Largest Acquisition In Nvidia History: Jensen Pays $20BN For AI Chip Startup In Bid For Google's TPU Tech

Just before the market close on Friday, Nvidia unveiled its largest ever acquisition (which however was structured as a licensing deal to avoid anti-trust concerns) when it agreed to buy Groq - pardon license all of Grok's assets and acquire its entire executive team - a designer of high-performance artificial intelligence accelerator chips, for $20 billion in cash. In reality what the deal is really about is Grok's TPU expertise, and specifically the knowledge inside CEO Jonathan Ross' head, who helped launch Google's TPU, the search giant's custom Application-Specific Integrated Circuit. 

Jonathan Ross, chief executive officer of Groq 

The news was first reported by CNBC, citing Alex Davis, CEO of Disruptive, which led the startup’s latest financing round in September. Davis, whose firm has invested more than half a billion dollars in Groq since the company was founded in 2016, said the deal came together quickly (that part is true: the deal likely came together in the days following the recent dramatic ascent of Google's Gemini and TPU architecture, not to mention stock price, as explained below).

Groq raised $750 million at a valuation of about $6.9 billion in September. Investors in the round included Blackrock and Neuberger Berman, as well as Samsung, Cisco, Altimeter and 1789 Capital (where Donald Trump Jr. is a partner). Groq said at the time it would use the funds to expand its data center capacity. Instead, the participating funds are about to 3x their money in 3 months, an unprecedented venture return, thanks to Nvidia's massive cash hoard.

Groq said in a blog post on Wednesday that it’s “entered into a non-exclusive licensing agreement with Nvidia for Groq’s inference technology,” without disclosing a price. Clearly, however, this is much more than just a licensing agreement since Groq founder and CEO Jonathan Ross along with Sunny Madra, the company’s president, and other senior leaders “will join Nvidia to help advance and scale the licensed technology,” the post said.

As Bloomberg explains, sharing a slightly different perspective on how the deal is structured or rather wants to be structured, the world’s largest publicly traded company paid for the right to use Groq’s technology and will integrate its chip design into future products. Some of the startup’s executives are leaving to join Nvidia to help with that effort, the companies said.

Groq will continue as an independent company with a new chief executive, existing finance chief Simon Edwards as CEO, it said Wednesday in a post on its website, which of course it will only pretend to be for regulatory and anti-trust reasons: Nvidia will have stripped all the good stuff, i.e., the TPU IP. It’s data center business, which offers outsourced computing, will continue, the company said in the post. 

Davis told CNBC that Nvidia is getting all of Groq’s assets, though its nascent Groq cloud business is not part of the transaction. Groq said “GroqCloud will continue to operate without interruption.”

The deal represents by far Nvidia’s largest purchase ever. The chipmaker’s biggest acquisition to date came in 2019, when it bought Israeli chip designer Mellanox for close to $7 billion. At the end of October, Nvidia had $60.6 billion in cash and short-term investments, up from $13.3 billion in early 2023. 

In an email to employees that was obtained by CNBC, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the agreement will expand Nvidia’s capabilities.

“We plan to integrate Groq’s low-latency processors into the NVIDIA AI factory architecture, extending the platform to serve an even broader range of AI inference and real-time workloads,” Huang wrote, revealing the deal rationale. 

Groq has been targeting revenue of $500 million this year amid booming demand for AI accelerator chips used in speeding up the process for large language models to complete inference-related tasks. The company was not pursuing a sale when it was approached by Nvidia, Davis said. While it is unclear what is the actual LTM revenue, the acquisition represents a 40x multiple of its "targeted" sales... so do the math. 

So what is the reason for the deal? Well, as we explained in "The Google TPU: The Chip Made For The AI Inference Era", in recent months Nvidia and its GPU architecture has lost momentum to Google and its TPU, which as noted above, is the "chip made for the inference era." And so, instead of developing its own Tensor architecture, Nvidia decided to just buy it. Or rather, it pretends not to buy it as regulators may just kill the deal, which instead was structured as an asset-purchase/licensing deal. 

