All one needs to know about successful investing in one sophisticated chart 👇

Isn’t this funny? It also explains the lack of political will for long-overdue reforms in France. Only one in three French people works in the real economy, two-thirds live, one way or another, off other people’s taxes. They won’t vote for politicians who say France’s absurd pensions and overblown state spending are unsustainable, they vote for those who promise to lower the already low retirement age even further. France is cooked. There will be no serious reforms. Higher interest spending will accelerate the rise in the debt/GDP ratio. France is heading into a debt crisis that will hit the entire eurozone. The ECB will, as always, bend the rules and its mandate and start printing money again, making savers and pensioners across Europe much poorer. The situation is so bad that no nice options remain.

The video of Tucker Carlson being destroyed by Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg for spreading the usual Russian propaganda lies that Russia’s economy is allegedly larger than the UK’s is making the rounds. Russia is a failed, deeply corrupt state. Two in five Russians lack decent sanitation. There is no infrastructure, investment, future-ready industry, or innovation. They prop up this house of cards by producing weapons burned in Ukraine. It is not true GDP growth. Don’t believe what Russian assets and useful idiots tell you on social media.

Most people don’t yet grasp what is happening in France. Markets are pricing French sovereign debt as junk, rating agencies will eventually have to follow. This will have two major impacts: 1. Most French banks are already rated at or just below the sovereign, so a move toward junk would likely drag domestically focused lenders with it. Credit to households and firms would slow sharply, hurting the economy and widening the fiscal deficit even further, a vicious cycle. 2. For the ECB, the constraint is legal as well as financial. A fall below investment grade would force sales by ratings-bound investors while making any backstop harder to justify under current rules. The next euro crisis will begin in France. The first, which began in Greece, will feel like a walk in the park compared with what comes next.

The French-German 10-year spread touched about 155 basis points yesterday, the widest since the 2011 euro crisis, and has roughly doubled in a few weeks. A budget promising roughly €43 billion in savings failed to steady the market. The deficit path remains above 5% of GDP, debt is still climbing, and the 2027 presidential election hangs over every fiscal promise. Higher yields feed the problem, more of the budget goes to interest, so the consolidation needed to stabilize the ratio grows larger, not smaller. The spillover is already visible, the widening is no longer confined to France. Italy, Belgium, and Greece have moved with it. In a monetary union without a shared treasury, one large sovereign under stress reopens the question of who ultimately backstops the system. The ECB can compress spreads for a while, but it cannot make French primary balances add up without reigniting the argument over fiscal transfers that the north has never accepted. If Paris cannot pass and stick to a credible path before the election, the next leg will not stay inside France. The first euro crisis was about hundreds of billions, the second will be about trillions and will most likely break the failed experiment called the euro.

Isn’t it cute that Canada wants to become an EU associate member, and the current UK government keeps talking about rejoining? Let’s look at where the main European countries stand. Shall we? 1. People are slowly realizing France today is Greece in 2011. French debt/GDP is 119%, Greece’s was 126% just before the first euro crisis. Even the smallest reform attempts trigger fierce French union resistance and strikes. French communists poll well, their program would bankrupt a solid country, let alone one heading into a debt crisis. Le Pen’s Front National seriously talks of lowering France’s retirement age, already among the lowest in the developed world. France is a train wreck in slow motion. 2. Germany is a case study in self-sabotaging a manufacturing powerhouse. Hardly a week passes without a major layoff or bankruptcy. The left-green ideology decision to close perfectly fine nuclear plants choked German industry, and will enter the history books. Chinese competition is wiping out one traditional German company after another. Grotesque regulations, bureaucracy, reforms resistance and overtaxation finish the job. 3. Spain looks more or less stable at first glance, tourism helps float the boat. Letting in hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants yearly will eventually sink it. The foreign-born population is 20% but accounts for about 80% of new unemployment-benefit registrations. Watch what this does to Spanish finances. 4. Italy under Meloni is fine for now, but she faces pressure from populists to her right. France’s fiscal debacle also lifts Italian bond yields, with Italian debt/GDP at 138%, the implications are clear. Otherwise, Europe is fine. Clearly time to rejoin.

Elections in France, Sweden, Germany and other countries showed one thing, immigrants mostly vote for far-left parties. As they are not that known for strong support of LGBTQ and women’s rights, there must be another reason. Programs no longer matter, the left’s open antisemitism and promise of unconditional lifelong welfare benefits suffice to win the votes. The left eventually sees that its socialist policies fail and make things worse, driving traditional voters away, so it lets more voters in. At some point, this will become very difficult to address.

Germany’s “green energy transition” is simply mind-blowing. Did you know that switching off coal power plants instead of the perfectly fine nuclear power plants would have avoided CO2 emissions, equal to Berlin’s emissions over 80 years? But that’s not all, it’s even much worse: 1. Energy-intensive industrial production imploded, and many well-paid jobs were lost. 2. The same products are now made in Asia, but with far higher emissions, for example cars built and shipped from China cause 70% more emissions than built in Germany, concrete 100% more. 3. Without abundant, reliable nuclear power, Germany will not join the energy-intensive AI revolution. Without AI, its products will lose competitiveness further. Germany’s “green” approach has hurt both its economy and the environment. Why did they do that to themselves and the planet?

