Zerohedge

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Statistical games can be played to mask the realities of our neofeudal economy, but “narrative control” can’t obscure the facts or the banquet of consequences that these realities have set.

Not everyone in America gained ground as a result of the rampant hyper-financialization and hyper-globalization of the 21st century. Let’s begin our analysis of who gained ground and who lost ground in the year 2001, when China entered the WTO (World Trade Organization) and offshoring / globalization shifted into high gear and when the Federal Reserve began ramping up its financialization / monetary manipulation–oops, sorry, policy interventions.

The top 1% and the top 10% gained ground. The bottom 90% lost ground, especially the bottom 50%. Wage earners lost ground, while corporate insiders, financiers, speculators using leverage and those lucky enough to be born long enough ago to buy assets at pre-bubble valuations gained ground.

If you want to argue with these facts, argue with the Federal Reserve Database. All these charts are drawn from the St. Louis Federal Reserve FRED Database.

Let’s start with the varying multiples generated by asset bubbles since 2001.

• NASDAQ up 9.3X

• Corporate profits up 6.2X

• Case-Shiller Housing Index up 3X

Those are some serious bubbles, given that $1 in 2001 is $1.80 in today’s currency.

If the NASDAQ index had risen at the same rate as inflation since 2001, it would be 3,340, not 17,166.

Corporate profits would be $1.26 trillion annually, rather than $4.3 trillion. Hmm, $3 trillion a year is a nice chunk of extra change for gutting national security, quality and durability by offshoring essential industries.

The Case-Shiller Housing Index would be up from 110 in 2001 to 200 today, rather than 323.

So how did each household sector do since 2001?

• Net worth of top 1% up 5X

• Net worth of 90-99% up 3.9X

• Net worth 50-90% up 3.2X

• Net worth bottom 50% up 3X

How much of the nation’s total household net worth does each sector own now in dollars?

• Total net worth: $160.2 trillion

• top 1%: $49.4 trillion

• 90%-99%: $58.3 trillion

• Top 10%: $107.7 trillion

• Bottom 90%: $52.5 trillion

• Bottom 50%: $4 trillion

Note that the top 1% own roughly the same net worth as the bottom 90%.

How much of the nation’s total household net worth does each sector own now as a percentage of total net worth?

• Total net worth: $160.2 trillion

• Top 1%: 31%

• 90%-99%: 36.5%

• TOP 10%: 67.5%

• Bottom 50%: 2.5%

• 50%-90%: 30%

• BOTTOM 90%: 32.5%

Since wealth is concentrated in the top layer of each sector–the top 1% own the lion’s share of the top 10%’s net worth, and the top 10% of the 50% to 90% sector own the lion’s share of that sector’s net worth–we can say with confidence that the top 20% own roughly 80% of the net worth–in line with the Pareto Distribution (the 80/20 rule).

What’s lost in this aggregate number is the extreme concentration of income-producing wealth (and thus political power) in the top 0.1% of the citizenry and the mere crumbs left to the bottom 60%. As many of us have pointed out over the past 15 years, the only accurate description for this system is neofeudal, where a New Nobility owns the wealth and political power, the bottom 80% are modern-day debt-serfs and the “middle class” is now the 90% to 99% sector, with those in the 80% to 90% sector having just enough home equity to fancy themselves “middle class” in name if not in ownership of income-producing assets or political influence.

What do we call a system in which the top 1% own roughly the same net worth as the bottom 90%? Neofeudal. Any other description is misdirection / propaganda aimed at protecting the interests of the Nobility at the expense of the serfs.

The NASDAQ stock market index: up 10X at its recent peak.

Corporate profits up 6.2X as surveillance pricing, monopoly price-gouging, crapification, planned obsolescence and extortion have worked marvelously well in stripmining the citizenry to enrich the top 10% who own 90% of all stocks, the “shareholders.”

Wage earners’ share of the nation’s income has been slashed over the past five decades. Unsurprisingly, hyper-financialization and hyper-globalization did nothing to reverse this decline of American labor in favor of global capital.

If housing fell 40% from its current valuation, it would return to the trend line.

Here’s a chart of net worth since 1950. Approximately $100 trillion was added above and beyond what inflation dictated.

Some percentage of the bottom 50% benefited from the housing bubble, but even with the bump to $4 trillion in net worth, the bottom 50% owns a grand total of 2.5% of total net worth.

Here’s the 50% to 90% sector:

Here’s the 90% to 99% sector:

Here’s the top 1% sector:

Statistical games can be played to mask the realities of our neofeudal economy and society. But narrative control by the well-paid apologist-punditry class–everyone’s doing great because I’m doing great–can’t obscure the facts or the banquet of consequences that these realities have set.

