This feature is a follow-up to my recent long form on Donald Trump’s secret weapon against the Globalist Deep State. Read ‘The Wolf of Main Street’ for additional context.
In the shadow of a trade war that’s less a clash of titans and more a choreographed severance—where tariffs serve as narrative artillery, port fees as flanking maneuvers and export bans as feints in a grander game—Scott Bessent, the Wolf of Main Street himself steps forward with a growl that echoes through the corridors of global finance.
Too dramatic, you say?
Well, patriots are leaning into the drama. Why should we let them have all the fun?
As Treasury Secretary, Bessent is already drawing lines in the sand over China’s rare earth provocations, declaring in no uncertain terms that America and her allies “will neither be commanded nor controlled” by Beijing’s supply chain strangleholds.
Wednesday morning, amid IMF and World Bank confabs, Bessent ripped into Chinese trade negotiator Li Chenggang as “unhinged,” unveiling the backstory of Beijing’s Oct. 9 surprise rule changes—export curbs on the sort of rare earths we’re all going to pretend were a part of common parlance all along …. gallium, germanium and antimony, to name a few—substances whose withholding apparently threaten to choke the electric industry, semiconductors and solar panels worldwide.
Bessent slammed China’s moves as “economic coercion” and “unreliable,” while stressing that Trump won’t blink at stock market jitters or shutdown pains, even if said pains apparently cost the economy $15 billion a day.
Whose economy, exactly?
Best not to ask.
But more to the point I’ve been making in various contexts over the course of years when I dip my toes into an economic world I never used to have any interest in, and from where I’m sitting, this isn’t bluster …. rather, it’s not bluster ALONE; it’s the opening salvo in what Bessent frames as ‘China vs. the World,’ a standoff where rare earth minerals become the latest leverage point in a decoupling that’s been building since the Scamdemic shattered the illusions of globalist interdependence.
But as I’ve long argued, from the depths of “Doomed Dynasty” to the heights of “The Golden Switch,” this isn’t mere rivalry; it’s mutual acceleration toward multipolarity disguised as adversity to rally the masses and purge the parasites, with fresh flares like U.S. port fees on Chinese ships and Trump’s soybean retribution threats—along with many more to come, I’d expect—only amplifying the drama, and calling attention to the theater itself.
Consider the concept of the margin call, a merciless mechanism in the speculative arena where leverage itself turns from prey to predator, forcing the overextended to cough up collateral or face liquidation.
In whatever context you want to apply it to, it’s a game of balance sheets and breaking points, where one party’s excess becomes another’s opportunity to strike, often triggered by a cascade of shorts, puts and hedges that expose hidden vulnerabilities.
Put most simply—and dramatized in a series of big budget Hollywood Wall Street exposés in the 2010s—it’s what happened writ large across the socioeconomic battlespace when a whole lot of people like you and I got indirectly fucked without consent, a moderate number of earnest hedgies got fucked with partial consent … and a very, very small number of financiers well, did the fucking in the first place back in 2008.
Excuse the French.
Bessent knows this intimately—after all, as I explored in my last long-form, he build his economic legend on one such Margin Call.
The short version?
Back in the ‘90s, as the sharp edge of Soros Fund Management, Bessent helped orchestrate the infamous Black Wednesday assault on the British Pound, amassing a $10 billion short position that pummeled the Bank of England into raising rates from 10% to 15% in a single day, only to surrender and exit the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in the aftermath, and by Bessent’s design.
It was a margin call on a national scale, exposing the fragility of fiat facades—overvalued currencies propped up by artificial pegs—while netting over a billion in profits as the pound plummeted 20% against the dollar.
The UK didn’t just depreciate; it shattered under the weight of speculative siege, proving that even empires can be margin-called when their reserves run dry against relentless pressure, with second-order effects rippling through European markets and foreshadowing the euro’s coming fractures.
Fast-forward to today, and that same dynamic is unfolding not between hedge funds and currencies, but between nation-states themselves, in a theater where sanctions are shorts, tariffs are puts and export controls—aka ‘Trade Wars’ are the ultimate hedges.
