2026-08-18 ATS briefing¶

Ebola is Back-and the IMF's Relief Fund Is Empty¶

The IMF's Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust holds $120 million while the DRC alone owes the Fund almost $300 million in debt service next year. The arithmetic is brutal enough on its own, but the institutional pattern behind it matters more. Twelve years ago, when Ebola tore through West Africa, the Fund discovered its disaster-relief instrument had no public-health mandate. The fix took three months of emergency diplomacy, a US Treasury push, and a G20 blessing. The same scramble repeated during COVID, which nearly exhausted the trust. Now the DRC outbreak has arrived to find the cupboard bare, and the IMF is once again begging shareholders for replenishment.

The proposal on the table is elegant in its simplicity. The Fund holds 90.5 million ounces of gold booked at $45 an ounce, worth roughly $4,000 on today's market. Selling 10% would seed a $35.8 billion endowment yielding over $1 billion annually, enough to fund the CCRT and the entire concessional lending architecture in perpetuity. The IMF has sold gold before, in 1999 and 2009, at nearly three times the proposed volume. The obstacle is political: an 85% supermajority requirement makes US congressional approval essential.

What the article does not dwell on is why the Fund's shareholders prefer this ritual of periodic begging to a permanent solution. Donor countries get leverage from keeping the IMF dependent on their goodwill. The UK and Japan could pledge $185 million and $100 million within days of COVID being declared, but that speed was itself the product of crisis conditions, not institutional design. A permanent endowment would remove that discretionary power. The gold sale is technically simple and politically inconvenient for exactly the same reason it is necessary. The DRC's $3 billion in outstanding IMF debt, borrowed during COVID, now collides with oil-price shocks and Ebola. The Fund's own instrument for this purpose cannot cover one country, let alone the thirty others that might apply. The question is whether the US sees more value in a functioning relief mechanism or in the leverage that comes from its absence.

How China Found Its Most Potent Weapon¶

Source: Foreign Affairs

Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 quip about rare earths being China’s oil has become the favoured proof of a decades-long Beijing plot, cited by Trump, by the House Select Committee, by Pompeo’s adviser Miles Yu. The authors dismantle this teleology with a more interesting history. China’s dominance of roughly 85 percent of global rare-earth processing emerged from a scramble to control its own chaotic domestic producers, who were undercutting each other and depleting resources in the 1980s while Beijing prioritised foreign exchange over strategic restraint. The 2010 export restriction to Japan, often read as the first strike in a resource war, may have been less a designed punishment than a symptom of the central government’s incomplete grip on its own industry.

The correction matters because it reframes the current standoff. The weaponisation of rare earths is real, but it is the product of an action-reaction spiral between Washington and Beijing, not the unfolding of a master plan. Each power’s defensive move reads as offensive to the other, and the spiral accelerates. The authors note Beijing learned the art of export controls from US sanctions practice, a detail that punctures the myth of Chinese strategic genius while also indicting American policy.

For all its clarity, the piece stops short of naming what the spiral is driving toward. Two states with rival claims to global leadership are each trying to secure chokepoints in the same integrated economy, and each success by one is read as an existential threat by the other. The estrangement this produces empowers the aggressive voices on both sides, as the authors say. What they leave implicit is that this dynamic has no internal brake. The race to secure leverage over critical minerals is not a prelude to a stable equilibrium but a preparation for a world in which the other side cannot be trusted with anything. That is a world of permanent economic warfare, and the working class in both countries will pay for it in higher prices, disrupted supply chains, and the political mobilisation that accompanies each new round of escalation.

A Second ADNOC Strike in a Week as Koh-e-Mubarak Hardens Into an Evasion Hub¶

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

Two ADNOC-affiliated tankers took UAV strikes in the Strait of Hormuz on August 14, the second such incident in under a week, and the UAE's immediate attribution to Iran sits oddly against the fact that neither UKMTO nor CENTCOM has confirmed anything. The vessels have been AIS-dark since July, so independent verification is thin. What is verifiable is the geography: the strikes happened at the precise choke point where Iranian retaliation for Israeli strikes on its oil infrastructure would land, and where the UAE's own commercial interests now collide with its role in the US-led maritime coalition.

