Tuesday, 18 August 2026

HAS IRAN GONE BACK TO “OLD WAYS OF THINKING?

August 18, 2026#IranNo comments

18 August 2026

HAS IRAN GONE BACK TO “OLD WAYS OF THINKING?”

Has Iran really gone back to an older way of thinking, or has it simply changed the level at which it understands the conflict?

This is an interesting point raised by Alistair Crooke : that Iran thinks "holistically", this kind fo thinking starts from the whole rather than the parts. Instead of asking:“What are the separate problems?”, it asks:“What is the relationship between all these things, and what larger reality do they collectively reveal?”

While Western thinking tends to think linearly and break down a subject into smaller packets, essentially reductionist / decompositional thinking: data → variables → components → relationships → model → strategy.

1. The question: a different way of seeing the same world

Western governments tend to approach complex problems by breaking them into manageable parts. We collect data, analyse it, construct models, identify objectives, devise strategies and then organise programmes of action. Everything is laid out separately, rather like washing hanging on a clothesline.

This is not a criticism. It is one of the great strengths of modern Western thought. It makes complex problems measurable, manageable and operational.

But Iran increasingly appears to be looking at the conflict at a different level. Nuclear capability, missiles, regional alliances, Israel, America, sanctions, the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz are not necessarily seen as separate problems. They can be understood as interconnected parts of one larger strategic system.

At first sight, this can look like a return to an older way of thinking. But that description is misleading.

The important change is not that Iran has abandoned modern analysis. It is that it may be integrating the results of that analysis into a broader systemic picture.

Key concepts and glossary

Analytic thinking — breaking a complex problem into separate components and analysing each one.
Systemic thinking — understanding a problem through the relationships between its components.
Level of analysis — the scale at which a problem is examined, from individual events to the wider international system.
Perspective — the conceptual frame through which reality is interpreted.

2. The American approach: identify the issues

The contrast is particularly visible in the way the American objectives of the war can be expressed. At their most basic level, they can be reduced to four principal military problems:

nuclear capability — prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon
ballistic missiles — destroy or substantially reduce Iran's missile capability
naval power — destroy Iran's ability to threaten maritime traffic and American or allied forces
regional armed groups — reduce Iran's ability to support organisations such as Hezbollah and the Houthis.

This is classic issue-based thinking. Each problem can be identified, targeted and measured. Has the missile force been sufficiently degraded? Has the navy been neutralised? Has the nuclear programme been disabled? Have Iran's regional partners been weakened?

There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. Indeed, military operations require precisely this kind of decomposition. The difficulty arises when the separate operational problems are mistaken for the entire strategic problem.

Key concepts and glossary

Issue-based analysis — treating distinct problems as separate objects of policy.
Capability — the practical ability to perform a military or political function.
Operational thinking — translating strategic objectives into concrete actions and measurable results.
Objective — a defined outcome that policy or military action seeks to achieve.
Proxy — an actor through which another power pursues interests indirectly.

3. Iran's “issues” are harder to separate

We can certainly construct an Iranian list: regime survival, strategic autonomy, military deterrence, preservation of its nuclear programme, regional influence, economic survival, sanctions relief and leverage over Hormuz.

End all US threats against Iran and its allies
Permanently stop US military action
Iran develops its military and nuclear programs unhindered
Withdraw US blockade forces
Recognise that Hormuz is under permanent Iranian control
Compensate Iran for war damage
Lift US sanctions
Release Iran’s frozen assets

But once the list is made, something interesting happens. The items do not appear to be independent issues. They become instruments serving a larger strategic purpose.

The missile programme is not merely a missile issue. It is part of Iran's deterrence.

The nuclear programme is not merely a nuclear issue. It concerns technological sovereignty, deterrence and the ability to resist external control over Iran's security choices.

Iran's regional relationships are not merely a collection of “proxies”. From Tehran's perspective, they also provide strategic depth and complicate the ability of its enemies to concentrate their power directly against Iran.

Hormuz is not merely a shipping issue. Geography gives Iran an extraordinary source of leverage over a vital artery of the world economy.

The pieces therefore fit together. They are different manifestations of one strategic problem.

Key concepts and glossary

Strategic autonomy — the capacity of a state to make fundamental security decisions without another power being able to dictate them.
Deterrence — discouraging an opponent from acting by making the anticipated costs unacceptable.
Strategic depth — geographical, political or military space that makes it harder for an adversary to attack a state directly.
Leverage — an advantage that gives one actor influence over another's behaviour.
Sovereignty — the authority of a state to determine its own political and strategic affairs.

4. This is not “old” thinking

Calling this a return to an ancient or traditional way of thinking risks confusing two different things.

Iranian institutions are perfectly capable of modern technical analysis. They use intelligence, economics, military technology, operational planning and quantitative information just as other modern states do.

Nor is holistic thinking uniquely Iranian, Persian or Eastern. Clausewitz, Sun Tzu and modern Western systems theorists all recognised that complex conflicts cannot be understood simply by adding together isolated components.

The distinction is therefore not really old versus modern. It is analytic versus synthetic.

Analytic reasoning asks: “What are the separate components of the problem?”

Synthetic reasoning asks: “What do those components mean when viewed together?”

A sophisticated strategist needs both. The important question is which level dominates the final judgement.

Key concepts and glossary

Holism — understanding a whole system rather than treating its parts as independent.
Synthetic reasoning — combining separate observations into an understanding of the larger whole.
Strategic culture — historically developed assumptions and habits that influence how a state understands security and power.
Systems thinking — examining relationships, feedback, dependencies and interactions within a system.
Strategic patience — accepting short-term costs in pursuit of longer-term objectives.

5. The crucial shift: from issues to the system

This produces two very different questions.

The American question: How do we remove the capabilities that make Iran dangerous?

The Iranian question: How do we prevent America and Israel from acquiring the ability to determine Iran's future?

These questions are not symmetrical.

The first is primarily about capabilities. The second is about power relationships.

Washington can therefore regard the Iranian missile programme as one problem that might be traded for sanctions relief. Tehran can regard the same missiles as one component of the security architecture that protects the Iranian state.

The disagreement is consequently deeper than a dispute about missiles.

It concerns the nature of the relationship itself.

If Tehran believes that the underlying American and Israeli objective is to prevent Iran becoming a sufficiently powerful and autonomous regional actor, then individual negotiations over missiles, uranium enrichment or sanctions become secondary. They are symptoms of a larger strategic contest.

Key concepts and glossary

Power relationship — the relative ability of actors to influence one another.
Security architecture — the military, political and strategic arrangements through which a state seeks security.
Grand strategy — the coordination of military, economic, diplomatic and political resources in pursuit of fundamental national interests.
Structural conflict — conflict arising from incompatible positions within a wider system rather than from one disputed issue.
Strategic contest — prolonged competition over relative power and the rules governing a political system.

6. Why diplomacy becomes so difficult

This may help explain why negotiations can become increasingly sterile.

If the dispute is genuinely about an individual issue, diplomacy can produce a bargain. But if one side believes the underlying problem is a struggle over strategic autonomy, an agreement concerning one particular capability may appear inadequate.

Iran could reason that surrendering missiles in exchange for promises of sanctions relief leaves it vulnerable if the fundamental power relationship remains unchanged.

Washington can reason that sanctions relief without removing the underlying Iranian capabilities simply gives Iran the resources to rebuild them.

Both sides can therefore regard the other's proposed solution as treating a symptom rather than the disease.

This does not mean that Iran necessarily believes diplomacy is useless. A more precise interpretation is that diplomacy becomes subordinate to the balance of power.

Once a state believes that the fundamental issue will ultimately be decided by relative power, negotiations become useful mainly when they reflect, reinforce or change that balance.

Key concepts and glossary

Coercive diplomacy — using threats or limited force to persuade an opponent to change behaviour.
Bargaining — exchanging concessions to reach an agreement.
Balance of power — the distribution of capabilities among competing states.
Credible commitment — a promise that the other party has reason to believe will be honoured.
Strategic coercion — using economic, military or political pressure to alter an opponent's strategic choices.

