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Trump spent his birthday weekend about the way you’d expect: cage fights, surrounded by people who love him, and a ceasefire between Israel and Iran to cap it off. Everything a man could want.

On this today’s episode I asked Doug what he made of the deal. His answer was three words. “It’s gonna blow up.”

The deal was the party favor

Watch the timing. The whole thing came together so the announcement could land on the birthday — same energy as the cage matches and the gold. A show. And like the birthday, it was over about as fast as it started. Heavy strikes hit Lebanon within a days of everyone shaking hands.

A real peace settles something. This one didn’t. You can’t go back to how things were before, and the new arrangement is worse than the old one: Iran came out of this stronger, not weaker. You bomb a country in a surprise attack, you don’t get to call it even afterward.

The $300 billion question

Part of the deal, as we understand it, hands Iran something like $300 billion. Doug’s first question was the right one — where does that money come from, who puts it up, and in what form? Nobody has answered that.

He thinks Iran goes further. Down the line they insist on a toll on everything moving through the Strait of Hormuz: a dollar a barrel, call it what you like. Plenty of people won’t want to pay it. That isn’t a settled peace.

“Calmed down” is not the same as open

Trump says Hormuz is open and flowing. The numbers say otherwise. Roughly 25 ships transited yesterday in both directions — about 75% below where traffic ran before the shooting started. Somewhere between 1,500 and 1,700 ships are still trapped in the Gulf.

And the market keeps forgetting one thing: even if every one of those ships sailed today, it’s about a month before that oil hits a refinery and becomes something anyone can use. For prices to fall, things have to calm down first — and they haven’t. The enthusiasm about cheap oil coming back looks badly overdone.

Who’s the dog and who’s the master

This doesn’t hold for another reason: Israel has no intention of stopping. The Lebanon strikes make that plain, and the campaign against Hezbollah is part of the deal. For any of it to stick, somebody has to leash the attack dog — and as Doug said, after all these years it’s still not clear who’s the master and who’s the dog between Israel and the U.S.

Ukraine hasn’t paused either. The Ukrainians threw somewhere between 600 and 1,000 drones at Moscow and lit up Russian oil facilities. Five years in, Putin still treats it like a police action while the other side treats it like a war. That doesn’t end. War is the health of the state, Doug likes to say. States like to stay healthy.

What Doug’s doing about it

Oil is sitting around $75 to $80. Doug doesn’t see it going much below that, and it could run a lot higher if Hormuz spins out again. So he’s still long energy, still long gold and the miners — not because of a headline, but because both are cheap against the rest of the market and both pay you to wait. Real dividend yields, which Doug calls an outward sign of inward grace.

I’m in it with him. The crowd wants the tech melt-up — AI everything, new highs every other day. We’d rather own the stuff nobody’s looking at, that has real value and trades near its real-terms lows.

We cover the specific gold, mining, and energy names in Crisis Investing. If you want them subscribe below:

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In December 2017, a company that sold iced tea out of Long Island, New York announced it would be called Long Blockchain Corp. It kept making iced tea. It owned no blockchain, ran no nodes, employed no cryptographers. It changed a few words on a press release.

The market got drunk on Long Island iced tea that day as the stock closed up 183%. That’s some strong tea.

A British firm added “blockchain” to its name in 2017 and ran up 394% within hours.

That these companies receive new money, and that their stock prices go up, is evidence that many people are gambling rather than investing in productive enterprises.

The gold explorer with no gold becomes a lithium play in 2021, a uranium play in 2023, a critical-minerals play in 2024, and bolts “AI” onto itself for the 2025–26 season. The ground didn’t change; only the investor deck did.

This is namewashing: dressing up a company in the current trend. Commonly it’s a shell, or close to it. The managers—unhindered by such irrelevant matters as cash flow or concern about crashing into rocks—sail in whatever direction the wind is blowing, shedding a failed story and donning the next hype, without ever building a mine, a greenhouse, or a server. Management stretches its expertise to fit the new tale, and the money pouring into the placements arrives. Like taking candy from a baby.

The public stock listing is the company’s only real asset, and it’s an asset only because of the challenges of getting a new listing. Indeed, the TSX Venture Exchange reverse-takeover machinery exists to recycle a listing: new board, a project vended in, a raise, a new name. The rename marks the regime change. You’re not buying a mining company that rebranded; you’re buying a ticker symbol burdened by millions of old outstanding shares.

Notice which way the dilution runs. Put fresh money into a real company and your shares thin out the existing owners’ claim on real assets, but add cash value. Such an investment is sensible for all. It’s also a reasonable speculation to put fresh money into a shell with experienced management and a great idea. But putting fresh money into a broke shell run by empty suits with a weak idea and a nifty new name? Your check is the first thing of value to walk through the door. The pre-existing shares, backed by nothing, now share in your money. You did not dilute the old holders. The old holders diluted you.

Whether it’s namewashing or just a lousy shell, they’re looking to turn their dream and your money into your dream and their money.

It is not new, and it is not subtle

In 1999, three finance professors studied 95 companies that added “.com” onto their names. In the five days around the announcement, the name change alone produced abnormal returns near 53%. A suffix was the entire business plan.

When the dotcom dream curdled, researchers tracked firms that stripped “.com” back off their names. Those companies also rose — by roughly 60% over the following weeks. The label paid going in and coming out.

It keeps working, without doing any work.

A name change moves no earth and ships no product. It nurtures nothing but hopeful expectations. That a name change alone reprices a stock at all tells you the buyer is paying for the story, not the value.

In April 2026, Allbirds perfected the form. The wool-sneaker company sold its actual shoes to a licensing outfit for $39 million, kept the empty listing, and declared itself an artificial-intelligence company: NewBird AI. It owned no chips, ran no data center, wrote no code. The stock ran nearly 600% in a day. It has just renamed itself again—Smartbird—and popped another 39%.

Start with the People

Two of Doug Casey’s 9Ps of Resource Stock Evaluation are People and Paper (share structure). Namewashing is one of the tells our 9Ps assessments look to catch. We are not grading the moniker. We are grading whether the people running the company build assets or just harvest the float. A team that rechristens its company to match this quarter’s fashion has told you which business it is in, and that business is namewashing. Ask one thing: has this crew ever handed shareholders an ounce, a permit, a dividend or an exit — or only a new name and a new request for money to keep food on the table and appease the prior round of shareholders whose money was burned?

Long Blockchain was delisted, subpoenaed, and folded into a footnote. The strategy did not retire with it.

When your friend tells you about an exciting new AI company to “invest” in, remember that these so-called opportunities are currently appearing several times per day. Always ask yourself, is this company trying to build wealth for all the shareholders by finding and producing goods and services? Or is it trying to mine your wallet to produce money for itself?

At Crisis Investing, we see the difference. Join us as we find companies with good people, good ideas, and good property — companies that work to resolve crises rather than add to them. You can subscribe to Doug Casey’s Crisis Investing here.

Sincerely,

John Hunt, MD

The “peace deal” is a surrender document

Doug’s not buying the victory lap. He called the still-unreleased memorandum of understanding what it is: “a surrender document, which is a stack of wins for Iran and a bunch of, uh, maybe ties, best case, for the United States.” His read on why we haven’t seen the text yet — “they’re expecting a lot of backlash on it, and it’s gonna be difficult for Trump to spin it as a victory of any kind.”

He gives Trump exactly one piece of credit, and it’s a backhanded one: if Trump actually walks away rather than escalating, that’s the right call, because there was never a good reason to bomb Iran in the first place. Doug went back to 1953, when we overthrew their elected government and installed the Shah, and 1979, when they took the embassy. “There’s reasons on the part of the Iranians to dislike the great Satan. But we don’t have any good reasons to dislike the Iranians.”

Then there’s the small matter of the roughly $300 billion in damage. You break it, you bought it — so who pays? Supposedly “private entities” looking at Iran’s reconstruction as an investment. Doug wants names. And the tollbooths are already in the fine print: no service fees for the first 60 days, then the Iranians start collecting.

His verdict on the man running our side of the table hasn’t moved since his first Trump essay in 2012: “a man without any philosophical or moral center. And that’s more and more true ‘cause the power has really gone to his head.”

The real story isn’t the ceasefire. It’s Section 219.

This is the part of the episode I’d push you toward if you watch nothing else. While everyone stares at the Iran headlines, two bills are moving through Congress that almost no one is covering.

The National Defense Authorization Act carries a provision — renumbered from 224 to 219 — that fuses the U.S. and Israeli militaries. At the same time, an Intelligence Authorization Act with a Tom Cotton amendment does the identical thing on the intelligence side. These are privileges we extend to no other ally on earth. Doug’s deadpan: “Maybe we should make Israel the 51st state. I mean, is that completely off the wall?”

It isn’t off the wall. I walked through six concrete ways the arrangement cuts against American interests. A few that stuck:

A future president who wanted to cut off the intelligence pipeline — the targeting data Israel uses for strikes the U.S. opposes — would have to justify it to Congress within 15 days. Translation: no president ever will.

Israel gets access to our most sensitive AI, quantum, and autonomous-weapons research. Israel also has a documented record of moving U.S. military tech to China. Nothing in the bill stops them from doing both.

The Lavender and Gospel systems that generated kill lists of tens of thousands in Gaza get pulled into U.S. military programs. As Doug put it — imagine that targeting logic pointed at “the rise in anti-Semitism in the US” and the things people say on Twitter. “You find yourself on a kill list pretty easily.”

And the kicker: the Defense Intelligence Agency just raised Israel’s espionage threat to “critical,” its highest rating, describing the operations against senior U.S. officials as unhinged. At that exact moment, Congress is mandating deeper integration. “It’s the equivalent of discovering your business partner is stealing from you and responding by giving him the keys to the safe.”

