Individual Economists

Iran Hits Back At EU: Designates European Armies As 'Terrorist Entities'

Zero Hedge -

Iran Hits Back At EU: Designates European Armies As 'Terrorist Entities'

Iran is saying two can play at the West's game: on Friday the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council blasted the EU's decision to designate the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a "terrorist organization," warning that Europe's own militaries would now be viewed through the same lens.

"The European Union certainly knows that… the armies of countries that have participated in the European Union's recent resolution against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are considered terrorist entities," Ali Larijani wrote in a post on X. He added bluntly: "Therefore, the consequences of that shall be borne by the European countries that undertook such an action."

NurPhoto

However, there's probably nothing in the way of European military assets for the Islamic Republic to sanction, so this 'action' by Tehran will remain largely symbolic. Iran does have assets held in various places of Europe though.

EU foreign ministers agreed on Thursday to formally classify the IRGC as a "terrorist organization" and urged member states to implement the designation without delay - after a few longtime holdouts flipped.

Among those recently changing their stance include France, Spain, and Italy - but apparently the recent deadly protests, and Trump's pressure, had an impact.

One bit of irony is that the West has over the past year removed its designation of Syria's Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), after Jolani took over Damascus. HTS is literally the founding al-Qaeda group in Syria.

The IRGC stands accused by the West of directing Iran's crackdown of domestic unrest, after economic-driven protests took over town and city streets this month. 

Thousands died, but Iran officials have pointed to armed saboteurs being mixed in among the peaceful demonstrators, leading to mayhem and a high death toll.

The United States, Canada, and Australia had already blacklisted the IRGC, while Germany and the Netherlands have for years pressed the rest of the EU to follow suit.

But Tehran sees the Guard Corps as part of, or also chief safeguard of the nation's security and military. It is envisioned as 'protecting' the 'Islamic Revolution' since 1979. In the past, some countries even gave top IRGC officials diplomatic credentials.

Tyler Durden Sat, 01/31/2026 - 08:45

Muslim Leaders In Italian City Demand Removal Of Plastic Pig From Deli Shop Window

Zero Hedge -

Muslim Leaders In Italian City Demand Removal Of Plastic Pig From Deli Shop Window

Via Remix News,

A plastic pig displayed in the window of a newly opened delicatessen on the Piazza dei Signori in the Italian city of Padua has triggered a local controversy after a senior representative of the city’s Muslim community called for its removal, arguing that it is offensive and inappropriate.

The pig, placed in the window of the deli Mortadella… e Non Solo, is used to advertise the shop’s sandwiches and cured meats, which are primarily made from pork.

According to Il Giornale, Salim El Mauoed, the regional vice president of Padua’s Muslim community, urged both the shop’s owners and local authorities to intervene, describing the display as “in bad taste” and offensive to Muslims who pass through the area.

There is no legal basis requiring the business to remove the display.

The pig imagery is a central part of the shop’s branding and appears not only in the window but also in its logo, promotional materials, and merchandise shared publicly on social media.

El Mauoed’s request has drawn criticism from some politicians and residents, who argue that it amounts to interference with lawful commercial activity and undermines the principle of civil coexistence.

They contend that living together in a pluralistic society necessarily involves accepting visible expressions of different cultures, religions, and dietary traditions, particularly when those expressions are neither targeted nor discriminatory.

Il Giornale reports that some members of the local Muslim community believe symbols seen as contrary to Islamic religious precepts should be avoided in shared urban spaces.

Others, however, have warned that removing a legal and commonplace commercial symbol risks establishing a precedent in which religious objections could reshape long-established customs and everyday practices.

The newspaper also notes that the deli employs Muslim staff, some of whom have publicly defended the display, saying the plastic pig simply reflects the nature of the business and is not intended to offend anyone.

The pig remains on display for now.

Read more here...

Tyler Durden Sat, 01/31/2026 - 08:10

Ukraine Moves To Purge Dostoevsky & Tolstoy From Public Mention

Zero Hedge -

Ukraine Moves To Purge Dostoevsky & Tolstoy From Public Mention

In the latest escalation of Ukraine's cultural purge and targeting of all things Russian, Ukraine's Institute of National Memory has this month formally branded the famed classic Russian authors Fyodor Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy as vectors of "Russian imperial propaganda".

This has included a call from the body which operates under the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine for all streets, monuments, and public institutions bearing their names be wiped from the map.

Image via Union of Orthodox Journalist-Ukraine

According to Interfax, commenting on the ruling, "the assignment of their names to geographical objects, names of legal entities and objects of property rights, objects of toponymy, as well as the establishment of monuments and memorial signs in their honor in Ukraine was the embodiment of Russification - Russian imperial policy aimed at imposing the use of the Russian language, promoting Russian culture as superior compared to other national languages ​​and cultures, displacing the Ukrainian language from use, and narrowing the Ukrainian cultural and information space."

In a January 20 statement, the Institute of National Memory's 'expert commission' claimed the literary legacy of both writers is "directly connected to the glorification of Russian imperial policy." The Ukrainian officials also asserted there are signs of "Ukrainophobia" in their books.

The move was met with complete silence in Western media, and the story has gone almost completely overlooked, despite Dostoevsky and Tolstoy having long been widely studied and appreciated across the globe, and in American colleges, literary programs, theaters - and among common avid readers.

Their works, from The Brothers Karamazov to the massive War and Peace have done much to shape Western culture and higher education in the 150 years of the works' existence. 

And yet the Ukrainian government-linked institute now claims the historic prominence of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy across Ukraine was not because it is literary art with universal appeal, but somehow part of a long-running Russification campaign designed to marginalize the Ukrainian language and culture.

Ukraine has in essence just labeled two of the world's greatest historical authors, which far pre-date both the modern Russian Federation and Soviet Union of the 20th century, as 'propaganda'.

The following is an actual line from the original Interfax report: "The head of the UINP, Oleksandr Alferov, states that local authorities need to check the names of their streets with these lists."

Tyler Durden Sat, 01/31/2026 - 07:35

Next-Level Spying: How China Read The West's Wiretaps For Years

Zero Hedge -

Next-Level Spying: How China Read The West's Wiretaps For Years

Authored by Shanaka Anslem Perera via Substack,

The four trillion dollars in institutional capital positioned for stable UK-China relations rests on an assumption that died in a Chengdu server room sometime around 2019. The assumption is that espionage between major powers operates within understood boundaries, that telecommunications infrastructure is contested but not compromised, that the surveillance systems Western governments built to watch their citizens cannot be turned around to watch them. The assumption has been falsified. What follows is the complete mechanism of how China’s Ministry of State Security achieved persistent access to the private communications of three British Prime Ministers’ closest advisers, the phones of a US President-elect, and the wiretap systems that were supposed to catch them doing it. The positioning implications are immediate. The framework is permanent.

On January 26, 2026, The Telegraph disclosed that Chinese hackers had penetrated right into the heart of Downing Street, compromising mobile communications of senior officials across the Johnson, Truss, and Sunak administrations. The story was buried on page seven, treated as a technology curiosity. It was, in fact, a solvency event for the Western intelligence alliance. Not because phones were hacked, which happens, but because of how they were hacked: by weaponizing the very surveillance infrastructure that Western governments mandated for their own intelligence agencies. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act in the United States and the Investigatory Powers Act in the United Kingdom require telecommunications carriers to build backdoors into their networks for court-ordered wiretapping. Chinese state hackers found those backdoors. And walked through them.

The intelligence value is almost impossible to overstate. For approximately four years, operators linked to the MSS’s Chengdu bureau had the capability to see not just who British officials were calling, but whom the FBI was investigating, which Chinese operatives were under surveillance, what the United States knew about Beijing’s activities, and when counterintelligence was getting close. They could geolocate millions of individuals. They could record phone calls at will. They compromised the surveillance of their own surveillers, achieving the counterintelligence equivalent of reading the other side’s playbook while the game was in progress.

What follows is the institutional playbook. The positions are already being built.

The Backdoor That Swung Both Ways

The story of Salt Typhoon is not fundamentally a story about hacking. It is a story about architecture. Specifically, it is a story about what happens when governments mandate that their surveillance systems include single points of failure, then assume those points will only fail in their favor.

In 1994, the United States Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, requiring telecommunications carriers to design their networks with built-in capabilities for government wiretapping. The law emerged from FBI concerns that digital switching technology would render traditional surveillance impossible. CALEA’s solution was elegant in its naivety: force every carrier to build a standardized interface through which law enforcement could access communications pursuant to court order. The interface would be secure because it would be secret, protected by access controls, audited by compliance regimes. No adversary would find it because no adversary would know to look.

Twenty-two years later, the United Kingdom enacted the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, colloquially known as the Snooper’s Charter. It went further than CALEA, mandating that technology companies retain communications data and provide access mechanisms for intelligence agencies. The architecture was the same: centralized access points designed for authorized users, protected by the assumption that authorized users would be the only ones using them.

Salt Typhoon was the adversarial audit that the system failed.

The Chinese operators did not need to hack individual phones, which would have been noisy and detectable. They did not need to intercept communications in transit, which would have required breaking encryption. They hacked the wiretap system itself. Once inside the CALEA infrastructure at AT&T, Verizon, and Lumen Technologies, they had access to everything the FBI had access to: call metadata showing who contacted whom and when, geolocation data derived from cell tower triangulation, the actual content of unencrypted calls and texts, and most devastatingly, the database of active surveillance requests. They could see whom the United States government was watching. They could see if they themselves were being watched.

The vulnerability was not a bug in the architecture. It was the architecture.

For decades, cryptographers and privacy advocates warned that there is no such thing as a backdoor only good guys can use. A vulnerability is a vulnerability. If it exists, a sufficiently motivated and resourced adversary will find it. The NSA and GCHQ and FBI dismissed these warnings as theoretical, academic, disconnected from operational reality. Law enforcement’s access needs are legitimate. But Salt Typhoon demonstrated empirically that the risks of mandated backdoors extend to everyone, including the governments that mandated them.

The irony approaches the unbearable. As Salt Typhoon was being discovered in late 2024, the UK government was pressuring Apple to weaken iMessage encryption under the Investigatory Powers Act. The argument was the same one that produced CALEA: law enforcement needs access, and carefully controlled access can be kept secure. Apple reportedly disabled certain features for UK users rather than comply. At precisely the same moment, as The Telegraph would later reveal, Chinese operators were reading communications from the heart of Downing Street through the access points the UK government had mandated.

