2026-07-14 ATS briefing¶

Senegal Is on the Brink¶

The IMF and World Bank kept lending to Senegal while red flags were flying. An independent audit in February 2025 revealed $7-13 billion in unreported debt accumulated between 2019 and 2023 under former president Macky Sall, pushing the debt-to-GDP ratio from under 75% to over 132%. The multilateral institutions had electronic access to government finances and spotted anomalies as early as June 2021 — yet in 2023 they approved an extra $300 million in budget support and a new $1.8 billion loan package, disbursing $279 million immediately. Sall likely used that disbursement as collateral to keep borrowing.

This is not a story about a rogue borrower tricking innocent lenders. The IMF and World Bank are supposed to be the adults in the room, the ones with the expertise and the leverage to enforce transparency. They chose not to. Why? Because Senegal was a showcase — a stable democracy in a region of collapsing states, a success story for the model of debt-financed development. Admitting the books were cooked would have meant admitting the model was producing the same results in Dakar as in Bamako or Ouagadougou, just more slowly.

The consequences now fall on the Faye government, which inherited the mess and must negotiate a new IMF programme while the country teeters on default. Debt service will drain resources from public services, infrastructure, and the very investments that were supposed to justify the borrowing in the first place. And this is happening in the only major Francophone West African state that still has accountable government — precisely when Russia is fishing in troubled waters across the Sahel. The IMF and World Bank helped manufacture the crisis they now claim they want to resolve.

The Mother of All Economic Shocks Is Chinese Mercantilism¶

Source: Project Syndicate

Arvind Subramanian’s argument is simple and, for a Project Syndicate piece, unusually direct: the single most consequential economic force of the last half-century has been Chinese mercantilism, not US monetary policy, not globalisation as such, not the 2008 crash. He is not wrong about the scale. The entry of a labour force the size of the entire developed world into the global market, combined with state-directed export expansion and currency management, did produce a shock that reshaped wages, profits, and investment patterns everywhere else. But Subramanian’s framing is itself a form of ideological displacement. By naming Chinese mercantilism as the “mother of all shocks,” he absolves the internal logic of capital accumulation of any independent responsibility. The crisis tendencies of the system become an external intrusion, a Chinese problem, rather than something generated by the normal functioning of global production and finance. The real shock was not that China played the game, but that the game was structured so that one country’s industrialisation would necessarily mean deindustrialisation and wage compression elsewhere. Subramanian’s policy prescription — that the US and Europe must now respond with their own strategic protectionism — simply confirms the point. Inter-imperialist rivalry is not a deviation from liberal order; it is what liberal order becomes when the underlying rate of profit can no longer be sustained without territorial or market conquest. The article is useful precisely because it makes explicit what mainstream economics usually euphemises: that the system has no mechanism for absorbing a successful late developer without crisis.

UAE condemns Iran's 'brazen' attack on tankers as US launches fresh strikes¶

Source: BBC News

The Strait of Hormuz is being turned into a toll road by the US president, and the toll is 20% of cargo value. Trump’s announcement that the US will blockade Iranian ports while charging everyone else for passage is a remarkable piece of piratical logic: we are seizing control of a waterway that international law places partly in Iranian and Omani territorial waters, and we will bill the world for the privilege. The UAE’s condemnation of Iran’s tanker attack as “brazen” sits oddly beside Washington’s simultaneous claim to be both policeman and tax collector of the same stretch of water.

Iran’s foreign minister parrots Trump’s “GUARDIAN” language back at him, undercutting the US claim to legitimacy while signalling that Tehran understands the game: whoever controls the strait controls the price of oil. Brent crude jumped 9% on Monday alone, and the 0.7% uptick in Asian trade on Tuesday suggests markets are pricing in sustained disruption, not a quick resolution. The 25% of global oil that normally transits the strait has already been choked since February’s strikes; the blockade and counter-blockade are now formalising what was already a de facto closure.

