Regulators, Mount Up!
March 2026
The Rover
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.
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.
