Fraunces Tavern.

Fraunces Tavern, Credit: Sean Ring

It's still there. Still serving. There's a portrait of Washington in the window and a bronze plaque on the wall. Tourists snap a photo and move on. They have no idea what happened inside.

Most folks assume it was a victory bash. That the general and his men drank the place dry after beating the British.

That's a great story. It's just the wrong tavern, and the wrong night.

What happened here was quieter. And, I think, far greater.

The Room That Fell Silent

The date was December 4, 1783.

The war was won. The Treaty of Paris was signed. Nine days earlier, the last British troops had sailed out of New York Harbor. The city was finally free.

Washington asked his officers to meet him upstairs, in the Long Room. Fewer than 30 came.

He didn't give a speech. He couldn't.

He raised a single glass of wine and managed one sentence: “With a heart full of love and gratitude I now take leave of you.”

Then he stopped. He couldn't go on.

The only man who wrote it down was Colonel Benjamin Tallmadge, who ran Washington's spy ring. He described the general as “suffused in tears.” One by one, Washington embraced every officer in the room. He started with Henry Knox. Nobody spoke. Grown men in uniform wept and didn't bother to hide it.

The Tallmadge Memorial outside Fraunces Tavern, Credit: Sean Ring

Then he walked out, down to the ferry, and left.

No toast list. No drinking contest. Just goodbye.

The Man Who Handed It Back

Washington had an army. It loved him. It had just beaten the most powerful empire on earth. Congress was broke, weak, and unpopular. The soldiers hadn't been paid.

Every incentive pointed one way: keep the sword. Take the country. Make yourself king.

Throughout history, the man who controls the guns keeps the power. They rarely give it back. History is a graveyard of generals who “saved” their nations and then ran them into the ground.

Washington did the opposite.

He rode to Annapolis. On December 23, 1783, he stood before Congress and resigned his commission. He gave the power back to the people. Then he went home to Mount Vernon to farm.

As the story goes, King George III heard what Washington planned to do and said that if he actually did it, he'd be “the greatest man in the world.”

He did it. Twice, in fact. He'd walk away from the presidency, too.

As far as history is concerned, only one other man did that: Cincinnatus. He was the Roman farmer who took command in a crisis, won, and then gave up the power the moment the job was done. For 2,000 years it was a legend. Washington made it real.

The Bill Worth Paying

Now for the party you were promised, because there was one. It just came 4 years later.

By September 1787, the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia was almost finished. The hard fighting over the new government was done. The men who built the republic were about to sign it and go home.

So they threw Washington a farewell dinner at the City Tavern.

The First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry hosted. These were the same volunteer horsemen who'd ridden with Washington years before. Now they cut loose.

The bar bill survived. Pepperdine University professor Gordon Lloyd dug it out of the archives. For 55 gentlemen, the tab read like this:

54 bottles of Madeira. 60 bottles of claret. 8 of whiskey. 22 of porter. 8 of hard cider. 12 of beer. And 7 big bowls of punch.

Friggin’ legends!

That's more than two bottles of wine per man, and we haven't even counted the punch.

At the bottom, the tavern keeper added one more line. Breakage. They'd smashed the glasses.

In today's money, the whole night ran north of $15,000.

Three days later, they signed the Constitution.

Two Bills, Both Worth It

So there are two bills in this story, and the country paid both gladly.

The first came due at Fraunces. It was paid in tears, in a silent room, by men who'd given eight years and… nearly… their lives. That was the cost of winning.

The second came due in Philadelphia. The men paid that bill in Madeira and broken glass because they had just built something that had never existed before. That was the reward for winning.

But there was a third bill. The one Washington refused to hand the country. The crown.

That's the bill that would have cost everything. America would’ve had a king instead of a president, a dynasty instead of a republic. He looked at it, and he said no. Then he went home to his farm.

Even with my sympathy for monarchy (there’s only one head to cut off!), I must admit Washington’s actions make me incredibly proud.

Wrap Up

We spend a lot of time in the Rude pointing out where our leaders loot the till and call it public service. We're right to. The looting is real, and you see it more clearly than the herd does.

But it's worth remembering, especially now, that it doesn't have to be that way. It wasn't always. The man whose face hangs in that tavern window had every reason to grab it all. He gave it back instead.

That's not a myth. That's the deal at the heart of your country.

So the next time you're in lower Manhattan, walk down to the corner of Pearl and Broad. Look up at the brick. Raise a glass if you like.

Here’s to history's greatest bar bill…. And America’s own Cincinnatus. 

Kevin Warsh has said it so many times now that traders count it like a scoreboard. He said it at his Senate hearing. He said it at his first press conference. He said it again yesterday, at his second FOMC meeting as Fed Chairman.

And yesterday, the Fed held rates steady at 3.50% to 3.75%. Again.

But the vote wasn't clean. Three regional presidents — Beth Hammack of Cleveland, Neel Kashkari of Minneapolis, and Lorie Logan of Dallas — voted no. They wanted a hike, right now. The final tally was 9-3.

Compare that to Warsh's first meeting in June. That one was unanimous, 12-0.

Something changed in six weeks. And it tells you who Warsh is actually working for.

The Confession

Let's start with why "inflation is a choice" matters so much.

For years, Fed officials blamed inflation on everything but themselves. Supply chains. Pandemics. Greedy corporations. Wars overseas. Anything except the printing press.

Warsh just said, in plain English, that persistent inflation happens because central bankers decide to tolerate it. Not because of bad luck. Because of choices made by people with names and titles.

