WEBVTT
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The prevailing view is that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard leadership calling the shots, having the sort of intimate access to the new supreme leader in whatever state of health he's in, are of the view that they're winning.
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They see no reason to negotiate with the U.S.
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and make any concessions.
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Welcome back, everybody, to the Heroes Path Dispatch.
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I'm Colonel John Fenzl.
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You know, eleven days ago, we left you with a canceled strike and a promised deal and a test.
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Watch two numbers the ships that were going through the Straits of Hormuz and the sign at the corner.
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Tonight, the verdict, 10 ships a day and the most expensive August gas in American history.
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So the deal never arrived.
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Iran issued six conditions.
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The president says it will keep the strait behind a wall of steel.
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And this very morning, Iran attacked two oil tankers belonging to the United Arab Emirates, one of the countries trying to broker the peace.
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An interim shipping arrangement expires on Monday.
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Meanwhile, back home, the economy blinked.
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The first negative jobs number of this war.
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So that's tonight.
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The so what, the now what?
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About every single story.
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Jeff Steinberg, good to have you with us.
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To be back, Jeff.
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Well, it's funny, Jeff, because we talked about this last week.
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After last week's dispatch, we talked about a lot of things that weren't on the news.
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And then suddenly the next day or two days later, they were on the front page of the New York Times.
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But so it's yeah, and that's everything.
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It was the Ebola piece.
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It was a number of other stories as well.
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So I think we're hitting on some things.
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Either that or the New York Times is watching the dispatch as well.
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So now it tells us that we're doing something right.
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But let's hit on five quick topics, Jeff.
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If we could Ukraine just hit deeper inside Russia than ever before.
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They flew hundreds of drones 500 miles east of Moscow and struck one of Russia's largest refineries.
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It killed 13 people.
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It was definitely Russia's deepest wound of the war.
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What's your take on that?
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Yeah, I think that's absolutely the case.
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That Ukraine clearly is getting a lot of assists from a European NATO countries, Britain number one, but others as well.
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And so we're seeing an escalatory pattern in which the war, having previously been largely focused on military targets, has now been broadened to strategic bombing going both ways.
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That refinery hit was a serious blow.
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Clearly, the Russian population is tiring of this war because it's been brought to their doorsteps.
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And on the Ukraine side, the port of Odessa has been shut for the entire month of August.
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In July, as the result of Russian strikes on port facilities and commercial ships leaving those Ukrainian ports.
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There were 50 ships leaving in July, the month before it was 400 August zero.
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And so the war is really dragging on and taking a serious economic and psychological toll both ways.
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And now we're seeing creep that the war is extending into territories that had been previously excluded.
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Latvia, some other Eastern European countries have seen drones and other Russian attack vehicles hitting there, whether it was redirected off target or whether it was intentional.
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And again, the European footprint through joint military production and other things is escalating.
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The United States this week gave permission to Turkey to transfer some Patriot air defense missiles to the Ukraine.
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And so we may be seeing a shift in US posture towards this war, even though President Trump remains largely diverted on the Middle East situation.
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Well, let's talk about the second topic, and that's Ebola.
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It's not something that a lot of us are paying attention to here at home, but it's a grim milestone, and the deaths have doubled in under a month.
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Over 2,000 dead now, more than 4,400 cases.
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It's officially the second largest Ebola outbreak in history, and it's still the fastest spreading ever recorded.
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So where do you think this is going?
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Previously, the U.S.
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had been one of the largest sources of funding for disease prevention early warning programs.
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When the dust settles on this, hopefully it will be contained and won't spread throughout the African continent.
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Combating these kinds of diseases, Ebola is nothing new.
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It's something that is known, has been identified.
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It's a terrible illness.
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But the mechanisms had existed for early detection and preempting of the kind of spread that we're seeing now.
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To my mind, it's clearly an issue that resources are not available, and we're dealing with unstable areas, effectively low-intensity war zones, which compounds the problems.
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They've got three vaccine trials that begin in the Congo within weeks, and they've got some other candidates that are already in human trials, so it's still an ocean away, but it's an optimistic sighting.
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Hopefully we'll see what happens.
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Let's talk about Washington having its most productive week of the summer, and then they just leave town in Congress.