The whole thing is engineered to be irreversible. Once Israeli tech is embedded in our weapons and supply chains, you can’t pull it out without degrading readiness, and the contractors with plants in key congressional districts make it politically untouchable. Doug connected it to the USS Liberty in 1967 — the attack LBJ waved off and ordered the surviving sailors to keep quiet about. If this passes, Doug says, you’re not just watching the decline of the empire. You’re watching the formal end of American sovereignty.

The AI bubble is going nuclear — literally

Then there’s the money. Trump told reporters he expects the top AI companies to start “giving back” to the public, floating a government stake. His exact words, from the June 10 Reuters piece I read on air: “we’re talking about giving back something to the public, and if we do that, the public will become very rich.”

Doug’s response, verbatim: “What the fuck is going on? The public will become very rich.”

These companies are losing money hand over fist, and he’s not calling it a bubble. He’s calling it a super bubble — trillions flowing into one place, which has never happened before, guaranteeing a misallocation of capital on a scale we’ve never seen. And he’s skeptical it’s even being spent on anything constructive. Very little of these data centers, as far as he can tell, is going toward medicine or science. It’s going toward accumulating data on people.

Here’s the speculative thread we pulled, and I think it’s the right one: if you’ve been told for over a year that we’re in an existential AI race with China, then AI isn’t a product. It’s a strategic weapon. And the State Department is already acting like it — it moved to restrict the latest top-tier model from foreign nationals, and the model went dark within days. My bet: the most advanced models end up reserved for state-selected entities, and the rest of us get the leftovers. When the private money hits a wall, the public sector picks up the tab to push these weapons forward.

There’s a physical problem nobody’s pricing in. A single large data center wants a gigawatt — what a full-size nuclear plant produces, and those take a decade and $10 billion to build. You don’t get there with hundreds of them unless the state and the corporations merge under something like war powers and ram through small modular reactors. Doug’s one-liner: “Mussolini would approve totally.”

Meanwhile China is running its AI open source — handing it to the world — while we ration ours. “Once again, the Chinese come off as the good guys.” Same as the oil market, where China cut consumption by three to four million barrels a day and arguably saved the world from a recession we started.

The frame: a stricken dinosaur

Pull back and the picture is uglier. Trump is building a battleship — a giant high-priced target — in the precise era when warfare is moving to drone swarms. “This is what happens when you have a bankrupt empire thrashing around like a stricken dinosaur.” And a stricken dinosaur, Doug notes, is more dangerous than a healthy one.

We got into whether we’re heading for World War III. Doug’s view: we’re already in it, we just haven’t named it yet — the same way World War II really started in 1936 or ‘37, years before the dates in the textbooks.

The through-line I keep coming back to — Bill Bonner’s “primary trend” — is a move toward authoritarianism everywhere. Look at the right-wing wave in Latin America: Fujimori’s daughter winning in Peru on a platform of CECOT-style mega-prisons, faceless judges, surveillance drones, and AI crime mapping. Some of it works — Bukele genuinely cleaned up El Salvador. But Doug’s warning is the one to sit with: she’ll eventually be replaced by someone worse, and the surveillance machine she builds gets inherited by the really bad guys.

Which is why he half-joked we shouldn’t be saying any of this — “undoubtedly Palantir or a Palantir lookalike is recording and cataloging our conversations.” After the next big event that gets Americans fired up about rounding up the bad guys, “we will quietly disappear.”

Where it lands

Doug doesn’t think Israel survives the next 50 years — two billion Muslims against a state of six or seven million doesn’t end well. But I gave the other side its due, by way of Paul Craig Roberts: Israel may be the only country on earth right now actually taking things seriously. While Putin runs a five-year “police action” in Ukraine, the Israelis define every potential enemy as an enemy and methodically clear the board. “You gotta have a lot of respect for the Israelis. They’re smart, they’re tough, they’re focused.”

We try to end on a bright note. Doug obliged, sort of: the ascent of man has been running for 10,000 years, and maybe this is just a bump in the road. His honest preference, though, was simpler — “I’d rather live in a fool’s paradise than a real unpleasant disaster.” We’re in the fool’s paradise now. He thinks the other one’s coming.

Watch the full conversation below. We’re back Friday — and as Doug says, anything can happen between now and then.

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The hoped for Trump War Put came into play on his birthday and the markets loved it. This next chapter in the peace saga has kept the broad markets buoyant, with but occasional dips. Our long-time happy spaces in gold, silver, uranium and those that dig them out of the ground have begun a recovery as well from what we might choose to call a correction within a longer-term upward trend.

People are believing this current promise of peace, again.

A deal you can’t read and is pointless to critique

We don’t get to see this deal. We’re told it exists. Some bits of it emerge, verbally. I have no ability to influence the deal. I can’t do a damn thing about it. There is nothing solid to critique and neither Trump nor Iran, nor Israel, nor Hezbollah, would waste time reading any suggestions I might make as to what a peace deal should include. So I ain’t gonna bother.

But we can remember that peace still isn’t Trump’s alone to deliver. It takes Iran too, and Iran’s leadership seems pretty messed up right now. Neither party in this deal has earned the confidence and trust of the other. As far as we know, so far, Israel hasn’t signed onto the promised peace deal. Although maybe it has. Who knows. And Hezbollah might lob a wrench into the works, just to keep things burning. And then as far as actually beginning to resolve the war-induced (aka, government-induced) economic distortions caused by the war, there are those pesky insurance underwriters who decide when the Strait of Hormuz actually reopens to Western shipping.

I suggest we treat the market rally as what it is: a mood, priced on a promise, made by people who may or may not be in a position to keep their promises. The broader markets are overvalued by almost every measure, ripe for the next random shot fired in the Middle East or by the Federal Reserve to trigger a decline. Everyone wants the markets to keep shooting the moon, or more apropos this week: shooting for Mars. So it’s reasonable to assume that that hyped up hope will lift the markets for a time. Yay.

This can be an opportunity to create an opportunity.

A month ago, and at Matt Smith’s urging, I published an article titled Keep Some Dry Powder, in which I suggested that we all examine our portfolios to confirm we had enough emergency cash, and to build enough dry powder that a major decline would feel like an opportunity instead of a knife in the belly. Soon after, we hit a pretty mean decline of about 20% in the metals and miners.

The current rally in our space is now climbing off these lows. It feels good as our gold, silver and various stocks rise back up. For those of us who need to learn the same lessons over and over in our lives, we’ve had a fresh reminder that in a politically controlled economy, things don’t make sense or follow rules. Whether we like it or not, we need to behave as the speculators that political and central bank shenanigans have incentivized us all to become. I am anticipating that Trump’s Birthday edition of his War Put will give us a chance to build cash positions for those who missed earlier opportunities.

When prices rise on news you can’t verify, sell into the strength as it appears. Best not to wait for the next panic and wish you had.

Over the next days and weeks, look at your winners. Look at the positions you’d be relieved to be out of if the Strait ends up staying shut months more. Trim them if they are in a good-enough price territory and leave that cash in your portfolio. It’s dry powder — an option with no expiration date, the right to buy great assets at panic prices whenever the next panic arrives. And it will arrive.

Keep your survival money walled off and untouched, or start building it if you don’t have any.

Sure, holding cash means you miss some of the upside. But holding no cash means you miss the opportunities the big declines hand you. No cash is high anxiety. No cash is every egg you own riding on market dynamics you don’t control.

Cash is the opposite of all that. Cash is freedom. Freedom to act, freedom to wait. Dry powder isn’t money doing nothing. It’s money ready and raring.

Printing press vs. press release

The Fed Put pays out because the Fed owns the printing press. Trump’s War Put—or I suppose we can call it a Peace Put—pays out only as long as everyone believes it. The first is a perversion with teeth. The second is a wager based on little info and lots of hope.

As for me, I am going to use this evolving rally while the moods run hot. I am going to tap some profits from broader market positions. And as our core metals and mining positions are heading back up, I am going to look to see what I can do without and turn some of it back into cash. It’s all part of playing the long game of speculating in the setting of government actors that will keep causing harm to us all.

Berkshire Hathaway is sitting on a record $397 billion in cash — its highest ever. So it’s not just little old me talking up cash. If one of your friends or family members could benefit from a reminder that hype and hope aren’t plans, that cash is king, that what goes up often comes down, and that anxiety is lower when cash is higher, please forward this email or otherwise share it, so they can read and subscribe to Doug Casey’s Crisis Investing.

Sincerely,

John Hunt, MD

I expect that economic history books will teach that ridiculous stock market dynamics accompany late-stage fiat currency decay.

Over the last decades, people have moved from being investors, to speculators, and now—with the full deployment of prediction markets—gamblers.

What’s the difference?

As an investor, your capital flows into an enterprise—a critical mineral mine, an oil rig, a robot manufacturer, a spaceship builder—and the enterprise uses it to try to create more new value. Your funds are used to build a facility to process ore. A well drilled to pull stored energy from the ground. A robotic system’s new skill set. Or a communication system and transport platform to Mars. In the pursuit of profit, investment helps direct capital to the most efficient producers of needed or desired goods and services.

At IPO or in a private placement you are directly providing funds to a company. When you buy in the open market, it is different. You are either: 1) deploying your capital to own dividend-producing shares—essentially building your own cash mining operation; or 2) speculating that the company’s stock price will rise.

But in either case you are entrusting your wealth (directly or indirectly) to people who have fiduciary obligations to make more money for you by producing those needed or desired goods and services.

Which takes us to … the speculator.

