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

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My top posts from the past week:

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Casey Donaldson

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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"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

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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.

******

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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The Trinity Site

At 5:30 am Mountain War Time, July 16th, 1945, the world would never be the same.

In the remote Jornada del Muerto desert of New Mexico, in the middle of a thunderstorm, the plutonium implosion device known as The Gadget ignited and kicked off a nuclear age nobody was ready for. The brightest scientific minds the world had ever assembled had spent years building it. When it detonated, the Gadget created a 38,000-foot mushroom cloud, vaporized the steel tower it sat on, carved a crater half a mile wide, eight feet deep into the desert floor, and turned the sand beneath it into a green radioactive glass called Trinitite that still lies in the desert today.

The site was chosen for its remoteness and secrecy, aka the middle of nowhere, relatively close to Los Alamos, where the Manhattan Project was led by J. Robert Oppenheimer. Los Alamos still serves as the nation's sole site for producing new plutonium cores for America's nuclear arsenal.

When the world’s first atomic explosion was lauded as a giant success, scientists hugged each other and celebrated. Oppenheimer sat back and realized the world had changed forever. Oppenheimer recalled a quote from Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Oppenheimer understood what those hugging did not.

After the celebrations subsided, particles floating through the air were just getting started. Radioactive contamination silently rode these particles through the air like a cowboy over a canyon, hitting everyone downwind — downwinders if you will.

On the morning of July 16th, 1945, a thirteen year old girl named Barbara Kent and her fellow dancers were camped near Ruidoso, New Mexico — a small mountain town nestled in the Sierra Blanca range, built around a sawmill and trading post near the noisy Rio Ruidoso river. Today, Ruidoso is an outdoor oasis with elk wandering through town, a popular ski destination, and cool mountain air that draws visitors from across the Southwest.

That morning, the girls were playing in the river when ash began to fall from the sky. What the young girls really thought were warm snowflakes was ash. At that elevation, it is not uncommon to see snowflakes at any time of year, and the girls had no reason to think otherwise. So they did what thirteen year old girls do on a summer morning by a mountain river. They caught the warm flakes with their tongues. They let them land on their faces. They laughed.

All of the girls except Barbara Kent were dead before the age of thirty. Cancer took every one of them.

Kent lived to tell the story. Most of the people downwind of Trinity never knew what had fallen on them, never understood why their bodies began to fail, never connected the warm snow of that July morning to the cancers that followed years later. They simply got sick and died in a small town in New Mexico while the rest of the world celebrated the dawn of a new age.

The downwinder phenomenon did not end at Trinity. Nuclear downwinders are residents of areas across Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and New Mexico who were exposed to radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests conducted mostly between 1951 and 1962. These individuals developed significantly higher rates of leukemia, thyroid cancer, and breast cancer from involuntary radiation exposure. Nobody asked their permission. Nobody warned them. Nobody told the girls by the river to stay inside.

Before the Trinity test was even complete, components for the first nuclear bomb were already being shipped across the Pacific to Tinian Island. The success of the test gave President Truman the confidence to issue the Potsdam Declaration demanding Japan’s unconditional surrender. When Japan did not surrender, the uranium cores were delivered by the USS Indianapolis right before being sunk by a Japanese submarine.

On August 6th, 1945, the uranium weapon Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, and eighty thousand people died immediately. The bomb leveled five square miles. By the end of 1945, the death toll had reached 140,000 from radiation sickness, burns, and fires. Ninety percent of the city’s infrastructure was destroyed, including 42 hospitals, killing most of the medical staff alongside their patients.

The nuclear age that began in a desert in New Mexico gained traction on the ground in Japan. More than 2,000 nuclear tests followed across the world as nations rushed to develop their own weapons. The Cold War was born, and the weapons grew stronger.

Some very large consequences came out of a desolate patch of New Mexico desert. The world hasn’t looked the same since.

The most interesting things I read this month:

An Update on Iran:

Last month, we dove deep into the Iran situation. As of now, not much has changed. Conflicting stories come out every day, negotiations are happening, then they aren't. JD Vance sat on the runway at Joint Base Andrews with a plane full of fuel ready to take off for talks, only to have Iran ghost him entirely. Vance, Kushner, and Witkoff don't know who to talk to. We have blown up the last four groups of Iranian leadership.

Here is what we know: the Strait of Hormuz is closed. That is all that matters.

Donald Trump told the world on April 18th that the Strait was open. It was not. This two-week excursion is now on week eight with no end in sight. The US military has admitted it could take six months just to clear the underwater mines already laid. And before we could even wrap our minds around that timeline, Iran laid a heavy new round of mines to expose the lie directly.

Iran wants the Strait closed, and Iran is calling America's bluff that it can't stay that way. The markets are agreeing with what Trump is lying about saying.

10% of the world's oil supply has been taken offline. 40% of regional refineries have been attacked. Oil is barely higher than it was before the war started. We are facing a larger supply shock than COVID, and markets are at all-time highs. Efficient market theory says the market is always right, yet this is the dumbest market I have ever seen.

And there is a reason for that.

The Financial Times reported that the Trump administration has been in direct communication with large-scale commodities traders to influence oil prices. That is the explanation for what otherwise makes no sense. Bad news comes out, and oil rises 5%, then the faintest hint of progress sends it down 13%. That is not a free market. That is a managed narrative.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Donald Trump may think they are the smartest guys in the room, but the longer this goes on, the more difficult the narrative becomes to manage. Keeping oil prices from going parabolic buys time and saves face. But actively manipulating commodity prices erodes the one thing that makes American financial markets the envy of the world — trust. Trump already has a “boy who cried wolf” problem, announcing the war is ending, and the Strait is open every two to three days. So when the world stops trusting those words entirely, the true consequences begin. And at that point, Trump will no longer be able to manage the narrative.

I have only touched on oil. This doesn't even account for urea, sulfuric acid, and the broader supply chain collapse quietly accelerating beneath the headlines.

We are on the clock for the Northern Hemisphere growing season. Only half of all farmers were able to secure the fertilizer needed for a successful harvest. Fertilizers feed approximately 4 billion people. With El Niño-driven droughts occurring across the planet, the fertilizers plants need to build strong roots and survive dry conditions simply are not there.

It is no exaggeration to say that one billion people could starve.

If you have not already, you need to stress-test your portfolio assuming the Strait of Hormuz remains closed for the rest of the year. The worst-case scenario, not even a month ago, was the Strait closing through mid-April. We are way past that now with no end in sight.

If things deteriorate from here, this will not be a financial story or a supply chain story.

It will be a civilization story.

Henry Paulson Suggests US Make a Break-Glass Treasuries Plan

The Secretary of the Treasury during the 2008 Global Financial Crisis just issued a stark warning to American authorities — we need a break-glass for Treasuries. You don't call for a break-glass emergency plan unless you see something the rest of Wall Street isn't talking about…

Former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson called on US authorities to prepare a back-up plan in order to avert a potential collapse in demand for Treasuries — an event that he warned would have “vicious” effects.

“We need an emergency break-the-glass plan, which is targeted and short-term, on the shelf, so it’s ready to go when we hit the wall,” Paulson said in an interview for Bloomberg Television’s Wall Street Week with David Westin.

