The affordability crisis, of course, is a shocking revelation—at least if you live inside the comfortable bubble of the Washington swamp. For everyone else, it’s been obvious for years: inflation isn’t just about demand, shortages, or fading trust in public institutions, but also about governments spending like the credit card has no limit. Unsurprisingly, a new Plasma study shows the fastest-rising cost-of-living cities are a greatest-hits album of policy excellence and fiscal illiteracy: New York City, San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, San Jose, Chicago, and Baltimore. In other words, the places most eager to lecture the rest of the country on economics are doing a stellar job making daily life unaffordable.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/new-study-shows-cities-where-cost-living-rising-fastest

It’s no coincidence that the most expensive metros read like a roll call of deep-blue governance: higher taxes, thicker regulation, and zoning rules so tight they could pass for rent control cosplay. Studies from Berkeley and BEA data confirm this isn’t a fluke but a 15-year trend—blue states consistently run higher costs across housing, utilities, goods, and services, with housing about 50% pricier and utilities roughly 45% more expensive than in red or purple areas. While every city feels inflation, blue cities feel it harder, thanks to strong demand colliding with policy-engineered housing shortages, environmental mandates, and zoning laws that make building homes harder than passing a budget on time.
https://besi.berkeley.edu/publication/what-drives-high-costs-in-blue-states/

The stark price gap between blue and red or purple states shows how policy-heavy, tightly policed markets can override fundamentals and systematically distort prices.

In a twist that has set Euro-politics buzzing, Germany’s AfD has positioned itself as the lone voice demanding accountability over Nord Stream, arguing that whoever was responsible should pay the bill—an idea that sounds refreshingly old-fashioned in a continent otherwise fluent in finger-pointing and selective amnesia. The party frames its stance as “law and order,” while accusing Europe’s leadership of sacrificing domestic industry and jobs on the altar of geopolitical signalling.

Strip away the theatrics, and the argument boils down to this: German voters foot the energy bill, while Brussels debates values, Kyiv wages war with others money, and no one seems especially eager to explain who blew up the pipeline—or why European taxpayers should quietly absorb the cost.

https://www.rt.com/news/631660-afd-germany-ukraine-enemy/

Ukraine’s wartime messaging has become a masterclass in propaganda : dramatic claims are launched with great urgency, repeated across European podiums, and then quietly retired once verification proves inconvenient. Allegations flare, headlines follow, donations flow—and the evidentiary trail somehow evaporates.

Even U.S. officials have conceded that some of the most cited incidents cannot be independently confirmed, a reminder that in modern conflicts the fog of war pairs nicely with the fog of public relations. In Eurostan, diplomacy was sidelined long ago, escalation is monetized, and information warfare now does as much heavy lifting as tanks—except narratives, unlike facts, never need to be proven to remain useful.


https://www.reuters.com/world/pentagon-cant-independently-confirm-atrocities-ukraines-bucha-official-says-2022-04-04/

The reality is that Ukraine and its corrupt leader is both villain and global puppet theater, with the alphabet agencies pulling strings. Anyone who disagrees is instantly promoted to “an agent of Moscow,” proof that in modern geopolitics, confidence often substitutes for evidence

In the brave new cafeteria of the Great Reset, meat is obsolete, cows are inefficient, and you—being carbon—are the real environmental hazard. Lab-grown protein, generously funded by green zealot billionaires, is rolled out as salvation: no farms, no slaughter, just stainless steel and good intentions. To ease the transition, a friendly internet celebrity tours a $200-million fake-meat factory for millions of kids, assuring them it tastes “just like the real thing” and is officially approved by the Ministry of Food (formerly FDA/USDA). Orwell would call it progress: control the menu, educate the children, and soon the slogan won’t be you will eat bugs—it’ll be you always loved them.

https://youtu.be/X-TaFVPhj2g

In the brave new food pyramid, no one quite knows what lab-grown meat does to humans—but that’s fine, because uncertainty is now a feature, not a bug.
The ‘World Entertainment’ Forum began by saying meat was bad for the planet, then for the climate, then for the water, steadily discovering new sins for cows as needed. Billionaires cheer from the sidelines, urging wealthy nations to “voluntarily” switch to synthetic protein while investing heavily in farmland—pure coincidence, of course. Regulators are still debating what to call this stuff, which is convenient, because if you don’t name it clearly, no one can complain when it shows up on the dinner plate.


https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_White_Paper_Roadmap_Protein.pdf

Best of all, the rollout strategy is classic Orwell: normalize it through children, label dissent as ignorance, and by Agenda 2030 everyone will swear they always preferred meat grown in a vat—because Big Brother knows what’s for dinner.