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Didn't they?
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Is out now.
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House has been out.
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They're not back until days after Labor Day.
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Everything is focused on the upcoming midterm elections, and some major pieces of legislation were kicked down the road until after the August recess, including Trump's favorite piece of legislation, the SAVE Act that would mandate voter ID on a much more stringent scale, did not have the votes in the Senate.
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It failed.
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It was 12 votes shy of the 60 votes needed to pass it.
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There was no action taken on the supplemental defense spending for the Iran war.
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And there's a lot of pushback against that.
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The House passed resolution being the War Powers Act, and the Senate is pending on that as well.
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I think members of Congress are highly sensitive to how close and important this November election is going to be.
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And you're seeing some fault lines developing on both sides.
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On the Republican side, President Trump's attack on the Senate majority leader, John Thune, prompted a pushback that normally this is something that the president refers to the Senate leadership, and it's a matter of mutual respect between the branches.
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We're in for some extremely unpredictable and tumultuous developments when Congress is back in September.
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Yeah, the Senate returns September 14th, the House returns on August 35th.
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And as you talked about, the war powers clock lands while Congress is barely even back.
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Another topic, speaking of vaccines earlier, there's been a vaccine whiplash here at home.
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There were two decisions, five days apart.
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On August 5th, the FDA approved the first mRNA flu vaccine in history.
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It was Moderna's for adults 50 and up.
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After trials showed that it outperformed the standards, shot up about 27% in the 50s to 60 groups.
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It's a significant scientific milestone, and that's encouraging.
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On August 10th, the president signed an executive order cutting the recommended childhood vaccine schedule from 18 diseases to 11.
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And the reason that matters, and it's going to affect, you know, all of us who have kids because your pediatrician's false schedule and your school district's requirements are going to now be in motion.
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So I think that in that regard, all of us who do have kids need to start talking to your own doctor, and that advice never changes.
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It's part of a larger picture in which the Republican Party is trying to place greater and greater decision-making authority at the state level where there's something like 37 states where the Republicans have either a trifecta control over both branches plus the governor's office.
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So there's a systematic strategy.
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It was part of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 to do as much as possible to reduce any of the kind of federal oversight programs, such as these public health issues.
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I think we're seeing a kind of mini epidemic of measles, something that we haven't seen in many years.
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And so I think we're seeing, on the one hand, astounding breakthroughs from the medical research side of things and the federal government looking to move things in the reverse direction, restricting requirements, reverting back to state-by-state control, the kinds of things that are likely to have very serious medical public health consequences down the road.
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Well, not just here at home, but abroad, you've you had a magnitude 7.4 earthquake in Northwest Columbia.
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That's killed more than two people.
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And then I think they've got something like you know 2,700 that are still missing.
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Rescuers couldn't even reach the epicenter for days.
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But then here at home, the month of July was one of the hottest ever recorded in the United States.
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I think it was the hottest recorded.
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Right.
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Yes.
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Going back to 18.
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So that's 18 as well.
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So a lot, a lot that's happening.
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Well, Jeff, let's talk about the deal that wasn't.
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11 days ago, the president said the parameters of a deal in Iran were agreed to.
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Walk us through what actually happened.
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Yum began.
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The negotiations back and forth between Iran and Oman were moving forward.
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The results of those negotiations seemed to basically assert the Iranian claims of sovereign control over the Straits of Formuz.
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They were working out a deal where transit in one direction would pass on the Iran side, on the other direction, the Oman side.
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The U.S.
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has not been party to those talks, but through the United States, they've been briefed on them.
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But quite frankly, internally within Iran, the more hardline factions of the Revolutionary Guard are further consolidating their decision-making controls.
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The head of the Supreme National Security Council was replaced.
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Four new commanders have been appointed, replacing those killed in the early strikes of the beginning of the war.
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The prevailing view is that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard leadership, calling the shots, having this sort of intimate access to the new supreme leader in whatever state of health he's in, are of the view that they're winning.
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They see no reason to negotiate with the U.S.
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and make any concessions.
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The elected government, President Pazeski and Galibaf, the elected speaker of the modulus, even though he's a former IRGC general, their view is that the population is suffering, and the opportunity for a deal in which the United States is clearly looking for an exit.
