Authored by – Remix News Staff – via Remix News,

German Federal Police recorded 98,026 crimes at train stations and on trains in the first half of 2026, with foreign nationals substantially overrepresented among identified suspects in violent, property and sexual offenses relative to their share of the population. In the crime of sexual offenses, foreigners represented 53 percent of suspects.

The figures, provided by the Interior Ministry in response to a parliamentary inquiry from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) group, exclude high-volume offenses such as fare evasion. They include roughly 14,000 violent crimes, 1,104 sexual offenses, about 24,000 property crimes, approximately 16,000 cases of property damage, nearly 4,500 drug offenses, and 796 weapons offenses, according to German newspaper Berliner Zeitung.

For sexual offenses, 53 percent of known suspects were non-German, with Syrians, Poles and Afghans again ranking highest.

🇩🇪‼️ “I will beat you till you die… Look at your pig skin.” A migrant makes sexist, racist, and anti-LGBT remarks against young women in the Berlin train system near the Tempelhof stop. https://t.co/LuJZCcrTsT

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) November 19, 2024

🇩🇪🔴 “Since the attack, he wakes up every night screaming.” An African migrant randomly attacked a 14-year-old German boy inside Freiburg’s central train station and tried to gouge out his eye. The victim’s father, Roland H., also believes the attacker may have tried to carve a swastika into the boy’s cheek. The suspect has already been released by police. Leon had just stepped off a train from Heilbronn on Sept. 9 and was waiting on a staircase for his father, 54-year-old Roland H., when an Ethiopian man punched him in the face without warning. The blow knocked Leon’s head against a stone step and left him dazed. The attacker then bent over him, reached for his eye and shouted, “I’ll kill you!” A cafe owner, 46-year-old Pino R., said he saw the assault and intervened. “I saw the boy sitting by the stairs. At that moment, I saw and heard the perpetrator running towards the boy shouting: ‘I’ll kill you,”’ Pino R. told Bild newspaper. He added, “Then, the man reached for the boy’s eye and threatened to tear out his eyeball. Then, I jumped on the attacker and pulled him down.” Only then, Pino R. said, did he see that the man was holding a carpet knife. He called staff for help and alerted police. Roland H. arrived shortly afterward and found his injured son on the stairs. Leon was taken to a hospital with injuries to his face and eye. The father said that the injury on Leon’s cheek looks remarkably like a swastika, raising questions about whether the Ethiopian migrant tried to carve the symbol in the boy’s face. “Thank God he missed the eye when he tried to grab it,” Roland H. said. “I am so grateful to Pino. He saved my son’s life.” Officers found pepper spray and a utility knife in the suspect’s pants pocket. The suspect allegedly told police he had mistaken the boy for someone else. Leon remains in pain and is taking painkillers. He is also receiving psychiatric treatment following the random attack. “He is now very introverted and has said he will never take the train again,” his father said. “Since the attack, he wakes up every night screaming.” Follow: @RMXnews

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) September 21, 2026

Among suspects of known nationality in violent crimes, 5,596 were German citizens and 4,631 were non-German, meaning foreign nationals accounted for about 45 percent of identified suspects. The most frequent non-German nationalities were Syrian (581), Polish (575), Ukrainian (439) and Afghan (351).

In property crimes, non-Germans made up 56.4 percent of known suspects, ,948 versus 5,283 Germans, led by Poles, Ukrainians and Romanians.

Foreign nationals make up roughly 15 percent of Germany’s population of about 83 million, according to federal statistics. The share of non-German suspects in these categories is therefore several times higher than their population proportion.

🇩🇪A German bus comes to a halt after a Black male spits on a train window and then exposes himself to passengers (cameraman turns away just in time). The incident occurred in the city of Ulm in southwestern Germany. This is what Europeans have to deal with on public transport now.

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) August 27, 2026

Similar overrepresentation has appeared in prior years’ data for stations and trains, including elevated rates in knife-related and sexual offenses.

In 44 cases of people being pushed onto the tracks, 16 of the 25 suspects with known nationality were foreign nationals. Knife attacks totaled 141 at stations and 54 on trains. Attacks on Federal Police officers and railway staff also featured notable shares of non-German suspects among those identified.

The stations with the highest overall crime counts included Cologne Central Station (2,664), Hamburg (2,662) and Frankfurt (2,226). For violent crimes, Leipzig recorded the most (397), followed by Hanover and Frankfurt.

🇩🇪”Please stop touching me… You’re touching me and I don’t want that.” A migrant male sexually assaults a young woman on a German train, while criticizing her piercing, saying it is for prostitutes who “do everything. Sucking, swallowing.” German public transport in 2026. https://t.co/NUjcBhtuMS

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) May 7, 2026

AfD lawmaker Martin Hess called the numbers a “security policy declaration of bankruptcy” by the government, highlighting the prominence of Syrian suspects in violence and sexual offenses and arguing that stations and trains were being turned into areas of fear.

It is important to note that for all German suspects, there is no information available out their migration background. In many cases, it has been discovered through the analysis of first names of these suspects that at least half of them have foreign names, such as in the category of gang rape.

🇩🇪🔴 A migrant was awarded with German citizenship after stabbing this German comedian 5 times inside the Bremen central train station. Nikita Miller expressed disbelief that the migrant who nearly killed him received German citizenship. Not only that, but he was released on the same night of the stabbing by the judge. “Nothing has been done so far. The perpetrator was released the same night with the statement: ‘He no longer poses any danger.’” Miller told the court that he only survived because he successfully fought back during the random attack. However, during the 20 second fight, Miller suffered 5 serious stab wounds, including a head stab wound that was 15 cm (6 inches) long and required 12 stitches. The justice system argued that since the migrant did not kill Miller, he could not be charged with attempted murder and had his charge dropped to bodily harm. The most incredible aspect of the case may be that Miller told German news outlet Express that the suspect was granted German citizenship despite the stabbing attack. The suspect’s nationality has never been released. Since the incident, Miller has moved from Cologne to Norway, citing safety concerns in Germany and his struggle with the justice system. He psychologically dealt with the knife attack through therapy, but could not stand the thought of something happening to his family. “I thought, if something happens to my wife or my family and I have to struggle with this justice system again, I won’t survive it a second time. And then I said, ‘We have to move.’”

— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) May 12, 2026

For the better part of three years, the hottest seat in London’s multi-manager world was a European rates book: lever up French OATs in repo, clip the carry, collect the seven-figure payout. This month, the French bond market sent the bill.

According to a must-read report from eFinancialCareers’ Sarah Butcher, London’s macro hedge funds are quietly emptying out their EGB desks. Funds aren’t talking about performance, but headhunters and bank traders who have been keeping score say the count of ejected European rates PMs and traders has climbed from the mid-70s a few weeks ago to close to 100 people. One senior trader at a liquidity provider summed it up in four words: “Everyone has blown up… they are all out”

In other words, the most crowded trade in European fixed income just found out what happens when the collateral is the problem.

And the bleeding hasn’t stopped. This morning Bloomberg flashed that the French bond risk gauge is nearing 160bps, a fresh 15-year high, while French 10Y yields hit 5% for the first time since July 2002.

Below we walk through what blew up, why it blew up (twice), what Goldman, Morgan Stanley and the rest of the Street make of it, and why the market’s attention is already drifting to the next domino: Italy.

The Trade: Borrow Against France, Pocket The Difference

The mechanics were simple enough to fit on a Post-it. Funds bought French government bonds, financed them in the repo market using those same OATs as collateral, and pocketed the gap between the bond’s yield and the repo cost. Lever it up enough times and a few basis points of carry becomes a career. Per eFC, as French yields rose amid political chaos, OATs sold off and the whole highly leveraged structure was turned upside down.

A bank trader watching from the sidelines was less charitable:

“These people weren’t even real portfolio managers,” claims one senior trader, watching from the sidelines in a London bank.

“They were just using EGBs as a carry asset. Buying bonds, sitting on the carry and getting a percentage cut. It was fun for a while. You had a lot of PMs who were long France and long Italy, but with inflation coming in and rates high, it wasn’t going to last.”

Another PM in the sector offered a more philosophical take: “every bubble gets its moment.”

The wider version of the trade, as Bloomberg reported on Oct 2, was the OAT asset-swap: funds including Taula Capital and Balyasny had built positions to harvest the spread between French yields and interest-rate swaps. Those were lucrative right up until the budget blowup of Oct 1, when the trades flipped from winners to liabilities and everyone hit the exit at once. RBC BlueBay’s Kaspar Hense told Bloomberg what that looked like from the inside:

“Most typical hedge-fund strategies are in risk reduction mode. There have also been stop-loss levels triggered, partly on the steepener trades and now on long France trades.” (emphasis ours)
— Kaspar Hense, RBC BlueBay Asset Management, via Bloomberg

Fidelity International’s fixed income CIO Marion Le Morhedec went further, estimating that hedge fund activity could explain roughly half of the recent moves in the French-German spread, pointing to particularly heavy Eurex activity. Turns out the “liquidity providers” were also the liquidity takers.

Regular readers will recall that we called this one in real time on the very first day of the month:

it’s been a while since we had a European sovereign debt crisis

*FRANCE-GERMANY 10-YEAR YIELD SPREAD WIDENS 8BPS TO 135BPS

France CDS widest in 13 years

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 1, 2026

…which was followed hours later by “Debt Crisis Back? European Bond Markets Crash, CDS Explode Amid France Budget Panic Contagion” (Oct 1). By the next day, the OAT-Bund spread hit 154bps, the widest since 2011, and the deleveraging was in full swing.

Same Trade, Same Crowd, Same Exit Door

The most damning detail in the eFC piece: according to the liquidity-provider trader, many of the PMs who blew up this month had already blown up in March, on the same positions. That was when the Iran war and the Hormuz shock triggered the first great European rates unwind, and when, per Bloomberg, multi-strats from Millennium to Balyasny to ExodusPoint gave back some or all of their year-to-date gains as crowded trades unwound.

Seven months apart, the same book got carried out twice. Diversification at its finest.

“They’ve blown up twice on the same trades.”

Another trader observes that a lot of funds moved into the European fixed income space in the belief that it was easy money:

“The whole European carry system is now being questioned.”

You can see both episodes in Goldman’s own long-OAT/short-Bund rolling futures basket, which the bank’s Systematic Trading Strategies desk circulated to clients: a steady grind higher for three years, a wobble in March, and then a near-vertical collapse that has wiped out roughly five years of gains as the basket fell from a February peak of ~104.3 to ~99.2.

Goldman’s STS desk described the October contagion mechanism in that same note (available to pro subs here):

OATs have come roaring back into market focus over the last month. Where an unwind of popular rates positions following the latest ECB meeting (mostly steepeners), seemed to spread to wider carry trades in the rates space among a bid for volatility. A weak starting position for France with regards to debt and fiscal background and uncertainty into next year’s election as well as challenging budget process didn’t help. (emphasis ours)
— Goldman Sachs STS, Tim Huiszoon, Oct 12

Translation: the steepener crowd got stopped out first, then the losses bled into every other levered carry position on the same risk books. Not a fundamental repricing so much as a margin call with a French accent.

