TheChek News Flow

Investors’ hopes for bold moves are wishful thinking, no matter who wins U.S. vote

With scant detail on how Beijing aims to stimulate its way out of its economic downturn, some investors have speculated that the U.S. presidential election might prompt the big “bazooka” markets have hoped for.

According to people involved in policy discussions, that is wishful thinking: A bazooka isn’t coming—at least not this year.

Hopes rose for bolder stimulus action when a key Chinese legislative session was postponed until this week. Some investors and analysts viewed it as a sign that Chinese leader Xi Jinping was waiting for U.S. election results to potentially adjust his stimulus plan—especially if Donald Trump, who has pledged sweeping tariffs on Chinese products, looked set to return to the White House.

The people involved in policy discussions say that scheduling issues involving some participants in the legislative meeting caused the delay.

While the U.S.’s approach to China in the next four years will likely affect the country’s economic trajectory, they say, the key planks of the stimulus package aimed for the remainder of this year have been set, with the plan awaiting only formal approval at the legislative meeting.

However, these people say, Beijing is discussing how the U.S. election’s potential impact will affect market sentiment in China. They say that authorities are planning on signaling after the legislative session that more steps to support growth are in the pipeline and that a package of incremental measures can be expanded depending on an assessment of risks to the Chinese economy.

For instance, these people say, if Trump wins the election and goes ahead with his promised tariff hikes, China could try to boost what Beijing describes as “effective demand” at home by increasing government spending in high-end manufacturing and other projects seen by the Xi leadership as crucial to the country’s competitiveness.

That could further antagonize the West, which has scrambled to counter Beijing’s broad expansion in manufacturing. China’s policy has flooded markets with low-cost electric vehicles and other Chinese products.

Some government advisers privately acknowledge that Beijing could have delivered a more detailed and coordinated message about what it aims to achieve with the new stimulus plan. More clarity could have led to less of a roller-coaster ride for markets, they say.

Since China’s leadership made a sudden pivot in late September toward more broadly supporting the economy, it has left investors guessing at the scale of the coming stimulus.

A series of underwhelming news conferences by various economic agencies didn’t help. One reason for the muddled messaging, the people involved in policy discussions say, is that senior officials are afraid of saying anything that could expose vulnerabilities in Xi’s economic agenda.

The vague details of Beijing’s promised support for municipalities, banks and developers left investors with little to hold on to, making it hard for Xi to resuscitate the country’s long-suffering stock market, one motivation for his economic pivot.

That doesn’t mean that the stimulus measures like interest-rate cuts rolled out since September haven’t had some effect. Notably, the housing market, which has been mired in an unprecedented downturn for more than three years, has improved, with both home sales in major cities and sales revenue by top developers rebounding over the past month. “The question is how sustainable the housing recovery can be,” wrote Larry Hu, China economist at Macquarie, in a new research report, citing still-low consumer confidence.

The neck-and-neck race between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Trump is posing yet another test for Beijing to manage investor expectations.

Beijing is particularly wary of a Trump return, people close to the leadership’s thinking have said. If Harris is elected and her policies mirror Biden’s tough but more targeted and predictable approach on China, that would likely be the lesser of two evils in Chinese leaders’ views.

The declaration of a winner after the Nov. 5 election could take several days if not longer, another potential complication for Beijing as it aims to present more on its stimulus in the days following the conclusion of the legislative meeting on Nov. 8.

The aftermath of the election could also steal the thunder of Beijing’s stimulus announcement so that Xi doesn’t get the stock-market vote of confidence he seeks. For investors, uncertainty around the election outcome is also likely to muddle the picture of the potential effectiveness of the Chinese stimulus.

Many economists have urged China’s leadership to shift its focus away from factories and toward getting more money into the pockets of Chinese consumers. Such a strategic change in economic policy, the people say, isn’t in the cards, at least for the foreseeable future.

Any measures that China takes in reaction to the election outcome are likely to be fairly limited. Ting Lu, chief China economist at Nomura, predicts that Beijing’s overall fiscal support for the economy, measured by government borrowing, will amount to between 2% and 3% of the country’s gross domestic product over the next several years. In the event of a Trump win, it could be closer to 3%, according to Lu, while after a Harris win it might be closer to 2%.

Beijing likes to tout its ability to mind its own business, and an increasingly inward-looking policy has made China more isolated from the U.S.-led West. But the market speculation involving potential U.S. impact on Beijing’s decision-making underscores that the Chinese market is just as much a captive of American swings as the rest of the world.

