The Daily Doom

AMERICAN FAIR: The Country May Not Be Great Yet, but the Grift Is Grand!

David Haggith — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 01:17:37 GMT

No headlines are as twisted and amusing to talk about today as those that cover Trump family business ventures and the “Trump State Fair,” as it should be called because it is essentially looking like an extended holiday, tacked onto his personal White House birthday bash, except that the smashing UFC prize fights were more entertaining than anything you’ll see at the fair.

While the TheRump boasted that his capital extravaganza is practically the best attended fair ever, the opening coverage by Fox News told a different story—one it didn’t intend to tell. Fox made the mistake of showing the fairgrounds as the backdrop for its coverage, so while they interviewed all the usual capital clowns that parade through Fox News regularly, the background kept showing a mere smattering of people trundling unenthusiastically across the vast landscape, nearly bare of humanity.

In fact, as a display of Trumpian grandeur, the Arc de Trump, which was featured in crumbling condition and minuscule scale compared to the actual planned presidential folly, might as well have had the final description from the poem “Ozymandius” engraved on it:

And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

That is not too far off from how the capital grounds looked in the background of the Fox broadcast or to how the Arc de Trump looked with its stapled-on vinyl cladding that was supposed to mimic white marble, which was starting to peel loose as it shrank in the hot sun, its wobbly structure, and, frankly, boring façade (when compared to the other grand arches built by more grand leaders in other formerly grand empires). Some attendees said it looked like the arch had been purchased “from the bargain website Temu” and assembled on site.

An event that was billed as being, in scale, like a world fair, celebrating American grandeur, is a testimony to fake structures and cheap façades, because even the pavilions look like propped-up, movie-set backdrops. So, maybe it did accurately represent America and its government in more ways than Trump intended.

Given how many things broke down or didn’t go as planned at the fair, I would not be surprised if the ferris wheel broke lose from its standings and rolled to a rest in the quagmire of the new Trump reflecting swamp. I think even the statue of Abraham Lincoln, sitting at the end of the swamp pond is probably wearing a carbon-filter mask by now to keep out the stagnant stench that so aptly symbolizes the entire Washington government that fails to do anything about Trump as he threatens to take over other nations, destroys parts of the capital grounds, repeatedly brushes aside the Constitution’s limits, slanders the concept of democracy, and crushes the global economy under a war that very few Americans wanted. You may disagree with me on the war now, but I doubt you will when the bill comes through in your own bank account in the form of skyrocketing inflation and global stagnation because there is probably more oily slime floating on top of that reflecting pool right now than oil floating through the Strait of Hormuz.

Most of the performances that were supposed to entertain the unassembled masses had been cancelled when the artists saw that the whole thing was looking more like Trump Birthday Party 2.0 than like a fair celebrating America’s birthday 250 years ago, which has come to rest in this Trumpian mess. For awhile, the attractions were even appropriately shut down by an energy crisis, which left the food and ice-cream spoiling and the ferris wheel unrevolving. Oh well, as we’ll likely find out from the Trump-Israel-Iran War by early next year, who needs food? We may even find all our credit no longer so “revolving” as we keep stacking it up to buy the scarce food at soaring prices.

Speaking of food and paralleling what we have seen constantly with the announced Iran diplomatic talks, one of the listed restaurants for the fair was a no-show. It even publicly announced, contrary to the US government claims, that it had never agreed to participate.

It looks like the few people who attended were either dying of boredom or stopping to sleep or take a stretch (because they were bored):

You’d think some of the photos were shot two hours after closing, give the scarcity of people.

There were, however, some fun facts to learn from the states that did show up to take up space in the pavilions: Kansas ranks fourth among states for sunflower growing, and Georgia has topped the ranks for the number of poultry farms since 1951! Those were the fair’s highlights of America.

One article in the news below describes the fair as “achingly, numbingly dull.” The canning exhibits at the average country fair are more interesting. Listing statistics on reader boards, instead of building grand exhibitions, no one seems to have approached the Trump bash with much enthusiasm. Nearly twenty states didn’t show up at all. In the Wyoming booth, you can stroke actual bison fur, while the top draw of all is the one from Trump’s new home state—now that he is largely ostracized in New York—Florida. The exhibit drawing all the attention—because Florida is known for its Trumpian golf courses—was a 3x5 artificial putting green! At Trump’s age, maybe that is all his cankles can handle.

As for exhibits by departments of state, Defense put on one of the most spectacular shows by having a couple of marines paint camouflage on the faces of children.

“This is all so weird,” said Amy Cohen, 65, a university administrator from Virginia, “I am really sad and disappointed that what could have been an extraordinary celebration of the many, many things that make the United States a wonderful place was attenuated, reduced and flattened.
“It’s like reading a social studies textbook from the seventh grade. There’s so much vibrancy in the country, and this is unnecessarily vanilla. And there aren’t a lot of people here.”
Trump supporters weren’t convinced either. Holly Lewis, 57, a travel agent from Richmond, Virginia, said: “I grew up with state fairs in Iowa, and this is really disappointing.” She was sitting in a chair at the Maine stall with her daughter Dani, 26.
Besides the chairs, there’s nothing other than a backdrop with a few facts printed on such as: “Maine is the largest producer of blueberries.”

You can capture a sense of the record crowds here:

Emptier than a list of actual accomplishments from Trump’s war with Iran. Of course, today’s fake news being what it is, they probably cheated and took that photo, taken on the 28th, before the fair opened that day. (The fair opened on June 24th and will close … well … none too soon.)

I’d say, save your money and take the kids for some rides and non-melted ice-cream at your local county fair. At least, your county fair might have a real rodeo like the one where I live does, instead of the lone cowboy bouncing on a bucking bronco once a day like Old Faithful, except a lot less often.

Ari Drumm, 58, a salesman who had flown in from Florida, blamed TDS—Trump Derangement Syndrome—for the no-show states and the no-show crowds. “It’s a disgrace,” he said. “We should be together in this. We should be 50 united states and this is not very unified.”

Should be. You can keep on blaming the TDS, or you can recognize that the president has left the country so demoralized in a state of malaise that even very few Trump supporters bothered to show up. Yeah, we should be more unified, but the most divisive president in US history has created a fair that appropriately symbolizes what dividing America in order to conquer leaves you with. As Abraham, who now presides over this affair from the far end of the new green pond of reflective goo, once said: “United we stand, Divided we fall.”

He [Drumm] wore a t-shirt with Maga emblazoned on the front, and as he walked off, the slogan on the back became clear. Beneath photographs of the president and JD Vance, the writing on the back of the t-shirt said: “The Outlaw and the Hillbilly cleaning up America one liberal at a time.”

Well, there it is, as displayed on the Capital Mall—cleaned up so you can see lots of green grass and very few people standing or coming together.

Yet, the Big Man, himself, as Hunter Biden once referred to Daddy President, opened his fair by saying,

“Tonight, as we stand on the edge of our 250th year of independence, I am thrilled to declare that America is back,” he said….
Joe Biden or Barack Obama could never have created such a show, Mr Trump insisted.
On that, he is probably correct.

His speech was described as scripted and dull—or, as I would put it, the event planners could have created a better opening event with animatronics of Sleepy Uncle Joe shaking hands with the curtains and then stumbling off the stage over a bag of sand. It would have, at least, been entertaining … and also represented what America seems to be coming to as the powers that be divide and conquer the people that be into two ridiculous camps of squabbling masses, who have come to feel they have nothing in common anymore. Animatronic Joe could have even arrived on the stage on a bicycle and fallen over in a face plant. Trump has landed in similar fashion with this event.

America got Trumped

But, hey, at least America is Great Again for the Trumps. The Don, himself, amassed over a half-billion-dollar fortune in one year just from his crypto enterprises, and his two sons are benefiting from investing in a massive tungsten mine that now has been awarded a hefty US military contract plus all they’ve made off crypto ventures and real-estate development deals that suddenly opened up in Arab nations, etc.. His wife, Melania, made over $17-million last year from her film rights and publisher licensing and “for the sale of NFTs and other collectibles.” In fact, nearly $6-million of her haul came from the “collectibles” category.

It was bad when the Bidens did it, and it’s just as bad when the Trumps do it.
[You’d think that would be a no-brainer for both the Left and the Right.]
Insider deals, finders’ fees and backdoor introductions to family members are business-as-usual in Third World banana republics, but these slimy practices have now been normalized in the White House, to the shame of the nation.

The Bidens were chumps compared to Trumps. The Donald, himself, made even more than he gained on crypto from his sales of “celebration coins,” which topped $600,000,000. Trump also reported gifts totaling $370,000, making it clear how he can forego the presidential salary of $400,000/year on gifts alone. It’s a great grift if you can get it!

The disclosure also reveals a bevy of royalty deals that paint a picture of just how exhaustively Trump has been able to capitalize on his name and political brand since entering political life.
The royalty income includes: $4.7 million received through a licensing agreement for “Trump Watches” with The Best Watches on Earth LLC; a deal related to the publication of “The Greenwood Bible,” a collaboration with “God Bless the USA” singer Lee Greenwood, netting $208,486; a licensing deal for “Trump Sneakers & Fragrances” for $67,634; an endorsement of a ”’45′ Guitar” for $35,920; and publishing agreements for “Letters to Trump,” “Save America” and “A MAGA Journey,” for $590,730, $1,893,965 and $552,685, respectively.

It takes a whole department of accountants just to keep track of all his presidential sidelines. In fact, as you can see from this graph just published in Forbes, Trump’s net worth has nearly tripled since he became president less than a year-and-a-half ago:

Forbes

Nice run! Trump’s towering figures clearly show his eventual payouts to writer E. Jean Carroll for her successful sexual-abuse/libel law suits against him, if he ever actually makes those payments, will be mere Trump change compared to the jingle he’s made from the White House.

It’s a good thing, though, that he is not dependent on the gate fees and concessions from his fair.

America may not be great yet, but the grift is grand!

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MOU: The Meltdown of Understanding

David Haggith — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 23:20:22 GMT

“Ceasefire? No, we agreed to have a cheese fire.”

Since covering the meltdown of the latest ceasefire agreement by Trump in my weekend Deeper Dive, several more stories are burning up the press that demonstrate the deterioration of agreement—if there ever was any actual agreement—on anything the MoU says. I threw three of those articles into the Deeper Dive at the last minute on Sunday morning as I hurriedly proofed that article in order to get it published before even more stories emerged. So, I’ll go over now how the newly emerging stories add force to the statements I was making in that article about the ceasefire burning up and what ramifications for the oil market are already showing.

Talks on/talks off, Iran walks off

After the tit-for-tat missile barrages that took place with several exchanges over the weekend, the first repercussion came as no surprise: Iran completely cancelled talks in Switzerland. Trump reactively announced, in time to get ahead of the stock market’s opening, however, that Iran requested a meeting in Qatar; but it appears that is more than a venue change, and both sides temporarily swore off more violence to give those talks a chance. Jared Kushner and Steve Witcoff have dispatched for Qatar, but Iran did not respond as to whether this was a real meeting or an empty Trump claim.

However, if you look at Iran’s eventual rebuttal, you can see it is a carefully worded statement, in which Iran said there are “no technical talks” scheduled anywhere; but it did not say there are no talks whatsoever. So, maybe it qualified things with the word “technical” to make it sound like there might not be any talks at all. It leaves a little room to wonder if the US dispatch will be shunned.

I presume “technical” talks deal with how mines will be removed and what the timeline for doing that must be or how uranium will be handled, how ships will clear with Iran for passage. There is huge room for disagreement on all of that, even as to whether Iran has any say in clearing ships for passage. So, Iran is, at least, saying, all those kinds of details will not be negotiated.

So, maybe Iran left a door open to clarification of the framework of the deal to see what it even means since no sides involved have agreed very well on what even “ceasing fire” means. That still leaves plenty of room for those talks to go up in flames because the vagary was intended to skirt the thorny issues for now. As both sides attempt to become more definite in what the terms mean when they use them, impasse may easily be reached.

Even on the matter of “technical” talks, the two sides contradict each other:

U.S. officials said both sides would pause hostilities and allow commercial vessels to transit the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz.
“Technical talks are slated to continue on all areas of the MOU,” a U.S. official told CNBC on Sunday. “Both sides will stand down for now and vessels can move freely.”

Things went so bad over the weekend that the president already ramped his own rhetoric back up to threatening annihilation of Iran.

“There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable, and will be forced to militarily complete the job that we very successfully started. If that happens, the Islamic Republic of Iran will no longer exist!” he wrote on Truth Social.

That threat didn’t stop some in Iran from coming right out and saying there will be no talks of any kind whatsoever. In fact, Trump’s threat may have pushed Iran back to a more hardline position:

Earlier Monday a White House official said the Witkoff-Kushner delegation was en route to Qatar for Iran talks, but it’s looking like Tehran will give the US a cold shoulder. Iran state Tasnim is citing Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson, who says:
“We will not hold any negotiation meetings at any level with the American side in the coming days,” directly contradicting prior reports coming out of Washington.

But, hey, at least Trump got to get word out to his stock market in time this morning to make some highly profitable bets, I read.

Bloomberg is also confirming the new statement out of the Iranian side….
Also Fars has separately stated within the last hours:
“No nuclear negotiations have been held with the US so far, and there will be no negotiations on nuclear issues until Iran’s conditions are met.”
More latest:
IRAN SAYS DELEGATION WILL VISIT QATAR BUT RULES OUT US TALKS

So, it kind of looks like Trump is, once again, overselling Iran’s desire to negotiate with the US.

So it seems Witkoff and Kushner will merely meet with Qatari and Pakistani mediators? It remains an open question whether the Iranians will be present in Doha at all. It could be Tehran is issuing the contradictory messaging in order to keep leverage and pressure up, or else to try and humiliate the White House.

Qatar, in the meantime, has halted all marine traffic, even fishing boats and recreational craft, through the part of the strait that is its maritime territory.

Oil prices slide and glide

The next ramification to play out was a change in the oil market. Oil prices, which had touched fractionally below $70 per bbl for West Texas Intermediate and nearly $72 for Brent, edged back up today to $70.85 and $73.20. The move probably remained just a quiver because the strait was supposedly opened back up, and talks are supposedly back on, and missile fire has supposedly stopped for now. But not so fast.

The Thursday attack on the container ship Ever Lovely prompted some shipowners to pull back and wait for additional information about how safe transiting the Strait is. The U.S. military on Friday carried out strikes on Iran in response to the attack on the vessel….
“Participants appear to be shrugging off these developments, instead focusing on what a continued recovery in oil flows would mean for the global balance,” ING’s commodities strategists Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey warned in a note on Monday.
“This complacency is odd and clearly leaves significant upside risk if the supply recovery proves slow – or if we see significant re-escalation. While the oil market is technically in oversold territory, momentum appears to still be to the downside,” they added.
ING’s strategists continue to believe “the market is too optimistic about the timeline for a recovery in Persian Gulf supplies.”

While the strait has reopened, tanker traffic has slowed as shippers thought the last attempted passages might be safe, but suddenly they were not. So, shipping companies are timid about tempting fate.

The attacks on commercial vessels and the U.S. retaliatory attacks on Iran continue to test not only the fragile ceasefire, but also the willingness of shipowners and operators to press on with transits through Hormuz.
Since a weekly peak of vessels transiting Hormuz on June 24, traffic has materially eased, both in the outbound and inbound directions, according to ship-tracking data by Kpler compiled by Bloomberg….
Although traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has resumed and more vessels are openly broadcasting their position, a return to normality is far from certain and far from near amid persistently volatile operating conditions in the Middle East and its key shipping lane.

Other analysts agree in warning that a stable move back to prewar prices is unlikely.

Commodity strategists warned Monday that prices could reflect an overly optimistic stance from markets, which are underestimating the scale of persistent supply-side challenges.
Analysts argue that shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz is unlikely to swiftly return to pre-war levels, even after a pickup in activity following the U.S.-Iran ceasefire agreement, as Tehran seeks to exert leverage over the critical chokepoint.

Those are some of the reasons I have said that oil prices would plunge upon reopening, but then soar again. Prices plunged based on the unrealistic optimism I had expected—relief over the temporary opening of the strait.

Nikos Petrakakos, managing director of investments at Tufton Investment Management, said many shipping companies remain wary of sending vessels back through the key energy chokepoint, citing uncertainty over the peace framework, lingering concerns over sea mines and elevated war-risk insurance premiums.
“Even though there is some more motion going on, in general, we’re nowhere near being back to where it was,” Petrakakos told CNBC’s “Europe Early Edition” on Monday.

Rather, what we see is a few companies willing to test the waters—mostly just to get their loaded tankers the heck out of there if they see moments that seem like they might be safe. Sitting there hasn’t proven to be completely safe either.

While vessels that had been trapped are now transiting the Strait, she said the bigger challenge is persuading shippers to send vessels back in. “Shipping costs are incredibly high right now, and you still can’t find enough shippers willing to go back out in there,” Sen told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

Markets have been disconcertingly ignorant of the real problems that must be addressed to get oil flows back up to helpful levels.

Amrita Sen, founder and director of research at Energy Aspects, said markets may be underestimating how far shipping conditions remain from their pre-war norm….
“Before this war, Iran really had no power or say over what goes through the Strait of Hormuz,” Petrakakos said. “That is a status quo that’s changed going forward. I don’t see Iran going back to where it was before.”

Shippers also fear sanctions will stop the flow of money if they do try to pay a toll. Then they’ll be stuck in the strait again:

But Sen said that an official toll mechanism would be unacceptable to Gulf Cooperation Council countries and Western companies, noting that the fees issue is tied more to Iran’s need to repatriate funds for its post-war reconstruction.
“Iran is using its leverage aggressively to make the point that they are the ones that will control shipping, especially through that southern lane,” Sen said. “Western companies are simply not going to be allowed to pay that toll.”

There is also the issue of insurance, which does not suddenly become available just because the strait becomes available:

While vessels that were stranded in or near the Strait may gradually exit, Petrakakos said insurers are still a long way from being comfortable enough to provide cover for ships entering the Strait to pick up cargo.
“I think insurance will only really start moving in, I would say, months,” he said, adding that it takes time for insurers to become comfortable before lowering premiums, highlighting the issue with Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.

Today’s articles bring up another factor that I brought up this weekend as to why things are not going to just pop back to normal, even if an agreement were completely settled today and tanker traffic resumed normal operation today:

For oil markets, the focus has shifted from immediate supply disruption to the question of how quickly depleted inventories can be rebuilt, Spanjer said.
“The narrative that’s come into the market is: ‘How are we going to backfill all the stocks we’ve taken out?’” he said. “Every importer in the world is going to build higher stocks.”

That is where I said the SPR is still going to run dry and Cushing will be slow to refill because there will be high demand by everyone all over the world to backfill tank farms. Global restocking is going to keep fuel prices elevated for a long time.

Unlike nutty Jeremy Siegel whom I criticized this weekend for inanely predicting oil will settle down into the sixties by the end of this year,

Spanjer said his year-end target remains $80, arguing that additional supply could be absorbed by buyers looking to rebuild inventories.
Looking further ahead, Spanjer said he sees oil trading in a $75 to $85 range in 2027. Once inventories have been rebuilt, he said, upside risks are likely to be more limited.

Even that is a big if because it depends on the ceasefire holding.

Then, of course, there is that little problem of the mines:

Russia adds to oil shortages with Ukrainian help

We are also hampered by the fact that Russia, thanks to Ukraine, is now running out of fuels. So, its ability to export and help fill the vacuum is becoming increasingly limited by political rebellion when citizens see their government selling oil to outside interests while leaving Russian citizens dry. Putin acknowledged for the first time this weekend that this has become a problem for Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has conceded that the country is facing fuel shortages following a barrage of long-range Ukrainian drone strikes on key energy infrastructure, although he insisted the Kremlin was dealing with them.
The Russian president’s comments during an interview with a state TV reporter on Sunday mark the first time he has detailed the extent to which Ukraine’s deep-strike success has hampered Russia’s fuel production.

Russia, in fact, is now pressed to switch from being a net exporter of oil to being an importer:

Putin said Russia would import more fuel and expedite repairs of oil facilities to end what he described as the “temporary deficit,” according to The Associated Press.

And Ukraine says Russia is far from having seen the end of this degradation of its oil industry, which means still less ability to fill in the supply gap created by the gulf’s shutdown.

Ukraine has stepped up attacks on Russian oil facilities in recent weeks, seeking to cut off Moscow’s energy revenues and try to force Putin into bringing an end to the more than four-year war.
The attacks, including a huge explosion at Gazprom’s Moscow Refinery earlier in the month, have prompted analysts to suggest that the conflict could be shifting in Ukraine’s favor….
“Putin did not explicitly discuss Ukraine’s strike campaign against Russia or the wide-scale gasoline shortages experienced across the entire country, but Putin is likely subtly trying to portray himself as cognizant of the economic and social struggles Russia is facing,” ISW researchers said Sunday….
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on Sunday that the country’s forces struck two more Russian oil refineries, one in the Krasnodar region, which was estimated to be about 186 miles from the front line, and another facility in the Yaroslavl region, about 435 miles from the Ukrainian border.

Collateral burn

Meanwhile either that Iranian air force that Trump said long ago was completely destroyed or Iran’s completely sunken navy delivered some severe damage to the US during the weekend skirmishes:

U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet Headquarters in Bahrain “Completely Destroyed”
Arab media are airing video they report is from this weekend, claiming it shows Iranian missiles raining down on the US Navy Fifth Fleet Headquarters in Bahrain. Arab media says the Headquarters is now “completely destroyed.”
Here’s the video being aired by Arab media outlets tonight (Sunday, 28 June 2026) …

The United States military is claiming all inbound missiles and drones launched by Iran were shot down, that no US facilities were hit, and no one was injured. That certainly doesn’t comport with the spectacular explosions shown in the video. So, either the US is lying again, as it was proven to have done in previous strikes and as has become common practice under Trump, or Arab media used AI to concoct a video of massive destruction to the facilities.

Another report that came out late yesterday said that Iranian missiles were flying over Jordan toward Israel. There was no report of any hitting Israel, however, and Jordan was said to be intercepting them; but Israeli fighter jets were also reported heading toward Iran. I cannot find any followup reports on how that turned out or corroborating whether any of it was true.

Netanyahu celebrated a new framework agreement with Lebanon that he said could be historically significant, even as he celebrated giant explosions set off by the IDF in Lebanon today to destroy a deep 200-meter long tunnel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz have freshly announced that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) completely demolished a massive Hezbollah underground fortress embedded deep beneath the southern Lebanese village of Majdal Zoun. The village itself was leveled, with the IDF having released footage showing an unusually strong explosion:

Ceasefire/schmeasefire?

Bombing like that makes “significant historic agreements” look pretty fragile, and Israel hasn’t seen a ceasefire yet that it couldn’t blow up, usually, of course, with plenty of Arab help to get the ball rolling.

So, maybe oil has gotten just a little ahead of itself by settling so close to the 60s? It won’t stay there for long.

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THE DEEPER DIVE: Iran War Flares Back Up

David Haggith — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 15:02:38 GMT

You can’t find them this dumb out of the box, and frankly I don’t know how anyone makes them become this dumb by any means, but someone has augered the bottom drains of one of the world’s supposedly brightest colleges to try to root out its dumbest renowned economist. We’ll get to the clog of brain hair they found, but first …

Iran’s military advisor Mohsen Rezaei is threatening mass American casualties if the Trump-Israel-Iran War reignites, and it’s not an empty threat because the war does appear to be reigniting:

We will introduce new capabilities to the arena, and Trump should know that this time he will suffer widespread casualties. If the enemy makes a mistake, the next war will not be like the previous one.

While the comment is intentionally vague so as not to enable the Americans to prepare for the kind of attack Iran has in mind, Iran is telling Washington that round two will cost more in American lives than round one did, should this weekend’s rekindling hostilities spiral further out of control. Is he talking about firing up sleeper cells in America, hitting military housing and not just command facilities and weaponry? While there is no telling, Iran has threatened a much broader and deeper response a few times now if Trump breaks his own ceasefire and goes back to war, and this weekend’s action is looking like that is moving from possibility into probability, which is why I’m taking it up as the subject of this Deeper Dive.

UPDATE: In fact, the latest headline really kicked the risk level up a notch after I completed the first draft of this article:

Iran ceasefire in tatters as Tehran strikes at EIGHT US targets and promises to make life ‘hell’ for Americans... after Trump threatened to annihilate country if war broke out again

Look at the events that have unfolded in the last few days: Iran attacked and damaged a container ship that was attempting, Iran says, to pass through the Strait of Hormuz without Iranian clearance, and it is not clear in news reports whether or not Iran is charging tolls for any non-Iranian ships that want through or even just not allowing any non-Iranian ships at all to pass through. So far, reports about ships passing through talk about Iranian-flagged ships. In which case, Iran has not ended its embargo. The US has because it was the only one ever blocking Iranian ships. However, the deal did not say the passage would open immediately because it vaguely allowed time for clearing mines.

The weakness of the deal has always been that it leaves the stickiest points vague so that Iran would not have a reason to avoid making a deal because Trump wants out of the war he started. Trump has made it outspokenly clear at this point that his primary reason for getting out is that the oil crisis will become, in his words, “bedlam” for the world if it lasts another month. The fact that he has clearly lost some of the will to keep fighting this out is one reason I have avoided calling this a “Schmeasefire,” as I did all the other pauses. I was certain those would all fail, and they all did. This one, I give a little chance of it succeeding because I’m certain Trump wants out if he can get any deal that he believes he can sell as a success, but that looks more tenuous this weekend.

Risks to the economy run sky high if the US does return to all-out war, but a lot of damage is already going to have to play through even if the strait clears up by Monday. I found it a bit funny, though, to listen to a couple of experts as they spoke optimistically about the future for the economy and for stocks. Wharton School professor of finance and economist, Jeromy Siegel was the funniest, even though he was, at least, alert enough to say tech stocks are in trouble.

I’ve rarely seen such violent relative volatility. It’s like “I’m for tech” or “I’m against tech.” I’ve seen markets go up and down, and usually the sectors are pretty well correlated. The sectors are as uncorrelated as I’ve ever seen!…
It’s hard to call a top. A couple of weeks ago we had a sharp decline, and I said, “That’s usually not the end. It usually challenges it and sees if it can go above it.” Now the NASDAQ had that decline, challenged it, and now seems to be fading again. So, I think those tech are in a more precarious situation now than we saw in that selloff a couple of weeks ago.

You may recall that was the same take I just gave on the NASDAQ, too, saying that major tops usually occur with that kind of a retest and a fail of the retest and that we are now sputtering along after a “triple top” of such tests in a more precarious situation because the retest failed to hold TWICE. It hit a slightly higher high, but fell much lower right away (the sell-off Siegel talking about), then it attempted to test that ceiling and failed before reaching it. So, on the belief that tech stocks have topped, Siegel and I fully agree, and it’s nice to have some confirmation about the meaning of that pattern in finding a major top.

Siegel, however, is not saying it is a top for the overall market, but just a top for tech. I disagree. This is how the dot-com bust blew up. Tech started the crash and went down the hardest, but it pulled everything down in its undertow. With all the troubles right now, including especially the oil crisis, which is where Siegel starts to sound like a court jester, it’s all going to go down. No need to be timid like Siegel in saying the market is coming down. And that’s where Siegel should be writing comedy, not economic analysis.

First, his setup for the big joke:

The fall in the price of oil is truly stunning.

Maybe in size, but it is no surprise. It is truly predictable. That is why I predict things here—to show that economists should see this stuff coming, but they don’t! I predicted we would see a big reflexive drop in the price of oil as soon as ships started moving through Hormuz because the speculators respond to headlines and think, Oh, Strait reopened, problem ended.

So, I told my readers to expect some major sighs of relief over the oil situation, but also warned those sighs will be short-lived because they will end as soon as we start seeing shortages of gasoline at the pumps, and that is fairly predictable because we already know the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) will be empty in less than a month, and it will take more than a month for ANY oil to make it from the Strait of Hormuz to the US, if any even does manage to escape, which does not appear to have happened so far. Alternately, ship traffic will end if the strait shuts again, which is a high likelihood.

No one believed it could have a sixty handle.

(Waving my hand over here.) I don’t think I called out specifically that crude would get down into the 60s, but I did say it would take a big drop, so that doesn’t surprise me much. Had I put a number on it, I probably would have conservatively said the 70s, but numbers like $69/bbl for West Texas Intermediate don’t surprise me, and that’s the lowest I’ve seen so far. Not that far off from the 70s.

Then the funny part:

I’ve been looking at futures prices for gasoline…. It’s going to start falling very fast late in the summer to early Fall. By election time, we might have gasoline down around $3.36/gallon.

That’s the point where I snorted my coffee out my nose and had to wipe down the computer screen.

That is very good for the economy. It’s good for the value stocks.

It’s also fantasy.

And then Siegel provides pure comedy gold:

Gasoline prices suggesting we might even have a ZERO or NEGATIVE CPI reading.

Unless Siegel got some clairvoyant reading that Trump is not going to return to war, no matter what Iran does, and is going to have oil flowing through the gulf by Monday in non-Iranian tankers and is going to make sure all oil going through the gulf initially goes directly to the US so that it all arrives, now that Cushing is empty, at the same time the SPR runs completely dry for the first time in its history and is going to somehow wipe out all the energy inflation from AI and eliminate all the chip inflation from AI that is driving up the price of all electronics and is going to cancel all his inflation-causing tariffs, THEN there is ZERO chance that we go to ZERO CPI, much less deflation by the end of this year!

That is where I exclaim you cannot find economists this dumb straight out of the box; so, they must all be smoking some pretty funny weeds over there at the Wharton School. I thought that was a school of economics and finance, but maybe that is just a front for a school of experimental GMO horticulture because they have some weed like no one else’s weed.

Therefore, Jeremy says, the market is just fine; it will just have a different complexion to it.

A very bloody complexion maybe. One that looks like the market has ebola/hemorrhagic fever.

The other somewhat funny guy (but nowhere near as hilarious as Siegel) is a stock expert in the headlines below, who claims the tech route is just the typical “June Swoon” and that it has nothing to do with the end of “irrational exuberance,” as Greenspan talked about before the dot-com bust. We are now past “the bump in the road,” he assures everyone.

That is only true if you consider the final scene in Thelma and Louise “a bump in the road.”

We’re past the bump in the road like Thelma and Louise were past the final bump. Just a bump.

Becoming grounded again in reality

That kind of blue-sky thinking, or maybe blue Thunderbird thinking, is not well grounded, so it typically doesn’t fly for long. Therefore lets look down at the size of the bumps that have already popped back up in the last couple of days. They look more like tire spikes thrown across the road than mere bumps. Just know there are a thousand more possibilities like these that just popped up to threaten to end Trump’s Big Deal.

Here is a short synopsis of the rest of the article that follows for paying subscribers:

Iran closed the strait again and struck a ship in the pilot house to make it clear it was not going anywhere.
Trump told Iran it violated the ceasefire because it violated the ceasefire.
So, Trump attacked Iran to pay it back for violating the ceasefire.
Iran said Trump, thereby, violated the ceasefire, so it attacked Bahrain to pay Trump back for violating the ceasefire, which he did in order to pay Iran back for violating the ceasefire.
This time Iran hit a tanker.
Kurdish forces just put boots on the ground and crossed over into Iran to take part in the war.
Israelis are starting to openly worry they are losing their last friend.
Marco Rubio worries out loud that Iran’s scheme for the taking control of the Strait of Hormuz for good could play out as a template in other parts of the world, causing restrictions other straits by states that will want to now charge tolls—a hemorrhagic contagion that he says will cause global economic chaos if Iran is allowed to set the new standard strait.
And inflation has now moved into services where it has become much more tightly rooted than when it was just in goods or, especially, just in energy. And that’s before the big scare of energy inflation that will hit when fuel stations start running dry. Some of us lived through that and remember that, without the SPR, that’s what happens in an event like this, which will yield the absolute proof of how dumb the economist of high calling featured above is in his prediction of negative inflation by year’s end. I’ll lay that out very clearly at the end.

Now let’s put some flesh on those bones:

2nd UPDATE: This headline popped up as I was proofing this article: U.S. launches additional Iran strikes as tensions flare up over Hormuz

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The tit-for-tat attacks that restoked the war

A mere half a week has set the war back to the flash point for total conflagration. The conflict heated up in a major way on Friday after Iran, once again, closed the strait:

A one-way attack drone launched by Iran on Thursday struck the Singapore-flagged cargo ship Ever Lovely in the strait off the coast of Oman, Central Command said in a post on X. The vessel continued on its way through the strait, a major thoroughfare for oil shipments.
Trump said the U.S. military “knocked down” three other attack drones aimed at ships in the strait.

The US, then, felt it needed to punish Iran so that it doesn’t think it can get away with such attacks or like we are afraid to go back to war:

The U.S. military struck Iran on Friday after President Donald Trump accused the Islamic Republic of “foolish violation” of a ceasefire agreement by launching drone attacks at ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran’s military later said it had retaliated for the attacks.
U.S. Central Command said its aircraft “struck Iranian missile and drone storage locations and coastal radar sites.”

So, the US response escalated beyond the single successful strike that was reported for Iran, likely to try to disable Iran enough to make future firing on ships more difficult, though that hasn’t stopped them so far.