7. The insight — and the danger

There is a genuine advantage to systemic thinking. A state that sees the whole system may recognise connections that an issue-by-issue bureaucracy misses. It may understand that destroying one capability does not necessarily remove the strategic problem that produced it.

But there is an equally serious danger.

Once a leadership becomes convinced that it has discovered the underlying reality, almost every subsequent event can be interpreted as confirmation.

This is confirmation bias. A coherent worldview can become so comprehensive that contradictory evidence is absorbed rather than allowed to challenge it.

That warning applies equally to Tehran, Washington, Moscow and Jerusalem.

The argument should therefore not be that Iran has suddenly discovered the truth while the West remains trapped in linear thinking. That would simply replace one simplistic model with another.

The more defensible proposition is that Iran may increasingly be operating at a different level of strategic abstraction.

Key concepts and glossary

Confirmation bias — favouring evidence that confirms an existing belief and discounting evidence that challenges it.
Worldview — an overarching interpretation of how the world works.
Strategic abstraction — reasoning about underlying structures rather than individual events.
Paradigm — a general framework through which information is interpreted.
Cognitive trap — a systematic error produced by the way a problem is framed.

8. The bottom line

Has Iran gone back to “old ways of thinking”?

No.

It may instead be shifting from issue-based thinking to systemic thinking.

Western policy tends to begin with the individual problem: missiles, nuclear enrichment, regional armed groups, sanctions and shipping.

Iran increasingly appears to see these not as separate problems but as components of one larger question:

What will the future balance of power in West Asia look like, and who will have the power to determine it?

Once the question is framed in those terms, missiles, nuclear technology, regional alliances, economics and Hormuz cease to be independent pieces of washing on a clothesline.

They become threads in the same garment - That is not a return to the past.

It is a different way of seeing the present.

Key concepts and glossary

Systemic perspective — interpreting individual events as parts of a larger interconnected system.
Geopolitical order — the distribution of power, influence and security relationships across a region.
Strategic autonomy — freedom to make fundamental strategic decisions without external coercion.
Grand strategic problem — the fundamental long-term challenge determining how a state organises its national power.
Strategic perspective — the frame used to understand the relationship between events, interests and power.

References

TO MOBILISE A FRACTURED SOCIETY FOR WAR

August 16, 2026#PropagandaNo comments

From Fear to the Front Line: Mobilising a Fractured Society

A Living in the Air analysis

Fast Track (30 seconds)

Twentieth-century states used a well-documented, repeatable process to move a population from indifference to a willingness to fight - fear, atrocity framing, collective identity, patriotic duty, legal obligation. It worked because "the nation" being mobilised was one people with one story. Knowing the process is a citizen's main protection against being moved by it unknowingly.

That process now faces a new problem. Mass immigration has replaced the old homogeneous "us" with several groups holding different cultures, religions and loyalties. This article sets out the process, then asks how it is likely to be adapted to work on a multicultural population that is no longer one people.

Mobilising a fractured society

1. Why This Matters

There is a well-established, historically documented process for turning an anti-war population into one that is ready to send its young men to the front line. This is not conspiracy theory - it is the subject of serious academic study, from Lasswell's dissection of WWI propaganda to Bernays and Lippmann's accounts of building and running the precess.

Recognising the stages as they happen is the only real defence a citizen has against being moved by them.

Since then, the game has changed. The process was perfected across two world wars fought by nations that were, broadly, one people. Since the late 1990s, mass immigration has ended that homogeneity across the West. There is no longer one national story to activate - there are several, increasingly organised around different cultures and religions rather than simple nationality. This article is about how that process is updated for today's multicultural western society, and how to recognise the updated process as it starts to be rolled out (it has already started).

It matters because being aware of this process can protect you from being drawn into arrangements for your conscription.

2. The Classic Escalation Ladder

Historians of propaganda identified a repeatable six-stage ladder (process) running through both world wars:

threat identification,
atrocity framing,
in-group consolidation,
patriotic duty,
legal obligation, and finally
the machinery of conscription itself.

Harold Lasswell's 1927 study of WWI propaganda first mapped this sequence across British, French, German and American campaigns.

Fear opens the process, the first rung - it is the one stage that needs no shared identity to work - it is close to a universal reflex. Jacques Ellul later distinguished this short-term "agitation propaganda" (agiprop) from slower "integration propaganda", which does its work not by frightening people but by quietly normalising belonging: the message is "this is who we are, this is how people like us behave".

Fear is then converted into moral conflict through the atrocity frame by foregrounding. Foregrounding is documenting or exaggerating the cruelty of the adversary. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis catalogued these various foregrounding techniques in the 1930s specifically so citizens could recognise, name and question them as they happened, rather than unconsciously absorb them as simple plain fact.

Glossary - Integration propaganda: Jacques Ellul's term for slow, repeated messaging that normalises belonging to a group rather than provoking sudden fear. It works by making "this is who we are" feel ordinary and unquestioned, part of everyday life, rather than by frightening people into action.

Glossary - Atrocity frame: The technique of converting a strategic (elites') conflict into a (popular) moral one by foregrounding - by documenting or exaggerating an adversary's cruelty. Lasswell found every side in the First World War were mounting near-identical atrocity campaigns.

Foregrounding - sometimes by documenting, sometimes just by exaggerating - the cruelty by the adversary. Lasswell's original study catalogued how WWI belligerents each ran near-identical atrocity campaigns against each other.

3. From Belonging to Obligation

The middle stages of the original mobilisation process assumed a single, settled, in-group that fear and outrage could activate. Bernays was explicit in Propaganda (1928) that this kind of messaging does not create loyalty from nothing - it activates loyalty that already exists.

Once that collective identity is switched on, Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922) describes how it is reframed from preference to obligation.

His "pseudo-environment" - the manufactured picture of a distant war that we experience only through stories and images in the media, not being there ourselves - is what turns "I belong" into "I owe", and can ultimately produce a willingness to sacrifice ourselves for people we have never met. The final step is the logistical that converts that moral duty into codified law: conscription statutes and mobilisation orders, where persuasion ends and compulsion begins.

Every one of these stages, from the call to fight through to the front line itself, also maps onto Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. That is not incidental. Campbell's argument was that this mythic structure recurs because it mirrors individual psychological development - which is exactly why propagandists reach for a hero's narrative rather than a bureaucratic one when they need a population to accept sacrifice.

Glossary - Pseudo-environment: Walter Lippmann's term for the mediated, manufactured picture of the world that most people experience in place of direct reality. We rarely see a war firsthand; the pseudo-environment - the pictures, stories and repeated messages we are shown - becomes the reality we act on.

Glossary - The hero's journey: Joseph Campbell's monomyth, set out in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949): a recurring mythic structure - call to adventure, threshold, trials, sacrifice, return - found across cultures, and long used, consciously or not, to move populations toward sacrifice.

A mobilisation process

Fear — establish the threat.
Moral framing — turn the enemy from dangerous into evil.
Collective identity — establish who “we” are.
Patriotic duty — turn belonging into obligation.
Legal obligation — turn obligation into enforceable duty.
Operational mobilisation — turn legal obligation into people, training, transport and ultimately deployment.

4. The Problem: There Is No Longer One "Us"

This is where the historical model breaks down. Sustained mass immigration since the late 1990s, pursued by Western governments often against the stated preferences of their own populations, as expressed by populist parties, has changed what "the nation" means. In-group consolidation (activating our natural loyalty) no longer has one audience - it has several, increasingly organised around civilisational or religious identity, sense of belonging, rather than plain vanilla nationality.

Campbell's own research is instructive here. He drew the hero's journey from comparative mythology across many diverse cultures. The problem for a modern mobilisation campaign may not be that the mythic structure has disappeared - it is that competing populations now carry different, non-overlapping versions of their founding myths. A fragmented society can still climb the early rungs of the ladder easily enough; "fear and atrocity framing" barely need cohesion to work. It is the top rungs - patriotic duty, legal obligation, actual sacrifice - that could buckle under these dispersed loyalties.

A fragmented society can still climb the early rungs of the ladder easily enough. It is the top rungs - patriotic duty, legal obligation, actual sacrifice - that history suggests could buckle.