The Western Hegemon’s 2022 sanctions blitz against Russia—intended as a knockout blow with asset freezes, SWIFT exclusions and energy caps—backfired spectacularly, accelerating a global exodus from unipolar globalism toward the multipolar dawn.
As I observed and projected at the time in the pages of the Righteous Russia series, Russia didn’t buckle; it pivoted, gold-backing its ruble to stabilize at pre-war levels, forging BRICS alliances that now encompass the Global South’s emergent might—expanded in 2025 with new members like Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE, together contributing over 30% of global GDP and challenging dollar hegemony through commodity-backed trades and local currency settlements.
Meanwhile, China, ever the strategist under Xi Jinping, seized the momentum, leading the charge away from dollar dominance with de-dollarization pacts, digital yuan trials in cross-border payments and rare earth hoards that have clogged the West’s balance sheet with worthless IOUs.
This is THE margin call in macro form: what clogs one nation’s ledger is the asset the other controls exclusively, turning interdependence into a weaponized trap.
But for who?
And how?
For the US, the margin they—that we, ostensibly—are attempting to call is the world’s reserve currency, that petrodollar throne we’ve wielded since Bretton Woods, now under siege as China, Russia and BRICS cohorts decouple, hoarding gold (with BRICS nations holding over 20% of global reserves), oil and real assets while dumping Treasuries at record paces.
Conversely, China holds the reins on much of America’s manufacturing—those vast supply chains for chips (80% of rare earth processing), batteries (70% of global capacity) and pharmaceuticals—that Trump and his sovereign vanguard are methodically prying loose through reshoring incentives, export bans on advanced tech and now triple-digit tariff threats that could slap 100% duties on everything from EVs to the aforementioned soybeans.
On the surface, this tit for tat screams of adversarial intent: Trump’s revived trade war, with additional 100% levies on Chinese exports announced Oct. 10, new port fees hiking shipping costs by 20-30% and—what inspired this writing—Bessent’s declaration that China “can’t be trusted” amid Beijing’s hardball bets that U.S. markets can’t sustain the pain.
And yet, as I’ve posited time and again, I firmly believe this decoupling is mutual, a pincer maneuver where Trump and Xi wage narrative and economic wars not to destroy one another, but to save face before their nationalist bases while the second-order effects ripple like shockwaves across the battlespace … revealing that the terrain itself is the true enemy being confronted and transformed rather then annihilated.
Trump’s tariffs and threats give Xi cover to expel globalist oligarchs from China’s factories, purging the CCP’s corrupt underbelly—think Evergrande’s collapse and the redirection of state subsidies toward domestic tech sovereignty—and redirecting production inward to fuel the Belt and Road’s multipolar nodes.
In parallel, Xi’s export bans and “fight to the end” rhetoric, in turn, force American reshoring, compelling corporations to bend the knee to sovereign sway rather than borderless greed, with supply disruptions and inflationary spikes building public mandates for energy independence and the very manufacturing revival Trump has been signaling since 2015, and that is now firmly underway.
After all, I’ll get no argument from this audience that this patriot plan has been in the offing at least that long, if not far longer.
It’s a staged enmity, in other words, where public barbs—Trump’s “retribution” vows and Xi’s unity calls to BRICS against U.S. policies—mask backchannel accords, compressing timelines to dismantle the System of Systems without allowing said System to tip the remnants of the New World Order into kinetic chaos.
The pain felt in the interim is real, but purposeful: U.S. shutdowns may cut into economic muscle, but they expose overleveraged systems within systems, while China’s market turmoil accelerates its pivot to multipolar trade and settlement.
And how does the US shield itself from China’s margin call without waiting for a decade and more of re-shoring efforts to manifest their magic in a corporeal sense?
Look no further than the subtle sieges now underway, where the administration disguises partial takeovers as partnerships, reclaiming former globalist bastions under American banners, a trend the Truth Community certainly interprets FAR differently than the ‘expert class’ who’ve made careers out of being wrong about everything that matters, while being rewarded by the System for that very fact.