Next, Iran felt it needed to punish the US for thinking it could retaliate so that the US doesn’t think it can get away with escalation or think Iran is afraid to go back to war, so …

“The Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Navy targeted several U.S. military positions in the region, warning that any future attacks would draw ‘a broader response than this’,”

Is that the same navy that Trump already said several times was completely destroyed so that it all now lies on the bottom of the sea? Something lies, that’s for sure. Lies all the time.

Iran did not say what it attacked, but it was later confirmed that it attacked nearby Bahrain:

Bahrain condemned an Iranian drone strike early Saturday, describing it as “a blatant violation of its sovereignty, a flagrant threat to the security of citizens and residents, and a blatant breach of international norms and conventions that prohibit targeting civilian objects and terrorizing innocent people.”

That, of course, opens up the additional risk that Bahrain punishes Iran in order to show it that it is not afraid to fight and that Iran cannot simply walk away from attacking Bahrain.

Bahrain has been among the Gulf countries most critical of Iran and hosts the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet.

This is apparently the point at which Iran struck the bridge of a tanker, likely disabling it from further travel. No crew were reported as injured or killed.

Vance, in a post on X on Friday, wrote, “Iran signed a ceasefire agreement. We have honored it.”
“If they have disagreements about how the MOU is being applied, they can pick up the phone,” Vance wrote. “But violence will be met with violence.

Iran summarized the tit-for-tat exchange somewhat differently, showing that, once again, the two sides clearly do not see eye-to-eye on what their intentionally vague agreement means:

After the U.S. strikes, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp said in a statement: “Following the violation of the ceasefire by the Zionist regime in southern Lebanon, a few hours ago, the treaty-breaking US regime, as always, violated its commitments and, under various pretexts, attacked the coasts of the Islamic Republic of Iran with an airstrike due to the passage of a violating ship through an unauthorized route in the Strait of Hormuz.”
“The IRGC Navy responded to this aggression by striking the positions of the US terrorist army in the region,” the IRGC said.

Let’s be clear and honest: The US did not strike Iran “due to the passage of a violating ship.” The US wants ALL ships to pass through via any non-mined passage. It struck Iran because Iran struck the violating ship because Iran wants only its own ships passing through.

“According to clause 5 of the Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding, the arrangements for controlling passage in the Strait of Hormuz are with the Islamic Republic of Iran; however, the US, by provoking various parties, sought to violate this commitment, to which a necessary response was given, and this will be the case from now on.”
“If the aggression is repeated, our response will be broader than this,” the IRGC said.
Ebrahim Azizi, the head of the national security commission of the Iranian parliament, in a post on X said, “The U.S. attacked Iran in the middle of negotiations once again.”
“The failed U.S. President has shown he has no commitment to the principles of negotiation or a ceasefire,” Azizi said.
“This reckless violation of the ceasefire will, as always, lead to retreat and regret on their part. The blame game does not work anymore.”

The problem with using vague words to get the other party to sign an agreement is, of course, that those vagaries are the fault lines where deals predictably break up so that ships get bombed and people killed during the intentional room for misunderstand–ings. Iran understands that it will control the strait and will charge tolls if it darn well wants to, which makes economists like Jeremy Siegel incredibly naive to be forecasting zero or even negative inflation by the end of the year on the basis that the oil crisis is over now.

That series of strikes over the last three days left the strait in the following condition:

The International Maritime Organization had begun moving stranded vessels out of the Gulf through an alternative route near Oman’s coastline after the interim US-Iran agreement. However, those efforts were suspended after Thursday’s attack on a commercial ship.
Shipping analysts say confidence in the route has weakened again even though commercial traffic continues. Any sustained disruption could have global consequences because around 20% of the world’s seaborne crude oil passes through the strait….
Negotiators are still expected to pursue talks on Iran’s nuclear programme and sanctions relief, but the latest military exchanges, coupled with renewed attacks in the Strait of Hormuz, have significantly raised the risk that the interim agreement could unravel before a final deal is reached.

It could, of course, all stop there with talks resuming.

On the other hand, it could be that all talks stop there. The latest reports call further negotiations into question:

The latest via Reuters:
IRAN WEIGHS WALKING AWAY FROM SWISS TALKS AFTER US STRIKE
IRAN MAY HALT SWISS TALKS AFTER US STRIKE ON SIRIK
Gulf states have newly condemned “in the strongest terms the treacherous Iranian attacks” on Bahrain, after drones hit the country’s territory. The GCC statement further alleged that the Iranians targeted “civilian infrastructure and properties”….
Independent journalist and pundit Michael Tracey points out sarcastically but aptly that Indefinitely bombing Iran sounds a lot like what you might call “endless war”. And so the weekly tit-for-tat escalation might grow more regular until there simply is no more MoU deal to reference back to at all.

But, hey, the “June swoon” in tech stocks is over because the war was just a bump in the road, and gasoline prices will be down to $3.36 per gallon, which I think is as likely as the $0.36 per gallon that was actually the typical price back when I was in Middle School, mowing lawns. But Siegel thinks it is so likely that he is predicting we’ll also see zero inflation. When you see what I’ll be showing you about the path of inflation and broadening types of inflation to date, it should become immediately clear that a total end to inflation so quickly is impossible. The Fed hasn’t been able to end inflation for five years, and the rise is now prominent. We wouldn’t have zero inflation, even if this war had never happened.

Well, there is perhaps one way we could move into his even more bizarre prediction of “negative inflation,” which would be if the world goes strait into nuclear holocaust and we find ourselves living in the pages of The Apocalypse, but that is hardly the rosy picture Siegel painted with a goofy smile of prices falling because oil is falling at record speed and will keep doing so. I seriously do not know how economists become that dumb then smile at their own stupidity as if they just said something smart and encouraging!

So, while the hostilities could, of course, all have stopped there, even if talks remained stalled, hostilities did not stop there as we’ll see in the next section.

3rd UPDATE: This headline also popped up early Sunday morning while I was going through and doing my proofreading of this article: Trump again threatens Iran with annihilation as Kuwait and Bahrain report attacks. None of the article, by the way, has been altered to reflect new facts in these headlines, except for the insertion of these updates. In fact, I am deliberately not even reading the articles until I get to the end of my proofreading. The article is based entirely on the facts as they were when I finished the first draft on Saturday.

Boots on the ground arrive in Iran …

Economic Collapse Gains Momentum as Stocks Lose Momentum

David Haggith — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 19:19:33 GMT

If you look at the stock market over the past two months, you see a clear triple top in the NASDAQ, which had been driving all the momentum relentlessly uphill until recently:

MarketWatch

That’s the look of a major top. What I see graphed out in that image is a market that climbed confidently and rapidly to a peak in May (the first circle), ignoring the war completely. Then it finally fell a little (caught its breath after months of not falling). From that stumble, it tried to rebuild, mustering all of its former momentum, in order to push above that May peak in order to try to keep the bull market alive. It succeeded by just by a tiny bit by early June, but it couldn’t hold that slightly higher ground for more than a couple of days. So, it fell … much harder than it did after the first peak. From there, it tried again with everything it had to push back up above its ultimate early-June summit, but this time it could barely hit the level of the first peak. So, it fell again; and it is now trundling sideways, close to the bottom of its big drop from the summit.

The market quite simply is out of gas. It does not have the old energy it once had for high-tech that was driving bets relentlessly higher. It is, in fact, quite literally out of gas as it also struggles with the huge energy shortage that has developed that is raising corporate expenses. Of course, the NASDAQ is breaking up worse than the other indices because it is the vault full of AI and chip stocks. The once-enthusiastic market is worn out.

The area we are flatlining in at the end of the graph was well explained, I thought today, by another article in boldface in The Daily Doom’s news headlines section. I read this morning that stocks are bouncing “wildly to nowhere” because major market-making institutional investors are now just betting the volatility—casting a bet against the market one way, sure it will swing the opposite, pocketing the profit when it does and then casting a bet the opposite way. They are surfing the chop, which is a way some people make a lot of money when the market finally breaks; but it is a dangerous surfing game for the novitiates, who are likely the ones taking the wrong side of those bets.

Exorbitant enthusiasm dies hard, but this looks like the bull’s initial death throes—like stocks are in anaphylactic shock and just quivering now.

The Dow is not breaking up as badly, though it is flat-lining over the past couple of weeks, too, near the top level of its last summit, which has become major resistance even for the Dow. that is because the big-momentum, high-tech stock investments are rotating into more mundane investments now. The Dow is less heavy in high-tech and bigger on other blue chip companies like major banks, major retail, major energy companies and major manufacturers. So, it is trending slowly sideways but not taking the rough action seen in the NASDAQ.

That, too, is how the dot-com bust happened, which is how I’ve always said this last bull market was going to die. So, it all looks right on track for me, and the long fall to a bottom that may take a couple of years to play out with temporary bear-market rallies along the way will begin when the horseplay at the end of the above graph gives up. That will happen when the next big trigger hits, and there are several likely big triggers to keep it happening every time it thinks it can recover:

When the Iran war breaks open again or when the gulf is clearly reclosed .
When the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve hits bottom in about 3-4 more weeks.
When the first gas stations in the US run out of gas because the SPR, Cushing and other facilities cannot adequately buffer the peaks in summer energy demand, which will drive gas and diesel prices up locally wherever that happens.
When AI inflation adds to energy-crisis inflation, which is already adding to the tariff inflation and becomes a fire tornado that is suddenly clearly out of control.

All of those things have a reasonable likelihood of happening this summer. One headline below points out how AI is now the third wave piling into inflation, not just because of how it is also driving up energy prices, but particularly because of how it is driving up the prices of all electronics, such as cell phones, computers, iPads, video games, etc. because AI is an enormous demand vacuum sucking chips away from all other products as chip producers push all their production capacity to flow toward higher-paying AI ventures, which forces everything else to pay higher prices to compete for production capacity on chips that are in short supply.

Another big threat in the headlines below is Putin expanding his war to other former Soviet bloc nations near Europe’s former iron-curtain border as he becomes desperately angry over Ukraine’s increasingly broad and successful drone attacks inside Russia, which he has not been able to defend against. The serious damages Ukraine has brought to Russia’s oil infrastructure have turned into Russia’s own internal gas and diesel crisis, making Putin’s war more unpopular at home. Putin is now threatening NATO because he believes NATO has to be involved in targeting those attacks because Ukraine doesn’t have the satellites to do the targeting on its own.

Meanwhile, the questionable deal between Trump and Iran took a big hit today when Iran attacked a cargo ship in the strait and threatened a broader war against any ships that it hasn’t approved for transit, while also clarifying that, yes, Iran will charge tolls if it wants to and that it will certainly be the entity that controls the strait, perhaps in a shared-power arrangement with neighboring Arab states, but certainly, it pointed out, exclusive of the US entirely.

“Oh, and by the way, if you put boots on the ground, USA, we’ll rush a million of our own troops to attack them.” This it threatened as it warned against the movement it has seen of US war ships toward the strait. Plus, Trump yesterday boasted that Iran made big concessions, to which Iran responded by thanking him for the amazing victory they had just experienced.

It turns out—satellite photos in one story below reveal—that Iran rained major damage down on US military bases in the Middle East, contrary to the endless lies of the Trump Administration. The destruction to command headquarters was so great that the US is considering not even rebuilding the bases. Winning!

All of those things are going to keep ganging up on the stock market and bond market and piling onto inflation to harm all other markets by diminishing consumer capacity, even as AI starts to seriously strip down human employment for months and months to come, also reducing consumer capacity. So, yes, as two videos call out below—one by an economist, another by a billionaire—we are already sliding down into an economic collapse that will sweep markets down with it.

Delirious stock investors are going to get their heads kicked in. The question is will it be many of the biggest investors, or will it be, as usual, the little retail investors that jumped into the momentum late in the game, who are buying up all the stocks the billionaires want to sell—because that kind of rotation (toward other types of investors, not just other types of investments) is the flip side of the explanation for the pitches up and down in recent days. For every major institution casting bets on the volatility, there has to be a counterparty taking up the other side of the bet, and that’s usually the little guys, often baited by the big guys, such as Goldman’s Sacks of Gold, to believe there is still room for stocks to rise.

Meanwhile, some Israeli leaders in videos posted below are now demanding the US use nuclear weapons on Iran and taunting the US for it cowardice in not doing so. One has to wonder why these emboldened and boisterous starlets are not taunting their own country to use their own nuclear weapons. “No,” the truly demented and depraves Israeli leaders say, “We have to keep our nuclear weapons in order to maintain the nuclear threat by making other nations wonder whether or not we even have nuclear weapons.”

Like that makes sense. Brainless as their arguments are, you should hear how strident they are in demanding the US do so and taunting it as a coward for not going there! You can hear it via videos posted in one of the boldfaced articles below. It’s like listening to the inmates in the psych ward banging on their cell bars with their tin cups or like a pyromaniac demanding the fire marshal supply gasoline.

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Breaking up Is Hard to Do—Earthquakes Everywhere

David Haggith — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 14:32:16 GMT

It seems like a mere two days ago that I wrote, “Feeling All Shook up.” That would have been a better headline for today when four major earthquakes appeared in less than 24 hours around the world with two of them back-to-back in the same place. The one-two-punch of earthquakes, at 7.2 and 7.5 on the Richter scale in Venezuela with less than a minute separation, was enormously devastating. Then the Hayward fault in California woke back up with a medium-scale EQ felt in three states. And to top it all off, Japan had a huge earthquake that nearly touched being a 7.0.

What on earth is going on? Literally. What on earth?

While I cannot answer that question because the quakes have no apparent correlation geologically with each other, that is an extraordinary number of high-intensity EQs for a single day. Many headlines below cover the quakes with photos, etc.

Inflation shakeup

We got a tremor today for inflation, too, which hit 4.1 on the inflation Richter scale. News focused on a somewhat friendlier number—the much more restrictive core inflation that factors out entirely the two largest areas of current inflation (energy and food), the ones that also hit your budget the hardest. But, even there, the rate rose to 3.4% on the Fed’s favorite more sanguine gauge, which was the highest since October 2023.

So, it is a tick up, even on the minimized gauge in the inflation that I’ve said will be coming this summer as energy prices finally have time to start seeping into other products and services. This reading was for May, so pre-summer. And it underscores my writing yesterday about just how badly the Fed is failing to curb inflation when its core gauge is, as of today, 58% higher than the Fed’s targeted 2.0 level. This is a longterm worsening trend, in play for years now, making total mush out of Treasury Secretary Bessent’s words yesterday about needing to be “open minded” about inflation, as it is likely to come down quickly on its own now that the war is ending.

First, we don’t know the war is ending because, once again, both sides have polar opposite views in how they read the main, intentionally vague sticking points in the MoU; and, second, the Fed hasn’t been able to get inflation down for YEARS now, so what kind of utter nonsense thinks it will level off after this energy crisis without a massive Fed fight? (Even though the Fed cannot do anything about energy-caused inflation, it will have to look like it is trying, and that will cripple the economy further; but, hey, interest rates are going to rise regardless of what the Fed does because bonds are certainly pricing in inflation, so the Fed’s only job is to try to keep up so it can appear to be in control.)

AI shakedown

Speaking of “upheaval,” note the headline below under “Digital Dominance.” The Wall Street Journal reports (but I’ve carried it on MSN so you can read it without subscribing because that is what I always try to do for my readers, which Drudge, for instance does NOT do) a major effort to get MILLIONS of workers ready right away for the coming upheaval from AI.

A new coalition of companies and policymakers said it is time to ready the U.S. workforce for major disruption, no matter the ultimate scale.
To that end, the bipartisan consortium, which includes state governments, philanthropic groups and employers ranging from Amazon.com and Microsoft to Bank of America and Eli Lilly, is coming together to develop a new “people strategy” for the artifcial-intelligence era. Called RAISE US, it launches Thursday and will be led by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who served under President Joe Biden, and former Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb, a Republican.

We’re talking a coming 8.0 magnitude earthquake in the jobs market, but it is likely to hit like a long, LONG rumble, rather than an instant jolt—a quake that keeps shaking for a few years, constantly getting more violent. That headline hits on an interesting day for me, because I was just scanning job openings for writers now that I’m retired to see about a better-paying side gig, and there wasn’t a thing I’d think about applying for. While the positions paid $70-80,000, every single one of them involved either using AI to create stories or (which was MOST of them) training AI how to replace writers! Well, that is going to happen clearly, but I’m not going on that death march.

“We’re going to need to scale, and scaling can never be done by single institutions,” said Brad Smith, vice chair and president at Microsoft.
The mission of the group is to “pull all the levers at once,” Raimondo said. That means teaming up with employers to find ways to help workers gain skills or new roles and joining with educators to roll out different types of training.

Right now, given what I just saw this morning on LinkedIn, it looks like the number-one type of training is learning how to train AI to replace you!

It also plans to propose policy changes such as tweaking unemployment benefits to let displaced workers continue to get them while they, for instance, start new businesses with AI.

What did I just say?

Business groups and lawmakers have warned that more must be done to prepare the U.S. workforce for potential upheaval. The Leadership Now Project, a group of more than 400 current and retired business executives, devoted several sessions at its annual spring meeting to AI’s potential threat to jobs, comparing it to the effects of globalization and offshoring in recent decades.

It’s already coming in much faster than globalization or offshoring as I described in this week’s radio interview in the article I linked to at the top of this editorial. It is a transition that is changing with exponential speed since the start of this year.

This time, though, “The scale of change and reshaping of jobs and careers is different—and more so than it has ever been, I think, in human history,” Holcomb said.

That’s more like it.

An effort in Arkansas will focus on supporting “an AI-powered career navigation platform.”

And that’s NOT more like it.

Said one of the people working in this joint effort:

“I personally don’t believe there’ll be nothing for humans to do, so we’re just going to sit around and take up leisure time,” Raimondo said. “But I am worried—obviously, I wouldn’t be doing this if I weren’t worried.”

In another story today, Indian factory workers, which was where all the jobs once fled under George Bush 2.0, are being instructed to make videos that train AI in how to replace them. Your final gig under the old world order is training AI to replace you.

The 32-year-old had been working at the garment factory on the outskirts of Delhi for nearly a year when management asked workers on her line to strap small cameras to their foreheads before starting their shifts. Nobody explained why.
As Lalita sat stitching shirts and trousers, the camera recorded everything: the rhythm of her hands guiding cloth through the sewing machine; the precision with which she aligned collars and seams; the speed at which her fingers corrected folds and imperfections; even interactions with colleagues. “We found it funny at first, because of how we all looked with that headgear,” she says.

Well, guess what? It’s not funny now that they know it was so they can be replaced with AI robots. Instead, it is earthshaking as they ask at the top of the story, “Who is going to pay us when we are replaced by robots?”

What Lalita and her colleagues did not know was that their daily routines were being captured as part of a growing effort by companies in India to collect first-hand data from factory floors, information increasingly valuable in the race to automate industrial work.

Well, they know now!

Humanoid robots have emerged as the latest frontier in the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence. Industry experts increasingly describe data as the biggest bottleneck in robotics and automation. Unlike large language models such as ChatGPT or Gemini, which were trained on vast quantities of text available online, robots require first-person recordings of physical work.

Don’t worry. They’ll catch up in a year via video training.

Probably a lot less than a year.

Companies collecting egocentric footage say the future may require hundreds of millions – and potentially billions – of hours of human activity filmed across factories, warehouses, shops and homes before robots can reliably navigate real-world environments.

Don’t count on it. The new AI can extrapolate and figure out how to do things even faster once it gets the basic picture. So, yeah hundreds of millions of hours to cover EVERY industry on earth, perhaps, but only hundreds of hours to cover the ONE that you work in.

Elon Musk has predicted that roughly 80% of Tesla’s future value will come not from electric vehicles, but from its humanoid robots.

This type of filming is actually called “egocentric data.” Good name for something that will strike right at the heart of the human ego since many people evaluate themselves AS TO WHO THEY ARE by WHAT THEY DO. They probably shouldn’t, but they DO.

Sensing the opportunity, a growing ecosystem of firms, including Humyn AI, FPV Labs, Micro1, Egodata, Neocambrian, XP Robotics, Objectways, Scale AI and CynLr, has emerged to build data pipelines for robotics companies.

That’s the new field, but it may well finish replacing ITSELF in less than two years. I’d call that a short-term business model because soon the AI robots can collect all the video data. They’ll be teaching other AI robots how to do the work they’re doing by filming themselves doing it faster than humans, so AI can learn how it’s done RIGHT.

“South Asia remains the workshop of the world for many labour-intensive industries. If you’re trying to teach a robot how humans work, there are few places that offer the same combination of scale, diversity and density of human labour as India. On any given day, millions of workers are sewing garments, assembling products, sorting goods and performing tasks that robotics companies want machines to learn,” says Puneet Jindal, the founder of Labellerr AI, a technology company that collects egocentric data in India.

India’s cheap labor is now replacing itself.

This will be earthshaking on a massive social scale for a nation of 1.5 billion people who were only just starting to get the feel of being a modestly prosperous society. It will be for all the rest of us, too, because, if it’s happening in India where labor is cheap, it will be happening more everywhere labor is expensive!

Capturing the footage is only the first step before recordings are cleaned and annotated for clients, ensuring that hands remain visible, movements are accurately tracked and actions are separated from background activity.

Yes, but AI will quickly be doing ALL of that laborious video editing in mere seconds.

The Guardian’s examination of data-collection practices across six factories in five states found that workers wearing devices ranging from meta smart glasses to head-mounted cameras received no compensation for generating footage that would later be sold to technology companies.
“Sometimes they give us a soft drink,” says Lalita, who earns about $200 a month at the factory….
“The demand for egocentric data is exploding, and new companies are entering the market every month promising to deliver it more cheaply,” says Jindal. “International clients are often willing to pay significantly more for this footage, but the pressure to undercut competitors keeps pushing costs downward. By the time that trickles through the supply chain, the workers generating the data are often left with nothing.”

As goes the data stream, so goes the whole AI stream. You’re not going to get any special compensation for teaching AI how to replace your, but you very likely could find yourself teaching AI how to replace you.

Jindal says attempts to compensate workers directly are often resisted by factory owners. “Their argument is that labour costs are already rising and margins are under pressure. They say that if costs increase further, factories may shut down or scale back operations, leaving workers without jobs.”

Yeah, so “to hell with the workers” is, I guess the motto. Typical. And that’s about how well AI benefits are likely to trickle down. It’s not a coming earthquake. It is already rumbling in various parts of the world and spreading toward a part near you, and white-collar workers are the easiest to replace because thinking and decision making are, at least, SUPPOSED TO BE what AI does best.

In some factories, the footage is being used for more than training AI. Records reviewed by Scroll.in found that some companies also generated productivity reports from the recordings, ranking workers based on time spent actively working, estimating losses from “idle” periods, and even tracking how much time workers spent talking to colleagues. In some cases, reports singled out specific workers and identified when and where co-workers gathered to socialise.

Robots, of course, won’t likely be doing all of that nonsense. Or, if they do, they will be communicating telepathically via Bluetooth or WiFi while they work at super-human speeds. You won’t even know they are talking up a storm!

The flip side to all of that, of course, is the likely citizens revolt that will come if AI is allowed to push so many people out of work. Even brick masons are wearing the head gear and training their AI robot replacements. One mason sends the data via a phone and says,

“The phone feels heavy and uncomfortable to wear,” he says. “But I’ve only just started. Maybe I’ll get used to it with time.”

Heavy for a BRICK mason? Well, don’t worry. You won’t have time to “get used to it.”

And the apprenticeship training will go much faster than it did for you:

Unlike conventional workplace data, these recordings capture workers’ bodily knowledge, the movements, instincts and skills accumulated through years of experience. Yet once converted into datasets, that knowledge can be circulated through global AI supply chains.

The move from apprentice to journeyman will take only seconds. Overall, this will be earthshaking in its social and economic impact.

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People Say the Dumbest Things!

David Haggith — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 05:07:06 GMT

That is what the news is full of today—the really dumb things that really important people just said—the clowns in government. Today’s top story in dumb things begins with the US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent. First, he qualified his statement by contending the question asked of him about whether it was wise to let the economy run hot:

I wouldn’t call it “letting the economy run hot” because that implies that inflation is running hot.

Oh, so inflation that has run 50% or more higher than the Fed’s target rate every month for five years now isn’t inflation running hot? That, of course was before the war and its oil shortages. That’s just the new normal inflation rate that is now regarded as the good news if we can just get inflation back down to 3%, now that it’s boiling over that level.

Bessent should have listened to bond legend Jeffrey Gundlach two days ago when Gundlach commented that the past five years have been a total loss of inflation control for the Fed and explained why the difference between a routine 2% inflation rate, which held consistent for years, and a 3% rate matters due to the compounding effect of interest rates:

According to Gundlach, we are now frozen into a period where long bond interest rates will be well above 5% for years to come because of the extreme debt the US has, which …

… makes it almost impossible in my view for longterm interest rates to decline—even if … we get into a weaker economy.”
We’ve gone from an average Treasury rate of under 2% across the entire maturity spectrum to now just under 4%…. That’s going to continue to happen….
In the past thirteen corrections and/or bear markets in the S&P 500, the dollar went up in all of them … and it went up around 8-10%…. [During the last one] the dollar dropped about 8-10%.

Last I heard, a falling dollar tends to equate with rising price inflation. So, that, at least, runs between his words.

That is corroborating my case that during this cycle of interest rates you’re not going to have the same reaction function, and there’s going to be something of a crisis in the longterm bond market.
You could have a situation where longterm Treasury rates during a weak economy actually go up to 6-6.5 percent….
Maybe no one will lend us money anymore….

You would think the head of the US Treasury would be concerned about that, instead of talking about how beautiful the roses were I what used to be the White House rose garden. In talking of the Treasury’s possible coming credit crisis, Gundlach says,

Refinancing isn’t possible anymore … because the rates are higher now. Bonds that are rolling off have to be refloated at higher rates, and that is actually more stressful…. I recommend people own nothing in the way of momentum stocks….
For the US investor, I’ve been pounding the table. You’ve got to get away from all US…. You’ve got to get away from all dollar-based….

Again, reading between the lines that would be because of inflation. The falling value of the dollar that such investments are made in means those investments lose to inflation.

And if inflation keeps rising, that sucks more and more out of real GDP, which is what we measure to know if the economy is doing anything because we don’t want to just be measuring inflation. All of that clearly goes over Bessent's head, who goes on to argue that inflation probably won’t be any problem and that GDP will rise nicely, as a result.

Before we get to Bessent’s dumb argument, Gundlach also points out that consumer sentiment, as compared to all the most reliable economic indicators, is at an all-time low. Regardless of what the indicators are trying to tell people the economy is doing, they’re not feeling it! My belief is that one huge part of that is because government inflation readings are way off the mark, so they are under describing the impact of inflation on the consumer or on GDP.

It just suggests there is a social mood that something is not going right. I think that has a lot to do obviously with the inflation rate.

And why would that be when the inflation rate is barely above 3%. Well Gundlach’s answer (and mine, too) has been that it is because that rate has held 50% higher than the Fed’s target rate of 2% for such a long time that it is grinding down the average person’s wealth. (And I would add that this rate is significantly understated, so the long grind has been much worse than indicated.)

And here’s where he gets clear about how dumb thinking like Bessent’s is:

This has been the case now for a few years … before the oil crisis and before the war….
The moment that solidified all this in my mind was at the end of 2021…. Anybody who had a brain knew that the money printing was going to lead to … an inflation spike of significance.

That seemed obvious to me back then, but I couldn’t convince Fed Chair Jerome Powell or Bessent’s prototype, Janet Yellen. That, of course, is because they never read me because the opinions of the people they are willing to listen to are so much better.

Gundlach also gives strong points in the final 10-15 minutes about the seriously deteriorating state of the private credit market and how it appears it is all being covered over in lies about the credit ratings just as happened before the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. So, worth listening to. He scribes how one rating agency rates a particular investment at “95.” Another rates the same investment at “8.” Clearly, he says, people are paying to get the credit rating they want just as happened back in 2007.

But to Bessent, everything is sugar plums and fairies for the economy in the year ahead, which he expects will be running at a real GDP growth rate well above 3%, even though, if inflation were calculated more honestly than those credit ratings in private credit, real GDP would already be sub-zero. Gundlach continues about how software companies were supposed to keep the stock market from crashing:

All of a sudden, in the fall, people woke up and said, ‘Wait a minute, [software] is being disrupted potentially by AI. It reminded me of 2007 when everyone thought that Fannie Mae was going to come in and rescue the problems of defaults and mortgages, and in one weekend—it was a Sunday—I was thinking about it, and I got this crack of doom feeling. All of a sudden, I said, ‘Wait a minute! Fannie Mae is bankrupt!… They’re drowning in these problems!… It can’t bail out anybody!

That’s where Gundlach sees us now in the private credit market. Then it was mortgage-backed securities. Now it is private credit. He’s likely as right now as he was then.

Bessent doesn’t even begin to understand the problems that are going to hit his department directly … to such a level of willful blindness that he doesn’t even believe we have hot inflation; but, getting past his objection to the premise of the question, he gets even dumber:

I think we can have a high GDP economy without the traditional inflation seeping in….

Seeping?

At the present rate that inflationary pressure is growing, that like saying water is seeping into the kitchen when someone just opened a fire hydrant outside, and the stream of water has broken through the kitchen window and has already knocked mom over backward.

Of course, he says that with his usual smarmy kind of smile, which is the kind of smile that only a billionaire could have when a little kid tells him the popcorn at the theater is so expensive, and it turns out the billionaire owns both the theater and the popcorn company, so the kid’s complaint warms the cockles of his grinchy heart.

Asked if there is an underlying inflation rate the Fed should be concerned about, Bessent replies,

What I think is that we do need to have an open mind on the price or the inflation impact of the Iran conflict and see what inflation looks like on the other side of this, and then we have an open mind that the AI boom could up productivity and be disinflationary and get us back down to target.

In other words, instead of worrying about pesky inflation that might evaporate anyway as soon as the war ends, we should take hope in the possibility that the great devil that is already stripping away personal livelihoods at an exponential rate (as I described in yesterday’s radio interview) is going to help the average man by making corporate billionaires more profitable because their will costs go down due to a productivity increase.

Ah yes, the old smell of trickle-down economics that makes billionaires prosper so they can release a drop of precious water to the parched tongue tips of the lesser folk.

The Fed hasn’t been able to “get us back down to target” for years; but, hey, AI may be disinflationary by eliminating enough jobs to increase business productivity per remaining employee, saving corporations the costs that actually put money in the hands of the average working man or woman, which was supposed to be HOW the wealth would trickle down. If that happens—and we should be open minded, Bessent says, and just wait to see if it does—the inflation will cool off for you shortly after you have lost your income due to the same AI. Who could hope for anything more? I think in the world of computing, they call that a “loop.” It’s certainly loopy thinking.

Bessent claims we are going to get back to a GDP growth rate with a three-handle.

Hmm! Let’s look at the trajectory during the first four quarters of Trump’s term to see if that handle pans out:

Trading Economics

The US economy expanded an annualized 1.6% in Q1 2026, up from 0.5% in Q4 but below 2% in the advance estimate, primarily reflecting downward revisions to investment and consumer spending. (Trading Economics)

Well, that doesn’t look a lot like a predictable trajectory to something over 3%, but Bessent likely knows more about how the number rigging will improve this year than I do because even those numbers are overstated due to not subtracting out nearly enough inflation to remove actual inflation from what is reported as actual production. Knowing the planned rigging in the reporting mechanisms better than I, he can probably more accurately predict for us where GDP is going to go.

The government takes out what the government reports for inflation, and those reports nearly everyone said were way off last year due to DOGE cuts greatly taking down the data gathering and due to all the usual “seasonal adjustments” the government likes to make, which are almost always to the government’s good, as well as two months of missing data due to a government shutdown, plus the government’s always ludicrous way of calculating the inflation in costs of homeownership by asking people who haven’t rented a house for years what they think their house would rent for, not what they think it costs them to live there … because THAT makes sense. Surely whatever non-renters think it would rent for must be whatever it costs them to live there.

So, hey, with the aftermath of inflation caused by an oil crisis that is just now hitting home with major oil hubs hitting “tank bottoms” and the SPR, according to the president, going to run dry in, now, less than a month, we should easily get back to where GDP was BEFORE THE TRUMP TARIFFS RIPPED THE GUTS OUT OF IT IN THE TWO QUARTERS JUST PRECEDING THAT WAR!

Let that be a lesson not to complain to a billionaire about the cost of your popcorn. He’ll just tell you that you are darn lucky you can still afford going to the movies, so shut up about your silly worries.

Now, we’re going to dart quickly to two other really dumb things people said in the news today:

The EU parliament just voted in a central-bank digital currency, but they have assured everyone it will “never replace cash” because people like cash. Well, what did you think they were going to say? “Here it is—the end of cash forever!” The stupid thing is that they think you will be dumb enough to believe them, which I am sure you will not. Maybe their constituents are dumber.

But, hey, that is nowhere near as stupid as King Trump’s energy secretary who reportedly claimed today that the oil problems are now over because “Iran will not have the ability to close the Strait of Hormuz going forward.”

His proof of that is that ships are going through right now with US escorts. Well, really just Iranian ships are going through, and they are going through because the US has OPENED the strait from its own barricade not because those ships were ever stopped by Iran. Iran was never in the business of stopping its own ships. So, that’s just a little bit dumb.

“That’s their key leverage and we’re taking that leverage away from them.”

Their key leverage is the way we kept their own ships from going through, and now they’ve lost that?

