At 1:20 in the morning on Tuesday, Iran's foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, boarded a plane in New York bound for Doha. Hours earlier, Secretary of State Marco Rubio had ordered Iran's entire United Nations delegation out of the country. Tehran insists the trip home had been on the schedule since September 17. Washington's version is blunter — Rubio said they "had overstayed their welcome."

Either way, the talks are dead. And you are about to pay for it.

Qatari mediators had been carrying a seven-day proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and restart nuclear discussions. Araghchi said publicly that "if the necessary conditions are met, the strait could be reopened. The choice now is with the US." President Trump called Iran's offer "not good enough," denied reports that he'd offer sanctions relief, and then said this: "We will blow 'em up or make a deal. But the time is coming."

The market heard him. On Thursday, Brent crude jumped $4.28 to $102.31 a barrel — back above $100 — and WTI climbed to $92.87. Diesel hit $6.39 a gallon. PetroChina cancelled its October fuel exports. And the Navy is sending the USS Theodore Roosevelt and its strike group to join the two carriers already in the region, due to arrive by the end of November, with an amphibious group carrying more than 2,000 Marines already underway.

Now look at the calendar. The midterms are November 3. Trump has hinted Tehran may prefer to deal after the election — and the Roosevelt shows up after the election. In other words, the White House is building the option to escalate right after the votes are counted, and Iran knows it.

Most people stopped paying attention to this war months ago. It has been seven months since the first U.S. and Israeli strikes on February 28. There was an April ceasefire, a June memorandum signed at Versailles, and the end of the naval blockade. Most investors filed the whole thing under "resolved."

They're wrong.

The strait never went back to normal. Regional oil exports recovered to 12.8 million barrels a day in September — the best month since the war began — but that's still far below the roughly 20 million barrels a day that moved through Hormuz before February. Three Liberian-flagged tankers were hit by unknown projectiles this week while crossing with their transponders switched off. On September 14, an Iranian antiship cruise missile left eight U.S. Marines injured. The Pentagon's wounded list now stands at 861 service members, with at least 19 dead.

So why does this matter to you?

Because oil at $100 isn't just a gas-pump story — it's an inflation story, and inflation is now a Federal Reserve story. Headline PCE inflation ran 3.4% in August. The Fed, under Kevin Warsh, already raised rates on September 16, and 16 of its 19 officials expect to do it again this year. Every extra dollar on a barrel of Brent makes that second hike more likely.

Let me put this in plain English. The war is no longer something happening "over there." It's sitting inside your mortgage rate, your bond portfolio, and your grocery bill.

If you own no energy, I urge you to fix that. Skip the lottery tickets on small drillers and buy the large, cash-gushing producers that pay you dividends whether Brent is $80 or $120. Keep in mind that the bottleneck isn't the oil — it's the strait. Producers whose barrels never touch Hormuz collect the war premium without carrying the war risk.

Plan accordingly.

Since Feb 28th, the S&P has slid -4.1%.

But the people invested in the Patriot Income Plan (P.I.P.)...

They barely noticed.

While the world panicked over "World War III"

Their distributions kept arriving. On schedule. In full. Some have collected 15+ separate payouts during the three months of war.

And their portfolios? The average partnership inside P.I.P. has gained 7.2% during this conflict. The best performer rose 15.3%.

That's the difference between owning stocks and owning infrastructure.

Stocks trade on fear. Infrastructure collects fees on every molecule of oil and gas that moves through America, war or peace, boom or bust.

And that's exactly what P.I.P. is.

A way for you to own critical infrastructure that pays you whether America is at war or not.

With unit prices cooling from wartime highs, today may be the best entry point in months. The next P.I.P. payout is days away.

Enroll now, before it's issued.

P.S. Since 2020, the average partnership in P.I.P. has produced 20% avg. annual gains. That's in addition to the 10% yield. One investor already collects $4,800 a month. Another hasn't worked in years. Show me something better. I'll wait. [Enroll in P.I.P. →]

The most important price in the world is breaking records, and almost nobody on television is talking about it.

On September 25, the 30-year Treasury yield hit 5.48% — its highest level since 2004. The 10-year reached 5.20% that day and was trading near 5.29% by Wednesday, about 1.25 percentage points higher than in early March. And it isn't just America. Japan's 10-year government bond hit 3.075%, the highest since 1996, while Germany's 10-year Bund briefly crossed 3.6%, a 17-year high.

So who's buying all this debt? Fewer people than Washington needs.

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says the government ran a $2.0 trillion deficit in the first eleven months of fiscal 2026 — $168 billion in August alone. The national debt has passed $40 trillion, and just the interest on that debt now costs more than the entire defense budget. Think about that. A country fighting a hot war in the Persian Gulf spends more paying its lenders than paying its military.

Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, put it plainly: "Such extraordinarily high deficits are just one piece of our fiscal situation that is falling apart."

The Fed is raising rates to fight inflation. Higher rates raise the government's interest bill, a bigger interest bill means more borrowing, and more borrowing pushes yields up again. Hiking into a debt this size is like dropping Mentos into a can of Diet Coke — and the Fed dropped the first one on September 16.

Mortgage rates are already near 7%, up about a full point since before the war. If you hold long-dated bonds because they "always" protect you in a crisis, I want you to reconsider. In this crisis, the bonds are part of the problem.

In short, these debts will never be repaid in dollars worth what they're worth today.

Copper is telling you something the bond market already knows — the world is running short of real things.

Chile, the largest copper producer on earth, mined just 369,500 tonnes in August. That's down 12.8% from a year ago and the lowest monthly total since February 2011. State-owned Codelco and BHP's Escondida and Spence mines all came in light, hit by weather damage, operational trouble, and falling ore grades. And it may get worse: workers at Antofagasta Minerals' Centinela mine, which produced 240,400 tonnes last year, voted 98.73% to strike after rejecting the company's wage offer.

