A localized commercial real estate crash has been spreading through downtown Baltimore City’s office market like cancer, with more than $1 billion in property value erased since 2020. The rapid decline of the commercial tax base in the downtown area is colliding with deep structural crises, including violent crime, a continued population collapse (now at a 100-year low), fiscal mess, and the increasing risk that the unhinged left-wing politicians in City Hall will hike taxes on working poor households to offset the shortfall. What you’re seeing in Baltimore is a death spiral: capital leaves, residents follow, the tax burden shifts onto those who stay, and the cycle feeds on itself with no clear bottom in sight.

The Baltimore Sun, now owned by conservative David Smith (who also owns Sinclair Broadcasting), and Democrats in the state have become visibly angered that the paper is not producing left-wing propaganda as leftist Gov. Wes Moore’s polling data slides. Reports from the paper indicate that between 2020 and fiscal 2026, more than $1 billion in commercial property value has been erased, or about 29% of the city’s commercial properties – 4,085 out of 14,027 – saw their assessed values slashed on average by 28.7%.

“The pace of losses has been so sharp that officials have repeatedly issued out-of-cycle reassessments, rather than waiting for Maryland’s standard three-year review,” The Sun wrote in the report.

Downtown Baltimore is witnessing a troubling trend as businesses continue to close, leaving employees without jobs and residents without essential services.

The latest casualty is the Sheraton Hotel, a key fixture of the Inner Harbor, which has left 69 employees jobless.… pic.twitter.com/PagIL8uW9J

— FOX Baltimore (@FOXBaltimore) January 17, 2026

The steepest losses have been concentrated in Downtown, the Inner Harbor, and Downtown West:

Commercial property values in Downtown alone fell $496.3 million in assessed value over the last six years, while the Inner Harbor dropped $363.4 million and Downtown West lost $214.6 million — a combined decline of more than $1.07 billion across those three districts.

Some of the city’s most recognizable properties saw steep reductions: 100 Pratt Street E in the Inner Harbor lost $138.9 million in assessed value during that period, while 1 Light Street in Downtown dropped $87.3 million. Several other high-profile properties posted losses exceeding $40 million.

David Bramble, managing partner at MCB Real Estate, told the local paper that the downtown area of Baltimore is “experiencing massive value loss,” adding, “If this trend continues unabated, Baltimore will face even more serious financial hardship, impacting all its residents and businesses, from neighborhoods to the waterfront.”

The paper noted that city officials and business leaders said downtown’s commercial struggles stem not only from crime but also from the era of remote work.

“A lot of these workers are still working from home, at least a few days a week. T. Rowe Price might have a trader who, in 2018, went to the office five days a week. Now he’s coming in two or three days a week. As a result, the needed downtown office space is being downsized,” said Richard Clinch, executive director for the University of Baltimore’s Jacob France Institute. 

While remote work is only part of the story, traders, wealth managers, and back-office staff at major financial institutions in the city are all saying the same thing: Baltimore’s crime problem has become intolerable and is bad for business.

Related:

Build It, And They Will Come? Not The Case At Baltimore’s Harbor East Luxury Tower

Maryland Dem Officials Freak Out At Journalists Ahead Of Exposé On Governor

Two Years Later, No Key Bridge As Maryland Dems Focus On Tampons In Men’s Bathrooms

Already starting to emerge:

D.C. Economy “Under Strain,” Faces Biggest Spending Cuts Since Great Recession

Baltimore’s epic demise is a direct consequence of decades of failed one-party Democratic rule that prioritized left-wing social justice experiments and other left-wing policies over public safety, economic competitiveness, and basic law and order. City leaders sold voters on a progressive utopia, but what they delivered instead was an exodus of residents, capital flight, a recession-like business environment, and years of crime and chaos.

A vice president of finance at a major institution in the city confirmed that failed left-wing leadership at City Hall has accelerated Baltimore’s death spiral. 

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe,

The Hormuz crisis offers us a profound insight into the real power structures in Germany. Nothing seems able to convince the Berlin monolith to partially shield its citizens from the consequences at gas stations through tax cuts.

It is now unavoidable that the Iran shock will translate into an inflation driver, working its way through economic value chains into consumer prices. These developments almost force a reduction of the tax burden on households and the middle class. It may sound strange to climate socialists, but wealth is created exclusively in the private sector, and certainly not in the state bureaucracy, which is currently profiting from the price surge at gas stations at the expense of citizens and enjoying a small special economic boost.

In March alone, the Finance Minister collected roughly half a billion euros more at gas stations. That makes him the winner of the crisis.

To dispel the impression of a secret profiteer, Klingbeil points to the generally precarious budget situation. In fact, his hands are essentially tied: the Merz-Klingbeil duo is driving the country’s public debt through the roof. Klingbeil is the skywalker among European debt makers. He has begun a catch-up race to place Germany in the top tier of debt states alongside neighboring France, Italy, and Spain. The German public debt ratio currently stands at 63 percent, but the debt spiral is accelerating. This figure will rise dramatically in the coming years.

