Tomorrow’s Affairs, 44 Broadway, London (2025)

10/02/2025

International central banks no longer trust fiat money. In the past, sovereign bonds were a reliable investment and a necessary component of national reserves.

However, global central banks are returning to gold as the safest and most dependable source of value following years of unsustainable debt growth and excessive deficit spending.

Global demand for gold surged once more in 2024, and central banks were mostly responsible for the spike in purchases, which hit a record high of 4,974.5 metric tonnes.

Gold purchases by central banks throughout the world continued to pick up speed, surpassing 1,000 metric tonnes for the third year in a row. Additionally, purchasing increased by 54% year over year to 333 tonnes in the last quarter of 2024.

According to the Global Gold Council, Poland's monetary authority was the biggest purchaser, buying 90 tonnes of gold by November 2024 with the goal of having gold make up about 20% of its holdings.

With 73 tonnes of gold purchases between January and November 2024, India rose to the second-largest position, bringing its total reserves to 876 tonnes.

In 2024, Turkey purchased 72 tonnes of gold, and its gold reserves accounted for 34% of its total foreign exchange reserves.

It's interesting to note that the People's Bank of China (PBoC) also increased its total to 2,264 tonnes in 2024 by almost 30 tonnes.

Full story at the link in our bio.

09/02/2025

As the third anniversary of Vladimir Putin's decision to invade Ukraine approaches, many Russians reflect on the journey that has changed their lives and their country. This is primarily done by the influential individuals surrounding Putin or those who have direct ties to his rule.

The members of Moscow's upper class find themselves in a series of perplexities. Their expectations do not match reality. Many of them have begun to ask questions, albeit quietly.

Are we really that great? It can't be that we are just a "monkey with a gr***de," a common expression in Russia that describes an incompetent, unqualified, and generally not very scary person who has accidentally come into possession of something dangerous that can harm himself and some people around him.

Realisation comes slowly. People are beginning to realise that global affairs will never be the same.
Many things are not going well for the people of Moscow. It was not long ago that these people saw themselves as masters of humanity building a new world order, but now they are begging new Syrian authorities.

Full story at the link in our bio.

09/02/2025

Last week, I mentioned our technological strides in my article about DeepSeek's R1 large language model (LLM). However, as we embrace these advancements, a pressing concern looms: what do these new LLMs and AI technologies mean for our privacy and security?

We must ask the question, what about our data? Who will regulate what information is taken? We can all agree that AI's allure is undeniable. Yet beneath this shiny exterior lies a potential minefield for our personal information.

It can feel like a magician's trick sometimes: look over here so you don't see what I'm doing over there. LLMs ingest vast amounts of data to function effectively, but this data often includes sensitive personal information, which is what raises significant privacy concerns.

Government Concerns Rising

South Korea's industry ministry has temporarily banned access to DeepSeek due to security concerns and has advised agencies to exercise caution when using AI services such as DeepSeek and ChatGPT.

Full story at the link in our bio.

08/02/2025

Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has not left his subjects with the clearest instructions on how they should behave towards the new American administration's policy on Iran's nuclear programme.

His address to air force officers this week was cautious and vague, despite his intention to keep his countrymen calm about developing nuclear capabilities.

The Iranian leader took extreme care in selecting his words when reacting to US President Donald Trump opening up the possibility of dialogue with Iran on nuclear issues.

“The very person who is in office today tore up the agreement. He said he would, and he did. This is an experience we must learn from,” said Ali Khamenei.

On the recent possibility from the White House that there is a place for dialogue with Iran, Khamenei said that negotiations with the current administration “are not intelligent, wise or honourable.”

Full story at the link in our bio.

08/02/2025

"When looking at world history, we have learnt that power does not necessarily mean wisdom and justice," says Yuval Noah Harari in his new book. The first page of the book titled NEXUS starts with this observation. Humanity's continued abuse of power leads it towards self-destruction. He also emphasises an important issue: "Never summon a power you cannot control."

Harari makes a crucial point by metaphorically referring to ancient stories that we all know well: individual initiative does not move power. Power emerges when a large number of people come together. In short, power does not gain strength unless a movement is collective.

Like his predecessors Aldous Huxley, Michel Foucault, John Stuart Mill, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Ibn Khaldun, Harari warns about the danger of being governed by the "worst" in society.

Almost all of these valuable thinkers have discussed the danger of consolidating power in a single person or group. They also mentioned the risk of civil society becoming politicised over time.

Therefore, they argued that the social contract should be based on free will, not on what the masses like or dislike.

"Our problem is actually a network and information problem," says Harari. In fact, he states that information is the glue of all networks. Therefore, for good governance, everyone in the network must have access to accurate information.

