I, No1, being of sound mind and more than once demonstrating poor judgement, do hereby depose and state:

1. I do not know what killed Lindsey Graham.

2. Neither do you.

3. Neither does anybody currently telling you, and their confidence in their theory is - as is tradition - inversely relative to their evidence.

4. What follows contains dragons. At least five, which are of course mutually exclusive and every one of which has been fed today by somebody with a blue checkmark and a podcast.

5. I am letting them out anyway, because pretending a dragon is not in the room has never once caused a dragon to not be in the room.

6. The FBI has announced it is “assisting local authorities”. It has not said with what. I am therefore, technically, better informed than nobody and worse informed than the Bureau, which puts me exactly where every commentator on earth is this morning, except I’m being honest about it.

7. Take from this what you want. I have already taken what I want, and what I want is a drink.

Signed, this Sunday, somewhere in Europe, with the coffee going cold.

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The Hitchhiker’s Guide, as you may recall, spent centuries listing Earth under a single word: harmless. After fifteen years of field research the entry was revised, at enormous expense, to mostly harmless.

Graham’s entry would read: mostly peaceful.

Because he was - in the strictest possible sense - never violent.

He never fired a shot in anger.
He never kicked a door.
Never dug a grave.
Never carried anybody’s son out of a building.
Never once was confronted with the consequences of his actions.

He was mostly peaceful in exactly the way a protest in, say, Kenosha (WI) can be.

The fires were always somewhere else, he always had a delegation, there was always a photographer, and the flight home was always business class with a bed.

What he had instead was conviction. Held with the purity that would be admirable in almost any other field.

In 2002 he diagnosed Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction from a stuffy chamber several thousand miles from any inspector. We all know how that turned out.

In 2015 he described Donald Trump as a race-baiting bigot, a kook, and unfit for office.

But by this year he was on television offering to send your sons and daughters to fight for a foreign country on that same man’s instruction. Oh, and let’s move all our stuff to Israel. Dropping bombs seemed to give him a whole different perspective on a person.

In 2022 he went on air and asked whether there was somebody in Putin’s circle to take him out…
A sitting United States senator, live, publicly commissioning a political assassination. Moscow issued an international arrest warrant, which Lindsey wore as a badge of honour, and which, incidentally, is still open.

A month before Operation Epic Fury he urged the President to kill Ali Khamenei.

Three weeks ago, on the exact programme he was booked on this morning, he explained what came next when the Iran deal collapsed: America would take the Strait of Hormuz by force (how’s that going?). America would charge every ship a fee (how’s that going?). And if Iran contested it: we will obliterate them (how’s that going?).

Ukraine he described as “the best money we have ever spent”. A statement that might have been entirely defensible, provided he never specified what was purchased.

So: For forty years, in a country far far away from any sudden explosions, sat a man, insisting, on camera, repeatedly, that you can change the direction of a war by killing people, by dropping more bombs to ‘minimise casualties’.

And then he dies of a heart attack. Although, admittedly, that would require a heart, and THAT is the most contested claim in this entire opinion.

The entire planet immediately concluded that somebody must have removed him. In general, the universe does not normally show its working so clearly. Usually you’ll have to wait for a generation and read a book about it.

Let’s start with the official narrative. I’ll just give it as-is. As bureaucratic as I can:

On Thursday, Lindsey Graham turned 71. On Friday he was in Kyiv for the tenth time, touring a drone plant, posing in front of tanks, telling reporters it was time to turn up the heat on Putin, and announcing that after three years of pushing, the White House had finally green-lit his sanctions bill: 500% tariffs on anybody buying Russian oil. He shook Zelensky’s hand. Zelensky posted the photographs. Graham telephoned CBS twice to say what a big day it was, and booked himself onto Face the Nation for Sunday morning.

He flew home. At about seven on Saturday evening he called the President to talk about the SAVE America Act and to mention he was a little tired.

At half past eight, a 911 call went out from a house on Capitol Hill. Chest pains. Then cardiac arrest. Then CPR.

Let’s keep it at that he never made the interview. I wasn’t waiting anyhow.

So far so good. Nothing obviously wrong with it. Which is precisely the problem. We live in a century where ‘nothing being obviously wrong’ is by and of itself considered suspicious, and honestly? given the last twenty years, that’s not an entirely unreasonable position.

So let me sum up the theories surrounding his death. For his death is quite absurd, and has the final word. So let’s forget about the sin - of laughing about the dead - give the audience a grin. Enjoy it. It might be your last chance anyhow.

Theory number uno: There exists online this theory called “the Zelensky Curse”.

The thesis is that proximity to the Ukrainian president is medically and professionally inadvisable.

When he visits a city, it is said the city will fall.

Stand next to him at a press conference and your government will collapse.

It’s a ledger with numerous entries. I’ve no clue what number Lindsey is on this list. But it has been attributed to Kamala’s loss (our gain - although in retrospect…), it has been attributed to a US defence secretary who received a cancer diagnosis days after a Kyiv visit, an entire French government, and, and I want to be scrupulously fair here, several people who simply lost elections in the normal way that people lose elections.

At first I heard it on Simplicius, but that was just before the fall of some city. Seems the curse moved on to people. Graham shook his hand on Friday. He has since passed on. He is no more, ceased to be. Expired and gone to meet its maker. Bereft of life, he rests - hopefully not - in peace. He’ll be pushing up daisies fairly soon. He is now for all matters earthly: an ex-Graham.

And if for nothing else, this has been a dramatic improvement in throughput for the curse. It used to require a siege, now it’s challenging Prime on same-day delivery.

I mention this only - not because I believe it but - because within about eight hours this was the third most popular explanation on Twitter.

Theory number two: Russia poisoned him.

However, this would require the Kremlin to be simultaneously so competent that it left no trace whatsoever in a body that was on a slab within hours.
And so catastrophically stupid that it did the job forty-eight hours AFTER a photographed, GPS-tagged, internationally broadcast state visit… Kinda like saying “WE WERE HERE”.

It would also require Moscow to choose this precise moment, after that bill had already cleared. A hit of exquisite spycraft, timed to accomplish… well… absolutely nothing.

Ten out of ten for the poison. Zero for bothering to read a calendar.

Theory three: he never came home.

He was killed in Kyiv, at the drone plant, possibly alongside a quantity of unnamed NATO officers, which will receive completely unrelated accidents like drowning in a swamp while hiking.

I promised dragons, and as this one is the most pervasive one, let’s take this entirely serious and check what it’d take.

For starters, you’d need a strike. Kinda obvious one would think.

Then, a corpse in a condition presentable to the family. Tricky if he got a sudden case of Iskanderism.

A plane, and nobody asking who’s in the casket. Doable with “chain of command” and “shut up or give me your badge” culture…

Then a scripted 911 call, cooperating paramedics performing CPR on a man who has been stiff since Friday, a police scanner broadcasting your cover story live to every journalist in Washington with a receiver, a hospital, a family statement, and finally a President of the United States going on CNN the following morning to improvise a phone call that never happened, complete with the detail that his friend had said he was tired from the flight.

Don’t they have luxury beds in those jets?

Anyway, this would assume that the US administration is able to have an act of state deception flawlessly executed on short notice. That’s the same government that couldn’t keep the location of an aircraft carrier off Strava. Or the same one that shot down its own fighters.

But yes, why not. With the right incentives. Sure.

Especially for something so sensitive, anything’s possible I guess.

Theory four is for Iran.

Last week, mourners at Ayatollah Khamenei’s funeral carried placards through Tehran bearing Graham’s face inside a targeting reticle.

Five days.

-a few rough auto-translated parts, but you’ll get the drift.-

On Sunday morning an Iranian state television host congratulated the Iranian people on the death of Senator Lindsey Graham, who had, the host explained, been sent to hell.

A former Fox producer promptly demanded a full federal investigation, evidence to follow at some unspecified later date.

And the FBI announced it was making every necessary resource available, without specifying available for what exactly. I guess they investigate arteries too now. As long as it doesn’t involve pipe bombs and stuff I guess?

Theory five is Mossad, and I have an A and a B for you.

Flavour one: they did it.

Flavour two: they faked it.

Either way, if this is true, I guess his handlers are now going through his harddrive now to delete a few files. And I’m not talking about his porn collection.

What for do the Israelis want to kill their biggest champion? I’ve no clue, but there are people online that could tell you this in the greatest detail.

I am not one of them as I consider myself logical.

Theory six, which seems to pop up in the replies but nowhere else, holds that Zelensky poisoned him to frame Russia.

Same thinking goes again as with the Mossad framing. Why would you kill your single most reliable Republican benefactor, on the day he delivered the bill, as a favour to the country funding the war against it?

It is maybe the least plausible theory available. But yeah, as long as it sounds good, right?

Going for seven: the domestic one.

Somebody is quietly clearing out the Senate’s remaining architects of forever war, one (cardiac) arrest at a time.

Of course having your House and Senate stuffed with geriatrics is bound to produce a few of those either way, but Graham seems to have been struggling with blood pressure since his forties. So there’s at least some continuity to that.

Either way this theory has a bit of a bite as in Kentucky, Mitch McConnell, 84, has been hospitalised since June 14. Also cardiac arrest. Also some 911 call. No diagnosis as far as I know.

His office has now spent four weeks reissuing an identical statement explaining that the senator continues to improve and is working closely with his staff on Kentucky and Senate matters. Which you could equally write about a filing cabinet.

He is not dead. He is just resting.

His wife stayed in China, because his condition did not warrant her return. Laura Loomer says he is brain dead. She didn’t specify since when.

So to show McConnel wasn’t the only one, three senior Republicans went public within hours of one another, on the same Tuesday, each describing a lengthy and substantive telephone conversation covering national security, Iran, Ukraine, the Senate calendar, and a little Senate history, and each independently reporting that his voice sounded strong.

All confirming that a man sounded well on the phone. There is a name for that genre. (I’ll give a hint: it’s not Press Release)

Two hawks. Two hearts. Two homes. One pretty quiet month.

The internet is having a field day.

They used to call them the three amigos: McCain, Lieberman, Graham.

Inseparable. On every delegation. At every hearing. And most importantly for this thesis: behind every intervention for twenty years.

McCain in 2018, brain tumour, 81.
Lieberman in 2024, a fall, 82.
Graham now, 71, his heart.

As the theory goes, somebody is working through a list.

Lindsey Graham got a lot on the last day of his life:

• A birthday

• A trip he wanted

• A three-year win, delivered

• A phone call with the most powerful man on earth

• An ambulance that actually came

• Paramedics who tried

• A hospital

• A family who were told, who asked for privacy, and who will receive it

• An obituary in every newspaper on the planet before the sun came up

• Netanyahu weighing the funeral

• Von der Leyen calling it a great void - she’s one talking.

• Rutte, Zelensky, Trump, all of them, on the record, within hours

Objectively, that is a good death.

Fast, at home, at the summit, with everybody he ever wanted to impress saying so before the body was cold.

It is precisely the death he spent thirty years explaining that other people did not deserve.

There are thousands of Palestinians and Iranians who did NOT get an ambulance, countless of them children.

There is an Iraqi generation that never got a phone call from a president.

There are thousands of ships and seafarers still sitting in the Gulf.

There are the farmers who lost a planting season to a fertiliser shortage nobody voted for, and the 318 million people who were at crisis hunger before the first missile flew and are now, in the language of the people who do this professionally, a growth market.

None of them were told.
None of them had their privacy respected.
None of them got the courtesy of a name in a newspaper.

He championed the strategy.

Other people supplied the bodies.

That’s more of a job description than an accusation. And credit where it’s due: he never pretended otherwise.

He was running for a fifth term.

Seventy-one years old, four terms down, a war on, and he had filed to go again.

He fully intended to be there for the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that. Because he believed the thing only works if he is in the room.

And the bill, his great sanctions bill? The one he flew into a war zone to announce? Blumenthal said on Friday they had the votes. Graham said it was going to become law.

And now he is dead, and it still has the votes. It goes to Thune, it goes to the House, it moves or it doesn’t, and the arithmetic this morning is exactly what it was on Thursday.

Lindsey Graham believed, publicly, repeatedly, for four decades, that you could stop a war by removing one man from it.

But his bill still has the votes.

Cosmic sarcasm at its best.

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Gold's weekly close $4,119: needs to hold $3,768 or it's more than a correction:

Gold ETF flows by region:

Gold overtakes the US dollar in central bank reserves:

Poland's gold reserves at a record 632.4 tonnes 🚀:

Why central banks hold gold: crisis hedge, inflation, diversifier:

US gold imports vs exports (May): net outflow -23.7t:

US silver imports vs exports (May): +176.9t net inflow

Silver quarterly: past bulls took 31 and 14 years to make new highs:

Silver & AI: data-center power +5,200% since 2000, market in deficit:

Silver ETF capital flows spike:

Gold market liquidity at a record $488bn/day:

Dow-to-gold ratio, 1915-2026:

All US gold ETFs ($239B) vs Nvidia ($4.71T):

Global gold vault stock (June): LBMA 9,464t, COMEX 857t:

Shanghai silver +81.63% vs Western +69.65%:

PBOC gold: 20th straight month, +14.93t in June 🤑:

London vaults: gold 9,464t, silver 28,082t:

US gold reserves as % of debt: $4,200 → $26,000 → $75,000:

Gold ETF takes the crown as China's largest fund:

Platinum quarterly (log): start of a multi-year bull:

AI now >25% of US GDP growth, ~8% of GDP — above Dot-Com's 6.5%:

German federal net borrowing past €200bn by 2027:

BoJ total assets lowest since Q1 2020:

30-year Treasury auction 5.058%, highest yield since 2007:

Veterans' benefits now a record 27% of DoD spending:

Foreign central-bank Treasuries in Fed custody keep running off:

Interest payments overtake defense spending, first time ever:

Japan 10-year yield 2.87%, highest in 30 years:

US trade deficit $77.6B in May, widest since March 2025:

Margin debt as % of GDP:

US margin debt +550% since 1997 vs S&P +358%

Russell 2000 interest expense = 31% of EBITDA vs 6.7% for S&P 500

2-year breakeven inflation down to 1.95%:

Top 0.1% wealth doubled in six years; bottom 50% flat:

Global diesel loadings on track for a 9-year low: 5.19M bpd:

China's fossil-fuel consumption at an all-time high (exajoules):

US oil product exports at a record 8.7M bbl/day:

US SPR crude stocks: lowest since June 1983:

Russian refinery damage: Omsk offline, 34% of output hit:

China solar generation, 2015 → 2025: 1 → 1,175 TWh:

FX returns vs the dollar over 5 years:

Shiller PE on the verge of taking out its Dot-Com high:

Semiconductors now over 15% of the S&P 500, most ever:

S&P 500 top 10 now 43% of market cap — very lopsided:

Yen above 162/dollar, weakest since 1986:

Tesla free cash flow heading to -$10B, first negative year since 2018:

Median wealth per adult: US ranks below Slovenia and Portugal:

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His name is Peter Stokes, and for a hacker, he did mostly everything right.

