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EndGame Macro
Holiday Demand Is Missing in Action
This is the linehaul spot rate, what truckers earn per mile, excluding fuel. Normally, heading into Thanksgiving, this chart bends up. Shippers rush to move last minute retail volume, carriers gain leverage, and spot rates usually get a seasonal lift.
But here, the line is fading. After peaking near $1.83 in early November, rates are sliding back toward $1.74 just as we enter one of the busiest weeks of the year. That’s the opposite of what this season typically delivers.
What It Likely Means Under the Surface
The simplest way to read this is that demand is soft and capacity is still too loose.
Retailers don’t seem to be scrambling for trucks. Either they ordered early, they’re keeping inventories lean, or consumer goods demand just isn’t strong enough to stress the network. When shippers feel no urgency, carriers lose pricing power even during peak season.
And remember we’ve been living through an extended freight downturn. Too many trucks, not enough loads. That dynamic doesn’t magically fix itself during the holidays, especially when smaller carriers are still feeling the pinch from higher operating costs and tight margins.
Contract freight is also likely absorbing the healthier lanes, leaving the spot market as the overflow and that overflow doesn’t look very full.
Why It Matters
Cooling spot rates into Thanksgiving is one more soft signal from the real economy. It’s not saying things are falling apart; it’s saying things aren’t heating up either. Freight tends to turn before the broader economy, and right now it’s telling you that demand is “meh” than having momentum.
So when this chart dips into a major holiday instead of spiking, it’s not a fluke. It’s freight quietly reminding us that the goods side of the economy is still fragile and the people most exposed to that fragility are the small and mid sized carriers who usually count on Q4 to bail them out.
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Holiday Demand Is Missing in Action
This is the linehaul spot rate, what truckers earn per mile, excluding fuel. Normally, heading into Thanksgiving, this chart bends up. Shippers rush to move last minute retail volume, carriers gain leverage, and spot rates usually get a seasonal lift.
But here, the line is fading. After peaking near $1.83 in early November, rates are sliding back toward $1.74 just as we enter one of the busiest weeks of the year. That’s the opposite of what this season typically delivers.
What It Likely Means Under the Surface
The simplest way to read this is that demand is soft and capacity is still too loose.
Retailers don’t seem to be scrambling for trucks. Either they ordered early, they’re keeping inventories lean, or consumer goods demand just isn’t strong enough to stress the network. When shippers feel no urgency, carriers lose pricing power even during peak season.
And remember we’ve been living through an extended freight downturn. Too many trucks, not enough loads. That dynamic doesn’t magically fix itself during the holidays, especially when smaller carriers are still feeling the pinch from higher operating costs and tight margins.
Contract freight is also likely absorbing the healthier lanes, leaving the spot market as the overflow and that overflow doesn’t look very full.
Why It Matters
Cooling spot rates into Thanksgiving is one more soft signal from the real economy. It’s not saying things are falling apart; it’s saying things aren’t heating up either. Freight tends to turn before the broader economy, and right now it’s telling you that demand is “meh” than having momentum.
So when this chart dips into a major holiday instead of spiking, it’s not a fluke. It’s freight quietly reminding us that the goods side of the economy is still fragile and the people most exposed to that fragility are the small and mid sized carriers who usually count on Q4 to bail them out.
Spot rates are cooling off as we move into Thanksgiving week.
This is not normal. Spot rates usually cook as we head into a major holiday. https://t.co/UkNhMtrNJM tweet
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EndGame Macro
What Harvard’s IBIT Position Is Really Telling Us
IBIT sits at the top of their 13F slice, towering over Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and even gold. But that’s more about the way 13Fs work than Harvard suddenly reinventing itself.
A 13F only shows one narrow sleeve of their public equity book. The whole endowment is about $57 billion, and this position is roughly 1% at the total level. It only shows up as 20% here because the rest of the holdings in this slice are smaller, spread out positions. So this isn’t Harvard loading the boat on Bitcoin. It’s Harvard placing a small, asymmetric long term bet that just looks oversized inside this particular window.
Why Make This Move Now?
If you look at the university’s financial backdrop, the timing becomes a lot more intuitive. Harvard just ran a $113 million operating deficit. Federal funding was frozen during a political fight. A new endowment tax is about to chew hundreds of millions a year starting in 2026. Donations toward the endowment have softened. And they issued $750 million in bonds earlier this year to keep operations steady.
They’re not in distress, but the flow of money around them is getting tighter. In that environment, big, long lived institutions often reach for a little more return. Not recklessly but just enough to tilt the long term math in their favor. Pensions do it through private equity. Endowments do it through venture. Bitcoin, in ETF form, has become another way to do the same thing without overhauling the entire risk budget.