That's not a new idea to readers of the Rude. Milton Friedman said it seventy years ago: inflation is a monetary phenomenon. You've heard it here in a dozen different ways, from the Patience Tax to the Ratchet.

But hearing it from the man actually running the Federal Reserve? Now, that’s new.

The people who spent nearly 40 years insisting the Fed manufactured the inflation problem, rather than merely reacting to one, just got the loudest possible confirmation. And it came from inside the building.

Who Warsh Actually Answers To

The Senate confirmed Warsh in May by a vote of 54-45. That's the closest, most divided confirmation in the history of the Federal Reserve chairmanship. President Trump picked him. Half of DC fought it.

But it’s important to understand that what a leader believes isn’t important. It’s who keeps him in power. Every leader serves his winning coalition, the specific group of people whose support he actually needs to survive. Everyone else is noise.

Trump nominated Warsh. But Trump isn't the “coalition” that keeps Warsh's policy credible day to day. That job belongs to a much bigger, much less forgiving group: the global buyers of US Treasury debt.

If bond investors decide Warsh is soft, they sell. Yields spike. The dollar may wobble a bit, but it ultimately strengthens on the yield increase. Mortgage rates climb. Trump's own economic agenda suffers. Warsh's only real leverage, the thing that makes him useful to the man who appointed him, is credibility with people who never voted for anybody and don't answer to the White House at all.

That's why a Trump-picked Fed chair is talking like a hawk while inflation runs at 4.2%. He's not serving the man in the Oval Office. He's serving the market that would happily wreck an economy over a rate cut it doesn't trust. There’s a reason why James Carville wants to return in his next life as a bond trader.

What Happened to Your Money Yesterday

Despite Warsh’s intentions, the market didn't love any of this.

Stocks fell during his press conference. The Dow dropped over 1,100 points. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq both slid over 1.5%. Meanwhile, the 10-year Treasury yield rose to 4.69%, and the 30-year climbed past 5.21%. The 2-year yield, more tied to near-term Fed expectations, actually fell slightly.

Traders now expect at least one 0.25% increase by year-end, not the cut markets had been begging for. According to Fed Fund futures, the probability of a September hike is over 60%.

Wrap Up

If you've spent the last few years holding cash, gold, or short-duration assets while your neighbor chased every rate-cut rally, today was a small down payment on being right.

The Patience Tax isn't gone. But for the first time in a long while, the Fed chairman is talking like someone who intends to reverse it.

Position for higher rates staying around longer than Wall Street wants. Favor shorter-duration bonds over long ones; the long end is where the pain is landing hardest. Keep some dry powder. And watch Warsh's mouth in Jackson Hole next month as closely as the market will. He's already told you it's where the real signal lives.

This month, the national average for a gallon of gas crossed $4.00 for the first time since 2022. In plenty of states, it's a good deal higher. You felt that at every fill-up. Every delivery. Every grocery run that rode in on a diesel truck.

Dimon didn't feel a thing.

The head of America's largest bank runs his empire from a gleaming new tower on Park Avenue. To a man in that chair, the price at the pump is a rounding error. He could fill every tank in his motorcade for what he spends on lunch.

And from that height, he has been telling the rest of us to tough it out.

The Case He Makes

Dimon came out for the war plainly. He said tolerating Iran for 45 years was “kind of beyond me.” He pointed to the ballistic missiles, the funded proxies, and the long march toward a bomb.

And he's not wrong that a nuclear-armed Iran would be an ugly thing. Reasonable, patriotic people can look at that threat and decide it must be faced. That's a fair argument. Hold onto it.

Because the war isn't the tell, it’s who he nominated to pay for it.

The Skunk He Can't Smell

Asked about Americans who already feel like they're in a recession, Dimon didn't dodge. He agreed. For parts of society “not doing very well,” he said, “I completely acknowledge that.”

Then he argued we press on anyway with higher gas and stickier inflation. A year of it, if that's the price.

In his shareholder letter, he called the coming inflation “the skunk at the garden party.”

Nice line. Here's the problem: he's not the one who'll smell it.

The Sacrifice Arbitrage

Arbitrage is when you buy a thing cheaply in one place and sell it expensively in another, pocketing the spread. It's the oldest trade on Wall Street.

Dimon has found a new one. Call it the sacrifice arbitrage.

The sacrifice is cheap for him and expensive for you. He supplies the sacrifice, while you supply the suffering. He keeps the spread.

Remember, Dimon doesn't have to skip a vacation, delay a repair, or juggle a grocery list to endorse this year of pain. He just says °resolve° and is happy to let 150 million other people carry it.

“Give Me Your Money, Or Your Kids Get It!”

Dimon frames it as a hard choice. If we squeeze Iran's economy and let the pressure grind for a year, we avoid the other thing: American boots on the ground… which means American kids coming home in boxes. Pay at the pump, he says, and we won't have to pay in blood.

Sounds generous. Except it isn't.

Look hard at the menu. Column one: you pay with higher gas, higher prices, a thinner paycheck for a year. Column two: you pay with your sons and daughters. Two options. Same customer. You.

That's the false choice. He dresses it up as picking the cheaper bill. But both bills are mailed to the same house — yours. In neither column does the man offering the choice put in a dime. He doesn't fill a tank. He doesn't send a child. He just decides which way you bleed and calls it prudence.

A real menu would have a third column. The one where the people who wanted this war, and who profit most from the order it protects, carry a real piece of the cost themselves.

Unfortunately, the war profiteers never print that column.

Whose Bill Is It, Really?

