Vice-President Vance: "End the War, Change our relationship to Israel"

From the Veep's Xitter feed, November 4:

One of the things the data analysts on our side obsessed over was "composition"—whether the electorate looked close enough to 2024 for Republicans to win. And despite polls that showed a Democrat blowout, the data kept on telling us the same story: in some states turnout was merely OK, in other states it was downright amazing, and in no state was it catastrophic. There was a genuine sense of optimism on our team: our people were showing up. So, I asked the smartest data guy I know, does that mean we're going to shock the world? "No," he told me. "We might do better than the polls suggest. But the data is telling us that a lot of Trump/Vance 2024 voters are pissed and planning to vote for the other guys. Our voters are turning out, but they may not vote for us." Well, that looks prophetic now. Our voters did show up. In Florida, for example, the electorate was 9 points more Republican than Democrat, just a couple points worse than 2024. Undoubtedly there were places we could have done better on turnout. But the main problem is not turnout. The main problem is that many people who voted for Trump/Vance in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026. There will be a lot of infighting and arguing over what happened and why that is. One of the pollsters I really respect told me that our economic messaging wasn’t sharp enough down the stretch. I’m sure that’s true. But the real reason we lost is obvious to almost everyone. Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were: 1) End the war 2) Focus on cost of living/inflation 3) Put America First 4) Change our relationship to Israel Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. While many spent Monday attacking Rachel Campos Duffy for calling for a diplomatic resolution to the conflict, it turns out her political advice was sound. (She’s also a great person.) In the next few months, there's going to be a lot of gaslighting. Expect to hear any number of establishment politicians say the solution to our woes is amnesty. I'm open to the idea that we should change enforcement—by focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance. But anyone pushing amnesty is lying to you. The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. If you'd like to argue it was worth it, that losing the Senate for the next 6 years was worth it, then do so. Argue it was a worthwhile cost to pay. Agree or disagree, that's at least honest. But everyone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there. I remain hopeful about our country. To the people who are pissed off and want to say, “I told you so”: you’re right, you did tell us so. Take that energy into electing Republicans who share your worldview. To the people who are just pissed at the results, you should be. Let’s take that anger and get back to the work of saving our country.

— JD Vance (@JDVance) November 4, 2026

...MUCH MORE

Continues

....Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:

1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel

Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results.... 

This follows on yesterday's:

"GLOBAL MARKETS-Stocks erase losses, oil tumbles after Trump says US will end $4 billion funding to Israel"

"GE Vernova Sinks 10%, Vistra Down 12% as Democrats Win Congress: 'Incrementally More Negative Sentiment'” (GEV)

From TIKR, November 4: 

Key Takeaways

• GE Vernova fell 10% today, with Vistra and Constellation Energy, after Democrats won both chambers of Congress.
• Only about 20% of GE Vernova’s contracted gas turbine capacity serves data centers.
• Eaton and Caterpillar just reported rising data center demand, and new curbs would face a presidential veto.
• Next up: whether GE Vernova’s gas contracts reach the 130 gigawatts management expects by year-end.

GE Vernova (GEV) fell 10% this morning after Democrats won the Senate and the House in Tuesday’s midterms, and investors sold AI power stocks.

Vistra (VST) fell 12% and Constellation Energy (CEG) fell 7%. Yet Eaton (ETN) and Caterpillar (CAT) are still seeing data center growth.

Evercore ISI analysts led by Amit Daryanani wrote in a note: “Assuming a more restrictive data center development environment, this could create incrementally more negative sentiment for AI infrastructure exposed names.”

Sentiment is the key word here.

Most of these turbines aren’t for data centers 
GE Vernova had 122 gigawatts of gas equipment under contract at the end of September. As of midyear, only about 20% of its contracted gigawatts served data centers....

....MUCH MORE 

Blood Bank Coolers Hacked In France

There is no reason for this stuff to be connected to the internet.

From CNBC, November 4:

Blood banks targeted in latest European fridge cyberattacks 

• Blood banks have become the latest target of cyberattacks on fridges across Europe, the French Blood Establishment confirmed Wednesday.
• Cold storage units with blood products were remotely hacked, with temperatures raised excessively.
• EFS said no blood products were lost and no health impact was identified after alarms detected the anomalies quickly.

French blood banks were on Monday affected by the recent wave of cybersecurity attacks on European refrigeration systems, the French Blood Establishment confirmed on Wednesday.

The organization said that while it wasn’t the direct target of the attack, cold storage units operated by external providers containing the EFS’ blood products were compromised across three of its sites, with hackers cranking up temperatures.

“Specifically, temperature and defrost thresholds were set to excessively high levels,” the EFS said in a statement translated from French to English by CNBC.

“These cold storage units—located at EFS preparation and distribution sites—are used to store blood products prior to their delivery to healthcare facilities, as well as samples intended for EFS biobanks.”

They also stored frozen plasma used for transfusions the manufacturing of medicinal products.

The EFS said that its surveillance systems were triggered rapidly, and depending on the situation, affected equipment was either brought under control with no impact on the products or samples, or they were taken offline. No samples or blood products were lost during the attack, with samples quickly transferred to other facilities, the EFS added....

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As noted after the second attack on grocery store coolers:

"Frozen part II: Hackers remotely defrost produce in Euro supermarkets ... again"
The cooler/chiller companies better get this under control....

The life-saving/life-changing miracle of refrigeration is taken for granted. Big mistake

If interested see also: 

July 2024 - "...Refrigeration and the Many Virtues of the Cold Chain"
Cold, very important. For me and for the world....

And why were we so interested? Money.
As mentioned some years ago:

June 3, 2019
Logistics: Big Money For Warehouses, Looking at Cold Storage.

...This next bit brings back some memories. My second stock to double was a cold storage company, actually a dairy with a cold storage operation that was valued at about one-quarter of comparables. I started chipping away at the float and before I got anywhere near enough stock, the management, who knew full well the value of the operation, did an LBO and took it private at 2x market and ended up generating cash-on-cash returns (for themselves) of around 40% per annum for a decade or so.
Bastards.

