Frank Penkala

This will age well, as truth tends to do. A daily inspiration and reminder to push back on the prevailing narratives to help others find humanity in an insane situation.

BREAKING. Thirty-six hours ago President Donald Trump said “obliterate.” This morning he said “productive conversations.” The question every trader, diplomat, and general is asking: what broke between Saturday night and Monday morning? Six things broke simultaneously. Not one of them was Iranian. First. The bill arrived. The Pentagon requested over $200 billion in supplemental funding. The war cost $11.3 billion in six days, $16.5 billion in twelve. At $1.38 billion per day and accelerating, congressional resistance to the supplemental is real. The money that was supposed to fund “days not weeks” now needs a vote that may not pass. Second. The Fed killed the rate-cut thesis. On March 18, the Federal Reserve held rates at 3.5 to 3.75 percent and revised its 2026 PCE inflation forecast to 2.7 percent from 2.4, citing the Iran war energy shock. The dot plot shows one cut in all of 2026, down from two. Every basis point of delayed easing is pain for housing, credit, and the Magnificent Seven. The war that was supposed to demonstrate strength is demonstrating inflation. Third. The allies revolted politely. Twenty-two countries signed up to coordinate on Hormuz. Zero committed a warship during combat. Japan is releasing strategic reserves. South Korea’s Kospi has fallen 12 percent. Europe’s gas surged 35 percent after Qatar’s LNG was knocked offline & declared force majeure up to 5 years. Trump called NATO “cowards” and got a press release. The coalition of the willing is a coalition of the waiting. Fourth. TSMC sent the signal. Taiwan imports nearly 97 percent of its energy. Its LNG reserves cover 11 days. Qatar supplies a third of global helium, which TSMC needs for chip fabrication. The helium is bottled behind a closed strait. Every Nvidia GPU, every Apple chip, every AI cluster depends on a fab in Hsinchu counting its gas in single-digit days. The Magnificent Seven have shed hundreds of billions as energy rotation crushes tech. Fifth. Birol named the damage. The IEA chief told Australia this morning that 40 energy assets across nine countries are severely damaged, global oil supply has fallen 11 million barrels per day, the crisis exceeds both 1970s shocks combined, and no country is immune. He named fertilisers and helium as interrupted flows. The man who runs global energy security called the war Trump started the worst energy crisis in modern history. Sixth. The midterms. Gas prices are up 93 cents per gallon. Sixty-six percent of Americans call this a war of choice. Sixty percent disapprove. Fifty-seven percent say it is going badly. The numbers that matter in Washington are not barrels per day. They are approval ratings in swing states where voters fill their tanks every Tuesday. Six pressures. One post. President Trump did not discover diplomacy. He discovered arithmetic. The 48-hour ultimatum was a threat. The 5-day pause is a confession that the threat’s consequences were worse than its target. Destroying power plants would have sealed the strait permanently, triggered Ghalibaf’s promise to “irreversibly destroy” Gulf desalination and energy infrastructure, crashed TSMC’s supply chain, spiked inflation past 3 percent, and handed the midterms to the opposition on a platter of $7 gasoline. The pause is real. The relief is not. The strait is still closed. The 40 assets are still damaged. The fertiliser is still blocked. The planting window is still closing. The five-day clock is already ticking. The molecules do not negotiate. The molecules wait. Full deep dive analysis: open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

LOL. Trump is now PRETENDING to negotiate with Iran so he can say they've agreed to almost everything, in order to push oil prices lower for a few more days. His new "5-day" delay lines up perfectly with a planned U.S. Marines landing assault after the close of markets on Friday, at which time Trump will claim Iran backed out of the (imaginary) negotiations, and thus we had to land Marines to take the Straight by force. That's what's shaping up here. Don't be fooled by Trump's false claims of negotiations. It's all theater for gullible Fox News idiots.

Is the world really going to have to burn because the USA can't impeach a president?

Why can Israeli media say it but not you, @abcnews?🤔

@traderhc Gold falling + extreme fear = liquidity crisis, not flight to safety. When margin calls hit, even safe assets get dumped for cash. The dollar strength confirms it - everyone needs dollars to cover positions, not protection.

The former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent, just issued a direct call to the American people: “I will not in good conscience send young men and women off to die on foreign battlefields. We’re at a critical juncture. We need to let our leaders hear that we do not support this war.” This is not a protester. This is not a Democrat. This is not the media. This is the man whose entire job was to assess threats to America. Who confirmed Iran had no nuclear program. Who confirmed there was no intelligence of an imminent threat. Who confirmed the war was started due to Israel lobby pressure. Who confirmed the investigation into Charlie Kirk’s death was stopped. Who resigned rather than be complicit. And now he is asking the American people to speak. Call your representative. Call your senator. Make them hear you. 14 Americans dead. $21 billion spent. An F-35 hit for the first time in history. Funerals now secret. Casualty counts hidden. Zero allied warships. The world walking away. The man who knew the most just told you what he thinks. Now it’s your turn.

Qatar Gas CEO : We incurred a $20 billion loss at the facility we built for $26 billion two years ago.

Oil shocks absolutely hit families — agreed. But oil spikes are also a scarcity/supply story while the world still runs on oil. If we constrain supply before we’ve built the replacements at scale, we can actually increase volatility and inflation during the transition. So I’m curious how you see a real Green Industrial Revolution working in practice — not just “more renewables,” but the full stack: power + transmission, manufacturing (transformers, cable, heat pumps, industrial equipment), materials (steel/cement inputs), and transport/logistics (freight, ports, trucking/rail electrification). Canada’s usual failure mode is program-by-program spending that creates bureaucracy and doesn’t build fast enough. Biden’s IRA approach actually moved steel and concrete because it used automatic production credits / predictable incentives to mobilize private buildout at scale. Is that the model you mean? And what reforms would you make so we can actually build this stuff fast enough to lower costs — rather than sliding into scarcity-by-process and higher prices?

Another two Canadian charities have had their registration revoked after the CRA found they were using donor funds to support the Israeli military. zurl.co/GqkJi

🇮🇷🇶🇦🇺🇸 That orange glowing hellscape you’re looking at is Ras Laffan in Qatar. A complex one third the size of New York City. The world’s largest LNG production facility. 20 percent of global LNG supply up burning so bright and hot it would give Hades a run for its money. Force majeure declared with buyers across Asia and Europe scrambling. One analyst (Ira Joseph, global fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia) said it’s hard to see Qatar back in the market before mid-year and even that is optimistic. Your gas bill in Berlin, Seoul, Tokyo, London it just soared tonight. This is what Netanyahu’s 40 year dream looks like at ground zero. A port city burning orange on the Persian Gulf at midnight, reflected in the water, cranes silhouetted against the fire, the world’s energy infrastructure going up in literal smoke, in real time. Israel bombed South Pars this morning. Iran named Ras Laffan by mid-afternoon and by nightfall it was on fire. The Epstein coalition started this. The rest of the world is paying for their biblical levels of arrogance.

Joe Kent's wife Shannon was killed by an ISIS suicide bomb in Syria in 2019. She was a Navy cryptologist with JSOC, fluent in four languages, a mother of two. He buried her at Arlington. Then he spent 7 years turning his grief into a career fighting the wars that took her. This is a 20-year Green Beret. 11 combat tours. CIA paramilitary. The man Trump trusted to run the National Counterterrorism Center. He's not a pundit giving takes from a studio. He knows what a flag-draped coffin looks like up close. 170,000 people liked that post in two hours. 12 million saw it. But the number that matters is two. That's how many sons are growing up without their mother because of a war just like this one. When the person with the most skin in the game tells you it's wrong, you listen.

The world's worst contributor to antisemitism is lecturing Canada's government on how to prevent it. Israel's genocidal regime wants to crush our constitutional rights. It could not care less about real antisemitism.

🇺🇸🔥IT’S HAPPENING: Carrie Prejean — longtime Trump ally and supporter for nearly 20 years — just said this: “MAGA is dead. Deader than dead. We do not recognize President Donald J. Trump anymore.” “I think we are an occupied nation. A foreign country has occupied our government. This President is being influenced by a foreign government.” This is not a Democrat. This is not a Never Trumper. This is someone who called Trump a dear friend for two decades. Chris Murphy said Israel forced our hand. Marjorie Taylor Greene said she no longer believes Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize. Rand Paul is exposing missing border wall billions. Thomas Massie is threatening to read Epstein names on the House floor. The Christians booed Ted Cruz off stage. Joe Rogan said Trump has nothing to lose because death is imminent. The coalition that put Trump in office is not just fracturing. It is publicly declaring itself dead. “An occupied nation.” Those are the words of a 20-year ally. Never stop connecting the dots.

