You Need To Read This

  Not this post; this one. Seriously. You do:

Rheinmetall’s CEO went on CNBC and said the thing that nobody in his position is supposed to say. “If the war lasts another month, we will have nearly no missiles available. All European, American, and also Middle East country warehouses are empty, or nearly empty.” This wasn’t a leak. Not an anonymous source. Not a think tank estimate. This was the CEO of Europe’s largest defense manufacturer, on camera, stating plainly that the cupboard is bare. It is the military equivalent of the pilot coming on the intercom to say he doesn’t know how to land.

Future’s so bright:

The IEA released 400 million barrels from strategic reserves. The largest coordinated release in history. It will be remembered as such for 3.8 days. The fire extinguisher lasted less than a week and the fire hasn’t even noticed.

United Airlines is planning for $175 per barrel through the end of 2027. Whatever “winding down” means, United’s CFO doesn’t believe in it. Corporate planning has looked at the situation, done its own maths, and concluded that this is a two-year problem being described as a two-week one.

Does this sound like Trump and COVID all over again? And shouldn’t that worry us? Or should it worry us that this is worse?

There exists in diplomacy a concept known as “sanctions”, which works on the same principle as telling a child they can’t have dessert while you’re eating cake in front of them. The United States has been sanctioning Iran for years. It has also been bombing Iran for three weeks. These are, in the normal course of events, complementary activities. One is economic warfare. The other is the regular kind.

This week, the US Treasury lifted all oil sanctions on Iran. For 30 days. 140 million barrels of Iranian crude, sitting on ships at sea, may now be sold freely on the global market. Including to the United States itself.

In yuan.

The United States is purchasing, with Chinese currency, oil from the country it is currently bombing?! The same oil that funds the missiles that just shot down an F-35 for the first time. The same missiles that are redecorating allied oil infrastructure.

Treasury Secretary Bessent called this “narrowly tailored”. Narrow like in white, and tailored as in card, apparently.

In the same OFAC filing, Russian oil sanctions were lifted as well. And Belarus potash too, because apparently the universe was running low on irony and needed to top up.

The logic, insofar as there is any, goes like this: the war has crashed the global oil market so hard that the administration needs the enemy’s oil to keep gasoline prices from eating the midterms. They are unsanctioning the people they’re bombing because the bombing is working too well at the thing they didn’t want it to do. The sanctions were necessary to stop Iran funding the war, but the war made the sanctions too effective, so the sanctions had to be lifted to fund the war effort against the country that no longer needs sanctions because the oil revenues that sanctions were preventing are now required to prevent the economic damage caused by preventing those revenues, which is itself a consequence of the military campaign designed to make the sanctions unnecessary by making Iran the kind of country that doesn’t need sanctioning, which it would be, if the sanctions hadn’t been lifted to pay for making it that.

And still it gets worse:

Friday’s press gaggle. Barely exaggerated: at 12:03 PM, President Trump told reporters he wanted a ceasefire with Iran. At 12:05 he declared victory. At 12:07 he announced he was sending Marines. At 12:08 he said no boots on the ground. At 12:11 he said he did not want a ceasefire. At 12:16 he declared victory again. At 12:17 he asked for a ceasefire. At 12:23 he told NATO they were cowards. At 12:29 he said Iran was begging for a ceasefire. At 12:31 he said everything was perfect. At 12:36 he said $500 oil was a good thing. At 12:37 he demanded Iran open Hormuz. At 12:39 he said Hormuz was never closed. At 12:41 he said the US was not at war with Iran. At 12:42 he declared victory in Iran.

By 3:43 PM he told CBS he doesn’t want a ceasefire. By 5:13 PM - 13 minutes after futures markets closed for the weekend, in a coincidence that should be studied in every securities fraud textbook - he posted on Truth Social that the US is “getting very close to meeting our objectives as we consider winding down our great Military efforts”. The S&P reversed more than 1% in seconds. QQQ had already surged 1.1% in the 80 minutes before the announcement, with call options flowing in at a pace that suggests someone, somewhere, had an itinerary.

No notes. Or surprises,