Several reports have indicated that Saudi Arabia and Yemeni government forces are preparing for a major offensive against Houthi rebels in the coming weeks, which will mobilize a huge force with an aim to take back Yemen’s Red Sea coast and to ultimately secure the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, amid an ongoing threat to global shipping in the Red Sea area.

Over 100,000 Yemeni pro-government troops could mobilize for the offensive,  Reuters has reported. Last month, the ease and quickness of Houthi gains proved humiliating for the Saudi coalition in Yemen.

The report described, “The Saudis are considering two possible options for the assault, the Gulf and Yemeni officials said: Either a narrowly focused attack on ​the area around Bab el-Mandeb or a broader offensive that also includes other synchronized attacks on multiple fronts around Yemen, in the governorates of Al-Bayda, Marib, Taiz and Al-Jawf.”

Parallel to the Reuters reporting, Axios said Friday that the United States will definitely not join the offensive in any direct way, short of possible intelligence or even targeting help.

The report cited US officials who say Riyadh again directly requested military help from Washington, but the kingdom has been rebuffed for the second time in a few weeks.

The Saudis are expected to focus on air cover for ground forces loyal to Sanaa, and reports suggest the Saudis wanted US warplanes in the air as well. 

Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid Bin Salman called Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth to brief him ahead of the operation and specifically requested US airstrikes as coverage for the ground operations. The request was rejected, US officials say.

An admin official was cited in Axios as saying the US “is not going to take kinetic action for now.”It was just a week ago that President Trump was said to have been close to ordering US military support in the Yemen theatre, but that he decided against it at the last minute.

Sunni clerics denigrate Shi’ites of the region:

Speaking at a conference in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan’s top Muslim cleric said: “Houthis have no connection whatsoever to Islam.” pic.twitter.com/PY47Bmi99d

— HatsOff (@HatsOffff) September 30, 2026

US officials have said getting bogged down in the Yemen conflict would be a “distraction” at a moment US forces engaged against Iran and in escorting oil transit through the contested Strait of Hormuz.

There’s also the fact that in prior years when the US was more directly supporting of the Saudis and UAE in coalition operations in Yemen, it did little to change realities on the ground, other than imposing misery and death on the broader Yemeni population.

Authored by Patrick Feeley via Substack,

Very few people in the AI financing debate are reading the deals like a credit trader would. We have had a week of headlines about who is raising what. Amazon is moving $8 billion of chips off its balance sheet. Broadcom is lending $42 billion to its own customer. Nvidia is offering to backstop $125 billion of the debt people use to buy Nvidia. The coverage treats each number as a scoreboard. Hardly anyone asks the question that matters once the paper is sold, which is who is holding the risk and whether they know it.

There is one person who would have asked. He went to federal prison, and he was also right about a version of this problem forty years before almost anyone else.

Berkeley, 1965.

In 1965 Michael Milken was an undergraduate at Berkeley when he came across an NBER monograph by W. Braddock Hickman, Corporate Bond Quality and Investor Experience, published in 1958. Hickman had gone through decades of corporate bond records, from 1900 to 1943, and reached a conclusion that should have been scandalous. Investors usually overestimated the risk in higher-yielding bonds. They treated the rating as the risk, and the rating was wrong often enough that the paper everyone feared tended to do better than its reputation.

Milken later wrote that he “was struck by the disparity between theory and reality.” That is a modest way to describe what he saw, which is that a whole profession had confused a letter grade with a probability. Most people who find something like that write a thesis. Milken built an industry. He went to Wharton to study capital structure, joined the firm that became Drexel Burnham Lambert in 1969, and moved the high-yield desk to Beverly Hills in 1978.

The machine.

The numbers still look fake to me. Public junk bonds outstanding went from $8.5 billion in mid-1977 to $59.1 billion by mid-1985 and roughly $200 billion by early 1990. Between 1978 and 1985 Drexel underwrote 57 percent of every new-issue dollar in the market. One desk, and largely one man. The money built MCI, Ted Turner’s empire, Steve Wynn’s casinos and McCaw Cellular, and it funded T. Boone Pickens’s raids on the oil majors, which readers of my last piece will recognize as an early chapter of the constructivist trade. By 1989 the Predators’ Ball at the Beverly Hilton drew more than 3,000 people. Pickens was there.

Most people, including some who worked there, get the ending wrong. Drexel did not die of bad bonds. Drexel Burnham Lambert filed for bankruptcy on February 13, 1990, and the Los Angeles Times described the cause as “a staggering liquidity problem.” The firm defaulted on roughly $100 million of loans, a small number against the market it had created, and the market lost its main dealer overnight. Most of the issuers were fine and most of the paper was fine. What disappeared was the one institution willing to take the other side.

Two months later Milken pleaded guilty to six felony counts and paid $600 million. He was sentenced to ten years and served 22 months. Weeks after his release he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and he spent the next three decades building the Prostate Cancer Foundation and FasterCures before his pardon in February 2020. As a former biotech person I would guess his second career did more good than his first did harm. That is a different essay.

The detail that belongs in this essay comes from 1987. That year, according to the GAO, insurers held more than 30 percent of all junk bonds outstanding. In April 1991 California regulators seized Executive Life, which had 62.7 percent of its general account in junk. The institution that failed was the marginal buyer of the paper, with long liabilities, a capital charge set by the rating rather than the asset, and a board that believed it owned bonds.

The skeptic.

The popular memory of Milken is a man who sold leverage to anyone who would take it. His own writing says close to the opposite. “Debt isn’t good. Debt isn’t bad. For some companies, close to zero debt is too much leverage.” In the Wall Street Journal in 2009 he laid out six factors and warned that when they point toward rising business risk, “even a dollar of debt may be too much for some companies.” In Bloomberg Businessweek in 2014 he named the industry. Stable, predictable revenue can carry debt. Technology, he wrote, “should finance growth primarily with equity.”

Read that again and then look at what is being sold this week. I suspect the man who built the high-yield market would hesitate to lend against a GPU.

He also kept a short list of principles about credit. The first one is four words long. Rating is not credit. Most of what follows is an application of those four words.

The tape.

