In another central bank denial, New York Fed President John Williams has declared that inflation has "likely peaked" and that monetary policy is "well positioned" — a phrase so reliably recycled across Fed press conferences that it should be trademarked — while simultaneously acknowledging that the Middle East war contributed significantly to the inflation he now expects to fade, on the assumption that the Middle East war will cooperate with his forecast by conveniently de-escalating. It will not. Germany is rebuilding its military, Poland is expanding at wartime pace, Finland has built underground shelters for its entire population, Europe is racing to 3-5% defence spending, Ukraine is consuming munitions at industrial scale, China is eyeing Taiwan while the Empire's stockpiles are depleted, and the Hormuz ceasefire has already been formally cancelled — none of which features in Williams' projection of inflation.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/15/new-york-fed-president-williams-says-inflation-has-peaked-rates

The Fed has NEVER controlled inflation and for sure not in a world at war — as always, it controls the narrative, and the narrative is losing ground faster than the ceasefire it's betting on.

The Macro Butler just made his CNA 938 debut — and Europe’s rally just got a reality check. 🎙🔥

He joined Andrea Heng and Rani Samtani on Open for Business to deliver the macro call that European bulls don’t want to hear: the recent outperformance of European equities versus US stocks is purely cyclical — a head fake dressed as a trend — and the secular value trap remains firmly intact. Here’s the full thesis:

Domestic investors are fleeing bonds, not discovering stocks. Political chaos and geopolitical risk at Europe’s doorstep are pushing locals out of government paper and into equities — not because Europe is thriving, but because the alternatives are worse.

💱 Foreign investors should stay away. A collapsing EUR against the USD and Asian currencies will eat every return before it reaches your portfolio. Currency-adjusted, the “outperformance” largely disappears.

⚔️ Two wars at Europe’s doorstep are expanding, not contracting. The secular headwinds — energy costs, demographic decline, political fragmentation — have not been resolved. They’ve been temporarily papered over by a cyclical bounce.

The head fake won’t last. The value trap will.

📻 Listen to the full interview on CNA 938 Open for Business.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-cna938-radio-16072026

June retail sales rose a headline 0.2% — landing precisely on consensus, which tells you everything about a data point so thoroughly telegraphed it barely qualifies as news — with the real story buried in the gasoline line, where receipts plunged 5.3%, their sharpest decline since 2022, as pump prices fell roughly 50 cents a gallon courtesy of the Iran ceasefire that has since been formally cancelled and replaced with renewed airstrikes. Strip out the fuel deflation and sales rose a solid 0.7% — meaning the American consumer is not thriving so much as temporarily relieved that the same war that caused the inflation also briefly paused it.

Adjusted for CPLie, June retail sales managed a heroic +0.57% MoM in real terms — a new all-time high, apparently achieved by American consumers who live paycheck to paycheck, carry $1.685 trillion in auto loan debt, save at a threadbare 3%, and discovered that 50 cents off at the pump was sufficient to trigger a spending spree of historic proportions. The mechanism is as elegant as it is fragile: the same Middle East excursion that was declared won on Hour 1 of Day 1 briefly paused — via a ceasefire now formally cancelled and replaced with renewed airstrikes — long enough to temporarily deflate gasoline prices, which temporarily relieved just enough household budget pressure to temporarily boost discretionary spending, producing a real all-time high that will prove as durable as the peace deal that created it.

In a nutshell, the American consumer is resilient in the bank's database and stretched at the grocery shelf — the June retail report managed to confirm both simultaneously.

The Macro Butler has joined Umar Tasleem on Türkiye’s Diplomacy to answer the three questions the financial media refuses to ask out loud:

💰 Who is actually paying for the Empire’s Middle East excursion? It’s not the government — it’s the consumer, the taxpayer, and every household whose grocery bill, energy cost, and mortgage payment has quietly absorbed the war premium nobody officially declared.

🛢 What are the real impacts for consumers? A 20% Hormuz toll, renewed airstrikes, collapsing ceasefire subscriptions, and oil prices reloading for the next leg higher — the “energy relief” of June was a promotional offer with a very short expiry date.

🚫 Sanctions have never worked — and never will. Twenty-seven rounds of European sanctions against Russia have produced the highest Russian LNG sales to Europe on record over the past six months. The data doesn’t lie, even when the policy does.

The war is inflationary. The sanctions are counterproductive. And the consumer is picking up the tab.

📺 Watch the full interview on Türkiye’s Diplomacy with Umar Tasleem.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-turkiyes-diplomacy-5ef

The Macro Butler is back on Piggo's Trading Desk — and the war cycle just went global. 🔥⚔️
He deliver the macro playbook for a world where every theatre of conflict is simultaneously escalating and every commodity tied to war is repricing higher. The full briefing covers:

⚔️ Middle East Season 2 — ceasefire cancelled, Hormuz mines intact, Iranian oil in limbo, and oil prices reloading for the next leg higher.

Eastern Europe — Ukraine striking deep into Russia, Patriot missile factories opening in Kyiv, NATO committing to 5% defence spending, and the war of attrition showing no sign of a negotiated exit.

🛢 The Investment Thesis — own everything you need to conduct a war: energy producers, commodity miners, defence manufacturers. The sector rotation into undervalued war-cycle producers has barely begun.

💵 Dollar dynamics, Red Sea disruption, energy security, and the commodity supercycle — all connected, all accelerating.

🎧 Watch the full episode on Piggo’s Trading Desk — before the next escalation does the pricing for you.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-piggos-trading-desk-3d9

In a prime-time address from the East Room — a venue typically reserved for declarations of war, national emergencies, and moments of genuine constitutional gravity — the Manipulator-in-Chief devoted 25 minutes to relitigating the 2020 election, stoking doubts about the upcoming midterms, and presenting declassified intelligence reports so heavily redacted, years old, and evidentially thin that the most damning claim about noncitizen voters arrived as a one-page press release with no underlying evidence. The speech was delivered on the sixth consecutive day of US airstrikes against Iran, amid a foodborne illness outbreak, extreme heat, deadly Texas flooding, and an inflation rate that continues its cheerful disregard for official projections — a backdrop that presumably suggested to the communications team that pivoting to 2020 election grievances was the strategically optimal deployment of prime-time presidential bandwidth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EL5ZYJrAHc

When the bombs are falling for the sixth consecutive day and the President's prime-time address is about the 2020 election, the art of distraction has found its masterpiece.