A bonus LIVE episode of Masters in Business:

I spend most of the evening listening to — and laughing — with bestselling author and financial journalist Michael Lewis, live from the Landmark Theater in Port Washington, NY.

Our wide-ranging, 90-minute conversation covered the full arc of his career, from “Liar’s Poker” to “Who is Government.” The informative – and often hilarious – conversation included his experiences turning Moneyball into a film (including on-set hijinks from Brad Pitt), how his career as a writer evolved, and what he is working on next. (His latest book, Blockers, is out on October 6).

You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.

You DO NOT want to miss this fun, rollicking live episode of Masters in Business.

Transcript below…

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Lewis LIVE Transcript:

 

This is Masters in Business on Bloomberg radio

Barry Ritholtz: Another Masters in Business Live, this time with Michael Lewis.

I’ve been fortunate to interview the poet laureate of finance, I don’t know, maybe a dozen times, 10 times over the years I’ve interviewed him after each of the last few books.

And, I’ve interviewed him live at a couple of conferences and events. I’ve had dinners with him. I’ve gotten drunk with him at a bar late at night. Imagine the greatest storyteller of your generation, and then sitting at a bar and having a couple of drinks with him; it’s every bit as spectacular as you would imagine.

So when I read that his new book was coming out. I said, “Hey, if you’re interested in speaking to a small group at a local theater, I’d be happy to to set that up.” And, his book  PR people said, “Great.”

So at the Main Street Theater in Port Washington to a crowd of just 300 people, he regaled us with stories for 90 minutes. You’ll hear almost no me in this, because my job was just to give him a nudge and then stay the hell out of his way. You could tell the audience loved it. It was so much fun, there were plenty of I had never heard before, listen for the story about Billy Bean and the f-bomb.

