Earlier I posted some questions on my blog for next year: Ten Economic Questions for 2026. Some of these questions concern real estate (inventory, house prices, housing starts, new home sales), and I posted thoughts on those in the newsletter (others like GDP and employment will be on this blog).

I'm adding some thoughts and predictions for each question.

Here is a review of the Ten Economic Questions for 2025.

1) Economic growth: Economic growth was probably close to 2% Q4-over-Q4 in 2025. The FOMC is expecting growth of 2.1% to 2.5% Q4-over-Q4 in 2026. How much will the economy grow in 2026?  Will there be a recession in 2026?
A year ago, I argued that "Looking at 2025, a recession is mostly off the table."  I did go on recession watch during 2025 due to the tariffs, but I noted I wasn't forecasting a recession. 
Even though job growth will likely be sluggish in 2026, fiscal policy will be supportive of economic growth and there will be some boost from a rebound from the government shutdown.  So,  I think a recession in 2026 is very unlikely.  Of course there are always exogenous events such as another pandemic, super volcanoes, a major meteor strike or even nuclear war.  
It is possible that we will see a pull back in AI and data center investing, and that might negatively impact growth, but that would likely be a 2027 story.   It is very likely that many of the tariffs will be ruled illegal (they clearly are illegal), but the Administration has other tools to enact tariffs (more economic uncertainty). 
I've expressed concern about unregulated or poorly regulated areas of finance leading to another financial crisis, but that takes a few years to happen.
Here is a table of the annual change in real GDP since 2005. Note: This table includes both annual change and Q4 over the previous Q4 (two slightly different measures).     

Real GDP Growth YearAnnual
GDPQ4 / Q4 20053.5%3.0% 20062.8%2.6% 20072.0%2.1% 20080.1%-2.5% 2009-2.6%0.1% 20102.7%2.8% 20111.6%1.5% 20122.3%1.6% 20132.1%3.0% 20142.5%2.7% 20152.9%2.1% 20161.8%2.2% 20172.5%3.0% 20183.0%2.1% 20192.6%3.4% 2020-2.1%-0.9% 20216.2%5.8% 20222.5%1.3% 20232.9%3.4% 20242.8%2.4% 202512.1%2.1% 1 2025 estimate   Real GDP growth is a combination of labor force growth and productivity.  
Productivity varies and is difficult to predict, but the labor force growth will likely be sluggish in 2026.  So, my guess is that real annual GDP growth will be less than the FOMC expects, perhaps close to 2%.
Here are the Ten Economic Questions for 2026 and a few predictions:
• Question #1 for 2026: How much will the economy grow in 2026? Will there be a recession in 2026?

• Question #2 for 2026:  How much will job growth slow in 2026? Or will the economy lose jobs?

• Question #3 for 2026: What will the unemployment rate be in December 2026?

• Question #4 for 2026: What will the participation rate be in December 2026?

• Question #5 for 2026: What will the YoY core inflation rate be in December 2026?

• Question #6 for 2026: What will the Fed Funds rate be in December 2026?

• Question #7 for 2026: How much will wages increase in 2026?

• Question #8 for 2026: How much will Residential investment change in 2026? How about housing starts and new home sales in 2026?

• Question #9 for 2026: What will happen with house prices in 2026?

• Question #10 for 2026: Will inventory increase further in 2026?

Gold's Bigger Picture In A Narrowing 2026

Authored by Mathew Piepenburg via VonGreyerz.gold,

It’s that time of year again to put everything somehow together.

But looking back on the knowns of 2025 as we prepare for the inevitable unknowns of 2026, there is little need for the wringing of hands.

Preparation vs. Timing

This is because the more things change, the more they stay the same. And toward this end, we do know this much: Unprecedented and unsustainable debt has made the global financial system, its paper currencies and its bloated markets a bug looking for a wind-shield.

In short, and as history confirms, there is no avoiding the gravity of debt nor the ripple effects of its appalling misuse.  

Mouse-clicked trillions to monetize debts just means slow but consistent currency destruction. Timing the same is not nearly as important as preparing for it, and the walls are narrowing/closing in on a broken monetary model.

Equally known is the fact that policy makers in such a desperate yet now mathematically obvious setting of their own making will do what they have always done throughout history.

That is, as conditions worsen, they will become increasingly desperate (perhaps even militant) to employ their favorite tools of manipulation, dishonesty and non-accountability for the fatal corners in which they’ve placed us and our debased paper currencies.

In the end, and as usual, the man on the street will pay for the sins of the clowns in power who have made the currencies by which they measure their wealth little more than melting ice-cubes.

Precious metal owners, of course, have seen this pattern recognition well ahead of the crowds. The historical, banking, and currency risks attendant to all slowly dying monetary systems means one thing: Real money will have more power than paper money. Or as I stated elsewhere: Rock now beats paper.

Looking Back

We saw 2025 begin with much fanfare out of DC to cut spending and impose a series of emergency measures (from gold-revaluation and tariff headlines to USAID and The GENIUS Act) out of the White House to make a clearly broken America great again.

“Our Currency, Your Problem.”

Critical to this laudable goal was the “External Revenue Service” and a wave of tariff measures designed to make the rest of the world pay for the overspending of a nation who for decades arrogantly maintained that an “our currency, your problem” policy would never end.

That is, after America waffled from a promised gold-backed dollar in 1944 to a welched fiat-dollar in 1971, it then conveniently imposed a petrodollar in 1973 to force global demand of an otherwise inflationary dollar before legally (and equally conveniently) price fixing the dollar’s only honest antagonists – gold and silver – on the COMEX exchange in 1974.

As owners of the world reserve currency, the U.S. could compel decades of demand for its dollar through oil, while simultaneously knee-capping precious metals on the New York COMEX and then export American inflation globally with impunity.

Or so we thought.

But with debt levels at $38T (unlike $250B in 1971) and a debt/GDP ratio at 124% (unlike 38% in 1971), the U.S. and its weaponized dollar is clearly not the same hegemon today that it was when John Connolly made the famous claim, “Our currency, your problem.”

In short, the U.S. went too far, and the world knows it.

Our Currency, Our Problem

When, for example, the U.S. attempted its Liberation Day tariffs in April of 2025, markets tanked. But far more importantly, no one showed up at Uncle Sam’s Treasury auction to buy his unloved IOUs.

Not very, well… liberating.

In other words, and thanks to decades of debt-addiction, inflation-exporting and the fatally short-sighted (stupid) idea of weaponizing the dollar in 2022, DC was forced to accept the inevitable yet now present karmic reality that “our currency is now OUR problem.”

Or stated even more simply, no one wants, trusts or fears the indebted and debased USD as they did in decades prior.

This IS a problem for DC…The U.S. is simply too much in debt to be all-powerful. 2025 and 2026 were and will be a much different world than 1944 or 1971. The US, in short, is not what it once was, and nor are its dollars or IOUs.

Who Wants an IOU from a Broke(n) Issuer?

Since the USA outsourced the American dream and manufacturing to China and the WTO circa 2001, it has lived essentially on debt and the assumption that the world, from Tokyo and Riyadh to Moscow and Shanghai, would always buy its IOU’s and hence its dollar.

By April of 2025, however, we learned this assumption was not only arrogant – it was false.

As U.S. markets plunged and crickets chirped at the April Treasury Auction, DC was forced to immediately retreat on its strong-armed tariff policy in order to restore calm on the NASDAQ as well as renew interest in its less-loved UST and USD.

Anywhere But the USA?

Around the same time as the DXY and dollar were cratering in 2025, the ABUSA—or “anywhere but the USA”—trade kicked into gear, as an already openly de-dollarizing BRICS+ wave was joined by booming stock markets in the UK, Japan and emerging markets, all of whom outperformed the US composites.

Even European stocks, suffering under genuine recessionary indicators from angry French farmers to Volkswagen shutdowns, rose 36% in dollar terms, including dividends, nearly doubling the S&P’s 19% in 2025.

AI Will Save Us?

Meanwhile, US markets pretended that AI, which had gone from expensive to just ridiculous, would somehow save us from, well, I guess humans themselves.

AI (whose prices vastly outpace revenues) accounted for 80% of US market gains in 2025. NVDA, at the center of a circular financing bubble in which concentrated tech names were investing over $350B in AI data centers, and pricing in what they assumed would be $2T in annual revenues which have yet to arrive.

A Ticking Credit Time Bomb

This dangerous AI spend/bubble is funded primarily in off-balance sheet debt via private credit pools and other SPVs, the magnitude of which screams of credit risk.

Speaking of private credit, this market of bad loans to an entirely unknown class of largely subprime borrowers now churning between hedge funds, private equity pirates, and VC supermen is literally screaming of default risk ahead.

Tapped-out borrowers in these hidden pools are paying their interest payments in “equity” rather than actual dollars.

No wonder Jeffery Gundlach sees private credit pools as the new weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile, longer-sighted players like Michael Burry are short AI, and that value-driven “oracle from Omaha,” Warren Buffett, is sitting on over $380B in cash, the largest such defensive move in Berkshire Hathaway’s history.

Sadly, such credit risk is not merely a US market embarrassment. The global shadow-banking system is a $250T bubble providing increasingly defaulting credit outside an already sick, yet at least “quasi-regulated” banking system.

Instead, this “shadow lending system,” which has no capital requirements/security, also has zero depositor insurance or central bank access and is ticking like a time-bomb beyond our so-called financial “headlines.”

The Markets Will Save Us?

But hey, at least US markets (CAPE at 39.5 by October and 30% of its market-cap held by 10 companies) are still double-digit positive heading into 2026. Something must be strong in the USA despite the worst private labor data since 2008.

But sadly, the real wind beneath the US markets is not as clean or strong as the current numbers suggest.

Rigged Game

In fact, 2025 saw $1.3T of stock buy-backs—i.e. insiders (led by Apple and Google) buying their own shares to artificially increase share prices and “fudge up” Earnings per Share data by reducing share volume.

In essence, this once-illegal practice of artificial market manipulation boils down to executive insiders voting themselves a raise (they are paid on share prices). As Buffett himself observed: “This is deception, not talent.”

Meanwhile, these same C-suiters have also been quietly selling their other shares at market highs to cash out before a crash.

In such a totally rigged game, it sure is good to be on the inside.

For the rest us market outsiders, however, chasing these inflated market highs is an entirely personal choice.

Given that Pavlovian markets are entirely Fed-driven, so long as QE liquidity is mouse-clicked at the Eccles Building and rates are artificially compressed, a dovish Fed typically means this Frankenstein bubble can stumble, arms stretched forward, to even more frothy highs.

Looking Ahead

This brings us to the Fed in 2026. Will or can it tow the White House’s line to further rate cutting and more QE? The likely answer is yes, and not because of politics, but because of basic survival.

