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Debt, Delays, Dependencies -Why Public Banks Should Not Support Nuclear Power

Prof. Claudia Kemfert; Merete Looft; Ute Koczy; Vladimir Slivyak; Prof. Steve Thomas; Dr. Alexander Wimmers; Prof. M. V. Ramana; Dr. Paul Dorfman

Report, 2026
Herausgeber: Urgewald; Ecodefense, 25 April 26, https://www.urgewald.org/en/debt-delays-dependencies-nuclear

The world does not need new nuclear power. Yet institutions like the World Bank, the ADB and other development banks are stubbornly marching towards an economic disaster that creates toxic waste and exacerbates the climate crisis by redirecting scarce resources away from technologies that have long proven themselves cheaper, faster, cleaner and more effective.

There are many solid arguments against this waste of taxpayer money. This report serves as a compilation of science-based theses against the renaissance of nuclear power. In five thematic articles, four renowned scientists and an expert on Russian nuclear policy provide key facts and figures on the topic.

Urgewald and Ecodefense – Debt, Delays, Dependencies (April 2026) (7.51 MB)

April 28, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs | Leave a comment

The Impact of the Middle East Crisis on Women and Girls

By UN Population Fund

, https://www.ipsnews.net/2026/04/the-impact-of-the-middle-east-crisis-on-women-and-girls/?utm_source=email_marketing&utm_admin=146128&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Gaza_Crisis_Deepens_as_Aid_Restrictions_and_Ongoing_Strikes_Strain_Humanitarian_Operations_Inside_th

CAIRO, Egypt, Apr 23 2026 (IPS) – Six weeks into the 2026 Middle East military escalation, UNFPA Arab States Regional Office warns that its impact on 161 million women and girls living in conflict-affected areas across the region remain largely invisible in conflict analysis, humanitarian response, and funding priorities.

A new Call to Action, Regional Analysis of the Socio-Economic Impact of the 2026 Middle East Conflict on Women and Girls published by UNFPA, the UN sexual and reproductive health agency, highlights that current response mechanisms remain overwhelmingly gender-blind, treating gender-based violence (GBV) and maternal health as secondary concerns rather than life-saving priorities.

“The omission is not merely analytical – it is structural,” the report states. Without sex-disaggregated data and gender perspectives, the international community is conducting incomplete risk assessments, misaligning interventions, and missing critical opportunities for stabilization and peace.

The conflict is projected to cost regional economies $120–194 billion – equivalent to 3.7 to 6 percent of collective GDP. Four million additional people are estimated to be pushed into poverty and 3.64 million jobs may be lost. Women – overrepresented in informal employment – face disproportionate livelihood collapse while shouldering increased unpaid care work.

Supply chain shocks through the Strait of Hormuz threaten to delay lifesaving humanitarian supplies by up to six months. Across Gaza, Lebanon, Sudan, and Yemen, more than 260 health facilities and 14 mobile medical units have already shut down. Food insecurity is intensifying, with documented patterns showing women and girls eat last and least.

The report also highlights a surge in GBV risks driven by hyper-displacement, while sanctions and financial “de-risking” are crippling the ability of women-led organizations to deliver essential services. These organizations—often the first responders in crises—are being cut off from the very funding streams meant to sustain them

UNFPA is calling on national governments, UN agencies, donors, and civil society to:

Integrate gender systematically into all conflict analysis and response frameworks

Protect and fund GBV and sexual and reproductive health services as core, lifesaving interventions.

Finance and empower local women-led organizations, removing barriers to their access and participation.

Ensure women’s leadership in recovery, peacebuilding, and decision-making processes.

“Making women and girls visible is not optional,” the report concludes. “It is fundamental to effective humanitarian action, sustainable recovery, and lasting peace.”

UNFPA is the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency.

IPS UN Bureau

April 28, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, women | Leave a comment

Protest Targets Capital One to Demand Bank Ends Loans to Israeli Weapons Company

Activists are urging the bank to not extend additional credit to Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer.

By Joseph Mogul , Truthout, April 23, 2026

On the morning of April 21, a dozen community members with the anti-imperialist campaign Demilitarize Brooklyn Navy Yard (DBNY) entered the Capital One corporate offices in Midtown, Manhattan, unfurling two banners that read: “Capital One Pays For Genocide” and “Eject Elbit Systems.” The group quickly installed a “soft blockade” with the banners, partially obstructing two hallways to bring attention to workers. One protester walked across the building lobby, showering the floor in faux cash stained with red paint.

A New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer and two private security guards stationed inside grabbed the banner, shoving protesters and reporters toward the exit. Before forcing DBNY outside — where the protest continued — an NYPD officer shouted at this author: “No freedom of press on private property!”

This action comes days before the expiration of a $545 million loan from a consortium of six banks — including $90 million from Capital One — to Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer. As part of a global week of action called by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement to “intensify the BDS campaign against Elbit,” organizers planned actions in New York City, Boston, and the Washington, D.C. area targeting Capital One under the moniker “Eject Elbit.”

“This week, Capital One’s $90 million loan to Elbit Systems is set to either renew or expire, and we came out in multiple cities to let them know that we’re not giving up,” said one Eject Elbit organizer in D.C. who chose to remain anonymous for security reasons. “They’ve heard from us for months, and they will continue to hear until they drop this violent funding.”

According to a Bloomberg financial markets database, the $545 million loan was signed on May 21, 2021, and is set to mature on April 24, 2026. The BDS Global Week of Action overlaps with a pivotal moment of escalation — pressuring Capital One to not extend additional credit to Elbit Systems.

Elbit Systems is one of most complicit actors in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, supplying the Israeli military with weapons such as MPR 500 bombs, which are specifically designed for “densely populated urban warfare.” Elbit also developed border surveillance systems crucial to the maintenance of Israeli apartheid, and repressive immigration enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border, where the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) awarded Elbit with $23.9 million to install surveillance towers in 2023.

In addition to organizing against two companies operating on city-owned property at the Brooklyn Navy Yard — Easy Aerial and Crye Precision, both with ties to the Israeli military and DHS — DBNY joined the national Eject Elbit campaign last fall.

“Easy Aerial supplies Elbit Systems; they’re collaborators,” said Iman Bowman, a DBNY spokesperson, referencing contracts to retrofit Elbit Systems ground vehicles with Easy Aerial autonomous drones.

DBNY recently celebrated its first victory after successfully pressuring the Brooklyn Navy Yard not to renew Easy Aerial’s lease in February. Now the campaign continues fighting local nodes of the global weapons supply chain to Israel, including Elbit’s financiers…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://truthout.org/articles/protest-targets-capital-one-to-demand-bank-ends-loans-to-israeli-weapons-company/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=01f7de4f88-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_04_23_09_18&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-01f7de4f88-650192793

April 27, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

Hormuz Dateline

What Iran Actually Understands

Iran does not need to win a naval war in the classical sense. It only needs to make transit uncertain, costly, and politically radioactive. Mines, drones, missiles, fast boats, electronic piracy, and the psychology of fear are enough to turn a chokepoint into a garotte. That is the essence of asymmetry: a state under pressure parlays geography into power. Tehran does not need to dominate the sea. It needs only to make everyone else remember that the sea is not theirs.

The US-Israeli axis has long acted as if the region were a board and its opponents pieces. Hormuz shreds that assumption with the patience of geography.

14 April 2026 David Tyler AIM Extra, https://theaimn.net/hormuz-dateline/

The war now has the smell of salt, oil, and old empires trying to defy the tide.

