2026-07-29 ATS briefing¶

The AI Threat to Financial Stability¶

The Fed’s new task force on AI and the economy conspicuously avoids the question of financial stability. Brian Judge argues this silence is dangerous, because the current AI investment boom reproduces the structure of past manias — railroad bonds in the 1840s, dot-com equities in the late 1990s — but with a systemic twist. In those earlier episodes, overinvestment in transformative technology eventually corrected itself: creditors and shareholders were wiped out, but the real economy absorbed the loss and moved on. Today, AI has become the sole story propping up US asset markets. A correction would not be a contained sectoral event; it would be a broad-based collapse of the collateral and confidence that underwrite the entire financial system.

The argument is strongest where it draws the parallel to fictitious capital. AI firms are valued not on current earnings but on a future that keeps receding. Capital flows into the sector not because production has been revolutionised but because every other outlet for surplus value has been exhausted or is too risky. The Fed’s silence on stability is therefore not an oversight. It reflects the central bank’s deeper entanglement: it cannot acknowledge the bubble without popping it, and it cannot pop the bubble without triggering the very crisis it is supposed to prevent.

What Judge does not explore is how this dynamic might accelerate inter-imperialist rivalry. If US financial stability is now staked on a single speculative bet, any serious challenge — from a rival currency bloc, a competitor in AI development, or a geopolitical disruption — becomes an existential threat to the dollar system itself. The Fed’s task force may be looking at productivity gains. The real question is whether the state can manage the crash when the one-way bet finally goes the other way.

China puts the ‘squeeze’ on Taiwan with new maritime patrols¶

Source: Al Jazeera

The shift of Chinese coastguard patrols to waters east of Taiwan marks a qualitative escalation, not just a quantitative one. For years, Beijing’s maritime pressure was concentrated in the Taiwan Strait, the narrow corridor between the island and the mainland. Moving operations to the eastern side, where Taiwan faces the open Pacific, transforms the geometry of containment from a frontal squeeze into an encirclement. An island that imports nearly all its energy is acutely vulnerable to this.

The article frames this as “grey zone” tactics — actions below the threshold of open war that strain Taiwan’s resources and morale. But the material logic is more direct. A coastguard fleet that can request commercial vessels’ origins and destinations today can stop and inspect them tomorrow, and reroute them the day after. The line between law enforcement and blockade is thin, and China has already simulated a blockade in military exercises. The coastguard’s status as a paramilitary force under the Central Military Commission, not a civilian police body, underscores that this is not a separate track from military confrontation but a more deniable one.

What makes the timing significant is the US posture. With Washington absorbed in the war in Iran and a president who has publicly framed weapons sales to Taiwan as a bargaining chip, Beijing appears to be testing how much it can tighten the noose before provoking a response it cannot manage. The joint statement from Britain, Germany, and France carries no material weight — it is diplomatic noise, not a naval commitment. The real question is whether the US has the bandwidth or the will to treat a slow-motion quarantine as a casus belli. For now, the answer seems to be no, and China is acting accordingly.

Uganda begins emergency food handouts after 19 die from hunger¶

Source: The Guardian

Nineteen dead from hunger in Karamoja, and the Ugandan government is handing out 9,400 tonnes of food. The immediate cause is straightforward: the rains failed in April, crops failed, and 1.5 million people are now in crisis. But the relief operation itself is a symptom of a deeper shift. This is the first large-scale distribution organised by the government after the funding void left by aid cuts — most dramatically from USAID, whose annual $42.8bn budget has been slashed, forcing the World Food Programme to cut over a million people in Uganda from assistance.

The minister for Karamoja promises drought-resistant seeds for next season. The Food Rights Alliance calls for water infrastructure and making food access a fundamental human right. Both are talking about the next planting cycle or the next policy paper. Neither addresses the grinding mill where Angelina Nakiru crushes rock for gold dust to buy a cup of maize. The work is dusty and exhausting, and when she fails to earn the meagre pay, her children sleep hungry. That is the permanent condition beneath the emergency: a population whose labour is so devalued that the only alternative to starvation is artisanal mining for a pittance.

