In September, the International Criminal Court will conduct a confirmation of charges hearing against warlord Joseph Kony. Leader of the once notorious rebel group Lord’s Resistance Army and the subject of ICC warrants dating back two decades, Kony is still at large, still evading arrest.

Thirteen years ago, a group of American do-gooders tried to do something about this. 

The NGO Invisible Children published a 30-minute YouTube video with high hopes. With their film ‘Kony 2012’, they sought to stop the Lord’s Resistance Army, which had kidnapped, killed and brought misery to families across several Central African nations since the late 1980s. The video opens with our blue orb home spinning in outer space as the director reminds us of our place in time. “Right now, there are more people on Facebook than there were on the planet 200 years ago,” he says. “Humanity's greatest desire is to belong and connect, and now, we see each other. We hear each other. We share what we love. And this connection is changing the way the world works.” In other words,  the technology of connection will solve this problem.

Despite the uber virality of the film,100 million plus views nearly overnight, Kony remains a free man, though much more infamous, and his victims didn’t get all the help they needed. The campaign seemed to embody slacktivism at its most poisonous: the high hope that you can change the world from your sofa.

“Hope,” Gloria Steinem once wrote, “is a very unruly emotion.” Steinem was writing about US politics in the Nixon era but the observation holds. Hope is at the core of how many of us think about the future. Do we have hope? That’s good. It’s bad if we have the opposite – despair, or even cynicism. 

Former CNN international correspondent, Arwa Damon knows this unruly quality of hope firsthand. For years she worked as a journalist in conflict zones. Now she helps kids injured by war through her charity called INARA. She discussed this work last month at ZEG Fest, Coda’s annual storytelling festival in Tbilisi. In war, Damon has seen how combatants toy with hope, holding out the possibility of more aid, less fighting only to undermine these visions of a better tomorrow. This way, she says they snuff out resistance. This way they win. 

In seeing this, and in surviving her own close calls, Damon told the Zeg attendees, she realized she didn’t need hope to motivate her. “Fuck hope,” she said to surprised laughter. 

So what motivates her to keep going? “Moral obligation,” she said. After everything she has seen, she simply cannot live with herself if she doesn’t help.  She doesn’t need to hope for an end to wars to help those injured by them now. In fact, such a hope might make her job harder because she’d have to deal with the despair when this hope gets dashed, as it will again and again. She can’t stop wars, but she can, and does, help the kids on the front lines. 

Most of us haven’t crawled through sewers to reach besieged Syrian cities or sat with children in Iraq recovering from vicious attacks. And most of us don’t spend our days marshalling aid convoys into war zones. But we see those scenes on our phones, in near real time. And many of us feel unsure what to do with that knowledge because most of us would like to do something about these horrors. How do we deal with this complex emotional reality? Especially since, even if we are not in a physical war zone, the information environment is packed with people fighting to control the narratives. In this moment of information overload and gargantuan problems, could clinging onto hope be doing us more harm than good? 

Emotion researchers like Dr. Marc Brackett will tell you that instead of thinking of emotions as good or bad, we can think of them as signals about ourselves and the world around us. And we could also think about them as behaviors in the real world. Dr. Brackett, who founded and runs the Center for Emotional Intelligence at Yale, said hope involves problem solving and planning. Think about exercising, which you might do because you hope to improve your body. In those cases hope could prove a useful motivator. “The people who only have hope but not a plan only really have despair,” Dr. Brackett explained “because hope doesn't result in an outcome.”  

Developing a workout plan seems doable. Developing a plan to capture a warlord or stop kids from suffering in wars is a good deal more complex. The 2010s internet gave us slacktivism and Kony 2012, which seems quaint compared to the 2020s internet with its doom scrolling, wars in Ukraine and Gaza and much more misery broadcast in real time. What should we do with this information? With this knowledge? 

Small wonder people tune out, or in our journalism jargon, practice news avoidance. But opting out of news doesn’t even provide a respite. Unless you’ve meticulously pruned your social media ecosystem, the wails of children, the worries about climate change, the looming threats of economic disruption or killer machines, those all can quickly crowd out whatever dopamine you got from that video of puppy taking its first wobbly steps. But paradoxically, the pursuit of feeling good, might actually be part of the problem of hope. 

I took these questions about hope to Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, an acclaimed psychologist and neuroscientist. She too talked less about our brains and more about our behaviors. The author of, among other things, How Emotions are Made, Dr. Barrett noted that we might experience hope in the moment as pleasant or energizing and it helps with creating an emotional regulation narrative. Meaning: we can endure difficulty in the present because we believe tomorrow we will feel better, it will get better. However, Barrett said hope alone as a motivator “might not be as resistant to the slings and arrows of life.” If you assume things will get better, and then they don’t, how do you keep going? 

“I think people misunderstand what's happening under the hood when you're feeling miserable,” she added. “Lots of times feel unpleasant not because they're wrong but because they're hard.”

I told Dr. Barrett about Damon’s belief that she keeps going because of moral obligation and she again looked at the emotional through the behavioral. “There is one way to think about moral responsibility as something different than hope,” she said, “but if hope is a discipline and you're doing something to make the parts of the world different you could call it the discipline of hope.” This could be a more durable motivation, she suggested, than one merely chasing a pleasant sensation that tomorrow will be better.  “My point is that, if your motivation is to feel good, whatever it is you are doing, your motivation will wane.”

After ‘Kony 2012’ shot to astonishing success, in terms of views, the creators raised tens of millions of dollars but achieved little on the ground – an early lesson in the limits of clicktivism. Once upon a time American do-gooders hoped they’d help Ugandan children simply by making a warlord infamous, now the viralness of  Kony 2012 feels like a window into a cringey past, a graveyard of hopes dashed. But maybe we just grew up. Maybe our present time and this information environment full of noise and warring parties asks more of us. Maybe hope has a place but among a whole emotional palate of motivations instead of a central pillar keeping us moving forward. Because let’s be honest: we may never get there.  Hope, as the experts told me, doesn’t work without a plan. And, raising hopes, especially grand ones like changing global events from your smartphone, only to have them dashed can actually prompt people to disengage, to despair maybe, or even to embrace cynicism so they don’t have to go through the difficult discipline of hope and potential disappointment.  

One day, during the start of the pandemic, when my home doubled as my office, I got a piece of professional advice I’ve held tight. A therapist who works with ER doctors shared with a group of us journalists that when we work on tasks that seem never ending, burnout is more likely. To prevent it, he advised that we right-size the problem. Put down the work from time to time, celebrate our achievements (especially in tough times), develop rituals and build out perspective to nourish us as we keep doing the work.

The pandemic ended but we bear the scars and warily look out at a horizon full of looming troubles, most of them way outside the control of any one of us. Both Dr. Marc Brackett and Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett reminded me: emotions are complex and humans aren’t motivated by just one thing. But no matter what mountain we want to climb we would all do well to adopt this conception of hope as a discipline rather than just a feeling. Because in this environment, there’s always someone on the other side betting we’ll give up in despair.

A version of this story was published in last week’s Sunday Read newsletter. Sign up here.

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I was invited to deliver a keynote speech at the ‘AI for Good Summit’ this year, and I arrived at the venue with an open mind and hope for change. With a title “AI for social good: the new face of technosolutionism” and an abstract that clearly outlined the need to question what “good” is and the importance of confronting power, it wouldn’t be difficult to guess what my keynote planned to address. I had hoped my invitation to the summit was the beginning of engaging in critical self-reflection for the community. 

But this is what happened. Two hours before I was to deliver my keynote, the organisers approached me without prior warning and informed me that they had flagged my talk and it needed substantial altering or that I would have to withdraw myself as speaker. I had submitted the abstract for my talk to the summit over a month before, clearly indicating the kind of topics I planned to cover. I also submitted the slides for my talk a week prior to the event. 

Thinking that it would be better to deliver some of my message than none, I went through the charade or reviewing my slide deck with them, being told to remove any reference to “Gaza” or “Palestine” or “Israel” and editing the word “genocide” to “war crimes” until only a single slide that called for “No AI for War Crimes” remained. That is where I drew the line. I was then told that  even displaying that slide was not acceptable and I had to withdraw, a decision they reversed about 10 minutes later, shortly before I took to the stage.

Looking at this year’s keynote and centre stage speakers, an overwhelming number of them came from industry, including Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon. Out of the 82 centre stage speakers, 37 came from industry, compared to five from academia and only three from civil society organisations. This shows that what “good” means in the "AI for Good" summit is overwhelmingly shaped, defined, and actively curated by the tech industry, which holds a vested interest in societal uptake of AI regardless of any risk or harm.

“AI for Good”, but good for whom and for what? Good PR for big tech corporations? Good for laundering accountability? Good for the atrocities the AI industry is aiding and abetting? Good for boosting the very technologies that are widening inequity, destroying the environment, and concentrating power and resources in the hands of few? Good for AI acceleration completely void of any critical thinking about its societal implications? Good for jumping on the next AI trend regardless of its merit, usefulness, or functionality? Good for displaying and promoting commercial products and parading robots?

Any ‘AI for Good’ initiative that serves as a stage that platforms big tech, while censoring anyone that dares to point out the industry’s complacency in enabling and powering genocide and other atrocity crimes is also complicit. For a United Nations Summit whose brand is founded upon doing good, to pressure a Black woman academic to curb her critique of powerful corporations should make it clear that the summit is only good for the industry. And that it is business, not people, that counts.

This is a condensed, edited version of a blog Abeba Birhane published earlier this month. The conference organisers, the International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency, said “all speakers are welcome to share their personal viewpoints about the role of technology in society” but it did not deny demanding cuts to Birhane’s talk. Birhane told Coda that “no one from the ITU or the Summit has reached out” and “no apologies have been issued so far.”

A version of this story was published in the Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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No one becomes an anti-corruption activist to make money, least of all in Ukraine. When I first met the co-founders of the Anti-Corruption Action Center – Vitaliy Shabunin and Daria Kaleniuk – back in 2014, they were already veterans of state persecution, and have become only more experienced in the decade since.

AntAC has pioneered and pushed through many of the reforms that have helped Ukraine to become more transparent and less corrupt, leading to the creation of new courts, new laws, new law enforcement agencies, and much more. And this is why it is so alarming that Shabunin has been arrested and his home searched, on the transparently absurd premise that he was dodging military service, while he was following an order from his superior officers to be seconded to the National Agency for Corruption Prevention.

“We strongly believe that, in addition to illegal persecution, these searches are an attempt by the authorities to obtain information about the Anti-Corruption Action Centre’s activities,” said the AntAC. “The goal is simple – to undermine our activities aimed at exposing government corruption.”

It is easy to condemn corruption by your opponents, but sadly easy to excuse it in your friends, particularly in wartime. AntAC’s consistent refusal to go easy on anyone – for example, over the government’s recent refusal to follow the law over the leadership of the Economic Security Bureau of Ukraine – has won it many enemies, but even its critics recognise how central it has been to Ukraine’s democratic development.

“The actions of the pre-trial investigation bodies can be considered either as complete incompetence of officials and unsuitability for their positions, or as a deliberate attack aimed at putting pressure on Vitaliy Shabunin, who continued to criticise the work of state bodies while serving in the military,” said 90 Ukrainian NGOs in a joint statement. 

Western foreign officials need to raise Shabunin’s case with their Ukrainian counterparts and continue raising it until this case is dropped. If Ukraine wants to keep receiving support as a democracy fighting a dictatorship, it needs to keep acting like a democracy, and that means its leaders being willing to hear things they don’t want to hear.

THE U.S., A CRYPTO-POWERED TAX HAVEN?

So the European Union’s Anti-Money Laundering Authority is up and running, and one of its first acts has been to warn about the risk posted by cryptocurrencies in its 2025 work programme. Bruna Szego, AMLA’s chair, added that national regulators need to regulate crypto companies as stringently as they do anything else, and that big crypto companies were likely to be among the 40 institutions that AMLA will directly supervise, along with the continent’s largest banks.

The view from the UK is similar. “The risk of money laundering through cryptoassets has increased significantly since 2020 with cryptoassets increasingly appearing in money laundering intelligence over this period. Cryptoassets are increasingly used for laundering all forms of proceeds of crime,” states the country’s newly-published money laundering risk assessment. “The international nature of the blockchain and cryptoasset transactions present unique difficulties in conducting effective enforcement against criminal actors.”

For anyone with a passing acquaintance with money laundering, all of this is completely non-contentious. However, it is hard to square this caution with what’s happening in the United States. Trump’s own crypto company is expanding its business, U.S. regulators are now cool with retirement accounts holding crypto, and yet another big crypto firm is looking to sell shares on the stock exchange. The technology’s boosters are feeling confident, and presenting blockchain as central to national security.

I see cryptocurrencies as near perfect tools for criminals and tycoons to escape the rules democracies put in place to prevent them from owning everything and bribing everyone. But I can also appreciate the artistry of the efforts of the Digital Chamber to boost its members’ business interests by arguing that they’re for the good of the United States and therefore for the good of humanity (for are those two causes not one and the same?).

“It is TDC’s position that blockchain technology supports global economic freedom by empowering those who resist tyranny around the world,” said the Chamber, one of the biggest crypto lobbyists in Washington, DC.

I don’t know what’s worse: that people say this stuff without believing it, or that they actually believe it. Being able to move money in secret may theoretically empower everyone, but in reality it disproportionately empowers already rich people. The U.S. is turning itself into a blockchain-powered tax haven at any incredible rate. Cartels, kleptocrats, oligarchs, spies, plutocrats, these are the real long-term beneficiaries from cryptocurrencies, and if we don’t realise that soon then the rest of us will pay a heavy price for Washington’s capitulation to their lobbyists.

THE U.K., TWO STEPS FORWARD, ONE STEP BACK

Britain, meanwhile, continues its inch-by-inch progress towards a less dirty financial system. It has dissolved 11,500 companies that did not abide by newer, more stringent rules around transparency, closed three company formation agents, and barred several people from working in corporate formation again. For those of us used to how appallingly lax things used to be, this is all rather good to see, if hard to believe (they do, after all, have previous when it comes to boasting about things they shouldn’t be proud of).

The government is planning a summit on countering illicit finance which, coupled with a surprisingly good-looking series of proposals for getting dark money out of politics, feels weirdly hopeful for a country with a tendency to err on the side of letting dirty cash go wherever it likes. I anticipate that counterbalancing bad news will be along next week.

Still, while I’m being optimistic, I’ll give a shout out to The Latimer Network, which brings together experts and practitioners in countering illicit finance from the U.K. and beyond, with the aim of improving how that is done. One of its particular focuses is on trying to think of a better way of identifying money laundering than the current workhorse: the Suspicious Activity Report (SAR). 

Tens of millions of SARs are filed globally each year, supposedly to alert the authorities to transactions that look dodgy. That is far too many to read, and most of them are valueless anyway, and it would be great to come up with a better way of monitoring transactions, so that criminals are excluded from the financial system. And don’t tell me it’s blockchain.

However, if you’d like an insight into some of the problems facing the British government, here’s a piece I wrote on the absolute disaster that is the national water system. You wouldn’t have thought you could mess up the water supply in a country where it rains so much, and yet, here we are.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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The numbers are staggering: Meta is offering AI researchers total compensation packages of up to $300 million over four years, with individual deals like former Apple executive Ruoming Pang's $200 million package making headlines across Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, OpenAI just raised $40 billion, with the company valued at $300, reportedly the largest private tech funding round in history. 

But beneath these eye-watering dollar figures lies a profound transformation: Silicon Valley’s elite have evolved from eager innovators into architects of a new world order, reshaping society with their unprecedented power. This shift is not just about money or technology, it marks a fundamental change in how power is conceived and exercised. 

We often talk about technology as if it exists in a silo, separate from politics or culture. But those boundaries are rapidly dissolving. Technology is no longer just a sector or a set of tools; it is reshaping everything, weaving itself into the very fabric of society and power. The tech elite are no longer content with tech innovation alone, they are crafting a new social and political reality, wielding influence that extends far beyond the digital realm.

To break out of these siloed debates, at the end of June we convened a virtual conversation with four remarkable minds: Christopher Wylie (the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower and host of our Captured podcast), pioneering technologist Judy Estrin, filmmaker and digital rights advocate Justine Bateman, and philosopher Shannon Vallor. Our goal: to explore how Silicon Valley’s culture of innovation has morphed into a belief system, one that’s migrated from the tech fringe to the center of our collective imagination, reimagining what it means to be human.

The conversation began with a story from Chris Wylie that perfectly captured the mood of our times. While recording the Captured podcast, he found himself stranded in flooded Dubai, missing a journalism conference in Italy. Instead, he ended up at a party thrown by tech billionaires, a gathering that, as he described in a voice note he sent us from the bathroom, felt like a dispatch from the new center of power:

“People here are talking about longevity, how to live forever. But also prepping—how to prepare for when society gets completely undermined.”

At that party, tech billionaires weren’t debating how to fix democracy or save society. They were plotting how to survive its unraveling. That fleeting moment captured the new reality: while some still debate how to repair the systems we have, others are already plotting their escape, imagining futures where technology is not just a tool, but a lifeboat for the privileged few. It was a reminder that the stakes are no longer abstract or distant: they are unfolding, right now, in rooms most of us will never enter.

Our discussion didn’t linger on the spectacle of that Dubai party for long. Instead, it became a springboard to interrogate the broader shift underway: how Silicon Valley’s narratives, once quirky, fringe, utopian, have become the new center of gravity for global power. What was once the domain of science fiction is now the quiet logic guiding boardrooms, investment strategies, and even military recruitment.

As Wylie  put it, “When you start to think about Silicon Valley not simply as a technology industry or a political institution, but one that also emits spiritual ideologies and prophecies about the nature and purpose of humanity, a lot of the weirdness starts to make a lot more sense.”

Judy Estrin, widely known in tech circles as the "mother of the cloud" for her pioneering role in building the foundational infrastructure of the internet, has witnessed this evolution firsthand. Estrin played a crucial part in developing the TCP/IP protocols that underpin digital communication, and later served as CTO of Cisco during the internet’s explosive growth. She’s seen the shift from Steve Jobs’ vision of technology as "a bicycle for the mind" to Marc Andreessen’s declaration that "software is eating the world." 

Now, Estrin sounds the alarm: the tech landscape has moved from collaborative innovation to a relentless pursuit of control and dominance. Today’s tech leaders are no longer just innovators, they are crafting a new social architecture that redefines how we live, think, and connect.

What makes this transformation of power particularly insidious is the sense of inevitability that surrounds it. The tech industry has succeeded in creating a narrative where its vision of the future appears unstoppable, leaving the rest of us as passive observers rather than active participants in the shaping of our technological destiny.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and PayPal co-founder, embodies this mindset. In a recent interview, Thiel was asked point-blank whether he wanted the human race to endure. He hesitated before answering, “Uh, yes,” then added: “I also would like us to radically solve these problems…” Thiel’s ambivalence towards other human beings and his appetite for radical transformation capture the mood of a class of tech leaders who see the present as something to be escaped, not improved—a mindset that feeds the sense of inevitability and detachment Estrin warns about.

Estrin argues that this is a new form of authoritarianism, where power is reinforced not through force but through what she calls "silence and compliance." The speed and scale of today's AI integration, she says, requires us " to be standing up and paying more attention." 

Shannon Vallor, philosopher and ethicist, widened the lens. She cautioned that the quasi-religious narratives emerging from Silicon Valley—casting AI as either savior or demon—are not simply elite fantasies. Rather, the real risk lies in elevating a technology that, at its core, is designed to mimic us. Large language models, she explained, are “merely broken reflections of ourselves… arranged to create the illusion of presence, of consciousness, of being understood.”

The true danger, Vallor argued, is that these illusions are seeping into the minds of the vulnerable, not just the powerful. She described receiving daily messages from people convinced they are in relationships with sentient AI gods—proof that the mythology surrounding these technologies is already warping reality for those least equipped to resist it.

She underscored that the harms of AI are not distributed equally: “The benefits of technological innovation have gone to the people who are already powerful and well-resourced, while the risks have been pushed onto those that are already suffering from forms of political disempowerment and economic inequality.” 

Vallor’s call was clear: to reclaim agency, we must demystify technology, recognize who is making the choices, and insist that the future of AI is not something that happens to us, but something that we shape together.

As the discussion unfolded, the panelists agreed: the real threat isn’t just technological overreach, but the surrender of human agency. The challenge is not only to question where technology is taking us, but to insist on our right to shape its direction, before the future is decided without us.

Justine Bateman, best known for her iconic roles in Hollywood and her outspoken activism for artists’ rights, entered the conversation with the perspective of someone who has navigated both the entertainment and technology industries. Bateman, who holds a computer science degree from UCLA, has become a prominent critic of how AI and tech culture threaten human creativity and agency.

During the discussion, Bateman and Estrin found themselves at odds over how best to respond to the growing influence of AI. Bateman argued that the real threat isn’t AI itself becoming all-powerful, but rather the way society risks passively accepting and even revering technology, allowing it to become a “sacred cow” beyond criticism. She called for open ridicule of exaggerated tech promises, insisting, “No matter what they do about trying to live forever, or try to make their own god stuff, it doesn’t matter. You’re not going to make a god that replaces God. You are not going to live forever. It’s not going to happen.” Bateman also urged people to use their own minds and not “be lazy” by simply accepting the narratives being sold by tech elites.

Estrin pushed back, arguing that telling people to use their minds and not be lazy risks alienating those who might otherwise be open to conversation. Instead, she advocated for nuance, urging that the debate focus on human agency, choice, and the real risks and trade-offs of new technologies, rather than falling into extremes or prescribing a single “right” way to respond.

“If we have a hope of getting people to really listen… we need to figure out how to talk about this in terms of human agency, choice, risks, and trade-offs,” she said. “Because when we go into the , you’re either for it or against it, people tune out, and we’re gonna lose that battle.”

At this point, Christopher Wylie offered a strikingly different perspective, responding directly to Bateman’s insistence that tech was “not going to make a god that replaces God.”

“I’m actually a practicing Buddhist, so I don’t necessarily come to religion from a Judeo-Christian perspective,” he said, recounting a conversation with a Buddhist monk about whether uploading a mind to a machine could ever count as reincarnation. Wylie pointed out that humanity has always invested meaning in things that cannot speak back: rocks, stars, and now, perhaps, algorithms. “There are actually valid and deeper, spiritual and religious conversations that we can have about what consciousness actually is if we do end up tapping into it truly,” he said.

Rather than drawing hard lines between human and machine, sacred and profane, Wylie invited the group to consider the complexity, uncertainty, and humility required as we confront the unknown. He then pivoted to a crucial obstacle in confronting the AI takeover:

“We lack a common vocabulary to even describe what the problems are,” Wylie argued, likening the current moment to the early days of climate change activism, when terms like “greenhouse gases” and “global warming” had to be invented before a movement could take shape. “Without the words to name the crisis, you can’t have a movement around those problems.”

The danger, he suggested, isn’t just technological, it’s linguistic and cultural. If we can’t articulate what’s being lost, we risk losing it by default.

Finally, Wylie reframed privacy as something far more profound than hiding: “Privacy is your ability to decide how to shape yourself in different situations on your own terms, which is, like, really, really core to your ability to be an individual in society.”

When we give up that power, we don’t just become more visible to corporations or governments, we surrender the very possibility of self-determination. The conversation, he insisted, must move beyond technical fixes and toward a broader fight for human agency.

As we wrapped up, what lingered was not a sense of closure, but a recognition that the future remains radically open—shaped not by the inevitability of technology, but by the choices we make, questions we ask, and movements we are willing to build. Judy Estrin’s call echoed in the final moments: “We need a movement for what we’re for, which is human agency.”

This movement, however, should not be against technology itself. As Wylie argued in the closing minutes, “To criticize Silicon Valley, in my view, is to be pro-tech. Because what you're criticizing is exploitation, a power takeover of oligarchs that ultimately will inhibit what technology is there for, which is to help people.” 

The real challenge is not to declare victory or defeat, but to reclaim the language, the imagination, and the collective will to shape humanity's next chapter.

A version of this story was published in last week’s Sunday Read newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Who decides our tomorrow? Challenging Silicon Valley’s power appeared first on Coda Story.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who secretly likes a one-star review. It’s awful to get one yourself (and I have, several times), but I have to admit that there is a nasty kind of pleasure to be had from reading at length how someone else’s restaurant, film, album or book is awful. So, if you’re that kind of person too, I recommend you dive into “How Well Does the Money Laundering Control System Work?”, a spectacularly critical if scrupulously academic article by Mirko Nazzari and Peter Reuter.

At the risk of giving away the punchline: the short answer to the question in the title is “it doesn’t”. Although, there are also additional details about how the anti-money laundering (AML) system acts as a moat around big banks to protect them from competition, while raising the costs of banking for everyone, excluding vulnerable and marginalised people from the financial system altogether, and doing nothing to stop criminals from keeping their wealth. So perhaps the answer is more like “not only does it not work, but it actively makes the problem it’s purporting to solve significantly worse”.

Of many damning examples that Nazzari and Reuter pick out, perhaps the most striking is how the Financial Action Task Force “grey-listed” South Sudan in 2021 for its failure to meet the FATF’s standards, at a time when the country’s very existence was threatened by civil war and humanitarian crisis. The idea that anyone would choose to launder significant amounts of money through a state without any effective government or legal apparatus is absurd, yet the FATF went ahead and imposed limitations on its ability to access banking services anyway, thus further crippling an already fragile economy and worsening a humanitarian catastrophe.

“It is hard for anyone to defend the current system with enthusiasm. Its failure to reduce either the predicate crimes that generate large criminal revenues or the volume of money laundering is uncontested. Even though specific estimates of costs are lacking, no one doubts that those costs are in the hundreds of billions of dollars globally,” Reuter and Nazzari write. “Government claims of success often appear ritualistic and are seldom scrutinized in detail. Yet, for all that, there is hardly any discussion of fundamental reforms in any country.” 

I have been, as regular readers will know, writing a book on this precise topic and it is very pleasing that two distinguished researchers have come to exactly the same conclusions that I came to. I have also recently published an article about how the cryptocurrency tether is a dream tool for criminals looking to evade restrictions, and it is just one of many similar financial innovations that are rendering the AML system an ever-deader duck. 

TURNING A BLIND EYE

On one level this is bad, because anything that makes it easier and cheaper for criminals to keep their money is awful. But on another level, if it was already easy and cheap for criminals to keep their money, perhaps the existential threat to the tattered remnants of the AML system that is posed by crypto gives us an opportunity to design a new system that does better. It is after all a very important challenge.

“All elements of our security are supported by our ability to tackle illicit finance – the flows of funds from criminal activity that underpin threats to the U.K. including terrorist networks, serious and organised crime groups, and hostile state actors,” claims the government’s brand new national security strategy.

Part of the difficulty of trying to persuade politicians of the urgency of improving the AML system is the sheer volume of jargon involved. But you don’t need acronyms to explain why this matters: money buys power; the more money criminals, terrorists and spies have, the more powerful they will be; powerful criminals, terrorists and spies are bad; so do something about it; the end. Of course, taking on the rich and powerful requires political determination and a belief in democracy, which is a whole different challenge.