A 1% position barely hurts if it flops, but it matters if it compounds. That’s exactly the kind of trade endowments like Harvard are comfortable making.
How They’re Probably Framing Bitcoin Internally
Look at the neighbors in the holdings list…Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia, Taiwan Semi, plus gold. That’s not random. It shows how they see Bitcoin somewhere between digital gold and high beta tech optionality.
It’s a hedge against a long term world where governments run persistent deficits, liquidity comes in unpredictable waves, and real returns are harder to find. And it’s a call option on a future where digital infrastructure like payments, custody, tokenization becomes a bigger part of the financial system.
For an allocator thinking in decades, not quarters, that makes practical sense.
Why the ETF Structure Was a Breakthrough
The other reason this is happening now is simple: the wrapper finally works for them.
A spot ETF solves every headache that kept institutions away like custody, compliance, reporting, liquidity, accounting. It turns Bitcoin into something that looks just like GLD, QQQ, or any other clean line item. That’s when conservative pools of capital finally move: when the operational risk goes away.
The Bigger Meaning
Harvard didn’t suddenly believe in Bitcoin. They made a small, thoughtful allocation that fits their long term goals, reflects the tougher funding environment they’re facing, and positions them inside an emerging financial landscape instead of outside it.
The real signal isn’t that Harvard is betting big on crypto. It’s that Harvard is no longer treating Bitcoin as something outside the institutional universe.
When one of the most cautious, traditional stewards of capital on earth decides Bitcoin belongs in the portfolio, even at 1% it tells you the asset has crossed a psychological line.
We’re not at the beginning of that shift anymore. We’re somewhere in the middle.
Just checked and yeah $IBIT is now Harvard's largest position in its 13F and its biggest position increase in Q3. It's super rare/difficult to get an endowment to bite on an ETF- esp a Harvard or Yale, it's as good a validation as an ETF can get. That said, half a billion is a mere 1% of total endowment. Big enough to rank 16th among IBIT holders tho. - Eric Balchunas tweet
What Harvard’s IBIT Position Is Really Telling Us
IBIT sits at the top of their 13F slice, towering over Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and even gold. But that’s more about the way 13Fs work than Harvard suddenly reinventing itself.
A 13F only shows one narrow sleeve of their public equity book. The whole endowment is about $57 billion, and this position is roughly 1% at the total level. It only shows up as 20% here because the rest of the holdings in this slice are smaller, spread out positions. So this isn’t Harvard loading the boat on Bitcoin. It’s Harvard placing a small, asymmetric long term bet that just looks oversized inside this particular window.
Why Make This Move Now?
If you look at the university’s financial backdrop, the timing becomes a lot more intuitive. Harvard just ran a $113 million operating deficit. Federal funding was frozen during a political fight. A new endowment tax is about to chew hundreds of millions a year starting in 2026. Donations toward the endowment have softened. And they issued $750 million in bonds earlier this year to keep operations steady.
They’re not in distress, but the flow of money around them is getting tighter. In that environment, big, long lived institutions often reach for a little more return. Not recklessly but just enough to tilt the long term math in their favor. Pensions do it through private equity. Endowments do it through venture. Bitcoin, in ETF form, has become another way to do the same thing without overhauling the entire risk budget.
A 1% position barely hurts if it flops, but it matters if it compounds. That’s exactly the kind of trade endowments like Harvard are comfortable making.
How They’re Probably Framing Bitcoin Internally
Look at the neighbors in the holdings list…Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia, Taiwan Semi, plus gold. That’s not random. It shows how they see Bitcoin somewhere between digital gold and high beta tech optionality.
It’s a hedge against a long term world where governments run persistent deficits, liquidity comes in unpredictable waves, and real returns are harder to find. And it’s a call option on a future where digital infrastructure like payments, custody, tokenization becomes a bigger part of the financial system.
For an allocator thinking in decades, not quarters, that makes practical sense.
Why the ETF Structure Was a Breakthrough
The other reason this is happening now is simple: the wrapper finally works for them.
A spot ETF solves every headache that kept institutions away like custody, compliance, reporting, liquidity, accounting. It turns Bitcoin into something that looks just like GLD, QQQ, or any other clean line item. That’s when conservative pools of capital finally move: when the operational risk goes away.
The Bigger Meaning
Harvard didn’t suddenly believe in Bitcoin. They made a small, thoughtful allocation that fits their long term goals, reflects the tougher funding environment they’re facing, and positions them inside an emerging financial landscape instead of outside it.
