Macro Monday Missive – March 16th, 2026
Macro Monday Missive
A Few Words From GoRozen
“… an entire generation of market participants has grown accustomed to approaching oil from the short side. Genuine oil bulls have become a rarity.” -GoRozen (from their Market Commentary referenced below)
Hello, Subscribers:
More so than anything else, globally consequential warfare carries with it a unique power to clarify. When conflict erupts between major powers or in strategically important regions, markets often react irrationally. But those reactions can also reveal a country’s true priorities, things that remain obscured during long stretches of peace.
The ongoing, uh, war, is it? … between Iran, Israel, and the United States can, in market terms, almost be mistaken for occurring in a world somewhat separate from that which has seen U.S. technology stocks reach nose-bleed valuations while civilization-fortifying commodities go embarrassingly unsung. And yet, like a massive orbiting body, the gravitational effects produced by America’s latest foray into the Mid East have been very much felt by all. They include those who’ve hitched their wagons to the “number go up” techno-fantasist psychology and who have been blithely existing in a bubble, both literally and figuratively.
Analyzing the abovementioned non-war war’s very real effects for us as only they can are market luminaries Leigh Goehring & Adam Rozencwajg (G&R/GoRozen). G&R’s recent Natural Resource Market Commentary (linked below) serves up comprehensive context both the immediate impact of the Strait of Hormuz’s predictable (except by our current administration) closure and the myriad supply/demand pressures that have been so materially laid bare by said closure.
Cyclical production and consumption dynamics in the world of commodities (energy and otherwise) operate under immense forces of momentum whose currents can certainly strengthen or weaken in response to exigencies such as military conflicts and trade wars. Oil in particular is an object of such peculiar quality because of the way its market valuation is subject to such intensive data manipulation. Purportedly credible bodies like the International Energy Agency (the IEA) never need to be right so long as they appear confident in their transparently political forecasts. Of course, this is also the case in politics, on Wall Street, and in Big Tech, where there is a deep-seated imperviousness to justified criticism that can be traced to an unwillingness to admit error. This “Once I thought I was wrong but it turned out I was mistaken” mindset also applies to the bubble-blower-in-chief, the Fed.
Thus, with oil figures difficult to pin down due to opaque accounting and subjective forecasting, the wages of geopolitical catastrophes, such as we’re now experiencing, are counterintuitively corrective in their ability to set straight actual supply numbers. Basically, politicized organizations like the IEA can fool most of the people, most of the time, but when a crisis strikes, it becomes immediately clear that the emperor of the oil market has been reigning in the buff.
The GoRozen excerpts provided below illustrate for us in politically agnostic form where energy as a whole falls in the grander course of global commodity movement, while also articulating for us what a compromised Strait of Hormuz could mean for the world’s energy matrix.
Let’s get to it…
G&R
(G&R Commentary excerpts and Haymaker editorial passages below)
Every mention of Chinese alliances, common causes, trade deals, and so on are always attended by a massive asterisk, one whose footnote reads something to the effect of: “Not Valid In Times of Actual Crisis” – To the extent that’s fundamentally true of all international dealings, there’s something almost refreshing about China’s willingness to adopt a survivalist posture the moment trade disruptions manifest. They are dependent on Iranian energy, but that’s apparently not enough to see them militarily or even politically intervening on behalf of Iran’s ruling class.
GoRozen lays everything out here:…
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