At the same time, China is also in danger of falling victim to its own warnings about external risks, especially those posed by the U.S.

Bert Hofman, a professor at the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute and former World Bank China head, says Beijing sent a positive signal to the market with its recent policy reorientation to support the economy. But he says that Beijing’s longstanding rhetoric about external risks could diminish the impact of domestic policy to boost demand.

“U.S. policies vis-à-vis China play a disproportionate role in the official discourse on the Chinese economy, while the real challenge is domestic demand.” Hofman says. “Because China has made the U.S. a disproportionate challenge.”

National Energy System Operator says businesses and households need to play a greater role

UK businesses and households will need to be far more flexible about when they use electricity for the country to decarbonise the power system by 2030, according to official advice set to be published on Tuesday. 

Some of Britain’s ageing nuclear power stations will also need to be kept open longer than planned, under the modelling of one of the Labour government’s flagship climate targets.

The advice from the National Energy System Operator says businesses and households need to play a far greater role than currently in balancing the electricity system, according to people familiar with the matter.

This could involve factories ramping up output during windy periods when wind farms were at higher capacity, or households unplugging electric cars when renewables output is low.

NESO is already trying to encourage this sort of consumer behaviour by paying households to defer usage when needed. The state-owned company said last month it would offer the payment scheme all year-round.

Electricity supply and demand needs to be balanced second-by-second, a more complicated task when more supply is coming from intermittent renewables.

NESO’s modelling of the 2030 target includes a scenario where “demand-flexibility” rises from just under 3GW currently to about 11-12GW, according to the people familiar with the matter.

The report says meeting the target will also need French-state utility EDF to extend the life of some of its ageing UK nuclear power sites to meet demand alongside the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant, due to open in 2030.

Torness and Heysham 2 are considered in industry the most likely to be able to make it to 2030 and slightly beyond, with a decision by EDF due at the end of this year. The stations are currently due to close in March 2028. 

The NESO advice, due to be published on Tuesday, marks the most concrete appraisal of whether and how the government will be able to meet its manifesto pledge of a clean power system by 2030.

Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, argued that meeting the pledge would help bring energy bills down by moving the UK away from fossil fuels in favour of “homegrown clean energy”.

Shortly after taking office in July, he asked NESO for its advice on how to reach the 2030 target, which is five years’ faster than the 2035 clean power target promised by the former Conservative government.

The earlier target has been considered unworkable by many in industry given the huge amount of new wind turbines, solar farms, cables and pylons required within a short space of time.

The NESO report finds that target is possible but challenging to meet, according to the people familiar with matter. NESO said it would publish its advice on Tuesday.

The Department for Energy Security and Net Zero did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

NESO also forecast that less offshore wind would need to be built than Labour set out in its manifesto ahead of the July 4 UK general election.

The report estimates that about 43-50GW of offshore wind capacity will be needed by 2030, up from about 15GW now but less than the 55GW of conventional, fixed bottom offshore wind Labour envisaged.

The Office for Budget Responsibility forecast on Wednesday that environmental levies on electricity bills would rise by more than a fifth by 2030, to help pay for policies including more offshore wind turbines and keeping gas-fired turbines on standby to step in when needed.

Tehran has warned diplomats that it is planning to use more powerful warheads and other weapons

Amid U.S. warnings against a counterattack on Israel, Iran is sending a defiant diplomatic message: It is planning a complex response involving even more powerful warheads and other weapons, said Iranian and Arab officials briefed on the plans.

It remains to be seen whether the Iranian threats are real or just tough talk. Israel’s punishing airstrike against Iran on Oct. 26 shredded the country’s strategic air defenses, leaving it badly exposed and sharply raising the risks to Iran if it follows through.

How the Israeli response plays out will depend on the size, nature and effectiveness of Tehran’s threatened strike. So far, Israel has refrained from hitting Iran’s oil and nuclear facilities, essential to its economy and its security, but that calculus could change, Israeli officials have said.

Iran has told Arab diplomats that its conventional army would be involved because it had lost four soldiers and a civilian in Israel’s attack, the Iranian and Arab officials said. Involving its regular army doesn’t mean its troops would be deployed but that the paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that normally deals with Israeli security matters wouldn’t act alone in this case.

An Egyptian official said Iran warned privately of a “strong and complex” response.

“Our military lost people, so they need to respond,” said an Iranian official. He said Iran could use Iraqi territory for part of the operation and would likely target Israeli military facilities “but much more aggressively than last time.”

Iran isn’t planning to limit its response to missiles and drones, as two previous attacks did, and any missiles used would have more powerful warheads, the Iranian and Arab officials said. Iran said it mostly fired four different types of medium-range ballistic missiles in its last attack on Israel on Oct. 1—Emad and Ghadr missiles and two of Iran’s newest and most advanced, Kheibar Shekan and Fattah.

Another factor in Iran’s response is the U.S. election, the Iranian official said. Iran doesn’t want to influence the U.S. election with its attack, the official said, adding the response would come after Tuesday’s voting but before a new president is inaugurated in January. Iran prefers Kamala Harris over Donald Trump, according to U.S. intelligence agencies.

Officials from Egypt, Bahrain and Oman said Iranian diplomats gave those broad outlines of the response after warnings from the U.S., both public and private, against engaging in a tit-for-tat with Israel.

Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said last week there would be “severe consequences” if Iran attacked Israel or the U.S.

“We believe this should be the end of the direct exchange of fire between Israel and Iran,” she said.

Following Israel’s attack, Iranian officials initially told other countries in the region that it didn’t intend to respond. Within days, the tone shifted.

On Friday, a top Iranian general threatened “an unimaginable response,” and the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, weighed in Saturday to warn of a “tooth-breaking response.”

Western officials say they believe Iranian decision makers are debating how and whether Iran should respond, including whether an attack should come directly or from proxies outside Iran to offer a layer of deniability. Israeli officials also believe Iran is seriously considering a response and have warned they are willing to mount a far more aggressive attack in return.

Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Israeli military had struck Iran’s “soft underbelly” and dismissed “haughty words” from Tehran’s leaders. “Today, Israel has greater freedom of action than ever before,” Netanyahu said. “We can go anywhere that we need to in Iran.”

The U.S. worked to limit Israel’s Oct. 26 attack to military targets, leaving Iran’s nuclear and oil facilities alone. The Arab officials said they were worried Israel wouldn’t be restrained this time, and Netanyahu reiterated last week that preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons remains Israel’s “supreme objective.” Iran denies it is working to build a nuclear weapon.

Israel signaled it could hit these types of targets in its Oct. 26 attack. It struck a facility Iran had in the past used for nuclear weapons work. Satellite imagery showed Israel also hit a very low value target at Iran’s Abadan refinery, experts said.

On Sunday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said his country can’t let Israel’s attack go unanswered. However, in a sign that Iran is still debating how to retaliate, he said “the type and intensity of our response” could change if there were a cease-fire in Gaza and Lebanon.

The U.S. said its military wasn’t involved in Israel’s most recent attack on Iran, but any retaliation would likely involve American forces helping defend Israel. U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has ordered several B-52 Stratofortress bomber aircraft, tanker aircraft and Navy destroyers to the Middle East, the Pentagon said Friday.

The additional military assets will arrive as the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group is expected to leave the region. The U.S. will be without a carrier and its accompanying ships in the region for the first time since shortly after Hamas attacked Israel in October 2023.

Authorities rush to find ways to fill government coffers depleted by property sector slump

Chinese authorities are demanding wealthy individuals and companies double-check their taxes for unpaid liabilities in a move that threatens to further dent investor confidence in the world’s second-largest economy.

Tax officials in recent months have asked wealthy individuals and companies to carry out “self-inspections” of their tax payments and cough up any deficiencies, as local governments hunt for revenue to refill coffers depleted by a property slump.

The tax drive comes as Beijing prepares to announce the details of a large fiscal stimulus this week that is expected to focus on restoring the finances of local governments, many of which are struggling to pay suppliers and employees.

Economists are pinning their hopes on the package, the next phase in a stimulus push that started in September, to help revive household and investor confidence after two years of deflationary pressures driven by the property crisis. Beijing launched the push as economic growth in the third quarter fell short of the official target for this year of 5 per cent.

The tax demands have stirred unease and even “fear” among the country’s wealthy in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, a China-based tax partner said.

“Some of them simply didn’t really know what to declare when they were asked to conduct self-inspections,” the partner said. “Many also didn’t realise before . . . [that] their overseas personal gains would be subjected to taxes in China.”

