Trump and Putin demand your vote
April 03, 2026
Big news! The Puppet Regime series has been nominated for a Webby Award for best social comedy series.
Help the Regime win a People's Voice Award! Vote now: https://wbby.co/58950N
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Vote for Puppet Regime in the Webby Awards!
02 April
We are thrilled to announce that our one and only Puppet Regime series has been nominated for a Webby Award in the Social & Games - Comedy Category! Our puppet parody videos made it to the top 11% of over 13,000 projects entered in this year's 30th Annual Webby Awards, and we are in the running both for the Webby Award (selected by the Academy), and The Webby People's Voice Award (voted on by the online public)!
Help us win! Vote for us by April 16th at midnight at: https://wbby.co/58950N
In addition, we are very proud to share that our "Ian Explains" video series, featuring Ian Bremmer's opening monologue from our GZERO World television show, was named an Honoree in the Social & Games - News & Politics Category: https://wbby.co/58979H
US lifts sanctions on Venezuelan leader, Gulf countries caught in Iran's crossfire, Moscow fuels Madagascar’s military government
02 April
US lifts sanctions on Venezuela’s leader
Delcy Rodríguez, the long-time Venezuelan regime insider who took over after the United States abducted her boss Nicolás Maduro in January, had been under US sanctions since 2018. That changed on Wednesday, after the US lifted the sanctions against her. She is so far the only member of Venezuela’s governing elite to be removed from the list, a sign that Washington is committed to deepening its relationship with her. In his speech to the nation last night, Donald Trump referred to the two countries as “joint venture partners.” The move is yet another blow to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who, along with broader hopes for a swift transition to democracy, looks to be left out in the cold for now.
Gulf countries caught in the crossfire if US escalates in Iran
Gulf countries have been caught in the middle of the Iran war, literally. As Iran’s neighbors and hosts to US military bases, they have found themselves exposed to attacks on their investments and infrastructure, while their energy exports have been trapped by Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Gulf countries like the United Arab Emirates are reportedly pushing the US to keep fighting until Tehran can no longer pose a threat to Dubai’s oil-rich economy. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is starting to look unsure about Trump’s promise to hit Iran’s energy infrastructure, with some officials believing the kingdom wouldn’t be able to “handle the volume” of Iran’s retaliation.
Madagascar’s military gets a boost from Moscow
Madagascar’s military government just got mightier thanks to Moscow. The five-month-old junta received a shipment of Russian weapons and aid on Wednesday as it consolidates power and tightens ties with the Kremlin. After seizing power in October amid protests over water and electricity shortages, the military welcomed Russian troops and arms in December, followed by helicopters and relief after a cyclone in February. The country’s military leader, Michael Randrianirina, underscored the shift by visiting Russia last month before France – Madagascar’s former colonizer and second-largest trade partner – in his first trip abroad, signaling a broader realignment that could expand Moscow’s footprint across the Indian Ocean.Keep reading...Show less
Hard number: AI has college students second-guessing
02 April
College students in the US know they’re soon entering a labor market that looks dramatically different from their parents’ generation, and even from a few years ago. Unemployment among young people is up. Meanwhile, companies are shedding jobs, citing AI as the reason. New polling shows nearly half are second-guessing their career plans.
Where US tariffs stand one year after Liberation Day
02 April
US President Donald Trump rattled the global economy when he announced tariffs on around 90 countries on “Liberation Day” one year ago today, but probably not in the way either supporters or critics first imagined. At its peak, the tariffs the US imposed were the highest in nearly a century, yet tariffs haven’t broken the global economy. They haven’t triggered the kind of all-out collapse many feared.
Tariffs didn’t “deglobalize” the world overnight, as some feared. Instead, they rewired how companies think. Businesses now assume politics is a permanent cost of doing business with the US. Supply chains are no longer built just for efficiency; they want redundancy, flexibility, and political safety. That means more rerouting, more stockpiling, more friend-shoring, and, inevitably, adjusting to more friction.
