Confirming reports from earlier this week, the latest estimates from the International Energy Agency signaled that the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which unexpectedly quit OPEC earlier this year in a shock move that threatened the cohesion of OPEC, produced 4.1 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil in June, its highest output ever.
The UAE’s crude oil production jumped from 3.3 million bpd in May to 4.1 million bpd in June after the country left OPEC effective May 1, started raising output, and managed to sneak a lot of exports out of the Middle East even as the Strait of Hormuz was mostly blockaded for the first half of June.
The crude oil production in June, at 4.1 million bpd, was the highest ever on record for the UAE, nearly double the output in March 2026 at the start of the Hormuz crisis. The production level also topped the previous record of 4 million bpd from the spring of 2020 when the OPEC+ producers were fighting for market share in a brief price war during peak Covid, according to OilPrice.com
The UAE has sought to adapt to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz by sneaking tankers in dark mode through the Strait and increasingly offering to sell many of its crude grades for loading offshore Fujairah and at Sohar in Oman, outside the Strait.
Moreover, the Abu Dhabi national oil company ADNOC accelerated plans to have a new pipeline operational in 2027 that would double its oil export capacity through Fujairah, which sits outside the Strait of Hormuz.
ADNOC plans to build a new project, the West-East 1 Pipeline, which is expected to become operational next year and double the UAE’s energy giant’s export capacity through the Emirate of Fujairah to meet global demand for energy supplies.
The national oil company also plans to plans to award as much as $55 billion (200 billion UAE dirhams) on upstream and downstream projects over the next two years. The announcement of accelerated growth came days after the UAE said it would quit OPEC effective May 1 to pursue its national interests.
By Molly Schwartz, cross-asset macro strategist at Rabobank
Daily crossings through the Strait of Hormuz increased substantially after the US and Iran announced a “peace” agreement in mid-June. However, those numbers have started to dwindle as the ceasefire—peacefire, shmeasefire—appears increasingly shaky. According to Bloomberg, the Joint Maritime Information Center said that traffic through the Strait remains at “reduced levels,” (around 24% of pre-war transit) even though US-assisted vessel transits have been largely uninhibited.
Reuters reports that “some war insurers advise shipowners to pause Hormuz voyages after attacks,” adding that “war insurance for ships inside the Gulf has already ticked higher towards 3% of a vessel’s value, up from 2% at the end of last week.” Meanwhile, quotes for coverage as high as 5% are still circulating. So even though the Strait is technically open, there don’t seem to be many takers—nor tankers.
Trump did declare just a few days ago that the ceasefire was “over,” with the US commencing strikes on Iranian sites, including the Iranshahr airbase, and Iran responding by attacking its neighbors in Kuwait and Jordan. Yesterday afternoon, explosions were heard in Bushehr, which is—likely not coincidentally—home to Iran’s only nuclear power plant. Initial reports suggest that the power plant itself was not hit. Brent crude oil prices did not move in reaction to the announcement.
Whether the ceasefire is truly “over,” or whether another MOU will emerge in the coming days (weeks? months?), remains very much an open question. Oil markets, however, remain as optimistic as ever. While Brent crude climbed by roughly $8, briefly trading above $80/bbl for the first time since 22 June, more than half of that move was retraced yesterday, with prices closing at around $76/bbl.
In other news, Anthropic has tapped former Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke to join its Oversight Trust, which seeks to “keep the artificial intelligence company accountable to its public mission.” The importance of the Oversight Trust has only intensified following earlier events this year, when Anthropic delayed the release of its Mythos model and triggered an emergency meeting among global leaders to address concerns about its potentially dangerous capabilities.
New York Fed President, John Williams, made several notable comments today on inflation, that seem to be at odds with those of current Fed Chair Warsh. In a speech organized by the New York Fed, Williams highlighted his concerns about the inflationary effects of AI, saying that “if [AI demand] creates a sustained impulse to demand relative to supply in inflation, I do think that’s the kind of situation where you don’t look through.” Some readers may recall Warsh’s manifesto published to the Wall Street Journal in November of last year titled “The Federal Reserve’s Broken Leadership,” where Warsh calls attention to the disinflationary effects of AI, saying that “AI will be a significant disinflationary force, increasing productivity and bolstering American competitiveness.” While Williams also notes the potential for AI to “play out in a more benign way,” his aforementioned base case shines a light into the varying schools of thought and the potential for “good family fights” when the Fed next convenes.
Task Force Warsh also announced the individuals who will be leading each of his five Fed task forces:
Communication: Former BoE governor Mervyn King, UW professor Peter Fisher, and former BCB President Arminio Fraga.
Balance sheet: Harvard University professors Karen Dynan and Jeremy Stein, and former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan.
Data sources: Harvard University’s Raj Chetty, former Walmart CEO, Doug McMillon, and UChicago’s Kevin Murphy.