Companies that find nothing wrong during their self-inspections have been told to send in stamped attestations and “retain their evidence for inspection”, according to a notice in one city seen by the Financial Times.

Authorities have also asked individuals to start paying back-taxes, including from their personal overseas investment gains, people familiar with the matter said, in some cases citing a little-used legal provision from 2019.

A lawyer said his wealthy Chinese clients were able to engage in negotiations with tax officials, suggesting there was some “wriggle room” on their potential tax liabilities.

The drive by central and local governments to raise revenue, which also includes a large increase in fines and penalties on the private sector, follows a three-year property slowdown that has hit local authorities’ finances and undermined household and investor confidence.

Government land sales revenue — one of its major revenue sources — dropped almost 25 per cent during the first nine months of this year over the same period the previous year. Nationwide tax revenue fell 5.3 per cent in the same period. China’s total fiscal revenue between January and September this year fell 2.2 per cent compared with the same period last year to about Rmb16.3tn ($2.3tn), official data showed.

“Local governments obviously don’t have money,” said one executive of a medium-sized manufacturing company in Suzhou, one of China’s industrial heartlands near Shanghai. He added that they were frequently hitting companies in his area with heavy fines.

“China’s fiscal deficits have reached a tipping point,” said Gary Ng, a senior economist at Natixis. “There is more urgency to find alternative revenue sources . . . and taxing the wealthy and some companies creates a less direct economic impact on most residents.”

China’s push for “stringent revenue collection” was “pragmatic and necessitated by the prevailing economic winds”, said Kher Sheng Lee, Asia-Pacific co-head of the Alternative Investment Management Association, a hedge fund industry body. “On the flip side, it risks unsettling [business and] investor confidence if the crackdown widens.”

In recent months, there has been a spate of announcements from listed companies about their tax bills.

In October, Hisun Pharmaceutical said it discovered it owed Rmb18mn in taxes and late fees during a “self-inspection”. Beijing-based Allgens Medical in September paid Rmb8mn after its local tax bureau notified it of “tax risk concerns” from prior years to self-inspect. Guizhou Gas’s self-inspection resulted in payment of an extra Rmb20mn in tax.

On top of ordering the self-inspections, local governments have imposed fines on businesses as they try to compensate for the fall in land sales revenue.

Seven out of 16 provinces showed sharp growth in revenue from fines and confiscations last year, with western Chongqing and the capital, Beijing, reporting increases of 22.4 per cent and 21.9 per cent, respectively, according to Chinese media outlet Yicai. Many local governments have stopped publishing fine revenues due to the “abnormal” growth in recent months, local media reported.

“This type of thing — local authorities levying extra fines and taxes on companies — is happening every day and it’s hurting morale,” said an economics professor in Beijing who wished to remain anonymous.

China has a state-level central tax bureau, but local tax officials typically deal with the taxes of individuals and locally registered companies in their respective regions. China’s state tax administration did not respond to a request for comment.

The administration in June said it had not organised any nationwide tax inspections and that it had sent routine notices to some companies to ensure they were properly applying tax policies.

But Beijing has recently implemented new upgrades to its tax surveillance system and is able to better share data across different government departments, financial institutions and tax authorities in a step up of tighter scrutiny and enforcement.

Natixis’s Ng said the tax collection push targeting the rich and private companies “may not be enough”, adding that officials were likely to “eventually consider taxes related to properties [and] broaden the tax base”.

Family offices invest a substantial amount of capital in startups each year. In the first half of 2023, 27% of overall startup deal value came from deals that included a family office investor, according to a recent report from PwC.

Despite their prevalence in startup deals, family offices can be a mysterious class of investors for founders to navigate, as they are not nearly as public or as easy to find as VCs. Multiple family office investors said during a TechCrunch Disrupt panel that the easiest way to approach investors like themselves is to seek out family offices that have alignment with what a startup is building.

Bruce Lee, the founder and CEO of Keebeck Wealth Management, said that when founders are looking to get connected with family offices, they should seek out families that made their wealth in the sector the startup is building in.

“[Family offices] have to kind of look for areas where you feel you have edge, or that the family has edge in a particular technology, so they can add strategic value to not only the conversation, but to the investment itself,” Lee said.

Eti Lazarian, a principal at Elle Family Office, agreed and added that families want to find businesses that are complementary to their own.

