Morning Coffee — Wednesday, March 11, 2026
BRC FinTech Corporation (“BRCF”) • BRCFinTech.com • Brass Rat Capital LLC (“BRC”) • Toomre Capital LLC (“TC”)
Observations: National COVID-19 Day • Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster 15th Anniversary • Madrid Train Bombings 22nd Anniversary • 1918: First Confirmed Case of Spanish Flu Pandemic • National Dream Day
From the Desk of Lars Toomre, Managing Partner — BRC / BRCF / TC
Lars is navigating a confirmed case of COVID-19 and is experiencing considerable brain fog as this edition goes to press. The Tau Intelligence Engine (“Tau”) and the Bull Shit Detection (“BSD”) algorithm have both been running continuously, though Lars candidly acknowledges that viral interference with the prefrontal cortex has reduced the analyst’s own cognitive clock speed. Readers who identify factual errors are earnestly invited to flag them. Epistemic humility — the recognition that one’s knowledge is incomplete and one’s models are approximations — is the foundational virtue of sound risk management, and it has never felt more immediately personal.
MARKET SNAPSHOT — Wednesday, March 11, 2026 (Morning) Gold (COMEX Apr) : $5,229.70 /oz (+2.71% on 3/10 settle; ATH $5,589 in late Feb) Silver (COMEX Mar) : $89.083 /oz (+6.01% on 3/10 settle) Brent Crude : ~$87.90 /bbl (52-wk high $119.50; pulled back sharply on IEA/G7 reserve news) WTI Crude : ~$83.13 /bbl (Mon intraday high $119.48; now in retreat) US 10-Yr Treasury : ~4.11% (easing from 4.21% Tuesday high; FOMC March 17-18 next week) DXY (Dollar Index) : ~98.78 (3-month high 99.69 on 3/9; easing) S&P 500 : ~6,782 (YTD performance pressured by Iran conflict) VIX : ~24.93 (elevated; sub-30 but far above pre-conflict lows) GLW (Corning) : $137.15 (BRC cost basis $120.00 — +14.3% on 3/10) GNRC (Generac) : ~$218 (BRC cost basis $200.00 — +~9% on 3/10) February CPI released TODAY at 8:30 AM ET (see Section XI for discussion).
II. The Strait of Hormuz: Escalation, Mines, and the Great Retreat
The dominant macro story of early March 2026 has entered a new and contradictory phase, one that the BSD algorithm is flagging with particular insistence. On one side of the ledger: the IRGC has publicly declared that Iran, not the United States, will determine the conclusion of Operation Epic Fury — a strategic assertion that the party defining “victory” controls the duration of the conflict. Iran is reported to have begun mining the Strait of Hormuz (“SoH”). President Trump has threatened “unprecedented military consequences” if Hormuz transit remains blocked, and Senator Rand Paul has warned publicly that a protracted Iran war will produce “disastrous” midterm results for the Republican Party in 2026. On the other side of the ledger: Brent crude has plunged from a 52-week high of $119.50 to approximately $87.90 in the span of approximately 48 hours, as Trump simultaneously offered conciliatory “it could end soon” language and the Group of Seven (“G7”) governments queried the International Energy Agency (“IEA”) about a coordinated strategic petroleum reserve release that would be the largest in the IEA’s history.
The tergiversation — the evasive, contradictory public positioning — between military intensification and diplomatic conciliation is precisely the kind of narrative inconsistency that the BSD algorithm is architected to identify. Mines do not disappear because a politician expresses optimism. The IRGC does not unilaterally abandon strategic positions because a G7 communiqué discusses reserve releases. A strategic petroleum reserve (“SPR”) release is a demand-side palliative that buys time — it does not restore a mined waterway, and it does not demobilize an adversary that has explicitly asserted control over the conflict’s duration.