That led us into being on the right side of the the whole pandemic need for storage and particularly cold storage. Another example of how just being in the right place at the right time can make this whole investing thing so much easier:

June 6, 2019
"It's About To Become A Hot Market For Cold Storage Facilities"—CBRE

March 30, 2020
"Coronavirus: Panic buying sparks surge in flexible storage demand"

April 27, 2020
The UK Food Situation Is Going to Get Interesting
From Reuters:
World's biggest cold storage supplier could reach full UK capacity in three weeks.....

If interested see also January 2019's "Logistics of Cold"
That essay mentions an apple farmer, Barbara Pratt. She's also Maersk's director of refrigerated technical services.
Maersk thinks pretty highly of her, giving her a page on the website: THE QUEEN OF COOL.
Unfortunately, when the cybercrooks attacked Maersk it was lost—you now get a "subdomain takeover" notice so, if interested here she is saved at the Internet Archive page. 

In October 2021 the story was:
Buying Warehouses In Europe and China
It was rather lonely in 2019 when we were pitching warehouses and cold storage facilities but by December 2020 we were posting stuff like:

Real Estate: "Logistics market is hot, but is a bubble forming?"
It's always nice to see a sector you've been babbling about for a couple years finally referred to as a bubble....

Good times.

"A Democrat won the Texas governor's race after promising to halt new data center construction"

Back to Yahoo Finance, November 3: 

A strong showing by Democrats in Texas swept Gina Hinojosa into office as the state's first Democratic governor since 1990 in a contest closely watched by Big Tech companies. 

The state is considered a bellwether for government restrictions on AI data centers.

Incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott conceded the race late Tuesday, calling Hinojosa and then telling his supporters, "mathematically we are not going to be able to win this election." The Associated Press declared Hinojosa the winner at 11:17 p.m. ET.

Hinojosa, Texas' first Latina governor, has pledged to impose a moratorium on data center construction in Texas, which accounts for more than 25% of planned US capacity by 2030. 

"We view the Texas gubernatorial race as particularly important for the next leg of the AI trade," wrote Raymond James's Ed Mills in a pre-election note saying that a strong Democratic showing there "could signal a broader electoral wave while increasing concerns about data center moratoriums and more restrictive AI regulation in the nation's largest planned data center development." 

Bank of America called the race "one of the highest impact elections for the entire utility sector."

Hinojosa made opposition to data center construction a central part of her campaign and charged in one ad that incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott "works for" Elon Musk alongside images of the two men.

She staked out plans for a moratorium on new data center construction as well as stricter regulations on water and power usage and an end to tax breaks.

Abbott was seeking his fourth term as governor and said last year he wanted Texas to be the "epicenter of AI development."

More recently, he announced a moratorium of his own and said he would support more stringent requirements on power and water usage. Hinojosa quickly charged Abbott with "lying" and said his new proposals amounted to an "election year pause."

The race reflected a national mood that has turned sharply against data centers in recent months.

A UMass Amherst Poll in September found nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose local AI data center construction, with just 11% of voters welcoming their construction. These results showed that 76% of Democrats and 52% of Republicans oppose construction in their communities.

Across the country, voters also weighed in on at least 50 local ballot measures related to data centers in contests that spanned 13 states from Arkansas to Wisconsin....

....MORE 

Capital Markets: "Election-Inspired Dollar Setback may be Buying Opportunity Ahead of Friday's Employment Report "

From Marc to Market: 

The US election results initially spurred a sell-off in tech shares as Democrats may be more interested in regulating AI than the current administration, and local initiatives on ballots seemed overwhelmingly to support limits on the data center build out. That said, the amount of territory or percentage of data center plans seem relatively modest. While equities have recovered, the dollar remains broadly lower. The intraday momentum indicators are stretched, and the greenback has begun consolidating after session lows were recorded in the European morning. 

The dollar’s drivers, including the outlook for Fed policy and the economy, are likely to be more supportive over the next 48 hours or so.  The US sees the ADP private sector jobs estimate today, alongside the final services and composite PMI, ISM services, and the September trade balance.  Several Fed officials speak tomorrow and Friday, and those that have spoken recently seem to support a rate hike next month. And then on Friday, is the October jobs growth is seen a little more than 60k, which would be better than the three-month average....

....MUCH MORE 

Also at Marc to Market: 

Surplus: The History of Too Much and the End of Economic Primacy 

Surplus: The History of Too Much and the End of Economic Primacy

The Puzzle

The United States carries more than $40.5 trillion of debt. Neither party has the appetite to address it. Yet adjusted for inflation, real interest rates remain subdued. While nominal yields are near multi-decade highs, real yields are modest. The US 10-year yield is a little below 4.95% now, and US CPI was 3.7% in September. 

Scarcity cannot explain this. There is too much capital chasing too few outlets, and that is the argument of Surplus. The S&P 500 could fund the entire $5.2 trillion AI build-out with about 2.5 years of profits. Buybacks happen not because senior executives are generous; US corporations are now net lenders. Return the hot potato, the surplus capital to investors. Let them figure out what to do with it.

Politics and Economics Rejoined

Harold Lasswell, a founder of modern political science, defined politics as "who gets what, when and how." To the modern ear that sounds like economics....

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"Asian shares mixed as Democrats retake US Congress"

From dpa via the Oman Observer, November 4: 

Asian stocks ended mixed on Wednesday after Democrats took control of both houses of Congress in a dramatic win in the US midterm elections, raising uncertainty over tech regulation, trade policy and the US budget deficit.

Meanwhile, after a gauge of US job openings exceeded economist estimates, the probability of the US Federal Reserve hiking rates by 25 basis points in December rose to 80% in money markets.

Gold prices jumped more than 2% to hold above $4,000 an ounce in Asian trade, driven by a softer dollar and lower Treasury yields.

