DeepSeek shock wave hits Wall Street

Nick Beams

US tech companies, Wall Street and the political and military establishment have been delivered a major blow with the announcement by a small Chinese startup company, DeepSeek, that it is able to develop an advanced AI system without the most advanced chips produced in the US and at much less cost.

The logo for the app DeepSeek [AP Photo/Jon Elswick]

On January 20, DeepSeek introduced R1, a model for solving complex problems. It explained that it had developed a so-called large language model (LLM) which could learn and improve itself without human supervision using lower-level technology and at lower cost. The model was open source, meaning that the process by which it was developed can be followed.

According to the Wall Street Journal: “Specialists said DeepSeek’s technology still trails that of OpenAI and Google. But it is a close rival using fewer and less-advanced chips, and in some cases skipping steps that US developers consider essential.”

Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who has been advising Trump, said on X on Friday: “DeepSeek R1 is one of the most amazing and impressive breakthroughs I’ve ever seen.”

He called its development “AI’s Sputnik moment,” likening it to the Soviet Union’s launch of the first satellite to circle the earth in 1957, an event which shocked the US.

A week after its model was released and assessed, a shock wave hit Wall Street in trading on Monday.

Shares in Nvidia, the leading US manufacturer of advanced AI chips, which has been at the centre of Wall Street’s high-tech boom, plunged by almost 17 percent. The company lost around $600 billion in market value, more than double the previous record it held for a single-day fall and the biggest for any company in history.

Broadcom, another AI-based stock dropped by 17 percent. The S&P 500 closed 1.5 percent lower and the tech-heavy NASDAQ dropped 3 percent.

Other companies, not directly involved in AI but connected to its development, were also hit. Siemens Energy, which supplies electrical hardware for AI infrastructure, dropped 20 percent and Schneider Electrical which supplies power products used in data centres fell 9.5 percent.

The DeepSeek breakthrough, if it is sustained and some are calling it into question, threatens to upend the major investment plans of the leading US AI firms. Nvidia has said that it expects what the Financial Times (FT) calls the “data centre building frenzy” to continue to at least the end of the decade.

Luca Paolini, chief strategist at Picet Asset Management, told the FT the DeepSeek development showed “how vulnerable the AI trade still is, like every trade that is consensus and based on the assumption of an unassailable lead.”

The AI boom on the stock market began after the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022. From the start of 2023 the NASDAQ index has risen by 92 percent, an increase in market capitalisation of $14 trillion which has shoveled tens, if not hundreds, of billions into the portfolios of tech company founders and chef executives. In Monday’s trading the index lost market capitalisation of $1 trillion. The arrival of DeepSeek has raised major concerns.

As an article on Bloomberg noted: “Suddenly, a rally predicated on US AI dominance turned into a question of whether the hundreds of billions in AI investments would ever lead to profits large enough to justify the rich valuations afforded to Megacap stocks. The group makes up 30 percent of the S&P 500 by weighting, more than at any time in history.”

Comments from a number of analysts and executives cited by Bloomberg, pointed to the development of a sea change in AI and the market boom it has promoted.

Max Gokhman, senior vice president at Franklin Templeton Investment Solutions, said: “Today’s moves show just how precarious this market set up is. When valuations stretch to the sky it’s easier for small trembles to make the entire market rumble.”

Vey-Sern Ling, managing director at the wealth management firm Union Bancaire Privee, said: “DeepSeek shows that it is possible to develop powerful AI models that cost less. It can potentially derail the investment case for the entire AI supply chain, which is driven by high spending from a small handful of hyperscalers.”

Paul Nolte, a senior market strategist at a wealth management firm, said he did not know whether this was a “Sputnik Moment” for stocks but it was a wake-up call that the US was “not the only game in town.”

“That requires a lot of investors to look at the AI companies in a different way: To put these very high valuations in stocks thinking they have cornered the market is a huge mistake and that is being re-rated.”

The DeepSeek development, has major political implications. Trump has declared that the US is the global leader in AI and its development and monopolisation is central to his Make America Great Again project aimed at ensuring American dominance over the global economy, and above all the suppression of China.

The attack on the technological development of China, which began in the first Trump administration and was considerably intensified under Biden, has centred on imposing export bans on high-end computer chips on the grounds of “national security.”

But even before the DeepSeek announcement there have been clear indications that not only has this policy been failing but it may have even pushed forward Chinese high-tech development.

Last year the Chinese phone and telecommunications company, Huawei, which was nearly put out of business by bans imposed under the first Trump administration, released a phone which more than adequately rivalled those of its competitors. It involved the development of a new chip which had been considered very difficult.

China is already the global leader in photovoltaics, crucial for solar panels, and is fast becoming the world leader in electric vehicles if it is not already.

Now the question will arise in the US political and military establishment as to whether this might occur in AI.

As Mitul Kotecha, head of emerging markets macro and foreign exchange strategy at Barclays told the FT: “It seems as if there is a bit of reality dawning that China has not been sitting idle, even as these tariffs and investment restrictions on tech companies have been put in place.”

Notwithstanding the impact of the tech bans, and they have been significant, Chinese companies have been able to draw on the capacities and ingenuity of the tens of thousands of graduates who come out of colleges and universities every year.