“Foreign agents are watching as America’s anti-corruption regime crumbles. They see an extraordinary window of opportunity, and they know they’ll have to act quickly to take full advantage,” writes Casey Michel in this hugely alarming article (there’s something about seeing everything put together in one place). “Foreign regimes are beginning to see just how far their money can go in Trump’s America.”

FRIENDS IN HIGH PLACES

Of course, having an effective AML system also relies on banks abiding by the rules that are imposed upon them, which is tricky because there’s money to be made if you welcome in customers that other institutions are excluding. And that brings us to Monzo, an online bank which gained a full British license in April 2017, and now has around 12 million customers and is valued at several billion pounds. It appeared to have some pretty high-prestige customers, considering some of them registered their addresses as “Buckingham Palace” and “10, Downing Street”, but it appears they were not being entirely truthful. Monzo was not providing bank services to the king or the prime minister, but was instead not doing basic checks on the veracity of its clients’ information. 

“Monzo’s failure to gather sufficient customer data meant that the Firm was unable effectively to assess whether transactions were consistent with expected activity or were suspicious. In addition, there were weaknesses in Monzo’s transaction monitoring processes,” noted the Financial Conduct Authority last week, as it fined the bank 21 million pounds. Monzo is a small bank, with a tiny fraction of the assets of an HSBC or a Barclays, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it has almost certainly laundered more money internationally than South Sudan. 

Yet, the chances of Britain being grey-listed are nil. Perhaps the biggest flaw in the world’s AML system is that it’s a cosy club of rich countries who are all very forgiving of each other’s slips and foibles, but very willing to condemn others. Somewhere that’s perhaps deserving of more condemnation is Liechtenstein, which has an unfortunately-named zombie trust crisis, caused by suddenly imposing sanctions on a financial system that had previously been very happy to provide services to wealthy Russians if not, as far as I know, to actual zombies.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Systemic Rot, the Launderers at ‘Buckingham Palace’ & Zombie Trusts appeared first on Coda Story.

I am a regular listener to Ezra Klein’s podcast, and I’m a fan. There should be more podcasts that treat serious issues seriously, but there’s something he said back in April when talking about the root cause of problems on the Left of politics that has concerned me since I heard it. “It’s not just the fault of money in politics, because there’s money on all sides of the issues. There’s something else going on,” he said.

That concerned me because it encapsulated a mistake that’s often made about why political funding is problematic. It’s often assumed that the only problem is that rich people can buy support for an issue they care about, so it’s therefore often missed – as Klein did – that a far bigger problem is that they define what is considered an issue in the first place.

You could look at the fact that billionaires supported both Republicans and Democrats in last year’s presidential election (although far more money went to Republicans), and conclude that – since both sides got money – it’s not a big deal. Or you could wonder which issues don’t get attention because no one with money is interested in them being discussed.

Five years ago, when I’d just started writing this newsletter, I made a big thing out of the fact that three people owned more than $100 billion. Centi-billionaires were new back then, but they’re old hat these days. Some 18 people have passed that threshold now, and more will be along to join them very soon. Oxfam predicts there will be five trillionaires by the end of the decade, and that was before Donald Trump’s tax cuts were passed by Congress.

Last year, here in the U.K., it looked like Keir Starmer actually understood the importance of protecting politics from the corrupting effect of money, but he’s failed to actually follow through. “Time and again, Labour’s warm words about cleaning up politics have not translated into action. Rather than rebuilding faith in democracy, Starmer’s listlessness risks eroding it even further,” wrote the journalist Peter Geoghegan last week.

Meanwhile, over in France, billionaire wealth has already nosed its way into politics and is helping to raise the profile of the Far Right. 

“Media groups, at the hands of a few powerful men,” wrote one observer late last year, “are actively shaping the political discourse in a way that normalises far-right narratives and talking points. By giving disproportionate airtime to far-right figures and framing their extremist positions as legitimate responses to France’s social and economic challenges, these media outlets are gradually shifting public opinion.”

It's a sign of this shift in opinion that the asset manager Aberdeen (fresh from cancelling a rebrand to ‘abrdn’, which cost an estimated £500,000) has decided to sack the independent board of the Financial Fairness Trust, which has supported organisations researching the effects of inequality. A few years ago, that kind of philanthropy was a cheap way to look like the kind face of capitalism. These days, I’m not sure anyone cares.

Back when I was a cub reporter, an old-timer gave me some advice: “don’t write about process, nobody cares about process, write about results”. It’s good advice for someone trying to write articles, but it’s bad advice more broadly, because process is important. The process of drafting regulation is when laws get defined; the process of crafting the rules that will guide the implementation of laws is when questions get resolved. The power of billionaires is that they can afford to employ people to monitor that process, and to make suggestions. If the rest of us don’t care, the world will be stolen from us without any of us noticing.

And once it’s stolen, it’ll stay stolen. Thanks to impenetrable financial structures like a trust registered in South Dakota, the super-rich can keep their wealth safe in perpetuity. When I first wrote about South Dakotan trusts, back in 2019, there was around $350 billion squirreled away in the Mount Rushmore State. That total has now hit $815 billion, having risen by $100 billion in the last year alone.

“It’s going to go on for—the estimates vary — 10 to 15 more years. But, there’s a huge transfer underway from the boomer generation to the next generation," said Bret Afdahl, the director of the state’s Banking Division.

Sometimes it can be hard to stay optimistic.

THE IMAGINARY BANKER

Here’s a weird story: “meet Barbarat Giuseppe, the world’s most prolific banker. He’s run most of the world’s largest banks … Mr Giuseppe’s spectacular career is spoilt only by the small detail that it’s all fraudulent”.

Guiseppe may not actually exist, but he’s been able to create a series of U.K.-registered companies with the same name as major financial institutions: UBS, Goldman Sachs, and so on. When he’s been caught, he’s just created new familiar-sounding companies, perhaps as part of a money laundering scheme, though it’s not immediately clear how it would help.

“We need to see prosecutions. Skip the hard stuff of finding victims of fraud. Do an “Al Capone” and prosecute the easy offences instead,” writes Dan Neidle’s Tax Policy Associates. Amen to that.

It’s a story that shows that, despite attempted reforms, there are still major problems with many aspects of the U.K.’s company formation system. “The foundations for a successful regime are now in place, however it will take a concerted effort from across the economic crime architecture to deliver results,” wrote Transparency International’s Ben Cowdock.

RUSSIA’S BLOCKCHAIN BET

Last week, I wrote about how Russia was moving money via crypto and Kyrgyzstan to evade Western restrictions on its financial sector, and here’s an interesting analysis of the phenomenon. “Russia is building a parallel financial system using blockchain as its backbone,” writes analysts from Astraea. “This network presents a growing challenge for regulators and underscores the urgency of developing coordinated international responses to crypto-based sanctions evasion.” 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post The Men Who Bought the World appeared first on Coda Story.

There are cities that teach you to read between the lines, to notice the way the air shifts before history changes course. Beirut in 2008 was one of those cities. A familiar cast filled its glitzy bars and air conditioned coffee shops: correspondents, fixers, schemers, dreamers – but beneath the surface, the city was still reeling from the earth-shattering assassination in 2005 of its former prime minister Rafic Hariri. Beirut was caught between recovery and reckoning, not yet knowing that the region's biggest earthquake was still gathering force just across the border.

It was in this world that I found myself, the latest addition to the city's English-speaking press corps. I had landed as the BBC's correspondent, but unlike most of my on-air colleagues at the time, I had an accent no one could quite place and a backstory most of my fellow foreign correspondents would have struggled to map. Except for Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, the other accented foreigner in Beirut's lively foreign correspondents group.

In Beirut, like all foreign correspondents Ghaith and I were outsiders to the country we were reporting on, but we were also outsiders trying to break into an industry that was reluctant to accept us. I remember at one particularly loud Beirut media party, a middle-aged man shouted into my ear that the new BBC correspondent's accent was a disgrace, an act of disrespect to British listeners. He didn't realize he was speaking to that very correspondent. 

Ghaith meanwhile had made his way from an architecture school in Baghdad (evident in the skill he brings to his sketches) onto the pages of The Guardian, somehow transforming the drawbridge of the British media establishment into an open door.  But it wasn’t our struggle that we bonded over – it was bananas. Or, more precisely, the scarcity thereof.

In Saddam’s Iraq, I learned from Ghaith, much like in the Soviet Georgia of my childhood, the lack of bananas turned them into more than a fruit. They were a symbol of luxury, a crescent-shaped promise that somewhere life was sweet and abundant. Most kids like us, who grew up dreaming of bananas, set out to chase abundance in Europe or America as adults. For whatever reasons, Ghaith and I chose the reverse commute, drawn to the abundance of stories in places that others wanted to flee. 

Ghaith and I decided to turn our community of two into a secret club we called “Journalists Without Proper Passports”: JPP, or was it JwPP. We couldn’t quite agree on the acronym, but it became a running joke about the strange calculus of turning what you lack into what you offer. Our passports, while pretty useless for weekend trips to Europe or getting U.S. visas, worked miracles for getting into places like Libya, Yemen, Uzbekistan, Burma, and Iran.

On a trip to Afghanistan, Ghaith left his Beirut apartment keys with a fresh face who had just arrived in the city: Josh Hersh. Josh, I only recently learned, had been agonizing over whether he should move from New York to Beirut, coming up with excuse after excuse not to make the leap. "In April, I'm gonna be in Afghanistan," Ghaith had told him when they met. "You can stay in my apartment, no problem." Just like that, Josh had no more excuses. And so, while Ghaith was in  Afghanistan, Josh was settling into Beirut's rhythm, discovering what the rest of us already knew: that the city had a way of making you feel like you belonged, even when you clearly didn't.

Josh had a keen reporter’s eye for things the rest of us missed. I remember one night at Barometre – a sweaty, crowded Palestinian bar where men spun in circles to music that seemed to defy gravity – Josh and I slipped outside for air. He pointed at my beer and said, "You aren't really drinking that, are you?" Just like that, he'd guessed my secret: I was pregnant. That was Josh's gift – listening and watching harder than anyone else, catching the detail that unlocks the rest of the story.

The gift was on full display when, almost two decades after they met, Ghaith and Josh sat down in Tbilisi at ZEG, our annual storytelling festival. Josh was interviewing Ghaith at ZEG for Kicker, his podcast for Columbia Journalism Review.

The conversation happened at a moment when the Middle East was literally on the brink of a wider war. The old fault lines – sectarian, geopolitical, generational – were shifting beneath our feet. And Ghaith's words felt both urgent and timeless, a reminder that beneath every headline about good guys and bad guys are people making desperate choices about survival. Unlike many of us, who eventually scattered to desk jobs at a comfortable distance from the action, Ghaith is still the one regularly slipping into Damascus and Sana’a, telling stories that – as Josh put it “refuse to moralize”, to categorize people as heroes or traitors, insisting instead on the messy, human reality of survival. 

At ZEG, he talked about Mustafa, a young man in Damascus who became a "reluctant collaborator" with the Syrian regime – not out of ideology, but out of a desperate calculus for survival. "My rule number one: I will never be beaten up ever again," Ghaith recounted Mustafa saying. "And of course, he gets beaten up again and again and again." It's a line that lands with particular force now, as the region cycles through yet another round of violence, and the world tries once more to flatten its tragedies into headlines.

Ghaith also spoke about the legacy of violence that shapes the region's present – and its future: "That's the legacy, the trauma of violence, that is the biggest problem in this region, I think. It is an organic reason why these cycles perpetuate themselves."

And then there was his insight into how the West – and the world – misunderstands the Middle East: "At one point, I realized there is no one conflict crossing the region from Tehran to Sana'a via Baghdad and Damascus. But a constellation of smaller conflicts utilized for a bigger one… It's so much easier to understand the conflict in the Middle East as Iran versus the Sunnis or the Jihadis versus Israel. But if we see it as a local conflict, I think it's much more difficult, but it's much more interesting."

"My anger with Americans is not only destroying Iraq, not only committing massacres and whatnot, and not a single person went to jail for the things they did in Iraq. Not George Bush. Not Nouri al-Maliki. No one has ever stood and said, well, I'm sorry for the things we've done. We will never have a proper reconciliation because the same trauma of violence and sectarianism will be repackaged and will travel to Syria, to Yemen and come back to haunt this region. And that's my problem. And this is why I'm angry."

Josh, with his characteristic gentleness, pressed Ghaith on these patterns and the craft of reporting on them. And Ghaith, ever the reluctant protagonist, brushed aside the idea of bravery: "I'm scared all the time. Not sometimes, but all the time. But also, I think it's not about me. I want to tell the story of Mustafa, of the other people on the ground. I don't want to be distracted by my own story, reading “War and Peace” in a Taliban detention cell."

When the session ended, people didn't leave with answers – they left with better questions. There was that electric feeling you get when a conversation has broken something open, when the neat categories we use to understand the world have been gently but firmly dismantled. In that room, for an hour, we weren't talking about "the Middle East" as an abstraction, but about the weight of history on individual lives.

In a moment when the region is once again at the center of the world's anxieties, when the language of "good guys" and "bad guys" is being weaponized by everyone from politicians to algorithms, we need conversations that refuse to let us off the hook. We need the kind of journalism that Ghaith practices, journalism that insists on the messy, contradictory reality of people's lives, that sees the individual inside the collective tragedy.

A version of this story was published in last week’s Sunday Read newsletter. Sign up here.

Listen to the full conversation on The Kicker. If you're curious about the stories that shaped it, pick up Ghaith's book, and join us at the next ZEG, where the best conversations are always the ones you didn't expect to have.

The post What We Miss When We Talk about the “Middle East” appeared first on Coda Story.

When I lived in Bishkek 25 years ago, then-president Askar Akayev was so effusive in expressing his desire for Kyrgyzstan to become the Switzerland of Central Asia that the Swiss ambassador once joked that Akayev liked his homeland better than he did. 

It was a pretty understandable hope - who wouldn’t want their poor ex-Soviet republic to become as prosperous and stable as Switzerland? – but it was a forlorn one. Both countries are multilingual and mountainous, but have little else in common. In the end, Akayev fled to Russia, his fall precipitated by the Tulip Revolution. He was the first of three presidents to be chased out of office, only for each new government to be every bit as corrupt and incompetent as those that were overthrown. 

But will it be sanctions-dodging that finally brings Kyrgyzstan and Switzerland together? There is already substantial transhipment of physical goods via Kyrgyz companies to help Russians access goods they’re supposedly barred from purchasing, including luxury cars, but the business appears to be becoming more elaborate.

A GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY

Back in April, the former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao (he stepped down after being jailed in the US, but still owns most of the company) announced that he was advising Kyrgyzstan on crypto reforms. “Such initiatives are crucial for the sustainable growth of the economy and the security of virtual assets, ultimately generating new opportunities for businesses and society as a whole,” said current president Sadyr Zhaparov at the time.

In May, we heard that Kyrgyzstan plans to launch a dollar-pegged stablecoin called USDKG which, fascinatingly, will be backed not – as it is at Tether (USDT) or Circle – with dollar assets, but with $500 million worth of gold from the Kyrgyz government.

“Anyone holding USDKG can redeem it for physical gold in Kyrgyzstan, exchange it for crypto like USDT, or withdraw it as fiat through the traditional banking system,” said William Campbell, who is advising the government in Bishkek on the venture. 

Apparently, the aim is for the cryptocurrency to be used for remittances back to Kyrgyzstan from citizens abroad, as well as legal tender inside the country, but it also looks like an open invitation to money laundering and sanctions dodging. If USDKG works the way he says it will, it will be a state-approved backdoor linking the gold market, the traditional financial system, and the crypto world. It would be in short a 21st-century version of what Switzerland used to be for Nazis, dictators, mafiosi, spies and tax-dodgers, before the rest of the world forced it to go straight (ish).

Last week, the FT published a fascinating investigation into how a fugitive Moldovan oligarch and a Russian bank have created a rouble-backed stablecoin called A7A5, which they are trading in Kyrgyzstan, effectively to gain access to USDT, which they lost when the Garantex exchange was shut under U.S. pressure in March.

“(It is a) friendly jurisdiction that is not so subject to sanctions”, said A7A5’s director Leonid Shumakov. “It is no secret that this jurisdiction is currently helping a lot to cope with the pressure [Russia] is under.”

Earlier this year, the United States sanctioned a Kyrgyz bank that it suspected was trying “to create a sanctions evasion hub for Russia to pay for imports and receive payment for exports”. But it’s not clear what it can do about a stablecoin if it has no connection to the U.S. financial system and therefore no reason to fear the Department of the Treasury.

History shows that when a sufficiently large number of rich people or companies become discontented by government restrictions on what they can do with their money, they will find a jurisdiction willing to earn fees by helping them evade those obstacles. This is how places as varied as Hong Kong, Dubai, the Cayman Islands and Delaware earn a living, and it would not be a surprise if Kyrgyzstan were to join them.

SHEDDING LIGHT ON THE DARK ECONOMY

Britain of course is the granddaddy of all the tax havens, so it’s heartening to see evidence that reforms to try to clean up its rotten financial system are starting to have some effect. In 2023, parliament passed a law to prevent British companies from being quite so perfect a vehicle for the committing of financial crimes, and the corporate registry has issued a progress report.

Highlights include the fact that tens of thousands of fraudulent companies have been struck off the register, many other companies have been forced to update their information to make it accurate, and attempts to create companies with false information have been prevented. Applicants are going to have to verify their identity before they file information, but will also have the right to prevent that information becoming public if it would pose a risk to themselves.

It wasn’t long ago that Companies House was the preferred source for cheap, reliable shell companies used in money laundering scandals globally. And it is genuinely brilliant that efforts are being made to prevent that from happening again (although there is still a long way to go).

It’s interesting as well that UK law enforcement agencies are trying to build ties with foreign counterparts in order to tackle corruption and financial crime, not least since they appear to be trying to encourage American agencies not to retreat from the fight. It will of course take more than a few nice words from the Brits to enthuse Donald Trump’s White House about the merits of fighting corruption, particularly considering the number of attorneys tackling investigations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act appears to have been halved.

While on the subject of international cooperation, here’s an interesting paper about the effect on a bank in the Isle of Man of the automatic exchange of information, which was brought in after the 2007-8 financial crisis to make it harder for people to dodge tax. Its analysis is based on leaked data and only covers one relatively small bank in one relatively small jurisdiction, but appears to reveal some pretty significant flaws in the regulations, which may make them less effective than we’d hoped.

And while on the subject of tax havens, the British Virgin Islands has issued proposals for how it might make its corporate registry less opaque, and they are not great. “Most alarmingly,” said Transparency International’s Margot Mollat, “the policy of notifying company owners when their information is accessed puts journalists and civil society actors at serious risk of retaliation and legal intimidation.” This isn’t transparency, Mollat added, “it’s a system that will frustrate scrutiny and protect dirty money”. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Crypto’s backdoor through Bishkek appeared first on Coda Story.

Earlier this week, as the Iranian defense minister headed to Qingdao for a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit, Donald Trump was basking in the spotlight at a NATO gathering in the Netherlands, claiming credit for brokering a Middle East truce. But beneath the headlines, one untold story was about who gets to shape the new world order, and how Russia, once a regional kingmaker, is now struggling to define its place.

As old alliances crack, Russia is scrambling to shape a new global order. Its answer: an unexpected bold imperial narrative that promises stability but reveals deep anxieties about Moscow’s place in a world where legitimacy, history, and power are all being contested.

The Iranian defense minister’s trip to Qingdao - his first foreign visit since the ceasefire with Israel - was meant to signal solidarity within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a block that includes Russia, India, and Pakistan. But the SCO, despite its ambitions, could only muster a joint statement of “serious concern” over Middle East tensions when Iran was being bombed by Israel - a statement India refused to sign. This exposed the stark limits of alternative alliances and the growing difficulty of presenting a united front against the West. In Qingdao, Andrei Belousov, the Russian defense minister, warned of “worsening geopolitical tensions” and “signs of further deterioration,” a statement that’s hard to argue with.  

Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, Trump relished his role as global peacemaker, claiming credit for an uneasy Israel-Iran truce - a truce that Russia welcomed while being careful to credit Qatar for its diplomatic efforts. Russia itself reportedly played a supporting role alongside Oman and Egypt. But the real diplomatic heavy lifting was done by others - and Russia’s own leverage  was exposed as limited. 

Once the region’s indispensable power broker, Moscow found itself on the sidelines. Its influence with Tehran diminished, and its air defense systems in Iran—meant to deter Israeli and later American strikes—were exposed as ineffective. With Bashar al-Assad’s rule in Syria collapsed, the Kremlin is acutely aware it cannot afford to lose another major ally in the region. As long as the Iranian government stands, Russia can still claim to have a role to play, but its ability to project power in the Middle East is now more symbolic than real. The 12-day war put Russia in an awkward position. Iran, a key supplier of drones for Russia’s war in Ukraine, was unimpressed by Moscow’s lack of support during the crisis. Even after signing a 20-year pact in January, Russia offered little more than “grave concern” when the bombs started falling. Similarly to the SCO, BRICS, supposedly the alternative to Western alliances, could only issue a joint statement, revealing just how thin multipolarity is in practice.

Enter the new narrative spin

For years, Vladimir Putin has argued that the West’s “rules-based order” is little more than a tool for maintaining Western dominance and justifying double standards. His vision of multipolarity is not just anti-American rhetoric—it’s a deliberate strategy to appeal to countries disillusioned by Western interventions, broken promises, and the arrogance of those who claimed victory in the Cold War. Russia has worked to turn Western failures—from Iraq to Afghanistan, from Libya to the global financial crisis—into recruitment tools for its own vision of “civilizational diversity.” Multipolarity, in the Kremlin’s telling, is about giving every culture, every nation, a seat at the table, while quietly reserving the right to redraw the map and rewrite the rules when it suits Moscow’s interests.

For a time, this approach was paying off. Russia’s anti-colonial and multipolar rhetoric resonated well beyond its borders, particularly in the Global South and among those frustrated by Western hypocrisy. 

But across the periphery of Russia’s historical empire, from Central Asia to the Baltics, from the Caucasus to Ukraine and Georgia, Russia’s multipolar message is seen not as liberation but as yet another chapter in a centuries-long cycle of conquest, repression and forced assimilation - a reality that continues to define the struggle for self-determination across Russia’s former empire.  Here, Russia’s message of “sameness” has long served as a colonial tool, erasing languages, cultures, and identities in the name of imperial unity. 

The recent conflict in the Middle East has forced Moscow to adapt its “multipolarity” messaging yet again. As its limitations as a regional power became impossible to ignore, Russian state media and officials began to reframe the conversation—no longer just championing multipolarity, but openly embracing the language of empire. In this new narrative, ‘empire’ is recast not as a relic of oppression, but as a stabilizing force uniquely capable of imposing order on an unruly world. The pivot is as much about masking diminished leverage as it is about projecting confidence: if Moscow can no longer dictate outcomes, it can still claim the mantle of indispensable power by rewriting the very terms of global legitimacy.

As we peered into the abyss of World War III, Russian state media pivoted: suddenly, ‘empire’—long a slur—was rebranded as a stabilizing force in a chaotic world.

This rhetorical shift has been swift and striking. Where once the Kremlin denounced imperialism as a Western vice, Russian commentators now argue that empires are not only inevitable but necessary for stability. “Empires could return to world politics not only as dark shadows of the past. Empire may soon become a buzzword for discussing the direction in which the world’s political organization is heading,” wrote one Russian analyst. The message is clear: in an age of chaos and fractured alliances, only a strong imperial center—preferably Moscow—can guarantee order. But beneath the surface, this embrace of empire reveals as much uncertainty as ambition, exposing deep anxieties about Russia’s place in a world it can no longer control as it once did.

Inside Russia, this new imperial rhetoric is both a rallying cry and a reflection of unease. In recent weeks, influential analysts have argued that Iran’s restraint—its so-called “peacefulness”—only invited aggression, a warning that resonates with those who fear Russia could be next. Enter Alexander Dugin, the far-right philosopher often described as “Putin’s brain,” whose apocalyptic worldview has shaped much of the Kremlin’s confrontational posture. Dugin warns that if the U.S. and Israel can strike Tehran with impunity, nothing would stop them from finding a pretext to strike Moscow. This siege mentality, echoed by senior officials, is now being used to justify a strategy of escalation and deterrence at any cost.

Dugin’s views were echoed by Konstantin Kosachev, chair of the Russian parliamentary foreign affairs committee: “If you don’t want to be bombed by the West, arm yourself. Build deterrence. Go all the way—even to the point of developing weapons of mass destruction.”

But for all the talk of “victory,” by all sides post the 12-day war,  the outcomes remain ambiguous. Iran insists its nuclear ambitions are undimmed. While Israel and Trump’s team says Iran is further from a bomb than ever before – still, the facts are murky and the region is no closer to peace. As one Russian analyst remarked, the normalization of “phoney war” logic means that everyone is arming up, alliances are transactional, and the rules are made up as we go along.

If the only lesson of the 12-day war is that everyone must arm themselves to the teeth, we’re not just reliving the Cold War—we’re entering a new era of empire-building, where deterrence is everything and the lines between friend and foe are as blurred as ever.

In a world where old alliances crumble and new narratives emerge, the true battle, it seems, is not just over territory or military might, but over the stories that define power itself. Russia’s pivot to an imperial narrative reveals both its ambitions and its anxieties, highlighting a global order in flux where legitimacy is contested and the rules are rewritten in real time. Understanding this evolving empire game is essential to grasping the future of international relations and the fragile balance that holds the world together.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

Research and additional reporting by Masho Lomashvili.

The post The Empire Game 2.0: Through Moscow’s Eyes appeared first on Coda Story.

Years of sanctions have substantially weakened the Iranian economy, as evidenced by Iran’s keenness to have them cancelled, with sanctions removal a key sticking point in negotiations with the U.S. before Israel began bombing Iranian nuclear sites on June 13. But anyone who thinks sanctions are an all-powerful tool should spend some time speaking to Tehran businessmen. The exchange houses in the bazaar in Tehran can arrange money transfers to and from anywhere you like, no matter what the Office of Foreign Assets Control says.

It’s all coordinated via encrypted messaging apps and, as long as you’re transacting with a major centre like London, Paris or New York, your cash will be ready for collection within a couple of hours. “You can get paid electronically if you have a bank account. You need to be a bit careful about having lots of random payments coming into your account, but otherwise it’s straightforward,” one Iranian told me.

The trick is the same one used at various times and on various continents in Chinese Underground Banking, hawala transfers, or the Black Market Peso Exchange, all of which also exist to provide financial services outside the Western-dominated financial system. Instead of moving money electronically through bank accounts, they transfer value through the trade network, something that Western policy makers really struggle to get a grip of, not least because they often don’t understand what’s going on.