Wars get paid for with printed money and higher prices. And that bill never lands evenly. It hits the wage earner and the saver first — the people furthest from the money spigot. It touches the asset-rich last, if it touches them at all.

Dimon sits closer to that spigot than almost anyone alive.

The same machine that has quietly moved wealth upward for 20 years is the machine he's now asking you to salute. Cheap money floats his assets. Rising prices sink your paycheck. He calls that a trade-off worth making.

Of course he does. He's on the right side of it.

An Older Word Than “Unfair”

Medieval thinkers called it a failure of distributive justice. Authority exists to carry the common good and spread the burden of the community, not to shove it onto the shoulders least able to hold it and least asked for their opinion.

A leader who orders a sacrifice he will never feel, for people who were never consulted, isn't leading.

He's billing.

Getting Used

Now, you love America. You'd carry your fair share of a real burden and never say a word. That's who reads the Rude. That instinct is honorable.

And it's the instinct that others use.

The men who benefit most from your willingness to sacrifice are the ones who quietly arrange to never sacrifice themselves. Perhaps you’ve always sensed that the loudest voices for “toughing it out” were the ones who'd never feel the tough part.

Remember, leaders answer to the small circle that keeps them in power. The taxpayer at the pump was never in that room. He just gets the invoice slid under the door.

Wrap Up

You can't lower the price of gas by being angry at a banker, so don't waste the energy.

nInstead, Learn to name the trade the second you see it. When a man insulated from a cost tells you to carry the cost, ask him the one question that ends the con:

What will it cost you?

If the answer is “nothing,” you've discovered the true trade.

Then position accordingly. If oil stays bid on Hormuz risk, energy is the rare place where the pain and your portfolio point the same way. Own it.

As I’ve long said, you can’t save the world, but you can save yourself.

You get to keep the dignity of a man who would sacrifice for something real and who flatly refuses to be volunteered for something that just pads another man's bonus.

The pump doesn't lie. Watch who flinches when the number climbs.

That’s where we are right now.

The wars in Iran and Ukraine have oil prices in the headlines every day. The main shipping lane in the Middle East is a war zone. And Yemeni soldiers shot up two Saudi Arabian oil tankers in the Red Sea.

All that points to higher prices at the pump. But what if I told you that we are at an all-time extreme for refining profits…

Let me show you what I mean.

Cracking the Barrel

A barrel of oil contains 42 gallons of liquid. If we divide the price of a barrel of oil by the price of a gallon of gasoline, we get a simple Oil to Gas ratio. It’s not perfect, because it doesn’t account for the prices of the other distillates. But for rough data, it’s great.

Another way to think of this is how many gallons of gasoline it takes to buy one barrel of oil. The average oil-to-gas ratio since 1990 is 34 gallons of gasoline to buy 1 barrel of oil.

Statistically, 95% of the data falls between 28 on the low side and 41 on the high side. 

Above 41, gasoline is cheap compared to the oil price. Below 28, gasoline is expensive. Since 2005, gasoline has been expensive more often than it was cheap. Those are periods when refiners are making more money than usual. 

You can see the period in 2020, when refiners clawed back profits after the COVID lockdown. And then the refiners claimed “constrained global refining capacity” to put the spurs to us again from 2022 to 2023. Now, the refiners have the Iran war as an excuse.

On July 6, 2026, the Oil to Gas ratio hit 23. That’s tied for the 5th lowest level since 1984. In other words, refiners are gouging the heck out of us today. And that will show up in their earnings.

The major refiners begin reporting at the end of July. Investors think this will be a good quarter for the group, as you can see from the chart of the VanEck Oil Refiners ETF (NYSE: CRAK):

A Crowded Trade

Everyone is on the long side of this trade. It’s all over the headlines. Bloomberg, Forbes, and Reuters all post about it weekly (if not daily). It’s super popular right now.

I agree with them, but (and it’s a major BUT), I don’t think it will last. 

The saying in commodities is that the cure for high prices is high prices. When stuff gets expensive, we buy less of it. And gasoline has a long history of high prices killing demand.

The U.S. consumes about 35% to 40% of the world’s gasoline production. And most of that consumption (over 90%) is average joes driving our cars. 

But here’s the thing. The average joes feel pinched right now. Everything costs more, particularly the stuff we buy every day. I cruised through my local grocery store (Publix) the other day, checking prices. An 8-pack of Bounty paper towels costs $30. 

Paper towels! And a box of cereal topped $6. Holy food inflation! Those prices began to hit the market. Two major retailers announced revised earnings recently.

Giant grocery store chain Albertsons and ag supply store Tractor Supply both cut guidance for the rest of the year. According to Bloomberg:

Tractor Supply Co. cut its guidance for the remainder of its fiscal year and withdrew its longer-term outlook as shoppers continue to pull back from bigger-ticket purchases and discretionary spending on goods like seasonal items and pet toys and treats.

 The Albertsons executives said,

…the company expects to see additional cost pressure from suppliers in the second half of the year and that other grocers are investing more in prices. Low-income households continue to experience the most pronounced pressure. 

Wrap Up

Those two bits of information are like tremors in a major fault zone. You better believe that this chart of Albertsons foreshadows a lot of retailers:

And I fully expect refiners to get here too. So, if you are long refiners, it may be time to look for an exit. And if you are so inclined, it may be time to look for short positions among the group.

Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna had written an amendment together. One Republican, one Democrat. It would have pulled a single section out of the defense bill.

The Rules Committee didn't vote it down. It just left it off the list.

Anna Paulina Luna filed her own version. Same result.

So on Wednesday, the House passed a $1.15 trillion defense bill, 216 to 212. The section stayed in. And not one member ever had to say yes or no to it on the record.

Watch how that worked. You'll see it again.

The Section Nobody Voted On

Section 219 sets up a joint defense technology program with Israel. It used to be numbered 224. It puts one Pentagon official in charge of the whole effort.

The list of covered fields is long. Counter-drone systems. Missile defense. Artificial intelligence. Quantum. Autonomous systems. Cyber. Electronic warfare. Biotech. It also covers joint production, shared supply chains, and folding Israeli or jointly built technology into American military programs.

Now let's be precise, because precision is the whole game here.

Committee chairman Mike Rogers says the section doesn’t merge command structures. It doesn’t put American troops under foreign orders. It doesn’t hand over control of our operations. He's right on all three counts. The two countries have built weapons together for decades. Iron Dome. Arrow. David's Sling. Much of this work already exists.

If you hear somebody say Congress merged the two armies on Wednesday, they've overshot. And the overshoot is exactly what lets the whole argument get waved away.

The quieter provision is the one to watch.

A Law About What A Future President May Decide

Section 622 expands intelligence sharing and limits the restrictions on it. The Senate's version goes further. It would stop a president from scaling back intelligence cooperation over human rights concerns unless he notifies Congress and names American security as his reason.

To be sure, that’s a statute telling a future commander-in-chief how he may use his own judgment.

There's one more detail worth your time. A letter from Bibi himself in June described the shift from American aid toward joint development and production as "my plan."

Take that for what it is: a foreign leader, claiming authorship of an American bill, in writing.

The Same Day, A Different Deal

While that was happening, Energy Secretary Chris Wright signed a nuclear cooperation deal with Saudi Arabia's energy minister.

It runs 30 years. It's worth tens of billions. American firms get first call on supplying the reactors and the fuel.

What's missing is the language experts call the gold standard. That's the clause barring a partner from enriching uranium or reprocessing spent fuel. It isn't in there. Reporting indicates the safeguards would be run by the two governments rather than by the international agency that usually does the job.

Congress gets 90 days to look at it. To stop it, both chambers have to pass a resolution of disapproval.

Notice the default mode here: Silence is a tacit approval.

And in fairness, there's a real case for the deal. The Saudis are going to build reactors either way. Better American vendors, American fuel, and American engineers on site than Russian or Chinese ones with nobody watching. That argument deserves a hearing, and it rarely gets one.

What The Two Have In Common

The partner country isn’t the problem. It’s how long future generations are wedded to the deal their grandparents made.

One deal runs three decades. The other writes cooperation into permanent law instead of policy. Policy is what the next administration can change on a Tuesday. But it can’t change the law.

The Founding Fathers thought hard about this. They decided two-thirds of the Senate had to approve a treaty, because deals like this outlive the men who agree to them. A high bar was the price of binding future generations.

Neither of these things faced that bar.

One rode in on a bill nobody was allowed to amend. The other takes effect unless both chambers stand up and stop it.

That's the lock.

Nobody Had To Be Corrupt

You don’t need a corrupt villain for this to happen.

Every player did the rational thing. Committee leaders wanted a clean bill. Leadership wanted the votes. Members wanted to avoid a roll call that could be clipped and mailed to their district in October. The Rules Committee gave all of them what they wanted by giving them nothing to vote on.

Bad outcomes don't require bad men. They just need a process where dodging a vote is easier than taking one.

Sadly, the path of least resistance is one politicians usually follow.

It Isn't Finished

None of this is law yet. The Senate hasn't passed its own defense bill. A procedural vote there failed 50 to 46 on July 14. Section 219 is the House position, nothing more. Both chambers still have to agree on identical text. The section can be changed, watered down, or dropped in those talks.

The Saudi agreement has its 90 days on the clock right now.

So there are three things worth watching, and you now know to watch them.

One: whether Section 219 survives the House and Senate negotiations.

Two: whether Senate leaders find 60 votes for their version.

Three: whether anyone files a disapproval resolution before the nuclear clock runs out.

Wrap Up

The story will get reported to you as a fight about one foreign country. It isn't.

It's a fight about how long a deal lasts, and how few people have to sign it.

A step to the left, another painted panel caught my eye. A wooden sign, hand-lettered: “The Merchants’ Coffee House — News & Policks.”

Now, I already knew coffee houses built London's money machine. Lloyd's of London, the great insurance market, started as a coffee shop on Tower Street. Traders were thrown out of the Royal Exchange for rowdiness, so they set up shop in Jonathan's Coffee House. That gathering became the London Stock Exchange.

What I didn’t know, until I stood at that window, was that the same thing happened here. On this exact corner. Wall Street and Water Street.

And the story is even better than London's.

The Corner Where Everything Traded

The Merchants’ Coffee House sat on the southeast corner of Wall and Water. By the 1780s, it was the busiest room in America.

Men came to read the papers, argue politics, and cut deals. They insured ships over coffee. They auctioned cargoes, real estate, and horses. The Chamber of Commerce met there. So did half the clubs and societies in the city.

In 1784, a group of merchants sat in that room and laid the plans for the Bank of New York. It was the city's first bank. Alexander Hamilton was in the thick of it. That bank still exists today. You know it as BNY (formerly Bank of New York Mellon).

In 1789, the same room welcomed President-elect Washington, a week before he took the oath a few blocks away.

And in 1790, sworn brokers held the first public sale of stocks right there.

No government agency planned any of this. No central authority drew up a blueprint. Men just kept showing up, cup in hand, and the deals kept getting bigger.