Welcome to the Ministry of Humanity : OpenAI is reportedly building a “humans-only” social platform where proving you’re human may require Face ID or an Orb that scans your eyeballs—because nothing says authenticity like biometric compliance.

The announcement conveniently coincided with a Worldcoin pump, reminding us that in this brave new internet, humanity is verified by hardware, privacy is optional, and all users are equal—some just more scanned than others.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/01/28/openai-wants-to-create-biometric-social-network-to-kill-xs-bot-problem/

Fresh off torching “Jerome Too Late,” Donald Copperfield reached into his magic hat and voilà—Kevin Warsh reappeared as the next Fed chair, ready to deliver “independent-in-name-only” monetary policy, complete with a Truth Social prophecy declaring him the greatest ever and “central casting.” Once an inflation hawk, Warsh has since discovered the miraculous virtues of lower rates—just in time for the audition—raising polite concerns that Fed independence may soon be more of a costume than a principle, all while the FOMC still votes, rates stay stubbornly high, and a DOJ probe lurks backstage like an unscheduled encore.

Give it one bad CPI print, half a soft jobs report, or a single day the S&P doesn’t hit a new high. In Truth Social time, that’s a few hours max before “Kevin Too Early” is born—caps lock included, independence revoked, and monetary policy declared tremendously premature.

In today’s episode of “Inflation Is Totally Dead—Trust US Propaganda”, U.S. wholesale prices jumped more than expected in December as companies politely shoved tariff costs straight onto wholesalers. PPI popped 0.5%—its biggest move in three months—while the “don’t worry about food and energy” gauge sprinted ahead at one of the fastest clips of the Jubilee Year, rudely ignoring economists’ soothing forecasts. Services prices surged, especially for machinery dealers discovering inflation is great for business, and while goods prices stayed flat thanks to cheaper energy, the message was clear: inflation didn’t leave, it just went to the gym. With PPI feeding straight into the Fed’s favourite inflation metric, this was less a data point and more a reminder that price pressures aren’t cooling—they’re stretching before the next lap.

Forget the headline inflation bedtime stories—down in the trenches where investors and CFOs actually live, the spread between core CPI and core PPI flipped negative again in December. That’s month two in a row and the worst gap since March 2025, right before the great April tariff tantrum. Translation: costs are sprinting while pricing power is jogging, margins are about to feel the squeeze, and equities may soon discover that valuations, like gravity, still work.

In a nutshell, December’s PPI gut-punched the “inflation is over” fairytale: input costs are sprinting, pricing power is limping, margins are next, and gravity is warming up for equities.

🤵 The Macro Butler Weekly Digest 🤵

🌐 Free markets don’t die in revolutions—they’re quietly conscripted: the Don Roe Doctrine marks the moment capital stops roaming freely and starts serving the state. 🌐

Read more here: https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-don-roe-doctrine-and-the-end

While YouTube macro wizards hyperventilated over precious-metal volatility, the real drama quietly unfolded in the Middle Kingdom: China’s official manufacturing PMI slipped into contraction at 49.3, well below expectations, with non-manufacturing following it south to 49.4. This wasn’t a harmless Lunar New Year hiccup—supply weakened, demand rolled over, and business confidence took a visible hit. Translation: China’s economy stumbled out of the 2026 starting blocks, and unless policy support shows up quickly, the only thing expanding may be calls for a PBoC rate cut by late February.

Behind the PMI headline wobble, the real culprit was demand having a lie-down. Manufacturing output cooled but stayed in expansion, while new orders slid back into contraction and export orders sank further, confirming that buyers—domestic and foreign—were nowhere near enthusiastic. Confidence didn’t help: business expectations suffered their sharpest one-month drop since late 2022, suggesting policy support arrived fashionably late. Prices ticked higher thanks to commodities like copper—nice for fighting deflation, less nice if margins get squeezed downstream. Small and mid-sized firms felt the pain fastest, slipping deeper into contraction, while large firms merely limped along. Outside manufacturing, construction collapsed (officially blamed on bad weather, unofficially on weak investment), while services hovered just below expansion—less a collapse, more a tired shrug.

In a nutshell, when the drums are loud but the fields grow quiet, the wise see the truth: China’s PMIs fell into contraction not by seasonal fate but by weakening demand and fading confidence, reminding us that when policy arrives late, imbalance spreads first to the smallest pillars.

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https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-don-roe-doctrine-and-the-end-79f