The US dollar dropped against all of its Group-of-10 peers while the benchmark 10-year Treasury note declined seven basis points to 4.89% as a commanding "blue wave" forced traders to rethink US President Donald Trump's remaining policy agenda and the political trajectory into 2028.

Brent crude futures were modestly higher at $103.76 a barrel after seeing sharp swings in the previous session amid uncertainty over the US-Iran peace talks.

Qatar said it saw hope for an interim deal as both the US and Iran evaluate new proposals put forward by mediators, despite fresh US strikes and continued threats to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

However, Iran's national security chief indicated in a social media post that Washington's response to Iran's demands for reopening the Strait of Hormuz and resuming peace talks was insufficient.

Trump told US broadcaster Fox News on Tuesday that he is "not looking to kill lots of people" in Iran following the midterm elections, but warned Washington would act decisively if needed.

Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong markets rose as a crushing defeat for US President Trump in the midterm elections opened the door to legislative deadlock.

China's Shanghai Composite index rallied 2.16% to 3,686.17 while Hong Kong's Hang Seng index surged 1.67% to 23,919.50, led by technology and healthcare stocks.

Investors shrugged off the results of a private survey that showed China's services sector expanded at its slowest pace in three months in October, with business confidence easing amid fierce competition and rising costs.

Japanese markets fell sharply as trading resumed after a public holiday. The Nikkei average lost more than 3% to hit a three-month low before recovering some lost ground to settle 1.42% lower at 62,188.63. The broader Topix index dropped 0.89% to 3,895.38.

Tech stocks suffered heavy losses, with Japanese chip-testing equipment maker Advantest, Japanese chip-equipment maker Tokyo Electron, Japanese telecom and investment group SoftBank Group and Japanese memory-chip maker Kioxia Holdings falling 3-5% on worries that Democratic control of both chambers in the US could lead to tighter regulation of data-centre projects and slower AI infrastructure spending.

Seoul stocks swung between gains and losses before closing higher as battery and pharma stocks rose on hopes for policy support by the Democratic Congress in the US. The Kospi index climbed 0.62% to 5,683.80....

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"Democrats won control of Congress. Their economic agenda is set to target healthcare, tariffs, and Trump's allies"

From Yahoo Finance, November 3: 

Democrats retook power in Washington on Tuesday night after flipping key House and Senate seats to command majorities in both houses of Congress.

Democrats secured control of the Senate after winning races in historically red states including Texas, South Carolina, and Kansas.

The party was also "marching toward control of the U.S. House" late Tuesday night, according to the Associated Press, after flipping seats from Florida to New Jersey to Kentucky. Four major networks said Democrats' control of the House was assured. 

Democrats retook power in Washington on Tuesday night after flipping key House and Senate seats to command majorities in both houses of Congress.

Democrats secured control of the Senate after winning races in historically red states including Texas, South Carolina, and Kansas.

The party was also "marching toward control of the U.S. House" late Tuesday night, according to the Associated Press, after flipping seats from Florida to New Jersey to Kentucky. Four major networks said Democrats' control of the House was assured.

The power shift creates a new platform for Democrats to launch investigations of President Trump's economic allies — Elon Musk to name one — and pass bills that may be unlikely to become law but will mark a sharp change in the political climate for business leaders and economic issues after two years of unified Republican control.

The change also appears set to elevate figures like Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren and others to prominent positions with oversight over economic policy.

Democrats are planning "a shock-and-awe legislative sprint," the New York Times reported, on issues like healthcare subsidies and Trump's tariffs, which could prompt a wave of bills to pass the House but stall against the 60-vote threshold in the Senate. Even in the minority, Senate rules mean Republicans retain the power to stop legislation. 

Democrats are also likely to seek areas of bipartisan agreement on pharmaceuticals, the housing market, and AI data centers, all sectors that both Republicans and Democrats have spotlighted on the campaign trail.

Divided government, of course, may also set the stage for political clashes that could be destabilizing to markets and the broader economy.

"While conventional wisdom suggests equities tend to rally following midterm elections, particularly when the outcome produces divided government, we caution that the post-election environment may look considerably different this cycle," warned Raymond James Washington Policy Analyst Ed Mills in a pre-election note.

He added that much of the recent volatility has been driven by unexpected moves from the White House. "We believe Trump will increasingly test the limits of executive authority during the remainder of his term," Mills wrote.

An expected focus on Elon Musk and Trump's economic team 
The House is set to be led by Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who has been notably tight-lipped about his plans.

He met with Democratic volunteers as Election Day wound down and told reporters, "We're relentlessly focused on driving down the high cost of living and fighting for an affordable America."

Jeffries avoided the question of whether he would reach out to Trump while the president told the New York Times he will accept the election results.

Democrats overall, going by early signals, intend to aim their new powers at an array of high-profile targets, with Musk chief among them, as part of a far-reaching effort to impose new checks on the Trump administration.

"Lawyer up," said Rep. Robert Garcia, who is poised to become chair of the House Oversight Committee, in one particularly pithy signal of the Democrats' plans.

Recent developments involving Elon Musk and Starlink in Ukraine are just the latest topic that Democrats say they will investigate around the world's richest man. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine and discussed the decision on a call with Trump in October.

A group of Silicon Valley lawmakers said in a letter the issue raises broader concerns and could lead them to "closely scrutinize federal funding awarded to Mr. Musk's businesses" in the next Congress....