Productivity and jobs: Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, Stanford’s Carles I. Jones, and Asha Sharma from Microsoft.
Inflation framework: Harvard University’s Greg Mankiw, NYU’s Thomas Sargent, and the BIS’s former economic advisor, William White.
Canada’s Mark Carney spoke with the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Jeddah (the first Canadian PM to make the trip since the year 2000) to discuss the war between the US and Iran, as well as opportunities for economic collaboration. This resulted in the signing of several MOUs, including one to “strengthen cooperation across key defense, economic, trade and investment, cultural, educational, scientific, and consular priorities. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is now also scheduled to attend the Canada Investment Forum in September.
Guns Fall Silent As Trump Says US-Iran Talks On Again, But Insists ‘In No Uncertain Terms, Ceasefire Is OVER’
The guns have actually been silent in the Middle East overnight, after two days of deadly strikes between the United States and Iran, amid a general return to premarket open headlines of ‘peace imminent again’ as mediators desperately work to get diplomacy back on track. The White House position is that the ceasefire is over but that Washington has agreed to reengage Tehran in mediated talks.
Trump indicates US has agreed to Iran talks, but United States has stated to them, in no uncertain terms, that cease fire is over.
The New York Timeswrites early Thursday that “Qatar, which helped broker the U.S.-Iran truce last month, has been in talks with Washington and Tehran to de-escalate the crisis, according to two officials with knowledge of the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy. In recent days, several other regional countries — Bahrain, Kuwait and Jordan, all of which host U.S. military facilities — said they have come under Iranian attack.”
The same report further says, “Even as the fighting appeared to subside on Friday, it remained unclear whether the latest mediation efforts could prevent that cycle from repeating.” The situation has devolved into a “dangerous test of wills, with each side trying to show that it can absorb the other’s attacks and respond forcefully, without tipping the conflict back into full-scale war,” NYT continues.
And separately Bloomberg also reports, “Talks between the US and Iran on a permanent peace deal are continuing, according to a US official, despite two days of clashes that threatened an already fragile ceasefire. The renewed hostilities risk undermining efforts to rebuild depleted global oil inventories, the International Energy Agency said.”
Bloomberg continues: “Oil prices steadied on Friday after a bumpy week. While gasoline prices have fallen since the fragile ceasefire, they’ve lagged crude’s sharp decline, prompting one asset manager to buy protection against stickier-than-expected US inflation.”
There appears real movement on this, given also that Reuters is freshly reporting that Qatar negotiators are currently in Iran to meet Iranian officials, as part of the effort to immediately de-escalate tensions and create conditions for broader negotiations.
Still, the crisis is on edge and full-scale war could return at any moment, also as the UK Maritime Trade Operations agency is once again alerting global vessels security threat in the Strait of Hormuz remains at its highest level.
In Iran, the burial of the slain Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has finally concluded, and the IRGC’s top commander, Brigadier-General Ahmad Vahidi, has pledged vengeance against the US and Israel for the assassination, saying it won’t “be erased from the historical memory.”
The Revolutionary Guard chief called for the “full realization of justice and a fitting response to the criminals, especially the child-killing American army.” An estimated 41-43 million people attended the six-day funeral for the late Khamenei, according to Iranian media.
NEW: Iran warns it will retaliate against infrastructure attacks and strike Israel in response. pic.twitter.com/JmkyZ7Zeyy
In the meantime we commented overnight on who is not seeking permanent Iran peace at this point, on lingering concerns about the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. The Wall Street Journal in a Thursday evening report says that Israel has provided fresh intelligence to the White House indicating just such a Tehran-linked plot.
The timing is quite curious and interesting given it comes just as the warring sides standing on the brink of returning once again either to talks, or to full-scale war:
Israel shared new intelligence with the U.S. that it said indicated a fresh Iranian plan to kill President Trump, people familiar with the matter said, a finding that would mark an escalation in the war between Washington and Iran.
Iran for years has vowed openly to retaliate against Trump for the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, who was a top general in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, in the president’s first term.
The Israeli embassy in Washington declined to comment. Iran’s Mission to the United Nations didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The White House referred The Wall Street Journal to comments the president made on Wednesday.
The Israelis have remained deeply dissatisfied with terms laid out in the previously agreed-to MoU, and so have every incentive to goad Washington further into the conflict. Certainly many within the US administration know this, and so might be taking this new ‘intelligence warning’ – which was leaked rather quickly to major media – with the appropriate degree of skepticism.
The US has still – somewhat surprisingly – affirmed it remainsengaged in ‘technical talks’ with Iran, despite the prior days of tit-for-tat bombings. “Technical talks between the US and Iran are continuing, according to a US official, following two days of clashes that threatened to shatter an already fragile ceasefire between the two nations,” reports Bloomberg, also late in the day Thursday. “The US is still committed to finding a solution with Iran, the official said Thursday, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the matter.”
So it appears there’s still hope that things might not spiral further. As for the alleged assassination plot, this isn’t the first time Iran has faced such accusations, and each time Tehran officials have vehemently denied them.
SK Hynix ADRs Set To Open At $181, Well Above Offering Price
Summary:
SK Hynix’s ADRs Set to Open at $181, 22% Premium Above $149 Offering Price
SK Hynix ADRs Priced At 3% Premium As Wall Street Readies Wave Of Leveraged ETFs
SK Hynix’s ADRs Set to Open At Premium
SK Hynix’s ADRs, trading under the temporary ticker SKHYV, are indicated to open at $181 per share, 22% above their $149 offering price. The strong opening suggests robust investor demand for the world’s leading supplier of high-bandwidth memory.
As noted earlier, SK Hynix sold 177.9 million ADRs at $149 per share, raising roughly $26.5 billion. Each receipt represents one-tenth of a Seoul-listed common share.
The temporary trading symbol SKHYV will switch to SKHY when regular-way trading begins next Monday.
Roth Capital Partners’ sales trading team asked:
One may ask how investors, looking back in two years, will come to view the timing and meaning of SK Hynix’s U.S. offering?
SK Hynix ADRs Priced At 3% Premium As Wall Street Readies Wave Of Leveraged ETFs
The next test of the AI trade arrives today, as South Korean memory-chip maker SK Hynix’s American depositary receipts begin trading under the temporary ticker SKHYV.
Shares were priced at about a 3% premium to Thursday’s close of its ordinary shares in South Korea. The $26.5 billion offering attracted demand for roughly seven times the shares available, forcing the chipmaker to scale back allocations to major investors, according to Bloomberg.
The company sold 177.9 million ADRs at $149 each, raising $26.5 billion, surpassing Alibaba’s US debut to become the third-largest listing in history. Each ADR represents one-tenth of a Seoul-listed common share, giving US investors direct exposure to the world’s leading supplier of high-bandwidth memory amid the AI boom that could soon unlock the Physical AI boom.
According to the report, Baillie Gifford, Coatue Management, and Situational Awareness Partners received about $5 billion of ADRs, roughly $2 billion less than indicated. Over 500 institutional investors placed orders, including long-only funds, technology specialists, and sovereign wealth funds. The allocation remained concentrated, with 10 investors taking half the deal and the top 25 accounting for about two-thirds.
Wall Street analysts weighed in with their first takes of the deal, courtesy of Bloomberg:
Jung In Yun, CEO at Fibonacci Asset Management
“I take 3% premium as a constructive signal. It shows that global investors are still willing to pay up for direct US access despite the recent volatility in Korean equities”
From the company’s and banks’ perspective, the level looks sensible; it is strong enough to demonstrate demand, but not so aggressive that it creates unnecessary aftermarket risk
In the current market, a clean, stable debut matters more than squeezing out the last few percentage points of valuation
Sanghyun Park, founder of Clepsydra Capital
It shows global funds accept paying up to bypass local index and currency friction and direct exposure to the company’s HBM dominance
The banks capitalized on the limit to conversion that prevents arb traders from instantly erasing the spread on the first trading day
This avoids the typical Korea Discount seen with legacy local names and points toward a TSMC-style scarcity model
“Since 3% is just the primary floor and the float is so heavily choked, we could easily see the premium gap much higher once US trading opens on Friday”
Travis Lundy, an independent special situations analyst who publishes on Smartkarma
“To me that is not that much of a premium. Eminently reasonable given the current swap rates on owning SK Hynix” local shares
The 3% premium to Thursday’s close is actually a discounted price to Wednesday’s close and every other close for the past few weeks when investor demand was “multiple times” the offering size
There is an interesting dynamic whereby if the headroom expands, it will take pressure off the banks to fund local into swaps, which should reduce the swap rate, which should in turn reduce the ADR premium slightly
Dilin Wu, a strategist at Pepperstone Group
“The 3% premium tells you the roadshow demand was strong enough to price above Thursday’s Korean close — and that’s the first concrete evidence that the accessibility premium is real”
The real test will be the first two weeks of trading before upcoming earnings; if the ADR consistently trades above the Korean share dollar equivalent, it confirms US investors are willing to pay a premium for accessibility — and that should pull the Korean shares higher
The ADRs could be included in the Nasdaq 100 in December; once that inclusion happens, passive fund inflows from vehicles like the Invesco QQQ become a mechanical buying force
Francis Oh, head of Asia business development at Rex Financial, which provides exchange-traded products
“The current 3% premium should not be over-interpreted at this early stage”
“TSMC’s 18% premium reflects structural friction that accumulated over years, not a level established immediately post-listing; any meaningful convergence or divergence for SKHY toward comparable levels is more likely to unfold as a gradual”
SK Hynix’s ADR offering comes weeks after SpaceX tapped the public markets in the largest initial public offering in history, while Alphabet is raising $85 billion to fund its AI buildout. Traders are betting heavily that AI-related demand is a secular growth story for memory stocks, which have historically been viewed as more cyclical.