The Fed’s Real Mandate & Problem

The Fed’s real mandate is bond market stability, not inflation, which is an open lie, and not employment, which is equally so. Given that the post-2022, weaponized USD is openly unloved and untrusted, someone has to buy Uncle Sam’s debt, and that won’t be China or Japan.

Japan has been dumping USTs to support its own broken credit markets and Yen, and China, well… it has been walking away from USTs (in favor of gold) in a staggering manner. Its FX reserves were once 40% USTs; by 2025, that figure had fallen to less than 1%:

Given the fact that less UST demand means lower bond prices and hence rising bond yields, Uncle Sam is in deep trouble heading into 2026.

Rising bond yields are an absolute terror to bankrupt debtors like the US, because it means the interest expense on its debt, already over $1T/year, gets even harder to repay.

The Bond Market’s Real Power

For this reason, DC needs to keep yields and rates down. The Fed has thus been pushing rates down in 2025, but as we also saw in 2001, yields still climbed despite the Fed’s rate cuts, a terrifying confirmation that the Fed’s tools are breaking down as the bond market, rather than Powell, takes the wheel.

In 2025, 70% of Uncle Sam’s IOUs were short-duration bonds, which need to be paid back soon. This will be entirely unsustainable going into 2026 unless Powell breaks out bazooka money printing and becomes a perma-buyer of our own debt with mouse-clicked dollars.

This should be a tailwind for precious metals.

Temporary QE – What a Joke

The “temporary QE” Powell announced in December of 2025 is as much of a joke as the “transitory inflation” he announced in 2022.

Instead, we can rationally expect that this temporary QE will become structural QE in 2026, and that the Fed’s balance sheet will expand massively, which could bring the DXY and dollar further south and hence the dollar’s percentage of global reserves even lower.

This, too, should be a tailwind for precious metals.

The Dollar—Weaker or Stronger in 2026?

Some, however, predict a “last-dance” for the dollar, and I have debated this issue for years with Brent Johnson and more recently with Henrik Zeberg. Their case for the strong dollar has obvious merits, and I won’t unpack all the details of our divergences here.

No hegemonic currency gives up easily or overnight. Ultimately, a DXY at 110 has a set-up. I don’t, however, see it anywhere near 130, 140 or 150 as the milkshake theory suggests.

Gold’s Endgame: More Important than Timing

Regardless of this dollar debate, however, the end-game for gold and silver is agreed by all—it’s merely the timing where the mugs-game of predicting and debating the dollar’s direction takes form.

That is, and regardless of the Dollar’s relative strength or weaknesses to other currencies in 2026, and regardless of the desperate move to create dollar-demand via a 2025 stable coin ruse, all paper currencies are losing purchasing power in absolute terms when measured against real money—namely gold.

And that, ladies & gentleman, explains a 2025 in which gold and silver broke more all-time-highs than Trump tweets in a typical day.

Golden Light-House Cutting Through the Fog

Wondering what to do about gold in 2026 is no mystery for those who own gold as a wealth preservation and store-of-value asset as opposed to a speculation trade.

Trading precious metals, of course, requires precise timing. (I know a few who actually do it well.) Preserving long-term wealth in precious metals, however, only requires common sense.

Egon von Greyerz has been making the case for gold for decades, while many “gold experts” were popping up on YouTube screens in 2025, only to capture an obvious price move. Where were they when gold was outperforming markets for the last 25 years?

But none of this really matters, because all-time-high gold and silver prices measured in paper currencies is almost comical, akin to measuring your weight on a broken scale.

For decades in general, and for 2025 in particular, we have tracked the obvious tailwinds for real money like gold in a setting of dying paper currencies like the dollar. There’s always a new headline or event to explain.

But the jig was up long ago. The bigger picture, which Egon saw decades ago, was always right before us.

Since 1971, when the US insulted the world and its Constitution by taking away a gold standard, all the major currencies have lost more than 95% of their purchasing power when measured against gold.

The more recent evidence of this accelerating and now undeniable trend toward gold and silver has been almost too obvious, from a rising, BRICS-lead de-dollarization trend, unprecedented central bank gold-stacking and a COMEX meltdown this year, to the BIS’s Tier-1 gold status confirmation and the year-end desperation to artificially repress the silver price by systems terrified of what rising metals says about their dying currencies.

In short, a world soaked in over $300T in debt is, as Thomas Gresham warned centuries ago, naturally moving from bad (paper) money to real (gold/silver) money as a superior strategic reserve asset and store of value.

For those who understand the advantages of saving in real money and spending in fiat money, sitting around and speculating about the future price of gold and silver in dollars or euros, or trying to time its “peak-price” or potential retracements, is missing the far bigger picture.

Yes, gold can and will have pull-backs—but from what price? And yes, metal-poor exchanges can continue to try (with less and less effect) to manipulate the physical metals with paper contracts and leverage, but the end-game will never change.

That is, paper money will continue to be debased to monetize the debts of nations led by financial midgets, which means gold and silver will continue their secular rise.

This is not a bull market in precious metals, but simply a fatal turning point for paper currencies globally.

This explains why central banks to commercial banks are trying to get as much gold as possible today in preparation for the Uh-Oh’s happening now and tomorrow in a system tilting towards a reckoning of historical magnitude.

This, folks, is not sensationalism. This is history 101.

In this context, I will not make price targets in gold or silver for 2026. I never have in years prior, and never will in years to come.

But every day of every year, we have consistently said that these metals will rise materially in the years to come. This never meant in a straight line, but always in a longer-term direction north.

The more speculators worry about timing an entry or exit in metals rather than preserving their wealth in them, the more they risk missing that inflection point wherein real money like gold, with its infinite duration and fixed supply, simply becomes too rare and too expensive for most investors to meaningfully acquire.

Thus, if you are looking to trade in gold or silver, watch the tape, and best of luck to you.

But if you are looking to preserve a portion of your generational wealth in real rather than paper wealth, watch history—not just of yesterday, but the very history you are living in right now.

Tyler Durden Thu, 01/01/2026 - 23:30

Jack Smith's Twisted, Machiavellian Lawfare Mindset Paints Dystopian Future For The USA If Not Dispatched Quickly

Authored by Sundance via The Last Refuge,

I don’t care if you support Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis or the Easter Bunny, any American who doesn’t realize the tenuous future of our union, after reviewing the information within this testimony, is going to forever live in a collapsed dystopian nightmare, if they vote for any political representative who supports it.

The House Judiciary Committee has released the [VIDEO] and [TRANSCRIPT] of special prosecutor Jack Smith’s deposition.  What is outlined within it is alarming in the extreme.  I strongly urge anyone with any platform to review the details and quickly highlight the content therein.  There is no time to waste.

Jack Smith appeared before the committee with three personal lawyers to support him.  The content of the deposition is chilling in the extreme.  While many will focus on the granular details of the testimony, I wish to highlight one of the more alarming aspects to the bigger picture.

The predicate for Jack Smith to prosecute President Trump for his efforts to “interfere in the 2020 election”, and thereby “challenge all democratic norms”, essentially boils down to Jack Smith accusing President Trump of participating in a fraud when he challenged the outcome of the 2020 election.

To get beyond President Trump’s first amendment right to free speech, Jack Smith claims Trump knowingly understood that Joe Biden had won the election; President Trump was told by senior Republican advisors that Biden had legitimately won the 2020 election; President Trump rejected the reality of the “truthful information” presented to him, and instead chose to launch a psychological operation against the American people, i.e. “fraud.”

It is the charge of “fraud” which underpins the entirety of the case against Donald Trump, as pursued by Jack Smith.   The charge itself is predicated on definitions of what constitutes truthful information, and within that subset of predicate you begin to realize just how important it is to professional leftists that they control information.

The case was dropped after the results of the November 2024 election, won by President Trump.  However, if President Trump had not won that election, the prosecution would have continued.

Jack Smith notes in his testimony, in the most Machiavellian way, that his primary prosecution approach was to present “Republican” witnesses like Mike Pence, who Smith cunningly said he could not discuss as he was restricted from revealing grand jury testimony.

Smith was prepared to present witness testimony from Pence and other political “Republicans” who told President Trump that Joe Biden had legitimately won the election, and Trump needed to concede.  This testimony then forms the baseline for the definition of “truthful information” that Trump rejected out of a malice mindset to continue clinging to power.

In essence, Smith defines what is “truth” (Biden won), then outlines how that truthful information was delivered and how President Trump dismissed it. Therefore, President Trump’s “mens-rea”, or state of mind, was one of promoting an intentional falsehood.  According to the Lawfare approach selected by Smith, this mindset is the predicate that blocks President Trump from using his First Amendment right to speech as a defense.

Intentional fraud is not allowed under the protections of “free speech.”   Jack Smith wanted to prove that President Trump was engaged in intentional fraud, and wanted to prove his mindset therein through the use of Republican political voices who delivered information to President Trump.

Jack Smith sought to define “truth”, and then counter the free speech defense by mob agreement on what constitutes the “truth.”  Under this predicate, President Trump was being prosecuted for a thought crime, and Jack Smith sought to legally prove he knew his thoughts.

The only way Jack Smith could prove fraud would be to prove that President Trump believed the information about Joe Biden winning the election.  Smith sought to prove Trump’s belief by presenting Republican voices who told President Trump he lost.

Whether you like or dislike President Trump, the issue here is alarming when contemplated.

A man tells you a chicken is a frog, you laugh.  The man then brings 15 of your family members to tell you a chicken is a frog. You reject the absurdity of the premise, but the man brings forth hundreds more people to tell you the chicken is a frog, and if you do not accept that Chickens are Frogs, you will be defined as mentally impaired, institutionalized and become a ward of the state.

[Insert any similar metaphor needed, including “what is a woman.”]

When we consider the current state of sociological, societal or government manipulation of information, and/or the need for government to control information (mis-dis-mal-information) as an overlay, you can quickly see where this type of legal predicate can take us.  Bizarro world becomes a dystopian nightmare.

Yes, it is also clear that Leftists, inside that closed-door committee hearing, are intending to impeach President Trump on these grounds if they successfully win the 2026 midterm election.  However, that is not the critical takeaway from this deposition.   Instead, the critical takeaway is how the Lawfare construct can be twisted and manipulated to create the legal means to the leftist ends.

Stop the Division! 

We cannot allow these communist, Marxist and leftist-minded control agents get back into power.

It’s not about Trump.  It’s about us.

Tyler Durden Thu, 01/01/2026 - 22:00

40-Year Harvard Professor Pens Mic-Drop Indictment Of Institutional Anti-White Racism

A history professor who taught at Harvard University for 40 years wrote a scathing letter slamming the Ivy League institution over its "exclusion of white males." 

Professor James Hankins wrote in a piece titled "Whit I'm Leaving Harvard" that his decision to retire "was not a sudden one," and that he'd made up his mind in 2021 after the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown and George Floyd riots - both of which dramatically changed Harvard's graduate admissions process.