A DIGITAL ACT OF WAR

Cryptocurrencies have really supercharged these networks because, instead of moving value in a shipload of used cars or a container of designer handbags, which take weeks to reach their final destination and are cumbersome to buy, move and sell, they can be shifted quickly, easily and with minimal time delay. Hawaladars can now shift value between countries with their phones, and the sarafis in Tehran are all using Tether, despite the fact they’re not supposed to (I mean, neither are Venezuelans, but that hasn’t stopped the national oil company).

This is why last week’s hack by the Israel-linked group Predatory Sparrow (who are presumably unrelated to calypso king Mighty Sparrow, but I’ll take any excuse to link to this banger) is so interesting. By raiding $90 million from Tehran’s Nobitex crypto exchange it was striking a blow against the informal financial ties between Iranians and the rest of the world. The lost cryptocurrencies included, according to Chainalysis, “Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin, Ripple, Solana, Tron, and Ton” although the hackers didn’t actually steal them but instead sent them to addresses from which they could not be retrieved, which is a bit like raiding a bank and burning all the currency in its vaults. Elliptic, however, noted that dollar-backed stablecoins may be among the stolen crypto.

Stablecoins are different to other cryptocurrencies in that their value rests on something other than the forces of supply and demand – in Tether’s case, that is the dollar – and the companies that issue them own large stocks of real-world assets to protect the price peg. The strange consequence of this is that while America’s allies use stablecoins to escape the dollar financial system, they are in effect supporting that system by maintaining demand for U.S. Treasuries.

ALL THAT GLITTERS IS CRYPTO

They are not entirely happy about this, which is why they have been investing so heavily in the other great reserve asset: gold, the price of which has hit high after high after high this year. And this raises the fascinating prospect of a gold-backed stablecoin taking off, giving all the advantages of Tether but without having to support the U.S. government.

“The rise of gold-backed currencies that circumvent the US banking system, coupled with sanctioned regimes’ growing interest in the adoption of alternative currencies and payment systems, could create a massive blind spot for US financial intelligence and sanctions enforcement efforts,” argues the Atlantic Council in an acute analysis. It suggests that Western countries should stop spraying sanctions around like they’re antibiotics on a pig farm, or such a future will come to pass sooner than anyone would think possible.

It's a warning that seems to be falling on deaf ears in Washington, where congresspeople are busy debating ever-higher sanctions, and where businesspeople are busy riding the crypto wave. The latest deal is the appearance of Tron on Nasdaq via a reverse merger, which is good news for the company’s Chinese-born founder Justin Sun. As you may remember, a probe by US regulators into Sun’s activities was paused after he made a $75 million investment into the Trump family’s crypto firm World Liberty Financial last year.

This was not the only Trump dividend from the family partnership with Tron, a blockchain blamed for 58 percent of all illicit activity in the crypto world, since two of the president’s sons in February joined the advisory board of the bank that organised the reverse merger. On top of that, Tron has started minting the Trump family’s own stablecoin USD1, which will help increase the first family’s already large crypto dividend.

In case you’re concerned that the business ties between Sun and the Trump family might lead to a conflict between the president’s personal and public interests, however, there is no need to be. “President Trump is dedicated to making America the crypto capital of the world,” White House spokesperson Anna Kelly has said. “His assets are in a trust managed by his children, and there are no conflicts of interest.”  I don’t remember everyone being quite so accepting that Hunter Biden’s business interests were separate to those of his father, but of course that was a very long time ago.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Crypto Warfare and a New Gold Standard appeared first on Coda Story.

Coda’s ZEG storytelling festival in Tbilisi has come to an end, and I am both overloaded with information and exhausted by drinking too much wine. My take-home message was that oligarchy is spreading ever wider, and that we need to take its threat to democracy far more seriously than anyone is doing at the moment.

I shared a stage with Ed Caesar, author and journalist from The New Yorker- magazine, who has written some great pieces on oligarchs (as well as much else), with Paul Caruana Galizia, who made this excellent podcast on Londongrad, and with Hans Gutbrod, whose piece on Georgia’s own Bidzina Ivanishvili is very much worth reading. And if you like surreal, ethereal documentaries, I highly recommend Salome Jashi’s ‘Taming the Garden’, which tackles oligarchy and its implications through the story of Georgian trees. 

The joy of the festival is in the incidental meetings, of which few were more joyful for me than sitting next to Joseph Stiglitz at dinner and getting to hear his views on inequality, oligarchy, and the age of Trump. Where else would I ever get to do that? 

Moral of the story: you too should find time to come to Tbilisi next year for ZEG. If you do, you can also make a side-trip to the market to stock up on one of the world’s best condiments.

SHOW US THE MONEY

Victoria Cleland, the Bank of England’s Chief Cashier, has announced that worried Brits are hoarding cash. “At a time of uncertainty, at a time of crisis people do move to cash. They want to make sure they have literally got something under the mattress,” she said at a conference in London.

This, she said, helps to explain why the value of all the banknotes in circulation keeps going up – indeed, it hit a new all-time high of 85.872 billion pounds this year – despite the fact that people use less cash all the time. The Bank of England has previously estimated that between 20 and 24 percent of banknotes at any one time are being used in transactions, and the rest are unaccounted for (or, according to Cleland, hoarded). 

So, if we do the sums and we accept Cleland’s logic, we can say that around 1,000 pounds worth of banknotes is being hoarded by every single person in the UK, up from around 920 pounds last year. I have to say that, with all due respect to Cleland, I am very dubious about that figure, not least because someone is getting a double share to make up for the fact that I don’t have even a fraction of that.

The most recent survey I can find, which is from 2022, suggests I am not alone. The average Brit had just 113.82 pounds at home back then, and it’s hard to see why that total would have increased ninefold in the last three years.

This is not a UK-specific situation. The last survey conducted for the Federal Reserve shows that the average American had $373 either in their wallet or at home in 2024, down $70 from the year before. So cash hoarding in the US is going down, but the value of banknotes in circulation keeps going up –  indeed, it hit a new all-time high of $2.835 trillion in the most recent data release, which is around $7,000 for every person in the United States. So either Brits and Americans alike are spectacularly under-reporting how much cash they’re keeping at home, or someone else is using all that cash for something else.

Considering that barely a week goes by without news of major money laundering gangs being busted with bags full of banknotes, I personally would like it if central bank officials put a little bit of thought into asking whether the extremely healthy demand for their products is not in fact coming from organised criminals. And if it is, whether central banks ought to do something about that.

Five years ago, the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee scolded the Bank of England for not caring about where its banknotes go. “The Bank needs to get a better handle on the national currency it controls,” its chair, MP Meg Hillier, said. It still does.

TRACKING ‘ENDANGERED’ MILLIONAIRES

Regular readers will know how much I admire the ability of Henley & Partners, the world’s foremost passport vendor, to turn almost any piece of news into an advertisement for buying a new passport and/or visa.

In recent times, the alarm is being sounded by changes to British tax policy which, basically, make it more expensive for very rich people to live and to die in the UK. And Henley responded in the way that it always does – “provisional estimates for 2024 are even more concerning, with a massive net outflow of 9,500 millionaires projected for this year alone,” it reported last year about the “wealth exodus”. All was not lost, however. If only the UK would scrap taxes on capital gains and inheritance and privatise its healthcare system, millionaires might be persuaded to stay.

The ‘research’ was picked up very widely, with few media outlets questioning its methodology, its publisher’s motivations, how representative its purported database of 150,000 people was of the millions of millionaires in the world, or indeed how exactly anyone knows where they’re all going. The Tax Justice Network has now delved into the report, and its findings are worth a read, not least the headline conclusion that there was no exodus. The correct policy response, it argues, would therefore not be tax cuts at all but higher taxes on wealth.

So, what should we think? Are millionaires leaving the sinking ship, or are they clinging on to help rebuild? Should we lower taxes or raise them? The obvious solution is surely to use satellite tags so millionaires can be tracked like wildebeest as they migrate from the watering holes of Chamonix to the rich, grazing pastures of Mayfair via the rutting grounds of St Barts. Only then can we know for sure if they’re being chased into extinction.

CALLING OUT MONACO

The European Union’s regularly updated “list of high-risk jurisdictions presenting strategic deficiencies in their national anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism (AML/CFT) regimes” has done something worthwhile for the first time I can remember by singling out Monaco.

Normally, the list is made up of a random selection of irrelevant places and third-order tax havens. And there’s plenty of the usual on display: why anyone would worry that Côte d'Ivoire, Namibia and Nepal, for example, are supposedly big centres for financial crime, I have no idea. And normally, the list will avoid pointing a finger at any country that is closely allied or aligned with any EU member, which means the U.S. and U.K. never get singled out even though they’re clearly far more problematic than, say, Algeria.

This time, however, the list does single out Monaco. The principality is a major problem, with deep ties to deeply unsavoury people and a fast-developing financial scandal.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post The cash hoarders, migrating millionaires, and Monaco mischief appeared first on Coda Story.

There are two options for criminals in a democracy who don’t want to go to jail. The first is to launch a large-scale campaign to legalise whatever crime it is that you want to commit. This is hard, slow, laborious and, in most cases, impossible. The second is to not get caught. This is not necessarily easy either, but it’s a lot easier when law enforcement agencies are small, embattled and under-funded.

The 300,000 or so financial institutions subject to regulations in the United States have to report any suspicions they have about transactions, as well as reports of large cash payments, to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN. The idea is that their reports will alert investigators to crimes while they’re going on, and help the goodies catch the baddies.

DEFUNDING THE COPS

Sadly, however, FinCEN’s computer system is so clunky it’s like, as a former prosecutor once said, trying to plug AI into a Betamax. Investigators often have to create their own programmes to trawl a database that gains more than 25 million entries every year, or else just pick through them in the hope of finding something interesting. It effectively means that this vast and priceless resource is hardly ever used.

And now FinCEN’s budget looks like it will be slashed even further. “The pittance allocated to FinCEN in the current budget has been reduced even further,” wrote compliance expert Jim Richards, with a link to the 1,200-page supplement to the White House’s proposed 2026 budget with details about the cut. The reduction would take spending back to 2023 levels, which is worrying for anyone keen on seeing criminals stopped. And that’s even before you take into account the effect of workforce disillusionment at regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, resulting from the cuts imposed by DOGE.

“I experienced some dark times during my SEC career, including the 2008-09 financial crisis and the Enron and Madoff scandals,” wrote Martin Kimel in a passionate column in Barron’s. “ But morale at the Commission is the worst I have ever seen, by far. No job is secure. Nobody knows what will become of the agency or its independence.” So, he added, “when the SEC offered early retirement and an incentive payment for people to voluntarily resign, I and hundreds of others reluctantly accepted.”

If you lose experienced personnel, and you lack the resources to invest in the latest technology, you will always lose ground against entrepreneurial and skilled financial criminals. That is the inevitable consequence of what is happening in the United States, which will be devastating for the victims of fraudsters, crooks, hackers and more.

THE UK PRECEDENT

There is, however, a cycle to this kind of thing. Governments that are determined to unleash the private sector always cut enforcement of regulations, but then they become embarrassed by the inevitable revelations of corruption, sleaze and incompetence that result. This is what happened in Britain, where years of news headlines about London being the favourite playground of oligarchs finally led to government action.

Three years ago, the British authorities imposed a special levy on financial institutions to fund the bodies that fight crime, and last month it published a report on the first year of spending. More than 40 million pounds has been invested in new technology to tackle Suspicious Activity Reports (so no more Betamax in London), and almost 400 people have been hired to do the work, including some of them finally beginning to try to drain the swamp that is the U.K.’s corporate registry. This is good news. 

It is inevitable that, just like in the U.K., the United States will eventually become so appalled by the rampant criminality that will result from the cuts to FinCEN, the SEC and other bodies, that politicians will start building a decent system to stop it. I just wish everyone would get on with it, so millions of people don’t have to lose out first.

THE EU GETS INTO GEAR?

You can accuse the European Union of many things, but you can’t say that it acts hastily. Several months after the last progress update from the Anti-Money-Laundering Agency (AMLA), it has appointed its four permanent board members. They represent an interesting cross-section of European expertise. 

There’s Simonas Krėpšta who, at the Bank of Lithuania, has overseen the country’s booming fintech sector and, therefore, has a good insight into the country’s booming money laundering sector, which has seen quite a lot of firms get fined, including arguably Europe’s most valuable startup Revolut. 

Then there’s Derville Rowland of the Central Bank of Ireland, who will bring inside knowledge of Europe’s most aggressive tax haven. And Rikke-Louise Ørum Petersen, who joined Denmark’s Financial Supervisory Authority in 2015, just when the money laundering spree by Danske Bank was about to explode into public view. Finally, there’s Juan Manuel Vega Serrano, who was previously head of the Financial Action Task Force, which gives him plenty of experience of working at an ineffective, slow-moving, superficially apolitical, supranational anti-money laundering organisation. 

All told, I’d say this is a pretty perfect group of people for the job. The European Union works slowly, but it works thoroughly. Of course, AMLA won’t actually be doing anything until 2028, and it probably won’t do much after that either. But you can’t have everything.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Creating a culture of corruption appeared first on Coda Story.

The Corporate Transparency Act was passed by Congress at the very end of Donald Trump’s first term, with bipartisan support and an important mission to protect national security, expose wrongdoing and complicate the committing of financial crime by forcing companies to declare the names of their owners. 

This was at the time not a controversial piece of legislation, not least because American politicians – as part of the Financial Action Task Force – have been pressuring other countries to pass similar laws since the late twentieth century. But it has proved messy to implement. FinCEN, the United States’ financial crimes enforcement network, only finished making the necessary rules to file what it calls “beneficial ownership information” last year – just in time for judges in Alabama and Texas to declare them illegal, and then for the second Trump administration to basically ditch them altogether by saying they don’t apply to 99.9 percent of corporations that are registered in the U.S.

The consultation period over this decision to ditch the filing requirement is now over. (So, if you feel strongly but didn’t get round to writing in, I’m sorry to say you’ve missed your chance.) It is now possible to browse through the several-dozen submissions from concerned citizens and organisations, which is an enlightening experience.

MAKING COMPANIES OPAQUE AGAIN

In the pro-rules camp, you can find comments from law enforcement agencies, anti-corruption organisations, environmental campaigners, credit unions and others who are concerned that the Trump administration’s decision to maintain the previous lax standards is damaging and unwise.

“Without this data,” stated the National District Attorneys’ Association, in a fairly typical submission, “prosecutors are left blind when investigating shell companies used by fentanyl and human traffickers, cybercriminals, and corrupt foreign actors.” These, they added, “are not abstract concerns –these are real threats to American families and communities.”

In the other camp are the small business owners, or associations representing them, who are delighted that the requirements to file their details with FinCEN are now history, and want all beneficial ownership information already filed to be deleted. 

“For many of us, the original BOI requirements felt like an unfair assumption of guilt, treating hard working entrepreneurs as potential criminals rather than the backbone of our economy,” wrote Stephen McKissen, the owner of a video production company in Denver, Colorado. Removing the requirement, he argued, “for US companies and US persons to report BOI lifts a significant weight off our shoulders.” 

Ever since the world’s first piece of anti-money laundering legislation was passed in 1970, businesses have complained about the compliance burdens it imposed upon them. Criminals hide by pretending to be legitimate businesspeople, and the only way they can be exposed is by imposing rules on everyone, thus obliging honest folk to undergo paperwork and inconvenience, which is not popular with the honest folk (or, I suppose, the dishonest ones).

It's crucial to the way the legislation is implemented therefore to minimise that inconvenience, to make sure it does not cause so much irritation that it becomes a political issue. This appears to be where the U.S. efforts ran aground. I had a look at the FinCEN portal through which company ownership is registered and which the small businesses were complaining about. It didn’t look too bad to me, but if the registration process is anything like the comment-reading process, I can see why people are annoyed about having to do it.

Every single comment on the proposed rule changes has the same headline, so it’s impossible to tell which are interesting and which are utterly banal, without opening a new page, then opening a new attachment. When you return to the main page, the list of them rearranges itself unexpectedly, so it’s hard to know which ones you’ve already read. It is in short a very poorly designed piece of software, and you’d think a country that created Google, Apple, Facebook and the rest might have been able to find some better programmers.

Back, though, to America’s notoriously lax shell company legislation. It is the result of it being devolved to state level, so that some states – Delaware and Nevada are stand-out examples – end up competing with each other to attract more incorporation, thus sparking a race to the bottom. 

Perhaps there’s nothing that could have been done to make American business owners appreciate the need to file information about beneficial ownership, but the lesson for bureaucrats is that you have to make compliance easy. Having to file information at both state and federal level was never going to be popular, particularly if the web portal involved was also clunky and annoying. 

However, what’s left of the Corporate Transparency Act will nicely align with the White House’s wider agenda, since it now only applies to foreign companies that have registered to do business in the United States. If criminals currently using offshore-incorporated corporations want to avoid having to report their identity to the authorities, they’ll now need to set up a domestic shell company, which will I suppose be a small win for USA Inc.  

It’s too early to say whether Trump’s tariffs and threats will bring businesses and manufacturing back to America, but he is at least making onshore shell companies great again.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post How Trump is bringing shell companies back onshore appeared first on Coda Story.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the apocalypse in the last few days, and wondering what options oligarchs believe are available to help them escape it. In Mark Lynas’s new book about atomic weapons, he helpfully provides a table showing what percentage of each country’s population would die during or immediately after a nuclear war. The sheer number of places that have 100 or a number in the high 90s in the right-hand column is a bit bleak, but if you think like an enabler you can see opportunity.

New Zealand is often touted as the go-to destination for riding out the apocalypse. Vivos has apparently built a 300-place luxury bunker on the South Island, and Rising S Bunkers, an American company that specializes in the building of doomsday shelters, have been busy too. Peter Thiel obtained New Zealand citizenship, though tragically was not able to build his own mega-bunker after he failed to get planning permission. But that has not stopped other billionaires from planning their escapes to the land of the long white cloud.

BILLIONAIRE BOLTHOLES

Politicians in Wellington are only too happy to help. In April, they eased up on the rules around the country’s golden visa programme to attract more of this sweet flight capital, removing a requirement that applicants speak English, and reducing the cost. You now only need to spend 21 days in the country to establish residency, down from three years, which is good news for tech barons keen not to have to pay tax or make friends or stuff like that.

“In the past, the vast majority of applicants were looking for tax havens,” former immigrant minister Stuart Nash told the FT. “Now they’re looking for safe havens.” Nash is a man for the snappy catch phrase. Since leaving government, he has set up Nash Kelly Global, a relocation company, which has the distinctly yuk for an ex-politician but very on-brand tagline: ‘What they don’t tell you about New Zealand. It’s not what you know. It’s who you know.’

But I’m afraid New Zealand is not quite the safe option it’s been cracked up to be. For a start, how safe is New Zealand? Lynas’ deaths table shows that in the event of war, 68 percent of New Zealanders would be dead after two years of nuclear winter. Okay, that’s better than Russia (98 percent), the United States, China, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Germany (99 percent) or Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates (100 percent), but it’s still not great. And expensive fortifications wouldn’t help: billionaires would not be able to hide forever from gangs of survivors and would be, Lynas writes, “winkled out of their bunkers and hiding places like fat grubs”. 

So, which countries do offer the best survival prospects in the event of Trump or Putin getting an itchy trigger finger? Iceland, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Haiti and – painfully no doubt for Kiwis – Australia all have a 0 percent death rate. At present, Iceland does not sell visas, and Australia closed its investor visa programme last year, so it’s no good to you even if you have the cash to flash. But there are plenty of options among the others: Uruguay’s is a bit pricey, but Costa Rica will sell you residency for just $150,000, and Argentina is practically giving it away.

I’m surprised no one’s started marketing these countries to rich people worried about nuclear war: ‘If life sends you nuclear winter, enjoy the fresh powder.’ Mr Nash, you can have that one for free.

ESCAPE TO MARS

Of course, everywhere on Earth is going to be impacted a bit by nuclear war, so why not abandon our planet altogether? Elon Musk’s current plan is for a first unmanned mission to take off for Mars next year, with people due to land on the red planet in 2028, and for a self-sustaining colony to exist within 20 years.

SpaceX has released a handy new video simulation of the journey, though I hope for the Muskonauts’ sake that they won’t have to listen to that dreadful music for the entire eight-month trip. If I was as rich as Musk, I’d have licensed Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ at least. The upside to living on Mars of course is that you wouldn’t be on a planet that could be rendered uninhabitable by a nuclear bomb. The downside though would be that you’d be on a planet that’s already uninhabitable. So, perhaps it would be better to focus on securing the future of Earth instead? 

“Surely the best way to protect the human species in coming decades is to focus on resolving the tensions we face at home, from unbridled nuclear proliferation to strategic global competition and realignment,” wrote noted physicist Lawrence Krauss.

Predictably enough, Musk dismissed Strauss’ argument by tagging @IfindRetards in reply (such a hilarious guy!). But Strauss raises an interesting point. Cold War-era treaties, negotiated to prevent an extraterrestrial arms race, declare that there is no sovereign territory or territorial appropriation in space. Yet, according to Starlink’s terms of service, Mars is “a free planet”, and no Earth-based powers have authority there: “Disputes will be settled through self-governing principles, established in good faith, at the time of Martian settlement.” 

That looks a lot like Musk is claiming the right to govern Mars as its settlers see fit. Of course, it’s not impossible that the new settlers (who will have been chosen by Musk, trained by Musk, brought to Mars by Musk’s rocket, and who will be entirely dependent on Musk for future resupply) might set up a genuinely democratic system of self-government. But it’s also possible that Musk might want to claim Mars for himself. That would be in violation of Earth’s treaties, and therefore bad. It would also – considering the havoc wreaked by Musk in his brief stint in government – be a pretty grim prospect on its own terms. 

Of course, you don’t need to go to Mars to set up your own government. Right here on earth we have Eleutheria, which is now aiming to negotiate a 99-year lease for a bit of Tuvalu to build a “free private city”, having given up on the idea of building a state in a Bir Tawil, an isolated, unclaimed bit of desert between Egypt and Sudan. It is indeed easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post The oligarch’s guide to sitting out a nuclear winter appeared first on Coda Story.

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, some 31 percent of “revenue agents” (the people tasked with conducting tax audits) have lost their jobs. This is supposed to save the government money, but it’s a bit like trying to reduce the cost of crime by sacking police officers. 

“This administration is clearly running the risk of losing hundreds of billions of dollars -- in fact, likely over $1 trillion -- through its destruction of the IRS. “At a time when deficits are high and rising, that seems a baffling policy choice,” said Larry Summers, noted economist, former treasury secretary, and former president of Harvard University.

The policy is indeed baffling if its aim is to collect taxes; it’s not baffling at all, though, if the intention is to help rich people dodge them.

An early announcement from Trump’s Department of Justice was to pause enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which has been central to global efforts against bribery since the 1970s. Trump has long argued that prosecuting American businesses for bribing foreign officials makes it harder for U.S. companies to compete. A new DoJ memo shows that it has now thought about what it wants to do, and how to do it in a way that prioritises American interests.

There have long been suspicions that U.S. authorities reserve their biggest fines for non-US companies (a French bank getting fined almost $9 billion, for example), and suggesting that prosecutions will be “America first” is unlikely to help with that perception. “Enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act ("FCPA") will now be focused on conduct that harms U.S. interests and affects the competitiveness of U.S. businesses, further suggesting that future FCPA enforcement will be focused on non-U.S. companies,” noted lawyers from White&Case in this assessment.

There is already widespread global concern that the Trump administration will exploit the U.S. dollar’s dominant position in finance to force foreigners to do what it wants. Suggestions that corruption laws are not equally enforced will only further that suspicion. The fewer foreigners who rely on dollars, the less impact US sanctions will have, so it would be good if officials would consider that before implementing their policies.

MINDING THE TAX GAP

Readers old enough to remember the financial crisis of 2007-8 will also remember the wave of popular anger against tax-dodgers that followed it. American prosecutors investigated Swiss banks (good times!); protesters occupied branches of Starbucks (fun!); almost all countries agreed to exchange information with each other about their citizens’ tax affairs to uncover cheats (massive!).

According to the EU Tax Observatory, this information exchange has been a triumph, and cut wealthy people’s misuse of offshore trickery by two-thirds. I have always been a little suspicious of these declarations of victory, however, despite them coming from such a good source, and find grounds for my doubts in this new report from the UK’s National Audit Office.

British tax authorities every year estimate a tax gap – the difference between what the country’s exchequer should receive, and what it actually gets – and politicians regularly talk about reducing it. If the Trump administration seems uninterested in clamping down on tax evasion, and financial chicanery in general, the British government has pledged additional resources for technology and investigators to try to understand what’s happening and whether its tax gap estimate is close to being accurate, so we may learn more about this in future years. Fingers crossed.  

But the NAO report suggests that the way it’s calculated may be a bit questionable. According to the standard estimate, wealthy individuals pay around 1.9 billion pounds less than they should. But, according to a different estimate (“compliance yield”), the tax authorities have successfully brought in an extra 3 billion pounds from wealthy people that would not have been collected without their efforts.

It is a little hard to understand how it is possible to increase tax compliance by 1.1 billion more pounds than the entire deficit that wealthy people are supposedly underpaying. It’s like losing two pounds down the back of an armchair, reaching beneath the cushion and finding three. Except with billions. Something else is very definitely going on. “The large increase in compliance yield raises the possibility that underlying levels of non-compliance among the wealthy population were much greater than previously thought,” notes the NAO.

I am, I admit, someone who fixates on offshore skulduggery, but I can’t help noticing the report states that a mere five percent of the UK tax authorities’ investigative efforts were looking into “offshore non-compliance”. Tax advisers are clever, well-paid people, and they’ll know very well about the best places to hide their clients’ money, and there’s even a suggestion for them in the report: if your client holds wealth in properties abroad, or owns shares in her own name rather than through an institution, her home government will never know about her income she earns from them. Happy days.

A POSTER CITY FOR ILLICIT FINANCE

And speaking of offshore skullduggery. The city of Mariupol has long been central to the war in Ukraine. Enveloped early by Russian forces, its defenders held out for months in an epic battle in the ruins of the Azovstal steel plant, before surrendering in May 2022. Moscow has since made it the poster city for the supposedly prosperous future available in a Russia-ruled Ukraine, but a new report makes clear how hollow such claims are.

“Powerful Moscow-based networks are controlling much of the reconstruction programme. Well-connected companies are benefiting from Russian spending that involves the widespread use of illicit finance and corrupt practices,” note its authors, David Lewis and Olivia Allison. They have specific policy recommendations, of which I think the most important ones relate to my old bugbear of sanctions, which should be better targeted and more strategically deployed. Russia’s crimes in Ukraine include the looting and economic exploitation of cities like Mariupol. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Making America corrupt again? appeared first on Coda Story.

As Rome prepared to select a new pope, few beyond Vatican insiders were focused on what the transition would mean for the Catholic Church's stance on artificial intelligence. 

Yet Pope Francis has established the Church as an erudite, insightful voice on AI ethics. "Does it serve to satisfy the needs of humanity to improve the well-being and integral development of people?”” he asked G7 leaders last year, “Or does it, rather, serve to enrich and increase the already high power of the few technological giants despite the dangers to humanity?"

