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.

🚨 THE US ECONOMY IS BOOMING... SO WHY DOES EVERYONE FEEL POORER? 🚨

Politicians say the economy is strong.

Consumers say:
🏠 Housing is unaffordable.
🛒 Groceries cost more.
⛽️ Fuel costs more.
💳 Debt is exploding.

Someone is telling the truth.
Someone is managing the statistics.

The real economy isn't measured by press conferences.

It's measured by what families can actually afford.

📉 Rising debt.
📈 Rising living costs.
📉 Falling purchasing power.

Welcome to the strange world where official numbers look great while consumers feel worse.

The Macro Butler pulled up a chair on The Time Compass Show with Bud Leiser to dismantle the week’s most dangerous myths before the rest of the world had finished its coffee. Another Hormuz MOU — another peace deal with the shelf life of a campaign promise.

Kevin Warsh’s FOMC debut: why his much-anticipated entrance will confirm, like the ECB and Bank of Japan before him, that the Fed has become a purely decorative institution in the age of Trump Stagflation.

And private credit fund freezes rapidly curing investors of the illusion that “alternative” means “accessible” — and sending them straight back to the only asset class that has never needed a redemption gate, a press release, or a central banker’s blessing: gold and precious metals.

No hopium. No soft landings. Just the macro playbook the consensus is still too comfortable to price in.

🎧 Watch now — and decide what’s actually in your portfolio before the next gate closes.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-time-compass-show-743

In another news that will confirm that the next great gold bull market will be driven by Asia, Singapore has announced on June 15 that it will establish an over-the-counter gold-clearing system by end-2026, with six bullion banks — including JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and DBS — signing on to participate, in what can only be described as the financial world's most eloquent vote of confidence in a metal that the same financial world spent the better part of a decade dismissing as a barbarous relic. The Monetary Authority of Singapore will also introduce central bank vaulting services from October 2026, allowing foreign central banks to store bullion reserves securely in the city-state — which is a diplomatically refined way of saying that sovereign institutions would like their gold somewhere stable, well-governed, and not subject to being frozen by executive order before breakfast.

https://www.cnbctv18.com/market/commodities/singapore-to-introduce-gold-clearing-system-this-year-become-bullion-hub-ws-el-19925317

Asian consumers already account for roughly 70% of the world's annual gold demand, yet the region's infrastructure has not kept pace — a gap Singapore is now moving to close with the quiet efficiency it brings to everything it decides to be serious about.

That JPMorgan, an institution not historically known for its sentimentality about gold, is among the founding participants tells you rather more about the direction of travel than any central bank survey or newsletter — including this one.

China's May data arrived like an uninvited houseguest bearing contradictions: retail sales fell 0.6% year-on-year — their first decline since the post-Covid reopening — fixed-asset investment retreated 4.1%, private investment slumped 7.1% at its worst pace since 2020, and car purchases plunged 16%, suggesting the Chinese consumer has studied the art of the closed wallet with monastic discipline. Meanwhile, the factory hummed heroically: industrial production climbed 4.5%, high-tech manufacturing soared 15%, semiconductors exports exploded 111%, and AI-related electronics jumped 17% — proof that the Middle Kingdom has mastered the ancient paradox of producing everything the world desires while its own citizens desire nothing at all.

In a nutshell, China keeps selling magnificently to the world while refusing to buy anything from itself

America's long-awaited manufacturing renaissance arrived in May and immediately sat down for a rest, with factory output flatlining after four months of gains — missing the consensus forecast with the quiet dignity of a student who studied the wrong chapter. The headline conceals a tale of two factories: durable goods, data centres, computers, and defence equipment hummed along heroically, with computer and electronic output up more than 4% over three months — its best run in five years — while nondurable goods manufacturing was dragged into the gutter by chemicals and petroleum, with synthetic dyes and pigments alone dropping 5.5%, a supply-chain casualty of the war that Washington declared won in Hour 1. Looking at the data with forensic precision, US factory output actually increased in only about one-third of categories — which is the polite way of saying two-thirds of American manufacturing is either stagnant or declining while the press release celebrates the remaining third.

In a nutshell, America isn't experiencing a manufacturing renaissance — it's experiencing a very expensive data-center construction project with a war subsidy attached.

