My book Rigged, exposing an establishment cover-up at the highest level on both sides of the Atlantic followed by a whole series of miscarriages of justice, has already sold out its initial print run and been reprinted in the UK. Now it's being published in the United States:

The $TRUMP meme coin generated about $616 million for the Trump family, while buyers lost more than $700 million, according to Reuters' estimates. The coin has tumbled 97% from its January 2025 peak reut.rs/4oisC7e @specialreports

🚨BREAKING: Filton 4 sentenced as terrorists Amnesty opposes the use of terrorism powers in this case. It is completely disproportionate to punish protesters for criminal damage as if they were terrorists, a sentence which stays with you for life. The defendants in today’s case were sentenced as terrorists because prosecutors want to make an example of them. Today's decision shows how direct action protesters could be treated in the future. The use of terrorism laws against direct action protesters must end. Together we must continue calling out the abuse of power and fighting for our right to protest. Read our position: Criminal Damage, Direct Action, Terrorism: Misuse of counter-terrorism powers in the UK: amn.st/6015B87ZCx

Well, here's some math. Starlink is a profitable business with about $11 billion of sales and $3 billion of free cash flow. It might be worth $75 billion at a frisky multiple of 25X free cash flow. The balance----the space launch business and the AI/data centers in space fantasy----has $7 billion of sales and NEGATIVE -$17 billion of free cash flow. So why is it worth anything, unless you are pricing a dream peddled by sell-side hucksters?! In short, after trading up to $2 trillion based on $75 billion of tangible Starlink value, where's the remaining $1.925 trillion of it? This isn't just the classical mania of the crowds. This is sui generis--- mass insanity in a casino that has been giving a lobotomy by three decades of money-printing madness at the Fed and its fellow-traveling central banks around the planet.

RT @realazadeh: I’ve been saying this since it all started: Trump’s Iran and Strait of Hormuz policy is simpler than people think. Sure, th…

NEW: The former CIA officer found with more than 300 gold bars in his home worked closely with the Stephen Feinberg, the #2 Pentagon official, on a covert program to spy on China

Good take by @adam_tooze in the FT. I think a good analogy to use is this: imagine Saudi Arabia offered to sell their oil wells at 80% off, and you could somehow ship them home. You'd call any leader who refused that deal a complete fool. Well that's pretty much what China is doing with solar panels. That's what people fail to understand: there's such intense competition and so much supply in China - the so-called "involution" phenomenon - that it's YOU, as a customer, who's getting subsidized when you buy solar panels. This is literally China paying your energy bill. And it's like oil wells because, once it's installed, there's no dependency. You buy it once, and for three decades (the average lifespan of a solar panel) you're extracting energy from your own sun, just like an oil well extracts from your own ground. It's one of the most sovereign energy asset you can buy. The rational response when you see this is to buy as many as you can, as fast as you can. All the more when you're Europe and you have massive energy supply problems (and no solar industry of your own to protect). But no, we scream "overcapacity" and put up tariffs. We're so deep into geopolitical brainworms that we can't recognize the best deal in the history of energy. Src for the article: ft.com/content/b6cac184-75a4…

Respect. Sigh .

It's not just the exploitation of a tragedy. JD Vance's picture of Britain - where migrants have led to a crime surge - is the opposite of the truth. comment.press/vance1234

UK, EU, Japan, and South Korea are in decades long decline because every time we use our R&D to develop a breakthrough technology we are coerced, sometimes blackmailed, into selling it to US rentier owners by IPO or M&A so the profits of our innovation and R&D flow to US (Nokia, Skype, Alstom, etc). US bleeds its vassals whenever they excel. John Bolton tried this on Huawei (cooperatively owned by employees) which refused US IPO listing by ordering the 2018 arrest of COO Meng Wanzhou. China stood up to the blackmail. Huawei remains employee owned and has massively expanded its range of operations to eliminate all US dependency in the Chinese tech stack. It is refusal to be subjugated that distinguishes China’s rise to challenge US primacy and hegemony.