Thirty-three kilometres. That is the width of the Strait of Hormuz at its narrowest navigable point: two shipping lanes, each two miles wide, one in, one out, with a median strip of Iranian territorial water between them. Through those lanes passes approximately 21 million barrels of oil every single day. That is one barrel in every five consumed anywhere on earth. Add the liquefied natural gas, and you have roughly 20 percent of all the LNG traded on global markets squeezing through a corridor you could drive across in less than half an hour. A fifth of the world’s energy supply running through a gap that geography, not American naval doctrine, placed there.This is not a side theatre. This is the throat of the world economy, and in this war it has become the place where the old American order goes from swagger to strain. What was once sold as a system of irresistible reach; US power, Gulf oil, the dollar, the naval umbrella, the client-state arrangement, now looks clapped-out, ruinously costly, and exposed as it is caught, hoist by its own petard, dependent on a choke point that cannot be bullied out of geography.

No aircraft carrier in the world can widen the Strait of Hormuz by a single metre.

The Arithmetic of Vulnerability

The numbers matter because official language exists precisely to hide that fact.

When the Iran-Iraq war threatened these waters in the 1980s, oil prices doubled within months. When Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping began in late 2023, global shipping insurance rates for Gulf-adjacent routes increased by up to 600 percent within weeks. Lloyd’s of London has now quietly tripled war risk premiums for vessels transiting the Gulf. That is not a diplomatic assessment or a Pentagon briefing. That is the financial system’s hard-nosed verdict on what is actually happening, stripped of all the official language about deterrence and security and the rules-based order.

While Trump posts to Truth Social about erasing civilisations and US admirals post to Facebook about historic firsts, the insurance market is pricing the reality that the propaganda is designed to conceal.

Australia has a particular stake in this arithmetic that the Albanese government would prefer its citizens not examine too carefully. Australia sends approximately 80 percent of its LNG exports through or near the Gulf corridor. When Hormuz is threatened, Woodside’s share price moves. The war that Albanese insists Australia is not involved in is directly affecting the income of Australian energy companies and, through them, the superannuation balances of ordinary Australians. Pine Gap processes targeting data for the strikes. Australian-made F-35 components are in the payload. And Hormuz is where the bill arrives.

What Iran Actually Understands

This is a strategic fact Washington cannot deny. Or lie about. The US-Israeli axis has long acted as if the region were a board and its opponents pieces. Hormuz shreds that assumption with the patience of geography. Israel can strike, assassinate, bomb, and escalate, but it cannot turn the Gulf into a risk-free zone. The US can threaten, sanction, and deploy, but it cannot guarantee the one thing the market demands most: confidence. That is the precise point at which imperial force runs into imperial limits. Empires can break things. Claim to rule the world. But it’s not so easy to rebuild trust once the world has called your bluff.

The ruling classes of all three powers; American, Israeli, Iranian are happy to gamble with systems they do not themselves live inside. They talk deterrence but they mean coercion. They may say security but they mean control. They may invoke peace but they build the conditions for the next war. It is the coastal fishermen, the dockworkers, “sea-gulls”, the tanker crews, and the families living with the knowledge that a misfire, a mine, or a drone can change the day in an instant who live inside the system these men are gambling with. That distinction matters. It is, in fact, the only distinction that matters.

The Petrodollar’s Exposed Seam

The petrodollar order was always more fragile than its keepers cared to admit. It rests on a Faustian bargain: Gulf oil will flow, the US will police the sea lanes, the dollar will stay as the world’s reserve currency, and regional rulers will play along so long as the deal suited them. Hormuz is where that bargain begins to fray.

The petrodollar system requires that oil be priced and settled in US dollars. That settlement runs through SWIFT, the global payments network, from which Iran has been excluded as an act of economic warfare. That exclusion has produced a direct, rational, and accelerating response: China, Russia, India, and an expanding coalition of the economically non-aligned are developing alternative settlement systems specifically designed to route around the dollar’s dominance.

This is not ideological posturing. It is financial self-defence against a system that has been openly weaponised. Hormuz is where that process becomes visible to everyone simultaneously.

The dollar’s centrality has depended on the belief that US power could secure the energy arteries while underwriting the financial order that prices global risk. But every threat to Hormuz chips at that belief. Every disruption reminds the world that this system is not floating on neutrality. It is anchored in force. And once force has to be constantly displayed, the myth of effortless supremacy begins to crack along every seam.

This is also why Hormuz looks, feels and even sounds like the end of an era. Not a stagey, Hollywood end of empire, but something slower and more repugnant: the fish rotting from the head, the end of imperial pretension publicly betrayed by the geography it claimed to master. The old style assumed that military reach could substitute for political legitimacy, that sanctions could replace diplomacy, that client regimes could be managed indefinitely, and that publics could be disciplined through spectacle and fear. Hormuz answers all of that with one simple fact: you can command the skies and the seas and still be strategically cornered. You can own the ocean narrative and still depend on a narrow strait you do not fully control.
The Scene Itself

Picture the actual scene, because power loves to use abstraction uses to hide from accountability.

Tankers move slow and dark under a white-hot sky. Naval escorts shadow them like anxious bodyguards. Insurance underwriters in distant offices recalculate exposure in real time. Traders watching screens flicker red. Refineries in South Korea, Japan, and India scramble to secure alternative supply. And in the waters themselves, and on the shores, and in the cities behind those shores, the people who have no choice but to live in the world that distant men are gambling with.That is Hormuz. Not a metaphor first, but a machine for making the abstract painfully concrete. It is thirty-three kilometres of water through which the pretensions of three nuclear-adjacent powers, and the complicities of a dozen client states including our own, are being tested against the oldest and most indifferent judge available: physical reality.

The old imperial language can still speak loudly, but it cannot hide the fact that the world runs through exposed conduits. It can still threaten, but it cannot guarantee outcome. It can still destroy, but it cannot stabilise what it has broken. That is the end-of-era feeling: not the end of power, but the end of the illusion that power can be made clean, automatic, and permanent.

The Narrowness of the Waterway, the Narrowness of Official Thinking

Hormuz is where the lie breaks down. It is where the empire finds the edge of its own reach. It is where the petrodollar shows its dependence, where military supremacy meets strategic vulnerability, and where thirty-three kilometres of salt water becomes a lesson in the catastrophic narrowness of the thinking that brought three powers to this point.

The old order still speaks in the voice of inevitability. Hormuz answers with a counter-argument that has been making the same point since the first trading dhow passed through it: no empire, no doctrine, no naval task force gets to abolish geography.

The market knows it. The insurance actuaries know it. The tanker captains threading those two-mile lanes know it. The fishermen on the Iranian shore know it.

The men ordering the strikes are the last to learn it. They always are.

This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES

April 16, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs | Leave a comment

All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars: Iran and the Bankers’ Endgame

As for Iran, it is not only the largest and strongest of the Islamic countries but operates the world’s only fully interest-free (riba-free) banking regime. This stands in direct contrast to the conventional Western model, which relies on interest as its primary revenue mechanism. “Money making money out of itself” underpins the global derivatives complex, which is built on rehypothecated, collateralized debt-at-interest.

April 10, 2026 Ellen Brown ScheerPost

“The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.” —Prof. Caroll Quigley, Georgetown University, Tragedy and Hope (1966)

In February 2026, the United States and Israel launched surprise airstrikes on Iran. The officially proffered reasons — preventing Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon and forestalling its aggression — have not held up under scrutiny. As James Corbett documented in recent Corbett Report episodes, the nuclear pretext appears to be recycled propaganda, and the scale and timing of the strikes raise deeper questions about motive.