....MUCH MORE 

Also at Yahoo Finance:

Over the next decade, the U.S. Treasury will spend $20 trillion in interest on the national debt—$200 billion a month by 2036

"Trending Now: The End of the World" November 6

From the always handy Find a Protest website: 

Trending Now: The End of the World
ICAN Deutschland, Artists Against the Bomb und der Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung [im Rahmen Programm der (Kunst-)Ausstellung 

"Artists Against the Bomb"] (Die Veranstaltung findet auf Englisch mit deutscher Simultanübersetzung statt)

Date: Friday, November 6th, 2026
Time: 6:00 PM
Location: Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung, Berlin, Germany 

....MUCH MORE, map, theme, contact info, organizer website

 

FindAProtest homepage 

Browse Find a Protest:

 

Interactive Protest Map 

 

Browse Protests by Cause

 

This Weekend 

 

Popular Cities - https://www.findaprotest.info/#popular-cities 

MIT Technology Review: "The Impossible Issue"

From MIT, November/December 2026 issue:

 

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"GLOBAL MARKETS-Stocks erase losses, oil tumbles after Trump says US will end $4 billion funding to Israel"

From Reuters via London South East, November 3: 

* Dollar flat, Treasury yields edge higher as midterms eyed

* Apple's ​weak outlook ⁠adds to tech earnings gloom

* Oil volatility keeps ​investors on edge

Stocks in Europe and the US reversed course to trade ​higher ‌on Tuesday as oil prices dropped after US President Donald Trump said Washington would stop $4 billion in funding to Israel after the end of ⁠this year.

Speaking to Fox News' Fox and Friends, Trump said Israel ⁠no longer needed the funding. He had made a ​deal with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stop the aid, he said.

The comments sent oil prices lower and helped stocks reverse their losses. The pan-European STOXX 600 index rose 0.13% to 650.3 points, while futures tracking the benchmark S&P 500 index added 0.14%.

AI ANXIETY ​KNOCKS STOCKS ‌IN ASIA

The gains offered some relief after a fresh bout of AI anxiety unnerved investors, who are also on tenterhooks as voting began in crucial US midterm elections....

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It Looks Like The Japanese Gangsters Were Right

Although we didn't outright sneer when linking to this May 2024 Le Monde article:

"In Japan, yakuza are reduced to stealing Pokémon cards", 

it might have been a bit condescending to include "Making a slow getaway: Japan's anti-yakuza laws result in cohort of ageing gangsters" among the outro links. The geriatric mobsters may have known exactly what they were doing....

Since then we've seen:

October 20, ABC News - Thieves steal nearly $1 million worth of Pokémon cards in SoCal FedEx truck break in 

November 1, ZeroHedge - Pokemon Card Mania Sparks Bubble Fear: "Just Doing A Crazy Bull Run" 

Which started with: 

A PSA 10 Aquapolis Crystal Lugia just sold for $360,000 again, tying the record from earlier this month; in August one sold for $148,511, per . New floor or the top? Follow us for more collectible news https://t.co/BDysHzoZxu

— Nerdcave’77 (@nerdcave77) November 1, 2026

As it's hook and then went into charts, graphs, market analytics, fear/greed indicators, lists of top cards, analyst commentary:

We are no longer just talking about people spending a few thousand dollars on nostalgia anymore. At these extravagant prices, collectibles are competing for the same pools of capital that could otherwise be sitting in stocks, crypto, watches, art or other alternative assets.... 

and so much more that it's actually a bit overwhelming. 

For what it's worth today's introduction was previously used on top of a September 2025 Wall Street Journal story:

"The Hot Investment With a 3,000% Return? Pokémon Cards"

Meanwhile I still look back at what might have been:

June 2018 - CryptoKitty Trading Volume Collapses: Andreessen, Union Square and Climateer Hurt Worst which has most of the story including:

Matt Levine Writes About CryptoKitties ("this column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners"). 

Matt Levine's Meow Culpa—CryptoKitties, An Exegesis 

"How we made $100K trading CryptoKitties"
Not us, we're HODLers, this guy:... 

Which was followed by March 2019's "Who owns IP on the blockchain? CryptoKitties give glimpse into less-cute crypto concerns"
I had asked that people not mention CryptoKitties in my presence as I am still in mourning* but they do anyway....

And finally:

"Elaine Thinks About Signaling and Destroys My CryptoKitties Dreams":

Her piece was written a couple weeks ago i.e. at least two cryptocurrency price tumbles ago.
Think of a waveform, but not the smooth, soothing shape of a sinusoid. Rather think of a faux quasi-periodicity with just enough regularity to trigger a mirage of pattern recognition, just enough to suck you in, across the event horizon of speculation into the madness of Hunter S Thompson:...

"Still humping the American Dream, that vision of the Big Winner somehow emerging from the last minute pre—dawn chaos of a stale Vegas casino. Big strike in Silver City. Beat the dealer and go home rich. Why not? I stopped at the Money Wheel and dropped a dollar on Thomas Jefferson—a $2 bill, the straight Freak ticket, thinking as always that some idle instinct bet might carry the whole thing off. But no. Just another two bucks down the tube. You bastards! No. Calm down. Learn to enjoy losing.... 

—Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Excuse me, I have to take a moment  

"Why is Egypt jumping into Houthi war? First, follow the money."

From Responsible Statecraft, October 29:

Cairo buys an increasing amount of fuel from abroad, owes billions to foreign lenders, and depends on open Red Sea-Suez traffic, among other pressures. 

Egypt's parliament has voted, after two postponements, to authorize President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi to take “necessary measures” to help defend Saudi Arabia against the Houthis, the Iran-aligned group that controls much of Yemen and has spent weeks firing missiles and drones at the kingdom’s airports and fossil fuel infrastructure.

It took weeks of debate in the halls of power for the parliament to ultimately give Sisi the greenlight. This is unusual given that the chamber is largely pro-government and normally gives the president what he asks for.

A handful of members abstained over concerns that relevant details — such as the length of the mission, the cost, how many troops would be sent — were never disclosed. Their complaints reflect deep unease in Egypt about being dragged into a foreign war.

To understand why Sisi has pushed to provide military support to Saudi Arabia, despite institutional reluctance, one must follow the money.