There is, as yet, no public response from the Pentagon or other sections of the military and intelligence establishment to the DeepSeek development. But no doubt it will be subject to careful study because AI is regarded as an existential issue for the maintenance of US dominance. And the conclusion will be drawn that if the measures imposed so far have not been effective, then others must be developed, including outright military methods.

ICE escalates raids across the US after Trump demands 1,500 immigrant arrests per day

Kevin Reed

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers use a chain to restrain a detained person, Monday, January 27, 2025, in Silver Spring, Maryland [AP Photo/Alex Brandon]

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers dramatically increased daily arrests of immigrants in cities across the US beginning on Sunday under orders from the Trump White House.

In a meeting on Saturday, Trump administration officials demanded quotas for ICE arrests be raised from a few hundred to between 1,200 and 1,500 people per day. A report in the Washington Post said the increase was demanded “because the president has been disappointed with the results of his mass deportation campaign so far, according to four people with knowledge of the briefings.”

The Post report also said, “The quotas were outlined Saturday in a call with senior ICE officials, who were told that each of the agency’s field offices should make 75 arrests per day and managers would be held accountable for missing those targets.”

Prior to the new quotas, the daily number of immigrants being arrested by the Biden administration was 311 people on average.

ICE reported 956 people had been arrested on Sunday by multiple federal police agencies in cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Diego, Denver, Miami, Atlanta and major cities in northern Texas.

While the president and his fascist border czar Tom Homan are claiming that the raids are “enhanced targeted operations” aimed at “keeping potentially dangerous criminal aliens out of our communities,” it is clear the arrests are being carried out indiscriminately and the up to five-fold increase will intensify this fact.

In an example of the blatantly racist tactics being utilized by immigration authorities—which exposes the fundamentally undemocratic character of the entire operation—Navajo Nation Council Speaker Crystalyne Curley reported that at least 15 Indigenous people in Arizona and New Mexico have reported being stopped and asked to produce proof of citizenship. Some of these US citizens in tribal communities have also been detained.

A press release issued by the Office of Navajo President Buu Nygren on Friday said, “My office has received multiple reports from Navajo citizens that they have had negative, and sometimes traumatizing, experiences with federal agents targeting undocumented immigrants in the Southwest.”

Other reports have shown that the raids are above all aimed at intimidating and terrorizing immigrant families and communities as part of the Trump administration’s campaign to scapegoat immigrants for the crisis of American and world capitalism.

In the Chicago area, ABC Eyewitness News said a woman reported that her father, who had been in the US for 30 years, was arrested at his home in Waukegan. Yelitza Marquina explained that the seizure of her father happened under apparently false pretenses. “They (family members) opened the door because they thought maybe one of us was in trouble or something happened to us. Never did they think it was ICE.”

In another example of the despicable role of media personalities in the ICE offensive, “Dr. Phil” McGraw has been permitted to “embed” with ICE officers during raids in Chicago. The purpose of the ride-along by the former psychologist, who rose to television fame alongside Oprah Winfrey, is to bolster the Trump administration’s claims that only “known criminals and terrorists” are being targeted by ICE.

In Miami, CBS News interviewed an unidentified man who said ICE had taken his wife during a raid in the neighborhood of Brownsville. The man said his wife of 11 years was from Venezuela and had a court date scheduled to complete a three-year process of getting her US citizenship. He said, “everything was good” until ICE showed up. “They just came, and they snatched her,” he said.

In Los Angeles, Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) officials mobilized their forces to assist the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in carrying out the crackdown in the fire ravaged city. Matthew Allen, special agent in charge of the DEA’s LA field division, posted photos on social media showing DEA agents, who were masked, armed and dressed in paramilitary fatigues, deployed in a residential area.

In Texas, ICE representatives confirmed to the Texas Newsroom that raids were underway across the northern cities of Dallas, Irving, Arlington, Fort Worth, Garland and Collin County. The statement said that 84 people had been arrested in North Texas and the state of Oklahoma, and they were taken to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations field office in Dallas for processing.

Targeted operations were also carried out in Austin and the Rio Grande Valley. In Austin, ICE was supported by DEA agents from Houston. However, details on the number of arrests or where they were carried out have not been reported.

On Sunday afternoon, protesters gathered at the Texas State Capitol in response to the raids in Austin. One protester told KXAN, “They are the epitome of the American Dream. They’ve come here and worked hard. They have a right to be here just like anyone else who has fled a country that doesn’t provide the needs of the citizens.”

A demonstration against the ICE raids was also held in Omaha, Nebraska, near 24th and L streets in the south of the city, as reported by KETV 7 ABC.

It is not clear what kind of process those who have been arrested will face. It is being widely reported that anyone who is merely undocumented—a civil, not criminal, infraction—and picked up in the raids will be deported, along with those authorities claim who have committed crimes in the US.

Also, US military aircraft are being used to fly groups of immigrants back to their home countries. CNN reported from Guatemala City on Monday about two flights by US military planes that had landed with migrants who had been deported.

Numerous Democrats have been interviewed on CNN about the vicious attacks on immigrant workers and their families. Not one has disputed the assertions of the fascist Trump and his cabinet officials that the US has been invaded by “drug dealers, criminals and rapists.”