And yet, the global economy proved more resilient than expected. At the beginning of this year, the International Monetary Fund upgraded its 2026 growth outlook to 3.3%, a reminder that tariffs alone were not enough to knock the system off course. As IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said in a GZERO World interview with Ian Bremmer at the World Economic Forum in Davos, tariffs turned out to have less impact than many initially believed.
The American tariff wall was porous and riddled with deals and exemptions. In fact, since Liberation Day, US tariff policy has changed more than 50 times. The US Supreme Court, too, diluted Trump’s trade policy in its decision to strike down tariffs he imposed under emergency powers.
At the same time, many countries shirked at tariffs and sought multilateral trade deals of their own. In Georgieva’s words, the majority of countries looked at tariffs and said, “thank you, but no thank you.” In the case of the European Union, the unpredictability of US trade policy appeared to speed up long-stalled talks and secure deals with South America’s trade bloc, Mercosur, and India.
But resilience is not the same thing as immunity. The war in Iran may prove to be the stress test that tariffs on their own were not. A prolonged conflict doesn’t just add another geopolitical headache, it compounds existing strains with global energy shocks, shipping disruptions, higher insurance costs, and stickier inflation. That combination could weigh heavily on global growth.
So what, ultimately, did Trump’s tariffs change? They changed the operating system of globalization. They made political risk central to economic decision-making. They accelerated the shift from maximum efficiency to strategic resilience. And they tore down the open global economic order that the US built and led for decades.
The bottom line: Tariffs didn’t sink the global economy. They made it more brittle, more fragmented, and more dependent on everything else going right. With Iran now in the mix, that’s a far shakier bet.Keep reading...Show less
The case against political prediction markets
01 April
The day before the United States and Israel struck Iran on February 28, more than 150 accounts on Polymarket correctly bet it would happen on that specific date. At least six newly created wallets collectively earned approximately $1.2 million after buying contracts at prices as low as 10 cents. One account with the handle “magamyman” placed its first trade 71 minutes before news of the attack broke, when the market was pricing the probability at 17%. By the time the smoke cleared over Tehran, “magamyman” had turned $87,000 into $553,000. Another user netted $2.14 million across multiple contracts tied to the same strikes. Last week, a cluster of new accounts placed large bets on a ceasefire by late March or mid-April minutes before President Donald Trump posted about the “very good and productive conversations” between the US and Iran, gaining over $300,000 in unrealized value the moment his Truth Social announcement dropped. Two months earlier, an anonymous account had turned $38,500 into $485,000 betting on the capture of Nicolas Maduro, with its largest positions placed hours before the covert operation became public.
In any other context, these people would be investigated, prosecuted, and punished. In the booming world of prediction markets, it’s just business as usual.
I’ve been watching this industry closely for years, and I’ve come to believe that it’s more corrosive for public life than even social media. In theory, prediction markets have genuine benefits – for information aggregation, price discovery, hedging – but these are bounded by a narrow set of conditions that political event contracts systematically fail to satisfy, and they are outweighed by the far higher costs they impose on society.
The Iran and Maduro insider-trading cases aren’t isolated incidents. The most comprehensive empirical study yet of so-called “informed” trading on Polymarket, covering more than 93,000 markets and nearly 50,000 unique wallets, found suspicious trading pairs achieving a 69.9% win rate – more than 60 standard deviations above random chance – with $143 million in anomalous profits over two years. And this almost certainly understates the problem. Skilled forecasters outperform the market, but they don’t outperform it by that much, on accounts opened days before a single event, with their largest positions placed hours before covert operations go public.
Platforms’ defenders argue that insider trading in these markets is actually desirable – that insiders have the most accurate information, and the point of these markets is to surface the truth. Banning insiders from trading, in this view, is like banning your best sources from contributing to a newspaper or the most sophisticated investors from participating in traditional financial markets. But unlike journalism and traditional finance, a prediction market is zero-sum: Every dollar won by an insider comes directly from the pocket of a schmuck who’s under the impression they’re participating in a forecasting exercise. If a few insiders dominate a market, the suckers taking the other side of their trades will keep losing and eventually run out of money or wise up and stop participating. The market will become thinner, more volatile, and accordingly less informative. Price discovery, meet adverse selection.
