In a press conference masterfully conducted by Viceroy Rubio — that virtuoso of diplomatic dystopia — the Empire has unveiled its bold new strategic objective for Operation Epic F**k-Up, entering another day of decisive hourly victories: the goal is to restore the access to the Strait of Hormuz exactly the way it was before the Empire started the war.
To summarise: the Empire launched a holy war, closed the world's most critical oil chokepoint, destroyed a quarter of global LNG supply, sent gasoline above $4, triggered the Trump Stagflation, introduced Europe to fuel rationing, deployed troops to hotels, fired its Army Chief of Staff, blockaded a blockade, threatened the Pope, called Iran "crazy bastards" on Easter Sunday, and has now — after all these days of uninterrupted victory — concluded that the optimal outcome is things going back to the way they were.

The way they were, one recalls, was before all of the above happened.

The Ministry of Victory wishes to assure the public that this represents a major strategic breakthrough. Critics have noted that "restoring things to the way they were before the war" is also known as "not starting the war." The Ministry has no comment. Viceroy Rubio is understood to be working on the messaging. The Strait remains closed. The irony does not. 😂

Fresh off the plane from China, The Macro Butler landed straight on The Contrarian Capitalist Podcast— and what he saw in the Middle Kingdom will change the way you think about the next decade.

While the Empire wages holy wars and drowns in stagflation, China is already living in the future — AI-powered, decoupled from the West, and quietly positioning itself to thrive in exactly the kind of chaotic world that Washington just accidentally created.

This is the interview that connects the dots:

🤖 China’s AI revolution — it’s not coming, it’s already here

🌏 The great decoupling — and why it’s irreversible

📈 How China wins while the West burns

🎙 Pull up a chair. This one will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about the world’s next superpower.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-the-contrarian-capitalist-71f

The Macro Butler joined Cris Sheridan from Financial Sense Wealth Management for a deep dive into the great global decoupling already underway between China and the West — and why investors are massively underestimating its inflationary consequences.

From semiconductors becoming the new strategic commodity controlled by only a handful of players, to the coming supercycle in oil, copper, nickel, wheat, gold and critical resources, this discussion explores why the next decade will be defined by supply shortages, geopolitical fragmentation, and structurally higher commodity prices.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-financial-sense-07052026

The Macro Butler is back on Piggo’s Trading Desk — and this time, he brought history. 📚⚰️

While Washington blows trillions on weapons and Medicaid bureaucracy, China is quietly winning the AI race by doing something radical: actually investing in infrastructure and its own people. Revolutionary concept, apparently.

The uncomfortable truth nobody in Washington wants to hear?

💰 The real MAGA playbook: invest in average Americans and the nation’s extraordinary natural resources — not plutocrats and Pentagon contractors

🏛 From Rome to Spain to Britain — every empire collapsed the same way. The US is now lining up with impressive precision to join that distinguished list of fallen plutocracies

This isn’t doom. This is history rhyming so loudly you can hear it from Beijing.

🎙 Pull up a chair. This one connects 2,000 years of imperial collapse to your portfolio — and tells you exactly where to stand when the music stops.
👉 Watch now — because understanding why empires fall is the most valuable investment research you’ll ever consume. 🛢💡

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-piggos-trading-desk-b91

In Eurostan, Brussels’ technocrats are now flirting with restricting VPN access under the noble banner of “protecting children,” because apparently online privacy has suddenly become a dangerous extremist activity. After rolling out age-verification systems requiring IDs, facial scans, and biometric checks, officials are now worried that citizens are using VPNs to escape the surveillance maze — which, naturally, means the VPN itself must now become suspicious.

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/782618/EPRS_ATA(2026)782618_EN.pdf

As always in the Orwellian playbook, the pattern never changes: first comes “misinformation,” then “safety,” then mandatory identification, and finally the quiet criminalization of anonymity itself. Conveniently, all this arrives alongside digital IDs, CBDCs, online speech regulation, and expanding financial monitoring — but citizens are reassured this is all merely about keeping the children safe while the infrastructure for full-spectrum digital compliance is built one regulation at a time.

The Macro Butler was back on BFM 89.9 — Malaysia’s premier business radio — and he didn’t come to sugarcoat the macro. 🎙

The verdict on Operation Epic F**k-Up’s global economic fallout?

🔥 Trump Stagflation is spreading — and it’s just getting started

🏦 The Fed, the BOJ, and central banks worldwide are trapped — raising rates kills the economy, cutting them fans the inflation. There is no good option.

💸 Faith in public institutions is collapsing — and when this happens, capital moves. Fast.

📈 Where does it go? US assets. And more importantly —

🥇 Gold. The ultimate antifragile asset. Zero counterparty risk. No central bank can print it. No sanctions can freeze it. No Truth Social post can devalue it.

