Greetings folks,

Kim Kardashian and Lewis Hamilton confirmed their relationship this week. Between her $4 billion SKIMS valuation and his $300 million Ferrari contract, this might be the first couple whose combined portfolio outperforms most private credit funds this year. Ferrari shares were up 2% on the news, which tells you everything you need to know about what the market actually values. Speaking of things that cost more than expected.

Let’s get to this edition.

The first thing the CIA did was lie. On April 3, an F-15E Strike Eagle with the call sign “Dude 44” was shot down over southwestern Iran. The pilot was rescued within hours. The weapons systems officer, an Air Force colonel whose name has not been released, was not. He had ejected, climbed 7,000 feet up a ridgeline in the Zagros Mountains, wounded, armed with a handgun, and hidden himself in a crevice. The IRGC launched a massive manhunt with helicopters and drones. Iranian state television urged civilians to find the “enemy pilot” and offered a $60,000 bounty. Local Bakhtiari nomadic tribesmen, who are traditionally armed with rifles and know every ridge of the Zagros, joined the search. The colonel radioed “God is good.” Washington initially suspected it was a trap.

So the CIA ran a deception campaign. According to multiple US officials, CIA operatives planted fabricated transmissions inside Iran claiming the airman had already been found and was being moved by ground to various locations across the country. The intent was to steer IRGC forces away from the actual search area. It worked. While Iranian troops chased ghosts, the CIA used what officials described only as “special technology” to locate the colonel and verify his identity. Israeli intelligence assisted in confirming his position and ruling out a trap. Israel halted its own strikes in the area to avoid compromising the mission. CIA Director John Ratcliffe sent the coordinates to the Pentagon. Trump ordered the rescue.

What followed was the most complex combat search and rescue in modern US history. The military established a forward operating base on an abandoned agricultural airstrip (200 feet by 3,900 feet) 14 miles north of Shahreza City in southern Isfahan. Hundreds of commandos were airlifted in overnight. SEAL Team 6 led the ground element, with Delta Force and Rangers in reserve. MQ-9 Reaper drones scanned the area and fired on anyone approaching within three kilometres. Four B-1 bombers dropped nearly 100 satellite-guided 2,000-pound bombs on Iranian convoys moving toward his position. The commandos reached him at night. There was no resistance. Then the plan fell apart in the most expensive way possible. The two MC-130J transport aircraft waiting on the makeshift airstrip got stuck in the sand. Attempts to dig them out failed. Replacement aircraft had to be called in. Once everyone was clear, the US bombed its own planes: two MC-130Js and four MH-6 helicopters, destroyed on the ground to prevent them falling into Iranian hands.

The cost of retrieving one colonel from a mountain crevice is worth calculating.

Estimates vary. Clash Report put the aircraft losses alone at $386 million. Defence Security Asia, factoring in the full operational footprint, suggested the total may exceed $2 billion. Iran spent $60,000 on a bounty. The colonel is expected to recover, the IRGC’s ego isn’t. Rumor (I am now starting) has it, Netflix has already bought the rights to make a movie out of this.

What People Are Saying

The rescue dominated social media for 48 hours. On Reddit’s r/military and r/aviation, the consensus was a mix of awe at the operational scale and disbelief at the cost. One commenter calculated the price per pound of rescued colonel. On X, the split was predictable: supporters framed it as proof that America does not leave anyone behind, while critics pointed to the $460M hardware bill and asked whether the same government would spend that on healthcare. CIA Director Ratcliffe called Iran “embarrassed and humiliated.” Iran’s Parliament Speaker Qalibaf responded: “If the United States gets three more victories like this, it will be utterly ruined.” Polymarket briefly let users bet on whether the colonel would be rescued, then pulled the market after Rep. Seth Moulton, a Marine combat veteran, called it a “dystopian death market.” There were 219 active war bets on Polymarket on Friday. By Monday, there were 223.

When a LendingTree survey of 2,000 Americans finds that 78% of them view fast food as a luxury item, something structural has broken. It is not a branding problem or a menu problem. It is a math problem. Fast food prices have risen 39% to 100% since 2014, outpacing the 31% general inflation rate over the same period. A Big Mac in Seattle costs $6.99. The same Big Mac in Boise costs $5.19. 75% of Americans say fast food is no longer cheaper than eating at home. 46% say it costs about the same as a sit-down restaurant. 22% say it costs more. The industry that was built on being the cheap option is no longer the cheap option.

McDonald’s felt this first. US same-store sales dropped 3.6% in Q1 2025, the worst quarter since COVID. CEO Chris Kempczinski acknowledged a “bifurcated (I really don’t like that word) consumer base” in which lower-income traffic has fallen nearly double digits for almost two years while higher-income traffic has risen by a similar amount. The same restaurant, the same menu, two completely different economies walking through the same door. McDonald’s prices have risen approximately 40% since 2019. Beef prices are up 51% since February 2020. The company launched a $5 Meal Deal, extended it through summer 2026, and is now rolling out a $3 value menu. Kempczinski’s line to investors: “McDonald’s is not going to get beat on value and affordability.” The franchisees had a different response. The National Owners Association drafted a 15-item “Franchisees Bill of Rights,” including the explicit right to set prices without intimidation from corporate. McDonald’s can now revoke franchise licenses for pricing violations. The people who own the restaurants and the people who own the brand are openly fighting about who gets to decide what a Big Mac costs.

Burger King went the other direction. On February 26, it announced the first major changes to the Whopper in nearly a decade: a premium bun, creamier mayo, and a clamshell box replacing the paper wrap. The president of BK US and Canada, Tom Curtis, gave out his personal phone number and took 12,000 customer calls over two weeks. The head chef tested building the Whopper upside down before deciding that was a distraction. The upgrade costs each franchisee an extra $4,000 a year. Corporate told them not to raise prices. Patrick Doyle, the former Domino’s CEO now at Restaurant Brands International, listed McDonald’s strengths on an investor call and then added: “They do not sell the Whopper.” He suggested the Whopper “may actually be a better brand than Burger King.” McDonald’s responded three days later by launching the Big Arch, a 1,020-calorie burger priced at $8.19. The burger arms race is now a protein arms race.

The competition is not really between McDonald’s and Burger King anymore. It is between fast food and the grocery store. When grocery prices are lower than restaurant prices, lower-income households go to the grocery store. McDonald’s is pivoting to chicken because the global chicken market is larger than beef and because Chick-fil-A has been eating its lunch. The Snack Wrap re-launch was the most popular new chicken product in recent US history. When the same company reports double-digit traffic growth from high-income customers and double-digit traffic declines from low-income customers, that is not a fast food story.

The most interesting thing McDonald’s is doing, though, is not happening in America. It is happening in Hanchuan, a largely rural city in central China where a million people live between fields and small factories, and where the local economy runs on sewing thread and fisheries. McDonald’s opened its first restaurant there in January 2026. The Economist visited on a snowy afternoon and found it packed. Over the next three years, McDonald’s plans to add 3,000 outlets to the 7,000 it already has in China, many in towns like Hanchuan. KFC is adding 4,000 to its 12,600. Roughly two-thirds of China’s population lives outside its 50 biggest cities, which are already saturated: 70% of KFCs are within a ten-minute bike ride of another KFC. The new frontier is the countryside. But here is the twist. McDonald’s in China is mostly owned by Citic Capital, a state-backed investor. Starbucks sold 60% of its China business to Boyu Capital, a firm co-founded by the grandson of former paramount leader Jiang Zemin. Burger King did a similar deal. Western brands are handing operational control to Chinese investors because they lack the capital and local knowledge to expand into semi-rural areas themselves.