The technical community has a name for this: the security paradox. Systems designed to enable surveillance become targets for adversary surveillance. The more access points you create for your own agencies, the more attack surface you expose to foreign agencies. The debate between security and privacy was always a false binary. The real tradeoff was between surveillability by your government and surveillability by everyone’s government.

Salt Typhoon collapsed that tradeoff into a single devastating data point.

The Kill Chain That Cannot Be Killed

Understanding what happened requires understanding how telecommunications networks actually function, not how they appear in policy documents.

A modern telecom network is not a monolithic system but a layered architecture spanning edge devices that connect to the public internet, core routing infrastructure that moves packets between networks, administrative systems that manage configurations and access, billing and customer data platforms, and lawful intercept systems that process surveillance requests. Each layer has its own attack surface. Salt Typhoon targeted the layer that matters most: the edge devices that control everything else.

The primary intrusion vector was a pair of vulnerabilities in Cisco IOS XE, the operating system running on millions of enterprise routers and switches worldwide. CVE-2023-20198, with a perfect 10.0 CVSS severity score, allowed an unauthenticated remote attacker to create an administrator account with Level 15 privileges, the highest access level on Cisco devices. CVE-2023-20273 enabled command injection that elevated those privileges to root access on the underlying Linux operating system. Chain them together and an attacker can create a god-mode account on any exposed Cisco device, then execute arbitrary code with full system control.

The vulnerabilities were disclosed in October 2023. Cisco issued patches. Many telecommunications operators delayed patching due to operational constraints that made rapid remediation nearly impossible.

This dynamic is not incompetence, though it resembles incompetence. Telecommunications infrastructure operates under pressures that create structural patch delays. These networks run 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Downtime is measured in lost revenue and regulatory penalties. Patching a core router requires scheduling maintenance windows, testing updates in lab environments, coordinating with interconnected carriers, and accepting the risk that the patch itself introduces instability. For many operators, the calculation becomes: known theoretical vulnerability versus certain operational disruption. They chose the theoretical vulnerability. Salt Typhoon chose them.

Recorded Future’s Insikt Group documented the campaign exploiting over one thousand Cisco devices globally between December 2024 and January 2025. But the truly alarming finding was that attackers also exploited CVE-2018-0171, a vulnerability in Cisco Smart Install that had been patched seven years earlier. Some devices in critical telecommunications infrastructure had not been updated since 2018. The attack surface was not the frontier of zero-day exploitation. It was the accumulated technical debt of an industry that treated security as a cost center.

Once inside, Salt Typhoon deployed a sophisticated persistence mechanism designed to survive exactly the remediation attempts carriers would eventually undertake. The primary implant, documented by Trend Micro researchers under the name GhostSpider, operated entirely in memory without touching disk, evading traditional antivirus that scans for malicious files. It used DLL hijacking to execute within the context of legitimate processes, bypassing application whitelisting. Communications with command-and-control servers were encrypted and disguised as normal HTTPS traffic, blending with legitimate web activity.

The deeper persistence came from Demodex, a kernel-mode rootkit that modified the Windows operating system at its lowest level. Demodex hooked into system calls to hide its own processes, network connections, and registry entries from administrators running diagnostic commands. An operator investigating a compromised system would see nothing amiss because the rootkit was filtering what they could see. The malware achieved what the cybersecurity industry calls god-mode persistence: invisibility so complete that the only certain remediation is physical hardware replacement.

On Cisco devices specifically, the attackers exploited the Guest Shell, a Linux container environment designed for running legitimate management scripts. By injecting malicious code into this trusted container, they achieved persistence that survived standard reboots and even operating system reimaging. The infection lived below the level that normal administrators could access. It was not hiding in the house. It had become part of the foundation.

The operational sophistication extended to exfiltration. Salt Typhoon deployed a custom tool called JumbledPath that enabled packet capture across multiple network hops while simultaneously clearing logs and disabling logging along the capture path. They could intercept traffic without leaving forensic evidence of the interception. They modified Access Control Lists on compromised switches to explicitly permit their command-and-control IP addresses, ensuring their backdoors remained reachable even as security teams updated firewall rules. They created Generic Routing Encapsulation tunnels to route stolen data through compromised infrastructure, making the exfiltration appear as legitimate network traffic.

According to Cisco Talos analysis, the average dwell time before discovery was 393 days. One environment showed attackers maintaining presence for over three years. Three years of access to telecommunications infrastructure that carries the communications of governments, corporations, and private citizens. Three years of watching the watchers.

Inside the Chengdu Hacker-for-Hire Marketplace

Attribution in cyber operations is notoriously difficult. Attackers route through compromised infrastructure in multiple countries, use commodity malware available to any buyer, and deliberately plant false flags suggesting different national origins. The intelligence community has learned hard lessons about premature attribution.

Salt Typhoon attribution does not suffer these ambiguities. It is among the most thoroughly documented cases of state-sponsored cyber operations in the public record.

The US Treasury Department sanctioned Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology Co., Ltd. on January 17, 2025, identifying it as a Chengdu-based cybersecurity company with direct involvement in the Salt Typhoon cyber group. The language was unusually specific for a sanctions designation, which typically uses more cautious phrasing. Treasury stated that the Ministry of State Security has maintained strong ties with multiple computer network exploitation companies, including Sichuan Juxinhe. The implication was unmistakable: this was not a rogue actor tangentially connected to Chinese intelligence. This was an MSS operation executed through contractor infrastructure.

Chengdu has emerged as the primary hub of China’s offensive cyber contractor ecosystem, a distinction it shares with no other Chinese city to the same degree. The reasons are structural. Sichuan University and Chengdu University of Information Technology produce a steady pipeline of computer science graduates with the technical skills offensive operations require. The provincial government offers tax incentives for high-tech enterprises that attract cybersecurity firms. The MSS’s Chengdu bureau has historically been aggressive in recruiting and contracting local talent. The result is a geographic concentration of capability that the intelligence community has tracked for over a decade.

Sichuan Juxinhe is not an isolated entity but part of an interconnected ecosystem. Treasury’s designation also referenced Beijing Huanyu Tianqiong Information Technology Co., Ltd. and Sichuan Zhixin Ruijie Network Technology Co., Ltd. as associated entities. These firms share corporate registration patterns, overlapping personnel, and technical infrastructure in ways that suggest coordinated rather than independent operation.

The ecosystem became dramatically more visible in February 2024, when over five hundred internal documents from i-SOON (Sichuan Anxun Information Technology Co., Ltd.) appeared on GitHub in one of the most significant leaks of Chinese cyber operations ever recorded. The documents revealed a hacker-for-hire marketplace where private firms bid on government contracts to compromise specific targets. Price lists showed costs for different levels of access. Marketing materials advertised tools for hacking Twitter, Gmail, WeChat, and Telegram. Target lists included governments in India, Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea, and NATO member states. The operational picture was unmistakable: China’s cyber espionage apparatus operates significantly through private contractors who compete for MSS and PLA business.

The i-SOON leak provided a Rosetta Stone for understanding how Salt Typhoon operates. Domain registration patterns used by i-SOON matched those observed in Salt Typhoon infrastructure. Malware families overlapped. The corporate relationship between i-SOON and other Chengdu firms explained how capabilities and targeting information might flow between ostensibly separate entities.

The UK government reached the same conclusion. On December 9, 2025, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper announced sanctions against Integrity Technology Group and Sichuan Anxun Information Technology (i-SOON) for activities against the UK and its allies that impact our collective security. The 13-nation joint advisory released in August 2025 explicitly attributed the campaign to MSS-linked private contractors, co-signed by agencies from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Germany, Japan, and five other nations.

The evidence supporting attribution is overwhelming: convergent technical indicators across multiple intelligence services, targeting patterns aligned with MSS priorities rather than financial motivation, sanctions from two G7 governments naming specific companies, a leaked document trove revealing operational details, and multi-national intelligence consensus among powers with no incentive to coordinate false attribution.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun dismissed the allegations as unfounded and irresponsible smears and slanders, claiming China stands against hacking and fights such activities in accordance with the law. Chinese state media advanced the counter-narrative that Salt Typhoon accusations represent US efforts to secure congressional appropriations rather than genuine intelligence findings. The Global Times characterized the accusations as a farce of US smear tactics against China.

These denials represent diplomatic necessities. They do not survive contact with the documented evidence.

The Crown Jewels: Three Prime Ministers’ Inner Circles Exposed

The targeting profile of Salt Typhoon reveals strategic intent far beyond conventional espionage.

In the United States, nine telecommunications carriers have been confirmed compromised: Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, Lumen Technologies, Spectrum (Charter Communications), Consolidated Communications, Windstream, Viasat, and at least one additional unnamed provider. Senator Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, characterized it as the worst telecom hack in our nation’s history. The scope comparison is instructive. SolarWinds, the Russian supply chain compromise discovered in December 2020, affected approximately 18,000 organizations with deep penetration of roughly 100. Salt Typhoon compromised over 200 companies across 80 countries.

The data accessed falls into two categories with very different strategic implications.

The first category is bulk metadata: call detail records showing who contacted whom, when, and for how long, plus geolocation data derived from cell tower connections. Former Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger confirmed that attackers gained capabilities to geolocate millions of individuals. Metadata reveals patterns invisible in content alone. If a senior Treasury official calls a specific BP executive three times in one night before a North Sea oil announcement, Beijing knows the policy shift before the Cabinet does. Mapping communication networks reveals the actual decision-making structure of governments, which often differs substantially from organizational charts.

The second category is targeted content interception. Fewer than 100 individuals had actual call content and text messages directly compromised, but those individuals included Donald Trump, JD Vance, and senior staff from the Harris campaign during the 2024 presidential election. Congressional staff from the House China Committee, Foreign Affairs Committee, Armed Services Committee, and Intelligence Committee were accessed in breaches detected in December 2025, according to the Financial Times. The targeting was not random. It was surgical.

The United Kingdom penetration, disclosed by The Telegraph on January 26, 2026, reached right into the heart of Downing Street. The National Cyber Security Centre confirmed observing a cluster of activity targeting UK infrastructure since 2021. Aides to Prime Ministers Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak had their communications compromised across a three-year period that included the COVID-19 pandemic response, the Ukraine war’s escalation, and critical UK-China trade negotiations.

Whether the Prime Ministers’ personal devices were directly compromised remains publicly unclear. The distinction may matter less than it appears. In a telecom network intrusion, attackers do not need to compromise individual devices. They compromise the network itself, intercepting communications as they transit carrier infrastructure. The Prime Minister’s phone may have been perfectly secure. The calls it made were not.

