Financial markets
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Digital Money is a Form of Behavioural Control
The technical specifications for retail digital currency establish that the power to condition, cap and suspend payment is a design choice rather than an unavoidable consequence of digitisation Editorial Analysis | November 2026 Project Rosalind was a collaboration between the Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub and the Bank of England, and its stated purpose… Continue reading
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AI Promise is “The Old Company Town” in New Clothes
The old logic of scrip, company provision and administrative grants is returning under the language of technological plenty. The coal operators discovered that paying workers in tokens redeemable only at the company store was more profitable than paying them in money, and the architects of programmable settlement have rediscovered the same principle Editorial Analysis |… Continue reading
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They Signed the Rules in Secret – How Public Services Got Handed Over in Contracts Nobody Reads

Why the systems that decide who gets healthcare, benefits and payments are now governed by private agreements rather than laws you can Editorial Analysis | October 2026 ‘The “Contract” is now the “Constitution” as the architecture of identity, allocation and payment is being settled in commercial agreements that legislatures rarely examine and courts are reluctant… Continue reading
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Iran’s Gas Capacity Claim and the Politics of Self-Sufficiency

Pezeshkian’s Moscow figures reveal a production system built under pressure, yet the distinction between capacity and output complicates the strategic picture General Article | October 2026 The Gas Exporting Countries Forum convened in Moscow during late October 2026, bringing together states that collectively hold the majority of the world’s natural gas reserves, and the Iranian… Continue reading
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Europe Is Being Made Poor on Purpose

Why your wages buy less, your factories are closing, and the talk of war keeps growing How a rentier oligarchy extracts wealth through the cost of financing, deindustrialises its own productive base, and prepares populations for conflict over the world’s resource-rich periphery Editorial Analysis | October 2026 The economic condition of the advanced capitalist states… Continue reading
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Who Owns Your Country?

How privatisation and tax cuts turned public assets into private fortunes, and taxpayers into interest-payers for a creditor class Editorial Analysis | October 2026 The fiscal position of the advanced capitalist state has undergone a transformation whose distributional consequences are rarely stated in the terms they require. World Inequality Lab data record that net public… Continue reading
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The Country That Builds Things Wins

Why steel, ships and electricity matter more than the GDP figures on the evening news Purchasing power parity (PPP), manufacturing capacity, and electricity generation reveal a different hierarchy from the one that financial markets and broadcast media present. Editorial Analysis | October 2026 China is winning. It must be argued that an economy consists of… Continue reading
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The 2023 Ukraine Peace Deal That Was Derailed

A proposed agreement reportedly accepted by Putin as a basis for negotiations offered Russian troop withdrawals, security guarantees for Ukraine and $300 billion for reconstruction. But the initiative was derailed after Zelensky’s government rejected territorial concessions and the Biden administration declined to back the backchannel effort. General Article | October 2026 Reports concerning a proposed… Continue reading