5. What History Suggests Comes Next

The likely adaptation is that in-group consolidation must move up a level - from plain nation, up to a more abstract frame that a fragmented population can still share even where national identity is contested.

"democracy versus autocracy", "the free world", "the rules-based order".

But the atrocity-frame stage can proceed largely unchanged, since it depends least on shared identity.

The real friction should appear at the legal-obligation stage. We could expect continued official reluctance to name conscription as a live possibility for as long as possible - not because it may turn out to be not be needed as there is always a faint hope for diplomacy or surrender, but because a fragmented society makes it the single highest-risk step in the whole sequence, the step-too-far the people wan't buy.

Bottom Line

The tools - fear, moral framing, mythic narrative - are unchanged and still work. What has changed is the audience: no longer a society with one dominant story about itself, but several. A mobilisation campaign that does not reckon with that may find the ladder holds for the first few rungs and buckles precisely at the step that has always mattered most - the one requiring a shared answer to "who is we?".

And the process that worked fine bottom-up is now replaced by one where values are imposed top-down... do you think that's going to work?

References

Lasswell, H. (1927). Propaganda Technique in the World War.

Ellul, J. (1962). Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes.

Bernays, E. (1928). Propaganda.

Lippmann, W. (1922). Public Opinion.

Campbell, J. (1949). The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Edward Bernays: The Man Who Engineered Consent

Bernay's five-step process for engineering consent - still the basis of propaganda. Perhaps it will be used again to get a reluctant young public social media to the front lines.

The biggest cons we never knew. If a man could convince a nation that bacon was healthy, that smoking was liberation, and that a foreign government deserved to fall - would you still trust your own opinions?

Fast Track (30 seconds)

Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, took his uncle's theories of the unconscious and turned them into a professional discipline: engineering public consent on behalf of paying clients. He convinced America that bacon was the healthy breakfast, that women smoking in public was an act of feminist liberation, and - working for United Fruit - helped lay the psychological groundwork for a CIA-backed coup in Guatemala. He called what he did "the engineering of consent." Everyone else eventually called it propaganda.

You have scrolled past adverts that did not feel like adverts. You have watched a product review quietly funded by the company being reviewed. You have formed an opinion on a political candidate from a feeling you cannot quite explain. None of it was an accident, and almost all of it traces back to one man: Edward Bernays, born in Vienna in 1891, died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1995, at the age of 103.

Bernays is the reason breakfast looks the way it does. He is the reason women began smoking in public. He is a reason an elected government in Central America was overthrown. He did not merely sell products - he sold identities. And unlike most architects of influence, he wrote down exactly how he did it, in plain language, and called it "the engineering of consent." Others would later call it propaganda.

Why It Matters

Bernays did not just invent techniques - he invented a worldview still governing how information reaches you today. Astroturfing, native advertising, manufactured expert consensus: all of it traces to a single man who believed the public could not be trusted to reason for itself, only steered. Understanding his methods is the first step to recognising them in your own newsfeed.

Contents Cover the Following

This article covers:

Bernays's family relationship to Sigmund Freud and the psychoanalytic ideas he inherited
his formative role in First World War propaganda
his invention of the "public relations" profession
four of his most famous campaign successes, including the 1954 Guatemala coup
his own uncomfortable brush with Nazi propaganda
and why his philosophy still shapes public life today.

1. A Freudian Inheritance

To understand Bernays, start with his family. He was born the son of Eli Bernays and Anna Freud Bernays, the sister of Sigmund Freud. His father, in turn, was the brother of Freud's wife. Bernays was doubly related to the father of psychoanalysis, and Freud's ideas about the unconscious - hidden desires, irrational drives beneath rational behaviour - were dinner-table conversation in his childhood. They would later become his professional weapons.

The family emigrated to New York in 1892. Bernays studied agriculture at Cornell, graduating in 1912, though farming never interested him. What fascinated him was influence itself: how to get people to think, feel, and buy in ways they believed were entirely their own idea.

"He did not sell products.

He sold the unconscious back to the people who owned it."

Glossary - More of Freud's Key Concepts

The id, ego, and superego - Freud's 1923 structural model split the mind into three forces in permanent tension: the id (instinctual, pleasure-seeking, wholly unconscious), the superego (internalised moral authority), and the ego (the mediator trying to reconcile the two with reality). Bernays essentially treated advertising as a lever on the id, bypassing the ego's rational gatekeeping entirely.

Repression and the return of the repressed - Freud argued the mind pushes unacceptable impulses out of conscious awareness, but they don't disappear - they resurface indirectly, in dreams, slips of the tongue, or symptoms. This is the theoretical basis for Bernays's assumption that people can't be reasoned with directly: the real desire is buried, so you have to reach it sideways, through symbol and association rather than argument.

Symbolic displacement - Freud held that repressed desires often attach themselves to substitute objects, a person, an object, or an act standing in for the thing that can't be consciously wanted. This is close to the literal mechanism of "Torches of Freedom": the insight that a cigarette could become a symbolic stand-in for a desire, such as autonomy or equality, that couldn't be pursued directly.

2. The War That Taught Him Everything

Bernays's early career included theatrical publicity and a stint reframing a taboo play about venereal disease as a public health cause - his first real lesson in the power of framing a message rather than the message itself.

Then came the First World War. In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson formed the Committee on Public Information to convince a sceptical American public that the war was righteous. Bernays, aged 26, worked alongside Walter Lippmann and Carl Byoir, deploying posters, speeches, and "four-minute men" who delivered scripted patriotism in cinemas nationwide. It worked spectacularly. At the Paris Peace Conference, Bernays watched crowds cheer Wilson as a hero based entirely on manufactured messaging - and a thought took hold: if propaganda could send men to die for a slogan, it could certainly sell them a product.

Glossary

Framing - the choice of which subject a piece is placed inside. The same facts could sit within several different frames, but only one is chosen, and that choice decides what the audience is invited to think about and what is left outside the picture entirely. Bernays's staging of a play about venereal disease as a public health cause rather than a scandal shows this clearly: the play did not change, only the frame within which it was presented changed - and with it, what the audience was prompted, "pre-formatted," to consider.

Walter Lippmann - American journalist and CPI colleague of Bernays who wrote on how public opinion is shaped by mediated images and stereotypes rather than direct experience.

Carl Byoir - Publicist who worked alongside Bernays on the Committee on Public Information, later becoming one of the pioneers of the modern public relations industry.

3. Inventing "Public Relations"

In 1919, Bernays opened his own firm with Doris Fleischman, a journalist and feminist who became his wife and lifelong business partner - and whose contributions to his work have been largely written out of history. Wary of the word "propaganda," Bernays rebranded himself a "counsel on public relations," a term that sounded benign while describing the same scientific manipulation of opinion for private gain.

He drew theoretical grounding from three sources: Freud's theory of the irrational unconscious, Gustave Le Bon's writing on crowd psychology, and Wilfred Trotter's concept of the herd instinct. In 1923 he published Crystallizing Public Opinion, the first book on public relations as a discipline. In 1928 came Propaganda, whose opening lines remain his starkest confession: that manipulating public opinion is essential to democracy, and that those who do it "constitute an invisible government" - the true ruling power of the country.

Glossary

Counsel on Public Relations - The title Bernays gave himself in place of "propagandist." It sounded neutral and professional, but described the same underlying work: the deliberate shaping of public opinion on behalf of a paying client.

Gustave Le Bon - French social psychologist whose 1895 book The Crowd argued that individuals in a crowd lose their capacity for rational thought and become susceptible to suggestion and emotional contagion. Examples: a football crowd, a protest crowd.

Wilfred Trotter - British surgeon and social psychologist who developed the concept of the herd instinct, the idea that human beings have a primal urge to conform to the behaviour of the group.

Bernays's Key Publications - Bernays set out his ideas across several books.

Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) was the first work to treat public relations as a discipline.
Propaganda (1928) remains his most quoted, opening with the claim that the deliberate manipulation of public opinion "is an important element in democratic society," and that those who do it "constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of the country."
The Engineering of Consent (1955) restated the same philosophy, three decades on.

4. The Campaigns

Bernays's theory only matters because of what he did with it. Four campaigns define his legacy.

4.1 Bacon and the "hearty breakfast." Hired by Beechnut in the 1920s to reverse falling bacon sales, Bernays did not actually advertise bacon at any point. He asked a physician whether a heavy breakfast was healthier, then had that doctor survey 5,000 colleagues. The resulting headlines - "Doctors recommend a hearty breakfast" - never named Beechnut either, yet fixed bacon and eggs in the American morning, and the idea that breakfast is "the most important meal of the day" persists to this day.

4.2 "Torches of Freedom." Working for the American Tobacco Company, Bernays was asked to get women smoking in public. A psychoanalyst told him cigarettes symbolised male power in the female mind - so smoking in public could be reframed as defiance. On Easter Sunday 1929, Bernays staged young women lighting "torches of freedom" during New York's Easter Parade, presented to the press as a spontaneous feminist protest. It was, in reality, a Lucky Strike marketing campaign, and it helped more than double the female smoking market within a decade.

"The parade was not a protest.

It was an advertisement wearing the clothes of a protest."

4.3 Green, soap, and the presidency. Bernays ran a national soap-sculpting contest for children on behalf of Ivory - "children," he noted bluntly, "are the enemies of soap" - and made green the fashion colour of 1934 to match Lucky Strike's packaging. He also softened Calvin Coolidge's stiff public image with a vaudeville breakfast on the White House lawn, proving that politicians, like soap, could be repackaged.

4.4 Guatemala. The darkest chapter. Hired by United Fruit Company after Guatemala's democratically elected government redistributed unused company land to peasant families, Bernays built a sustained campaign branding President Jacobo Arbenz as a communist threat - he sent newsletters to 250 journalists, he gave guided press tours, he planted stories. The narrative reached Washington, where senior officials had personal ties to United Fruit. In 1954 the CIA's Operation PB Success, driven largely by psychological warfare, forced Arbenz's resignation. Thirty-six years of civil war followed, killing an estimated 200,000 people. Bernays later described himself, remarkably, as "a casualty of the situation."

5. The Uncomfortable Footnote

In 1933, Bernays learned that Joseph Goebbels kept his book Crystallizing Public Opinion on his propaganda bookshelf, using it against Germany's Jewish population. Bernays, who was Jewish himself, wrote only that this "shocked" him, before concluding that any tool could be used for good or evil. No deeper reckoning followed.

6. Why It Still Matters

Bernays died in 1995, still giving interviews from Cambridge, USA, where he lived into his nineties. His tools evolved into social media, targeted advertising, algorithmic amplification, and influencer marketing - but the underlying philosophy is unchanged: that the public is irrational, that its desires can be mapped and steered, and that an unseen elite class must guide opinion from behind the curtain. He effectively invented astroturfing and native advertising, and perfected manufactured "expert consensus," decades before either had a name.

What he may not have foreseen is the democratisation of his own methods. Techniques once requiring a trained professional are now available to anyone with a smartphone - a shift that has made the "invisible government" he celebrated not just invisible, but diffuse and largely ungovernable.

Glossary

Astroturfing - The practice of creating a fake grassroots movement to simulate genuine public demand for a corporate or political goal. Bernays's 1929 "Torches of Freedom" march, presented as spontaneous feminist protest but staged for a tobacco client, is one of its first documented examples.

Native Advertising - Commercial messaging embedded within editorial content so seamlessly that audiences struggle to distinguish it from independent journalism. Bernays pioneered the technique by planting client-friendly stories in newspapers without ever naming the client, decades before the term itself existed.

Manufactured Expert Consensus - The strategy of enlisting doctors, scientists, or academics to lend their authority to a commercial or political message, creating the appearance of independent agreement. Bernays perfected this in his 1920s "hearty breakfast" bacon campaign, in which a doctor-led survey generated headlines that never named the client, nor "bacon," nor Bernays himself.

Bottom Line

Bernays was not wrong that people are susceptible to emotional manipulation and herd behaviour; modern behavioural psychology largely confirms this. Where his philosophy turns dangerous is in the conclusion he drew from it - that an elite should therefore manage opinion on the public's behalf. That leaves the essential question permanently unanswered: who watches the "engineers of consent"?

Bernays worked, with equal professional detachment, for tobacco companies, banana monopolies, and authoritarian clients alike. His true legacy is not any single campaign but a worldview - that consent can be manufactured, and that reality itself can be designed and sold. He reduced citizens to consumers, and public discourse to marketing, and he told us so, in plain print, more than ninety years ago. We read it. And the machine he built keeps on running.

ARGENTINA GULF STATES JAPAN - WHEN QE IS NOT QE

August 08, 2026#Dollar, #InvestNo comments

Argentina, the Gulf States and Japan - America supports its treasuries without calling QE

ESF, FIMA and the Dollar's Hidden Architecture

What happens when a country is enormously wealthy, yet suddenly finds itself short of money? And what happens when the issuer of the world's reserve currency decides it cannot allow that shortage to force the sale of the assets underpinning its own financial system?

The Gulf states and Japan both faced dollar shortages in 2026 despite immense wealth. Washington's response - Treasury's ESF and the Fed's FIMA facility - reveals a crucial but underappreciated distinction between existing government money and newly created central-bank reserves. Neither is quite QE. But together they raise a harder question: how far can "temporary" liquidity support go before it becomes permanent?

Fast Track (30-second summary)

The Gulf states and Japan both faced dollar shortages in 2026, despite owning vast dollar-denominated wealth. Wealth and liquidity are not the same thing.
Washington responded with different tools: Treasury's Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF), the Federal Reserve's FIMA repo facility, and the Fed's separate permanent swap lines. They look similar to the recipient but draw on fundamentally different sources of money.
ESF liquidity is existing Treasury money, swapped outright with no collateral. FIMA liquidity is newly created central-bank reserves, lent against Treasury collateral.
Neither is technically quantitative easing. But both exist to stop foreign holders from having to sell US Treasuries - and that is where the real question begins.
After all, it's not what these facilities are called that matters, it's what happens when "temporary" liquidity support never quite manages to go away.

Why It Matters

If foreign holders of US Treasuries increasingly need Washington's help to avoid selling those Treasuries, the United States is no longer simply managing its currency. It is managing the willingness of the rest of the world to keep holding it. That has consequences for inflation, for the dollar's reserve status and for how much room the Federal Reserve genuinely has before liquidity support turns into permanent monetary accommodation.

Contents Cover the Following

Wealth Is Not the Same Thing as Liquidity
The Gulf Swap Line: What Was Actually Offered
Gold and the Liquidity Trap
Japan, FIMA and the Real Difference Between Treasury and Fed Money
Three Levels of Intervention - and the Question That Follows

1. Wealth Is Not the Same Thing as Liquidity

The closure, or near-shutdown, of the Strait of Hormuz during the US-Iran war created a financial problem quite different from the physical destruction it caused. The Gulf states did not suddenly become poor. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar and the other oil producers still held enormous stocks of sovereign wealth, foreign-exchange reserves, US Treasury securities and gold. None of that disappeared because tankers could no longer move normally through the Strait.

What disappeared, temporarily, was something more basic: the flow of new dollars.

The Gulf economies are unusual because their principal source of foreign currency is also their principal source of government revenue. Oil is sold internationally, overwhelmingly in dollars, and those dollars finance everything from imports to sovereign investment. When Hormuz stopped functioning normally, that revenue flow was interrupted.

A person can own £5m house and still be unable to pay a£10k repairs bill. The problem is not insolvency. It is liquidity.

The same principle applies to a state. The Gulf producers could be simultaneously extremely wealthy and temporarily short of dollars - and the obvious remedy, selling Treasury holdings to raise cash, created a problem of its own. If several large reserve holders sell Treasuries at once, a Gulf liquidity problem becomes a US financial-market problem. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent effectively confirmed this when he told the Senate that swap lines exist to maintain order in dollar funding markets and prevent disorderly asset sales.

Washington, in other words, was not necessarily rescuing an insolvent state. It was offering liquidity to a wealthy one, precisely so that wealth would not have to be liquidated.

