Dn Bric

[ian bremmer @ianbremmer]

picture = 1000 words

[ian bremmer @ianbremmer]

the brits turning over their governments more often than the italians is quite something.

[ian bremmer @ianbremmer]

the world needs the strait of hormuz reopened. should have happened months ago, but today’s outcome is the best option available.

having said that, iran war has been a disaster. no agreement on nukes, ballistic missiles, support for proxies…and one of the world’s most brutal regimes remains in place…and is getting paid off.

biggest foreign policy failure of trump administration by a long margin.

[Barchart @Barchart]

Shiller PE Ratio is now just 3.5% away from passing the Dot Com Bubble as the most expensive stock market valuation in history 🚨🚨🚨

[Walter Deemer @WalterDeemer]

The Rise And Fall of Radio Corporation of America 100 years ago:

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

BREAKING: According to our analysis, ~$920 million worth of crude oil shorts were taken 70 minutes before an Axios report claimed the US and Iran were near a "14-point" deal to end the war.

At 3:40 AM ET today, nearly 10,000 contracts worth of crude oil shorts were taken without any major news.

This is equivalent to ~$920 million in notional value, an unusually large trade for 3:40 AM ET.

At 4:50 AM ET, just 70 minutes later, Axios reported that the US is "close" to a "memorandum of understanding" to end the Iran War.

By 7:00 AM ET, oil prices had fallen over -12% with these crude oil shorts gaining approximately +$125 million.

Minutes later, Iran launched the "Persian Gulf Strait Authority" and oil prices surged +8%.

What just happened?

[KKGB @INArteCarloDoss]

Hegseth is drunk again. US controls SOH but there is no safe passage of ships and when ships try to pass they are attacked. This makes zero sense. Same with this constant oscillation between “open the strait now”, “we don’t need the strait, it’s others problem”, “we control it”

[Jason Goepfert @jasongoepfert]

Funds are selling while retail is buying.

The 2nd-largest hedge fund selling in tech in a decade meets the 3rd-largest retail fund flow into $QQQ.

[HealthRanger @HealthRanger]

The situation with oil is worse than you think.

The oil wells of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and the UAE are not like a garden hose. They are mature, low-pressure reservoirs that require precise gas injection to maintain flow. Once that flow stops, water encroachment -- what engineers call water coning -- traps oil behind barriers of saltwater that are nearly impossible to reverse. Worse, paraffin waxes and asphaltenes precipitate inside the wellbore tubing, clogging the rock pores with solid deposits.

This is not theory; it is basic petroleum physics. The recent Israeli strike on Iran's South Pars gas field -- the largest in the world -- caused a lasting shock to the entire regional energy system. When the field was hit, the pressure dropped across hundreds of wells. Even if peace breaks out tomorrow, those wells will never produce at their former rates without expensive re-drilling that takes years. The same applies to Qatar's Ras Laffan LNG complex, which was struck by Iranian missiles in retaliation. These are not temporary shutdowns; they are permanent fractures in the energy backbone of civilization.

Industry studies show that even short shutdowns of five days to a few weeks cause flow rate losses of 20-30%. The wells in Kuwait never fully recovered after the Desert Storm fires, and that was with only a few months of disruption. Now we are looking at months of no production, with many fields flaring gas instead of exporting it.

The Strait of Hormuz closure has already removed a significant share of global energy, and rising energy costs are triggering cascading impacts across industries, including food and transportation. Every day the strait remains closed, the invisible tax on global oil supply grows larger -- not just from lost barrels, but from the permanent impairment of the reservoirs themselves. The world could lose 4 to 6 million barrels per day of capacity even after the strait reopens, and that means higher prices for years.

Read the full article here:

No Way Out: Why Permanent Damage to Persian Gulf Oil Wells Begins Now
https://t.co/2ZkeNCib95

[The Factor Report @PeterLBrandt]

The abuse of power to unethically speculate on price discovery by the Orange Hair administration is spectacular by the way it shines a spotlight on its own activity. There is NOOOOO doubt in my mind as a 52 year veteran of trading that this is being done by the Trump gang

[Simon Ree @simon_ree]

Stocks have already priced an outcome - war ends, Hormuz reopens, oil mean reverts, earnings carry the tape, Fed is on-hold but benign - and are now demanding that reality cooperate

With IRGC ship seizures and Iran's refusal to attend Islamabad talks, reality is not yet cooperating

The gap between what's priced and what's actually happening is the trade

Id rather own a Brent long than an $SPX call here

[KKGB @INArteCarloDoss]

Way more corrupt than Nixon

Way more inept than Carter

Way more dumb than Bush Jr

As senile as Biden

And time will prove that he is way more economically illiterate than Hoover

[Seyed Mohammad Marandi @s_m_marandi]

Personally, I believe Trump is probably saying all this nonsense about agreements with Iran so that he can later claim, "Iran didn't keep its promises" - promises Iran never made. The chances of renewed murderous aggression from Trump and Netanyahu are high.

