Media worth consuming – March 2025

Top Five Articles

European nations are spending more on Russian fossil fuels than they donate to Ukraine.

Group dinners with Trump are going for $1 million a person and individual meetings for $5 million, with the proceeds expected to fund his future presidential library.

A 76 minute podcast on fake experts and the madness of crowds, five years after the Covid hysteria began.

A Stanford professor who was smeared by Fauci, the mainstream media and his university for speaking the truth on Covid is the incoming head of the National Institutes of Health.

Brazil is building a four lane highway through protected Amazon rainforest so that delegates for the November climate summit can have a faster trip from the airport to the conference centre.

Finance

Talk of a US recession might be premature with jobs data improving in recent months. US core inflation is edging higher with both goods and services contributing to the uptick. Given the high P/E ratio on US stocks, bonds have a good chance of outperforming stocks over the next decade. Hedge funds are lobbying hard to stop leverage caps and disclosure requirements.

Global HR company Rippling has accused its rival Deel of corporate espionage after an alleged mole was outed via a “honeypot” Slack channel. With art prices falling over the last two years, art lenders have been making margin calls.

Politics & culture

This year’s World Forum was dominated by speakers pushing for restrictions on free speech and democracy. The EU blatantly lied to Congress in claiming that it is “deeply committed to protecting and promoting free speech” and that its laws restricting speech apply only to Europe. The NSW Premier claims that free speech is incompatible with multiculturalism and must be sacrificed. British chat forums are closing as the compliance burden under new online safety laws is too high.

The mainstream media is using press dinners to openly attack Trump, despite him being far more available to the press than Biden. Elon Musk’s chatbot calculated a 75-85% probability that Trump is a “Putin compromised asset”. Hunter Biden claims he is too poor to continue suing those who accurately reported on the contents of his infamous laptop.

Democrats and sympathetic judges are using a record number of universal injunctions to restrict the Trump administration from implementing key policies, with counter legislation and judicial impeachments being advanced to stop the trend. Trump’s executive order targeting a Democrat aligned law firm resembles the Obama’s IRS’s targeting of conservative charities. A UN judge has been convicted in the UK of enslaving a woman as a house maid.

Twelve hard truths about Ukraine highlight why it needs to stop the war. Russia is using horses and donkeys on Ukrainian battlefields, with opinion divided on whether this creative or desperate. An American explains to Europeans why America is sick of paying for European wars.

The anti-Assad forces that the US supported in Syria are now slaughtering minority civilians after gaining control. South Korean fighter jets inadvertently dropped bombs on their own civilians during live fire drills. Serbian politicians engaged in a brawl including smoke grenades and tear gas during the consideration of a university funding bill.

Turkey’s government has issued warrants or arrested over 100 opposition candidates and officials, including the main rival for upcoming presidential elections. A rural Indian town created an uproar after six men participated in a local government swearing in ceremony in place of their wives who were elected under a gender quota system. Morgan Stanley’s diversity programs increased the hiring of racial minority employees but resulted in complaints from all sides.

Economics & work

Ray Dalio says the US financial system is heading for a heart attack, pointing to the need for DOGE to slash the federal deficit. The Trump Administration is looking to shut down the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, long known for its corruption and waste. Trump is likely to have an easier pathway to slashing government spending if he pursues recission instead of impoundment. The American social security system is a Ponzi scheme, with the ageing population making reform inevitable.

The Federal Reserve is on track to lose over $1 trillion on its disastrous QE program, around the same amount as its combined profits from 2008 to 2022. Germany is abandoning is relative fiscal conservativism, with large government spending set to increase further due to additional defence and infrastructure expenditures. China and Canada are trading retaliatory tariffs on electric vehicles, steel, aluminium, canola oil, pork and seafood.

A British tribunal has ruled that a man allocated an inferior seat location at work is entitled to compensation, as it was effectively the same thing as being demoted. The enormous growth in non-market jobs in Australia helps explain the poor productivity outcomes. Low and medium income Australian households face the worst ever rental affordability as population growth continues to outpace housing supply. Australians are increasingly considering 40 year mortgages in a futile attempt to accommodate unaffordable house prices.

Miscellaneous

In the early days of Covid, American, British and German intelligence officials believed that Covid most likely came from a lab leak, but their views were silenced by their governments. A judge in Missouri has ordered China to pay $24 billion in damages to Missouri for withholding information about the existence and spread of the virus and then cutting off the supply of personal protective equipment. The debate about the nutritional value of seed oils.

The governing bodies of world tennis are being sued for allegedly acting as a cartel that suppresses player’s earnings. The movie studio that buys distressed films and takes them to market.