July 22 2025
Economy Shows Resilience; New MLK Files Released; Pentagon Withdraws Marines From LA; China's Oil Thirst; Drones Dominate Warfare
Global Economy Shows Surprising Resilience, Brushing Off Tariffs
Vast Trove of MLK Files Released
Pentagon to Withdraw 700 Marines From Los Angeles Deployment
China's Thirst for Oil Nears Peak Amid Aggressive EV and Domestic Drilling Push
On Ukraine's Front, Drones Dominate Warfare, From Killing to Delivering Dinner
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Global Economy Shows Surprising Resilience, Brushing Off Tariffs
The global economy is sailing through this year’s historic increase in tariffs, displaying an unexpected trait: resilience. Faced with extreme uncertainty, businesses and households have surprised economists with their ability to hedge, finding a short-term path through as they await clarity on where tariffs will end up. Global producers brought forward purchases and rerouted goods destined for the U.S. through third-party countries that are subject to lower tariffs. For the most part, households and businesses have continued to spend and invest despite the uncertainty, analysts say. The world economy grew at a 2.4% annual rate in the first half of this year, around its longer-term trend, according to JPMorgan. Trade volumes are buoyant, stock markets on both sides of the Atlantic have rebounded to record highs and growth forecasts from Europe to Asia are being raised. Investment, manufacturing employment, spending and overall activity all held up globally, according to Goldman Sachs.
WSJ
Vast Trove of MLK Files Released
More than 6,000 documents related to the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., totaling nearly a quarter-million pages, were posted to the website of the National Archives late Monday afternoon, in what the administration hailed as a triumph of transparency. But several noted King historians said they had found little in the way of new revelations about the death of the civil rights leader in the documents, and noted that the trove does not include F.B.I. wiretap recordings of Dr. King and other materials that remain under court seal until 2027. Trump administration officials said the King assassination documents include notes on the leads pursued by investigators, interviews with people who knew his killer, James Earl Ray, and previously unreleased details of interactions with foreign intelligence services during the manhunt for Mr. Ray.
NYT
Pentagon to Withdraw 700 Marines From Los Angeles Deployment
Pentagon officials will begin withdrawing 700 active-duty Marines who were sent to Los Angeles last month, the latest scaling back of the Trump administration’s contentious military deployment in Southern California. The withdrawal of the Marines follows the departure of nearly 2,000 California National Guard soldiers and a smaller contingent of about 150 specialized Guard firefighters. The troops had been dispatched to Los Angeles by President Trump starting on June 7, after protests erupted there over immigration raids. More than half will now have been ordered back to base; an 1,892-member brigade of military police remains. The Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, framed the pullout as the natural closure of a successful military response that was needed to quell civil unrest in the nation’s second-largest city. A Defense Department official said the Marines were expected to complete their withdrawal by as soon as Tuesday.
NYT
China's Thirst for Oil Nears Peak Amid Aggressive EV and Domestic Drilling Push
BEIJING—China’s thirst for oil drove global demand for decades. Now a government campaign to curb that addiction is nearing a milestone, with national consumption expected to peak by 2027, then begin to fall. Chinese officials have long worried that the U.S. and its allies could hamstring the nation’s economy by choking off its supply of foreign oil. So China has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into weaning itself off the imported stuff by reviving domestic production and swiftly building the world’s leading electric-vehicle industry. “The energy rice bowl must be held in our own hands,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping has said. Across China, fleets of gas-guzzling Volkswagen and Hyundai taxicabs are being replaced by electric models designed and produced locally. Last year, nearly half of passenger vehicles sold in the country were either all-electrics or plug-in hybrids, compared with 6% in 2020. In a remote corner of China called the “sea of death” for its harsh conditions, oil workers are trying to coax more crude out of the ground by drilling holes as deep as Mt. Everest is high. State-owned PetroChina reported $38 billion of capital expenditures last year, nearly as much as Exxon Mobil’s and Chevron’s combined. China boosted oil output by 13% from 2018 to 2024, to around 4.3 million barrels a day. Crude imports fell nearly 2% last year.
Editor’s note: this is one of the first articles I wrote when I started my Substack in 2022. I hold a different view today, driven in large point by China’s oil demand flattening.
China might collapse
Contrary to the common narrative of China’s rise to threaten the West, we should consider the nonzero probability of Chinese collapse
Greg Loving
WSJ
On Ukraine's Front, Drones Dominate Warfare, From Killing to Delivering Dinner
KOSTYANTYNIVKA, Ukraine—On the sun-drenched eastern front of this grueling war, Ukrainian drones are doing more and more jobs, from killing Russian troops to evacuating casualties to bringing dinner to foxholes. Around this city, some infantry from Ukraine’s 93rd Mechanized Brigade have been stuck in their dugouts for three months. Rotating the troops must wait for fog and rain to block the view of Russian drones. So Ukraine’s air and ground drones bring the men food, water and ammunition, said Lt. Col. Yehor Derevianko, a battalion commander in the brigade. “We even deliver burgers.” He’s been fighting Russian forces in Ukraine’s east since 2014, and says the war is evolving faster than ever. Drones are now so dominant that they force everything else—infantry, armor, artillery, logistics and even trench design—to adapt to a sky full of buzzing robots. The wiry commander leads the defense of his sector from a basement full of large screens under an abandoned apartment block. Men with laptops direct drone pilots to where Russian infantry are trying to infiltrate the fields and woodlands around the city. On one screen, the crosshairs of a reconnaissance drone fixed on a Russian soldier squatting in a bush. A small quadcopter drone closed in slowly and dropped a grenade. It missed.
WSJ
July 22, 1944: Advancing Soviet forces reach the Nazi concentration camp Majdanek, in Lublin, Poland. It is the first major camp to be liberated, six months before the larger and more infamous Auschwitz.
During World War II, the Soviet Union and United States were allies, with America serving as the "arsenal of democracy" by providing massive military equipment aid to the Soviets. An estimated 27 million Soviet citizens died in the conflict, with millions of soldiers dying on the Eastern Front to defeat Nazi Germany. Today, 80 years after the 1945 victory, Russia celebrates this triumph annually on May 9th with grand military parades in Moscow's Red Square, calling it the "Great Patriotic War." Putin has leveraged these commemorations as a tool for national unity while promoting efforts to rewrite the prevailing post-war narrative that emphasized Americas role in the victory, instead highlighting the Soviet Union's massive sacrifices and decisive role in defeating the Nazis.
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Sources
- https://www.wsj.com/economy/trade/global-economy-tariffs-trade-growth-b2c1824a?mod=hp_lead_pos2
- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/21/us/politics/mlk-jr-files-trump.html
- https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/21/us/marines-los-angeles-withdraw-trump.html?searchResultPosition=1
- https://www.wsj.com/world/china/china-oil-demand-lower-b5ae15ed?mod=hp_lead_pos7
- https://www.wsj.com/world/ukraine-russia-drone-war-adef7e49?mod=hp_lead_pos8
Contact: greg@loql.ai
