***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Economic Fare:
Those Westerners who hate Donald Trump seem to be happy to fight him to the last Iranian. And those who push for renewable energy seem to be happy to see the Middle East destroyed, since they believe that it will force the energy transition on us. Few people realize how dire the situation is. Antonio Turiel is one of the sharpest minds on this planet, and he is not shy about telling how things stand. He correctly says, “Given the current situation, suggesting that the answer is a renewable energy transition is like a house fire breaking out and thinking it’s a good time to call a builder to install fire doors.” To say nothing about having handed power to a band of criminal psychopats devoid of even a shred of moral restraint. Unless some kind of miracle occurs that stops the war now, we are facing the Seneca Abyss.
Dead man walking
From Antonio Turiel’s Blog - 23 March 2026
The Iran conflict enters its fourth week. Once again, to avoid panic and a widespread stock market crash at the opening of Monday’s session, a fabricated story has been concocted to calm the market. In this case, Donald Trump has declared a five-day truce (only on the American side; Israel is proceeding independently), supposedly thanks to fruitful talks with Iran over the weekend (talks already denied by Iranian authorities).
We’re in extra time. In the coming weeks, the last ships that left the Strait of Hormuz before the closure will arrive, and when they do, the shortages will become painfully obvious. In fact, things are already going terribly wrong. The list of countries experiencing fuel supply problems or even imposing rationing measures ( Japan , Australia , New Zealand , India , Thailand , etc.) is growing by the day. China has restricted fertilizer exports , and in the US, it’s estimated that this season will be short between 25 and 35 percent of the fertilizers typically used . The helium shortage will cause a sharp drop in chip production within weeks , not to mention the disastrous situation with aluminum and copper, to name just a couple of raw materials. But really, everything is affected. Unsurprisingly for regular readers of this blog, diesel is currently one of the most scarce things, and that affects absolutely everything, including the supply chain of all kinds of raw materials.
There doesn’t appear to be an easy solution. Iran won’t back down without a credible non-aggression pact from the US and Israel, guaranteed by major powers like Russia and China, and war reparations commensurate with the damage inflicted. It can’t settle for less, because it knows that if it gives in now, they’ll attack again in a few months, having rearmed. But these conditions are completely unacceptable to the US and Israel. There really is no easy way out of this impasse. Everything suggests that immense structural damage will be inflicted on the global economy.
Putting myself in the context of Spain and Europe, let’s be honest, unless something unimaginable happens right now (literally a miracle), we’re going to crash. No other outcome is conceivable. We’re going to suffer a very long-lasting, perhaps even permanent, loss of 25% or more of our energy consumption, and it’s going to happen over the next few months. We’re going to see a good portion of our industries collapse, never to recover. We’re going to see unemployment skyrocket. And in the advanced stages of this debacle, we’re going to see shortages of fuel and even food.
Perhaps the powers that be have mechanisms we can’t even imagine, perhaps they have ways to stop this war in its tracks and, with it, this disaster. I don’t know. I neither know nor can I know these things. What I do know is that, without a radical change of course, we are going to sink, and sink very deep. And even if that miracle were to happen, the damage already done would have severe consequences in the coming years. Although, of course, nothing compared to the current collapse.
Right now, we’re losing around 20 million barrels of oil and petroleum products per day, which is about 20% of global consumption and, more importantly for us, represents 40% of the oil available for export. There’s also a shortage of about 20% of liquefied natural gas, 30% of nitrogen fertilizers, 30% of helium, 30% of aluminum, and 30% of sulfur (which is needed to make sulfuric acid for industrial processes, including copper extraction). There’s an incredible backlog of containers in the area. The shortage of medium crude oil in the Persian Gulf region is particularly affecting diesel production, as well as kerosene. In fact, some airlines are starting to cancel flights. What will happen to tourism next, only time will tell.
This is not going to be just another crisis. This is going to be an economic catastrophe. Combined with the bursting of the enormous financial bubbles that have inflated over the last few years, it’s difficult to grasp the magnitude of what’s about to happen. .....................
Truck drivers in the U.S. are feeling some of the first economic effects of the rapid surge in the cost of diesel. Broader economic impact could hit soon
Oil is likely to surge to extreme highs in 2026, but that does not mark the beginning of a long-term structural bull market. It’s a wartime spike inside a debt-saturated global economy. The higher prices go, the more they tighten credit, weaken growth and destroy demand. Oil is more likely to peak with the crisis and then follow a weakened global economy into a longer period of softness.
