It's Tough for the 'Kids of Fukuyama'

The 🐿️'s 'Start the Week' note! "Malthus Ag Basket" implementation plus our weekly review of BUSHY™ and live Acorn trade ideas. 2026, Week 10.

In case you missed it, ‘Farmer Squirrel’ (in collaboration with Nico) published a new piece - with no paywall - on current opportunities in corn, cotton and wheat markets triggered by the Hormuz Crisis. Check it out 👇.

The 🐿️ is a ‘kid of Fukuyama’. I left school in 1989. That summer, Francis Fukuyama’s original essay “The End of History?” was published in The National Interest. I was a teenager waiting tables in London to save for a pre-university tour of South America when the news of the fall of the Berlin Wall came through on the radio of the restaurant kitchen.

By the time Fukuyama’s essay had become a book - The End of History and the Last Man (1992) - I had completed my first internship in the European research department at Cazenove, a London stockbroking firm (now part of JP Morgan). Communism and fascism had been comprehensively defeated. There was no politico-economic belief system that could rival liberal democracy. We had reached history’s ‘telos’ (endpoint).

It’s been a pretty rough decade for us kids of Fukuyama. We spent 20 years patting ourselves on the back before the cracks - the GFC, opioid crisis, 2016 populism eruption etc. - became impossible to ignore. As for the core tenet that economic liberalization spawned political freedom? LOL!

The ‘triumph’ of Western liberal democracy has collided with a messy multipolar reality. Instead of our free-market utopia, we now have the return of state-directed industrial policy and the weaponization of global trade.

The geopolitical architecture we spent our careers taking for granted - anchored by a hyper-financialized Pax Americana - is being systematically dismantled. Frankly, the overt grift is pretty sickening too.

For a macro rodent conditioned by the post-Cold War peace dividend, this regime shift demands a rewiring of mental models. The world of perfectly optimized supply chains and structurally suppressed inflation (and volatility - this is even more important) is over.

Turns out that history didn’t end in 1989 after all. It just went on a long sabbatical, and is now back with a vengeance to remind us that hard assets and ‘just in case’ supply chains are pretty much all that matters.

The ongoing war in the Middle East has accelerated a major de-grossing of the BUSHY™ beta portfolio and the Acorn book that was already well underway. It started in early February. If the conflict ends up with $200 oil tipping the global economy into a recession, that risk cut was insufficiently aggressive.

It turns out that my bias towards relative economic winners in a multi-polar world actually needs someone to win.

That said, BUSHY™ only gave up 0.18% last week - OK during a pretty rough week for risk assets. The numbers look great versus benchmark and the S&P but you can’t eat relative performance. It’s time to pull the drains up!

Will do our weekly review of that portfolio and of the Acorn positions after completing the unfinished business from yesterday.

New “Malthus Ag Trade” Implementation

When thinking about structuring the “Revenge of Malthus” Ag basket, this weekend’s US attack on Kharg Island focuses the mind.