Buried inside the 927-page financial disclosure that President Trump’s office filed this week with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics is a number that says a great deal about how his second term has reshaped his business, and perhaps his diplomacy along with it: $515 million. That is roughly what Trump earned last year from the sale of tokens issued by World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency venture launched by his sons and the sons of his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff. It is one piece of a crypto windfall that, once meme-coin royalties and other digital-asset income are added in, helped push Trump’s total reported earnings for 2025 above $2 billion.
Op-Ed
The pause that can’t become peace
The announcement came late on a Sunday evening when the Persian Gulf had already endured its worst 48 hours since the June ceasefire: US aircraft striking Iranian military targets, Iranian missiles and drones raining down on American facilities in Kuwait and Bahrain, a Qatari national killed by shrapnel aboard a stricken vessel, and a US president warning from his social media account that the Islamic Republic of Iran “will no longer exist” if Washington was forced to resume the war.
The Hormuz ceasefire was ambiguous by design
The agreement signed on June 17 was presented to the world as the architecture of an enduring peace. Less than a fortnight later, it had become a vocabulary test — one that both Tehran and Washington are failing, or refusing to take. Each new drone strike, each fresh round of US airstrikes on Iranian coastal infrastructure, each Iranian missile falling on a Gulf Arab air base is now accompanied by the same claim from both capitals: the other side violated the memorandum of understanding first.
Back to the table in Geneva — after a war that ended where it began
There is a scene that keeps returning, unbidden. It is the morning of 26 February, and in Geneva, Iranian and American negotiators are sitting across a table from one another, putting concessions and demands on paper. The Strait of Hormuz is open. Ships are moving. The nuclear question is live but contained. Multiple sources who were present have confirmed that those talks were, by the cautious standards of diplomacy, going somewhere. Forty-eight hours later, the bombs began to fall.
Budget changes little
Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb has presented his government’s third consecutive IMF-compliant budget, and the central fact about it is the simplest one: nothing in its design points toward growth. The deficit target of 3.6 per cent of GDP and the 4 per cent growth projection sit comfortably within the Fund’s parameters, as they were always going to. That is not a criticism of the finance ministry’s competence. It is a description of what an IMF programme is for. The Fund’s mandate is external balance, not expansion. A government operating under it can manage a crisis. It cannot, by the terms of the arrangement, choose to grow faster than the programme allows.
Budget delivers what the IMF wants, not what the people need
Pakistan’s budget today will be framed as the dividend of two years’ hard stabilisation work. A day earlier, the economic survey supported that framing: GDP grew 3.7 percent, the economy reached a record Rs126.87tn ($452.1bn), inflation fell from 23.4 percent to single digits, and the fiscal deficit narrowed to levels the finance ministry calls the best in decades. By the standard measures of macroeconomic management, Pakistan has had a good year, and the finance ministry is not wrong to say so.
Pakistan’s Stability Trap
There is a particular kind of economic failure that is hardest to fix: not the dramatic kind, with a collapsing currency and queues at the central bank, but the quiet kind, where just enough has been done to remove the urgency for doing more. Pakistan has arrived, with some effort and genuine sacrifice, at exactly that dangerous place.
A protection racket
Sometime in the next few days, the finance minister will stand before the parliament and deliver a budget speech that will include, as it has every year for at least two decades, a solemn commitment to broaden the tax base. There will be new mechanisms announced, fresh enforcement pledges made, perhaps a digital initiative or two. The FBR will be modernised again. The informal economy will be brought in from the cold, again. And next year, the same speech will be delivered again.
Five trillion rupees, and the roads still have potholes
There is a particular dishonesty embedded in the way Pakistan discusses its finances each budget season. The conversation is almost entirely about the intake side — tax-to-GDP ratios, the informal economy, FBR targets, provincial revenue shortfalls. Focusing on revenue is politically safe. It points the finger outward, at taxpayers who evade, at sectors that resist documentation, at the IMF for demanding more. What it carefully avoids is the other side of the ledger: what the state costs, who benefits from that cost, and why the people in a position to reduce it have every personal incentive not to.
Pakistan’s Budget of Borrowed Time
There is a ritual quality to Pakistan’s annual budget exercise that has grown almost theatrical in its predictability. The finance minister rises. Revenue targets are announced with conviction. Tax-base broadening is pledged. The IMF nods approvingly from Washington. The press covers it for two days. Then the lobbyists who were in Islamabad the week before the budget speech collect their exemptions, the salaried class discovers its withholding has increased, and the country proceeds to do exactly what it did the year before — borrow to survive, reform to perform, and grow barely enough to matter.