Market Fare:
To pay or not to pay, that is the question
A.I. Fare:
.......... Take a look at the numbers here. The Nvidia Blackwell Ultra delivers 35 times lower cost per token than the previous generation, the Hopper platform. The Hopper platform is what most of the data centers are currently using. After the Hopper, we’re going to get the Blackwell chips, which will drive the cost per token down by 35 times.
After Blackwell, we get Rubin. Rubin brings the cost per token down another tenfold, compared to Blackwell. What this means is we’re looking at Jevon’s paradox: AI is now going to get so cheap, that its use will increase massively. We saw this with coal. With every efficiency improvement in the steam turbine, coal use merely went up. Because you could do the same amount of work with less coal, we started using steam turbines for more jobs, so overall coal use went up.
There may be an AI bubble currently, just like there was an Internet bubble that popped in the year 2000. But you know what happened after the Internet bubble popped? The infrastructure that was built became integrated into our everyday lives. The popping of the Internet bubble didn’t stop the use of the Internet, it just meant that the companies that built the Internet lost a lot of money.
We're shockingly prone to "cognitive surrender."
In a matter of only a few years, AI chatbots have become a common part of many of our daily lives, even though they remain deeply flawed systems.
The reality is that chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, or Anthropic’s Claude still make regular mistakes. According to an October study by the BBC, even the most advanced AI chatbots gave wrong answers a whopping 45 percent of the time.
But many users don’t understand that reality.
Quotes of the Week:
Blind Squirrel: I think we are now at the stage that every single day that the Strait of Hormuz is closed you should sell some more long positions. That’s what we will be doing.
Blind Squirrel: I think we are now at the stage that every single day that the Strait of Hormuz is closed you should sell some more long positions. That’s what we will be doing.
Delwiche: In times of strength, optimism can stay elevated for extended periods, oscillating between excessive levels and healthy resets in sentiment. In bull markets, optimism bends but doesn’t break. Price weakness accelerates when sentiment breaks down and bulls head for the exits. That is the negative feedback loop we are seeing emerge in the data right now.
Charts:
1:
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Despite being a renewables superpower, China continues to permit and build new coal-fired power plants at a rapid pace. Analysts say the nation’s new five-year plan will ensure further coal plant expansion and jeopardize China’s ability to deliver on its climate promises.
U.S. B.S.:
.... Trump is like the mobster Vincent Gigante who walked around Greenwich Village in slippers, pajamas, and a bathrobe in an effort to convince federal prosecutors that he was crazy. Trump’s babble is a similar act. Only a very stupid person would be fooled by it. The Iranians are not stupid, nor should we be. ..............
This war is moving inexorably toward a most dangerous phase, and as Americans and growing numbers of U.S. soldiers oppose it, the chance of a false flag attack in the U.S. to generate outrage toward Iran from Americans grows with it. Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern has just warned of that possibility.
For years, the general consensus among the mainstream and the independent media has been that Trump’s rise twice to the presidency has been a break with tradition because he is so bizarre a character with no political experience, etc. This assessment has come from those who love or hate him. I have argued the opposite for years: that he is an establishment figure from the start, dressed in costume, so to speak. Few have agreed. I recently wrote:
Some say that is because he is a complete anomaly and was able to twice become president by some strange twist of fate. If that is so, it would be the first and second time in modern history that it happened. A man with no political experience, a comical reality-tv joke, a bombastic fat party boy with weird dyed hair who talks like a version of an East Coast Valley Girl, a womanizer, a very wealthy New York real estate wheeler and dealer, etc. gets the votes of middle Americans who are losing their farms and factory jobs and are angry at the government. All sorts of explanations have been given for this “anomaly,” except that it was not one, except in appearance.
Now it seems that others may be coming around to the same opinion. In a recent article, Seeing Trump Clearly, Craig Murray, the former British diplomat, author, and Scottish human rights activist, who attended and reported on Julian Assange’s extradition trial, wrote:
It is comforting to see Trump as a buffoon, to accept the facade he presents of a blustering and ill-educated ignoramus, who swings wildly between policy options, and who does not understand the world of geopolitics.But that is nonsense.
