Top Three Videos – August 23, 2026
Steve Hanke: What Happens When Yen Collapses? Economist Steve Hanke On Next Currency Crisis...(Aug 17, 2026)
David Lin...
Summary
Steve Hanke says the July 31st joint US-Japan yen intervention — the first US intervention in the yen since 1998 — produced only a dead cat bounce (yen from 164 to 156, now back to 159.58) because nothing changed in the fundamentals: Japan’s M2 is growing at just over 2% a year when it should grow around 6%, and the new prime minister is widening deficits atop the world’s highest advanced-economy debt-to-GDP ratio. Recounting the Asian financial crisis, he explains that Thailand and Indonesia blew up because they ran the “deadly cocktail” of a pegged exchange rate plus discretionary monetary policy, and that his currency board plan as Suharto’s chief adviser — which made the rupiah appreciate 25% in one day on the mere announcement of his appointment — was killed by Clinton, who threatened to withhold the $43 billion IMF bailout and sent half the Pacific fleet off Jakarta because Suharto knew about Chinese money flowing to Clinton’s campaign through a Jakarta bank. Hanke calls the IMF’s official history “all lies,” notes no currency board in history has ever failed (Hong Kong sailed through the crisis; his Bulgaria board ended 242%-per-month hyperinflation), and sees no imminent new Asian crisis — just a weakening yen and a 30-year Treasury yield that could rise another 50 basis points.
Top 5 Key Topics
- The failed yen intervention: The US-BOJ joint move was more credible than the BOJ alone but changed no fundamentals, so shorts piled back in and the yen has retraced half the move; Hanke expects repeated interventions will be needed because “the only way you can change the course of a currency is to change the fundamentals.”
- Japan’s real problem is tight money, not loose: The financial press calls Japanese policy loose because rates are low, but M2 growth of barely 2% — versus the ~6% Hanke says is consistent with the 2% inflation target — has kept nominal GDP dead since the bubble popped in 1991, and he’d prescribe either a currency board or a monetarist money-growth rule.
- The deadly cocktail that caused the 1997 crisis: Thailand and Indonesia pegged to the dollar while running discretionary monetary policy, swapping falling foreign reserves for domestic bonds until the pegs blew; the IMF’s float advice sent the rupiah into freefall (ultimately down ~85% to around 16,000), triggering food riots in Jakarta.
- How Washington killed the Indonesian currency board and Suharto: Clinton told Suharto three times (with Hanke listening in) that adopting the currency board meant no $43 billion bailout, then US naval exercises off Jakarta spooked the military into abandoning it; IMF chief Camdessus later boasted in his retirement speech that removing Suharto was an accomplishment, and Hanke ties Clinton’s motive to Chinese campaign money routed through an Indonesian bank.
- Currency boards never fail: Hanke’s Bulgaria board (July 1997) ended 242%-a-month hyperinflation immediately with money market rates at 2% within a year; Hong Kong’s board (rebuilt by John Greenwood in 1983) made Soros-style attacks impossible because reserves back 100% of monetary liabilities. The IMF blocks new ones anyway because its “religion” is independent central banks with discretionary policy.
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Prof. David Gibbs: Russia, China & Iran Dismantle US Empire - NATO's Strategic Failure...(Aug 9, 2026)
World Affairs in Context...
Summary
David Gibbs argues US foreign policy since the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance has pursued unilateral global hegemony through force, making America “the most aggressive country in the world” — citing a Lancet study finding US-led sanctions kill over 500,000 people per year, roughly 28 million over 50 years, more deadly than Russia, China, or Iran. He traces this to neoconservatism, which took Israel as its model of unapologetic force, sold wars through “humanitarian intervention” (Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya — all disasters), and faces zero accountability, with figures like Victoria Nuland promoted after each failure. He predicts Russia wins in Ukraine (spending only 6.3% of GDP on its military with Putin at 74% approval per Levada polling), that US defeats in Ukraine and Iran will deal NATO an unrecoverable blow, and that de-dollarization marks the beginning of the end of American hegemony — while warning that an irrational Europe talking of breaking up Russia could stumble into nuclear war.
