Legend has it that in the winter of 1811, Andrew Jackson, not yet US president, was escorting a coffle of enslaved people along the Natchez Trace, an ancient Native American trail winding alongside the Mississippi River, when he was intercepted by federal agent Silas Dinsmore.

Though not yet president, he was already a prominent figure across the Western borderlands: Tennessee’s first representative elected to Congress and to the state Supreme Court; commander of the Tennessee militia; a man of immense fortune amassed as a lawyer, merchant, horse breeder, and planter; and the vigilant guardian of vast profits reaped from slavery, the slave trade, and the violent expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands. Indeed, according to some accounts, Jackson remains the only president to have personally driven slave convoys (coffles).

Federal officials like Dinsmore were deployed across the region under the 1807 Intrusion Act to prevent squatters and settlers from encroaching upon Western public lands. The American Founding Fathers had rebelled in 1763 against King George III’s Royal Proclamation, which barred white settlers from crossing beyond the Ohio River; yet those very same founders now sought, through analogous federal legislation, to halt the westward deluge of unruly, defiant, and armed settlers.

A few years earlier, Congress had outlawed the transatlantic slave trade. The purpose of Dinsmore’s checkpoint was to verify that the human “chattel” transported along this route were “genuine slaves”, either imported prior to 1808 or born within the United States.

Accounts of what transpired next diverge sharply. In one version, when the federal agent demands his papers, Jackson points to the US Constitution, retorting, “Here they are.” In another version, the future president draws his pistols and declares, “These are my passports!” Whatever the literal truth, Andrew Jackson, the slave trader, proclaimed that no federal statute or official had the authority to shackle his “commercial” enterprises or meddle with his property rights. He subsequently launched a ferocious campaign to have Dinsmore dismissed, punctuated by explicit threats against the federal agent’s life. In one of his fiery protest letters to the federal government, he demanded: “Lord, has it come to this? Are we freemen or are we slaves? Is this real, or is it a dream?” In the end, he had his way. Dinsmore was ultimately relieved of his post. In his defence, Dinsmore observed that “gentlemen from the Western Country” of Jackson’s stripe believed themselves bound by no law whatsoever. In their eyes, a federal agent merely demanding documentation verifying the ownership of enslaved people was itself a form of “slavery”.

Legend has it that in the winter of 1811, Andrew Jackson, not yet US president, was escorting a coffle of enslaved people along the Natchez Trace, an ancient Native American trail winding alongside the Mississippi River, when he was intercepted by federal agent Silas Dinsmore.

Though not yet president, he was already a prominent figure across the Western borderlands: Tennessee’s first representative elected to Congress and to the state Supreme Court; commander of the Tennessee militia; a man of immense fortune amassed as a lawyer, merchant, horse breeder, and planter; and the vigilant guardian of vast profits reaped from slavery, the slave trade, and the violent expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands. Indeed, according to some accounts, Jackson remains the only president to have personally driven slave convoys (coffles).

Federal officials like Dinsmore were deployed across the region under the 1807 Intrusion Act to prevent squatters and settlers from encroaching upon Western public lands. The American Founding Fathers had rebelled in 1763 against King George III’s Royal Proclamation, which barred white settlers from crossing beyond the Ohio River; yet those very same founders now sought, through analogous federal legislation, to halt the westward deluge of unruly, defiant, and armed settlers.

A few years earlier, Congress had outlawed the transatlantic slave trade. The purpose of Dinsmore’s checkpoint was to verify that the human “chattel” transported along this route were “genuine slaves”, either imported prior to 1808 or born within the United States.