London copper sits at $14,416.50 a tonne. The only things holding it back are a strong dollar, rising Treasury yields, and China's Golden Week holiday, which keeps Chinese buyers out of the market through October 7.

Meanwhile, Washington has quietly become one of the biggest mining investors in the world. Government money committed to rare earth and magnet projects hit $7.6 billion in the 18 months through June — more than four times the entire 2020–2024 total. The Pentagon owns $400 million of MP Materials' preferred shares and guarantees it a floor price of $110 a kilogram for the neodymium-praseodymium that goes into magnets. The Energy Department holds warrants worth a 5% stake in Lithium Americas, and Energy Fuels landed a $725 million conditional loan in June.

Most investors still treat mining as a boom-and-bust trade. Rinse and repeat. But when the U.S. government sets your price floor and owns your stock, the "bust" half of that cycle gets a lot smaller.

And one more thing... last week's Trump–Xi summit in Washington produced only a promise to work toward restoring rare earth shipments — not a guarantee. China still processes about 90% of the world's rare earths. If you own Western producers with Pentagon backing, you're holding the insurance policy. Don't sell it because a summit went smoothly.

Nvidia's greatest advantage was never its chips. It was CUDA — the software every AI engineer on the planet learned to write. On Wednesday, China went after that moat.

DeepSeek released free, open-source tools, built with Huawei, for programming Huawei's Ascend accelerators — including a language called TileLang, designed as a Chinese alternative to CUDA and tuned for the new Ascend 950 chips. DeepSeek also plans to install at least 160,000 Huawei accelerators in a data center in Inner Mongolia, and founder Liang Wenfeng has told investors that training future models on domestic chips is now a strategic priority. Huawei's training chips are slated to ship between this quarter and early next year.

Let me put this in plain English. China isn't trying to buy its way back into Nvidia's world — it's building a separate one and handing it out for free.

That matters because America's strategy for years has been to win by denial: cut off the best chips, and China falls behind. But export controls only work if the other side has nowhere else to go. DeepSeek is raising money at a valuation near 500 billion yuan — about $74 billion — and is talking about a public listing. That's capital flowing into the exact thing Washington tried to prevent.

Keep in mind that the two governments just agreed at last week's summit to set up an AI safety channel, with a dedicated dialogue scheduled for November. Washington and Beijing are talking about AI risk precisely because they've accepted there will be two separate AI systems running the world.

If you own the American AI leaders, you don't need to sell. But you should stop assuming China's market will ever be theirs again. That revenue isn't delayed. It's gone.

On January 28, gold hit $5,590 an ounce — the highest price in history. War fears were peaking, the Fed was on hold, and the dollar was weak. Everybody had an opinion about gold. A month later, the bombs actually started falling.

And gold went down.

This morning it trades around $4,179, which is 25.3% below that January peak. Earlier this year, gold was up more than 95% from a year before; today that year-over-year gain is just 7.8%. Silver tells the same story at about $61 an ounce, down nearly 5% in a month.

Most people look at that and conclude gold failed. A war, oil above $100, a record national debt — and the "crisis metal" fell by a quarter. The headlines have moved on.

Here's what actually happened. Gold pays you nothing. So when a 10-year Treasury pays you more than 5%, and the Fed is raising rates instead of cutting them, holding gold has a real cost — and a stronger dollar makes that cost bigger. Gold didn't fall because the world got safer. It fell because cash and bonds suddenly started paying well.

Now ask Howard Marks's second-level question: what happens next?

The Fed is hiking into the deficits you just read about in Section 02. Every hike makes Washington's interest bill — already bigger than what it spends on its military — that much heavier. Sooner or later, the Fed has to choose between fighting inflation and keeping Washington solvent, and history says it picks Washington every time. The day it blinks, the force that pushed gold down runs in reverse.

As Buffett says, be "fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful." In January, everyone was greedy for gold. Today, almost nobody wants it. Meanwhile, the buyers who don't care about next quarter — central banks — bought roughly 863 tonnes in 2025.

So here's what I want you to do.

First, if you own no gold, start now. Harry Browne's Permanent Portfolio kept a quarter of its money in gold for exactly this kind of decade. You don't need 25%, but every paid-up subscriber should own some — and today you can buy it a quarter cheaper than the crowd paid in January.

Second, if you already own gold, don't sell it to chase bond yields. Those yields are high because the market is worried about the very debt that will eventually force the Fed's hand.

Third, own the best producers alongside the metal. Even after the drop, gold is still far above the prices that low-cost miners need to make money.

I've given you the answer. Horse, meet water.

Fiscal 2026 ended on Wednesday, and the CBO's full-year tally is due in the coming days. With $2.0 trillion already booked through August, the total will land near a record. If you hold long bonds, watch the 30-year's reaction — 5.48% is the line to beat.

Sixteen of 19 Fed officials expect another hike this year. If August's softer core inflation reading of 3.0% holds, Warsh may wait until December. If oil stays above $100, he won't.

Trump has floated a deal with Iran after the midterms, and the Roosevelt arrives by the end of November. If you own energy, hold it through that window. Escalation risk peaks after the votes are counted, not before.

The two-month truce extension runs into January — when China's paused rare earth restrictions come back into play. If November's AI dialogue and the talks on cutting tariffs for $30 billion of goods stall, expect Beijing to reach for the minerals lever again.

Russia sent NATO a diplomatic note this week threatening to use "the entire arsenal of forces and capabilities at its disposal, including nuclear weapons" if the alliance tries to isolate its Baltic exclave. NATO called it "reckless." If you own European defense stocks, this is why the spending boom isn't ending anytime soon.