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Netflix does it again.

FreeFall is the second documentary about Boeing since the 737 Max crisis. What struck me watching it is that this movie is less about Boeing than it is about America.

Airplane safety became secondary to stock price, financial engineering, and CEO bonuses. Another entry in the long story of how everything in America has been financialized. Including the planes flying tens of thousands of feet over our heads at 600 miles an hour.

Boeing began falling behind Airbus. Aircraft deliveries, market share, and stock price all reflected it. Boeing needed something new. Their answer was the 737 Max — literally the same airplane as the original 737, fitted with new, more fuel-efficient engines. 346 people died for greener engines and CEO bonuses.

Rather than design a genuinely new aircraft, Boeing chose the cheaper path. The development budget for a clean sheet airplane was estimated at $10 to $12 billion. The re-engine approach was sold internally as a fraction of that cost. Jim McNerney would look like a hero on Wall Street by keeping costs down and padding the bottom line. Cutting production costs can be smart business. But maybe not on airplanes.

To hit those targets, you don't build the 737 Max in Seattle and assemble it down the street. The plan was to build components across roughly 20 countries—Japan, China, South Korea, France, Vietnam, India — and assemble them at a brand-new Boeing plant in South Carolina.

The Boeing plant in Seattle was one of America’s darling manufacturing operations, and still is to some extent. At its peak, it employed tens of thousands of workers and provided good middle-class jobs for thousands of families. But as we have watched repeatedly since China entered the WTO in 2001, middle-income jobs do not survive when CEO bonuses depend on cutting them. The cost of living in Charleston was lower than in Seattle. Lower wages were permissible. The math worked on paper.

Parts from around the world arrived in South Carolina, where newly hired workers tried to assemble pieces that didn't fit together quite right. Quality engineers raised red flags. They were told to shut the fuck up. Delivery deadlines mattered more than keeping the fuselage together.

The two fatal crashes — Indonesia in October 2018 and Ethiopia in March 2019 — resulted from all of the above. Budget pressure to make the financials look better. Outsourced manufacturing that eliminated good jobs and introduced quality problems. Internal warnings were covered up to meet delivery dates. Corporate profit drove the 737 Max program at every decision point, every time.

One thing all Boeing CEOs since the early 2000s have in common is that they came up under Jack Welch, longtime GE CEO, whom some call the greatest CEO in American history. I would call him one of the architects of America's financialization.

The Welch playbook:

1. Cut costs over quality.

2. Fire the bottom 10% of performers every year regardless of context.

3. Offshore and outsource everything that can be moved to boost margins.

The incredible run in GE’s stock price made Welch look like a genius, while he quietly undermined the foundation of American manufacturing and led the charge to eliminate the middle class. Boeing followed that playbook precisely in producing the 737 Max. 346 people are dead while the CEOs walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation. The stock crashed, and nobody went to prison.

This is the story of America. The jobs that paid real wages to real people were outsourced. Corporate profits were prioritized over safety. People died, and the people responsible got rich.

FreeFall is about Boeing. But Boeing is just the most visible chapter in a much longer book about America.

Manufacturing is hard. It takes hundreds of hours of engineering to produce one small part. It will take over a decade to bring anything meaningful back ot the U.S. now that we lost it. Especially in rare-earth refining. This is no easy task in presidential four-year terms. More on this later.

It’s really fun when your loved ones watch these shows coming from a guy who averages 50 flights a year for the last decade…

The most interesting things I’ve read this month:

1. The U.S. is Burning Through Its Supply of Interceptors to Counter Iran’s Attacks

2. Osama Bin Laden: Mission Accomplished

3. BESSENT SAYS THE IRON DOME WON’T MATTER IF CHINA WINS THE AI RACE

4. MBS Urged Trump Twice to Strike Houthis Amid Red Sea Threat

5. Rivals Altman and Musk Rally Behind Dario Amodei’s Calls for AI Slowdown

6. Bessent Says the U.S. Can Grow Its Way Out of the Debt Crunch. What Would It Take

7. Hedge Funds Are the Wild Card in the Turbulent Bond Market

8. Russia Is Churning Out Smart, Cheap New Weapons Faster Than Ukraine or the U.S.

9. Debris Found in Yemen Suggests Saudi Arabia Fired Its First Chinese Missile

10. See How the U.S. Is Attacking China’s Control of Critical Minerals

1. The U.S. Is Burning Through Its Supply of Interceptors to Counter Iran’s Attacks

The U.S. Is Burning Through Its Supply of Interceptors to Counter Iran’s Attacks — WSJ 09/15/2026

The U.S. military fired up to 70 or more of its high-end air defense interceptors last week when Iran launched a missile attack on Jordan, U.S. and regional officials familiar with the matter said, a heavy expenditure that underscores Iran’s improved ability to target U.S. forces and challenge American air defenses.

U.S. forces fired 60 to 70 Patriot interceptors to counter the attack, which consisted of about 20 ballistic missiles, some of the officials said. The U.S. also fired more than a dozen Thaad interceptors, one of the officials said. The expenditure is about what the U.S. has used in a full week at other times in the war, another of the officials said.

The exchanges showed how air-defense math can favor the attacker and how Iran has adapted its attacks to force the U.S. to burn precious munitions.

The nature of the attack made it more difficult to counter. Iran targeted American troops with warheads that separate into more numerous projectiles as they close in on their target, the officials said.

The defenses didn’t stop everything. While no troops were killed in the attack last week, Iran managed to hit jet fighters and other aircraft at the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, one of the officials said.

You are always told to avoid politics at family gatherings, but that didn’t happen for us over Labor Day.

We were at a 90th birthday party when a family friend started weighing in on the Iran War. I will call the family friend Bob. Bob is a staunch Fox News watcher, but also a successful guy. Part owner of a heavy civil construction company. Not struggling financially in any way. Bob was outright laughing at the possibility of the US having munitions shortages.

This newsletter has reported on munitions shortages nearly every month since the conflict began. The article above describes the US burning through 60 to 70 Patriot interceptors. Plus THAAD rounds just to counter 20 Iranian missiles. And Iran still got through. But that is beside the point.

This conversation told me that roughly half the country has no idea what is actually happening in the Middle East. They smile and nod along at what Jesse Watters and Laura Ingraham tell them every night, then go back to their chicken wings and Miller Lite.

Iran's entire strategy is captured in two sentences

• U.S. forces fired 60 to 70 Patriot interceptors to counter the attack, which consisted of about 20 ballistic missiles.

• The exchanges showed how air-defense math can favor the attacker and how Iran has adapted its attacks to force the U.S. to burn precious munitions.

Iran knows it can build missiles faster than America can build interceptors. All Iran has to do is keep firing until the math runs out. Fourth-grade arithmetic shows this is unsustainable. But half the country still believes:

1. We have no munitions shortages.

2. We are winning in Iran.

3. The Strait of Hormuz is open.

4. We could win tomorrow if we actually wanted to.

The only way that changes is when the loss becomes so public and so embarrassing that the pain translates directly into financial markets. By then it will be too late to position for it.

What does this chart look like when Fox News reports those four points above are false?

Bob had a follow-up idea before the conversation was cut short for obvious reasons: Why can’t we just bomb everything coming in and out of Iran on land?

Besides the resources it takes to do that with dwindling munitions, the logistical challenges, and civilian (children) casualties that turn entire generations into “Death to America” chanters. Iran has been smuggling goods in and out of the country for forty years. There aren’t a few routes like I-35 with goods transacting back and forth. They built these routes to avoid detection.

The largest railroad in Iran runs to the one country Donald Trump isn’t dumb enough to mess with. China. The moment American forces start hitting supply lines, this conflict escalates toward WWIII faster than any press conference can manage. Ukraine hit a Russia-Iran supply line on the Caspian Sea, and the world held its breath for a minute.

Countries that are not involved get involved quickly when their supply lines are threatened. Reminder: the U.S. wasn't involved in WWII until it cut off Japan’s oil supply line.

When the Fox News consensus finally figures out what is actually happening in the Middle East, it will be too late. Markets will be shocked. The question is whether your investments are positioned for that moment. The market has begun to sniff this out over the last three years, with Gold and Bitcoin outperforming the SPX.

Russia is sharing intelligence with Iran. You can be certain of it. The US has been doing the same for Ukraine since day one.

If the Bobs of the world don’t want to believe me, maybe they will believe Zelenskyy as he admits the West can’t produce interceptors fast enough.

Time will tell.

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Apocalyptic Tourism

In late August, we took a trip to Colorado for a wedding — Estes Park, Boulder, and a night in Denver before flying out. It was one of those trips that hits you with reality over the head that you had only been reading about.

In a 24-hour period, we went from elk running across a parking lot in the Rocky Mountains to shantytowns of people living in their vehicles in front of brand-new apartment buildings. If you haven't been to a deep blue big city in a while, I wouldn't rush. Not out of politics, but out of wanting not to fear for your safety.

We started the weekend in Estes Park. A large tourist area with good restaurants, cool mountain town history, and the Stanley Hotel looking over the city. The Stanley inspired The Shining. It looks exactly like the kind of place where haunted, scary shit happens. Beautiful, eerie, and completely removed from reality.

Boulder and Denver are where reality hit me over the head. Earlier this year, I read a book by Peter Turchin called “End Times.” The title sums it up, but it’s really about what gets you to have people start hating each other. The book tries to answer the question: why do the Charlie Kirk and UnitedHealthcare CEO shootings happen?

End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration by Peter Turchin is a 2023 non-fiction book that applies cliodynamics—an interdisciplinary science combining history, mathematical modeling, and sociology—to explain why modern societies, particularly the United States, face severe political instability and social collapse.

Core Concepts

• The Wealth Pump: Turchin describes this as the economic mechanism where wealth flows upward, enriching the elite while driving down the standard of living for the general population. Over generations, this creates a stark divide between the wealthy and everyone else.

• Popular Immiseration: As the wealth pump operates, the working and middle classes experience declining well-being, stagnant wages, and decreasing economic security. This widespread misery creates high potential for mass mobilization and public anger.

• Elite Overproduction: When wealth becomes concentrated at the top, the number of people striving for elite status (wealthy positions, high-status jobs, and political power) surges. Because the number of elite slots remains fixed, society produces far more elite aspirants than it can accommodate.

• Counter-Elites: Frustrated “overproduced” elite aspirants who fail to secure power become angry and alienated. These counter-elites turn against the established order, weaponizing popular resentment and fueling populist or revolutionary movements to overthrow the ruling establishment

Walking around Boulder felt like a live demonstration of all four core concepts happening simultaneously.

The average home in Boulder costs over a million dollars. One block from some of the most affluent neighborhoods in the state, a man stands on a corner holding a sign just to eat. Near campus, college students walk by in $300 athleisure outfits, while a homeless guy walks around them who can’t even afford a shower. Everyone just goes about their day like this is completely normal. The homeless are ignored like graffiti on a building.

On Pearl Street at 11 am, I stepped over a man sleeping on the sidewalk to get to a sushi restaurant where two people cannot eat for under $100, drinking water with their meal. Across the street, an art gallery had small paintings starting at $1,000. Both things exist on the same block. Nobody flinching. Just walk around…

The sad thing is, these scenes are becoming everyday life in cities like Boulder, San Francisco, and New York. We have forgotten this isn’t normal. What takes root in these states does not stay there. In the 90s and early 2000s, these were the spots to be, the hot spots of prosperity. What happens in these locations eventually spreads to all other states. Which used to be what everyone strived to achieve. Now it’s spreading, and everyone looks around like, what the hell happened?

I’ll tell you what happened: middle-class manufacturing jobs got sent overseas to increase profit margins on Wall Street by a couple percent. CEOs were the heroes while workers got left behind.

I came home from Colorado grateful for northern Minnesota. The shantytown of vehicles with t-shirts draped over the windows for privacy was still behind the hotel when we left. That image stayed with me the whole flight home.

The End Times scenes I have witnessed in the real world:

1. A guy riding a skateboard in zombie masks on the desolate streets of Denver during COVID.

2. Dirty homeless men weaving between girls in sports bras and spandex on CU campus in Boulder.

3. A homeless man standing on the corner in front of multi-million dollar homes trying to eat.

The wealth disparity in America has reached levels not seen since the 1850s. If history is any guide, we all know what happened in the 1860s if nothing changes. Are you investing accordingly?

The most interesting things from the month:

1. The Queen of Versailles Documentary

2. HVAC Email Backlog

3. Citadel Buys Situational Awareness’s Stock Portfolio After Big Losses in AI

4. U.K. Discovers Component in Its Naval Drones Sent Signals to China

5. Scott Bessent’s Yen Trade Has Unintended Consequences for the Markets

6. China’s New Export Engine: Supplying the Factories of the World

7. Iran’s Secret Plan to Escalate the War

8. CIA Chief’s Surprise Moscow Trip Was to Warn Russia Not to Attack NATO

9. Let the Bond Market Speak

10. Warsh Makes the Case for Higher Rates and Raises the Bar for Standing Pat

1. The Queen of Versailles

The early 2000s were a wild time in America. After the dotcom bubble burst and rebounded, making money looked simple. Low interest rates. Easy money everywhere. America was the lone global superpower with a booming housing market and a war in the Middle East that barely made the evening news. What could go wrong?

We stumbled onto the answer the other night looking for something to watch.

The Queen of Versailles is a 2012 documentary directed by Lauren Greenfield. It follows billionaire timeshare mogul David Siegel and his former beauty queen wife Jackie as they begin construction on a 90,000-square-foot Florida home modeled after the Palace of Versailles, only to watch their empire unravel when 2008 hits.

How quickly I forgot what that era actually looked like. Low-cut jeans. Sperrys. Polos. A housing market built on spectacular levels of nonsense. No money down loans. Mortgages handed out to anyone who could spell their name because denying a loan based on income felt impolite. It was racist to deny a loan to someone of a different race, as they didn’t have the income to support the loan either. The original DEI started in the housing crisis. A fifth mortgage was approved for someone because housing only goes up, and everyone always pays. David Siegel built the largest house in America while already living in a mansion with a beauty queen wife twenty years younger than him. This was just another day back then.

Siegel made his fortune in the timeshare business. A product specifically designed to leach money from middle-class Americans on vacation, many of whom eventually have to hire attorneys just to escape the contract. The documentary treats him as a sympathetic figure. That is somehow the most 2008 thing about it.