BCA Research’s “Ultimate Decision Tree” for the Iran conflict, now widely circulated, assigns 70% probability to what it terms a “massive oil shock” scenario. That tree was constructed before the current IEA/G7 discussions on reserve releases. The Tau Engine’s conditional probability modeling treats the reserve release announcement as reducing the short-term probability of sustained $115+ crude but not as altering the structural probability of a return to elevated prices if the underlying military situation does not resolve. The WKG has logged this under lars:concept_hormuz_asymmetry: the United States has overwhelming first-strike military superiority, but mines already in the water are not neutralized by firepower. Minesweeping operations under hostile conditions, against shore-based anti-ship missiles, are a sustained naval engagement that requires weeks, not days.
Strait of Hormuz tanker transits reportedly fell from approximately 24 per day to just four per day at the blockade’s worst. The United States Energy Information Administration (“EIA”) has published a forecast expecting Brent to remain above $95 per barrel over the next two months, before declining below $80 in the third quarter of 2026 — a forecast that explicitly acknowledges its dependence on “modeled assumptions of both the duration of conflict in the Middle East and resulting outages in oil production.” That caveat is, for the BRC analytical framework, the most important sentence in the EIA’s report. It is a formal acknowledgment that duration — the single variable markets most systematically mis-specify during armed conflict — is the controlling parameter.
“In war, the will is directed at an animate object that reacts.”
— Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Book I, Chapter 1 (1832)
Source: Project Gutenberg / On War. Clausewitz’s tripartite theory of war — passion (the people), chance (the military), and reason (the government) — is directly applicable to the Iran conflict, where all three elements are operating at maximum intensity simultaneously.
III. The Airlines: Nearly 100% Unhedged Into the Inferno
First Deutsche Bank, and now UBS, have published research notes warning that U.S. commercial airlines are “nearly 100% unhedged” against the current energy price shock. The irony of UBS carrying this particular finding — UBS being among the probable members of the “Group-17” non-U.S. institutions with significant precious metals clearing operations through the London Precious Metals Clearing Limited (“LPMCL”) system — is not lost on Toomre Capital. The same institution warning about airline fuel exposure is itself navigating one of the most extraordinary precious metals markets in recent history.
Commercial airline fuel hedging programs were largely dismantled in the years following COVID-19, as carriers seeking to preserve liquidity chose to forgo the premium costs of options and swap programs. The implicit assumption was that the energy price environment would remain range-bound — precisely the kind of benign-baseline assumption that the Tau Engine’s fragility dashboard is architecturally designed to stress-test. At $87.90 Brent, the pain is already significant; at the 52-week high of $119.50, it was acute; in the BCA Research severe scenario of $140–$150 Brent, which the “massive oil shock” branch of the decision tree assigns material probability, the unhedged carrier faces existential cost structures. Jet fuel typically constitutes 20% to 30% of airline operating costs under normal price conditions; at $120+ crude, that figure rises sharply.
The operational implication that the BSD algorithm wants to underline: the unhedged airline situation is not a hidden risk. Deutsche Bank and UBS have both published it. The risk is visible. What is not yet priced, in BRC’s assessment, is the second-order effect on air freight pricing, airport economics, regional tourism, and the broader consumption impact of significantly higher domestic airfare prices in a consumer economy that was already registering extraordinarily low Michigan Consumer Sentiment readings before the Iran conflict began.
IV. Private Credit: The First Domino, the Interval Fund Architecture, and the Cascade Scenario
Bloomberg’s March 10 report on Cliffwater LLC confirmed what Brass Rat Capital has been tracking as a high-probability stress event: the $33 billion Cliffwater Corporate Lending Fund (“CCLFX”) is experiencing redemption requests in excess of 7% of its outstanding shares. The fund’s structure — a 1940 Act interval fund required to repurchase up to 5% of shares quarterly, with discretion to extend that to 7% if requests are sufficient — means the fund is now operating at the outer boundary of its designed liquidity tolerance, a condition Rubric Capital’s investor letter characterized as making Cliffwater “the first domino in the bank run we foresee.”
Boaz Weinstein of Saba Capital Management told CNBC’s Inside Alts that the actual redemption figure, when formally announced, could reach 10% to 20%. Weinstein, it should be noted, has his own tactical position in this situation: Saba, alongside Cox Capital Management, has launched a tender offer to purchase approximately 6.9% of Blue Owl Capital Corp. II shares at a 34.9% discount to net asset value (“NAV”) — a transaction that both reveals and accelerates the pricing of the gap between book valuations and market-clearing levels. The sophistication of Weinstein’s self-interest does not invalidate the structural concern; it merely requires that the BSD algorithm apply appropriate weighting to his public statements.