The strategic timing compounds the damage. The 2021-2024 window included decisions on Huawei’s role in UK 5G infrastructure, the AUKUS security pact formation, Hong Kong sanctions policy, and bilateral trade negotiations with Beijing. Chinese intelligence had real-time visibility into British decision-making during discussions where China’s interests were directly at stake. The information asymmetry is staggering.

Australia was similarly targeted. ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess confirmed in November 2025 that Salt Typhoon attempted to access Australia’s critical infrastructure, including telecommunications networks. Canada experienced confirmed breach of at least one unnamed telecom in February 2025. The campaign extended beyond the Five Eyes core: a South African provider was reportedly compromised via Cisco platforms, Southeast Asian telecoms detected new malware variants, and European telecommunications organizations identified intrusion attempts as late as October 2025.

The counterintelligence implications are the most damaging aspect, though the least publicly discussed.

By accessing CALEA systems, Salt Typhoon operators could see the database of active wiretap requests. They knew whom the FBI was investigating. If MSS operatives in the United States were under surveillance, Beijing could pull them out before arrests occurred. If FBI investigations were approaching sensitive Chinese assets, Beijing could warn them. If counterintelligence operations were building cases against Chinese technology companies or influence operations, Beijing could see the evidence accumulating.

This is the counterintelligence nightmare: your surveillance apparatus becomes the adversary’s intelligence source. The FBI was not just failing to catch Chinese spies. It was showing China exactly where to find its exposed spies before the FBI could catch them.

The Hidden Correlation That Risk Models Never Saw

Systems approaching critical transitions exhibit a distinctive signature that financial risk models systematically miss. Surface metrics remain stable while underlying pressure accumulates. Correlations appear benign precisely because the stress is building uniformly across connected components. Then the transition happens not gradually but all at once, in a cascade that propagates faster than response mechanisms can activate.

The physics of phase transitions describes the phenomenon with precision. Water remains liquid as it cools, molecules slowing gradually, temperature dropping predictably. Then at exactly zero degrees Celsius, the system reorganizes instantaneously into a crystalline structure. The transition is discontinuous. Nothing in the gradual cooling predicted the sudden restructuring.

Salt Typhoon’s propagation through global telecommunications followed this pattern. The Global Cyber Alliance documented 72 million attack attempts from China-origin IP addresses against telecommunications infrastructure worldwide between August 2023 and August 2025. The number is not the important part. The distribution is. Rather than concentrating on a few high-value targets, the campaign probed systematically across the entire internet-facing surface of telecom networks in 80 countries. When one vector failed, others succeeded. The attack percolated through the network of networks, finding paths of least resistance through unpatched devices, legacy systems, and accumulated technical debt.

The 80-country spread was not a bug or scope creep. It was the exploitation of network topology itself. Telecommunications providers interconnect through peering relationships, shared vendors, inherited trust, and common infrastructure. Compromising one provider creates pivot points into connected providers. The attackers did not need to breach 80 countries independently. They needed to breach enough nodes that cascade dynamics carried the compromise further.

Financial risk models trained on historical correlations would have seen nothing unusual in the period before disclosure. Telecom stocks moved with normal volatility. Cybersecurity spending followed typical budget cycles. The correlation stability that risk managers found reassuring was measuring the pressure building uniformly, not the probability of release.

The parallel to credit markets before 2008 is instructive though imprecise. Mortgage-backed securities showed stable correlations because they were all exposed to the same underlying risk. The stability was the warning, not the comfort. When housing prices turned, the correlation snapped to one and everything moved together. The diversification that looked protective turned out to be concentration disguised.

Salt Typhoon exposed a similar hidden correlation in critical infrastructure. The assumption was that a breach of Verizon had no implications for BT, that American vulnerabilities were American problems, that European telecoms operated in a separate risk regime. The assumption was wrong. The same Cisco devices run everywhere. The same CALEA architecture creates the same vulnerability everywhere its analogues exist. The same contractor ecosystem targets everyone with the same tooling. The diversification across carriers and jurisdictions was illusory. They were all one network.

Five Eyes Fractures Under Pressure

The Five Eyes intelligence alliance, comprising the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, represents the deepest and most institutionalized intelligence-sharing arrangement among Western democracies. Its origins in World War II signals intelligence cooperation have evolved into comprehensive collaboration on technical collection, analysis, and counterintelligence. Salt Typhoon tested this architecture as nothing has since its formation.

The initial response demonstrated the alliance’s coordination capabilities. The December 2024 Enhanced Visibility and Hardening Guidance for Communications Infrastructure was the first joint Five Eyes response to the breach. The August 2025 advisory expanded to 13 nations, co-sealed by 22 agencies attributing the campaign to specific Chinese companies with unprecedented multinational consensus. The coordination was real and consequential.

But the fractures were also visible.

UK officials pointedly stated that had American regulations matched British standards, we would have found it faster, we would have contained it faster. The criticism was technically accurate. The UK’s Telecommunications Security Act 2021 imposed security obligations on carriers that exceed CALEA requirements. But the same UK government pursuing those regulations was simultaneously pressuring Apple to weaken encryption under the Investigatory Powers Act, replicating exactly the architectural vulnerability that Salt Typhoon exploited. The internal contradiction was not resolved so much as ignored.

The regulatory divergence reflects deeper philosophical disagreements that Salt Typhoon intensified without settling. The FBI and CISA’s December 2024 recommendation that Americans use end-to-end encrypted messaging applications represented an extraordinary acknowledgment that carrier networks cannot be trusted. Yet both agencies have historically sought encryption backdoors for law enforcement access. The cognitive dissonance remained unaddressed: advocating for encryption to protect against foreign adversaries while seeking to weaken encryption for domestic law enforcement.

The FCC’s regulatory response exemplified the policy incoherence. In January 2025, the Commission proposed mandatory cybersecurity requirements including role-based access controls, multi-factor authentication, and vulnerability patching for telecommunications carriers. Then-Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel stated: In light of the vulnerabilities exposed by Salt Typhoon, we need to take action. In November 2025, the reconstituted FCC voted 2-1 to revoke those rules. Chairman Brendan Carr argued for an agile and collaborative approach over regulatory mandates. Commissioner Anna Gomez dissented: This FCC today is leaving Americans less protected than they were the day this breach was discovered.

The Cyber Safety Review Board investigation, established to provide an authoritative post-mortem on Salt Typhoon, was terminated in January 2025 when the incoming administration dismissed all members before their investigation concluded. The official lessons learned process stopped before identifying lessons.

Intelligence sharing itself became contested. Reports emerged in 2025 that DNI Tulsi Gabbard barred sharing certain intelligence with Five Eyes partners. While some former officials characterized concerns as faux outrage, noting that withholding occurs routinely, others warned of a chilling effect on critical intelligence sharing at precisely the moment coordination mattered most.

From a Chinese perspective, as expressed by state media and diplomatic channels, the sanctions and coordinated Western response represent political escalation that unnecessarily heightens tensions and contradicts stated commitments to engagement. Beijing has consistently framed the accusations as evidence of anti-China bias in Western intelligence assessments rather than legitimate security concerns.

Salt Typhoon revealed that even the world’s most sophisticated intelligence alliance, facing the world’s most aggressive cyber adversary, operates with fundamental coordination failures, regulatory incoherence, and philosophical contradictions that compound rather than contain the damage.

Why Hardware Must Replace Software

The most alarming aspect of Salt Typhoon is not what happened but what continues to happen.

CISA Executive Assistant Director Jeff Greene stated plainly: We cannot say with certainty that the adversary has been evicted, because we still don’t know the scope of what they’re doing. Senator Maria Cantwell’s December 2025 assessment was equally stark: Telecom companies infiltrated in the attack have failed to prove the Chinese hackers have been eradicated from their networks.

AT&T and Verizon announced in January 2025 that they had successfully expelled the attackers from their networks, with Mandiant providing independent verification. The claims met immediate skepticism from government officials and security experts. The skepticism has not been resolved. When Senator Cantwell demanded documentation, the carriers could not provide evidence that Chinese hackers had been fully removed.

The technical reasons for persistent access are well understood.

Salt Typhoon’s persistence mechanisms, including GRE tunnels on network devices, Demodex kernel rootkits, and modified authentication server configurations, can survive standard remediation procedures. The attackers’ average dwell time of 393 days before detection, with some environments compromised for over three years, demonstrates operational security sufficient to reestablish access even after apparent eviction. If the attackers anticipated discovery, they likely created backup persistence mechanisms that remediation teams have not found.

Read the rest here and consider subscribing

Tyler Durden Sat, 01/31/2026 - 07:00

10 Weekend Reads

The Big Picture -

The weekend is here! Pour yourself a mug of Danish Blend coffee, grab a seat outside, and get ready for our longer-form (surprisingly arts & entertainment oriented) weekend reads:

23 Ways You’re Already Living in the Chinese Century: The robotics explosion. The energy revolution. The cultural takeover. It’s everything you wanted for the United States—but done better in China. (Wired)

The Cult of Costco: Its consistency is its superpower. (The Atlantic)

Can Department Stores Ever Be Fun Again? Saks Fifth Avenue’s bankruptcy filing has revived debates about how these once celebrated shopping emporiums can regain their luster. (New York Times)

The Harry Potter Generation Needs to Grow Up: You don’t see this with fiction like “The Lord of the Rings” or “The Chronicles of Narnia.” Sales of those books may rise and fall in response to new film or TV adaptations, but those franchises aren’t bound to a particular generation in the way that Harry Potter is bound to the millennials. (New York Times)

By All Measures: Our problems are too vast, our distance from them too great. How do we navigate our derangement of scale? (Longreads)

Are You Enjoying Our Linguine? How American tourists took over everything. (The Dial)

How Hackers Are Fighting Back Against ICE: ICE has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on surveillance technology to spy on anyone—and potentially everyone—in the United States. It can be hard to imagine how to defend oneself against such an overwhelming force. But a few enterprising hackers have started projects to do counter-surveillance against ICE, and hopefully protect their communities through clever use of technology. (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

There is No Proto-Dragon: The Illusion of Fictional Taxonomy: Ask not what a dragon does, but what a dragon is. (Typebar Magazine)

Defining Moments in TV History You’ve Probably Never Heard About: Many of the most-important events have slipped from our collective memories. But their impacts live on. (Wall Street Journal)

The Search for Alien Artifacts: Is Coming Into Focus From surveys of the pre-Sputnik skies to analysis of interstellar visitors, scientists are rethinking how and where to look for physical traces of alien technology. (Wired)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Kate Burke, CEO of Allspring Global Investments a global asset manager with more than 600 billion dollars in assets under advisement. She is also a director on the firm’s board. Previously, she was at AllianceBernstein as COO/CFO.