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The U.S.
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may very well be willing to release most of the frozen Iranian funds.
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They may be willing to accept some form of acknowledged Iranian control over the straits.
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And President Trump is saying he's prepared to make a deal that won't even touch on the nuclear issue.
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There was a background story, which is that the president went through a very elaborate security ruse in order to safely return home from the NATO summit in Turkey.
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It's been widely publicized in the last few days that CIA and a consensus of US intelligence agencies rejected the claims of an imminent threat to the president's life coming exclusively from the Israelis.
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So you've got tensions and frictions between the US and Israeli positions on the whole Middle East.
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So I see it as a stalemate.
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The U.S.
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is not ready to relaunch a kinetic phase of the war, but it seems as if the real Secretary of War is Scott Bessant, the Treasury Secretary, who's been making most of the administration statements about economic warfare, tightening of the screws.
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And so the Iranians are blockading the straits, and the United States is blockading the Iranian blockade.
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So nothing's really moving through the straits.
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Something else is happening too, Jeff, that whenever a deal gets close, somebody in Tehran shoots at the peacemakers.
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And so that's where we're at today.
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Jeff, you also, before we came on, you had mentioned you had an interesting conversation with a friend of yours in Israel.
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You want to relate that conversation?
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King's basic view is that if there is a deal with the United States and Iran, this vastly increases the vulnerability for Israel because they're not party to that agreement.
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And his view is that if the Iranian Revolutionary Guard leadership is smart and can get past their hubris and sense that they're winning, if they were to take an agreement, see the lifting of some sanctions, the freeing up of at least a significant portion of that billion in frozen assets in various parts of the world, then within three, four, five years, they're gonna be in a position to have rebuilt all of their support networks from the Hezbollah and Hamas to the popular mobilization forces in Iraq, and Israel's gonna be in a much worse situation.
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And so he thinks that shoot the peacemakers, that's been the Israeli policy vis-a-vis Hezbollah and vis-a-vis Iran throughout, period, and he thinks that Israel's best hope right now is that the hubris and sort of intoxicated view among the IRG leadership that they've got the winning hand may prompt them to dig in their heels and ultimately force Trump to come around to joining with Israel on a much more massive new stage of attack after maybe some weapons replace, which is a much more complex and more long-term process than most people realize.
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He's not a very happy camper, and he believes also that Netanyahu will do anything and everything to win re-election.
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He noted that there are some people around Netanyahu who are openly mooting the idea of assassinating the front runner opposition candidate, General Eisen, who was a former chief of staff of the F and who's gaining in the polls.
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And there we don't see that as a headline in the future.
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I mean Yeah, I said to him this is like the Rabin assassination take two.
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Yeah.
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And he said, Well, it's the same cast of characters.
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Jeff, let's talk about what this all means for us and talk a little bit about what's on the horizon.
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We've been talking for months about this kind of early warning triple.
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First of all, you have fertilizer.
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The war has cut Iran-linked fertilizer shipments, and so now the feeding season becomes a thin October harvest.
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That's going to impact grocery prices five weeks before the midterms.
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That's on the horizon, certainly.
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And then it's not too early to start talking about Christmas as well, because the insurance rates to get through those sea lanes in Hormuz is running as much as 30 times normal.
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And the holiday inventory on those ships is being ordered right now.
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So that reaches American shelves in November.
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So we'll be seeing that.
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And then you stack the tariffs on top of it.
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So you can call it the war tax on Christmas if you want.
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But uh and then the thing is on August 24th, 10 days from now, the federal government releases a study that sets 2027 water allocations on the Colorado River.
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And this is after they proposed the largest cuts in history.
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40 million people, seven states, and much of America's winter produce depend on that number.
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So it'll be a one-day headline and then a year-long fight ahead of us.
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People are looking at both diesel and jet fuel reaching that where supplies availability, refinery capacity is in crisis, and again, barring any kind of resolution and reopening of the Straits of Goldman Sachs is warning that we're once again going to be at that tipping point where supplies themselves are not available.
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And even beyond just the pricing, we're going to deplete whatever minimal rebuild of strategic reserves we had during that limited period where the ceasefire was actually functioning.
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Jeff, what else is on the horizon that we're not talking about that we should be talking about?