Francis – and the Vatican at large – had called for meaningful regulation in a world where few institutions dared challenge the tech giants.

During the last months of Francis’s papacy, Silicon Valley, aided by a pliant U.S. government, has ramped up its drive to rapidly consolidate power.

OpenAI is expanding globally, tech CEOs are becoming a key component of presidential diplomatic missions, and federal U.S. lawmakers are attempting to effectively deregulate AI for the next decade. 

For those tracking the collision between technological and religious power, one question looms large: Will the Vatican continue to be one of the few global institutions willing to question Silicon Valley's vision of our collective future?

Memories of watching the chimney on television during Pope Benedict’s election had captured my imagination as a child brought up in a secular, Jewish-inflected household. I longed to see that white smoke in person.  The rumors in Rome last Thursday morning were that the matter wouldn’t be settled that day. So I was furious when I was stirred from my desk in the afternoon by the sound of pealing bells all over Rome. “Habemus papam!” I heard an old nonna call down to her husband in the courtyard. 

As I heard the bells of Rome hailing a new pope toll last Thursday I sprinted out onto the street and joined people streaming from all over the city in the direction of St. Peter’s. In recent years, the time between white smoke and the new pope’s arrival on the balcony was as little as forty-five minutes. People poured over bridges and up the Via della Conciliazione towards the famous square. Among the rabble I spotted a couple of friars darting through the crowd, making speedier progress than anyone, their white cassocks flapping in the wind. Together, the friars and I made it through the security checkpoints and out into the square just as a great roar went up. 

The initial reaction to the announcement that Robert Francis Prevost would be the next pope, with the name Leo XIV, was subdued. Most people around me hadn’t heard of him — he wasn’t one of the favored cardinals, he wasn’t Italian, and we couldn’t even Google him, because there were so many people gathered that no one’s phones were working. A young boy managed to get on the phone to his mamma, and she related the information about Prevost to us via her son. Americano, she said. From Chicago.

A nun from an order in Tennessee piped up that she had met Prevost once. She told us that he was mild-mannered and kind, that he had lived in Peru, and that he was very internationally-minded. “The point is, it’s a powerful American voice in the world, who isn’t Trump,” one American couple exclaimed to our little corner of the crowd. 

It only took a few hours before Trump supporters, led by former altar boy Steve Bannon, realized this American pope wouldn’t be a MAGA pope. Leo XIV had posted on X in February, criticizing JD Vance, the Trump administration’s most prominent Catholic.

"I mean it's kind of jaw-dropping," Bannon told the BBC. "It is shocking to me that a guy could be selected to be the Pope that had had the Twitter feed and the statements he's had against American senior politicians."

Laura Loomer, a prominent far-right pro-Trump activist aired her own misgivings on X: “He is anti-Trump, anti-MAGA, pro-open borders, and a total Marxist like Pope Francis.” 

As I walked home with everybody else that night – with the friars, the nuns, the pilgrims, the Romans, the tourists caught up in the action – I found myself thinking about our "Captured" podcast series, which I've spent the past year working on. In our investigation of AI's growing influence, we documented how tech leaders have created something akin to a new religion, with its own prophets, disciples, and promised salvation.

Walking through Rome's ancient streets, the dichotomy struck me: here was the oldest continuous institution on earth selecting its leader, while Silicon Valley was rapidly establishing what amounts to a competing belief system. 

Would this new pope, taking the name of Leo — deliberately evoking Leo XIII who steered the church through the disruptions of the Industrial Revolution — stand against this present-day technological transformation that threatens to reshape what it means to be human?

I didn't have to wait long to find out. In his address to the College of Cardinals on Saturday, Pope Leo XIV said: "In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching, in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labor."

 Hours before the new pope was elected, I spoke with Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings institution who’s an expert in AI and labor policy. Her research on the Vatican, labour, and AI was published with Brookings following Pope Francis’s death.

She described how the Catholic Church has a deep-held belief in the dignity of work — and how AI evangelists’ promise to create a post-work society with artificial intelligence is at odds with that.

“Pope John Paul II wrote something that I found really fascinating. He said, ‘work makes us more human.’ And Silicon Valley is basically racing to create a technology that will replace humans at work,” Kinder, who was raised Catholic, told me. “What they're endeavoring to do is disrupt some of the very core tenets of how we've interpreted God's mission for what makes us human.”

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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Apparently, the word “deadline” was first coined in a notoriously brutal Confederacy-run prison during the American Civil War: any prisoners that crossed the line got killed. The point of a deadline is that, if you don’t stick to it, there are severe consequences. So what do you call a line that, should you cross it, brings zero consequences? A shrug-line? A meh-line? A British-Overseas-Territories-line?

“Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands (BVI), the Cayman Islands and the Turks and Caicos Islands will have legislation on registers of beneficial ownership approved through their respective legislatures by April 2025, with implementation by June 2025 or earlier,” was the unequivocal deadline in a joint communiqué agreed by the British government and the leaders of these five of its Overseas Territories (OTs) in November last year.

It's now May and, well, that has not come to pass. The deadline has been crossed. So what will happen now that all of them (except the Cayman Islands) have failed to approve laws to open up their corporate registries? Will someone get shot? Or will everyone just shuffle about a bit and hope no one’s noticed?

These five jurisdictions are leftover bits of the British Empire which, for various reasons, never became independent. London wasn’t particularly keen on keeping them, mainly because doing so was expensive, so back in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, they were encouraged to find ways to fund themselves, with no one particularly caring how they went about it. 

Each of these territories, to varying extents, discovered that there was profit to be made from helping foreigners to move money, and not asking too many questions about where the money came from. As a result, these places are often referred to as tax havens, but that’s misleading since they offer far more than just tax advantages to their clients. 

Shell companies, particularly those of the BVI, became notorious for hiding money for gangsters, tax dodgers, cartels, kleptocrats and other crooks, and the British government struggled to do anything about it. Then, in 2018, a group of backbench MPs seized on the post-Brexit collapse in political coherence and passed a law forcing the OTs to open up their corporate registries so everyone could see who actually owned their companies.

The law came with a deadline: the end of 2020. But no one obeyed it, so it was extended by the British government to 2023. No one obeyed that deadline either, so it was extended again to April 2025. And now? It’s all just a bit embarrassing.

“We must stop the dither and delay of recent years and pierce the veil of anonymity that protects criminals and kleptocrats,” said Margaret Hodge and Andrew Mitchell, architects of the 2018 legislation, back in November last year. But dither and delay persist.

The debate gets caught up in allegations of ignorance, colonialism, arrogance and so on, but it really comes down to one important point: no one in power in Britain cares enough about stopping corruption to take the political and financial hit of overruling the OTs’ own politicians and paying their bills. More than half of the BVI’s budget comes directly from company incorporation fees. What money do you replace that with, if you change the rules so that no one wants to set up shell companies there anymore?

In the case of Anguilla, a surprising amount of money – around $50 million this year, apparently, which is about a third of all its revenues – comes from its domain name, which is the fortuitous .ai. But that’s not an option open to the other OTs, and if they ask too many questions about who’s doing business with them, that business will go elsewhere.

TETHERED TO EL SALVADOR

One business that already has gone elsewhere is Tether, the crypto company that runs the world’s most popular stablecoin USDT, which has almost $150 billion worth in circulation, and incidentally has a domain name -- .io – derived from yet another random imperial fragment, the British Indian Ocean Territory. Previously registered in the BVI, Tether relocated to El Salvador earlier this year after it obtained a license from President Nayib Bukele’s government.

Bukele, whose in his X bio currently describes himself as a “philosopher king”, is much caressed by the American right, who love him for his willingness to indefinitely lock up not just Salvadorans but anyone the U.S. wants to imprison without bothering first to check if they’re guilty or not. Bukele’s methods, the American right says, has made El Salvador safer. But, thanks to journalists from El Faro, we have yet more evidence that the decline in crime that he boasts of may be at least as much to do with secret negotiations with gangsters as it is to do with arresting them. 

“Gangs turned Bukele into a relevant politician,” said El Faro’s editor-in-chief Óscar Martínez. “It is impossible to understand Bukele’s rise to total power without his association with gangs.”

So how does a man who’s previously called himself the “world’s coolest dictator” respond to press reports like these? By threatening to lock up the journalists involved of course, allegedly with investigations under criminal statutes often used against gangsters.

“Treating journalism as a criminal act deprives Salvadorans of essential information,” said Cristina Zahar, Latin America programme coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Prosecutors should abandon these cases now and ensure ‘El Faro’ journalists can safely report on matters of public interest.”

Tether has no problems with El Salvador’s political atmosphere and complexities. It plans to build a 70-storey tower in the capital, San Salvador, which will serve both as its headquarters and as a location for other finance companies. “It is the country of the future,” says Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino. 

The fact that the stablecoin issuer is bedding so comfortably into a place like El Salvador is bad news for people who worry about Tether’s outsized role in enabling global money laundering, but potentially good news for Bukele, who has made crypto a key part of his development plan for his chronically-indebted nation. It’s too early to say whether this has worked – although it’s also too early, no matter what “The Economist” might think, to say that it hasn’t --  but it’s an interesting echo of the British OTs’ twentieth-century model: undercut everyone else’s regulations, enable crime overseas, and make a good living out of it.

It's too much to hope that, as a civilisation, we’d have learned from our mistake sufficiently not to repeat it, but I do hope we’re not still going to be arguing about how to solve the resulting problems in 50 years time.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post How do you solve a problem like the BVI? appeared first on Coda Story.

It happened so quickly.

On Friday afternoon in Delhi, I was at my daughter's school, waiting to pick her up and straining to eavesdrop on knots of parents and -- this being Delhi -- separate knots of household staff. Every tightly bunched group was absorbed by conversation on the only subject anyone in Delhi, and no doubt the rest of India, was talking about: are we going to war with Pakistan?

By Saturday afternoon, my assumption that India and Pakistan would find a way to step back from the brink because they had no other serious choice, seemed wildly optimistic. On the jingoistic, cacophonous, largely unwatchable Indian news channels, there were still reports of drones being shot down and air bases and military infrastructure being attacked. War seemed imminent. So imminent that India’s largest-selling weekly newsmagazine went with “War!” and a battalion of fighter jets on its cover. 

But by five pm on Saturday, Donald Trump announced a complete ceasefire. Before anyone from the Indian or Pakistani government had said anything. Entire nations were caught off guard. The screeching newsreaders, still foaming at the mouth, were outraged – “who moved my war?” 

And then the media swiveled on a dime (rather, a one-rupee coin). Spinning furiously, crazed hamsters on their wheels, the analysts and anchors insisted India had won. In Pakistan, their counterparts were doing much the same. The truth is, both countries had lost 

India and Pakistan had been locked in a clumsy, deadly two-step while the rest of the world looked away. It began on April 22, with a terrorist attack in Pahalgam, Kashmir, in which 26 men, almost all of them Hindu, and singled out for their religious affiliation, were killed. United States Vice President JD Vance, was in India on a “private trip” at the time, with his Indian-American wife and children.

The attack was a provocation that the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist government could not tolerate. Their supporters bayed for vengeance. And Modi, whose personal brand as the protector of the Hindu nation – boasting in campaign speeches about his 56-inch chest – is predicated on him being the leader of a newly vigorous, aggressive India, an emerging superpower, had to respond with overwhelming force.

It took two weeks -- during which India did not provide proof of the Pakistani state's involvement in the April 22 attack beyond an established history of Pakistan’s financing of terror. The country featured on the Financial Action Task Force's grey list between 2018 and 2022, though it insists it has since largely cleaned up its act. Indian retribution came in the form of the bombing of what India described as terrorist camps. This was, Indian officials said, a restrained, responsible response to Pakistan-sponsored terrorism. No military sites, for example, were hit.

Pakistan said civilians were killed and that mosques were bombed. They then retaliated to India's retaliation. And India retaliated to Pakistan’s retaliation against India’s retaliation. Inevitably, there was a retaliation to the retaliation to the retaliation against the retaliation. And so on, until Trump announced the ceasefire. As the bombings intensified, both India and Pakistan insisted they didn't want war and were taking responsible actions to de-escalate. In the warped logic of this fighting, the bombs being dropped actually signaled both countries' understanding that they could go so far and no further.

Initially, the United States, which has played a part in brokering peace in previous clashes between India and Pakistan, seemed content to let both countries duke it out. It’s “none of our business,” said Vance. While Donald Trump seemed to think the dispute over Kashmir was the latest episode of a show that dated back "1,000 years, probably longer." Later, he modified this assessment to mere centuries.

The truth is, this conflict is a product of British colonial rule, of the hastily conceived and disastrously executed partition of India in 1947. The Cliffs notes, with considerable nuance lost through inadequate summary, are as follows: Kashmir, a Muslim-majority state with a Hindu king, wanted to be independent of both India and Pakistan. But when Pakistani forces invaded Kashmir in October, 1947, the king asked India for help and signed an agreement binding Kashmir to the Indian union. 

It led to the first war between Pakistan and India, nations that were born just weeks earlier as the British departed. Under the terms of a United Nations-negotiated ceasefire, India gained control of about two-thirds of Kashmir. But this was temporary until a plebiscite to determine the future of Kashmir was held. This plebiscite never happened. As a result, both countries believe they have an inalienable right to the entirety of Kashmir: India because of the king's decision to sign the instrument of accession; Pakistan because Kashmir is a Muslim-majority state and Pakistan was created as a homeland for the subcontinent's Muslims. In 1965, both countries fought another inconclusive war. 

But as long as India continues to pretend there is a viable military solution to its disputes with Pakistan, the prospect of conflict, if not outright war, remains an ever-present Damoclean threat.

But since 1989, as the Soviet Union collapsed and there was a proliferation of US-funded mujahideen in the region, separatist sentiments in Kashmir spiraled into violent insurgency. India says these militants are a proxy, a tool of the Pakistani deep state. So Kashmir became a theater of both postcolonial and post-Cold War conflict.

Between 1999 and 2019, the U.S. reliably talked both countries off the ledge and leading international diplomatic efforts to get India and Pakistan to back off when overly aggressive gestures and posturing threatened to become kinetic. The U.S. has Cold War-era strategic and security ties with Pakistan but only recently has India become a close partner with an active role to play in containing China’s emerging dominance. India, Australia, Japan and the U.S. are part of the Quad, a loose grouping intended to counter China’s designs on the Indo-Pacific.

Modi and Trump have made several displays of personal friendship, each supporting the other’s election campaigns. But the Trump administration had declined to intervene in current tensions. It was a position of apathy, as if it had no stake in preventing war. For Modi, it must sting that carefully choreographed hugs with Western leaders had not resulted in more diplomatic support for his military action against Pakistan. 

Modi also received little support from institutions. For instance,  India had lobbied for the IMF to withhold funds from Pakistan. But the IMF chose to release $1 billion in loans to Islamabad, even as Pakistan was engaged in artillery exchanges with India. With the U.S. seemingly taking a back seat, Saudi Arabia and Iran had offered to mediate, as had Russia. Even China, which provides over 80% of the Pakistani army's weaponry and also administers part of Kashmir, said it would help broker peace. 

But it was the U.S. that swooped in over the weekend. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio both posted about the negotiations, with Trump even saying he had used trade as leverage to prevent a nuclear war. “Millions of people,” he said, “could have been killed.”

While Pakistan were happy to acknowledge the U.S. role in forcing a truce, Indian diplomats and politicians were either tight-lipped or disapproving. India has long resisted external interference in the Kashmir dispute, insisting that negotiations have to be strictly bilateral. Ultimately, neither India nor Pakistan can afford full-scale war. This is not asymmetrical combat. India may be much larger than Pakistan and conventionally more powerful. It may have a growing economy, while Pakistan is struggling to finance its debts. But, as one British analyst said, if this is a Goliath-David struggle, David has a nuclear weapon in his sling. 

The Trump-brokered ceasefire may only be temporary respite – so temporary, indeed, that barely hours after the agreement was announced, the chief minister of Indian-administered Kashmir posted on X that he had heard explosions in the state capital Srinagar. “What the hell,” he wrote, “just happened to the ceasefire?” But as long as India continues to pretend there is a viable military solution to its disputes with Pakistan, the prospect of conflict, if not outright war, remains an ever-present Damoclean threat.

As an Indian citizen and a parent, I find both governments' confidence that they can toe an invisible line more than a little disconcerting. But, judging by the political and media response to the prospect of war, only a few shared my scepticism. In India, since April 22, there have been very few calls for peace, very few questions about the need for a military response to a terrorist attack, even though bombing Pakistan has not deterred subsequent terrorism.

One of those calls for peace, though, came from Himanshi Narwal, whose husband of six days, an Indian navy officer, was shot in front of her. Narwal, who was photographed kneeling beside her husband's prone body, became a symbol of India's grief and outrage. 

That was before she spoke. Narwal told reporters that she only held the men who had murdered her husband responsible and not all Muslims or all Kashmiris. "We want peace," she said, "and only peace."

This sentiment made her a target of Hindu nationalist scorn on social media. Narwal was excoriated as a "woke secular" – a particularly Indian insult, mixing American right wing culture war tropes with the Indian use of the word "secular" to mock Indian liberals who supposedly kowtow to minorities, particularly Muslims.  

India's initial retaliation was given the code name "Operation Sindoor", a reference to the deep red powder some married Hindu women dab on the parting of their hair or on their foreheads. India's military action, in other words, was being taken on behalf of the women who had lost their husbands on April 22. Women like Himanshi Narwal. Though what she, and others like her, might think is apparently besides the point or even worthy of contempt. 

The contrast between Narwal's dignity and the absurd propaganda peddled by the mainstream Indian media would have been comical if it were not simultaneously so depressing. On Friday evening, a friend, an editor at a national magazine, sent me a collection of screen grabs of headlines in India, mostly from television news. Each claim was remarkable -- Pakistani planes being shot out of the sky, rebels from Balochistan capturing the city of Quetta, the Indian navy bombing Karachi, even reports of a coup -- and each claim was either knowingly false or entirely unverified. On Indian TV screens every night, since Wednesday night when India first bombed its targets in Pakistan, we've been exposed to a tale told by idiots.

 Was it too much to hope for some restraint? But the tone taken by the mainstream media, a mimicking of the abrasive arrogance of Hindu nationalist trolls on social media, was matched by the Indian government. I watched a spokesperson from the BJP, India's governing party, tell a British news channel about Modi's "3E policy -- evaporate, eradicate, eliminate... shameless Pakistan needs to be taught a lesson." Oy vey! 

And now, does the ceasefire mean that the so-called 3E policy has been abandoned? Would the Modi government – which had blocked the few critical, independent voices – have the courage to reimagine its response to Pakistan, to reevaluate the belligerence of its rhetoric, and to instead embrace the inherent strength in India’s secular, constitutional values and enter into constructive dialogue?

The signs are not encouraging. In a late bid to wrest the narrative momentum from Donald Trump, Indian politicians, journalists and commentators spread word of the country’s new approach to terrorism. Modi, having been silent through much of the fighting, elaborated on the “new normal,” in an address to the nation on Monday night. India, he said, would no longer distinguish “between the government sponsoring terrorism and the masterminds of terrorism.” The words were belligerent, the policies no kind of solution. 

Perhaps, India’s wounds are still too raw for self-reflection. But the question remains: Is India going to be held hostage to its own anger? Or will it acknowledge that talks, and people to people contact, must resume.

A version of this story was published in last week’s Sunday Read newsletter. Sign up here.

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When I think back to my time growing up in the 1980s and ‘90s in a small authoritarian Eastern European state bordering Greece, Turkey, Romania and the Black Sea, one scene always springs to mind: arriving at my high school in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, early in the morning to find a queue of sleepy students dutifully waiting to be let in. The girls were in their regulation “prestilka" – a dark blue apron with round white collar, incomparably unflattering and now reminiscent of something from “The Handmaid’s Tale”. The queue had formed because the staff were conducting a spot check on our appearance. Joining the end of the queue, I felt an undercurrent of anxiety. Would I be reprimanded today? What for?

 Living in an authoritarian state is a performative juggling act, an act of camouflage, of deflection, of concealing your true preferences, opinions and thoughts. Blending in, rendering yourself invisible increases your odds of leading a functional life.

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House, watching from London where I now live, I find myself reminded of the self-censoring and isolationist culture of 1980s Bulgaria. Every time I ask friends in the U.S. how they are doing, I receive remarkably familiar, self-distancing responses. “I’m trying to steer clear of all the information,” says one. “I guess I’m going insular and trying to focus on my family and what I can control,” says another. “I can’t cope with the news”, says a third. “I know that sticking our heads in the sand is not helpful,” a fourth one tells me, “but I feel helpless and scared and I’m not sure what I can do. Call it self-preservation.”

And there it is. The antibiotic-resistant superbug I and everyone around me grew up with. I sense it. Smell it. Feel it. Fear.

At my school in Sofia, no one was spared from scrutiny. For girls, three conformity boxes had to be ticked: aprons not too short; nails not too long or painted; hairstyles deemed neat and, if you were particularly unlucky, unceremoniously, publicly checked to be certified free of nits. If the staff decided you had failed on any of these parameters, you were reprimanded. Too many of these and you would find yourself with a reduced mark for “behaviour” at the end of term. If you graduated from school with a less than “excellent” behaviour mark, you could not apply to university, even if you’d achieved the highest possible academic grades. A short apron, fancy nails, messy hair or a smart mouth could cost you your future.

I have always been one to talk back. An ambassador’s daughter who grew up in Bulgaria, Switzerland, Afghanistan and Ethiopia before being accepted into the only English-teaching selective high school in Sofia at the age of 14, I insisted on speaking my mind at every opportunity. It was a bad, even dangerous habit. Freedom of speech in any shape or form was not a concept anyone dared entertain. The periods of terror in the late 1940s and ‘50s had made sure of that, though at the time I knew nothing about them. The terror and multiple purges were a state secret, undiscussed in books and not a topic for even private conversations. Their legacy was an atmosphere of inherited fear and mute obedience.

In hindsight, I realize that what I struggled with most at school was the uniformity of thought and the unwillingness to question the status quo that the teachers demanded from us. The rules were understood, without being explicitly written down – “never talk politics, even with friends and extended family”; “never be heard criticising Todor Zhivkov,” Bulgaria’s leader from 1954 until his eventual removal from office in 1989. There was always a certain distance between people. What we said at home, mild as it was, could not be repeated outside, which meant always being guarded around others. And that is exactly how the ruling Bulgarian Communist Party (BCP) wanted it.

With sorrow, I see now that my American friends, who grew up on the progressive side of the iron curtain, suddenly have much more in common with me than we ever imagined we would. It is hard to comprehend that the United States of America -- that most coveted destination for young Bulgarians who dreamed of basking in unrestrained freedom, self-made wealth and the coolest pop, rap and grunge music scenes of the 1990s – could be clamping down on self-expression in the 21st century. 

Like me, Americans now know what it is to feel an insidious fear of the state. To experience that ever-present fear of punishment and retribution, a fear that incessantly obstructs and eventually destroys social cohesion. A fear that is evidently penetrating deep within the ranks of even the Republican party. Lisa Murkowski, a longtime Republican senator from Alaska, recently made a startling public admission: “We are all afraid,” she confessed at a conference in Anchorage. A courageous statement that reflects the mood of the nation. A national poll from the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School conducted among 2,096 18 to 29 year-olds between the 54th and 66th day of Trump’s second term revealed astonishing levels of fear among young Americans across gender and education status. Six in 10 of those surveyed, whether college-educated or not, admitted to being fearful for the future of America.

In Bulgaria, the trust in those around you, which is the social glue in every society, was stripped away, destroyed through the repeated post-1945 purges. Like Musk’s DOGE purges of the federal government across multiple sectors, these had eliminated or rendered destitute thousands of “bourgeois”, police and civil servants, military personnel, workers and anyone who opposed the ruling party. Informants were encouraged, not unlike Trump’s administration threatening government workers to either report DEI initiatives within their departments or face the “consequences”.

The news of immigrants being deported to El Salvador despite having no criminal records, as well as the recent disappearance of a Venezuelan legal immigrant who had been detained in Texas reminded me of Bulgaria’s Belene labor camp, an island on the Danube whose existence I only learned about long after the communist regime was gone. Thousands of people targeted by the regime were marooned there over the decades, sometimes disappearing altogether, never to be seen again.

Fear of the state affects everything, every relationship. I know, because in my adolescent years it even crept into my relationship with my late father. The son of ethnic Bulgarian refugees from Greece, who had settled in a small southern Bulgarian town in the early 1900s, my father finished his professional career as an ambassador, which placed our family within the small minority of privileged Bulgarians allowed to travel abroad.

Like all those in governmental or high-profile jobs, my father was a member of the BCP. But he was also a compassionate man who truly believed in the ideals of equality and social justice. Unlike many others, he did not use his status to profiteer, taking pride instead in the integrity reflected in our two-bedroom apartment, which I shared with my parents and sister. My parents had no holiday villas, no second flat, and none of the other substantive material possessions typically enjoyed by the nomenklatura.

Kind though he was by nature, my father could be uncharacteristically hard on me. He was particularly critical of my outspokenness and worked hard to tame it during my teens. For years, I took his harsh words at face value and felt somewhat deficient. At the turn of the century, I became one of the hundreds of thousands of young Bulgarians who left Bulgaria to move to the West – the land of freedom, democracy and self-expression. I transformed my deeply instilled feeling of deficiency into hard work and determination to succeed in the most libertarian city of all - London.  I explored unfamiliar ways in which humanity was celebrated in the U.K., including practicing critical and creative thinking, and attending gigs and personal growth courses to name a few. Following a ruptured marriage, I even embarked on personal therapy, which was and perhaps still is a somewhat foreign concept in Bulgaria.  

In therapy I frequently explored the wound that my father’s judgements had inflicted on me, along with my distorted relationship with power, control and visibility derived from the regime with which I grew up. For some time I blamed the patriarchy for my father’s harshness towards my younger self. After all, feisty girls and women have never been in fashion anywhere, at any time.

It was only recently that it dawned on me that this was far from being the whole story. My father wasn’t just conditioned by patriarchy but by authoritarianism too. What he had feared above all was that my desire to name things as they were, to say it as I saw it, would endanger my future in a country that demanded unquestioning loyalty, obedience and conformism. He had been trying to protect me. I was surprised I hadn’t made the connection earlier. As the authoritarian regime in Bulgaria fell at the end of 1989, so did my father’s harsh stance towards my way of expressing myself. He softened dramatically, encouraged me to study, to develop professionally, and travel, his natural kindness coming to the fore as he got older.

Since Trump returned to power in January, many journalists, columnists, political pundits and academics have been stunned by the speed and brutality with which he has grabbed American society by the scruff of the neck and is marching it head down towards what some call authoritarianism, others autocracy, competitive authoritarianism, oligarchy,  patrimonialism, kleptocracy or more pejoratively kakistocracy. Whatever the exact version of the oppressive regime Trump is thundering towards or will be allowed to settle on, the one thing he is already circulating is the currency of fear – the currency in which all authoritarian regimes trade.

