2026-06-17 ATS briefing¶

Food shortages spark scuffles outside supermarket in Bolivia¶

The scene outside a supermarket in Bolivia’s capital is not a riot but a ration queue turned ugly. Weeks of protest roadblocks have choked transport routes, and shoppers are now scuffling over limited supplies. The immediate trigger is political — blockades organised by supporters of former president Evo Morales, who is locked in a power struggle with the current government. But the deeper dynamic is economic, and it reveals something about the fragility of distribution under pressure.

Bolivia is not a food-insecure country in aggregate. It produces enough. The shortages are not a failure of harvest but a failure of circulation. Roadblocks sever the link between surplus and consumer, and what appears as scarcity is actually a logistical bottleneck. That distinction matters. When people fight over bread in a city that sits near grain-producing regions, the contradiction is not between nature and need, but between political paralysis and the just-in-time logic that governs modern supply chains.

The state cannot or will not break the blockades by force, and the market cannot reroute supplies fast enough. So the burden falls on working-class shoppers, who must compete for what little reaches the shelves. This is not yet a crisis of overaccumulation or a systemic breakdown — but it is a warning. When distribution seizes up, even a relatively stable economy can tip into daily desperation. For Bolivia, the question is whether this is a temporary convulsion or the beginning of a deeper unraveling.

Every British Prime Minister’s Nightmare¶

Source: Project Syndicate

Yanis Varoufakis cuts through the usual pieties about the "special relationship" to name its material core: American financiers' willingness to buy British government debt. The UK does not have a privileged ally; it has a creditor. Every prime minister, from Truss to her successors, governs on borrowed time — literally.

The 2022 gilt crisis was not a one-off blunder by Liz Truss. It was a demonstration of sovereignty's limits under financialised capitalism. Truss had a plan; the bond market had other plans. The mechanism is brutally simple: when investors lose confidence in UK fiscal credibility, they sell gilts, yields spike, and the government's borrowing costs explode. The result is not just higher debt payments but a forced austerity that constrains whatever domestic agenda a prime minister might attempt.

Varoufakis's framing reveals a deeper contradiction. Britain's ruling class needs the US financial system to absorb its debt, but that dependence strips away the very policy autonomy that might address the country's decaying infrastructure, stagnant productivity, and fraying social fabric. The "special relationship" is not a partnership of equals; it is a leash.

For the left, the implication is uncomfortable but unavoidable. Any serious challenge to the status quo must reckon with this financial stranglehold. A government that tries to redistribute wealth or invest heavily will face the same bond-market discipline that destroyed Truss — unless it is prepared to break with the mechanisms that make that discipline possible. That means confronting not just the City of London but the deeper architecture of dollar-denominated global finance.

The Fed Has Been Honest and Stupid¶

Source: Project Syndicate

The article’s title promises a critique of the Fed’s honesty and stupidity, but the substance is thinner than the headline suggests. Buchholz’s central claim is that the Fed relies on outdated regional data and lagging indicators, leaving it blind to real-time economic shifts. He compares the central bank to a pilot fixated on instruments while a mountain looms ahead.

This is not wrong, but it is shallow. The real stupidity is not a matter of outdated maps or slow data. The Fed’s problem is structural: it must manage a monetary system that is fundamentally unmanageable under capitalism. Interest rate policy is a blunt instrument applied to a system riven by contradictions — overaccumulation, fictitious capital, and the relentless pressure to inflate asset prices to stave off crisis. The Fed cannot see the mountain because the mountain is the system itself.

Buchholz’s framing — honest but stupid — lets the institution off the hook. The Fed is not stupid. It is constrained. Its honesty, such as it is, consists of admitting it cannot resolve the contradictions it is tasked with managing. The real question is not whether the Fed’s maps are outdated, but whether any monetary authority can steer a system that requires perpetual growth on a finite planet and endless credit expansion to sustain fictitious values.

For revolutionary politics, the takeaway is modest but clear: don’t mistake institutional incompetence for the root cause. The Fed’s blindness is systemic, not technical.

Baltic Dry Index Down for 2nd Day¶

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

A two-day dip in the Baltic Dry Index, down 1.8% to 2,670 points, is hardly a crash, but the composition of the decline is worth noting. The capesize segment — the giant vessels hauling iron ore and coal — took the hardest hit, dropping 3.5%. Panamax, the next tier down, fell more modestly. Meanwhile, the smaller supramaxes actually rose.

This pattern suggests a specific, not general, softening. Capesizes are the most exposed to heavy industrial demand, particularly from Chinese steel production and coal imports. A drop there could signal a temporary lull in restocking, or it could be the first tremor of a broader slowdown in the movement of raw materials. The divergence with supramaxes — which carry more diverse cargoes like grains and minor bulks — complicates the picture. It may simply be a rotation of demand, not a collapse.

Still, freight rates are a leading indicator of real economic activity, stripped of financial froth. When the cost of moving physical goods softens, it often precedes a contraction in industrial output. For a world economy still digesting high interest rates and overcapacity in manufacturing, this is a data point worth watching — not for panic, but for what it reveals about the real, material circulation of commodities beneath the noise of financial markets.

US–Iran deal: Progress… but not quite lasting peace¶

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

The US–Iran interim deal is a classic case of capital demanding a circuit-breaker, not a resolution. After 100 days of conflict that choked the Strait of Hormuz—through which flows a fifth of global oil, a fifth of LNG, and nearly a third of LPG—the disruption had become a material drag on accumulation. The deal’s core function is to restore circulation: reopen the strait, lift blockades, and inject $24bn in frozen Iranian assets as a short-term liquidity fix.

