Has gold finally found its bottom — and is silver the even bigger opportunity from here? 🥇🥈🔥
Over the skyline of Singapore, The Macro Butler returns for another Arigato Deep Dive with Arigato Investor (Chloe Lin) to answer exactly that. In this conversation, The Macro Butler reveals:

🥇 Why the gold bottom is in — and the geopolitical, monetary, and war-cycle catalysts set to drive the next leg higher.
🥈 Why silver may be the bigger opportunity — the asymmetric play the consensus keeps overlooking.
💼 How he’s advising his multi-millionaire clients to position their portfolios amid US market uncertainty right now — the exact strategy, not the sanitized version.
📉 The key trends he’s watching across precious metals and the broader markets heading into a volatile second half.

Just the macro playbook that history — and now the price action — keeps validating.

🎧 Watch the full Arigato Deep Dive now.
https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-arigato-investor-30072026

July's jobs report delivered the market's favourite genre of statistical comedy: the US economy actually lost 23,000 workers — below every single estimate on Wall Street, a 5-sigma miss so far outside the range that the 80,000 median forecast was off by more than 100,000 — while the unemployment rate somehow declined from 4.2% to 4.1%, achieved through the elegant mechanism of 178,000 people simply vanishing from the labour force faster than the 87,000 who lost their jobs, because in modern American statistics, the fastest route to a lower unemployment rate is convincing people to stop looking for work entirely. The revisions arrived precisely on schedule: May was slashed by 66,000 and June by 37,000, erasing 103,000 jobs that were previously celebrated as evidence of a resilient consumer, confirming that the "strong labour market" of prior months was a rough draft awaiting correction.

As always, the chart tells the story the headline won't: the unemployment rate "fell" to 4.1% not because Americans found jobs but because they stopped looking — a diet declared successful by throwing out the scale. Meanwhile the real drama is that the geopolitical premium the consensus swore was "erased" has come roaring back. Every time unemployment ticked up from a cycle low while oil spiked simultaneously — 1973, 1979, 1990, 2008 — the economy learned that "stagflation" and "soft landing" are not synonyms, no matter how creatively the participation rate is massaged.

Falling unemployment because people quit looking, and rising oil price — that's not a soft landing, it's the 1970s switching the runway lights back on.

The Ministry of Defensive Operations has issued a routine agricultural clarification: according to formal complaints Lebanon has lodged with the United Nations, Israel sprayed the toxic herbicide glyphosate across an 18-kilometre strip of southern Lebanese farmland in February 2026, at soil concentrations of 22,750-23,000 micrograms per gram — over 11,000 times the level of routine agricultural use — in an operation Lebanese officials describe as designed to render the land "empty of any life." The Ministry prefers the term "buffer zone" to the term "scorched earth," though the distinction is lost on the 76% of farmers displaced from affected areas, the 22-24% of Lebanon's cultivated land now damaged, and the citrus and banana groves that produce up to 97% of the region's fruit and will not recover within a generation. Satanyahu’s  tactic is not new — the Scythians used it against Darius in 513 BC, Rome salted Carthage's soil in 146 BC.

https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/from-gaza-t

When the objective shifts from defeating an enemy to poisoning the soil so no one can farm it for a generation, the war stopped being against a military long ago — and civilisation has simply run out of new ways to describe an old crime.

🤵 The Macro Butler Weekly Digest 🤵

🌐 How Nations Borrow, Why Empires Break, and Where Capital Flees When Governments Can No Longer Pay…🌐

Read more here: https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/when-the-house-of-debt-falls

The Ministry of Regional Stability has a minor architectural update: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Pakistan signed the Makkah Joint Defense Agreement— a NATO-style mutual defence pact for the Muslim world stipulating that an armed attack on any of the three will be treated as an attack on all, uniting 380-400 million people, Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, Turkey's advanced drone fleet and second-largest NATO military, and Saudi Arabia's economic weight into a single deterrence bloc.


https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/8/7/turkiye-saudi-arabi-pakistan-sign-joint-defence-agreement-whats-in-it

The Empire's Middle East excursion achieved what no adversary could: it convinced its own allies that they need a defence pact against the world the Empire built — and left Israel more isolated than the day the bombing began.