2. The Gulf Swap Line: What Was Actually Offered

The story became public in April 2026, when the UAE approached Washington about a financial backstop. President Trump said a currency swap with the UAE was under consideration; Bessent later told senators that several Gulf and Asian allies had made similar requests.

What made the proposal interesting was the choice of tool. Rather than extending the Federal Reserve's permanent swap network - the arrangement it maintains with a small group of major central banks such as the Bank of Japan and the ECB - the administration considered instead using its Treasury's own Exchange Stabilization Fund. Under such an arrangement, Treasury would acquire dirhams from the UAE and provide dollars in return, with the transaction normally reversed later. The UAE would obtain dollars without selling its US assets.

There is an important qualification. The UAE facility was proposed and supported, but there is no reliable evidence it was ever drawn. It would be wrong to say Bessent lent the Gulf states billions from the ESF. What can be said with confidence is more interesting: Treasury built, or was prepared to build, a mechanism specifically designed to stop a dollar shortage from forcing Gulf states to sell US assets. The precedent was Bessent's genuine $20 billion ESF swap with Argentina in 2025 - a reminder that the tool is real, even where its Gulf application remained hypothetical.

3. Gold and the Liquidity Trap

The timing of the gold-price collapse in March 2026 invited a tempting story: Hormuz closes, oil revenue collapses, Gulf states need cash, they sell gold, gold falls. It is a clean narrative. It is also not supported by the evidence.

The World Gold Council's analysis of the roughly 12 per cent March fall - during which global gold ETFs lost around $12 billion, equivalent to some 84 tonnes - attributed the move to deleveraging and liquidity dynamics rather than any change in gold's investment case. Crucially, the Council examined and rejected the specific claim that Gulf oil exporters had been selling gold for liquidity.

That leaves a more interesting explanation. Gold fell not because confidence in it collapsed, but because in a liquidity shock, even the strongest reserve asset (and one that had considerably appreciated in value recently) can be sold to raise cash elsewhere - leveraged positions unwound, futures reduced, the dollar strengthened. Gold can be wealth and still be sold for liquidity. It is the same distinction that opened this article, now demonstrated in a different market.

4. Japan, FIMA and the Real Difference Between Treasury and Fed Money

The Gulf episode might have remained an unusual wartime footnote had something similar not happened, unmistakably, with Japan.

By July 2026 the yen had fallen toward ¥164 to the dollar, a forty-year low. Japan intervened to support its currency; this time, Washington joined in, with the New York Fed executing trades - reportedly selling euros and buying yen, a deliberate choice to avoid the appearance of an operation against the dollar itself. It was the first joint US-Japanese intervention in almost three decades.

Bessent then went further. On 4 August he said the United States would do "whatever it takes" to support Japan, and argued the Fed should consider enlarging its FIMA facility - currently capped near $60 billion, a figure he called small relative to today's Treasury market.

FIMA - Foreign and International Monetary Authorities - lets an approved foreign central bank borrow dollars from the Fed by pledging Treasuries as collateral. Japan holds roughly $1.1 trillion of them, the largest foreign stockpile in the world. Selling a meaningful slice to fund currency intervention would push Treasury yields higher at precisely the moment Washington wants them stable. FIMA offers another route: Japan keeps the Treasuries, pledges them, and receives dollars against them instead.

It is worth being precise here, because three distinct mechanisms are now on the table, and it is easy to blur them into one story about "Washington helping foreign holders get dollars."

The ESF currency swap, considered for the UAE, exchanges dollars for dirhams outright, with the transaction unwound later. There is no collateral involved and no new money created - simply Treasury's own dollars going out and coming back.

The FIMA repo facility, used by Japan, is collateralised lending. Japan pledges Treasuries it already owns - not yen, not dirhams - and receives newly created dollars against them, to be returned once the loan is repaid. The name itself signals this: it is formally the FIMA Repo Facility, a repurchase-agreement structure, not a swap line.

The Federal Reserve's permanent swap lines, maintained with a small group of major central banks including the Bank of Japan and the ECB, are a third, separate standing arrangement again - and notably, neither the Gulf nor the Japanese episode described here actually drew on that particular facility.

The Gulf and Japanese cases are therefore not the same operation, and the money behind them is not the same either.

ESF dollars are Treasury's own resources - existing government funds, or funds Treasury borrows through the ordinary fiscal machinery. The flow runs: Treasury's existing or borrowed funds, through the ESF, to the foreign central bank. The Fed does not create anything, and no new reserves enter the system. That is why the original observation - that the Gulf proposal was potentially Treasury money rather than Fed money - matters.

FIMA dollars are different in kind. When the Fed lends against Japanese Treasury collateral, it does not draw down some existing pile of dollars. It creates the reserves electronically, the same accounting-entry privilege that comes with issuing the world's principal reserve currency. Its balance sheet simply expands: Japan's Treasuries in as collateral, new reserves out as newly created dollars. No taxpayer hands over the money; no depositor loses it. It is manufactured, temporarily, for the transaction.

Is that quantitative easing? Technically, no. With QE the Fed creates reserves and buys the Treasury outright, so it becomes a permanent Fed asset. With FIMA the Fed creates reserves and lends them, taking the Treasury only as collateral, to be returned when the loan is repaid. One is a purchase. The other is a loan. The distinction is real, and it is why economists are careful to describe FIMA as collateralised central-bank lending rather than asset purchase.

But notice what both operations achieve for the financial system in the moment: an immediate increase in the dollars available, and a foreign asset that does not have to be dumped on the market. Different plumbing, same practical effect on the day it happens. That is the pattern already visible with the Gulf states, now recurring with Japan: interrupted revenue or a currency crisis creates a dollar need; a Treasury or Fed facility supplies dollars against collateral rather than forcing an asset sale.

The central bank does not necessarily have to buy the bond. It can lend against the bond.

5. Three Levels of Intervention - and the Question That Follows

It helps to set out the full progression, because the argument sharpens considerably once it is visible as a single continuum rather than three unrelated stories.

Level 1 - Treasury and the ESF. The government draws on its own existing or borrowed financial resources. No new money is created.

Level 2 - the Fed and FIMA. The central bank creates reserves electronically, but only as a collateralised loan, intended to be reversed.

Level 3 - quantitative easing. The central bank creates reserves and purchases assets outright, with no expectation of reversal.

Existing government money; newly created but collateralised central-bank money; newly created money used for permanent asset purchases. Each step along that continuum is technically distinct from the last. Each step also moves a little closer to the one beside it.

Every facility examined here comes with the same reassuring vocabulary: temporary, collateralised, reversible, liquidity rather than solvency support. And technically, each description is accurate. A swap line has a maturity. A FIMA loan has collateral. None of these is formally the same operation as an announced round of QE.

But the important question was never really what the facility is called. It is what happens when the underlying problem does not go away. Suppose Japan repeatedly needs dollars to defend the yen. Suppose Gulf states repeatedly need liquidity when energy revenue is disrupted. Suppose the Treasury market becomes too systemically important for its largest foreign holders to be allowed to sell freely into it. At that point, "temporary liquidity support" starts to look less like an emergency exception and more like permanent infrastructure - each use making the next one a little more expected, and a little harder to withdraw.

Bottom Line

The United States is not simply defending the dollar. It is increasingly defending the liquidity architecture built around the dollar - a system that depends on foreign countries wanting to hold Treasuries, but which becomes fragile precisely when those holdings grow large enough that selling them would destabilise the market itself. The ESF and FIMA are not QE, and the distinction between existing money and newly created collateralised money is real and worth defending. But the more precise question is not whether this is QE by another name. It is how far the United States can move along this continuum - from existing government funds, to collateralised central-bank lending, toward outright asset purchases - before temporary liquidity support becomes something closer to permanent monetary accommodation. Reversible into what, exactly, remains the harder question, and it is not yet answered.

Glossary

Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) - A US Treasury-controlled fund, created in 1934, used for foreign-exchange and international financial operations. Its resources are Treasury's own dollars, foreign currencies, gold and SDR-related assets, not newly created central-bank money. It can be expanded through Treasury borrowing, but that draws on the ordinary fiscal financing system rather than a printing press.