"In reviewing graduate student applicants in the fall of 2020 I came across an outstanding prospect who was a perfect fit for our program. In past years this candidate would have risen immediately to the top of the applicant pool," he wrote. "In 2021, however, I was told informally by a member of the admissions committee that ‘that’ (meaning admitting a white male) was ‘not happening this year," 

Hankins said that in another instance, a white male student who he described as "literally the best" at Harvard - and who won the prize for graduating senior with the best overall academic record - was also rejected from the school's graduate program because "He too was a white male."

"I called around to friends at several universities to find out why on earth he had been rejected," Hankins continued. "Everywhere it was the same story: Graduate admissions committees around the country had been following the same unspoken protocol as ours."

"The one exception I found to the general exclusion of white males had begun life as a female."

The deal was an even playing field, not extremely tilted in the other direction.

They broke the deal.

Therefore, there is no deal. https://t.co/ZDraFvZbYl

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 29, 2025

Hankins gave his last lecture at the school two weeks ago, after finishing out a four-year retirement contract he signed in 2021 which has now expired. 

Hankins called Harvard's COVID restrictions "tyrannous invasions of private life" - as professors were forced to lecture in masks and give seminars on Zoom. 

On top of that - he decried Harvard's dropping their "two-book standard" of requiring staff to have published two books to prove their expertise in a subject area, blaming "feminist activists" 

History professor James Hankins taught at Harvard for 40 years. (Sophie Park/Bloomberg)

"The two-book standard would be shelved in the late 1990s when we were under increasing pressure to hire more women faculty," he wrote, adding "Feminist activists, at Harvard as elsewhere, were demanding that half of all new appointments be women. That, they claimed, was what liberal standards of equality required."

Hankins wrote that women previously made up less than 10% of PhDs in the history department - however "equality required that standards be lowered."

"Feminists denied vociferously that this was happening," he continued, adding "The real problem, they said, was the inability of men properly to value female scholarship."

"Soon the department was promoting an ever higher percentage of junior faculty," he wrote. "The dynamic was similar to Congress voting to restrain its own spending."

Tyler Durden Thu, 01/01/2026 - 21:15

New York Times Rewrites History Again With Nikole Hannah-Jones

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

Former New York Times reporter and Howard University professor Nikole Hannah-Jones has long been controversial as a writer who expressly rejects objectivity and neutrality in journalism. That was most evident in her “1619 Project,” which was ridiculed by historians and law professors in claiming that slavery was the driving force behind American independence. Nevertheless, the project was awarded the Pulitzer Prize despite glaring historical errors. Yet, this month, Hannah-Jones is back on the pages of the New York Times again rewriting history. This time, she is praising cop-killer and 1960s revolutionary Assata Shakur.

Hannah-Jones has been a lightning rod in her writings, from declaring “all journalism is activism” to spreading conspiracy theories against the police.

Yet, mainstream media, including the Times, has run interference for Hannah-Jones, including the dean of the University of North Carolina trying to shut down criticism by reminding a reporter that they must all defend Hannah-Jones.

Hannah-Jones’s latest project of historical revision is a sorrowful memorial to Shakur, which shows the same disregard for facts in favor of a preferred narrative.

Born JoAnne Deborah Byron (and later adopting the names of Joanne Chesimard and Shakur), the violent revolutionary was a member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army.

In 1977, she killed New Jersey police officer Werner Foerster, 34, a U.S. Army Vietnam veteran who left behind a widow and a young son.

She later escaped prison and fled to Cuba, where she died earlier this year. In 2005, she was declared a domestic terrorist. In 2013, the Obama Administration put her on the most wanted list.

You would know little of that from the New York Times column. After all, all journalism is activism, according to Hannah-Jones, and, if the facts do not fit the narrative, the facts have to go.

In her column, Hannah-Jones seems to dismiss the conviction as the result of an “all-white” jury. What is omitted is that Shakur had a long and violent criminal record. She was previously shot in the stomach during what was believed to be a drug-connected crime at the Statler Hilton in Manhattan. 

She was sought in other crimes, including a 1971 bank robbery. When asked, Shakur later shrugged off such crimes as a type of racial reparations: “There were expropriations, there were bank robberies.”

Police car after grenade attack

She was also linked to a grenade attack that injured two police officers after being identified by witnesses. In 1972, she was identified by Monsignor John Powis as one of the suspects in the armed robbery at Our Lady of the Presentation Church in Brownsville, Brooklyn. During the robbery, the priest was told “We usually just blow the heads off White men.”

She was also tied to the murder and ambushing of police officers for years before she was stopped on May 2, 1973 on the New Jersey turnpike by State Trooper James Harper who was backed up by Trooper Werner Foerster in a second patrol vehicle. The resulting shootout left Harper wounded and Foerster dead.

Her trials spanned a variety of charges ranging from bank robbery to kidnapping to attempted murder, and other felonies. However, while there were acquittals and a mistrial (due to a pregnancy) on different charges, she was ultimately convicted of murder before her escape.

Yet, the Times and Hannah-Jones brush over that history to gush about Shakur and the effort to shield her, even describing the criminal network as akin to the famed system used to free slaves before the Civil War: “Shakur had been hidden in the United States for several years by a sort of Underground Railroad.”

The Times column bewails how “freedom came with shattering costs for her and her family.” Not a single line of sentiment for the widow and son that her victim left behind in New Jersey, let alone the other victims in murders and attacks that she was connected to as part of the Black Liberation Army.

Of course, such sentiment is not allowed for true victims.

For example, Hannah-Jones was again published by the New York Times, warning in a column that memorials to Charlie Kirk are “dangerous.”

Hannah-Jones has also chastised other writers for covering shoplifting stories because “this is how you legitimize the carceral state.”

Yet, the New York Times is still actively involved in projects to rewrite history with Hannah-Jones. This is the same newspaper that barred columns from Senator Tom Cotton for arguing for the deployment of National Guard troops to quell violent riots, but published columns by “Beijing’s enforcer” in Hong Kong and a University of Rhode Island professor who previously defended the murder of a conservative protester.

It is the same newspaper that forced out a variety of editors who published opposing viewpoints or challenged biased coverage and journalistic activism.

The Times column ends with a line that is breathtaking in its ahistorical and amoral message: “Shakur, who saw herself as an escaped slave, died free.”

A convicted murderer and wanted terrorist died in one of the most blood-soaked, repressive regimes in the world . . . but Hannah-Jones and the New York Times want everyone to know that she “died free.”

That is comforting. As for Werner Foerster, he just died and was not mentioned once by name in the Times column.

Tyler Durden Thu, 01/01/2026 - 20:30

US, Israel Set Firm 2-Month Deadline For Full Hamas Disarmament

Israeli media is reporting that Israel and the United States have reached an understanding to give Hamas a two-month ultimatum to finally and fully disarm. The reports say the agreement came immediately after an overnight meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago at the start of the week.

The move is being described as a fixed deadline rather than an opening for negotiations. Israeli and US teams are already reportedly working simultaneously to determine what they describe as "practical disarmament." This after Hamas has effectively been defeated since it launched the brutal Oct.7, 2023 terror assault on southern Israel.

Source: Washington Post/Getty Images

Another key focus is the dismantling of Hamas’s underground tunnel network throughout Gaza, which Israeli officials consider a core element of the group’s military strength.

Hamas has throughout the Gaza war proven itself effective in guerilla and insurgency tactics, utilizing small teams to maneuver quickly in and out of the tunnels, even at times taking out IDF tanks with IEDs. Sometimes bombs are even attached to Israeli armor vehicles by hand in these ambushes, after which a Hamas militant darts back into an underground tunnel, as has been demonstrated in various videos.

Sources quoted by Israel Hayom said Israeli officials doubt Hamas that would be willing or able to relinquish most of its weapons or military capabilities within the two-month window.

From the perspective of Hamas leadership, the moment it fully gives up its weapons means the group is effectively dead and will have no more influence to govern in the future.

But this is also exactly what the US-Israeli plan and the ceasefire calls for: the effective end of Hamas rule in governance in the Gaza Strip forever.

PM Netanyahu while giving media interviews during his December US trip described that Hamas still possesses "around 60,000" Kalashnikov rifles and "hundreds of kilometers" of tunnels.

He has vowed that Hamas disarmament can be achieved "the easy way" or the hard way - that is through military force. But as of last summer, Hamas was insistent that it will never give up its weapons.

There's also the possibility that Hamas leadership won't be able to induce all of its fighters and 'ground troops' to give up their weapons - again, as they would fear being tracked down and killed by Israeli forces.

Tyler Durden Thu, 01/01/2026 - 19:45

Expect The Precious Metals Rally To Continue In 2026

Authored by Michael Wilkerson via The Epoch Times,

2025 was an extraordinary year for precious metals. Gold, silver, and platinum each outperformed other asset classes, including equities, bitcoin (2024’s best performer), and even indexes tracking artificial intelligence (AI)—one of 2025’s most popular investment themes.

Silver and platinum rose by approximately 170 percent in 2025, while gold returned a highly respectable 73 percent.

Among AI stocks, only Palantir outperformed gold.

Why such stellar performance from assets once derided by governments as “barbarous relics” and shunned by investors as outdated?

The reason I wrote at the start of last year that we should “expect gold to shine in 2025” was because global conditions had fundamentally - and perhaps irreversibly - shifted.

I noted then that the primary factors driving gold prices included shifting geopolitics prompting central bank stockpiling, investor concerns over the creditworthiness of the U.S. government (and, by extension, the dollar), persistent inflation eroding the purchasing power of paper currencies, and widening supply-demand imbalances.

These forces are unlikely to abate in 2026.

As a result, we should expect precious metals—including gold, silver, and platinum—to continue performing well in the coming year. Indeed, deglobalization and the continued push toward resource nationalism and the protection of critical materials lend additional support not only to these metals but also to the broader commodities complex.

In recent years, central banks around the world have reduced their purchases of U.S. Treasury securities—formerly their largest reserve asset—and have instead been stockpiling gold. China, Russia, and India have all been significant buyers, as have many smaller, independent nations eager to remain outside the U.S.–China conflict.

Observing how the United States imposed financial sanctions on Russia following its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, many countries have concluded that dependence on a dollar-dominated financial system is too risky. They fear that the U.S. government may weaponize the dollar system—via financial sanctions or trade policy—and they’re seeking alternatives. Shifting from Treasurys to gold and other metals offers a hedge. A prominent example of efforts to reduce reliance on the U.S. dollar is the development of alternative currencies partially backed by gold reserves, such as those being pursued by BRICS nations.

Beyond geopolitics, foreign central banks are concerned about the deteriorating credit condition of the United States, which has been downgraded by all three major ratings agencies. The federal government holds more than $38 trillion in debt—growing by trillions each year—which cannot realistically be repaid except through issuing more debt.