Therefore, if some information is free for some decision-makers and restricted for others, it cannot be called a network. Truthful information must circulate at every point in the network to ensure decisions are made correctly.

Full story at the link in our bio.

07/02/2025

Russia is not a friend of America, nor has Russia even sincerely wanted to be one.
Contemporary Russia, similar to 1987 Russia, is filled with more or less the same imperial sentiment. The difference is only in the strength and self-confidence that Russia has.

Russia has never been a fan of America, not even back in those days, during the very early 1990s, when America sent it food aid. Russia pretended to be humble and obedient due to its weakness in hopes of challenging America one day.

Therefore, USAID operated in Russia for decades behind the enemy's lines.

From a Russian perspective, the USAID represented an enemy that required deceit and exploitation.

According to the information USAID has shared on its website, this organisation is apparently proud of its achievements in Russia. This is a dramatic self-deception by the USAID.

Not much that the USAID has accomplished in Russia is beneficial to America.

Full story at the link in our bio.

07/02/2025

Critics who warned last year that a European Union minerals pact with Rwanda would inflame instability in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo were vindicated last week when Rwanda-backed rebels captured the city of Goma.

The EU is now facing calls to suspend the pact struck with Rwanda last February. It aims to ensure a secure stream of critical minerals used in smartphones, electric cars and green technologies amid competition with China.

But it was hardly a secret that most of the minerals exported from Rwanda actually originate from eastern Congo, where more than 100 armed groups have vied for control and millions of people pay the cost, suffering mass rapes and kidnappings as well as mass displacement and acute food insecurity.

With the world focused on President Donald Trump, Rwanda, the darling of the west for its efficient handling of aid and reform, embarked on a stealth occupation of eastern Congo, culminating on 26 January with the capture of Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu that is only 100 km from the Rwandan capital Kigali.

Around 4,000 Rwandan troops accompanied rebels from the Congolese March 23 Movement (M23), say reports. DRC's government called the takeover a "declaration of war” as M23 appeared to be advancing towards Bukavu in South Kivu and even threatening to march “all the way to Kinshasa,” the DRC capital 1,500 km away.

Rwanda has denied supporting M23. But Jean-Pierre Lacroix, chief of UN peacekeeping, said the Rwandan army is in "de facto control of M23 operations”. “There was no question that there are Rwandan troops in Goma supporting the M23,” he said.

Full story at the link in our bio.

06/02/2025

US President Donald Trump's idea to move Palestinians out of Gaza and turn it into a "Riviera of the Middle East" has, as shocking as it was, already fulfilled its purpose to a large extent.

President Trump has thus raised a bar of political expectations well beyond what seemed feasible before he took office.

In many ways, the extreme idea of turning Gaza into Miami, without Palestinians in it, will be more or less corrected, but since President Trump has launched it, its outlines will hover over all future negotiations on a post-conflict Middle East.

Trump has escalated things once again, only to de-escalate them very quickly afterwards. As with the 25% tariffs on imports of goods from Mexico and Canada, which President Trump postponed for a month after talks with the leaders of the two neighbouring countries, de-escalation is already underway.

Moreover, it came very soon after Trump's loud announcement, which he made during a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Full story at the link in our bio.

06/02/2025

Listen up, kids. Yes, I’m talking to you, majority of English Gen-Z men who apparently favour Britain being run by a dictator, and especially those who fancy a man in uniform on top. Or for that matter, all who are losing confidence or interest in democracy and are turning to illiberalism around the globe. I’ve had the good fortune to have worked in some of the less savoury places on earth and can guarantee you this: being ruled by a dictator is the pits.

It sucks in so many ways that by the time the self-interested bastard’s portrait has appeared on every office wall and on your (blockchain) currency, you won’t even remember what first made you feel a bit meh about the imperfect functioning of democracy.

I recognise the desire for a strongman to lead a traumatised, threatened and disillusioned group. In the Middle East, which used to be my patch as a reporter, there’s no shortage of those. But it never ends well.

I can list the ills of the countries that I covered, but some will say that the oppression, killing, torture, ethnic tensions, gender violence, poverty, under-development, illiteracy rates, terrible health outcomes, etc., etc., are a result of regional factors, not dictatorship.

This would ignore that many of those same outcomes, certainly killing, oppression, torture, often gender violence and bad health results, can be found in other, supposedly better-functioning dictatorships, such as Russia and China.

Full story at the link in our bio.

05/02/2025

I recently watched the first season of Netflix’s series “The Recruit”. To be accurate: I managed only the first episode. As a career CIA officer, the disconnect between my experience running espionage operations and the Hollywood portrayal was just too absurd to stomach. “Gray Man,” “Jack Ryan,” and “The Agency” were also particularly painful in this regard.

