I guess it makes sense when you’re running a military empire that the generals get to mouth off and make threats—not just the POTUS and random senators and such like.
From Friday, July 18, 2025 UK Times "Daily Briefing:"
"New leadership in Ukraine"
"Yulia Svyrydenko, 39, has become Ukraine’s second female premier and its second youngest in President Zelensky’s biggest wartime reshuffle.
Who is Svyrydenko? Yulia Svyrydenko replaces Denys Shmyhal, 49, having previously served as minister for the economy. In that role, she won praise for negotiating the minerals deal with the US and leading a delegation at last week’s Ukraine Recovery Conference that won pledges of billions of dollars in support from the country’s allies. “She’s young, dynamic and has experience having difficult talks with the US and other governments,” said Oleskiy Haran, a professor in politics at the Kyiv-Mohyla academy, Ukraine’s leading university. However, although she is respected by diplomats and Ukrainian civil society, Svyrydenko is not well known to the Ukrainian public, having never stood for election as an MP.
What are her plans? Shortly before her appointment, Svyrydenko told The Times that Ukraine needed to become more self-sufficient through rapid economic growth, particularly in the defence sector, where Kyiv believes it can become a global leader. “Military and defence tech is one of the locomotives for growth – that’s obvious,” she said. “But also industrial sectors are growing: agricultural processing, construction and trade. We should move from a country that is exporting raw materials to a country that is exporting goods with added value, to get more income into the state budget.” She is also expected to build on good relations with Scott Bessent, the US Treasury secretary, to steady Kyiv’s transatlantic alliance.
Who else has been moved around? Svyrydenko has negotiated promotions of her two former deputies at the economy ministry to key posts. Taras Kachka becomes deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration and will lead talks on joining the EU, while Oleksiy Sobolev, who helped to negotiate a joint US-Ukraine investment fund, will take over a department merging the former economy, ecology and agriculture ministries. The trio are regarded as being “clean” ministers, whereas a number of “old guard” figures who have been retained are accused of presiding over corruption."
Lest anyone think that the apparently idiotic General's Kaliningrad kerfuffle (sorry I have come to like that word) wasn't purposeful and part of a larger setup to open a new front against Russia:
I don't blame Russia a bit for preparing for war against NATO. The avant-garde propaganda coming from Poland and Germany and the Baltic states indicates imminently hostile actions against Russia; and then you have real military threats via the build up of forces in Finland and Sweden. Russia would be fools not to respond forcefully against these unprovoked real and rhetorical threats.
He spent 2017 trotting around Oregon at his Town Halls warning darkly that Dark Money was influencing our elections, and oh by the way it is critical to investiagate the extent to which Russia may have interfered with the 2016 presidential election to aid their favored candidate.
Your profile says that you worked for the FBI? You have an outstanding grasp of military and economic matters for whatever my opinion means. Very well put together analysis. Reminds me of Simplicius here on Substack. You might get famous if you keep this up.
I spent a career in the Army and my observation of the Officer Corps across the services is that there is an A, B and C team. The A team are formidable in every way a human can be, intellectually, physically, and morally. I worked for a few of them and they are giants. There is a Grand Canyon gap between the A team and the B team, who are competent but well outside any brilliance in anything. They will row at their oar hard but are not going to conceive anything (much less speak or act),outside of the currently accepted paradigm which is often as you know, dead wrong. These guys will follow whatever conventional foolishness is the current fashion right over the edge of the falls without so much as a question. The C team are mediocrities or downright incompetent. My year group are mostly retired with the best of them flag officers. I still have a feel for who’s who at the upper tiers but I don’t know of any A team serving in senior ranks, which woild be the geographical or functional MACOMs, even Corp and Division commanders. They all seem to be a few B team and a preponderance of C Team. Donahue and his staff as an example, have compromised whatever intelligence they might have to please the court, so whatever they never had a lot of to begin with gets spent simply parroting the party line (Kaliningrad example). Need look no further than the war between Russia and NAT-, I mean, Ukraine. A goat rope from day one, run entirely by the best and brightest of the NATO member states. The truth is that Russia fought their plan, almost flawlessly really, and will likely accomplish what may qualify as the most difficult of all military endeavors; a war of annihilation (Vernichtungsschlacht), that achieves the complete destruction of the enemy’s military capability. Russian victory will be a strategic defeat of NATO and the US of course, an outcome delivered by the C team political and military leadership of the West.
