MacroVoices #551 with Michael Every: Oil Came Back Down, the Risk Didn't Leave

Contents

1. What the Episode Covers
2. The Points Worth Keeping
3. Going Further
4. Oil came back down — so are we fine?
5. The headline sounds so certain — how do I judge it?
6. I don’t trade oil, so why does this matter to me?
7. Worth a Look
8. One Thing to Take Away

Thus what enables the wise commander to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is foreknowledge. —— Sun Tzu, The Art of War, “The Use of Spies” (Spring and Autumn period; translated by the author)

In MacroVoices episode 551, recorded on September 24, 2026, host Erik Townsend brought back Michael Every, global strategist at Rabobank, to walk through geopolitics. Every’s read is that both Iran and Russia-Ukraine sit closer to escalation than to a ceasefire, and that the recent slide in oil rests on hope the facts don’t support — he noted Brent traded up to $110 a barrel during the Red Sea and pipeline attacks, and that China proposed extending the current trade truce through the end of Trump’s term while Washington would only discuss three to six months. The market desk later in the episode added that the US 10-year Treasury yield had pushed above 5% that same week, its highest since 2007. Every left himself a door: if a deal does get struck, the whole chain of reasoning stops holding.

What the Episode Covers

Every’s job title is global strategist, and the job itself is to judge how one event travels across assets, regions and disciplines. Across this episode he and the host tie together Iran, Russia-Ukraine, global diesel, the Greenland–Denmark security agreement, Beijing’s calculus, and Washington’s use of stablecoins as a foreign policy tool. One trading-floor joke ends up carrying the whole hour: rates traders now have to be oil traders, because oil is what tells you where bond yields go.

There’s a non-market reason I liked this one. Late in the recording the host announced a format change — listeners kept emailing to complain that he cuts guests off at the 45-to-50-minute mark, so they decided to record a bonus hour to cover the South China Sea, North Korea and Taiwan. A ten-year-old show changing its format because listeners complained is worth writing down.

The Points Worth Keeping

One: the blockade works, so the other side hits somewhere else. Every’s chain runs like this — if the US economic blockade on Iran actually bites, Iran’s incentive is to escalate militarily elsewhere, directly or through proxies with a layer of deniability. He points to the trouble in the Red Sea, the East-West pipeline being struck, Yanbu being struck. His emphasis is repeatability: Yanbu, Riyadh, Aramco facilities, that already-damaged pipeline all remain reachable. So unless you hold specific knowledge of when these wars end, anyone pricing peace is holding hope.

Two: when diesel goes, farmers and trucks stop first. The host put it plainly — a country out of diesel is a country where farmers can’t move food and trucks can’t move anything, and rationing follows. Every says he isn’t the energy expert, but his bank’s energy specialist is deeply worried: look at supply and demand, at inventories, at how long it’s been since the West built a refinery while closing existing ones, and a genuine diesel crisis reads as possible. When the figure of roughly 40% of Russian refining capacity came up, the host stopped to say he got that from X and hadn’t verified it — that admission is worth more to me than the number.

Three: an export ban is a dial, not a switch. There’s a proposal in Washington to halt US diesel exports and keep the barrels at home. Every says nobody in the oil business thinks the market works that way, then adds the premise that matters: the world is fragmenting on tariffs, decoupling and industrial protection, while energy still runs as one deeply integrated global market. His hypothesis is that the gentlemen’s agreement breaks, and he jokes that the US ends up forming a North American petroleum and hydrocarbons trading bloc where everyone else knocks at the door. And it wouldn’t be all-or-nothing: he uses Brazil’s election and the Netherlands as a transshipment point into Europe to show that cutting off one particular buyer is itself a pre-election signal.

Four: the loudest headline often ends the other way. A few months ago European leaders took turns on stage saying they would never tolerate US pressure on Denmark. The noise faded, and a Greenland security agreement got signed: no time limit, US arrangements survive even if Greenland votes for independence, the US can expand bases with Denmark informed rather than consulted, and third-party investment in Greenland’s minerals needs US sign-off. Every says he heard this outcome as a rumour five or six weeks earlier, while everyone else was still listening to the echo of the previous headlines.

Five: China wants the status quo without a war. Every’s read is that Beijing wins most from the current arrangement and loses on net from war, yet it can’t let Russia lose and can’t let Iran lose, and backing either too openly accelerates the split into blocs — so the play is more redundancy and more stockpiles. He pulls a tell out of a Bloomberg report: China asked to extend the truce through the end of Trump’s term, and the US side would only consider three to six months. Someone declining to lock in two years of calm probably thinks a card lands in his hand inside six months.

Six: Congress stalled it, so the money took another road. The stablecoin segment is the part I most want to go verify. Every says the Clarity Act stalled in Congress, which cost dollar stablecoins the adrenaline shot of a clear legal framework. But his friend Izabella Kaminska found that inside the Development Finance Corporation there’s a new unit called SWORD, doing strategic lending around the world in the name of supply chains and national security — and planning to pay in stablecoins. His conclusion: the US is serious, and Congress declining to approve doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, it means it happens through a quieter channel than the banking system.

Going Further

Oil came back down — so are we fine?

This is the mistake I make most: bad news lands, the price doesn’t fall, and I cross the whole thing off my list. This episode offers a clean cut — separate “the conditions changed” from “people stopped looking.” Every’s point is that those facilities are still reachable and that pipeline can be hit again. None of those conditions moved because oil sold off; what moved is how much premium the market will pay for them.

The market desk gave a matching example. The S&P 500 chart looks handsome, while the equal-weight index made a lower low that same week, the Russell 2000 weakened across the board, and only 28% of stocks sat above their 50-day moving average, with five mega caps carrying the index. An index rising and a market rising are two things, the same way oil falling and risk leaving are two things. I’ve since added a column for myself: the condition that made me call this dangerous in the first place. When the price moves, I check that column instead of the quote.

The headline sounds so certain — how do I judge it?

Greenland handed me a repeatable move. What was public at the time was European leaders’ posture, journalists’ adjectives and the market’s fear level. What decided the outcome was the clauses in a document: does it expire, who holds the veto, does an independence vote void it. Not one word of the emotion made it into that document.

So when I meet a headline stated with total certainty, I try to rewrite it as one sentence: who conceded what, on which clause. If I can write it, I keep reading; if I can’t, I know the headline is a thermometer for mood. Every’s talk about second- and third-order thinking sounded abstract to me at first, until I noticed that this is all he’s doing — he doesn’t guess moods, he guesses who gets forced to lean on whom. Europe backs Ukraine, yet Europe also eats the worst of a diesel shortage, which makes Europe the party with the strongest motive to tell Kyiv to stop hitting refineries. That inference needs no inside information, only the question of whose bill is biggest.

I don’t trade oil, so why does this matter to me?

One line of Every’s I copied down: you can try to guess the reaction function of the Fed, the ECB or the Bank of England, but that reaction happens in response to geopolitics. Seen that way, diesel is the shared upstream of inflation, yields, currencies and central bank decisions.

The way I turned that into something usable was a bottleneck pass: take every company on my own holdings list and write down which physical input, if it stops, stops the company — power, water, one specialty material, one shipping lane, one packaging plant that only two firms can run. Doing it, you find some companies have a blank answer (their constraint sits in demand, not supply), and some companies share the same name in theirs. That repeated name is the thing worth tracking, and tracking it costs less effort than tracking headlines. I’ve done this twice, and the two lists differ: the first pass was too coarse, I wrote “chips,” which is the same as writing nothing.

Worth a Look

• MacroVoices episode 551 (September 24, 2026) — macrovoices.com holds the earlier Michael Every interviews, where the stablecoin thread is laid out in more detail
• Michael Every posts regularly on LinkedIn and X; he also mentions his bank’s research platform for clients
• Energy economist Anas Alhajji, cited twice in the episode — his distinction between benchmark prices and local market prices deserves its own read
• The US Energy Information Administration’s weekly diesel inventory and refining data, for checking answers rather than for forming views
• The CFTC’s Commitments of Traders report, which the market desk used to show the yen flipping from net short to net long in two weeks — a crowding map, not a forecast

One Thing to Take Away

A price coming down tells you one thing: attention moved on. The conditions that made something dangerous are a separate list, and checking whether they’re still there is on you.

Here’s something I’ve tried, and you can run it on something that has nothing to do with money. Think of one thing you consider settled — the argument at home that never finished, the small ache that went away on its own, the message you never answered and nobody chased. Write down the condition that made you call it over (he stopped bringing it up? it stopped hurting? she didn’t ask again?), then go look at whether that condition holds today. The first time I did this, I found that my condition for “settled” was “the other person went quiet,” which was never the thing itself.

Raw Markdown

This article is an educational discussion of investment method. It is not advice to buy or sell any individual security, offers no target prices, and does not analyze any current holding. Investing carries risk; make your own decisions or consult a qualified professional.