Phenomenal World is brilliant. If you want yawn debates about migration & Brexit then it won’t be for you. But if you want to understand the deep global patterns that lead to populism / Brexit / tariffs / currency collapse then dig in…

The thing to remember is that Blair is happy for the UK to be a safety deposit box for capital. That was the New Labour strategy & due to low(ish) debt in the 90s, we could sustain this policy, service the interest & still have money left over for benefits & wagefare. That world ended in 2008.

With Palantir embedded with Network Rail and now with SpaceX being positioned as the primary train WiFi provider, we must ask the question: how much control is the US tech industry going to get over our railways?

Can't tell you how long I've been waiting for a mainstream UK politician to say this. www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

An optimistic thread for anyone who thinks these are dark days. The world is changing. Endogenously - the only way it sticks. Investors flocking to green energy heralds economic sovereignty & distributed power in the world to come. A better, freer, more equal world may emerge👇

18/ "In the short term, the war raises export income for US oil producers In the longer term, the energy dominance strategy is self-defeating—creating profound volatility, insecurity,& intermittency that militates against investors, consumers, and govts alike" www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/daw...

16/ Trump "has made fossil fuels both expensive and unreliable. People used to worry that addiction to oil made us dependent on Middle Eastern autocracies. ...We have learnt since 2022 that it also makes us dependent on Trump, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu." bsky.app/profile/ande...

9/ Over the past decade there has been a global green industrial buildout as country after country wanted a position in new industries. The problem in the mid-2020s was not factory overcapacity, but a lack of coordinated global demand The Hormuz shock has violently solved that under-demand problem.

Well done Charles. How nice to wake up to old-fashioned diplomacy. Calm, polite but direct in his message. What a lesson in manners to Trump’s vulgar rabble. And someone deserves a knighthood for that Trump bell. It will be mercilessly memed online - which is of course, the point: eyeballs.

When this happened in WW2, I believed we called it the ‘blitz’. If I remember my GCSE history, the people raining bombs on our capital city were seen as the bad guys?

Perhaps this is a good faith post but it repeats the false equivalence of invasion of Iran to defence *against* Hitler. The second problem is to conflate mistakes with reckless abandon of norms. Let us remember that Iran stood down & expressed contrition after bringing down Flight 752 in 2020👇

3/6 It runs a trade surplus because it produces far more than it consumes or invests domestically. In more familiar terms, China runs a trade surplus because it saves far more than it invests, and of course saving is just production minus consumption.

This is beautiful👇

Qatar warns war on Iran could 'bring down' world economies - https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/qatar-warns-iran-war-could-bring-down-world-economies

The people who listen to Michael Hudson will already know that he is one of the most perceptive geopolitical commentators out there - trigger warning: also cantankerous & fervently anti US - but even I am stunned as his ability to predict every move in this war *before* it happened👇

NEW How Palantir captured the Ministry of Defence How a close read of public domain documents show how MoD was commercially colonised by Palantir By me, at FT www.ft.com/content/5207...

UK govt finances better than expected in January. Ridiculous single statistic obsession. Must prioritize public welfare. Unemployment rising, millions in poverty, unfit roads, unaffordable housing, NHS queues, deindustrialization, endemic profiteering. Can't rejuvenate without public investment.

So SCOTUS, with its fabricated-out-of-thin-air immunity doctrine, has actually made American presidents less accountable than LITERAL royalty.

America: well we must have extended immunity for the president because we inherited the principle of sovereign immunity from British legal tradition, and... Britain: *arrests the brother of the sovereign*

Lioness Devouring a Man, palace of Ashurnasirpal II (Nimrud, near Mosul), Iraq, ca. 750 BCE

The wheels of justice may turn slowly, but in Britain: sleaze, malfeasance and/or incompetence in office - Johnson, Truss lose jobs Britain: Epstein dealings: Mandelson fired; Andrew arrested US: crickets. Nothing to see here. The rich and powerful do as they please.