But here is what the documentary really is. It is a time capsule of what happens when an entire society confuses leverage for wealth and mistakes rising asset prices for prosperity. The Siegels did not build an empire. They borrowed one. And when the tide went back in, we saw who had clothes on.

The housing bubble of 2008 was never actually fixed. It was transferred. The pain that should have reset the system was papered over with bailouts, zero interest rates, and quantitative easing until the everything bubble replaced it. Stocks, real estate, private equity, venture capital, and now AI infrastructure are all inflating simultaneously on the same cheap money logic that built the Palace of Versailles in Orlando.

Nobody was punished. The bankers kept their bonuses. The system absorbed the loss and moved on.

Here is the number worth sitting with. By the end of 2008, only 8% of mortgages were delinquent. Eight percent. That small a number nearly took down the entire global financial system because everything was so deeply interconnected and leveraged against everything else.

Where are we at today? The same spot. Sitting in the middle of a bubble that AI only needs to put 8% of white-collar workers out of a job to produce the same result. Not half. Not a quarter. Eight percent. 2 out of 25 people. The same threshold that almost ended modern finance applied to the white-collar workforce that services the debt, buys the homes/cars, and pays the taxes that hold the everything bubble together.

When it seems like the party will never end, that is when it’s closing time…

Time will tell.

2. HVAC Backlog

Building things is hard. You get in your car every day, hit the gas pedal, and never once think about what it takes to turn steel, plastic, aluminum, and rubber into something that drives down the road. One airbag sensor, five or six parts, can prevent any vehicle from getting off the assembly line. One little sensor in a vehicle with millions of parts sourced from all over the world, and the whole thing sits in a lot until it arrives.

Americans have had it easy for too long. Water comes from the faucet. Electricity comes from the wall. Food comes from the store. Cars come from the dealer. We have forgotten the hundreds of thousands of moving parts behind every single one of those processes.

Every complex system we rely on was built by two kinds of people. The engineers who designed the sensors, valves, gaskets, wires, switches, nuts, and bolts. And the builders who actually had to put the shit together to make it work — the electricians, HVAC guys, plumbers, what is left of manufacturing workers, and mechanics. The people who use their hands and tools to build shit that allows things to function in the real world. We will call them the specialists.

America is losing all of its specialists.

We spent a generation telling young men to go into finance instead of building things. Finance is sexy. Put on a suit, get in a nice car, head to the skyscraper. Being a plumber and literally getting shit to roll downhill was not exactly aspirational. But ask yourself who will be making the real money over the next few decades. The guys directing shit downhill. That’s not discrediting plumbing, it’s necessary work. And they will make tenfold more money than the accountant whose job AI will replace in two years.

Try getting someone to work on your house and let me know how it goes. I have been trying to get an HVAC company out for four months to do some ductwork. I called three different places. The first never called back after I texted and called. The second answered and told me to call back in the slow season, and they will consider it. The third received two voicemails and multiple calls before I finally sent an email, and got this back at 12:56 am:

“The work just keeps coming faster than the workers can keep up with.”

That one sentence from an HVAC company at one in the morning is a more honest assessment of America’s infrastructure crisis than anything produced by a congressional committee this year. I can live without my ductwork for a few more months. But can America stay competitive without a complete revamp of its electrical grid in the next few years? The answer requires the same specialists nobody wanted to become, and the backlog is only getting longer.

It doesn't matter whether it is HVAC, electricians, construction workers, or the materials they need to work with. We are in trouble. And the people who could fix it are booked.

I posted this on X recently, and it sums up the scale of what we are actually facing:

TWENTY YEARS. Zero net progress on the grid. And we are now asking that same grid to power the AI buildout, the EV transition, the robotics revolution, and the reshoring of an industrial base we spent forty years dismantling. All of it needs to happen at the same time. All of it needs to be built by specialists we do not have enough of. All of it needs to be financed at the highest interest rates in a generation.

I hope you like inflation. It is not going anywhere.

Time will tell.

3. Citadel Buys Situational Awareness’s Stock Portfolio After Big Losses in AI

Citadel Buys Situational Awareness’s Stock Portfolio After Big Losses in AI —WSJ 07/30/3036

Situational Awareness, the once-highflying AI-focused hedge fund, sold the bulk of its stock portfolio to Ken Griffin’s investment firm Citadel after suffering deep losses, according to people familiar with the matter.

It marks a sudden downfall for Situational, led by former OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner. It had amassed well over $20 billion in assets under management since its founding just around two years ago, making it one of the fastest-growing firms in years. Aschenbrenner, who is in his mid-20s, was seen by some as an AI oracle, with other investors closely tracking his firm’s movements as it placed big, leveraged bets.

As investors shed positions in artificial-intelligence related stocks, Situational was under pressure to raise cash, either through sales of holdings or new capital commitments, to meet margin-call demands from its lenders, some of the people familiar with the matter said.

In 2007, a handful of overleveraged hedge funds started quietly blowing up six months before anyone used the word crisis. Bear Stearns had two funds collapse in June 2007. Most people shrugged it off. Sixteen months later Lehman Brothers was gone, and the global financial system was on life support. The dominoes always start falling before anyone connects them.

Leopold Aschenbrenner runs a concentrated AI stock portfolio called Situational Awareness, built around the thesis that AI is the most important technological development in human history and the companies enabling it will generate returns that justify dumb valuations. It may be a crazy thesis, but it is the thesis driving the entire market right now, and it made him billions of dollars at one point.

It is also the thesis that just got him hunted.

Citadel, one of the most sophisticated trading operations on the planet, acquired Aschenbrenner’s portfolio after it suffered significant losses. The details matter more than the sequence. A concentrated leveraged AI fund ran into trouble. The market smelled blood. Short sellers targeted his positions with the kind of coordinated aggression that only happens when someone is known to be forced selling. Once that starts, it does not stop until the position is gone or the fund is.

This is what overleveraged looks like in a market priced for perfection. Everything works until it doesn’t. And when it stops working, the exit is always smaller than the entrance.

One fund is not a crisis. But one fund is how every crisis starts. In 2007, the funds that blew up first were not the biggest names. They were the most exposed. The biggest names came later. After the contagion had time to spread through every interconnected position on Wall Street.

The AI financing ecosystem we covered earlier in last month’s letter is built on the same overleveraged logic:

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The Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) is one of the most pristine wilderness areas in North America. Over a million acres of untouched lakes, forests, and waterways on the Minnesota-Canada border that have been protected for decades. It is genuinely beautiful. I say this as someone who lives in the Duluth, Minnesota area, has spent weeks camping there, and understands what that land means to the people who love it. And we may have to mine it anyway.

Beneath the Boundary Waters sits one of the largest undeveloped deposits of critical minerals in the United States. Copper, nickel, cobalt — the exact materials required to build the batteries, the weapons systems, the electric grid, and the AI infrastructure that determine whether America remains a sovereign nation capable of defending itself or becomes permanently dependent on China for the inputs that run the modern world.

This is not a debate about whether you love nature. I love nature. This is a pros vs cons decision that nobody in Washington has the courage to put plainly. So I will.

Option one — you protect the Boundary Waters at 100%. Every acre untouched. And you permanently hand China the leverage that comes with supplying the critical minerals America refuses to dig out of its own ground. That leverage looks like what we have covered all year in this letter. Taiwan arms deals held hostage. Data centers dependent on Chinese copper. Weapons systems that cannot be built without Chinese rare earths. A way of life that gets altered not by a war but by a supply chain.

Option two — you allow carefully regulated mining in a defined area of the Boundary Waters. You accept that some wilderness is the price of sovereignty. You begin the decade long process of building a domestic critical minerals supply chain that does not require a phone call to Beijing every time America needs to defend itself or build something.

There is no third option. There is no version of this where America gets 100% protected wilderness and 100% critical mineral independence simultaneously. YOU CAN’T HAVE BOTH. That is not a political position; it’s opportunity cost.

The people who will fight hardest against mining the Boundary Waters are the same people who have zero clue that China is our supply chain and that it pollutes more than the rest of the world combined. The connection between a pristine lake in Minnesota and a weapons system that can’t be built is not obvious until it is. By then, the decision has already been made for you.

Writing the future of America ourselves will always be better than the version that relies on China for everything. And if that means sacrificing 1% of nature areas, it’s what we have to do. Would we even notice? Making the hard choice isn’t for everyone.

I am not a hater of nature. I am a realist about what it costs to ignore what is underneath it. China put out more greenhouse emissions in seven years than the U.S. did in a century to become a global power.

Your comfortable lifestyle will not stay the same with China as our supply chain. Is protecting nature worth that to you?

The most interesting things I read this month:

1. Iran Launches Surprise Missile Attack on U.S. Forces

2. China Erases Real Estate Gains From the Last 20 Years.

3. Frequent Oil Draws From U.S. Strategic Reserve Push Old System to Breaking Point.

4. Japan finance minister urges giant pension fund to invest more at home.

5. China’s Xi Touts Open-Source AI and Takes a Swipe at U.S. Dominance.

6. The Massive Supply Deals Feeding the AI Frenzy Are No Sure Thing.

7. China Successfully Tests Sea-Based Rocket Booster Recovery System

8. Russia Passes Crypto Law to Legalize Trading

9. Fed Holds Rates Steady but Three Officials Vote for Increase

10. Canadian Wildfires Create Hazardous Air in Midwest and Northeast

1. Iran Launches Surprise Missile Attack on U.S. Forces

Iran Launches Surprise Missile Attack on U.S. Forces —WSJ 07/28/2026

Iran launched a surprise ballistic-missile attack on American forces in Jordan, a U.S. official said, a violent escalation that piles new pressure on President Trump to renew the war in earnest.

The missiles were all successfully intercepted, the U.S. military said. But the assault raised the prospect that American forces would have to respond, just as negotiations to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and eventually jump-start broader peace talks were picking up speed.

The assault marked a shift for Iran, which until now had generally fired on U.S. forces in retaliation for American airstrikes on its own territory. With the unprompted missile attack, Iran showed it is willing to take the fight to the U.S. on its own terms in an attempt to force Trump’s hand.

Shortly after the Iranian strikes on Jordan, the American military said U.S. and Saudi jet fighters had launched strikes in Iraq on Tuesday against Iran-backed groups that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps previously directed to attack American troops and Saudi energy infrastructure. Those attacks against U.S. forces weren’t successful, U.S. Central Command said.

I attempted to ignore the Iran War this month because it’s a rollercoaster ride filled with drama, lies, and market manipulation. But it’s just the gift that keeps on giving.

Iran launched its first attack against American forces that was not a retaliation this last week. Not a response to a strike. An unprovoked offensive move against American forces by a country that has been only retaliating in this war for five months.

The war is changing.

For months the pattern was consistent — America strikes, Iran retaliates, both sides announce ceasefire progress, Trump declares victory and that a deal is almost done. It was a predictable cycle that both sides understood and managed. That cycle is over. Iran moving from retaliation to initiation is a strategic shift that signals Iran believes the balance of pressure has tilted in its favor. The evidence suggests Iran is right.

The geography of the war is expanding, and that is the development that should concern everyone most. Saudi Arabia is now involved. Iraq is now involved. Yemen (the Houthis) restarted being involved. Ukraine sent a drone attack to hit an Iran-Russia trade route — pulling the European war and the Middle Eastern war into direct contact for the first time. The walls between the world’s active conflicts are getting thinner.

Hegseth and Trump continue to deny that munition stockpiles are a problem while WWIII is not a hyperbole at this point. It is a direction.

Iran does not need to win a single battle. Iran just needs America to keep losing ground on every other front while the Strait stays closed and the interceptors run low.

And then this landed two days before Iran’s unprovoked attack.

Trump Pauses Iran Strikes as Officials Weigh Dwindling Air Defense Stocks —WSJ 06/26/2026

President Trump has put off a major escalation of his military campaign against Iran amid efforts to revive diplomacy to open the Strait of Hormuz and a debate over the impact of declining munitions stocks, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

But the operation was delayed so diplomacy could proceed and as officials discussed the effect a major attack could have on the U.S.’s shrinking stocks of Patriot and other air defense interceptors. The president could still order an attack, officials said, noting that the situation remains fluid.

The White House has been informed of the declining inventories of air defense interceptors by Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, officials added.

The Wall Street Journal published a story reporting that Trump had paused strikes on Iran as officials weighed dwindling air-defense stockpiles — the same stockpiles that Hegseth and Trump publicly deny are a problem. Two days after that story ran, Iran launched its unprovoked attack by a military that, per Trump, had already been destroyed.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff personally briefed the White House on declining interceptor inventories. The same stockpiles Iran has been methodically depleting since February by deliberately firing older, less accurate missiles first to drain American air defenses before deploying their best weapons.

Iran didn’t need a source inside the Pentagon. They engineered the shortage themselves and have been watching it develop in real time on the battlefield. The WSJ story didn’t tell Iran anything Iran didn’t already know. It told the American public what we have been saying for months.

Trump paused the escalation. Iran read the pause as confirmation. The unprovoked attack followed.

Every denial from the Pentagon that turns out to be true becomes more damaging in the future. Every act of Iranian strength makes Trump’s words less credible. The White House is losing an information war against an adversary that doesn’t need social media — it just needs to allow Trump to be himself and blow up at his advisors for negative news. If your boss blames you for accurate information, the accurate information stops flowing. Right on time, as news of Trump blowing up at his advisors surfaced yesterday:

The question is whether Washington is changing with the war — or whether it is still reading from a script that Iran has no missiles and/or military remaining.

Only time will tell.

2. China Erases Real Estate Gains From the Last 20 Years

China just erased 20 years of real estate gains. Cities that were held up as ridicule to overbuilding — the ghost cities, the empty apartments, the developments nobody moved into — have seen property values collapse back to levels not seen since the early 2000s. The Western financial media covered it as a cautionary tale about communist central planning failures and speculative excess.

Do the ghost cities really haunt the economy? Hell no. But they do have an oversupply problem. But what does oversupply do? Makes things very cheap.

How much richer would the average American be if you could buy a home today at 2004 prices? Think about what that actually means. A generation of Americans who could afford a down payment in their twenties. Young couples who could start families without doing a five-year financial plan first. People who could take career risks, start businesses, and build wealth because their housing costs left room for something else. Instead, we have turned the place where people lay their heads at night into the hottest speculative asset in the country — and then wondered why birth rates are falling, why young people are angry, and why the American Dream feels like a movie from a different era.

