While Japan’s bond market quietly catches fire, the Bank of Japan struck its best this-is-fine pose—holding rates at 0.75% (a 30-year high) while upgrading inflation forecasts and hinting that the next hike may arrive sooner than summer. One lone hawk dissented, everyone else waited on elections and politics. Add a tax-cut pledge from Tokyo’s political class and you get the full BOJ routine: do nothing today, talk tough about tomorrow, and hope the bond market behaves in the meantime.

The BOJ added a few more hawkish winks to ‘its nothing-to-see-here act’, softening its risk assessment, trimming cautionary language, and quietly floating the idea that an April rate hike is very much on the table. Governor Ueda promised to be “nimble” in smoothing bond-market volatility—right after a long-bond meltdown sent yields to multi-decade highs—while reminding everyone that April price hikes by Japanese firms will be carefully watched.

In short, in the country of the rising sun, inflation forecasts are up, confidence is rising, the yen is sinking—and the BOJ is still hoping words will do the heavy lifting.

Welcome to the great U.S. “buyer’s market,” where investors quietly snapped up about one in three single-family homes in Q2 2025 and Washington is now arguing over the dictionary definition of “institutional investor.” The Interventionist-in-Chief wants to ban them to appease an angry electorate priced out of the American Dream—but blaming Wall Street for housing unaffordability is easier than admitting policy vaporized purchasing power, jacked up living costs, and now offers… more regulation as the cure. In short, when government breaks affordability, it sues the mirror.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/01/stopping-wall-street-from-competing-with-main-street-homebuyers/

Institutional investors didn’t wake up one morning twirling their mustaches and plotting the death of homeownership—they simply followed the incentives policymakers left lying around. The real villains are supply bottlenecks, soaring building and ownership costs, and mortgage rates that have turned homeowners into hostages, leaving a market with 37% more sellers than buyers.

Slapping a fuzzy ban on “institutional investors” won’t fix affordability—it’ll just kneecap small landlords and builders, solve nothing, and let policymakers declare victory before lunch.

https://t.me/TheMacroButlerSubstack/1286

Another reassuring reminder that everything is absolutely fine—at least if you’re watching from a White House cocktail party. U.S. business activity limped into the new year with a microscopic improvement, as the S&P Global January composite index edged up a heroic 0.1 point to 52.8, still signalling expansion but with all the enthusiasm of a Monday morning. New business remains sluggish, hiring is barely breathing, and firms are reluctant to add staff amid weak demand, high costs, and chronic uncertainty. Manufacturing showed a faint pulse, services moved at their slowest pace since spring, and while orders improved, they remain uninspiring. Inflation pressures eased just enough to change nothing, keeping the Fed comfortably on hold. Optimism ticked up among manufacturers, while service firms stayed cautious—proof that the economy is growing, just not enough for anyone outside the plutocracy to notice.

In a nutshell, the U.S. economy is technically expanding, but only in the way a patient “improves” by blinking—too weak to hire, too sticky on inflation to cut rates, and just strong enough to keep policymakers congratulating themselves.

To end a week that felt like a geopolitical marathon run in flip-flops, U.S. consumer sentiment staged a modest comeback, climbing to a five-month high in January as Americans collectively decided things are not getting worse fast enough to panic today. The University of Michigan’s index jumped to 56.4, its biggest monthly gain since June, with optimism spreading across incomes, ages, education levels, and political tribes—suggesting hope is once again bipartisan.

Tariffs, once a favorite dinner-table anxiety, have quietly exited the chat for five straight months, while inflation expectations cooled just enough to let consumers breathe without actually relaxing. That said, sentiment remains more than 20% below last year’s level, because high prices, fragile purchasing power, and whispers of labor-market softening still loom in the background like unpaid bills on the kitchen counter. Consumers expect prices to rise 4% over the next year and 3.3% longer term—hardly a victory lap—but spending continues anyway, helped by improved buying conditions for big-ticket items and the seasonal placebo effect of tax refunds.

In a nutshell, U.S. consumers feel better than they did a month ago, but beneath the optimism lies the familiar reality of high prices, fragile purchasing power, and confidence doing most of the heavy lifting.

🤵 The Macro Butler Weekly Digest 🤵

🌐 Natural gas’s “told-you-so” moment is here: physics wins, geopolitics adapts, and power will get cheaper. 🌐

Read more here: https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-natural-gas-moment

Freshly returned from the capital of globalism—where he delivered a masterclass on the sacred Don Roe Doctrine—Donald Copperfield unveiled what may go down as the most inspired act of his first White House year. On January 23, the United States formally exited the ‘World Holocaust Organization’, better known in Newspeak as the WHO—proving once again that in an age of perpetual emergencies, the boldest move is to unplug from the Ministry of Health, where ignorance is strength and vaccine is heresy.