Sure enough, blockchain data shows roughly 70% of Polymarket traders lose money while fewer than 0.04% accounts have captured more than 70% of all realized gains, collectively pocketing an estimated $3.7 billion. Meaning the vast majority of retail bettors are chum – liquidity for the privileged and unscrupulous few who already know how the story ends.
And insider trading, serious as it is, is actually the more tractable problem. The deeper issue is what happens when insiders can bet on an outcome they have some ability to influence. A military commander choosing to retreat a day early to quadruple a month’s salary. A diplomat betting on the success or failure of the ceasefire talks he’s leading. An intelligence analyst front-running his own assessment. An elected official making public statements or public policy based on what outcome yields them highest payoff. A journalist reporting not what happened, but whatever makes him richer … or safer. These aren’t edge cases or hypotheticals. They’re the structural consequence of financializing decisions that are supposed to be insulated from market incentives. When people can profit from outcomes they can shape, prediction markets don’t surface truth as much as they create systematic incentives to corrupt it … and the people and processes that determine what counts as such.
The national security dimension is where this crosses from corrupt to dangerous. When odds on an imminent strike or an election outcome move sharply and media outlets broadcast that movement as the informed market consensus, that reported signal starts influencing how journalists frame events, what the public sees as likely and legitimate, and even how adversaries perceive intent. Iranian intelligence was almost certainly monitoring Polymarket before the February strikes. A state actor wanting to manipulate crisis dynamics could move a thinly traded geopolitical market for a few million dollars – plausibly deniable and far cheaper than mobilizing military assets – and manufacture the appearance of insider knowledge about imminent action. Cable news now quotes odds as if they were poll results. The odds become the story, never mind that it doesn’t take much to make them flip.
Kalshi says it wants to replace “debate, subjectivity, and talk with markets, accuracy, and truth.” According to its co-founder and CEO, Tarek Mansour, the company’s vision is to “create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” He gets an A for honesty, but auctioning off public deliberation and reality to the highest bidder is not really the pitch he thinks it is. The differences of opinion we’ve spent several thousand years building institutions to resolve – about war and peace, about who governs and how, about whether leaders serve their country or themselves – are not differences of opinion that benefit from being turned into betting lines. Some things should remain outside the logic of the market.
Democratic governance requires a baseline of institutional faith, the belief that the people making decisions are answerable to something larger than their own interests. Prediction markets don’t just erode that faith. They financialize its erosion. Every market that opens on a political outcome is a bet that the institution overseeing it can be gamed. The more people make that bet, the more they’re right.
Most pernicious is the damage these platforms inflict on their users. We already know how addictive and financially ruinous gambling is – that’s why casinos used to be illegal most everywhere. Studies show the legalization of mobile sports betting since 2018 increased personal bankruptcy rates by around 10% in states where it took effect, tripled calls to gambling helplines, and left roughly 1 in 5 young men under 25 on the spectrum of a gambling disorder. Prediction markets follow the same playbook as these online casinos – Kalshi derives roughly 90% of its trading volume from sports bets, despite its high-brow forecasting branding. Then it extends that model into domains with higher stakes, worse information asymmetries, looser regulation, and far larger negative externalities.
When you have money riding on a nuclear detonation by the end of the decade or whether a famine reaches a certain body count, you’re no longer evaluating those outcomes and the institutions that produce them as a citizen – you’re a bettor with a directional position, rooting for whatever makes you richer. The sports betting literature is unambiguous: when there’s money on the line, even diehard fans care more about the spread than the game.
Now imagine that happening to voters. To the people who are supposed to form opinions about governance and hold institutions accountable. As Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) put it: “What happens to us, spiritually, when every moral question in this country becomes a market?” Nothing good.
