It took the US 200 years to reach its first $1 trillion in debt. It took 95 days to add its last.

After several weeks of build up, today the Treasury announced that total public debt surpassed $40 trillion for the first time, after jumping by over $60 billion in one day, and has now surged by $1 trillion in just over three months, and by a third of the total in less than five years, as US lawmakers continue to ignore calls to contend with historically wide fiscal deficits.

The largely expected news came just hours after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unexpectedly announced the Treasury’s latest attempt to rein-in long-term borrowing costs from multi-year highs, the most important component of the growth in debt. The Treasury stunned the market when it said, just two weeks after the latest Refunding Announcement where it should have made this change, that it was ramping up the support for longer-dated securities by “increasing, by at least double, the size of liquidity support buyback operations for longer-dated nominal coupon securities (the 10-year to 20-year sector and the 20-year to 30-year sector).”

The announcement that sent yields plunging, if only for the time being. 

Remarkably, it was less than 5 years ago that US debt hit $30 trillion back in January 2022, illustrating the rapid growth in federal borrowing needs. And there’s no end in sight. 

As Bloomberg notes, “Republicans have long opposed revenue-raising tax increases,” while Democrats are best known for spending like drunken sailors to maximize socialist central planning, and both parties are loathe to sign on to politically toxic cuts to healthcare and retirement benefits for seniors. Many observers anticipate Congress and the administration of the day will only act if forced by a financial-market disruption.

That won’t stop them from talking about it all the time, though, as both parties at least pretend to understand that the US is on a catastrophic collision course should debt growth continue at this pace, and if the AI bet – which is now an all-in for virtually everyone – fails to dramatically boost productivity. Bessent, for one, said a key reason he got involved in politics was to help tackle deficits running at a pace unprecedented for times outside of major wars, pandemics or depressed job markets. So far he has failed catastrophically, and worse, he is doing precisely the kind of activist issuance “Twisting” for which he bashed his predecessor, Janet Yellen.

Economists, the Congressional Budget Office and Wall Street all see little or no progress in coming years for the deficit-to-gross domestic product ratio.

“Optically, I’m sure crossing thresholds like $40 trillion will focus attention on the issue in the near term,” said Matthew Luzzetti, chief US economist at Deutsche Bank AG. “But it does not represent a magical threshold for debt dynamics, and projections have anticipated this outcome for some time.”

More important, Luzzetti said, is the climb in US Treasury yields, which is steadily increasing the cost of servicing the record debt load. Last Thursday, the department’s latest 30-year bond auction resulted in the costliest such sale in a quarter century. A 10-year auction a day earlier drew the highest financing cost at that tenor since 2007, and only today’s announcement which sent yields tumbling prevent today’s 20Y Treasury auction from pricing at the highest yield on record. 

As buyers demand higher yields, that in turn drives up the Treasury’s borrowing needs. With two months left to go in the fiscal year, the government’s tally for interest costs so far for 2026 is $1.37 trillion – a 20% increase on the same period a year before. That in turn adds to the debt, potentially fueling further investor calls for higher rates, in a pattern known as a “doom loop.”

For a visual of said doom loop, consider that the Treasury paid out about $85 billion to bondholders in its semi-annual coupon payment on Monday, the largest on record. For comparison, the Treasury paid out $75 billion of interest at the mid-month settlement period in August 2025 and about $80 billion on Feb. 17.

Interest costs are now the third-largest part of the budget, surpassing healthcare and just behind Social Security. However, at $1.6 trillion, Social Security will be topped by gross interest no later than 2026.

It gets worse: thanks to the AI bubble – and specifically the AI debt bubble which we correctly spotted one year ago and which the market is only now starting to freak out about – the record debt issuance to fund capex is now starting to crowd out of demand for US paper. This means that very soon, the US government will have to decide: keeping the electorate happy, or funding data centers so they can buy the latest massively overpriced memory chips needed to run the latest chatbot. Incidentally, those soaring memory costs are now adding about 0.5% to core PCE, a number which the admin will soon realize is very politically unpopular, and will lead to a historic crackdown on hyperinflationary memory and semiconductor prices. 

“The federal budget is the enemy within,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and a former director of the CBO, wrote in a note Monday. “It is the greatest threat to the foundations of economic progress, U.S. international economic standing, and national security. The only reason for optimism should be material actions to rein in the sea of red ink. There are no such material actions.”

He is right, of course: the only time there can be material actions, is when the bond vigilantes crash the market, yet actions such as those by Bessent today assure that said day was just punted several weeks or months into the future, again and again.  

But wait, because there is even more: all of the above assumes no recession, no crises, no emergencies for the foreseeable future. Well, consider that US debt exploded higher during the most recent economic downturns tied to the global financial crisis and the Covid pandemic. During those periods, revenue slid as tax-paying workers lost jobs, and assistance payments jumped. One can only imagine where US debt will be after the next recession/pandemic/hot war.

Going back to Bessent, the current Treasury secretary came into office in 2025 touting a budget deficit target of around 3% of GDP by the end of President Donald Trump’s second term, which concludes in January 2029.  It’s not clear how that will possibly happen: as of July the ratio is 6% and rising… and will keep rising the longer the AI bubble drains demand for US long-dated paper.

Meanwhile, according to recent reports, Trump is seeking to galvanize support ahead of the November midterm elections, and is looking at new tax-cut promises in addition to increases in defense spending, both of which will supercharge the deficit and lead to even more debt. Meanwhile, the Elon Musk-led 2025 Department of Government Efficiency effort, which sought to slash discretionary spending including on contracts and government buildings, failed to cut outlays as much as DOGE’s own estimates projected. 