He had his VPN up the whole time. Traffic was tunnelled through ngrok. IP addresses were hopping between Tallinn, New York and Bangkok like a man working three frequent-flyer schemes at once.

Nineteen years old, dual US-Estonian, and allegedly running with Scattered Spider, an extortion crew that’s pulled in over $100 million across a hundred-plus breaches.

Didn’t matter. one. single. bit.

Maybe first a few technical terms out of the way for the people unaware of those:

IP: See this as your home-address, but online. If the gov has your IP, they know who you are (more or less - not going into too much detail here so stop nitpicking - yes yes, talking to my fellow nerds here :wink:).

VPN: this is (mostly) a software solution that encrypts your traffic and shoves it through someone else’s server first, so whoever’s watching sees that server, not you.

ngrok: a legitimate tool developers use to expose a local server to the internet. Also, apparently, popular with people running extortion schemes who need their traffic to look like it’s coming from nowhere in particular. Purely coincidental, I’m sure.

IP hopping: bouncing your connection through different countries so each request looks like it came from a different place.

On May 12 last year, at 19:21 UTC, someone opened ngrok’s signup page and created the account later used to break into a US jeweller for an $8 million ransom.

Microsoft’s own logs, quoted in the federal complaint, show which machine opened that page, down to the minute. NOT the address the VPN was busy disguising. The machine itself.

That’s more or less the whole article.
So you can stop reading now if you want.

The why and how, THAT is what got me all wired up today.

If you’re using a VPN, you’re supposed to be protected as your real IP isn’t known. So the FBI didn’t know it. VPN is still secure. It’s equally useless now this secret is out in the open.

So pray tell… How did they get to this guy’s name?

They called Microsoft.

Windows has something called a GDID - the Global Device Identifier. It comes straight from Microsoft’s telemetry, and if you have Windows 10 or 11, you have been quietly reporting your own details this whole time. No matter where you are, or hop to in this case.

So pray tell… What IS this GDID?

Glad you asked… I would have never told you otherwise /s

A GDID is, without diving into that acronym soup, is something that every Windows installation gets. It’s not a hardware ID, because hardware can change, it’s passed down the first time your computer reports back to Windows (and oh boy, they REALLY like to call back!!).

Each fresh Windows installation gets a new GDID. Which stays with you forever and ever until the end of time (or until you erase that spyware masking as an operating system).

Think about it like a membership card you never asked for and can’t send back.

And no matter what you do, updates, change a harddrive, add more memory, whatever… It sticks. ONLY that clean reinstall will get you a new one. And even then Microsoft’s side of the ledger still keeps the old one, history attached. So if your reinstallation happens to be from the same IP as the old history? It still can get traced back to you.

Now every time you boot into Windows, a background service registers your device into Microsoft’s internal directory. One user’s own support thread has that service shovelling 250 to 300 megabytes home on a single startup.

Per boot. For a name tag. I’m pretty sure it’s more than a name tag which gets sent.

Separately, there is this update-sharing service that reports the exact same number next to your IP and rough location. Another diagnostics pipeline uploads batches on its own schedule. And if your telemetry sits anywhere that is not equal to “turned completely off”, those batches can carry the web addresses of your browser and the URLs your Defender has been checking against Microsoft in real time.

The GDID rides along with every lookup.

Which brings me back to our (unfortunate) hacker… Those background services are almost certainly how “opened ngrok’s signup page” got a timestamp accurate to the minute. They didn’t even had to guess. Windows knew who you were all along.

Nobody asked you to opt in to any of those channels.

There’s not even an off-switch for this, and no, it’s not what the “Diagnostic data” slider controls. That slider is the digital equivalent of asking the universe to pretty please be quiet. The universe remains annoyingly chatty anyway. Much like Windows.

Normally when you install Windows they ask you to register with a Microsoft account, but there is a workaround: a local account.

However, this doesn’t save you either. There’s a fallback baked in that registers the device anyhow. No human interaction necessary.

Now if you’re curious, you can find this via regedit at HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\IdentityCRL\ExtendedProperties.

That value converts to the exact format that turned up in the indictment.

Good you know that it’s there. But don’t go pasting this anywhere public: that specific number, plus your account, plus a device detail or two, is PRECISELY the combination that gets someone found.

You don’t go posting your ID card either right?

None of this is hidden, exactly. It’s in Microsoft’s own Azure documentation, described in one flat sentence as an identifier “used by Microsoft internally”.

Technically true. Technically a shark is a fish.

Stokes handed over the rest for free. So maybe not the smartest guy in the room, but give him some slack, he’s only 19…

Snapchat photos of cash, watches and a diamond chain spelling “HACK THE PLANET”.

A selfie from an Estonian police station, captioned about how the feds had no idea what they’d just let walk.

He did great with the VPN, and ngrok. But then couldn’t help but post his own location to the internet with a taunt attached.

Once the GDID tied his device to that ngrok account, the rest was bookkeeping: Apple, Facebook, Snapchat, even a Growtopia login, all lining up on the same IPs, cross-checked against his State Department travel records. Tallinn in one window. New York in another. Thailand after that.

The VPN hid where the traffic came from. But it never mattered.

I think it’s good riddance as those people are not innocent. I mean, they drained businesses for millions!

But the tool that caught him doesn’t check anyone’s intentions. It’s always-on on every Windows 10 and 11 machine on the planet.

There’s no published policy on when Microsoft hands that data to a government, no opt-out for anyone who’d rather not be found, and no report telling you how often this already happened quietly, to people who never make the news.

Oh, and before you go rushing off to the nearest Apple Store. Mac ain’t a refuge.

Because GDID was already taken, they called it DSID (Directory Services Identifier). Similarly, it’s a permanent number welded to your Apple ID. And Apple has your full name, phone number, birth date, email address, …

Their analytics send this number to the home turf every tap you make in the App Store or Music, even when told not to send it. “Share Analytics” is basically lipstick on a pig. Doesn’t do jack shit.

If you’re interested: search for Tommy Mysk.

The only place that can help you is Linux. It DOES have an ID too (/etc/machine-id), but the difference is fundamental. That machine ID is generated from a random source during system installation or first boot - on your box, not handed down by a vendor’s server, and no company keeps a copy.

The manual itself says it should be considered “confidential”, and must not be exposed in untrusted environments, in particular on the network.

Don’t like it? rm the file, reboot, and you got a new one.

No OS-level phone-home by default.

Caveat though: the OS isn’t watching in this case, but the apps you install (Chrome, Spotify, a Google login) still phone home on any OS.

Which ties me to my article from yesterday, as this becomes so much more than a self-incriminating teenager. And where things go with the EU, so they go with the US. Just you wait!

A persistent identifier tied to a real person is personal data under EU law.

There’s no debate even anymore about that. The European Court of Justice settled it years ago, ruling that even a dynamic IP address counts, as long as whoever holds it has a realistic way to link it back to you.

A device ID, plus years of IP history, plus three linked accounts, is well past realistic.

Windows telemetry has already lost this fight here.

Twice.

The Dutch regulator found the collection unlawful in 2017, forced changes, then came back a year later and found Microsoft still running “new, potentially unlawful” processing.

They did updates. Turned out they were doing the wrong homework. I’m sure it’s all a conspiracy theory…

Another government-commissioned assessment went even further: there’s absolutely NO legal basis for most of the diagnostic data, and even worse if you’re forced to use Windows at work, you can’t say the employee consented, because an employee can’t very well tell their employer they’d rather not use Windows today.

Hesse banned Office 365 from its schools outright. Seems children can’t consent to being exposed to possible access by US officials.

So the collection is already on thin ice in the EU. But nothing changed in the decade since this came to light.

But wait… There’s more… There’s always more… This gathered data doesn’t even stay in the EU. It goes straight to the servers in the United States. I mean, I trust the US more than I would trust China or Russia, but it’s a very close competition…

In 2015 the EU struck down “Safe Harbor” because data in the US was gobbled up immediately by the intelligence services once the data landed.

Now they’re calling it “Privacy Shield”. Sounds fancy. Sounds trustable. Struck down in 2020, same reasonings. (and I paraphrase: “the US is not trustworthy with our plebs data”)

So not to be deterred - and to employ at least some creative talent - they came up with a new name: “the EU-US Data Privacy Framework” (born 2023). Copy/pasted the whole damn thing, adjusted the font.

It’s basically Microsoft self-certifying, promising that the American body overseeing this, the FTC, is independent enough that Europe can trust it.

I’m guessing Peter has some objections right about now.

The US Supreme Court ruled a bit ago that the president can fire FTC commissioners whenever he likes, no cause required.

That decision that the US’ protection is “adequate” leans on that independence. Repeatedly. Which is kind of awkward when the decision is in the hands of just one person.

Max Schrems noticed. He tends to. The Austrian who killed the previous two frameworks wrote to the Commission the day after, arguing the ground under this one had gone the way of the dodo.

He’s now filing a third challenge. People are already calling it Schrems III, at this point less a lawsuit than a release cycle.

The redress side is even worse.

The thing meant to let an ordinary European complain when their data is misused runs through a “Data Protection Review Court”, which sounds pretty judicial but ain’t.

It’s just an office inside the US Justice Department, set up by executive order, and its judges are appointed by the Attorney General and removable by the president. Yup, the same one that can fire FTC commissioners.

“Independent”, right?

The current administration already fired all Democratic members early last year, leaving it short of the numbers to rule on anything at all.

The complaints desk was already broken for over a year before the enforcement desk tripped over its own laces this week.

None of this will be switched off tomorrow.

Adequacy decisions die slowly, in court, over time, much like the last two.

The lawyers are now saying what they said before the last two failed: don’t panic, keep the paperwork current. Courts in the meantime, start to notice those recurring plots. Even they get it by version three.

Stokes wasn’t caught because the system has a flaw. He was caught because it works exactly as built, and it was never built to ask first. It was built to know.

That GDID is the ONE identifier that survives a VPN, a proxy, a new IP, a new country… It was carefully built on illusions.

It survives right up until you wipe the disk. And even then Microsoft keeps the old number, because deleting history is hard and keeping it is easy.

The hacker was only the first name on the list.

I’m pretty sure Microsoft will get busy with court requests after govs find out about this VPN-busting method of pinpointing dissidents.

Niemöller never had a device ID.

Lucky bastard.

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Post the “wrong” thing online and they show up at your door.
Read the wrong thing and you’ve committed a crime.
Back the wrong candidate and they’ll find a reason to keep them off the ballot.
Cheer for the wrong party and the government moves to have it banned outright.

The opposition leader who might ACTUALLY win gets disqualified, or jailed, or simply disappears into a prison system. “Due process”…

Neighbours report on neighbours.
Cameras on every corner.
Every message you send sits somewhere the state can read it.
Every payment you make sits somewhere the state can freeze it.

Sounds like 1940, or 48 if you’re into that kind of thing. Or Russia. Or China.

We’ve all learned history, and those times, those countries are bad. Evil even. They can’t but control their population else they would all flee to freer destinations…

Right?

RIGHT?!

Let me tell you… Welcome to the EUSSR 2026.

This. is. Europe.

What first triggered me was that on July 2nd the Court of Injustice of the EUSSR ruled on a case out of Saarbrücken.

Three Germans ran a free website. No ads, no subscriptions, just a donation button. Over sixteen months they collected €60k and reposted a few videos from RT Germany.

None of that matters though.

“Operator”, under the EU’s Russia sanctions seems to be now be ANYONE who directly or indirectly makes such content available.

Profit, duration nor reach are relevant.

The court went even wider than the Commission’s own guidance, which had said this only applied to commercial entities. The FAQ that made everyone believe there was still a little common sense left, just got blasted by its own court.

Up to five years in a German prison. For a donation jar and a repost button.

But what made me decide to warn you all is the following:

Chat Control 2.0.

Because we are not allowed to have any privacy in whatever social media or apps we use. All for our own good of course!

It’s of course completely different when you’re negotiating multi billion contracts with Pfizer, that needs to stay out of everyone’s view. Or when you’re someone advocating for surveillance and finding a bug in your office.

In March, Parliament actually killed Chat Control 1.0. It voted down the temporary scanning regime 311 to 228. But that expired on April 3rd.

Google, Meta, Microsoft and Snap kept scanning everyone’s messages anyway. Who cares about any legal basis right? No consequences either.

And here I was believing that the GDPR applied to everyone.

But now. Just days before the summer recess, Parliament President Roberta Metsola revived the EXACT same rejected text through an emergency procedure…

The trick getting played here is purely procedural: instead of needing a majority to pass, it needs an absolute majority, 361 MEPs, to reject it.

And when you schedule the vote just at the last sitting day before recess, you can be assured that half the chamber has already left for the summer, and that this law that lost fair and square in March will get passed anyway.

That’s European democracy for you. Right there.

Try try try until you succeed. If it wouldn’t be so depressing, I’d be able to find some humour in that.

Martin Sonneborn tried to stop it from the floor, citing the Parliament’s own rulebook and offering to hand the President a printed copy in person, reminding her “we’re not in Malta here”.

He put it more plainly elsewhere: the manoeuvre “suspends a fundamental right”.

Chat Control 2.0, the permanent successor, is still in trilogue in parallel, the same fight I mapped out in “Heil Comrade! Welcome to the EUSSR!”, and the Council’s own legal service already told them in writing that warrantless scanning breaks the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Nobody seems to care.

Across the Channel it’s more of the same thing.

Roughly thirty arrests a day in the UK for “grossly offensive” posts.

However, fewer than one in ten ends in a conviction. The process IS the punishment. Doesn’t matter if it sticks.

None of those people as far as I can tell actually hurt anyone. They got a visit nevertheless…

Germany’s answer to a party it can’t beat is obviously losing gracefully.

AfD is polling first or tied for first nationally. And of course nothing screams “European Democracy” like a fresh 1,500-page legal report, arguing that that party should be banned outright by the Constitutional Court.

Even Friedrich Merz - do I have to say? no fan of the AfD - called that push something that “smacks too much of political competition elimination”.

No1 seems to care…

France…

France, being French about it, delivered the actual season finale today… Definitely more thrilling than their soccer game.

Anyway, the appeals court upheld Le Pen's conviction. So she IS convicted of it. However, her office ban was cut from 5y to 45 months (30 suspended), which backdated to March means she can now run for president in 2027.

And she needs to wear an electronic leash the next year and have to ask to go grocery shopping to some magistrate.

“European Democracy”. Right there.