On October 2 the Financial Times reported that Amazon is pitching investors on a special purpose vehicle (a separate company set up to hold specific assets and borrow against them) that would own roughly $8 billion of already-installed Nvidia Grace Blackwell chips, raise debt against them, and lease the chips back to Amazon. The stated goal is a lighter balance sheet. The other effect is a rating. Investors expect the paper to come out investment grade on the strength of Amazon’s double-A, which is what opens it to insurers and pension funds. Amazon says each series of chips will last at least five years. In the same article the FT noted that Grace Blackwell will soon be superseded by Vera Rubin. Both facts ran in one story, and I have not seen anyone comment on it.

A day earlier Reuters pulled a number out of Anthropic’s IPO filing. Broadcom will lend Anthropic up to $42 billion in convertible notes, roughly a third of a $125.2 billion, five-year commitment to lease Google TPUs that Broadcom helps design. Anthropic’s own filing flags the potential conflict of interest and warns that certain defaults could make “a substantial portion of its lease obligations immediately due.” Bloomberg reported that banks are separately assembling $60 billion for Broadcom’s chip financing, $42 billion senior and $18 billion junior, with Blackstone leading the junior piece. In August Nvidia set up a platform with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to bring in more than $500 billion of outside money, and Jensen Huang said Nvidia holds an option to backstop $125 billion of it.

CoreWeave remains the live experiment. In August it closed a $2.6 billion loan with a roughly five-year maturity against customer contracts that average about three years. Meta’s Hyperion data center was financed with $27.3 billion of bonds through Blue Owl’s Beignet vehicle, priced at 6.581 percent, rated A+, one notch below Meta, and kept off Meta’s balance sheet. Pimco reportedly took about $18 billion of it, which is one firm holding two thirds of one deal.

All of this is being priced with the 10-year Treasury above 5.2 percent. It touched 5.34 percent on October 1, the highest since 2002. JPMorgan expects $4.1 trillion of AI-related debt to be issued through 2030. For scale, the entire junk bond market that Milken built peaked at around $200 billion.

How a trader reads it.

First, the rating is borrowed. A vehicle that owns depreciating silicon is being rated off Amazon, not off the silicon. That works for as long as Amazon pays the lease, and the lease is most of the trade. Strip the structure away and a buyer of that paper is long Amazon credit at some spread over Amazon’s own bonds, plus a residual bet on what a 2026 GPU fetches in 2030. The first leg is easy to price. The second is hard to hedge, because I am not aware of any real forward market in used Blackwells. If the spread does not pay for the second leg, the buyer is being paid for Amazon risk and taking the chip risk for nothing. Milken would have asked about it in four words.

Second, the debt can outlive the asset. Five-year money on chips with three-year contracts and a successor generation already announced is a bet on renewal. The CoreWeave lenders said as much and described themselves as comfortable underwriting renewal risk. That may be a reasonable bet, but it is closer to a venture bet than a term loan, and I would expect it to be priced like one. Amazon trimmed the useful life of some servers from six years to five in 2025. Michael Burry spent his October 1 Substack arguing the real economic life is shorter still. I do not know the right number, and I doubt anyone does. What I do know is that the coupon is fixed and the collateral value is not, and if the collateral falls short, the lender holds the difference.

Third, the marginal buyer looks familiar. In 1987 it was the insurers. In 2026 it is insurers and pension money again, reached through investment-grade structures that look like corporate bonds and behave partly like equipment leases. Cliff Asness put it better than I can in March. “The lion doesn’t care if the ostrich is first loss or higher up in the capital structure.” Tranching sorts out who takes the first loss, and the size of any loss stays the same. To be fair to Asness, he has been careful to say he did not predict the timing of trouble in private markets, and I am not predicting it either. I am describing a structure.

There is a real counterpoint, and Milken would make it himself. Anyone with a contract from Anthropic or Amazon has absorbed every rate increase so far. One executive told CNBC last month, “If you have a deal with Anthropic, will 50 basis points really stop you?” Probably not. My guess is that trouble, if it comes, starts two tiers down, with the smaller neoclouds lenders have started turning away and the second-string chip lessors who priced their books when the 10-year was in the 4s. Credit cycles have a habit of starting where few people are looking.

The club.

There is one more pattern Milken would recognize, and it is the one I think about most as a public-market investor. In 1989 the Los Angeles Times described the Drexel network as a club whose members were lending to and borrowing from each other. Deals cleared because the same handful of balance sheets sat on both sides of the trade.

In 2026, Broadcom lends to its largest customer so that customer can lease Broadcom’s chips. Nvidia offers to backstop the debt its buyers use to buy Nvidia. Several of the sponsors in the Nvidia platform also appear in the Broadcom financing. Each deal is defensible on its own. Taken together, the suppliers have become a meaningful source of their own demand, and the public is about to be invited into the arrangement through an Anthropic IPO that people close to it have put at up to $2 trillion.

To be precise, I think AI demand is real, perhaps the most real thing in the economy right now. My concern is narrower. When the junk market seized in 1990, the companies were mostly sound. The dealer that made the market walked away, and nobody else would take the other side. For AI credit, the chips will almost certainly get used. What I would want to know is who makes a market in GPU-backed paper in the quarter one of the large sponsors decides to sit out. Today, as far as I can tell, it is largely the sponsors themselves.

People.

The part of Milken I like most is the optimist. “People are the scarce resource,” he said. “It’s not buildings, it’s not printing presses, and it’s not factories.” I did not expect to find him on chips, but he got there too. “For today’s computer chips, it’s less than two percent of the cost. Brainpower has become the ‘raw material’ for building companies.”

Hold that up against this week. Borrowed money is going into the factory at a 5 percent risk-free rate, and very little is going to the people who have to make the factory pay. I would guess the return on AI accrues mostly to the operating companies that take the compute and turn it into margin, and many of them are small and mid caps that have not done it yet. They are sitting on the adoption gap.

Anthropic seems to see it the same way. It just committed $100 million to train 10,000 engineers to deploy its models inside customers. Read that as a signal. A model company is paying out of pocket to close the gap between buying compute and using it, which suggests the chips alone do not close it. The lenders are financing the supply side of a market whose bottleneck, I think, sits on the demand side, with people.

Six questions Milken would ask.

1. Does the debt pay down before the chips stop earning?
2. Should this business be financed with debt at all, or, as he put it, primarily with equity?
3. Whose credit is actually being rated, the chip’s or the guarantor’s?
4. Who owns the residual if a 2026 GPU is worth a fraction of book in 2029?
5. Is the seller financing its own customer, and who makes the market if the dealer steps back?
6. Who turns the compute into margin?

