Belgrade. Budapest. It’s not the classic tourist itinerary – but by his very footprints, Xi Jinping’s historic state visit is redrawing the power map of Europe. What does the continent look like once he’s done stomping about?  Meanwhile, the Pound is in deep trouble - the Egyptian Pound, that is.  As the land of the pharaohs takes a 45 % haircut on its currency, Egypt is spreading its multipolar tentacles. They’ve announced that they’re going to be settling their trade debts in currencies...

This week, as advertised on Twitter dot com, the lads are answering your questions. Among other topics, they cover: Rent-seeking behaviour in the West. Airbus. The German elite. The Mexican-American standoffBook recommendations. The life-changing magic of JM KeynesAnd memes. Of course, this is also a premium week.  So  to get the full two hour show, you’ll have to be signed up on Patreon.  Sign up is easy.  Go to https://www.Patreon.com/multipolarity.  It’s five Dollars, Pounds, or...

Like Germany hiding in the Euro, China have long played the game of keeping their currency soft, to juice their exports.   But now, with the accelerator still jammed to the floor on US inflation, it seems that the powers in Beijing might be looking to devalue the Rimimbi even further.          Everyone plays currency games - the trick is not to get caught. And the problem for China might be that they’re on the brink of embarrassing their adversaries.  Meanwhile, what happens when a miracle...

A diplomatic incident in Latin America has somehow become the focal point for an ever-expanding range of stories - from the Venezuelan elections, to US energy policy to Ecuadorian banana exports to Russia.  Leading even coolheaded observers to ponder the question: are we approaching the Latin American embassy incident singularity?  Meanwhile, there are always good tariffs and bad tariffs - and in announcing his new shipbuilding policies, this week Joe Biden’s giving us both a plate of cheese...

Little Rocket Man has a new toy. This month, Kim Jong Un unveiled a Bond-villain-like missile with an extending tip. On that tip was what looks to be a hypersonic glide vehicle.  A hypersonic glide vehicle is the real deal. They're extremely fast. They can manoeuvre at those high speeds. And we don’t yet know if it’s possible to shoot them down.  On paper, this means that North Korea has more advanced potentially-nuclear missiles than the West.  On paper, this is bad news.  But the story...

The Atlanticists versus the Autonomists -  the European civil war coming soon to a bureaucracy near you.  It’s long been a theme of this show that the continent is being slowly capsized by its long term problems, related to energy and productivity.  We’ll be picking through three news items that tell the short term story of the continent’s woes.   Terrible producer confidence numbers out of Germany, oil prices back to a fresh spike even in the teeth of an incipient recession, and Poland’s...

New research from Bloomberg says that Beijing is steering the Chinese economy away from the recent real estate boom, and into high tech manufacturing.  It’s a drive estimated to be worth 19% of GDP by 2026.  Running the numbers, not only is China Collapse Theory once again proved false, the market may even have under-priced how much gas there still is in the tank.    Meanwhile, the Francis Scott Key Bridge has collapsed, effectively blockading Baltimore Port for a long time to come.  The 80...

This is a special edition of Multipolarity on  The Economic Consequences Of The War.  In 1919, JM Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Predicting the death of the old world order after Europe’s first unsuccessful attempt at suicide.  We aren’t yet at peace, but the economic consequences of the present war in the middle of Europe are starting to come into view.  Consequences for NATO as a new study shows that in order to meet their target of 2% of GDP, European Nato members...

NVIDIA has become a stock market behemoth on the back of their AI-friendly graphics chips. Last week saw them hit a $2.19 trillion market capitalisation. So are they the future of the globe’s most info-critical resource - or a sign that we’re entering the Pets.com era of the AI age? Meanwhile, after months of delays and diplomatic blocking operations, Sweden and Finland are officially in NATO.  But with past and future president Trump signalling that he will be less than interested in...

Does the housing market obey the laws of supply and demand?  We say no.  Join us for a controversial, possibly mind-blowing journey into the heart of darkness, into an upside-down-world that set Twitter on fire this week.  Victoria Nuland has fallen on her sword. Or someone else’s sword. Whatever happened to America’s third-ranking diplomat, suddenly retiring at 62 while her President hobbles on at 80, it does seem there are suddenly a lot of swords about.  Does the fall of notoriously...

"Hamburgers will decide America's future". So says Malcolm Kyeyune in a recent essay ruminating on the American journalist Tucker Carlson's recent visit to Moscow where he famously - or, perhaps, infamously - purchased a burger at Russia's new McDonald's clone, 'Tasty, that's it'.  Kyeyune sees Carlson's culinary adventure as reminiscent of Mikhail Gorbachev's decision to do an advert in which Russians would debate whether the fall of the Evil Empire was worth the introduction of fast food...

The numbers are finally in. Israel’s economy has contracted 20 per cent year on year. It seems the only consolation is that it’s still doing better than the economy of Gaza.   How long can this level of decline go on?  With no end to the war in sight, and a new front in Lebanon cracking open, are we witnessing Israel’s fall from the first rank of the OECD?  Meanwhile, remember the war no one cared about?  You know – the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War? Of September 2020? Between Armenia and...