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Global stocks were steady overnight, with U.S. equity futures marginally higher, as sentiment improved following reports that President Trump plans to ease tariffs on foreign auto parts used in U.S.-made vehicles. The news comes as Trump marks his first 100 days in office, ahead of a rally in Michigan scheduled for this evening. 

The Wall Street Journal, citing multiple sources familiar with the plans, reported that the proposed tariff rollback would offer major relief to automakers producing vehicles within the U.S. borders. These companies have been battered by the trade war due to their deeply entrenched supply chains spanning Asia and Europe. 

Sources added more color to what the tariff reprieve looks like: 

The decision will mean that automakers paying Trump’s automotive tariffs won’t also be charged for other duties, such as those on steel and aluminum, according to people familiar with the policy.

The move would be retroactive, the people said, meaning that automakers could be reimbursed for such tariffs already paid. The 25% tariff on finished foreign-made cars went into effect early this month.

The administration will also modify its tariffs on foreign auto parts—slated to be 25% and effective May 3—allowing automakers to be reimbursed for those tariffs up to an amount equal to 3.75% of the value of a U.S.-made car for one year. The reimbursement would fall to 2.5% of the car’s value in a second year, and then be phased out altogether.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told WSJ in a statement about Trump’s move to ease the pain for automakers: 

President Trump is building an important partnership with both the domestic automakers and our great American workers.

This deal will be a major victory for the president’s trade policy by rewarding companies who are already manufacturing domestically, while providing a runway to manufacturers who have expressed their commitment in investing in America and expanding domestic manufacturing.

In a separate statement to Bloomberg, Lutnick said:

This deal is a major victory for the president’s trade policy by rewarding companies who manufacture domestically while providing runway to manufacturers who have expressed their commitment to invest in America and expand their domestic manufacturing.

Trump’s trade war is an urgent move to shift critical supply chains out of China, either by relocating them to a friendlier shore or reshoring them. 

Ford CEO Jim Farley commented on the WSJ report:

Ford welcomes and appreciates these decisions by President Trump, which will help mitigate the impact of tariffs on automakers, suppliers and consumers.

We will continue to work closely with the administration in support of the president’s vision for a healthy and growing auto industry in America. Ford sees policies that encourage exports and ensure affordable supply chains to promote more domestic growth as essential. 

This news comes ahead of Trump’s trip to Michigan to celebrate the first 100 days of his second term in office. The president will speak at Macomb Community College in Warren, about 20 miles north of Detroit, around 6:00 p.m. local time.

Ahead of Trump’s first 100 days, crazed Michigan Democratic Rep. Shri Thanedar filed articles of impeachment against the president, stating:

I have introduced articles of impeachment against President Trump. When Trump ignores the Constitution, Congress, and the courts, he is not ‘fighting for America.’ He is tearing it down and endangering our democracy.

Trump’s pivot on auto tariffs represents the latest development in his ever-changing trade strategy to friend-shore or re-shore critical supply chains.

As the 2025 rental season kicks off, square footage is becoming the new currency for renters. After a decade of shrinking apartments, new data from RentCafe shows that average unit sizes grew again in 2024, reaching 908 square feet — a reversal driven largely by market demand for more livable space, according to RentCafe.

In 2024, the average U.S. apartment size grew to 908 square feet, reversing a decade-long trend of shrinking floorplans. Studios, one-bedrooms, and two-bedrooms all expanded slightly, gaining between 4 and 13 square feet. Florida cities Tallahassee and Gainesville topped the list for largest average apartment sizes, while Seattle retained its title for the smallest.

Among major markets, San Francisco led the growth with an average unit increase of 59 square feet over the last decade, followed closely by Queens, New York. Marietta, GA, saw the most dramatic jump overall, with new apartments adding 100 square feet compared to those built before 2015, highlighting a broader market shift toward larger, more livable rental spaces.

Studios, one-bedroom, and two-bedroom units all expanded slightly over the past year, adding between 4 and 13 square feet. Developers, responding to consumer preference, heavily favored one-bedroom units, which made up nearly half of all new apartments built.

The RentCafe report says that Florida cities Tallahassee and Gainesville lead the nation for the largest new apartments, with Tallahassee units averaging 1,130 square feet despite a small decline from older stock. Baton Rouge, Knoxville, and Marietta, GA, round out the top five. In fact, Marietta posted the largest growth overall, with new apartments boasting 100 more square feet compared to those built before 2015.

