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The Gun Is Not the Constraint. The Chemistry Behind the Shell Is.
The Mines Are Cleared. The Mines Were Never the Constraint.
Riyadh Bought Its Pipes at Home for Policy Reasons and Got Insurance Instead
Apple's New Chief Gets the Products. The Outgoing One Keeps the Governments
The Container Line and the Listening Post Turn Out to Be the Same Ship
The Cheapest Thing in This Conflict Is Now the Footage
Somebody Finally Paid for the Years Nothing Is Needed
The Pay Freeze Exempts the Jobs Government Cannot Afford to Lose
The Credit Expires in December. The Tariff Has No Published Scope
The Strait of Hormuz Has No Cape of Good Hope
The Big Read
The Long ViewThe Closure Emptied the Strait and Tripled What a Tanker Earns
Scarcity of willing tonnage is a cost to everyone shipping oil and a windfall to everyone owning a ship. The seafarers are on the other side of that ledger.
A US Navy cruiser under way. The closure is contested by navies; the rate sheet is downstream of that. File photograph, 2021.
National News
You Cannot Ban the Equipment You Cannot Find
The purchase order is the fast half.
World
The ships can reroute. The people aboard them cannot
Risk moves through shipping in layers.
You Cannot Delegate the Thing You Have Never Done
Every Bad Policy Was Written for One Person Who Left Years Ago
The Complaint That Would Have Saved You Never Reached Anyone
Health
The Trial Showed It Was Not Worse. The Label Now Says It Cuts Risk.
A cardiovascular indication is not a clinical detail.
The Shortage Made Room on the Shelf. A Second Supplier Is a Harder Thing to Build.
More capacity at the same sites is more output and the same fragility.
The Bonds Are Longer Than the Machines They Paid For
When capex approaches cash flow, the next dollar is borrowed.
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How to submitThe Picture
Iran Stopped Closing the Strait and Started Publishing a List
Markets
A Secondary Sale Is the Only Place a Private Credit Mark Meets a Buyer
Field Notes
A Thousand New Rules, and Eighteen Percent Fewer People to Enforce Them
National News
You Have to Accept the Transfer Before You Can Ask Not to Go
National News
Federal Hiring Does Not Stall at the Interview
Latest News
Everything we have published, newest firstThe AI Buildout
The Coordination Is Permanent. The Compute Is Donated.
The National AI Research Resource has been made permanent, with an operations centre run by the San Diego and Texas supercomputing centres. The compute behind it still arrives from Nvidia, OpenAI and Microsoft, and no appropriation figure was announced.
The Data Centre's Next Constraint Is the Box the Power Arrives In
Eaton is putting $242m and 1,200 jobs into a million square feet in North Little Rock to make customised electrical enclosures, and says the plant will double its US capacity for them. A company does not double capacity for a product that is comfortably supplied.
One Plant, One Drug, and a Regulator Choosing Which Failure the Patient Gets
Ifosfamide has been in critical shortage for about three months. It is a decades-old chemotherapy used in curative and salvage regimens for sarcoma and testicular cancer, and American supply ran overwhelmingly through one contract plant in Germany, which the FDA had cited in March for recurrent microbial contamination.
National News
The Pay Freeze Exempts the Jobs Government Cannot Afford to Lose
Most federal civilian pay is frozen at 2026 levels next year. Law enforcement gets 3.8 percent and the military gets five to seven. The exceptions are an admission that pay decides who shows up.
Everybody Audits the Package. Nobody Audits the Shelf It Sits On.
A decade of supply-chain security verifies what a package is. This is an attack on the thing that hands you the package.
Eligibility Buys a Place in the Queue, Not the Childcare
Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia were running waiting lists for childcare assistance this spring, against eight states in 2023. Three more simply turned eligible applicants away. Indiana alone had nearly 37,000 children waiting for a benefit they already qualify for.
The Long View
Private Credit Stabilised and Deteriorated in the Same Quarter, and Both Are True
One account of second-quarter results says conditions have begun to stabilise. Another, from a review of filings by 44 business development companies, says portfolios moved further below cost. Ares Capital's non-accruals rose 15 percent to $708m. The reports do not contradict each other; they describe different derivatives of the same line.
Fifty-Six Gigawatts of Cell Capacity, Thirteen of Wafers. The Cells Need Wafers.
America's solar manufacturing pipeline now holds 55.9GW of announced and in-build cell capacity and 41.4GW of modules. Wafers — the step that sits between polysilicon and cells, and without which neither is any use domestically — total 13.3GW across every stage of the pipeline combined.
A subsidy keyed to output would require the state to grade journalism.
The Navy Can Escort the Ship. It Cannot Underwrite It.
Warships have been escorting tankers through the Strait of Hormuz for months. War-risk premiums went from one to three percent of hull value before the war to between seven and a half and ten percent, and the escort did not bring them down. Security and risk are priced by different institutions, and they do not net.
Google Keeps the Auction and Gets a Referee Instead
A divestiture ends. A rule needs a referee, and the referee has no end date.
Opinion Voices
Argument and analysis from our columnists
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The reporters and editors behind the coverage
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The Story So Far
State Capacity13 stories
- 4 Sept A Thousand New Rules, and Eighteen Percent Fewer People to Enforce Them
- 4 Sept You Have to Accept the Transfer Before You Can Ask Not to Go
- 4 Sept Federal Hiring Does Not Stall at the Interview
- 3 Sept Saving the Agency Is Not the Same as Keeping the Capability
- 3 Sept Eligibility Buys a Place in the Queue, Not the Childcare
- 2 Sept The Gun Is Not the Constraint. The Chemistry Behind the Shell Is.
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The Ports Fixed Themselves. The Roads Behind Them Did Not
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Everyone Diversified Their Model Suppliers. Almost Nobody Diversified the Layer Underneath
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Agencies Cannot Hire Fast Enough to Spend What Congress Appropriated
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The Equipment Lease Was the Last Easy Credit. It Is Not Any More
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The Delivery Room Is the First Thing a Rural Hospital Closes
Health
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The Quiet Revenue Line in Your Index Fund
Markets
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School Districts Are Budgeting for Students Who Never Arrived
National News
The Cranberry Brief