McDonald’s cannot afford to feed low-income Americans at prices they will accept. Its solution is to find a billion people in rural China who think $5 is a treat, not a grievance. The company that built its empire on being the cheap option in the richest country on earth is now betting its growth on being the expensive option in the Chinese countryside. By exporting obesity, drug such as Ozempic will be profitable for a long time to come.

What People Are Saying

The Whopper redesign went viral on TikTok, where BK president Tom Curtis’s personal phone number stunt generated millions of views. One Redditor on r/fastfood summarised the upgrade as “more TLC than the sloppy ass mess they’ve been serving for the past couple decades.” McDonald’s CEO Kempczinski went viral for the wrong reasons after posting a video of himself taking a conspicuously small bite of the Big Arch, which rival chains mocked openly. On Seeking Alpha and Stocktwits, MCD bulls point to the $5 Meal Deal driving positive comps in the second half of 2025, but bears note that Placer.ai foot traffic data still shows a 4% decline in same-store visits. Evercore ISI analyst David Palmer noted BK is gaining ground. The franchisee rebellion has gotten less attention in mainstream media but is generating significant discussion on LinkedIn, where franchise operators describe McDonald’s new pricing standards as the most aggressive corporate overreach in the chain’s history.

China has 65 million empty apartments and a population that is dying faster than it is being born. Deaths hit 11.3 million last year against 7.9 million births, the third consecutive year of population decline. The property market has collapsed, leaving entire high-rise developments vacant. Cemeteries, meanwhile, have not collapsed at all. Plots at Shanghai’s Songhe Cemetery cost approximately 760,000 RMB per square metre, roughly six times the price of downtown Shanghai housing at 130,000 RMB per square metre. The math was inevitable. Families have started burying their dead in empty apartments.

The practice has become widespread enough that Beijing passed a new law, effective March 30, attempting to stop it. The law bans the storage of cremated remains in residential buildings and threatens fines for property managers who allow it. Enforcement will be difficult. Many of these buildings are ghost towns with no active management. Some families have turned entire apartments into memorial shrines. The younger generation, priced out of both the housing and cemetery markets, has adopted a different approach: they are renting apartments in buildings known to contain remains, at steep discounts. Several tenants told the FT they preferred the arrangement. The dead are quiet neighbours.

The deeper problem is demographic. Yi Fuxian, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that the government’s attempt to ban bone ash apartments may accelerate the very crisis that created them. Traditional burial rites are one of the few remaining cultural incentives for having children in China. Families want descendants to tend graves and honour ancestors. If the state makes burial unaffordable and then criminalises the alternatives, it removes one more reason to have a family at all. The policy designed to restore order to the housing market may deepen the population decline that emptied the buildings in the first place. China’s new “bone ash apartments” are redefining the real estate market, because even after death, people still creating a housing bubble. In a pro-forma, what would you put the occupancy at?

What People Are Saying

A related hashtag on Weibo drew more than 7 million views. The top comment: “Who would resort to this if cemetery plots were affordable?” Another: “Who’s going to go in and check? Or are they planning to put a GPS tracker on every single urn?” A third: “Even at 90% off, cemetery plots are still too expensive.” On Reddit’s r/worldnews, the story sat at the intersection of dark humour and genuine alarm. Several commenters noted that property prices have fallen 40% since 2021, making apartments cheaper than cemetery leases (which last only 20 years and must be renewed). Shanghai recorded a record 10,000 sea burials in 2025, suggesting the government’s “eco-burial” alternative is gaining some traction. An academic analysis of 2,537 comments on Red Note described bone ash apartments as “a private solution to a public infrastructure failure.”

When gas prices rise from $3 a gallon to $4, the average American household spends over $1,000 more per year on fuel. That is roughly an eighth of discretionary spending, which means money is diverted from eating out, clothing, and entertainment. Oil has been gyrating around $100 a barrel since the war began on February 28, up from $60 at the start of the year. The winners are obvious: oil and gas stocks are up an average of 8% since the bombing began. Airlines are suffering. American Airlines is down 20%, United is down 13%. Delta is up 3%, because it owns a refinery in Pennsylvania that supplies three-quarters of its domestic fuel. One airline bought a refinery. Two airlines did not. That is the entire story of their stock performance in a single sentence.