At this point we see traffic at about 25% of normal but with expectation of more Iranian oil coming out to the market.

Excuse me, did you just agree with me and say the Trump administration “expectations of more Iranian oil coming out to the market?” So, the Iranians have lost control of the strait because the 25% that is coming out is their oil and we can expect to see more of their oil get shipped to market?

I’ll tell you, though, when we look at the inentory levels of gasoline, they’re really quite low. They are at historic lows, and they look like they will continue to get lower.

This is supposed to be comforting?

Is that why Bessent is so sure inflation will vanish now that the war is ending? Maybe you should have a talk with him.

But still at this point, the transit through the Strait of Hormuz is still only about at the level of 25% of what has been normal.

Yes, that is because Iran is now able to get all of its gas and oil out at record prices, which are kept high by those low inventories of gasoline in the US and other nations and by the low competition that results from none of Iran’s competitors being able to safely transit out of the strait, leaving Iran with a hand that looks like a strait flush out of Hormuz!

So, in Trump’s favorite phrase, they “hold all the cards.”

Asked how long he thinks it will ever take to get back to normal, the energy secretary answers,

Well, I don’t think we’ll ever be back to normal…

Also comforting.

… as we’ve had it in the past because there is the question of who controls the Strait of Hormuz.

Now, I’m really confused: the article started by claiming you said Iran no longer controls the Strait of Hormuz. Of course, they never controlled it before the war either, so who does control it?

And the president has said that Iran can’t charge tolls.

Uh well, in terms of getting back to normal, that was normal all the time, going back throughout automobile history. However, do they listen to the president?

Iran has said we’ll have a Persian Gulf strait authority and a Persian Gulf insurance company.

Hmm. The word “insurance” there reminds me of the mafia. “We suggest you buy some insurance from us for your little restaurant here in the Bronx so that we don’t have to blow it up or bust your head against your open till.” So, since the president will not allow them to use the word “toll,” they are switching to defining it as “insurance.” And they’ll bill it as insurance, too, … where you pay the contractual $2,000,000 premium, and they will insure you against your ship being bombed, and their state-owned insurance company will be highly profitable because they will have no losses since they are the ones bombing ships, making it easy to assure the company never pays out on losses awarded to anyone who paid to buy their insurance.

I suppose for a guy like Trump, who grew up doing real-estate development in New York, this is just how business works.

So, I think there is a pervasive anxiety among shippers about the degree to which Iran will actually have a say—will control the strait.

Gee, ya think?

And that’s still to be worked out.

Oh, so everything is solved then. No wonder Bessent is so sure the inflation coming from the oil crisis will be short-lived.

In the fourteen point memorandum there’s ambiguity about charges.

Wasn’t that MY point several days back? It is all so ambiguous that it is likely to all blow up again, as it has each time, whenever each side interprets the points as they want?

No wonder Bessent feels we should just be open minded and see how it all turns out. You have to be open minded when the whole thing is open to very opposing interpretations.

The rest of the world will look at it as tolls, and that is something that is very troubling to the shipping industry and the global oil industry.

Ah, so the insurance IS what I thought. I’m thinking the president, at this point, does not feel you should be the spokesperson on this. (Though I am liking your refreshing honesty, except that it runs completely against your claim that Iran has lost control over the strait.)

Asked if he thinks that “sticks” by a reporter dumb enough to say all of that just “sounds like noise at this point,” I think, “Maybe like thunder that comes from the guns of very big ships.” It certainly sounds like the sticking point to me! The secretary’s response:

Well, that’s what we’re going to see play out—that Iran is very clear that it intends to have fees that they will charge.

Gee, I’m really struggling here to see how you are not making all my points for me. So, uh, thanks … I guess?

It is, in a sense, a creeping nationalization.

Ah, even better. He points out that the world won’t accept Iran nationalizing shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, especially not the Arab world since they are on the other shore of that strait.

So, that leads to a peaceful, inflation-free resolution how?

And that will be playing out over the next few months.

Great. At least, we now have a timeframe from Trump’s lead energy head. We’ll get this thorny deal with opposite interpretations worked out over the next few months. So, let’s see, the Cushing tank farms have hit bottom already, and the president has announced the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves will be out of oil in, now, less than a month; but we’ll, at least have this worked out in a few more months!

But Iran has discovered that it CAN become a regulator of the world oil market by controlling the strait.

Oooo kay. And that equals “the US has ended Iran’s ability to close Hormuz” how?

He, then, places oil prices ending up short-term at $75-85 per barrel. Uh, sure. Wait until you see what happens when the SPR runs dry, and you’ve still got “a few months” of negotiation to go with Iran over what this vague deal means.

Then he admits that even when the strait finally does get back open …

I’ve talked to shippers. Some are rushing to get their tankers back in. Others are holding back because they don’t know what’s going to happen. They don’t want their tankers to be stuck there again…. You have a thousand tankers or so that need to get out of the gulf. Then you have to get tankers in. Production has to be started, and there’s the degree of bringing production back … to previous levels, and dealing with the damage and how extensive is still to be ascertained … given the amount of missiles and drones that pounded the Arab parts of the country.

Thank you, Mr. Secretary. That was completely comforting. Just a few little snags, and we can, if all goes well in the interpretive process of these negotiations, get production back up to where it was in many more months. With all oil reserves running out in the US this summer, that sounds like a lot of fun. No wonder Secretary Bessent sees no inflation problems ahead.

I’m guessing that, if he were captain of the Titanic, he’d be telling us that the tropical seas that he sees right before us have no chance of hosting icebergs. So, breathe easy: these are the people running our country … as presented in their own words!

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Feeling All Shook up

David Haggith — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 19:40:06 GMT

Sometimes hearing it all in an interview is a little friendlier and more down-to-earth feeling than a written editorial, so here’s a radio interview I did today about today’s stock market shake-up as well as the latest news on the oil war:

Click for the interview I did today with a more-or-less local radio show.

You can also help to keep the truth going out to others by sharing The Daily Doom!

(The headlines that follow in boldface are the stories covered in today’s radio interview.)

Scrambled Eggs ala Trump

David Haggith — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 20:47:09 GMT

Over the course of the weekend, Israel followed through on American intelligence and did what the intel said it would do. It attempted to destroy President Trump’s Big Deal. Israel and Hezbollah continued to fight, and that blew up the start of peace talks between the US and Iran in Switzerland as US intel had claimed is the Isreali plan. Iran walked, and, at first, no one talked.

Iran did more than just walk away, however, it closed the Strait of Hormuz AGAIN. That’s, at least, the second closure since the present ceasefire began and the strait reopened. That caused Trump to smoke out the top of his head, screaming at the Iranians in numerous expletives that in older days would have been illegal to print, and that’s also why Iran walked, saying it would not return to the table until the US president apologized for cussing the Iranian dignitaries out.

Trump did more than just swear profusely. (I’ll leave you to take his word for that by reading his words.)

Iranian negotiators stormed out of the high-level peace talks with the US in Switzerland on Sunday after a frustrated President Trump unleashed his fury on the regime — threatening to seize the Strait of Hormuz and “blow the s–t out of them.” [That was the least of his language.]
The talks were abandoned after just 80 minutes when the discussions entered a “difficult phase” following “an insulting message by the US president,” Iran’s state news agency reported.

After getting drubbed by a good cussing out, Iran clarified its own response, saying “the primary option is jihad.”

The Islamic Republic’s chief negotiator and head of Iran’s parliament, Mohammed Ghalibaf, slammed Trump’s threats as an act of “desperation.”
“We don’t take the Americans’ threats seriously,” he wrote on X.
Ghalibaf went on to warn the president that any force would be met in kind.
“They had better watch their statements,” he hit back.
“Our armed forces are ready to respond in another way. Whatever they say, we are the ones who will act.”

The US contradicted Iran’s claim that it had closed the strait again, but then the president threatened the Iranian negotiators saying that, if they didn’t immediately reopen the strait, they’d be lucky to even make it home. He threatened in his old familiar style to all-but-destroy Iranian civilization by blowing the excrement out of it. So, strait open/strait closed, who knows? Who’s telling it strait? I’m guessing the president of the United States would not threaten to bomb them to bits if the strait were still opening, but maybe he would.

The US also countered Iran’s claims that it was no longer present at the talks and that it had snubbed a handshake photo opt as well, while the US said “No snub. There was no snub.” Maybe, but there were also no handshakes with the Iranians.

A senior US diplomat engaged in the negotiations later downplayed the diplomatic row, insisting that the peace talks remain ongoing.
“The Iranian delegation is still at the negotiating venue and the US delegation expects to continue working through the night,” the official said, adding that the discussions have included “clarifying some of the confusing messaging from Iran on the Strait and building deconfliction mechanisms to ensure the Strait will remain fully open.”

I guess they were confused, too. I’m glad they got their messaging clear, because it’s still as clear as the smoke of burning tankers and crude to me; and, by that, I’m not referring to the president’s language.

VP JD Vance did set it all straight though, by saying he hoped the talks, which he had arrived to just as the Iranians were leaving, would turn over a new leaf in Iranian relations. At the end of the meeting that the Iranians said didn’t happen, Vance announced a major victory, saying the Iranians had agree to allow UN/IEA inspectors back into the nation, something that the Trump-Israel-Iran war blew completely apart.

So, that was tremendous news because it means that, at least, on one issue Vance has gotten us back to where Obama had taken us with the JCPOA before Trump blew that up. With any good luck the Turnip administration will recover the entire JCPOA but simply at the small additional cost of destroying the global economy, delivering us vastly higher prices for everything for months, if not years, to come, and slaughtering a lot of people and things in many nations at the cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. All to the good in the “Golden Era” of greatness I guess.

Bringing clarification to the likely costs to come, Vance’s boss also spent more than four hours talking with his war-monger buddy Lindsay Graham who returned to the press from the meeting with the Prez. to say that the way this ends, if Iran doesn’t get back to the negotiating table and/or doesn’t get oil flowing again right away through the strait that the administration said is not closed, is that the US will …

… take the Strait of Hormuz over by force. The United States will control the Strait of Hormuz. We’ll charge a fee for all those who go through to pay for the operation. And we’re going to expand the Abraham Accords in calendar year 2026. We’re going to get Saudi Arabia to join the Abraham Accords, which is the biggest change in 5,000 years in the Mid East.

That, of course, means we jump out of the frying pan and into the fire by placing big-time boots on the ground in the center of the hottest zone on earth. To make everything that entails clear, Graham added that, if Iran contests the US control of the strait, “we’ll obliterate them.” However, talk of enforcing the Abraham Accords into action, surely put a smile on Jerod Kushner’s face.

Oil apparently liked the news because, even with many stories this weekend of a raging oil shortage going on in Russia right now, oil prices dropped. In fact, the oil shortage is so peculiar right now, that even though Russia is rationing oil in many parts of the country and in Crimea, Saudi Arabia turned to Russia to buy fuel oil so they can generate electricity to keep the air conditioners running. Nevertheless, jet fuel prices crashed, leaving airlines that have priced higher fuel costs into tickets already sold with a substantial windfall. However, that said, Europe is running out of fuel, so gasoline prices are skyrocketing all over Europe, especially as it faces a hellish heat wave, driving up fuel use for power generation. Prices down/prices up at the same time in different places.

At least, we know the strait is open for the Iranians. They are now moving peak oil through the strait, as in what is described as a “wartime high.” So, that’s good, I guess. Somebody’s getting oil, and it means that much is going according to Trump’s own plan, since he made that possible for Iran when he switched from playing bad cop to good cop in order to get them to talk. We have ways of making you talk. One of them is money—lots and lots of money. It was really only three Iranian tankers that passed through so far, but that is the wartime high for a one-day period.

So, oil prices are plunging, even as Oilprice.com publishes an article today claiming that …

Global oil and fuel inventories are being drawn down rapidly, raising fears of a severe supply crunch if Hormuz disruptions persist.

Just enough fear to lower the price of oil, I guess, because disruptions certainly persisted all weekend long as well as today, and prices dropped. According to Oilprice.com, there is now almost no possibility that the world will avoid going over the oil cliff.

That cliff will be the result of fast-depleting commercial and strategic inventories of oil and oil products around the world.

“Fast depleting” must be good news because the article reported the strait was still closed as of the time of its writing, and oil prices were still plummeting. So were stocks. Trump had just boasted the stock market was up, when Space X, having just launched its IPO, crashed 9%, sucking the NASDAQ down into a deep hole with it. Ah well, as they used to say with Space X rockets, “What goes up, must come down quickly.”

As I explained in a previous piece, the world is fast approaching “tank bottoms,” that is, the depletion of usable oil and oil products inventory. When that inventory effectively runs out, there will be a bidding war for oil and oil products to replace the millions of barrels per day that will still be needed but unavailable from inventories as the drama in the Persian Gulf continues.

With one of the world’s largest oil producers (the Saudis) competing against the Russian people for their own oil for the sake of the Saudi people, it sounds like the bidding wars for refined fuels have begun in some parts of the world, even as crude prices tank.

Iran also enriched our knowledge of the deal by clarifying that uranium is off the table.

Iran’s president said Sunday that the Islamic Republic will not give up its right to enriched uranium as part of the peace deal with the US — while noting that a deal could save the country’s economy by unlocking sanctioned cash.

The deal has already achieved the latter part of that statement with Iranian oil freely transiting the strait now, while all other traffic remains shut out, and with $30-billion reportedly released from sanctioned Iranian funds as enticement because that is one of the ways of making them talk along with $6-billion in enticement funds on its way from Qatar.

“In just these few days, and until the day before yesterday, we exported nearly 16 million barrels of oil, whereas during the 50-day siege period, it was not possible to move even one barrel of oil,” the Iranian president claimed.
“In this short period, we were able to recover part of our credits and resources and carry out numerous actions,” he said of the immediate sanctions relief.

So, the deal is proceeding well for Iran. As for their goals outside of collecting the money, Iran said,

“Our primary option is jihad, whether on the battlefield or in the streets. We are not worried about the negotiations failing. We have not gone into negotiations out of desperation or helplessness,” Abdollah Haji Sadeghi told Al-Jazeera.

Iran did provide assurances that it will not seek a bomb, so there is another way the war and the Big Deal have gotten us partially back to Obama’s JCPOA. Just a fact that this is all we’ve recovered so far from the original deal that Trump shredded during 1.0; but it’s a start, and there are fifty-some days of egg-breaking and omelettes yet to go.

As far as the fate of Iran’s nuclear material, President Masoud Pezeshkian said his nation was willing to provide assurances, yet again, that Iran would not develop nuclear weapons.
But, he said that enriched uranium is still needed to develop power plants in the country.
“What the United States demands is that Iran not build an atomic bomb. This is nothing new, and we can also state in writing that we have no intention of building a bomb,” Pezeshkian said in a statement.

Anything they say in writing is certain to be true, or they wouldn’t write it. Right?

“However, we will not relinquish our right to enrichment, and the other side will have no choice but to accept this right,” he added.
Iran currently possesses nearly 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium, which is believed to be buried underground following joint US-Israeli airstrikes last year.

Except that industry experts say uranium enriched to the present level is not necessary at all in order to run nuclear reactors for electricity production or for nuclear medicine production. Bombs are pretty much its only use.

Meanwhile, Israel, which expressed being dismayed by Trump’s attacks on NetanYahoo as being something of a village idiot, has weighed in on the deal. With Trump having just literally stated that he’s the boss, Bibi clarified that, no, he is:

Netanyahu Continues Defying USA, Says IDF Troops To Occupy Southern Lebanon As Long As Necessary

“Necessary” for Israel has always meant many years.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that his nation’s military will continue its operations in Southern Lebanon for as long as he demands, blatantly spitting in the face of President Trump and the recent peace deal between America and Iran….
“Nothing will alter that commitment….”
Netanyahu’s remarks came just days after President Trump told Axios he’s had to try to keep the Israeli prime minister “sane” and that he thought “Bibi” would refrain from attacking Lebanon after the peace deal.
Questioned on his ability “to control Israel from attacking Lebanon,” President Trump said he believes they’ll refrain because, “They have a lot of respect for me, and they do as I say.”

I guess not:

However, within hours of the president’s Axios interview being released, the Israelis conducted intense airstrikes across southern Lebanon that resulted in nearly 50 deaths and about 100 injuries.

Ah well, I suppose no president wins every skirmish. Just a few more broken eggs.

Apparently, the visuals in the video, which you can find if you click on the X post above, were not enough, so Israel added clarification:

Top Israeli Official Openly Calls For Genocide As US Seeks Peace: ‘All Of Lebanon Must Burn’

That was Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir, so probably close to being an authority on the Israeli military position. He, at least, holds a position that makes him think he is.

Ben-Gvir issued a scathing rebuke of the current Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) negotiated between Iran and the United States after Israel says four of its soldiers were killed in Southern Lebanon in an attack by Hezbollah — although some reports suggest Israel and Lebanon have subsequently agreed to a new ceasefire late Friday morning. In his statement, Ben-Gvir said the goal should be to indiscriminately “obliterate” Lebanon.

Well, at least, someone is speaking clearly. Not a lot of ambiguity in his statement of the Israeli position. And again …

“For every tear of an Israeli mother, a thousand Lebanese mothers must weep,” Ben-Gvir said in the Friday post on X. “All of Lebanon must burn! With all due respect to the Americans, Israel must make it clear to the entire world that the blood of our sons and the security of our citizens are not forfeit. All of Lebanon must burn…. Enough with the ping-pong. In the Middle East, you don’t win with measured responses and restraint — you need to go berserk. To obliterate. To crush the terror.”

Clear enough, then.

Netanyahu is said to have bet his entire relationship with everyone in the US and the world on Trump, and the bet is not paying off really well right now. Go figure. Maybe Israel’s chagrin over the deal and the president’s tongue lashing is causing the president’s edginess that is resulting in him going back to telling the ayatollahs that he will probably have to disintegrate them very soon.

For a decade, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu placed all his chips on Donald Trump. He gambled that with Trump, he would be able to bring down the ayatollahs’ regime in Iran. Along the way, and especially ahead of the change of administration in January 2025, he clashed with the Democratic Party and lost the support of much of the Western world.

Yeah, the whole world thing is not going well for Israel right now. Trump and Vance have both made it repeatedly as clear as a kick in the teeth that Israel doesn’t have a meaningful friend left outside the US, and that even that could be up for grabs soon if the yahoo doesn’t tuck in his tail.

… in recent weeks, Trump appears to have unexpectedly abandoned Netanyahu on the way to an agreement with Tehran. Then again, was it really unexpected?
The French Jewish philosopher and writer Bernard-Henri Lévy recently published an article in Le Point against Trump under the headline “Betrayal and humiliation: the real doctrine of Trumpism.” According to Lévy, the president’s foreign policy is defined not only by abandoning U.S. allies, but also by an element of deliberate public humiliation.

With any luck, Trump will win one more victory out of this war that he can post on an arch somewhere—that he got the strait back open that took a war to get closed.

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WAR AND PIECES: Trump's Attempt at a New Deal Sputters ahead in Fits and Stops, but it Does Move

David Haggith — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 22:12:04 GMT

A war of words

Today got off to a bumpy start in the Strait of Hormuz. Iran walked away from the first day of talks in Switzerland because Israel did a little more bombing in Lebanon, and they announced Trump’s deal was on pause until Israel proved it was done fighting. Iran started the day by opening the strait, but then the Iranian IRGC announced the strait was closed and threatened to blow up any ships attempting passage, perhaps because Iran had suddenly announced the deal was on pause, so they felt they were carrying out orders from on high; but then the Iranian foreign minister announced the strait is still open, and some ship traffic did start to move through.

Israel and Hezbollah announced a ceasefire, which may be why Iran appeared to reverse itself, but Netanyahu made clear there is no way Israel is pulling out of occupying Lebanon even though Iran had already said it understands the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) as requiring Israel to exit completely to prove it is done fighting because there is nothing about this deal being a ceasefire with Lebanon. It is a promised end of the war; clause one guarantees total peace and security in Lebanon with neither side ever starting a skirmish again. Needless to say that is a major reason Israel will not sign on and why so many in Israel abhor this deal.

It is hard to imagine the ceasefire holding with Israel sitting right there inside of Lebanon. It’s equally hard to imagine Israel allowing people who lob rockets into Northern Israel freedom to restock and regroup, which is the situation they would have if Israel weren’t right there on the ground keeping close watch and challenging any attempt to do such things. So, it’s a very fragile ceasefire.

Of particular interest today, in light of what I wrote yesterday, is the vice president of the United States sharply, with notably angry words, rebuking the Israeli government. While he kept Netanyahu out of his direct line of fire, he stated in no uncertain terms, using the same words I did yesterday and the day before, that Israel does not have a single national ally left in the world that is sympathetic to Israel other than the United States and indicated Israel is even at risk of ending its last remaining alliance if members of Netanyahu’s government do not shut up about Donald Trump and his ceasefire deal.

Vance starts by stating upfront that he is upset with what he is hearing and goes on to say that Israel’s situation is rapidly deteriorating in world opinion and US opinion because of how it storms ahead in this war. He describes Israel’s situation as precarious, if not dire, and indicates the possibility that it could find itself charging forward without a single ally in the near future if the government’s words against President Trump don’t stop. He spelled out how much of Israel’s military is built on US dollars, and made it clear that relationship is at risk. (You’ll find the video in the first story highlighted under today’s War section if you’re a paying subscriber. Very sharp words from the lead negotiator of the MoU.)

Meanwhile Israel’s most widely distributed newspaper, owned by Trump’s major donor Miriam Adelson, ran a scathing open letter to President Trump, criticizing his failure in this war and claiming Trump “betrayed” Israel. It started with the headline, “You could have been the greatest president of all, but you failed.”

I say to you: You made a colossal mistake. You failed by signing a surrender agreement with a murderous and cruel terror regime. You severely harmed American interests and the democratic and human values of the enlightened world, and you turned over the hourglass toward the next war, which your successors will have to deal with in the years to come….
And I am trying, and failing, to understand what caused this absurd change of direction, so contrary to everything you have said and done until now. The midterm elections are a flimsy excuse. You are in your second term, and the surrender memorandum of understanding will hurt the Republicans more than it will help them.

Probably not words that are going to kindle the friendship between the president and Israel as JD Vance said Israel had better be careful to do, though they were not words from the government like those he mentioned. The open letter concluded with “one last word” of warning to the president of the United States:

We feel betrayed, nothing less, because your heart was, it seemed, in the right place, with all your flaws. You acted against it. You lost your patience and your moral and leadership compass. Only if you walk this back and avoid reaching a final agreement with Iran might there be a correction.

As I said, the numbers of people who loathe this deal as a failure among Israelis and their government, among US Democrats and Republicans alike, and even among social influencers who are MAGA diehards constitute an extraordinarily large cross-section of the world. I did find one article today by a MAGA supporter who supported the deal as a great win for Trump.

I found it to be pathetically weak, making claims like the deal is a win because it reopens strait—something I’ve pointed out many times is no win from the war whatsoever because the strait was 100% open and free of all peril before the war, which cannot be said now, especially seeing today’s dangerous confusion, and it is far from clear that the control over the strait that this agreement promises to Iran if the deal is finalized, will not result in tolls again down the road.

Another win he pointed to was a better uranium deal. Uh, where? That’s a fantasy. Yes, it could happen and that would be win, but you cannot use it as your argument for saying Trump clearly won the war and those who don’t think so are crazy because the crazy person is the one who believes something happened that never happened. We have no idea how the uranium equation will turn out. We do know Trump said he would release $30-billion of Iranian funds, held by America, to Iran as soon as they re-opened the strait, and that is with no deal on uranium. We know Obama released only a small fraction of that amount, and Trump demolished that release of money as being beyond horrible. We know that Trump is already equivocating by saying we don’t really need to secure the uranium by taking it out of the country because it is already buried under dust.

So, I’ve posted a great satirical rebuttal by a longtime Trump supporter in the humor section below toward any claim that this deal is a win. It’s quite funny and comes from someone who has spent the last seven years supporting Trump and ripping Biden to shreds, so hardly someone naturally inclined to discredit anything Trump does. He spends most of his work tearing up liberals. Thus, even megaMAGA influencers have a hard time seeing this war as anything remotely resembling a win for Trump.

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(Today I wrote a regular editorial and aggregated headlines because I wrote and published my weekend Deeper Dive early. Usually, there would be no editorial or headlines on Friday while I start composing it. This is to make up for that.)

THE DEEPER DIVE into the Donald's TOTAL Failure in his US-Israel-Iran War

David Haggith — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 02:40:21 GMT

Trump promises to give a vast fortune to the Ayatollah’s regime to make a deal.

I had a paying subscriber of many years quit me this week because he said I was dishonestly representing Trump as being the major loser in the Iran war based on the deal he has now struck with Iran. He said I know better than to frame it as a lost war or to claim that he has stopped the war when clearly he can always go back to it if he wants to because he doesn’t like the final deal. I think it is clear he will do everything he can to avoid going back to it because of how badly he is losing, and I’ll lay that out more exhaustively than I did the first time because apparently I need to, and it IS a major claim, and major claims need major support; but it is claim for which I will show there is tremendous evidence and a world of support.

While a multitude of people all over the world from parties on every side of politics now see this as a clearly lost war for everyone but Iran, there may be many Trump supporters, who still refuse to see how bad the Memorandum of Understanding is based just on what I presented earlier. So, I decided to make it an early Deeper Dive because it is certainly the most important decision in front of us right now, which is why I couldn’t get it out yesterday.

It’s also the perfect topic for an editorial coming out of last two days of news headlines because I have rarely seen the news so loaded with stories FROM ALL SIDES on how truly terrible this deal is. Let me start of by saying that, at the time of composing this article, we have only “leaked” versions of the Memorandum of Understanding that was signed ahead of schedule by Trump and Iran yesterday, so it is possible that what I’ve seen is a fake version.

However, the version I’ve seen is widely spread across news outlets now, and Trump has not, this time, called it fake news, as he ordinarily does quite quickly. Neither has Iran, and if it is the wrong version, Trump has only himself to blame because he has refused so far to release his version of the deal. Perhaps he is releasing it today, and it may even hit the news before I finish this article. So, I’m working based from what Trump has allowed us to believe is the real version by saying nothing against it and presenting no alternative as of my starting this writing.

The Second Middle East Oil Crisis has just arrived on US shores!

I want to lead off by presenting how much the world has lost already due to this war in order to reinforce how deadly serious this topic is. I predicted the US would be reaching tank bottoms in the last week or two of June. Here we are, and that has hit. Hal Turner, who has done a pretty good job with presenting early facts that bear out, ran an article yesterday, quoting Zero Hedge, saying that day of tank bottoms has hit and hit hard right on schedule, and Hal was loaded for bear because he was angry at the flack he took for making that prediction:

For WEEKS, I warned all of you . . . . Today, it happened . .
For literally WEEKS, I warned readers of this website and listeners to my radio show that we here in the US would start hitting “tank bottom.” Now, the “pipeline crossroads of the world” in Cushing, Oklahoma, HAVE hit tank bottom.
Any oil flowing into Cushing, is redirected to flow straight out. Storage tanks are at their operational bottom; NO RESERVES AVAILABLE.
So now we need to see, who is going to GET oil and who isn’t? You’ve got to know the Military will get THEIRS first . . .
Once we start hearing who won’t get more oil until “two weeks from next Friday” we will have an idea of which parts of the country will run out of Gasoline, Diesel, Propane, Aviation, and Bunker fuel(s). EXPECT TO SEE GAS RATIONING in Parts of this country, soon.
MORE ! ! ! !
U.S. President Donald Trump, attending the G7 Meeting in France, told the media just minutes ago “`We Run Out of Reserves in About Four Weeks’ (if the Iran deal wasn’t done.)
Now, here’s the “rub:” If Israel screws-up the Iran deal, and attacks either Iran or Lebanon again, then Iran will shut the strait of Hormuz all over again - BEFORE WE GET THE OIL -- which will take 35 days to arrive at the West Coast, 45 Days to arrive at the Gulf Coast, and 55 days to arrive at the East Coast. That time does NOT count the number of days it takes to physically LOAD those massive tanker vessels.
So we are most definitely NOT “out of the woods” and we will be running-out of fuel in some areas of THIS country within weeks.
I earnestly hope you took my warnings seriously, and got yourselves several five-gallon gasoline storage cans - and FILLED THEM UP.
Right now, we have no way of seeing the internal oil distribution priorities that will have to be implemented, so there are, in fact, areas of THIS country that WILL run out of fuel for some period of time. YOU need reserve gasoline (or perhaps Diesel) to try to get yourself through that outage.
Oh, and for those of you who mocked my reporting, who called me “Chicken Little the sky is falling” or smeared me as “The Boy who cried Wolf”, and those others who scorned my reporting as “click bait” or “Doom Porn” it turns out I was right, and you were wrong. Tank Bottom arrived today at the Primary commercial oil reserves for this nation.
So the real question is, will those smart-asses who doubted me, NOW go out and get prepared? Or will it just be too much for them to admit I was right, and they were wrong?

You’ve read my repeated predictions that said the same thing Hal says he has been saying, even claiming this part of June would be the time when we hit tank bottoms. While I got one kind comment from someone with some good knowledge of the oil industry that thought I might be premature on that timing, I did not get any flack from any of my readers on that particular prediction, so I don’t feel the frustration Hal does; but I’ve been there plenty of times in the past.

I know how he feels, because I like to say I give “the news before it happens” because I make lots of predictions in order to reveal how predictable bad policies often are if you are an honest broker of the facts who does not skew his view to please his paying subscribers or to suit what I want to believe either. I am often as “far out” as a year ahead of when things turn bad, telling my readers why specific things will turn bad and often when they will turn bad and why it will take that long for it to get bad enough for everyone to see it; and I often lose paying subscribers for presenting views they hate to hear. So far as I have seen, they never come back when those views turn out to be right. So, I know how he feels.

What is important to note with Hal’s reporting of the arrival of “tank bottoms” is how serious this arrival is for the US and the world. Cushing has the nation’s largest tank farms. It is the central hub for oil distribution in the United States. When Hal says that no oil is going into the tanks—it’s all just passing straight through the connections to other places and the tanks are empty—what he means is that there is zero buffer left at Cushing. It’s tanks are not only a part of our long-term reserves in oils, their purpose is to let the solids and the junk like sand, settle out of the oil to the bottoms of the tanks (which is why crude oil don’t drain from the bottom) before moving it along and to act as a buffer because often more oil flows in than we need at the moment; and then, at other times, such as the last half of June when school is out and family vacations begin or during times of extreme energy consumption for heating homes, there is not as much coming in as we need. The buffer of these large tank farms, evens out the flow.

So, what Hal is saying is the ebb and flow will create moments now when some areas are underdelivered … right as vacation time arrives when jets need far more fuel and cars need more gasoline and diesel. There is no way of predicting which areas will get hit with the first gas stations out of gas; but for those of us who lived through the seventies, we remember how gas stations would periodically run out of gas and have to put up signs that they were out while other stations nearby still had gasoline, so that those with gas had lines that went clear around the block until they ran out, too. Some stations limited how much gasoline you could get in one purchase. So, we had de facto gasoline rationing as service stations did what grocery stores often do when they advertise a special but limit quantities per customer so that the supply will last for all of their customers.

That is how this will hit, and I think it may get even worse than that. If Cushing is at tank bottoms, then a lot of other tank farms are probably not far off. For now there may be be some buffer left in the system at other sites; but Cushing is the main hub. President Trump, himself, admitted he had to sign this deal with Iran because the US is running out of fuel. He places the timeline for running out to where we will see shortages at the pumps a month out. With shipping schedules, that timeline will hit us because we cannot ship oil fast enough out of the gulf to resupply before that month timeframe hits. When Trump finally realized that, he got afraid and tried desperately to end the war, still looking like he had some kind of victory.

Trump saying the world will run out in four weeks undoubtedly includes the US, given what just transpired at Cushing. I want to point out his statement here is tacit admission by the president of the United States that he felt he HAD to sign this deal because Iran’s strong arming via the Gulf of Hormuz WORKED! Trump, himself, is saying that the oil crisis Iran created by closing Hormuz “put pressure” on him to make a deal, even to the point of admitting that not making a deal would have resulted in global “bedlam.”

THAT IS LOSING! It means Iran’s scheme worked exactly as Iran had always hoped closing the Strait of Hormuz would work. Trump, himself, states that pressured him to sign a deal to avoid “bedlam,” I will argue it pressured Trump to sign a VERY BAD deal that gained the US absolutely nothing, while it gains Iran a great deal and is ALREADY far worse than Obama’s JCPOA, regardless of whether it puts a better end to the uranium than the JCPOA.

Trump insists that he will negotiate term he likes into the deal over the next sixty days, but the agreement, itself, says its terms cannot be renegotiated—that the only things that can be negotiated are the things the deal specifically postpones for negotiation within the now-beginning sixty-day period, which is primarily whether Iran gets to continue enriching uranium and what happens to its existing highly enriched uranium. That means the part left up in the air that Trump did NOT secure with this agreement is the part he constantly said was most important. Therefore, the deal is likely to blow up or just go into endless extensions if Iran fails to give up its uranium.