Bloomberg expects that the US debut of SK Hynix will unlock a new “wave of leverage ETFs” tied to the chipmaker’s American depositary receipts. It expects ProShares, Leverage Shares and Rex Shares are some of the fism planning to products taht offer 2x daily returns on the memory chip giant.
Bloomberg Intelligence noted:
A fresh pool of leveraged US-listed ETPs would mean the daily rebalancing flows would grow larger, potentially fueling already heightened volatility. The size of the leveraged products also made it difficult to meet the promise of delivering twice daily returns, creating a tracking gap.
Trump Refuses To Sign Landmark Housing Bill In Protest Over Stalled Elections Legislation
President Donald Trump declared Friday morning that he won’t sign the sweeping bipartisan housing bill awaiting action on his desk in protest of the Senate’s failure to pass his signature elections legislation. Unless the president issues an outright veto by midnight, however, the housing package will become law Saturday without his signature.
In a Friday morning Truth Social post, Trump said he was withholding his signature “in PROTEST” over the Senate’s inability to pass the SAVE America Act, a comprehensive elections overhaul that would require photo identification to vote and proof of citizenship to register, and would bar most mail-in balloting, with exceptions for military service, disability, illness and travel.
The president asserted that the elections bill is “polling at 97% with the Republican Party” – a figure he offered without citing a source – and called its failure “a serious threat to any politician who votes against it.” He renewed his demand that Senate Republicans “TERMINATE THE FILIBUSTER,” warning that Democrats would abolish the 60-vote rule “in their very first hour” back in power. Rendering “Democrats” throughout with a derisive misspelling, Trump added that the “title of DUMB” would revert to Republicans if the party allowed the stalemate to stand.
A Deadline, Not A Veto
This is of course performative unless Trump actually vetoes it. Under the Constitution, a bill becomes law automatically if the president neither signs nor vetoes it within 10 days, excluding Sundays, while Congress is in session. That clock on the housing measure – the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act – runs out at the end of Friday.
Because Congress has remained formally in session through the window, the “pocket veto” that would let the bill die quietly is widely viewed as unavailable. That leaves Trump two choices: veto the legislation outright, or let it lapse into law. His post on Friday, notably, promised only not to sign it.
A veto would face long odds. The Senate approved the package 85-5 on June 22, and the House passed it 358-32 – margins far beyond the two-thirds needed in each chamber to override. Congressional observers caution, though, that override votes can scramble such numbers, as some members retreat rather than be seen defying the president. Lawmakers overrode a Trump veto of a defense bill once before, in the final weeks of his first term.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., a close Trump ally, has already conceded the likely endgame. “If he doesn’t, it’s still law,” Johnson said last week of the president’s refusal to sign.
The Housing Bill
The bipartisan measure marks the most comprehensive federal housing legislation in decades. It aims to expand supply and lower costs by cutting regulatory barriers to construction, streamlining reviews, encouraging local zoning reform and restricting large institutional investors from buying up single-family homes, alongside pilot programs to expand access to smaller mortgages.
Republicans had planned to campaign on the law this fall. With the average 30-year fixed mortgage hovering near 6.5 percent, affordability consistently ranks as voters’ top concern heading into November’s midterm elections – and Trump’s approval on housing has slipped since he began blocking the bill.
Trump upended the bill’s rollout on June 24, canceling a Capitol signing ceremony roughly an hour before it was to begin – with the stage, desk and presidential seal already set in Statuary Hall – and declaring on social media that he would not sign until Congress passed the SAVE America Act, which he labeled “a National Emergency.” He has since dismissed the housing package as being “of minor importance” and a “yawn” next to the elections bill.
The tactic is familiar: earlier this year, the president derailed a bipartisan deal on surveillance authorities to press the same demand.
The SAVE America Act has passed the House but failed five times on the Senate floor, where Democrats are unified against it and Republicans’ 53 seats fall short of the 60 needed to break a filibuster. Four Republicans – Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky – have twice voted no.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-SD, has flatly refused to gut the filibuster, telling Fox News that Republicans are “bound by arithmetic.” Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, the bill’s most vocal Senate champion, has countered that the party is only “10 votes shy of cloture” and should force Democrats into a grinding floor fight. Roughly two dozen House conservatives, meanwhile, have vowed to block other legislation until the voting bill moves – a rebellion that stalled the annual defense bill and sent the House home early for its July Fourth recess.
Friday’s post also appears to walk back a compromise Trump embraced only days ago. On Tuesday, he endorsed House GOP leaders’ plan to pass pieces of the SAVE Act through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process – a package Johnson has dubbed “reconciliation 3.0.” The president’s return to demanding the filibuster’s termination suggests that détente may already be fraying.
