On this Day:
1099
First Crusade: Christian soldiers take the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem after the final assault of a difficult siege
1381
John Ball, a leader in the Peasants’ Revolt, is hanged, drawn and quartered in the presence of King Richard II of England.
1685
Monmouth Rebellion: James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, is executed at Tower Hill, England, after his defeat at the Battle of Sedgemoor on 6 July 1685.
1799
The Rosetta Stone is found in the Egyptian village of Rosetta by French Captain Pierre-François Bouchard during Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign.
1806
Pike expedition: United States Army Lieutenant Zebulon Pike begins an expedition from Fort Bellefontaine near St. Louis, Missouri, to explore the west.
1815
Napoleonic Wars: Napoléon Bonaparte surrenders aboard HMS Bellerophon
1838
Ralph Waldo Emerson delivers the Divinity School Address at Harvard Divinity School, discounting Biblical miracles and declaring Jesus a great man, but not God. The Protestant community reacts with outrage.
1975
Space Race: Apollo–Soyuz Test Project features the dual launch of an Apollo spacecraft and a Soyuz spacecraft on the first joint Soviet-United States human-crewed flight. It was both the last launch of an Apollo spacecraft and the last launch of a Saturn family rocket.
Space Race: Apollo–Soyuz Test Project features the dual launch of an Apollo spacecraft and a Soyuz spacecraft on the first joint Soviet-United States human-crewed flight. It was both the last launch of an Apollo spacecraft and the last launch of a Saturn family rocket.
***
Socialism is "the result of an unrelenting negativity, carping spirit, and lack of appreciation for achievement and greatness." (cowan)
***
The Keres people, who occupy seven pueblos (villages) in New Mexico, speak a language totally unrelated to that of their neighbors, and their origins have been frequently disputed.
Aliens.
***
The Keres people, who occupy seven pueblos (villages) in New Mexico, speak a language totally unrelated to that of their neighbors, and their origins have been frequently disputed.
Aliens.
***
Replacing the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism. Mamdani is going to straighten New Yorkers' ties and cancel their subscriptions.
***
Roughly 27% of Americans — and 52% of men ages 18–49 — say they have an active account with an online sportsbook
***
Researchers at the University of Linz in Austria demonstrated that the color red significantly decreases cognitive functioning in men. The combination of the colors red and yellow together can induce hunger, which has been capitalized on by several chain restaurants.
***
Charitable gifts by individuals, bequests, foundations and corporations to U.S. charities increased 5.7% in current dollars (3.0% adjusted for inflation) to an estimated $617.20 billion in 2025.
***
U.S. Treasury has borrowed $155 billion every month of this fiscal year—and is now paying $24 billion a week in interest on its debts.
***
Is Hormuz, Suez?
A short history of the modern Middle East conflict and what Dalio in Fortune thinks is its direction and destructive outcome:
In late October 1956, Britain and France — alongside Israel — invaded Egypt after President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, the vital trade artery connecting Europe to Asia. Militarily, the operation was a success. Within days, Anglo-French forces controlled the northern portion of the canal, but it unraveled off the battlefield.
The United States, alarmed by the unilateral action and unwilling to allow its allies to destabilize the Cold War equilibrium, applied crushing pressure. Washington threatened to withhold emergency IMF loans as the British pound came under speculative attack. It was financial warfare, and it worked. Eden, facing a currency crisis, withdrew from Egypt in humiliation within weeks.
The military had won. The empire had lost. And what followed was a cascade that Dalio, in Bridgewater’s research, describes as the classic sequence of imperial decline: allies stopped deferring to London; creditors reassessed British debt; the pound sterling — which had served as the world’s reserve currency for over a century — began its long retreat. Within four years of the Suez Crisis, Britain had granted independence to Ghana, Malaya, Nigeria, and Cyprus. Within a decade, Harold Macmillan’s “winds of change” speech had formalized what Suez had revealed: the British Empire was in managed retreat, not strategic expansion.
Yet certainly Britain had exceeded anyone's expectations. A tiny island ruled the waves and the world as a military leader, a commercial powerhouse.