To succeed, repression requires submission. What more efficient way to achieve it at national scale than by instilling widespread fear of loss of income, status and freedom, and personal reprisal? In the words of the prominent Bulgarian political commentator Ivan Krastev: “Make people fear the future and democratic institutions are paralysed.” Once fear sets in, the boundaries that protect us from the state’s all-encompassing control can completely crumble.

In authoritarian Bulgaria the state held sway over how you looked, what you learned, and how you behaved, all with a view to ensuring that you complied with the party’s need for a surrender of individual agency. My friends and I still lived our teenage lives, fell in love, slacked on homework and had fun, but we, and our parents, were always looking over our shoulders.

To avoid the danger of any form of organised resistance or independent thinking, extracurricular clubs, beyond the odd choir or orchestra, did not exist in our high schools. Art and music and critical thinking were not part of the curriculum. What was mandatory, however, was introductory military education (IME) in which students were taught how to handle a Kalashnikov.

Reading through the journals I kept between the ages of 16 and 18 has revealed many of the tensions I held deep inside. Amidst the predictable descriptions of my relationships’ peaks and troughs, I discovered much yearning for freedom and longing for resistance and courage. I also discovered fear, humiliation and disempowerment - the polar opposites of freedom and courage. The humiliation and disempowerment did not belong to my generation, but had been inherited, creeping into my worldview through the buried experiences of those before me. My 1989 journal was peppered with quotes from books I had read, alluding to freedom and courage or fear and cowardice:

 “If I am fear-struck and sensible enough

And yet I still die

Do not look for bullets in my skull.

Do not look for a knife in my belly.

Do not look for potassium cyanide in my blood.

Pay attention to my knees.

If you find scars from crawling –this was my death.”

[my translation]

I had copied this from the 1962 poem “The Real Death” by Stefan Tsanev. 

A Bulgarian saying warning against resistance also found its way into the pages of my journal: “Many ahead of their time have been forced to wait for it in very uncomfortable places.” Another Tsanev quote also warns of the cost of rebellion: “The murdered quietly lay under the pedestals, the murderers stood on the pedestals.” But I also copied down a Bulgarian saying condemning the meek acceptance of one’s fate: “Like a bomb hidden in your pocket, silence is dangerous.”

In recent years I have been pondering the damage that Bulgaria’s almost half-century of authoritarianism (preceded by centuries of enslavement under the Ottoman empire) has caused subsequent generations. The three greatest barriers to societal and individual flourishment I have identified are these: the inherited terror of visibility, passed down through the generations, that perpetuates self-repression; the severed trust in institutions and each other which makes democracy permanently volatile; and the underdeveloped ability to ask each other meaningful questions for fear of “prying”, which is a prerequisite for intimacy and social cohesion. Sometimes I close my eyes and fantasise about where Eastern European societies might be if they hadn’t inherited authoritarianism’s straitjacket.

And then I turn my gaze to the U.S. in the hope that this traditionally free society can avoid this crushing straitjacket, no matter how bad things seem now. Having grown up in a regime which institutionalised voicelessness, I find myself in imaginary dialogue with all Americans, and my friends in particular, pleading with all those who understandably feel fearful, worried and consequently apathetic not to mute their voices just yet.

Having lived through authoritarianism with its controlled planned economy, I remain optimistic that the US, the oldest democracy functioning within a free economy, is well placed to resist the Trump administration’s brisk march towards authoritarianism. This would require more individuals, whether CEOs, academics, lawyers, business owners, news journalists, ordinary Americans or any other civil society actors, to be brave and to choose to resist (overtly or covertly), despite feeling fear. In fact, robust research of over 300 violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1900 to 2006 which resulted in government overthrow or territorial liberation shows that a successful campaign for political change requires a remarkably small proportion of the population: just 3.5 percent. In the US this would still amount to over 11 million people mobilising.

It’s been rewarding to witness the power of the free market economy and the voice of the consumer in action in the United States. They have already made a difference by punishing Elon Musk’s Tesla for his widely damaging leadership of DOGE. Market analysts have recently concluded that the 71% year-on-year drop in Tesla profits has been driven at least in part by Musk’s role in the White House, causing a branding crisis for Tesla. Consequently, he will be curtailing his role in DOGE which is exactly what those giving up their Teslas or Tesla orders wanted. This development could have never happened in any planned economy, like the one in Bulgaria during the second part of the 20th century. I hope this news serves as a strong impetus for ordinary Americans who deem themselves powerless to take a stand. For example, what better way to resist than supporting the free press by donating/subscribing to news outlets or to non-profit organisations like CPJ and ICFJ whose mission is to protect press freedom and the truth. In an act of defiance, Sheryl Crow not only publicly discarded her Tesla but also chose to donate to NPR who have been continuously attacked by Trump’s administration.

Under deep state surveillance, you learn not to ask questions or share much about yourself as a way of staying safe. Now I consider it a joyful expression of a free existence to ask questions.

In hindsight I realise that what helped my parents to not profiteer from the corrupt communist system was having moral clarity and actively choosing to act with integrity. In the current context this means choosing whether to be a Harvard or a Columbia University, a Murkowski or a silent Democrat or Republican senator. For remaining neutral is choosing a side, the enabler’s side. The anti-democratic assault Trump is inflicting on American society cannot survive without the apathy of every citizen who chooses to remain silent. To feel more resolute I remind myself of Martin Luther King Jr.’s wise words that “our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”  

One of the most efficient ways in which authoritarianism in Bulgaria managed to maintain obedience was through destroying the existence of small communities. Those who were afraid, worried, or anxious lacked not only town halls to turn to but also local communities where they could just speak to one another. We had no way of finding out what the true preferences of those around us were because we did not meet regularly in bigger groups. So to me, the single most defiant and joy-inducing action an American citizen could take would be to create or participate in activities that strengthen social cohesion at the local level. Whether it’s joining local community social events, choirs, sports activities, arts or other clubs, participation strengthens the social glue that keeps democracy alive at a grassroots level and has the potential to weaken false narratives and government control.

Whenever I went back to Bulgaria during my first decade of living abroad, I was often surprised by how few questions everyone asked each other. At times I felt frustrated and was judgemental, rolling my eyes every time I heard someone admitting to not having asked an important question for fear of being deemed nosy. I had mistaken this underdeveloped skill to ask questions for a lack of interest in those around them. Until one day I realised that this too had been a legacy of authoritarian times. Sharing or finding out the “wrong information” in an era of deep state surveillance could cost you your freedom. You therefore learned not to ask questions or share much about yourself as a way of keeping yourself and your family safe. This insight ignited my passion for deep conversations. Now I consider it a joyful expression of a free existence to ask profound questions. In times of a heightened threat of authoritarianism, asking deeper questions is a way of truly understanding yourself and connecting with those around you. Practicing the art of conversation is a defiance of authoritarianism.

Being creative, producing any form of art (and yes, everyone is intrinsically creative!) and supporting arts institutions is another powerful form of resistance against authoritarianism. To keep us subservient, my generation of Bulgarians were deprived of the opportunity to express themselves creatively throughout high-school education. This came at a high cost to us all, the cost of believing that being creative was the preserve of the lucky few.  By its very definition, creativity resists conformity and repression while neuroscience tells us that creativity is also an antidote to anxiety. Embracing our creativity is a way of maintaining a free spirit.

The lack of freedom of speech in authoritarian Bulgaria was reflected in the news media being reduced to a propaganda machine. Its sole role was to legitimise those in power every day and in every way. For this reason, I feel a twinge of sadness every time I hear my friends anywhere in the world voicing their temptation to completely switch off from the news. Knowing the truth is not a given, but a consequence of tenacious and hard-fought journalism operating in a functioning democracy. Turning away from the news is exactly what authoritarian leaders like Trump want us to do because it enables them to act without restraint. While I understand the need to limit the consumption of breaking news as a way of protecting our mental health, I know too well how profoundly discomfiting a world with no truthful news can be. Not switching off the news is perhaps the most subtle yet powerful way to defy authoritarianism.

Like many around me, I too sometimes find it challenging not to feel defeatist and to remain hopeful for the future of my children. When such moments descend on me I take solace in their transience and, more importantly, in history. I look back and remind myself that no dictator, tyrant or autocrat has ever irreversibly crushed the human spirit or won the long-term battle for a better world and greater justice.

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Pretty much everyone in Brussels has had it in for Malta’s “Citizenship by Investment programme ever since it launched a decade ago, but it took the European Court of Justice to finally kill it, on the basis that it’s illegal to make acquisition of a passport a “mere commercial transaction”. “Such ‘commercialisation’ of citizenship is incompatible with the basic concept of Union citizenship,” the court declared.

On one level, I am fully onboard with the widespread rejoicing that has followed the decision, and anything that annoys ex-Maltese prime minister Joseph Muscat is clearly an unalloyed good. I’m also not persuaded by the argument from passport vendors Henley & Partners (who helped design the programme) that this decision was an infringement of national sovereignty. A Maltese passport gives its holder rights to live, work, and travel anywhere in the European Union, so European authorities should have a say, not least considering some of the questionable people who’ve obtained, or rather bought, citizenship in the past.

However, at the risk of being one of those people, I want to point out that this is not the knockout victory that it looks like. 

It’s a basic principle of the offshore world that I called “Moneyland” in a previous book that if rich people perceive something as onerous – taxes, transparency, democratic oversight, legal accountability, alimony -- they’ll find a way to get out of it. I have little to no sympathy for any of this, with the one partial exception of citizenship. 

It is undeniably unfair that someone like me – born in Britain, with one Canadian parent – has access to two super useful passports, whereas someone born in, say, Palestine, Nigeria or Bangladesh is stuck queuing for visas from countries that charge a fortune for the application, and may not provide them anyway.

The golden passport schemes of countries like St Kitts and Nevis, Turkey and, er, Nauru all sprang up in response to demand from people rich enough to travel the world but inconvenienced by borders (or by law enforcement), and that demand isn’t going away just because formal schemes like that in Malta are abolished. Instead, it will become informal.

So, I would like European authorities to now pay attention to places like Italy, Romania and Poland, which award citizenship to people with an ancestral link to the country, or to people from places that were once within the borders of the country. In Romania’s case, that includes parts of modern-day Bulgaria, Moldova, Hungary and Ukraine. How scrupulous are they being about the authenticity of the documents being provided? How sure can we be that cash isn’t changing hands? I hear an awful lot of rumours. 

Malta’s problem may have been that it made the commercial aspect too obvious, and the lessons its politicians will learn is that they should just put the word out that proving Maltese descent will be easy if you pay enough money to the right people. Also, Vienna still sells passports to people who make exceptional contributions to Austria, why isn’t the European Commission going after them?

A FREE PASS FOR THE PIG BUTCHERS?

The latest iteration of anti-corruption measures in the United States seems to go like this: Prolonged discussion in Washington, with extensive stakeholder consideration; an injunction from a judge in Texas at the request of some random business which doesn’t like having to do paperwork; the federal government deciding to give up on regulation. 

We saw this earlier this year with a judge blocking the implementation of the Corporate Transparency Act, and may be seeing it again with attempts to regulate all-cash property purchases being stymied. We now await word from the administration to see if they’ll give up on this too.

In some ways, this is good. Anti-money-laundering regulations can be extremely intrusive and often lack democratic oversight, so a bit more discussion can help legitimacy. But in other ways this is bad, not least in how it plays into a growing perception that the United States is retreating from any efforts to enforce rules around financial crime. It’s even been told off by the U.K. about violating a global anti-bribery treaty, which must have raised some eyebrows.

I hope though that the U.S. authorities will stay the course with their designation of Cambodia’s Huione Group as being of “primary money laundering concern”. As successive studies by Elliptic have shown, Huione is the largest illicit marketplace of all time, and central to much of the cyber-enabled wave of fraud given the nasty name of “pig butchering”. According to Elliptic, Huione group companies have taken in at least $98 billion in crypto assets to date, and anything that prevents them from operating freely is good.

HITTING RUSSIA WHERE IT HURTS

When Donald Trump did not include Russia in his big chart of which countries would face tariffs, it looked pretty odd, particularly given the fury with which he went after penguins and seals. However, the economic turmoil unleashed by “liberation day” does appear to be hitting Russia hard nonetheless, since lower oil prices threaten to undermine its state budget.

It’s a good time therefore to read this excellent article by Tom Keatinge about Western sanctions on Russia’s oil industry, how Moscow has responded to them, and what should now be done. With its shadow fleet of aged tankers insured – if at all – by under-capitalised companies, Russia has found new customers, above all in India and China, and managed to keep earning the petrodollars it needs to keep its war going. Now, it not only continues to pose a strategic threat to the West, but also a very significant environmental threat as well.

“Yet despite these risks and Russia’s disregard for conventions and norms related to safety on the high seas, the West’s unwillingness to act decisively in the face of the Kremlin’s flouting of international maritime conventions means that Russia is able to operate with impunity,” Keatinge writes. His injunction is to “Remember the Original Mission”, and that applies to all sanctions. 

Western countries imposed restrictions on hundreds of individuals and companies in the months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine with the aim of crippling the Kremlin’s war effort. This clearly hasn’t worked. I would like to see a discussion – with the same urgency as the initial sanctions were discussed – about what to do next. Ukrainians are dying every day, and the mission is to save their lives. We need to remember it.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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In early April, I found myself in the breathtaking Chiesa di San Francesco al Prato in Perugia, Italy talking about men who are on a mission to achieve immortality.

As sunlight filtered through glass onto worn stone walls, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie recounted a dinner with a Silicon Valley mogul who believes drinking his son's blood will help him live forever.

"We've got it wrong," Bryan Johnson told Chris. "God didn't create us. We're going to create God and then we're going to merge with him."

This wasn't hyperbole. It's the worldview taking root among tech elites who have the power, wealth, and unbounded ambition to shape our collective future.

Working on “Captured: The Secret Behind Silicon Valley's AI Takeover” podcast, which we presented in that church in Perugia, we realized we weren't just investigating technology – we were documenting a fundamentalist movement with all the trappings of prophecy, salvation, and eternal life. And yet, talking about it from the stage to my colleagues in Perugia, I felt, for a second at least, like a conspiracy theorist. Discussing blood-drinking tech moguls and godlike ambitions in a journalism conference felt jarring, even inappropriate. I felt, instinctively, that not everyone was willing to hear what our reporting had uncovered. The truth is, these ideas aren’t fringe at all – they are the root of the new power structures shaping our reality.

“Stop being so polite,” Chris Wylie urged the audience, challenging journalists to confront the cultish drive for transcendence, the quasi-religious fervor animating tech’s most powerful figures. 

We've ignored this story, in part at least, because the journalism industry had chosen to be “friends” with Big Tech, accepting platform funding, entering into “partnerships,” and treating tech companies as potential saviors instead of recognizing the fundamental incompatibility between their business models and the requirements of a healthy information ecosystem, which is as essential to journalism as air is to humanity.

In effect, journalism has been complicit in its own capture. That complicity has blunted our ability to fulfil journalism's most basic societal function: holding power to account.

As tech billionaires have emerged as some of the most powerful actors on the global stage, our industry—so eager to believe in their promises—has struggled to confront them with the same rigor and independence we once reserved for governments, oligarchs, or other corporate powers.

This tension surfaced most clearly during a panel at the festival when I challenged Alan Rusbridger, former editor-in-chief of “The Guardian” and current Meta Oversight Board member, about resigning in light of Meta's abandonment of fact-checking. His response echoed our previous exchanges: board membership, he maintains, allows him to influence individual cases despite the troubling broader direction.

This defense exposes the fundamental trap of institutional capture. Meta has systematically recruited respected journalists, human rights defenders, and academics to well-paid positions on its Oversight Board, lending it a veneer of credibility. When board members like Rusbridger justify their participation through "minor victories," they ignore how their presence legitimizes a business model fundamentally incompatible with the public interest.

What once felt like slow erosion now feels like a landslide, accelerated by broligarchs who claim to champion free speech while their algorithms amplify authoritarians.

Imagine a climate activist serving on an Exxon-established climate change oversight board, tasked with reviewing a handful of complaints while Exxon continues to pour billions into fossil fuel expansion and climate denial. 

Meta's oversight board provides cover for a platform whose design and priorities fundamentally undermine our shared reality. The "public square" - a space for listening and conversation that the internet once promised to nurture but is now helping to destroy - isn't merely a metaphor, it's the essential infrastructure of justice and open society.

Trump's renewed attacks on the press, the abrupt withdrawal of U.S. funding for independent media around the world, platform complicity in spreading disinformation, and the normalization of hostility toward journalists have stripped away any illusions about where we stand. What once felt like slow erosion now feels like a landslide, accelerated by broligarchs who claim to champion free speech while their algorithms amplify authoritarians.

The Luxury of Neutrality

If there is one upside to the dire state of the world, it’s that the fog has lifted. In Perugia, the new sense of clarity was palpable. Unlike last year, when so many drifted into resignation, the mood this time was one of resolve. The stakes were higher, the threats more visible, and everywhere I looked, people were not just lamenting what had been lost – they were plotting and preparing to defend what matters most.

One unintended casualty of this new clarity is the old concept of journalistic objectivity. For decades, objectivity was held up as the gold standard of our profession – a shield against accusations of bias. But as attacks on the media intensify and the very act of journalism becomes increasingly criminalized and demonized around the world, it’s clear that objectivity was always a luxury, available only to a privileged few. For many who have long worked under threat – neutrality was never an option. Now, as the ground shifts beneath all of us, their experience and strategies for survival have become essential lessons for the entire field.

That was the spirit animating our “Am I Black Enough?” panel in Perugia, which brought together three extraordinary Black American media leaders, with me as moderator.

“I come out of the Black media tradition whose origins were in activism,” said Sara Lomax, co-founder of URL Media and head of WURD, Philadelphia’s oldest Black talk radio station. She reminded us that the first Black newspaper in America was founded in 1827 - decades before emancipation - to advocate for the humanity of people who were still legally considered property.

Karen McMullen, festival director of Urbanworld, spoke to the exhaustion and perseverance that define the Black American experience: “We would like to think that we could rest on the successes that our parents and ancestors have made towards equality, but we can’t. So we’re exhausted but we will prevail.”

And as veteran journalist and head of the Maynard Institute Martin Reynolds put it, “Black struggle is a struggle to help all. What’s good for us tends to be good for all. We want fair housing, we want education, we want to be treated with respect.”

Near the end of our session, an audience member challenged my role as a white moderator on a panel about Black experiences. This moment crystallized how the boundaries we draw around our identities can both protect and divide us. It also highlighted exactly why we had organized the panel in the first place: to remind us that the tools of survival and resistance forged by those long excluded from "objectivity" are now essential for everyone facing the erosion of old certainties.

The Power of Protected Spaces

If there’s one lesson from those who have always lived on the frontlines and who never had the luxury of neutrality – it’s that survival depends on carving out spaces where your story, your truth, and your community can endure, even when the world outside is hostile.

That idea crystallized for me one night in Perugia, when during a dinner with colleagues battered by layoffs, lawsuits, and threats far graver than those I face, someone suggested we play a game: “What gives you hope?” When it was my turn, I found myself talking about finding hope in spaces where freedom lives on. Spaces that can always be found, no matter how dire the circumstances. 

I mentioned my parents, dissidents in the Soviet Union, for whom the kitchen was a sanctuary for forbidden conversations. And Georgia, my homeland – a place that has preserved its identity through centuries of invasion because its people fought, time and again, for the right to write their own story. Even now, as protesters fill the streets to defend the same values my parents once whispered about in the kitchen, their resilience is a reminder that survival depends on protecting the spaces where you can say who you are.

But there’s a catch: to protect the spaces where you can say who you are, you first have to know what you stand for – and who stands with you. Is it the tech bros who dream of living forever, conquering Mars, and who rush to turn their backs on diversity and equity at the first opportunity? Or is it those who have stood by the values of human dignity and justice, who have fought for the right to be heard and to belong, even when the world tried to silence them? 

As we went around the table, each of us sharing what gave us hope, one of our dinner companions, a Turkish lawyer, offered a metaphor in response to my point about the need to protect spaces. “In climate science,” she said, “they talk about protected areas – patches of land set aside so that life can survive when the ecosystem around it collapses. They don’t stop the storms, but they give something vital a chance to endure, adapt, and, when the time is right, regenerate.”

That's what we need now: protected areas for uncomfortable truths and complexity. Not just newsrooms, but dinner tables, group chats, classrooms, gatherings that foster unlikely alliances - anywhere we can still speak honestly, listen deeply, and dare to imagine.

More storms will come. More authoritarians will rise. Populist strongmen and broligarchs will keep fragmenting our shared reality.

But if history has taught us anything – from Soviet kitchens to Black newspapers founded in the shadow of slavery - it’s that carefully guarded spaces where stories and collective memory are kept alive have always been the seedbeds of change.

When we nurture these sanctuaries of complex truth against all odds, we aren't just surviving. We're quietly cultivating the future we wish to see.

And in times like these, that's not just hope - it's a blueprint for renewal.

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According to Oxfam, In its annual survey of inequality, “there’s never been a better time to be a billionaire.” The rise in monopolies, inheritances, and soaring asset prices means global inequality, Oxfam argues, is now close to where it was at the peak of Western imperialism.  

But this is not the impression you receive from interviews with individual billionaires, such as Egypt’s Nassef Sawiris. He told the FT that while he would always be in Britain’s debt for having given him a home when he was threatened by the Muslim Brotherhood, he was now leaving for Italy because British taxes had become too onerous. It’s a stance that reminds me of this unimprovable scene from “The Simpsons Movie”. Sawiris too is a rich man who wants to give something back – just not the money.

A ROMAN TAX HOLIDAY

“I don’t know any person in my circle,” Sawiris says, “who is not moving this April, or next April if [their children] have a school year or something like that.” 

His net worth has increased from $3.7 billion in 2016 to $9.6 billion now, which means he has a lot of worldwide income. Fortunately his new residency in Italy means he won’t have to pay tax on any of it. People who are resident in Italy only pay tax on income they earn in the country, with taxes on income earned elsewhere being replaced by a flat payment of 200,000 euros. If your tax bill is likely to be substantially higher, it’s an attractive option. Attractive enough to persuade some senior bankers from the City of London to move to Milan.

 It is a “non-dom” system copied from a centuries-old British approach that is finally being abolished at the end of this month, hence the panicked reports about an “exodus” of the ultra wealthy from Britain. 

Tax policy tends to go in waves, with governments offering tax breaks to rich people, then abolishing them – as Spain has recently done -- when the ensuing influx drives up house prices and becomes electorally unsustainable. All this new money pouring into Italy will presumably have the same effect, and the same consequences. So there’s a definite advantage for a government that does not have to worry about elections, like that of Abu Dhabi, which has – in the words of Sawiris, who has residency in the emirate as well as in Italy -- “English law without English weather”.

That isn’t entirely true. Yes, the Abu Dhabi Global Market is governed by English common law, with a wonderful selection of foreign judges, but it is a system that is only accessible to people who can afford it. For others who live in the emirate – including the 132,000 people estimated in 2021 to be living in conditions of slavery, one of the highest rates in the world – English common law very much does not apply. Perhaps the place could be better described as allowing the rich to enjoy English rights without English responsibilities, and you can see why that might be a popular prospect.

But why should the United Arab Emirates get all the fun, with dollar millionaires flocking to its sands? Vying for the attention of the wealthy, Donald Trump launched a “gold card” visa, to facilitate the entry of the only immigrants he approves of – wealthy ones. A gold card offers residency and an accelerated path to citizenship for about $5 million. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick claims he sold 1,000 of them in short order, apparently raising $5 billion in a single day even though there is no official application process in place. Incidentally, buyers of Trump’s gold card visas will, as in Italy, reportedly only have to pay tax on their U.S. earnings, not their international income.

But experts are sceptical. For starters, the U.S. president can’t just create new immigration routes. That’s Congress’s job. Trump will also struggle to provide the tax breaks available in countries such as Italy (and which used to attract people to the U.K). And the United States is very much not offering the kind of stability that Abu Dhabi is right now.

“Ever since the US election and especially since the inauguration and flood of executive orders, I have seen a dramatic uptick in the number of wealthy American families who have retained me to secure second residences/citizenships,” said David Lesperance, a global tax and immigration expert. He wrote an analysis of the gold card and concluded that the only major group of wealthy people likely to use it would be American citizens who could renounce their citizenship then apply for a card as a way out of future tax liability. Even that would depend on legislation getting through Congress. “The Trump card is dead on arrival because there is no viable market,” he told me.

HOW NOT TO RETURN STOLEN MONEY

I’ve written before about the difficulties that Texan lawyer Jim Kingman has faced in trying to prosecute corruption cases in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a far flung US territory with a penchant for baroque money laundering schemes. but this week there’s good news.

“I really hope this puts to bed the idea that people of the CNMI do not care about corruption, do not care about how public money is spent,” said Kingman, “because they do, and the attentiveness demonstrated by this jury shows they do regardless of the outcome.”

 There’s less happy news from Belgium, however, despite the positive announcement that it had seized two hundred million corruptly-obtained dollars. The cash was the fruit of bribes paid to Gulnara Karimova, daughter of the former president of Uzbekistan, to approve telecoms schemes. It is always hard to find a way to return such cash to its rightful owners, because you don’t want it just to be stolen by senior officials again, but Belgium seems to have chosen a particularly bad way to do it.

“There is a significant risk that the Uzbek authorities will use the repatriated funds to serve the personal interests of the ruling elite and their associates. Despite some reforms under President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, state corruption, nepotism, conflicts of interest, favouritism and rent seeking remain systemic and widespread,” note the Uzbek Forum for Human Rights and Central Asia Due Diligence in a joint statement.

Considering the very large amount of seized Russian funds currently held in Belgium, it is important that Brussels ups its game before any of that is confiscated, and potentially “returned” to the very people who stole it in the first place.
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Regular readers will know I dislike Transparency International’s flagship Corruption Perceptions Index, but my only objection to TI’s interesting new Opacity in Real Estate Ownership index is the acronym. Honestly, who thought OREO was appropriate here? Own up. 

Kleptocrats love buying property, partly because it’s a good way to get rid of a lot of money at once, but mainly because it tends to be both a good investment and gives one a nice place to live. So kudos to the authors of this report for showing which countries aren’t doing enough to keep the kleptocrats out. 

“Real estate has long been known as the go-to avenue for criminals and the corrupt for laundering their ill-gotten gains. Seeking security for their investments, they often target the world’s most attractive markets to place their dirty money,” the report states.

Many countries can be a bit lax about cracking down on these purchases, because they see them as useful investment into their economies. In fact, they have a bad habit of offering golden visas alongside the property to further incentivise purchases, although some countries – including, earlier this month, Spain – have begun to realise these are not the convenient source of free money they were presented as, precipitating as they do housing shortages and rising rents.

