Olav Chen

Price increases since the start of the Iran war... European Natural Gas: +85% Heating Oil: +80% Brent Crude Oil: +54% Urea: +48% WTI Crude Oil: +46% Gasoline: +44% Diesel: +42% Sulfur: +25% Coal: +24% Fertilizer: +23% Palm Oil: +13% US Natural Gas: +8% Iron Ore: +7% Rice: +7%

Sixteen years ago, one man stood alone on a grassy hill at a music festival in Washington State, USA, and started dancing by himself. People glanced over and looked away. Some laughed. His roommate leaned in and warned him people were filming him. He did not stop. Then one stranger got up and joined him. Then another. Then the hillside tipped. Within minutes, hundreds of people were sprinting from across the field to be part of something that, thirty seconds earlier, had been one man being laughed at in a field. Someone filming from higher up the hill said quietly: "See what one man can do. One man can change the world." The clip spread across the internet in 2009. Entrepreneur Derek Sivers played it at a TED conference to explain how movements actually begin. Not with the first person brave enough to start, he argued, but with the first person willing to join them. Collin Wynter, the man dancing alone, later said he had no idea he had done anything special. He was just tired of watching everyone sit still.

Every time oil prices surged 50%+ above trend, a recession followed. Every. Single. Time. We just crossed that threshold again. This isn't a prediction. It's history rhyming.

📊Evolución de los países mas endeudados. 👇

Don Tzu: You can’t lose if you don’t have a goal.

Blir det renteheving i Norge i 2026? 📈🇳🇴

dn.no/marked/wall-st… 👇

Hvor er oljeprisen ved utgangen av mars? 🛢️📈

Everyone is talking about energy and oil. Here is matching oil type, supplier and buyer as illustrated. More featured on today's Chartbook Top Links in the comment below.

Human population density around the world. 📽: Tyler Morgan-Wall

Blir det Norgespris på drivstoff? ⛽️🛢️

dn.no/bors/wall-stre… 👇

The Strait of Hormuz was not closed by missiles. It was closed by seven insurance circulars. On March 1st and 2nd, seven of twelve P&I clubs covering 90% of global tonnage cancelled war risk coverage across the Persian Gulf. Transits collapsed from 138 vessels per day to fewer than 3. The US can destroy Iran's entire military apparatus. It cannot compel European actuaries to underwrite the voyage. But here is the part that should keep every allocator awake tonight. CNBC confirmed on March 11th that Iran continues shipping crude to China through the exact waters Western insurers declared unnavigable. Shadow fleet tankers broadcast "CHINA OWNER" on AIS transponders. Iran sells 80 to 90% of its crude to Beijing. Attacking those cargoes would be self-defunding for the autonomous IRGC commands that depend on that revenue to operate. The seven P&I clubs did not close the Strait for China. They closed it for everyone except China. The US responded with a $20 billion DFC reinsurance facility. It covers 5.7% of the estimated $352 billion insurance gap. It excludes P&I liability, the mechanism that actually shut the strait. Zero vessels have transited under DFC coverage since March 6th. No sovereign has ever reopened a war-zone shipping lane through government insurance during active combat. Not once. Markets price this as a 4 to 8 week disruption. Red Sea premiums remain 4 to 6 times elevated after 26 months. Solvency II mechanically prevents rapid reinstatement. The actuarial reality is 6 to 18 months after hostilities end. That gap between military timelines and insurance timelines is where China's compound advantage accumulates, quarter after quarter. And the compounding runs across six domains simultaneously. 1.39 billion barrels of crude stockpiles. 3.89 terawatts of installed power. Over 1,000 gigawatts of solar. 295,000 industrial robots installed in a single year. 90% of global rare earth processing. DeepSeek achieving frontier AI performance at one-sixth the cost. Meanwhile 400 Tomahawks were fired in 72 hours. 10% of the Navy's inventory. Heritage Foundation projects US munitions exhausted in 25 days against China. THAAD interceptors were moved from South Korea to the Middle East on March 10. The rare earth magnets needed to build replacements are controlled by Beijing. Export restrictions in force since April 2025. But the fortress has fractures that its admirers refuse to discuss. Iran's Mosaic Doctrine is splintering. Foreign Minister Araghchi admitted his military units are "independent and somehow isolated." CSIS confirms Chinese commercial vessels have not received safe passage guarantees. Over 50 Chinese ships stranded. At least 10 attacked. Shadow crude flows through. Legitimate Chinese shipping gets hit. Both are true simultaneously. Augmented government debt: 126.6% of GDP. Births in 2025: 7.92 million, the lowest since 1949. Working-age population shrinking 6.6 million per year. Automation offsets roughly a quarter of the manufacturing gap. The services sector remains nearly untouched. Three pillars of the fortress are structurally sound. Two are weaker than claimed. One is actively undermining itself. The alpha is not in the thesis. It is in the space between the strongest and weakest pillars, where consensus diverges furthest from reality. Full 11,000+ word institutional analysis on my Substack. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

Whatever happens in the Strait of Hormuz, energy markets have been changed for ever econ.st/4s6Srbx