Heavily indebted governments have few options other than allowing inflation to erode the real value of their obligations. The United States cannot default outright, as the dollar is the global reserve currency, and tax increases have political limits. Inflation, then, becomes a hidden tax, steadily undermining the dollar and diminishing household wealth.

A new generation of Americans has now experienced the painful effects of inflation firsthand. Since 2020, the dollar has lost more than 20 percent of its real value—and over 40 percent since 2000. The lesson of inflation, once internalized during the 1970s, had been largely forgotten after decades of relative price stability. But it’s once again relevant as people around the world lose confidence in government-issued money—paper IOUs that lose value annually.

Gold and silver, long regarded as hedges against inflation, are resuming their traditional role as stores of value amid geopolitical, monetary, and economic uncertainty.

Retail investors are also part of this trend, purchasing both gold-backed paper assets and physical bullion. In the third quarter of 2025 alone, tons of metal held by U.S.-based, publicly traded gold ETFs increased by 160 percent. In the first half of the year, 95 million ounces of silver flowed into silver-backed funds globally—surpassing the total for all of 2024. Costco and other retailers now offer gold and silver coins to a growing number of households, many of whom previously saw no need for anything beyond dollars in their pockets or savings accounts.

Gold supply remains constrained due to high production costs and limited new mine development. Meanwhile, silver and platinum have each faced multi-year supply shortages, though for different reasons. These imbalances are unlikely to ease anytime soon—except in the case of a global recession. With the United States and other nations designating these metals as strategic resources, pressure is mounting to develop new domestic sources—a multi-year process. In the meantime, stockpiling is accelerating.

I don’t expect the metals rally to end soon, as the underlying drivers remain intact. While price gains in 2026 may not match 2025’s dramatic surge, these commodities are still poised to advance. Assuming additional interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve and other Western central banks—and ongoing government failure to rein in deficits and debt—investor concern about the inflationary effects of loose monetary and fiscal policy will likely persist. This will continue to support gold, silver, platinum, and other commodities and real assets that preserve value against fiat currencies.

Tyler Durden Thu, 01/01/2026 - 16:20

Earlier I posted some questions on my blog for next year: Ten Economic Questions for 2026. Some of these questions concern real estate (inventory, house prices, housing starts, new home sales), and I posted thoughts on those in the newsletter (others like GDP and employment will be on this blog).

I'm adding some thoughts and predictions for each question.

Here is a review of the Ten Economic Questions for 2025.

2) Employment: Through November 2025, the economy added 610 thousand jobs in 2025.   How many jobs will be added in 2026?  Or will the economy lose jobs?
Last year, I wrote about 2025:

"So, my forecast is for gains of around 1.0 million jobs in 2025.  This will probably be the slowest job growth since 2010 (excluding the 2020 pandemic job losses)."

That was a little optimistic - excluding the pandemic and the great recession - 2025 saw the fewest jobs added since 2003.  Ouch.
For review, here is a table of the annual change in total nonfarm, private and public sector payrolls jobs since 1997.  

Change in Payroll Jobs per Year (000s) Total, NonfarmPrivatePublic 19973,4063,211195 19983,0462,733313 19993,1882,727461 20001,9331,669264 2001-1,733-2,284551 2002-518-751233 2003124166-42 20042,0401,893147 20052,5292,343186 20062,0911,882209 20071,146858288 2008-3,548-3,728180 2009-5,039-4,965-74 20101,0221,238-216 20112,0582,370-312 20122,1862,253-67 20132,2992,366-67 20142,9912,864127 20152,71732,563150 20162,3312,124207 20172,1152,03580 20182,2862,159127 20191,9861,771215 2020-9,274-8,199-1,048 20217,2336,837396 20224,5554,256299 20232,5941,860734 20242,0121,559453 202561017661-1561 111 Months through November.
The bad news is the job market has stalled.  The BLS noted in December:

"Total nonfarm payroll employment ... has shown little net change since April."

Fed Chair Powell noted at the recent FOMC press conference that the economy might have lost an average of 20,000 jobs per month over that period.

Click on graph for larger image.

And more bad news - for job growth - is that the labor force will grow slowly in 2026!
This graph shows the jobs added per month since January 2021.  
It appears that population growth will be slow in 2026 (births minus deaths plus net immigration) and the overall participation rate will decline due to demographics.  That suggests that labor force will grow slowly.  My sense is the economy will not lose jobs in 2026, but it is possible.
So, my forecast is for gains of around 0.6 to 1.0 million jobs in 2026.  This might be an even slower year for job growth than 2025!   
Here are the Ten Economic Questions for 2026 and a few predictions:

• Question #3 for 2026: What will the unemployment rate be in December 2026?

• Question #4 for 2026: What will the participation rate be in December 2026?

• Question #5 for 2026: What will the YoY core inflation rate be in December 2026?

• Question #6 for 2026: What will the Fed Funds rate be in December 2026?

• Question #7 for 2026: How much will wages increase in 2026?

• Question #8 for 2026: How much will Residential investment change in 2026? How about housing starts and new home sales in 2026?

• Question #9 for 2026: What will happen with house prices in 2026?

• Question #10 for 2026: Will inventory increase further in 2026?

Rebuttals And Responses To Lingering Gloom About AI

Authored by Arthur Schaper via Americsan Greatness,

In a previous article, I outlined two concerns regarding the rise of AI.

• One deals with the Doom, i.e., safety concerns. No one has challenged me on this aspect, and now, with the rise of AI-induced suicides, protections for children must come into play.

• The other concern centers on the Gloom: the elimination of jobs and the irrelevance of human ingenuity. Will AI create more and better than human beings? What happens to the workforce if AI can eliminate the next generation of employees?

I countered this fear with the creation of ATMs and how their invention did not induce higher unemployment but led to more banks, greater needs, and more workers.

A software engineer from Florida, let’s call him Robert, challenged my optimism.

I have commented on political, cultural, and spiritual issues for fifteen years, from local papers to national news stations. For the first time, I received a call from a reader (that would be Robert), who lives in Clearwater, Florida. I was pleased, impressed, and intrigued by his rebuttals.

Robert argued that customer service-based entry-level employment will disappear. For example, we contact insurance companies to set up a policy or seek help from customer service. In five years, he said, AI will be able to craft “employees” who can respond to all of our questions.

Robert then informed me that AI will soon integrate and synthesize expansive library-sized amounts of information in the fields of law and medicine, rendering professionals in those fields redundant.

Last of all, Robert described an AI program that scanned the works of a famous author and then received a couple of prompts outlining a certain plot and specific characters. With all of that input, the program churned out a short story in the same style and substance as the author. The writer whom the AI program imitated confirmed the accuracy of the content.

Robert brought up some excellent points.

Did I explore the long-term strains that would develop with the rise of AI in the workforce and the artist’s studio?

I even came across a recent CNBC article that seems to confirm Robert’s AI gloom:

“There is growing evidence that the widespread adoption of generative AI is impacting the job prospects of America’s workers, according to a paper released on Tuesday by three Stanford University researchers.

The study analyzed payroll records from millions of American workers, generated by ADP, the largest payroll software firm in the U.S.

The report found “early, large-scale evidence consistent with the hypothesis that the AI revolution is beginning to have a significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the American labor market.”

Most notably, the findings revealed that workers between the ages of 22 and 25 in jobs most exposed to AI—such as customer service, accounting, and software development—have seen a 13% decline in employment since 2022.”

Perhaps my assessment of AI’s impact was too optimistic. A 13% decline is not something to sniff at.

Then I read the next paragraph:

“By contrast, employment for more experienced workers in the same fields and for workers of all ages in less-exposed occupations such as nursing aides has stayed steady or grown. Jobs for young health aides, for example, rose faster than their older counterparts.”

The leveling off of entry-level jobs is inevitable with innovation. The millions of workers associated with horse feeds and horse care are gone, now that we rely on gas-powered combustion vehicles to travel from point A to point B. Where all the horse-related professions disappeared, in their place emerged all sorts of mechanics and other car-related employment needs.

I reflected on other technological innovations in the last century, which further confirm that new inventions won’t hinder economic growth or business opportunity.

Typewriters required specific types of repair, along with ink, new keys, and replacement ribbons. Then came computers. They also required ink, but for more complex types of printers. Mechanics who repaired typewriters, keyboards, etc., shifted to computers. More people today own laptop computers than owned typewriters in the past. Innovation lowers costs and increases wealth, allowing individuals to purchase goods that were once luxuries. With widespread ownership of new gadgets comes the need for more maintenance and improvement. All of this expansion creates more jobs and employs more workers! Creative invention leads to creative destruction, which inevitably creates more employment opportunities, just in different fields.

AI can direct robots that lay bricks or build buildings. But a human being will still have to design the ideal structures for a community. The robot can lay the groundwork, but someone will have to ensure that the robot finishes the job properly. Judgment on value, quality, mission, and vision still lies with human beings. AI cannot replace that.

AI may replace the scut and grunt work of paralegals, but the creativity, intuition, and ingenuity of a lawyer to spot the necessary argument or determine the proper legal course of action during a trial, without clear information manifested in writing, will still require a keen and aware human mind. Also, do we really want cold, heartless robots to serve as judges? Discretion, interpretation, and mercy are essential to a well-functioning criminal justice system.

These factors also impact the medical and counseling professions. AI can analyze data more quickly and engage in more penetrating analysis to diagnose patients. Robots may develop the skills to complete complex surgeries on patients. But AI can never replace the heart and soul of a human being, which is required for care and long-term healing. AI is not going to harm the workforce but open up new demands, which human beings will have to supply.

But what about the arts? Should we acquiesce to robots writing our stories and just sit back and enjoy our forced indolence?

Theater owners feared for their livelihoods with the advent of television. However, the movie industry didn’t take a dive but survived and even thrived. Why? Because the quality of movie production improved due to competition, and the refined art and technical skill rendered in movie theaters exceeded that of the TV studios. Different means and different uses of media shifted taste and increased interest, thus generating different wants and needs.

Critics like Robert might counter that the movie industry is still in decline, all because of social media, especially YouTube and Rumble. Could AI, coupled with social media, put actors, directors, and producers out of work?

First of all, people are still going to movies. Individual content creators can produce entire movies or video segments with fewer staff and gain immense wealth, too. More creators releasing all sorts of content has generated more demand (however specialized), and more workers are needed in differing tech fields to meet these new demands. AI can assist with the production, but the direction and motivation remain with the creator.

AI can churn out poems, stories, and novels. AI cannot snuff out the creativity, spiritual guidance, or inspiration of the human soul.

Consider the immense genius of Sir Isaac Newton.

Newton imagined problems and answered questions beyond the scope of any human being, not just in his time, but today!

Newton asked questions that his colleagues, and even AI today, have not answered. More importantly, Newton asked questions that AI could never think of. Newton’s broad, probing questions (just in the field of optics!) still drive scientific inquiry. In stark contrast, AI and robots cannot be curious, even if human beings forge self-conscious androids. They will only search for something if directed or prompted by their creators.