Accounts of what transpired next diverge sharply. In one version, when the federal agent demands his papers, Jackson points to the US Constitution, retorting, “Here they are.” In another version, the future president draws his pistols and declares, “These are my passports!” Whatever the literal truth, Andrew Jackson, the slave trader, proclaimed that no federal statute or official had the authority to shackle his “commercial” enterprises or meddle with his property rights. He subsequently launched a ferocious campaign to have Dinsmore dismissed, punctuated by explicit threats against the federal agent’s life. In one of his fiery protest letters to the federal government, he demanded: “Lord, has it come to this? Are we freemen or are we slaves? Is this real, or is it a dream?” In the end, he had his way. Dinsmore was ultimately relieved of his post. In his defence, Dinsmore observed that “gentlemen from the Western Country” of Jackson’s stripe believed themselves bound by no law whatsoever. In their eyes, a federal agent merely demanding documentation verifying the ownership of enslaved people was itself a form of “slavery”.

I have previously written on the American “frontier mentality” and how it was theorized by Frederick Jackson Turner at the close of the nineteenth century. Here, a clarification is perhaps warranted: one must distinguish between the word border, which signifies fixed state boundaries, and the term frontier, which, drawing an analogy from our own history, denotes a more fluid zone akin to the uc or serhat [the marchlands or shifting imperial periphery]. While a border in American history denotes a determinate, immutable, and demarcating boundary line, the frontier invoked by Jackson as a marcher domain signifies, by turns, a distinct way of life or cultural realm, the westward expansionist rush, and, in another sense, a safety valve engineered to avert domestic civil strife.(1) In this sense, the frontier corresponds to a mental construct, both material and fantastical, through which white American settlers forged their conception of liberty. Freedom, democracy, civilization, and innovation are continually hailed as products of this frontier mentality. Here, colonial expansionism and the internal cohesion of society are conceived in tandem.

At least in the Jacksonian universe. The Jacksonian era, which saw Jackson elected president after overthrowing the coalition of the Founding Fathers, is an epoch that Donald Trump frequently praises and draws inspiration from. Reflecting American boundlessness rather than mere American exceptionalism, this period coincided, not accidentally, with racial terrors, the populism of the white “common man”, and relentless financialization and speculation. Sociologist Daniel Bell points out that this sense of boundlessness engendered a certain “lightness” within the American national character, fostering the illusion that this nation had freed itself not only from the weight of history, but even from the constraints of nature, life, and death itself. American settlers were not merely moving west and south; they were actively incited to do so. Dispossessing Indigenous populations, confiscating Mexican territory, and annexing numerous new states to the United States were viewed, on the one hand, as preventive measures against domestic “social explosion”; yet, on the other hand, they inevitably expanded the non-white population within the country. The appalling violence along the frontier simultaneously gave rise to liberty, ethnic cleansing, master-race democracy, and racialized dread of non-white peoples. The Indian Wars not only secured fresh land for white settlers, but also injected into these “virgin” territories real estate speculations and financial chicanery far beyond the capacity of the ordinary white man to withstand.

The blood-soaked frontier of capitalist accumulation

Capital comes into the world dripping from head to toe with blood and dirt; it accumulates; cyclical bottlenecks impede its accumulation; it stalls, and then it lurches forward to push the frontier further out. This leap forward manifests at times as technological advancement, and at others as the violent conquest of new markets and human populations.

American capitalism, having set its sights first on the whole of North America, then across the entire American continent, soon after across the Pacific, and eventually over the whole planet, pairs the myth of boundlessness with an intrinsic drive toward domestic and external expansion. In an essay examining area studies and geography, the Marxist geographer Neil Smith observes that the United States conceptualizes the world as flat. From Woodrow Wilson’s reimagining of the Monroe Doctrine on a global scale to the globalization agendas of the Clinton and Bush eras, US rulers have consistently envisioned the globe as a frictionless space through which American capital can circulate unhindered, liberated from geographic boundaries and physical barriers. Consequently, the border must perpetually function as an open frontier; it must forever be thrust outward. “In such a world,” Smith asks, “what could possibly be the utility of deep geographic knowledge?” According to Smith, the widespread geographic illiteracy observed among Americans constitutes, above all else, “a highly rational expression of a specific imperial ambition.”

For this reason, the “closing of the frontier” is synonymous with doomsday for the Jackson-Wilson lineage. I wish to emphasize once more the spiritual significance underpinning the frontier idea: the white man’s lust for dominion across the Americas and the wider world cannot brook containment at home either. Jackson’s refusal to present identification to a federal agent effectively foreshadowed the conflict of the American Civil War. Northern Yankees seeking to emancipate the cotton-picking slaves of Southern planters were perceived as assaulting liberty, property, and the patriarchal family. The Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic spirit of liberty, supposedly lost in Europe before its rediscovery by the Hitlerites, had supposedly been reclaimed in America. Structural impediments such as entrenched bureaucracy and feudalism were absent in the New World. The Aryan spirit of independence, having emerged from the German forests and crossed the Atlantic, was revitalizing this boundless continent. Now, the Northerners were stripping away private property, subjecting the South to military occupation, and swelling the federal state under the pretext of aiding former slaves.

Doubtless, the contours of today’s battle between Trump, the forces coalescing around him, and their adversaries bear the unmistakable imprint of this border conflict. The closing of the frontier, both abroad and at home, inevitably necessitated a domestic and external social reorganization. The New Deal order, reviled today by Trumpists, neoconservatives, libertarians, and Silicon Valley prophets alike, rested fundamentally on the premise that the frontier had closed. It is true that the New Deal was riddled with internal contradictions. Franklin Delano Roosevelt made constant concessions to Southern Democrats, while labour protections were never granted constitutional status. Moreover, the international expansion of the New Deal was rendered possible solely through warfare; the American New Deal incorporated on the world stage the internationalization of American capital, seeking to ensure that it encountered no frontiers across the globe.

Yet the metaphors wielded by the warring factions endure intact. The closing of the frontier demanded an internally oriented, relatively “social” state. This domestic compact was hemmed in by the structural limits of capital and the boundaries erected by socialism and democracy. The neoliberal and neoconservative sorties of the 1970s represented a concerted counter-offensive against these very boundaries.

The apocalyptic representation of the American economy

The Economist argues that American capitalism has taken an “apocalyptic turn”. According to the publication, apocalyptic thinking has emerged as the single most potent driving force within contemporary American capitalism.

Elon Musk, for instance, seeks to establish a colony on Mars through SpaceX in order to safeguard against “existential threats to humanity”. Musk is hardly alone. This apocalyptic gloom is nurtured by the familiar liberal premise that terrestrial resources are intrinsically finite, compounded by the eschatological debates swirling around the civilizational threats posed by artificial intelligence.

“Today’s American business landscape,” writes The Economist, “is classified not by industry, but by eschatology. The spectres of war and geopolitics loom as large over corporate boardrooms as the perils of AI.” The magazine recalls that last year, Palantir CEO Alex Karp authored a book arguing that the future of the West hinges on high-tech defence firms like his own. Palmer Luckey, founder of Palantir’s sister company Anduril, another defence technology firm, routinely airs his conviction that China will attempt an invasion of Taiwan. According to The Economist, virtually every corporation trading in critical minerals now spins a compelling narrative explaining why its proprietary assets would become agonizingly scarce in the event of such a conflagration.

This bleak disposition is rapidly spreading across the financial sector. Much of Wall Street is reported to be in a “fatalistic mood”. Capital withdrawals by investors from previously obscure private credit funds have recently undermined confidence across private markets as a whole, the magazine notes, observing:

“The roster of financial innovations that central bankers warn pose ‘systemic’ risks to the economy is so vast that it is astonishing the edifice has not buckled under the sheer weight of its own dread. Cryptocurrency, one such vehicle, is inherently an apocalyptic enterprise; it purports to offer insulation against state interference and against the inflation generated by ‘Uncle Sam’s’ profligate spending, most notably in defence.”

Last year, the most widely read volume on Wall Street was reportedly titled “1929”. For the current year, a plausible candidate might well be “1873”, suggests The Economist. Investors increasingly characterize equity markets by drawing parallels with historical catastrophes. A Deutsche Bank strategist recently asked: “Will 1999 morph into 2000, or into 1987? Or will the clock simply reset to 1996?” The Economist considers a replay of the 2008 scenario equally plausible.