The thesis that “All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars” was popularized by Michael Rivero in a 2013 documentary by that name. His accompanying article begins with a quote from Aristotle (384-322 BCE):

The most hated sort [of moneymaking], and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural use of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest.

Rivero then traces how private banking interests have financed and profited from conflicts on both sides for centuries — from the founding of the Bank of England in 1694 to fund William III’s wars to modern regime-change wars.

Full-Spectrum Financial Dominance

Other commentators point to the report of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) titled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (September 2000), which called for “full-spectrum” U.S. military forces to achieve global preeminence. It postulated the need for a “catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor” to accelerate the military transformation the authors envisioned.

This was followed by a 2007 Democracy Now interview in which Gen. Wesley Clark revealed that weeks after 9/11, he had been shown a classified Pentagon memo outlining plans to “take out seven countries in five years”: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off with Iran. The first six have since been destabilized or regime-changed. Iran, considered the ultimate prize for Middle East dominance and oil control, remains the last one standing.

Why those seven, and why was Iran the ultimate prize? Greg Palast’s 2013 article titled “Larry Summers and the Secret ‘End-Game’ Memo” supplied the missing financial logic. In 1999, the world was opened to unregulated derivatives trading, so that sovereign bonds, oil flows, shipping routes, and war-risk policies could all be collateralized, rehypothecated (pledged multiple times over), and gambled upon. The lynchpin was the 1997 WTO Financial Services Agreement (the Fifth Protocol to GATS), which became operational in 1999.

None of the seven targeted countries joined the WTO, and they were also not members of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That left them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers’ central bank in Switzerland. Other countries that were later identified as “rogue states” were also not members of the BIS, including North Korea, Cuba, and Afghanistan.

The last piece in the financial control grid was detailed in David Rogers Webb’s 2024 book The Great Taking. The Everything Bubble, including what some commentators estimate to be more than a quadrillion dollars in derivative bets, is just waiting for a pin. When it bursts, it will trigger large institutional bankruptcies; and under the legal machinery Webb documents, the derivative players will take all.

The 2026 Hormuz insurance crisis triggered by Lloyd’s of London could be that pin. More on all that below.

The City of London and Lloyd’s Weaponize Chaos

For more than three centuries, the City of London – the “Square Mile” that is London’s financial center — has financed both sides of wars and sold insurance against the destruction that would follow. Lloyd’s of London is the insurance pillar of the City’s financial control grid. It is not actually an insurance company but is a corporate body that “operates as a partially-mutualized marketplace within which multiple financial backers, grouped in syndicates, come together to pool and spread risk.” …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Iran’s system was designed to eliminate usury and align finance with real economic activity and risk-sharing rather than speculative debt. It has long been viewed as structurally incompatible with the interest-based, collateral-heavy architecture of City of London and Wall Street finance — an architecture that requires perpetual debt servicing and easily rehypothecated assets to feed the derivatives machine.

By rejecting interest at the national level, Iran has thus insulated itself and its financial partners from the control grid that has made the global “Great Taking” possible……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

But the immediate need in the current context is to settle the conflict with Iran, and settle it fast, before another black-swan shock ignites the derivatives daisy chain and activates the final Great Taking on a global scale. https://scheerpost.com/2026/04/10/all-wars-are-bankers-wars-iran-and-the-bankers-endgame/

Ellen Brown is an American author, attorney, and activist known for her work on financial reform and public banking. She is the founder of the Public Banking Institute and the author of books like Web of Debt and The Public Bank Solution, advocating for publicly owned banking systems.

April 14, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, Iran | 1 Comment

Could a New Nuclear Reactor Double or Triple Electricity Rates in New Brunswick?

The implication of these experiences and proposals is that a new 1,000-MW reactor for New Brunswick could carry a price tag of $15 to $26 billion. Estimates of the costs of electricity needed to cover the capital costs of new nuclear plants, if they’re financed through electricity rates, range from the mid-20¢ to more than 40¢ per kilowatt-hour—nearly double to even triple current consumer electricity costs in New Brunswick. Such increases would undermine energy affordability, economic competitiveness, and any plans for decarbonization through electrification.

April 9, 2026, Mark Winfield and Susan O’Donnell, https://www.theenergymix.com/could-a-new-nuclear-reactor-double-or-triple-electricity-rates-in-new-brunswick/

At the end of last month, the NB Power Review Panel report recommended considering building a new large nuclear reactor at the Point Lepreau site in New Brunswick. That recommendation raises a series of questions, not least whether the province can afford a new reactor, how it would be paid for, and its impact on electricity rates and the province’s overall financial position.

It is important to grasp the scale of such a project and its potential economic impacts. Based on recent experience in other jurisdictions, a new large reactor of the types likely to be considered for Lepreau could cost between $15 and $26 billion. That would be a far higher capital expenditure than the original Point Lepreau reactor, which itself came in at more than $5 billion in 2026 dollars.

If the cost of a new reactor were passed on directly to NB Power customers through electricity rates, those rates could double or even triple.

Already, the costs of the original construction and later refurbishment of New Brunswick’s existing reactor at Lepreau make up $3.6 billion of the utility’s current crippling debt, the NB Power Review noted. That debt, plus the fact that the reactor has been operating below capacity since the refurbishment, is costing ratepayers dearly.

But despite New Brunswick’s costly nuclear experience, a new reactor has been in the cards since 2023, when NB Power and the provincial government published plans calling for 600 megawatts (MW) of new nuclear power by 2035 at the Point Lepreau site on the Bay of Fundy.

The original plan was to build two small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). After spending almost $130 million in public funds for SMR activities, New Brunswick found it couldn’t attract the private investment the designs needed to move forward.

The NB Power Review Panel strongly advised against SMRs, echoing a statement by Energy Minister René Legacy six months ago. He rejected the notion of building first-of-a-kind SMRs because of the technological and economic risks associated with their incomplete and unproven designs.

Instead, the review panel recommended that the province consider “initiating the planning assessment phase for an additional large scale, proven technology nuclear plant to be sited alongside the Point Lepreau facility.”

The last new full-scale nuclear reactor project in Canada, the Darlington nuclear power plant east of Toronto, was completed more than 30 years ago. The enormous cost overruns on that project contributed significantly to the effective bankruptcy of the province’s utility, Ontario Hydro, leading to its eventual break-up.

As the memories of these previous experiences with large nuclear construction projects have faded, new projects are now being proposed in Ontario and Alberta. These projects, and experiences with the handful of new-build nuclear projects initiated in Europe and the United States in the last two decades, give us some indication of the reactor options, and their potential costs, for New Brunswick.

If the cost of a new reactor were passed on directly to NB Power customers through electricity rates, those rates could double or even triple.

In Ontario and Alberta, two reactor designs, the CANDU MONARK and the Westinghouse Electric AP1000, have been considered for the expansion of the Bruce Nuclear power plant on Lake Huron, a proposed 10,000-MW Ontario Power Generation plant at Wesleyville on Lake Ontario, and the proposed 4,800-MW Peace River Nuclear Project in Alberta.

The 1,000-MW CANDU MONARK, intended as a successor to the existing CANDU reactors in Ontario and New Brunswick, is owned by Montreal-based multinational AtkinsRéalis (formerly known as SNC Lavalin). Although it’s being aggressively promoted to potential international customers, the MONARK design remains incomplete. The situation has already led the Alberta project’s proponents to switch their proposal to favour the AP1000 design by Westinghouse Electric.

