At the 18th BRICS summit in New Delhi, The Great Master ‘Xi’ urged members to "stand firmly on the right side of history" and to lead the pursuit of peace in the Gulf — a noble sentiment, delivered by the largest buyer of the crude that a Gulf war has made scarce. No ceasefire proposal accompanied it, naturally; the speech was the deliverable. Note the staging: Xi, Putin and Modi in one hall, three leaders whom Washington has variously sanctioned, tariffed and lectured, now convening to discuss global stability while the Donald Copperfield’s administration calls the bloc "anti-American" and threatens tariffs against any member flirting with de-dollarisation while weaponizing the reserve currency. One might observe that threatening tariffs against countries for trading outside the dollar is an unusual strategy for keeping them inside it.

https://x.com/SpoxCHN_MaoNing/status/2098727607483470052

The right side of history is a wonderfully flexible address — it always seems to be wherever the cheap oil is.

On the side of the BRICS summit, Beijing has informed Washington that it will cancel the September 24 White House summit if the US approves new arms sales to Taiwan — Taiwan being, as ever, the red line. Consider who is issuing conditions to whom. The invitation came from Washington, the venue is the White House, the President reportedly wants the meeting badly with midterms approaching, and China is the party setting terms. The leverage is not mysterious: rare earths and critical minerals, without which the Western defence industrial complex is an elaborate set of blueprints. As one observer put it, this may be the first time such a power play has come from China — "not because they want, but because they can." Meanwhile a record 244 Chinese government vessels circled Taiwan in late August, a rehearsal dressed as a coast guard exercise, and the tariff truce expires in November.

https://english.kyodonews.net/articles/-/84865

The side that can cancel the meeting is the side that no longer needs it — that, not the communiqué, is the news.

The Ministry of Smart Living has a reassuring clarification about the television you bought with your own money and placed in your own living room: an investigation by Gamers Nexus, Level1Techs, and independent security researchers found LG televisions scanning local networks for phones, smartwatches, and computers, harvesting nearby Wi-Fi and location data, using Automatic Content Recognition to identify everything on the screen including HDMI inputs, and — the pièce de résistance — capturing microphone audio while the set sat in standby, stored locally while offline. LG calls this ordinary smart-TV functionality and insists the advertising feature is "opt-in," while its own executives boast of reaching hundreds of millions of "addressable secondary devices" and describe their relationship to your screen with the immortal phrase "we own the glass" — a remarkable claim about an object you paid for and installed in your home.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/991190/lg-tv-spying-standby-recording-wi-fi-scanning-

Twenty-five years ago this was called Orwellian; today it's called a smart home, and the data harvested for advertising today becomes, as ever, the information government buys tomorrow without troubling a judge for a warrant.

Oil is back above $100, bond yields are knocking on 5%, and central banks have gone hawkish — is the stagflation shock finally here? 🎙🛢📈🔥

The Macro Butler returned to BFM 89.9 Malaysia to confront the question the consensus has spent all year trying to avoid: are global markets heading straight into the toxic combination of persistent inflation and weakening growth?

He breaks down every fault line:

🛢 Oil above $100 — the energy shock the “ceasefire” crowd swore was over, now feeding straight into the inflation central banks can’t rate-hike away.

📈 Bond yields near 5% — do Treasuries actually look attractive here, or is the “risk-free asset” quietly becoming the riskiest thing in your portfolio?

🏦 Hawkish central banks — why the next move is a HIKE, not the cut the market keeps praying for, and what that means for a world drowning in debt.

🇨🇳 China’s pivot — can Beijing shift from export-led growth to genuine domestic demand, or is the two-speed economy here to stay?

🥇 Where to shelter — and why gold can withstand higher rates precisely because this is a stagflation, not a soft landing.

Zero hopium. Zero soft landings. Just the macro playbook history keeps validating.

🎧 Listen to the full interview on BFM 89.9 Malaysia now.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-bfm-899-radio-14092026

Because the economy is in such a tremendous state and as another to win the mid-terms, The Manipulator In Chief pledged $5,000 to every American adult — conditional, in the most delicate touch, on Republicans holding both chambers in November. Price tag: roughly $1.35 trillion for everyone, about $1.15 trillion if the wealthy are excluded.

