“…For years, Donald Trump has treated the stock market as his personal scoreboard, boasting when indices rose and raging when they fell. But in this phase of the Iran war, that instinct has fused with something more dangerous: an awareness that a single presidential post can send oil and equities lurching in opposite directions, and that the story told about war — “on the brink” or “productive talks” — is itself a lever on trillions of dollars in paper value.​

The pattern around his supposed Iran talks makes the point. Over one weekend, he careened from doubling down on war — threatening Iran’s power plants and setting ultimatums over the Strait of Hormuz — to suddenly suggesting that the U.S. was “considering winding down” operations and had engaged in “productive conversations” with Tehran. Iranian officials have flatly denied that any such substantive talks are happening, calling his claims “fake news” deployed “to manipulate the financial and oil markets to escape the quagmire” in which Washington and Tel Aviv now find themselves. Iran specialists who actually speak to people in the country say the same thing in more careful language: whatever contacts exist are superficial, nowhere near the hard bargaining and concessions that a real ceasefire would require.

The timing around one particular morning is hard to ignore. At 6:49 a.m. in New York, on an otherwise quiet Monday with no major economic releases or central bank speeches scheduled, roughly 6,200 Brent and WTI futures contracts changed hands in a single minute. The notional value of those trades was about $580 million. Veteran traders describe the move as “really abnormal” for that time and context — an unusually aggressive sale into a market with no obvious catalyst. Just a quarter of an hour later, the president posted on social media that there had been “productive conversations” with Iran and that strikes on its power infrastructure were being postponed. Oil prices quickly fell, futures on the S&P 500 jumped, and financial outlets framed the whole move as a “relief rally” driven by hopes of de‑escalation. As one journalist close to Iranian officials put it, “Somebody made an enormous amount of money this morning on that.”

Seen from the Situation Room, the temptation must be obvious. With one set of words you can raise oil, sink equities and tighten the screws on an adversary. With another set — “very good talks,” “Iran wants a deal,” “we’re winding down” — you can reverse the move and bathe domestic markets in a momentary sense of relief. The risk to American troops, to Iranian civilians, to everyone downstream of higher prices and disrupted flows does not show up on the trading screens. The profit and loss on those half‑hidden trades does.​

War as Side Bet

On the tape, that 6:49 a.m. episode looks less like coincidence and more like choreography. In a dead patch of the calendar, thousands of oil contracts hit a thin market in one concentrated burst, driving prices down. Minutes later, the president appears, announces “productive conversations” with Iran and a pause in strikes on its grid, and the same screens flash green as equities rebound on cue. What gets sold to the public as a passing mood swing — “relief” on hopes of de‑escalation — is a reminder that a single, well‑timed message can turn war risk into a tradable pattern…”

~ Full article…

“…Risk and Privilege are intertwined in ways that define our lives and the system we inhabit. Privilege boils down to being buffered from risk, and this is scale-invariant, meaning that it works in the same way from the individual to the nation-state: wealth and power serve to insulate us from risk. Those without wealth and power are fully exposed to risk.

(…)

The point here isn’t just the asymmetric distribution–it’s the buffers against risk have been dismantled by government policies favoring those with the least exposure to risk. The percentage of the national output / economic activity that is distributed to wage earners has been declining for decades. The money and the privileges it buys have been diverted to benefit capital.

This is what’s different now: apologists can claim that “the rich have always collected most of the income and owned most of the wealth,” but that’s not the point: the point is the buffers against risk have been dismantled as policy decisions that favored the already-wealthy and already-privileged who already had ample buffers against risk.

For the bottom 80%, the lifestyle you ordered is out of stock. For the top 10%, the serial credit-asset bubbles have fattened their wealth and income. Risk for them is now concentrated in The Everything Bubble: should it pop, their buffers will melt like sand castles in a rising tide of risk…”

~ Full article…

“…While much public attention has focused on travelers and workers from the United States and Europe trying to leave the region, most migrants to the Gulf come from the rest of the world — Africa, Asia and other countries in the Middle East. Undoubtedly, one reason that almost all of the civilians killed have been foreign nationals is that they make up a majority of the region’s population. In Saudi Arabia, foreign residents are roughly one-third of the population; in the Emirates and Qatar, the proportion is an estimated 80 to 90 percent.

But low-paid migrant workers are also uniquely vulnerable as the conflict widens. They are more likely to live in overcrowded housing with insufficient exit routes, putting them at greater risk if explosions or fires occur. And they are more likely to hold essential jobs, as grocery store cashiers, sanitation workers and delivery drivers, that require them to continue working as usual while many citizens and wealthier foreign residents can take shelter.

(…)

Leaving is a choice that is typically not available to the lowest-paid migrants, who are bound by employment contracts, debts or family obligations. And whatever the risks they face in the Gulf countries — more common than war is abuse and exploitation — they keep coming, because the remittances they send home are a lifeline…”

~ Full article…

See also:

‘If I don’t work, I go hungry’: The migrant workers risking their lives to keep the Gulf running

…”As missiles target the Gulf, the region’s vast population of migrant workers – who make up the majority of residents in countries such as Qatar and the UAE – are being left to fend for themselves, according to a human rights organisation with researchers embedded in the affected countries.

Mustafa Qadri, executive director of Equidem, told MEE that the organisation’s network of migrant worker investigators across the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Jordan has documented widespread panic, psychological trauma and systematic exclusion from official safety measures.

(…)

Qadri said workers face two distinct forms of discrimination.

The first is exclusion from official safety communications. While some formal statements have referenced all residents, workers on the ground say they have not received meaningful guidance on shelters, evacuation routes or emergency support.

The second is structural discrimination. As essential workers in every sector of Gulf society – construction, hospitality, healthcare, security, domestic service and logistics – many of these workers are required to continue working through attacks, often moving toward danger rather than away from it.

(…)

Particularly alarming, he added, is the situation of delivery riders and other gig economy workers, who remain on the streets while their wealthier clients shelter at home.

And since the start of the conflict, more and more residents in the Gulf are using delivery services, opting to stay inside instead of venturing out to buy basic goods and necessities…”

***

Far from home, millions of migrant workers in the Gulf are trapped by war

“…In 2019, the International Labor Organization estimates there aremore than 24 millionmigrant workers across the Gulf region alone — typically employed in low-wage jobs in construction, domestic housework, seafaring and caregiving. The ILO reports that over 92% of the work force in the UAE alone is made up of foreign workers. Most of the migrant workers across the region hail from countries such as India, Bangladesh, Kenya, Senegal and Indonesia.

Currently, there are an estimated 2.4 million Filipino migrant workers in the entire region. The majority, around one million, work in the UAE, according to Joanna Concepcion, the head of Migrante-International, a Manila-based group that supports Overseas Filipino Workers — or OFWs — in over 20 countries…”

“…In a recent interview with Fortune, University of Pennsylvania economist Kent Smetters, who directs the Penn Wharton Budget Model, said the real debt picture looks very different.

“What we call implicit obligations are twice the size of explicit obligations,” Smetters said.

Those implicit obligations are the promises buried inside programs like Social Security and Medicare.

If you count them, he argues, the real number is not $39 trillion.

It’s closer to $100 trillion.

And that’s coming from someone inside the system.

The reality is even worse.

The Official Debt Is Only the Tip of the Iceberg

The number politicians like to cite — roughly $39 trillion — is what economists call explicit debt.

That’s the money the federal government has legally borrowed through Treasury bonds and bills.

But the government has made massive promises it hasn’t funded.

These are called unfunded liabilities.

They include things like:

• Social Security benefits
• Medicare
• Veterans benefits
• Federal pensions
• Government healthcare commitments

These programs promise trillions in future payments with no money set aside to pay for them.

According to the Treasury’s own Financial Report of the United States Government, the 75-year unfunded shortfall is already over $73 trillion.

But that estimate only looks 75 years out.

Stretch the timeline further — which economists often do when measuring long-term obligations — and many fiscal analysts place the real number well above:

$200 trillion.

In other words, the $100 trillion estimate being discussed now may still be conservative. Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, a former advisor to the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department, has spent decades studying what he calls fiscal gap accounting.

His conclusion is far more alarming.

Kotlikoff has estimated the true long-term fiscal gap of the United States at roughly:

$220 trillion.

That figure represents the present value difference between all future government spending promises and expected revenue.

Kotlikoff has been blunt about what that means.

“The U.S. is bankrupt.”…”

~ Full article…

“…In the later years of Mr. Epstein’s life, after he was incarcerated and registered as a sex offender, no one did more to bankroll his opulent lifestyle than Mr. Black, 74, a towering figure on Wall Street and a fixture of the global art scene.

Mr. Black paid Mr. Epstein $170 million over six years for what Mr. Black has said were tax and estate-planning services. The sum dwarfed what elite law or accounting firms would have charged for similar work, baffling both his Wall Street peers and investigators on Capitol Hill.

The millions of pages of Epstein-related emails and other documents that the Justice Department released this year offer a potential explanation for the size of the payments: Mr. Epstein essentially served as a fixer whose services went beyond modernizing Mr. Black’s finances or reducing his taxes, according to a New York Times review of those records.

Mr. Epstein suggested ways to obscure millions of dollars that Mr. Black paid to women, as well as to Mr. Epstein himself. He brainstormed about how to avoid taxes on some of the payments. He took credit for defusing a government audit of a woman to whom Mr. Black had paid millions of dollars. He planned ways to surveil, intimidate and silence another woman who was threatening to publicly accuse Mr. Black of abuse. He even counseled Mr. Black to separate from his wife after she learned of his infidelity.

Mr. Black paid about $20 million to a dozen women, at least some of whom he’d had sexual relationships with, according to the recently released files and notes taken by congressional investigators and shared with The Times. Mr. Epstein was involved in figuring out ways to dispense a significant portion of that money.

Mr. Epstein summed it up to Mr. Black in a 2017 email: Mr. Epstein’s job, as he saw it, was partly about “saving you from yourself.”…”

~ Full article…

“…While the US attack on Iran throttles energy production and exports to China, following the cutting of energy exports from Venezuela to China in a war earlier this year, and years of attacking Russian energy production via Ukraine, US-backed militants in Myanmar are attacking pipelines leading directly into China;

A US citizen and several Ukrainians were caught bringing in large numbers of combat drones to fight the central Myanmar government and attack key infrastructure across the country including Belt and Road Initiative projects;

Zooming out from any one of these conflicts reveals a global US war and proxy war as well as a developing global oil blockade against China…”

~ Podcast…

“…Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg, who is not a career Pentagon official but the billionaire co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management, signed a letter on March 9 directing that Palantir’s Maven AI system become an official program of record across the US military.

Corruption is clearly the problem.

The order moves oversight from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency to the Pentagon’s Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office, the same office whose director Cameron Stanley demonstrated Maven’s targeting capabilities at a Palantir corporate event earlier this month.

Program of record means Maven gets its own budget line, its own acquisition pathway, and the kind of institutional permanence that survives administrations. Canceling a program of record requires political will that almost never materializes. This is how you make a vendor relationship into infrastructure.

The timing is obvious. Three weeks into a war with Iran. Thousands of strikes executed through Maven. And now the formalization. The war that Palantir wanted, created the dependency, and the dependency justifies the formalization.

(…)

Feinberg’s letter orders the transition completed by September. Future contracting goes through the Army, which already has the $10 billion deal with Palantir in place. Oversight goes to the office that already functions as Palantir’s in-house champion.

The company that assessed the threat, justified the war, targeted the strikes, and profits from the continuation now has permanent program-of-record status, directed by a billionaire from the same investor class as the company’s founders.

The corruption is so obvious, history will not be kind to Palantir…”

~ Full article…

***

Pentagon to adopt Palantir AI as core US military system, memo says

“…Feinberg’s order is a significant win for Palantir, which has landed a growing ​stream ​of contracts with the U.S. government, including a deal announced last summer with the ​U.S. Army worth up to $10 billion. Those awards have helped ‌double the company’s stock price in the past year, lifting its market value to nearly $360 billion.

Maven can rapidly analyze huge amounts of data from satellites, drones, radars, sensors and intelligence reports, and use AI to automatically identify potential threats or targets, like enemy military vehicles, buildings and weapons stockpiles.

During a presentation at a Palantir event earlier this month, Pentagon official Cameron Stanley, who leads its AI office, demonstrated how the company’s Maven platform could be used for weapons targeting in the Middle East, and he showed heat map screenshots from the Maven platform.

“When we started this, it literally took hours to ‌do what you just saw,” he said, according to a YouTube video uploaded by ​the company last week.

United Nations expert panels have warned AI weapons targeting without human intervention ​raises ethical, legal and security risks since AI picks up inadvertent ​biases from the data sets used to train it.

Palantir says its software does not make lethal decisions and humans remain ‌responsible for selecting and approving targets…”

“…China, which was the largest holder of U.S. government debt as recently as 2019, has cut its holdings to the lowest level since 2008, driven by changing trade patterns, geopolitical concerns, and domestic economic pressures.

The Cayman Islands has emerged as an unlikely place to fill the gap. This small British overseas territory held $427 billion in U.S. Treasuries as of November 2025, making it the sixth-largest foreign holder. But a 2025 Federal Reserve analysis revealed that the total figure was actually closer to $1.4 trillion by the end of 2024—with some estimates reaching as high as $1.85 trillion—after nearly 40 percent of new treasury notes and bonds were purchased in the Cayman Islands after 2022.

While these figures suggest that the territory is the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt, the main buyers are not Caymanians or the government, but hedge funds. After the territory passed its Mutual Funds Law in 1993 amid the 1990s hedge fund boom, these vehicles began incorporating in large numbers, drawn by flexible regulation and low taxes. The Cayman Islands today is home to roughly three-quarters of the world’s offshore hedge funds.

Many have used so-called “basis trades,” borrowing heavily to profit from small price gaps between U.S. Treasury bonds and their future equivalents. The strategy has grown so large and opaque that it has triggered a Federal Reserve investigation.

(…)

In 2022, the bankruptcy of cryptocurrency exchange FTX exposed billions in missing customer funds and became one of the largest financial frauds of the decade. Court filings showed that more than a fifth of its registered customer accounts were from the Cayman Islands—greater than any other jurisdiction—highlighting how easily new and risky ventures could be structured.

The territory also plays a central role in shadow banking. After banks pulled back from lending following the 2008 financial crisis, non-bank loans and financing surged, and many such funds have been domiciled in the Cayman Islands, such as Blackstone’s iCapital Offshore Access Fund SPC.

(…)

While the Cayman Islands may be Britain’s most prominent offshore jurisdiction, other British territories in the Caribbean also play influential roles. The British Virgin Islands (BVI) has become a major center for company incorporation. Its International Business Companies Act, introduced in 1984, simplified company formation, and the BVI is now the “leading domicile for corporate registrations.” With roughly 400,000 companies registered there, many of them simple shell companies with often unknown owners, it surpasses even the Cayman Islands in number.

BVI-registered companies hold around $1.5 trillion in assets, while the territory’s GDP is around $1.7 billion. The 2016 Panama Papers, leaked from law firm Mossack Fonseca, revealed that a massive share of the shell companies used by politicians, oligarchs, celebrities, and criminals to shelter wealth were registered in the BVI. Mossack Fonseca was reportedly unaware of the owners of 75 percent of the offshore entities.

Similarly, the Paradise Papers, leaked from law firm Appleby in the British Overseas Territory of Bermuda, highlighted how corporations and individuals used offshore structures for tax planning and asset protection. Bermuda is also the global “leader in captive reinsurance companies,” hosting many of the world’s largest catastrophe insurers and reinsurers. Investors can hedge or speculate on risks ranging from hurricanes to financial shocks.

In 2023, Vesttoo, a Bermuda-based insurtech company, used fake collateral documents to back reinsurance deals, fabricating billions in financial guarantees, in what a Delaware court filing described as Bermuda’s “largest insurance fraud ever.” In October 2024, the Tax Justice UK ranked the BVI and Cayman Islands as the world’s most damaging tax havens, with Bermuda coming in third place…”

~ Full article…