The contradiction is not between two competing legal frameworks — the UN’s 12-nautical-mile rule versus Trump’s “fairness” — but between two states each claiming exclusive sovereignty over a chokepoint that capital needs to treat as frictionless. Neither Iran’s “guardianship” nor America’s 20% levy can stabilise the flow of oil; both are attempts to extract rent from a crisis neither can resolve. The IRGC’s warning that “co-operation with the aggressor enemy” will create an “energy crisis in the world” is not a threat but a description of what is already happening. For the working class, the immediate consequence is higher transport costs feeding into inflation, while the underlying dynamic — inter-imperialist rivalry over the physical arteries of accumulation — shows no sign of being settled by strikes or tolls.

Houthis: Saudi airport targeted in retaliation for strikes on Sanaa airport¶

Source: Al Jazeera

The Houthis claim to have struck Saudi Arabia’s Abha airport with missiles and drones, framing it as retaliation for a strike on Sanaa’s international airport. The Yemeni government says it carried out the Sanaa strike; the Houthis blame Saudi Arabia. The immediate dynamic is a familiar one: a cycle of escalation in which each side’s action is presented as a response to the other’s aggression, with no clear origin point.

But the material context matters more than the attribution. The Houthis have spent years developing a strike capability that can reach deep into Saudi territory, and they have used it repeatedly to pressure Riyadh. The Saudi-led coalition’s air campaign has failed to break the Houthis militarily, and the blockade of Yemeni ports has not starved them into submission. What we are seeing is a stalemate in which both sides can inflict pain but neither can win decisively.

The warning to airlines to avoid Saudi airspace is not just a military tactic. It is an attempt to impose a cost on Saudi Arabia’s integration into global air travel and trade networks — a form of asymmetric economic warfare that bypasses conventional military parity. For the Houthis, this is a way to translate military persistence into political leverage. For Saudi Arabia, the inability to secure its own airspace against a non-state actor is a strategic humiliation that no amount of advanced weaponry can easily fix.

A Japanese Wake-Up Call for America¶

Source: Project Syndicate

Japan’s currency defence is haemorrhaging credibility. The Bank of Japan spent over $70 billion in May alone to prop up the yen, yet the currency has since slumped to a forty-year low, with some estimates putting it 15% undervalued against the dollar. Long-term bond yields have surged to multi-decade highs after the abandonment of yield-curve control. The authorities are throwing money at symptoms while the underlying condition — a vast stock of public debt, an ageing population, and a private sector that prefers to hoard savings abroad rather than invest at home — goes untreated.

Desmond Lachman’s warning to the United States, France, Italy, and the UK is conventional enough: a crisis in one over-indebted economy can trigger a reassessment of others. But the comparison is worth pressing further. Japan’s predicament has long been treated as exceptional — a case where high public debt was sustainable because the debt was held domestically and the central bank could always buy bonds. That exceptionalism is now fraying. If Japan can lose control of its own currency and bond market despite a current-account surplus and a captive domestic investor base, what does that imply for countries that lack both?

The real wake-up call is not about fiscal discipline in the abstract. It is about the limits of state capacity when the global dollar system tightens. Japan’s crisis is unfolding because the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes have sucked capital back into US assets, forcing the yen down and import prices up. The Japanese state can intervene, but it cannot repeal the gravitational pull of dollar-denominated yields. For the US itself, the lesson is not that it should balance its budget, but that the dollar’s reserve status is not a permanent exemption — it is a privilege that depends on the rest of the world continuing to accept US debt as a store of value. That acceptance is not guaranteed forever, and the mechanism that would break it is the same one now breaking Japan: a loss of confidence that feeds on itself.

