Cuba: “Oil imports to the island reached zero in January for the first time since 2015, according to data from shipping reports and Kpler Ltd.” www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

With the IMF having updated the financial positions in the Fund data to end January, one can see that the matching SDR transactions for Argentina and USA have appeared again, +586m SDR for Argentina, -586m SDR (=$807m) for USA. www.imf.org/external/np/...

Not the only UK risk today with a gulf between the official term and the actual duration, amirite, send skeet www.ft.com/content/3260...

Drew mentions something important: with every foreign bureau shut or correspondent laid off, local reporters, researchers, fixers, translators etc all lose jobs or work as well. These essential people, many of whom take substantial risks, just get cut off, likely without severance or support.

The ‘Bell Pottinger’ death rattle.

Nothing says ‘America 250’ like hiring German mercenaries for a reactionary enterprise, I suppose www.ft.com/content/f869...

It was not in trading Argentine peso forwards, just to be clear. He tried that in 2018 and lost $1mn. www.justice.gov/epstein/file...

Looks like Studwell's Africa follow-up to How Asia Works will focus a lot on population density: “At the start of the C20th, Africa’s pop. density — at under five people per km²— was similar to England’s in 1066... In 2030, Africa will finally reach [Asia's in 1960]“ www.ft.com/content/a926...

This is preying on my mind a bit. Jeffrey Epstein was not primarily a British scandal! So far we've removed a Prince from the Royal family, fired our US ambassador who was one of the most important political figures of the last few decades and banned the CEO of Barclays from the financial industry..

Elon Musk has nothing on Indonesian tycoons. After the Jakarta market was hit by an MSCI warning over low free floats (largely in tycoon-dominated firms) - www.ft.com/content/e96e... - one tycoon responds with... stock buybacks (ie free float goes down): www.ft.com/content/18b5...

Would be cool if this was a nom de plume (guerre?) inherited by all prime ministers, like the 007 designation. The name is Pond, John Pond, Theresa May quietly chuckled to herself as she read another PPS screed on Brexit, etc.

I think of people cadging things from him (flights etc) that monetarily should've been baubles to them. Saw it before in patronage networks looting various states for bizarrely small sums. They didn't need it, got no real use of it, but they did it, because in a way that's just what patronage is.

I jinxed the emerging markets rally. A few days after this went out... South African stocks had their worst open in years today, (gold stocks down 8% plus). SK Hynix also off 8%. www.ft.com/content/bba3...

Stanley Druckenmiller says Kevin Warsh is not a permanent policy ‘hawk’ - scoop by @pollard.bsky.social. The billionaire investor is a long time mentor of Warsh (and also Scott Bessent) www.ft.com/content/4ec8...

Fun reminder in this that the Baltic states (and Iceland) are both advanced economies (in IMF terms) and frontier markets (MSCI terms).

David Hackett Fischer in ‘Albion’s Seed’ seems way more interested in the Cavaliers/Virginians than Puritans or Quakers as a mass of cultural contradictions (viz. ‘hegemonic liberty’). And as the most self-aware that ‘folkways’ were often reconstructed.

Great read on the Khamenei family's shadowy, exported wealth >> Thousands have died in recent anti-government protests in Iran, while Mojtaba Khamenei - touted as a possible next leader of the country - has built a global property empire. www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

My story, written this morning from Minneapolis, is part of The Economist's cover package this week Inside the movement challenging—and disrupting—ICE www.economist.com/united-state...

Westerners cosplaying 996 (obviously grounded in critique, not emulation, and now subject to intense regulation in China itself) feels like the vogue for chinoiserie from another era. It’s about as deep www.ft.com/content/d0b7...

The continued sharp drop in Indonesian stocks over the MSCI warning is, ironically enough, the sort of thing you might see in a market where free float and liquidity were significantly exaggerated. I fear it’s not beating the allegations… www.ft.com/content/ae6f...

Brazil wants to issue its first ever renminbi bond this year per its latest borrowing plan. Panda or offshore? Anyway if this will help set a benchmark for later corporate issuance that’s a big deal. cdn.tesouro.gov.br/sistemas-int...

Bari Weiss is going for the good old ‘scoop of interpretation’, so the UK takeover of US newsrooms is clearly advancing also in the spiritual sense www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/b...

Maybe CBS' new Ukraine correspondent is very talented. One point of comparison: it took me 10 years to get a permanent staff job as an international correspondent. Does Bari Weiss expect him to go to the frontline, though? If so, that's potentially irresponsible, given his lack of experience

Tether say it's a ‘gold central bank’ buying a tonne a week. Meanwhile last year Uzbekistan, a 'gold central bank'/ big producer did buy tonnes here and there but overall holdings were largely constant at 380-390 tonnes (their value went up $19bn to more than $50bn... out of $61bn total reserves).

When free floats aren't quite as free as thought. MSCI could cut Indonesia's stock market from 'emerging' to 'frontier' status if by May it hasn't addressed “ongoing opacity in shareholding structures and concerns about possible coordinated trading behaviour”: www.ft.com/content/baf0...