Far from it, the Democrats argue that Trump has a “moral obligation” to protect those who are innocent, while also consistently supporting the pretext that “criminals” must be arrested and deported. This amounts to an endorsement of an unprecedented assault on the basic rights of the most vulnerable sections of the working class.

Australian governments exposed for human rights violations on youth detention

Eric Ludlow

Global NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) has in its World Report 2025 slammed Australian state and territory governments for human rights violations including the treatment of children in the criminal justice system.

Governments in Australia have adopted a “tough on crime” stance to counter a supposed youth “crime wave.” 

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Labor government on August 24, 2023, amended the Youth Justice Act to legitimise locking up children in adult cells. [Photo: Australian Human Rights Commission]

In reality, youth crime is on the decrease and the policies of governments to incarcerate young people—particularly those from impoverished backgrounds—is part of a wholesale assault on the democratic rights of working-class people.

The age of criminal responsibility is just 10 in New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Western Australia (WA) and the Northern Territory (NT). In August, the Victorian Labor government abandoned plans to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14. Instead, it has raised it to just 12.

The only jurisdiction in the country with a criminal age of responsibility of 14 years is the Australian Capital Territory. That is the minimum recommended by the UN. Children younger than the age of criminal responsibility cannot be charged or prosecuted.

According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, more than 700 children between 10 and 17 years old were in detention in 2022–2023. That number has likely ballooned further. About 60 percent of the children imprisoned across the country are indigenous.

Among the detained youth are many who are kept in adult jails. 

The WA government has detained children in Unit 18—a wing of the maximum-security Casuarina Prison. In September 2023, a 17-year-old Aboriginal boy, Cleveland Dodd, committed suicide after being incarcerated at Unit 18 and the Banksia Hill youth detention centre. He was regularly subjected to solitary confinement.

The situation in the NT is the most shocking.

There, the prison population has skyrocketed to more than 2,600 this month following the imposition of the lower age of criminal responsibility. The prison population has nearly doubled since 2012 when it was 1,413. The number of people in NT prisons is more than 1 percent of the territory’s population which is about 255,000.

Around 89 percent of the prison population in NT is indigenous. This is despite the territory’s indigenous people only making up 26 percent of the total population. This is the outcome of the centuries-long oppression of Aboriginal people under Australian capitalism. Many live in poverty with little to no access to healthcare, education and social welfare. They are the most oppressed section of the working class.

If the Northern Territory were a separate country, it would have the second highest incarceration rate in the world—behind only El Salvador—according to the World Population Review. 

This extraordinary situation is the responsibility of both Labor and conservative governments. Labor held office from 2016 until last August, as the incarceration rate consistently increased, before suffering a major election defeat, substantially resulting from popular anger over the massive cost-of-living and social crisis.

The next highest imprisonment rate in Australia is WA which has 0.2 percent of its population behind bars.

Across the NT’s prisons and work camps, there are 2,177 beds. This means that there is an overflow of hundreds of prisoners currently being held in police watch houses. Australian Human Rights Commissioner Lorraine Finlay also found that rising prisoner overcrowding and overheating—problems across the country—are acute in the NT.

The government has begun work to add up to 1,000 new beds to NT prisons by 2028. This includes reopening the Don Dale youth detention centre as the Berrimah adult jail to house 200 adult prisoners by March. Done Dale was exposed in 2014 as a site where children were tortured and inhumanely treated, shocking workers and youth across the country.

Earlier this month, NT chief minister Lia Finocchiaro claimed that more arrests meant “safer streets.”

Legal advocates have slammed the “tough on crime” policies of NT and other governments.

“Law and order posturing about punishment, power and control has never worked before and it won’t work now,” National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services chair Karly Warner said in September.

A report in September 2022 by the Justice Reform Initiative found that nearly three-quarters of people in the NT’s prisons have been in prison before.

In other words, incarceration is in no way an effective means of rehabilitating young people and workers. The response of governments to the social crisis confronting the working class is to punish workers and youth rather than investing in education, housing and welfare services to prevent the resort to crime.

Immense resources are being used to bolster the police and prison system in the Northern Territory.

According to Productivity Commission data, the NT government spent more than $270 million on prisons and community corrections facilities in 2022–23. Across Australia, the figure is about $7 billion.

In its 2024–25 budget, the NT government pledged a further $325 million between 2023 and 2027 and a further $120 million every year from 2027 to review the territory’s police force and recruit an additional 200 officers. It also includes a further $15 million per year between 2023 and 2026, and then $10 million every year from 2026, to meet “correctional services demand.” An additional $30 million will also be put into establishing youth detention camps between 2024 and 2026.

All of this comes amid a broader crackdown in Australia and internationally against the social rights of ordinary workers and young people who are increasingly angry about mounting social crisis, the rising cost of living and explosion of imperialist militarism abroad. 

As the social opposition mounts, governments are moving to criminalise opposition to the policies of war and austerity.

Over the course of the ongoing Gaza genocide, protesters against the war crimes committed by Israel and supported by the imperialist powers including Australia have been arrested.

US quits the World Health Organization and sabotages international public health

Benjamin Mateus

One of the first actions taken by Donald Trump after his inauguration Monday was to issue an executive order withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization. The order stated as among the reasons this abrupt departure, the “WHO’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic (and other global crises), failure to adopt urgently needed reforms, and its inability to demonstrate independence from the inappropriate political influence of WHO member states,” a reference to China.

