“Watching the news is a bit like watching a bad opera,” Bill Bonner once said to me. “You can tell from all the shrieking that something very important is supposed to be happening, but you don’t quite know what it is. What you’re missing is the plot.”
He said that after we’d attended a classical Chinese opera in Beijing — magnificent costumes, astonishing discipline, ear-splitting vocals, and a storyline that only made sense once someone explained the structure underneath. The observation stuck.
And, in fact, made it into the introduction of Empire of Debt under the heading, “the theme of this book in a nutshell.”
That’s our task today. We’re trying to establish the plot.
Each morning, we wade through exposés cataloguing all the terrible things the Trump administration is doing, how irredeemable the man is, and how anyone who follows him — or worse, thinks independently — must be morally suspect or psychologically impaired.
Just trying to understand the plot is, well… exhausting.
We woke up this morning as if we were born anew.
Hallelujah!
We have no interest in Stephanie Ruhle’s nightly autopsy of why Trump, Musk, or Bezos are villains, or in breathless commentary about how China and Russia are supposedly running rings around Washington in tariff skirmishes and diplomatic theater.
Truth be told, we feel a flicker of empathy for Ms. Ruhle. While lecturing her audience, she often glances furtively off camera — presumably toward the 11th Hour producers — checking whether she’s getting the message right for the advertisers keeping the lights on for the Now network, recently spawned with extreme bias from NBC Universal.
Alas, the real task is harder than that.
Today, we want to read the geopolitical board, identify the moves actually being made, and understand how power, capital, and geography are rearranging themselves as the Trump Great Reset enters its next phase.
To be fair, we do agree with Ms. Ruhle on one thing. She opens each show by counting the number of days Trump has been back in office — or ticking down the calendar toward the November 2, 2026, midterm elections.
On that point, she’s right. Time waits for no man. Presidents included.
From the Bonfire to the Risk Board
As we’ve tracked since April 2, 2025, the early phase of the reset burned hot. Institutions weakened. Assumptions cracked.
This week supplied fresh evidence. Software buckled under pressure from artificial intelligence. Metals convulsed under leverage.
What follows looks colder and more deliberate. The metaphor shifts from bonfire to board game. The game isn’t chess. It’s Risk. Territory matters. Chokepoints matter. Supply lines matter.
Winning depends less on elegance and more on control.
Donald Trump’s geopolitical instincts resemble a New York City property developer studying a neighborhood map. Borders. Access. Distance. Resources. Greenland stays central for that reason alone.
Defense analysts quoted this week described the Pituffik Space Base as the backbone of Arctic surveillance and missile warning, anchoring the northern flank between North America and Europe. Lose leverage there, and the entire geometry shifts.
The same logic applies south. Venezuela. Panama. Energy corridors. Shipping routes. Trump’s hemispheric focus echoes a modern Monroe Doctrine, sharpened by tariffs and energy leverage. NATO increasingly reads like a service agreement. European capitals protest in public while quietly adjusting defense budgets.
Tariffs arrive quickly. Negotiations accelerate. Reversals follow. Commentators call it chaos. Markets treat it as compression.
With U.S. naval assets moving into range of Iran this week, Washington signaled readiness without locking itself into escalation. Control the chokepoints. Influence energy flows. Dictate timing. Trump’s national security posture favors the Western Hemisphere over distant theaters.
In Risk terms, hard-to-hold territories get abandoned so reinforcements can stack at home.
Musk Takes the High Ground
If Trump plays the classic board, Elon Musk operates on the Space expansion pack.
Control increasingly lives above the map. Starlink controls a dominant share of operational satellites, a fact repeatedly underlined in coverage of Ukraine and modern warfare. Communications, navigation, and data flow now hinge on infrastructure owned by a single corporate actor.
This week’s SpaceX–xAI consolidation sharpened the picture. Barron’s described the merger as collapsing aerospace, artificial intelligence, and communications into a single vertically integrated platform. Other analysts called it the most ambitious private consolidation market have ever seen.
Orbital data centers. Solar-powered computing. Redundancy beyond terrestrial regulation. These are no longer science-fiction footnotes.
Musk speaks openly about Mars as a hedge — a spare board where civilization keeps a backup key. His businesses align toward developing the necessary tools to get there articulated with unsettling consistency.
Bezos Builds the Factories
Jeff Bezos enters differently.
While Musk races outward, Bezos industrializes. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander contract and the accelerating cadence of the New Glenn rocket mark a shift from ambition to execution. Payloads are scheduled. Reinforcements arrive reliably.
