chris repke

With all this talk about “regime change” and “taking out the Ayatollah”, I was horrified, wondering what kind of people deliberately target religious leaders and then kill them in the name of their god? The I remembered. Oh yeah, those people…

@RealRickRule @maneco1964 You’re a credit guy Rick, if this was a company, what rate would it honestly take for you to loan them money? For me, I think it might take triple digits. Certainly no less than 50%.

would you loan money to this entity?

@Djiaux_xyz @nickturse Shit. You’re right. We’re probably invading Sweden next week. They’re gonna get a big heaping dose of freedom and democracy dropped on them.

@Chris_Repke @nickturse Or maybe now is when he gets it At gunpoint

NEW: Pentagon Reveals Attacks in Latin America Are Just the Beginning With “Operation Total Extermination” and Trump’s threats against Cuba, expect more U.S. military strikes in the region. theintercept.com/2026/03/23/tru…

@ArmchairW Great. First we had a navy that can’t get within 600 miles of Iran, then an Air Force that can’t fly over Iran, now we’re going to have an army that can’t get within 600 miles either. May as well throw in the Coast Guard too, they’re 10,000 miles away. We spend $1T+/y for this?

All going to Jordan and Israel. If this is for an invasion, our line of departure is a thousand kilometers from the Iranian border and will still be under effective enemy fire. Welcome to the Anti-Access/Area-Denial world.

@adamtaggart We need a new airline called “Wild West Air”. Everyone can carry weapons of choice. No rifles, swords, rpg’s. They’re just too big. But pistols and knives are fine. Cockpit is bank vault caliber locked before boarding and pilots fully armed. Smoking allowed. Safest airline ever.

Seeing a lot of debate on the recent move to send ICE agents to assist TSA at airports It has made me think of this question Which would make you feel safer: boarding a plane where the passengers were security screened by TSA, or ICE? (i.e., who would do a more competent job?)

@gnoble79 @jedimarkus77 This should all be common knowledge by now, but since it clearly isn’t, I’ll do my part and repost this. Bravo sir, well put.

Private credit returns 11.5% on loans that yield 9.5%. Nobody asks how. I'll tell you how: Leverage. They take a portfolio of loans yielding 9.5%, lever it 2x, and the gross return doubles to 19%. Subtract financing costs and fees, hand the client 11.5%, and show them a chart with a line so smooth it would make Madoff jealous. That's the product Wall Street has been selling to pensions, endowments, insurance companies, and now your 401(k). They even gave it a nice name. "Private credit." There's a better name for it: volatility laundering. The returns aren't smooth because the risk is low. They're smooth because nobody is marking anything to market. The same people making the loans are the ones deciding what they're worth. When everything's going up, that's a feature. When it turns? It's a trapdoor. And we're watching the trapdoor open right now. Funds are gating redemptions across the industry. Loans are going from 100 cents on the dollar to zero in a single quarter. The biggest asset managers on earth are telling investors: "Sorry, you can't have your money back." And none of this should surprise anyone who's been paying attention. Every cycle produces the SAME SCHEME wearing a different outfit. Junk bonds in the 80s. Mortgage-backed securities in 2007. Both sold the identical promise - equity-like returns with bond-like stability. Both ended the same way. Private credit is the 2020s version. Bigger numbers. Fancier packaging. Same math. The leverage is the tell. Any time someone shows you returns that look too good for the underlying asset, there's leverage hiding somewhere in the structure. And leverage doesn't create returns... It amplifies outcomes - in both directions. What pisses me off is that the people running this know exactly what they're doing. The risk disclosures are 400 pages long. The gates are buried in footnotes. It's not technically illegal. But doing something because you can get away with it - not because it's right - is a special kind of rotten. After 2008, NOBODY went to jail. Banks paid fines that amounted to rounding errors on their balance sheets. The message was clear: heads you win, tails the taxpayer covers it. So of course they did it again. Why wouldn't they? And here's where the realist in me takes over from the idealist: They're not going to let this blow up cleanly. They NEVER do... The playbook is extend, pretend, and print. Special vehicles. Special accommodations. More liquidity injected into a system that's already drowning in it. Every time they paper over a crisis, they confirm the only trade that matters. Gold pulled back hard this week - from $5,000 to around $4,575. Every shakeout over the past two years has been a buying opportunity. The structural case (debasement, central bank accumulation, collapsing confidence in sovereign debt) hasn't weakened. It's accelerated. The worse private credit gets, the more they'll have to print. And the more they print, the HIGHER gold goes. It's not complicated. It's just math that most people don't want to accept.

@LukeGromen 5 highest inflation countries, 10y yields, and gold rise last 5y (data approximate): Arg: 33%, 14%, 3,844% Turk: 32%, 34%, 1,600% Venez: 682%, 10.4%, 3,000%+ Iran: 48%, N/A, 3,000%+ Angola: 13%, N/A, 300%+ And people still think higher U.S. rates will be bad for gold. 🤣

Has the Fed ever been hiking rates at the same time that it is growing its balance sheet (as it is presently doing via the latest version of "Not QE")? That seems contradictory (and inflationary.)

@KingKong9888 Maybe, but what is the GCC supposed to do? They don’t have a real army. They can’t go win the war. Give us $? We print $’s. Let us use their airspace and bases? We already do. What are they supposed to give us that they haven’t already?

This would be a smart move on Trump’s part if it is true.

@Osinttechnical At this point, each of these flights uses up about 1% of remaining JASSM inventory. Once it’s depleted in the next couple weeks, the U.S. produces enough JASSM’s to fly one of these bombers, once a week. That’s it.

USAF B-52, sporting a full load of JASSM cruise missiles, headed towards Iran.

@LukeGromen @HayekAndKeynes I find it hard to believe the 4-D chess plan was to leave Iran as the dominant power in the ME. And that’s exactly where this war is heading to. I actually think this might make the Shiites the cool Islam, and we could see young Muslims around the world turn from Sunni to Shiite.

@HayekAndKeynes As long as Fed buys basically the entire bond market, I agree We'll have succeeded in ending post-1971 structure of USD reserve status with this little operation. If that was the goal, then brilliant 4-D chess. If not, well...too late now. Should've thought of that earlier.

Trump needs to walk away now. Mission was to destroy nuke capacity and end funding of regional terrorism ✅ World doesn’t want to touch the straight of Hormuz. They will figure out it’s their problem now. It will take care of itself.

@MichaelRovers30 @donaldgorbachev @SouthAsiaIndex You can keep infighting for the next 1,300 years again if you want. But if you do the Jews are going to take most of the Sunni Middle East. Your choice.

@Chris_Repke @donaldgorbachev @SouthAsiaIndex Try to tell that to syrians and iraqis who faced genocides by iranian militias, Iran wants to take over the islamic world, they have been ruthless since 79, their clerics called sunnis infidels, they are extremists, women in iran got jailed for showing hair, they hate Arabs…etc

Just IN:— Saudi Arabia set to declare war against Iran if it targets any energy infrastructure in Saudi Arabia one more time. - Saudi media

@porterstansb Privacy. The govt has no business knowing what its citizens are doing as long as they aren’t breaking any laws.

I want everyone to remember that everything we are about to experience as a country was simple to avoid. We have failed at the basics of civilization, and so, we are going to be destroyed: 1. Don’t initiate violence. For the last 60 years, we’ve been the aggressor in every conflict. Doesn’t make us safer. 2. No representation without equity. When you can vote yourself my property without contributing yours, there is no liberty. 3. If you don’t kill the criminals, they will kill you. Empathy for victims. No mercy for perpetrators — or their families. Find a rope. And make their families pay reparations. Crime will disappear. 5. Citizenship must be earned: contribute to society, have children, pay taxes for 10 years, no criminals. Then you’re a citizen. 6. Everything you let the government do, will suck. Post office. Amtrak. Schools. Privatize all government functions with 10-year competitive bids. 7. Never allow the government to borrow money or print it. Where the government controls both the sword and the currency, there will be no freedom. What did I leave out?

@donaldgorbachev @SouthAsiaIndex Agree except MBS does have a choice. It’s a radical one, but it’s there. He could ally w/ Iran. Put aside theocratic differences and unite the Muslim world against the Epstein class. If Saudi did that, the rest of the Muslim world would go along too. And they’d win.