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Well, the debt, the federal debt, a number of economists took very careful note that the US intervened, the Treasury Department intervened to temporarily prop up the value of the Japanese yen, which had collapsed down to the range of 160 plus to the US dollar.
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The normal range is any down to even 100.
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But the intervention was made by pleading the U.S.
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Treasuries and Fed's holdings of euros, not dollars, because the flip side is the concern that any sell-off of U.S.
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is going to drive up yields on those treasuries.
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There's a complex array of issues relating to U.S.
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government debt, the economic underpin of the US-Japan partnership, which is one of the few really dynamic and positive bilateral relations that the administration currently has.
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I think it's kind of like watching paint dry, but it could have some big and serious consequences in the run-up to the November elections.
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Warsh has got his first speech as chairman in late August, and then we just had a negative jobs report as well.
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And I just read today that we're rapidly approaching 50 trillion debt, to your point.
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So we're going to all be feeling this.
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There's no question.
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Right.
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Nobody watches when the labor department revises the job statistics two or three weeks after they release them.
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Everybody is keen on the big numbers.
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The job creation figures in June look good, but they've been corrected back down substantially.
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So we're in an extremely flat labor market, and unemployment remains at a lower level because the labor force is dwindling because of immigration policy and other things.
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We have the lowest labor force participation rate that we've had in decades.
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61% of people of working age, which is generally 18 to 65.
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Only 6% are either working or currently looking for full-time employment.
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That's pretty dramatic.
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Jeff, let's close with this.
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For two weeks, no American bombs have fallen on Iran, and yet the war got bigger.
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It moved into ledgers and shipping lanes, into jobs reports, and into our kids' backpacks.
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The sieges are quieter than the strikes.
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They're not gentler.
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So we'll keep watching those two numbers with you.
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But Jeff, thanks so much for being with us.
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It was a pleasure.
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Yeah, so we'll try to get this posted the right away tonight.
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To everybody listening, hold your people close, keep an eye on that sign on the corner, and make your voice heard.
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I'm Colonel John Fenzel.
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Thank you for walking that path.
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Bye now.
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The prevailing view is that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard leadership calling the shots, having the sort of intimate access to the new supreme leader in whatever state of health he's in, are of the view that they're winning.
00:00:15.759 --> 00:00:18.879
They see no reason to negotiate with the U.S.
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and make any concessions.
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Welcome back, everybody, to the Heroes Path Dispatch.
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I'm Colonel John Fenzl.
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You know, eleven days ago, we left you with a canceled strike and a promised deal and a test.
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Watch two numbers the ships that were going through the Straits of Hormuz and the sign at the corner.
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Tonight, the verdict, 10 ships a day and the most expensive August gas in American history.
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So the deal never arrived.
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Iran issued six conditions.
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The president says it will keep the strait behind a wall of steel.
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And this very morning, Iran attacked two oil tankers belonging to the United Arab Emirates, one of the countries trying to broker the peace.
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An interim shipping arrangement expires on Monday.
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Meanwhile, back home, the economy blinked.
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The first negative jobs number of this war.
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So that's tonight.
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The so what, the now what?
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About every single story.
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Jeff Steinberg, good to have you with us.
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To be back, Jeff.
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Well, it's funny, Jeff, because we talked about this last week.
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After last week's dispatch, we talked about a lot of things that weren't on the news.
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And then suddenly the next day or two days later, they were on the front page of the New York Times.
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But so it's yeah, and that's everything.
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It was the Ebola piece.
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It was a number of other stories as well.
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So I think we're hitting on some things.
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Either that or the New York Times is watching the dispatch as well.
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So now it tells us that we're doing something right.
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But let's hit on five quick topics, Jeff.
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If we could Ukraine just hit deeper inside Russia than ever before.
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They flew hundreds of drones 500 miles east of Moscow and struck one of Russia's largest refineries.
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It killed 13 people.
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It was definitely Russia's deepest wound of the war.
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What's your take on that?
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Yeah, I think that's absolutely the case.
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That Ukraine clearly is getting a lot of assists from a European NATO countries, Britain number one, but others as well.
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And so we're seeing an escalatory pattern in which the war, having previously been largely focused on military targets, has now been broadened to strategic bombing going both ways.