FIMA Repo Facility - The full name of the facility Japan used in 2026: a repurchase-agreement structure, distinct from a swap line, in which a foreign central bank pledges US Treasuries as collateral and receives newly created dollars against them, returning the Treasuries when the loan is repaid.

Federal Reserve standing swap lines - A separate, permanent set of currency-swap arrangements the Fed maintains with a small group of major central banks, including the Bank of Japan and the ECB. Distinct from both the ESF swap and the FIMA repo facility, and not the mechanism used in either the Gulf or Japanese episodes described here.

Quantitative easing (QE) - A central bank policy in which it creates reserves to purchase financial assets outright, usually to lower yields and increase monetary liquidity. Unlike FIMA, the purchased asset becomes a permanent holding on the central bank's balance sheet, with no expectation of reversal.

Liquidity versus wealth - Wealth is the total stock of assets a country or person owns. Liquidity is the availability of immediately spendable money to meet obligations. A country can be extremely wealthy in Treasuries, gold and reserves and still face a genuine shortage of dollars it can spend today.

Currency swap line - An arrangement in which two monetary authorities exchange currencies outright for a set period, with the transaction reversed at maturity and no collateral involved. The Gulf proposal in 2026 would have used one such swap, via Treasury's ESF, exchanging dollars for dirhams.

Deleveraging - The forced or voluntary reduction of borrowed money and leveraged trading positions, often producing rapid, indiscriminate asset sales - including, as in gold's March 2026 fall, sales of assets whose long-term investment case has not actually changed.

Reserve currency - A currency, such as the US dollar, held in large quantities by foreign governments and central banks as part of their official reserves, and used as the dominant medium for international trade and finance. Reserve-currency status gives the issuing central bank the unusual ability to create that currency electronically to meet global demand for it.

Collateralised lending (as distinct from asset purchase) - A transaction in which money is lent against a pledged asset that must eventually be returned, as opposed to a purchase, in which the asset changes hands permanently. FIMA is collateralised lending; QE is asset purchase - the distinction is central to why the two are not the same operation, even when their short-term market effect looks similar.

References

To be completed - source list for Bessent Senate testimony, World Gold Council March 2026 report, and FIMA Repo Facility documentation.

The Liquidity Cycle Peaks Again: What Michael Howell's Framework Says About 2026

If money moves markets before fundamentals ever do, what does it mean that the world's most experienced tracker of that money now says liquidity has peaked?

FAST TRACK (30-second summary)

Michael Howell, who built his global liquidity framework watching money physically move across the Salomon Brothers trading floor in the 1980s, argues capital arrives first before fundamentals justify it. His sixty-five month liquidity cycle, identified in 2000 and stable ever since, is currently peaking in 2026, following the last peak in 2021.

Warning signs include a bearish flattening yield curve, narrow market breadth beneath a handful of surging technology names, a gold-oil ratio implying oil should be trading well above two hundred dollars a barrel, heavy US debt refinancing, and stress in market plumbing.

The big structural problem: roughly six hundred billion dollars a week of US debt needing refinancing, forcing authorities to suppress bond market volatility rather than control yields directly.

Howell's advice is not to time the peak precisely but to manage risk: keep a disciplined core portfolio and ring-fence any speculative positioning.

Introduction

There is a persistent habit among investors of treating markets as a referendum on fundamentals: earnings, interest rates, growth forecasts. Michael Howell, who has tracked what he calls global liquidity for four decades, argues this gets the causality backwards. Money moves first. Fundamentals catch up later, if at all, to justify what has already happened. His framework, developed on the trading floor at Salomon Brothers and refined ever since, treats the flow of money and credit through world financial markets as the primary driver of asset prices, with fundamentals relegated to the story told afterwards.

What follows sets out Howell's current thinking on where the liquidity cycle stands, how it is measured, and what it implies for asset allocation through the remainder of 2026.

Why It Matters

If Howell is correct that liquidity leads fundamentals rather than the reverse, then conventional analysis, focused on earnings multiples, GDP growth and central bank rate announcements, is perpetually looking in the rear-view mirror. For a reader trying to position a portfolio ahead of a shift rather than in reaction to one, understanding where the liquidity cycle sits matters more than parsing the latest earnings season. The stakes are not abstract: Howell's own cyclical marker points to a peak in 2026, and the framework's last peak, in 2021, was followed by a significant repricing across risk assets.

Contents Cover the Following

1. What global liquidity actually measures
2. Why liquidity leads fundamentals rather than the reverse
3. The sixty-five month cycle and its four phases
4. Late cycle warning signals: the yield curve and market breadth
5. Debt monetisation and the mechanics of yield suppression
6. The gold to oil ratio as a triangulation tool
7. IPOs, buybacks and the direction of flows
8. Portfolio construction across the cycle
9. Beneath the Headline Rate: SOFR, Reserves and the Fed's Plumbing - this is covered in the article Fed Plumbing Explained

1. What Global Liquidity Actually Measures

Howell defines liquidity broadly as money and credit, not simply the money supply figures that dominate financial commentary. The practical measurement looks at the credit side of financial institutions' balance sheets worldwide: central banks such as the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan and the People's Bank of China, alongside private sector banks, shadow banks and the repo markets. The distinction that matters is between money circulating in the real economy, which funds car manufacturing or widget production, and money circulating within financial markets, which is what his framework is built to track. It is this second category, wholesale money used for financial transactions rather than real economic activity, that determines asset prices.

Glossary

Global liquidity. The aggregate flow of money and credit through world financial markets, encompassing central bank balance sheets, private bank lending, shadow banking and repo market activity, as distinct from money circulating in the real economy. Howell treats it as a measurable quantity, built up bank by bank and market by market, rather than a loose metaphor for "easy money".

Shadow banking. Lending and credit creation carried out by institutions other than traditional deposit-taking banks, such as money market funds, hedge funds and private credit vehicles. It sits outside much conventional bank regulation, yet supplies a large and growing share of the credit that Howell's framework tracks.

Repo market. Short for repurchase agreement market, where institutions borrow cash overnight or short-term by temporarily selling securities, usually government bonds, with an agreement to buy them back at a slightly higher price. It is one of the plumbing systems of global finance and a key place where liquidity stress shows up first.

Financialisation. The long-run growth of financial markets relative to the size of the underlying economy. Howell notes that US financial markets are now roughly two times GDP, compared with fifty to sixty percent several decades ago, which is why liquidity flows now carry outsized influence over asset prices relative to historical norms.

2. Why Liquidity Leads Fundamentals Rather Than the Reverse

Howell's central claim is that capital arrives before the justification for it does. Expanding price-to-earnings multiples, for instance, reflect anticipation of future fundamentals that may or may not materialise, but the transaction itself is driven by available money. When central banks force liquidity into markets, as occurred after the 2008 financial crisis and again after the pandemic, asset prices rise regardless of what fundamentals are doing at the time.

"We're schooled in the idea that markets react to fundamentals, but actually capital gets there first."

The growing size of financial markets relative to GDP amplifies this effect: wealth effects generated by rising asset prices now feed back into the real economy in a way that was far less significant thirty or forty years ago.

Follow the money - be the first to get where the banbks are pushing the liquidity

Glossary

Wealth effect. The tendency of rising asset prices to increase consumption and economic activity, independent of underlying income growth, by making asset holders feel and behave as though they are wealthier. A rising stock market can therefore lift real-economy spending even before wages move.

Lagging indicator. A metric, such as corporate earnings or GDP growth, that responds to and confirms a market move only after the move has already occurred, rather than predicting it in advance. Howell's argument is that most of what investors watch closely falls into this category.

Price-to-earnings multiple, PER. A valuation measure comparing a company's share price to its earnings per share. A rising multiple means investors are paying more for each unit of current profit, typically because they expect profits to grow, or because there is simply more money chasing the same shares.

Cantillon effect. A theory describing how the benefits of money creation are distributed unevenly. Those who receive newly created money first can buy assets and goods before prices rise, while those who receive it later often face higher prices without a corresponding increase in income.

