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Just a matter of time before Silver replaces the USD. Silver for smaller, everyday lower size transactions and Gold for larger institutional size ones. Companies like Strategy have tried to use Bitcoin for Treasury holdings, that is failing. Now it’s time to return to REAL money, Gold & Silver.https://x.com/IntlStacker/status/2028808438159982893
https://x.com/BryceMLipscomb/status/2028575336670097423
SPECULATION SO FAR
Mr Rubio said President Donald Trump was forced into a preemptive response after learning of an imminent Israeli attack, as officials knew such an attack would trigger retaliation against US military personnel in the Middle East.
“It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone – the United States or Israel or anyone – they were going to respond, and respond against the United States,” the secretary of state told reporters at the Capitol on Monday.
“There was a threat to Israel. If we equate a threat to Israel as the equivalent of an imminent threat to the United States, then we are in uncharted territory.”
https://x.com/WarTracker_/status/2028282748163457122
https://x.com/aldamu_jo/status/2007064761150927207 (posted in January 2026)
Jeffrey Sachs — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Sachs (Globalist)
Trump, unsatisfied with Spain’s behavior regarding its military and cooperation with the United States announced he will “cut off all trade” with Spain.
The channel claimed that many members of the body had been killed or wounded.
The Assembly of Experts is the clerical body responsible under Iran’s constitution for appointing and overseeing the supreme leader.
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202603031369
support turning into resistance
Shit continues to hit the fan in private credit, as we have long suspected would happen. As I’ve tried to keep in the discussion, while all eyes over the past few days have understandably been glued to the escalating conflict with Iran and its knock-on effects across energy and equities, that geopolitical noise has overshadowed financial fault lines developing in credit markets.
Yesterday it was reported that Blackstone is facing record withdrawal requests from its flagship private credit vehicle, the Blackstone Private Credit Fund, according to Bloomberg.
Investors sought to redeem 7.9% of the fund’s shares in the latest quarter — the largest redemption wave in its history — amounting to roughly $3.8 billion. The fund, which holds about $82 billion in assets including leverage, typically caps quarterly redemptions at 5%, underscoring how unusual the surge in withdrawals has become.
To satisfy the requests, Blackstone expanded a previously planned 7% tender offer and stepped in alongside employees to absorb the remaining 0.9%.
“These investments were about meeting 100% of requests for the quarter with certainty and timeliness,” a Blackstone spokesperson said, adding that the move reflects the firm’s conviction in the strategy.
Bloomberg notes that rising redemption requests are not isolated to one manager, but part of broader unease across the $1.8 trillion private credit market, where concerns about AI-driven disruption in software borrowers, valuation opacity, and credit quality are increasingly surfacing.
None of this happened in a vacuum.
In the days leading up to this headline, I was already pointing to stress signals building beneath the surface. On March 2, I wrote that the more important test for markets wasn’t geopolitics — it was bank stocks.
The SPDR S&P Regional Banking ETF (KRE) had already been sliding hard, down sharply pre-market after a brutal prior session. That selling began before missiles flew, which told me something critical: the pressure was endogenous. The market was already starting to acknowledge cracks in private credit, and if that pillar of liquidity weakened, external shocks would act as accelerants rather than root causes.
Just days earlier, on February 27, I noted that regional banks and private credit were “living on borrowed time,” propped up by commercial real estate exposure, subprime auto lending, and generous marks on illiquid loans.
The KBW Bank Index dropped sharply, while alternative asset managers embedded in private markets — including Apollo Global Management (APO) and Blue Owl Capital (OWL) — sold off aggressively. I also warned that when private funds begin limiting redemptions or shifting payout structures, it’s rarely procedural — it’s usually an early warning that liquidity is tightening.
I emphasized that private credit’s perceived stability rests heavily on Level 3 accounting and model-based valuations. Assets that don’t trade don’t get marked down in real time. But when redemptions rise and funds must meet cash outflows, theoretical marks meet actual bids. That’s when repricing can happen abruptly.
Combine that with a Fed that appears constrained, aggressive bank selling, and geopolitical risk layered on top, and the margin for error in a market trading at extreme multiples shrinks fast.
Blackstone meeting redemptions in full may calm nerves temporarily. But record withdrawals from one of the industry’s largest evergreen vehicles are not noise. They are signal. In my view, this cycle in private credit is unlikely to resolve cleanly — and I suspect things get worse before they get better.
Now that the Iran situation has dominated headlines and traders’ screens, the deeper issues in private credit — from elevated default risk among heavily leveraged borrowers to rising redemption pressures on ostensibly stable credit funds — are finally forcing a reckoning among market participants. Rather than being the primary cause, geopolitical tensions have acted as a distraction from structural risks that were already evident and building; this dynamic only reinforces that the private credit unwind we’ve been flagging isn’t a matter of “if,” but when, and the market may now be entering that phase.
