🤵 The Macro Butler Weekly Digest 🤵

🌐 Natural disasters, a towering wall of debt refinancing, rising tariffs, and the relentless slow burn of reflation are poised to ignite a financial misfire into a full-blown wildfire. 🌐

Read more here: https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/financial-misfire

‘1,000 friends too few; one enemy too many’—so said the Indonesian president at SPIEF last week, channelling pure diplomatic poetry while standing next to Putin.

The Global South cheered.

Meanwhile, the declining West was too busy handing out war games and pushing its Malthusian bedtime stories to notice. Priorities, right?

Full Speech here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POhJQEO6yrA

The self-proclaimed ‘Peacemaker-in-Chief’—who in reality plays the role of ‘Warmonger-in-Chief’—would be more accurately titled the ‘Schizophrenic-in-Chief’ or better yet, the ‘Egocentric-in-Chief.’ After all, in his narcissistic world, war is just a high-stakes soccer match, and anyone outside his plutocratic circle is merely a disposable spectator.

He may delude himself into thinking it was a tidy 12-day war—but history will remember it as the opening act of a holy war that will rage through the decade and well beyond.

While diplomacy is now apparently conducted via social media posts and hashtags, the US Flash PMI did its own version of humblebragging: Manufacturing was totally flat—but hey, it beat expectations (52.0 vs 51.0), so that’s a win in Fed-speak. Services also edged down a touch but still managed to outshine forecasts (53.1 vs 52.9). So yes, the economy is slowing, but it’s beating expectations while doing it—kind of like bragging about jogging slower than last year but still faster than your neighbour. Meanwhile, service sector prices jumped again—because tariffs, wages, fuel, and financing costs apparently missed the memo about disinflation.

In a nutshell, the US economy’s cooling off but still beating expectations—while service prices keep sprinting thanks to tariffs, wages, and rising costs.