The sixth is the one I spend my days on, and it is the only one where the answer is a company rather than a structure. Milken liked to say the past is always triple-A and the future is always single-B. He meant it as encouragement, and I take it that way. The future is worth financing, as long as the people doing the financing know what they own. This week a good number of them will own Amazon credit with some used-chip risk attached, and I hope they are being paid for both.

This note is for research and discussion only. It is not an offer to sell, or a solicitation to buy, any security. Sargasso Capital Management may hold positions discussed or related instruments and may change those positions without notice.

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

On Theo Von’s podcast, Zohran Mamdani defined socialism as the government delivering whatever you need for a dignified life. That is Marx’s rule for communism’s last stage – and New York is already getting the invoice.

Von asked him to define socialism. Mamdani said socialism means you will have whatever you need to live a dignified life, and that it is the government’s job to deliver on that. Housing. Childcare. Transit. The things, he said, that let you take a breath.

Karl Marx saved a version of that sentence for the end of the road. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme he split communist society in two. The lower phase still pays you for the work you do. The higher phase, once “all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly,” gets a banner: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

THEO VON: “Will you define socialism for us?”

MAMDANI: “Socialism, to me, means that you will have WHATEVER YOU NEED to live a dignified life, and that it is the GOVERNMENT’S JOB to deliver on that.”

I’ve heard a line like that before. It came from a famous book, and it was… pic.twitter.com/B9jKlJkVXH

— The Vigilant Fox ? (@VigilantFox) October 2, 2026

Mamdani skipped the abundance and kept the needs. He also skipped the part where the state is supposed to wither. In his version the state is the delivery service.

On CNN’s Amanpour in September he said the model “will absolutely translate” nationally, because the only majority in the country is the working class, and its inability to afford housing, childcare, and transit “goes beyond any one city.”

After the June primaries he had already said a democratic socialist can get elected anywhere, for any office. A late-July CNN poll found about a third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning adults calling themselves democratic socialists. House Speaker Mike Johnson’s read was blunter: the party had nominated some of the most radical candidates ever to run.

One example of this playing out came in February, when Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez cut a Spanish-language ad for free 3-K and Pre-K. The script: if your child turns three or four in 2026, you can enroll in New York City, and any parent is eligible regardless of occupation, income, or immigration status.

The spot landed in the same season City Hall was warning of a budget crunch and a possible property-tax hike. “Whatever you need” did not come with a residency test.

City Hall has built a network of nearly 200 creators, grown out of the campaign’s Creators4Zohran shop and run through a private Signal group, “NYC Creators Announcements,” overseen by a new-media director salaried at $175,000.

It has paid some of them for agency campaigns, typically $5,000 to $20,000 a pop. The Department of Social Services spent more than $100,000 this year on a social push under a contract signed in 2025, before Mamdani took office. The Office of Mass Engagement sits at $54 million. The needs principle, distributed by group chat.

Sitting at a desk for the country’s 250th birthday, Mamdani said the powerful have always treated America as “an arena of supremacy, where only a select few are allowed freedom, where not all are created equal,” belonging to those with the right accent or shade of skin.

Patriotism, he said, is dissent. Love of country is the reason you refuse to leave it. Critics noted he was eight years a citizen, using the occasion to indict the country, after a $4 billion Hochul bailout for the agenda.

Bill Maher, of all people has called out Mamdani for exactly what he is. Maher pointed at the hire of tenant advocate Cea Weaver and her line about electing more communists. “That’s a communist,” Maher said. “You’re allowed to believe it. You’re allowed to vote for it. Let’s just not pretend that that’s not what this is.“

Mamdani still says democratic socialist. The definition he gave Theo Von is the one Marx wrote for the higher phase of COMMUNISM, with one edit: the government stays, and it delivers the agenda.

President Trump recently said that over $20 trillion in foreign investment has flowed into the US so far in his second term.

“We have more money being spent from outside countries and companies. Over $20 trillion. That’s five, six, seven times higher than any country. Not just here, any country ever,” Trump said, adding that the total could climb to $25 trillion by the end of his term.

🚨 President Trump stuns the World by saying our Manufacturing is higher than ever and $20 Trillion dollars is being invested into America

“No country in HISTORY has ever been close”

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I VOTED FOR

Follow @mr_pool001 pic.twitter.com/qPr4i4INN2

— Mr pool (@mr_pool001) October 1, 2026

Yet UBS economist Arend Kapteyn wrote in a new note on Thursday that new foreign direct investment totaled $232 billion in 2025, roughly $30 billion below its 10-year average. He said that, adjusted for inflation, investment that year was below every pre-pandemic year.

“One way to assess whether manufacturing is being ‘onshored’ to the US is through foreign direct investment (FDI) data,” Kapteyn said.

Kapteyn’s findings clash with the White House’s narrative of the early innings of a durable manufacturing revival. The latest White House tracker lists trillions of dollars in announced US and foreign investments, with commitments from the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Japan, Saudi Arabia, India and South Korea alone exceeding $5 trillion.

Kapteyn continued:

Yet little of this is visible in the BEA’s New Foreign Direct Investment data (chart below). 

New FDI totaled just $232bn in 2025, around $30bn below its 10-year average and, in real terms, lower than in any pre- pandemic year. There was a modest pickup relative to 2022-24, driven mainly by media/ telecoms and primary metals (within ‘other manufacturing), but no broad-based investment surge. 

Also note that, 94% of new foreign investment took the form of acquisitions of existing US firms. Only 2% reflected the creation of new businesses and 4% the expansion of existing foreign-owned operations, suggesting that foreign capital is largely changing ownership rather than adding new productive capacity.

The gap between the data Kapteyn analyzed and the White House’s announcements may partly reflect the lag between investment pledges and actual spending. The bigger question is how much of that money will ultimately finance new US production capacity, rather than acquisitions of existing businesses.

State news agency WAM quoted UAE Attorney General Hamad Saif Al Shamsi as saying the Flydubai Omani co-pilot accused of attacking the captain with a crash axe tried to seize control of the passenger jet bound for Israel and attempted to carry out a “terrorist attack.”

Planning, attempted terrorist act behind flydubai flight FZ1073 incident: Attorney-General#WamNews https://t.co/OWxoZ9nWWR pic.twitter.com/JCE3NuGppa

— WAM English (@WAMNEWS_ENG) October 3, 2026

“Investigations into the incident involving flydubai flight FZ1073 found that the co-pilot had attempted to carry out a terrorist attack,” Al Shamsi said.

BREAKING:

The Omani co-pilot who stabbed Captain Smit Machchhar and tried to crash Flydubai Flight FZ1073 on its way to Tel Aviv has been identified as Hamam Al Hamami.

Netanyahu stated today that it’s becoming increasingly clear after the first interrogations that the attacker… pic.twitter.com/qXBS64D7W8

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 3, 2026

The aircraft operating flight FZ1073 from Dubai to Tel Aviv on Wednesday, about one week before the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks, plunged 18,000 feet during the attack as passengers and crew subdued the attacker.

Between 05:22:07 and 05:22:36 flight #FZ1073 dropped from 30,875 feet to 16,750 feet (-14,125 feet in just 29 seconds) pic.twitter.com/hHfnX7cKWI

— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) September 30, 2026

🇦🇪🇮🇱🇸🇦🚨 UPDATE: Damage visible on FZ1073 after emergency landing

Images from Tabuk appear to show significant damage to the upper tail of flydubai flight FZ1073 following this morning’s extraordinary incident.

Reuters reports, citing an Israeli official, that a physical… pic.twitter.com/AXKCqt5Qjx

— DD Geopolitics (@DD_Geopolitics) September 30, 2026

The passenger jet, with 174 souls on board, diverted to Tabuk in northwestern Saudi Arabia for an emergency landing.

Al Shamsi said the investigation is under way “to uncover all the circumstances of the incident, its motives, and related connections, in addition to completing technical examinations and examining physical and digital evidence.”

On Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel was investigating whether the co-pilot had acted under anyone’s direction, warning that anyone involved in the terror plot would pay a “heavy price.”

Flydubai halted all flights on the Israel route shortly after the terror plot was foiled, and Israel’s El Al canceled its scheduled flights, stranding some Israelis in the UAE.

Two weeks after a cluster of Istanbul asset managers stopped honoring redemptions, triggering a market-wide circuit breaker and the liquidation of 131 funds held by some 455,758 Turkish retail investors, Ankara has unveiled its plan to make everyone whole. Or at least, to make everyone a little bit less un-whole.

As Bloomberg reports, Turkey will start payments to investors caught in the fund crisis. The Capital Markets Board (SPK) approved interim payments of up to 1 million lira (about $20,400) per eligible investor in funds run by Tera, Pusula, Atlas and Hedef, calculated on each investor’s “net investment” as determined by the Central Securities Depository (MKK). Below a million lira, you get your money back; above it, you get a million and a place in the queue. Money market funds get paid first, the rest in descending order of investor count, with A1 Capital, Bulls and Pardus funds slotted in afterward. The interim payments are advances against whatever the liquidation ultimately recovers, which is a polite way of saying nobody knows yet.

Finance Minister Mehmet Simsek, meanwhile, insists that “we are not talking about a systemic problem,” pointing out that public debt is just 22% of GDP and the budget deficit is “roughly half the developing country average.” All true, and also not much consolation to the investor who, as Turkish Minute recounts, sold her Istanbul home before moving to Portugal, parked the proceeds in stock funds as an inflation hedge, and has watched her account fall ~90% while being unable to withdraw even that. “It is melting away before my eyes, and I can’t do anything about it.”

The “please give it back” account

The payouts are the boring part. The truly bizarre part is how Turkey – long the biggest banana in crowded bus of capital markets banana republics – plans to refill the pot.

Alongside the interim payments, the regulator announced the creation of “Voluntary Return Accounts” at Birlesik Fon Bankasi “for individuals seeking to return excessive profits obtained from pre-liquidation share sales.” Proceeds will be funneled to the fund liquidation estates and on to Ziraat and Isbank for distribution to investors. A separate “General Share Refund Account” has been opened for anyone who would like to hand back profits from speculative trading in listed stocks, and a new fund inside the deposit insurer TMSF will receive assets later determined to be proceeds of crime (details here).

To summarize: Turkey’s plan to compensate 455,000 losers is, in part, to ask the winners nicely.

Bloomberg’s Eric Balchunas summed it up best: “Turkey wants investors who made a lot of money in market to gift excessive returns to the other investors who lost $20b.”

Turkey wants investors who made a lot of money in market to gift excessive returns to the other investors who lost $20b in funds w ponzi like schemes that are being liquidated. Wow. pic.twitter.com/Aw7RVn6DJQ

— Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) October 1, 2026

Which raises a question that every holder of Turkish assets, foreign ones included, will now be asking: if realized gains can be deemed “excessive” after the fact, at what point do they become yours?

For those who don’t feel like volunteering, there is the stick, or rather a discounted stick: under a leniency provision, anyone who pays twice their gains (minimum 500,000 lira) within 15 days of a criminal complaint gets a reduced penalty. Note where that money goes: not to the stranded investors, but to the Treasury and Finance Ministry. Market manipulation as a revenue line.

So who exactly made the “excessive gains”?

Here the honor system runs into a few practical problems. According to a detailed timeline of the probe, Pusula chairman Muhammed Yariz wired roughly 2.89 billion lira (~$15 million) to Edmond de Rothschild in Switzerland on September 1, two weeks before his firm defaulted; Pusula Holding chairman Serdar Turhan sent ~1.2 billion lira (~€25 million) to the same Swiss bank on August 24. Both have since been arrested. One suspects the Birlesik Fon Bankasi “voluntary return” desk is not their first call.

Then there’s Cengiz Avci, a major shareholder in Odine Solutions, a stock that rose 987% this year to a peak 366 billion lira valuation before collapsing 94%. Prosecutors allege he booked ~15 billion lira in gains and converted 12 billion lira (~$244 million) into cash. There is an arrest warrant. He “had not returned and was not located.” Presumably the voluntary return form got lost in the mail.

And then there’s the politics. Fatma Betul Sayan Kaya, deputy chair of Erdogan’s ruling AKP and a former family minister, resigned after the opposition alleged she bought shares in shipbuilder Ozata Denizcilik, a navy contractor whose valuation was ramped to $5 billion (above Ford Otosan) while Tera’s brokerage reportedly controlled 95% of its shares, for about €1.1 million in April and sold for €23.3 million just before the September 16 crash. Kaya has not directly addressed the allegations, which remain unproven in court. A 21x return in five months: if that isn’t “excessive,” we’d love to know what is.

It doesn’t stop there. As Middle East Eye details, one Erdogan adviser sat on Tera Portfolio’s board until January, another former presidential adviser stayed on until the crisis erupted, and an Ozata board member arrested this week is the son of a former banking regulator and the son-in-law of a sitting deputy finance minister. Tera chairman Emre Tezmen, arrested on charges of running a Ponzi-like scheme, previously served on the board of the MKK, the very central depository now tasked with calculating each investor’s “net investment” for the payouts.

Freeze, unfreeze, arrest the tweeters

The enforcement response has been equally on-brand. On a Friday, the Justice Minister announced asset freezes on 46 companies, 18 funds and 42 individuals. By Sunday, the freezes on 45 companies and 19 funds were lifted after the CMB conducted “a new assessment,” with Simsek explaining that “protecting investment, employment, production and exports was a priority.” Restrictions on the 42 individuals remain. Meanwhile, prosecutors in Bakirkoy arrested 16 people for social media posts deemed to be market manipulation and blocked access to 246 accounts “spreading speculative panic.” It’s always the tweets.

Officials have now identified 217 suspects across 26 manipulated stocks, with 56 detained as of September 30. The mechanics of the scheme were hardly sophisticated: funds piled into illiquid, low-float stocks, and with nobody on the other side, prices went vertical. Prosecutors allege some prices were inflated nearly 100x. Then the regulator tightened concentration rules in late August, the funds were forced to sell into a market with no bid, and retail rushed for the exits on the TEFAS platform. The ones who got out first were, inevitably, the ones closest to the funds.

The numbers tell the story: Pusula’s funds shrank from 115 billion lira to under 8 billion, with 107 billion lira withdrawn before the doors closed. Money market funds, supposedly the safe end of the spectrum, saw 456 billion lira pulled in a single week (from 2.14 trillion to 1.68 trillion). In other words, those who knew ran, and those who trusted a “state-supervised system,” as one law graduate who invested with her mother put it, are now waiting for a $20,000 interim check.

What Goldman is telling clients

As the crisis erupted, Goldman’s EM credit desk wrote on September 17 that the equity market’s 6% plunge was due to the “near-collapse and redemption default of asset manager Pusula Portfoy, precipitated by the regulator’s clampdown on concentrated ‘fund-chain’ positions,” followed by Tera “failing to meet redemption requests.” The central bank responded with bond buybacks (you know, “NOT QE”), bigger repo auctions and lower discount rates, while Simsek spent the day “defending current policy mix and committing not to deviate from the anti-inflation track despite elections.” Turkey CDS widened 10bps intraday before closing +6.5bps; Turkish bank perps fell as much as 65 cents. 

We were more laconic: Turkey was getting “Leopolded” we reported late on Sept 16 when first news of the fund meltdown emerged.

Turkey getting Leopolded pic.twitter.com/vZYZqcPT24

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) September 17, 2026

By that weekend, Goldman’s EM credit team was calling it a “systemic liquidity squeeze” in which “the liquidation of approximately $20 billion in local funds, sparked by redemption failures, dragged the BIST 100 down 6% and pushed external sovereign debt and CDS as much as 15bps wider midweek.” Yet the bank’s key takeaway was that “Turkey’s move was technical rather than credit-driven, with a domestic fund liquidation transmitting into external debt before local buyers and short covering reversed most of it.”

Goldman CEEMEA sales trader Ashwin Sharma went further, noting that the crackdown targeted a speculative boom that index provider MSCI had described as “co-ordinated trading,” and that reining it in, “given threats of possible MSCI demotion (to Frontier),” was “a clear positive for me.” His conclusion: “Despite near-term redemption-driven volatility, I continue to see Turkey as an attractive buy-on-weakness story,” with banks pointing to further rate cuts and NIM expansion into 2027, and an energy price shock (Turkey is a net oil importer) the biggest risk. The bank’s GIR EM strategists echoed the theme in their weekly kickstart, flagging Turkey’s 5% weekly drop on “regulatory action on select investment funds.”

The carry crowd hasn’t left either. In a September 29 note, Goldman’s EM SSA desk said Turkey remains a carry trade “GIR continues to favour and where we continue to see client allocation,” with clients extending out the curve into paper like the EBRD 27.5% 2029s, which yield ~200bps above the 2027s. Then again, as of this morning, the bank’s credit desk reported that in the Turkish corporate complex “risk was still available and offered with corps feeling particularly abandoned.”

Which is, in a nutshell, the Turkish trade: the high-30s lira yields and the orthodox finance minister are real, and so is the system in which an AKP deputy chair allegedly makes 21x on a navy shipbuilder ramped by a fund whose chairman sat on the board of the securities depository, while the regulator’s answer to the losers is a $20,000 advance and a bank account for the winners’ conscience.

Been here before

Readers will recall the last time Turkish markets needed a marketwide trading halt, after the arrest of Erdogan’s top rival Ekrem Imamoglu sent the lira to a record low (“All Hell Breaks Loose In Turkey“). And in May we noted that Turkey had sold nearly all its US Treasuries, dumping holdings from ~$16 billion to $1.8 billion alongside gold to defend the lira after the Middle East war erupted. The buffers, in other words, are thinner than the macro tables suggest.

As for the gated funds, the playbook should be familiar to anyone who followed the private credit redemption mess earlier this year: illiquid assets, daily liquidity promises, and a “screen price” that only exists until someone tries to sell. As one local analyst put it, whether the till “will have the money to pay it is unclear.” The interim payments come out of what’s left in the funds; the rest depends on the liquidators finding buyers for stocks that, by prosecutors’ account, had been inflated as much as 100-fold, and on the winners volunteering to give back their winnings.

We wouldn’t hold our breath. But we would watch the precedent: in Turkey, a realized gain is now only yours until the government decides it was excessive.

Unverified reports and footage circulating on X early Saturday morning appear to show smoke rising from Saudi Aramco’s Riyadh refinery. The cause and any impact on operations remain unclear. Separately, Axios reports that Saudi Arabia is preparing a major offensive against Iran-backed Houthis in the coming days. President Trump’s comments last week that a bombing campaign against Tehran could resume after the midterm elections add to signs that the Gulf conflict remains far from any near-term resolution.

Turkish news outlet Türkiye Today cites NASA’s FIRMS satellite monitoring system, which shows higher-intensity VIIRS thermal hits across Aramco’s Riyadh refinery, one of Saudi Arabia’s most important refining assets, with a capacity of about 130,000 barrels a day.

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) accounts on X are sharing footage of what may be Iran-backed Houthi attacks on the refinery. No official word yet on why thick black plumes of smoke are rising from multiple locations at the refinery.

More unconfirmed close-up footage showcasing the ongoing fire inside Saudi ARAMCO Riyadh Refinery, Riyadh Province, Saudi Arabia.
https://t.co/m4ITAHGBy0 pic.twitter.com/BMOGtYrtws

— Hexagone Intel (@osinthexagone) October 3, 2026

⚡️BREAKING: Saudi Aramco Riyadh Refinery has been Struck by Yemen’s Houthis

Smoke is rising from Multiple Locations pic.twitter.com/s1apeEtfIX

— Iran Observer (@IranObserver0) October 3, 2026

Houthis have managed to Strike the Main Saudi Aramco Refinery in Riyadh!!
Nasa Frim shows it’s likely on Fire after the hit. https://t.co/Sx0gLmwYRY pic.twitter.com/fgiXtH1R5k

— Ali (@MerruX) October 3, 2026

Unconfirmed footage showcasing ongoing fires inside Saudi ARAMCO Riyadh Refinery, Riyadh Province, Saudi Arabia. Unusual VIIRS thermal hits with increased intensity are observed across the refinery on NASA FIRMS satellite imagery. https://t.co/0GF1rCFoqV pic.twitter.com/Aow3HglPgh

— Hexagone Intel (@osinthexagone) October 3, 2026

A separate report by Axios overnight states that the Saudis are preparing for a major operation against the Houthis in the coming days, targeting coastal areas that give the rebels leverage over the critical maritime chokepoint of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait. The report cites two US officials.

More color from Axios:

Behind the scenes: A U.S. official said the Saudis have been planning the operation for weeks and that plans were approved by Saudi leadership several days ago.

• The operation will include ground forces loyal to the internationally recognized government in Yemen with Saudi air cover.
• On Thursday, Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid Bin Salman called Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to brief him on the planned operation and ask again for U.S. airstrikes against Houthi targets, the U.S. official said.
• A U.S. official said that the U.S. “is not going to take kinetic action for now.”

President Trump reiterated to TIME last week that he may escalate attacks on Iran after the November midterms if an acceptable deal can’t be reached.

Separately, University of Chicago political scientist Robert Pape has warned that Oct. 1 could mark a new phase in the conflict. He writes that “Iran’s 45-day deadline to the United States expired today.”

“On August 16, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council decided that if Washington did not lift its naval blockade of Iranian ports within 45 days, Tehran would retain the option of launching renewed attacks against U.S. forces,” Pape underscores. “That clock has now run out.”

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

The Green Party is going to war against language, having decided the words “mother” and “father” are no longer fit for its members.

Ahead of its conference in Brighton this weekend, Zack Polanski’s party has circulated an ‘Inclusive Terminology Guidance’ telling activists to drop “mothers and fathers” for “parents and carers”, and warning that the wrong vocabulary can create “unwelcoming or exclusionary” environments and feed into bullying and harassment under the party’s own code of conduct.

The Telegraph reports that the document, already in use as equalities training, brands a run of ordinary English “unacceptable”, then tells members what to say instead. ‘Sexual preference’ is out because it “implies that attraction is a choice”. ‘Transsexual’ is out because it “does not encompass non-binary people”. ‘Homosexual’ is discouraged for the same reason.

Green Party members have been told to replace terms such as “mothers and fathers” with gender-neutral terminology under new guidance on inclusive language ??https://t.co/s1W0OR75Ob pic.twitter.com/onYLGHsaFj

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) October 1, 2026

‘Lunatic’ and ‘nutter’ are non-compliant because they “reinforce negative stereotypes and stigma about mental health”. ‘Elderly’, ‘youngster’, ‘able-bodied’, ‘sex-change’, ‘female politician’ and ‘lady doctor’ are all on the discouraged list. Gendered job titles go too: ‘chair’, not ‘chairman’; ‘police officer’, not ‘policeman’.

The race section is the same project in different clothes. Members are steered toward “global majority”, described as an umbrella for people of Black, Asian, Brown, Indigenous and Latin American heritage, on the grounds that these groups are most of the world’s population and are “often minoritised” in countries such as the UK.

‘Brown’ should be “used with caution,” while “racially minoritised” is preferred because it “emphasises that minority status is created by social and power structures, rather than being inherent”. “Black, Asian and minority ethnic” is to be handled carefully, because “many people are uncomfortable with grouping diverse experiences under a single label”.

‘The party wants to legalise drugs and ban mother and father. What planet are you on?

Martin Daubney and Ben Smoke discuss the ‘inclusive terms’ set out for the Green party conference. pic.twitter.com/g9Av86IsyM

— GB News (@GBNEWS) October 1, 2026

A section titled “What if I get it wrong?” tells members “it’s OK to make mistakes from time to time”, provided they are trying to be more “inclusive”. The approved response is to apologise, thank the person who corrected you, and “adjust your language moving forward”. Then the stick: “repeated or deliberate behaviour may be considered harassment, which is unlawful“.

A Green Party spokesman told the Telegraph and the Daily Mail: “This is an existing and standard equalities training document, similar to those found in other organisations that also take equalities seriously. It is a guide and nothing else.” The spokesman did not say when it was published.

The Free Speech Union called it “absolutely mental”:

This is absolutely mental. When will this madness end?

The censorious Green Party is back to policing what we can and cannot say.

This time, rather than turning its sights on the press, it has published an Orwellian language guide telling delegates which words and phrases are… pic.twitter.com/sFKr2Tc7tp

— The Free Speech Union (@SpeechUnion) October 1, 2026

Conservative Party chairman Kevin Hollinrake said: “The Greens are obsessed with policing people’s language and thoughts in the name of their increasingly bizarre crusade against ordinary Brits. Last week they were dictating who people spend time with and what jokes they make. Now they’re attempting to prohibit perfectly normal words like ‘mother’ and ‘father’.”