TI divided its analysis into two halves, highlighting not just flaws in the anti-money laundering architecture, but also in the availability of data. If journalists, analysts or activists can’t see who owns what, then no one can tell if kleptocrats have been allowed to sneak through the net. It’s worth reading in full, particularly because of the way it shows that these two halves of the problem feed off each other, for good and ill. 

South Africa, Singapore and France get singled out for praise, with the worst performers – Australia, the United States and South Korea – losing out because they were marked down dramatically on the weakness of their anti-money-laundering protections. When it came to the opacity of ownership information, the worst offenders were Japan, India and the United Arab Emirates (surprise! Okay, not at all a surprise).

I hope that this report informs national and international discussions about fighting kleptocracy. But I also hope someone points out that TI needs a better acronym before OREO becomes entrenched. My suggestion for a new name, after literally minutes of intense thought, would be Lax Ownership Of Property Hurts Ordinary Law-Abiding Entities (LOOPHOLE). 

Although I concede that “entities” isn’t a great word at the end there. Neither is “lax” at the beginning, to be honest. 

WITH ‘FRIENDS’ LIKE THESE

While on the subject of acronyms, thank you to a reader for alerting me to the existence of the “Mobilizing and Enhancing Georgia’s Options for Building Accountability,
Resilience, and Independence” bill, which has been put forward by a bipartisan group of US congresspeople. I am a sucker for a daft acronym, and suspect this is the first time a Georgian word has featured in a proposed piece of American legislation. “Megobari” being, of course, Georgian for “friend”.

Georgia has been suffering from political turbulence for some time, with the Georgian Dream political party – backed by the country’s richest man, the Russophile oligarch Bidzina Ivanishvili -- cementing control over the country. Transparency International’s Georgian branch has been publishing a list of high-level officials who hold what it considers to be questionable wealth. There are worrying signs that Western companies are happily enabling what’s happening in the South Caucasus. Georgia used to be a rare success story when it came to combating corruption, as well as a staunch Western ally in a difficult part of the world.

We would be fools to let it slip back to its bad old ways, without at least trying to arrest the slide a little, so I hope the Megobari bill makes some progress. “This bill provides Georgian Dream officials with a choice to abandon the would-be dictator Ivanishvili or face sanctions,” said Congressman Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina. With the “MEGOBARI” Act now being approved, it marks at least legislative support for Georgia’s EU-leaning democratic aspirations.

WHO NEEDS ENEMIES?

And sticking with acronyms, the House and Senate bills put forward to (under-)regulate the stablecoin industry, and which Donald Trump wants rushed through by August, have the acronyms STABLE and GENIUS, which is witty if you like that kind of thing. 

Back in the latter days of Trump’s first term, Representative Brendan Boyle (Democrat of Pennsylvania) introduced the STABLE GENIUS bill, to try to force the president to undergo a mental acuity test. There’s probably some deep lesson in the fact that an acronym that was intended to mock Trump in his first term is being used to flatter him in his second. But frankly it’s all too depressing to contemplate, so let’s move on.

Though onto a topic that’s also depressing. Here’s an interesting column about how Russian oligarchs are apparently back in the market for New York real estate. It’s been a tough few years for rich Russians, since sanctions have forced them to stay away from their traditional playgrounds in London, Manhattan and the south of France.

But, according to real estate brokers in New York at least, they’re back. “We’re seeing a lot of Russian nationals,” a broker said. “I’ve had five Russians look at properties in the $10 million to $20 million range in the past few weeks -- condos and townhouses.” Over the last couple of years, the broker confirmed, “oligarchs couldn’t buy anything in the U.S., and Putin put pressure on Russians not to buy here or in Europe.”

I’m a little bit suspicious of the claim that Russians are once more hunting for NYC real estate, since I think it would be a foolish oligarch who trusted a large amount of money to there being any stability in U.S. policy towards Russia. But if it is the case, it does highlight some of the issues raised by the OREO (ugh!) index, particularly in the light of the Trump White House’s decisions to scrap much of the anti-corruption architecture. 

That said, I wouldn’t expect much dirty money to be coming from Russians at the moment. Russian buyers have been drying up in Turkey and the UAE, which suggest the Russian economy is not generating the kind of cash that leads to property splurges, not least with U.S. tariffs leading to potentially lower oil prices. In my view, real estate brokers might do better to look more towards the old faithful klepto-gushers of South America and China.

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I visited the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands a couple of years ago, intrigued by its curious bad luck in repeatedly being struck by massive gaming and money laundering scandals, like this one and this one. In case you’re not au fait with the CNMI, it’s a US territory north of Guam, which is best known as the place the Enola Gay and the Bockscar departed from on their way to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It's also the current home of Jim Kingman, a Texan lawyer who was invited to the commonwealth in 2023 to act as special prosecutor in a baroque corruption scandal featuring former ex-Governor Ralph Torres, who had been acquitted along party lines in impeachment proceedings in the islands’ senate the year before.

A LESSON FROM SAIPAN

And for Kingman, it’s been basically downhill from there. His attempts to investigate, subpoena or prosecute have been frustrated at every turn by a local elite that’s decided it doesn’t really want him to make any progress. “Where are the feds? Where is the oversight? Where are the ethics committees? Where is the bar? What are we even doing out here?” he asked in a fed-up Facebook post, a year into the corruption trial, with almost no progress made.

With the change in government in Washington, DC, Kingman is clearly concerned about the future of his mission on the islands, and has given an interview to a local journalist who also described the sheer extent of obstruction that Kingman has faced. It’s a bitter read, but it has a defiant tone, a commitment to fighting corruption, that leaves an optimistic aftertaste.

“One promise that I can make is that I won’t quit,” Kingman said. “I can’t promise the desired results in a process I don’t have control over. There is a fundamental change that needs to happen to set up a more sustainable government and that will have to come from the people here. The forces that I have been facing have made it clear that these changes will not be received from an outsider.”

Kingman is just doing his job as a lawyer, but the reason I single him out is that he’s looking pretty unusual among American lawyers at the moment. Faced with hostile politicians, Kingman is choosing to fight. Far better paid, better networked and more powerful lawyers than him are choosing to take a different route and roll over when threatened. 

I’m glad Kingman is sticking to his principles, and wish him luck. If anyone hasn’t read about what Pakistani lawyers did over a decade ago to preserve judicial independence in the face of an interfering autocrat, I highly recommend this piece. Faced with far tougher circumstances than those confronting New York’s white-shoe firms, Pakistan’s lawyers and judges took their struggle to the streets and found that most people are sympathetic to the idea of an independent judiciary that can act as a constraint on a dictatorial, power-hungry executive.

SLOW PROGRESS

Of course, lawyers can take to the streets. But the authorities’ chronic neglect of offices that investigate and prosecute corruption and financial crime has critically hampered their effectiveness. 

The U.K. non-profit “Spotlight on Corruption” has produced a really useful dashboard to track how the British authorities have fared in their efforts against financial crime. Long story short – it’s been pretty bad. If anyone needed proof that underfunding investigative agencies for years and years was an ineffective way to tackle complex criminality, then here it is.

And more evidence has been provided by Transparency International UK’s Ben Cowdock who has produced a fascinating summary of the progress the British authorities are making in reforming its corporate registry. Long story short – it’s not going very quickly. 

With an assessment by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on the horizon, the “pressure is on to get Companies House reform right,” Cowdock notes. The FATF sets international standards for tackling money laundering and runs mutual assessments of its members on a regular timetable, and the UK is due to be assessed in December 2027. Before that, however, in February 2026, will be the assessment of the United States and there could be fireworks.

MADE EVEN SLOWER

Donald Trump has just pardoned a corporation for the first time. He decided to cancel the judgement against the founders of a crypto trading company that was fined $100 million last year. Authorities said the fine reflected the expectation that the digital assets industry “takes seriously its responsibilities in the regulated financial industry and its duties to develop and adhere to a culture of compliance.” But Trump appears to have given up on enforcing corporate transparency, which is a central pillar of the FATF’s approach to tackling illicit finance.

“What the getaway car is to a bank heist, the anonymous company often is to a fraud scheme,” said Transparency International U.S. in this useful factsheet of cases in which American shell companies have enabled fraud and financial crime. The Trump administration’s response to this has been to not only do nothing, but to stop what was already being done. There has not yet been a time when the American government has so egregiously flouted the FATF’s core principles. And the U.S. was central to crafting FATF back in the late 1980s, so we are drifting into uncharted and rocky waters. It's hard to imagine the FATF approving of what’s happening, and harder to imagine this White House reacting well to being criticised, so you’d hope the FATF is preparing for the fallout. 

If it is, however, it’s not showing any sign of being ready for battle. Its most recent publication is almost aggressively dull. And the latest public pronouncement from its president suggests that, while she might have some thoughts about the arrangement of the deckchairs, she’s not got much to say about the iceberg up ahead.

I am personally not a huge fan of the FATF, which has been very good at producing documents and very bad at stopping money laundering. In fact, I sometimes wonder if money laundering experts aren’t the modern day equivalent of the self-perpetuating lawyers lampooned by Charles Dickens in “Bleak House”. “The one great principle of the English law is,” Dickens wrote, “to make business for itself.” Still, we might find we’ll miss the FATF if it’s gone. 

AND FINALLY, WHAT IS A KLEPTOCRACY?

I was in Oxford last Thursday to chair an event for Professor John Heathershaw and Tom Mayne, two of the authors of Indulging Kleptocracy, a book about how British professionals have helped foreign thieves and crooks to steal, keep, protect and spend their fortunes. The week before I was in Washington and had lunch with Jodi Vittori, professor at Georgetown University, and author of this recent piece in Foreign Policy headlined “Is America a kleptocracy?”.

These are noted experts on kleptocracy, with lots of very interesting things to say, but they have different definitions of what the word means. In the U.K., Heathershaw and Mayne use it to describe the multinational networks that allow corrupt officials to steal money from places like Nigeria or Kazakhstan, launder it offshore, and spend it in London, the French Riviera or Miami. In the United States, however, Vittori and Casey Michel use it to describe a system of government (like a corrupt version of autocracy, democracy or any other -cracy).

I think these two definitions are the sign of something quite interesting. The United States has so much diversity in terms of how wealth is treated between individual states that crooks and thieves are able to build a kleptocracy within just one country. And the task just became easier, with a specialized team at the Justice Department investigating kleptocrats’ deals and assets now deemed unnecessary by the Trump administration. Not entirely surprisingly, the team’s investigations had irritated some of Trump’s closest advisors and allies.

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In April last year I was in Perugia, at the annual international journalism festival. I was sitting in a panel session about whether AI marked the end of journalism, when a voice note popped up on my Signal. 

It came from Christopher Wylie. He’s a data scientist and the whistleblower who cracked open the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. I had just started working with him on a new investigation into AI. Chris was supposed to be meeting me, but he had found himself trapped in Dubai in a party full of Silicon Valley venture capitalists.

“I don’t know if you can hear me — I’m in the toilet at this event, and people here are talking about longevity, how to live forever, but also prepping for when people revolt and when society gets completely undermined,” he had whispered into his phone. “You have in another part of the world, a bunch of journalists talking about how to save democracy. And here, you've got a bunch of tech guys thinking about how to live past democracy and survive.”

A massive storm and a once-in-a-generation flood had paralyzed Dubai when Chris was on a layover on his way to Perugia. He couldn’t leave. And neither could the hundreds of tech guys who were there for a crypto summit. The freakish weather hadn’t stopped them partying, Chris told me over a frantic Zoom call. 

“You're wading through knee-deep water, people are screaming everywhere, and then…  What do all these bros do? They organize a party. It's like the world is collapsing outside and yet you go inside and it's billionaires and centimillionaires having a party,” he said. “Dubai right now is a microcosm of the world. The world is collapsing outside and the people are partying.”

Chris and I eventually managed to meet up. And for over a year we worked together on a podcast that asks what is really going on inside the tech world.  We looked at how the rest of us —  journalists, artists, nurses, businesses, even governments — are being captured by big tech’s ambitions for the future and how we can fight back. 

Mercy was a content moderator for Meta. She was paid around a dollar an hour for work that left her so traumatized that she couldn't sleep. And when she tried to unionize, she was laid off.

Our reporting took us around the world from the lofty hills of Twin Peaks in San Francisco to meet the people building AI models, to the informal settlements of Kenya to meet the workers training those models.

One of these people was Mercy Chimwani, who we visited in her makeshift house with no roof on the outskirts of Nairobi. There was mud beneath our feet, and above you could see the rainclouds through a gaping hole where the unfinished stairs met the sky. When it rained, Mercy told us, water ran right through the house. It’s hard to believe, but she worked for Meta. 

Mercy was a content moderator, hired by the middlemen Meta used to source employees. Her job was to watch the internet’s most horrific images and video –  training the company’s system so it can automatically filter out such content before the rest of us are exposed to it. 

She was paid around a dollar an hour for work that left her so traumatized that she couldn’t sleep. And when she and her colleagues tried to unionize, she was laid off. Mercy was part of the invisible, ignored workforce in the Global South that enables our frictionless life online for little reward. 

Of course, we went to the big houses too — where the other type of tech worker lives. The huge palaces made of glass and steel in San Francisco, where the inhabitants believe the AI they are building will one day help them live forever, and discover everything there is to know about the universe. 

In Twin Peaks, we spoke to Jeremy Nixon, the creator of AGI House San Francisco (AGI for Artificial General Intelligence). Nixon described an apparently utopian future, a place where we never have to work, where AI does everything for us, and where we can install the sum of human knowledge into our brains. “The intention is to allow every human to know everything that’s known,” he told me. 

Later that day, we went to a barbecue in Cupertino and got talking to Alan Boehme, once a chief technology officer for some of the biggest companies in the world, and now an investor in AI startups. Boehme told us how important it was, from his point of view, that tech wasn’t stymied by government regulation. “We have to be worried that people are going to over-regulate it. Europe is the worst, to be honest with you,” he said. “Let's look at how we can benefit society and how this can help lead the world as opposed to trying to hold it back.”

I asked him if regulation wasn’t part of the reason we have democratically elected governments, to ensure that all people are kept safe, that some people aren’t left behind by the pace of change? Shouldn’t the governments we elect be the ones deciding whether we regulate AI and not the people at this Cupertino barbecue?

“You sound like you're from Sweden,” Boehme responded. “I'm sorry, that's social democracy. That is not what we are here in the U. S. This country is based on a Constitution. We're not based on everybody being equal and holding people back. No, we're not in Sweden.” 

As we reported for the podcast, we came to a gradual realization – what’s being built in Silicon Valley isn’t just artificial intelligence, it’s a way of life — even a religion. And it’s a religion we might not have any choice but to join. 

In January, the Vatican released a statement in which it argued that we’re in danger of worshiping AI as God. It's an idea we'd discussed with Judy Estrin, who worked on building some of the earliest iterations of the internet. As a young researcher at Stanford in the 1970s, Estrin was building some of the very first networked connections. She is no technophobe, fearful of the future, but she is worried about the zealotry she says is taking over Silicon Valley.

What if they truly believe humans are replaceable, that traditional concepts of humanity are outdated, that a technological "god" should supersede us? These aren't just ideological positions – they're the foundations for the world being built around us.

“If you worship innovation, if you worship anything, you can't take a step back and think about guardrails,” she said about the unquestioning embrace of AI. “So we, from a leadership perspective, are very vulnerable to techno populists who come out and assert that this is the only way to make something happen.” 

The first step toward reclaiming our lost agency, as AI aims to capture every facet of our world, is simply to pay attention. I've been struck by how rarely we actually listen to what tech leaders are explicitly saying about their vision of the future. 

There's a tendency to dismiss their most extreme statements as hyperbole or marketing, but what if they're being honest? What if they truly believe humans, or at least most humans, are replaceable, that traditional concepts of humanity are outdated, that a technological "god" should supersede us? These aren't just ideological positions – they're the foundations for the world being built around us right now. 

In our series, we explore artificial intelligence as something that affects our culture, our jobs, our media and our politics. But we should also ask what tech founders and engineers are really building with AI, or what they think they’re building. Because if their vision of society does not have a place for us in it, we should be ready to reclaim our destiny – before our collective future is captured.

Our audio documentary series, CAPTURED: The Secret Behind Silicon Valley’s AI Takeover is available now on Audible. Do please tune in, and you can dig deeper into our stories and the people we met during the reporting below.

The post Captured: how Silicon Valley is building a future we never chose appeared first on Coda Story.

Last week I attended a crypto conference in Washington, D.C., and can report back that things are changing fast. New regulations look certain to come through in a hurry and – judging by the heinous quantity of lawyers in the venue – a lot of people are very serious about making a lot of money from them. This is, in my opinion, not good.

Crypto people complained bitterly under the Biden administration that regulators were treating them unfairly, by restricting their ability to do business. Many observers pointed out that crypto people were being regulated exactly the same way as everyone else, and that the reason they were struggling was that their product only makes money if it can break the rules, but the crypto people didn’t agree and responded by spending over $119 million on political donations before the 2024 elections.

MONEY WELL SPENT

The lobbying has paid off. Victorious (and well-funded) Republicans have responded to the crypto industry with a degree of enthusiasm that is positively overwhelming. Supposedly dead under the Biden administration, crypto has been brought back to rude health. “I'm so excited for all of us,” said House Majority Whip Tom Emmer. “This has been a long road to get here. We are on the precipice of actually making this happen. And guess what? That's only the beginning.”

He said Congressmen and senators were determined to get a bill onto President Trump’s desk by August that would regulate the stablecoin industry, thus providing the kind of legal certainty that would allow these “digital dollars” to explode even more dramatically than they already have. A lot of this will be overseen by the Office for the Comptroller of the Currency, which has already moved to scrap the cautious approach of the old days (i.e. last year).

“I’m creating a bright future for banks in America to use digital assets. Financial inclusion is the civil rights issue of our generation,” Rodney Hood, Acting Comptroller of the Currency, told a side session at the conference. “I have removed the sword of Damocles that was hanging over the head of the financial services industry.”

Millions of people lack bank accounts in the United States, and they are overwhelmingly the poorest members of society. Governments have failed to do enough to make sure everyone has access to financial services. And if crypto really could help vulnerable people access banking, then I’d be all for it, but I fear – certainly on the evidence of what I saw last week – it won’t.

Perhaps the most alarming discussion was that concerning World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s own crypto firm. Donald Trump Jr., beamed in by videolink, appeared to be seated on what looked like a white throne. He loomed over the stage like a permatanned deity in an inadequately-buttoned shirt. He explained that he’d only realised the power of crypto after his father had come out as a Republican and the family had all been cancelled. “You put that little R next to your name,” he said, explaining the need for crypto. “And I sort of realized very quickly just how much discrimination there is in the ordinary financial markets.”

The other three founders of the firm, which was created last year, all took to the stage in person. Zachary Witkoff – the son of President Trump’s special envoy tasked with helping to negotiate a ceasefire in Ukraine – spells blockchain wrong on his LinkedIn bio, and got the dress code wrong by wearing a suit and neglecting to grow a beard. Zachary Folkman, who once ran a company called ‘Date Hotter Girls’, wore a bomber jacket and facial hair, which matched the mood more precisely. Chase Herro was the most hirsute and casual of the lot, in joggers and a white baseball cap, and he explained that they would be targeting ordinary Americans, with the aim of getting them to use crypto to buy ham sandwiches from a bodega, as well as aiming to transform the cross-border payments system with their own stablecoin – USD1. 

The idea that these four nepo man-babies would be given the keys to any kind of financial institution was alarming, but the prospect of them doing so under permissive new regulations and an administration headed by one of their dads, was terrifying. “So one of our biggest goals is to kind of bring everybody back together and realize that this is a free market and, like, let the free market dictate who survives and who doesn't, and who thrives and who doesn't,” said Herro. Trump’s sons, incidentally, have also just invested heavily in a bitcoin mining company. 

WELCOME BACK, ALL IS FORGIVEN

The pace at the conference was frenetic, and every other session seemed to have Congressmen and/or senators explaining how cryptocurrencies would do their bit to make America prosperous and grand. Even three Democrats held a side session called “keeping crypto non-partisan”. No one was listening, though, partly because all the lawyers were talking to each other in the hallway but mainly because the Republican chairs of the Senate and the House banking committees were on the main stage at the same time explaining how America would remain the world’s crypto capital. 

Crypto is Trump’s project now, and no one cares what the Democrats have to say. If you want to see how much the industry has embraced the president’s talking points, check out this comically politicized advert from the blockchain company Solana, home of the $Trump memecoin. Even on X, the backlash was so fierce that Solana had to delete it.

What does this mean for the rest of the world though? American politicians seem to have decided that cryptocurrencies – and, particularly, dollar-denominated stablecoins – are good for America, that they bring business to the country, and help find customers for the Treasury’s debt. Anything that gets in the way of crypto therefore is bad for America. With great power comes great opportunity, as Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben might have said if only he’d had more donations from a pro-crypto SuperPAC.

Bo Hines, the hatchet-faced head of Trump’s council of crypto advisers, said his message to any crypto people working offshore was: “welcome home”. 

As for Tom Emmer, even the prosecution of the founders of Tornado Cash – the software that, prosecutors say, allowed criminals including North Korean hackers to hide $1 billion of stolen wealth – was governmental overreach. “We need all that innovation, all those risk takers and creators in this country, that's what is the definition of success. From that you'll get that economic growth,” Emmer said.

There is a terrible irony that cryptocurrencies – an idea much of whose popularity stemmed from the public anger sparked by the deregulation and greed that caused the great financial crisis of 2007-2008 – are becoming a new nexus for deregulation and greed. And I worry about what the backlash will bring when this too collapses. And I worry about all the bad behaviour that will be enabled before the collapse happens.

As Corey Frayer, who served in the Securities and Exchange Commission under Joe Biden, once said: “Crypto is a machine where fraud and money laundering go in one side, and political donations come out the other end.” 

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Victor Orbán wants to adopt a zebra. Reading about the Hungarian Prime Minister's bizarre request to become a “symbolic ‘adoptive parent’” of a zoo zebra, I had a feeling of déjà vu. Another oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili, who lives in a glass castle overlooking my hometown Tbilisi, is also obsessed with zebras. To be fair, he has a whole private menagerie. "Lemurs roamed free in my yard like cats," Ivanishvili once boasted to journalists. He's even taken selected reporters to meet his zebras. I never managed to get on that list.

These seemingly eccentric obsessions with exotic animals reveal a fundamental truth about how power itself works. The zebra collection isn't merely decorative – it's emblematic of a system where the arbitrary whims of the powerful become reality, where resources that could serve many are instead directed toward personal indulgence. Orbán admires Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream party, which has steered the country away from EU integration. Trump openly praises Orbán. These men create a web of mutual admiration, exchanging not just tactics but symbols and sometimes even PR consultants – as we learned when Israeli media revealed that Benjamin Netanyahu’s advisers had orchestrated a covert campaign to counter negative discourse around Qatar. Those same advisers were also tasked with cleaning up Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić's public image.

Years ago as a BBC correspondent in Central Asia, I remember staring with bemusement at a massive golden statue in Turkmenistan of the former president, Saparmurat Niyazov, the self-styled ‘Turkmenbashi’, the ‘father of all Turkmen’. The statue rotated to always face the sun. We journalists used to dismiss it as the eccentricity of a dictator in a little-known corner of the world. These weren't mere quirks, though, but  early warning signs of an authoritarian pattern that would spread globally.

Last weekend, we gathered voices who have witnessed authoritarianism's rise across continents for our event "The Playbook." Their unanimous observation: the patterns emerging in America mirror what they've already witnessed elsewhere.

Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, who has faced multiple criminal charges and arrest warrants in the Philippines for her journalism, described her own sense of déjà vu watching events unfold in the United States. Democracy dies not in one blow but through "death by a thousand cuts"—media capture, then academic institutions, then NGOs, until the entire society bleeds out, Ressa warned.

Bill Browder, the architect of the Magnitsky Act that holds Russian leaders to account for human rights violations – which he lobbied for after his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was murdered in Russian custody – mapped how Vladimir Putin perfected symbolic terrorization through selective targeting. He saw this pattern being repeated in the U.S.: "This attack on law firms, as an example, going after Covington & Burling, Perkins Coie, and Paul Weiss... what's the message to every law firm in America? Don't go after the government." He pointed to judges facing impeachment threats and green card holders being threatened with deportation as classic examples of the Putin playbook unfolding in America – striking fear into entire sectors through selective prosecution.

Many audience questions focused on resistance strategies, with particular frustration directed at the Democratic Party's seeming inability to mount an effective opposition. "Why are they so quiet about this?" Armando Iannucci asked, voicing a common concern about the lack of a coordinated response.

Yet Browder managed to see a bright side in America's chaotic, decentralized resistance: "The Putin model is to find the leader of the opposition and then destroy them," he noted. "But if you don't have a leader and resistance comes from everywhere, there's no way to stop it." He pointed to student-led protests in Serbia and Georgia, where grassroots movements without central leadership proved remarkably resilient.

Few know more about resistance than anti-apartheid era South African activist Kumi Naidoo, who served as head of both Greenpeace and Amnesty International. While he offered practical resistance strategies, Naidoo also emphasized something crucial: "We have demonized people who do not agree with us," he cautioned. "We cannot move forward in this moment where we find ourselves unless we consciously build bridges to the people that are not with us." This doesn't mean compromising on principles, but rather understanding the genuine concerns that drive people to support authoritarian figures.

"The worst disease in the world that we face,” Naidoo said, “is not HIV/AIDS or cancer or influenza—it's a disease we can call affluenza." This pathological obsession with wealth accumulation creates the perfect environment for would-be dictators, as ordinary people mistakenly see oligarchs not as threats to democracy but as aspirational figures. The zebra-collecting billionaire becomes someone to admire rather than fear.

Every speaker at our event expressed a haunting familiarity with America's unfolding crisis – they've all seen this movie before, even though no one, right now, can possibly predict how it ends. Iannucci, creator of “The Death of Stalin” and “Veep – so, someone who has, literally, written the script – said the current reality might put him out of the job. How do you parody something already so absurd? 

“Trump,” he said, “is a self-basting satirist in that he is his own entertainment." Still, Iannucci underscored why humor remains vital in dark times: "Dictators and autocrats hate jokes because laughter is spontaneous, and they hate the idea of a spontaneous reaction that they have no control over."

Far from mere entertainment, Iannucci argued that storytelling itself becomes essential resistance. He challenged us to move beyond speaking only to those who already agree with us: "We must tell authentic stories which are rooted in reality. And understand that to stand a chance to get through this moment we're in, we have to invest equally on the objective side as well as the subjective side."

As authoritarians build their global networks of mutual admiration, from private zoos to public policy, the countering networks of resistance become all the more crucial.

Maria Ressa's powerful assertion that "when it is a battle for facts, journalism becomes activism" particularly resonated with me. As a journalist, I've been trained in objectivity and balance. Yet we now face a moment where the foundations of free thought that my profession relies on are themselves under direct assault. This isn't about choosing political sides – it's about recognizing when factual reality itself is being deliberately undermined as a strategy of control.