The real signal isn’t that Harvard is betting big on crypto. It’s that Harvard is no longer treating Bitcoin as something outside the institutional universe.
When one of the most cautious, traditional stewards of capital on earth decides Bitcoin belongs in the portfolio, even at 1% it tells you the asset has crossed a psychological line.
We’re not at the beginning of that shift anymore. We’re somewhere in the middle.
Just checked and yeah $IBIT is now Harvard's largest position in its 13F and its biggest position increase in Q3. It's super rare/difficult to get an endowment to bite on an ETF- esp a Harvard or Yale, it's as good a validation as an ETF can get. That said, half a billion is a mere 1% of total endowment. Big enough to rank 16th among IBIT holders tho. - Eric Balchunas tweet
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App Economy Insights
🗓️ What are you watching this week?
• Tuesday: $AS $KLAR $PDD
• Wednesday: $NVDA $PANW $TGT $BLSH
• Thursday: $WMT $INTU $VEEV $ESTC $NTES
All visualized in our newsletter. https://t.co/j4Zb8NHOZv
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🗓️ What are you watching this week?
• Tuesday: $AS $KLAR $PDD
• Wednesday: $NVDA $PANW $TGT $BLSH
• Thursday: $WMT $INTU $VEEV $ESTC $NTES
All visualized in our newsletter. https://t.co/j4Zb8NHOZv
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EndGame Macro
RT @onechancefreedm: (2/2) This triangulation matters. Washington’s pressure on cartels and its push to realign Venezuelan oil exports are designed not only to weaken Maduro but to block China from entrenching its role as creditor and investor, and to prevent Russia from securing permanent military outposts in the Caribbean basin. By dismantling cartel controlled flows of minerals, fuel, and shadow finance, the U.S. aims to deny Beijing and Moscow channels through which they can project power. In effect, cartels are the lever by which rivals can tap the hemisphere’s resources and liquidity outside U.S. oversight. Breaking that lever is a prerequisite to maintaining dominance.
The Fourth Turning framework amplifies the stakes. Every 80–90 years, U.S. order has reset through crisis: the Civil War, the Depression and WWII, the Cold War and Bretton Woods. Each climax produced new institutions and new definitions of power. By that cycle, the decisive window is 2025–2032. The dollar order created after 1971 is fraying under debt, inflation shocks, and rival clearing systems experimenting with gold, commodities, or digital rails. To preserve leverage through this reset, Washington must secure uncontested depth at home. That means ensuring that oil from Guyana and Venezuela flows west, that lithium and rare earths are channeled into Western industries, that migration crises are controlled, and that shadow banking no longer launders cartel dollars in ways that undermine the financial system.
Grandin and Leech help decode why Venezuela is pivotal. Grandin shows us that U.S. interventions in Latin America are not distractions but rehearsals for global contests, refining methods that are later applied elsewhere. Leech reminds us that behind every campaign lies energy: wars, sanctions, and financial crackdowns follow the pipelines of oil and minerals. Add China and Russia into the frame and the picture sharpens: Beijing building credit and trade networks to tilt the hemisphere eastward, Moscow offering military muscle to erode U.S. dominance.
The risk is timing. If cartels remain powerful, if Chinese loans sustain Caracas, or if Russian arms alter the balance of deterrence in the Caribbean, the U.S. could face simultaneous crises abroad and instability at home just as the global order resets. But if Washington succeeds in breaking cartel sovereignty, redirecting oil flows, and limiting Beijing and Moscow’s footholds, it would emerge into the next system with secure depth, resource corridors intact, and dollar dominance reinforced.
In this light, the struggle in Venezuela is foundational. It is where imperial methods are tested again, where energy and minerals are rewired into U.S.-aligned circuits, and where rivals are blocked from turning the hemisphere into a pressure point. Grandin and Leech provided the intellectual scaffolding to see this. The contest now unfolding, between Washington’s bid to reassert control, China’s economic lifelines, and Russia’s military shield, is not about one man in Caracas. It is about who writes the rules of the next global order.
tweet
RT @onechancefreedm: (2/2) This triangulation matters. Washington’s pressure on cartels and its push to realign Venezuelan oil exports are designed not only to weaken Maduro but to block China from entrenching its role as creditor and investor, and to prevent Russia from securing permanent military outposts in the Caribbean basin. By dismantling cartel controlled flows of minerals, fuel, and shadow finance, the U.S. aims to deny Beijing and Moscow channels through which they can project power. In effect, cartels are the lever by which rivals can tap the hemisphere’s resources and liquidity outside U.S. oversight. Breaking that lever is a prerequisite to maintaining dominance.