Allianz Trade agrees, noting in an Oct 9 report that speculative shorts, hedge-fund asset-swap unwinds and thin liquidity created a negative loop, with market depth more than 50% below normal:

“The speed reflects a positioning shock, not a pure repricing of fundamentals. Long-term investors are sitting out ahead of the elections… Fragmentation is far from 2012 or 2020 levels, but the ingredients are in place.” (emphasis ours)
— Allianz Trade, “Toasted, not burnt”, Oct 9

Note the second sentence: the real money that would normally buy the dip is sitting on its hands until the election. Which leaves… nobody.

The Plumbing Problem Nobody Wanted To Talk About

It’s not just about P&L. Hedge funds have stepped in as the marginal provider of liquidity in European sovereigns precisely as central banks, pensions and banks stepped back. Per Bank of France data cited by Reuters, French government debt accounts for roughly €100 billion of the €250 billion in euro-area sovereign bonds pledged as repo collateral. In other words, France is the euro repo market.

So far the repo market itself has held up, but the risk is obvious: a further ratings cut narrows the pool of institutions able (or willing) to take OATs as collateral, which raises funding costs, which forces more selling. Commerzbank flagged exactly this back in September after Fitch’s downgrade:

“…once a second agency downgrades to single-A, OAT repos may cheapen visibly, similar to BTPs, where more than half of bonds already trade above the depo rate.” (emphasis ours)
— Commerzbank, via MNI, Sep 16

With Moody’s reviewing France on Friday, that is not exactly a theoretical concern. And as we noted when the sell-side spent a day insisting the OAT rout was “just positioning,” the contagion had already jumped to the banks, with the selloff reactivating Europe’s “doom loop” (Oct 7). Goldman’s European financials desk is still hiding under the desk:

“We are staying in risk off mode on banks (topics remains Euro sovereign crisis fear + Rates + Competition + Agentic, ie peak ROTE)… Appetite for French banks is very low given how long it will take to have some clarity.” (emphasis ours)
— Goldman Sachs EU Financials specialist sales, Oct 20

“Overshot Fundamentals”… Says Goldman (Two Weeks Ago)

To be fair to Goldman, the bank has been leaning against the panic. Its strategists argued earlier this month that the OAT selloff appeared to have overshot fundamentals, amplified by positioning, though they conceded France is cheap relative to peers but lacks a catalyst. GS’s STS desk went further on Oct 12, flagging GIR’s expectation that the spread stabilizes at tighter levels and pitching a 1-year principal-protected option on OATs vs Bunds as a reversal trade with the 10Y spread at ~135bps.

The market had other plans. After weekend riots across France (nearly 2,400 arrests), the spread widened another 8bps to ~145bps on Monday, per Goldman’s Daily Monitor, which ran this as its chart of the day: the OAT-Bund spread (inverted) dragging the euro down with it.

Goldman’s FX desk confirmed the hedge funds were already heading for the exits:

“EUR option volumes – which have been an key indicator for broader portfolio hedges – have also decreased and are more than 30% off the highs. Certainly, a lot of hedges have been put on already and broad de-risking across popular positions was a hallmark of last week’s activity.” (emphasis ours)
— Goldman Sachs FX desk, Oct 19

Bloomberg’s Vassilis Karamanis reads the same options market more darkly: the premium for longer-dated euro downside now exceeds short-dated, suggesting the euro’s weakness “reflects more than a positioning adjustment.” So much for “just positioning.”

By Monday’s close, French 10Y yields had posted their highest close since 2002 (Oct 20), and on Tuesday the spread hit a 156bps peak:

French bonds getting smashed: OAT-Bund spread back to crisis wides.

Expect ECB monetization demands to return

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) October 20, 2026

And this morning the milestone everyone was waiting for finally printed: per Bloomberg, French 10Y yields hit 5% for the first time since July 2002, with the OAT-Bund spread out another 5bps to 158bps as Brent traded above $110. So much for stabilizing at tighter levels.

Goldman’s own economists, meanwhile, aren’t buying the government’s numbers either. In Tuesday’s European Daily, Alexandre Stott writes:

“Recent protests over school underfunding and cost-of-living pressures have been among the largest since the pension reform strikes of 2019 and 2023 and the ‘yellow vests’ movement of 2018… we remain sceptical that the government will meet its deficit target of 5.0% of GDP next year… Our poll-based model therefore continues to see Le Pen as the clear favourite to become President next year.” (emphasis ours)
— Goldman Sachs, European Daily: France—Budget Adoption Likely Later This Year, Oct 20

Morgan Stanley’s chief global economist Seth Carpenter, whose note we published on Oct 11, is just as blunt about the arithmetic, and about the cavalry:

At wider than 150bps, the 30yr OAT-Bund spread surpassed the 130bp mark reached in the euro area debt crisis a decade ago… Debt stabilization would require a primary surplus of roughly 2% of GDP, a turnaround of about 5 percentage points. That shift would be larger than the adjustment required in Italy in the early 2010s… We think the bar for direct ECB intervention is very high, but France may not be the last test. (emphasis ours)
— Morgan Stanley, Seth Carpenter, Sunday Start

Put differently: the ECB is not coming to rescue anyone’s carry book, and certainly not before Paris finds a fiscal squeeze bigger than the one Rome needed in 2011. Good luck with that during riots. Bill Blain, for his part, awarded a “No Sh*t Sherlock” prize to anyone who spotted European yields spiking after the riots, warning in Tuesday’s Morning Porridge that the unrest could “metastasise into a potential bond crisis unless the ECB can swiftly demonstrate it is able, willing and stands ready to intervene.”