China treats housing as a place to live. They don’t treat it as a speculative asset. America's treatment of housing as a speculative asset for the last 30 years has consequences, making it more expensive, more financialized, and more out of reach for the people who need it most. We avoided China’s supply correction by never allowing the correction to happen—through zoning laws and every policy mechanism available to protect Boomers’ asset values at the expense of younger generations.

Housing is the single biggest factor standing between most Americans and financial freedom. Not student debt. Not car payments. Not coffees and avocado toast. The mortgage, or the rent paid to someone else’s mortgage, consumes the income that would otherwise build wealth, fund retirement, and give people the margin to do what they love.

What if we looked at a house the way we look at a refrigerator? A useful thing you need. A cost of living. Not a stock. Not a speculative bet. Not the primary vehicle through which the middle class builds net worth because every other option has been made too complicated, too risky, or too expensive to access.

China’s real estate collapse was an accident that came as a blessing. But buried inside that accidental experiment is what happens when you stop treating shelter as an investment. The answer is uncomfortable for everyone who doesn’t already own a house.

Only time will tell.

3. Frequent Oil Draws From U.S. Strategic Reserve Push Old System to Breaking Point

Frequent Oil Draws From U.S. Strategic Reserve Push Old System to Breaking Point —WSJ 07/13/2026

The U.S. is tapping in to its national stocks of crude with abandon. The withdrawals are taking a toll on the strategic reserve system.

Just in the past four years, the Biden and Trump administrations have ordered the largest releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve while seeking to tamp down soaring oil prices—a total of 352 million barrels, or nearly half the capacity of the stocks.

Now, frequent drawdowns, wear-and-tear and a lack of investments are straining the reserve, according to experts. The 60 Gulf Coast salt caverns that make up the stocks can’t be drawn from or refilled at the rate at which they were designed, federal researchers found. Equipment failures have bedeviled the reserve’s managers. At one point, a well broke and caused the loss of hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude.

The upshot: President Trump or a future administration might not be able to rely on the massive oil buffer like others have in the past—even as the prolonged U.S.-Iran war all but ensures continued volatility in energy markets.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was built for emergencies. Instead, it has been used as a political tool to keep gas prices down before elections and to mask the consequences of an energy policy that has left America more exposed than at any point in the last 50 years. Now the system built to save us in a real emergency is breaking down — and a real emergency is exactly what we are in.

352 million barrels drawn in four years. Nearly half the total capacity. Not because of a war that cut off supply overnight. Not because of a hurricane that wiped out Gulf Coast refining capacity. Because both parties needed gas prices lower before November. The SPR was treated like a checking account instead of a fire extinguisher — and now the fire extinguisher has a crack in it.

The system is nearly 50 years old and has never been tested at this pace. The 60 salt caverns along the Gulf Coast were designed with specific draw rates and refill rates that have been consistently exceeded. Equipment that has never been pushed this hard is now failing in ways nobody fully understands. A well broke, and hundreds of thousands of barrels were lost. A headline that never got the attention it deserved.

Nobody in Washington wants to game out this situation publicly. The Iran war continues. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. We are getting to hurricane season on the Gulf Coast. Trump reaches for the SPR — the tool every administration has relied on to buy time in an energy crisis, but the system cannot deliver at the rate the moment requires. Equipment fails. Draw capacity is limited. The buffer that was supposed to prevent panic at the pump cannot perform.

Americans are not ready to pull into a gas station that has no gas. That is not hyperbole. That is the logical endpoint of a 50-year-old system drained to keep prices politically manageable, operating beyond its designed limits, in the middle of the largest energy shock in modern history. The panic that follows empty pumps is not a supply chain story; it is a public order story.

We have been using the emergency buffer to avoid short-term pain. The long-term cost of that decision is a system that may not be there when we actually need it.

Only time will tell.

4. Japan finance minister urges giant pension fund to invest more at home

Japan finance minister urges giant pension fund to invest more at home —FT 07/9/2026

Japanese stocks surged almost 2 per cent and the yen rose from a multi-decade low after the country’s finance minister called on domestic pension funds and the public to shift more assets into domestic markets.

Traders in Tokyo described Satsuki Katayama’s comments on Friday as a form of “stealth intervention” in currency and bond markets.

Katayama said in a press conference that encouraging Japanese pension funds and households “to invest more in Japanese financial assets” was a policy measure that the administration wanted to pursue. She explicitly included the Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF), which manages a global portfolio of roughly $1.8 trillion.

“The GPIF is the largest investor. When they start to move it influences smaller asset managers to follow suit,” she said. But she cautioned: “I think this kind of verbal announcement will be very shortlived if it is not followed through with actual asset allocation changes.”

Japanese borrowing costs have surged to their highest levels in 30 years as plans for aggressive government spending threaten to put further strain on the country’s high levels of debt.

Japan is the single largest foreign holder of United States Treasury bonds. Not China. Not Saudi Arabia. Japan. For decades Japanese institutions — led by the Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF), the largest pension fund on the planet managing $1.8 trillion in global assets — have recycled Japanese savings into American debt, keeping Treasury yields suppressed and giving the United States the ability to borrow more than it could ever afford on its own merits.

Japan’s Finance Minister just told that fund to bring the money home.

Traders in Tokyo called it stealth intervention. That framing says it all. When a finance minister encouraging domestic investment reads as market intervention, it means the market has been so dependent on Japanese capital flowing outward — into American Treasuries specifically — that even the suggestion of redirection moves currencies and bond markets immediately. The GPIF does not need to sell a single Treasury bond for this to matter. The signal alone is enough. When the largest investor in the world starts moving, smaller asset managers follow. That is the cascade Katayama herself encouraged and acknowledged.

This is not a hostile act. That is exactly what makes it more dangerous than if it were. Japan is not selling Treasuries to punish America. Japan is not making a geopolitical statement. Japan is doing what every rational country watching this year unfold has been quietly forced to do — protecting its own currency, its own citizens, and its own financial system in a world where the American security guarantee has been revealed as conditional, and the dollar has been weaponized often enough that holding it in unlimited quantities is no longer obviously wise. When the world holds $21 trillion of your assets, you have very little power when they want to sell.

Japan watched the Iran war cut off the energy supply its entire economy depends on. It watched American sailors enforce a blockade while Trump secretly paid Iran to break it (covered last month, Made in China). It watched its fuel lines grow, and its Treasury holdings lose purchasing power simultaneously. Japanese borrowing costs are now at their highest levels in 30 years. At some point, the Finance Minister has to answer to Japanese pensioners — not American bond markets.

The math on the other end of this is brutal.

The United States carries $39.5 trillion in debt at levels it already cannot afford to service. Every basis point that Treasury yields rise adds billions to the annual interest expense. Every large foreign holder that redirects capital home rather than into Treasuries puts upward pressure on those yields. Japan is the largest. If Japan is bringing money home, others are already doing it quietly or preparing to. The Gulf states are redirecting east. China has been reducing exposure for a decade. And now the most loyal buyer America has ever had is getting different instructions from its own government.

USTs are not dead overnight. But the buyer base that made American borrowing costs artificially cheap for 40 years is shrinking in real time — at the exact moment America needs to borrow more than ever to fund a war, service existing debt, rebuild its industrial base, and finance an AI buildout larger than anything in history. The Treasury market does not have a dramatic collapse moment. It has a slow grinding realization that the world’s most important debt market no longer has enough buyers at prices America can afford.

The price of everything hasn’t doubled; your dollars are just worth half as much.

Only time will tell.

5. Open-Source AI and Takes a Swipe at U.S. Dominance

Open-Source AI and Takes a Swipe at U.S. Dominance —WSJ 07/17/2026

Chinese leader Xi Jinping endorsed the building of open-source artificial-intelligence models, touting an approach that has helped the country catch up with the U.S. in global influence.

Speaking here Friday at an AI conference, Xi cast China as a champion of openness and equality, implicitly criticizing U.S. moves to protect its lead in AI semiconductors and models.

“We should oppose overstretching the concept of national security in the field of AI or placing one country’s security over that of others,” Xi said, without naming the U.S.

His speech comes as the U.S. and China are jockeying for leadership of global AI, with the U.S. generally acknowledged on both sides to hold a small lead. Each country hopes that its AI models will become standard around the globe. And each hopes to gain a national security advantage with new technology such as Anthropic’s Mythos model, which can automatically detect cybersecurity flaws.

The Trump administration recently intervened to temporarily block access to Mythos, citing national security concerns.

Hours before Xi’s speech, Beijing-based Moonshot AI offered the latest breakthrough from China, an open-weight model called Kimi K3 that has surprised many in Silicon Valley with its advanced capabilities.

The U.S. and China have taken different approaches in the AI models that underlie chatbots such as Claude and ChatGPT. In Silicon Valley, OpenAI, Anthropic and other technology giants are building largely proprietary models using Nvidia’s cutting-edge semiconductors.

Chinese companies such as DeepSeek, Moonshot and Zhipu AI have been playing catch-up and have published many open-source models, which people are generally free to use and adapt.

Chinese Kimi-K3 comes in #1 in the frontend code arena, surpassing the best American model, Claude Fable 5.

For a generation, Americans were told not to worry about China. They only make cheap goods. They copy everything. They can never truly innovate. The gap is too large. The institutions are too different. The culture of intellectual freedom that produces breakthrough technology simply does not exist in an authoritarian state.

That narrative is over.

The American strategy has been to spend $680 billion in AI capex from the Magnificent Seven alone in 2026. Proprietary models built on Nvidia’s most advanced chips. Export controls to keep those chips out of Chinese hands. The logic is sound — if you control the best hardware and build the best models on it, you win.

China’s strategy has been to let America do the expensive work and then route around it. Open source models that anyone can use, adapt, and improve. DeepSeek shocked Silicon Valley by producing a model that competed with America’s best at a fraction of the cost — built on chips China was not supposed to have access to. Kimi K3 just did it again. Every time America assumes the export controls are working, a Chinese model arrives that suggests otherwise.

This is the oldest Chinese competitive playbook applied to the most important technology race in history. Watch America spend the money. Absorb the intellectual property through every channel available. Build on top of what America pioneered. Compete at lower cost with higher efficiency. It worked in manufacturing. It worked in solar. It worked in electric vehicles. The mindset that it cannot work in AI because AI is different is the same mindset that said China could never build a world-class car or a world-class battery.

The only meaningful economic growth the United States has produced in years has come from AI. The stock market is priced to perfection on AI returns that have not yet materialized. The Magnificent Seven are burning through cash reserves to win a race that is turning out to be much closer than the $680 billion price tag was supposed to allow. If China wins the AI race, or even fights to a draw, the economic and market consequences for America will be a story for the history books.

And here is the detail that should end the debate about how serious this is. American AI executives, the people building these systems, the people who see the internal scorecard every single day, are terrified. Not concerned. Not cautious. Terrified. When the people closest to the technology are scared, the people furthest from it should be paying very close attention.

Top American AI Execs Sound Alarm on Chinese Models —WSJ 7/20/2026

OpenAI and Anthropic executives are sounding the alarm about the rise of cheap AI, particularly powerful new models produced in China, suggesting they will lead to a “dystopian” AI future and present unacceptable security risks without regulation.

Some analysts who study the AI industry say the two companies, which are preparing for public listings in the next year, just want to eliminate the competition.

The emergence of highly capable, open autonomous AI systems—including Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 model and Alibaba’s Qwen 3.8 Max, which were released in recent days and viewed favorably by investors and users—has turned the AI race on its head once again. Kimi K3 also was competitive with U.S. models on some benchmarks.

I would blame security risks too if I were scared of losing.

Anthropic just pledged $40 million to politicians to pass legislation in their favor. That is embarrassing. The most advanced AI company in America — the company building the model the US government is relying on for national security applications is spending $40 million on lobbying because it cannot beat Chinese competition on merit alone. You have to be pretty desperate to have politicians do your fighting for you.

When you start asking for government protection, it’s already over.

We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to maybe hold a small lead over a country that has never needed to match us dollar for dollar to eventually win. That should terrify everyone.

Only time will tell.

6. The Massive Supply Deals Feeding the AI Frenzy Are No Sure Thing

The Massive Supply Deals Feeding the AI Frenzy Are No Sure Thing —WSJ 07/20/2026

Contracts worth billions of dollars have become the commercial glue holding the AI boom together. But investors shouldn’t rely on them sticking if the boom fades.

Contracts to supply computing power for artificial-intelligence calculations have become such a fixture of the craze that whole industries have begun reorganizing around them. AI suppliers say these arrangements give them unprecedented visibility into their future revenue, allowing them to wow investors with promises of bumper sales and profits ahead.

The computer-memory business may be the most extreme example. Memory suppliers and their customers have sought out longer-dated deals in recent months.

We have seen this movie before. The assets were different. The financing structures were different. The buzzwords were different. But the underlying logic was identical — and it ended the same way it always ends when an entire financial system organizes itself around the assumption that valuations only go up.

In 2008 it was mortgages. Banks bundled them, rated them, sold them, and used the proceeds to make more loans to fund more bundles to sell to more investors. Every layer of the system was priced on the assumption that housing values would keep rising. When they stopped rising, the entire structure unwound simultaneously because every piece was connected to every other piece through the same flawed assumption.

In 2026, it is AI contracts.

Companies are signing billion-dollar computing contracts based on projected AI revenues that have not yet materialized. Those contracts are being used as collateral to raise financing. That financing is being used to build more infrastructure. That infrastructure is being valued based on the contracts. The contracts are being signed based on valuations that assume the infrastructure will generate returns. Every layer of the AI financing ecosystem is priced on the assumption that AI adoption and revenues will keep accelerating forever.

What happens when that stops?

The answer is 2008. Except worse. In 2008, the US entered the crisis with manageable debt levels and a full toolkit — interest rate cuts, quantitative easing, bank bailouts, fiscal stimulus. The Fed had room to move. The Treasury had room to spend. The system had shock absorbers.

Today the US enters this potential crisis with $39.5 trillion in debt, interest rates at twenty-year highs, a Treasury market that cannot find enough buyers, a Federal Reserve that is simultaneously being pressured to cut rates and facing an inflation environment that argues for hiking them, and a geopolitical backdrop that is draining every financial and military resource available. The shock absorbers are gone. The toolkit is empty. And the crisis being built in AI financing is larger than the mortgage market that nearly took down the global financial system in 2008.