At the same time, big-city hubs like San Francisco and New York’s Queens are seeing apartments expand after years of contraction. San Francisco units grew by 59 square feet over the last decade, while Queens added 39 square feet. Still, Seattle remains the city with the smallest new apartments, averaging just 649 square feet — a steep 57-square-foot drop compared to a decade ago. 

Not every city followed the trend toward larger spaces. Arlington, TX, saw the sharpest decline, with new units shrinking by an average of 215 square feet. Detroit, Memphis, and Birmingham also experienced significant reductions as developers prioritized smaller, more affordable units, the report concludes. 

RentCafe’s report, based on Yardi Matrix data, analyzed apartment sizes across the 100 largest U.S. rental markets as of February 2025. The findings reveal a clear shift: where the market allows, renters are demanding — and developers are delivering — more breathing room.

Authored by Alexander Zemek-Parkinson via BondVigiliantes.com,

Is there a relationship between the price of gold and bonds? Most vigilantes would agree that there is some correlation based on inflation, with bond yields and the price of gold rising when inflation is on the way up, and vice versa. Most “goldbugs” would probably agree with this assessment. They would say that the metal was a repository of long-term value and was an effective medium for protecting purchasing power. The late Julian Baring was the man with the golden fund1. He presented the relative purchasing power of gold in terms of fixed-price menus at the Savoy, an exercise he frequently undertook with M&G’s former CEO Paddy Lineker. Baring’s results were somewhat mixed, but there can be no doubt of his conclusion that, over time, the gold price not only equalled but outpaced the rate of inflation. It would be easy to conclude, in today’s world of rising bond yields and a historically high gold price, that there is a correlation, and that it is still valid.

But is it? An answer to this can be found in Ian Fleming’s novel, Goldfinger.

Before we turn our attention to Bond, Treasury Bond… Let me enlighten you on the secret life of Ian Fleming. He worked at (but not for) the Bank of England, and in both the film and the novel, he stages a well-crafted scene in one of its palatial offices. He introduces us to a fictional Colonel Smithers, whose job it was to monitor the quantity of gold in the vaults and to stem any bullion ‘leakage’ (smuggling to you and me). Enter the evil Auric Goldfinger, who leads Bond on a merry chase across Europe and the US.

Part of that chase takes Bond to Geneva, where Fleming attended university. Here’s where things get interesting. Goldfinger’s lair where he melts down his gold Rolls-Royce, is on the outskirts of a small village called Coppet4. Fleming gives a detailed description of the village’s ancient chateau, the small forest behind it and the position of a building which houses his foundry. This all exists in real life, except that the foundry is actually the tomb of one of the earliest Bond Vigilantes: the banker Jacques Necker, who was a finance minister under Louis XVI. Necker was popular because he thought debt finance was preferable to placing a heavier tax burden on the public.

Central to Necker’s concept of debt finance was the establishment of a central bank along British principles and a beneficial partnership between sovereign and private investors. System and laws were all-important. He succeeded in raising substantial loans for the beleaguered King as the nation’s political scene deteriorated. His scheme worked for a while, but the debt he created expired worthless. Necker got the sack, the King met the guillotine and a popular government was installed. In its place came the revolutionary interest-free fiat currency called the Assignat. These bills came with a dark warning on their borders5: “Death to counterfeiters, and rewards to denouncers”.

I’ve decided that none of this is a coincidence (or I wouldn’t have an article). What is Fleming actually trying to tell us? The message is clear that there is a link between debt and the value of gold. But does it hold true for inflation?

Below is a graph that is going to come as no surprise to the contemporary Bond Vigilante. It shows an observable correlation between bond yields and CPI. When inflation goes up, bond yields go up. When it comes down, bond yields come down. Nothing exciting.

Source: Bloomberg

Now, let’s look at that again with the same bonds but set against the price of gold instead. We are looking for moments where the yield on the bonds fall and the gold price goes up to seek out some form of correlation between the two asset classes that we are told by textbooks exists.

Source: Bloomberg

Admittedly, a tricky graph there but there are a couple of times where we can see this in action. We see in ’82, ’87 and ’07 clear points where the yields fell and the gold price went up reflecting the ‘flight to safety’ that these trades tend to represent. So we are seeing a negative correlation in action. This sort of thing happens at times of market distress and when things in global markets look dicey.

Of late though, once you dial in on the rolling correlation between the price of gold and the real yield of US Treasuries over the last 20 years, that relationship has begun to break down. In the last 5 years, the correlation has hovered around zero thanks to the recent rise in the gold price. So quite literally there is no correlation between the two assets (and we know there has certainly been market distress recently).