Killings continue on Del Monte farm in Kenya, families say, after G4S hired for security¶

Source: The Guardian

The substitution of one security apparatus for another has not altered the fundamental relationship on Del Monte’s Kenyan pineapple farm. G4S was brought in after the Guardian exposed killings by the in-house team, yet three more men have died in the past year — two brothers, Stephen and Haron Kibandi, and Michael Muiruri — in incidents allegedly involving the British firm’s guards or, in Stephen’s case, a police officer operating alongside them. The company’s response is instructive: it denies wrongdoing, declines to share footage, and points to the same police watchdog that is supposed to investigate the deaths it helped produce.

This is not a failure of corporate reform but its logical expression. Del Monte’s $100m-a-year operation sits in a county where the average monthly salary is £280; pineapple theft is a structural inevitability, not a moral failing. The farm’s sheer scale — 40 square kilometres — makes policing by consent impossible, so coercion is built into the business model. Hiring G4S and announcing a human rights impact assessment was never about ending violence; it was about insulating the brand from liability while maintaining the same regime of exclusion. The Kenyan police’s new “critical infrastructure protection unit” only deepens the problem: when the state formalises its partnership with a private security firm, lethal force becomes harder to prosecute, not easier.

The real contradiction is not between good and bad security, but between a profitable export operation and the people whose land and labour sustain it. Until that is resolved, the killings will continue regardless of who wears the uniform.

Nigeria says army has killed 300 bandits in north-western state of Zamfara¶

Source: The Guardian

The Zamfara government’s claim of 300 bandits killed in a single operation is less a measure of military success than an admission of how deeply the state has ceded territory to armed groups. The bandits are not a unified enemy but a shifting ecosystem: cattle rustlers, kidnap-for-ransom gangs, and jihadist factions whose cooperation is pragmatic, not ideological. They share an interest in a weak central government, and they have found one. The state’s response—a two-day assault that residents say required local vigilantes to make up the numbers—suggests the army cannot hold ground, only clear it temporarily.

What is striking is the absence of any economic dimension in the official account. Zamfara is one of Nigeria’s poorest states, and the bandits’ primary activities—stealing cattle, taxing farmers for access to their own land, kidnapping schoolchildren—are not anomalies but a brutal form of accumulation in a region where the formal economy offers nothing. The state cannot protect the peasantry, so the peasantry either pays protection money or joins the vigilantes. The army’s intervention, backed by US drone strikes and special forces, targets the symptoms while the conditions that produce banditry—mass unemployment, land dispossession, a state that exists only to extract—remain untouched.

The real contradiction is not between the army and the bandits but between the Nigerian state’s need to project sovereignty for international partners and its inability to offer any material basis for loyalty among its own population. Every “successful” operation postpones the reckoning.

Mexico to file criminal complaints over migrants killed by ICE in US¶

Source: The Guardian

Claudia Sheinbaum’s announcement that Mexico will file criminal complaints in US courts over the deaths of 17 Mexican citizens killed by immigration enforcement marks a shift in tone, but the substance is worth examining. The Mexican president is explicit that diplomatic letters “have yielded no results,” and that the killing of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo — shot while driving to work, with no criminal record and 35 years in the US — has made inaction untenable. The move is framed as a legal escalation, not a break in relations.

But the legal route is itself a form of containment. Filing complaints in US federal and local courts means accepting the jurisdiction of the state whose agents killed your citizens. It is an appeal to the very system that produced the violence, asking it to police its own. Sheinbaum knows this. Her caveat — “this is not about creating conflict” — suggests the limits of the gesture. The Mexican state is unwilling to rupture the bilateral relationship, even as CIA operations on its soil and US charges against its governor of Sinaloa accumulate.

What is really being tested here is not US immigration law but the sovereignty bargain that has structured North American integration for decades. Mexico supplies labour and absorbs the political cost of its criminalisation. When that bargain produces corpses, the Mexican state must be seen to act — but cannot afford to act in a way that disrupts the flow of capital or cooperation. The criminal complaint is a pressure valve, not a weapon. Whether it becomes more depends on whether the Mexican working class, which Sheinbaum says is “outraged,” forces the state to mean what it says.