OpenAI is the most exposed of all of them. The company is valued at levels that assume it wins the AI race, monetizes that win at scale, and generates the kind of returns that justify a valuation built on hope and momentum rather than earnings. It has burned through capital at a pace that makes the dotcom era look disciplined. It is preparing for a public listing into a market already questioning whether AI capex will ever generate the returns being promised. And it is doing all of this while, as mentioned above, Chinese open-source models are matching its performance at a fraction of the cost.

OpenAI is too big to fail in the same way Lehman Brothers was too big to fail. Right up until it wasn’t.

We are risking trillions of dollars, the stability of the global financial system, and a potential crisis with fewer tools to solve it than we have ever had— only to potentially end up with the second-best AI on the planet.

Just in as I was writing this letter:

Nvidia in Talks With OpenAI to Guarantee $250 Billion Financing for Data Center — WSJ 07/26/2026

Every week we are seeing a new deal worth hundreds of billions of dollars in financing. The math does not add up.

We are staring 2008 2.0 right in the face, and no one is talking about it.

Only time will tell.

7. China Successfully Tests Sea-Based Rocket Booster Recovery System

China Successfully Tests Sea-Based Rocket Booster Recovery System — Reuters 07/9/2026

China on Friday successfully ‌tested an experimental rocket retrieval system using a net attached to a sea platform, state media reported, in the hope of breaking U.S. dominance in reusable rockets.

If everything covered above wasn’t enough — China is in the space race too.

The country that built its early economic foundation on cheap manual labor, that the Western world dismissed for decades as incapable of genuine innovation, is now competing with the United States across every frontier that defines superpower status in the 21st century. Reusable rockets are the latest. It will not be the last.

China’s space program has accelerated at the same pace as everything else it has decided to prioritize. Methodical. Patient. Deliberate. Funded by a government that does not need to justify its budget to quarterly earnings calls or a Congress that cannot agree on anything. While America’s space ambitions have cycled through administrations, budgets, and political priorities, China has kept building. The same way it kept building factories. The same way it kept building solar panels. The same way it kept building electric vehicles until it owned the market.

The pattern is the same again. America innovates. China studies. America commercializes. China subsidizes. America debates. China builds. By the time the Western media notices China is competing, China is already winning. Do you get it yet?

The generation that grew up watching America put a man on the moon assumed space was America’s domain permanently. That assumption belongs in the same pile as the assumption that China only makes cheap goods, that Iranian missiles couldn’t threaten aircraft carriers, and that the SPR would always be there when we needed it.

If the stories in this letter have a single throughline, it is this — the world America built after World War II is being contested on every front simultaneously by a country that started with nothing and has spent 40 years preparing for exactly this moment.

The space race is just another visible frontier. The others are already further along than most Americans realize. The stock market has not yet realized this. From last month:

When the game isn’t going the way you want, you have two choices. You can play better. Or you can change the rules.

Nasdaq just changed the rules.

To accommodate the anticipated IPOs of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, Nasdaq has quietly loosened its listing requirements. The official reason is modernization. The real reason is desperation. The AI bubble needs new fuel, and the world’s most valuable private companies need an exit for their early investors. Nasdaq just handed them one.

Let’s be clear about who benefits from this and who doesn’t.

Who Benefits? Early investors

Did the Nasdaq change the rules so Elon could cash out before China catches him? Seems like that to me.

Only time will tell.

8. Russia Passes Crypto Law to Legalize Trading Under Tight Central Bank Oversight

Russia Passes Crypto Law to Legalize Trading Under Tight Central Bank Oversight —The Moscow Times 07/22/2026

Russia has passed a long-awaited law establishing a legal framework for cryptocurrency trading, allowing Russians to buy and sell major digital assets through Central Bank-regulated intermediaries while maintaining a ban on using cryptocurrencies for domestic payments.

The legislation, adopted after years of debate, is part of the Kremlin’s broader effort to formalize the cryptocurrency market while preserving tight state oversight. Authorities have increasingly turned to cryptocurrencies to facilitate cross-border trade as Western sanctions have restricted access to the global financial system, but they have also sought to limit unregulated domestic use.

Russia passed comprehensive cryptocurrency legislation this month. While the United States Congress continues to debate the Clarity Act — unable to pass basic digital asset regulation despite years of trying — Russia codified its own framework and moved on.

This is worth pausing on. The country under the most severe Western financial sanctions in modern history, the country that watched its central bank reserves frozen overnight in 2022, the country that has spent three years building financial infrastructure specifically designed to operate outside the dollar system — that country just passed crypto laws. Not because Russia loves technology. Because Russia understands what Bitcoin actually is.

Bitcoin is a neutral reserve asset. Digital gold. A settlement mechanism that operates without borders, without intermediaries, and without the permission of any government or central bank. No country can sanction it. No banker can print more of it. The 21 million coin limit is not a feature — it is the entire point. It is the mathematical guarantee that no Scott Bessent, no Federal Reserve, and no political crisis can inflate it away.

We have watched this thesis build all year in this newsletter. Iran accepting Bitcoin for tanker transit tolls. Gulf billionaires needing to move capital during active missile strikes. China building gold exchanges worldwide as a settlement alternative to the dollar. Every story has pointed toward the same conclusion — the world is searching for neutral financial infrastructure that cannot be weaponized by Washington. Bitcoin is the purest expression of that search.

Russia passing crypto legislation is not a story about Russia embracing crypto. It is a story about a country that learned the hardest possible lesson about what it means to hold reserves in someone else’s currency — and is now building the architecture to never be in that position again.

The United States cannot pass the Clarity Act. Russia passed its own version and moved on. The country being sanctioned is building the financial future faster than the country doing the sanctioning.

And then this landed right before this letter went out.

There have been growing conversations about returning to Hamiltonian economics — a framework built around a neutral reserve asset as the foundation of trade and commerce. Which makes the following statement from the Treasury Secretary particularly curious.

Treasury Secretary Invokes Bitcoin Creator Satoshi Nakamoto in Plea for Clarity Act —Yahoo Finance 07/30/2026

“I believe Satoshi once said it best: ‘If youon’t believe me or don’t get it, I don’t have time to try to convince you, sorry.’” — Scott Bessent, Treasury Secretary of the United States

The man managing the world’s reserve currency just quoted the anonymous creator of Bitcoin in a public plea for crypto legislation. That is a signal worth paying attention to.

Could Bessent be leaning toward US trade being net settled in Bitcoin? It is not as far-fetched as it sounds. The US could let China have the gold and compete with an entirely different neutral asset — one America currently leads the world in holding and building infrastructure around. China owns the gold exchanges. America owns the Bitcoin network. That is not a bad hand if you choose to play it; that is the best hand America has currently.

What makes this harder to dismiss is the timing. Bessent quotes Satoshi. Russia passes crypto law. The Clarity Act still sits in Congressional limbo. Donald Trump cannot brag about being the crypto president of the world while Russia beats him to the legislation.

The country being sanctioned is building the financial future. The Treasury Secretary is quoting its founder. And Washington still cannot pass a bill.

That is a warning — and possibly an opportunity.

Only time will tell.

9. Fed Holds Rates Steady but Three Officials Vote for Increase

Fed Holds Rates Steady but Three Officials Vote for Increase —WSJ 07/29/2026

WASHINGTON—Federal Reserve officials held interest rates steady Wednesday over the objections of three bank presidents who wanted an increase, underscoring how pressure is building inside the central bank to act on inflation that has run above its target for five years.

The Federal Reserve held rates steady. That is not the news.

The news is that the Fed is completely boxed in and everyone in the world, including our enemies, knows it. Raise rates, and you crash a stock market already pricing perfection, detonate a Treasury market that cannot afford higher borrowing costs, and tip a war economy into recession. Lower rates into the largest supply shock in modern history and you pour gasoline on an inflation fire that is already burning through every supply chain covered in this letter. There is no door number three.

Let’s put the US fiscal position in terms anyone can understand. Imagine an individual earning $50,000 a year carrying $400,000 in debt with zero dollars in savings. That person does not have good options to make additional investments in the future. They cannot borrow their way to prosperity. They cannot spend their way to stability. Every decision they make is constrained by a hole so deep that even the right choices only slow the descent. That is the position the United States is in. And Bessent and Warsh — two genuinely intelligent men are being asked to outsmart a math problem that does not have a clever solution.

Kevin Warsh walked into the most impossible job in American finance in May. His first meeting as Fed Chair and his credibility is already being questioned. That is not a reflection of Warsh’s capabilities — it is a reflection of the position he inherited. The Fed’s new communication framework, designed to stop over-telegraphing future moves and give the committee more flexibility, is now making a different problem more visible. Business leaders cannot make decisions without some visibility into the rate environment. Would you sign a ten-year commercial lease without knowing whether rates were going up or down, let alone a thirty-year mortgage? Would you buy a home? Would you break ground on a new factory?

The businesses that were supposed to reshore American manufacturing, rebuild the industrial base, and win the AI race need capital at a cost they can plan around. The Fed’s new silence gives them nothing to plan around. The cure for over-communication may be creating its own form of paralysis — not in the Fed, but in every boardroom and every mortgage application that depends on some reasonable expectation of what money will cost six months from now. The groundwork of future economic growth is paralyzed.

The Fed is not the villain of this story. The Fed is the last institution standing between a manageable crisis and an unmanageable one — with no good tools, no political cover, a new chairman under immediate scrutiny, and a world that is simultaneously demanding lower rates and generating the conditions that make lower rates dangerous.

This is one job I would not want. Not for any amount of money.

Only time will tell.

10. Canadian Wildfires Create Hazardous Air in Midwest and Northeast

Canadian Wildfires Create Hazardous Air in Midwest and Northeast —WSJ 07/16/2026

Winds swept the smoke from the north, where the Canadian government reported more than 100 uncontrolled wildfires. Swaths of the Northeast and Midwest were under National Weather Service air quality alerts as unhealthy levels of particulates were carried into the region. Multiple alerts were extended into Friday as the smoke crawled southeast.

The smoke from Canadian wildfires is blowing into the United States again. Skies turning orange. Air quality alerts across the Midwest and Northeast. The kind of images that generate enormous amounts of climate change coverage and renewed calls for green energy investment.

Here is the number nobody puts next to those images. A single large Canadian wildfire generates more CO2 emissions than the US produces in a 3-5 year period. According to the Canadian Climate Institute, Canada has spent $500 billion on the transition to green energy and for what? One fire every few years to make that spending worthless. The mathematical reality of wildfire emissions versus industrial emissions is so uncomfortable that it rarely appears in the same article as the policy prescriptions being funded to address climate change.

Hundreds of billions of dollars have been committed to the green energy transition. Wind farms, solar panels, EV subsidies, grid upgrades, carbon credits, and the entire apparatus of climate policy that has reshaped energy markets, manufacturing decisions, and geopolitical relationships over the last two decades. And one bad fire season in Canada undoes years of that progress in a matter of weeks.

This is not an argument against clean air or a healthy environment. It is an argument about priorities, honesty, and the strategic consequences of the choices America made while convinced it was saving the planet.

Russia and China watched the green energy transition unfold and made a different calculation. Russia kept pumping oil and gas and became Europe’s energy supplier of choice until the Ukraine war forced a reckoning that Europe is still recovering from. China ignored the climate fad long enough to build the factories that now make the solar panels, the wind turbine components, and the EV batteries that the Western green transition depends on. China did not skip industrialization to protect the environment. It industrialized at maximum speed — coal plants, steel mills, chemical factories — and then positioned itself as the manufacturer of the green economy it never fully committed to living in.

The countries that took climate change most seriously are now dependent on the countries that took it least seriously for the materials required to address it. America dismantled its industrial base in part to reduce emissions. China built the replacement industrial base with no such constraints. The green transition did not reduce global emissions. It offshored them — and handed China the leverage that comes with manufacturing everything the transition requires.

One wildfire. More emissions than a country produces in a year. Hundreds of billions spent. And the solar panels cleaning it up were made in a Chinese factory powered by coal.

The green energy transition will come with consumers buying reliable and smart energy over time. Solar panels are getting cheap enough where they will pay for themselves. We don’t need to print hundreds of billions of dollars, breaking Western nations, to force it while we are already broke.

It’s not whether you agree with climate change or not; it’s just the math, and the math has never added up. The smoke just makes it visible.

Only time will tell.

The Rover Portfolio:

Updates:

and were sold.

PBF was discussed above, and Sirius XM was sold to raise cash. I believe the market is going to have a whoosh down, and the more cash, the better to take advantage of that buying opportunity. Sirius was my weakest position with the least upside. I held it for three years as it gained a little, but not much. It’s still Berkshire Hathaway’s 13th largest position.

I realize this is different from what I have been sharing, but this is my liquid net worth. Message me if you would like to discuss anything further.

That is it for this month. Enjoy the last bits of summer, as it will be over before we know it. I hope your summer has had more moisture and less humidity than mine.

Thank you for being a part of this!

Casey Donaldson

Disclosure

The investment positions, opinions, and analysis contained in The Rover are for informational and entertainment purposes only and do not constitute financial advice, investment recommendations, or an offer to buy or sell any security. I am not a licensed financial advisor, broker, or investment professional.

All investments carry risk, including the potential loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The positions I hold and discuss in this newsletter — including but not limited to Bitcoin, gold, Tencent Music Entertainment, Nam Tai Properties, and any other securities mentioned — reflect my personal investment decisions and are not recommendations for others to follow.

The Rover may discuss speculative investments, emerging markets, cryptocurrency, and other high risk assets. These are not suitable for all investors. Before making any investment decision, you should conduct your own research, consult with a licensed financial professional, and consider your own financial situation, risk tolerance, and investment objectives.

The information in this newsletter is believed to be accurate at the time of writing but may become outdated. Markets move fast. The world moves faster. Neither The Rover nor its author assumes any liability for decisions made based on the content of this publication.

Invest at your own risk. Think for yourself.

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Made in China

I spent the weekend of June 20th wiring my garage. In reality, I did about 10% of the work while one of my best friends did all the hard stuff, but details…

Nothing glamorous. Just a few men, a plan, and a trip to Menards to grab the components needed to get the job done. Breakers, wire, outlets, junction boxes. The usual.

Somewhere between the electrical aisle and standing in the middle of an unfinished garage, it hit me. I didn’t even need to turn things over or flip boxes around. Reading the small print on the back of every component.

MADE IN CHINA.

Every single one.

The breakers that will protect my garage from burning down — made in China. The wire running through the walls — made in China. The outlets I will plug my tools into — made in China. The junction boxes, the lightbulbs. China. China. China.