 

GS survey: Half of investors plan to increase exposure to hedge funds

Source: Wall Street Journal

 

Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.

~~~

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

 

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

Indian Christians Facing Rising Persecution Look To America For Help

Zero Hedge -

Indian Christians Facing Rising Persecution Look To America For Help

Authored by Nathan Worcester via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Amit recounted a familiar story for Christians in his region of India: pastors jailed; parishioners afraid to worship in public.

The situation, Amit said, is getting worse “day by day.”

Nuns from Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity community hold signs as they listen to a speaker during a demonstration against the tabling of the Protection of Right to Freedom of Religion bill in Bengaluru, India, on Dec. 22, 2021.Abhishek Chinnappa/Getty Images

Almost two millennia after St. Thomas the Apostle brought Christianity to the subcontinent, believers in northern India bear witness to a rise in persecution. Laws on religious conversion and physical attacks, including during the 2025 Christmas season, have driven fear into sanctuaries of love and faith.

Deepak, another Christian in northern India, said “there’s a lot of intimidation and harassment going on.”

He said Hindu radicals regularly “attack or disrupt [Christian] gatherings or go to mob violence.”

As a condition of speaking with The Epoch Times, both Amit, who has worked in Uttarakhand, and Deepak, who is based in Delhi, requested that their names and the details of their activities be anonymized out of fear of reprisal.

Statistics from the United Christian Forum, published on local website, The Wire, reflect an increase in violence against Christians in India in recent years. They documented 734 attacks targeting Christians in 2023. In 2024, that figure climbed to 834.

Genocide Watch, the Voice of the Martyrs, and other organizations have also chronicled anti-Christian trends in the country, in line with a similar pattern of growing violence against Muslims and other non-Hindu Indians.

Amit, Deepak, and others who spoke to The Epoch Times linked what is happening to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a political party that has ruled India since 2014 under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They decried the influence of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a street-level Hindu nationalist group associated with the BJP.

Much of the organized, sometimes violent opposition to Christianity is concentrated in northern India, a BJP stronghold.

Nigel Barrett of the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India, the episcopal conference for India’s Latin Catholic bishops, told The Epoch Times in an email that “the persecution is not confined to northern India,” citing attacks in the western state of Rajasthan after it passed a conversion law, in the southern state of Karnataka, and elsewhere across the country.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi waves to the crowd after filing his nomination from the temple town of Varanasi, India, on May 14, 2024. Rights groups report that much of the organized, sometimes violent opposition to Christianity is concentrated in northern India. Anindito Mukherjee/Getty Images

Henry Hiinii, another Indian Christian in Delhi, told The Epoch Times that “the governments are not doing much to help the Christian community” as it comes under attack.

The BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh did not respond to requests for comment from The Epoch Times.

Some Indian Christians and close observers hope President Donald Trump—the man who has pledged to save Christians worldwide—will respond.

Commissioner Stephen Schneck of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom told The Epoch Times that the U.S. government should “issue targeted sanctions against Indian government officials and entities who participate in or tolerate egregious religious persecution of Christians, Muslims, and others.”

Escalating Hostility

Scott Bledsoe, who served as a pastor for 28 years, has visited India twice, cultivating relationships with Christians there. He said his latest visa to visit this past summer was denied.

Bledsoe told The Epoch Times he started to hear about anti-Christian persecution “in the last 10 years,” describing local mob violence against groups attempting to build churches.

Over the same period, major Christian nonprofits operating in the country faced setbacks and scrutiny, often tied to their receipt of money from abroad, including from the United States.

In 2017, Compassion International, a humanitarian organization headquartered in Colorado Springs, said it left India under pressure from the government.

The Missionaries of Charity, the group founded by Mother Teresa, sustained a serious blow in 2021, when it was barred from receiving foreign funding.

Deepak said these incidents are a bad sign for the homegrown Christian missionaries planting and nurturing small churches, including in unfriendly parts of the country.

“If you can go after them, then smaller organizations don’t have any chance,” he said.

A man moves chairs outside a small church in Kandhamal, India, on Sept. 19, 2018. In recent years, states across India have passed laws against forced conversion. Numerous Christians, accused of coercing people into accepting their faith, have been jailed under the statutes. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

In recent years, states across India have passed laws against forced conversion and numerous Christians, accused of coercing people into accepting their faith, have been jailed under the statutes.

Some Christians believe the opposition even extends to a kind of low-level surveillance enforced by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and similar groups. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh alone is estimated to have 4 million members nationwide.

There are spies and people that are always watching what you’re doing,” Deepak said.

He said some believers worry that singing a religious song in their own home could draw scrutiny from neighbors, leading to arrests and prosecution under forced conversion laws.

Deepak recounted a visit to a church where that fear meant services were kept very quiet.

I did a small devotion with them from the Bible and how the church was persecuted,” he said.

A wave of attacks on Christmas celebrations in late 2025, linked to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and similar groups, renewed concerns about the safety and freedom of Christians in India.

Devotees light candles outside a church during Christmas Day celebrations in Amritsar, India, on Dec. 25, 2022. The plight of Indian Christians has drawn attention from U.S. political leaders, who cite controversial conversion laws and related mob violence. Narinder Nanu/AFP via Getty Images

“Christians are actually afraid to celebrate Christmas openly now,” Deepak said.

Amit said Christmas services were restricted in many parts of northern India.

Schneck described “a sharp increase in targeted attacks against religious minorities” over Christmas 2025.

Similar attacks have continued into the new year,” he said.

Amid rising tensions late last year, Modi attended a Christmas service at New Delhi’s Cathedral Church of the Redemption.

The Indian Christians who spoke with The Epoch Times, however, were skeptical of the sincerity of that gesture, attributing it to concerns over votes.

“It is disturbing to see limited official condemnation from the political authorities,” Barrett said.

However, a recent judicial decision on a conversion law drew praise from them.

In December 2025, judges on the Allahabad High Court ruled that merely preaching Christianity and distributing Bibles does not run afoul of a forced conversion statute in Uttar Pradesh, a heavily Hindu state in northern India.

Hiinii described the ruling as “good news” but said many people do not yet know about it.

A general view of the deserted Allahabad High Court in Allahabad, India, on March 22, 2020. In December 2025, judges on the court ruled that merely preaching Christianity and distributing Bibles does not run afoul of a forced conversion statute in Uttar Pradesh, a heavily Hindu state in northern India. Sanjay Kanojia/AFP via Getty Images American Response

The plight of Indian Christians has started to attract the attention of American political leaders.

In a Dec. 19, 2025, op-ed in The Hill, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.) and U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom leaders asked Secretary of State Marco Rubio to designate India as a Country of Particular Concern, a designation outlined in the International Religious Freedom Act. They cited its controversial conversion laws and the resultant mob violence.

A 2023 State Department report on religious freedom in India noted Christians’ concerns about those laws and their reports of harassment.

That same year, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom held a forum on religious freedom in India.

Read the rest here...

Tyler Durden Fri, 01/30/2026 - 23:25

Thai Police Track Down 3 Children Suspected Of Lighting Homeless Man On Fire

Zero Hedge -

Thai Police Track Down 3 Children Suspected Of Lighting Homeless Man On Fire

Authorities in Thailand have located three children, ages nine to 15, who are suspected of setting a homeless man on fire under a bridge in Bangkok and recording the attack.

The victim, a 51-year-old man known as Karn, lives beneath the Ban Ma Bridge in the Prawet district, where he earns money by collecting recyclable materials. He said the incident happened while he was asleep, according to SCMP.

“I was sleeping under the bridge when I felt cold liquid being poured on me before flames erupted on my body,” Karn told reporters.

Witnesses in the area said the attack appeared unprovoked, supporting Karn’s claim that he had no connection to the suspects.

SCMP writes that police confirmed Thursday that the three minors have been identified, but their identities are being kept confidential under child protection laws. Investigators said the children could face charges including attempted murder and destruction of public property, after nearby infrastructure was damaged during the fire.

Video footage of the incident quickly spread online, drawing intense backlash. Many users demanded tougher punishment, with some calling for the suspects to be tried as adults or for their parents to be held legally responsible.

The case has renewed attention on violent incidents involving young people in Thailand. In August last year, three teenagers in Lampang were arrested for killing a disabled dog by setting it on fire in an abandoned building, though authorities never revealed the outcome.

That same month, a separate attack in Bangkok made international headlines when a Malaysian tourist couple was set ablaze by an unemployed man near a major shopping center.

The government later pledged to cover their medical expenses and provide compensation.

As investigators continue their work, the latest incident has sparked wider debate about youth behavior, accountability, and public safety in Thailand.

Tyler Durden Fri, 01/30/2026 - 23:00

Seven Reasons Not To Bomb Iran

Zero Hedge -

Seven Reasons Not To Bomb Iran

Authored by Josiah Lippincott via American Greatness,

By the time this piece publishes, the United States military might already have launched air strikes on Iran. Indeed, planes could be launching while I write this. Nevertheless, here is a list of seven reasons why our government should not intervene in the Middle East.

1) It has never gone well. That is unlikely to change now. In 1953, the CIA overthrew the elected government of Iran to help the British more easily extract oil. We then installed the Shah, whom lots of Persians didn’t like. That problem came to a head in 1979 with the Shah being deposed and the religious fundamentalists, led by the Ayatollah, coming to power. That was not a success story for the United States.

Then there are the horrific boondoggles in Iraq and Afghanistan, the lies that drew us into the First Gulf War (babies stabbed in incubators!), the Syrian civil war, the disastrous collapse of Libya after Obama’s airstrikes, the Arab Spring nonsense, and the intervention in Lebanon that led to 200 Marines getting killed. I could go on.

The American government has a long pattern of failure in the Middle East.

2) Iran is not a military threat to America. This will cause the DC establishment types to be upset, but it is true. Iran’s anger with America stems from the coup we staged there and the meddling in Iran’s near abroad. This relationship can be easily fixed by simply stopping our current policy of hostility to the regime in Iran and adopting a policy of simply ignoring the region.

This is the right policy towards Iran because the country is not a threat to us. Iran cannot militarily attack America. The Revolutionary Guard is not going to stage an amphibious landing on the Potomac. Iranian agents of subterfuge on American soil have been hapless fools, easily foiled.

Even if Iran develops nuclear weapons, nothing changes. Iran cannot nuke America without getting obliterated in return. Therefore, there is no incentive to use those nuclear weapons in an offensive fashion.

Pakistan, North Korea, Russia, and China are all “bad” powers that have nuclear weapons. They’ve never used these weapons for a reason—the price isn’t worth the gain. Nukes are an ace in the hole for national defense, but they don’t have offensive utility in a world of atomic parity.

3) Iran’s relationship to Israel is not our problem. Iran and Israel despise each other for reasons that are complex and not worth getting into here. Needless to say, this is not a problem for Americans. Lots of people on earth don’t like each other. This isn’t new. The best thing to do in these cases is to simply stay out. We ought not borrow trouble that has no bearing on our national interests.

Israel is a big boy country. The Israelis can solve their own problems. There is no need for the American taxpayer to be involved.

Much is made of the anti-Semitism of the Iranian regime, with the implication being that the Ayatollah will use nuclear weapons against Israel if he gets the bomb. This is fearmongering with no basis in reality. Israel, like America, has nuclear weapons. If Tel Aviv gets annihilated, then so will Tehran. There is simply no gain for the Iranians in that case. Moreover, there is absolutely zero reason for the United States to get mixed up in a potential nuclear standoff between any countries anywhere on earth.

To be frank, the leadership of Iran is no more insane, moralistic, or fanatical than the Israeli or American ruling classes. In fact, they seem to be less expansionist than our own DC meddlers, mostly due to the aged character of the Iranian ruling element. The American military-industrial complex is more ferocious about spreading gay sex, feminism, and “democracy” abroad than Iran is in spreading Shia Islam.

4) The Iranian struggle for freedom is not a concern of the American government. The Declaration of Independence says that the purpose of government is to secure the rights “to life, liberty, and happiness” of the American people.

The Iranian people, however we may feel at a personal level about their cause, are not Americans. They don’t pay taxes, don’t owe us loyalty, haven’t consented to being ruled by us, and we have not agreed to rule over them in turn.

Their problems are their problems. The American government serves the American people. The Iranians are not Americans. They don’t get to ask American taxpayers to give them money, weapons, and support.

If Americans privately want to support women’s liberation or whatever in Iran, they are welcome to do so, but that isn’t what tax money is for.

5) Tax money spent on bombing Iran would be more useful here at home. Let’s take a hard-headed view of the costs at stake here: every dollar we spend monkeying with the desert drama queens is a dollar we didn’t spend on something else here at home.

War does not “boost the economy” because all of the weapons used and all of the soldiers’ paychecks have to come from taxing the economy. Everything in life comes with tradeoffs. War is no different.

Americans shouldn’t pay for weapons to be used on causes that don’t serve their interests, and our primary interest is protection. Our government is supposed to protect our bodies and our property. We have real problems with this right now here at home. Much more needs to be done to make American communities safe and peaceful.

I care far more about violence and criminal mischief in Hillsdale, Michigan, than in Tehran. Lots of bad things happen every day all over the world. Our tax dollars should be used to solve problems here.

6) Intervention backfires. Wars for human rights and far-flung geostrategic “interests” are always boondoggles. The long-term effects are bad: we stoke resentment among the natives, offend local power players, get sucked into unintelligible complex regional problems, and bear the long-term costs of dealing with the fallout.

There is, thankfully, an easy way to avoid all these issues: just stay away. If individual Americans care about the Middle East, then they can choose to spend their own money and time messing around in the region.

Surely, if Americans really thought bombing Iran was a good idea, then they would be eagerly offering up money to mercenaries and resistance fighters to go in there and spread freedom. Since most Americans are not doing this willingly, why should they be forced to support these measures unwillingly with tax dollars? It doesn’t make sense.

7) The American government should adopt the golden rule out of self-interest. Americans would not like it if a foreign government decided to meddle in our internal affairs. If China or Russia announced that they were going to launch military operations against the American homeland because of police “brutality” waged by ICE against illegal migrants, there would be an enormous backlash. Even leftists might view this as going too far.