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That refinery hit was a serious blow.
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Clearly, the Russian population is tiring of this war because it's been brought to their doorsteps.
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And on the Ukraine side, the port of Odessa has been shut for the entire month of August.
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In July, as the result of Russian strikes on port facilities and commercial ships leaving those Ukrainian ports.
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There were 50 ships leaving in July, the month before it was 400 August zero.
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And so the war is really dragging on and taking a serious economic and psychological toll both ways.
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And now we're seeing creep that the war is extending into territories that had been previously excluded.
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Latvia, some other Eastern European countries have seen drones and other Russian attack vehicles hitting there, whether it was redirected off target or whether it was intentional.
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And again, the European footprint through joint military production and other things is escalating.
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The United States this week gave permission to Turkey to transfer some Patriot air defense missiles to the Ukraine.
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And so we may be seeing a shift in US posture towards this war, even though President Trump remains largely diverted on the Middle East situation.
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Well, let's talk about the second topic, and that's Ebola.
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It's not something that a lot of us are paying attention to here at home, but it's a grim milestone, and the deaths have doubled in under a month.
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Over 2,000 dead now, more than 4,400 cases.
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It's officially the second largest Ebola outbreak in history, and it's still the fastest spreading ever recorded.
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So where do you think this is going?
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Previously, the U.S.
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had been one of the largest sources of funding for disease prevention early warning programs.
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When the dust settles on this, hopefully it will be contained and won't spread throughout the African continent.
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Combating these kinds of diseases, Ebola is nothing new.
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It's something that is known, has been identified.
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It's a terrible illness.
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But the mechanisms had existed for early detection and preempting of the kind of spread that we're seeing now.
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To my mind, it's clearly an issue that resources are not available, and we're dealing with unstable areas, effectively low-intensity war zones, which compounds the problems.
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They've got three vaccine trials that begin in the Congo within weeks, and they've got some other candidates that are already in human trials, so it's still an ocean away, but it's an optimistic sighting.
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Hopefully we'll see what happens.
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Let's talk about Washington having its most productive week of the summer, and then they just leave town in Congress.
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Didn't they?
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Is out now.
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House has been out.
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They're not back until days after Labor Day.
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Everything is focused on the upcoming midterm elections, and some major pieces of legislation were kicked down the road until after the August recess, including Trump's favorite piece of legislation, the SAVE Act that would mandate voter ID on a much more stringent scale, did not have the votes in the Senate.
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It failed.
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It was 12 votes shy of the 60 votes needed to pass it.
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There was no action taken on the supplemental defense spending for the Iran war.
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And there's a lot of pushback against that.
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The House passed resolution being the War Powers Act, and the Senate is pending on that as well.
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I think members of Congress are highly sensitive to how close and important this November election is going to be.
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And you're seeing some fault lines developing on both sides.
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On the Republican side, President Trump's attack on the Senate majority leader, John Thune, prompted a pushback that normally this is something that the president refers to the Senate leadership, and it's a matter of mutual respect between the branches.
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We're in for some extremely unpredictable and tumultuous developments when Congress is back in September.
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Yeah, the Senate returns September 14th, the House returns on August 35th.
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And as you talked about, the war powers clock lands while Congress is barely even back.
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Another topic, speaking of vaccines earlier, there's been a vaccine whiplash here at home.
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There were two decisions, five days apart.
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On August 5th, the FDA approved the first mRNA flu vaccine in history.
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It was Moderna's for adults 50 and up.
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After trials showed that it outperformed the standards, shot up about 27% in the 50s to 60 groups.
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It's a significant scientific milestone, and that's encouraging.
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On August 10th, the president signed an executive order cutting the recommended childhood vaccine schedule from 18 diseases to 11.
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And the reason that matters, and it's going to affect, you know, all of us who have kids because your pediatrician's false schedule and your school district's requirements are going to now be in motion.
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So I think that in that regard, all of us who do have kids need to start talking to your own doctor, and that advice never changes.
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It's part of a larger picture in which the Republican Party is trying to place greater and greater decision-making authority at the state level where there's something like 37 states where the Republicans have either a trifecta control over both branches plus the governor's office.
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So there's a systematic strategy.