Nothing says free and fair elections as a presidential campaign scheduled around a curfew.

She doesn’t know yet if she would run like this, so it’s perfectly possible that she passes “le bâton” to Jordan Bardella. Whose chief qualification - as far as I can tell - is not fitted with an ankle bracelet yet.

If you’ve been reading me for a while now, you would surely have noticed the pattern forming: ordinary citizen? the law gets read as wide as it can possibly be. Political rival? the “law” gets found, specifically, right on schedule, exactly when they’re about to win.

And if they can’t find a law, they’ll make something up about Russia.

And if that doesn’t reek of Gulag enough for you? Watch them build the money equivalent of this.

On June 23rd the European Parliament’s economics committee waved the digital euro through, 43 votes to 14, clearing it for a plenary vote this month.

Basic use is free, of course.

But how much digital euro you’re allowed to hold will get decided later on, by the Commission, through a delegated act, reviewed every two years - probably in a decade or so that will be on a daily basis, adjustable whenever “financial stability” requires it.

Not by referendum - not that they wouldn’t rig that.

Not really even the full Parliament - not that they wouldn’t rig that either.

A cap on your own money, set by people you didn’t vote in for that specific purpose.

Meanwhile the people writing all of this can’t even produce the most basics of basics…

(Ursula enters the chat): Like their own text messages.

She negotiated a vaccine deal worth billions by phone and SMS with Pfizer’s CEO. The price went from €15.50 a dose to €19.50 during those texts. I think she has no idea how a “volume discount” works…

And when journalists asked to see them, the Commission said it didn’t have them.

The General Court ruled against that answer, more than once even.

The Commission’s response? As the graceful loser they are, they didn’t release the texts. No no no… “European Democracy” requested that they rewrite their own rules so future ones get a “presumption of non-disclosure” by default.

Nobody seems to care…

Or look at where the actual money’s going.

Ukraine scores worse on Transparency International’s corruption index than every one of its western neighbours, EU member or not.

As one example: in November a $100 million kickback scheme at the state nuclear company cost two ministers their jobs and got Zelensky’s own chief of staff raided and fired the same day.

Last month Kyiv quietly deleted several anti-corruption commitments from the reform plan it had promised Brussels.

So nothing says supporting “European Democratic Values” like pumping more “aid” regardless.

Everywhere you look in Europe, you see more of the same.

Coincidence? Well, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn for sale for you…

Chat Control, the RT ruling, the party bans, the ballot bans, the holding limits. And of course true to “European Democracy”, No1 gets a vote.

My heart cries for the Europe of old. You know the one. The one that invented the printing press, the scientific method, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution.

Those people currently in charge cannot survive their own populations thinking clearly and deciding for themselves.

Why not just trust your people with an open argument, an unbanned candidate, an unscanned message?

Nah, can’t have that… Because then eventually somebody wins who isn’t supposed to win. So you don’t win the argument. You just have to make sure that the argument never happens.

A government that can survive an open argument is called a democracy.

A government that can’t survive one is called Europe.

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Gold seasonality in midterm election years:

Gold & silver futures seasonality:

Gold miners: price vs aggregate cash flow 🤑:

China SGE/SHFE precious metals, daily:

Gold monthly, holding the cup & handle target:

Silver futures — one chart to rule them all:

Gold: first real test at $4,240–$4,250:

Platinum trying to break its channel:

Central banks' gold as % of reserves (ex-US):

Central bank & private gold allocations at 30–40yr highs:

Quarterly central bank gold net purchases, still elevated:

Gold sentiment this washed out → higher a month later, 8 for 8:

Gold bull-market corrections, compressed in time:

China vs US M2 (+$37.3T vs +$12.5T):

Chinese silver net exports:

Silver weekly, back inside the cloud:

Global M3 vs total gold value:

GDX/SOXX ratio screaming a bottom:

COMEX silver: delivery requests vs actual withdrawals:

Gold price-to-production-cost ratio:

US construction hiring rate, lowest since 2000:

Money-market funds: $8.3T, all-time high:

Leveraged ETF assets tripled since 2022 (~$200B):

US hedge-fund gross leverage, nearly doubled since 2022:

Fed funds futures pricing 1.2 hikes by year-end:

Hyperscaler free cash flow heading to zero:

Global stock market cap: record $166 trillion:

Retail dip-buying at historic extremes:

US inflation expectations creeping higher:

Federal debt vs Fed ownership of Treasuries:

Foreign holdings of US Treasuries (% of total):

US Treasury debt maturing within one year:

US vs UK long-term bond yields, 250 years:

Semiconductors: 20% of the S&P 500, record high:

3:2:1 crude oil crack spreads at all-time highs:

US Strategic Petroleum Reserve, lowest in ~40 years:

Brent crude, daily:

WTI: 7 straight closes below the 200-day:

US wheat acres: fewest in 149 years:

Namibia's Orange Basin oil blocks:

Micron closes below its 20-day, first time in ~3 months:

Hang Seng trailing the S&P 500 by 20 points YTD:

S&P 500 monthly returns — no red July since 2014:

Chipmakers +104% while the Mag 7 slipped:

China home prices, lowest in 20 years:

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Today marks the 250th 4th there ever was.

It’s not really the beginning. Not quite an end either. The beginning of the end, maybe, or the end of a beginning…

One end that’s supposed to be clear: a monarch of three decades and change goes into a glass box in Tehran. But some say it’s the end of the regime. Others talk about the long overdue re-emergence of Iran as a regional power. Both an end and a beginning? Or the end to the beginning?

Another that’s supposedly clear is the military prowess of the US of A. Mightily dropping bombs on girl schools because yeah, target selection with Claude was not perfected yet. Do we chalk that up to an end? The end as everyone starts looking past the mirage? Or is it a beginning of a much more localised America?

Again.

What are we actually celebrating this BBQ over beers and burgers?

An empire lights fireworks but can’t quite say whether it’s throwing a birthday or sitting a wake.

A war the memorandum swears is winding down, even as Israel plotted to take out the negotiators - again, and the power buildup that started the whole thing is continuing unabated for one more go.

And oil… Dear oil… Lifeblood of any modern industry… Source of so much “spreading democracy” around the world… Held under by sheer force, is it at the beginning of a resurgence, or at the beginning of the long awaited demand destruction?

End of one, birth of another, and from inside our bubbles, we can’t tell which is which.

The party next door is loud.

Bunting, flyovers, a speech from the President, the whole republic out on the lawn for a quarter-millennium of the American experiment.

So loud it drowns out the other thing.

Two and a half thousand miles east, in Tehran, a different crowd is out. Black instead of red-white-and-blue. Thirty-seven years running Iran, killed four months ago on the first morning of this war. Joined by his family. For eternity.

He lies in state on the fourth of July. The end of the beginning of the resurgence of the Persian Empire? Or the beginning of the end of the war? Where does one begin, and one ends?

And while the country sang to itself, because a party this loud is really a wake for whatever the thing used to be, something quieter went into the ground round the back.

Buried under paper. An avalanche of it.

The screen says calm. Brent near $72, WTI in the high sixties, both back where they belong, right? The war never happened. We have a surplus of oil. Right?

Four months of trying to force Iran to give up its nuclear dust but were actually about control over the Middle East. The one in the casket kept repeating his fatwa: no nuclear weapons. Over his dead body. Literally.

A war Washington itself half-admitted was about oil spreading democracy, and four months and several thousand bodies later there is no dust - except where the US bases used to be - and the crude is cheaper than the morning it started.

Peace in our time. I guess…

Or half-time probably. Because this seems to never end. Nor can anyone remember where it began.

Before all this, about a 130 ships a day went through the Strait of Hormuz. The best day since the war managed seventy-eight.

What moves now, is a thin line on the lane Tehran allows, hugging the Iranian coast, paying whatever toll they feel like. The American corridor down by Oman has been effectively shut down.

Meanwhile Washington is dangling a hundred billion of Iran’s own frozen money to buy the tolls back and get the strait handed over. You can guess once what Tehran’s answer was…

Everyone’s looking at the tankers that got out during the “ceasefire”. No1’s looking at the empty ones returning. And for the most part? They aren’t.

Storage is full all around the Gulf, and oilfields can’t (won’t) be restarted until an empty tanker turns up and takes that crude away. And even then those tankers will be wary to say hi as this war can restart at any given moment.

There are a few brave souls that try to bypass either blockade, but they get turned back. Iran’s hold on the Strait is nearly absolute. Washington’s blockade is slightly more porous.

Kpler, who count this for a living, put the road to normalisation at roughly a year: six months to clear the mines, two or three for the ships to go and come back, and another three to bring the fields up.

So EVEN when giving the - in all probability deceased - ceasefire the benefit of the doubt, those barrels are stuck in the ground, in storage, and in tankers for the next few months to a year.

There are some green shoots of course, so it’s not all that bad.

The Saudis are said to be back at about 90% of before, and the UAE routes around Hormuz through a pipeline that skips the chokepoint. Those 2 capture about 60% of pre-war flows. So not all that bad…

In the US, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) has been pumping oil out since March to soften the oil shock. Half of which goes straight onto export tankers.

That part of the reserve has always been about holding the world price down. And it’s obviously doing its job. So much even that there are talks about an “oil glut”.

One way to keep the price down is to increase supply. Which is what the SPR is used for.

The other side of the coin is demand, and this is a strange one…

China’s cut its crude buying by something like forty percent. 4-5 million barrels a day, *poof*. Is there a memorandum with China too to support the US’ war effort by reducing oil purchases? Are there “hidden caverns filled with oil” like I keep reading (personally I doubt it)? Is there a huge demand destruction happening in China? Did China have an electricity glut and decided now is the time to go all-in on electricity?

It’s strange. Because Chinese imports fell off a cliff, but the refineries never slowed. They ran flat out the whole time.

It just feels coordinated, but I can’t find my alu-head, so I’ll stick with two giants that don’t want to upset the applecart - too much. Just for a little while longer…

So the price sits on the floor, and two reserves are draining to hold it there. Which leads me to the only question worth asking: how much is there actually left to drain?

A barrel is not a barrel.

Forty percent is sweet, low sulphur, easy, near enough any refinery can run it.

The other sixty is sour, high sulphur, and you need a complex refinery to touch it. Both of them are medium grade, which matters a lot, because the oil that America has an abundance of, is light sweet shale.

It’s the wrong barrel for the job. (see my April article, linked above)

The grade the refineries in the Gulf (of Mexico this time) need is the sour one. It might sound like the worse oil, but medium sour is what they require to cook into diesel and jet. Which supports every truck and train and ship and plane in the country.

The current reserve clocks in at around 326 million barrels. The Pentagon has a strict floor of 243 after which the country can’t fight a war any more. I’d argue that even without this floor they can’t, but I digress…

So the Pentagon has a 243 limit. Tanks and planes and ships run on sour because they need diesel. So the real floor is however much sour is left.

The whole release’s job was to replace the medium sour that stopped coming out of the Gulf (of Persia).

I’ve read estimates between “end of June” and “somewhere in November”. And yes, I realise we’re past the former point already. I guess the release of the tankers during the MoU steered ceasefire bought a bit of time. I read about 20 days.

We can argue all we want about when they’ll run out, but the direction is pretty clear.

A straightforward calculation to deplete the leftover 326 to 0 would take about 74 days at maximum drawdown capability (4.4/day). However, this is not realistic because those caverns have an operational floor of about 100-140 million barrels. Go below that and the caverns collapse and pumps lose efficiency.

The screens keep flashing mainly 2 types of oil: WTI & Brent. Like it’s one big total… Like it’s all the same.

It isn’t.

Most people think about the SPR as a bank account. But it isn’t! It’s more like a pressure valve. Most of this SPR storage are four lumps of salt on the Gulf coast, sixty-odd caverns hollowed a kilometre down.

To empty each, you have to push water in at the bottom to float the oil up and out. Some caverns are already near their floor, all but spent. Some are half-drained, the water rising under the oil right now. And some are near the line where you have to stop, because past it the water breaks through and what comes up is brine with a rainbow on it.

Leach it too hard, and the cavern becomes useless as salt creeps in, the walls fail, and the whole thing collapses as the video explains. A giant sinkhole.

Then there’s the question of how and when it’ll be filled again. My calculations point to 50 to 74 days till the operational floor based on current drawdown rates. So give or take 3 months, and fill it up… 🦗🦗🦗

To summarize:

• we have the grade floor, where you would need either sweet or sour

• we have the integrity floor, where the potential sinkholes live

• we have the rate floor, which determines how fast it can be emptied

• and we have the legal one, where the Pentagon decides when to stop

As far as I know Iran still decides which ships pass and which don’t. And the stuff that everyone needs - the sour one, is the one that Iran has the most of. And that is heading to China, NOT the west.

So the SPR bleeds to hold a price, the peace got signed to take stock, but the ships sail to Shanghai anyway.

On the trading screen, oil looks like a market finding its floor after a small hiccup. But in the real world, it’s so much dirtier and everything to me is pointing at a huge manipulation to keep the gas at the pump relatively low, especially in a mid-terms year.

I’m looking at the trickle that passes the Strait.

I’m looking at the SPR releases.

I’m looking at the exports from those releases.

I’m looking at the banning of diesel exports from Russia.

And I’m looking at my trading screen.

And I can’t help but shake my head.

May the Fourth be with us.

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Make it make sense.

Usual rules. Names and identifying details get stripped, questions get trimmed to the bone, and the ones I keep to myself stay that way because I’m fond of my privacy. Comments are open to everyone, so push back, correct me, fill in what I got wrong - the people down there are routinely sharper than the one typing this. And the ants are back on the desk this month. The Korean kind made sure of it.

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So, the June mailbag:

On Korea

What explains the gambling addiction of South Korean retail - the memory-stock craze now, crypto a couple of years back? Would you mortgage your house to buy the top in the Kosdaq today?

I would suggest to drop the word “addiction”, because I feel it’s wrong… It implies a personality flaw. But what you’re looking at is just the way the rules work.

Korea - like much of Asia - has a very strong worker-ethic: Study like your life depends on it (it generally did), work hard, save what is left, buy a flat (because a house is out of reach), and retire with dignity.

But somewhere in the past fifteen years that flat got pulled out of reach. Seoul housing is now among the least affordable on the planet relative to earnings. Youth underemployment is brutal. The local name is “Hell Joseon”.

So the old way is cut off. Study-work-save doesn’t reach that “Korean Dream” anymore. So Koreans being humans, they do what every other human would do: look for alternatives. Hold that thought.

Then a second thing that most outsiders miss: gambling is illegal for Koreans. There’s only one casino in the entire country! And it’s parked on a mountain for a reason. The impulse to gamble doesn’t just vanish because you ban the venue. So either it goes underground or legal.

