for embedded evaluators, an antitrust waiver and a talk with Beijing, while China goes full send, as we discussed in “‘Pace The Frontier’: Amodei, Altman & Musk Team Up Against The AI Singularity While China Goes Full Send”. Meanwhile, OpenAI is busy defending itself against Apple’s lawsuit alleging that OpenAI misused Apple’s hardware trade secrets after hiring its former VP of iPhone and Apple Watch product design. Trade secrets, it seems, are having a moment.

The Real Penalty Lands On The Cap Table

The sanctions themselves are probably more symbolic than crippling. MiraclePlus is a Beijing-based firm investing in Chinese startups, and its exposure to the US banking system is likely limited. But the signal matters: for the first time in this case, Washington is targeting the capital behind the theft as well as the thief, and it is doing so with a law built for exactly that purpose.

The more interesting question is what happens next to the MiraclePlus portfolio. SiliconFlow and AgiBot are both eyeing Hong Kong IPOs, and global investors tend to get nervous when a company’s early backer is on a US sanctions list, regardless of what the backer says about “candid communication.” We suspect the lawyers for those deals are having a busy week.

As for Ding, a jury found he stole Google’s AI crown jewels, a judge gave him a year, and his alleged backers got blacklisted. Something tells us the next would-be Ding will look at that math and decide the risk-reward is still pretty attractive.

Authored by Daniel Lacalle via dlacalle.com,

Decades of bloated government, entitlements, subsidies, and mass migration have destroyed Europe’s competitiveness and growth, all paid for with ever-rising taxes and more debt. They have also created enormous social discontent. Taxpayers are exhausted, and the recipients of subsidies are looting and vandalizing the streets. The flames in French cities are the bill that is arriving.

On Saturday 17 October, France burned again. What began as marches against the cost of living and the state of public schools turned into the worst violence the country has seen in decades. According to the French government, 550,000 people took to the streets, 1,200 were arrested, and 150 police officers were injured. In Limoges, rioters set the city hall ablaze; in Marseille, they broke into the city hall; and in Lyon, they torched the tourist office. AFP reporters on the ground described scenes more intense than the 2023 riots and the Yellow Vest protests of 2018 and 2019, six months before a presidential election. Major cities, including Paris, Marseille, and Lille, suffered enormous commercial damage with smashed shopfronts, shattered glass, and ransacked retail spaces. In Bordeaux, Mayor Thomas Cazenave reported that up to 100 stores were looted in his city alone.

The riot images will be explained away as the work of a violent fringe, and it will be said that the mob that loots luxury boutiques and supermarkets certainly does not represent the hundreds of thousands who marched peacefully. However, the anger is real, and it has a cause.

Europe has spent half a century building the largest welfare state in the world on the promise that government could guarantee prosperity, security, and equality for everyone. That model has completely failed, and the people who were promised everything are discovering that the state only delivers stagnation and impoverishment.

France is the clearest example of what “democratic socialism” does to a rich nation. France is the most state-heavy economy in the European Union. French public spending reached 57.2% of GDP in 2025, the second highest in the EU and 7.7 points above the average. Its tax burden is among the highest in the world, at 45.3% of GDP in 2024, behind only Denmark in the EU. Public debt rose to 119% of GDP in the second quarter of 2026, and the deficit stood at 5.1% of GDP in 2025. If big government, high taxes, and immigration delivered prosperity and social peace, France would be paradise. Instead, the protesters on the streets of Paris are demanding more of the same medicine that made them sick.

The welfare machine eats the economy.

France is not an extreme or single example. The disease is continental. Government expenditure in the European Union reached 49.5% of GDP in 2025 and 49.8% in the euro area. Half of the economy is directly controlled by the state, and much of the rest is regulated, subsidized, or taxed to the point of exhaustion. Social protection benefits alone reached 4,925 billion euros in 2024, 27.3% of the EU’s GDP, after growing 6.9% in a single year while nominal GDP grew only 4.4%.