It was strong. I think the consensus in EM trading anyway really began to fracture with the Mar a Lago Accord talk (remember that?? A million years ago??) but it took a while. Yet here was @rajakorman.bsky.social in Nov 2024!

None of you mentioned that ‘Albion’s Seed’ has a nice line in ‘Simpsons’-style absurd incongruity to explain those folkways.

Colombia, Bulgaria, Korea, Turkey, Zambia, Hungary, Egypt, Brazil, Chile, Romania, South Africa, Mexico, Taiwan. All emerging stock markets that are up at least 10% in US dollar terms this month.

Colombia's and Panama's debt management offices rn: 😑

Now, I'm no clairvoyant. But I sense a Fitch downgrade of Afreximbank might be in the offing: “PRESS STATEMENT Cairo, Egypt… Friday, 23 January 2026: African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) has today officially terminated its credit rating relationship with Fitch Ratings.”

'Board of Peace' latest: the US hates the Brics, but Trump anyway now heads a de facto club of Brics+ countries outside the original Brics, some Brics partners, and one or two prior Brics invitees/maybes.

The DRC wants to sell its first dollar bond this year. Ideally it will want a lower yield than the record 13.7 per cent for an African eurobond set by Republic of Congo last year (albeit a weird domestically focused deal)... www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Nedbank has put in an offer to one of Kenya's bigger banks NCBA, which Standard Bank was expected to buy. FDI of 0.6% of GDP. South Africans appear to recognise the conclusions of the Time Travelling Economist, that Kenya will be the next country to industrialise in SSA (the first since Mauritius)

Trump's 'Board of Peace': not so much a UN substitute as a nightmare blunt rotation of frontier market bond issuers. Latest joiners include Egypt, Pakistan, and Azerbaijan.

Today a debt fund manager told me they are not psychologically ready if EM turns out to have another good year this year after last year, because of US craziness (or weaker dollar). Everyone is so used to EM usually reverting to disappointment, it will shock if it doesn’t happen for once.

Another way of looking at this is that tripwire forces work and this one has Gone Horribly Right in smoking out US intentions and raising US costs. www.ft.com/content/80d6...

FinDevLab on Senegal's attempt to avoid a debt restructuring this year: the Common Framework is a mess but so is gambling for redemption and shifting the eventual cost to the regional currency union. findevlab.org/wp-content/u...

I'd forgotten that one classic case in public international law is the ‘Eastern Greenland’ opinion, when the League of Nations predecessor to the ICJ ruled against Norway's occupation of part of the island in 1931. Norway accepted Denmark's claim to all Greenland. www.worldcourts.com/pcij/eng/dec...

Shares in Hanwha Aerospace (seller of Korean, ie non-US, howitzers to Nato states) are up 40% so far this year.

Don't suspend their visas, just make them use the visa system people from developing countries have to use. AOC will be President by Friday.

Qatar has long been a neutral or mediatory space for things Venezuelan, but more importantly it would be even tougher to enforce there as a foreign judgment creditor. www.semafor.com/article/01/1...

“I’m also very nervous about whether AI demand is real. I have to invest up to US$56bn this year, and if we didn’t do it carefully, it would be a disaster for TSMC.” (The CEO of the dominant stock in the EM benchmark is confident that US demand is there btw) www.ft.com/content/a3b4...

Iran: "Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, an economist at Virginia Tech, estimated Iran’s total capital flight last year at between $10 billion and $20 billion, creating what he called “a bad situation that does not seem tenable.” www.wsj.com/world/middle...

“A degree of calm has since set in across the streets of Tehran, at least by day… However, state hospitals are operating at full capacity, while police and intelligence services have warned families to keep young people off the streets.” www.ft.com/content/fdc3...

Korean prosecutors have demanded the death penalty for ex-President Yoon over his insurrection charges. First call for a former Korean leader to face a death sentence since Chun Doo-hwan in 1996 (he was sentenced, later commuted to life imprisonment, then pardoned). en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN2026...

Interesting that Games Workshop is similar to DC in comics in setting firm guidance against generative AI. (Both have highly creator-driven readers and collectors I think)

Governors of two emerging-market central banks, the Banco Central do Brasil and Bank of Korea, are among the 11 central banking institutions that have expressed “full solidarity” with Jerome Powell and the Fed: www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/dat...

Finance minister, not a central banker, but for me the EM analogy to Trump-Powell is the saga of Jacob Zuma versus Pravin Gordhan in South Africa, 2016-17. Gordhan was charged, then charges were dropped, then he was sacked anyway. But ultimately SA's core public finance institutions survived.

Just saying, I spent twenty years in Emerging Markets watching countries pull this sort of thing with their Central Banks and am available for lucrative consulting gigs.

The US has confirmed that creditors won’t be able to attach revenue from Venezuelan oil that lands in US Treasury accounts. Which would have been a very bold holdout strategy anyway. In other words another sign that recovery will await a restructuring. www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/...