# When Every Headline Leads Back to One Trunk: Michael Every on the Geopolitical Puzzle (MacroVoices #551, Part 2)

Source: Realpha Blog (blog.getrealpha.com)
Original article and charts: https://blog.getrealpha.com/en/blog/macrovoices-2026-09-25-macrovoices-551-michael-every-decoding-the-global-/

> Notes after listening to the MacroVoices #551 bonus episode: Iran's one-week deadline, the rumored diesel export ban, Canada's war game, and how Michael Every routes all of it back to the US-China contest. Educational listening notes, not investment advice; no tickers, no price targets.

Published: 2026-09-26
Locale: en
Tags: geopolitics, energy, us-china, ai, podcast-notes


![A night oil terminal, rows of pipelines running along a jetty toward a loading tanker in the far distance with a faint city glow behind it](/covers/macrovoices-2026-09-25-macrovoices-551-michael-every-decoding-the-global--cover.png)

> Wear the silk yourself, and have your attendants wear it; the people will follow. Then forbid Qi to weave it, so that we must buy from Lu and Liang — and Lu and Liang will abandon their farming to weave silk for us.
>
> — Guanzi, "Light and Heavy V" (Warring States period; translation mine)

In the MacroVoices #551 bonus episode released on 25 September 2026, host Eric Townsend and Rabobank global strategist Michael Every took three headlines from that morning — Iran's one-week deadline to the United States, a rumored 90-day US diesel export ban, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney ordering his military to war-game a US invasion — and routed all three back to the same trunk: the US-China cold war. Iran's news moved WTI three to three and a half dollars in a single spike, which Michael called predictable, since this is an economic war and a physical war running at the same time. He said several times that he was projecting dots forward rather than forecasting; these are my notes, and they are not a forecast either.

## What this episode covers

The episode's origin story is part of the story. Eric said Michael had more to say than an hour could hold, so they recorded a bonus session the next day — no budget, no plan, the production team told at the eleventh hour, editing standards relaxed, seams audible.

They also reset the ground rules. The show normally avoids unconfirmed rumors and speculative theories; this time they let them in, because after a disciplined first hour neither man could assemble a picture of the world. So the tone is private conversation, with Michael interrupting himself to flag which parts are logical possibilities rather than his view.

## Key takeaways

**One: three stories, one trunk.** Iran gave the United States a week to lift the military blockade or face resumed asymmetric escalation. Politico reported Trump was committed to a 90-day diesel export ban, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright — a man whose first words are usually "under the leadership of President Trump" — went public to say markets don't work that way. Michael treated none of these as standalone events. He routed each back to the US-China contest, then told Eric his instinct was right: grasp the trunk and you're halfway to the answers.

**Two: the export ban writes its own sequel.** He started with why it misses its target. Energy is an interlocking system, so bottling diesel at home solves one problem and manufactures several — pricier crude, fuel prices circling back up, shortages abroad, possibly shortages at home. Then he sketched the path: blanket ban, chaos somewhere, the policy refined into "not everybody, only ABC and not XYZ," then government-subsidized storage so refiners keep running, which amounts to a strategic reserve for diesel. The real power sits in the list. When you hold something others need and they won't do what you want, economic coercion is a tool as old as time. Michael doubted it would be done in such crude terms, but said that is the underlying dynamic: the allies you trust sit at the top of the fuel priority list, and those who refuse to kiss the ring sit at the bottom.

**Three: the Canadian arithmetic.** This was the clearest segment for me. Carney ordered the war game; Michael noted that a century ago both countries had plans against each other and most militaries keep what-if scenarios in dusty drawers, so the exercise isn't new — its disclosure is. What he cared about was the economic half. Canada's tradables come in two kinds: a few high-value industrial sectors fully integrated with the US, and raw materials. Europe wants the raw materials and can buy them today without any new relationship. Europe does not want Canadian cars, trains or jets; it has its own. Ninety percent of Canadians live within a two-hour drive of the border they'd be turning away from. And the army's conclusion, if it ever came to a fight, was to head for the hills and fight like insurgents. His question: where is the upside in that distribution?

**Four: two constellations, not two countries.** On one side the US plus a set of countries mid-negotiation over whether they sit inside the bloc and what it costs. On the other, more than China. Iranian-designed drones now carry Russian jet engines and outrun Ukraine's interceptors, and may travel back to the Middle East to be fired at US and Israeli forces. North Korea tests hypersonics while reportedly preparing another fifty thousand men plus munitions for Russia. In the Western Hemisphere, nearly every Latin American state signed a Monroe-flavored declaration. A Russian suicide drone crashed inside Romania — technically an Article 5 violation. Will NATO strike back immediately? No. That is what salami-slicing looks like.

**Five: the mid-fifties physical.** Eric's read was that someone is tricking America into burning through its weapons. Michael's version differed: America never had the resources it believed it had. His image was a man in his mid-fifties who still feels thirty, looks passable in the mirror, starts training and discovers it hurts and he can't keep up. The Iran campaign already exposed too few interceptors and not enough bunker fuel in Hawaii for the Pacific fleet. Meanwhile China builds a new ship on a five-minute clock rather than a five-year one.

