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Greetings lovely people,

The world hasn’t got any less weird or unhinged over the past week, which is fantastic news for us.

What’s even better is that you get a nice, juicy digest straight here to your email. So don’t bother watching the news, or even reading anything else ever again.

Stick with us (and click the ads). On with the show…

⏰ Today's reading time is 7 minutes

As the midterm results rolled in indicating a decisive win by the Democrats, Wall Street remained its usual level-headed self and promptly shat the bed.

While indices initially skyrocketed – a typical reaction to electoral certainty – on Wednesday morning, the trend reversed at a staggering rate and scale, as more than $3.2 trillion in market value was erased across a single session.

The Nasdaq 100 dropped by up to 6.4%, marking its worst single-day decline since March 2020. Not to be outdone, the S&P 500 fell 4.4%, marking its worst second-day performance following a midterm election in nearly a century.

Still determined to be the #1 worst, the Dow plunged over 1,800 points (3.4%), representing the worst second session after a midterm election in data going back to 1896.

The vast majority of this wealth erasure occurred in the AI and tech sphere, with investors exhibiting concern that new Democrat-led policies of regulation and market limitations will result in an industry slowdown.

Ultimately, traders decided that if the world isn’t actually going to be dissolved in the cosmic bile of a malevolent techdaemon, they might as well buy that tv instead.

Either way, it’s probably already priced in anyway…

In what could only be described as “the ultimate indignity”, France’s youth are officially being lectured on fertility by Macron, a man who has no children and married someone 30 years older than him. Mmmmm.

Stéphanie Rist, the country’s health minister, submitted the monitoring committee’s plan for the fertility plan this past Tuesday.

With it, she declared the launch of a widespread information campaign to support young couples with ambitions of having children.

Come the end of November, all 29-year-old men and women will have received a letter outlining lifestyle choices associated with the “preserving or enhancing of fertility”.

Practices include lowering alcohol consumption, physical exercise, a healthy diet and ceasing tobacco use.

In short, the French – if they want to produce more French people going forward – will have to stop being French.

Expect half of Paris to be engulfed in flames by tomorrow lunchtime.

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The Bank of England has raised interest rates to 4%, its first increase since 2023, as the economic fallout from the Iran war drives a fresh inflation shock.

The Monetary Policy Committee lifted rates from 3.75% by eight votes to one, warning that more rises are likely, tied to the cost of the US-Israeli war with Iran and disruption to the Strait of Hormuz.

Blink and you might have missed how former PM Liz Truss wasn’t too pleased with the news and dished out her own nugget of wisdom on the topic, which is a bit like Jack the Ripper giving his take on how women can stay safe walking home alone late at night.

The Bank is also slightly late to the party: the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank raised rates in September.

Inflation is now forecast to reach 5% next year, with Governor Andrew Bailey warning that another hike could come as soon as December.

What’s so sneaky about inflation is that it erodes purchasing power and increases tax burdens without requiring governments to make any unpopular decisions like, say, increase taxes.

Bombing the shit out of Middle Eastern countries won’t help on the inflation front either, but then again I’m not a geopolitical analyst so what do I know?

Across Europe this week in Italy, Germany, Romania and the UK, supermarket fridges and freezers were attacked through a cyber hack.

Hackers seized control of cooling units in almost 700 supermarkets, raising the temperatures and spoiling the food. Millions of euros of losses in food damage were incurred. 

In the case of Germany the attack had minimal impact, seeing that their food was already inedible to begin with.

Later in the week French authorities raised the alarm when the French blood service (EFS) said temperature and defrosting thresholds had been raised to “very high levels” in a cyber attack on French blood banks.

Many have been pointing fingers at the pesky old Ruskis who, not content with filling X with racist and homophobic bot accounts, have been getting more creative at subverting the West and its support for Ukraine.

If you performed an acid-alkali pHD colour test on the U.S. right now, it would definitely be more purple than red.

The U.S. Midterms on November 3rd have rocked the boat and are hands-down a victory for the Democrats. 

The Democrats took both Congress and the Senate according to results, far exceeding the more cautious predictions of the polls. 

Trump congratulated the Democrats on their electoral success, insisting he was looking forward to collaborating with them in the new year.

But just as you may be thinking ‘huh, that’s quite a gracious response. Maybe he’s finally having a stroke’, he throws in this absolute beauty.

“I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!”

Who’s gonna to tell him?

Anyway, here are the standout Midterm results you need to know:

The final results of the Israeli elections are in, with more than 5.7 million people voting. 

Drumroll please…

Neither bloc has managed to get a majority which means a coalition will be necessary.

This is fairly common in Israeli politics, due to its oversupply of ideologues and opinionated nutjobs, which lends itself quite well to proportional representation.

President Herzog has announced that he will officially nominate the Prime Minister who he believes is most likely to form an effective coalition on Sunday, with ‘effective’ very much being the key word there.

The positive thing about the Eisenkot bloc was that it was able to rally together against Bibi Netanyahu.

But the negative thing about it is that dunking on Bibi is pretty much all they agree on.

The parties within the 67 Knesset seats will likely refuse to form a coalition amongst themselves, even under Eisenkot’s leadership.

Avi Lieberman of the Yisrael Beiteinu party, whose notable quotes include ‘there are no innocents in Gaza’, isn’t going to have ‘form a government with the Arabs’ on his list of New Year’s resolutions.

But his party holds 7 seats, so without him, even with the Arabs, the coalition maths doesn’t add up as it would only have 60 seats. 

Eisenkot, if appointed, has 28 days with the possibility for a 2 week extension, to try and form a coalition government.

If he is unsuccessful, it would then be the turn of the second nominee, most likely Bibi Sketanyahu, to try his hand at clinging to power for as long as humanly possible forming a coalition.

Of course, if Bibi and friends decide to start another war all of these scenarios go out of the window and the priority will once again shift to bombing the shit out of your neighbours, as opposed to lesser priorities like respecting the results of a democratic election.

I’ve read that headline about 274 times now, and it makes me smile each time.

John McNeil, 56, was a passenger in Lindsey Sangster's vehicle which was stopped by police on the M74 in Glasgow on the 22nd April 2023.

Bags of heroin and cocaine were later recovered by a police dog underneath the front passenger seat of the Volkswagen Golf.

The goods were being guarded by Pablo the lamb (no prizes for guessing who he was named after), who McNeil insisted was being used for ‘shepherd training’.

Pablo must have been on break, because officers reported he was apprehended ‘happily munching a bag of chips left on the back seat.’ Pablo has now been rehoused somewhere with a more suitable diet for him.

Rumour has it they will use the whole saga for a new original TV series: Breaking Baaaaaaad.

We’d love it if you left us some feedback as to how you found this edition.

Our intern will get back to you within 4-5 business days, once we’ve let them out of the basement for their legally mandated half an hour of fresh air.

Thanks to Steven & Jack