ACCORDING TO EUGYPPIUS
2 MONTHS AGO VENEZUELA WAS A HUGE STORY AND THE PANICANS WERE RAGING
As we consider where the Iran war is headed, let’s check in on Trump’s first regime-change operation this year. Yesterday, Bloomberg reported, “Venezuela’s Crude Exports Double in February Under US Oversight.” It’s even better than that. Stand by for refueling.
Remember the good old days in January, when President Trump “intervened” in Venezuela, and the entire progressive establishment lost its collective mind? “Another Iraq!” they shrieked. “Boots on the ground!” They howled, “Regime change never works!” And they kept saying the word, “quagmire!”— although I’m pretty sure they don’t know what that word means.
Believe it or not, all that was two months ago. Let’s check in.
Bloomberg reported yesterday that Venezuela’s oil exports doubled in February. They’ve shot up to roughly 1.4 million barrels a day from only 800,000 in January. That’s $2 billion in oil sales in a single month —which is a lot for that benighted country— all flowing through U.S.-managed accounts earmarked for the benefit of the Venezuelan people.
They expect another $5 billion in the coming months.
Here’s the part progressives wish would disappear. Under former President Maduro (now president of his cell block), Venezuela was shipping 90% of its oil to China. For the privilege, China got a massive discount, paying as much as $21 per barrel below market price.
In other words, Maduro’s dictatorial regime was fire-selling Venezuelan oil to prop himself up while his people starved. Under the new U.S.-supervised arrangement, that discount collapsed to just $6 below market. Venezuela now makes nearly 30% more on every single barrel, and the money is going into humanitarian and reconstruction programs instead of into Maduro’s Swiss bank accounts.
Mind you, I’m not arguing that intervention is justified whenever a third-world dictator strikes a bad deal with China. At the end of the day, that’s a Venezuela problem. Driving China out of Latin America was the goal, but a side benefit is that Venezuelans are almost immediately enjoying the blessings of de-Chinazation.
So let’s check the ‘quagmire scoreboard’ (South American edition). Two months in, we have: a murderous dictator captured, political prisoners freed, diplomatic relations renewed, elections being planned, oil exports doubled, revenue redirected to the people, and China lost its sweetheart deal on oil stolen from American oil companies.
President Trump will never get the credit for this, but this is truly historic. I’m not sure there’s anything historically comparable to this turnaround in Caracas. Remember— Trump did something new, bold, and different with this new style of regime change. He took out the leader, but left the government in place. That was a massive political risk, but it also created dizzying new possibilities.
Trump’s innovation was making a lightning recovery possible. I can’t find a single example of a post-regime-change country hitting all of these markers within an eye-watering 60 days:
…Dictator removed and facing criminal trial
…Political prisoners freed (540+ and counting) and political prisons closed
…Sweeping amnesty law passed covering 25 years
…Oil exports doubled — $2B in revenue in one month, flowing through transparent channels
….Diplomatic relations restored
….10-12% annual GDP growth projected
….No ongoing military occupation
…..China weakened
Maybe most astonishing of all: rebuilding Venezuela is costing America nothing; we are actually making money on it. Talk about the Art of the Deal. If you’d tried to sell me on this idea a year ago, I’d have called it impossible. I probably would have argued with you about it.
What makes the Venezuelan recovery historically unique is its self-funding mechanism. Every other major post-regime recovery —Germany, Japan, South Korea, Iraq— required massive external capital infusion. Once again, Trump saw potential that nobody else did: use Venezuelan assets.
Caracas crouches over the world’s largest proven oil reserves. The wealth was always there. The only thing standing between Venezuela and prosperity was the guy who was stealing everything. Remove the guy, redirect the revenue, and the country starts healing— using its own money.
That’s not just historically fast. Trump might have created a genuinely new model: the anti-quagmire, featuring rapid regime change without nation-building— where liberating a country’s own resources is the reconstruction plan. No occupations, no hundred-billion-dollar restoration packages, no forever wars.
If that’s a ‘quagmire,’ then we need more and better quagmires.
Iran is a bigger, pricklier problem than Venezuela. But Trump’s unprecedented, creative approach to the Caracas turnaround suggests his team also has similarly innovative ideas for handling Tehran. If so, it’s good news for us, and great news for the Iranian people. Let the man work.
JEFF CHILDERS
Saudi media quoted reports from “media close to the Revolutionary Guards” saying that Iran’s interim defense minister, Majid Ibn Reza, who was appointed yesterday, has been killed
https://x.com/izakaminska/status/2028754523137699958
Hormuz and China.
or MATE?: GLOBAL Systemic Margin Call?
