Matt Clinton

Bringing order to chaos.
Separating signal from noise.
Decoding the forces shaping the next economic order.

[Matt Clinton @Senecalytics]

An excerpt from the $USDZAR update for paying clients... take note!

[Matt Clinton @Senecalytics]

$USDZAR is trading like South Africa DOESN'T import 60% of its diesel. Alrighty then.

[Matt Clinton @Senecalytics]

Every sitting federal politician shown in the graphic is an AIPAC recipient.

[Shadow of Ezra @ShadowofEzra]

Trump continues to have a strong winning streak within the GOP despite the two losses.

[Matt Clinton @Senecalytics]

My suggestion is to stop focusing on oil and start focusing on diesel.

The global economy runs on it.

[Matt Clinton @Senecalytics]

Awkward.

[🇸🇦Abdulsalam Saleh @abdulslam2017]

Your Excellency, the President of the United States,
In response to your post a few hours ago on Truth Social, we would like to inform you that you have miscalculated, and we invite you to review the terms of the officially signed contract between the Ministries of Energy of both countries, which is entirely devoid of these newly introduced conditions you are now bringing up.
Your attempt to link these agreements to normalization conditions at this specific timing is nothing more than a blatant investment in Netanyahu and a failed attempt to downsize and diminish Saudi sovereignty. Today, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is leading a historic international coalition—having mobilized the nations of the world for it—to do justice to the grievances of the Palestinian people, revive the two-state solution track, and recognize the Palestinian state. This is a supreme, deeply rooted goal in Riyadh’s conscience, and its strategic constants in supporting the Palestinian cause are a million times more precious than any technical or nuclear agreement.
Saudi Arabia's policy is not managed by the logic of cheap quid-pro-quos nor does it bow to dictations. The Kingdom's constants are crystal clear, and under no circumstances will it ever compromise or reduce its monumental efforts into fleeting deals.
🦅🇸🇦

[Matt Clinton @Senecalytics]

China: communist in theory, capitalist in practice.

America: capitalist in theory, oligarchic in practice.

Europe: democratic in theory, socialist in practice.

Regime labels are lagging indicators

[Caleb T. Maupin @RealCalebMaupin]

China produces 48% to 50% of the world’s tea, 28% of the world’s rice, 24% potatoes, 50% apples, 50% all vegetables, 40% all peanuts in the world.

Who built this MASSIVE FARMING SYSTEM?

Not Ayn Rand, idiots.

Famines happened all the time prior to the Communists.

[Dylan Bradfield @DilBradly]

U.S is next - Dont forget the $1.2trn in Margin!

[Matt Clinton @Senecalytics]

Can anyone explain to me how you would defend a 1200km long pipeline from a drone strike?

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

COLUMN: Iran will win some short-term battles over the Strait of Hormuz, putting US President Trump over a barrel. But its ability to hold the global economy to ransom will fade as bypass pipelines proliferate. And Iranian officials know it.

@Opinion

https://t.co/uimMjVJ7bN

[Matt Clinton @Senecalytics]

The dollar’s role as the global reserve currency is existential to the United States.

Without it, America ceases to exist as a superpower.

Everything else is secondary.

[VBL’s Ghost @Sorenthek]

Wow. We invaded to support the USD (out loud)

[Farai Mazhindu @FaraiMazhindu]

When 46 individuals capture over half of all BEE mining deals, the grand illusion of economic transformation is completely shattered.

This is not empowerment. It is institutionalised kleptocracy disguised as social justice.

The BEE has functioned as a closed loop syndicate for a tiny, politically connected elite.

In South Africa, you do not achieve success through operational excellence, mineral innovation, or capital efficiency. You achieve it through proximity to the ruling party's deployment committee.

Forty-six ANC cadres get unimaginably wealthy by simply signing their names on ownership certificates, while the actual miners and surrounding communities continue to live in absolute squalor.

Global capital and serious mining houses look at South Africa and see an uninvestable landscape. They are forced to hand over massive equity chunks to non-productive political cronies just for the permission to build.

Instead of investing profits back into advanced machinery, geological exploration, and stable logistics, billions are siphoned off into luxury estates and foreign bank accounts.

When a regime treats its national resources as a private treasury for a selected few, it has surrendered all moral legitimacy to govern.

[Afshin Rattansi @afshinrattansi]

On this day in 1954, John Foster Dulles and the United Fruit Company organise the landing of the CIA’s Exile Army to Guatemala to begin the coup against President Jacobo Árbenz.

Árbenz had become enormously popular, with an Agrarian Reform policy which saw uncultivated portions of large land-holdings expropriated in return for compensation and redistributed to poverty-stricken agricultural laborers. Approximately 500,000 people benefited from the decree.

Árbenz had threatened to nationalise the United Fruit Company, which was an arm of US imperialism. John Foster Dulles owned significant stock in the United Fruit Company.

The coup was led by CIA asset General Castillo Armas, what would follow would be 4 decades of US-backed brutality by successive dictatorial regimes, which fought to protect US interests. Among the horrors was the genocide of the Maya people.

[Mark Hammond @MarkHam80780803]

“I have totally defeated you and also transferred $300 billion dollars into your bank account”

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Fascinating argument by Bloomberg's top energy analyst Javier Blas 👇: he argues that China effectively saved the world economy during the Iran war by absorbing the brunt of the global oil supply shock on its own, without visible economic damage.