The Fourth Turning framework amplifies the stakes. Every 80–90 years, U.S. order has reset through crisis: the Civil War, the Depression and WWII, the Cold War and Bretton Woods. Each climax produced new institutions and new definitions of power. By that cycle, the decisive window is 2025–2032. The dollar order created after 1971 is fraying under debt, inflation shocks, and rival clearing systems experimenting with gold, commodities, or digital rails. To preserve leverage through this reset, Washington must secure uncontested depth at home. That means ensuring that oil from Guyana and Venezuela flows west, that lithium and rare earths are channeled into Western industries, that migration crises are controlled, and that shadow banking no longer launders cartel dollars in ways that undermine the financial system.
Grandin and Leech help decode why Venezuela is pivotal. Grandin shows us that U.S. interventions in Latin America are not distractions but rehearsals for global contests, refining methods that are later applied elsewhere. Leech reminds us that behind every campaign lies energy: wars, sanctions, and financial crackdowns follow the pipelines of oil and minerals. Add China and Russia into the frame and the picture sharpens: Beijing building credit and trade networks to tilt the hemisphere eastward, Moscow offering military muscle to erode U.S. dominance.
The risk is timing. If cartels remain powerful, if Chinese loans sustain Caracas, or if Russian arms alter the balance of deterrence in the Caribbean, the U.S. could face simultaneous crises abroad and instability at home just as the global order resets. But if Washington succeeds in breaking cartel sovereignty, redirecting oil flows, and limiting Beijing and Moscow’s footholds, it would emerge into the next system with secure depth, resource corridors intact, and dollar dominance reinforced.
In this light, the struggle in Venezuela is foundational. It is where imperial methods are tested again, where energy and minerals are rewired into U.S.-aligned circuits, and where rivals are blocked from turning the hemisphere into a pressure point. Grandin and Leech provided the intellectual scaffolding to see this. The contest now unfolding, between Washington’s bid to reassert control, China’s economic lifelines, and Russia’s military shield, is not about one man in Caracas. It is about who writes the rules of the next global order.
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EndGame Macro
RT @onechancefreedm: (1/2) Empire’s Workshop, Crude Interventions, and the New Struggle for Venezuela: U.S., China, Russia, and the Fight to Lock Down the Hemisphere
Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop argued that Latin America was the testing ground where Washington refined the tools of modern empire with sanctions, covert wars, regime destabilization, and the ability to fold raw power into the language of democracy. Garry Leech’s Crude Interventions showed how U.S. foreign policy cannot be separated from oil, with military campaigns and financial pressure used to guarantee access to hydrocarbons and maintain the global dollar order. When read together, these books describe with eerie precision the storm now unfolding around Venezuela.
The U.S. is not treating Venezuela as a peripheral crisis but as a hinge point for the Western Hemisphere. Washington knows that in a Fourth Turning moment, when institutional and monetary systems globally are under stress, it cannot afford to let rivals exploit instability in its own backyard. This is why the narrative of a drug war has given way to a broader strategic frame: cartels as shadow sovereigns, controlling not only narcotics but also ports, trucking fleets, pipelines, minerals, and even migration flows. By designating them as terrorist entities, sanctioning their banks, and targeting their logistics networks, the U.S. is asserting that migration, minerals, and energy corridors fall under national security, not law enforcement.
Here Grandin’s thesis is alive: Latin America once again becomes the workshop where imperial methods are refined. But Leech’s oil centric warning is also central: this is not ultimately about law enforcement, it is about restructuring energy and financial flows to ensure they remain under U.S. command. Guyana’s new oil reserves, Venezuelan offshore rigs, and cartel linked extortion of refineries are treated as strategic arteries of the global economy. Washington’s military patrols in the Caribbean, sanctions on narco linked banks, and crackdowns on illicit shipping are less about Maduro than about guaranteeing that adversaries cannot disrupt or capture these arteries.
China and Russia complicate this picture. Beijing has become Venezuela’s primary creditor and economic lifeline, providing billions in loans, supplying oil and goods to circumvent U.S. sanctions, and securing new deals to develop oil fields that could generate over $1 billion in investment by 2026. Beyond Venezuela, China is now the leading trading partner for much of South America, backing infrastructure projects from Brazilian ports to Chilean energy grids. Its strategy is patient, embedding influence through debt, trade, and long term supply chains.
