This is the only chart that matters right now…not borrowing costs (@lukegromen).

It’s the weekly chart of Brent Crude.

I’ve been telling my patrons for three weeks in the Market Reports that the Brent Crude chart has all the earmarks of a market being manipulated UP to support a narrative…

That narrative is Donald Trump is a madman who broke the world and is losing in Iran.

Look at the chart carefully, you see big gaps between weekly closes and opens. Also, note the tails to the downside versus the wicks to the upside. Tails are much longer than wicks…. telltale signs of a market that has topped but someone is trying to keep reflating it.

Why? Many reasons, from speculations, positions, narrative control, etc. Markets are the sum total of all of these players.

But the reality is that you can only manipulate a market over a short period of time (H/T@armstrongeconomics) unless you control the total pricing system for that market… i.e. central banks and currencies…. and why the gold and silver markets have been manipulated for years.

Oil is a market of immense volatility, with 5-year moving average of its Range/Price topping 7% on a weekly basis, which is in bitcoin territory. It should be the most boring market on the planet, since everyone depends on it. But it isn’t.

It trades like a penny stock on a double espresso. (H/T Dennis Miller).

Someone profits from that volatility. Someone works with others to create that volatility. All Roads don’t lead to DeMoines, FYI.

Oil volatility is the enemy of certainty. It retards investment in some cases and redirects it to other less viable investments in others… c.f. Wind, solar, LED lights, and all this Watermelon (Green on the outside, Commie Red on the inside) nonsense.

If we want a world of predictability, which is the essential purpose of Human Action (H/T Mises, something most Miseseans have forgotten), then we have to accept that sometimes we have to defend our right to a predictable future.

And no amount of asking for it nicely is going to get us there. We were never voting our way out of this.

That’s why I’ve been in full-throated favor of this conflict with Iran. It’s why I allowed myself to see the world differently than I did previously.

The Federal Reserve is just a tool. It can (and has) been a tool for evil, but it can also be a tool for good, like all technology. This is why SOFR was the beginning of this war, and why this morning’s announcement by Iran is end of the current battle in it. It should still be deprecated in importance, removed from duties it was never designed nor been allowed to perform.

The same can be said for the US military, which has been a tool used to enforce the “tyranny of evil men” (H/T Roger Avery & Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction) on Wall St., Bay Street, K Street, and 10 Downing Street. But, like the Fed, it can be used judiciously, to serve humanity with the right set of circumstances and the right mission.

It did so.

We’ve been blackmailed by evil people for generations to accept this lack of investment certainty to indulge our cynicism, or lack of faith in humanity.

We chuckled in “Collapsitarian” for too many years. And I, frankly, just got sick of it.

It’s pathetic and evil and we shouldn’t tolerate it in them or ourselves for another gods-damned minute. Period. It’s anathema to human life, common decency, and civilization itself.

This is the truth. And it all goes back to the intersection of selling narrative while hitting desperate people where they live and breathe… in their pocketbooks. In the end, oil prices want to fall because the fundamentals are bearish (H/T @DoombergT). There is no Peak Oil. There is no Green New Deal.

There is only Zul…. okay, maybe not Zul. *grin*

This chart is your literal snapshot of a pricing control system being destroyed in real time… by one guy, Donald J. Trump, with support from his Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent, Sec. War Pete Hegseth and his merry band of warfighters, and his Sec. of State Marco Rubio.

He has both exposed and stolen London’s control over oil flows to support its centuries-old evil by the studious application of Gold (dollars), Goats (American Industrial Might) ‘n Guns (Brrrrrt!). Stew all you want, haters. But, he’s done it. The Hormuz Blackmail is done. Trump has his hand on the global oil spigot now… and he can turn the volatility up or down. The US is the global price setter now, like it or not.

… Why?

This article first appeared on my X feed here

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