Iranian agents have been caught planning attacks and murders in France. Iran’s proxy Hezbollah has deep ties to Latin America’s drug gangs. Now Australia’s intelligence service has concluded that Iran was directly responsible for attacks down under. Our main story today examines what Iran’s deep reach says about Australian society.

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Is Trump triggering a banking crisis? A bank crisis is coming. “It could suddenly result in triggering European nations to unite as a new world power larger than either the Soviet Union or the U.S.,” wrote Herbert W. Armstrong in 1984.

Is U.S. President Donald Trump triggering that crisis right now?

I’m not enough of a constitutional scholar to know if President Trump’s firing of Fed board member Lisa Cook is legal or not. Some of the most important decisions about your life are made by unelected bureaucrats at the Fed. It seems reasonable to me that someone you vote for should be able to hire and fire those bureaucrats.

But it’s also clear President Trump wants the Fed to help him borrow more money. “We will have a majority shortly on the Fed,” he said yesterday. What does he plan to do with that? “I think we have to have lower interest rates.” He wants to make it cheaper for businesses and consumers to borrow money.

At the same time, his “big, beautiful” spending bill pushes government borrowing even higher. He’s dabbling in new forms of financial technology such as stablecoins that will help the government borrow in unusual, and perhaps hidden, ways. EuroIntelligence pointed out this morning that this “might pose existential threats to other fiat currencies in the rest of the world.”

The whole world may be forced to follow President Trump down this path. Lower Fed rates put pressure on the rest of the world. For example: If you get paid more interest on your savings in Europe, you’ll sell your dollars and buy euros—making the dollar weaker and the euro stronger. A strong euro sounds good. But if the euro is expensive, so are all the goods made in the EU, which are priced in euros. A weak dollar is an invisible tariff against the whole world—added to all of Trump’s new tariffs. The European Central Bank will be pressured to follow Trump’s lead or see EU exports dry up even further.

President Trump is leading the world toward high inflation—then a massive bust.

“The dollar was already on borrowed time as the world’s hegemonic reserve currency before the death of the Fed,” wrote the Telegraph’s Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. “The process will now accelerate, with potent implications for the dollarized system of global finance.”

The seeds of that bust are already here. “The Achilles’ heel of Trumpism is that the U.S. has a net international investment position of minus $24.6 trillion, or 82 percent of gdp,” wrote Evans-Pritchard. “It has a personal savings rate of 4.7 percent, a fraction of U.S. postwar levels or of global levels, and is living off a constant supply of foreign credit to cover day-to-day spending.” The rest of the world will not loan America money forever, and when the credit cuts off, the crash sets in.

America was already heading for a crash. Its debt was unsustainable before Donald Trump was elected. Many other countries have their own financial sins. But President Trump is hastening the crash—and leaving his fingerprints all over it.

Europe is about to experience its most devastating financial crisis since the 1920s—if not before. And if Trump gets his way, he and the United States will appear to be directly responsible for it.

As Mr. Armstrong wrote, it will prompt Europe to unite suddenly and mobilize against the United States, the power it blames for all its trouble. Led by an overwhelmingly hostile media—many already hate Donald Trump and are hostile to America—that hatred will reach a fever pitch.

The actions of this week could play a major role in the rise of the Holy Roman Empire that will soon bring down America. Watch for our Trumpet evening brief for more coverage on this story and how President Trump’s control of the Fed, use of stablecoins, and tariffs are all building to a perfect storm.

Germany’s military is rising fast: Here are several stories just from the past 24 hours.

• Germany approved more arms exports last year than any previous year, according to details of an arms export report published by Politico yesterday. The government approved €12.8 billion (us$14.8 billion) of exports in 2024, up from €12.1 in 2023. The vast majority of these approvals—€8.2 billion—were for Ukraine.
• This morning, the German cabinet approved several bills that will help Germany boost its military power. One creates a new National Security Council, to be chaired by the chancellor, and will include key ministers and officials from allied countries, nato and the EU. The council is designed to plan for emergencies and help Germany move more quickly when those emergencies hit.
• It also approved a new military service bill, aimed to help quickly expand the number serving in the military. Once passed, Germans will receive a questionnaire after they turn 18 assessing their ability to serve in the Army. Men will have to fill it in; for women, it’s voluntary. Its purpose is to encourage more to sign up and to make it easier to introduce conscription later. The government wants to increase the number of soldiers from 180,000 to 260,000 by the early 2030s.

The council and military service bills still need approval from the Bundestag. But the coalition government has a large majority; now that the cabinet has approved them, they’re almost certain to go through.

“Germany’s great industrial power is being rapidly transformed for military purposes,” wrote Gerald Flurry in our latest Trumpet magazine. “Germany is already Europe’s largest military spender, but it is only at the beginning of a frightening military transformation.”

IN OTHER NEWS

Vatican Secretary of State Pietro Parolin condemned Israel while opening an ecclesiastical event in Naples on August 25. “We are appalled by what is happening in Gaza, despite the condemnation of the whole world,” he said, adding that “it makes no sense.” Parolin is one of the most powerful men in the Catholic Church. Trying to prevent another October 7-style massacre should make sense to anyone. To understand why the Catholic Church keeps trying to rally the world against Israel, read Mr. Flurry’s article “Pope Francis’s Real Legacy.”