Russia, by contrast, plays a narrower but sharper role. Its influence rests on military and security cooperation. In 2025, Moscow and Caracas signed a new strategic partnership, followed by the opening of a Kalashnikov ammunition factory in Venezuela. Russia also positions itself as lender of last resort, offering oil swaps and financial lifelines despite sanctions. On the information front, it aligns with Maduro’s worldview, using state media to amplify narratives of resistance against U.S. imperialism. Its objective is less about economic penetration than about ensuring the U.S. faces constant friction in its own hemisphere. Continued on page 2…..
tweet
RT @onechancefreedm: (1/2) Empire’s Workshop, Crude Interventions, and the New Struggle for Venezuela: U.S., China, Russia, and the Fight to Lock Down the Hemisphere
Greg Grandin’s Empire’s Workshop argued that Latin America was the testing ground where Washington refined the tools of modern empire with sanctions, covert wars, regime destabilization, and the ability to fold raw power into the language of democracy. Garry Leech’s Crude Interventions showed how U.S. foreign policy cannot be separated from oil, with military campaigns and financial pressure used to guarantee access to hydrocarbons and maintain the global dollar order. When read together, these books describe with eerie precision the storm now unfolding around Venezuela.
The U.S. is not treating Venezuela as a peripheral crisis but as a hinge point for the Western Hemisphere. Washington knows that in a Fourth Turning moment, when institutional and monetary systems globally are under stress, it cannot afford to let rivals exploit instability in its own backyard. This is why the narrative of a drug war has given way to a broader strategic frame: cartels as shadow sovereigns, controlling not only narcotics but also ports, trucking fleets, pipelines, minerals, and even migration flows. By designating them as terrorist entities, sanctioning their banks, and targeting their logistics networks, the U.S. is asserting that migration, minerals, and energy corridors fall under national security, not law enforcement.
Here Grandin’s thesis is alive: Latin America once again becomes the workshop where imperial methods are refined. But Leech’s oil centric warning is also central: this is not ultimately about law enforcement, it is about restructuring energy and financial flows to ensure they remain under U.S. command. Guyana’s new oil reserves, Venezuelan offshore rigs, and cartel linked extortion of refineries are treated as strategic arteries of the global economy. Washington’s military patrols in the Caribbean, sanctions on narco linked banks, and crackdowns on illicit shipping are less about Maduro than about guaranteeing that adversaries cannot disrupt or capture these arteries.
China and Russia complicate this picture. Beijing has become Venezuela’s primary creditor and economic lifeline, providing billions in loans, supplying oil and goods to circumvent U.S. sanctions, and securing new deals to develop oil fields that could generate over $1 billion in investment by 2026. Beyond Venezuela, China is now the leading trading partner for much of South America, backing infrastructure projects from Brazilian ports to Chilean energy grids. Its strategy is patient, embedding influence through debt, trade, and long term supply chains.
Russia, by contrast, plays a narrower but sharper role. Its influence rests on military and security cooperation. In 2025, Moscow and Caracas signed a new strategic partnership, followed by the opening of a Kalashnikov ammunition factory in Venezuela. Russia also positions itself as lender of last resort, offering oil swaps and financial lifelines despite sanctions. On the information front, it aligns with Maduro’s worldview, using state media to amplify narratives of resistance against U.S. imperialism. Its objective is less about economic penetration than about ensuring the U.S. faces constant friction in its own hemisphere. Continued on page 2…..
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EndGame Macro
RT @onechancefreedm: Venezuela, Cartels, and the Real Targets of U.S. Power
The real pressure campaign isn’t aimed squarely at Maduro. It’s aimed at the cartels because they, not the formal government, hold decisive influence over Venezuela’s leverage and Mexico’s stability. These groups function as shadow sovereigns that manage ports, regulate migration routes, tax trade, and control resources. In Venezuela, the Cartel de los Soles and Tren de Aragua oversee black market economies that eclipse state oil revenues. In Mexico, the Sinaloa Cartel and its rivals dominate trucking fleets, customs, pipelines, and even agriculture. Their reach extends into the economic core of the hemisphere.
This isn’t simply a drug war. The United States is demanding broader macroeconomic concessions. Migration is the first pressure point. Cartels decide whether caravans move through the Darién Gap and across Mexico’s frontier, either overwhelming or easing pressure on the U.S. border. By designating them as terrorist actors and striking their networks, Washington signals that this leverage must be aligned with American political needs.
Energy is equally critical. Cartel backed militias siphon fuel, extort refineries, and hover near Venezuela’s offshore zones, just as Guyana rises as a major oil producer. U.S. naval deployments are less about Maduro than about securing rigs, safeguarding new supply routes, and denying rivals the chance to disrupt or capture a vital source of future oil.