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It was part of the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 to do as much as possible to reduce any of the kind of federal oversight programs, such as these public health issues.
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I think we're seeing a kind of mini epidemic of measles, something that we haven't seen in many years.
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And so I think we're seeing, on the one hand, astounding breakthroughs from the medical research side of things and the federal government looking to move things in the reverse direction, restricting requirements, reverting back to state-by-state control, the kinds of things that are likely to have very serious medical public health consequences down the road.
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Well, not just here at home, but abroad, you've you had a magnitude 7.4 earthquake in Northwest Columbia.
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That's killed more than two people.
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And then I think they've got something like you know 2,700 that are still missing.
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Rescuers couldn't even reach the epicenter for days.
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But then here at home, the month of July was one of the hottest ever recorded in the United States.
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I think it was the hottest recorded.
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Right.
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Yes.
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Going back to 18.
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So that's 18 as well.
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So a lot, a lot that's happening.
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Well, Jeff, let's talk about the deal that wasn't.
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11 days ago, the president said the parameters of a deal in Iran were agreed to.
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Walk us through what actually happened.
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Yum began.
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The negotiations back and forth between Iran and Oman were moving forward.
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The results of those negotiations seemed to basically assert the Iranian claims of sovereign control over the Straits of Formuz.
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They were working out a deal where transit in one direction would pass on the Iran side, on the other direction, the Oman side.
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The U.S.
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has not been party to those talks, but through the United States, they've been briefed on them.
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But quite frankly, internally within Iran, the more hardline factions of the Revolutionary Guard are further consolidating their decision-making controls.
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The head of the Supreme National Security Council was replaced.
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Four new commanders have been appointed, replacing those killed in the early strikes of the beginning of the war.
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The prevailing view is that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard leadership, calling the shots, having this sort of intimate access to the new supreme leader in whatever state of health he's in, are of the view that they're winning.
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They see no reason to negotiate with the U.S.
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and make any concessions.
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The elected government, President Pazeski and Galibaf, the elected speaker of the modulus, even though he's a former IRGC general, their view is that the population is suffering, and the opportunity for a deal in which the United States is clearly looking for an exit.
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The U.S.
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may very well be willing to release most of the frozen Iranian funds.
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They may be willing to accept some form of acknowledged Iranian control over the straits.
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And President Trump is saying he's prepared to make a deal that won't even touch on the nuclear issue.
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There was a background story, which is that the president went through a very elaborate security ruse in order to safely return home from the NATO summit in Turkey.
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It's been widely publicized in the last few days that CIA and a consensus of US intelligence agencies rejected the claims of an imminent threat to the president's life coming exclusively from the Israelis.
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So you've got tensions and frictions between the US and Israeli positions on the whole Middle East.
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So I see it as a stalemate.
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The U.S.
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is not ready to relaunch a kinetic phase of the war, but it seems as if the real Secretary of War is Scott Bessant, the Treasury Secretary, who's been making most of the administration statements about economic warfare, tightening of the screws.
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And so the Iranians are blockading the straits, and the United States is blockading the Iranian blockade.
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So nothing's really moving through the straits.
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Something else is happening too, Jeff, that whenever a deal gets close, somebody in Tehran shoots at the peacemakers.
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And so that's where we're at today.
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Jeff, you also, before we came on, you had mentioned you had an interesting conversation with a friend of yours in Israel.
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You want to relate that conversation?
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King's basic view is that if there is a deal with the United States and Iran, this vastly increases the vulnerability for Israel because they're not party to that agreement.
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And his view is that if the Iranian Revolutionary Guard leadership is smart and can get past their hubris and sense that they're winning, if they were to take an agreement, see the lifting of some sanctions, the freeing up of at least a significant portion of that billion in frozen assets in various parts of the world, then within three, four, five years, they're gonna be in a position to have rebuilt all of their support networks from the Hezbollah and Hamas to the popular mobilization forces in Iraq, and Israel's gonna be in a much worse situation.
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And so he thinks that shoot the peacemakers, that's been the Israeli policy vis-a-vis Hezbollah and vis-a-vis Iran throughout, period, and he thinks that Israel's best hope right now is that the hubris and sort of intoxicated view among the IRG leadership that they've got the winning hand may prompt them to dig in their heels and ultimately force Trump to come around to joining with Israel on a much more massive new stage of attack after maybe some weapons replace, which is a much more complex and more long-term process than most people realize.
