Petteri Orpo, the winner of the Finnish election, is a fiscal conservative, who has promised to cut unemployment benefits and other welfare programs. He also ran on the pledge to reduce the public debt, allow tax cuts and boost economic growth. | As Finland’s incumbent Prime Minister Sanna Marin acknowledged defeat in a neck-and-neck election, the liberal-conservative National Coalition led by Petter Orpo claimed victory and is on its way to form a coalition government. ● Despite Marin being lionized by domestic and international media as a "progressive icon", her Social Democrats failed to secure a second term, losing to both the National Coalition and the nationalist Finns. Though less than a single percent separated the three parties at 20.7, 20.1 and 19.9 percent, the poor showing of the Social Democrats' support parties further cemented the rightward swing.

Prices for a barrel of oil jumped 7 to 8% last night in pre-market trading, after OPEC+ announced a reduction in oil production of about 1.1 Million barrels per day. | As this story is written, 10:04 AM EDT on April 3, 2023, The West Texas Intermediate contract jumped 5.74% to $80.01 a barrel, while Brent jumped 5.67% to $84.42. This will translate into higher prices at the gasoline pump for cars and the diesel pump for trucks, which then causes a rise in consumer prices for everything that has to move by truck. This type of demand inflation cannot be halted by central banks raising interest rates. NEW PRICING MECHANISM More shockingly, the top oil producers in Russia and in India agreed to change the market pricing mechanism they use to price oil transactions. The largest oil producer in Russia and India's top refiner have agreed to adopt the Asia-focused Dubai oil price benchmark. They have abandoned the Europe-dominated Brent benchmark. The signals are changing. This will make it much easier for countries to buy oil WITHOUT USING THE U.S. DOLLAR! That's huge. They just told the US / Eurotrash to FOAD. (F*ck-Off and Die) Basically, they're sizzling the West' bacon and there's nothing [the U.S.] can do about it short of war.

NATO leaders would rather not know if their allies were involved, the newspaper’s sources said | Western officials would rather not know who bombed the Nord Stream pipelines, lest they discover that their allies were responsible, the Washington Post reported on Monday. The report listed Polish and Ukrainian operatives as likely perpetrators, but left out one key suspect. “Don’t talk about Nord Stream” is now an unwritten rule at gatherings of European and NATO policy-makers, an unnamed European diplomat told the newspaper. “Leaders see little benefit from digging too deeply and finding an uncomfortable answer,” the Post added, stating that officials “would rather not have to deal with the possibility that Ukraine or its allies were involved.” “It’s like a corpse at a family gathering,” the diplomat continued, explaining that while everyone can see the metaphorical body, they pretend it’s not there. “It’s better not to know,” the source said. The Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines were destroyed in a series of near-simultaneous explosions off the Danish island of Bornholm in September. The blasts severed a key conduit of Russian natural gas to Europe, although the flow along Nord Stream 1 had been shut earlier that month, and the German government halted the activation of the newly-constructed Nord Stream 2 immediately after Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine last February.