A speculator seeks disturbances in the market prices—often caused by government officials—and provides liquidity to help smooth out what could otherwise be financial tsunamis. He’ll buy when no one else is buying. His carefully researched analysis that gold, or uranium, or oil, or sulfur (or corn or bitcoin or tungsten) is too cheap leads to his willingness to buy the underpriced commodity, which nudges the price toward the truth. His efforts help discover the price of goods. A true price tells miners when and how much to dig, and that improves productivity and smooths out business cycles.

The biggest government-created disturbances in the market are war and fiat currency. Accumulation of monetary metals and their miners are speculations on the continued debasement of currency. Indeed, much of the stock market is a speculation that the governments and central banks will keep inflating their currencies. That is why the stock market rises on even hints of central bank loosening (creation of new money).

But other government interventions are rampant. Subsidies of green energy. Mandates to buy health insurance. Wait—the list is so long it is not worth typing. Most everything is now subject to government intrusion into the markets. Speculation is therefore what most people are doing when they buy stock.

Then there is the gambler. Prediction markets are the new rage. But most of the time, they create only entertainment value. Betting on whether your World Cup team advances provides liquidity to no productive enterprise, discovers no price that directs capital, takes on no risk that someone needs to shed. Betting on whether Taylor Swift gets engaged this year creates no goods or services. The implied probabilities that the prediction markets create coordinate no useful economic activity. No mine opens. No spaceship is built. These bets aren’t even derivatives. They’re slot machines generating money for the house, and the house is your brokerage. There are no corporate execs with fiduciary obligations to help you make money. There are just those who either want the whole pot, or 2% of every pot.

How did a casino end up inside your brokerage account? The way most changes happen: slowly, then all at once.

In 1988, three University of Iowa economists built a small market where people bet real money on elections. Five dollars and a modem got you in. The Iowa Electronic Markets were an experiment in whether betting markets could produce accurate election forecasts. And they worked—from 1988 to 2004 their prices beat the polls about three times in four. People putting money on the line out-forecast the pollsters.

Then the thing got scaled and diversified. Intrade carried it online and died in 2013 after US and Irish government interventions. Crypto revived it—Augur, then Polymarket—global, always-on. Kalshi got itself federally licensed in 2020. And in September 2024 a federal judge freed up the industry, ruling the CFTC had no power to call election contracts “gaming.” The dam broke.

What poured through wasn’t the price discovery created by speculation. It was sports outcomes, then everything else. Kalshi listed Super Bowl contracts. Robinhood, Crypto.com, and Interactive Brokers piled in with thousands of events to bet on. Arguing the losing side in court, the CFTC’s own general counsel called it “an online casino.” The casino won, and it now sits one tab away from your retirement account.

The scale is growing from marginal toward enormous. Robinhood ran roughly $3 billion through its prediction-market book in one month this spring. In the sector, volume went from under $100 million a month in early 2024 to north of $13 billion a month by the end of 2025. Projections run to $1 trillion a year by 2030 — about what Elon Musk is worth after a lifetime building cars and rockets. One trillion created by production. The other churned for entertainment.

Over the long term, the steady investors and the hard-working speculators create wealth for the world and themselves. In contrast, as the house nibbles off a fraction of the probabilities in an otherwise zero-sum game, the gamblers in the prediction markets will lose money.

The investor and speculator put capital at risk in service of production. The prediction market gambler spends money for entertainment. When a financial system migrates from the first two to the third, it stops financing the producers of the world and those who fix government economic disruptions, and instead starts consuming wealth purely for entertainment.

I’m not suggesting that gambling or entertainment in general is wrong. Heck, as AI and robots take over most labor, humans will put more and more of their time into consuming entertainment. All good. But the purveyors of prediction markets will endeavor to conflate in your mind the consumption of entertainment with the production of new financial wealth. It’s not.

It’s gaming. It’s goofing off. It’s fun. Whee….

While you have fun, keep (or start) investing and speculating so that you add value to yourself and the world. That’s fun too. Subscribe to Crisis Investing. And please forward this email on to people who will benefit from what we write and do here.

Sincerely,

John Hunt, MD

On SpaceX: the stock opened at $135 and ran past $171, up about 30% on the day. Elon’s stake alone was worth roughly $867 billion at the IPO price — add Tesla and he’s well past a trillion. Doug’s glad it held, and so am I, because a SpaceX flop would’ve taken the rest of the market down with it. But neither of us is mistaking the party for health. When IPOs spike like it’s 1999, somebody’s ringing a bell at the top. We’ll see if anyone’s listening.

(We also spent a minute on how absurd a trillion is. A billion pennies stacked would reach from New York to Palm Beach. A trillion gets you to the moon and back — twice.)

Then the part of the market we actually care about. On January 29 the gold miners’ bullish index hit 100. On June 10 it hit zero. Doug’s response is the only sane one I can come up with: it can’t go lower, so he’s buying, not selling. Oil’s down there with it — West Texas around $80, Brent around $84 — even with Hormuz shut for more than 100 days. What’s holding it down is China, which has quietly pulled close to 5 million barrels a day out of its imports. I asked Doug how that’s even possible. Neither of us has heard a good answer.

On inflation: official CPI ticked up to 4.2%, producer prices hotter still, and Doug’s “personal CPI” is worse — $140 for a simple dinner for three. Kevin Warsh runs his first meeting as Fed chair next week. The question I keep circling back to: who lends the government money for 10 or 30 years at 4–6% when the only exit from the debt is the printing press?

The listener questions ranged wide:

• Costa Rica — Doug lived there for months and has cooled on it. The place that pioneered the gringo-friendly tropics has gotten expensive and touristy. His pick in Central America today, if forced: maybe Panama.

• Tokenized gold — Kinesis, Tether Gold, and others let you spend gold off a debit card backed by audited vault metal. Doug likes the concept — it makes gold money again — with one question I share: is it really yours, and can you actually redeem it?

• Ivanhoe Mines and Ebola — A deadlier new Ebola strain is in the Congo. Doug’s not worried about Ivanhoe; Katanga is effectively cut off from the outbreak zone.

• Lutnick, stablecoins, and Epstein — Doug doesn’t trust anyone orbiting Trump, and he doesn’t think the worst of the files ever sees daylight.

• Humanoid robots — Some 200 robot companies in China are racing on cheap EV battery tech. Doug’s bet: five years from now we each have one standing behind us, doing what it’s told.

Doug closed on the line he keeps coming back to: the trend of the market is still up, even as the trend of civilization points down. Two different things. The gap between them is where this whole conversation lives.

A word on where the real work happens.

A zero on the sentiment index isn’t a reason to panic. It’s an entry point — but only if you know which names to own. That’s what we do in Crisis Investing. Last month we walked paid subscribers through the Ivanhoe sulfur story before it was on anyone’s radar; this episode’s setup in gold and oil is exactly the kind of hated-sector moment the newsletter is built for.

Doug and I aren’t trying to call the top of the SpaceX mania. We’re putting capital into the things nobody wants while they’re cheap. If you’d rather be early than comfortable, the paid subscription is where we name the specific companies, the entry prices, and the risk we’re taking. Upgrade to Crisis Investing and come buy the bottom with us.

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Enjoy the weekend,

Matt

I join you in dismay over the market declines of this past week. I join you in uncertainty over how the most active political players might next jerk our portfolio values around. It’s hard to avoid having an otherwise beautiful day a bit ruined. These sorts of corrections or re-pricings or flights to liquidity or bubbles releasing gas or whatever we want to call these lousy market periods can and often do affect levels of personal confidence, security and indeed happiness.

As for me, I try to see the positives. Our investment and speculation theses are rational. Our long-term outcomes should be good. Wealth is created by buying low and selling high. Now is a better buying opportunity than last week. I wish I knew whether next week will be an even better buying opportunity. But political shenanigans are difficult to predict. Which is my segue into today’s topic.

At Crisis Investing, we analyze investment and speculative opportunities by deploying Doug Casey’s Nine Ps of Resource Stock Evaluation. Over time, I’d like to go through these Nine Ps, one by one, as news cycles highlight the importance of each. Today is Politics.

You can do everything right — the geology, the people, the paper — and still lose to a government man.

Of the Nine Ps we use to grade resource companies, Politics is the most frustrating. It turns out a deposit is worth only what the local sovereign lets you keep.

Political risk is not just rebels, kidnap gangs and blood in the streets of dumpster-fire nations. It’s also ecopolitics, predatory taxation, and nationalization right at home. And ecopolitics isn’t just about protecting the snail darter or box turtle. Primarily, it’s a potent tool for financial extortion by the state, and the politicians’ incentives are to use it.

Assessing political risk starts with the legal architecture. Common law jurisdictions — the Anglosphere inheritance of Britain, the US, Canada, Australia — build law from precedent. Judges constrain the state, property rights accrete case by case, and yesterday’s ruling binds tomorrow’s bureaucrat.

In contrast, civil law jurisdictions (most of the world) run on codes written by politicians and those who pay them. Civil law codes can be rewritten by the next legislature, or a democratic mob. Bureaucrats are respected and empowered. Politicians like power and so gravitate to civil law.

Neither system guarantees anything, but common law has given the individual more defenses against the state. Common law jurisdictions are far better for long-term investments.

The US is supposed to be a common law nation. However, that is increasingly unrecognizable. And some states are far worse than others. In California, Governor Newsom banned new fracking permits starting in 2024 and ordered a study on ending all oil extraction by 2045. New well permits collapsed from 2,366 in 2019 to 73 in 2024 — and only four in the first half of 2025. Then refineries started closing, pump prices threatened his presidential ambitions, and he reversed course: he signed SB 237 in late 2025, authorizing 2,000 drilling permits a year in Kern County (where most of the state’s oil sits), shielded from environmental litigation through 2035. You can get whiplash watching this guy. Capital cannot be wisely invested when the whims of over-empowered politicians have existential real-world effects. Dealing with the continual threat of whimsical sovereigns is not the secure terrain that investors prefer and require. But it can be fertile ground for speculators willing to deploy capital to bid on politically distressed opportunities.