Although Trump seems to be a clown, Murray says, it would be a terrible mistake to take seeming for being, for Trump is vicious and very dangerous and wholly intent on destroying the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, Iran and the Iranians, while supporting Israel’s takeover of Lebanon and Syria for Greater Israel and the United States. Yes, it is true that Trump and his venal family are also making a financial killing swinging deals throughout the Middle East, but his policies are part of a long-term U.S. strategy. Most importantly, Murray writes:
It is essential not to lose sight of the bipartisan nature of the United States’ long term plan. In a very real sense Trump is continuing – if greatly accelerating – the policy under Biden ................
........... Donald Trump is a US president who is doing US president things. US presidents consistently murder people with unforgivable acts of mass military violence, mistreat immigrants and marginalized communities, and promote tyranny for the benefit of corrupting special interests in defense of the US empire and the capitalist status quo. That’s what their job is. If they weren’t willing to do these things, they wouldn’t get the job.
Trump is not some freakish aberration; he is the product of the same American political status quo as his predecessors. He became president the same way they did, and the powers he now wields were given to his office via mundane executive, legislative and judicial decisions and precedents before he was ever elected.
But because the “No Kings” protests are organized by liberal defenders of that same political status quo, the demonstrations cannot address any of this. The whole thing is designed to be as large and inclusive as possible while also ensuring that it doesn’t disrupt the established order in any meaningful way. ......
They are not protesting against the US empire. They just want a more polite, photogenic empire.
They are not protesting the corrupt oligarchic political system which gave rise to Donald Trump. They just want the corrupt oligarchic political system to give rise to presidents who make them feel less uncomfortable.
The problem is US presidents, not kings. The problem is the US empire, not Trump. The United States needs drastic, revolutionary change, not daytime protests designed to be as inoffensive as possible. As long as Americans are protesting against fictional monarchies and easily replaceable oligarchic puppets instead of resisting the actual imperial machine, the abuses are going to continue.
The war in Iran is the most obviously evil American war in generations. People should be flooding the streets in every major US city. Washington DC should be on fire. Soldiers should be deserting en masse. Instead we’re seeing these stupid fluffy lib theater conventions where people get together to do nothing.
Americans of conscience should be feeling deeply embarrassed right now.
War Fare:
Aurelien: Plans, Platforms And Projectiles.
The longer-term meaning of the Iran war.
Now that the Weekend War That Wasn’t is in its fourth week, it’s becoming clear that just about everything to do with its progress, as well as its origins and its potential consequences, is covered in hopeless confusion. Confusion about exactly how the conflict started and why, confusion about what kind of conflict it is, confusion about what its originators were trying to achieve, confusion about what those who claimed to be, or have been identified as, the originators thought they were trying to achieve, confusion about what has actually happened, confusion about the meaning of what has apparently happened, insofar as it is known, confusion over what “victory” means for various actors, confusion over whether some of the parties even have a concept of victory, let alone if it’s a feasible one and how it can be evaluated, confusion about how the fighting can be stopped, if it can be, and confusion about all of the manifold interacting political, economic and military consequences. Not bad for something that was supposed to be finished before the markets opened on the Monday.
Some of this confusion is inevitable in any major politico-military crisis, and I’ll explain why in a minute, and what the consequences of that might be. More of the confusion is the result of pundits competing with each other to protect their business models by trying to convince you that they alone know What This is All About, and that the explanation for all of the above confusion just happens to be based on one of their pet obsessions. I’ll start by trying to dissipate some of this confusion, and look at what this implies for an “end” to the conflict. I then want to talk about the difference between Aspirations, Consensus and Plans, and how that helps us understand what appears to be happening and may follow. I finally want to talk about some of the more likely practical results of the conflict, which is important in the sense that I don’t think we have been in a more dangerous moment since 1914, and the consequences of this conflict could be equally far-reaching. ...............................................
......... And of course as I suggested a couple of weeks ago, crises like this acquire a momentum of their own beyond a certain point, and it is easier to go forward, no matter how dangerous, than it is to go back.
This interpretation clearly has major implications for a resolution of the crisis, because it means that it will be very difficult—indeed it may actually be impossible—to arrive at a consensus in Washington that the fight is over, the US has lost and must act accordingly. .........................
