Count Binface & The Rise of Economic Statecraft – the Hormuz toll booth, Korea's chip casino, and a Fed reinvented
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The US bombs dozens of sites inside Iran while insisting the ceasefire talks are still on. A South Korean chipmaker posts a 19‑fold jump in profit, and the market loses $100bn in a day. Kevin Warsh hands the future of the Federal Reserve to a venture capitalist and two retired retail executives. And then, perhaps the sanest event of the week is a man in a dustbin costume standing for Parliament in Clacton. In this week's In the Company of Mavericks, I pull together my daily HyperNormal Reports into a single story: the death of rules‑based, stateless globalisation and its replacement by hard‑edged economic statecraft, nations wielding energy, technology, capital and currency for power and resilience rather than efficiency. A wrap of the world that knows the old system is broken but can't bring itself to say so.
In this episode:
The Strait of Hormuz and the new geopolitics of oil — the IRGC "toll booth," Kharg Island, re‑sanctioned Iranian crude, and Brent's anxious round trip
Korea's casino and the memory‑chip supercycle — Samsung's 19x profit crash, SK Hynix's blockbuster IPO, and the $2trn‑to‑$20trn memory trade
What AI is really doing to work and wages — the Jevons Paradox, the "Age of Average," China's 320m gig workers and a modern Engels' Pause
Kevin Warsh's reinvention of the Fed — five task forces, dot‑plot demolition, and the Greenspan lesson on holding the line
Japan and China's balance‑sheet strain — surging JGB yields, GPIF "phoning home," and China's two‑speed inflation/deflation economy
The private‑equity parking lot — 13,500 trapped portfolio companies and easyJet pointing to the London exits
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