I could tell you the people running these platforms are uniquely evil. But the truth is their business model – and the booming demand for their products – is the logical endpoint of America’s rotten political economy, where most young people believe the system is rigged against them and upward mobility through work and savings feels foreclosed. In this context, a bet that might 10x overnight stops looking like a vice and starts looking like the only ticket out of the permanent underclass. The platforms understand this and market to it deliberately, promising agency while delivering extraction. Kalshi’s pitch is “make your grandkids proud.” Coinbase’s prediction markets’ pitch is “take back control.” In reality, of course, prediction markets – like meme stocks and crypto and NFTs before them – don’t democratize access to wealth; they redistribute it from suckers to insiders, deepening the desperation and mistrust that drives people into the casino in the first place.
This is all happening in a country whose governance was already substantially captured. Members of Congress are allowed to hold and trade individual stocks while voting on legislation affecting those companies. The president runs a business empire and a meme coin while making executive decisions. Lobbying and campaign finance already let concentrated capital buy political and policy outcomes.
Now layer on prediction markets: anonymous accounts (Polymarket is blockchain-based, with wallets publicly traceable but nearly impossible to identify), no meaningful insider trading enforcement, and an administration whose most senior figures – Donald Trump Jr. is an adviser to both Polymarket and Kalshi – have a direct financial interest in keeping the platforms unregulated. We have created a mechanism for the politically connected to convert their access into private profit. At least lobbying buys outcomes on behalf of institutions with broader interests and accountability. Prediction market insider trading is purely personal: a single anonymous wallet, in or out of the money, accountable to no one.
None of this is to say that prediction markets have no legitimate use case. Hayek was right that markets aggregate dispersed private knowledge better than any centralized mechanism. On apolitical, technical questions – where will inflation land, will the Fed cut rates – prediction markets have been found to perform about as well as the best professional forecasters, sometimes better. Beyond information aggregation, there’s also a genuine hedging argument: multinationals exposed to regime change, energy majors exposed to shipping-lane disruptions, a manufacturer exposed to import tariffs – these are real risks that well-designed event contracts could in principle help insure against. But both cases require conditions that fail systematically on political questions – conditions that existing platforms were deliberately built to violate.
The wisdom of crowds requires independent participants, dispersed information, and no ability to move the outcome. Ask crowds to predict outcomes that are politically charged, emotionally loaded, or controlled by a small number of people with nonpublic information, and the conditions for wisdom collapse. Opinions stop being independent and start reflecting tribal alignment or the positions of a few large “whales” whose bets materially shift the odds.
The hedging logic, meanwhile, only works when the hedger can’t influence the outcome, information asymmetries are manageable, and participants are identifiable. Blockchain infrastructure, pseudonymous wallets, and offshore jurisdiction make those conditions impossible to meet. The same anonymity that might serve a legitimate hedger serves the defense contractor who knew about the Iran strike 71 minutes early. You cannot build a legitimate risk market on infrastructure designed to be unaccountable.
Only after mounting scandals did both major platforms announce enhanced rules – banning trading on stolen confidential information, prohibiting trading by anyone who can influence an outcome, and blocking political candidates from wagering on their own campaigns. But when Kalshi’s CEO says the long-term vision is to “financialize everything” and Polymarket’s CEO describes insider trading as “sort of an inevitability” with “lots of benefits,” the limits of self-policing are obvious. Sen. Todd Young of Indiana, the lead Republican sponsor of bipartisan legislation to restrict such bets, identified the deeper problem: prediction markets create “incentives or temptations that those who hold positions of public trust might harbor,” and no platform terms of service can legislate that away.
Which is why the growing governance momentum matters, however partial. California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order last week barring state officials from using nonpublic information to profit on prediction markets. Multiple bills have been introduced in both chambers recently – barring the president, members of Congress, and senior executive branch officials from trading on prediction markets, prohibiting event contracts tied to war and assassination, expanding CFTC and state enforcement authority. Red and blue states alike are moving within their own jurisdictions. Whether any of it survives congressional gridlock and court challenges is uncertain.