The New York Times lays it bare: Trump’s team is staking claims in strategic giants like U.S. Steel (with Nippon’s bid blocked for national security), Intel (via $8.5 billion CHIPS Act infusions), MP Materials (expanding rare earth mining with DoD contracts) and Trilogy Metals (securing copper for defense), injecting government equity and forward-buying commitments to wrest control from Beijing’s grasp.
This isn’t outright nationalization; it’s inversion—turning public-private predation into sovereign stewardship, with price floors stabilizing markets, a strategic mineral reserve stockpiling 12 months’ worth of critical inputs and export controls ensuring no foreign power can margin-call our tech sovereignty.
JPMorgan’s $1.5 trillion pledge amplifies this trend—even if the bank doesn’t want to admit it’s bowing to Trump’s pressure—funneling billions into supply chains, defense, energy independence (think modular nuclear and fracking booms) and frontier tech like AI and quantum, all while CEO Jamie Dimon nods to “unreliable sources” abroad and aligns with Bessent’s sustainable investment narrative.
This is the unfurling of the playbook from “The Switch” writ large: accelerating the collapse of overleveraged conglomerates—witness Boeing’s bailouts and Big Pharma’s repatriations—so that resilient, decentralized enterprises rise from the rubble Too Small to Fail in a Golden Age where abundance trumps scarcity, with Apple’s $6 billion in U.S. facilities, NVIDIA’s domestic chip fabs and a 400% surge in repatriated jobs just the earliest proofs of the pivot.
All of which echoes “The Golden Switch” even more profoundly—a fusion of reclamation and restoration, where we’ve inverted the Deep State’s “Great Reset” into our Good one, repurposing their tools for the formation of a multipolar mesh of sovereign regions.
Trump’s tariffs, in this context aren’t punitive; they’re the greased rails for the restoration itself, ditching subsidized green energy follies for nuclear and domestic drilling, while international capitulations—from India’s BRICS deepening to Brazil’s alignments and even Bessent’s $40 billion aid push for Argentina’s economy—signal a world yielding to American ingenuity, not hegemony.
All of which brings us back to the Wolf himself.
Scott Bessent isn’t just Treasury Secretary; he’s the architect Trump handpicked to navigate this Golden Age transition in 2025-26, the name to watch as fiat fractures give way to asset-backed actuals.
In 2024, as the Wall Street Journal captured, Bessent publicly yearned for a seat at the table of this “coming global economic re-ordering,” sensing the shatterpoints where the very leverage he made his name cultivating is turned around not to flip companies or even currencies, but empires.
Trump, ever the dealmaker, granted that wish, installing him to turn his Black Wednesday prowess against the very system that birthed it.
In this theater as in many others at once in the Shadow War, this is convergence incarnate: the economic front fusing with the narrative war, accelerating us toward a dawn where sovereignty isn’t bargained or requested, but reclaimed.
And here’s the real genius in the Kayfabian sparring between Trump, his acolytes and Xi Jinping: it grants each narrative shielding for the global economic re-ordering, which is in effect a decoupling, not from each other, but from the globalist mesh that was engineered to bind nations in a collectivist nightmare in the first place, siphoning wealth upward to the spiders who spun the web—those Davos elites and central bank cartels who’ve peddled fiat illusions for generations.
Trump is using the trade war to disguise the fact that he’s literally borrowing from Xi’s repertoire, partially nationalizing core industries in a country that prides itself on a private market, but which has, in truth only had one on a narrative level for decades, as evidenced by infamous and generational bailouts of Wall Street on the back of Main Street carnage.
By framing his Golden Age push as anti-China protectionism, then, Trump slips in government stakes and incentives that echo China’s state-guided capitalism, reclaiming steel, chips and minerals without the socialist stigma, all while Xi uses U.S. pressure to consolidate his own sovereign controls.
As you can see, when you zoom out rather than in, it becomes clear that Trump isn’t truly competing with Xi in this economic restructuring; he’s copying his playbook ... and it could be argued that Vladimir Putin was the one who wrote it.
