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The source of this latest wobble? The White House, naturally. Vice President Vance announced a plan – a trading bloc, aimed at pushing back against China’s dominance in rare earth minerals. The idea is to establish “reference prices” – which sounds terribly sophisticated, until you realize it’s just a fancy way of saying “price floor.” My aunt Mildred, who collects thimbles and understands these things, explained it to me over Thanksgiving. It’s all about leverage, she said, brandishing a miniature porcelain shepherdess. I mostly nodded and tried not to make eye contact.

The herd is stampeding, naturally. Investors, like frightened sparrows, are abandoning the nest. The question isn’t whether the stock will fall further – the wind is already howling – but whether there’s a sliver of opportunity hidden in the wreckage. A chance to pick up pieces at a price that reflects the true, diminished reality.

The whole thing hinges on getting into the U.S. market, naturally. Because Canada, apparently, isn’t enough. There was this little blip last December, a momentary surge of optimism, and everyone got excited. For, like, a day. Then reality set in. Which is that federal laws are…federal laws. And they don’t just change because someone wants them to. It’s a system, people!

And now, as if summoned by a mischievous sprite, arrives further disquiet. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), those arbiters of fiscal prudence, propose a meager increase – a paltry 0.09% – in payments to private insurers for the year 2027. One might almost suspect a jest, were the implications not so serious.

The trigger? Some privately held outfit called Anthropic unleashed a new tool for their Claude large language model. A PLUGIN, they call it. A plugin to handle data analysis, legal mumbo-jumbo, sales pitches… the usual corporate rot. The instant reaction? Investors started having flashbacks to the dot-com bust, convinced this thing is going to render entire software industries obsolete. Like some kind of digital Grim Reaper, swooping in to collect the souls of overpriced code. The contagion spread FAST, and Nvidia, naturally, got dragged down with the rest of the tech titans.

In the years 2022 and 2023, Bitcoin languished, a forgotten volume in the vast catalog of speculative assets. The tightening of monetary policy, a deliberate constriction of the circulatory system of capital, diverted attention towards more tangible, if equally illusory, refuges. But then came a reprieve: the sanctioning of ‘spot price ETFs’ – a curious attempt to anchor the intangible to the concrete – and the ritualistic ‘halving’ of mining rewards, a numerical sleight of hand. These events, coupled with the pronouncements of central bankers – pronouncements often as inscrutable as the pronouncements of oracles – briefly inflated the price. The accumulation of Bitcoin as a ‘Treasury’ asset by certain entities suggests a desire to create a self-contained economic universe, a miniature empire built on cryptographic foundations.