This is not a forecast. This is the playbook.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-bfm-899-radio-08052026

In another nonfarm payrolls release destined to fuel Washington’s propaganda machine, the U.S. economy supposedly added 115,000 jobs in April, marking a second consecutive monthly gain while the unemployment rate remained unchanged. March payrolls were also revised modestly higher, reinforcing the official narrative of a resilient labour market despite underlying signs of slowing momentum. Beneath the headline, however, the picture was less impressive. Job growth remained heavily concentrated in education, health services, and transportation — the latter boosted by recent regulatory changes — while broader labour demand stayed subdued after nearly a year of near-stagnant employment growth. With immigration slowing sharply, economists and policymakers have also quietly lowered the threshold for what now qualifies as a “solid” payroll report.

The unemployment rate remained conveniently unchanged at 4.3%, staying above its two-year moving average for yet another month since October 2023 — a signal that has historically been associated with the early stages of an economic bust. But this time, markets are apparently expected to believe that rising unemployment, sticky inflation, and slowing growth are all simply part of the magical new economic doctrine now known as “Trump Stagflation.”

In a nutshell , another “strong” payrolls report, another chapter in the statistical theater of Trump Stagflation.

🤵 The Macro Butler Weekly Digest 🤵

🌐 AI wasn’t built to cut costs—it was built on them. Energy, chips, geopolitics, and power: this is the real balance sheet of artificial intelligence. 🌐

Read more here: https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-hidden-costs-of-ai

While the Empire continued enforcing the blockade of the blockade to encourage Tehran’s “voluntary cooperation,” Iran appeared to play a card that Donald Copperfield never included in the script. A massive oil spill emerged near Kharg Island, the terminal handling roughly 90% of Iran’s crude exports, with satellite imagery from May 6–8 showing a spreading slick covering tens of square miles across the Persian Gulf. The official cause remained “under investigation,” naturally, but the timing fuelled speculation that Tehran may have decided that if sanctioned oil can no longer be stored or sold freely, it can at least be redistributed environmentally.

https://www.thedefensenews.com/news-details/Satellites-Detect-Large-Oil-Spill-in-Persian-Gulf-Near-Irans-Kharg-Island-Export-Terminal/

In the grand Orwellian energy transition, the theocracies of Washington, Tel Aviv, and Tehran continued preaching morality while conducting geopolitics through blockades, shortages, and floating crude oil.

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

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-hidden-costs-of-ai-podcast

While markets continued debating whether the “Epic F**k Up” was finally ending, the reality inside global storage facilities looked far less comforting: crude inventories kept collapsing toward levels where the issue was no longer price, but whether the system could physically function at all.

According to JPMorgan Chase projections, inventories were expected to fall toward 7.6 billion barrels by June 2026 — the so-called operational stress level — before approaching 6.8 billion barrels by September, effectively the minimum needed to keep pipelines pressurized and refineries operating. Below that threshold, the conversation shifts rapidly from “$90 or $110 oil” to the far more awkward question policymakers prefer to avoid: what happens when fuel infrastructure itself starts breaking down?

Global inventories for major fuels are in the same mood, now sitting at, or below, the lowest seasonal levels of the past five years — just in time for the Northern Hemisphere’s peak summer demand season, because apparently the global energy system enjoys living dangerously. Gasoline inventories looked “reassuring” a few months ago, peaking at their highest levels since 2019 in February, only to perform a spectacular disappearing act by May and fall below the lowest levels seen for this time of year in more than a decade. But markets remain calm, reassured that shortages are surely just another “transitory” phenomenon.

In short, the global economy now has roughly four months to magically rediscover diplomacy before every major market on Earth reprices simultaneously. Energy, food, shipping, manufacturing — all remain tied to the same rapidly shrinking inventory curve that policymakers are still pretending is perfectly “manageable.”
But for now, markets remain comforted by reassuring press conferences explaining that shortages, inflation, and geopolitical escalation are all somehow a non-event.

As the Empire continues exporting “democracy” through regime-change adventures, more countries are inevitably concluding what Pyongyang understood years ago: in the modern Orwellian rules-based order, the ultimate despot survival package is not human rights — it is nuclear deterrence. On cue, North Korea quietly updated its constitution to authorize an automatic nuclear strike if Comrade Kim is assassinated or if the country’s nuclear command system is threatened. The message was refreshingly straightforward by diplomatic standards: if leadership disappears, so does everyone else. Iran, apparently, provided the latest reminder that in the global security marketplace, nuclear weapons remain the closest thing to a lifetime insurance policy.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/north-korea-revises-constitution-drop-references-unification-korean-peninsula-2026-05-06/

As Confucius almost certainly never said, “When oil burns in the Middle East, factory prices rise in the Middle Kingdom.” China’s producer inflation surged at its fastest pace since the pandemic as the Iran war sent energy and commodity costs soaring, officially ending years of factory deflation and reminding investors that globalization works beautifully right until shipping lanes catch fire. Yet while AI-driven demand for semiconductors and integrated circuits exploded, helping high-tech exports surge, many Chinese manufacturers now find themselves trapped between rising input costs and consumers still reluctant to spend, a situation ancient scholars would describe as “the margin is squeezed from both Heaven and Earth.” Copper, oil, chemicals, and AI chips all became more expensive simultaneously, proving once again that in the modern economy even artificial intelligence ultimately depends on mines, pipelines, and geopolitical chaos.