It really is special . . .I thought this was a blast, and I think you will also. With no further ado, Michael Lewis on his new book, “Who is government” and his career as a writer.

~~~

Barry Ritholtz: Welcome, Michael.

Michael Lewis: It’s a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Barry Ritholtz:Welcome to the North Shore of Long Island to Gatsby, Long Island.

Michael Lewis: I’ve seen none of it. It was dark and rainy. Is it?

Barry Ritholtz: Let’s start out, how, how you doing? How’s the book tour going?

Michael Lewis: So it’s called Who is Government?

Barry Ritholtz: Who is government?

Michael Lewis:You said, “What is government?”

Barry Ritholtz: Yeah, the same thing. Who is government?

Michael Lewis:And, it’s an odd, it’s an odd. If we’re gonna be honest here. There are books and there are book-like objects. And this is closer to a book like Object, because I didn’t write the whole thing. I wrote, I wrote a third of it. Mm-hmm. I, I love it. But I, but I got, I am, I have six other writers that I hired to do this with me.

I’m answering this the way I’m answering your question. The book tours, it’s normally my least favorite part of what I do for a living. It’s, and, and I don’t know why that is. I just don’t because it’s a slog. It’s, it’s, I don’t like being on tv. But you gotta do that. I don’t, the the business of presenting yourself this way is so different from the business of writing the book that it’s jarring in, in the first place and then the worst thing happens. 

You start to like it. And, and then you get, you get going back in to like, being a writer book is jarring. But, but the, the thing that is usually a, a problem is that, you know, you’re kind of on the line, you know, it’s your book, it’s just you’re out there alone. Now, if people say it sucks, I can just say it’s the other people who are responsible.

And so I feel it’s kind ofit’s kind of a, it’s kind of a pleasure, this one compared to the others going out and talking about it.

Barry Ritholtz: So I’ve only seen you with some of the other authors once or twice. You were on some show with, Kamua Bell and I don’t think you were, I haven’t seen you with any of the other co-authors.

Michael Lewis:Did you see the, did you see it was Morning Joe with Kamal Bell? (Yeah.) All right, so Kamal be, is a six foot, five inch, 300, 250 pound black man. Right? And, and he shows up at Morning Joe in a sweatshirt that says immigrants aren’t criminals, but the president is one. And, and, and, and, and they say. They say you can’t wear that on tv.

Joe is not there. He’s remote and so they, they try to find something that will fit Kamal, be nothing will fit Kamal be Is that why it was inside out? Is that what he did? No. What he did, no, it gets worse than that. They then tried to get him to flip it around and it looked ridiculous. Then they put it right side, the right side out again and they put black tape over just the bottom part of that.

And then when they, by the time we got, he got finished, we’d lost our segment. They, they, they, they’d run out of time and Joe was heading off to Dr. There’s another hour Joe was headed off to drive his kid to school and they called him and said that we can’t have him on because you know, we can’t figure out what do with the sweatshirt.

And Joe Interceded and said, have him wear the sweatshirt. He can make sure everybody can read it. And put him on and Wow. And what was, but what was really weird about it is that though Joe was comfortable making that statement on his, on his show, n none of the authorities in the actual studio were, and so they frame Kamau, it’s like this giant head and you can’t see anything.

And the whole time he’s talking, he keeps going, he goes, he’s going like this with a sweatshirt. [I saw that}. Did you see that? Yes. Yeah. No, it was, it’s incredibly distracting. I was trying to have a conversation and he’s, this man is doing this thing with his sweatshirt. But yes, mostly it’s been, I mean, I, I’ve done some stuff with some of the co-authors, mostly stage stuff.

So I’ve been on stage one way or another in one city or another with all of them or each of them.  but most of the, most of the other stuff, the TV stuff I’ve had to do on my own.

Barry Ritholtz: So I want to get to this book in a minute, but first I wanna set the stage with the arc of the two prior books [’cause] I that are related to this. Well, exactly. That’s what I’m teeing up.  I’m just trying, don’t get ahead of me. Just trying to help.  So the premonition was how the US really did a mediocre job. During the pandemic, you focused on charity Dean and the pandemic emergency response team and the mess they had to clean up.

I’m curious how that book led to the Fifth Risk, which was the book,  that was the predecessor to this. So I’m gonna have to help you. Go ahead. The fifth risk is before this. Before the, before the premonition. It goes Fifth Risk Premonition this

Barry Ritholtz: Then, withdrawn. Okay.  So, but, so the Fifth Risk is the predecessor book to this.

Michael Lewis:Yes. How did that lead to this book? Yeah, so that, there we go. I’m sorry, I got the order wrong. Yeah, yeah. Sorry about that. And, and your wife, Wendy, is here somewhere in the front row. I’m so sorry you’re feeling poorly, but thanks. Thank you for coming,

Barry Ritholtz: By the way, wouldn’t be the first time you’ve embarrassed me in public and we, we could save that conversation for later. [Okay. But, okay.] How did those books lead to this book?

Michael Lewis: So, this is how it happens. It’s really simple and it is all none. It all seems worthy from a distance. Like I have some great political or social purpose. In fact, it’s all literary opportunism. Trump is elected the first time. Trump fires a day after his election his transition team and enterprise, I didn’t know existed until I read he’d fired it. But it was 550 people that Chris Christie assembled for him to go into the government and receive from the Obama administration, the briefings that a thousand people in the Obama administration had by law, spent six months preparing.

So given it’s Obama, it’s probably like the best academic course in the history of the government, on the government. And, Trump fired the people who were gonna go listen to this. Like they just said, we don’t need. And he told Chris Christie — Chris Christie told me, he said — we’re so smart, that it’ll take us an hour to figure out how the government works. We don’t need that.

And I thought this is like a great comic premise that, that, that I can go and wander around the government, get all these briefings that he didn’t bother to get, and the reader will feel rightly like they know more about the government than the president and the president’s supposed to be running it.

And the, that book, it was, it’s, it was a series again, it was more of a book like object. It was three long Vanity Fair pieces plus a piece, that, so it just happened to work as when you glued ’em all together. But I picked intentionally the departments that nobody paid any attention to. So not state or treasury or anything like that. I picked commerce, agriculture, and energy. Ones where if I turn to my neighbors in Berkeley, all of whom have, are inflicting their political opinions upon me constantly, if I say, what does the Commerce Department do? They, I get a blank stare. They have no idea. And I found in those places one really good material, like all of the places sort of like matter.

There’s stuff going on in each of them that’s really, really, really important.  but unbelievable characters. Can I tell you about one character?

Barry Ritholtz: Sure. but I don’t want before you, [I don’t want you got, your train is on the track and I don’t want to interrupt]. Well, you’re, you’re just skipping the best part of how did you get access to all these people?

You kinda left out if there’s this giant transition team that was supposed to be for the incoming Trump administration and he fired them all,how did, how did you get access to this?

Michael Lewis:He fired the ones who were going in to listen to the briefing. So you just, the briefings were still there in some ways. Like in some places, like the Turkey sandwiches were still moldering and, you know, that they had prepared, they had figured out what drinks they might want. It was all, all set up.

Barry Ritholtz: So you reach out to,who?

Michael Lewis: I reach out to, in the first place,  people inside the energy department, I, I got some names of officials in the energy department, started with the outgoing Obama people, but quickly got into the civil service.

Cause the civil service does the briefings.  I mean, they’re the ones who are. I mean, in the energy department, for example, running a $50 billion cleanup of the nuclear waste left behind in eastern Washington from the building of the atom bomb in the 1940s, it’s still going on. You know, there’s like that thing, there’s, there are all these things.

There’s a nuclear arsenal. I went and I went and met with the people who managed the nuclear arsal arsenal, and they couldn’t tell me the, there was classified stuff, but they could tell me a lot. And their attitude was, we’re so grateful someone’s come to listen. Like, like we did all this work to like explain how it all works.

And, and, and I started with energy, but not I, you know, it could have gone anywhere. But I started with energy because I don’t know if you remember, but Rick Perry was [Oops!] Oops. Was Donald Trump’s pick for Secretary of Energy? ’cause he, ’cause he, I mean, in Trump’s mind it looks like oil Texas, right?

Looks good on television. But Rick Perry had called for the elimination of the energy department when he was running for president. And that’s a little awkward. You’re gonna go be running this place when you said it shouldn’t exist. [Tough first day]. But he had no idea what was in it. And the minute he found out it was in it, he went to the senate, his senate hearings, and said, God, I’m really sorry, con, I like, I was wrong. You shouldn’t get rid of this place.

So I went there because he was, because I just thought this is like, this is the reductio ad  absurdum of this, this ignorance. And the pieces, the pieces really worked. Like they, I mean, the material was so good, but what happened as I crept my way through the obscure parts of the federal government, I kept meeting incredible people — I was not, I did not have a picture in my head of who who the federal employee was.

What I was meeting was very different from what I had imagined. And so the book comes out, it sells half a million copies and it’s glued together, Vanity Fair articles, which told you that there is a interest in a civics lesson. Which is what it was kind of. And I got the problem of having it write it as you will soon have, and afterward to the paperback, it comes out a year later.

And I thought, you know, I kind of, although it’s worked so far, I’m, it bothers me that I’ve not done a deep dive into one of these people. ’cause the people, they’re, they were, they were mission driven, usually very expert in some very narrow thing, completely incapable of telling their own stories.  walled off by political people, so they weren’t allowed to tell their own stories, oblivious to the sense any themselves as characters.

But, but that’s great. Characters don’t know their characters. I mean, the fact that you don’t know you’re a character makes you an even better character. And I thought, I’m just gonna pick one of these people. So who. Now when I had this problem, Trump had then shut down the government. It was, it was the first, it was the government shutdown of 18 and 19, early nine.

It was early 2019, and he had furloughed 60% of the civilian workforce sent them home as ential workers who without pay. So I got, there is an organization in Washington called the Partnership for Public Service that tries and fails over and over to get positive attention shined upon these federal workers and they give an award called the Sammy Award to people who do something good in the civil service.

It’s been going on for, this has been going on for two decades and still no one pays it any attention, but there’ve been lots of nominations for those awards, thousands of them. So I cross referenced like anybody who’s been nominated for a Sammy and that was like 8,000 people or something with who’s been furloughed.

And the list came back and it was like 5,000. It was some huge list. And I thought, what the hell am I gonna do with this? It was alphabetized. I just took the first name on the list. “Arthur A. Allen.” He was the first one on the list, and I found his phone number. I called him up and said, I wanna come talk to you about what you do. And I didn’t really know what he did.

So this is the beginning of this book, because what happens with Arthur A. Allen, I go see him. He is the, the lone oceanographer in the Coast Guard Search and Rescue Division. He’s been at it for 30 something years. And he, he pretty quickly is, tells me that like Americans have this unbelievable ability to get lost at sea, to just like, we just do it better than anybody else.

And so the Coast Guard just rescue is constantly occupied. He figures out some, a few years into his career, he witnesses a tragedy. He’s, he’s out in the field. He’s at the Chesapeake Pace Station. A storm summer storm comes outta nowhere. The Coast Guard is pulling people off the Chesapeake Bay. They discovered that they got everybody, but there’s one boat missing and it’s got a, a woman who was Art’s wife’s age and a little girl who was his daughter’s age.

And they’re, they, they know because they know when the storm kicked up, when the boat likely capsized, they were on a sailboat. And they, so they know and they know where they were when they capsize, kind of. But what they don’t know, presuming that they’re on, on the upside down boat, is how that upside down sailboat drifts at sea. Objects drift differently. Like if you’re in an inner tube, it’s, you’ll move in the ocean differently than if you’re in an upside-down sailboat than you would if you were on a life raft, you know, and so on.

And they find the girl and the mother dead the next morning and Art says, that’s never gonna happen again.

When he is telling me this story, like. What he’s done with his career, a bunch of things. But he has basically invented the science of studying objects drifting at sea. And he’s told me, and at this point in our interactions, I’d been, I was there a couple days before, I said like, why did you even bother to do this?

And he goes over to his bookshelf and he pulls this yellow newspaper article from the Norfolk, whatever, about this mother and child. And he starts to cry. He said that, that could have been my wife, that could have been my child. And when I saw when that happened, I said, it’s never gonna happen again.

So he starts studying how objects drift and throwing them into the Long Island Sound from he lives in Connecticut and he classifies a couple of hundred objects, the results they, and reduces their drift patterns to mathematical formula.

Like 10 days after the Coast Guard gets his formula, 350 pound man, this is a very American thing to do. I remember runs out of his window on a cruise ship in the carnival on a Carnival Cruise line, cruise 80 miles east of Miami and isn’t discovered missing for like several hours. And he does it at night

Because they have cameras on the side of the boat. They know when, when he, they can go back and say, oh, this is when he went off. But Art had studied fat man at sea and

Barry Ritholtz: That’s a thing? Fat guy’s floating at sea?

Michael Lewis: He had a fat, he actually studied large and smaller people and he had fat guy at sea and which will turn out to come turn out to come in very handy in future years.

But this is the first time. Fat guy at sea who goes over off a boat and isn’t discovered missing for a few hours in human history. He’s dead. Like, it’s like finding a person at sea is like finding a soccer ball in the state of Connecticut. You just, it’s, it’s almost impossible. They pluck this dude out of the water like seven hours because he’s fat.

He can live forever. You know? You not, no hypothermia. The risk is someone so’s gonna swallow it, but that’s it. And it’s really a huge advantage to have that fat. And they pluck him out and he’s sort of like, kind of cool. He’s like, like, he’s not panicked or anything. He’s just floating at sea. But they, he, he, they pull him out and there are all these articles about like how great the search and rescue people are who pulled him out of the sea.

No one asks, how’d they find him?

The Coast Guard themselves are shocked, like, how well this worked. And this goes on. I mean, I taught, interviewed another fat guy who fell off another boat in, in, in the Pacific. And I, who was saved miraculously after like eight hours. And I said, like, how do you think they found you? And he said, what, how, what saved you? Or something?

And he says, when I was floating in the ocean, I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, and that’s why I was saved.

And I said, no, no, no, no, no, you’re saved. ’cause of Arthur A. Allen, you know, that’s who saved you. But nobody paid, had paid any attention to this dude and what he had done.

So I spent a few days with him listening to the, I mean, the whole intellectual stuff about how what he did, how he did what he did. It was riveting. But the motive, like this I’m not gonna let another American die because they, we don’t know this. He fixes the problem. Thousands of people are alive today around the world because of what he’s done.

He’s been honored by other countries, Taiwan and Australia. But we pay him no attention. So I gather my stuff to go write my, the end of my book and, and I’m on my way back to the airport.

And he, after I’ve spent the time with him, and he calls cell, this is the moment this book starts, he calls my cell and he says, Hey, you are a writer. And I said, I’ve been there with my notepad. You know, I’ve been like, I’ve been, I know I had said something when I called him, but I said, and he said, he said, man, he said, I was just talking to my son. He says, like, you’ve published books and like one of the books became movie. A movie. And he goes, are you gonna, are you gonna write about this? Are you gonna write about me?

And I said, yeah, Art. I mean, why do you think I flew across country and spent three days interviewing your wife and children and all the rest? He said, I just thought you were really interested in how objects drift.

And, and, and, and, and this is, this, this, this is your One, an inessential worker. Two, your public servant, your civil servant. They have no sense. Like they deserve any kind of attention. The stories that come out of them are amazing. And I thought, man, I should have done it the first time. I should have been diving into these people’s lives. So the next time, if I ever come back, I’m gonna come back focused on the people.

And when I, I was on a hiking trail with David Shipley, who was once until recently, the opinion editor of the Washington Post. And he had space and he had money and his, and he, we could write as long as we wanted in his pages, he said, I said, let me, I’m worried that if I go do this, it’ll just be either, “Oh, this is Michael Lewis’, take on the federal government, or I made it up.”

Or whatever, like, whatever. Whenever people don’t want to hear the message, it’s very easy to come after the writer and try to undermine the whatever’s in the,

Barry Ritholtz: Is that why you picked six other writers? That’s what I did. I said to shield the accusation of bias?

Michael Lewis: also to get a bit, a little bit of a bigger kind of sample, like not gonna tell ’em what to do. I didn’t even tell ’em why I, what, what I was gonna do. And I’ve done two of these big profiles in here and the material is as good as ever.  but I said, we’re just gonna, you just go into federal government and wander around and find a story. And six out of the five out of the six other six did much of what, basically what I did, they found unbelievable character studies, individuals doing things that were just to shock them.

One, he’s, he’s a wonderful writer, John Lanchester, English writer.  decided instead that his character was the consumer price index, which is a challenge.  but he actually makes it work. It’s ’cause it is an amazing achievement. But he, he writes, so he, he went off the reservation a bit.

Barry Ritholtz: I’ll push back on the characterization when we come to that chapter. Right, right. ’cause I have a different spin on that. Oh. But, but let’s talk about some of the chapters in here, starting with Ronald Walters of the National Cemetery. I can’t start with myself.

Michael Lewis:You wanna start that way? I mean, other, other people’s. I edited it, but other people, other people. I give you such a sh I will tell you.

Barry Ritholtz: So you wanna start with the coal mines? Let’s start with No, no, I don’t wanna, I I’ve already muscled you around too much.

Michael Lewis: Feel free to muscle. I’m the fish and you’re the fisherman. Okay. You’re supposed to be landing me.  but it’s, um.  Ronald Walters. So this is the one, the one writer who came to me after I had employed them all and said, is there anything on your cutting room floor that you would like to have written about that you didn’t write?

I said, well, that’s funny you say,  but yes, it’s Ronald Walters. Casey Sepp, who’s a wonderful New Yorker writer. She, she wrote a book about Harper Lee called Furious Hours. And we met because I reviewed that book for the New York Times so favorably she got in touch and sent me toffee boxes of toffee.

But, but when we became friends, Ronald Walters, this I’ll be brief because I didn’t get to know him. You know, I’m just read, I’m reading it like you, but what it intrigued me, Ronald Walters is in the Veterans Administration. I think he’s the only one who still has his job securely, but he, he may be insecure now too, but he took over these National Cemeteries Association, the cemeteries that where we bury veterans.

And there are like 55 of these things around the country, like 4 million veterans are buried in them. They’re burying them. It’s at an astonishing rate and it’s sort of like, it’s a sacred duty. It’s where we bury our war dead. It’s where we bury people who’ve made great sacrifice for the country. And it’s a tribute to the country that we take it seriously, that the Veterans Administration even has this program.

But when he inherited it, it was struggling in its, it’s a weird way to put it, consumer satisfaction. The consumers in this case were the loved ones of the people who were being buried. And he took it from, and we know this because the University of Michigan measures customer satisfaction across the society. It’s all institute big institutions, not just it’s private sector, but also government agencies. And it was kind of like most of the government agencies, kind of high sixties. It was like a mediocre thing.

And in a period of a decade, Ronald Wal Walters took it. To being not just the enterprise in the United States government that had the highest customer satisfaction, but the enterprise in the entire country. More than Costco, more than Amazon or FedEx or the other ones that people like it.

And no one knew his name. No one knew how he did it or why. And I, I had, when I was fiddling around with picking someone to write the, afterward for the Fifth Risk, I’d heard his story. And I almost, I tried calling and actually they didn’t even return my calls. The veteran administration wouldn’t talk to me.

So,  so it was there and I said, go, go find that out, out about that. And so she writes about how he did what he did. It’s an,

Barry Ritholtz: It’s an absolutely beautiful chapter. It actually made me cry. Did it? It’s the only, only chapter in the book that, that brings tears to your eyes. Let’s talk about coal mining and how dangerous it is. Let’s talk about your first chapter.

Michael Lewis:So, so another, so this is. I mean, it, it’s so unusual to find such a rich vein of material that is basically unexplored, that is so predictably yielding gold. And this, so this is, this is number two for me. I’ve done our Allen, I’ve done the, the agencies.

II’m gonna go pick another person. So I went back to, kind of did it the way I did it before. I got a list of the people who were nominated for Sammy’s awards this year or last year. And this list was almost 600 people. And because it’s, they don’t know what they’re doing.  I mean, they know what they’re doing in some ways, but they just don’t know how to create interest in people.

All these, this list of the people who’ve been nominated for the award, it just said their name and what they’d done. And you looked at the accomplishment and they were often amazing. It was like, you know, you know, it, it, but it would, it would never say how they did it, you know, “Cured cancer” but that was it kind of thing. John Smith at the National Institute of Health Cure Cancer, period. End of story.

I was going through this listening. It was all just cold-blooded, you know, it was just like, until I get to Christopher Marx,  solve the problem of coal mine roofs falling in on coal miners, which has killed 50,000 American coal miners in the last century, leading cause of death in the most dangerous occupation in the country.

The occupation is so dangerous that it was more dangerous being in a coal mine than being in the Vietnam War. That’s how, that’s how dangerous it was. But the last sentence said he was a former coal miner. They finally gave me some, something to think about. And so I looked and I thought, man, there has got to be a story here.

I mean, I’m thinking grew up in West Virginia, like Dad was injured or killed, or see, you know, there, there’s some, how this person gets out and does this. So I had spun this whole tale up in my head.  and I find his number, and again, like our ally, he’s lives in Pittsburgh. I call him, I cold call him. In this case, he knew who I was.

He’d read Moneyball and it turned out that he thought of himself as money balling coal mines. But that’s a whole separate thing.  but, but,  he, he, he, I say, I just wanna hear, I just wanna hear your story. Like give me the, the 10 minute version. I’m gonna give you the five minutes of the 10 minute version because it hooked me.

He says, I grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and my dad was a professor at the university. And I thought, oh, like my whole movie is different, you know, I don’t know what the movie is, but this, this not. And I thought, oh, my interest just went. And then he started to tell me, he says, if you looked at just a little bit, you’d find my dad was kind of famous.

Robert Marks was the name. And Robert Marks had been brought, brought to Princeton without a PhD. To help Princeton. He had devised a mechanism for stress testing. He was stress testing fighter planes for the Navy and the Air Force before they built them. He take the design, build a little model, and he had this, this complicated way of just testing whether or not this design was going to actually work in practice.

And Princeton had brought ’em in to test little nuclear reactors they wanted to build to see if it was gonna crack. And Robert Mark one day was teaching an engineering class at Princeton. When an undergraduate walks in from an art history class and says, this device you have, could you use it to like figure out what’s holding gothic cathedrals up?

Because we just, they just told us that no one understands how these, the roofs of gothic cathedrals don’t collapse. There’s no records left by the builders, then they’re built over a century. No one knows what’s decorative, what’s actually holding the weight. And he said, yeah. And he became famous because he became the guy who figured out how they built the gothic cathedrals and what was keeping them up.

What was keeping the roof up. So that’s Robert, that’s the dad. Chris is telling me this in the first 15 minutes I’m talking to him. He says, so that was my dad. He said, I, I had a problem with my dad’s life. It was the Vietnam War. I got kind of radicalized. I thought I, I saw it wasn’t Princeton kids who were fighting and dying.

And that really bothered me. And he said,  I, he, he said, he started throwing words around the house like bourgeois. And, and pretty soon he said, I’m not, he could go have gone to Harvard or Princeton. I’m not gonna do that. I’m gonna go join the working class. So he breaks with his dad, big break. He goes on the road.

He works in an auto factory, works in the UPS plant, and finally ends up with several fellow radicals in a coal mine in West Virginia. The other three radicals all quit at the end of the first day. It’s that brutal. He finds it interesting. Why he finds it interesting is still a bit of a mystery, but he stays in the mine for a year and almost dies twice that he sees how dangerous it is.

He crawls out of the mine, goes and gets a PhD, an undergraduate and a PhD at Penn State in, in rock engineering, and begins the process of figuring out, he, there’s all this data that the US government has co collected on. They’ve, they’ve observed the problem. It’s a bit like the CDC does with the disease that they’ve observed the problem without actually trying to stop the problem.

So they have all this data on when roofs fell and what the conditions were. He just, he starts to study it. And over a career, a really, really interesting career figures out how to stop this from happening and stops it from happening. So he is telling me this on the phone and,  I did gimme all the details of his work, but, and, and I stop him and I say, oh.

So you rebelled against your dad and then you just went and had your dad’s career. He was, he figured out how to keep the, what was keeping up the rules of gothic cathedrals and you figured out how to keep the rules of coal mines up. And, I mean, this is someone I’ve just started talking to on the phone.

He gets outraged. It’s like bull***, you know, like I’m calling, you know, that has nothing to, I had nothing to do What I did, had nothing to do with my father’s career.  we, we have nothing in common. Completely different thing if that’s your theory, like go away kind of thing. And I said, just seems a natural observation.

So so two things. when I, I went and spent a lot of time with him. We rolled around West Virginia. He took me into coal mines and he doesn’t mention till like the third day that, oh, you know, it was funny. I were, you reconciled. When did, how did you reconcile with your dad? And I asked him, ’cause they had become reconciled before his dad died.

And he said it was gradually, he said, but there was this moment he said, I. The National Cathedral,  the federal government thought the National Cathedral in Washington might be falling down. This was in the year 2000. One of the towers was subsiding faster than the other. And,  they didn’t know why. So they called his dad to test to see how the load was moving through the National Cathedral.

And the dad figured out that his stuff didn’t work because whatever was going on, it wasn’t above ground, it was below ground. So he called his son, and his son had the stuff to go figure out what was going on below ground. And together they wrote a paper about how the National Cathedral, how it was, what was gonna happen.

And we didn’t have to worry about it falling down, but they studied it together and put everybody’s minds to rest. Now, when you have that to navigate too, in a story, you got a story. I mean, it’s just like that. And, and so Art Allen had the Yellow Wing newspaper.  Christopher Marks had the, had the, the dad.

I met, but I gotta say I’ve met lots of people in like the Storm center and the National Weather Service who lost loved ones to tornadoes or that, that this instrument, the federal government is filled with all of all this purpose, all these things that, that it’s where the problems of the private sector doesn’t wanna deal with go, you know, you know, it’s like if there’s no money to be made in it, but we’ve decided as a society we wanna address it.

That’s where the, that’s where we, that’s what we use to address it. Who, who is attracted to these problems? People who have a particular interest in this problem for whatever reason. And that quality, like caring about the problem, it’s outside yourself. I’m gonna fix the problem, tends to come from a deep place.

And that’s where literature comes from. You know, it’s the, the, the motives of the characters are, are,  are in our government. These are rich and interesting people with rich and interesting backstories and, and.  you know, e every time you kind of start scratching at one, you get at this.

BR: So, so let’s address that a bit.  I wanna discuss your process a little bit, which I’m fascinated by. You once said to Malcolm Gladwell at the 92nd Street Y “the subjects choose me. I don’t go looking for books. The stories wander into my life and they get to the point where they can’t not be written. The stories kind of find me, a relationship develops between me and the story.”

ML: I have no choice. That’s true. So, so expound on that a bit. You want the three minute or the five minute version? Whatever you’re comfortable with. Alright. I mean, this goes back to who I am. I mean, I’m basically. I’m a new, I grew up in New Orleans, was raised to be a decorative object. I was raised to, what does that mean?

Not useful. Okay. Like, like nobody around me did anything useful and no one planned to, and hence you end up on Wall Street there. No. Yeah. Well that’s funny. But, but, but there’s a certain charm you acquire on the streets of New Orleans that are very useful when you’re trying to sell a bond.  but it’s that, but yes, so a lot of New Orleans make their way to Wall Street.

They do quite well on Wall Street. You get the gift of gab kind of thing. But,  you learn to tell a story, which is very valuable in the financial markets and also valuable, very valuable to writers but I, I’m basically lazy, like that is true. Um. You know, it’s, it’s it’s core in me. Like the working part of me has been added on somehow.

But the deep me, I would just sit around, scratch myself for the rest of my life.

BR: If, if you, you’ve written 14 books, how is that lazy?

ML: This is, I’m, I’m not lying. This is this. I’m telling you the truth. You’re just gonna have to figure out, you gotta make sense of it. Okay.  this is God’s truth.

My father, when I, from the age of about seven to the age of when I was 18, had me persuaded that there was Latin, we had a coat of arms. Lewis, Lewis, and there was always a Latin under it. He persuaded me that what that Latin said was you translated. Was, do as little as possible. And that unwillingly for it is better to see, receive a slight reprimand than to perform an arduous task.

My father raised me to be lazy, you know? I mean, that, that he was like, don’t try, don’t, don’t sweat it. You’re working too hard. It was the, it was, this is the environment I was raised in and I took to it.  but, but you didn’t, you, but I did. Up to a point. Every book you’ve written, you embed yourself now in unfamiliar places, learn.

It’s also true. You learn. It’s also No, it’s true. It’s, I’m curious. I got that too. I’m actually curious. I see something and I want to know about it and, and it happens a lot. It just happens a lot. And so it’s a, with pleasure, I find I pursue a curiosity. I ask like, curiosity. Why are the Oakland A’s winning baseball games with no money?

Like, how is that possible? That’s a beginning, that’s a curiosity. I, and so I go to the trouble, but most people have that thought and go, eh, who? Who knows? And then fun. And, and you, you spend, you spend weeks and weeks and wait years. Wait, so, so, so, so it is not, it is true that I do the work. It is true. I eventually do the work, but I do from a place of deep laziness.

It’s deep. It’s like that, it is, I get curious. I start to get involved. I realize, oh my God, this is, look at this story. And it is, it is got to, it really does have to rise to the level in my mind that this story is so important and it’s delusional. Like is any story that important? But it’s, the story is so important that I have an obligation to do it.

So now I, now I have to do it because I have an obligation. I make myself feel that way. And when I feel that way, then I’m off.  then, then I forget about the laziness and I do the work.

BR: So you have this incredible knack of finding yourself in the right place at the right time. Before everybody else figures out this is what’s so this is an incredibly lucky thing.

ML: Okay, so I mean, but it’s, I’ll give you that. This one’s Lucky

BR: Liar’s Poker. You’re there early in the rise of Wall Street. It was working. Okay. You were working Moneyball. No one had any idea what was going on with Saber Metrics and how this scrappy little broke team was able to put together a competitive run;

Going Infinite. You embed with FTX and Sam Bankman Fried a year. That was kind of cool. That was a year before, right, but you after, but that was also after the, I didn’t know that was happening. Oh, oh, you didn’t know that was happening. And then the whole Undoing Project with Danny Kahneman, who just coincidentally lived down the street from you.

You have this ridiculous knack to finding yourself at the head of a wave that’s about to crash over society. I mean, once or twice as dumb luck. How do you do it six times in a row? That’s not exactly luck.

ML: I think it is; I mean, in, in that, I, you know, you and I, so he’s just published a book too, “How Not to Invest.” It’s really good. And, and you, you say 18 different ways in the course of this book, how skeptical you are of the ability to predict the future.  [Sure.] I am too. Okay. Everybody wants you to predict the future and you just shouldn’t do it because it’s just, you know, you can’t, who knows where the stock wants, but you’re always skating to where the puck’s gonna be.

BR: Explain that.

ML: It’s maybe, I think the puck is just coming to where I happen to be. That, that it, that. So, so I don’t think I, I really think it. Sam Bankman Freed lands on my front porch after someone asked me to just interview him and evaluate him from, I didn’t go looking for him. He walked up and I said, this is interesting.

I’m gonna follow, I’m just gonna follow him around.  this, I had, I had this nagging sense. That I’ve left all this gold in the mind. I still feel that way. There’s gold in that mind still. And I left the gold in the mind. Let’s go back there and get it and bring some friends and they can have some of the gold too.

And,  the, I mean, I had no idea that Trump was going to do what he’s done to the government. No, none. I, I did have a sense like he didn’t care about it. That he was going to just completely try to gut it. I had no sense.  so in every case I know the, how much accident there was. I will say, if I were trying to make the case that I have, I know something that other people don’t or there’s something about me that leads to being a little ahead of the curve.

I’d only say that. The best, the closest thing to the best way to predict the future is just pay attention to the present. That you pay closer attention to the present than other people are. You. You see, it’s the, the, the future is there. And so it is,  I, I do pay attention to the present. I observe. And, and, and I also, so this gets back to the laziness,  that, that when you’re lazy, it’s an actor.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing to be a little lazy. Amos Tversky, my character in the Undoing project had a great line, which I, which, which I tell every kid who asked for advice, I just repeat it. He says, “People waste years of their lives not being willing to waste hours of their lives,” that people get so worked up about making, being busy, moving their career up.

They don’t let anything, they don’t let things in. They, they, they’re like always achieving. And if you just back away and let the world come into you,  it, it’s, that’s a helpful approach to a writer also. If, if you’re a little lazy, like you would rather basically not be doing anything,  it takes a level of interest to move you.

Like I know a lot of writers who just go, they can always find something to write about because they know, they feel like they have to be writing, so they just force it.  before I sit down and bother to put a word on the page, I’ve gotten. So I’ve had to get so excited about it to offset the natural tendency not to do anything.

And so that it, it’s, it’s like the material is leaping over higher hurdles mm-hmm. To get to the place with me that I wanna write about it.

So maybe that’s, that has something to do with this.

BR: Can, can I float a theory to you?

ML: Sure. I think it’s gonna be bulls***. You can do it.

BR: Malcolm Gladwell’s Grand Unified theory of Michael Lewis books is biblical allegories.

ML: Right. That’s bullshit.

BR: Yeah. That is bullshit, right? Daniel And the Lions then is Liars Poker. The Blindside is Good. Samaritan David and Goliath. Moneyball. Like, you’re not doing biblical allegories.

ML: No, I mean you can, the truth is you can find almost any, you can map almost any story onto the Bible.

BR: Right? Right. But, but here’s what’s not: Every Michael Lewis book features a character and the archetype, Michael Lewis character, quirky outsiders pushing against the grain ’cause they’ve discovered some interesting insight or truth or previously unknown thing that is against the consensus. And then they apply that to their field and either they make a lot of money shorting stocks or they save fat guys who’ve fallen off of cruise ships.

ML: Yeah. That’s, those are the same characters, but every, who’s that character and liar’s poker?

BR: You!

ML: You think that’s me?

BR: Well, you show flashes of you. Yeah. It was your first book. Yeah. So yeah. We’ll cut you a little slack. Yeah, but you know, in fact, let, let’s talk about Liar’s Poker.

Yeah. So, so, so we, we, we did a podcast on the 30th anniversary. [Right.] You had to go reread it, not just reread the book, but read it out loud for the audio version.

ML: Yeah. I hadn’t reread it since I wrote it.

BR: So, so first, what was that experience like?

ML: Awful. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever gone back and, I was 26 when I wrote that, and I’d never written anything. I mean, I’d written letters to my mother and a few articles in The Economist and I mean, it was a, I was just work,  I was really raw. And I,

BR: but still there are flashes of the future. Michael Lewis, the writer throughout, Hey, listen, first of all, for a first time book, it was great,

ML: but you know what’s funny?

BR:  And you were 26 so you could cut yourself some slack.

ML: So there were some things, some things I noticed. One is there was just general infelicity, but I noticed that whenever I thought I was being funny, I wasn’t funny. And whenever I didn’t, I was like, oh, that’s funny. But I didn’t know it was funny, you know, it was embarrassing, you know, there was, I was, I thought I, there were lines that were clearly like, designed to get people to laugh and then I shouldn’t have been doing it.

that, and there were structure. I, so it was, I, but, but yeah, I, I mean, I’m feel finally towards it, it got my, it launched my career.

BR: I’m going back and let me also, now I’m back.

ML: I’m still stuck on your theory,

BR: So, but let me just point out that you wrote that book while you were working full-time at Solomon Brothers, you were doing this nights and weekends, right? At least that’s when you started sketching this, this wasn’t Michael Lewis the full-time writer, correct?

ML: Right.

BR: So when you look back at that, you gotta give yourself a little slack, not bad for a first attempt.

ML: No, no, no. I, no, it wasn’t, it’s fine. It’s not bad for a first book. I agree. It’s not bad for a first book, but the, I, when I think about when your description of what of my books, the quirky outsider the line.

I think of it this way. Because they’re not like Billy Bean’s, not quirky. Billy Bean’s like the coolest guy in the room when he walks into a room. He is, yes. He’s got, we’re all quirky, like underneath. We all have little things, things going on that are, we’re all above average. All we’re all neurotic or a little, we all have stuff.

