International Open Data Day | National Be Heard Day | Genealogy Day | Alexander Graham Bell Day
By Lars Toomre, Managing Partner, BRC FinTech Corporation
"Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman." — Louis D. Brandeis, Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It (1914). BRCFinTech.com/quotes/brandeis-sunlight
Morning Snapshot: March 7, 2026 (09:00 ET — Saturday, Markets Closed)
AssetFriday CloseWeek ChangeNote
Gold (Spot)$5,131−5.3% from Monday's $5,417Structural bid intact; safe-haven buying on NFP shock
Silver (Spot)$84.13−10.7% from Monday's $94.26Paper liquidation; physical premiums widening
Brent Crude$92.69+28% on the weekBiggest weekly gain since April 2020; Hormuz at standstill
WTI Crude$90.90+35.6% on the weekLargest weekly gain in futures history (since 1983)
S&P 5006,740.02−2.0% on the weekNFP shock (−92K jobs); worst week in five months
VIX29.49+24% on the weekFear is back
10Y UST Yield4.12%+14 bps on the weekRose to 4.17% intraday; fell on NFP shock
MOVE Index121.5Five-year breakout sustainedBond market is the dog; equities are the tail
Feb NFP−92,000vs. consensus +50,000Worst jobs report since pandemic; unemployment 4.4%
Lars Temperature101.0°FCOVID confirmedOut of action minimum one week
Word of the Day: Epistemic (adjective, from the Greek episteme, knowledge). Relating to knowledge or the conditions of acquiring it. Today is International Open Data Day, dedicated to the proposition that publicly funded data should be publicly accessible. The most consequential financial data in the world — which 17 banks hold 215 million ounces of net short silver on COMEX — remains epistemically closed. The FDTA was enacted to open it. Four years later, the lock remains.
Finnish Word of the Day: Perintö (noun). Inheritance; legacy. On Genealogy Day, the word reminds us that knowledge, like wealth, is inherited — and that the provenance of what we inherit determines its reliability. The WILT Knowledge Garden is a genealogy of financial concepts. The FinTology Foundation, announced today, will build the next generation of that genealogy.
I. COVID, Open Data, and the View from the Sofa
The flu was not the flu. It is COVID. Confirmed yesterday by PCR test after five days of fever, a drive from Sterling, Virginia to Palm Beach County, and approximately 25,000 words of analytical writing produced at temperatures between 101.0°F and 102.2°F. The physician's instruction: rest for a minimum of one week. No travel. Limited screen time. Hydrate.
I shall comply with the hydration. The rest is negotiable. The screen time is non-negotiable — the markets do not pause for a positive PCR result, and the bridge at Big Bayou Canot does not un-displace itself because the engineer has a fever.
Today is International Open Data Day — the single most on-thesis celebration day in the entire calendar. It is the day dedicated to the proposition that data generated by public institutions, funded by public money, and relevant to the public interest should be openly accessible, machine-readable, and free of proprietary encumbrance. It is, in other words, the day that the Financial Data Transparency Act ("FDTA") was designed to celebrate every day of the year.
And yet. The CFTC's Bank Participation Report ("BPR") — aggregate only, no names, no LEIs. The LBMA — no position data of any kind. The CME — "technical issues" halting trading 48 hours before delivery deadlines. The Object Management Group ("OMG") — a 501(c)(6) trade association claiming Voluntary Consensus Standards Body ("VCSB") status while its members control the standards. The Enterprise Data Management Association ("EDMA") — perpetuating the Financial Industry Business Ontology ("FIBO") under the OMG umbrella while violating the good name and legacy of the late Richard Soley, the former OMG CEO who understood that standards must serve the public, not the dues-paying membership.
