Joseph Belbruno Blog

  REVIEW & OUTLOOK Trump and a New ‘Arsenal of Freedom’ Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently made a bracing remark that received almost no attention. “This is a  1939 moment,” he told defense executives in a speech, “or, hopefully, a 1981 moment— a moment of mounting urgency.” The Administration deserves credit if this urgency translates into fixing how the U.S. military fields equipment, amid new threats and ways of war. The Defense Department has released memos on pushing the bureaucracy to move faster in buying everything from drones to missiles to ships. Most Americans have been hearing tales of Pentagon woe—late, expensive new aircraft carriers; an 8,000% price markup on a soap dispenser inside a C-17 bathroom. Mr. Hegseth says the Administration is aiming to “rebuild the arsenal of freedom,” and the Trump crowd has identified the dysfunctions: Overregulation, diffused accountability, and insufficient competition. “Every process, every board, and every review must ...

  Protest over plan to house 600 asylum seekers in town Daniel Sexton - South East Mon, November 17, 2025 at 12:38 AM GMT+8 2 min read No arrests were made, police say [Eddie Mitchell] A protest has taken place in an East Sussex town over government plans to house 600 asylum seekers in a former military site. The government announced plans in October for the asylum seekers to be  housed in a now disused army training camp  on the outskirts of Crowborough. Sussex Police confirmed that a planned peaceful protest had taken place on Sunday morning in the town, and no arrests were made. A Home Office spokesperson told the BBC it was "furious at the level of illegal migrants and asylum hotels in this country". The Home Office apologised for the handling of the plans to house asylum seekers in Crowborough [Eddie Mitchell] More Moving asylum seekers to military sites is part of the government's attempt to end the controversial use of hotels – something it has pledged to do before...

  The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education Nov. 16, 2025 Credit... Illustration by Alvaro Dominguez/The New York Times Listen to this article · 9:09 min  Learn more 202 By  Jean M. Twenge Dr. Twenge is a psychology professor at San Diego State University and the author of “10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World.” The standardized test scores of American students had been rising for decades. Then they began to slide, dropping to their lowest point in two decades in 2023 and 2024. This is not a problem confined to the United States. Worldwide,  the performance  of 15-year-olds in math, reading and science reached a nadir in 2022. These dismal results are at least partly a result of  the Covid-19 pandemic . Missed instruction during those years may still be having an impact on academic performance. But that’s only part of the story. The decline in test scores started  well before  the pandemic, around 2012. One  obvious culprit is smar...

  AI Is Making Big Tech Weaker $300 billion Microsoft 200 Alphabet 100 Amazon 0 2020 ’21 ’22 ’23 ’24 ’25 Note: Figures for 2025 are forecasts. Sources: FactSet; S&P Capital IQ Revenue growth at these companies should support the spending for now, but keeping up with the AI Joneses is also eventually  going to require more debt . doubled its debt when it issued a $30 billion bond in October, while  Oracle   ORCL  2.43% sold $18 billion of bonds in September after signing a $300 billion cloud-computing deal with OpenAI. Taken together, those changes—weaker cash balances, less cash flow, more debt—are beginning to fundamentally alter the tech-company business model. For investors, that may require looking at tech companies through a different lens: largely as capital-intensive businesses whose success hinges on spending decisions rather than on ultra-scalable software and cloud-computing players profiting from people and companies going digital. Raymond James t...

  Insurers will face scrutiny if private credit breaks Toby Nangle toby.nangle@ft.com · 15 Nov 2025 Private markets have been attracting increasing regulatory scrutiny, and for good reason. It’s not just that the level of disclosures is less than what is required in public markets. Or even that valuations of private market assets are more based on models rather than public pricing, robbing regulators of market signals that could inform their work. It’s because private markets have become so big. By value, global private assets under management came to just over $13tn in 2023, having more than doubled in size over the previous five years, according to a recent report by financial data firm Preqin. It estimated that this figure is on track to almost double again by 2030. The vast majority of these holdings are private equity assets, though the growth of private credit has been explosive. To put these numbers into perspective, Bain & Company estimates that the total assets under m...

  The Rats are rattled.  China’s secretive gold purchases help fuel record price rally Large amount of unreported transactions presents fresh challenge for bullion traders Additional contributions from Cheng Leng in Beijing and Ray Douglas in London LESLIE HOOK — LONDON · 15 Nov 2025 China’s unreported gold purchases could be more than 10 times its official figures as it quietly tries to diversify away from the US dollar, say analysts, highlighting the increasingly opaque sources of demand behind bullion’s record-breaking rally. Publicly reported buying by China’s central bank has been so low this year — 1.9 tonnes purchased in August, 1.9 tonnes in July and 2.2 tonnes in June — that few in the market believe the official figures. Analysts at Société Générale estimated that, based on trade data, China’s total purchases could reach as much as 250 tonnes this year or more than a third of total global central bank demand. The scale of the country’s unreported purchases highlights...