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The Swamp’s year ends tonight. Yours could get interesting depending on where the money lands.

Every good nightclub has two things: people with money and a bouncer deciding who gets in. The Pentagon has an enormous amount of the first. Congress has been working on the second. And a handful of mining and manufacturing companies could find themselves inside a very profitable party.

America spent decades convincing other countries that its friendship was worth having. Then its ambassador to Greece allegedly explained, over dinner, that their governments were replaceable. Beijing couldn’t have written a better sales pitch. And it didn’t even have to pick up the check.

In 1884, a dollar bought roughly what it had bought before the Civil War. Try imagining that today: twenty years after a 75% inflationary surge, the price level had retraced the entire move. America once had inflation that went away.

The most dangerous voter in American politics this November may be the Republican who does absolutely nothing. He doesn’t have to switch parties. He doesn’t have to put a Mamdani sign on his lawn, discover a sudden enthusiasm for socialism, or start watching MSNBC. He merely has to stay home. And the first bits of election data suggest quite a few of them may be thinking about doing exactly that.

Two superpowers guard the gate. The Houthis hold the key.

Oil at $105 is bad enough. The trouble is that $105 is the price everyone can see. If you actually need physical crude delivered to a refinery, the market is telling a nastier story. Cargo premiums are rising, diesel has traded at the equivalent of roughly $180 a barrel, and crack spreads have blown out to extraordinary levels. The Iran war’s economic damage was delayed by reserves, rerouting and extra production. It wasn’t avoided. Now the price behind the price is starting to hit home.

Bruce Yandle’s Baptists wanted to save your soul. His bootleggers wanted to save their margins. Forty years later, Silicon Valley has rebuilt the arrangement for artificial intelligence: the safety crowd supplies the sermon, Big Tech collects the profits, and DC builds the moat.

America can pump record amounts of oil and still get crushed by gasoline prices. That sounds contradictory until you remember one inconvenient fact: you can’t pour crude oil into a Ford’s gas tank. The real shortage is increasingly happening one step downstream.

I got the Fed call wrong because I was watching the wrong Fed. The Federal Open Market Committee doesn’t meet in Washington 8 times a year. It trades every day. By the time Kevin Warsh raised rates Wednesday, the bond market had already made the decision for him.

Breaking up is easy when it’s only about flags, parliaments, and national pride. It gets harder when somebody asks who owns the debt, who funds the deficits, and what currency everyone plans to use on Monday morning.

For years, Silicon Valley told investors there was no price too high for artificial intelligence. Spend the trillion. Build the data centers. Buy the chips. Drain the grid. Now, suddenly, the same crowd wants to slow down — for humanity’s sake, naturally. Funny how existential caution arrived just as the bills came due.

Rome collected tribute from its protectorates. Washington prefers LNG contracts, tariffs, and factories. Different empire, same arrangement.

Saudi Arabia built the East-West Pipeline to escape the Strait of Hormuz. But once Hormuz closed, the bypass became indispensable. And anything indispensable eventually becomes a target.

Pete Hegseth and Scott Bessent are both fighting battles that are going badly. But only one man has the luxury of arguing about the score. The Pentagon runs on politics and narrative. The Treasury runs on prices. And prices are becoming very inconvenient for Bessent.

For decades, the surest trade in the labor market was long college degrees and short manual work. That trade is reversing. And like most crowded trades, the people caught on the wrong side are discovering that yesterday’s prestige offers no protection.

The media saw bad meals aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. The sea saw something else entirely: too many missions, too few ships, and 35 years of neglected American naval power.

Jeff Bezos built Amazon by selling books. Thirty-two years later, his company is buying old ones by the thousand, chopping off their spines, scanning their pages, and throwing what remains in the trash.

I went to Avignon expecting medieval architecture. Instead, I found one of the clearest explanations of fiscal dominance ever built.

When Madrid issued an order that violated Basque law, the answer was magnificently polite: We obey, but we do not comply. John Adams saw the genius immediately.

The United States controls the world’s financial plumbing. Iran sits beside the world’s most important oil chokepoint. Now each side is trying to weaponize what it controls.

Oil is a thing. Copper is a thing. Gold is a thing. A 20-year Treasury is a promise. In August, the market made its preference painfully obvious.