The publication contends that this millennial economy is structurally “paranoid”. “Historically,” it notes, “the appearance of comets presaged the end of the world.” Today, however, web trackers monitor the private jets of the super-rich, driven by the suspicion that, should cataclysm strike, the elite will flee to fortified redoubts.

The American economy is sustained in an unsustainable manner by the expenditures of the super-rich, while the vast majority subsists under conditions of increasing precarity. At least, this is the diagnosis offered by the economists cited by The Economist, who emphasize the emergence of a “K-shaped” economy.

The Governor of Utah warns that if the US loses the AI race to China, the country is finished. Musk, in a dispute with Sam Altman over OpenAI’s governance structure, wrote: “Excuse me, but the fate of human civilization is at stake.” Why, then, if the outlook is so catastrophic, do American equities remain so richly priced? According to the magazine, firms are raising capital in direct proportion to the severity of their doomsday narratives, scrambling to secure funds ahead of the impending market crash that many anticipate.

The Economist lays the underlying logic bare: “America is an experiment in terrifying oneself into prosperity…. There is no sales pitch to investors more compelling than asserting that your venture will bring about the end of the world as we know it.”

Yet the most provocative insight is reserved for the conclusion. An economy that pairs widespread corporate distrust with “an escalating elite millennialism is an economy primed to detonate.” And it adds: perhaps the lurking historical precedent is not 2008, 1999, 1973, or even 1873, but 1789.

The closing of the frontier and the quest for new frontiers

The neoliberal and neoconservative response to the closing of the frontier, constantly scouring the horizon for new accumulation frontiers, has ultimately targeted artificial intelligence. The emergent paradigm that Giulia Dal Maso designates “longevity capitalism” transforms human life itself into an “asset class”. Dal Maso writes:

“Life expectancy, and the uncertainty surrounding it, is no longer perceived as a self-evident, universal absolute. What follows examines how (extended) life has been captured; how the volatility surrounding longevity has become a new accumulation frontier, a terrain where capital extracts value from the indeterminacy of biological time. The term ‘longevity capitalism’ is advanced to theorize this formation: a biopolitical and financial regime through which capital subsumes the temporality of life into its own circulation.”

Biological duration has ceased to be a mere metaphor for capital accumulation; it has become its actual operational medium. Under longevity capitalism, the reproduction of labour power shifts fundamentally: “what capital has learned to colonize and feed upon is biological time itself, namely the indeterminate duration of the living body.”

The obsession of tech magnates such as Bezos, Altman, Musk, and Thiel with “longevity”, along with their aggressive capitalization of longevity startups, signals both the commodification of new frontiers and novel strategies for breaching systemic barriers. This quest is by no means confined to cryonics or anti-aging therapies: island utopias, charter cities, special economic zones, and offshore tax havens are part of the same architecture. According to Dal Maso, the political horizon of these elites is transparent: no death, no taxes, no democracy.

Here we encounter precisely what Melinda Cooper terms “patrimonial capitalism”. In my previous article, I touched upon Joseph Schumpeter’s gloomy prognostications regarding the fate of capitalism. For Schumpeter, the rise of the joint-stock corporation, the “democratization” of corporate ownership via public stock listings, and the structural divorce of administrative management from legal ownership sounded the death knell of capitalism, initiating an irreversible decline: an epoch in which the means of production were socialized was inevitable. Socialism would, regrettably, triumph. Schumpeter posited that capitalism harboured a tendency not to deepen its inherent contradictions, but rather to mitigate them. Rather than polarize, capitalism tended toward equalization. In the process, capitalism’s signature dynamic, “creative destruction”, was being eliminated.

Cooper reminds us that Schumpeter’s “ideal” capitalism was an organizational model in which capital accumulated through the vehicle of the dynastic family enterprise. Schumpeter traced the dark horizon of capitalism directly to the disintegration of the bourgeois family. The founding of a family was the primary psychological engine underpinning the impulse to innovate:

“Only a subject thinking across generational horizons was capable of executing the heroic leap of faith demanded by genuine innovation. The authentic entrepreneur was willing to sacrifice immediate personal consumption precisely because he was animated by the desire to establish an enduring fortune for his progeny.”