Cliffwater has simultaneously engaged Evercore to manage a $1 billion private credit secondary sale, moving first-lien assets into a separately leveraged vehicle — a technique that is legal, not uncommon in stress situations, but structurally revealing. One does not engage Evercore for a secondary portfolio transaction unless the primary fund’s liquidity management is under meaningful pressure. The firm retains approximately $9 billion of exposure to the underlying assets after the proposed transfer, and has drawn on credit facilities rather than cash to manage its ongoing redemption obligations.
The deeper issue, which the Provokative AI (“ProvokAI”) discipline requires Lars to state plainly, is the mismatch between the liquidity promises embedded in interval fund marketing materials and the actual liquidity of the underlying assets. Direct corporate lending is illiquid by construction. The interval fund wrapper provides defined-interval liquidity — categorically superior to no liquidity at all, but categorically different from the daily-redemption liquidity of a money market fund. The gap between these categories has not always been communicated with sufficient force to the retail and wealth management investors who constitute the primary capital base of the interval fund universe.
UBS’s separate warning about loans to non-bank financial institutions (“NBFIs”) threatening a banking crisis operates in the same conceptual space. The risk that was redistributed from regulated bank balance sheets under post-2008 capital requirements did not disappear — it migrated to entities with less regulatory oversight and liquidity architectures dependent on the continued confidence of investors, who, under simultaneous macro stress, are the least likely to maintain that confidence.
“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin.”
— Ernest Hemingway, “Notes on the Next War,” Esquire, September 1935
Source: Goodreads / Hemingway
V. Corning and Generac: Constructing a Wartime Energy Portfolio
Lars discloses that Brass Rat Capital entered two new long equity positions on Tuesday, March 10, 2026: Corning Incorporated (GLW) at $120.00 per share and Generac Holdings Inc. (GNRC) at $200.00 per share. As of Wednesday morning, GLW is trading at $137.15 — a gain of approximately 14.3% from entry in a single session, partly catalyzed by UBS’s price target increase to $171 and the broader narrative around AT&T’s announced $250 billion U.S. capital investment plan. GNRC is trading at approximately $218 — a gain of approximately 9% from entry, against a 52-week high of $236. The BSD algorithm, as always, cautions against extrapolating single-session validation into permanent thesis confirmation.
The GLW thesis is multi-layered. Corning Incorporated, founded in 1851 and headquartered in Corning, New York, is the dominant global manufacturer of optical fiber cables and specialty glass, with additional businesses in display glass, automotive ceramics, environmental technologies, and life sciences. The Optical Connectivity segment is a direct beneficiary of the extraordinary multi-hundred-billion-dollar capital expenditure programs being pursued by hyperscale technology companies — Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft — to build the AI infrastructure of the next decade. AT&T’s $250 billion U.S. investment plan is a specific, large, near-term demand catalyst for fiber optic products. Analysts at Seeking Alpha identify Corning, alongside Ericsson (ERIC), American Towers (AMT), and Crown Castle (CCI), as potential primary beneficiaries of that program.
The wartime angle on GLW is more subtle. As the United States and its allies invest in hardened communications infrastructure — a process that accelerates materially during sustained geopolitical conflict — demand for resilient fiber-optic networks rises. The military applications of Corning’s specialty glass and photonic products, while not the primary investment thesis, are not trivial to a defense budget that will grow substantially amid the Iran conflict.
The GNRC thesis is more immediately war-contingent. Generac Holdings, founded in 1959 and headquartered in Waukesha, Wisconsin, is the dominant U.S. manufacturer of residential standby generators, portable generators, and — increasingly — grid-scale and data center backup power systems. The company’s strategic pivot toward AI data center power reliability is exactly the kind of structural positioning that benefits from the collision of two simultaneous secular trends: the explosive growth of AI compute demand, which requires extraordinary power reliability and uptime tolerances, and the wartime energy disruption that is elevating U.S. grid reliability concerns to national security priority. Data center operators — hyperscalers and co-location providers alike — are signing large, multi-year contracts for backup generation capacity, and Generac is the largest independent supplier in that market.