Saudi Arabia keeps roughly $10.3 billion parked at Egypt’s central bank. These deposits count toward Egypt’s foreign-currency reserves. Add accounts owned by Kuwait and Qatar and the total is about $18 billion, close to one-third of Egypt’s $57 billion of reserves. Egypt relies heavily on these deposits because it is one of the world’s biggest wheat importers. It also buys an increasing amount of fuel from abroad and owes billions in interest to foreign lenders, all in dollars, which it does not, on its own, earn enough of.

There is no public indication that Riyadh tied those critical deposits to Egypt’s military support. But Cairo does not need to be asked. Its pound just hit a record low of 56 to the dollar. Debt service — interest plus repayments — takes about 64% of this year’s budget, and the interest payments alone cost more than the state spend on education, health, wages and subsidies put together. A government in this position cannot easily say “no” to one of its main financial backers.

Egypt has spent decades avoiding foreign entanglements, especially in Yemen. In 1962 then-President Gamal Abdel Nasser sent troops there to back the republicans in a civil war. The republicans ultimately won, but Egypt was bogged down for years and lost thousands of soldiers.

Yet staying out has proved much harder than Egypt hoped. When Iranian missiles hit the United Arab Emirates earlier this year, Abu Dhabi, which rescued Egypt’s economy in 2024 with a blockbuster $35 billion property deal on the Mediterranean coast, complained loudly that its Arab friends were doing nothing. Cairo then quietly sent a detachment of Rafale fighters, which only became public knowledge when Emirati state media showed Sisi inspecting the jets during a visit.

The lesson learned from that episode is that Gulf money comes with an expectation of visible loyalty....

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Capital Markets: "The Greenback is Mixed as Americans Vote; Aussie Sold after RBA Signaled Its Fifth Hike may be its Last"

From Marc to Market: 

The US dollar is mixed today, as Americans vote in the midterm elections.  There does not seem to a robust pattern for the dollar around the midterm elections, but the S&P typically does well in the fourth quarter of the mid-term year, and with even more regularity, the S&P rallies in the third year of a presidential term (2027).  

There have been two notable developments today. First, as anticipated, the Reserve Bank of Australia delivered its fifth hike of the year today, and encouraged market speculation that the tightening cycle is over. The Australian dollar, which has been buoyed by the tighter monetary policy, is the weakest of the G10 currencies today, off nearly 1/3 of 1% to its lowest level in a little more than two weeks. Second, the PBOC announced an increase reserve requirement for foreign currencies. This, coupled with the first back-to-back increase in the dollar’s fix in a little more than a month, suggests a period of consolidation may be at hand....

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"Brookfield plans for a $27 billion AI data center at UK power station"

Talking big money.

DRX:Lon is up 67.00 (+8.28%) at 876.00 

From CNBC, November 3: 

• Brookfield is planning a data center with more than one gigawatt of capacity at a site in England.
• The asset manager estimated that the potential investment for the project could exceed £20 billion ($26.8 billion).
• Drax Group, which operates the power station the facility will be housed at, saw shares rise more than 8% on Tuesday morning. 

Brookfield is targeting a massive artificial intelligence data center in the north of England, as Europe scrambles to develop infrastructure to support the rollout of AI amid high energy and land costs.

Energy company Drax Group said Tuesday it has signed an agreement with Brookfield and the asset manager’s neocloud platform Radiant to jointly develop an AI data center on the Drax Power Station estate in North Yorkshire. London-listed shares of Drax were up 8.8% in early morning trading.

The project is initially targeting up to 100 megawatts of capacity to be operational from the first quarter of 2028, with an additional 500 MW of capacity to be brought online between 2028 and 2031. It is then looking to secure more than 1 gigawatt of capacity at the site by an unspecified date.

Brookfield estimates total investment, including semiconductors, could exceed £20 billion ($26.8 billion), with an initial £2.5 billion investment in phase 1.

“This is a unique opportunity for the UK’s AI ecosystem to build at scale,” Radiant CEO Mahdi Yahya said in a statement. “By designing, building and operating from the UK, it will give British researchers, startups and enterprises access to frontier compute at home.”

The first phase of Brookfield’s project in North Yorkshire will use power from the grid and target commercial customers from early 2028.

The initial phase is subject to planning, regulatory and network approvals from the government and relevant agencies, alongside securing a tenant for the project, Drax said in a statement said. The company added that final investment decisions are yet to be made.

Europe’s AI data center push
While the U.S. has surged ahead on developing the huge data centers needed to power AI, Europe has been slower to break ground on the facilities. The U.K. in particular has struggled with high energy costs and challenges with long waiting times for businesses to connect to the grid....

....MUCH MORE

Also at CNBC:  Jim Cramer says these six fashion stocks are buys beyond the AI trade

If one is so inclined we have much more on Drax, the largest powerplant in Britain, including the James Bond connection (Moonraker's villian, Hugo Drax*) and the admiral. Use the 'Search blog' box, upper left.

Richard Drax's grandfather, Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, KCB, DSO, JP, DL, was pals with Ian Fleming.

—Bournemouth Daily Echo, Revealed: James Bond's 11 surprising connections to Dorset and the New Forest, October 25, 2015.

Ditto at: "https://www.mi6community.com/discussion/7270/the-real-james-bond-characters-flemings-inspirations"

....There's probably a connection to the giant biomass power plant of the same name but I've forgotten what it is. Or maybe that's just the northern branch of the fam.

Renewable Fuel: "Wood Pellet Giant Enviva Discloses a Financial Crisis"
*Nationality American 

Occupation  Criminal mastermind 

Affiliation Independent 

Status Deceased; shot by a poison dart and blasted into space by James Bond

"Frozen part II: Hackers remotely defrost produce in Euro supermarkets ... again"

The cooler/chiller companies better get this under control.

From The Register, November 2:

Let it go (bad): Dozens of stores report mass food wastage as managers start their week in puddles 

The cyberattacks on commercial refrigerators and freezers in Europe continue, as a slew of grocery stores in Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Sweden report widespread food wastage as a result of miscreants raising the temperatures to highs of 50ºC (122°F).