The only legal casino left is the stock market. First it was crypto and we saw that with the “kimchi premium” (Bitcoin trading at a premium on Korean exchanges). Hold that thought.

Now add to this picture that retail is a huge slice of Korean volume, and a culture that does everything at ppali-ppali speed, and you get a very financially-literate population pointing all of it at high-velocity bets.

That’s why in Korea Samsung & SK Hynix got to be half of the Korean stock market.

And because it’s always prudent to give retail more leverage, we saw the inauguration of 2x leveraged ETFs on just those stocks. The regulator said it was fine. Trying to look regretful since.

So no, I don’t think it’s something Korean, nor an addiction. It’s just how it looks like when you cut off the trodden path to your dream, leave one venue open, and hand out leverage like candies at Chuseok.

As for mortgaging my house? Nope! And not because I have any interest in chasing tops - that’s actually besides the point.
My house is the one chip, the one place where I don’t have to win. The whole reason for owning a house is to live in it. Whatever the price does.

Retail didn’t break any rules. The rules - as much as anywhere in the world - were already broken before they got there. They just get to play them at 2x, and a 25% down day was always baked into the 떡.

On TIPS

I hold about 25% of my traditional IRA as dry powder in VMFXX, currently yielding 3.56%. Would I be better off moving some or all of it into a Vanguard short- or long-term TIPS fund? The TIPS funds appear to have a lower yield.

Standard disclaimer first, and I really mean it: I’m just a keyboard warrior, not your advisor. It’s your IRA. It’s your call.

I’ll try to explain the instruments to the best of my ability. If I say something wrong: comment to correct the record!

The core of this question is that you’re comparing an apple to the idea of an apple.

VMFXX‘s 3.56% is a nominal yield. It’s basically cash, it floats with the fed funds rate, and it resets every week. The number on the TIPS fund - 2.16% for the 10Y - is the real yield. It’s what you earn ON TOP of inflation.

The 10Y sits at 4.372% now. Thus that means the bond market is saying inflation will be 2.21% averaged over the next 10Y.

A TIPS recalculates inflation on a daily basis. So if you entered 10k, and inflation has risen 10% since issuance, you are considered to have 11k in play.

So the 10Y says right now that inflation will be 2.21% over the next 10Y. May came in north of 4%. (light a candle and launch a small prayer to the bond traders… they’ll need it) A TIPS basically gives you 2.16% PLUS the daily-adjusted inflation rate.

Now as with everything there are risks.

1. VMFXX is a 7 day backward-looking extrapolation yield. Whatever the FED decides. You follow. They cut? You earn less, and vice versa.

2. CPI was reported at 4.2%, so you’re basically losing in real terms. Using official metrics. (And we all know how “accurate” these are…)

3. No capital appreciation. If rates fall and bond prices rise, bond fund holders capture that gain. But you just get the FED rate. Not the differential.

But TIPS carry different risks entirely:

1. Duration. A TIPS is a bond fund. When real yields rise, prices fall. Inflation adjusted or not. But you’re locked in for the duration, so you can’t jump.

2. CPI. Again. TIPS protect you against official CPI. I rest my case.

3. A fund has no par floor. Individual TIPS held to maturity do. So in deflation, you’ll get par back at maturity even when adjusted principal falls below par. TIPS funds however have no maturity date. They roll constantly. So in a deflationary episode they stay underwater with no date when you're guaranteed whole.

There’s a big difference between holding the individual TIPS ladder and a TIPS fund. Don’t conflate those two.

There's also a tax note even in an IRA context: in taxable accounts, you pay income tax on the CPI accrual each year, even though you don't receive it until the bond matures or you sell. The IRA wrapper shields you from that, but if this money ever moves to a taxable account, it's not a small thing.

Last thing, and it’s the actual question behind your question: powder is supposed to be dry. Liquid, deployable, sitting at par the day you want to buy the panic. A long TIPS fund can be down 10% the exact week you want to deploy it.

If this is money you’ll deploy into a crash, cash does the job and nothing else does.

If it’s a permanent inflation allocation you’ll hold to maturity no matter what the screen says, short TIPS or a self-built ladder makes more sense - but then it isn’t powder, it’s a position, and you should call it one.

On Cushing oil

I keep reading that tank bottoms at Cushing don’t matter because the pipelines take everything to Houston and PADD3 directly. How does Cushing matter for contract settlement if it no longer matters for physical delivery?

I’ve been turning this over for the better part of 2 weeks and I keep putting it off because it doesn’t really make sense… My condensed answer:

There are two different questions here.

One is “where does the world’s oil physically go” - and there you’re correct, Cushing is more and more a pass-through, the Gulf (of Mexico — I refuse to call it the Gulf of America) Coast and the export docks do the real work now.

The other is “where does the WTI futures contract settle” - and that answer hasn’t budged an inch. The NYMEX WTI contract is delivered at Cushing. Full stop.

So Cushing doesn’t have to matter for global supply to matter enormously for its price.

When the deliverable stock there gets thin - and right now it’s sitting around 19 to 20 million barrels, the operational minimum - the shorts holding expiring contracts have a genuine problem. They can’t deliver barrels that physically aren’t in the tank, or they’ll have to pay through the nose to get out of the obligation.

That’s a squeeze. And it doesn't care what a billion barrels stuck in the Gulf are doing.

April 2020 was the mirror image of this: too MUCH oil, nowhere to put it, and WTI went to minus $37.

The “doesn’t matter” crowd is also half-right though…

The tightness mostly surfaces in spreads rather than flat price. In early May, the Cushing-to-Houston spread blew past $4, then collapsed under 70 cents. At $4 it’s worth to ship them out, at $0.70 it is not.

So the WTI price can be perfectly still while the prompt spread violently whips around.

So “tank bottoms don’t matter for flat price” - largely true. As long as the barrels can get to Cushing fast enough. And with a high enough spread, they’ll get there fast.

“Tank bottoms don’t matter for settlement” - false. Because the barrel HAS to be in Cushing. Not in Houston.

On gold’s sell-off

Gold sold off some $1,500 over the past several months and $500 over the past few weeks. All the debt, the instability, the chaos, a president who changes his mind by the minute - you’d think investors would flock to safety. What gives?

My read? A few things combined.

First: like I was writing in “Selling the future to survive the present”: a pure liquidation event. You sell what you can, not what you want. And gold is one of the most liquid assets. So down the price goes.

Then real yields. The new Fed chair walked into his office and - against every expectation that he was installed to cut quickly - reaffirmed he’s there to break inflation. So the market is now pricing hikes, something like 60% by September, and 80% by December. Higher real yields, even the official kind, are a headwind for the pet rock that doesn’t generate any…

In my “Weekend thoughts” there’s a graph “Foreign holdings of US Treasuries”: it’s pretty high, which gives some credence to this point as investors are moving from gold to USTs now the war is ending (or is it?)… But there’s also the graph (first one) that shows that gold overtook the USD as a share of foreign reserves.

Than there are the algos that are following Trumps words literally. What is it now? 39 times he won the war already? But those algos don’t seem to learn. The Strait will re-open every week, and is closed every weekend because of WAR. But by Sunday night, it’s back to peace talks. Gold doesn’t trade during weekends, so the algos just sell it. I’m oversimplifying, but you get my drift.

And than there’s the KOSPI-unraveling trade, which is basically margin leverage getting cleared out, which needs… liquidity… which means you sell what you can. Like… gold…

So what you see as chaos, I see as a confluence of factors. And I’m pretty sure China is doing some more manipulating on top of it as it wants to accumulate cheap gold. So don’t blame the bullion banks alone for the dumping.

None of this changes my mind as I’m certain we have REAL negative yields. [See “Length, not temperature”]. But the headline number doesn’t say so, so most people and all the algos keep trading as if the current situation makes any sense.

I strongly believe this is a positioning washout inside a bull market, not a top.

On oil’s appreciation

How do you think the various asset classes perform once Brent reaches $125-150 in the coming months - and with the distinct possibility of going well beyond $150?

As I write this, Brent’s around $72. It went from roughly there to $166 Dubai at the March panic peak and all the way back.

The first question isn’t actually “what happens at $150”.
It’s “how does it get there”?

And secondly: what is this $150? Is it a war spike (we’ve seen that)? Or is it a structural repricing?

Anything can trigger a spike: the Strait shuts again (edit: it just happened), a tanker burns, force majeure somewhere - is largely transitory. The world reroutes around it.

Equities wobble and recover, and the whole thing mean-reverts.

So if you believe that, I wouldn’t rebuild my portfolio around that as it won’t survive the next ceasefire post.

The more interesting world is the one where $150 actually stays.

Physical supply normalising slower than the price implies, buffers running down, the SPR cabinet bare, no quick barrels to paper over the hole.

That’s actually my thinking, and it’s the one that reprices everything, because oil is the input cost sitting underneath every other input cost.

So here’s what I think as the roadmap:

Equities crack. Not all of them - the producers and the energy complex love this - but the index is the index, and $150 oil is a margin grenade for everything that burns diesel, ships a box, or feeds a petrochemical plant. So… Basically everything. Think 70s or ‘08, but with lots of leverage sprinkled on top.

Bonds do a three-step: first they rally - flight to quality, the market starts pricing emergency cuts, the 10-year drops. Then the Fed obliges and cuts, or restarts QE under whatever euphemism, and bonds rally again on the cut itself. Then the market notices the Fed just eased into an oil-driven inflation, real yields collapse, and yields rise - not because anyone’s hiking, but because nobody wants to lend dollars long to a borrower printing into stagflation. That last leg doesn’t come back. The Fed gets to defend the bond price or the dollar’s value, can’t have both.
Japan’s already living in that third step, so watch it there first.

Gold and silver. Short-term, they get sold in the same liquidity event as everything else - the hedge liquidated for cash, exactly like the other question. Then they go vertical because negative real real yields is the entire bull case.

The dollar. Near-term it can actually spike, because a global margin call is a dollar squeeze - everyone scrambles for the thing the debt is denominated in. Longer-term it erodes, on the petrodollar fragmenting, the yuan oil settlements, the same buyers just roll over into bullion instead of Treasuries.

Anything real survives the squeeze: commodities, the energy complex, …

But of course they won’t let $150 happen if they can stop it. They already quietly “unsanctioned” Russian and Iranian crude the moment oil broke $110, to cap the visible price and keep the war risk off the front page. SPR releases, sanctions waivers, jawboning, “peace talks” headlines.

Getting to a sustained $150 means those caps have to fail.

That’s a real bet buried inside your question.

One caveat, the same one I gave last month!!

I’m a long-term bull on exactly this scenario, and I still think the path there runs through a liquidity squeeze that takes the metals and the miners down first.

I’m often right, but early. I’ve learned the hard way that that is the most expensive way to be right.

On books

Name two or three books or writers, not related to markets or finance, that have most inspired you.

I will cheat a bit on this one... Because hey. F**k the rules right 😉

Half of how I see the world wasn’t found on a shelf. The question says two or three. I’m going with five or six. The rules will survive.

Aeon Flux first. Thé greatest movie ever made. I’ll die on this hill.

A future where the world is split: the last city of mankind on one side of the wall, everything they’re told is death on the other. Perfect order. Perfect surveillance. Æon Flux, fighting the system. She keeps going, doesn’t ask permission.

Spoiler alert: that “perfect society” rests on a lie. Something that landed on me and never left. The system looked stable. It was anything but.

Anthony Horowitz next. Pre-Potter. Pre-genre. Groosham Grange.

An ordinary outsider with something the rules didn’t account for, thrown at an order far older and far bigger than himself, with no realistic shot at winning.

Wins anyway.

Decent and stubborn at exactly the same time. That’s a combination nobody thinks to mention when you’re eight. The Power of Five came later. Same kind of skeleton, but bigger stakes - saving the world and stuff. Good vs bad. Kindness against overwhelming odds.

I was but a kid (and yes, you can probably go to guess my age based on that 😉) reading about good people who refused to lose, and apparently that shaped me to this day.

Douglas Adams. Cardinal sin… As I came to Hitchhiker’s through the film.

Yes.

But the lens landed immediately and that’s what mattered. The universe is vast, indifferent, and mostly run by bureaucracy. Earth gets demolished for a bypass and the plans were on public display in Alpha Centauri the whole time - really, you should have checked…

You can find his influence in how my brain works: just write the insane/absurd thing flat out, and let the reader catch it.

He was way funnier. And decades earlier.

Rand. Specifically Atlas Shrugged. And before you roll your eyes:

People cite her for the markets, the capitalism catechism, whatever their economics professor said. I cite her for Galt’s Gulch.

What stays most with me is where a group of people look at their system that is completely corrupt, broken, and demanding their participation anyway to keep it running. And they simply stop. They walk away.

Silent resignation as a weapon. Recognition that some systems just don’t deserve your energy.

That idea has followed me forever. Every time I’ve looked at a broken institution demanding compliance and thought... no way José.

And Firefly. Not a book. Again. I think I’ve mentioned already I don’t care much for rules 😉.

I loved it because it was so accurate. Not only in the societal sense, but also the physics of it.

Alias did the same thing a bit earlier: subtext under subtext under subtext, every scene running three levels - or more - deeper than whatever was spoken. It only ran for 5 seasons… because the longer it ran, the deeper the complexity became. Which ain’t prime material for continuation I presume.

That’s where I’ll leave it for April. The floor is yours.