And the punchline: Groq was founded in 2016 by a group of former engineers, including CEO Ross. Ross is a former Google chip executive who helped start that company’s Tensor Processing Unit, or TPU, the search giant’s custom chip that’s being used by some companies as an alternative to Nvidia’s graphics processing units. As part of the deal, he and other top executives will join Nvidia “to help advance and scale the licensed technology,” Groq said in the statement. 

In its initial filing with the SEC, announcing a $10.3 million fundraising in late 2016, Groq listed as principals Ross and Douglas Wightman, an entrepreneur and former engineer at the Google X “moonshot factory.” Wightman left Groq in 2019, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

Huang added that, “While we are adding talented employees to our ranks and licensing Groq’s IP, we are not acquiring Groq as a company.” Narrator: you are.

Nvidia has ramped up its investments in chip startups and the broader ecosystem as its cash pile has mounted. The company has backed AI and energy infrastructure company Crusoe, AI model developer Cohere, and boosted its investment in CoreWeave as the AI-centric cloud provider was getting ready to go public this year.

In September, Nvidia said it intended to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI, with the startup committed to deploying at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia products. The companies have yet to announce a formal deal. That same month, Nvidia said it would invest $5 billion in Intel as part of a partnership.

Nvidia has been making investments in companies across the AI infrastructure ecosystem and is trying to keep a large lead in the market for inference — running models once they have been developed. The company’s leadership has already pledged billions to a wide variety of projects that it believes will further the overall AI industry. Nvidia agreed to invest as much as $100 billion in OpenAI and has even bought a stake in erstwhile nemesis Intel Corp.

By incorporating a new type of design into what it sells, Nvidia is showing willingness to be flexible and add novel capabilities. That approach is likely aimed at keeping its biggest customers and new adopters focused on its technology at a time when in-house efforts from Google, Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. are gaining momentum as the industry rushes to install as much computing capacity as quickly as it can.

With today's purchase, pardon, "licensing deal", Nvidia has formally lobbed its response to Google's recent ascent with its Ironwood TPU and Gemini AI, which saw a dramatic divergence in the Google vs Nvidia ecosystems (chart below).  The question now is will Google issue its own "code red" and pull every string in its power to kill the deal, or will it respond even more forcefully. One thing is certain: if Nvidia has now successfully caught up to Google and its TPU technology, the alligator jaws of the Google vs OpenAI/Nvidia chart are about to slam shut.

Tyler Durden Thu, 12/25/2025 - 14:54

'There Is Nothing To Celebrate': Gaza's Christians Mark Somber Christmas Amid Fragile Truce

Via Middle East Eye

Youssef Tarazi, a Palestinian Christian in Gaza, says the giant Christmas tree that once stood as a symbol of communal celebration will not be lit this year. For a third consecutive year, Gaza's Christian community says they will be observing Christmas without public celebrations, as Israel's alleged repeated ceasefire violations and restrictions on humanitarian aid entering the enclave continue to cast a shadow over the holiday.

"Churches have suspended all celebrations outside their walls because of the conditions Gaza is going through," Tarazi, 31, told Middle East Eye. "We are marking the birth of Jesus Christ through prayer inside the church only, but our joy remains incomplete".

Palestinian Orthodox Christians will observe Christmas on January 7 according to the pre-Gregorian calendar, while Catholics are celebrating on Dec. 25.

Before the war, churches across Gaza transformed their courtyards into gathering spaces, decorated streets with festive lights and hosted carols that brought families together. 

Muslims often joined Christian neighbors to mark the occasion, including the annual lighting of a large Christmas tree in Gaza City. "This year, we cannot celebrate while we are still grieving for those killed, including during attacks on churches," Tarazi said.

"Nothing feels the same anymore. Many members of our community will not be with us this Christmas".

George Anton, the director of operations at the Latin patriarchate in Gaza and head of its emergency committee, echoed those sentiments. "We cannot celebrate while Christians and Muslims alike are mourning devastating losses caused by the war," Anton told MEE. "For us, the war has not ended".

Anton said churches are limiting observances to prayers and a nativity scene inside church buildings. "In the past, we decorated our homes. Now, many homes are gone. We decorated the streets. Even the streets are gone," he said. "There is nothing to celebrate".