Now, here is what else is important to understand to realize how dire the damage to the US already is, before we even get into discussing how bad the parts of the deal that are already locked in are. The other main reserve storage facility that the US has—the SPR (Strategic Petroleum Reserve)—is in the worst shape it has been since 1983. And why does that date mean so much? 1983 takes us back to the Reagan years when the SPR was created BECAUSE OF THE ENERGY CRISIS of the seventies in order to provide a buffer against any future oil crises coming out of the gulf region. It takes us back to a year when THEY WERE STILL FILLING THE RESERVES FOR THE FIRST TIME. They have never been this low since that date when they were still in the process of being filled. So, Cushing is out, and the SPR, taken down by Biden and lately by Trump to help reduce gasoline prices some during the present war, has never been this low, other than when they were still filling it up for the first time:

The reserve is now more depleted than it was in July 2023, when it hit 346.8 million barrels, as then-President Biden struggled to counter the energy shock triggered by the start of the war in Ukraine.
To find a lower level than last week’s reading, one has to go back almost 40 years to July 29, 1983, when the reserve stood at 339.9 million barrels as it was first being built up by the Reagan administration.
As Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, put it Monday, “No matter where you stand politically, it’s a remarkable statistic.”

With Cushing effectively empty, and the SPR at its worst point since its initial filling, we are in the worst energy crisis we have seen since the seventies, and it is still going to get a lot worse because of the long delivery times for getting that extra oil to the US, AND the problem is global just as it was back then, so everyone else will be competing for the limited shipments that can eventually get through. It is also worse than the situation in the 70s because equipment and storage all over the Middle East has been damaged by the war, which was not the case back then; so, the ability to load more ships than those that are already loaded, once the strait is reopened, is nowhere near what it was. Also, before any significant shipments can commence without tolls under the MOU, the strait has to be cleared of mines.

So, as Hal pointed out, you would be fool to kid yourself into thinking this is not going to be bad. Whether it is safe or feasible for you to store a lot of volatile gasoline will depend on your property and circumstances. When I had a farm, I could easily do that in drums, and I would, as I did for my tractor; but now that we’ve moved into a small town, I have only a garage, and I don’t want hundreds of gallons of gasoline in my garage. So, I’ll have to tough it out. We may have to minimize our driving at times when local shortages appear as they are likely to do. If it’s like the seventies, empty gas pumps will be spotty, but prices will soar. If you can stock up safely now, it will likely be a good hedge against fuel inflation, in the very least, because, for the moment, oil prices are down because of speculators giving to much credence to the eventual reopening of the gulf. That will flip quickly when some refineries cannot get enough of key ingredients they need for making finished fuels.

It’s actually lower now than the graph shows. I think Trump’s timeline for running out of oil likely refers to when the SPR will be sucking bottom, too. With Cushing running out and other tank farms likely starting to do the same, the draw on the SPR will become intense. When that happens, as is almost certain, the crisis goes full-blown.

Genocide is the next likely stage if the war goes on

Before we talk about just HOW BAD this deal is, let me also lead off by clarifying that I don’t think Trump should prolong the war to get rid of Iran’s uranium, because I doubt he will succeed at doing that, and the damage for the entire world is already severe due to Iran’s successful retaliation to the first phase of this war, and Trump has now proven to Iran that their leverage worked splendidly, so they will certainly deploy that leverage fully again if we go back to war and do the same for access to the Suez Canal as they threatened.

Trump said he completely eliminated the “Iranium” problem, as I have called it for a long time, last summer. I’d prefer to stay with that solution, though I never believed it was anywhere near being “totally decimated” and “completely obliterated” as the always-lying, boastful braggart claimed. It was, however, crippled, and I think the occasional bunker buster could keep it crippled without reigniting a massive war and even make it nearly impossible for Iran to get people to work in those places by dropping a bomb on their heads whenever they get close to recovering uranium, sending Sisyphus back to rolling his bolder up the mountain all over again.

I also think going back to war will be more horrible than anything we’ve already seen, besides being much more damaging to the oil situation than what we’ve already seen because Iran has said it will pull out all the stops on destroying oil around the gulf, and the US will have to pull out all the stops on destroying Iran if it is to have any hope of getting the regime changed, having clearly failed at that objective already, though Trump left himself intentional “plausible deniability” for now denying that was ever an objective. (We’ll get to that below.)

Trump will have to follow through on the threat that proved to be the bluff and bluster that I believed it was (and hoped it would be), which was to bring genocide to Iran. It will not likely turn the heads of the regime, but will will make them all the more fierce in their response now that they have had time to restock their war supplies, likely from allies like Russia (which probably doesn’t have much left to offer), N. Korea, China and who knows how many other sources? Iran has pretty well followed through on all of its threats of late, rather than just saber rattling.

Trump’s threat was to blow up every significant bridge in Iran while Israel blew up all the railways and to blow up every electrical generation facility in Iran. In a dessert in the summer time, as I pointed out when he first made the absurdly illegal (by the Geneva Convention) threat, that would starve people to death, except that they would die for thirst first. With no generation to run municipal pumps, water would dry up even as they began drowning on their own sewage because sewage treatment uses a lot of electricity and pumps, too. They would quickly run out of all fresh and frozen food due withering and rot. Without all major bridges and railways out, no food replenishment or tanked water could be shipped in, except along navigable rivers, which there are not a lot of in the dessert, especially with an equal blockade imposed on the gulf by the US, as Trump had in place but has temporarily lifted. You can be sure it will go back into place when this deal blows up, as I think it is likely to do, except that Trump has nowhere left to turn that I can see, except to his threatened genocide. So, he’s best accepting his already extreme losses and moving on.

Finally, the war that has already happened has been expensive, has degraded the US defenses for any war that might really need to happen, should the US be attacked. Replenishing those arms will be more expensive than what we’ve already seen. I think the US has piled on enough massive debt, and needs to stop, as Trump originally, promised from involving itself in wars over problems that were not a serious threat to the US. Iran apparently did not have a bomb, just as Tulsi Gabbard, head of intel, declared it did not have before the war started; or it seems they would have used it while they could. Maybe they are saving it as their final recourse, but they would likely rather deliver one to Tel Aviv than to the US, given their intense hatred Islamic for Jews and especially the State of Israel to which hatred the US holds a close second in Iran’s eyes in good part because of its support of Israel.

Trump promised to stop fighting other people’s wars and to put America first. I don’t see that going further than what he did last summer with Iran puts America first. However, that concern is small compared to the concern for millions of citizens in Iran who would die if this war became an all-out conflict, should Trump fail to truly rid Iran of its uranium so he goes back to “dropping bombs on their heads” as he just said he will do if he doesn’t like the deal:

In my estimation, I don’t THINK he will go back to doing that because he has already chickened out over the oil crisis, and he knows he will make the oil crisis extremely worse if he does go back to war. So, I think he’s likely bluffing again to try to wrench the best deal out of them on the uranium that he can. I think he’ll try to sell whatever smoke-screen of a deal he can get as a victory on the uranium, though it won’t likely be any better of the victory that the JCPOA was, which he already resoundingly criticized as a horrible deal, which means, after all of our losses that we still have to face, all we likely end up with is a worse deal than the “horrible deal” Trump tore up during Trump 1.0.

I also don’t think Trump will go back to war, though I am not predicting he won’t, but I think he really, strongly wants to avoid that because I don’t think he has such an evil heart that he could care less about creating mass genocide. I think that was a vain bluff. I think he will prefer to accept a bad deal over being responsible for the prolonged death of millions of people, which is likely if he really does what he threatened to do.

If he does go back to war, it may be with a different plan than utterly destroying the infrastructure necessary for civilian survival in a dessert country. I could be wrong on that. I won’t stake much on it, but I find it hard to believe his heart is that dark, even though I think he is clearly the worst president this nation has ever had, and I think that part will bear out when we see what a horrible nation he has delivered to us over the next 2.5 years of his term, instead of the “golden era” he promised.

Now, let’s talk about what Trump got.

The no-deal bad deal

First, as both sides clearly stated, this isn’t a peace agreement. It’s a ceasefire in order to talk about a peace agreement, and Iran has repeatedly made clear it will not give Trump what he claims he is going to get. They’ve pretty well proven their resolve, and they have a great deal more reason to have such resolve now that they have seen Trump say that he signed what he did because he was pressured by how bad the oil situation was about to become (and frankly, still is, though it will be far worse if they go back to war). I think Trump means it when he says this would be “global bedlam,” and I doubt he sees global bedlam that includes the US as a success.

To make this easy by way of introduction to how badly this present agreement stacks up to the deal made by Obama with the JCPOA, I’m going to post a simple chart that compares the basic facts of the two agreements:

The most important objective, getting rid of the Iranium problem, is the part where Trump got nothing but an agreement to keep talking. Of course, that has always been Iran’s plan for buying time for clandestine enrichment. So, Iran is happy with buying time to keep working in secret. Trump got nothing out of this deal that was a claimed objective, and if you don’t win any of your goals in war, you did not win the war.

My friend and longtime supporter claimed that one reason Trump has not lost is because we still have the ability to destroy Iran, and we can always do that. We leave with the most weapons; but that has nothing to do with winning a war. That is, in fact, how the US has retreated from other true quagmires. If that was winning, then Vietnam was a huge US success, and so was Afghanistan. We left both wars, leaving lots of our weapons behind for our enemies to use in controlling the people we claimed we were trying to help; yet, we still left with possession of far more weapons than what we gave away to them as we fled the scene. And most of us consider those wars a total loss.

We left because it became clear we were not winning anything. In Afghanistan, the war went bad and useless as soon as it strayed from just capturing bin Laden to regime change to get rid of the Taliban. The Taliban are now more in power than ever because they are more heavily armed than ever because of how shamefully President Biden ended the war by fleeing and leaving lots of serious weaponry in place for the Taliban to claim, leaving the Taliban in power, and leaving the Afghan people who had supported our cause defenseless against them. It was a pathetic retreat.

Vietnam was not much better. In both cases, regime change failed because both wars became a quagmire due to the fact that these regimes never surrender as easily as the US thinks they will if it just hits them with a lot of heavy weapons. We never learn. The Russians learned the same thing in Afghanistan. The regime in Iran is every bit as hardened as the Taliban, every bit as religiously driven. It’s also driven by hatred that goes back for centuries and a sense of loss over the once-great Persian Empire that it wants to see restored, and it believes Allah will give it all of that empire and more if it perseveres. The regime will all die rather than surrender, and I think they have now pretty well proven that. Everyone from staunch conservative war hawks to screaming liberals is saying that. So, the regime-change objective of the war was a complete fail.

Now, as I said above, President Trump intentionally left himself “plausible deniability”—well, I wouldn’t call it plausible, but that’s what he tried for—by never fully and clearly stating regime change as an objective. He frequently waffled around stating it as a definite objective of the war, but the fact that he constantly talked about it at first but then quit talking about it when it became clear that had failed showed me he was intentionally a bit vague on that objective. HAD he accomplished that when killing the prior ayatollah, I have zero doubt he would have boasted endlessly about how he toppled the regime and so clearly won his primary or secondary objective the war. In fact, he claimed he won the war as soon as he did decapitate the regime, though it quickly went and grew another head on him; and, like the hydra, it will keep doing that if it needs to. It is still the same group in charge, so Trump has gone to saying he was never really seeking regime change as a goal of the war.

Clearly, however, he was, or he was incredibly evil and immoral for coaxing the Iranian people to rebel against the evil ayatollahs and their Muslim regime that seeks to totally suppress the people and shove Islam down their throats. 30,000 civilians who took up the Trump challenge and rebelled against there regime when the bombs started falling were slaughtered. No doubt many of them finally got up the courage to rebel against their oppressors because Trump convinced them help was on the way—that the US was set on regime change. He told them that now was the time for them to seize their own country.

It is, in my moral philosophy, unforgivable to provide that kind of false hope—the kind that leads tens of thousands of people to face death by implying so strongly that the cavalry is coming, and then stop the cavalry from arriving. That, to me, and there is room for moral disagreement I suppose, was a massive fail. I’ve had many people provide big false hopes to me in life that they sounded very sincere about, and they were nothing compared to the scale of losing one’s life, but I can tell you I have come to hate it when people give false hopes and then back away from doing anything to deliver what they promised.

I’d rather you never speak any hope to me at all. I’ve had a belly full of those kinds of promises in my life, BUT I DIDN’T DIE BECAUSE OF THEM. So, this, to me, is completely unconscionable, and that’s why I’m not about to allow Trump to claim he did not raise regime change as a goal of the war. So, he lost that objective completely, and he clearly has not gained his statde objective of ending the Iranium problem where he also has nothing to show but TALK.

Now, look at the rest of the deal to see how badly he already lost this war by how bad the terms that are locked in are:

Trump constantly criticized Obama for giving Iran a lot of money in order to get them to accept the JCPOA, but what Obama gave Iran was “peanuts,” as Trump likes to call the huge inflation in energy prices that he delivered via his war, compared to what Trump has already given away.

Let’s be clear, that Obama did not give US funds. Obama released frozen Iranian funds, and by the same reasoning Trump has not, at least, stated that he is giving any US funds, but the Trump MoU does promise an immediate massive release of Iranian funds that dwarfs what Obama released to get a deal—$25-billion off the top compare to $1.7 billion; but that is just the immediate give. Trump’s deal already promises $300-billion more down the road if Iran follows through with a final deal Trump can stomach. So, there much greater bait is on the table than Obama ever had to deploy and a much greater amount promised to immediately turn over when Iran re-opens the strait.

Moreover, Obama kept the sanctions in place. Trump has already promised that, if Iran follows through, all sanctions will be ended. So, Trump has now placed himself in a situation of one of the following outcomes: 1) Massive giveaways and total sanction relief if Iran signs a deal he accepts on the uranium, which is many are saying is likely to not be better than the uranium freeze in the JCPOA, or 2) going back to a more savage war than we’ve already seen with far more permanent damage to ME oil facilities and far worse shortages for the the entire world than we’ve ever seen, or 3) endlessly extending the 60-day negotiation period without the JCPOA anymore, which Iran would love, so that it can continue its clandestine enrichment free of gunfire and inspections.

I don’t see afourth alternative other than the one I think is unlikely, which is that Iran totally surrenders its enrichment and its uranium and allows wide-open inspections everywhere to prove that is actually happening. As emboldened as they now are, I don’t see that as even remotely plausible. If it happens, then I will have to say Trump won something, but right now, he’s releasing far more money to them than Obama did and letting them ship their oil to make even more money in order to get them to open the strait. So, it’s already worse than what Obama actually did, and many Republicans are saying so. Many Trump supporters are saying so.

As the summary above shows, we’ve lost more of our own people’s lives, suffered a lot more injuries and spent a huge amount more treasure in order to gain, so far, much less than we already had in the deal Trump tore up. So, we stand at a major loss right now. We may be better for having bombed some of Iran’s stored uranium last summer than we were under the JCPOA, but we could have accepted the win then, as Trump claimed, and stopped there. We have not significantly improved that situation with the subsequent war. At least, not that Trump has been able to show.

It is also not clear that some of the $300-billion promised from the “gulf consortium” to rebuild Iran if the deal goes through will not be provided by the US. The “gulf consortium” is vague and could easily include the US. It would be a terrible loss if we had to spend our treasure on this war only to spend a lot more of it fixing the damages our war created if we do not get unconditional surrender of the regime as we did with Germany and Japan at the end of WWII before aiding in their reconstruction under the Marshall Plan. Yet, the MoU promises that won’t happen. It promises all the reparations if a deal is finalized and takes regime-change off the table up front as necessary for getting them.

I’ll leave off on the global costs, impacts on wage growth etc. that the summary mentions because I believe those are speculative numbers, though they may very well be right. Instead, let’s go to what people on all sides of the question are saying about the deal, starting with those most likely to want to claim a Trump victory.

Obama’s JCPOA - torn up in 2018 by Trump - and supported by the UK, France and Germany- agreed on intrusive oversight of Iran’s nuclear programme. It was a landmark accord to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons in exchange for some economic relief from some of the heavy sanctions it was under. And what is believed to be Trump’s agreement amounts to a devastating and even bigger cave-in on sanctions relief and billions in reparations to Tehran.

Much of which is said to be heading straight into the warchests of Tehran’s proxies, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Yemeni Houthis. Israel may have found Obama’s JCPOA wrong because it did rely on Tehran cooperation but Tel Aviv and in fact most Israelis absolutely hate the Trump deal. It cuts Israel out of the negotiations and will, if adhered to, prevent it from attacking Hezbollah - something it is impossible to imagine Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreeing on. [—The Mirror, granted not a great news source, but I agree with the summary statement here.]

Even Trump’s own big supporters HATE this agreement

Here’s where it gets fun. While it is unlikely that Israel will (as the summary just quoted says) ever stand by this agreement (as we’ll also get to below,) Republicans across the spectrum HATE this agreement. It’s a given that warmongers like John “Bomb-’em” Bolton would come out and eviscerate the deal because he has always leaned hard toward just nuking ’em, and he hates Trump viscerally anyway for firing him; so we won’t give any like him any space here. However, many Senate Republicans who are in pretty good with Trump are torching the no-deal deal as well.

Let’s start with Ted Cruze because that is where Trump’s own son gets comical in his retort. Cruze, who has been a huge and stalwart MAGA supporter of Trump since he changed team when he lost his primary against Trump, stated the following:

What has been released so far suggests that, unfortunately, the president is getting, I think, very poor advice when it comes to this deal. History teaches that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is a bad idea. Under the terms of what’s been released, somewhere between $10 billion and $30 billion will flow to the Ayatollah immediately before they make even a single nuclear concession.
I think that’s ill-advised. That money, if it goes to the Ayatollah, will go to fund terrorists trying to kill Americans and weapons that will be used to try to kill Americans. And it also appears to formalize a permanent role for the Islamic regime controlling the Strait of Hormuz. It is difficult to see what possible benefit to America could come from that….

And then to the silly retort by Trump Jr.:

@tedcruz is lying thru his teeth about the deal. We're not giving them a cent and he knows that. Using fake news about the peace deal to undermine @realDonaldTrump is the opposite of MAGA.","username":"DonaldJTrumpJr","name":"Donald Trump Jr.","profile_image_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/profile_images/766652495858896897/LjrJJB9a_normal.jpg","date":"2026-06-17T21:52:10.000Z","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{"full_text":"\"Nearly one thousand Americans have been murdered by the Ayatollah and the mullahs... It is not remotely in America’s interest for us to pay to rebuild that capacity that we just took out.\" - @tedcruz @realDailyWire\nhttps://t.co/EDfzRpO9jA","username":"bdomenech","name":"Benjamin Domenech","profile_image_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/profile_images/2039773532889223168/EVLSXhpF_normal.jpg"},"reply_count":2950,"retweet_count":1564,"like_count":7622,"impression_count":1237898,"expanded_url":null,"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM">

So, MAGA is splitting further based on this bad no-deal deal, and the best Trump Jr. can come up with is that “We’re not giving them a cent.” The comical weakness of that retort is that Cruze never said “WE” are giving them any money, and the no-deal deal does not say that either. Cruze said exactly as the deal says—that we are “releasing” the money. The agreement immediately gives to the Iranians $30-BILLION dollars of their own frozen funds, MORE THAN TWENTY TIMES MORE than the amount that Obama released in frozen Iranian funds in order to get a solid deal that was fully worked out and had more of a treaty status. Trump gives up front over twenty times more just to get Iran to reopen the strait (i.e, to stop hurting us) and keep talking about what kind of a uranium solution the new deal will achieve. If Trump gets more than Obama out of them, maybe it still won’t be worth all that this deal concedes, but getting that is far from being accomplished so far, and his own supporters think that is hugely unlikely, so I’m not going to just give him that as a possible win from the war. Far from it. You don’t have to take it from me: Read on from others on Trump’s side of the aisle:

Senate Republicans raise alarm over Trump’s deal with Iran
President Trump’s deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for lifting sanctions on Iran is getting strong pushback from Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill who warn that giving Iran’s theocratic regime access to billions of dollars in economic relief would be a major “blunder.”
Some Republicans are warning that the likely outcome of the more than 100-day conflict is not worth the cost to the nation: the lives of 13 American service members and more than $100 billion spent….
“Ronald Reagan is rolling over in his grave,” fumed Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) in a social media post, calling the war and its outcome the “worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”
“Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future. Now, Iran gets to build brand-new infrastructure under this deal,” he wrote on the social platform X….
A classified CIA assessment estimated that Iran still had 70 percent of its prewar missile stockpile and 75 percent of its mobile missile launchers, according to a report by The Washington Post.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said the lack of significant Iranian concessions on its nuclear program, its weapons arsenal and its long-standing practice of funding militant proxies throughout the Middle East raises serious concerns. He pointed out the deal doesn’t prevent Iran from continuing to enrich uranium or toll the strait, and “it gives them a lot of money they can use to fund their proxies….”
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said it’s hard to argue that Trump’s decision to order joint missile strikes with Israel against Iran in late February produced an outcome to justify the cost in lives and munitions….
“You got to do the balance of accounts: a hundred billion roughly, maybe more, spent today; 13 dead, 365 wounded, injured; our partners in the Middle East bombed, they’ve had casualties. There’s got to be a lot of return on that,” Tillis said, summing up the cost of the conflict.
He said Trump appears to have fallen well short of his objectives at the start of the war.
“We set out by saying we were going to drive down to zero their nuclear capability. Now we’re equivocating on that. We said that we were not going to make the mistake that Obama did by sending them a plane full of cash. I got to reconcile the numbers there,” he said….

If you have to offer a $300-billion bribe to gain only one objective of a war you started, then clearly you did not win the war! And that is Trump’s best-case landing point. Worse yet, look at the completely obtuse arguments Senate Republicans who want to support the deal have to turn to. They should be ashamed at their falsehoods or their stupidity:

Moreno says that while Iran will benefit from the easing of sanctions on its oil exports, U.S. consumers will also benefit from lower fuel and fertilizer prices, which factor heavily into the cost of food and other goods and services.
“That helps us. Yes, of course it helps the Iranians also. It helps us lower energy prices,” he said.

You might as well argue that the benefit of this massive war effort was that it managed, in the end, to stop short of creating more of the damage that it created. His best defense is that Trump won an end to furthering the severe damages to the US that HIS war created!

What an idiot! We should consider this a good deal because we won the right to stop hammering our own feet with a jackhammer. I’d call that “damned by faint praise!”

Even Moreno’s claim that this takes us back to lower oil prices is completely idiotic. Such vapid thinking! We are going back to HIGHER prices once the truth about those diminishing oil reserves fully manifests.

He continues …

“We’re on the verge of a historic possibility in a world that is not under threat by Iran, where we don’t live in fear of an Iranian regime with a nuclear weapon,” he said.

Are we? Is the Iranian threat over? Even the JCPOA provide such a “possibility.” But possibilities are far from accomplishments, and that possibility was always a possibility until Trump vacated the JCPOA, minimal as it was. I’m confident that possibility will be blown to bits in no time by Israel, if no one else, because Israel, one of the major parties to this war was not included in negotiating the agreement, absolutely does not sign on to it, and some leaders in Israel vow to blow it to bits, as we shall see.

When one of the major warring parties refuses to sign on and states its commitment to continuing war, you are far from having a ceasefire. So, we’re back to a Schmeasefire because Israel will likely blow it up before it will accept it. You haven’t ended a war until all the warring parties sign on; but back to the Republicans where Trump is mostly likely to find support.

Cassidy said Trump’s new MOU with Iran “is going to leave Iran stronger, and it’s going to leave our allies weaker, and it may commit U.S. taxpayer dollars….”
Cassidy said Iran now has leverage over the rest of the world through its demonstrated ability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz.
“Now, Iran recognizes they can use their leverage over the Strait of Hormuz to extract from the other countries of the world whatever they want. And whereas before there was a credible threat that something would happen if they attempted to do so, I think that threat under this president seems to be exhausted,” he said…. [As in their ability to do so is now a reality. So, that’s a loss for the US and the world because we flinched first and flinched hard.]
Many Republican senators are skeptical that Iran will negotiate an end to its nuclear enrichment in good faith.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) warned last month that agreeing to a 60-day ceasefire to negotiate a nuclear deal with Iran would be a “disaster.”
“The rumored 60-day ceasefire — with the belief that Iran will ever engage in good faith — would be a disaster. Everything accomplished by Operation Epic Fury would be for naught!” he warned in a post on X.
Wicker on Wednesday declined to comment on the deal….

If all are wrong in their statements about what the deal spells out, those errors are entirely on Trump:

Republican senators and a senior Senate GOP aide said they were not aware of any plan to brief the broader Senate on the details of the agreement and what to expect from the negotiations over the next 60 days.

The Senate has a right to know, just as congress had the right and constitutional obligation to declare this war, which Trump thwarted because he has no regard for the constitution, and Republicans in congress had no resolve to protect their own constitutional powers and responsibilities, so they let him get away with that even though Trump has shown his willingness to push beyond constitutional limits several times until the Supreme Court is pressed to corral his overreach.

That is historically pathetic on the part of Republicans, who once claimed to be constitutional conservatives.

In another article, we read further “conservative” Republican criticism:

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporter Jamie Dupree, “the $300 billion fund for reconstruction and economic development of Iran—though not funded by U.S. taxpayers—would make Iran’s payoff under President Obama’s 2015 deal look like a pittance by comparison.”
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, told Semafor he’s “concerned about” the agreement, adding, “I’ve heard it described as an intermission, unfortunately leaving Iran with the capability to rebuild its arsenal and continue enriching uranium….”

Looking outside the Senate to current and former MAGA people:

Former Vice President Mike Pence, expressed support for the war initially, but said in an interview with CNN on Tuesday, the deal is “much bigger than a mistake,” adding that he’s particularly concerned about “these immediate concessions, particularly sanctions wavered right out of the gate.”
Conservative podcaster and Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro, who supported Trump’s attacks on Iran, told Fox News on Wednesday the agreement appears to be a “disaster that does not achieve any of the actual goals set by the administration at the beginning,” including eliminating Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs, requiring Iran to end support of terrorist groups and open the Strait of Hormuz toll-free, and leaving U.S. sanctions against Iran in place until it makes progress to meet its end of the agreement.
New York Times neoconservative columnist Bret Stephens, who supported the war initially, wrote that the “hard men of Tehran appear to have scored a decisive victory over the vain man of Washington,” accusing Trump of betraying Israel, the Iranian people and Americans who supported the war, and calling the deal “a debacle.”
Trump ally Steve Bannon said on his podcast “we can’t get in the business of giving these guys all this money and giving them access. We got the sanctions, keep the sanctions on, don’t let them sell any oil, don’t put in $300 billion or let anybody do it . . . I think we’re looking at this cockeyed, we shouldn’t be doing anything for these people….”
Fox New host Brian Kilmeade said Wednesday “it doesn’t look like Iran has been brought to its knees . . . at this moment, it seems like Iran got a lot out of it that many people weren’t expecting.”

Tell me those are not words depicting a massive loss for Trump and the US from the people most likely to support Trump. So, how am I being a dishonest broker for calling this a total loss? Even most of those who do support the present deal do so, not on the basis that it is better than the JCPOA that we had before Trump destroyed it, but solely on the basis that Trump has lost the war and that getting out of the war is better than soldiering on with it where we would have to shorten our remaining weapons supply a lot more, spend a whole lot more treasure, and puts boots on the ground to achieve anything more. Their arguments really come down mostly to supporting this losing deal on the basis of cutting our losses now. Nothing about it being better than where we were before the Second Iran War began or having any possibility of being better than the JCPOA which never gave anywhere near this much away to our sworn enemies as Trump has already promised if he gets a final deal.

As for those Republicans like megaMAGA Trump supporter Lindsey Graham, who is an Iran hawk who tries to focus on the possibility that this may be worth it if it gets Iran to completely end its enrichment and turn over its uranium, I’ll just note that even Trump is now doing his usual pre-TACO move where he starts walking back from the stated objective. Trump is now saying he doesn’t need to recover Iran’s uranium and minimizing that former objective by referring to it as “uranium dust” because, while it probably is dust, calling it that reminds everyone it is buried under the dust of the earth by his summer quest. He looks like he is feinting back to the position that what was accomplished then is good enough. If he does, the war was a total waste but at an enormous cost of coming pain to the rest of the world and of considerable empowerment to Iran for having proven how it can use its reach over the strait to harm the world and having proven to the whole world that it can stand up to the worst the US is willing to throw at it and squeeze the US so hard it will promise to put together a reconstruction package in order to get out of the war with a deal.

Consider the following maxim of war: “To defeat the enemy, your willingness to kill the enemy has to be greater than their wellness to die.” We would have to slaughter Iranian civilians in the process of continuing a regime-change war or even to get the present regime to cave in on the uranium issue by use of warfare. Trump does not appear willing to do that, and it will be a war crime if he does what he threatened in his original bluff.

I won’t go on with criticisms from the Left about what a loser Trump is with this deal because they are, of course, going to say that, though I agree with many of their criticisms. It’s just that they are not going to convince any remaining MAGA supporters that this deal was was a huge loss for Trump, for the USA, for Israel, and for the whole world that has a lot of suffering ahead of it. I also won’t stretch this out further with criticism from those who may be politically neutral who come at it as analysts because I don’t want to stretch this out, and you can read all of those criticisms in the section of the headlines below that I will make available to all subscribers, paying or not paying, just to prove how resounding from all sides the criticism is. There are, of course, always going to be MAGA cult members who will support anything Trump does to their dying day, rather than hit their own pride by admitting they were wrong; so, I won’t quote them in their support either, for the same reason I didn’t quote the liberals. They are the other extreme of the bell curve—the parts you cut off at both ends to find the mean of public opinion.

With that, let’s finally turn to Israel because they will likely blow the whole thing up anyway because it is far worse than the JCPOA that they hated:

Israel absolutely ABHORS this deal

As I said in my recent podcast interview, Israel is likely to completely isolate itself with this war that Trump CLEARLY wants out of because he bit off more than he can chew. You can play a short video clip of that part of the interview here:

Netanyahu is being torn to shreds over where this has ended up. Unsurprisingly, he continued to make some strikes in Lebanon, both because he hates the deal and it is his personal bias to bomb evil Hezbollah to extinction and because of the huge pressure he is getting from all sides not to let this rest where Trump has left it.

Israel violated the ceasefire in Lebanon yesterday, June 16, carrying out a double-tap strike in Mayfadoun.
A vehicle was struck, and the subsequent arrival of medical crews and civilians was then bombed three times.
First-Responders were reportedly all killed.
Iran then issued a warning to Israel: “Stop attacks in Lebanon or face severe response from Iran.”

That’s a snapshot at the tenuous state of affairs. Iran seems to be holding back from retaliating because this deal is such a sweet deal for Iran, and it would love to, at least, get its hands on all the proffered front money in the deal before it torches the deal with retaliation against Israel, but that desire may not even last that long.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hopes of clinging to power in an election this autumn have long been shaky, but the interim U.S. deal with Iran has added yet another complication.
U.S. President Donald Trump has opted to end the wars in Iran and Lebanon long before Israel’s goals were accomplished, and Netanyahu’s ‌boast in March that “we are changing the face of the Middle East” looks increasingly empty.
Already facing corruption allegations, domestic political controversies and criticism over security failings in the October 7, 2023 Hamas ‌attack on Israel, he will now face voters’ judgement of his handling of the wars and Israel’s relationship with the United States, its most important ally.

That relationship suffered when Obama cut Netanyahu out of further involvement in any discussion when Bibi decided to short-circuit the US president and take his case straight to congress. It suffered stress when Biden found him a horrible person to deal with. It has suffered further stress now under Trump as Bibi has tried more than once to torpedo Trump’s aim for a peace plan of some sort. If he keeps pushing it, as seems highly likely, he may destroy that relationship. Trump has sounded pretty angry and VERY disparaging of Netanyahu at a level that is imperiling a re-election of any government involving him. His critics are using Trump’s deal to fight back and seem to by tying into some serious Israeli rage due to the price Israelis have paid due to direct hits by Iran.

NO LASTING VICTORIES
However the election unfolds, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, whom supporters once called “King Bibi”, is already the most consequential leader of recent Israeli history and the object of boundless fury to critics.
Netanyahu’s Likud party portrays him as the security hawk who staved off demands for a Palestinian state while urging attacks on Israel’s enemy, Iran, and its regional proxies….
“There will be no Palestinian state to the west of the Jordan River,” Netanyahu said in 2025, adding “for years I have prevented the creation ‌of that terror state, against tremendous pressure”.
His hawkish image was dented by ⁠security failings before the Hamas attack, for which he has not taken responsibility, and by wars that brought military successes but no lasting victories. Tens of thousands of people have been killed in Israeli strikes in Gaza and Lebanon, and Israel’s military death toll is at its highest in decades.

And, for that war in Gaza, he lost European allies over what they claimed was genocide because of the numbers of civilians who died and the huge destruction of civilian property in Gaza. Even if that was necessary to extinguish Hamas, he is likely to lose even more European allies, if he has any left to lose, over this war with Iran, especially if he re-ignites it, which all Europeans seem to agree should be put to rest before they wind up in the Great Depression 2.0. It is costing them a fortune directly in economic damage, and it cost a lot of civilian lives in Iran, too.

Although Israelis mostly backed the war in Gaza, many turned against Netanyahu’s handling of it. Some prominent generals and families of hostages were among critics who said he lacked a clear strategic plan.
The killings of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were celebrated in Israel. But Hamas still controls much of Gaza, revolutionary theocrats still rule Iran and Hezbollah has survived in Lebanon.

As a result, the competition against his re-election has grown fierce and potent as it taps into Israeli rage and frustration over the undecided state of affairs that is already empowering Iran.

