Month: January 2025

Planning to save more money is once again top of mind for many Americans making resolutions for 2025.

As Statista’;s Anna Fleck shows in the chart below, data from a recent survey by Statista shows that one in five U.S. adults are committing to the financial goal.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Vows to eat healthier, exercise more and lose weight were the next most commonly cited resolutions this year, picked by between 15-19 percent of respondents.

Four in ten U.S. respondents said that they do not plan on making any resolutions for next year.

Authored by Lawrence McDonald via The Bear Traps Report,

The Legendary “W” Games

Over the last 250 years of American political gamesmanship, both parties have played year-end games into the arms of a new incoming administration. In early 2000, the incoming George Walker Bush team discovered that every keyboard in the White House and other administrative offices was missing the “W” key.

The outgoing Clinton staff had removed all the “W” keys to annoy the new administration after an extremely contentious election.

The damage was small, estimated at $15,000.

But the bigger message here was that when the party that runs the White House changes, the outgoing administration will leave some proverbial “time bombs” for their successors.

While the damaged keyboards were more like a bad joke, what Biden is doing to Trump now is serious business. The outgoing administration has opened the spigots table max to get every penny out the door while they can under the existing budget.

It’s almost like they are looting the Treasury before they leave town.

Biden is Opening the Floodgates with Spending

Spending for 2025 is expected to exceed $2Tr by the time Biden leaves DC on January 20th. This is over 30% of the annual budget, and Trump will have to cut spending for the rest of the year to stay within the limits of the allocated budget. This could mean a notable slowdown in GDP growth in the first quarters of 2025.

Bonds have taken Notice

Ever since the Fed cut rates in September, U.S. 10-year bond yields are about 1% higher, and mortgage rates are following in lockstep. Hedge funds are selling short, betting on lower bond prices into colossal incoming bond sales from the U.S. Treasury. This is a highly unusual activity and has the fingerprints of the bond vigilantes everywhere; a revolt is in the works.

Lunatics – as Usual – on Capitol Hill 

Congress, in its usual fashion, has failed to agree on the next budget, so the government is currently operating under a “continuing resolution” (CR). This continuing resolution means the government is allowed to spend the same amount of money they spent last year, which is $6.75TR. The government’s fiscal year started on October 1st, and Biden is on a run rate to spend almost $2TR by the end of December and a deficit that may exceed $800bl (+60% y/y). So, when Trump comes in on January 20th, he has three quarters left of the government’s fiscal year, but by then, Biden has spent more than 30% of the total allocated budget. This forces Trump to cut spending right off the bat. We estimate spending could drop by $500bl quarter over quarter, or 25% from Q4 to Q1. This is an estimate, and the timing of spending can change. But the fact is that Biden is emptying the coffers before Trump gets in. Every week, more money and weapons are sent to Ukraine, more subsidies are given to semiconductor makers to build plants in the US, and more government employees are hired.

US Yields Surge While Others Languish

Since September, US Yields have surged over 20% on Biden’s sugar high, while Canadian and German yields are down since then, Chinese yields have collapsed, and UK yields are only modestly above the September level.

Government Job Growth Twice the Rate of the Private Sector

Private sector job growth has lagged government job growth significantly in the last year as the government keeps hiring people.

Why is this so Bad?

We believe that this spending deluge by Biden on his way out is partially to blame for the surge in bond yields in Q4. Some may say it’s because of Trump and his promised tax cuts, but the Republican House majority is so slim that it’s unclear how much of a fiscal stimulus Trump is actually able to get through Congress. Also, the incoming Senate majority leader Thune (R, SD) has said he will only get one bill through reconciliation in FY 2025 and another one in FY2026. His priority is on immigration and energy legislation, so a fiscal spending bill might not come until late 2025 or early 2026 if anything. But if yields are being pushed up by all this spending in Q4, then what will happen if spending falls back in early 2025? And what will happen to GDP growth? A $500bl drop in government spending from Q4 to Q1 is the equivalent of 1.7ppt of growth. So, if Q4 nominal growth comes in at 5.7% annualized, this could drop to 4% in Q1 if government spending slows down accordingly.

Treasury’s Reliance on Short-Term Debt Exploded in Recent Years

Election Rigging? We are witnessing a Covid era like spending in 2024 without a pandemic. The Treasury Department has come to rely on short-term bills to fund the government. But with $36Tr of debt, the Treasury has to issue bills almost every day to keep funding the government and to refund maturing debt.