Where Do 100 Ejected Rates Traders Go?

The career fallout is where the eFC report gets really fun. Some will drift back to the banks, where one headhunter said dealers need them to manage ECB exposure and bond books. The catch, per a bank trader: these PMs were pulling in $1 million-plus, a number that at a bank you only see as a desk head. Many are also tied up in non-competes, and some are still collecting guarantees and in no rush to find work. Good news for the departed PMs; allocators may see it differently.

Not everyone was pushed: one source estimated roughly 10% left voluntarily, some to raise their own funds, because allocators are struggling to find people both willing and able to take risk. Which is one way of describing a market where everyone who took risk just got carried out.

More ominous is the verdict from the trading floors: one trader told eFC that funds piled into European fixed income believing it was easy money, and that the whole European carry system is now being questioned. A bank trader called it systemic. And per the headhunter, the big fear now is that Italian BTP spreads go the way of OATs, a risk Morgan Stanley also flags, noting that wider OAT spreads are already putting pressure on BTPs.

Bottom Line

Goldman’s bet is that this was a positioning flush: the levered carry crowd got shaken out, the forced selling is largely done, and spreads should drift back in. Maybe. But consider what has happened since the “overshoot” call: riots, a 5% 10Y, a spread nearing 160bps, a Moody’s review on Friday, and a presidential race where Le Pen polls at 34%-38% in the first round. The forced sellers may be gone, but the natural buyers never came back, and the marginal bid in OATs for the past three years was a levered London pod that is now on gardening leave.

And this was never just about politics. Since the Hormuz crisis began, France has underperformed every major bond market, Italy included:

Which is why we lean toward the skeptics: this isn’t the end of a positioning unwind, it’s the beginning of a regime where France trades like the periphery, and where Italy, with the same crowd long it on the same leverage, is next in line. When the people who spent three years harvesting European carry are now warning that the asset class may never look the same, it’s probably worth listening. Expect the ECB monetization chorus to get a lot louder. We’ll check back after Friday’s Moody’s decision.

Much more in the full Goldman GS European Daily “France – Budget Adoption Likely Later This Year” note, both available to pro subs.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

British landlords are being offered thousands more each month to house small-boat arrivals than local councils pay to shelter vulnerable British families, a Daily Mail investigation has revealed.

The deals come from Clearsprings Ready Homes, one of three Home Office contractors operating under multi-billion-pound taxpayer-funded contracts.

In one south London case, a landlord was offered £4,500 a month for a three-bedroom flat he currently rents to Southwark Council for £1,790. That is an extra £32,520 a year, plus bills, council tax and maintenance covered for three years.

‘Are you a Labour MP? …because you’re a very sensible one!’ Michelle Dewberry agrees with Labour MP Graham Stringer that landlords shouldn’t be offered higher rents to provide accommodation for asylum seekers. https://t.co/nQ6KbsZY0u

— GB News (@GBNEWS) October 21, 2026

Landlords offered bumper rents to evict tenants and house small boat migrants as Labour accused of ‘outrageous racket’ in broken Britain https://t.co/YoOKKB5dQW

— Daily Mail (@DailyMail) October 21, 2026

The anonymous landlord told the Mail: “I already rent to Southwark Council, and they are able to offer significantly more than the local authority, which to me is bizarre. The council has a ceiling on what they are allowed to pay landlords like myself.”

He continued, “For a three-bed flat I get £1,790 from the local authority to house families, while I would rent it to Clearsprings for £4,500 per month. I didn’t go with them because it would have meant terminating my contract with Southwark Council and putting families at serious risk of homelessness. I am not prepared to do that. But many landlords just see it as an opportunity to earn more, and just go with them.”

Here’s the kicker: The company, which has a taxpayer-funded contract worth around £7billion, is understood to be targeting landlords who currently provide accommodation to councils, students and vulnerable people, including those fleeing domestic abuse.

— Patrick Christys (@PatrickChristys) October 21, 2026

Clearsprings is understood to be targeting properties already used for council tenants, students and vulnerable people, including those fleeing domestic abuse.

The firm, run by Graham King (estimated fortune £726 million), houses around 30,000 asylum seekers and reported £62.6 million profit on £1.4 billion turnover in the year to January 2025.

It is one of three contractors (alongside Serco and Mears) with contracts originally awarded under the Conservatives and running until 2029.

The National Audit Office has previously put expected Home Office spending on the main asylum contracts at £1.67 billion for 2024-25.

Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp called it “a day of shame for Labour” and said: “It is insane that illegal immigrants who have broken our laws, and some of whom go on to commit appalling crimes against women and girls, are being prioritised above law-abiding citizens who work hard and pay their taxes.”

“Over 85,000 illegal immigrants have crossed the Channel under this Labour Government yet only seven per cent of arrivals are removed. This has led to a huge increase in HMOs and flats being used to house them – with over 93,000 people now in asylum accommodation,” Philp further urged.

A Home Office spokesman claimed that the department pays a capped contractual rate and that “any amount above that is covered by the contractor and not taxpayers.”

Officials pointed to hotel closures and claimed savings of more than £1 billion on asylum support since the election, along with 80,000 removals.

