Treasury Scrooge Bessent, maintaining the deadpan composure of a man explaining why water is dry, assured markets that the waiver "will not provide significant financial benefit to the Russian government" as it only covers oil "already stranded at sea" — which is a sophisticated way of describing the hundreds of millions of barrels of embargoed Russian crude floating near Indian waters, waiting for precisely this moment. Vitol, that most discreet of commodity trading houses, is presumably already warming up its phones. The operational logic is breathtaking in its circularity: Washington bombs Iran to cut off Gulf oil supply, creating a global energy crisis, then waives Russian oil sanctions to prevent India — the second most Gulf-dependent nation on earth after China — from running dry, while simultaneously insisting the 30-day timeline reflects strategic intent rather than the administration's own internal estimate of how long Operation Epic Fury will last before the next U-turn.

In a nutshell, Washington bombed Iran to strangle oil supply, then issued a Russian oil waiver to India — because nothing says maximum pressure like sanctioning your allies into crisis and quietly reversing course before breakfast.

In a masterpiece of Machiavellian propaganda, ‘Sata- Nyahu’ 's advisors have attributed the massacre of 130 girls in southern Iran to a misfire — because in information warfare, the first story told is the one remembered, regardless of its relationship to truth.

The Prince who controls the narrative controls the battlefield, and the battlefield of perception is always more consequential than the one measured in territory. Yet Sata- Nyahu and the Warmonger In Chief, drunk on the early communiqués of Operation Epic Fury, are repeating the oldest imperial miscalculation in the history of Persia: mistaking destruction for victory. As Machiavelli observed, the prince who relies on cruelty alone has not secured his position — he has merely postponed his reckoning. Nobody wins a holy war, prayers do not produce regime change, and the empire that bombs a mountain fortress while its bond market hemorrhages and its domestic approval collapses has not achieved Epic Fury — it has achieved Epic Miscalculation.

In a jobs report that arrived with the cheerfulness of a tax audit, the US economy managed to destroy 92,000 jobs in February — the worst monthly performance since last August — just in time for Washington to blame the snow. And blame the snow they will, with the enthusiasm of politicians who have never met a weather event they couldn't repurpose as economic cover. The inconvenient detail, naturally, is that the sectors doing most of the destroying — Leisure, Education, and Healthcare — are not traditionally known for their sensitivity to cold fronts. These are indoor industries, staffed by people who work in buildings with heating, and their simultaneous deterioration suggests that something rather more structural than a February blizzard is quietly undermining the US labour market.

Labour force participation rate fell to 62%, the lowest since November 2021 and the unemployment rate well it ticked higher to 4.4%, back to the December 2025 level and remaining above the 2-year average since October 2023. When the unemployment rate stays above its 2-year average and the S&P 500 to oil ratio accelerate its collapse which started since December 2025, the omen for an economic bust are seldom auspicious with wars and scarcity which will follow leading to what while be remembered as the ‘Trump Tremendous Stagflation’

In a nutshell, February destroyed 92,000 jobs, Washington blamed the snow, and the conditions for the Trump Tremendous Stagflation are ripening with the inevitability of a prophecy nobody wanted to read.

In a retail sales report so thoroughly overtaken by events that it arrives with the relevance of last week's weather forecast during a hurricane, January sales declined 0.2% — a figure that was delayed twice by Washington's shutdown circus, compiled before Operation Epic Fury closed the Strait of Hormuz, and is now being presented to investors as actionable intelligence. Washington will, of course, blame the weather — and to be fair, an Arctic blast that cancelled more flights than the pandemic and left a million homes without power does tend to discourage discretionary spending. Yet beneath the meteorological excuses, the structural picture is unchanged: wealthier households continue to spend, middle- and lower-income consumers are growing increasingly cautious, restaurants and bars declined, and the K-shaped economy hums along with its customary indifference to official reassurances.

The control group — that GDP-relevant measure that excludes everything inconvenient — managed a 0.3% increase, which will be cited as evidence of resilience by the same analysts who will shortly be revising their consumer outlook to account for $120 oil, supply chain disruptions, and the inflationary consequences of a holy war that was not included in any January retail survey.

