In a development that would have made William Tell spin in his grave, Switzerland — that beacon of centuries-old neutrality, home to numbered bank accounts and discreet geopolitical fence-sitting — has enthusiastically adopted the EU's 19th sanctions package against Russia, because apparently eighteen rounds of sanctions that demonstrably failed to alter Russian behaviour were simply not enough. The latest measures include a complete ban on Russian LNG imports, restrictions on ruble-pegged cryptocurrencies, expanded export bans on metals, and — in a touch of particular Swiss irony — restrictions on tourism-related services to a country whose oligarchs have been quietly banking in Geneva for decades. Switzerland's foreign ministry, maintaining the deadpan composure for which the Swiss are justly famous, insists the country remains "formally neutral" while simultaneously adopting the foreign policy positions of Brussels with the punctuality of a Swiss train.

https://tass.com/world/2091785

Switzerland — once the world's most reliably neutral safe haven — has quietly traded centuries of strategic ambiguity for a front-row seat in Brussels' sanctions circus. The alpine fortress of financial discretion has spoken: neutrality, it turns out, has an expiry date.

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As the world's geopolitical strategists debated who would fire the first missile in the Middle East — a question apparently requiring more deliberation than expected — the US Treasury quietly slipped $44 billion in 7-year notes past a distracted planet. The result was, by recent standards, almost encouraging: a high yield of 3.790%, down sharply from 4.018% last month and the lowest since November, pricing precisely on the screws with the When Issued — no tail, no drama.

The internals were solid if unspectacular. The bid-to-cover rose to 2.498, above both last month's 2.454 and the recent average of 2.461 — a welcome improvement after recent weakness. Foreign demand softened modestly, with Indirects taking 63.6%, down from January's 66.9% but still above the recent average of 62.6%. Directs came in at 26.91%, precisely in line with the six-auction average, leaving Dealers with a manageable 10.4% — a slight improvement from last month's 10.9%. In summary: a clean, unremarkable auction — which, given recent history, counts as a victory.

Overall, a surprisingly solid auction — and a reminder that Wall Street's institutional memory is short and its faith in the "risk-free" narrative remarkably durable. Whether this represents genuine conviction in US Treasuries or simply the mechanical demand of investors with nowhere else to park capital remains the more uncomfortable question — particularly as the forever bankers' wars continue to expand, fiscal arithmetic continues to deteriorate, and the once unimpeachable risk-free asset quietly accumulates the very risks it was never supposed to carry.

To close out February 2026 in style, The Macro Butler pulled up a chair at the Piggo’s Trading Desk for a conversation that Wall Street’s clean-energy evangelists would rather you didn’t hear.

On the agenda: why coal — that most unfashionable of commodities — may well be the fuel that powers the AI revolution nobody saw coming, and why the “Drill Baby Drill” chorus rings rather hollow when virtually every major producer outside Donald Copperfield needs oil north of $90 to actually make the economics work.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-piggos-trading-desk-f62

Listen to The Month That It Was in February 2026 from The Macro Butler.

You can now also listen to this podcast on YouTube; Rumble & TikTok.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-month-that-it-was-february-2026

In a masterclass of geopolitical schizophrenia that would make even the Ministry of Truth blush, the United States government has simultaneously attempted to destabilise Cuba through a coup, imposed tariffs on any nation selling oil to the island, declared the Cuban government "an unusual and extraordinary threat to national security" — and then, in the same breath, announced a new licensing policy to facilitate the resale of oil from the 52nd great state of Venezuela to Cuba "in solidarity with the Cuban people."

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/us-treasury-to-allow-resale-of-venezuelan-oil-to-cuba-to-ease-islands-fuel-crunch-5991071

The Office of Foreign Assets Control, that tireless guardian of American values, will now helpfully streamline oil flows to the very country its own executive order designated an extraordinary national security threat — provided, naturally, that the Cuban military, intelligence services, and government institutions receive none of it, because nothing says humanitarian solidarity quite like sanctioning a country into a fuel crisis and then offering a carefully licensed trickle of relief to the private sector that survives it.

Viceroy Rubio, delivering the week's most unself-aware commentary, observed that Cuba's economic model "doesn't work" and that the island needs "a different economic model" — a diagnosis delivered by the representative of a government that has spent sixty years ensuring Cuba's economic model has every possible obstacle placed in its path. As the Ministry of Solidarity would remind us: destabilisation is humanitarian. Sanctions are support. And the coup that was never officially attempted was always about freedom.

https://www.axios.com/2026/02/26/us-americans-cuba-boat-shooting-rubio

Washington's Cuba policy in one sentence: starve the island, attempt a coup, then offer a licensing exemption and call it solidarity.

In one of the final data releases rescued from Washington's forever shutdown circus, January PPI arrived fashionably late and brought thoroughly unwelcome news. Headline PPI surged 0.5% MoM — the largest monthly jump since September and well above the 0.3% expected — lifting the annual reading to 2.9%, comfortably above the 2.6% consensus. The real surprise, however, was core PPI, which exploded 0.8% MoM against expectations of 0.3%, pushing the annual rate to 3.6% — the fastest pace since March 2025 and a full 60 basis points above what economists had confidently predicted. Services, accounting for 68% of the headline index, did most of the damage, while food and energy remained mercifully deflationary — small comfort given that the propagandistic inflation-is-under-control narrative just took another quiet battering. In summary: the data was delayed by Washington's circus, and when it finally arrived, it brought exactly the kind of news those in power was hoping the shutdown would help everyone forget.

For equity investors focused on what truly matters — corporate America's ability to pass higher input costs through to end consumers — the January spread between core CPI and core PPI delivered a third consecutive monthly warning signal. The spread is now at its lowest level since March 2021, a period that preceded the great derating of 2022 by precisely twelve months. The message is unambiguous: input cost inflation is accelerating faster than consumer price inflation, meaning margins are being compressed at the corporate level. In an environment where equity valuations remain elevated, a sustained negative CPI-PPI spread is historically one of the most reliable leading indicators of earnings pressure — and the clock, it appears, is ticking.

In a nutshell, January PPI arrived late, came in hot, and delivered a margin compression warning that equity bulls would very much prefer to ignore.

🤵 The Macro Butler Weekly Digest 🤵

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In the latest season of War for Peace, the self-styled Chairman of the Board of Peace dusted off the neocon playbook and, with the confident precision of someone sure he invented it, launched a fresh conflict with Persia on the noble premise that toppling another leader will somehow bring stability to a region renowned for replying to foreign intervention like a hornet nest to a stick.

The neocons — eternal back-seat drivers of liberation who’ve never faced voters or gotten a formal declaration of war since 1941 — apparently talked a candidate elected to end forever wars into starting yet another one.

From Saigon to Baghdad to here, the script stays the same: regime change is the goal, democracy is the gift wrap, and everyone else foots the humanitarian tab.

War is Peace, Bombing is Liberation, and the neocons are just trying to help.