🌍❌🐣 Global fertility rates fall below the replacement rate for the first time

A new paper called "Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World" by Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde of the University of Pennsylvania and Patrick Norrick of Northwestern University, prepared for the Annual Review of Economics and circulated this month, concluded: "As of 2026, humanity is likely below replacement fertility. That has never happened before, not in wars or pandemics."

The replacement rate is usually quoted as 2.1 births per woman, which is the figure for a rich country with low child mortality; globally, the authors put it nearer 2.20 to take into account the higher mortality rates in poor countries - and the world's own fertility rate is now at roughly that level. The UN's central projection still has the crossing two decades away.

If Fernandez-Villaverde and Norrick are right, world population peaks at about 9bn around 2056 and then falls, "first slowly, then fast". The UN's medium variant has it rising to about 10.3bn into the mid-2080s. That is not a rounding difference; it is thirty years and 1.3bn people, and it is the difference between a problem for someone else's career and a problem for this one.

Their evidence is that the decline has stopped being a rich-world story. Fitting a single-factor model to 236 countries since 1950, the authors find the common component peaked in 1978; what is driving fertility down now is country-specific, and of those country trends 219 are negative and not one has levelled off. The steepest falls are in low- and middle-income countries and among poorer, less-educated women - the groups every projection assumed would keep the average up. In recent data, 37 countries recorded about 1.65mn fewer births than the UN had projected, a shortfall of 9.3%.

No standard explanation fits. The authors run through several candidates - income, housing costs, childcare, women's education, urbanisation - and conclude none accounts for the pattern, offering instead a conjecture: modernity itself, which makes a third child expensive and childlessness cheap. IntelliNews has tracked the same phenomenon through the baby bust that crept up on everyone and the demographic point of no return as the number of women of child-bearing age is now in decline.

🔗 https://www.intellinews.com/global-fertility-rates-fall-below-the-replacement-rate-for-the-first-time-463085/

🛢 Usually, shipping a barrel of crude from the Middle East to Asia costs around $1.50–$2.50. But with VLCC rates soaring in 2026, TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné says freight and insurance costs have surged to roughly $10 per barrel—turning transportation into a significant part of the delivered cost of crude.

🔗 OilPrice

🇮🇱⚔️🇹🇷🇪🇬Convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, who served 30 years in a US prison for passing classified Navy intelligence to Israel, is now running for the Knesset and named Türkiye and Egypt as Israel's next major strategic threats.

Türkiye and Egypt are coming up next as our major strategic threat in the north and south.

Unless we have all these other fronts eliminated by that time, we're going to be in a terrible situation.

He said Israel must first take Iran "off the map, so to speak" and warned:

I'm not so sure we will have as easy a time with the Turks as we've had with the Iranians.

He called the coming confrontation inevitable:

The storm is coming.

🔗 Clash Report

🏦 🇺🇸 💵 Bessent could tap near $1 trillion Treasury General Account to fund bond buybacks, sources said

The Treasury could use its General Account to help fund purchases of government bonds, according to two senior Treasury officials.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has built up the TGA to around $950 billion currently.

The Treasury surprised markets last week by doubling the size of bond buybacks, but the impact on yields was short-lived because of skepticism over the firepower available to Bessent.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/24/bessent-1-trillion-treasury-general-account-bond-buybacks.html

🚤 🇺🇸 🏹 Six months of engineering and systems integration with Lockheed Martin led to the first live-fire demonstration in Saildrone history.

At RIMPAC, SD-3001 launched two JAGM missiles while operating with US Navy assets.

This demonstration is the first of a series of planned integrations ahead of the launch of Saildrone’s largest and most advanced USV—the Saildrone Spectre. Measuring 52 meters (170 feet), the Spectre is designed to accommodate much larger, containerized mission sets and payloads. Future capabilities for this platform include the integration of the Lockheed Martin Mk 70 launcher and various towed arrays designed to support anti-submarine warfare operations.

Spectre, the first of which is under construction, will weigh around 300 tonnes with full payload, and capable of speeds of up to 30 knots. The USV features a concealed payload deck that accommodates up to five 20-foot containers or two 40-foot containers, making it well-suited to carry any number of the combat-tested effectors produced by Lockheed Martin, thereby satisfying a wide range of mission sets and operational requirements. Spectre’s two variants, with or without the patented Saildrone Wing, offer optionality between near-silent transits for acoustically sensitive missions or a low profile for high-speed kinetic strikes.

The 20-meter (66-foot) Surveyor USV can operate autonomously in the world’s harshest environments, remaining on mission and on station for months at a time. The Saildrone Surveyor utilizes radar, EO/IR, ML-based detection, passive acoustics, and AIS to maintain continuous situational awareness alongside the newly integrated JAGM dual launcher.

The work continues: https://www.saildrone.com/news/us-navy-rimpac-lockheed-martin-advance-autonomous-warfare