Source: https://www.longtermtrends.net/gold-vs-real-yields/

So what then should we make of gold recently breaking the $3,000 mark? Is this significant for bond markets? Yes.

Things become clearer when we start considering broader macroeconomic movements over the last 50 years. From the 1980s onward, global market dynamics started to change with the introduction of Reaganomics, the Cold War summit and the widespread acceptance of globalisation. The world got smaller and the peace dividend grew, and with it came the development of broad mechanisms for an international system of freer trade. To the astonishment of Julian Baring, bond prices flew as global inflation fell and international cooperation improved. Bond risk premia dwindled.

Then, with the credit crisis of 2007 and the sovereign debt crisis of 2009, gold got moving again and made up for lost time. Why? Fear and uncertainty needled their way back into the bond markets and to gold’s residual value. In both government and commercial bond markets, investors began to demand higher yields8 because the benefits of globalisation seemed to be fast-disappearing9. We now appear to face a more uncertain macroeconomic environment, and quantitative easing, which eventually supported bond prices at artificially high levels, has gone into reverse. Just as the peace dividend now seems to be on the wane, the risk vectors have begun to rise.

Fleming, at the time of Goldfinger, was facing another series of global transformations: the wane of the Bretton Woods system, the possible change of the pound to a fiat currency and their effect upon the fabric of British social and political constructs10.  

Gold has begun to behave like wampum, tulip bulbs and beanie babies11, bubble assets whose unexplained residual value eclipsed their intrinsic value and whose price reflects something other than the commodity it represents. To return to Mr. Baring, the Savoy index would now tell us that a single gold sovereign could buy you roughly 15 meals (a historic high). But where exactly is gold’s additional residual value coming from? I’d return to our friend Colonel Smithers, who supplied the moral to this, our Goldfinger parable.

Whilst bonds are the barometer of trust and faith in a system, Smithers maintains that…

“Gold is the talisman of fear”.

 Cue the Bond theme tune...

The gap between human and machine reasoning is narrowing…and fast.

Over the past year, AI systems have continued to see rapid advancements, surpassing human performance in technical tasks where they previously fell short, such as advanced math and visual reasoning.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Kayla Zhu, visualizes AI systems’ performance relative to human baselines for eight AI benchmarks measuring tasks including:

1. Image classification

2. Visual reasoning

3. Medium-level reading comprehension

4. English language understanding

5. Multitask language understanding

6. Competition-level mathematics

7. PhD-level science questions

8. Multimodal understanding and reasoning

This visualization is part of Visual Capitalist’s AI Week, sponsored by Terzo. Data comes from the Stanford University 2025 AI Index Report.

An AI benchmark is a standardized test used to evaluate the performance and capabilities of AI systems on specific tasks.

AI Models Are Surpassing Humans in Technical Tasks

Below, we show how AI models have performed relative to the human baseline in various technical tasks in recent years.

Year	Perfomance relative to the human baseline (100%)	Task
2012	89.15%	Image classification
2013	91.42%	Image classification
2014	96.94%	Image classification
2015	99.47%	Image classification
2016	100.74%	Image classification
2016	80.09%	Visual reasoning
2017	101.37%	Image classification
2017	82.35%	Medium-level reading comprehension
2017	86.49%	Visual reasoning
2018	102.85%	Image classification
2018	96.23%	Medium-level reading comprehension
2018	86.70%	Visual reasoning
2019	103.75%	Image classification
2019	36.08%	Multitask language understanding
2019	103.27%	Medium-level reading comprehension
2019	94.21%	English language understanding
2019	90.67%	Visual reasoning
2020	104.11%	Image classification
2020	60.02%	Multitask language understanding
2020	103.92%	Medium-level reading comprehension
2020	99.44%	English language understanding
2020	91.38%	Visual reasoning
2021	104.34%	Image classification
2021	7.67%	Competition-level mathematics
2021	66.82%	Multitask language understanding
2021	104.15%	Medium-level reading comprehension
2021	101.56%	English language understanding
2021	102.48%	Visual reasoning
2022	103.98%	Image classification
2022	57.56%	Competition-level mathematics
2022	83.74%	Multitask language understanding
2022	101.67%	English language understanding
2022	104.36%	Visual reasoning
2023	47.78%	PhD-level science questions
2023	93.67%	Competition-level mathematics
2023	96.21%	Multitask language understanding
2023	71.91%	Multimodal understanding and reasoning
2024	108.00%	PhD-level science questions
2024	108.78%	Competition-level mathematics
2024	102.78%	Multitask language understanding
2024	94.67%	Multimodal understanding and reasoning
2024	101.78%	English language understanding

From ChatGPT to Gemini, many of the world’s leading AI models are surpassing the human baseline in a range of technical tasks.

The only task where AI systems still haven’t caught up to humans is multimodal understanding and reasoning, which involves processing and reasoning across multiple formats and disciplines, such as images, charts, and diagrams.

However, the gap is closing quickly.

In 2024, OpenAI’s o1 model scored 78.2% on MMMU, a benchmark that evaluates models on multi-discipline tasks demanding college-level subject knowledge.

This was just 4.4 percentage points below the human benchmark of 82.6%. The o1 model also has one of the lowest hallucination rates out of all AI models.

This was major jump from the end of 2023, where Google Gemini scored just 59.4%, highlighting the rapid improvement of AI performance in these technical tasks.

To dive into all the AI Week content, visit our AI content hub, brought to you by Terzo.

To learn more about the global AI industry, check out this graphic that visualizes which countries are winning the AI patent race.

Authored by Guy Birchall via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

London is losing its richest residents.

The British capital has seen more than 30,000 millionaires vanish over the past 10 years.

It has now dropped out of the top 5 cities for millionaires around the world, with New York, the Bay Area, Tokyo, Singapore, and Los Angeles all ranking higher, according to a report commissioned by Henley and Partners, a United Kingdom-based investment migration consultancy.

The firm found that London had lost 11,300 dollar millionaires in just 12 months, including 18 individuals with a net worth of $100 million or more, and two billionaires.

London, which now has 215,700 millionaires, is one of only two cities in the top 50 — the other being the heavily sanctioned capital of Russia, Moscow—that has fewer rich individuals than a decade ago.

In total, the British capital has lost 12 percent of its wealthiest residents since 2014, while Moscow has lost 25 percent.

Many millionaires fled Moscow in the wake of Western sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Though the Russian capital has lost more millionaires as a percentage over the past decade, with 10,000 leaving, in terms of sheer numbers, London has lost three times that number in the same time frame.

The majority of departures have been to other European countries such as Italy and Switzerland, as well as the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Dubai, in particular, has seen a huge growth in the number of millionaires over the past decade, increasing by 102 percent.

So what is driving the super-rich out of what was once one of the premier playgrounds of the rich and famous?

Andrew Amoils, head of research at New World Wealth, who carried out the report for Henley and Partners, told The Epoch Times there were numerous factors for London losing some of its wealthiest residents.

He said that rising concerns about crime and safety were the big factors putting the rich off the British capital.

“Safety is one of the key drivers of long-term wealth growth,” Amolis said. “Women and child safety is especially important—the recent child grooming scandal highlighted this crisis.”

Crime and Safety

A number of billionaires in recent months have made similar statements about crime being an issue.

Devin Narang, an Indian entrepreneur, said in a meeting attended by David Lammy, then shadow foreign secretary, that fear of crime in London was one of India’s elite’s biggest concerns about the city.

“People are being mugged in the heart of London–in Mayfair,” Narang, a member of the executive committee of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, said at a meeting in New Delhi in February 2024, the Financial Times reported.

“All CEOs in India have had an experience of physical mugging and the police [in London] not responding.”

Manchester United owner Sir Jim Ratcliffe also said that he had stopped wearing luxury watches in the capital.

“I can’t wear a watch in London, and I just need to be a bit wary, a bit careful,” Ratcliffe told The Sunday Times.

Ratcliffe, one of Britain’s wealthiest people, cited the story of a murder over a Rolex picked up on one of his company Ineos’s CCTV cameras at its headquarters in Knightsbridge.

“He died in a pool of blood because somebody tried to take his Rolex, and he resisted. About a year ago, we had three guys in hoodies, with machetes, right outside the office, opposite Harrods.”

More than 6,800 watches were reported stolen in 2023, the latest year for which figures are available, an increase from more than 6,000 in 2022.

Taxes a Turnoff

High taxes are another one of the prime reasons the rich no longer call London home.

Amoils said: “Capital gains tax and estate duty [inheritance tax] rates in the UK are amongst the highest in the world, which deters wealthy business owners and retirees from living there.

“The recent tax rises from the October 2024 budget have exacerbated this issue as they pulled non-doms, farms, and small businesses into the UK estate duty net.”

Non-dom, short for non-domicile, describes a person who lives in the UK, but whose permanent home for tax purposes is outside the country.

It refers to a person’s tax status and has nothing to do with their nationality, citizenship, or resident status, although it can be affected by these factors.

A non-dom previously only paid UK tax on the money they earn in Britain and did not have to pay tax to the British government on money made elsewhere in the world.