Since October 2023, Gaza's Christian homes, schools and churches have been damaged or destroyed during Israeli military operations. Three historic churches - Church of Saint Porphyrius, the Holy Family Church and the Gaza Baptist Church - have suffered severe damage.

Anton said at least 53 Christians have been killed directly or indirectly during the war, with many others injured. "Some were killed in air strikes, while others died because we could not reach hospitals or provide medicine, especially elderly people with chronic illnesses," he said.

Determined to stay

This Christmas comes amid what church leaders describe as the smallest Christian population Gaza has seen in decades.

More than 400 Christians have left Gaza during the war, fearing for their lives after relatives and friends were killed. Today, an estimated 220 Christian families - around 580 people - remain in the strip. "Those of us who remain are determined to stay," Anton said, while acknowledging that worsening humanitarian conditions may force more families to leave in search of medical care and stability.

For the last two years, Nazareth, the hometown of Jesus Christ, has not been able to properly celebrate Christmas. Due to the war in Gaza, there has not been a tree in the village square, and the Christmas market has not been open.https://t.co/KVVHKLfgbr

— Crux (@Crux) December 22, 2025

Around 70 percent of Gaza's Christians belong to the Greek Orthodox Church, with the remainder Latin Catholics. "The situation affects everyone - Christians and Muslims alike," Anton said. "We are part of this society, and what happens to Gaza happens to us".

On October 20 2023, less than two weeks into the war, Israeli strikes hit the Church of Saint Porphyrius complex, killing at least 16 people who had sought refuge there. The church is one of the oldest in the world, built on a site used for Christian worship since the fifth century.

In another attack on 17 July, Israeli fire struck Gaza's only Catholic church, killing two women and injuring several others, including the parish priest. "All Palestinians, including the Christian community, are still living with the consequences of the war," Anton said. "We are grieving, frustrated and unstable. We cannot celebrate as if nothing has happened".

Tyler Durden Thu, 12/25/2025 - 13:30

From Snowflakes To Raindrops: The Decline Of White Christmas

The magic of a white Christmas - snowflakes dusting city streets and children sledding under twinkling lights - is firmly rooted in the collective imagination, whether in Northern America or Europe.

But what are the actual chances of having a white Christmas?

As Statista's Tristan Gaudiaut details below, according to meteorological service data published by various media reports, there is a significant decline in the likelihood of waking up to snow on December 25 around the world.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Over the last few decades, the tendency for winter precipitation to occur more often in the form of rain, some cities in the Northern Hemisphere are now experiencing white Christmases about half as often as they did in the mid-20th century.

In North America, where a white Christmas is defined as at least 2 cm (1 inch) of snow cover, Montreal is known to be a winter wonderland, with snow recorded 79 percent of the time on December 25 between 1955 and 1989.

Nowadays, the largest city in the province of Quebec sees snow the same day around 68 percent of the time (1990-2024), a drop of 15 percentage points.

A little further south, in the United States, Chicagoans could once expect a snowy Christmas nearly one in two years (47 percent in 1955-1989), but now just face a 35 percent chance (1990-2024), while New Yorkers' odds have fallen from around 18 percent to 12 percent over the same period (-33 percent).

Across the Atlantic, data collected in Germany reveals a similar story.

Munich, famed for its fairy-tale Christmas markets dusted in snow, has seen its white Christmas probability (defined in Europe as at least 1 cm of snow cover) decrease from 47 percent in 1955-1989 to around 20 percent since 1990, a drop of more than 50 percent.

Berlin, less of a snow guarantee, has gone on its side from over a one-in-four chance (29 percent) to just under one-in-five (18 percent), with the last white Christmas dating back to 2010.

Tyler Durden Thu, 12/25/2025 - 12:45

FBI Raided Secret Service Agent's Home In Charity Tax Fraud Probe

Authored by Susan Crabtree via RealClearPolitics,

The FBI recently raided the home of a Secret Service agent on Vice President JD Vance’s detail in an alleged tax and wire fraud case involving millions of dollars in donations and grants.

