More than a billion barrels of oil have not reached the market since February. The IEA calls it the largest supply disruption in history. This morning Iran sealed it, declaring the Strait of Hormuz closed to every ship on earth. Oil rose 2%.
That 2% is the most important number in the world right now, because it hides the others. Crude sits near $95 not because the shock is small but because the rich world has spent the months since February burying it, draining emergency reserves, rerouting tankers around Africa, letting savage prices kill its own demand. The IEA expects those buffers to run dry by mid-July. After that, there is nothing left to hide behind.
The countries that import their food never had anything to hide behind. Hormuz carries roughly a third of the world’s seaborne fertilizer trade, the urea and ammonia the Gulf ships to farms across Asia and Africa. With that line cut, fertilizer prices are up 30% and the World Food Programme projects 45 million more people driven into acute hunger. Its chief says aid agencies are now reduced to taking, in his words, from the hungry to give to the starving. The shock does not show up as a spike on a chart. It shows up as crop failure in a country already one bad season from famine.
And the safety net is fraying. The US has pulled 66 million barrels from its strategic reserve, down to 349 million, with no plan to refill until 2028, just as hurricane season opens. A reserve built to survive a crisis at home is being spent to disguise one abroad.
The story today is the calm, not the chaos. The most violent number is the one that did not move, and the silence it buys is being paid for in food.
@Ekaeoq So what did you expect? That being in the EU would always mean asking bigger countries for money without ever facing consequences down the line? Did you really think you could live off that forever? Hahaha, this is only the beginning for you,idiot
@P_Abuo@Eng_china5 The problem is that they don’t want to solve it, they want chaos, so that people like you will ask for more security, and that’s when you’ll be playing their game, because they will take away your freedom.
@P_Abuo@Eng_china5 The troubling part is that it rarely happens all at once. It’s gradual each step seems reasonable in isolation, justified by a real or manufactured threat. By the time people notice how much they’ve lost, the mechanisms to reclaim it have often been weakened too.
@P_Abuo@Eng_china5 And history backs that up from Rome’s transition from republic to empire, to 20th-century totalitarian regimes that began with promises of order and security, to modern examples of “temporary” emergency measures that quietly became permanent fixtures.
We are very close to the launch of the latest Chinese AI model, DeepSeek-V4. There is much speculation and some unconfirmed leaks about the efficiency of the upcoming model compared to the American models ChatGPT and Cloud. According to the leaks, the cost of input via DeepSeek's API will be $0.27 per million tokens. If this is true, it will be more than 50 times cheaper than its competitors, whose models cost $15 per million tokens.
Of course, the cost varies due to the different operating mechanisms of the models.
It is not only the tech community that is eagerly awaiting the release of the new model, but also the markets. The emergence of a model that offers competitive efficiency at such low prices will put significant pressure on American AI companies.
The model is scheduled to launch this month, and there are speculations that it will be released in the coming days, coinciding with the start of the Chinese New Year.
$125k Bitcoin loading.
Everyone panicking, calling bear market.
I call it Black Friday.
Self-custody = no one takes it.
Gold + BTC = actual wealth.
2026 gonna be spicy. 💀 #Bitcoin#crypto