| Swan Dive — January 22, 2026 Addison Wiggin Markets got their little dopamine hit yesterday — the kind that makes grown men in Midtown act like lab rats pressing a lever for pellets.
After all the media speculation we had fun mocking in yesterday’s Dive, the president stuck to his tariff playbook and came away from Davos with “a framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland,” then abruptly backed off his Denmark tariff threats… and a rally on Wall Street commenced.
Uncertainty removed, risk assets bid, relief everywhere. Just as JPMorgan’s trading desk reportedly predicted: this administration threatens tariffs, markets wobble, then the White House signals progress, and the dip-buyers rush in like they’ve been trained to do.
According to the Times, the announcement followed a NATO meeting on Wednesday in which top military officers discussed a compromise that would allow Denmark to “give the United States sovereignty over small pockets of Greenlandic land” — pockets where U.S. military bases could be built, expanded, hardened, and legally protected.
Officials likened it to the United Kingdom’s bases in Cyprus and Gibraltar: sovereign land parcels that function as strategic outposts under the owning nation’s law. Guantanamo Bay in Cuba is similar, too. The U.S. military used its prison to some alarming degree during the forever war on terror.
So, after all, the Greenland deal isn’t a purchase in the traditional sense. It’s not a flag-planting conquest like so many satirists filling up my inbox have impugned.
It is, however, empire by easement — sovereignty through legal carve-outs, national borders rewritten like zoning permits. The island stays “Greenlandic” in theory, but the key territory becomes American in practice.
And the more you stare at it, the more it looks like the inevitable endgame of Trump’s foreign policy method: maximum leverage, minimum troops, permanent advantage.
Better, in our humble opinion, than years of unending blank checks to NATO or evergreen deals that send wads of taxpayer cash into defense contractor coffers. 🧊 Greenland Was Never the Fantasy — Only the Coverage Was One final note on Greenland, we hope.
The United States already has a military base in Greenland: Pituffik Space Base, formerly Thule Air Base. Roughly 150 U.S. service members are permanently stationed there as of 2025, after the U.S. reduced its footprint from the 6,000 personnel it maintained during the Cold War.
And the U.S. presence predates the Cold War.
During World War II, when Denmark was occupied by the Nazis and Greenland left exposed, the Americans moved in — building airfields, stations, defenses — and keeping watch for German submarines.
After the war, the arrangement was formalized through the 1951 Greenland Defense Agreement under NATO.  One of the oodles of maps we’ve seen on X to explain why Greenland is important to the West's defense against Russia, geographically, and China, because as the ice melts, they are dominating trade routes throughout the Arctic. (Source: X) Denmark’s flag still flies alongside Greenland's… to preserve the official fiction that the territory remains Danish.
The U.S. flies its own flag on the facilities it runs. The agreement was modified again in 2004, giving Washington effectively unrestricted access at Pituffik.
So when Trump brought up Greenland, he was not inventing a deranged new obsession, as so many writers want you to believe.
And markets — of course — don’t ask whether it’s honorable. As an investor, you don’t move until you know what the price is. So far, nothing’s on the table for Greenland, but the spectre of Trump as fascist dictator for a day has subsided enough for investors, retail and professional, to go back to obsessing over AI stocks. 📬 Reader Mail: Politics as Loyalty Test Before we go further, a quick note about the Grey Swan inbox.
We got another reader message this morning that fits a pattern we see almost every day now: someone furious that we haven’t chosen a political team and publicly worn the jersey.
Last week, we were accused of “exalting” the president and threatened with cancellation. Yesterday, we were threatened again. This time, the reader drew another line in the sand.
“I subscribed for the investment advice,” writes Sarah Louise H., “but will cancel next time I hear you mock President Trump.”
So which is it? Do we “exalt” or “mock” the man too much?
Some readers say they can’t tell which side we’re on.
Others, like Jon W., who writes: “In my view, with my depth of experience of studying by subscription to classical historical economic research publications, Grey Swan Fraternity is second to none.”
Maybe we’re just writing about the things we think are essential.
Truth is, we abhor politics. It’s mostly the art of taking your money and then trying to make you happy you gave it away to someone else’s cause.
That said, we try to write about debt, markets, inflation, and the power games that move them each day. The market doesn’t care who you voted for. Treasurys don’t care. The dollar doesn’t care. Gas prices don’t care. Your retirement account definitely doesn’t care.
Tribal politics is a luxury belief system. Portfolio management is a survival craft.
So we’re going to keep doing the thing that gets you paid: mapping the world as it is, not as you wish it to be. If you’d like to add your voice: send your comments here: addison@greyswanfraternity.com. 📉 The Smart Money Has Been Selling Now we get to the part that matters.
While headlines obsess over Greenland theatrics, professional investors last week were dumping U.S. equities at scale.  Institutional investors sold $9.2 billion in U.S. equities last week. That makes five straight weeks of selling — not “panic,” not “crash,” but consistent distribution. They dumped $8.1 billion in single stocks and $1.1 billion in ETFs, bringing the four-week average to $3.5 billion.
Meanwhile, hedge funds bought for a fifth consecutive week. Retail bought for a second consecutive week.
This is the kind of split you see at tops: pros de-risking while the public buys the narrative.
What do they know?
Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.
But we have seen the pros selling before the loud headlines before: the “rotation” some call it, or “dispersion” as Goldman Sachs intelligence forecast last week.
And then — the air pocket.
For you, the individual investor, it’s never the first wave of institutional selling that gets you. It’s the second. When the bounce fails, the exits shrink. Fast. ⚙️ AI’s Circular Financing Loop Has a Familiar Smell The most consequential market mechanism in the entire landscape: the AI money loop.
We saw circular financing structures in the tech bust. They always look “strategic” right up until they look “fraudulent.”  The details matter here, because they explain why the AI trade — which still feels invincible to most investors — could become the 2026 version of “subprime.”
OpenAI reportedly spends $3.30 to make $1.00. The reason is margin stacking: paying Nvidia’s massive GPU margins, paying Microsoft’s markup on Azure, then paying its own operating costs on top.
Google does not have this problem.
Google built its own TPUs. Google owns its own data centers. Google pays electricity and depreciation.
That creates a cost advantage — not incremental, but structural. Every query served compounds the advantage.
You can feel the pressure building in the ecosystem: traffic softness, competitive shift, public defections, ads creeping in, “Code Red” declarations, original authors leaving.
Supplier funds the customer. Customer funds supplier. Everybody marks it “investment.”
SoftBank sold billions of Nvidia stock to plow into OpenAI. Nvidia considers investing in OpenAI while OpenAI commits hundreds of billions for GPUs. Microsoft’s exposure depends on Azure commitments tied to OpenAI.
This isn’t capitalism. It’s a daisy chain.
And daisy chains break at the weakest link.
What tightens the noose is that the AI story now has a calendar date:
April 27, 2026: Musk v. OpenAI goes to jury trial.
Damages sought: $79–134 billion.
Cash reserves reportedly: $64 billion.
The judge has already said there is “plenty of evidence” of fraud.
If discovery forces disclosures, or if settlement pressure triggers governance restructuring, or if headline risk shakes confidence, the repricing could be violent — because hedge fund positioning in AI infrastructure is already extremely crowded.
You don’t need an AI “collapse.” You only need the market to stop paying infinity multiples for circular funding.
That’s when the magic dies. Continued Below...
The G7 Summit isn’t typically a headline-grabber.
But the upcoming summit — beginning on June 14 — has an air of great urgency, because a major announcement could be forthcoming.
The potential shocker?
Well, it concerns a Cold War era map of a “forbidden America" — a map whose extended U.S. borders could take effect before the leaves turn color.
If enacted into law, America would gain 836,000 square miles of land — three times the size of Texas — thereby giving Republicans a vice-grip on the Oval Office and Congress.
But the investment implications could be even bigger.
Click here to view the secret map, ASAP >>
🪙 Gold Is Rising Because Reserve Trust Is Falling While investors stare at stock charts, central banks stare at political risk.
Gold continues to climb because the monetary order is being revised, quietly, without ceremony.  The dollar’s share of global reserves is now roughly 40%, down from 60% in 2016. No other fiat currency filled the gap. Gold did.
That is the only fact you need to understand the long-term arc.
After the West demonstrated it could seize reserves, “safe” became a new word. Gold has no counterparty. It cannot be frozen with an executive order. It does not require permission to settle.  China’s Treasury holdings are near 18-year lows while its gold reserves sit at record highs.
Reserve status for the U.S. dollar doesn’t fail with headlines and press conferences; it fails with a slow migration of confidence. ❄️ Natural Gas Just Lit a Fuse Under Utility Inflation Now add cold weather to monetary drift.
Natural gas prices have surged +75% in three days as an Arctic blast spreads across the U.S. — reportedly the largest three-day gain in history.  (Source: Kobeissi Letter) This matters because utility inflation doesn’t behave like gasoline inflation. Gasoline is loud and volatile and politically obvious.
Utilities are quiet. They rise in the background, month after month, bill after bill — the slow bleed inflation that doesn’t show up in the press until end users throw a hissy fit.
Trump proposed limiting costs charged by utilities in the Mid-Atlantic last week due to rising demand from AI data centers being built in Northern Virginia.
Nixon, the nation’s last imperial president, proved over 50 years that price caps during times of inflation achieve the exact opposite: prices continue to rise. 🏛️ The Middle Class Is Shrinking One last point — and it may be the most politically explosive of all.
“For the first time in America’s history,” writes Grey Swan contributor John Robb, “the top 10% of income earners account for ~half of all consumer spending.”
That is not a fun fact. When half the consumer economy is concentrated among 25–30 million people, the incentives of the entire system change. The middle class becomes less a driver and more a backdrop. Politics becomes a tug-of-war between those with assets and those without.
And it changes what “growth” means. It means economic data can appear strong even while the majority feels squeezed. It means the market can boom even while the country fractures in protest.
It means “affordability” becomes the primary political weapon, because the majority is living in an environment of rising bills and declining trust.
In Empire of Debt, we write about the empire as a system that prioritizes strategic advantage over domestic coherence.
This is what an empire looks like in its mature stage: external leverage (Greenland), internal squeeze (inflation), and a political culture that becomes allergic to nuance (our reader inbox).
~ Addison
P.S. We’ve got another Grey Swan Live! two-fer for you this week:
First up, it’s a tale of two “M’s” … Mamdani vs. Milei. If you listen to Milei’s address to the WEF in 2024 and Mamdani’s inaugural address from this year, you’ll be blown away.
They both are in sharp contrast to Trump's foreign policy and approach to state capitalism.
This week, we called up Joel Bowman — our “man on the scene” in Buenos Aires since before President Milei got elected.
We’ll get his take on Milei and Mamdani and a primer on Investing At the End of the World.  Then on Friday — because it’s not just about what we trade, but how we trade — we’re hosting a special presentation on how to stop overpaying the IRS in 2026.
If you have requests for new guests you’d like to see join us for Grey Swan Live!, or have any questions for our guests, send them here.
How did we get here? Find out in these riveting reads: Demise of the Dollar, Financial Reckoning Day, and Empire of Debt — all three books are now available in their third post-pandemic editions. You might enjoy one or all three. 
(Or… simply pre-order Empire of Debt: We Came, We Saw, We Borrowed, now available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble or if you prefer one of these sites: Bookshop.org, Books-A-Million or Target.)
Please send your comments, reactions, opprobrium, vitriol and praise to: feedback@greyswanfraternity.com |
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