I stood there in the garage for a moment and thought about what this stuff would cost if it were made in America. Real answer — about three times as much. The electrician I hired to bring my house up to code didn’t charge me three times as much because the parts were already at the house. The parts being cheap is the only reason any of this is remotely affordable for a regular person trying to fix or build a home.

Americans love the idea of Made in America. It polls beautifully. It sounds great on a bumper sticker. It feels righteous to stand in a Home Depot aisle, fighting the urge to pound your chest and look at the flag.

But here is the part nobody wants to say out loud — Americans are not ready for what Made in America actually costs. They are not ready for a $47 outlet. They are not ready for a $180 breaker. They are not ready for construction costs that make today’s housing market look affordable by comparison.

We want the factories back. We want the jobs back. We want supply chain independence. What we do not want is the bill.

And that is the problem, nobody in Washington is honest enough to put on a bumper sticker.

The garage is wired. And somewhere in a factory on the other side of the world, someone worked a 60-hour week to make sure I could afford to do it.

The most interesting things I read this month:

Trump Says Ceasefire With Iran is Over After Latest Attacks

Trump Says Ceasefire With Iran is Over After Latest Attacks —WSJ 7/8/2026

President Trump said he believed his ceasefire deal with Iran was over and that the U.S. would likely carry out more strikes soon, following another round of Iranian attacks on ships in the Strait of Hormuz that snarled efforts to reopen the strategic waterway.

“We hit them very hard last night…probably hit them hard again tonight,” Trump told reporters at a NATO summit in Ankara on Wednesday. “I’ll give them a little warning, we’re going to hit them hard tonight. But we’ll see how it all works out.”

The president’s remarks were the starkest sign yet that diplomacy with Iran has stalled under the preliminary peace agreement he signed in mid-June.

During earlier comments to reporters, sitting next to North Atlantic Treaty Organization Secretary-General Mark Rutte, Trump stopped short of saying the U.S. would restart the war, however, and said he would let talks continue if the parties were willing.

“To me, I think it’s over. I don’t want to deal with them anymore,” Trump said.

“They’re liars, they’re cheats, they’re sick people,” Trump added. “Now I’ll let our wonderful negotiators keep talking if they want, but I don’t see it.”

Trump’s remarks came after the U.S. and Iran traded blows in fighting ignited by Iranian attacks on ships including a liquefied natural gas tanker in recent days. The U.S. military said it hit more than 80 targets primarily along Iran’s coast near the strait, and Iran responded with strikes of its own, launching drones and ballistic missiles at Bahrain and Kuwait, both of which host U.S. military bases.

They’re liars. They’re cheats. They’re sick people.

That is the President of the United States at a NATO summit — sitting next to the Secretary General of the most important military alliance in history — describing the country he signed a ceasefire with three weeks ago. The ceasefire, he called a historic victory. The deal he announced to stop the market from falling apart every time the 10-year Treasury has hit 4.4%.

Words mean nothing in this war. They haven’t since the first bomb dropped.

Here is where we actually are. Iran struck an LNG tanker in the Strait of Hormuz. The US hit more than 80 targets along Iran’s coastline in response on the first night alone. Iran launched drones and ballistic missiles at Bahrain and Kuwait — both hosting American military bases. The Strait remains functionally closed. The ceasefire that was supposed to end all of this is now, in the President’s own words, over. And Trump is telegraphing the next strike to reporters on camera at a NATO summit, as if he were announcing a press conference.

“I’ll give them a little warning; we’re going to hit them hard tonight.”

This is not a strategy. Sounds like desperation dressed up as strength.

The Strategic Petroleum Reserves, meant to cushion the blow of a prolonged energy shock, are depleted. The weekends are for war playbook — the pattern of announcing ceasefires Sunday night and resuming strikes after market close on Friday — has been exposed so many times that markets barely react anymore. Iran knows the timing. Iran knows the Treasury pressure. Iran knows that every announcement of peace is driven by the bond market, not by battlefield calculations. They have been running the same play since February, and it keeps working.

Trump is searching for any leverage that doesn’t exist. Iran struck a US protected LNG tanker not because they miscalculated, but on purpose. They know the US cannot sustain $120 oil indefinitely or even for a few months. They know the Treasury market has a breaking point. They know that Scott Bessent is on the phone with commodity traders every time crude threatens to go parabolic. They know that the American political system cannot tolerate pain for longer than a news cycle.

The markets will continue to be treated as more important than lives. Every ceasefire announcement will be timed to a Treasury auction or a stock market open. Every escalation will be followed by a hint of talks to walk the S&P back from the edge. This is not foreign policy. It is market management with missiles.

Trump said he doesn’t want to deal with them anymore. Iran is counting on that. An adversary who wants to walk away is an adversary who will eventually accept worse terms just to leave. Iran has been waiting four months for America to get tired.

IRAN IS NOT TIRED. THIS IS THE MOMENT IRAN HAS BEEN WAITING FOR, FOR 40 YEARS.

The ceasefire is over, and the world's most powerful military is announcing its next strike to a room full of journalists.

That does not sound like winning.

Lag 7

For years the Magnificent Seven (Mag 7) were the greatest cash generating machines Wall Street had ever seen. They bought back their own shares by the billions — borrowing cheap money at near zero interest rates to reduce share counts, inflate earnings per share, and send their stock prices to levels that made the dot com bubble look like a warmup act. It was the greatest financial engineering story of a generation.

That story is over.

The same companies that spent a decade vacuuming up their own shares are now issuing new ones. The cash that once flowed back to shareholders is now flowing into data centers, GPUs, and AI infrastructure at a scale that would have seemed delusional five years ago. The Magnificent Seven are collectively planning to spend over $680 billion on capital expenditures in 2026 alone. That is up from roughly $400 billion in 2025. A 70% increase in one year.

Let that number sit for a moment. $680 billion. In a single year. With Iranian missiles hitting the Middle Eastern data centers they need to build in, a domestic grid too underpowered to support them, and a return on investment timeline that nobody can honestly define.

Alphabet guided 2026 capital expenditure of $175 to $185 billion — more than double its 2025 outlay. Amazon forecasts $200 billion in capex, up 53% from last year and well above Wall Street’s estimate of $145 billion. Meta is spending $125 billion. Microsoft is on pace for $144 billion.

The free cash flow that made these companies the darlings of every index fund in America is shrinking fast. Capital expenditure across the six that have reported surged 75% year over year to $136.6 billion for the quarter. As a result, free cash flow fell by more than a sixth year over year.

They are becoming cash broke in the pursuit of AI dominance. And here is the part that should make every investor uncomfortable — nobody can tell you with a straight face what the return on that investment looks like or when it arrives.

Microsoft reported 15 million paying Copilot customers for its AI assistant, which sounds impressive until you realize that is a fraction of its 450 million Microsoft 365 customer base. Investors were not impressed. The stock was crushed. The market is starting to ask a question these companies do not have a clean answer to: when does the spending become profit?

The Magnificent Seven accounted for 55% of the S&P 500's total return from 2023 through 2025. But that weighting can work against them in downturns. Since they make up such a large part of the major indexes, dragging the rest of the market down is also a possibility.

One third of the American stock market. Spending money it used to return to shareholders. Into an AI buildout with no guaranteed return. At valuations that assume everything goes right. That is scary.

This is the setup nobody on CNBC is connecting plainly. The companies that propped up the market through COVID, through rate hikes, through Liberation Day — are now making the biggest and most uncertain capital bet in corporate history. Simultaneously. At the top of the market.

The Magnificent Seven spent years buying back shares with borrowed money to look rich. Now they are issuing shares and spending cash to actually become something new. Maybe it works. AI may well be the most transformative technology in human history, and the returns could dwarf the investment.

But maybe it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, the companies that hold up a third of the American stock market will have burned through the cash cushion that made them bulletproof — right when the world needs them to be.

Stock Indexes Are Divided on Rules for Megacap IPOs. How Exposed Will You Be?

Stock Indexes Are Divided on Rules for Megacap IPOs. How Exposed Will You Be? —WSJ 6/5/2026

The rules are changing for IPOs, and not for the better.

Advisers for SpaceX reached out to major index providers to discuss how it and other hot startups might join key indexes sooner than normal, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year. Inclusion in major indexes can significantly boost demand for a company’s shares from institutional asset managers that must buy in order to track their benchmarks.

Faster inclusion also helps indexes accurately track the universe of public companies, and means index-fund investors will have exposure to some of the biggest and hottest newly public companies faster than they otherwise would have. If your goal in owning a large-cap index fund is to be invested in all of the biggest U.S. firms, new fast-tracking rules help accomplish that sooner.

SpaceX is expected to go public at an extremely expensive valuation based on metrics like price-to-revenue, and skeptics aren’t excited about rule changes that could put the company into millions of Americans’ retirement plans sooner.

Some say that allowing a company like SpaceX into an index soon after it starts trading mostly benefits early investors in the company, by allowing them to easily sell their stakes.

But S&P’s move to keep profitability requirements avoids the most controversial issue, and maintains existing criteria for the most-popular U.S. index. Other indexes that simply include the largest companies argue that they are adding fast-tracking rules so they can accurately track the market sooner.

When the game isn’t going the way you want, you have two choices. You can play better. Or you can change the rules.

Nasdaq just changed the rules.

To accommodate the anticipated IPOs of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, Nasdaq has quietly loosened its listing requirements. The official reason is modernization. The real reason is desperation. The AI bubble needs new fuel, and the world's most valuable private companies need an exit for their early investors. Nasdaq just handed them one.

Let’s be clear about who benefits from this and who doesn’t.

Who Benefits? Early investors — the venture capital firms, the insiders, the employees sitting on stock options worth more than most people will earn in a lifetime will benefit enormously. The moment these companies hit public markets at peak valuations, the people who got in early get the long awaited cash. They get to sell. They get to leave.

You get to buy.

And here is the part that should make every passive investor’s stomach turn — whether you plan to buy SpaceX, Anthropic, or OpenAI or not, you will. The moment these companies hit the major indexes, every index fund, every 401k, every passive Nasdaq tracker automatically owns them. You don’t get a vote. You don’t get a choice. You are being forced to buy some of the most expensive companies in financial market history at valuations with no historical precedent.

SpaceX was recently valued at 100 times sales. ONE HUNDRED TIMES SALES. That number wasn’t even seen at the very peak of the dotcom bubble — right before the Nasdaq lost 80% of its value over the following two years.

The rules Nasdaq loosened existed for a reason. Listing requirements are not bureaucratic red tape. They are risk filters. They exist to protect the people on the other end of the trade — the retail investors, the pension funds, the ordinary people whose retirement accounts don’t have a venture capital team doing due diligence on their behalf. Loosening those filters doesn’t reduce risk. It transfers it. From the insiders who are selling to the public who is buying.

The WSJ noted it plainly — some say that allowing a company like SpaceX into an index soon after it starts trading mostly benefits early investors by making it easier to sell their stakes. That is the cleanest summary of what is actually happening here.

The S&P 500 held firm and did not follow Nasdaq’s lead. That is worth noting. When the most important index in the world declines to bend its rules for the hottest companies on the planet. That is a signal.

The market is not valuing these companies. It is feeding the monster.

Kevin Warsh Wants the Fed to Stop Explaining Everything

Kevin Warsh Wants the Fed to Stop Explaining Everything — WSJ 6/14/2026

The Old Gentleman’s Club just got new management. The new Fed Chair, Kevin Warsh, has arrived and already begun to put his spin on things.

Kevin Warsh boiled down his advice for the Federal Reserve before an audience of investors last year. “Stop talking so much,” he said. “More thinking, less talking.”

For more than a decade, Warsh has argued that the Fed should say less. How much a central bank reveals about its thinking shapes mortgage rates, markets and the cost of borrowing for everyone.

In Warsh’s view, the central bank has buried itself in its own communication. It produces forecasts that markets fixate on and that box the committee in. Officials give speeches or interviews on every side of every question. Warsh wants the Fed to say less and let markets do more of the work.

The Federal Reserve has operated the same way for 100 years. Press conferences after every meeting. Forward guidance carefully wordsmithed to move markets a quarter point at a time. The result is a central bank that spends more time managing its own narrative than managing the economy.

Warsh just ended that era.

His four task forces will gut and rebuild the central banking platform from the inside. Communication — how the Fed talks to markets. Balance sheet — what the Fed holds and why. Economic data — what the Fed measures and how. Productivity, jobs, and the impact of AI — something no previous Fed Chair has ever formally tackled. And inflation framework — the foundation every interest rate decision is built on.

That is not a tweak. That is a renovation.

The old gentlemen’s club ran on consensus, comfort, and the unspoken agreement that nothing would change too fast. Warsh is a different animal. He has been arguing for a decade that forward guidance — the Fed’s practice of telegraphing its next moves to markets — has turned the central bank into a hostage of its own words. When you tell markets what you are going to do, you have to do it. You lose the flexibility that makes monetary policy effective in the first place.

Saying less gives the Fed its power back.

Now, here is the political reality underneath all of this. Trump put Warsh in this chair for one primary reason — to lower interest rates. Cheaper money means easier borrowing, a higher stock market, and a war economy that doesn’t immediately bankrupt the Treasury. The problem is the Fed committee is currently leaning toward hiking rates, not cutting them. And the Fed Chair cannot move rates alone. The committee votes. Warsh can modernize the communication strategy, rebuild the balance sheet framework, and study the impact of AI on jobs all he wants — but if the committee votes to hike, rates go up regardless of who sits in the chair.

Trump Picked Warsh to Cut Rates. His Committee Is Talking About Hikes. — WSJ 6/16/2026

When President Trump picked Warsh in January, the Fed looked headed for lower rates—and the cheaper mortgages and loans that come with them. Investors expected several cuts this year, on top of three in late 2025, thanks in part to a wobbly job market that left officials worried that high rates were doing more harm than good. Inflation, meanwhile, looked like it might resume a decline toward the Fed’s 2% goal once the effects of tariffs faded.

Four months later, almost none of that holds. Hiring has picked back up, and inflation is climbing instead of cooling. It’s now running above 3%.

The forces behind the turn weren’t the ones the Fed had braced for. The AI build-out, once expected to tame inflation by lifting productivity, instead looks like a source of it—straining supplies of chips, electricity and the materials to build data centers in a way that smacks of a boom rather than a slump. Soaring tech stocks are adding fuel, leaving investors feeling flush and spending freely.