Paulson said a breakdown in the $31 trillion market for US government debt would be different from the financial crisis he dealt with while at the Treasury’s helm two decades ago.

“As bad as it was,” the government had fiscal firepower to address the credit meltdown, he said. “You can come in and clean up the mess.” But in the event of a US public debt crisis, “when you hit the wall and you’re trying to issue Treasuries and the Fed is the only buyer and the prices of the Treasuries are going down and interest rates are up, that’s a dangerous thing.”

Take note that Paulson said when Treasuries hit the wall, not if.

Paulson was explicit about why this crisis would be different from 2008. During the financial crisis, the government still had fiscal firepower to clean up the mess. A US public debt crisis is a different animal entirely. When you are trying to issue Treasuries and the Fed is the only buyer, with prices falling and rates rising simultaneously, there is no clean-up. There is only damage control.

The fragility Paulson is warning about is already baked into the numbers. All of America's tax revenue from 2025 was spent by the end of March 2026. Everything from here through the end of 2026 is borrowed through Treasury sales, with the promise of paying interest on top of principal. At some point, the countries buying those Treasuries start asking whether that promise is credible. You wouldn't lend someone $100 at 5% interest if you believed they could never pay the $100. That is the calculation other nations are running as I write this.

A true treasury market crisis would trigger:

1. Interests rate surge

2. Inflation crisis

3. Government funding shortfall

4. Federal Reserve intervention

The consequences from a true Treasury crisis could bring down the entire global financial system and exactly why it would never be allowed to happen, and exactly why Paulson's real question isn't whether we need a plan. It's how much money we'll need to print.

I have been writing since the Iran war began that Iran does not need to beat the US military. Iran just needs to beat the US Treasury market. And as the Strait of Hormuz sits closed, Iran is accomplishing that mission slowly and deliberately.

The Hormuz closure is turning Treasuries buyers into sellers, cutting off American funding sources at the exact moment US deficits are blowing out. The only defense against a wave of countries selling USTs is to offer them something better than selling. A direct line of credit. A swap line.

U.A.E. Asks U.S. About a Wartime Financial Lifeline —WSJ

The United Arab Emirates has opened talks with the U.S. about obtaining a financial backstop in case the Iran war plunges the oil-rich Persian Gulf state into a deeper crisis, U.S. officials said.

U.A.E. Central Bank Gov. Khaled Mohamed Balama raised the idea of a currency-swap line with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Treasury and Federal Reserve officials in meetings in Washington last week, the officials said. The Emiratis emphasized that they had so far avoided the worst economic effects of the conflict but might still need a financial lifeline, the officials said.

Swap lines are typically administered by the Fed, but its 12-person policy committee, the Federal Open Market Committee.

It usually reserves them for relieving severe funding-market pressures that could spill back into the U.S. economy. It has standing arrangements with central banks in the U.K., Canada, Japan, Switzerland and the European Union. During periods of acute stress, most recently in 2020, it extended swap lines to nine other central banks, including in Mexico, South Korea and Brazil. The U.A.E. has fewer ties to U.S. markets than traditional swap recipients.

The United Arab Emirates has opened talks with the US about obtaining a financial backstop in case the Iran war drives the Gulf state into a deeper crisis. The UAE Central Bank Governor raised the idea of a currency swap line with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve officials in Washington last week. The UAE emphasized they had so far avoided the worst economic effects of the conflict but may still need a lifeline.

The WSJ noted that the UAE has fewer ties to US markets than traditional swap line recipients. But what the article buried is the number that matters — the UAE holds $108 billion in US Treasuries. A country facing a dollar shortage doesn't go looking for a swap line as a first resort; it sells Treasuries. That is the fastest and most obvious way to raise dollars in a crisis. The swap line conversation is happening because the US cannot afford to let that selling begin.

The longer the Strait stays closed, the more of these conversations will surface. Bessent will be handing out swap lines to any country on the verge of selling. Not out of generosity, but out of necessity. The US is not offering financial lifelines because it wants to. It is offering them because the alternative is watching the Treasury market unravel in real time.

The UST market is in such a fragile state that we are forced to lend in dollars rather than allow anyone to sell freely to raise dollars on their own. If we do not control other countries' actions, we are in trouble. We are throwing stones in a glass house. The world is a drunk driver, and the UST market is the car we are trying to keep between the lines. Iran doesn't need another missile. Every day the Strait stays closed, another country lines up for a swap line, and the car swerves over the centerline.

Chinese Satellites Over Mideast Battlefield Put U.S. on Edge

Since the U.S. and Israel launched attacks against Iran in late February, Chinese satellite imagery of the conflict zone has proliferated—potentially offering battlefield guidance to Tehran and other U.S. adversaries.

U.S. concerns about the use of such data in the Middle East grew after the Chinese artificial-intelligence company MizarVision claimed on social media to have tracked the movements of American aircraft carriers, F-22 stealth fighters and B-52 bombers by using AI to analyze satellite data.

A Pentagon assessment of China’s military power published in December said China-based commercial satellite firms have participated in business exchanges with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The Pentagon didn’t elaborate and it couldn’t be determined whether and how Iran might be using Chinese imagery to guide its military operations.

The capabilities of China’s remote-sensing satellites came into sharper focus after an American satellite operator said it was withholding indefinitely images of the conflict zone in the Middle East in response to a U.S. government request.

Russia and China are 100% helping Iran with the war against the US. Chinese satellites are tracking our every move in real time. Aircraft carriers, battleships, or fighter jets, nobody is safe from eyes that never sleep. While the US government is withholding all images, China is selling them to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The US has never faced something like this. It changes everything.

The Mahan Doctrine, developed by US Naval Officer Alfred Thayer Mahan in the late 19th century, has been the bedrock of American defense strategy since World War II. Its core argument is simple — national greatness is inseparable from sea power. Control the oceans, control the commerce, control the world. Build a concentrated battleship navy. Secure overseas bases. Dominate the maritime chokepoints.

What is going on in Iran tells us the Mahan Doctrine is dead.

Iranian missiles are accurate enough to evacuate CIA offices across the Middle East and keep American aircraft carriers 1,000 kilometers away from the battlefield, ending 80 years of strategic assumptions permanently. Sea lanes cannot be managed when the enemy can see everything from space and hit anything from shore. Aircraft carriers are being compared to dinosaurs — expensive, slow, and vulnerable in a world where a $50,000 Iranian missile guided by a Chinese satellite can find a $13 billion ship.

There may not be a clear loser yet. But there are two clear winners, and neither of them is the United States.

Russia is printing billions of dollars on record oil markets without firing a single shot at America. China is quietly expanding its influence across South Asia while the US burns through interceptors. The best proxy war China and Russia never had to fight is being fought in Iran.

Here is the part the mainstream media is missing. The story has been told from the beginning as America striking Iran to hurt China’s oil supply. Cut off Chinese energy, and you cut off Chinese power. Simple.

So explain this: China is one of the largest oil importers on the planet. And as of April 28th, China is exporting oil to the very region desperate for it (including American allies Japan and South Korea).