Iran is ready.

[Sari Arho Havrén @SariArhoHavren]

Great read coming from Lithuania by @GLandsbergis

“The US was never perfect  — but it represented aspiration towards an ideal. Liberty, freedom, call it what you want, but it was best represented by the US of A. 

This was peak American soft power. It meant that Europeans chose to accept American leadership — not because we had to, but because we believed we were on the right side of history, together.”

1/2

[Warren Pies @WarrenPies]

The last 10-days have been unlike any 10-day period in the market since 1950.

First, the S&P 500 is up 9.8% in 10-days, which is in the 99.7th percentile of all 10 day returns.

[Global Markets Investor @GlobalMktObserv]

🚨The US stock market has never been this OVERVALUED:

The Buffett Indicator, which measures total corporate equities relative to GDP, rose to 232.6%, the highest level in history.

This is well above the 2000 Dot-Com Bubble peak of 162.6% and the 2021 market frenzy high of 218.7%.

Since the Great Financial Crisis low, the ratio has risen +163.6 percentage points, or more than 3 times.

US equities are in uncharted territory.

[Sari Arho Havrén @SariArhoHavren]

For the first time, the American President, his administration and family join Russia, China and other autocrats to rally for a corrupt leader who actively works to undermine democracy, freedom and the people who root for democracy.

An example of how valuable soft power was lost in less than half a year. This is not America that was respected and admired.

[Simon Ree @simon_ree]

$SPX is sitting right back where it was the day before the bombs started dropping on Iran

Think about what's happened in between:

- A 5-week kinetic war involving the world's largest economy
- The Strait of Hormuz... through which ~20% of global oil flows... effectively shut and still not reopened
- Oil, gas, fertiliser, helium, chemicals... all disrupted simultaneously
- Missile and drone strikes on ~30% of the Gulf's petrochemical and oil infrastructure
- Iran's Supreme Leader killed, replaced by a successor publicly demanding "revenge"
- Crude still 35-40% above pre-war levels
- A two-week ceasefire so fragile that Israel was bombing Lebanon on day one of it

The equity market's verdict on all of that? Nothing to see here

Round-trip. As if none of it ever happened

What's going on here? Here's both sides as honestly as I can lay them out.

THE BULL CASE (and it isn't stupid):

Systematic flows are running the show. CTAs who were max short at the lows are being mechanically force-fed back in as realised vol collapses. Vol-target funds are re-leveraging. Dealer gamma flipped supportive above 6,800. Once that machine starts running, fundamentals become decoration

Consensus base case: the ceasefire holds, Hormuz gradually reopens, oil drifts back into the $80s, and the whole episode gets filed away as a transitory hit to Q2 margins. Not a regime change, a minor speed bump

Meanwhile the AI capex story keeps printing money. $AMZN up 5% today on Andy Jassy's letter pushing in-house silicon. Meta's new model launch. The whole Mag7 narrative humming along independent of anything happening in the Persian Gulf... and despite the odd data centre getting blown up along the way

Yardeni and the bull camp are out today telling clients the bottom is in and trimming recession odds back to 20%. They might be right

THE BEAR CASE (and it's the one keeping me awake):

Is anybody actually doing the earnings math?

A sustained $25-30/bbl crude premium is a tax on every transport, chemical, packaging, retail and consumer-discretionary P&L in the index. None of it is in the numbers yet. Not the margin contraction from rising input costs. Not the working capital getting eaten by tankers rerouting. Not the insurance and freight rates that have repriced violently

Today's data quietly screamed stagflation. Jobless claims jumped to 219k (highest in three months). February core PCE sticky at +0.4% m/m. Consumer sentiment still in the toilet

The market is paying ~22x forward earnings on a 2026 EPS number that hasn't been honestly marked since late February

Meanwhile, Goldman's commodities desk is openly modelling Brent averaging $100+ through 2026 if Hormuz stays jammed another month

Vance, Witkoff and Kushner sit down with Iran in Islamabad on Saturday. Iran's 10-point demand list (full Hormuz control, sanctions removal, enrichment rights) is functionally unacceptable to Washington

A two-week pause is not a resolution. It's an option that expires

The market has decided the geopolitical risk premium is zero. We'll soon know whether that's a decision that ages well.

[Robert A. Pape @ProfessorPape]

The Iran ceasefire is being called a “pause.”

It’s not.

It’s a revelation:
The U.S. used overwhelming force—and still could not control the outcome.
That’s a structural shift in power.

[Common Sense 🇺🇸💙 @commons96055467]

To comply with the ceasefire, any American tankers crossing the Strait of Hormuz, must pay $2 million in Yuan to Iran. The US is experiencing the mother of all humiliations in the eyes of the world.