Trump also cited the US’s disproportionate funding of WHO compared to China, although the assessed contributions are based on a country’s gross domestic product, and the US actually provides about 18 percent of WHO’s overall funding, well below its 27 percent share of the world economy. 

Contributions to the WHO budget [Photo: WHO]

Lawrence Gostin, a professor of global health at Georgetown University in Washington DC and director of the WHO Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law, said of Trump’s executive action, “This is the darkest day for global health I’ve ever experienced. Trump could be sowing the seeds for the next pandemic.”

The day after the signing of the executive order to withdraw, the WHO offered a meekly worded reply:

The World Health Organization regrets the announcement that the United States of America intends to withdraw from the Organization.

WHO plays a crucial role in protecting the health and security of the world’s people, including Americans, by addressing the root causes of disease, building stronger health systems, and detecting, preventing and responding to health emergencies, including disease outbreaks, often in dangerous places where others cannot go.

The United States was a founding member of WHO in 1948 and has participated in shaping and governing WHO’s work ever since, alongside 193 other Member States, including through its active participation in the World Health Assembly and Executive Board. For over seven decades, WHO and the USA have saved countless lives and protected Americans and all people from health threats. Together, we ended smallpox, and together we have brought polio to the brink of eradication. American institutions have contributed to and benefited from membership in WHO.

With the participation of the United States and other Member States, WHO has over the past 7 years implemented the largest set of reforms in its history, to transform our accountability, cost-effectiveness, and impact in countries. This work continues.

We hope the United States will reconsider and we look forward to engaging in constructive dialogue to maintain the partnership between the USA and WHO, for the benefit of the health and well-being of millions of people around the globe.

The US pullout is taking place five years to the week since WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) when COVID first erupted in Wuhan, China. It is the imperialist powers, and above all the United States, which bear responsibility for the 27 million excess deaths globally attributable to the pandemic since then, including 1.5 million excess deaths in the US. It is they who did far more than “mishandle” COVID-19. They pursued a policy of deliberate mass infection, “living with the virus,” which has made this lethal illness a seemingly permanent affliction.

The US cutoff of ties with the WHO will only make more likely the emergence of new viruses, potentially even more lethal than SARS-CoV-2, such as H5N1 (bird flu) whose lethality could be 50 times as great unless urgent measures are taken to prevent mutations that make human-to-human transmission possible.

Lack of funding for the WHO means many of the programs that have controlled the spread of disease like tuberculosis, HIV and measles will see these previously checked pathogens emerge, in particular low to middle-income countries (Africa, Middle East, and Asia) reliant on the programs provided by the WHO. Additionally, viruses like Ebola and Marburg virus which have recently erupted could find their way into dense urban populations and spread unchecked across the globe. 

What the WHO spends its resources on. [Photo: WHO]

Global immunization efforts that have saved at least 154 million lives over the past 50 years are under threat. In that time, vaccinations against 14 diseases (diphtheria, Hemophilus influenzae type B, hepatitis B, Japanese encephalitis, measles, meningitis A, pertussis, invasive pneumococcal disease, polio, rotavirus, rubella, tetanus, tuberculosis and yellow fever) have seen a reduction in infant deaths by 40 percent globally, and by more than 50 percent across the continent of Africa.

A Lancet study from 2024 bears quoting. The report said:

The vaccines modelled in this study are estimated to have saved 154 million lives since 1974, 95 percent of these in children younger than five years. This equates to nine billion life-years saved and, further considering the added benefit of reduced morbidity, 10·2 billion healthy years of life have been gained due to vaccination. Measles vaccination has been the single greatest contributor and is likely to remain so. Vaccination has accounted for close to half the total global reduction in infant mortality, and in some regions to the majority of these gains (appendix p 8). As a result of 50 years of vaccination, a child born today has a 40 percent increase in survival for each year of infancy and childhood. The survival benefits of infant vaccination extend to beyond 50 years of age, a remarkable finding considering the exclusion of smallpox and the exclusion of the anticipated benefits of human papillomavirus (HPV), influenza, SARS-CoV-2, Ebola, mpox and other vaccines affecting adult mortality.

However, one in five children lack access to lifesaving vaccines. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in 2023, over 14.3 million children under the age of one did not receive their recommended vaccines. This is 2.7 million more than in 2019, the year before the pandemic. Almost all these children live in low and middle-income countries, mainly in Africa and South-East Asia. They include Angola, Afghanistan, Democratic republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Sudan and Yemen. One must add Gaza and all of Palestine to this list.

Elevating RFK Jr. and witch-hunting of Dr. Peter Daszak

Any US contribution to research, training, and collaboration on the development and distribution of vaccines will likely become a thing of the past with Trump’s elevation of the anti-vaxxer and professional wrecker of public health Robert F Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services. Public health, instead of a global instrument for the betterment of the population’s well-being, will be turned into a weapon for US national security policy, with vaccines, medicines and even viruses treated as levers for coercion. 