The irony that a conflict in the Strait of Hormuz should drive the value of a Waukesha, Wisconsin, generator manufacturer is not lost on Lars. It is precisely the second-order transmission mechanism that markets systematically underweight in the early phases of a geopolitical event. The SBRM Solutions (“SBRMS”) framework, and the broader FinTech and Agentic AI analytical infrastructure that BRCF is developing, are oriented toward identifying these second-order vectors before consensus pricing catches up.
Lars adds an uncharacteristic note of humility that brain fog makes unusually sincere: both positions were entered at advantageous prices on a day when the market was broadly selling risk. There was no ex ante guarantee of gains in the subsequent session. The thesis was correct; the timing was fortunate. BRC holds both positions with a medium-term investment horizon.
VI. A Sociological Observation: Generation Z, Feminism, and the Limits of Institutional Narrative
The BSD algorithm flags the following data point as analytically significant, not merely culturally interesting: mainstream media organizations, according to multiple recent reports, are struggling to explain why young men of Generation Z are demonstrating markedly reduced affiliation with contemporary feminist ideological frameworks. The framing of the coverage — that the phenomenon requires “explanation” in the sense of a pathology to be diagnosed — is itself informative. It suggests that the expectation of alignment was embedded in institutional assumptions and that the deviation is experienced as surprising.
Lars does not attempt to resolve this contested sociological question in a financial analysis publication. Lars does observe, however, that the SBRMS framework — which advocates for machine-readable transparency in institutional reporting — would materially improve the public discourse if applied to the underlying survey data and methodology behind such pronouncements about generational ideological alignment. The quality of much publicly reported social science data would not survive a rigorous SBRMS audit, and the Morning Coffee audience deserves to apply the BSD algorithm to these narratives with full force.
VII. The Tau Engine Dashboard: Fragility at Sustained Elevated Alert
The Tau Intelligence Engine (“Tau”) — BRCF’s proprietary structural fragility measurement framework, which assesses systemic stress through interconnection mapping rather than historical price variance — has been running at its highest sustained alert level since February 28. This morning’s dashboard reflects the following structural nodes:
Geopolitical Fragility — CRIMSON: The Hormuz partial blockade, IRGC counter-narrative, reported mining operations, and the internal U.S. political pressure from Senator Paul’s midterm warning constitute an escalatory cascade that has not reached equilibrium. Oil’s sharp 11% decline on March 10 reduces short-term price pain but does not alter the underlying military situation. Tau’s geopolitical fragility index is at its highest reading since the post-2022 Ukraine escalation period.
Private Credit Fragility — ELEVATED: CCLFX 7%+ redemptions is a specific, named, quantified stress event in a $33 billion fund. Blue Owl Capital Corp. II gating, Saba/Cox tender at 34.9% discount, and the Cliffwater Evercore $1 billion secondary sale represent visible price discovery. Tau’s private credit fragility index is at its highest since the BREIT gates of 2022–2023.
Monetary Policy Fragility — ELEVATED: Rate traders are pricing additional Federal Reserve (“Fed”) cuts following the unexpected February net job loss of approximately 100,000 positions. The next Federal Open Market Committee (“FOMC”) meeting is six days away — March 17–18, 2026. The stagflationary dynamic — energy-driven inflation pressure colliding with recessionary employment signals — creates a policy paralysis that the Fed’s dual mandate does not cleanly resolve. Cutting into an energy shock validates inflation; holding into a recession accelerates unemployment. Chairman Powell’s press conference on March 18 will be among the most carefully parsed in years.
Energy Infrastructure Fragility — ELEVATED: Even with Brent at $87.90, the airline sector’s near-100% unhedged fuel exposure is acute. The path from $88 back to $119 is shorter than the consensus currently seems to believe it is, should the Hormuz military situation deteriorate. And Tau’s fragility methodology is specifically designed to assess path dependencies, not just current-state valuations.
