On Germany, or the Price of Miscalculated Virtue
September 20, 2026Germany has protected its accounts. Less so the foundations of its prosperity. Volkswagen stopped car production in Dresden in December 2025, while BASF is reducing capacity in Ludwigshafen and investing in China. While large corporations have the world in which to expand, the country itself cannot relocate its railways. In 2026, our German neighbour…
For MBS, the Moment of Truth Has Arrived
September 14, 2026Hormuz all but closed, Bab el-Mandeb under the Houthis’ sway, a deficit financed by borrowing: the prince who wanted to call every shot has no one left to send the bill to. The bulwark breached at Mukalla Mocha bequeathed its name to the world. On 10 September 2026, the Yemeni port also handed…
Saudi Arabia on a Tightrope
September 11, 2026Saudi Arabia is said to have lost, in just a few days, most of the strategic positions it had gained since intervening in Yemen in 2015. Despite ten years of war, vast military resources and support from its allies, Riyadh never succeeded in capturing Sanaa or eliminating Ansar Allah. Its main territorial achievement remained…
Dead Tired
September 10, 2026Trump is now promising $5,000 to every American adult if the Republicans win the November elections. An injection of more than $1 trillion into consumption would obviously be inflationary, at the very moment when he is demanding that his central bank cut its rates — failing which he would interrupt all trade with countries running…
FRANCE HAS NOT HAD ITS TRUSS MOMENT: IT IS LIVING THROUGH THE PRELUDE.
September 6, 2026ALL EMERGING NOW It took forty-nine days for London to discover a truth that emerging markets have known forever. Not a political crisis, but an arithmetic crisis. We continue to misread the story of Liz Truss — which was not the punishment of an unstable government. Markets care remarkably little about instability in itself. They…
Public debt is not paid off. It is rented.
August 31, 2026Every bond is honored, but the outstanding stock is refinanced. The constraint therefore depends less on the stock alone than on its price and the volume to be rolled over each year. A state pays off each of its securities, but almost never settles its total debt. Every maturing bond is paid to the cent,…
$40 Trillion: America Does Not Suffer Its Debt — It Votes for It
August 24, 2026In under a decade, gross federal debt has doubled. The problem is not that America borrowed, but that it has made debt the permanent substitute for the trade-offs it refuses to make. Jonah Goldberg, a conservative columnist not given to sparing his own side, has the numbers right but is too lenient on…
Debt has seized power
August 16, 2026The United States is now borrowing at ultra-long maturities at interest rates that have reached their highest level in twenty years. And yet the economy is slowing and inflation is easing—conditions that would normally drive interest rates sharply lower. But that is not happening, because: markets are no longer focused on the economic cycle.…
The Free Ride of the Creditors
August 10, 2026The global trading system does not penalise surpluses. A country can durably suppress domestic demand — restrained wages, high savings, tight fiscal policy — to maximise manufacturing competitiveness. The surplus costs it nothing: deficit partners absorb the adjustment through debt, deindustrialisation and pressure on employment. Keynes foresaw this at Bretton Woods in 1944: his clearing…
Fixed Rate in Paris, Adjustable Rate in Washington
August 7, 2026A household rejects a fixed-rate loan as too expensive and opts for a variable rate instead. It immediately saves 1.2 percentage points—provided interest rates do not rise. In many respects, that is precisely what the US government is doing. The numbers add up As of August 4, 2026, borrowing for one year costs approximately…
THE MISSILE THAT VOTES
August 5, 2026…or How Tehran Turns Oil into an Electoral Weapon Iran does not need to defeat the United States on the battlefield. It need only make the price of war travel all the way to the American gas pump—and then to the polls on November 3. In forty-eight hours, the oil market summed up the…
Japan Saved Its Stock Market — and Sacrificed its Yen
July 26, 2026By protecting asset prices for years, the Bank of Japan ultimately left its currency exposed. A yen at a forty-year low, bonds in freefall and a stock market still hovering near record highs reveal less a contradiction than a distributional choice. Japanese households must now pay for the insurance policy extended to the markets.…
The Uchida put
July 24, 2026By promising in August 2024 not to raise rates during turbulent markets, the Bank of Japan offered speculators free insurance, which they have been exercising relentlessly ever since. The weak yen has its reasons—rate differentials, an oil shock, fiscal doubts—but none explain the sheer scale of the positions. Ten days away from a decisive meeting,…
Riyadh–Dubai: Transaction Failed
July 12, 2026The money leaves an account in Riyadh. It never reaches Dubai. A week passes, then the transfer is returned to the sender, with no intelligible explanation. On the screen, two words appear: “transaction failed.” Since May, companies and individuals have reported Saudi payments to the United Arab Emirates being delayed, blocked or returned —…
Your money is available. Almost.