In this regard, strong-arming the entire academic infrastructure is not a farfetched thought. One should recall the comments made by David Feith, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs in the first Trump administration, speaking to the Heritage Foundation in July 2024. After condemning government funding of international research as national security threat, speaking to how such collaboration can be brought under check, he added:

It can be done through Congress and the executive branch through various ways, for the US government to perform an audit on all US government funded biomedical and related research in China, and that this audit place a strict one-year deadline establishing a presumption that this research, because of the nature of the Chinese political system is going to be nontransparent and unsafe, and a net negative for international scientific cooperation … it would establish essentially an audit and a rebuttable presumption that would hopefully have a very dramatic effect in cutting down on research cooperation with China which the US government and the US universities and also US corporations have shown not to be able to properly monitor. 

A key element of this anti-China campaign is the McCarthyite witch-hunting of scientists like Dr. Peter Daszak, formerly head of the EcoHealth Alliance, for their principled work on pandemic prevention with China. It is shameful that so many scientists have stood on the sideline and kept silent. Working people and young people must come to the defense of Daszak and the critical work he and others are carrying out.

The origins of the WHO

Presently, the WHO has offices across the entire globe divided into six WHO Regional Offices—Washington DC (Pan American Health Organization), Copenhagen (Regional Office for Europe), Cairo (Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean), Brazzaville (Regional Office for Africa), New Delhi (Regional Office for South-East Asia) and Manila (Regional Office for the Western Pacific). Although it has been the most enduring international public health agency, it wasn’t the first.

The emergence of public health as a discipline was intimately connected with the growing class struggle in the milieu of the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This period saw centers of population growing rapidly, intensifying the impact of communicable diseases that left the poorest sections of workers facing high rates of infant mortality and despondency. 

In 1851, the first of the International Sanitary Conferences was held in Paris. Twelve countries participated in the meeting sending physicians and diplomats to discuss how to stop the spread of yellow fever, cholera and plague. In particular, the national policies in place had failed to contain the epidemics of cholera that swept across Europe in the first half of that century severely disrupting commerce. Many of the merchants who bore the brunt of the quarantine measures urged their government to support international action.

By the end of the 19th century, advances in germ theory and medicine paved the way for application of more effective forms of disease prevention. Publications about diseases assumed international classification systems that aided front-line health workers. By 1902, the Pan American Health Organization was established in response to yellow fever epidemics in the Western hemisphere. 

The initial development of public health education as a planned discipline fell to the charity of the well-to-do, as with the Rockefeller Foundation, established in 1913, which helped establish the public health departments at Harvard and Johns Hopkins. After World War I and the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed more than 50 million people and infected more than 500 million across the globe, the League of Nations Health Committee and Health section were established in 1920.

By 1928, the first antibiotics had been discovered, with widespread use as treatments for infections beginning in 1942, in the first years of World War II. It was at this time that the first form of immunodeficiency virus was transmitted from simians to humans in central Africa. A mutated form of this virus was later identified as a human immunodeficiency virus. 

In the aftermath of the war, the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation which was founded in 1943 to address the needs of war victims. UNICEF was established in 1946 to address the needs of children whose countries were destroyed by the war. Two years later, the WHO was founded under the auspices of the UN.

The year before the WHO was established, a horrific cholera outbreak in Egypt that claimed more than 20,000 lives spurred an international response. At the same time, the US established a National Malaria Eradication Program to eradicate the disease that was prevalent in the Southeastern states.

Bond markets reveal growing concern over government debt

Nick Beams

For several months global bond markets, the chief source of financing for government debt, have been sending out signals that beneath the appearance of stability in the financial system and the continued rise in stock markets, all is not well.

Specialist Dilip Patel works at his post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Tuesday, Oct. 3, 2023. [AP Photo/Richard Drew]

While immediate factors, such as whether central bank interest rates are going up or down and the expected movement of inflation, affect bond prices, it is apparent that longer-term, deeper forces are at work.

The bond market is being moved by concerns over how much longer governments can continue to finance the mountain of debt they have accumulated. The International Monetary Fund estimates total global government debt to be $100 trillion. This is the result of the continual outlays governments have incurred in propping up their economies and corporations.

When interest rates were low or near zero after the onset of the COVID pandemic, the payment of interest on this debt was not a major problem. Now it is, because of the increase in rates since 2022.

This is attested to by the fact that despite the US Federal Reserve cutting interest rates by a percentage point since September last year, the yield (interest rate) on 10-year bonds in the US, and their counterparts around the world has risen. Under “normal” conditions they would be expected to fall.

The yield on the 10-year UK bond, or gilt as it is known, has spiked from around 3.6 percent last September to about 4.6 percent now. In recent days it has been trending higher, raising predictions it could reach 5 percent.

The US 10-year bond has undergone a similar movement which started at the same time as the Fed began cutting its base interest rate.

Significant attention has focused on the UK which experienced severe financial turbulence in October 2022 because of the attempt by the short-lived Liz Truss government to finance tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy by increasing debt. This set off an escalation in bond yields requiring the intervention of the Bank of England to prevent a full-blown financial crisis, leading to the resignation of Truss.

While the crisis two and a half years ago has sometimes been attributed to the excesses of Truss, or incompetence, the underlying causes of the near meltdown have remained.