In the alleged scheme, the agent accepted donations to a charity that purports to help inner-city youth and victims of domestic violence but didn’t provide the services it reported to the IRS, according to several knowledgeable sources in the Secret Service community.

The raid, which took place on or around Dec. 8, was the culmination of more than a year of work by a joint FBI-IRS investigation that the Secret Service joined in recent months, the sources said. Federal investigators have interviewed more than a dozen Secret Service agents, some of whom contributed to the nonprofit at the center of the probe, which is run by an agent on Vance’s detail.

The Secret Service has placed the agent on unpaid administrative leave and suspended his security clearance, signs that the agency considers the potential crimes and misconduct extremely serious, even though the individual has not been arrested, according to sources familiar with the matter.

RealClearPolitics has reached out to the USSS and has been told a statement is forthcoming.

The alleged fraud could further bruise the Secret Service, which is facing retention problems as it struggles to regain its once elite reputation after two Trump assassination attempts last year. In addition to potential criminal prosecution, the Secret Service agent could face internal insider threat allegations for demonstrating poor judgment and possible criminal intent.

“This is bigger than the 2012 prostitution scandal because agents are trained to investigate tax and bank wire fraud – anyone involved knew what they were doing was illegal,” one source remarked.

In 2012, more than a dozen Secret Service agents and other personnel were placed on administrative leave, and several were eventually fired after their superiors discovered they had hired prostitutes during a trip to Colombia to prepare for then-President Obama’s visit to the Summit of the Americas.

The agent whose home was raided is listed as the founder and chairman of the charity’s board of directors on tax documents filed with the IRS.

The charity in question purports to provide laptops to young inner-city youth in its “Laptops for Hope Program” – at least some of which are laptops donated by the Secret Service because they are beyond their warranties, according to knowledgeable sources. Investigators, however, are looking into whether laptops discovered in the basement of the agent’s home were ever donated to the youth or whether there were plans to do so.  

In tax documents, the charity states that its mission is to provide “emergency assistance to survivors of domestic violence, financial literacy, preventing childhood obesity, & [stet] supporting families affected by HIV/AIDS in VA, MD, DC, & GA.”

The alleged tax and wire fraud schemes could implicate numerous Secret Service agents and employees, some of whom allegedly donated to the charity and then received part of their donation back in a payment. Investigators are looking into whether the donations allowed the Secret Service agents to file deductions and write off numerous work-related expenses, the sources said.

The charity has been operating since 2022, receiving $351,329 in contributions and grants in its first year while paying just $23,000 in salaries, tax documents show. In 2023, contributions and grants shot up to $806,409, and the nonprofit paid its officers a total of $154,590. Those numbers increased to $979,053 in contributions and grants in 2024, the latest tax document available. That year, the charity reported paying $267,221 in salaries.  

Tyler Durden Thu, 12/25/2025 - 12:00

COVID Christmas: Never Forget

Yes, it's been five years.

Yes, it's the season of joy and forgiveness, blah blah blah.

But, fuck that!

In 2020, while the sheeple huddled in fear-porn isolation, a cabal of power-hungry bureaucrats and pharma-shilling "experts" pulled off the greatest heist in modern history: they stole Christmas.

Not with guns or tanks, but with "emergency decrees," arbitrary lockdowns, and endless streams of hysterical propaganda about a virus with a 99.7% survival rate for most.

Across the West, authoritarian governors and health czars like California's Gavin Newsom and New York's Andrew Cuomo played Grinch-in-Chief.

Family gatherings? Banned.

Churches closed on the holiest night of the year, while big-box retailers like Walmart raked in billions—essential, you see.

Travel restrictions grounded flights, borders slammed shut, and millions faced solitary holidays, Zoom "celebrations" replacing real human connection.

In the UK, Boris Johnson's last-minute Tier 4 lockdown crushed plans for millions, proving politicians love nothing more than moving goalposts.

And to ensure we don't forget (or forgive) those that imposed such a farce upon so many, Martin Armstrong dug up some images as a reminder...

The economic carnage was deliberate: small businesses gutted, restaurants shuttered, while Amazon's Jeff Bezos laughed all the way to his yacht.