This is interesting, 20.7% of Spain’s population is foreign-born, yet the ratio of newly registered unemployed, with foreigners at 79%, is the exact opposite. Can someone please explain the logic behind Spain being Europe’s immigration champion? It has one of the highest youth unemployment rates, making it hard for young people to start a family. Why import more unemployed people? Wouldn’t a points-based system, admitting well-educated people who would contribute rather than compete with young Spaniards for entry-level jobs, make more sense?

Germans don’t yet understand what is coming. An epic squeeze between the US tech and AI revolution, and massively improved Chinese manufacturing capabilities will wipe out the German industrial base. The current wave of bankruptcies and layoffs announced every week is nothing compared to what lies ahead. Germany has a few years left to keep masking the implosion and lack of reforms with more debt and growing government spending, but this will only slightly slow the demise, not stop it. It will be brutal, a former manufacturing superpower replacing its industry with government „jobs“ simply can’t stay prosperous.

The socialist pitch is always free housing, healthcare, education, free everything. The delivery is always shortages, higher taxes, more bureaucracy, and the discovery that nothing was free. If the model works, show results instead of promising a bright future. Socialism has been tried many times, just pick one example that worked. The problem is, it never has.

The United States is now the world’s largest producer of both oil and natural gas. In 2025 it averaged a record 13.6 million barrels of oil a day and more than 1,000 bcm of gas, well ahead of Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and everyone else. This is the result of a political culture that still treats energy as something to produce rather than something to ration. Europe has gone the other way. The UK just keeps debating the North Sea fields, Groningen is being shut. German domestic gas output has collapsed by roughly 80 percent over two decades, and nuclear capacity was retired by ideology. The result is a continent that consumes energy it no longer makes, paying a premium for imported LNG and living with higher industrial and household power prices. Manufacturing, farming, and AI all scale with cheap, reliable, abundant power. A society that constrains its own production chooses scarcity and decline over prosperity.

Did you know men in China retire at 60, blue-collar women at 50, and white-collar women at 55? At the same time the official youth unemployment rate is 19%, the real rate is probably much higher. Imagine the youth unemployment rate if Chinese workers retired at the same age as Europeans. Just do the math. Maybe building debt financed ghost towns, idle airports, and vacant illuminated skyscrapers does not drive prosperity after all. Aren’t naive Western socialists who praise China as proof socialism works simply cute?

Markets have delivered a verdict that would have sounded absurd a decade ago, France now pays more to borrow for 10 years than Italy, Greece, Spain or Portugal. It is the price of a political system that has spent years treating fiscal gravity as optional. Debt is heading toward 120% of GDP, the fiscal deficit remains stuck above 5%, and public spending is still among the highest in the developed world. Announced pension and labour-market reforms were diluted, delayed or abandoned. Reform attempts immediately trigger furious union reactions and strikes. The former PIGS countries did the opposite after the first euro crisis in 2010–12. They ran primary surpluses, cleaned up banks, and accepted that membership in a currency union requires domestic adjustment. A second euro crisis would not look like the first, France is too big to be treated like Greece. Contagion would hit Italian and Belgian spreads, French banks, and the credibility of the entire monetary union. The ECB can buy some time, but it cannot substitute for a political class unwilling to tell voters that the bill has arrived.

The French labor code has more than 3,000 pages, Swiss labor law has 200. Where would you like to invest and create new jobs? France’s unemployment is 8.3%, Switzerland’s registered rate is 3.0%. French youth unemployment exceeds 21%. A typical French full-time private-sector wage is about €3,600 gross a month, in Switzerland it is about CHF 7,024 (€7,400). Why does the left love regulations so much? They hurt those they want to “protect.”

Waiting for BBC and CNN’s acclaimed, objective and independent journalism to condemn the two Israeli oppressors on their genocide mission to storm and unjustifiably regain control of the cockpit of a plane peacefully taken over by deeply harmless, peace-loving activists. The plane has always belonged to them.

This is really interesting. High pensions and welfare spending can buy social peace in the short run, but not indefinitely if it is debt-financed, growth stays weak and the working-age population shrinks. Isn’t China’s 8% quite surprising? For a country that still calls itself socialist, the state spends a much smaller share of national output on welfare than every rich democracy. Beijing has prioritized investment, industrial policy and control over a European-style welfare state. Today’s French-style pensions are bankrupting the next generation though. The party will not continue forever.

OMG, if what happened on the Dubai–Tel Aviv flight today is confirmed, there will be a Hollywood movie one day. A crew member attacked the pilot with a knife and disabled the aircraft’s systems. The plane fell 18,000 feet within minutes and almost crashed. Two Israeli passengers stormed the cockpit and subdued the attacker. The stabbed captain was too severely injured to stabilize and land the plane safely. Two more Israeli pilots were on board, they landed the plane and saved 180 people. Regardless of what one thinks of Israel and Israelis, the constant threat they live under makes them real heroes in extremely tough situations. Wow.