Greetings folks (yes I know it’s not Friday),

On March 26, Donald Trump became the first sitting US president in 165 years to put his signature on American currency. The new bills will replace the Treasurer’s signature with the President’s, starting with $100 notes in June. A 24-karat gold coin bearing his face was also approved. Cash currently accounts for just 14% of all US payments, which means the president has chosen to put his name on something fewer people use every year. You’ll start seeing his signature a lot more when he starts putting it on $1 notes (if you don’t know it’s probably a good thing). I just found this week, in December Trump was awarded inaugural FIFA Peace Prize. It was awarded as a ‘symbol of unity’. Nothing unites people faster than collective disbelief, so I guess they nailed it. Let’s get to it.

The Economist reviewed Barry Eichengreen’s new book, Money Beyond Borders, and the timing could not be better. Eichengreen, a Berkeley economist who has spent a career studying how currencies rise and fall, draws a parallel between Rome and America that feels less like metaphor and more like a checklist. The Roman denarius dominated Mediterranean trade for centuries because Rome had military reach, institutional credibility, and a currency that everyone used because everyone else used it. Sound familiar?

Nero began debasing the silver content of the denarius to fund foreign wars and a golden palace. Successive emperors followed suit. By the third century the currency had lost roughly 90% of its silver content. Pliny the Elder complained that Rome was running a trade deficit with India, draining precious metals eastward in exchange for spices and silk. The deficit was unsustainable then. The US trade deficit with China hit $279 billion in 2024.

Eichengreen’s argument is that dollar dominance has three pillars, and Trump is taking a hammer to two of them. Reducing America’s military footprint undermines the first. Recklessly increasing the budget deficit while questioning the independence of the Federal Reserve undermines the second. The network effect (everyone uses dollars because everyone uses dollars) is powerful, but it is a lagging indicator. It held for Rome too, right up until it didn’t.

None of the dollar’s would-be successors have the full package. The euro lacks a common fiscal authority and a powerful military. The Chinese yuan is backed by authoritarian institutions that foreign investors do not trust. Bitcoin has none of the three. The dollar’s dominance is less about the dollar being strong and more about everything else being worse. Which is reassuring until you remember that Rome probably felt the same way about the denarius in 250 AD. Don’t worry, Trump’s signature on the US Dollar will ensure it remains the reserve currency for decades to come.

Sentiment

The Eichengreen thesis generated heated discussion across financial media and academic circles. On r/investing and Hacker News, users debated whether the dollar’s reserve status is genuinely at risk or whether the structural alternatives remain too weak to matter. Seeking Alpha contributors noted the book’s timing alongside Trump’s fiscal posture, with several calling it “the most relevant economics book of the year.” On X/Twitter, the Nero comparison went viral, with one post calling it “history rhyming so hard it’s basically karaoke.” LinkedIn commentary from institutional economists leaned cautious: the dollar isn’t dying, but the margin of safety is narrower than at any point since Bretton Woods.

Patrick McGee at the Financial Times published a detailed investigation into Apple’s supply chain for the company’s 50th anniversary. In Jobs’ first seven years as CEO, Apple earned a cumulative net profit of about $2.1 billion. Today, Apple earns $2.1 billion per week. The story of how it got there is not about design or software. It is about manufacturing extraction.

The iPod Classic had a beautiful stainless steel back, 0.4 millimetres thin, polished to a mirror finish by a master craftsman in Japan. When demand outpaced what 20 Japanese companies could produce, Apple sent in film crews. They recorded the angle of the craftsman’s wrist, the pressure and speed and sound of the polishing, how to manage heat distortion without warping the metal. Then Apple broke every step into mathematical code and automated it at scale in China. The craftsman’s wrist became an algorithm.

Sharp was another case study. Apple offered to help retool Sharp’s struggling LCD TV factory for smartphone panels, prepaying roughly $1 billion. Inside Sharp’s own factory, Apple installed a secret office for up to 50 people. No Sharp employees allowed. The workers were not Californians: they were display professionals recruited from Samsung, Motorola, and Taiwanese companies. Through capital, embedded personnel, and ruthless contracts, Apple controlled the production line from the inside. When Apple needed panels, utilisation exceeded 90%. When it didn’t, the factory sat idle. Sharp’s management felt they had eaten a “poisoned apple.” Their words.

Apple’s standard purchase order requires suppliers to assign “without reservation, all ownership rights, title, and interest.” One former Apple manufacturing engineer said: “If we wanted to bring up another supplier, we would say, hey, we own the IP. We can go to someone else and tell them everything they need to know.” A former subject matter expert was more blunt: “I felt horrible about it. We’d screw over the original IP owner. I did this over and over.” Apple’s official response to the FT: “The entire premise of this story is false.”

