The Lead

The Price Is Usually Wrong

by Jason Ross (EIRNS) — Oct. 12, 2026

Monday morning the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the economics Nobel to Robert Hall and Michael Woodford for the theory that governments and central banks, by communicating their plans, “can influence this view of the future and move the economy in the right direction.” The committee chairman said their models leave us “better equipped to deal with shocks in the economy, such as energy crises.” The shock is here. Brent oil opened the day at $105. The Strait of Hormuz is mined, and Riyadh’s airport has been hit four times in five days. China has stopped exporting fuel. The 30-year Treasury is at a 24-year high. And the prize goes to a doctrine in which talking about the economy is the way forward.

Is that doctrine already the method of government? On Sunday President Trump posted that “effective immediately, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE” between Russia and Ukraine. Zelensky said it was news to him. Today Peskov would say only that “contacts continue,” and Lavrov observed that “ceasefire” has replaced “strategic defeat of Russia” as the slogan of Zelensky and his European “masters,” with the same purpose, a respite to rearm. The White House then told Axios that the ceasefire covers refineries only, a proposal its own official called “one-sided.” Something real did happen: Treasury’s license for Russian diesel runs to April 2027, while seven senators of both parties are demanding it be revoked. And Boris Johnson wants the Royal Navy to intercept Russian fuel tankers. But a ceasefire is not declared into existence. It is negotiated, and Witkoff and Kushner have put their Moscow trip on hold.

The same method runs through the week. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., with 4,080 measles cases in the country and several children dead in Pennsylvania, announced that HHS will pay doctors for every report filed to a system that records anything that happens after a vaccination and proves nothing, so that the number of reports, the anti-vaccine movement’s favorite statistic, will rise. Homeland Security agents searched Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home three weeks before the election, well inside the 60-day pre-election window during which Justice Department guidance has forbidden such actions. The War Secretary proposes to livestream a firing squad, although it’s not clear whether that will actually happen. We have announcements in place of policy.

Meanwhile the people who do real work are in the street. Italy’s steelworkers struck today in Taranto and Genoa against a court order to shut the country’s last blast furnace by Oct. 25. France’s students and teachers strike for “10 billion on the table” in a school system where more than half of secondary schools began the year short a teacher. Argentina’s students march Thursday. Italian farmers who gathered in Cosenza on Saturday will march on Rome Oct. 27. In Germany the labor minister resigned this morning and the SPD will elect a new leadership; Merz has 10% approval and his own party’s premier in Saxony says four years of weapons instead of diplomacy have led to “a catastrophe.” These are not calls for improving management of expectations. They are asking whether they have a future, and demanding concrete actions to ensure they have one.

Lyndon LaRouche wrote in 2007, when the Nobel went to three game theorists a year before the crash none of them foresaw, that the award showed the Committee “does not presently require a demonstration of what scientific tradition defined as a ‘crucial,’ or unique … proof of principle in defining its standards for awards,” and that the world needed their designs “about as much as a sufferer from the common cold needs the curative powers of a heavy dose of cyanide.” The proof of principle in economics is whether a people can feed, fuel, employ and improve itself, and raise the next generation to go further. Diane Sare’s independent campaign for President has a program of Glass-Steagall, a national bank in place of the Federal Reserve, and credit directed to production. The alternative, as she put it of Hegseth’s autonomous-warfare command, is a system that keeps “sucking the life-blood out of the real economy and the human race.” Three weeks before the midterms, in which LaRouche independent Jose Vega is a candidate in NY-15, the choice is between a government that announces and a government that builds.

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Collapsing Imperial System

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