Meanwhile, Border Security Commander Duncan Capps has warned that nearly 3,800 migrants are currently waiting in camps between Calais and Dunkirk – almost double the usual number of around 2,000.

Nearly 4,000 migrants waiting to cross to Britain – double the normal amount -warns border security commander https://t.co/oJx5Fs3I5x

— Daily Mail (@DailyMail) October 21, 2026

Capps told MPs: “I think the French estimate at the moment is that there is almost 3,800 people between those two camps. Previously it was broadly about 2,000 between them.” He added that larger boats and higher occupancy mean “it is only a matter of time till we have a mass casualty event in the Channel.”

Crossings so far this year are down on last year’s total, but the backlog in northern France shows demand remains high. Migrants typically make multiple attempts; French intercepts do not lead to detention, so the same people can try again.

Since Labour took office in July 2024, more than 83,000 people have crossed in small boats – more than the roughly 83,000 personnel in the British Army.

Total small-boat arrivals since records began in 2018 now exceed the combined strength of the Army, Navy and RAF. Former Royal Navy officer Chris Parry has described the intake under Labour as the equivalent of “six-and-a-half divisions of fighting-age men.”

Arrivals have at times averaged one every minute during peak periods. The system processing them has been described by a Home Office decision-maker who assessed thousands of claims as fundamentally broken.

Speaking to The Times, the official known as J said: “At best 1 per cent of asylum seekers are genuine. There’s almost no aspect of the asylum system that isn’t either a massive fraud or just really dysfunctional. Nothing works as it should.”

Common patterns include package claims from the same nationalities using near-identical stories, staged photographs, and networks charging thousands of pounds to coach applicants to claim they are gay or face political persecution. BBC undercover work has documented advisers offering fabricated evidence for sexuality-based claims.

The housing pressure is not new. Earlier this year the government signalled that every area of the country should expect to take a share of arrivals as hotels are closed and people are dispersed into residential property.

Projections have suggested migrants could account for 40 per cent of new UK homes by 2030 under current trajectories.

Local residents have repeatedly protested when HMOs or former military sites are converted for this purpose.

The current Clearsprings offers simply accelerate the same displacement dynamic with higher guaranteed rents funded through the contractor model.

The pattern is consistent: record crossings, low removal rates, an asylum system described by its own officials as riddled with fraud, and now private contractors using the resulting demand to outbid councils for ordinary housing.

British families on the housing list, students, and people fleeing domestic abuse are being asked to compete against a taxpayer-backed premium for people who arrived illegally.

The contracts were set under previous governments; the volume and the political choice to keep the system running at this scale sit with the current one.

Without a sustained reduction in arrivals and a higher removal rate, the housing pressure and the cost will surely spiral out of control.

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us

Over the years I have written frequently about what I call the “Pillager Class” and the “Producer Class” in an attempt to explore the reasons why certain people, groups and cultures always seem to turn to looting and destruction rather than building anything of value of their own.

It is a threat the west has been dealing with for thousands of years: We engineer and create and plan for the future, and instead of doing the same, the pillager class decides it’s easier to take what we have. Sometimes they are subtle like a parasite, and sometimes they’re not so subtle, like a swarm of locusts.

There are numerous theories on why this happens. Some think it stems from genetics, others from low IQ, others think it’s purely a cultural phenomenon, and some people argue that it’s a mere reactionary response to poverty. I suspect it’s a combination of all these things. At bottom though, it seems that certain groups are simply born with the pillager instinct; a subset of the populace perpetually stuck in scavenger limbo.

A good comparison to understand this is the classic “lottery winner” dilemma. Data suggests that around 70% of all lottery winners lose every dime they won in 5 years or less. It doesn’t matter if it’s thousands of dollars or millions of dollars; they can’t seem to keep their hands on wealth.

They go from cash windfall to bankruptcy and financial failure so quickly, winning the lottery is often treated like a curse rather than good luck. This happens because they are incapable of planning for tomorrow. Their brains are ostensibly stunted, and they can only think in terms of the present moment. They are doomed to live in poverty because they are incapable of growing beyond their most base desires.

The pillager class is very similar. You can take them out of the global ghettos, bring them to your home and give them every opportunity imaginable to improve their circumstances, and yet, they will always choose thievery and barbarism instead. The only thing that might change is the complexity of their crimes.

Somali daycare and medical fraud in the US is a prime example. Fake college degrees and the H-1B theft of American jobs by Indian scammers is another. The Muslim “Silent Jihad” – a strategy of invasion through false integration, is also a pressing threat.

These people aren’t thankful for the opportunities handed to them. They believe they are entitled. In every case they argue that it is Americans who should be grateful for the migrants on our soil, for it is they who “built our country” (Third world immigration to the US was highly restricted until the mid-1960s, so this claim is nonsense). They don’t care that their invasions will eventually kill the golden goose. Some of them WANT to kill the golden goose.

In France right now, migrant rioters say they are looting and burning because they want more. More access to education. A better cost of living standard. More influence in government. All of this is a lie; what they really want is an excuse to steal whatever isn’t bolted down and then tear apart the rest. But it’s interesting that their moral argument for ransacking Paris is that they are owed more freebies in a country that already took them in. This tells us all we need to know about them.

Beyond the average pillager’s tendency to covet what the west has, there is an element of conspiracy which feeds the multicultural influx. In my article “Pillagers vs Producers: There’s Only Two Ways To Save The Western World”, I look specifically at the alliance between third world cultures and Marxist activism. This alliance is the source of the radioactive sludge that is giving the west cancer. It is this partnership that fuels the rise of migrant incursions into the western world.