And Of Course, Outrage Ensues
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, who helped steer the housing bill through the Senate, urged Trump in a video posted to X to “sign the damn bill.” Sen. Mark Kelly, D-AZ, accused the president of holding the legislation “hostage.”
Republican patience is thinning in public, too. Tillis, who is retiring, reduced his objection to a sentence: “It’s quite simple: It’s a math problem.” Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas quipped that any colleague not at least a little frustrated by now should question their own sanity. Thune, asked about the canceled signing last month, would say only that the decision was the president’s call to make.
Trump has shown no sign of relenting. He promoted the SAVE Act from the National Mall during his July Fourth address, and in a weekend post warned that without it, “I don’t want to be the last Republican President!”
Prediction market Polymarket applied for a license to offer U.S. users margin trading, enabling them to place bets with less upfront capital, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
Polymarket’s U.S. affiliate, Coming Home GBA LLC, filed for a futures commission merchant license with the National Futures Association, Bloomberg said, citing a company representative. Polymarket will also require authorization from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for changes to its rulebook that would allow trading without fully collateralized positions.
Prediction market platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi offer yes-or-no wagers on the outcomes of events, such as weather, sports and elections. Margin trading lets investors open positions with less upfront capital, a practice common in traditional markets. Kalshi received clearance to offer margin trading in March.
Polymarket’s application comes as prediction markets continue to grow. Volumes hit $51 billion last year and are on pace to reach about $240 billion in 2026. Wall Street broker Bernstein recently said it expects volume to rise to $1 trillion by 2030 as the sector evolves from niche wagering into wide-based “information markets” spanning sports, crypto, politics and the economy.
Polymarket’s application follows a marketing campaign it announced Wednesday to convince policymakers, regulators and potential users that it is trustworthy. Four years ago, the company agreed to stop serving U.S. customers as part of a $1.4 million settlement with the CFTC, which alleged it had offered unregistered event-based derivatives.
Polymarket did not respond to a CoinDesk request for comment.
Better Off? How Generational Progress Slowed In The US
Bettering yourself financially or at least giving your children the opportunity for a more prosperous future has driven people to emigrate to the United States for generations. But is the next generation still better off in this day and age?
Gen X achieved a similarly low increase of median household incomes over Baby Boomers at 16 percent.
This is in contrast to the post-war generation, which at age 36-40 earned 27 percent more than the Silent Generation.
For this generation growing up during World War II, the number still stood at 34 percent on average.
Taking as a baseline the Greatest Generation, which was born between 1900 and 1927, the Silent Generation earned 34 percent more, while Boomers made a cumulative 70 percent more, Gen X took home 97 percent more and finally Millennials brought in 133 percent more than the Greatest Generation even when adjusted for inflation.
The data also shows that the Silent Generation worked 14 percent more hours than the generation before and Boomers worked another 14 percent more.
However, working hours have been relatively stable for generations since.
While the numbers show that average income wealth rose in the United States over time and that more people gained access to at least a middle-class life over the decades, this doesn’t mean that everybody is necessarily making more than those who came before.
A study published in 2017 and widely reported then showed that only 50 percent of people born in 1984 made more than their parents at age 30.
For those born in 1940 and turning 30 in 1970, this number had still been above 90 percent.
There was a time when the arms dealer waited in the corridor. He financed the campaign, endowed the think tank, took the general to dinner, and hoped the man inside the office would remember him when the contract came up. The wall between the money and the decision was thin, often corrupt, but it was there. Someone held the public trust, and someone else tried to buy it, and you could at least tell the two apart.
That wall is gone. The financier no longer waits in the corridor. He holds the office. He signs the checks. He is the buyer and the seller, the regulator and the regulated, the public interest and the private portfolio, fused into a single man in a single suit, and the arrangement is entirely legal, which is the whole problem.
One of these men may already be familiar from a previous article. His name is Friedrich Merz.
The chancellor was the warm-up act
From 2016 to 2020, Merz chaired the supervisory board of BlackRock’s German arm, the local office of the largest pool of private capital on earth – a fact confirmed, without embarrassment, by his own party’s foundation. Then he climbed back into politics, and in March 2025, as chancellor-in-waiting, he drove through the outgoing Bundestag — deliberately before the newly elected parliament could convene – the constitutional amendment that exempted defense spending from Germany’s debt brake. The borrowing limit Germans had treated as sacred since 2009 was gone. German military spending rose 24 percent in a single year to $114 billion, the largest in NATO Europe, and BlackRock held stakes in the very contractors – Rheinmetall, Hensoldt – that the money would flow toward.
He broke no law. He simply spent four years learning, from the inside, how the machinery paid out, and then went and pulled the lever. The arrangement was a particular kind that no scandal quite captures, because nothing in it is hidden. It sits in plain view, in regulatory filings and procurement requests, and it works precisely because everyone involved can say, truthfully, that they broke no rule.
It reads as a German problem only until you cross the Atlantic. There the same face turns up in an American suit, several of them, installed not adjacent to the war machine but at its controls.