When property rights depend on political discretion, economic calculations break down. In 2019 the British Columbia legislature passed DRIPA (the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act). In December 2025, the BC Court of Appeal ruled that granting mineral claims requires First Nations’ free, prior, and informed consent. Call it what it is — a consent requirement that functions as a veto right. You can say that royalties and equity for First Nations are not automatic or statutory, but the incentives of First Nations’ decisionmakers are to leverage their new power as a legalized government-enforced protection racket. I recently wrote about how bad incentives lead to dysfunction.

Blame the right people. Not Californian oil companies, not First Nations. Blame those who create lousy incentives that subsidize the destruction of wealth. Blame the politicians who took common law jurisdictions and turned them into rule-of-men systems where one election, one ruling, one premier can re-price a deposit to zero.

So when we grade a resource company using Doug Casey’s Nine Ps of Resource Stock Evaluation, Politics can carry as much weight as Property and People as essential determinants of success. Some of the best drill holes on Earth sit under the worst governments. The ore is covered in deep political overburden that has to be scraped off before it can become an economic deposit. Unlike removing real geologic overburden, in politics, you can scrape it off and have it all reapplied with the next politician’s whim.

It’s frustrating to have an investment in a mine stolen by nationalization, or war. Majors try to avoid the riskiest locations, and thus the valuation of any resource or reserve in lousy jurisdictions is reduced.

Perhaps the people who have benefited from their Common Law will learn to stop their government leaders from turning their nations into jurisdictions of political whimsy. I don’t think that is likely. So it falls to us to identify, avoid, or at least try to price in the political risks. That’s what we do at Crisis Investing, alongside the rest of the Nine Ps that we use to analyze investment and speculative opportunities.

I invite you to join us by subscribing to our free and premium (paid) newsletters, where we combine teaching with brevity, and identify opportunities to increase your wealth in ways that will allow for your future equanimity in the face of expected high volatility. This sort of lousy week will not be the last.

Sincerely,

John

John Hunt, MD

The Trump hangover

Woods voted the way a lot of people voted in 2024: not for an ideology, but against Kamala, against the open border, against the trans material aimed at kids. He gave Trump room. Then he watched the room fill up with the usual disappointments.

During the campaign, Trump said high home prices were a government creation and that he could knock them down 40%. Woods thought: finally, someone gets it. Then Trump took office, decided nobody actually wants cheaper houses — least of all the boomers whose net worth lives inside them — and rolled out a 50-year mortgage instead.

That, Woods notes, is the American way. “We’re going to make it affordable” has never once meant “we’re going to lower the price.” It means more loans, more debt, a bigger number you’re now able to finance. The same trick that gave you six-figure tuition will now hand you a mortgage your grandchildren can inherit.

Doug’s read on the man is harsher. Trump, he says, is “such a skilled and enthusiastic liar that you almost have to believe him” — too bald-faced to be credible, and totally without a moral center. What makes it maddening, Woods adds, is that the man is also genuinely funny and tends to go after people who deserve it — which is exactly what makes him so easy to want to like, right up until you notice that nobody draws his wrath like the most principled people on his own side: Thomas Massie, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens.

“You always get John McCain”

The line Woods is most famous for — the one Jeremy Corbyn has quoted, the one that’s gone everywhere while almost nobody knows he wrote it — is this: No matter whom you vote for, you always get John McCain.

People thought Trump was the exception. They thought they were voting for option A and would, for once, not get option B. Woods’s point is that the machinery doesn’t much care what you select on the ballot. Ron Paul, he says, would have actually stopped the wars — the president is commander-in-chief; he can simply decline to prosecute them — but you can’t get a Ron Paul through the door, and some of that is the machine and some of it is the electorate.

The episode spends real time on the taboo you’re not allowed to name out loud. JD Vance said the obvious thing — that American and Israeli interests will sometimes diverge, because they’re two different countries — and got branded an antisemite for it. Congressman Randy Fine openly bragged about helping vote Thomas Massie out over Israel. As Woods puts it: they’ll say it themselves, celebrate it even, but the moment you repeat their words back to them, you’re the bigot. Mearsheimer and Walt were right that the lobby exists. The strange part is being made to pretend it doesn’t.

Nobody believes what everybody believes

Woods borrows a line from his friend Kevin Dolan: nobody believes what everybody believes. We’re all expected to affirm a dozen propositions almost no one actually holds. Egalitarianism is the example — everyone salutes it, nobody lives by it.

The proof is in what happens when you swap the picture. A Pride Month image made the rounds: a tattooed lesbian couple, one of them in full head-to-toe Islamic dress, two kids, the slogan “be who you are, no matter whom you love.” The internet replaced the couple in the doorway with a somber portrait of Robert E. Lee. Is he allowed to be who he is? The joke lands because the “be who you are” crowd very obviously keeps a list of exceptions — people you’re specifically not permitted to be, because they say so. Even a writer like Roald Dahl gets his books rewritten decades into the grave for using the word “fat.”

The generations at war

The starkest data point in the whole conversation is the Massie polling. Split by age, it wasn’t close. Younger voters — and Woods means everyone up into their mid-fifties — were overwhelmingly for Massie. The 65-and-up crowd were overwhelmingly for a man they’d never heard of, the one Fox News told them to back after taking Massie off the air for a year and a half.

Woods won’t let either side off easy. The boomers took a lot out of the system — pension, Social Security, the inflated house — and now wonder what the kids are complaining about. But he refuses the counter-myth that the young are helpless victims of high prices and no jobs. With the tools sitting in your pocket, he argues, you can become a master of the universe — not easily, but more easily than at any point in history. You just have to stop scrolling long enough to find the right guides and do something real. The man who waits by the phone for someone to call and tell him he’s useful was doing fine in 1957. In 2026, that’s a losing strategy.

The white pill

Then, after the better part of an hour spent cataloguing the decline, the conversation turns.

Strip out the politics, Woods says, and look at how a human being can actually live now. He went to see Beethoven’s Ninth a few weeks ago and it lifted him to the heavens. He has the leisure to play chess anywhere in the world, to study the greatest games ever recorded, to hand off the laundry and spend those hours on what he loves. None of it was available to an ordinary person two centuries ago. It exists because of an inherited capital structure most people never stop to thank — which Woods calls one of the most profound acts of ingratitude in history.

Doug’s framing is the one to end on. The three of them, he admits, are a rounding error; the writing and the podcasting probably won’t turn the tide. You do it anyway — for the good karma, and because, as Woods says, you want to look your kids in the eye and tell them their dad fought. We didn’t win, but your dad fought.

Teddy Roosevelt put it the way Doug likes to quote: do what you can, where you are, with what you have.

The primary trend is up. The near term is the worry. But the long ascent of man has survived worse than this, and the collapse of one overextended empire may yet prove a blip on a very long chart.

Incentives are what determine behavior. Not intentions. Not intelligence. And, for most people, not character.

Incentives.

When you want to understand why an institution, a government, a corporation, or a person does something that seems irrational, stop asking what they were thinking and start asking what they were rewarded for. The answer will be obvious in retrospect.

The Three Flavors of Bad Incentives

A malincentive is a reward for doing something harmful. The scientist whose funding and promotion depend on producing the politically favored conclusion rather than valid science. The rating agency paid by the banks whose bonds it is rating. The hospital compensated based on the number of diagnoses of COVID it makes as opposed to honest scientific assessment of whether COVID was actually present. The regulator whose post-federal-retirement job will be in the industry he is supposed to regulate. The doctor who earns additional money by ordering lots of lab tests. In each case someone is being paid to do something that encourages fraud, destroys wealth or causes harm. That damage is not incidental. It is the predictable result of some human being choosing to incentivize harm. Malincentives are countered by good morals, but malincentives often win out.

A misaligned incentive is subtler and more common. The reward structure leads to actions that diverge from the intended goal. The salesman who gets a commission for selling products in a way that most rewards him, not in the way that best serves the company’s customers, its other employees, or its profits. The fund manager paid on assets under management rather than returns. Paying lazy people by the hour instead of by the job. The behavior that results is rational from the individual’s perspective and destructive from the system’s perspective. It’s the result of poor management decisions combined with individual character insufficient to do the right thing despite the misaligned incentive. Doug Casey defines stupidity as an unwitting tendency to self-destruction. Misaligning an organization’s incentive structure is stupid, and avoidable.

A perverse incentive arises when government rewards the opposite of what it intends. This is the law of unintended consequences. Cobra bounties in colonial India, offered to reduce the cobra population, produced cobra farming. Government-subsidized flood insurance results in beachfront development in flood zones. Federal student loan guarantees intended to improve access to education produced a tuition bubble that priced out the students they were meant to help. Subsidizing people who produce no goods and services while taxing those who do leads to fewer producers and more people on the dole. And then pretty much all policy in the “health insurance” realm is perverse.

When a system produces outcomes that seem irrational, those outcomes often result from individual rational responses to incentives developed by either stupid people or evil people. There’s no shortage of such people, so no shortage of predictably bad outcomes.

Why This Matters to You

Intentions are what people want to do. Incentives determine what people actually do.

There are many ways to benefit from awareness of bad incentives.

When you examine a company’s investment deck, listen to a sell-side guy on a phone call, or get convinced by a promoter, stop to think about the incentives of those who provide the information. Are their incentives aligned with you making money? If they are, groovy. But if their incentives are to make money from you, as opposed to with you, be careful.