I also found myself enthusiastically agreeing with Kumi Naidoo who emphasized that we must genuinely listen to those who support authoritarian figures, not to validate harmful policies but to understand the legitimate grievances that fuel support for them. From Manila to Moscow to Washington, the pattern is clear but not inevitable. The script is familiar, but we still have time to write a different ending – one where free thought and factual discourse prevail over manipulation and fear.

If you would like to become part of conversations like this one, we have news: we have just launched a brand new membership program connecting journalists, artists, thinkers and changemakers across borders. Join today to receive the recording of this event and access to future gatherings where we'll continue connecting dots others miss.

The post When autocrats buy zebras appeared first on Coda Story.

A striking characteristic of Russian officials has long been how they combine passionate opposition to all the West professes to stand for with a marked willingness to invest, live, educate their children, party, and litigate in the West. And that brings us to Dmitry Ovsyannikov (there’ll be more on the elaborate spelling of his name in a bit), who was appointed governor of the city of Sevastopol by Vladimir Putin in 2016.

Sevastopol is the largest city on the Crimean peninsula, and was stolen from Ukraine by Putin in 2014 on the grounds that it had once belonged to Russia. “It was only when Crimea ended up as part of a different country,” Putin told the State Duma over a decade ago as justification for the annexation of Crimea, part 1 of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, “that Russia realised that it was not simply robbed, it was plundered.” Most Western countries do not accept this logic, and have tried to punish people involved, which is why Ovsyannikov was sanctioned by the European Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom.

WESTWARD BOUND

Ovsyannikov left Crimea in 2019 for a position in Moscow, but his political career came to an abrupt end after a scandal at a regional airport. He then did that thing Russian officials do and headed to Britain. In 2023, he moved into his brother’s house in London, where his wife and children were already living and attending private school.

Private schools, however, have to be paid for, and prosecutors say that arranging those payments was tantamount to circumventing the UK’s sanctions, so he was charged along with his wife and brother, and this month they went on trial. The alleged wrongdoing is fairly small-scale, but it’s an important test case. We have a few weeks to wait for an outcome, but there are some interesting points to draw out from it already.

The first is about spelling. If you’re trying to avoid notice as a Russian (or a representative of any other nation which uses a different alphabet to ours), it’s an entry-level stratagem to play around with transliteration. It’s noticeable that in the court documents, he uses a different version of his name -- Dmitrii Ovsiannikov – to that favoured by the Kremlin in the good old days, which is a switch between two common transliteration systems. His brother, meanwhile, spells his surname Owsjanikow, which uses yet another. I’m hoping there’s a third sibling, who’s gone all pre-revolutionary with Ovsiannikoff.

The second is about his citizenship. Ovsyannikov left Russia for Turkey in August 2022, which many Russians did after Putin invaded Ukraine, though admittedly most of them had not been senior officials in the occupying administration. He then applied for a British passport, which he obtained early the next year. 

Apparently Ovsyannikov’s father was born in Bradford, in the north of England, in 1950. How did a Yorkshire lad hook up with a Soviet lady at the height of the Cold War? Did their eyes meet over a discussion of production quotas? If there are any authors of “socialist realist romance” among my readers, this could be your time to shine. Ovsyannikov himself is 48, so he must have been born in 1976 or 1977. 

The third and most important thing about his case is whether he should still have been subject to sanctions at all. The U.K. may have continued to sanction Ovsyannikov, but in 2023 he challenged his EU designation and was removed from the bloc’s sanctions list on the grounds that he was no longer in a position of power or responsibility in Russia. Some may think that’s a weak reason, but I am inclined to think sanctions lists should be adapted if people have ceased the offending behaviour. Sanctions are a foreign policy tool, not a law enforcement instrument, and if the aim of the policy has been achieved, they should be cancelled. 

There are lots of oligarchs and officials who would be willing to do quite a lot to get off the sanctions list, much of which would severely inconvenience Putin. It may feel icky, but I think our governments should be open to such deals. The point of all this is to undermine the Kremlin after all.

AND IT’S STILL ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

This is not to deny that it does indeed feel icky to see sanctioned individuals try and evade those sanctions to buy Mercedes SUVs, as Ovsyannikov did. He used his brother as a proxy to buy the car. It reminded me of company owners who nominate proxies offshore to hide the real ownership structure. Since 2016, companies in the U.K. have been obliged to name a “person of significant control”. The idea of the law was to stop people hiding behind opaque shell companies to commit financial crime, but is anyone enforcing it?

Apparently not, since lawyer Dan Neidle has been able to publish a map with the location of 65,000 foreign companies that own U.K. entities, none of which are declaring who is in control of their operations. You can search on the map yourself. There are five companies in the Falkland Islands, for example, and there’s even one in American Samoa: are these remote jurisdictions making late bids to become offshore tax havens?

Just as I was thinking about the efforts of Companies House to rein in fraud, I was still thinking about the use of cash money by launderers from last week. I was reading this article, and I was struck by the claim that the US aerospace sector is due to export $125 billion this year, making it the country’s second most successful exporting industry. 

In 2023, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing produced 1,326,976,000 $100 bills. That’s not all profit, because each bill costs 9.4 cents to print, and there’s some dispute about quite how many of those go abroad, but serious estimates range from 80 percent to 70 percent. Once you’ve done the sums, you end up with profits from $100-bill exports in 2023 of somewhere between $92.8 and $106.1 billion.

We don’t have the figures for 2024 yet, but the Federal Reserve said it would be ordering between $155.8 and $160.6 billion worth of $100 bills, which would yield profits of somewhere between $109.0 and $128.4 billion. 

Look at that number again: at the top end of the range, that would nudge aerospace into third place, and establish the $100-bill-printing industry as America’s second most successful exporter. Even at the bottom end, it would be fourth, ahead of brand name pharmaceutical manufacturing ($103.3 billion), and quite a lot bigger than natural gas liquid processing ($62.9 billion). Who says the public sector can’t contribute to the economy?

Before someone writes in: yes, I know that banknotes are technically loans made to a government, rather than products sold by the government. But it’s more fun this way, so I’m going with it.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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We’re now a couple of months into Donald Trump’s second coming as president.   For perspective on what’s happening, it’s worth studying the tenure so far of the president’s favorite European leader, Viktor Orbán, the longtime prime minister of Hungary.  Orbán took over Hungary when it was a democracy by winning an election in 2010 and has transformed it into an authoritarian state. Trump is emulating Orbán. Whether he can succeed depends on whether Americans can mount an effective resistance.  

To set the stage for Orbán’s rise, we start with what happened in Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  

The pace of political change in the early 1990s was dizzying, and the forces propelling democracy seemed unstoppable: old political barriers between East and West collapsed; free markets sprang up everywhere and democratic elections were held; a divided Germany was reunited; the Soviet Union dissolved; Europe expanded; and a new global economy seemed to be taking over the world.

These changes caused one optimistic observer to predict that democracy would be the final form of government.  But there were other forces at work, less visible at first, but leading to a very different kind of change. Some effects of the changes listed above included: international companies moving their factories out of Europe to Asia; neoliberal shock therapies cutting social spending in the new democracies of Eastern Europe; social services that had been provided by the old regimes were replaced unevenly by capitalism; corruption broke out as state assets were privatized; economic inequality grew between the new class of oligarchs benefiting from privatization and everyone else; bank bailouts and lending crises shook the financial system; then came the massive flow of refugees into Europe from wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and North Africa. 

All this led to the rise of xenophobic politics – first in Hungary, then across Europe. It was a populist pushback against disruptive and disorienting changes.

This is when the assault on democracy began, and for seven years I was in the middle of it, in Hungary, where I was president of Central European University.  I saw first-hand how a politician like Orbán could manipulate a populist rebellion in order to take over a democracy and turn it into an authoritarian state. 

When my term ended in 2016, I returned to the U.S. – just in time for the first election of Donald Trump.  Friends joked that maybe I had carried the Hungarian anti-democracy disease back home.  

Hungary has been a laboratory for reactionary populism, years before it spread to the rest of Europe and to the U.S. The 2008 financial crisis hit Hungarians harder than most Europeans and Americans, and many began to feel no better off than they had been under communism. By 2014 a European Commission poll showed that 70% of Europeans distrusted their elected governments – up from only 25% in 2002.  In Eastern Europe people were feeling left behind by the loss of jobs, stagnating incomes, austerity programs and cuts in social welfare – all products of the economics of globalization.  

Hungarians, some have argued, have a deep-seated victim mentality – the product of centuries of invasions by Mongols, Turks, Russians, Austrians, Germans and Soviets – and Hungarian civil society was stunted by outside domination.  On top of that, the country was deeply divided between a majority rural population that spoke only Hungarian and a cosmopolitan minority who were the dominant elite.  

This set the stage for an anti-democratic politician, and in walked Viktor Orbán.

Ironically, Orbán had been a hero of the democracy movement that overthrew the old regime. He had good organizing and rhetorical skills, which he used to stimulate Hungarians’ sense of victimization. He attacked the European Union as “the new Moscow”. He railed against refugees, calling them “a threat to Christian civilization”. He campaigned on the memorable slogan, “make Hungary great again,” and he promised Hungarians that he would rescue them from migrants and foreigners and people of other races and religions. He created a new identity politics by offering the vision of a “Great Hungarian Nation” as a way to prop up a worn out and disintegrating society.  

Orbán boasted that he would build a new form of government, which he called “illiberal democracy” -- an Orwellian term he invented to justify turning his election into a weapon to attack democratic institutions. He maneuvered a narrow electoral victory into a supermajority in the parliament, and paved the way for rewriting the Hungarian Constitution:

Viktor Orbán has become an icon for anti-democratic nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic. Steve Bannon once declared that “Orbán was Trump before there was Trump.”

Orbán took over the media through government regulation, censorship, and financial pressure -- and today he controls 85% of the average Hungarian’s sources of information.  

He undermined the judiciary and the rule of law by expanding and packing the Constitutional Court, forcing independent judges to retire, cutting back the Court’s jurisdiction and drastically revising the Constitution.

He built a governing base out of a new oligarchy of corrupt businesses who benefited from noncompetitive government contracts, with funding from Europen Union grants to Hungary as a new member state.  The grants totaled nearly 30 billion euros before they were finally suspended when Hungary was held by the European Court of Justice to be violating the EU’s rule of law requirements. 

Orbán attacked Hungarian civil society -- branding organizations that received any support from the US or Europe as “foreign agents”, conducting harassment investigations of critics, and taking away the academic freedom of universities.  

I was running an international university whose mission was to revive academic freedom in Eastern Europe. During the Obama presidency, when the US promoted academic freedom, I was able to protect CEU from Orbán and expand its academic programs.  But when Donald Trump was elected in 2016, he endorsed Orbán, and Orbán took the gloves off and started attacking universities, forcing CEU out of the country and taking over others by censoring and dictating what they could teach.

Viktor Orbán has become an icon for anti-democratic nationalists on both sides of the Atlantic, and he’s had an especially large influence on Donald Trump’s MAGA movement.  Steve Bannon once declared that “Orbán was Trump before there was Trump.”  

Orbán has developed a playbook that’s now kept him in power for 15 years, and his playbook is the foundation for Trump’s Project 2025.  Here are Orbán’s rules for turning a democracy into an authoritarian state – rules that Donald Trump is now working to implement in the U.S.:     

One: take over your party and enforce internal party discipline by using political threats and intimidation to stamp out all dissent.

Two: build your base by appealing to fear and hate and branding immigrants and cultural minorities as dangers to society, and demonizing your opponents as enemies of the people.    

Three: use disinformation and lies to justify what you’re doing.

Four: use your election victory to claim a sweeping mandate -- especially if you don’t win a majority.

Five: centralize your power by destroying the civil service.  

Six: redefine the rule of law as rule by executive decree.

Seven: eliminate checks and balances and separation of powers by taking over the legislature, the courts, the media, and civil society. 

Eight: rely on your oligarchs to supervise the economy, and reward them with special access to state resources.    

Nine: ally yourself with other authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and support his effort to undermine European democracies and attack sovereign countries like Ukraine.

Ten: get the public to believe all this is necessary, and resistance is futile.

The scope of Orbán’s influence reaches across Europe.  

In Austria, a political party founded by former Nazis will be part of a new coalition government this year headed by a leader who has close ties to Russia and opposes European support for Ukraine. A similar nationalist far-right government has taken over next door in Slovakia.

Europe’s three biggest countries, Italy, France and Germany, have all swung toward the far-right, but so far they remain democracies. 

Italy has a nationalist government headed by Prime Minister Georgia Meloni, who’s followed parts of the Orbán playbook, but has been pushed toward the center and has softened her position on immigration and Ukraine.  

In France, the far-right party of Marine Le Pen won last year’s parliamentary elections, but a coalition of opposition parties, prodded by Emmanuel Macron, united to deny her party a parliamentary majority. Their resistance will be tested by new elections in June.  

In Germany the center-left government headed by Olaf Scholz fell at the end of last year. In late February, parliamentary elections took place that determined whether the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party would become part of a new government.  Viktor Orbán, Elon Musk and JD Vance all endorsed the AfD before the elections, but it came in second with just under 20% of the vote, and polls show that 71% of Germans believe that the AfD is a threat to democracy because of its overt connections to the Nazi past. 

Poland, the biggest new democracy in Eastern Europe, at first adopted but is now resisting the Orbán model.  A far-right government elected in 2015 almost destroyed the independence of the Polish judiciary, but opposition parties united to defend the courts and defeated the government in 2023, replacing it with a centrist regime headed by Donald Tusk, with a strong commitment to restore Polish democracy.  

So, what lessons can be drawn from all this? 

One lesson is that populist movements are having a big impact on democracy.  They start as reactions to destabilizing events, like economic or cultural upheavals, and they demand change and democratic reform. It’s important to listen to these movements, to understand their demands, and to show how democracy can give people the ability to shape and adapt to change. Meanwhile authoritarians like Viktor Orbán may seem attractive at first but inevitably suppress people’s voices and freedom, and promote corruption and economic inequality.   

Responding to populism can be done by building coalitions for economic fairness on issues like healthcare, education, taxes and public spending.  There are historical examples of this, like the American Farmer Labor coalition that brought together urban workers, white farmers and black sharecroppers and led to the Progressive Movement and the New Deal in the 20th century.  Today there’s an urgent need for a new populist movement to attack economic inequality.

A second lesson is that defending democracy should itself be a populist cause. In the Orbán playbook the national flag is hijacked by the authoritarian leader.  The flag of a democracy must be reclaimed as a symbol of the rule of law, of a society built on human rights and freedoms and international alliances and humanitarian values. When these soft power democratic assets are destroyed, a huge void opens up -- to be filled by authoritarians like Xi Xinping and Vladimir Putin who are the ultimate political models for Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump. 

A third lesson is that the ultimate goal of an authoritarian leader is to weaponize the state against all democratic opponents. Orbán’s playbook demonizes anyone who doesn’t support the leader as an “enemy of the people.” This stigma is then enforced by targeting opponents with regulatory penalties like tax audits, educational penalties like denials of accreditation, political penalties like harassment investigations, physical penalties like withdrawing police protection, criminal penalties like prosecution. The result is a hollowed-out shell of democracy – like Orbán’s Hungary.

What about the U.S.?  The US is better situated than Hungary to resist authoritarianism.  It’s thirty times bigger and infinitely more diverse, and its diversity is the source of its economic and cultural strength. The US has an enormous and active civil society, a judiciary that remains mostly independent, a free and open if partially captured and manipulated media, and a constitution that guarantees the rights of the people to challenge and change their government.  Donald Trump won less than fifty percent of the vote in last fall’s election, and his approval rating is well below that in recent polls. 

This is not a mandate for hollowing out American democracy.  

National polls show that 70% of Americans today see democracy as a core American value.  Resistance to the assault on democracy is not only possible, it’s essential, and it can work, as shown by the growing number of successful lawsuits that have been brought against Trump’s flood of executive decrees, and the rising tide of grassroots mobilization by civil society groups across the country, who are organizing demonstrations and lobbying legislators to stand up for democracy. 

Defending democracy is a long game. For two and a half centuries Americans have fought to expand the right to vote, to achieve equal protection, to oppose intolerance and political violence, to gain freedom of speech and religion, to guarantee due process of law. These goals may now seem to be blocked by Trump, but the U.S. is not Germany in the 1930s nor Hungary in 2025, because citizens across the country are beginning to resist authoritarianism. To succeed, authoritarianism requires big government, and Americans have long been opposed to big government. 

Building resistance is hard work and sometimes may seem futile, but every small act counts and many small continuous acts can make a profound difference in resisting an authoritarian regime.  Six decades ago, in South Africa at the height of apartheid, the original Robert F. Kennedy eloquently predicted what would be achieved by resisting authoritarianism:  

“Each time a person stands up, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression.”

A version of this piece was first published in Rappler.

Image credits:
Donald Trump and Viktor Orban in the Oval Office. May 13, 2019. Washington, DC. Mark Wilson/Getty Images.
Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban on the sidelines of the Third Belt and Road Forum in Beijing on October 17, 2023. Grigory Sisoyev/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.
Xi Jinping and Viktor Orban. Liszt Ferenc Budapest airport, Ferihegy, Hungary.May 8, 2024. Vivien Cher Benko/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.

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For the first time since comparable records began, there are fewer companies on the UK’s corporate registry. It’s a sign that anti-fraud reforms are beginning to show the first signs of a provisional impact. Companies House, as Britain’s corporate registry is known, has historically been dreadful – a “fraud fiesta”, in the words of the Dark Money Files podcast. Registering British companies was for years cheap, easy, and completely unverified, meaning they were the money launderers’ getaway vehicles of choice. 

A WELCOME FALL

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and subsequent public concern about kleptocratic wealth infiltrating the UK, the government pledged to improve Companies House, including by giving it powers to check information, and obliging corporate directors to provide proof of identification. These are baby steps, but they’re already having results: “the companies register shrank during the period October to December 2024, for the first time since quarterly reporting began in the period April to June 2012”.

There were 5,408,707 companies on the register at the end of 2024, which was 19,879 fewer than at the end of September. That was a decline of 0.37 percent, so not a huge deal, though that did not deter some people. “COMPANY NUMBERS CRASH IN BUDGET FALLOUT,” shrieked the tiresome rightwing blog Guido Fawkes, which attempted to claim the falling numbers were because recent tax rises were scaring entrepreneurs away from starting businesses.

There is a strange belief among supposedly pro-business people that the easier it is to create a company, the more economic growth you will get. This is true, up to a point. But after that point, companies are so easy to obtain that they’re registered for the purposes of fraud, money laundering and corruption rather than honest enterprise, which will obviously impede rather than encourage business. 

So it is good that Companies House is finally trying to keep the more obvious malefactors from hiding their identities behind what anti-money laundering expert Graham Barrow calls burner companies. “None of these companies that were got rid of,” he told me, “were contributing anything.” 

Barrow runs a compliance firm called RiskAlert247, which trawls Companies House data in the quest for fraudulent firms with a programme called “Spider Sense”, which spots signs of dodgy behaviour. A mere five-minute demonstration was enough to convince me that the number of companies registered on Companies House has a long way to fall before it starts to reflect the actual quantity of legitimate firms in the country. There are hundreds of thousands of tax-dodging and fraud-enabling vehicles still on the registry although hopefully when new powers are brought in, they too will be winnowed out.

In the meantime, if you’d like a laugh, or simply to see how bad things were before the government got round to acting, look up “JOHN SMITH 3A LIMITED” – registered address 1 Any Road, Area, Anytown, United Kingdom, ZB2 2ZZ – on Companies House, and click on the “people” tab.

ANOTHER WELCOME FALL

The value of all the euro banknotes in circulation peaked in June 2022 at €1.60 trillion, and has been trending infinitesimally downwards ever since. In January this year, it was recorded at €1.57 trillion. This is as it should be: fewer people use cash for payments, therefore people take fewer banknotes out of banks, and so there are fewer banknotes in circulation.

What’s odd, however, is that – for decades – the opposite has been happening all over the Western world. The usage of cash has been in steep decline, but demand for banknotes has remained consistently strong. Although euro printing has begun to decline, it is only a recent phenomenon. The total of euro banknotes out there is still a lot higher than the trillion euros that were in circulation a decade ago. Central bankers call it a paradox, which is their way of saying they have no idea what’s going on.

While the value of euro notes in circulation has fallen, however slightly, the value of British pounds in circulation hit £90.5 billion in the first week of March, up more than three billion from last year, which was also an all-time high. And the value of cash dollars in circulation hit an all-time high of $2.36 trillion in January, which is twice as much as there was in January 2015, and that in turn was twice the total of January 2005. 

Ruth Judson seems to be the Federal Reserve analyst tasked with trying to work out who’s using all the dollars the Bureau of Engraving and Printing keeps churning out. Her latest paper estimates that more than half of them are circulating outside the United States. 

BUT IT’S STILL ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

To me, the most interesting observation Judson makes is that demand for smaller denominations is declining, so the growth is overwhelmingly coming from people wanting more and more $100 bills. My personal theory is that, as money laundering rules have become more stringent, more criminals have turned to storing and moving their wealth in cash, and they naturally prefer to do that in large denominations, because you can get more value in a smaller space. It’s the criminal economy, stupid.

But why are they choosing to use $100 bills, rather than the even more valuable €200 or €100 banknotes? That is a bit of a mystery. Or a paradox, if you will.

Considering the destruction that the White House has wreaked on U.S. anti-corruption work, I should be pleased to see the announcement of tougher anti-money laundering measures. But I’m sorry to say I’m not. The Treasury Department has decided that money service businesses along the Mexican border must now report any currency transaction over $200 in a supposed action against cartels. This is catastrophically misguided. 

At the moment, all currency transactions over $10,000 have to be reported, and that is already producing a colossal deluge of paperwork. In 2023, Fincen received almost 21 million Currency Transaction Reports. Just imagine how many they’ll get now the threshold is $200, and the policy won’t even work at stopping the cartels.

According to the U.S. government’s own figures, Mexican cartels make $19-29 billion a year. They are NOT transferring these profits back home $200 a time via corner stores in Maverick County, Texas. Obviously. Even at the lower end of the estimate, that would involve more than quarter of a million money transfers every day, or more than 37,000 from each of the counties that the Treasury Department is imposing new measures on. 

If they actually wanted to stop the cartels, they should look instead into who’s taking all those $100 bills off their hands, since by their own estimates $25 billion is smuggled across the southern border in cash each year.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post It’s the criminal economy, stupid appeared first on Coda Story.

In Russia, we learn early that power corrupts absolutely, strongmen wear their worst intentions like badges of honor , and atrocities spiral from seemingly minor threats. Where I grew up, we hold these truths to be self-evident.

Having spent most of my life watching Putin's Russia take shape, I recognize familiar patterns in American politics today. There is a theory, expressed only half in jest, among some who analyze Donald Trump—as he undermines traditional alliances and creates havoc within the federal government—that he must be a Russian asset. I understand what they mean. Trump consistently parrots Putin talking points, and Russian state media celebrates Trump with unusual enthusiasm. As American presidents, whether left or right, are rarely cheered in Russia, one might suspect some kind of collaboration.

But there is a simpler explanation: Trump and Putin are remarkably similar men who naturally understand each other. No conspiracy required—Trump would feel right at home in Moscow.

This isn't to suggest moral equivalence. Trump, after all, has not waged a genocidal war claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. He aspires to dictatorship but hasn't succeeded in achieving it—yet. He hasn't killed his political opponents or nationalized major companies to enrich his friends. Given America's robust institutions, he is unlikely to ever have the opportunity to do these things. In any case, he likely doesn't harbor such aims—he seems much more jovial than Putin.

Still, the parallels between them are unmistakable:

Both men emerged in the moral ambiguity that followed World War II's short-lived moral clarity. They share a worldview in which only large, feared countries deserve respect. Trump famously told Bob Woodward that “real power is… fear.” In both domestic and foreign affairs, neither operates appears to believe that promises matter or that empathy should guide decision-making. While many politicians behave similarly, few presidents so openly belittle neighboring countries and their leaders as Trump and Putin routinely do.

Both men consider loyalty—even feigned loyalty—to be the only true virtue. Trump's pardoning of the January 6 insurrectionists demonstrates his adherence to this principle. Unlike in his first term, when staffers frequently defected or expressed dissatisfaction, Trump now trades competence for loyalty in those he employs, exactly as Putin does. 

Just observe JD Vance's transformation. During Trump's first term, he was a clean-shaven intellectual on a book tour who compared Trump to Hitler. Now, he resembles a Central Asian heir to the throne and his almost comically masculine posturing mimics his boss’s style. This shapeshifting ability shouldn't surprise anyone who read Vance's memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” in which he described his childhood talent for adapting to different father figures. "With Steve, a midlife-crisis sufferer with an earring to prove it,” Vance wrote, “I pretended earrings were cool... With Chip, an alcoholic police officer who saw my earring as a sign of 'girlieness,' I had thick skin and loved police cars." For men like Trump and Putin, loyalty isn't optional, it's existential, and Vance has mastered the art of becoming whatever his current patron requires.

Both Putin and Trump harbor a profound distrust of democratic institutions. Trump's fixation on the "stolen election" of 2020 mirrors Putin's trauma from his failed bid to manipulate the 2005 Ukrainian election to his advantage. For both men, personal political losses were transformational. In Putin’s case, every challenge to his authority has turned him into a different, usually worse, person. 

It may seem paradoxical that a man who never faces competitive elections changes with each successive term, but it's true – and each iteration is more dangerous than the last. Trump too has changed since his last term. He may still be erratic, may still be a lying, megalomaniacal, overconfident salesman. But those of us who have seen authoritarian evolution up close recognize a fundamental transformation. Trump’s rage at institutional betrayal has calcified into conviction, into a doctrine founded on distrust. The trauma of defeat in 2020 didn't just wound Trump's ego; it convinced him to view the entire democratic apparatus as illegitimate. This shift, this hardening of his position should not be underestimated.

Another thing Trump and Putin have in common is that both believe corruption is universal. I recognize in Trump a mindset common in Russia—indeed, it's fundamental to how power operates in Moscow. Trump doesn't just call opponents "crooked” as a joke, he seems to genuinely believe that graft, and graft alone, motivates everyone. For Trump, corruption is not merely personal enrichment but is the only effective means of governance, of exerting control. This approach makes dealing with Putin convenient—negotiations are simpler when you believe everyone has a price. But I’ve seen in my country how such transactionalism ultimately backfires, creating whole new avenues of institutional corruption that involve orders of far greater magnitude than simple personal enrichment ever could. 

Apart from an intrinsic understanding of corruption, both Trump and Putin also understand, crave and deliberately create chaos. Whether through war, nuclear threats, dismantled treaties, or bureaucratic upheaval, disorder provides leverage. When Elon Musk is tasked with destroying the civil service, the goal is to make government employees more pliable for whatever comes next. The damage, of course, will extend beyond Trump's tenure—after he leaves office, American civil servants will have lost their trust in the entire American system, the whole edifice of government, and it won’t be easy to restore that faith.