Those of us trying to fight against the organized demolition of our society are certainly not the first to see the danger coming. I recently came across a book which I can only call prophetic – A book which describes almost everything happening in the world today, and it was published back in 1973.

“The Camp Of The Saints”, by French author Jean Raspail, has been banned in many libraries around the world while the writer was accused of “racism” and “xenophobia” for his fictional depiction of a migrant onslaught in Europe, starting in France and leading to the fall of the west. The story is set in the near future and reads like a timeline of current events.

The root premise of the The Camp Of The Saints is that a demonic partnership exists between the liberal left and third world pillagers. The nihilistic progressives, reveling in atheism, Marxism and globalism, are represented by the character of “Ballan”, an arrogant and godless leftist philosopher very similar to the French Marxist, Jean Paul Sartre.

Ballan travels to the squalor of India as part of a “humanitarian mission” to send tens-of-thousands of migrant children to be adopted in Europe. The group is eventually accused of having nefarious motives to use pity and guilt to undermine the west. Ballan essentially admits to the plan, and screams at his accusers that borders, nations and cultures are “rubbish” that must be destroyed.

In his fury, Ballan marches onto the streets of Calcutta and stumbles across an Indian man referred to as the “Turd-Eater”; an absolutely pathetic specimen of a human being. The Turd Eater is part of the “untouchable class” in India and he works as a “dung roller”; a person who collects human feces from the streets and rolls the manure into bricks to be used as fuel for fires. He is also known to eat the bricks in times of starvation (all of this comes from very real practices in the recent history of India, unfortunately).

The Turd Eater is a large man charged with the care of his deformed son, who he often carries on his back. The child cannot speak and only makes incomprehensible noises. (Until the past decade, consanguineous marriages or inbred marriages in India represented around 23% of all marriages in the country. That rate has now supposedly fallen to 11% but remains an ongoing issue in rural areas).

Ballan sees the encounter as a miracle, a profound moment. He reasons that this man and his child have experienced the pinnacle of suffering and thus they possess the ultimate knowledge of humanity (This is a common delusion among leftists – the notion that the “oppressed classes” posses a superior knowledge of life and should thus be treated as precious, or perhaps even worshiped).

The Turd Eater dreams of going to the west, and Ballan seeks to help him. In the process, Ballan turns the Turd Eater into a demagogue, a leader of the migrant masses. The philosopher whispers dark rhetoric into the man’s ear, which the man then repeats, mixing eastern and Christian religious concepts into a theosophical gibberish about the East coming to save the Christian west. His deformed child becomes a messianic symbol of the movement, an “inspiration” for mass immigration.

Again, this is brilliantly prophetic. Today, the political left constantly feeds talking points to third worlders, teaching them to appeal to our Christian and Constitutional principles. How often in the US have we heard migrant representatives talk about the First Amendment, freedom of religion, America as a “melting pot”, and the conservative “Christian duty” to help those in need?

These are all carefully scripted manipulations designed to use our own ideals to destroy us. As I have covered in past articles, these claims are based on false and twisted versions of Biblical teachings and misrepresentations of the intentions of the Founding Fathers. At no point ever has western heritage called us to accept responsibility for the pillager class.

Ultimately, the character of Ballan falls victim to his own creation. A massive migrant army sets out under the command of the Turd Eater to ride an armada of flotillas to France, and Ballan seeks to join them. Instead, they beat him and drown him in the dirty and disgusting Ganges river simply because he is white.

Meanwhile, leftist politicians and activists in Europe welcome the migrant invasion with open arms in the name of empathy and humanitarianism. This leads to more flotillas and caravans flooding into the west. Eventually, westerners are culturally replaced as victims of genocide. The people who do try to fight back are accused of racism and their efforts are undermined by lack of strong leadership.

The leftists treat the destruction of the west as justified and they cheer the replacement, only to be replaced themselves. The story is about the ideological self-sabotage of the west through liberalism. It is a warning from 50 years ago that is coming true today.

The one thing that The Camp Of The Saints misses is the reality of an underlying and malicious agenda – The globalist influence, the NGO funding, the UN backing, all the elements of power that are maneuvering and helping the third world replacement to happen. They aren’t creating the pillager class, it already exists and has always existed. Rather, the globalists have identified the pillager class as a useful weapon and they are aiming the barbarian horde at the US and Europe to fulfill the Marxist vision of a borderless, homogenized socialist empire.

This is a righteous act according to progressives, because of the West’s colonial past. In their minds, westerners ARE the pillagers. As Marxist Jean Paul Sartre once said:

“But to become natives altogether, our soil must be occupied by a formerly colonized people and we must starve of hunger…”

“You will be convinced that it would be better for you to be a native at the uttermost depths of his misery than to be a former settler.”

The demonization of western settlement relies on an ignorance of history and a romanticized image of “indigenous peoples.” The west brought technology, infrastructure and an alternative to the savagery of the ancient world. There are many disturbing accounts of these archaic cultures written by explorers, missionaries and native witnesses. They read like the most grotesque horror stories you can imagine.

Brutal slavery, torture, mass murder, child sacrifice, rivers of blood, the stench of death permeating the air, all of it at the hands of more powerful tribes subjugating smaller tribes. The old world was a pagan hell on Earth. The average leftist growing up in the unprecedented security and sanity of the modern west cannot comprehend the nightmares that existed before settlers arrived on the shores of Africa, Asia and the Americas.

When we exited some of these places in the name of “social justice”, we left behind stunning infrastructure. Billions upon billions of dollars in advanced systems and industry, clean water, waste management, healthcare and transportation.

