America once built the world’s greatest infrastructure. 🇺🇸🏗
 
Now it struggles with collapsing bridges, aging power grids, broken supply chains, and airports that look like abandoned shopping malls.
While trillions were printed for Wall Street and forever wars, the real economy quietly decayed underneath.

Infrastructure isn’t political — it’s the foundation of growth, productivity, and national power. ⚡️📉

The next economic superpower won’t be the country with the best slogans.
It will be the one that can still build infrastructure for its citizens rather than destroy those of other countries.

Learn to Earn with The Macro Butler Financial Academy: https://themacrobutler.com/financial-academy/

US manufacturing activity surged in May to its strongest level in four years as companies rushed to front-run the inflation shock triggered by the Middle East excursion — because nothing says “healthy economy” like panic-buying raw materials before the next oil tanker disappears from the Strait of Hormuz. Factory activity hit a 48-month high while input prices posted their biggest jump since 2022, supply chains slowed again, and businesses quietly started cutting jobs as costs exploded. In short, manufacturers are still producing, consumers are still paying more, and economists are once again discovering that “temporary inflation” has a remarkable talent for overstaying its welcome.

In a nutshell, America’s factories are booming for all the wrong reasons: panic-buying, exploding energy costs, and the growing realization that “transitory inflation” has once again become permanent.

As another glorious episode of CP-Lie Z, Japan’s softer April inflation print was largely powered by base effects, cheaper government subsidised school lunches, and statistical ninja techniques rather than any real victory over inflation. Beneath the anime smoke screen, price pressures remain alive and well, with rising oil prices preparing their inevitable “final boss” return across the economy. The Bank of Japan now looks increasingly likely to unleash its next rate hike attack toward 1% in June.

In a nutshell, Japan’s inflation “cooldown” was mostly a statistical anime filler episode, with rising oil prices already preparing the next boss battle for the Bank of Japan.

Ahead of Memorial Day Weekend, The Macro Butler returned to Piggo’s Trading Desk for another completely “peaceful and non-controversial” conversation.

From the foreign interests quietly steering American politics behind the curtain, to the magical world of Washington stock market manipulation helping plant the seeds of the next American Civil War, nothing was off limits.

We also explored the coming Taiwan Strait showdown, the economic shockwave from the Strait of Hormuz closure, the looming risks of global food shortages — and wrapped things up with a special warning on how not to become exit liquidity in the future SpaceX IPO circus.
If you still think 2026 is a normal macro cycle… this interview is for you.

🎥 Watch now before another “totally unexpected” geopolitical event arrives 15 minutes before market open.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-piggos-trading-desk-597

After aggressively dumping gold at the start of the great Middle East “stabilization mission,” Turkey eventually discovered that defending a collapsing currency requires sacrificing whatever remains liquid — including U.S. Treasuries. As the Iran conflict triggered another classic emerging-market liquidation spree, Turkey’s foreign reserves suffered their largest monthly collapse on record in March, falling by $43.4 billion while the current-account deficit widened sharply under the weight of soaring commodity prices. Apparently, in modern central banking, “reserve management” increasingly means deciding which asset to sell first before the next crisis arrives.

Turkey’s economic “stabilization strategy” is now looking increasingly similar to a garage sale of national reserves. Hammered by soaring oil prices following the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, Ankara first dumped gold, then quietly liquidated nearly all of its U.S. Treasury holdings — collapsing from $16 billion to just $1.8 billion in a single month — in a desperate attempt to slow the lira’s decline. Despite aggressive interventions, inflation continues accelerating, bond yields are exploding, and the lira keeps sinking, proving once again that defending a currency with dwindling reserves is a bit like trying to stop a flood by selling the furniture.

🚨⚠️ THE TAIWAN STRAIT IS THE NEXT GLOBAL ECONOMIC FAULT LINE ⚠️🚨

Forget the headlines.
If the Taiwan Strait gets disrupted, this isn’t just a geopolitical story anymore — it’s a global semiconductor cardiac arrest. 💻🔥

No chips = no AI boom
No AI boom = no market euphoria
No market euphoria = Wall Street suddenly remembers which stocks perform during stagflation.

From supply chains to smartphones, EVs, data centers, and military tech… everything runs through Taiwan. And the world is dangerously underprepared for what happens if that artery gets blocked.

Learn to Earn with The Macro Butler Financial Academy: https://themacrobutler.com/financial-academy/

After spending months being quietly transformed from Director of National Intelligence into Director of “Do Not Invite,” Tulsi officially resigned under the noble banner of caring for her husband’s illness — conveniently ending one of Washington’s more awkward relationships between an anti-war intelligence chief and an administration enthusiastically expanding military operations from Iran to Venezuela.

