2026-07-09 ATS briefing¶

How Vulnerable Are US Financial Markets?¶

Dambisa Moyo’s piece on US financial market vulnerability is a textbook warning from the liberal centre: the numbers look bad, something might pop, but the system will probably muddle through. She points to over $1 trillion in borrowed money sloshing around markets and a Shiller CAPE ratio near 42 — more than double its historic median. The two triggers she identifies are higher interest rates and a loss of confidence in the tech giants driving the AI boom.

What Moyo dances around but never names is the underlying dynamic: capital with nowhere productive to go. The US economy is not generating enough profitable investment opportunities to absorb the vast sums of money that have been printed and borrowed. So that money piles into financial assets, bidding up prices and pushing leverage higher. This is not a glitch — it is the system working as designed. The state and the Fed have chosen to prop up asset prices rather than allow a proper清算 (liquidation) of overvalued capital.

The contradiction is plain. If rates stay high enough to curb inflation, the leveraged positions unwind and the bubble bursts. If rates are cut to save the markets, inflation reignites and the dollar weakens — threatening US imperial privilege. Either way, the underlying overaccumulation is not resolved, only displaced.

For revolutionary politics, the key point is that this fragility is structural, not cyclical. The next crisis will not be a return to normalcy but another round of the same unresolved contradictions, likely deeper and more destabilising than the last.

Trump orders US to cut all trade with Spain¶

Source: The Telegraph

Escalating inter-imperialist rivalry — US trade war against a NATO ally signals the breakdown of bourgeois international order and the return of raw imperialist coercion as the dominant mode of competition.

Trump Is Remaking Latin America¶

Source: Foreign Affairs

Trump's Monroe Doctrine Revival: Short-Term Gains, Long-Term Risks¶

Foreign Affairs presents a striking portrait of US policy in Latin America under Trump: a return to nineteenth and twentieth-century interventionism, rebranded as the "Donroe Doctrine." The article's author, Brian Winter, documents real tactical successes—the 48-minute military operation that toppled Maduro, unprecedented security cooperation with Mexico's Sheinbaum, a 14% drop in US overdose deaths, and measurable rollback of Chinese influence.

But the analysis reveals a deeper contradiction. Trump's approach works precisely because it abandons the post-Cold War pretence of mutual respect. He threatens to "take back" the Panama Canal, conducts unilateral strikes on cartels, and endorses friendly candidates. The results are tangible: Mexico extradites cartel leaders, Central America steps up interdiction, Panama limits Chinese port operations.

Yet Winter warns of a gathering backlash. The historical parallel is precise: twentieth-century US interventions bred Castro and Perón. The same dynamic is already visible—resentment building beneath the surface of cooperation. When Trump's attention inevitably shifts to more pressing crises (the article notes his Iran war is "a miscalculation of historic proportions"), the scaffolding of coercion may collapse.

The real question the article raises but doesn't fully answer: is this sustainable? Trump's policy depends on constant threat projection—tariffs, military strikes, diplomatic bullying. It requires a US president willing to maintain that pressure indefinitely. But the logic of American empire has always been that coercion works until it doesn't, that domination breeds resistance, and that the costs of enforcement eventually exceed the benefits extracted.

For revolutionary politics, the implication is clear: the return of open US interventionism in Latin America creates conditions for anti-imperialist movements to re-emerge. The question is whether any force on the left can channel that inevitable backlash into something more than nationalist reaction.

Baltic Dry Index Breaks 6-Day Advance¶

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

The Baltic Dry Index’s six-day advance has broken, but the headline tells us less than the divergence beneath it. The capesize segment — the heavy lifter for iron ore and coal — dropped 0.8%, dragging the overall index down. Yet panamax and supramax rates both rose. This is not a uniform softening of demand, but a shift in its composition.

Capesizes are the most exposed to China’s steel production cycle and to the infrastructure-driven commodity flows that have been a key outlet for overaccumulated capital in recent years. A dip here suggests either a temporary lull in restocking or a more meaningful signal that Chinese industrial demand is cooling. The fact that smaller vessels — more tied to grain, fertiliser, and regional coal trades — are still climbing points to a fragmented picture: basic necessity flows remain intact, but the high-volume, high-investment end of the cycle is showing strain.

For a Marxist reading, the question is whether this is a routine fluctuation in freight rates or an early tremor in the real economy’s absorption of surplus. The Baltic Dry Index is notoriously volatile, but its recent run-up and this partial reversal occur against a backdrop where global industrial output is already under pressure from overcapacity and debt saturation. If capesize rates continue to slide, it would suggest that the material basis for the recent optimism in dry bulk — the movement of raw inputs into production — is narrowing. That would be worth watching, not as a predictor of crisis, but as a gauge of how much slack the system still has before it tightens.

Jackdaw boss warns of winter fuel shortages if gas field not approved¶

Source: BBC News

The Jackdaw gas field presents a textbook contradiction between the immediate needs of capital accumulation and the long-term requirements of planetary survival — but the framing of the debate obscures more than it reveals.

Adura’s Neil McCulloch is deploying a classic tactic: manufacturing urgency to extract state approval. His warning of winter shortages if Jackdaw isn’t approved rests on the UK’s deliberately maintained vulnerability — only eight days of gas storage, a policy choice, not a natural limit. The UK could have built storage capacity. It chose not to, preferring to rely on just-in-time supply from the North Sea and international markets. This is not an accident; it is the logic of capital seeking to avoid the costs of storage infrastructure while externalising the risk onto the population.