The banker who became the Navy
Consider John Phelan, who until March 2025 had no connection to the military beyond a seat on a charity board. His career was money: he co-founded MSD Capital, the private investment firm that managed the personal fortune of Michael Dell, and later founded his own firm, Rugger Management. He gave Trump’s joint fundraising committee $834,600 in April 2024. Months later he was nominated to run the United States Navy, and in March he was confirmed, handed a $263.5 billion budget and command of nearly a million sailors and Marines.
Before his confirmation, Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote to him about the obvious. He had recently earned over $5 million in capital gains from Palantir, a defense-software contractor that took in $541 million from the Pentagon in fiscal 2024 alone, and whose relationships Phelan’s own acquisition vehicle had once advertised. She asked him to divest his defense holdings and to recuse himself, for four years, from matters touching his former clients and employers, noting that a dozen Biden appointees had voluntarily gone beyond what the ethics laws required. Phelan declined to make the stronger commitment. He was confirmed anyway, 62 to 30, with eleven Democrats joining every Republican in the room.
The man overseeing the Navy’s shipbuilding budget was, weeks earlier, a private investor with money in the companies the Navy buys from. Nobody hid it. It was printed in his disclosures and read aloud at his hearing, and it changed nothing.
The private-equity takeover of the Pentagon
Phelan is the modest case. The full expression of the thing sits one floor up, in the office of the deputy secretary of defense, where Stephen Feinberg runs the day-to-day of the entire department.
Feinberg co-founded Cerberus Capital Management and led it for thirty-three years; in his own sworn testimony to the Senate he put the firm’s portfolio at over $65 billion. He was a major Trump donor, and by the time he was confirmed in March 2025 he was, at a listed minimum net worth of $2 billion, the wealthiest official in the administration. What he has built since is not influence over the Pentagon. It is ownership of its investment arm.
Feinberg has surrounded himself with a circle of advisers drawn from his old firm. The group includes former Cerberus managing director John Gallagher and a deal team led by Cerberus alumnus George Kollitides – who was, until 2015, chairman and chief executive of Remington, the gunmaker Cerberus owned. Industry executives nicknamed the squad “Deal Team Six,” a joke on the SEAL unit that killed bin Laden, and Kollitides told a Milken Institute audience he found the name both fun and fitting while explaining that economic warfare has been a part of all successful nations for thousands of years. A Stanford professor watching this described it plainly: private equity has just acquired its largest organization.
The organization it acquired writes checks the size of nations. Under Feinberg, the Pentagon stopped merely buying weapons and began buying companies. It took a $400 million preferred-equity stake in the rare-earth miner MP Materials, enough to make the United States government the firm’s largest single shareholder at roughly 15 percent – ahead, as it happens, of BlackRock. It put $1 billion into an L3Harris rocket-motor unit slated to go public in 2026. Stakes in Trilogy Metals, Vulcan Elements, and ReElement Technologies followed, a portfolio that a group of House members warned was locking federal policy to the fortunes of individual firms – picking winners, and by definition creating losers.
Whose companies get the contracts
Here is where the fusion stops being abstract… Feinberg signed an ethics agreement before confirmation. He would divest from Cerberus and recuse himself from matters involving the firm. But the fine print left the door open: he could transfer his Cerberus holdings into trusts benefiting his adult children, a maneuver legal under conflict-of-interest law but one ethics experts say hollows out its purpose, and he could keep contracting with Cerberus for administrative services. That contract was meant to end in April 2026. In January, he reversed course and extended it with no end date. The financial relationship between the deputy secretary of defense and the private equity firm he used to run now continues indefinitely.
Meanwhile the department began handing out contracts for Golden Dome, Trump’s missile-defense shield, a program that has already ballooned to an estimated $185 billion. The Pentagon at first refused to name the companies winning the work. When it finally released a list, at least four of the winners turned out to be owned or partly owned by Cerberus: North Wind, Stratolaunch, Red River Technology, and NetCentrics. The department still will not disclose what those contracts are worth, and by law is required to announce only those above $9 million.
Does Feinberg personally pick the contractors? The department says he has no direct responsibility for Golden Dome acquisitions. But the general who runs the program, Michael Guetlein, described his own chain of command without ambiguity: I report to the deputy secretary and only to the deputy secretary, he said. He is the only official who can tell me no. The man who can say no to the entire missile-defense program is the man whose old firm owns the companies being paid to build it, and whose family may still profit from that firm’s returns. No single email needs to be produced. The architecture does the work.
The recruiting pitch says it out loud
For anyone wondering how normal this has become, the sales brochure settles it. To staff its new investment operation – an “Economic Defense Unit” meant to deploy up to $200 billion over three years – the Pentagon hired the headhunting firm Heidrick & Struggles, whose recruiting deck went hunting for bankers at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, and Bank of America.