While the White House praised her “incredible job,” Tulsi increasingly found herself excluded from key decisions, gently reminded that questioning permanent war strategies in modern Washington is roughly as career friendly as criticizing inflation statistics at the Federal Reserve.

https://x.com/DNIGabbard/status/2057877960783204419

The great American “blockade of the blockade” is starting to look remarkably selective, as ships continue crossing the Strait of Hormuz after politely coordinating with Iranian authorities, paying generous bitcoin “navigation fees,” and then requesting permission from the U.S. blockade further offshore — because nothing says “rules-based order” quite like two competing toll booths in the same waterway. While Viceroy Rubio warned that Iran’s shipping toll system is “unacceptable,” Tehran appears to be proving that in modern geopolitics, whoever controls the chokepoint eventually discovers the ancient and highly profitable art of monetizing panic.

https://x.com/Kpler/status/2057764655976587619

As the new Fed Chair was officially sworn in as Central Banker-in-Chief, Wall Street’s endlessly imaginative EYIs are increasingly awakening from their enchanted “rate cuts and a soft landing” fairy tale and are now pricing in a 25bps hike by December with a delightful 95% probability. Meanwhile, Trump Stagflation continues to evolve rapidly from a “baseless conspiracy theory” into what increasingly resembles the Empire’s official economic doctrine, while the Manipulator-in-Chief reassures the population that the Persian “little excursion” remains merely a minor inconvenience required to continue exporting democracy, inflation, and regime change all at once.

At this stage, like most public institutions of the Empire, the Fed resembles less a central bank and more a nervous airline passenger politely handing the cockpit over to the bond market, while its credibility continues a graceful descent somewhere above the Strait of Hormuz — still technically a soft landing, just missing the runway, the engines, and possibly the plane itself.

🤵 The Macro Butler Weekly Digest 🤵

🌐 America — like much of the world — is drowning in debt just as rising rates, stagflation, and AI job losses hit the economy all at once. 🌐

Read more here: https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/a-world-on-borrowed-time

While Donald Copperfield was busy distracting the public with another round of “imminent Armageddon” headlines and TACO Tuesday diplomacy, the most important primary of the upcoming midterms quietly took place on May 19. Thomas Massie did not simply lose a local race — Washington delivered a very public reminder that any politician questioning endless war funding or challenging the foreign-policy consensus risks being politically erased. What was presented as a normal Republican primary somehow became the most expensive House primary in U.S. history, with tens of millions flooding into a Kentucky congressional race that most Americans had never heard of before. Apparently, democracy remains sacred in Washington… provided the correct people finance it first.

https://dailycaller.com/2026/05/20/thomas-massie-ed-gallrein-donations-kentucky/

Thomas Massie’s real political crime was not losing a primary — it was opposing endless foreign aid, permanent wars, and openly criticizing the influence of AIPAC over Congress while Washington continued funding conflicts abroad as America sinks deeper into debt, inflation, and social decline. After the election, AIPAC openly celebrated spending millions to remove him, turning what used to be called “foreign influence” into something closer to a public relations campaign. Massie repeatedly argued that no foreign country should automatically receive American taxpayer money, whether Israel, Ukraine, Egypt, or anyone else — a position that in modern Washington apparently qualifies as radical extremism. The most remarkable part is not even the lobbying itself, but how openly the political system now advertises who is allowed to remain in Congress and who gets financially erased for asking inconvenient questions.

https://x.com/TrackAIPAC/status/2056885271132827834

The Manipulator-in-Chief ultimately sided with the same foreign lobbying machine against the very voters he once claimed to defend. The man who built an entire movement around “draining the swamp” now stands comfortably alongside the donor networks and lobbying interests that MAGA once portrayed as the embodiment of that swamp. Donald Copperfield publicly attacked Thomas Massie as the “worst and most unreliable Republican Congressman,” despite having praised him and encouraged MAGA supporters to back him only a few years earlier — apparently before loyalty to ‘Satanyahu’ became a more important qualification than loyalty to the people of Kentucky.

This is how republics slowly decay — not through foreign invasion, but through corruption, lobbying power, financial intimidation, and political systems that increasingly appear more responsive to entrenched interests than to ordinary citizens themselves.

As another conveniently timed “existential threat” emerged to help justify Season 2 of the Epic F**k Up in the Middle East, the ever-obedient fake news media suddenly discovered an alleged Iranian-linked plot targeting Donald Copperfield’s favourite dynasty princess, Ivanka. The storyline could hardly be more perfect: portray the ruling family as innocent victims just in time for another round of democracy delivery by missile. Meanwhile, the far less cinematic explanation — that Washington’s foreign-policy scriptwriters and Bibi’s war cabinet never wanted the conflict to end in the first place — quietly remains off-screen where it belongs.

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

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/a-world-on-borrowed-time-podcast