Bitcoin has survived every narrative failure by pivoting to the next one - digital gold, inflation hedge, safe haven, risky asset. But what happens when mid-January 2026 delivers perfect conditions for a rally and nothing happens? Brent Donnelly examines the moment crypto's reflexive loop between price and story finally may have broken, and asks the question no one wants to answer: what does bitcoin actually do anymore?

Markets optimize for what they can measure, but how can you quantify the thing markets have always required to operate: trust? Adam Butler examines the strip-mining of trust through stories from trading pits, hospitals, newsrooms, and election offices. Institutional credibility, increasingly, converts to quarterly returns, while the industries selling replacements for trust profit from the void they create.

The U.S. trade deficit isn't something China imposes on America. It is something American corporations engineered to maximize shareholder returns. Adam Butler traces how four decades of policy choices and ideological commitment built a machine that extracts value from workers on two continents and channels it to Wall Street. While tariffs seem like the obvious response, they target the wrong problem.

Reserve currencies don't fall in revolutions. History shows that they thin at the margins until they cease to matter anymore. Grant Williams traces how the dollar's dominance, seemingly unshakeable, rests on a recycling mechanism that's quietly breaking down. Through the lens of sterling's invisible collapse after the Suez Crisis, he reveals the invisible mechanism through which reserve systems lose their centrality, not through visible crisis but through the redirection of capital that happens long before anyone notices.