BR: But,  your characters have a lot of stuff, Mike.

ML: Sometimes they’d have a lot of stuff, but they, the,  the thing, what I think of, I think of it as more as I get excited by someone who could teach me. Mm-hmm. And all my characters are, are teaching me something about the world. And now the kind of person who’s teaching you something, something about the world often is someone who has been challenging the world.

So that’s true too. They’re often in kind of conflict with the world. But what’s attracting me to them, I never think, oh, quirky great. Or I never think that Brad Tama is not quirky. He’s a nice Canadian boy. Mm-hmm. And Flash boys. Flash boys that he is. The least quirky person who ever carried a book, he is normal.

He’s like as normal as they, they get. And there’s some stuff there with what there is, is nice Canadian boy collides with Wall Street and, and is upset when he sees what’s going on.

BR: But he figures out a way around and, and figures out, yes, figures out that the, he’s the least quirky of all your characters, but let, let’s stick with Moneyball.

But, but how, how did you gain access to the A’s? How did they, you know, grant you keys to the kingdom?

ML: This often happens too, that you have a question. And the question is equally interesting to the subject. So I called Billy Bean, went and go see him. I said, I just look, it doesn’t make any sense. You’re spending one fifth with the Yankees are spending, how can you be competing if this market is efficient? The Yankees should be buying all the best baseball players and you would just lose all the time.

And he said, “No one has asked me that question.”

It’s what I think about all the time. The sports, he’s just covered by sports writers and the sports. The baseball writers at the time paid no attention to the financial disparities. They weren’t thinking of the money on the field. And that’s all they thought about was the front office, was the money on the field. So he was interested in the question in the first place. And also, I didn’t tell him I was writing a book. I told him I thought I didn’t know what I was gonna write. Maybe a little magazine piece, maybe nothing.

And it got more and more interesting and I disguised how interesting I was. And when I just divulged, you know, two months into it that I was thinking about writing a book. It was too late. He couldn’t get rid of me. I knew too much.  but, but there was, and, and I had found ways to insinuate myself into, into their lives.

I mean. You, you, this is like, how do you make yourself, how you,

BR: How do you get them to let you hang around?

ML: That’s the important thing. You’ve gotta hang around. You gotta be kind of in the, you know, just, just they, they forget you’re there. Kind of hang around. So that was the trick there. Did I  ever tell, have I told you when that book became a book?

BR: No.

ML: Like when I came home at late at night and I said, wrote my publisher and said, this is gonna freak you out, but I’m gonna write a sports book.  I was, I was, I was in the locker room of the Oakland A’s interviewing, telling the players. I was interviewing the players one by one and telling them what the, why they were, they were playing first base or why they were the lead off hitter.

They, they, they had no idea front office, no idea. The, a front office regarded it as a science experiment and they were the lab rats and it just confused their lab rats if you told them what the experiment was. And they told me like, don’t talk to ’em about it. They just thought they won’t handle it well. And, but the players were really interested.

So I was, they, I was welcome in the clubhouse and, and they were coming out of the showers. I was waiting for my guy to talk to him and I, for the first time I saw the Oakland A’s naked, and it was such a disgusting sight. It was, it was, it was like, it was just, I mean, not,

BR: not ripped professional athletes.

ML: It was like they had cankles and they had, they were all fat. They look a beer league team. They looked like, and I had the thought, which I relayed to the front office. It was like, if you line those naked bodies up against a wall and asked anybody what they did for a living, nobody would guess professional athletes that they, they would guess like, you know, wall Street guys, they could, they could be Wall Street guys, they could be accountants, they could be flight attendants, they could be, but not, not professional athletes.

And the front office said, “It’s funny you say that because we are aware of how unattractive they are without their clothes on. ” that, that, that, that they, they said that. And the, and there’s a, that “We get excited. When they’re unattractive without their clothes on. And they don’t look, when they don’t look right because the market, we, we are evaluating them blind. It’s just we’re valuing, we are looking for performance statistics. And when we find the player whose statistics are, are promising, but they look wrong, we know why the market’s misvaluation them. They’re misbeing mis-valued because of the way they look.”

And I remember, I just, it blew my mind. I remember going, driving home and thinking, oh my God, this is when you have a duty to write it. Like never mind baseball. Think of this as a corporation, and they got these employees, they’ve been doing the same thing for a hundred years. Millions of people are watching them stats attached to every move they make on the job. If those people can be misvalued because of the misvalued, because of the way they look, who can’t be? Everybody can be.

So this is a universal story. It’s that feeling like this is a universal story. And,  and so I got very excited and I wrote my publisher note and said, sorry, here it comes. I’m gonna be writing a book called Moneyball.

And now the flip side of this is, none of my subjects ever know what I’m doing. They really don’t. They know I’m hanging around, but they, I mean, Oakland saw me. I spent a week with the Blue Jays. I spent days with the Rangers, I spent days with the Mariners. I spent fifth time with the Red Sox, and I had to do that to know that they were special, like, know that nobody else was doing this. And  and so, but, so from their point of view, it was like, what’s he doing? Like Billy,

ML: And when, so when Billy Bean got the book, and my subjects only get the book when everybody else gets the book, you know, I, I don’t want him, I don’t want him bothering me.  and he got the book. He was furious. It was like

BR:  He was angry because you let out the secret.

ML: Two things, two things. One was like, since when am I, the main character could have told me. You know, it’s that kind of thing. It’s like, I, I’m not, I was not, I didn’t sign up for this kind of thing. But, but second thing he says, I thought he was gonna be pissed off because I, I had revealed their secrets.

That’s what I was worried. I was worried that was the betrayal. He says he’s, he’s on the phone, he’s like, incoherent. And I said, what is bothering you? And he said, you have me saying all the time. And I said, you do say all the time. What am I supposed to do there? And he said, “You don’t understand. My mother’s gonna be so upset.”

And, and, and, and I said, you’re mom, you know, like, really, it’s like a sigh of relief if that’s what we’re worried about here. Low level problem. And, and turned out not to be a low level problem. She was furious. She, she is still furious and she’s angry at me.  she’s still angry at me. I swear to God. She’s angry about it.

And,  but. But I said to Billy, I said, I started laughing. I started said like, if I was so worried you were gonna be angry with me for, for, for stitching together this narrative that revealed all your secrets. I found out as much as I could and I put as much of it in the book as I could, and it’s gonna blow your competitive advantage. I thought that’s what you were angry about.

And this is pause on the end, other end of the line. And he says, “You don’t think anybody in baseball is gonna read your book?” He says, he’s like, they’re always gonna read your book. They don’t, they don’t know how to read. He said, but he said like, we’ve been doing this for years. Nobody’s asked a question and  [wow]. And he was kind of right. He was right about that. It was too narrow. He was right that nobody ever reads a book who thinks they know what they’re doing and changes their mind. Like no GM at the time was gonna say, oh, I learned something from this book, or, oh, we’ve been doing it the wrong way.

BR: Well, didn’t the GM of Red Sox eventually come?

ML: Well, at no. While I was working on the book, John Henry had just bought the Red Sox, [the hedge fund manager], and he was saying, he actually said, what do I gotta do to prevent you from writing this book? Because he said, we’re about to do this here. And he wanted to hire Billy.

And I became, it was kind of fun. I remember doing this on payphones in the airport. I became, they weren’t allowed to negotiate [talk, right]. So they negotiate through me. So I, I, I helped organize Billy’s contract with the Red Sox and  and Billy was gonna go and then change his mind last minute I and Theo Epstein becomes the GM of the Red Sox.

Mm-hmm. See, Theo was trying to hire Billy too. He was part of the group inside, and, but the rest is history. And Theo leads the Red Sox to Victory, and Billy Bean has written out of that story but the, the Red Sox were about to do it. New owner, like new owner who had background in finance. So he gets this, he gets statistics and data and all that.

What happened was other owners read the book, like the head of Goldman Sachs at the time I know, talked to the, the owner of the Mets and said, “You’re being ripped off by your own management.” Like they don’t know what they’re doing. And o at the ownership level, they started to change things. So that, that’s, that was how the change happened.

It would’ve happened anyway. What would’ve happened if I hadn’t read the written the book is the Red Sox would’ve done this. They would’ve won the World Series using. Sabremetrics or statistics mm-hmm. They would’ve gotten total credit for revolutionizing the sport. And no one and Billy Bean would’ve been a footnote. Hmm.  that, that’s, that’s what would’ve happened.

BR: Of, of all your books, that became a movie. That’s probably my favorite film version. [Is it?] what was that process like watching? Do you just essentially sign the papers and that’s it? Or did they retain you for script consulting or anything like that?

ML: So what happens is, what happens is, for sure the movie people would rather the author be dead. There’s no question. Like, all you can do from their point of view is cause trouble like complain or give advice.

And I was aware of this quite early. Like, I know they, they don’t care what, I think it was really clear they didn’t care, but they were trying to pretend like they’d sort of cared. And this was Blindside actually was the first one.

And I thought. It, but they wouldn’t leave me alone. Like it, I couldn’t just say, here, really? Just give me the money. I’ll give you the book and whatever you do. No. Whatever you do [See at the opening!] Yeah. See at the opening. And if it just, just make it don’t suck. And,  and, and it’s on you. If it does.

’cause it’s your, it’s gonna be, it’s not my movie. It’s your movie. And they refuse to accept that blunt relationship, I think. ’cause they don’t believe that. I actually think that. And so what happens is they pretend to be interested.

BR: They don’t know you’re lazy.

ML: They don’t know I’m lazy. I really, they’re like, they pretend to be interested in what I think I have to pretend to be, believe they’re interested in what I think we have this false interaction where I give them advice and they ignore it all.

And, but out of this, some really lovely friendships have sprung like it’s a social relationship. So I’m friends with all the directors who’ve made the movies really friends. And some of the actors are still in my life. And like Jonah Hill will just call me up outta the blue and say, “I got a problem. I’m gonna just talk this through” and that kind of thing.

And. And that that is gr That’s been great. Can I tell you a story about the Moneyball movie? Sure. It’s, it’s the Moneyball movie. Was this sort of,

BR:  You guys wanna hear a story about Moneyball, right? [Yeah]

ML: So the Moneyball movie. So Billy being, in addition to being pissed off at me because I had him saying all the time he was, he was put, I really admire the guy.

He was put in a really difficult position. The book puts him in opposition to his industry. He knows something everybody else does, and all the other GMs hate him. All of a sudden, when he is, he didn’t deserve this. And he, but he, instead of, instead of throwing me under the bus, he just fought. He said, there’s not nothing in the book that’s not true.

So you wanna, you wanna fight about it, come fight. And he’s brave. He’s basically a very brave person. However, it was so unpleasant. The book I. A among, among the most un, maybe the most unpleasant publication in that it all of baseball was angry, really angry. And, he said, he called me one day, he says like, Sony Pictures is trying to buy my life rights to make a movie. And I says, I just wanna tell you I’m not doing this. Like, I, I didn’t want the book. I don’t want a movie. I don’t need this.

I said,” Billy, you don’t understand. They never make the movie. They just give you money for your rights that I’ve sold. I dunno, a dozen magazine articles, five books, money just comes outta Hollywood and they never make anything.”

‘Cause they hadn’t made anything at that point.

And I, when I gave the list of like the amounts I’d raked in from Hollywood for doing absolutely nothing, he sort of said like, this is free. And I said, yeah, it’s free. And so he took a bunch of money for his life rights. It was an option that renewed every 18 months and every 18 months he called me, he goes, “You’re a genius. Like, this is unbelievable. You’re right. They’re not gonna make this movie.” It goes on for years, you know, like seven years.

But, and, and then one day he calls me up and says, you, he said, he said, Brad Pitt just called me and he says he’s coming over to the house and my wife is putting on makeup and the babysitter’s going home to get a dress.

And, and it was like he said, “You said this wouldn’t happen” I remember he was like, you said this wouldn’t happen. And I said, I don’t know what to tell you. Like I’m, I’m a little shocked this is happening.

Flash forward, I don’t know, a year, six months, they’re shooting in the Oakland Coliseum. And,  I’d gone to a set, the set a couple of times.

This was the cool thing I brought my kids because they had 8,000 extras in the Oakland Coss and they’d gotten body doubles for the 2002 Kansas City Royals and Oakland A’s. So like Barty Zito looked more than like Barry Zito, than Barry Zito. And they’re replaying this game and they’re moving the 8,000 people around the Colise to make it look like it’s full, and it’s a great drama.

Before I go over,  to see this, they call me and say, Sony calls me and says “Billy Bean is refusing to have anything to do with anybody. Like, he’s not visited the set. He let Brad Pitt come to his house once, and that was it. And that he’s like, everybody’s worried. He’s just angry about this. Could you get him down? His office is at the stadium. Could he just walk down and shake a couple of hands and make everybody feel good?”

And so I, I called him, I said, Billy, like, it’s not that big a deal. Just come on over. And he said, “Are you gonna be there?”

And I said, yeah. He says, okay, then I’ll come, I’ll come and I just spend 10 minutes.

I don’t want them to think I’m into it though. So it was like, okay, they know you’re not into it. Come on over. Shakes some hands. So we get there, I’m there on the field,  and he comes walking out and this production, young male production assistant comes running outta left field and he’s got the headgear and he’s got a, he’s got a notepad and he comes running up to Billy and says, Mr. Bean, Mr. Bean, you, “You’ve been my hero ever since I read your book. I just want, I won’t tell you how you changed my life.” And Billy’s like, it’s not my book. He, he wrote the book, he points to me, he goes, no, this is your book the guy’s. So it’s like weird. He says, will you just please sign my book?

And Billy says, alright, I’ll sign your book.

And so he opens the notepad and there were two Billy beans in the major leagues at the same time. Wow. And they both played at, in the same outfield on the Tigers. And I think the twins, that was weird. They were both there on the field at the same time. And the other Billy Bean was gay, and he came out of the closet and wrote a memoir and it called like “Hitting from the other side of the plate.”

And so this guy has, has the gay Billy Bean’s memoir. And, and Billy, the, the straight Billy Bean is, he’s like, there’s nothing good is happening right now. It’s like, he’s like, “What do I say? What do I do?” I’m not, you don’t say I’m not gay. You don’t say you don’t, there’s nothing you can do in this situation.

And I look over and in the a’s dugout Brad Pitt’s rolling around, he set the whole thing up. He had Sony pictures call me to talk Billy to come into the field so he could play this. He had thought of this joke and so he could play this joke on Billy, on Billy Bean and it worked. It really worked.

BR: So that is a great story.

Before we open this up for questions, I want to ask one or two more questions, including another story you told about a name confusion when you had spent some time in Israel, with Danny Kahneman.

ML: Oh, that’s funny. And you, you, similar story you go to wasn’t nearly as good a story is this. So Danny Kahneman, the great Israeli psychologist who’s one of the main characters of the Undoing Project,

BR: One of the two main characters.

ML: Yeah. He was one of the two main characters. And he and Amos both had done a lot of work with the Israeli military. He had, he had Moneyballed Israeli, Israeli troops to determine who should be a,  an officer. And you devise whole these, these metrics so you can measure it rather than just do it by an interview.

So he was there very early. The reason I even wrote that book is I came back to that book after Moneyball. ’cause when Moneyball comes out, Richard Thaler economist, Cass Sunstein, his writing partner, reviewed it and said. “Michael Lewis has written a really interesting story, but he doesn’t know what it’s about.”

And he, they said “It’s a case study in the work of Kahneman & Tversky. That’s how I even heard that these guys existed. Anyway, I go to Israel, we’re going to the military base where Danny did that money balling work for the, for the Israeli army. And we get, we get there and they are 400 of the best looking young women I’ve ever seen. And what, just waiting for us, like waiting in a mob behind the gates when we come through and they look at us and they just kinda like melt away.

And at first I thought, wow, Danny’s got it going on, you know, I mean it’s like what he, they’re here for Danny and it turns out there’s an Israeli underwear model model named Michael Lewis.

And, and he’s got like, he’s got like unbelievable abs. And so they, they’d seen Danny Kahneman coming with Michael Lewis and they thought it was the underwear model.

BR: Unbelievable. So, so there’s  a question I want to, I’ve been wanting to ask you for a while and I just never. Get to it, so I’m gonna force it early.

You, you have, I know you have all these stories that are half told and all these things that are future projects. I’m always curious if there was a loose thread in a story that you said, I really wanna pull that and see what happens in some of the books you’ve published, but you haven’t gotten to

ML: What do you mean?

BR: What characters, what lines of, of thought that you kind of briefly go over and sort of say in the back of your head, gee, I should really circle back to that. That looks really interesting, but just haven’t gotten around to, from any of your books. ’cause I know you have dozens and dozens of things that you’ve started, new. You have all your research and folders and stuff, right? Is there any

ML: You mean what do I have on the back burner that might go on the front burner? No.

BR: Well that’s another question. It’s, it’s what kinda loose thread has been out and about from some of the books you’ve written that you just,

ML: You thinking something?

BR:  No, nothing in particular. This is, this was,  literally a,  a Twitter question. I said, gimme some questions for, oh, this was the only one that I thought was half decent.

ML: I thought you were asking me about, I was wrong. No, no, no. But it’s funny because I don’t, no, I have books that I, I they, they’re books that I started and stopped ’cause they didn’t work.

There’s book, a book that got away that would’ve been a shot at a masterpiece. But the subject tossed me out ’cause I made the mistake of writing something in a magazine about him before I wrote the book.

BR:  What was that?

ML: George Soros? It was 1990. And Soros was interested in me for a bunch of reasons. He, I had. Soros had somebody he really admired as a money manager. Like he was Soros. As Soros. His name was Neils Taub. He ran Jacob Rothschild’s money in London and he was, he was, he’s the smartest person I’ve ever met in the financial markets about the financial markets he had. Just that he had, you know how Soros has those jungle instincts?

He had them times two and older guy, he took me under his wing when I was at Solomon Brothers, I cold called him and I said, basically, I know you’re, I know that there’s no reason you wanna talk to me. I’ve just arrived. I’m 24. I said, I’m a new guy here. Can I take you out to breakfast? And something about the interaction caused him to say, sure, you can take me out to breakfast.

And we went out to breakfast and he said, you’re not gonna try to, if as long as you don’t try to tell me anything, sell me anything. Pretend you know something, I’ll do my business through you. And for the next two years. Over the next two years, he became the second biggest customer at Solomon Brothers. And I didn’t never have to do anything. I just picked up the phone

I would describe to him like what I’m seeing on the trading floor. I describe what I was seeing in the markets, but I never said, you should do this ’cause it would’ve been folly. And he appreciated that.

And he told Soros about me when I left to write “Liars Poker.” And so Soros was very receptive to me. And he took me on a private trip, you know, when the Berlin Wall fell, he built all these institutes for democracy around Eastern Europe. He took me on a private trip through the, the, these places. And there was a book to do about both his fear about the threats to democracy, which seem very prescient right now.

And, like this isn’t forever. These places don’t, they have to learn democracy and we have to help them. And what he was doing in his, in the financial markets and he was gonna let me write about both and like an idiot. I then I wrote, because I was at the New Republic, I wrote for the New Republic, a piece about the trip.

And it was not rude about him. It was, what I thought of him. But I did make fun of his writing, like the all the theories. He has all these theories about why, how markets work, [Reflexivity?] yeah. All that. This intellectualizing, which is, it’s, he’s a jungle animal. And it’s like, he layers on top of it a complicated explanation. And he was so vain about his philosophy that he was really irritated when someone didn’t take it seriously.

And that was, it didn’t wanna see me again. And that was the, that was the one huge one. I’ll never make that a mistake again. It was gold, the material, and no one else was gonna get it. And no one did. No one wrote the book, the book never got written.  And that book could be a, could have been a very valuable book.

But I have that, I have those kind of things. I don’t have, and I have, I think I, I’m not gonna talk about what they are, but I think I know what the next two books are. I think I know what I’m about to go do. Um. But I don’t have anything. I don’t have anything where I think, oh, oh, I wished I’d written, if I wanted to do it, I’d go do it. You know?  I sold Moneyball as two books. I thought the second book was going to be about the kids they drafted that year using algorithms. And I spent two years in the minor leagues chasing around after these guys.

BR: No, go.

ML: I, two years I was in uniform as a midland rock hound in Midland, Texas, and kept shagging fly balls before the game. Like I put a no go, it’s just all notes in a under my office. Yeah. No, go.

BR: So, you know, I always come with like four hours worth of questions. Yep. But what I’d like to tell how many did, how many, how many did we not get to

ML: Oh, three quarters.

BR: Yeah. But it doesn’t matter. I wanna bring the house lights up.

ML: You never expect me to talk so much.

BR: My job’s to give you a nudge and get out of the way. Okay. So I, I think I, I mostly accomplish what I wanted to. Yep. Why don’t we bring up the house lights are up and let’s see. If there are any questions from the audience, one back here.

Yeah. I’m not gonna,  just say, say your name and it’s, it’s hard to see you. So listen. And where are you from? We’ll, because Michael’s from California. We’ll, we’ll give him,  a Long Island geography lesson. Go ahead.

Audience: hi,  Mr. Lewis.  my name’s Andrew Ucci, huge fan of yours.  all your books and your podcast against the rules as well. I’m from just up the street, so very, very convenient commute.  I have a question for you,  related to “Losers, the road to any place, but the White House”, one of your, I believe, criminally underrated books.

Can you expand upon your relationship with John McCain as well as,  what you think he means to American politics?

ML: What a question. Great question. I never get asked about John McCain, but if you ask me what the most influential thing I ever wrote was. Yeah, I might say the first thing I wrote about John McCain.

I met John McCain. I, so I was co I was assigned to cover the 96 Presidential campaign for the New Republic.

I was learning my craft. I’d written Liar’s Poker, but I had not, I mean, I’d not, I’d never written for a school newspaper, no English teacher ever thought I was worth more than a C, you know, I was just like, there was no, I had no background for this. And the New Republic at the time was filled with the most talented collection of writers I’ve ever seen in one place. And editors.

And the editor at the time was Andrew Sullivan and Andrews ship me off to just go do what I would do on the road. And I got in a car and I never got out of it. I was all over the country for the next nine months. And, It quickly became clear that the 96 presidential campaign was the most boring presidential campaign in human history. And around Bob Dole and Bill Clinton were armies of communications people who were gonna make sure you never saw anything interesting and

So I just started writing about what was interesting rather than what I was supposed to write about. And I, and I started to pick up characters who resonated with me and with, in small groups of voters.

So I made the, I flipped it, I made minor characters, the main characters, and put Dole and Clinton in the background. And it really worked as a series in the New Republic. And then I, it brought out as a book.

But in the course of this, I was in a air, you know, a terminal in Spartanburg, South Carolina at 11 o’clock at night told the Dole campaign was gonna land to pick me up.

And the question was why would they do that? And why they would do that was McCain was in the same terminal. And I recognized him, vaguely, it was just the two of us. And they came over to, said “Hi.” And we started talking and he was at that time disgraced. He was part of the, one of the Keating five, he’d been involved in the, in the savings and loan scandal. He had barely won his reelection.

He was just different than any politician I met. He was like real, and I just started getting interested in him. And then I learned his story about how he had been in, he’d been held in prison and his limbs had been broken during the Vietnam War and that they were torturing him. This was the amazing thing.

The Vietnamese were torturing John McCain to get him to accept early release. They were trying to let him go, because his father was an admiral and they thought they could undermine the morale of the American troops if they started letting in the fancy people’s kids out of prisoner of war camp.

And he, and so he got beat up over and over because he refused to go home before the people who had been, who had been captured before him. Now it, so the piece that create, I. I found it by just, I was just hanging with him. ’cause I was interested in him. I didn’t know where it was gonna lead. He didn’t really belong in a book about the nine six presidential campaign, except he was dole’s most popular surrogate.

But hold that was, that to one side.

He lets slip that he has this relationship and it was, it came, came out very naturally. This guy, I was coming over to his office. This other guy was coming over to his office named David Ihin. And David Ipshin was a Vietnam War protestor who went with Jane Fonda to Hanoi and piped anti-war propaganda into John McCain’s cell.

And Ipshin had later in life,  things had changed since that time. And McCain had been celebrated for his war heroism and Ipshin had become kind of blacklisted by American politics because of his involvement, even though McCain kind of admired his conviction. And McCain saw,

Ipshin ends up going to work for Clinton. And then I. If someone came out with a story about how Ian had done this with Jane Fonda and Clinton was about to kind of release him, and McCain got involved and told Clinton, like, “You keep him on and I’m gonna get up and give a speech about this guy on the, on the senate floor about he’s my friend.”

They developed a relationship. And so I wrote the story about the, this relationship between the war protestor and the war hero. And, it was 3000 words in the New Republic, which ends up in this book, “Losers” and McCain at that moment was sort of like untouchable by the journalist. Nobody paid was paying much attention, and he was a little disgraced

Overnight, everybody wanted to write the same story and, and he got his relationship to the rest of the world, to the media in Washington just changed. He would, he, we, we became friends and he, he let me in on this process.

He was like, “That piece changed my life.” And, and it made it possible for him to go become the candidate he became.

It was an, it was amazing watching what a little piece of journalism can do. And it was very mo a very moving story. The, the wrinkle to it was, when I wrote the story, Chen was dying. He was dying of cancer. He was on his deathbed. So Chen was telling me about how what John McCain had done from him, from, for him, from his deathbed.

and it was just powerful. And so, I, I dunno what to say about this except that I found in spending time with him that even in politics, you could find these pockets of authenticity and if you, and if you respected them,  that they, they, they generated a different kind of response than most political writing.

And I also found that like, if you found what was good in someone in the political process, the readership wanted to hear it. Like they, they were so used to the kind of distance, the critical distance, which. Ends up being kind of antiseptic. You don’t ever really know the person. And McCain, he wasn’t really running for anything at the time.

He certainly wasn’t a presidential candidate. I could get, let the reader get close to him. And the reader really enjoyed that.  and they, when he ran for president, you know, he almost knocked off Bush the first time. And I mean, they, they started out really well. But that campaign,  he called me before and he said,  I want you to come with me.

Just be with me wherever. You don’t have to write about it. If you don’t wanna write about it, but I want you to, I want you to watch. I wanna see you watch this process up close, like in the middle of a campaign. And I said, how close can I get? And he said, you have the other bedroom in my place in, in Washington.

We’ll just, we’ll actually live together and you just go wherever you, and we had just had our first child and I could not go to my wife and say, guess what? I’m going off of John McCain for the next year. And he being old school, being a man of his generation, did not understand it. It was like, what? It’s a kid, you know, he is a military guy too, like right.

They, they would breed and then go off on a ship for the next five years. And so he, he was just bewildered by the fact that I was not gonna ride shotgun on his first presidential campaign because I had had this child.  so, and that ended up being kind of the end. I mean, I, at that point I became a little more distant friend, like, like, but I, it would’ve been fun to watch it.

BR: For sure. Let’s get another question.

Audience: I saw you today on Nicole Wallace’s program on today

ML: Could you Believe I got here? I that’s see, yes. I couldn’t believe,

Audience: I was wondering if it would be canceled. Yeah. But you said one thing that had me fascinated. You said that most people don’t know what government does, and you said nobody knows what the Department of Commerce does. What does it do?

ML: Well, there’s a book called The Fifth Risk, and there’s a chapter in that book by me that explains it. But, but what it does, you know, I, when you ask people who don’t know, they kind of say commerce, business. Business of course. So 80% of the budget is the National Oceanographic Administrator,

BR: NOAA

ML: And, and 75% of that budget is the weather surface. So what they do, weather prediction is a, is at the center of the Department of Commerce, which is a little odd. But I mean, the, the names one of our problems in explaining our federal government is the names of the places don’t actually describe the places,  energy commerce.

Agriculture should be Department of Rural. Mm-hmm. It’s rural. It keeps rural America afloat. Commerce should be the Department of Weather. That would be good. I didn’t really oppose this idea of turning the Department of Defense into the Department of War that’s a little more on the nose.

BR: Wasn’t it the Department of War way back when Energy is the Department of Science and Technology.

ML: That’s what it is. It’s a, it’s, it’s amazing what is in the energy. But all the national labs in,

BR: I the fifth risk, you tell the story that they wanna privatize the Commerce Department, all the energy reporting. And then once you do that, who, where are you getting the data for all these people saying, well, I get the weather on my app.

I don’t, we don’t this, they get it from AccuWeather, but AccuWeather gets it from the National Weather Service. Right? That’s right. So it was, they, the accu, what they Trump tried to do the first time around is give the Department of Commerce to the AccuWeather, CEO and let him have his way with it. And what would’ve happened was he would’ve, he would’ve created preferential access.

Probably to his own, so his own app would’ve gotten more. Now. And you also describe in the book how much more accurate weather forecasting has gotten tornado warnings.

ML: So, so it’s like, this is the thing about government, it’s, it’s like when it does something right, people just, it’s like, it’s the way you treat your parents when they’re good parents. You don’t even notice. They get no credit. It’s when they screw up. You notice. And that’s the relationship we have with our government. We’re like a 14-year-old boy and our government is our mother. That that’s sort of the, the, the how mature our relationship is. And,

But the national weather, what they have done, if you go back and talk to a weatherman who’s been doing it for 50 years, he, he kind of say like, you know, I, what I used to do is like, wake up in the morning, go outside and say “Sunny! Could be sunny for a while” you know, that they could do almost nothing, you know, out a day or two kind of thing. These accurate forecasts out seven days. The, the, you know, being able to figure out where, which way a hurricane’s going, getting better, tornado prediction, all this stuff is huge achievement with huge effects. Like, it really makes all our lives and, and it has a big effect on commerce too, right? On business.

Your plane, did you remember when you were flying as a kid and the plane was just always bumping around? Again, it’s not doing that nearly as much. It’s because the airlines have better data about, from the National Weather Service about what’s going on up in the, with the, with the currents. So,

That happens and nobody says, “Wow, cool. They did that. It’s all taken for granted.” It’s all, it’s all taken for granted now. What, what hap pens but the dystopia is like, it gets privatized and, and. And Barry gets the, the premi gold or platin or whatever it is, tornado forecast. And I get the, I get the silver forecast.

So my, I’m in my house when it comes through and you aren’t, you know, that, that it’s, it becomes a, I mean, a real matter of equity. It if we’re seeing if we’re getting different, I mean it seems like that should be a public good.

BR: Makes plenty of sense. Let’s,  balcony, let’s get a question up top. Here we are. Fire away.

Audience: Hi.  so first of all, you talked about the 96 campaign and just so you know, I listened to some of your podcasts from that as well. You are this American life as well. I don’t know if you remember that.

ML: Back in nine. Oh, it so that’s funny.  IRA Glass was just starting this American Life when I was doing that, and he called and said, could you just, I mean, this was back when there were pretty low budget.  I would just go as an episode, go read the New Republic stuff.

So I’m like, four or five of these things are early episodes of this American life. And he became a good close friend through that. But yes, so I I’ve never listened to them, but I remember, yeah, they’re, you did a phenomenal job.

Audience: You should listen to them again and maybe compile them. They were great. You talked about, besides from,  McCain, that story you relayed, you did something about,  some,  you did a lot about Dole and you also did something about, I don’t know, some other guy in business who, it was a, it was a proto-Trump. It was, his name was Maury Taylor. Right. And he was the businessman who was running to make government [put up his own money] put up that guy.

He spent $7 million getting 7,000 votes in New Hampshire and Iowa. And he was in many ways the most reasonable candidate.  he was like, when you gave everybody what he stood for, everybody kind of agreed and then they saw him and freaked — ’cause he did none of the artifice of the, of the politician. But he was great fun. I remember him this well.

So this is another moment, the the New Republic for a moment thought, what the hell is he doing? He’s turning Maury Taylor into the main character of our ’96 presidential campaign coverage. And I did, he was the main character of that story

I went out with him,  just to see what the hell was going on. He was in Iowa and he had three r three huge RVs with speakers on the front. And he had Blair Bruce Springsteen as he went into town and he had kegs of beer on the back and he’d get, he’d throw a party in every town. But the day, the morning I was with him, he rolls into this, the, the biggest public school in Iowa, I can’t remember where, where it was Ames or somewhere.

And it’s, and they’ve rolled out, they’ve made all the students. Go to the local, the auditorium it’s huge to hear the presidential candidate. And Morey’s been a presidential candidate for about, at that point, like four weeks. And before that he was the CEO was the same time, CEO of Titan Tire and Wheel, Midwestern Tire Company.

And had no experience or knowledge of politics. He didn’t know anything.  but he, except he knew about life. He was, and he, he was like your, he was like a great dad, but he didn’t know anything.

And so he gets up, I don’t know what they’re expecting, but it’s sort of like the civics lesson for the day. And they’re, they’re a thousand kids out there and they’re all asleep ’cause it’s eight in the morning and he comes bursting through the doors and, and he looks up and he says, and the first thing he goes is like, kid in the pink hair, my day we used to get rid of the weirdos.

And, and, and, and, and, and the kid goes, “Oh,” you know, and they’re all alert. And he goes, and then he says, I want someone here tell me what the most important thing in life is. And you could see all the teachers, getting a little uncomfortable, but you’re, they’re hoping he’s gonna say, you know, love family country something. And they’re guessing these things and they’re, they’re guessing what they think a presidential candidate would say.

And it’s, nah, nah, that’s not the, i, you guys don’t know anything. And he reaches into his pocket and he pulls out a huge wad of a hundred dollars bills “Money! This is the most important thing in life.”

And you can see all the teachers going, oh my God. And he had me! At that moment, he had me, I said, wherever this guy goes, I wanna see what happens.

BR: $7 million for 7,000 votes.

ML:Yeah. And he still bothers me. I mean, he still calls me all the time to tell me why I need to love Trump. He loves Trump,  to tell me why I, I’m wrong. Like this thing drives him crazy. It’s like, government doesn’t do anything good.

BR: You know? He is like, he’s that kind of Republican. Well, you know, there are a lot of people who have that sort of philosophy ingrained. In them since, you know, Reagan.  what makes this book so interesting is how you’re not taking a partisan side left or right. No, you’re, you’re not talking politics. It’s here are the people who do the people’s business with your taxpayer dollars.

Yeah. I love the story about the guy who is the tax collector. There’s, there’s a line in the book that stuns me. There’s 6 million people who are entitled to a, the earned tax credit that don’t apply. And then there’s something like 25,000 people who’ve made more than a million dollars that haven’t filed their taxes since 2017. How come we’re not trying to help the people who are owed this scredit and collect from the people who can’t be bothered to pay taxes? That doesn’t seem partisan. That just seems administratively competent.

ML: That’s right. No, no, I, the, the whole point it, we, I, if you’d asked me what the point of the thing was when, when we started, it was just, I know they’re great stories and I’m going to use these writers to demonstrate, It isn’t me, It’s like these stories are there and they should be told that was it

After the fact, there is a purpose to it, and the purpose is you can have your prejudice about the government. You can have you, you can hold the stereotype of the lazy, indolent nine to five, doesn’t care about anything milking. You waste, fraud, abuse, deep state, whatever it is, you think, but you’re not allowed to have it without knowing this.

If you want to read these stories and still think that, okay, but you gotta know, you gotta hear these stories. And if you hear these stories, some part of you will think, I shouldn’t really think that that’s, that’s dumb. It’s, it’s more complicated than that.

Sure. There are problems with the government. Sure. There are things that need to be fixed. Sure. And a lot of it is like the way we administer the situation, we put them in. But there are unbelievable people here. They are in many ways the best among us. They’re here, they’re there to serve, and they found some purpose. And in that purpose, they found a purpose in life. They’ve learned how to lead their lives in a very meaningful way, and for us to go after them as if they’re enemies is it’s very damning about us, and that that’s. That’s the kind of what we’re trying to get across.

BR: It’s, it’s 9:05. Is that, is that a spot where we should  I think that’s where we say goodbye. Let, let’s wrap it up. Thank you so much, everybody. Let’s hear it. Thank you so much, Michael Lewis!