Minerals deepen the stakes. Cartels are embedded in gold, lithium, and rare earth supply chains essential to the energy transition. By targeting their networks, Washington is forcing these flows into Western industries rather than adversarial channels. The same applies to logistics. Cartel linked firms dominate trucking and shipping across Latin America. Treated as national security actors, they must either integrate into U.S. aligned trade systems or be financially isolated.
The financial layer ties it together. For decades, cartel money coursed through U.S. and global shadow banking. Wachovia admitted to laundering billions. HSBC paid fines for moving narco dollars through correspondent accounts. Those flows blended into offshore dollar markets and were quietly tolerated as liquidity. That era is ending. By sanctioning Mexican banks and invoking new authorities to target Chinese intermediaries, Washington is dismantling the pipelines that once made cartels invisible participants in global finance. This is less about narcotics than about restoring control over the monetary arteries of the hemisphere.
In this light, Maduro looks more like a broker than a sovereign. His survival depends on cutting deals with cartels, and his power is limited by their willingness to concede. Washington knows this, which is why the real campaign of sanctions, patrols, financial strikes is aimed at forcing cartel networks to alter their behavior with regards to managing migration, secure energy corridors, channel minerals westward, and stop using trade to empower rivals.
Whether this ends in regime change is uncertain. It could stabilize Maduro as a weakened figurehead while cartels yield to U.S. terms. Or it could undermine the foundations of his rule and trigger political transition. That ambiguity may be deliberate.
What is clear is that this is not just about narcotics. It is about redefining the cartels role in the hemispheric order, severing their ties to the shadow banking system, and forcing them to deliver macroeconomic concessions that serve U.S. strategic dominance.
tweet
RT @onechancefreedm: Venezuela, Cartels, and the Real Targets of U.S. Power
The real pressure campaign isn’t aimed squarely at Maduro. It’s aimed at the cartels because they, not the formal government, hold decisive influence over Venezuela’s leverage and Mexico’s stability. These groups function as shadow sovereigns that manage ports, regulate migration routes, tax trade, and control resources. In Venezuela, the Cartel de los Soles and Tren de Aragua oversee black market economies that eclipse state oil revenues. In Mexico, the Sinaloa Cartel and its rivals dominate trucking fleets, customs, pipelines, and even agriculture. Their reach extends into the economic core of the hemisphere.
This isn’t simply a drug war. The United States is demanding broader macroeconomic concessions. Migration is the first pressure point. Cartels decide whether caravans move through the Darién Gap and across Mexico’s frontier, either overwhelming or easing pressure on the U.S. border. By designating them as terrorist actors and striking their networks, Washington signals that this leverage must be aligned with American political needs.
Energy is equally critical. Cartel backed militias siphon fuel, extort refineries, and hover near Venezuela’s offshore zones, just as Guyana rises as a major oil producer. U.S. naval deployments are less about Maduro than about securing rigs, safeguarding new supply routes, and denying rivals the chance to disrupt or capture a vital source of future oil.
Minerals deepen the stakes. Cartels are embedded in gold, lithium, and rare earth supply chains essential to the energy transition. By targeting their networks, Washington is forcing these flows into Western industries rather than adversarial channels. The same applies to logistics. Cartel linked firms dominate trucking and shipping across Latin America. Treated as national security actors, they must either integrate into U.S. aligned trade systems or be financially isolated.
The financial layer ties it together. For decades, cartel money coursed through U.S. and global shadow banking. Wachovia admitted to laundering billions. HSBC paid fines for moving narco dollars through correspondent accounts. Those flows blended into offshore dollar markets and were quietly tolerated as liquidity. That era is ending. By sanctioning Mexican banks and invoking new authorities to target Chinese intermediaries, Washington is dismantling the pipelines that once made cartels invisible participants in global finance. This is less about narcotics than about restoring control over the monetary arteries of the hemisphere.
In this light, Maduro looks more like a broker than a sovereign. His survival depends on cutting deals with cartels, and his power is limited by their willingness to concede. Washington knows this, which is why the real campaign of sanctions, patrols, financial strikes is aimed at forcing cartel networks to alter their behavior with regards to managing migration, secure energy corridors, channel minerals westward, and stop using trade to empower rivals.
Whether this ends in regime change is uncertain. It could stabilize Maduro as a weakened figurehead while cartels yield to U.S. terms. Or it could undermine the foundations of his rule and trigger political transition. That ambiguity may be deliberate.
What is clear is that this is not just about narcotics. It is about redefining the cartels role in the hemispheric order, severing their ties to the shadow banking system, and forcing them to deliver macroeconomic concessions that serve U.S. strategic dominance.
You don’t have to support this action or like it, but if you work in markets you should *pay attention* to it.
