Peter Versluis

[STORY & ANALYSIS @STORYTELLER8987]

A rare total solar eclipse across parts of Spain, Iceland and Greenland ,one of those moments that makes you realize how incredible our universe really is.

[The Macro Paper @macropaperr]

BREAKING:

🇺🇸 US 30Y bond yield just hit 5.28%, its highest level since the 2007 Financial crisis.

First Japan and now the US, the bond markets of major economies are getting crushed.

[Lukas Ekwueme @ekwufinance]

By starting the Iran war, the US choked one of its major funding sources... Japan.

- Japan imports 100% of its oil
- ~95% of those imports came via Hormuz

Inflationary pressures in Japan were already building prior to this war. Now they've gotten even worse.

To keep rates from surging and the yen from falling, Japan has spent over $100B, mostly by selling USTs.

This put upward pressure on US yields, which forced Bessent to step in, partner up with the BoJ and intervene in the yen...

And start laying the groundwork for QE for Japan.

The US created the conditions that threaten its own financial empire and is now busy trying to fix them on the fly.

[Marcos Agustín @marcosagusstinn]

🇩🇪🇨🇳 Germany is being crushed by China.

Germany is heading for a historic trade deficit with China.

🔸 Germany’s trade deficit with China surged to €55 billion in H1 2026.

🔸 The EU already runs a ~€1 billion-a-day goods deficit with China.

🔸 Chinese firms receive 3–8x more government support than competitors in OECD economies.

China is a key financier of Russia’s war economy with imports from Russia up ~57% since 2021

Europe must treat China as an economic adversary financing its main military threat.

[Martien Visser @BM_Visser]

Zeldzame aardmetalen zijn essentieel voor elektronica, de energietransitie en defensie. Het proces om ze uit ertsen te halen is complex, potentieel vervuilend en energie-intensief. Ondanks mooie woorden laat de EU dat 'dus' aan anderen over. Slim?
#grafiekvandedag @EU_Eurostat

[Financelot @FinanceLancelot]

What do you get when you combine a 2008 housing bubble, a 2000 dot-com bubble and a 1998 currency bubble?

[Lukas Ekwueme @ekwufinance]

During WW II the US demanded gold as payment... now China is doing the same

By the end of the war, the US:

- Held ~2/3 of the world's official gold reserves.
- Accounted for ~ 50% of global manufacturing.

This laid the foundation for the post-war monetary order. The American hegemon, and the US dollar as the world's reserve currency, was born.

Today, the US has reversed its position.

- It offshored much of its industrial base to China.
- Manufacturing capacity has declined by ~70%.
- China = 30% of global manufacturing (2x US share)
- The US is exporting gold in unprecedented amounts, much of it to China.

In other words, China is doing exactly what helped lay the foundation for the rise of the American empire:

Becoming the world's unrivaled industrial superpower while accumulating as much gold as it can.

While the US focused on dominating the paper world, China stayed laser-focused on the physical one.

[Chris Martenson @chrismartenson]

Oil jumped from $80 to $120 in 2022 when the world thought 3 million barrels of Russian oil might come off the market. The current energy crisis is inarguably far worse. If the price does not dramatically increase, we are simply going to burn through all our supply.

Full interview: https://t.co/tYI1QLyh9b

[Esther Sanz @_esthersanz]

Esto se encontraron ayer los bomberos 😱

[Johanns (Alpen)weer @johannsalpenweer.bsky.social @Alpenweerman]

Video vanuit Spanje. Hij helpt om de snelheid van de verspreiding van een (bos)brand te begrijpen. De vlammen zijn ver weg, in minder dan 8 minuten zijn ze bij de camera.

[Chris Martenson @chrismartenson]

Probably nothing...

[HealthRanger @HealthRanger]

Here’s a bombshell global famine analysis you haven’t heard anywhere else:

For each day that the war with Iran continues, about 400 million people will face a day with no food in the 2027-2028 time frame. (I will show you the math.)

Even more shockingly, MOST of the starvation and food desperation will occur in nations that have no involvement whatsoever in this war.

Thus, the current casualties on the ground, of U.S. soldiers, Iranians or Israelis, will be absolutely dwarfed by the number of famine casualties around the world (largely concentrated in SE Asia, Africa and some Middle Eastern countries such as Somalia).

Here’s the math:

It is broadly understood by most food scientists and agricultural analysts that synthetic fertilizers currently feed about half the world’s population: roughly 4 billion people.

If you conduct deep research on the percentage of synthetic fertilizer that comes out of the Persian Gulf, mostly via natural gas extraction and the Haber-Bosch process to create nitrogen-based fertilizers, you come to find that Persian Gulf fertilizer production accounts to 8% - 12% of the world’s total fertilizer production. (Most fertilizer is produced and consumed domestically and isn’t traded on international markets, so even though Persian Gulf exports as much as one-third of globally TRADED fertilizer, it only accounts for 8% - 12% of global fertilizer production.)

If we settle on 10% here, then we realize that Persian Gulf fertilizer exports keep about 400 million people alive around the world. Thus, end to end, one day of halted fertilizer exports results in around 400 million people not having food for one day, in the end. (The pipeline is long and convoluted due to growing seasons, food harvests, stored food supplies, and so on.)