~~~

That was my conversation with Michael Lewis. We went out to dinner afterwards. he had an early morning TV hit, so we literally, he had dinner at 9:30 — 10:15. He had to run back to the hotel. But, oh my goodness, that was just so much fun. And you can imagine just sitting down with him to dinner afterwards. It, it’s just every bit as magical as, as you would imagine, every time he comes into town and I have an opportunity to sit down and interview him.

I jump at it.  I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I do. Special thanks to the folks at the Main Street Theater in Port Washington,  especially Karen, for,  allowing me to put this together. It was really a great time.

 

The post From “Liar’s Poker” to Today: An Evening with Michael Lewis appeared first on The Big Picture.

Key Events This Week: Trump-Xi Meeting, Fed Speakers, PMIs And Durables

After an extremely busy week for central bank decisions, the week ahead brings a mix of economic data, even more central bank decisions, lots of Fed speak, and geopolitical events.

The first read of the September PMIs across the major economies on Wednesday should provide the most timely update on global growth momentum, while investors will also be watching policy decisions from the Norges Bank, Riksbank and SNB on Thursday with their hike probabilities according to futures at 62%, 21% and 5% respectively, according to Deutsche Bank.

Attention will also turn to the meeting between Presidents Trump and Xi on Thursday which will likely garner a lot of headlines. We also have opening week of the UN General Assembly debate in New York.

In the US, the focus will increasingly shift towards next Friday’s payrolls report, which will be the most important data release before the October FOMC meeting. Ahead of that, markets will be very keen to hear from a heavy schedule of Fed speakers throughout the week. These comments will frame last week’s FOMC meeting, where policymakers delivered a widely expected rate increase but signalled a more hawkish policy outlook. The updated projections showed a strong majority of officials anticipating further tightening, while Chair Warsh emphasized that the Committee still sees limited evidence that policy is meaningfully restrictive.  

Fed communication begins today with Chicago Fed President Goolsbee alongside the Chicago Fed National Activity Index. Tomorrow, investors receive the Philadelphia Fed non-manufacturing survey and the Richmond Fed manufacturing index. On the policy front, Fed Vice Chairs Williams and Jefferson are due to speak. Williams is viewed as one of the four officials who are still expected to see the Fed easing by the end of next year, so any hints on that outlook will be closely scrutinized.  

Wednesday’s main event will be the September flash PMIs. Economists expect the US manufacturing PMI to edge down to 53.6 from 53.9, while the services gauge is forecast to ease slightly to 55.9 from 56.5. Given the recent focus on AI-related investment and broader capex trends, these surveys will be watched closely for signs that business activity remains resilient. Fed Governor Barr is also due to speak. Investors will also be watching Wednesday's Treasury buyback announcement ahead of Thursday's 20-30yr operation, particularly after last month's decision to at least double the size of long-end buybacks.  

Thursday sees August new home sales and initial jobless claims. Last week continuing claims hit their lowest since January 2024. Fed speakers include Williams, Barkin, Hammack and Paulson, offering further opportunities for markets to assess where officials stand after last week’s hawkish meeting. Friday’s US durable goods report will be particularly important from a growth perspective. Our economists expect headline orders to rise by 0.6% month-on-month, with orders excluding transportation and core capital goods both expected to increase by 1.1%. The data should provide one of the clearest indications yet of whether the recent strength in business investment is being sustained. Williams and Hammack are also due to speak on Friday.  

Here is a day-by-day calendar, courtesy of DB

Day-by-day calendar of events

Monday September 21

• Data: US August Chicago Fed national activity index, China 1-yr and 5-yr loan prime rates
• Central banks: Fed's Goolsbee speaks, ECB’s Kazimir and Dolenc speak, BoC’s Macklem speaks

Tuesday September 22

• Data: US September Philadelphia Fed non-manufacturing activity, Richmond Fed manufacturing index, business conditions, UK August public finances, Eurozone September consumer confidence
• Central banks: Fed's Williams, Jefferson and Barkin speak, ECB's Nagel and Sleijpen speak
• Auctions: US 2-yr Notes ($69bn)
• Other: General debate of the UN’s General Assembly in New York (until September 28)

Wednesday September 23

• Data: US, UK, Germany, France and Eurozone September PMIs
• Central banks: Fed's Barr speaks, ECB's Vujcic, Zigman and Lane speak
• Auctions: US 2-yr FRN (reopening, $28bn), 5-yr Notes ($70bn)
• Other: OECD’s interim economic outlook

Thursday September 24

• Data: US August new home sales, September Kansas City Fed manufacturing activity, Q2 current account balance, initial jobless claims, Japan September PMIs, Germany September Ifo survey, France September consumer confidence, business confidence, EU27 August new car registrations, Canada July retail sales, Australia labour force survey
• Central banks: Central bank decisions in Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, Fed's Williams, Barkin, Hammack and Paulson speak, ECB’s economic bulletin, BoE’s Dhingra, Breeden and Lombardelli speak
• Earnings: Costco
• Auctions: US 7-yr Notes ($44bn)
• Other: US President Trump and China’s President Xi meeting in the US

Friday September 25

• Data: US August durable goods orders, September Kansas City Fed services activity, UK September GfK consumer confidence, Germany October GfK consumer confidence, Eurozone August M3
• Central banks: Fed's Williams and Hammack speak, ECB's Vujcic speaks

Looking at just the US, The key economic data release this week is the durable goods report on Friday. There are many speaking engagements with Fed officials this week, including events with Governor Barr on Wednesday, President Paulson on Thursday, President Hammack on Thursday and Friday, and President Williams on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.

Monday, September 21 

• There are no major economic data releases scheduled.
• 06:30 AM Chicago Fed President Goolsbee (FOMC non-voter) speaks: Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee will speak about monetary policy at the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum in London. Speech text and Q&A are expected. On August 28, Goolsbee said, “As I look at the inflation data, we were above the target, then it was going the wrong way, then we got a couple of months of more benign readings but that certainly doesn’t feel like we’re out of the woods.”

Tuesday, September 22 

• There are no major economic data releases scheduled. 
• 10:05 AM New York Fed President Williams speaks: New York Fed President John Williams will give keynote remarks during the New York Fed’s Treasury Market Conference. Speech text is expected. On September 2, Williams explained that “we are neither seeing second-round effects, nor unusual broadening of the effects of higher energy prices, and we are seeing well anchored inflation expectations,” though his comments came prior to September’s warmer CPI print.
• 10:20 AM Fed Vice Chair Philip Jefferson speaks: Fed Vice Chair Philip Jefferson will speak at the New York Fed’s Treasury Market Conference on discount window modernization and Treasury market functioning. Speech text is expected.
• 01:00 PM Richmond Fed President Barkin (FOMC non-voter) speaks: Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin will deliver a speech to the CFA Society Baltimore. Speech text and Q&A are expected.

Wednesday, September 23 

• 09:45 AM S&P Global US manufacturing PMI, September preliminary (consensus 53.5, last 53.9); S&P Global US services PMI, September preliminary (consensus 56.0, last 56.5)
• 10:05 AM Fed Governor Barr speaks: Fed Governor Michael Barr will speak on housing at the Chicago Fed Community Development Summit. Speech text and Q&A are expected. On September 1, Barr said, “A series of shocks—from tariffs and then the conflict in the Middle East, as well as from the rapid AI buildout—has pushed us off course. And core non-housing services inflation remains elevated.” He also added that “with inflation above target for a protracted period, there is a risk of broader price pressures taking hold, a risk I am watching closely.”

Thursday, September 24 

• 04:10 AM New York Fed President Williams speaks: New York Fed President John Williams will participate in a moderated discussion during the London Macro Policy Forum. Q&A is expected.
• 08:00 AM Richmond Fed President Barkin (FOMC non-voter) speaks: Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin will participate in a fireside chat at The Economic Club of Washington D.C. Q&A is expected.
• 08:30 AM Initial jobless claims, week ended September 19 (GS 200k, consensus 200k, last 196k): Continuing jobless claims, week ended September 12 (consensus 1,750k, last 1,730k)
• 08:50 AM Cleveland Fed President Hammack (FOMC voter) speaks: Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack will give opening remarks at the Inflation: Drivers and Dynamics Conference hosted by the Cleveland Fed and the European Central Bank. Speech text is expected. On September 4, Hammack stated, “Both the hard data and the anecdotes are telling me the same thing: policy is not restrictive. Inflation is too high—and the longer it stays above our objective, the harder it will be to bring it back down…Right now, what I’m hearing is that it is time to act.”
• 10:00 AM New home sales, August (GS +0.7%, consensus +1.3%, last -10.5%)
• 10:10 AM Philadelphia Fed President Paulson (FOMC voter) speaks: Philadelphia Fed President Anna Paulson will speak about the economic outlook at the Tenth Annual Fintech Conference hosted by the Philadelphia Fed. Speech text is expected. On August 4, Paulson explained that she sees “two plausible scenarios for how current policy is affecting inflation.” One is that “the current setting of the federal funds rate is mildly restrictive and this will bring inflation to 2 percent in an acceptable time frame” and the other is that “current policy is not restrictive enough to deliver our target rate of 2 percent inflation.”

Friday, September 25 

• 05:15 AM New York Fed President Williams speaks: New York Fed President Williams will participate in a policy panel during the 6th Monetary Economics Conference in Oxford, UK. Q&A is expected.
• 08:30 AM Durable goods orders, August preliminary (GS -1.0%, consensus -0.3%, last +1.1%); Durable goods orders ex-transportation, August preliminary (GS +0.6%, consensus +0.6%, last +0.4%); Core capital goods orders, August preliminary (GS +0.5%, consensus +0.7%, last flat); Core capital goods shipments, August preliminary (GS +0.3%, consensus +0.7%, last +1.2%): We estimate that durable goods orders declined 1.0% in the preliminary August report (month-over-month, seasonally adjusted) based on our tracking of commercial aircraft orders. We forecast a 0.5% increase in core capital goods orders—reflecting continued strength in the new orders components of manufacturing surveys in August—and a 0.3% increase in core capital goods shipments—reflecting the continued increase in core capital goods orders in recent months.
• 10:00 AM University of Michigan consumer sentiment, September final (GS 47.5, consensus 47.5, last 47.8): University of Michigan 5-10-year inflation expectations, September final (GS 3.4%, last 3.4%)
• 2:00 PM Cleveland Fed President Hammack (FOMC voter) speaks: Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack will participate in a policy panel discussion at the Inflation: Drivers and Dynamics Conference hosted by the Cleveland Fed and the European Central Bank. Q&A is expected.

Source: DB, Goldman

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/21/2026 - 10:55

Another Tanker Struck In Strait Of Hormuz As Iran's President Heads To NY

Just as the Iranian delegation of President Masoud Pezeshkian is set to fly to New York City for this week's UN General Assembly, where it's expected that the Iranians could be engaged in some sideline diplomacy with the White House, another tanker incident has unfolded off in the Persian Gulf area.

The UK Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) agency is reporting Monday that an oil tanker has been "struck by an unknown projectile" while on an inbound transit route in the Strait of Hormuz.

As a result of the attack under as yet unknown circumstances two crew members suffered "minor injuries". But the vessel is reportedly in good enough shape to continue on to its next port of call.

It may have been the result of a small drone, given what appears to only be light damage or an incident not significant enough to put the vessel out of commission. Tehran is seeking to keep its leverage and 'control' over the vital energy transit waterway.

"Vessels are advised to transit with caution and report any suspicious activity to UKMTO," the reiterated. 

But oil prices have slid to their lowest in 11 days amid optimism that Iran's Pezeshkian could hold talks with US officials, or else could engage in renewed diplomacy via mediators on the UN sidelines.

Trump in a Sunday Fox News interview actually indicated openness to a meeting with Pezeshkian, in a first of the war. Trump was asked about the high level UN meeting and surprisingly he went so far as to say he would "probably be open" to meeting with the Iranian president.

Still, this was all coupled with threats. In Trump's mind, there seem to be three options on the table, or as he put it--"to obliterate Iran, letting it rot economically or reach a deal."

Tim Waterer, chief market analyst at KCM Trade, has observed, "It seems that a degree of risk premium is being removed from oil prices on hopes that a diplomatic path to de-escalate the US-Iran war may arrive this week."

Meanwhile, a regional US commander has claimed that oil and liquefied natural gas shipments through the the Strait of Hormuz have reached their highest level in six months. This is being hailed as a sign that US naval protection and mine-clearing efforts could finally be paying off.

Iran has meanwhile over the weekend once again warned US allies in the region that they'll be considered "complicit" if the US resumes it military assault on the Islamic Republic. The Iranian military HQ stated that "any mistakes will result in painful attacks."

Iran’s President Will Enter the U.S. DURING the War for the UN Meeting

This is VERY RISKY

President Masoud Pezeshkian is expected to travel to New York in the coming days to address the UN General Assembly and meet world leaders.

The security situation is extraordinary. Dr.… pic.twitter.com/AtY24KDYEd

— Ryan Rozbiani (@RyanRozbiani) September 20, 2026

Tehran further indicated Sunday that it is still awaiting Trump's response to its conditions for ending the war. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf confirmed to AFP that Iran's demands were sent to Washington via the Qataris. The US could decide to convey its counter offer while the Pezeshkian delegation is in town.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/21/2026 - 10:45

US Futures Rise, Near All-Time High, As Oil, Yields Drop On US-China Diplomacy Optimism

US futures are higher driven by Trump / Xi optimism around AI, Middle East, and trade with Middle East kinetic headlines over the weekend reflecting a pause to escalation. Sentiment was lifted by signs of progress on geopolitical issues: it’s a big week for talks, with Trump set for a summit with China’s Xi Jinping on Thursday and a possibility of talks with Iran’s president at the UN General Assembly. As of 8:00am ET, S&P futures are up 0.7%, rising to 7,770 and less than 1% from all time highs, as Nasdaq futures gain 1.1%, with tech strength on full display in APAC trade and also leading in premarket US trading with broad-based strength across Semis, Memory, and Mag7. Cyclicals ex-Energy are leading Defensives with the AI theme boosting Tech / Industrials within Cyclicals. Within Defensives, both healthcare and staples have pockets of strength as today looks like a broad-based rally in both the SPX and within Tech. WTI is below $100, dropping for a fourth day, fuel prices are lower, while bond traders reckon the Fed will succeed in its fight against inflation helping drive bond yields lower as the yield curve bull flattens, as the USD drops to session lows. This is bidding up risk assets with Equities leading. The Fed’s Goolsbee speaks 6.30am with previous speakers Fri / Sun offering a hawkish view which reiterates Warsh’s key points. According to JPM, given the macro and earnings strength, the market may be underpricing the number of hikes through YE27. There is little on today's calendar: we get the Aug Chicago Fed Nat Activity Index (est. -0.04) at 8:30am ET.

In premarket trading, Mag 7 stocks are all higher: Meta climbs about 2% after shares in the social media giant sold off on Friday. Tesla +1.5%, Alphabet +0.3%, Nvidia +0.8%, Amazon +0.7%, Microsoft +0.4%, Apple unchanged.

