The plot twist that nobody at Wall Street apparently modelled is that Chinese teapot refiners — absent from previous ADNOC tenders entirely — have now emerged as buyers, drawn by discounts now competitive with Iranian and Russian alternatives, meaning Beijing is quietly diversifying its cheap oil sourcing while oil price sits at levels that make every energy bull feel personally insulted.

The Ministry of Timely Revelations has delivered its latest production: footage leaked by Israel's Channel 12 — aired with impeccable precision on the eve of the NATO summit — showing Israeli officials ordering the implementation of the Hannibal Directive on October 7th, with a senior officer calling to "strike Gaza, break it all apart, along with the soldiers who got abducted," while Minister Ben Gvir arrived and ordered cameras stopped, apparently unaware that orders to stop filming are considerably less effective in the age of smartphones. The Hannibal Directive — a policy named after the Carthaginian general who chose suicide over capture, officially rescinded in 2022, and allegedly activated anyway — authorised overwhelming firepower against vehicles carrying abducted soldiers, which means Israel may have killed its own hostages to avoid the political inconvenience of prisoner swaps.

https://www.thecanary.co/skwawkbox/2026/06/29/hannibal-directive-video/

The timing of the leak is the editorial: released not when it would serve justice, not when families of the 83 hostages who died in captivity could have used it, but precisely when it could maximally embarrass The Manipulator In Chief at NATO — a reminder that in the Ministry of Managed Narratives, even war crimes footage has a preferred release date.

In a development that will surprise nobody who noticed that Michael Saylor has spent the better part of three years telling anyone within earshot that Bitcoin is the supreme store of value and should never be sold under any circumstances, Strategy has sold 3,588 Bitcoin — worth approximately $375 million — to cover preferred stock dividends, because even the world's most committed Bitcoin evangelist occasionally needs to liquidate the supreme store of value to pay the bills that accumulate when you finance your supreme store of value purchases with leverage.

The sale reduces Strategy's total holdings to 597,325 BTC at an average acquisition cost of $69,726 per coin — a portfolio that is currently unprofitable on paper and will require issuing preferred shares with dividend obligations that, it turns out, must be serviced in the currency Bitcoin was supposed to replace. The irony writes itself: Strategy's entire thesis is that Bitcoin protects against currency debasement and institutional financial fragility, yet the vehicle delivering that thesis is a leveraged equity structure that periodically sells Bitcoin to service the preferred dividends of the very institutional investors it was supposed to liberate from such arrangements.

🚨 THE PACIFIC IS HOLDING ITS BREATH. 🚨

China says it's ready.
Taiwan is preparing.
The world is watching.

One miscalculation could reshape global trade, semiconductors, energy markets... and your investment portfolio.

🌏 Geopolitics isn't just politics anymore.

It's a market-moving force.

🎯 Watch the full video to understand why the Taiwan Strait could become the next most important economic flashpoint .

While bombs resumed their scheduled programming over the Middle East, the Empire's Treasury auctioned $58 billion in 3-year paper at a high yield of 4.179% — down modestly from June's 4.192%, which had been the highest since February 2025 — stopping through the When Issued by a respectable 0.6bps and snapping a two-auction tailing streak, confirming that someone out there still finds three years of American sovereign paper an attractive proposition at yields that would have caused institutional cardiac arrest approximately 36 months ago.

The bid-to-cover came in at 2.600 — below last month's 2.645 and the recent average of 2.645, though the chart tells the more honest story: the 3-year BTC has flatlined in a 2.5-to-2.7 range for six years, suggesting the market has simply reached a structural equilibrium of mild indifference toward short-duration American paper. The internals were more interesting: Indirects surged to 67.5% — the highest since April and well above the 62.5% recent average — confirming that foreign central banks and sovereign wealth funds remain selectively engaged at the short end even as they retreat from duration. Directs collapsed to 7.7% from 15.3%, leaving Dealers holding 24.75% — their largest share since February — meaning the contractually obligated buyers of last resort were back on cleanup duty at the short end of the curve.

Overall a surprisingly strong auction — foreign buyers showing up in force at the short end on a day when the broader bond complex was having a thoroughly ugly session, a bifurcation that confirms the emerging consensus: the world will lend the Empire money for three years, but extrapolating that appetite to seven, ten, or thirty years requires a leap of faith that auction after auction is revealing fewer investors are willing to make.

On July 6, while the Empire was busy maintaining its Middle Eastern ceasefire with alternating drone strikes, China's People's Liberation Army Navy launched a nuclear-capable ballistic missile from a submarine into the Pacific Ocean — a "routine annual training exercise," Beijing assured the world, in the same tone one might use to describe a fire drill. Japan strongly urged China to reconsider before the launch — a request received, acknowledged, and ignored with the efficiency of a military that has been accelerating its modernisation timeline at Mandarin Xi's personal direction. The missile was launched on the precise day China and Russia commenced their annual "Joint Sea-2026" naval exercises off Qingdao, involving submarines, destroyers, frigates, and supply vessels from both Pacific fleets — because nothing says "routine training" like coordinating a nuclear missile test with your strategic partner's fleet.

https://x.com/globaltimesnews/status/2074056252808888771

The strategic message requires no decoder ring: while the Empire exhausted its munitions stockpiles, drained its petroleum reserves, and destroyed its Gulf bases fighting a war it declared won on Hour 1, the Sino-Russian axis has been quietly drilling, building, and launching — and they briefed Papua New Guinea before they briefed the Pentagon.

