The Ministry of Strategic Diplomacy keeps following its official four-phase negotiation methodology, rendered as a circular flowchart for the benefit of allies, adversaries, and confused bond traders alike: Phase One, "We're going to bomb their power plants"; Phase Two, "They called us begging for a deal"; Phase Three, "They're giving us everything we want"; and Phase Four, "They're scum, you can't negotiate with these people" — after which the cycle returns seamlessly to bombing power plants, having resolved precisely nothing while consuming a strategic petroleum reserve, closing two shipping chokepoints, and whatever credibility remained.

The genius of the diagram is its honesty: there is no exit node, no "peace achieved," no "conflict resolved" — merely an eternal loop in which each phase is announced with total conviction via Truth Social, believed by markets for approximately 48 hours, and then contradicted by the next phase with equal conviction.

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117023461141824050

The "You are here" arrow, pointing at Phase Two, is the only fixed coordinate in an otherwise infinite rotation — a reminder that whichever soothing headline is currently calming the oil market, the return to Phase One is never more than one social media post away. The Iran ceasefire completed this cycle four times in five weeks.

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-canceled-iran-attack-war-b3026149.html

The negotiation cycle has no destination because the process is the destination — bomb, deal, betrayal, repeat, and bill the taxpayer for each rotation.

🚨 WANT TO UNDERSTAND WHERE WE ARE IN THE CYCLE? 🚨

Most investors react to the news.
The best investors understand the cycle.
📈 Every boom...
📉 Every bust...
💰 Every opportunity...
...follows a pattern.
The question isn't what happens next—it's where we are today and why it has always been all about cycles...

🎯 Learn how to understand the economic cycle by joining The Macro Butler's Financial Academy.

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

July's US manufacturing data offered investors the customary choose-your-own-adventure: the ISM survey surged to 55.6 — its strongest since May 2022 — with inflation lower, orders higher, and employment beating expectations, while S&P Global's competing PMI flatlined at 53.9 near three-month lows, meaning the same economy is simultaneously booming and stalling depending entirely on which analyst you prefer to believe. Beneath the survey there are some warning signs about the future growth trajectory — namely production growth slowing for a third month, supply chain delays intensifying to their sharpest deterioration in four years, exports falling, customers pushing back on high prices, and the Q2 precautionary stockpiling binge fading exactly as predicted. Input costs remained elevated thanks to high energy prices, producers kept raising factory gate prices to protect margins, and business optimism about growth slipped to its lowest since last October — a constellation of stagflationary signals.

In a nutshell, strip away the rosy ISM headline and the truth is unmistakable: America's factories aren't booming — they're screaming stagflation in broad daylight.

What actually makes a bull market real — and why almost everything the financial media calls one isn’t. 🐂

The Macro Butler is featured again in Hubbis with a piece that dismantles one of the market’s most abused words.

A genuine bull market, The Macro Butler argues, is not a reflexive 20%-off-the-lows bounce dressed up as a trend — it is a sustained, structural advance of higher highs and higher lows that must pass two unforgiving tests: it has to rise against every major currency simultaneously, and it has to outperform every rival asset class on the ratio charts. Strength in a single depreciating currency isn’t a bull market — it’s a currency collapse in disguise.

Read the full piece on Hubbis — and learn to tell a real bull from a dead-cat bounce before the crowd does. 👇
https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/hubbis-the-real-bull-what-defines

🚨 STOP LISTENING TO CENTRAL BANKERS. START WATCHING THE CYCLE. 🚨

The biggest fortunes aren't made by predicting the next Fed meeting...
They're made by understanding where we are in the economic cycle.

📈 Every boom has a peak.
📉 Every crisis creates opportunity.

Financial freedom belongs to those who understand the cycle—not those hanging on every central banker speech.

🎯 Learn the cycles to earn with The Macro Butler Academy.
https://themacrobutler.com/financial-academy/

The Ministry of Public Health Innovation has identified its next revenue opportunity: Moderna is back at the public trough with an experimental mRNA vaccine targeting the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, with Health Canada authorising a Phase 1 trial in about 80 adults across three sites — in a country that has never recorded a single Ebola case and whose own government admits the risk to the general population is low, because healthy Canadians make excellent unpaid human data for a product destined for a third-world African market. The financial architecture is a masterpiece of privatised reward and socialised risk: the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations has pledged up to $50 million for preclinical research, Phase 1 testing, and manufacturing doses before the trial even concludes — meaning if the product fails, outside funding absorbs the loss, and if it succeeds, Moderna keeps a proprietary vaccine.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/ebola-vaccine-trial-health-canada-moderna-9.7295616

When a company with no market for its product finds a disease with no cases in the country testing it, the vaccine was never the mission — the recurring government contract was.

The Ministry of Public Health has issued its final clarification on the pandemic accountability question: the citizens who were locked down, censored, threatened with unemployment, separated from dying relatives, and treated as criminals for asking questions are now respectfully informed that the officials who imposed all of it are entitled to pardons, lawyers, and constitutional protections — the very protections those officials showed no interest in extending to anyone else when ordinary citizens needed them. The doctrine of "trust the science," which functioned throughout the pandemic as a political loyalty oath enforced by censorship and mandate, has now been quietly retired and replaced with its inverse: the right to remain silent, invoked 111 times under oath by the same man who once insisted that questioning him was questioning science itself.

When the people who criminalized questions suddenly rediscover the right to remain silent, "trust the science" reveals what it always was — a one-way loyalty oath that only ever applied to you.

💰 WANT TO FILL YOUR POND OF MONEY? STOP CHASING EVERY PUDDLE. 🚨

The wealthiest investors don't try to catch every opportunity...

They go where the money is already flowing.

📈 Follow the flows
🌊 Follow the capital.
💵 Follow the cycle.

Success isn't about working harder—it's about fishing in the right pond.

🎯 Watch to learn how following the flow of money can transform the way you invest with The Macro Butler Financial Academy

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

July's services data delivered the market's favourite genre of good news: the kind that dissolves the moment you read the second paragraph. S&P Global's Services PMI leapt to 54.6 — its highest since October 2025 and biggest monthly jump since May 2024 — with business confidence surging, new work hitting a 19-month high, and private sector employment finally rising for the first time since April, prompting the customary declaration that the economy is accelerating into Q3. Then the fine print arrives to spoil the party like a chaperone at a school dance: the improvement "partly reflected temporary factors," with the biggest demand surge coming from consumer-facing services thanks to — wait for it — the FIFA World Cup and US Independence Day celebrations, meaning America's economic renaissance was substantially powered by soccer fans and hot dogs.

The Ministry of Shared Sacrifice has published its latest polling data, which reveals a remarkable pattern of generational altruism: support for mandatory military service reached 62% in France, 53% in Germany, and 51% in Poland — but when the German figures are disaggregated by age, net opposition among those aged 18 to 29 hit 46%, while net support among respondents over 70 stood at 49%, confirming that the demographic most enthusiastic about war is precisely the one guaranteed never to fight it. The elegance of the arrangement is total: those safely beyond military age will never receive the draft notice, surrender their careers, or be ordered into a trench — they will watch the war on television while congratulating themselves for supporting "national service" as though clicking "yes" in a poll were an act of personal courage.

https://agerpres.ro/english/2025/07/04/the-return-of-conscription-eu-countries-debate-bringing-back-military-service-enr--1465742

The same political establishment that dismantled Europe's industrial base, destroyed affordable energy, accumulated mountains of sovereign debt, and refused every opportunity for serious diplomacy now demands that a generation with no voice in those decisions be prepared to die defending the order that bequeathed it unaffordable housing, stagnant wages, and crushing taxation. The children of the connected will find deferments; the working class will supply the bodies, as always.

The Treasury's Quarterly Refunding once again delivered the market's favourite kind of news — no news at all — retaining auction sizes well into 2027 with the same market-soothing "for at least the next several quarters" language it has recycled faithfully since Janet Yellen's Activist Treasury Issuance days, because nothing calms a bond market quite like a Treasury Secretary pretending nothing is happening. What is actually happening, however, is that Scrooge Bessent is deepening the government's reliance on short-term T-bills in a strategy dealers have affectionately dubbed "T-bill and chill" — the fiscal equivalent of paying your mortgage with a series of increasingly frantic payday loans and calling it a liquidity strategy.

The bill-to-debt ratio is now historically high, borrowing needs swelled to $739 billion for the quarter, and total US debt hits $40 trillion in two weeks — yet the Treasury declines to increase longer-dated coupon issuance because 10-year yields just hit their highest since Bessent took office, and issuing more long bonds at those yields would be embarrassing. Some strategists link the reluctance to the looming November midterms, because engineering a market melt-up until the election is considerably more urgent than fiscal sustainability.

"T-bill and chill" works beautifully right up until the day it doesn't — at which point the Treasury discovers that refinancing $40 trillion every twelve months is less a strategy and more a treadmill set to maximum speed.