For this reason, as for others I’ll touch on, it seems highly unlikely that there will be a “deal,” with Iran, let alone a detailed agreement. If you can’t even decide what you want, it’s hard to persuade someone to give it to you.
So a United States which was not prepared for this war and had no agreed objectives for it, finds itself with its fingers caught in the wringer. What could it do? Well, for the first time perhaps in its modern history, Washington cannot just “declare victory” or silently acknowledge defeat, and go home. The VietCong could not pursue the Americans back to Washington, the Taliban were happy for the US to leave Afghanistan. But the regime in Tehran has a vote here, and they also have a policy. (Recall that the Persian Empire stretched from India to Libya at one point.) As a minimum objective, Tehran will want to evict all foreign forces from the Gulf, and become the undisputed regional superpower. In the past, Israel was the main threat to these ambitions, but it’s not clear how far that that country will be in any shape to resist them in a few months time. If that is indeed one of Iran’s ambitions, then there are two reasons why the US, and the West in general, is not going to be able to frustrate it. The first is to do with the developments of new technologies. .................
.............. In other words, the platform-centric West may be about to hit a hard limit of capability. Even in principle, it isn’t possible to build platforms that can counter the sheer numbers, simplicity of manufacture and relatively low cost of projectile-based defences, or to resist such projectile technologies being used aggressively. In the short term this is going to benefit Iran, both in defeating the US and Israel and in its regional ambitions. In the longer term, it is going to have a massive effect on the strategic balance in the world and, as usual, nobody is thinking seriously about it.
All of the above?
As of March 23, 2026, the major developments in Iran over the past 24 hours center on a fragile pause in U.S. strikes against critical infrastructure and escalating retaliatory missile exchanges with regional adversaries. President Trump announced a five-day delay for planned strikes on Iranian power plants and energy infrastructure, citing “productive talks” aimed at a resolution. The common consensus on intelligent sites is that this is absurd. The Iranian Foreign Ministry has officially denied any direct dialogue with Washington, labeling reports of talks as “fake news” intended to stabilize energy markets. This is surely the more believable statement.
Only lunatics would trust in the value of any kind of negotiation with Trump or his bloodied henchmen Witless and Kushion, and the Iranians are not lunatics (although investors probably are). .........
............ The five day delay follows a 48-hour ultimatum for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. There are very few indications at this time that Iran will reopen the Strait today, in five days, or in five weeks. If he was sane, and there are no indications that he is, Trump would be extremely concerned about the increasing chatter in responsibile places of the inevitability of a global recession
........... A sane response to this crisis, which will surely get much worse the longer the Strait is closed, would be to do anything to stop it, given the highly negative consequences for energy prices, fertilizer, helium and other commodities essential for the global economy, the inevitable inflationary pressures such high prices will cause ....................
yeah, this is not great
.................... At this point, it’s an economic suicide pact. Let’s take away the question of whether we take Kharg Island or decapitate the Iranian leadership. It’s very clear that it’s who can withstand the most economic pain. And this is dangerous because it’s quite clear that we probably can’t.
***** War on Iran
The illegal war launched by the United States and Israel against Iran has triggered the mother of all commodity-supply shocks. In response to the unprovoked onslaught, Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between Iran and Oman’s Musandam peninsula, has brought to a standstill the delivery of huge amounts of the world economy’s critical inputs.
Iran is the seventh country to undergo US military intervention in the first fifteen months of Trump’s presidency; five of these seven are rich in oil. Oil wars might make sense if American companies actually wanted to drill more. But they are hesitant to do so when oil is oversupplied and under-demanded. The raid on Caracas in January earned little interest among international oil majors, who were unenthused about the prospect of resuscitating Venezuela’s decrepit infrastructure and bitumen-like oil reserves, despite White House exhortations.
The world has never seen an interruption on this scale to the supply of stuff. It easily surpasses the 1979 oil crisis, sparked by the Iranian revolution, in which crude oil production declined by 4 percent. ...........
........... Iran has some simple needs to be willing to declare peace, the most important of which is “this is the last war”, the second of which is “no more assassinations and no more attacks” and the third of which is “since we can’t trust you to keep any agreement we have to make you incapable of attacking us again or too terrified to do it.”
Manjier has a lot of contacts in the Resistance, here’s the list he published:
............ Notice that it includes stopping the war/genocide on Libya/Hezbollah and Gaza. There’s no way the Israelis will agree to that unless they have no choice.