In sum, the “heroic entrepreneur” was, by definition, “simultaneously a prospective founder of dynastic wealth.”(2)

Today’s crop of tech billionaires appears to have rediscovered the allure of what Cooper identifies in Schumpeter as “reactionary futurism”. According to Cooper, the monetary and regulatory environment of the new millennium, combined with the structural erosion of New Deal securities statutes, has fatally compromised the governance architecture of publicly traded corporations. There now exists a new corporate elite composed of private equity investors and entrepreneurial founders who exercise unchecked managerial authority over the firms they control. Figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have ascended precisely upon this material foundation. The “mythic aura of the founder-entrepreneur” is weaponized through these personalities. Thiel, for example, contends that founder-dominated enterprises resemble “feudal monarchies”, contrasting them favourably with allegedly more “modern”, publicly listed corporations characterized by dispersed shareholder structures and managerial bureaucracies. In Thiel’s view, founder-entrepreneurs can act decisively, command feudal loyalty, and execute multi-decade visions. Conversely, “impersonal bureaucracies staffed by credentialed managers” remain fixated on short-term quarterly metrics demanded by public equity markets. Cooper writes:

“Thiel’s corporate philosophy exalts the founder as a primordial patriarch, an antinomian figure who razes existing codes to establish new ones, gazing toward a distant technological horizon while resurrecting archaic social hierarchies. In his imaginative universe, founders may be cast as orphaned sons, fratricidal brothers, or patricidal heirs; yet it is precisely through these transgressive acts that they emerge as architects of new dynastic bloodlines and familial fortunes.”

Thus, we witness the corporate roots of the structural tension dividing the Silicon Valley vanguard from the “professional-managerial class” (PMC), an administrative stratum that ballooned under neoliberalism and serves as the primary constituency for contemporary “woke” institutional culture. Silicon Valley-backed Trumpism regards the dismantling of the New Deal administrative state and the eradication of the managerial corporate apparatus, which it decries as the breeding ground of “wokeness”, as one and the same objective.

The contradictions of the long downturn

What happens when the frontier is closed, or when the channels to reopen it are blocked? The fundamental divergence between Jackson and Trump lies in the fact that Jackson symbolized an expanding American capitalism, whereas Trump embodies a defensive entrenchment strategy for an empire in decline. While Trump’s predatory posture toward Greenland, Mexico, and Canada mimics the westward-charging settler ethos, too much water has passed under the bridge. Excepting transitory speculative booms, American capitalism has been caught in structural stagnation since 1973. The frontier appears closed; yet a powerful fraction of capital refuses to submit to this closure, seeking instead to batter the gates down.

This zero-sum dynamic is reigniting debates over the “return” of the state. How do boundless accumulation and state expansion coexist? First, as Quinn Slobodian demonstrates in Globalists, the libertarian, neoliberal, and ordoliberal imaginary has never been preoccupied with an unfettered market so much as with a minimal state secured by an overarching international legal framework. Second, prolonged economic stagnation highlights a configuration that vindicates Dylan Riley and Robert Brenner’s widely debated theorization of “political capitalism”: as capital becomes increasingly reliant on political intervention to underwrite its profitability, the capacity of wage workers to organize mass resistance and articulate a “common cause” is steadily degraded. According to Riley and Brenner, within this structural matrix, the “unskilled” segment of the working class, particularly those possessing the “advantage” of being native-born or white, retreats into its “primary” identities, attempting to capture income redistribution in its favour through an aggressive assault on social expenditures. Conversely, the credentialed segment of the working class, employed overwhelmingly within low-margin service sectors, seeks to preserve and expand the welfare state. “At the mass level, therefore,” the authors conclude, “the material basis of political conflict in the US is fundamentally a struggle waged between these two distinct segments of the working class over the allocation of social spending.”