We expect other countries to mind their own business and to stay out of ours. We should do the same abroad. Our real interests are right here on our own soil.

Instead of going abroad in search of monsters to destroy, the American government should worry about problems here. The easiest way is to simply stay out of unnecessary conflicts. The opportunities for problems abroad are simply too great. The Middle East is a mess and one the American government has done more, over its history, to create than to solve.

Time to take a step back.

Tyler Durden Fri, 01/30/2026 - 22:35

"Leader Turned Follower": Lululemon's See-Through Legging Fiasco Exposes Brand Drift

Zero Hedge -

"Leader Turned Follower": Lululemon's See-Through Legging Fiasco Exposes Brand Drift

Lululemon Athletica has drifted from its core strength in premium, high-quality yoga pants, chasing trends and fast product cycles. Competitors such as Alo Yoga and Vuori are quickly taking market share, while Lululemon has seen quality lapses, culminating in the botched launch of its "Get Low" tights earlier this month.

Bloomberg reports that Chief Brand and Product Activation Officer Nikki Neuburger told hundreds of employees at a meeting last week and in a video shared with staff worldwide that customers were not wearing the new $108 Get Low tights correctly.

Neuburger said that customers who bought the new controversial leggings, which some customers claim were see-through and "not squat proof," must size up and wear skin-toned underwear before putting on Get Low tights.

Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData, was quoted by Bloomberg as saying that Neuburger's memo to staff blaming customers for the see-through tights fiasco must "honestly be a joke."

"You are selling a premium product, you shouldn't have to issue instructions to women on how to wear leggings because your product is defective," Saunders said.

Earlier this month, Lululemon pulled its new tights from its North America e-commerce website just days after launch, following an uproar on social media over claims that the leggings were see-through. But it re-introduced the tights to the online store about a week ago.

In response to the epic failure, founder Chip Wilson felt compelled enough to blast the Board in a social media post:

This is a new low for lululemon. Pulling back the "Get Low" product line after three days is clearly a total operational failure. This comes just 17 months after the failed launch of the "Breezethrough" leggings, a product line also discontinued for similar product flaws. I've believed that lululemon has lost its cool for some time, but it is now evident to me that the Company has completely lost its way as a leader in technical apparel. For years, lululemon's results (particularly in North America) have shown how the Company has struggled to deliver products that are compelling and beloved; now it is unable to simply deliver products that work.
Despite any finger pointing internally following this mishap, this is not the fault of any hard-working employees. This is the fault of the Board. It is clear that persistent failures like this are born out of this Board's lack of experience in creative businesses, disinterest in product development and quality, and focus on short-term, self-interested priorities. How could anyone reach a conclusion other than the Board continues to make decisions that are destroying the brand and the stock price?
What product quality testing did the Board review? How often does the Board review the product pipeline? Are leaders empowered to make the best product decision or simply pushed to the lowest cost decision?
I believe a leading Board would have a Brand Product Committee and have asked these questions.

For memory's sake, let's take another look at the Get Low line.

And one last time.

Meanwhile, Alo Yoga and Vuori are winning influencers and younger customers; Lululemon's attempts to follow that playbook have epically backfired. Year-to-date, shares are down 17%, below Covid lows.

Saunders said, "They've gone from being the leader in the category to, honestly, a bit of a follower."

Tyler Durden Fri, 01/30/2026 - 22:10

US Judge Grants Asylum To Chinese National Who Filmed China's Uyghur Prison Camps

Zero Hedge -

US Judge Grants Asylum To Chinese National Who Filmed China's Uyghur Prison Camps

Authored by Frank Fang via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A pro-democracy activist who fled China after documenting what he described as concentration camps in the Xinjiang region was granted asylum on Jan. 28 by a New York state immigration judge, amid widespread concern about the risks he would face if deported.

Guan Heng speaks in a YouTube video that documents his trip to China’s Xinjiang region in October 2020. Screenshot/The Epoch Times

Guan Heng, 38, applied for asylum after arriving in the United States illegally in 2021. He was living in New York state before he was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in August 2025.

The case attracted international scrutiny in December 2025, with lawmakers in two dozen countries, including the United States, urging the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to abandon its plan to deport him to Uganda. The agency subsequently canceled the plan.

During the Jan. 28 hearing in Napanoch, New York, Judge Charles Ouslander said that because Guan had filmed a video of the Xinjiang region, Guan had a “well-founded fear” of being persecuted if he were sent back to China.

Guan was asked whether he filmed the detention camps and released the video shortly before arriving in the United States to support his asylum case. He said that was not his intent.

I sympathized with the Uyghurs who were persecuted,” Guan, speaking by video link from the Broome County Correctional Facility in Binghamton, New York, told the court through a translator.

Human Rights in China (HRIC), a New York City-based advocacy group that has advocated for Guan’s release, has detailed Guan’s journey from China to the United States. In 2020, he read a BuzzFeed News report on detention centers in the Xinjiang region and decided to verify it, HRIC said.

In October 2020, Guan traveled to the Xinjiang region alone. He released most of his video footage on YouTube in October 2021, the same month he arrived in Florida by boat after sailing from the Bahamas, to which he had traveled from Ecuador after fleeing China, according to the advocacy group.

HRIC characterized Guan’s video footage as an “extremely rare, first-person, on-the-ground video from a Chinese citizen.”

A month after Guan released his video, Chinese authorities, led by state security officials, began systematically targeting Guan’s relatives in China in what HRIC called “collective punishment.”

Guan told the judge that Chinese police had questioned his father three times since he released the video.

Guan’s attorney, Chen Chuangchuang, argued in his closing statement that his client’s case represents a “textbook example of why asylum should exist” and said that the United States has both a “moral and legal responsibility” to grant Guan asylum.

In December, before the DHS shelved its plan to deport Guan to Uganda, Chen spoke to NTD, a sister outlet of The Epoch Times, about how the Ugandan government “has a troubling record of cooperating with the Chinese Communist Party in making arrests in Uganda.”

Sending a well-known dissident like Mr. Guan to Uganda would be unsafe,” Chen told NTD, according to a translation of his remarks in Chinese.

The judge said in his ruling that Guan had proven his legal eligibility for asylum, describing him as a credible witness. He said Guan faced a real risk of retaliation if returned to China, noting that Chinese authorities had questioned his family members and asked about his whereabouts and previous activities.

Guan was not released immediately, as a DHS lawyer said the agency reserves the right to appeal within 30 days. The judge urged the department to make a swift decision, noting that Guan has been detained for about five months.

Rights groups and activists have welcomed the judge’s decision.

Clayton Weimers, executive director of Reporters Without Borders North America, applauded the court for recognizing “Guan Heng’s courageous work and the risks he would have faced if deported,” according to his statement.

“His footage of Uyghur concentration camps was invaluable to journalism that helped expose the horrors in Xinjiang, a region where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has committed crimes against humanity and genocide, according to the US State Department,“ Weimers said in the statement. ”Guan’s asylum is a rare win for press freedom under the current administration.”

Both the Trump and Biden administrations have formally declared the Chinese regime’s treatment of Uyghurs as “genocide” and “crimes against humanity.”

Rayhan Asat, a human rights lawyer of Uyghur heritage at the Atlantic Council, said “the American people stood up to defend Guan Heng’s rights and American values,” according to a post on X.

“The rule of law prevailed,“ Asat wrote. ”America will be better today because Guan Heng will be part of the American dream.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Tyler Durden Fri, 01/30/2026 - 20:55

Trump Sues US Treasury For $10 Billion Over Tax-Returns Leak

Zero Hedge -

Trump Sues US Treasury For $10 Billion Over Tax-Returns Leak

In the latest sign that we're living in unusual times, the sitting president of the United States is suing the US Treasury and Internal Revenue Service -- both housed in his executive branch -- and asking to be paid at least $10 billion in compensation for "reputational and financial harm," according to a complaint first publicized Thursday.  

We're printing money willy-nilly -- so what's another $10 billion for Trump & Sons? 

The suit springs from the IRS's failure to maintain the confidentiality of President Trump's tax returns. Between 2018 and 2020, then-IRS consultant Charles E. Littlejohn stole Trump's tax files and handed them over to The New York Times and ProPublica, which reported extensively on them. In 2024, Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison for stealing not only Trump's files, but also those of thousands more wealthy Americans, and giving them to the two news outlets. Prosecutors said he sought a role at the IRS with the intention of gaining access to Trump's information. He found such a role via Booz Allen Hamilton, which had a contract with the IRS. Citing the breach, Treasury killed all its remaining contracts with the firm earlier this week. 

The Trump lawsuit makes for some strange dynamics within the executive branch: Trump-chosen Scott Bessent is both Treasury Secretary and acting IRS commissioner, and he'll have to figure out how to respond to a $10 billion demand presented by his own boss. Trump is joined in the suit by his two eldest sons, Donald and Eric, both executive VPs at the Trump Organization. In a 27-page complaint filed with the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida, the Trumps allege:  

"[Treasury and the IRS] have caused Plaintiffs reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing."

According to the complaint, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration had warned the IRS about its insufficient protections for confidential taxpayer information -- not just once, but every year from 2010 to 2020. The uncorrected deficiencies enabled Littlejohn to steal Trump's information, upload it to a website and then share it, the Trumps allege: "Defendants were obligated to have appropriate technical, employee screening, security, and monitoring systems to prevent Littlejohn’s unlawful conduct. Defendants failed to take such mandatory precautions." 

Trump says the US government owes him $10 billion for failing to prevent Charles Littlejohn from stealing his sensitive tax files

In late September 2020 -- about five weeks before that year's presidential election pitting Trump against Joe Biden -- the Times published a sprawling, multi-article analysis of Trump's tax filings, determining that he'd only paid $750 in taxes in 2016, and no taxes in 10 out of the previous 15 years. "His reports to the IRS portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes," reported the Times. (In a telling indicator that leftist media's relentless obsession with Russia scaremongering was still going strong in 2020, the Times laughably had to acknowledge that the documents failed to "reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia.")

Trump was clearly done wrong by having his tax files exposed to public view without his consent. However, Trump's lawsuit underscores an exasperating aspect of man's relationship to the state: When governments do wrong and are compelled to pay damages, the cost is always passed on to the citizenry, whether through taxation or inflation

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

Cold Weather Delays NASA Moon Launch At Least Two Days

Zero Hedge -

Cold Weather Delays NASA Moon Launch At Least Two Days

Authored by T.J. Muscaro via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.—Humanity’s return to the Moon’s orbit will have to wait at least another two days.

NASA’s Space Launch System Moon rocket prepares for launch ahead of Artemis II at Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on Jan. 30, 2026 (T.J. Muscaro/The Epoch Times).

NASA said on Jan. 30 that the earliest launch date for the Artemis II mission—the first crewed mission to fly around the Moon in more than 50 years—was pushed back from Feb. 6 to Feb. 8 due to the unusually cold weather disrupting critical pre-launch operations.

“Managers have assessed hardware capabilities against the projected forecast, given the rare arctic outbreak affecting the state, and decided to change the timeline,” the space agency said in a press release.

Teams and preparations at the launch pad remain ready for the wet dress rehearsal.

“However, adjusting the timeline for the test will position NASA for success during the rehearsal, as the expected weather this weekend would violate launch conditions.”

Before the behemoth Moon rocket called the Space Launch System can be cleared for launch, it needs to undergo a “wet dress rehearsal,” which is a run-through of launch day operations.

They include fully loading and unloading the rocket, powering up, powering down, and recycling critical systems.

It is at this time that any lingering problems with the spacecraft, such as fuel leaks, reveal themselves, as was the case for Artemis I.

Artemis II’s wet dress rehearsal was scheduled for Jan. 31.

However, mission managers decided the day before that it would be too cold and they are now targeting Feb. 2, with the simulated launch window beginning at 9 p.m. (ET).

While the space agency rules out a launch on the first two days of the February window—Feb. 6 and Feb. 7—a finalized launch date won’t be announced until after teams have reviewed the outcomes of the wet dress rehearsal.

According to NASA’s weather criteria for the Space Launch System, fueling cannot be initiated if the 24-hour average temperature at key points of the rocket is below 41.1 degrees Fahrenheit.

The National Weather Service office in Melbourne, Florida, warned of an extreme cold and freeze watch for Cape Canaveral, and several other counties across Central Florida for Jan. 31 through Feb. 1.

Temperatures could drop as low as 20 degrees Fahrenheit, with a cold wind chill possibly hitting as low as seven degrees Fahrenheit.

Strong gusts reaching 45 mph were also possible for the morning of Jan. 31, which would also violate launch conditions.

Now, NASA plans to keep the Moon rocket and Orion crew capsule out on Launch Complex 39B in the meantime, as engineers take precautions to maintain the vehicle through the cold.

Those include keeping the Orion capsule powered up and configuring purges to ensure proper environmental conditions for certain elements of the boosters and spacecraft are maintained.

Meanwhile, the Artemis II crew remains in their pre-flight quarantine in Houston.

Mission managers were still assessing when the crew would arrive at Kennedy Space Center ahead of the launch.

Tyler Durden Fri, 01/30/2026 - 20:05

Succession

The Big Picture -

 

 

So, we announced our succession plan this morning.

My emails and DMs lit up immediately, with all sorts of questions, but mostly asking, “Are you retiring?!?”

No, but I’ll get to that shortly.

The reason we announced this: As a financial planning firm, I wanted all of our clients, partners, employees, and colleagues to see that we practice what we preach. If you want clients to take you seriously when you advise them to think in decades, make estate and business continuity plans, you have to follow your own advice.

From the beginning, when we self-funded our launch and had just five of us, we have been inviting key employees to become partners. We have always done this with our own capital, a bank line of credit, and no outside investors. By the end of our first decade, we had 20 partners. In 2024, there were 26 partners. This year, we grew to 29 partners.

Our goal is to be the best employee-owned advisory shop in the country.

As for my daily routine, nothing has changed. I still hold the roles of Chairman and Chief Investment Officer. My daily activities are essentially the same. I am still in the office the same number of times a week; I am still doing my pods at Bloomberg, still blogging, speaking at conferences, and writing more books.

What is going to change? More of our RWM rockstars are now employee-owners, with many more expected to become owners over the next decade.

Maybe I’ll swap the old Cabrio for a newer model, one with ABS & airbags. I recently found a new timepiece I’d been hunting for a while, and I pulled the trigger on that. And, I added more Munis to my personal portfolio. Aside from that, not much is different…

