Bloodlust is the last refuge of the failed market prognosticator.

Am I the only one who has noticed that this Substack writer bizarrely pivots to militaristic (or quasi-militaristic) solutions to support his political preferences when things are not going his way?

As an occasional reader of this newsletter — occasional because he writes too much and like a heavy blizzard buries you in such a snowdrift of words that most of us struggle to remember what his views were a week ago, never a month or a year ago — I have noticed that he has been getting a lot of things wrong. The best solution to that sort of repeated failure is to change the subject, a kind of chicanery.

So tariffs in 2025 were supposed to create inflation in the US and disinflation in the export countries, US yields would rise, the US dollar would strengthen, etc,( yet all talk of the dollar’s diminished standing as a reserve currency was bunk.) Well, we know what happened to the dollar against all the major currencies (except the yen) in 2025.

When predictions falter, bait and switch. Monetary debasement becomes the dominant theme in late 2025. All government yields every are going to rise because of fiscal incontinence. Did not happen. Then bait and switch again. Era of the strong dollar is over, and a dollar crisis is coming. The currency will be fall sharply against its peers.

But history has a nasty habit of intervening and kicking the legs out under one’s fondest hopes. Oil experiences a historic surge because of the US and Israel’s foolhardy warmongering. And of course the dollar goes exactly in the opposite direction — not because of all this triumphalist nonsense that Wall Street hucksters like Brooks and his fellow-travelers from investment banks have been peddling — of a “flight to safety” and “flight to quality” — but because the $ has been the carry currency of choice for the last many years. Investors have been short the dollar for years, so when a geopolitical shock hits, there is an unwinding of these unhedged positions and there is a “flight to home”, which is the correct way to see it.

So that’s when a descriptive accounts of the market become prescriptive ones, even though they are totally inconsistent. So hit the Russian shadow fleets and reduce the supply of oil in global markets (because Ukraine matters a lot to the author of this newsletter) but hit the Iranian oil hubs and increase the supply of oil (because Israel matters to him equally).

In the end, we get a tangled web of nonsensical predictions and opinions from him.