How badly are we really hurting them?

America Loses Its Will to Work

China, AI, and reshoring our defense industrial base are not the biggest threats America faces right now. The biggest threat is that people are no longer willing to do what it takes to keep America great. Without the people willing to do laborious jobs, none of the above matters. Bringing manufacturing back to America means nothing if we don’t have the workers willing to do the work.

We now have multiple generations of smart people who went into finance instead of building things. The finance jobs were easier and paid six to seven times more. Who wouldn’t choose Wall Street over designing automobile parts?

In the mid-1990s, politicians and commentators could still speak of America’s work ethic without apology. In the 2020s, America’s cognoscenti constantly suggest something baneful in the bourgeois idea that gainful toil is virtuous—movies romanticizing manipulated workers and vilifying rapacious corporate executives; intellectuals contending that the five-day, 40-hour work week abuses wage laborers; academics suggesting terms like “work ethic” are racist; journalists ready to portray every worker-management relationship as exploitative.

The constant brainwashing that work should be optional is starting to show its face in the numbers. COVID amplified these mindsets exponentially when people were paid double to sit at home and do nothing. As social welfare budgets grow to historic levels and people are applauded for opting out, this doesn't end well for a society.

Evidence abounds that many Americans no longer consider gainful work a natural and necessary part of life. The sudden explosion of online sports betting bespeaks a nation of young men seeking ways to pocket cash without doing any work. Pandemic-era measures that kept able-bodied men in their homes, bored and looking for ways to pocket a few bucks, enhanced the attractiveness of wagering on games. Americans bet $5 billion on sports in 2018. In 2024 they bet $150 billion. The sports-betting phenomenon reveals, if nothing else, the loss of any notion that income should bear some relation to a product or service rendered. The bettor produces no product or service for his winnings.

Ponder also the sudden ubiquity of advertisements for personal-injury law firms that promise to get their clients ample reward for damages. All over the country one encounters them on television, radio and billboards, with phone numbers leading to call centers that weed out weak claims. Have so many people really suffered bodily injury?

About 1 in 7 Americans 18 to 24, according to a recent Rand study, are neither working nor looking for work. Many young people support a “universal basic income”—a government payment to every American, regardless of income or employment status.

The COVID shutdowns left wounds that are still bleeding. The public used COVID as an excuse not to work and exploit the government for money. The problem is that money comes from working Americans. At some point, the people holding up the floor run out of strength.

We are now at an inflection point in our fight to maintain our position at the top of the global food chain. Keeping it is going to take hard work and determination. The American public does not seem to care. If you asked ten Americans to work 60-hour weeks to ensure America stays the most powerful country in the world, two might volunteer. If you asked the same of ten Chinese people, all ten would do it without hesitation.

Above is the largest disconnect nobody in Washington wants to talk about.

The ones who believe AI will create new jobs to replace the ones it destroys, fine. But what technical job does someone who takes orders at a fast food counter transition into during the AI revolution? Someone working 25 hours a week is not going to go string high voltage cable in the heat, grinding out 60-hour weeks. That gap does not close on optimism.

If America doesn’t win the AI war, fix the grid, and reshore the industrial base, all of which require hard, physical, unglamorous work, our standard of living will decrease. And then you do the hard jobs anyway, for a lot less money, with higher prices for everything you enjoy in your life right now.

The politicians won’t tell you this. Nobody wins an election by telling people they need to work harder. People are too used to waiting with their hand out. But the countries competing against us are not waiting for anything.

Lifestyle

For most of my years on Earth, sleep ranked at the bottom of my priority list. I had the full “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” mentality and lived it out completely. A good time always won. Drinks, staying out late, running on empty — that was just normal. Even on work nights, I’d watch TV in bed until 10:30 or 11 and be up at 5 am without thinking twice. When you’re sleep deprived 90% of the time, you adapt and keep moving. You don’t realize what you’re losing because you never had anything to compare it to.

Over the last couple of months, I made sleep a real priority for the first time. The results have been more dramatic than I expected. I feel better, I’m losing weight faster, and the quality of every day has gone up — especially the mornings, and I am not a morning person.

The changes I made were not dramatic. No alcohol during the week, and if I drink, no more than one night. Bed at 8 pm. I know that sounds like something nobody actually does, but it works because I still get to watch TV in bed. Some nights I’m out by 8:15. Some nights I’m up until 9. Either way, I’m consistently getting close to eight hours.

Eight hours is the target. I know Elon Musk brags about running on six, but he’s also a psychopath and visibly deteriorating in real time, which is exactly what the research would predict for someone his age running a chronic sleep deficit. Shoot for eight hours.

Two supplements have helped me get there: magnesium and glycine. Both are natural, cheap, and up to 50% of American adults are deficient in magnesium alone. A direct consequence of modern farming stripping nutrients from the soil. Message me if you want specific supplement recommendations.

I’m sharing this now because of a study I came across that stopped me in my tracks. A December 2025 study published in SLEEP Advances by Oregon Health & Science University found that insufficient sleep outweighed the effects of diet, exercise, smoking, and loneliness as drivers of reduced life expectancy. Do not compete with them, but outweigh them. Sleep also activates the brain’s drainage system, clearing the proteins associated with Alzheimer’s disease at twice the rate of waking hours. A Mayo Clinic study found that just four hours of sleep deprivation increases fat storage and accelerates aging of the heart’s blood vessels.

Take your sleep seriously. It is the highest return investment you are not making.

Investments:

The Buffett Indicator, or yardstick, is one of the most widely used metrics for evaluating how expensive the stock market is. The indicator is the ratio of stock market capitalization to GDP. What began in a 2001 Fortune magazine interview is now the go-to metric for stock market valuation. It’s not 100% perfect, but what is?

As you can see, 2026 has broken out to be the most expensive stock market we have ever seen. Higher than the Roaring 20s and the dot-com bubble. Currently, the indicator sits at 230%, well above the dot-com bubble peak of 146%. We are truly in uncharted territory.

Let me put this bluntly — if you don’t really know what you are doing, what you are buying, and why you are buying it, you shouldn’t be buying stocks.

401k

I gave a full breakdown of my 401k last month.

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I hope you are doing well.

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Craig Tindale

Why Sulphuric Acid Commands the Upstream Chokepoint of Civilisation.

Most people think industrial power resides in the somewhat glamorous, better-known end products: chips, missiles, EVs, copper, uranium, and food. If we were to simply listen to the public narrative, we’d assume nothing else existed…

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3 months ago · 107 likes · 11 comments · Craig Tindale

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Jim Grant on Current Events and What War Means for Inflation

Shovels, Not Spreadsheets: The Resource Crisis Wall St. Isn’t Pricing In with Luke Gromen & Craig Tindale

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Casey Donaldson

I hope you are doing well.

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I, Pencil by Milton Friedman — an oldie but a goodie on the complexity of supply chains. If the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, we will all learn hard lessons.

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Patrick Bet-David is joined by Richard Werner and Luke Gromen to break down oil, the state of the USD, and inflation.

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The US reported that three commercial ships were attacked by Iran’s IRGC in the last 24 hours. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed. Plan your week accordingly.