No matter how sophisticated AI becomes in terms of computation or generativity, it cannot replicate, let alone exceed, human creativity or curiosity.

Consider the fantastical inventions and operations in Star Trek and Star Wars. The capacity to research, develop, and test means for traveling to Mars or other far-off places will be much closer to reality because we have the technology to accomplish unforeseen, unprecedentedly important tasks in a timely fashion. They could finally be manifested by humans, with the help of AI.

AI will liberate human ingenuity from mundane tasks. But the human element will not disappear. The wants and needs, and the resources needed to meet them, cannot be predicted by man and therefore cannot be replaced by AI.

AI can compute faster, reason more efficiently, but the availability and expanse of knowledge itself is a problem that it will always remain unsolvable. Isaac Newton, for all his scientific genius and prowess, recognized this inevitable limitation:

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

AI can do, but cannot dream.

AI can think, but it cannot envision.

AI can work, but it cannot inspire.

AI can make our lunch, but it will not eat our lunch.

The Roberts of the world should rest easy.

Tyler Durden Thu, 01/01/2026 - 14:00

The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form weekend reads:

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Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with

 

Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.

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To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.

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Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:

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Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with

 

Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.

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To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.

 

The post 10 Weekend Reads / 10 Sunday Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.

52 things I learned in 2025: This year I stopped being a consultant, started a tiny company, sold hundreds of little modular synths…   https://medium.com/@tomwhitwell/52-things-i-learned-in-2025-edeca7e3fdd8 See also 52 things I learned in 2025 The news (to me) this year. https://fritinancy.substack.com/p/52-things-i-learned-in-2025 But see also 52 Things I Learned in 2025 Here are some of the most interesting things I learned this year. https://probablyinteresting.substack.com/p/52-things-i-learned-in-2025 Really? OK 52 things I learned in 2025 presented under the comment that ‘no explanation or context of what it is about the article I learned, just a title and link of something important to me personally or professionally in [year]’. https://www.dontwasteyourtime.co.uk/blogging/52-things-i-learned-in-2025/ Last Damned One 52 Good Things from 2025 The 19th year of my annual gratitude practice, now spanning 990 good things. https://medium.com/the-coach-life/52-good-things-from-2025-9e71083e87b5

 

Warren Buffett: A Question of Character: Warren Buffett, who will retire this week at age 95, has compiled perhaps the most astounding investment and management record in financial history. Anyone who invested $10,000 when he started out in 1956 and remained in the fund — c0nverted in in 1969 to Berkshire Hathaway — today would have an investment worth $2.9 billion. No misprint.  https://rogerlowenstein.substack.com/p/warren-buffett-a-question-of-character

All That Cheap Chinese Stuff Is Now Europe’s Problem: Trump’s tariffs have redirected the flow of low-value packages away from the U.S. into backyard warehouses on the Continent; the ‘new Silk Road’ (Wall Street Journal)

The Vanity Fair photographer who disrupted Trumpworld’s polished image: Every line, spot, blemish and blood vessel was captured by Christopher Anderson’s lens. What was he thinking?   https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/power/2025/12/17/vanity-fair-susie-wiles-photos/

The year Trump broke the federal government: How DOGE and the White House carried out a once-unthinkable transformation of the nation’s sprawling bureaucracy. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2025/trump-federal-government-workers-doge/

The 50-Year Republican Plan for Total Victory: aaaa https://brucebartlett.substack.com/p/the-50-year-republican-plan-for-total

Jan 2

ChatGPT is overrated. Here’s what to use instead. (Washington Post)

America’s Biggest Oil Field Is Turning Into a Pressure Cooker: Drillers’ injection of wastewater is creating mayhem across the Permian Basin, raising concern about the future of fossil-fuel production there. (Wall Street Journal)

 

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Stephanie Drescher, Apollo’s Chief Client and Product Development Officer. She oversees everything from the global wealth business to portfolio management, product development, and client marketing. She is a member of the firm’s leadership team. Since 2020, Barron’s has named her annually to its list of the 100 Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance.

 

My end-of-week morning train WFH reads:

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Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview  this weekend with

 

Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.

 

 

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My morning train WFH reads:

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Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with

 

Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.

 

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My mid-week morning train WFH reads:

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Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with

 

Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.

 

My Two-for-Tuesday morning train WFH reads:

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Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with

 

Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.

 

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My back-to-work morning train WFH reads:

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Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with

 

Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.

 

 

The post 10 Friday Monday AM Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.

What Do You Resolve For 2026?

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

One of the most underrated intellectuals of the 20th century is Henry Hazlitt, author of “Economics in One Lesson” (1946). His career is far more varied than people know. Long before he was writing free-market treatises, he was a working journalist on Wall Street and, later, literary editor of The Nation and then H.L. Mencken’s chosen successor at The American Mercury.

His first published work is a wonderful little book published in 1922 called “The Way to Will Power.” He was only 28 when he wrote it, and spoke about the book none at all later. One suspects that he later found it too rudimentary or immature. Personally, I think it is wonderful.

The book aspires to apply what he learned as a financial reporter to matters of personal decision-making. His points are obvious once you think about them but, then as now, most people do not.

In finance and economics, the key to success is to match long-term ambitions with decisions one makes today. An orientation toward the future is always the key. He begins with the way a single price on the market today incorporates all knowns and expectations for the future. Silver might be $80 today not merely because of existing market conditions but based on the perception that there will be future uses, shortages, and high demand.

This is always a point about prices that confuses people. If there is a plan next year to permanently close a beach, the property values along the coastline will fall not next year but right now. This is because markets by their nature are always forward-looking. This is also why the price system always outwits the central planners. It benefits from its status as the composite wisdom of millions of buyers and sellers, whereas a government bureaucrat only knows what he knows.

Hazlitt wondered if there were ways to make our personal lives behave with as much intelligence.

He offers the example of the man who wants to lose weight, develop muscle tone, and upgrade his health. But night after night, he keeps choosing to go out gambling and drinking with his friends. Every morning he has a sense of regret about this and recommits to living a more healthy life.

Somehow his ambitions are not realized. He deeply desires health. The problem is that at no particular moment is health offered as an immediate alternative to drinking and staying out late. The choice on any particular evening is to go to bed early without fun or go have fun with his friends. He wants both health and fun but at every marginal unit of time, he always chooses fun over health and therefore never obtains his long-term goal.

In economics, this is the equivalent of a person who has high aspirations to build a large pool of personal savings from which he can earn interest, dividends, and increased financial valuations. But the consumption decisions he makes daily not only squander all the money he has but also drive him further into debt. He wants to be financially responsible but gains more personal advantage in the near term by doing what feels best at the moment.

To Hazlitt, the whole key to living a rich and rewarding life really comes down to this insight he gained from economics: match the decisions you make today with your dreams of how you want to live and who you want to be in the future. In other words, he urges not just a long-term orientation but a profound commitment today to making every decision about what it implies for the future.

Simple point? Maybe but it is easily overlooked, especially during the holidays.

We are surrounded by food and drink, invitations to indulge, and enjoy the freedom to sleep late and otherwise languish. The days are short and the weather is cold so the last thing on our minds is getting out, getting healthy, getting sober, and preparing for the future.

This is roughly where people are at the end of these days. And this is precisely why we have New Year’s resolutions. They reflect a sense of disgust over what the previous weeks have revealed about our own personal discipline and reflect a determination to change. Upon making the resolution—read more, get in shape, stop drinking—we are already feeling better as if adopting the ambition is half the battle.

The truth is that having a goal is none of the battle at all unless one’s decisions in the moment perfectly match one’s long-term hopes. Making resolutions stick means more than just imagining a better future. It means giving up right now that thing you want to do in order that the goal you desire is feasible and realized.

Hazlitt’s insight here is all the matching of time preferences. The here and now must embody the ambition of who you want to be in the future. This is particularly difficult when it comes to diet. A poor diet is addictive, and it is easy to swear it off following a huge meal over overindulgence. That’s the moment in which a fast seems like a great idea. That outlook lasts until the next morning when your empty stomach changes your mind.

What Hazlitt wrote here in 1922 contributed to the growing use of the term “willpower” in popular culture. We all just have to say no to the easy and quick thing in order to achieve that harder thing that unfolds over time. The example of the trade-off between consumption and investment is the best economic analogue: there can be no real prosperity for any society without the discipline to defer immediate consumption.

The sociologist Max Weber speculated that it was precisely the Protestant celebration of self-discipline and saving that bred the incredible prosperity of the West in the 19th century. The savings created a gigantic pool of capital for investment and empire building. The riches flowed and came to challenge the core values that gave rise to them in the first place. Frugality is forgotten when the money seems endless. Modest living and prudential management of material matters get sidelined.

In our own financial times, every major business and most smaller ones too have learned to live off leverage, as much as possible. If there is any chance an institution’s profit streams can outpace the cost of borrowing, living off debt can seem like the right thing to do. Of course this is only possible thanks to fiat money and the Federal Reserve system, without which the entire empire of debt would have collapsed long ago. In this way, our central banking institutions and profligate legislatures have undermined the whole basis of long-term prosperity.

There is a more insidious aspect to this pattern. When Hazlitt was writing in 1922, money was still gold and silver, interest rates were high and punishing, and hard work and savings were highly rewarded. There was a match between how government and finance lived and how we should live as individuals. In other words, the world made some sense.

It’s no longer clear that the functioning of finance and government makes much sense. If you and I lived in our private lives the way major corporations and legislatures function, we would live for the day, squander every dime, stay as inebriated as possible, and hope to foist the consequences of our misjudgements on others in the future.

Notice that Hazlitt’s view is all about having ambitions for the future rather than languishing in past trauma, as the culture says we should do today. This a fateful error. You can always use past trauma as an excuse for neglecting future triumphs.

Is it any wonder that the idea of willpower—which entered the vocabulary in the early 20th century—is so unfashionable? It just so happens that this very day, an attack on the notion appears in the nation’s major newspaper. The writer says we should forget about willpower (“overrated”) and adopt instead something she calls “situational agency.”

As best I can tell, she means that we should forget trying to resist temptation and instead structure our lives to eliminate it entirely. Perhaps this is the Ozempic theory of how to get thin. Forget saying no to pie and third helpings. Just take a pill to change your preferences entirely!

I have my doubts that pharmacology can overcome the core problem that Hazlitt identified. Indeed it seems like an excuse to pretend that the problem doesn’t exist at all. Surely there is some artificial means by which we can bypass the need for any self-discipline!

To restate Hazlitt’s core power, we all underestimate the power of the mind. Decide to quit smoking—really decide—and it is done. Same with drinking, overeating, and sloth in general. The difference between now and a better future is a simple change in thinking.

We will all make New Year’s resolutions, and most will be broken.