And it still is. Today, Britain is a prosperous, mid-sized economy of nearly 70 million people, with a GDP that ranks fifth globally — behind the United States, China, Germany, and Japan. It is a respected member of NATO and the G7, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and home to London, one of the world’s great financial centers. But its “special relationship” with the U.S. is not the same as it was before the Suez Crisis.
Dalio compared the Hormuz standoff directly to the Suez crisis in March. “We are in the early stages of a world war that isn’t going to end any time soon,” he wrote on his Substack — arguing the Iran conflict was not a standalone episode but a systemic reorganization of global power, one in which the financial and military contests are inseparable.
Two key factors behind the decline are the “petrodollar” system and the national debt. To get the former, you have to flash forward to a 1974 handshake that the public wouldn’t learn about for another 42 years.
President Nixon had dispatched Henry Kissinger to Saudi Arabia to strike a secret arrangement. Riyadh agreed to price and trade its oil exclusively in U.S. dollars and channel its petroleum windfalls back into U.S. Treasury bonds; in return, Washington promised military aid, equipment, and security guarantees. Other OPEC members followed, locking in the dollar as the indispensable currency of the modern world and giving rise to the “petrodollar” system.
Britain’s pound had been the anchor of global trade since the Napoleonic era; it took two world wars, a Great Depression, and a humiliation in Egypt to finish it off. The dollar’s own arc runs roughly 80 years, from the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, where the victorious United States anchored the postwar monetary order to a simple promise: every dollar was redeemable for gold at $35 an ounce. It mutated again in 1971, when the costs of Vietnam and the Great Society had so strained American finances that Nixon unilaterally slammed the gold window shut — ending dollar convertibility overnight and untethering the currency from any hard constraint. What replaced the gold anchor was something more abstract and more fragile: the credibility of American power itself, significantly boosted by the forthcoming secret Petrodollar deal.
What is different now — what makes the Iran war more than just another Middle East misadventure — is the convergence: a $39 trillion debt load, a 30-year low in the dollar’s share of foreign reserves, a physically threatened petrodollar chokepoint, and a domestic political climate that has made endurance nearly impossible.
And it still is. Today, Britain is a prosperous, mid-sized economy of nearly 70 million people, with a GDP that ranks fifth globally — behind the United States, China, Germany, and Japan. It is a respected member of NATO and the G7, a permanent member of the UN Security Council, and home to London, one of the world’s great financial centers. But its “special relationship” with the U.S. is not the same as it was before the Suez Crisis.
Dalio compared the Hormuz standoff directly to the Suez crisis in March. “We are in the early stages of a world war that isn’t going to end any time soon,” he wrote on his Substack — arguing the Iran conflict was not a standalone episode but a systemic reorganization of global power, one in which the financial and military contests are inseparable.
Two key factors behind the decline are the “petrodollar” system and the national debt. To get the former, you have to flash forward to a 1974 handshake that the public wouldn’t learn about for another 42 years.
President Nixon had dispatched Henry Kissinger to Saudi Arabia to strike a secret arrangement. Riyadh agreed to price and trade its oil exclusively in U.S. dollars and channel its petroleum windfalls back into U.S. Treasury bonds; in return, Washington promised military aid, equipment, and security guarantees. Other OPEC members followed, locking in the dollar as the indispensable currency of the modern world and giving rise to the “petrodollar” system.
Britain’s pound had been the anchor of global trade since the Napoleonic era; it took two world wars, a Great Depression, and a humiliation in Egypt to finish it off. The dollar’s own arc runs roughly 80 years, from the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, where the victorious United States anchored the postwar monetary order to a simple promise: every dollar was redeemable for gold at $35 an ounce. It mutated again in 1971, when the costs of Vietnam and the Great Society had so strained American finances that Nixon unilaterally slammed the gold window shut — ending dollar convertibility overnight and untethering the currency from any hard constraint. What replaced the gold anchor was something more abstract and more fragile: the credibility of American power itself, significantly boosted by the forthcoming secret Petrodollar deal.
What is different now — what makes the Iran war more than just another Middle East misadventure — is the convergence: a $39 trillion debt load, a 30-year low in the dollar’s share of foreign reserves, a physically threatened petrodollar chokepoint, and a domestic political climate that has made endurance nearly impossible.
7/15/26
No comments:
Post a Comment