INTRIGUE’S LATEST
The global affairs briefing you’ll actually look forward to reading.
Who won the US-Iran war?
Just 90 minutes before President Trump’s 8pm Tuesday deadline expired, news broke of an immediate two-week ceasefire partly based on Iran’s 10-point plan, which Trump argues is a “workable basis on which to negotiate” via talks that’ll now continue in Pakistan. There’s plenty of mutual yelling around the details, but the only four explicitly-and-mutually confirmed […]
Is private credit about to blow?
“When you see one cockroach, there’s probably more.” Remember who said that? Long-time Intriguers will recall it was JP Morgan’s billionaire boss, Jamie Dimon, referring to some of the jitters around private credit late last year. And… maybe it’s just the cat, but we’re hearing some scratching and scurrying sounds under the couch again. What’s […]
Anything but French, s’il te plaît
Many Intriguers will have experienced stumbling through a sentence, botching the word order, conjugating a weird ending, picking the wrong declension, then bringing it all home by accidentally switching to the informal register. And that’s just in English! In many parts, simply giving the local lingo a try earns instant brownie points, and there’s now […]
Latest Articles
Why the US is going back to the Moon
If everything goes to plan (pretty big ‘if’ these days), NASA’s Artemis II mission will take off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre aboard a 98m (322ft) rocket during a two-hour window later today (Wednesday), from 18:24 ET. Destination? The Moon. It’s a fly-by rather than landing, but still significant for a couple of reasons: But […]
Is Cuba next?
When you’ve got a human headline in the White House, it’s hard to know where to look: take Friday, when the entire press corps almost stroked out over President Trump’s claims that the Saudi crown prince is kissing his cheeks (not the facial ones), while we quietly double-clicked on this bit: “Cuba’s next, by the […]
One Strait, a thousand disruptions
As the Houthis now join the fray, and crude pushes back above $110, we’ll see more headlines capturing the ripples across every part of our day, starting with that… Some workers might now smash the snooze button, with Pakistan and the Philippines moving to a four-day week for bureaucrats — Sri Lanka has gone a […]
Big Tech is in Big Trouble
Think you had a rough week? Imagine being a top lawyer at Meta or Google, who got their meditation session in the team offsite mindfulness pod interrupted by news that US juries just handed down two landmark rulings with global implications. First, a New Mexico jury just ordered Meta (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp) to pay $375M […]
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Geopolitics
Why the US is going back to the Moon
If everything goes to plan (pretty big ‘if’ these days), NASA’s Artemis II mission will take off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Centre aboard a 98m (322ft) rocket during a two-hour window later today (Wednesday), from 18:24 ET. Destination? The Moon. It’s a fly-by rather than landing, but still significant for a couple of reasons: But […]
More Articles
Spy chiefs take the hot seat
DC’s intelligence chiefs have stepped out of the shadows and into the congressional spotlight for their annual grilling this week. Sure, it’s all tied to the unclassified Annual Threat Assessment, and spooks love to defer spicy answers to the off-camera closed-door briefings, but it’s still pretty revealing. So here are the week’s top five spymaster […]
Why world leaders think the world is “under destruction”
Gone are the days when big thinktank events like the Munich Security Conference (MSC) were the exclusive preserve of tweed-clad IR nerds arguing about great power theory. This is 2026, darn it: the MSC’s Wolfgang Ischinger kicked things off Friday rocking Macron’s trademark aviators, before unleashing a weekend of panels and speeches he branded “Under […]
Three surprising election results
We got three electoral surprises Sunday, so let’s explore why each matters, starting in… Newish conservative PM Sanae Takaichi was always going to win, but she’s now got i) a standalone supermajority, after ii) Japan’s biggest single-party victory in post-war history. So… why does this matter? So… what next? Takaichi not only wants to continue […]
The geopolitics of the Winter Olympics
Italy’s Winter Olympics opening ceremony kicks off in just a few hours, meaning we’ll soon burn our evenings watching snowboarders called ‘Tanner’ and ‘Yui’ pull sick Frontside Double Cork 1080 Lien-to-Melon Reverts. But it also means that, as with any event bringing the world together, geopolitics is now in the air (doing a sick Frontside […]
ECONOMICS
Why the IMF might be done and dusted… or not
It was a week ago that International Monetary Fund (IMF) head Kristalina Georgieva kicked off the Fund’s DC ‘spring meetings’ with an ominous note — “trade policy uncertainty is off the charts”. You could feel it in the DC air, with Intrigue sources confirming delegations from every corner of the globe were scrambling for meetings with […]
More Articles
The central bank war for independence
US stocks and the US dollar plunged again on Monday after the president colourfully called on Jerome Powell, the Fed Chair, to cut rates. Anyway, while this monetary soap opera plays out on the world stage, it’s reignited a debate that everyone thought was resolved decades ago: the notion that central banks must be independent from politics. Why? The […]
A moron premium in the US?
We’ve been writing about bonds before they were the flavour of the week. And events now dictate that we revisit bonds again. Who are we to argue with events, dear Intriguer? Typically if US stocks tank, spooked investors will shift their cash over into bonds — the ultimate safe-haven. Why? When you buy bonds (loan the US government money), […]
Did Trump just blink?
Just after our last edition hit your inbox, Donald Trump decided to: Of course, markets breathed a semi-sigh of relief. But… did Trump blink? Here are the three main arguments you need to know: Treasury Secretary Bessent argues this was all part of Trump’s successful strategy, with 75 countries now reportedly lining up to negotiate […]
Trump and Xi play chicken
We’ve already explored Trump’s tariffs, but it’s worth a quick recap of his rationale before we tour today’s wild ripple effects: And while he’s now slapped tariffs on everyone (otherwise he says China just reroutes via third countries), the big kahuna tariffs are now really on China. Building on earlier tariff rounds during Trump 1.0 and Biden… The […]
Technology
Big Tech is in Big Trouble
Think you had a rough week? Imagine being a top lawyer at Meta or Google, who got their meditation session in the team offsite mindfulness pod interrupted by news that US juries just handed down two landmark rulings with global implications. First, a New Mexico jury just ordered Meta (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp) to pay $375M […]
More Articles
Spy chiefs take the hot seat
DC’s intelligence chiefs have stepped out of the shadows and into the congressional spotlight for their annual grilling this week. Sure, it’s all tied to the unclassified Annual Threat Assessment, and spooks love to defer spicy answers to the off-camera closed-door briefings, but it’s still pretty revealing. So here are the week’s top five spymaster […]
The fight tearing AI and defense apart
News recently broke that the Pentagon had used Anthropic’s Claude AI tool to capture Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. Cue the memes about Secretary Hegseth prompting AI with something like “hey Claude, go seize Maduro without US casualties, make no mistakes”. But this was all apparently news to Anthropic itself, which reportedly sought clarification. The AI firm […]
The massive supply chain shortage you didn’t know about
You’d think 2026 already had enough on, but no — someone has gone out and helpfully coined an entirely new genre of Armageddon: not nuclear, not biblical, but supply chain: So what’s driving this impending RAMageddon? Intrigue’s hard-core nerds will forgive us when we casually split chips into three families: First there are the compute […]
Should all countries launch their own LLMs?
While you might know beautiful Chile for its copper, its wines, its pisco-fight with Peru, or its ridiculously long and skinny profile like it’s spooning Argentina (nena, wake up), there’s now a new reason: Chile just launched Latin America’s own large language model. Creatively named LatAm-GPT, the idea is to “develop capabilities in the region […]