Interest Payments on the Federal Debt Load

• 2026: $2.1T?

• 2025: $1.5T?

• 2024: $910B

• 2023: $658B

• 2022: $475B

• 2021: $352B

• 2020: $224B

*CBO data, Bloomberg. The average weighted coupon on the U.S. debt load is about 2.7% vs. over 4.5% for 10-year U.S. Treasuries. As bonds mature, they get refinanced at much higher yields.

$10Tr of Debt Refinancing Next Year

In 2024 Treasury faced around $10Tr of maturing debt. To refinance this debt, it issued a whopping $26Tr of bills and bonds. More than 84% of that paper was short-term bills with a maturity of 6 months or less. Treasury keeps re-issuing bills with a maturity of 4 to 8 weeks or 3,4 to 6 months, which are the most popular maturities in a continuing, ever-increasing roll down of the debt, day after day, month after month.

Apple Long-Term Bonds and Interest Rates

ALERT – By issuing nearly a colossal load of extremely short-term bills, Janet Yellen succeeded in suppressing bond volatility in an election year and, in our view, strategically placing that bond market volatility into 2025 after the election. You can “why” see above, she wanted LESS long-term paper in circulation markets in the election year. Now, in 2025 – this paper has to be rolled over and termed out into longer-dated bonds. The USA is behaving like a financially trapped emerging market country. Living on the “front-end” of the yield curve is a VERY dangerous game.  The Apple AAPL 2.55% bonds due 2060 are trading down at 57 cents on the dollar. If long-term bond yields go to 6%, take a guess where this bond will trade. Near 47 cents on the dollar? Now think of the trillions of USD loans issued in 2017-2021 on bank balance (commercial real estate, mortgages, corporate debt outstanding). Losses are in the trillions of dollars with higher incoming interest rates. 

Interest Rates UP – Bond Prices DOWN

Never, ever forget that 6% today is equivalent to the destructive capacity of 10% twenty years ago. Interest rates up, mean bond prices down. A 1% move in interest rates higher today is an entirely different, far more lethal equation.

Incoming Stress Points

In 2025 the U.S. Treasury faces $9.6Tr of maturities in their so-called publicly held debt. In Q1 alone — the government faces $5.58Tr of maturities (bonds coming due, redemption), but 86% of those are short-term bills that the Treasury department rolls over into new 4-week, 8-week, 3,4, or 6-month bills, among others. 

As a result, almost daily bill auctions are coming to a theater near you, as the Treasury Department mindlessly keeps pushing new paper into the market to pay back the colossal amount of maturing debt.

Is There Any Reason to Buy Treasuries?

The new Treasury department under Scott Bessent may reduce bill issuance a bit and increase coupon paying issuance, just to alleviate some of the pressure on the bills market and extend the duration of outstanding US debt. Now that the big slush fund that bought all these bills, the so-called Reverse Repo Facility (RRP), is close to being depleted, it will be harder to sell all that short-term paper. In addition, Goldman Sachs expects that the Federal Reserve will stop the run-off of treasuries from its balance sheet by the end of January and begin buying treasuries again with the proceeds of the maturing MBS on its balance sheet. As such, the Fed becomes a modest buyer of treasuries next year, which allows the Treasury to increase coupon issuance without disrupting the long end.

One big bullish catalyst for treasuries would be a regulatory change to exempt treasuries from the Supplemental Leverage Ratio (SLR). It is unclear if and when this would be implemented, although Bessent was hinting at regulatory relief for banks to boost banks’ treasury holdings. Exempting treasuries allows banks to hold more Treasuries on their balance sheets without needing to hold additional capital against them, freeing up the capacity for banks to participate more actively in the Treasury market. Its unclear how much treasury demand that would create, but in 2021, when the temporary SLR exemption was reinstated after COVID, prime dealers reduced their Treasury holdings from $250bl to $125bl in 2 months. A change in the SLR ratio may come but is going to take months before the rules are changed. A phase-out of QT for treasuries would be a more immediate, albeit more modest, relief for the bond market. According to this timeline, the Fed will end up buying $100bl of treasuries in 2025, a big change from the $500bl of treasury sales in 2024.