The pitch promised recruits unmatched access to top-level government officials and privileged information flow — whatever you need, you can get. It offered salaries reaching $600,000 through a government-aligned nonprofit, against a federal average near $100,000. And it described the job not as public service but as a two-year secondment leading to exceptional exit opportunities, including the chance to launch a new fund with members of the team. Come into the government, use the access, leave richer, on the strength of relationships built on the public payroll. This is not a leak of something embarrassing. It is a document written to attract people, on the assumption that the merger of private profit and public office is the perk.
A former assistant director on the White House technology-security staff, reading the same deck, warned that an effort this size has the potential to distort national-security-critical industries in ways he did not think anyone had seriously contemplated. There is, he added, obvious potential for truly egregious corruption. But corruption is almost the smaller point. Corruption implies a rule being broken. What is happening here is a rule being dissolved.
The same men, both shores
Line them up. Merz chaired an asset manager and then commanded the German rearmament that manager profits from. Phelan ran a billionaire’s money and then took command of the Navy that buys from the companies he held. Feinberg ran a private equity empire and then took the Pentagon’s second chair and filled the building with his former partners. Different countries, different uniforms, one profession and one move: from owning the assets of war to commanding the state that pays for them.
The line worth repeating from Merz’s own story turns out not to have been about Germany at all. The buildup manufactures the danger it claims to answer. Every European budget hardens Moscow’s conviction that it is being encircled, which justifies the next budget, around and around, while the men who profit count their dividends and call it security. That was true of one chancellor. It is true of an entire class of men who have stopped seeing daylight between the public interest and their own book, because across their whole careers there never was any.
The old fear, the one Eisenhower named in 1961, was that the military-industrial complex would acquire unwarranted influence over the government. That fear is quaint now. Influence is what you need when you are standing in the corridor. These men are not in the corridor. They are behind the desk, and the desk has a checkbook with no ceiling, and the recruiting brochure is on the table telling the next banker that whatever he needs, he can get.
Thomas Karat writes investigative work published at karat.substack.com and the Libertarian Institute, drawing on a corporate career and academic training as a behavior analyst to examine how institutions manufacture consent and influence.
Europe Votes Against Thought-Policing ‘Chat Control’, Brussels Passes It Anyway…
On Thursday in Strasbourg, 314 Members of the European Parliament voted to reject the return of “Chat Control,” the legal regime allowing tech companies to scan the private messages of roughly half a billion Europeans.
So naturally, the scanning regime won – thanks to a ‘quirky’ voting procedure in Brussels that allowed legislation to survive even though most MEPs who cast a vote opposed it. That should alarm anyone who still believes the word “parliament” is supposed to mean something.
Losing by Winning
The vote took place at second reading, under an urgent procedure pushed through just two days earlier by Parliament’s largest bloc, the centre-right European People’s Party.
At second reading, the arithmetic is rigged toward passage. Rejecting or amending the text does not require a majority of votes cast. It requires an absolute majority of all 720 MEPs: 361 votes.
That means every absent MEP and every abstention effectively counts in favor of the law.
This is how “DEMOCRACY” works in Europe:
⛔️ 314 vote AGAINST mass surveillance.
✅ 276 vote FOR it.
MASS SURVEILLANCE WINS.
Then the same bureaucratic hypocrites travel the world lecturing everyone about democracy and their so-called “European values.”
On Thursday, 607 members voted: 314 to reject, 276 to proceed, and 17 abstained. Another 113 were not in the chamber. The rejection therefore fell 47 votes short of the required threshold. A clear majority of voting MEPs opposed the measure – and the measure became law again anyway. Not coincidentally, the vote was scheduled for the final sitting day before Parliament dispersed for its summer recess, when absenteeism is at its annual peak.
The path to this outcome is as important as the result. Parliament had already rejected an extension of these same rules on 26 March. The regulation then expired on 3 April. In any functioning democratic system, that would have been the end of it. Instead, the Council returned on 2 July with essentially the same text, repackaged as a new proposal. Then, on 7 July, the EPP secured an urgency procedure by a narrow 331-to-304 vote, bypassing committee scrutiny and setting up Thursday’s vote under second-reading rules.
Marketa Gregorova, the Greens/EFA negotiator on the file, accused the EPP of violating Parliament’s own rules of procedure and abusing its position to force a re-run of a question the chamber had already answered. She was right to do so.
This is actually quite unbelievable.
Did you know that Nazis never won an over-whelming majority? They gained rule through such exceptions.
When a legislature can be made to vote on the same question repeatedly, under progressively worse rules, until it produces the desired answer, the word “vote” begins to look decorative.
What was revived on Thursday is “Chat Control 1.0” – the ePrivacy derogation first adopted in 2021 – not the broader permanent proposal commonly known as Chat Control 2.0.
The revived regime permits, rather than requires, providers such as Meta, Google and Microsoft to scan private messages, emails and uploaded images on unencrypted services for child sexual abuse material. It will now run until April 2028, unless permanent legislation replaces it first.