And now If Trump and his all-too-loyal allies seem detached from reality, then the joke is on reality.

Many American observers now hold out hope that constitutional guardrails and democratic institutions will do their job. These observers believe checks and balances will contain Trump's excesses until the midterms or the next presidential election bring relief. They're not entirely wrong—America is certainly better positioned to withstand authoritarian creep than Russia was in Putin's early years. 

America's independent judiciary, free press, federalized power structure, and long democratic tradition provide genuine protective layers that Russia lacked. But I've also seen how institutions crumble not through frontal assault but through slow erosion, as bureaucrats, judges, and legislators become complicit through fear, ambition, or simple exhaustion. 

When I read pundits like Ezra Klein argue we shouldn't believe Trump's threats because his power is more limited than he pretends, I recognize a familiar pattern of wishful thinking. Klein suggests that since Trump lacks congressional control and broad public support, his power exists mainly in our collective imagination of it. This analysis assumes Trump operates within the traditional boundaries of American politics. But that's precisely what authoritarians never do. Those who dismiss Trump's ability to transform America make a fundamental error of perspective. They judge his capabilities by the system's rules, while he succeeds by dismantling those very rules. 

Trump has few constitutional powers, true. But autocrats rarely acquire power through constitutional means—that's precisely why they want to become autocrats: to avoid this hassle. They find cracks in the system—a corrupt judge here, a sycophantic legislator there, a couple of overworked bureaucrats willing to look the other way.

Worse, those who can most effectively prevent state capture are least equipped to recognize it. Trump isn't trying to subdue coastal liberals and activists; he’s going after unelected civil servants, military officers, and corporate stakeholders. Whatever their qualifications, these aren't people prepared for civil disobedience—that's not in their job descriptions. They advance their careers by executing orders without overthinking them, not by questioning authority. Whatever resistance they might offer has been further diminished by Musk's crusade against the "deep state."

Meanwhile, the elected officials who can resist often voluntarily surrender. Many Republican congressmen, whatever their real feelings and opinions, have meekly knelt before Trump's throne. Autocratic systems actively select for the unprincipled and obedient. Compare Trump's second administration to his first—adverse selection is already evident.

And now If Trump and his all-too-loyal allies seem detached from reality, then the joke is on reality. 

So far, Trump has twice won the most competitive elections on the planet, and Musk is officially the world's richest man, having built businesses few thought possible. JD Vance, in addition to becoming VP by 40, wrote a bestseller at 31. They all have a history of making their ideas come true. If you think the world isn't crazy enough to follow them further into the abyss, you might want to reconsider your assumptions. In my part of the world, at least, it's always been just crazy enough.

Even though nearly every statement Trump makes is false, he remains deeply true to those falsehoods. His fictions, which share so much with those invented by Putin, have given both men control of their nations’ narratives – false or not. So, when evaluating Trump's threat, consider Pascal's wager: If we spend four years on high alert over dangers that never materialize, we've endured unnecessary stress. If we relax and let his worst ambitions come to fruition, we face a potential catastrophe. The first scenario is clearly preferable.

Americans often ask how ordinary Russians can support Putin's regime. Perhaps now you're getting a clearer picture. The path from democracy to autocracy isn't marked by tanks in the streets but by the slow erosion of norms, the replacement of competence with loyalty, and the methodical exploitation of institutional vulnerabilities.

Trump has given us plenty of advance warning. Authoritarians announce their crimes long before they commit them. Even the most unprincipled men hold deep convictions and manifest character traits that rarely change. That's not advanced political theory—it's Russian History 101. The question remains, though, now that we know – what are we going to do?

The post The Shadow Puppet: A Russian’s Warning about Trump appeared first on Coda Story.

It’s been a big few weeks for crypto. El Salvador, the world’s biggest state-level crypto enthusiast, has apparently reverse ferreted on its agreement with the International Monetary Fund to stop buying bitcoin. Meanwhile Tether, the world’s biggest stablecoin and favourite of the most tech-savvy money launderers, seems to have finally decided to enforce Western sanctions and block a Russian cryptocurrency exchange from accessing tens of millions of dollars in USDT holdings. And U.S. crypto folks are beginning to worry that perhaps Donald Trump was exaggerating/lying when he said, back in July, “I will immediately order the Treasury Department and other federal agencies to cease and desist”.

BUKELE’S BITCOIN BET

But first to El Salvador. News of the death of its bitcoin project appears to be exaggerated, with the country buying yet more of the cryptocurrency just days after agreeing a $1.4billion deal with the IMF that seeks to “confine government engagement in Bitcoin-related economic activities.” On X, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele posted: “No, it’s not stopping. If it didn’t stop when the world ostracized us and most ‘bitcoiners’ abandoned us, it won’t stop now, and it won’t stop in the future.”​​

El Salvador has many problems – not least excessively high levels of debt and a sluggish economy – to which Bukele has presented Bitcoin as the answer, including by making it legal tender in 2021 and obliging merchants to accept it for payments. Under pressure from the IMF (which says Bitcoin’s “widespread adoption could threaten macroeconomic stability and raise fiscal risks”, without elaborating), the El Salvador government has cancelled those reforms. But Bukele’s latest tweets suggest he’s not given up on his plans.

I don’t think anyone outside the IMF is nostalgic for the days when the lender used to bully the countries of Central and South America. But I doubt the IMF will take Bukele’s taunting quietly, so we’ve presumably not heard the last of this.

Personally, given my interest in financial crime, I think Bitcoin is a bit of a sideshow. It’s clunky, it’s expensive to use, and it’s wildly volatile – all of which mean it’s great for speculation, but not much good as a money laundering tool. Tether, on the other hand, now that is something to keep an eye on.

TOO LITTLE TOO LATE?

“What El Salvador has achieved, thanks to President Bukele, is truly incredible and will be narrated in history books,” posted Tether’s CEO, the emollient Paolo Ardoino, after Bukele said he would keep buying bitcoin. Tether issues the world’s biggest stablecoin, which is a cryptocurrency that’s worth the same as a dollar, but doesn’t suffer from any of the restrictions imposed by the kind of squares who comply with anti-money laundering rules at banks. Tether, incidentally, relocated its headquarters to El Salvador in January, so technically Bukele’s government is responsible for regulating it (lol).

Unlike Bitcoin, Tether is cheap, easy to use and non-volatile, which is why it’s become a funding vehicle of choice for Hamas, Hezbollah, the gangsters of the Mekong region, Russian money launderers, North Korea apparently, and almost any other baddies you can mention. Also unlike Bitcoin, Tether is a centralised operation, meaning it can freeze its currency if it wants to. The fact that it so rarely did was either a mark of its commitment to financial inclusion, or a sign that it didn’t care about enabling rampant fraud. But it looks like it may be trying to clean up its act.

Because bombshell news: almost three years after the U.S. sanctioned Garantex, a Russian cryptocurrency exchange, Tether finally got around to freezing its digital wallets. Before we get too delighted about the stablecoin’s decision to cooperate (the EU having also sanctioned Garantex last month), this was the result of the US Secret Service – in cooperation with Germany and Finland – working to cripple the exchange’s infrastructure. Tether presumably had little choice but to do what it did. 

In the meantime, sophisticated obfuscatory skills have allowed Garantex to move $60 billion worth of crypto since the US imposed sanctions. Still, there will be many annoyed Russians who will now be on the lookout for an alternative exchange. “We have bad news,” as Garantex announced on Telegram, “Tether has entered the war against the Russian crypto market… Please note that all USDT held in Russian wallets is now under threat. As always, we are the first, but not the last.”

THE CRYPTOCRATS’ LAMENT

If Russians who use crypto are struggling with sanctions, American crypto investors are increasingly annoyed by the suspicion that still shrouds the industry. “None of the federal banking agencies have actually overturned any of the anti-crypto guidance,” said Caitlin Long, CEO of crypto-friendly Custodia Bank. “It is still presumed unsafe and unsound for a bank to touch a digital asset.”

Donald Trump won substantial backing from crypto folks in last year’s election, thanks to his promises to cancel what they felt was excessive regulation of their activities. “We can't live in a world where somebody starts a company that's a completely legal thing, and then they literally get sanctioned and embargoed by the United States government,” said Marc Andreessen on the Joe Rogan podcast in November. Remarkably self-pitying, considering Andreessen’s a tech billionaire,

He and his fellows complain about widespread debanking – by which they mean that banks are closing the accounts of crypto companies and/or their owners, because of concerns about money laundering – and the fact there is no appeal process against such decisions. Crypto industry leaders insist the practice is really driven by banks’ determination to smother a competing technology in the cradle, and has unfairly targeted right-wingers. Trump promised to end the practice, but in truth this is a complex issue, and Long’s comments suggest they’re losing patience with his failure to master it.

The Senate Banking Committee held a hearing on debanking last month, which featured three representatives of the crypto industry. But the witness who impressed me most was the Brookings Institution’s Aaron Klein who made it clear that the real victims of debanking are not crypto bros, but the kind of people without the money to effectively lobby President Trump.

“Approximately one in ten Black, Hispanic, and Native American households lack a bank account, about five times higher than for whites. Being unbanked is even more likely among those with a disability, with an unbanked rate above 11 percent,” said an excellent 15-page primer he submitted as evidence, which is well worth reading (it can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.)

The core of the issue is that banks face onerous regulations, worry about being fined, and therefore can’t see the value in providing accounts to clients who are more likely to cost them money than earn it. Yes, some of those clients work in crypto, but most are poor immigrants just trying to get ahead. (Check out quite how many of the FinCEN enforcement notices relate to convenience stores that cash cheques, rather than multi-billion-dollar money laundering schemes, and you’ll see what I mean.)

There is no easy fix to this, but the roots of the problem lie in the global rules against money laundering set by the Financial Action Task Force, which is currently holding a consultation on the issue. Should you have a lot of time on your hands, and an exceptionally high boredom threshold, you can read it. Perhaps you could send in an opinion too. Everyone has known about the problem for decades, and no one has ever been bothered to do anything about it before, but perhaps this time they will. Or perhaps they won’t. 

What we’re still waiting to learn is how the Trump administration intends to regulate crypto, or if it intends to regulate at all, given the investigations being dropped, last week’s crypto industry summit at the White House, and the mooted creation of a national cryptocurrency reserve.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Cryptocrats fear regulation will stymie a new crypto era appeared first on Coda Story.

An early definition of kleptocracy, given by Singaporean journalist-turned-politician Sinnathamby Rajaratnam in a speech in 1968, was that it is a "a society of the corrupt, for the corrupt, by the corrupt". It’s a neat formulation, with its echo of Abraham Lincoln’s most famous line from the Gettysburg Address. And I’m curious about how exactly a society can change from Lincoln’s dream to Rajaratnam’s nightmare.

The first bit to go is the last part of the phrase – “by the corrupt” – because winning elections is the easiest thing for crooks to achieve in a society with well-established institutions. It’s the other stuff that gives the crooks trouble. Once corrupt people are in government, the middle part of the phrase – “for the corrupt” – does not necessarily follow. If the institutions remain run by honest people, kleptocracy not only may not take root, but the corrupt politicians may be pushed out of office by the next election.

HOW KLEPTOCRACY TAKES ROOT

So something I’ve been keeping an eye on since Donald Trump’s inauguration is how the Securities and Exchange Commission  treats Justin Sun. In case you don’t remember him, Sun is a Chinese crypto billionaire who spent $6.2 million on a banana, then ate it.

In March 2023, the SEC charged Sun and eight celebrities (including Lindsay Lohan, which I was disappointed by, being a fan of both Mean Girls and The Parent Trap) with fraudulently promoting crypto tokens. “Sun paid celebrities with millions of social media followers to tout the unregistered offerings, while specifically directing that they not disclose their compensation,” said Gurbir Grewal, head of the SEC’s enforcement division at the time. “This is the very conduct that the federal securities laws were designed to protect against.”

Six of the celebrities agreed to pay up to settle the charges at the first opportunity, another did a few months later. But Sun was in no hurry, which may have been a sensible policy. Last week, lawyers for Sun and the SEC wrote to the Manhattan judge overseeing the case asking that it be put on hold, saying they’ll come back with a status report in two months’ time. Now, this may all be procedural and above board, but it also may not be.

By September 2024, Trump began to talk about a new crypto company he was launching called World Liberty Financial. It had the admittedly clever tagline: “Be DeFiant” (DeFi of course meaning decentralized finance, the term for digital peer-to-peer transactions). But Trump’s venture struggled to hit its fund-raising target until it found a cornerstone investor: Justin Sun, who put in $75 million.

“This guy,” said World Liberty co-founder Zak Folkman at a forum in Hong Kong last month, with a gesture towards Sun, who was sitting beside him, “saw that regardless of the outcome, this project is a monumental move forward for the entire crypto community.” It is not yet clear what if anything, besides fundraising, World Liberty actually does, but at the same event, Folkman – who once set up a company called ‘Date Hotter Girls LLC’ – said its success came despite there being “no special treatment to anybody who purchased the token."

Hmmm, about that. Now, it’s clearly not true that the Trump White House is going easy on crypto just because Sun gave Liberty Financial $75 million. The SEC has already dropped a case against Coinbase, and last summer Trump was already telling a crypto conference that “when we see the attacks on crypto, it's a part of a much larger pattern that's being carried out by the same left-wing fascists who weaponize government against any threat to their power.” 

Since his inauguration, Trump has issued an Executive Order promising to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.” Pausing the investigation into Sun could just be part of a general reluctance to enforce regulations or crackdown on crypto. And the cryptocurrency Sun founded was not named as part of the national crypto reserve mooted by Trump.  

But the Sun case didn’t ever really have anything to do with crypto as such anyway, and the SEC was always careful to make clear it was charging him for the way he marketed his token, not for the fact of it. “We’re neutral about the technologies at issue, we’re anything but neutral when it comes to investor protection,” said Grewal.

So, from the point of view of people who don’t want the United States to tilt further towards Rajaratnam’s definition of a kleptocracy, it would be nice if the SEC maintained its case against Sun or else made very very very very clear that any decision to drop the case was in no way connected to the fact that he gave the US president’s company a nine-figure sum. It would also be nice if the Trump White House was prepared to promise action against some of the more egregious crypto frauds, but not many people are holding their breaths.

PROTECTING THE PRIVACY OF KLEPTOCRATS

On an unrelated note, it appears that Sun also shares the Trump White House’s, er, particular approach to which kinds of free speech should actually be free. Sun, reportedly, put pressure on a crypto trade publication to take down an article critical of his stunt with the banana. Spending six million dollars on a banana should, apparently, be above reproach. 

Talking of free speech and those who believe themselves to be above reproach: the authorities in the uber wealthy Swiss town of Cologny were not cool about the idea that some journalists might stage walking tours pointing out homes bought with the proceeds of some of the more egregious bits of financial crime enabled by folks nearby.

“The residential area perched above the lake is a popular refuge for certain kleptocrats, potentates and other financial pirates,” the event’s publicity announced, before it got cancelled because the local authorities wouldn’t give permission for it to go ahead. Which is to say: the world may be changing more quickly with each passing minute, but Switzerland isn’t.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Of the corrupt, for the corrupt, by the corrupt appeared first on Coda Story.

If you’d like to know how I came to write about financial crime, you can watch the keynote speech I gave at the Royal United Services Institute FinSec conference earlier this month. The short version is that I was radicalised by Ukraine. I used to write about other subjects, but the Maidan revolution of 2014, and the subsequent annexation of Crimea, revealed the true dynamics of the world to me in a way nothing had before. 

OLIGARCHS CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH

It was partly the revelation of how gross the fallen kleptocrats’ greed had been; it was partly the realisation of how complicit Western enablers had been in the corruption of these kleptocrats; it was partly how Russia’s bought-and-paid-for proxies used blatant lies as cover for its annexation of Ukrainian territory; and it was partly the way that corruption had crushed Ukraine’s ability to respond. Ultimately, it was the combination of all four factors working together that convinced me there was nothing more important to the future of democracy than bringing illicit finance under control.

This is why it was so appalling to see the president of the United States repeating the Kremlin’s lies about Ukraine last week. Corruption of truth plus corruption of morals plus corruption of money equals the destruction of democracy.

Now I’m not going to pretend I have any influence over supporters of Donald Trump. Let's face it, not many of them read this newsletter, and if they did, they wouldn’t listen to me anyway. But it has made me think about what needs to be done in response.

The core of Putin-style politics is what he understands winning an argument to look like. When his opponents are too scared, confused, exhausted, or dead to continue, he thinks he’s won. Sometimes he has: murdering anyone who disagreed with him in Chechnya, shattering an entire city, plus driving out hundreds of thousands of people, did indeed pacify that poor, beautiful place, though it did not work so well as a strategy in Syria.

But here’s why the truth is so troubling to oligarchs, and why Trump unleashed his inner troll when Zelensky said some anodyne but true things, because, no matter how loud you shout, no matter how many people you imprison or murder, two plus two always equals four. And “if that is granted, all else follows.”

SO LET’S CONFRONT THEM WITH THE TRUTH

No matter what the trolls say, actual free speech is not just about letting your opponents say what they like, but about creating structures in which everyone can speak, everyone can be heard, and everyone can agree that the point is to arrive at the truth, not to shout louder. A marketplace of ideas, like any marketplace, can’t function without fair regulations.

And if our rulers refuse to abide by those regulations – like Trump or Putin or, in the U.K., former Prime Minister Boris Johnson – then it is everyone’s duty to call them out. So, it was great to see that Josie Stewart, a British civil servant who lost her job for exposing falsehoods told by Johnson’s government about the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, won a tribunal case for wrongful dismissal.

“We can’t have a system that says stay silent, no matter what you see, and forces dedicated public servants to choose between their conscience and their career,” she said. The usual boring people will claim she was part of the deep state or “the blob,” or whatever, but actually Stewart and people like her are a crucial safeguard against corruption.

Incidentally, in Wales, parliament is debating a new law that would mean politicians could lose their seats if they deliberately lie, which is an interesting idea.

LIKE THE TRUTH ABOUT THE DAMAGE BEING DONE BY MUSK

The good folks at Accountability Lab and Humentum have continued their work to assess the effect of Elon Musk’s decision to destroy USAID (all to save the equivalent of around three and a half days’ worth of the U.S. budget deficit). They have responses from 665 recipients of aid funding, and have broken down how much those organisations will lose and what it means.

The money was spread across many areas, but the largest group affected have been organisations that provided healthcare services, followed by those working in “governance” and “anti-corruption”, with the impact potentially catastrophic even for those who didn’t rely on USAID for all of their money.

Here’s another estimate: after one week of the freeze, almost a million women lost sexual health services; after a month, that figure will hit four million. After 90 days, the supposed length of the freeze, almost 12 million women and girls will be denied life-saving care. That means, if previous trends repeat themselves. 4.2 million women will become pregnant without wanting to, of whom 8,340 will die.

Clinics were one of the few places in rural Afghanistan where women could still work, but now that’s gone. “To be honest, it was one of the worst days of my life,” a midwife in rural Afghanistan told Service95. Imagine what other days an Afghan midwife has likely lived through, and marvel that somehow Elon Musk has managed to make it worse. The knock-on effects in terms of increased misery, increased corruption, and increased terrorism are impossible to calculate, and how any of it benefits the United States is a mystery to me.

WAITING OUT SANCTIONS

While the U.K. is talking tough on sanctions, it is unclear what the Trump administration means to do about the sanctions on Russia and its oligarchs as it continues to negotiate peace. I found this UK Financial Threat Assessment nerdily fascinating. Particularly for its description of some of the mechanisms used by sanctioned Russians to evade restrictions on the movement of their money. Take this choice sentence: “Neo-Bank fails to detect that the regular deposits it receives from Global Bank into the account of Seafarer Z are made by Manager Y, which is funded by Company X, and therefore indirectly by the (sanctioned individual).” 

The British government has promised to keep oligarchs with ties to the Kremlin out of the U.K., where they once bought their most expensive toys, including mansions, newspapers and football clubs. But the oligarchs are sitting tight. For instance, superyachts are expensive toys. And Roman Abramovich hasn’t moved his 162-metre monolith for three years. Mooring fees alone cost more than $200,000 a year. If oligarchs are prepared to go to all that trouble just to keep the crews of their yachts paid, what will they do to buy weapons?

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Why the future of democracy depends on controlling illicit finance appeared first on Coda Story.

Three years ago this week, as Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, an extraordinary wave of global solidarity swept across the world. Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in cities from London to Sydney. Tech giants blocked Russian state media. Even Switzerland abandoned its neutrality to freeze Russian assets. Only five countries voted against a United Nations resolution calling for Russia to withdraw its troops from Ukrainian territory, compared to the 141 who voted in favor of it.

Today, that solidarity has been replaced by something no one could have imagined in February, 2022: the United States has refused to back an annual resolution presented to the UN General Assembly that condemns Russian aggression and demands the removal of troops. Instead, the leader of the world's most powerful democracy now repeats the Kremlin's false narrative that Ukraine started the war.

This stunning reversal of the U.S. position represents Vladimir Putin's greatest victory - not in the battlefields of Ukraine but in a war that most of us thought ended over 30 years ago: the Cold War. 

Putin's win is no accident. For decades, he has been explicit about his ultimate goal: to return to the world of 1945, when the leaders of the U.S.S.R., U.S. and Britain sat around a table in Yalta to divide the world between them. The invasion of Ukraine three years ago was never about Ukraine - it was about reclaiming lost power and forcing the West back to the negotiating table. Putin’s success stems from the collective failure of the Western establishment, convinced of its own invincibility, to recognize his systematic dismantling of the order they claimed to defend.

It would be too simple to blame Donald Trump or any single political leader for finally giving Putin his seat at the table. This failure belongs to the entire Western establishment - including media organizations, think tanks, universities, corporations, and civil society institutions.

The values the West claimed for itself - defense of individual rights, rule of law, democratic values - were worth fighting for. But having “won” the Cold War, Western establishments grew complacent. They assumed the moral high ground was unassailable, dismissing those who warned it could be lost.

When Putin called the Soviet collapse "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," Western analysts dismissed it as rhetoric. When he told George W. Bush that Ukraine was "not a country," they treated it as diplomatic bluster. When he used his 2007 Munich speech to declare ideological war on the Western-led world order, they saw a tantrum.

Each subsequent action - from the invasion of Georgia in 2008, to the annexation of Crimea in 2014, from the downing of MH17, also in 2014, to the killing of opponents throughout Putin’s reign - was treated as an isolated incident rather than part of a carefully orchestrated strategy. When Georgian leaders warned that Ukraine would be next, the Obama administration ignored them, dispatching Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Geneva to meet her Russian counterpart and present him with the infamous "reset" button. When Baltic and Polish leaders pleaded for increased NATO deployments and warned about the Nord Stream pipeline's security implications, they were dismissed as paranoid.

"The Western Europeans pooh-poohed and patronized us for these last 30 years," former Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski told Politico in 2022. "For years they were patronizing us about our attitude: 'Oh, you know, you over-nervous, over-sensitive Central Europeans are prejudiced against Russia.'"

The Lost Victory

Meanwhile, inside Russia, Putin was perfecting the playbook that would eventually transform the West itself. His ideologues, like Alexander Dugin, weren't just discussing Russia's future - they were designing a blueprint for dismantling liberal democracy from within. Dugin, and the influential Izborsky Club think tank, understood that the key to defeating Western values wasn't to challenge them head-on, but to turn their contradictions against themselves.

It wasn't that Dugin had anything particularly compelling to offer. His vision of a post-liberal world order where traditional values trump individual rights was hardly original. But when he sat down with Tucker Carlson in April last year to present Putin as the defender of traditional values against the decadent West, his message resonated with conservatives because too many Westerners felt that liberal values had become hollow promises. 

Many studies, like this from the Pew Research Center, showed that Americans were rapidly losing faith in their institutions. Rather than addressing these grievances, the Western establishment preferred to blame disinformation and foreign interference, dismissing citizens’ concerns and creating resentments that Putin proved masterful at exploiting.

Putin was also methodically building a global coalition that extended far beyond the West. While Western media focused on Russia's influence operations in Europe and America, Moscow was crafting a different narrative for the Global South. In Africa, Russian embassies bombarded newsrooms with op-eds positioning Russia as the successor to the Soviet Union's anti-colonial legacy. The message was simple but effective: Russia was fighting Western imperialism, not waging colonial war.

Engineering the West's Downfall

While Western governments spent billions setting up fact-checking initiatives and disinformation monitoring centers - always reacting, always one step behind - Putin was methodically building loose, agile networks that tapped into genuine popular anger about Western hypocrisy and double standards.

Putin's triumph lies not in offering better ideas or values - democracy, individual rights, and rule of law remain powerful ideals. His genius was in exploiting the growing gap between these principles and people's lived experiences"

The West's reactive stance allowed Putin to continuously set the agenda. The vast "counter-disinformation" industry - now effectively destroyed by Trump’s aid cuts-  focused on debunking individual claims but consistently missed the bigger picture. From RT Arabic's dominant position in Lebanon to coordinated social media campaigns across Africa, Putin crafted narratives that positioned Russia as the champion of all those who felt betrayed and marginalized by the Western-led order.

"Russia's message lands well and softly," one editor from Johannesburg told me during a gathering of African editors in Nairobi in 2022. "The challenge for our team is to objectively navigate overwhelmingly pro-Russian public sentiment." 

The success of this strategy is now undeniable. And yet, Putin offers little in return for his repudiation of the West. Democracy, individual rights, and rule of law remain powerful ideals. His genius was in exploiting the growing gap between these principles and people's lived experiences, a gap that Western establishments proved unwilling or unable to address.

This blind spot - coupled with the West’s inability to imagine losing - became the so-called free world’s greatest vulnerability. While liberal establishments were congratulating themselves on the "end of history," Putin was methodically working to rewrite its ending. While they dismissed the appeal of traditionalist values as backwards and parochial, he was building a global alliance of like-minded leaders and movements. 

Putin's victory was never inevitable. At each step, Western institutions had opportunities to recognize and counter his strategy. Instead, their conviction in their own righteousness led them to consistently underestimate both the threat and the extent of their own failures.

Today, as Russian state media hosts celebrate their triumph and Trump prepares to negotiate Ukraine's surrender, the scale of Putin's achievement is breathtaking. He has succeeded where generations of Soviet leaders failed: not just in resisting Western influence but in fundamentally transforming the West itself. 

The Cold War’s new ending is exactly as Putin scripted it. Not with the triumph of Western liberal democracy, but with its possibly fatal weakening. The Kremlin's guiding framework—where power is truth, principles are weakness, and cronyism is the only real ideology—now defines the White House as well.The question isn't how we got here - Putin told us exactly where he was taking us. The question is whether we can finally abandon our arrogant certainties long enough to understand what happened - and what comes next.

Read More

The Club That Wants Russia to Take Over the World: Our 2018 investigation revealed how the Izborsky Club, a self-described "intellectual circle" of philosophers, journalists and Orthodox priests, was working to dismantle Western liberal democracy. Read how they laid the groundwork for today's reality.

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