The Fed has been Politicized

We have been very critical of Yellen’s term at the Treasury, but upon some further reflection, we think it’s really the case that Yellen’s only real issue was acting in the short-term interests of her boss and her party as opposed to thinking longer-term about how the government finances itself on a sustainable basis.

Her decision to fund the government with T-bills over duration securities and violate long-standing Treasury Department “norms” was incredibly short-sighted, but as someone who works for the President, ORDERS to follow.

Many have been super critical of her for these decisions because she should know what they would lead to and how really what she (and Powell together) has done is favor asset owners and the wealthy over everyone else in America, exacerbating wealth inequality to precarious levels in this country while still not bringing inflation back down to target. So ultimately, her decisions got her team knocked out of office anyway.

Looking forward, though, the issue is that there is no one in the government who is really thinking about and acting on behalf of the longer-term interests of the country when it comes to how much debt we are raising and how we are financing the government. The myopia about these decisions to get the existing political party in control through the next election is incredibly concerning.

The Fed has said this is not their lane; however, they are elected to 14-year terms and are supposed to be above politics. There are things they could have done to offset the politicization of the Treasury. They chose not to, they continue to protect asset holders and the Treasury market, decisions that really just make them become political as well. They could have better neutralized Treasury’s political decisions through more active QT, actually selling securities instead of just rolling them off, not adding to their duration holdings such that the weighted average maturity (WAM) of their positions is longer than Treasury’s own WAM. Powell’s Fed needs to be getting way more criticism than they are currently about these decisions which have made it harder to bring inflation down for the average American.

So if the Treasury is not going to think long term and the Fed is not going to either (the Fed actually is complicit because they don’t allow any real treasury market dysfunction to exist, which would be the way to deal with these long term issues by having the market / bond vigilantes do their thing), then who will? This is a problem, the bond market is starting to figure it out, term premiums are starting to normalize and the new administration will have to make some big decisions early on in their term.

Maybe @elonmusk and @DOGE can look into this as well. Someone has to!

*  *  *

Pick up Larry’s new best-selling book — “When Markets Speak“ – On Amazon today.  

With everyone on edge after the New Orleans ‘terrorist attack‘ on Bourbon Street early this morning, reports flooded X moments ago of a ‘boom’ and/or a ‘vehicle fire’ in Las Vegas. 

BREAKING: Witnesses heard “boom” video smoke rising near Trump Tower in Las Vegas.
pic.twitter.com/Fk3TtxnMlN

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) January 1, 2025

It turns out the ‘boom’ was caused by a Tesla Cybertruck ablaze in front of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas, possibly due to a lithium battery fire.

Cybertruck blew up in front of Trump hotel in Las Vegas. Those are our luggage by the door and that’s where we were when it happened. pic.twitter.com/KaVZXfGLNK

— ayackle (@kaaaassuu) January 1, 2025

What are the odds?

An era came to a close in Europe on the first day of 2025.

Russian gas exports via Soviet-era pipelines running through Ukraine came to a halt on New Year’s Day, marking the end of five decades of Moscow’s dominance over Europe’s energy markets, as well as cheap gas that kept Germany’s economy humming.

The gas had kept flowing despite nearly three years of war, but Russia’s gas firm Gazprom said it had stopped at 0500 GMT after Ukraine refused to renew a transit agreement as we previously noted.

According to Reuters, the widely expected stoppage is unlikely to impact prices for consumers in the European Union – unlike in 2022, when falling supplies from Russia sent prices to record highs, worsened a cost-of-living crisis and hit the bloc’s competitiveness – however, that is a rather naive statement since European nat gas prices have been rising all year and closed 2024 more than doubling from their February lows. They will only keep rising now.

The last few European buyers of Russian gas via Ukraine, such as Slovakia and Austria, had already arranged alternative (and far more expensive) supply, while Hungary will keep receiving Russian gas via the TurkStream pipeline under the Black Sea. But Transdniestria, a breakaway pro-Russian region of Ukraine’s neighbor Moldova also reliant on the transit flows, cut off heating and hot water supplies to households early on Wednesday. Local energy company Tirasteploenergo urged residents to dress warmly, hang blankets or thick curtains over windows and balcony doors, and use electric heaters.

The European Commission said the EU had prepared for the cut-off.