When the dust settles there will be some great bargains.
Your guess is as good as mine.
The morning’s top story on the New York Times’ web page reported, “Iran Escalates Retaliatory Strikes Around the Region.” Iran’s military strategy appears to be modeled after a cranky toddler who, after being told he can’t have a cookie, proceeds to throw the cookie jar at every single person in or near the house, including the dog, the cable guy, and his Omani neighbor who was just trying to return a tahini dish.
Iran’s largely unsupervised missile crews continued launching strikes at uninvolved neighboring countries yesterday, trying to crush American civilian targets like Amazon’s data centers and official ones like US embassies. It’s not so much a retaliatory campaign as a temper tantrum with ballistic missiles. Even the Little Rocket Man, Kim Jong Un, might call it excessive.
Yesterday, Business Insider reported, “How the US and Israel weakened and blinded Iran to take control of its skies in the opening hours.” Yesterday’s most militarily significant quote arrived courtesy of Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan “Raisin’” Caine, who said simply, “Local air superiority has been established over Iran.”
That’s a big development.
For comparison, four years into the Proxy War, Russia has yet to achieve air superiority over Ukraine. For example, Moscow’s non-stealth jets cannot safely fly over Kyiv. Air superiority means that the country enjoying it can strike targets anywhere it wants, whenever it wants, without significant fear of loss. So Iranian troops, missile crews, and military leaders are now all toads ‘neath the harrow.
On Day One, the U.S. sent B-2 stealth bombers— our $2 billion invisible ones. By Day Two, they’d switched to B-1 Lancers, which are older, non-stealth bombers that carry much more ordnance but need safe skies to operate. By yesterday afternoon, Israeli media reported its jets were flying directly over Tehran and dropping bombs on target.
They don’t send non-stealth bombers into contested airspace. They only send them when it’s safe.
Iran has plenty of ballistic missiles— they’ve been firing waves of them at Israel, U.S. bases across the Middle East, and its neighbors’ hotels. But every launch is a death sentence for the launcher. U.S. and Israeli surveillance assets —satellites, drones, AWACS— are watching every square mile of Iranian territory in real time. If a missile goes up, its origin coordinates go straight to the nearest fighter or bomber, and that launcher ceases to exist before the crew can reload.
It’s a losing trade every time. Iran fires a missile that may or may not get intercepted by Iron Dome or a U.S. destroyer’s Aegis system. In exchange, it permanently loses the launcher, the crew, and whatever else was parked nearby. The Iranians are spending down an inventory they can’t replace while the U.S. rotates fresh aircraft off carrier decks.
Satellite imagery already shows damage to a major missile base near Najafabad in Esfahan Province. (I did not make those names up.) Underground ballistic missile facilities have been hit by B-2 bombers carrying 2,000-pound bunker busters. The IDF says it’s specifically targeting Iranian leadership and ballistic missile launchers — a combination that means every launch order might be the last one the guy giving it ever issues.
Iran’s military is caught in a doom loop: hide and survive, or shoot and be destroyed.
? The anti-war narrative is back on the front burner! And it is reaching full, shrill steam. Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans —who for the last four years traded their US flags for Ukrainian ones and clapped like mental patients at snack time over funding Kiev’s conman with hundreds of billions— have suddenly turned on a dime and become studious anti-war philosophers.
Congressman Adam Schiff, who never met a weapons package for Ukraine he didn’t love, gravely warned about “the dangers of unilateral executive military action.” The New York Times editorial board —which ran “The Case for Arming Ukraine” at least four hundred times— published “The Risks of Escalation in Iran” before the first B-2 had even returned to base.
Suddenly, everyone on cable news can pronounce “Strait of Hormuz” and has strong opinions about the War Powers Act. These are the same people who couldn’t find Iran on a map last Tuesday but are now deeply concerned about “regional destabilization.” Please. The New York Times, this morning:
Afghanistan? Iraq? HOW ABOUT UKRAINE?? It’s funny, I don’t remember the Times describing Biden’s $175+ billion Ukraine adventure as “embracing military power.” That was called “defending democracy.” When Biden armed an endless, four-year proxy war against a nuclear superpower —a conflict that involved zero U.S. or NATO interests— they swooned over his cabbage-like statesmanship.
But when Trump uses the U.S. military directly —with air superiority established in 48 hours— suddenly, it’s reckless warmongering.
They spent four years cheering a proxy war against a nuclear superpower and snored louder than a bulldog after a big meal. Now they’ve suddenly discovered the horrors of military conflict and the “risks of escalation”— just in time for a Republican president to be the one in command.