According to his calculations, China "cut its average daily waterborne oil imports by the same amount as the combined oil consumption of Germany, France and the UK."

And, still according to Blas, they "did so without suffering economic harm" because they could rely on many levers: their huge strategic petroleum reserve, a massive surge in EV usage, their remaining coal-fired electricity capacity, and coal-to-chemicals replacing lost feedstocks.

Had China not been ready to absorb that blow, a good argument can be made that the economic damage to the West, and the world at large, would have spiraled far beyond what we saw.

Effectively, China's energy strategy at all levels (petroleum reserves, EVs, etc.) and its ability to withstand huge supply shocks paid off for everyone, not just for them.

It sounds awfully familiar: in 2008 too it was China's stimulus package and continuous buying of US Treasuries that averted a complete breakdown of the global financial system.

So twice in 20 years the country the West loves to present as a "threat" to the global economy effectively saved it from a US-made global economic disaster 🤷

[Matt Clinton @Senecalytics]

China's living in the future.

[Shenzhen Channel @sz_mediagroup]

Nicknamed the “Potato Bus” for its rounded capsule-like shape, this vehicle is actually RoboBus — an autonomous mini bus developed by Guizhou-based tech company PIX Moving（翰凯斯）. The L4 self-driving shuttle features a steering-wheel-free design and is built for urban sightseeing, parks and smart mobility scenarios. It has already entered operation on routes in Guiyang, offering visitors a futuristic way to explore the city.
@TripInChina @thisisGBA @Kanthan2030 @MarioNawfal @XueJia24682

Video from 萨瓦迪卡

[Lyn Alden @LynAldenContact]

More specifically, never bet against the fiscal-driven debasement train.

[Matt Clinton @Senecalytics]

That's some Cease Fire you got there.

[Arya Yadegaar @AryJeayBackup]

Timeline of events…

1️⃣ Fujairah port in the UAE was attacked, which Iran denied responsibility - 48h ago.

2️⃣ Saudi Arabia & Kuwait cut off US access to their airbases and felt that Trump downplayed the attack on Fujairah - 24h ago.

3️⃣ US forced to stop “Project Freedom”

4️⃣ Thoday noon, the US attacked an Iranian tanker in the Strait of Hormoz to satisfy Arab leaders & likely promised MBS to retaliate.

5️⃣ Saudi Arabia & Kuwait reversed decision to limit US access to their airbases - 6h ago

6️⃣ Iran attacks 3 US Navy ships that were trying to transit through the Strait.

7️⃣ US attacked Qeshm Island and Minab in response to Iran's attacks on Fujairah & its ships.

8️⃣ Iran downs 2 hostile drones

9️⃣ US says ceasefire is not over.

[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?

[Matt Clinton @Senecalytics]

In effect the value proposition is: "Same league as frontier US AI, at a fraction of the price, open-source and freely modifiable, and hardware-agnostic - you can run it on whatever infrastructure you choose."

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Wow, this is huge, after months of speculation and the U.S. running a massive pre-emptive discreditation campaign (https://t.co/OYg0rNn9MN), DeepSeek-V4 is finally out!

I haven't studied it in depth but here are the most striking aspects as far as I can tell:

- Fully open sourced with open weights (available for download on huggingface: https://t.co/YMvgMTErcr)

- Zero CUDA dependency anywhere in its stack, which is probably the biggest deal of all. For those who don't know, CUDA is Nvidia's software layer - the foundation nearly every frontier AI model in the world is built on. Except, as of today, DeepSeek V4, which can run entirely on Huawei Ascend chips via Huawei's CANN framework (https://t.co/YLL7kJEYq5). Very concretely it means that China now not only has its own frontier AI models, but its own domestic AI stack, top to bottom.

- The prices are insanely low. V4-Pro is roughly 3x cheaper than GPT-5.5 on input and 8.6x cheaper on output. And V4-Flash is an order of magnitude cheaper still, at $0.14/$0.28 per million tokens vs OpenAI's $5/$30 - so 30-100x cheaper than GPT-5.5 (!). And remember, these are the prices DeepSeek charges on its own API - anyone can download the weights and run them for "free" on their own server.

- It is at or near the frontier on most benchmarks that matter. V4-Pro-Max matches or beats GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.6 on competitive programming (Codeforces rating 3206), coding (LiveCodeBench 93.5), and math (HMMT 95.2, IMO AnswerBench 89.8). It trails the very newest GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.7 on a handful of the hardest agentic and knowledge benchmarks, but it's in the same league.

In effect the value proposition is: "Same league as frontier US AI, at a fraction of the price, open-source and freely modifiable, and hardware-agnostic - you can run it on whatever infrastructure you choose."

Which is insanely good. I now understand the need for a preemptive discreditation campaign: they had every reason to be worried. For the vast majority of use cases, you'd have to be a literal idiot to keep paying OpenAI or Anthropic's prices when this exists.

[Jack Farley @JackFarley96]

Largest Private Credit default ever?

Medallia default doesn't just wipe out $5.1B in equity, it imperils the lenders too

Blackstone's public BDC $BXSL (3rd largest in world) owns Medallia loans in massive size: nearly $400 Million which comprises ~5% of net assets

1/2

[Matt Clinton @Senecalytics]

Did Avis announce it's becoming an AI company too?

This is the DAILY chart.

500% up in less than a month.

But you know, efficient market theory and all that...