Russia and the former Soviet Union spent half a century building up a major share of the European gas market, which at its peak stood at around 35%.

But the EU has slashed its dependence on Russian energy since the start of the war in Ukraine by buying more piped gas from Norway and LNG from Qatar and the United States.

“The European gas infrastructure is flexible enough to provide gas of non-Russian origin,” a spokesperson for the Commission said. “It has been reinforced with significant new LNG (liquefied natural gas) import capacities since 2022.”

The biggest beneficiary of said LNG imports is, of course, the US which has seen its LNG exports to Europe soar since the Ukraine war and since the US blew up the Nordstream pipeline, making (expensive) US sourced LNG one of the few realistic alternatives for Europe. In other words, Europe has gone from relying entirely on cheap Russian gas to relying entirely on expensive US LNG.

Ukraine, which refused to extend the transit deal under pressure from the vegetable in the White House (whose son was recently pardoned for any crimes starting around the time Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of Ukraine’s energy giant Burisma), said Europe had already made the decision to abandon Russian gas.

Combined pipeline routes from Russia delivered a record high 201 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas to Europe in 2018. The number however ground to a halt after the Ukraine war; the Nord Stream route across the Baltic Sea to Germany was blown up by the US in 2022 and the Yamal-Europe pipeline via Belarus has also shut. Russia shipped about 15 bcm of gas via Ukraine in 2023, down from 65 bcm when the last five-year contract began in 2020.

“We stopped the transit of Russian gas. This is a historic event. Russia is losing its markets, it will suffer financial losses,” Ukraine’s Energy Minister German Galushchenko said in a statement.

While Ukraine’s propaganda is understandable – Russia long ago found alternative end markets – nobody will suffer as much as Germany.

As Bloomberg’s Stephen Stapczynski wrote, “Cheap Russian gas was the backbone of some European economies for essentially half a century. That’s now ending. And Europe is set to face higher-for-longer gas prices.” One needs only to look at the ongoing collapse of Germany’s economy to observe this in real time.

And some more context from the Bloomberg analyst who writes that Russia provided half of Germany’s gas in 2021. It’s now zero, and so “due in part to the loss of Russian energy and other factors, Germany’s economy is 5% smaller than it would have been if the pre-pandemic growth trend had been maintained.”

Ukraine, of course, is also a loser: the country that has become a deep state testing bed for World War 3, will lose up to $1 billion a year in transit fees from Russia. To help offset the impact, it will quadruple gas transmission tariffs for domestic consumers from Wednesday, which could cost the country’s industry more than 1.6 billion hryvnias ($38.2 million) a year.

The company halted supply to Austria’s OMV in mid-November over a contractual dispute but in recent weeks Russian gas has been reaching Austria via Slovakia at a rate of around 200 gigawatt hours (GWh) per day. For Jan. 1, only about 7 GWh per day is expected to flow from Slovakia to Austria, Austrian energy regulator E-Control said.

Slovakia’s main gas buyer SPP said it would supply its customers mainly via pipelines from Germany and also Hungary, but would face additional transit costs.

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

The U.S. government is currently constructing the most colossal monument in the history of the world.  It is a monument of debt, and we will forever be remembered as the nation that piled up far more debt than anyone else ever did.  For decades, this generation has been recklessly spending the money of future generations of Americans.  Most people seem to think that we are totally getting away with this swindle, but the truth is that the party is almost over.  Our national debt has already surpassed the 36 trillion dollar mark, and according to usdebtclock.org at our current rate of spending our national debt will surpass the 51 trillion dollar mark four years from now.

We are a spoiled, bloated, greedy nation that has run up a debt so big that words simply do not do it justice.

We have got to stop spending so much money, but we just can’t help ourselves.

In January, Donald Trump will be faced with some very difficult decisions regarding our debt as soon as he is inaugurated…

It’s going to be an urgent issue for Trump as soon as he takes office. The federal government will resume the cap on its borrowing authority on Jan. 1, as the U.S. sits on a national debt of more than $36 trillion, though the Treasury Department can buy time for a number of months with so-called extraordinary measures. The fiscal time bomb illustrates the struggle Trump and Republican leaders face heading into 2025, as they consider whether to court Democrats who will want concessions or their own conservatives who are known for rigidly sticking to their demands to cut funding.