And the war Trump launched in Iran sent gasoline and commodity prices higher. A deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz will ease pressures, but slowly, and the economy that emerges won’t be the one that existed before the war. The case for cuts has gone with it.

Trump may have installed his guy. His guy may still have to deliver news Trump doesn’t want to hear.

The era of the Fed telling you exactly what it is going to do before it does it is over. Whether that means lower rates or higher ones, markets will have to do something they have forgotten how to do.

Think for themselves.

GM in Talks to Supply Weapons Parts to Lockheed Martin

GM in Talks to Supply Weapons Parts to Lockheed Martin — WSJ 6/16/2026

GM, back in the weapons business, tells you everything you need to know about the true levels of US munitions supplies.

General Motors is in talks with Lockheed Martin about making parts for the defense contractor’s weapons, according to people familiar with the matter.

Under the arrangement, GM would manufacture commonly used parts that could help Lockheed bolster munitions production, the people said. The companies are discussing which components GM could potentially make.

“Today’s environment requires us to think differently about how we strengthen the industrial base,” Lockheed Chief Operating Officer Frank St. John said. “Production capacity is a national security capability.”

Pentagon officials have said they might need the companies to backstop traditional defense contractors that are struggling to meet demand for strike weapons and interceptors that the U.S. and its allies burned through in the Middle East this year.

Read that last line again. The Pentagon needs General Motors to backstop traditional defense contractors that are struggling to meet demand. The company that builds your truck is being called in to help the company that builds missile defense systems because the missile defense company cannot keep up.

Ask yourself when exactly America decided the company that builds your truck should stop building the weapons that defend your country. The answer is the same answer it always is. It was cheaper not to.

During World War II, American manufacturing was the arsenal of democracy. GM wasn’t building Chevrolets. Ford wasn’t building Mustangs. The entire industrial base of the United States was converted overnight into the most prolific weapons manufacturing operation the world had ever seen. Tanks, planes, ships, and ammunition poured out of American factories at a pace that genuinely changed the outcome of the war.

Then the war ended. And over the next 70 years, in the name of efficiency, shareholder returns, and the relentless pursuit of cheaper, America quietly dismantled that capability and handed it to the lowest bidder.

Now we are paying for it.

Stocks of critical weaponry have been depleted by two simultaneous wars — Iran and Ukraine — with no credible plan for replenishment. The official position from Pete Hegseth and the Trump administration is that American munitions stockpiles are ample and the situation is under control.

So explain this.

If stockpiles are ample, why did the US pull THAAD missile defense systems out of Asia in what can only be described as desperation? THAAD is the system protecting Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea from North Korean and Chinese ballistic missiles. Removing it leaves China with an open window on Taiwan and leaves our two strongest allies in the Pacific — the same countries we need to reshore our supply chains and buy our Treasuries — with zero protection. You don’t pull your most advanced missile defense system from the most strategically sensitive region on the planet because you have plenty of everything.

If stockpiles are ample, why is the Pentagon calling General Motors?

The math is simple and brutal. At current production rates, we are looking at three to four years to replenish what has been spent. Three to four years during which China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are not taking a break.

And here is the part nobody in Washington wants to say out loud. Bringing this manufacturing back to America is the right call. It is also going to be extraordinarily expensive. American labor costs more than foreign labor. American environmental standards cost more than no standards. American supply chains cost more than Chinese ones. Every shell casing, every guidance system, every component that gets reshored adds to the bill.

Rebuilding the arsenal of democracy in 2026 will be inflationary. There is no version of this that isn’t. The question is whether America is willing to pay the price of being able to defend itself, or whether we keep choosing cheaper until cheaper gets someone killed.

GM building weapons parts again isn’t a feel good story about American manufacturing. It’s an admission that we let something critically important slip away in the name of a margin.

Cheaper isn’t always better. Sometimes it’s just cheaper until it isn’t.

Rocked by the Iran War, the UAE sours on Trump

Rocked by the Iran War, the UAE sours on Trump — The Washington Post 6/24/2026

The United Arab Emirates just sent Washington a message. They are done pretending this war was a success.

The UAE — America’s most reliable partner in the Gulf, the country that hosts US military bases, the country that has quietly enabled American power projection across the Middle East for three decades, is turning sour on Trump over the Iran war. And if the UAE is willing to say it out loud, you can be certain every other Gulf state is thinking it behind closed doors.

But the UAE isn’t the most interesting defection this month.

The neocons are turning too.

The neoconservatives who have pushed regime change in Iran since the Reagan administration — the think tank architects, the foreign policy lifers, the people who have spent 40 years arguing that one more strike, one more sanction, one more push would finally topple the Iranian government are quietly stepping back from the war they spent decades demanding. The public defeat Trump wanted them to suffer is beginning to materialize.

We said this in the April letter. Our base case since the beginning has been that the Iran war would serve as the mechanism for breaking up the structural dependency between the United States and Israel — and for finally discrediting the neoconservative foreign policy apparatus that has driven America into the Middle East repeatedly for 40 years. Not through a policy paper. Not through a congressional debate. Through exposure. Let them have their war. Let the world watch what it costs. Let the American public see whose idea this was.

Like a moth drawn to a flame, the only way to stop the moth is to let it reach the flame. Trump may be closing in on simultaneously discrediting the neocons who want America in permanent war, redefining the toxic dependency on Israel, degrading Iran’s nuclear capability, and rebuilding American energy dominance from scratch. If he pulls it off, it would be the biggest presidential win since WWII.

If this conclusion is even remotely correct, there will be no TACO. The neocons and Netanyahu are going to suffer a painful and public defeat. Trump has the Western media exactly where he wants them — broadcasting that this was Israel’s idea, that Trump was duped, that the war was Netanyahu’s war. Whether entirely true or not, half the country believes what MSNBC reports, and the other half believes Fox News. Either way, the narrative is being shaped.

The Israeli Times reported it. Vance made the call to Netanyahu. The Western media ran with it. Netanyahu oversold regime change. Trump went along. The war didn’t end in two weeks. The Strait is still closed. The Treasury market is fragile. It’s beginning to make more sense now why the UAE threatened that either they get a swap line, or energy will be priced in Chinese yuan moving forward.

The neocons got their war. They are not getting their victory.

When the people who wanted this war the most stop defending it, the war is lost. Not on the battlefield. In the minds of the people who funded it, planned it, and sold it to three consecutive American presidents.

That is how the war in Iran actually ends.

For 50 years, the petrodollar system has run on a simple arrangement. Gulf nations sell oil in dollars, recycle those dollars into US Treasury bonds, and America gets cheap oil and a permanent buyer for its debt. That arrangement is now cracking.

The Gulf states are watching the Iran war destroy their neighbors’ energy infrastructure, close the waterway their entire economy depends on, and expose the American security guarantee as conditional and unreliable. The petrodollar surplus that used to flow automatically into Treasury auctions is being consumed by a war nobody in the Gulf asked for. The UAE is demanding a swap line or risk dollar dominance. Others are quietly redirecting surplus eastward toward China.

The United States needs buyers for its debt more urgently than at any point in modern history — and the most loyal buyers in the room are leaving. You find out what American debt is actually worth when that happens.

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Lifestyle

Budgeting

"Now let me leave this little word of counsel for you. Keep a little ledger, as I did. Write down in it what you receive, and do not be ashamed to write down what you pay away. Write down every single item." —JD Rockefeller

J.D. Rockefeller would go so far as to reward his child who kept the most accurate expense ledger.

I started tracking every dollar I spend a few months ago. Not because I was in trouble. Because I realized I didn’t know 100% where my money was actually going, and that bothered me more than whatever the number turned out to be.

The mortgage I knew. The insurance, the utilities, and the gym membership. What I didn’t know was everything in between. The dinners that add up to a car payment. The subscriptions quietly renewing in the background. The hundred small decisions that happen on autopilot between paydays that consume more than you think it should.

When I finally sat down and looked at it honestly, it was slightly uncomfortable. That discomfort was the point.

You cannot improve something you don’t track. I have said that in this newsletter before. It applies just as much to your bank account. The simple act of writing down where your money goes forces a confrontation with reality that most people spend their entire lives avoiding. And that confrontation is where things actually get better.

Budgeting does three things at once. It reduces stress — because uncertainty is always scarier than the actual number. It shows you exactly where your money is going, so you can make deliberate choices rather than reactive ones. And it builds the habit of treating your personal finances the way a good business treats its books. With accountability. With intention. With a clear picture of what is coming in and what is going out.

The tools don’t matter. I use a simple spreadsheet on Google Sheets since it’s free. A notebook works. An app works. Whatever you consistently open is the right answer. What matters is starting. Pick a month. Track everything. At the end of thirty days, you will know more about your financial life than most people learn in a decade.

We are living in an inflationary world where the cost of everything is going up, and the purchasing power of every dollar is going down. In that environment, the people who know exactly where their money goes will be the ones who have money left when it matters most. If your finances are stretched thin right now, this is step one to fixing the issue.

Start this month. You won’t regret it.

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Investments

The stock market is the most expensive it has ever been by every measure. Price to earnings. Price to sales. Market cap to GDP. Pick your metric — they all tell the same story. We are at valuations never seen before in modern history, not even the peak of the dotcom bubble in 2000. And we all know how that ended. The difference this time is the world outside the stock market is actively on fire while the market pretends otherwise.

Look at everything covered in this newsletter and ask yourself one question — is any of it deflationary? The Iran war. The Strait closure. Rebuilding 40 years of dismantled manufacturing. Reshoring the defense industrial base. Funding an AI buildout larger than the Manhattan Project, the railroads, and the fiber buildout combined. Universal basic income to replace jobs lost to automation. All of it requires massive money printing into record debt levels just to maintain the status quo. The buyers of that debt are getting nervous. The Treasury market needs more buyers than ever and has fewer than ever. That is not a backdrop that ends with a soft landing.

I am positioning accordingly. Most of my new money is going into gold and Bitcoin to combat the coming inflation, whether markets have priced it in or not. I am limiting my exposure to the Magnificent Seven as much as possible — the companies propping up a third of the S&P are burning cash into an AI bet with no guaranteed return, sitting in a market priced for perfection, and the world is not a perfect place. Many of these stocks are at the lowest prices in over a year. One development from China could crash this market. You may underperform the market for a year or two, taking this posture. A lost decade or worse is coming for those who don’t. This AI buildout has no finish line and no guaranteed winner. Position like it.

401k

Small change to allocation.

33% International Small Cap Value

33% Diversified International Fund

33% Change from S&P 500 Index to Vanguard Growth Index Fund

Small change to the 401k this month. I used AI to backtest every fund option available in my plan against the S&P 500, going back as far as the data allowed. The Vanguard Growth Fund was the only option that barely beat it. So I made the switch. A few extra percentage points of return, compounded over decades, can make a difference.

Most people set their 401k allocation once and never look at it again. I have been guilty of this too. The reality is your 401k is likely your largest investment vehicle and it deserves the same attention you give everything else. The tools for this analysis are now available to everyone now. Pull up your plan options, feed them into an AI, ask it to backtest performance against the S&P 500, and see what comes back. It takes thirty minutes, and the results might surprise you.

I am still bullish on international equities on the reshoring thesis — South Korea and Japan remain my conviction plays for when America needs its Asian allies to rebuild its industrial base. That allocation stays. Plus, not being in high-risk American markets has short-term benefits. The switch from a broad index to the Vanguard Growth Fund is a small tweak with a meaningful, very long-term impact.

Bitcoin

Bitcoin is cheap. Not cheap in the way a failing business is cheap — cheap in the way an asset gets cheap when the world is distracted by a war, and nobody is paying attention to the underlying thesis. The underlying thesis has not changed. If anything, it has strengthened every single month this newsletter has been written.

Trump and Bessent can walk back dollar debasement talks all they want. The talks were walked back because markets needed calming, not because the problem was solved. The debt is still there, and the deficit is still blowing out. The Treasury market still needs more buyers than it has. The petrodollar recycling mechanism is still cracking. The printing press is still the only tool left when everything else fails. Bitcoin was built for exactly this environment — and capital will flow into it when the world catches up to what is already happening. That takes time. It always does.

I added Morgan Stanley Bitcoin Trust to my Bitcoin holdings this month as another way to ride the thesis. has a net asset value (NAV) of $18.27 per share and trades at a discount on most days. The expense ratio is cheap at 0.14%. I am still dollar cost averaging every week through the River app and have no intention of stopping. I will double my weekly position before I stop buying. The position is sized for a long timeline. The world will need a non-sovereign store of value before this decade is over. Bitcoin is the only candidate that has survived long enough to be taken seriously, and can be sent in a timely manner.

Gold

Central Banks Are Rethinking Where They Store Their Gold —WSJ 6/16/2026

Central banks are increasingly shifting where they store their gold—a move that reflects growing geopolitical concerns and a desire to ensure greater control and access to reserves.

A survey from the World Gold Council, an industry body representing gold miners, showed fewer central banks now store bullion in London and New York than a year earlier, two hubs that house the world’s most liquid bullion markets.

“This year’s survey reveals an emergent trend of central banks increasingly looking to diversify gold vaulting locations,” the WGC said Tuesday.

Central banks do not repatriate gold in times of peace and prosperity. They repatriate gold when they are preparing for something.

Think about what it means to move your gold out of London and New York — the two most liquid bullion markets in the world. You are accepting less liquidity, higher storage costs, and greater logistical complexity. Nobody does that without a reason. The reason is that London and New York are American and British — and after watching Russian reserves frozen overnight in 2022, every central bank on the planet quietly asked itself the same question. What happens to our gold if we end up on the wrong side of Washington?

The answer was to bring it home or send it somewhere safer.

Now ask the next question — if gold isn’t going to play a larger role in the global financial system, why does it matter where it’s stored? It matters because the countries moving their gold are positioning for a world in which gold is not just a reserve asset but also an active settlement tool. We are already watching this in real time. Iran accepting gold for tanker tolls. Countries selling gold to China for yuan to pay for oil. China opening gold exchanges across the world to make the metal more accessible as a trade settlement mechanism. This is not speculation. It is happening in the headlines of this newsletter every single month.

Trump and Bessent are helping China’s gold strategy by driving down the price of gold versus the USD. Every time the dollar strengthens, dollar-priced gold goes down — and China, which has been accumulating gold at a pace that nobody in the West can accurately measure, pays less for every additional ounce. And China is fine with playing the long game. I will not stop buying gold until China does. And China is not stopping.

PBF Energy

No change in stock holdings.