In Belgium, around 40 Delhaize stores were affected after the attackers reportedly switched fridges and freezers into defrost mode overnight, between Sunday and Monday, resulting in stock issues.

Diego Louwers, a Proxy Delhaize store manager in Overijse, near Brussels, told RTL Info that the consequences of the cyberattacks were "catastrophic," forcing the store to throw out the entirety of its fresh and frozen products.

"We can't have anything worse in our line of work," he said. "We have to throw away all of our merchandise, and it's both heartbreaking and very complicated operationally."....

....MUCH MORE 

FrenchTech: "CERN Partners With Mistral to Build a New Kind of AI for Physics"

From HPCwire, October 27:

CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, has spent decades collecting enormous amounts of data from particle collisions. With the recent rapid growth in AI capabilities, CERN wants to develop a foundation model that can make better use of all that data.

To help it achieve this goal, the European physics laboratory has teamed up with French AI company Mistral. The two have signed a statement of intent to explore the development of foundation models for scientific research.

CERN is already using AI for particle physics. With Mistral, CERN wants to move from multiple specialized AI models to a more general foundation model that could perform several scientific tasks. Their first project is a proposed Large Physics Model, reportedly called Flare, that would be trained on billions of simulated collisions from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

How much data has LHC collected? According to some estimates, CERN currently holds around one exabyte of experimental data from the LHC. That is equivalent to one million terabytes. And that amount is expected to grow significantly. An upgrade to the LHC around 2030 is expected to increase the number of collisions tenfold.

The new foundation model with Mistral could handle several of these tasks together. It could help reconstruct collision events and identify particles, reducing the need for separate algorithms.

What’s in it for Mistral? The partnership provides access to one of the world’s largest scientific datasets and an opportunity to expand its work into scientific research....

....MUCH MORE 

I was sort of hoping for next-gen riot-dispersing sound cannons but this could get interesting too. 

"The face you make after you voted for socialism because gas was expensive."

From Resist CBDC:

The face you make after you voted for socialism because gas was expensive. https://t.co/HEFsbtdZWu

— Resist CBDC 🏁 (@Resist_CBDC) September 26, 2026

As has been observed, most recently in Brazil, you can vote your way into socialism, you can't vote your way out. 

Kilkenomics: Economics, Comedy (like Davos without the hookers) November 6 - 8, Kilkenny, Ireland

Tickets still available.

From the event website:

“John Maynard Keynes meets Lenny Bruce”

 

“Having a laugh despite the gloom”

 

“A little jewel where players manage to talk human without being patronizing”

 

“I’ve been to lots of festivals and conferences, but Kilkenomics may just be the best. More than that: it felt like democracy.”

 

“Wildly successful”

 

“An utterly bizzare idea but the public love it”

 

....MUCH MORE

Capital Markets: "What a Difference the Weekend Made"

From Marc Chandler at Bannockburn Global Forex:

What a difference the weekend made.  There is a resilience today that was not seen at the end of last week.  Questions over the Ai-meme, which drove the semiconductor index down 7.2%, have eased today, despite S&P cutting Meta’s rating outlook at the end of last week. Last week, France escaped a Moody’s downgrade, but at the end of the week saw its outlook cut by Fitch.  At the end of last week, December WTI reached a contract high near $105. The reports suggesting that Washington will give the negotiations more time has pressured December WTI below $100, which appears to be one of the factors that may be behind the lower bond yields today. 

The US dollar is mixed. Most European currencies are higher but the Norwegian krone, which might have been knocked back (~0.70%) by the pullback in oil prices.  The dollar-bloc currencies and the Japanese yen are also weaker.  Tomorrow is the US midterm election.  There does not seem to be a strong statistical pattern for the dollar around the election.  However, one of the most regular patterns is that the S&P 500 tends to do well in Q4 of the midterm election year, and the third year of a presidential term (2027) is the strongest year of the presidential cycle. 

Prices..

....MUCH MORE 

"New ‘riot tax’ set to be levied on insurance policies in France"

 From The Connexion, October 29:

A 0.8% increase to home and vehicle insurance is planned to be introduced from 2027 

A new so-called ‘riot tax’ to cover the cost of repairs from protests in France is set to be levied on insurance policies starting from January 2027.

The ‘tax’ will take the form 0.8% levy on home and vehicle insurance policies, as well as policies held by local authorities and businesses. 

Money raised will be siphoned off into a fund specifically for damage caused by rioting and urban violence. The fund will receive around €400 million per year, the lion’s share of this directly from the new levy.

The policy, first suggested in 2023 and included in the 2026 budget but yet to come into force, made headlines once again following damage caused in protests on October 17 and 24, which estimates suggest has reached €1 billion. 

However, the fund is not retroactive and will not cover damage from these riots or any others that take place this year.

While the levy is legal following its inclusion in the 2026 budget, the decree introducing it still needs to be approved by France’s Conseil d’Etat before it can be implemented, with the body set to look over the proposal in the coming weeks. 

If validated, a full overview of the regulations will be published in France’s Journal officiel.

It is modelled on a similar levy for natural disasters (catastrophe naturelle), which sees funds raised from a special levy on policies set aside to be used solely in the event of claims following a natural disaster. 

The ‘riot tax’ has been criticised as an additional expenditure for households during a cost of living crisis, and a punishment against residents and vehicle owners who must now foot the bill for the actions of a violent minority. 

However, the state has maintained it is necessary to provide assistance for smaller businesses damaged during protests through a collective effort. It has noted too that some insurers are now hesitant to offer riot coverage, leaving smaller businesses at risk.

Independent of this levy, a ‘rioter pays’ bill (casseurs-payeurs) has recently been approved by senators. It would see people found guilty of participating in a gathering that led to damage or looting held civilly liable for some of the repair costs....