When adjusted for the officially curated CP-Lie, the picture darkens considerably — real retail sales declined by more than 0.5% MoM in January, retracing back to September 2025 levels. Declining retail sales when adjusted for inflation have historically signalled not a temporary weather-related blip but a genuine cooling in US consumption growth. In other words, American consumers are not spending less because of the snow — they are spending less because, in real terms, they have less to spend and will soon have even less to spend after they have filled their fridge and tank.

In a nutshell, January retail sales arrived already obsolete, and confirmed what the CP-Lie has been hiding all along — the American consumer is not weathering the storm, they are the storm.

In a development that somewhat undermines the triumphant "Mission Accomplished" energy of Operation Epic Fury's opening hours, The Warmonger in Chief has quietly convened a meeting with America's manufacturers of death to discuss ramping up weapons production — because nothing signals a swift, decisive victory quite like an emergency production planning session in week one. The empire that was supposedly winning big and winning fast has apparently discovered, with the geographical awareness of someone who skipped the chapter on Persian mountain fortresses, that a holy war is not resolved by a weekend of airstrikes and a strongly worded Truth Social post. Ammunition is depleting, production lines need scaling, and the defence contractors — those tireless servants of peace — are being summoned to ensure the killing can continue at industrial scale.

As history has repeatedly and expensively demonstrated, the only guaranteed winners in a holy war are the people selling the weapons, and they, at least, are having an excellent quarter.

It took precisely one day for BlackRock to follow Blue Owl's lead and join the private credit gating parade, announcing that its $26 billion HPS Corporate Lending Fund — one of the largest non-traded BDCs in existence — would cap redemptions at 5% after investors requested 9.3% of their shares back. In other words, clients asked for $1.2 billion and will receive approximately $620 million, with the remainder politely retained in the name of "foundational liquidity management" — which is what sophisticated asset managers call a gate when they would prefer not to use the word gate. BlackRock helpfully explained that without this feature, there would be a "structural mismatch between investor capital and the expected duration of private credit loans" — a structural mismatch that was, one assumes, fully disclosed in the marketing materials that attracted $26 billion in the first place.

As the private credit cockroaches continue to emerge one quarterly filing at a time, the $1.8 trillion industry's foundational promise — that illiquid assets packaged in semi-liquid vehicles are perfectly fine during times of stress — is being tested with the thoroughness that only a redemption wave can provide.

🤵 The Macro Butler Weekly Digest 🤵

🌐 When holy wars lead empires to the economic altar, prosperity favours the calm mind over the loud narrative. 🌐

Read more here: https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/when-holy-wars-lead-empires-to-the

In a diplomatic masterstroke worthy of the Ministry of Peace's finest traditions, the Chairman of the Board of Peace — that tireless champion of bombing for democracy — has followed the well-worn imperial playbook to its logical conclusion, demanding total surrender from Iran. The timing is, as always, impeccable: delivered precisely as reports emerge that the Empire and its ally are burning through ammunition at a pace that suggests Operation Epic Fury was planned with the same logistical foresight as the six-week Iraq campaign of 2003. Demanding unconditional surrender from a mountain fortress of 90 million people, whose security forces remain intact, whose IRGC controls the hard power, and whose geography has repelled every empire that has attempted the same manoeuvre for the past two millennia, is not a negotiating position — it is a presidential tweet.

As Confucius might observe: "The empire that demands unconditional surrender has studied history long enough to repeat it." Roosevelt demanded Germany's unconditional surrender on January 24, 1943 — and the actual surrender came on May 8, 1945, two years and more than two million soldiers later. The script, it appears, has not been updated in eighty years: demand total capitulation, underestimate the resolve of the adversary, absorb the casualties, and eventually arrive at the outcome that a negotiated settlement might have delivered at a fraction of the cost in blood and treasure. It never fails — Democrat or Republican in the Situation Room of the White House — when faced with a determined adversary, the American imperial reflex defaults to the same playbook, the same rhetoric, and ultimately the same arithmetic. The only variable that changes is the body count.

https://fdr.blogs.archives.gov/2017/01/10/the-casablanca-conference-unconditional-surrender/

As the Ministry of Democratic Liberation would remind us: this is not an ultimatum issued from a position of diminishing ammunition — it is simply the natural conclusion of a peace process conducted entirely through airstrikes.

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