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He's not a very happy camper, and he believes also that Netanyahu will do anything and everything to win re-election.
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He noted that there are some people around Netanyahu who are openly mooting the idea of assassinating the front runner opposition candidate, General Eisen, who was a former chief of staff of the F and who's gaining in the polls.
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And there we don't see that as a headline in the future.
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I mean Yeah, I said to him this is like the Rabin assassination take two.
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Yeah.
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And he said, Well, it's the same cast of characters.
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Jeff, let's talk about what this all means for us and talk a little bit about what's on the horizon.
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We've been talking for months about this kind of early warning triple.
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First of all, you have fertilizer.
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The war has cut Iran-linked fertilizer shipments, and so now the feeding season becomes a thin October harvest.
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That's going to impact grocery prices five weeks before the midterms.
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That's on the horizon, certainly.
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And then it's not too early to start talking about Christmas as well, because the insurance rates to get through those sea lanes in Hormuz is running as much as 30 times normal.
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And the holiday inventory on those ships is being ordered right now.
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So that reaches American shelves in November.
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So we'll be seeing that.
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And then you stack the tariffs on top of it.
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So you can call it the war tax on Christmas if you want.
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But uh and then the thing is on August 24th, 10 days from now, the federal government releases a study that sets 2027 water allocations on the Colorado River.
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And this is after they proposed the largest cuts in history.
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40 million people, seven states, and much of America's winter produce depend on that number.
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So it'll be a one-day headline and then a year-long fight ahead of us.
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People are looking at both diesel and jet fuel reaching that where supplies availability, refinery capacity is in crisis, and again, barring any kind of resolution and reopening of the Straits of Goldman Sachs is warning that we're once again going to be at that tipping point where supplies themselves are not available.
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And even beyond just the pricing, we're going to deplete whatever minimal rebuild of strategic reserves we had during that limited period where the ceasefire was actually functioning.
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Jeff, what else is on the horizon that we're not talking about that we should be talking about?
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Well, the debt, the federal debt, a number of economists took very careful note that the US intervened, the Treasury Department intervened to temporarily prop up the value of the Japanese yen, which had collapsed down to the range of 160 plus to the US dollar.
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The normal range is any down to even 100.
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But the intervention was made by pleading the U.S.
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Treasuries and Fed's holdings of euros, not dollars, because the flip side is the concern that any sell-off of U.S.
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is going to drive up yields on those treasuries.
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There's a complex array of issues relating to U.S.
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government debt, the economic underpin of the US-Japan partnership, which is one of the few really dynamic and positive bilateral relations that the administration currently has.
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I think it's kind of like watching paint dry, but it could have some big and serious consequences in the run-up to the November elections.
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Warsh has got his first speech as chairman in late August, and then we just had a negative jobs report as well.
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And I just read today that we're rapidly approaching 50 trillion debt, to your point.
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So we're going to all be feeling this.
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There's no question.
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Right.
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Nobody watches when the labor department revises the job statistics two or three weeks after they release them.
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Everybody is keen on the big numbers.
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The job creation figures in June look good, but they've been corrected back down substantially.
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So we're in an extremely flat labor market, and unemployment remains at a lower level because the labor force is dwindling because of immigration policy and other things.
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We have the lowest labor force participation rate that we've had in decades.
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61% of people of working age, which is generally 18 to 65.
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Only 6% are either working or currently looking for full-time employment.
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That's pretty dramatic.
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Jeff, let's close with this.
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For two weeks, no American bombs have fallen on Iran, and yet the war got bigger.
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It moved into ledgers and shipping lanes, into jobs reports, and into our kids' backpacks.
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The sieges are quieter than the strikes.
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They're not gentler.
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So we'll keep watching those two numbers with you.
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But Jeff, thanks so much for being with us.
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It was a pleasure.
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Yeah, so we'll try to get this posted the right away tonight.
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To everybody listening, hold your people close, keep an eye on that sign on the corner, and make your voice heard.
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I'm Colonel John Fenzel.
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Thank you for walking that path.
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Bye now.
