
The Macro Paper
@macropaperr • 9,448 subscribers
Global Capital Markets Simplified: News, Research, Every Macro Headwind.
Shorts
Videos

The US is about to charge $30 million per tanker to cross the Strait of Hormuz. Trump just declared the US the "Guardian of the Hormuz Strait" and said it will take a 20% cut on all cargo passing through. Here is what that actually means. A fully loaded supertanker carries about 2 million barrels of oil. At $75 a barrel, that cargo is worth roughly $150 million. A 20% fee on that is $30 million. Per ship. Per crossing. Now compare that to what Iran was charging. Iran's toll has been running at $1.5 million to $2 million per vessel. On a $150 million cargo, that is about 1.3%. Trump called that toll unacceptable. His replacement is roughly 15 times more expensive. The scale of this is what nobody is talking about. Before the war, 20.3 million barrels of oil crossed Hormuz every single day. At $75 oil, that is $1.52 billion of crude moving through the strait daily. A 20% cut on that comes to roughly $304 million a day. That is about $111 billion a year. For comparison, Iran's entire toll system was projected to earn $1 billion to $2 billion a year at best. The US plan would collect more than 50 times that. There is no precedent for this anywhere in global trade. The Suez Canal charges roughly $300,000 to $700,000 per vessel. The Panama Canal is similar. Both are man-made canals that countries built and maintain. Hormuz is a natural waterway. Under international law, ships have a right of transit passage through it. That is the exact legal argument the US used against Iran's toll. And the cost does not land on the US. It lands on Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iraq, who ship the oil. And on China, India, Japan, and South Korea, who buy it. A $30 million fee per tanker works out to $15 per barrel. That gets passed straight into the price of crude. Oil is already up over 4% today. The strait that was supposed to reopen and lower prices is now being turned into the most expensive stretch of water on earth.
The Macro Paper63,688 次观看 • 1 个月前

🚨 CHINA'S AI PLAYBOOK ISN'T TO BEAT OPENAI AND ANTHROPIC. IT'S TO MAKE THEM IRRELEVANT BY MAKING INTELLIGENCE FREE. Chinese labs are giving away frontier-level models for free. Zhipu's GLM-5 already beats Claude Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3.0 Pro on key benchmarks. DeepSeek, Qwen, and Kimi round out 4 of the top 5 open-weight models globally, all released under open licenses anyone can use commercially. The real weapon isn't the models, it's the cost to run them. Chinese provinces like Gansu, Guizhou, and Inner Mongolia are cutting data center power bills by up to 50%. DeepSeek trained its R1 model for around $6 million, compared to roughly $100 million for GPT-4. The remaining blocker is chips. US export controls still cut China off from Nvidia's best hardware. But Zhipu already trained a full frontier model entirely on Huawei's Ascend chips, no Nvidia involved. Huawei's next-gen Atlas 950 cluster, launching late 2026, claims 6.7 times the compute of Nvidia's planned NVL144 systems. If Huawei closes the chip gap while China keeps giving away free, near frontier models running on subsidized power. The entire business model OpenAI and Anthropic are built on, charging hundreds of billions in aggregate revenue for access to intelligence, stops making sense. Why pay premium prices for marginal capability gains when a free alternative running on cheap compute gets you 90% of the way there.
The Macro Paper71,691 次观看 • 1 个月前

JAPAN'S STOCK MARKET IS CELEBRATING ITS OWN COLLAPSE. ¥95 trillion ($610 billion) has been added in just 3 days, as semiconductor stocks lead a broad rebound across Asia. The same currency driving this rally is also breaking Japan's economy from the other side. Japan posted a ¥406.9 billion trade deficit in June, imports up 25.4% year-over-year against exports up 19.3%. Imports are outpacing exports not because Japan is buying more, but because the weak yen is making everything it buys from abroad more expensive. A weak yen pumps up exporter profits and chipmaker stocks, which is why the market is ripping right now. That same weak yen also makes oil and imports more expensive, and Japan's central bank still hasn't gotten inflation under control. Nothing about today's rally fixes that. It's the same weak yen, just showing up as a win on one chart and a warning sign on the other.
The Macro Paper22,584 次观看 • 28 天前
没有更多内容可加载