Once we reflect on why this is, we will be better positioned to match how we live today with the kind of life we want to have in the future. It’s the core human problem from time immemorial, one not easily swept away with fiat money, pills, and assurances that this time it will be different.

Tyler Durden Thu, 01/01/2026 - 10:30

12 NASA Satellite Images That Tell The Story Of Earth In 2025

From devastating wildfires to swirling cloud vortices, NASA’s fleet of Earth-observing satellites captured remarkable views of our planet throughout 2025.

As Visual Capitalist's Nick Routley shows below, these images reveal both the beauty and fragility of Earth’s systems, documenting natural phenomena, climate events, and human impacts visible from space.

All images featured in this article come from NASA’s Earth Observatory, captured by instruments aboard a variety of satellites in orbit around Earth. Together, they tell the story of a dynamic planet in constant flux.

The Palisades Fire’s Footprint

NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey

This false-color Landsat 9 image from January 14, 2025, reveals the burn scar left by the Palisades fire in Los Angeles County.

The fire ignited on the morning of January 7 near the Pacific Palisades neighborhood and spread rapidly, consuming nearly 24,000 acres (97 square kilometers) of wildland and developed areas within one week. In this image, which combines shortwave infrared, near infrared, and visible light, unburned vegetation appears green while recently burned landscape shows as light to dark brown.

The charred areas stretch north and west of Pacific Palisades toward Malibu, where land previously burned by the December 2024 Franklin fire is also visible along the coast.

Desert Dust Streams from Iran

NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview

This Terra MODIS image from January 22, 2025, captures dust plumes sweeping across southeastern Iran and streaming over the Gulf of Oman toward the Arabian Peninsula.

The airborne material originates primarily from the dried bed of Hamun-e Jazmurian, an intermittent lake in one of southwest Asia’s major dust source regions. In this arid basin, some areas receive less than 10 centimeters (4 inches) of annual rainfall while evaporation rates remain high.

The dust traveled south-southwest across the water to the coast of the United Arab Emirates, where the haze reduced visibility and prompted weather warnings. Beyond disrupting transportation, such dust events pose health risks: a recent analysis found that material from Jazmurian basin storms contains heavy metals and other substances hazardous to human and ecosystem health.

Floating Solar Farm on India’s Narmada River

NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey

This Landsat 9 image from January 30, 2025, shows arrays of floating solar panels, known as “floatovoltaics,” spread across a reservoir on the Narmada River in Madhya Pradesh, India.

The geometric blue rectangles visible in the reservoir represent two floating solar projects commissioned in 2024, with a combined capacity of 216 megawatts. The reservoir, created by the Omkareshwar Dam completed in 2007, spans more than 90 square kilometers.

Floating solar installations offer an alternative to land-based systems in areas where space is limited. They can also reduce evaporation, impede algal growth, and benefit from the cooling effect of water on panel efficiency.

Swirling Skies and Melting Icebergs

NASA Earth Observatory/Wanmei Liang, using VIIRS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE, GIBS/Worldview, and the Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS)

This NOAA-20 VIIRS image from February 24, 2025, captures von Kármán vortex streets forming behind three of the remote South Sandwich Islands in the southern Atlantic Ocean. The swirling cloud patterns appear when persistent westerly winds of moderate strength push marine stratocumulus clouds past the steep volcanic peaks of Visokoi, Candlemas, and Saunders islands.

Named after mathematician and aerospace engineer Theodore von Kármán, who first described these oscillating flow features in 1911, the vortices form alternating spirals that rotate in opposite directions downstream of each obstacle. The cloud trail extending from Saunders Island appears slightly brighter than surrounding clouds due to volcanic emissions from Mount Michael, which has been weakly erupting since 2014. To the west of the island chain, several icebergs drift visibly beneath thin cloud cover.

Haze Sweeps Over the Mediterranean

NASA/ISS External Camera

This photograph from the International Space Station’s external camera on April 30, 2025, provides an oblique view stretching from the Alps to Sicily, revealing layers of industrial haze drifting across the Mediterranean basin.

Much of the haze originates from the Po Valley in northern Italy and the Rhône Valley in France, where surrounding mountains trap pollutants. The Po Valley haze drifts hundreds of kilometers over the Adriatic Sea toward Greece. Astronauts have documented this atmospheric phenomenon for decades, providing a unique perspective on how geography shapes air quality across southern Europe.

Glacier Collapse Buries Swiss Village

NASA Earth Observatory/Wanmei Liang, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey

This Landsat 9 image from May 29, 2025, shows the aftermath of a catastrophic collapse of the Birch Glacier in Switzerland’s Lötschental valley.

The debris buried most of the village of Blatten, traveled 2.5 kilometers down the valley, and climbed 240 meters up the opposite valley wall before damming the Lonza River and causing flooding. Authorities began evacuating residents on May 19 after detecting instability. By May 27, the glacier was moving at 10 meters per day. Scientists believe rockfall accumulation on top of the glacier led to basal melting that reduced friction, triggering the collapse. The event was unusual in magnitude for the Swiss Alps.

Rare Snow Blankets Australia’s Northern Tablelands

NASA Earth Observatory/Wanmei Liang, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey

This Landsat 8 image from August 3, 2025, captures a rare blanket of snow across New South Wales’ Northern Tablelands, the heaviest snowfall in the region since the mid-1980s.

A powerful low-pressure system brought up to 40 centimeters (16 inches) of snow to the highlands while dumping more than 100 millimeters of rain at lower elevations. The storm stranded vehicles, closed highways, and left properties without power. Flooding triggered dozens of rescues across the region.

Phytoplankton Bloom in the Barents Sea

NASA Earth Observatory/Wanmei Liang, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview

This Aqua MODIS image from August 5, 2025, reveals a massive phytoplankton bloom swirling through the Barents Sea near Norway’s Bear Island.

The milky turquoise-blue colors indicate the presence of coccolithophores, single-celled organisms armored with calcium carbonate plates that scatter light. The green hues come from diatoms, another type of phytoplankton. The Barents Sea typically experiences two bloom seasons: diatoms dominate in May and June, while coccolithophores peak in August.

These microscopic organisms form the base of the Arctic marine food web and play a critical role in the ocean’s carbon cycle and oxygen production. Researchers are closely studying how warming Atlantic currents may be shifting the location and extent of these blooms.

Hurricane Erin Roils in the Atlantic

NASA Earth Observatory/Wanmei Liang, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview

This Terra MODIS image from August 18, 2025, shows Hurricane Erin churning in the Atlantic Ocean as the first hurricane of the 2025 season.

The storm underwent rapid intensification, jumping from Category 1 to Category 5 in just 24 hours between August 15 and 16, reaching peak sustained winds of 160 mph. Erin became only the 43rd Atlantic hurricane to reach Category 5 status since 1851, and the earliest to do so at this location.

Factors contributing to its explosive strengthening included light wind shear, a compact structure, and warm sea surface temperatures. While Erin did not make landfall, it caused more than 147,000 power outages in Puerto Rico and prompted evacuation orders for North Carolina’s Outer Banks.

British Columbia Wildfires Send Smoke Skyward

NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview

This Aqua MODIS image from September 2, 2025, captures thick smoke plumes rising from multiple lightning-ignited wildfires in British Columbia’s Cariboo region. The Itcha Lake fire had burned approximately 17,000 hectares (170 km²), while the Beef Trail Creek fire consumed around 7,800 hectares (78 km²) and the Dusty Lake fire charred about 2,800 hectares (28 km²). Evacuation orders were issued for surrounding communities.

The towering pyrocumulus clouds generated by these fires can inject smoke and particulate matter high into the atmosphere, where it can travel thousands of kilometers and degrade air quality across distant regions. By the end of the season, British Columbia had burned 732,000 hectares (7,320 km²), slightly above the 10-year average. Overall, Canada experienced one of its worst fire seasons on record, trailing only 2023.

A Desert Intersection

NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey

This Landsat 9 image from September 11, 2025, reveals a striking geological boundary in China’s Tarim Basin where the Mazartagh ridge meets the Hotan River. The 145 km (90 mile) ridge acts as a natural barrier, creating distinct dune patterns on either side.

The Hotan is the only river fed by glacial meltwater that maintains enough flow to cross the entire Takla Makan Desert. For centuries, this region served as an important source of nephrite jade collected along the ancient Silk Road.

Stubble Burning Shrouds Northern India in Haze

NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview

This Aqua MODIS image from November 11, 2025, shows thick haze blanketing northern India during the annual crop residue burning season.

Farmers in Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh burn rice stubble between October and December to quickly clear fields before planting wheat.

On this day, air quality exceeded 400 on India’s national index, well into the “severe” category. Scientists have detected a shift in burning patterns: fires now peak from 4-6pm rather than the previous window of 1-2pm, meaning traditional satellite monitoring systems miss many fires. Estimates suggest stubble burning contributes 40-70% of particulate pollution on peak days.

The Tip of the Iceberg

These 12 images represent just a fraction of the thousands of observations NASA’s satellites make each year.

From tracking climate patterns to monitoring natural disasters, this orbital perspective helps scientists understand Earth’s interconnected systems and provides critical data for decision-makers around the world. As our planet continues to change, these eyes in the sky remain essential tools for documenting and responding to the challenges ahead.

Tyler Durden Thu, 01/01/2026 - 09:55

American Legal Sovereignty Threatened By Greenpeace's Retaliatory EU Lawsuit

Authored by John Swallow via The Epoch Times,

The strength of the American civil legal system rests on a simple principle: those who break the law on U.S. soil answer to U.S. plaintiffs in U.S. courts. Our constitutional order depends on juries empowered to weigh evidence, judges and plaintiffs entrusted to enforce verdicts, and a system insulated from foreign interference. However, that foundation is now being tested by an activist organization determined to escape domestic accountability for domestic acts, by turning abroad and using a foreign country’s laws and courts to take another bite at the legal apple, so to speak.

In March 2025, a North Dakota jury delivered a decisive $670 million verdict against Greenpeace and its affiliates, finding them liable for extreme torts against Energy Transfer LP in the form of defamation, trespass, and conspiracy. The jurors rejected the claim that the Greenpeace activity—supporting violent demonstrations that disrupted construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016 and 2017—was protected speech, finding instead that Greenpeace orchestrated a campaign of unlawful disruption and reputational harm against Energy Transfer.

While the award has since been reduced to $345 million, the fact remains: the jury verdict was well founded.

During the trial, Energy Transfer’s lawyers presented compelling evidence showing Greenpeace’s role in orchestrating the protests. The group spent $55,000 training activists in direct action and violent protest tactics, supplied them with power tools, tents, propane, cold-weather gear, and lockboxes to chain themselves to heavy equipment, and encouraged confrontations with law enforcement. Meanwhile, its former executive director was found to have used an official Greenpeace email account to raise another $90,000 to fuel the effort.