Hence, credentialed, university-educated professionals form the electoral backbone of the Democratic Party. Anchored in state-subsidized private and non-profit sectors, particularly healthcare and education, these workers organize their politics around state-mediated “trickle-down” redistribution.(3) The policy platforms championed today by Daron Acemoglu and Joseph Stiglitz as “working-class liberalism” or “progressive capitalism” represent the programmatic articulation of this stratum’s class interests. Demands for the regulatory containment of artificial intelligence likewise reflect the acute status anxieties of this white-collar constituency. While AI occupies a central position in Silicon Valley’s quest for a new frontier, it reverberates with distinct apocalyptic overtones for the PMC.

The rightward drift of the precarious, largely white working class is, according to the authors, “best understood as an expression of transparent material interests.” In the absence of viable structural alternatives, this constituency falls back on its primary identities to defend its precarious position within the labour market and protect the value of its modest assets. It embraces a populist strain of supply-side economics, launching a fierce assault on social spending, which it perceives, not entirely without reason, as a redistributive machinery that diverts resources away from itself toward other segments of the working class.

This systematic attack on social spending sits at the very core of right-wing working-class politics, according to Riley and Brenner. The authors acknowledge that this posture appears contradictory on its face. “Yet,” they add, “when no viable political mechanism exists to shift aggregate income from capital to labour, underwriting capitalist profitability constitutes a rational, second-best strategy in the short run.” This calculus forms a central pillar of the broad and durable working-class support enjoyed by supply-side economic policy and its structural assault on the welfare state.(4)

***

The libertarian economist and Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan framed the vital function of the frontier in distinct terms: the frontier offered the institutional option of “exit”. Left to operate without bureaucratic state intervention, the market would function in precisely the same manner as the frontier: it would provide an escape hatch from coercive social relations and the tutelage of the nanny state. The frontier was the very incarnation of liberty.

The imperative of exit or escape constitutes one of the defining motifs of Silicon Valley eschatology. The obsession with pushing beyond frontiers is merely its outward manifestation: whether framed in geographical terms (including the colonization of space or Mars) or through the diversification of speculative assets, the strategy of exit resolves into fleeing the apocalypse or transforming the apocalypse itself into an exceptionally lucrative investment opportunity. The speculative bubble currently enveloping AI indicates that capital allocation is oriented not toward contemporary demand, but toward financing speculative escape trajectories for the future. Capital expansion proceeds detached from authentic social utility, guided strictly by expected returns. Investment is wholly uncoupled from tangible demand; forward-looking speculation has emerged as the primary motor of the capitalist psyche, sustained by blind guesses.

In the concluding installment, we turn our focus to scenarios of systemic collapse. Visions that read like science fiction or speculative fantasy will be scrutinized as structural pillars of contemporary capitalist eschatology.

(1) The safety-valve doctrine embedded within the American frontier mentality historically encompassed the systematic sexual violation of Indigenous women. This dynamic offers a harrowing illustration of how structural violence was biologicalized to reproduce racialized and gendered hierarchies. In The End of the Myth, Greg Grandin observes that women across every class, caste, and skin colour were subjected to pervasive sexual violence, with enslaved Black women bearing the brunt of this brutality. The passage is long, but essential for grasping the perverse internal logic of this mindset:

_”During the decades leading to the Civil War, as abolitionists began to describe slavery as a moral evil that was degrading republican values, proslavery ideologues responded by defining the institution as a ‘positive good’ that helped elevate republican virtue. Enslaved people were commodities, bought and sold in the market. But having many slaves, southern cavaliers said, allowed proslavery advocates to rise above the market’s crassness and develop more refined, chivalric qualities. Rape was an instrument of that refinement. Enslaved women, proslavery ideologues said, were ‘safety valves’ that helped siphon white male lust away from white women, allowing southerners to present their section as genteel and mannered. Writing to the Jamestown Journal in New York to complain about an abolitionist editorial that described the regime of sexual terror that southern, enslaved women were forced to endure, Samuel Rutherford, a slave trader from Knoxville, Georgia, conceded the accuracy of the editorial but said that sexual access to enslaved women functioned as a ‘safety-valve to the virtues of our white women, which are so much higher in the scale of virtue than your northern women.’’”

(2) Cooper advances crucial insights regarding this structural transformation. Her analysis warrants citation at length:

“At its peak, shareholder value ideology promised a more democratic form of capitalism and a wider distribution of financial wealth. The twenty-first century presents a very different picture. Accelerating since the 2008 global financial crisis, privately held, founder- or family-controlled firms have assumed a new prominence in American financial markets. Aided by alternative avenues of private financing, tech startups have deferred public listings for as long as possible, achieving multi-billion-dollar valuations without undertaking an IPO. When they do eventually list, they devise elaborate governance mechanisms to insulate insider control behind a veneer of public ownership. Today, some of the most capitalized tech corporations rely on dual-class share structures and bespoke voting arrangements that empower the corporate founder to override the majority of public shareholders on all significant matters. The resurgence of founder control is largely attributable to the dramatic expansion of private credit markets, an unintended consequence of post-crisis banking regulations. Private funds such as venture capital and private equity have assumed an increasingly central role in channelling direct funding to startups seeking to evade the regulatory oversight of public equity markets. Projecting their own structural preferences for asymmetric authority, private funds have actively indulged autocratic tendencies among entrepreneurial founders, presiding over the emergence of a new executive caste distinguished both by extraordinary corporate power and staggering private fortunes. Alongside private fund managers, tech founders dominated the billionaire rankings throughout the 2010s and early 2020s, a period when consecutive waves of quantitative easing by the Federal Reserve drove asset valuations to historic highs. This unprecedented windfall was funnelled directly into family offices: kinship-based wealth preservation structures that have themselves evolved into aggressive investors within private asset markets. The institutional relations binding the actors of this private equity ecosystem are deeply intertwined: successful founders and retired fund partners invariably entrust their wealth to family offices, which in turn deploy substantial capital back into private equity vehicles, venture rounds, and founder-dominated corporations. These dynamics exemplify a pronounced drift toward ‘patrimonial’ capitalism, where the boundaries separating dynastic wealth preservation from the structural requirements of entrepreneurial innovation are systematically dissolved.” Hence, the dynamics of hyper-financialization and the anti-establishment posturing of the post-neoliberal era operate in profound structural alignment.

(3) Riley and Brenner highlight that the expansive apparatus of non-profit entities, philanthropic foundations, and charitable trusts constitutes another primary employment reservoir for credentialed professionals, noting that aggregate employment within this sector now exceeds that of domestic manufacturing. In their estimation, these institutional complexes are structurally committed to advancing technocratic remedies for systemic crises, most notably racial disparities.

(4) The authors observe that more privileged segments of the working class that have succeeded in acquiring private property naturally constitute a receptive audience for conservative economic proposals hostile to wage increases and redistributive taxation.

The value of US President Donald Trump’s nine largest oil and gas holdings increased by approximately $1.5 million to $4.4 million during the first six months of the war with Iran.

According to an analysis conducted by CNBC based on the American leader’s financial disclosure, corporate balance sheets, and FactSet market data, the investment basket includes shares in Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Kinder Morgan, Marathon Petroleum, Occidental Petroleum, Phillips 66, Valero Energy, and Williams Companies.

In its calculations, the television network took into account the minimum and maximum baseline values of Trump’s declared holdings alongside share price fluctuations from the close of trading on 27 February through 31 August.

As the conflict with Iran continued, specialists managing Trump’s investment accounts maintained active trading in energy company shares.

Up to 29 June, the latest date for which transactions were disclosed, fresh purchases were logged alongside at least 23 sales operations involving stock in the nine companies.

Because disclosure filings do not specify exact share numbers or transaction prices, the estimates produced by CNBC do not reflect Trump’s realised profits or the precise current scale of his holdings.

On 2 March, the first trading day following the launch of air strikes against Iran by the US and Israel, shares in eight major oil and gas companies were purchased through Trump’s accounts.

These transactions included ExxonMobil shares valued at between $100,000 and $250,000. Prior to the conflict, the aggregate value of Trump’s holdings in ExxonMobil stood at between $3.2 million and $12.5 million.

Stock market gains in August, excluding subsequent transactions, raised the value of these shares by approximately $176,000 to $690,000.

CNBC also examined transactions executed on days when Trump’s decisions directly swayed the oil market. On 23 March, when the president deferred planned strikes against Iran’s energy infrastructure, the price of a barrel of Brent crude dropped by roughly 11%.

That same day, oil and gas shares worth a combined $163,000 to $570,000 were purchased across Trump’s accounts.

A similar transaction took place on 7 April. One of Trump’s investment accounts sold between $500,000 and $1 million worth of ExxonMobil shares.

Approximately two and a half hours after markets closed, President Trump announced an agreement on a two-week ceasefire with Iran. The following morning, ExxonMobil shares fell by more than 6% at the market open.

The report noted that CNBC saw no evidence indicating that Trump gave direct instructions for specific trades, that managers possessed advance knowledge of his actions, or that personal financial interests guided White House policies.

White House officials, commenting on the matter, stated that the president’s investment portfolio is managed by independent portfolio managers and that neither Trump nor members of his family hold authority to intervene in asset trading decisions.

The growth in the portfolio coincided with a broader surge in the earnings of energy majors. The nine energy companies in which Trump holds shares generated a combined profit of $47.6 billion in the second quarter.

During the same period last year, that figure stood at $15.9 billion. The profits of ExxonMobil and Chevron alone climbed from $9.6 billion in the prior year to $26.6 billion.

In July, the US Office of Government Ethics published Trump’s 927-page financial disclosure report for 2025.

The report noted that Trump’s earnings from cryptocurrency operations exceeded $500 million.

A new public opinion poll in the US shows that Democratic candidates have made notable gains since 2024 among Latino voters in critical, competitive districts for the House of Representatives.

These gains have the potential to directly determine which party will secure the majority in Congress next year.

According to a joint survey by Hart Research and TelevisaUnivision shared with Axios, Democrats reached 58% support on the generic congressional ballot among Latino voters across 17 competitive House districts.

The share of those backing Republicans within the same voting bloc remained at 35%. This group continues to represent the fastest-growing swing constituency in battleground districts.

Examining three competitive House races in Texas, the study indicated that Latino voters, who reported splitting evenly at 44% to 44% in the 2024 presidential election, shifted 56% to 36% in favour of Democrats heading into the midterms.

Latino support for Democrats also increased in other states. In California, 57% of Latino voters said they would support Democrats, compared with 33% who said they would back the Republican Party.

Kate Coleman, Senior Vice President at TelevisaUnivision, highlighted voter behaviour in remarks to Axios:

“Latino voters are not locked into one party. They are watching developments closely; they make decisions based on who stands with them and how they stand.”

The survey data determined that 11% of Latino respondents who said they voted for Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election now support Democratic candidates.

Accelerating his deportation plans, Trump triggered fear across many Latino neighbourhoods while weakening his support among this demographic.

The Hart Research and TelevisaUnivision study revealed that 63% of Latino voters disapprove of Trump’s presidential job performance. The share of those approving of his performance in office stood at 36%.

Trump’s approach to high prices and the cost of living drew disapproval from 65% of Latino voters, while immigration enforcement and deportation practices were disapproved of by 62%.

More than half of Latino voters, at 64%, reported that they disapprove of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

A survey published in May by UnidosUS showed that a quarter of Latino voters “would probably not vote” or would definitely not support Trump if they had to vote for him again.

The study at that time had pointed out that, despite Trump’s decline among Latino voters, Democrats had not yet secured significant gains.

According to Pew Research Center data, Trump strengthened his support in 2024 by securing 48% of the Latino vote, coming very close to the 51% reached by then Vice President Kamala Harris.

Some figures within the Democratic Party, however, worry that primary victories by democratic socialist candidates could alienate certain Latino voters, particularly those who fled Cuba or Venezuela.

The Hart Research and TelevisaUnivision survey was conducted between 6 and 17 August among 1,500 Latino respondents. The poll’s margin of error was reported as 2.5 percentage points.