Add the subsidies. European governments spent 340 billion euros on energy subsidies in 2024 and another 168 billion euros in state aid. Governments first make energy expensive with taxes, regulations, and ideological mandates, then subsidize the very costs they created, and finally borrow to pay for the subsidies. Citizens pay three times, as consumers, as taxpayers, and as the future holders of the debt.

The debt is the inevitable consequence. Greece ended 2025 with public debt at 146.1% of GDP, Italy at 137.1%, France at 115.6%, Belgium at 107.9%, and Spain at 100.7%. And those figures hide the largest liability of all. According to Eurostat, the pension entitlements already accrued in social insurance schemes reach 500% of GDP in Spain, 462% in Austria, 438% in Italy, 397% in France, and 347% in Germany, almost all of them unfunded, according to Eurostat. These are promises that no government can keep without crushing the next generation with taxes or destroying the purchasing power of the currency.

Germany, once the engine of Europe, now transfers 127.4 billion euros from the federal budget to its pension system in 2026, rising to 132 billion in 2027. Spain’s Social Security debt has almost quadrupled since 2018, from 34,888 million to 136,176 million euros, and social contributions cover pension payments only until early October. The welfare state now lives on borrowing against the future rather than on what the economy produces.

Competitiveness destroyed

There is no free lunch. Every euro of spending must be paid for by the productive economy, and Europe’s productive economy is suffocating. The International Monetary Fund expects the euro area to grow just 1.1% in 2026, compared with 2.3% in the United States, with France at a miserable 0.4% and Italy at 0.8%. Labor productivity per hour worked in the EU stood at only 78.5% of the US level in 2024, and in 2025 it grew just 0.4% compared with 1.6% in the United States.

German industrial production has fallen every year since 2022, and the BDI industry association no longer expects a recovery in 2026, only stagnation. Output in energy-intensive sectors is at its lowest level since the end of 2023. That is what happens when energy is made artificially expensive, labor is taxed at confiscatory rates, regulation multiplies, and capital flees.

Inflation makes the situation even worse. Euro area inflation rose to 3.8% in September 2026, with energy prices up 18.9% year-on-year. Governments that printed and borrowed their way through every crisis now discover that the real wages of their citizens cannot keep up. The cost-of-living crisis that sent hundreds of thousands into French streets has its roots in decades of too much government, not too little.

Mass migration worsens the situation.

Instead of reforming, European governments chose to import the illusion of growth. On January 2025, 46.7 million people living in the EU had been born outside it, 10.4% of the population, and the number of non-EU citizens rose by 1.6 million in a single year to 30.6 million. Immigration may be a powerful engine of prosperity when it is carefully selected for skills and enters flexible labor markets with low taxes and limited welfare. Europe did the opposite. It combined mass migration with rigid labor markets, enormous taxes, and the most excessive welfare benefits on the planet.

The result was predictable. Many immigrants have no incentive to adapt or participate and are trapped in low-wage jobs and welfare dependency. Thus, public services were stretched beyond capacity, housing became unaffordable in the major cities, and integration failed in entire neighborhoods. Governments used headline GDP inflated by population growth to hide stagnant income per person, while workers saw their wages fall in real net terms as inflation and their taxes rise. This is the evidence of a model that promised everything to everyone and delivered disappointment to all.

When you create a state big enough to promise everything, it delivers almost nothing but takes away everything it can.

Angry taxpayers, entitled mobs

Democratic socialism created two angry Europeans. The first is the angry taxpayer, the middle-class worker, the small business owner, and the self-employed professional who pays more every year and receives worse services, longer waiting lists, unaffordable housing, security problems, and a pension system that will not be there when they retire. The second is entitled Europe, a constituency that has been taught for decades that the state owes it everything and responds to inevitable disappointment with rage and violence.

Both are victims of the same lie. Politicians promised that they could raise taxes on the rich, borrow without limit, and expand entitlements forever with no consequences. They told voters that someone else would pay. Now that someone else, the productive economy, is exhausted. Capital is leaving, young talent is emigrating, industry is closing, and the bill is landing on the middle class and on young people who will inherit the debt.

