All Gates, All Barbarians

From Caracas to Taipei to the Arctic: 2026 opens with permission structures breaking

I don’t usually like to start a new year with a bang.

Not because the world won’t oblige us with one anyway, but because January has a tendency to offer a “signal” that is really just adrenaline.

And yet here we are.

The US has captured Maduro. In this way, a “local” story becomes a global one. A reminder that the old comfort blanket — what happens there stays there — was always thinner than we wanted to admit.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea that the micro era is dying. Or maybe it’s already dead, and we’re just the last ones to accept it.

How many times have we told ourselves: this is political noise, this is regional, this won’t spill over?

How often has that been true lately?

In markets, I try to live in conditional paths, not single-point forecasts. The difference matters. One path is neat. The other is reality.

When a taboo is broken openly, the real question isn’t only “what happens next in Venezuela?”

It’s: what just became thinkable elsewhere?

Macro D wrote a great piece below, and it captured the mood I’ve struggled to put into clean sentences: the sense that the “rooms of the world” are no longer separable. That the doors between geopolitics, resources, law, and capital flows are now permanently ajar.

All gates.

All barbarians.

Read it with a trader’s eye, but also with a citizen’s stomach.

Let’s dive straight in.