We now know how Trump was actively manipulating the price of oil during the Iran War. And it’s worse than you expected.

Trump secretly approved Qatar-Iran cash deal — 6/15/2026

The US secretly approved a financial and maritime arrangement between Qatar and Iran, under which billions of dollars were paid to Tehran in exchange for free passage for Qatari tankers and ships through the Strait of Hormuz, three diplomatic officials now confirm.

This was a deliberate and conscious course of action by the US administration, which allowed its navy to turn a blind eye to the arrangement, in complete contradiction of its declared policy. The move was intended to ease the crisis in global energy markets and curb rising oil prices.

The current revelation proves that the White House had already laid the groundwork at the time for the memorandum of understanding being forged with Iran. In doing so, the administration gave Iranian terrorism a critical economic lifeline at a moment of particularly severe financial strangulation.

Let that sink in.

The United States Navy was enforcing a naval blockade of Iran. American sailors were putting their lives on the line to strangle Iranian oil revenues and force a negotiated end to the war. While that was happening, the Trump administration was secretly approving Qatar to pay Iran billions of dollars to let oil through the same Strait the Navy was blockading.

The left hand was enforcing the blockade. The right hand was paying to break it.

This is why oil never made sense during the war. Bad news sent oil up 5%. Good news sent it down 13%. The Financial Times reported that Bessent was on the phone with large commodity traders. Now we know the full picture. It was not just market communication. The administration was actively managing the physical oil supply behind the scenes while publicly declaring a naval blockade. The price of oil was being managed from both ends simultaneously — suppressed through secret payments to Iran and manipulated through back channels with Wall Street traders.

The US Navy publicly blockaded Iran. Trump paid Iran to open the Strait in private. The sailors enforcing the blockade had no idea the deal was already being cut above their heads.

That is not foreign policy. That is a betrayal of every service member who was put in harm’s way under the pretense of a nonexistent strategy.

Iran got its economic lifeline at the moment of maximum financial pressure. The moment when the sanctions and the blockade were working. The moment when a little more patience might have produced a real result. Instead, the administration blinked — secretly, so nobody would notice, and handed Tehran exactly what it needed to keep fighting.

Trump gave Iran a lifeline to stabilize its stock market. The Navy paid the price for it.

PBF remains a hold. The energy crisis is not over. Infrastructure destroyed during the war will take years to rebuild, regardless of what any deal says on paper. Crack spreads remain favorable, and jet fuel shortages are not resolved by a secret payment from Qatar. The thesis is intact.

Sirius XM

No change in the position after trimming some last month.

Sirius is having a good year, and I don’t expect that to change.

SiriusXM’s first-quarter results showed free cash flow tripling year over year, churn falling to a record-low 1.5%, and EBITDA margin expanding, prompting management to reaffirm robust full-year guidance of roughly $8.5 billion in revenues, $2.6 billion in adjusted EBITDA, and $1.35 billion in free cash flow.

Growth catalysts are building: April’s exclusive YouTube audio-advertising partnership extends reach toward 255 million monthly listeners starting this fall, while May’s expanded LiveRamp identity-targeting deal with AdsWizz strengthens programmatic monetization. June’s video-podcast distribution agreement with Tubi adds 100 million monthly users, leveraging podcasting’s strong revenue momentum. With leverage trending toward management’s low-to-mid 3x target and continued capital returns, this Zacks Rank #3 company’s broadening advertising ecosystem and disciplined execution support a constructive near-term outlook.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2026 earnings has remained steady at $3.10 per share in the past 60 days. In the past six-month period, SIRI shares have returned 35.8%.

—Zacks Industry Outlook

Alibaba

Sold!

I sold my stake in Alibaba this month. After five years of owning it, I needed a break — and more importantly, the thesis changed.

Alibaba is the Google of China. It is one of the most dominant technology companies on the planet, a genuine leader in AI, and by almost every fundamental measure, it is cheap. None of that matters right now. What matters is that Trump and Bessent have made it abundantly clear they will not allow Chinese companies to win the AI war. The Pentagon labeled Alibaba an aid to the Chinese military. Export controls are tightening. The geopolitical environment between the US and China is not improving — and in that environment, owning the most visible Chinese AI company is owning a target.

I will be looking to reenter at some point. The business is too good, and the valuation is too cheap to ignore forever. But after five years of watching this stock fight through trade wars, delisting threats, regulatory crackdowns, and now an active shooting war that has redrawn the lines between American and Chinese interests — I am taking the break it has earned me. Sometimes the best investment decision is the one that lets you sleep at night.

New Position: Tencent Music Entertainment

I opened a new position in Tencent Music Entertainment this month. TME is the dominant music streaming platform in China — think Spotify, but for 1.4 billion people — and it is trading at roughly one-tenth of Spotify's valuation. That kind of discount does not exist without a reason, but in this case, the reason is geopolitics, not fundamentals. And geopolitical discounts on great businesses are historically where the best returns come from.

The financials are genuinely impressive. TME is profitable, growing, and throws off real cash. It is a spinoff of Tencent, one of the most sophisticated technology conglomerates in the world, which means its operational DNA and balance-sheet discipline are in place. The music streaming business in China is still in its early innings compared to Western markets, where streaming penetration is mature. TME has room to grow into its valuation in ways Spotify simply does not at current prices.

The risk is the same as on every Chinese equity right now — geopolitics. I sold Alibaba partly because the target on its back had gotten too large. TME is a different profile. It is a consumer entertainment company, not an AI infrastructure play. It is not on the Pentagon’s radar. It does not compete directly with American technology interests. For a Chinese equity in this environment, that distinction matters. I am sizing this position accordingly — meaningful but not oversized — and will add if the thesis continues to develop.

This is part of getting back to the basics as an investor. This has legitimate 10x potential, unlike Alibaba.

Nam Tai Properties $NTPIF

Nam Tai has been quietly gaining momentum, and the next 60 days will tell us everything about whether that momentum is real or just noise. Three catalysts are on the clock simultaneously, and the stock cannot afford to miss any.

First, the press release announcing the new technology center must come before July 30th. That announcement has been dangled long enough that the market has partially priced it in — which means a delay hurts more than an on-time delivery helps. Second, Q2 earnings hit August 14th and the technology center has to show up in the numbers in a meaningful way. A press release without financial proof is just a press release. Third, the annual meeting came and went with no news on relisting. That silence is not fatal, but it is not encouraging. The relisting was supposed to be the catalyst that unlocked this position. Every quarter it gets pushed further the thesis gets harder to hold.

I am still holding but watching closely. Nam Tai has been a lesson in patience that has tested every definition of the word. The business is real, the assets are real, and the Shenzhen technology hub location is genuinely valuable. But real assets need real catalysts to move a stock — and July 30th is the next moment of truth. Miss it, and this position gets a serious reassessment.

GameStop

Ryan Cohen is going after eBay, and I believe he will figure out a way to get it done.

Cohen has been aggressive and public about the pursuit, making it clear this is not a casual conversation. Michael Burry reiterated this month that a GameStop acquisition of eBay would create an instant Berkshire Hathaway — a cash generating machine with a built in marketplace, a loyal customer base, and a CEO who has already proven he can take a dying retail brand and turn it into something the market underestimates. That thesis is compelling enough that I am staying in the position despite the one thing that gave me pause this month.

GameStop approved a share count increase, and I do not love it. Dilution is dilution and shareholders deserve a straight answer about what those shares are for. The most charitable read is that Cohen needs the ammunition to fund the eBay acquisition and is positioning the balance sheet accordingly. The less charitable read is that the stock is being used as currency at a moment when the valuation may not justify it. Cohen has earned enough of my trust to get the benefit of the doubt — but this is the kind of move that needs to pay off quickly. If the eBay deal gets done at a price that makes sense, the share increase will be forgiven. If it doesn’t, it won’t be forgotten.

House

Nothing crazy this month. The garage is finally wired — one of the bigger items on the list since we moved in and a project that took longer than it should have thanks to the electrician shortage I mentioned last month. Walking out there and flipping a switch that actually does something is a better feeling than it has any right to be. The closet is almost done as well. What started as a straightforward build has turned into one of those projects that reveals three new problems for every one you solve. We are close enough to the finish line that I can see it.

Spring delivered on its promise. Green grass, longer days, and enough warmth to actually enjoy being outside after a winter that wore out its welcome sometime around February. The trees are in the ground, the garden is planted and being negotiated with the deer on a daily basis, and the house is starting to feel less like a project and more like a home. Better times are here.

Upgrade to Paid

That is all for this month. Happy belated 4th of July to my American friends. I can’t believe summer is more than half over.

Thanks for being a part of this!

Casey Donaldson

Disclosure

The investment positions, opinions, and analysis contained in The Rover are for informational and entertainment purposes only and do not constitute financial advice, investment recommendations, or an offer to buy or sell any security. I am not a licensed financial advisor, broker, or investment professional.

All investments carry risk, including the potential loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The positions I hold and discuss in this newsletter — including but not limited to Bitcoin, gold, PBF Energy, MicroStrategy, MSBT, Sirius XM, Tencent Music Entertainment, Nam Tai Properties, GameStop, Sprott Physical Uranium Trust, and any other securities mentioned — reflect my personal investment decisions and are not recommendations for others to follow.

The Rover may discuss speculative investments, emerging markets, cryptocurrency, and other high risk assets. These are not suitable for all investors. Before making any investment decision, you should conduct your own research, consult with a licensed financial professional, and consider your own financial situation, risk tolerance, and investment objectives.

The information in this newsletter is believed to be accurate at the time of writing but may become outdated. Markets move fast. The world moves faster. Neither The Rover nor its author assumes any liability for decisions made based on the content of this publication.

Invest at your own risk. Think for yourself.

I hope you are having a great week. Here are The Rover’s highlights from last week:

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The Rover University:

Benny & The Squirrel prior to the SpaceX IPO.

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My top posts from the past week:

Click on the post, and share what you think!

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Thanks for being a part of this!

Casey Donaldson

The Missing Scientists

Who were the first people targeted in Iran by the US and Israel? The scientists.

Albert Einstein went into exile in 1933 because Hitler put a bounty on his head. Becoming a scientist can come with risks they don’t teach you in physics class.

What we are witnessing today reads like a science fiction novel. We are currently at 11 high-profile missing scientists working in plasma physics, anti-gravity, nuclear technology, and the cutting-edge metals science required to maintain strength at the most extreme temperatures in our galaxy.

I am going to cover the one I find most interesting — the granddaddy of all missing scientist cases. Neil McCasland.

William Neil McCasland is an astronautical engineer, retired United States Air Force major general, and former commander of the Air Force Research Laboratory. Currently the director of technology at Applied Technology Associates.

It was the morning of February 27th, 2026. A repairman was at the McCasland household. Neil had a brief interaction with him around 10am. His wife left for an appointment around 11am. By the time she returned at 12:04pm, Neil McCasland was gone. His phone, glasses, and wearable devices were all left on the table. A red backpack and a .38 revolver were missing. At 3:07pm his wife reported him missing.

The wife also reported that in the weeks prior, the 68 year old McCasland had been dealing with anxiety, lack of sleep, and short-term memory problems. Normal things as you approach 70. In casual conversation, he had mentioned he would rather not live than live with mental decline.

Surveillance cameras sit on both ends of the street. The public was asked to check doorbell cameras throughout the neighborhood. No video footage of McCasland has surfaced. The only physical evidence — an Air Force sweatshirt found one mile from his home.

Who was Neil McCasland? The list of what McCasland hasn’t done might be shorter than what he has:

• Bachelor of Science in Astronautical Engineering from the Air Force Academy

• Master of Science in Aeronautical Engineering from MIT

• PhD in Astronautical Engineering from MIT

• Studied at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government

• Ran Kirtland Air Force Base — the hub of 80% of America’s secret programs and classified research. Directed energy, space weapons, dark satellites. If the US is reverse-engineering UFO technology anywhere, it is at Kirtland.

• Oversaw research at Wright-Patterson Air Force Research Lab. The home of the Corona, NM crash debris. The same lab where the US reverse-engineered Nazi technology after WWII.

• Alleged Majestic 12 member — the secret committee of scientists, military leaders, and government officials formed to investigate and cover up alien spacecraft and extraterrestrial life. Never confirmed by the government.

If there was a reverse-engineering program or contact with extraterrestrial life, McCasland made a career of it. The guy was connected into parts of the government the President may not even know about. Presidents come and go. Guys like McCasland take a lifetime oath. The military doesn't want a one-term President impeding decades of work. And if the President is kept in the dark, playing dumb is always an option if something goes wrong.

McCasland’s wife claimed he only held a normal security clearance since retirement and had no knowledge of UFO remains from Corona (Roswell). But he wasn’t that innocent.

Remember the hacked Hillary Clinton emails WikiLeaks released in 2016? McCasland is in them.

Blink-182 singer contacted Hillary Clinton’s campaign chief to talk UFOs — The Guardian 10/11/2016

In another email, sent this year, he tells Podesta he has been in touch with a former official involved in the Roswell incident – in which, it is claimed, the US government covered up the its recovery of an alien ship in New Mexico in 1947. The government said it was a weather balloon. DeLonge said he had been in discussions with Maj Gen William McCasland, who had a long career in the US air force, specialising in matters pertaining to space. “He mentioned he’s a ‘skeptic’, he’s not … He just has to say that out loud, but he is very, very aware – as he was in charge of all of the stuff,” DeLonge wrote. “When Roswell crashed, they shipped it to the laboratory at Wright Patterson air force base. Gen McCasland was in charge of that exact laboratory up to a couple years ago.”

McCasland was quietly working with DeLonge on releasing UFO information to the public. His retirement was not as quiet as advertised. He was also part of a consulting firm that mixed private and government research funds. The only time government and private money get mixed is when the government can’t afford to be reported as involved. Sounds like a good reason to make someone disappear and make it look natural.

Especially at a moment when Italian magazine L’Espresso reported that Donald Trump is wrestling to gain oversight of secret agencies — agencies that, as mentioned, do not want oversight. Trump making UFOs a public issue suddenly makes a lot more sense. Presidential oversight needs public support. You build public support by opening the curtain just enough.

The mainstream media (MSM) wants to sell the story that McCasland wandered into the Cibola National Forest in the Sandia Mountains outside Albuquerque and took his own life. But after search parties of 700 people and extensive drone coverage of a national forest frequented by the public, nothing has been found. Not a trace.