What Europe needs is less state. Another subsidy, another tax on «the rich» or another emergency fund financed with joint debt will only deepen the crisis. The way forward is to cut unproductive spending, reduce the tax burden on labor and investment, end the subsidy culture that keeps the economy zombified, liberalize markets, and abandon the ideological mandates that have made European industry uncompetitive.

Europe needs a migration policy designed for prosperity rather than electoral calculation, selective, linked to employment, and not to welfare entitlement. It needs a gradual transition from unfunded pay-as-you-go pensions to capitalized systems in which workers own their savings, as Sweden and the Netherlands have shown is possible.

Citizens need to realize the truth, which is that the state does not create wealth; it consumes it.

The riots in France are a warning to America. When a society is told for decades that it is entitled to everything and then discovers that the state is broke, the result is not solidarity but violence.

Democratic socialism promised Europe equality and security. It delivered stagnation, inflation, debt, and rage. If America adopts this system, it will follow the same path of misery and desperation. The sooner Europe abandons democratic socialism, the sooner it can recover the prosperity that made it the envy of the world.

Bloomberg cites a Barclays corporate presentation saying the bank is cutting 5,000 jobs as it pushes ahead with cost-cutting measures and adopts artificial intelligence to improve efficiency.

The reductions would affect about 5% of the bank’s workforce. The London-based lender employed about 93,000 people globally at the end of 2025, according to Bloomberg data.

Barclays said it was “structurally reducing” costs to “generate capacity for investment.” The presentation also touched on organizational simplification and greater efficiency, supported by AI.

Separately, a Bloomberg report says that technology and finance jobs for young people in the UK have fallen sharply.

Payroll jobs for young people in information and communication have plummeted 30% between the end of 2022 and the end of 2025, according to Boston Consulting Group data. Finance jobs for the same age group fell 10%. Combined, the two sectors – that is, about a decline of 45,000 jobs – left about 163,000 employed. 

Young folks “are being squeezed out of some of the UK’s most important sectors,” said Raoul Ruparel, senior director at BCG’s Center for Growth, as companies grow more reluctant to hire young workers. 

“AI may be playing a part, but it’s unlikely to be the whole story,” Ruparel said. “Much of the fall happened in 2023 and 2024, before today’s more capable AI tools. A post-pandemic tech downturn and remote working, which makes juniors harder to train, are also likely factors.”

Layoffhedge, which tracks SEC filings, WARN notices, and verified press reports, has recorded 702,000 job cuts across 541 US companies this year alone. That’s about 2,300 job cuts per day.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

A publicly funded advert from the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre’s We-Consent campaign shows grandparents arriving at the front door. One grandchild rushes in for a hug. The other winces and recoils as the older couple lean in. The voiceover declares: “Not everyone wants a hug. Even from the people who love them. Awkward? Maybe. Important? Absolutely.”

This is not a measured reminder about bodily autonomy. It is a deliberate attempt to plant suspicion inside ordinary homes, cast grandparents as potential abusers, and train the next generation to treat spontaneous family affection as something that requires official clearance.

The same ideological current that wants to erase the words “mother” and “father,” rewrite sex education as social engineering, and replace “husband and wife” with sterile inclusive language is now targeting the simple act of a grandmother putting her arms around a grandchild.

?? Ireland is basically telling grandparents that a hug from Nana requires a consent form. The republic has launched a consent campaign ad warning grandparents not to assume their grandchildren want a squeeze. Is the “Irish goodbye” being replaced by the “Irish hello”? Writer: Marie https://t.co/92rg9ifarr

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) October 21, 2026

The 25-second clip is part of the broader We-Consent programme funded by the Department of Justice and aims, in its own words, to inform and educate the public about “all forms of consent” across every relationship.

In practice it has produced a video that visually distorts the grandparents’ approach so they appear threatening.

The indoctrination is getting really weird.

