If you knew you were sitting at the helm of a collapse in fin mkts, which would bring social unrest and likely displace your position of power what would you have done?
🚨Chevron just filed a $13.8 billion RIGI application for Vaca Muerta.
30-year tax, FX and regulatory stability locked in.
One of the largest single investment plans in Argentina's shale patch.
Chevron is going all in 🇦🇷🛢️
This is a full field, multi decade shale development commitment.
El Trapial, Neuquén.
100% Chevron-operated.
Hundreds of horizontal wells, gas and liquids handling, water and midstream infrastructure all tied into Argentina's growing export pipeline to the Atlantic. 📋
What RIGI gives Chevron:
→ Corporate income tax locked at 25% with accelerated depreciation
→ FX protections retain hard-currency export proceeds, shielded from future capital controls
→ Export duty exemptions on qualified output after ramp-up
→ 30 year stability on tax, customs and FX rules
→ International arbitration access (ICSID) for disputes
This is exactly what Chevron said it was waiting for.
Executives have been explicit: RIGI was the precondition for going all in on Vaca Muerta.
The scale of the bet:
→ $13.8 billion committed over the project life
→ Target: roughly triple Chevron's Vaca Muerta output by 2035
→ El Trapial becomes one of Chevron's main non-US shale growth engines
→ Sits alongside 50% non-op stake in Loma Campana the flagship YPF/Chevron development
Chevron already spent $ 500M+ on El Trapial's early unconventional phases. This RIGI application is the full commitment. ⚡
If you want to know my view on it within the full case with names, math, triggers of the disclosure stocks.
Read my article.
The link is in the below comments👇
The Secretary of the Treasury presenting a clear picture of a primary purpose of financial transactions and stores of values on distributed ledger technology.
Please understand what this means to what you do on distributed ledger technology - including if DTC moves your stocks and bonds accordingly.
This, as margin debt is soaring, levered ETF are seeing record inflows, P/C skew is blowing out and equity positioning reaches multi-decade highs (cash at ATL's)
What could go wrong
🇦🇱 TIRANA SHUT DOWN: Albanians protest Kushner resort land grab.
Thousands of Albanians flooded the streets of their capital in a massive show of resistance against the government's sale of protected lands to Jared and Ivanka Kushner's $1.4 billion resort development.
The protest brought Tirana to a standstill. Albanians are doing more to protest the Zionist takeover of their country than any other western nation.
Americans, take notes.
I will soon be introducing a bill to give the public a 50% ownership stake in the largest AI companies in America.
This would guarantee that the trillions created by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us — and block oligarch decisions that harm the American people.
“What the fuck are you doing?!” Trump lit into Netanyahu over the Lebanon bombing:
“You're fucking crazy. You'd be in prison if it weren't for me. I'm saving your ass. Everybody hates you now. Everybody hates Israel because of this."
@BarakRavid & I
https://t.co/b1lEZEmN6p
John Hussman just published one of the most important pieces of market analysis I have read this year and every serious investor needs to read it.
His warning flag system just triggered at levels only seen THREE other times since 1992.
One of those times was March 24, 2000, the exact peak of the tech bubble. The other clusters preceded significant market drawdowns as well. We are now seeing daily tallies of overextension signals that rival or exceed every prior extreme in the data.
But here's what's really scary:
The S&P 500 Information Technology sector trades at a P/E of 45 on operating profit margins of 30% which is more than THREE TIMES the historical norm. If you normalize those margins to anything resembling what competition and creative destruction have produced in every prior cycle, the effective P/E is north of 135.
And people are calling this a buying opportunity.
10 companies now make up 40% of the S&P 500. Bank of America's latest fund manager survey shows the highest jump in equity exposure on record. This is the same level of crowding we saw right before the market gave up a third of its value in 2022.
The script never changes. Only the names of the stocks and the narrative used to justify paying any price for them.
In the late 1990s it was the internet. In 2007 it was structured credit. Today it is AI.
Every single time the crowd convinces itself that valuations do not matter because THIS TIME the technology is transformational. And every single time the math eventually wins.
Read Hussman's full piece, then look at your portfolio and ask yourself honestly whether you are positioned for what history says comes next:
https://t.co/rSuMhqDjof
Every obedience experiment in history had the same overlooked finding.
Not everyone complied.
In Milgram’s lab, 35% refused to deliver the final shock. In Asch’s line experiments, 25% never conformed, not once, across any trial. In Zimbardo’s prison, at least one guard refused to dehumanize. One prisoner demanded a lawyer instead of a doctor and broke the psychological frame entirely.
We spent decades studying the ones who obeyed.
We barely asked what made the others different.
That question matters more now than it ever has.
The resisters in the COVID era were not difficult to find. Physicians who filed exemptions and lost their licenses. Nurses who walked away from careers rather than mandate patients into decisions they hadn’t genuinely chosen. Scientists who published contrary data knowing what it would cost them. Parents who stood alone at school board meetings. Ordinary people who simply said, quietly, without drama , no.
What made them different?
Research consistently identifies a cluster of factors. Not personality traits you either have or don’t. Situational and cognitive patterns that can be cultivated.
First: prior reflection on authority. The resisters had usually thought, before the crisis, about the limits of institutional trust. They weren’t cynics. They were people who had already asked the question “under what conditions would I refuse?” before anyone was asking them to comply.
Second: a concrete reference point outside the consensus. A value, a principle, an oath, a relationship that existed independently of the institutional structure demanding compliance. Something the system couldn’t reach.
Third: at least one other person. Milgram found that a single dissenting confederate reduced compliance dramatically. The resisters rarely stood entirely alone. They found each other. Sustained each other. Gave each other permission.
Fourth: the willingness to tolerate social pain. Not immunity to it. Tolerance of it. They felt the pressure. They felt the exclusion. They chose the discomfort of integrity over the comfort of belonging.
None of this is innate. All of it is learnable.
The most important thing Milgram, Asch, and Zimbardo taught us is not how fragile conscience is.
It’s that conscience can hold, if you’ve trained it, named its limits, and found even one other person willing to hold theirs beside you.
Build that now. Because the experiment is always running.
Until then stay humble.
The near incomprehensible lack of understanding of how the energy markets work is perhaps going to be looked back upon as the bedrock to what will be a depression greater than the 1930's and how we got there.
@calvinfroedge Where are you from again Canada or Mexico? Getting rid of the vile religious dictatorship in Iran was a great thing to do for the Iranian people, the MidEast & the people of the world. A month or two more of higher prices is a small price to pay. Stop whining & complaining.
Somebody take Trump’s phone. The man is one AI prompt away from posting himself as the Emperor of the Milky Way, Defender of the Universe, and Supreme Commander of the Dinosaurs.😇
Rabbi Eliyahu Kin declares:
First, the Third World War will destroy Edom - Europe and America. Only then will the Jewish Messiah come and a new Jewish kingdom will be established. The West will flow with blood as punishment for the goyim. This is not a threat. This is a prophecy.
This isn't a third world country. This is Macron's France 🇫🇷
Images of the destruction caused by riots in France are making headlines around the world.
Mainstream media is doing all it can to collectively ignore what happened in Paris last night because it doesn’t suit their narrative that all migrants are good.