The Koh-e-Mubarak anchorage tells a fuller story. Twenty vessels clustered there, eight OFAC-designated, one broadcasting a false identity while holding 1.84 million barrels of crude in apparent floating storage, another laden with Iranian naphtha declaring India as its destination. This is not a smuggling backwater; it is a functioning logistics node where Iranian exports meet the shadow fleet, with bulk carriers arriving as recently as August 14 to keep the operation turning over. The dark transits through the southern corridor and the stationary concentrations off Larak and Qeshm suggest the Iranian side has routinised evasion to the point where it is less a covert activity than an industrial one.

The Bab el-Mandeb picture complicates the neat narrative of Houthi blockade versus Western response. Four Pakistani state-operated tankers have now transited the blockade unimpeded toward Yanbu, while twelve Saudi-flagged vessels reroute via the Cape. The Houthis are not blockading Saudi Arabia; they are blockading specific flags and affiliations. That selectivity is the real strategic content here, and it points to a war being fought through shipping lanes where the distinction between state, corporation, and sanctioned entity has dissolved entirely.

Zhu Rongji's Legacy of Demographic Decline¶

Source: Project Syndicate

The hagiography around Zhu Rongji’s death treats the 1994 tax-sharing reform and WTO accession as twin engines of Chinese growth, and so they were. But Yi Fuxian’s argument is that these same policies carried a demographic price that now threatens the entire project they once powered. The tax reform centralised revenue while leaving expenditure with local governments, forcing them into land sales and debt to fund themselves. The WTO accession then tied China’s growth model to export manufacturing and the vast migration of young workers from countryside to coastal factories. Both dynamics, Yi argues, fed the fertility collapse: the cost of housing and childcare in the cities, the hollowing out of rural communities, the one-child policy’s enforcement becoming more punitive precisely as the economic incentives to have children weakened.

The piece is strongest when it refuses to separate economic from demographic policy. Zhu’s reforms did not merely coincide with population decline; they structured the incentives that produced it. The central government’s fiscal grip and the export-led model created a growth machine that treated people as a mobile labour supply rather than a reproducing population. That machine has now run its course, and the demographic base it consumed cannot be restored by the pronatalist subsidies Beijing now offers. The contradiction is concrete: a state that spent three decades building an economy dependent on cheap, abundant labour now finds that very economy has made labour scarce and expensive.

What the article leaves implicit is the political dimension. A shrinking population with an ageing workforce undermines the fiscal bargain of 1994, since fewer workers must support more pensioners through a system already strained by local government debt. The growth model Zhu championed has generated the conditions of its own exhaustion, and the demographic ledger is where the bill comes due.

Nine shipbreaking workers killed in Bangladesh¶

Source: Hellenic Shipping News

The Hong Kong Convention was supposed to close the gap between the Basel Convention's prohibitions on hazardous waste exports and the reality of where end-of-life ships actually go. Nine workers at Ferdous Steel in Chattogram died on 14 August after exposure to toxic gas inside the LNG carrier MT RASI, and the yard where they died holds HKC certification. The convention entered into force in June 2025; by August, Bangladeshi yards had recorded 84 accidents, 15 deaths and 81 injuries. Certification has become a paper shield for shipowners, not a standard that governs practice.

The chain of responsibility runs through the vessel's ownership. The RASI was the former HL RAS LAFFAN, owned by South Korean H-Line Shipping and linked to cash buyer GMS. The NGO Shipbreaking Platform had warned H-Line in March 2025 that it was preparing to retire the vessel and had flagged the company's pattern of sending end-of-life ships to South Asian beaches. The shipowner sells, the cash buyer brokers, the Bangladeshi yard beaches the vessel and pays the wage bill. When the toxic gas kills, the liability stops at the yard gate, where a Bangladeshi court might eventually act, while the profit was taken further up the chain.

The HKC's weakness is structural, not incidental. It sets a lower baseline than Basel precisely so that signatories can claim compliance while continuing to export hazardous vessels to countries without the infrastructure to dismantle them safely. The European Commission now considering approval for beach-dismantling facilities suggests the convention is being used to legitimise the practice rather than phase it out. The Bangladeshi authorities' response, a notice from BELA demanding investigation and shutdown, will test whether the state can act against a yard that generates employment and foreign exchange. The 17-year-old among the dead was not a worker in any legal sense that would have protected him.

State minimum wages and cost of living¶

Source: FRED Blog

The federal minimum wage has sat at $7.25 since 2009, a nominal figure that inflation has long since gutted. The FRED Blog's map of state-level minimums shows 30 states plus DC have moved above it, with a median of $11.85. But the piece's real contribution is its second map, which adjusts those wages for regional price parities. DC's $18.40 collapses to $16.74 once its 110.72 RPP is applied; New Hampshire's $7.25 falls to $6.96. The gap between the nominal and the real is where the politics lives.