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) October 21, 2026

Also, as Graham Linehan pointed out, the makers of the advert even managed to crowbar in a diverse grandchild who looks nothing like the grandparents, just for the sake of it.

Why is one of the kids black? Is this about hugging your grandkids or random strangers?

— Graham Linehan (@Glinner) October 21, 2026

On GB News, Patrick Christys reacted with open disbelief, remarking that you would try telling that to his Greek grandmother.

‘Oh come, sweet asteroid of death… you try telling that to my Greek grandma!’ @PatrickChristys is in disbelief at a video released by the Irish state that warns grandparents over hugging their grandchildren. https://t.co/c3KsOC1dDi

— GB News (@GBNEWS) October 21, 2026

The backlash was immediate and cross-party. Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan stated that the video “does not represent the views of the Government,” was “both inappropriate and demeaning to grandparents,” and had been removed by the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre after officials engaged with them.

He added: “It goes without saying that having loving grandparents in a child’s life is an incredibly positive thing to be cherished and not something to be campaigned against.”

He further noted that while consent education around sexual relationships is vital, “this video did not advance that aim and in many ways was counterproductive.”

Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín called the advert “bonkers” and said it was “planting the seed that a grandparent’s hug may be insidious and a suspicious activity,” which he described as “really wrong.”

He argued that grandparents possess the “emotional intelligence” to know when a child does not want to be hugged, that the state has no business in this space, and that it “owes grandparents an apology.”

Fine Gael Senator Gareth Scahill labelled the piece “a complete waste of resources,” “offensive and potentially damaging to our older population,” and “a million miles off the mark.” He observed that the distorted imagery gave “a distinct impression of threat” and asked: “What’s next? Will we need to sign consent forms at arrival halls… before we can greet family members?”

Councillor Gavin Pepper slammed the government and NGOs for “losing the run of ourselves.” He wrote that while children should never be forced into unwanted contact, “we also need a bit of common sense.” The grandparent-grandchild bond is “one of the most important bonds in Irish family life,” and “a hug from a loving grandparent should not be presented as something strange or suspicious.” “Irish culture, family and traditions matter.”

None of this is an isolated misstep. It sits inside a wider pattern of institutional hostility toward the nuclear and extended family. The same political and cultural forces that fund these campaigns have pushed to strip “mother” and “father” from official language, treat biological reality as optional, and reframe parental authority as a risk to be managed by the state.

The We-Consent campaign’s own materials speak of moving “from a Moment to a Movement” and of changing culture so that consent becomes “an integral part” of every interaction. In the grandparents advert that ambition collapses into the grotesque: ordinary love is reframed as a potential violation requiring prior negotiation.

Families that once operated on shared affection, known character, and instinctive boundaries are now to be tutored by state-funded NGOs in the correct way to greet their own kin.

Public money was spent to produce and circulate this video, and the organisations involved saw no problem with casting Irish grandparents as the face of unwanted physical contact. Real sexual violence is a serious crime. Pathologising a grandmother’s hug is not a contribution to preventing it. It is a contribution to the long project of making the family itself feel unsafe, contingent, and in need of external supervision.

Parents and grandparents will continue to hug their children. The state can keep commissioning ads that treat that fact as a problem. The rest of the country has already decided which side of that argument is deranged.

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times,

The chaos in the streets of France has a familiar ring to Americans who watched several cities burn in the summer of 2020. What started as “mostly peaceful” protests were quickly hijacked by chaos actors who whipped up excitable populations into a looting and pillaging frenzy, resulting in police crackdowns in the best cases but utter destruction in the worst cases.

The metaphor of the powder keg is one that is often invoked here. In the U.S. case, we had suffered months of COVID lockdowns that created pent-up energy on the part of an entire generation that had been shut out of schools, spilling into the streets in the name of protesting racism.

Oddly, a media that had been screaming for people to stay home and stay safe flipped on a dime to urge everyone to get out in the streets for purely political protests.