First senior member of the royal family to be arrested since Charles I...

Suspect William & Charles escalated this. Lots of unflattering articles about the late Queen’s judgement. They needed a separation strategy.

Oh, the grand old duke of york He ██████████████████ He ██████████████████ And he ██████████████████

She never lived to see this moment, but it’s worth remembering that none of this would have happened without Virginia Giuffre. She had the courage to speak out against power and privilege when it was just her word against Andrew’s. Thanks to her, justice & accountability may finally have its day.

It is absolute and utter neglect to let this come this close to the wire just as the US has let most of its overseas broadcasting shutter.

Our son had a tooth out in USA under anaesthetic…

It really is good👇

What this child has gone through. The stress surges will live in his body. He’ll feel unsafe & needy, likely causing hell to future partners. He’ll shut down or lose control when threatened. He may struggle at school & fall into petty crime. It is criminal for the state to inflict such harm👇

The financial crisis is why we’re here. We backstopped asset markets & tore money out of the real economy with austerity. Better to have split the banks, let housing crash, let City contract & sort out our damn trade deficit & energy deficiency. Instead we got Brexit & US tech monopolies.

It really is an urgent matter. A huge geopolitical mistake that ties us into path dependent reliance on the US👇

“Stop pretending Jesus was crucified because he preached good vibes & personal growth” Amen to that. Jesus was a radical who stood up to power to protect the weak. A stunning piece of writing👇

You might ask why Labour seems fixated on giving Palantir contracts for police and health in the UK?

Don’t let this White House lie to you. Believe what you see. Alex Pretti was trying to help a woman off the ground. Then immigration agents tackled, shot, and killed him. It’s time for them to get the hell out of MN.

Alex Pretti was a colleague at the VA. We hired him to recruit for our trial. He became an ICU nurse- I lover working with him. He was a good kind person who lived to help and these fuckers executed him. White. Hot. Rage.

Gosh, this is quite something👇

The people who spent years defending and even lionizing Kyle Rittenhouse and Ashli Babbitt now want us to believe that an unarmed mother in her car and a disarmed nurse were domestic terrorists who deserved to be murdered by law enforcement.

They know what they say is untrue, they do not care it is untrue. The media know that what they repeat is untrue, they do not care it is untrue. Their supporters know what they are told is untrue, they do not care it is untrue. Telling the truth is not enough, unless people care about the truth.

Exactly. The important thing is to balance trade & capital flows. Not try & protect against genuine productivity improvements👇

Code for - we need govts to give us more $, because the market is not delivering adequate use and revenues, because users don't yet see the benefits from the technology.

Because the US needs oil. It needs oil to sustain $$ demand. Once countries are self sufficient in energy, the demand for $$s dies & the US can’t fund their budget. China & Oil > strong $$. End of oil, China decoupled, the US has a massively overvalued stock markets & a gig economy👇

Great interview *but* “the motive is domination” is wrong. The motive is fear. The US saw that China was beginning to decouple from the US system. That put the $$ at risk & *that* puts all those crazy/stupid valuations at risk which is why the tech billionaires got involved. The UK & EU now have …

You are missing that the $$ is going to come under increasing pressure & may collapse if China stops investing its surplus in US markets. There are better responses than Trump’s but forcing your trade deficit on your colonies - sorry, allies - is hardly new?

2024: can Europe defend itself ALONGSIDE America? 2025: can Europe defend itself WITHOUT America? 2026: can Europe defend itself AGAINST America?

The question they should be asking is whether the EU will choose *them*? 2 despots on 2 fronts & they haven’t even got energy security? 🤔

This is the British economy writ large. We can’t afford our consumption. It can only be paid with debt, asset sales or cuts. We have had 20 years to figure this out yet politicians are ASLEEP. They daren’t explain that we can’t keep borrowing from tomorrow to fund today. We need WAGES not debt👇

LIQUIDITY PREFERENCE!!!! Have none of them read Keynes?