Similarly, 10 days of continued closure means roughly about 400 million people having nothing to eat for 10 days. Now, we have to account for the fact that people don’t starve instantly. They can survive some period of time without food. This is typically limited to a few weeks. Few people can survive past 45 days without food. So unless food is redistributed from the food-abundant nations to the food-scarce nations, just 45 days of closure of the Strait of Hormuz creates an “air pocket” in the fertilizer supply chains that puts the lives of up to 400 million people at risk due to food scarcity, in its simplest form. But reality is more complex...

Especially when hungry, people are resourceful and most will take steps to avoid starving. There’s the cannibalism factor when people start eating each other, for example. That can keep some groups fed for a while longer, although the people they eat obviously won’t survive. Similarly, there will be much more local hunting of animals (even rats), dumpster diving, the eating of zoo animals, the neighbor’s cat, etc. When hungry, people will eat shoe laces, leather, tree bark, cardboard and all sorts of other things they normally wouldn’t eat, and when you see this behavior, you know things are bad.

There are also resourceful people who will refuse to die from starvation because they will hunt, kill and eat a variety of animals, or they will steal from grocery stores, hijack food delivery trucks, etc., in order to survive. And some food-abundant nations will make efforts to contribute food to those nations where famine is worsening. So I don’t think anywhere near 400 million people will actually die from starvation. The number might be much smaller, perhaps just one-tenth: 40 million. But even then, that number is shockingly far higher than any number currently in the minds of anyone in the mainstream media, the White House, the Pentagon, or even the UN.

Almost nobody realizes the long-term mass famine repercussions of this ongoing war, and how Trump’s actions are in effect risking the lives of potentially tens of millions of people IN THE FUTURE (next year, mostly), because of the long pipeline of energy → fertilizer → food. The energy is cut off today, the fertilizer runs out soon, and the famine kicks in not long after that.

This isn’t just a question of food costing more. It’s an issue of the food simply not existing because it’s not being grown due to the lack of fertilizer. Or crops that are grown produce far lower yields because of the lack of fertilizer. In a worst-case scenario, around 5% of the total global population could face high risk of famine in 2027-2028, or even longer if this war continues.

Put another way, Trump isn’t simply waging war on Iran. His war of choice is actually a war against the human race, and it’s a war against the innocent civilians and children in marginalized nations like Bangladesh, Somalia, Yemen, and even nations like India and Egypt where food security is dicey even in a good year. If not halted, Trump’s war could quite literally end up killing far more humans than the Holocaust of World War II. Multiples of that.

That’s the path we are currently on. Spread the word. Do your own research on this. Tell me why I’m wrong if you think I’m wrong. Tell me where the food is going to come from if the fertilizer doesn’t flow out of the Persian Gulf.

Because you can do all the research in the world, and it doesn’t change the facts on the ground. If the strait stays closed, the world begins to starve, and the starvation escalates dramatically in 2027 to the point where easily tens of millions of people will face the risk of dying from famine.

I will cover this in more detail in tomorrow's broadcast.

[Shafeeq @Y2SHAF]

future historians are going to have a nightmare trying to explain why we ran out of drinking water because we needed to cool down the machines generating 4K AI fruit videos

[Glenn Tunes @glenn_tunes]

SPEECHLESS 🙄

[Harald Doornbos @HaraldDoornbos]

Vanzelfsprekend zit er helemaal geen Hezbollah in Tyre's Christelijke wijk - en toch moeten die Christenen weg. De meeste inwoners daar zijn juist zeer kritisch tov Hezbollah. Maar goed, het Israelische optreden in Libanon gaat allang niet alleen meer om Hezbollah. Het gaat om het permanent verdrijven van miljoenen mensen, het verwoesten van hun huizen, het creëren van zoveel mogelijk vluchtelingen in de hoop dat er een burgeroorlog begint tussen Shia, Christenen en Sunni waardoor Libanon volledig implodeert en ten onder gaat aan geweld, anarchie en sectarische waanzin. Alsof je bewust bijenkasten omver gooit. Zo'n verzwakt en tot de grond toe afgebrand Libanon vormt de komende 50 jaar geen bedreiging voor Israel, waardoor Israel weer 50 jaar lucht krijgt. Dat is de echte reden van dit alles. In Gaza, West Bank, Libanon, Syrie en Irak en Iran. En als Egypte, Jordanie, Turkije en Pakistan een te grote mond hebben in de toekomst, gaat dat scenario ook daar plaatsvinden.

[Aaron Rupar @atrupar]

Trump’s Truth Social posting over the last hour or so is completely batshit insane. Get a load of this nonstop nuttery.

[Remco de Boer @remcodb]

Wat heeft de leveringszekerheid van energie in Nederland te maken met het tv-programma 'Help, mijn man is klusser!'. Alles.
Zie mijn bijdrage vanmiddag in de Tweede Kamer...

[Chris Martenson @chrismartenson]

Oil prices are far too low, and I strongly suspect they are being actively manipulated by people who know paper markets very well but physics not at all. In 2022, oil prices were vastly higher than they are currently, and yet no demand destruction occurred. Hence, too low.

[Chris Martenson @chrismartenson]

Tick tock, the clock is ticking. The Head of Research at one of the world's largest oil traders just warned that if the Iran War continues until June, we will exhaust all available oil inventories.

Full report: https://t.co/PSsGutlv7A

[Qasem Al-Ali @AlaliQasem]

Let’s put this in context:
1973 Embargo → 7% supply offline → prices +300%
1990 Gulf War → 7% supply offline → prices +75%
2026 Hormuz → 15–20% supply offline → prices +120% futures, +220% spot
This isn’t a repeat of history. It’s in a category of its own.