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Every day I assume every position I have is wrong.
- Paul Tudor Jones
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Compoundoor
347 posts
@TMTLongShort It’s a bad time to be long risk anywhere in the world. Long relative value US vs ROW is not actionable.
Tick tock, we’re in the timeboxing problem and Pandora’s box is wide open, going to take some real wizardry to close it back up with a tidy bow.
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We are going to run it so hot into midterms.
Don’t let panicans (poors) convince you otherwise.
This is also a bad time to be short US vs ROW.
Risk parity is broken for now. Geopol risk is underpriced. Govt intervention will go up not down.
Navigate accordingly.
🫡
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@TMTLongShort @nokoveve Make up my mind if they aren’t intertwined. Are Druck and Thiel also geopolitics grandmasters but masquerading as successful fund managers unlike gigachad Bessent?
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Balaji is wrong and Zeihan is wrong.
Systems are reflexive.
Balaji keenly observed the deterioration of America and formed a view that was correct in its cynicism at that point in time.
But that same observed rot is what galvanized someone like Bessent to step up and serve. It’s what convinces people like Thiel and Druck in the background to take their time to help construct a plan. It’s why people like Emil are in government right now.
I don’t disagree with Balajis framing and I appreciated Zeihan’s framing too before he went off the deep end with TDS.
Geopol is more complex than tech and crypto. For one thing the variables are not constant and for another finance, tech, psychology, game theory, industrial realities, domestic politics and military doctrine all interplay within the broader chess board.
But more important than anything else is understanding risk-tolerance and capabilities of the people with the levers of power. Balaji is starting from the assumption of status quo and WSJ framing and that is inherently flawed.
Balaji@balajis
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@TMTLongShort Isn’t the ability to retain and grow institutional capital at a macro fund largely dictated by one’s prowess to extract alpha from ambiguous cross-asset and market relationships? A skill that would be directly transferable to being adept at geopolitics.
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@ratiospreader Your first problem is misconstruing IQ with ability to retain institutional capital
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@westermice @TMTLongShort Yeah, because day 1 executive orders never get signed.
Ukraine is different. Trump thought he could push a button and claim victory. Narcissism.
Decoupling requires a prolonged game of chicken and we don’t have a history of having the stones or pain tolerance to follow thru.
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@ratiospreader @TMTLongShort It doesn’t matter who is next . They will continue the same policies. Biden continued the trade war. Trump continued Ukraine war when he promised to end it when he came into office. Usg has permanent interests regardless of party
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That’s the beauty of the plan. They don’t get that choice. It’s abrupt. It forces them to completely shift their economy away from China and whoever is in Chinas sphere including Russia.
In or out. There’s no half assed placate Trump and then turn on us in a decade.
You choose dollars or yuan.
F-35s or J-20s
And if you say it’s not fair… of course it’s fucking not.
We are done playing fair. We are done trying to keep the veneer of benevolence.
Ask Maduro or the Ayatollahs 🫡
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@westermice @TMTLongShort Not winning an election if we’re throwing ourselves into a self inflicted recession imo
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@ratiospreader @TMTLongShort Continuity of agenda . New admin will continue the work
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@TMTLongShort For conversation sake, say you lose midterms, is it burn the boats Valhalla decoupling gambit or pack it up and focus on 2028?
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@ratiospreader We have to take economic medicine regardless. Getting through midterms is easier than you think. Bribes are coming. Polling is wrong.
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@TMTLongShort Things that really don’t matter now for 500.
Canada got more oil, LNG and fertilizer economic leverage back due to that Persian Gulf 4D masterclass as you call it.
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Are you paying attention anon 😉
First Squawk@FirstSquawk
US AND MEXICO LAUNCH REVIEW OF TRADE DEAL WITH CANADA
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@TMTLongShort Ser. Maybe you think critically.
If Kharg was always the game, you approach this whole thing in reverse.
Spec ops infiltrate Kharg.
GCCs and military allies united to keep flows moving thru Hormuz.
Air strikes across Iran to split their attention.
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Every single one of these troops will be deployed before a single American is boots on the ground ex-special forces for limited ops like uranium retrieval or Kharg.
Think critically people. I’m begging you.
It’s too early in the morning for this shit.
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@FuzzyFace56 @TMTLongShort Don’t be crazy. They’re busy eating ribeyes, lobster and ordering pizzas.
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@ratiospreader @TMTLongShort Who couldnt see this comming? You think folks in the pentagon just do nothing all day?
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@TMTLongShort Who do you think is going to eat oil
and fertilizer spikes? Or are Americans going to just stop consuming? Because we have a long history of that.
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@ratiospreader Ser pull up bbg what are you talking about…
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Let the record show that I anticipate a red wave in the upcoming midterms as bribes are coming and voters in America really only care about how rich they feel.
Polling doesn’t reflect this currently but will fairly soon as tax refunds and then bribes hit checking accounts. x.com/goodalexander/…
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@TMTLongShort You sure you can make that guarantee that this was game theorized? Or did the admin think they could press bets after one shotting Venezuela?
Your thesis relies heavily on that Trump has conceded the midterms and is all in now. Which is more plausible than the brain trust in DC
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Since the panicans are out in force this morning let me explain why the probability of sustained high oil prices aren’t likely.
Irrespective of strategic reserves let’s play a quick game of “how would someone not retarded approach the problem”.
The problem with “experts” is they think in binaries.
Current narrative is as follows:
A. Americans have no tolerance for boots on the ground
B. Therefore Trump is unable to fully secure the Strait
C. Therefore zero oil will flow because even a single strike on a tanker is too high of a risk
D. Therefore there is a high risk of oil > $150 which would crash the global economy
Instead I’m begging you guys to think creatively for once in your goddam lives.
Oil tankers typically have a crew of 20 - 30 people.
On a normal day roughly 140 tankers pass through the strait carrying 20 million barrels
Currently there are something like 700 tankers waiting to transit and transit flows have dropped by 90%+
So let’s think forward two weeks which is well within the strategic reserves window for most major economies
The U.S. and Israel will have saturated Irans military and IRGC targets and will have shifted to micro targeting residents of anyone associated with the regime
They will actively be encouraging people to rise up and there’s a good chance they will.
Now let’s assume they don’t. That’s fine.
20 people per tanker x 140 tankers = 3k American soldiers who you can swap in to run the tankers and engineer flotillas ten at a time with two destroyers alongside them and an F18 overhead to shoot down any drones using lasers and CWIS
We have roughly 90 destroyers and cruisers and another 30 LCS.
And again we don’t need to ensure all the oil flows. Only the oil going to our allies and then set price controls.
6m of those 20m barrels goes to China. You tell China that’s their problem.
And meanwhile you take Kharg obviously.
This is just one of fifty game plans you can come up with. Are there flaws? Probably.
I’m a tech analyst not a fucking military planner.
But I can guarantee you there are whole teams of people with expertise in Washington who thought this far ahead before taking on an operation where the enemy literally had one card to play which is to throttle oil flows.
Will oil prices stay elevated? Very possibly.
Will Trump taco because this is existential for the economy and withdraw without regime change? Absolutely the fuck not.
🫡
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@TMTLongShort So it was Bessent who didn’t max out the SPR in advance of this 4D tactical masterclass culminating in a singular chokepoint in the Strait of Hormuz that even a decimated Iran can keep destabilized for years 😏
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Since people continue to use the 4D chess retort disparagingly I would suggest for your own mental sanity you should just make believe Bessent is president and Trump is his advisor whenever you try to analyze the admin going forward.
The “Middle East experts” are the same 120 IQ class of people as the economists who predicted tariff impacts… midwits who think specialization bestows predictive capability.
There are plenty of high IQ people in Washington….hell once upon a time the CIA optimized recruiting based on IQ….and they have been perpetually handicapped by retards at the top.
Trump might be a retard but he’s a retard who defers to people he trusts on topics he’s unsure of.
Bessent is president 🫡
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@EnergyAntonio @TMTLongShort The strawman is the time boxing of all of this unfolding. Admin is forced into a 2 minute drill for everything to conveniently fall into place or else there will be an inevitable TACO folding situation.
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Iran is about China, but not in the childish “cut off one supplier and Beijing collapses” sense. It is about engineered scarcity. If this thesis is right, Washington is not stumbling into Middle Eastern chaos. It is accepting, and perhaps courting, a world of higher energy prices, higher fertilizer prices, disrupted shipping, and recessionary pressure because the United States is one of the few powers positioned to survive that environment better than its rivals.
Yes, the Gulf Arabs will resent it. Yes, Europe will hate it. Yes, global growth will get smashed and Russia will benefit at the margin. None of that disproves the logic. The point is relative leverage, not universal prosperity. If Hormuz is compromised and Iranian production is damaged, Asia’s import-dependent economies become more desperate for substitute barrels, maritime protection, and reliable trade corridors. Energy security stops being an abstract macro variable and becomes a weapon. So does shipping security. So does fertilizer. So does food.
That is where the real pressure on China comes in. Not because China cannot physically keep people alive on bare caloric minimums, but because regime stability is not built on subsistence rice. It is built on a population, especially an urban and coastal middle class, accustomed to rising living standards, protein consumption, consumer abundance, and the implicit promise that the Party can keep delivering all of it. Strip out reliable imports of feed, soy, meat inputs, and energy, and the issue is not mass starvation. The issue is degradation. Scarcity. Inflation. Friction. A slow reduction in the standard of life that underwrites consent.
And in that world, food exporters and energy exporters hold the knife. The United States sits on both. Brazil matters too, but Brazil is not untouchable in a truly gloves-off contest. So the thesis is not that Iran is a sideshow. It is that Iran is the mechanism: the pressure point through which Washington can raise the cost of modern life for everyone, then exploit the fact that America remains one of the last major powers with the resource base to feed, fuel, and protect the system everyone else still depends on.
That is why, under this view, the chaos is not a policy failure. It is the policy.
Or, our ruling class is retarded and didn’t think this through at all. Coin toss.
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@TMTLongShort And all imports to the United States halt immediately and we’re back in the Stone Age? Is the leverage in the room with us right now?
Sure hope we can subsist on potatoes and artificially dyed food.
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Destroying Iranian oil infrastructure is absolutely harmful to the American consumer but before you start getting your panties in a twist remember that Trump has levers he can pull that would push the pain towards Europe and China.
This includes preventing LNG exports, capping excess pricing by producers, diverting VZ supply, and releasing SPR.
The incentive is to drive a meaningful divergence in energy cost for industry between the U.S. and its closest allies vs those it’s trying to teach a lesson to.
Remember how screwed German industry was when they lost access to Russian gas and chemical companies had to divert production to Louisiana.
Now think about the setting going into the Xi meeting in April.
Xi will say “you need us more than we need you… we really only care about retaining trade access to Europe anyways”
And Europe will say “fuck the orange man, Xi is nicer to us”
And Trump will say “bet, I’m going to fuck all y’alls access to energy for a generation and withdraw dollar liquidity while I’m at… have fun standing up enough solar panels while you have rolling blackouts 😘”
And that my friends is what you call manufacturing leverage. 🫡
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@TMTLongShort Seriously the copium is uncanny. How many times do you have to shift the goal posts to just frame up the thinking as “maybe not retarded”
Trigger an oil black swan event to ignite inflation into AI driven unemployment spike, so you can’t cut. But at least LMT takes a meeting. 😂
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Do you see how steps are being taken to ensure the American economy is on the right footing if China attempts to go kinetic?
Accelerate AI spend and you incentivize a faster TSMC buildout in AZ
Provide a war and you build enough support to accelerate munitions production
Start a tariff kerfufle and you get China to set off a race to reshore REE supply chains
Maybe they are retarded… but have you considered what it means if they’re not?
Lockheed Martin@LockheedMartin
We have agreed to quadruple critical munitions production. As a result of President @realDonaldTrump's leadership, we began this work months ago with @SecWar Hegseth and Deputy Secretary Feinberg.
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