Michael Every — De-Globalization Is Forcing Nations Worldwide To Choose A Side

2:32 "Special military operation twist" — the frame for everything

• Bessent has introduced a Treasury version of operation twist: increasing buybacks — "relatively small scale but symbolically very significant" — of off-the-run longer-duration bonds, funded by issuing more T-bills.
• Is it yield curve control? "Not 100%. It's moving in that direction." It's a maturity shift to the short end — the same thing Yellen did, and the same thing "many emerging markets who can't manage their debt profile" do.
• His addition: read it alongside everything else happening globally and "it's not operation twist, it's special military operation twist."

4:24 The Genius Act / Clarity Act link nobody is making

• The day before the buyback announcement, Bessent opened public input on the Genius Act (stablecoins); the Clarity Act that bookends it is "imminent," probably before year-end — so expect stablecoins "pushing out aggressively by 2027 at the latest."
• Mass adoption (especially in emerging markets) forces issuers to buy T-bills — "an artificial bump for several trillion dollars' worth potentially" — right as issuance shifts to the short end, capping upward pressure there. "I don't see too many people making that link."

6:16 Stablecoins as a with-us-or-against-us screen

• They are "not currency. They're a digital IOU backed by US debt held in the US." Accept them and you're in the US monetary camp; reject them and "maybe we're going to limit market access."
• "So you start to bifurcate the world. That's inherently geopolitical" — George W. Bush style.

6:36 Total economic war on Iran — and secondary pressure on everyone else

• Bessent, after the Trump tweet, has declared total economic war on Iran; the same binary applies to third countries — keep trading with Iran and "you're going to get slapped."
• "There's going to be an emerging nexus around US markets, US tech, US finance, US stablecoins on one side, or you can work with Iran on the other. It's up to you." The target list is short but includes very large countries.

8:02 Removing the bond market's veto over war

• The observed pattern — every time the US 10-year hits a threshold, Trump floats a deal — has been "true to a degree." But once you control the curve one way or another, "you are effectively saying we are not going to allow the financial market constraints of the Treasury market to tell us what we do or don't do militarily against Iran."

8:36 Iran squeezed to a survival economy — military action after the midterms

• Apparently no Iranian oil getting out (the host cites ~10m bbl/d sneaking out via Oman under US chaperone); no revenue means they "can't pay their own soldiers… their own militia." Inflation approaching 100% (from ~50% at the start of the war), currency collapsing.
• Iran will go to a survival economy, but over months the pressure works: he still expects the US to return to military action after the midterms, with the market constraint removed and stablecoins making it cheaper to fund.

11:45 Economic statecraft vs mercantilism vs neo-mercantilism

• The correct label is economic statecraft — "using every instrument of state together towards an economic goal."
• Mercantilism = deliberately running a trade surplus to stockpile gold. Neo-mercantilism = using the state with the private sector to run a surplus "just to have more physical production of stuff." America is aiming at neo-mercantilism ("they're not going for gold here") but isn't there yet — it still runs a large deficit.
• Globalist governments use statecraft too: the US "used a lot of economic statecraft in order to achieve the open world goals that it's now retreating from."

15:14 Spiritually yield curve control — and the knife analogy

• Not textbook YCC, but the twist plus engineered stablecoin demand for T-bills is "spiritually aligned" with it. Same tool, different purpose: "a knife can be used to peel a piece of fruit or to defend your home from an intruder."
• He'd be "gobsmacked" if this were only about flattening the curve with "no second, no third, no fourth order effects" — he wagers there's a comprehensive plan to re-industrialize, reshore and bifurcate the world, with a more Hamiltonian economy where government "incentivizes, encourages, cajoles and threatens the private sector into doing things that increase US power rather than quarterly returns."

17:30 The plan is evolving — Iran exposed real weaknesses

• The US expected a quick win over Iran like Venezuela; it didn't happen, exposing "significant and real weaknesses" — e.g. no drone defenses in the Middle East, "staggering complacency."
• Lesson: "all large bureaucracies… are always behind the curve, they're always fighting the last war." But as legacy hegemon the US can still leverage its position, "whether it's through building things or… tearing them down."

18:24 The real shortage is diesel, not crude — rationing by force

• Even assuming 10m bbl/d through Hormuz (half the old flow), with China buying less and Saudi routing via the Red Sea, crude isn't the binding constraint — refined product, diesel is: "you need every kind of distillate in order to have that fully functioning machine," and the Middle East refineries are missing.
• If military escalation doesn't resolve it in months, expect far more aggressive statecraft to secure diesel at US-suitable prices — "rather than rationing by price, which is how a market economy works globally, it will be rationing by shut up and give me the stuff."