Anyway, again great work. I look forward to reading more.
Financial repression. Say it ain't so! This has already happened: "This includes regulatory carve-outs of US Treasuries from banks’ supplementary leverage ratio requirements." Sorry I don't have a link at hand but it shouldn't be hard to find this. I expect the other actions noted to follow quickly. They just make too much sense as interim efforts to try to keep the economics of the U.S.S. U.S. afloat for awhile longer.
Ukraine was, and perhaps still is, a hub for human trafficking. I am wondering if banks in Ukraine were used for Epstein's affairs.
Breaking Epstein-related news: Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch, Wall Street Journal, and authors about a story revealing that Trump sent Epstein a birthday card in 2003 with his sketch of a naked woman inside, plus mention of a "wonderful secret" shared with Epstein.
When the story was published July 17, 2025, Trump rebutted "I never wrote a picture in my life".
You have to laugh (it helps with the sanity). Both sides are now throwing the kitchen sink at each other. The Dems go with a dodgy letter that Trump allegedly wrote and now Tulsi is going after Obama and Co for trying to overthrow Trump with the Russia hoax. They really need a good war to take our minds off this.
General Donahue, who failed upwards to command US Army - Europe after overseeing one of the worst days in the entire War on Terror during the Kabul Airlift, decided to run his mouth today about NATO being able to quickly conquer Kaliningrad.
Let's do the work his staff didn't.
...
Donahue is either bluffing or he's an idiot and the USAREUR staff are incompetent - someone with his level of supposed expertise shouldn't even need to be briefed on a force array this elementary, let alone get the takeaway so dramatically wrong. In any event, I'm sure the Russian commander in Kaliningrad (according to Wikipedia, that would be MG Andrey Ruzinsky of the Russian 11th Corps) rolled his eyes at Donahue's comments when he was informed of the matter.
"Washington is faced with a choice: Either it can accept that dollar hegemony is finished and radically change its approach to global monetary matters, or it can allow the collapse of dollar hegemony to take place via market pressures". They are going for the third choice - the one outlined at the top of the article: proxy wars and tariff bullying to try and restore the status quo ante. As you say, it isn't working and it won't work. On a side note, and a minor one: if in my military days I'd appeared in public in the state that Donohue is above, I'd be on a charge.
Nothing changes until the environment changes, and that means that the West will continue its slow decline until there is a major societal change that impacts most everyone. World war can accomplish this, but nuclear weapons make that inadvisable. A banking and stock market collapse is a realistic scenario; it almost happened in 2008, but the Fed stepped in and printed endless fiat money. A real pandemic with hundreds of millions of dead would also suffice; Covid was a dry run, but the real deal would get everyone's attention. Most likely is that Ukraine breaks sooner than anyone thinks and Europe has a financial crisis when their Central Banks' collateral evaporates. Then comes civil unrest on a scale no thought possible. And the contagion soon spreads worldwide.
As bad as this sounds, it's the only road to redemption. Desperation begets work ethic (or lacking that, extinction).
Total agreement, Tom. Trump was the final chance for a Great Man to turn things around. He has done some good things but it is abundantly clear that he will not - or cannot - take down the Deep State. That means things continue until they can't.
Trump is ranting against Powell to lower rates. The three month treasury is around 4.3%, so a real return of perhaps 1.6% before taxes. Real returns were negative for most of the two decades before. With yearly deficits of $2T and debt of $37T, why should rates be lowered? So that suckers can fund federal largess with negative real returns? To goose a stock market with all-time high valuations? To blow a little more real estate bubble? To give a final lift to boomer 401ks before they enter the grave?
The Fed can lower the Fed Funds rate, but that doesn't mean the longer dated Treasury rates will drop. From mid-September 2024 when the Fed made the 0.50% cut in the Fed Funds rate, the 10-year is up about 0.70% to 4.42% and the 30-year is up about 1.00% to 4.99%. Trump doesn't seem to understand that the bond market sets the current interest rate for Treasury bonds, not the Fed.
I'm sure Trump wants lower rates to help real estate, further juice the stock market, cut the borrowing cost to fund the deficits and reduce the interest burden on the consumer. Lower rates would also help banks with their $480 billion or so of unrealized losses on their bond portfolio. As noted above, the longer end of the curve might not drop, but go up if the Fed cuts rates later this month.