On top of that, the jury found that Greenpeace knowingly defamed Energy Transfer by falsely accusing the company of knowingly desecrating Native American burial grounds during pipeline construction. In reality, Energy Transfer took extensive precautions to protect cultural and historical sites. Such fabricated and highly incendiary claims were found to have inflicted serious harm on Energy Transfer’s public reputation and its standing with financial institutions.

But rather than accept the ruling of the court, Greenpeace is attempting an end-run around it. Just weeks before the trial concluded, Greenpeace and Greenpeace International filed a retaliatory lawsuit against Energy Transfer in the Netherlands, invoking the European Union’s new anti-Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation (anti-SLAPP) directive. Importantly, the EU directive allows EU-based entities, such as Greenpeace International, to pursue damages against non-EU actors for cases originally brought outside the EU—expanding its reach far beyond Europe’s borders.

The Dutch lawsuit marks the first test of the new EU directive, and it appears that Greenpeace’s goal is to reframe its adjudicated misconduct as “free speech,” sprinkle in its own claims, which could and should have been raised and litigated in the North Dakota forum, and ask a foreign tribunal to essentially re-litigate, where a North Dakota court had already ruled following a full jury trial. Such tactics are abusive, costly, extra-jurisdictional, and very concerning for any company dealing with EU-based entities as no U.S. company could anticipate being hauled into an EU Court by or through its activities in the United States.

Fortunately, at least for now, Recital 29 of the directive only applies to untruthful allegations, meaning that if the claims in the original suit are proven true, anti-SLAPP protections do not apply. On that basis alone, the Dutch court should dismiss the case.

The directive was meant to protect European journalists, activists, and civic participants from frivolous lawsuits meant to silence dissent for activities on European soil. As determined in court by a jury, under the guidance of an experienced judge, the Energy Transfer/Greenpeace case was not frivolous. Nothing Greenpeace could say in a Dutch court could undermine the “truth” as found by a North Dakota jury, under state law.

However, the danger of allowing Greenpeace to relitigate facts and activities already determined by a lawful proceeding in the United States risks setting a dangerous precedent. If a foreign-based entity can lose in the United States and live to fight the same fight overseas, it creates a real incentive for bad actors to engage in tortious activities in the United States while discouraging what might be perceived as fruitless litigation. What company can afford to pay the price of a never-ending battle overseas?

The Greenpeace tactic of using the EU directive as a counterweight also raises jurisdictional questions concerning liability of a U.S. company under foreign laws when they have done nothing to justify being hauled into a foreign court. Indeed, allowing a foreign tribunal without jurisdiction over a U.S.-based company to require even a response to an EU action would open the floodgates to duplicative litigation and erode the confidence American companies should have in U.S. systems of civil justice.

Energy Transfer recently appealed a decision by the North Dakota Southwest Judicial District Court and Judge James Gion—who is overseeing the proceedings—to not enjoin Greenpeace from moving the EU lawsuit forward. The jury got the case right and the Judge got his denial of an injunction wrong. In America, courts should do all they can to respect and protect jury verdicts and those who pay the price to bring justice to those who violate American laws, even if they are foreign-based.

The stakes of the anti-SLAPP suit are too high to simply hope for the right outcome.

We should not forget that Greenpeace is not simply testing the boundaries of free expression—it is testing whether U.S. legal sovereignty and the rule of law still mean something. The answer must be a firm and resounding yes.

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

Tyler Durden Thu, 01/01/2026 - 09:20

Earlier I posted some questions on my blog for next year: Ten Economic Questions for 2026. Some of these questions concern real estate (inventory, house prices, housing starts, new home sales), and I posted thoughts on those in the newsletter (others like GDP and employment will be on this blog).

I'm adding some thoughts and predictions for each question.

Here is a review of the Ten Economic Questions for 2025.

3) Unemployment Rate: The unemployment rate was at 4.6% in November, up from 4.2% in November 2024.   Currently the FOMC is projecting the unemployment rate will decrease to the 4.3% to 4.4% range in Q4 2026.  What will the unemployment rate be in December 2026?
Click on graph for larger image.

The unemployment rate is from the household survey (CPS), and the rate increased in November to 4.6%, up from 4.2% in November 2024.  An unemployment rate of 4.6% over the next few months might suggest an employment recession according to the Sahm rule.

Forecasting the unemployment rate includes forecasts for economic and payroll growth, and also for changes in the participation rate (previous question).
"Uncertainty" was the key economic word for 2025, and probably for 2026 too.  There is significant uncertainty in the labor market with signs of weak hiring and concerns that AI will impact job growth.  Sometimes an employment recession continues as some employed individuals become cautious.  At the same time, we should see some economic boost from fiscal policy in 2026.
It appears that the participation rate will decline in 2026 based on demographics and that population growth will be slow due to less net migration.  That suggests that the labor force will grow slowly in 2026. So even if job growth stays slow in 2026 (next question), the unemployment rate might stabilize or even decline.
However, my guess is the unemployment rate will be in the mid-to-high 4% range in December 2026.  
Here are the Ten Economic Questions for 2026 and a few predictions:

• Question #3 for 2026: What will the unemployment rate be in December 2026?

• Question #4 for 2026: What will the participation rate be in December 2026?

• Question #5 for 2026: What will the YoY core inflation rate be in December 2026?

• Question #6 for 2026: What will the Fed Funds rate be in December 2026?

• Question #7 for 2026: How much will wages increase in 2026?

• Question #8 for 2026: How much will Residential investment change in 2026? How about housing starts and new home sales in 2026?

• Question #9 for 2026: What will happen with house prices in 2026?

• Question #10 for 2026: Will inventory increase further in 2026?

Finnish Police Seize Russia-Linked Ship Accused Of Cutting Undersea Cable

The Europeans have taken yet more 'counter-Russia' actions amid widespread allegations that Moscow has sponsored sabotage campaigns targeting EU communications infrastructure.

Finnish authorities have newly detained a cargo ship suspected of damaging an undersea communications cable. The vessel has been identified as the Fitburg, and had departed St. Petersburg, Russia and was traveling toward Israel when it was intercepted by Finnish authorities.

Handout: Anadolu/Getty Images

Security officials have since confirmed, "Finnish authorities have taken control of the vessel as part of a joint operation."

The cable in question links Helsinki with Tallinn and is operated by the Finnish telecom company Elisa. Like with other similar cable cutting allegations, officials admit there's no smoking gun proof at this point.

Prior similar instances of Russia's 'shadow fleet' supposedly engaged in cable cutting activity have generated ample headlines but nothing in the way of proof.

Bloomberg and European media have reported that fourteen crew members are currently being held by authorities - which includes nationals of Russia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan.

The Finnish police and the Border Guard have accused the vessel dragging its anchor along the seabed, after which it entered Finnish territorial waters at the request of authorities, whereupon it was taken into custody.

"At this stage, the police are investigating the incident as aggravated criminal damage, attempted aggravated criminal damage, and aggravated interference with telecommunications," the police said.

The Finnish coast guard tracked has charged that "The ship's anchor chain had been lowered into the water." This after it was taken into custody.

Finland's President Alexander Stubb says he's closely monitoring the situation amid a pending investigation. "Finland is prepared for various security challenges and responds to them in the manner the situation requires," he said on X.

This kind of thing has occurred in the Baltic Sea region, allegedly many times since the Ukraine war began. CNN writes that "At least 10 undersea cables have been cut or damaged in the Baltic Sea since 2023."

Finland seizes vessel suspected of damaging underwater cable

Finnish authorities have seized the cargo vessel Fitburg off the coast of Porkkala in connection with damage to an undersea data cable between Helsinki and Tallinn. The vessel departed Saint Petersburg on December 30… pic.twitter.com/ihtJpkZVlW

— MarineTraffic (@MarineTraffic) December 31, 2025

Sometimes the vessels at the center of these controversies were already under Western sanctions, and have been boarded by authorities from various EU and NATO countries.

Tyler Durden Thu, 01/01/2026 - 08:45

Russia's Secretive Hypersonic, Nuclear-Ready Oreshnik Missiles Go Operational In Belarus

Belarus has announced that Russia's Oreshnik intermediate-range nuclear capable ballistic missile system has been deployed on its territory, though details and specifications - including range - of the projectile remain secretive.

On Tuesday, the Belarusian Ministry of Defense released a video it claims shows the Oreshnik system being deployed inside the country. It featured Russian troops and technicians in a ceremonial flag-raising while stationed in Belarus, along with a convoy of vehicles moving into a field-based firing position before being concealed under camouflage netting. 

Oreshnik, via Reuters

Accompanying this was the recent emergence of satellite images indicating that Moscow is indeed positioning the nuclear-capable missiles in Belarus.

But questions have been raised as to the precise location of the missile systems, given that the undated published video features only support vehicles and doesn't appear to including the launch apparatus itself. 

Still, the video includes a senior officer informing troops that the systems have officially entered combat duty and references prior routine training and reconnaissance exercises carried out by missile crews.

Russian state media has referenced a precise date for the missile transfer to Belarusian territory, however:

Russian officials have likened its conventional destructive power to that of a low-yield nuclear strike, highlighting its dual strategic and tactical potential. By comparison, Western militaries currently lack a directly equivalent hypersonic MIRV-capable system, giving Oreshnik a unique edge in speed, maneuverability, and multi-target strike capability.

Up to ten systems are slated for deployment in Belarus under an agreement reached between Minsk and Moscow shortly after the missile’s initial combat test.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko announced in a parliamentary address this month that the Oreshnik systems had arrived in Belarus on December 17. Deputy Defense Minister Pavel Muraveyko said last week the combat patrol areas are set and the system is fully operational and ready for use.

Already Belarus plays host to Russian tactical nuclear weapons - though details of this too remain shrouded in mystery and intentioned strategic ambiguity.

EuroNews: "Analysts identified a former airfield near the Russian border as a likely site."

Russia shows nuclear-capable Oreshnik missile system in Belarus

Russia's Defence Ministry released the first images of an intermediate-range weapon entering service. Analysts identified a former airfield near the Russian border as a likely site. pic.twitter.com/vkEv6eGP5r

— euronews (@euronews) December 30, 2025

2025 has been a big year for Moscow showcasing its military might and tech. As we reviewed earlier, in a matter of less than a year, Russian scientific know-how came up with four bangers:

1. Oreshnik: hypersonic missile, already tested in the Ukraine battleground.

2. Burevestnik: Or “Stormbringer”, with that nice Deep Purple ring. Nuclear cruise missile with unlimited range.

3. Poseidon: nuclear-powered torpedo, capable of loitering underwater, undetected, for unlimited time; then, at a command, strikes enemy coasts with a nuclear payload, provoking a radioactive tsunami. Largely exceeds the destructive power of the Sarmat, Russia’s largest ICBM.