His TeraWave satellite network targets governments, AI centers, and corporate heavyweights with immense throughput. Where Starlink spreads access broadly, TeraWave monetizes the most valuable lanes. Financial writers described it as owning the trade routes rather than the ships.
Bezos maintains careful alignment with government institutions.
Defense contracts, Space Force partnerships, and a measured political posture position Blue Origin as the dependable alternative when reliability matters more than spectacle.
To the chagrin of the media elite, yesterday Bezos laid off 300+ employees – one-third of the workforce – from the Washington Post, following years of declining readership and financial struggles for the publication.
The layoffs include substantial cuts in the newsroom, including foreign bureaus, ostensibly because they are unable to accurately follow, or at the very least, provide useful analysis of the Trump grand realignment strategy.
China Plays the Long Game While Others Announce Moves
China, on the other hand, looks slow because it is incremental.
While other players announce strategy, Beijing has been accumulating its position. Artificial islands in the South China Sea function like new territories added mid-game, extending reach into shipping lanes that carry roughly a third of global trade. Each runway, port facility, and radar installation expands the board without forcing a decisive confrontation.
The Financial Times described this week’s activity as “infrastructure diplomacy.” Ownership matters more than declarations.
Under the Belt and Road Initiative, ports, railways, and logistics hubs now stretch from Greece’s Piraeus port to Sri Lanka’s Hambantota harbor, placing Beijing astride routes competitors must use whether they approve or not.
One European trade official put it plainly: “They don’t need to blockade anything. They already own the toll booths.”
China’s long game centers on logistics dominance. Supply chains outweigh speeches. Manufacturing scale outruns sanctions. When Belt and Road borrowers struggle to service debt, Beijing asks for collateral — port leases, land access, resource concessions. Territory shifts hands quietly, one balance sheet at a time.
That logic extends directly into raw materials. China controls roughly 80–90% of global rare-earth processing capacity, a reality that resurfaced this week as export controls returned in response to U.S. trade coordination. No threats. No rhetoric. Just paperwork that slows factories elsewhere.
China’s response to Musk’s dominance in orbit follows the same script. Parallel systems replace shared ones. Domestic AI. Hardened data sovereignty. Satellite constellations designed so that no external CEO can toggle access during a crisis. The Digital Silk Road mirrors the physical one: closed loops, controlled inputs, insulation from outside pressure.
Thus far, China has been expanding its influence without having to roll the dice.
That’s why we continue to favor the commodity space for investments and trades.
“We’ve seen some big swings in prices in recent months, but the story remains the same,” notes our own Andrew Packer, who has targeted several commodity-related trades over at the Grey Swan Trading Fraternity. We expect to see even more trading opportunities in commodities in the months ahead.
The Triangle Tightens
By early 2026, the most delicate structure on the board sits between Trump, Musk, and China. Trump depends on Musk’s technology to remain competitive. Musk depends on China’s manufacturing ecosystem for Tesla. China benefits from time, scale, and resource leverage that compound quietly.
Each side manages exposure while preparing for friction. The market has started to price that tension through capital allocation rather than headlines. Supply chains, energy security, satellite access, and processing capacity now matter as much as earnings forecasts.
This phase of the reset emphasizes control. Geography reasserts itself. Infrastructure regains primacy. Energy, minerals, data, and launch capacity form the new balance sheet of power. Institutions adapt or get bypassed.
The Financial Times observed this morning that global politics now flows through supply chains the way it once flowed through oil pipelines. Capital already behaves as if that’s true.
For individual investors, the message remains straightforward. Favor assets tied to physical control, infrastructure, and scarcity. Systems built on smooth assumptions strain once friction returns.
If you’ve followed along with our books, we’ve established the plot: Empire of Debt warns that debt-heavy architectures fail loudly when reality intrudes, including for historic empires. Financial Reckoning Day maps how the epic cycles mete out consequences in market folly and in your daily life. Demise of the Dollar traces how paper monetary regimes strain under competing claims—from precious metals to Dollar 2.0 digital assets.
Ahhhh… sigh.
Our task is cleaner now. Just keep in mind, when everyone’s shrieking and hollerin’ in the theatre, it’s time to check what’s bolted down and who guards the exits.
Folks seated in the audience who confuse the noise on the stage for some form of reality usually learn the difference the hard way.
~ Addison
P.S. Tomorrow on Grey Swan Live! with Mark Jeftovic, we’ll dig into bitcoin’s historic 45% correction and walk through what we see coming next, piece by piece—crypto plumbing, precious metals structure, and the infrastructure shifts underneath— with the goal of placing your investments safely.