Institutions that trade in trust can’t afford to wait to find out. That’s why two weeks ago, Eurasia Group banned all staff and their families from betting on prediction markets. No incident prompted the decision. Our people are a principled lot – hence why they work here rather than at the firms that get paid to produce conclusions. But the structural incentive is there regardless of individual ethics. As analysts, we often have access to nonpublic information about tradable events. We hold confidential client information about how major institutions are thinking about and positioning around those same events. And we sometimes have some degree of influence over how outcomes unfold. Trading on our analysis wouldn’t make us better at our jobs – it would just give us a hidden stake in the outcome and shroud our work in suspicion. We’re already plenty accountable: our calls are falsifiable, time-bound, and transparent to our clients, and we face real reputational and commercial consequences when we’re systematically wrong. That’s a healthier incentive than an anonymous financial position on a binary outcome, because it rewards understanding the world accurately over time – and changing our minds when the facts change – rather than being right about this contract, by this date, according to these resolution criteria.
The ban can’t prevent violations – that’s what our hiring process is for. It’s also not a substitute for regulation – or for society deciding that some things simply shouldn’t be tradable. An internal policy governs what happens inside our walls; it doesn’t govern the defense contractor, the financial analyst, or the elected official on the other side of the market. What it does is make clear where we stand and ensure that our clients, sources, and readers never have reason to wonder whether our analysis is chasing the truth as we see it or chasing a payout.
Will others follow? I wouldn’t bet on it.
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A new US regulatory framework sets clear rules for stablecoins, defining issuer responsibilities and laying the groundwork for consistent federal and state oversight. With guardrails in place, stablecoins are shifting from crypto experiment to payment infrastructure.
Explore the stablecoin framework with Bank of America Institute.
See: “Raphael: Sublime Poetry at the Met.” The first Raphael retrospective ever mounted in the US is running through June 28 at the Met Museum. This is the kind of show that only comes around once in a generation. It traces his entire career, from his early days in Urbino to rivaling Leonardo and Michelangelo in Florence, to becoming the papal court's go-to artist in Rome, all before dying at just 37. Perhaps most striking is the show's focus on Raphael's revolutionary depictions of women, and what modern science is only now revealing about how he made them. For those outside New York, the Met's illustrated catalog and metmuseum.org offer a worthy consolation prize. – Hélène
Find: The rituals you lack. The modern world, with its relentless focus on progress, work, individualism, and production! production! production! has robbed us of the rituals, play, and communal connections that give us meaning in this life. That’s the argument of Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose short, intense book The Disappearance of Rituals traces this deracinating fixation with “production” into everything from James Bond films, to drone wars, to selfie culture, to the resurgence of nationalism, and the problems with pornography. In all, he writes, we have become a society of "communication without community.”A bracing book from Han, who made his name with the 2010 manifesto The Burnout Society. -Alex K
Play: Outside. The war is over (no, not that one, but the one against winter in the North East). Go frolick. – RileyRead NowShow less
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Forty-eight countries have officially qualified for the World Cup, after Iraq booked the final spot with its win against Bolivia on Tuesday. It’s the first time Iraq will be competing in the tournament in 40 years. The Democratic Republic of Congo, too, is set to participate for the first time in years (52 to be exact!), and even declared a national holiday today to celebrate.
Trump to address the nation about Iran, NASA shoots for the moon, India begins counting a billion-plus people
April 01, 2026
Trump takes Iran war to prime-time
What are Donald Trump’s aims in Iran? He’s sent conflicting signals in recent days — is he ending the war soon or launching a ground invasion? Is he forcing open the Strait of Hormuz or forgetting about it? Has the Iranian regime changed, or not? This evening may bring some clarity when he addresses the nation at 9 pm Eastern with what the White House called an “important” update. He faces a tough crowd: the American public largely opposes the war, partly because it has driven up energy costs, further stoking high prices that 87% of Americans say have now reached “crisis” levels. The average price for gasoline has now topped $4 per gallon for the first time in three years.
