Talk World

Late Thursday night Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, marched a second criminal referral to the Justice Department—this one aimed squarely at Fed governor Lisa Cook. Donald Trump, not coincidentally, is now trying to fire her. The official charge? On government ethics forms Cook allegedly low-balled the value of three properties and—here comes the hook—secured a mortgage under what the White House is calling “fraudulent terms.” A paperwork squabble over a house? Hardly. Trump has discovered that the fastest path to the Fed’s printing press runs straight through America’s front doors and backyards. The backstory is simple: once Trump 2.0 took shape, the president-elect’s inner circle concluded that the single most lucrative lever in the United States is still the power to create dollars. That lever, however, sits inside the Federal Reserve—an institution arm-in-arm with Wall Street. A frontal assault would ignite a market meltdown. So Trump is waging a proxy wa...

A single, brutal truth flashed across the sky over Kyiv at dawn on August 28: Europe’s long summer is finished. At 5:03 a.m. a Russian cruise missile slammed into a nondescript cluster of buildings on the left bank of the Dnipro. Twenty seconds later a second missile followed—double-tap, the signature of an execution. Ukrainian authorities insist the site was a civilian facility and have declared today a city-wide day of mourning. Yet within hours the SBU locked the area down tighter than a crime scene, and both the EU mission and the British Council complained that their adjacent offices had suffered “damage.” If it was only a kindergarten or a warehouse, why seal it off—and why summon Russia’s ambassadors in Brussels and London the same afternoon? Because the address is almost certainly the forward headquarters of NATO’s “advisory teams” in Ukraine. For months those teams have quietly run training ranges, satellite uplinks and weapons-repair shops inside Kyiv. Russia has known, but u...

  In just 24 hours last week, the U.S. military suffered two ominous mishaps: 09:53 Eastern, 20 August. A single-seat F/A-18E Super Hornet splashed into the Pacific. The pilot ejected and was fished out 88 minutes later, but the jet—price tag $70.4 million—was a total loss. CBS counts this as the sixth F-18 the Navy has written off in ten months. Meanwhile in Okinawa. The 25,000-ton amphibious dock-landing ship USS New Orleans —a sister in size to China’s Type 071—burst into flames at White Beach Naval Facility. Japanese firefighters offered help; the Americans waved them off, insisting the blaze would be “quickly contained.” It burned for twelve straight hours. Deja-vu. In July 2020 the Bonhomme Richard , a 40,000-ton “Lightning Carrier” slated to carry F-35Bs, cooked for four days in San Diego and was later scrapped. Same story: open flame, no quick fix, end of a capital asset. Why does this keep happening? Conventional wisdom blames “high op-tempo and low maintenance”—the milita...

A short dispatch from the front lines of industrial policy. Seoul is on edge this week. On August 25 South Korea’s new President, Lee Jae-myung, will meet Donald Trump in Washington. Ordinarily a U.S. –Korea summit barely moves the KOSPI. This time Korean executives, editorial writers, and chat-room day-traders are all sweating the same headline: “Commerce Secretary Lutnick Eyes Equity Stakes in Exchange for Chip-Act Funds—Targets: Micron, TSMC, Samsung.” Samsung is Korean. That is why the anxiety is spiking. But this is no longer a trial balloon. The template has already been executed—on an American company, no less. The victim was Intel, and the choreography was brutal. Act I: The Ambush August 7, with zero warning, Trump posted on Truth Social that Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan must resign “immediately” because of “serious conflicts of interest.” No details, no legal process—just a presidential shove. Act II: The Reversal Five days later Trump hosted Tan at Mar-a-Lago flanked by Commerce Sec...

A short note from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. During her speech at the annual Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde blurted out what policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic have quietly understood for two years: the war in Ukraine has been an unexpected windfall—not just for the United States, but for Europe, too. Here is the sound-bite that will live on: “The large post-pandemic inflow of foreign-born workers has helped Europe bring inflation down without a sharp growth sacrifice.” She added that without those workers, Germany’s GDP would be roughly 6 % smaller than it was in 2019, and that Spain’s surprisingly strong recovery is “largely thanks to foreign labor.” That is a remarkable confession—especially when you consider where it was made. Why Jackson Hole? Every August, the Kansas City Fed herds the world’s top monetary officials to Grand Teton National Park—think snow-capped peaks, trout streams, and more elk than people. The meeting sta...