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Wages going up will mean people have more money to spend and therefore small businesses will make more profit 👇

🇮🇩🇨🇳 JUST IN: Indonesia & China just killed the USD for payments! From today: Chinese tourists pay ANY QRIS merchant with Alipay. Indonesians use local apps in China. Straight Rupiah Yuan. Zero USD. Zero forex fees. Tourism & trade just leveled up. De-dollarization is here.

10 days after the UAE threatened Washington with yuan-denominated oil sales, Saudi Arabia quietly handed 12 million of its citizens the keys to China's payment network. That is not a coincidence. The barq-Alipay+ deal is being framed as a fintech story. It is not. It is a monetary sovereignty move dressed in consumer language. Alipay+ is not an app. It is Ant International's unified payment gateway connecting 2 billion user accounts across 50 wallet platforms to 150 million merchants in 220+ markets. That is the functional equivalent of Mastercard and Visa for the Chinese-led financial ecosystem. Saudi Arabia just plugged its citizens directly into it. This matters because the direction of flow has changed. When SAMA announced Alipay+ acceptance in September 2025 alongside Google Pay, the framing was inbound. Chinese tourists paying at Saudi merchants. Fine. Manageable. Marginal to dollar architecture. What barq announced this week is outbound. Saudis travelling abroad, spending through Chinese payment rails instead of Visa or Mastercard. That is not the same thing. That is Saudi household consumption bypassing the American-dominated transaction layer entirely. Riyadh has been building both rails simultaneously, and it accelerated the Chinese one as the Iran war unfolded and US credibility frayed. Riyadh is not convinced Washington has won. Not on Iran, not structurally, and certainly not on China. The ceasefire is fragile. Hormuz remains a permanent vulnerability. And the US demonstrated during this war that its security guarantees create instability as readily as they resolve it. Saudi Arabia's answer is infrastructure optionality. Google Pay for the American relationship. Alipay+ for the Chinese one. mada underneath both, keeping sovereign control over the national layer. This is not defection. It is deliberate non-alignment expressed through payment architecture. The petrodollar was never just about oil invoicing. It was about Gulf capital flowing through American financial plumbing at every stage. That plumbing is being replicated in Chinese. When the moment comes that the choice matters, the infrastructure will already be in place. Riyadh never announces its pivots. It builds parallel systems until one becomes unnecessary.

This tweet is a fascinating insight into the dire state of the U.K. Mostly it’s people who find it morally abhorrent for people to be on minimum wage serving coffee. If you can’t use the minimum wage for entry level unskilled work. What can you use it for? Many seem to think Peter should divert his savings to subsidise higher wages effectively operating at a loss. An economically irrational thing to do. Why would you pay (and work) to lose money? Many seem to think he should shut the coffee shop down completely, removing those jobs from the market all together. Presumably no jobs is a better outcome than minimum wage jobs. The minimum wage is now roughly £26k a year. About what I started on as a mathematics lecturer in 2010 after I completed by PhD. I worked 60-80 hours a week. Your take home pay on the national average wage is only £170 a week more than someone on a minimum wage job. Which in order to get you’d need to have a profession and about a decades worth of experience in that profession. That’s like one family meal and maybe a trip to the cinema. Hardly worth a decades hard work is it? And if you’re trying to save for a property, you won’t be able to have that. It also means that the median UK worker is a family meal and some mild entertainment away from morally objectionable abject poverty. What a mess

Tumble dryers are expensive on energy and mostly unnecessary - a trad clothes-line much better for clothes and climate. On this, I’m with Ed M.

The Greens will raise the minimum wage to £15 for all workers 💪

Go bust then