NASA and SpaceX launched Crew-12 at 5:15 a.m. ET from Cape Canaveral, marking the first time a NASA mission lifted off on a Friday the 13th.
The Falcon 9 booster returned to Earth and landed cleanly, triggering sonic booms across Central Florida.
Four astronauts — NASA’s Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA’s Sophie Adenot, and Russian cosmonaut Andrei Fedyaev — are headed to the International Space Station for an eight-month mission to replenish the crew after a medical evacuation.
On this go, the hardware worked. The reusability model worked. If you’ve been following SpaceX launches, you know Musk, the creator, is not afraid to lob rockets into space just to determine what won’t work.
We’ll be talking to private equity specialist Matt Milner about pre-IPO shares in SpaceX on Grey Swan Live! next week, Thursday, February 19, 2026. Details pending.
Dip Buyers Reassert the Boom
After yesterday’s drawdown, dip buyers stepped in across Mag 7, software equities, crypto, and Dollar 2.0 assets.
As noted in this morning’s Ripple Effect, the so-called Magnificent Seven slipped into official correction territory earlier this week, yet the broader tape showed bids returning.
Our research team continues to map the asset boom taking shape under Trump’s policy mix: deregulation, tariff realignment, national security spending, monetary restructuring, and AI acceleration. The asset class response remains consistent — capital seeks ownership.
If you’re on board, this is a great time to have access to capital and own assets. You’ll benefit from reflation and innovation cycles despite what’s happening in the broader economy.
Those holding only wages feel pressure first when volatility hits retirement accounts, pensions, and insurance pools.
Mob psychology around AI will determine whether enthusiasm sustains or backlash accelerates. When portfolios rise, technology feels empowering. When portfolios contract, machines look like competitors. That’s going to be an ongoing refrain in 2026.
AI Promises Abundance — and Disruption
Mustafa Suleyman, who leads Microsoft’s AI initiatives, told the Financial Times that most white-collar professional tasks could be automated within 12 to 18 months.
Lawyers, accountants, marketers, project managers — anything related to desk work faces compression.
Challenger data showed 7,624 January layoffs attributed directly to AI — about 7% of the month’s total. Since 2023, AI has been linked to nearly 79,500 announced job cuts. Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Byrd cautioned clients that measurable macroeconomic impact may lag several years.
In Silicon Valley, Mercor quietly hired tens of thousands of highly credentialed contractors at $45 to $250 per hour to train large language models for OpenAI and Anthropic.
The Wall Street Journal reported that these specialists refine the outputs of systems that may later automate their own fields.
Anthropic published a safety review warning that its newest Claude models showed “elevated susceptibility to harmful misuse” in certain testing environments, including limited support for chemical-weapons research under adversarial prompts.
CEO Dario Amodei previously warned that AI could displace up to 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years and described advanced AI as potentially the most serious national security threat in a century.
Mrinank Sharma, who led safeguards research at Anthropic, resigned this week.
In his letter, he wrote that humanity’s capacity to shape the world now exceeds its wisdom to manage it.
₿ Hugh Hendry and the Human Problem
Hugh Hendry never fit neatly into macro orthodoxy. The former Eclectica founder and CIO made his reputation – and his investors a fortune – before and during the 2008 crisis, describing markets in existential terms.
In 2007, he wrote, “Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into unproductive works.”
In 2008, as leverage collapsed, he said, “There is no role for speculation today… we’ve exposed our flanks and the enemy is advancing.” His fund delivered one of the strongest macro performances of the post-crisis era.
Now, after suffering through an epiphany earlier this week, Hendry, writing on Substack from his Caribbean bolt-hole in St. Barts, frames bitcoin as “a hard object in an elastic monetary world.”
Fiat systems, he argues, “buy time during trauma but create ratcheting inflation that disproportionately burdens the asset-poor.” Bitcoin, by contrast, enforces scarcity mechanically:
“Bitcoin’s fatal flaw, if it has one, is not technological. It is revelatory. It shows you the future too early and too clearly… the asset does not break. The holder does.”
He notes that 70–80% drawdowns remain part of the pattern. The risk lies less in cryptography than in human coordination and temperament.
Bitcoin sits roughly 50% below its recent high. But endurance — not code — is its potential gating variable.