Fauci the Flip-Flopper pontificated from his ivory tower, warning against singing carols or hugging grandma, as if seasonal joy itself was a superspreader event.

This wasn't public health - it was social engineering on steroids.

Fear was the weapon, compliance the goal.

The tyrants wrapped their theft in "science" bows, but the data later exposed the scam: excess deaths from despair, suicides, delayed treatments far outweighed their "saved" lives narrative.

Five years on, the damage lingers: fractured families, eroded trust, and a precedent for endless control.

Christmas 2020 wasn't just stolen - it was sacrificed on the altar of technocratic tyranny.

Never forget: they hated the Whos down in Whoville, and they'll do it again given half a chance.

Never Again!

Tyler Durden Thu, 12/25/2025 - 11:15

Intensifying Shortage: This Is What A Run On The London Silver Market Looks Like

Authored by David Jensen via Substack,

Dutch trading specialist Karel Mercx posted the following commentary where the opposite (multiply by -1) of the silver swap rate minus US interest rates can be used as a proxy for the implied silver lease rate to determine physical shortage in the London silver market.:

“The 1-year silver swap minus the US interest rate is now –7.18%.

That distortion explains why the silver rally is not over.

Only at the red line do supply and demand normalize.”

A further six days ago Mercx posted the following commentary:

“ The 1-year silver swap minus the US interest rate is now almost –7%! That distortion is the key reason the silver rally is not over.

That spread should be positive, since silver needed in one year comes with storage, insurance, and financing costs.

Extra explanation.

The silver swap rate is a crucial part of the global precious-metals trade. It exists because major players such as banks, producers, industrial users, and investors constantly exchange silver for dollars without physically moving metal from vault to vault. This mechanism keeps the London physical market tightly connected to the New York financial market.

But that system is now under strain. Physical silver today is almost 7% more expensive than silver for delivery one year from now. Swaps were designed to avoid shipping metal around the world, yet today silver is being moved because buyers are demanding delivery.

Holding physical silver isn’t easy or cheap.

A $1 million position weighs several hundred kilograms, spread across dozens of heavy bars that require vault space, insurance, and security…

…That question is now being priced in. As long as the 1-year silver swap minus US rates remains below the red line, silver’s upside pressure continues. No one knows where supply and demand will reconnect. … ”

I’ve added a trend arrow to the chart that Mercx posted:

Figure 1 - One Year Silver Swaps Minus One Year One Year US Interest Rates at Dec 23, 2025; source: Karel Mercx x.com

Note that the distance from the red line normalization is increasing as the London silver shortage intensifies. The London silver market is devolving, not stabilizing.

[ZH: the spread between SHFE and COMEX silver futures is extreme to say the least - incentivizing the flow from London to Shanghai]...

This is what a run on the London ‘physical’ silver market looks like where holders of unallocated promissory notes for silver ownership and delivery, at the margins, start to demand physical metal delivery.

The enormous leverage of London paper (vapor) claims vs physical silver available for delivery gives the potential for a very quick unwind of London.

Tyler Durden Thu, 12/25/2025 - 10:30

Arab Nonprofit Stirs Pot With Times Square Ad On Christianity's Holiest Day

On the holiest day of the Christian calendar, the nonprofit Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) purchased a gigantic Times Square advertisement in New York City declaring, "Jesus is Palestinian." This inflammatory and divisive rhetoric is nothing more than an attempt by the Arab nonprofit to stir up the Christian nation with their own narrative.

Adeb Ayoub, National Executive Director of ADC, told The New York Post that the nonprofit has been renting ad space in Times Square this year, with rotating weekly messages.

"There's a lot more similarities between Arabs and Muslims and Christians in this country than others want to allow us to believe and there are similarities and there is a fear of culture, shared religion," Ayoub said.

NYPost's report continued:

"Most of the Americans in this country are Christian and the birthplace of Christianity is Palestine. If people wanna go back and forth and debate it, then great, the billboard sparked debate. At least you're having a conversation about it. Otherwise, we're silenced and our voices and positions don't come out."