My opinion: he is still alive somewhere. The group that took him knows exactly what they are doing. Every camera was evaded. Every tracking device was left behind. Cell phones were factory reset. The gun and backpack were taken to establish motive. Another missing scientist had her toothbrush and hair straightener taken. Again — motive. Not all 11 missing scientists were taken. But the ones that were taken were taken deliberately.

The strangest part of all of this is the story mirrors the plot of a book called The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin. One of Barack Obama’s most highly recommended books. There is a story that Eddie Vedder (lead singer of Pearl Jam) and Obama were sitting around a campfire one night. Vedder pushed Obama on the true nature of reality — how the world really works at the highest level. Whether things happen above the President’s head. Obama’s response was simple.

“Read The Three-Body Problem.”

The most interesting things I read this month:

Exxon warns oil inventories will hit dangerously low levels in weeks, forcing prices to shoot higher

Exxon warns oil inventories will hit dangerously low levels in weeks, forcing prices to shoot higher — CNBC

The Strait of Hormuz (SOH) remains closed. For the third month in a row, that is all that matters. The rumored peace deal announced recently hasn’t changed anything yet.

We have been writing about this since March. The warnings have gone from analysts and mainstream media writers to the executive suites of the largest oil companies on the planet. Chevron CEO Mike Wirth (who some could argue is the true leader of the US military) sounded the alarm first about inventories. Now Exxon Senior VP Neil Chapman is telling the world at a conference in New York that we are approaching the tank bottom.

Exxon Mobil warned Thursday that oil inventories will fall to record low levels in coming weeks, forcing prices to spike and curbing demand.

“We’re approaching unheard of inventory levels,” said Exxon Senior Vice President Neil Chapman at a conference hosted by Bernstein in New York.

“I mean really, really low levels,” Chapman warned. “You can debate whether that’s going to hit, those really low levels, in two weeks or three weeks. Once you get to that point, then you’ll see price shoot up.”

The price of physical Brent oil cargoes will spike to $150 to $160 per barrel when inventories hit all-time lows in coming weeks, the executive said. “When the price gets to a certain level, demand destruction brings it back into balance,” he said.

Iran’s closure of the strait has cost the market more than a billion barrels so far, the largest oil supply disruption in history, according to the International Energy Agency. Oil stockpiles have mitigated the impact so far, but that “can’t last forever,” Chapman said

The story of the Strait has always been food and energy. Basic human needs. And the longer the closure pushes on, the more those basic needs get squeezed on supply and pushed up on price. At this point, the Strait will still be under Iranian control on Labor Day. The Iranians are not on the clock. Trump is, as the rumored peace deal is already under threat as of Friday morning.

A deal may be close, but it would not be a peace deal as much as a surrender:

If this is accurate, this would be the greatest strategic loss for the US in history.

I was not alive for Vietnam, but watching Turning Point: The Vietnam War on Netflix, the parallels to Iran are impossible to ignore. The biggest one being the lies told to the American people. It is a sad thing to say out loud, but Iran has been more honest with the American public than our own President. I believed Trump on the first two or three peace deals. Now that we are at 39, it is tough not to feel like we are being played.

In the Netflix series, North Vietnam and the US argued about the shape of the negotiating table for two and a half months. That is a true story. Four sides — the US, South Vietnam, North Vietnam, and the Vietcong — and the communists would not sit down until they felt equal at the table. Sound familiar? Even this morning the deal is reportedly 75% done.

The rapid withdrawal at the end of Vietnam looks closer to reality in Iran every week this drags on. Countries around the world are hurting as food and energy supplies tighten. As we have predicted throughout this war, the longer it went on, the more US Treasury bond selling we would see. And March just saw the largest Treasury sale since 2023.

March Saw the Largest US Treasury Sale since 2023 — Bloomberg

The world needs energy. The world needs food. The world holds a lot of dollars. And right now, the world is selling those dollars to buy what it actually needs. Trump is great at pounding his chest and declaring America will be fine. Maybe it will be. But how great of a world leader are you when you crush your allies’ economies for your war, while China is making its name for itself partnering with countries for the exact opposite reasons?

“Bollocks!” Stacey Abrahams slams the rights redistricting

“Bollocks!” Stacey Abrahams slams the rights redistricting — MS NOW

Stacey Abrams was not on my bingo card for 2026, but here we are. And yes… the same Stacey Abrams who got a fresh $2 billion grant from the Biden administration after she lost the Georgia gubernatorial race.

Anyway…since the Iran war began, I could not for the life of me figure out how Trump felt comfortable with any of this Iran business heading into the midterms. This war feels about as unpopular as Vietnam in 1975 — the year Congress denied Gerald Ford additional funding because half of its members had won their seats on an anti-war platform.

I have written in these pages before that whatever you think of Trump, the man has been politically intelligent. The crazy words and posts haven't necessarily translated to crazy actions. Until Iran.

The story Abrams has been screaming about finally answers something I have been wondering for months. The redrawing of district lines across the South could cost Democrats 20 seats in Congress.

Despite Trump's deeply unfavorable political actions, Republicans will still hold Congress.

Political divisiveness will continue to grow as both parties drive toward their own version of socialism. One with state-backed businesses and one with no billionaires.

Beijing Deploys Long-Threatened Economic Arsenal Against U.S. Pressure

Beijing Deploys Long-Threatened Economic Arsenal Against U.S. Pressure — WSJ 5/5/2026

Since the trade war Donald Trump opened in 2018, during his first presidency, Beijing has been quietly building a counter-sanctions arsenal: a blacklist for foreign firms it deems hostile, a law authorizing punishment of any company that helps enforce U.S. sanctions on Chinese targets, a rule ordering Chinese parties to ignore those sanctions outright, and expanded powers for its antitrust regulators to kill cross-border merger deals on national-security grounds.

After the U.S. Treasury sanctioned five small Chinese refineries—the so-called teapots—for buying Iranian crude, China’s Ministry of Commerce activated, for the first time, its blocking rules. The 2021 statute is modeled loosely on the European Union’s 1996 blocking regulation against U.S. extraterritorial sanctions on Iran and Cuba, but the Chinese version has teeth its European model rarely tested.

Under Beijing’s rules, the affected refineries can now sue, in Chinese courts, any counterparty anywhere in the chain that complies with the U.S. sanctions—the bank that refuses the payment, the insurer that declines coverage, the shipowner that won’t carry the cargo.

Compliance with Washington has just become a litigable offense in Beijing. Every multinational touching Chinese oil flows now faces a bilateral liability problem its compliance department wasn’t built to manage.

The biggest thing Americans struggle to understand about China is its culture. China is patient in a way that would make most Americans physically ill. Passive-aggressive to the point of sickening. But the patience pays off.

Xi Jinping watched Trump start the first trade war in 2018 and began building this arsenal that same day. The same way watching Biden freeze Russian assets in 2022 began China's immediate move toward gold. If you don’t hold your assets in dollars, there is nothing to freeze. The pattern never changes — whether an action hurts China or not, defensive policies are implemented immediately to ensure it never happens again. China doesn't wait to see how things play out. China prepares for the next move before the current one is finished.

A company in China can now be sued for complying with Donald Trump's rules. Long threatened since the first trade war. Now it is live.

The next phase of the US-China conflict will be fought with these tools. And this is exactly why the dollar-workaround system that China has been quietly building matters so much. China does not need the dollar to do business. Oil and energy are priced in dollars across the globe, yet China found countries willing to sell outside of it — Russia, Venezuela, and Iran. It is no coincidence that a proxy war is currently happening in two of those locations and a presidential kidnapping in the other.

The real battle right now is not fought with missiles or tariffs. It is contested which currency future commerce is settled in. If that currency is not the dollar, the US is not the global power.

Saudi Arabia $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund opens Shanghai office to “boost China investment ties.”

Saudi PIF opens Shanghai office to boost China investment ties – Bloomberg 5/6/2026

If you are wondering who is and isn’t on our side in the Middle East, I would start by looking at who is opening investment offices in China.

Saudi Arabia’s $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund just opened its first office outside of the kingdom, in Shanghai, to deepen investment ties with China. It’s worth noting that China is already Saudi Arabia’s largest trading partner by a significant margin.

This is a peculiar partnership to watch. The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia asks Donald Trump for military favors with one hand while investing the proceeds from oil sales in China with the other.

Trust Saudi Arabia if you want. I won’t forget that 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 came from Saudi Arabia. A fact that has been quietly swept under the rug for 25 years.

China to buy at least $17 billion in US agricultural products annually

China to buy at least $17 billion in US agricultural products annually — Reuters 5/14/2026

WASHINGTON, May 17 (Reuters) - China has committed to purchasing at least $17 billion of U.S. agricultural ​products in 2026, 2027 and 2028, the White House ‌said in a fact sheet released on Sunday.

The commitment was made during meetings between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping last ​week, the White House said.

Sometimes I am surprised Donald Trump doesn’t have a shoulder injury from patting himself on the back so much.

After the Xi-Trump meeting last week, the White House announced that China committed to buying $17 billion in US agricultural products annually through 2028. The administration called it a big win for farmers.

Is it?

What the White House failed to mention is that $17 billion is still half the agricultural purchase levels under Biden. On top of that, diesel fuel for farm equipment is at its highest price ever. Every farmer that voted for Trump regrets it.

As a Midwest kid who grew up next to corn fields in Minnesota, farming holds a close place in my heart. Most of us from the Midwest come from family farms if you go back two to three generations. From John Deere locking farmers out of their own $600,000 combines with software restrictions to the seed corporations' monopoly, farmers were already hurting before any of this started.

You can ignore farmers hurting as much as you want. But when you complain about grocery prices, ask yourself where food comes from.

My brother-in-law farms a pretty big operation in North Dakota. He was thankful he locked in a fertilizer contract through July before the Strait of Hormuz closed on March 1st. Smart move. But even with fertilizer locked in, fuel prices have been cutting deep into profits. One day of fuel for his operation costs $4,000.

Americans are terrible at thinking ahead, but just because our lives haven’t flipped upside down yet due to supply chain disruptions doesn’t mean it’s not coming. Everything was expensive before Iran. Even if the situation in Iran ends today, fuel and food will continue to get more expensive. I have no idea what Trump was thinking.

Inflation is how the great powers of history have fallen.

The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam

The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam — WSJ

Americans feel threatened by AI. From jobs to utility bills, we are treating it more as direct competition than a tool for a better future. The mindset is simple — why support something that will take my job and use the energy I need?

The only thing growing faster than the artificial-intelligence industry may be Americans’ negative feelings about it.

In one poll after another in recent weeks, respondents have overwhelmingly voiced concerns about AI, a challenge to claims by industry executives that their technology would gain popularity by improving people’s lives.

Consumers resent energy-price jumps exacerbated by the spread of data centers. Workers fear widespread job losses. Parents worry about AI undermining education and harming children’s mental health. In recent months, the wave of anger has brought protests, swayed election results and spurred isolated acts of violence.

Whether you agree with the pushback or not is not the point.

China could not have written a better ally for the AI war than America’s own citizens. We have written many times in this letter about it, but people like to ignore the obvious — WE ARE IN AN AI WAR WITH CHINA! Do not fight the data centers. Do not fight the policy that allows AI to work alongside us. Support the policy that enables it to succeed for both parties.

AI taking jobs is a real fear, and I don’t think humanity has a clean answer for it right now. But we can produce more energy. The fact that our elected leaders have done nothing meaningful with the energy grid in 25 years is not AI’s fault.

From our April letter:

The constraining factor on building data centers is simple: you need an electrical grid capable of powering them. The US has added barely any terawatts to its grid over the last 25 years. You cannot build out AI without massive increases in energy. China has built and added an entire US grid's worth of energy capacity in the last ten years alone.

When your utility bill doubles in a month, it is hard to support the cause. I understand that. But the stakes here are much bigger than personal finances. Losing the AI race to China means China makes everything for the United States going forward — including the weapons our military depends on.

Supporting AI is not optional if the US wants to retain its global position. And it is not optional if you want your lifestyle to stay recognizable. When the UK lost its position as a global superpower, everything in their lives became dramatically more expensive.

Lifestyle

The best minds in history had something we no longer have. It's free. It requires nothing. Quiet time to think.

In the age of the thing in your pocket consuming every free moment, we lost a commodity we never knew we needed. Non-stimulated time to think about what is happening in our lives, the world, and our families.

So many people today just bounce from one thing to the next. You wake up and check a small screen. Go to work and stare at a larger screen. Come home and bounce back and forth between a huge screen and a small screen. Did you even realize this is your day?

This is not how it has always been. Even in the younger years of millennials’ lives, this was not the case. If you wanted to stimulate your brain, you had to do something about it. Today there is so much stimulation coming at you that you have to actively fight to find time to just think.

Think about what? Anything. Your dreams. Your goals. Where is the world going? Is a certain idea correct or incorrect? Are you living a life aligned with who you actually are? Study the ideas of the greatest minds in history and just sit on it for a while. See what comes to you.

Warren Buffett is the greatest investor of all time. But was he really an investor — or a professional thinker? He sits in his office and reads all day. He takes hours to just think. Buffett has made hundreds of billions of dollars doing what most people never make the time for, yet provides huge returns. Simple task, not an easy one. If you think it is easy, put your phone down for one hour at night and see how you do.

Think about being in nature for a week. A chirping bird, a stick breaking, water running — that may be all the noise you hear. Compare that to now, when something is going in your ear 24 hours a day. “I just need background noise while I work.” That is fine. But do you think your brain is operating at full capacity when that is happening? It isn’t.

I challenge you to take time this week to do nothing but think in quiet. And if you try to get out of it by saying you don’t have time — do it in the car. No music. No podcasts. Just drive and think for one week.

Quiet time to think has sharpened my focus when I need it most and given me the space to step back and realign my investments.

Investments

After watching the mania in markets over the last few weeks, if you aren’t scared, you aren’t paying attention. The entire market is being propped up by four companies while the government is telling us it can fund trillion-dollar deficits, build out data centers, bring manufacturing back to the states, fund the Iran War, and roll over existing debt all at the same time without HUGE money printing.

The first cracks in the market calling its bluff are pressuring Trump to make a bad deal with Iran.

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Hello reader,

I hope you are having a great week. Here are The Rover’s highlights from last week:

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The Rover University:

Porter Stansberry: The End of America in 2029 — Porter will give you a no BS take of where the world is at and how to make money off it.

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My top posts from the past week:

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I am glad you’re apart of this.

Casey Donaldson