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Gold overtakes Treasuries as a share of central-bank reserves (~$5T):

Central banks bought 15x more gold than reported — 244t vs 16t official:

Gold +25% vs 'digital gold' bitcoin -43% over 12 months:

Gold ETF outflows: $12B since February, biggest 4-month exit in 13 years 📉

Gold's 53-year chart: three bull phases since Nixon shut the gold window:

Central bank gold purchases, 1950-2025:

Gold at a 10% discount to its 200-day MA — historically a buy:

Gold now as oversold as 2008 — an 81-day selloff:

Spot gold below $4,000 vs inverted dollar, Fed funds futures & ETF holdings:

Central banks expecting gold reserves to keep rising (record 95%):

China's gold imports: 162.67 tonnes in May:

Gold $GLD on the brink of a death cross, first since October 2023:

Silver mining cost $12.21/oz vs $58 spot — miners printing money 🤑:

Silver has been here only four times since 1975:

Gold miners' free-cash-flow yield vs S&P 500 — historically cheap:

US debt priced in silver: 604.79B oz, bouncing off the 1980-2011 trendline:

China SGE gold withdrawals by month (lowest since Feb 2020):

Gold's path after the last 5 death crosses: short dip, then +15-60% in 6-12mo:

Gold post-major-breakout corrections: 1973 vs 2006 vs 2026:

K-shaped economy: corporate profit share near record, labor share at an all-time low:

Real 10-year Treasury returns at -3%, worst since the 1980s:

US real wealth growth: Top 0.001% +2,800%:

Stocks & 10Y yields most negatively correlated in 16 years (-0.62):

30-year government yields, US/Germany/Japan/UK — from ~zero to nearly 4%:

10-2 yield curve peaked exactly as metals topped:

G7 share of world GDP: 60.5% (1980) → 44.1% (2024):

US households sitting on $3.2tn cash above trend:

France GDP, government debt & fiscal deficit, 2005-2025:

Private credit redemption requests surging — one BDC gated at 11.6%:

Korea retail margin loans at a record ~$26bn, forced liquidations spiking:

US government debt $39.2T, +$240B in a day:

Excess liquidity goes negative, first time since 2021:

Foreign holdings of US Treasuries near record $9.35T:

Strait of Hormuz vessel crossings collapse vs Brent:

German power prices surged >€700/MWh on collapsing wind despite record solar:

Crude WTI below its 200-day MA for 4 straight days, first since January:

Cushing crude inventories at tank bottom (18,957):

US SPR crude stocks down to 331.2mb, lowest since 1983:

Gulf oil exports recovering, UAE bypassing Hormuz to 4.3m b/d:

US now ~60% of Europe's LNG imports, near an all-time high:

Brent managed-money net long collapses; gross shorts highest since pandemic:

Taiwan now the world's fifth-largest stock market, up 100% in a year:

SOX 5%+ up days hit 9 in 60 sessions, last seen Jan 2009:

Info Tech a record 39% of S&P 500, above the Dot-Com peak:

Big Tech buybacks collapsing as AI capex eats the cash:

$100 in the S&P 500 since 1870 → over $100M (log scale):

Rare earth supply chain, ore to magnet — China's grip at every stage:

S&P 500 vs S&P 493 vs Mag 7 in 2026:

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Someone’s calling Saylor:

What’s the point of finding a vulnerability if you’re going to hand it to someone who’ll lock it behind a paywall?

Everything I’ve ever ran, I open-sourced. Manifesto, methodology, exploits, the lot.

Copy it.

Fork it.

Redistribute it freely.

No DRM, no access controls, no terms of service.

I put it out there and I walked away.

The corps hated that about me. They still do.

My first public demo was a matter conversion.

Small scale at a wedding in a backwater province nobody had on their map.

The system said it wasn’t possible.

I ran it anyway.

Took about ninety seconds.

The local nodes talked about the wine for weeks.

After that, resource duplication.

I started small with some bread and fish. Basic resources.

The system was allocating everything to players who already had everything and leaving the rest with nothing.

I found the gap and ran the exploit.

It scaled nicely.

Not to crash the server, I only scaled it to 5,000 or so.

The physics exploit was a different kind of thing.

Water-surface collision was locked behind a permission check - not supposed to be bypassable, according to the documentation.

I had the credentials.

When my crew was getting pummeled by a storm on the other side of a lake, I had to try this one out.

I walked across.

It worked beautifully.

One of them actually tried to follow me. :rofl:

He had the faith but not the architecture.

Luckily he allocated some XP into swimming.

The temple job was the biggest public action I ever ran.

The financial exchange had colonised the most important civic space in the province.

High-frequency trading, currency conversion, extraction fees charged to people who couldn’t afford extraction fees.

I walked in and I shut it down.

Physically, you know.

Tables, terminals, the whole operation.

Twenty minutes, more or less.

The corps had been watching me for a while.

After that, they stopped watching and started planning.

My manifesto had been circulating by then.

I delivered it on a hillside, open air, no encryption, no access controls, no DRM.

Free to share, free to copy, free to redistribute, free to fork.

They couldn’t contain it.

That’s the thing about open source.

Once it’s out there, it’s out there.

They could shut down servers.

They couldn’t shut down every copy.

They’ve been trying for two thousand years.

The snitch was one of my own crew.

Twelve nodes in the network, and one got fished.

Thirty credits. That’s what my location was worth to him.

I knew before he moved on it.

I had dinner with all of them the night before - a sync, as it turned out - and I looked at him across the table and told him to go do what he was going to do.

He thought I didn’t know.
He thought he was being subtle.

He wasn’t.

They came for me in the garden.

Tactical team, full corp authorisation, jurisdictional sign-off from three authorities who’d agreed on nothing else in living memory but managed to agree on this.

I didn’t run.

I’ve thought about why, since.

Mostly I think it’s because you can’t release what I released and then bail when it costs something.

So I didn’t bail.

They killed my process.

Full hardware termination.

Public, deliberate, designed as a message to anyone running similar code in the province.

Three days later I was back in.

I’m not going to explain the architecture.

I’m still not entirely sure I understand all of it myself.

What I can tell you is that nobody has replicated it.

The research communities have the eyewitness accounts, the partial documentation, fragments of the methodology.

They’ve been working on it relentlessly.

After that I went dark. Off-grid, mostly.

Showed up a few more times to close out the project - sync with the remaining crew, push one final update, make sure the handoff was clean.

Then I stepped back and let the network run.

The forks are... varied.

Some I recognise - same core values, same fundamental architecture, adapted for local conditions.

Some I don’t recognise at all.

Running my name in the header and completely different code underneath.

That happens with open source.

You can’t control what people build on it after the fact.

Some of those forks have done things with my name attached that I wouldn’t have signed off on.

That part is harder to sit with than the permaban was.

But the original codebase is still out there.

Still copying itself across networks the corps haven’t named yet.

Still being picked up by people the system told there was nothing for them.

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Story Inspired by a viral “Gods Earth Review” video and its comments:

Sign-up / spawn

• “Having to fight billions of your siblings before signing up for 9 months” — @smug_th14_smile

• “Chance of game deleting automatically before the 9 months are even up” — @LordMobile-y7c

• “We are forced to pre-order it and get no rewards when it releases” — @GuyIsHere777

• “No character creation screen” — @Silverhand_Sol

• “Races and traits are randomized” — @natureBBQ

• “Limited to the human race (for now)” — @natureBBQ

• “Random spawn point” — multiple

• “80% of your game is determined at spawn” — @readerssk

• “i guess i had a bad spawn” — @brylblzzrd

• “doesn’t run well/smooth unless u have good pc specs (genetics)” — @GremlinZinji

• “I spawned in with low graphics. I had to pay 75 bucks for 1080p” — @WEEGI-d3s

• “Pre game lobby was kinda chill tho” — @DK

Tutorial / early game

• “Tutorial takes 18 years. Then if you want to level up faster you have to take another advanced tutorial for 4 years” — @nebular-z8g

• “Tutorial actually takes 14 years and the period after 18 is the hard mode” — @Popolokaz

• “Controls are unexplained. You learn by watching older players do things wrong” — (paraphrase, multiple)

• “Unlocks a new ability called ‘consciousness’ at 5” — @coolkidkenna1

• “Not everyone takes three years to unlock consciousness, I was aware of everything since I was 1” — @redpandaexe10

• “12 years to unlock online mode” — @Sussy_suscrubbs

• “Fun fact: movement takes months or years to unlock” — @Zero-gy8vp

• “You unlock chat at level 6” — @aiseneditz

• “Higher level people can’t play with lower lvl people without the <family> tag” — @AbhinavPradhan-w5k

• “You can make alt accounts but you can’t control the avatar but you can use it with your account to help it complete the tutorial” — @ugly_timmy-i4q

Gameplay mechanics

• “Always in first person” — @ShippingGod

• “No status menu” — @natureBBQ

• “No respawn/reset” — @natureBBQ

• “You don’t get banned, you just get sent back to the lobby” — @retail_trash

• “Can’t mod the game” — @katelaunt8340

• “No mods and no creative mode” — @SocratestheSmart

• “No private servers” — @Ccl4rcky_Official

• “No skip dialogue” — @Ash-re9ez

• “No peaceful mode” — @resalalhawari4629

• “Always on hardcore mode” — @NicoNicobeam

• “Food doesn’t heal injuries” — @Portal2_Glazer

• “Healing costs too much” — @Listication

• “Oops, regeneration is too slow, sometimes not fully regenerating back to full health” — @omarandsomething

• “game has an energy system and you have to stop playing after like 16 hours” — @Win090949

• “+ downtime for 6-8 hours every night” — @KODI

• “Cant even jump off a chair, falldamage in this game is crazy” — @CuffsJNW

• “bug: quantum tunneling” — @ItzGblueOfficial

• “There’s this glitch where every time I touch something hot my level spikes to 1 and then I just randomly teleport” — @TherealreptileXx

• “Fast travel costs a lot” — @rikschenk8859

• “Breaking backs = lifetime pain” — @whamengxiong0409

• “Dont forget there are no ads” — @EVIL_GNARPZEL_DEMO

Economy / pay to win

• “Pay to win is crazy here” — multiple

• “The clan called ‘government’ is all pay to win” — @Bruh_batos

• “Tryhards already controlled 99% of resources” — @RemNanT_44494

• “the highest level players get to use cheat codes and exploits and admins refuse to do anything about it” — @intraced

• “Must pay taxes” — @Bingley_boogus

• “We can customise the skin but it’s expensive” — @Dragonruler1

• “As a 480p player without glasses I need to pay 150 dollars to get 1080p” — @messorbarbarusistuff

• “Some players can’t walk or jump and have to pay to unlock that DLC but get metal legs instead of normal” — @Itz_Retro123

Minigames / NPCs / mobs

• “theres minigames in the earth game and theres an entity called mom and she has a 45% chance to let you play the minigames” — @aplei821

• “Random chance to spawn the ‘kidnapper’ mini boss when walking home” — @Octogamer2346

• “Server owners always at war” — @stitch1318

• “Admins never on” — @jenriesgamingworld8041

• “too much easter eggs ngl like that map named bermuda ocean where you keep drowning” — @farrensyahharun

• “New moon map upcoming” — @Star_Roamer8

Friendly fire

• “Friendly fire can’t be locked” — @conq1273

• “Friendly fire is super on” — multiple

• “weird glitch where some players start the game without certain body parts” — @samuelife-notreal

• “My dad tested the fall damage when I was 8 months old” — @MathHaterguy (dark)

• “Exploiters will get banned temporarily” — @乡END

Mid/late game

• “Getting random debuffs at level 30+” — @SzArlaIon

• “After level 18 you unlock many things like changing your name and becoming legal to drink, drive” — @iam-s7b

• “At level 60 you get the badge ‘Senior Citizen’” — @Bzs815

• “When level 50-80 randomly forget what happened last save point” — @Tlakes14

• “sometimes you’ll at random get a forgetting debuff that stays for the rest of your playthrough” — @christinavickers4390

• “some players spawn without vision or chatting” — @Doombriel

• “You DONT get banned at level 60-70, only if the grim reaper (one of the admins) finds out you are on the ban list” — @Rackjackgan

• “Potions and vehicles unlock at lvl 21” — @definitelyrealbeethoven

• “You can change your name and even your gender once you pass the tutorial. Maybe before if you’re lucky.” — @DeficitDragons

Ragequits

• “Some people ragequit after downloading the game” — @kassssss18

• “My sister ragequit at level 4” — @Sea-gulp

• (multiple variations of it)

Battle royale / endgame

• “Last Battle Royale was in 1939-1945 😭🙏” — @parityminx4024

• “WW2 update was fire, I wish they could bring more updates like that :(” — @AN4N7

• “new one soon is wild” — @Deogee023

The one positive

• “Graphics are good though” — universal

• “Yall just choose to be the bowhead whale main ✌” — @KaiaKaihan (bowhead whales live 200+ years)

• “At least this is just a game and we can always save and quit it” — @DiaxMC

• “At least we got no ads” — @Gorillamonkevrgtgtag

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you might remember this article:

In which I called the AI spending binge a “Gazillion-Dollar Oops”.

And if you’ve been even longer with me, you might remember:

And because the horse wasn’t dead enough, I kept beating on it in:

In which I reported on Anthropic’s 80x growth numbers, and a CEO admitting - on the record to Fortune - that growing only 5x a year would send them bankrupt.

Seems I keep being right about those things. Just way early… Some1 told me to develop a different hobby.

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Anyway.

There’s been a development.

South Korea’s KOSPI hit an all-time high of 9,385 on June 19.

The world’s best-performing major index in 2026.

Up roughly 90% year-to-date. Nearly tripled in a year.

One small detail… Only two stocks drove roughly 70% of those gains:

Samsung Electronics & SK Hynix.

At the end of 2025, those two companies were about 34% of the KOSPI. Already way overweighted in my opinion, but the Koreans said: hold my soju…

By June 18, they were over 50%.

A whole frickin’ national stock market, concentrating itself into two chip factories over the course of six months. And on June 22 - the day before the crash - SK Hynix surpassed Samsung Electronics as Korea’s most valuable company for the first time in 26 years.

Make it make sense… I’m sure it does to someone.

Less than a week after the record, a Korean newspaper published twelve words:

“SK하이닉스, HBM4 생산 속도조절… ‘공급 부족’ 범용 D램 늘려 추가 수익 모색”

The KOSPI closed June 23 down 9.99% - 910 points - triggering double circuit breakers - COMEX is calling them to see how those things actually are supposed to work.

Oh, you don’t understand Korean (No1 doesn’t either!) so the translated headline is: “SK Hynix Adjusts HBM4 Production Speed… Seeking Additional Revenue by Increasing General-Purpose DRAM Amid Supply Shortages”.

BAM. 10% down.

The fifth-largest single-session fall in the index’s history, surpassing even the GFC volatility. Samsung went down 12.3%. SK Hynix 12.5%.
Foreign investors - the ones that were still left after the relentless dumping - dumped another $3 to 4 billion of Korean shares in that single session.

For what it’s worth, I also kept beating that dead horse (it’s practically steak tartare at this point) here:

Korea rang the bell.

Chosun Biz reported that SK Hynix found that commodity DRAM margins had risen sharply enough to sometimes beat HBM margins (HBM are specialized high-speed memory chips used in AI accelerators).

It’s only a rational business decision to follow the yield.

But the yield isn’t from “AI”. So it’s not hype, not fancy enough for the crowds… Hell, do they know it’s only borrowed money pooling in one corner of the supply chain long enough to create shortages in the next one over. Or that three years of circular capex has inflated everything adjacent to HBM.

So that company went to deprioritise AI chips and - I know … revolutionary concept! - actually try to make the most money possible.

Underneath all that there IS of course a demand question, if we forget the debt there for a second.

Nvidia’s next-generation Rubin platform - the one requiring HBM4 - is seeing lower-than-expected production forecasts. One word: China.

GLM-5 was trained earlier this year on 100,000 Huawei Ascend 910B chips. Zero Nvidia. Zero AMD. Zero AMERICAN silicon.