When asked whether his group is disputing that Jesus was Jewish, Ayoub said that "Jesus lives within all of us" and that the subject was "up for interpretation."

He added that Jewish groups he claims have waged a digital war against him since the Spring are free to promote their own views about Jesus.

Based on publicly available records, Adeb Ayoub appears to be affiliated with the United Mission for Relief and Development (UMR), which has a significant focus on Palestine. He also has links to "Liberation Legal" ... 

Earlier this year, ADC hosted ArabCon 2025, the nation's largest annual convention of Arab Americans, in Deaborne, Michigan, which hosted anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour and China-linked Medea Benjamin of CodePink, among others.

Ahead of ArabCon, ADC wrote on their website, "Recent attempts to smear the organization and our upcoming conference deploy the same racist and tired playbook meant to intimidate and shame Arab and Muslim spaces– branding ArabCon with inflammatory labels like 'pro‑terrorism' and 'antisemitic.'"

Ayoub told NYPost that a new billboard will appear in Times Square for New Year's Eve... 

Tyler Durden Thu, 12/25/2025 - 09:55

"And May All Your Christmases Be [Woke]": Liberal Pundits Come For Santa And Other Holiday Traditions

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

“And may all your Christmases be [woke].”

As Santa prepares for his harrowing journey around the world, he is being closely pursued by liberal commentators protesting his race, gender, and capitalist leanings.

The perpetually outraged have finally come for Christmas.

One columnist at Slate called for Santa to be replaced by a penguin due to his race.

Aisha Harris admitted that she was being a bit cheeky in pushing the penguin substitute but sought to express “my real concern that America continues to promote the harmful idea of whiteness-as-default.”

Back to Santa. The British Brighton and Hove Museums have been the focus of this debate over the reposting of an earlier column by the museum’s Joint Head of Culture Change, Simone LaCorbinière, who explained that the traditional Christmas simply will not do with a Santa who is “too white, male” and a colonizer of elves.

I suppose that when you use public dollars to hire someone who will serve as “Joint Head of Culture Change,” it was only a matter of time before they came for Christmas. After all, the idea is that the British culture must generally change, right?

In a 2023 column titled Decolonising Father Christmas, LaCorbinière warns that Santa is “too white, male” and the traditional story “presents Santa as the ultimate authority of all societies. This asks us to accept colonial assumptions of cultural superiority. It doesn’t recognise the complex realities colonised people face.”

She expresses horror at the fact that Santa is “an old white man [who] supervise[s] the elves’ work.” We can put aside that Santa was identified in “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (1823) as a  “chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf.” LaCorbinière portrays him as a heartless white capitalist living off the labor of a captive elf workforce. She calls for “Santa to work in the factory alongside the elves.”

Changes must be made, according to the museum, to decolonize Christmas and break away from holiday images that are “white, male and non-disabled”:

“This perpetuates the harmful ‘colonial gaze’. Non-Western cultures are ‘othered’. It says that the coloniser has the power to judge all people. And it ignores many communities’ histories and traditions. Telling the story like this teaches new generations that the coloniser knows best.”

Santa is not alone.

In the meantime, NPR noted White Christmas has racist undertones, while Joy Reid has declared Jingle Bells to be a racist song.

Even “It’s a Wonderful Life” is a “bigoted” story fed to the populace to reinforce capitalist and racist values. Professor James Deaville warned recently that “while some viewers see the ending as affirming community, the film also keeps George partly ignorant of how the forces of inequity are actually operating in his largely white community.”

They are the self-flagellants of the holidays, moving through Christmas markets (which are also fascist traditions) with Gregorian chants of guilt.   Here are some enlightened carolers seen recently spreading “Tidings of Great Joy [Reid]” for the holiday:

Clearly there are many liberals who still enjoy the holidays without the need for self-affirming declarations of outrage or disgust. 

However, for some on the left, there is little joy in Christmas without identity politics and white guilt.

So the more the merrier and, as Tiny Tim declared, “God bless us, every one!”