Richard Soley is sadly now deceased. He was a man of integrity who believed in open standards. What is being done in his name — the capture of FIBO by an industry trade association, the use of VCSB designation to advance proprietary interests, the systematic exclusion of genuinely open alternatives like the SBRM — would have appalled him. On International Open Data Day, I call upon the agencies implementing the FDTA to honour Soley's legacy by rejecting any VCSB that fails the OMB Circular A-119 "balance of interest" test. The EDMA/FIBO/OMG nexus fails that test on its face. This is industry capture, and it is not in any sense a good thing.
Who does one appeal to when a trade association controls a VCSB and issues its own standards? The answer, as Analytical Note 2026-007 documented: Congressional oversight (certification requirement), open alternative development (the SBRM, MIT-licensed), and litigation under the Administrative Procedure Act. The FDTA's statutory text incorporates OMB A-119 by reference. A conflicted VCSB is a violation of the statute. Someone with standing needs to bring the case.
The specifics of the EDMA/FIBO capture deserve enumeration. FIBO — the Financial Industry Business Ontology — was originally developed with genuine academic and regulatory input. It was intended to be a shared, open vocabulary for financial concepts, enabling machine-readable regulatory reporting across jurisdictions. A worthy goal, entirely consistent with the FDTA's purpose. But the governance has been subverted. EDMA — the Enterprise Data Management Association — is a trade association whose members include the data management vendors, consultants, and service providers who profit from FIBO's adoption. The OMG, as the organisational umbrella, collects membership dues from these same entities. The result is a standards process in which the entities selling FIBO implementation services control the specification of what FIBO requires — a textbook conflict of interest that OMB A-119's "balance of interest" criterion was designed to prevent.
Richard Soley built the OMG into a respected standards body over decades of careful stewardship. He understood that credibility required independence from commercial interests. What has happened since his passing — the capture of FIBO, the conflation of standards development with trade association revenue, the systematic marginalisation of non-commercial participants — is a betrayal of his legacy. I did not always agree with Richard, but I respected his integrity. That integrity is being monetised by his successors, and it offends me.
The alternative exists. The SBRM — built on W3C-standard RDF/OWL/SHACL, published under MIT licence, developed in the open without membership dues or vendor gatekeeping — demonstrates that genuinely open financial ontology standards are technically feasible and economically sustainable. The only reason FIBO persists as the presumptive standard is institutional inertia and the lobbying power of EDMA's membership. On International Open Data Day, that inertia should be challenged.
II. Announcing the FinTology Foundation
It is also Genealogy Day — and on Genealogy Day, it is appropriate to announce a new branch of the family tree.
BRC FinTech Corporation is in the process of establishing the FinTology Foundation, a Massachusetts public educational charity organised under Chapter 180 of the Massachusetts General Laws and Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. The Foundation will operate four integrated programme areas:
Pillar I — Youth and Early-Career Financial Education. Educational programmes for individuals aged 14 to 25, building practical financial competency grounded in structured, machine-readable financial knowledge — not glossary memorisation but ontological understanding. The ability to read a Form 990, a 10-K, a bank regulatory filing. The ability to ask: where is the data, who controls it, and why is it not open?
Pillar II — Life-Transition Financial Competency. Programmes for adults who have assumed sudden financial responsibility due to life transitions — the loss of a spouse, divorce, disability, or the receipt of a significant financial event like an insurance settlement or inheritance. The largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history — an estimated $84 trillion — is creating an unprecedented population of individuals who must manage complex financial assets without adequate preparation. The FinTology Foundation will reduce the social stigma associated with financial inexperience among adults and create supportive peer learning environments. Too many Baby Boomers are suddenly alone, suddenly responsible, and suddenly ashamed to admit they do not know what a basis point is.
Pillar III — Ontology Development Grants. Grants to accredited educational institutions for an instructor and a team of students to collaboratively develop a formally defined, machine-readable ontology for a specific financial domain — such as the concepts on an IRS Form 990 — in a way that a computer can process and interpret the document with fidelity comparable to a human reader of average educational attainment. Each ontology conforming to W3C standards (RDF, OWL, SKOS, SHACL), published under open licence, integrated into a cumulative Semantic Tree of Financial Knowledge.