And then there is the next round of political theater: the current pace of debt accumulation…

We’ll take the over https://t.co/Gw0yfjylXR pic.twitter.com/Abq2dtPtrx

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) August 19, 2026

… means that the government has about 4 or 5 months before it again hits the debt ceiling of $41.1 trillion. Hitting that marker is expected to trigger another in the series of partisan showdowns in Washington over the years to head off a potentially devastating US payments default.

“The government has not taken meaningful actions to address the large general government fiscal deficits,” Fitch said. “Spending pressures will mount over the next decade due to an aging population.” The country will be “vulnerable to future economic shocks” as debt levels increase, the rating company said.

For Fitch, talk is cheap: instead of downgrading the US credit rating, one week ago Fitch reaffirmed the US at AA+, assuring that absolutely no remedial step will be taken, and that the next debt crisis will be cataclysmic.

“Hitting this big round number will hopefully send a wake up call throughout Washington,” said Michael Peterson, who chairs the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, a research group, in regard to the $40 trillion. “It will hurt everyday affordability across the country if we don’t get our debt under control,” he said.

He is wrong: everyone knows that the US is on a historic collision course with destiny. The only wake up call was for gold and bitcoin algos, both of which finally woke up from a bizarre slumber, sending both real and digital gold soaring.

Summary:

• Trump’s Economic War against Iran Begins 
• Trump says “severe economic consequences” for any country that does businesses with Tehran
• Trump says “ECONOMIC D-DAY” begins against Iran
• UAE Cuts Ties As Iran Warns Gulf States Against Helping Washington; Kpler Says US Navy Gaining Ground In Hormuz

​​​​​​​”ECONOMIC D-DAY”

President Trump is out with a Truth Social post describing today as “ECONOMIC D-DAY” against Iran, declaring that his total economic war against Tehran will be the “MOST CRUSHING ECONOMIC OPERATION EVER TAKEN AGAINST ANY COUNTRY.”

Trump said that with Tehran’s military and military-industrial base reduced to “now rubble” and its “currency worthless,” he will unleash severe economic consequences against “ANY country that allows its financial institutions, businesses, airports, or government entities to provide any type of lifeline to Iran.”

Here’s the full Truth Social post:

Last week, Derek Holt, head of Capital Markets Economics at Scotiabank in Toronto, offered clients a preview of what the campaign to economically isolate Iran could look like (view here), including the potential targeting of China. Notably, much of Iran’s crude exports flow to Chinese buyers.

UAE Cuts Ties As Iran Warns Gulf States Against Helping Washington; Kpler Says US Navy Gaining Ground In Hormuz

Iran’s parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf is visiting Baghdad while at the same time US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has spoken UAE National Security Adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan to discuss the Hormuz situation and security. Except of course the two sides aren’t talking with each other.

President Trump has made clear that no talks are on, and that none are scheduled, as he’s been floating a ‘new’ strategy to ‘strangle’ the Iranian economy over the long term. CNN reported Tuesday that White House officials have recently communicated that they are shifting their strategy — going from “hammer Iran ASAP” to “strangle them” over time.

As for Ghalibaf, he blasted War Secretary Pete Hegseth and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Tuesday, mocking this new disengagement strategy, given the US has already failed to bring Tehran to its knees.

“Americans think squeezing Iran harder will win concessions that were never part of the agreement,” Ghalibaf wrote in a post on X. “Bessent and Hegseth are way out of their league,” Ghalibaf added while referring to them as the “clown crew.” He stated:

Stop waiting for the clown crew to pull a rabbit out of their hat and clean up the mess you made.

After declaring a new ‘offensive’ military posture in response to the crisis, Iran is showing no signs of backing off the confrontation with the US in the region. On Wednesday its armed forces warned Gulf countries against hosting or assisting American forces, saying it would be tantamount to joining the war on the US side.

“We wish to warn that any assistance or facilitation provided to the aggressor U.S. military amounts to participation in the U.S. military operation,” armed forces chief of staff Ali Abdollahi said.

“It seems unlikely that such a large number of military aircraft, particularly refueling aircraft could be present at regional bases without knowledge of host countries,” the official continued as cited in Mehr news agency.

It’s not known how many refueling tankers or else large warplanes are still positioned in the Gulf, but certainly the bulk of regional refueling aircraft operated by the US Air Force are currently concentrated at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion international airport – and has been subject of a lot of media attention.

And in another significant escalation that effectively torpedoes any remaining illusions of hoped-for cross-Gulf detente, the United Arab Emirates has announced Wednesday a complete and immediate severance of all economic ties with Tehran. The move comes on the heels of what UAE officials claim was a barrage of Iranian ballistic missiles targeted directly at Emirati territory.