Tyler Durden Thu, 12/25/2025 - 08:10

White House Orders Venezuelan Oil "Quarantine" As Gunboat Diplomacy Drives Dark Fleet Tanker Into Atlantic

The Trump administration has ordered the U.S. military to enforce a two-month "quarantine" of Venezuelan oil, signaling an intensification of gunboat diplomacy aimed at fostering regime instability in Caracas, with potential spillover effects that could ripple across the Caribbean into Cuba.

"While military options still exist, the focus is to first use economic pressure by enforcing sanctions to reach the outcome the White House is looking (for)," a U.S. official told Reuters on Wednesday afternoon, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The U.S. Coast Guard has already intercepted two Venezuelan crude tankers this month and is prepared to seize another dark fleet tanker, but the vessel Bella-1 was chased away.

Sources familiar with the sanctioned Bella-1 told Bloomberg that the tanker retreated into the Atlantic after being pursued by U.S. Coast Guard forces. The tanker failed to comply with instructions to move to calmer waters for boarding.

Bella-1's decision to evade closely monitored Venezuelan waters underscores how the Trump administration's U.S. blockade, widely viewed as gunboat diplomacy, has already disrupted Venezuela–Cuba–China oil flows. The blockade is set to further tighten financial pressure on President Nicolás Maduro's government by constraining crucial oil revenues. Beijing has already condemned Trump's gunboat diplomacy.  

According to analytics firm Kpler, Caracas has shipped nearly 900,000 barrels per day this year and relies on 400 dark-fleet tankers to transport the crude, much of which is bound for China. 

"The efforts so far have put tremendous pressure on Maduro, and the belief is that by late January, Venezuela will be facing an economic calamity unless it agrees to make significant concessions to the U.S," the U.S. official told Reuters.

Also reported this week, the Trump administration continues to expand its large military presence in the Caribbean, with more than 15,000 troops, an aircraft carrier, multiple warships, and stealth fighters staged across the region.

As we have repeatedly noted, this all reflects a significant reposturing of the U.S. military toward so-called Western hemispheric defense, effectively a Monroe Doctrine 2.0.

Tyler Durden Thu, 12/25/2025 - 07:50

The Economics Of Santa Claus

Authored by Vincent Cook via The Mises Institute,

When I was a junior at a high school in the suburbs of Los Angeles in late 1978, rather uncharacteristically, I took a big risk. The teacher of my American Government class, Mr. Knapp, gave us an assignment to write a serious paper about government economic policy. Instead of doing that, I decided to submit a paper with a satirical theme, estimating what it would cost to become Santa Claus. Not only was I not following instructions, I had no idea how Mr. Knapp would react to my brand of humor.

As you read the transcription of my paper below, bear in mind that I wrote it a few years before I learned anything about libertarianism or about Austrian economics. Still, I was under the influence of the libertarian zeitgeist prevailing in California at the time. With inflation raging out of control while traditional statist authority figures in both major parties were lamely touting yet more business-as-usual interventions and tax increases, Californians had had enough by then. In November of 1978, they revolted against property taxes (led by the legendary anti-tax gadfly Howard Jarvis, passing the Proposition 13 voter initiative to amend the state constitution) and even gave a libertarian candidate for governor 5.5 percent of the vote. Reading this work of mine, I’m sure you’ll agree that there was a definite proto-Austro-libertarian influence at work.

Keep in mind too that the purchasing power of the dollar in 1978 was at least a factor of ten times greater than it is today, and, of course, the American population has increased a great deal too, so you might find my cost estimates absurdly low. They weren’t low at the time, however. Also be mindful that there was neither an internet nor privacy-unfriendly smart phone service, and personal computers had only just been introduced into the marketplace (in fact, my part-time retail job responsibilities at Radio Shack the previous summer included sales of the primitive TRS-80 computer), so you’ll have to pardon the technological backwardness of my cost analysis in the information category—that part of Santa’s job could probably be done much more cheaply these days.

I have added screenshots of my paper showing a couple of Mr. Knapp’s comments.

Figure 1: Important Question Posed by Mr. Knapp

Source: Vincent Cook

Figure 2: Mr. Knapp’s Overall Comment

I’m taking another big risk to spring my youthful joke on you nearly five decades later, hoping that you’ll enjoy it as much as Mr. Knapp did back then—Merry Christmas!

