Warsaw, 2024 – Somewhere between the Vistula’s lazy bend and the next EU summit, Poland has quietly become the world’s most over-qualified cautionary tale. Thirty-five years after the Berlin Wall’s souvenir hawkers packed up, the country sits at the geopolitical equivalent of the last booth in a 24-hour diner: everyone ends up there eventually, the…
John Sununu: The Man Who Made Bureaucracy a Contact Sport By Dave’s Locker International Affairs Desk On the surface, John H. Sununu looks like the sort of technocrat who could be quietly misplaced behind a potted palm at any OECD reception. A former governor of New Hampshire, White House Chief of Staff to George H….
Courtney Wild and the Global Epidemic of Disposable People By Marcello Vanzi, International Correspondent, Dave’s Locker PARIS—If you squint through the diesel haze drifting off the Boulevard Périphérique, Courtney Wild’s story looks almost Parisian: a woman reduced to a headline, a case file, a cautionary tale. Yet the same plot points—powerful men, silenced women, and…
Honduras: The Little Republic That Couldn’t Catch a Break By Dave’s Locker International Desk (with a stiff cup of contraband coffee) If global geopolitics were a dinner party, Honduras would be the guest who arrives early, helps set the table, and still gets seated next to the drunk uncle who keeps spilling merlot on the…
ABTC Stock: From a Quiet Nevada Lab to the World’s Lithium Chessboard By Dave’s Locker International Desk When American Battery Technology Company (ABTC) closed Monday at US $1.47—up 38 % in five sessions—day-traders in New York saw a meme revival. Half a world away, however, the ripple was felt on three continents where governments are…
From Davos to Dhaka, the whispers started on trading floors and in diplomatic cables before sunrise: “Have you seen the Jolts Report?” By the time the New York open bell chimed, the headline had ricocheted across every major time zone, turning a once-sleepy U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics release into a planetary flashpoint. Overnight, the…
Seoul, South Korea – At 3:14 a.m. local time, when most of this megacity’s 9.7 million residents were asleep, a 14-year-old coder in Gangnam discovered that a Roblox experience titled “Steal a Brainrot” had been quietly translated into Korean, Arabic, Spanish and Tagalog. Within four hours, the game’s concurrent player count leapt from 12,000 to…
Northwestern Mutual’s Quiet Power: How a 167-Year-Old Wisconsin Insurer Is Quietly Shaping Global Capital Flows By Dave’s Locker International Desk Milwaukee rarely dominates global financial headlines—until now. While Wall Street fixates on the latest fintech unicorn or Beijing’s regulatory crackdowns, Northwestern Mutual has been moving trillions of dollars in ways that reach far beyond its…
Gold’s Quiet Rally: Why GLD Is Suddenly the Whole World’s Hedge By Dave’s Locker International Desk LONDON—On trading floors from Tokyo to Toronto, one three-letter ticker has muscled its way back onto every macro strategist’s screen: GLD, the SPDR Gold Shares ETF. After months of listless drifting, the world’s largest bullion-backed fund has surged 11…