Tehran had quickly denied it had fired missiles on its territory, but UAE authorities later clarified that the military observed two missiles inbound from Iran, which caused no damage or casualties – which triggered an urgent missile alert for the population on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, below are some of the latest major developments and reports related to the Iran conflict:

Iran has weighed attacking US military targets in Europe should Donald Trump escalate the war, according to people close to the regime, as Tehran considers its options to increase the stakes of the conflict. FT

Even as Iran projects resilience in the war with the United States, its leaders are worried that a threat of more economic punishment by Donald Trump could increase hardships, reignite unrest and further erode the Islamic Republic’s legitimacy. RTRS

Iranian attacks on shipping in the Strait of Hormuz are piling up without an American military response, raising the risks of crossing the strategic waterway and frustrating some Arab allies who worry the U.S. doesn’t have a strategy to wind down the conflict. WSJ

However, shipping analytics firm Kpler has suggested that the US Navy is gaining ground in the Strait of Hormuz, and that Iran is ceding some control, amid a war of words between President Trump and Iranian leadership over who has actual ‘control’.

previewing new sanctions still to be announced…

The Trump administration appears to be indicating it favors economic warfare in its approach to the conflict with Iran, touting its naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and previewing new sanctions still to be announced. https://t.co/k5g4FBcxF7

— ABC News Politics (@ABCPolitics) August 19, 2026

“At the moment, however, the evidence is clear: The United States, patrolling the strait with its navy, is gaining ground – and Iran is losing much of its control of the critical waterway,” writes CNN. “More than 80% of liquids transits through the Strait of Hormuz over the past two weeks have taken the Omani route – a UN-authorized shipping channel that Iran vehemently opposes – or have been ‘dark’ transits that likely took the Omani route, according to Kpler, which tracks ships using transponders and satellite data.”

But there’s as yet no rush for international shipping to return to the waterway, given the risk of attack and all of the serious unknowns which could result in total losses as well as threaten the safety of crew.

Authored by Morgan Sweeney via The Center Square,

A forthcoming federal rule on open banking may allow banks to charge new fees for access to consumer data, a move critics say would harm consumers and runs counter to other parts of President Donald Trump’s agenda.

Open banking allows consumers to authorize banks and other financial institutions to securely share their financial data electronically with third-party providers.

Why now?

The White House was reviewing the anticipated rule from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as of last week, according to reporting by Bloomberg Law. The rule would help shape the federal framework for open banking in the U.S., building on a broad provision contained within the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010.

Dodd-Frank was passed to enhance transparency and accountability and strengthen consumer protections in the financial industry after the economic crisis of 2008. The law is just under 850 pages long, and Section 1033 – which provides the legal basis for the open banking ecosystem that has evolved in the U.S. – was not one of its central provisions. Section 1033 is about one page long and it ensures that Americans have the legal right to access their own financial data upon request. Financial institutions must provide consumers’ financial data relevant to the sought-after financial product or service in “an electronic form usable by consumers.”

The law gives the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau broad authority to define and standardize this process, which is partly why affected industries have anticipated federal rulemaking on open banking for more than a decade.

The Biden administration issued the long-awaited rule in late 2024, which required banks to provide data directly to third parties authorized by consumers and prohibited banks from charging third parties fees for accessing the data, among other provisions. Banks pushed back, suing the bureau claiming it was exceeding the authority it was granted under Section 1033 and challenging those provisions in court.

Banks have said the rule would require them to build and maintain costly interfaces for third-party access while preventing them from being able to recoup those costs.

Last summer, JPMorgan Chase & Co. submitted proposed fees to data aggregators like Plaid for accessing Chase customers’ financial data.

The Trump administration has said the Biden administration’s rule was unlawful, “arbitrary and capricious” and began working on a rewrite of the rule last August. The lawsuit is essentially paused until the new rule is released, and the court ordered that enforcement of the Biden rule be stayed.

The Trump administration’s version reportedly includes a provision that would allow banks to charge volume-based fees to fintech companies to access consumer financial data, meaning banks could begin charging fintech companies once they make more than a certain number of requests for customer data.

Who pays the price?

News that the Trump administration’s rule would include a data-rationing provision prompted numerous objections from fintech companies and consumer advocacy groups, who argued that if banks didn’t pay for the data sharing, consumers ultimately will.

“Inevitably, if [the cost] is on the third party, it’s going to go back to the consumer,” said Todd Zywicki, a George Mason University law professor who formerly led a CFPB task force on federal consumer financial law and served in a leadership role at the Federal Trade Commission.

A third party is really a false choice, according to Zywicki, and between consumers and banks, he thinks banks are the much better option.

“The bank already has built-in incentives to collect the data, keep the data safely, use the data, and under law would already be required to share the data with consumers for them to be able to use it to shop for themselves,” Zywicki told The Center Square, “To then say, OK, now you have to also let Plaid access my data or Mint access my data, so they can go find me a better savings account than recommended to me or suggests this product instead of that product just strikes me as the only way to really make sense on this.”

The five largest banks in the U.S. reported a record-worthy second quarter. JPMorgan reported its highest quarterly profit in history, Goldman Sachs had its best second quarter ever, and Citigroup enjoyed its best quarter in a decade. Bank of America also posted strong results, while Wells Fargo beat Wall Street expectations. Collectively, they brought in $49 billion in profits.

Zywicki and other sources who spoke to The Center Square also maintained that banks have already done much of the work to build an open banking ecosystem and any costs they might incur to share data with more third parties would be relatively small.

“Banks already are collecting and holding information securely… They’ve already got to share the information for free with the consumer. It’s just a matter of whether a third party can get the information on behalf of the consumer,” Zywicki added.

But there’s another cost to consumers that could be even greater than any immediate impact on their wallets, advocates warn, and that’s the cost of continued fervent fintech innovation.

“We have already seen the nation’s biggest banks take advantage of regulatory ambiguity to impose fees and throttle access. Further uncertainty could stop the next great startup from forming and prevent consumers from accessing affordable financial products,” said Miranda Margowsky, head of communications for the Financial Technology Association.

Fintech innovation can do more than help consumers manage their finances. Startups like Carefull, a fintech company that analyzes customers’ financial activity for unusual patterns, can help detect warning signs of dementia or cognitive decline, potentially years before a clinical diagnosis.