The representative of a genocidal apartheid state is pressuring Ottawa to “limit certain ‘freedoms.’” That’s a direct quote. Israel is the single biggest threat to civil liberties in Canada.

BREAKING: Netanyahu confirmed alive after being pictured in a restaurant in Tel Aviv with his good friend Charlie Kirk

Data centers are already here, and they’re here to stay. They’re only going to get bigger, use vastly more power, and require millions of tonnes of copper at a scale we simply do not have the capacity to mine yet… We looked at one Microsoft baby data center and found that it used 2,177 tonnes of copper. This was just one tiny data center. No one has found as much copper as the Ivanhoe group, but we cannot rest on our laurels. We must keep discovering new deposits, building new mines and producing more copper if we can hope to keep GDP growth at 2% and build a better world for our children and grandchildren… Our gratitude, as always, to @BMOmetalsmining in its 35th edition for providing a tier one platform to discuss what’s really needed.

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This is What It Means to Have Balls It’s a kind of psychopathy. That’s the only word for it. They are killing people wantonly. They are bombing schoolgirls — 150 of them. Not combatants. Children. And the machinery of Western power grinds on as if this is simply the cost of doing business. Thirty years. Thirty years of this madness. And it has cost us trillions. Not billions — trillions. Trillions bled out of the American body while the roads crack and the bridges rust and the living standards of ordinary Americans stagnate or fall. Netanyahu is a madman. That is not hyperbole — it is a clinical description of a man who operates outside every boundary of law, humanity, and restraint. And Israel, under his direction, has become what it has become: a rogue, murderous state that kills with impunity because it has calculated, correctly, that Washington will cover every crime, fund every atrocity, and veto every consequence. Trump is an utter disgrace to this nation. Let that be stated plainly. Every word of America First was a lie. Every promise of restraint, of ending the forever wars, of putting the American people before foreign entanglements — inverted. Reversed. Betrayed. He did the exact opposite of what he told the American people he would do. The exact opposite. Congress? Dead. It does not matter whether it is Johnson or Schumer. These people are useless. They are on the Zionist lobby’s payroll and they have been for decades. They have squandered our wealth. They have squandered our strength. They have mortgaged the future of this country to a foreign policy that serves no American interest whatsoever. Ask yourself the simple question: why does China have 50,000 kilometers of high-speed rail — roughly 30,000 miles — and the United States has not one mile? Why is Chinese infrastructure advancing at a pace that would have seemed impossible a generation ago while American infrastructure is literally falling apart? The answer is not complicated. China does not go to war. The United States is in nonstop, undeclared war. War that is never voted on, never debated, never honestly accounted for. The cost is not just money. It is freedom. It is the steady transformation of this republic into a military state — one that funds foreign carnage while its own people live on crumbling foundations, both literal and figurative. This is madness. It is shocking, disgraceful, and it is bankrupting the United States, morally and financially. And Trump lied. Every word of it. Every last word.

We are sending our kids to school to memorize facts that AI can retrieve in 0.3 seconds. We're grading them on essays that AI writes better than their teachers. We're preparing them for jobs that won't exist by the time they graduate. The entire education system is training humans to compete with machines at what machines do best. That's not education. That's sabotage. The schools that survive will teach thinking, not memorizing. Creating, not repeating. Discerning, not obeying. Every other school is a museum that doesn't know it yet.

My typical playbook is to sell geopolitical spikes. This time feels different. Iran striking its regional neighbours was unexpected and massively escalatory, putting oil infrastructure at risk and making insurance on vessels through the Strait for now uneconomic. Without decisive regime change it’s reasonable to expect an enduring risk premium in the oil price, greater than what we've historically seen, and especially with the “twilight of shale” and rapid OPEC spare capacity exhaustion happening in real-time. For equities this is coinciding with a massive rotation out of tech/software into hard assets like energy (32% of the S&P500 now chasing <6%), with the energy sector still out-of-favour and under-owned. What to own? Long-life, high margin, low growth, high free cashflow assets in politically safe jurisdictions 🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦.