BREAKING: DHS announces via federal register that Secretary Mullin is closing a Biden-era loophole that allowed Chinese nationals to travel to the Northern Mariana Islands without a visa for 14 days, which four GOP Senators alleged was facilitating Chinese birth tourism. Senators @SenMikeLee, @votetimscott, @SenBillCassidy, & @JohnCornyn had written a letter to Mullin in April, urging him to close the loophole, which Mullin has now done. Via the notice: “The Secretary has broad authority to suspend the program for good cause, including threats to national security, law enforcement interests, and immigration enforcement. The Secretary has determined that there is good cause to suspend EVS- TAP, while DHS, in consultation with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Interior, evaluates the program.”

FORTRESS: The Pentagon is preparing every major U.S. military base to survive 90 days without outside support — no civilian power grid, no global supply chains, no outside fuel or water. The initiative, revealed in documents reviewed by Fox News Digital, envisions portable nuclear reactors, massive battery storage, and microgrids that can disconnect installations from civilian electricity entirely. Strategic reserves of munitions, fuel, critical minerals, and medical supplies would be stockpiled based on wartime consumption rates. Civilian factories are being pre-identified to shift to defense production during a crisis. Pentagon chief spokesperson Sean Parnell put it bluntly: "Power is combat now. Without electricity, you lose communications, water, logistics, assembly lines and just basic military command structures." Full story here

Good morning. Of note: French bond yields have been surging today (Bloomberg chart), pulling European peers higher and spilling over somewhat into the US. As noted previously, this dynamic is worth monitoring: if it gains traction, and it's an IF, the resulting two-way feedback loop could easily become a headache for many countries. #economy# #markets# #france# #yields# #bonds#

我以前在法国最好的大学巴黎政治学院学经济学。以我在法国生活和读书的亲身经历来看，法国今天变成这个样子，我一点都不意外。法国最大的问题就是，所有人都在想着怎么分过去留下来的蛋糕，而不是怎么把未来的蛋糕做大。我在巴黎政治学院读书的时候，最让我震惊的就是，我们经济学课上读的东西，居然大部分不是亚当·斯密，而是马克思！ 马克思的理论说白了，就是人类历史是由富人和穷人之间的阶级斗争推动的。富人叫资产阶级Bourgeoisie，穷人叫无产阶级Proletariat。因为资产阶级掌握着生产资料，无产阶级没有，所以只能靠给资本家打工赚钱。这两个阶级的利益天生就是对立的。 但这套理论最大的问题，就是它假设生产资料是固定的，新的生产资料不能被创造出来。很多法国人被这套思想洗脑了，觉得如果自己是穷人，想过上好日子，唯一的办法就是把富人干掉。当年法国国王路易十六就是这么被送上断头台的，今天法国发生的事情，本质上也差不多。你看这个视频，一群野蛮人直接冲进一个年轻女孩开的店，把店砸了，再把里面的商品全部抢走。 马克思错就错在，在资本主义社会里，只要你愿意承担风险，就有机会创造出原本根本不存在的财富。而且你创造财富的同时，整个社会的生活水平也可以跟着提高。但要做到这一点，大家就得想着怎么去创造未来，而不是整天争抢过去的东西。 法国其实跟印度一样，有很多非常聪明、非常努力的人。问题是，这些聪明又肯干的法国年轻人，根本看不到自己国家有什么未来，所以最后一个个都跑去美国了。我认识的大部分法国朋友，宁愿死都不想回法国，因为那个地方真的太让人压抑了。 你随便哪天去巴黎街上走一圈，就能看到一群法国年轻人站在路边，一只手拿着烟，另一只手端着红酒。这些人对自己的人生根本没什么追求，也不想着去创造什么价值，每天就是混日子，慢慢烂下去。法国这种根深蒂固的问题，我觉得至少还得花一百年才能解决。

My dear American friends, in my last post I gave you a snapshot of where France stands today. Now let me show you how we got here. I want you to see the whole movie before you buy the ticket. After the war, France was a machine. We called it the Trente Glorieuses, thirty glorious years. We built Concorde, the most beautiful aircraft ever made. We built a fleet of nuclear reactors in about fifteen years and gave ourselves some of the cleanest, cheapest electricity in the world. We built Ariane and put Europe in space. We built the TGV, the fastest train on earth. We invented the Minitel, an online network in millions of homes before most of you had heard of the internet. We were not a museum. We were builders. Then came 1981. François Mitterrand. Think of him as our Bernie Sanders, except he actually won. At his side, in the office next to his at the Élysée, sat a 37-year-old prodigy named Jacques Attali, his special adviser for the next ten years. The brightest minds of the left, convinced they could run an economy from a ministry. Here's what they did. They governed with Communist ministers. In 1982 they nationalized dozens of banks and the biggest industrial groups in the country: Paribas, Suez, Saint-Gobain, Thomson, Pechiney, Rhône-Poulenc. They lowered the retirement age to 60. They cut the work week to 39 hours and added a fifth week of paid vacation. They created a wealth tax. They hired massively into the public sector. Reality hit in less than two years. Capital fled, inflation ran wild, and the franc was devalued three times. In March 1983 Mitterrand had to slam on the brakes and impose austerity just to stay in the European monetary system. But here's the trick: the brakes never reversed anything. They just slowed the ratchet. The so-called right came back with Jacques Chirac, and nothing was undone. Under Chirac's presidency, France passed the 35-hour work week. Left or right, every government added one more program, one more rule, one more tax, and nobody ever took one away. At the same time, the political class did something even more destructive than bad economics. It turned the youth into a political instrument. Instead of teaching young people, including millions of children of immigrants, to love the country they lived in, it taught them a story of guilt and grievance: France as the oppressor, France as the thing to resent. You cannot integrate people into a country you've taught them to despise. We are living with the consequences of that narrative today, in our schools, our suburbs, our streets. Then forty years of slow decline, all the way to Macron. And the story has a perfect ending. In 2007, Jacques Attali chaired a commission on how to unleash French growth. Its deputy rapporteur was a young civil servant named Emmanuel Macron. The commission proposed more than 300 reforms to free the economy. Almost none were ever implemented. Even the men who built the system knew it wasn't working, and even they couldn't undo it. No balanced budget since 1974. Public spending around 57% of GDP. Debt above 3,300 billion euros. Growth stuck under 1%. Now the number that should keep you up at night. In 1995, GDP per person in France was about $27,000. In America, about $29,000. We were neck and neck. Today France is around $49,000. America is around $90,000. You are now nearly twice as rich per person as we are. What changed? Not our talent. Not our engineers. Not our schools of mathematics. The only thing that changed is that we went all in on socialism. The 35 hours, the endless regulation, the taxes that chase out anyone who builds, the belief that the state should do everything and the individual should ask permission for everything. There's a line people love to attribute to Einstein: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. We tried. For forty years, we tried. Every government promised that one more program, one more tax, one more regulation would finally fix things. You just saw where it got us. So if you choose the Democratic Party, which is literally turning socialist in front of your eyes, you will deserve what comes next. Let me tell you exactly what will happen if you go down that road. Nobody will vote for decline. Every single measure will sound generous, compassionate, reasonable. Your builders will slowly leave or stop building. Your state will grow every year and never shrink. Your debt will compound. And in thirty years, your kids will look at a chart like the one I just described and wonder when it all went wrong. You still have something we lost. You have Elon Musk sending rockets to orbit and landing them on their tail. You have Palmer Luckey building the defense industry of the future. You have Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, and thousands of founders nobody has heard of yet, building in garages right now. Trust your entrepreneurs. Don't trust your politicians. I come from your future. Don't make it yours.

Buried under yesterday's @USTreasury Iran sanctions is something not done before. This is the first time khums (the one-fifth levy observant muslims pay on surplus income) is named as a channel the Islamic Republic exploits for sanctions evasion and terror finance. The alert publish by FinCEN didn't hold back saying some collectors act "on behalf of prominent Iranian ayatollahs with ties to the regime or on behalf of the Supreme Leader himself." The U.S. government is asking banks to be on the look out for these flows and report them. In 2024 two men in Texas pleaded guilty to collecting khums on Khamenei's behalf, carrying cash out in amounts under $10,000 to evade detection, and once used 25 pilgrims bound for Iraq to hand-deliver dollars to Iran.