“Netanyahu lost the war. Netanyahu did not deliver - at the moment of truth he collapsed,” opposition leader Yair Lapid said after Trump imposed a new Israel-Hezbollah truce as part of his deal with Iran.

Trump was practically a hero in Israel, more so than in the US prior to this war. They are none to happy at the moment.

Netanyahu decries such criticism as part ‌of a campaign to diminish Israel’s accomplishments. Warning of a potential nuclear threat from Iran, he said: “If we had not acted in time and with overwhelming force – we would not be here today.”

They already were there “today”, so that’s nonsense—at least nearly today. It’s far from evident that Iran would have finally pushed them into the sea over the past four months if this war hadn’t happened. So that’s not true. They would still be here, as Iran did not use any nuclear weapon even during the full heat of this intense war. So, that claim is as desperate a claim as Trump’s statement that Israel would not exist today without Trump’s support.

The devastation in Gaza drew accusations abroad of genocide that Israel rejects and an International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Netanyahu on war crimes charges, which he called absurd.
While he has assiduously courted Western support for Israel, he has also antagonised U.S. presidents and other world leaders. A biographer quoted former U.S. President Joe Biden as in private calling him a “son of a bitch” and “a bad fucking guy.”

Increasingly, Netanyahu’s brazen determination to carry out his forceful and bullheaded way of trying to claim the Promised Land through militant Zionism without any mandate from God to do so—at any cost—is costing him a loss of allies; and this war has taken those losses of allies further. While I have called that relentless march toward the prophecies of Israel’s isolation that seem to correlate with other prophecies about Armageddon, that doesn’t mean I think Armageddon happens this year or next, just to be clear about what I’ve said or meant in the past when I brought Armageddon up as many do these days. I am just saying it is the continuation of relentless and reckless moves on his part in that direction that will eventually assure Israel gets there, whether that is in three years or ten. I don’t think it will take much longer; but I’m not saying this war will become Armageddon, but it is march of madness in that direction.

In the U.S., his close ties to the Republican party and attacks on Democrats have helped upset decades of bipartisan support among politicians. Backing for Israel is falling among voters of both parties.
Trump, the U.S. president he has been closest to, called him “fucking crazy” during a June phone call.

Trump actually said that several times and through various media, which has dented Netanyahu’s reputation at home because losing America as an ally would be the last straw for the secular state of Israel’s viability, and Netanyahu is clearly pushing the boundaries, especially given how many Israelis revere Trump, even though they hate where the latest war has left them. It’s kind of a no-win situation for Bibi either way. If he doesn’t push the war back into being a full-on war at this point, Trump may cool off; but it is far from clear that he will stop and stay stopped for sixty days (plus whatever extension Trump agrees to, as he usually TACOs out and does, if he still doesn’t have a solid deal in sixty days).

It goes against Bibi’s gut instincts to now sit on hold when he had far more he intended to accomplish and stated those objectives a lot more clearly than Trump did, and that is made more difficult as his political rivals hold him accountable for capitulating to the demands of Trump at the cost of losing in Israeli public opinion significant ground to Iran by where this has ended up.

Things have gotten hostile between Bibi and Trump:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told President Donald Trump last year that he was the “greatest friend Israel ever had in the White House.”
Now, as Trump tries to finalize a deal to end the war with Iran, he’s unloading on Netanyahu with rhetoric that no other American leader has dared to use publicly.
He claimed credit for Israel’s existence — “without me, there would be no Israel” — and cursed his judgment in interviews. He even described him as “crazy.”
Netanyahu’s tenure as prime minister spans four U.S. presidents, and he’s frustrated all of them at one point or another. But none has voiced that as openly as Trump, who started the conflict in tandem with Netanyahu.
The tension comes as Trump criticizes recent Israeli attacks in Lebanon, which threatened to jeopardize negotiations between Washington and Tehran. Trump has been pushing for a deal as he faces political blowback at home, where the war is unpopular and has driven up gasoline prices….
“Without the U.S., there would be no Israel. Without me, there would be no Israel because no other president was willing to do what I did,” Trump said. “I have had a great relationship with Bibi. Now Bibi has to be more responsible with respect to Lebanon.”
There has long been a bipartisan consensus around supporting Israel in Washington, but that has frayed in recent years. Liberals have been increasingly outraged by Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, especially during the war in Gaza, and conservatives have questioned the importance of longstanding American support for Israel. There are concerns about antisemitism on the left and the right….
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris often disagreed with Netanyahu during the war in Gaza, and sometimes they criticized him publicly. But they were more circumspect to avoid facing accusations of being anti-Israel.

That’s how much more severe Trump’s criticism of Netanyahu is than anything by any American leader to date, and many of them had big issues with Netanyahu who, in my opinion is a snake in the grass that plays America however he can. It is getting pretty bad, however, when Israel starts losing conservative Republicans and sees lots rising anti-Semitism in the MAGA movement. At one time, Republicans, and especially Evangelical Christian republicans were monolithic in supporting everything Israel does at all costs to America. That monolith of support is now showing lots of cracks. Will it topple in a year? Probably not, but it is folly to think it is impervious to crumbling right as it shows so many strains through every structure of former pro-Israel support.

Conservative, pro-Israel groups were divided on the seriousness of Trump’s public condemnation of Netanyahu.

Divided isn’t good for Israel. Not too far back there was a time when Republicans and other conservative groups were about as close to undivided on that topic as any people get. Netanyahu’s arrogant bullheadedness keeps costing him more and more support.

Republican Jewish Coalition President Matt Brooks described Trump’s criticism as little more than the inevitable disagreement among family members.
Brooks dismissed that any muted criticism of Trump's comments from his party represented a political mixed message because Trump has been reliably supportive of Israel as president.
If Biden or Harris said something critical, it came from the position of someone who was hostile toward or didn’t have the same level of support for Israel that President Trump has,” Brooks said.

I would argue the risks there are in the opposite direction. The fact that such large cracks are starting to show in the strains Trump is feeling over Bibi’s disregard of his wish to end the war as quickly as possible because of the serious oil pressure he finally openly admitted to feeling and the acknowledgment that he knows it will be much worse in another month, makes those cracks in Trump’s support far more serious than any discontent Biden or Obama had with Israel. They are visible, highly audible cracks in Israel’s most reliable foundational support. That actually is far more threatening than when the cracks are heard from people who are already considered somewhat hostile toward you.

Trump, remember, to the world’s chagrin, moved the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. This is foundational support making the sound of large cracks with hostile rants.

Klein, president of the conservative Zionist Organization of America, said he worried that Trump was making the comments in public to appeal to Israel critics “because he sees that Americans have become more hostile toward Israel than they’ve ever been.”
“That worries me,” Klein said.

And these critics that Trump wants to appeal to are in his own MAGA movement which is replete with antisemite cockroaches among many others who are not antisemite. The antisemitic ones are especially fed up with Trump’s Iran war as they see it as putting America LAST and Israel first!

Moreover, One of Netanyahu’s most formidable opponents has seized on Bibi’s failure to deliver on his objectives in this war and that opponent promises, if he wins the elections in October, he will take the war to its full conclusion, regardless of how much that thwarts Trump’s interests and demands:

Former prime minister Naftali Bennett said on Monday that Iranian regime change will start when Israel has a new government.
“The clock for regime change in Iran will start as soon as the government in Israel is changed,” said Bennett. “The leadership is a disappointment.”
“The term of the Netanyahu government began with a civil war, continued with the massacre of October 7, and ends with a historic failure against Iran,” he added.

So, many are calling this an historic failure in one way or another. Other hardliners in Israel, even within Netanyahu’s present government coalition, agree:

Earlier on Monday, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said in an X/Twitter post that Israel is not bound to US President Donald Trump’s US-Iran ceasefire agreement.
“Trump’s agreement does not bind us. Israel is not subject to the United States, and we are an independent and sovereign nation,” he said.
“We are not partners to this agreement that does not ensure our security, and it does not bind us in any way,” continued Ben-Gvir. “We must not compromise on anything less than the dismantling of Hezbollah, we must not withdraw from any territory that our fighters have captured and cleared of terror infrastructure, we must not return to a situation where thousands of terrorists sit on the fences of northern settlements, and certainly we must not remain silent for a moment in the face of fire directed at the State of Israel.”
Other Israeli officials took to X on Monday morning to state their positions, including Yair Golan, leader of The Democrats, who criticized Netanyahu for capitulating to a deal he deemed unsatisfactory.
Netanyahu “stood on the sidelines” as Israel’s “military achievements secured with the courage of our pilots and the blood of our fighters have been erased,” Golan said.
“Trump signs an agreement that funnels billions to the Ayatollahs’ regime, leaves the nuclear infrastructure intact, preserves the ballistic threat as is, and throws a lifeline to the murderous regime in Tehran,” he said in harsh criticism of the agreement.
Pinning much of the blame for the agreement he sees as unsatisfactory on Netanyahu, Golan continued, saying, “Netanyahu is good for Hamas. Netanyahu is good for Iran. Netanyahu is good for Hezbollah. Netanyahu is not good for Israel.”
Golan ended his post by saying, “Replacing him is not just a political necessity - it is an existential security imperative….”
Benny Gantz, leader of the Blue and White party, said “…it is forbidden to agree to restrict Israel’s freedom of action in Lebanon or to a withdrawal that endangers the residents of the north…. The emerging agreement with Iran appears to be a strategic failure that will require Israel to engage in diplomatic, military, and legal struggles in the coming years, which only a broad Zionist government can lead….”

So, the hardliners are out in force against Netanyahu’s semi willingness to capitulate to Trump’s demands, and Netanyahu, himself, is a major hardliner—always has been.

Former IDF chief of staff and leader of the Yashar! party, Gadi Eisenkot, lamented what he views to be a major failure of the government in his own X post, saying, “What began as the gravest failure, with historic internal and international legitimacy, is ripening into the bleak outcome of a failed government.”
“A government that operated without strategy or diplomatic or leadership courage, and over three years lost the public’s trust and that of its allies while abandoning Israel’s residents,” Eisenkot continued.
“An abyss yawns between the empty promises of ‘total victory’ and this morning.”

So, this is a deal that pleases almost no one. Granted, it is not a done deal, but, as it stands right now, it is a deal that has won absolutely nothing for the US that it didn’t have a lot more of before this war and nothing of objectives clearly gained for Israel. All it has won at great cost is the right to keep talking in hopes of the possibility of a deal that may someday match up to the JCPOA, which was barely and acceptable deal, but was far better than where the world stands a this moment. After all, opening the strait, as I said in my former article, is not a win from this war. It was already a lot MORE OPEN before the war.

And I give a high probability to Israel finding a way to torpedo the deal:

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich also posted on X, saying, “The agreement with Iran is bad for Israel and for the entire free world. Period.” He also implied that Israel will have to continue to carry out the war against Iran itself in order to ensure that Iran does not achieve nuclear weapons.
He alluded to heavy pressures upon the Israeli government and on Netanyahu to comply with the ceasefire’s restrictions, while maintaining defiance of stipulations he views as detrimental to Israeli security.

Netanyahu also knows Bennet is capable of defeating him and replacing him as PM because he already did so once in the past, though his coalition government only lasted a year.

So, all of Israel appears to hate this agreement.

Conclusion

The cost of this no-deal deal for Trump on this world stage has been as high as it is for Netanyahu, though both men have done their best to lose global respect consistently over the years:

How Trump’s ‘Operation Epic Disaster’ turned the world against America
[The original British Telegraph version of the story adds “Donald Trump wanted to bring the Islamic Republic to its knees. He failed on all counts.” I’m presenting here a version you can fully access, as I promise in my subscription offerings The Daily Doom will always TRY to do in its aggregation of headlines that you can read for free without any membership.]
The Iran war has revealed the limits of US military power to achieve political objectives. But it has also left allies and partners questioning their relations with Washington.
“We deployed American power recklessly and incomprehensibly,” said Aaron David Miller, a former US state department negotiator and adviser during multiple Republican and Democratic administrations.
“The moral and strategic argument is that Operation Epic Fury has been an epic disaster,” he said, adding: “What significance did this war have to advancing the national interests of the US?”

That is what many in MAGA and throughout the US are now asking.

It’s better to end the war than continue deeper into an extremely costly quagmire, but to call anything about the no-deal deal a victory is a travesty! It is another Schmeasefire that is unlikely to hold because Israel won’t tolerate this conclusion. It so far accomplished no stated objective. If the war continues in order to accomplish the Iranium objective, the losses to the US and the world will become even greater.

The better approach since the JCPOA no longer exists, was always to accept the PARTIAL win from last summer, though it was far from the complete victory Trump boasted of at the time in order to try to claim his Nobel Peace Prize. It would have been better to just keep reburying the uranium with occasional bunker-buster bombs as necessary. Not a great solution, but far better than where the whole world stands now after this war as Trump retreats with nothing won or, at best, with the uranium situation somewhat better settled akin to the JCPOA but at far, FAR higher costs to the US and the world and consolations given to re-empower Iran.

If he doesn’t retreat via a deal no better than the JCPOA and likely a lot worse in terms of everyone it gives to Iran, all hell breaks lose. He sounds already like he is preparing the path for saying securing the uranium doesn’t matter, and Iran promises not to do any more enrichment, which is the same baloney Iran already promised under the JCPOA with far fewer concessions from the US (and no war). Those massive concessions will lead to ayatollahs’ re-empowerment, and that is not good for anyone, not even in Iran. That assures Israel goes back to war on its own.

I could have presented a lot more evidence of how widely this deal is hated by people of all political stripes due to how much the no-deal deal concedes up front and what it gives down the line for getting nothing for now but a reprieve from the damages Trump’s war brought on and not a lot going forward but possibilities in exchange for significant empowerment of the existing Iranian regime.

You can feel my opinion is wrong of the outcome is, but stop short of accusing me of simply playing fast and free with the facts and accusing me of showing intellectual dishonesty in how I handle them. There is obviously ENORMOUS agreement around the world that this deal stinks, even if Trump gets some control back over the uranium, which is far from sure or even likely.

You can disagree with my conclusion, but I’m clearly not playing loose with the facts, and for once I am solidly within an opinion that seems to be shared by majorities on all sides, and that doesn’t happen often; and I never get there because I feel compelled to agree with any majority.

The short of this deal is that Trump’s won nothing yet, except the right to keep talking at extraordinary cost, and he’s fronting a lot of money to provide enough incentive for Iran to agree to go back to talking out an agreement on the Uranium. He’s put up ten times that much money down the road as enticement to cinch an agreement, which is more than an agreement on the uranium is worth given how much it will empower Iran and its continuous incitement and funding of terrorism around the world. He has effectively allowed the US to become hostage to a terrorist enterprise, and is offering to pay the ransom.

He’s even already backpedaling enough to say it’s not necessary to get all the uranium out of the country and never was. Trump will get no thanks from me, even if we wind up better than we were under the JCPOA because the cost to getting there is already WAY too high, and will be far higher down the road even if we don’t go back to war, and a re-empowered Iran will find holes in any deal anyway or ways to keep creating trouble anyway.

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David Haggith — Wed, 17 Jun 2026 00:37:36 GMT

Instead, of writing an editorial today, I did a podcast interview with Geopolitics and Empire on Substack that gives my overview of the Iran War deal if you want to see a friendly, in-person conversation about the things I wrote on yesterday as well as get Geopolitics’ perspective: (They don’t give free access to the full video interview, but there is thirty minutes there of solid free content. They also have a link where you can listen to the whole interview for free, audio only, with ads.)

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*The audio version of this podcast episode is available ad-free to Paid Subscribers on Substack (also on Spotify via Substack integration); or on Apple Subscriptions/Supercast for $4.99 a month/$49.99 a year. The free audio version with ads is available via the…

Listen now

14 days ago · 8 likes · Geopolitics & Empire and David Haggith

You can also see in the headlines below an explosion of the themes I brought out yesterday as being major problems with Trump’s no-deal deal in my editorial, “Trump Loses War Bigly, Wins NOTHING for the US or Israel!” As the criticism of Netanyahu and Trump blows up across the internet, you can see how this is a deal (still in the making) that satisfies no one, except maybe Iran, who is boasting today about how the won the war. You can also read the actual written deal, or what is claimed by Saudi Arabian news to be a leaked copy of the deal, which so far Trump has not rejected as being fake news:

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Trump Loses War Bigly, Wins NOTHING for the US or Israel!

David Haggith — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 01:39:11 GMT

Figuratively speaking, Iran steam-rolled the president as he laid down his arms in total defeat.

First off, let’s be clear that the war isn’t over. The present deal is not a treaty; it’s just an extended ceasefire, which may turn out to be “Schmeasefire 2.0.” We’ll see if Israel cooperates, which is far from certain, as you’ll see below. In fact, it is not even a truce yet. It’s an agreement to establish a truce when and if Iran signs on this coming Friday. Everything could blow to bits before Iran even signs on, especially with totally disgusted Israel’s help.

U.S. President Donald Trump described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “a very difficult guy” and said Israel should be grateful for the agreement reached between Washington and Tehran, following the announcement of a framework aimed at ending months of conflict in the region.
Speaking after the U.S.-Iran deal was announced, Trump criticized recent Israeli strikes in Lebanon, saying they had nearly complicated efforts to secure the deal. He argued that Israel would have faced a serious threat if Iran had succeeded in obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Trump also warned that military action against Iran could resume if negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear programme fail to produce a final agreement….
The future of Iran’s nuclear programme remains unresolved and is expected to be one of the central issues during a 60-day ceasefire period…
(“Trump Calls Netanyahu ‘Very Difficult Guy’ After U.S.-Iran Deal”)

The no-deal deal

Even conservatives on Fox News have described the no-deal deal as a disaster! Trump, of course, said Israel should be thankful toward him, rather than enraged:

“To be honest with you, he [Netanyahu] should be very thankful to us for doing this. Because if Iran had a nuclear weapon, Israel wouldn’t be around for two hours,” Trump told the media house….
As per the agreement, all military operations will be halted, and negotiations will resume between the two nations on several issues, including Tehran’s nuclear programme.
He added that he was authorising the immediate removal of the US naval blockade and the reopening of one of the world’s most strategically important shipping routes. “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” Trump wrote. “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade,” he added.
(“Trump Rebukes Netanyahu After Iran Deal Announcement, Says US Saved Israel From Nuke Armageddon”)

Yet, Iran’s side of the blockade remains in force until Friday. So, it is not a truce yet, much less a treaty. It’s a deal to resume negotiations, starting on Friday with the US having to prove its worthiness first by fulfilling some of its obligations leading up to Friday. For now the total ceasefire and lifting of the US blockade are the only things that have gone into effect today.

The strait is not open yet for the rest of the world, even though the US is immediately removing its own naval blockade so that Iran’s economy can begin to flow again. The rest of us can struggle along until we show a week of good faith. Then the strait will open on Friday if the ceasefire doesn’t become Schmeasefire 2.0 by Israel’s undoing of it. However, it will still only be open at that point for the purpose of mine removal by the US at its own risk.

Second, let’s be clear that Trump’s big boast of getting the Strait of Hormuz open—the highly successful closure of which was a devastating blow laid against him and the world by Iran—is not a win. The strait was already open before the war in much freer way than it will be under the terms of this hope-based deal, which still says that Iran will have some control over the strait, though it is vague as to what that means. Iran did not control before; so this is, in the very least, a small victory for Iran. Iran didn’t win the ability to exact extravagant tolls for passage, but it will have more control over passage than before the war, and who knows what that will mean?

As for Israel tipping the deal over on its head. It has already tried:

An Israeli drone strike targeted a car in southern Lebanon, killing its driver, Lebanese security sources and state media reported on Monday.
The strike was the first reported deadly Israeli attack in Lebanon since the announcement of the U.S.-Iran agreement.
(“Israeli strike kills one in south Lebanon, first deadly attack since US-Iran deal announcement”)

The strike resulted in Trump scurrying to offer Iran more concessions if it would refuse to respond to the Israeli attack on its Lebanese ally:

US President Donald Trump reportedly offered Iran additional concessions while urging Israel to avoid actions that could derail a deal.
Israeli officials assess that US President Donald Trump will make additional concessions to Iran in exchange for the regime refraining from responding to the IDF retaliatory strike on a Hezbollah in Beirut’s Dahieh suburb, Channel 12 reported on Sunday.
The nature of the reported concession is not known….
According to the report, US officials also made clear in their discussions with Israel that Israel should not, under any circumstances, take any action that could jeopardize the agreement. In other words, even if Iran ultimately launches an attack, Israel is expected to refrain from responding.
Iran claimed that the US President offered them money in exchange for their restraint, but they refused it, stating, “We will not betray our allies (Hezbollah). The response is close.”
(“Trump offered Iran more concessions after Beirut strike”)

So, the deal could blow up a day or two after it was announced like all of Trump’s other self-praised deals if Iran responds to the Israeli strike, unless Israel practices very uncharacteristic restraint and does not respond to Iran’s promised retaliation for Israel’s post-deal attack in Beirut. It hangs on a thread as ceasefires often do:

Trump reacted furiously to the Israeli strike, which came after several Hezbollah drones exploded in Israeli territory on a day the President planned to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Islamic regime. In a post on Truth Social, he wrote: “This morning’s attack on Beirut should not have happened, particularly on a special day when we are so close to a Peace Deal with Iran.”
He added that “Israel has the right to defend itself against threats, but the attack it was responding to was very small and meaningless, nobody was hurt, injured, or killed, and should not disrupt this important process….”
President Trump told Fox News that in a call following the strike, he asked Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, “What the *‎*‎*‎* are you doing?” and told Netanyahu not to conduct additional strikes.

The Israelis are enraged and feel betrayed

Trump’s no-deal deal has stirred up considerable outrage and feelings of betrayal within Israel at the governmental level and among the people because the war wrecked a great deal of punishment from Iran upon the people of Israel and their economy, and they got nothing out of it, other than the punishment they gave to their enemies, but nothing actually gained.

One of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest associates told Channel 12 that Trump’s social media post [announcing the deal to try to make a deal] was received with astonishment. A senior Israeli official said this evening: “Trump’s announcement is a resounding slap in the face. The restrictions have reached a new level—the expectation that we not strike inside Lebanese territory is inconsistent with the notion of a strategic ally.”

Trump slapping Bibi Netanyahu in the face with his words adds to the sense of defeat and betrayal. It may be a political loser for Bibi.

For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the war he had hoped would secure his legacy — Israel and the United States together attacking Iran — may be ending in a way that could sully it….
The full text of the deal has not yet been released, and Israel was not directly involved in the negotiations. But initial details suggest that it does nothing to curb Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, or its funding of regional proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen….
When it comes to constraining Iran’s nuclear program — a matter of greatest importance to Israel and the greatest priority of Mr. Netanyahu’s career — the terms of the deal remain undisclosed or still to be negotiated during the agreed 60-day cease-fire. Questions remain over what will become of Iran’s stock of highly enriched uranium and whether the country will be able to keep enriching nuclear fuel….
In a news conference Monday night, Mr. Netanyahu said that Israel would seek to “preserve its freedom of action” to act against threats, including in Lebanon. He said Israel had done just that earlier in the day, killing four people he said had posed a threat to Israeli soldiers….
Others in his government were more blunt.
“The agreement with Iran is bad for Israel and the entire free world. Period,” Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, wrote on social media earlier on Monday.
Worse still for Mr. Netanyahu, who faces re-election in a few months and is behind in the polls, President Trump, the Israeli leader’s most valuable political asset, has publicly rebuked him multiple times in recent weeks.
While Mr. Trump has praised Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, as pragmatic, he has called Mr. Netanyahu “crazy,” ungrateful and lacking in judgment….
In effect, Mr. Netanyahu appeared to have fallen into a trap.
Had he refrained from hitting back at Hezbollah at that moment, his growing number of critics, including on the Israeli right, surely would have accused him of allowing a new “equation” to take hold. Striking Beirut could have been seen as off-limits to Israel because of Iran’s alliance with Hezbollah and Mr. Trump’s determination to close a deal with Tehran.
But going ahead with the strike was equally perilous for Mr. Netanyahu. Two Israeli defense officials said senior military commanders raised concerns that a strike would prompt Iran to fire missiles at Israel in retaliation, setting off a new escalation of violence. Israel would then be accused of trying to derail the U.S.-Iran agreement just as it was being clinched, they feared….
If Mr. Netanyahu’s goal indeed was to blow up the pending U.S.-Iran deal, he failed to anticipate how forcefully Mr. Trump would push to save it.
Three hours after Israel picked up information that Iran was preparing to attack it with missiles sometime on Sunday night, the two defense officials said, Israel learned that Iran had halted those preparations to give Mr. Trump a chance to calm the situation and close the agreement.
Israel now finds itself counting the ways that Mr. Netanyahu’s grand strategy against Iran has failed.
And Israelis are increasingly convinced that it will make the 2015 Iran nuclear deal look “perfect in comparison,” as the Netanyahu biographer Ben Caspit wrote in the Israeli daily Maariv on Monday.
(“Israel Counts the Ways that Netanyahu’s Iran Strategy Failed”)

On the last note, President Obama agreed, saying he would be very surprised if the final negotiations even result in a deal as good as the one he worked out, which Trump tore up. Israel could easily, as biblical prophecy predicts for the end-times, end up without a friend in the world—not even the US as the snaky Netanyahu has managed to sour relationships even with the world leader he recently praised as Israel’s greatest friend.

For more than a decade, Mr. Netanyahu has steadily raised his bets in pursuing his strategy against Iran. His 2015 address to Congress denouncing then-President Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran broke with decades of Israeli bipartisanship and left Mr. Netanyahu frozen out of the talks.
His alliance with President Trump alienated Democrats, a growing number of whom turned against Israel during its war with Hamas in Gaza. The war with Iran, and the perception that Israel had dragged the United States into it, added many Republicans to that column.
With its lofty goal of toppling the Iranian regime, the war was the culmination of Mr. Netanyahu’s long-term strategy. But it ended up showing Iran that the thing it feared most — the might of the U.S. military — was something that it could withstand, said Shira Efron, an analyst at RAND Corporation, a think tank.
“Israel has lost all its leverage, and this has real costs,” she said. “The U.S. can just sort of walk away. But Israel is here in the region with an Iran that is only more threatening….”
“If there is intelligence one day in the future that Iran is building a nuclear weapon and enriching the military-grade uranium, Israel will have to go it alone,” [Mr. Katz, the analyst and a former editor of The Jerusalem Post] said. “We can’t rely on anyone else now….”
Mr. Netanyahu’s difficulty managing his relationship with Mr. Trump could be glimpsed in his failure to come out and say publicly what some members of his own right-wing coalition were already saying on Monday — that the U.S.-Iran deal was terrible for Israel.

Even Israel’s supposed heroic Jewish friends in the US are seen now has having turned against Israel.

Israel sold out by its hero Jews

One article on a Jewish news site is titled “The Jews Who Sold Out Israel.” It leads off with the following claim:

JD Vance, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff drove the Iran deal over Rubio and Hegseth’s objections, leaving Israel sidelined and Tehran celebrating. A reckoning is due.
There’s a bitter irony embedded in the wreckage of this deal, and nobody in polite company wants to say it out loud. So we will.
The two men most responsible for pushing Donald Trump across the finish line on the most dangerous capitulation in American Middle East policy since the JCPOA are Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. Both Jewish. Both men who built their public personas, in part, on deep and loudly proclaimed love for Israel and the Jewish people. Both men who flew to Islamabad, sat across from Iranian envoys, and negotiated away the leverage that blood and treasure had bought, while Netanyahu was left in the dark calling allies desperately trying to find out what was happening to his country’s future….
[The deal] left Iran’s nuclear program unresolved, its enrichment infrastructure intact, and $12 billion in unfrozen assets flowing to Tehran before the ink even dried….
Kushner and Witkoff acted against Israeli interests with extraordinary enthusiasm. They were so desperate to close a deal, any deal, that they apparently lost sight of what the deal was actually for. They wanted the win. They wanted the photo. They wanted to be the men who ended the war.
What they delivered instead is a framework that Israel’s own officials describe as a profound threat. Iran’s centrifuges are still spinning. Its enrichment stockpile sits at 60% purity. The nuclear question has been “deferred” to 60 days of future negotiations, a timeline that every serious analyst of Iranian diplomacy knows is designed to run out the clock. And Hezbollah, battered but unbowed, has just received a ceasefire that locks Israel into terms it didn’t author and can’t escape without defying Washington.
None of this is a secret. The reporting is there, sourced and documented. Trump’s announcement that a deal had been finalized came as a surprise to Prime Minister Netanyahu. In recent days, Netanyahu found himself in the dark, calling allies close to the Trump administration to try and gather information. The leader of America’s closest regional ally was reduced to making desperate phone calls, scrounging for intelligence about his own country’s security future, while Kushner and Witkoff were on the phone with Qatari mediators finalizing the terms.
Iran’s military, for its part, issued a statement declaring it had “humiliated” the United States and Israel after the deal was announced. They said the quiet part loud. And they’re not wrong….
Both [Hegseth and Rubio] knew that the leverage earned through Operation Epic Fury was the most significant strategic asset the United States had accumulated in the Middle East in years. And both watched it get traded away for a memorandum of understanding and a signing ceremony in Switzerland.
The Rubio and Hegseth camp understood something that the dealmakers did not: that ending a war is not the same thing as winning one. You can end a war by surrendering.

So, nothing was won in terms of stated objectives of the war, which were poorly stated in the first place, except this: In exchange for a lot of money and restored freedom, Iran will keep talking about these things. Yet, the full truth gets far worse:

What makes this sting beyond the geopolitics, beyond the nuclear math, beyond the strategic catastrophe that this agreement may well represent, is the personal dimension. Jared Kushner celebrated the Abraham Accords as a generational achievement for Israel and the region. He was not wrong. Steve Witkoff negotiated the Gaza hostage deal with genuine effectiveness. These are not men without accomplishment. But somewhere between the Abraham Accords and the Islamabad talks, the goal shifted. It stopped being about what was good for Israel and started being about what was good for the deal.
And so now we have this: a U.S. President publicly humiliating the Israeli Prime Minister, calling him a difficult guy who should be grateful, screaming that he’d be in prison without American protection, and lecturing Israel on its right to self-defense. A nuclear program deferred rather than dismantled. Billions flowing to Tehran. Hezbollah alive in Lebanon under a ceasefire Israel didn’t negotiate and can’t enforce.

That’s right, to top off his losses just to schedule a deferment to make a deal to try to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, Trump proposes to pay Iran a vast fortune to cover all the damages he has caused them if the deferred part of the deal goes through. This is after already paying an even larger fortune to cause those damages, bringing havoc to the entire world economically.

Right now, the US won only the right to talk about the nuclear program, which we have been talking about for decades. Everyone knows the pattern. Iran is always willing to extend talks because talking buys time for covert activity and replenishing military hardware. For now, all nuclear material stays under Iran’s stewardship with nothing agreed, apparently, about what a nuclear deal should even look like.

Biblical prophecy of Israel left without a friend among all nations of the world

(If you’re not interested in seeing how biblical this fail might be in scale, you may want to skip to the closing section.)

In October of 2024, I wrote an article warning “Israel Increasingly Isolated as Nations Gather Around it to Make War.” In that article I referred back to other articles I’ve written along the way about biblical prophecies that state Israel will become total isolated in the end times:

Thundering toward Armageddon
It’s not hard to see the many nations of the world that are Muslim would turn in unison against Israel … but those nations may also include Russia as an ally of Iran and other nations that turn against Israel—Islamic Turkey seeming more on sides with Russia now than with the US or Israel—because yet another prophecy says that, in these times, Israel will lose its allies:
12 “This is what the Lord says:
“‘Your wound is incurable,

your injury beyond healing.

¹³There is no one to plead your cause,

no remedy for your sore,

no healing for you.

¹⁴All your allies have forgotten you;

they care nothing for you.

I have struck you as an enemy would

and punished you as would the cruel,

because your guilt is so great

and your sins so many.

¹⁵Why do you cry out over your wound,

your pain that has no cure?

Because of your great guilt and many sins

I have done these things to you. (Jeremiah 30:12-15)
In another article (“Existential Crisis Envelops the Middle East”) I wrote …
This kind of war is entirely different than anything we’ve seen Israel fight in recent decades…. I think it could easily wind up with Israel facing abject failure because of how much they are outnumbered and how much better armed some of their opponents are than in the past and find themselves facing that situation without any remaining friends if they push beyond US limits because they think they can claim the Promised Land by their own might or by divine blessing that still requires their own might.
And in a Deeper Dive laying out my predictions for ‘24 for paying subscribers clear back in January, I wrote …
Biblical prophecy talks about the war to end all wars—the Battle of Armageddon—as a situation in which all the nations around Israel will turn against it, and Israel will be left without a friend. The present situation certainly has that possibility forming more strongly than we’ve seen in my fifty years of adult life.
We’ve always seen Israel at risk from its neighbors; but now some of its longtime friends are sounding less committed and more disapproving. I think Netanyahu has played them long enough with pretenses of being willing to find some sort of path to peace while always skirting any progress there, that liberal European nations and the current liberal government of the US are falling away from Israel. They see ol’ Bibi as a hard-headed conservative who cannot be trusted. Many conservative Jews see him that way, too, but for opposite reasons.

The first part of the prophecy from Jeremiah that I quoted in that article also describes the end-times as being a time of extreme peril for Israel, though it says God will eventually save them (albeit with a caveat that I’ll come to):

4 These are the words the Lord spoke concerning Israel and Judah:
5 “This is what the Lord says:
“‘Cries of fear are heard—
terror, not peace.
6 Ask and see:
Can a man bear children?
Then why do I see every strong man
with his hands on his stomach like a woman in labor,
every face turned deathly pale?
7 How awful that day will be!
No other will be like it.
It will be a time of trouble for Jacob,
but he will be saved out of it.
8 “‘In that day,’ declares the LordAlmighty,
‘I will break the yoke off their necks
and will tear off their bonds;
no longer will foreigners enslave them.
9 Instead, they will serve the Lord their God
and David their king,
whom I will raise up for them.
10 “‘So do not be afraid, Jacob my servant;
do not be dismayed, Israel,’
declares the Lord.
‘I will surely save you out of a distant place,
your descendants from the land of their exile.
Jacob will again have peace and security,
and no one will make him afraid.
11 I am with you and will save you,’
declares the Lord.
‘Though I completely destroy all the nations
among which I scatter you,
I will not completely destroy you.
I will discipline you but only in due measure;
I will not let you go entirely unpunished.’ (Jeremiah 30:4-11)

If we are, in deed, heading into those times, a very rough battlefield right in the heart of Israel lies ahead as Israel marches into battle on its own without a friend among all the nations. It may still be a little while off, but the outfall of the present war has nearly finished Israel’s loss of friends, now putting even the US at risk of no longer being an ally to Israel. It won’t take much more to shove that over the edge. This is a developing situation I have been tracking for a few years. It all relates to another end-time prophecy of the Old Testament that is even more stark in its wording:

As for the prophecies that I said predicted the nations all around Israel will rise up against it in a great and final battle that hugely imperils Israel, I’ll end with one particularly stunning prophecy spoken as God’s judgment against Israel by the prophet Zechariah, but also against the nations that gather around it a little too desirous of carrying out that judgement, which also talks about the final coming of the Messiah:
Zechariah 14
1 A day of the LORD is coming when your plunder will be divided among you.
2 I will gather all the nations to Jerusalem to fight against it; the city will be captured, the houses ransacked, and the women raped. Half of the city will go into exile, but the rest of the people will not be taken from the city.
3 Then the LORD will go out and fight against those nations, as he fights in the day of battle.
4 On that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem, and the Mount of Olives will be split in two from east to west, forming a great valley, with half of the mountain moving north and half moving south.
5 You will flee by my mountain valley, for it will extend to Azel. You will flee as you fled from the earthquake [1] in the days of Uzziah king of Judah. Then the LORD my God will come, and all the holy ones with him.
6 On that day there will be no light, no cold or frost.
7 It will be a unique day, without daytime or nighttime—a day known to the LORD. When evening comes, there will be light.
8 On that day living water will flow out from Jerusalem, half to the eastern sea and half to the western sea, in summer and in winter.
9 The LORD will be king over the whole earth. On that day there will be one LORD, and his name the only name.
10 The whole land, from Geba to Rimmon, south of Jerusalem, will become like the Arabah. But Jerusalem will be raised up and remain in its place, from the Benjamin Gate to the site of the First Gate, to the Corner Gate, and from the Tower of Hananel to the royal winepresses.
11 It will be inhabited; never again will it be destroyed. Jerusalem will be secure.
12 This is the plague with which the LORD will strike all the nations that fought against Jerusalem: Their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths.
13 On that day men will be stricken by the LORD with great panic. Each man will seize the hand of another, and they will attack each other.
14 Judah too will fight at Jerusalem. The wealth of all the surrounding nations will be collected--great quantities of gold and silver and clothing.
15 A similar plague will strike the horses and mules, the camels and donkeys, and all the animals in those camps.
16 Then the survivors from all the nations that have attacked Jerusalem will go up year after year to worship the King, the LORD Almighty, and to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles….

This prophecy is often related to the famous prophecy in the Book of Revelation about the Battle of Armageddon. Intriguingly, it starts with an event written about in the news just a month ago as something that is in danger of happening:

12 The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up to prepare the way for the kings from the East.
13 Then I saw three impure spirits that looked like frogs; they came out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet. 14 They are demonic spirits that perform signs, and they go out to the kings of the whole world, to gather them for the battle on the great day of God Almighty.
15 “Look, I come like a thief! Blessed is the one who stays awake and remains clothed, so as not to go naked and be shamefully exposed.”
16 Then they gathered the kings together to the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.
17 The seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air, and out of the temple came a loud voice from the throne, saying, “It is done!”
18 Then there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder and a severe earthquake. No earthquake like it has ever occurred since mankind has been on earth, so tremendous was the quake.
19 The great city split into three parts, and the cities of the nations collapsed. God remembered Babylon the Great and gave her the cup filled with the wine of the fury of his wrath.
20 Every island fled away and the mountains could not be found.
21 From the sky huge hailstones, each weighing about a hundred pounds, fell on people. And they cursed God on account of the plague of hail, because the plague was so terrible. (Revelation 16: 12-21)

We may be storming in international madness toward those times. With the huge upsurge of fireballs streaming past the earth lately, as reported in The Daily Doom, the astronomical signs may not be that far off either. Who knows what greater, earth-rending astronomical body these large meteors are escorting?

Deliverance comes but not without judgment by God against Israel for its wrongs first:

Hear, O my people, and I will speak; O Israel, and will testify against thee. I am God, even thy God…. And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will delver thee, and thou shalt glorify me. (Psalm 50:7,15)

The prophecies in the New Testament indicate God will ultimately defend Israel, as described in the Zechariah Old Testament prophecy in that passage about the arrival of the messiah, but they make one caveat clear. It will not happen until the Jewish people accept Jesus as their Messiah. In Jesus’ parting words to the Jewish leadership in the temple that stood on the Temple Mount of Jerusalem before it was destroyed:

29 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. 30 And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ 31 So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. 32 Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started!
33 “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell? 34 Therefore I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. 35 And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. 36 Truly I tell you, all this will come on this generation [the generation alive when Jesus said that did lose the city and the Temple where he was speaking and evetually the whole nation].
37 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. 38 Look, your house [the temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem] is left to you desolate. 39 For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’” (Matthew 23:29-39)

Are the nations of the world now storming toward Armageddon as Israel loses the last of its allies?

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Trump Trumped himself … and the world

Many other articles in the headlines that follow for paying subscribers rip into Trump by laying out the guts of what a terrible deal this was for the US and for Israel, including particularly that, the US will turn over to Iran hundreds of billions of dollars if a real deal is ever reached over the uranium. Not only is the deal described by conservatives on Fox, as “a disaster,” it’s also described as “an American humiliation” in another article with president Trump doing anything he had to just to end the war he started.

Numerous articles lay out all the bad parts of the no-deal deal, such as this excerpt about just one of the many:

And under the terms of a new “peace” deal, will [Iran] soon be aided by many billions of dollars of sanctions relief from the very president who condemned Barack Obama for doing just that?
Before the war, America’s deterrent was fearsome; Donald Trump was able to press Hamas into a hostage deal in Gaza with apocalyptic rhetoric alone. Who will take him seriously now? We were told “a whole civilisation would die”, but with Trump at the helm, it is Western civilisation that finds itself in decline.
On February 28, the mightiest military power in history was mobilised against the evillest regime on Earth. Four months later, we have no answer to the nuclear question; no containment of Iran’s proxies; no curbs on its ballistic missiles; no guarantees on Hormuz; no regime change in Tehran.

(Paying subscribers can read the articles below to gather all the details about how bad the no-deal deal really is. I only summarized the main points.)

THE DEEPER DIVE: Inflation Soars on Trump's Hot Air

David Haggith — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:02:14 GMT

The timeframe for Trump fake peace deals to blow up seems to be shortening. On Friday, Iran Deal #39 was announced and destroyed in a single morning. Since the oil war is the primary driver of rapidly intensifying inflation, I’m going to lead off with a summary of the past week’s war action with Iran by OilPrice.com and then we’ll look what happened on Friday morning right after the close of those events and then where it has all finally settled early Saturday morning:

The U.S.-Iran conflict escalated again on Thursday before abruptly swinging back toward diplomacy, producing another day of extreme volatility in both energy and financial markets. The escalation began after two days of renewed exchanges between Washington and Tehran following the downing of a U.S. Army helicopter near Hormuz earlier this week. On Tuesday and Wednesday, U.S. forces retaliated against Iranian targets, while Iran responded in kind. Early on Thursday, Trump threatened to seize Kharg Island, which handles Iran’s crude exports, warning of attacks overnight (in the manner of Venezuela). Those remarks sent oil prices higher until later on Thursday, when Trump reversed course, saying the strikes had been cancelled and a deal was “close”, sending crude in the other direction as the market appeared to simply dismiss Iran’s denial of any agreement in the works. Oil trades on every Trump headline these days. Oil has effectively become a referendum on Trump’s latest social media post.

That is where we were as of Thursday evening. Then, on Friday, Iran suddenly claimed the 49th deal, which it had just denied in the afternoon on Thursday, actually does have an imminent end of war in site that Iran has agreed to, which it said would likely be signed this weekend. So, maybe Trump was right after all. Stocks certainly thought so and began their predictable escalation; but then they are already willing as any John in a brothel to be tricked with any new bullish narrative. Oil prices dropped, and showed the oil market is also riding on every word the Donald speaks. However, bond yields rose as if bond traders weren’t buying the hope that this deal meant the end of oil-scorched inflation was suddenly within sight.

As Iran laid out the terms of the deal, it sounded to me so favorable for Iran, I found it hard to believe Trump would sign it, as he had just boasted was about to happen. Iran claimed it would reopen the strait 30 days after the deal was signed:

Iran’s state-news agency Mehrs published a document in which the U.S. would agree to withdraw its forces from around Iran, lift its naval blockade in 30 days and provide $300 billion in reconstruction money to the Islamic Republic.
Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz in 30 days but under arrangements set by Tehran, according to Mehrs. (CNBC)

If there was suddenly light at the end of the tunnel, thirty days more in a tunnel as dark as oil was an awful long way to the light.

This sounded to me like Iran was about to win the war—US agrees to pay for everything it broke, strait doesn’t until after another thirty days economic ruination, and then it opens under Iran’s terms, which, of course, would include heavy tolls and their total control of the strait for all time to come.

Most glaringly, the deal, as Iran described it, said nothing about uranium, except that this agreement was an agreement to work toward an agreement, and it left such other things as the uranium to be negotiated after the initial terms were carried out by the US. It sounded like deal #39 was the same deal that Iran always held out to Trump, not like anything he wanted. Under these terms, Iran could easily get delivery of the initial promises and then still stall forever on the uranium. If that was the 39th deal Trump had announced to turn the market around yesterday, he would have to be awfully desperate to sign such a thing, but he did get another great TACO trade out of the stock market for his family and friends if he did decide to chicken out.

Then this happened right after the news from Iran shifted the markets:

Trump’s tone shifted Friday after Iranian state media released a document described as a draft deal. The U.S. president denied the Iranian text represented what Washington and Tehran had agreed in writing.

And that has always been the snafu: both sides have completely different understandings of what the vague TALK of a deal means and always seem to have no written draft of any kind of preliminary mutual agreement. So, they say what they want to say. That, or Iran just denies there was any walk toward a deal at all.

President Donald Trump on Friday insisted that the terms of a war-ending deal that have been circulating in Iranian state media “have NOTHING to do with the terms that were agreed to, in writing.”

Probably only in Trump’s writing with no Iranian signature, as he has never in all of these deals produced anything in writing for the pubic to see that Iran had actually signed onto the deal he claims they agreed to in writing.

Iran’s Mehr News Agency had reported that a draft deal includes a commitment from the U.S. to lift oil sanctions and that final negotiations will not begin until half of Iran’s frozen funds are released and a U.S. naval blockade ends. The deal also includes a pledge from Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 30 days, among other points, Mehr reported.
“What they said, including their weak and pathetic statement on having a deal, bears no relation to the truth,” Trump said in an angry Truth Social post Friday morning, slamming the Iranians as “very dishonorable people to deal with.”
“With them, there is no such thing as dealing in good faith,” Trump wrote.
“They better get their act together, and FAST!” the president wrote of Iran. (CNBC)

Well, that was certainly a case of the toad calling the snake ugly. Suddenly, this morning’s early flash of a deal before our eyes was off, and headlines that had claimed it was about to be signed vanished or got revised to speak more of Trump’s denial of any kind of deal like the one Iran had just described. So, deal-on/deal-off in the same morning on Friday, closing the week just like it had gone everyday but with even faster speed. It has always been stunning how quickly Trump deals fall apart, even back in the tariff days when he tore them up himself; but this was a new speed record.

Trump had claimed in the Oval Office on Thursday that the U.S. “just made a great settlement of the war with Iran,” subject to the “finalization of documents.”

For me, Trump’s first announcement of Deal/No-Deal #39 was the point at which I said to myself, “Yeah, sure.”

Apparently, Trump was, again, operating off a page that the US had put together that looked great for the US, and Iran was operating off a page it had put together that looked great for Iran, and each was tricking itself into believing its memo was the one the other was accepting. They are obviously on completely different pages.

Even Zero Hedge, which has almost never criticized Trump until very recently, lest it offend its core audience, has apparently had enough of his lies at last and published the following article on Friday:

Fool Me Once? Shame On You. Fool Me 39 Times...?
After several days of strikes against Iran, and several morning announcements that strikes were set to continue, Trump announced via Truth Social that the “scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran” have been cancelled as a peace deal has been agreed upon. Indeed, “discussions and final points have been, in both concept and great detail, approved by all parties involved…
According to our recently published energy strategy report, 103 Days, 38 Peace Deals, yesterday’s announcement would constitute the 39th peace deal declared since the onset of the war….
It should be noted that the provided list of “all parties involved” does not include one party who some would argue is pretty heavily involved…Iran. Perhaps Iran was counted in the “and others” part of the list, but this wouldn’t be the first time the US proposed a deal it thinks Iran can’t refuse, just for Iran to either outright refuse it, or announce that it never received such a peace deal in the first place.

That’s the same thing I had written about Trump’s announcement.

It should also be noted that some of the “involved parties” who were listed, like Israel and Pakistan, have confirmed that they had not been informed of any agreement at the time the peace deal was initially announced.
The market’s reaction to the deal coupled with the major IPO events today may add further credence to our view that defense-related rhetoric these days has just as much to do with financial markets as they do with geopolitics.

I couldn’t have said it better myself, except that I’d add “and particularly with profiteering off of insider knowledge about the deal’s announcement schedule,” which may be what they were implying, but I’d just state it outright as an obvious likelihood, since big, highly profitable trades keep happening right before the announcements.

And, finally, we got this, as yet, unverified report of where fake deal #39 has ended up early this morning:

Stocks, which had soared to over 500 points on the Dow settled quickly back on Friday to about half of the morning’s manipulated rise from the unexpected deal/no-deal because, once again, the war, which is now moving into its fourth month, continues indefinitely. Most likely what is holding the market up that much is the enthusiasm generated from SpaceX’s big IPO debut on Friday. That was bound to be an adrenaline rush, though even SpaceX settled down halfway from its maximum rise after its initial opening. That still left Elon Musk as the world’s first trillionaire. Musk is hoping to raise money to put AI data centers in space, so that should be lovely. The skies will be forever filled with giant floating lights. Maybe they’ll even sport huge flashing billboards or corporate logos for all to see.

With the state of the peace negotiations established as farcical once again, I want to turn to a real discussion about what is happening and will be happening right now with rapidly rising inflation because the die for that has already been cast for this summer. We’ll look at how hot the two latest inflation reports this week got and how much of the new inflation happened outside of the direct rise in energy prices, since a rise in energy prices was easily certain; then we’ll look at what inflation measures show the rise is going to become substantially worse over the summer and why. That is with oil prices as they have been.

Then we’ll close by looking at what oil industry leaders said this week is coming in oil prices, which will raise all of that up to a higher plane, since the cost of energy is the main driver in the rest of the rising inflation, though tariff-caused inflation is intertwined in a way that cannot easily be separated out anymore.

Inflation is roaring back HOT!…

Trump TACOs Again, as Predicted Here!

David Haggith — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 02:29:23 GMT

‘Twas only yesterday that I wrote

There is just so much winning! Actually, I can tell you one kind of winning that has a good chance of playing out in the next couple of days. It is now widely known that every time Trump makes a big announcement like today, very large inside trading moves appear in the stock market 15-30 minutes before his announcement. So, maybe Trump & Co. shorted the market in all the right places before the announcement today, and then will buy many stocks in 24-48 hours because Trump will announce another 2-3 day horizon for deal #39. He and his will make bank twice in about forty-eight hours … again. Somebody is doing it. We don’t know who, but we do know large bets are being placed just in time every time.
So much winning!
(See “Trump Accidentally Tells Truth, Market Tanks and Oil Banks.”)

And, so, as predictable as rain in the Pacific Northwest, Trump suddenly TACOed to create today the 39th lie about Iran making a deal soon now, which should provide a short reversal for markets where he and his, if they are so disposed, can benefit by making the trade in the opposite direction of yesterday, which is why I also wrote,

And to think I saw someone say again today how benevolent Trump is to continue to work as president and not collect his salary! When you have the choicest throne in the world for making pronouncements to benefit insider traders plus supreme-court-granted “total immunity” for everything you do as an official action, who needs a paycheck when you can make bank off proclamations of war and peace?

Far bigger money is being made each day than the president’s annual salary by whatever people are making these large, precisely timed trades just ahead of his major announcements.

And today’s announcement is:

US President Donald Trump has cancelled planned strikes against Iran tonight. It comes hours after he threatened more bombings on the Middle East.

And here was the exact wording of the instant-replay lie that was issued this morning:

Trump wrote on Truth Social: “Based on the fact that discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran have been brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved, I have, as President of the United States of America, cancelled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran this evening. Discussions and final points have been, in both concept and great detail, approved by all parties involved, including the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and others

Note that his final list includes everyone but Iran, the one party that most has to agree and that has in all 38 previous lies been nowhere near ready to make a deal. In fact, Iran almost always comes right out and says there was no deal on the table on the same day the president announces that a deal is one 2-3 days off. Maybe they weren’t in the list because he started off by saying they approved it, but we know if that were the case, the deal would be done. This time, notice, he did not deploy his usual language that says the deal is imminent or that Iran is anxious to make a deal. Is that part of the lie, after 38 total fails for the former lies, getting harder to pitch?

He obviously makes all this stuff up as he goes. That doesn’t matter to him because it works splendidly for all the insider trades that have been reported.

As I also said yesterday, Iran will decide when the war is over, and it has already said it will launch serious reprisals for Trump’s latest attacks. The article continues,

The two previous nights have seen back-and-forth strikes between the US and Iran as the conflict continues. Trump said he intends to take Kharg Island, a five-mile-long coral island, north of the Strait of Hormuz “at some point in the not too distant future”.

So, before the next 24 hours is over, my next prediction is that we’ll see Iran say it is not interested in making any deal with the Don, and then, to prove its point, as in the past, it will make the reprisal attacks to those Trump made that night before, which it has already promised will be bigger and broader than its recent forays.

Today, it announced that Elon Musk’s businesses in the ME will also be on the target list.

And, there it is! Prediction fulfilled already!

I just got the last sentence above finished, then had to rush back to my regular job on an extra-busy day at 11:30 AM PDT (2:30 PM EDT), three hours earlier than I usually have to return for my split shift. It was nonstop work from then through a pre-scheduled dinner engagement, so I didn’t get back to do the proofreading on this editorial until this evening, whereupon I saw the following update had posted.

UPDATE 2:52 PM EDT --
Iran publicly and vehemently DENIES there is __any__ agreement with the U.S.
Israel reports that they have not been updated and do not currently recognize that an agreement has been reached.
Iranian source close to the negotiating team tells Fars News Agency (Iran) that Iran has NOT approved any text for an initial memorandum of understanding with the U.S. The denial comes after Trump claimed Iran had agreed “at the highest level” to such a text, and later said the document had been finalized. (“Is this Trump’s 31st peace deal’?”)

So, nobody that matters among “all the parties of the agreement” ever saw the agreement. What a liar! Being questioned about such fake announcements is what caused baby Trump to storm of the interview stage the other day.

I suppose I should not get points for this prediction, though, because it was as easy as falling off a horse, yet I hadn’t read anyone else stating it as an actual prediction, though I’m sure many would have been able to make it, had they the audacity. The hard part for me was not the prediction. (And maybe I just missed the articles that did state it as a prediction.) The hard part for me is believing how many people are STILL so incredibly and intentionally stupid, they keep falling for his endless repetition of lies.

The story continues with further confirmation of everything I wrote about his announcement of a retreat today and his announcement of more attacks yesterday.

Iranian media:
The Islamic Republic news agency Tasnim: “Another Trump retreat, once again justified by claims of progress in the negotiations. Over the past two months, Trump has declared 38 times that an agreement was within reach and on the verge of being signed. In the span of just three days, he has ‘sent his vice president to Pakistan’ four times in his imagination”
Hal Turner Personal Opinion
One cannot discount the reality that upon this “announcement” by President Trump, stock Markets that had been losing value all day, suddenly turned around and skyrocketed. It appears to many people the President’s remarks are Market Manipulation….

So right on every part of that prediction. They become fulfilled so quickly I can’t write and then proofread fast enough on a busy day to get the article published ahead of the fulfillment of the claims! It’s just that predictable. (I left everything in the preceding section exactly as I wrote it, other than the typo corrections made during this proofread before publication.)

The primary reason I try to give so many of my perspectives as predictions then note every time they are fulfilled is to help people realize they can trust the perspective or, at least, that they should give it serious thought, because it may be hard to trust these perspectives when so often they run counter to what you are hearing in the mainstream press and sometimes even in the alternative press and almost always to what you are hearing the present president say is going to happen!

Trump Accidentally Tells Truth, Market Tanks and Oil Banks

David Haggith — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 01:36:30 GMT

I started the week claiming “Trump’s Israel-Iran Schmeasefire Blows Apart.” Then, yesterday, I reported on how Trump’s lie count for claims that “Iran really wants to do a deal, and the war will end in 2-3 more days” hit instant-replay #38. And now on Wednesday, just two days after I declared the blowout of the Schmeasefire, the feigned deal to be made has disintegrated to a level that blew a fuse in Trump’s brain, causing him to accidentally get honest for once. And that’s when the bottom fell out of the stock market and the elevator went up on oil.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the U.S. would hit Iran “very hard” again, escalating his public threats as he pressed Tehran to sign a deal.
“We hit them hard yesterday, and we’re going to hit them hard again today,” Trump said at a White House signing event for the Secure America Act. “We’re going to be attacking them and attacking them very hard.”

As a result, the running-on-fumes, jawboned stock market plunged 953 points on the Dow (-1.87%) and 509 points on the smaller NASDAQ (-1.98%)

The real moment of honesty came when …

He wrote early Wednesday that Iran has “taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them, now they will have to pay the price!!!”

Waiting too long is a sure sign that it really wants to make a deal??? It has, of course, waited too long because, as I’ve said every time Trump spoons a little of his snake oil to his willingly captive stock market, Iran is not the least bit anxious to make a deal. Iran is hoping to make Israel and US suffer severely, and it has said so. It has said the war will be over when Iran decides the war is over. Iran has already been devastated by heavy bombing, but the regime has survived; and the regime wants to make sure to exact severe economic harm on the US and Israel and a great part of the West in revenge. More than three months ago, I said Iran had turned this war into a war of attrition when it blocked the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran knows that the longer it simply maintains the blockade, the more severe the damage will become for the rest of the world, including the US and Israel, and Israel becomes increasingly hated by nearly the whole world every time it tries to blow up a deal. So, stalling on every offered deal plays perfectly into Iran’s hand.

Trump has also now admitted that Iran did more than shoot down a US helicopter, it also attacked some US destroyers.

Of course, because the stock market has licked every drop of Trump’s snake oil from its lips, the market has a lot of re-reckoning to do as the fact that the war is not ending soon gets relentlessly pounded into incredibly-dense-because-incredibly-greedy investors’ heads. Both the stock market and oil market.

“The Iran war story is really consequential,” said Jed Ellerbroek, portfolio manager at Argent Capital Management. “Either investors are going to be proven right, that [there’s] nothing to worry about, Trump will take care of it, we’ll get a deal with Iran and the strait will open up, but if not, it feels like oil prices are going to have to go up a lot.”

Again, the former leading market stocks continued to lead the market down today, which has been my thesis for months—that AI would take everything else down in a dot-com style bust. That was my claim even back in the days when all the experts were spelling out why that could never happen. Now, it’s happening.

You see, the market cannot handle the truth from the Don because he has nurtured it on lies for so long, that accepting the truth will require major re-orientation, and that will become very disorderly.

Shares of Micron Technology Advanced Micro Devices,and Broadcom were lower, falling for the fourth day in five. The iShares Semiconductor ETF dropped more than 3% rolling over on Tuesday. Chip stocks were pummeled at the end of last week, culminating in a 10% decline for the SOXX ETF on Friday. The group then rebounded slightly Monday before the selling resumed Tuesday.

There are, of course, still idiots who …

believe the weakness is just profit taking after such a rapid run.

It should also come as no surprise that Iran’s war of attrition, which keeps oil prices elevated between $90-100/bbl, is now driving general inflation up more sharply. That came out in the news headlines below, too. Watch, as I have been forecasting, for the major inflation gauges to get red-hot as we move through the summer.

Trump said Iran “should sign the deal” and said that the U.S. wants an agreement “that’s meaningful and works.”
“We’ll see what happens with the deal,” Trump said.

Again, a little unintended honesty seeped in. It has always been the US (Trump) that “wants an agreement.” Iran has always made it crystal clear that it has little-to-no willingness to negotiate with Trump because it considers him a pathologically relentless liar and because the gap between his demands and theirs is so wide. The other unintentional honesty is that “We’ll see what happens with the deal.” Yes, we will. It has always been the case that we will see what really happens and that nothing we see ever looks anything like what Trump keeps saying is right around the corner.

Iran has a say in how the war goes, and their answer to Trump is that it goes hotter:

In response Wednesday afternoon, the head of the national security commission in Iran’s parliament, Ebrahim Azizi, wrote that “this time, the war won’t be limited to the region,” in a post on X.

Trump, as always, continued today to say Iran’s air force and navy have been completely wiped out, so it’s kind of peculiar that they keep managing to take out US helicopters and damage destroyers. We’re now way, way past the original 2-3 days that were supposed to take us to a deal with Iran, so I guess “we’ll see what happens” when Iran intensifies the war effort, as it now says it will do, since the US has gone back to a more intensified war. Iran has done much better at doing what it says it will do than Trump has.

An Iranian drone then brought down an American Apache helicopter prompting several hours of U.S. retaliatory strikes. Iranian officials tried to portray the downing as an accident, then launched missile and drone strikes on U.S. allies in the Gulf and Jordan in response to the American attacks.

Another bit of larger truth slipped out as the president lost his patience today because his delusions are not being fulfilled by Iran:

US President Donald Trump said three US Navy destroyers were attacked as they moved through the Strait of Hormuz….

Earlier he had mentioned only the helicopter. However, after this new revelation, things get foggy again:

“Three World Class American Destroyers just transited, very successfully, out of the Strait of Hormuz, under fire. There was no damage done to the three Destroyers, but great damage done to the Iranian attackers,” Trump wrote on Truth Social….
“They trifled with us today. We blew them away,” Trump said in Washington.
But Iran’s top joint military command accused the US of violating the ceasefire by targeting an Iranian oil tanker and another ship. It also said the US carried out air attacks on civilian areas on Qeshm Island, a strategic point at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz believed to house much of Iran’s naval force, and nearby coastal areas in Bandar Khamir and Sirik in southern Iran. Iranian air defences were also triggered over western Tehran. The military said it had responded to these incidents by striking US military vessels east of the strait and south of the port of Chabahar.
A spokesperson for Iran’s Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, the operational base of Iran’s Armed Forces, claimed the Iranian strikes inflicted “significant damage”, contrasting with the US Central Command claim that none of its assets had been hit.

Who you gonna believe? Last time Trump said our aircraft carriers were not harmed, we saw photos of them smoking and limping off for repairs and heard about whole compartments being burned out.

Reassuringly, Vice President JD Vance indicated today that the war may continue for another year (at most, he said). I guess we’ll see what happens there, too.

There is just so much winning! Actually, I can tell you one kind of winning that has a good chance of playing out in the next couple of days. It is now widely known that every time Trump makes a big announcement like today, very large inside trading moves appear in the stock market 15-30 minutes before his announcement. So, maybe Trump & Co. shorted the market in all the right places before the announcement today, and then will buy many stocks in 24-48 hours because Trump will announce another 2-3 day horizon for deal #39. He and his will make bank twice in about forty-eight hours … again. Somebody is doing it. We don’t know who, but we do know large bets are being placed just in time every time.

So much winning! And to think I saw someone say again today how benevolent Trump is to continue to work as president and not collect his salary! When you have the choicest throne in the world for making pronouncements to benefit insider traders plus supreme-court-granted “total immunity” for everything you do as an official action, who needs a paycheck when you can make bank off proclamations of war and peace?

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AI Bubble Troubles Keep Boiling Over

David Haggith — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 02:52:45 GMT

A few top experts are now sounding a fire alarm on the collapse of the AI bubble that I have been saying for a couple of years will eventually take the stock market down, though particularly emphasizing the now-imminent timing of that event as the market’s convulsions look like the bull is dying. And with that will go other markets in a great collapse.

One more piece of evidence of the insanity came in today with news that Apollo and Blackstone have just put together a MASSIVE $35 BILLION loan/equity funding entity (called a “Special Purpose Vehicle”) for Anthropic, which makes for one of the biggest private-credit deals in the history of Earth.

Half the insanity comes on the side of the major investors. Blackstone is already struggling with serious troubles in its flagship fund, forcing it to put limits on redemptions from the fund to prevent a run to hell. Apollo, too, is in some jeopardy, but both are running long on Anthropic—very long—and that’s where the trouble lies on the other side.

Just like all those dot-com busts of companies around the year 2000, Anthropic has never reported a profit as it reached for the moon in loans and equity investments. Though it has strong revenue, it loses in the billions every year by endlessly expanding is expenditures. And, now, with energy prices soaring, that is sure to make its bottom line tougher, being an ultra-high energy demand company.

Even if not all of its enormous energy consumption is oil-based, as Petro-generation plants charge massively higher levels, customers start to try to shift to alternative, providing increased demand into which the alternatives are able to start raising prices. We’ve already seen how that has caused one electrical utility in the Tahoe area to abandon an entire community of 50,000 to go chasing after the higher money that AI is willing to pay to get the power it needs.

So what could go wrong?

The toxic chemistry

Many major banks and investors have been pulled into the tranched deal. (And who could be concerned about the feigned safety of tranched investment layers after the massive collapse of mortgage-backed securities that were tranched, yet still wound up peeling every single layer down to about nothing?)

The announced deal, of course, is to fund Anthropic’s continuing relentless build-out of AI data centers. It’s largely a chip deal, and chips makers have been showing the biggest signs of trouble in the stock market as AI starts bracing for headwinds. You may recall, I recently asked the question, “With AI now taking charge of its own development, how long before its exponential increase in design speed causes its own data centers to become obsolete? A year or two? It won’t be long and AI will likely develop much less power-consumptive forms of faster computing and greater storage, turning all these massive, power-starving, heat-wave pushing, noise-rocking, light-polluting centers built in the middle of nowhere to become giant liabilities.

Or as Zero Hedge far more mildly phrased it,

It also adds to a deluge of chip-backed loans that sparked debate over how quickly graphics processing units would depreciate as AI technology evolves.

I think the answer to that is “very,” meaning many of these project may become victims of their own success, locked into extraordinary energy-consumptive facilities with longterm financing to pay off on the the chips when new companies come along with technology that uses half the space and a tenth the energy in just a year or two, designed, of course, by renting space on the AI behemoths being built today.

We can see here the spending on these AI ventures is scheduled to keep growing at a massive rate, with the biggest step up this year, though some of the centers are starting to experience serious public pushback that has caused the largest of all of them (in Utah) to be scaled back.

Zero Hedge

Or as ZH also put that:

But wait, there’s more... because if that wasn’t enough, Morgan Stanley, which advised Broadcom and arranged the transaction, is also lending money to investors participating in the deal!
And just because this is a “chip-backed” off-balance sheet SPV where nobody really knows who holds the debt, the monstrous circularity of all the deal aspects will be ignored until the AI credit bubble cracks.

Which could be this week or next, since cracks are already appearing everywhere on the surface of AI and chip manufacturers.

Piling all of these banks into the toxic chemistry of this brew, means the AI meltdown could become as explosive to the entire financial world (if not likely worse) than the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.

And, exactly like that massive mess …

As for the punchline: demonstrating the insane frenzy of anything involving AI, investors involved in the deal did not even know what they were investing in! According to the FT, investors pitched on the deal were not given early access to Anthropic’s financials ahead of its IPO….
This wasn’t the only such deal: just days prior, Anthropic (which will use proceeds from this private credit SPV to purchase Google chips made by Broadcom), agreed to pay $1.5 billion a month for access to 325,000 Nvidia GPU also held by SpaceX. No wonder these sham agreements were structured so they can be terminated by either party after December 2026.

Being so deeply inter-wired, it will be hard if the bubble bursts, as I believe it is starting to do, for it not to become a devastating cascade of failures.