In October, the Labour government confirmed plans to abolish non-dom status from April 2025, and to replace it with a residence-based regime, which will also bring foreign earnings into the UK inheritance tax system.

Dwindling Importance

Another factor spurring the movement of millionaires is the fact that the city itself is becoming less globally significant.

“The London Stock Exchange (LSE) was once the largest stock market in the world by market cap, but it now ranks 11th globally,” Amolis said.

“The past two decades have been particularly poor, with a large number of delistings and relatively few new IPOs.

“The continued ascendance of rival financial hubs such as Dubai, Paris, Geneva, Milan, Lugano, Frankfurt, and Amsterdam has eroded London’s status as Europe’s top financial center.”

He added that growing American and Asian dominance of the global space has also prompted several wealthy tech entrepreneurs in the UK to reconsider their base location, with many moving to tech hubs in North America and Europe.

“A lot of the new wealth that has been created in the last decade has mainly been from the tech sector, so if you miss out on that, you are missing out on a huge amount of wealth,” Amolis said.

Amolis also said that the historic appeal of London and the UK was its use of English, which remains either the first or second language of most millionaires globally.

“However, over time, this has become less relevant as the economies of the other major English-speaking countries like the United States, Australia, and Canada have grown,” he said.

“Furthermore, there are now several other high-income markets globally where one can get by only speaking English, including the likes of Singapore, the UAE, New Zealand, and Malta.”

Another factor is that part of the drop in the number of wealthy people in London is not necessarily that they left the city; they just became less well off due to the drop-off in the stock market and a worsening exchange rate of the pound against the dollar.

“A lot of them have just got less money,” Amolis said. “So, for instance, if someone was worth $1.2 billion and then their investments have gone down and they are now worth $900 million, they are no longer a billionaire.”

Despite this drop in wealthy residents, London remains one of the most expensive cities to live in, with property prices per square meter higher than anywhere else on the planet—other than Hong Kong, New York, and Monaco.

A Jeff Bezos-backed startup unveiled on X a cheap electric truck priced at roughly half the cost of the average new American pickup. The catch: it lacks power windows, infotainment screens, and self-driving features.

“The people spoke. We built. Meet the radically simple, radically affordable Slate,” Slate Auto wrote in the post on X on Thursday.

The people spoke. We built. Meet the radically simple, radically affordable Slate. Reserve yours at https://t.co/Y5RkOIFCRo pic.twitter.com/uvSZVpdkWv

— Slate Auto (@slateauto) April 25, 2025

“A radically simple electric pickup truck that can change into whatever you need it to be — even an SUV,” the Slate Auto website says, adding, “Made in the USA at a price that’s actually affordable (no really, for real).”

At 14.5 feet long, the customizable EV is more akin to a Toyota pickup (Hilux) from the mid-1980s.

The range of the EV truck is abysmal, at 150 miles – or 240 miles with a longer-range battery pack – the vehicle in our minds is not a serious truck – instead, similar to mini trucks Americans are importing from Japan to run around town.

Any serious work, whether towing or hauling actual weight, in the EV space will be done by the Tesla Cybertruck or the Rivian truck, or a diesel-powered truck by Dodge, Ford, or Chevy for long-haul towing.

Again, the Slate Auto vehicle isn’t a serious pickup truck, but it does look like fun to run around town.

Authored by Thomas Brooke via Remix News,

The Sweden Democrats have called for climate activist groups to be convicted under terrorism laws, arguing that sabotage by eco-extremists is making life miserable for ordinary citizens and must be stopped immediately.

Fed up with repeated disruptions from groups like Restore Wetlands, which have recently blocked rush-hour traffic, interrupted parliamentary debates, and even stormed the Royal Ship Vasa, the Sweden Democrats are calling for harsher measures to arrest the ongoing civil disruption.

Pontus Andersson Garpvall, a member of the Riksdag’s Justice Committee, told Aftonbladet that voters and citizens are exhausted by the relentless activism.

“Voters and citizens are very tired of this type of action,” he said.

“We believe that it should be examined whether current terror legislation is applicable to this type of action. If that is not possible, we must look at changing the terror legislation.”

He emphasized that the goal is to introduce such severe penalties that socially disruptive sabotage will be eliminated altogether.

The Sweden Democrats intend to negotiate with the government to advance this proposal.

The right-wing populist group currently props up the center-right government led by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson following the Tidö Agreement, which confirmed SD support for the current administration in exchange for certain policy proposals, particularly on migration.

Now, the party has eco-warriors in its crosshairs, with Garpvall accusing a small group of extremists of hijacking the lives of ordinary citizens by believing in apocalyptic scenarios and taking increasingly aggressive actions to spread their message.

