At 8:30 on Friday morning, the Labor Department told you what the Federal Reserve didn't want to hear. The U.S. economy added just 29,000 jobs in September — a fraction of what Wall Street expected — and unemployment ticked up to 4.2%. Worse, the government quietly erased 60,000 jobs from July and August. July is now a negative number. The economy lost jobs that month, and nobody knew it until last week.

So why does this matter to you?

Because less than three weeks ago, on September 16, the Fed raised its benchmark rate to 3.75%–4% — its first hike since 2023 — and told you to expect more. Officials penciled in a year-end rate between 4.1% and 4.4%. Going into Friday's report, traders put the odds of another hike this month at roughly 70%. By Friday afternoon, those odds had collapsed to about 25%.

Mohamed El-Erian summed up the mood: the report "will reinforce the impact of recent Fedspeak in calming expectations about an October rate hike." In other words, the Fed is about to discover it's fighting a war on two fronts — and it only has one weapon.

Let me put this in plain English. Inflation is running at 3.4% — well above the Fed's 2% target — largely because Brent crude is sitting above $100 a barrel. Wages grew just 0.1% last month. So prices are rising faster than paychecks, hiring has stalled, and the central bank is tightening anyway. That's stagflation. Most people haven't used that word since the 1970s. They're about to start.

And there's a second problem nobody in Washington wants to discuss. Raising rates when the government owes $40 trillion is like dropping Mentos into a can of Diet Coke. In the first nine months of fiscal 2026, Washington paid $857 billion just in interest — up 13% from a year earlier. The deficit through June hit $1.4 trillion. Every quarter-point the Fed adds makes that bill bigger, and the 10-year Treasury yield is already at 5.18%.

Think about that. The U.S. government is borrowing to pay the interest on what it already borrowed. These debts will never be repaid.

Most investors are watching the stock market's reaction — futures rose 0.8% on Friday because bad news means fewer hikes. That's first-level thinking. Howard Marks would tell you to ask the second question: what happens when the Fed has to choose between protecting jobs and protecting the dollar? It can't do both. History says it picks jobs — and lets inflation run.

Which brings me to gold.

Gold traded at $4,157 this morning, up 0.4% on the jobs data. Keep in mind that's roughly 26% below its January peak of $5,608. Gold has fallen 5.6% over the past month as rising yields made cash and bonds look more attractive. Most people see that as a reason to stay away. I see it as the market handing you a discount on the one asset that doesn't depend on Washington keeping its promises.

If you own long-dated Treasuries, I urge you to ask what you're being paid to take on the risk that inflation stays above 3% for years. If you don't own gold, this pullback is your second chance. Warren Buffett says to be greedy when others are fearful. Right now, the gold market is fearful of a Fed that is about to lose its nerve.

Plan accordingly.

On December 14, President Trump will gather the leaders of the world’s largest economies at his private Miami resort.

And I believe what happens there could change the U.S. dollar forever – potentially triggering a historic repricing across American markets.

The pieces are already falling into place:

A flurry of executive orders… billion-dollar government stakes in obscure mining companies… a landmark pact with 13 nations… and a special agreement signed by six billionaire tech moguls.

At Trump’s December summit, those pieces could finally be assembled in public for the first time – and a new kind of dollar presented to the world as a done deal.

Whether you’re a Republican or Democrat – whether you support this monetary shift or oppose it – you could soon be using Trump’s New Dollar.

That’s why I’ve produced this critical new documentary revealing:

Why I believe Trump is desperately trying to reset America’s money…

Why this has nothing to do with Bitcoin or gold – but is tied to the most valuable resource of the 21st century…

And three moves I believe you can make today to prepare – including the name and ticker of the investment I believe could benefit as this shift unfolds.

The last time America reset its money, it reportedly created – on average – more than 1,000 new millionaires every day for five decades.

But that was only one side of the story.

Millions of workers and savers were quietly left behind as their wages stalled, their savings were hollowed out and the American Dream slipped beyond their reach.

Now, I believe that same dividing line could be drawn again.

The headline price of oil is lying to you. Brent closed Friday at $102.25 while U.S. crude (WTI) settled at $91.11 — an $11 gap that tells you the world isn't short of crude so much as it's short of the fuel refineries make from it.

Here's what happened. On October 1, China's biggest refiners — PetroChina and Zhejiang Petrochemical — suspended fuel exports for October. Beijing hasn't approved exports outside Hong Kong and Macau. Kpler estimates China's diesel stockpiles are about 20 million barrels below pre-war levels, and gasoline sits roughly 9 million barrels short of Beijing's target. In other words, China just decided its own trucks and farms come first — and the rest of Asia can fend for itself.

That's the second blow. The first came from the war. Middle Eastern refineries have been disrupted for months, and Ukrainian drones keep hitting Russian refining capacity. Diesel is the fuel that moves freight, runs farm equipment, and powers militaries. When it gets scarce, everything gets more expensive.

Europe's answer was to open the emergency cupboard. Under a French proposal — pushed hard by President Trump — European governments and members of the International Energy Agency (IEA) agreed to release 100 million barrels: 50 million barrels of diesel from Europe and 50 million of crude. It knocked WTI down 1.9% on Friday. Brent barely moved.

And one more thing... on Saturday, Yemen's Houthis claimed missile and drone strikes on Saudi Aramco facilities near Riyadh and at Khurais. The Saudi-led coalition called the claims "misleading," but Brent traded above $103 after the reports. Yemen's 2022 truce collapsed in July, and the fighting is now spilling into the world's most important oil fields.

So why does this matter to you? Emergency reserves are a one-time fix for a structural problem. You can't refill a strategic reserve with oil you don't have. If you own refiners or diesel-heavy shipping exposure, you're on the right side of this trade. If you're a business that burns diesel, lock in your costs now.