White House already talking about bailouts

As these top-heavy deals stack up, another article today asks if the White House knows something is going wrong with all this AI stuff. Is it all about to tip over?

Does the White House Know Something About AI That It Isn’t Telling Us?
…The S&P 500 dipped down below its 21-day exponential moving average (EMA) for the first time since this bull run began nine weeks ago. Again, the dip was expected, but the severity was extreme.
This is a significant warning that the uptrend is in danger. How the market reacts in the first half of this week will determine whether this was just a “garden variety” dip in a bull market, or if stocks are in danger of something worse.

Well, the market has been rather tremulous in the first half of this week, following the Friday episode of the cold sweats and shivers that the above article was talking about. The NASDAQ, which is the watering hole where all of these stocks gather, flatlined Monday after its spectacular Friday plunge. Then today it plunged another 2% but recovered some of that toward the end of the day to end up down 1%. So, it’s stumbling, and that looks like “something worse” based on this analyst’s warnings about Friday’s heavy action.

He goes on with an interesting side note. The bailout talk has already begun:

What is telling is that the Trump administration immediately surfaced over the weekend to talk about potentially taking stakes in large AI-companies.

The kind of Fascist economics Trump loves.

The fact the Trump administration is already talking about an implied bailout of large AI-companies is a major warning. It’s well known that the most famous AI company, OpenAI which first introduced the public to Large Language Models (LLMs) with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 is in significant financial trouble: the company has over $100 billion in commitments on just $26 billion in annual revenues. Indeed, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been hinting at the need for a bailout since third quarter of 2025.

OpenAI is one of the biggest over-spenders of all the over-spenders.

In this context, the fact the President of the United States is suggesting that the government take stakes in AI companies just a few days after a severe market sell-off is deeply concerning. Does the White House know something about AI that it isn’t telling us? Are these companies not actually the highly profitable market leaders that they claim to be? Or is there something systemic happening under the surface that the White House is attempting to get “in front of”?

Taxpayer dollars might get piled by the Treasury (now allowed to own stocks) into the biggest LOSERS of all. Of course, with unlimited funding possible, will the Treasury just keep piling in enough trillions to keep them above water, even if they don’t recover their losses on tax-payer dollars for an entire decade, if ever, as the best of the best managed to do after the dot-com bust while all the rest of the major market leaders got flushed entirely?

More big names speaking out about a big bust

I led off by saying other big-name analysts and investors were in today’s news, expressing their beliefs that it looks like the AI bubble is about to burst, as I’ve been saying I am certain it is:

The ongoing stock market retreat has fueled concerns that the AI bubble may be on the verge of bursting, potentially ending one of the most remarkable bull runs in history—one that created several trillion-dollar companies.

And that’s a lot of value to implode, which will leave widespread damage throughout the financial world if this over-leveraged market melts down. Again, this concern developed out of Friday’s market action, which I started leaning toward prior to Friday.

US stocks retreated sharply this week, with top technology companies being the top laggards. Broadcom AVGO was one of the top laggards as it plunged by 21% from its highest point this year. Its market capitalization dropped from $2.27 trillion to $1.83 trillion.
Some analysts are warning that the AI bubble is forming and that it may burst soon. A good example of this is billionaire Ray Dalio, who warned of parallels between the current AI growth to that of the dot-com bubble, which burst in 2000. He also warned that the soaring US debt may compound this crisis, saying that the US was now in a point of no return.
Mark Cuban, the billionaire Shark Tank star, also warned that the AI bubble may burst and end like the search engine crash. He pointed to the search engine wars of the late 1990s, which eventually resulted in Google GOOG being the most dominant players.
Michael Burry, who predicted the housing bubble, has also warned about the industry. He has also placed short trades on top companies in the AI industry like Nvidia NVDA and Palantir PLTR.

Ties to the slippery slope of oil lies

Of course, these stocks gyrate with every lie the president tells to jury-rig the oil market back down in price. We are now on lie 38 of his Iran Series in the count of the number of times he has said Iran is eager to strike a deal in 2-3 days, according to the count of those lies kept by the writer of one article in the news below.

Each time, Trump makes those announcements, it appears insiders profit hyugely from the swings that come to oil and stocks with bets placed perfectly to profit from the swings just about 15-minutes to half an hour before the president makes his announcement.

President Donald Trump claimed that a peace deal with Iran is just “two or three” days away, asserting it would prevent the country from acquiring nuclear weapons and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
However, this is not even the first or second time the president has made such a claim. It is, in fact, the 38th time that the president claimed a deal was coming….

One can see why he would want to play this game as often as he could, given that someone of several is/are profiting immensely each time he does.

Speaking to reporters at Madison Square Garden on Monday, Trump revealed that Washington [or Jerusalem?] and Tehran had been going “back and forth.” He stated, “They were going back and forth [with strikes], and now they both agreed, through me, to stop, and now we’re in the final throes of what will be a very, very good deal.”

But then Iran blew up a US helicopter over the Strait of Hormuz, so Trump said was forced to retiate and blew up some Iranian stuff, and now Iran says that means it is forced to blow up more US stuff, even as the Schmeasefire continues to fall apart with Israel striking Beirut and other parts of Lebanon and Iran retaliating by striking northern parts of Israel. (That’s why I call it the “Schmeasefire.”) Still, the markets are endlessly dumb enough to keep hearing what they want to hear from Trump’s mouth and trade the way his insiders need them to move in order to capture the biggest swings.

Of course, the Supreme Court has already ruled that Trump is immune for prosecution for anything he does as part of an official action. So, no doubt, he had people he needed to notify about each of his announcements just ahead of the actual public announcement, whom he happened to know would be positioned to cast some very profitable trades for both themselves and him.

This latest time:

“The strait will open up right away,” he insisted, adding, “It’ll open up immediately upon signing.”

As I’ve said so many times before, “Uh huh, sure.”

The stealth recession and the fake CPI

Also very interesting is a very article that is very specific in its details, which I’ve tacked onto the boldfaced headline section. It covers the AI/chip revolt in the stock market, but also says, we have been in a hidden recession for quite awhile now, exactly matching my claim that we have been in a stealth recession since Biden’s last year in office.

What the article does very nicely is lay out all the ways with specifics in time that the US has dummied down the way it calculates inflation, always to the effect of reducing it, just as I’ve reported for years (but in one nice comprehensive, easy-to-read package). It details how official inflation, as I’ve been claiming, cloaks recessions in the government’s real GDP numbers because the government’s stated real GDP growth is far from being real growth. Throughout that past two years, if you take out all the fakery that was made even worse by the DOGE firings and government shutdowns that seriously hampered the ability to gather data from businesses, GDP “growth” has been negative.

So, yes, Trump’s golden era started in a stealth recession from the Biden era, and it has become only deeper in recession at an accelerating rate during Trump’s first year of tariff and turf wars. And now it is falling even more rapidly under the massive oil inflation that is building up quickly.

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Trump's Israel-Iran Schmeasefire Blows Apart

David Haggith — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:18:22 GMT

Hal Turner composed an excellent hour-by-hour, even minute-by-minute, updated synopsis of how the schmeasefire started blowing up over the past day. I’ve posted it at the top of the war section for anyone who wants a good review of how it all fell apart between yesterday evening and this morning.

Trump predictably said the deal is still coming together because Iran really wants to make a deal, but it looks like it is hanging by the thinnest of threads because, while Iran said it has done all the bombing and missile strikes against Israel it intends to do at this point, it also said it will do a lot more for a full seven days if Israel retaliates. Israel stated outright that the war is not over because it fully intends to retaliate forcefully.

Trump said Israel and Iran “are looking to do an immediate ceasefire” and that negotiations were proceeding despite the attacks. Trump earlier ordered that Iran and Israel “must immediately stop” attacking.

The news caused the 30YR US Treasury to break above 5% and finally hold there all day. While this is danger territory for stocks, the stock market appeared to decide, again, to listen to Trump. Chipmaker stocks rebounded some from their previous routes, but the AI crash contagion sped to South Korea where the market was halted on “circuit breakers” after taking an 8% cliff dive. The Dow traded flat, but the NASDAQ closed up less than 1%, not a lot compared to its recent dive.

“This continues to be a market that is evaluating the catalysts and the potential risks and placing them on a scale,” said William Northey, investment director at U.S. Bank Asset Management. “The solid fundamentals that exist here in the U.S. – based on consumer strength, capital expenditures, the corporate earnings cycle – have been outweighing in large part the risks associated with the Middle East conflict.”
However, the longer the conflict exists, the “more potentially damaging it can be to fundamental economic activity [due] to the creation of inflation pressures that are beyond transitory,” he added.

Oil schmoil

Oil markets also foolishly ignored the resurgence of war. Prices bolted up, but then faithfully settled back down as soon as Trump assured investors his schmeasefire talks were proceeding nicely. (Talk about intentionally gullible markets.) Or maybe it was as soon as Iran said it was done … for now … with attacks, the two events being close in timing. (Likewise, perhaps, for the settling down of stocks.)

Both markets—oil and stocks—are beyond foolish to be ignoring the realities of this war. Analysis reported today says that, if the war ended today, the quickest the Strait of Hormuz could get back to “normal” would be January of 2027. Even Donald Trump said it would not be likely to open at all until the end of summer. While oil prices settled down as soon as Iran said it was done (for now), the foolishness of that bet became immediately apparent (or should have) when Israel said it’s not over. So, oil speculators seem to be betting just on any positive facts of the given moment and discounting any negative predictions. They may be deliberately rolling big on the bets with the worst odds but biggest potential payoffs, but they’d do a lot better to cast those bets on a roulette wheel in a casino somewhere.

Three articles today talk about why the approach of tank bottoms are a problem even though the US has lots of crude and refineries are running about as close to full capacity as they get. The biggest problem is the rate at which inventory is falling. Tanks were full to a surplus before the war, so that surplus against normal needs has kept problems from emerging, but we are now well below the surplus.

Finished Gasoline inventory is still fairly good, but inventories have been falling much more quickly than usual, and we haven’t even hit the summer driving season. The main reason for the unusual rate of decline is not the lack of refining velocity, but the amount of gasoline that is being sucked out of the nation’s inventory by high European demand, pushing prices up for US consumers. As Europeans and others quickly get to their own tank bottoms for stored gasoline, their demand for US gasoline will intensify, and American buyers will have to compete against that demand. So, things could tip quickly.

A certain relatively high level of crude oil inventory works as a buffer in pricing, but typically when the market gets below that “lower high," let’s call it, market buyers become more jumpy, prices become more volatile. Production may experience some interruptions. Levels are now particularly low at one of the nation’s most important storage facilities:

‘You have a buffer getting close to not being a buffer anymore,’ analyst says
An aerial-drone view of a crude-oil storage facility in Cushing, Okla. Crude inventories are at their lowest levels in years in the U.S. amid a war with Iran that’s dragged on for months….
There are growing worries that U.S. commercial oil inventories are too low for comfort as the war with Iran enters its fourth month far from a clear resolution - and a lot hinges on how much longer the conflict drags on.
Inventories are the shock absorbers of the energy world: They smooth out the tension between the ups and downs of supply and the usually steady pace of demand. To be an efficient cushion for countries and companies, however, stockpiles need to be at “Goldilocks” levels: not too much, not too little.

Also, some fuels like diesel and jet fuel are dependent on distillates in the mix that come largely from the Middle East because they are more easily refined from the oil over there and because US facilities do not handle that kind of oil refining as well.

One article in The Daily Doom headlines today makes the point that the US is good through the summer, but two others stress the rate of depletion and the lack of special distillates as likely to cause production problems by the end of June. That will make buyers jumpier.

One article especially points out the folly in the way people are looking at the total amount of oil in stock, pointing out that most of that oil in stock is not accessible. As much as 10-20%, depending on the tank, is junk oil that has built up at the bottom of the tanks—sludge—that cannot be pumped. The tanks have to be cleaned to get the sludge out, and the sludge requires special processing to get valuable products out of it, which still doesn’t yield much fuel.

Another large percentage of oil is in transit from other areas. When the US talks total inventories, it is also talking loads paid for that are moving across the water. Then there is the huge amount that sits in pipes and needs to always be in pipes to keep them flowing. You don’t really want to try to drain the thousands of miles of pipelines dry unless you’re extremely desparate or its necessary in spots for repairs, and all of that is included in total oil inventory.

In fact, a recent analysis suggests that the world oil system will start to experience “operational stress” sometime in June. Operational stress “is the point at which the system begins to experience significant functional strain: price volatility becomes extreme, rationing of refined products begins in the most exposed markets, and the margin for error in supply chain management drops to near zero.” This analysis takes into account ongoing strategic petroleum reserve releases around the globe and states that “[e]ven full deployment of strategic reserves buys weeks, not months, at current drawdown rates….”
To understand why the world economy is about to hit a wall with regard to oil supplies, you need to understand exactly what “operational minimum” means. While there appear to be many billions of barrels of oil inventories left as of now, most of those barrels are what is known as “system fill.” They fill pipelines, refineries, oil tankers, rail tank cars, and tanker trucks. It is not feasible to operate a pipeline without any product moving through it. It is not feasible to operate refineries without any feedstock in them. It is impossible to operate a seaborne or land fleet of tankers without having some of that fleet actually carrying oil and/or oil products to their destination, products which are unavailable for use while in transit.
The absolute operational minimum floor for the global oil system is estimated to be about 6.8 billion barrels. Below that, the system will simply not function. On our current trajectory, the world will reach that point in September, if not before. It turns out there really weren’t 8.5 billion barrels of available oil inventories across the world at the beginning of the war, only 8.5 billion minus 6.8 billion, or 1.7 billion. Big difference!

However, the picture gets worse, and hence the shorter timeframe to troubles given by some:

The moment we reach “tank bottoms” actually comes before we reach operational minimum. Technically, “tank bottoms” refers to the sludge that builds up on the bottoms of storage tanks, which must be periodically cleaned out and disposed of or processed to extract valuable products. In this context, this moment is when practical commercial storage runs very low, so as not to be a reliable buffer between current supply and demand. That’s when a bidding war will begin, and oil prices are likely to spike to $150 a barrel or higher, oil industry executives say. That moment is not far away, even as the world sleepwalks through the greatest oil crisis in history.

Once some tanks start getting down to sludge, panic sets in, and bidding wars start. It’s not that we have hit a level where we cannot produce. There may still be enough oil to keep producing until the end of summer; but the problem is that operations become more erratic and less efficient, so buyers become more jumpy, which means prices become even more erratic and jumpy.

An agreement to end the Iran war within the next few days would not change the outcome because it would take at least three months to normalize traffic through the Strait of Hormuz under the absolute best of circumstances. And, I don’t think we’ll see anything like the absolute best of circumstances arise anytime soon or probably ever again.

And, as if that is not bad enough, reports are coming in today that the flash point that I said last week could hit very hard, just did. Two reports I came across said Yemen has shut down access to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. I haven’t seen anything from mainstream news sources on that yet. If it proves to be true, it will more than double the coming inflation pain by hitting more oil, but mostly by now bringing a major freight route to a close.

More fake peace talks

The idea that the war will end soon won’t solve the oil problem even if Trump is not just lying as usual, which it, once again, appears he is:

President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post earlier Monday that, despite the latest outbreak of violence, both Israel and Iran “are looking to do an immediate CEASEFIRE!”
“Final negotiations on ‘Peace’ are proceeding, subject to ignorance or stupidity getting in its way,” Trump wrote. He added that an ongoing U.S. blockade of Iranian ports in the Gulf of Oman will not be lifted “until a ‘Final Deal’ is reached.”
“Things should move quickly,” Trump claimed as the war, which he initially said would last four to six weeks, crossed the 100-day mark on Sunday.

Exact same pattern as all other times. Trump says Iran is dying to make a deal. Iran says it is not and then proves it by launching some more attacks. It seems ignorance and stupidity are getting in the way all the time.

However, an Iranian official earlier Sunday appeared to cast doubt that any agreement with the U.S. was forthcoming, telling MS NOW, “a deal with President Trump is no longer feasible at this stage.”

Iran has stated several times that it has no willingness to negotiate with someone who lies all the time. Today’s action certainly shows they are not too concerned about scrambling to make a deal.

Miscellaneous mashup

Two other interesting side notes came through today on things I wrote earlier today and earlier last week. One is a story about how much support inside of Russia for Putin is falling apart and how more people are feeling emboldened to criticize the war he is stuck in, even calling it a “war” now, even though doing so can bring swift punishment. Most of the article is behind a paywall now, but earlier in the day I read it all. It was a pretty thorough take down about how Putin’s popularity is bleeding.

(See my earlier editorial today: “Trump’s Iranium Quagmire.”)

The other article was about AI by one of the biggest investors in AI, who says he has become convinced that many of the top people in AI really are driven by a zeal to create a digital god to rule over humanity.

Venture capitalist Bill Gurley, one of the technology industry’s most influential investors, says he has developed a disturbing theory after spending weeks studying Anthropic, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies.
According to Gurley, the threat may go far beyond concerns that major AI firms are seeking regulations to eliminate competition.
Instead, he fears some of the industry’s most powerful figures genuinely believe they are creating something akin to a digital deity….
“The more I dig, I’ve met people who I dare say think it’s their responsibility and they’re excited about building a species that’s superior to humans,” Gurley said during a recent episode of the “All-In Podcast.”
“I don’t think they think they’re writing software.
“I think they’re midwifing a deity here.”

(See my earlier Deeper Dive: “THE DEEPER DIVE: Racing Toward Dystopia, Part One.”)

He says that all their talk about the need for regulations to slow down development to a safer speed are nothing more than an attempt to use regulations to slow down their competition in order to not let competition widen beyond the current leaders. Typical story when it comes to regulation.

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Trump's Iranium Quagmire

David Haggith — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 05:19:31 GMT

I wrote the following editorial (verbatim) over the weekend—mostly on Saturday—as my lead-in for the Monday headlines. I wrote it because we have just passed the 100-day mark of Trump’s war against Iran and because I expected things to now go hotter, not to cool off. I wanted to get it published just before that happened. The war, however, got a slight jump on me, and missiles started flying this evening (Sunday or, at least, that is when I first read the news about fifteen minutes ago before heading off to bed).

So, I’m publishing the editorial this evening without any changes at all, so you can see what my thinking was about Trump’s quagmire in Iran before any news came out about Iran launching missiles at Israel and Israel intensifying things in Lebanon, etc. At this late evening hour, it SOUNDS like Trump’s schmeasefire finally went up in flames. Tomorrow may look different, but that’s what it sounds like, having skimmed the headlines. It’s 10PM and I have to get to bed for work in the AM, so we’ll see where thing are later tomorrow…

At the 100-day point in the Trump-Israel-Iran War, President Trump looks as stuck in one place as President Putin has looked for four years now in Ukraine. That quagmire also became evident enough in about 100 days, just as George HW Bush declared victory in what was called a “100-Day War” in Iraq then wound up stalled for years in a quagmire that never found the weapons of mass destruction he claimed were there.

With the 100-day point in the in Trump’s Second Iran War now stuck in Trump’s Schmeasefire, nothing has been gained on any of the objectives Trump has talked about. Iran is now saying, as I warned in my last Deeper Dive would now become abundantly apparent to the whole world that the United States is now a “deflated power.” As they make that statement, Trump is claiming Iran has been decapitated.

To build some trust in the analysis of the quagmire the US is now stuck in (again), I want to show how I laid out the quagmire Putin would be stuck in when he first invaded Ukraine as I called the war all along the way. I’m going to lay out the fact of what I said back then about a clearly badly failing war in Ukraine that was far from clear to most back when I was making those statements. I want to do that as a corollary to what I am saying now about Trump’s imperial quagmire.

Clearly of these invasions of nations that did not attack the invader, even going back to the Bush Wars, have gone as leaders of the big guys planned. I each case the underdogs held up far better than the attackers believed was possible. We need to take an imperial lesson from that:

Prior to Putin’s “Not-War” in Ukraine, I used to write A LOT for Zero Hedge and RT, I was a paid feature writer for about a year with RT and interviewed on their television station. So, I was making about $1,000 a month just off the articles I did for them (back when Biden unconstitutionally fired me from my regular job for refusing the Trump kill shot). RT loved my criticisms of the US so much, several of which were most-read features, that they finally asked me, after Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, to become part of a television panel on the Not-War.

That was where we parted. I had enjoyed working with their editors at their London branch and had no problem writing US criticism where it was due for whomever was willing to publish it, WHICH CERTAINLY WAS NOT THE MAINSTREAM PRESS IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! However, I knew they would hate what I had to say about Putin’s internationally illegal invasion of a nation that had not attacked Russia—as preemptive as anything George Bush ever did, which I also railed at back in the days—and I didn’t want, even in any token way, to be a part of a program that would seek to make Putin’s imperial quest look justifiable.

I also didn’t want the US government during a time of war where the US had sided with Ukraine to see that I was getting $1,000 a month, modest last that figure was, wired straight into my bank account from a major Moscow bank. Most of all, I knew I intended to write fiercely against this imperial quest to restore parts of the old Soviet empire back into Russia’s grasp, and felt it would lack integrity to be collecting pay from Moscow while attacking Putin’s Not-War. I resigned from the world I was doing with RT, and used my membership, while it lasted there, to publish critical comments about all he hypocrisy in Putin’s war, the assassinations of his critics and, especially to scoff at the certain failure that I predicted for his quagmire of a war.

The same can be said for Zero Hedge, which is a publication founded by a father and son who come from a former Soviet satellite to create one of Putin’s sly propaganda publication. Putin, as the former KGB head of disinformation in Easter Europe back in the Soviet days is one of the masterful, highly trained liars in the world. You don’t reach top status in disinformation, which is a euphemism for lying, without knowing how to sell lies as facts, which is why they use the word “disINFORMATION” for their lying propaganda. The best lies are wrapped in a lot more truth than lie, like a pill you want a dog to swallow, you insert it into a very tasty piece of raw meet.

Zero Hedge, by all appearances if the front door for a Russian troll farm where I imagine former Soviets sitting in their dull bedroom with the sheet over the window, a pack of cigarettes rolled up in a t-shirt sleeve, and a mostly dead-solider bottle of vodka on the small desk where they hammer out their midnight troll bait.

Once I started relentlessly criticizing Putin’s miscarriages in Ukraine, the trolls got extremely hot. I battled them relentlessly with lots of barbed criticism of their own hypocrisy and idiotic claims about Putin’s certain quick victory for a couple of months until Zero Hedge hypocritically (having complained about times when they were censored or banned on Twitter) banned me from commenting on its site and stopped giving any of their usual promotion to the articles I had been publishing there for years; and, of course, banned me from publishing anymore. (There was no lack of integrity in my sharply criticizing Russia while still publishing article on ZH because they never paid a dime for anything I ever wrote there. So, to me, it was just a hostile marketplace of ideas.)

The trolls did their best to lacerate everything I said about how that war would go from the start; and, yet, today I can honestly say that EVERYTHING but one prediction I made happened as I said it would, and here is how that went: (And nothing they said went as they were certain it would.)

When Putin was lining up all kinds of heavy military hardware along Ukraine’s eastern border, he said it was just for war-games. I agreed with Biden who claimed he had intel that showed Putin was definitely going to invade, and I said why. The trolls pounded me severely for being so “stupid” to side with Biden (whom I couldn’t stand, but I don’t make my predictions based on whom I like). They said obviously I was a liberal Biden supporter, with zero basis, given that I already hated Biden for firing me over the vaccine and for turning the US into the pages of George Orwell’s 1984 faster than I ever imagined would happen. I had spent many article railing against Biden, too, even on RT and Zero Hedge, but that was suddenly all forgotten. AND THEN PUTIN INVADED just like I said he would.
When Putin did invade, he publicly stated he was only going in about ten miles to reinforce local resistance to Ukrainian abuse in the Donbas region and would stop there. Is said he was lying and would go all the way to Kyiv. The trolls at Zero Hedge and critics at RT, where most had loved my writing when I was critical of US military adventurism and misfires, and elsewhere said I was wrong—that Putin didn’t want regime change and didn’t want all of Ukraine. He was nothing lie GW Bush. I said, “What do you think all those “Zs “on his tanks are for? ‘Zoom!?’ They are to say, ‘Zelensky, these tanks are for you! We’re coming to get you.’” Putin immediately stormed right past his fake line and went all the way to Kyiv.
I said Putin would lose at Kyiv because the Ukrainians were fighting for their existence and their freedom while Putin’s troops didn’t even want to be there and were largely stuck in the mud. My critics said I was nuts because Putin was way stronger than Ukraine, way smarter, and would slaughter them for being so foolish to resist (as if they had no moral right to defend their internationally and even Pre-Putin Russian-recognized boundaries like any other people would do on this constantly warring planet. Russia came out and stated that I was right about regime change—they were going to topple the current regime and place a more cooperative Ukrainian government in place. Putin lost faster than my trollish critics ever imagined he could and rapidly retreated with no regime change achieve.
Some of Putin’s sudden retreats were almost hilarious in how much they looked like a Russian version of the Keystone Kops. I even said how one of the most ridiculous ones of all would play out: When Putin formed a now infamous massive line of tanks to attack, I said the dumb tank formation was proof Putin was stuck in a quagmire—that it was the dumbest maneuver in the history of war because the tanks were lined up for slaughter. In a practically prescient manner, I said Ukraine could easily take them out with mere hobby drones. Since use of small drones in war had not happened for anything other than maybe occasional spying, my critics scoffed at my stupid fantasy and said Putin was wisely and patiently lining up his tanks so he wouldn’t even have to fight because the Ukrainians would see they were overwhelmed by an unstoppable force, so they would surrender. And look at what happened next:
I wrote a letter to the White House asking why they were not already shipping thousands of drones to Ukraine to take out those tanks by dropping grenades down their open turrets. The scheme was a no-brainer. The situation was pregnant for such an answer, especially because no major warfare had ever before been attempted with hobby drones! I pointed out that thousands of units of cheap hardware could overwhelm single units of expensive hardware, and even Ukrainian children could safely fly the drones in through the treetops undetected. The US government could not even envision such a thing. (I am certain my letter had nothing to do with what happened next.)
The strategy of war turned on its head, and the Ukrainians took the obvious move and started bombarding the tanks with tiny drones and turned the tanks all around so they fled. You never saw tanks scramble so fast in so many places and get stuck because their own tanks were blocking them from retreating. It was a slaughter, and Russia became a laughing stock. And warfare was forever changed.
When Putin started opening his silo doors to flash his nuclear hardware in hopes of intimidating Europe and the US from helping Ukraine, I said he was bluffing. My critics said our help would result in WWIII, forcing Putin do drop “the bomb.” I said there was no way Putin was that dumb. It was all saber rattling. Here we are four years later, and he hasn’t used a nuke yet. I’m not saying we could never get there, but standing up to him has resulted in him being stuck essentially in one place as badly as Russia was in Afghanistan.

The little guys stood up better than any of my numerous critics at Zero Hedge and RT believed they could, arguing strenuously that Ukraine would be obliterated in a month or two if they didn’t surrender. Standing against Putin showed you cannot simply let dictators take over greater parts of the world in imperial conquest just because they have nukes without putting up some serious resistance because, if you do, all will be lost to the one lunatic willing to use his nukes. Now, I hope we’ll get rid of nukes forever, as Reagan started to do and George Bush unfortunately ended; but, until we do, detente seems to work better than anything else to stop nuclear dictators from encasing the entire world in an iron curtain.

That said, standing up to nuclear dictators is a tough and extremely dangerous call that can go seriously bad. If it does go bad, I put the moral failure entirely from the start on the shoulders of the imperial invader who is flashing his nukes and threatening everyone while starting wars of imperial expansion and/or consolidation in multiple other nations, as Putin has done all along Russia’s southwestern perimeter to try to cobble some of the old empire back together. He doesnt’ have to threaten nukes.

Putin’s imperial ambitions, which my critics also argued strenuously with me about, were proved shortly after they argued by Putin’s long invasion speech in which he obsessed on “the Great Catastrophe,” as he called it, of the Soviet Union’s collapse and used it to justify taking Ukraine back. That was in spite of the fact the leaders of the Soviet Union had given Ukraine a vote to succeed or join in writing as an agreement with Ukraine back when the Soviet’s got Ukraine to join the USSR. They had to include that provision as a way of avoiding a worse war of conquest way back then, but they never allowied it to happen until the Soviet Union collapsed.

Putin’s imperial invasion was also in spite of the fact that the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had given Crimea to Ukraine to be included in its boundaries (being from Crimea, himself), knowing Ukraine always had the right to vote to succeed, which it was offered finally a chance to do when the USSR collapsed and the Russian Federation was coming into being, AND UKRAINE VOTED TO SUCCEED, TO NOT JOIN THE FEDERATION. So, it’s boundaries were internationally legitimate in every way, including every Soviet and post-Soviet Russian way and were recognized globally and by Russia until Putin became imperially ambitious and started carrying on about righting the “Great Catastrophe.”

Putin is now paying a heavy price for his ill-gotten land grab by seeing Russia relentlessly pummeled on the inside, as close to him as Moscow, seeing 350,000 of his own soldiers slaughtered (MORE THAN UKRAINE HAS LOST) and seeing his own popularity finally crash to now that the war is coming home to rest as well as his economy lying in shambles. The Russians have lost the freedom to even talk openly about it, having finally gained such freedom when the USSR collapsed, with the most outspoken Putin critics stuffed back in gulags as per the old Soviet practice or given some nice Beryllium Borscht as another throwback to the old days. (And that is why you don’t want unconstitutional emperors, who change the constitution so they can stay in power, in charge, Trump being one who would like to do the same!)

Ukraine is taking huge losses, too, but they are defending their own land. I would take those losses defending my land and my freedom to the bitter end, too; so how can I blame them for doing what I would do if Russia attacked Idaho because it has a lot of Nazis hidden in the hills? Much as many in the US hate Nazis for the same reason Russians do (having lost many lives to fighting them in the trenches in WWII), that’s a lame excuse for imperial invasion, but you always need some kind of window-dressing to sell the invasion to the public.

HERE’S MY POINT: Four years down the road, Ukraine has gone exactly as I said it would in terms of the overall picture. I defy anyone to look back at my writings back then and pull out anything factually where I predicted something about how that war would go and show I turned out to be wrong. You can disagree with my beliefs about Russia, but you cannot show me where my predictions about the outcome of the war were wrong, except the one thing I noted above, which was that I did think Russia might use a tactical nuke at the dam near Kharkiv, and it did not. Other than that, everything has gone as I thought it would, and Putin has gotten virtually nowhere for almost the last three years of that war. In fact, Ukraine keep pushing back inside his own boundaries with some pretty big successes.

The war has resulted in inevitable major losses for Ukraine because it is trying to defend itself against a much stronger invader; yet, it is resulting in even bigger losses of soldiers for Russia because Ukraine is fighting for its existence on its own turn out of a deep and bitter memory of how oppressive Russia was to Ukraine for the better part of a century, and they are doing so with a lot of heavy assistance. Its citizen soldiers have deep motivation to keep their land, though, of course, there are always some that don’t want to enjoin the war. Russia’s soldiers, on the other hand, don’t even want to be there at all. They want to go back to their own land, and many are essentially held with guns to their heads to keep them on the front lines. They know if they retreat without orders to do so, they will be shot in the back.

For Ukrainian soldiers, Ukraine is as far back to home as they can go! I predicted from the start that, with or without US and European help, Ukrainians would fight to the last man and woman standing. My critics predicted that, too, but blamed it on US intervention. I still disagree. The Ukrainians will do everything to hold on against their invader. The US and European help only makes a difference as to how many of the invaders they take out and whether the Ukrainians all die by losing or possibly some live on still in their own land after a long and very destructive war of attrition BECAUSE they are going to fight to the bitter end, even without the help. They have proven their resolve to do so. I would do the same if Russia were attacking the US. The Canadian would probably do the same if Trump attacked Canada, as he has vaguely and irrationally threatened.

So will the Iranians!

And that brings us to the crux of why this is and will remain a quagmire for Trump unless he decides to destroy them entirely.

Ukraine has so far gone exactly as I expected, and Iran is also going as I’ve said I expect it will all along the way, too! Both wars are invasions of a small nation by a superpower nation, and I do not expect Iran will cave in on the nuclear issue anymore than Ukraine caved in to Russia in what many thought would be an easy victory for Russia. I’ve already said regime change is a lost goal for the US, just as regime change in Ukraine quickly proved to be for Russia. They lost that objective in about a hundred days.

I have said repeatedly Trump is lying about how badly Iran wants to make a deal all along the way. They don’t. That has always proven to be right. If we’re going to take them over and decapitate their regime as Trump wants to pretend he has done, they want to inflict as much pain as they can on the way out.

Both Putin and Trump started their invasions expecting quick and relatively easy victory. Both were dead wrong because they failed to comprehend how motivated the ones being invaded would be to hold out against them.

Show me where everything in Iran hasn’t gone as I’ve said. My writings on the subject are all right here. I don’t take my positions to be popular with anyone. In fact, they often make me very unpopular, whether on markets, politics or wars. I take them because I believe them to be correct as to how things will go whether I like that outcome or not and whether I belive the path I say will be taken is wise or not. (In fact, it often is NOT wise; but the world is not wise.) I’ve held my views on these wars consistently, and I have nothing to apologize for on the claims I’ve made about these wars so far.

