Britain paid £36m for a veto. Not for the tungsten.
A proposed £25m loan gets more expensive each quarter. The offtake remains unsigned.
Contributor
UAO Editorial
Chart of the Day
Chart of the day — 2026-08-26
Sources: Tungsten West plc, “Strategic Investment by the UK Government NWF”, RNS, 25 August 2026;
Britain Bought a Stake in a Tungsten Mine. It Still Has No Tungsten.
Britain's National Wealth Fund committed £36 million of conditional equity to restart a Devon mine, alongside proposed debt, governance rights and an offtake negotiation.
Chart of the Day
Chart of the day — 2026-08-25
Source: Federal Reserve Board, H.15 Selected Interest Rates, release dated 24 August 2026, carrying
38% of $15.6bn. The private-markets exit is rationed.
An application to the SEC would let a fund change its managers without a shareholder vote — including affiliated ones. The compensating right is an exit that met 38% of the dollars requested last quarter.
A fund that is 35.8% cash. Seven exit doors, from 5% to 10%.
Seven notices told investors how much they may ask for back this quarter. Four reports showed how much is sitting in cash. And a filing reported as a launch is the fourth attempt to register the same fund since March.
Marcie Frost: Three Words in Blue Ink
She started as a teenage typist and never finished college — on her application she wrote “not degreed yet” in blue ink. Then she took America’s largest public pension fund from 68% to 85% funded. Inside Marcie Frost’s decade at CalPERS.
The Probability Desk
The Probability Desk — 2026-08-22: Does Brent print $100 by 30 September?
Hormuz is shut and the 60-day US-Iran memorandum expired on 17 August with no successor. From spot $93.26, the Desk puts 58% on a $100 Brent print within 30 trading days - below its own 50,000-path model.
A 25-year high in real yields just broke the buyout math.
Treasury sold 30-year inflation-protected debt at 2.973%, the most since 2001, and primary dealers were left holding 2.10% of it. The same morning a canal cut traffic to 34 ships with its lake at a five-year average. Both are the same story.
Chart of the Day
Chart of the day — specification
Source: Federal Reserve H.15 (DFII30, DFII10), latest observation 19 August 2026. Diamonds mark auction stop-out yields — a different measure from the daily constant-maturity curve.
The Probability Desk
PD Chart of the Day — 2026-08-20
For four weeks in June and July a signed US–Iran memorandum reopened the Strait of Hormuz to toll-free transit. The seven-day moving average of daily transit calls peaked at 26.71. The 2025 average was 75.16; the threshold prediction markets use for "normal traffic" is 60. The memorandum expired on