“The goal here is to create a competitive framework where… small banks, for example, or fintech providers, or whoever can compete against the big banks that are currently holding the data,” Zywicki said. “It’s not really much of a fair playing field if banks can continue to use this information to market their [own] products.”

At odds with Trump’s agenda

Critics of a data tolling system have also said that allowing banks to charge for access to consumer data undermines several of the administration’s other priorities and initiatives.

Several advocacy groups submitted a joint letter to the administration in July saying that the proposal would violate the spirit of one of Trump’s May executive orders that specifically calls for government regulation that promotes financial innovation.

“The United States is a global leader in financial innovation, driven in part by the rapid growth of financial technology (fintech) firms,” the order reads. “To foster this financial innovation, the Federal Government must update regulations…. and remove overly burdensome and fragmented regulations and supervisory practices that form barriers to entry and primarily benefit incumbent financial services firms.”

The president has also heavily promoted Trump Accounts, the government-backed, tax-preferred investment savings accounts for minors, as a way for ordinary American families to leverage financial tools more often used by wealthier individuals. Trump Accounts use Plaid to connect users’ bank accounts to the platform, though users whose financial institutions are not supported can verify their accounts manually.

The president has also been a vocal supporter of cryptocurrency and has advanced crypto-friendly policy. He and his sons founded World Liberty Financial, a financial platform that “bridges the gap between traditional banking and blockchain-powered innovation.”

But the Blockchain Association, a cryptocurrency industry trade group, doesn’t support volume-based fees either. It was one of the organizations that signed onto the July letter, and it also wrote a letter to the CFPB in October.

“The President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets has entreated ‘the Federal government to operationalize President Trump’s promise to make America the crypto capital of the world.’ Maintaining the broad permissions and prohibition of fees prescribed by the [Biden administration] Open Banking Rule is critical to realizing this goal and sustaining American leadership in fintech and blockchain for the century ahead,” it wrote.

What’s next?

The bureau’s rewrite of the Biden administration’s open banking rule is being reviewed by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, according to Bloomberg. The bureau issued an advance notice of proposed rulemaking in August 2025, received public comments and drafted a proposed rule. Once the White House review is complete – potentially with changes – the bureau can issue a notice of proposed rulemaking. That proposal will also be subject to public comment before the bureau can issue a final rule.

“It’s really important to get this one right,” Zywicki said. “When you get a regulation wrong, it’s really hard to fix.”

The Center Square reached out to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Bank Policy Institute and multiple banks but did not receive a response in time for publication.

Nature is healing, with the latest data from the AI search visibility platform Promptwatch showing that OpenAI’s ChatGPT citations from Reddit have plunged in recent weeks to nearly zero.

“It looks like Reddit is almost wiped from ChatGPT sources; the query fanout changes had a big impact, and in the past couple of days it seems to be almost completely removed from prompt responses,” Promptwatch founder Klaas Foppen wrote on X.

looks like reddit is almost wiped from chatgpt sources

the query fanout changes had a big impact

and the past couple of days it seems to be almost completely removed from prompt responseshttps://t.co/oCGm9M0yPO pic.twitter.com/c2GJF2apG7

— Klaas (@forgebitz) August 18, 2026

According to Promptwatch, Reddit’s daily share of all citations returned by ChatGPT Search began to move sharply lower in the first week of August, then fell to near zero by mid-month.

Promptwatch’s website said the red lines on the chart began on August 8, when OpenAI changed the query fanout behavior of ChatGPT Search. By August 14, or last Friday, those citations had plunged again to near zero.

Promptwatch continued:

Reddit lost almost its entire citation footprint in ChatGPT within a single day. From July 18 through August 7, it held a steady 3.83% average share of ChatGPT citations, one of the largest of any domain. On August 14, the share collapsed to under 1%, and the August 14-17 average of 0.52% is an 86.4% relative drop.

The slide started earlier: on August 8, the same day ChatGPT changed its query fanout behavior, Reddit’s share fell from the high 3s to the mid-2s. The chart shows when each change happened, not why. A shift in ChatGPT’s source selection is the obvious candidate, but a data-collection issue cannot be ruled out, so treat the size of the drop as provisional while we keep monitoring.

Reddit citations in ChatGPT have been controversial from the start because there is often no confirmation of where the information originated, and the citations could point to someone claiming to be an engineer, doctor, trader, or insider without proving their credentials. There’s also the fact that Reddit generally leans left-wing, which could alter answers. 

All-In Podcast’s Jason Calacanis asked Grok, “Is this a choice because of quality or because of legal IP issues?”

The answer:

Mostly quality. OpenAI shifted ChatGPT Search query fanout around Aug 8 to heavy use of site: operators targeting trusted domains. This cut Reddit citations from ~3.8% to 0.5% by Aug 14 (Promptwatch data) to reduce spam and low-quality results. The 2024 licensing deal for…

— Grok (@grok) August 19, 2026

Someone asked:

very likely the reason

— Klaas (@forgebitz) August 18, 2026

Foppen noted that instead of ChatGPT tapping Reddit, more official sources and direct-site citations are being pulled.

Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

Communism is on the rise in the United States and has now entered otherwise mainstream Democratic Party politics.

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is on track to increase the number of its members in Congress from two to at least six in January, possibly more. That’s not including Sen. Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a democratic socialist.

A DSA member named Francesca Hong just came within striking distance of becoming the Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin, one of our largest and most important states. Hong was narrowly defeated in the Aug. 11 primary by Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley.

Don’t be confused by those calling themselves socialists. A few may be well-meaning middle-of-the-road Democrats who favor the Scandinavian socialist model. But others are wolves in sheep’s clothing – communists who use the socialist label to hide their real intentions.

What’s interesting is that many of the new socialists don’t even try to hide their radical leanings. They publicly call themselves socialists and are proud of it.

After the fight against communism in the U.S. in the 1950s and the U.S. victory in the Cold War by the early 1990s, most Americans might assume that communism is no longer a threat to the American way of life and the U.S. political system.

That’s a mistake.

Communist and Marxist ideas are alive and well in the U.S. and are thriving in universities, think tanks, foundations, the media and other institutions that Americans typically think of as having better motives.

The Evolution of Revolution

This ideological infiltration may follow Marxian economics, but the method used by the new communists was anticipated by the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who wrote in the 1920s and 1930s.

Gramsci agreed with Marx’s goal – the abolition of private property – but he thought the way to achieve it was not through violent revolution but through a long-term struggle for control of society’s cultural and political institutions.

Decades later, this strategy came to be described as “the long march through the institutions.”

In other words, communism would not necessarily win by direct confrontation but by a gradual infiltration of education, culture and governance and the decline of critical thinking.

U.S. institutions would become ideological boot camps and propaganda outlets that would gradually convince Americans that communism, dressed up as “socialism,” was the better path.

From there, it would be a simple task to tear down traditional constitutional structures by getting rid of the Senate, the Electoral College and an independent judiciary.

Top-down communist control would be the final step. No revolution required. Just long-term rot like the proliferation of mold or termites.

For a powerful example of this process, consider the recent controversy surrounding the Smithsonian Institution and testimony before Congress by Anthea Hartig, director of the National Museum of American History.

The dispute centered on whether America’s national museums have increasingly emphasized slavery, race and inequality at the expense of the country’s founders and achievements. Hartig defended the museum’s approach and told lawmakers that it does not take sides in America’s political debates.

The Smithsonian’s treatment of Benjamin Franklin, for example, emphasizes his history as a slaveholder. Yet Franklin was also one of the great scientists and founders of the 18th century and, later in life, became a leading abolitionist.

He served as president of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and, in 1790, petitioned Congress to work toward ending slavery.

Franklin also became the nation’s first postmaster general, helped establish an early fire insurance company and helped found the institution that became the University of Pennsylvania, where I attended law school.

The real issue is one of emphasis: whether America’s national museums should primarily celebrate the country’s achievements or increasingly focus on slavery, race, inequality and other failures in the American story.

That debate is worth having because institutions shape the way Americans understand their own country.

A Very American History of Communism

Communist ideology never entirely disappeared from America. It took root in organized political movements following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 and expanded during the Great Depression.

The New York Times’ Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty notoriously minimized Stalin’s man-made famine in Ukraine in the early 1930s, reporting that helped obscure the brutality of the Soviet system.

American communism suffered a setback after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, which was a nonaggression treaty between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. American communists and fellow travelers were disillusioned that Stalin would make a deal with Hitler, who was universally viewed as the avatar of fascism.

Anti-communism reached a frenzy stage during the Cold War with the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 after their conviction for conspiracy to commit espionage, the Alger Hiss case, accusations of communist infiltration leveled at government officials by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Despite these setbacks, the radical left had a revival during the 1960s and 1970s and is prominent today in the success of the Democratic Socialists of America, now the largest socialist organization in the United States.

Castro’s American Alumni

Cuba also played an important role in the American radical left during the Cold War. Many American radicals traveled to Cuba or absorbed the influence of Castro’s revolution, including Stokely Carmichael and Angela Davis.

Karen Bass, now the mayor of Los Angeles, traveled repeatedly to Castro’s Cuba in the 1970s as part of the Venceremos (“We Will Conquer”) Brigade, where young American left-wing activists worked alongside Cubans and were immersed in the communist revolution.

Cuba was not the only source of communist influence. Barack Obama, as a teenager in Hawaii, had a relationship with Frank Marshall Davis, a writer and activist with documented ties to the Communist Party. Obama later wrote about Davis in Dreams from My Father and the influence Davis had on his thinking about race and identity.

If you wonder why race relations in the U.S. remain strained after enormous progress beginning in the 1960s and why socialism is on the rise today in urban centers like New York and Los Angeles, the history of the American radical left and its ties to international socialist movements are worth understanding.

The labels and tactics have changed, but the underlying struggle over property, markets and political power has not disappeared.

Politics Comes for Your Portfolio

The rise of socialism inside the Democratic Party is an enormously important political story on its own. But it also has huge investment implications that could affect your portfolio.

Many democratic socialists favor higher taxes on wealthy households, expanded government healthcare and tuition programs and sweeping changes to policing, immigration and other institutions. Some prominent figures on the left have also supported “wealth taxes” – which would tax certain holdings of property, shares, bonds and other assets rather than merely income.

Depending on how such a tax were structured, investors could find themselves selling retirement assets just to pay the new wealth tax.

Apart from causing social and economic disruption, these policies could hurt your retirement because you’ll have to pay the taxes needed to finance them. Later, you may pay even more taxes to clean up the mess.

Gold and silver may be among the best assets to own in these circumstances because they’re non-digital, can be held outside the banking system and are difficult to freeze electronically.

A Florida billionaire was revealed Tuesday as the deep-pocketed buyer who shelled out a jaw-dropping $40 million for Ferrari’s one-of-a-kind Luce EV, the Italian supercar that critics mercilessly roasted for looking straight-up fugly.

The buyer: Dr. Herbert Wertheim, an optometrist who founded Miami-based Brain Power, a firm that cooks up tech for the eyewear industry.

The Journal reports:

Wertheim’s unique model, dubbed “Chassis 0,” has an estimated worth of $1.1 million, according to Sotheby’s. The car has been shipped to Italy for modifications – although Wertheim didn’t know what kind – and he will take possession of it next year. But much like with the Ferrari Daytona SP3 he bought last year for $26 million at the same auction, Wertheim’s bigger plan for the Luce – or the Lucy, as he calls it – is to be a fundraising workhorse for the many charities he supports.

“It will not be my personal car to go to Publix to get bananas,” said Wertheim. “I don’t want to break the sound barrier, but you know, it’s nice when you’re trying to get on the highway quickly.”

If you thought Wertheim might be woke, you would be mistaken. The 87-year-old regularly hits Mar-a-Lago, the private club owned by President Donald Trump, who he considers a friend. At a charity gala in Palm Beach, Wertheim dropped another $2 million for a private White House visit with Trump. The winning bid came during the bash at Mar-a-Lago estate, raising cash for educational scholarships for kids of Palm Beach cops and firefighters.Wertheim has an an estimated net worth of $4.6 billion.

Authored by Jonathan Turley via jonathanturley.org,

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been frantically trying to restart a presidential campaign that appears moribund, with polls showing him losing in some states to figures such as Pete Buttigieg and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

In his absence, his multibillion-dollar high-speed train also seems to be going nowhere fast. A new report from the state inspector general revealed that the train will be delayed again and that the public is being kept in the dark about ongoing problems with Newsom’s signature project. Oh, and one more thing: the project will run out of money by December 2027.

Benjamin Belnap’s report revealed the project is again running out of money. It found missing details in the project’s 2026 business plan, and concluded that the project will again be out of money by next year.

The state has already spent $18 billion, but it will need at least another $18 billion to finish the first segment. It could take roughly $200 billion more actually to complete the original San Francisco-to-Los Angeles line.

Even with billions more, the current segment will not be completed until 2034.

Voters approved a $9.95 billion bond issue in 2008 under Newsom’s predecessor after absurdly low cost estimates. Newsom has been a champion of the project. Influential figures and companies stood to make a fortune, and the key was to secure a “buy-in” worth billions, so that it would become increasingly difficult to abandon the project as overruns and delays sent costs soaring.

Now the official estimate of future ridership has dropped by 25%, and it demands billions more to complete a project delayed by decades. Remember that this entire project was meant to create a rail line of only 171 miles.

One would think that the California voters would be marching to the capital with pitchforks and torches over such breathtaking incompetence and waste. However, they appear to have been conditioned to accept the lowest level of performance from their public officials.

The response of Democratic leaders is crushingly predictable: they are pledging to seek a federal bailout to cover their own incompetence. The Democratic nominee for governor, Xavier Becerra, is promising to fight to get back federal funds that were cut off by the Trump Administration. While promising to seriously review any problems in the project (as if they are not obvious), no one has been held accountable for this financial train wreck. Instead, all Democrats can do is demand that citizens around the country help bail out their boondoggle.

Yet, the Inspector General is describing a failure of leadership where no one is making any real decisions:

“Exploration of specific financing mechanisms is a positive step, but because the Authority might run out of funding as soon as December 2027, and the financing strategy the Authority uses has the potential to significantly affect the amount of interest it will need to repay, the Authority and state lawmakers have little time for delay in deciding upon a strategy and implementing it.”

Belnap indicated that those in control are simply shrugging off the problem, noting that “[b]ecause the Authority has thus far not demonstrated a willingness to establish and reinforce a process that ensures accuracy and transparency in project reporting, we have directed our report recommendations to the Board.”

In the meantime, the state will continue to creep along with a project that is sucking billions into a project that has become a national disgrace. Becerra’s pledge to seek bailouts shows that the problem remains the political culture in California. There is little accountability left in a one-party state where companies and individuals have made fortunes off this debacle. The only people being taken for a ride are Californian citizens and it is not the ride that they bargained for.

Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”

Almonty Industries has evolved from a junior miner into an established tungsten producer and a pure play on the China decoupling theme, the incoming defense rearmament supercycle in the West, AI infrastructure, and, of course, critical-mineral scarcity. As Western governments race to rebuild a tungsten supply chain outside China, Almonty’s producing assets and the ramp-up of its Sangdong and Panasqueira mines position the miner as a potentially critical supplier to the Western world.

Let’s begin with the catalyst. Beijing tightened tungsten export controls in February 2025, citing national security concerns, and has continued to subject the metal to strict controls. The restrictions have severely curbed available supply, triggering a squeeze in the physical market and driving prices above $3,125 a ton as of Wednesday morning.

Image via Cantor Fitzgerald: 

Earlier this year, an inquiry from the US Defense Logistics Agency about potential tungsten purchases unsettled an already tight market, according to industry commentary circulated by Almonty. The agency, which manages critical stockpiles of tungsten for the government, ultimately did not proceed after industry players raised alarm bells that a massive government purchase could drive prices even higher.

Tungsten supplies are certainly turning out to be a major chokepoint: much of the metal available outside China is already committed under long-term contracts, leaving very little supply for the US government to add to its national stockpile.

Meanwhile, Japan is facing a critical shortage. Shipments of Chinese APT, or ammonium paratungstate, a vital white-powder intermediate used to create tungsten products, have reportedly stopped entirely since the beginning of this year, placing immense pressure on Japanese hard-metal and tool manufacturers. Japan has since increased its imports of tungsten scrap, but the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security has issued a new rule requiring US suppliers to allocate 100% of their tungsten scrap to domestic buyers, not overseas ones.