VIII. The April Calendar: A Month of Market-Moving Events
Lars — operating with COVID-impaired cognitive bandwidth but sustained analytical determination — wants to begin sketching the April calendar, because the density of market-moving events in April 2026 is extraordinary even by the elevated standards of a wartime environment. The WKG is logging this section as a living document to be updated as dates are confirmed.
APRIL 2026 KEY MARKET EVENTS CALENDAR (Preliminary)
Apr 3 (Fri)BLS Employment Situation — March 2026 (first post-war-onset jobs report covering full March)
Apr 10 (Fri)March CPI Release — Bureau of Labor Statistics, 8:30 AM ET. This is the first CPI reading that will fully capture the energy shock of the SoH blockade. Expect heightened Treasury yield volatility.
Apr 14 (Tue)JPMorgan Chase (JPM) Q1 2026 Earnings — Jamie Dimon's first full-quarter read on war-era credit conditions, trading revenues, and reserve-build requirements.
Apr 14 (Tue)Wells Fargo (WFC) Q1 2026 Earnings — 7:00 AM ET release; conference call 10:00 AM ET.
Apr 15 (Wed)Bank of America (BAC) Q1 2026 Earnings — 6:45 AM ET release; conference call 8:30 AM ET.
Apr 15 (Wed)Tax Day — individual federal income tax returns due.
Apr 22 (Wed)Tesla Q1 earnings (est.) — EV demand + energy storage in war/grid-reliability context.
Apr 28-29FOMC Meeting — Two-day meeting; policy statement at 2:00 PM ET on April 29. Second wartime Fed meeting. Will the committee have cut rates by then? The March 17–18 meeting (next week) sets the context.
Late AprilCaterpillar (CAT) Q1 Earnings — Key read on infrastructure, construction, and energy-sector equipment demand in a wartime energy environment.
Late AprilMagnificent Seven earnings — Alphabet (GOOG), Meta (META), Microsoft (MSFT), Amazon (AMZN) all expected to report in late April. Collectively: the AI infrastructure capex cycle, cloud revenue, and advertising demand in a consumer-stressed environment.
Lars wishes to underscore the specific analytical significance of the March CPI, expected approximately April 10, 2026. The February CPI, released earlier this morning (March 11) at 8:30 AM, covers the pre-war-onset period and provides the pre-shock baseline. It will show whether underlying inflation was accelerating or decelerating before the conflict. The March CPI will be the first reading to capture the oil shock, the gasoline price surge (which the American Automobile Association (“AAA”) has reported as the largest weekly increase in recent memory), and the transmission of energy input costs into goods and services prices. Markets will price the March CPI with extraordinary intensity. Treasury yields, rate cut expectations, and FOMC language at the April 28–29 meeting will all be conditioned by whatever the April 10 print delivers.
The Q1 bank earnings trio — JPM on April 14, WFC on April 14, BAC on April 15 — will be the first full-quarter read from the largest U.S. financial institutions on credit conditions, loan demand, reserve builds, and trading revenues in a wartime energy shock environment. Jamie Dimon has historically been the most candid voice among major bank CEOs on systemic risks, and his commentary on private credit, NBFI exposures, and the state of the commercial real estate market will be parsed with unusual intensity. The FOMC meeting of April 28–29 immediately follows these earnings reports, meaning the Fed will be making its rate decision with full knowledge of the major banks’ own read on credit conditions.
IX. FDTA and VCSB: Transparency Most Needed When Least Convenient
The temptation to defer discussion of the Financial Data Transparency Act (“FDTA”) Section 5821 during a wartime energy shock is understandable and must be resisted. The FDTA was enacted precisely to create machine-readable financial reporting standards that would enable regulators, investors, and the public to identify systemic risk before it crystallizes into systemic crisis. The events of this week — a private credit structure reaching its liquidity limits with limited public visibility, an unhedged airline sector whose exposure was documented only in sell-side research rather than any regulatory filing, and an oil market that moved $31 per barrel in a single week — are precisely the type of system failures that FDTA-quality transparency was designed to prevent.