Pillar IV — The Reference Library of Financial Authority. A physical and digitally preserved reference collection of authoritative primary-source publications — regulatory releases, standard-setting body publications, canonical academic works — designed to resist the semantic drift, paraphrase distortion, and hallucination artefacts that characterise repeated generative AI processing cycles. The Reference Library is the evidentiary ground truth against which AI-generated financial definitions can be verified. When the large language models hallucinate the definition of "amortisation" after ten generations of paraphrase, the FinTology Reference Library will have the OED entry, the FASB codification, and the original APB opinion on the shelf.
The four pillars are mutually reinforcing. The ontology grants produce structured knowledge that feeds the educational programmes. The Reference Library provides the authoritative foundation for the ontologies. The educational programmes create the next generation capable of building and maintaining the entire system.
The FinTology Foundation's mission: To advance public understanding of financial systems by educating young people and adults in structured financial knowledge, funding the development of open, machine-readable financial ontologies, and preserving authoritative financial definitions as ground truth in the age of generative AI.
More details to follow as the filing process progresses. On International Open Data Day, this felt like the right moment to plant the flag.
III. The Week in Review: A Bridge That Has Moved
The week of March 2–6, 2026, will be remembered as the week the bridge shifted visibly. A summary for those who missed the daily editions:
Monday (Mar 2): Operation Epic Fury — US/Israeli strikes on Iran — commenced. Gold spiked to $5,417 intraday. Silver hit $94.26. Sampo Score: 78.
Tuesday (Mar 3): The dollar squeeze hit. Gold crashed 5.16% to $5,050. Silver collapsed 10.82% to $79.74. Platinum down 11.7%. A broad liquidation event, not a fundamental repricing. BMI/Fitch projected gold at $5,600 within the week. Sampo Score: 80.
Wednesday (Mar 4): Dead cat bounce. S&P up 1.8%. No pulse. The bounce was short-covering, not conviction. Sampo Score: 79.
Thursday (Mar 5): MOVE Index broke to a five-year high at 118.3+. BRC FinTech published the Zombie Bank Monitor methodology paper (2026-M003). Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank scored as "Zombie" on preliminary assessment. Sampo Score: 82.
Friday (Mar 6): NFP day. February payrolls delivered a shock: the US economy lost 92,000 jobs, against a consensus expectation of +50,000. Unemployment rose to 4.4%. The worst jobs report since the pandemic. Yields spiked to 4.17% intraday on oil-driven inflation fears, then reversed to 4.12% on the NFP disaster — the stagflation signature in real time. Brent crude settled at $92.69, up 28% on the week. WTI at $90.90, up 35.6% — the largest weekly gain in futures history. Gold closed at $5,131. Silver at $84.13. Trump demanded "unconditional surrender" from Iran, ruling out any near-term de-escalation. The dead cat bounce expired. BlackRock capped withdrawals from a private credit fund for the first time — a new Cheese Doodle Index entrant. Sampo Score: 84.
Net for the week: Gold down 5.3%. Silver down 10.7%. S&P 500 down 2.0% (worst week in five months). Brent crude up 28%. WTI up 35.6%. MOVE up to five-year breakout. The US economy lost 92,000 jobs. Oil posted its biggest weekly gain since 1983. The train is on the bridge. The bridge has moved. The monitoring system has not detected it.
IV. The Kathy Ruemmler Affair: Why This Grates
The Rothschild-Epstein-Ruemmler connection, documented in federal exhibits EFTA00584904, EFTA02592865, EFTA00582812, and EFTA00669908, continues to raise the hair on the back of my neck. Let me articulate why, because the media silence on this story is itself a data point.
Here is what the federal record shows: Epstein brokered a $25 million consulting fee for himself by introducing Kathy Ruemmler — Obama's former White House Counsel, on the shortlist for Attorney General — to the Edmond de Rothschild bank. Ruemmler then negotiated the bank's DOJ non-prosecution agreement under the Swiss Bank Program. The $45 million DOJ penalty triggered Epstein's maximum fee. The money was wired within days.