Anybody should now be clear: The debt party of a state that burns its citizens’ capital in reckless fashion, whether in Ukraine or through the redistribution mechanism of the green transformation, must end. The state is an overfed glutton, extracting ever-higher tax revenues while sinking deeper into the debt spiral.

Yet the burden does not rest solely on debt. The state’s hyperactivity drains scarce resources from the private capital market, raises credit costs, and drives genuinely productive investments abroad. The damage has accumulated for years and is being made worse by the energy cost crisis.

One can only imagine the relief that the private sector needs to restart the prosperity engine and compensate for the ever-growing damage caused by the state bureaucracy. Germany’s plight urgently calls for reforms and an end to the failed eco-socialist transformation project.

In Germany, however, things are a little different. Economic rationality does not dominate. In the land of climate doomsayers and would-be world improvers, as former Economics Minister Robert Habeck once said, „all in“ — and all levers were set towards eco-socialism.

In fact: over 50 billion euros are pumped annually by the German state through the Climate and Transformation Fund (KTF) into the green wonder economy, which during the Hormuz crisis proved not to solve problems but rather to be their obvious cause.

The green wonder economy is leaving deep wounds in public budgets, whose deficits are spiraling out of control – in this year alone, another 180 to 190 billion euros of new debt will likely be recorded. https://www.tichyseinblick.de/daili-es-sentials/staatsverschuldung-rekord/

No one in Berlin is thinking about tax cuts anymore, regardless of how media artists around Chancellor Friedrich Merz try to pacify the public.

Even in the unlikely event of a temporary reduction in the electricity tax or an increase in the commuter allowance, the fundamental extraction mechanism remains unchanged. The CO₂ trading system drained roughly 25 billion euros from the private sector last year. This figure will continue to grow annually. There is no reason for gratitude, even if Berlin returns a few crumbs of citizens’ money here and there — robbed is robbed!

It was the economists at RWI in Essen who calculated the Finance Minister’s crisis dividend for March. They arrived at a sum of 490 million euros.

It is beyond question that the state is acting unethically in this crisis, delaying relief and exploiting citizens’ financial hardship.

The RWI’s call to suspend VAT on fuels is entirely justified, but it was coldly rejected by the Finance Minister. With his characteristic empathy, Klingbeil pointed out that citizens had made savings elsewhere due to high fuel prices. VAT revenue there had decreased, so a reduction at the pump was out of the question.

Klingbeil is instead contemplating a so-called windfall tax, in which, in the spirit of central planners, he could also make gas station operators and oil companies pay in light of their high profits in these weeks.

Budgetary planning games in Germany revolve exclusively around higher levies. Considering a projected new debt of up to 4.5 percent this year — counting the hidden funds of special assets — it is clear that the country no longer represents a healthy state.

The political aim of the Merz-Klingbeil government is the establishment of a massive state apparatus, resting on two pillars: the green artificial economy on one side and the massively expanded military sector on the other. This goes hand in hand with a growing state share, which has long exceeded 50 percent, as well as with rising public debt. The private sector bears the brunt of this, through higher levies or later via rising inflation rates.

Everything follows a clearly defined script. Only the extent of Berlin’s cynicism in the face of these policy consequences sometimes still surprises.

The Environment Minister calls for switching to electric cars amid the fuel price crisis, while the Transport Minister recommends the exhausted citizens switch to the catastrophe train.

In addition, the state-aligned media sector no longer minces words, celebrating high fuel prices as a unique opportunity to enforce the green societal transformation through citizens’ wallets.

To emphasize once again: a reduction in fuel levies is not a political quick fix. It would mark the beginning of a retreat from climate policy and a return to political reason. Energy must be affordable, and the exploitation of domestic energy sources should be central to policy. Achieving this requires a lean state, giving private industry the room for necessary investments. What we are witnessing is the systematic implementation of the opposite of this policy.

In his first year in office, Chancellor Friedrich Merz managed the feat of expanding the public service by a staggering 205,000 new employees. There is no sign of bureaucracy reduction or scaling back the state apparatus.

The economic hemorrhage of the private sector to finance the machinations of the growing hyperstate, including projects like the failed war in Donbass, is unprecedented.

In Berlin, people still believe they can successfully complete the green transformation project. What is shocking is not the ideological blindness or the intellectual modesty that comes with this policy. One should have become accustomed to that since the years of the Merkel era.

Even more striking is the ability of politicians to completely shirk responsibility despite the visible decline of both economy and society. They have succeeded in elegantly severing causality between the green planned economy and the country’s decline, systematically concealing accountability and consequences.

About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a German graduate economist, has worked as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination

The War Zone’s Ian Ellis posted on X about a suspicious Chinese vessel operating in the Gulf area, which he described as a “Chinese surveillance ship” with “close ties” to the People’s Liberation Army.