Westinghouse is a U.S.-based company owned by two Canadian firms: infrastructure developer Brookfield Renewable Partners; and uranium miner Cameco Corporation.

Cost information is available on the AP1000 reactor, as two units were completed in 2024 at the Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia. The total estimated cost of those two 1,100-MW reactors was US$36 billion, or about $26 billion per reactor in 2026 Canadian dollars. The plant has been described as “the most expensive power plant ever built on Earth.” When it went into service, Vogtle resulted in a nearly 24% increase in Georgia Power’s electricity rates, the largest jump in the utility’s history.

AtkinsRéalis is currently pitching the CANDU MONARK to Poland, with a reported estimated cost of $45 to $50 billion for a three-reactor plant, or about $15 billion per unit. The company has also proposed an “Enhanced CANDU 6” design, an updated version of the existing plant at Point Lepreau.

The province could also try to finance the costs through its general tax base. That is the approach that Ontario seems to be taking, at an estimated cost to the provincial treasury of $7 to $8.5 billion per year. Electricity subsidies now account for more than half of Ontario’s deficit, exceeding annual capital expenditures on education and health care by wide margins.

In New Brunswick, the annual costs of that approach, even spread over the decade or more of construction, could exceed the province’s current, record $1.39 billion deficit, and match or exceed its entire annual capital spending plans in all other areas. Adding the cost to New Brunswick Power’s current $6-billion debt would further cripple the utility and likely put it on a path to the kind of de facto bankruptcy that befell Ontario Hydro.

In addition to the financial risks for New Brunswick, a single large reactor project would repeat and magnify a key problem associated with the original Lepreau project—putting an even higher portion of the province’s electricity supply eggs in a single, very expensive and high-risk basket.

The delivery of the NB Power Review Panel report gives New Brunswick an opportunity to reflect on its future electricity pathways. Those directions need to emphasize affordability, decarbonization and sustainability, reliability, and the capacity to adapt to changing economic, technological, and geopolitical circumstances. A single large nuclear project is unlikely to meet those criteria.

Mark Winfield is a professor at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University in Toronto, and co-chair of the faculty’s Sustainable Energy Initiative. Susan O’Donnell is adjunct research professor and lead researcher on the CEDAR project in Sustainability and Environmental Studies at St. Thomas University.

April 11, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, Canada | Leave a comment

Audit cites DOE oversight failures on NuScle nuclear project

E&E News 1st April 2026

The Department of Energy mismanaged a landmark nuclear project to construct the country’s first small modular reactor, according to an audit by DOE’s Office of Inspector General released Tuesday.

The Carbon Free Power Project was a partnership between the federal government, NuScale Power and a coalition of Utah utilities that included $1.36 billion in DOE cost-share financial assistance. The government grant would help fund construction of the company’s first units at the Idaho National Laboratory.

The project that launched in 2015 was ultimately canceled in 2023 after NuScale and the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems mutually agreed to terminate development of the plant. Cost estimates for the first-of-a-kind advanced reactors had climbed, giving the utilities that had agreed to purchase the power cold feet. NuScale’s stock price had collapsed. The canceled project left the U.S. government out $183 million………………………………..(Subscribers only) https://www.eenews.net/articles/ig-cites-doe-oversight-failures-on-nuscale-nuclear-project/

April 11, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

Trillions Hidden, Humanity Starving: The Super-Rich vs. the Rest of Us

April 6, 2026, Josh Scheer, https://scheerpost.com/2026/04/06/trillions-hidden-humanity-starving-the-super-rich-vs-the-rest-of-us/

Ten years after the world first glimpsed the Panama Papers, the shadow empire of the super-rich is no less formidable. New analysis from Oxfam reveals a staggering truth: the untaxed wealth hidden offshore by the richest 0.1 percent now exceeds the combined wealth of the poorest 4.1 billion people on Earth. That’s not a statistic—it’s a moral indictment.

Oxfam estimates that $3.55 trillion in untaxed wealth was stashed in tax havens and unreported accounts in 2024 alone—more than the GDP of France and over twice the combined GDP of the world’s 44 least developed countries. Within this minuscule elite, the top 0.01 percent controls roughly $1.77 trillion of that hoard. Meanwhile, ordinary people continue to shoulder the burden: underfunded schools, crumbling hospitals, and fraying social safety nets are the collateral damage of a system engineered to let the wealthiest operate above the law.

Within this microscopic elite, the top 0.01 percent controls roughly $1.77 trillion. Meanwhile, billions of people are left with underfunded schools, crumbling hospitals, and social safety nets that barely function. The system isn’t “broken” — it’s working exactly as it was designed to work, just not for the vast majority of us.

The consequences are brutally clear. Public services starved of funding. Ordinary people shouldering the cost of inequality. A global economy rigged to reward the few and punish the many. Trillions of dollars that could fund hospitals, schools, clean water, and climate solutions are instead parked in secret accounts, out of reach and untaxed.

“This isn’t clever accounting; it’s power and impunity,” says Christian Hallum, Oxfam International’s Tax Lead. “The consequences are as predictable as they are devastating: ordinary people pay for the privileges of a tiny few.”

Progress has been made. The Automatic Exchange of Information (AEOI), launched in 2016-2017, has nudged down the share of untaxed offshore wealth to about 3.2 percent of global GDP. But the gains are uneven. Many countries in the Global South—the nations that need tax revenue the most—remain excluded from the system.

Two Bold Proposals to Tax Wealth Across the Land

Oxfam calls for bold, global action: taxing extreme wealth, strengthening financial transparency, and ensuring the richest 1 percent pay their fair share—especially multimillionaires and billionaires. A UN-led Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, approved in 2024 and under negotiation through 2027, could be a turning point—but only if nations have the courage to confront entrenched power.

The Panama Papers were meant to be a wake-up call. A decade later, the alarm still blares—but the world seems content to hit snooze while trillions slip offshore, untaxed and untouchable. Meanwhile, billions of people scrape by.

Inequality isn’t an abstract concept—it’s a crisis of fairness and morality. And as long as the super-rich are allowed to hide fortunes beyond reach, the rest of us will pay the price.

April 10, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs | Leave a comment

The Myth that Won’t Die: “War is Good for the Economy”

the problem with the obsession with unemployment. Employment by itself should not matter, but employment on what?. If people are exchanging their work for money but not producing goods valued by others, that amounts to wasted resources, money, and labor.

Carlos Boix, 4 April 2026, https://mises.org/mises-wire/myth-wont-die-war-good-economy

War is the ultimate government intervention. It is the excuse for all kinds of evils to be imposed on the governed. From confiscation through taxes and inflation to restriction of freedom of speech and the redirection and even nationalization of whole industries, nothing increases state power such as war.

As the state is predatory and produces nothing of use, it is the ultimate impoverishing situation. From an ideological point of view, it is even worse, mixing love for one’s culture and homeland with the state itself. It reduces individual’s resistance to loss of liberty and creates in their minds the myth of the protecting government.

There is also another insidious idea that a lot of people hold: That is that war has economic and other benefits, not to certain individuals or groups, but to the community at large. It is worth examining these supposed benefits to show that no, war does not benefit the community, it is just death and destruction.

Economic Stimulus

As with all government stimulus, this is just a redirection of resources. Instead of adapting to current resources, what a war stimulus does is to increase money and credit at unprecedented levels to pay for exorbitant government spending. This just means that real resources are taken from the community in the form of inflation and taxes and spent away on things the community does not want.