This is so insanely corrupt, I can’t even believe it. More than half the donors to Trump’s $400 million White House ballroom just won over $50 billion in new federal contracts in six months. And here’s the part that should make your blood boil. Sixteen of these 27 donors were facing federal enforcement actions, antitrust reviews, labor cases, securities charges. Many of those cases have been quietly dropped or scaled back since Trump took office. You write a check, your legal problems disappear. That’s not a coincidence. The White House won’t even release the full donor list. They’re hiding it on purpose, because daylight is the one thing pay-to-play can’t survive. A federal judge already ruled ballroom construction has to stop until Congress authorizes it. Government is supposed to serve the people, not auction itself off to the highest bidder. When access goes to whoever pays the most, working families always end up paying the price. We either end the corruption, or the corruption will end us. wapo.st/3QmJjSz

Trump Administration Live Updates: House Passes Measure to End Iran War, a Rebuke of President nytimes.com/live/2026/06/03/… via @NYTimes

Thousands of Albanians took to the streets of Tirana on Tuesday night to protest Jared Kushner’s €1.4 billion luxury resort project on a protected stretch of Albania’s Adriatic coast—Reuters

It always astonishes me how there is virtually ZERO public debate - or even public awareness - in Europe about the decisions that will most shape ordinary people's lives. These days, the EU is drafting a new anti-China legal framework where - quite literally - the more affordable and competitive Chinese products are, the more illegal they'd become. You'd think EU citizens would want to be informed about such things - as it couldn't be more consequential for their prosperity. Yet I bet virtually no EU citizen is even aware of it, beyond a vague sense that there is some sort of trade dispute going on. So what's going on exactly? It all centers around a new legal instrument the EU is drafting called the "overcapacity instrument" (euobserver.com/218003/china-…). First of all, the very notion of "overcapacity" is pretty ridiculous to begin with, especially the way it's being defined by the EU, as it basically means being competitive enough to export. By this definition of "overcapacity," pretty much every European industry that's ever run a trade surplus - German cars, French wine, Italian fashion - has been guilty of "overcapacity." I'm not even exaggerating: if you read this study by the EU Parliament on "Industrial overcapacities, with a focus on China" (europarl.europa.eu/RegData/e…), they define "overcapacity" as building more capacity than your domestic market can absorb. So the moment you build capacity to export abroad, you're in "overcapacity." Utterly ridiculous. And what this "overcapacity instrument" is about is creating a permanent legal mechanism for the EU to block Chinese competition across whole sectors of the economy, if they happen to be in "overcapacity." In effect, this means that if China is competitive globally in a given sector in such a way that it exports a lot, that's proof of overcapacity, and legally it'd mean that the entire sector can be restricted from the EU market. Which means it really, factually, is a legal framework where the more affordable and competitive your products are, the more illegal they become. Which is a CRAZY economic concept! 🤦‍♂️ Please note that it's different from the anti-subsidy legal instrument, which the EU has already put in place in 2023 (the "Foreign Subsidies Regulation": competition-policy.ec.europa…). This "overcapacity instrument" would be above and beyond this: it wouldn't even matter if a particular sector was subsidized by the Chinese government or not, the mere fact of its competitiveness in exports would be grounds for restrictions in the EU. It doesn't take a genius to understand how badly this could impact everyday people: this is European consumers being forced to pay more for worse products by law, so that uncompetitive European firms don't have to improve. Politicians frame it as avoiding a "China shock 2.0" but really this is choosing an even steeper self-inflicted decline than is already the case, where EU citizens would subsidize mediocre EU companies that would have even less pressure to catch up. It's a hidden tax: subsidies for uncompetitive firms paid by consumers instead of governments, which in turn makes them less incentivized to become competitive. The first "China shock" did de-industrialize Europe somewhat, but at least it made things cheaper for European consumers. If this becomes Europe's response to a second "China shock" not only it'd make everything more expensive but it'd do nothing for EU industry: you don't become competitive by banning the competition... Look at China itself: the way it industrialized was NOT by banning Western firms but on the contrary by welcoming them strategically and learning from them. You learn to compete by... competing, duh! What I find most shocking in all of this isn't even the policy itself - you can make arguments for and against protectionism, and reasonable people can disagree. What's shocking is that virtually no European media outlet is explaining any of this to the public. This is unarguably one of the single most consequential economic decisions the EU will make this decade, affecting the price of everything, and it's being drafted in near-total silence. No newspaper is running the headline "EU plans to make Chinese goods illegal if they're too affordable" - even though that's essentially what's happening. But that's what you call a "democracy" with "freedom of expression" these days apparently...