The screen version of the intelligence world displays perplexing interest in getting a few small details right while otherwise throwing common sense to the wind.

Why hire some ex-intelligence officer to assure that Jack Ryan’s badge looks real and the file folders are the right color if the basic story has no connection with reality whatsoever?

The handful of people who know what a real burn bag for classified papers looks like will also be the most critical of the show’s other failings. When a new series like “The Recruit” drops, I can count on numerous texts from my former colleagues commenting on its foolishness.

Full story at the link in our bio.

05/02/2025

A string of shop closures scheduled for this year is adding to the woes of Britain’s once-busy high streets and highlighting the challenges facing a struggling but evolving retail sector.

The latest high street retreat by both chain stores and independent retailers will add to the almost 13,500 permanent shop closures in 2024, an almost 30 per cent increase on the previous year. In the process, 170,000 jobs were lost.

The Centre for Retail Research, which provided the figures, predicted worse was to come in 2025.
‘Permacrisis’ was how the UK-based CRR previously described the dilemmas confronting global retail since the world financial crisis of 2008 and hugely exacerbated by the widespread lockdowns that accompanied the Covid-19 pandemic.

It stated that post-pandemic consumers had “got out of the habit of high-street shopping or even visiting a store.”

A related phenomenon of the post-Covid recovery is that British consumers have stuck with the online shopping habits they picked up during the lockdowns even more enthusiastically than their American and European counterparts.

Full story at the link in our bio.

04/02/2025

By February 2022, nationalism in Ukraine had undergone a profound transformation. Faced with the existential threat from Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukrainians rallied around symbols once considered divisive.

The phrase “Slava Ukraini!” (Glory to Ukraine)—historically associated with Stepan Bandera, one of the most known figures of the Ukrainian nationalist movement—resonated not just in Kyiv and Lviv but also in south-eastern regions, where Bandera had long been viewed with scepticism.

Suddenly, it was on the lips of politicians, diplomats, and ordinary citizens in cities like Mykolaiv and Kherson, places where such slogans had rarely been embraced before.

For decades, Russian propaganda vilified Bandera, amplifying his brief cooperation with N**i Germany and portraying him as the epitome of brutality.

This narrative resonated not only in Russia but also in Poland and Israel, where Bandera remains a controversial historical figure. But when Russian missiles rained down on Ukrainian cities, “Slava Ukraini!” became a rallying cry for resistance and national survival.

A similar shift occurred with language. Speaking Ukrainian became an expression of loyalty and defiance, a rejection of Russian imperialism—not only politically, but also culturally.

Russia had long used its culture as a propaganda tool, using its literature, music, and even ballet to justify expansionism.

One of the most striking examples is Sergei Polunin, the internationally acclaimed ballet dancer born in Kherson, who renounced his Ukrainian roots, tattooed Vladimir Putin’s face on his chest, and openly supported Russia’s war effort.

While Russian bombs were falling on Ukrainian cities, Polunin toured Russia and raised funds for the invading army. In this context, Ukraine’s rejection of Russian culture is hardly surprising.

Full story at the link in our bio.

03/02/2025

The strong pressure brought quick diplomatic wins to the administration of Donald Trump in several important places for his foreign policy agenda.
For instance, he has forced Colombia to accept illegal migrants from the US, and Panama has decided to abandon China's Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure megaproject due to pressure related to the canal.

Will South Africa be one of the next targets of Trump's political and economic pressure?

The heavy accusations of the US President against the expropriation law indicate that South Africa will very soon, if not already, become a training ground for exerting strong pressure from Washington, with the expectation of bringing major changes in government policy in Pretoria.

The US president has clearly labelled as racially motivated, to the detriment of the white minority, the law on the expropriation of land, which was signed by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa last week.

“Terrible things are happening in South Africa, the leadership is doing some terrible things, horrible things. So, that’s under investigation right now. They are taking away land, confiscating land, and they are doing things that are perhaps far worse than that,” said Trump.

Full story at the link in our bio.

03/02/2025

According to the 2023 International Trade Barrier Index (TBI), the countries that ranked the worst for imposing the highest trade barriers were India, Russia, and Indonesia. The index, which ranks eighty-eight nations affecting 72% of the world population and 96% of the global GDP, highlights some interesting facts:

The countries with the worst tariff scores are India, Russia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Egypt. China and Brazil also ranked poorly, placing 77th and 79th overall in the TBI.

South Asia as a region had the highest trade barriers, with little variation among its countries. Thus, the BRICS that some analysts love so dearly are the global leaders in tariffs and trade barriers.

The United States fell from the 51st place to the 65th during the Biden administration.