Beware: If you check out Hendry’s Substack page, his writing style is, umm, unique. He’s recently taken to ee cummings style poetry without capital letters, for example. Or images like the one below:
Even while commenting on the global financial system.
If you’ve got the stomach for it, Hendry’s got some useful insights on investing during the realignment of the global financial and monetary systems, of which we write daily.
We continue to see value in bitcoin, as part of a broader theme of reworking the U.S. dollar for the 21st century – something we call the Dollar 2.0 .
Even with the massive drawdown in bitcoin, our experts, ranging from myself, our portfolio director Andrew Packer, as well as contributors such as Frank Holmes and Mark Jeftovic, are as bullish as ever – and appreciate that their fiat dollars can buy twice as much of these Dollar 2.0 assets as in recent months.
Deregulation and the Energy Pivot
President Trump announced the rescission of the 2009 “Endangerment Finding,” arguing that it imposed $1.3 trillion in regulatory costs. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told The Wall Street Journal it represents the largest deregulatory action in U.S. history.
The administration frames the move as relief for auto manufacturers and consumers. The broader market reads it as a shift in industrial policy — lower compliance costs, higher domestic energy production, and a recalibration of climate priorities.
You’re about to see a huge sigh of relief from automakers and tech entrepreneurs trying to follow the president’s lead and start making stuff in America again and reshoring supply chains.
Industrial inputs, defense contracts, and infrastructure suppliers react faster than policy debates. That will mean bigger business for rare earths and natural resource companies.
The Fire Bombing of Dresden
On the evening of February 13, 1945, Allied aircraft began fire-bombing Dresden.
More than 800 American and British planes dropped roughly 3,400 tons of explosives over two days. The resulting firestorm burned for days. Eight square miles of the city were destroyed.
A 2010 Dresden report estimated the death toll between 22,700 and 25,000 people. Many were civilians. Many were children. Hospitals that survived the blast could not handle the burns. Mass graves followed.
Dresden had never been a major war-production center. It was known as the “Florence of the Elbe,” rich in architecture and culture. The stated objective was to disrupt communications and rail lines supporting German troop movements. Critics argued the scale of destruction exceeded the tactical purpose and served to break morale as much as logistics.
Among the American prisoners of war in Dresden was Kurt Vonnegut. He survived the bombing in an underground slaughterhouse and later wrote Slaughterhouse-Five.
Jamie Dimon warned in 2024 that “World War III has already begun,” pointing to coordinated conflicts across Ukraine, the Middle East, and Asia. He identified nuclear proliferation as the most serious existential risk. JPMorgan runs internal war-game scenarios accordingly.
No doubt, the global monetary system is shifting. Central banks are accumulating gold at a historic pace. Foreign investors hold $9.1 trillion in U.S. Treasurys, but at a declining pace. Stablecoins, as Secretary Scott Bessent has articulated, are the Treasury’s best shot at maintaining an innovative advantage and financing the largest debt pile in human history.
History records on this day that when political systems lose proportion — when fear outruns judgment and power outruns restraint — human beings are capable of committing apocalyptic acts against one another.
Kurt Vonnegut died April 11, 2007. He maintained until his death that Slaughterhouse-Five is an anti-war novel.
So it goes.
The stock market will reopen on Tuesday.
~ Addison
P.S. For the record, the names in the Grey Swan Model Portfolio continue to pay strong dividends outside roiling tech, and we still like bitcoin and Dollar 2.0 digital asset plays. See the library of special reports in the members section on the website for more alternatives to tech stocks.
Yesterday, U.S. Global Investors founder Frank Holmes reviewed some of the trends today. Despite the short-term challenge to the stock market, economic fundamentals are in good shape right now.
Frank explained in detail how alternative data, like global airline demand, helps his team rebalance their portfolio of ETFs when market trends shift.
Washington is betting that crypto assets and stablecoins can create a bigger, more efficient market for U.S. debt, extending the dollar’s reserve-currency status.
Frank noted that the recent crash in crypto could easily reverse as regulatory conditions improve and market sentiment can return on a dime. And that many of the companies in our Dollar 2.0 wheelhouse are poised to benefit from that shift. The replay is available for members in our Video Archives.