The contradiction is not between drought and rain. It is between a state that can find 45bn shillings for emergency food when bodies start piling up, and a system that has never found the political will to build the water infrastructure that would make that drought survivable. Karamoja has adequate rainfall and water routes, as Kirabo notes. What it lacks is the investment that would turn subsistence farming into something resilient — because under the current logic, the region's poverty is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be managed. Emergency food keeps people alive until the next crisis. It does not break the cycle. And with the imperialist aid architecture contracting, the Ugandan state is now forced to manage that cycle directly, without the buffer of USAID dollars. The question is whether this necessity will produce anything more than a more efficient distribution of hunger.

How Conflict in the Middle East is Impacting Maritime¶

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

The Houthi blockade of the Bab al-Mandab Strait, declared on 20 July, is not an isolated act of piracy but a lever inserted into the most congested point of global oil circulation. The strait carries 7% of global oil output, and the article’s data shows it is now functionally linked to the Strait of Hormuz, where transit volumes have collapsed 95% since the US-Israel war on Iran escalated in late February. Saudi Arabia had been routing up to 7 million barrels per day through the Red Sea to bypass Hormuz; the Houthi move closes that workaround, pinching supply from both ends simultaneously.

The market response is instructive. Oil prices broke $100/bbl for the first time since May, yet time-charter rates for VLCCs rose only 3% week-on-week, to $113,310/day. That is 48% above the one-year average, but the modest weekly move suggests the market had already priced in Gulf risk. The contradiction is concrete: shipping capacity is being hoarded, not deployed. Owners are keeping vessels idle or on short hauls because the insurance and war-risk premiums on a Hormuz or Bab al-Mandab transit make the run unviable at any freight rate. The 95% drop in Hormuz transits is not a strike or a port closure — it is a rational refusal by capital to sail into a war zone.

What matters for the crisis is that two chokepoints are now functionally closed, not by naval blockade but by the cumulative effect of missile strikes, insurance costs, and rerouting decisions made in shipping boardrooms. The article flags whether the Houthis will follow through on further attacks, but the structural point is already visible: the global oil market is being reorganised around risk, not price. Longer routes, higher bunker costs, and fragmented supply chains are becoming the new normal. For the revolutionary left, the implication is that the energy basis for any stabilisation of the world market is being physically dismantled, not by design but by the logic of a war that no single state controls.

America Is Betting Against International Law¶

Source: Project Syndicate

The United States has performed a remarkable pivot on international criminal law. In 2023, Washington actively fed intelligence to the International Criminal Court to secure an arrest warrant for Vladimir Putin, treating the Rome Statute as a useful weapon against a geopolitical rival. Now, with the ICC pursuing arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, the US has reversed course entirely — threatening sanctions against the Court, its staff, and any state that cooperates with its rulings.

What looks like hypocrisy is actually something more coherent: the US treats international law as an extension of its own sovereign power, not as a constraint upon it. When the ICC targets an adversary, the Court is a legitimate instrument of justice. When it targets a US ally, the Court becomes an illegitimate body that oversteps its mandate. The principle is not law but alignment.

The contradiction here is not between US rhetoric and US action — it is between the universalist pretensions of international law and the material reality of a single superpower that can decide, case by case, whether the law applies. The ICC has no army, no treasury, no enforcement mechanism beyond the goodwill of states. When the world's dominant military power turns hostile, the Court's vulnerability is absolute.

Yet Alter's point about the pen passing to other countries is worth taking seriously. The US campaign against the ICC may accelerate what is already happening: the fragmentation of international legal authority. If Washington discredits the Court in one theatre, other powers — China, Russia, India, Brazil — will feel freer to build parallel institutions or simply ignore rulings that inconvenience them. The result is not the death of international law but its Balkanisation: multiple legal orders, each backed by a different bloc of states, none capable of binding the others.