There is an important lesson to be learnt from this information. For decades, the West has opened trade to the world and trade barriers have been lifted, leading to an unprecedented improvement in access to goods and services and making everyone richer in the process. The development of free trade has helped many nations lift millions of citizens out of poverty.

No one denies the powerful good that free trade brings to the world. However, some nations have built barriers while the world was opening and, instead of joining the world in open trade, they have become a group that is trying to build a strategic alliance exempt from free and open markets, the BRICS.

Full story at the link in our bio.

02/02/2025

This week's big tech story comes from a little-known Chinese company called DeepSeek. The AI world is abuzz with DeepSeek announcing its latest large language model (LLM), the R1.

You know a company is making waves when you try to sign up to test their service (I did this myself), and it takes you over 48 hours due to a notification that says, “Due to large-scale malicious attacks on DeepSeek's services, registration may be busy. Please wait and try again."

For those of us tracking the rapid evolution of AI, this wasn’t just another product launch; it was a seismic shift in the landscape of artificial intelligence. DeepSeek’s R1 isn’t just another LLM; it’s a statement.

This statement shows that the future of AI isn’t just about who can build the most innovative model but also about who can build the most brilliant model efficiently.

DeepSeek has thrown down the gauntlet to its competitors, and I'm here for it. Let’s start with the basics: What is DeepSeek?

For the uninitiated, DeepSeek is a relatively new player in the LLM arena, but it’s quickly making a name for itself. Unlike the tech giants that dominate the AI conversation, think OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, DeepSeek has positioned itself as a lean, agile innovator.

Its models are highly efficient in terms of computational resources and cost. The R1 is a leap forward in affordability and accessibility.
So, the question is, why is the world talking about DeepSeek R1 this week? Two words: cost efficiency.

Full story at the link in our bio.

02/02/2025

The Kremlin knew what to expect from previous US administrations, as they all followed almost the same algorithm of management technology.
With the Trump administration refusing to follow the old political and diplomatic dogmas, the Kremlin may not know what to expect from the USA for the first time in modern history.

Above all, the Kremlin does not know what to do if the Trump administration deviates from conventional political science and diplomacy schemes.

In Moscow, considerable attention was paid to the statement by the American conservative journalist Tucker Carlson that the administration of the previous US president, Joe Biden, was after Vladimir Putin.

"The Biden administration tried to kill Putin," Tucker Carlson, who did a major interview with Vladimir Putin last year, said on his podcast this week.

Yet Trump's favourite journalist has provided no evidence for his claim. The top people in the Kremlin viewed this unpleasant narrative from a different perspective, while ordinary Russians were mostly shocked by it.

Full story at the link in our bio.

01/02/2025

Just three weeks before the federal parliamentary elections, the German conservatives have taken a risky step by removing the "firewall" to the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).

By allowing the AfD to pass non-binding restrictive measures against migrants in the Bundestag, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), have broken the decades-long consensus of the political mainstream that the far-right should not come to power.

The outgoing German chancellor and leader of the Social Democrats, Olaf Scholz, is one of those who accuse the conservatives of destroying the historical consensus to prevent history from repeating itself and extremists from coming to power.

The firewall has fallen, said Mr Scholz on the occasion of the joint vote by the mainstream conservatives and the AfD in the Bundestag last Wednesday. Alice Weidel, the AfD's candidate for chancellor, said the same thing, but in a winning tone.

The considerable political divide with the far-right was bridged, but just two days later, the Bundestag rejected the first motion involving both the centre and far-right.

However, the scar on the political face of the candidates for the formation of the next conservative German government and its leader, Friedrich Merz, will remain very visible until the end of the election campaign.

Full story at the link in our bio.

01/02/2025

World history is filled with wars, conflicts, and tensions. So, what if these conflicts had never existed? What kind of place would the world be? Have you ever thought about it? You must have pondered this at some point.

Unfortunately, even on issues we all agree on, numerical examples are often the only way to be taken seriously. Therefore, I will attempt to answer the question, "What would economic prosperity, technological development, hunger, and poverty look like if there were no wars and conflicts?" by presenting some theses and numerical comparisons.

Economic Prosperity

Let’s start with the topic of economic prosperity. Wars result in the loss of trillions of dollars globally each year. As of 2020, the economic loss due to war and violence around the world is estimated to be around $14.5 trillion.

If this enormous amount could be spent on health, education, and infrastructure, we could see a significant increase in national income growth rates each year.

Full story at the link in our bio.

Tomorrow’s Affairs

10/02/2025

09/02/2025

09/02/2025

08/02/2025

08/02/2025

07/02/2025

07/02/2025

06/02/2025

06/02/2025

05/02/2025

05/02/2025

04/02/2025

03/02/2025

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