Economic statecraft joins up with the political and economic variants in a unified Grand Macro Strategy. tweet
AkhenOsiris
Nadella got a sneak peek of Gemini 3 and he musta been hella impressed 😂
"Of course, the real test of this era won’t be when another tech company breaks a valuation record. It will be when the overall economy and society themselves reach new heights."
I’ve been thinking a lot about what the net benefit of the AI platform wave is. The real question is how to empower every company out there to get more out of this platform shift and build their own AI native capabilities and enterprise value (vs inadvertently just transfer their unique value to the tech sector!!).
Bill famously said a platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it. That’s the essence of the positive-sum future.
Even in our somewhat zero-sum mindset industry, we can create partnerships that create value for all parties involved. Our partnership with OpenAI is a great example. Our investment helped them scale; their research accelerated our own innovation. That’s what healthy platforms and partners do—they catalyze and compound progress.
There’s no better proof than what we announced just this week. The world’s first AI superfactory was co-designed with OpenAI and informed by three generations of AI supercomputers we built for frontier model training and inference. It was also a result of working closely with Nvidia and getting better at the full stack optimization from model architecture to micro-architecture of the chip and everything between three companies!
We also did the work to bring AMD into the fleet doing inference of GPT models, which enabled them to get up to speed on their own software stack for AI.
And now all this infrastructure will scale to support every startup to enterprise doing their own training to inference.
You can see the same dynamic in coding. Thanks to AI, the category itself has expanded and may ultimately become one of the largest software categories. I don’t ever recall any analyst ever asking me about how much revenue Visual Studio makes! But now everyone is excited about AI coding tools. This is another aspect of positive sum, when the category itself is redefined and the pie becomes 10x what it was! With GitHub Copilot we compete for our share and with GitHub and Agent HQ we also provide a platform for others.
Of course, the real test of this era won’t be when another tech company breaks a valuation record. It will be when the overall economy and society themselves reach new heights.
When a pharma company uses AI in silico to bring a new therapy to market in one year instead of twelve. When a manufacturer uses AI to redesign a supply chain overnight. When a teacher personalizes lessons for every student. When a farmer predicts and prevents crop failure. That’s when we’ll know the system is working.
Let us move beyond zero-sum thinking and the winner-take-all hype and focus instead on building broad capabilities that harness the power of this technology to achieve local success in each firm, which then leads to broad economic growth and societal benefits. And every firm needs to make sure they have control of their own destiny and sovereignty vs just a press release with a Tech/AI company or worse leak all their value through what may seem like a partnership, except it's extractive in terms of value exchange in the long run.
We know that the Internet wave had tremendous positive sum impact in the world, and yet we also had some sectors that got hollowed out like local media. This time around we have the opportunity to ensure broad diffusion of this tech with choice and control that is distributed to ensure positive sum outcomes across the board.
At the end of the day, this new technological wave gives us the opportunity to dream bigger and set higher ambitions for what we can collectively achieve. Each of us will need to play our part! - Satya Nadella tweet
Nadella got a sneak peek of Gemini 3 and he musta been hella impressed 😂
"Of course, the real test of this era won’t be when another tech company breaks a valuation record. It will be when the overall economy and society themselves reach new heights."
I’ve been thinking a lot about what the net benefit of the AI platform wave is. The real question is how to empower every company out there to get more out of this platform shift and build their own AI native capabilities and enterprise value (vs inadvertently just transfer their unique value to the tech sector!!).
Bill famously said a platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that creates it. That’s the essence of the positive-sum future.
Even in our somewhat zero-sum mindset industry, we can create partnerships that create value for all parties involved. Our partnership with OpenAI is a great example. Our investment helped them scale; their research accelerated our own innovation. That’s what healthy platforms and partners do—they catalyze and compound progress.
There’s no better proof than what we announced just this week. The world’s first AI superfactory was co-designed with OpenAI and informed by three generations of AI supercomputers we built for frontier model training and inference. It was also a result of working closely with Nvidia and getting better at the full stack optimization from model architecture to micro-architecture of the chip and everything between three companies!
We also did the work to bring AMD into the fleet doing inference of GPT models, which enabled them to get up to speed on their own software stack for AI.
And now all this infrastructure will scale to support every startup to enterprise doing their own training to inference.
You can see the same dynamic in coding. Thanks to AI, the category itself has expanded and may ultimately become one of the largest software categories. I don’t ever recall any analyst ever asking me about how much revenue Visual Studio makes! But now everyone is excited about AI coding tools. This is another aspect of positive sum, when the category itself is redefined and the pie becomes 10x what it was! With GitHub Copilot we compete for our share and with GitHub and Agent HQ we also provide a platform for others.
Of course, the real test of this era won’t be when another tech company breaks a valuation record. It will be when the overall economy and society themselves reach new heights.
When a pharma company uses AI in silico to bring a new therapy to market in one year instead of twelve. When a manufacturer uses AI to redesign a supply chain overnight. When a teacher personalizes lessons for every student. When a farmer predicts and prevents crop failure. That’s when we’ll know the system is working.
Let us move beyond zero-sum thinking and the winner-take-all hype and focus instead on building broad capabilities that harness the power of this technology to achieve local success in each firm, which then leads to broad economic growth and societal benefits. And every firm needs to make sure they have control of their own destiny and sovereignty vs just a press release with a Tech/AI company or worse leak all their value through what may seem like a partnership, except it's extractive in terms of value exchange in the long run.
We know that the Internet wave had tremendous positive sum impact in the world, and yet we also had some sectors that got hollowed out like local media. This time around we have the opportunity to ensure broad diffusion of this tech with choice and control that is distributed to ensure positive sum outcomes across the board.
At the end of the day, this new technological wave gives us the opportunity to dream bigger and set higher ambitions for what we can collectively achieve. Each of us will need to play our part! - Satya Nadella tweet
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Dimitry Nakhla | Babylon Capital®
RT @arpangup: When Shohei Ohtani was a high school freshman, he created a detailed "dream sheet" with one central goal: to be the #1 draft pick for 8 NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) teams.
It was a 64-cell roadmap based on a framework called the Harada Method.
Here's exactly what Shohei did 👇
1. First, some history.... The Harada Method was created by Takashi Harada, a Japanese junior high track coach. He took a team ranked last out of 380 schools and, using his system, turned them into the #1 team in the region within 3 years. They held that top spot for the next 6 years.
2. You start by placing your main goal in the center of an 8x8 grid. For Ohtani, this was "be the #1 draft pick."
3. Next, you identify 8 critical supporting pillars needed to achieve that goal. These surround the main goal.
Ohtani's 8 pillars were:
• Body
• Control
• Sharpness
• Speed
• Pitch Variance
• Personality
• Karma/Luck
• Mental Toughness
4. You then break down each of those 8 pillars into 8 smaller, actionable tasks or daily routines.
This fills out the entire 64-cell grid, turning a massive dream into a concrete, daily action plan.
To improve his karma, he listed tangible actions like:
• Showing Respect to Umpires
• Picking up trash
• Being positive
• Being someone people want to support
5. The method goes far deeper than just technical skills. It forces you to analyze your weaknesses and build confidence. It also has a highlight on service to others, emphasizing that humility and contributing to your community are essential for personal success.
6. The key to the system is daily execution and accountability. Once the 64-cell chart is complete, you turn the tasks and habits into a daily diary and a "Routine Check Sheet." It’s designed to transform abstract intentions into a measurable, daily practice.
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RT @arpangup: When Shohei Ohtani was a high school freshman, he created a detailed "dream sheet" with one central goal: to be the #1 draft pick for 8 NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) teams.
It was a 64-cell roadmap based on a framework called the Harada Method.
Here's exactly what Shohei did 👇
1. First, some history.... The Harada Method was created by Takashi Harada, a Japanese junior high track coach. He took a team ranked last out of 380 schools and, using his system, turned them into the #1 team in the region within 3 years. They held that top spot for the next 6 years.
2. You start by placing your main goal in the center of an 8x8 grid. For Ohtani, this was "be the #1 draft pick."
3. Next, you identify 8 critical supporting pillars needed to achieve that goal. These surround the main goal.
Ohtani's 8 pillars were:
• Body
• Control
• Sharpness
• Speed
• Pitch Variance
• Personality
• Karma/Luck
• Mental Toughness
4. You then break down each of those 8 pillars into 8 smaller, actionable tasks or daily routines.
This fills out the entire 64-cell grid, turning a massive dream into a concrete, daily action plan.
To improve his karma, he listed tangible actions like:
• Showing Respect to Umpires
• Picking up trash
• Being positive
• Being someone people want to support
5. The method goes far deeper than just technical skills. It forces you to analyze your weaknesses and build confidence. It also has a highlight on service to others, emphasizing that humility and contributing to your community are essential for personal success.
6. The key to the system is daily execution and accountability. Once the 64-cell chart is complete, you turn the tasks and habits into a daily diary and a "Routine Check Sheet." It’s designed to transform abstract intentions into a measurable, daily practice.
The legend continues!
Shohei Ohtani is the NL MVP for the second straight season! https://t.co/aVC7HqxENQ tweet