“When a family invests in something that has to do with the business that they are in, they can bring a lot of value to your business, as well as a collaboration,” Lazarian said. “So usually we’re looking for something that can complement each other.”

Both Lazarian and Lee added that this alignment is not only related to finding family offices, but is also one of the things that makes family offices good investors to have. Lazarian said that family offices tend to make investments into companies that they care about on an emotional level compared to traditional VCs. She added that when family offices invest, they do so to see a company succeed no matter what, which can make them more flexible and patient investors.

“When you work with venture capital, you feel like always you have a gun to your head that you have to … perform to their goals,” Lazarian said. “When you work with a family office, it feels like the runway is more extended. You have more time. It feels like you know you have more air to breathe as you’re working towards your goals.”

Both Lazarian and Lee added that for founders looking to meet family offices in their respective industries, industry or regional conferences are a great place to start because family offices frequent these events.

Once a founder gets connected with a family office, Lazarian and Lee said they should expect to pitch them differently. While startups can pitch VCs on dreams and aspirations, that doesn’t work on family offices. Companies should pitch their projections and metrics, not that they will be a future unicorn.

The finding of a tight race, by a top-rated pollster, surprised both parties in a state that hasn’t been on anyone’s radar in the presidential election

Democrats got a gift over the weekend, albeit one that could prove to be a mirage. The Iowa Poll, the gold standard of political surveys in the Hawkeye State, showed Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of former President Donald Trump by 3 percentage points.

It was a shocking finding for a state nobody considered competitive and raised Democratic hopes of a last-minute shift that might benefit Harris in traditional battleground states such as Michigan and Wisconsin. Overall, the final polls taken just before Election Day found a neck-and-neck race in the battlegrounds. But Democrats are hoping that the apparent shift toward Harris recorded by the Iowa Poll, particularly among older women and independents, indicated a broader trend, possibly in reaction to Trump’s recent rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, where some warm-up speakers made racist, sexist or otherwise demeaning comments.

Republicans immediately threw cold water on the poll, casting it as an outlier. The former president won Iowa by 8 percentage points in 2020, and there has been no general election presidential campaigning in the state or significant advertising. Iowa’s entire congressional delegation is Republican, and it has been trending red for years. And in other polls released over the weekend, there was limited evidence of a drastically reordered race.

In early 2023, the Democratic National Committee yanked Iowa’s first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses and instead made South Carolina, a state that saved President Biden’s 2020 primary campaign, the party’s leadoff nominating state. That led even some Democrats to suggest that the party had essentially given up on competing for rural voters.

Republicans kept their first nominating contest in Iowa, where Trump in January won more than half the vote in what was the largest margin in the history of the first GOP presidential nominating contest.

Iowa GOP Chairman Jeff Kaufmann said on X that the poll’s main sponsor, the Des Moines Register newspaper, and its pollster, Ann Selzer, had “lost any shred of credibility they had left.” He added that the poll should be considered “propaganda” and that Trump would win the state.

Trump’s campaign, in a memo Sunday, dubbed it “an absurd outlier poll.”

Selzer said in an email that her “method for the current poll is the same as I used for the 2020 and 2016 Iowa Polls that showed Donald Trump winning Iowa.”

Even Democrats suggested the findings should be treated with caution, though state party officials tried to leverage it to motivate activists in the state for a final wave of door-knocking and calls.

“This is just a poll, and what really matters is that Iowans show up and make their voices heard,” Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart told reporters.

Iowa House Democratic Leader Jennifer Konfrst told reporters she was “pleasantly surprised, but not shocked” by the poll’s findings. She called Iowa a “purple” state and said abortion restrictions are motivating women in particular. “They are sick and tired of politicians interfering in their doctors’ offices,” she said. The state bans abortions after six weeks of pregnancy.

The Iowa Poll found swings toward Harris among some voter groups that were larger than commonly seen in surveys. After trailing among independent likely voters in prior surveys, those voters favored Harris by 7 points in the new poll. The change was driven by independent women, who backed Harris in the new survey by 28 points, compared with a 5-point tilt toward Harris in September.

Another pollster, Emerson College Polling, on Saturday reported Trump ahead in Iowa by 10 points. It found Harris ahead among women by 5 points, whereas she led by 20 points among women in the Iowa Poll.