He added, “This extraordinary obsession with censoring how people speak and behave in their everyday lives is made even more nonsensical by Polanski’s inability to get a grip of the vile antisemitism within his own party.” He added that Polanski should “look closer to home before lecturing others about what they can and cannot say.”

JK Rowling answered in the only register the document deserves. “Speaking as the elderly mother of three youngsters, who hasn’t had a sex change and knows many homosexuals, it is my able-bodied and sexually-preferred opinion that the Greens are turning into total nutters.“

Speaking as the elderly mother of three youngsters, who hasn’t had a sex change and knows many homosexuals, it is my able-bodied and sexually-preferred opinion that the Greens are turning into total nutters. pic.twitter.com/omMjs7Nxbb

— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) October 1, 2026

None of this arrives in a vacuum. Polanski took leadership of the party in September 2025. Membership has since jumped from about 68,000 to 200,000 by March 2026, with 441 new councillors elected in May, a haul swollen by left-wing activists who left Labour under Sir Keir Starmer after Polanski put Palestinian activism and transgender rights ahead of anything resembling environmental policy.

A YouGov poll this week found Britons now rate the Greens “weak, out of touch, incompetent and serving their own interests”, with net favourability sliding from plus five to minus 19 on his watch. He is standing in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election on 8 October, against Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali.

The language guide is the internal version of positions the party has already taken in public. Last year, on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Polanski was asked if a woman can have a penis and answered yes. He called biological sex “not necessarily” binary, described gender as a “spectrum”, and claimed he knew better than the UK Supreme Court, whose April 2025 ruling in For Women Scotland had defined sex under the Equality Act as biological sex at birth.

By March 2026 a leaked Green dossier was proposing a Department of Migration that would work with education authorities to “disseminate knowledge” in classrooms about “the situations from which those seeking asylum and resettling refugees are fleeing, and the need for and moral obligation of asylum and humanitarian protection.”

In May, Scotland’s loosened rules produced Green MSP Dr Q Manivannan, a transgender Tamil immigrant on a temporary student visa, without British citizenship or permanent residence.

The victory speech introduced “a transgender Tamil immigrant” whose pronouns are “they/them”, and included the claim that “Transness is Blackness. Transness is womanhood. Transness is disability.” A party that will not say mother and father had already elected someone for whom every category is interchangeable.

In July, two weeks after Reform’s Ann Widdecombe was killed in a hammer attack at her Dartmoor home, Polanski shared an Instagram post of a man in a T-shirt bearing a guillotine and the line “We’re only making plans for Nigel.” Reform UK reported him to the Metropolitan Police for incitement. He later unshared it.

A party spokesman said he “unequivocally does not support this type of dangerous message” and had accepted the collaboration “without realising there was more to it.” Nigel Farage said: “If I was to post anything as inciteful then I would expect to be arrested, and so should Polanski.”

The same week as the language guide, the Mail on Sunday reported Green training that told members to police friends’ jokes, log “what happened, including dates, times, locations”, and audit the race of their closest friends to fight “affinity bias”.

The attempt to retire “mother” and “father” flattens a biological relation into an administrative one.

The Communist Manifesto treats the charge of wanting to abolish the family as a boast as much as an accusation, and answers it by declaring that the bourgeois family vanishes with capital. Engels, in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, cast the monogamous household as a property arrangement whose job was to produce heirs, and looked forward to its supersession once private property was abolished.

Later Western Marxism kept the target and dropped the economics. The family became the workshop in which “oppressive” norms, sex roles, and authority were said to be reproduced.

Erasing words is how that is done without a manifesto. “Mother” names a woman who carried a child. “Father” names the man who fathered one. “Carer” names a function anyone can be assigned. Once the specific words are marked as harmful, the specific institution becomes harder to defend, because the defence has to be made in the replacement language.

This is exactly what George Orwell warned of in 1984.

A party that already tells children they owe a moral debt to asylum policy, that already treats sex as a spectrum, and that already elevates identity over citizenship, has every reason to want “mother” and “father” filed under unacceptable. The family is the rival loyalty. Marxism has always understood that. The Green guide is the HR version.

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Commie Canada and the dis-United Kingdom should be renamed the “Dumb and Dumber” of the British Commonwealth.

King Charles III’s North American prime minister, Mark Carney, ran to The New York Times last week to talk about his military combat preparations against the United States in the event that President Trump crosses Lake America and liberates Canada from its delusional leaders. What a showboating dunce. The U.S. singlehandedly sustains Canada’s economy and national security, yet the tiny central banker huffed and puffed in a hilariously Napoleonic display of fake strength.

In the same interview with the failing Times, Con-man Carney outlined his intent to integrate Canada’s economy with that of China and the European Union and to replace the U.S. Dollar with a China-linked global reserve currency. Rhetorically defending Canada’s sovereignty while insulting his U.S. benefactor, Little Mark Carney explained how he would subjugate his socialist nanny-state to Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping and unelected European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. Mark is the global mascot for “educated” idiots everywhere.

Not to be outdone by not-so-Great Britain’s Canadian cousin, U.K. Prime Minister Poindexter (er, I mean Andy Burnham) informed the United Nations General Assembly last week that his government was constructing yet another speech-police organization (this one given the august name, “National Centre for Information Defence,” which should not be confused with the “Research, Information, and Communications Unit,” the “Government Communication Service,” the “Counter Disinformation Unit,” the “Defending Democracy Taskforce,” the “Information Threats and Influence Directorate,” the “Rapid Response Unit,” the “National Cyber Force and Social Cohesion Taskforce,” the “Media Monitoring Unit,” or any of the other information-control agencies already mobilized across totalitarian Britain) to protect the British people from scary thoughts and words. Burnham blamed the Russians for spreading “a narrative of decline, stoking division, and sowing despair” in the U.K. (and definitely not Westminster’s promotion of decline, division, and despair!) and promised to counteract this “information warfare” by censoring Britons’ public speech and feeding his collapsing country a steady diet of State-sanctioned propaganda. In order to beat back the Russians, Dilapidated Britain must have its very own digital Iron Curtain! Two cheers for democracy! Hip hip…who cares.

