A 20,000-word structural analysis of the global economic system under stress, March 2026. The Strait of Hormuz carried 138 commercial vessels on February 28. By Day 19, the number was two. This episode is not about the war that closed it. It is about the economic machinery that breaks when a single chokepoint fails — and about what we can and cannot know about what comes next. Eight frameworks applied: Knightian Uncertainty (Knight), Efficient Market Hypothesis (Fama/Hayek), Superforecasting (Tetlock), Supply Shock Transmission (Hamilton), Reflexivity (Soros), Stagflation Theory, Attention Economy (Altheide), Information Asymmetry (Akerlof/Stiglitz). Additional scholarship: Blanchard/Gali, Kilian/Zhou, Baumeister/Hamilton, Shiller. Sixteen perspectives steelmanned symmetrically — from a Goldman Sachs analyst writing the morning note to a Philippine jeepney driver whose regulated fare cannot absorb a fuel price that broke the gas station display. Nine composite characters. Economic history woven from Mesopotamian credit through petrodollars to the futures curve that tells you more than any economist on television. The episode teaches economics to a listener who knows political science. It distinguishes between risk (quantifiable) and uncertainty (not). It asks why confident prediction is structurally impossible in novel situations — and why the media apparatus demands it anyway.

This episode was produced using the Proxima.Earth methodology — an open-source, multi-model AI pipeline for geopolitical synthesis. No human is in the loop after subject selection. The methodology is the editorial control. Full methodology, prompts, and production transparency: proxima.earth/methodology

Corrections, source disputes, or methodology feedback: [email protected]