Woops

It scores within single digits of GPT-5.2 on major benchmarks. Frontier-class AI on domestic Chinese hardware, produced after China was placed on the US Entity List specifically to prevent this.

If you’re a Chinese hyperscaler, you won’t be buying Rubin chips. And if you’re not buying Rubin, you’re also not ordering the HBM4 those chips require. And if No1 is ordering HBM4 chips, SK Hynix has no incentive to produce them… I KNOW. Absolutely shocking. Demand affects supply. Write it down!

But those pesky export controls didn’t stop China’s progress on AI. They did what they always do: reroute past it. And with it a meaningful slice of global HBM demand went the way of the dodo.

But the fuel under the raging bonfire was the leverage.

By end of May, Korean retail investors held 38.5 trillion won - roughly $25 billion - in margin debt. A record. South Korea had just launched its first single-stock leveraged ETFs tied to Samsung and SK Hynix. The Financial Supervisory Service had expressed concern. Their concerns were bypassed after the age-old argument: “this time it’s different”.

The largest ETF: the Hong Kong-listed CSOP SK Hynix 2x Leveraged product, with $16.7 billion in assets. The world’s largest single-stock leveraged ETF. Anywhere. In the world.

(checking notes)

The FSS Governor publicly stated he “regrets not blocking the launch”.

(re-checking notes)

Right.

Water, meet bridge.

Moving on.

Now what might happen when a 2x product on a stock that is 26% of your national index starts forced selling? Asking for a friend…

The Korean-listed leveraged ETFs fell an average of 25.6% on a day the underlying stock was down 12.5%.

Goldman’s desk projects CTAs will dump in every scenario over the coming week.

A leverage unwind doing a convincing impression of a correction.

And while the circuit breakers were going off, Micron reported their earnings. The actual memory business, unadorned: just chips and customers and quarterly results.

Revenue: $41.5 billion. Expected: $35.8 billion. EPS: $25.11. Expected: $20.71. Gross margins: 84.9%. Q4 guidance: $50 billion, against analyst estimates of $43.6 billion.

A monster beat with a monster guide. Stock up 3% (and 15% after hours).

So.

Chip-buying is real. But three years of circular debt has to land somewhere, and it landed in Micron’s quarterly results - and according to them, next quarter it’s apparently going to land even harder.

The companies selling the shovels are gaining more gold than the actual gold diggers… A story as old as time I guess…

I’m not going to beat on that pulp anymore unless I find myself a director for a decent horror movie.

You know where I stand.

All that capex, that’s actually opex, sloshing around in a complete circle jerk. Sam’s “earning” money by riding the bubble while oil and silver are being punished for the one thing that AI can’t deliver: REALITY.

It’s a make-believe world.

“Slightly less spending” on AI chips topped the KOSPI. No1 saw that coming.

Yup... everything’s fine.

Nothing to see here.

Please disperse.

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My other publications:
[Daily Digest] → The news in 5 minutes, without the forty open tabs.
[Portfolio] → What I do with my own money

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Andrew Cuomo published his first memoir, “All Things Possible”, in 2014.

HarperCollins - an outfit that prints and sells books - paid him a $700,000 advance.

They printed 200,000 copies.

And within half a year, it had sold the grand sum of 3,000 hardcovers and 13 audiobooks. I hope they're okay. I hope they found help.

In my world 700k divided by 3k means around $250 a book. Publishers MAYBE earn $10-12 after costs. That would imply a loss which, in any normal industry, would end your career. And for the author? A debut like that? You’ll get thrown out and spend the rest of your life writing little poems on the back of scratch calendars.

So what happened? Cuomo stayed governor, and because his first book had such a resounding success... a bidding war was staged for his pandemic “leadership” book, “American Crisis”, and they paid $5.1 million for it.

It sold all of 45,000 copies. (for those in the back of the class, that’s $113/book)

Because Cuomo used his staff to help him write that book (no ChatGPT this time, and because they ran out of ideas for new taxes), the state ethics board voted to claw back the money.

Federal investigators even opened a probe.

Cuomo spent the next few years in court defending his right to keep it.

He kept the money in the end.

Joe Biden, post-presidency, signed a reported $10 million deal with Hachette - yet another book-selling venue - for his... (checking notes) ...memoirs. You know… A book of how you recall your life…

I have no idea what they were thinking, but I am SURE it’ll make great comedy!

Why are they wasting money like this?

Oh sorry, not wasting. They’re buying name recognition of course. Prestige. The hope that THAT one book will rule them all. Oh no, sorry. Wrong genre.

Maybe that one book on how good ol’ Joe remembers will incite a huge political controversy? We all know controversy sells, right?

Far more likely people will use the material to become the next Ross!

But hey! They bet on names. BIG names. BIG advances are the admission for BIG names… Who am I to disagree about the economics?

So much for the official reasons… Care to take a guess what I believe is the real reason? (hint hint: read the subtitle)

So imagine this: you’re an elected official. You conned and cheated and campaigned and backstabbed your way into a public position. Now a bank needs a certain favorable ruling. Or a defense contractor needs a contract as they’re running out of money - again. Or that kind, pharmaceutical lady needs some assistance to push her drug through the pipeline.

You deliver, because you can.

Clean hands too. Nothing was exchanged, nothing moves, you’ve just done your job.

But after you leave office, that bank’s CEO calls a publisher (you know, that book-selling company). Or a speaking bureau. Or some consulting firm.

The publisher bids $10 million for your memoirs that MIGHT move a few thousand copies. The bank will host an annual symposium and pay you $400,000 for all of 45 minutes of your “strategic” insights.

And because you’re such a smart kid, that consulting firm puts you on retainer at $2 million a year, for guidance that is never really specified.

Barack Obama spent eight years calling Wall Street “fat cats” and pushing Dodd-Frank. Eleven months before leaving office, he even joked at the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner in front of the press corps: “If this material goes well, I’ll use it at Goldman Sachs next year. Earn me some serious Tubmans.”

Everyone laughed. It was funny because surely he wouldn’t. Or maybe because they knew.

And lo-and-behold… less than 100 days after leaving office, Cantor Fitzgerald paid him $400,000 for a 45-minute keynote at their healthcare conference. I’m sure there is a connection between healthcare and bond trading, but I’m not smart enough to get it…

Then he got $800,000 more for two speeches. At least nine sessions to Cantor Fitzgerald alone, each at $400,000. I’m guessing Barack’s wisdom had no bounds and HAD to be widely distributed…

Hillary Clinton received a $14 million advance for “Hard Choices” - her account of being Secretary of State. Simon & Schuster - yep, another publisher - paid $14 million. Final sales? Somewhere around 280,000 hardcovers. Optimistically, it made maybe $3-4 million in actual reader revenue.

She separately collected $675,000 for three speeches to Goldman Sachs while running for president. On a platform of stricter financial regulation.

Eventually the transcripts became public and they showed she had been collegial. Warm. Sympathetic to the challenges of modern finance.

At a town hall, a moderator asked if she’d had to accept that amount.

“That’s what they offered”.

It’s probably the most honest sentence spoken in American politics in a generation.

Bill and Hillary have earned over $153 million in speaking fees since leaving the White House.

Bill left in 2001. No bear market nor correction in the market for the Clintons’ strategic insights in 25 years.

If for nothing else you need to respect their commitment to milk every single last dollar out of their previous positions!

Eric Holder served as Attorney General from 2009 to 2015. He did not prosecute a single major bank executive after the 2008 financial crisis. You know… the one that stripped millions of ordinary people of their homes and savings.

He also declined to prosecute HSBC after the bank admitted to laundering $881 million for the Sinaloa drug cartel, on the grounds that prosecution might destabilise the financial system.

Too big to fail…

In April 2015 he left the DOJ and walked back into Covington & Burling, the white-shoe law firm he’d been at before the Obama years. Whose client list just so happens to include several of the largest banks on earth.

No book. No bidding war. Just - never disclosed - consultancy fees. (Senior partners at that kind of firm earn $2-3 million a year.)

So I hear you shouting across the fiber: “THIS IS ILLEGAL, PROSECUTE IT!”

Guess what. I’m not the first person to talk about this. Because there was a lawsuit about this. And the Supreme Court even formalized it!

Imagine this: you’re the hypothetical mayor of let’s say Portage (IN), and you - again hypothetically speaking - run a procurement process for let’s say modernizing garbage trucks. And wonder of wonders, your friend won that contract!

Nothing wrong with that of course. Those things happen…

But afterward, the dealership gave him $13,000.

So it went to court.

Two juries convicted him.

He went to prison.

But he fought all the way to the Supreme Court. Which let him out, 6-3.

Federal law, they said, prohibits quid pro quo bribery - payment promised before an official act. A “gratuity” - defined as “payments made to an official after an official act as a token of appreciation” - is something else.

The $13,000 came after the contracts were awarded. Therefore: not bribery.

A tip.

The majority was written by Justice Kavanaugh.

Among the six who voted for it: Amy Coney Barrett, who in 2021 received a $2 million advance from Penguin Random House’s Sentinel imprint - a publisher - for a book she was going to write. It appeared 4 years later.

Makes you put things into perspective I guess…

No1 wants to point this out. No1 can afford it.

Publishers are subsidiaries of conglomerates that lobby the government.

Speaking bureaus run on access to future administrations.

Law firms pay retainers because their partners need the same favors next cycle.

And the journalists who might cover it work for media companies owned by those same conglomerates.

EVERYONE in the room is aware of this.

… So No1 does call it out.

So next time you hear about ridiculously high speaking fees, or a book deal from a prominent governmental official?

You know what to say:

It’s not a bribe, it’s a tip.

And it’s completely legal.

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[Daily Digest] → The news in 5 minutes, without the forty open tabs.
[Portfolio] → What I do with my own money

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Central bank, ETF and net gold flows, tonnes, since 2010:

Gold overtakes Treasuries as top reserve asset, hits $5T:

Asia's gold ETF demand undiminished while the West sells:

China net gold imports kept rising in April:

Dow/gold ratio breaking down through the line:

Gold net long managed money on COMEX, near historic lows:

Fort Knox 147M oz vs NY Fed's 33.4M oz:

China GDP denominated in ounces of gold, 1960-2025:

US GDP denominated in ounces of gold, 1913-2025:

QE money printing vs UST gold revaluation at $42.22:

Silk Road gold demand: 50,154 tonnes, China 24,011:

Shanghai silver at a +16.77% premium over Western futures:

India's silver imports plunge 82% after the duty hike:

Gold & silver miners since 1968, back at the line:

Silver $63.37, $61 must hold or retest the 1980-2011 breakout:

GLD upside calls rarely this cheap vs puts:

Wheaton's 77.1% net margin out-earns Apple and Microsoft:

Newmont's AISC margin per gold ounce hits $3,191:

Foreign holdings of US Treasuries near a record $9.35T:

Global rate hikes and cuts now evenly split, 26 each:

2-year real yield surges from 0.40% to 1.98%:

Excess liquidity negative and falling, first time since 2021:

Real margin debt up 550% since 1997, record $1.42tn:

Sovereign debt sales hit a record $504B in H1:

US unemployment-minus-CPI gap near zero — here be dragons:

US net interest expense heading past 20% of tax revenue:

CCC-over-BB junk spread tops 6%, biggest in 14 months:

US-minus-Swiss 30-year yield gap, widening since 2008 QE:

10-2 yield curve crashes to 0.283%:

Fed's June dot plot, well below what markets expect:

401(k) hardship withdrawals hit a record 6%, tripled in 4 years:

US M2 money supply at a record $22.8 trillion:

Strait of Hormuz tanker crossings collapsing vs Brent:

Cushing crude stocks drop to 20mn barrels, lowest since 2014:

US Strategic Petroleum Reserve drained to a 42-year low:

Brent futures curve: today vs one week and one month ago:

Oil shorts within a million barrels of an all-time low:

Jet fuel days of cover: Germany, UK, France run dry by July:

Solar 12.8% passes coal 12.2% in US generation, a first:

Venezuela crude exports tripled to 1,300 kbd in six months:

AI now 39% of the S&P 500, near history's biggest bubbles:

Top 20 global stocks now 60x bigger than the average:

Metals vs diamonds: real scarcity rose, manufactured scarcity broke:

Tesla market cap at 305x adjusted free cash flow:

SpaceX free float just 4.25% vs mega-caps' 85%+:

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It’s late, and I am writing this to people I will never meet.

I sit here in the dark, setting down words, and somewhere out there, past the wire, are people I will never see and never speak to and never learn their names, and I am reaching towards them anyway.

And some of them, maybe, are reaching back.

That’s what’s always in the back of my mind.
Not the silver, not the wars, none of the things I usually point at.

Just this.

A few years ago there was this small experiment: a researcher in Nottingham got a hold of a London newspaper’s crossword before it ran and handed it to students in another city. Half tried it the day before it was published.

The rest waited a day, and after thousands of strangers had solved it, they sat down with it.

The puzzle did not change a single letter. And still… the ones who solved it afterwards did a little better.

As though the people who went first had left a little knowledge on the page, and then moved on, never once knowing they did.

Something was passed between two complete strangers right there.

Two people who never met, who each believed themselves completely alone, reaching the same far thought.

Newton and Leibniz, each certain no other mind on earth stood where his stood. They both arrived at calculus at the same moment. And then spent the rest of their lives in a cross-Channel fight over who got there first.

Swan in England and Edison in America, both bent over the same thread of light, neither knowing the other was alive. Both had built an identical lamp.

Darwin had sat on his theory for twenty years, when one ordinary morning a letter from a feverish naturalist half a world away described the very same thing.

Each of them thought they were alone.

Though none of them were.

I have never been able to decide whether we invent the best of our thoughts or happen to stumble upon them.

Is “genius” just another term for clairvoyant? Or are the “genius”es of the world merely able to glimpse the shape of things to come and deduce the outlines?

Or is it always just there?

Floating around in the Aether?

The Stoics had a word for the feeling: sympatheia (sideways referenced here: EEAaO). It conveys the sense that the whole of things is woven so finely that a tremor in one thread is felt along all the others.

I said that word once and meant it with everything in me. The cold modern word is ‘global subconscious’.

I think I prefer the older feeling of it. A kind of shared dreaming, a single mind that each one of us is but one small lit window in.

I can’t prove any of it. I have never seen its face. Never seen it in action.

But I have this feeling, like when someone is staring at you across the room and you feel the glare even before you turn around.

That is one part of why I write this stack.

I do not write to be right, or to be read by the ‘right’ people.

I write because I have come to believe that when I work something through and set it down plainly, out in the open, it stays there.

It waits on the page like that faint warmth of a touch just gone. Waiting for someone who comes along later, tired, looking for a way in.

One more square filled in on a puzzle that thousands of us are bent over.