Grown, Not Built

Nobody ordered Wall Street into existence. No act of Congress said, “Let there be a stock exchange.” It grew.

When the coffee house got too crowded, the brokers moved. In 1792, twenty-four of them signed a short agreement, by tradition under a buttonwood tree at 68 Wall Street. That handshake deal is the founding document of the New York Stock Exchange.

Then they moved indoors again, to the new Tontine Coffee House up the street. That became the first real trading floor in America.

See the pattern? A market is not a building the state puts up. It’s what happens when free people are left alone to trade, trust each other, and keep their word.

Friedrich Hayek called this “spontaneous order.” Nobody designs it. Nobody runs it. It emerges from millions of small choices, and it works better than anything a committee could ever draw up.

The men in that room had their own money on the line. Get a deal wrong, and you paid for it yourself. That’s skin in the game. It’s why they were careful, and why the thing they built lasted 230 years.

The Other Panel

I owe you an honest word, because the window shows two panels, not one.

Next to the coffee house sits a darker sign: “New York's Municipal Slave Market.”

A block from that coffee house, the city ran a market where human beings were bought and sold. And here’s the ugly truth that fits our theme exactly: that market was not spontaneous. A government created it. The Common Council passed a law in 1711 to establish it. It was ordered into being by the state, by statute, on purpose.

The coffee house was no saint either. Among the goods it auctioned, shamefully, were people. Freedom to trade does not make men good. It only leaves them free to choose, for better and for worse.

But there is a thread of hope that came from the same room. The Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves also met at the Merchants’ Coffee House. The men working to end slavery in New York gathered under the very same roof. Mulligan, our tailor-spy, helped found it.

The worst market on that street was the one the government built. The movement to end it grew, like everything good on that corner, from free people choosing to meet.

Wrap Up

Over and over we are told markets need smart planners at the top. That without the experts steering, the whole thing falls apart.

Once you stand on Wall Street, you learn the truth. No one planned the most powerful financial center on earth. It brewed itself, one cup at a time, in a room full of merchants who simply wanted to trade.

There was no czar. Or mandate. And much to the chagrin of New York City’s current mayor, no five-year plan. Just coffee, conversation, and men who kept their word.

Next time someone tells you the economy needs a firmer hand from above, tell them about the corner of Wall and Water. Tell them Wall Street was the market nobody ordered.

Then finish your coffee. You’re standing in better company than you know.

Sean and I have been talking about these drugs for years — not as patients, but as analysts and traders. I share research with Sean. Sean tells me when a chart is screaming buy or sell.

We were trading GLP-1 peptide small caps years before either of us ever filled a prescription.

So when his doctor wrote him a prescription this past March, the conversation turned personal, and it went about like this: he asked if it worked, I told him I'd lost 45 pounds on it, and I told him he'd feel fantastic.

Three months later he was messaging me that he couldn't believe what it had done. The weight, sure — but more than that, the quiet. Walking past the refrigerator with the indifference of a man who no longer hears it calling. Awake for the first time in years. One beer in six months, and it tasted like nectar, but one was enough.

I know the feeling, because I'm in it too and I feel like I did ten years ago.

So consider all that the field notes of a two-man clinical trial. No control group. Just one shared suspicion that the American food supply might be the real disease.

Here's the part worth paying attention to, though. What Sean and I are feeling may be bigger than the number on the scale.

It may be the life clock itself.

Sean talked about tirzepatide, saying it was a "GLP-2." That’s close, but not quite. GLP-2 is a real hormone, just a different one.

Tirzepatide is a dual agonist: it works two receptors at once, GIP and GLP-1, where plain old Ozempic works just one. And Sean's instinct was dead right — it does do more than Ozempic. And that turns out to be the story, because the more of these receptors a drug engages, the more it seems to do.

Hold that thought for a minute.

Unexplained Goodness

Now for the mystery. In 2023, a trial called SELECT put semaglutide — Ozempic's active ingredient — against a placebo in roughly 17,600 people who were overweight but not diabetic. The result: a 20% drop in heart attacks and strokes.

That’s remarkable on its own. But then the researchers went digging to find out why — and here's the part that grabs me. Only about a third of that heart benefit could be explained by the weight the patients lost. Two-thirds came from something else.

Something else. That's the phrase that turns a diet drug into a genuine scientific riddle. If most of the good these drugs do has nothing to do with the number on the scale — then what, exactly, are they doing inside the body?

Part of the answer is that these drugs turn down inflammation — the low, invisible fire that smolders under nearly every disease of aging, from clogged arteries to failing memory. Damp that fire and a great many things improve at once, and you don't just see it on the scale; you feel it. That quiet energy Sean is feeling, the fog lifting, the naps he no longer needs — that's not just the weight. That's a fire going out.

But here's another finding that makes me sit up.

We can now measure how old you are biologically — not by the candles on your birthday cake, but by the mileage on the cells.

The tools are called epigenetic clocks. They read chemical marks that accumulate on your DNA in a predictable rhythm as the years pass — like a molecular speedometer. And in a real, randomized, placebo-controlled trial published this year, semaglutide slowed that speedometer down.

On one clock, the pace of aging dropped by about 9%. On another — the one built specifically to predict your overall odds of dying — the drug slowed the reading, too.

To my knowledge, this is the first time a drug has been shown, in a controlled human trial, to actually put the brakes on a person's aging clock.

For twenty years, the longevity crowd has pinned its hopes on stuff like rapamycin and metformin. And I love the science — but let's be honest about what it is: gorgeous results in mice, and a great deal of hope in humans.

The GLP-1 drugs walked into the room holding the thing everyone else was still promising — real human endpoints. 

So when Sean tells you the Magic Pill has made him feel a decade younger, the emerging science says he may be more right than he knows. Under the belt notches, the machine really does seem to be running younger.

But as with everything else in life, there are a couple of catches.

Restore, Not Resurrect

The first is what "younger" means. So far, these clock studies were done in people whose clocks were already running fast — bodies under real metabolic stress. What the drug seems to do is bring a racing clock back down toward normal.

That's restoration, not resurrection. It's undoing the damage modern life did to you — which, if we all remember what the lockdowns did to our waistlines, is exactly the point. It is not yet proof you can take a perfectly healthy man and run his clock below the factory setting. Repair first. Reversal, someday, maybe.

The second catch is muscle, and it's the one nobody prints on the billboard. These drugs strip weight fast, and some of what comes off is muscle right alongside the fat. That’s not unique to GLP-1 drugs. Any plan that takes weight down fast takes muscle along with fat.

Muscle is your retirement account for old age — it's what lets you climb the stairs and catch yourself when you stumble at eighty. So if you're on these things: pick up something heavy a few times a week, and eat your protein. That isn't a warning against the drug. It's the instruction manual. Follow it, and you keep the good and reduce the bad.

Which brings me to the next part — and back to Sean's receptors.

There’s Another

Remember how the drug does more the more receptors it hits? Tirzepatide does two. A new one under late-stage trials hits three.

It’s called retatrutide, and it adds a third target — glucagon — on top of the two tirzepatide already carries. That glucagon receptor does something the others don't: it tells the body to burn fuel, including the fat wedged around your liver and organs, the nastiest, most inflammatory fat you carry. Which is why retatrutide posts the biggest weight loss in the entire class and the deepest cleanout of liver fat anyone has measured. It goes straight at the fire, at its hottest source.

And the muscle news is better than you'd fear. Even though retatrutide takes off more total weight, the ratio holds — the same healthy, mostly-fat split the gentler drugs manage — most likely because that GIP receptor lends muscle a hand. More total loss, same quality.

That's the direction the whole field is moving: not just stronger, but smarter. Combinations built to spare muscle. Pills coming to retire the needles. Every year, more effect and less friction — and, increasingly, aging itself in the crosshairs rather than merely the scale.

So where does that leave the two of us — and you?

Not at the fountain of youth. But plausibly at the first pill that bends the actuarial tables the right way — and here is what sets it apart from every dutiful statin you've ever choked down: you can feel this one working. Sean can feel it. I can feel it.

That's new, and it's why this class is one of the defining medical stories of the decade.

I won't hand you a ticker today. Just know that the two companies behind these drugs, Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, are on that list, and the small-cap peptide names Sean and I have been kicking around for years sit downstream of the very same wave. 

And if slowing a racing clock back toward normal impresses you — wait until you hear about the enzyme that just walked out of an AI, and into a lab, and stripped forty years of molecular damage off human tissue the entire field had sworn was permanent.

That's not slowing the clock. That's running it backward. But that's a story for next time.

I was wrong. Since then, we’ve dipped into the $50s.

I watched them get dragged behind the woodshed for the last two and a half months. The market has a way of humbling anyone who gets too cocky. I've earned (and learned) that lesson more than once.

So when silver popped yesterday, I felt the old itch. The one that whispers, "This is it. The turn. Back up the truck."

I'm not scratching it. Not yet. And by the end of this, I don't think you will either.

Of course, if you’re already stacking the physical metal, by all means, keep on stacking. I’m specifically talking to those who invest in the miners.

Let me show you why this bounce looks more like a trap than a turn.

Two Good Days Don't Make a Trend

Silver had a nice couple of days. Prices jumped. The bulls got loud. Your inbox probably filled up with folks telling you the metal is off to the races.

Maybe they're right. But the odds say otherwise. Not only that, as of this morning, we still haven’t broken back up through $60 yet.

A sharp, 4-day rally inside a falling market is the most seductive thing in finance. It feels like the bottom. But it's usually just a pause on the way down. My downside target on my daily chart is $42. That doesn’t mean we’ll hit it. It just means the downtrend may not be over yet.

Wall Street has an ugly name for these kinds of rallies: the dead cat bounce. Even a dead cat bounces if it falls far enough. That doesn't mean it's alive.

The Trend Is Still Down

Start with the chart, because the chart doesn't lie.

Over the last three months, silver is down about 23%. It fell from the high 80s all the way into the high 50s. And it didn't drop in one clean panic. It fell in a pattern: lower highs, then lower lows, again and again.

Its RSI is still in bear territory, as well, meaning the downtrend is still intact. Not only that, but the price is below the 50-day moving average, which itself is now below the 200-day moving average. That’s a confirmed long-term bear market. To be fair, that’s just what’s happening right now. This move may mark the beginning of a new rally, but it’s too early to tell.

This means the sellers are still in charge. Every time silver rallies, it stalls at a lower spot than the time before. Every time it drops, it sinks further than before.

Four good days don't erase that. Not yet.

Back in the spring, when silver sat near $73, I flagged a downside target of $63. We crashed right through it. Now we're testing even lower ground. The chart saw this coming. That's cold comfort if you were long, but it's proof the framework works.

The Wind Is In Its Face

Now look past the chart. The bigger picture is no kinder.

The dollar has been firming up. We’re trading at 101.15 as I write this morning. Treasury yields have been climbing. Both are poison for silver.

That’s because silver pays you nothing. Nada. Niente. No dividend. No interest. When you can earn a fat yield on a riskless T-bill instead, holding a lump of metal costs you something. A strong dollar makes it worse, because silver is priced in dollars.

Then there's fear. Silver and gold catch a bid when the world looks scary. But every time the headlines calm down, that safe-haven money walks out the door. Lately, the panic buyers have been leaving. And, allegedly, no one knows what The Donald’s next move is.

Strip out the fear bid, and you're left with raw supply and demand. Right now, that math doesn't favor the bulls.

The Buyers Are Getting Shaky

Silver isn't just a shiny thing people hoard. Half its job is industrial. It goes into solar panels, wiring, and gadgets of every kind.

When the price runs too high, those buyers flinch. They purchase fewer ounces. They swap in cheaper stuff where they can get away with it. “High prices cure high prices,” as the old traders say. That erosion is already showing up in the solar trade.

Silver use in photovoltaics fell 6% in 2025 to 186.6 million ounces and is forecast to fall another 19% in 2026 to about 151 million ounces. Reuters also reported that solar makers are doing their best to replace silver as prices soared, which had increased panel costs. It’s textbook “substitution effect” stuff.

To be fair, though, manufacturers are lowering silver loadings per watt and testing copper-based designs, but silver still remains important in higher-reliability PV applications. So it’s only partially getting substituted.

More importantly, this is a short-term move. Long-term, we still don’t have enough of the metal to build out all the things we want to.

On the other side, the traders who pushed silver up have been bailing out. The crowd, me included, was all-in on the long side. When a crowd that size turns, it turns fast. The rush for the door creates quick, violent rallies as short sellers cover. Then those rallies die just as fast.

That may be what we’re seeing: Not new buyers arriving, but old sellers catching their breath.

What Would Change My Mind

I'm no permabear on silver, far from it. The long-term story for this metal is real. When the cycle turns, silver tends to scream higher and leave gold in the dust.

But I want proof, not hope. January’s negative gamma squeeze prohibits me from taking things on faith in this “widowmaker” of a market.

Let’s see silver break the pattern. It needs to punch through a prior high instead of rolling over at a lower one. It needs real buyers back at the table, the industrial kind and the investment kind, not just short sellers scrambling to cover.

Until then, the burden sits on the price. A few green candles don't meet it.

Wrap Up

You don't have to catch this knife.

The people getting hurt right now are the ones who need to be right… today. They see a bounce, and they lunge, terrified of missing the turn.

You can wait. Let silver prove itself. If this really is the bottom, you can give up the first few percent and still catch the meat of the move. It’s cheap insurance against being wrong.

And if it's a dead cat bounce, you'll watch from the sidelines while the impatient ones get taught the same lesson the miners taught me.

Patience isn't glamorous, that’s for sure. But in a downtrend, it's the closest thing to a free lunch you'll find.

These wars drove up the price of oil. And rising oil prices make everything more expensive. Then, when the Iran ceasefire took effect, oil prices came back down. But refined product prices didn’t. 

I’ll show you why inflation will continue to rise… and I’ll show you the commodity to own right now.

You see, these wars may be good news for electricity and commodities. Here’s what Goldman Sachs wrote in its recent update: 

In particular, we think that the Iran conflict ultimately reinforces many of the themes supporting power and metals demand, more so than oil and gas. From a potential increased reliance on EVs, to further investment into renewable power generation, both of which require further grid investment, to potentially larger defense spending, and growing competition to win the AI race, these themes are highly supportive of power, copper, lithium and aluminum demand.

Higher oil prices destroy oil demand. I remember this well, from back in 2008. Folks stopped driving. They rolled all their errands into a single trip. They didn’t take long vacations. And they conserved. That clobbered demand and brought the oil price back down. 

The Goldman analysts see that coming. And I agree. The wars right now are about to send oil prices back up…possibly to new all-time highs.

Two Interconnected Wars

There are three major fronts on the oil market today. Two are hot wars. The third is purely economic. 

In Iran, the U.S. struck major oil infrastructure on Kharg Island. That’s Iran’s major oil export terminal. Up to this point, the U.S. targeted military targets. By leaving the oil infrastructure in place, it preserves Iran’s ability to sell oil. That cash flow meant that the country’s economy continued to operate. 

But those strikes will reduce Iran’s ability to sell oil. We don’t know how much, yet. But that’s an important difference in the war.

At the same time, Ukraine developed a new capability. Its drones can now hit targets 1,500 miles into Russia. And their targets are refining and storage. 

Ukraine’s drones hit so many refineries that Russia…the world’s third largest oil producer…must now ration fuel. It suspended diesel exports for the rest of July and began importing gasoline from India. 

Giacamo Prandelli published a great analysis of these attacks in The Merchant’s News Substack. 

As he points out, both wars followed the Allied war plan from World War II. It wasn’t big, set-piece battles that won the war. The Allies planned to target Germany’s fuel lines that did it. You can’t move a tank without diesel, and you can’t fly planes without jet fuel.

Modern economies are the same. You can cripple an economy by simply making fuel prohibitively expensive. And that’s what’s going on in both Iran and Ukraine.

This is an astonishing volume of refinery production damage in Russia. The Ukrainians know what they are doing.

The Arabian Split

As I said, Iran and Ukraine are two of the three legs driving major disruptions in the global oil trade. The third war is economic. It’s the split between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. 

The two countries compete for dominance in the region. And when the Iran war kicked off, the UAE sided with the U.S. and Israel. But Saudi Arabia stood closer to Iran. The tensions peaked when the UAE quit the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). That’s a huge rift. 

According to Bloomberg, it caught Saudi Arabia completely off guard. 

The positive (for the oil price) from this split is that the UAE ramped up its oil production to all-time highs:

These are the forces currently pushing on oil prices. We have crude oil supply, but there is a lack of refined fuels, particularly diesel. And that’s important, because you and I don’t buy crude oil. We buy refined products like gasoline, diesel (in every Amazon shipment), and jet fuel every time we fly.

The Oil-Gasoline Rift

The reduced number of refineries worldwide (thanks to the wars) kept the prices of those oil products high…even though oil prices fell. You can see what I mean in this chart of WTI Crude price versus the gasoline price:

As you can see from the chart above, crude oil prices fell 36%. However, gasoline prices fell by only about 16%. Diesel prices (not shown) are down about 18% from their previous highs. 

That’s an odd scenario. Crude oil supplies look okay (for now). The UAE is bumping up its production, and more oil is coming from the U.S. and Venezuela, keeping a lid on prices. But the destruction of refining capacity creates a premium for fuels…so the price of gas and diesel remains high. 

And when it comes to inflation, we don’t really care about oil prices. We care about the stuff that we use from it. Fuels. And those prices aren’t coming down as fast. In fact, we may see much higher prices this year. Refiners’ shares are soaring, as you can see in this chart of the VanEck Oil Refiners ETF (NYSE: CRAK):

This is the highest price since the CRAK ETF began in 2015. In Europe, the price of a gallon of gasoline is $7.44 on average. That suddenly makes an electric vehicle look much more attractive.

Europe is buying all the electric vehicles they can get right now. I heard a joke on a podcast last week about Trump and Netanyahu as the most valuable EV Sales team for Chinese carmakers. 

That’s because, according to BloombergNEF, global EV sales are on pace to hit 23.3 million sold in 2026. That’s 27% of all new cars sold.

Wrap Up

Investors have an opportunity here: it’s the KraneShares Electric Vehicles ETF (NYSE: KARS). As you can see from the chart below, it now trades at its lowest price since 2025. If the EV market continues to climb (and that looks likely), this is a great opportunity.

This sector looks oversold. And with high fuel prices looking to stay higher for longer, this is a great way to take advantage.

Byron King has spent years studying the physical and geological realities behind energy and natural resources. These are the kinds of hard constraints that don't show up in a headline but eventually show up in a price.

My own background is different.

After running a hedge fund for most of the 2000s, my focus has been far more specific: identifying asymmetric risk.

I’m talking about situations where the potential reward is meaningfully larger than the potential downside, then structuring trades to take advantage of that imbalance as efficiently as possible.

This week, those two perspectives are pointing in the same direction.

The Clock is Ticking on Cheap Oil

Byron has been warning for some time about the condition of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve, specifically the salt caverns used to store it.

According to Byron, there are real operating constraints on how low the SPR can fall before it runs into genuine logistical and geological limits.

Recent SPR releases have supplemented global oil supply, helping keep prices more contained than they otherwise might have been, even as conflicts have disrupted parts of the world's energy supply chain.

Commercial inventories, separate from the strategic reserve, have also declined significantly.

Now think about what happens next.

Those SPR releases can’t continue indefinitely. When they slow or stop, that supplemental supply disappears from the market.

At the same time, global demand for oil continues to grow. Eventually, the SPR itself will need to be refilled, creating an entirely new source of demand on top of existing consumption.

Layer in refinery strikes, export disruptions, and shipping bottlenecks across key waterways, and you have a tightening supply meeting rising demand.

That’s about as basic as economics gets.

Lopsided Risk/Reward

I’m not in the business of predicting exactly where oil prices will go or precisely when they’ll move.

What I look for is a situation where the risk and reward are genuinely lopsided, where a well-defined downside sits next to a disproportionately large potential upside.

This energy setup fits that description.

The downside appears relatively limited. Oil prices don’t need to spike dramatically for this thesis to work. They simply need to stop benefiting from a temporary support mechanism that’s unlikely to last forever.

The upside, meanwhile, could involve a genuine structural supply squeeze colliding with demand from multiple directions.

When one side of a trade rests on a temporary prop, and the other rests on physical reality, I pay attention.

The Stock Built for this Setup

Once I’ve identified an asymmetric opportunity, the next step is finding the right investment vehicle.

In this case, that means looking at producers and other companies whose profitability moves directly with oil prices.

One name I personally own through Income Alliance is Exxon Mobil (XOM).

It’s about as direct an expression of this thesis as you’ll find: a major producer whose earnings and asset values generally move with crude prices.

If this setup unfolds as expected, companies like Exxon stand to benefit.

Make Your Money Work Smarter, Not Harder

The final piece of my process is deciding how to structure the trade.

Owning shares outright is one option, but it’s rarely the most capital-efficient approach.

When I have a strong conviction, I often prefer deep-in-the-money call options rather than buying the stock itself.

Because these options have strike prices well below the current share price, they already contain substantial intrinsic value and relatively little time premium.

As a result, they tend to move much like the underlying stock while requiring significantly less capital.

That leaves additional capital available for other opportunities or simply in reserve.

The Winning Formula

This is how I approach nearly every trade I make… 

• First, find genuine asymmetry, a setup where the odds are structurally in your favor, not just a hunch about direction.
• Second, find the right vehicle to express that thesis cleanly.
• Third, structure the position so your capital works as efficiently as possible.

Find the asymmetry.

Choose the right vehicle.

Structure it efficiently.

That’s the approach I’ve relied on for the past 25 years, and it’s exactly what I believe is developing in the energy sector today.