The natives ended up dismantling all of it out of greed or they let it rot out of laziness. Many countries reverted economically and technologically. Even nations like India which still maintain deep trade and political ties to the west are giant dung heaps otherwise, with mountains of garbage and feces in the streets. They simply cannot run their civilizations properly, and so, they all want to travel to the west.

It is time to put an end to the western self-loathing and nihilism championed by the political left. We need to accept the fact that our culture is superior in design, or at least it was until the progressives got hold of it. And, ultimately, we need to adopt a philosophy of selectivity, merit and a refusal to compromise. If this means deporting third worlders in large numbers, so be it. If it means booting out militant leftists and sending them to an island somewhere, so be it.

They declared war on us first. There is no rule that says we have to let them win. As Jean Raspial notes in The Camp Of The Saints:

“In the strange war that was coming, victory would go to those who loved themselves the most…”

The novel describes the death of the west as suicide by empathy; a condemnation of the liberal tendency to view the dregs of the world as our moral responsibility. But it is not the responsibility of the west to save the world. If we did save it, the only practical method would be colonialism.

Bringing the west to the third world is the only way to pull them out of the gutter. Bringing the third world to the west is a sure way to drag us all into the gutter. After a decade of invasion by the pillager classes into the US and Europe, after the recent infestation of the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, after the riots and looting we are seeing in France this week, the terrible end result is predictable and undeniable.

The truth is, if the downfall of our civilization continues, it is only because we allowed it to happen.

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

Ukraine’s wartime corruption saga, which so far has swept through the state nuclear monopoly, the president’s former chief of staff and the prosecutor general’s office, has now reached the one institution that was supposed to be above it all: the central bank.

On Wednesday morning, detectives from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU), working with the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO), searched the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) headquarters in Kyiv and the home of what the bureau coyly called “one of its employees.” According to a law enforcement source cited by the Kyiv Independent, the premises searched belonged to Governor Andriy Pyshnyi himself, and MP Danylo Hetmantsev said as much publicly: the “employee” was the governor.

The NBU confirmed the searches and said it was operating as usual. By evening, Pyshnyi was on Facebook insisting that, per the court order, the criminal case concerns neither the central bank’s activities nor his duties as governor, and that the searches turned up no evidence of wrongdoing by him or any NBU staffer. The central bank also denied rumors that he had resigned. Which, as anyone who has followed Ukrainian politics knows, is usually what happens right before someone resigns, or is resigned. 

Follow The Sense Bank

So what are the detectives actually looking for? NABU hasn’t said, but lawmaker Yaroslav Zhelezniak, who first publicized the raid, says it is tied to two cases: the Karpatnaftokhim petrochemical complex in western Ukraine, and the running of state-owned Sense Bank by outside individuals. Zhelezniak also called on Pyshnyi to step down.

Sense Bank is the thread worth pulling. The lender, formerly Alfa-Bank Ukraine and part of Mikhail Fridman’s empire, was nationalized after Russia invaded. It has since become a recurring character in the Energoatom kickback probe, the largest corruption case of Zelensky’s tenure. Prosecutors say a Hr 150 million ($3.4 million) bail payment for former Energy and Justice Minister Herman Halushchenko was routed through Sense Bank with allegedly laundered money, and in August they charged Zelensky’s former deputy chief of staff Iryna Mudra, Sense Bank CEO Oleksiy Stupak and others over the scheme. The NBU, as supervisor, has been criticized for not stopping it.

The direct link to Pyshnyi: Sense Bank’s former supervisory board chairman told a parliamentary inquiry that Vasyl Veselyi, a figure in the leaked NABU “Mindich tapes,” was appointed to the bank on Pyshnyi’s recommendation. Pyshnyi denies making any such recommendation. In those same tapes, Veselyi and businessman Oleksandr Tsukerman reportedly discussed influencing board appointments at the bank and talking to Zelensky’s then-chief of staff Andriy Yermak about it.

That last name matters, because Pyshnyi got the job in October 2022 as a Yermak ally, after his predecessor Kyrylo Shevchenko abruptly resigned and then said NABU had accused him in a Hr 206 million embezzlement case at a state lender. Pravda reported in August that Zelensky was already unhappy with Pyshnyi and that his dismissal had been discussed. So two of the last two NBU governors have now had anti-graft detectives at the door. Not a great hit rate for the institution that also happens to guard the nation’s gold reserves.

And as a bizarre coda, on the very same day Hungarian authorities detained György Matolcsy, Viktor Orbán’s longtime central bank governor, whose son is the subject of a separate probe into corruption at the Hungarian central bank. Central bankers across the region probably had a quiet dinner tonight.

Speaking Of Reserves… Where Is The Gold?

Which brings us to the question nobody in Kyiv was asked today. To be clear upfront: nothing reported so far ties the NBU probe to Ukraine’s reserves, and Pyshnyi says the case has nothing to do with the bank’s operations. What follows is speculation, labeled as such. But if the central bank’s supervisory function was compromised by people with access to the president’s office, it seems fair to ask what else was sitting within reach.

On paper, the answer is reassuring. Ukraine’s international reserves hit a record $57.7 billion as of Feb. 1 (unclear how much of that is US “donations”) and monetary gold made up 8.5% of them, up from 5.7% a year earlier, thanks largely to gold’s price surge rather than any buying spree. The World Gold Council puts Ukraine’s holdings at 27.37 tonnes, unchanged through the second quarter, worth roughly $4.9 billion as of January per CEIC data.