Thanks for being a part of this.

Casey Donaldson

We took last weekend off for Easter, but it’s good to be back.

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What’s Going on in Private Credit? — Howard Marks

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Every parent should listen to Joe Liemandt on the future of education.

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The Real War Isn’t in Iran — It’s in the US Treasury Market with Luke Gromen & Lyn Alden

Last Energy Crisis, This Sector Went Up 20x — Trader Ferg

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With the US-Iran failing to make a deal, the investing week starts tonight. Get ready for another wild week.

I am glad you’re here.

Casey Donaldson

Santa Fe, NM

New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment…or Atomic Spy Capital.

Contrary to my prior belief, New Mexico and its capital, Santa Fe, are beautiful. Stunning sunsets, art galleries, and famous green chiles. Ancient cultures of Catholics and Pueblo Native Americans lived side by side for centuries. You can buy a $7,000 leather jacket at Lucchese in downtown Santa Fe if you’re feeling froggy, but spy capital? Yes.

I knew little about Santa Fe before visiting, but the history just bled out of the 500-year-old chapels, adobe storefronts, and downtown streets where some of the most infamous Soviet operations in American history went down.

Nuclear fission came to New Mexico for one reason: there isn’t anything here. When you’re dealing with deadly radiation and the most violent explosions the world has ever seen, you need space. The extreme isolation and sparse population that kept the rest of the world away were exactly what drew the brightest scientific minds on the planet.

From the late 1930s until 1946, Santa Fe and its larger partner Albuquerque were the sites of some of the most intense spy activity in world history. No one knew about it for years — except the foreign agents involved.

Author and retired CIA operative E.B. Held calls Santa Fe a “sacred city” for Russian operatives. Soviet agents were so cocky that they reportedly had their pictures taken in front of the iconic Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi. In broad daylight. On the main plaza.

When you think of nuclear espionage, the mind naturally drifts to WWII. But it didn’t stop there. Perhaps the greatest defector in US history, a dismissed CIA operative named Edward Lee Howard, escaped from Santa Fe in 1985 in a bold scheme to flee to the Soviet Union. Our parents were in high school when espionage was still being conducted on these streets. It wasn’t that long ago.

Most people don’t even know what goes on in New Mexico. That is exactly how the intelligence agencies prefer it.

Winston Churchill once said of the Soviet Union, “It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” New Mexico was where that enigma quietly did its most devastating work on American soil.

You can still visit these locations today, the same streets where the Soviets laid the groundwork to compete in the arms race and change the course of the Cold War.

The building Soviet agent Josef Grigulevich used to plan the assassination of Leon Trotsky still stands on Santa Fe’s central plaza. It’s a Häagen-Dazs ice cream shop. Nobody knows.

The spy meeting house in Albuquerque is now a bed-and-breakfast. 209 High Street, where David Greenglass handed over bomb secrets, is currently the Spy House B&B. You can sleep there tonight.

The biggest act of treason in US history happened on a bridge in Santa Fe. On June 2, 1945, Klaus Fuchs handed Harry Gold a packet containing bomb sketches, trigger details, the upcoming Trinity test location, and America’s intention to use the bomb on Japan. In a single meeting. The Soviets knew more about the Manhattan Project than Harry Truman did. The father of the Soviet bomb, Igor Kurchatov, later described the intelligence flowing out of New Mexico as “of tremendous, inestimable importance” to the Soviet state.

And then there’s Oppenheimer. His codename in Soviet intelligence files was “Chester.” The CIA investigated and concluded there was, in the words of the report itself, “room for an honest difference of opinion.” That isn’t a clearance. That’s a polite way of saying they never fully ruled it out. The man who built the bomb may have been feeding its secrets to the enemy the entire time.

New Mexico. The Land of Enchantment. Where you can walk the same streets where the Cold War was decided before Americans knew it had started.

Source

The most interesting things I read this month:

The Iran “Excursion”

President Trump has called what the average person would call a war an excursion, a short military exercise with an end in sight. What it’s actually been is anything but that. We have heard every day that this will all be over soon. I regret to inform you that the President of the United States hasn’t picked up too many history books.

When you kick a hornet’s nest, you don’t get to decide when the hornets stop coming after you.

On February 28, 2026, the US and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury — a joint strike campaign targeting Iran's leadership, nuclear program, and military infrastructure. The operation included a decapitation strike that assassinated Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei during Ramadan. Killing the Supreme Leader during Ramadan is the equivalent of assassinating the Pope on Easter. Notably, just three days before the strikes, Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi said a historic agreement to avert conflict was within reach. The attack came during active negotiations. Israel knew time was slipping away to eliminate the Ayatollah, but Trump couldn't resist being in charge of the situation, so the US jumped in alongside them.

Iran retaliated with hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles targeting US military bases across Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. If you are an ally of America, you are a target in Iran's eyes. Approximately 2,000 vessels and 20,000 seafarers are now stranded in the Strait of Hormuz. More than 1,750 people have been killed in Iran. Thirteen US service members have been killed. At least 1,094 people in Lebanon have been killed in Israeli strikes since March 2. More civilians have died on both sides than soldiers.

The head of the International Energy Agency called this the greatest global energy security challenge in history. Brent crude surged roughly 30% in under three weeks. Energy infrastructure is being attacked daily.

Iran rejected Trump’s 15-point ceasefire proposal and issued five conditions of its own, including war reparations and Iranian sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s military mocked the Trump administration publicly, asking whether the level of internal conflicts had reached the point where America was negotiating with itself. Trump is learning that making a deal in New York real estate is considerably simpler than resolving a war on the global stage.

This is your friendly reminder that during the Iran-Iraq war of 1980, Iran fought on for six years after Iraq proposed the first peace plan.

It blows my mind that no one in the US government apparently considered Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz as a consequence of this war. The Atlantic and CNN both reported that Trump and his associates never war-gamed that scenario. 20-25% of the global oil supply travels through a single strait. As we wrote in last week’s piece, One in the Hand:

In the name of cheapness efficiency, we concentrated 25% of the world’s oil through one chokepoint. That’s not a supply chain. That’s a single point of failure.

Iran hasn't stopped at closing the Strait. It has made all energy infrastructure a target. If you purchase American weapons, you are a target. Iranian attacks have severely damaged over 40 energy assets across nine countries crippling key infrastructure in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf, including 17% of Qatar's LNG capacity. These strikes have forced facility closures, disrupted maritime traffic, and sent global energy prices soaring. More than 40 Middle East energy assets ‘severely damaged,’ IEA chief says —CNBC

The 2008 Financial Crisis was caused by financial engineering and excessive debt; it nearly brought down the system, but it was recoverable. Iran's attacks are on physical world assets. You can't restructure a destroyed LNG terminal. It takes 3-5 years to build one from scratch. Each train is custom-made, several stories tall, and requires heavy-haul equipment just to put in place. It’s the largest LNG field in the world, and Qatar has 115,000 people who work there, and livelihoods depend on those facilities.

Australia Fuel Crunch Expands to Hundreds of Gas Stations —Bloomberg

Fuel shortages are already spreading. Australia reported 600 gas stations running out of fuel in a single week.