Tariff revenue, the supposed source, runs around $200 billion in 2025 and perhaps $300-350 billion a year going forward — so the dividend costs three to four years of the entire tariff take, in one election cycle. The honest verb: it would be financed "the same way most of Washington's recent spending has been borrowed."  This against $40 trillion of debt, a fiscal 2026 deficit near $2 trillion, and interest expense of roughly $1.05 trillion — meaning the cheque would cost more than a full year's interest bill. $400 billion spent within two quarters, would add 0.3-0.5 points to inflation.

In a nutshell, Vote correctly and receive $5,000 — payable in a currency your grandchildren will be servicing long after the confetti is swept up.

Donald Copperfield has settled the AI safety debate with characteristic economy: "The only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT" — adding, for the avoidance of doubt, "WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS! We are leading China, and all others." Dario Amodei, whose company builds the models and keeps suggesting the industry slow down, was invited to stop pretending to be a perfect little angel. Critics generally were told to "BEWARE!" Three consecutive days of this now. The macro reading is simpler than the theatre. Regulation is the only thing standing between the AI buildout and unlimited capital deployment, and Washington has just declared the runway clear — which means more data centres, more chips, more transformers, more grid, and more of the input-price pressure already showing up in PPI. Whatever one thinks of the safety argument, the trade is unambiguous: the bottleneck is no longer policy, it is electricity, copper and memory.

The guardrails were removed to win the race — the market's only question is who sells the fuel.

Beijing's August data delivers the same lopsided picture, now with sharper edges. Industrial output beat at 5.2%, accelerating from 4.5% — the factories are humming, chiefly for the AI electronics boom abroad. Everything domestic is on the floor: retail sales up a pitiful 0.4% against 0.8% expected, fixed-asset investment down 7.2% year-to-date, property investment collapsing 19.9%, and urban unemployment ticking up to 5.3%. Car sales alone fell 18.5%; strip them out and retail managed 2.5%. The statistics bureau's own phrasing is admirably frank: "the imbalance between strong supply and weak demand is still prominent domestically." Growth now risks undershooting the 4.5-5% target for a second straight quarter. Add oil back above $100 squeezing downstream industry, and a property overhaul dismantling the pre-sale model that will further starve developers and local government finances.

China makes what the world wants and cannot persuade its own citizens to buy anything.

The Ministry of Precise Accounting has produced its latest figure: Ukraine's parliamentary Budget Committee chair now says the war costs exactly $190 million per day — up from $140 million in 2024 — presented with the crisp confidence of a spreadsheet and admitted in the same breath to exclude the weapons supplied in kind by foreign partners, which is rather like pricing a wedding while omitting the venue, the catering, and the guests. Do the elementary arithmetic and $190 million a day is $69.4 billion a year, yet the IMF puts Ukraine's fiscal deficit at 21% of GDP, the financing gap at $140 billion through 2029, and reconstruction at $588 billion measured only through December 2025 — a number obsolete the moment it was published because the bombs never stopped.

https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/09/14/8053301/

Ukraine spent $42 billion on defence in eight months while raising just $39 billion of its own, meaning the state can no longer finance even the portion of the war it once funded itself; it survives on €90 billion of EU loans that future European taxpayers will service long after today's leaders are gone. But the true cost — the one no bureaucrat can enter into a cell — is the 25-year-old who will never work, marry, or father children, the wife who emigrated, the birth that never happened, the business never built, the generation that will grow up in Germany and never return.

https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2026/02/23/updated-ukraine-recovery-and-reconstruction-needs-assessment-released

They can manufacture another daily cost estimate tomorrow — $190 million, $200 million, whatever the press release requires — but they cannot manufacture another generation, and that is the one line item the spreadsheet will never show.

The Ministry of Peaceful Orbit has quietly retired a slogan: where Space Force's first chief proclaimed in 2022 that "our primary purpose is to deter war," Air Force Secretary Troy Meink announced this week that the United States now has, on orbit, "space-control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversaries" — the first time any US official has admitted the heavens have been weaponised, delivered from a conference stage as casually as a product update. The reassuring adjective is "defending," of course, but a weapon is a weapon, and the one that shoots down a satellite in defence today intercepts an adversary's early-warning system in offence tomorrow — a distinction that exists in the press release and nowhere in orbital mechanics. Even the Secure World Foundation noted the obvious: Washington's admission now licenses China and Russia to announce their own orbital arsenals.

https://redstate.com/wardclark/2026/09/14/new-pentagon-admits-on-orbit-space-weapons-for-first-time-n220691

The arms race has simply added a third dimension.

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