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/us-officially-exits-world-health-organization-accusing-agency/story?id=129455089

This marked another textbook inflection point in the post-WWII order: the moment when a nation remembers it has a spine and a supranational institution remembers it was never elected. Born in 1948 as part of the Bretton Woods dreamscape, the WHO spent 76 years evolving from coordination forum to self-appointed Ministry of Health, generously funded by the U.S. to the tune of roughly $1.3 billion a year. The relationship predictably soured on schedule—first withdrawal in 2020, reversal in 2021, and the sequel in January 2025—right on cue with the cycle of globalism giving way to sovereignty. Along the way came the COVID moment, when a “call to action” morphed into permanent emergency, war metaphors replaced science, and “flatten the curve” justified policies that flattened everything else. In true Orwellian fashion, coordination became control, caution became compulsion, and questioning was rebranded as heresy—until, inevitably, the plug was pulled.

What we are witnessing follows a well-worn historical script: nations reclaim authority when international institutions drift from technical coordination into political power. The WHO’s COVID response—marked by credibility erosion, and ambitions for expanded emergency authority—triggered a crisis of trust the institution never recovered from. For the U.S., disproportionate funding with equal voting power, praise for China amid evident early failures, and proposed treaty provisions resembling rule by unelected health commissars made withdrawal inevitable. The financial hit to the WHO will be meaningful, pushing it closer to Chinese and European influence, while America’s budgetary “savings” are symbolic rather than material. The result is a fractured global health order: regional bodies rise, influence blocs harden, and centralized governance gives way to redundancy and decentralization—less elegant on paper, perhaps, but far more resilient when reality refuses to follow the script.

The WHO withdrawal fits a familiar late-empire pattern: institutions built to solve problems quietly evolve into self-licking bureaucracies that mistake permanence for purpose. From the UN to NATO and other trade bodies, credibility erodes once coordination morphs into politics, and the next years are shaping up as a global season of sovereignty—Brexit echoes, nationalist governments, and growing allergy to one-size-fits-all global rules. America’s exit signals a pivot from post-war multilateralism toward bilateral deals and domestic capacity, driven less by isolationism than by resistance to unelected, mandate-creeping authority. The result will either be radical reform or a WHO rebranded as a soft-power annex for others; neither flatters its founding mission. History says cooperation won’t vanish—only reboot.

The question is whether the next version delivers resilience or just more committees, more titles, and fewer answers, all while reminding us that in modern global governance, credentials are optional, accountability is negotiable, and “health coordination” can sound suspiciously like Ministry of Wellness.

Many academics still treat society with thinly veiled contempt—the “great unwashed” unworthy of serious consideration—missing the inconvenient fact that innovation only emerges from freedom of thought, not centralized wisdom. Convinced of their intellectual superiority, they see little reason to engage with those who actually build, fix, and create. Julian Huxley made this mindset explicit at UNESCO’s founding, dismissing “unrestricted individualism” as an error and reducing the individual to a rounding error in history—an early blueprint for a worldview where people exist to serve systems, not the other way around.

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https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-natural-gas-moment-podcast

As the global elite packs up from its annual self-congratulatory retreat—having once again declared the economy “robust” between canapés and panels—reality taps politely on the shoulder. BlackRock, long the unofficial mascot of the ‘World Entertainment Forum’, just admitted that one of its private credit vehicles needs a roughly 19% haircut, thanks to a parade of troubled loans. Its middle-market lending BDC is repricing net asset value from $8.71 to barely above $7, weighed down by busted e-commerce roll-ups and a home improvement firm that opted for bankruptcy instead of the growth narrative.

Management even waived part of its fees—always a subtle sign that everything is absolutely fine. Meanwhile, investors are rediscovering that private credit is not immune to cycles, gravity, or bad underwriting, no matter how confident the Davos slides looked.

For scale, this paragon of private-credit sophistication clocks in at roughly $497 million in market cap—small enough to trip over the cycle it was supposed to master. BlackRock TCP became part of the empire after the 2018 Tennenbaum acquisition and now sits neatly inside BlackRock’s private credit “offering,” just as BlackRock splurged $12 billion on HPS Investment Partners to double down on private markets.