🚨 CALIFORNIA: THE FUTURE... OR A WARNING LABEL? 🚨

The state with:
💰 Some of the highest taxes
🏠 Some of the highest housing costs
⚡️ Some of the highest gasoline prices
🏕 And some of the largest homeless populations

Yet we're constantly told everything is working perfectly.

At what point does "progress" start looking suspiciously like decline?
California was once the land of opportunity.

Today it's becoming a case study in what happens when ideology collides with economic reality.
This story is bigger than California. It's a preview of where many countries are heading next when governments are misbehaving.

The Iran deal has now entered its Hollywood franchise phase. Every few weeks comes a new trailer announcing that peace is imminent, a deal is near, diplomacy is working, and everyone should remain calm. Then somehow the negotiations are delayed, the tensions escalate, the deadlines move, and another sequel gets released. By this point, the "Deal Is Near" narrative has had more reboots than Batman, more cliffhangers than Netflix, and a longer production schedule than the next Avatar movie. Investors may soon discover that the most reliable strategic reserve in the world is not oil, but the endless supply of optimistic headlines promising that peace is just one more meeting away.

🚀 SPACEX IPO? COUNT ME OUT. 🚀

Everyone wants the next big thing.
Everyone wants the next moonshot.
Everyone wants to buy the IPO.

Which is exactly why you should not buy it.

📈 Sky-high expectations
💸 Private investors looking for liquidity
🌕 Dreams already priced in
🐑 Retail investors arriving fashionably late

History is full of "can't miss" IPOs that somehow managed to miss.

Remember:
The best company is not always the best investment.
And the most exciting story is often the most expensive stock.
Before you FOMO into the next space-age gold rush, ask yourself:

Are you buying the future...
or financing someone else's exit?
Watch the full video before boarding this rocket. 🚀🔥

In a heartwarming tale of the bar being set so low it required excavation equipment, the University of Michigan's Consumer Sentiment index heroically bounced from its all-time record low of 44.8 in May to a still-deeply-depressing 48.9 in June — beating the 46.0 consensus estimate, which should tell you everything about the state of American optimism when exceeding 46 out of 100 qualifies as a victory lap. The culprit for this burst of euphoria? Gasoline prices eased early in the month, delivering particular relief to lower-income consumers for whom fuel comprises a larger share of their budgets — proof that the American dream has been successfully downsized to "slightly cheaper petrol." The real comedy, however, arrives in the inflation expectations data, where the headline number declined yet every single political party reported higher inflation expectations — a statistical achievement so creatively incoherent it raises the entirely reasonable question of whether someone is simply making it up.

When your consumer confidence index bounces off an all-time low and everyone still expects more inflation, the recovery is less "green shoots" and more "weeds in the pavement."

🤵 The Macro Butler Weekly Digest 🤵

🌐 When the bell rings and the confetti fall, every IPO begs one question: if it's this good, why are the insiders selling it to you? 🌐

Read more here: https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-last-buyers-club

🚨 THE TRUTH ABOUT IPOs 🚨

Wall Street tells you IPOs are opportunities.

History suggests they're exit strategies.

💰 Insiders buy early.
📈 Hype reaches maximum levels.
📺 Financial media goes into overdrive.
🐑 Retail investors rush in.
Then reality arrives.

The biggest gains are made BEFORE the IPO... not after it.
Before you buy the next "once-in-a-generation opportunity," ask yourself:
👉 If the future is so bright, why are early investors suddenly so eager to sell?

⚠️ THE #1 RULE OF INVESTING: SURVIVE. ⚠️

Everyone wants the next 10x winner.
Almost nobody talks about avoiding the -50% loser.
📉 Lose 50%?
You need a 100% gain just to break even.

The secret to long-term wealth isn't making spectacular gains.
It's avoiding catastrophic drawdowns.
🏆 Protect capital.
🏆 Stay liquid.
🏆 Be patient.
🏆 Strike when Time & Price Meet.

Because the investors who survive the crashes are the ones who own the bargains afterward.
Don't focus on getting rich fast. Focus on staying in the game.