If I were Japan or South Korea right now, I would not feel confident in my alliance with the United States. Both countries are heavily reliant on Middle East oil. It won’t be long before their leaders have to explain to voters why holding trillions in US Treasuries is an intelligent idea while their citizens sit in fuel lines for hours.

The Strait of Hormuz and Middle East energy will never look the same as they did before February 28th, 2026.

Since the birth of the petrodollar system in 1973, energy markets and financial markets have been inseparable. Gulf countries sell oil, recycle the proceeds into US financial markets and weapons, and the system hums along. It’s worked out beautifully for America — cheap oil and record stock markets. The rest of the world had a different experience, as covered in last month's issue — Regulators, Mount Up! To make a long story short, a Middle East alliance can not happen due to taking over global oil prices, so Israel and the US continue to kneecap countries and cause division.

Financial markets have been violently volatile, surging on days Trump announces peace progress and crashing when Iran proves he was lying. Iran Hasn’t Requested Pause on Energy-Site Strikes —WSJ The Wall Street Journal exposed one such lie when the White House claimed Iran had requested a pause on energy site strikes. Iran had made no such request.

Iran doesn’t need to beat the US military; Iran just needs to beat the US Treasury market, and Iran is winning. Here is the number that matters: every time the 10-year Treasury hits 4.4%, Trump announces a ceasefire or a breakthrough in peace talks. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the administration's economic success should be measured by the 10-year Treasury yield. We are at an all-time high since Liberation Day. The bond market didn't just create fear, it created the famous term TACO. Trump Always Chickens Out. The same dynamic that forced Trump to retreat on tariffs is now driving the war policy. It goes to show that high debt levels tie your hands.

The 30-year Treasury is approaching 5%. At that level, the interest expense on America's debt becomes a fiscal death spiral. It is scientifically proven that we will go bankrupt print money if the 30-year Treasury is over 5%.

The only exit is the printer. Printing money into the largest energy crisis of our lifetimes, with inflation already climbing at the fastest rate most Americans have ever seen, is a recipe for numbers that would make the 1970s look mild. Inflation has brought down nations far more powerful than we like to admit. The US is the best in the world at blowing things up; everyone knows that. But missiles and aircraft carriers cannot save the Treasury market.

Energy and financials are just the beginning. This is where shit gets real. One third of the world's fertilizers, helium for microchips, and the petrochemicals that make your Lulu leggings all pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

Helium shortage has already started impacting tech supply chains —Reuters A helium shortage is already impacting tech supply chains.

The global population of 8.3 billion people is fed thanks to humanity's extraordinary ability to produce food with fertilizers and genetically modified seeds. Remove one-third of that fertilizer supply, and you are not talking about higher grocery bills. You are talking about places that import food, having nothing to import.

It's already starting. Midwest farmers are saying plainly, if you didn't secure your fertilizer last year, you aren't getting any this year. What we call in the business a no-bid market. No amount of money fixes a shortage that doesn't exist. We are entering a period where the things that matter most — energy, food, raw materials cannot be purchased at any price.

The ceasefire of a few days ago is the most fragile ceasefire in our lifetimes. The entire planet is walking on egg shells. The Strait is still not open, and until then everything above applies. It is not a coincidence we won’t hear anything until after the market close on Friday, as the US has not slowed down in shipping personal and equipment for a ground invasion to the Middle East.

More to come on the supply chain crisis next.

What to watch: Energy prices. I am studying some coal names, as they will be needed to supplement all the LNG that has come offline. A new decade of energy is among us.

A 12-Order Cascading Analysis of a Zero-Flow Strait of Hormuz Closure

Systemic Risk: A 12-Order Cascading Analysis of a Zero-Flow Strait of Hormuz Closure — Craig Tindale

Overall, investor consensus right now includes the level of denial I have not seen in my investing career. The market crashed at the beginning of a virus that 99.9% of people survived Covid was dramatic, but apparently the greatest energy shock the world has ever seen is no big deal. That disconnect should concern anyone paying attention.

The gap between paper markets and physical reality is widening in ways that cannot be ignored. WTI crude seems reluctant to hold above $100 a barrel while physical Omani barrels are trading at $160. Paper silver contracts sit around $70, while you cannot find physical silver online for less than $80. What you are witnessing is the financial market manipulating the price of a share of oil on a screen in America versus the price of a real barrel of oil in the Middle East. Those two things are no longer the same.

The markets and media are pushing a narrative that things are not yet out of hand. I want to point out two facts that cut through that narrative:

1. The world’s most powerful military (according to Trump and Rubio) has not been able to open the Strait of Hormuz.

2. If the Strait remains closed for another two weeks, it becomes a near certainty that US stock and bond markets will get hit by the combined effect of the Financial Crisis and Covid. Simultaneously.

Earlier this month, Craig Tindale published an analysis of the cascading collapse of global supply chains that will occur if the Strait remains closed. It is long. It is a must-read:

The modern world order, having organized itself around efficiency, cost minimization, and logistical precision, has created a machinery of dependence so extreme that the interruption of one narrow corridor can propagate outward into a general crisis of civilization.

What appears at first as a maritime blockade is in fact the exposure of the entire global system as a hierarchy of brittle interdependencies.

Here is the chain as Tindale lays it out: oil and LNG fail as inputs into electricity, fertilizer, shipping, chemicals, mining, manufacturing, and state finance. From there, fuel inflation becomes fertilizer inflation. Fertilizer inflation becomes food inflation. Food inflation becomes urban instability, sovereign subsidy exhaustion, and hunger. In this sequence, food shortages are not a secondary humanitarian issue. They are among the central political outcomes because modern populations do not experience systemic breakdown through grand strategy. They experience it through unaffordable bread, intermittent power, empty pharmacies, and the collapse of public order.

The physical cascade goes deeper than food. The loss of sour crude becomes a sulfur and sulfuric acid crisis. That becomes a crisis for copper and cobalt. That becomes a transformer and grid crisis. That becomes a semiconductor crisis. That becomes a crisis for computing and data centers.

The myth that digital civilization floats above heavy industry is, in this scenario, extinguished. Compute is shown to rest on copper, transformers, stable voltage, LNG, and ships.

In this framework, hyperinflation is not cyclical. It is being used as a tool in war. When energy-importing nations are forced to acquire dollarized fuel at any price, when currencies weaken, and fertilizer costs reprice an entire harvest cycle, inflation enters every household budget and every government ledger simultaneously. Firms cannot quote. Governments cannot subsidize. Populations can no longer calculate the future. Credit markets seize. Foreign exchange reserves are draining. The boundary between economic crisis and political crisis disappears.

The closure of Hormuz, under this analysis, is the event through which the modern world recognizes that its supply chains were never only economic structures, but the hidden constitution of social peace itself.

If we get to April 15th and the Strait is still closed, the world will begin to spiral. The collapse of the following supply chains has already begun:

• Fertilizer

• Helium and Electronics/AI

• Pharmaceuticals

• Plastics

• Oil/LNG

It is 2026, and the threat of starvation for food-importing nations is real. Some of the largest food importers outside China are Japan, the EU, and South Korea. That list reads almost identically to the list of the largest holders of US Treasuries. Those countries own 40% of US bonds.

