My book Rigged, exposing an establishment cover-up at the highest level on both sides of the Atlantic followed by a whole series of miscarriages of justice, has already sold out its initial print run and been reprinted in the UK. Now it's being published in the United States:

This is a huge NYT investigation into how Russia uses shell companies and Tether, a crypto coin, to evade sanctions and buy arms. What it doesn't mention is that the main U.S. backer of Tether is Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm run by Howard Lutnick's sons. nytimes.com/2026/09/24/busin…

We are back at rate hikes to fight a supply shock. Will this stop the war against Iran? Will it reopen the Strait of Hormuz? Will higher financing costs help build out renewables? No. But it risks pushing livelihoods & democracies over the edge.

“Scott Bessent is basically Norman Lamont”. For those who aren’t old enough or don’t recall he was the Chancellor who blew huge sums of public money in 1992 trying to defend an indefensible price. Then it was the value of the pound. Now, US bonds.

Peak corruption: Donald Trump has traded more securities (stocks and other financial assets) than every member of Congress COMBINED since he returned to office. Trump says he supports a ban on Congress members trading stocks... but he will exempt himself. Bloomberg reports: "Trump or his money managers made nearly 28,700 trades in the 17 months between his second inauguration and the end of June... During that same period, Capitol Hill lawmakers collectively reported about 22,200 similar transactions". Source: bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-…

A state pension of £13k should ignite debate about why it is so low, not about its affordability

The UK's bond market is collapsing. Today, the yield on a 30Y Bond in the UK hit 5.95%, its highest level since March 1998. Yields in the UK are now 15 TIMES above 2020 levels, with the highest borrowing costs among G7 countries. What is happening? Let us explain. (a thread)

What's amazing about the global bond sell-off is how many people are saying rising yields are about strong growth. Seriously!? You think rising yields in Japan, France, Italy or UK are about growth? We're in a global debt shock. Not a global growth shock. robinjbrooks.substack.com/p/…

This brilliant animated bar chart illustrates an economic achievement without precedent in modern times: the lifting of hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in China (and India) - while in 'advanced' countries, the expectation of rising living standards slowly faded...

“Reform UK has banned at least three journalists who have investigated the party and Nigel Farage from its annual conference, which begins on Thursday. The Guardian’s City editor, Anna Isaac, the investigative reporter Peter Geoghegan and the broadcaster and biographer Michael Crick were told this week that their credentials to cover the event had been declined. A Reform spokesperson said Geoghegan and Crick were refused accreditation because the party viewed them as minor figures. They declined to comment on why Isaac was not given accreditation.” theguardian.com/politics/202… by @horton_official

BREAKING: Germany's government has accused Russia of being behind an attempted drone attack on a major regional airport aje.news/9ujnbv

Stanford researchers scanned teenagers listening to their mothers, having already shown that in young children her voice lights up half the brain. Something had switched. In children under about twelve, the reward circuitry fires harder for their mother's voice than for a stranger's. In adolescents it flips. The reward regions respond more strongly to unfamiliar voices, and her voice stops being the sound the system reaches for. The crossover happens somewhere between thirteen and fourteen. Nothing has gone wrong. The circuitry has not broken and she has not been demoted. It is being retuned deliberately, because a person who is going to leave home needs to start finding other people interesting, and the brain arranges that by making everyone outside the house more rewarding to listen to. Which means the thing every mother of a teenager describes has a mechanism. He is not ignoring her out of contempt. Her voice is no longer arriving at the part of him that used to light up for it. Two things worth holding onto here. The first is that the hearing and processing regions are still there and still working. He hears her perfectly. What changed is what his reward system does with the sound. The second is that this is temporary, and there is a whole literature on adult children and their mothers to say so. The circuitry is being repointed outward for the years he needs to build a life away from her. It is not being deleted. So a woman finds herself talking to somebody who used to run toward her voice across a car park, and who now barely registers it. That is her son's brain doing exactly what it is supposed to do, on schedule, and it is a horrible thing to be on the receiving end of. jneurosci.org/content/42/20/…

We are witnessing a shock redistribution from the many to the rich: The profit share is at its highest level since WWII. The first bump was sellers’ inflation which ushered in Trump. The second bump is Trump’s chaos casino designed to push up profits.

An essay I've just written for @nytimes on why Big Tech is the 21st Century’s equivalent of the East India Company: "What It Would Take to Dismantle the Most Powerful Companies in the World" nytimes.com/2026/08/28/opini…

In 1988 Dolly Parton pulled every 7th and 8th grader in Sevier County into a room and told them to pick a buddy. She made them sign a contract.. if BOTH graduate, she hands you both $500. One fails, nobody gets paid. The county dropout rate went from 35% to 6%. She handed out the checks herself. In 1989 she offered $500 to every kid in the county who wanted to go to the local college. When Gatlinburg burned in 2016, she sent 900 families $1,000 a month for six months. You've probably heard that part. Here's the part you haven't: The fund raised more than expected, so she showed up in May and handed every one of those families another $5,000 on top. Then she quietly put $3 million into the recovery group that handles the years after the news trucks leave. She built her county an entire hospital. She played a benefit concert in 2007, Dollywood and the Stampede matched it, and LeConte Medical Center opened in 2010 with a birthing unit and a women's center in it. In 2022 she started covering 100% of tuition, books, and fees for Dollywood employees. Full-time, part-time, AND seasonal. In 1991 she paid for a bald eagle sanctuary because the birds couldn't be released back into the wild, no press release. And when Hurricane Helene came through here in Western North Carolina, she wrote a personal check for $1 million and her companies matched it. She didn't owe North Carolina anything, but she helped us anyway. She started the Imagination Library because her daddy couldn't read or write. Before he passed, he told her it was the most important thing she ever did. Rest in Peace, Dolly 🇺🇸

Media outlets often claim Americans are wealthier than Europeans, but it's simply not true. US average wealth looks high, but is skewed by extreme inequality. US median wealth is quite low. I analyzed the data to show how awful US living standards are: geopoliticaleconomy.report/p…

Of course the biased Western media tries to make this sound bad, but it's actually awesome: The Communist Party of China runs mass service centers that are open to the public and offer free internet, cheap food, work desks, training and classes, plus sometimes child care & gyms.

The Iran war is a redistribution machine: Big oil profits have shot up to historic highs. Our research shows that 50% of fossil fuel profits go to the richest 1% in the U.S. The rich are the ultimate beneficiaries of the war windfalls. The bottom 50% claim a mere 1% of profits while they are hit the hardest by the cost shock. And that’s just the domestic economy. People in the Global South have been priced out of energy needs for months.

1/7 FT: "According to economic theory, productivity and real wages should grow in tandem, with the benefits of new technology being shared with the workers who produce the stuff. But in the US, Europe and Japan, pay growth has decoupled from... ft.com/content/9741206d-b53f…

When credit spreads start to ‘blow out’, that means the people who spend all their days thinking about the creditworthiness of the ‘Mag 7’ (the big tech companies from Alphabet (google) to Meta (Facebook) think the risk that they default on their debts is growing…..