The bigger story is China’s counter-move. What the FT calls the “grumpy curve” inverts the Western assumption that manufacturing is the low-value middle of the value chain, with high-value design and branding at the ends. China bet that knowhow and scaled capacity matter more than profits. BYD started supplying Apple around 2008, making metal casings. It is now one of Apple’s most important iPad assemblers and a titanium alloy supplier. That training helped BYD build an electric vehicle company that outsells Tesla. Apple is worth $3.7 trillion and earns $100 billion a year. It cannot produce a single iPhone without China. As the FT concludes: “It took America a generation to relearn the lessons it had taught Japan. It might not get a second chance this time.” I am not sure why this is surprising, my iPhone has been harvesting more data than a Wall Street Quant fund. What do you think Face ID does?

Sentiment

This piece landed like a bomb in tech and supply chain circles. On Hacker News it generated over 1,200 comments within 24 hours, with former Apple suppliers confirming the filming practices. On r/technology and r/investing, the Sharp story provoked outrage, with users calling it “corporate colonialism with better lawyers.” Seeking Alpha analysts noted the implications for Apple’s tariff exposure. On LinkedIn, supply chain professionals called it the best piece of investigative business journalism this year. X/Twitter debate centred on whether Apple’s practices were standard business or something more extractive.

Everyone is watching the oil price. Brent is above $108 a barrel this week, up more than 50% since the US and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury on February 28. WTI is tracking above $105. But oil is the headline everyone already knows. The more interesting story is everything else trapped behind the Strait of Hormuz that nobody is talking about.

Start with helium (its not just for ballons). The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Qatar supplies roughly a third of the world’s helium, the supercooled gas that keeps AI chip fabrication tools at operating temperature and MRI scanners humming. Helium is the second most common element in the universe and one of the rarest on Earth: it exists in small concentrations in natural gas pockets, gets separated out, and ships as a supercooled liquid. Suppliers are already telling customers to expect cuts and surcharges. Supply cannot be switched on quickly.

Fertilizer is worse. About a third of global seaborne fertilizer trade passes through the Strait of Hormuz, and urea prices have jumped 50% since the war started. The Gulf region produces nearly half the world’s urea and 30% of ammonia. Qatar Energy has declared force majeure on LNG exports, and since natural gas is the primary feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer (70% of production costs), the disruption cascades. 54 US agricultural groups wrote to Trump calling for market relief. The Carnegie Endowment was direct: even if Hormuz reopens tomorrow, restarting fertilizer production and transport takes weeks that Northern Hemisphere farmers do not have. Miss a planting season and you never recover it. G7 countries maintain strategic petroleum reserves. They do not maintain strategic fertilizer reserves.

An estimated 37 to 38 million people across the Gulf depend on desalination plants for drinking water, with virtually 100% dependency in Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE. All Gulf coast desalination plants are within range of Iranian drone systems. Kuwait has suspended operations at the port of Shuaiba. Bahrain has closed its main port. Qatar has halted all maritime navigation. The World Economic Forum summed it up: “This is an energy crisis, a water crisis, and a food crisis, and all three are happening at once.”

Aluminium prices are rising because the Gulf states account for 20% of raw aluminium exports. Nearly 50% of global sulfur exports originate west of the Strait, and sulfur is a key input in phosphate fertilizer. War-risk insurance premiums have gone from 0.125% to 0.2-0.4% of hull value per transit. For very large oil tankers, that is an extra quarter of a million dollars per trip. At least 150 vessels are anchored in open water around the Strait, cargo going nowhere. Container shipping companies have suspended Hormuz transits entirely.

The food chain cascade is where it gets dark. Project Syndicate estimates that more than 100 million people are at risk of a humanitarian catastrophe if the closure is prolonged. A ship captain brave enough to dash through would carry oil, not fertilizer, because oil is worth more per tonne. The Saudi pipeline that could bypass Hormuz was built for crude, not ammonia. Iran, meanwhile, announced on March 26 that ships from China, Russia, India, Iraq, and Pakistan would be allowed through. Everyone else can negotiate. Iran is essentially running a selective-access toll booth on the world’s most important waterway. Per SolAbility, if the conflict ends now, global GDP losses are $590 billion. If it continues three months, losses exceed $3.5 trillion, or 3.15% of global GDP. For context, the 1973 oil embargo disrupted roughly 7% of world supply through voluntary restriction with no infrastructure damage. This crisis strands 15% of world supply with active infrastructure targeting and no spare capacity. The IEA’s chief had a warning for April: “The next month will be much worse than March, because the cargo ships that loaded oil before the war are no longer arriving. In April, there is nothing.” War isn’t just bad for everyone, it’s the ultimate market crash disguised as a fireworks show.

