Iran Offers to Open Strait of Hormuz If US Lifts Blockade, Ends War

Resource Nationalism: China Halts October Fuel Exports, Tightening Global Diesel Squeeze A sense of resource nationalism is gripping the world, whether it involves copper, rare earths, other critical materials or, of course, refined crude products. Kicking off Thursday, a Reuters report said that the Trump administration has asked Germany and France to release emergency diesel inventories to help create a buffer against the supply squeeze in the industrial fuel or face a potential US diesel export ban. President Trump has floated a diesel export ban for weeks, while US oil refining...

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...

Waste Of The Day: Education Fraud Sweeps Nation Authored by Jeremy Portnoy via RealClearInvestigations, Topline: Since 2019, school districts across 24 states and Puerto Rico have lost $225 million to fraud confirmed by the U.S. Department of Education inspector general's semiannual report to Congress. No more than $67 million has been recovered. Key facts: Open the Books and the State Financial Officers Foundation documented 74 instances of confirmed school fraud, averaging over $3 million each. There are far more that have gone unprosecuted or undetected. Florida and Illinois schools each had the most...