“An ordinary worker who is on his or her way to work is not very happy if he or she is late because people have sat down on the road. There is irritation from the common man against this, so it is up to the politicians to come up with measures,” he told the Swedish newspaper.

He acknowledged that some level of civil disobedience should be tolerated in a democracy, but stressed that actions targeting protected sites such as airports must be dealt with much more severely.

“If it had been a foreign power that, for example, flew drones at Swedish airports to stop flights, they might have had a completely different view of it than they have now,” he said of the government.

Adding to their concerns, Garpvall pointed out that many of these activist groups have international ties and that it remains unclear who is financing their operations.

Read more here…

The good news is that without the work, former employees are going to have plenty of time to spend on their lives. The bad news is that they’re not going to have much more money to spend. 

Citigroup is shutting down its Málaga office less than three years after opening the hub, cutting a few jobs and relocating others to London and Paris, according to FT.

Opened in 2022 during a fierce post-pandemic talent war, the Costa del Sol office offered junior bankers eight-hour days and work-free weekends, a sharp contrast to the grueling hours typical in New York and London

Citi said the closure is part of its plan to “simplify the firm and make improvements to how we operate.”

It added, “Unfortunately, this decision means that six of our colleagues in Málaga will be leaving the firm, and we will provide support to them during this process.”

FT writes that the initiative, which selected 27 analysts from over 3,000 applicants, was originally praised by Citi’s global co-head of investment banking, Manolo Falcó, who said it was “not a gimmick” and that there would be no “stigma” for those opting for better work-life balance.

The closure comes amid a wider retreat from pandemic-era perks, as a prolonged dealmaking slump forces investment banks to tighten office policies.

We’ve come a long way since Covid, when work-life balance came into focus after disgruntled Goldman Sachs junior bankers made the infamous PowerPoint presentation that forced banks on the street to at least pretend and posture like they cared about their lower-rung employees’ mental health. 

We reported last summer that junior bankers on Wall Street were already back to working 100 hour weeks. Interviews with current and former junior bankers revealed that 100-hour work weeks had resurged as banks pursued a modest deal flow. Employees, speaking anonymously, said that workloads were testing promises to protect trainee health. 

Authored by Amir Taheri via The Gatestone Institute,

In 2013 when a little-known cardinal from Argentina was elected the Pope of the Catholic Church, taking the title of Francis, many wondered in which direction he might walk in Saint Peter’s shoes.

The election came as a surprise in the wake of the unprecedented decision of Pope Benedict XVI to abdicate the pontificate. Benedict, a German, had been revealed as a conservative pontiff focused on the doctrine in what he called “a time of upheavals.” That was the time when globalism was in the ascendancy and all religions appeared to be on the defensive in the face of political and cultural forces advocating multiculturalism and secularism.

In his book Values in a Time of Upheavals, Benedict spoke of “the three myths” that threaten mankind: science, progress and freedom which, transformed into absolutes, pretend to replace religious faith.

Once elected, Pope Francis turned out to be at the other end of the spectrum from Benedict as far as their respective world views were concerned. In a sense Benedict, steering away from the quotidian of politics, focused on the core doctrine of his faith, powerfully spelled out in his other book, Jesus of Nazareth.

Pope Francis, however, quickly showed that he wished to play a political role in the hope of injecting his religious values into the global debate. Leaving the doctrine to his predecessor, he used catechism or the flexible rituals of the faith as the template for his political positions which he spelled out in a book formed by interviews with two Italian journalists.

Because Francis was the first Jesuit priest to become Pope, it was not surprising that, true to his evangelist mission as a “soldier for Christ,” his emphasis was on securing the largest possible audience for the Catholic Church rather than defending the strictest form of doctrine in an age of cultural relativism.

He learned much from his most recent predecessors: John Paul II and Benedict XVI. The former emphasized the political dimension of his mission, especially in the struggle to help central and Eastern Europe bring down the Iron Curtain. When the Cold War ended with the disintegration of the Soviet Empire, John Paul II was among history’s victors, his doctrinal conservatism conveniently pushed aside.

In contrast, Benedict XVI, a theologian by training and temperament, put the emphasis on doctrinal issues in a brave attempt to save the Catholic Church from the ravages of political correctness, wokeism and multiculturalism.

As a result, many Catholics did not warm to him, while non-Catholics found him anachronistic. Francis decided to look to John Paul II rather than Benedict XVI as a model. The difference was that John Paul II was a political Pope on the right of the center while Francis turned out to be left of center. That encouraged some of Francis’s critics on the right to portray him as a fellow traveler or even a communist.