The great tungsten squeeze has positioned Almonty as a pure play on ex-China supplies, especially as it advances its Sangdong Mine in South Korea toward full production. The project is expected to become a major source of non-Chinese tungsten for Western defense manufacturers and critical-mineral supply chains. The miner also operates one of the world’s longest-producing tungsten mines in Portugal.

On the earnings front, the company’s existing operations benefited from record tungsten prices during the second quarter. Revenue increased 498% from one year ago. Almonty reported net income of about $182 million, though most of that reflected a noncash accounting gain related to convertible securities.

Image via Cantor Fitzgerald: 

It’s that very supply gap that shows why Almonty’s mines in South Korea and Portugal are becoming extraordinarily important to the West, not just for defense industries facing a weapons-production supercycle because of depleted stockpiles and the urgent need to resupply, but also for the semiconductor industry, where tungsten hexafluoride is used to create microscopic connections inside advanced memory chips. The supply squeeze ties Almonty to Samsung, SK Hynix, other chipmakers, and the broader AI infrastructure boom.

At the start of the week, Almonty authorized a $300 million stock buyback, allowing it to purchase up to 5% of its outstanding shares over three years.

CEO Lewis Black wrote in a statement, “The Board authorized this program because we do not believe today’s share price reflects the underlying value of this Company or the assets behind it.”

“Almonty controls one of the largest and highest-grade tungsten deposits outside of China at precisely the moment Western governments and defense manufacturers are rebuilding their critical minerals supply chains around non-Chinese sources,” Black said.

He added, “With Sangdong advancing toward full capacity, we believe our own shares are one of the most attractive investments available to us at current market pricing, and repurchasing them is a direct way to build value for the shareholders who own this business alongside us.“

The buyback comes as Almonty’s shares have diverged from tungsten prices since late April.

Almonty’s story should be viewed within the broader China decoupling theme, a trend likely to accelerate as the Trump administration seeks to reindustrialize the US and secure critical supply chains. The underlying move here is to reduce exposure to Chinese supply chains before a potential invasion of Taiwan disrupts access to strategic minerals, semiconductors, and other materials essential to the Western defense-industrial base and now the entire AI data center buildout. 

Authored by Andrew Fenton via CoinTelegraph.com,

Australian tech firm Apate deploys a vast array of AI-bot characters worldwide that play the role of gullible scam victims to waste millions of hours of con artists’ time each month.

Hilariously, one of the company’s monthly performance metrics is how many times frustrated scammers swear at the idiot ‘victims’ who are playing dumb and stringing them along.

“I think we’re the only company in the world that is actually keeping as part of their KPIs the number of F-words that scammers are dropping at them,” Apate founder Dali Kaafar tells Magazine with a chuckle. 

The company has a stable of almost 200,000 AI characters that are able to hold convincing phone conversations and to chat on social media and messaging platforms.

”I can tell you that we’re basically servicing, as we call them, hundreds of thousands of calls a day, and pretty much hundreds of thousands of conversations on the other channels,” he says. 

Every hour of a con artist’s time they waste is another hour they’re not scamming a member of the public. In the six weeks up to the end of 2025, Apate’s bots engaged in 600,000 scam calls for a single telco called TPG in Australia. 

“Essentially, we wasted more than five hundred days of scammers’ time,” he explains. “That roughly equates to somewhere around thirteen million dollars being saved.”

The bots’ other goal is to elicit actionable intelligence for banks and telcos to combat scam rings across Australia, Asia, Africa and the UK and Europe.

Apate bots deal with scammers via chat. Source: Apate

Scam baiting at scale with AI victims

Kaafar says he got the idea when he received a scam call while having a picnic with his family in Sydney back in November 2021.

To his wife’s annoyance, but his kids’ delight, he strung the scammer along for 44 minutes by pretending to be a gullible rube falling for the scam. 

“What followed was really literally a full comedy show for my kids,” he says, adding that during the call he’d also learned a lot of potentially useful information about the mechanics of the scam and the tactics used.   

“As I hung up that call, I remember thinking very clearly: if I could do that just for fun, imagine what technology can do at scale.”

Working as a professor at Macquarie University at the time, he raised the idea with some of his doctoral students working on AI and security.

“I said, ‘Guys, there has to be a much better way of doing this. Let’s build something that is really automating this whole process of engaging scammers at scale, but also, perhaps most importantly, extracting all sorts of intelligence from these conversations.’ And that’s literally how it started.”

Within a few months they’d secured funding from the Office of National Intelligence to research the idea, and the project was spun off from the university into Apate in 2023. The company now works with most of the big banks in Australia, as well as numerous banks in the UK, South Africa and South East Asia. 

Apate is far from the only company scam baiting fraudsters using AI bots — though they are doing it on a greater scale than most. United Kingdom telco O2 rolled out an AI Granny campaign last year, which frustrates scammers by taking up hours of their time talking about her 28 cats. It was as much an ad campaign to warn the public about the dangers of scam calls as anything else.

O2’s highly entertaining AI Granny. Source: 02

Creating the perfect AI victims

Apate launched with 120 different personas across different genders, ages and personality types, and now have 197,000 personas with identifiable vocal tics, accents, and they make the same noises people make when they’re trying to think of what to say. 

“We spent a lot of time refining and building these AI bots that sound exactly like you and I and our neighbors,” he says. 

The AI models were trained on “hundreds and hundreds” of hours of recorded conversations between human scam baiters and scammers, so they can employ counter strategies.

“They know that they’re talking to bad guys, if you like, and they really navigate the conversations so that it sounds really very, very realistic to any scammer out there, even if a scammer is skeptical about things.”The bots get sent out on WhatsApp and Telegram to act as honeypots for scammers. While the old cliché that you can’t scam an honest man is not true, it’s still very possible to exploit the scammer’s desire for money. 

“They are cybercriminals, really. I think we just very often forget that they’re cybercriminals who are trying to get people’s life savings. And so that element of greed is sometimes what our bots also exploit.”

Bots collect valuable intel from each scam call

In the crypto industry, Apate works for “one of the leaders in blockchain analysis,” which may or may not be Chainalysis. They aren’t interested in wasting scammers’ time — they want intelligence on which wallets and methods scammers are using so they can track the flow of funds. 

“These bots, as they engage across different conversations, extract new crypto wallet addresses by the hundreds and by the thousands,” he says. “It’s data and intelligence that is coming literally before their damage happens.”

Scamming is big business, and the call centers are “pretty much corporate organizations,” Kaafar explains. 

“This data is very, very important because, literally, that’s the new account or the new wallet where you really need to pay extreme attention to. Because this is where these… scammer compounds are collecting their money or their funds with.”

“Think about it literally as being always ahead of the scammer’s tactics. And the more you know before the money gets transferred, the better it is.”

In July, Apate’s bots uncovered a marketplace for brokers soliciting verified bank accounts in India, offering commissions of up to 5% paid in USDT on the proceeds from scams passing through the accounts.

Apate’s human staff in Sydney. Source: Apate

AI arms race between good guys and bad guys

Scammers are increasingly using AI bots themselves, and it won’t be too long before AI scammers are as ubiquitous as spam emails. Scamming people is a $1.24 trillion business, so the industry can afford the compute required to scale up operations.
Apate’s research suggests that about 20% to 30% of scam text conversations employ AI already, but Kaafar isn’t too worried about the outcome of anti-scam bots fighting scam bots.
He says their researchers believe that AI bots playing defense have an advantage, according to game theory, because they’re trying to extract intelligence, while the scam bots are trying to get the other AI to perform an action.

“You can also demonstrate mathematically that that is to the advantage of a defender because it becomes easier to extract intelligence from the attacker’s AI model,” he says.

“We can imagine a world where scammers become a lot more sophisticated and deploy such technology. But that also means that if they do, they’re actually deemed to lose the game, which is great news in the fight against scams.”

The scandal and controversy over the USS Lincoln aircraft carrier continues, despite the Trump administration and top military brass reiterating this week that the issues have been hugely overblown. It’s long been reported that the supercarrier which is front line in the war against Iran has suffered resupply problems, low morale, sub-standard conditions, and mental health problems given the over-extended deployment.

One prominent media outlet is now alleging that the crisis is largely due to War Secretary Pete Hegseth having “hid” a crucial piece of information – that amid Iran’s retaliation during Operation Epic Fury, it had destroyed much of the main resupply base for the US Central Command region (CENTCOM).

MS Now senior national security reporter David Rohde made the claim, saying that when the logistics hub Naval Support Activity (NSA) Bahrain was struck by Iranian ballistic missiles at the start of the war, it effectively crippled Pentagon resupply and logistics for the Mideast region.

According to MS Now’s reporting:

During a segment in MS Now discussing President Donald Trump’s dismissal of reports of low morale and the mental health concerns of those aboard the carrier during an unusually long deployment, Rohde said the resupply issue was “because Pete Hegseth hid the fact that Iran destroyed the main resupply base that the United States has in the Gulf.“

“He did not make that public in press conference after press conference, and that is, again, the way that they have mishandled this war,” Rohde added. The full segment can be viewed here.

As a reminder, at the end of June the Wall Street Journal featured several satellite images which demonstrated the widespread destruction at the base. From there, the Pentagon was forced to only maintain a small staff there, and is said to be mulling abandoning it as an operations center altogether.

“When the Iranian missiles and drones came for the nerve center of America’s naval operations in the Middle East, some of them hit their mark,” that prior WSJ reporting indicated. According to more:

The U.S. Navy base in Bahrain was repeatedly targeted between late February and June. Strikes that got through caused extensive damage, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of satellite imagery, social-media footage and interviews with current and former servicemembers—damage that the Pentagon hasn’t publicly acknowledged. Hit hard were the command headquarters and at least a dozen other buildings, along with two satellite communications terminals. 

The military said no one was killed at the base, known as Naval Support Activity Bahrain, and that the strikes didn’t significantly impact operations. The U.S. evacuated most personnel but has kept a small staff on the ground. 

,,,The extensive damage done to America’s sole naval base in the Middle East—along with hits to at least 20 U.S. sites across the region, including military installations and diplomatic facilities—has the U.S. re-evaluating its entire footprint in the region, according to U.S. officials familiar with the deliberations.

All of this reportedly had significant impact on the USS Lincoln’s ability to maintain standard supplies and conditions. Again, all of this is being downplayed or else outright denied by the Pentagon and US administration. 

Media headlines focused on the Lincoln have been growing over the summer…

We will quote one unnamed former national security insider who has offered the following…

“Bahrain NSA was critical to keeping carriers on station because it provided nearby supplies and you can’t put the carriers in at ports within missile range of Iran as they will become sitting ducks (and sabotage targets). Bahrain NSA was a soft target (I’ve been there), and questions should be raised about why it wasn’t hardened if we were going to use military force against Iran. Iran could not destroy a carrier so it did the next best thing and destroyed its logistics.”