In another landmark moment for a central bank that spent three decades perfecting the art of doing nothing, the Bank of Japan heroically raised rates to 1% — its highest since 1995 and a number the rest of the developed world would recognise as still essentially zero, but which in Japanese monetary policy circles qualifies as a hawkish revolution worthy of a ticker-tape parade. The accompanying decision to pause bond purchase tapering was immediately punished by the super-long JGB market, with yields on 20-year-and-above tenors rising on the entirely reasonable observation that pausing a taper does nothing to fill the structural demand void the taper already created — foreign sellers active, domestic buyers tentative, life insurers returning "selectively," which is polite bond-market language for "barely."

In a nutshell, the BOJ declared a hawkish revolution at 1%, and the bond market responded by selling the long end — because stopping the bleeding doesn't close the wound.

🚨 THE FED'S WORST NIGHTMARE HAS ARRIVED 🚨

Inflation won't go down. 📈
Growth won't go up. 📉

And the Fed is trapped right in the middle.

Welcome to Stagflation.

Raise rates?
💥 Risk a recession.

Cut rates?
🔥 Risk another inflation surge.

Do nothing?
🍿 Watch both happen at the same time.

For years, investors were told central bankers had everything under control.
Now they're discovering that printing trillions, running record deficits, and fighting multiple geopolitical crises may have consequences after all.

🎯 The next decade won't be about chasing growth.
It will be about protecting purchasing power.

Watch before the market figures it out.

While the world held its breath for Kevin Warsh's debut performance at the FOMC podium — widely expected to deliver the monetary policy equivalent of a participation trophy — the Empire's Treasury quietly auctioned $13 billion in 20-year paper (technically a 19-year-11-month reopening of Cusip UV8, because Washington can't even issue debt without a footnote). The auction priced at a high yield of 4.927%, a meaningful step down from last month's 5.122%, stopping through the 4.937% When Issued by a razor-thin 0.1bps — making it four consecutive 20-year auctions without a tail, which in the current fiscal environment qualifies as a minor miracle.

The bid-to-cover surged to 2.75 — the highest since March and above the 2.648 recent average — while internals were nothing short of stellar: indirects exploded to 71.6%, their highest since July 2024, with Directs coming in below average at 19.9%, leaving Dealers holding a historically skeletal 8.5%, one of the lowest on record. A remarkable contrast to last week's 30-year disaster, where the same foreign crowd couldn't find the exit fast enough.

Overall a surprisingly strong auction — one that would warm any deficit-addicted bureaucrat's heart, yet rests on a foundation of collective denial.
Most investors have yet to grasp that in the age of Trump Stagflation, the once-upon-a-time risk-free asset has quietly completed its transformation into the riskiest line item in the portfolio.

🚨 NATO'S NEXT CRISIS MAY NOT BE RUSSIA... 🚨

What happens when one of NATO's most important members starts looking East instead of West?

🇹🇷 Turkey sits at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East, the Black Sea, and global energy routes.

And the geopolitical tensions are rising fast.

⚠️ Middle East conflict escalating
⚠️ Energy security at risk
⚠️ NATO unity under pressure
⚠️ Global markets ignoring the warning signs

Investors are obsessed with AI.

Meanwhile, geopolitics may be quietly rewriting the next decade.

The biggest risks are often the ones nobody is pricing in.

🎯 Watch the full video before the headlines catch up with reality.

🤵 The Macro Butler Special Service 🤵

🌐 Hawk by instinct. Dove by orders. Stagflation by surprise. what the new Chair means for stocks, bonds, gold & cash. 🌐

Read more here: https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/warsh-ington-a-fed-under-stress

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

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/warsh-ington-a-fed-under-stress-podcast

In a triumph of statistical presentation, May retail sales rose a headline 0.9% — a number that loses considerable glamour once one notices that gas station receipts alone jumped 3.4%, meaning Americans didn't spend more because they felt wealthy but because filling the tank got more expensive courtesy of the Iran war. Strip out the gasoline inflation effect and the picture is a firm but thoroughly unspectacular 0.7%. The fine print is even more instructive: the figures are not adjusted for inflation, real wages are declining, the savings rate is sliding, and the card data from BofA and JPMorgan quietly reveal that it's wealthier Americans doing the heavy spending lifting while lower-income households navigate tighter budgets and elevated borrowing costs — a K-shaped "resilience" that would be more honestly described as two entirely different economies sharing the same headline.

Adjusted for CPLie, headline retail sales managed a heroic +0.24% MoM in real terms — barely clawing to January 2021 levels, which sharp-eyed historians of recent financial disasters will recognise as the precise inflection point that preceded the last stagflationary surge. The consensus will naturally overlook this inconvenient parallel, busy as it is celebrating the nominal number with the analytical rigour of someone reading only the restaurant's name and not the bill.