According to data from the World Bank, the share of the population living in extreme poverty ($3/day PPP) is now higher in the United States than in China.

New research: we have studied the wealth of the 200 Californian billionaires and what they effectively pay in tax. From Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) to Sergei Brin and Larry Page (Alphabet), the results are edifying. 🧵 nytimes.com/interactive/2026…

This is shocking - and it is letting down a generation. Meaningful work is a social and moral imperative and govt could tackle this by reversing the cut in the NIC threshold which has decimated first jobs. When we faced a similar crisis post financial crash Gordon Brown exempted under 21s from NICs and hospitality generated 1 in 3 new jobs for them. The Covid VAT cut also protected these jobs

90% of money created since 2000 was created by private banks. Not the government. And between 1980 and 2000, the government was actually destroying money while monetarists were blaming it for inflation. In my latest video, I show exactly how private debt acceleration drives asset price booms, how financial equity works like a seesaw that always tilts against the non-bank sector, and why the obsession with cutting government deficits is making all of this worse. You'll find more details in the comment section. #PrivateDebt #FinancialInstability #EconomicReality #PostKeynesian #SteveKeen

President Donald Trump sued his own government for ten billion dollars. He settled with himself. The fund created from that settlement is $1.776 billion. The number is not arithmetic. It is encoded with the year of American independence. On May 18, the Justice Department announced the “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” a $1,776,000,000 compensation pool drawn from the federal judgment fund. The pool exists because President Donald J. Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization agreed to drop their $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the 2019 leak of Trump’s tax returns. In exchange for that dismissal, plus the withdrawal of administrative claims related to the 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago and the Russia investigation, the DOJ created a fund to “redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare.” The President himself is ineligible to claim from it. His pardoned allies are not. The judgment fund is a perpetual appropriation. It does not require new congressional authorization. Congress allocated unlimited spending authority for legal settlements decades ago, and the DOJ is using that mechanism to create what House Democrats call a $1.7 billion slush fund. No congressional vote took place. The fiscal authority for $1.776 billion was already on the books. The administration applied an existing rule to a settlement of a lawsuit the President filed against himself. The Acting Attorney General who signed the settlement is Todd Blanche. Two years ago, Blanche was Trump’s lead criminal defense attorney in the hush-money case that ended in 34 felony convictions, and in the federal cases brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith. Within two weeks of Blanche becoming Deputy Attorney General in March 2025, the Justice Department’s top ethics lawyer formally instructed him to recuse from cases involving Trump in his personal capacity. The ethics lawyer was fired four months later. Blanche became Acting Attorney General in April. The defense attorney now runs the department that settled his former client’s lawsuit against itself. The federal judge overseeing the case, Kathleen Williams, issued an order stating she was “stripped of jurisdiction” because the settlement was never docketed. The court could not review what was never filed with the court. The settlement evaded judicial scrutiny by being executed outside the docket. Williams ordered the case closed. Approximately 400 pardoned January 6 defendants have already filed Federal Tort Claims Act applications seeking between one and ten million dollars each. In March, the DOJ paid Michael Flynn $1.25 million to settle a malicious prosecution suit that a federal judge had previously dismissed in its entirety. The Flynn payment was the prototype. The Anti-Weaponization Fund is the system. The fund will be administered by a five-person commission appointed by the Attorney General. The President can remove any commissioner. The fund stops processing claims in December 2028, weeks after the next presidential election. The same week, the 30-year Treasury auctioned at 5% for the first time since 2007. The President was in Beijing with seventeen CEOs carrying burner phones. Meta announced it would fire 8,000 people to fund $145 billion in AI capex. Google disclosed the first AI-developed zero-day. And a federal compensation fund was named for the year 1776 and structured to pay the people the President pardoned, using money Congress approved decades ago for purposes that did not include this. The settlement is the architecture. The number is the message. open.substack.com/pub/shanak…

Today’s figures show the labour market continues to be soft with number of those in work continuing to fall and unemployment rising to 5%. This is directly linked to changes in employment taxes, costs and regulations

Saudi Arabia has come to view Israel and its actions as a threat to regional security and sees the UAE’s alignment with Israel in a poor light. Read @NeilQuilliam1's latest analysis for Chatham House⤵️ chathamhouse.org/2026/05/how…