The state of the UK was the subject of an interview given by billionaire Ray Dalio, the founder of the global hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, to the Financial Times (FT) this week in which he warned that it could be headed for a “debt death spiral.” This is a situation where increasing amounts of money must be borrowed just to pay the interest on existing debt.

There was a risk that the combination of rising interest costs, now at £100 billion a year, and the need to roll over existing debt at a higher interest rate would produce a self-reinforcing cycle.

He said the situation looked “like a debt death spiral in the making.”

The gilt market turbulence was a “supply-demand problem.”

“Why else would long-term [yields] rise when there’s an easing [of monetary policy], the exchange rate is going down, and the economy is weak?”

The supply-demand problem means that the issuing of government bonds (debt) exceeds the demand for them at a given price. Consequently, investors are only prepared to purchase bonds if their price is lowered with a consequent rise in the yield. (The two have an inverse relationship.)

The economic and social consequences of the emerging UK debt spiral were spelled out in an FT editorial last week. It said the lack of confidence in the UK economy had become “infectious,” spreading from businesses to the financial markets. Bond yields were near their highest in 16 years.

The FT said the so-called “bond vigilantes” had the UK in their sights and would be looking for “improvements.”

What that would consist of was laid out very directly. Tax increases had been ruled out because that would be “disastrous for confidence.”

“But that means Labour must be prepared to make savings in high-cost, yet politically sensitive, areas such as welfare benefits, the civil service and the triple-lock on pension payments,” the editorial said.

(The triple lock refers to the present arrangement in which pensions are increased by whatever is the highest number, 2.5 percent, the increase in wages or the rise in inflation.)

While the UK may be characterised as the “sick man” of the major economies as far as debt and interest payments are concerned, the position of the US is objectively even worse. However, it is able to sustain massive government debt, now approaching $36 trillion, with an annual interest bill heading for $1 trillion, because the US dollar is the global currency and in demand.

But there are growing warnings that even with this “exorbitant privilege” the US financial position is ultimately not sustainable.

In his FT interview Dalio did not confine himself to the UK but pointed to the situation in the US. He called for the deficit to be cut from its present level of 6 percent of GDP to 3 percent.

In a blog post he advocated for a cut in interest rates to 1 percent, letting inflation rise to 4.5 percent, increasing tax revenue by 11 percent, slashing discretionary spending by 47 percent or some combination of these measures.

But the Trump administration has ruled out tax hikes, and will cut corporate taxes, the Fed has no intention of reducing rates and will increase them again if inflation rises. This means that the focus is on spending. There is no question as to where the axe will fall, with the Department of Government Efficiency headed by the fascist billionaire Elon Musk calling for spending cuts of $2 trillion.

US government spending is around $6.3 trillion, of which nearly $1 trillion is on the military and the same amount on interest payments to bond holders. Neither of these items will be reduced which means that the target will be social services, health, education and other vital areas impacting the working class.

Trump has said Social Security will not be touched in his Make America Great Again program, advancing at times the bogus claim that tariffs will pay off government debt.

But all his assertions are founded on quicksand as the logic of the debt numbers makes clear. US government debt is at present around 100 percent of GDP. But on current projections it is set to rise to 200 percent of GDP within a decade. Even with the “privilege” conferred on the US because of the role of the dollar, this escalation is unsustainable.

In a recent comment, FT columnist Gillian Tett cited what she called the “influential” “Tree Rings” newsletter which warned that if the 10-year yield rises above the nominal US growth rate, then it is “mathematically certain to quickly trigger a debt death spiral.”

In his FT interview Dalio provided no timeframe for the explosion of what he has characterised as a “debt bomb.” He likened it to the development of a heart attack when plaque builds up and increases the risk of a piece breaking off.

“You can’t tell exactly when that is going to happen, but you can say that the risks are very high and rising.”

Gig economy apps demand payment for UK workers to even receive their wages

Darren Paxton

Workers using the gig economy app YoungOnes have accused the company of holding their earnings to ransom by charging them a fee to receive their wages on time.

YoungOnes now charges workers 4.8 percent of their earnings to receive their wages in one minute, 2.9 percent to receive it in three days, or they can decline and receive their wages after waiting 30 days. Before this, these gig economy workers would typically receive their wages in the three-day period free of charge.

Screenshot of the YoungOnes website which states, "Download the App - Find a Gig in Five Minutes"

The company was founded in the Netherlands in 2017 by Pim Graafmans, as an offshoot of YoungCapital recruitment agency. InsiderMedia noted in October 2023 that “Almost 350 UK businesses have signed up to the platform to find freelancers since its launch in the UK.”

Providing a digital platform for companies to hire workers on a gig-to-gig basis without offering them basic legal protections or income stability, YoungOnes advertises, “We call it ‘work on demand’. After all, why would you want to work for a boss, if you could be one yourself?”.

This is not the reality for workers using the app. They are not their own bosses, but one of the most exploited sections of the working class.

YoungOnes is not the only app to function like this. Others include PeoplePerHour, an Israeli multinational named Fiverr, as well as Flexy and Temper. There are hundreds more.

This “pay to be paid” policy blows up the lie that the gig economy is a flexible way for workers to control their hours and receive quick money as and when needed. Tom Gillam, a gig economy retail worker from Manchester, told the Guardian, “People do gig work for short-term cash ... it feels like we’re being held to ransom… It is so immoral it’s unreal.”