My point now is that things are going to get rougher in the MiddleEast, unless Trump chickens out, which he has shown he is deftly capable of many times. The Iranian regime is not going to chicken out by caving in on the uranium. They have shown their resolve just as many times as Trump has chickened out from his braggadocios threats. There position isn’t what changes. Trump’s is.

Trump’s latest dance has been to attempt a little crab walk sideways ahead of his chicken dance to see he can sell the idea that he does’t really need an agreement from Iran to end enrichment and turn over all of its enriched uranium, having said from the outset that was essential. He tends to test things that way and say, if it brings a huge outcry from his supporters, that he never actually said he would do that. It seems to have escaped his dim mind that, if his new claim were true, it only means he didn’t really need this war in the first place either.

Naturally, the many other little Eastern European nations that finally managed to free themselves from Russia after decades of dictatorial servitude that ended back in the eighties are not about to go back under the thumb of the former disinformation chief over Eastern Europe who served the KGB in its top ranks. So, of course, all of those nations will defend themselves to the last man and woman standing, whether they believe they will win or not, whether the CAN win or not. Those nations, like Ukraine, experienced an entire lifetime of horrors under Russia that reinforce their will to remain independent and free of their former overlords.

So, if Russia doesn’t back down from his invasions, PUTIN is going to take the world into another world war. I am not saying he should not fight against NATO expansion, but the only thing he has accomplished with his stupid war is giving far more backbone and resolve and greater membership to NATO by proving in the minds of those little nations that they need a BIG ALLIANCE. By invading Ukraine, he has given them every reason to fear he might do the same to them and find some other Nazi excuse as his canard for the another not-war.

Likewise, Iran, is a nation being invaded, having not attacked the US homeland. It is now fighting for its existence, which is different than all of its past fighting for terrorist reasons. Those were about its own Islamic imperial quest and its hatred toward Israel and the US; so, they are far from innocent victims, but Trump’s war has made the situation existential for them. The US is fighting for oil and control, as it proved in Venezuela and done so many times in the Middle East, so it is nowhere nearly as motivated. Typical NeoCon obsession. After all, according to Trump, he already solved the Iran nuclear problem, so how denuclearization of Iran be the true reason? Nuclear threat is just the reason (likely even factual) that sells the war like Nazis in Ukraine.

You see, it doesn’t make any difference to me whether it is the US that starts an imperial war to control oil or gain turf—a NeoCon policy Trump has continued unabashedly—or Russia that starts an imperial war to rebuild Putin’s dreams of the former Soviet empire. The only ones who can stop the war are the invaders. Otherwise, those wars will continue until one side achieves a decisive military victory; and that, as we are seeing, is a lot harder than many believe when the other side is existentially and patriotically and, in Iran’s case, even religiously motivated..

I”m consistent on this: All imperial wars are equally unjustifiable. I’ll make no excuse for either the US or Russia. Both Putin and Trump are clearly obsessed with empire building, and both of their nations have a long history of imperialism, which I am against, no matter who does it because I believe that stance has integrity, regardless of what excuses those superpowers use (and they ALWAYS have excuses that sound good) for going in for their next land grab.

So, Trump started yet another imperial war that does not serve the average American’s interest one iota, but it will cost every average American a small fortune in inflation and economic destruction under the ever-growing volcanic mountain of debt. That is what MAGA got for its unquestioning support of the “Peace President,” as Trump ridiculously named himself—just one more stupid imperial war. And this war that he started will be as much of a quagmire for the US as Ukraine is for Russia.

That is why I wrote all of last week that the stock market is stupid to keep falling for Trump’s claims that it is nearly over. That will only be true of Trump retreats or actually does obliterate Iran, but that latter path will bring a whole lot more destruction to the US and the world, too.

Like all of the United States’ wars since its one justifiable victory in WWII, there is still no decisive victory in this war, even though the Peace President declared victory last summer and then declared it again about ten days into his second war in Iran. All the average American gets out of this venture is a clear loss to a much smaller player with a much bigger mountain of debt for us. And that loss is what started last week to price into the stock market!

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(The headlines below share the story of the war as it was when I wrote everything above. I’ll capture the current headlines and those that come out tomorrow morning and send an update.)

Economania (national & global economic collapse plus market news)

100 days of the Iran war: How global markets and the economy have been affected, in charts

Wars & Rumors of War (including cyberwar, civil unrest and revolts)

Trump Says He Never Promised No New Wars

At Hundred-Day Point, Iran Mocks United States’ “Deflated Power”

Trump claims Iran is ‘virtually decapitated’ as war enters 100th day

Political Pandemonium & Social Senescence (socio-political issues & events)

‘I’ve Had Enough!’ Trump Storms Out of Meet the Press Interview in Wild Fashion — Explodes On NBC’s Kristen Welker After She Hits Him With Fact Checks

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Markets Take a DEEPER DIVE!

David Haggith — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 22:58:04 GMT

The stockslide down the mountain in a few stocks on Thursday that I warned, even as many other stocks soared, could be the likely start of a major market crash, developed into a thunderous roar on Friday. It swept the NASDAQ another 4% over the cliffs into the largest point-drop (-1,121) in NASDAQ history … as in ever! $1.75-trillion got wiped out in the overall stock market in a single day! That’s what I call some sudden realization of the kind I warned could develop very quickly!

Suddenly, the mountain moved, as Trump would like to say, “like never before! No one has ever seen anything like this before!” At least, not in the high-performing NASDAQ. That was one for the record books. The Wall Street fear gauge also made its biggest leap in two years, showing definite panic in the air.

Wall Street has been anticipating that negotiations to end the war will eventually be successful

Wall Street is dumb. Of course, if Trump totally TACOs out after Friday’s historic market mess, then maybe the war will suddenly end. It could be his biggest TACO yet. -OR- … (We’ll get to that.)

The stocks that couldn’t crash brought everything down!

Again, it was the undefeatable, unsinkable AI-related stocks of the future that gave all the momentum to the slide with chip stocks especially crumbling all over the mountainside, which is how I’ve been saying for a long time the next big crash would happen. It would be a strong echo of the dot-com bust, though likely bigger. A little bit of big stuff would slide at first, then more, then everything would start to move. And this could happen very, very quickly, I said:

And that was exactly how the dot-com bust began. First, people thought tech couldn’t fall, but then the many companies that had bad earnings reports took some big dives. Eventually many of those got wiped out entirely. Then everything started to slide over the course of more than a year—almost two years. Even those that survived took years to recover from the massive rotation that picked up steam as investors woke up to realize they could not keep rewarding earnings non-performance forever….
Rotations like this in stocks are how major crashes often get started. A big piece starts to slip here, then another over there, and then the whole mountainside starts to move…. With major stock avalanches, big companies can absorb things for so long, then they start to go critical, and suddenly major slabs of the mountain start to move. (“Past the Point of No Return: The Economic Collapse Is Happening!”)

But, hey, at least, Donald McRonald the clown prince—er, uh king—told the market it was stupid, too, albeit for opposite reasons than I have given for calling it that. He said it should have gone up on Friday because of a great jobs report. I’ve been saying it was idiotic to be going up at all during the months of this war with the obvious troubles that are falling upon us because of the war. It was in denial because of its greed, fueled by his endless lies about the war, denial that even made it think the high-tech leaders could not make the market fall as they did in 2000 and 2001. But, hey, the stock experts were saying AI couldn’t lose. Who am I to say otherwise?

True, the Donald’s “great jobs report” was above expectations, as he claimed, but expectations were extremely low (at a paltry 85,000 new jobs). Truth is the 172,000 added jobs were not much above the 150,000 breakeven-with-population-growth line that separates recessionary job growth from real growth. So, it was not strong, and especially not something that looks like Making America Great Again! In fact, it’s pathetic when a president has to boast about a number like that as a fulfillment of MAGA.

It was far from “the greatest report ever” as the Donald likes to quack about everything he accomplishes. It just didn’t stink like previous reports, and a breath of fresh air (or, at least, non-putrid air) was enough for the financial press that likes to sift out the glints of fool’s gold to call it a “good report.”

The report didn’t do well for bonds, though, which continued their pricing landslide on Friday, just like they did on Thursday, forcing yields on the US10YR to solidly break above 4.5% all day long as soon as the drizzly jobs report came out.

As if all of that was not enough new rock breaking free on the mountainside, BlackRock, liquidated ALL of its Bitcoin holdings on Friday! They got rid of $250,000,000 in five minutes. It looks like they are getting ready for next week!

As Hal Turner wrote at the close of markets,

EVERYTHING THAT COULD GO WRONG FOR MARKETS WENT WRONG TODAY!

Shown another way, Friday delivered a tech and crypto bloodbath:

And that’s what a landslide looks like once all the sectors that were cracking up suddenly see all stocks in that sector give way together.

Friday’s market mayhem—not acting like it was supposed to in the feigned wisdom of market makers—left the financial press scrambling for an explanation of why the unbreakable was cracking up so badly all of sudden (even though I clearly laid out why it would do that before it happened right here where I do my best to deliver “the news before it happens”). They gave the lamest explanation:

The catalyst for the chip turn was unclear. Some disappointment in Broadcom’s failure to raise its AI chip outlook Wednesday night caused the group to lose ground on Thursday. But Friday’s selling reached a new level of intensity. A spike in Treasury yields following a much stronger-than-expected jobs report for May didn’t help the case.

Commented Turner, in keeping with my own perspective of these lame writers,

Stocks, Commodities, Crypto -- ALL DOWN today, and no one is saying exactly why.

When delusions break

That is because it doesn’t compute with their beliefs (and because no mainstream financial writers read here). I wrote out why the market was in a stage of imminent collapse on Thursday after having laid the groundwork for the past year: Tariff wars and ground wars have cracked and weakened the economic rock considerably for the past year. They have built up inflationary pressures that will become nearly impossible to calm. Throughout the last few months, endless lying by Donald Trump about this catastrophic war have set up a major oil calamity that is now poised like a huge overhang above our heads, obvious to some, but obscured by his lies to the many who want to believe money is to be made.

Lies cause delusions to grow. Lies are what delusions are built on. Lies matter. On Wednesday, I noted with caution that Trump’s endless lies were no longer working. I had been warning for weeks that his endless lying would eventually get everyone to this point where no one trusts him to negotiate with, and finally even the markets would not trust him. Then, on Thursday, all markets started to show signs of dangerous movement (even as the overall stock market shot upward, which no doubt made my claim that economic collapse was now happening counterintuitive to many). Part of the danger was in how many prices in stocks, bonds, Brent and crypto finally ignored Trump’s vain reassurances—the kind of spreading tremors and individual tumbling stones—dust moving in cracks all over the mountainside—where you sound the alarm and warn the city below that the mountain is starting to collapse.

Sometimes it only takes a few small moving rocks to release a huge overburden that is ready to slide. On Thursday a few critical stocks fell hard as most stocks rose. They were the harbingers of what was about to unfold. On Friday, the media couldn’t understand why the mountainside slid because they had no deep understanding of its many faults or of the shaky ground the whole edifice was all built on—their delusions that they believed in because they wanted to.

The few big guys that got clobbered on Thursday got clobbered again on Friday, but, this time, many others joined them, contrary to the beliefs of the market’s chief architects that high-tech can never fall (as faithfully recorded under the prevailing wisdom among mainstream financial writers over the past year). So far as I had seen, no one in the mainstream press had written that Thursday’s quirky drops in spots of the market while the overall market soared would result in Friday’s sudden collapse, but I did:

While the Dow soared a huge 900 points to another all-time high today, it didn’t do it for the usual reason. Money actually fled tech and moved into bank stocks and other more mundane or maybe safer investments. This looks like the start of a rotation, which happened orderly today, but rotations sometimes indicate people fleeing the longtime market leaders, and that can quickly go disorderly once momentum builds.

And so it quickly DID on Friday:

Shares in Broadcom were more than 6% lower after tumbling more than 12% on Thursday. Marvell Technology and Micron Technology dropped 12% and 11%, respectively. Intel dropped more than 9%, while Advanced Micro Devices fell 10%.

Those Friday falls, adding momentum to the drops that happened to a select few stocks on Thursday and the tiny start of such indicative moves the day before that, drove the first three of those top-listed stocks down into the bear’s den in just three days. Not bad. Half a week to more than a 20% crash in fake value! When the really big guys fall that much, that drives a huge slide of everything.

I had pointed out several other anomalies on Thursday as well, which looked like trouble was going to quickly spread to the broader market:

So, we went from a large losing day for stocks yesterday [Wednesday], to a major rotation day with some tech stocks taking big losses today, even though the market overall shot up. Yet, there were some even bigger losers outside of tech where poor earnings were not forgiven. Calvin Klein’s owner, PVY, experienced its biggest plunge since the flash crash of 1987. The company got decapitated today, losing almost a third of its value in one day. Again, the Iran war was tagged as being a significant contributor to that company’s stock crash:

Cracks were suddenly showing up in unsuspected and seemingly unrelated places as broad, hidden structural failure tends to do in any structure. In this case, it was areas completely outside of oil and tech where tariffs and the war were doing economic damage. I also pointed on Thursday to labor problems that showed deep, enduring failures in the labor market, irrespective of what Friday’s paltry jobs report showed to the positive on the surface when the president boasted of his jobs numbers. Market analysts on Friday also pointed along with Trump to the superficial overall jobs number. I pointed on Thursday before that report to quirky problems that showed signs of significant stress building beneath the surface of the labor market because it doesn’t matter that the paint looks good if the concrete is cracking.

I also pointed to some major signs of trouble in credit markets on Thursday.

All of that emerged on Thursday, but none of the mainstream media was paying much attention to any of those things. Yet, I made the audacious claim right in the title of my Thursday editorial that we had just moved “Past the Point of No Return: The Economic Collapse Is Happening!”

As I summarized,

There were several signs of major collapse today, ranging from merely shifting ground, to roaring rockslides, all among the crème de la crème of Big Tech.

Then on Friday nearly everything broke free.

Here is how it all slid away:

S&P 500 down -1.65%, wiping out $1.14 trillion.
Nasdaq down -2.60%, wiping out $1.11 trillion.
Gold down -3.38%, wiping out $1 trillion.
Silver down -6.9%, wiping out $280 billion.
Bitcoin down -6.31%, wiping out $80 billion. [Down 16% on the week.]

As bad as things burst into pieces on Friday, the regardlessly rosy glasses kept doing what rose-colored glasses do among the relentlessly dumb and greedy stock mongers:

“This is a bit of profit taking,” said Anshul Sharma, chief investment officer at Savvy Wealth. “The AI narrative still remains intact….”

Yeah, sure it does! Just “a bit of profit taking.” What a joke. The landslide couldn’t have anything to do with the worst oil crisis in world history starting to bring on what will likely be the worst inflation in US history from a war that was supposed to be decisively over a couple of months ago. Instead, we get this drivel:

“Expectations got more elevated than they thought, and I think even relatively good news can end up disappointing when it’s not as high as where the expectations are.”

Understatement of the decade. Disappointing good news doesn’t make markets cave in unless there are deep faults underneath the market. Are we supposed to believe that mere profit-taking in stocks is why bond yields have been soaring, too, then, taking down the value of existing bonds? It couldn’t be that both major moves are highly related to rampant stagflation that is likely to make the stagflation of 70s energy crisis look like a warm-up act before this economic catastrophe is over. Somehow that glaring possibility escaped every expert’s attention.

The Iranium build up is going critical

Meanwhile, as peace talks have apparently stalled while war slowly heats back up, the TACO king is now accused of “crabwalking” away from his pledge that Iran must and will agree to hand over all of its nuclear material.

Anyone who could have guessed the war wasn’t going “to end soon” like the president has continually said it will with an agreement by Iran to denuclearize, wave your hand.

(Hmm, it feels like someone just turned a big fan on in here.)

According to Zero Hedge,

Donald Trump’s language on the Iran peace talks has gone from “deal imminent”, to “a deal soon, maybe” to “actually, we really don’t need a deal”.

That, of course, is exactly where I have said his boisterous but vain talk is going all of this year.

Trump showed signs of crabwalking away from a key demand that Iran hand over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium by saying that he does not need a deal with Iran to secure the uranium, but that there was no reason to send US troops into Iran to do so because the uranium is “entombed”.

Translated: The Donald’s whole pretense for the Trump-Israel-Iran War, following his “total obliteration” of Iran’s nuclear program last summer, was … well, just that—pretense for a war by those hungry for war. If his current statement is true, he never needed a deal. He could have just kept the uranium entombed with an occasional missile strike or bunker-buster bomb every time Iran got close to digging it out.

Of course, that was the Haggith plan since last summer, not the Hegseth plan. If it really was all entombed, just keep it entombed, rather than starting an out-of-control Middle-Eastern war involving numerous nations that would turn into a quagmire, as it has!

If the president now comes back to the Haggith plan (which was also the plan of many others, of course ; ) then the war will end up as a major strategic loss for the US, as even the thoroughly pro-Trump Zero Hedge agrees:

Capitulation on the highly enriched uranium or the limits of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program shifts the needle back towards US strategic defeat, with potentially grave consequences for all who have prospered under 80-years of Pax Americana.

That is because it will firmly underscore how the US keeps losing regime-change wars—how the little guys can stand up to the big guys. I’m not saying Trump should keep doing the war. I’m just saying it means he’s really already lost the war he claims to have won because the regime hasn’t changed, nor has the uranium, and the gulf remains as closed as ever, while the US economy is falling apart in huge slabs that are now sliding down the mountain.

As obvious as that is, I still came across an article this week explaining what an unrecognized genius Trump is for how he is conducting the Iran war. It was right back to the old 44DDD-chess argument. Trump, the writer argued, is just playing far beyond the league of anyone with enough TDS to criticize his masterful execution of this war.

Trojan Trump

Trump is nothing but a Trojan Horse for true conservatives because he’s a man whose only center is himself. There is nothing about him I would recognize from the Reagan days as a true conservative. Rather than being strictly for the original intent of the constitution, as the word “conservative” denotes, he constantly finds ways to skirt it. What do we have to show for his past year-plus but a now crumbling nation economically, not a greater nation, a nation dishonored and distrusted around the world diplomatically, one that breaks every bargain it agrees to, a nation that threatens to take over its friends, a nation with less international trade, a nation much more deeply in debt than it was before Trump with not a shred of discipline toward becoming fiscally responsible left anywhere among the Trump brand of Republicans, a nation running a lot more useless wars started by the “Peace President” who said he would put an end to useless wars, more presidential profiteering and favoritism toward those who pay to play than Team Biden could even imagine on the Big Man’s rarest of cognizant days … and a highly successful coverup for all of Trump’s cronies in the Epstain crowd (and himself). Who has heard of Epstein lately? He sure managed to get that out of the public conversation!

America keeps getting more and more beat up by the wrecking ball who brought down the White House, and Friday gave loud testimony to how shaky things are getting. There is no surprise in this. This market collapse does not have me scratching my head like the mainstream financial press was doing the last couple of days. It was EXPECTED. THE MARKET’S ACTIONS DIDN’T SUDDENLY NOT MAKE SENSE. THEY SUDDENLY DID MAKE SENSE.

I point out how I have been saying this all along so maybe more people will tune in and believe my claim this week that the worst is yet to come from Trump’s presidency, (especially his war, but also the tariffs and especially the matrix of lies because lies DO matter). You can know worse is coming because the mountainside is sliding now, just as I said Thursday would likely come quickly see—stocks, bonds, crypto, and private credit, all of it—and the high-tech, industrial village below is seriously imperiled.

That said, don’t be surprised if the slide momentarily stops for a few days or even tries to rise back up the mountain. Given the relentless foolishness of this market, that’s quite possible. The worst is going to come, regardless, because renewed increases in oil prices are going to start showing up this month, as I also focused on Thursday. Those will drive opium-addled stock market into a far worse slide when it fully wakes up to reality.

Of course, the stock crash may not pause at all if the market has finally gotten religion, but I won’t hold my breath on this market having gotten wise that quickly. I suspect it may need more hard knocks on the head, just as happened during the extended dot-com bust. Why would it be different this time?

As Hal Turner summarized Trump’s yoyo world effectively on Friday evening,

Oh. Gee whiz. It’s late on Friday, the markets are now closed . . . . and once again, all the bad news comes out. What is this, about the eighth or ninth week we’ve seen this play? Peddle nonsense Monday-thru-Thursday that “a deal is coming” or “Negotiations are doing well” and then on Friday (after the markets close) it all goes to shit.
The morons who claim to be professional stock traders, and the dimwits who claim to be professional commodities traders, fell for it once again. Oil dropped in price (again) this week, despite the world being a full week closer to the “tank bottom” in several countries.
Here in the USA, we are now about four or five weeks away from “tank bottom” of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and the dingbats in the commodities markets dropped the price of oil AGAIN this week !?!?!?!?
Instead of using this time to build-in the prices we are going to see just a few short weeks from now, the so-called “professionals” are acting as though there isn’t much of a problem, and everything will be Rainbows and Unicorns real soon. Such people are living in fantasy land.
Nothing can stop the world - and the USA - from reaching “tank bottom” and when that comes, the price shock for gasoline and diesel fuel is going to absolutely HAMMER the general public. [That was the BIG point I made here at The Daily Doom Thursday and a time or two before that. It’s already a done deal, so it cannot be prevented even by ending the war today, which isn’t going to happen anyway. It’s just playing out as we keep draining the tanks of critical types of Middle-East oil that we need to mix with our own.]
The big question this weekend is, will the wheels fall completely off, and hostilities resume?…
The fact that everything is down today at the same time means either that something broke in the system OR whales are expecting the war in Iran to resume and are selling everything and taking down the entire market with them.

This sure couldn’t happen at a better time for Elon Musk’s long-vaunted IPO of Space-X on the stock market. That may turn into the biggest build-up of a boondoggle in history as it gets birthed into a vacuum. However, who knows what a relentlessly dumb and certainly desperate stock market might pour into Musk’s IPO against all odds in blind and desperate hope for another run of greed? I wouldn’t bet anything specific against the lunacy of this market that has only just this past week gotten schooled on reality, while all the financial writers still seem to be too stupid to figure out how something so perfect and practically indestructible as they believe the high-tech market to be could go so suddenly and spectacularly wrong.

“Just a little profit taking,” they said. Famous last words. Regardless of their inanity, the collapse will continue. Final delusions will be short-lived because real and now unavoidable price pain is coming throughout the world very soon, not just in oil, but in everything that oil eventually prices into. Rising AI job losses will make the pain worse, and they are rising quickly now.

Now that things are collapsing everywhere, will Trump pull the ultimate TACO move and give away the farm to Iran just to get out of this mess he created -OR- (the question I said at the top I’d come back to) will he get desperate and enraged and finally start bringing the genocide to Iran that he promised a month or so ago?

And we haven’t even hit “tank bottoms” yet! That event isn’t supposed to happen, according to Big Oil execs for another 2-3 weeks.

I think the big moves are going to happen quickly now because I believe all the major money has likely gotten wind of oil troubles that are going to turn dramatically worse around the end of this month and decided now is the time to unload. As I wrote Thursday in “Past the Point of No Return: The Economic Collapse Is Happening!” the markets’ first moves were fairly orderly, starting as rotation to safer stocks, but things could go disorderly in a day, and it seems that happened.

All US markets are now spiraling down simultaneously into a deeper dive. It’s an economic collapse due to fault lines that have been building stress for a long time, but Trump has done all he can to help stomp it down with his tariff madness that taxes Americans and diminishes trade, his endless off-and-on chaos, his relentless lying and total lack of personal integrity as exhibited with the Epstain Files, and, especially, his strikingly overt, utterly madcap imperial goals of conquest in hopes of being viewed someday as Trump the Great. He’s already building Trumphal arches and designing Rushmore monuments to establish his legacy as the Great One in stone.

All of that will take probably a couple of years to play out to its ultimate bottom, just as the dot-com bust did, because it is just that big! There is much to fall and a long way to drop, and it will come with all the upheaval of major attempted rescues along the way and more endless lies about how spectacularly well those rescues are going, which the market will want to believe.

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Economania (national & global economic collapse plus market news)

Seemorerocks

Trump has DISASTER LANDING as Ayatollah REJECTS MEETING!

25 days ago · 3 likes · Robin Westenra

Nasdaq drops 4% (1,100 pts), biggest plunge since tariff turmoil of 2025, as chip stocks tumble; S&P 500′s 9-week winning streak set to end

Wall Street panics as stock markets crash deep into the red despite the excellent May jobs report

10-year Treasury yield shoots higher above 4.53% after strong jobs report

Gregory’s Newsletter

Lions. Trump Floats Out "Final War Negotiations," And Praises Today's "Strong Jobs Report," (It Was a Payrolls Report). AND STOCKS ARE FALLING.

LIONS, LOOK AT THE CONTRADICTION!!!! Trump floats out “final war negotiations.” AGAIN…

25 days ago · 68 likes · 27 comments · Gregory Mannarino

Money Matters (monetary policy, metals, cryptos, currency wars & going cashless)

Bitcoin cracks below $60,000, sinking to lowest level since October 2024, a 17% weekly loss amid a record streak of bitcoin ETF outflows

Inflation Factors (too much money chasing too few goods due to weather, sanctions, tariffs, quarantines, etc.)

Iran Oil Exports Plunge To Four Year Low As Blockade Tightens, While Iranian Inflation Soars To World War 2 Levels

Wars & Rumors of War (including cyberwar, civil unrest and revolts)

Peace Talks Stall: U.S. Denies Iranian Claims Of Warning Shots At Destroyers

Atomic Crab: Trump showed signs of crabwalking away from a key demand that Iran hand over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium

Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level

New Footage Reveals Ford Carrier Damage Far More Severe Than Pentagon Acknowledged

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Meta’s stock sinks on report company could raise tens of billions of dollars to fund AI push

Trump Announces Model Cities Initiative To Rollout AI Drones And Pre-Crime Surveillance ‘Dedicated To Restoring Law And Order’

Anthropic suggests global pause on building the most powerful AI systems as the latest models show signs of escaping human control

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Past the Point of No Return: The Economic Collapse Is Happening!

David Haggith — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 01:34:56 GMT

While the Dow soared a huge 900 points to another all-time high today, it didn’t do it for the usual reason. Money actually fled tech and moved into bank stocks and other more mundane or maybe safer investments. This looks like the start of a rotation, which happened orderly today, but rotations sometimes indicate people fleeing the longtime market leaders, and that can quickly go disorderly once momentum builds.

To give you a sense of today’s rockslide, one chipmaker—Broadcom—caved in more than 12% on a revenue miss today. Micron Technology tumbled more than 8%. Semiconductor names slid broadly. These were big moves.

“After an astonishing earnings season, the AI trade is still alive and well, but this rally is getting tired after an incredible more than two-month surge,” said Dennis Follmer, chief investment officer at Montis Financial….
Thursday’s moves “suggest the early innings of a rotation and it’s also a reminder that not all AI stocks are the same and there are different expectations built into each stock,” he added.

And that was exactly how the dot-com bust began. First, people thought tech couldn’t fall, but then the many companies that had bad earnings reports took some big dives. Eventually many of those got wiped out entirely. Then everything started to slide over the course of more than a year—almost two years. Even those that survived took years to recover from the massive rotation that picked up steam as investors woke up to realize they could not keep rewarding earnings non-performance forever.

Even though not all tech stocks were equal in that some companies really did have what it took back then to become the new business paradigm that would dominate industry for decades, those that had what it took to become the new species of business after the major extinction event, took almost a decade just to recover to where they had been before the fall.

As an example or troubles on this tremulous June day, Kevin O’Leary, heading up one of the biggest AI projects on Earth, announced he’s going to significantly scale back his massive Utah data center, reported on in this past weekend’s Deeper Dive, to try to ease the potentially disorderly public backlash over these monstrosities. So, there were several signs of major collapse today, ranging from merely shifting ground, to roaring rockslides, all among the crème de la crème of Big Tech.

The big catalyst for today’s tech slide was the Iran War, which as I reported yesterday has spent this week slowly building up renewed momentum:

This comes after a losing day on Wall Street, with stocks pressured by rising tensions in the Middle East. Attacks escalated between the U.S. and Iran. Iran struck Kuwait International Airport early Wednesday, while a day earlier U.S. Central Command said it had defeated multiple Iranian ballistic missiles and drones, and carried out “self-defense strikes” on Qeshm Island in the Persian Gulf. It said that this was in response to “attempted attacks” by Tehran.

So, we went from a large losing day for stocks yesterday, to a major rotation day with some tech stocks taking big losses today, even though the market overall shot up. Yet, there were some even bigger losers outside of tech where poor earnings were not forgiven. Calvin Klein’s owner, PVY, experienced its biggest plunge since the flash crash of 1987. The company got decapitated today, losing almost a third of its value in one day. Again, the Iran war was tagged as being a significant contributor to that company’s stock crash:

Analysts were spooked by sustained pressure across the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region, where the prolonged U.S.-Iran conflict and softer consumer demand are now weighing on its revenue outlook….
PVH reaffirmed its full-year adjusted EPS guidance, which fell short of the Bloomberg Consensus estimate, and cut its revenue outlook amid a deteriorating macroeconomic environment….
Guggenheim analyst Simeon Siegel wrote in a note that while PVH reiterated full-year earnings, it “suggested that pressures from the prolonged conflict in the Middle East and related macroeconomic pressures were negatively impacting the full-year revenue outlook.”

Some of those other “macroeconomic pressures” might likely be the Trump Tariffs.

Loosening labor

So far this year, the labor market has been incredibly resilient against any kind of turnover; however, jobless claims also took a nasty leap today. Again, the damage concentrated intensely in tech companies, which announced the most cuts in two years, as they ramped up spending on AI.

In May, Artificial Intelligence (AI) led all reasons for job cuts for the third month in a row, with 38,579 announced cuts.
It is the highest monthly total ever recorded for the reason since Challenger began tracking it in 2023, and it accounted for 40% of all cuts announced in May - up from just 7% in January, 25% in March, and 26% in April.
For the year, AI has been cited in 87,714 cuts, or 22% of all 2026 layoffs, already far surpassing the 54,836 attributed to the reason in all of 2025.
“The labor market is being reshaped by technology in real time,” said Andy Challenger, the company’s chief revenue officer.
“AI is now the leading reason companies give for cutting jobs.”

Longterm unemployment is also surging. It has reached the highest level it has seen since the massive Covid layoffs when multitudes failed to ever return to work.

On a macro level, the growing number of Americans in this boat raises red flags about the strength of the labor market and overall economy….
“It tells us a lot about economic health,” said Cory Stahle, an economist at job site Indeed.

Credit collapse

As stocks and labor roll over while corporate earnings fade, another crisis has been building in the private credit market, which broke off another large section today with major player Blackstone restricting withdrawals from its flagship fund in an effort to slow the outflow of investors fleeing the fund.

It comes a day after private markets giants sold off after Switzerland’s Partners Group said it was curbing redemption requests in one of its European private equity vehicles….
Partners Group said on Thursday it was prepared to restrict withdrawals in more of its funds, warning that the spike in client withdrawals is now spreading from private credit into private equity.

Breakout emergency measures and rotations like this in stocks are how major crashes often get started. A big piece starts to slip here, then another over there, and then the whole mountainside starts to move.

Big Oil makes the slope slippery

The down pressure on major sectors of the economy is going to grow more quickly now because economic collapse is being lubricated by oil. It’s no longer just tariff troubles. While Trump keeps pretending a deal is imminent with Iran, the war keeps heating up. Oil companies are telling the president that major fireworks in fuel prices will hit later this month, putting that major impact right at the start of summer when I said the inflation from the war would go critical.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration and other sources began showing that fuel makers were increasingly relying on oil and fuel from their storage tanks to replace products no longer arriving from the Middle East.
“We’re at dangerously low levels already,” said one industry executive who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations with the administration. “We have shared those concerns at the highest levels of government about what’s coming in mid-to-late June.… I hope they are paying attention to inventories right now. You’re hitting tank bottom.”

Just as I said for the above situation with major stock avalanches, big companies can absorb things for so long, then they start to go critical, and suddenly major slabs of the mountain start to move.

A White House official denied that any senior members of staff have been warned privately by the industry about inventories. “Politico’s anonymous sources are wrong,” the official said.

Denial as a strategy only works for so long to delay a collapse, too. More than one source is saying the same thing:

Exxon Mobil warned Thursday that oil inventories will fall to record low levels in coming weeks, forcing prices to spike and curbing demand.
“We’re approaching unheard of inventory levels,” said Exxon Senior Vice President Neil Chapman at a conference hosted by Bernstein in New York….
“I mean really, really low levels,” Chapman warned. “You can debate whether that’s going to hit, those really low levels, in two weeks or three weeks. Once you get to that point, then you’ll see price shoot up.”
The price of physical Brent oil cargoes will spike to $150 to $160 per barrel when inventories hit all-time lows in coming weeks, the executive said.

Even if the Trump-Israel-Iran War were to end today, which it won’t, that wouldn’t improve the tank levels at all in time to stop the late-June arrival at critical levels that shoot prices up.

“I don’t know, whether it’s two to three weeks or three to four weeks,” Chapman said. “What I’m really saying is, once you get to the minimum inventory levels and all-time low inventory levels, there’s only one way to go.

That would be UP in price.

If oil started shipping out of Iran today, it wouldn’t arrive here in time to stop oil supply from going critical later this month. That level of shortage is already a fait accompli. If the wars stopped today, it would take months, not weeks, to clear out mines and convince ships it’s safe to travel and then to ship across multiple oceans to arrive at their destinations. So, we are past the point of no return for this economic collapse.

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