Max Foster

Opinions, views, & market commentary are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

@Interestingna11 In a very crowded trade you can’t risk waiting for the signal to be absolutely clear because then you’re the last person out.

[Mitt Romney @MittRomney]

“we will pay any price….to assure the success and survival of liberty.” Is this still true? Do we prize liberty or do we prize power and purse? No more clear test than the choice between Ukraine and Russia. Abandon Ukraine and we abandon liberty. Eventually even our own.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.

[Max Foster @pullhook614]

This is happening now.

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

Advice from a former trader:
If the administration is considering imposing a diesel export ban, don’t spend a week publicly deliberating. That just gives trading houses ample time to accelerate exports of any inventory, driving up domestic prices regardless of the final decision.

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

Advice from a former trader:
If the administration is considering imposing a diesel export ban, don’t spend a week publicly deliberating. That just gives trading houses ample time to accelerate exports of any inventory, driving up domestic prices regardless of the final decision.

[Max Foster @pullhook614]

Please check your NOTAMs people

[Thenewarea51 @thenewarea51]

Now NORAD is intercepting a R66 helicopter over Chicago. You can’t make this stuff up! 🤣

How did these people even pass a checkride in the first place or a Flight Review?

Audio via @theATCapp and tracking via @ADSBex

[Thenewarea51 @thenewarea51]

Now NORAD is intercepting a R66 helicopter over Chicago. You can’t make this stuff up! 🤣

How did these people even pass a checkride in the first place or a Flight Review?

Audio via @theATCapp and tracking via @ADSBex

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

Keystone XL pipeline was delayed by Obama, restarted by Trump, cancelled by Biden and restarted again by Trump. Offshore wind started under Biden was cancelled by Trump.
Biden paused new LNG export. Trump has paused new onshore wind.
Separately, people are mad about energy costs.

[Max Foster @pullhook614]

@Rory_Johnston @SchrodingersAlt Go look at it now…

[TheIntelFrog @TheIntelFrog]

“For if Men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences, that can invite the consideration of Mankind; reason is of no use to us—the freedom of Speech may be taken away—and, dumb & silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.”

-George Washington (1783)

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

Oil and gas production has delivered only middling financial returns for decades, largely because of the boom/bust nature of energy markets. If you want to penalize companies during high prices, you also have to cushion the lows, else there will be structural underinvestment.

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

The law prohibiting any living person from appearing on US currency should be expanded to bar the federal government from naming anything after a living person.

[ian bremmer @ianbremmer]

iran’s nuclear & ballistic missile programs were a real threat. more to israel and the gulf states than than to the united states, but real nonetheless.

responding to that threat with an all out regime change war is one of the most irresponsible foreign policy decisions the united states has made in my lifetime.

we will suffer the consequences of this mistake for years for years to come.

[Tom Kloza @TomKloza]

Given Phillips 66 disclosure today of nearly $900 million in pre-tax mark-to-market losses thanks to hedging, this Mid-March tweet has proved prescient.

[Andrew Coyne 🇺🇦🇮🇱🇬🇪🇲🇩 @acoyne]

NASA is the best of America, what America used to be: professional, science-based, dedicated to excellence, idealistic, and dazzlingly ambitious. May America one day recover its NASA soul.

[Max Foster @pullhook614]

First Substack. Hope that it can provide a little context on the current conflict in the gulf for those outside of oil & gas and living in the US.

https://t.co/ZYIY8qqBJk

@annmarie
@tomkeene
@JavierBlas
@ianbremmer
@Rory_Johnston
@RichardHaass
@Bob_McNally

[ian bremmer @ianbremmer]

dystopia: whatever happens to the pilot, at least polymarket will make money on the outcome.

shut this down.

[Richard N. Haass @RichardHaass]

It is not clear whether Iran's parliament speaker was killed, but what is clear is that these targeted killings must stop. They will not bring about regime change, but they will undermine what limited prospects still exist for negotiating an acceptable end to this war.

[Max Foster @pullhook614]

@johnarnold @HayekAndKeynes @chigrl Correct, you would hedge vs Brent or WTI if you were starting to buy cargoes pricing off of those markers

Assuming refiners are margin hedging which is an inconsistent practice.

I suspect there was significant trader involvement in Brent/dubai moves this week

[Max Foster @pullhook614]

As is Tehran.

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

Equity traders learned to discount the daily Trump comments on tariffs after a few weeks of overreacting to them early in '25. Oil traders are quickly learning the same lesson.