A New York Times/Siena College poll of battleground states released Sunday, which didn’t include Iowa, offered mixed evidence. The survey reported that Harris leads by 11 points, 55% to 44%, among the 8% of voters who only recently settled on a choice of candidate. The survey also showed she had made gains in North Carolina, where her 2-point lead contrasted with the survey’s finding in late September of a 3-point Trump advantage; and in Georgia, where Harris had trailed by 4 points in late September and now led by 1 point. Trump’s pathways to 270 Electoral College votes are greatly diminished without those two states, and the former president has several North Carolina stops in the closing stretch.

But the same survey also found that the race in Pennsylvania—which is particularly critical to Harris’s chances—had settled into a tie after Harris led by 4 points in September. And it showed no movement in Wisconsin, which like Iowa has an overwhelmingly white voter pool. The survey found Harris leading there by 2 points, unchanged from its prior poll.

Overall, the Times/Siena poll found the race within the polls’ margin of error in all seven battleground states.

A separate survey released Sunday, by NBC News, found the two candidates tied at 49% each in a head-to-head matchup among voters nationally, with essentially no movement from a month earlier. In October, the survey found the candidates tied at 48% each.

Far-right organization that played central role in Jan. 6 Capitol riot has reorganized into chapters that are echoing claims of ballot fraud—and discussing a response

Members of the Proud Boys, key instigators in the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot, are mobilizing in support of Donald Trump—and in some cases, making threats about the presidential election.

While it isn’t clear what the far-right group is planning or how coordinated its plans are, many chapters are amplifying election-cheating claims made by Trump or his allies and discussing potential responses, according to a review by The Wall Street Journal of dozens of accounts on Telegram, the messaging app, and Trump’s Truth Social platform. Chapters have gathered across state lines, talked about watching polls and have been boasting about attending Trump rallies to protect the former president.

The online chatter comes as law-enforcement officials confront an unprecedented array of aggressors this election season: foreign operatives, homegrown extremists and lone wolves such as those accused of trying to assassinate Trump.

The digital activity appears to show the Proud Boys regrouping after the imprisonment of many members and top leaders—individuals that a bipartisan House panel called central orchestrators of the riot. Former national chairman Enrique Tarrio is serving 22 years for seditious conspiracy and other charges for trying to thwart the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden.

A Texas Proud Boys chapter’s Telegram account recently shared a post alleging a Democratic conspiracy to install Vice President Kamala Harris as president through “millions of fake ballots.”

Replied a commenter pictured with a Proud Boys flag in the background: “So we can shoot them then, right?”

A North Carolina Proud Boys chapter, which has formally endorsed Trump on Telegram, thanked its members who volunteered to “work the polls” in the primaries, calling it an “excellent trial run for the general election in November.” The chapter also talked about providing “security” for Trump at a September rally in Wilmington, N.C., and declared that Harris “will not win without a steal, which is exactly what they are planning to do.”

The North Phoenix Proud Boys posted a picture of a gun arsenal on Truth Social last month, declaring, “Proud Boys stocking up getting ready for Nov…It’s going to be biggley!!” An Ohio chapter warned on Telegram that “once Trump wins,” antifa will riot, adding, “Prepare accordingly.”

The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a nonprofit tracking hate speech and extremism, documented in a new report a 317% surge in “violent rhetoric related to election denialism” by various groups on Telegram during October. The organization cited posts that used alleged rigged elections to justify an “inevitable civil war” and a call to “Shoot to kill any illegal voters.”

Heidi Beirich, the organization’s co-founder, said groups like the Proud Boys are planning to do poll watching and have signaled they are prepared for violence.

In one discussion—viewed by the Journal—Proud Boys members suggested “keeping your rifle by your side.”

The federal government is planning dramatically increased security for this Jan. 6 when Congress meets to certify election results. Law-enforcement officials say they don’t expect an attack of similar scale, in part because more than 1,500 rioters were charged.

Yet the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Homeland Security warned state and local officials in October that solo extremists or small groups, similarly galvanized by “election-related grievances,” could mobilize for violence between Election Day and at least the Jan. 20 inauguration.

In the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, the Proud Boys were “leading the on-the-ground efforts to storm the seat of government,” the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia said in a written statement after Tarrio’s 2023 sentencing. “No organization put more boots on the ground.”

With their national leadership ranks thinned, the Proud Boys appear to have pivoted to localized operations.

On Telegram, a North Carolina chapter said “a hard lesson was learned about having a national PB leadership structure after J6,” referring to the riot, and said that now, there are more than “100 individual chapters conducting local events yet still feeding their lessons learned to the club as a whole.”

The local chapters list “tenets,” such as “declare ‘the West is the best’” and “venerate the housewife.”

The Proud Boys recently joined demonstrations in Springfield, Ohio, as top Republicans in September floated a debunked claim that Haitian migrants were eating pets.

“The red hat army is coming back. From now til the election,” an Indiana Proud Boy chapter posted on Telegram in July with a photo of a MAGA cap.

A Telegram page for a chapter in Long Island, N.Y., boasted about members who it said attended a Trump rally in Michigan last month. “If they only knew we were backstage and all over,” the post states.

Another Proud Boy Telegram post said members from a half-dozen states converged on Trump’s Oct. 5 rally in Butler, Pa., the site of the July assassination attempt. Their post, accompanied by a photo slideshow, said members were there “to watch Trump’s back and to experience the momentous occasion with the good people of the MAGA movement.”

Julie Farnam, a former U.S. Capitol Police assistant director over intelligence, who is now a private investigator, cautions that decentralized chapters make the Proud Boys harder to track.

Farnam said potential presidential pardons for Jan. 6 defendants is a factor driving their support for Trump. Trump has floated the idea of pardoning Jan. 6 rioters. On Telegram, some Proud boys post photos of themselves, claiming to be outside Trump rallies, with signs like, “free the J6 prisoners.”

“They will expect that Trump will pardon,” Farnam said.

A Kentucky Proud Boys chapter said on Truth Social last month it was “standing back and standing by,” which it called a throwback to Trump’s use of that phrase to the Proud Boys during a 2020 presidential debate. The chapter promoted a Sunday Traveling Trump Train event in Lexington that it said was organized by Christian conservatives.

A Kentucky chapter member told the Journal his group doesn’t have plans to gather for the election, but said there is a possibility members will attend the inauguration if Trump wins—to celebrate and raise awareness of the Proud Boys imprisoned over the Capitol riot.

Some Proud Boys also express support for Trump’s proposals, particularly immigration.

A recent Telegram post by an Ohio Proud Boys group said: “1/20/25: Trump is sworn in as President. 1/21/25: Me and the Proud Boys begin the deportations.”

Cartel to leave output curbs in place an extra month in effort to boost anaemic crude prices

Saudi Arabia and other members of Opec+ have delayed a plan to begin raising oil production until the end of the year, as the group tries to revive crude prices that have continued to flag despite turmoil in the Middle East.

The world’s largest oil exporter and seven others, including Russia, Iraq, the UAE and Algeria, would leave all output cuts in place until the end of December, Opec said in a statement.

The eight countries had been due to start unwinding voluntary cuts, but have postponed the plan for at least another month amid persistent weakness in the oil price.

The planned increases would have lifted the group’s production by 180,000 barrels a day by December, as part of a gradual unwinding of 2.2mn of cuts over 12 months.

Brent crude has fallen by almost 14 per cent over the past 12 months, in part because of concern over demand from China. It closed at $73 on Friday, having briefly dropped below $70 in September, to its lowest since December 2021.

“The Opec Secretariat noted that the eight Opec+ countries Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria, and Oman […] have agreed to extend the voluntary production adjustments,” the group’s statement said.

The statement also reaffirmed a commitment to the cuts by Iraq, Russia and Kazakhstan, which had previously frustrated other members, particularly Saudi Arabia, by pumping more than their quotas.

Postponing the unwinding of the cuts for another month also enables the group to delay a decision on production levels for 2025 until after the US election, analysts said. Opec+ members are due to meet in person on December 1 in Vienna, when a final decision is expected.

US voters are set to head to the polls on Tuesday. Republican candidate Donald Trump has said he wants to halve energy prices within a year of taking office.

Oil prices have reacted to escalating conflict in the Middle East over the past year, but have tended to pare short-term gains as macroeconomic factors come back to the fore.

Prices fell more than 6 per cent last Monday after Israeli strikes on Iran stopped short of targeting oil and nuclear facilities, which calmed the market and put the focus back on China’s economic outlook.

They climbed only slightly on Friday after Major General Hossein Salami, head of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard Corps, vowed that Tehran would deliver an “unimaginable” response to the strikes.

On Saturday Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic republic’s supreme leader, threatened Israel with a “crushing response”.