• Cryptocurrency-linked stocks are rallying as Bitcoin trades above $84,000, near an eight-month high.
• Accenture (ACN) gains 4% after Anthropic partnered with the technology consulting company to test the safety of its advanced artificial intelligence models.
• Alkermes (ALKS) climbs 8% after announcing positive Phase 1b results for ALKS 7290 in adults With attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
• Arhaus (ARHS) rises 2% after Jefferies upgraded the furniture company to buy, writing that it has “newfound optimism on the retailer’s strategy to elevate brand awareness” and improve market share.
• Candel Therapeutics (CADL) gains 6% after BofA upgraded the biotech company to buy, citing optimism about a prostate cancer treatment.
• Ciena (CIEN) rises 5% after Evercore ISI raised the recommendation to outperform, citing the way data centers are boosting demand for optical networking equipment.
• Critical Metals (CRML) soars 24% after President Donald Trump said the he reached an agreement with Denmark over Greenland that would give the US “permanent control over security” of the Arctic island. In April, Critical Metals agreed to acquire European Lithium Ltd., giving it full ownership of a rare earth project in Greenland.
• Securitize (SECZ) rises 8% after Cantor Fitzgerald initiated coverage with a recommendation of overweight as it sees the tokenization company benefiting from recent Securities and Exchange Commission guidance.
• Warner Bros. (WBD) is up 7% and Paramount Skydance (PSKY) is up 6% as the latter is in settlement talks with California officials over its planned acquisition of the former.

In other corporate news, settlement talks between Paramount Skydance and California officials over the planned acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery are said to include a financial penalty if the company fails to make good on a promise to distribute 30 films per year in theaters. Nscale, a developer of AI data centers that counts Nvidia and Microsoft among its partners, filed for an IPO. Novo Nordisk shares fell after the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy outlined its 2030 strategic ambitions, targeting revenue CAGR in line with industry peers. SoftBank is seeking the equivalent of more than $11 billion in what would be one of the biggest junk bond deals ever to fund OpenAI investments in OpenAI

Global markets are firmer across the board, helped by lower energy prices despite heightened geopolitical tensions over the weekend. Brent is down about 2% as diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict are parsed, while oil and LNG flows through Hormuz hit a six-month high. The Houthis said they attacked sensitive sites in Riyadh and an Aramco facility in Yanbu over the weekend, while US President Trump reportedly said that he is thinking of "blowing up" all of Iran. One source of potential optimism is the commentary following US-China trade talks, with US Treasury Secretary Bessent describing talks as "successful" on trade and AI, while they agreed to hold another meeting on AI dialogue. For the Trump-Xi meeting - which is Xi’s first trip to the US in three years - trade, AI, critical minerals, industrial capacity, Taiwan, Ukraine and the Middle East are all on the bingo card.

The “feedback from the talks between China and the US is feeding a positive narrative as the week begins,” said Alexandre Baradez, chief market analyst at IG in Paris. “That said, for me oil prices remain the key driver.”

“The market doesn’t really need any grand bargain,” says Panmure Liberum’s Mark Taylor, who thinks signs of “amicable agreement to manage tensions” will be enough to support risk appetite. “However, if fresh tariff threats, tech restrictions or hostile commentary resurface, it could quickly revive the trade-war risk aversion,” he adds.

For today, oil is also a major risk-on driver. In a sign that US naval protection and mine-clearing efforts in the Strait of Hormuz were paying off, a regional US commander said oil and liquefied natural gas shipments through the waterway reached their highest level in six months, which almost helped push Brent below $100. Trump told Fox News he would “probably” be open to meeting his Iranian counterpart on the sidelines of the UN assembly this week.

Meanwhile, as BBG notes, the AI debate continues to rumble on, with the narrative to positive over the weekend, despite some news reports of a looming drop in memory prices. South Korea’s chip exports surged nearly 260% year-on-year in the first 20 days of September, to a record $34.1 billion. Accenture shares surged after it was chosen by Anthropic to test the safety of AI models, and SocGen said AI could help it make substantial cost savings.

But there’s still a lot of caution. Citi’s CEO said companies are racing to build up their defenses as AI models become more powerful and risk spurring cyber attacks. Today’s Big Take looks at how AI risk is making CIOs nervous. Elsewhere, opposition to data centers continues to mount: Data Center Watch said some 45 projects worth $68 billion were blocked or delayed by local pushback during the second quarter.

“AI is clearly becoming the next major area of strategic competition, but the fact that both sides are at least discussing a mechanism for dialogue is constructive,” said Mohit Mirpuri, senior partner at SGMC Capital Pte. “Markets don’t necessarily need Trump and Xi to resolve all their differences on Thursday, they mainly need reassurance that those differences remain manageable and don’t spill back into another trade or technology shock.”

And then there is inflation: price pressures continue to show up, with US retail diesel prices topping $6.50 a gallon for the first time, copper holding gains and food shock risks making headlines. Fed’s Kashkari said inflation remains too high and that pressures have broadened beyond the oil-price shock of the Iran war.

European shares gain as cooling oil and gas prices ease inflation concerns, while optimism ahead of this week’s China-US summit also lifts sentiment. The Stoxx 600 rises 0.9% with tech outperforming while healthcare falls after Novo Nordisk disappointed investors who were hoping to see more robust sales targets at the company’s capital markets day. Here are some of the biggest movers on Monday:

• Kuehne+Nagel shares rise as much as 6% following the freight transportation firm’s collaboration with US tech behemoth Amazon, which will include providing assistance on logistics services and infrastructure for Amazon Web Services.
• Lundbeck gains as much as 4.6% after UBS raised its recommendation to buy from neutral, saying the company is potentially on track to turn around its R&D activities, and notes several upcoming key trial readouts.
• Lotus Bakeries gains as much as 6.2% after UBS raised its recommendation to buy from neutral, saying the company is potentially on track to turn around its R&D activities, and notes several upcoming key trial readouts
• Huber+Suhner shares rise as much as 5.6%, recouping the losses booked on Friday after the maker of telecommunication products held its capital markets day.
• Industrie De Nora shares rise as much as 5.9%, extending a rally after Italy agreed to cover full costs for its Gigafactory project, according to a statement.
• Novo shares fall as much as 7.7% after the Danish firm outlined its 2030 strategic ambitions at its Capital Markets Day in London.
• Ayvens shares drop as much as 6.2% after the fleet management company outlined its new 2029 strategic plan. Jefferies said the new targets are “more realistic than ambitious.”
• VW shares fall as much as 2.6% after Kepler Cheuvreux downgraded the German carmaker to hold from buy citing a profit warning that offset positives from a restructuring program.
• Craneware shares fall as much as 25% after the healthcare software company cut its revenue guidance for FY27 amid disruption caused by a cyber security incident.
• Ipsen drops as much as 7.8% after Amneal Pharmaceuticals received FDA approval for its generic version of somatuline.

Asian stocks advanced as an extended rally in semiconductor shares and a decline in oil prices supported investor sentiment. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index rose more than 1%, heading for a fourth straight session of gains. Samsung Electronics, TSMC and MediaTek were the top contributors to the gauge’s increase. South Korea’s Kospi was the best performer in the region. Markets in Japan were shut for a holiday. “Friday’s Wall Street session has aided sentiment in the AI names early, with the US semiconductor index rising close to 3%, led by the memory names as contract prices keep rising,” said Josh Gilbert, lead APAC analyst at Etoro. “Korea and Taiwan carry the most exposure to that, which is why we’ve seen buyers return to Asia, with flows coming back into the region after a run of selling.” The MSCI Asia Pacific Index is up about 23% so far this year. However, the gauge has risen just 0.3% so far in September as the Federal Reserve’s hawkish rate hike, persistent inflation concerns, elevated bond yields and growing unease over the

In FX, the Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index is near unchanged. USD/JPY is back on a 157 handle after Friday’s reported rate check.

In rates, treasuries trade near session highs in early US session, supported by steeper gains across European bond markets as oil prices slide, leaving Brent crude on track for the longest run of declines since June. Energy prices are easing amid diplomatic efforts to end the US-Iran war and signs cargoes are still moving through the Strait of Hormuz. Treasury coupon auctions of 2-, 5- and 7-year notes commence Tuesday. US yields are 3bp to 4bp richer across the curve with front-end lagging slightly, flattening 2s10s and 2s5s spreads by ~1.5bp. 10-year is around 4.955% with bunds and gilts in the sector outperforming by 1.5bp and 3.5bp. In Europe, French bonds outperform, moving the French-German 10-year yield spread back below 100bp; 105bps spread reached Friday was the widest since 2012. IG dollar issuance slate includes a few deals already.  Dealers expect around $40 billion of new issuance this week, possibly including Sysco Corp., which is preparing a roughly $17 billion bond sale. This week’s Treasury note auctions include $69 billion 2-year Tuesday, $70 billion 5-year Wednesday and $44 billion 7-year Thursday.

are on the decline with the US 10-year borrowing cost down 4bps at 4.96% - note, cash trade was closed overnight due to the Japanese market holiday. Yields in the UK and Germany are also lower, with the pullback in energy outweighing mounting political risks for the latter. French 10-year bonds are outperforming after being trounced on Friday and the OAT-bund yield spread is back below 100 basis points.

In commodities, WTI crude futures are down almost 3%, Brent is down more than 2% as diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict are parsed, while oil and LNG flows through Hormuz hit a six-month high. Spot gold is down 0.8%. The crypto rally is extending with Bitcoin up 4.7% and at levels not seen since January. 

US economic data slate includes August Chicago Fed national activity index at 8:30 a.m. Fed speaker slate is blank for Monday.

Market Snapshot

Top Overnight News

• Oil prices slid to their lowest in 11 days on Monday as investors ‌hoped for diplomatic progress on the Iran war due to this week's UN meeting, and eyed a partial recovery in shipments from Saudi Arabia. Brent crude futures and US West Texas Intermediate crude touched their lowest since September 10 earlier on Monday. The Brent contract for November was at $101.75 a barrel at 0859 GMT, down $2.12, or 2%. RTRS
• The Iran war has created a new shortage on the oil market. This time the scarce commodity isn’t just crude—it is the ships that carry it. Drone attacks that shut Saudi Arabia’s bypass pipeline earlier this month have forced more crude back through the Strait of Hormuz and onto a tanker fleet already stretched thin. WSJ
• The US and China have agreed to set up an AI dialogue ahead of a high-stakes summit on Thursday in Washington between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping. US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent said the two sides had negotiated the creation of an AI dialogue mechanism, which was floated when Trump met Xi in Beijing in May, in talks with Chinese vice-premier He Lifeng in New York on Sunday. FT
• China is more than halfway toward its pledge to buy 25 million tons of US soybeans this year, but a commitment to purchase at least another $17 billion of American farm products has largely stalled. BBG
• OpenAI projects it will burn through almost $280bn by the end of 2030, highlighting its huge long-term funding needs as the AI company pushes for a valuation of more than $1.2tn in fresh investment talks. The company expects negative free cash flow of $278bn over five years from 2026 to 2030 as it invests aggressively to expand its access to computing power. FT
• Friedrich Merz vowed to stay on as German chancellor after his CDU suffered heavy losses in state elections. The party won just 4.9% in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, shutting it out of a regional assembly for the first time in the country’s postwar history. BBG
• SoftBank’s seeking the equivalent of over $11 billion for AI investments in what would be one of the biggest junk bond deals ever, people familiar said. BBG
• Wall Street banks are expecting the US to borrow up to $1tn over the next year by selling short-term Treasury bills as part of a growing dependence on quick-maturing debt that leaves Washington vulnerable to rising interest rates. FT
• The Fed’s Austan Goolsbee warned the central bank cannot ignore repeated and persistent supply shocks, and must respond in a way that may cause economic hardship. BBG
• Investors are betting on a Fed win the inflation fight, turning bullish on front-end Treasuries. Two-year yields remain well above the central bank’s range, offering scope for the securities to rally if inflation eases or rate hikes are less than priced. BBG

A more detailed look at global markets courtesy of Newsquawk

APAC stocks were ultimately mixed, but with cautious gains seen for most of the region ahead of this week's key meetings in the US, including the UN General Assembly and the Trump-Xi summit, while there are also thinned conditions with the closure of Japanese markets through to Wednesday. ASX 200 was uneventful amid mixed M&A related headlines and further RBA rate hike calls, with CBA bringing forward its rate hike call to September from November, while ANZ expects hikes in both September and November. KOSPI outperformed as tech stocks took impetus from the advances in the Nasdaq last Friday. Hang Seng and Shanghai Comp were mildly higher ahead of the Trump-Xi summit this week and after US and Chinese officials held talks in New York ahead of the leaders' meeting, with China's top trade negotiator describing the discussions as 'not bad', while state media noted the sides had frank, in-depth and constructive exchanges on important economic and trade issues of mutual concern, as well as holding dialogue on AI-related issues.

Top Asian News

• Japan's government will work with major machinery manufacturers to collect machine-learning data for physical AI applications such as autonomous robots and assigning unique IDs to factory equipment to enable cross-vendor data aggregation, according to Nikkei.
• Japan is poised to ease restrictions on regional bank loans for AI and energy projects, Nikkei reported.
• China's CPC Politburo met to discuss draft documents to be submitted to the Fifth Plenary Session (26th-29th October), with Chinese President Xi presiding.

European bourses (STOXX 600 +1.0%) are firmer across the board, helped by lower energy prices despite heightened geopolitical tensions over the weekend. The Houthis said they attacked sensitive sites in Riyadh and an Aramco facility in Yanbu over the weekend, while US President Trump reportedly said that he is thinking of "blowing up" all of Iran. One source of potential optimism is the commentary following US-China trade talks, with US Treasury Secretary Bessent describing talks as "successful" on trade and AI, while they agreed to hold another meeting on AI dialogue. Sectors highlight the positive bias. Tech tops the sector pile, with Industrials and Basic Resources following closely behind. To the downside is Health Care, with Optimised Personal Care and Energy rounding out the sector laggards. Explaining the underperformance in Health Care is the downbeat reaction in Novo shares (-5%) after they announced their 2030 ambitions. The drugmaker plans to launch over 5 blockbusters by the end of 2030 and targets pipeline sales of over DKK 150bln in 2035.

Top European News

• German Chancellor Merz vowed to stay on despite a ‘disaster’ in regional elections with partial results showing his CDU at just under the 5% threshold for parliamentary representation in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, while the centre-left SPD is projected as 35.5% of votes and the far-right AfD is expected to get 37.0% of votes, according to exit polls. Merz's conservatives are projected at 20% of votes in the Berlin state election, while the Left Party is seen at 24.5%, SPD is seen at 12%, and AfD is seen at 16% in Berlin.
• Scope downgraded France’s long-term ratings to 'A+' from 'AA-' and revised the outlook to stable; DBRS affirmed France at 'AA', lowered the French outlook to negative.

FX

• Snapshot: G10s are mixed against a flat USD this morning. The Antipodeans are mildly firmer, benefiting from the risk tone, whilst the Loonie and JPY are the marginal laggards.
• DXY currently holds within 100.20 to 100.37 range, and towards the highs made post-FOMC last week. Newsflow for the Dollar has been lacking this morning; oil prices are slipping off highs, despite ongoing supply disruptions, as attention turns to the UN General Assembly Council this week, alongside the summit between President Trump and Xi. The current mood between the two is positive; Trump recently suggested that he and Xi get on “very well”, whilst Treasury Sec Bessent suggested they had a very successful engagement with the Chinese on trade and AI.
• JPY is a touch lower this morning, giving back some of the strength made last Friday. The Nikkei reported that the BoJ conducted a “rate check” on that Friday, which helped curtail some of JPY pressure seen following the Bank’s dovishly perceived rate decision. This makes evident that the Japanese officials remain ready and active in the market to keep USD/JPY from approaching the 160.00 mark once again. If market expectations of a Fed-BoJ divergence continue to grow, then it may prove to be difficult for Japan to significantly prevent another bout of upside in the pair. Do note that Japan is away on holiday and returns on Thursday; as such, the lower-volume environment could provide a decent opportunity for the MoF to enact some intervention.
• EUR is essentially flat vs USD, despite political uncertainty from within the region. Firstly, two regional elections were held in Germany over the weekend; the ruling CDU party performed terribly, falling short of the 5% threshold to enter state parliament in one state. There is now mounting pressure on current Chancellor Merz to resign, though he announced that he will stay in office and “fight on”. The state election results point out the issues the German population is currently facing, but for now, it will remain a regional problem. It will likely have little impact on the federal government itself; as such, the EUR is little changed.

Fixed Income

• USTs (+8 ticks) are stronger this morning, benefiting from 1) falling energy prices and 2) markets awaiting the US-China meeting at the White House on Thursday. On the first point, supply disruptions remain, and Trump recently said he is thinking of “blowing up” all of Iran. It seems as if markets are shifting their attention to the UNGA this week, with Trump reportedly set to meet Gulf leaders and then President Xi. There may be growing hopes that a framework agreement/deal can be ironed out; recent reports have noted that Pakistan’s Interior Minister has travelled to Iran.
• Yields are lower across the curve, with very slight underperformance at the belly. The US 10-year (4.96%) has now slipped below the key 5.00% mark, given the aforementioned energy dynamics. A constructive UNGA mood and/or geopolitical progress could help the 10-year continue to slip to near-term lows, with 4.92% a likely area of support (low from 18 Sep).
• Gilts (+72 ticks) outperform vs peers, and currently hold towards the upper end of an 85.28 to 85.76 range. UK-specific news flow has been focused on pre-budget speculation around housing and CGT, but with action in UK paper today ultimately driven by energy dynamics. On trade relations, UK PM Burnham is set to meet US President Trump this week. Reports suggest that the talks between the pair will focus on the Middle East, energy costs and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict.
• EGBs dominate the fixed income space this morning. Bunds after the latest state parliamentary elections, and OATs after sovereign updates and the latest fiscal disclosure. However, despite these points, EGBs are firmer with the marked energy pullback providing relief and some caveats/points to look to with reference to Bunds and OATs specifically.
• For Germany, the Grand Coalition’s CDU had a disaster in the two elections, while their SPD partner fared somewhat better. Within Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the CDU are set to come in below the 5% threshold to enter state parliament, while AfD won with 38.2% but PSD a near second on 35.5%; a point that provides some relief, as there is no appetite to work with AfD, and thus SPD will likely lead a SPD-Green-Die Linke combination of some description in the region. For now, we await the final results of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania to confirm if CDU has missed the threshold. Thereafter, we look for signs of more pressure on Chancellor Merz and whether the Grand Coalition may look for an alternative to him, a ‘Kanzlertausch’, given the September regional election outcomes and his personal low approval rating.
• Turning to OATs, firstly digesting the trend cut to negative from stable at DBRS, due to “the risk of the government failing to address fiscal imbalances is increasing, leading to a continued rise in the government debt ratio over the medium term”. Additionally, Scope cut France to A+ (prev. AA-), primarily due to the deteriorating fiscal outlook.

Commodities

• WTI Nov and Brent Dec futures are softer after initially advancing at the open on weekend escalation, including a Houthi attack on a Saudi Aramco facility in Yanbu and Trump reportedly saying he was considering “blowing up” Iran. Prices subsequently reversed as the immediate escalation failed to develop further and Trump also signalled openness to meeting Iran’s President. Further, there may be some hopes that the Trump-Xi meeting this week may help simmer down some geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. This morning’s picture remains mixed in terms of newsflow: the IRGC said it shot down a US MQ-1 drone over Hormuz and warned the war “is not over”, while Pakistan’s Interior Minister is heading to Tehran, with conflicting reports over whether the trip involves US-Iran mediation. WTI Nov trades close to the bottom of a USD 93.46-97.22/bbl range, while Brent Dec nearer to the lower end of a USD 96.97-100.22/bbl range. Dutch TTF is sharply softer (-3.8%) alongside the broader pullback in the energy complex within a EUR 76.85-80.55/MWh range.
• Precious metals are softer as the Dollar remains firm in the face of lower oil prices. Spot gold trades around USD 4,350/oz within a USD 4,342-4,383/oz range, and with the 100 DMA at USD 4,319/oz today. Spot silver similarly trades flat on either side of its 100 DMA (USD 66.40/oz) in a narrow USD 65.73-67.05/oz parameter.
• Base metals are firmer despite the cautious broader backdrop, extending some of last week’s gains. COMEX copper trades near the upper end of a USD 6.60-6.66/lb range, and 3M LME copper trades towards the top end of a USD 14,540.50-14,688.00/t parameter, with the complex supported by the generally positive tone across Chinese markets ahead of the Trump-Xi summit and after constructive US-China trade discussions in New York.
• Kazakhstan oil shipments to Ust-Luga were recorded at 200k metric tons in August, according to Interfax.
• French Finance Minister Lescure said France’s strategic oil stocks are full.
• Naftogaz said ORLEN (PKN PW) will supply up to USD 500mln of petroleum products to Ukraine to stabilise the market and deliver three LNG cargoes in Q1 2027.
• South Africa's Pretoria is reportedly looking to leverage its role as a platinum supplier to help integrate into the US and China, Semafor reported.

Trade/Tariffs

• US Treasury Secretary Bessent said they had a very successful engagement with the Chinese on trade and AI, while they agreed to hold another meeting on AI dialogue and the US suggested a notification system between the two countries. Bessent separately commented that he is likely to meet the Chinese delegation in two months and they discussed extending the trade truce, although no pact was reached, according to FT citing an interview following Bessent's meeting with Vice Premier He Lifeng.
• USTR Greer said they implemented a board of trade, with the US and Chinese teams to continue working on a board of trade agreement, while the board of trade from the Chinese side is likely to include consumer goods and low-tech items.
• China's top trade negotiator Li said trade talks are ‘not bad’ and that talks will continue on Monday among the working group, while he confirmed that both sides discussed AI along with trade and investment.
• Chinese state media noted that China and the US conducted frank, in-depth and constructive exchanges on important economic and trade issues of mutual concern, while they held dialogue on issues related to AI.
• US and China were reported on Friday to be discussing cutting tariffs on US LNG ahead of Xi's visit, with potential USD 30bln reciprocal tariff cuts, while the visit could bring broader energy and agricultural deals.
• China reportedly purchases more US soy cargoes ahead of the President Trump-Xi meeting.
• Indian Trade Minister said a trade agreement with New Zealand will provide duty-free access to New Zealand for 100% of India's exports.

Central Banks

• Fed's Kashkari (2026 voter) said inflation remains too high and that price pressures have expanded beyond the oil-price shock from the Iran war and are affecting the broader economy.