Sentiment

This story dominated every platform this week. On r/investing and r/geopolitics, the helium-for-AI-chips angle generated the most surprise, with several users noting they had never considered the connection. Stocktwits was heavily focused on fertilizer plays (NTR, MOS, CF Industries). Seeking Alpha contributors published multiple deep dives on the non-oil supply chain impacts, with the Carnegie Endowment piece getting the most traction. On X/Twitter, the “G7 has no fertilizer reserves” stat went viral. LinkedIn commentary from agricultural economists warned that food inflation could persist well into 2027 regardless of ceasefire timing. Bluesky discussion centred on the water security angle, which mainstream media has largely ignored.

OnlyFans announced in October 2025 that it had paid out $25 billion to creators since launching in 2016. Fans spent $7.22 billion on the platform in 2024. Net platform revenue was $1.4 billion on a 20% commission. The company employs roughly 1,000 people, 80% of whom work in content moderation. Profit margins sit between 32% and 36%. By any traditional measure, this is one of the most efficient business models in tech. The platform that everyone jokes about at parties is quietly one of the most profitable companies in the UK.

The income distribution is a case study in platform economics. The average creator earns $131 per month, or about $1,570 a year. The top 1% of creators capture roughly 33% of all revenue. The top 0.1% capture an estimated 76%, averaging $146,881 per month. Sophie Rain earned $43 million in 2025. The average creator has 21 subscribers. Only 10% work on the platform full time. It is, in miniature, the entire economy: a tiny number of people capture most of the value, and the long tail works for what amounts to a rounding error. 70% of top creators’ income comes from direct messages, not subscriptions. The real product is not content. It is attention.

The founder, Leonid Radvinsky, died on March 23 at the age of 43 from cancer. He had owned 75% of Fenix International, the UK parent company. In January 2026, he tried to sell 60% of the company for $8 billion. Nobody would buy it. By March, he was in talks with Architect Capital at a valuation of $3.5 billion. He died during the negotiations. The company that paid him $500 million in dividends over two years lost more than half its asking price in two months. The Financial Times reported in January that OnlyFans creators now make up more than half of O-1 visa applicants to the United States, the “extraordinary ability” category historically reserved for Nobel laureates and Olympic athletes. We live in interesting times.

The banking story is where it gets structural. In 2021, OnlyFans nearly banned all sexually explicit content after BNY Mellon and JPMorgan withdrew support. The CEO told the FT it was banks, not Mastercard, that forced the decision. The ban was reversed within days after massive backlash, but the underlying problem persists. In 2025, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency reviewed the nine largest US banks and confirmed that they had restricted legal industries based on “reputation risk,” with adult entertainment at the top of the list. Decisions were based on optics and media pressure, not fraud or illegality. Trump signed an executive order banning “politicized debanking,” but it does not cover Visa or Mastercard. Last week, the FTC sent letters to all four major payment processors threatening enforcement action. The most profitable platform in the UK’s creator economy still cannot get a normal banking relationship. In case you wondering West Virginia, is the highest per-capita spender on OnlyFans in the United States. I just found my new dream job, content moderation at Only Fans.

Sentiment:

Radvinsky’s death generated surprisingly little mainstream coverage, but heavy discussion on Reddit (r/technology, r/business) and Hacker News. The O-1 visa stat was the most shared data point, with immigration lawyers confirming the trend on X/Twitter and LinkedIn. On Stocktwits and Seeking Alpha, the valuation collapse from $8 billion to $3.5 billion was the lead story, with analysts debating whether the company is uninvestable or merely mispriced. The debanking angle resonated across political lines: libertarian-leaning users cited it as government overreach, progressive users as discrimination against sex workers, and finance professionals as an example of banks using compliance as moral policing.

The Wall Street Journal reported that thieves stole 413,793 KitKat bars somewhere along their journey from a factory in central Italy to Poland. That is 12 metric tons of chocolate. Both the bars and the truck remain missing. Nobody was hurt. Nestlé confirmed it was not an April Fools’ joke. “Yes, it really happened,” a spokesman said. What the company lost in chocolate, it gained in what may be the most effective crisis communications response of the year. Their statement: “We’ve always encouraged people to have a break with KitKat, but it seems thieves have taken the message too literally and made a break with more than 12 metric tons of our chocolate.” Multiple brands piled on with meme responses. The marketing department got a better week than the logistics department.