....MUCH MORE 

The "Rioters Pay" bill is getting more pushback because of, well, the observation made by Frédéric Bastiat after the February Revolution of 1848.*

From Reuters, October 27/28:

Critics attack 'anti-democratic' French bill making rioters pay 

A proposed French law making rioters liable to pay up to €10,000 ($11,150) for damage they cause faces ​a backlash from rights groups and some lawyers who say it attacks the basic democratic right to take ‌to the streets to protest.

 

President Emmanuel Macron's government, under pressure to quell social protests accompanied by some of France's worst unrest in years, says the law is needed to compensate victims of the vandalism that often follows protests, such as the looting and rioting seen across the country on October 17....

....MUCH MORE 

 

Free speech, free Adidas, free iPhones, same same.

*And Freddie?

“Government is the great fiction through which everybody 
endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” 

—The State, Frédéric Bastiat, 1848 

"Argentina’s Milei pitches a regulation-free AI haven at the end of the world"

From the Associated Press, November 2: 

Leer en español   

Data centers have become one of the most polarizing issues in the world. Argentina’s president wants to lure as many of them as he can get.

As residents and policymakers in the United States and Europe fight the facilities that power artificial intelligence, President Javier Milei is pitching Argentina as a haven, promising a hands-off approach to draw foreign investment his crisis-prone country needs.

Like his ally, U.S. President Donald Trump, Milei frequently posts AI-generated images on social media. He has proposed creating “nonhuman corporations” run entirely by AI agents.

“We are not going to regulate artificial intelligence,” Milei told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Washington last month. “We are going to leave it free.”

Visitor logs obtained by The Associated Press show a steady stream of tech figures meeting with Milei and his aides in recent months, from venture capitalist Peter Thiel to representatives of OpenAI, Amazon, Google, Oracle and data center companies. Foreign Ministry records show that data center developer Crusoe, which helped build OpenAI’s flagship campus in Texas, sought talks this year with Argentine energy officials about U.S. government-backed investments.

Milei’s hopes rest as much on geography as on ideology. Patagonia offers vast, open plains where noisy server farms can be built far from population centers, a chilly climate to cool the machines, powerful winds to generate electricity and one of the world’s largest shale deposits in Vaca Muerta to fuel power plants.

“In densely populated parts of the U.S. and Europe, there’s a lot of fighting over access to the grid and who should get the electricity,” said Marta Zlotkowska, head of international development at Green Capital, a Polish renewable energy company that plans to build a $3 billion data center in Patagonia to lease to big tech firms for AI computing, though it has yet to secure a customer.

“We compared potential locations for the project around the world and Argentina — well, Patagonia — came out on top in every category,” she said.

Patagonia’s AI promise
For Argentina’s energy industry, already booming as the Iran war hikes oil prices, data centers represent a tantalizing new market. Pampa Energía, one of the country’s biggest power companies, has announced plans to supply immense amounts of gas-fired power to a data center near Vaca Muerta and is seeking developers....

....MUCH MORE 

"Europe's Natural Gas Prices Soar to Four-Year High as Winter Looms"

If the forecasted early breakdown of the polar vortex comes to pass, allowing Polar air to head south, the recent riots will be fondly looked back upon as 'the quiet time.'

From OilPrice, October 26: 

Europe’s benchmark natural gas price jumped by 2% at opening in Amsterdam on Monday, extending the 7% weekly gain from last week, as concerns mount that the gas withdrawal season has started amid no signs that Qatar’s LNG flows would return anytime soon.

The front-month price at the Dutch Title Transfer Facility (TTF), the benchmark for Europe’s gas trading, rose by 2.1% to as much as $107.40 (95.73 euros) per megawatt-hour (MWh) early on Monday, reaching its highest level since 2022.

The European natural gas price is now at its highest levels since the autumn of 2022, when Europe faced the first winter without most of the Russian pipeline gas supply. The current price is also equivalent to more than $30 per million British thermal units (MMBtu).

The TTF price rallied by 7% last week as several EU countries began withdrawing gas from storage amid lower temperatures....

....MUCH MORE 

From Severe Weather Europe, October 28:

Polar Vortex Split Forecast: The Earliest Stratospheric Warming on Record Is Coming 

The Polar Vortex is heading toward a record early disruption. The latest forecasts show stratospheric winds collapsing toward a full reversal in early November, splitting the Polar Vortex into two separate cores. If the reversal happens, it will be the earliest Sudden Stratospheric Warming on record, by at least three weeks.

An event this early is uncharted territory. With a Super El Niño already shaping the weather pattern, the impacts are harder to track than in mid-winter. But forecasts already show the first indirect links to the split cores, with cooler trends developing over parts of Europe and the eastern United States in coming weeks.

In this article, I look at the developing Polar Vortex split and the Stratospheric Warming, how deep it reaches through the atmosphere, and what it could mean for the weather in the mid-range. I also look at why the long-range data points to an even stronger disruption in mid-winter 2026/2027.

The Polar Vortex is a broad winter circulation over the northern (and southern) hemispheres. You can imagine the Polar Vortex as a spinning wall over the polar regions, rising from the surface into the stratosphere (over 50 km/31 miles high), trapping the cold polar air inside.

The Polar Vortex is divided into two layers: the stratosphere (at higher altitudes) and the troposphere (at lower altitudes). These two layers are connected but can often behave differently. A strong, stable Polar Vortex acts like a barrier, locking the coldest air into the North Pole, creating milder conditions for the United States and Europe. Image: NOAA

When the Polar Vortex is disrupted or “collapses,” this polar barrier breaks, allowing cold Arctic air to spill southward into the mid-latitudes. But this early in the season, the Polar Vortex is still building up for winter, so a disruption now behaves differently than in mid-winter.

Below is an example from NOAA of how a disrupted Polar Vortex releases cold polar air into the United States or Europe in winter.....