If Trump decides that it is time to cut spending, that will make our short-term economic problems even worse.

But if he decides to keep spending money at current levels that would be suicidal.

Most Americans have no idea how difficult it is to spend a trillion dollars.

If you spend one dollar every single second, you could spend a million dollars in just twelve days.

If you spend one dollar every single second, you could spend a billion dollars in 32 years.

But at that same rate, it would  take you more than 31,000 years to spend a trillion dollars.

Let me give you another illustration.

If you were alive 2000 years ago and you started spending one million dollars every single day when Christ was born, you still would not have spent one trillion dollars by now.

That is how large one trillion dollars is.

But the United States is not one trillion dollars in debt.

The United States is 36 trillion dollars in debt.

And as I discussed the other day, we will never pay that debt off.

A trillion $10 bills, if they were taped end to end, would wrap around the globe more than 380 times.  That amount of money would still not be enough to pay off one-third of the U.S. national debt.

But if you are determined to do something, the government wants you to know that you can help.

If you can believe it, the government is actually taking online donations that will be used to help pay off the national debt.

Or at least that is what they are claiming.

If you were able to donate one dollar every single second to help pay off the national debt, it would take you hundreds of thousands of years to come up with enough money to pay it off.

Are you starting to get the picture?

We are in so much trouble.

We could have lived within our means and left America in tremendous shape for the generations that follow us.

But that is not what we did.

Instead, we have saddled our children and grandchildren with the greatest mountain of debt in the history of the world.

What we have done to future generations of Americans is beyond criminal.  One day, if they get the chance, they will look back and curse this generation for what we have done to them.  We spent tens of trillions of dollars that belonged to them, and we have stuck them with the bill for our wild excesses.  We have taken the greatest economic machine that humanity has ever seen and we have driven it straight off a cliff.

And yet we are so proud of ourselves.

We think that we are so special and that we have all the answers.

Of course the truth is that we should be deeply ashamed of ourselves.  Over and over again we kept sending the same clowns back to Washington D.C. and they just kept on spending our money like they were playing a really twisted game of Monopoly.

So now we are going to pay the price.

All of us.

Apparently the Chinese wanted to see how much of a joke the U.S. Treasury has become, because they hacked into it a few weeks ago…

A state-sponsored actor in China hacked the U.S. Treasury Department, gaining access to the workstations of government employees and unclassified documents, the Biden administration said on Monday.

The announcement comes after revelations in recent months that China had penetrated deep into U.S. telecommunications systems, gaining access to the phone conversations and text messages of U.S. officials and others.

According to Reuters, this was a “major incident”…

The hackers compromised a third-party cybersecurity service provider and were able to access unclassified documents, the letter said, calling it a “major incident.”

According to the letter, hackers “gained access to a key used by the vendor to secure a cloud-based service used to remotely provide technical support for Treasury Departmental Offices (DO) end users. With access to the stolen key, the threat actor was able override the service’s security, remotely access certain Treasury DO user workstations, and access certain unclassified documents maintained by those users.”

Of course you don’t have to be a hacker to find out the big secret that the U.S. Treasury is trying to hide.

The big secret is that we are broke.

We are drowning in an ocean of red ink, and we can barely pay our bills.

Something has got to change, because if we stay on the path that we are currently on we will be 51 trillion dollars in debt four years from today.

*  *  *

Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

Over the last year, the future strength of the global economy has been a mixed picture amid rising protectionism and geopolitical conflict.

In the U.S., growth was resilient – but higher prices, despite cooling inflation, continued to squeeze consumer wallets. European economies faced slower growth, with Germany facing a two-year downturn. In China, property market troubles weighed on consumer confidence and economic growth.

Given this backdrop, how confident are people around the world in the global economy looking ahead to 2025?

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld, shows global economic sentiment by country, based on survey data from Ipsos that asked respondents whether they felt the global economy would be stronger or weaker in 2025 compared to 2024.

Rising Optimism for the Global Economy in 2025

Below, we show how consumers view the global economy across 33 different countries, drawn from a survey of 23,721 adults between October 25th and November 8th, 2024:

Overall, consumers are slightly more optimistic about the global economy going into 2025, with 51% agreeing it will be stronger than in 2024, on average.

This is a one percentage point increase from last year’s survey results which were an even 50/50 split.