What the RPP adjustment exposes is that the state-by-state patchwork is not a rational response to local conditions but a reflection of the balance of class forces in each state. West Virginia's $8.75 and the gray states clinging to $7.25 are not places where living is cheap enough to make those wages viable. Arkansas, with the lowest RPP at 86.94, still leaves a minimum wage worker earning roughly $11.50 in national terms, a figure that fails any credible subsistence calculation. The map is a geography of working-class power, or its absence, drawn in dollars.

The blog's own caveat is quietly devastating: RPPs reflect what the average household consumes, not what a minimum wage worker consumes. The basket is wrong for the very people the policy targets. Rent, healthcare, and transport, the categories that eat the largest share of a low wage, vary far more sharply than the average basket suggests. The adjustment understates the problem.

The deeper point is that the entire exercise, mapping and adjusting, treats the minimum wage as a technical calibration problem. It is not. It is a political ceiling on the price of labour, set by employers' ability to resist and workers' capacity to fight. The federal floor's two-decade freeze is the national expression of that balance. State-level variation is the same struggle fought on worse terrain, where capital can play jurisdictions against each other. The maps are useful, but they measure the symptom.

Hichilema wins second term as president of copper-rich Zambia¶

Source: Al Jazeera

Hakainde Hichilema's 60 percent share of the vote looks decisive until you weigh it against what the second term is for. The count was briefly halted by attacks on election officials, a detail Al Jazeera carries without elaboration, but the real pressure on Zambia's democracy comes from what sits under the ground. The country is Africa's second-largest copper producer, and that copper is the material basis of the energy transition both Washington and Beijing are scrambling to secure.

Hichilema came to office in 2021 as a market-friendly reformer, promising to clean up the corruption and debt defaults of his predecessor. Five years on, the arithmetic has not moved in his favour. Zambia remains saddled with a debt restructuring that has squeezed public services while the copper price, and the rents it generates, have been absorbed by foreign capital. The election result is a mandate for continuity, but continuity of what? The same extractive model that delivered the debt crisis in the first place.

The US-China rivalry over critical minerals gives Lusaka leverage it has not yet used. Hichilema has played both sides, signing deals with Washington's minerals security partnership while Chinese firms continue to operate the major mines. That balancing act is sustainable only while copper demand holds up. If the energy transition slows, or substitutes emerge, Zambia's bargaining position evaporates and the second term will be spent managing decline rather than negotiating it.

For the Zambian working class, the choice between imperial patrons is no choice at all. The copper leaves, the profits follow it, and the debt stays. Hichilema's victory consolidates a political settlement that has delivered stability without redistribution, and the attacks on election officials suggest that settlement is wearing thin at the edges.

The smoke is at our door¶

Source: Tempest

The S66 bus in West Brighton runs through a neighbourhood where the fog used to be a natural backdrop, and Julia Corrado's memory of joking about the Verrazzano Bridge not being "put out" does more work than any statistic could. The same joke now lands differently: a teenager coughs instead of laughing. That shift from mist to smoke, from a world that parts to let the bus pass to one that clings to skin and embeds itself in clothing, is the material experience of a climate that has stopped being a backdrop and become an active participant in daily life.

The article's sharpest observation is that the narrative shift from climate denial to acceptance has not disrupted capital at all. Denial had a time limit, as Corrado notes, because it could only survive in the space between public understanding and lived experience. Once the smoke is at the door, that space collapses. But acceptance has proven just as commercially fertile. Private insurers withdrawing from disaster-prone regions, investment firms marketing climate-risk portfolios, AI touted as an energy optimiser while its data centres drive electricity demand upward: capital now profits from both producing instability and managing its consequences. The inevitability of environmental collapse becomes a business model rather than a political problem.

The inequality of exposure is where the class analysis lands with real force. Wealthier households retreat into central air and remote work; delivery drivers, construction crews, warehouse workers and teachers in disinvested schools keep producing value while inhaling particulate matter. The 82,100 premature deaths from the 2023 smoke event are not distributed evenly, and neither is the burden of adaptation, which falls on individuals expected to buy their own safety. The teenagers on the bus, faced with urgency they cannot process, reach for the only resource they know: add to cart. Some will be radicalised instead. The article leaves that fork in the road open, which is honest. The system that manufactured the smoke has also manufactured the conditions under which some will fight it and others will simply shop.