Why does this grate? Because the architecture is identical to the opacity architecture in capital markets. A private intermediary (Epstein) connects the regulated entity (Rothschild bank) to the regulator's own former officer (Ruemmler), who then negotiates a settlement that benefits the regulated entity while the intermediary takes a fee calibrated to the outcome. The regulated entity pays less than it arguably should. The intermediary profits from the opacity. The public never learns the details until 3.5 million pages of documents are released a decade later.
This is the same architecture that permits 17 unnamed banks to hold 215 million ounces of short silver with no public accountability. The same architecture that allows the LBMA to set the global silver benchmark through an opaque auction. The same architecture that permits a 501(c)(6) to claim VCSB status. The rules are written by the entities the rules are supposed to constrain.
The media silence is a second-order effect of the same architecture. The institutions that should be investigating — the major newspapers, the wire services, the investigative units — are dependent on access to the same financial institutions whose officers are implicated. Goldman Sachs confirmed Ruemmler's departure on February 13, 2026. The story should have been front-page news for a week. It was not. Draw your own conclusions about why.
V. Private Credit: Where Are the Lawsuits?
Private credit is, to use a term that does not appear in the OED but is universally understood, a dumpster fire.
How many more credits are going to go from 100 cents on the dollar to zero in less than three months? The marks on these portfolios were never market-based — they were model-based, which in practice means management-based, which in practice means optimistically-based. When a loan to a software company that is being disrupted by AI is carried at par on December 31 and written to zero on March 15, somebody made a decision to delay the recognition of loss. That decision benefited the fund manager (who continued to collect fees on the higher AUM) and harmed the limited partners (who redeemed at NAVs that were fiction).
Where are the lawsuits? American pension funds and university endowments have been the primary capital sources for private credit's expansion from a $500 billion niche in 2019 to a $1.7 trillion behemoth in 2026. When the losses from stale marks and delayed write-downs are finally recognised — and they will be — the fiduciary liability will be enormous. The pension fund trustees who allocated to semi-liquid credit vehicles with quarterly gating mechanisms without understanding that "semi-liquid" means "illiquid when you need it most" have failed their duty of prudent management.
The Cheese Doodle Index is not a joke. It is a quantification of the gap between marketing liquidity and actual liquidity. When a fund markets itself as "semi-liquid" but gates at 5% or 7% per quarter, the marketing is a misrepresentation. When the same fund carries assets at model-derived marks that bear no relationship to observable secondary-market transaction prices, the NAV is a misrepresentation. When a pension fund fiduciary relies on both misrepresentations to justify an allocation that ultimately harms beneficiaries, there is a lawsuit.
The UBS estimate — 13% default rates in private credit under an aggressive AI disruption scenario, versus 4% projected for high-yield bonds — should be tattooed on the forehead of every pension fund investment committee member who approved a private credit allocation in the last three years. Somebody promoted this asset class aggressively to retail and institutional investors. The legal discovery process will determine who, and whether they disclosed the risks adequately.
Cheese Doodle Index — Weekly Update (March 7, 2026):
FundCDI RatingStatusWeek Change
Blackstone BCRED🧀🧀🧀🧀Gating 7.9%; employee backstopStable
Blue Owl OBDC II🧀🧀🧀🧀🧀Fully gatedStable at maximum
BlackRock (unidentified PC fund)🧀🧀🧀🧀Capped withdrawals for the first timeNEW ENTRANT — Friday
Apollo Credit Opp.🧀🧀🧀Elevated redemptionsWatching for upgrade
Ares Real Estate🧀🧀🧀🧀CRE marks under extreme pressureDeteriorating
KKR Private Credit🧀🧀🧀Rumoured elevated queueMonitoring
The BlackRock gating — the largest asset manager in the world, capping withdrawals from a private credit fund for the first time — is the canary. When BlackRock gates, the signal is no longer theoretical. The Tau Intelligence Engine assigns a 45% probability that a fourth major fund gates within two weeks. If that occurs, the Sampo Score moves to 86+ (Critical Fragility) and the private credit liquidity drought becomes a self-reinforcing cascade that no individual fund can escape through its own actions. This is the Knickerbocker Trust scenario of 1907, updated for 2026: the run starts at one institution, spreads through the interconnected web of counterparty relationships, and is resolved only by extraordinary intervention or by allowing the weakest members of the system to fail.
V-B. The Gates-Epstein Thread: No More Teasing
I promised on Friday that Monday's Coffee would deliver the Gates-Epstein analysis. COVID has accelerated the timeline. Here is the outline — the full treatment will follow next week when the fever permits deeper sourcing.
The Epstein Files documents establish that Jeffrey Epstein proposed to Bill Gates a donor-advised fund that would utilise Kathy Ruemmler's regulatory relationships — with the IRS, the SEC, and the DOJ — to structure philanthropic vehicles with tax advantages not available to conventional charitable giving. The Gates Foundation calendar entries, previously reported by Sayer Ji, show multiple meetings between Epstein and Gates Foundation staff in the 2014–2019 period. The question that has not been answered — and that the mainstream press has not pursued with any vigour — is: what specific infrastructure were Epstein and Gates building together before COVID?
The intersection of surveillance technology (Epstein's investments in Israeli cyber firms through Ehud Barak), public health data infrastructure (the Gates Foundation's global health surveillance programmes), and financial engineering (the donor-advised fund, the Rothschild bank relationship, the regulatory access through Ruemmler) describes a bio-digital infrastructure project that, if built, would have given its operators unprecedented access to personal health data, financial data, and regulatory machinery simultaneously. Whether this project was ever completed, how far it progressed, and who else was involved are questions that 3.5 million pages of federal documents may eventually answer.
I am not making an accusation. I am identifying a pattern in the documentary record and asking questions that the journalists with access to the full document set should be asking. On International Open Data Day, the irony of a data transparency advocate calling for more data transparency on a story about surveillance infrastructure is not lost on me. Nor is the irony of doing so from a COVID-ridden sofa in South Florida, having been made sick by the very pathogen that brought "public health infrastructure" into the global vocabulary.
More next week. The fever is not going to stop the analysis. It may slow the typing.
VI. The Tau Intelligence Engine and the $200 Oil Scenario
The Tau Intelligence Engine and its BSD algorithm — the Bull Shit Detector, for those new to the nomenclature, though the acronym also serves as shorthand for Bridge Structure Displacement in deference to this week's Big Bayou Canot metaphor — are running at elevated alert levels across every vector. The losses in some of the underlying portfolios being monitored — precious metals desks, energy-sector loan books, private credit vehicles — have to be extreme. The real crash has not yet occurred. What we have seen this week is the prelude: the vibration through the floor before the wheels leave the track.
The elevated MOVE Index tells this former member of the 1987 bond vigilante crowd that the real pain from the Iranian war has yet to arrive. The oil price transmission to CPI operates on a 30 to 180 day lag across multiple channels. Brent at $92.69 — up 28% in a single week, the largest weekly gain since April 2020 — is already a crisis. WTI at $90.90, up 35.6% on the week, marks the largest weekly gain in the history of the futures contract dating back to 1983. Qatar's energy minister told the Financial Times on Friday that crude prices could reach $150 per barrel in the coming weeks if tankers remain unable to transit the Strait. JPMorgan's Natasha Kaneva estimates production cuts could approach 6 million barrels per day by the end of next week if the Strait is not reopened. But give it two to three weeks — when storage capacity around the Persian Gulf is full, when the insurance market has fully priced in the Hormuz risk, when the Ras Tanura shutdown's downstream effects propagate through the refining complex — and oil could reach $120, $150, or conceivably $200 per barrel.
