The first edition of the year has been reduced to the bare essentials in ‘The Week That Was.’ Fear not: the full-strength, long-form of The Macro Butler weekly newsletter—once again generously stuffed with charts, cycles, and a healthy dose of sarcasm—returns next week. Until then, may your your resolutions be long-lived, and your portfolio spared any early-January indigestion.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-week-that-it-was-as-of-january

In 2025, BYD quietly did the unthinkable: it beat Tesla at the whole selling cars business, becoming the world’s top EV maker while Tesla logged a second straight year of falling deliveries. The Chinese giant won on price and scale, especially in Europe, while Tesla investors were gently reminded that the company is now valued less as an automaker and more as a promise—AI, robots, autonomy, and a future where cars may be optional. Energy storage profits helped soften the blow, and Elon Musk responded in classic form by pivoting toward robotaxis and “next big things.”

In short, BYD builds cars; Tesla builds narratives—and the market is still deciding which matters more.

https://www.tiktok.com/@the.macro.butler/video/7591054699726507285

While the second day of the new year will be remembered as the moment the Warmonger-in-Chief finally pulled the trigger on Venezuela, markets behaved as if the memo had been circulated well in advance.

Energy stocks surged on the very first trading day, confirming that—surprise, surprise—Saturday morning’s “unexpected” war was already fully penciled into the price action.


https://www.barchart.com/stocks/sectors/rankings?timeFrame=today

In the rhythm of cycles, those who listen to noise are often surprised, while those who observe balance are not.
Though absent from the forecasts of Wall Street’s finest, this trend is expected to define the fiery ride of the Fire Horse in 2026, with the Energy sector leading the S&P 500.

Read more by subscribing here:
https://themacrobutler.com/monthly-meditation/

Markets don’t react to headlines. They react to positioning.
While the crowd debated morality and politics, readers of The Macro Butler Monthly Meditation were already positioned for the ripple effects of the U.S. strike on Venezuela:
⚡️ Energy volatility
💰 Commodities repricing
🌍 Capital rotating—fast
This isn’t about cheering conflicts.
It’s about understanding second-order effects before they hit the tape.

https://youtube.com/shorts/3PFrm-KZ8_I?feature=share


If you prefer clarity over noise, cycles over narratives, and preparation over panic—
👉 Visit TheMacroButler.com
Think ahead. Act early. Stay solvent.

Everyone talks fundamentals.
Insiders read the chart.

Here’s a sketch of what subscribers to The Macro Butler Financial Academy get every week in the Insider Weekly 👇

📉 Key technical levels that actually matter
📊 Trend, momentum & positioning—no indicator soup
⏱️ What changed this week… and what didn’t
🧠 Clean setups, disciplined risk, zero hype

https://www.tiktok.com/@the.macro.butler/video/7591351042227309842

No memes. No FOMO. No “to-the-moon.”
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Charts don’t lie. Narratives do.

With Venezuela’s Bolivarian strongman now cooling his heels in NYC’s finest concrete resort, the obvious question is: where did all the money go? Billions in oil, gold, and state assets apparently didn’t vanish—they allegedly shape-shifted into Bitcoin, with estimates floating as high as $60 billion, enough to rival MicroStrategy and make El Salvador look like it forgot its wallet. If true, it seems Venezuelan gold didn’t just leave the country—it went straight to the blockchain.

https://www.thelibertybeacon.com/the-60-billion-question-is-venezuela-secretly-a-bitcoin-superpower/

In short: Venezuelan gold was allegedly turned into crypto via Turkey and the UAE, laundered through mixers, and locked away in cold wallets—because nothing says “national development” like blockchain hide-and-seek.

The gold flowed from the Orinoco Mining Arc through state miners, onto planes, into refineries, and finally into crypto wallets. High-tech laundering, old-school couriers. Same story as always—just with better software and worse punchlines.

And the crypto circus didn’t stop at gold.

Enter PDVSA-Cripto: the sequel nobody asked for. Saab’s partners allegedly helped reroute billions in oil revenues using Tether, turning Venezuela’s oil trade into a stablecoin-only side hustle. Between 2020 and 2022, oil cargos increasingly settled in USDT via OTC brokers and private wallets—because why use a national oil company when you can use a crypto wallet?
The result: ships sailed away with $20+ billion worth of oil, while PDVSA got the privilege of waiting by the phone. By December 2025, roughly 80% of Venezuela’s oil revenue was reportedly collected in USDT. Tether froze 41 wallets with $119 million—which sounds impressive until you realize it’s likely just the loose change that was easy enough to spot.

Same story, new tech: oil out, money gone, blockchain blamed for being “too transparent.”

https://www.ainvest.com/news/blockade-spur-venezuela-shift-80-oil-revenue-usdt-2512/?ref=whalehunting.projectbrazen.com

And so we arrive at the predictable finale.

With Maduro cooling his heels in Manhattan, the real mystery isn’t whether the regime survives—it’s whether its fortune ever re-enters the daylight, or simply dissolves into the blockchain, accessible only to those who still remember the passwords. The old tricks—shell companies, tankers, friendly banks—haven’t disappeared. They’ve just been upgraded with stablecoins, OTC brokers, private wallets, and partners who suddenly can’t be found.

Once again, Bitcoin and its crypto cousins prove their timeless utility: not for wealth preservation; payments, productivity, or freedom speeches—but as the most efficient escape hatch ever invented for money trying to slip quietly out of the official grid.
Same laundering, new technology. Different decade, identical outcome.

Beyond supplying oil to China, Chávez’s and Maduro’s Venezuela also flirted heavily with Moscow—where China brought checkbooks, Russia brought missiles. By late 2025, Russian lawmakers were openly musing about sending Kalibr and Oreshnik missiles to Caracas, a not-so-subtle reply to U.S. naval muscle in the Caribbean and a reminder that geography cuts both ways. The partnership was bluntly geopolitical: Venezuela bought over $4 billion in Russian weapons, hosted exercises and bomber flyovers, and became Moscow’s symbolic outpost in Washington’s backyard. On energy, Russia didn’t need the oil but still helped—via Rosneft loans, equity stakes, and creative sanction-dodging shipping schemes—proving that when ideology meets opportunity, pragmatism always gets the last word.

https://www.kyivpost.com/post/63593

The Moscow–Caracas trade balance jumped 64% in 2024, underscoring sustained engagement despite Venezuela’s economic decay, as Russia continued to treat the country both as a commercial opportunity and a strategic geopolitical outpost.

The reality of Venezuela is neither a simple oil grab nor just a drugs story. Cutting China’s energy access may come later, but the primary move looks strategic: blocking Russia from turning Venezuela into a 1962-style Cuba redux. Unsurprisingly, the Manipulator-in-Chief has installed a hardline Russia hawk—widely seen as a ‘Government Sachs alumnus’—as the new self-styled “Viceroy of Venezuela,” reminding us this chessboard runs far deeper than the headlines suggest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMVxYx80v1k

While most people were debating afternoon tea on the first Sunday of the year, The Macro Butler was on Asharq Bloomberg TV, unpacking the latest twists in global oil markets—and revealing what Operation Absolute Resolve really means for oil and gold investors

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-asharq-bloomberg-tv-a0d

🎬 Markets, oil, gold… and the stories Wall Street won’t tell you.

While most people are still stuck on headlines, this video breaks down what’s really behind Venezuela—and why macro matters more than ever. No noise, no fairy tales, just cycles, capital flows, and consequences.

https://youtu.be/Yw-KoGn2Yx0

👉 Watch closely.
👉 Think independently.
👉 Then visit themacrobutler.com to go deeper.

As the Don-Roe doctrine continues its global tour of “creative disruption,” U.S. manufacturing delivered a reminder that reality rarely follows headlines. The ISM Manufacturing slipped to 47.9 in December—still in contraction, but hardly the collapse the narrative merchants were selling. Beneath the surface, orders improved, employment ticked up, backlogs shrank more slowly, and customer inventories fell fast enough to quietly whisper “restocking ahead.” Supplier delays nudged the index higher, though this likely says more about trade policy friction than surging demand, while prices stayed flat—suggesting tariff panic may be past its peak.

Bottom line: manufacturing isn’t booming, but it’s also refusing to roll over on cue, stubbornly grinding forward while policymakers argue and pundits rehearse the same old recession monologues.

Stablecoins aren’t “stable,” they’re strategic weapons in the global money game. 💣💸

The Macro Butler just dropped a new Academy lesson digging into the real world of Stablecoins—who controls them, how they’re used, and why they matter far more than crypto hype would have you believe.

https://www.tiktok.com/@the.macro.butler/video/7592074050655112469

If you want to understand where money is really moving (and who’s pulling the strings), this one’s for you.
👉 Learn more at themacrobutler.com

In what can only be described as Venezuela’s opening ceremony into colonial adulthood, Donald Copperfield—apparently unconvinced that Viceroy Rubio can be trusted with the keys—announced that the United States, with Chevron as its trusted chaperone, will graciously sell 30 to 50 million barrels of Venezuela’s precious black gold on the open market. The proceeds, we are told, will help finance the reconstruction of America’s newest geopolitical accessory: the soon-to-be 52nd state.

At a generous market price of roughly $55 per barrel, the sale would raise between $1.65 and $2.75 billion—a sum impressive enough for a press release, yet laughably insufficient to rebuild an economy with an estimated GDP of $82.77 billion, let alone recover the roughly $60 billion the Bolivarian regime reportedly smuggled out over the years via gold sales. But fear not: the money did not disappear. It merely evolved. According to circulating estimates, those billions in oil, gold, and state assets may have shape-shifted into Bitcoin—up to $60 billion worth—enough to rival MicroStrategy’s balance sheet and make El Salvador look like it left its wallet at home. If true, Venezuelan gold didn’t flee the country; it simply upgraded to the blockchain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw-KoGn2Yx0