Recall the post-Soviet chaos of the 1990s, when Boris Yeltsin’s “shock therapy” privatizations birthed a rapacious oligarchy—tycoons like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Boris Berezovsky snapping up state assets at fire-sale prices, amassing fortunes in energy, media and metals while ordinary Russians plunged into poverty.
Putin, after ascending in 2000 infamously waged a calculated war on this new elite, not to eradicate wealth, but rather to subordinate it to sovereign will.
His primary means?
Taking stakes in private companies, essentially nationalizing them—especially those pertinent to strategic defense and production.
Yukos Oil, once Khodorkovsky’s empire was dismantled through tax evasion charges, its assets absorbed by state-controlled Rosneft; Gazprom reclaimed majority control over natural gas behemoths; and sectors like aerospace and nuclear energy saw outright state takeovers, redistributing spoils to a new cadre of loyalists who bent the knee rather than challenge the Kremlin, as you’ve no doubt been told—albeit in inverted form—over the ensuing decades.
This de-privatization wasn’t framed as communism’s return in Russia herself, but as the reclamation of Russia’s destiny from Western-backed predators, purging the oligarchs who meddled in politics while allowing compliant ones to thrive under Putin’s umbrella, which is to say … the peoples.’
In effect, Trump and Xi are using the weapons of the enemy against them—sanctions, tariffs, and supply chain chokepoints repurposed from globalist tools of control into instruments of liberation—much as Putin inverted the 90s’ disguised piratization into a sovereign resurgence.
The actuals of the Good Reset are necessary: these partial nationalizations, reshoring mandates and asset-backed pivots that dismantle the fiat facade and foster abundance through decentralized, multipolar trade.
But the Narratives are tightropes—delicate balances where Trump cloaks Putinesque moves in MAGA exceptionalism, Xi in Chinese resilience and Putin himself in anti-Western defiance, all to avoid the stigma of “socialism” or “authoritarianism” that could unravel domestic support that has been so carefully cultivated.
Only after the Great Reset has been halted—its scarcity agendas exposed and inverted—can the Good Reset unfold, paving the way for a return to true sovereign trade and even cooperative competition, where multipolar powers compete on equal footing, East balances West and abundance flows from decentralized ingenuity rather than centralized predation, with leaders like Trump, Xi and Putin as unlikely co-authors in a script that redeems nationalism itself, the ultimate sovereign macro that amplifies rather than stamps out the micro.
After all, as I have said time and again in these digital pages, just as it’s true that you were the carbon they wanted to eliminate, it should now be apparent that YOU are the power patriots are trying to project.
Act accordingly.
Until next time, stay Positive, stay Based and most importantly … stay Bright.
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This is a great description of what could look like chaos, absurdity, authoritarianism or all of it balled up into hope without substance. A game? Quite. Authoritarianism? Not quite. Thank goodness these players recognized the dangers of the WEF at a time when many refused to admit the WEF existed. Ah, but they did and it looked like no one could stop their plan. The "Climate Crisis" went so well for so long. Now, while the MSM is whining about fat Democrat governors and naughty Republican boys, Trump and Bessent continue their one hundred eighty degree economic turn under the guise of "mean Xi". But these guys mean business. And Bessent has shown he can howl as good as any wolf out there. Thank you for so much fun reading this piece. Finance is so far from my forte and I may not understand it very well but you do. Every time I read your work or hear you on a podcast I feel a little bit smarter. So, carry on my good sir.
Bombs Away: https://cosmiconion.substack.com/p/parasites-gonna-pop 💥
The margin call has begun — and the parasites are the collateral.
The Wolf’s been watching the pressure build.
Tariffs here. Supply chains snapping there. Currencies wobbling like bad teeth.
What most see as chaos is really the final act of a long-running margin call on the parasite economy — that fake prosperity built on leverage, deceit, and debt.
Two watchers stand on opposite hills describing the same storm.
Burning Bright calls it the Multipolar Margin Call — the great economic inversion where Trump, Xi, and Putin pretend to fight while dismantling the globalist control grid from within.
Clif High calls it the Event-Stream collapse — the metaphysical pressure wave that dissolves every false system as consciousness rises.