In March, 2024, Democrats vowed, “We must stand firm against authoritarian regimes who threaten global security.” But in March, 2026, they now say, “This reckless military adventurism puts American lives at risk.” There are more quotes like this than I can count. I could do this all day.
And finally: welcome back the body count graphic, which suddenly reappeared on CNN’s chyron after a four-year hiatus. The network that never once ran a casualty ticker for Ukraine —where conservative estimates range past half a million dead— has re-discovered an urgent new interest in counting in single digits.
Spoiler alert: The body count isn’t about the bodies.
JEFF CHILDERS
MAYBE THIS ?
“You shouldn’t homeschool. You should let experts educate your kids.”
“Ok. And we get bad results, the experts will be held responsible for their failure?”
“Good heavens, no. Outcomes are your responsibility as parents.”
“Ok. If I’m responsible anyway, I think I’ll just homeschool.”
“You aren’t smart enough to educate your children. Leave it to the experts.”
“But…you just said…”
“You obviously still need to be involved. You need to spend time at home ensuring good educational outcomes.”
“Ok. How much time will I have?”
“We’ll have them most of the day. After homework and everything else, you’ll have 2-3 hours, tops. Far less if they are in extracurricular activities.”
“So you get my children for far longer than me each day, and take no responsibility?”
“Yes. We’re the *experts.*”
“Well, if those 2-3 hours each night is all it should take to ensure good educational outcomes, I think I’ll homeschool and be done before noon everyday.”
“…”
“…”
“Why do you spew such hate toward teachers?”
Monthly. big money was made on the silver so range bound for now as higher oil hurts the bottom line and too heavy and bulky to pack in the suitcase. Ratio has never been so low….
This is hilarious!
India is looking at once again increasing its purchases of Russian crude as the war in the Middle East threatens to hit supplies in the world’s third-largest oil importer, Bloomberg reported on Monday.
State refiners in the South Asian nation held talks with government officials over the weekend in New Delhi to work on contingency plans to meet requirements since the supplies through the Strait of Hormuz have almost stopped, according to the report.
India is now considering buying Russian cargoes that are loitering near its waters, the news outlet said, citing people familiar with the matter. There are believed to be about 9.5 million barrels of Russian oil in tankers in Asian waters, according to the report.
https://www.rt.com/india/633485-indian-refiners-looking-to-increase/
So I have had a chance to prepare a chart showing the logic of why a drop to 42.90 is possible. Possible is not a guarantee however. Rather it is a probability if price cannot quickly recover and continue higher. So this target is only going to be meaningful for a few days at most when we will have more information to work with. If price goes red again as its done today I expect the worst to transpire and the 42.90 will then come into play.
Official statement from Iranian Foreign Ministery – Majid Takht-Ravanchi
https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2028488048632037784
Top Iranian official Mohsen Rezaee: “We want to form an Islamic army with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and several other countries.”
https://x.com/SMO_VZ/status/1934373962173358379
https://x.com/AytSJNEng/status/2028673319030100207
https://x.com/mohammedakunjee/status/2028604704410734626
https://x.com/AdameMedia/status/2028607173975064975
Patriot missiles are the most valued and rare commodity these days!
https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2028546048533414058
https://x.com/MyLordBebo/status/2028583483593957607
Trump made a deal with nearly all the nations of the Middle East and the Muslim world, to bring peace to the region.
Peace in the region could never be accomplished so long as the Iranian regime and their terror proxies exist, so Trump is eliminating the problem, and paving the way for a stable and peaceful Middle East.
Now take it 40,000 feet. The CIA has been cleansed, strings have been cut, and Deep State destabilization of the Middle East is coming to a close. Trump is eliminating Deep State assets in the region, meaning Khamenei’s radical Islamic regime and their terror proxies like Hezbollah, Houthis, Hamas, etc.
Trump is undoing decades of CIA meddling and purging Deep State assets worldwide. Iran and their terror proxies in the Middle East, and the drug cartels in the Western Hemisphere.
Without these rogue assets and Deep State tentacles intentionally destabilizing these regions, the world will be free to move forward into a new era of peace.
It’s actually happening.
https://x.com/_Postive_Vibes/status/2028543001035989344
Correction — commentor updated that this announcment was made on Jan 13, 2026 — same leave date of March 17
https://x.com/Strong5590/status/2028559171482788003
https://x.com/DC_Draino/status/2028578623402242282
9 minutes (hidden camera video)
https://www.ctvnews.ca/vancouver/article/bc-moving-to-permanent-daylight-time/
US issues evacuation warning telling Americans to leave the following countries now: • Iran • Iraq • Syria • Israel • Egypt • Qatar • Oman • Jordan • Yemen • Kuwait • Bahrain • Lebanon • Saudi Arabia • United Arab Emirates