22:01 Venezuela as diesel-feedstock 3D chess

• The host's read — going after Venezuela first secured heavy-crude feedstock for US refineries ahead of a Gulf disruption — is one Every shares: "that's one of the reasons why I thought the Venezuela action would happen the way it did."
• Rough figures: the US now takes around half of Venezuela's production, where previously almost all went to China — "a significant pivot." But ramping Venezuela back to 2–3m bbl/d from ~half a million, and building new US refineries, are slow.

23:50 Physical constraints beat financial constraints — and everyone's shirt is dirty

• "The real physical world constraints… matter far more than the financial constraints."
• To the horror at the Treasury "playing with" its own market: look at the ECB buying peripheral/Italian bonds with an overt spread policy, the BOJ buying nearly all JGB issuance for years, the Bank of England in gilts, the PBOC "left, right and center." "Lots and lots of dirty shirts out there" — dollar critics look at one shirt and never hold up the others.
• The joke he likes: the US is using "financial warcraft… to prepare for a World of Warcraft" — financial mechanisms as the adjustment lever toward securing physical supply.

26:14 Cheap money into a physically constrained world = commodity pressure

• Running hot with borrowing costs held down so everyone can pile into AI and the rest "of course… is going to have an upward pressure on commodity prices because there is only so much physical stuff out there at any given time."
• "Ironically, you create even more physical pressure with that financial lubrication" — which only works if the physical supply is lined up first; otherwise you get the money-printing catastrophe critics already assume. When the Fed did operation twist and QE, "do you think for a second they were thinking about supply chains or US industry? I put it to you they were not."

32:30 "What is GDP for?" — and the split global dollar interest rate

• Trillions flowing into T-bills lowers US rates, "which is only useful if it's going into useful parts of the economy… If it's going to inflate assets, that's useless. That's old-fashioned Fed thinking."
• The mechanism he's hypothesized: strategically calibrate T-bill issuance (which caps stablecoin issuance) so the dollar's interest rate abroad runs higher than at home — propping the dollar internationally while keeping domestic borrowing cheap.

34:12 Petrodollar → "petro-stablecoin", and a third dimension to the balance sheet

• Lean on energy exporters to be paid in stablecoins and "you suddenly create all this demand."
• The technical punchline his own colleagues struggle with: pay for imports in dollar stablecoins and it "doesn't even operate on the current account, capital account the same way" — the T-bill stays inside the US entity, "no dollars leave the US to pay for the goods. You get a digital token." The US "ends up basically getting a lot of stuff for free and creates like a third dimension to the two-dimensional balance sheets."
• The European retort — "we won't use them" — meets the Eurodollar answer: "you have them because America grants them to you. And if you don't want that, don't sell to the US."

40:56 His methodology — project the hypothesis to its logical endpoint

• "I look at these hypothetical ideas and I project them forward to the logical endpoint this direction or that direction."
• Both branches land in the same place: if stablecoins work, the US gets stuff cheaply and re-industrializes and rearms; if Europe and others opt out, "none of those are exporting to the US anymore — ergo, the US will have to re-industrialize because no one's selling to it." "Either way you end up getting what you want. But one way is nicer than the other."

48:30 "What is finance for?"

• Every profession sees the world through its own lens ("bakers talk about yeast and dough"), and finance has been "on a pedestal for 40 years." He doesn't think that survives.
• Ask "what is GDP for" and you are forced to ask "what is finance for — and if you don't ask it yourself you will be asked it at some point." Finance is "an important appendage, but it's not the dog."

51:56 The data-center backlash — statecraft needs public consent

• Headlines are turning: rising electricity bills, "fields turned into these giant metal boxes," and compute that may take people's jobs.
• Central-planning-style "this will be good for you" won't hold — "you have to make sure that the man and woman in the street absolutely feels that they're getting something from it": local tax cuts or direct benefits where AI centers get built, the way steel and coal towns had good jobs and community investment. Expect "a political pivot on that front."
• The ideal is voluntary, not legislated — "a voluntary dynamic market system underneath the umbrella of economic statecraft where actually people feel better off and at the same time national power… is increasing. This is the game. But you have to have all of it."

56:44 Renewables at scale means an awful lot more copper — look at the totality of the system

• Speaking with solar panels on his roof and a hybrid in the drive: doing it "purely through that on a national level" requires "an awful lot more copper… because you're going to have to have multiple levels of the transmission system to allow for periods where you have a surge relative to the base."
• The general rule: "look at the totality of the system rather than just the individual project" — true for everything he describes.