Geopolitics: Iran

• US President Donald Trump reportedly said on Sunday that he is thinking of "blowing up" all of Iran as he left the Camp David retreat a day early to return to the White House, while Fox News reporter Yungst said Trump told him during a phone call that "very big things are going to be happening" soon. Furthermore, Trump said his options are ‘wiping out’ the regime, letting it ‘rot economically’ under naval blockade, or striking a deal, according to Fox News and The Telegraph.
• US President Trump said on Friday that the Iran War will end soon, adding that once the war ends, US gasoline prices will revert to prior levels and could even fall further. US President Trump confirmed on Friday the US is talking to the Houthis, saying they want a deal, while adding "we'll see" on whether to annihilate Iran.
• US CENTCOM commander Cooper said oil and LNG shipments through the Strait of Hormuz in the past two weeks reached the highest levels in six months. More US troops had reportedly died amid the Iran war than the Pentagon disclosed publicly, according to a report on Friday in the Washington Post.
• Pakistani Interior Minister travelled to Iran today, IRNA reported. Tasnim later reported that the trip is unrelated to Iran-US matters and will focus on bilateral relations and cooperation, with the report adding that Pakistan is not carrying a message between Iran and the US.
• Iranian officials conveyed their conditions to mediators for re-engaging in negotiations for ending the war with the US, while the conditions include ending the war on all fronts and the naval blockade, as well as unfreezing Iranian funds and they also want an end to the war between Saudi Arabia and Yemeni Houthis.
• IRGC spokesman said all of the US' superior technologies pale in comparison to Iran's offensive and defensive capabilities, adding that Tehran are defining the new regime in the region, not America, and the war is not over and continues. The spokesman added that the IRGC has prepared itself for a long-term war and that they have new targets and weapons ready if the US launches a new attack.
• IRGC said it shot down a US MQ-1 drone over the Strait of Hormuz.
• UKMTO received a report of an incident involving a vessel transiting the Strait of Hormuz, reported at 07:30 UTC. A tanker conducting an inbound transit was struck by an unknown projectile.
• Qatar's PM Al-Thani said Gulf states need to cooperate to restore regional stability and help reach a settlement between the US and Iran. It was separately reported that Qatar's Energy Minister said US Treasury Secretary Bessent is "wrong" in saying that the strategic Strait of Hormuz will be worthless in two years.

Geopolitics: Ukraine

• Russia's Press Secretary Peskov said there have been no progress in negotiations on Ukraine yet but remains open to further talks, IFX reported.
• UK Burnham hopes to build bridges with US President Trump at their first meeting and wants to press the case for the US to help Ukraine with air-defence systems.
• Moscow Oil Refinery was hit during a drone attack that was part of Ukraine's largest barrage this year.

Geopolitics: Other

• US, Denmark and Greenland reached a security agreement that expands the US’s role on the Arctic island to end the row that threatened NATO.
• North Korea launched two missiles off its eastern coast on Sunday. It was also reported that North Korea rejected an IAEA resolution on its nuclear program and vowed to keep its status as a nuclear-armed state.
• Japanese Defence Minister Koizumi and US Defence Secretary Hegseth agreed in a phone call to further strengthen security ties.

US Event Calendar

• 8:30 am: Aug Chicago Fed Nat Activity Index, est. -0.04, prior -0.08

DB's Jim Reid concludes the overnight wrap

For 2026 standards, its been a relatively quiet weekend news wise but yesterday saw more, albeit expected, heavy defeats for the ruling CDU in two German state elections with a surge in support for the far right AfD in one and the far left Die Linke in the other. Chancellor Merz called the early results "a disaster" but vowed to press on with reforms. In Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the AfD won 38.3% of the vote, roughly double its support from the previous election in 2021 and enough to make it the largest party in the state even if a coalition to keep them out of power is likely. The shock was that the CDU didn't even make the 5% threshold to enter parliament for the first time in the country’s post-World War II history. So this will create huge amounts of political pressure on the Chancellor and raise questions about the reform agenda.  

Meanwhile, in Berlin, the Left Party (Die Linke) emerged as the biggest force with 25.3%, ahead of the CDU and Greens. The mainstream parties seem to be caught in a continued pincer movement. On the far-right the AfD continues to gain support on anti-immigration and anti-establishment themes, particularly in eastern Germany, while the Left appears to have capitalised on concerns over housing affordability, living costs and social inequality. For markets, the immediate implication is not a change in national policy, but a further weakening of Germany’s political centre and another reminder that the forces driving political polarisation across Europe remain alive and well.

Also over the weekend, President Trump announced that the US, Denmark and Greenland had reached an agreement that would allow a significant expansion of the US military presence on the island, with Trump describing the deal as giving the US “permanent control over security” in Greenland. The agreement falls well short of Trump’s earlier ambitions to acquire Greenland, while Danish and Greenlandic leaders stressed that it explicitly recognises Greenland’s right to self-determination and Danish sovereignty. Taken at face value, if this agreement holds it actually reduces event risk, as the Greenland issue could easily have come back to be a high tension hotspot in the months ahead.

Overnight in Asia, equity markets are advancing led by technology shares supported by optimism from US-China trade talks ahead of the much anticipated summit between President Trump and President Xi Jinping later this week. Across the region, the KOSPI (+1.79%) is outperforming with Japanese markets closed for the three-day Silver Week holiday. Elsewhere, the Hang Seng (+0.57%), the Shanghai Composite (+0.55%) and the CSI 300 (+0.42%) are all trading moderately higher. S&P 500 (+0.41%), NASDAQ 100 (+0.54%) and Stoxx (+0.55%) futures are all higher. Brent is -2.21% lower at $101.65/bbl which is helping. It's been above $100/bbl again since September 9th, and although US cash Treasury trading hasn't commenced due to the Japanese holiday, US and European bond futures are all notably higher this morning.  

Moving on, the week ahead brings a mix of economic data, central bank decisions, lots of Fed speak, and geopolitical events. The first read of the September PMIs across the major economies on Wednesday should provide the most timely update on global growth momentum, while investors will also be watching policy decisions from the Norges Bank, Riksbank and SNB on Thursday with their hike probabilities according to futures at 62%, 21% and 5% respectively. Elsewhere, attention will turn to the meeting between Presidents Trump and Xi on Thursday which will likely garner a lot of headlines. Indeed they already have overnight as discussed above. See our Geopolitics team's preview of the summit here. We also have opening week of the UN General Assembly debate in New York.  
In the US, the focus will increasingly shift towards next Friday’s payrolls report, which will be the most important data release before the

October FOMC meeting. Ahead of that, markets will be very keen to hear from a heavy schedule of Fed speakers throughout the week. These comments will frame last week’s FOMC meeting, where policymakers delivered a widely expected rate increase but signalled a more hawkish policy outlook. The updated projections showed a strong majority of officials anticipating further tightening, while Chair Warsh emphasised that the Committee still sees limited evidence that policy is meaningfully restrictive.  

Fed communication begins today with Chicago Fed President Goolsbee alongside the Chicago Fed National Activity Index. Tomorrow, investors receive the Philadelphia Fed non-manufacturing survey and the Richmond Fed manufacturing index. On the policy front, Fed Vice Chairs Williams and Jefferson are due to speak. Our economists view Williams as one of the four officials who are still expected to see the Fed easing by the end of next year, so any hints on that outlook will be closely scrutinised.  

Wednesday’s main event will be the September flash PMIs. Our economists expect the US manufacturing PMI to edge up to 54.0 from 53.9, while the services gauge is forecast to ease slightly to 56.1 from 56.5. Given the recent focus on AI-related investment and broader capex trends, these surveys will be watched closely for signs that business activity remains resilient. Fed Governor Barr is also due to speak. Investors will also be watching Wednesday's Treasury buyback announcement ahead of Thursday's 20-30yr operation, particularly after last month's decision to at least double the size of long-end buybacks.  

Thursday sees August new home sales and initial jobless claims. Last week continuing claims hit their lowest since January 2024. Fed speakers include Williams, Barkin, Hammack and Paulson, offering further opportunities for markets to assess where officials stand after last week’s hawkish meeting. Friday’s US durable goods report will be particularly important from a growth perspective. Our economists expect headline orders to rise by 0.6% month-on-month, with orders excluding transportation and core capital goods both expected to increase by 1.1%. The data should provide one of the clearest indications yet of whether the recent strength in business investment is being sustained. Williams and Hammack are also due to speak on Friday.  

Recapping last week now and it was a story of two halves that left most assets little changed from where they started the week. The first half saw a fresh rise in energy prices that led to renewed fears of stagflation, and we even saw the 10yr Treasury yield close above 5% for the first time since 2007. But on Wednesday, the Fed delivered their first rate hike since 2023, which seems to help ease inflation fears with a delay but the reality was that energy price falls were the more important theme reversing the yield spikes.  

Brent crude oil prices were down -0.71% on the week (-0.91% Friday), closing at $103.87/bbl after approaching $110/bbl in the first half of the week. That marked a reversal after a +17.1% jump over the previous two weeks. While oil prices stabilised, sovereign bond yields still extended their rise overall. For instance, the 10yr Treasury yield reached an intraday peak of 5.04% last Tuesday, before ending the week at 5.00%, up +2.9bps on the week (+6.5bps Friday). Meanwhile in Germany, the 10yr bund yield also hit an intraday peak of 3.57% on the Wednesday, before ending the week -1.4bps overall at 3.52%. French bonds underperformed, with the 10yr spread over bunds closing above 100bps on Friday for the first time since 2012. In absolute terms, the 10yr French yield also hit a post-2008 high on Friday of 4.56%.  

This backdrop meant equities saw modest losses last week, with the S&P 500 down just -0.08% (+0.17% Friday). The index was boosted by some of the big tech stocks, with the Magnificent 7 up +1.05% last week, marking its 4th consecutive weekly gain. However, small cap stocks struggled by comparison, with the Russell 2000 down -1.50% last week. After the AI doomerism of the previous weekend, the Philly Semiconductor index (SOX) closed up +0.73% after being down nearly -6% on Monday. Meanwhile in Europe, there were slightly larger declines, with the STOXX 600 down -0.57% (-1.11% Friday).

Elsewhere, there were some sizeable moves in FX last week, with the dollar index up +1.11% after the Fed’s hike, marking its biggest weekly gain since June. Conversely, the Japanese Yen weakened -2.08% against the US Dollar last week, which marked its biggest weekly decline since October 2025. That followed the BoJ’s 25bp rate hike, but the move was already priced in and two members voted against the hike, so markets interpreted the decision in a dovish light.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/21/2026 - 08:36

Same Crowd, New Apocalypse...

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity News,

They received a new brief. The instant the AI-doom circuit kicked into gear the same 'protesters' who spent years on climate, oil and "Palestine" are back on the street with fresh banners declaring 'the end is nigh'.

The clips looping across X could be any march of the last decade. Same wardrobe. Same slogans. Same dead-eyed rhythm.

Only the monster changed.

And just like that the Retard Brigade has moved on from "Palestine" and onto the robots.

It's actually hilarious.... pic.twitter.com/SToBv9kE4B

— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) September 18, 2026

Yesterday, dozens of them marched from OpenAI's Mission Bay headquarters to Anthropic's offices beside Salesforce's Dreamforce crowd, then on to San Francisco City Hall. 'Stop the AI Race' wanted Mayor Daniel Lurie to declare a local "AI state of emergency." Chalk on the pavement read "Extinction is on the table." Staff at both labs were told to quit.

Organiser Michaël Trazzi said industry leaders had asked Washington to regulate and been turned down. Fellow organiser Hunter Glenn told reporters, "I was pretty scared about the possibility of extinction for awhile," and called AI safety a bipartisan cause.

Other demonstrations dubbed 'PauseAI' and 'Pull The Plug' assembled outside Downing Street in London after Anthropic alignment lead Evan Hubinger said he personally believed there was a greater than 10 percent chance AI could "kill all humans" within a decade.

Their line: "10% chance of extinction? 100% chance of resistance."

I wish they'd make their minds up -

I thought climate change was going to wipeout the world !

— LindaTG1810 (@ltg1810) September 18, 2026

??Suddenly, Gaza is out and AI doomsday is in for the professional protest class. Which of course means all the leftwing billionaire and Chinese money has switched causes.

Funny how this all works, huh? pic.twitter.com/47kY2pkvnZ

— ??David Blackmon?? (@EnergyAbsurdity) September 18, 2026

These groups are full of pliable, already-petrified people who need the next extinction story the way some people need a weather report. Climate was going to cook them. A virus was going to finish them. Oil was going to drown them. "Palestine" was going to moralise them. Now the robots will delete them. They are desperate to believe anything will wipe them out, because a life without a scheduled apocalypse leaves them with nothing to virtue chant about.

That is why the propaganda works. They live wracked with fear and stay wide open to scaremongering on every topic conceivable. Hand them some dodgy stats and a Netflix documentary and they will screech into the streets. The content of the threat is secondary.

?.?.

The retards are on the march. As usual.

The Commies have made this "the current thing."

And, for them, the issue is never the issue. The issue is the revolution. pic.twitter.com/ok4UXDSvCJ

— GuardAmerican? (@GuardAmerican) September 18, 2026

Braindead protestors at it again. Look at the profile for this @Channel4News in the UK. It's literally ALL fear mongering.

Protestors in 2026:
-No Kings
-Free Palestine
-Reflecting pool
-ICE
-It's OK to kill your kids

Now: AI is going to kill us. pic.twitter.com/juDOWLlaXU

— Topher (@TopherGotWifi) September 18, 2026

They really are NPC robots getting a new chip inserted.

— Neal Asher (@nealasher) September 18, 2026

"Ima feeling hela cute today, gonna protest the future!"

— baranoww (@WBaranowski) September 18, 2026

Yup.... https://t.co/H6Zvy22Ype pic.twitter.com/IxqDtixC8a

— Tim J Baxter. Get Off My Beach! (@TJ69B) September 19, 2026

A U.S. pause would hand China the century's defining technology and freeze the labs already winning. Sam Altman went to Congress in 2023 asking for tighter rules after OpenAI already held a commanding lead - regulatory capture with a halo. OpenAI withheld GPT-2 in 2019 as too dangerous. It was fully out months later. No measurable harm.

Every AI doomsday call since the 1950s has missed. Europe sold GDPR as privacy and now hosts none of the world's dominant labs, because the rules decide who gets to build.

Computer science professor Pedro Domingos noted, "Europe actually passed this AI Act some years ago that puts draconian restrictions on AI," he said. "Europe is now out of the AI race. I hope we're not gonna let the same thing happen in America."

On the labs driving the panic: "I am much more worried about Anthropic than I am worried about AI." And: "These people think the apocalypse is coming... There's an AI god that's being born and they are the parents of that god."

WATCH: Professor @pmddomingos: "Europe actually passed this AI Act some years ago that puts draconian restrictions on AI.... Europe is now out of the AI race. I hope we're not gonna let the same thing happen in America." https://t.co/xfAkAu7pNN pic.twitter.com/sslfJEkvew

— Innovation Council (@innovationcncl) September 18, 2026

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave the extinction industry a simpler number. There is a "0% chance" the world ends in 2030, however the risks are framed. "2030 is not going to be the end of the world." The man selling the chips that power the boom is not losing sleep over the apocalypse.

Jensen Huang is giving the AI doomsday crowd a reality check.

The Nvidia CEO says there's a "0% chance" the world ends in 2030, regardless of how people frame the risks of artificial intelligence.

"2030 is not going to be the end of the world."

Apparently, the man selling the...

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) September 19, 2026

Scott Jennings had already mapped the rotation. "It's always the same apocalyptic crowd moving from one issue to the next. Responsible guardrails are one thing, but handicapping American innovation while China speeds ahead with zero regulation isn't sound policy - it's just foolish."

If the U.S. wins the AI race, this will be President Trump's greatest legacy. What I see right now is a lot of people trying to slow him down who don't want him to have that legacy. pic.twitter.com/vP6nhbnLNM

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) September 16, 2026

Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale told Jesse Watters the scare is not civic caution. It is a coordinated campaign. "These guys don't believe in God. They're atheists, but they've created something they believe is God," Watters said, laying out Lonsdale's point.

"This is their Messiah, and this is their end of the world." Lonsdale urged, adding "There is a coordinated campaign to make the American people afraid."

Lonsdale outlined how an industrial revolution is coming that would be "amazing for America if we get it right." The people trying to stop it, he said, "hate America."

Speaking of which, Bill Gates is also back on the emergency circuit calling AI an "alien intelligence."

"I don't think any government is nearly as deep on this as they have to be," he told Reuters. "Governments are way behind on this one."

Then the Hollywood script: "There's all sorts of movies where some aliens are coming, and magically the US and China and everybody comes together to solve the problem. AI is kind of like this alien intelligence. It's here, and we better do like it shows in those movies."

On a podcast he went further: "It's not the role of the industry to self-regulate or understand the whole-of-society impact that comes out of AI."

He wants a permanent cross-border watchdog stitched from nuclear inspections, aviation rules and ozone treaties - and a meeting with Xi Jinping.

His foundation pledged $1 billion over two years to spread AI through schools, clinics and farms in the same news cycle. Alarm in one hand. Pipeline in the other.

Bernie Sanders appeared at the Future of Life Institute's "Pro-Human Assembly" in Washington. Obama's orbit told Democrats to get "on top of" a technology "moving very fast in private hands." Netflix dropped an AI-doom documentary a producer compared to "An Inconvenient Truth" or "The Social Dilemma." Same template. New monster.

President Trump has already rejected the slowdown. "We're leading China in AI," he said. "Whoever wins AI, wins." A lot of the horror stories being shopped around, he added, "won't happen."

The protest addicts started marching the minute the fear campaign was turned up because they were already waiting for the next wipeout. The malleable mob arriving right on schedule - to demand Washington park a still-American lead under a global committee while Beijing keeps training.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/21/2026 - 08:20

Westinghouse Eyes $50 Billion IPO As America Builds Valuations Faster Than Reactors

Westinghouse, the nuclear business that helped blow a hole in Toshiba’s balance sheet, is preparing for a different headline: a potential valuation above $50 billion.

Bloomberg reports that the American nuclear king could publicly file for an IPO as soon as October. It submitted confidential paperwork in July, and while nothing is set in stone yet, the proposed valuation would crown a wild rehabilitation.

The collapse came in 2017, when Toshiba-owned Westinghouse filed for Chapter 11 under the weight of cost overruns at the miserably managed Vogtle and Summer projects in Georgia and South Carolina. Brookfield Business Partners and institutional investors bought it out of bankruptcy in 2018 in a $4.6 billion deal.

Brookfield spent the next several years rehabilitating the company and bolting on new acquisitions. Westinghouse acquired Rolls-Royce’s systems and services business, Laveer Engineering, BHI Energy and Spain’s Tecnatom. By 2022, Brookfield counted eight completed acquisitions since 2019.

The revamped business emphasized technology and services, instead of emphasizing project management, which came with the construction risks that sank it under Toshiba.

Cameco arrived through a second transaction in 2023. It paid $2.1 billion for 49% while Brookfield and friends took the other 51%. The final enterprise valuation was $8.2 billion, including $3.8 billion of debt retained by Westinghouse.

At $50 billion, the headline valuation would be roughly eleven times the 2018 deal.

Recall the October 2025 agreement between Cameco, Brookfield and the US government that brought up the IPO idea in the first place. The program contemplated up to ten AP1000 reactors and at least $80 billion of investment, supported by federal financing and permitting assistance.

Everything seems to be moving along swimmingly, however, the whole point was to start putting some steel in the ground, which seems to have been forgotten about at this point...

We have just recently exceeded 1,000 days since the US pledged to contribute to the effort of tripling global nuclear capacity

Unfortunately, America is leading in only one category: nuclear-grade talk

The structure of the US arguably makes this one of the most challenging… https://t.co/qXJIyvV6nK pic.twitter.com/oJb7ndG6A2

— Steffan Szumowski (@UnoMasReactor) September 8, 2026

When the deal was originally announced back then, the USG’s participation interest would vest after a final investment decision and binding agreements committing it to at least $80 billion of reactor projects. Once vested, it would receive 20% of cumulative cash distributions above $17.5 billion.

An IPO would convert that interest into a five-year warrant to acquire equity equivalent to 20% of the company’s public value above $17.5 billion, measured at exercise.

With the interest vested, Washington could require an IPO on or before January 2029 if the opening valuation reached at least $30 billion. Nothing's been discussed yet to indicate that specific trigger was pulled to instigate the current IPO.

Questions still remain as to the exact ownership structure of Westinghouse post-IPO, but on their 2026Q2 call, Cameco CEO Tim Getzler indicated ownership will still stay with them and Brookfield: “We and Brookfield control Westinghouse today; we don't expect that to change”

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/21/2026 - 07:45

Investor Day Bust: Novo Nordisk Plunges As Wall Street's Turnaround Hopes Fade

Novo Nordisk shares tumbled as much as 7.7% in Copenhagen trading after Wall Street analysts questioned the Danish drugmaker's turnaround efforts amid the loss of its GLP-1 lead to Eli Lilly & Co.

At its capital markets day earlier in London, Novo outlined plans for more than five blockbuster launches and over $23 billion in new sales in the coming years. But that comes as its obesity-market lead has been surrendered to Eli Lilly, and analysts were hoping for more commentary from management about turnaround efforts as the stock is down 18% on the year.

"Investors are selling the shares because they are not seeing concrete news that could drive the stock higher," Nordnet investment economist Per Hansen wrote.

CEO Mike Doustdar told analysts, "We need to work harder, and we will." However, much of the optimism from capital markets a few years ago about Novo leading the GLP-1 race has all but faded.

Much of Novo's medium-term outlook rests on CagriSema, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analysts Michael Shah and Christos Nikoletopoulos. That treatment has already disappointed Wall Street multiple times, including failing to match Lilly's Zepbound in a head-to-head trial. Other potential growth drivers remain earlier in development and carry a higher risk of failure

From the peak of the GLP-1 craze in mid-2024, Novo shares in Copenhagen have plunged a staggering 74%, with shares stabilizing since August 2025.

"The event came amid mounting investor pressure for clarity beyond obesity drugs Wegovy and Ozempic as Novo's semaglutide patent expiries approach in the early 2030s. Investors were increasingly focused on Novo’s next growth drivers following setbacks for obesity candidate CagriSema. Novo said it expects revenue growth between 2026 and 2030 to be in line with industry peers," UBS analyst Nana Antiedu wrote in a note.