~~~

For the past 12 years, we have built a firm dedicated to putting clients first. Every day, we share with investors what we truly believe are the best ways to manage their portfolios and financial lives. We do this for free to the general public, and in great specificity and detail for our clients. I have been doing this publicly since the late 1990s, and that will go on for as long as I can cobble together an intelligent sentence.

I am excited about what we have built so far, and I look forward to what this team will accomplish over the next decade!

 

 

Source:
Ritholtz Wealth Management Executes Employee-led Succession Plan to Create Industry’s Most Visible, Dominant “Forever Firm”
BusinessWire, Jan 30, 2026

 

See also:
Inside Ritholtz Wealth Management’s Succession Plan
By Andrew Welsch
Barron’s Jan 30, 2026

Barry Ritholtz sells shares in $7.6bn RIA’s planned succession
By Ian Wenik
CityWire, Jan 30, 2026

Ritholtz Wealth Puts Succession Plan in Place As Co-Founder Barry Ritholtz Nears 65
By Alex Ortolani
Wealth Management, January 30, 2026

 

The post Succession appeared first on The Big Picture.

Watch: Jennings Destroys Dems For Refusing To Condemn DA's Vow To "Hunt Down Nazi" ICE Agents

Zero Hedge -

Watch: Jennings Destroys Dems For Refusing To Condemn DA's Vow To "Hunt Down Nazi" ICE Agents

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

CNN contributor Scott Jennings unloaded on Democrats during a heated panel discussion, exposing their failure to denounce Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s inflammatory threats against federal ICE agents enforcing immigration laws.

Jennings highlighted how such rhetoric from left-wing officials undermines law enforcement and fuels division, especially as the Trump administration ramps up deportations of criminal illegal immigrants.

“Yeah, this is highly inappropriate. No prosecutor in America should be doing that, let alone yelling at and about law enforcement officers,” Jennings urged.

He laid out the core issue plainly: “Look, this debate, a lot of words and a lot of talking around it. We have existing federal immigration law. We have law enforcement agencies, duly sworn officers that have been ordered by the president to go out and enforce those laws. That’s really all the debate is about here.”

Jennings pointed to successful enforcement elsewhere: “And in most jurisdictions, these laws are being enforced quite amicably. There are no incidents. Transfers are happening.”

“People are being deported that have a reason to be deported. It’s just in this specific jurisdiction, people have decided that federal immigration law shouldn’t apply!” he added.

He then escalated his critique to the broader pattern among Democrats: “And now you have sort of radical Democrats around the country ramping this up even further by claiming that they’re going to ‘hunt down’ federal law enforcement officers as though they were Nazis.”

Jennings called out Rep. Eric Swalwell specifically: “You have Eric Swalwell in California promising a reign of terror if he becomes governor against anybody who’s ever worked for ICE!”

