The Ministry of Fiscal Innovation has identified a magnificent new revenue stream: the SpaceX IPO. The Communist Republic of California, surveying the billions in capital gains about to crystallise among state-based employees of a company whose founder relocated both Tesla and SpaceX headquarters out of the state specifically to escape California's regulatory hostility and tax burden, has concluded that the appropriate response is not to ask why entrepreneurs keep leaving — but to position itself to harvest the exit on the way out. State officials have openly acknowledged that IPO windfall gains could help plug budget holes and support spending programmes increasingly dependent on volatile tax receipts — which is the Sacramento way of describing a fiscal model that gorges during boom cycles, expands permanently, and then expresses theatrical surprise when the cycle turns and revenues collapse.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/18/california-ipo-tax-windfall.html

The encore is even more creative: California is simultaneously debating a one-time 5% billionaire wealth tax estimated to generate roughly $100 billion — a proposal whose primary achievement would be to accelerate the capital flight the state is already experiencing and ensure that the next SpaceX is founded in Texas. The Ministry sees every successful company, every IPO, and every wealthy resident not as an asset to cultivate but as a resource to harvest — and then expresses bewilderment when the harvest keeps moving.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/18/california-billionaire-tax-ballot-tech-opposition

California didn't build Silicon Valley by taxing success — it is dismantling it the same way, one exit at a time.

The Macro Butler returned to Asharq Bloomberg TV to deliver the macro call the consensus is too uncomfortable to make: the latest pullback in gold is not a warning — it’s an invitation.

Forced sellers are in full capitulation, the chart is screaming a textbook double bottom, and the geopolitical powder keg that the market keeps pretending has been defused is about to remind everyone why gold exists in the first place. When Trump Stagflation stops being a forecast and becomes a headline, and when investors finally accept that the Eternal Bullion is the only asset that carries no counterparty risk, no central banker’s blessing, and no redemption gate — the dip will be a distant memory.

Gold is not for peace. Gold is for war. And war, it turns out, is not going anywhere.

📺 Watch now — before the next geopolitical catalyst turns today’s pullback into tomorrow’s missed entry point.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-asharq-bloomberg-tv-1f6

The Macro Butler is delighted to be featured again by Hubbis— Asia’s premier wealth management platform — to make the argument that every serious investor needs to hear: in a world of weaponized currencies, gated private credit funds, reckless governments, and central banks that don’t control the cycle but are controlled by it, gold remains the only truly antifragile asset.
📖 Read now — and ask yourself why your portfolio still treats gold as optional.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/hubbis-eternal-bullion

The Ministry of Stable Governance has a brief administrative announcement: ‘The Keith Starmer’ has resigned as Prime Minister and Labour leader just under two years after capturing the keys to Number 10, succumbing to an internal party mutiny after his parliamentary colleagues concluded he was no longer best placed to lead them into the next general election — a verdict ‘The Keith’ accepted "with good grace," which is British for "I had no choice." Britain now faces its seventh Prime Minister in a decade, a rate of leadership turnover that would embarrass a mid-tier football club, achieved by a nation that still occasionally lectures the world on institutional stability.

The immediate catalyst was Andy Burnham's by-election victory in Makerfield, which handed the "King in the North" a seat in the Commons and effectively checkmated Starmer's already diminishing authority — proof that in modern British politics, the most dangerous man is not the opposition but the ambitious colleague two constituencies away. Starmer, in a final act of theatrical selflessness, framed his departure as patriotism rather than capitulation — because in the Ministry of Truth, every political execution is repackaged as a sacrifice.

https://x.com/BBCBreaking/status/2068978424341836101?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2068978424341836101%7Ctwgr%5Ea35b1a5e7595dcbf5ae3dd70a8a580a7e42c303c%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fprime-minister-keir-starmer-resigns-uk-faces-7th-leader-decade

🚨 THE MOST UNDERVALUED ASSET IN THE WORLD? 🚨

While everyone is chasing AI stocks, meme trades, and the latest Wall Street fairy tale...

One asset class is quietly trading at valuations not seen in years.

👀 Nobody wants it.
📉 Sentiment is terrible.
💰 Capital has fled.
⚠️ Supply is tightening.

And that's usually when the biggest opportunities are born.

The greatest investments are rarely popular when they are cheap.

They're popular after they've already doubled.

The question isn't what everyone is buying today.

It's what they'll be desperate to buy tomorrow.

🎯 Watch the full video to discover why the most hated asset today could become one of the biggest winners of the next cycle.

The Wise Investor does not announce what he accumulates — he simply accumulates. China imported 163 tonnes of gold in May alone — a two-year high — bringing the five-month total to 692 tonnes, up 76% year-on-year, while the People's Bank of China officially reported purchasing a modest 10 tonnes, a discrepancy so vast it suggests the left hand has been instructed not to inquire what the right hand is doing.

‘Government Sachs’ estimates actual PBOC purchases ran closer to 24 tonnes in April — still five times below the import pace — leaving a mathematical gap large enough to park a sovereign wealth fund in, yet politely unaddressed by all parties. Meanwhile Hong Kong is stockpiling 400-ounce London Good Delivery bars ahead of its July gold clearing system launch, Singapore is racing to follow, and a record 45% of the world's central banks have confirmed they intend to increase gold reserves over the next twelve months — because when the wise men of 76 nations simultaneously reach for the same antifragile asset, the movement is no longer tactical but civilisational.

When the world's largest gold buyer imports five times more than it officially admits, the Master reminds us: it is not what is declared that reveals the strategy — it is what is quietly carried through the door.

🚨 INFLATION IS BACK... AND THIS TIME IT'S WEARING A MILITARY UNIFORM 🚨

The first inflation wave came from Covid.

The second is arriving through war, energy shortages, supply disruptions, and geopolitical chaos.

⛽️ Higher oil prices
🚢 Disrupted trade routes
💣 Expanding conflicts
🛒 Rising living costs

And yet investors are still being told inflation is "anchored."

History is clear:

When governments spend more...
When wars expand...
When commodities supply tightens...

Inflation doesn't disappear.

It comes back stronger.

🎯 The real question isn't whether inflation returns.

It's whether your portfolio is prepared for this second wave.

Watch the full video and discover why the next inflation wave may already be underway.

The Master observes: the wise investor who studies the river's behaviour across years will not be surprised when it runs shallow in June. The Bloomberg seasonality heat map covering two decades of XAUUSD returns delivers a quietly sobering message for the impatient: June has been gold's most treacherous month in the calendar, printing red with remarkable consistency across the last twenty years — 2012's savage -11.04%, 2025's -9.20%, 2013's -6.26% and 2022's -2.21% among the more memorable casualties — while the current June 2026 is already down -9.25% with the month not yet complete. The pattern is not accidental; June traditionally coincides with the seasonal lull between Indian wedding demand and the autumn restocking cycle, a period when speculative positioning unwinds, and fair-weather gold enthusiasts discover that conviction is considerably easier to maintain during a rally.

The wise investor does not sell the river because it runs shallow in June — he fills his vessel and waits for the current that history has always delivered.

The Macro Butler was back on The Time Compass Show with Bud Leiser to deliver two calls the consensus is still not ready to price in.

First: Warsh-ington’s Fed will soon discover what the bond market already knows — the Fed doesn’t control the cycle, the cycle controls the Fed, and rate hike is not a question of if but when.

Second: the current gold pullback is a seasonality-driven gift with a twenty-year track record of resolving higher.

Before the next wave of the war cycle fully reprices, before Trump Stagflation graduates from forecast to front page, and before the next cohort of investors remembers that the Eternal Bullion carries no counterparty risk, no redemption gate, and no central banker’s permission slip — the entry point will be gone.

June is historically gold’s weakest month. July and August are historically when the river runs strong again.

🎧 Watch now — and decide whether you’re adding to the Eternal Bullion before the catalyst, or chasing it after.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-time-compass-show-5ba

June's Flash PMI delivered the kind of headline that looks magnificent until you read the second paragraph: US Manufacturing hit a 49-month high at 55.7 while Services climbed to a 4-month high of 51.3 — prompting the customary "resilience" parade before the fine print quietly dismantled the celebration. The manufacturing surge is being temporarily buoyed by inventory building amid supply fears, factory job cuts are running at their highest since 2009 excluding the pandemic, and the overall growth rate remains consistent with a barely-above-1% annualised GDP in Q2. In summary: America has been panic-buying inventory it fears it won't be able to source, firing the workers who make it, and calling the result a 49-month high.

When your manufacturing renaissance is built on fear-driven stockpiling and your factories are cutting jobs at the fastest pace since 2009, the milestone is less a recovery and more a mirage.

In a fitting curtain-raiser to what promises to be a memorable week for the Empire's debt calendar, the Treasury sold $69 billion in 2-year notes at a high yield of 4.189% — up from 4.071% last month and the highest since January 2025 — stopping through the When Issued by 0.3bps, the biggest through since January.

The bid-to-cover arrived at a perfectly unremarkable 2.643 — essentially unchanged from last month's 2.640 and sitting squarely on the recent 2.61 average, the auction equivalent of a shrug. Internals were mildly disappointing: Indirects slipped to 55.45% from 57.60%, their lowest since December 2025, suggesting foreign enthusiasm for two years of American paper is quietly fading; Directs compensated by surging to 34.3%, their highest since October 2025 — domestic accounts apparently deciding that 4.189% was too good to ignore — leaving Dealers holding a skeletal 10.24%, their lowest since February.