Novo has been pursuing a turnaround effort this year, already leading to substantial restructuring. Doustdar has cut as many as 9,000 jobs and removed several management layers, with total cuts reaching about 13,000. Novo is also pursuing new therapeutic areas and using AI to accelerate drug development.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/21/2026 - 06:55

My Yom Kippur morning reads:

​• Weeks Before the Midterms, Almost Everything Is Getting More Expensive: David Uberti and Justin Lahart on mortgage rates near 7%, gas at its highest since 2022, and the Fed’s first hike in three years. The price of eating out and buying a house keeps rising, while higher interest rates add to borrowing costs (Wall Street Journal)

​• Jonathan Swift v. AI: Dónal Gill on Gulliver’s Travels and the Engine at the Grand Academy of Lagado, which let “the most ignorant person write books… without the least assistance from genius or study” — in 1726. Three hundred years ago, the satirist warned of a world in which reading and writing are replaced by the flashy simulation of human knowledge. Can he help us fix it? (The Dial) see also Zombie iPocalypse The New Dark Ages: ​Anthony Gottlieb reviews The New Dark Ages — noting that the rumored demise of books has produced plenty of books, from Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death onward. The End of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society (Literary Review)

• The Market Has a Rule of Its Own: Before the Fed reads the long end as a message, it should identify who is speaking. ​The latest from Yes, I Give a Fig. (Yes, I Give a Fig)

• Fight intensifies over the fate of homes falling into the sea: California homeowners are building a costly rock wall to hold back the ocean, escalating a battle over private property and what to do about years-long beach erosion amid storm damage and higher tides. ​Hannah Knowles from Dana Point’s Beach Road, where some houses have already collapsed and neighbors are scrambling to keep theirs from going next. (Washington Post)

• How to Tell Whether a Plunging Stock Will Keep Plunging: One of the oldest pieces of Wall Street wisdom is not to try catching a falling knife—a stock that’s plunging. They can keep going longer and more violently than investors expect. But what if you already own it? The oldest Wall Street wisdom says don’t catch a falling knife — but what if you already own it? (Wall Street Journal)

• A Stealth Startup Thinks It Just Hacked the Memory Shortage: Lauren Goode on Kepler Computing, the San Jose chip startup that spent seven-plus years quietly redesigning computer memory architecture — and just came out of stealth into a global shortage. It’s new approach to chip design—and a proprietary material—can help end the supply bottlenecks that have sent memory prices surging. (Wired)

•  Flock cameras are riddled with security vulnerabilities and hard-coded credentials: (Micah Lee) see also Boston dumps Flock, says it shared data nationwide in violation of contract. City: Flock enabled “nationwide lookup” despite contract requiring it to be disabled. (Ars Technica)

• NYC deploys robotoilets. The public bathrooms have a strict 10-minute time limit. A suite of high-tech public restrooms has started to land in New York City as part of a push by the mayor’s office to make it easier for people to find a place to go while they’re on the go. (Gothamist)

• The Three Dreaded Words No One Wants to Hear: What’s for Dinner? Americans spend more time cooking than they have in two decades, but hectic schedules and rising costs make it a key pain point. Mayor Mamdani unveils the first two of 17 modular Throne Labs restrooms. (Gothamist)

​• He Interviewed Tom Cruise for GQ. We Interviewed Him About How It Went.: Geoff Edgers on Cruise’s first deep chat in years — “It was… really something.” Cruise’s on-camera interview was pitched as his first deep chat in years. It was … really something. (Washington Post)

Video of the day: Jimmy Kimmel’s Interview with James Talarico That the FCC Doesn’t Want You To See

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business with Glen Kacher, founder and CIO of Light Street Capital. He launched the firm in Palo Alto after stints working with Julian Roberts at Tiger and Roger McNamee at Integral. His Mercury funds returned 45.7% in 2023, 59.4% in 2024, and 37.3% in 2025 — the best three-year stretch of any of the “Tiger Cubs.” He describes the firm as “the Silicon Valley Home Team, 100% focused on tech opportunities.”

 

From a Savings Glut to a Savings Shortage

Source: Apollo

 

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

VW Supervisory Board Recommends Another 4,100 Job Cuts At Porsche

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe

The hailstorm of bad news from Germany’s auto industry simply refuses to end. Again and again, heavy hailstones from corporate press offices crash down on anxious workforces at the automakers, ruining politicians’ election campaigns and destroying the last hopes of those still clinging to the promise of an electric car made in Germany.

The latest impact: According to a report by Handelsblatt, citing an internal recommendation by Volkswagen’s Supervisory Board, the personnel scalpel is once again being applied to the “Sport Luxury” division, meaning Porsche. Another 4,100 jobs are to be eliminated at Porsche, after it had already become clear that a total of 9,000 positions would disappear over the coming years. Porsche currently still employs 41,800 people.

According to the Supervisory Board’s proposal, Porsche is supposed to improve its operating profit by €3.8 billion by the end of the decade. In overhead costs alone, the Supervisory Board’s calculation shows a gap of around €700 million. That gap is to be closed through the additional job cuts. Volkswagen’s austerity program now seems to be updated almost weekly.

The notion that Volkswagen’s luxury brand Porsche could shield itself from the group-wide restructuring — or, better put, the clear-cutting — is now finally gone. The crisis runs deep, it is comprehensive, and it has already cost 150,000 jobs across the automotive sector. For consulting firm Roland Berger, there is still no end in sight. Berger expects another 200,000 jobs to disappear from Germany’s automotive sector by 2030. Entire value chains — and with them purchasing power, knowledge and prosperity — are disappearing.

A catastrophe for suppliers, for entire regions and for municipal treasuries that had relied so heavily on revenues from what was once Germany’s flagship industry. But that is what happens when you become ideologically entrenched …

Stuttgart is the blueprint for industrial locations across the republic that until recently threw themselves with fervor into the warm, ecologist current. The home of Porsche and Mercedes-Benz closed the last fiscal year with a deficit of €712 million — and the comfortably wealthy city could become a poorhouse if nobody pulls the emergency brake. Residents of these regions will have to prepare for public services — well-equipped schools, municipal sports facilities, swimming pools and recreational centers — to become luxury goods. The automotive industry is leaving; it is leaving behind empty coffers and high unemployment. A German Rust Belt is emerging before our eyes.

The downward spiral has engulfed every segment of Germany’s automotive industry: intense competitive pressure from China, tariff tensions with the United States, towering energy costs at home and an endless regulatory frenzy are all battering the business. It was therefore only a matter of time before even a luxury brand like Porsche would come under the wheels. And the company’s communications strategy seemed strangely familiar: In a kind of salami tactic, common in politics, the company has been announcing since 2024 that Porsche would initially allow temporary production contracts to expire. Around 1,500 employees were affected that year. In February 2025 came the announcement that around 1,900 jobs in Zuffenhausen and Weissach would be eliminated by 2029. Another 500 temporary contracts were not to be renewed.

In May 2026, it continued: Porsche announced the closure of its subsidiaries Cellforce, eBike Performance and Cetitec. More than 500 jobs were lost. At the end of July this year, the future package was finally presented: Another 5,000 jobs are to be eliminated by 2035, naturally in a socially responsible manner. So much should the future be worth.

Taken together, that amounts to around 9,000 jobs — meaning that more than one in three positions at the home location will disappear. Now another 4,100 new job cuts are being added — the company is being ground down further and further.

Volkswagen’s decline is accelerating. A look at its compressed margins is more than alarming: Originally, management had calculated on an operating margin of between 4 and 5.5 percent this year. It has now shrunk to 1 percent. A €10 billion special effect is weighing on the result. The ailing group is in intensive care.

What is happening at Volkswagen is the great mirror image of German industry: poor domestic conditions and excessively high energy costs following disastrous political decisions are making industrial production at home almost impossible. Since 2018, around 15 percent of German industrial production has disappeared. Around 420,000 jobs in manufacturing have been lost since 2019. With these jobs, engineering expertise is disappearing as well — expertise that is indispensable to a society. Disastrous construction projects such as Berlin Brandenburg Airport, Stuttgart 21 or the Hamburg Opera, where costs and schedules regularly spiral out of control, loudly testify to Germany’s brain drain.

Germany in 2026: Some are no longer capable of organizing infrastructure projects, while others, representatives of business and labor unions, are incapable of anticipating trends in global markets. Together, in their hour of need, they strike up a hymn to moralism, in a green overtone, always self-assured and arrogant toward dissenting criticism. A melody of decline.

* * * 

About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a graduate economist, has worked for or over 25 years as a journalist and media producer for clients from various industries and business associations. As a publicist, he focuses on economic processes and observes geopolitical events from the perspective of the capital markets. His publications follow a philosophy that focuses on the individual and their right to self-determination.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/21/2026 - 06:30

Venezuela's Oil Revival Faces "Decade Or Two" Climb Back To Record Output, Piper Sandler Warns

President Trump's "Donroe Doctrine" positions energy security in the West as a key pillar of US national security. 

The removal of socialist Nicolás Maduro and the subsequent massive Venezuelan oil deal represent the opening act in a longer-term effort to rebuild production and secure supplies closer to the Gulf of America. 

Piper Sandler global energy strategist Jan Stuart's view, however, highlights the time required for these new Venezuelan supplies to ramp up: any meaningful recovery in Venezuelan output could take years, with a return to historic production highs potentially requiring a decade or two. That timeline clashes with the view that additional Venezuelan barrels could provide near-term relief to US refiners amid the global diesel crisis.

"We'll stay tuned but suspect that reaching the old record highs will take a decade or 2 and oodles of good fortune," Stuart wrote in a note. 

Trump described the US-Venezuela deal as the "biggest oil deal in history" and said it would amount to control of 65 billion barrels of oil reserves.

North American Blue Energy Partners is set to develop the oil fields, with the Department of War holding a 35% stake in the venture and rights to a portion of its production. Venezuelan royalties and taxes could total roughly $200 billion over 25 years.

A Reuters report last week said ExxonMobil was negotiating a return to Venezuela's Orinoco Belt for the first time in nearly two decades.

Venezuelan bonds have rallied around these developments but the risk to investors is for a prompt revival. 

Beyond energy supplies, Venezuela reportedly prepared its first aluminum shipment to the US in years last week: 15,000 metric tons from state-owned Venalum, facilitated by Mercuria Energy Group and Heeney.

The cloud hanging over Venezuela's resources revival is the outcome of the US midterms. Stuart questioned whether US military backing for the oil deal would survive the next US election. Rebuilding production could take a decade or two. Investors now have to ask whether Trump's commitment can last that long.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/21/2026 - 05:45

Meloni: Italy Set To Ban Face Coverings In School, Limit Foreign Students Per Class

Authored by T.J. Muscaro via The Epoch Times,

Italy is moving to ban face coverings in schools and limit the number of foreign students per class, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni announced at a youth event on Sept. 19.

Italy's Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni waits to welcome Austria's chancellor at the Palazzo Chigi in Rome on Feb. 10, 2025. Filippo Monteforte/AFP via Getty Images

The event was hosted by her political party, Brothers of Italy. It marks a push by her government to respond to the continuing influx of non-European immigrants, especially those from the Islamic world, with the goal of ensuring these children can better assimilate into Italian society.

"For us, anyone who comes to Italy and wants to build their future here must learn our language, understand our culture, and respect our rules," she said to a standing ovation. "It is the only serious way to welcome them."

One major element of this education reform will be making learning Italian mandatory.

"If there is only one child in a class who doesn't understand Italian, that child will likely be able to learn the language and integrate quickly with the help of classmates and teachers," she said. "However, if the number of children who don't understand the language becomes large - or even the majority - that is no longer integration; it is neglect."

Meloni declined to specify what that limit would be. But according to research institute Fondazione ISMU, currently 11.6 percent of students in Italian schools are foreigners, nearly 12 of every 100 students.

The banning of face coverings was included in the push for increased assimilation.

"You must go to school with your face uncovered, and in Italy no one, in the name of a real or supposed tradition, can decide that a young woman must hide herself," Meloni said.

She did not mention hijabs, traditional headscarves that do not cover the wearer's face, in her address.

If approved by the government, this measure will need parliamentary approval within 60 days.

Meloni's government has made an effort over the years to curb illegal immigration, winning legal battles to fast-track deportation and keep out illegal immigrants who may have entered Europe illegally through its territory but were caught outside of it

Italy has also taken measures against Spain, citing a "high risks to internal security" and a possible terrorist-infiltration threat, after tens of thousands of Moroccan nationals overran Spain's North African enclave, Ceuta, between July 30 and July 31.

Meloni recently reached a historic milestone by becoming the longest-serving uninterrupted Italian prime minister since World War II.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/21/2026 - 03:30

America Spends More On Defense R&D Than Any Other OECD Country - By A Mile

On the OECD's yardstick - defense R&D budget allocations per $1,000 of GDP - the United States spends $3.64. The next country on the list, South Korea, spends $2.06, and nobody else clears a dollar.

Britain is third at $0.97, Germany fourth at $0.79, France fifth at $0.50. The average across the 20 countries ranked is $0.58; the median is $0.27. Greece, at the bottom, spends nine cents.

The gap is about to get wider: the Department of War's request for fiscal 2027 is $1.5 trillion, 42% above this year's funding.

As Visual Capitalist explains further, defense research and development is one way countries invest in future military capabilities, from advanced weapons systems to emerging technologies.

This visualization ranks selected OECD countries by defense research and development (R&D) budget allocations per $1,000 of GDP. The data comes from the OECD Economic Outlook, Volume 2026 Issue 1, with figures covering 2024 or the latest available year as of August 2026.

Defense R&D has also historically played an important role in shaping civilian technologies. Research tied to national security has helped support breakthroughs in fields such as computing, aerospace, satellites, medicine, and advanced materials. However, the link between military spending and innovation is not automatic, as secrecy can impede knowledge diffusion, among other factors.

The U.S. Leads by a Wide Margin

The United States ranked first, with defense R&D budget allocations equal to $3.64 per $1,000 of GDP. In absolute terms, the U.S. is also the world's highest military-spending country by a wide margin, with 2025 spending totaling $954 billion and accounting for one-third of global military spending that year.

The U.S. allocation was nearly 1.8 times South Korea's and more than 3.7 times the United Kingdom's, which ranked second and third, respectively.

The table below shows defense R&D budget allocations per $1,000 of GDP for selected OECD countries:

Rank Country Defense Budget R&D Allocation per $1,000 of GDP 1 United States $3.64 2 South Korea $2.06 3 United Kingdom $0.97 4 Germany $0.79 5 France $0.50 6 Poland $0.49 7 Japan $0.42 8 Slovenia $0.35 9 Norway $0.30 10 Netherlands $0.28 11 Australia $0.26 12 Sweden $0.26 13 Spain $0.23 14 Estonia $0.19 15 Türkiye $0.19 16 Finland $0.18 17 Latvia $0.15 18 Belgium $0.10 19 Hungary $0.10 20 Greece $0.09

Although U.S. military spending as a share of GDP decreased in 2025 compared with the annual average between 2015 and 2022, the Trump administration's U.S. Department of War announced in April 2026 that its Fiscal Year 2027 (FY27) Defense Budget would request an unprecedented $1.5 trillion, a 42% increase compared with 2026 funding.

Included in that amount are plans to increase defense R&D spending from $16.6 billion in 2026 to $18.7 billion in 2027, with a stated focus on a general science and technology fund.

South Korea and Europe Round Out the Top Five

Allocating $2.06 per $1,000 of GDP to defense R&D, South Korea ranked second, making it the only other OECD country above $2.

South Korea has emerged as one of the world's fastest-growing arms producers and exporters, supported by sustained government investment in its defense industry.

Reflecting this growth, four South Korean companies appear in the SIPRI Top 100 list of global arms producers with the largest arms sales revenues in 2024. Their combined revenues increased by 30% from 2023 to 2024.

Following South Korea, the ranking drops quickly. The United Kingdom placed third at $0.97 per $1,000 of GDP. Between 2019 and 2024, the UK's Ministry of Defense tripled its net expenditure on R&D from £1.02 billion to £3.07 billion.

Germany followed in fourth place at $0.79 per $1,000 of GDP, while France ranked fifth at $0.50 per $1,000 of GDP. France and Germany are the European Union's largest and second-largest defense R&D spenders, respectively.

Most Countries Spend Far Less on Defense R&D

Across the 20 OECD countries shown, the average defense R&D allocation was $0.58 per $1,000 of GDP.

The median was much lower, at $0.27 per $1,000 of GDP, showing how much the top spenders skew the average.

Within the top 20, the drop-off is steep. The U.S. allocation of $3.64 per $1,000 of GDP was more than seven times fifth-ranked France's $0.50 and more than 40 times 20th-ranked Greece's $0.09.

Defense R&D intensity varies considerably among wealthy economies because countries may prioritize procurement, active personnel, operations, or research differently.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/21/2026 - 02:45

All Eyes Are On Belarus Ahead Of The US' Reported European Military Drawdown

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

The potential pullback of some US forces from the Baltic States upon the completion of its force posture review could be followed by European NATO if Russia agrees to pull back some of its forces from Belarus in order to then establish partial buffers in the post-war European security architecture.

NBC reported last week that the US is considering withdrawing up to half of its ~80,000 troops that are deployed to Europe along with large amounts of equipment. This coincides with European fearmongering led by Poland and France that Russia plans to ramp up its hybrid attacks against European NATO (E-NATO) into increasingly regular kinetic ones that it'll then deny. E-NATO is also undergoing rapid militarization led by Poland and Germany while deploying ever more forces to Russia's doorstep.

These sky-high NATO-Russian tensions might be reduced upon the US' potential drawdown of its forces in Europe depending on the success of the following creative diplomatic proposal. If some US forces are pulled from the Baltic States, then the US might coerce its E-NATO allies to follow suit if Russia does the same with at least some of its forces in Belarus, which they fear could be exploited by it as a launchpad into the Baltic States. The military-strategic logic behind this proposal requires some explanation.

Just as E-NATO fears that Russia could exploit Belarus as a launchpad into the Baltic States, so too does Russia fear that E-NATO could exploit the Baltic States as a launchpad into either Kaliningrad, Belarus, or "mainland Russia". E-NATO claims that its gradual military build-up in the Baltic States is to deter Russia while Russia's own regional build-up is arguably to deter E-NATO. The resultant security dilemma risks a major war by miscalculation or a (Ukrainian?) false flag and is why tensions must urgently be reduced.

The key to this proposal is Belarus, Russia's mutual defense and Union State ally with which the US is in the midst of a fast-moving rapprochement marked by phased sanctions relief in exchange for the release of so-called "political prisoners". President Alexander Lukashenko is receptive to Trump 2.0's outreaches in order to reduce multifaceted Western pressure on Belarus since the large-scale phase of the Ukrainian Conflict began nearly half a decade ago and to counterbalance disproportionate dependence on Russia.

They and Putin could thus agree to an arrangement whereby any planned American military drawdown from the Baltic States leads to a partial drawdown of Russian forces in Belarus, incentivized by more sanctions relief for both of them, conditional on E-NATO pulling back its forces from the Baltic States. Poland, where Trump is considering a permanent US military presence and which already commands E-NATO's largest army, could then become the bloc's military bastion if they redeploy their forces to there.

It was earlier explained why "Poland Would Be The Baltic States' Best Security Guarantor In NATO 3.0", namely due to geographic reasons, the aforesaid military factors, and its envisaged leadership of the Intermarium. If this arrangement is implemented, then it could turn the Baltic States and Belarus into partial buffers, both of which would remain under their allies' mutual defense umbrellas for deterrence purposes, which could spark progress on Ukraine's negotiated demilitarization for the same purpose.

If coupled with a Russian-American(-Polish?) mechanism for verifying compliance and addressing issues as they may emerge (e.g. Ukrainian drone flights over Belarusian and Baltic airspace), then tensions could be reduced and a basis for the post-war European security architecture would be established. All eyes are therefore on Belarus ahead of the US' reported European military drawdown since that country and its leader are the key to this vision for averting a major war in the most realistic way possible.

Tyler Durden Mon, 09/21/2026 - 02:00

Shurk: Bush's Islamic Appeasement Greatly Damaged America

Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,

Last week, President George W. Bush sat down with his former secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, to discuss the September 11, 2001, Islamic terror attacks on the United States. While reflecting on his actions twenty-five years earlier, Bush went out of his way to defend Islam: "I also made it clear that Islam was a religion of peace, not a religion of war, and that these people subverted their religion." Bush's absurd statement echoed a similarly absurd statement he made days after the attacks when he told the world, "Islam is peace," even though the burned bodies of three thousand dead Americans strongly suggested otherwise.

There have been 50,000 Islamic terror attacks since 9/11. Without question, Islam is a cult of conquest, misery, and war.

Bush's Islamic appeasement angered me twenty-five years ago, and his continued appeasement infuriates me today. I cannot believe that the man who asked Americans to go to war against an Islamic menace that threatened (and still threatens) the world can be so intellectually shallow and morally obtuse. "Islam is a religion of peace," is a disingenuous stock phrase that is too cute by half. President Barack Obama loves to tell the same lie.

While Americans fought and died in foreign lands in an effort to keep Islam's homicidal evil from causing further harm to the United States, Bush and Obama resettled Muslims into America's heartland. Twenty-five years ago, the sight of a woman wearing a burqa in the Midwest would have shocked and worried passersby. Today, it is too common for anyone to feign surprise. Both the number of Muslims and the number of mosques in the United States have more than doubled since the Islamic terror attacks that changed our country permanently. Bush told Americans that we had to fight the terrorists "over there" so that we would never again have to fight them "over here." While brave American warriors died "over there," Bush and Obama betrayed those warriors' sacrifice by inviting more Muslims "over here," ensuring that Americans will continue to endure Islamic terror attacks until this existential threat is honestly recognized and neutralized.

President Bush is eighty years old, plenty old enough to have learned that he has no business telling Muslims what their "religion" means. If he were telling black Americans what it means to be black, critics would rightfully accuse him of "whitesplaining." Does Bush believe himself to be an expert on the Quran? Has he become a Texas imam or an "austere religious scholar" during retirement? If not, then why does he insist on telling Americans that Islamic terrorists "subverted their religion"? The opposite seems patently clear: Wherever the scourge of Islam stretches its poisonous tentacles, Islamic violence is certain. Muhammad was a pedophile who encouraged the rape, torture, and murder of innocents. It should be no surprise that pedophiles, rapists, and murderers consider that malevolent deviant a "prophet."

Writer Antonio Graceffo wrote a well-researched essay this month describing in detail how Muslims are persecuting and murdering Christians across Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia. Carrying out massacres against Christians with hammers, machetes, axes, and guns, Muslims are right now engaging in a genocide that corporate news media and Western governments entirely ignore. In Nigeria, the Congo, Mozambique, Syria, Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Turkey, Algeria, and Indonesia, Muslims threaten Christian lives. These are the barbaric conquerors whom Bush defends as noble representatives of the "religion of peace." No self-described Christian should stay silent while Muslims slaughter Christ's followers around the world. Somehow, Bush remains quiet about Islam's unquenchable thirst for Christian blood.