But Drewry’s framing of a “60-day peace window” is telling. This is a strategic pause, not a settlement. The underlying contradictions remain untouched: Iran’s nuclear programme, Israeli non-compliance, and the absence of direct US–Iran diplomacy. The agreement is brokered through third parties—Pakistan, Qatar, Egypt, Turkey—which signals not multilateral strength but the absence of any hegemonic authority capable of imposing order. The US can no longer dictate terms; Iran cannot be crushed. So capital gets a temporary corridor, not a stable regime.

For shipping, the return of insurers is the key indicator. War-risk premiums will ease, but they will not disappear. Vessels are still keeping transponders off. The market is pricing in uncertainty, not peace. This is what a crisis of overaccumulation looks like when it intersects with inter-imperialist rivalry: not a clean resolution, but a series of provisional fixes that defer the reckoning. The next 60 days will determine whether this is a ceasefire that holds or a pause that resets the clock for the next phase of disruption.

Peace With Iran Is All About Lebanon Now¶

Source: Project Syndicate

The ceasefire deal between the US and Iran, as reported by Shlomo Ben-Ami, is a study in imperial overreach meeting its own limits. Trump’s war in the Middle East began with maximalist aims; it ends with a whimper: reopening a strait that was never closed to begin with, and kicking the nuclear question further down the road. The real prize, Ben-Ami argues, is Lebanon — or rather, the fate of Hezbollah.

Here the contradiction sharpens. Trump wants a deal to extract himself from a war he started but cannot win. Israel, however, sees any arrangement that leaves Hezbollah intact as a strategic defeat. The US president may claim he “calls the shots,” but the Israeli state has its own logic of escalation, one rooted in the impossibility of a permanent military solution to a political problem. If Israel continues its campaign in Lebanon, the ceasefire collapses. If it stops, Hezbollah survives.

What this reveals is not simply a diplomatic rift between allies, but the structural incoherence of US imperialism in a multipolar world. Washington can no longer dictate terms to its junior partners, nor can it impose a settlement on Iran. The deal, such as it is, papers over a crisis of accumulation and legitimacy. The war was supposed to restore US credibility; instead, it has exposed the limits of American power. For the revolutionary left, the lesson is clear: inter-imperialist rivalry is not a sideshow — it is the terrain on which the next phase of struggle will be fought.

The False Promise of U.S.-China Stability¶

Source: Foreign Affairs

The Foreign Affairs piece by Jonathan Czin offers a useful dissection of the current US-China "stalemate," but its analytical framework is tellingly limited. Czin correctly identifies that both Washington and Beijing have settled for a shallow, transactional quiet rather than genuine stability. He calls it "mutually assured disruption" — a phrase that captures the absence of any affirmative vision on either side.

The real insight lies in what Czin treats as a policy failure but is actually a structural necessity. He laments that the Trump administration has been sucked back into Middle Eastern wars, repeating the mistakes of Obama and Biden. This is presented as a distraction from the "real" competition with China. But this framing misses the point. The US does not get to choose between imperial policing in the Middle East and great-power competition in Asia. It must do both, because the capitalist world system requires active management of its energy chokepoints and its primary rival simultaneously. The overextension is not a mistake — it is the logical expression of a declining hegemon trying to hold together a global order that no longer fits its diminished capacity.

Czin notes that China is content to watch the US bleed in the Middle East while Beijing fortifies itself. This is correct, but he stops short of explaining why. China benefits from US overextension precisely because it accelerates the relative shift in power without requiring China to take on the costs of global policing. The "free rider" problem is not a bug of the current arrangement — it is the whole game.

What Czin cannot say, given his Brookings and NSC pedigree, is that this stalemate is not a policy error to be corrected by smarter diplomacy. It is the surface expression of a deeper contradiction: the US must compete with China while simultaneously maintaining the global military infrastructure that made US dominance possible in the first place. It can no longer afford both. The question is not whether Washington will come to regret the stalemate, but whether it can survive the attempt to break out of it.

Who holds US Treasury securities overseas?¶

Source: FRED Blog

The FRED Blog’s update on foreign holdings of US Treasury securities is a useful snapshot of a central mechanism in the global capitalist order. The headline fact is banal but telling: the nine largest foreign holders — led by Japan, the UK, and mainland China — account for roughly 45 percent of foreign-held Treasuries, a share stable since the early 2000s. Beneath that surface stability, however, the composition has shifted substantially.

This matters because US Treasury debt is not just any asset. It is the world’s principal reserve asset, the material anchor of the dollar system. Foreign holdings represent a vast pool of surplus value — profits, trade surpluses, and sovereign wealth — that cannot be profitably reinvested at home and instead flows into US government paper. That is a form of fictitious capital: claims on future US tax revenue that also serve as a geopolitical leash.

The shifting composition of holders reflects realignments in inter-imperialist rivalry. Japan and China, the two largest holders, are also America’s principal economic competitors. Their continued willingness to hold Treasuries is not charity; it is a strategic choice to manage exchange rates and preserve export markets. But the stability of the aggregate share masks growing tensions. If a major holder began to dump Treasuries in earnest, the consequences for US interest rates and the dollar would be severe — a vulnerability the US state manages through financial sanctions, diplomatic pressure, and the sheer depth of its bond market.

For revolutionary politics, the takeaway is indirect but real. The dollar system’s stability depends on the consent of rival powers who have their own reasons to maintain it — for now. That contradiction is one more pressure point in a crisis-prone world order.