The Ministry of Orderly Commerce has issued a minor trade update: the 60-day waiver allowing Iran to sell its oil — issued in late June as the centrepiece incentive of the historic peace deal — has been revoked after approximately ten days, leaving 63 million barrels of Iranian crude drifting across Asian waters on vessels with no clear destination, no confirmed buyers, and the navigational optimism of ships that loaded in good faith before Washington changed its mind on a Tuesday. The waiver was simultaneously the deal's primary economic carrot for Tehran and its first casualty, revoked in retaliation for Iranian tanker attacks that occurred while the waiver was still theoretically active — a sequencing so circular it suggests the peace deal was designed not to hold but to establish who violated it first. China's teapot refiners — Iran's last remaining reliable customers — are meanwhile demanding steep discounts.

The peace deal's economic incentive lasted ten days — the 63 million stranded barrels will last considerably longer.

The western propaganda has declared that Ukraine has "won the war" — a statement delivered with the straight face of an establishment redefining the finish line after watching the race run for four years without a winner. Ukraine is a country that survives exclusively on $195 billion in US aid, €215 billion in EU support, and NATO air defence systems it doesn't own, while simultaneously requesting another €6.6 billion from the EU peace fund because its own budget covers barely a third of its defence needs. The Ministry of Managed Narratives has apparently decided that "prevented total defeat" and "won" are synonyms — a semantic leap requiring the simultaneous acceptance that 525,000 to 625,000 Ukrainian military casualties including up to 150,000 dead, millions of refugees, and a destroyed economy constitute victory, while Russia's 1.4 million casualties including 400,000 to 450,000 dead constitute neither defeat nor winning.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/07/ukraine-won-war-russia-nato-alexander-stubb-finnish

When winning a war requires $410 billion in foreign financing, 150,000 dead soldiers, and an urgent request for more Patriot missiles, the only thing that has actually been redefined is the dictionary.

The Macro Butler is back on BFM 89.9 Malaysia — and the stagflation playbook just went global. 🎙🔥
Three calls. All signal:

Japan is the new canary in the stagflation coal mine. Like every other developed market, it’s caught between war-driven shortages pushing prices higher and an economy shrinking faster than its central bank can pretend otherwise. The BOJ — like the Fed, ECB, and every other central bank — is stuck between a rock and a hard place, and the rock is winning.

🛢 Oil has bottomed — just like gold did last week. War-driven shortages don’t negotiate with peace deals that require weekly airstrikes to function. Higher oil prices are coming, and with them, more misery for consumers, and more ammunition for the Trump Stagflation thesis.

US stocks remain the only game in town. Not because America is thriving — but because everywhere else is worse. Capital goes where it’s treated best, and right now that’s still Wall Street, however reluctantly.

🎧 Catch the full interview on BFM 89.9 Malaysia.
Are you positioned for the stagflation that central banks keep pretending isn’t coming? 👇

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-bfm-899-radio-08072026

The ceasefire that was declared a historic triumph approximately five weeks ago — and which the Manipulator-in-Chief personally described as Iran's "unconditional surrender" while taking a victory lap in Versailles —ended over the North Atlantic Terror Organization summit in Ankara.

Iran, for its part, responded by promising a "crushing response," activating air defences in Bahrain and Kuwait, and having its Parliament Speaker announce that "the era of bullying and extortion is over" — a statement that sits alongside the Manipulator-in-Chief's own "unconditional surrender" claim in the growing museum of declarations untethered from observable reality.

The ceasefire that ended the war that was won on Day 1 has now required 80 punishment strikes on Day 130 — at some point, the victory lap becomes a treadmill.

🚨 OIL DOESN'T CARE ABOUT YOUR OPINION. IT CARES ABOUT WAR. 🚨

While the headlines focus on the battlefield...

The oil market is pricing the next shock.

🛢 Supply risks.
📈 Higher inflation.
💸 More pressure on consumers and central banks.

Every geopolitical escalation has consequences far beyond the front line.

🎯 Watch the full video to see why wars remain the key catalyst for higher oil prices—and what it means for your portfolio.

The June FOMC minutes arrived with the gravitas of a 47-page document confirming what the bond market already knew three weeks ago: a majority of participants fear higher inflation, "a few" wanted to hike in June but politely held back, "several" no longer consider policy restrictive, and the committee has officially added AI to its list of inflation culprits — alongside tariffs, the Middle East war, and apparently the full moon. The Fed's new intellectual framework is breathtaking in its creativity: AI is simultaneously responsible for pushing core goods prices higher today AND will eventually reduce production costs and solve inflation tomorrow — a both-sides argument so elastic it could justify any policy decision from here to 2035.

https://www.scribd.com/document/1059745647/Fomc-Minutes-20260617#download&from_embed