The practical lesson is that capital begins with Federal Reserve policy, is leveraged through the financial system, and then spreads into the real economy. Successful investors seek to follow that flow, identifying where money is moving next as the Cantillon Effect, economic conditions, and geopolitical forces channel it into commodities, monetary metals, quality property, and companies with durable pricing power.

3. The Sixty-Five Month Cycle and Its Four Phases

Howell identified a recurring cyclical pattern in global liquidity data using Fourier analysis around the year 2000. That work established the sixty-five month periodicity and, once set, the method has proved stable ever since, with the actual cycle extrapolated forward and tracked against outcomes for the following quarter century. The cycle divides into four phases: rebound, calm, speculation and turbulence. Equities perform best during the rebound and upswing phases. Commodities do best around the peak, because the liquidity cycle leads the real economy, and as liquidity peaks the economy is moving from trough towards acceleration, increasing demand for raw materials. As liquidity subsequently tightens, defensive assets and cash come into favour, and as the squeeze deepens towards the cycle's trough, longer duration bonds perform best in anticipation of central bank rate cuts.

Howell's current assessment places the cycle at a peak in 2026, following the last peak in 2021.

Glossary

Sixty-five month liquidity cycle. A recurring cyclical pattern in global liquidity that Howell identified using data analysis around the year 2000, with an approximate periodicity of sixty-five months. It has been tracked and extrapolated forward ever since, and has lined up reasonably well with subsequent turning points in markets.

Fourier analysis. A mathematical technique, originally developed for physics and signal processing, that breaks a complicated, noisy series of data down into a set of simpler repeating wave patterns. Howell applied it to decades of financial data to test whether liquidity moved in genuine, measurable cycles rather than at random, and it was this analysis that surfaced the sixty-five month pattern.

Speculation phase. The late stage of the liquidity cycle, occurring around its peak, characterised by continued positive returns coexisting with elevated volatility, such that the risk-adjusted quality of those returns is significantly reduced. Howell places the market in this phase as of 2026.

Turbulence phase. The most difficult stage of the cycle, arriving as liquidity contracts sharply and financial conditions tighten. It typically brings the worst risk-adjusted returns for equities and commodities, and is when Howell's framework argues investors should already be positioned defensively rather than reacting to the stress as it appears.

4. Late Cycle Warning Signals: the Yield Curve and Market Breadth

Howell points to several markers of a late cycle environment. The most robust, despite lagging the liquidity cycle by roughly nine months, is the slope of the yield curve; a bearish flattening, where long end yields rise more slowly than short end yields, is a reliable late cycle confirming signal. A second marker is market breadth: strong headline index performance driven by a narrow group of technology and semiconductor stocks, while the broader market outside those names remains lacklustre and many individual stocks make new lows, is characteristic of a late stage rally rather than a broad-based bull market.

"You've got to be approximately right rather than precisely wrong."

Glossary

Yield curve. A line plotting the interest rates, or yields, on government bonds of different maturities, from short-term to long-term. Its shape is one of the most closely watched signals in finance, because it reflects investor expectations for growth, inflation and future central bank policy.

Bearish flattening. A movement in the yield curve in which long-term yields rise more slowly than short-term yields, causing the curve to flatten and potentially invert. It is generally regarded as a late cycle warning signal, since it suggests investors expect growth or inflation to cool even as near-term borrowing costs stay elevated.

Market breadth. A measure of how broadly a market's gains are distributed across constituent stocks, as opposed to being concentrated in a small number of large or high-momentum names. Narrow breadth beneath a rising headline index is a classic sign that a rally is running out of underlying support.

Term structure. Another name for the pattern of interest rates across different maturities, essentially the technical term behind the more familiar phrase "yield curve". Movements in the term structure are what Howell is describing when he refers to flattening or steepening.

5. Debt Monetisation and the Mechanics of Yield Suppression

A structural feature of the current environment, in Howell's account, is the scale of government debt requiring refinancing. US Treasury debt carries an average maturity of five to six years, meaning a continual rolling burden estimated at roughly six hundred billion dollars a week. Financial markets, in his view, now function primarily as refinancing mechanisms for existing debt rather than as new capital raising mechanisms for productive investment. When banks purchase government debt, they are, in effect, monetising it, a process Howell frames as printing money by another name.

The authorities manage this burden partly through issuance strategy, concentrating new supply at the short end of the curve to starve the long end and keep long yields capped, and partly through direct intervention, using Treasury buybacks to suppress bond market volatility whenever the MOVE index, the bond market equivalent of the VIX, spikes higher.

Glossary

Debt monetisation. The process by which government debt is purchased by banks or central banks acting as intermediaries, effectively expanding the money supply to fund government borrowing rather than debt being absorbed by genuine new savings. Howell regards the current pace of Treasury issuance and bank purchases as a modern form of this practice.

MOVE index. An index measuring implied volatility in the US Treasury bond market, functioning as the bond market's equivalent of the VIX equity volatility index. Howell treats spikes in the MOVE index as a more important signal to watch than the Federal Reserve's own policy rate.

Yield volatility control. A policy of suppressing fluctuations in bond yields through active intervention, such as Treasury buybacks, distinct from yield curve control, which targets the level of yields directly rather than their volatility. Howell argues this, rather than outright yield curve control, is what is actually happening in US Treasury markets today.

Debt refinancing. The process of replacing maturing debt with newly issued debt, rather than paying it off outright. With an average Treasury maturity of five to six years, a large share of outstanding US government debt must be refinanced on a rolling basis every year, regardless of whether new spending is taking place.

6. The Gold to Oil Ratio as a Triangulation Tool

Howell treats the long-run ratio between an ounce of gold and a barrel of oil, averaging around twenty to one over the past fifty to sixty years, as a further confirming signal that moves in step with the liquidity cycle. At the front end of a liquidity upswing, the ratio rises because the gold price climbs while oil lags. Towards the back end of the cycle, the ratio falls back not because gold declines but because oil catches up, as money exits financial markets and flows into the real economy.

With gold trading in the four to five thousand dollar range, the historical ratio implies an oil price above two hundred dollars a barrel, a figure Howell acknowledges sounds implausible to most investors but which he presents as a structural implication of sustained debt monetisation rather than a near term forecast.

Glossary

Gold to oil ratio. The number of barrels of oil that one ounce of gold can purchase, historically averaging around twenty to one over the long term - the last 50 or 60 years. Howell uses it as a cross-check on whether gold or oil is mispriced relative to the other, and as a secondary indicator of the liquidity cycle's stage.

Debasement trade. An investment approach built on the expectation that ongoing debt monetisation and currency creation will erode the purchasing power of fiat money over time, typically expressed through holdings of gold, gold miners, and broader commodities as stores of value rather than income-generating assets. Howell's gold-oil analysis sits within this broader thesis.

Triangulation. In this context, the practice of cross-checking a view on one asset, such as gold, against two other related variables, here the oil price and the gold-oil ratio itself, so that no single number is relied upon in isolation. It is a discipline for testing whether a price looks genuinely stretched or simply unfamiliar.

7. IPOs, Buybacks and the Direction of Flows

A wave of major initial public offerings, including SpaceX at a scale representing a significant share of total US market capitalisation, alongside anticipated listings from firms such as Anthropic and OpenAI, would ordinarily be read as liquidity being withdrawn from financial markets to fund real economy activity, a negative signal within Howell's framework. He notes a mitigating technicality: the free float offered in such listings is typically small relative to the headline valuation, forcing index funds and other passive vehicles to chase limited available supply.

The more significant structural shift, in his view, is on the buyback side. Share buybacks in the US have been substantial but are beginning to slow as corporate cash is redirected towards capital expenditure, at the same time as buyback activity in Europe and Japan is increasing, a divergence he suggests favours geographic diversification away from US equities.

Glossary

Initial public offering (IPO). The first sale of a private company's shares to public investors, converting it into a publicly listed company. Large IPOs draw fresh cash out of the pool of money circulating within financial markets and into the company being listed.

Free float. The proportion of a company's shares actually available for public trading, as distinct from shares held by founders, insiders or locked up post-listing. It determines how much index and passive fund buying pressure a new listing can absorb relative to its full valuation.

