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Hello reader,

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

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The Rover University:

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

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Happy Sunday!

I hope you had a great week.

Here are The Rover’s highlights from it:

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The Rover University:

Miles Taylor: AI and the Collapse of State Power — this will blow your mind on where the state of the world is going technologically.

Michael Green: The Giant Mindless Robot Driving Stocks — Listen to the end when Mike Green talks about how to live & family.

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My top posts from the past week:

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Casey Donaldson

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Good afternoon!

I hope you are having a great week.

See below for The Rover’s highlights from last week:

The Rover — your personal finance newsletter decoding global economic shifts. A proven way to look at the world differently for your investments.

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The Rover University:

The Undersea Cables that Keep the Internet Alive

The Commodity Bull Market is Here

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Have a great rest of the week!

Casey Donaldson

Good afternoon!

I hope you are doing well.

Here are The Rover’s highlights from last week:

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Learn more about The Rover — your personal finance newsletter decoding global economic shifts and tech frontiers. A proven way to look at the world differently.

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The Rover University:

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Have a great rest of the week!

Casey Donaldson

I hope you are doing well.

Here are The Rover’s highlights from last week:

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The legend Paul Tudor Jones.

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Casey Donaldson

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.

Here are The Rover’s highlights from last week:

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Learn more about The Rover — your personal finance newsletter decoding global economic shifts and tech frontiers. Empowering savvy inventors to navigate chaos in an inflationary world. Preventing one bad decision will be worth years of subscriptions.

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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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a month ago · 107 likes · 11 comments · Craig Tindale

Listen:

Watch:

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.

Here are The Rover’s highlights from last week:

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Learn more about The Rover — your personal finance newsletter decoding global economic shifts and tech frontiers. Empowering savvy inventors to navigate chaos in an inflationary world. Preventing one bad decision will be worth years of subscriptions.

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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.

Listen:

Watch:

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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My top posts from the past week:

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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

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Hope you are having a great week so far.

Since the petrodollar system began in 1974, the deal has been that the US buys oil from Gulf states and the Gulf states use that money to invest back in US financial markets. Gulf States have made money in American markets while also receiving security guarantees.

As we have seen in the Iran conflict, the security guarantees from the US are all talk. Talk is cheap when the missiles start flying…literally. From condos in Dubai to LNG plants in Qatar, if you are friends with the Americans, you are a target.

The systems American are use to over the past 40 years will not be the same. Fiat money has all ended the same in the past, and that is as a failed system with a gold backed system replacing it. The question is, will we that in the near future?

Time will tell. Thanks for being a part of this.

Casey Donaldson

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

Here are The Rover’s highlights from last week:

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

Listen:

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

Watch:

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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2 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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A barrel of oil sitting in a tanker off the Strait of Hormuz is worth more right now than the dollars promised to buy it. The world is about to learn that lesson the hard way. We are witnessing events where the world won’t be the same after.

In the name of cheapness efficiency we concentrated 25% of the world's oil through one chokepoint and 60% of copper refining in one country. That's not a supply chain. That's a single point of failure, from gas prices to the AI buildout.

Commodities are cheaper relative to stocks than at almost any point in modern history. It’s been a buying opportunity, but also a warning. We are witnessing the repricing of commodities when the trade routes that make cheap commodities possible stop working.

The Iran war isn't creating the systemic problem, it's revealing it. This is just the match hitting the gasoline. If someone handed Trump a playbook for crushing the dollar as a reserve asset, he's following it perfectly.

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Casey Donaldson

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

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The Rover University:

Is 'National Security' The New Investing Priority? with Peter Tchir

The Great Rotation is Here:

“If gold stays at $5,000, miners will still triple from here.

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Casey Donaldson

Hope you’re doing great.

As recently as 2020, BYD was barely on the radar for global car sales. From not even hitting one million units sold to becoming the Plant Earth champion in five years is unheard of.

While the US was focused on pumping out finished F-150s primarily made in Mexico, China was focused on laying the groundwork to manufacture anything.

There is a clear distinction in the thought process. One truck vs the raw materials and labor force to build entire SKU lines for any industry.

This is how BYD, China’s premier electric vehicle maker, went from selling fewer than 1 million cars in 2021 to almost 5 million, beating the American legend Ford in five years.

The reviews say BYD’s are even nicer than Tesla’s at half the price. There is a reason Donald Trump won’t allow them to be sold here.

The main theme is, today it’s vehicles, but what is next? Chips, AI, robots?

Learn more about The Rover — your personal finance newsletter decoding global economic shifts and tech frontiers. Empowering savvy inventors to navigate chaos in an inflationary world.

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Thanks for being apart of this!

Casey Donaldson

I hope you had a great week. Here are the highlights from it:

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Watch of the week:

"We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West's managed decline."

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Casey Donaldson