The five-second epistemology of the end of the monarchy. Saudi Arabia declaring war on Iran is the House of Saud signing its own death certificate and calling it a defense strategy. The CSIS piece already says it plainly — Iran has escalation dominance. The Gulf states are keenly aware that entering the fight would draw an even stronger Iranian reprisal against precisely those targets. And the United States could declare victory and go home, leaving Saudi Arabia to deal with the fallout.  That’s the trap. MBS has no choice and every choice is fatal. The theology is the architecture. The House of Saud is the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. Mecca and Medina. The theological legitimacy of the monarchy rests on the claim that this family protects Islam’s holiest sites. The family is about to declare war on a Shia Muslim nation on behalf of the United States and the evangelical Disney World. The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques joining the crusade. Larijani’s six-point letter to 1.8 billion Muslims just found its proof. The letter said the war is against Islam. Saudi Arabia declaring war on Iran on the American side is the confirmation. The Eastern Province is the detonator. The oil fields. Aramco’s headquarters. The historically Shia population that was demographically engineered to be diluted. Ras Tanura alone handles a significant share of Saudi Arabia’s approximately 7.5 million barrels per day of exports and was hit on the third day of the conflict.  A Saudi declaration of war gives Iran theological and strategic permission to activate the Eastern Province. Not invade it. Activate it. The Shia population that’s been suppressed for decades under a Sunni monarchy that just declared war on the largest Shia nation on earth on behalf of Christians. The monarchy doesn’t survive this. Not because Iran conquers Saudi Arabia. Because the declaration destroys the theological claim. The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques allying with the evangelical Disney World against a Muslim country — that’s the sentence that ends the custodianship. The 1.8 billion Muslims that Larijani’s letter addressed just watched the guardian of Mecca choose America over the ummah. The borders drawn by the British when they inherited the Ottoman Empire start dissolving the moment the theological legitimacy that held them dissolves. And MBS just dissolved it. Iran crossed a major line with its attacks on civilian and energy infrastructure. Saudis are understandably furious. Their military has the capacity to take the fight to the Iranians.  The capacity. The military capacity. Not the theological capacity. Not the political capacity. Not the capacity to survive what happens when you go to war against Iran and Iran targets every piece of energy infrastructure you have and the Strait stays closed and the oil can’t move and the economy collapses and the holy sites are guarded by a king who chose the crusade. The British drew the borders. The Americans armed the monarchy. The dispensationalist architecture built the evangelical Disney World. And now the monarchy declares war to protect the architecture that was never about protecting Mecca. It was about protecting the oil. The oil that’s plenty. The oil that can’t move. The oil that’s on the wrong side of a Strait that the king can’t open any more than the Navy can. The end of the monarchy isn’t a prediction. It’s a building inspection on a structure whose foundation just cracked. The Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques just chose a side that isn’t Islam. The 1.8 billion noticed.

If this escalation happens in 48 hrs, when the GCC countries that are currently Israeli/US lapdogs are decimated and their populace revolts, that’s a huge win for Iran. How does this help America? Shiite will become the cool Islam. Sunni will be synonymous w/jew, the Kmart Islam.

@biancoresearch Grab your rifle and go make Iran submit then.

Question for those who think Trump will TACO on Iran: what exactly does that look like? Declare victory and pull out? Then what? Iran walks away with de facto control over the Strait of Hormuz — the world’s most important energy chokepoint. That is not peace. That is Tehran holding a veto over the global economy. They would have the power to disrupt flows, keep oil prices elevated, punish the West, and extract concessions. And once you TACO under those conditions, the risk of a wider regional war probably goes up, not down, because Iran’s neighbors will not accept that new reality. If you want markets to recover and crude to settle down, the answer is not a face-saving exit. It is taking away Iran’s ability to coerce traffic through Hormuz. Until that changes, the risk premium stays.

In case you have not been keeping score the last 36 hours ...

@vaquerodepapel I don’t think Iran will mind though. He can go ahead and TACO. Go home, declare victory. That’s fine. Iran can keep playing with Israel 1v1 then.

Trump is gonna have a diarrhea melt down if Iran doesn't let him TACO.

@SantiagoAuFund Well when you say war with Iran, peace w/ Iran, sanctions, removing sanctions, balancing the budget, $200B military increase, focus on Ukraine, focus on China, focus on W. Hemisphere, and focus on Iran are all part of “the plan”, then sure, anything can be “the plan”.

Also remember, the country who has dominated the world for the last 80yrs and run by mad men has NO plan and has no idea what is going on… but Iran, who is not let by mad men, and whose navy and Air Force has been decimated, DO have a plan and it is going flawlessly…

@chrismartenson @vaquerodepapel My kids wishlist at Christmastime is more realistic than this garbage we put out. He may as well ask for a pony too.

Trump's demands are non-starters for Iran. It basically reads as "you agree to defang while we restock our offensive weapons to make another run at you later on."

@flyspider33 @omriceren So Lebanon and Iran teamed up to bomb Arkansas?

@Chris_Repke @omriceren See no, I think you're confused. When did Lebanon become part of Iran? When Iran decided to send their special forces group to provide training equipment and bombs including the manpower to bomb?

Huh. Fully operational IRBMs. I guess President Trump and U.S. defense officials had access to information regarding Iran's missile capabilities that was not available to leftwing tankies, New Right dipshits, and journalists.