Washington's export controls were designed to freeze this capability in place. They have instead set the pace.

The Treasury of the Empire sold $69 billion of two-year notes at 4.787%, up from 4.204% last month and the highest since June — and still managed to tail the When Issued 4.785%. A small tail, granted, but note what it took to produce even that: nearly sixty basis points of extra yield in a month, on the shortest, safest, most liquid paper the US issues.

The bid-to-cover of 2.627 beat both last month and the six-auction average, so the headline reads fine. The internals repeat the season's refrain — indirect bidders took 57.79%, down from 66.01% and below the 58.6% average, while dealers were left with 13.2%, their largest share since March. Foreigners are stepping back at every tenor now: two, five, seven, twenty.

When the supposedly world's safest asset needs a discount to clear, the question is no longer the price — it's the asset.

With the Houthis advancing along Yemen's Red Sea coast and both Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb now hostile, Riyadh picked up the telephone — and dialled Beijing. Not Washington. The ask: that China lean on Tehran to restrain the Houthis. Beijing duly made a private call. Consider why it can. Roughly 80% of Iran's seaborne crude went to China in 2025, Sino-Gulf trade runs about $300 billion a year, and half of China's oil imports come from the Middle East. That is not diplomacy; it is accounts receivable. Commerce creates relationships. Sanctions destroy them — and, more pointedly, when you become the largest customer of one nation, governments begin answering your phone calls. America still has the carriers, the bases and the security guarantees. What it no longer has is the position of being the party everyone must consult when something goes wrong.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-presses-iran-help-rein-houthis-after-saudi-appeal-sources-say-2026-09-17/

The superpower still patrols the sea lane — but when the shooting starts, the Saudis ring the customer, not the cop.

The Ministry of Contained Inflation has another number it would prefer you not connect to your grocery bill: US rough rice futures have surged 69% this year to $16 per hundredweight, on track to test the 2023 high, as America's rice harvest collapses to a 33-year low — production down 23% to 158.2 million hundredweight, harvested acreage at its smallest since the 1972/73 season, and ending inventories set to shrink 31% even after starting the year at a 40-year stockpile high. The grain that feeds half the planet is climbing in multiple regions at once. El Niño could push global food commodity prices up more than 15% as Hormuz, Black Sea, and weather risks collide in a perfect storm.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/media/29637/rcs-26h.pdf?v=64083

This is the inflation no rate hike touches and no ceasefire un-bombs: wheat at a 3-year high, cereals up 22%, and now the staple that sustains billions joining the rally — the third pillar of inflation thesis arriving not through demand but through the shortage that war, weather, and closed corridors manufacture on schedule.

Space is being weaponized, oil is heading to $150, and the world’s geopolitical red lines are being crossed one by one — is your portfolio ready? 🚀🛢🔥
The Macro Butler is back on the Financial Sense Podcast for a wide-ranging deep dive into the fault lines that will define the second half of 2026 and beyond. He connects the geopolitical dots the consensus keeps ignoring:

🚀 The weaponization of space — with the Pentagon now openly admitting on-orbit weapons, the arms race has added a third dimension, and the strategic implications for markets are only beginning.

🛢 $150 oil — why the diesel crack spread at record highs, two closed chokepoints, an SPR at a 40-year low, and a war cycle with no off-ramp are pointing crude far higher than the consensus dares forecast.

⚔️ Geopolitical red lines — from Hormuz to the Black Sea to Taiwan, the map of escalation is expanding, and every crossed line reprices risk the market hasn’t yet absorbed.

🥇 Where the smart money shelters — gold, silver, energy producers, and the hard assets that thrive when paper promises break.
Zero hopium. Zero soft landings. Just the macro playbook history keeps validating.

🎧 Listen to the full conversation on the Financial Sense Podcast now.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-financial-sense-21092026

Rejoice, comrade: the Hwasong-11B-1 has flown. Tested on 20 September under Rocket Man's personal supervision, the hypersonic warhead is said to promise the enemy "an incurable headache and a very cruel and unavoidable blow" — a phrase which commends to every central banker currently drafting forward guidance. KCNA calls it ultra-modern defence technology, and Kim notes that adversaries will grasp the implications without explanation, which is the finest thing ever said about deterrence by a man who has never once stopped explaining. Note the timing. The White House has just let it be known it would rather like to resume direct diplomacy; Pyongyang, still sulking over joint US–South Korean exercises, replies in the only dialect it has ever been rewarded for speaking.

https://x.com/nknewsorg/status/2102427833989791878

The missiles are not an obstacle to talks. Each test raises the asking price of the conversation nobody has yet had.

