A Lot Is Changing.
An unexpected rift.
“It’s the first thing I read every day.” — Brigadier General (retired) Russ Howard, founding director of The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point.
1. Institute for the Study of War (ISW):
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that, after the US-Ukrainian-European meetings on November 23 in Geneva, the peace plan is a “living, breathing document” that changes with new input every day. Rubio added that the parties in Geneva “really moved forward” and that there is no concrete deadline for Ukraine to sign the peace plan, stating that the United States wants to finalize the deal “as soon as possible,” even if that is after the initial November 27 deadline. Rubio stated that the United States recognizes that Ukraine needs security guarantees as part of a peace settlement and that achieving peace will “require for Ukraine to feel as if it is safe” from renewed invasions or attacks. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky stated, after the Geneva meetings, that “a lot is changing” and that talks will continue later on November 23. Ukrainian Presidential Office Head Andriy Yermak, who is leading the newly formed Ukrainian negotiating delegation, stated that delegations will continue working on November 23 and in the coming days to create a joint proposal between the United States, Ukraine, and European allies.
Western reporting also suggests that the United States is open to amending the peace plan, including points about the Ukrainian military and post-war security guarantees. The Washington Post reported on November 22 that US officials stated that the Trump administration recognizes that the security guarantees in the initial 28-point plan are “not strong enough yet.” US officials reportedly stated that US President Donald Trump may raise or remove the 600,000 cap on Ukraine’s military or may consider supplying Ukraine with Tomahawk long-range missiles in the event of a peace agreement to bolster postwar deterrence. The Washington Post reported that a US official stated that the United States and US allies would help Ukraine build a security “wall” along the ceasefire line using unspecified advanced technology. A US official stated that Zelensky responded to the US peace proposal by proposing a ceasefire on strikes against energy infrastructure, but that Russia then responded by labeling such a ceasefire as a “nonstarter.” (Sources: understandingwar.org, washingtonpost.com)
2. The nation’s top military officer will visit Puerto Rico and one of the several Navy warships dispatched to the Caribbean Sea to combat drug trafficking as the Trump administration weighs the possibility of a broader military campaign against Venezuela…General Caine’s visit comes as President Trump has approved several measures to pressure Venezuela and prepare for possible military action, according to multiple people briefed on the matter. Mr. Trump has signed off on C.I.A. plans for covert measures inside Venezuela, operations that could be meant to prepare a battlefield for further action, these people said. At the same time, they said, he has authorized a new round of back-channel negotiations that at one point resulted in Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, offering to step down after a delay of a couple of years, a proposal the White House rejected. (Source: nytimes.com)
3. Greg Ip:
There is nothing any elected official can do to “solve” the affordability crisis reliably. As Biden learned, people don’t want lower inflation (i.e., prices to rise more slowly); they want prices to fall. Trump promised they would. Overall prices haven’t fallen and almost certainly won’t. For prices merely to stop rising for a year (i.e., an inflation rate of zero), would probably require a deep recession. Overall prices haven’t fallen materially since the Great Depression.
Individual actions such as reduced regulation on energy production and infrastructure and capping certain drug prices will help at the margin, but tariffs do the opposite (as Trump seems to have acknowledged by rolling some back). (Source: wsj.com)
4. Americans with four-year college degrees now comprise a record 25% of total unemployment, underscoring a sharp slowdown in white-collar hiring this year. Government-shutdown delayed monthly figures published Thursday by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showed the unemployment rate for bachelor’s degree-holders rose to 2.8% in September, up a half-percentage point from a year earlier. Other levels of education, by contrast, registered little or no increase over the same period. There were more than 1.9 million Americans aged 25 and over with at least a bachelor’s degree who were unemployed in September — one in four of the total number of unemployed. Before 2025, the ratio never reached such a high in data going back to 1992. Younger, recent college grads have also been struggling to find work. (Source: bloomberg.com)
5. The housing market keeps getting worse. Home prices have risen more than 50 percent since the pandemic. About a third of Americans households now spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. In 2014, the median age of a first-time home buyer was 31. In 2025, it was 40 — the highest on record. The core of the problem is simple: Too much money chasing too few homes. How many more homes does America need? I’ve seen estimates ranging from two million to five million. It’s a shortage decades in the making — and one we’re nowhere near on track to solving. In 2025, America built fewer homes per 100,000 people than it did in 2005, 1995, 1985 or 1975. (Source: nytimes.com)
6. President Donald Trump faces an unexpected rift in the MAGA movement as Republican officials from statehouses to Capitol Hill warn his full-throated embrace of the tech industry’s artificial intelligence boom risks undermining Americans’ economic security and exposing their children to new harms. Trump has appointed influential tech investors and entrepreneurs to key positions in his administration and backed the sector’s ambitions for AI, scrapping regulations introduced by President Joe Biden and facilitating huge investments from foreign companies and governments into American AI firms…,But a growing cohort of Republicans — including Govs. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas, and prominent members of Congress such as Sen. Josh Hawley (Missouri) — argue AI’s breakneck growth could undermine the party’s populist appeal. Some have called for regulation to protect Americans against job losses driven by automation, shield teenagers from harms caused by chatbots and curb spikes in utility bills linked to the energy-guzzling data centers that power AI technology. (Source: washingtonpost.com)
7. South America’s political landscape is shifting rightward, with conservative leaders gaining power because of public frustration over crime, immigration and the economy. Chile is poised to elect as president a conservative who has proposed digging ditches to keep out immigrants. In Bolivia, voters recently kicked out the socialists who governed for nearly 20 years. And in Argentina, even the poorest voters have backed President Javier Milei’s efforts to shrink the state. Ruled several years ago by a cohort of leftists, many of them opposed to the U.S., South America is seeing its political pendulum shift to the right. It couldn’t come at a better time for President Trump. (Source: wsj.com)
8. After America, China is the world’s largest developer of new medicines and its companies ran about a third of the planet’s clinical trials last year. That is up from just 5% a decade before (see chart 1). It is also rising to the forefront in critical areas of research, such as those relating to cancer. Investors have taken note. Shares in Chinese biotech companies have surged by 110% this year, more than three times as much as their American peers. For much of the past century drug discovery was dominated by Western firms, the companies collectively often called “big pharma”. No longer. These companies face some of the steepest “patent cliffs” in their history, as drugs expected to generate more than $300bn in total revenue over the next six years will lose their patent protection by 2030. To plug the gap, big American and European firms are scouring the globe for promising molecules, and increasingly, it is finding them in China. (Source: economist.com)
9. The failure of Peak Rare Earths, an Australian mining company, to build a China-free supply of rare-earth minerals offers a look at how Beijing came to dominate the global supply of critical minerals—a position it is now deftly leveraging for geopolitical gain. China has choked off the supply of rare earths to wring key concessions from President Trump in his trade war. The sale of Peak Rare Earths to a Chinese rare-earth behemoth earlier this autumn is part of a pattern that means that, by 2029, Beijing will receive all the rare earths flowing from Tanzania, one of the world’s major emerging sources of the elements, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Some liken it to the grip China enjoys today over cobalt production in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “This is a very strategic loss,” said Gracelin Baskaran, a critical-minerals expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “This increases [Chinese] market power and it increases their market capacity to destabilize an already very fragile market.” (Source: wsj.com)
10. John Lam, UBS Group AG’s head of China property research and a longtime contrarian, is retreating from his earlier bullish calls and joining his Wall Street peers in predicting that the country’s four-year real estate downturn is far from over. Lam said in an interview that he expects home prices to fall for at least another two years before a recovery in China’s beleaguered residential property market can take hold. One reason is that potential buyers are increasingly opting to rent properties while prices are declining, he noted in a report earlier this month. (Source: bloomberg.com)
11. Robin Brooks:
Here’s the problem. As I’ve flagged for many months, we’re in the early stages of a global debt crisis. Longer-term bond yields are rising as markets grow increasingly fearful that high debt levels will be inflated away. A desperate search for safe havens is underway, which is what the “debasement trade” is all about. That’s what’s driven precious metals prices through the roof and is why countries with low government debt (Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark) are suddenly in vogue. In other words, patience is running out for governments whose only solution to a debt overhang is to spend more. That just doesn’t cut it. Japan is reaching the end of the road on this.
Why has Japan reached the end of the road on fiscal stimulus? The reason is that the Bank of Japan (BoJ) remains a big buyer of government debt. This means Japanese yields are being kept artificially low by the BoJ and would be much higher without this intervention. That would plunge Japan into a debt crisis, which the current and past governments are unwilling to confront. Instead, it’s more convenient to use the BoJ to artificially cap yields. The problem is that this doesn’t fix the underlying problem, which is over-indebtedness. It just transmogrifies what would be a crisis in the bond market into a currency crisis. (Source: robinjbrooks.substack.com)
12. The New York Times:
“What OpenAI is engaged in is the most dramatic case of ‘Fake It Until You Make It’ that we have ever seen,” said Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson. “They are making huge commitments that they literally can’t afford.” (Source: nytimes.com)
13. Major insurers are seeking to exclude artificial intelligence risks from corporate policies, as companies face multibillion-dollar claims that could emerge from the fast-developing technology. AIG, Great American and WR Berkley are among the groups that have recently sought permission from US regulators to offer policies excluding liabilities tied to businesses deploying AI tools including chatbots and agents. The insurance industry’s reticence to provide comprehensive cover comes as companies have rushed to adopt the cutting-edge technology. This has already led to embarrassing and costly mistakes when models “hallucinate” or make things up. (Source: ft.com)
14. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine have discovered a natural mechanism that clears existing amyloid plaques in the brains of mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease and preserves cognitive function. The mechanism involves recruiting brain cells known as astrocytes, star shaped cells in the brain, to remove the toxic amyloid plaques that build up in many Alzheimer’s disease brains. Increasing the production of Sox9, a key protein that regulates astrocyte functions during aging, triggered the astrocytes’ ability to remove amyloid plaques. The study, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggests a potential astrocyte-based therapeutic approach to ameliorate cognitive decline in neurodegenerative disease. (Sources: bcm.edu, nature.com)
15. As recently as 15 years ago, self-described conservative and liberal women between the ages of 18 and 35 were having children at around the same rate, according to an analysis from a large national study called the General Social Survey by Samuel Perry, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma. But in recent years, the gap has widened, his analysis shows. As of 2024, roughly 75% of liberal women in this age range were childless, compared with around 40% of conservatives. In 2010, the difference was only 5 percentage points. (Source: wsj.com)
16. Rolling out a yoga mat and flowing with your breath could be one of the best exercises for improving sleep in the long run. A meta-analysis of 30 randomized controlled trials revealed that regular, high-intensity yoga is more strongly associated with improved sleep than walking, resistance training, combination exercise, aerobic exercise, or traditional Chinese exercises, like qi gong and tai chi. (Source: sciencealert.com)
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