The Observer found that the YoungOnes app was being used by major chains and retailers such as Urban Outfitters to supply young workers over the Christmas period, while forcing them to reapply every day for each shift. Companies involved included the exercise brand Gymshark, cosmetics brand Lush, fashion brand Uniqlo and mattress manufacturer Emma Sleeps. In each of the ads put out by these companies, they state they are looking for “freelancers”.

In some Emma Sleeps stores, every employee is a “freelancer” hired through gig apps. The Guardian notes of the Observer’s findings: “The manager of mattress manufacturer Emma Sleep’s first UK shop said in a promotional video released by YoungOnes that her team is composed of ‘only freelancers’. She hailed the approach as ‘definitely the way that hiring… is going to go in the future’.”

This dystopian situation, where the most advanced technology is used to prey on workers who have no legal protections or rights—and who don’t know where or when their next shift or wage is coming from until they are pinged on their phones—opens up the working class to the most exploitative and insecure conditions. It is becoming a daily reality for ever larger numbers.

Lancaster university’s Work Foundation thinktank details the enormous growth of the gig economy and zero hour contracts.

Its UK Insecure Work Index for 2024 notes that “work has become less secure in the UK in the last year as workers have faced the worst cost of living crisis for 41 years…. In 2023, an estimated 6.8 million people (21.4 percent) were in severely insecure work. Since we last reported on this data in the UK Insecure Work Index 2022, this has risen by 600,000 people.” The COVID-19 pandemic, it observes, massively deepened this process.

Another study, “No Progress? Tackling long-term insecure work”, also published by the Work Foundation, explains that these workers face “a mix of low pay, unpredictable hours, poor protections, and limited career progression.”

Gig economy practices such as those introduced at YoungOnes are expanding across all industries and sectors, now reaching far beyond food delivery and retail into key and essential sectors like healthcare and childcare work.

A New Economics Foundation (NEF) thinktank study, “How The Platform Economy Can Impede High-Quality Care”, states:

“The way care is organised, via an under-regulated market of private providers, has resulted in a system whereby poor-quality care delivered by a workforce on low pay and poor conditions is the norm. In this context, the last decade has seen the emergence and growth of global corporate nurseries. In addition to expanding geographically, and buying up nurseries, several chain companies are expanding their portfolios into digital services and providing platforms for in-home childcare, which seek to disrupt the childcare market by linking and mediating between parents and carers”.

These “digital platforms” provide the basis for gig economy conditions for care workers, stripping them of their basic employment rights. In the case of care work, a sector that is tightly bound up with legal procedures, workers that are viewed as “freelance” will have to face the full weight of legal repercussions and be liable individually for any problems or damages whilst in work, with the employer abdicating all responsibilities.

The NEF notes, “The erosion of worker protections enabled by these platforms, through how workers are so often defined as ‘independent contractors’, is well documented. Likewise, care workers on platforms tend not to be treated as employees, and rates paid tend to be low.”

Warning that this “impacts care quality, since wages and working conditions are major predictors of quality in childcare,” the NEF adds that digital platforms “offer ‘on-demand’ or ‘emergency’ backup care by a pool of workers at short notice, despite numerous studies showing the importance of continuity of care.” It also raises concerns over safeguarding practices.

There have been many court cases in the UK ruling in favour of recognising workers in “gig economy sectors” as workers, and against defining them as “freelance”—including the 2021 Supreme Court case that saw Uber drivers officially defined as “workers”. Yet, since this ruling the gig economy has significantly grown in the UK, with the Office for National Statistics estimating that the number of gig economy workers will almost double by 2026.

The Labour governments “employment rights bill”, to take effect in autumn 2026, does absolutely nothing to protect gig economy workers who are falsely identified as “freelance”. The Guardian states, “The government has promised to consult on a simpler two-tier employment framework, which distinguishes between genuine self-employment and all other types of worker, but nothing has been published yet.”

This cynical operation from a government constantly boasting of its pro-business agenda will cement a tier system for employment, allowing 4.4 million gig economy workers to continue working with zero legal rights.

The trade union bureaucracy occasionally mouths “concerns” over the growth of the gig economy, but has organised nothing in opposition to its rapid growth.

What is in Trump's executive orders on immigration?

Eric London

President Donald Trump displays executive order after signing it at an indoor Presidential Inauguration parade event in Washington, Monday, Jan. 20, 2025. [AP Photo/Matt Rourke]

The first wave of immigration-related executive orders issued by President Donald Trump have now been published. With a few scribbles of his name on paper and no involvement from Congress, Trump has undertaken a substantial transformation of the legal landscape in the United States, eviscerated the basic rights of a significant portion of the population and upended the lives of millions of people. Having pardoned various officials and close relatives of the outgoing president to protect them from the coming onslaught, Joe Biden and the Democrats have left the population almost entirely at Trump’s whim.

Ideological travel ban

Name: “Protecting the United States from Foreign Terrorists and Other National Security and Public Security Threats”

What it does: Orders the State Department to initiate a review of all policies and regulations over the granting and denying of visas to enter the United States to prevent entry of those who “espouse hateful ideology.” Deems inadmissible for entry any who “bear hostile attitudes toward [US] citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles” or who “advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.”

How it works: Requires the rewrite of all State Department and DHS policies related to admission to the country and requires deportation of non-citizens who “who preach or call for sectarian violence, the overthrow or replacement of the culture on which our constitutional Republic stands.” Requires additional measures be taken to “ensure the proper assimilation” of immigrants into the US, to “promote a unified American identity and attachment to the Constitution, laws, and founding principles of the United States.”

Applies to: Millions of immigrants applying for all forms of visas to enter the US, whether to reside in the U.S. (immigrant visas) or to travel for work, study or vacation (non-immigrant visas). Also applies to roughly 25 million non-citizens in the United States, including those lawfully present on visas and those present without documentation. It makes no distinction based on age. This order is specifically directed at opponents of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

Birthright citizenship restriction

Name: “Protecting the Meaning and value of American Citizenship”

What it does: “Clarifies” the Constitution by declaring that “The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’” and interprets this provision to mean that children born to undocumented parents and many parents present in the US lawfully are not citizens.

How it works: All children born 30 days after January 20, 2025 are not citizens unless both the mother and father are lawful permanent residents, or if one parent is a citizen. Even if both parents were present in the US on lawful work, study or other visas at the time of birth, their child will no longer be a citizen. The order requires the State Department, DHS and other agencies to not issue passports or other citizenship documentation to the children of parents born under the circumstances listed above.

Declaring an “immigrant invasion”

Names: “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion” and “Protecting the American People Against Invasion”

What it does: Establishes a state of emergency that grants the president unbridled power to deny entry to immigrants, regardless of whether they have valid asylum claims under international law. It appears to effectively suspend 75-year-old statutes enacted by Congress relating to immigration based on theory that the president has the “foreign affairs” power to suppress the immigrant “invasion”:

The Immigration and Nationality Act [INA] does not, however, occupy the Federal Government’s field of authority to protect the sovereignty of the United States, particularly in times of emergency when entire provisions of the INA are rendered ineffective by operational constraints, such as when there is an ongoing invasion into the States. The President’s inherent powers to control the borders of the United States, including those deriving from his authority to control the foreign affairs of the United States, necessarily include the ability to prevent the physical entry of aliens involved in an invasion into the United States, and to rapidly repatriate them to an alternative location. Only through such measures can the President guarantee the right of each State to be protected against invasion.

The order does so on the basis of the rights of states under Article IV Section 4 of the Constitution, which requires the federal government “protect each of [the states] against Invasion” from a foreign nation, which clearly does not apply here. This sets the stage for the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (see below).

How it works: Suspends entry along the southern border and orders DHS, Secretary of State and the Attorney General to “take all appropriate action to repel, repatriate, or remove any alien engaged in the invasion across the southern border of the United States.” Requires all undocumented people in the United States register with the federal government under the Alien Registration Act of 1940 on penalty of civil fine or criminal prosecution. Creates “Homeland Security Task Forces” to coordinate large-scale law enforcement operations aimed at stemming the “invasion” throughout the country, regardless of distance from the southern border.  

Preparing Alien Enemies Act and military action in Mexico

Name: “Designating Cartels and Other Organizations as Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Specially Designated Global Terrorists”

What it does: Instructs the Attorney General and DHS Secretary “to make operational preparations regarding the implementation of any decision I make to invoke the Alien Enemies Act in relation to the existence of any qualifying invasion” and to “prepare such facilities as necessary to expedite the removal of those who may be designated under this order” (i.e., construct a broad network of internment camps). Combined with the declaration of an invasion, this order sets the stage for “anti-terror” operations against drug organizations operating in Mexico and Central America, as well as for the deployment of the military to US cities to deport immigrants accused of being associated with gangs.

How it works: Requires the Secretary of State, in consultation with other agency heads, to “make a recommendation of any cartel or other organization as a Foreign Terrorist Organization” because “it is the policy of the United States to ensure the total elimination of these organizations’ presence in the United States and their ability to threaten the territory, safety, and security of the United States through their extraterritorial command-and-control structures, thereby protecting the American people and the territorial integrity of the United States.”

Deploying the military on US soil

Name: “Clarifying the Military’s Role in Protecting the Territorial Integrity of the United States”

What it does: Deploys the US Armed Forces to the US-Mexico border to “protect and defend the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the United States along our national borders.”

How it works: At the end of January, US Northern Command will deliver to Trump a “campaign-ready Unified Command Plan” to “to seal the borders and maintain the sovereignty, territorial integrity, and security of the United States by repelling forms of invasion including unlawful mass migration, narcotics trafficking, human smuggling and trafficking, and other criminal activities.”

Other immigration developments

• Trump signed an executive order granting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border protection (CBP) the power to arrest immigrants at schools, churches, courthouses and other sensitive areas.
• The Mexican government of MORENA’s Claudia Sheinbaum has agreed to Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program, making Mexico complicit in the Trump administration’s ban on asylum.
• Life in immigrant neighborhoods across the country was severely disrupted by ongoing threats of mass workplace and community raids on Tuesday. In Chicago’s “Little Village,” local media reported that substantial sections of immigrants kept their children from attending school and stayed home from work.

Additional executive orders are expected in the coming days.