Going into 2025, the most optimistic countries are in Asia, particularly emerging markets like Indonesia, Malaysia, and India that have benefited from shifting global supply chains and demographic factors. Moreover, Indonesia and India are forecast to see among the fastest real GDP growth across major economies over the next decade.

When it comes to China, 78% of consumers have optimistic views on the global economy while Japan and South Korea are the two countries in Asia with a notably pessimistic outlook for the global economy next year.

In South America, the most optimistic countries include Argentina, Peru, and Brazil. Under President Milei, Argentina has seen its first fiscal surplus in 12 years driven by sweeping budget cuts and reforms. As inflation has plummeted, global economic confidence has significantly improved among Argentinians since last year.

For U.S. consumers, expectations rose by nine percentage points from last year’s survey, resulting in an optimistic majority of 54%. While tariffs stand to add new price pressures, Trump’s proposed tax cuts could help support economic growth.

By contrast, European countries have the most pessimistic views on the global economy. Amid looming trade wars and sustained energy price shocks from the Russia-Ukraine war, seven of the 10 most pessimistic countries were found on the continent.

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

Foreign jihadists have been appointed in senior positions in the new Syrian military, which is now led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), an offshoot of al-Qaeda that led the offensive that ousted former President Bashar al-Assad.

Syrian sources told Reuters that the foreign fighters appointed to the military include Uyghurs, a Jordanian, a Turk, and an Albanian. “This is a small token of recognition for the sacrifices Islamist jihadists gave to our struggle for freedom from Assad’s oppression,” an HTS source told the media outlet.

Among the Uyghurs is Abdulaziz Dawood Khudaberdi, the commander of the Turkistan Islamic Party’s (TIP) forces in Syria. The TIP’s stated goal is to create an Islamic State in China’s western Xinjiang region.

Khudaberdi was named a brigadier general in the Syrian military, and two other Uyghur fighters were appointed colonels.

Sources told Reuters that Turkish citizen Omar Mohammed Jaftashi and Jordanian citizen Abdul Rahman Hussein al-Khatib were also made brigadier-generals.

Abdul Jashari, an Albanian fighter who was designated a terrorist by the US Treasury Department, was made a colonel.

HTS is still designated by the US as a foreign terrorist organization, but the Biden administration has celebrated its takeover of Syria. The US has also made clear it’s willing to work with the new government and its de facto leader, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, who has been going by his real name Ahmed al-Sharaa.

Earlier this month, Barbara Leaf, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, met with Julani and announced the US was removing a $10 million bounty on his head.

The same US national security state that took away our rights and sent its soldiers to die for a “war on terror” is hailing the takeover of Syria by transnational jihadist rabble as a great triumph. And when the blowback comes again, they’ll find even more rights to take away. https://t.co/DrDh62gUXy

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) December 30, 2024

Julani, a former al-Qaeda leader, appointed other HTS members in senior positions of the “transitional government” and has said elections in Syria probably won’t happen for at least four years.

President Vladimir Putin has issued a traditional New Year’s Eve speech on Tuesday, which marks exactly 25 years of the Russian leader in power. There was a brief few year period when he was Prime Minister under President Dmitry Medvedev based on constitutional term limits.

He said that Russians should be “proud” of what Russia had done during his quarter century ruling the country. He issued the expected well wishes for the year ahead, but interestingly did not expressly mention the ongoing Ukraine war, which has resulted in far-reaching US and European sanctions on Moscow.

“Dear friends, in just a few minutes 2025 will be ushered in, completing the first quarter of the 21st century,” Putin began in the televised remarks.

“Yes, we still have a lot to decide but we can be rightfully proud of what has already been done,” he added, saying his 25 years as president led to the “further development” of the country and its economy and defense.

He heaped praise on Russian soldiers defending the nation, at a time that Ukrainian forces still occupy hundreds of square kilometers of the southern border region of Kursk.

“On this New Year’s Eve, the thoughts, hopes of relatives and friends, millions of people across Russia are together with our fighters and commanders,” Putin said. “Now, on the threshold of a new year, we are thinking about the future. We are sure that everything will be all right. We will only go forward.”

Putin first took power after having been named acting president on New Year’s Eve in 1999 when predecessor Boris Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned amid post-Soviet economic collapse and turmoil.

Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev started the tradition of a New Year’s Eve speech, and is watched by millions of Russian households. It typically involves a summary of major events of the past year, and general well wishes for the year to come.

“Now, on the threshold of a new year, we are thinking about the future. We are sure that everything will be all right. We will only go forward,” Putin said.

AFP noted that the address “aired on state TV just before midnight in each of Russia’s 11 time zones” – and it was also likely closely watched by analysts at Western intelligence agencies and the Pentagon.

The Trump administration enters the White House in less than three weeks, and all eyes will be on the question of how quickly Trump will push Kiev toward the negotiating table.

After 3 years of war, isolation, and economic stagnation, #Putin tells Russians: ‘Everything will be fine, we will move forward!’
● In his 2025 New Year’s address, he hails Russia’s ‘strength’ and ties the year to WWII’s 80th anniversary, dubbing it the ‘Year of the Defender’ pic.twitter.com/D8uqKLZ0UJ

— Jason Corcoran (@jason_corcoran) December 31, 2024

The Kremlin has been cautiously optimistic, but feels in control of the war in the Donbas. President Zelensky has meanwhile balked at the possibility of ceding territory, though the Crimea question has remained open from the Ukrainians’ perspective.

Russia is going to settle on nothing less than total and permanent control over the four territories in the east, and a permanent ban on Ukraine ever joining NATO. Trump is reportedly mulling a minimum 20-year waiting period for Ukraine, however. Moscow says even this long delay is not acceptable.

Authored by Darren Taylor via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The Mexican organized crime group accused of fueling the United States’ fentanyl crisis is now making the deadly drug in Africa, according to local and international law enforcement agencies.

The Sinaloa cartel has chosen South Africa as a major operational base, they said, largely because of its strong trade links to China, which produces the chemicals used to make the synthetic opioid.

“At this stage, there isn’t a big market for fentanyl in Africa, so much of this drug that’s being made in underground labs on the continent is being smuggled into the United States, the biggest fentanyl market in the world,” said Lt. Gen. Godfrey Lebeya, chief of The Hawks, South Africa’s top police investigative unit.

Drug overdoses have killed an estimated 400,000 Americans since 2021, with the majority linked to fentanyl, according to statistics compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In its legal prescription form, fentanyl is a highly effective painkiller.

Criminals, however, copy its chemical makeup in labs and illegally sell it as a powder, dropped onto blotter paper, put in eyedroppers and nasal sprays, or made into pills that look like legitimate prescription opioids, according to a report by the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse.

A few milligrams of fentanyl can kill, as it is 50 times stronger than heroin and 100 times stronger than morphine.

Lebeya told The Epoch Times that South African “drug traffickers and gangs linked to the Sinaloa cartel” are testing local narcotics markets.

“Fentanyl has definitely entered our trafficking conveyor belts,” he said. “We know that because we’re arresting suspects who are in possession of it and they tell us, ‘We want to see if South Africans get a taste for fentanyl.’

“This is very concerning because we’ve seen the scale of America’s crisis and we don’t want our country to go the same way.

“But we must be realistic and admit that it’s possible that we end up with a tragedy of our own because fentanyl is much cheaper than the other drugs circulating in South Africa, like cocaine and heroin, and the Mexicans who are driving fentanyl use in America are now on our soil.”

In July, The Hawks raided what they later described as a “drugs superlab” in South Africa’s northern Limpopo province, seizing large quantities of methamphetamine, a small quantity of fentanyl, and about 500 pounds of chemicals used to manufacture both drugs.

South African farmer Roelof Botha, 57, and three Mexican citizens—Gonzales Jorge Partida, 51, Gutierrez Lopes, 43, and Ruben Vidal Rodriguez, 44—are awaiting trial for alleged manufacturing, dealing, and possession of illicit drugs, as well as money laundering.

“We’re still questioning the Mexican guys,” Lebeya said. “They’re not saying much. But international partners have given us information that these men are working for the Sinaloa cartel.”

Lufuno Sadiki, senior lecturer in criminology at the University of Cape Town, told The Epoch Times that it’s “easy for Mexicans to blend in with locals” because they look very similar to mixed-race South Africans.

“It appears as if the Mexicans, mostly from the Sinaloa cartel, are linking up with the local gangs and showing them the ropes, so to speak, [with regard to] fentanyl,” she said.

