Your March Report
It was all just a classic credit inflation…no different from any previous one in history except this one is truly global and has lasted far longer than any one before.
March 2026
Vol. 5, Issue 3
By Tom Dyson
The Korean stock market fell 7% yesterday. Then it fell another 12% today…for a total loss of 24.6% from its peak last Friday.
Until this week, the Korean stock market was the world’s hottest stock market…up 76% in 2025… and up another 51% in the first two months of this year. Also, the rise in Korean stocks has only partially been driven by fundamentals. It’s mostly been driven by a retail investment craze for leveraged ETFs and other meme assets.
“Korean retailers are just crazy. They are not like average retail investors in other parts of the world. They are very aggressive,” said Jongmin Shim, Korea equity strategist at CLSA.
Meanwhile, in US markets, nothing seems to be pricing correctly since they started bombing Iran this weekend. The three markets we watch — precious metals, energy and shipping — all seemed to move yesterday in ways that had nothing to do with fundamentals…and everything to do with forced selling.
You probably noticed this, too.
I wonder, is Korea triggering liquidation across other markets?
I bet it is. The investment markets are just so darn interconnected, leveraged and speculative. As we’ve noted many times in these pages, these “runaway trains of selling” — cascading prices that trigger margin calls, leading to further price declines, causing liquidity to vanish…which sends prices even lower — are a core feature of contemporary markets and the biggest risk to investors.
Shipping is under attack all over the world. Over the last few years, I have tried to catalog all the incidents, but now I’ve lost track because there have been so many of late. Tankers being hit by drones, warships being sunk by submarines (the first US sinking of a ship with a torpedo since WW2), warships sinking submarines, two container vessels attacked just a few hours ago, and yesterday, for the first time ever, they attacked an LNG tanker. It belonged to Russia. Ukraine blew it up in the Mediterranean, using drone boats. Here are some pictures of the massive fireball…
