CMR is the leading provider of funding and management support for small to medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs 

Authored by Vijay Jayaraj via American Greatness,

Sometimes a story gets buried not because editors conspire against it, but because the news cycle has room for only one crisis at a time.

This year the big news has been the Iran war. But even accounting for competing headlines, the silence around a genuinely consequential development is telling.

And that is the story of India’s explicit rejection of the global net zero movement. India has walked away from its bid to host the COP33 UN climate conference, and the world’s climate press has treated it as a footnote rather than the signal it is.

India had spent years projecting a rising voice in the development of climate policy, and hosting a COP33 is the closest thing the bureaucracy has to a coronation.

Then, quietly, without public explanation, India withdrew its offer. No press conference. No elaboration. Just a government stepping back from a role for which it auditioned for years.

The truth is India has run the numbers on the cost of a net-zero energy transition for a population of 1.4 billion climbing out of poverty, and it does not like what it sees.

The notion that India should shackle its economy by adhering to restrictive climate policies, while its people still grapple with energy deficits, is illogical and morally indefensible.

Data India Doesn’t Need a Summit to See

Furthermore, the narrative of a rapidly degrading Indian environment due to energy consumption is demonstrably false.

India’s own environmental indicators do not support the apocalyptic framing of the climate-obsessed.

For years, hydrologists and climate modelers have relied on estimates of Himalayan snowfall to forecast water availability for hundreds of millions of people across South Asia’s most fertile Ganges plains.

Their projections of a seriously drier India, it turns out, were wrong.

A team of researchers, including scientists from the British Antarctic Survey, the U.K. Met Office, and the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, used frozen high-altitude lakes as natural pressure sensors rather than relying on undersized conventional rain gauges. What they found was startling: In a single winter, the best available snowfall models had underestimated seasonal snow over the Lake Hampta area of Himachal Pradesh by 37 percent. The peer-reviewed study makes clear that conventional instruments have been missing large volumes of snow for decades.

Then there is the vegetation story, which cuts even harder against the doom narrative. Researchers at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology modeled how India’s landscape would respond to a high-emissions future using the same family of computer models climate activists cite when warning of catastrophe.

The result was not desertification. It was the opposite. Gross primary production, a measure of how much carbon dioxide India’s forests, croplands, and other vegetation are absorbing, rose from roughly 729 grams of carbon per square meter annually in 1985 to about 830 by 2014 and is projected to nearly double to around 1,305 by the year 2100.

Layered onto that are the steady expansion of India’s forest cover over the past two decades and the recovering populations of endangered species such as tigers and Asiatic lions, successes resulting from conservation and habitat management rather than from decarbonization mandates.

All this means India has stopped outsourcing its environmental judgment to a U.N. process that treats every barrel of oil and every ton of coal as a moral affront, regardless of its benefit in lighting a clinic for children or powering a steel plant that employs thousands. A country that still has hundreds of millions of citizens without reliable access to electricity does not have the luxury of treating energy poverty as an acceptable trade-off for leadership in the climate industrial complex.

That is why India has expanded coal production and struck oil and gas deals with the United States and Persian Gulf producers. It has resisted binding emissions targets that would cap its own industrial growth, unwilling to commit to far-off targets for emission reductions. India’s relinquishment of COP33 hosting rights is perhaps the most visible expression of a strategic direction that has been building for years.

A country that the entire architecture of climate financing is supposedly built to help just declined to host the party. If climate summits worked as advertised, that would be unthinkable. But it is no longer, and pretending otherwise will not make the next withdrawal any less predictable.

Japanese Finance Minister Satsuki Katayama is set to announce as early as Monday that Tokyo and Washington are coordinating on steps in the foreign exchange market to curb the yen’s weakness, a person familiar with the situation told Bloomberg.

Satsuki Katayama

The content of the announcement is still being worked on but could happen as early as Monday morning, the person said, declining to be identified as the information isn’t public.

Reuters earlier reported Katayama would confirm the joint action, and reinforce the two sides’ commitment to battle what they deem as excessive declines in the yen.

Japanese authorities bought yen and sold dollars during New York trading on Friday, Bloomberg reported earlier, citing one person with knowledge of the matter. At the close of New York trading on Friday, the yen was quoted at 157.40 to the dollar, the strongest since early May.

Just two days earlier, it was flirting around the weakest levels since 1986.

The sharp gains were fueled by a combination of direct purchases of the yen, calls by officials to banks that trade the currency and jawboning from US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Katayama.

Bessent’s commitment to shoring up the yen was also shown when Reuters published a photograph of a notepad in front of him at a cabinet meeting in Camp David on Friday.

Under a “To Do” title, it was written “Buy Japanese Yen (JPY) $5-10 bil.”

Japan’s original plan appeared to have been to stick to a “no comment” line while the operation was underway, and offer only subtle hints of US support.

The approach was kept to Thursday and Friday.

But with multiple media reports emerging and Bessent’s to-do list on show, authorities may have decided to change course and make a clear public announcement.

The operation on joint action is “still ongoing,” Reuters said, citing an unidentified government official.

As James Thorne, Chief Market Strategist at Wellington Altus, explained via X, Bessent’s move toward the New York Fed matters because it signals that Treasury understands the long end is being driven by flows, not by the inflation scare Wall Street keeps recycling.

Japan is now central to that story.

If Tokyo must defend the yen, the Ministry of Finance may need to sell U.S. Treasuries, and when the largest foreign holder of U.S. debt becomes a seller, the long end will reprice.

That is why this moment looks bigger than a routine currency episode.

It has the feel of a new Plaza Accord and the opening phase of Bretton Woods 2.0.

Since the 1980s, Japan has sat at the heart of the global yen carry trade, exporting savings, suppressing yields, and helping sustain a financial order built on cheap leverage and central-bank engineering. That order is now breaking down.

The end of QE and the coming end of the yen carry trade mean capital markets, not central banks, will increasingly set rates.

This is also why the inflation narrative is so weak.

Breakevens remain anchored. Credit markets are not pricing a new inflation regime. Wall Street keeps labeling every rise in the long end as “inflation risk,” but that is intellectual laziness.

The real story is Japan, reserve liquidation, and a global adjustment process that has barely been recognized.

Adding to that pressure is Big Tech’s pivot from providing savings to demanding credit.

The same companies that once absorbed duration are now issuing debt to finance AI infrastructure, data centers, chips, and power.

That is another reason the long end is moving.

The upshot, secular forces are tightening credit conditions, and central bankers need to cut policy rates to help facilitate the adjustment.

A global economy hooked on the carry trade cannot go cold turkey.

This unwind requires finesse.

Bessent is starting that process, but central bankers and Wall Street still need to abandon the Keynesian dogma that treats rise in the long end as an inflation scare!

The deeper shift is structural.

America is escaping secular stagnation by running the economy hot through supply-side economics, deregulation, and productive investment.

A Warsh Fed would fit that world, because growth would no longer be treated as a policy mistake.

Japan, meanwhile, may finally be restructuring both its economy and its geopolitical role.

That is why this is not an inflation story. It is the beginning of a new regime.