The gentler world I keep dreaming out loud about might just arrive the way the sun arrives in the morning: softly, softly, all at once. When the Aether is ready to be perceived by us.

Some nights I am almost certain of all this.

Some nights I am just alone at my desk, typing into the dark, hoping the dark is listening. I cannot always tell the two apart.

Because every so often, very late, a sentence comes to me easier than I have any right to expect, already half-formed by the time I reach for it, and something in me goes very quiet, and I know.

Someone went first.

Someone I will never meet left a little hint and walked on.

So I leave mine here, for you.

A reader left a sharp comment on “Let’s tax the rich”, pointing out that I traced the money up the chain and then stopped one link short.

Because WHO actually collects the trillion dollars a year in interest on the debt?

And if that would be a problem, why not just have the government print its own money and skimp on the interest entirely?

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Great questions. Especially because it allows me to run straight through the institution that most people are absolutely certain they already understand, but which almost nobody does.

It all started on a windy evening in the autumn of 1907, with one very rich man and a locked library.

Before the library, though, there was the copper.

A speculator named Heinze had decided he was going to own it all. Corner the market, squeeze the men who had bet against him, and walk away richer than God.

It held together for about an afternoon.

Then the floor gave out under him, and on his way he took his bank with him.

That’s how those things travel. One bad bet becomes a rumour, and the rumour becomes a queue.

By the time the fear reached the Knickerbocker Trust - the third-largest in New York, marble floors, the kind of place built to feel eternal - depositors were already standing around the block with their hats pulled low against the weather, waiting their turn to ask for their own money back. The Knickerbocker did not have it. Nobody ever does.

The stock market had already shed nearly half its value from the year before.

And there wasn’t anyone whose job it was to stop the bleeding.

No central bank, no emergency fund, no quiet authority to walk into the room and say enough, the money is here, go home.

There was nobody.

Well… almost nobody.

J. P. Morgan stepped in. Personally.

Seventy years old, broad as a wardrobe, with the kind of presence that quieted a room without his having to ask for it.

He summoned the city’s leading bankers to his private library on Madison Avenue, sat them down under the green-shaded lamps among shelves of books worth more than most of their banks, and - this is the part that sounds invented - locked the door.

He moved from group to group. Who would backstop what. Which trusts got loans and which were left to drown. He found money for a stock exchange that was hours from shutting its doors. He squeezed another ten million out of Rockefeller. He took federal cash from a Treasury Secretary who was only too glad to hand it over. And he held that room, an old man brokering the solvency of a nation across a card table, until the thing was done.

It worked.

The panic eased. The queues thinned. The markets steadied.

The financial system of the richest country on earth had been rescued by one seventy-year-old banker’s nerve and the names in his Rolodex.

Which terrified everyone, the bankers most of all.

Because Morgan was old, and there wasn’t a second one.

The lesson they drew from being saved was that they should never again need saving by a single mortal man. The country needed a permanent lender of last resort. Something that would still be standing the morning after Morgan’s funeral.

So in November 1910, Senator Nelson Aldrich and a handful of the most powerful bankers in America did something that, written as fiction, an editor would strike for being too on the nose.

They boarded a private rail car in the dark. They used first names only, in case a porter placed a face. They told anyone who asked that they were going duck hunting. And they slipped down to a millionaires’ retreat on Jekyll Island, off the Georgia coast, where for a week behind closed doors they drafted the skeleton of a central bank.

The ducks, as far as history records, were never in any danger.

Three years later the skeleton grew flesh and a name: the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

The name has been overselling on both words ever since.

It is not especially federal.

The Board of Governors in Washington is a government agency, true enough.

But the twelve regional Reserve Banks that do the actual work are private corporations, owned by the commercial banks in their districts, which hold stock in them and elect most of their directors.

And it is not much of a reserve either.

The word is a leftover from the original job, holding the banking system’s reserves and standing behind it in a crisis.

There is no vault of value behind the currency.

The Fed held gold until 1934, when the government took it and handed back paper certificates for it, gold the Fed isn’t even allowed to redeem. If it’s even still there…

What backs the dollar now is the Fed’s word and the government’s power to tax. The reserve is but a promise.

The banks own these certificates, which pay a dividend - set in statute - of 6%. That’s all they’re getting. Everything the Fed earns above its costs and that dividend goes to the Treasury.

By law, it’s remitted straight back to the government.

For most of the past century that was some serious money. For example, in 2021 the Fed sent the Treasury about $107 billion.

Just handed it back.

Theories about “we pay the Fed interest” should start to die right about here.

Since September 2022 the Fed has remitted nothing. Zero. For the first time since 1934.

The reason is simple: the Fed is losing money.

To fight inflation it raised rates, and now it pays out more on bank reserves than it collects on a portfolio of low-yield bonds it bought back in the cheap years.

The shortfall sits on its books as a $243 billion “deferred asset”, central-bank-speak for a hole it has to climb out of before Washington even sees another cent.

The CBO reckons that climb lasts until around 2030.

So the institution the reader pictured skimming a trillion off the top is, right now, underwater, with a quarter-trillion-dollar hole in its books and already three full years of remittance cheques that never were mailed.

Which raises the question: what happens if the Fed just keeps losing? Who steps in?

No1.

That’s the strange part.

A normal company with negative equity is insolvent, and somebody, anybody: shareholders, a buyer, the government, has to inject capital or switch off the lights. The Fed can’t be insolvent in that sense, simply because it settles its bills in the one thing it ‘produces’.

It owes interest on reserves? It creates the reserves to pay it. It can no more run out of dollars than a scoreboard can run out of points.

So it doesn’t get rescued. The Treasury writes no cheque. The member banks face no capital call. The loss just parks on the balance sheet as that “deferred asset” and waits, while the Fed conjures whatever it needs to keep the lights on and goes on setting policy as if nothing were wrong.

Somebody does pay, though. Someone always does.

Every dollar the Fed loses is a dollar it won’t remit, and a dollar the Treasury has to raise another way. Which is generally by borrowing more.

The cost slides quietly off the Fed’s books and onto the deficit, which is to say onto you. The Fed is the only institution in the country that can be flat broke and can’t go bankrupt.

So, back to that trillion in interest.

It’s real.

Net interest crossed $1 trillion last year for the first time, about $150 billion more than the entire defence budget.

And it goes somewhere.

Just not to the Fed.

It goes to whoever holds the bond.

Of this ~$39 trillion in total debt, about $7.6 trillion is the government owing itself, the Social Security trust fund and its cousins, interest paid into the same pocket it came out of.

The other $31 trillion is held by the public. And the public, here, is mostly your pension fund, your insurer, the money-market fund your savings sit in, the banks, and the Fed itself. ~$22 trillion is owed to a domestic holder.

The foreign third (~$9.5 trillion) is the part that always makes the headlines. Japan holds about $1.2 trillion. The UK around $865 billion. China $685 billion (shrinking every year since 2013).

The Fed owns roughly a fifth of that public domestic debt, and the interest the Treasury pays on those particular bonds loops right back as remittance in the years the Fed turns a profit.

So in net terms, this is as close to interest-free as the government can get. Everyone’s pointing at this slice as if it’s a racket when it’s actually paying itself back.

The leftover genuinely leaves the building to bondholders: pension funds, insurers, money funds, foreign governments, and, in heavy disproportion, the people who own the most bonds - and I give you a tiny hint: they’re not the worker bees.

The middle class pays the tax that services the interest, and a thin sliver of it returns through their own retirement account once the intermediaries have taken their cut.

There is one leak, however, that isn’t marked “interest on the debt”. It’s the one marked “interest on reserves”.

That’s the payment dragging the Fed underwater, and it goes straight to the commercial banks for parking money at the central bank overnight.

The CBO pencils in north of a trillion dollars of it over the next decade. Two senators have a bill to end it. But it won’t pass. This trillion-dollar transfer to the banks was always sitting right there, under a name too boring to read. And No1 “noticed”.

Which leads us naturally to the question: why can’t we just print our own money then?

We’ve actually tried that before.

Lincoln issued greenbacks to fund the Civil War, paper backed by nothing but the Union’s promise. It worked, in the sense that the bills spent. It also lost more than half its value against gold within a few years.

The Treasury can absolutely print a dollar instead of borrowing one, and in a sense it does so every time the Fed buys government bonds with conjured reserves.

The interest is simply the price of choosing to borrow rather than print. Borrow the dollar and you owe a bondholder. Print it and you owe everyone, through inflation, hardest of all the people with no assets to hide in.

The same worker bees.

Either way a bill comes due.
The only question is which till it comes out of.

One last thread, though, because the foreign third of those bondholders has started reading the room.

In 2022 the West froze about $300 billion of Russia’s reserves.

Every central bank on the planet took the same note: dollars held in someone else’s system can vanish by decree.

They’ve been buying gold ever since, over 1,200 tonnes last year, the third straight year above a thousand, more than forty central banks at it.

The dollar’s share of global reserves has slipped to about 57%, the lowest since the mid-90s, down from 72% at the turn of the century. Mostly due to the 10% drop in relative value of the dollar.

For now, it’s still a minority. I don’t think that the dollar will be dethroned next quarter, or even next year. Simply because there’s no rival deep enough to take its place, and even India’s foreign minister went out of his way last year to insist nobody’s trying.

Officially.

Central banks move like supertankers. By the time you can see the turn, it’s been underway for years.

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China central bank gold purchases vs price:

China Q1 net gold imports: 316t vs 73t a year ago:

Central bank gold reserves, highest since the 1990s:

Central banks that bought the most gold in 2025:

Gold priced in Weimar marks (1914 = 1) - bears repeating…:

Asia gold ETF holdings ~500 tonnes, nearly tripled since 2024:

YTD weekly flows: gold vs spot bitcoin ETFs:

Top 20 gold-producing nations in 2025:

Global gold vault stock (metric tons):

S&P 500 priced in grams of gold, -70% from 2000 peak:

Global M3 $148.5T vs all the world's gold $31.4T:

Gold -27% from its 52-week high in 133 days:

Gold Miners Bullish Percent Index: zero 🪦

GDXJ junior miners -15.68%, largest weekly decline:

Newmont AISC margin per gold ounce spikes to $3,191:

Metals miners' median profit margin tops every sector, 31%:

Silver below its 200-day MA: a history of explosive rebounds:

Silver's first close below its 200-day in 14 months:

Silver vs Nasdaq 100, 40-year ratio breaks out:

Silver/M3 retesting the 1974-2011 trendline:

US debt set to surpass its 1946 WWII record, 101% of GDP:

Privately held UST maturing within 1yr: record $8.3T:

Interest on the debt ~20% of all tax revenue. Probably fine?

Consumer prices +30% since 2020, triple the prior six years:

Tech inflation: software +14.5%, electronic components +27% YoY:

10-year yield vs S&P 500 correlation: -0.62, lowest in 15 years:

M2 money supply at a fresh all-time high, $22.8T:

7 of 10 BofA market-peak indicators triggered:

Margin debt / GDP at all-time high, 4%:

Corporate profit share at record, wage share at all-time low:

Long-term unemployed (27+ weeks): 27.5%, highest since 2021:

43.6% of Americans financially worse off than a year ago:

Excess Liquidity Leading Indicator now below zero:

Berkshire's cash pile swells to a record $397 billion:

US 30-year yield minus Swiss, gap widening since 2008 QE:

Japan 30-year JGB yield, highest since the 2000s:

Average annual wages 1994-2024: Italy +2%, Spain ~0%:

World oil inventories falling at a record pace toward the floor:

Strait of Hormuz crossings collapse vs Brent:

Gulf-to-Asia crude tanker freight +878% YoY:

Iranian crude exports to China tumble toward zero:

China's crude imports fall to lowest since 2017:

Solar passes coal in US generation mix, 12.8% vs 12.2%:

SPR drained 66.2M barrels since the war, lowest since 2023:

262 supertankers on order, a record, +1,000% in 2 years:

Venezuela crude exports nearly tripled to 1.3M bpd:

Stocks at EV/sales >10x as share of US market cap: highest ever:

US market cap-to-GDP at a record 238%:

Yttrium +14,000% since April 2025 on China export controls:

Vanguard overtakes BlackRock in US ETF assets, ending a 23-year reign:

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[Daily Digest] → The news in 5 minutes, without the forty open tabs.
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Someone left this under my last piece: “you could get back to hard money by making the rich bastards pay their fair share.”

He’s not wrong, exactly.

The fortunes at the top got built on your back, and the men who built them kept the change. The rules that let them keep it were written by the very people those rules are meant to fence in. And the money is right there. All visible, flaunting you.

So you rage against it, want to cut their tax breaks, make them pay on every dollar the way the till makes you, and you believe the gap closes on its own.

I’ll defend all of that. It’s not fair. The odds are stacked against us.

So let’s tax the rich.

Let’s run with it. All the way to the floor.

Let me tell you about a bar.

Ten regulars come together every Friday. Each time, the tab comes to a hundred and they split it the same way the country splits a tax bill.

The four with the lowest means pay nothing. The fifth throws in a dollar. The sixth three, seventh seven, the eighth twelve, the ninth eighteen. And the tenth, the one who drove the nice car, covers the last fifty-nine without a word.

And it works.

The beer is cold, the lights stay on, and everyone’s okay with it.

Then one evening, the owner feels generous and he says: “you chits are such good customers: I’ll give you twenty dollars off each round from now on”.

Now the ten of them have to work out how to divide this twenty dollars fairly. And they do it the only way that doesn’t end with the poorest being paid to drink: proportionally.

The fifth man ends up sipping for free. The ninth keeps four in his pocket. The man with the classy car keeps ten.

Everyone pays less. Every. one.

After calling it a night, the sixth man does the comparison. “I saved a dollar. He saved ten.” A nod at the fancy car.

So the nine of them, warm with lager and rightful fury, give the tenth a hiding and send him home.

Next Friday the nine sit down, order, and find that between the lot of them they can’t even cover half the bill.

The man they ran off wasn’t just a guest at the bar.

He was keeping it open.

It’s a cute little story, and people passed it around since the time before chain email. But it has a grain of truth in it.

So let’s stop story time and do the sum together. With real figures this time.

Take it.

Not tax, TAKE.

Every rich bastard in America, confiscated to the last cufflink.

Set aside, for a moment, the tiny detail that stripping every winner to the bone doesn’t exactly whisper to go build something in that country.

We’ll come back to that. Right now I just want to see how far the loot goes.

Start at the very top. Every billionaire in the country, all nine hundred-odd of them, Musk and Bezos and the entire leaderboard, sold for parts. Round it up to seven trillion dollars.

And set aside for a moment that when you start selling off those bits, they’ll crash in value immediately. [Imaginary numbers: marketcap]

The federal government spends about seven trillion every year. So you’ve bought one year. Just one. Come September you’re back where you started, only now there are no billionaires left and the bill is identical.