Yes, Exactly! In fact the Fed lowering rates would very likely make the 10-yr and longer term bond rates increase and inflation increase given current conditions. The 10-year and longer term Treasury bond rates are not directly subject to the Fed fund rates (SOFR) and they will take into account the Fiscal debt and also the Fed holdings of mortgage-backed securities. Playing financial games will not solve the longer term issue of a productivity deficit vs. fiscal spending. Thus we have the ever increasing need for new "collateral."
Thank you for describing so plainly the kill trench that our government is sitting in, voluntarily. I wrote down your concluding two sentences, to learn and remember the reality of US fiscal crisis.
I don't know if Trump's trying to do any of that. Mostly that trying to use the news to scam the markets so they can ride the wave up and they can ride the wave down and make some coin. Of course that's only one of many ways that they're trying to profit off of this, but I don't think they have any Grand aspirations to revive the American empire
https://x.com/thinking_panda/status/1946097487208759639
From Friday, July 18, 2025 UK Times "Daily Briefing:"
"New leadership in Ukraine"
"Yulia Svyrydenko, 39, has become Ukraine’s second female premier and its second youngest in President Zelensky’s biggest wartime reshuffle.
Who is Svyrydenko? Yulia Svyrydenko replaces Denys Shmyhal, 49, having previously served as minister for the economy. In that role, she won praise for negotiating the minerals deal with the US and leading a delegation at last week’s Ukraine Recovery Conference that won pledges of billions of dollars in support from the country’s allies. “She’s young, dynamic and has experience having difficult talks with the US and other governments,” said Oleskiy Haran, a professor in politics at the Kyiv-Mohyla academy, Ukraine’s leading university. However, although she is respected by diplomats and Ukrainian civil society, Svyrydenko is not well known to the Ukrainian public, having never stood for election as an MP.
What are her plans? Shortly before her appointment, Svyrydenko told The Times that Ukraine needed to become more self-sufficient through rapid economic growth, particularly in the defence sector, where Kyiv believes it can become a global leader. “Military and defence tech is one of the locomotives for growth – that’s obvious,” she said. “But also industrial sectors are growing: agricultural processing, construction and trade. We should move from a country that is exporting raw materials to a country that is exporting goods with added value, to get more income into the state budget.” She is also expected to build on good relations with Scott Bessent, the US Treasury secretary, to steady Kyiv’s transatlantic alliance.
Who else has been moved around? Svyrydenko has negotiated promotions of her two former deputies at the economy ministry to key posts. Taras Kachka becomes deputy prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration and will lead talks on joining the EU, while Oleksiy Sobolev, who helped to negotiate a joint US-Ukraine investment fund, will take over a department merging the former economy, ecology and agriculture ministries. The trio are regarded as being “clean” ministers, whereas a number of “old guard” figures who have been retained are accused of presiding over corruption."
Added: From "Top Stories:" "3. Doctors could have their student debts written off as part of a deal with the government to avoid a five-day strike next week."...(I subscribe to Daily Briefing)... https://mail.aol.com/d/folders/1/messages/AH1UjSETg2T7HoR6OtKtj1Ht7Zc
.....I see today's front page of UK Times is still working on Skripal..... https://www.thetimes.com/
Lest anyone think that the apparently idiotic General's Kaliningrad kerfuffle (sorry I have come to like that word) wasn't purposeful and part of a larger setup to open a new front against Russia:
https://menafn.com/1109793573/Russia-Orders-Closure-of-Polish-Consulate-in-Kaliningrad
https://www.anews.com.tr/world/2025/06/27/poland-germany-must-tackle-russian-missile-threat-in-kaliningrad-minister
I don't blame Russia a bit for preparing for war against NATO. The avant-garde propaganda coming from Poland and Germany and the Baltic states indicates imminently hostile actions against Russia; and then you have real military threats via the build up of forces in Finland and Sweden. Russia would be fools not to respond forcefully against these unprovoked real and rhetorical threats.
Wyden. My senator from New York.
I live in Oregon.
He spent 2017 trotting around Oregon at his Town Halls warning darkly that Dark Money was influencing our elections, and oh by the way it is critical to investiagate the extent to which Russia may have interfered with the 2016 presidential election to aid their favored candidate.
Your profile says that you worked for the FBI? You have an outstanding grasp of military and economic matters for whatever my opinion means. Very well put together analysis. Reminds me of Simplicius here on Substack. You might get famous if you keep this up.