The numbers tell a different story from the rhetoric. Jackdaw provides 6% of winter peak demand, or 2% of annual consumption. This is not energy security; it is a marginal contribution that cannot meaningfully affect prices or supply resilience. The real function of Jackdaw is to extend the profitable life of North Sea infrastructure for Shell and Equinor, who have already sunk £1.5bn into the project. They need the state to validate that sunk cost.

The political landscape is shifting. Labour, under pressure from the Tory by-election win in Aberdeen South and from figures like Blair and Trump, is signalling a retreat from its anti-drilling position. Ed Miliband’s line — that new fields won’t lower bills — is correct but politically fragile. The contradiction is that the transition to renewables is not happening fast enough to absorb the 1,600 annual job losses in offshore oil and gas, and capital has no interest in managing that transition. The working class in north-east Scotland is being asked to bear the costs of a crisis not of its making.

The climate movement’s legal victory — forcing revised environmental assessments — is real but limited. Adura’s claim that Jackdaw represents 0.02% of global emissions is technically true but irrelevant: every marginal addition to fossil fuel supply pushes the carbon budget further beyond reach. The question is not whether Jackdaw alone breaks the climate, but whether the logic of piecemeal approval for individual projects can ever be reconciled with emissions targets. It cannot.

Can the Private Sector Save Vietnam?¶

Source: Foreign Affairs

Here is a summary and analysis of the article.

The Communist Party of Vietnam, under the newly dominant General Secretary To Lam, is attempting a high-stakes gamble. Having crushed internal rivals through the “Blazing Furnace” anti-corruption campaign and centralised power to a degree unseen in forty years, the Party is now using that unchallenged authority to pivot away from its old economic model. The plan, outlined at the 2026 Party Congress, is to sideline inefficient state-owned enterprises and actively promote the private sector as the new engine of growth, targeting an ambitious 10% annual GDP increase.

This is not a retreat from power but a reconfiguration of it. The Party is not liberalising; it is doubling down on centralised political control while trying to offload the burden of accumulation onto private capital. The old hybrid model—low-end private firms, foreign multinationals, and politically useful but uncompetitive state enterprises—has hit its limits. It failed to generate the domestic capital needed for technological upgrading, leaving Vietnam dangerously dependent on foreign investment. The state-owned sector, a key tool for patronage and regional redistribution, proved incapable of competing globally.

Lam’s solution is to use the Party’s newly concentrated power to break the bureaucratic and provincial interests that blocked past reforms. The risk is immense. By dismantling the state-owned sector’s economic role without building a robust domestic capitalist class, Vietnam is exposing itself to the classic contradictions of a dependent economy. It is betting that a more authoritarian state can force through the conditions for private accumulation, but this tightrope walk could just as easily lead to internal decay and a crisis of legitimacy if the promised growth fails to materialise or its benefits are captured by a narrow elite. The core tension is laid bare: can a party that defines itself by its monopoly on power successfully foster an independent capitalist class without eventually being challenged by it?

How Argentina Can Protect Its Resource Wealth¶

Source: Project Syndicate

The article argues Argentina should establish sovereign wealth funds to manage its lithium and hydrocarbon wealth, citing Alaska, Norway, and Chile as models. The premise is that resource-rich economies inevitably suffer the "resource curse" — Dutch disease, corruption, volatility — unless state institutions sequester revenues from direct political control.

This framing is instructive but incomplete. The real question is not whether to save resource rents, but who controls them and for what purpose. Norway’s fund works because it sits atop a highly organised social-democratic state with strong labour movements. Chile’s model, by contrast, has been a mechanism for stabilising investor returns, not redistributing wealth. Alaska pays citizens a dividend, but the oil companies still extract the surplus.

Argentina’s problem is not simply a lack of fiscal discipline. Milei’s Hayekian programme aims to dismantle state capacity precisely when the state would need to be strongest — to bargain with transnational capital over extraction terms. Without that capacity, a sovereign wealth fund becomes a piggy bank for the next crisis, not a tool for development.

The deeper contradiction: Argentina’s resource wealth requires massive upfront capital and technology that only foreign firms possess. Milei’s deregulation drive is a bid to attract that capital by offering maximum flexibility — low royalties, weak environmental rules, labour flexibility. A sovereign wealth fund funded by such concessions would be collecting crumbs from a feast it cannot control.

The article is a technocratic fix for a political problem. Argentina’s resource wealth will only serve its people if the state has the power to dictate terms to capital, not just manage the leftovers.

Concessional Finance Is Needed More Than Ever¶

Source: Project Syndicate

The article, by Islamic Development Bank president Muhammad Al Jasser, argues that concessional finance—loans on softer terms than the market offers—is more urgent than ever as debt burdens rise and climate shocks intensify. It promotes the Bank’s new fund as a model for mobilising resources to protect development gains.

The argument is sound within its own terms, but those terms are revealing. Concessional finance is a symptom, not a solution. It exists precisely because the normal functioning of capital markets cannot meet the needs of the global periphery. Private capital flows to where returns are secure; it abandons or extracts from economies deemed too risky or unprofitable. The mounting debt pressures Al Jasser cites are not an accident—they are the direct result of decades of financial liberalisation that forced developing states to borrow on commercial terms, often in currencies they do not control.

The real contradiction is that the institutions calling for more concessional finance are the same ones that presided over the architecture generating the crisis. The Islamic Development Bank, like the World Bank and IMF, operates within a system where the core imperialist states set the rules. Concessional funds are a bandage, not a cure. They can slow the bleeding, but they cannot reverse the underlying dynamic: the systematic transfer of value from the periphery to the centre through debt servicing, commodity price manipulation, and capital flight.

For revolutionary politics, the implication is clear. The demand should not be for more concessional finance, but for the repudiation of illegitimate debt and the construction of alternative economic relations between states—relations not mediated by the profit imperative.