You know what countries with hungry citizens don't do? Buy US stocks and bonds. In reality, America's closest allies will be selling Treasuries and liquidating US assets to raise cash to buy food at prices none of us have ever seen.

In such a world, hunger, hyperinflation, sovereign failure, technological stagnation, and geopolitical militarization are not separate crises. They are the normal operating features of a civilization that has discovered, too late, that its efficiency was built on concentrated fragility.

What to watch: US Treasuries. As nations raise cash, Treasury rates rise. The West dies in the bond market, so we will either default on our debt or print the money to make up the difference. We will never default on the debt so the big print will be forced resulting in extreme levels of inflation.

There is nothing wrong with playing defense. Stack cash. Get your watchlist dialed in. Get ready to pounce on the buying opportunity that follows. Cash is a position.

Banking, payments services disrupted after Amazon UAE data centers hit in drone strikes

Banking, payments services disrupted after Amazon UAE data centers hit in drone strikes —CNBC

What the mainstream media isn’t reporting is that the US hasn’t had more assets destroyed in a war since WWII, and we are only a little over a month in.

Iran understood the American weapons position better than most Americans did. Iran deliberately wasted its older, inaccurate, and smaller missiles early, knowing that US and Israeli interceptor stockpiles are fixed, and that replacing them requires an ass-kissing conversation with China. As the war has progressed, Iran has launched fewer missiles with greater strength and greater accuracy. They are not running out. They are just getting warmed up.

CNBC reported that Amazon had two data centers hit in the Middle East in the early weeks of the conflict.

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. So if you are Amazon, Apple, Meta, Nvidia, or Google, where are you building your data centers? New or after being hit by Iran?

The Middle East. The only American ally with a grid capable of supporting them. 175 existing data centers with 98 more scheduled by 2029. All within range of Iranian missiles.

The Magnificent Seven stocks have driven roughly a third of the entire S&P 500's market capitalization. Up from 12.5% in 2016. One third of the American stock market is now at the mercy of data centers sitting inside a war zone.

Think about what that means. The stock market is the economy. The stock market is the primary driver of tax revenues. The retirement accounts of 100 million Americans. All within striking distance of Iranian missiles.

The consensus view repeated endlessly by mainstream media is that the Iran conflict is fundamentally about China. Maybe. But has anyone in that conversation accounted for what happens when the Mag 7 starts losing data centers and has nowhere to build new ones?

Shifting construction back to the US is not an option. There is a three-year backlog for new data center electrical connections in America. We failed to address our grid problem for a generation in the name of climate change. The world has now been divided into two groups: countries that took action on climate and countries that did not. The countries that did not (Russia, China, and Iran) now have the rest of the world begging them for raw materials and energy.

Without rapid data center construction and improvements, the US will lose the AI race to China. When the US loses the AI race to China, it will have to ask China’s permission before entering any new conflict after Iran.

What to watch: I would no longer have a majority of my wealth in the S&P 500. I have taken steps to de-risk. A market crash of this magnitude would force the Fed to inject liquidity.

Boil In Your Own Oil

Those who began this operation should be left to work out their own oil problems — to boil in their own oil, so to speak.” — Pres. Eisenhower, 1956 — Luke Gromen

“Those who began this operation should be left to work out their own oil problems — to boil in their own oil, so to speak.” — President Eisenhower, 1956

That quote was made famous when the last global reserve asset fell. I covered the Suez Crisis in depth last month in the There Can Be Only Two section — but it wasn’t even a war so much as a small conflict. Eisenhower had been the Allied Commander in charge of all of Europe in WWII and had just finished fighting a decade earlier. Unlike today, America leaders were sick of war.

So when Britain, France, and Israel invaded Egypt simultaneously in October 1956 and left Eisenhower holding the bag, his response was cold and surgical. He imposed crippling economic sanctions that effectively cut Europe off from imported energy and forced all three allies to withdraw. He didn’t feel comfortable doing it. Britain and France were American allies, after all. But he felt he had no choice. How could the US support Britain and France, he asked, if in doing so it lost the whole Arab world?

Eisenhower’s gamble ultimately failed, Egypt aligned with the Soviet Union anyway and used the same dangle and delay strategy on Washington that Iran is using on Trump today. But the template Ike created was real: sometimes the only way to recalibrate a relationship that has become strategically costly is to let it burn.

Vance reportedly knocked PM in difficult phone call for overselling chances of Iran regime change — Israel Times 3/27/26 “Before the war, Bibi really sold it to the president as being easy, as regime change being a lot likelier than it was.

A month into this war, the Western mainstream media has begun admitting on multiple fronts that Israel convinced Trump to enter this conflict — and is now looking for someone to blame as the war deteriorates. The Israeli Times reported on March 27th that Vice President Vance had a difficult phone call with Netanyahu, who reportedly sold the president on the idea that regime change was far more likely than it actually was.

Whether you agree with Trump's policies or not, the man has had outstanding political instincts for a decade. You don't engineer the greatest political comeback in American history without them. This war has felt out of character. Luke Gromen pointed to a thread by @JanitorTito_ on X that offers the first logically coherent explanation for Trump's actions that I have seen since the bombs started falling. I am building on Gromen's framework here because it's the only alternative that makes sense.

Janitor Tito’s argument begins with a structural problem. The US and Israel have a dependency that is too deeply embedded to unwind through conventional policy. The lobby is too entrenched, the Overton window too narrow, and direct confrontation politically impossible. So how do you recalibrate a relationship that cannot be openly discussed?

His answer: You accelerate it. You support knowingly destructive plans explicitly and publicly, on Israel’s behalf. You name the beneficiary openly. You make the costs undeniable and visible to the American public. You break the window from the outside because it cannot be opened from the inside.

This long arc strategic thinking does not originate with Trump, Rubio, or Vance. They are the visible surface. It originates in the permanent fixtures — intelligence, foreign policy institutions, and the private strategic circles that produce the people who rotate in and out of power. The origin point is 1973. The Yom Kippur War and the oil embargo made the structural tension between unconditional support for Israel and American energy and regional interests impossible to ignore at the strategic level. That is when serious long-term thinking about this problem began inside the CIA and the State Department. It was never committed to paper as formal policy. It was transmitted through conversation, institutional culture, and the informal networks connecting intelligence, finance, and foreign policy elites across administrations.

The Overton window was intact then. But the thinking was already decades old.

What is new is not the thinking but the political moment. For the first time, a coalition has emerged that is simultaneously nationalist enough to prioritize American interests over the relationship and populist enough to be somewhat insulated from the traditional costs of doing so. The thinking has finally found a vehicle willing to operationalize it.

Here is the dollar connection that ties everything together, and this is where Janitor Tito’s analysis hits hardest. The dollar’s reserve status rests on three pillars: military dominance, energy markets priced in dollars, and the perception of the US as a stable, rational actor. The Israeli relationship has been quietly corrosive to at least two of those pillars for decades. It generates regional instability, complicating Gulf relationships. It produces foreign policy that looks irrational to external observers. And it has accelerated adversaries' motivation to build dollar alternatives. The single greatest threat to dollar reserve status is the BRICS coalition, and its political cohesion is substantially driven by the perception of US foreign policy as captured by a specific interest rather than driven by rational national interest of the US. Countries that might otherwise be indecisive about dedollarization have been pushed toward it by the optics of American Middle East policy.