Long-time readers will recall that Ukraine’s gold has a habit of wandering off at moments of political upheaval. On March 10, 2014, days after Yanukovych fled, we flagged an entirely unsubstantiated report from pro-Russian outlet Iskra that the reserves had been loaded onto an unmarked plane at Boryspil and flown to the US, and asked whether the price of Ukraine’s “liberation” was the handover of its gold to the Fed.

Was The Price Of Ukraine’s “Liberation” The Handover Of Its Gold To The Fed? http://t.co/9loLVQl0dZ

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) March 11, 2014

The NBU denied it. Then in November 2014, then-Ukraine Central Bank chief Valeria Gontareva casually admitted on TV that gold was down to about $1 billion of reserves, which, on our math at the time, implied far less than that, and we wrote that Ukraine admits its gold is gone (Gontareva currently now faces Up to 12 Years in Prison and Confiscation of Property in Case Involving Collaboration with Russia).

Here is a transcript of the clip above:

• 0:00 The NBU firmed the hryvnia by only 2 kopecks, to 15.75 per dollar. On the interbank market the dollar sold at 16.05 and the euro at about 20.
• 0:14 The devaluation sent gold up 5% in a day. A gram of top-purity gold now costs 665 hryvnias, an all-time high, and the price has nearly doubled since January.
• 0:38 Gold is disappearing from the NBU’s vaults and is only a tiny share of the reserves. Gontareva said so herself on Channel 5 (5 Kanal).
• 0:49 Gontareva says “Actually, practically, if you want to know, physically there isn’t any. There’s a small amount of gold bars, but it’s literally, probably, up to 1%.”.
• 1:00 She didn’t explain how it happened. Official NBU data show almost $1B of gold at the end of October, about 8% of reserves, or eight times what she says.
• 1:20 Even by the official figures, holdings fell by more than a third in October alone. Gold prices are falling, so the NBU is selling into the drop and losing money.
• 1:38 The gold was built up under former governor Serhiy Arbuzov, who decided in early 2011 to raise gold’s share of reserves.
• 1:57 Arbuzov, in an archive clip, says: “Roughly 21 tonnes of gold. That’s several billion dollars… these are reserves that aren’t subject to the changes paper money goes through, so the value will only grow.”
• 2:08 The bet made several hundred million dollars by late 2012, and the gold sat in a secure vault that journalists toured two years earlier.
• 2:35 How the gold is now vanishing from the vaults is unclear.

A week later the central bank admitted the outflow and called it an “optimization of reserve structure,” which is probably the most central-banker phrase ever coined for “it’s gone.”

NY Fed to Ukraine: “If you like your gold, we can keep it.” http://t.co/RVgAVcqIqO

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 18, 2014

IMF data later showed holdings dropping to 23.6 tonnes in November 2014, a nine-year low, from over 42 tonnes at the start of the year. The official explanation was sales to prop up reserves, and by December lawmakers were turning on their own central bankers over it. Weeks later came the cherry on top: the NBU had been conned into buying painted lead bricks as gold, about $300,000 worth, allegedly with help from someone on the inside.

Ukraine Central Bank Conned Into Swapping Its Gold For Lead Bricks http://t.co/mYdQ6OUsDZ

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 22, 2014

So where is the gold now? Probably in one of three places, and here’s where the speculation starts:

1. Where they say it is. The boring and most likely answer: the bulk sits in NBU vaults or, more plausibly given a war with missiles landing on Kyiv, in custody abroad. Wartime central banks routinely park bullion at the Bank of England, the New York Fed or the BIS, and the NBU has never published a bar list or a vault-by-vault breakdown. That opacity was a feature during the war. It looks a bit different on the day detectives are walking out of the governor’s office with (heavy) boxes.

2. On the road. Ukraine’s physical gold and cash do move, and we know this because one shipment got hijacked. In March, Hungary’s counterterrorism unit stopped two Oschadbank armored vans near Budapest carrying $40 million, €35 million and nine kilograms of gold from Vienna to Kyiv, with Orbán accusing Kyiv of bankrolling the Hungarian opposition. Hungary’s own tax authority later traced it to a documented Raiffeisen deal and closed the money-laundering case, and it is now Orbán, not Ukraine, facing a potential criminal case over the seizure. Still, it was a rare look at the logistics of state-owned precious metal moving across Europe in vans, and a reminder that gold, unlike a SWIFT transfer, actually has to be driven somewhere.

3. Pledged, swapped or lent. This is the one worth watching. Central banks under funding stress have a long history of quietly using gold as collateral, via swaps or leasing, while still reporting it as reserves. Nothing suggests the NBU has done this (or that it hasn’t). But if the institution’s governance was porous enough for outsiders to steer board seats at a state bank, independent confirmation that 27 tonnes are allocated, unencumbered and physically where they’re supposed to be would seem like cheap insurance. Maybe the IMF, which has a seat at every Ukrainian table these days, could ask.

A Run On Trust, Not On Gold

For now, the more immediate risk is institutional rather than metallic. The NBU’s independence is one of the few things Western lenders have consistently praised in Kyiv, and the IMF program and the EU’s Ukraine Facility both lean on it. A governor ousted under a corruption cloud, with the president’s office reportedly already wanting him gone, would hand critics of continued aid exactly the narrative they’ve been building since the Energoatom tapes leaked.

And if it turns out the case really does have nothing to do with the central bank, well, NABU just raided the head of the monetary authority of a country at war for a case unrelated to his job. Either way, someone in Kyiv is about to have a very uncomfortable meeting with the IMF mission.