In your own organization, start paying attention to your colleagues’ incentives, not just in your department, but throughout the organization. Every organization has good people. Every organization also has problems. To solve the problems, start by fixing the bad incentives. Then the efforts of the inventive people and hard workers will be directed to accomplishing organizational missions.

Government is in the unique position of forcing its bad incentives on us. We won’t get into solving problems caused by government. But screwed-up incentives lead to all sorts of market distortions.

One definition Doug uses for a speculator is someone who identifies where government actions pervert the market and then positions capital to benefit from that. In government, perverse incentives are the norm, layered on top of malincentives and misaligned incentives. Fertile ground in which to carefully plant some capital. Because government is now so pervasive in so many corners of the economy, most stock market activity is now speculation, not investment (the subject of a future letter).

Watch out for screwed-up incentives. Being aware of them will help you protect yourself, help you avoid problem investments, help you solve organizational problems, and help you find rewarding speculations.

At Crisis Investing, we are always looking at incentives, and as we find bad incentives, we decide whether to fight them or profit from them.

Usually, the second option pays better.

This is one of those letters that we in the trade refer to as evergreen: industry shorthand for material that stays relevant beyond the news cycle. Everyone needs to understand the role incentives play, yet it isn’t taught in school. The world could be a far better, wealthier, and more productive place if people learned these simple concepts. So, consider forwarding or sharing this note with anyone who’d benefit from seeing it.

Sincerely,

John Hunt, MD

When good is bad and bad is good, the perversion is complete.

The Fed Put: an ever-present perversion.

The Fed Put is a stop-loss insurance policy with no premium, gifted to asset holders (chiefly those investing in the stock market). The name is an options analogy: a put option gives its holder the right to sell an asset at a pre-set price no matter how far the market falls. After the 1987 crash, when Alan Greenspan flooded the system with liquidity to arrest the fall, investors started to assume the same protection would be granted for free to the entire stock market. If stock prices drop far enough, the Federal Reserve will arrive to deliver rate cuts and cheap money to put a floor under them. The investors’ assumptions proved correct. Greenspan first handed it out; Bernanke, Yellen, and Powell renewed it through every panic since. It became known as the Fed Put.

A real put option is bought by an asset owner, who assesses the cost-benefit ratio before paying a premium to buy the put to protect himself (for a limited term) from a decline in the value of the asset. But with a Fed Put, no one pays the Fed a premium, there is no limited term, and the Fed doesn’t take on risk. Instead, the Fed transfers the risk of asset decline from the asset owners to everyone else. And by everyone else, I mean taxi drivers, Joe the Plumber, bakers, candlestick makers, doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs. People who were never involved or interested, who don’t know what the asset is, don’t have money in the markets, and don’t even know they are insuring someone else’s wealth against loss.

It’s no wonder that when a victim of this racket learns what’s going on, he gets angry and wants to Occupy Wall Street or Audit the Fed.

But while the Occupiers and Auditors blow off steam, the market keeps going full steam as risk-takers stay insulated from their downside and buy too much stock.

Note: this is perverted, but not irrational. Indeed, the market actors are responding rationally to a centrally planned, inflation-riddled, central banking economy.

Trump’s War Put

Here’s where things get irrational.

Since February 28, when he started a war with Iran, Trump has issued his own puts. Every time the war pressures the markets (and war should pressure markets), out come the platitudes. Talks are proceeding nicely. A deal is days away. (We’ll note but otherwise ignore the occasional threats to end Persian civilization.)

Akin to the confidence in the Fed, the market has been putting confidence in Trump’s empty assurances. Trump’s War Put has reassured investors that they can take the risks needed to push asset prices higher. Despite a shooting war in the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz closed to Western shipping and commodity prices rising, the S&P 500 has climbed about 10% since the fighting began and hit one all-time high after another. It’s as if the war and its supply disruptions aren’t happening.

The market has been pricing a promised imminent peace, not the active war.

The Fed can and does perform on its Fed Put. But peace is not Trump’s to deliver, at least not alone. It takes two to tango, or in this case a third — Israel — whose leaders don’t feel obligated to listen to Trump. Functionally, the Strait reopens to Western shipping when insurance underwriters believe Iran won’t sink the ships. I doubt a Truth Social post will convince them.

At this point, it is irrational to place much trust in yet another statement from Trump that peace is imminent.

What is going on with the precious metals?

On Friday, the mob spent the day stampeding out of the markets and into the US dollar. This isn’t a run to quality. It’s a run to liquidity.

A Gulf war with the Strait closed should be a textbook moment for gold and silver to shoot upward and the miners’ values to climb too. They are doing the opposite, because in their rush for liquidity, they also sold gold and silver and quality mining stocks.

Sure, gold and silver had a good run last year, as did the miners. So perhaps part of the story of the decline in 2026 is that people have been taking profits from their successful speculations (a reasonable thing to do), in order to chase the broader, war-defying, market rally (less reasonable).

This morning, gold sat near $4,300, more than 20% below its January record. Silver is off about 19% since the war began. The gold-miner funds, GDX and GDXJ, have shed roughly 30% from their spring highs.

Friday’s good economic news led to a broad market sell-off because good news is bad news. The declines across the precious metals and mining sector on Friday sure felt like bad news for us.

But bad news is good news. The assets we most trust to protect our finances from the whims of politicians, the disruptions of war, and central bank debasements, are now on sale. That’s good news for those of us wanting to increase our positions.

Of course, it’s not good for those needing to sell now. For those folk, let’s hope that Trump’s War Put is effective again.

So what are the action items?

Take a look at stocks that you wished you had bought at lower prices. If you have sufficient dry powder without dipping into your emergency cash, this is an opportunity to buy a little. In this highly volatile market, there will be more good (or bad) news that will lead to more opportunities.

Although no one knows what will happen to the prices in the short term, an ounce of gold will always remain an ounce of gold that will continue to serve as a risk-off, inflation-resistant asset. The miners that produce gold should do well as investments, and selected junior explorers can be good speculations.

After a big run-up, they are on sale again. Until Trump’s next War Put lands today.

Please share our commentary with people you care about.

Sincerely,

John Hunt, MD

The market still has the feel of a party where the music is playing, everyone is drunk, and nobody wants to be the first guy to admit the building is on fire.

Gold & silver stocks got hit hard this today. First Majestic was down about 13% in a single day while we were recording. That’s the kind of move that reminds you why keeping some powder dry matters.

Yes, cash is trash. Yes, the dollar is being destroyed in real terms. But there’s a big difference between losing 5% or 10% a year to inflation and losing 13% in one afternoon because you were fully loaded with no room to move.

Doug’s point was not that he has turned bearish on gold stocks. Quite the opposite. He still thinks the small mining stocks are one of the cheapest corners of the market. The producers are minting money at today’s gold prices. Some of the developers are moving toward production. And sooner or later, the public is likely to notice.

But that does not mean they can’t get hit first.

As we reminded readers last month - It’s important to have dry powder. If the broad market rolls over — and Doug thinks we may be on the edge of that precipice — the little mining stocks will probably get dragged down with everything else. They always do. At least temporarily.

That’s why dry powder matters. It gives you the ability to act when everyone else is being forced to sell.

We also talked about what may be the bell ringing at the top of this market: the coming wave of giant AI and tech IPOs.

SpaceX. Anthropic. OpenAI.

These may be great companies. They may also be the exact kind of offerings you see near the end of a speculative mania, when insiders and venture capitalists need a public market exit. Once these companies are floated at absurd valuations, they’ll get shoved into index funds and ETFs, and ordinary investors will end up owning them whether they understand the risk or not.

That has a very dot-com feel to it.

The market is already unhealthy. Too much debt. Too much leverage. Too much passive money. Too many Robinhood traders buying one-day options. Too much faith that the authorities can always keep the casino open.

They probably can’t.

We also got into a darker subject: war crimes and nuclear weapons.

A listener asked whether nuclear weapons can ever be used without violating the laws of war, given that everyone knows civilians would be killed.

Doug’s answer was broader than nukes. The real moral break came when war stopped being mostly armies fighting armies and became the deliberate destruction of cities, infrastructure, and civilians.

That was not how wars were generally fought in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was not even the norm in World War I.

Then came World War II: Rotterdam, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo.

Then Korea.

Then Iraq.

And now we see the same logic in Gaza, Lebanon, and elsewhere. Blow up infrastructure. Destroy cities. Drive people out. Call it strategy.

Doug’s point was blunt: you don’t need a nuclear weapon to commit mass destruction. A fleet of bombers can do it. So can modern armies with conventional weapons. The moral rot is not in the weapon alone. It’s in the idea that civilians and civilization itself are legitimate targets.

We also touched on eVTOLs — electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft.

The dream is real enough: flying vehicles, drone technology, better batteries, and eventually a Blade Runner-style world where aircraft move around cities without internal combustion engines.

There are already public companies in the space: Joby, Archer, EHang, Vertical Aerospace, Eve Air Mobility.

But Doug made the right comparison. Investing in this sector today may be like investing in automobile companies in the early 1900s. There were hundreds of them. Almost all disappeared.

The winners may be huge. Most of the companies will probably go to zero.

And as usual, the real bottleneck may not be engineering. It may be regulation. The lawyers, lobbyists, and fixers may matter more than the engineers. That’s true in aviation. It’s true in mining. It’s true almost everywhere in the modern economy.

Finally, we got into inheritance.

Most people think the problem is taxes. And yes, the state is always the enemy. It wants a piece of everything, including your estate after you die.

But Doug thinks the bigger problem is what wealth does to children who were not raised properly.