For the revolutionary left, the lesson is not to mourn the ICC's weakness. The Court was never a neutral arbiter; it was a forum where the strong prosecuted the weak, with occasional exceptions when the strong fell out among themselves. The current crisis merely strips away the liberal fiction that law stands above power. What replaces it — a world of openly competing legal regimes — is more honest and, for movements that organise across borders, potentially more navigable.

The evidence that shows today's 20-somethings really do have it worse¶

Source: BBC News

The BBC’s data-collaboration with the Institute for Fiscal Studies confirms what anyone under 30 already knows: the material conditions of early adulthood have deteriorated sharply since the 1980s. Home ownership among 25-year-olds has collapsed from 43% to 15%. A quarter lived with parents in the 1990s; now 42% do. Wages for this age group, after inflation, have been stuck just above £28,000 for two decades — progress stalled entirely after the early 2000s.

The article frames this as a story of disappointed expectations, but the numbers point to something more structural. Housing costs now absorb a higher share of income than for any previous generation at the same age, and this is not a temporary spike. It reflects decades of asset-price inflation that has outpaced wage growth, turning housing from a consumption good into a vehicle for storing value — and locking out those who do not already own. The drop in female employment, the first since the 1980s, is particularly telling: it suggests that even the long postwar expansion of the labour force has hit a ceiling.

What is absent from the BBC’s framing is any sense of who benefits. The IFS data shows stagnation for young workers, but the economy has not stagnated overall. Productivity has grown; corporate profits have risen; asset prices have soared. The divergence between what the economy produces and what young workers receive is not a glitch — it is the normal operation of a system in which the bargaining power of labour has been systematically weakened. The parents quoted in the piece, who bought flats on single incomes and stayed in one job for decades, belonged to a different phase of capitalism. Their children face a labour market defined by precarity, credential inflation, and the looming threat of AI displacement — all while the cost of reproducing themselves, from rent to bills, rises faster than wages can follow.

The article ends on a note of resilience and adaptation, which is the liberal response to structural failure: adjust your expectations, hold goals loosely, learn to thrive on shifting sands. But shifting sands are not a foundation. The real question is whether this generation will eventually demand something firmer.

Can Renewables Industrialize Africa?¶

Source: Foreign Affairs

The Iran war, launched by the US and Israel in late February, is reshaping Africa’s energy calculus not through any direct battlefield effect but through the price signals it sends through global oil markets. Mohamed Adow argues that this latest shock is hardening a turn already underway since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: African states are moving decisively toward renewables, and toward the Chinese-backed “electro-state” development model that treats cheap, abundant electricity as the foundation for industrialisation.

The material logic is straightforward. Sub-Saharan Africa saw imported fuel bills rise by over 35 percent in the year after the Ukraine war. Solar costs have fallen 90 percent since 2010, battery prices 93 percent. Decentralised systems can reach rural populations in months rather than the years needed for grid extension. The continent holds 60 percent of the world’s best solar resources and vast untapped geothermal and wind potential. The economics now favour renewables, and the geopolitical turbulence of the past four years has made that preference urgent.

What gives the piece its edge is the inter-imperialist dimension. China’s customs data shows Africa’s solar panel imports surged 60 percent between mid-2024 and mid-2025, with Algeria up 3,000 percent and Botswana 700 percent. Beijing is not merely selling panels; it is financing transmission infrastructure, EV assembly lines, and battery-swapping networks — embedding itself in the physical fabric of African industrialisation. The US, by contrast, is still pushing a $4.7 billion LNG project in Mozambique, a fossil-fuel bet that looks increasingly anachronistic. Infrastructure creates path dependence, as Adow notes. The country that builds Africa’s renewable grid will shape its standards, supply chains, and diplomatic alignment for decades.

The contradiction here is not between renewables and fossil fuels in the abstract. It is between two rival capitalist powers competing to lock in the next phase of African development on their own terms. For revolutionary politics, the question is whether this competition opens space for African states to extract better terms, or whether the electro-state model simply reproduces dependency in a new technical form — Chinese turbines and batteries replacing Western pipelines and diesel generators, with the same underlying logic of extraction and debt.