Share buyback. The repurchase by a corporation of its own outstanding shares using company cash, reducing share count and, all else equal, supporting the share price. Howell treats it as the structural counterpart to IPO issuance in the flow of funds into and out of equity markets.

Capital expenditure (capex). Spending by a company on physical assets such as factories, equipment or infrastructure, intended to support future growth. Howell's point is that cash once used for buybacks is increasingly being redirected towards capex, reducing one source of equity market support.

8. Portfolio Construction Across the Cycle

Howell is cautious about translating cyclical analysis into precise market timing, preferring, in his words, to be approximately right rather than precisely wrong. His practical recommendation is a two tier portfolio structure: a disciplined core, built to compound steadily through the cycle even at modest annual returns sufficient to outpace inflation over the long term, and a smaller speculative allocation, sized according to individual risk tolerance, that can ride cyclical momentum during phases such as the current speculation stage without exposing the whole portfolio to a sharp reversal.

He regards the tendency of retail investors to treat their entire portfolio as a momentum trade, rather than ring-fencing speculation within a disciplined core, as one of the more consistent and costly mistakes made across market cycles.

Glossary

Core-satellite portfolio structure. This is the central structural idea Howell wants investors to take away. The "core" is the majority of the portfolio, say 80%. built for discipline and durability rather than excitement: diversified, unglamorous, and expected to deliver modest but reliable real returns, say 5 to 10% annual, that outpace inflation over the long run regardless of which phase the liquidity cycle is in.

The "satellite" is a smaller, clearly bounded portion, sized to what an investor can genuinely afford to lose, that is deliberately allowed to chase momentum during phases like the current speculation stage. The two are never mixed. The discipline is not in avoiding speculation altogether, since Howell is relaxed about investors taking speculative positions if they wish, but in never letting speculative logic govern the core, so that a sharp turbulence phase damages only the satellite and leaves the core, and the investor's long-term position, intact.

Risk management (in this context). The discipline of controlling how much of a portfolio is exposed to a given source of risk, rather than trying to predict the exact timing of a market turn. Howell frames sizing a speculative allocation as a risk management decision, not a forecasting one. Use Sharpe and Sortino.

Momentum trading. An approach that buys assets because their price is already rising, on the expectation the trend will continue, rather than because of an underlying valuation view. Howell warns against letting this become the default behaviour for an entire portfolio, since momentum can reverse sharply once a cycle turns.

Bottom Line

Howell's framework does not predict a crash on a given date. What it does is describe a regime: a liquidity cycle at its peak, a bond market showing late cycle stress, a rally increasingly narrow beneath the surface, and a debt refinancing burden so large that central banks are managing bond volatility directly rather than allowing markets to set yields freely. None of that requires an immediate reversal. It does argue for treating the current rally as a speculation phase rather than the early stages of a durable bull market, and for structuring portfolios accordingly: a disciplined core, a bounded speculative sleeve, and closer attention to commodities and non-US equities than the headline index numbers might suggest is necessary.

Optional Deep Dive

The basis trade. Part of what keeps long-term US Treasury yields capped despite a booming, inflationary economy is a specific piece of financial engineering known as the basis trade. Hedge funds buy cash Treasury bonds and simultaneously sell Treasury futures short, pocketing the small pricing gap between the two. The trade is highly profitable when scaled up with borrowed money, but it only works while bond market volatility stays low, because a sharp move in yields can turn a small, safe-looking spread into a large loss almost overnight. This is why the Treasury's own buyback programme, which steps in to suppress the MOVE index whenever it spikes, is not just a debt management tool but also, in effect, life support for the basis trade itself. The two are entangled: suppressed volatility sustains the trade, and the trade's continued appetite for cash Treasuries helps absorb the enormous weekly issuance the US government needs to roll over its debt.

Japan's role in financing US debt. Japan has historically been one of the largest foreign holders of US Treasury debt, a position closely tied to the gap between Japanese and US interest rates. For years, Japanese interest rates were held near zero while US yields sat far higher, encouraging what is known as the carry trade: borrowing cheaply in yen and investing the proceeds in higher-yielding US Treasuries. That flow has been a quiet but significant source of demand supporting the US bond market. As the Bank of Japan has moved gradually away from its ultra-low rate policy, the incentive for Japanese investors and institutions to keep recycling savings into US Treasuries has weakened, and any further narrowing of the US-Japan rate gap raises the risk that this long-standing source of demand shrinks or reverses, adding to the pressure on US authorities to find other buyers for their debt.

CPI Inflation. "The inflation process is often described using CPI, but CPI is merely the final stage visible to consumers. Inflation usually begins with rising commodity costs, appears next in business surveys such as ISM and PMI Prices Paid, then enters the Producer Price Index through intermediate-demand and final-demand goods. Only after firms pass these higher costs through the supply chain does inflation appear in consumer measures such as CPI and PCE. For this reason, CPI is generally regarded as a lagging indicator of inflationary pressure already building elsewhere in the economy."

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ISM Prices Paid – A survey measure showing whether purchasing managers are paying more or less for inputs.

PMI (Purchasing Managers' Index) – A survey of business activity, orders, employment and input costs.

PPI Intermediate Demand – Inflation occurring between businesses as goods and services move through the production chain.

PPI Final Demand – Prices received by producers for goods and services sold to final users.

CPI – Consumer Price Index; measures prices paid by households.

PCE – Personal Consumption Expenditures; the Federal Reserve's preferred measure of consumer inflation.

Cost Transmission – The process by which higher input costs move through the supply chain and eventually reach consumers.

References

Michael Howell, interviewed August, 2026.

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Tuesday, 18 August 2026

HAS IRAN GONE BACK TO “OLD WAYS OF THINKING?”

1. The question: a different way of seeing the same world

Key concepts and glossary

2. The American approach: identify the issues

Key concepts and glossary

3. Iran's “issues” are harder to separate

Key concepts and glossary

4. This is not “old” thinking

Key concepts and glossary

5. The crucial shift: from issues to the system

Key concepts and glossary

6. Why diplomacy becomes so difficult

Key concepts and glossary

7. The insight — and the danger

Key concepts and glossary

8. The bottom line

Key concepts and glossary

References

Sunday, 16 August 2026

From Fear to the Front Line: Mobilising a Fractured Society

1. Why This Matters

2. The Classic Escalation Ladder

3. From Belonging to Obligation

4. The Problem: There Is No Longer One "Us"

5. What History Suggests Comes Next

Bottom Line

References

Further Reading

Friday, 14 August 2026

Edward Bernays: The Man Who Engineered Consent

The biggest cons we never knew. If a man could convince a nation that bacon was healthy, that smoking was liberation, and that a foreign government deserved to fall - would you still trust your own opinions?

1. A Freudian Inheritance

2. The War That Taught Him Everything

3. Inventing "Public Relations"

4. The Campaigns

5. The Uncomfortable Footnote

6. Why It Still Matters

Saturday, 8 August 2026

Argentina, the Gulf States and Japan - America supports its treasuries without calling QE

Fast Track (30-second summary)

Why It Matters

Contents Cover the Following

1. Wealth Is Not the Same Thing as Liquidity

2. The Gulf Swap Line: What Was Actually Offered

3. Gold and the Liquidity Trap

4. Japan, FIMA and the Real Difference Between Treasury and Fed Money

5. Three Levels of Intervention - and the Question That Follows

Bottom Line

Glossary

References

Further Reading

Tuesday, 4 August 2026

The Liquidity Cycle Peaks Again: What Michael Howell's Framework Says About 2026

Introduction

Why It Matters

Contents Cover the Following

1. What Global Liquidity Actually Measures

2. Why Liquidity Leads Fundamentals Rather Than the Reverse

3. The Sixty-Five Month Cycle and Its Four Phases

4. Late Cycle Warning Signals: the Yield Curve and Market Breadth

5. Debt Monetisation and the Mechanics of Yield Suppression

6. The Gold to Oil Ratio as a Triangulation Tool

7. IPOs, Buybacks and the Direction of Flows

8. Portfolio Construction Across the Cycle

Bottom Line

Optional Deep Dive

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References

Further Reading

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