These are two New York Times headlines from a few hours apart on Monday:

“Oil Prices Fall After Trump Says That Iran War is ‘Very Complete’”

“Trump Walks Back Idea That War Is Near End: U.S Gains ‘Not Enough’”

Now, Trump did not walk anything back, because that would require him to take a coherent position about anything ever, which he doesn’t and probably can’t. Trump just says whatever he feels will gain him the most personal advantage in any given moment. This fact about him has been obvious to anyone since *at least* he announced his candidacy for president more than ten years ago.

But markets seem to have latched on to Trump’s first statement, that the war is nearly over, as if it were some sort of factual statement about reality and Trump’s intentions.

Oil prices have fallen, stock prices have risen…while Iran has started mining the Strait of Hormuz.

A fifth of global oil exports travel through the strait.

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/10/politics/iran-begins-laying-mines-in-strait-of-hormuz

Here’s a recent statement by Savita Subramanian from Bank of America:

"We thought the administration was going to be focused on affordability and quelling inflation, and that seems to be the opposite of what's actually happening."

Why would you think that? Why would you ever think that, much less in 2026, with uears and years of evidence that Trump is incapable of telling the truth or understanding things?

Because they hear what they want to hear.

Here’s another great line, this one from JP Morgan Chase:

“In the whole written history of the strait, it has never been closed, ever. To me, it was not just the worst-case scenario. It was an unthinkable scenario.”

Because something would be very bad, it not only would not happen, it could not happen, so it’s not even worth thinking about.

https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/persian-gulf-oil-squeeze-d9a39190

These people are Capital-C Capitalists, people whose entire existence is about manipulating money to make more money. If *anyone* is supposed to pay attention to and understand these dynamics, it is these people, the JP Morgan Chases of the world.

And they have so colossally fucked up.

Proponents of capitalism have often assured me that capitalists earn their rents and ownership and power and status by performing the socially critical labor of allocating capital to productive purposes.

This will come as no surprise to you, but this claim is bullshit. Capitalist ownership is the product of power relations, not the performance of any useful labor. If we didn’t already know this, we would just have to look at capitalists bidding down the price of oil futures *while Iran is mining the Strait of Hormuz* because a demented conman told them what they wanted to hear.

Capitalists listening to Trump gaslight them about the war and eating it up is the human equivalent to LLM psychosis. These are people who want to be led into a delusion, who eagerly assist their manipulator into deceiving them.

In contrast, there is one industry in which the players seem to have figured out that they need to factor reality into their models of the future and act accordingly: insurance.

This is particularly funny because insurance is, in a sense, just a form of gambling. But these are apparently the serious gamblers, while major banks and the stock market are run by degenerate fools eager to be led to their own ruin.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-do-we-deal-with-the-catastrophe-of-uninsurability

This is a long way of saying: the last few days should have hopefully laid bare to the world how utterly incompetent and delusional capitalists are. They do not play some critical role in the economy. They do not possess some secret knowledge or special wisdom, or, really, seem to understand how the world works. We do not rely on them to allocate capital wisely and efficiently.

They are, at best, naive marks of the world’s most obvious conman, so desperate for yet another dollar that they’ll believe anything that flatters their greed.

@HeavenlyPossum Capitalists 250 years ago had the idea to dig big old canals all over their homeland. Trade was fostered at the national level.

Capitalists 150 years ago had the stones to big humungous canals across continents. Trade was fostered at the international level.

Capitalists today can't imagine that a narrow waterway with hostile countries on each side might close.

I'm not saying today's capitalists are useless, or bad at their professions. But JFC they certainly don't think outside the box like they once did.