📽️ EMPIRE OF LIES GALA SCREENING

Shoutout from director Matthew Hope at the Q&A after the screening.

"Where did you find all this conspiracy stuff?"

A segment from last night’s preview Q&A at Genesis Cinema in London hosted by David Hughes.

Director Matthew Hope explains the origins of the idea to build a character around "conspiracy" ideas.

P. S. Matthew and I both prefer the terms critical thinking to "conspiracy theory"!

📱 ROBINMG

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3 minutes & 22 seconds of Professor Marandi truth bombs launched at Sky News commentator. Glorious.

📱 ROBINMG

🇮🇷💬🇺🇳 Iranian Foreign Minister Araghchi spoke with UN Secretary-General Guterres today.

Araghchi made Iran's position on Hormuz explicit: restricting vessel movement belonging to the enemy and its allies is Iran's legal right as a coastal state. The insecurity in the strait is a direct result of U.S. and Israeli aggression, not Iranian policy.

Guterres announced the appointment of Jean Arnault as his personal representative for Middle East affairs, with a mandate to establish direct contact with Iranian officials.

The UN is now inserting itself into the diplomatic track.

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The Programmable Crisis

Iran, Debt, and the Financial Regime Change

By Professor Fabio Vighi

The accelerating economic downturn will not just be managed with more money printing. It will be programmed directly into the money itself.

In a highly indebted economy, a sustained oil shock behaves less like traditional inflation and more like a tax on consumption. As rising energy costs absorb a larger share of household income, discretionary spending collapses. Corporate revenues fall while input costs rise, leaving heavily leveraged firms and households struggling to service debt. The result is not necessarily sustained inflation but the risk of a debt-deflation spiral—a dynamic visible in the months preceding the 2008 financial crisis. This economic crisis scenario makes the existing mountain of US public and private debt much harder to manage, creating a powerful incentive for radical financial solutions.

In other words, the escalation of the Middle East conflict could allow the US to legitimise tools for:

1. Digital Debt Monetization: a government-aligned digital dollar infrastructure could allow for the direct distribution of stimulus and the purchasing of government debt, bypassing traditional banking system constraints and political gridlock.

2. Direct Economic Control: a programmable, centrally managed digital currency platform gives authorities unprecedented levers to influence spending, saving, and capital allocation during a crisis. Money is no longer just a store of value; it can become “money with an expiry date,” programmed to devalue or vanish if not spent in a certain way.

3. Maintaining Dollar Hegemony: integrating private stablecoins into the official system can be a way to co-opt and regulate the crypto space, ensuring the next generation of digital money remains dollar-denominated and under US oversight, rather than shifting to a decentralized alternative.

In this respect, the recent US moves on crypto look like a strategic pivot toward enhanced monetary control. What am I referring to?

- On 4 March, Kraken Financial became the first crypto-native institution to obtain a Federal Reserve master account, allowing direct access to core payment rails such as Fedwire. This can be regarded as a “crossing of the Rubicon” regarding the centralisation of cryptos.

- On 19 February, the SEC (the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) issued new guidelines on stablecoin use, slashing the capital penalty (“haircut”) from 100% to 2%. This move legitimizes stablecoins as equivalents to money market funds in corporate accounting, effectively bringing privately issued digital dollars into the regulated financial system rather than leaving them in the crypto periphery.

Let’s not forget that the COVID “pandemic” provided the ultimate political and economic cover for unprecedented intervention (massive money creation, direct payments and bailouts). So what we are witnessing today could be framed as the “COVID Playbook Revisited”: the Iran-induced downturn would serve the exact same monetary function as the “pandemic.”

The key difference lies in the delivery mechanism. During COVID, the Federal Reserve printed money and sent it via the “going direct” strategy devised by BlackRock in the summer of 2019. Today’s newly regulated crypto/stablecoin infrastructure (Kraken on Fedwire, stablecoins in money market funds) resembles a digital “going direct”: the Fed could credit digital dollar wallets directly. They could impose time limits on spending, restrict usage to certain sectors, or even implement negative interest rates on excess digital cash to force spending. In this respect, BlackRock’s recent (6 March) restriction on withdrawals is highly symptomatic."

Read more:

https://savageminds.substack.com/p/the-programmable-crisis

📱 ROBINMG

Energy Lockdown

War, Oil, and the Coming Financial Reset

By Professor Fabio Vighi

Oil as Strategic Shock

The surge in oil prices, along with its volatility, functions as a strategic weapon. It is comparable to a silent pandemic – a Covid encore – that incapacitates the world’s economies and, crucially, justifies massive monetary interventions aimed at rescuing the over-inflated, credit-addicted markets, and sustain the increasingly fragile dollar-based architecture. The bill for this rescue, as always, will not be presented to the markets themselves. It will be paid by the average person through the erosion of wages and savings, the devaluation of pensions, and the steady transfer of wealth upward dressed in the language of stability. In this sense, the emerging energy crisis resembles a macroeconomic shock comparable to that of the pandemic era since the policy responses may ultimately follow a similar trajectory.

Monetary Intervention: the Pattern

During the Covid emergency, large-scale monetary intervention began even before lockdowns were implemented. In September 2019, the US repo market crisis forced the Federal Reserve to inject massive liquidity through daily auctions. When the “pandemic” arrived months later, the emergency provided political justification for expanding those interventions dramatically. The crisis did not cause the intervention – the intervention was already primed, and the crisis provided the cover. Energy shocks can play a similar role. By destabilizing debt and equity markets, and threatening recession, they create the conditions under which large monetary responses become both politically acceptable and economically unavoidable. As with Covid, this is not merely crisis management – it is another case of crisis deployment.

The War Behind the Narrative

In my earlier essay, The Programmable Crisis, I suggested that the United States and Israel initiated this war precisely to produce an energy shock large enough to cascade into a global financial crisis – one that would clear the path for a systemic reset aimed at prolonging the life of an exhausted, debt-saturated system. Seen from this perspective, the war is a trigger mechanism for that reset. To read the conflict through the familiar narrative of Iran’s nuclear programme means mistaking the decoy for the target. The Middle East war has already impacted on global markets. European gas prices spiked 25–30% in a single session, Brent crude surged above $110, and a historic $50-plus split emerged between WTI and physical Oman/Dubai crude – a sign that the paper oil market is rapidly decoupling from physical supply stress.

The Return of Demand Suppression

One of the clearest signals of how quickly this crisis could reshape policy comes from recent recommendations by the International Energy Agency. In response to escalating supply risks, the agency has proposed measures that would have been familiar during the Covid lockdowns: working from home where possible, cutting highway speed limits, limiting air travel, increasing car-sharing, and restricting car access in major cities. The justification is energy security rather than public health, yet the logic is strikingly similar to pandemic-era policies. Faced with a shock to the energy system, authorities may again be turning to behavioural constraints on mobility and consumption as tools of macroeconomic control. In fact, a pandemic-without-virus logic is already being operationalised.

Overall, the conditions for a systemic reset are falling into place. An escalating energy shock, an unwinding “everything bubble,” and a mounting global credit crisis are converging into a single destabilizing moment.

Read more:

https://fabiovighi.substack.com/p/energy-lockdown

📱 ROBINMG