A tale of two worlds

Israel is attacking the Lebanese capital city of Beirut this evening after Hezbollah reportedly took credit for rocket fire against the Israeli city of Haifa. Israeli warplanes have also hit multiple other sites across southern and eastern Lebanon today, including the Bekaa Valley and the Nabatieh District. Details about the extent of the damage in […]

Gulf Energy Shock Spreads To Global Plastics As War Sparks Force Majeure Wave Building on our earlier "Global Demand Destruction" note, which mapped how the Gulf energy shock is spreading globally and the immediate effects of rationing, price controls, and fuel shortages, another second-order disruption is quickly emerging: supply chain disruptions in critical plastic feedstocks. Plastics are core to the modern economy, and a troubling new Bloomberg report indicates that several producers of monoethylene glycol (MEG) and purified terephthalic acid (PTA) have declared force majeure, as tanker flows through the Strait...

Where Have The Men Gone? Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times, The Department of Labor keeps careful track of employment and the demographics thereof. Their latest report on men in the labor force is both mysterious and deeply alarming. It turns out that the labor force is missing about 7 million men who would otherwise be working. Close to a third of working-age men have vanished from the labor force. The labor force participation rate among “prime age men,” age 25 to 54, in the 1950s approached 100 percent. Now...