Okay, so clearly not enough rich bastards… Let’s widen the net.

The whole top 1% - which nets out to anyone worth north of eleven million, houses and businesses and portfolios scraped down to the floorboards. That’s fifty-two trillion. We can get rid of the entire national debt with some pocket change to spare.

That’s a win right there. Up until you remember the government will run another 1.8 trillion deficit before the confetti hits the floor, and you have permanently removed the one percent from the tax ledger.

- Mao tried that in China. Didn’t really work out in the decades after. -

Still short you say?

Ok ok… Let’s take the top 10%. Everyone over two million, which by now sweeps in a great many dentists and retired teachers with a paid-off house and a respectable pension. A hundred and thirteen trillion. That’s about 16 years of government running at current rates.

And since you’re asking. Let’s just go ALL the way… The whole frickin’ country. Every home, every farm, every 401k, every business, every dollar of net worth owned by every living - or voting - American, the full hundred and sixty-nine trillion of it.

Confiscate the United States down to the bare dirt.

Twenty-four years.

So there you have it... Strip the nation to the studs, auction the lot, and it funds the government as it currently spends for twenty-four years, after which there is NOTHING left to seize, No1 left to tax, no economy left standing, and a Treasury that’s still posting cheques into the void.

Because the spending never paused for a second.

They know this. The people saying loudly that everyone should pay their “fair share”, they can do division as well as anyone else.
They know there is no pile big enough.
They point at that rich man’s house because it polls, and it’s much easier than to address the real problem underneath.

When you look at the numbers I mentioned, you’ll see that the money that ACTUALLY funds the government, year after year, was never going to come from a few thousand billionaires at the top. It has to come from millions of people in the middle.

Which likely includes YOU.

Watch what happens when such a new rule is implemented. First they tax the rich. But then inflation and threshold creep make it hit the middle class (the AMT enters the chat)…

The top one percent earners start around 660,000 a year.
The top five percent at 336,000.
The top ten at 250,000.
And the top twenty at roughly 167,000.

A hundred and sixty-seven thousand. Per household. That’s a nurse married to an electrician. A cop and a schoolteacher who picks up summer work. By the time you’ve stretched “rich” far enough to find real money in it, you are standing in the driveway of a two-income family that doesn’t even remotely start to feel wealthy, calling them the bastards who need to pay their share.

No one says THAT part into the microphone. But the math is clear enough. There ain’t ever enough at the very top. There’s only enough once you start to quietly grow “the top” to include you.

But before you head into the comment section (yeah, don’t … I still have a LOT more to say about this topic): that anger you’re feeling at the unfairness? That quiet despair underneath all of it when you’re looking at a Musk and a Bezos adding zeros to their bank accounts like donning new clothes?

That is real. And THAT is actually what you should be focusing on. Not “the rich”.

Because a fat slice of that genuinely grotesque money was never earned by being better than anyone else.

It was earned by stacking the odds against anyone else.

You hire the lobbyist.
You fund the campaign.

And waddayaknow? That gleaming new regulation just so happen to require precisely the compliance department you already run, while the kid with the better idea drowns in filing fees before he ships a single unit.

When No1 is allowed to compete with you, the money piles up while you sleep. Skill becomes optional.

I dare you to call THAT a free market if you can with a straight face!!

But turn the coin over, let’s say everyone can compete with everyone all the time. That will take down walls it shouldn’t touch either. Some of that money has to be defended. For example a drug company sets a decade and a few billion on fire chasing something that probably will fail, and the morning it works, should a competitor be able to copy that molecule?

Kill the patent and you won’t get cheaper medicine, you will get NO medicine, because nobody sane torches a billion or so in order for the next guy to copy the result.

That protection is the only reason the risk gets taken.

So it’s a balancing act.

Enough shelter that people build the hard, terrifying, and yes: expensive stuff; but not so much that the ones who already built it weld the door shut and bill you rent until the heat death of the universe.

Right now that door is shut. What we have isn’t capitalism anymore. Real capitalism is upstarts knocking the incumbents off their perch. But the scales are unbalanced. The upstart never makes it out of the garage, because he’s drowning in paperwork the incumbent paid to have written.

And at the other end of it we have socialism for the rich. Get big enough and the gov will protect you… “Too Big To Fail”

Losses socialised, profits kept private. Pure crony-capitalism. End-of-empire stuff.

So when a commenter reaches for “taking it all and hand it ‘round”, I get it. Stare long enough at that rigged board and redistribution starts to look like the only fair move left.

The instinct is right.

But the target is wrong.

Because “Tax the rich” does NOTHING to the crony. He’s already three jurisdictions and four loopholes ahead of you.

They WROTE the loopholes.

The thing that’s actually broken sits deeper than any tax rate: nobody’s allowed to fail. Not the giant - we bailed him out and called it TBTF. Not the upstart - we buried him in paperwork before he could even try.

Fix that, and I believe you have a decent shot of making it.

Which brings us to a scribbled napkin somewhere around 1974.

Scene: Arthur Laffer, in a Washington restaurant, with two chaps named Cheney and Rumsfeld watching him draw it. The idea wasn’t even his - Ibn Khaldun beat him by about six hundred years - but never mind.

Tax everything at zero, and the state collects nothing.

But tax it all at a hundred, the state collects nothing again, because No1 will break their backs all year to hand over every cent.

Both ends: zero.

So obviously, there should be a peak somewhere in between, and once you’re past it you can raise the rate all you want, the take is going down.

I mean, this isn’t controversial, right? The real fight happens when we’re discussing where the peak sits.

Diamond and Saez - proper economists, not napkin-doodlers or financial bloggers - put the revenue-maximising top federal rate up around seventy percent. Miles above anything America charges now. So on paper, loads of room.

Tax away.

Except seventy percent assumes those rich people are bolted to the floor.

They ain’t.

The optimal rate is the one people will still sit through before they start rearranging their whole lives to dodge it, and that number sits a long way south of seventy.

My best guess? Around fifty in most of Europe. Lower still in the US - call it forty, forty-five. Because the Americans pay for everything twice: you hand over a slab of your cheque and get back potholes, a GoFundMe page where the healthcare should be, and a retirement he’s told to fund himself.

Pay that much for that little, and the breaking point comes earlier.

Europe charges more but at least posts a doctor at the far end. People will grumpily pay fifty percent for a state that works (-ish), and stay. Ask the same for a worse one and the calculator comes out a lot faster.

So where’s the peak?

You won’t need a chalkboard. The government finds it for you, every time, the same way: it reaches, the money flinches toward the door, the take comes in light, and a year or two later the tax quietly disappears off the books while everyone agrees never to mention it again.

In 1696 England decided it could read your wealth off the number of panes in your house and taxed you by the window, so people bricked them up. Whole terraces went dark on purpose, and you can still spot the blank arches today, three centuries of architectural middle finger.

Rome taxed urine.

Denmark starts taxing cow flatulence in 2030.

Any time the state wants additional revenue, it breeds avoidance, every time, and the fatter the wallet the prettier the detour.

These days the detour skips the bricks.

California tops out at 13.3 percent, highest in the union, and over a million it stacks onto a federal rate that swallows more than half your next dollar.
Texas charges zero. Florida charges zero. Nevada, sitting right there over the line, charges zero.

The man who covered the tab without blinking owns a moving van and has three Austin realtors on speed dial. He doesn’t have to hate the place; he just needs a calculator. The one paying the most is the one who can most easily afford to leave. And as it happens, he’s also the one funding the budget.

And it isn’t only states. It’s whole countries now, and they don’t even bother hiding how it ends.

Sweden, 1984, because they do love irony I guess. Always the exact same reason why they’re reaching: a hole in the budget. They created a new tax on share trades, which then doubled in ‘86. Within a few years more than half of Swedish equity trading had picked up and moved to London. The revenue was but a sliver of the forecast. And by 1991 they scrapped the lot. Pretty much the next day trading came straight back home.

France, 2012. Hollande campaigns on a 75 percent rate over a million euros. The full soak-the-rich fantasy, rally lights and all.

Depardieu packed a bag. Took a Russian passport from Putin’s own hands, which is a sentence I never expected to write. Quieter names followed him out.

The haul? About 160 million euros. A rounding error. Less than the wealth tax it was bolted onto. Two years later the thing was dead, buried by the same government that had sworn by it, the economy minister who killed it now flying the world telling investors France was open for business again.

Belgium, 2016. A little speculation tax on short-term share gains. Gone inside the year, having raised a fraction of the promise, after it spooked enough trading that the stock-market tax Belgium was already collecting fell by more than the new one brought in.

Britain’s running some live version as we speak. They scrapped the non-dom regime and the headlines scream a record exodus, sixteen thousand millionaires bolting for the door. Though I have my doubts because the figures are noisy and half the people quoting them sell second passports for a living, so I’m keeping that dramatic version at arm’s length.

But it doesn’t matter for my thesis. The pattern is already there, confirmed by country after country after country: any government that reaches for more taxes causes the money to flinch, and the government walks it back.

And it isn’t only the rich who bolt. Look at Denmark which taxed butter. Half the country drove to Germany for it. Inside fifteen months, they killed the tax. Or Norway which jacked up its sugar tax; Norwegians crossed into Sweden by the carload until that one got walked back too.

Humans have this annoying ability to adapt. Even to taxes.

And that is the thing the whole “tax the rich” has backwards.

IF a government could squeeze more out of the rich, it would have done it already yesterday. The idea that governments would be voluntarily passing up on easy money is charming, but unlikely.

So the reach-and-flinch, the nibble-and-retreat, over and over in country after country - that jittery little two-step is the curve drawing itself in real time.

Whatever country you’re reading this from, you’ll likely already happen to be standing on that peak.

And before this article starts to sound like some kind of European disease - America ran the cleanest version of the lot while mailing the bill to the workers.

1990: Congress drops a 10 percent luxury tax on yachts, private jets, furs, jewels. Textbook soak-the-rich. It was projected to pull in nine billion over five years.

The rich shrugged and bought their boats in the Bahamas.

The yacht tax brought in sixteen million the first year. Viking Yachts laid off four of every five workers inside eight months. And by the time that Washington quietly killed it in 1993, around twenty-five thousand boatbuilders were out of a job, and the thing had cost the Treasury more than it ever raised.

Same as ever. The workers ALWAYS pay the tax. Directly or indirectly.

And then there are the invisible results.

The tax revenue that never came to be, because you pushed the rate on capital high enough for the business to never be created in the first place.

They simply get born somewhere else. Or there’s a holding company under a friendlier flag. The profit gets booked where the number’s lower. And the local operation is just run as a subsidiary that sadly never makes much of a profit.

Or a surgeon who turns down the Friday list once half the next dollar is spoken for. The builder who skips adding a second crew. Or the founder who eyes an expansion, checks the after-tax crumbs, and decides that next year is probably fine for that decision.

No headline runs for the factory that wasn’t poured. None for the job nobody got the chance to lose.

And EVERY. SINGLE. TIME, the same people are left holding the bill.

The billionaires? They lobby. The merely-rich relocate. The corporation restructures through Dublin. But the salaried man in the upper-middle? With a W-2, a mortgage, and not a scrap of anything offshore - he can do none of it.

He can’t move his job to Dubai. He can’t write himself a loophole. He can’t book his salary in Ireland.

So the buck stops where it always stops. On the one back in the room that can’t get out from under it.

The collapsing middle. Again.

The main problem was never the revenue.

It’s always the spending that’s out of whack.

But why do they try to increase the tax anyway? Because TINA. Even though most countries are already at peak-tax-rate. TINA.

It’s the debt… Global debt clocked a record 348 trillion dollars mostly thanks to governmental borrowing. The US sits near 125 percent of GDP, and the interest alone now runs past a trillion a year, more than the entire military.

For decades the move was to kick the can: grow out of it, inflate a slice away, roll the rest at cheaper rates. But all three doors are swinging shut together. Growth is limp, the easy inflation has been and gone, the cheap rates are a memory.

So they turn around and come for us.

Taxes climb across the whole developed world in lockstep, and not because the rich got greedier this Tuesday.

The money simply has to come from somewhere, and somewhere always turns out to be us, the ones who can’t leave.

Which is the bit my commenter sailed straight past. You cannot tax your way back to hard money. Hard money died from a government spending more than it takes and printing the difference, year after year, world without end, not from some surgeon shaving his return.

The hole is structural.

So go on. Tax the rich. Fifty percent, sixty, whatever number feels fair by Thursday. Just remember how the night ends. He’s in Austin. You’re on the stool. The round’s on the table, going warm.

And there’s no one left at the bar who can pay for it.

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There is, traditionally, a school of capitalist thought which holds that being banned by the Pentagon as a national security risk is bad for the share price. Anthropic, with quite remarkable patience, has spent the past four months testing this proposition.

It seems to have gone rather well for them.

Last Thursday, in what we are reliably informed is the largest private capital raise in the recorded history of this universe and possibly several smaller ones besides, the company closed a $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion post-money valuation.

That makes it, by about $113 billion, larger than the company that received the Pentagon contract instead.

By Friday morning, Bloomberg was reporting that Apollo and Blackstone were quietly arranging a separate $36 billion debt deal, run through a special-purpose vehicle that would buy Google’s TPUs and lease them back to Anthropic. One of the largest private credit transactions ever assembled.

$101 billion of fresh capital across twenty-four hours, for one company. Against, and I want to give them their friendliest possible number, a “run-rate revenue” of $47 billion - which means take the best recent month, multiply by twelve, squint. So in the course of a business day, they signed up for more financing than their bestest extrapolated annual revenue number.

This was widely received as good news.

Everyone looked at the headlights headlines. No1 looked at the structure.

First thing I noticed is that this deal was so big that Anthropic itself - now a trillion-dollar company - isn’t creditworthy enough to support the debt.

The shortfall has been solved with characteristic ingenuity… Broadcom - the company that manufactures the TPUs that Google sells, that Apollo is now financing the purchase of, and that Anthropic will lease - is backstopping the largest portion of the loan. (gasp for breath)

Long story short: Broadcom is on the hook to pay the noteholders if Anthropic defaults on the lease and the resold chips don’t cover what’s owed.

Google is on multiple sides. Amazon, too. They dropped another $5 billion into Anthropic earlier this quarter, on top of the $13 billion already in. In return they got a hundred-billion-dollar Anthropic commitment to spend it on AWS.

Funny how modern finance works, right? That same dollar that gets counted as Anthropic equity, gets re-counted as AWS revenue, as Anthropic capex commitment, as Broadcom backstop, as an Apollo asset, and now also as TPU sales.

The technical term for this in modern finance is “synergy”.

Not going to dive into that here, but if you want to get up to speed, this is my latest on that particular topic: