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.

Summoned at dawn by BFM 89.9, The Macro Butler offered a few Confucian reminders on the U.S. job market—and on investing: the man who chases the crowd arrives last, usually at the top. FOMO, as the sages would agree, is not a strategy but a reliable method for buying enthusiasm and selling remorse.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-bfm-899-malaysia-09012026

In a rare flash of clarity since reclaiming the Oval Office, Donald Copperfield pulled the U.S. plug on 66 international organizations—climate clubs, policy talk-shops, and assorted globalist echo chambers—declaring them expensive, inefficient, and oddly uninterested in American sovereignty. Funding is cut, participation ends, and the message is simple: fewer conferences, more country.


https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/01/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-withdraws-the-united-states-from-international-organizations-that-are-contrary-to-the-interests-of-the-united-states/

The American people asked for self-rule, yet were handed binders from unelected councils who speak many languages but answer to none. In the name of “emergency,” sovereignty is borrowed, never returned, and democracy is told to wait in the hallway.
When many officials govern but no one is accountable, disorder is inevitable. If this path continues, the American Republic will not fall in battle, but drown in paperwork—until necessity, as always, forces renewal.

While the usual data cheerleaders will celebrate a lower unemployment rate, December’s nonfarm payrolls quietly tell a different story: the U.S. job market isn’t expanding—it’s napping. Payrolls rose a modest 50,000, well below expectations (which are traditionally optimistic works of fiction), and prior months were revised lower. Even during the holiday shopping frenzy, retail managed to shed 25,000 jobs, while hiring remained confined to leisure, hospitality, and healthcare—the economic equivalent of comfort food. For all of 2025, job creation limped in at just 584,000, the weakest year outside the Covid era. Layoffs are scarce, but so is ambition.

Unemployment may have graciously dipped to 4.4%, but now sitting comfortably above its two-year average, it’s yet another reminder that this much-celebrated “boom” is starting to wheeze like a late-cycle marathon runner—still upright, but clearly past its victory lap.

In a nutshell, December payrolls confirm that beneath the headline cheer, the U.S. job market isn’t booming at all—it’s a late-cycle economy quietly dozing off ahead of an election year.

U.S. consumer sentiment perked up slightly—apparently buoyed by holiday cheer and fading tariff fears—with the Michigan index inching up to 54, just enough to let economists declare victory. Inflation expectations, however, remain stubbornly festive at 4.2% for the year ahead and even higher over the long run, while worries about jobs and wages refuse to take the hint. Nearly two-thirds of consumers still expect unemployment to rise, especially the well-educated and well-paid, suggesting anxiety trickles down from the top. Spending holds up, confidence limps along just above record lows, and the Fed—having already cut rates three times—now watches patiently as inflation stays above target and optimism remains more seasonal than structural.

In a nutshell, holiday cheer nudged consumer sentiment higher, but with inflation expectations stuck high and job worries spreading, optimism looks more seasonal than structural.