Something similar seems to have happened in France. Rising unemployment, high cost of living, underfunded and failing schools, loss of opportunity, rising crime, and frustration over waves of new immigrant populations have reached a fever pitch. Peaceful protests turned violent with masked and destructive provocateurs lighting fires and pillaging whole commercial sectors in many cities.

It was six years ago that France experimented with some of the toughest lockdowns in Europe. They kept schools open but restricted gatherings of all sorts. Bars, restaurants, and cafés faced particularly long disruptions: closed from mid-March 2020, reopened gradually in June 2020, then closed again from late October 2020 until May and June of 2021. After that, there were long capacity limits. Cultural venues, gyms, and ski resorts were also heavily restricted.

Cities were shut to the unvaccinated. France used the passe sanitaire (health pass: proof of vaccination, recent recovery, or negative test) starting in summer 2021 for restaurants, bars, cinemas, museums, long-distance transport, large events, and shopping centers. From January 2022, this became a passe vaccinal for those over 16 in many of the same places, lasting until suspension on March 2022.

All of this was totalitarian by any standard and it created a fiscal crisis as the state funded the entire mess with huge subsidies and payments to both individuals and businesses. The economy never recovered and business has struggled ever since. In the backdrop of this is one of Europe’s most generous and expensive welfare states tangled up with a regulatory apparatus that makes the United States look like a laissez-faire utopia by comparison.

The unemployment problem is particularly poignant for students with advanced degrees as funded by the state. Like the latter years of the Soviet Union, everyone seems to have a high-level credential in something but these pieces of paper are guaranteeing nothing on the real-world job markets.

Then there is the resulting inflation, the worst in 40 years. It was intensified by France’s idiotic embrace of net zero policies on energy that have resulted in high prices and rationing. This is the land of austerity, highly controlled, with a ruling class presiding over dramatically declining living standards, a forever rising welfare state, a highly regulated business sector, combined with a disastrous immigration policy that has destabilized demographics.

No French government has balanced its books in 52 years. The parasitic elites have squandered the wealth of the population while closing off opportunities for enterprise and economic growth.

France, more than any other industrialized democracy, has followed the path of Progressive policies in everything. And look where it has gotten them? No one likes the results and absolutely no one trusts the system. French voters keep rejecting establishment politicians but the establishment somehow never leaves. Reform never arrives while frustrations fester.

The 19th-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat long ago nailed the question of the participation in the public life of a nation, explaining why it cannot belong to all but only to those who have the capacity to exercise that right responsibly.

“It is not the voter alone who suffers the consequences of his vote,” he wrote, “because each vote touches and affects everyone in the entire community; because the people in the community have a right to demand some safeguards concerning the acts upon which their welfare and existence depend.”

Exactly right and this is precisely the problem in which France found itself. It never restricted participation rights even as it flung open the borders and endlessly expanded the welfare state. This is the path to national suicide in any nation.

Is it too late for a political solution? Perhaps but that raises the question of how this chaos will resolve. We could look back to the interwar period in Europe and see one possible path. The inflation and social chaos as fallout from the Great War ended up raising a generation of authoritarian politicians rallying around fascist ideology. We tend to single out Germany but often forget that the same tendencies hit Italy, Spain, and France.

This is the only real modern precedent we have for how this ends. History may not repeat and I’ve wondered for years if something more dramatic is headed to Europe, something more like 1989 and 1990 in the former Soviet empire. States unraveled in different ways but the result was the same everywhere. An entire establishment and system were washed away in a few short years, discrediting decades of rule.

The states from that period that undertook the biggest reforms – Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Soviet satellites Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia – also happened to be the same states that resisted the push for open borders for several decades. They have avoided the economic sclerosis of Europe along with the social, demographic, and industrial decay. It’s possible that the next stage of Europe will involve not just the full-scale unraveling of the European Union but also the abrupt overthrow of whole political establishments.

Let France be a warning to America. The policies that inflicted so many wounds on this country are all the same policies advocated in elite and fashionable circles in the United States, pushed by the heights of academia, and celebrated by establishment media. It’s all about more controls, more corporate cartels, more regulations, higher taxes, and more immigration floods without any real standards over what constitutes citizenship.

If the United States goes this way – it very well could happen with enough voter apathy and poor policies such as those being imposed on New York City today – we’ll end up right where France is today. We face a choice. We can choose chaos or choose to return to the ideals of a constitutional republic that our Founders envisioned. This is not only a fork in the road for France. It points to a coming fork for the United States too.

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

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday that his directive to the Israeli military is to “overthrow the regime in Iran” as he continues to ramp up his rhetoric in the days before the October 27 Israeli elections.

“My directive to the IDF, the Mossad, and the defense establishment… is to overthrow the regime in Iran,” Netanyahu told a group of graduating IDF officers, according to The Jerusalem Post.

The Israeli leader went on to claim that Iran’s new supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, is pursuing nuclear weapons, a claim he’s been making about the Islamic Republic for decades.

“The Iranian regime still has not learned its lesson. Mojtaba Khamenei decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and has released the safety catch, and Iran is once again trying to develop weapons of death,” he said. “Iran is once again attempting to develop a nuclear bomb.”

While both Netanyahu and President Trump continue to frame the conflict as being about preventing a nuclear-armed Iran, there was no evidence either before the June 2025 war or the current war that Tehran had decided to pursue nuclear weapons, and that was the consensus of the US intelligence agencies.

Netanyahu also referenced Trump’s suggestion that the US and Israel will “finish the job” against Iran, something the US president said when endorsing Netanyahu for Israel’s elections.

“And so, as long as they are here, as long as they are willing to join a threatening and terrible weapon, the State of Israel is in existential danger. And our role, the role of all of us, is to save the nation. My good friend, President Trump, also believes that this is the only way,” Netanyahu said.

“He said a few days ago, ‘We are ready to finish the job, to finish the job, he said. We are ready to finish the job, but we will do it only with you, the State of Israel.’ And this is exactly what we will do,” he added.

The Financial Times reported on Wednesday that Netanyahu wanted to resume bombing Iran earlier this month and that the IDF was ready to start the strikes on October 10, but that Trump decided not to restart the conflict before the November 3 US midterm elections.

Meanwhile, an Iranian response to Trump recently touting the MOAB/nicknamed Mother of all Bombs, the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb:

Iran says it is preparing to unveil a weapon called the “father of all bombs”, amid reports Trump has ordered plans for strikes on Iran’s energy infrastructure using the “mother of all bombs”, the largest non-nuclear bomb in the US arsenal. LIVE updates: https://t.co/AfJieCwffH https://t.co/Z1vzPKS5sM

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) October 21, 2026

The report said that the strikes would have targeted Iran’s nuclear facilities, government sites, and civilian infrastructure, and that if Trump had given the green light, the attacks would have been heavier than the ones launched when the war began on February 28.

Chinese robotics leader Unitree unveiled its H2-X in a promotional video Wednesday morning, highlighting the terrifying capabilities of humanoid robots and raising questions about their eventual dual-use military applications.

The H2-X footage reminds us how close humanity is to the “Terminator” movie’s Skynet robots, with potential testing/deployment in active war zones becoming an increasingly near-term reality.

“Powerful performance to serve and guard you, with a maximum endurance of approximately 8 hours,” Unitree wrote on X.

Unitree Introducing: H2-X Kung Fu Legend Guardian🤖 Powerful performance to serve and guard you, with a maximum endurance of approximately 8 hours. Please use the robot safely and in a friendly manner. https://t.co/5RU5kDzSUK

— Unitree (@UnitreeRobotics) October 21, 2026

Unitree’s video builds on BTIG’s note last week, which outlined “real-world evidence” showing that these humanoids are moving onto factory floors, into warehouses, and behind restaurant counters.

Our view from the first quarter of this year is that movement already suggests these robots are intriguing Ukrainian military commanders, as testing may be underway or could begin soon.