Top Links 1106 Missiles made in Arkansas. More houses more babies? The Ebola emergency & smart talk about ugly feelings.

Great links, images, and reading from Chartbook Newsletter by Adam Tooze

Thank you for your support of Chartbook. Your generosity keeps this show on the road.

Olive Mudie-Cooke, Rouen Hospitals, 1916-1918

Arkansas Missile Making

Camden, Ark.—When the Pentagon put out an urgent call for rocket launchers and ammunition to send to Ukraine and replenish supplies at home in 2022, an answer came from an unlikely place: this remote southern pine-belt town, population around 10,000. The town faced a basic challenge: where to find enough workers to meet a surge in demand for weapons? Lockheed Martin one of the defense contractors clustered in the east part of Camden and already one of the town’s biggest employers, was reeling in government orders to produce more mobile rocket launchers. Other big defense contractors in the area also soon landed contracts to produce ammunition and expand their rocket facilities in Camden. Lockheed’s immediate strategy: expand the pool of potential workers. It began inviting local high-school seniors and their parents to its Camden facility for tours.

The contractor also started working with Southern Arkansas University Tech, a two-year community college in Camden, to ramp up apprenticeships, so it could more readily hire people who had never worked at a factory. In return, state officials stepped up workforce-development grants and began funneling millions of dollars to SAU Tech. The efforts largely worked, and have helped turn the area into an engine for America’s war machine. As of last year, Ouachita County, where Camden sits, and neighboring Calhoun County employed 3,140 people in their aerospace and defense industries, up about 54% from 2020, according to the Arkansas Department of Commerce. Camden’s identity as a defense manufacturing town dates to 1944, when the U.S. Navy set up an ammunition depot to produce rockets for World War II.

The town sat near major rail lines, which allowed munitions to be transported to both coasts. Its remote, rural location offered protection from a foreign attack. The town suffered in the years following the Cold War, when U.S. military demand waned. The decline in the timber and paper industries, once significant employers in the region, also dented the local economy. The city’s fortunes began to turn after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, as the war helped touch off a new round of investment in U.S. defense. Among the early Army contracts that rippled out to Camden was a $431 million agreement for Lockheed to produce more mobile rocket launchers. Aerojet Rocketdyne—now part of L3Harris—struck an agreement with the Defense Department to invest in new manufacturing facilities for rocket propulsion systems.

Source: Wall Street Journal

The basic logic of population decline is playing out in Japan in stark form.

Source: Financial Times

1% of GDP: Take this with a pinch of salt (see source), but the numbers for the economic drag of EU bureaucracy are eye-catching

Between 2014 and 2024 the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, considered over 1,000 proposals. Some 660 were adopted. Among (many) other things, these forced even smallish firms to monitor their data and global supply chains for all manner of digital, environmental and human-rights transgressions. The EU’s official beancounters at Eurostat estimate that reporting requirements and other paperwork cumulatively cost European businesses €150bn ($176bn) a year, equivalent to nearly 1% of the EU’s GDP—and that is not counting the innovation and growth forgone because entrepreneurs were put off by it all. Some new rules under discussion could add another €80bn to the bill if unchecked. The IMF reckons that selling goods and services across national borders in the EU costs firms the equivalent of a 44% and 110% tariff, respectively. A survey in 2025 found that German firms had to hire an additional 325,000 employees over the preceding three years whose job was to tick ever more bureaucratic boxes.

Source: The Economist

If housing were more affordable in the UK and the US, the birth rate might be slightly higher but it would not reverse the overall trend.

Source: Financial Times

Can America’s Development Finance Corporation grow into a major driver of US-led development?

Congress created the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) to provide a high-standard alternative to the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s trillion-dollar effort to extend geopolitical influence and industrial power through strategic infrastructure investments abroad. Seven years on, the DFC has built a nearly $49 billion portfolio across more than one hundred countries, advancing the growth of partner countries and U.S. strategic interests. Yet the agency remains constrained by an unsettled identity, slow and duplicative processes, narrow statutory and budgetary authorities, a modest scale, and a temporary authorization. This paper argues for a more ambitious vision for the DFC—moving from a cautious agency to a permanent, expedient, and properly tooled instrument of American power. It proposes reforms along four dimensions: strategy, speed, scope, and scale.

Source: Carnegie Endowment

Donald Trump’s foreign policy gets a muscular finance arm. The Development Finance Corporation’s loan book may soon rival the World Bank’s

In December, at the president’s behest, Congress extended the DFC’s life to 2031, lifted a ban on investing in rich countries, including America, and set aside $5bn for equity takes in companies worth up to 40% of their value. Lawmakers also lifted its ceiling for total lending from $60bn to $205bn, not that far off the World Bank’s loan book of $285bn. New loans declined to $4bn in 2025, amid the latest reorganisation after Mr Trump’s return to office. But Conor Coleman, the DFC’s investment chief, insists that the plan is very much to reach that ceiling. In order to do so, the DFC will operate like a Wall Street investment firm, insiders say. In February Mr Black opened an office in New York. This makes it easier to work with hedge funds, which the DFC favours as partners over development institutions. Mr Coleman says the DFC plans to make 60-80 investments a year, focusing on infrastructure and covering every industry from fossil fuels to pharmaceuticals.

So far most new investments have assisted America’s scramble for critical minerals. This includes, among other ventures, lending $570m to a rare-earths mine in Brazil and creating a mining joint venture with the Uzbek government. Mr Black is using the DFC’s new ability to invest in the rich world to start snapping up shares in an Australian graphite miner with assets in Louisiana. He has also signed a $1bn deal with Gecamines, a state mining conglomerate in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Mercuria, a Swiss commodity trader, to export Congolese copper. In contrast to Mr Biden’s preferred approach of helping individual firms, many of the new transactions are interconnected. Finance for two infrastructure projects, a railway in Angola (worth $550m) and another in the DRC (up to $1bn), should eventually help transport minerals including copper back to America. Other deals in Africa are under way but details are for now too sensitive to release, in officials’ telling.

Source: The Economist

The Great Wealth Transfer Includes $570 Billion in Classic Cars.

Hagerty Inc, a media firm and automotive insurance provider, estimates that 12 million enthusiast vehicles will transfer to a new generation in the US over the next 15 years in estate plans or inheritances. That’s roughly $570 billion in cars, according to data provided to Bloomberg.

Source: Bloomberg

Olive Mudie-Cooke, Burnt out Tank, 1916-1918

WHO Ebola Emergency Declaration Seeks to Spur Global Response

• The World Health Organization declared the Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda a public health emergency of international concern due to cross-border transmission and major uncertainty about the scale of the epidemic. The declaration follows confirmation of Ebola cases in Uganda’s capital Kampala and in Kinshasa, Congo’s sprawling capital of about 20 million people.

• The outbreak is caused by Bundibugyo ebolavirus, a rare virus strain with no approved vaccine or treatment, and has exposed severe logistical constraints facing responders in the region.

• The WHO declaration is intended to mobilize international funding, coordination and emergency response efforts, with the agency urging neighboring countries to strengthen surveillance, laboratory testing and infection-control measures instead of imposing travel or trade restrictions.

Source: Bloomberg

V.S. Naipaul, on the unselfconscious solipsism of Anglo-centric discourse, from Guerrillas (1975).

Enjoyed this:

Olive Mudie-Cooke, Italian Convoy: The Crush at 11th Hospital Genoa, 1916-1918