Bloomberg says “Germany’s Days as an Industrial Superpower Are Coming to an End”. Which poses at least one serious question - has Bloomberg been listening to Multipolarity?  As the industrial decline narrative goes mainstream, it seems like the copium has finally run out in the Chancellories of Europe.   Meanwhile, reports in the West of a Chinese bust have reached the kind of fevered tone normally associated with the final days of a boom. Yet somehow retail spending is growing at 7.4 per...

The US is now bombing Iranian targets, via B1 bombers that have to be flown direct from Texas to perform the task. This is an interesting new form of madness. As the West is pulled ever-deeper into the quagmire, we're taking a low road/high road approach to prediction: attempting to model the potential for serious conflict right up to an Iraq-style land war invasion. Then, we're devoting the second half of the show to thinking more strategically, about the future of the region, the...

All the greatest romances are love/hate.  As The Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor of geopolitics, Iran and America have always danced a dance of angry fascination with each other.  Now, as the Middle East burns, their kismet is truly aflame.   With an overstretched Joe Biden about to call in the airstrikes, we’re in the foxhole, figuring out if they’re actually gonna go all the way this time.  Or if this is just one more round of heavy petting.   Ever since a British general let slip...

As the 8th round of Tomahawk missiles hit the Houthis in ten days, a senior White House official caused guffaws when he proclaimed the attacks aren’t working - but that we should keep on doing them anyway. That senior official’s name? Joseph P Biden. So if the President himself can’t come to a logical line on what’s going on, what hope is there for his underlings? We’ll have the latest from the Red Sea carcrash.  In Britain, the new Defence Secretary Grant Shapps is ramping up the rhetoric,...

With the world's biggest container ships presently rounding the Cape of Good Hope, Vasco da Gama-style, the Lads are calling it: inflation is coming back. This could prove to be a sticky situation for the West's leaders. After all, we were supposed to have seen out the worst by now. Everything was wagered on turning the page in anticipation of election season in the autumn. So what happens to all those carefully laid plans?   Meanwhile, Lloyd Austin didn’t tell his boss he was ducking out...

The Global American Empire has had its honour impugned by the Houthi Rebels, sometimes called a 'ragtag army'. But as The Lads point out, that characterisation just doesn't work. High-end weapons, Iranian training, and a capacity to melt into the landscape will make 'winning' the war for control of the Red Sea an operational nightmare. With no clear goals, no obvious win criteria, and ever-more provocation to come, they think the transatlantic alliance is stepping into quicksand. This is a...

Remember the Ever Given? The boat that got stuck in the Suez Canal?  Well, thanks to the Houthis, traffic in the canal is down by almost as much as when it was plugged. It seems the red sea crisis is about to inject an inflation spike much like the one the Ever Given gave us. Only, this time, the memes will be much less jolly.  North of Israel, the war on two fronts is coming on nicely. With the assassination of Hamas’ deputy and a Hezbollah commander on Lebanese soil, we analyse the...

This week, we're pulling the scheduled predictions for 2024 episode, to do some century-wide predicting. The Houthi incursion into the Red Sea, that we've been reporting for a couple of months, has reached a new peak. It now seems as though it is more than simply a new front in a regional war. It may even threaten the Pax Americana. US attempts to form a counter-force coalition of the willing have foundered, and more and more it feels as though the forces of the BRICS would like the Red Sea...

This week on Multipolarity, something a bit different. We want to map the DC brain, from the inside. Somewhere, inside the Washington Beltway, are a bunch of very smart people who often think alike. Be they at the State Department, the Pentagon, CIA, other parts of the Federal government, or think tanks, they have been tasked with projecting the global power of the world’s greatest empire. They make the decisions. Someone has to. And just as France has its Enarques. Or China has its...

Most people have never heard of Guyana. Many think it’s in Africa. But Venezuelans know their CIA World Factbook inside and out. They’ve long claimed that its Western regions are rightfully theirs. And now that the Guyanese have struck oil, the Maduro regime want to take those areas by conquest. The question isn’t can Venezuela - population 30m - knock over Guyana - population 790 000. With the West presently preoccupied on two other continents, it’s: who is going to stop them?   This week...

The Bank of England is at risk of going broke — and it wants both a bailout from the taxpayer and the ability to raise taxes all of its own. Exsqueeze me, baking powder? We’ll be digging into the modern model of Central Bank Independence the B of E represents. And asking whether the big brains of monetary policy have actually invented much more than a self-licking ice cream cone.  Yankee Go Home - that’s the subtext of Victor Orban’s latest speech. Orban is often ahead of the curve when...

Ireland erupts in 'the biggest riots since 1916'.  The United Kingdom government dishes out its final budget before oblivion beckons, confirming what we've known for a while. With interest repayments now nearly 10 per cent of spending, there is an Argentinian world of pain just over the horizon. There's something irredeemably broken about the British Isles this week.  So in this Premium Episode, the lads are going hard and deep on Europe's North-Western Archipelago.