🚨 STOP TRYING TO PREDICT EVERY MARKET MOVE. 🚨

The secret to investing isn't reacting faster.
It's understanding the cycle. 🌊
📈 Know when to participate.
📉 Know when to stay patient.
💰 Let time—not panic—do the heavy lifting.
Sit back. Relax. Understand the cycle.
Then enjoy the ride. 🎢

Learn how to ear with The Macro Butler Financial Academy

https://themacrobutler.com/financial-academy/

Listen to a summary of The Macro Butler weekly newsletter via podcast on Substack; YouTube; Rumble; Spotify & TikTok.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/when-the-house-of-debt-falls-podcast

A nation that escaped its record deflation only by importing a war's worth of oil inflation is now watching that inflation drain away like bathwater — leaving behind the same empty tub of absent domestic demand it started with.

China's July PPI cooled to 3.5% from 4.1% — its first easing since the Iran war erupted in February — while CPI decelerated to a whisper-thin 0.5% from 1%, and core inflation slipped to 0.9%, confirming that Beijing's brief flirtation with rising prices was never a symptom of economic vitality but a temporary war surcharge delivered by tanker and now departing the same way.

The superior man notes the cruelty of the arithmetic: factories absorbed the higher costs of oil, chips, and metals because the mythical Chinese consumer — forever promised, forever absent — refused to let them pass a single yuan downstream, producing a K-shaped profit split so stark that energy producers feast on soaring margins while clothes-makers watch their earnings evaporate. As the oil shock fades, so does the only inflation China had, reviving the ancient fear that a genuine return to healthy prices remains, as the economists delicately put it, "a long way off."

China’s inflation arrived on an oil tanker and departed the moment the tanker gets cheaper.

The Ministry of Posthumous Warfare has achieved its most poetic legislative victory: the Senate passed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 by 86-11, a bill the late senator spent years failing to advance while alive and which passed only because he died — his death removing the final obstacle to the war-perpetuation he could no longer personally attend. The legislation authorises tariffs of up to 100% on the top five purchasers of Russian oil, extends economic warfare on Iran's energy sector, and arrives named after a man Trump himself observed was "more into keeping it going, frankly" — an epitaph so honest it may be the truest sentence spoken about Washington's foreign policy establishment in a decade.


https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2026-07-27_bill_text.pdf

They named the war-perpetuation act after the man who could only pass it by dying — a monument to a foreign policy that measures its own success by how many wars it keeps alive.

In a rare outbreak of common sense from Washington, Donald Copperfield has announced over $180 million to boost mining education — because someone finally noticed that America, the nation that wants to Drill Baby Drill and reshore its entire supply chain, had allowed its mining engineering programs to collapse to fewer than 600 students nationwide in 2023, down from nearly 1,500 eight years earlier. The Department of Energy is dropping $100 million to rebuild the workforce, the military is handing $32.7 million to the Colorado School of Mines, $25 million to South Dakota, and $23.6 million to Johns Hopkins for recycling — a genuinely sensible response to the inconvenient reality that China mines and refines an outsized share of the rare earths, lithium, graphite, and silicon that America needs for everything from semiconductors to advanced weaponry.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-mining-education-critical-minerals-180-million-dollars/

For once, Washington got the memo — America finally noticed it forgot how to dig the very minerals that power its strength, right as China holds the shovel.

🚨 WARREN BUFFETT IS SITTING ON BILLIONS... AND WHEN HE IS BUYING THAT'S THE SIGNAL. 🚨

While everyone else is chasing the market higher, Berkshire is keeping its powder dry. 💰
Why?

Because the biggest opportunities often appear when everyone else is forced to sell.
📉 Market correction?
💵 Cash ready.
🎯 Quality assets at bargain prices.

The question isn't whether Berkshire will deploy its cash...
It's what happens when it finally does.

Learn how to invest like Warren with The Macro Butler Financial Academy.

https://themacrobutler.com/financial-academy/

The consensus, ever fond of a dramatic headline, insists that China is hoarding gold to "destroy the dollar" — a thesis that confuses diversification with replacement and political ambition with market reality, and would require Beijing to be simultaneously plotting the dollar's demise while cheerfully holding trillions in dollar reserves and financing its trade in the very currency it supposedly wants to euthanize. The People's Bank of China added nearly 20 tonnes in July — its largest monthly purchase since October 2023, extending the buying campaign to a 21st consecutive month, with the pace accelerating from 160,000 ounces in March to 640,000 in July .