I spent a career in the Army and my observation of the Officer Corps across the services is that there is an A, B and C team. The A team are formidable in every way a human can be, intellectually, physically, and morally. I worked for a few of them and they are giants. There is a Grand Canyon gap between the A team and the B team, who are competent but well outside any brilliance in anything. They will row at their oar hard but are not going to conceive anything (much less speak or act),outside of the currently accepted paradigm which is often as you know, dead wrong. These guys will follow whatever conventional foolishness is the current fashion right over the edge of the falls without so much as a question. The C team are mediocrities or downright incompetent. My year group are mostly retired with the best of them flag officers. I still have a feel for who’s who at the upper tiers but I don’t know of any A team serving in senior ranks, which woild be the geographical or functional MACOMs, even Corp and Division commanders. They all seem to be a few B team and a preponderance of C Team. Donahue and his staff as an example, have compromised whatever intelligence they might have to please the court, so whatever they never had a lot of to begin with gets spent simply parroting the party line (Kaliningrad example). Need look no further than the war between Russia and NAT-, I mean, Ukraine. A goat rope from day one, run entirely by the best and brightest of the NATO member states. The truth is that Russia fought their plan, almost flawlessly really, and will likely accomplish what may qualify as the most difficult of all military endeavors; a war of annihilation (Vernichtungsschlacht), that achieves the complete destruction of the enemy’s military capability. Russian victory will be a strategic defeat of NATO and the US of course, an outcome delivered by the C team political and military leadership of the West.
Anyway, again great work. I look forward to reading more.
Andrew would at that, as would LTG Van Riper.
https://open.substack.com/pub/imetatronink/p/a-former-us-marine-corps-officershtml?r=rcjyt&utm_medium=ios
Blast from the past:
https://meaninginhistory.substack.com/p/more-on-the-russian-way-of-war
Thanks very much. I do my best. Andrei Martyanov would be pleased with your view of the Russian military.
Apparently the stable coin plan is to force financing on the US public and leave the plebs holding the bag.
https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/forget-mar-lago-accord-deutsche-210208693.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAJthyHuFAoqEYKvBVberylz5D4NofXvZSqwH7Mc0viJwY7zJR54cvSGkxhs2oAgjPLprPNpZnebRG5OTnTLsT0UaNvqOOQOUjhyclXmySlLhgfGPIKjXfMUPHlZjbOMVcJZBqcax5I6Zm4jZF4MCfyjifRdBOhdOUFEBp5vsclA3
Financial repression. Say it ain't so! This has already happened: "This includes regulatory carve-outs of US Treasuries from banks’ supplementary leverage ratio requirements." Sorry I don't have a link at hand but it shouldn't be hard to find this. I expect the other actions noted to follow quickly. They just make too much sense as interim efforts to try to keep the economics of the U.S.S. U.S. afloat for awhile longer.
Ukraine was, and perhaps still is, a hub for human trafficking. I am wondering if banks in Ukraine were used for Epstein's affairs.
Breaking Epstein-related news: Trump is suing Rupert Murdoch, Wall Street Journal, and authors about a story revealing that Trump sent Epstein a birthday card in 2003 with his sketch of a naked woman inside, plus mention of a "wonderful secret" shared with Epstein.
When the story was published July 17, 2025, Trump rebutted "I never wrote a picture in my life".
Not true~there are other sketches:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-claims-never-wrote-picture-102802613.html
Trump's friendly MSM news outlets Fox News and New York Post are owned by Murdoch.
This could be interesting...
You have to laugh (it helps with the sanity). Both sides are now throwing the kitchen sink at each other. The Dems go with a dodgy letter that Trump allegedly wrote and now Tulsi is going after Obama and Co for trying to overthrow Trump with the Russia hoax. They really need a good war to take our minds off this.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/treasonous-conspiracy-dni-gabbard-exposes-obama-center-trump-russia-hoax
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/kremlin-blasts-hostile-us-talk-nato-quickly-seizing-kaliningrad
https://x.com/ArmchairW/status/1946065784255529367
Armchair Warlord @ArmchairW
General Donahue, who failed upwards to command US Army - Europe after overseeing one of the worst days in the entire War on Terror during the Kabul Airlift, decided to run his mouth today about NATO being able to quickly conquer Kaliningrad.
Let's do the work his staff didn't.
...