The KitKat heist joins a surprisingly distinguished history of food crime. The greatest heist in Canadian history involved maple syrup. Between 2011 and 2012, thieves rented space in the same warehouse as Quebec’s strategic maple syrup reserve (this is a real thing), gradually siphoned off six million pounds of syrup from the barrels, and replaced it with water. The total haul: $18.7 million. A barrel of maple syrup is worth 13 times more than a barrel of crude oil. 17 men were arrested. The ringleader got eight years and a $9.4 million fine. In 2015, Italian police caught a gang of 11 who had spent two years stealing 2,039 wheels of Parmigiano-Reggiano worth $875,000, equipped with burglary tools, guns, two-way radios, and electronic alarm jammers. In Germany, someone stole a truck carrying 20 tonnes of Nutella. Police issued a statement asking citizens to report anyone “offering large quantities of chocolate via unconventional channels.”

According to FreightWatch International, food and drink heists account for 27% of all cargo theft, more than stolen electronics, pharmaceuticals, and auto parts combined. Gastropod reports that 4% of all cheese produced in the world is destined to be stolen. The black market for Parmigiano-Reggiano is apparently thriving. Given where inflation is headed I am not surprised that food theft is on the rise. Someone is storing these KitKat bars, until chocolate futures goes up.

Sentiment

The KitKat heist was the most shared business story of the week across all platforms. On X/Twitter and Reddit it generated thousands of meme responses and brand hijacks. Nestlé’s PR team was universally praised. On LinkedIn, crisis communications professionals held it up as a masterclass in turning bad news into engagement. Seeking Alpha noted the story had no material impact on Nestlé’s stock price. The maple syrup heist comparison dominated Hacker News discussion, where multiple Canadians confirmed that the strategic maple syrup reserve is, in fact, very real.

On the island of Mauritius, resort hotels keep a list of emergency contacts: police, ambulance, fire department, cyclone warning system, and Zoël Manguillier. Manguillier, 61, has found roughly 1,000 lost rings over the past 30 years. He started in the early 1990s when he ran a parasailing business and began diving to recover jewellery his clients dropped in the Indian Ocean. A French friend gave him his first metal detector in 1993, a Fisher model, and he never looked back. The Wall Street Journal profiled him this week and the stories are wonderful. A British woman lost her engagement ring on a beach. Manguillier found it in 20 seconds, which she described as the most tense of her life. A French tourist lost his wedding ring swimming at a resort. Manguillier found it. The tourist lost it again the next day. Manguillier found it again. When he does not find the ring, he charges only transport costs.

In a week where empires debase their currencies, companies extract the secrets of craftsmen, supply chains choke, platforms that generate billions cannot get a bank account, and someone steals 12 metric tons of chocolate: it is nice to know there is a man in Mauritius whose entire job is putting things back where they belong.

“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” John Maynard Keynes

Have a fantastic weekend (and a long one at that). I welcome feedback, comments, questions, and please forward this if you see fit.

Many thanks,

Sam

Market Snapshot

Companies Mentioned in This Edition

Sources

The Economist (“Money Beyond Borders” review, March 2026). Financial Times (Patrick McGee, “Apple at 50: how Asia fuelled its rise to the top,” March 29, 2026). Wall Street Journal (Georgi Kantchev, “Iran War Chokes Off Helium Supply Critical for AI,” March 2026). Wall Street Journal (Natasha Khan, Kelly Cloonan, “How a Massive KitKat Heist Turned Into Crisis PR Gold,” March 2026). Wall Street Journal (Zoël Manguillier profile, March 25, 2026). CNBC (“It’s not just oil and gas. The Strait of Hormuz blockage is rattling another vital commodity,” March 25, 2026). Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Noah Gordon, “Fertilizer isn’t getting through the Strait of Hormuz,” March 2026). Project Syndicate (Govaerts and Burke, “The Iran War Could Trigger a Global Food Crisis,” March 2026). World Economic Forum (“Lessons for ports from the Strait of Hormuz closure,” March 2026). SolAbility (“The Iran War: Implications for the Global Economy,” March 2026). The Fertilizer Institute (Hormuz closure impact statement, March 2026). Wikipedia (2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis, OnlyFans, Bouvier Affair). Fox News, CNN, NBC, CBS, Axios, AP, Euronews (Trump currency signature). ESPN, Al Jazeera, Fortune, CNN Sports (FIFA Peace Prize). Reuters (OnlyFans financial data). OCC 2025 Annual Review (debanking findings). Bank of Canada (rate decision, March 18, 2026). FreightWatch International (cargo theft statistics). ABC News, Medium, First We Feast (food heist history).