When a country sends a third aircraft carrier somewhere, it isn't sending a message. It's preparing options.

The Pentagon is sending the USS Theodore Roosevelt and about 10,000 sailors and Marines toward the Persian Gulf. When it arrives, the U.S. could have three carrier strike groups in the region at once for the first time since April — joining the USS George Washington, with the USS George H.W. Bush rotating back. The USS Makin Island amphibious group, carrying 2,200 Marines, also sailed. The USS Boxer group is already operating near the Strait of Hormuz, and the U.S. has added missile batteries in Qatar and Saudi Arabia in recent weeks.

Keep in mind how we got here. The June peace memorandum lifted the U.S. naval blockade of Iran on June 18. Washington reimposed it on July 14. By September 1, U.S. forces had turned back 84 commercial vessels and disabled three. Traffic through Hormuz averaged around 20 ships a day in August — against roughly 138 a day before the war.

The pressure is working on Iran's economy. The rial hit new lows over the weekend, Iran's central bank injected $2 billion to defend it, inflation is above 70%, and the oil minister resigned. But it isn't working on Iran's negotiators. Tehran now demands control of Hormuz as a precondition for talks, and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned: "If they move toward military solutions, we are more prepared than before."

Sun Tzu said the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. Washington is trying to do exactly that — and running out of time. The Navy's own analysts warn a three-carrier presence can't be sustained for long without wrecking readiness elsewhere.

Most investors have already moved on from the Iran war. They're wrong. If you own defense primes or shipbuilders, the demand for steel and munitions isn't slowing down. This is not a drill.

Nvidia's greatest asset isn't its chips. It's CUDA — the software millions of developers use to program them. Last Wednesday, China started building the way around it.

On September 30, DeepSeek released free programming tools for Huawei's Ascend chips. They're built on TileLang, an open-source language from a Peking University team led by Professor Zhi Yang, which lets developers write code once and run it on different chips. Every tool DeepSeek released matches one it had previously published for Nvidia GPUs. The two companies tested the work on a cluster of 128 Huawei Ascend 950 chips.

Put that next to the hardware. Bloomberg reported last month that DeepSeek plans to order 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT chips for a data center in Inner Mongolia. And back in June, a Huawei-backed team completed post-training of DeepSeek's 1.6-trillion-parameter V4-Pro model on Ascend chips — proving Chinese silicon can handle the hard part of AI, not just the easy part.

Nvidia's Ian Buck shrugged it off, arguing that AI coding agents are "actually accelerating CUDA adoption." That may hold in America. But in China, U.S. export controls have handed Huawei a captive market, and DeepSeek just gave that market the software it was missing.

In short, Washington's chip restrictions were supposed to freeze China's AI industry in place. Instead, they're forcing China to build a complete stack of its own — chips, software, and models. Lindy's Law says the longer a moat survives, the longer it's likely to last. CUDA's moat is two decades old. For the first time, somebody is draining it on purpose.

If you own Nvidia, you own the best AI business on the planet. You no longer own its China upside.

On September 23, Xi Jinping arrived in Washington for the first Chinese state visit in eleven years. It was his third meeting with President Trump in less than a year. The pageantry was lavish. The result was two months.

That's how long the trade truce was extended — to January 10, 2027. Both sides agreed to consider tariff cuts on roughly $30 billion of each other's goods, set up a new US-China Board of Trade, and created a channel for AI incidents. China agreed to buy more soybeans. Most importantly for you, Beijing again delayed its threatened ban on rare-earth exports — until January 10.

Chinese goods entering America still face a 36.5% tariff. American goods entering China face 31%. Earlier this year, tariffs approached 150%.

Phillippe Le Corre of ESSEC Business School put his finger on it: "Extensions are getting shorter… they haven't found common ground." Einar Tangen called the deal "a temporary sandbag holding back a structural flood."

Here's the idea. Look at the three stories above and you'll see the same strategy everywhere. China is hoarding diesel instead of exporting it. China is building chips and software to replace Nvidia. And China holds 60% of the world's known rare-earth deposits and processes about 90% of the metals — a lever it pulled in April when it restricted five rare earths, and one it was ready to pull on seven more before the truce.

Each short extension buys Beijing another lap. Each lap, China gets a little less dependent on the West, and the West stays almost exactly as dependent on China. That's the Red Queen problem in one sentence: America is running hard just to stay in place, while China is running somewhere.

So what do you do with this?

First, treat January 10 as a hard date on your calendar. If you hold manufacturers that depend on Chinese magnets — automakers, defense electronics, robotics — assume the rare-earth threat comes back before then.

Second, own the non-Chinese supply chain. The handful of companies mining and processing rare earths outside China will be worth more with every truce that expires. Most investors only buy them during a panic. I urge you to build positions while it's quiet.

Third, keep owning real assets. Gold, copper at $6.55 a pound, and silver at $61.67 all benefit from a world where supply chains are weapons. Copper is up 31% over the past year. That isn't a coincidence.

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

Odds of a hike later this month have fallen to roughly one in four. If you hear the Fed pivot toward "patience," don't mistake it for victory over inflation — it means the jobs market scared them first.

China's National Day holiday runs through October 7. If you see Beijing extend the export freeze into November, expect diesel prices — and the Brent-WTI gap — to widen further.

Three carriers in the Gulf gives the President options he didn't have last month. If you hold oil exposure, the date that carrier reaches station matters more than any OPEC+ meeting.

The next inflation report lands mid-month. If you see headline inflation above 3.4% alongside a stalling jobs market, the word "stagflation" goes mainstream — and gold's 26% discount won't last.

The truce and the rare-earth delay expire on the same day. If you're a paid-up subscriber, you've heard me say this before: China never gives up a lever. It just waits to use it.