By Matein Khalid King Dollar that saw a 20% rise in the world’s reserve currency (our currency, your problem) died in late September 2022 and the greenback is now 8% below its high on US dollar index (DXY). All G10 currencies have risen at least 7% against the USD. So its weakness is just not […]
The post Dethronement Of King Dollar Result Of A Sequence Of Events first appeared on IPA Newspack.
By Matein Khalid Unlike Hitler’s Panzer blitzkrieg against France/Benelux in May 1940, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has not been a pushover. Putin’s battle tanks have not taken Kiev or decapitated the Zelenskyy’s government. NATO is a far greater threat to Russia now that Germany has decided to rearm and send anti-tank/stinger missiles to the Ukrainian […]
The post Post-Ukraine NATO Threat To Russia Is Far Greater Than Before first appeared on IPA Newspack.
By Matein Khalid If Checkpoint Charlie in West Berlin was the epicentre of the Cold War between NATO and the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact satellite states, Ukraine is the crucible of the geopolitical confrontation between the West and Putin’s Russia. Putin weaponized Gazprom’s gas exports to Ukraine as far back as 2006, fomented secessionist militias […]
The post A New Global Energy Order Emerging With US Supplies As Pivot first appeared on IPA Newspack.
By Matein Khalid Recurrent lesson in Russian history is that the top guy in the Kremlin is toast if he loses a war or a high stakes geopolitical gamble. In 1962, Nikita Khrushchev, Cuban missile crisis gamble against JFK backfired and he was booted out from the Politburo by his fellow oligarchs two years later. […]
The post Parallels Seen With Stagnation After Invasion Of Czechoslovakia first appeared on IPA Newspack.
Matein Khalid Both Israel and the US were careful not to target Iran’s oil export terminal at Kharg Island, a major reason why Brent crude trades at 68 and not 100. It is ironic that Iran’s oil output is now 5.1-MBD (this figure includes condensates and gas to liquids), its exact amount in 1978, the last year the Shah ruled from his Peacock Throne. There is no […]
Matein Khalid My generation were teenagers in the late 1970’s and thus passionate fans of Sweden since Abba dominated the Top of the Pops (God, how I hated the ghastly Dancing Queen since every girl in high school thought this syrupy pop tune was written specifically for her!) and Björn Borg dominated Centre Court at Wimbledon as the Men’s Champion until the trophy was wrested from him […]
Matein Khalid The past decade dramatically illustrates the peril of trusting paper money as a store of value in a political system designed to pivot recklessly towards deficit financing and deliberate debasement of the world’s reserve currency. The US national debt is now $37 trillion and the annual budget deficit is now $2 trillion or 125% of GDP. Add political gridlock in Washington, violent migrant riots in […]
Matein Khalid It is ironic that Brent crude collapsed from its $78 high on the New York Merc to as low as 66.80 in early Singapore trading even though Iran’s Revolutionary Guards launched a missile strike on America’s largest military base in the Gulf in Qatar. This retaliatory strike was polite, measured and apologetic with advance notice given to Centcom to avoid any US military casualties. Trump […]
Matein Khalid Operation Midnight Hammer was a spectacular military success though it will take 60 years more for the top secret CIA files on Trump’s rendezvous with history at Fordo to be declassified even though I hope Centcom and the Pentagon generals will release their BDA (Battle Damage Assessments) in the next two weeks to reinforce their claim that the Islamic Republic’s nuclear assets beneath the mountain […]
Matein Khalid The India-Pakistan war in May and the Iran-Iraq war that rages as I write only reinforces my conviction that wars will be won or lost via a access to the latest missile air defense, stealth fighter jet platforms, ballistic hypersonic missile, power projection capabilities and state of the art ISR (intelligence surveillance reconnaissance) defense technologies. A nation without these capabilities is akin to a Stone […]
Matein Khalid The deployment of 30 US air-fueling tankers to the Middle East strongly suggests that Trump has decided to escalate the war with Iran with an American led strike on the underground nuclear site at Fordo. Since the B-2 Spirit super bombers would need tankers to refuel their fighter escort. Ali Khamenei’s tweet threatening America was precisely the wrong message to send to Trump at a […]
Matein Khalid There is precious little good news to emerge from the Middle East since the IDF launched its spectacular blitzkrieg and leadership decapitation strike against Iran’s nuclear asset and military/intelligence elite last Friday. This weekend was grim with Iran’s ballistic missile strike on Haifa and Tel Aviv with even a real miss on the IDF command and control complex in Kirya. Netanyahu’s boast that he would […]
Matein Khalid I had analyzed SpaceX as a potential 10X winner in the Dubai media circa late 2020 when it traded at a mere $46 billion in the private market and even invited a number of close friends in an investor syndicate after sourcing shares from the Founders Fund in San Fran via the secondary market. Shakespear’s Henry V praised the English longbow archers who won him […]
Matein Khalid I have had a neurological soft corner for Wall Street’s alternative asset manager stocks ever since I resisted the come hither importunings of multiple Morgan Stanley (MS) managing directors before the firm sold its private wealth division in the DIFC to Credit Suisse. Everyone of these MS honchos wanted me to subscribe to the Blackstone IPO in the summer of 2007 at $32. They assured […]