The Voluntary Consensus Standards Body (“VCSB”) governance question that BRC has been engaged in for months is not a procedural abstraction. It is a question about whether the 501(c)(6) trade associations proposing to govern financial data standards have institutional incentives aligned with the transparency the statute requires, or whether — to employ a term from the Lars Toomre lexicon — the VCSB process risks becoming a kakistocracy (governance by the least qualified, from the Greek kakistos, worst) of conflicted trade association insiders whose institutional interest is in delay, dilution, and obfuscation. SBRM Solutions (“SBRMS”) continues its consultative work on FDTA Section 5821 implementation and invites practitioners, regulators, and standards professionals who share these concerns to engage.
X. Gold, Silver, and the Group-17: Physical Delivery in an Extraordinary Market
Gold settled at $5,229.70 on the COMEX on March 10, up 2.71% from the prior session, having pulled back from the all-time high of $5,589 reached in late February. Silver settled at $89.083, up 6.01%. The brief retreat in precious metals that occurred in early March was characterized by analysts as a liquidity event: institutional investors facing margin calls in equity markets, or seeking to capitalize on a resurgent U.S. Dollar Index (“DXY”) that reached a three-month high of 99.69 on March 9, liquidated profitable precious metals positions to cover losses elsewhere. Gold and silver are now resuming their upward trajectory as the wartime inflation narrative reasserts dominance over the temporary dollar-strength narrative.
Lars continues to monitor COMEX-registered silver inventory levels and open interest dynamics. The Group-17 non-U.S. institutions that constitute the probable core of the LPMCL clearing system — HSBC, UBS, ICBC Standard Bank, BNP Paribas, Société Générale, Standard Chartered, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, ScotiaMocatta (Bank of Nova Scotia), Toronto-Dominion, Macquarie, Mitsubishi UFJ, Sumitomo Mitsui, Bank of China, ANZ, Commerzbank, and Crédit Agricole or Natixis — are operating in an environment of extraordinary structural tension between paper market positions and physical delivery capacity. The wartime environment introduces additional complexity: sanctions exposure, geopolitical alignment of counterparties, and the potential weaponization of financial clearing infrastructure.
XI. This Morning’s February CPI: The Pre-War Baseline
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (“BLS”) released the February 2026 Consumer Price Index (“CPI”) at 8:30 AM Eastern Time this morning, March 11, 2026. This report covers the February price environment — the period immediately preceding the February 28 commencement of Operation Epic Fury. It therefore constitutes the pre-war-onset baseline against which all subsequent inflation readings will be measured.
The January 2026 CPI, released February 13, showed the CPI-U rising 2.4% year-over-year to an index level of 325.252. The monthly increase was 0.2% on a seasonally adjusted basis, with shelter costs the largest contributor. Energy fell 1.5% in January. February’s reading — released today — will be analyzed by BRC in the WILT Knowledge Garden as the pre-shock datum. Whatever it shows, the analytical significance lies in its role as the comparison baseline for the March CPI (approximately April 10), which will be the first reading capturing the oil shock transmission.
For context: gasoline prices surged dramatically in the first week of March as Brent rose toward $119.50. While Brent has since retreated toward $87.90, the March monthly average gasoline price at the pump will include the full spike period. The March CPI energy component will almost certainly show a dramatic month-over-month increase even at current crude levels, because the BLS surveys gasoline prices throughout the month rather than only at month-end.
XII. A COVID Coda: The Taxonomy of Fog — and a Kalevala Interlude
On National COVID-19 Day, it seems appropriate for Lars to briefly address the condition from the inside. Brain fog, as a clinical description of the cognitive sequela (pl. sequelae; from the Latin, meaning a condition that is the consequence of a prior disease or injury) that frequently accompanies COVID-19 infection, is simultaneously more and less than the metaphor suggests. It is less dramatic: one does not wander in an actual fog, unable to find the door. It is more insidious: the difficulty is not finding thoughts, but having appropriate confidence in the thoughts one finds. The BSD algorithm, which normally maintains a continuous background scan for narrative inconsistencies, is running at reduced fidelity.