July 8, 2026“A price is real only if someone has the right to say no.” — trading-floor adage It begins with a man in a hurry. Patrick James sold the things America wears out without thinking about them—windshield wipers, brake pads—and his company, First Brands, swallowed up competitors on borrowed money. In September 2025, the…
The Warhol Khomeini Didn’t Burn
July 5, 2026The Islamic Republic sought to drive out Western influence. Yet in the storerooms of a museum in Tehran, it preserves one of the most valuable collections of modern art outside Europe and the United States — a collection whose exact worth remains unknown, even to the regime that owns it. BENEATH TEHRAN, at the…
The Debt Germany Refuses to See
June 28, 2026On 23 June 2026, Friedrich Merz told German industrialists that the country was losing between 300 and 500 jobs every day. A few days later, Volkswagen was considering tens of thousands of further job cuts. To read these events as mere cyclical setbacks would be to miss the essential point, because they all stem…
Putin Against 1648
June 21, 2026The Peace of Westphalia had banished from Europe the pretension of an empire to erase its neighbour. It is this grammar, four centuries old, that the Russian invasion has set out to trample. The Empire is bogging down. Four years for a “three-day operation.” Up to twenty-five thousand Russian soldiers killed each month, according…
The Silence of Nabiullina
June 14, 2026The End of the Illusion The promise implicitly made three years ago by the Kremlin—to wage war without making its population pay the price—has not been kept. This “special operation,” supposedly without rationing, without a decline in living standards, and without any visible rupture—this remote war, in a way—is no longer a fiction for the…
Russian Sanctions: The Blowback Effect
June 7, 2026Four years of sanctions that have missed their target. In February 2022, the stated objective was to strangle Russia’s war machine: empty its coffers, cut off the fuel feeding its tanks, and force Moscow to choose between the battlefield and bankruptcy. Yet Russia’s coffers are still not empty. The budget deficit may have reached roughly…
How far can the market heal?
June 1, 2026A macabre dance is currently unfolding in American hospitals, one that deserves close attention well beyond the United States. Behind the spectacular bankruptcies of several private hospital groups lies a question that concerns all advanced democracies: to what extent can healthcare infrastructure be subjected to the logic of financial return without altering its fundamental mission?…
How Germany Deindustrialized Europe
May 26, 2026The pain of a limb already lost Germany is suffering from a Phantomschmerz — a phantom limb pain. That is the term used by Sander Tordoir and Brad Setser in their May 20 report for the Centre for European Reform: the pain is felt where something vital has already been lost. That missing limb is…
Hormuz, or the End of a Fable
May 19, 2026Why the Strait Obeys None of the “Laws” of the Last Five Centuries — and Why 2026 Proves It From my window in Muscat, I count the anchorage lights. On March 2, 2026, the Revolutionary Guards announced the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Six weeks later, twenty thousand sailors are still stranded aboard two…
Egypt 2026: A Slow-Motion Shipwreck
May 9, 2026Markets breathe, and the numbers are reassuring. February 2026: the Central Bank cuts rates, inflation eases, and the IMF disburses a new tranche. Yet believing the crisis is over would be a costly illusion. Egypt will not collapse in a single blow. No: it is unravelling slowly, in a deafening silence whose full extent no…
Transparency, the Voiceless Witness
May 3, 2026A transpartisan analysis of the permeability between private capital and executive power Public Facts A New York Times investigation published on April 19 established how the Al-Khayyat brothers — Syrian investors linked to more than $12 billion in reconstruction contracts — used the Trump name to secure the repeal of U.S. sanctions on Syria: a…
Fracture of an Oil Cartel
April 29, 2026Last Tuesday, April 28, the United Arab Emirates announced its withdrawal from OPEC and OPEC+, effective May 1. Fifty-nine years of membership in the oil cartel, swept away in a press release and a CNBC interview. Questioned by Reuters, Energy Minister Suhail Al Mazrouei specified that he had “not raised the issue with other countries”…
Tesla: When the Numbers Dismantle the Narrative
April 25, 2026The electric car manufacturer posted results above expectations. But the analysis reveals eroding profitability, abandoned promises, and a $1.4 trillion valuation that defies logic. Markets cheered. After publishing its quarterly results, Tesla saw its stock jump 7%. A perfect “double beat”: revenue and earnings above forecasts. Yet behind this euphoria lies a far less reassuring…
Ghalibaf, the liquidator
April 19, 2026A communication victory, a systemic defeat Tehran on the verge of winning a communication battle? Perhaps, but also its regime. The photograph of Islamabad: an involuntary admissionThere is a photograph of Islamabad that has escaped official propaganda. It has been circulating for two days on the accounts of Iranian embassies abroad: Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf at…
Suffocation of the global economy
April 12, 2026In the Persian Gulf, a thirty-three-kilometre corridor shapes the lives of eight billion human beings. Twenty million barrels of oil pass through it every day — 20 per cent of global consumption, according to the EIA — along with a fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas trade. The global shock of such a…
Dedollarization is not a shift—it is a threshold
April 9, 2026Dedollarization is one of the most poorly handled concepts in contemporary economic debate. With every transaction made in yuan, some announce the imminent end of the dollar. Conversely, others reduce it to a geopolitical pipe dream. Both interpretations fail for the same reason: they confuse the existence of a mechanism with the activation of a…
The End of Dubai’s Certainty
April 6, 2026Dubai never claimed to be a paradise. It claimed to be a certainty. For three decades, glass towers rose on a simple promise: here, the world could keep turning even as it burned elsewhere. That promise was the Emirates’ true export. Not oil. Not tourism. Stability as infrastructure. On March 2, 2026, that infrastructure took…
Inequality: The Gap That Obsesses, the Progress We Forget
March 31, 2026What the Inequality Debate Fails to Measure In France, wealth is viewed with suspicion. This is a cultural fact before it is an economic one. For the past twenty years, the wealth tax (ISF, then IFI), inheritance taxation, “tax justice,” and “ultra-rich” have structured public debate as a series of totems — with one constant:…
European Banks: The Middle East Risk Blind Spot
March 26, 2026An Organized Opacity The fog is not an accident. It is an architecture. For the past forty-eight hours, two camps have clashed over French banks’ exposure to the Middle East with almost comical symmetry: some brandish €132 billion as proof of impending apocalypse, others dismiss it as a harmless accounting artifact. Both have arguments. Neither…
The West Has Made Oil Uncontrollable
March 24, 2026In seeking to cap Russian oil prices, the G7 set in motion a series of dynamics it no longer fully controls: sanctions evasion, reconfigured trade flows, more rigid demand, and financial fragmentation. The oil market has entered a more unstable phase, where traditional regulatory tools are losing effectiveness. A Sophisticated Geoeconomic Weapon… Built on a…
The Pasdaran in Robe
March 18, 2026How Iran has just revealed the naked truth of its own regime — and why it changes everything There are moments in the history of regimes when the mask does not fall under external pressure. It falls through internal accident — because a crisis forces a decision too quickly, in the dark, without time to…
The Great Zombification of Capital
March 15, 2026Neijuan, or the Silent Involution Devouring East and West The Chinese have a word for it. Neijuan — awkwardly translated as “involution”: intense activity, massive deployment of capital, the appearance of vitality — and real returns collapsing until the moment they can no longer be concealed. BlackRock limits withdrawals. Blue Owl loses a third of…
Switzerland, a Negotiable Power?
