Having absorbed a Supreme Court ruling striking down his IEEPA tariffs with all the grace of a man told his favourite weapon is unconstitutional, ‘Tariff Man’ took to Truth Social to announce that he had completed a "thorough, detailed, and complete review" of the "ridiculous, poorly written, and extraordinarily anti-American decision" — a review that apparently took less than 24 hours — and would immediately raise his new global tariff from 10% to 15%, the maximum permitted under the 1974 Trade Act. In other words: The Supremes took away his bazooka, so he reached for the next largest weapon in the drawer before the ink was dry. The delicious irony, naturally, is that for some countries, the new 15% baseline is actually higher than the tariffs that were just struck down — meaning the court ruling that was supposed to bring relief has, in practice, delivered the opposite.

The new tariff applies for 150 days without congressional approval, after which the administration will need either legislative support — a tall order given bipartisan opposition — or alternative legal authorities that will take months to prepare. The left is presumably already filing the paperwork.

As Confucius might observe: "The ruler who loses one tariff before breakfast and imposes a larger one before lunch has not lost the trade war — he has merely changed uniforms."

In “Eurostan,” where sovereign debt is apparently a growth industry, the ECB has thoughtfully decided to make its crisis-era repo facility, EUREP, permanent and global—just in case liquidity “unexpectedly” evaporates. Starting Q3 2026, central banks can park up to €50 billion in euro collateral at the ECB for ready cash, a reassuring move that would be entirely unnecessary if everything were fine. With Germany and France borrowing enthusiastically, long-end yields drifting upward, and the euro still aspiring to dollar status from a comfortable second place, the message seems clear: when demand for euro bonds wobbles, expand the backstop and call it stability. What began as an emergency umbrella now looks more like a standing invitation to absorb an ever-growing pile of sovereign debt—because nothing says confidence in a currency quite like preparing the lifeboats in advance.

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/pr/date/2026/html/ecb.pr260214~076e09a6cc.en.html

While Donald Copperfield waves the Iranian bogeyman like a shiny Weapon of Mass Distraction, the real plot twist is happening in the leveraged loan market — and this one doesn’t require special effects. As default fears creep in, investors are suddenly remembering that “high yield” occasionally comes with… high risk. The biggest buyers of leveraged loans — the great alchemists of finance who transform debt into collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) — are feeling the squeeze, especially in the magical realm of CLO equity, where dividends are now being trimmed faster than a hedge fund bonus in a downturn.

Following the latest gathering of guardians of “peace” in the Bavarian mountains—where security was preserved by promising more of it through force—China unveiled its tailless J-36, a benevolent flying command centre that ascends higher, sees farther, and shoots sooner, all in the name of harmonious balance. Said to cruise above 65,000 feet and armed with missiles that travel twice as far as their Western equivalents, the aircraft has inspired urgent reflections in Washington on the importance of maintaining superiority by redefining it. While the F-22 remains an excellent platform for yesterday’s dominance, the J-36 is presented as a system for tomorrow’s managed skies—where altitude is clarity, range is stability, and whoever detects first preserves peace. Naturally, officials insist there is no cause for alarm, merely a renewed commitment to ensuring that all sides remain equally secure—some, of course, more equally than others.

High above the glittering skyline of the Lion City, The Macro Butler sat down with Arigato Investors to decode the ultimate question: what is gold, why does it keep shining when the world gets wobbly, and why the financial center of gravity may be quietly packing its bags for Asia — with Hong Kong, China ready to host the afterparty in the next decade.

So grab your popcorn, polish those gold bars, and enjoy the show — because this isn’t just an interview, it’s a front-row seat to the next chapter of global finance.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-arigato-investor-04022026

In the great collective of Eurostan, where All Members Are Equal But Some Are More Equal Than Others, the Ministry of Unity has grown weary of Hungary's tiresome insistence on exercising its legal veto rights. The crime? Blocking a EUR90 billion loan to Ukraine and a new sanctions package — not through illegal means, but through the very unanimity principle that every member state signed up for when joining the union. Lithuania's foreign minister, a faithful servant of the collective, has helpfully diagnosed the problem: too much sovereignty, not enough compliance. The proposed cure is elegantly Orwellian — move to qualified majority voting in foreign policy, allowing 15 of 27 states representing 65% of the population to override the dissenting minority, because in Eurostan, democracy means the majority decides and the minority obeys.

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/02/23/change-eu-rules-to-stop-hungarys-abuse-of-veto-lithuanian-foreign-minister-says

Should Hungary persist in its thoughtcrime of independent foreign policy, Article 7 mechanisms stand ready to curtail its voting rights — because nothing demonstrates the strength of a union of sovereign nations quite like stripping a member state of its sovereignty for disagreeing. As the Ministry of Peace would remind us: Unanimity is Obstruction. Dissent is Abuse. And a veto exercised legally is an emergency requiring immediate institutional reform.

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/article-7-procedures/

In Eurostan, every crisis — debt, migration, war, sanctions — arrives as a fresh justification for deeper centralization, and Hungary's veto is merely the latest emergency requiring Brussels to expand its authority. Hungary is not the problem; it is the symptom of a fundamentally flawed construction: nations with divergent economic interests, energy dependencies, and geopolitical priorities being forced into a single foreign policy straitjacket. The real threat to European cohesion is not one veto — it is the institutional reflex to respond to dissent with centralization and to mistake enforced uniformity for genuine unity.

In yet another triumph for Brussels' unelected bureaucrats, Iceland — a nation of 390,000 people that survived the 2008 financial crisis precisely because it retained monetary sovereignty — is being fast-tracked toward Eurostan accession talks. The irony is exquisite: Iceland applied to join the Eurostan in 2009, thought better of it in 2013, and is now being courted again under the familiar pretext of geopolitical necessity. What proponents consistently ignore is that the euro was never an economic project — it was a political one, and a single monetary policy applied to economies as diverse as Germany, Greece, and Spain has never delivered the stability promised. Iceland already enjoys single market access through the EEA without surrendering monetary sovereignty — the optimal arrangement for a small independent economy.

https://www.politico.eu/article/iceland-fast-track-vote-eu-membership/

Joining the Eurostan and adopting the euro would mean trading the very tool that saved Iceland in 2008 for the same rigid monetary straitjacket that condemned southern Europe to a decade of austerity with no escape valve. Small nations with independent currencies can devalue and recover; eurostan members cannot. Sacrificing sovereignty for a political currency would be a profound long-term structural mistake — but in Eurostan, that has never stopped anyone before.

While the world braced itself for The Manipulator-in-Chief's State of the Disunion address, the US Treasury quietly slipped a $69 billion 2-year note auction past the distracted masses — awarded at 3.455%, a mere whisker above the when-issued yield of 3.454%, and the lowest result since August 2022. In other words, while the nation's attention was fixed on the theatre in Washington, the bond market was busy doing what it always does: lending money to a government that will spend it before the speech is over.

The internals were respectable but uninspiring. The bid-to-cover came in at 2.63, below the prior auction's 2.75, suggesting demand was present but hardly enthusiastic. On takedown, indirect bidders — the proxy for foreign demand — absorbed 55.91%, with direct bidders taking 34.28% and dealers left holding a modest 9.81%. In short: foreigners showed up, domestic institutions did their part, and dealers were spared the indignity of eating the leftovers — a considerably more dignified outcome than recent long-end auctions.

In summary, a subpar auction — and perhaps a quiet warning shot. As an increasing number of investors begin to question whether the world's erstwhile risk-free asset still deserves the title, the once-unthinkable is becoming consensus: a crumbling empire, a fractured body politic, and a $36 trillion debt pile do not a risk-free investment make.

In a stirring display of American military might, the USS Gerald R. Ford — the Navy's $13 billion flagship carrier and proud symbol of unmatched global power projection — is currently making its way toward Haifa, having been rerouted from Caribbean operations to the Persian Gulf theatre for the next instalment of America's freedom-spreading franchise. The 4,500+ sailors on board have now spent over 240 days at sea, making this one of the longest deployments in modern naval history, which is impressive until one learns that the ship's most pressing operational challenge is not Iranian hypersonic missiles but a vacuum sewage system averaging one maintenance failure per day across its 650 toilets.

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2026/01/toilets-are-a-dirty-word-on-the-u-s-navys-largest-and-most-expensive-supercarrer-ever/

The Navy, maintaining the dignity befitting the world's greatest military power, has confirmed the sewage situation while assuring the public that blocked toilets have not materially impaired the carrier's ability to project force — a reassurance that will no doubt comfort the sailor who missed his great-grandfather's funeral and the mother contemplating leaving the Navy after a year away from her toddler.

As the empire steams toward its next regime change, one is left to marvel at the poetry of it all: the most expensive warship ever built, crewed by exhausted sailors missing their families, its plumbing held together by daily maintenance calls, sailing toward another banker-approved war in the name of freedom.

At what felt like the 250th annual “State of the (Dis)Union,” Donald Copperfield took the congressional stage for a prime-time pep rally, declaring America “bigger, better, richer and stronger than ever” — inflation falling, enemies trembling, economy roaring louder than ever before (again). Between taunts across the aisle and vows of a new “Golden Age,” he promised retirement matches, stock-trading bans for Congress (a plot twist), tougher immigration rules, and unwavering strength abroad — from Iran to Venezuela to Ukraine. Democrats heckled, Republicans applauded, a Purple Heart was awarded, Olympians waved medals, and somewhere between diplomacy and military buildup, the show went on. Whether it was a reset, a revival, or just Season 250 of the same series remains, as always, a matter of ratings.

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

In a development that would have surprised absolutely nobody who has read Orwell, the United Nations — that venerable unelected institution born from the ashes of the League of Nations, which was itself born from the Treaty of Versailles, which was itself the root cause of the war it was supposed to prevent — has announced its intention to coordinate "global action" against disinformation and hate speech online. The stated objective is, naturally, to create "safer digital spaces," because nothing says safety quite like an unelected international body determining which information citizens are permitted to encounter.

https://video.twimg.com/amplify_video/2025848365011898368/vid/avc1/1920x1080/gFscU2e2e_oZwSDK.mp4?tag=21

The mechanism, outlined in the Global Digital Compact, calls for coordinated oversight across borders, platform accountability, and shared global standards for content moderation — which is a sophisticated way of saying that a select few will decide what is true, what is harmful, and what must be removed, on behalf of the eight billion people who never voted for them.

The historical irony is rich: every era has had its misinformation, its propaganda, its competing narratives — and in every era, the information later proven most dangerous was not the dissent that was suppressed, but the official narrative that was enforced. As the Ministry of Truth would remind us: this is not censorship — it is coordination. Not control — it is safety. And the unelected institution that defines truth on behalf of humanity is, of course, doing so entirely for your benefit.