Parliament did manage to push through two concessions. Amendments exempting end-to-end encrypted services passed with 369 and 362 votes, carried by an unusual coalition spanning liberals, the left and parts of the right. That matters: Parliament is now formally on record against breaking encryption.
But as civil-rights campaigner Patrick Breyer notes, the victory is partly symbolic. Providers cannot meaningfully scan end-to-end encrypted content in the first place without undermining the encryption itself.
The more revealing vote was the one that failed. An amendment to restrict scanning to individuals actually identified as suspects by the judiciary won a clear plurality, 322 to 255. But because it also needed 361 votes, it died.
In other words, a majority of voting MEPs wanted scanning limited to actual suspects. Europe got suspicionless scanning of everyone instead.
Migrants continue to treat Britain’s streets, parks, and waterways like a personal hunting ground, with fresh footage exposing the grim reality of unchecked mass immigration.
A disturbing new video circulating on X shows a woman – widely identified in comments as a migrant – seemingly actively hunting birds.
She uses a sheet to capture a seagull perched on a gate or property edge. After securing the bird, she looks around for more prey, scanning the area as if on a deliberate hunt.
— WeGotitBack ??????????? (@NotFarLeftAtAll) July 9, 2026
When locals spot her and begin filming while questioning what she is doing with the bird, she gestures dismissively – as if to say “what’s your problem?” and implying this is totally normal behaviour and none of their business.
The clip has sparked widespread outrage, with many slamming the trespass and illegal taking of wildlife.
This is sick. We don’t want this barbaric and cruel shit in our country!
— Nicola Beaumont. ? (@PsychBeaulogy) July 8, 2026
ALL gulls (commonly called seagulls) are fully protected in Britain by the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, making it illegal to kill, injure, or handle them, or to destroy their active nests and eggs.
This woman needs locking up…FOLLOW OUR LAWS OR BOG OFF ???? @BBCNews…
There have been further suggestions that the woman was actually “rescuing” the bird, but many are not buying that explanation.
? WOMAN WAS RESCUING SEAGULL, NOT STEALING IT
A video I shared yesterday of a woman catching a seagull in a blanket, was Not what it looked like, the woman in question was actually concerned for the small seagull after it has fell off the roof previously, as you can see in… https://t.co/X4ae0MxvCRpic.twitter.com/36ONNaUHu6
This does not align with the original video which shows a bird with an adult size wingspan, not a fledging who is unable to fly. The bird the woman was wrestling into the sack/blanket would have been able to fly. What this means now I cannot say, but something is amiss here.
Fair play, but a juvenile gull that size does not need ‘rescuing’. You can see in the original video that it tries to fly away from her. It was already fledged. pic.twitter.com/Hp2xzuaVYt
You have to be an idiot to see that first video even with the idea in your head that she is trying to help it, and still think she is trying to help it.
I see nothing in this video that refutes the first one. The woman is not present in this one, & it’s a different gull. As a wildlife biologist, I can say that she did NOT handle the gull like someone w/ its welfare in mind. Have you been threatened into issuing this statement?
This latest incident fits a clear pattern. Migrants have been repeatedly filmed hunting pigeons, with their bare hands in UK streets, and even using fishing rods to try and catch them.
Similar scenes have played out with protected swans and ducks across the UK and Ireland, where migrants set traps and butcher birds in public spaces.
The depravity doesn’t stop at birds. On the continent, a Nigerian migrant was caught cooking a cat in a public park next to a children’s playground, drawing fury from locals.
These cases echo reports from Springfield, Ohio, where Haitian migrants faced accusations of snatching and consuming local wildlife, including ducks and geese in parks.
Residents described scenes of animals being grabbed by the neck, decapitated, and taken for food – claims that amplified national debate over mass migration’s impact on communities and norms.
British wildlife laws under the Wildlife and Countryside Act strictly protect many of these species. Yet enforcement seems inconsistent when it involves certain arrivals who show little regard for local customs, laws, or basic animal welfare.
Locals filming these confrontations repeatedly highlight the same point: these individuals have housing, clothing, and food provided, yet they hunt urban birds as if in a survival scenario from their countries of origin.
The cultural clash is undeniable. Britain, long a nation of animal lovers with strong traditions of protecting wildlife, now contends with behaviors that treat public spaces as open butcheries. Pigeons and seagulls in cities scavenge in polluted environments, raising health risks from diseases, but that hasn’t deterred the hunters.
This is a visible symptom of failed open-border policies that prioritize globalist ideals over national cohesion and rule of law. While politicians lecture about tolerance, everyday Brits watch their parks and streets transformed, and communities on edge.
Mass immigration without assimilation imports incompatible practices that erode Britain’s way of life. Strong borders, enforced laws, and putting citizens first aren’t radical – they’re essential to preserving what remains of civilized society.
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