Top 5 Key Topics
- The 1992 blueprint for unilateral dominance: The Defense Planning Guidance document called for seizing the post-Soviet moment to establish unprecedented unilateral power, marginalizing the UN, keeping Europe under US tutelage, and expanding Cold War structures like NATO into the former Soviet Union itself — a model sustained by the military-industrial complex, think tanks, and academia.
- Neoconservatism and the Israel model: Born in the late 1970s after Vietnam, neoconservatives saw Israel — attacking adversaries unapologetically, downplaying negotiation — as what America should be, joining the US and Israel “at the hip.” Humanitarian justifications, first deployed in Bosnia and Kosovo, became the pretext for interventions that killed upwards of 500,000 Iraqis and left Libya with open slave markets.
- Zero accountability for failed wars: Unlike Vietnam architects Rusk and McNamara, no one pays for failures now — Victoria Nuland went from Cheney adviser through the 2014 Ukraine coup to continued promotion. Gibbs names only one sincere apology: Congressman Walter Jones of “freedom fries” fame, who spent his remaining life writing letters to families of soldiers killed in the war on terror.
- Why Russia wins in Ukraine: Russia commits just 6.3% of GDP to its military after four years (versus 40%+ US spending in WWII), leaving huge capacity in reserve; Putin’s Levada approval is 74% (down from 87-88%); Ukraine is out of air defense missiles with none left to give; and the near-signed Istanbul deal — neutrality, no NATO bases, Donbas autonomy — was torpedoed by Western states who thought they could break Russia into micro-states.
- The end of American hegemony: Defeats in Ukraine and Iran, the August 7th Saudi-Pakistan-Turkey defense pact, China’s move out of the dollar after watching sanctions on Russia, and Trump’s overt looting — “to the victor belong the spoils” on Venezuelan oil, with Venezuela’s export proceeds handled by the US Treasury “like a parent giving an allowance to children” — all signal an unrecoverable decline, with the main danger being a desperate Europe launching direct war with Russia.
Connor O'Keeffe: The Flock Camera Backlash Is a Very Good Sign...(August 19, 2026)
Guns & Butter...
Summary
The speaker says the great villain of 2026 is turning out to be the Flock automated license plate reader, a network of roughly 120,000 cameras across 49 states whose searchable, timestamped national database of every passing vehicle has become functionally indistinguishable from putting government GPS trackers in every American’s car. A genuine cross-partisan grassroots revolt — from pressuring local lawmakers to masked citizens cutting cameras down with electric saws — has pushed more than 50 jurisdictions to end their Flock contracts and forced the company into concessions, including cutting default data retention from 30 days to 7 and removing federal agencies from its nationwide search. The speaker argues the deeper story is that the public’s presumption of good faith in elites has completely evaporated — the “it’s for your safety” and “nothing to hide” tropes are being openly ridiculed — and calls this healthy skepticism a lesson that should not be unlearned.
Top 5 Key Topics
- How Flock’s legal theory works: The system exploits the idea that public observations aren’t privacy violations — like a cop reporting a car he saw drive by — but at network scale, recording license plate, make, model, and identifying details of every vehicle into a searchable national database recreates mass GPS tracking that would be flatly unconstitutional if done directly.
- Documented abuse is already here: Police and officials have used the Flock database to track romantic partners, ex-partners, and people dating their exes — warrantless surveillance for personal interest — and faulty camera matches have led to drivers being pursued and held at gunpoint as misidentified criminal suspects.
- The backlash is winning concessions: More than 50 jurisdictions have ended Flock relationships; after failing to brand camera-tracking activists as terrorists, Flock announced retention cuts from 30 to 7 days, mandatory case codes for searches, abuse-detection requirements, flagged emergency exceptions, and removal of all federal agencies from its national search database.
- The fear is future use, not just current misuse: Opposition spans the political spectrum, driven by scenarios from enforcing stay-at-home orders in a future pandemic to rounding up people for their political opinions — captured in the principle “don’t let the government grab power you wouldn’t trust your political enemies to wield.”
- Collapse of institutional trust as the real story: The speaker ties the revolt to a lineage of power grabs sold as public interest — the Patriot Act, the Iraq invasion, banker bailouts, Obamacare, COVID lockdowns — and says the surveillance-justifying propaganda is failing because Americans no longer believe the people in charge act in good faith, which he calls a good thing and a rising midterm issue.