Financial freedom isn't a Lambo. It's a Wednesday like this. 🌅

No alarm, no boss, no margin call. Just dusk over the Gulf of Thailand, lantern-lit paths and an empty fairway waiting for you. ⛳️🌴

Most people trade time for money. The goal is to trade money for time.

Compound your assets, and one day your assets will pay for your sunsets. 🌊

Learn to Earn with The Macro Butler Financial Academy

https://themacrobutler.com/financial-academy/

Thanks to Cris Sheridan from The Financial Sense, The Macro Butler thesis just became an anthem — and it hits harder than any research note. 🎵🥇🔥

“Red Lines in the Sky” takes everything the consensus refuses to price in and sets it to a big, anthemic hook: the weaponization of space, $150 oil knocking at the door, rare-earth chokepoints, and the one truth Wall Street keeps forgetting — you can print the money, but you can’t print grain.
This is the whole macro playbook in a tune:

🚀 Three powers drawing borders in the satellite night — the arms race that’s gone orbital.
🛢 Black gold running high — energy shortages feeding an inflation no rate hike can touch.
🥇 Measure that mountain in barrels, measure that mountain in gold — because a record-high ticker means nothing if it buys less down here on Earth.
🏛 “What if the bonds don’t hold? What if the cash runs cold?” — the sovereign debt crisis, in one devastating line.
Stocks can rise while the street gets squeezed. A record high won’t fill your needs. Look past the glow — what can you carry when the numbers go?
Just the truth, with a beat you can’t unhear.

🎧 Listen to “Red Lines in the Sky” now — and ask yourself: who pays for the power when the powers collide? 👇

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-financial-sense-the

September's flash PMIs arrived like a fanfare. Services 58.7 against 55.8 expected, a 59-month high; manufacturing 57.0 against 53.7, a 52-month high; the composite at 58.4, the fastest expansion since July 2021, implying annualised growth near 5%. "Business is clearly booming now in both manufacturing and services," declared S&P Global's Chris Williamson — before adding the clause that matters. Input costs rose at their steepest rate in four years on fuel and transport, supply-chain bottlenecks hit near two-decade highs excluding the pandemic, staffing is tight, and backlogs are building, handing firms pricing power. That is not a boom; that is a bottleneck being invoiced.

When the same report shows record growth and four-year-high costs, the economy isn't accelerating — the price tags are.

The Treasury of the Empire offered $70 billion of five-year notes at 5.033% — the first 5% handle on the tenor since 2007, a coupon no buyer has been paid in nearly two decades — and the auction still tailed 3.1 basis points, the second largest on record. Read that twice.

Uncle Sam paid a nineteen-year-high yield and still could not fill the book. The bid-to-cover collapsed to 2.212, the weakest since December 2018. Indirect bidders — the foreigners — fell to 54.31% from 61.51%, the lowest since the pandemic panic of March 2020, leaving dealers holding 15.8%, their most since May 2024.

A 5% coupon on five-year Treasuries and still no takers — that isn't a weak auction, it's a price discovery nobody in Washington wanted.

OFAC set a deadline of 12:01 a.m. EDT on 23 September to wind down Iran-related aviation business. Mahan Air flight W593, an Airbus A340, departed Tehran before the clock ran out and touched down at Guangzhou Baiyun at 4:39 p.m. local time — comfortably after it. Mahan has been under US counterterrorism sanctions since 2011, accused of ferrying weapons, personnel and equipment for the IRGC-Quds Force; Treasury had sanctioned Iran's remaining active airlines on 8 September, warning that anyone supporting the sector risks the same treatment. Beijing's Foreign Ministry replied on both the 22nd and 23rd that it rejects unilateral sanctions lacking Security Council authorisation.

https://www.arabnews.com/world/iranian-flight-lands-in-china-despite-us-threat-of-sanctions-flight-tracker-3002779