If your kids are weak, entitled, badly educated, and filled with stupid ideas, a large inheritance may destroy them. Money does not create character. It reveals it. And then it magnifies it.

The alternative many rich people choose is not much better: foundations.

That may be even worse.

Look at what happened to the great American fortunes. Carnegie. Ford. Rockefeller. The people who created those fortunes would probably be horrified by the bureaucrats, leftists, and professional do-gooders who eventually took over their foundations.

So the question is not simply, “How much money should I leave my children?”

The question is:

Have I raised children worthy of receiving it?

That’s the part most people avoid.

The real inheritance is not the money. It is the judgment, habits, values, courage, education, and competence you build into your children before the money ever shows up.

Get that wrong, and the money becomes poison.

Get it right, and the money becomes fuel.

Subscribe now

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00:00 June Holiday Banter
01:12 Pride Flags and Virginia
02:08 Trump Meme Calendar
05:08 Gold Stocks and Dry Powder
08:52 Nukes and War Crimes
13:01 Gaza and Lebanon Fallout
15:22 eVTOL Investing Outlook
18:43 Japan Yen Carry and IPO Top
21:16 Corn vs Soybeans Trade
23:18 Do Souls Exist
27:09 Sprott Cover Top Signal
29:47 Broker for Canadian Stocks
30:13 Inheritance and Raising Kids
35:39 Wrap Up and Next Week

Yesterday we walked through how insurance closed the Strait of Hormuz in early March.

What we did not address was who has been keeping it closed since then.

The April Recovery

A ceasefire was announced on April 8. Within days, dark-fleet traffic began ticking back up. Vessels were running their AIS transponders dark, presumably coordinating with Iranian authorities for transit permission, paying fees in yuan and Bitcoin. The transits climbed from near-zero in March toward twenty-eight ships per day by mid-May.

Matt Smith has been tracking them. Here’s a graph from him.

Trade was beginning to flow again. Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, and Iraqi crude were finding their way out.

But Iran was collecting tolls.

Operation Economic Fury

So on May 27, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the designation of Iran’s Persian Gulf Strait Authority — the new body Iran had set up to formalize transit fees — as a target of what Treasury calls “Economic Fury.” The designation falls under Executive Order 13224, the legal framework used against terrorist financing networks. Any vessel, company, bank, or state entity paying tolls to the PGSA now faces secondary sanctions and risk of being cut off from dollar clearing.

Western ships and shipowners attempting to transit the Strait will either be targeted by Iran or targeted by Bessent.

The DFC/Chubb Paradox

Meanwhile, the $40 billion DFC/Chubb reinsurance facility was supposed to bridge the gap between what Western insurers would write and what Western shipowners could afford. So far it has been unused.

Why unused? Perhaps because the facility’s vetting process requires beneficial ownership disclosure, cargo origin and destination, lender identity, and sanctions screening. Any vessel that actually transits the strait under Iranian permission — paying the toll, accepting IRGC navigation instructions — would fall afoul of Executive Order 13224 and be subjected to Economic Fury.

Whether by design or by uncoordinated agency action, Western-aligned commercial shipping has no legal route through Hormuz right now.

“Project Freedom”

In mid-May, the press began reporting that the U.S. military had escorted seventy commercial vessels through Hormuz with their AIS transponders disabled, under an arrangement CENTCOM called “Project Freedom.” The implication was that the U.S. Navy was getting Western cargo through the strait while bypassing both Iran and insurance limitations.

Several open questions about this are worth holding in mind.

Were the vessels insured? No lender lets a hundred-million-dollar tanker carrying a billion in cargo sail uninsured. The DFC facility’s application portal is not publicly open, which leaves a few possibilities.

1) If a ship had no liens on it, I suppose the captain could risk traversing the Strait of Hormuz naked. (Naked in this context means without insurance).

2) Maybe the DFC facility is quietly writing coverage (or “cover” if you are a Brit) for these specific operations through a non-public channel.

3) Conceivably the vessels carried existing non-cancellable war-risk policies.

4) Maybe the ship captain and owner got sick of waiting, and just drove on.

Was Iran capable of interdicting? Less capable than in March. Operation Epic Fury degraded Iranian radar, coastal defenses, and IRGC fast-boat infrastructure over ten weeks of strikes. By mid-May, Iran’s ability to detect and intercept escorted convoys moving at speed must have been substantially diminished. Trump told us it was totally gone, but he’s a man known to hyperbolize. The Iranian silence on these transits could indicate consent, or inability to detect, or political unwillingness to acknowledge an inability to interdict. All three are possible.

Why were the AIS transponders off? Two possibilities. Iran-coordinated dark-fleet vessels run AIS dark to keep their beneficial owners off Western sanctions databases. But vessels under U.S. military escort would also run AIS dark — to keep commercial ship-tracking services from publishing the convoy’s location in real time and giving Iran the targeting data its own degraded sensing network could not produce.

The reported Strait transits under “Project Freedom” could be real U.S. Navy-escorted commercial traffic. Or CENTCOM might have just rebranded existing dark fleet traffic to impress us. The verified facts — degraded Iranian capability, AIS-off transits, the absence of intercepts — fit either reading.

The Net Effect

We do not know whether the U.S. policy posture in May 2026 represents a coordinated maximum-pressure strategy intended to shake Hormuz free of Iranian control, or four uncoordinated federal agencies swatting at flies. Treasury runs sanctions. CENTCOM runs the blockade. DFC announces insurance facilities. State Department handles the diplomatic communications. Trump trumps.

When governments act, the difference between strategy and incompetence is academic. The market responds to the outcome, not the intent. Western-aligned shipping is filtered out. Non-Western shipping fills the gap. The changes will not unwind when the diplomatic situation eventually normalizes, because the relationships and infrastructure being built now will persist.

Fortunately, the free market will start restoring economic efficiency once the governments get out of the way. That happens about the same time that hell freezes over.

If this commentary is interesting to you, please forward it to anyone in your life who you care about, and suggest they subscribe to our free service. And if you want to profit from awareness of the Hormuz disruption and its diverse global effects (far beyond oil), join us in our premium Crisis Investing service.

Sincerely,

John Hunt, MD

I asked Doug straight out whether we’re in a market melt-up, and he didn’t hesitate. NVIDIA is worth about $5.5 trillion. Jensen Huang name-drops an AI company on stage and it pops 30% on the spot. I brought up Micron — it’s gone from a $30–60 billion company eighteen months ago to north of $1.2 trillion today. That kind of move makes the dot-com era I sat out feel small.

“We’re living in a fool’s paradise in the market,” Doug told me. And it isn’t just the headline names. Everybody’s trading options now, same-day expiration included. “It’s a gambling casino. It’s completely crazy.” When I looked it up, there are now roughly as many ETFs as there are listed stocks. The whole thing, the way Doug puts it, is “a floating abstraction, a moving paper fantasy. It’s gotta end badly.”

The part I keep wrestling with is when. I told Doug my own portfolio peaked back in late January, and I’ve since moved more to cash worrying about exactly this — which, looking at what the Nasdaq has done since, hasn’t exactly felt smart. He’s been here before; he and Bob Prechter have both called the top more than once and watched it run higher anyway. But one thing has him more confident than usual: almost nobody else feels the way he does. “That’s one of the many bells ringing.”

Speaking of bells — OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are all headed public at trillion-dollar-plus valuations in the weeks ahead. Doug’s read: “I kind of think their bell’s ringing at the ultimate top of the market.”

Then there’s the story that made me want to download every statement I own. Doug sent me a New York Times piece about a woman who logged into Fidelity to find her account — her entire life savings — simply gone. When she called, she was told she didn’t have an account with them at all. It took her two weeks of detective work to prove she’d ever existed in their system.

“It can vanish just like it did for this poor woman,” Doug said. The lesson is the one he’s been making for as long as I’ve known him: the only money you truly own is the gold and silver in your own hands — “what I got in my own clammy little fingers.” On that note, I picked up another five ounces yesterday, a few Philharmonics from a private seller down here.

Which brings us to the irony neither of us can get past. Trillion-dollar AI companies are minting new billionaires by the hundreds, and here we are “playing in the dirt” — gold and silver miners with $10, $20, $50 million market caps that don’t add up to a rounding error on a single one of those IPOs. Oil and gas were 30% of the S&P in 1980. Today it’s 4%. “Nobody cares about them.” I asked Doug if I’m crazy to sit on cash when these things look this cheap. He thinks it’s exactly backwards — and exactly the setup for the runaway bull market in resource stocks nobody’s watching.

Also in this episode: the data center buildout that my own digging suggests is really an effort to “birth their AI god”; the new $650,000 Ferrari EV that even a former chairman calls an embarrassment, and what the EU’s electric-car mandate says about Mussolini’s definition of fascism; where I am on the Battle Bank waitlist (still waiting); and why a British Sovereign in your pocket beats a one-ounce coin at the border.

Have a question for Doug? Subscribe to submit yours for an upcoming episode.

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The 21-mile wide Strait of Hormuz “closed” in early March. It wasn’t closed by a big beautiful wall. It wasn’t blocked (directly) by Iranian fast boats or mines in the water or tankers on fire or by the U.S. Fifth Fleet.

The strait closed because, in the first week of March, the insurance market withdrew. The International Group of P&I Clubs — the mutual associations that cover roughly 90 percent of the world’s ocean-going tonnage — issued cancellation notices on war-risk coverage for Persian Gulf transits.

Coverage stopped being available at any commercially viable price. Dylan Saunders-Mortimer, who leads marine war risk insurance for Marsh in the UK, told the press that underwriters “struggle to price risk where there is involvement from the United States or Israel on the basis that it almost removes the fortuity of the risk.” Fortuity of Risk is insurance lingo for “accidental.” Translation: when the risk is controlled by policy and military whims of over-empowered politicians, the actuaries cannot model the loss probability. A hundred underwriters in London, Oslo, and New York were left blind, and naturally stopped quoting.

War was no longer a risk, but a manifest reality.

Common sense told captains and owners that the risk was higher than normal. So in the face of a modest possibility of real danger, and no availability of any financial protection in the event of calamity, tankers idled outside the Hormuz chokepoint. Even if Iran sent them an engraved invitation for unmolested passage, the ships still had to wait for someone in London to sell them an affordable policy. Those who loaned money to buy the ships would insist that their collateral was insured or they’d call the loan, the same way that you are required to have comprehensive insurance on your car if you have an auto loan.

The net effect is that the lack of availability of relevant insurance was a proximate cause of the shutdown of twenty percent of the world’s daily oil supply. And Sulfur, and methanol, and helium, and urea.

Washington figures there is nothing that can’t be fixed by more government intrusion.

On March 6, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) announced a $20 billion maritime reinsurance facility with Chubb as the lead underwriter. By early April, the facility had been doubled to $40 billion with six additional partners — Travelers, Liberty Mutual, Berkshire Hathaway, AIG, Starr, and CNA. President Trump declared the program would help restore maritime trade through the strait.

Three months later, the U.S. Congressional Research Service summarized the result in a single sentence: “It is unclear if DFC has provided any coverage yet.”

The application portal has not opened. No vessel has received a policy under the facility. Forty billion dollars in committed reinsurance capacity has sat on paper. The vessels still moving through the strait are operating with Iran’s permission, paying tolls in yuan or Bitcoin to the Persian Gulf Strait Authority that Iran founded on May 5. Those shipowners are not interested in handing the U.S. Treasury a clean documentary trail that will be used against them later.

What moved into the vacuum.

Political distortions in the markets are where speculators provide service to the world while creating profit. To a great extent it is non-Western insurance providers coming into the market, speculating on how much they can trust the Iranians, and how well they can avoid the US Navy and dodge around Secretary Bessent.

While the Western insurance market sat closed and the DFC facility sits mired in its own mire, a parallel market expanded. China’s PICC Property and Casualty, China Re, and COSCO’s captive insurance arm continued writing coverage. Russia’s Ingosstrakh and the Russian National Reinsurance Company — both built specifically to operate outside Western financial architecture, and both expanded substantially after the 2022 sanctions wave to handle the dark-fleet business — were already in business. Even Iran launched its own platform in mid-May. It is called Hormuz Safe. It is settled in Bitcoin. The regime estimates it could generate $10 billion in annual revenue. Hormuz Safe does not cover damage from military attacks. It covers inspection, detention, and confiscation — meaning Iran is selling vessels insurance against Iran’s own political shenanigans. Good gig if you can get it. (Although, for sure, it is morally repugnant).

As of May 20, the Persian Gulf Strait Authority was authorizing about twenty-six vessels in a twenty-four-hour period. Russian and Chinese vessels are getting through. The strait is not closed. It is operating at perhaps a fifth of pre-war volumes, and it is running on a non-Western insurance and tolling system that did not exist three months ago.

Western insurance came back. Sort of.

By April, Western insurance single-transit premiums had come down from a peak of 10 percent of hull value to roughly 2 to 6 percent of hull value. (Pre-war, they were about 0.25% for a single transit of the Strait). The Lloyd’s Market Association issued a statement on March 23 arguing that insurance is technically available — and they are technically correct, the way a $100 cup of coffee is technically purchasable. For a $100 million tanker, 2 to 6 percent is $2 to $6 million per transit. The Western insurance market reopened at a price point that excluded most of its former users.

The Net Effects

Every week this persists, the non-Western insurance pool consolidates relationships, contracts, and reinsurance capacity that did not exist before. When Hormuz reopens, the Chinese and Russian capacity will keep some or much of the business it absorbed. After all, they provided service when others would not.

Markets route around obstacles. The Western insurance market closed Hormuz to its own users. The U.S. government made a pretense of filling the gap with $40 billion of printed “capital” that has, so far, insured no cargo. Non-Western alternatives absorbed the volume.

It’s a sad state of affairs when the US government is the force of whimsical political perversion of markets and the Russians and Chinese insurers are the ones taking the risk and keeping the trade moving.

In the next letter, we will get into government actions— the naval blockade, the OFAC designation of Iran’s transit authority on May 27, and the rest of the pressure campaign Treasury Secretary Bessent calls Economic Fury. Is the US government really trying to open the Strait of Hormuz, or is it trying to keep it closed? Whether it is brilliant and coherent strategy, or bureaucratic incompetence and malfeasance, the actions politicians and bureaucrats are taking are reshaping global shipping and supply/demand dynamics in ways that we strive to discern.

If our commentary and analyses are useful to you, please forward it to anyone in your life who you care about and suggest they subscribe to our free service. And if you want to be a part of profiting from awareness of the trends we see in the world, join us in our premium Crisis Investing service.

Sincerely,

John Hunt, MD

Oil matters. But focusing only on oil through this crisis is an error of omission.

The Strait of Hormuz carries about a fifth of the world’s oil, everyone knows that. But other commodities traverse that strait. And right now, they aren’t traversing. End the disruption tomorrow and the commodity supply consequences will still take months and years to resolve.

Every couple of days, Trump tells us there is a deal with Iran coming to re-open Hormuz. It’s the Art of the Tease, I suppose. The Strait of Hormuz has been a global economic disaster waiting to happen for 50 years. The region has been mired in conflict for, well, forever. Even if Trump pulls off a happy resolution this time, Hormuz will remain a ticking time bomb for our lives and the lives of our children.

The Strait of Hormuz is Iran’s non-nuclear trump card.

So let’s look at the other stuff that floats through that 21-mile-wide waterway.

Sulfur: the byproduct that became a chokepoint

Roughly a fifth of total global sulfur production sails through Hormuz. Sulfur is the precursor to sulfuric acid, and sulfuric acid is the precursor to phosphate fertilizer, battery-grade nickel and cobalt, uranium, and a long list of mining outputs and industrial chemistry production no one thinks about until it stops working.

Sulfur prices have nearly tripled since January.

Damn.

This price spike personally ticks me off because I spray sulfur on our grape vines to keep powdery mildew under control. Crisis Investing principles apply to the vineyard as well as the portfolio: buy the input before the input buys you. I bought enough to keep me and my clothes smelling like rotten eggs long after the stink of the midterm elections subsides.

Speculators profit from economic disruptions caused by political shenanigans. But seeing how to play this sulfur disruption requires some deep research. We just provided a sulfur-focused issue of Crisis Investing to our paid subscribers with a recommendation as to how to profit from the disruption.

Methanol: plastics, paints, and pretty much everything

Iran exports ten million tons of methanol a year. At least it used to. Add Saudi, Qatari, and Bahraini volumes and you have about 11 percent of total global methanol production routed through Hormuz.

China makes more than half the world’s methanol from coal, yet the country is still a net importer. Methanol is the upstream input to formaldehyde, acetic acid, MTBE, and a large fraction of the world’s plastics, resins, and synthetic fibers.

Methanol spot prices have nearly doubled in Asia and more than doubled in Europe since January. When methanol prices increase, the cost of everything from your kitchen counter to your car’s interior trim eventually follows. The lag is six to twelve months. Pay attention to the input contracts now. The consumer price effect follows later.

Damn.

Fertilizer

About a third of the world’s traded fertilizer moves through Hormuz. For urea — the workhorse nitrogen fertilizer that grows the corn, wheat, and rice the planet eats — Hormuz handles 45 to 50 percent of the export trade. That works out to about 13 percent of total global urea production trying to flow through the Persian Gulf’s inflamed prostate.

Qatar’s QAFCO operates the single largest urea facility on Earth. It has been offline since Iranian drones struck Ras Laffan on March 2 — followed by a ballistic missile attack two weeks later that damaged two LNG trains.

Urea prices have moved from $483 per ton on February 27 to over $850 by mid-April, with India’s panic-buying tender on April 15 clearing 2.5 million tons at $950 per ton. Prices eased somewhat in May but remain well above pre-war levels across most regions. China — the only real swing supplier — restricted its own urea exports to protect its domestic farmers. So the planet’s two largest sources of nitrogen fertilizer trade are simultaneously off the global market during the Northern Hemisphere planting season.

Damn.

Helium

Qatar produces a third of the world’s helium as a byproduct of liquefying natural gas at Ras Laffan. The same Ras Laffan that took the Iranian strikes. QatarEnergy’s CEO has said repairs will take three to five years.

With LNG production shut since March 2, roughly a third of total global helium supply went offline. Stranded transport containers have been steadily bleeding helium for three months — liquid helium boils off at up to 1 percent per day in transit.

There is no substitute for helium for cryogenic semiconductor manufacturing or MRI machines. South Korea sourced sixty-five percent of its helium from Qatar. Taiwan, sixty-nine percent. Samsung, SK Hynix, and TSMC are rationing. Spot prices have already tripled. Forecasts put them at seven times pre-war levels if the disruption stretches.

Every MRI machine depends on liquid helium to keep its superconducting magnet cold. Medical costs will rise. Semiconductor fabrication depends on helium for cooling and processing. The AI capex boom that Wall Street has been pricing as a perpetual motion machine depends on a gas sucked out of a single facility in the Persian Gulf. We’ll come back to helium in a separate letter — there’s an investment opportunity here.

Aluminum and steel: turns out that cars, trains … and roofs … aren’t built out of silicon.