“I mean, this kind of division and this kind of threat against people who basically signed up to enforce the law and do public service, it’s outrageous. And any Democrat ought to be able to sit here and say this is way over the line!” Jennings concluded.

The outburst came in response to Krasner’s recent vows during a City Hall event in Philadelphia, where he joined city councilmembers to unveil the “ICE OUT” legislation package. 

The bills aim to bar ICE agents from city-owned property, restrict agency cooperation and data sharing, and limit access to public facilities like libraries, shelters, and health centers without a judicial warrant.

Krasner labeled ICE agents as “a small bunch of wannabe Nazis” and threatened, “If we have to hunt you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades, we will find your identities. We will find you. We will achieve justice.”

Backlash has been swift. Pennsylvania State Sen. Jarrett Coleman dismissed the comments as “empty threats,” emphasizing that local officials cannot interfere with federal law enforcement. 

House Minority Leader Jesse Topper called them “not just hypocritical [but] outright laughable,” urging focus on community security instead. 

The White House noted a 1,300% surge in assaults on ICE officers, blaming “dangerous, untrue smears by elected Democrats” and praising agents for “act[ing] heroically to enforce the law and protect American communities.”

This rhetoric from Krasner fits into a larger pattern of incitement from Democrat-led cities against federal immigration enforcement. 

As we highlighted earlier, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson admitted to coordinating with other Democrat mayors, including Minneapolis’ Jacob Frey and Boston’s Michelle Wu, to impede ICE operations. 

Johnson has even established “ICE-Free Zones” prohibiting agents from city properties without warrants and is pushing measures to hold them accountable for alleged misconduct.

Tucker Carlson accused Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Frey of deliberately fueling chaos to spark a “color revolution” and civil war by refusing to protect citizens and allowing riots. 

Carlson warned that such actions lead to states rejecting federal authority, resulting in “warring nations within the same borders” and “killing at scale.”

These escalating threats from radical Democrats not only endanger federal agents doing their jobs but also erode the rule of law that protects American communities from criminal elements. 

With polls showing a majority of Americans supporting mass deportations, this resistance looks increasingly out of touch and dangerous. 

Enforcing immigration laws isn’t optional—it’s essential to putting America First and restoring order after years of open-border chaos.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Tyler Durden Fri, 01/30/2026 - 14:17

Tesla Shares Jump 5% After Musk Reportedly Mulls Merging SpaceX, xAI, Tesla Merger

Zero Hedge -

Tesla Shares Jump 5% After Musk Reportedly Mulls Merging SpaceX, xAI, Tesla Merger

Tesla shares jumped about 5% on Friday after reports suggested that Elon Musk is considering bringing his companies closer together through a possible merger involving SpaceX, Tesla, and artificial intelligence startup xAI. The news helped reverse losses from the previous session, when the stock slid following the company’s earnings report.

According to people familiar with the discussions, SpaceX has been evaluating different ways to combine parts of Musk’s business portfolio ahead of a potential public offering. One option involves a tie-up with Tesla, while another centers on xAI. These talks are still preliminary, and no agreement has been reached, but investors welcomed the possibility of deeper cooperation across the group.

The market reaction was swift. After falling to its lowest level in two months on Thursday, Tesla rebounded strongly in early Friday trading. The rally lifted the company’s valuation back toward $1.65 trillion, signaling renewed confidence in Musk’s long-term strategy despite recent financial pressures.

Much of that optimism reflects the potential overlap between the companies’ ambitions. Musk has repeatedly floated the idea of using SpaceX technology to support large-scale computing in orbit, which could benefit xAI’s push to expand its artificial intelligence systems. Tesla, meanwhile, could contribute through its battery, energy storage, and manufacturing operations, creating a tightly linked ecosystem spanning transportation, robotics, space, and AI.

Financial ties between the firms have already been growing. Tesla recently committed $2 billion to xAI, matching a similar investment made earlier by SpaceX. In a shareholder letter, Tesla said, “As set forth in Master Plan Part IV, Tesla is building products and services that bring AI into the physical world. Meanwhile, xAI is developing leading digital AI products and services, such as its large language model (Grok).”

Musk reinforced that view during the earnings call, arguing that collaboration is central to Tesla’s future. “But if there are things xAI can help accelerate our progress, then why should we not do that?” he said. “And that is the reason why we’ve gone ahead with such an investment. Because this is part of the strategic initiative.” The company has also highlighted links between AI development, its Optimus robots, and autonomous driving systems.

Still, significant uncertainty surrounds any potential deal. People close to the matter say the companies may ultimately decide against merging, and any transaction could complicate SpaceX’s plans for a major stock market debut later this year. That offering, if it moves forward as expected, could be one of the largest in history.

The surge in Tesla’s share price also comes as the company faces near-term challenges. Recent earnings showed weaker profitability, and management has warned that heavy spending is coming as it ramps up investments in autonomy and robotics.

Musk acknowledged the scale of those plans, saying, “This year for Tesla is the first major steps as we increase vehicle autonomy and begin to produce Optimus robots at scale — we’re making very, very big investments.” For now, investors appear to be focused less on short-term risks and more on the possibility that Musk’s interconnected vision could unlock new sources of growth.

Tyler Durden Fri, 01/30/2026 - 14:00

10 Friday AM Reads

The Big Picture -

My end-of-week morning train WFH reads:

The average 50-something American is now worth $1.4 million: Want to get rich? Get old. That’s what the data tells us about net worth in America. The average 50-something American has a net worth of $1.4 million, according to a report from Empower, the financial services firm. The average 60-something is worth $1.6 million. By contrast, the average 20-something is worth a mere $127,730. (USA Today)

America’s own goal: Americans pay almost entirely for Trump’s tariffs: Contrary to US government rhetoric, the cost of US import tariffs are not borne by foreign exporters. Instead, they hit the American economy itself. Importers and consumers in the US bear 96 percent of the tariff burden. (Kiel Institute) see also TACO Tracking: Trump Carries Out Just One in Four Tariff Threats: Financial markets and C-suite executives have mostly shrugged off Trump’s latest warnings involving Iran’s trading partners, Greenland’s supporters, Canada and South Korea, seeing them as merely words intended to gain leverage or change behavior — nothing he’d actually carry out. (Bloomberg)

How a BlackRock Loss Reignited Worries About What Is Hiding in Private Credit: Fund had marked investments as full-valued as recently as November, before disclosing a 19% decline last week. (Wall Street Journal)

Who’s been buying all the gold? “Some will argue that global central banks are moving their reserves away from dollars and into gold, and this is a better measure of debasement than the bond market.” (Financial Times)

U.S. Trade Deficit Widens Despite Trump’s Tariffs: The monthly trade deficit and imports rebounded in November after shrinking significantly in prior months, new data show. (New York Times)

Anthropic Is at War With Itself: The AI company shouting about AI’s dangers can’t quite bring itself to slow down. (The Atlantic)

The World Is Drowning in Tourists. Who Should Pay the Price? I’m the problem, it’s me. Last summer a French tabloid sting operation uncovered that Americans (or at least journalists posing as Americans) were being charged up to 50% more than Parisians in some of the city’s most touristy cafes. (Bloomberg)

How popular is Donald Trump? Silver Bulletin approval ratings for President Trump — and all presidents since Truman. (Silver Bulletin)

Yes, one image from space can change humanity’s perspective: Our view of the world, the Universe, and ourselves can change with just one glimpse of what’s out there. It’s happened many times before. (Starts With a Bang)

Michael J. Fox and Harrison Ford on Shrinking, Parkinson’s, and Donald Trump: Following his first TV role in five years, Fox hopes to meet with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about funding research for the incurable brain disease. But as he exclusively tells VF, the current administration “seems that they’re involved in other things that have less impact on peoples’ lives.” (Vanity Fair)

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Kate Burke, CEO of Allspring Global Investments a global asset manager with more than 600 billion dollars in assets under advisement. She is also a director on the firm’s board. Previously, she was at AllianceBernstein as COO/CFO.

 

YouTube leads all media, but legacy studios saw a live sports boost in Nielsen’s latest snapshot of TV distributors

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

 

Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.

 

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

What's Worrying Billionaires The Most In 2026?

Zero Hedge -

What's Worrying Billionaires The Most In 2026?

This infographic, via Visual Capitalist's Bruno Venditti, highlights the factors most likely to negatively impact the global market environment over the next 12 months, based on responses from billionaires across regions.

The data for this visualization comes from the UBS Billionaire Survey 2025.

Trade and Geopolitics Dominate Concerns

Tariffs rank as the top concern overall, cited by 66% of respondents. Close behind, 63% of billionaires point to major geopolitical conflict as a key risk, underscoring fears around wars, regional instability, and great-power rivalry.

Policy uncertainty is the third-largest concern, flagged by 59% of respondents. Meanwhile, 44% of billionaires remain worried about higher inflation, indicating that price stability is still not taken for granted after years of elevated inflation across major economies.

Regional Differences Reveal Uneven Risk Exposure

While global results show common themes, regional differences stand out.

In Asia-Pacific, 75% of billionaires cite tariffs as their biggest concern, reflecting the region’s deep integration into global supply chains and export-driven growth models.

Meanwhile in the Americas, 70% of respondents are most worried about higher inflation or major geopolitical conflict.

Lower-Ranked but Persistent Threats

Concerns such as debt crises (34%), higher taxes (28%), and global recessions (27%) still rank meaningfully, though below headline geopolitical risks.

Interestingly, technological disruptions (15%) and climate change (14%) appear lower on the list, suggesting that billionaires may view these as longer-term or more manageable challenges compared to immediate political and economic shocks.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out How Balanced Is Economic Growth Within Countries? on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

Tyler Durden Fri, 01/30/2026 - 02:45

What's Worrying Billionaires The Most In 2026?

Zero Hedge -

What's Worrying Billionaires The Most In 2026?

This infographic, via Visual Capitalist's Bruno Venditti, highlights the factors most likely to negatively impact the global market environment over the next 12 months, based on responses from billionaires across regions.

The data for this visualization comes from the UBS Billionaire Survey 2025.

Trade and Geopolitics Dominate Concerns

Tariffs rank as the top concern overall, cited by 66% of respondents. Close behind, 63% of billionaires point to major geopolitical conflict as a key risk, underscoring fears around wars, regional instability, and great-power rivalry.

Policy uncertainty is the third-largest concern, flagged by 59% of respondents. Meanwhile, 44% of billionaires remain worried about higher inflation, indicating that price stability is still not taken for granted after years of elevated inflation across major economies.

Regional Differences Reveal Uneven Risk Exposure

While global results show common themes, regional differences stand out.

In Asia-Pacific, 75% of billionaires cite tariffs as their biggest concern, reflecting the region’s deep integration into global supply chains and export-driven growth models.

Meanwhile in the Americas, 70% of respondents are most worried about higher inflation or major geopolitical conflict.

Lower-Ranked but Persistent Threats

Concerns such as debt crises (34%), higher taxes (28%), and global recessions (27%) still rank meaningfully, though below headline geopolitical risks.

Interestingly, technological disruptions (15%) and climate change (14%) appear lower on the list, suggesting that billionaires may view these as longer-term or more manageable challenges compared to immediate political and economic shocks.

If you enjoyed today’s post, check out How Balanced Is Economic Growth Within Countries? on Voronoi, the new app from Visual Capitalist.

Tyler Durden Fri, 01/30/2026 - 02:45

Berlin's Real Estate Market: Socialism On The Rise

Zero Hedge -

Berlin's Real Estate Market: Socialism On The Rise

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe

Germany’s debt crisis continues to tighten the political leeway of the Federal Republic. The latest push by Berlin’s SPD for stricter real estate regulation clearly signals the direction ahead: Parties at the brink are choosing state-controlled economics over a market-driven turnaround.

The German capital, Berlin, functions as a political testing ground and as ground zero for the united left of the Federal Republic. Like a magnifying glass, Berlin’s state politics reveal the broader response patterns of German politics to current social and economic challenges. The city’s real estate market now demonstrates trends likely to define the political character of the years to come.

Faced with dramatic housing shortages, steadily rising rents, and exploding property prices, policymakers respond with even stronger regulation and rent controls. This is a policy of artificial scarcity, as investors systematically retreat from the market due to declining expected returns. The SPD’s recent move confirmed that the course remains steady: increasing regulation and direct control over investors (Apollo News reported).

Overview of Regulatory Measures 

The SPD’s legislative initiative includes: severely restricting short-term tourist rentals to relieve the regular housing market; limiting potential rent surcharges for furnished apartments, preventing landlords from adjusting rents to reflect past investment in quality or amenities; capping index rents; and restricting modernization charges for property upkeep within narrow legal boundaries.

Investment incentives and expected returns are thus significantly curtailed. The government is executing a consistent departure from economic fundamentals, addressing a self-created scarcity with measures that further exacerbate it. Without prospects of refinancing, investors are increasingly withdrawing from the market, putting further strain on housing availability.

An additional measure is the introduction of a digital rental register—a sort of digital public ledger designed to enforce transparency and regulatory compliance. Larger landlords will be required to allocate a portion of their apartments to households with housing vouchers or the homeless. The state thus dictates down to the contractual level who may enter rental agreements.

The SPD initiative marks the next stage of a fundamentally socialist market design. One can easily imagine how such rules impact potential developers, private investors, and larger investment groups. At its core, this policy is likely to further damage an already pressured real estate market, at least in Berlin’s current conditions.

One development leads to another. In recent years, the construction sector has increasingly become a pawn of climate policy. Regulations are transposed into rental and building law without regard for economic consequences, inflating costs and freezing the status quo of building stock.

Ultimately, tenants bear the brunt, as investors face mounting pressure and withdraw. Lengthy permitting processes, economically unrealistic energy standards, retrofit obligations, and increasingly visible government interventions in rental and contract law make many projects unattractive. The result is a slowdown in new construction and systematically rising housing costs. Climate policy thus directly multiplies the existing housing shortage.

Reasons Behind the Property Price Explosion 

Property prices in Germany have surged for multiple reasons: First, over a decade of massive migration acted as a demand turbo. In urban centers like Berlin, Hamburg, or Frankfurt, the so-called “flow rate”—the part of the housing market ensuring mobility for tenants changing jobs or starting families—is completely blocked by the policy of perpetually open borders. Second, real estate has increasingly served as protection against systematic monetary depreciation, which follows rising public debt. The ECB expands the money supply through bond purchases while keeping interest rates low, steadily pushing property prices and rents higher to maintain profitability.

But that’s not all: the next political assault on real estate came through climate regulation, high investment requirements tied to the green transition, insulation mandates, enforced heating technologies, and construction rules. These act as massive barriers to market entry for new capital. In effect, the state artificially restricts housing supply on three levels: regulation, control, and building mandates.

Germany’s political refusal, for ideological and intellectual reasons, to rationally address migration and economic necessities has dramatic consequences. Last year, Berlin’s central planners set a nationwide housing target of 400,000 units. Yet massive regulatory interventions led to only around 205,000 completions—a decline of over 20% from the previous year. Similar numbers apply in Berlin, where massive migration requires roughly 20,000 new units annually. With only around 14,000 completed, the capital falls short despite state support and public housing. The market tightens, and the government responds with the same medicine—ultimately, those paying the price are tenants earning their own rent and not yet dependent on the growing social safety net.

The question remains how Berlin’s politics will react grosso modo to this massive encroachment on market freedom. The city’s leftist bloc will likely push to further tighten regulations, while Berlin’s CDU, as seen in the inheritance tax debate, quickly falls in line with the SPD. When it comes to increasing the tax burden on the middle class and holding them accountable for the reckless transformation into a green-socialist society, the Merz-CDU stands ready.

Strategic decisions in Germany today will economically burden future generations. The bloated debt state engages in a perverse game of wealth redistribution from the private sector to the bureaucracy. Rising taxes and contributions systematically disperse reform pressure on migration, welfare, or economic regulation. Credit is available; the middle class pays. Germany faces social redistribution battles artificially fueled by the SPD’s rental law.

* * * 

About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a German graduate economist, has worked for over 25 years, he has worked 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 Fri, 01/30/2026 - 02:00

Berlin's Real Estate Market: Socialism On The Rise

Zero Hedge -

Berlin's Real Estate Market: Socialism On The Rise

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe

Germany’s debt crisis continues to tighten the political leeway of the Federal Republic. The latest push by Berlin’s SPD for stricter real estate regulation clearly signals the direction ahead: Parties at the brink are choosing state-controlled economics over a market-driven turnaround.

The German capital, Berlin, functions as a political testing ground and as ground zero for the united left of the Federal Republic. Like a magnifying glass, Berlin’s state politics reveal the broader response patterns of German politics to current social and economic challenges. The city’s real estate market now demonstrates trends likely to define the political character of the years to come.

Faced with dramatic housing shortages, steadily rising rents, and exploding property prices, policymakers respond with even stronger regulation and rent controls. This is a policy of artificial scarcity, as investors systematically retreat from the market due to declining expected returns. The SPD’s recent move confirmed that the course remains steady: increasing regulation and direct control over investors (Apollo News reported).

Overview of Regulatory Measures 

The SPD’s legislative initiative includes: severely restricting short-term tourist rentals to relieve the regular housing market; limiting potential rent surcharges for furnished apartments, preventing landlords from adjusting rents to reflect past investment in quality or amenities; capping index rents; and restricting modernization charges for property upkeep within narrow legal boundaries.

Investment incentives and expected returns are thus significantly curtailed. The government is executing a consistent departure from economic fundamentals, addressing a self-created scarcity with measures that further exacerbate it. Without prospects of refinancing, investors are increasingly withdrawing from the market, putting further strain on housing availability.

An additional measure is the introduction of a digital rental register—a sort of digital public ledger designed to enforce transparency and regulatory compliance. Larger landlords will be required to allocate a portion of their apartments to households with housing vouchers or the homeless. The state thus dictates down to the contractual level who may enter rental agreements.

The SPD initiative marks the next stage of a fundamentally socialist market design. One can easily imagine how such rules impact potential developers, private investors, and larger investment groups. At its core, this policy is likely to further damage an already pressured real estate market, at least in Berlin’s current conditions.

One development leads to another. In recent years, the construction sector has increasingly become a pawn of climate policy. Regulations are transposed into rental and building law without regard for economic consequences, inflating costs and freezing the status quo of building stock.

Ultimately, tenants bear the brunt, as investors face mounting pressure and withdraw. Lengthy permitting processes, economically unrealistic energy standards, retrofit obligations, and increasingly visible government interventions in rental and contract law make many projects unattractive. The result is a slowdown in new construction and systematically rising housing costs. Climate policy thus directly multiplies the existing housing shortage.

Reasons Behind the Property Price Explosion 

Property prices in Germany have surged for multiple reasons: First, over a decade of massive migration acted as a demand turbo. In urban centers like Berlin, Hamburg, or Frankfurt, the so-called “flow rate”—the part of the housing market ensuring mobility for tenants changing jobs or starting families—is completely blocked by the policy of perpetually open borders. Second, real estate has increasingly served as protection against systematic monetary depreciation, which follows rising public debt. The ECB expands the money supply through bond purchases while keeping interest rates low, steadily pushing property prices and rents higher to maintain profitability.

But that’s not all: the next political assault on real estate came through climate regulation, high investment requirements tied to the green transition, insulation mandates, enforced heating technologies, and construction rules. These act as massive barriers to market entry for new capital. In effect, the state artificially restricts housing supply on three levels: regulation, control, and building mandates.

Germany’s political refusal, for ideological and intellectual reasons, to rationally address migration and economic necessities has dramatic consequences. Last year, Berlin’s central planners set a nationwide housing target of 400,000 units. Yet massive regulatory interventions led to only around 205,000 completions—a decline of over 20% from the previous year. Similar numbers apply in Berlin, where massive migration requires roughly 20,000 new units annually. With only around 14,000 completed, the capital falls short despite state support and public housing. The market tightens, and the government responds with the same medicine—ultimately, those paying the price are tenants earning their own rent and not yet dependent on the growing social safety net.

The question remains how Berlin’s politics will react grosso modo to this massive encroachment on market freedom. The city’s leftist bloc will likely push to further tighten regulations, while Berlin’s CDU, as seen in the inheritance tax debate, quickly falls in line with the SPD. When it comes to increasing the tax burden on the middle class and holding them accountable for the reckless transformation into a green-socialist society, the Merz-CDU stands ready.

Strategic decisions in Germany today will economically burden future generations. The bloated debt state engages in a perverse game of wealth redistribution from the private sector to the bureaucracy. Rising taxes and contributions systematically disperse reform pressure on migration, welfare, or economic regulation. Credit is available; the middle class pays. Germany faces social redistribution battles artificially fueled by the SPD’s rental law.

* * * 

About the author: Thomas Kolbe, a German graduate economist, has worked for over 25 years, he has worked 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 Fri, 01/30/2026 - 02:00

Pages