Islamic bloodlust continues to exsanguinate much of Europe. A recent German report shows that foreign migrants (most of whom are Muslim) are responsible for 47% of all violent crime in Bavaria. Over 80% of North African asylum-seekers in Switzerland have been accused of committing crimes while in the country. While British children beg the government not to resettle illegal immigrants into their tiny villages, the United Kingdom is granting settlement or citizenship to one new migrant every single minute.

How is the British government combating this unsustainable invasion? The Home Office hands each Islamic migrant a nine-page booklet explaining that rape and pedophilia are illegal and that women have the same rights as men. In this behavioral guide written primarily for Muslims, the British government outlines how it is not okay to beat women, mutilate girls' genitals, have sex with children or unconscious women, or leave babies alone. The document further advises Muslims that "women must consent to sex in all situations" and "are allowed to work, study, and make their own decisions" without "permission from men."

In a section on rape, Muslim men are informed that it is not appropriate to threaten someone into having sex or to have sex with someone who is "asleep, drunk, or unable to respond." The British government warns Islamic immigrants: "If you have sex with someone without their consent, this is called rape. Rape is a serious crime in the UK. You could go to prison, lose your support and accommodation, and it will affect your asylum claim." Furthermore, there are no exceptions for child rape: "Even if they say yes, it is still illegal." Finally, Britain's new Muslims are reminded that it is not acceptable to intimidate or abuse people or take sexual pictures or videos of strangers without their consent. These "religion of peace" people sure do need a lot of help figuring out that it's not okay to rape or beat women and children! Perhaps the Brits should stop dropping them off in rural villages where they quickly outnumber the locals ten to one.

A rational person should have no problem understanding Islam as a threat to the world. President Bush held a position of immense power from which he could see Muslim atrocities as key features of that cult belief system. The fact that he remains too much of a moral coward to confront and denounce Islam's murderers, rapists, and terrorists with clarity and resolve has contributed greatly to the current moral confusion plaguing the United States.

We now have members of Congress who openly support Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists. A terrorist-sympathizing Muslim is the mayor of New York City twenty-five years after his "religion of peace" friends flew hijacked commercial airliners into the Twin Towers and murdered thousands of civilians. Another terrorist-sympathizing Muslim running for the U.S. Senate from Michigan agrees with Muslim members of Congress that 9/11 was worse for Muslims who subsequently endured "Islamophobia." When Islamic terrorists aren't trying to murder Americans with their vehicles, bombs, firearms, or knives, they're rioting in the streets and demanding "justice" for Hamas animals who rape and kill women and behead and microwave babies.

Bush's inability to identify Islam as a murderous cult ideology has exacerbated the Islamic supremacy problem in the United States. In preparation for the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11 this year, public school administrators instructed teachers in Fairfax County, Virginia, to avoid associating the attacks with Islam. Teachers were even told to treat Muslims as heroes and to create "safe spaces" for Muslim students. Virginia's Democrat governor commemorated 9/11 by ignoring the act of Islamic mass murder and pretending that three thousand Americans died from some kind of inexplicable natural disaster. While New York City's Muslim mayor laughed during the 9/11 Ground Zero ceremony, New York's Democrat governor left early, so that she could appear on cable news. Meanwhile, Gen Z Americans are largely indifferent to the September 11, 2001, Islamic terror attacks on the United States. Some even celebrate Osama bin Laden.

Americans promised never to forget Islam's war against the West. Twenty-five years later, it is obvious that too many did forget. President Bush's moral equivocations are partially to blame for this travesty.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 23:30

Space Weapons Grabbed MSM Headlines, But USAF Secretary Hinted What Could Replace MQ-9 Reaper

The Air & Space Forces Association's Air, Space & Cyber Conference opened earlier this week at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland. Air Force Secretary Troy Meink's disclosure that the Space Force had launched "space control weapons" into orbit quickly dominated the news cycle.

Beyond the USAF's new space warfare capabilities, Meink's remarks about the service's plan to build out an upgraded unmanned aircraft fleet over the next six years warrant closer attention. His remarks offered potential clues about plans for a successor to, or an alternative operating alongside, the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper.

2024 image of American MQ-9 Reaper UAV brought down in Yemen’s Marib. ClashReport/X

The following excerpts from Meink's speech suggest a shift in unmanned aircraft procurement and hint that a Reaper replacement  - or perhaps a cheaper alternative - may soon be approaching: 

And this is not the only class of autonomous aircraft we are aggressively pursuing. As we saw in Epic Fury, ISR strike platforms have been essential. We have used MQ-9 and even now the ULTRA aircraft to great effect.

Building on these lessons, we are developing a family of low-cost multi-role strike platforms called the Mass Modular Aircraft, or MMAs.

MMAs will provide affordable, attritable, long-range strike, and we will be able to field them at scale. Our intent is to field 100 MMAs in 2029 at even a lower cost than the CCAs and a fraction of the cost of manned aircraft we build today. Then by 2032, 500 of these platforms will join our force operational fleet.

One platform worth watching is ULTRA, a Group 5 unmanned aircraft system developed by DZYNE Technologies, now part of Ondas.

ULTRA could assume part of the MQ-9 Reaper's surveillance workload, particularly missions that prioritize endurance and operating costs over weapons capacity. Its potential role is strongest in intelligence gathering, where extended flight times could reduce aircraft rotations.

In late summer, The National Interest examined the Air Force's search for a Reaper successor in an article titled "Why the US Air Force Wants a Replacement for the MQ-9 Reaper." Mounting Reaper losses in the Gulf conflict have increased the focus on a lower-cost alternative. ULTRA's capabilities support the case for a much cheaper alternative with longer endurance and, considered alongside Meink's remarks, may suggest that the alternative has been found: ULTRA.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 23:00

Leftists Rally To Stop Trump's Renovations To Crumbling Kennedy Center

Why is it a bad thing to repair Washington DC's crumbling landmarks and famous buildings?  It's only a bad thing when Donald Trump is doing it.  This attitude has led to numerous delays and problems with overall renovations across America's capital; from vandalism to direct interference with work crews to legal warfare as a way to stall various projects. 

It's the kind of "monkey wrenching" that is typical among communist organizations and it's designed to make political opponents look ineffective or incompetent through constant sabotage.  The goal of these people to to ensure that nothing good or positive is accomplished by their enemies.  No visual examples of improvement are allowed - The enemy cannot be seen as helping the public at large; only communism is allowed to "help the public".

The ongoing battle to finish renovations for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts might seem like a minor issue, but it represent a much bigger conflict between the people who want to reform and rebuild American society vs the people who want to burn everything to the ground.  

In response to the Trump Administration's plans for much needed repairs to the Kennedy Center building, activists are once again turning a reasonable effort into an "act of evil".  Leftists claim the renovations cover for Trump to "destroy the Kennedy Center because he can't add his name to the building".

Huge crowd for the Hands Off the Kennedy Center demonstration in DC to send the message to Trump: Don’t you dare knock down this living memorial to a slain President. pic.twitter.com/v52ofBwEof

— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) September 18, 2026

Protesters have been surrounding the building in hopes of blocking workers from entering and completing the job.  President Trump, as chairman of the Kennedy Center board of trustees, has led a plan for a major two-year overhaul of the main building of the center. The project is funded primarily by about $257 million appropriated by Congress.

The board selected a full closure of the main building (rather than a longer, more expensive phased renovation) so work can proceed without interruption. Some newer and more modern sections of the center are slated to stay open for limited programming and as a memorial space.

"Hands off!"

"Hands Around the Kennedy Center" rally in Washington, DC. pic.twitter.com/o2g10JJNAz

— CSPAN (@cspan) September 19, 2026

Draft plans prepared by consultants and reviewed by the board include:

Exterior and waterproofing:  Polishing the Carrara marble facade, plaza-level waterproofing, terrace/roof work, garage and subgrade repairs, landscaping, and fountain restoration.   

Building systems:  Full replacement of aging HVAC, plumbing (described as decades old), electrical, fire-protection, elevator, and escalator systems, plus technical stage equipment. 

Public spaces (“front of house”):  New marble flooring, furniture, draperies, and lighting in the Grand Foyer and similar areas; relocated box office; new coffee shop; restroom upgrades (including a VIP restroom); wayfinding improvements.   

Performance venues:  Upgrades to the Concert Hall (including acoustical work and work around its pipe organ), Opera House, Eisenhower Theater, and smaller spaces such as the Family Theater, Terrace Theater, and Theater Lab—new seating, flooring, lighting, and related modernization. 

The monument has been falling apart for years.  According to government records, 456 leaks were recorded in the building from 2018 to 2023.   Water intrusion has caused severe decay to internal walls and sensitive electrical areas.  The cooling and heating for the building is 30 years old and needs replacement.  Wiring is rotting and elevators need new parts.  Some plaster ceilings have recently collapsed after heavy rains. 

Another warning we can’t ignore. A section of the Grand Foyer ceiling collapsed after this week’s storms. Thankfully no one was hurt. Decades of deferred maintenance made this inevitable.

Chairman President Trump has been right: America’s cultural center needs to close,… pic.twitter.com/Z1KrNsk78p

— The Kennedy Center (@TKCOfficial) September 5, 2026

Many of these problems were flagged during the Biden Administration, but nothing was done.  Leftists claim these ceiling cave-ins are part of a "conspiracy" by Trump to push forward the renovations, but similar issues have been cited for years, well before Trump entered office. 

The motive behind left wing interference in these projects is simple:  To agitate and obstruct until people give up on having nice things.  When the public gives up and society is awash in decay, communists can step in and argue that they are the answer.  In other words, they intend to hold the country hostage and prevent improvement until the public gives them the power they desire.    

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 22:00

Pentagon Releases UFO Files Examining Warp Drives, Stargates, & Cloaking

Authored by Tom Gantert via The Epoch Times,

The Pentagon on Sept. 18 released its sixth batch of declassified and historical UFO files, including papers examining speculative concepts such as warp drives, cloaking devices, stargates, and wormholes.

In July 2025 in the northeastern United States, an eyewitness observed an intense bright light in their backyard as they parked their car upon returning home from work. This is a screenshot from the witness's personal video. Screenshot by The Epoch Times/Courtesy of the Pentagon

The documents, produced through the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program, examine subjects including discussions on ideas such as antigravity, negative-mass propulsion, and invisibility. The Pentagon cautioned that these were reference papers, not proof that the concepts are workable or validated.

The files span events from 1952 to as recent as 2025.

One 2010 file discusses "early experiments behind invisibility cloaking, describing several ways an object might be hidden from visual or sensor detection, including camouflage, transparency effects, and optical cloaking that bends light around an object."

Another 2010 file examined wormholes and stargates as "hypothetical spacetime structures within general relativity that theoretically offer a means of faster-than-light travel or communication."

A Pentagon research paper from the time describes injuries suffered by three healthy antenna engineers following what it called an "anomalous 'accident.'"

Within 72 hours, the engineers experienced skin heat and redness, fever, pain, headaches, numbness, nausea, diarrhea, hair loss, heart palpitations, insomnia, and anxiety. Two developed extreme light sensitivity and inflamed, bloodshot eyes. One showed signs of radiation illness and later developed indications of malignant changes.

The paper attributed the symptoms to accidental close-range exposure to a mixture of radiofrequency, microwave, and ultraviolet radiation. It characterized the investigation as "extensive, but controversial."

The files were published through the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, or PURSUE, according to Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell.

Parnell did not describe the number or contents of the newly released files in the announcement. He said the Pentagon and other federal agencies are working on the next release and will continue publishing additional material.

Previous releases included a pitch involving a Hollywood actor to NASA and a 1957 report of a UFO sighting in Germany.

In 2001, space advocate Carol Rosin wrote a letter to a NASA official with a proposal to bringing her husband, actor Jon Cypher, to the official's office to promote a space initiative. Her sales pitch stressed Cypher's appearances on "Hill Street Blues" and "Major Dad," his Broadway performance in "Man of La Mancha," his ability to sing opera in four languages and his fondness for discussing space.

Rosin assured the recipient that their proposal would not cost NASA "a dime" and would require only as much time as he wanted. She then invited him and his associates to lunch or dinner.

The 1957 report was an FBI file from a U.S. citizen who was a war prisoner in Germany. He reported seeing a UFO while working in Germany in 1944.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 21:30

Bechtel Splits With TerraPower As Holtec Postpones IPO

Bechtel and Bill Gates-backed TerraPower are parting ways over the next phase of the Natrium reactor project in Wyoming, adding a construction headache to a sector already digesting Holtec’s postponed IPO.

According to a layoff notice reported by Washington Business Journal, the companies failed to reach an agreement and “have decided to move forward separately.” 

It's a hard flip from April when Bechtel was celebrating mobilization and field execution at Kemmerer Unit 1. And just last month, TerraPower was still targeting completion in 2030 for the project, which is a 345 MW sodium-cooled reactor plus a molten-salt storage system.

Nothing has pointed yet to an actual halt in the construction efforts. But this isn't exactly the cleanest spot to suddenly change contractors. The fact that the industry is in the midst of its greatest attempted comeback yet makes it significantly more awkward that the two leading nuclear parties are struggling to work with each other.

While there is a sufficiently large construction industry for TerraPower to choose a new partner from, the list becomes incredibly short when considering which EPC firms hold the actual talent and nuclear industry experience required to complete the project on time and on budget.

On the domestic side, Fluor is likely high on the list, as they are arguably the number two nuclear construction firm behind Bechtel. In April, it signed an agreement with X-energy for initial planning and project-definition work on the proposed four-reactor development at Dow’s Seadrift site in Texas.

If Bechtel does get outright replaced, though, a name higher on the list than Fluor is likely South Korea’s Hyundai Engineering & Construction. Under an August framework agreement, TerraPower selected Hyundai as their EPC contractor for up to eight future Natrium reactors, with completion, price and performance guarantees intended to support commercial financing.

Meanwhile, Holtec has supplied the week’s other unwelcome headline. As we covered in our Labor Day nuclear roundup, the company had marketed 50 million shares at $15 to $18 each, seeking up to $900 million.

Barely a week later, Holtec confirmed the postponement, citing deteriorating investor sentiment and uncertainty around data-center development. It intends to keep its SEC registration statement on file and says work on Palisades and its SMR program will continue.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 21:00

Trump Announces 'AI Force', Plans To Name AI Czar As US Pushes Tech Dominance

Authored by AG News Staff via American Greatness,

President Donald Trump announced plans to form an "AI Force" and appoint an artificial intelligence czar as his administration looks to promote the rapidly growing technology while using existing laws to address potential wrongdoing.

Trump argued Democrats are attempting to create public doubts about AI after criticism of data centers failed to gain traction.

"It all began with an attack on our Data Centers, until people realized how wealthy and prestigious they were for the Communities in which they were built," Trump wrote on Truth Social, pointing to what he described as higher salaries, lower taxes and safer streets.

Trump said his administration would resist efforts to slow the industry's growth.

"We will not in any way hinder or stifle the Growth of this incredible Industry. Rather, we will cherish it, help it, and watch over it, as it grows!" Trump wrote.

The president also acknowledged the potential for harmful activity involving AI, but said existing criminal and civil laws could be used to address misconduct.

"For this purpose, I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS, in my First Term," Trump wrote.

Trump said he would soon announce an AI czar to help oversee the effort, adding, "Only High I.Q. individuals need apply!"

The president portrayed artificial intelligence as a potentially transformative force for the American economy, comparing its significance to the Industrial Revolution and the internet.

Trump said AI could eventually have an economic impact equal to as much as 25% of U.S. gross domestic product.

"We are leading China, and the rest of the World, and I intend to keep it that way!" Trump wrote.

In a separate post on Saturday, Trump said many people do not think the term “artificial intelligence” is an accurate way to describe the technology.

“A far more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomena would be Superior Intelligence (SI) or, Extreme Intelligence (EI) or, Supreme Intelligence (SI),” Trump wrote.

“This is a Poll, and I would appreciate everybody voting! Which is the best name for this ever-growing ‘Revolution?’”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who is considering a bid for the White House, criticized Trump’s statements about AI on Saturday.

“Instead of regulating AI, he’s posting polls to rename it,” Newsom wrote.

“California is taking action. I just signed an executive order accelerating America’s first independent AI safety oversight framework.”

The president’s announcement comes amid calls from some lawmakers to further regulate the technology and local protests against the construction of new data centers.

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 20:30

"Not Enough Raw Material!" - Resource Wars Put Tungsten In Crosshairs As Western Rearmament Supercycle Looms

Submitted by Almonty Industries CEO Lewis Black, 

The UK just invested £71m to restart a tungsten mine, with an option on half the output. Other governments will follow. I should be pleased – I've spent years arguing the West needs to fund its own supply.

The problem is I've seen what happens next. In 2008, Japan and South Korea poured billions into securing critical mineral supply chains. They funded projects across Australia and Canada. The result: no material produced. The money went to a generation of junior mining executives. I remember them on their boats in Monaco – very grateful, very happy. Governments have good ideas. The people they back to deliver on them are sometimes another matter.

The challenge is that a government is a jack of all trades – it can't tell a good mine from a bad one, so it hires engineers who write glowing feasibility reports with a waiver in the small print. And there is no shortage of people who call themselves management. Most of them are clowns who shouldn't be left alone with a box of matches.

Japan and South Korea learned. They stopped trying to pick winners and pushed the risk onto their industrial base – the companies that buy the stuff. Those companies know how to protect a dollar. If the new money follows that model, the checks might land somewhere useful this time.

Tungsten markets

Michael Dornhofer, ISBP – assessment as of 11 September, 2026

Tungsten prices in the USA and Europe stay unchanged for another week and are still around 3000 USD/mtu WO3. Reports from China show their domestic price trend moved to an upward tendency.

The reason is quite simple: There is not enough raw material! As the APT price in China is only about one third of the western price, Chinese APT producers are not willing to buy western concentrates on western price level. But without a significant amount of imported raw material, the industry is running short on raw material. Soon it will become clear whether the Chinese domestic prices will go up towards western levels, or China might reduce output of downstream products for export.

The coming weeks will show us. And there's another interesting development that even some "experts" overlooked. On 5 August, China placed several foreign entities under sanctions and banned them from operating in China. One entity on this list is the non-profit organization RBA.

RBA (Responsible Business Alliance) is the world's largest industry coalition dedicated to promoting responsible business conduct. RBA has more than 600 member companies including Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, Amazon etc. and runs the RMI (Responsible Minerals Initiative) program.

Nearly the entire western downstream industry insists on RMI certificates for their total supply chain. When, due to the ban of RBA, no RMI audits and certificates are possible in China, western downstream producers cannot accept any tungsten material or downstream products coming out of China.

China wants to replace the RMI audits by audits performed by CCCMC (Chinese Chamber of Commerce for Metals & Chemicals). But knowing that China imports thousands of tonnes of concentrate from countries like Myanmar and North Korea, and so material from these countries are in the tungsten supply chain in China, it's questionable who would trust Chinese audit certificates.

So, this easy-to-overlook new regulation in China could lead to an additional "firewall" between China and RoW, which might have a very significant effect on the tungsten world market.

Michael Dornhofer is founder of ISBP (Independent Supply Business Partner) in Graz, Austria. He has spent more than 20 years in tungsten, including 13 years at Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten, Sandvik's tungsten business, and has worked as an independent agent and consultant to the tungsten and hard metal industry since 2019.

From January, the door shuts

Since 2023, the Pentagon has barred Chinese, Russian, Iranian and North Korean tungsten from defense contracts. From 1 January 2027, that restriction moves upstream. It will no longer matter where the tungsten was melted or processed. What matters is where it was mined. Ore, feedstock, recycled material: if it started life in one of those four countries, it is out. The route that kept the loophole open – mine in China, process somewhere friendlier, sell it as non-Chinese – closes for good.

That's the American side. On the other side, producer countries are shutting their own doors. Zimbabwe banned exports of tungsten ore and concentrates in July, confirmed by the Ministry of Mines and reported by Bloomberg last week. Vietnam's industry ministry has drafted a proposal to pull tungsten off the permitted-export list entirely. Vietnam is the world's second-largest producer, at around 3,400 tonnes a year. If that draft becomes law, the non-China supply pool gets a lot smaller.

Zimbabwe barely produces any tungsten. The volume is negligible. But the pattern is worth watching – one more producer country pulling raw material off the open market. The list of places you can actually buy tungsten outside China keeps getting shorter.

Opinion

People ask why we don't branch out. Gold is on a run. Lithium gets headlines. Every commodity has someone telling you it's the one to watch. We do tungsten and molybdenum. We don't know anything else – and I would rather say that than pretend otherwise.

A vet treats everything that walks through the door. Dogs, cats, parrots. A doctor specializes. The guy who whips out your appendix does not do brain surgery, unless you're on a budget.

Mining is the same. Every deposit has its own geology, its own metallurgy, its own set of problems you only discover once you are underground. The companies that chase whatever commodity is fashionable learn everything at surface level and nothing underneath. We have been at this long enough to know what we don't know – and we don't know gold or lithium or anything that's not a refractory metal.

We are the doctor.

In the media

The analysts have arrived. Jefferies has initiated coverage of Almonty with a Buy rating, citing the tightening tungsten market and the growing need for supply outside China. With the shares up considerably over the past year, interest in both Almonty and tungsten has clearly moved on.

What matters now is execution – bringing new supply into a market that badly needs it.

*  *  *

On the tungsten news front, Almonty partnered with Rwanda's government last Monday, securing a foothold in Africa's largest tungsten-producing nation. By Thursday, the miner, which expects to become the leading Western producer of conflict-free tungsten (ex-China), tapped Swedish mining equipment maker Sandvik's Wolfram Bergbau und Hütten AG unit to process existing tailings from its Los Santos mine in western Spain.

As last week's news proved, Almonty's move is about bringing the most immediately available tungsten supply to the West as resource wars and China's critical materials chokehold on the world collide with the US rearmament supercycle set to kick off in the near term.

In other words, the West doesn't have the time to open new mines. 

via Christian Keller, Barclays' global head of economics research

Without critical materials, the West's rearmament supercycle, reindustrialization, data center buildouts and a nearly endless list of other projects would not be possible. Wall Street should refocus on producing miners that can deliver today because they're the ones providing the building blocks that make Western reindustrialization possible. 

Tyler Durden Sun, 09/20/2026 - 17:30