In his book, Francis admitted that he was attracted to communist themes, if not actual policies. In fact, the only political book he cites is “Our Word and Proposals” by the Argentinian communist writer Leonidas Barletta. “It helped my political education,” Francis said in his book. Francis deepened his “progressive” profile with a list of his favorite authors, including German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Belgian mystic Joseph Maréchal, and, last but not least, Argentina’s own literary icon, Jorge Luis Borges, none of whom could be branded as leftists.

Francis regarded “liberal capitalism” as immoral and said he found some sympathy for the “liberation theology” of the Latin American guerrilla-priests of the 1960s, while insisting that he was “never a communist.”

In fact, he included communism, along with unbridled capitalism, Nazism and liberalism in his list of totalitarian ideologies. And, yet, he points at secularism as the principal enemy of faith. “There is a denial of God due to secularism, the selfish egoism of humanity,” he asserted. Throughout his pontificate, Francis wrestled with the “social issues” that have dominated the public debate in the West in recent decades, among them abortion, birth control, divorce, gay and lesbian marriages, sexual abuse by church staff and prelates, and celibacy for priests. Here, Francis faced a real difficulty.

If he had simply reaffirmed the traditional positions of the Church, as Benedict XVI did, he would have weakened his status as a “progressive Pope.” If, on the other hand, he had adopted the “progressive” position, he would have antagonized many in his flock.

Francis dealt with this dilemma in the classical Jesuit style of seizing the bull by both horns.

Echoing Benedict, he asserted that what mattered was the core narrative of Christianity, the technical term for which is kerygma. Beyond that we have what Francis called “catechism,” which, in the sense he used it, concerns behavior and social organization.

Interestingly, he seldom mentioned dogma, the bridge between kerygma and catechism. Thus, issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and the Eucharist for divorced individuals, do not affect the kerygma. As for celibacy for priests, it is “a discipline, not a matter of doctrine,” he asserted, and thus could be abandoned in the future.

A year before his death, Francis published a pamphlet on literature, advising his flock to read as much as possible, even works by non-believers or adversaries of the faith. This was a bold move by a man who had inherited the office that created the infamous Index of books to ban and burn, which had remained in force until 1966. In addition to being a “progressive,” Francis was also an optimist.

“The moral conscience of different cultures progresses,” he asserted, reminding us how such “evils” as incest, slavery, exploitation, for example, were once, in different phases of human history, tolerated by all cultures and even religions but are now rejected with revulsion by all. But is human “moral progress,” if it exists at all, as linear as the Pope Francis seemed to believe? Francis’ intellectual landscape was dominated by ideas that could be traced back to ancient Athens rather than Jerusalem. He was more comfortable in the company of Aristotle than the Church Fathers. The only one he quotes is the quasi-Aristotelian St. Augustine, ignoring the contrasting positions of Jerome and Tertullian, among others. Is the church, indeed any formal religious organization, necessary for salvation? Francis couldn’t but answer with a resounding “yes.”

However, he weakened that “yes” by recalling that, as a young man, he dreamt of becoming a missionary to Japan, where Christianity had managed to survive and to some extent even prosper without any priests and no organization for over two centuries. I don’t know whether Francis had read Japanese novelist Shūsaku Endo’s fascinating novel “Silence”, which deals precisely with that subject. Endo shows that, even under the worst conditions of torture and despair, human beings look to religious faith for a measure of certainty about right and wrong and good and evil. Today, the problem is that religion, in most of its forms, is trying to imitate philosophy, which is the realm of doubt, or replace ideology as a means of organizing political action.

Francis repeated the assertion by André Malraux, that the 21st century will be “religious or it will not at all.”

The question is: religion in which of its many forms?

There are those who see kerygma as a poetic conceit, focusing on catechism, or its Islamic version the Shari’a, as a means of social and political control and domination. Then there are those who, having asserted the kerygma, allow the elastic to be pulled in the opposite direction as far as possible. The problem is that, at some point, the elastic might snap.

Will the next Pope continue Francis’s “progressive” agenda or return to Benedict’s “traditional” path? An Italian proverb says “morto un papa, se ne fa un altro” (Death of a Pope, makes another).

Since a majority of the 135 cardinals of the conclave mandated to elect the next Pope were appointed by Francis, one might assume that they would choose someone to continue his “progressive” legacy. However, taking Saint Mathews’ advice to “neither presume nor despair”, one cannot be sure.

The global mood has changed from the time Francis was chosen, and Benedict’s zeitgeist seems to be making a comeback in a world disappointed with the empty promises of progressivism.

So, don’t be surprised if the cardinals will have a tough time choosing between kerygma and catechism.