4. Khabarovsk: nuclear sub. Call him The Messenger of Doom: capable of delivering at least 6 Doomsday-enabling Poseidons.

As for the Oreshnik, it was at a December 2024 meeting with Belarusian President Lukashenko that Putin had first unveiled plans to station Oreshnik missiles in Belarus. He indicated at the time that the deployment would occur in the second half of 2025. There are prior reports saying the hypersonic Oreshnik has already been used against Ukrainian targets to demonstrate Moscow's 'shock and awe' capabilities.

Tyler Durden Thu, 01/01/2026 - 07:40

The Real Existential Threat Facing Europe

Authored by Nouriel Roubini via Project Syndicate,

Contrary to what far-right leaders claim, Europe’s greatest challenge is not immigration or “wokeness,” but its own economic and technological backwardness. With productivity growth lagging and innovation increasingly taking place elsewhere, Europe must confront its structural weaknesses or risk falling further behind.

US President Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy offers a misguided assessment of Europe, long regarded as America’s most reliable ally. Unrestrained immigration and other policies derided by administration officials as “woke,” it warns, could lead to “civilizational erasure” within a few decades.

That argument rests on a fundamental misreading of Europe’s current predicament. While the European Union does face an existential threat, it has little to do with immigration or cultural politics. In fact, the share of foreign-born residents in the United States is slightly higher than in Europe.

The real threat facing Europe lies in its own economic and technological backwardness. Between 2008 and 2023, GDP rose by 87% in the US, compared to just 13.5% in the EU. Over the same period, the EU’s GDP per capita fell from 76.5% of the US level to 50%. Even the poorest US state – Mississippi – has a higher per capita income than that of several major European economies, including France, Italy, and the EU average.

This widening economic gap cannot be explained by demographics. Instead, it reflects stronger productivity growth in the US, largely owing to technological innovation and higher total factor productivity. Today, roughly half of the world’s 50 largest technology firms are American, while only four are European. Over the past five decades, 241 US firms have grown from startups into companies with market capitalizations of at least $10 billion, compared with just 14 in Europe.

These trends raise a critical question: Which countries will lead the industries of the future, and where does Europe fit in? The race for technological leadership now spans a wide range of fields, including AI and machine learning, semiconductor design and production, robotics, quantum computing, fusion energy, fintech, and defense technologies. Europe enters this race at a clear disadvantage.

Whether the US or China currently leads the industries of the future remains open to debate, but most observers agree that it’s essentially a two-horse race, with America still ahead in several key areas. Beyond that, innovation is concentrated in countries like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, India, and Israel. In Europe, by contrast, innovative activities are largely confined to the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Switzerland – two of which are not even EU member states.

It is hardly a surprise, then, that while the US and China dominate global technological rankings, Europe finds itself far from the top. And the outlook is anything but reassuring, given that the next wave of innovation is widely expected to be more disruptive than anything we have seen over the past half-century.

The technological gap between the US and Europe can be attributed to several factors.

• First, the US has a far deeper and more dynamic ecosystem for financing startups, while Europe still lacks a genuine capital markets union, limiting the scale and speed at which new firms can grow.

• Second, Europe is hampered by excessive and fragmented regulation. A US startup can launch a product under a single regulatory framework and immediately access a market of more than 330 million consumers. The EU has a population of roughly 450 million but remains divided among 27 national regulatory regimes. An International Monetary Fund analysis shows that internal market barriers in the EU act like a tariff of around 44% for goods and 110% for services – far higher than the tariff levels the US imposes on most imports.

• Third, cultural attitudes toward risk-taking differ sharply. Until relatively recently, a failed entrepreneur in some EU countries (like Italy) could face criminal penalties, while in the US, a tech founder who has never failed is often seen as too risk-averse.

• Fourth, the US benefits from a deeply integrated academic-military-industrial complex, while Europe’s chronic underinvestment in defense has weakened its innovation capacity. Technological leaders like the US, China, Israel, and, more recently, Ukraine spend heavily on defense, with military research often producing technologies that have civilian applications.

Despite this, many European political leaders continue to frame higher defense spending as a tradeoff between security and social welfare. In reality, free-riding on US defense spending since the end of World War II has limited the type of innovation that could have generated more of both through higher productivity. Paradoxically, sustaining Europe’s social model will require greater investment in defense, beginning with meeting NATO’s new spending target of 3.5% of GDP.

If Europe allows its technological lag to grow over the coming decades, it risks prolonged stagnation and continued economic decline relative to the US and China. There are, however, reasons for cautious optimism. Increasingly aware that Europe faces an existential challenge, policymakers have begun to advance serious reform proposals. The most notable examples are the two major 2024 reports on EU competitiveness and the single market by former Italian prime ministers Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta, respectively.

Europe also retains considerable strengths, including high-quality human capital, excellent education systems, and world-class research institutions. With the right incentives and regulatory reforms, these assets could support much higher levels of commercial innovation. With a better environment for entrepreneurship, Europe’s high per capita income, large internal market, and elevated savings rates could help unleash a wave of investment.

Crucially, even if Europe never leads in cutting-edge technologies, it could still significantly boost productivity by adopting and adapting American and Chinese innovations. Many of these technologies are general-purpose in character, benefiting both adopters and pioneers.

All of this leaves Europe at an inflection point.

As Ernest Hemingway famously observed, bankruptcy happens “gradually and then suddenly.”

So far, Europe’s technological decline has been gradual. But if it fails to confront its structural weaknesses, today’s slow erosion could give way to a sudden and irreversible loss of economic relevance.

Tyler Durden Thu, 01/01/2026 - 07:20

My New Years Day reads:

• Financial Discipline Is an Easy Resolution to Make, but a Hard One to Keep: We all say we want to save more and spend less. The key is to think more broadly. (Wall Street Journal)

• Trump’s First Year Back, in 10 Charts: President Trump indisputably dominated 2025. Only the second president to be elected to nonconsecutive terms, the reinvigorated Mr. Trump plunged back into office with a muscularity unmatched by any other president in my lifetime. (New York Times) see also Charts of the year: Trump’s attempt to reshape world trade: The US president’s ‘liberation day’ tariffs spooked markets but the global trading system has proved to be resilient (Financial Times)

• Did “Sell America” Win After All? There’s been a “Sell America” media shtick since the first tariffs were announced. ETF Investors didn’t bite. Maybe they should have? (ETF.com)

• How Roomba invented the home robot — and lost the future: iRobot’s collapse marks the end of an era. Co-founder Colin Angle calls it a blow for robotics. (The Verge)

• ‘You Had to Be Brave’: Wall Street Remembers a Wild 2025: The stock market was rattled by AI bubble fears, trade war and actual war, only to rally back, paying off to anyone who was willing to risk buying the dips. (Bloomberg) see also In a Wild Year for Markets, Investors Who Did Nothing Did Just Fine: The year was dominated by tariffs, questions about the U.S. and artificial intelligence. (Wall Street Journal)

• The US Must Stop Underestimating Drone Warfare: The future of conflict is cheap, rapidly manufactured, and tough to defend against. (Wired)

• The Lost Art of Research as Leisure: Where have the amateur researchers gone, and how do we bring them back? (Kasurian)

• 10 scientific truths that somehow became unpopular in 2025: Scientific truths remain true regardless of belief. These 10, despite contrary claims, remain vitally important as 2025 draws to a close. (Starts With A Bang) see also The 10 Most Mind-Blowing Discoveries About the Brain in 2025: From glowing neurons to newborn memories, here are the most fascinating brain discoveries of 2025. (Scientific American)

• Inside RFK Jr.’s reshaping of public health in Trump’s first year: Interviews with almost 100 people reveal how Kennedy, as health secretary, has reshaped the vaccine and broader public health infrastructure in less than a year. (Washington Post)

• Five Things That Changed the Media in 2025: A.I., of course—but there were also other, less obvious stories and trends that are going to shape how we understand the news. (New Yorker) see also Top 25 News Photos of 2025: Powerful images from the past 12 months. (The Atlantic)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Stephanie Drescher, Apollo’s Chief Client and Product Development Officer. She oversees everything from the global wealth business to portfolio management, product development, and client marketing. She is a member of the firm’s leadership team. Since 2020, Barron’s has named her annually to its list of the 100 Most Influential Women in U.S. Finance.

States where the minimum wage is going up in 2026

Source: Axios

 

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The post 10 New Years Day Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.

2026: The Year Of Living Dangerously

Authored by Lawrence Kadish via The Gatestone Institute,

The British were the first to develop the aircraft carrier as an emerging weapon of war. But it was the Japanese who perfected the ship by combining as many as four aircraft carriers into a single battle group and deploying a task force that led to their devastating strike against the American fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

Nearly a century later, another ally, the State of Israel, has pioneered asymmetrical warfare in which they combine their technological superiority in gathering intelligence with precision strikes to counter enemies who seek their destruction. The Israelis' continued success can be found from the use of explosive pagers that took out Hezbollah terrorists, to hidden computer malware that disabled Iranian uranium enrichment. Their exploits could fill a book.

Our other allies, the Ukrainians, are using drones controlled by sleeper agents to destroy Russian military assets far behind the battle lines.

For the Russians, anyone and everyone could now be a suspect.

All of this begs the question: If this is what our allies are capable of, what can our enemies be contemplating?

As the successful Japanese carrier task force dramatically reminded the world in 1941, our enemies sit, watch, and consider how emerging tools of warfare pioneered by democracies can be used against these nations of freedom.

Who are the sleeper agents who may be working within our nation's utilities, capable of infecting our complex electrical grids with malware that, if activated, would plunge our cities into darkness?

Who are those who have purchased farmland near our Midwest strategic bomber air bases and whose barns and warehouses could now have drones hidden within them, waiting for a signal to strike?

Can hackers in North Korea manipulate our nation's financial system, threatening everything from bitcoin "banks" to financial transfers on the command of their Communist leader?

These are just some of the nightmare scenarios that America needs to understand and prepare to defend against in a world where armies do not need to invade and missiles do not need to be launched in order to disarm an adversary.

The Chinese, however, are not solely relying on stealth sleeper agents or asymmetrical opportunities.

China's second aircraft carrier is expected to enter service in 2026, according to the respected publication Aviation Week.

Separately, the publication also notes that while the Chinese are publicly criticizing the Trump administration's Golden Dome missile-defense program, they are hard at work at developing their own anti-missile defense shield.

It is classic Beijing – criticize your enemies for what you are already pursuing.

The year 2026 will see the United States advancing on multiple fronts, from accelerating our return to the Moon to strengthening our naval forces, to bolstering our drone technology, to increasing our strategic defenses.

All the while, the forces of freedom must recognize that, like Imperial Japan of 1941, our adversaries are watching Western democracies to determine our vulnerabilities.

It will require the White House to sustain its firm and resolute leadership to protect our future and all those who treasure democracy and freedom.

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

Tyler Durden Wed, 12/31/2025 - 23:30