Nazem Alkudsi, CFA

The Hormuz closure is not a 6-week shock. It is an 18-month stress test for the global food system. Most allocators are trading the obvious: oil up, defense up, gold up. They are missing the connective tissue. 🧵

New Mexico ordered Meta to pay $25 billion. Meta plans to appeal. Meta’s August settlement already included product restrictions. Consumer protection cases are reaching AI too. Eight states announced OpenAI lawsuits on 14 October. A shift in Congress this November could bring tougher scrutiny. Further data limits could hurt Meta’s ad sales. New product rules could raise costs or delay launches. How much of that risk is already in earnings forecasts?

Syria shut the pipeline. Baghdad worried about salaries. In January 1967, Iraq’s prime minister warned that its already strained finances could soon leave officials and army officers without full pay. Who, then, controlled Iraq’s oil? open.substack.com/pub/nazem/…

Memorandum of telephone conversation, the President and Prime Minister Blair, October 14, 1998, CONFIDENTIAL, declassified October 14, 2015." substack.com/@nazemalkudsi/n…

Norway did not sell a single Treasury this morning. It filed paperwork. Paperwork lasts longer. Norges Bank wrote to the finance ministry on Tuesday asking to cut government bonds in the $2.3tn fund’s benchmark from 70 per cent to 50. The Treasury share drops 12.2 points, about $80bn if the FT’s sums are right, with most of it going to agency MBS and other US debt. The number that matters is the small one. Dollar exposure falls half a percentage point. This is not a flight from the dollar. Norway still wants dollars. It wants to be paid more for holding them. For eighty years the Treasury was the one asset nobody had to defend. Now the letter says 50 per cent in government bonds is “sufficient” for liquidity, even in rough markets. Sufficient. A word for firewood, not for faith. Buried lower sits the sharper clause: weight governments by the market value of their debt, not their GDP. Borrow more, get a bigger slice of Norway’s savings. Japanese bonds rise 2.8 points. In April the finance minister said there were no plans to reduce US exposure. He was telling the truth. The benchmark gets rewritten anyway. Maybe the dull reading wins. The letter is only advice, and the ministry doesn’t go to parliament until spring 2027. But Norway publishes its reasoning so other funds don’t have to. The question of who buys the long end now has a co-signer in Oslo.

The Dutch statement says more than the headline. Of the 86 tonnes that left New York and Ottawa, some 59 never moved. They were sold in New York and gold of London standard was bought in London. The 27-odd tonnes that did travel went to Zeist. Dutch bars already of London standard went on to London in their place. No bar needed remelting. The word in DNB's own title is not safety. It is tradability. Gold at the Bank of England meets the London standard and can be sold quickly. Gold in New York and Ottawa, in DNB's words, "cannot be utilised as quickly." The long arc. In 2014 New York held 51% of Dutch gold. After that November's move, 31%. Today, 18.5%. One more line in the release. DNB says it used two methods, sale and shipment, so that if one proves impossible in a future crisis it has practised the other. The governor says he expects never to use the gold. His staff spent six months making sure they could. What crisis is the central bank of a AAA sovereign rehearsing for?

I had the privilege of working alongside Aksel Kibar (@TechCharts), one of the finest chartists I have encountered in my career. His work was never analysis for its own sake. It helped generate significant real profits for the sovereign wealth funds he served.

The Asian Financial Crisis, retold from the declassified files — for a generation raised on the AI boom. Part 1: the way up, and the vault nobody could see inside open.substack.com/pub/nazem/…

William Dalrymple’s East India Company analogy turns on dependence. Parliament intervened in 1773. The Company’s governing powers survived until 1858. Technology firms now supply military systems and critical infrastructure, while lobbying to shape public policy. Once a state relies on a company for critical functions, can it still regulate it on its own terms?

This morning the Treasury announced they will at least double buybacks of the long Gov. bonds from Sept 9 — “liquidity support,” $4bn+ per operation, 10–30yr. Read plainly: the long end lacks an anchor tenant, and the issuer is renting itself the space while one is found. 1974 showed how the finding is done. substack.com/@nazemalkudsi/n…

This week the US Treasury sold 30-year bonds at 5.216% — the highest auction yield since 2001. I spent close to thirty years inside Gulf sovereign wealth. I have seen this before. substack.com/@nazemalkudsi/n…

China answers the price of electricity 96 times a day. The easy reading: liberalisation. The better one: industrial policy by price signal, steering compute toward western electrons. When weather prices the hour, what does the machine still purchase? substack.com/home/post/p-209…

The dollar lost four yen before lunch. The people who should be worried own American equities. 163.41 at the open. 159.18 by eleven. A carry trade is a man asleep in a rowing boat. What keeps him dry isn’t the boat. It’s the flatness of the water. Warsh has taken the map away — no guidance, three dissents for a hike, the thirty-year back at 2007 levels. Tokyo intervenes at unannounced hours, defending a line it has already lost twice. Chop from the west. Chop from the east. One crowded sleeper between them. This comes apart over months, not in an afternoon. Ask what has been funding the AI complex — then ask what that money does when it wakes up wet. That’s about the floor. Below this you lose either the boat or the two-sided chop, and each one is load-bearing — without the boat the last line has no antecedent, without the chop there’s no argument, just a price and a prediction.

Bab el-Mandeb liquids-tanker crossings have fallen to eight a day from the usual 30, Kpler says. The affected route normally carries around 3 million barrels a day of Arab crude. Kpler links that lost prompt supply to relative pricing. The Brent-Dubai spread widened to roughly $7 a barrel, while Murban cash differentials reached around $15, from $5 a week earlier. The overlooked signal is not only the longer voyage. On Kpler’s calculations, the west-to-east paper arbitrage for Midland crude has reopened. The next test is whether physical Atlantic barrels follow the paper economics.

Most maps of the AI build-out begin with the chip. The map that decides whether it gets built begins with a sentence in a bond document: who is good for the rent? Texas project finance, Oracle credit, Britain’s grid queue and Hefei public equity look like separate stories. Read at the right altitude, they ask the same question: whose balance sheet is making tomorrow’s capacity fundable today? My latest Long Arc News essay: open.substack.com/pub/nazem/…