Under the latest “Don-Roe” gunboat remix, Washington decided that stirring chaos is a feature, not a bug: Venezuela here, Greenland there, and now a Russian-flagged tanker seized after a two-week chase—because nothing says “de-escalation” like poking a nuclear power. Moscow re-flagged, renamed, and officially blessed the ship as a giant “hands off” sign; the neocons read it as a dare. Sanctions were cited, law was waved, allies nodded—and once again, other people’s children get to audition for history while the architects cheer from a safe distance.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-seizing-venezuela-linked-oil-tanker-after-weeks-long-pursuit-2026-01-07/

Confucius warned that the loudest barking often hides the weakest bite—and today’s geopolitics seems determined to prove him right. Putin has spent years growling about nuclear lines in the sand, assuming Europe would flinch, only to discover that the West mistakes noise for restraint. Now his silence over Venezuela and the seized tanker speaks louder than any missile speech: when the dog stops barking, the village wonders whether it’s asleep—or already surrounded. British officials call tanker seizures “self-defense,” Neocons call it strategy, and Confucius would likely sigh and note that when everyone shouts about virtue and security, wisdom has already left the room.

Viceroy Rubio now rattles sabers at Cuba and flirts with buying Greenland at gunpoint, while Stephen Miller sketches a tidy imperial map where everyone gets a “sphere” and America keeps the hemisphere. Miller wants managed empires; Rubio wants confrontation—he’s been reliably hawkish on Russia, China, Iran, and anyone else within rhetorical range. Appointing Rubio as Secretary of State was less strategy than an olive branch to the Neocons, who promptly took the whole tree and now steer NATO. The result? A shiny new precedent: if Washington can muscle its way around Venezuela, Moscow can claim the same logic elsewhere. Pandora’s box is open—turns out chaos, once unleashed, doesn’t care who thought they were the magician.

As usual, the warmongering Malthusians are back in charge, determined to turn the Orinoco Basin into another stepping stone toward World War III, with China, North Korea, and Iran watching from the wings. This has nothing to do with oil, drugs, or “regime change”; it is the fusion of Rubio’s neocon crusade with Miller’s spheres-of-influence fantasy—a play for global dominance dressed up as moral necessity. The Wolfowitz Doctrine still serves as scripture: America equals “democracy,” everyone else equals “dictator,” and therefore anything is justified. The media obliges, Putin remains the cartoon villain, and inconvenient facts are quietly buried.

At the same time, Berlin declares responsibility for Ukraine’s security, London and Paris talk openly about deploying troops after a “ceasefire,” and the subtext is hard to miss: this looks less like de-escalation than a carefully staged tripwire. From Moscow’s perspective, such moves can easily be read as an invitation to freeze the conflict only long enough for NATO-aligned forces to enter Ukraine, after which any incident could be framed as a Russian violation and used to justify a far wider war. These announcements appear designed to keep the conflict alive under a different legal wrapper, not to end it.


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/06/uk-france-ready-to-deploy-troops-to-ukraine-after-ceasefire

We are told we live in a democracy, yet we never vote on war—only on the politicians who outsource it to neocons, media cheerleaders, and think-tank generals. They preached “peace” while standing on foreign stages urging regime change, and since then there has been none. The public supplies the bodies, the press supplies the applause, and the architects wash their hands—counting clicks, contracts, and careers—while the pawns bleed on the board.

The Macro Butler sat down with Umar Tasleem on Türkiye’s Diplomacy (A-News) to dissect the “Don-Roe Doctrine” and its revival of good old-fashioned gunboat diplomacy—an inspired policy choice that promptly opened a Pandora’s Box of geopolitical chaos no one bothered to read the warning label on.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-turkiyes-diplomacy

Taking a brief pause from playing ‘Stratego with gunboats’, Donald Copperfield crowned himself Central Banker-in-Chief, unveiling a home-grown version of QE—via his favorite social media platform, now apparently the official Federal Register. In a post, he announced the purchase of $200 billion in mortgage bonds, promising—just in time for the midterms—to push mortgage rates down, payments down, and housing magically “more affordable.” The funding logic? Not selling Fannie and Freddie last time left them sitting on $200 billion in cash, so naturally, it was destiny.

As of end-2025, the U.S. agency MBS market alone weighs in at about $9.1 trillion—a modest pile of mortgage paper issued by Fannie, Freddie, and Ginnie that just happens to underpin global housing finance. Against this backdrop, the White House’s $200 billion bond-buying announcement is less “game-changer” and more eyedropper in the ocean. In a market measured in trillions, this is financial theatre: symbolically busy, mathematically irrelevant, and highly unlikely to bend long-dated yields or overpower the gravitational pull of the ‘Trump Stagflation’.



https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/mortgaged-backed-securities-market?utm_source=chatgpt.com

As the sages quietly rearrange the pieces on the board, China has discovered a small and ironic truth: inflation has returned, but only to the dinner table. December CPI rose to 0.8%, driven almost entirely by food—vegetables up double digits—while the broader economy remains trapped in deflation, with producer prices falling for a 39th straight month and full-year inflation flat at zero. Holiday spending briefly stirred consumption, jewellery prices surged with gold, and officials praised “anti-involution” efforts, even as housing slumps, price wars, and excess capacity persist.

A look at the spread between core CPI and PPI—a useful gauge of corporate profitability—shows a slight decline from November, but it remains firmly positive, extending a trend that has been in place since August 2022. This suggests that, even amid intense competition and price pressure, companies that can truly meet customer demand are still able to protect margins. In contrast to the Western tendency to socialize losses and preserve weak players, China has tolerated creative destruction, allowing inefficient firms to fail while stronger ones consolidate market share. The result is a corporate landscape where national champions are forged through competition, not protection, and emerge structurally better positioned to compete on the global stage.

Thus the lesson is clear: when demand is weak and stimulus timid, prices do not rise by policy, but by weather, weddings, and the cost of cabbage.