Reserve currency status is the foundational source of American power, far more important than any bilateral relationship. If the Israeli relationship has become a structural threat to that status, it becomes unnecessary regardless of every other consideration. A country that controls the global reserve currency can recover from almost anything. A country that loses it cannot. That is the entire strategy in one sentence.

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.

But Janitor Tito is honest about the risks. This is a controlled demolition attempted in a nuclear adjacent environment with multiple actors. The architects are betting that chaos produces a better equilibrium than managed decline. That bet does not always pay off. The danger is the transitional period — oil above $100, perceived US destabilization, and China capitalizing on the chaos to accelerate dedollarization before the strategy reaches resolution.

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.

High risk. Potentially the highest reward any American president has attempted in 80 years. The question, as Janitor Tito puts it, is whether we can ride it to a controlled outcome.

What to watch: There is a significant risk to this plan, and it could go very badly. Reduce risk, raise cash, and stockpile essential goods. We have begun doing this in our own home as food production systems come under sustained attack. This is not paranoia. This is preparation.

When Humanoid Robots Come to a Small-Town Factory

When Humanoid Robots Come to a Small-Town Factory —WSJ

A robot is doing a job in Cheraw, North Carolina that a person did a year ago. For $10 an hour. Soon $2. That’s not the future. It’s not a movie. That is happening right now.

Stepping gingerly across the metal floor, it holds its four-fingered hands at chest level until it reaches its objective: a 25-pound basket of bearing components fresh from a stamping press. The worker uncurls its claw-like fingers, daintily grips the basket by its edges and walks it over to a conveyor that will send it through an industrial washing machine. About a minute after it grabbed the first basket off a pallet, it returns to grab another. So it goes for eight hours a day, basket after basket, pallet after pallet.

A year ago, a person did this job.

The robot is called Digit, built by Agility Robotics and currently being tested by Schaeffler, a global manufacturer that makes parts for cars and airplanes. There are only 200 humanoid robots in the workforce today. McKinsey estimates 5 million by 2040. That number is laughable, and not in the way McKinsey intends. China already has 2 million industrial robots running right now, so you’re telling me that will double in 15 years and not 5 or less? I don’t think so. McKinsey will be lucky to still have clients by 2030 at this pace. Who needs consultants when the robots and AI are smarter than the consultants?

Cheraw employs about 750 people. Like many small towns across America, it has faced decades of economic disruption from poor trade policy. The locals blame NAFTA. The textile industry left. Factories closed. The timber industry struggled. Now the robots are arriving, not as a recovery, but as the future.

As this article came out, two more headlines caught my attention:

OpenAI’s Former Research Chief Aims to Automate Manufacturing With AI — WSJ

Jeff Bezos in Talks to Raise $100 Billion for AI Manufacturing Fund —WSJ Jeff Bezos is in early talks to raise $100 billion for a new fund that would buy up manufacturing companies and seek to use AI technology to accelerate their path to automation. The fund, described in investor documents as a “manufacturing transformation vehicle,” is aiming to buy companies in major industrial sectors such as chipmaking, defense and aerospace.

Bezos is raising $100 billion to automate manufacturing. OpenAI’s former research chief is targeting factories. The smartest capital in America is finally paying attention. The problem is that China didn’t wait for American capital to pay attention.

China has entire factories running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in the dark. No breaks. No PTO. No health insurance. No humans. While America was debating trade policy on Twitter and consulting firms were building PowerPoint decks about the future of work, China was building the future.

Iranian missiles hitting Middle East data centers aren’t just an energy story or a financial story. They are a manufacturing story. No data centers means no AI progress. No AI progress means China wins the automation race by default, while America is still trying to find a plug-in.

The road to AI and robotic manufacturing will be a roller coaster. But the things I know are:

1. We are currently losing to China in robotic manufacturing and AI.

2. If missiles keep hitting AI data centers for too long, we will lose the AI race entirely.

3. If neither of those is addressed sooner rather than later, China will manufacture everything for our military moving forward.

What to watch: AI is accelerating much faster than anyone is talking about. What China makes for us doesn’t seem like a big deal until it’s the airbag censor in a vehicle or a safety switch in a fighter jet. These items are small in size, but will shut down the whole production line.

Lifestyle

The Real New Year

Since birth, we have been told that New Year’s Eve is on December 31st. You get all dressed up, still riding the Christmas high, and count down to the ball dropping. You get your resolution dialed in and your midnight kiss lined up.

I am here to tell you there is a better day to celebrate new beginnings.

March 20th was the Spring Equinox —the real first day of the new year. It is the first day when daylight and darkness are equal, the inflection point where the balance tips toward light. Every ancient civilization knew this. We forgot it somewhere between the Hallmark calendar and the ball drop.

So if you abandoned your January resolution somewhere around February 3rd, you are not behind. You are right on time.

It has always been hard for me to get excited about a fresh start when there is snow on the ground, darkness by 5 pm, and the seasonal depression is sitting on your chest like a weighted blanket. It is much easier to commit when the days are getting longer, the weather is turning, and the world outside your window starts looking alive again.

Everything in life moves in cycles. Nature doesn’t start its new cycle in the dead of winter. It starts now, when the cold dark gives way to warmth and new life. There is no reason your cycle should be any different.

The resolution you gave up on is still waiting for you. Pick it back up.

Investments:

The ceasefire in Iran is cute. But let’s be honest about what just happened.

Trump is not tough enough to do what would actually be required to defeat Iran. And frankly, the world couldn’t endure that level of pain even if he were. We all know Trump deeply cares about the stock market and his ego. A baseless victory will be declared, chest pounding will occur, and America will walk away. The timeline is unclear. The outcome is not.

No matter what Americans are told, the rest of the world watched this war play out in real time. They saw the Strait of Hormuz closed for weeks. They saw energy infrastructure across nine countries destroyed. They saw Iranian missiles get more accurate as the war progressed, while America announced a new peace deal every time the 10-year Treasury hit 4.4%.

The world doesn’t grade on Truth Social posts. We lost.

And the consequences don’t disappear with a ceasefire. Energy infrastructure that took decades to build will take years to rebuild. Supply chains that snapped don’t reattach overnight. Allies that watched America stumble don’t forget what they saw. The ceasefire ends the shooting. It doesn’t undo the damage.

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(Public, No Paywall) The Hormuz Crisis: An Alternative View

March 22, 2026…

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4 months ago · 185 likes · Anas Alhajji

Noahpinion

Decade of the battery

In 2015, Benedict Evans wrote a very influential piece called “The smartphone is the new sun”. By the middle of the 2010s, it was pretty clear that that decade would be defined in many ways by the mobile computing platform that Steve Jobs unveiled in 2007. For regular people, smartphones became the locus of their lives — an ever-present tether constantl…

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4 years ago · 134 likes · 54 comments · Noah Smith

Watch: The Next Phase of the New World Order

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Lincoln County, New Mexico

Regulators
We regulate any stealin' of his property
We're damn good too
But you can't be any geek off the street
You gotta be handy with the steel, if you know what I mean
Earn your keep
Regulators, mount up!