Economics of Santa Claus

How often have you heard that there is no Santa Claus? If you check your history books, there was a real St. Nicholas who gave gifts to children, and he was given the Santa Claus title. Suppose someone wanted to claim this title now. How much would it cost? (I will restrict this Santa to the United States.)

To examine this profound question, I will break down the cost analysis into the three major categories which Santa is expected to fulfill.

1) Manufacture of 220 million gifts. These must be elf-handcrafted, at a factory at the North Pole.

2) Distribution of 220 million gifts. Local distribution takes place during about 5 hours on Christmas Eve by assistant Santa’s with 12 reindeer sleighs.

3) Monitoring of 220 million people, to determine how good they are.

For the first category, I will assume that an elf is a special sub-culture of human beings.

An elf should be able to turn out one hand-crafted gift a day. Since working conditions at the pole are very difficult, Santa will be expected to provide room and board, plus a salary of $200 per day. 220 million gifts then would require 220 million elf-days of labor at $200 per elf-day, at a total cost of $44 billion. Assuming continuous use of facilities, a city would be needed to house 600,000 elves. At the North Pole, this would be very expensive, say $1,000 per elf per day. This would bring the cost of facilities to $219 billion per year. Assuming the materials for each gift cost an average of $30, including transport to the pole, then the materials cost would be roughly $7 billion. Finally, we have the cost of the factories themselves; which, given the transient nature of the arctic ice cap, might cost $60 billion per year.

We see that arctic manufacturing is very expensive, I estimate the sub-total for this category to be $330 billion each year.

The second category is distribution.

This can be further divided into primary distribution (from North Pole to local distribution centers) and Christmas Eve local distribution (from local centers by sleigh to living rooms of families).

For the primary distribution, airlifting goods from the North Pole to the Canadian railroad network would be needed. This would probably cost about $10 billion. Further distribution and storage would also cost about $10 billion.

For Christmas Eve, assuming a sleigh crew of 3 men could handle 20 households, a fleet of 3 million sleighs, 36 million reindeer, and 90 million man-hours of labor would be needed. Assuming $500 a year for maintenance, the sleigh fleet would need $1.5 billion, plus another $0.5 billion for storage. Each reindeer would probably cost $1000 a year, for a total of $36 billion. 90 million man-hours, at $10 per man-hour, would cost about $1 billion. An additional $1 billion would be needed to cover the cost of legal expenses involved for employees caught trespassing while delivering gifts.

The sub-total for this category is about $60 billion.

The third category of Santa’s activities is in checking up on people to see who is good and who isn’t, to determine who deserves the best gifts.

The best method would be to hire a detective to monitor listening equipment at homes, workplaces, and schools. A single Santa detective could probably monitor 20 people, and write in-depth evaluations of them. For the United States, this would require 11 million detectives, plus a communications network, information storage and processing at the north pole, and equipment for the detectives. Since a full-time detective probably would cost $20,000 per year, total labor cost would be about $220 billion per year. Information evaluation, storage, and communications might cost $30 billion for 220 million reports. New equipment costs (such as “bugs,” mini microphones, transmitters, tape recorders, etc.) might run about $2 billion a year.

Sub-total for this category might be about $252 billion per year.

Adding up the three subtotals, we get a grand total for being a Santa Claus as $642 billion per year.

This is even more than the federal government spends, which shows how impractical it is to become a Santa Claus.

Still, there might be some potential income for Santa.

Huge sums of money could be extorted from people by the bad information that Santa’s detectives get.

Santa might also get to claim his 600,000 elves as dependents on his tax forms. His detectives could claim to be unemployed, and thus collect welfare and unemployment checks from the government. Santa could incorporate and collect royalties on the use of his image from corporations.

Best of all, Santa’s free gifts might drive corporations into bankruptcy, and he could take over all economic activity in the United States, with all of its potential for profit.

Santa could then proceed to take over the economies of many extremely rich nations, like Saudi Arabia and Iran, and thus assure himself of enough money to run his operations.

Tyler Durden Thu, 12/25/2025 - 07:00