I don’t see any way this war ends before Israel is a smoking ruin, and the Gulf States are so terrified of Iran they declare they’ll never allow US bases in their countries again.
Can Iran enforce this? I think so. The US and Israel seem to be running out of interceptors a lot faster than Iran’s running out of missiles and drones. China’s in their corner, quietly supplying them with all the “non military” equipment they need. And Iran’s pain tolerance is extremely high: the decision makers know that if they don’t win decisively again Israel will just assassinate them later ..........
The problem, as has been stated many times, is that no “deal” is possible. America will not keep them. Israel will not keep them. So they must be defeated for Iran and its leaders to be safe. The victory must be crushing. If I were in Iran, I would be making the exact same calculation. ....
Of all the wars I’ve covered in my writing career, this one has been the hardest in the sense that figuring out what’s true and what isn’t is difficult. The baseline assumption is that nothing the US says about the war can be trusted. Most of what Iran says in concrete terms about what they fired and hit can be trusted. AI images and video have proliferated, so the old “show me picture” routine doesn’t work unless y0u’re a good image analyst and willing to spend hours. Trump, of course, lies about everything. Iranian official media exists, but it’s often censored by the West so reading their official statements is often difficult.
All that said, I think it’s time for something different: a collection of propaganda videos that are Pro-Iranian. Because of all the above, it’s unclear to me if these are official, but they’re interesting nonetheless.
The first appears to be official, was published by Russian “news” outfit RT, and makes the ethical case: .........
...I'm sorry if I'm going to sound like a religious preacher now, but this is what it takes at this moment:
— Alon Mizrahi (@alon_mizrahi) March 28, 2026
In the last 10 days or so, the US war machine unleashed upon all of us its most effective weapon of mass destruction: the coordinated lie.
By claiming negotiations are…
NEW 🇮🇷🇺🇸: Lego Animated Video Showing the Reality of War
— Ryan Rozbiani (@RyanRozbiani) March 28, 2026
This one was deep pic.twitter.com/ewJxyC7cJ5
Geopolitical Fare:
Escobar: The Long And Winding Petro-Gold Road
"Iran was a chew toy the Russians and British tussled over"
Other Fare:
Eisenstein: The Age of Peace is Very Close
The hero nation, the mirror principle, and why war is becoming obsolete despite current appearances
How can I speak of an age of peace? My nation has been almost continuously at war my entire life. One of my earliest memories is of sitting in front of the television with my father watching images of guns and tanks from the Vietnam War. He was so infuriated he leapt from his chair to shout at the television screen.
The few years of peace that followed the Vietnam War ended with the mini-wars, covert wars, and proxy wars of the Reagan-Bush era: Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Panama, Angola, Libya, Lebanon, Honduras, the Philippines, Kuwait. Then came Clinton’s wars: Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan (Operation Infinite Reach), and Iraq (Operation Desert Fox). This low-level simmer of post-Vietnam conflict finally erupted after 9/11 into the War on Terror under George W. Bush, starting in Afghanistan and Iraq (and neighboring countries), plus Somalia and the Philippines, launching the era of borderless global war. Next came Obama, who added major military operations in Libya and Syria and expanded Bush’s incessant low-level drone wars in Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere. Trump continued most of these operations, as did Joe Biden, who contributed the proxy war against Russia via Ukraine and supported Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza.
Finally we have Donald Trump, who in defiance of his numerous anti-war campaign pledges has continued his predecessors’ globalized omniwar and added a catastrophic new one in Iran. Let us also mention his campaign across Latin America, ostensibly against the drug trade: “Operation Total Extermination.”
......... Pragmatic critics of America’s imperial wars are fond of observing that the United States has not waged a truly successful war since World War Two. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya… each was left in worse shape than when the war began; in none of them were the stated objectives achieved.1 Of course, to the extent that the real goals like enriching defense contractors, sowing chaos, or justifying domestic surveillance and control, then these wars succeeded admirably. Nonetheless, the aggressor would have at least liked to achieve the appearance of victory. Why was it unable to? Why can’t the world’s most powerful nation not actually win a war against far weaker adversaries? If it were just Vietnam, or just Iraq, we could dismiss it as an aberration. But every war? There must be a deeper reason why war isn’t working the way it used to. ....................
Pics of the Week:
