The Strait Is Closed, Oil Is At $150, And Your Doritos Already Cost $7 — Welcome To Stagflation Season
A failed Iran deal, a Navy blockade, and a consumer already tapped out — the macro setup right now is genuinely alarming
Ticker Ratings
| Ticker | Rating | Entry Price | Current | $ Gain | % Gain |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| USO United States Oil Fund, LP | buy | $133.95 | — | — | — |
| PEP PEPSICO INC | sell | $156.99 | — | — | — |
| SHEL Shell plc | hold | $93.45 | — | — | — |
| JPM JPMORGAN CHASE & CO | buy | $307.94 | — | — | — |
| WFC WELLS FARGO & COMPANY/MN | buy | $84.56 | — | — | — |
| GLD SPDR GOLD TRUST | buy | $433.05 | — | — | — |
| BTC Grayscale Bitcoin Mini Trust ETF | hold | $70792.00 | — | — | — |
| GOOGL Alphabet Inc. | hold | $314.20 | — | — | — |
| META Meta Platforms, Inc. | hold | $621.69 | — | — | — |
| GS GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP INC | buy | $908.07 | — | — | — |
| SPY SPDR S&P 500 ETF TRUST | sell | $675.55 | — | — | — |
| QQQ INVESCO QQQ TRUST, SERIES 1 | sell | $607.11 | — | — | — |
Let's do a quick vibe check on the macro environment: US-Iran peace talks collapsed after 21 hours in Islamabad, Trump announced a Navy blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, and oil is already trading at $127/barrel with physical crude reportedly $30-$40 above futures prices — an unprecedented divergence that Bloomberg analysts are calling the biggest energy shortfall in history. Roughly 10-13 million barrels per day of upstream production is shut in. Cool, cool, totally fine.
Meanwhile, the consumer was already waving a white flag. $PEP missed revenue targets by ~$1 billion for the second consecutive quarter, with Doritos up 50% since the pandemic and Walmart quietly shrinking shelf space for them. That's textbook demand destruction — and it's spreading. Private credit, a $1.8 trillion industry with 80% concentration in PE-backed software firms, just saw $13 billion in retail redemption requests. The exits are getting crowded.
The one genuinely wild card? USDT issuer Tether — a 300-person company printing $10B in annual profit and sitting on $135B in US Treasuries — is now more systemically important to America's debt market than most sovereign nations. If stagflation breaks the dollar, the 17th-largest holder of US debt is a stablecoin company. We are so back.