August 25, 2026 · Operation Economic Outcast lands without a presidential signature, the market shrugs and the rial breaks, and I owe you a correction on a benchmark

Six days after the president promised an "economic D-Day" against Iran, here is what he has actually signed on the subject: nothing. We checked the Federal Register twice — zero Iran presidential documents since the nineteenth, and exactly one presidential document of any kind since the fifteenth, about tariffs on Canada. What landed yesterday was Treasury paper signed by an OFAC director: a determination naming five whole sectors of Iran's economy at once, which quietly pre-authorises sanctioning almost anyone, almost anywhere. The designations bear that out — they are overwhelmingly third-country, and the biggest name in them went almost unreported. Then the markets answered by making oil cheaper, while Iran's currency hit the worst number in its history. Plus the thirty-dollar discount that measures the blockade, Pakistan's army chief spending a day in Tehran meeting everyone except the people who decide, and a correction we owe you on a benchmark number from yesterday's show. And the 550-million-year-old animal that stopped eating and started farming. Sourced; the analysis is Anna Dudley's.