This was a post that was supposed to be published late last year, but alas, these retrospectives take longer to compile than people appreciate.
But before we get to it, first, a heartfelt apology to readers for operating in a newsletter format for three years that did not suit our style of insight-based reporting. This ensured some of our strongest calls were buried in convoluted prose or disappeared due to imported formatting that didn’t gel well with our systems and broke our HTML. Thank you for sticking with us regardless.
So here’s what you might have missed👇
Special repo facility
The Fed’s Standing Repo Facility (SRF) was the talk of the town towards the end of 2025. But it wasn’t always so:
As noted in The Blind Spot on March 25, 2025 in a post titled “The Fed’s quiet pivot to servicing intraday liquidity — and why it matters”:
Quite an important tweak happened to the U.S. financial system last week that you might have missed. And we at The Blind Spot consider it our duty not just to draw attention to it but to frame it in the broader context of what’s actually going on under the hood of modern monetary plumbing. From March 27 through April 2 the New York Fed will begin experimenting with the mechanics of its Standing Repo Facility (SRF).
And as we continued:
The analysis speaks to the intraday imbalance problem at the heart of the financial system — a problem often dismissed as a mere techn-cal inconvenience stemming from the mismatch between real-time payments and slower-moving risk management protocols. Yet the preferred workaround, prefunding, has become a major driver of the system’s dependence on excess reserves.
The SRF adjustments are exactly the type of fine-tuning one would expect to deal with this problem. They are also a sign that the Fed is now inching toward tools that might one day resemble what we describe as market-based real-time liquidity auctions — mechanisms that know when they’re needed and at what price, rather than waiting for lagging indicators.
Also noteworthy: A December 2025 working paper from the BIS has since argued in favor of introducing a novel “auction-based liquidity-saving mechanism”.
Key point: As QT pushed the system to its lowest comfortable level of reserves (LCLoR), we predicted it would inevitably put greater emphasis on short-term liquidity tools such as the SRF, or invite the creation of even more responsive ones.
Dollarization
As the world worried about de-dollarization, we argued in June that the bigger risk for markets was the prospect of dollarization, including the pegging of entirely new currencies to the dollar.
In November, the FT published confirmation that officials in Washington were exploring how to encourage more countries to adopt the dollar as their primary currency.
Stablecoins
We pegged our reputation on stablecoins being the next big power trend in global finance in our piece, The coming dollar superstructure: Why stablecoins are America’s next great export which was published on March 25. On a personal level, Izzy’s been obsessing about the topic since at least 2017.
And we’ve been doubling down ever since, including by launching our dedicated stablecoin pop-up publication The Peg.
Perpetual futures
It’s hard to dispute that 2025 was the year of the stablecoin. But 2026 is gearing up to be the year that stablecoins’ lesser-known “trading tool” cousin, the perpetual future, achieves similar recognition. A CFTC consultation is already underway.
It’s a trend we’ve been tracking for some time, but our definitive timestamp comes in the shape of our exclusive interview with BitMex’s Ben Delo, the inventor of the instrument, whom we interviewed in July 2022.
That story is now available for all readers here.
Christian revival
The Blind Spot has been tracking the rise of “Holy influencers” and conversions since at least May 2024, having spotted it as an emerging trend back then.
The mainstream press has finally started to catch up.
American Technate
In January 2025, we warned that Sid Meier’s Civilization Game was about to get real with the rise of Trump’s “American Technate”. But we also flagged that the idea had been originally popularized by the 1930s technocracy movement, in which Elon Musk’s grandfather was a prominent leader.
In January 2025, Dario argued that folding narcos under the same umbrella as terrorists would give the United States casus belli not just on Latin America but the whole world.
In October, Dario went on to describe the emerging trend as the “American America spread”.
Today, everyone’s calling it “Donroe Doctrine”. But the end result is the same. America is doubling down on power in its own sphere of influence, even as it withdraws from further afield – while keeping its strike options open.
3/I Atlas
Dario told you not to be afraid of the freaky comet with a greenish tail, even as astrophysicist Avi Loeb continued to spread all sorts of alien spacecraft fear. In the end, Dario was right, and Loeb was wrong. It really was just a weird-looking comet.
Havana syndrome and DEW weapons
Until the week of January 12, the theory that the military was using “directed energy weapons” and mysterious laser beams to influence weather and human biology was strictly consigned to the realm of science fiction.
Our sources said otherwise. Dario flagged the possibility that DEW weapons were being actively and surreptitiously used in global hybrid wars in his first-ever piece for the Blind Spot in June 2022:
Consider the stories on the internet about Direct Energy Weapons (DEWs) and their supposed relationship to the Californian wildfires from 2017 onwards. DEWs are ranged weapons that concentrate beams of energy, typically lasers, microwaves, particle or sound beams, on a specific target. Though the concept has existed for almost a century, lasers being formerly termed “death rays” during the 1930s, it is only recently that the US military, through its Space Force, has announced it is seeking to develop such platforms in orbit.
However, several news stories ranging from the “Havana Syndrome” events, or the mysterious directed energy attack near the White House in 2021, suggest such systems are already in use. The conspiracy-o-sphere, therefore, believes such weapons are used for obscure political purposes – notably, in causing the California wildfires.
This week, after years of denial, the U.S. government finally came clean that it had bought a Havana Syndrome device.
Low-cost warfare
China’s weird new missile-packed container ship made the rounds in December, 2025.
For the first time, an advanced military power had created a hybrid civilian-military looking ship, capable of deploying a wide variety of munitions while evidently being done on the cheap. But China wasn’t the first to do so — it was actually Iran in February 2024. And Dario spotted it then.
Dario’s longstanding call that the future of military tech will be “Lo-Hi” tech is also paying off. The thrust of the argument is that high-quality but low-cost technology will inevitably replace over-engineered prestige assets. Think drones or Renault Clios packed with a hundred kilos of C-4 explosives. The signature trend is weaponry that can overwhelm enemy defences, while also being cheap and easy to replenish.
As Dario wrote in November 2023:
But there’s more trouble ahead for western defence majors
Get used to two new critical words that are signing the end of the western defence establishment – dual use and attritable
Something Iran and Russia have become extremely adept at
The Western model of war is based on the U.S.’s doctrine of superior firepower.
This means we’ve come to rely on massive capex for high-cost, high-maintenance technological assets
A tragically outdated philosophy
It’s essentially the modern mounted knight
And woe all defence stocks which don’t adapt, and woo investors who understand the nature of this century’s pendulum-like swing away from sophistication and towards simplicity in defence.
The MSM are slowly catching on.
Saudi Arabia’s modernization risk
While the world was touting the evident drive by Crown Prince MBS towards modernizing Saudi Arabia, Dario begged to differ.
In January 2025, he outlined that because Saudi Arabia occupies a unique position as the spiritual centre of Islam, this modernization drive inadvertently opened space for a powerful counter-narrative among hardline Islamists. Long distrustful of the Saudi monarchy, these groups could leverage social and cultural reforms to challenge — and potentially de-legitimize — the religious authority claimed by the House of Saud. Dario further contended that rapid changes to the workforce and broader social fabric risked creating the very socio-political conditions in which radicalization can take root.
But Saudi Arabia’s position as the birthplace of Islam means I believe these reforms put MBS in a precarious position, despite their current popularity. And the threat won’t necessarily come from old-fashioned conservative Wahhabis.
Counter-intuitively, if the recent history of developed countries is anything to go by, a modern future for Saudi Arabia could turn its young men away from liberalism.
And the hypothetical alt-right Saudi Arabian young men’s idealized past won’t be in distant histories, unlike their equivalents in the West. And unlike in the West, they will have coherent reasons to reimpose this nostalgic vision: Saudi is the birthplace of Islamic law.
This perspective came after I accidentally happened upon some TikToks last year by young British-educated Saudis who denounced MBS’s invitation of Iggy Azalea to a Riyadh music festival where she twerked on stage – “In the home of the Ummah!”
This suggests MBS should distance himself from his westernizing reforms. Perhaps he could install a Westernization tsar who could be blamed, fired and exiled should the consequences of the reforms prove too much.
This prediction bore its fruits in June, when a new radical youth movement called “The Free Masked” emerged. It sharply criticized MBS’s policies that curtailed the speech of Islamic scholars and clerics while spending lavishly on modernization projects like NEOM.
Saudi leadership has already begun to respond. It has not only stepped back from full adherence to NEOM’s original vision, but has also moved to re-empower ultra-orthodox religious authorities as a means of reasserting spiritual legitimacy. In October 2025, Sheikh Saleh bin Fawzan al-Fawzan — a senior, ultra-conservative Salafi cleric — was appointed Grand Mufti, signalling a deliberate recalibration toward religious orthodoxy.
Russian assets
Late last year, Brussels finally capitulated on the prospect of seizing Russian assets to pay for the Ukrainian war effort.
We warned this would inevitably end up being the case as early as February 2024.
From Trump Dump to Trump Pump
They ended up calling it TACO. But on March 8, we predicted that Liberation Day on April 2 would amount to a Trumpian controlled demolition of the stock market. We think that assessment has held up pretty well. Not least because we also warned on March 15 that any stock market deterioration would soon be followed by the “Trump Pump”.
We’re sure there’s more to be proud of than just that, but we wouldn’t want to gloat.