According to Ellis, Hai Yang Shi You (285) was moored not long ago, just 10 miles from U.S. assets, raising concerns about Chinese intelligence-gathering activity in the region amid the US-Iran conflict.

Chinese surveillance ship Hai Yang Shi You (285) got underway in the Gulf again, just before the ceasefire was set to expire.

The dual-use survey ship, with close ties to the PLA, rode out the ceasefire at port in Qatar, ~10 miles from U.S. assets forward-deployed at Al Udeid AB.

Chinese surveillance ship Hai Yang Shi You (285) got underway in the Gulf again, just before the ceasefire was set to expire. The dual-use survey ship, with close ties to the PLA, rode out the ceasefire at port in Qatar, ~10 miles from U.S. assets forward-deployed at Al Udeid AB. pic.twitter.com/krirNNa0uL

— Ian Ellis (@ianellisjones) April 24, 2026

The latest ship-tracking data from Bloomberg shows that Hai Yang Shi You (285) has transited around the Gulf region, particularly around Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, over the last 60 days.

Ellis wrote in a separate X post that he closely monitors “20 Chinese research and surveillance ships.”  

The question becomes: What was the Hai Yang Shi You 285 doing just ten miles from U.S. assets forward-deployed at Al Udeid Air Base?

The next question is whether the ship assisted Iran in attacks on the base. These are just basic questions.

Authored by Mark Jeftovic via BombThrower.com,

And what you can do about it (besides complaining).

Palantir dropped a manifesto last weekend. 22 bullet points distilled from Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic, posted to X with the casual framing of “because we get asked a lot.” I haven’t seen a reaction so widespread, unanimously opposed and viscerally aghast since James Damore’s infamous “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”.

The usual suspects lost their shit. Engadget called it “the ramblings of a comic book villain.”

TechCrunch clutched its pearls at the bits about “regressive” cultures and “vacant and hollow pluralism.”

Bellingcat’s Eliot Higgins observed, (via Bluesky, of course), that these aren’t philosophical musings floating in the ether: they’re the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it’s advocating.

He’s not wrong, Palantir sells to ICE, DoD, NYPD, and the intelligence community. It may be a manifesto, but it’s also product literature.

Even Alexander Dugin, the Russian “Fourth Political Theory” philosopher, not exactly known for having a libertarian bent, seemed triggered by it, calling it “the plan of the Western techno-fascism” on X, “Pure Satanism” on his Substack.

Palantir manifesto is the plan of the Western techno-fascism. The superiority of the white race based on the technology. No antisemitism, no sacredness, no socialism of old historic fascism. This time pure capitalist, Jews friendly, profane, materialist. Anglo. Posthumanist.

— Alexander Dugin (@AGDugin) April 19, 2026

Former Greek FM Yanis Varoufakis called it “evil” and put out his own point-for-point on it – he calls it a refutation, it’s actually more of a rant.

So everybody across the horseshoe is big mad. Fine.

The thing is, none of this should surprise anyone. Let’s now look at why the policy this “manifesto” outlines was always going to arrive, with or without Karp’s prosaic stylings.

Karp Didn’t Invent “The Technate”

The merger of corporate power and state apparatus, the “technate” that people are suddenly discovering with horror on a Sunday afternoon, is not a new idea. It’s not even a recent one.

Back in 2013, Eric Schmidt (then Google’s executive chairman) and Jared Cohen (Google Ideas, ex-State Department advisor to Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton) published The New Digital Age. The book was blurbed by Henry Kissinger, Madeleine Albright, Tony Blair, and General Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA. That’s an elite-class blurb list for a book that explicitly argued for the intersection of Silicon Valley and state power, the fusion of corporate infrastructure with national security logic, and the reshaping of diplomacy through private platforms.

In 2013 it was called “transformational.” Kissinger gushing that it was, “a searching meditation on technology and world order” (he would go on to co-author The Age of AI with Eric Schmidt that should be every bit as concerning as Karp’s Technological Republic).

Not too long after that, Google’s Sergey Brin and Klaus Schwab held a fireside in Davos where Herr Schwab pontificated that with the advent of AI, since the algos would be able to predict election outcomes with 100% certainty, they may as well pick the winners anyway and we could do away with elections altogether.

Nobody batted an eye. My timeline certainly wasn’t overflowing with rage over it and the people who were calling attention to it were using facing all kinds of headwinds.