The less obvious winners are more interesting. LyondellBasell and Dow Chemicals, two of America’s biggest producers, are both up around 30%. You would expect chemical companies to suffer from higher oil prices. They benefit instead from access to cheap North American natural gas, which is now far cheaper than gas elsewhere in the world. CF Industries, a fertiliser manufacturer that uses natural gas as an input for ammonia, has surged for the same reason. On the losing side, packaged food producers including Campbell’s and General Mills have tumbled more than 20%. Investors know these companies jacked up prices during the post-Ukraine inflation wave in 2022 and will not get away with it again. Shoppers have already switched to private-label alternatives.

The defence contractors are having the quarter of a lifetime. Lockheed Martin hit an all-time high of $676.70, sitting on a $194 billion backlog. RTX carries a $268 billion backlog, with Tomahawk and AMRAAM missiles as the “workhorses” of the Iranian campaign. The proposed 2027 defence budget is $1.5 trillion, up from $1 trillion in 2025, which already exceeded the next nine countries combined. Then there is Shell. Its gas production fell about 5% from the war. But its commodity trading desks reported “significantly higher” profits. The renewable energy trading division alone was expected to post $200 million to $700 million for the quarter, up from $100 million. Shell lost production and made more money. Commodity trading desks love one thing above everything else: volatility.

One detail from the margins. The Financial Times reported that Pete Hegseth’s broker attempted to buy a BlackRock defence ETF (which holds RTX, Lockheed, and Northrop) before the war started. The investment did not go through because the fund was not yet available on Morgan Stanley’s platform. The Pentagon called the report “entirely false and fabricated.” BYD, China’s electric vehicle champion, is up 15% since the conflict began. CATL, the battery maker, is up even more. The repeated oil shocks of the 1970s dealt a heavy blow to Detroit, as consumers turned away from gas-guzzlers and purchased fuel-efficient Japanese cars instead. On a positive note Delta is also offering Brent Crude for their frequent fliers.

What People Are Saying

On r/investing and r/stocks, the Delta refinery angle generated the most discussion, with users calling it “the best vertical integration play in the market right now.” Defence stocks are polarising: Stocktwits sentiment on LMT and RTX is overwhelmingly bullish, while progressive finance accounts on X and Bluesky frame the rally as war profiteering. The Hegseth broker story was widely shared on Hacker News and LinkedIn, with commenters drawing comparisons to Congressional insider trading debates from 2022. The Shell trading paradox (losing production, making more money) was flagged by multiple Seeking Alpha contributors as evidence that oil majors are now primarily trading houses that happen to own wells. The BYD surge is being watched closely on r/electricvehicles, where sentiment is shifting from scepticism to grudging respect.

Between July 2025 and January 2026, the Banque de France sold 129 tonnes of gold that had been stored at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. It then bought back an identical volume of higher-specification bars on the European market. The total profit on the upgrade: €13 billion, approximately $15 billion. Bank governor Francois Villeroy de Galo said the decision was based on accessing “higher quality” gold in Europe and that it was easier to buy new bars than melt down old ones. The old bars did not meet current international specifications for weight, purity, and certification. All 2,437 tonnes of French gold are now stored in Paris. France has zero ounces remaining in the United States. The country that helped design the Bretton Woods dollar system has exited the vault.