Could oil reach $200? The historical precedent says yes under specific conditions: a sustained Hormuz closure (which removes approximately 20% of global seaborne oil trade), combined with a failure of strategic petroleum reserve releases to compensate (the US SPR is already at its lowest level since 1983), combined with winter demand persistence in the Northern Hemisphere. At $200 Brent, the American economy does not merely slow — it flips into a major recession. Consumer spending, which is 68% of GDP, cannot absorb $7+ per gallon gasoline. Corporate margins, already under pressure from AI investment commitments and private credit deterioration, crater.
And at $200 Brent, the Federal deficit cannot be funded externally. Foreign buyers of American debt — who have already been reducing their Treasury holdings as part of the de-dollarisation trend — will demand a premium that pushes interest rates higher than the economy can sustain. The Fed will face the impossible choice: hold rates to fight inflation (and crush the economy) or cut rates to support growth (and let inflation run). Gold, in that scenario, does not go to $5,600. It goes to $8,000.
I do not assign $200 oil a high probability — perhaps 15% to 20% under current conditions. But the tail is not priced. The VaR models do not include it. And the lithium-7 — the LBMA unallocated claims, the private credit marks, the GROUP-17 short positions — remains excluded from the yield calculation.
VII. Zombie Banks: Why Is Nobody Paying Attention?
The Zombie Bank Monitor (Methodology Paper 2026-M003, published Thursday) identified Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank as scoring in the "Zombie" classification on preliminary assessment. The response has been: silence.
This silence is itself extraordinary. We have two major European banks — members of the probable GROUP-17, simultaneously exposed to precious metals short positions, European energy-sector credit deterioration, and ongoing restructuring — scoring as functionally insolvent on a seven-dimension composite analysis, and no regulator, no rating agency, and no major financial publication has publicly addressed the question.
The Federal Reserve, the OCC, and the FDIC are keeping US zombie banks running through a combination of regulatory forbearance and access to liquidity facilities. The European Central Bank and the Bundesbank are doing the same for their zombies. The question is not whether these institutions are technically insolvent — the price-to-book ratios below 0.50 tell you the market's answer — but how long the sovereign backstop can sustain the pretence. The answer depends on whether the compounding stress vectors (oil shock, precious metals delivery stress, private credit contagion, bond market volatility) arrive simultaneously or sequentially. Simultaneously = systemic crisis. Sequentially = managed decline. The Sampo Score at 84/100 suggests we are closer to simultaneous than sequential.
VIII. California's Nuclear Epiphany and the Wealth Effect Reversal
Two seemingly unrelated developments that are, in fact, the same story:
California is reconsidering its 50-year nuclear moratorium. Assembly Bill 2647, introduced by Assemblywoman Lisa Calderon (D-56th District) with bipartisan support, would exempt advanced nuclear reactors licensed by the NRC after January 1, 2005 from the state's 1976 moratorium. The bill does not mandate nuclear investment; it removes the regulatory barrier. The irony is that California's moratorium — imposed when environmental activism was a force for preservation — has become a barrier to the clean energy transition that environmentalism now demands. AI data centres need baseload power. Renewables cannot provide it at the scale and reliability required. Nuclear can. The question for California's wealthy citizens, many of whom are already fleeing to Southeast Florida, is: in whose backyard will the new reactors be built?
The wealth effect reversal. Much of the American economy has optimised for the top 15 to 20 percent of the economic spectrum. Luxury goods, premium services, high-end real estate, private aviation, boutique financial advisory — entire sectors exist to serve a population whose spending is predicated on the appreciation of their asset portfolios. What happens when that segment cuts back? What happens when the portfolios that justified the spending — the equity positions, the private credit allocations, the real estate holdings, the art collections — deflate and stay deflated?
The answer is visible in microcosm in Palm Beach County, where I now sit with my COVID and my Advil. The island of Palm Beach has become a refuge for the ultra-wealthy fleeing New York, Connecticut, and California taxes. Real estate prices on the island have appreciated 150%+ since 2020. The service workers who maintain the estates, staff the restaurants, clean the pools, and drive the cars cannot afford housing within a reasonable commute distance. The infrastructure was built for a seasonal population; it now serves a year-round one. The schools are overcrowded. The traffic is impossible. The water utility is at capacity.
This is the Merrill Kelly problem at macro scale: wealth is mobile, capital follows the path of least confiscation, and the jurisdictions that attract the mobile capital must then deal with the infrastructure consequences that the mobile capital does not fund. When the portfolios deflate — and the MOVE Index breakout, the private credit gating, the equity selloff, and the energy shock are all deflation vectors — the spending stops. And when the top 15% stops spending, the other 85% discovers how dependent their employment was on serving the appetites of the wealthy.
I see this from my sofa every day. The construction cranes on Palm Beach island. The Rolls-Royces in the Publix parking lot on South County Road. The restaurant reservations that require three weeks' notice. And the home health aide who drives 45 minutes from Lake Worth because she cannot afford rent within the town she serves. The service economy of South Florida is a leveraged bet on the wealth effect continuing. When the S&P 500 is down 2.0% in a week, oil is up 28%, and the private credit portfolios that fund the charitable giving and the art purchases and the third-home renovations are being written down to zero, the leverage works in reverse. The cranes stop. The reservations open up. The aide still cannot afford the rent — but now her employer cannot afford the aide.
The nuclear question and the wealth effect question converge in energy policy. California's wealthy citizens flee to Florida to escape taxes and regulations. California then needs new energy sources (nuclear) to power the data centres that the remaining wealthy citizens (tech executives) are building. Florida absorbs the population influx without adequate infrastructure investment. Both states face energy crises of different kinds — California from regulatory constraint, Florida from demand growth. Neither crisis is priced into the equity market. Both are priced into the MOVE Index.
IX. The Sampo Score and the Week Ahead
Sampo Score — Weekly Trajectory:
DayScoreDriver
Monday (Mar 2)78Pre-Iran escalation baseline
Tuesday (Mar 3)80Gold/silver crash; dollar squeeze
Wednesday (Mar 4)79Dead cat bounce
Thursday (Mar 5)82MOVE breakout; Zombie Bank Monitor published
Friday (Mar 6)84MOVE sustained; NFP selloff; rumour velocity
Saturday (Mar 7)84Weekend assessment; COVID sidebar
Sampo Score: 84/100 (Severe Fragility).
The week ahead:
- March 11: February CPI — the inflection point for the stagflation thesis.
- March 12: 30-year Treasury auction — watch for the tail as a bond-stress indicator.
- March 13: Q4 2025 GDP (2nd est.); UMich 5Y inflation expectations; JOLTS.
- March 18: February PPI; Fed rate decision and statement.
- Ongoing: COMEX March silver delivery cycle at peak stress.
I will be writing from the sofa for the next week. The COVID does not change the analysis. The bridge has moved. The train is approaching. The monitoring system — VaR, BPR, stress tests calibrated on historical data — was not designed to detect the displacement. The FinTology Foundation, when it is operational, will train the next generation to build the monitoring system that should have existed all along.
Today is Alexander Graham Bell Day. On March 7, 1876, Bell received his patent for the telephone — the device that made long-distance communication possible. The FDTA and machine-readable financial reporting are the Bell telephone of regulatory transparency: the infrastructure that enables information to cross distances — between jurisdictions, venues, agencies, and generations — that were previously unbridgeable.
On International Open Data Day, the most consequential financial data in the world remains closed. The FinTology Foundation will work to open it. One ontology at a time. One student at a time. One concept at a time.
Know your exits before you need them.
Sláinte. Rest well. The line holds.
Lars Toomre is Managing Partner of BRC FinTech Corporation and Brass Rat Capital LLC. BSME, MIT (1982). This represents personal commentary and analysis, not investment advice.