....MUCH MORE 

AI: "The Race We’re Actually Running, Part 2: Good Enough at a Fraction of the Price"

Avoiding the question: 

Will the incoming Congress use their antipathy to Elon Musk and the AI build-out to cripple the AI expansion, remove the only sector propping up the economy, plunge the nation, and thus the world unto a depression, neuter any tech advantage America possesses, hand the emerging future to China and force the U.S. to follow the last-ditch German economic plan, betting everything on re-armament before the final war to end all wars?

That question. 

From the High Performance Computing geeks at HPCwire, October 30:

What the AI race is a contest over, and why the cheapest capable model may win

In part 1 of this series, I looked at where the US and China stand after two decades of investment. This installment asks the question the public debate tends to skip: when people say “winning the AI race,” what does winning mean?

There Is No Single Finish Line
The AI race gets described as though there were one finish line: one model, one moment when someone crosses first and the outcome is settled. The United States and China are not running toward the same point. If China is racing toward nine o’clock and the US toward two o’clock, both can run as fast as they possibly can and still not compete for the same prize. The useful question is what each side is trying to get, and what happens to the rest of the world once they get it. 

Five Things Being Contested
Frontier model capability. This is the headline contest: which model scores highest on the hardest benchmarks. The US leads, narrowly. Stanford’s 2026 AI Index put the gap between the leading US and Chinese models on the Arena leaderboard at about 2.7% as of March. In mid-October, the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index scored the best closed model at 58 and the best openly downloadable model at 46. The pattern is consistent: close on conversation, wider on hard reasoning and long autonomous tasks.

Chip manufacturing. The US holds a wide and, for now, structural lead: advanced chip fabrication sits in a small number of facilities the US and its allies control. Part of that lead is policy. The Institute for Progress estimates that with no H200 exports, the US would hold a 21 to 49 times advantage in AI compute produced in 2026, and that unrestricted exports of Nvidia‘s H200 could cut it to roughly 1.2 to 6.7 times. Commerce approved about 10 Chinese buyers in May, but Reuters reported no deliveries as Beijing steered its companies toward Huawei. That substitution is not one for one. Huawei’s Ascend 910C trails the H200 in computing power and memory bandwidth, and Epoch AI estimates Huawei’s 2026 output at about 880,000 H100-equivalents against about 23 million for Nvidia, under 4%. The tightest constraint is high-bandwidth memory, which China cannot yet make in volume. Huawei is pushing anyway. In September it pulled its Ascend 960DT forward to early 2027, a chip Bernstein estimates will roughly match the H200 with more than twice its interconnect bandwidth, and said a 256,000-card cluster is being deployed. How large the US lead stays depends on Washington’s export decisions and China’s memory production as much as on chip design.

Research volume and open-source distribution. China leads here, and this may be the contest that decides what the rest of the world runs on. Chinese models accounted for about 41% of downloads on Hugging Face over the past year, ahead of US models, and the summer brought a run of Chinese releases: Moonshot‘s Kimi K3, Alibaba‘s Qwen3.8, DeepSeek V4.1-Flash, and models from Z.ai and Xiaomi. In October, Anthropic reported that Z.ai’s open-weight GLM-5.3 came close to its restricted Mythos Preview model on cyber-exploit tests, while NIST’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation put it about four months behind the US frontier. DeepSeek and Huawei have also released open tools for programming Huawei’s chips, aimed at reducing dependence on Nvidia’s CUDA software.

A note on terms. An open-weight model publishes its trained parameters, called weights, so anyone can download it, run it on their own hardware, and modify it. Many people call these open-source models, though the training data and code usually stay private. A closed model, such as those from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, can only be used through the company’s own service.

The trade between the two is simple. Closed models are more capable, and open models are much cheaper. DeepSeek’s open-weight V4-Pro costs $0.66 per million input tokens and $1.98 per million output tokens off-peak (a token is about three-quarters of a word), against $5 and $25 for Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.7 and $5 and $30 for OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. That makes DeepSeek roughly 8 to 15 times cheaper. On SWE-bench Verified, a widely used test of fixing real software bugs, Opus 4.7 solves 87.6% of the problems; DeepSeek reports 80.6%, and an independent US government evaluation measured 74%. Put simply, the open model solves fewer of the hardest problems for about a tenth of the price.

Open models also reach what the best closed models could do only recently. Epoch AI puts the lag at about four months. So a buyer can pay a premium for the top of the range now, or give up some capability on the hardest tasks at a fraction of the cost and expect open models to reach today’s frontier within months. Many will take that trade for customer service, document processing, and routine coding, where the cheaper model already does the job. Open models are not only a Chinese story, either: hosting companies offer OpenAI’s open-weight gpt-oss-120b for well under a dollar per million tokens.

Capital. Stanford’s AI Index puts US AI investment in 2025 at about $286 billion against about $12 billion for China, roughly 23 times. China answers with state capital. Bloomberg reported in June that Beijing has drafted a five-year, roughly $295 billion plan for a national AI data-center grid, funded by state bonds, requiring at least 80%domestic technology and interconnected by 2028. That is about $59 billion a year, less than any one of the largest US cloud companies spends: Oracle, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet together are expected to spend about $800 billion on capital projects in 2026, according to research by Columbia Business School’s Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh. The Chinese plan’s strength is coordination, bringing state debt, land, power allocation, and domestic chips together under one national grid.

Talent. This trend favors China and compounds over the longest horizon, which makes it the hardest to reverse quickly.

What the Summit Did and Did Not Settle 
The most visible diplomacy of the fall was the Trump-Xi summit in Washington, which ended September 25. According to news reports of the readouts, it extended the trade truce to January 10, 2027, eased tariffs on about $30 billion of non-sensitive goods in each direction, and opened a dialogue on AI risks with a channel for AI-related incidents. Rare-earth talks will continue, and advanced chips did not feature. The leaders are expected to meet again at APEC in November and the G20 in Miami in December. The diplomacy is moving on its own track, and the competition in chips, models, and power is moving faster.

....MUCH MORE