France is not alone. Germany repatriated 674 tonnes from the New York Fed between 2013 and 2017. The Netherlands and Austria moved gold home around the same period. The trigger was Russia. When Western governments froze $300 billion of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves after the invasion of Ukraine, every central bank in the world took the same lesson: gold stored in someone else’s vault is only yours until it is not. The World Gold Council’s March 2026 survey found that 68% of central banks plan to increase gold holdings this year, up from 62% in 2025, with 29% citing geopolitical concerns as the primary motivation. Central bank purchases hit 1,237 tonnes in 2025, the third-highest total on record.

The country-level numbers are striking. China officially holds 2,280 tonnes but added 225 tonnes in 2025 and 25 tonnes in February 2026 alone, with 15 consecutive months of buying. Analysts believe Beijing is purchasing off the books. PBOC Governor Yi Gang said in January that “gold enhances reserve stability in an uncertain global environment.” Turkey added 95 tonnes in 2025 and 45 tonnes in January 2026 alone, hedging the collapse of the lira. Poland went from 103 tonnes in 2018 to 765 tonnes in 2024, a sevenfold increase in six years. BRICS+ nations now hold 17.4% of global gold reserves, up from 11.2% in 2019. Russia, which triggered the entire trend by getting its reserves frozen, is now a net seller, down to a four-year low.

Gold hit $5,600 an ounce in late February and currently trades around $4,750. The structural price floor is estimated at $4,500 to $4,600, the level where sovereign buyers become aggressive. The only country whose gold reserves have not moved in decades is the United States, which still holds 8,133 tonnes. Say you don’t trust the US, without saying you don’t trust the US?

What People Are Saying

The France story broke on financial social media over the weekend and drew sharp commentary. On r/economics and r/gold, the prevailing take was that the “quality upgrade” explanation is a polite fiction: France wanted its gold out of a jurisdiction that froze $300 billion of Russian assets. Boing Boing called it “a move that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.” India TV’s financial analysts suggested it could trigger a “domino effect.” Web And IT News framed it as a “tectonic shift in transatlantic trust.” The historical parallel to de Gaulle’s 1965 gold repatriation, which helped precipitate the collapse of Bretton Woods, has been widely cited. A German economist and former head of research at the Bundesbank has publicly called for Germany to move the remainder of its US-stored gold home as well. Gold bugs on Stocktwits are predictably euphoric. The more measured take, from Priority Gold: “What is striking is not that France did it. It is that it took until 2026 for the final piece to come home.”

Virgin Galactic reopened ticket sales this week for its commercial spaceflights. The price is $750,000 per seat, up from $450,000 (inflation at it again) when Branson flew in 2021. The flight lasts 90 minutes. Only 50 tickets are available at this price, and the company has already said it will raise it again after those sell out. The company made $2 million in revenue last year. Its net loss was $279 million. It has 650 future astronauts on the waitlist at various price points. Branson first announced the venture in 2004 with a promised ticket price of $100,000. Twenty-two years later the price has gone up 650% and the flights have not started yet. In a week where the US spent roughly half a billion dollars to retrieve Dude 44 from a mountain in Iran, and 78% of Americans consider a Whopper to be a luxury item, $750,000 to leave the planet for 90 minutes feels almost reasonable.

“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” Vladimir Lenin

Have a fantastic weekend. I welcome feedback, comments, questions, and please forward this if you see fit.

Many thanks,

Sam

Market Snapshot

Companies Mentioned in This Edition

Sources

Article 1: WSJ, Fortune/AP, Washington Post, Time, PBS NewsHour, Fox News, Israel Hayom, Jerusalem Post, Stars and Stripes, Al Jazeera, Axios, CSIS, Wikipedia. Article 2: The Economist (April 5, 2026), TheStreet, CNN Business, Axios, Fortune, LendingTree, FinanceBuzz, Tasting Table, UBS. Article 3: Financial Times. Article 4: The Economist (March 26, 2026), Euronews, Al Jazeera, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Vested Finance. Article 5: Newsweek, IBTimes, South China Morning Post, World Gold Council, Advantage Gold, OnlineGold.org, FX Leaders. Closer: Fox Business, The Register, Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance.