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allowing Iran to sell its oil — issued in late June as the centrepiece incentive of the historic peace deal — has been revoked after approximately ten days, leaving 63 million barrels of Iranian crude drifting across Asian waters on vessels with no clear destination, no confirmed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

The Fed spent three years being late to hike, two years being late to cut, and is now being late to hike again — consistency, at least, is not their problem.

The Ministry of Peace has issued a clarifying update on its anti-interventionist foreign policy: The Manipulator In Chief who vowed to end the Russia-Ukraine war before his inauguration, and who started a new Middle East war on Day 1 of his second term, has now greenlighted Patriot missile production in Ukraine, praised deep Ukrainian strikes into Russian territory as "an escalation that can help lead to an end," and opened his NATO press conference by offering the Cokehead from Kyiv "warm words and fresh promises of military cooperation" — a sentence that would have been considered satire approximately eighteen months ago. The Kremlin, which had been assured repeatedly that America was pivoting away from European entanglements, has noted the development with characteristic understatement —declaring the conflict is now a "real war" rather than a special military operation, because Berlin, Paris, The Hague, Oslo, and Washington are all actively directing strikes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vevxTmu63ic

The President who promised peace is now licensing missile factories in a war zone — the Ministry of Anti-Interventionism has been quietly renamed the Ministry of Managed Escalation.

As the ceasefire officially expired and the Manipulator-in-Chief greenlighted deep strikes into Russia — because nothing pairs better with a NATO summit than lighting a new fuse — the Empire's Treasury quietly auctioned $39 billion in 9-year-10-month paper at a high yield of 4.580%, up from last month's 4.538%, stopping through the When Issued by 0.6bps in the biggest through since September 2025, confirming that someone out there still finds a decade of American sovereign paper attractive at yields that would have been considered fiscally catastrophic approximately four years ago.

The bid-to-cover surged to 2.593 from 2.565 — the highest since September 2025 and comfortably above the six-auction average of 2.46 — suggesting that at 4.580%, the world still finds a decade of American sovereign paper sufficiently attractive to show up in force, geopolitical chaos notwithstanding.
The internals were nothing short of spectacular: foreign buyers claimed 81.5% of the auction — up from June's already-impressive 78.21% and the third highest on record — meaning overseas central banks and sovereign wealth funds absorbed more than four-fifths of the Empire's 10-year debt issuance on the same day Washington greenlighted deep strikes into Russia and bombed Iran for the 47th time.

With Directs collapsing to 10.73% — the lowest since April 2025 — domestic institutions apparently decided that geopolitical chaos paired with a restarted ceasefire was not the ideal moment to add duration, leaving Dealers holding a skeletal 7.8%, down from June's 9.5% and the lowest since January — meaning the contractually obligated buyers of last resort were barely needed, their thinnest showing in six months entirely absorbed by the foreign sovereign wealth funds and central banks who, for reasons that deserve their own geopolitical analysis, chose the day Washington armed Ukraine to load up on American paper.

Overall an extraordinarily strong auction — foreigners absorbing over four-fifths of the Empire's decade-long IOUs on a day when Washington restarted two wars, confirming that the world's reserve currency still benefits from the greatest gift in finance: the absence of a credible alternative.