Gulf states produce about 21 percent of the world’s aluminum. Emirates Global and Bahrain’s Alba run on Gulf gas and ship through Hormuz. A blocked Strait also blocks high-grade iron ore pellets and direct-reduced iron — the feedstocks for electric-arc furnaces that supply much of the world’s structural steel.

As the Iran war started, I rushed an order for the metal roof for my house at the suggestion of the company I hired to do the job. The roofer guys knew that metal prices were headed up and advised me well. Tradesmen and those who use commodity-based materials are intimately aware of the real-world effects of global insanity. We should pay heed to them.

The Straitjacket.

Globalization kinda stupidly assumed the chokepoints would stay open because the alternative was unthinkable. And yet we all knew this could happen. It’s not as if Iran’s leaders have been paragons of sanity. But who expected the US government leaders would pull the pin on the grenade?

The fertilizer for next year’s harvest is sitting in port. The helium for next year’s chips is evaporating in stranded containers. The aluminum for next year’s construction is still in Bahrain.

In a subsequent letter, we’ll get into who wins and who loses. The analysis leads to some unexpected and interesting conclusions. Crises are also opportunities, and we will start digging into those.

In the meantime, please do me a favor: forward this email on to whoever you think can benefit from understanding a bit more about economics—both global and personal. Start with your children. Please help us connect with them. Advise them to subscribe. Don’t let the unsound mainstream news and ridiculous social media dimwits serve as their source of information.

Oh, and another thing. The Strait of Hormuz isn’t the only chokepoint strait on the planet. Several others exist. That’s one of about a zillion reasons why peace is so damn important … and why a Crisis Investing mentality makes so much sense.

Sincerely,

John Hunt, MD

P.S. This supply restriction doesn’t increase inflation. But it increases prices. At Crisis Investing, we don’t conflate inflation with price levels. Rather we strive to think clearly, with integrity, with soundness. We don’t think in terms of Keynesian economic hogwash, because it is indeed hogwash.

Inflation is expansion of the money supply. Prices are affected by monetary expansion, but are also separately and independently affected by supply/demand dynamics. This is a core economic concept that, if understood, helps provide a secure foundation for sound economic thinking. Help your family overcome the constant barrage of Keynesian hogwash by sending them content that informs them while also inoculating them against the collectivist contagion. Please do forward this email on and ask them to subscribe.

It’s the little things that often get you. For want of a nail, the shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, the horse was lost — then the rider, the battle, and the kingdom. Something trivial that’s taken for granted may turn out to be critical for the whole system. When it goes, everything downstream goes with it.

That may be where we are right now with sulfur. I realize that sounds absurd. Sulfur wouldn’t seem to be a chokepoint of modern civilization.

I first encountered the element as a 9-year-old. It was one of the chemicals in my Chemcraft chemistry set. It was interesting to watch the yellow powder melt under the low flame of an alcohol-fueled burner, releasing the acrid smell of brimstone. Brimstone means “burning stone”; it’s the Biblical element that Yahweh favored for smiting wayward cities. Some say the unrighteous will boil in a lake of brimstone for eternity…

Despite its ancient credentials, most people can’t tell you where it comes from or how it’s now used. It’s produced mainly from sour natural gas processing — and as a byproduct of refining sour crude (like Venezuelan). It’s a costly nuisance for oil men that needs to be removed during refining. It’s also an unwanted byproduct from refining metal ores, which are mostly sulfides. It’s the fifth most common element on the planet. Before the ongoing Hormuz crisis, it was quite literally cheaper than dirt, often selling for around $50 a tonne.

Even though it can be a bothersome pollutant to oil and gas men, it’s valuable and essential to the world at large. It depends on where it is, and how much it costs to transport and transform into sulfuric acid — the most-produced industrial chemical on earth. Half of it is made into fertilizer. It also mines your copper (if the ore is an oxide, as opposed to a sulfide). It refines uranium, rare earths, nickel, cobalt, and reacts with lead for automotive batteries. It underwrites the entire industrial economy.

Until three months ago, about half of the world’s seaborne sulfur passed through the Strait of Hormuz, a byproduct of oil and natural gas production and refining around the Gulf. Then Washington, guided by Tel Aviv, launched what may be the most dangerous and outrageous war in recent memory — an unprovoked attack on Iran in the middle of active negotiations. It was a foolish decision Americans will spend decades trying to justify, rationalize, and pay for.

You know what happened next. Iran shut the Strait. And Trump’s threats, ultimatums, and shifting deadlines can’t pry it back open. It’s been closed for almost three months. It’s now more than just supply disruption — it’s turning into supply destruction. Refining and production infrastructure across the Gulf is being hit, and the damage to that kind of capacity isn’t measured in days or weeks. It will take months or years to return to the status quo ante. Persian Gulf sulfur exports are down roughly two-thirds. At the same time, China, by far the world’s leading sulfuric acid exporter, announced an outright ban on exports. Partially to protect its own farmers, and partially (I suspect) to intimidate other countries. Another three million tonnes of supply, gone overnight.

So now the price of sulfur itself is up almost 100%, and sulfuric acid is up roughly 160%. Every industry that depends on it is now forced to either pay whatever it costs, ration, or shut down.

This creates tension between food producers and metal producers. A little more than half of sulfuric acid goes to fertilizer. Much of the rest goes to mining. Both need it, both will get less and pay more. The decision over who gets priority will mostly be made by governments, not by markets. I know which way most governments lean.

For my part, I’ve bought the corn ETF we own in the portfolio (CORN). I’m also long rice in the futures market, because rice is a fertilizer hog. In fact, all the grains impress me as being underpriced. Shortages, and higher prices, are very likely because of the US/Israel versus Iran war.

The bottom line is that the damage is already locked in. The Strait could reopen tomorrow — it won’t but pretend it could — and the daisy chain of consequences would still play out for years. Sulfur capacity, like that of the oil and gas it comes from, doesn’t switch back on with a press release. Fertilizer not applied this spring isn’t a harvest deferred. It’s a harvest lost. Mines that idle their leach circuits don’t restart them in a week. The world spent years and tens of billions of dollars building the relevant infrastructure. Rebuilding it will take much, much longer than the war.

Yet the markets are still mostly sleepwalking. There’s a lot of apathy because people seem unable to fully grasp the situation. The shelves are still stocked, and the gas station pumps still work. The human brain is famously bad at reacting to slow-moving catastrophes.

For what it’s worth, the sulfur cascade is just one of several running in parallel. Energy lockdowns are starting to show up across Asia — four-day work weeks for state employees, jet fuel rationing, calls to cut air travel. Trucking is wobbling on six-dollar diesel. There’s a motor-oil shortage almost nobody is talking about yet, because the high-grade base stocks for modern synthetic oils mostly come from the Persian Gulf.

The supply cascades from the closed Strait will be with us for years. And I expect they’ll get worse before they get better. Trump is highly unpredictable; he could do anything now that he’s punched a giant tarbaby. However, I feel confident that the Iranians aren’t going to roll over. They’re righteously offended and expect more than a ceasefire. They’ll want reparations.

Sulfur is the element in this drama that most people aren’t watching. The cascade is already in the data — the wheat plantings, the cuts at acid-dependent mines, the empty acid storage tanks in Chile. The question isn’t whether any of this affects you; it will. The real question is whether you’ve positioned yourself to benefit while most people are getting crushed by it.

A small number of companies are going to come out the other side of this substantially richer than they went in. The one Lau walks you through this month is one of them. Details below.

Regards,

Doug Casey

Recommendation

Hi,

Lau here.

When we started building the case for this issue, the first question I asked was the obvious one: what’s the most direct way to play a sulfuric acid crisis? It turns out the obvious answers are mostly bad.

You can short the operators that need acid as an input. But their margins are still buffered by long-term contracts and pass-through clauses for the next few quarters. And shorting commodity producers in a generally bullish commodity tape is a great way to get carried out. You can chase the acid spot price directly. But no liquid ETF or futures contract gives you that exposure. Acid is too corrosive, too bulky, too regional to trade like a financial commodity.

You can try to find a pure-play sulfur producer. But pure-play sulfur miners are essentially extinct. Frasch mining (the old process of bringing elemental sulfur to the surface) shut down two decades ago. The biggest sour-gas processors that produce sulfur as a byproduct (Saudi Aramco, Qatar Energy, the Iranian oil entities) aren’t investable for U.S. retail. And the Western alternatives are integrated oil and gas plays where sulfur revenue is a footnote, not a story.

You can’t really get a clean sulfur play from the major sulfuric acid producers like Mosaic and Nutrien either. They’re actually on the wrong side of the trade. They consume sulfur to make acid in-house, then consume the acid to make phosphate fertilizer. They’re net consumers, not net producers.

That leaves the small handful of mining majors that own and operate their own integrated smelters: Freeport, Glencore, a couple of others. They do have some acid byproduct exposure. But at their scale, the acid revenue line is a footnote against the rest of their business. And none of them sit in a region where the acid market has truly seized up the way it has in the corners of the world hit hardest by the Hormuz cascade.

What you actually want is a company that produces acid as a side-product of something else profitable (ideally something you’re already bullish on independently), in one of those acid-starved regions, with structurally fixed costs that don’t move when the acid price triples. And the acid line itself has to be meaningful enough relative to the rest of the business to actually move the stock when the economics improve. Not just show up as a footnote.

That company exists. And it’s been quietly sitting at the center of one of the most important deposits of the metal that powers global electrification.

We’ll get to the name in a moment. First, a few pages on the math. Understanding why this combination is suddenly worth billions of dollars more than it was six months ago is what makes the rest of the case obvious.

If you’ve never thought hard about how modern smelters work, this is the part of the issue that’s going to change how you read every commodity headline that follows.

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