Matein Khalid Dr. Copper supposedly boasts a doctorate in economic forecasting because its price predicts inflection points in the global industrial cycle and Freeport-McMoRan (FCX) is the largest listed copper miner on earth, with gold and oil drilling businesses as ancillary SBUs. Dr. Copper is not exactly my fav prognosticator of the economic cycle but I do notice a mini price breakout of the red metal on […]
Matein Khalid My macro crystal ball begins to vibrate ominously whenever a perma-bull talking head joins the Squawk Box on CNBC, my spiritual, philosophical and financial lodestar in life and La Dolce Vita of the mercati monetari globali. After all, our beautiful business began as a money lender’s bench in Renaissance Florence 600 years ago and if we ever ran out of cash, they ruptured our banco […]
Matein Khalid While I never ever found diamonds in any coal mine, the truth is I never looked since I never really believed that De Beers/James Bond propaganda that diamonds are forever. In fact, my industry sixth sense tells me that diamonds are forever – worthless. I guess, my only investment in diamonds was a romantic one when I proposed to my then GF and now proud […]
Matein Khalid The fallout from the Moody’s downgrade is unfolding exactly as I guesstimated it would in my Sunday afternoon post. The 10 Year US Treasury note yield is now 4.54% and 30 year money is now 5.02%. So my 2/10 and 2/30 US Treasury note bear steepener strategy is oozing green – so far. Gold is also a classic haven from the fiscal Frankenstein that is […]
Matein Khalid While I was not surprised by Moody’s decision to cut the sovereign credit rating of the US from Aaa to Aa1 since I have done my best to warn my friends in this post about the King Dollar’s vulnerable underbelly on debt/deficits, I am surprised that the credit rating agencies is willing to risk the wrath of Trump White House with this move. After all, […]
Matein Khalid The US Treasury bond market is unnerved by Powell’s reluctance to cut rates at the May FOMC and increasing short bets on long duration Uncle Sam IOUs by the world’s biggest hedge funds. This is the reason the 2-year Treasury note yield, the single security most sensitive to changes in expectation of US central bank monetary policy, has risen 15 basis points this week to […]
Matein Khalid I was neurologically programmed to disbelieve every communique issued by the Indian or Pakistani military in the wartime and thus missed the spectacular 50% rise in the shares of AVIC Chengdu Aircraft, a Shenzhen listed vendor of the $39 million J-10 fighter jet that downed three Indian $250 million Rafales, a MiG-29 and Sukhoi-30 while French, British and US intelligence told sources in Reuters, Bloomberg, […]
Matein Khalid The smoke signals from Geneva came even faster than the one in the Vatican that announced the arrival of Pope Leo XIV on the world stage. If the US-China trade marathon was a Bollywood movie, Scott Bessant would be dancing wet and wild with the Chinese Vice Premier Lifeng in their Jet d’Eau or kowtowing on those little abraas that criss-cross the Rhône river since […]
Matein Khalid I spent a wonderful afternoon with an old friend, a Persian prince in his cousin’s Jumeirah villa to heal from the trauma of multiple Hindutva chicken hawks keyboard warriors berating me for pointing out the fact that Dassault Aviation shares have fallen 3% in Paris while the Chinese J-10CE fighter jet (Vigorous Dragon) soared 20% in Shenzhen. Only a moron with a Stone Age IQ […]
Matein Khalid I have not exactly been reticent in my conviction since last autumn that King Dollar was on the precipice of a seminal monetary regime shift that could mean 40% downside risk on its trade weighted index, as in 2001-06. Yet not in my wildest dreams did I anticipate that the New Taiwan dollar would surge 8% against the greenback, its best performance in 42 years, in […]
Matein Khalid He was a handsome young Gen-Z kid from Dubai, son of a Sindhi family long settled in the UAE, only a few years older than my twins. I can just imagine him as a toddler, all decked out in Babyshop diapers, then a little guy having his birthday bash with his classmates at McDonalds or Kidzania, as an IHS student on a school bus in […]
Matein Khalid Sterling’s wild swings in Planet Forex literally shaped my path in life after high school. Magret Thatcher’s monetarist revolution and North Sea oil bonanza had taken cable to 2.40 while the Pakistan military’s judicial murder of Prime Minister Bhutto on April 4th, 1979 meant that we were expelled from the Commonwealth. So I was easily able to persuade my parents that Matt should not follow […]
Matein Khalid My idea of nirvana Xanadu and Lotus Land is an emerging markets strategy bull session in the Waldorf cigar lounge with two bros who can dissect the best money making ideas in EM FX, EM sov debt and EM equities in the dozen odd countries where we see macro fairytales and masala shorts in sectors/countries on the precipice of emerging nightmares from Brazil to Hong […]
Matein Khalid The last time the U.S. Dollar Index plummeted 9% in the first four months of a year was way back in 1973, when Richard Nixon sat in the White House on the eve of Watergate, the October War in the Sinai/Gulan, the Arab oil boycott and a savage 40% bear market in U.S. equities. Last week provided a respite from the tsunami of greenback selling […]
Matein Khalid Gold’s spectacular bull market since its mid-2022 bottom at 1600, amid the most brutal monetary tightening by the Fed since the Volcker era under JayPo (now branded as a “loco” and a “major loser” by President Trump) has climbed seminal macro walls of worry. A surge in the US Dollar Index to 110 in Jan’25 did not kill gold’s bull run nor did tough love […]
Matein Khalid Thank God my macro instinct flashed a “get out” SOS in late February and I dumped King Dollar for Bonnie King Charlie’s British pound before New Year late last year and thus averted fate worse than death/Matty miskeen. My macro guardian angel now whispers a few subliminal ideas. One, Chinese factories shed 20 million workers last week and hiring is down 30%. So the youth […]