Those lyrics came from a movie based on a real story about the oldest game in American history. Someone had the money, someone wanted in, and somebody had to die for it.

Young Guns, starring Emilio Estevez, Charlie Sheen, and Kiefer Sutherland, was a band of outcasts hired by distinguished gentleman and county store owner John Tunstall to tend to his cattle in Lincoln County in the 1870s.

L.G. Murphy & Co. held a monopoly in the market, operating a store and brewery at Fort Stanton while leveraging military connections to secure contracts to supply beef and vegetables to the fort and the local reservation. Military contracts were the equivalent of moving kilos back then, the money was that good

The House — Murphy and Dolan acquired the cattle used to fill these contracts through shady means. Foreclosing on settlers who bought land on credit, leveraging the Santa Fe Ring — a corrupt network of politicians, attorneys, and land speculators who ran New Mexico Territory like a private business from the late 1860s all the way to 1912. Organized crime with a sheriff’s badge.

It’s hard to watch other people make money when you know you could do the same thing yourself. Pure capitalism. Tunstall and Chisum did the math. The problem wasn’t the idea, the problem was the competition were thugs. Gangsters don’t like it when someone invades their territory. Doesn’t matter if it’s a street corner in Chicago or Lincoln County, New Mexico, in 1878.

The breaking of that monopoly led to the Lincoln County War of 1878–1881. This is where Billy the Kid and the Regulators came in, making sure the Tunstall and Chisum side wasn’t getting cattle stolen.

President Rutherford B. Hayes called Lincoln’s Main Street the most dangerous street in America.

At the peak of the war, Billy the Kid shot two deputy sheriffs. The Regulators were trapped in Alexander McSween’s home for five days while it burned around them. McSween was killed while fleeing and lay dead in the yard. Billy the Kid escaped.

Frontier capitalism. The opportunity was real, but it could cost you everything.

Billy the Kid was 21 years old. Died a fugitive. But Tunstall and Chisum broke the monopoly. The outsiders won even after they lost.

That’s the American frontier in one story.

Today, the Lincoln County buildings still stand north of Capitan, New Mexico. The old courthouse and general store are still there today as a remembrance of one of the deadliest periods in New Mexico history.

The most interesting things I read this month:

The biggest headline of the month was the joint force attack on Iran by the US and Israel. I will tie in these article to that attack when applicable, but I will cover it more next month. There is still a lot more to play out if you ask me.

Xi Jinping calls for China renminbi to attain global reserved status

China reveals its plan to challenge the US dollar for dominance. -CNN

Trump is hand-delivering China the one thing it has spent 15 years trying to manufacture: a reason for the world to stop trusting the dollar.

China has been settling trade outside the dollar since 2009. Right after the Great Financial Crisis. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to see why. When the world’s reserve currency nearly takes down the global economy, the countries holding it start running numbers. And that math has always pointed in the same direction.

For anyone who has followed Chinese economic development over the last 20 years, this moment has been at the back of our minds. China wasn’t just building factories. It was building an argument.

The flagship ideology journal of China’s Communist Party just published remarks from President Xi Jinping outlining plans to turn the renminbi into a global reserve currency — the role the US dollar currently plays as the go-to currency for the vast majority of foreign transactions.

Being the global reserve currency sounds like winning. And it is, until it isn’t.

Strong demand for dollars gives the US outsized influence — the ability to borrow cheaply overseas and impose sanctions on rival nations.

But here’s what comes with that privilege. You have to print money to bail out debt crises across the globe that aren’t yours. You have to defend the petrodollar with your military. You watch your middle class hollowed out and your industrial base dismantled because a strong reserve currency makes your exports expensive and your labor uncompetitive.

The United States replaced Great Britain after WWII. London was in ruins. The UK was fragile and in conflict with Egypt. All it took was the failure of the pound to hold the $2.80 level, and America stepped in and inherited all the benefits and every single burden that came with them (more on this in a minute).

China has watched this movie from start to finish. Which is exactly why their answer to the reserve currency trap is gold.

China has been importing record amounts of gold. Reported and unreported. Nobody in the West knows exactly how much they actually hold. And that’s the point.

If the renminbi is fully backed by gold, China doesn’t inherit the fiat currency problem. No endless printing. No defending energy markets with aircraft carriers. No slow erosion of your manufacturing base to keep the reserve currency machine running.

A gold-backed renminbi sidesteps the very trap that has quietly gutted American economic power over 50 years. China doesn’t want to be the next America. They want to be something the world has never seen, a reserve currency that doesn’t cost your country.

Here’s the honest reality. The renminbi currently sits at roughly 20% of global exchange. The US dollar sits at 57%. That gap doesn’t close on dreams alone.

“To get people to use the renminbi, you’ve kind of got to carve out a niche, and it’s been really difficult,” said Dinny McMahon of Trivium China. “Now the way the Party thinks about it is — we’re in a really unique moment, because people are becoming disillusioned with the dollar.”

Disillusionment is not the same as trust. To dethrone a reserve currency, the world doesn’t just need a reason to leave, it needs somewhere credible to go.

Which is why China’s long game isn’t a frontal assault on the dollar. It’s a slow build of alternative infrastructure. And nowhere is that clearer than in how they’ve handled sanctions.

From our September 2025 newsletter:

“Sanctions were imposed on Russia’s VTB Bank in February 2022, and it was removed from SWIFT. Without access, VTB should have been cut off from global finance. However, the bank found at least one workaround: it advertised that account holders could transfer up to 1 million rubles daily into accounts on Alipay, China’s giant payment platform — with funds available within one business day. Russian customers move rubles from VTB to Alipay, and once inside Alipay, those funds can flow anywhere internationally — effectively neutralizing a major Western sanction.”

China didn’t build this workaround by accident. They studied every sanction the US has ever imposed and engineered exits around each one. The dollar’s ultimate power is exclusion. Cut someone off from the system, and they’re helpless. China is systematically making that power obsolete.

And you can only weaponize the dollar so many times before the world stops building on top of it.

What to watch: Gold. Gold will continue to do well as the world shifts away from the dollar and closer to a neutral reserve asset. I remain with gold and Bitcoin as my two largest positions.

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China urges banks to curb US Treasuries exposure

China urges banks to curb US Treasuries exposure, Bloomberg reports — Reuters

The end of the global monetary structure doesn't arrive loudly. It shows up in quiet headlines until the moment passes where there is no returning. This is one of those headlines.

Chinese regulators have advised financial institutions to curb holdings of U.S. Treasuries due to concern over concentration risk and market volatility. Officials urged banks to limit purchases of U.S. government bonds and instructed those with high exposure to pare down positions, though the advisory does not apply to state holdings, Bloomberg reported.

China isn’t just stopping Treasury purchases. They’re telling their banks to reduce what they already hold. That’s a different move entirely.

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