It is similar to getting all your savings and any credit you can get and spending it. For a while it appears that you are more affluent, until those resources are spent. Fiscal stimulus causes the same waste of savings and capital which, for a while, look to have stimulated the economy. But this is just spending. Soon there are not enough resources left and reality asserts itself. Once enough resources have been wasted, there are not enough to sustain the party, no matter how much money the government prints. If it continues to print, they create a hyperinflation period. If they stop, we get a recession.

The way the stimulus is done is also important. As it is done through banking credit, the temporal analysis of entrepreneurs is completely altered. A decrease in interest rates makes it look as if there are more resources saved. The problem is that the way entrepreneurs experience this is generally with an increase in demand. Those who do not respond—seeing it as unsustainable—will struggle to meet demand and will lose clients to other businesses and will still be hit hard in the downturn. Hence, most entrepreneurs will have to ride the wave and try to adapt when the crash comes.

This situation does not increase resources or make the community better off, it will waste resources and impede sustainable improvement. Overall, the community will be poorer afterwards. The idea that this kind of stimulus is positive is completely misguided.

Full Employment

When we visited Berlin, we were told the story of Communist Berlin, in which a person was paid to make a note every day of the clocks in Alexanderplatz. This is the problem with the obsession with unemployment. Employment by itself should not matter, but employment on what. If people are exchanging their work for money but not producing goods valued by others, that amounts to wasted resources, money, and labor.

This is the problem with public employment. Instead of a positive, it is a waste of resources. The government necessarily takes resources from the productive sphere—real resources that people demand—and redirects them to uses that people do not demand, such as filling forms, making military uniforms, or making munitions.

So yes, the government could tax or inflate enough to employ everyone in an economy, but that employment would take resources from the community, not add to them. They would just be wasting potential. This kind of use of employment just makes everyone poorer. This is what war full employment looks like.

At the beginning it gives the impression of full employment, but when the war finishes, the subsequent spike in unemployment is not because the government is not spending, but because the community has been depleted of resources.

Technological Advances

The idea that war fosters innovation and advances of technology is contrary to reality. It comes from those eager to justify war and see positive inventions against an imaginary counterfactual in which these innovations did not happen. Very few compare wartime to peacetime innovations. Those who do have shown that, at best, the rate of innovations is altered but changes little overall, and, at worst, there is a decline in inventiveness.

But here is the catch. This innovation is misallocated. Instead of innovations to better serve the customers, innovation during wartime serves the government and is intended to improve weapons and destructive power. Weapons and destructive power do not improve the quality of life of the people.

By redirecting research mainly to military use, there is a huge opportunity cost that few take into account. If we take the null effect on overall innovation and the focus on military innovation during wartime, we can safely say that wartime produces a reduction in technological advances and improvement of production effectiveness.

Social and Political Change

A typical example of beneficial social change is the entry of women in the workforce, wrongly attributed to the wartime economy during WWII. I say wrongly attributed because if we study labor market changes in countries that did not participate in WWII, such as Spain, we can see the same trend of female participation in the labor market. This is just another private social trend that people attribute to government intervention. The reality is that these social changes were already happening and defenders of war attribute them to government and to war itself.

Another counterfactual is the comparison with other wars. Why did WWII change the social status of women but the Franco-Prussian war of the 1870’s did not? Or even earlier wars?

Political change is sometimes presented as a benefit of war. How this is even argued is a mystery, but the idea is that war can topple an oppressive regime and create something better. Recent events show the contrary. Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan are all examples of wars that have either not caused a regime change or caused a chronic unstable civil war that has made the situation worse for the population.

In those countries in which regimes were, say “benign,” wars created an ideological shift towards more state power, the acceptance of more state intervention, and less individual freedom. Some people consider this a positive but, to me, all these are negative effects. Politically, war only benefits the government.

Conclusion

War has no positive effects. Mises wrote, “What distinguishes man from animals is the insight into the advantages that can be derived from cooperation under the division of labor.” And, “The market economy involves peaceful cooperation. It bursts asunder when the citizens turn into warriors and, instead of exchanging commodities and services, fight one another.”

This new war between the governments of Israel, the US, and Iran will be just like all other wars, negative in all its aspects.

April 9, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Trump’s $1.5 Trillion Pentagon Budget Will Make US Weaker

Passing this proposed budget would be a recipe for endless war, while undermining the nation’s ability to address the truly pressing problems at home that demand our urgent attention.

William Hartung, Apr 03, 2026, Common Dreams, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/1-5-trillion-pentagon-budget

It has been reported that the Pentagon on Friday will release a proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2027 of almost $1.5 trillion, with approximately $1.15 trillion in discretionary spending contained in the department’s regular annual budget and an additional $350 billion dependent on Congress including it in a separate budget reconciliation bill.

Whatever vehicles the administration chooses to promote this huge increase, it will be doubling down on a failed budgetary and national security strategy. If passed as requested, $1.5 trillion in Pentagon spending—in a single year–will make America weaker by underwriting a misguided strategy, funding outmoded weapons programs, and crowding out other essential public investments.

The current war in the Middle East is a case study in the ineffectiveness of an overreliance on military force in seeking to make America or the world a safer place. In his first term, President Trump abandoned a multilateral agreement that was effectively blocking Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon. Six years later, in his second term, the president initially justified his disastrous intervention against Iran as being motivated by fears of that very same program.

Diplomacy worked. Reckless resort to force does not, as evidenced by the devastating human, budgetary, and global economic consequences of the current Middle East war. Passing a $1.5 trillion Pentagon budget would be a recipe for endless war.

Meanwhile, other, non-military investments needed to protect the lives and livelihoods of Americans are being sharply reduced. By one account, the first week of the war on Iran cost $11.6 billion. That’s more than the Trump administration proposed for the annual budgets of the Centers for Disease Control and the Environmental Protection Agency combined for this year. Yet addressing the climate crisis and the need to prevent future outbreaks of disease are essential to the safety and security of Americans.

The administration has also reduced our available tools of influence on the foreign policy front by decimating the Agency for International Development, laying off trained diplomats at the State Department, and withdrawing from major international agreements. This leaves force and the threat of force as virtually the last tools standing for promoting U.S. security interests.

The Pentagon doesn’t need more spending, it needs more spending discipline. Spending billions of dollars on a Golden Dome system that can never achieve the President’s dream of a leak proof missile defense system is sheer waste, as is continuing to lavish funds on overpriced, underperforming combat aircraft like the F-35, or multi-billion dollar aircraft carriers that are vulnerable to modern high speed missiles.

The truth is, there are not enough factories, or skilled workers, or materials to effectively spend such a huge increase. It will be a recipe for waste, fraud and abuse.

April 9, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Cenovus pulled the plug on its much-ballyhooed ‘multi-year’ study of ‘small modular reactors’ in 2024 after a year.

So-called SMRs – which some say should stand for Spending Money Recklessly – aren’t ready for prime time, and probably never will be.

by David Climenhaga, March 28, 2026, https://albertapolitics.ca/2026/03/cenovus-pulled-the-plug-on-its-much-ballyhooed-multi-year-study-of-small-modular-reactors-in-2024-after-a-year/

Despite getting a much-ballyhooed $7-million in start-up costs from the Alberta Government in 2023, a year later Cenovus Energy Inc. pulled the plug on its study of the potential for so-called small modular reactors to generate power to wring oil from Alberta’s oilsands.

To the company’s credit, it only spent $555,000 of the public’s money on the project before losing interest.

The termination of the study was done so quietly, no one seems to have noticed. At least, there appear to have been no news reports about the project’s cancellation.

As recently as last year, though, new references could still be found to the tale told in the Sept. 19, 2023, press release published by Emissions Reduction Alberta (ERA), the Alberta Government office set up in 2009 to fund “Alberta-based technologies that lower emissions and costs for industries.”

That press release enthusiastically announced that the province would provide $7 million through ERA “for Cenovus Energy to conduct a preliminary, multi-year study on whether small modular nuclear reactors (SMR) can be safely, technically, and economically deployed in Alberta’s oil sands operations. Funding will be provided through the Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction (TIER) fund.”

The release quoted then Environment Minister Rebecca Schulz, who announced the funding at the at the World Petroleum Congress in Calgary, rhapsodizing, “a few years ago, the idea of expanding nuclear energy use was on the back burner – that is no longer the case.

“In Alberta, small modular nuclear reactors have the potential to supply heat and power to the oil sands, simultaneously reducing emissions and supporting Alberta’s energy future,” Ms. Schulz’s canned quote continued. “This funding is the foundation for that promising future. I want to thank Cenovus Energy and Emissions Reduction Alberta for their leadership in this work.”

“We are optimistic about the opportunities ahead and will continue working with industry to explore and enable small modular reactor development in this province,” said Energy Minister Brian Jean, playing second fiddle as he so often did when Ms. Schulz was involved, in the same release.

A CBC News report at the time quoted Ms. Schulz saying, “this is just another example of how industry dollars are being reinvested back into industry to support innovation in emissions reduction.” The CBC story also noted that that the study was “actually a four-year series of studies being lumped into one” with a total estimated cost of $26.7 million.

It would appear, however, that Cenovus quickly reconsidered that kind of spending on that particular topic. Presumably sometime in early 2025, ERA updated a statement on its website revealing that Cenovus had ended the SMR FEED Study ahead of schedule. (FEED stands for “Front End Engineering Design.”)

The undated statement, presumably unchanged from whenever it was first published, devotes 665 words to describing the project and its potential benefits. A line at the top summarizing the project’s status lists it without further comment as “terminated” and indicates that only $555,000 of the promised $7 million from the province was spent.

That page in turn provides a link to Cenovus’s SMR FEED Study Final Outcomes Report, which was published on New Year’s Eve 2024.

A report last week assessing the success of Canada’s 2018 strategic plan to develop SMRs across the country published by researchers Susan O’Donnell and M.V. Ramana for the CEDAR Project (Contesting Energy Discourses through Action Research) cited the Cenovus Final Outcomes Report.

Cenovus’s assessment of the potential for SMRs in Alberta’s oilsands was not enthusiastic.

“Cenovus decided in 2024 (during the execution of phase 1 work) not to continue with the Program beyond the end of 2024,” the company’s report says under the heading Lessons Learned.

“The phase 1 evaluation of nuclear from a business perspective showed SMRs are not economic or commercially feasible at present or in the near future,” the section continued. “The capital costs are high, the timelines are long and uncertain, and technology and supply chains lack maturity. While there is a potential application for industrial heat needs, significant progress in these areas is required, which may not happen for several years.”

Under the heading economic evaluation, the report reaches the conclusion that while it may be technically possible to use SMRs to provide steam for the Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage oilsands recovery technique, “they are not viable under current market conditions.”

Quite possibly cutting to the fundamental basis of the company’s decision, that section continues: “While existing government support programs are beneficial, they do not provide sufficient financial and risk management support to appropriately improve SMR feasibility.”

In other words, if the government isn’t going to pay for it, we can forget about it.

As for SMRs, despite the relentless effort by Alberta’s United Conservative Party Government to generate enthusiasm for their potential in the Athabasca oilsands, they’re not ready for prime time and quite possibly never will be.

Remember, as has been said here before, SMRs may be nuclear reactors, but they’re not small and they’re not really modular. They are multi-billion-dollar megaprojects, just not mega enough to justify their cost. The initials could stand for “Spending Money Recklessly,” Dr. O’Donnell and Dr. Ramana wrote last Monday.

Like other carbon reduction schemes pushed by the UCP Government, such as its failed hydrogen-powered truck fantasy and high-risk carbon capture and underground storage schemes that are now stirring up opposition in northern Alberta, they serve mainly as a way to to greenwash high-carbon oilsands activities.

April 9, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, Canada | Leave a comment

So much winning

318 million people were already at crisis-level hunger before February 28. That figure has been earmarked for aggressive growth,

Please make it stop, Mr. President

Gold and Geoppolitics, , Apr 02, 2026

In 2002, the Pentagon spent $250 million on the largest wargame in US military history called ‘Millennium Challenge’. 13,500 participants, 2 years of planning, the works. The idea was pretty straightforward: simulate an invasion of a Middle Eastern country in the Persian Gulf. Suspiciously resembling Iran. The purpose was to demonstrate that America’s technological dominance could steamroll anything in its path.

They picked a retired 3-star Marine named Paul Van Riper to play the enemy.

Van Riper, who spent 41 years in uniform from Vietnam to Desert Storm, took one look at the scenario and did what any self-respecting adversary would do. He ignored it completely. Instead of radios, he used motorcycle couriers. Attack orders were hidden in the daily call to prayer. Swarms of explosive-laden speedboats were sent through the Strait of Hormuz.

And in less than 10 minutes, he sank 16 US warships. An aircraft carrier, 10 cruisers, and 5 amphibious ships. Over 20,000 simulated American casualties. The equivalent of Pearl Harbor, executed with small boats and cruise missiles by a retired Marine with a phone and a bad attitude.

So the Pentagon did what any self-respecting institution does when reality disagreed with the plan.

The ships were un-sank. Van Riper’s forces had to turn on their anti-aircraft radar so it could be easily targeted and destroyed. They even told him he wasn’t allowed to shoot down the incoming 82nd Airborne. The whole rest of the exercise was scripted to guarantee an American victory.

Van Riper walked out in disgust. His parting words: “Nothing was learned from this. A culture not willing to think hard and test itself does not augur well for the future”.

That was 24 years ago. The conditions Van Riper exploited haven’t changed. They’ve only gotten worse.

And now we’re one month into this shooting war with Iran. “Operation Epic Fury”.

Let’s have a look at what we’ve achieved, shall we?

The Strait of Hormuz has been successfully transitioned from a free international waterway into a revenue-generating toll infrastructure, administered by the IRGC with a published fee schedule, a vetting corridor near Larak Island, and legislation pending to make it permanent. Ships currently pay $2 to $3.5 million per transit, settling in yuan through CIPS, which bypasses SWIFT entirely and represents a significant upgrade in settlement efficiency.

India has adopted the yuan. Japan has adopted the renminbi. Pakistan negotiated preferential rates at 2 tankers per day. Thailand secured bilateral access. Only COSCO, China’s state shipping line, moves freely, which streamlines the user experience considerably if you happen to be Chinese. The dollar’s share of global reserves has reached its lowest level in a century, which suggests the new framework is being broadly embraced.

This is the petrodollar in transition. The mechanism that has underwritten American empire since 1974 – Gulf oil priced in dollars, revenues recycled through US Treasuries, quietly funding a $39 trillion debt – is being replaced in real time by a yuan-denominated corridor that didn’t exist 5 weeks ago. And unlike a military defeat, which can be spun and repackaged for a news cycle to consumers with the attention span of a goldfish, a reserve currency transition is a one-way door.