“In exchange, the South Africans introduce the cartel guys to trusted contacts in the criminal underground and to corrupt officials.”

Organized crime groups are attracted to South Africa for several reasons, according to Professor Anthony Minnaar, a security risk management expert at the University of Limpopo.

“It’s the continent’s wealthiest economy with a banking system that’s linked internationally but is flawed,” he told The Epoch Times. “The country has well-established drug markets of its own and a plethora of drug-trafficking gangs.

“South Africa also offers regular flight connections to Central and South America, with its ports visited daily by vessels registered in Mexico.

“Then it has high volume trade traffic from China, and criminals are hiding chemicals used to make crystal meth and fentanyl in containers coming from China.

“South Africa also has a high level of official corruption.”

Professor Francois Steyn, head of the Department of Criminology at the University of the Free State, told The Epoch Times that the Sinaloa cartel had “probably been in South Africa for longer than we think,” maybe for more than a decade.

“We’re picking up evidence of this only now because our systems have improved over the past five years or so and so has our cooperation with American law enforcement,” he said.

In September 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers in Louisville, Kentucky, intercepted a package sent from South Africa containing enough cocaine and fentanyl to kill 220,000 people.

“That fentanyl must have been made in South Africa or somewhere else in Africa,” Steyn said. “If that wasn’t the case, it’s still clear that South Africa is being used as a conduit to get fentanyl and other narcotics into the American market and other markets.”

In January 2024, police found crystal meth and fentanyl worth 37 million rands (about $1.98 million) hidden in ornaments in a cargo shed at O.R. Tambo International Airport in Johannesburg.

The shipment was headed to New Zealand.

“It’s really sad to know that our territory is being used to play a role in America’s fentanyl pandemic,” Lebeya said.

“But I’d like Americans to know we are cooperating with the relevant agencies in the United States and doing our best [to prevent fentanyl manufacturing and distribution].”

An indictment in a U.S. court case relating to fentanyl production described it as the “single deadliest drug threat” ever encountered in the country.

Read the rest here…

Now France is getting in on the Syria action in the wake of President Bashar al-Assad’s overthrow on December 8. Currently the hardline Islamist movement Hayat Tahrir-al-Sham (HTS) holds Damascus and major cities across southern, central, and coastal Syria.

The Turks hold parts of the north near the border (and Turkey’s proxies, particularly the the Syrian National Army, or SNA), while the United States still occupies the northeast (also through its proxy the Kurkish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF). The Israeli military holds an expanse out of the Golan Heights in the south.

France’s defense ministry announced Tuesday that its warplanes launched airstrikes against Islamic State (ISIS) over the weekend.

This marks the first such French strikes in Syria since HTS took over Damascus:

“On Sunday, French air assets carried out targeted strikes against Daesh sites on Syrian soil,” the minister said in a statement on social platform X, using an Arab acronym for ISIS. He also published a video showing the military operation. “Our armies remain engaged in the fight against terrorism” in the region, Lecornu said.

French Rafale fighter jets and American Reaper drones “dropped a total of seven bombs on two military targets belonging to Daesh in central Syria,” the statement specified.

The ‘ISIS threat’ has also been cited by the Pentagon as ongoing justification for keeping some 2,000 or more American troops in Syria. The rationale for occupying Syria’s oil and gas fields has also been the ‘counter Iran’ mission, according to US officials.

But we should note the fact that ISIS has been relatively quiet since the HTS Jolani takeover of the country. Where are the big ISIS terror bombings of prior years when Assad held the country?

The reality is that ISIS terrorists are actually embedded with HTS and its foreign fighter affiliates, as recent American television footage has demonstrated.

The French government released footage of preparations for its weekend strikes on ISIS targets:

France says it carried out missile strikes against ISIS in Syria last weekendpic.twitter.com/iSECAEaz3Z

— Guy Elster (@guyelster) December 31, 2024

ISIS is the threat that keeps on giving: Western allies will stay in Syria for the time being while continually claiming that the coalition (Operation Inherent Resolve) must battle terrorists, even while giving tacit support to HTS in Damascus.

US-designated terrorist Abu Mohammad al-Julani of course began his jihadist career in Syria as a high-ranking member of ISIS and later al-Nusra Front (Al-Qaeda in Syria). As we highlighted previously, this is putting lipstick on a pig.