**Six: the truce that stops in January.** The last summit produced a trade truce. This time China asked to extend it through the end of Trump's term; Trump said early January. Michael turned that into a question: what do they know about the next few months that makes the truce dispensable, or makes them willing to signal that the rare-earth whip hand might weaken? Minerals processing and AI, he said, sit outside his wheelhouse, and he left them there.

**Seven: AI arms control and the darker inference.** The Economist suggested Trump pursue SALT-style talks with Xi on AI. Michael called it sensible in principle and unlikely in history: China opposes nuclear weapons while expanding its own warhead count to keep pace with Russia and the US. On the claim that Chinese open-source models let you air-gap your enterprise, he ran a smell test — the state that fills streets with cameras, whose EV bus reportedly kept trying to phone home from a quarry, is happy for you to own a model it cannot see, while the land of the free becomes the one reading over your shoulder? He thinks the polarity is reversed, and offered another reading: open weights as a financial-market weapon, so American labs get judged unprofitable before they arrive. Then he turned the knife on his own side. If you truly believe the endpoint is a superintelligence that can build a better version of itself, then letting international capital — Chinese capital included — buy the shares that fund it, and swooping in on national security grounds once it exists while the market says good night, strikes him as a clever move. The Manhattan Project, outsourced to private labs in Silicon Valley, would not have been left in their hands either.

**Eight: capital controls in slow motion, plus two old stories.** Eric asked whether the doors and windows being shut meant capital controls. Michael said it is happening in slow motion, slowly enough that you can still see it coming and step aside, and nobody has been caught off guard yet. Several jurisdictions already levy ruinous exit taxes; some are pushing unrealized capital gains taxes — pay every year on an assessed value you never sold, and leave half behind if you go. He declines to call that a capital control and calls it very high taxation, while noting it is something anyone with capital to allocate should think about. He paired the segment with two stories: a Soviet cosmonaut, shown off an American zero-gravity pen, answering "we use pencil"; and his younger years in Moscow, visiting a closed science city called Zelenograd for the Georgian restaurant, where residents held permits beyond the usual internal passport, met no foreigners, and faced limits on how many of their own countrymen they could meet. His conclusion: a world fighting over energy as a zero-sum prize will struggle to keep science open to everyone because markets.

## Going further

### "Ten geopolitical headlines a day — which one am I supposed to read?"

This is my own morning problem. Laid out flat it's Iran, diesel, Canada, North Korea, Romania, the South China Sea: six items, six place names, and what survives the reading is a vague unease. Tomorrow brings six more.

Michael's method gave me something to copy. Decide what the trunk is, hang each headline on it, and set aside whatever won't hang. His trunk is the US-China contest, and his hook is a question: whose list order did this change? Which country moved up or down the fuel priority list, which ally is being told to adopt the same external tariff toward China. What hangs is structure. What doesn't is mostly the noise of the day.

What worried me here is that a wrong trunk organizes noise beautifully. So I added a check: when a headline refuses to hang yet keeps reappearing week after week, the thing under review is the trunk, not the headline.

### "A policy headline just landed — do I act today?"

I've paid for this one. I'd read a policy headline, reason from its literal wording that same day, and then watch the policy arrive in a different shape. My move had been priced off the first quote.

Michael's path is worth keeping: blanket measure, chaos somewhere, carve-out lists by country, then subsidies and stockpiles growing around it. He hedged it heavily — unconfirmed, a political rumor — but the shape has value. What carries structural consequences in the diesel story is who lands on the exemption list and who gets the subsidized tankage. The price on announcement day is an opening quote.

To use that read, I have to admit I don't know how the list gets ordered. So it stays a variable under observation: which countries get named, which industries get waivers, over the coming months — instead of me writing the full story on the day of the headline.

### "How much freedom does my money have to move, and is that changing?"

Exit taxes and unrealized gains taxes sound like tax news with no bearing on a portfolio. Michael's line about slow motion — you can still step aside, nobody's been caught off guard yet — is the part that unsettled me, because slow-motion change comes without an alarm. We all have procedures for the kind with an alarm: an earnings blow-up, a stop level, a hostile call. For the silent kind, our procedure is to remember it occasionally.

I ended up writing it in as a position attribute alongside sector, size and liquidity: rule-change risk. Over the next three years, is the direction of the rules a tailwind or a headwind for where this money sits? And I had to admit that for most holdings I can't fill the box. That blank is information too. It says I've been reading that box off the news.

## One thing to take with you

The idea this episode left me with: slow-motion risk arrives without an alarm, so it needs a manual one. The things that blow up come and find you. The things that drift don't — they move a little during the months you weren't looking, and by the time you remember, the position is different. That is what Michael's capital-controls segment is about. There is still time to step aside, and "still time" won't knock to tell you it's ending.

Something I've tried, and it needs no portfolio at all: pick one thing you know is drifting that nobody will ever notify you about. A parent's health. The product line your company keeps quietly defunding. Your landlord's mood each renewal. A friend who stopped reaching out a few years back. Put a date three months out in your calendar with nothing but that thing's name in the subject line. You decide nothing that day; you answer one question — how far has it moved? The first time I did it the answer rattled me, because it had moved more than I assumed, and I hadn't checked once in three months.