NASA goes back to the future with moon mission
Tonight, weather permitting, the US will launch the first crewed mission to the moon since the Apollo 17 expedition of 1972. The four astronauts — three Americans and one Canadian — will orbit the moon (without touching down on it) before returning to Earth on April 10. There’s a lot riding on the mission, known as Artemis II. Success would be a critical step towards returning humans to the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17. The mission comes as space is taking on a new role in geopolitics and technology – not as a distant frontier, but as an emerging industrial zone. Since 2009, the US and China have invested some $400 billion in the space economy – with applications spanning defense, connectivity, and navigation. Space is also attracting the AI industry’s attention – companies like OpenAI and xAI want to build solar-powered, space-cooled data centers in space to meet the enormous energy demands of the AI boom.
The world’s largest census begins
Can you count to 1.4 billion? India is about to. The world’s most populous country is beginning its census, blending in-person surveys with a first-ever digital option that allows residents to submit their information on a mobile app. After being delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the process will proceed in two phases. The first will record the number of people and facilities in the country, the second will take into account people's economic indicators, quality of life, and – for the first time since India’s independence – caste. Caste is an ancient social hierarchy system in India that has been influential in deciding access to opportunities and resources, and the government is collecting it to create targeted welfare programs, though some fear it will increase social tension. Once the data is collected (which will employ 3 million enumerators over a year), it could prompt changes to India's political map, including seats in Parliament and state legislatures, as well as the distribution of government welfare programs in the world’s fastest-growing major economy.
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Chris, an Army veteran, started his Walmart journey over 25 years ago as an hourly associate. Today, he manages a Distribution Center and serves as a mentor, helping others navigate their own paths to success. At Walmart, associates have the opportunity to take advantage of the pathways, perks, and pay that come with the job — with or without a college degree. In fact, more than 75% of Walmart management started as hourly associates. Learn more about how over 130,000 associates were promoted into roles of greater responsibility and higher pay in FY25.
In this episode of GZERO Europe, Carl Bildt examines how the war in Iran is driving up energy prices, fueling inflation, and raising stagflation fears across Europe.
Support for the conflict, Bildt says, is “severely limited” across the continent, with many seeing it as “a completely unnecessary war with uncertain prospects.” He warns that Europe now faces “a serious inflation shock,” adding pressure to already weak growth.
Governments are responding with subsidies, tax cuts, and, in some cases, rationing, but Bildt argues their room to maneuver is limited. The broader fallout, he says, could include deeper economic pain, renewed strains with the US, and rising fears of stagflation and new refugee flows into Europe.
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In this “ask ian,” Ian Bremmer breaks down the latest developments in the Middle East, highlighting a new five-point peace initiative from China and Pakistan.
“The United States and Israel are not mentioned at all,” Ian explains, noting the plan avoids assigning blame and calls simply for an immediate cessation of hostilities. The plan also prioritizes securing shipping lanes and restoring global trade, addressing rising oil prices.
Ian also points to a potential opportunity for the US to delay military action. “This is a convenient opportunity for Trump to climb down,” he says, referencing the president’s earlier deadlines to target Iranian infrastructure.
Lastly, Ian highlights UN efforts to protect fertilizer and food shipments, warning that delays could disproportionately affect the world’s poorest.
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Last week, Microsoft announced Microsoft Elevate for Changemakers, a new initiative designed to help nonprofit leaders confidently navigate the AI era. The program provides essential AI credentials, access to a peer community, and role-based resources to support responsible, mission-driven AI adoption.
Part of Microsoft’s broader Elevate commitment, the initiative builds on the company’s 50-year legacy of supporting nonprofits worldwide. Microsoft partners with nearly one million nonprofit and education organizations globally and will deliver more than $5 billion in discounts, donations, and grants in the coming year. By equipping those closest to social challenges with the tools to lead, Microsoft Elevate for Changemakers helps ensure nonprofits remain at the forefront of AI-powered solutions.
Read the full blog here.