Donahue is either bluffing or he's an idiot and the USAREUR staff are incompetent - someone with his level of supposed expertise shouldn't even need to be briefed on a force array this elementary, let alone get the takeaway so dramatically wrong. In any event, I'm sure the Russian commander in Kaliningrad (according to Wikipedia, that would be MG Andrey Ruzinsky of the Russian 11th Corps) rolled his eyes at Donahue's comments when he was informed of the matter.
If Trump doesn't sack this guy or relegate him to Officer Commanding of Harvey Milk barracks in Biloxi, then that means he agrees with his words.
"Washington is faced with a choice: Either it can accept that dollar hegemony is finished and radically change its approach to global monetary matters, or it can allow the collapse of dollar hegemony to take place via market pressures". They are going for the third choice - the one outlined at the top of the article: proxy wars and tariff bullying to try and restore the status quo ante. As you say, it isn't working and it won't work. On a side note, and a minor one: if in my military days I'd appeared in public in the state that Donohue is above, I'd be on a charge.
Mark- here is a very plausible explanation for the Epstein turnaround by Trump and his administration by Jeff Childers and certainly worth the read:
https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/honeypot-friday-july-18-2025-c-and?r=rli95&utm_medium=ios
Thanks for the tip. Well worth reading. And wow, if that’s what’s now going on
Nothing changes until the environment changes, and that means that the West will continue its slow decline until there is a major societal change that impacts most everyone. World war can accomplish this, but nuclear weapons make that inadvisable. A banking and stock market collapse is a realistic scenario; it almost happened in 2008, but the Fed stepped in and printed endless fiat money. A real pandemic with hundreds of millions of dead would also suffice; Covid was a dry run, but the real deal would get everyone's attention. Most likely is that Ukraine breaks sooner than anyone thinks and Europe has a financial crisis when their Central Banks' collateral evaporates. Then comes civil unrest on a scale no thought possible. And the contagion soon spreads worldwide.
As bad as this sounds, it's the only road to redemption. Desperation begets work ethic (or lacking that, extinction).
Total agreement, Tom. Trump was the final chance for a Great Man to turn things around. He has done some good things but it is abundantly clear that he will not - or cannot - take down the Deep State. That means things continue until they can't.
deleted
Trump is ranting against Powell to lower rates. The three month treasury is around 4.3%, so a real return of perhaps 1.6% before taxes. Real returns were negative for most of the two decades before. With yearly deficits of $2T and debt of $37T, why should rates be lowered? So that suckers can fund federal largess with negative real returns? To goose a stock market with all-time high valuations? To blow a little more real estate bubble? To give a final lift to boomer 401ks before they enter the grave?
The Fed can lower the Fed Funds rate, but that doesn't mean the longer dated Treasury rates will drop. From mid-September 2024 when the Fed made the 0.50% cut in the Fed Funds rate, the 10-year is up about 0.70% to 4.42% and the 30-year is up about 1.00% to 4.99%. Trump doesn't seem to understand that the bond market sets the current interest rate for Treasury bonds, not the Fed.
I'm sure Trump wants lower rates to help real estate, further juice the stock market, cut the borrowing cost to fund the deficits and reduce the interest burden on the consumer. Lower rates would also help banks with their $480 billion or so of unrealized losses on their bond portfolio. As noted above, the longer end of the curve might not drop, but go up if the Fed cuts rates later this month.
Thank you very much, you and dissonant1 are helping me, an un-trained person, to understand the conversations on money practices.
Yes, Exactly! In fact the Fed lowering rates would very likely make the 10-yr and longer term bond rates increase and inflation increase given current conditions. The 10-year and longer term Treasury bond rates are not directly subject to the Fed fund rates (SOFR) and they will take into account the Fiscal debt and also the Fed holdings of mortgage-backed securities. Playing financial games will not solve the longer term issue of a productivity deficit vs. fiscal spending. Thus we have the ever increasing need for new "collateral."
Thank you for describing so plainly the kill trench that our government is sitting in, voluntarily. I wrote down your concluding two sentences, to learn and remember the reality of US fiscal crisis.
You are welcome and thank you, Joanne, for your comments on this blog. I appreciate reading them very much.
Exactly.
I like how you think
To get the printers going again!
The love of (borrowing) money (to fund wars) is the root of all (geopolitical) evil.
I don't know if Trump's trying to do any of that. Mostly that trying to use the news to scam the markets so they can ride the wave up and they can ride the wave down and make some coin. Of course that's only one of many ways that they're trying to profit off of this, but I don't think they have any Grand aspirations to revive the American empire