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

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-week-that-it-wasas-of-august-18e

Listen to a summary of The Macro Butler weekly newsletter via podcast on YouTube.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-hungry-decade-podcast

The Macro Butler returned to Asharq Bloomberg TV to answer the question the consensus keeps dodging: can escalating geopolitical tensions drive gold to record levels? The short answer — yes, and the catalysts are only multiplying:

⚔️ The war cycle is expanding, not contracting — from the Middle East to Ukraine to the widening ring around Iran, every new flashpoint reinforces the one asset that carries no counterparty risk.

🏛 The sovereign debt crisis is accelerating — Bessent’s “not-QE” buybacks, a Fed cornered into hiking, and a dollar losing its “risk-free” halo — all rocket fuel for the Eternal Bullion.

🥇 Central banks and sovereign investors keep accumulating — because when trust in public institutions erodes, capital migrates to what can’t be printed, frozen, or defaulted on.

While the mass media obsesses over every pullback, the smart money is quietly building positions in the one asset that has outlasted every empire foolish enough to ignore it.

📺 Watch the full interview on Asharq Bloomberg TV now.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-asharq-bloomberg-tv-6e3

🌍🔥 THE GLOBAL ECONOMY IS ENTERING THE WORST KIND OF SQUEEZE.

Inflation is surging. 📈
Growth is slowing. 📉
And policymakers are running out of easy answers.
The real question isn't “Will the economy slow?”
It’s “How high can inflation go while growth keeps falling?” 👀
That’s the stagflation trap investors should be watching.

Learn how to grow your wealth in a stagflation with The Macro Butler Financial Academy

https://themacrobutler.com/financial-academy/

"THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!" — announced in capital letters on Truth Social, which is where treaties go these days. The terms, such as they are: a private company with 100-year development rights over 17 Venezuelan fields, a 55% effective US stake, off-take crude at cost, and oversight by the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Capital, because nothing says free-market energy policy like the Department of Defence running your upstream. Caracas claims 65 billion barrels of proven reserves, $100 billion of investment and $209 billion of tax revenue, all negotiated by acting President Delcy Rodríguez — her predecessor being currently detained in the United States on narcoterrorism charges, having been collected nine months ago by military operation.

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117175567133618952

65 billion barrels on paper. Almost none in the tank. Donald Copperfield's "historic" agreement hands the US roughly 55% effective output through equity and at-cost off-take, on 100-year concessions, with $100 billion of private investment promised and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve pencilled in as the happy recipient. Splendid. Now the inconvenient arithmetic: Venezuela sits on 303 billion barrels of proven reserves — the largest on earth — and produces about 1.25 million barrels a day, which is roughly what a mid-sized shale basin manages without a signing ceremony. Reserves are a geological noun; production is an engineering verb, and the gap between them is measured in upgraders, diluent, pipelines, power, and years of capital that nobody in the announcement has yet volunteered. Sixty-five billion barrels sounds magnificent until you ask who is pumping the first one, with whose money, into which refinery. The deal is real. The oil, for now, is a spreadsheet.

Venezuela has the world's biggest reserves and one of its smallest outputs — a paper fortune is still just paper.

Listen to The Month That It Was in August 2026 from The Macro Butler.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-month-that-it-was-august-2026

Beijing reports that China's factories contracted for a second straight month — and calls it good news, which, to be fair, it sort of is. The official manufacturing PMI rose to 49.8 from 49.2, beating the 49.5 consensus, with sixteen of twenty-one industries improving and the statistics bureau declaring a "significant improvement." Note that 49.8 is still below 50, so the significant improvement is in the rate of decline. Electrical machinery and equipment printed above 53 on production and new orders; chemical raw materials sat below 50 — exports and anything adjacent to technology are carrying the load while the domestic consumer stays firmly in his shell. The non-manufacturing gauge disappointed at 49.0, with construction activity sliding to 46.9, its weakest since the pandemic began — blamed, in a flourish of meteorological candour, on heavy rain and typhoons.

China's factories shrank for a second month straight — and Beijing called it a recovery, because 49.8 is the new bull market.

Four hundred thousand people on a volcanic rock have done the arithmetic that Brussels prefers left undone. By 52.8% to 47.2% — against polls promising the opposite — Iceland has declined to reopen membership talks it first opened in 2009, when the banks were smoking and the IMF was at the door. Eleven of thirty-five chapters were provisionally closed before the process quietly froze in 2013. The fisheries chapter, curiously, was never opened at all. This was never an application, merely an opportunity to discover what an application might feel like. The opposition, unhelpfully literal, observed that if you apply to join the EU, you are applying to join the EU. Note what the campaign was actually about — currency, fish, farms, sovereignty — and what it was not about: the geopolitical necessity everyone in Brussels assured them was decisive. Small nations, it turns out, retain the capacity to count their own boats.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/30/iceland-eu-accession-referendum-result.html

Sovereignty is what remains when a country reads the treaty before signing it.

🚨 6 MONTHS OF WAR — BUT WHO IS REALLY PAYING THE PRICE? 🌍🔥

The biggest casualty may not be where you think.

🛢 Energy importers are getting squeezed
📈 Energy costs are feeding inflation
💸 Trade balances are deteriorating
🏦 Central banks are trapped between inflation and growth
And while markets keep looking at oil prices, the real damage is spreading through the global economy.

🎯 Don’t become the next economic casualty hiding in plain sight.

Learn how to spot the risks before they hit your portfolio with The Macro Butler Financial Academy. 📚💰
Understand the cycle. Spot the risks. Protect your wealth. 👀

https://themacrobutler.com/financial-academy/

🤵 The Macro Butler’s Monthly Meditation 🤵

🌐 How robots and embodied AI answer missing workers 🌐

Read more here: https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-macro-butlers-monthly-meditation-fbc

Dear Investors,

Please find below the performance of The Macro Butler IG Portfolio as of end of August 2026.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-macro-butler-ig-portfolio-august-bf9

Dear Investors,

Please find below the performance of The Macro Butler Strategic Portfolio as of end of August 2026.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-macro-butler-strategic-portfolio-fda

Dear Investors,

Please find below the performance of The Macro Butler Long/Short Portfolio as of end of August 2026.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-macro-butler-longshort-portfolio-60d

The Treasury Secretary of the Empire has discovered a new vocabulary. Sanctions will now arrive weekly, like a subscription, and ‘Scrooge’ Bessent assures us this will be "financial violence if we have to." One admires the if we have to — the reluctance of a man reaching for the second bottle. The inaugural round: several UAE branches of Banque Misr, Egypt's second-largest bank. Not the parent. Not the other branches. And with thirty days to correct one's behaviour before anything actually happens — D-Day, it seems, with a cure period. The doctrine as stated: "There can be no leakage. You're either with us, or you're with the Iranians." Splendid. Except that Iran's economic lifeline is China, and on China the administration has said precisely nothing.

https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/bessent-expects-new-us-secondary-sanctions-weekly-aiming-increase-pressure-iran-2026-08-30/

The empire that must announce its violence every week has already told you it cannot afford to commit it once.

The World Kingdom of oil is not short of money; it is exploring financing options. At least $8 billion of them, with Aramco queuing at the same window for its own arrangement — purely to diversify sources of capital, you understand, and certainly not because the Iran war shut the Hormuz tap and produced the sharpest contraction since the pandemic, oil output down nearly a quarter, a 34.3-billion-riyal hole in one quarter alone. And this with Brent averaging $87. Marvel at the arithmetic: the highest oil prices in years, and still the bowl goes round. Six billion in bonds already, four more from Aramco, seven from the PIF in May, thirteen billion syndicated late last year — a monument to fiscal strength, each brick borrowed. In tis context, the Vision 2030 has entered its most visionary phase: selling the assets to fund the vision, then borrowing against what remains.

https://www.ndtvprofit.com/world/saudi-arabia-weighs-8-billion-loans-as-west-asia-war-strains-finances-11981794