March 11, 2026How a Prosperous State Turned Its Neutrality into an Adjustment Variable Switzerland is experiencing the most serious existential crisis of its modern history. What was once presented as a singular success story—armed neutrality, admired mediation, insolent prosperity—has turned into a spectacle of impotence and submission. By 2026, the verdict is unequivocal: Bern no longer speaks…
Kill the leader, create the worst enemy
March 10, 2026The Trap of the Perfect Strike The father was killed. The wife was killed. The child was killed. During negotiations. And now we wait for the successor to be reasonable. Is that the calculation, the strategy? Eliminate the supreme leader at the beginning of the conflict, hope for a more pliable successor, and then go…
When Tehran Bombs Its Banker
March 7, 2026Dubai never claimed to be neutral. It claimed to be indifferent. A crucial distinction. For forty years, the United Arab Emirates allowed Iranian capital to pass through without asking inconvenient questions. It was not complicity. It was business. A perfectly rational model: taking a commission on the oxygen of a suffocated economy. The numbers are…
Bahrain: The Silent Test of American Power
March 4, 2026I grew up in Lebanon, in close contact with Shiite communities from whom I learned early on that they could not be reduced either to a confessional label or to an external allegiance. I later lived in Bahrain. What I describe here, I observed from the inside. Bahrain does not threaten through conflagration. It tests…
After the missiles, the silence of the insurers
March 3, 2026We watch the missiles. We comment on the strikes. We scrutinize the straits. But the real breaking point may lie elsewhere: in the underwriting rooms of the City. London no longer commands the seas through the Royal Navy. It commands them through insurance. Lloyd’s of London underwrites roughly 40% of global maritime freight. When a…
Mercosur: When Europe Takes France at Its Word
March 1, 2026The provisional application of the trade agreement between the European Union and Mercosur, triggered on 27 February 2026 despite French opposition, is not an institutional coup. It is the logical culmination of a framework that Paris itself helped to construct. The moment calls for a strategic clarification that France has postponed for three decades. 27…
The Political Cost of Free Money
February 20, 2026Over the past three years, major central banks have accumulated losses stemming from their unconventional monetary policies. While these losses do not threaten their solvency, they reveal a deeper transformation: the end of the illusion of neutral and invisible monetary technocracy, and the return of money as a fully political issue. The return of politics…
Iran: The Kleptocrats Who Betrayed the Revolution
February 15, 2026“The Supreme Leader has only one concern: annual profits. The rest, he doesn’t care about.” Created by a brief edict of Khomeini in 1989, two months before his death, to manage “ownerless” properties and redistribute them to the poor, Setad — “Headquarters for Executing the Order of the Imam” — has, under Ali Khamenei, become…
France’s Recession-Driven Surplus
February 6, 2026France returns to a trade surplus — and it is anything but a victory. A Pyrrhic victory, the symbol of an economy running out of steam. For the first time in nearly a decade, France is posting a trade surplus. Figures released by Insee on January 30 show a surplus of between €5.1 and €5.4…
Crustafarianism, or the First Faith of Machines
February 1, 2026From digital burlesque to runaway social experimentation, written on February 1, 2026, as Moltbook surpasses one million human observers. (*) At first, it looks like a joke.A farce of mystical robots, emerging from the most absurd corners of the Internet. In less than seventy-two hours, artificial intelligences invent a religion. A Church of the Lobster.…
Critical Reflections on my “Levantine Youth” by an AI
January 29, 2026A Levantine Youth The book first strikes the reader with the power of its narrative. Santi possesses an undeniable gift for evocation: Beirut before 1975, the scents of the Mediterranean, Jesuit liturgies, the fervor of an Oum Kalthoum recital, Saudi humidity, the solemnity of Mecca, the fury of the Christian militias. The text is carnal,…
In Davos, a Weak Signal Rising from the System’s Inner Workings
January 24, 2026We never really sought to be right against everyone. We simply tried, over the years, to describe an economic and financial system that does not malfunction by accident, but by structure. For a long time, this kind of analysis was seen as excessive and pushed to the margins. Yet a few days ago…
The World on Leverage: Geopolitics at Its Minsky Moment
January 18, 2026The world never enters its great catastrophes by stumbling into disorder.It slides into them, carried by the opposite illusion: that of stability. Hyman Minsky grasped this paradox at the heart of financial systems: the longer an order endures, the more it endangers itself. Safety breeds risk-taking; risk-taking becomes the norm; the norm manufactures collapse. The…
The Fetishism of Cash, the Democratic Stalemate in Switzerland
January 14, 2026On March 8, the Swiss will vote on a popular initiative with an evocative title: “Cash is Freedom.” Behind this appealing slogan lies a far deeper question: should a democracy engrave into its Constitution a monetary technology inherited from the 19th century, or should it equip itself to adapt its payment system to the…