The Navy has achieved a significant risk management milestone by declining to escort tankers through the Strait, citing conditions that were “too high” – a prudent assessment that prioritises fleet preservation over the stated objective of the war. 3,000 ships and 20,000 seafarers remain in the Gulf, representing the largest involuntary maritime community since the Age of Sail. Maersk has 10 container ships holding position, crews resourcefully extending provisions without fresh food. 470,000 TEUs of container capacity – 10% of the global fleet – is effectively in long-term storage, reducing wear on hulls. The insurance industry has contributed independently: 7 P&I clubs filing cancellation notices achieved what the entire US Fifth Fleet could not, surging war-risk premiums from 0.2% to 10% of hull value. Even after a ceasefire, insurers require 30 to 60 days of incident-free stability before reinstating cover. The Houthis’ Red Sea precedent: 26 months and still no policy written.

Flexibility in goal-setting is a hallmark of mature organisations, and the administration demonstrated this by quietly reclassifying the reopening of Hormuz from “strategic imperative” to “optional”. The waterway that carries a fifth of the world’s oil, that the war was partly launched to secure, is no longer required for the war’s conclusion. This frees up considerable strategic bandwidth to focus on objectives that are also not being achieved, but in less publicly measurable ways.

The war has successfully disrupted seven global commodity flows simultaneously, achieving a level of supply chain diversification that would be difficult to replicate intentionally.

The agricultural sector has been comprehensively de-risked from overreliance on Gulf-sourced inputs. Hormuz transit collapsed 97%, slashing maritime CO2 emissions in the Strait to levels not seen since the Age of Sail. An environmental triumph, really. It also took with it 80% of global sulfur production along with nitrogen capacity that was rendered uneconomic by gas prices. Russia contributed by halting ammonium nitrate exports. China pitched in by banning phosphate exports through August.

All those key macronutrients were successfully eliminated from global supply chains simultaneously, and during planting season no less. Urea at the Port of New Orleans hit $690 a tonne, a 45% gain in three weeks that commodity traders would kill for under normal circumstances. The nitrogen shortage has automatically opted one in four US farmers out of spring production.

318 million people were already at crisis-level hunger before February 28. That figure has been earmarked for aggressive growth, and with the planting window about to shut, the revised projections are locked in.

The plastics and pharmaceutical supply chains have undergone similar rationalisation. Three supply chains for polyethylene were streamlined in one stroke: Indonesia, South Korea, and Singapore. In a single week!

India, producer of 40% of US generic drugs, sources 87.7% of its methanol through the same 21 miles we just helped close, putting paracetamol, ibuprofen, and metformin for 537 million diabetics on an accelerated depreciation schedule…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The war has generated strong returns for stakeholders on all sides except the one funding it. Iran is producing 1.5 million barrels per day, up from 1.1 million pre-war, selling at $110 a barrel where it used to accept $47. That’s a win. Just not for us.

…………………………….. The war has attracted significant third-party investment. Russia contributed the strike plan, 500 MANPADS launchers, and satellite intelligence. China contributed BeiDou navigation, base imagery, and fabrication tools. In return, both are collecting above-market premiums on every commodity the war has disrupted, while committing zero personnel and accepting zero risk. Iran has been capitalised just well enough to sustain the engagement without resolving it.

And this brings us to the most exciting deliverable on the roadmap. The air campaign has successfully exhausted 15,000 precision strikes, fully deployed the cruise missile inventory, and generated a $200 billion supplemental funding request – yet Iran continues to launch, export, administer the Strait, and issue demands. The enriched uranium remains 100 metres under granite that no ordnance in the US arsenal can reach, which creates a compelling case for boots-on-the-ground engagement. Polymarket agrees: 66-68% probability of US ground entry by April 30.

………………………………………………………………..One month. 88 waves. 40 destroyed energy assets across 9 countries. Seven supply chains severed. A yuan toll booth where the petrodollar used to be. A famine building in the planting data. A carrier in Crete. An AWACS burning in the Saudi desert. Cruise missiles spent. Bond markets screaming. Allies shutting bases. $12 trillion gone. And the only option left on the table is the one that turns all of this into a footnote.

We’re going to win so much.

You may even get tired of winning. https://no01.substack.com/p/so-much-winning?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=4094764&post_id=192834077&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=wuef2&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

April 3, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Ukrainian Economy ‘Collapsing’

The only real solution to the Ukrainian problem is to accept the Russian peace terms.

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, Global Research, March 29, 2026, https://www.globalresearch.ca/ukrainian-economy-collapsing/5920470

Even Ukrainian authorities are beginning to admit the serious crisis affecting the country.

Recently, the head of the Kiev regime’s finance sector confirmed that the country is going through a catastrophic situation, showing deep concerns about the regime’s future.

This clearly shows how the nationalist junta in Kiev is rapidly destroying the country – something that could be avoided if the authorities agreed to make peace with Russia.

During a speech to the Ukrainian parliament on March 26, Daniil Getmantsev, chairman of the Finance, Tax and Customs Committee of the Verkhovna Rada, said that Ukraine is indebted and unable to pay all the expenses accumulated since the beginning of the conflict. He expressed concerns about the future of the Ukrainian economy and “sovereignty,” considering the country’s growing debts with major global financial institutions.

Getmantsev primarily denounced the country’s debts to the EU, the IMF, and the World Bank. He emphasized that Ukraine is already indebted to these organizations and does not appear to be in a position to repay this debt anytime soon. Therefore, the tendency is for the country to continue contracting more loans and becoming increasingly indebted.

The official explained some of the numbers behind the crisis. Ukraine failed to pay the installments of the loan from the EU’s “Ukraine Facility” program. Thus, the country missed out on part of the expected funding, as it failed to fulfill its part of the agreement.

He drew attention to the situation and warned Ukrainian parliamentarians about the current dangers. According to Getmantsev, it is possible that Ukrainians are close to “losing” the country because of this crisis. Therefore, he urges local politicians to act quickly to prevent the worst-case scenario. He believes immediate reforms are necessary, as well as greater integration with the EU, an audit of public spending, and a reform of the Ukrainian social security system.

“In 2025, we failed to meet 14 indicators of the Ukraine Facility. And because of this, we did not receive 3.9 billion euros (…) Moreover, 300 million of that amount is being lost completely in the first quarter [as] we have already failed to meet 5 out of 5 indicators (…) We can lose the country like this (…( Today is not the time to hide from responsibility, not the time for populism, not the time to look for popular decisions (…) It is the time for systematic work, European integration, deregulation, pension reform, an audit of state expenditures, and bringing the economy out of the shadows” he said.

This makes it clear that not even the regime’s own officials can hide the Ukrainian reality anymore. The country’s crisis has reached such a critical point that all sides are gradually admitting that it is impossible to maintain the current situation in the long term. With the decrease in international aid and constant losses on the battlefield, Ukraine has entered a critical phase in the conflict – being extremely vulnerable and close to collapse on several levels, mainly militarily and economically.

The previous attitude of Ukrainian and Western propaganda was to deny the crisis and claim that Ukraine had the economic and military situation under control. These lies helped keep the Ukrainian war machine active for a long time, but Ukraine’s losses caused European public opinion to change its attitude on the subject – which generated popular pressure in the West against continued aid programs.

Furthermore, Europe itself has reduced its capacity for aid. With the energy and economic crisis resulting from anti-Russian sanctions, added to constant international instability, Europe is entering a phase of social insecurity, making it more prudent to control spending than to continue systematically sending money to Ukraine. Although this money is often delivered in the form of loans, it seems certain that Ukraine will not be able to repay it. And even loans secured by the delivery of rare earth minerals and natural resources are unsafe, since exploration will be hampered during hostilities.

In fact, the pro-war lobby in the EU is still strong, which is why aid continues, but the material circumstances have forced the bloc to significantly reduce assistance – which has further worsened the crisis for Ukrainians. Now, there is no longer any way to disguise reality. Ukraine is trapped in a crisis from which it cannot easily emerge. No matter how much local authorities speak of “urgent measures” or “necessary reforms,” the country will certainly not be able to overcome its current difficulties while the conflict with Russia continues.

In this sense, the correct course of action for Kiev would be simply to accept the Russian peace terms and establish an agreement to end hostilities. Any other “measure” would be a mistake, incapable of saving the country from absolute collapse.

April 3, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Who Else, Besides Pete Hegseth, is Trying to Use the War in Iran to Get Rich?

31 March 2026 by Larry C. Johnson , https://sonar21.com/who-else-besides-pete-hegseth-is-trying-to-use-the-war-in-iran-to-get-rich/

Looks like Pete Hegseth tried to make a financial killing off of the war of aggression the US launched against Iran on 28 February 2026. According to the Financial Times:

Pete Hegseth’s broker at Morgan Stanley contacted BlackRock in February to make a multimillion-dollar investment in a defense-focused Exchange-Traded Fund (ETF) called IDEF.

This $3.2 billion fund is built around companies that benefit from increased military spending, including RTX, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Palantir — all major Pentagon contractors.

The request came just weeks before the U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran, a campaign Hegseth helped shape and strongly supported within the Trump administration.

BlackRock flagged the inquiry internally because of Hegseth’s high-profile role. The investment didn’t go through, but only because the ETF wasn’t yet available on Morgan Stanley’s platform.

BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, and the Pentagon declined to comment.

If you do the analysis on the weapons expended so far in the month-long war with Iran, the opportunity for war profiteering is quite clear. The US/Israeli Ramadan War has drained the US inventory of its two ballistic missile defense systems. Both US PAC-3 (Patriot) and THAAD interceptor inventories are significantly depleted or nearing critical levels as of late March 2026, after accounting for prior conflicts (Ukraine support, June 2025 12-day Israel-Iran war) and the ongoing 2026 Iran war (Operation Epic Fury). The high expenditure rates, combined with historically low peacetime production, have created a serious “race of attrition” that cannot be quickly reversed. Both the PAC-3 (Patriot Advanced Capability-3, specifically the MSE variant) and the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) interceptors are primarily manufactured by Lockheed Martin.

Combined Estimate of Remaining US Inventories (Rough Synthesis)

Exact classified figures are not public, so these are reasoned ranges drawn from consistent reporting (CSIS, Payne Institute, RUSI, JINSA, DoD budget data, and conflict usage estimates). Numbers reflect US-owned/controlled operational stocks (not including allies’ separate purchases).

PAC-3 MSE (Patriot terminal-phase interceptors):

Pre-2026 baseline: Roughly 1,600–2,000 modern PAC-3 MSE (out of a broader Patriot family inventory sometimes cited around 2,000 total, with older variants mixed in). As I have mentioned in previojous posts, cumulative production upper bound of ~4,620 through 2025 (with ~620 delivered in 2025) is reasonable as a global total, but the US retained share is smaller after Foreign Military Sales.
Major draws: Hundreds fired by US forces in the first 16 days of the 2026 war (estimates of ~402 in early reports, with some higher figures in intense periods); prior usage in Ukraine (hundreds total over years) and the June 2025 war; plus Gulf partner support.
Current remaining (late March 2026): There are few, if any, PAC 3 missiles left in the US inventory in Israel and the Persian Gulf. There are an estimate 1,400 PAC 3s remaining in INDOPACOM’s pre-war planning stock. Stocks available for sustained Middle East operations outside pre-positioned or diverted units are, under the most optimistic assumptions, critically low. The two-missile (or more) salvo doctrine multiplies consumption per threat. Yet, I have seen videos where at least four PAC 3s are fired at one target… which means the consumption rate is even worse than estimated.

THAAD (high-altitude ballistic missile interceptors):

Pre-2026 baseline: Around ~534–632 (MDA procurement/delivered figures; some estimates reference higher cumulative including pipeline or foreign orders). Production has been extremely low (~96 or fewer per year historically).
Major draws: Significant usage in June 2025 (~92–150 interceptors, often cited as ~25% or up to 30% of inventory); additional heavy expenditure in the 2026 war (estimates of ~198 in the first 16 days, or ~40% of pre-conflict on-hand inventory in some analyses). Gulf/Middle East operations have consumed a large share.
Current remaining (late March 2026): Reports indicate fewer than 400 ready/reserve interceptors in some estimates, with others warning of depletion risk within weeks (e.g., by mid-April) if current tempo continues. Some analyses describe ~30–40%+ of the stockpile already expended in the current conflict alone on top of prior usage.

US stocks of these two high-end ballistic missile defense interceptors are effectively strained to the point of operational risk for prolonged high-intensity defense. THAAD is in a more acute near-term crisis due to tiny production rates, while PAC-3 has a somewhat better (but still insufficient) ramp underway. If the war continues at saturation-attack levels, further constraints (or changes in tactics/priorities) become likely. Exact numbers remain opaque for operational security reasons, but the trend is clear: both systems are depleted or nearing depletion. Which means that Lockheed Martin can expect a major influx of cash to boost production and try to replenish exhausted missile air defense inventories.

I wonder who else in the Trump administration and the US Congress are making money off of this bloody war?

Judge Napolitano and I discussed the insanity of US plans to deploy ground forces to Iran:

VIDEOS on original – Judging Freedom Podcast – Full Escalation etc

April 3, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

‘Worst case scenario’: Wall St craters, oil surges as nuclear sites hit.

Wall St is imploding and oil is surging again as experts warn of a “worst case scenario” over frightening new strikes on nuclear facilities.

Ben Graham, March 28, 2026, https://www.news.com.au/finance/economy/world-economy/worst-case-scenario-wall-st-craters-oil-surges-as-nuclear-sites-hit/news-story/c19242591d70011f0f733addaf27be51

Wall Street sunk to its lowest level since September 2025 as oil prices soared again overnight as investors mash the panic button amid strikes on Iranian nuclear sites.

The Nasdaq Composite slumped 2.2 per cent in New York, the S&P 500 fell by 1.67 per cent following on from heavy losses in recent weeks, while oil shot up 4.2 per cent to $112.57 a barrel.

The drop came after US President Donald Trump extended a deadline for Tehran to open the Strait of Hormuz or face the destruction of its energy grid, pushing it from Friday to April 6.

The 10-day extension was his second since last week’s threat to destroy the infrastructure if Tehran didn’t reopen the critical waterway, a chokepoint that’s become increasingly urgent with global energy and commodity shortages mounting.

But with Iran maintaining a hold on the strait and intense hostilities continuing, Mr Trump’s announcement failed to lift the mood on markets.

Nuclear sites struck

One of the key reasons for the latest sell-offs of global stocks is due to a concerning escalation in the war as Israel’s military says it struck a heavy water reactor and a uranium processing plant in Iran.

“A short while ago, the Israeli Air Force… struck the heavy water plant in Arak, central Iran,” the military said in a statement, describing the site as a “key plutonium production site for nuclear weapons”.

Iranian media had earlier reported that US-Israeli strikes hit the Khondab heavy water complex, saying they caused no casualties or radiation leak from the site.

March 31, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs | Leave a comment

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