Learn to Earn what the mainstream media insights won't tell you.
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/the-last-buyers-club-podcast

The Ministry of Beneficial AI has announced, with the serene efficiency of a Friday evening 9 p.m. press release, that Anthropic has been ordered to immediately pull the plug on all foreign access to Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5 — including its own foreign national employees — just four days after their triumphant launch, citing a national security export control directive. The pretext is a theoretical universal jailbreak that, in a detail the government of the Empire apparently missed during its review, no tester has actually found — with disclosed potential jailbreaks described as either entirely benign or providing no model-specific uplift whatsoever. Anthropic had already warned before launch that perfect jailbreak resistance is not currently possible for any model provider — a philosophical position Washington apparently treats as a four-day processing time.

https://www.anthropic.com/news/fable-mythos-access

In the race to win the AI war, America's opening strategy was to confiscate its own weapon.

In her final act as outgoing Director of National Intelligence — presumably before the Ministry of Truth reassigns the filing cabinet — Tulsi The Brave has spent her last weeks in office detonating a remarkable quantity of carefully maintained official fictions. First, she declassified intelligence slides confirming that the US government funded more than 120 biolabs across 30 countries, including over 40 in Ukraine, information she says was "knowingly withheld from the American people" while officials including Dr. Fauci "lied repeatedly" about their existence — and threatened those who tried to expose the truth.

https://www.dni.gov/files/BIOLAB_Slides.pdf

Then, in a complementary act of institutional self-immolation, she retracted the intelligence community's own assessments on Havana Syndrome, finding they had selectively excluded inconvenient evidence, relied on an ethically flawed medical study, and were developed in a manner inconsistent with analytic integrity — which is the bureaucratic way of saying the reports were engineered to reach a predetermined conclusion while the afflicted diplomats and intelligence officers were quietly denied medical care. Taken together, the two revelations sketch a portrait of an intelligence apparatus that spent years simultaneously running programs it denied existed and dismissing the injuries of its own people with reports it now admits it fabricated.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/gabbard-rescinds-intelligence-committee-reports-on-mysterious-syndrome-6047063?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=ZeroHedge

When the outgoing intelligence chief's farewell gift is proof that the intelligence community lied about biolabs and its own wounded, the conspiracy theorists are owed a very long apology.

🚀 SPACEX IPO: THE BIGGEST OPPORTUNITY... OR THE BIGGEST TRAP? 🚀

Everyone is already counting their profits.

That's usually when investors should start asking questions.

🤔 Why go public now?
🤔 Who is selling?
🤔 Is the growth already priced in?
🤔 Are you investing... or providing an exit for early insiders?

History teaches the same lesson:

The most exciting IPOs often arrive when expectations have already reached orbit. 🌕

The best company in the world can still be a terrible investment at the wrong price.

Before you FOMO into the next "can't lose" opportunity, watch this video.

Because in finance, gravity eventually catches up with every rocket. 🚀📉

🚨 STOP FOLLOWING THE NOISE. START FOLLOWING THE MONEY. 🚨

The media is obsessed with headlines.

Smart investors are watching capital flows.

📺 News chases clicks.
💰 Markets chase liquidity.
🥇 Real assets preserve wealth.

While everyone argues about the latest crisis, the biggest opportunities are in gold, silver, energy, and hard assets.

The crowd follows narratives.

Successful investors follow signals.

🎯 The question isn't what people are saying.

It's where the money is moving.

Learn to Earn how to separate market noise from investment reality.

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

🚨 POLITICS, LOBBYING & POWER: THE STORY THEY DON'T TELL YOU IN FAKE NEWS MEDIA 🚨

Every election comes with promises.

Every campaign comes with donors.

And every major foreign policy decision comes with questions.

💰 Follow the money.
🗳 Follow the incentives.
🎭 Ignore the political theater.

The real battle in Washington isn't always Democrat vs Republican.

It's influence vs accountability.

Who shapes policy?
Who benefits?
And who ultimately pays the bill?

If you think politics is about principles, this video may surprise you.

The Ministry of Ever-Closer Union has announced, with the solemn gravitas of a press release written by committee, that Eurostan has taken "a major step forward" by agreeing to open the first accession negotiation cluster with Ukraine and Moldova — covering the "core values and principles on which the EU is built, from the rule of law to strong democratic institutions" — a sentence delivered with a straight face by an institution whose founding members include France, currently on its third finance minister of the year, and Italy, which has not balanced a budget since the introduction of the euro.

https://enlargement.ec.europa.eu/news/statement-president-von-der-leyen-and-president-costa-agreement-open-first-accession-negotiation-2026-06-12_en

Welcoming a war-ravaged nation into a fiscally insolvent union and calling it a strategic investment is either visionary leadership or the world's most ambitious exercise in shared denial.