In a conversation with Google founder Sergey Brin, founder of the WEF, Klaus Schwab, delights at the thought of a future without elections:

“Digital technologies mainly have an analytical power. Now [we’re going] into a predictive power, and your company is very much involved in… pic.twitter.com/9shJlXw3DG

— Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) August 13, 2023

My personal favourite goto clip about all-pervasive corporate surveillance that absolutely nobody gave a shit about, was this one, also via the darlings of Davos:

This is important to understand:#CBDCs will not be “money”: in the sense we understand it. They will be social credit scores, capped by your personal carbon footprint quota👇 pic.twitter.com/e6ibVwXM65

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) October 4, 2024

Here we have an ex-Goldman Sachs guy running a Chinese multi-national sermonizing about mass surveillance and personal carbon footprint quotas and my timeline was not filled with angry tweets from elite A-listers calling for the dismantling of Ali Baba.

Here in 2026 it’s the exact same structural narrative, now with Karp’s sharper edges and fewer Davos euphemisms, only this one is being called a fascist manifesto instead of drooled over by media elites.

The only major difference I can see is where Davos/WEF inspired technocracy was globalist, Palantir, Karp, Thiel et al are nationalist. Perhaps, a North American nationalist.

This map is from 1940

(This fits with what I wrote in my last edition of The Bitcoin Capitalist, about the factional rivalry between the intellectual descendants of Samuel Huntington (“The Clash of Civilizations”) vs his former pupil, Francis Fukuyama (“The End of History”) I posted an excerpt here.

Fukuyama thought the entire world would become one big Neo-Liberal circle-jerk.

Huntington said future conflict wouldn’t be between countries, but between cultures. And some cultures were less compatible with how we live here in the West, than others (Palantir’s point #21).

Overall, the project didn’t change. The faction driving it did.

Driving what? The inexorable drive toward post-Democratic technocracy.

Here’s what nobody wants to hear.

If you’re reading Karp’s 22 points and feeling a cold prickle of recognition, if you’re realizing that what Palantir is describing is the operational blueprint for the next 40 years, there’s something you have to sit with first:

You put your hand up for this.

In case you wondering what makes a company like Palantir even possible…. (find out why, here 👇) https://t.co/1mOEQ9JkLR pic.twitter.com/aLIjg1Sqw5

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) April 20, 2026

Perhaps not you personally. But collectively, “we”, the Western mass public already ran a dress rehearsal. And we all passed (or flunked) with flying colours.

During the pandemic and in the years immediately after, the political and managerial class was wrong about effectively everything.

The origin of the virus. The (non)-efficacy of lockdowns. The vaccines didn’t work and were in fact, kill-shots for many. The money printing.

The correct response to being that wrong, that publicly, and that unwaveringly, about that much, should have been pitchforks and torches in the streets, if not guillotines.

At the very least, in our enlightened civilization: recall elections, mass firings, inquests and class actions. There should have been a generational reckoning with expertise that got captured by politics, a media cartel that went full agitprop and Chapter-7 bankruptcy for institutional credibility.

That is not what happened.

What happened instead was that people stood on the dots. We wore the masks on the walk from the restaurant door to the table, then took them off to eat, sitting in saran wrap bubbles on the street in the middle of winter.

People snitched on their neighbours. They watched elites throw lavish maskless parties while they got tased by cops at their kids’ soccer games.

In other words: we “followed the science”, even as the science was revised quarterly to match policy because the facts on the ground refused to conform to the narrative.

And now, most people will fight tooth and nail to defend the very system that did this to them.

The pandemic was the trial balloon. The political class, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley watched carefully.

What they learned was this: the population will comply. The population will inform on itself. The population will absorb humiliating, contradictory, demonstrably false directives from authorities, and the dominant social behaviour will be enforcement of those directives on anyone who objects.

The Technate has been an ideation of post-Democratic elites since at least the 1930’s.

It has been moving forward inexorably ever since, but it was probably that event, the pandemic and the populace cucking out at a mass level when the technate became inevitable.

Not because of any single manifesto, book, or CEO. Because a civilization that behaves that way under stress has already told its elites what it will accept.

The Technocracy Is Already Here

The manifesto isn’t about Palantir specifically. It’s the blueprint for what I’ve already been noticing, not just in the US but everywhere, that I’ve been calling State Capitalism.

It’s the fused-lattice model of corporate-state power where the company doesn’t lobby the government, it is part of the governing apparatus, and the government in turn provides the regulatory moat that keeps the company’s competitors out, and to whom they can outsource things that national governments aren’t supposed to be doing.

This is where we’re headed for the next few decades. And it’s where we’re headed precisely because the population demonstrated that it would tolerate it, even while they decried “fascism”.

Ever notice how some people who want to lock you down, censor your speech, cancel you for wrongthink, force an experimental vaccine on you and take away your gas stove think of themselves as “anti-fascists” ?🤔🤡

— Mark E. Jeftovic (@jeftovic) January 15, 2023

Welcome to the Era of Mass Compliance.

Karp’s 22 points are the tidy, sanitized version of what we’ve already said in our “Repricing Sovereignty” piece. The early iterations are already in production. Every ICE deployment, every DoD contract, every integration between federal databases and private analytics, every AI-for-defense procurement cycle, every surveillance-as-a-service rollout is a beam in the Cathedral.