Lars is reminded of a passage from the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala — Canto XLIX, in which the world is plunged into darkness after the Sun and Moon are imprisoned by the sorceress Louhi. The old seer Väinämöinen must navigate and act without celestial guidance, relying entirely on accumulated wisdom and the world's structural knowledge rather than real-time illumination. It is a useful metaphor for analytical work under cognitive impairment: the frameworks remain, even when the immediate processing capacity is degraded. [Kalevala, Project Gutenberg]
Lars notes this not as a complaint — the COVID experience is trivial compared to the March 11 history catalogued above — but as methodological disclosure. The conditions under which analytical work is produced are part of its provenance, and provenance is the foundational concept of the WKG semantic architecture. The FinTech and Agentic AI frameworks that BRCF is developing are, in part, motivated by the recognition that human analytical capacity is not constant. ProvokAI is designed specifically to challenge model outputs, regardless of the analyst’s confidence level.
XIII. What Albert Gitchell Did Not Know — and the Precautionary Principle
Albert Gitchell, the army cook who reported sick at Camp Funston on March 11, 1918, did not know he was the first confirmed case of the deadliest pandemic in recorded history. He knew he felt unwell. He reported to the infirmary. He did what any reasonable person would do. And then the world changed.
The precautionary principle — the principle that protective action against potential catastrophic outcomes should be taken even in the absence of certainty — is, at its core, an acknowledgment that Albert Gitchell situations recur in every domain of human activity. The COMEX silver inventory situation may be a precautionary principle situation. The Cliffwater redemption cascade may be a precautionary principle situation. The unhedged airline sector, facing $88–$120 volatility in crude, is almost certainly a precautionary-principle situation. The reported mining of the Strait of Hormuz is unambiguously one.
Lars closes this edition from the sofa, with a cup of actual coffee that tastes considerably less than its aroma promises — a well-documented COVID symptom that would not be unfamiliar to the 50 to 100 million people who endured the Spanish Flu of 1918, nor to the Athenians of 430 BCE whom Thucydides described in The History of the Peloponnesian War, Book II, Chapters 47–54, as suffering from a plague that deprived them of ordinary sensation while the war raged outside the city walls. [Thucydides, Book II, Project Gutenberg] Thucydides was the first systematic epidemiologist and the first systematic war correspondent, and it is characteristic of his extraordinary intellect that he managed to be both simultaneously.
The Tau Engine remains at elevated alert. The BSD algorithm is running at reduced speed. The WKG is logging everything. Brass Rat Capital holds GLW and GNRC with conviction. SBRMS continues its work on FDTA Section 5821. ProvokAI challenges every output. And the FinTech and Agentic AI infrastructure of tomorrow is being carefully built in the middle of an extraordinary world.
📚 What Lars Is Reading This Morning:
- John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History (2004) — the definitive account of the 1918 pandemic, including the Camp Funston origin.
- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007) — the analytical framework underlying the Castle Bravo model-exclusion metaphor.
- Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book II (c. 431 BCE) — the plague of Athens section, written by a man who contracted the disease and survived to document it.
Stay curious. Stay careful. Stay humble.
— Lars Toomre, Managing Partner
Brass Rat Capital LLC (“BRC”) / BRC FinTech Corporation (“BRCF”) / Toomre Capital LLC (“TC”)
Palm Beach County, Florida
Wednesday, March 11, 2026
Disclaimers and Disclosures: This Morning Coffee post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Brass Rat Capital LLC holds long positions in Corning Incorporated (GLW) and Generac Holdings Inc. (GNRC) as disclosed herein. All market data reflect publicly available sources as of the morning of March 11, 2026; readers should verify current prices independently. The Tau Intelligence Engine (“Tau”), Bull Shit Detection (“BSD”) algorithm, WILT Knowledge Garden (“WKG”), SBRM Solutions (“SBRMS”), and Provokative AI (“ProvokAI”) are proprietary analytical tools and frameworks of BRC FinTech Corporation. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Tags: Iran HormuzOil Private Credit Cliffwater GLW GNRC Gold Silver FDTA COVID-19 Fukushima Madrid Spanish Flu Airlines CPI FOMC April Calendar Tau Engine BSD Algorithm