58:30 Scatter-gun geopolitics — Korea, Ukraine drones, Russian mobilization

• Trump talking to Kim and scaling back exercises with a willing South Korea makes sense against the whisper that North Korea is about to send 50,000 men to Ukraine on top of munitions.
• Ukraine's drone ecosystem is "incredibly dynamic… adapts daily from real-time information. Totally different from the Pentagon" and is close to its own long-range strike missiles; Russian refined-product exports have already halved.
• The whisper on Russia: after the Duma election (Sept 21 onwards) Putin may mobilize and escalate — "another couple of hundred thousand young men."

1:00:27 The Article-5 test and simultaneous escalation

• A further whisper: Putin might "put a foot over the line into a NATO country, just to test" — and if NATO shrugs at "only a small country… one of the Baltics," Article 5 is already dismantled.
• "And if that were to happen, don't rule out Iran escalating on the same day" — including strikes on US bases in Bulgaria, Greece, Cyprus. Not a forecast, but "logically, if one front is going to escalate, it makes perfect sense for all of them to escalate in tandem because that's when you put the most pressure on the Western system."
• Implied market volatility "is enormous… we ain't seen nothing yet."

1:02:43 Trump's space executive order — ~1,000 launches a year

• A same-morning headline: an executive order to massively increase US space launches and find new launch sites, with a target around 1,000 launches a year — "three space launches a week… Monday, Wednesday, Friday."
• "If you think everything on Earth is a mess… look up, because I think things are about to start getting very contested up in space." The economic opportunity depends on cost per journey collapsing, the way marginal cost works in any other industry.
• He leans to the "get to the moon / open space economics" motive over bankrupting rivals — "that is a dangerous game to play for the West given where it's starting from."

1:06:11 Space success feeds back into the stablecoin argument

• A country with cutting-edge, profitable space launches makes the international case for its stablecoins: "it doesn't half help support the argument for stablecoins internationally," which in turn supports T-bill buying, cheaper short-end borrowing and domestic lending "within this new kind of crypto nexus" to fund reshored supply chains.
• Caveat stated plainly: "I'm giving you an idealized version of it. Lots and lots and lots of things can go wrong."

1:09:17 Marginally more optimistic — America's dirty shirt is the cleanest

• Asked which country he'd start on the Risk board, he sticks with where he was and is "marginally more optimistic than last time we spoke."
• The outrage at the Treasury doing what the Fed used to do is selective — "it's perfectly okay to do it in order to get the stock market to go up… not okay to do it in order to do things besides the stock market going up."
• "America has still a better chance of prevailing and coming out stronger than it does collapsing." And to the gleeful: "there's no world in which America collapses and some other constellation steps forward" — a US face-plant injures China too.

1:13:36 Why he's structurally optimistic — globalization was the aberration

• He has never believed the pre-Trump world was "fair, equitable or sustainable. It wasn't. It was an accident waiting to happen and that accident's now happening. But on the other side of it, maybe we build a more crash proof car."
• Europe now looks set to push back hard on Chinese exports — "which could ironically therefore bring the US and Europe together," something he's argued was logical for years.

1:15:27 The investment themes: commodities tied to use, T-bills, two-way dollar volatility

• Commodities: "very clear in a more zero-sum neo-mercantilist rearming world where supply chains are being deliberately disrupted as a strategy… commodities are a good place to be absolutely" — but "they need to be tied to something. Pure speculation is not going to be encouraged." The powers that be want to see it "put to some use rather than hoarding it": copper to build out the grid, not to sit in a warehouse and be rehypothecated as money.
• Bonds/T-bills: "the T-bill argument from stablecoins I think is clear" — engineered demand at the short end.
• FX (explicitly not a trade — "I don't do FX strategy"): the consensus that the dollar suffers from the Treasury's actions ignores the stablecoin argument, so expect a couple of bad dollar months and then "everything comes screaming back the other way" — "really big volatility."

1:17:46 Where to follow him

• Full research on Rabobank's knowledge portal (clients only); some work on LinkedIn; the running conversation on X at @TheMichaelEvery — where, the host notes, ideas appear first and get built out over days before they tie into everything else.

1:21:08 Appendix — separate segment, not Michael Every

• Everything after (1:20:50) is Adam Taggart's weekly portfolio segment with Mike Preston of New Harbor Financial — a 7.5% TLT position, a ~10-year commodities bull market view, 50% equities with a blowoff-top expectation, covered calls/put-selling for income. None of it is Every's view and none of it is carried in the table above; it is noted here only so the transcript's tail isn't misread.