The British people are screwed. On average, their government grants settlement or citizenship to an illegal alien every single minute. These foreign nationals receive more welfare from British taxpayers than ever before. The third-world invaders (I mean, “newcomers”) use Britain’s streets as public toilets. Rather than securing the kingdom’s borders, the Home Office hands out a nine-page booklet informing mostly-Muslim men of military age that it is illegal to rape women and children while they conquer the islands. In the last two years alone, the number of illegal immigrants (and future citizens!) arriving by boat has exceeded the size of the entire British Army! But if these outrageous facts disturb you enough to publicly express your feelings on social media, you will most likely join the roughly 65,000 Brits who have been arrested for “speech-related offenses” over the last five years. Foreign invasion? Good! Free speech? Very bad!

Apparently, the British police state also plans to imprison anyone who would rather not fight WWIII against the Russian Federation. During a recent episode of former cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg’s “State of the Nation” on GB News, one leftist-globalist commentator in favor of mass conscription argued, “We would have to lock a few people up…some of the pro-Russian voices, people saying there isn’t a threat, don’t fight for your country, don’t go to war for Burnham, we’ll have to lock ’em up.” Rather than responding with horror at the suggestion that his fellow Britons should be imprisoned for opposing a catastrophic war, Rees-Mogg pedantically replied, “Well, we suspended habeas corpus during the Napoleonic Wars…indeed, yes.” In another interview, Rees-Mogg nonchalantly remarked that British citizens have a “duty” to “die” for Britain in a war against Russia.

In Burnham and Rees-Mogg’s Britain, the only way to “defend democracy” is to imprison anyone who disagrees with the British Establishment and to sacrifice everyone else to the killing fields! The British Isles might as well be renamed the “Gulag Archipelago.”

Interestingly, GB News – which leans conservative – discovered last week that Britain’s media regulator, the Office of Communications (Ofcom), had covered up data showing that viewers trust GB News more than the BBC. GB News, in fact, is ranked above all other networks with regard to viewpoint diversity and impartiality. British authorities apparently did not want the public to know these inconvenient truths because the BBC is treated as an objective, trustworthy, and premier source of news (fact check: false!). In an effort to control the public’s perception of the BBC, Ofcom restricted what information the public was permitted to know. P.M. Burnham takes the “defense of information” very seriously!

How seriously? Burnham and the British government force citizens to pay for the BBC’s awful dreck whether they watch it or not! Every household in the U.K. must fork over a £180 license fee to the BBC each year. Because more households are refusing to pay the license, the government is considering the imposition of a mandatory £11-a-month Internet tax in order to keep the BBC’s fake news funded. The BBC says that the “fee is essential for maintaining the quality and diversity of public broadcasting in the UK.”

What does “quality and diversity” look like at the BBC? Two “reporters” just did a major exposé describing how women who don’t polish their nails perpetuate “white supremacy.” No joke! “Nail art’s historical and creative roots are linked back to black, Latino, and Asian communities and the suggestion that bare nails are now a sign of high status could stigmatise bold manicures,” the BBC “reports.” “They are often called elegant or tasteful, and these are often usually euphemisms that perpetuate white supremacist standards of beauty.” Yes, Burnham, force Britain’s working-class to pay for this race-baiting propaganda posing as hard news!

Earlier this year, British authorities announced that YouTube and other social media platforms would be forced to manipulate their algorithms and push BBC “news” to the top of feeds in order to counter “disinformation.” In other words, Whitehall steals money from British citizens to pay for State-run TV and then forces them to watch it. During the Cold War, we called that Soviet-style propaganda. Yet if you ask the fake “reporters” at the BBC, Canada’s publicly-funded CBC, or America’s NPR or PBS, all these propagandists would insist that they have nothing in common with the Soviet Union’s Pravda or the Russian Federation’s RT (Russia Today) News. In the West, State-funded media are somehow not State media. Does that sound more like propaganda or breaking news?

Britain’s State-imposed “narrative control” is utterly totalitarian. Dismissing the “narrative of decline” and “despair” in Britain as a “corrosive narrative…which bears no resemblance to reality” and a “distorted and untrue narrative about Britain,” P.M. Burnham casts all public dissent as “far-right narratives.” As military historian Professor Michael Rainsborough mocks, “The problem isn’t the problem, the problem is the people noticing the problem.” Rainsborough points out that right after Burnham rebranded “decline” as “disinformation,” the prime minister laid out a “10-year plan” to fight inflation, housing costs, hopelessness, inequality, and division. “The narrative of decline,” in other words, “bears no resemblance to reality, although reality apparently requires a 10-year plan.”

Both Canada and Britain are failing. The public has noticed. Carney and Burnham wish to whitewash reality with fake “narratives.” The worse things become, the more difficult it will be for their ministries of truth to succeed. Expect the BBC to blame Trump, Putin, and “white supremacy.”

The Department of War has put out a request for service members with “FPV experience” to participate in testing events called “Gauntlets” and fly Category 1 drones in field training exercises to accelerate drone development and prepare the US for the next conflict, where drones, robotics, and automated kill chains dominate the modern battlefield.

“Are you an FPV pilot? We want to hear from you!” DoW asked on X on Friday morning.

“The Drone Dominance Program is recruiting service members with FPV experience who would like to be considered as pilots for future Gauntlets and related efforts,” the request said.

Are you an FPV pilot? We want to hear from you!

The Drone Dominance Program is recruiting service members with FPV experience who would like to be considered as pilots for future Gauntlets and related efforts.

Interested? Visit https://t.co/dlfuzlu2c0 to learn more: https://t.co/AyOAxjw9jt

— Department of War Innovation Unit (@DIU_x) October 2, 2026

The Drone Dominance Program is the DoW’s answer to purchasing large quantities of drones across every category, from 1 to 5, and building out a domestic supply chain of components free from dependence on conflict areas and countries such as China, which can easily weaponize supply chains to hinder procurement.

Earlier this week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth revealed that Autonomous Warfare Command, dubbed “AutoWarCom,” is set to accelerate the DoW’s purchases across all categories of drones, robotics, and AI.

What’s key is that drone procurement will be a massive part of the rearmament supercycle and provide tailwinds to drone companies, such as heavily shorted Ondas, whose Ultra drone could very well see ramped-up orders by the military as it’s seen as an MQ-9 Reaper alternative for ISR missions. 

“Once we apply sustained budget to changed doctrine, we will outperform the world,” said Owen West, a former Marine, assistant defense secretary, and Goldman Sachs trader who has been tasked with leading the DoW’s Defense Innovation Unit. “And by snapping in AI, we will be ahead of the world, because we are the leaders in AI.”