And here’s the part that separates the individuals from the crowd:

If you can’t beat ’em. Own ’em.

Long PLTR. This is straight out of the playbook my premium readers will recognize as “The Post Singularity Stack.” It’s a barbell trade that allocates to State Capitalism on one side, while personally building out sovereign technology on the other.

This isn’t an endorsement of the politics, because frankly, I’m done with politics (“vote harder, mofos”). Politics is a racket to keep the rabble in line.

Stand on the dots. Flap your arms. Good boy.

This will go down in history as the most assinine, ill-conceived campaigns ever produced
Most of these people don’t even know what Elbows Up means 🙄
Honestly, it’s like a Monty Python skit 😳pic.twitter.com/9MKFCGOHA8

— Canada has gone mad 🍎 (@HaveWeAllGoneM1) August 25, 2025

True self-sovereignty can only be acquired individually.

It’s an acknowledgement of the structural reality. We’ve been talking about this for a long time (we call it The Great Bifurcation, and as we always suspected, the branch you wind up in is largely an exercise in self-selection). For the next few decades, The Technate will be the vehicle through which capital will compound, and the only rational response is to own a piece of it. Capital is optionality. Wealth is exit velocity. And by wealth I mean not being economically dependent on The State, not living paycheque to paycheque, and not being one frozen bank account away from being forced into compliance.

There is an ancient Chinese aphorism,

“It is unlucky to remain obstinate in the face of overwhelming odds”.

Being morally aghast while your purchasing power erodes in losing sectors leaves you with neither the moral high ground nor the means to act on it.

The most important points of the manifesto are #5…

And #12:

The people who are panicking at the manifesto are the same people who voted, complied, and shamed their neighbours into the conditions that made it possible. They don’t get to be outraged now.

Some people saw this coming years ago. Some of us even wrote it down.

What happened to many of those people was they got deplatformed, canceled, debanked and generally villainized by the same people who are now screaming about Palantir.

I’m mostly done trying to warn the wider public on where things are going.

Now we’re just buying the ticker.

Get on the mailing list for the follow-up to this (The Pareto Paradox In The Age of Mass Compliance), follow me on X here, or if you want to get a look at The Post Singularity Stack, take the premium trial here ».

Authored by Antonio Graceffo via The Epoch Times,

Despite sanctions and two wars, the yuan is losing ground, with much of its earlier rise tied to Russia and now reversing.

The Kremlin drafted a memo this year outlining seven areas of potential economic convergence with Washington, including a proposed return to dollar settlement for Russian energy transactions. The stated rationale in the memo is that dollar integration would stabilize Russia’s balance of payments and foreign exchange markets. Russia never actually wanted to transact business in yuan. Moscow only did so because it was cut off from the dollar system by sanctions and had no choice.

The yuan was a fallback, not a preference. Russia’s desire to return to a dollar-denominated trade regimen is an implicit admission that the yuan-based arrangement failed to deliver monetary stability. It also demonstrates Russian President Vladimir Putin’s desire to decrease Russia’s dependence on China. Putin has many ambitions for Russia’s future, but among them is not for Russia to be the No. 2 power in a Beijing-centered world order.

Heading into the U.S.–Iran conflict, many pundits believed it would bring about the demise of the dollar while accelerating the internationalization of the yuan.

Bloomberg ran a piece titled “The Iran War Is China’s Global Payments Debut,” arguing it took four years of preparation after Ukraine, and this war, to make the yuan a serious contender.

The South China Morning Post cited analysts saying disruptions from the war could accelerate a shift in oil trade and threaten the dollar’s long-held dominance.

Deutsche Bank’s FX Managing Director Mallika Sachdeva wrote in March that the Iran war could be remembered as a catalyst for “erosion in petrodollar dominance, and the beginnings of the petroyuan.”

However, none of these predictions came true.

In fact, the Iranian Embassy in Zimbabwe posted that it was time to add the “petroyuan” to the global oil market, and Iran demanded that tankers be allowed passage only if trade was denominated in yuan.

But to date, the only confirmation is from Lloyd’s List that two ships paid a toll, and there is no clear evidence that the toll was paid in yuan. Lloyd’s List has also not released the names of the ships; therefore, they may very well have been Chinese-flagged vessels that paid a toll, allowing China to claim that de-dollarization was underway.

The logic behind their belief that dollar dominance would be damaged by this conflict was that the United States used sanctions and dollar-system exclusion as a primary weapon against Iran, just as it did against Russia. Every time Washington weaponizes the dollar, it gives non-Western countries an incentive to build off-ramps. Iran, China, and Russia all have a motive to route energy trade outside SWIFT and dollar settlement.

A major U.S. military and financial confrontation with Iran could have been expected to accelerate that, pushing Iranian oil sales into yuan, deepening CIPS usage, and giving China a showcase for an alternative system. However, the data shows the opposite. The dollar has lost no ground, and the yuan has made no gains. If Russia re-dollarizes, the yuan will lose much of its already small share of global trade.

The yuan’s global footprint does not support the internationalization narrative that Russia’s sanctions-driven shift was used to bolster. IMF COFER data for Q3 2025 put the yuan’s share of global foreign exchange reserves at 1.93 percent, down from 1.99 percent in the prior quarter, compared to the dollar’s 56.92 percent. The SWIFT November 2025 RMB Tracker recorded the yuan’s share of global payments at 2.94 percent, falling to 2.71 percent in February 2026.

Between 2020 and 2024, the yuan’s share of global trade settlement roughly doubled, rising from around 2 percent to a peak of 4.7 percent, according to SWIFT RMB Tracker data. That headline gain drove widespread claims that the yuan was displacing the dollar as the world’s trading currency. The reality is more complicated.

To understand how much of that gain was genuine organic growth versus a single sanctions-driven relationship, it is possible to estimate the dollar amounts involved. Global merchandise trade ran from approximately $17.6 trillion in 2020 to $24.4 trillion in 2024, meaning total yuan-settled trade grew from roughly $350 billion to $1.15 trillion, an increase of approximately $800 billion.

Over the same period, Russia–China bilateral trade grew from around $117 billion to $245 billion, with yuan settlement going from near zero before the 2022 invasion of Ukraine to roughly 60 percent of bilateral trade by 2024, a gain of approximately $145 billion in yuan-settled flows. That one corridor, therefore, accounts for an estimated 15 to 20 percent of the entire global increase in yuan trade settlement.

If Russia shifts back to the dollar, the yuan will lose part of its current 2.71 percent share of global trade settlement. In short, the yuan is not gaining internationalization, the dollar is not losing ground, and even two parallel wars, one in Ukraine and one in Iran, have not been sufficient to accelerate the yuan’s adoption as an international trade currency.

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

What has become extraordinarily clear is that nearly every data center, stadium, government building, power plant, substation, and other critical infrastructure site shares one major vulnerability: the lack of a low-cost, early-warning detection layer against one-way attack drones.

Additionally, Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems (C-UAS) architecture should include a kinetic countermeasure layer designed to defeat threats before impact. Without this layered approach, most critical infrastructure remains highly vulnerable to cheap kamikaze drones.

When reports emerge, such as the recent case in New Jersey where 15 crop-spraying drones were reportedly stolen in what investigators described as a sophisticated, coordinated theft, it only reinforces the alarming security concern: these drones, with meaningful payload capacity, can be easily repurposed into weaponized platforms.

The national security news outlet The High Side reports that the FBI is worried about the theft of these drones, as experts warn of “ridiculously bad” consequences and “a potential nightmare scenario” if bad actors weaponize these low-cost flying machines.

“The bureau is freaked out for a good reason,” Steve Lazarus, a retired FBI agent, told the local outlet.

Lazarus continued, “These aren’t hobby drones with cameras. They’re industrial sprayers designed to carry and disperse significant amounts of liquid quickly and with precision. A typical agricultural drone can cover a large area in minutes, following GPS-guided paths — that’s exactly what they’re built for in farming, but it also means that, in the wrong hands, they’re a ready-made delivery system.”

While The High Side and investigators are “spooked” by the theft and the mounting risk that these drones could be used to “disperse biological agents,” the greater threat is actually their payload capacity and the potential for these drones to be weaponized into low-cost, one-way attack drones.

The assessment we provided at the beginning of the note is that the glaring gap in layered air defenses against small drones in high-value areas will only open the door to advanced, low-cost solutions, such as passive acoustic counter-drone detection, outlined here. Some of these C-UAS systems may soon be imported from companies that currently have deployments in Ukraine.

Authored by Timothy Murphy via RealClearDefense,

The Strait of Hormuz reminds us that a single chokepoint can shape the global economy overnight. What most policymakers miss is that space has its own version of Hormuz—and we are rapidly losing control of it. Multiple sectors of the global economy are dependent on access to the Strait of Hormuz, but nations are becoming ever more reliant upon access to space to drive their economies. Similar to the Strait, the key corridor in space is Low Earth Orbit (LEO). All space systems are dependent upon access to it (either directly or indirectly), and the security of LEO and freedom of maneuver in space will increasingly rely upon Artificial Intelligence (AI). Success will come from AI’s capabilities in advancing commercial space activity, responding to current and future threats in space, and ensuring AI dominance through American control of the AI supply chain.

AI is fundamental to maintaining U.S. advantages in commercial space activity. Many people still do not realize the extent of U.S. military involvement in all international space activity – both military and commercial. During my time standing up current operations at U.S. Space Command, we saw the volume and speed of activity in space explode beyond what human operators could effectively track in real time. That gap is only widening. The Space Force operates a Space Surveillance Network that monitors the space environment and tracks all artificial objects in Earth’s orbit. U.S. and foreign companies use this data to launch satellites, avoid debris, and ensure their systems do not conflict with other objects in space. The surveillance network has always relied upon complex algorithms, and as the volume and complexity of space-based activity increases, AI compute will be increasingly necessary.

Providing this surveillance and tracking service will also advance U.S. advantages in the development of the commercial space industry. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and its preceding organizations played a critical role in solidifying air commerce as an economic force in the 20th century. U.S. development of the FAA ensured control over the global air industry which has generated wealth, economic benefits, and advanced logistics for over 100 years. America is on track to have similar influence over the development of space commerce, but AI will be critical to ensuring the expansion of surveillance, tracking, and deconfliction of space assets. The country that successfully employs AI capabilities to accomplish these functions will have the most influence on the future of the space industry.

While AI will be critical to commercial space development, it is absolutely necessary to counter the quantity and capabilities of current threats, much less future ones. Existing threats to the space domain are significant and not well understood. The dominant adversary is China, which has over 1,300 satellites in orbit and maintains multiple systems (in space and on earth) that can target U.S. and allied space systems. China’s threats to space represent a range from destructive weapons to high-power laser weapons and powerful jammers. A coordinated Chinese effort to jam or blind satellites in LEO wouldn’t just affect military systems. It would disrupt GPS, financial transactions, logistics, and communications simultaneously. Much of China’s efforts to deter and defeat the U.S. rely heavily on their counter-space plans and capabilities. China could attempt to deploy those capabilities to hamper U.S. operations in LEO and thus disrupt the key “choke point” for space access.

Much of China’s efforts to deter and defeat the U.S. rely heavily on their counter-space plans and capabilities. If deployed, they could directly disrupt U.S. operations in LEO and threaten access to this critical choke point. The U.S. cannot rely on human operators alone to respond. AI will be essential for detection, tracking, threat analysis, and real-time response to adversary actions. It can also provide decision-makers with options at tactical, operational, and strategic levels. These are capabilities the U.S. must accelerate in the years ahead.

In space, AI is not an efficiency tool. It is the only way to maintain control. To realize these advantages, the United States must confront a harder truth: AI is only as strong as the supply chain behind it. If the U.S. does not control the AI stack—from chips to training data—it will not control the space domain. And today, that stack is globally fragmented and exposed.

U.S.-based Nvidia’s GPUs power much of the AI ecosystem but systems like the GB200 rely on hundreds of global suppliers. That creates real vulnerability but also reflects reality. The U.S. cannot retreat from global markets without ceding influence. Selling American AI abroad sets standards, builds dependence, and keeps U.S. companies at the center of the ecosystem. The challenge is not whether to engage, but how. The U.S. should protect its most advanced capabilities from adversaries like China while avoiding broad export controls that weaken its own industrial base.

The world has seen how a single chokepoint can shape the global economy. Space has its own chokepoint that it is becoming more critical by the year. AI will determine who can operate in that domain and who cannot. The country that builds and supplies that infrastructure will not just compete in space. It will define it.

Col Timothy Murphy (U.S. Air Force, ret.) is a former national security affairs fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. From 2019 to 2020, he served as the first Chief of Current Operations for U.S. Space Command.

For the first time in many years, the United States has a top diplomat officially in residence representing Washington to Venezuela.

Veteran US diplomat John M. Barrett has arrived in Caracas to serve as chargé d’affaires at the US Embassy in Venezuela, the mission announced Thursday, marking a new phase in Washington’s diplomatic presence in Venezuela, and after a US military raid on Jan.3 ousted and captured longtime leader Nicolás Maduro.

Image via Prensa Libre

Barrett is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service, and he was tapped by the Trump admin for role in April after most recently serving as chargé d’affaires at the US Embassy in Guatemala.

His arrival forms part of President Trump’s stated three-phase plan to “restore democracy” in Venezuela, with the chargé d’affaires acting as the top US representative in the absence of a Senate-confirmed ambassador.

It must be recalled that it was actually the Director of the CIA who was the first top Trump admin official to visit post-Maduro Caracas and warmly shake hands with new leader, then-Vice President Delcy Rodríguez.

Ironically she had long been among the most staunchly socialist officials within the Chavista regime of Maduro, and her being accepted by Washington shows there was not actual regime change on any institutional level, just the tapping of a more pliant US puppet.

Various reports review that before his posting in Guatemala, Barrett served from 2023 to 2025 as deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in Panama.

“The relationship between the United States and Venezuela will shape the future of our hemisphere. My name is John Barrett, and I have just arrived in Venezuela to serve as charge d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas,” Barrett said in a newly video published introducing himself and the new role by the embassy on social media.

“President Trump and Secretary Rubio have a clear vision for the prosperity of our region, and I am here to continue implementing their three-phase plan for Venezuela. We remain committed to Venezuela,” he added.

His prior diplomatic roles include serving as counselor for economic affairs at the US Embassy in Peru and as consul general in Recife, where he led US diplomatic engagement across eight northeastern states.

CNN: Maduro presented the CIA as a boogeyman attempting to topple the regime, without any evidence.

Also CNN: “the CIA has helped supplant Maduro and is poised to help actively manage the Trump administration’s dealings with Venezuela’s new leadership” pic.twitter.com/nno8e1bJNu

— Glenn Diesen (@Glenn_Diesen) January 29, 2026

It’s expected that with the reopening and normalization of embassy operations, so will the presence of American spies in Caracas grow – as goes the pattern with most any country, but especially in the case of Latin America, and given the presence of the world’s largest proven oil reserves under the ground.

Via Middle East Eye

The Trump administration has told several Gulf states that they should use American companies to rebuild their infrastructure damaged by Iran’s retaliatory strikes amid the US-Israeli war on the Islamic Republic, US and Arab officials familiar with the discussions told Middle East Eye.

Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE are among the countries the US has tapped as potential customers for US engineering, manufacturing and construction firms, given the extent of damage in their countries, the officials told MEE.

Smoke rises following a strike on the Bapco oil refinery, amid the US-Israeli war on Iran, on Sitra Island, Bahrain, on March 9, 2026. via Reuters

Saudi Arabia and Oman have been less impacted by Iranian air strikes. In their talking points, US officials have been emphasizing the economic partnership the Gulf countries share with the US and its importance to reconstruction. 

A US official told MEE that promoting US companies for Gulf reconstruction was part of the Trump administration’s “America First” foreign policy, which prioritizes economic statecraft. 

But an Arab official told MEE that the push appeared “a little tone-deaf”, as the Gulf is still wary of a return to fighting and on edge over the US’s commitments to regional security.

The Trump administration’s push is not merely symbolic. Rystad Energy estimates the repair costs for energy-linked infrastructure in the Gulf alone could reach as high as $39bn, excluding the damage in Iran.

A fragile ceasefire between the US and Iran is holding, even as the two are locked in a stalemate over the Strait of Hormuz with rival blockades. Iran’s government has estimated that its economy overall suffered $270bn in direct and indirect war damages.

The Gulf monarchies generally opposed the US-Israeli war on Iran, but they faced the brunt of the Islamic Republic’s reprisals. The UAE was targeted with at least 2,000 ballistic missiles and drones.

The countries which suffered the most damage are also the most exposed to Iran’s newfound control over the Strait of Hormuz, as opposed to Saudi Arabia, which has a pipeline bypassing the chokepoint via the Red Sea. 

Gulf states have deep pockets to rebuild infrastructure, but there are signs they are wary of a longer-term downturn.

Kuwait has one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds. Valued at $1 trillion, the fund rivals those of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, although it flies below the radar. 

US Secretary of State Scott Bessent said this week, however, that the UAE and other Gulf states were seeking currency swap lines from the US, which would allow them to tap into US dollars while their energy exports are stalled. 

“I could see the US looking for a trade-off where Gulf states using a swap line commit to US firms for rebuilding,” a former US official told MEE. 

Kuwait, which sits at the northeastern corner of the Gulf, was also hammered by Iranian air strikes. While Kuwait keeps a lower profile than Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, it has the fourth-largest US troop presence in the world. Iranian strikes hit the US’s Camp Arifjan as well as Ali al-Salem Air Base.

But Reuters reported that Kuwait International Airport also suffered significant damage. At least two major Kuwaiti power and water desalination plants were damaged as well.

Likewise, Bahrain, a tiny Gulf island kingdom whose only land connection to the outside world is the King Fahd Causeway to Saudi Arabia, suffered significant damage from Iranian strikes.

🇸🇦🇶🇦🇦🇪🇧🇭🇰🇼GULF WAR DRIVES $58B REBUILD BILL – STRAINS GLOBAL EQUIPMENT AND SUPPLY CHAINS

The recent conflict across the Gulf is expected to generate a reconstruction burden of roughly $55–60 billion, with damage concentrated in energy infrastructure, logistics corridors, and… pic.twitter.com/wyBiGBuSVN

— THE GLOBAL WATCHDOG (@glwatchdog) April 18, 2026

Bahrain’s port, which hosts the US’s Fifth Fleet, was pummelled by Iran, but key industrial sites also suffered damage.

The Financial Times reported that Amazon’s cloud computing operation in Bahrain was hit by Iranian strikes. Aluminium Bahrain, one of the world’s largest single-site smelters, was attacked and had to declare a force majeure as a result of the damage. Bahrain’s Bapco refinery also declared a force majeure after the strikes.

US and Arab officials said the US has not yet lobbied on behalf of specific companies, but wants to put American firms at the front lines of reconstruction.