Capital Mischief
Capital Mischief: what I learned briefing six presidents, applied to your portfolio. The market-moving events. Before the smart money sees them.
- Top in Finance
- #105
- Paid leaderboard
- #12
- Subscribers
- 22K
- Paid subscribers
- 1,000+ paid
- Badge
- Bestseller 1k
- Followers
- 29K
- Paid plan
- $100/mo
- Recommends
- 4
- Podcast
- Yes
rounded by Substack
other newsletters
What they write about
Long-form essays connecting geopolitics and commodity prices to everyday costs, written by a former presidential briefer. Recurring subjects include diesel and oil markets, inflation as households experience it, energy infrastructure and conflict, and a reader advice column. Also covers the author's fiction writing.
- geopolitics
- oil
- diesel
- inflation
- essays
- advice column
Recent examples: The World Will Have to End Without Me This Week. Dave Asprey Plans to Outlive a 30-Year Treasury by 97 Years. I Followed Him Into the Jungle. · Dear Charlie #49: Her Father Stood Up in Budapest in 1956, So She Can Tell You What a Clean Airport Costs.
Written from Capital Mischief’s own published post titles and openings in Sep 11, 2026. It describes the subjects the newsletter covers, not its views, and is not investment advice.
Growth history
Subscribers (thousands, nightly)
22K on Sep 10, 2026 → 22K on Sep 30, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #105 today · #104 a week ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 21 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 20%
- Best rank seen
- #97
- Rank, 7 days
- −1 place
- Followers added
- +414
- Posts
- 20
- Reactions per post
- 169
- Reactions tracked
- 4.4K
- Tickers covered
- 1
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 28, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 26 posts
in tracked posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: Trump's Greenland "Infinite Life Agreement" Arrived Six Days Before Xi. That's the Point. — 299 reactions on Sep 19, 2026.
Recent posts
- The World Will Have to End Without Me This Week. Dave Asprey Plans to Outlive a 30-Year Treasury by 97 Years. I Followed Him Into the Jungle.
- Dear Charlie #49: Her Father Stood Up in Budapest in 1956, So She Can Tell You What a Clean Airport Costs.
- Xi Quoted a Harvard Professor to Trump’s Face. Three Books Explain What He Was Really Asking For.
The Mischief Library, Saturday, September 26, 2026 Thursday night, Xi Jinping invoked George Washington’s Chinese porcelain collection . He recalled Nixon’s 1972 trip. Trump handed him a bald eagle statue and told him it embodied “the free and soaring spirit of America.” They dined on sesame-crusted sea bass while Elon Musk and Jensen Huang sat at the head table and Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg watched from the cheap seats like billionaires at a zoo exhibit where the animals have nuclear weapons. Then yesterday morning, the visit ended with tea and a tour of the National Archives . The…
- FOUNDING MEMBERS: For the First Time in 14 Years, Not One Fed Official Sees Downside Risk to GDP. The Last Time This Many PhDs Agreed on Anything, they Were Wrong.
- I Spent Years Reading Signals for Four-Star Generals. One of the Best I Ever Found Was Pizza Deliveries Near the Pentagon.
This Week the Chair Turned Around, Which I Do Not Recommend to Anyone. Let me tell you about the number that is not on the sign. Every gas station in America posts its gasoline prices in numerals three feet tall, lit from behind, legible from a moving car at sixty. Diesel gets a smaller line. Often around the side. Often not lit at all. That design choice is the most consequential piece of graphic art in the country. Gasoline is a consumer price. You pay it once a week, you watch the meter climb, and you feel robbed in real time. Diesel is a producer price. You never pay it directly and you…
- The Man From the Cave Comes to Washington. Everybody Else Brings a Briefing Book.
Seven months ago, I took you to a cave. An actual cave, because apparently normal childhoods are no longer sufficient preparation for running nuclear powers. Xi Jinping spent seven years as a sent-down youth in Liangjiahe, a poor village in Shaanxi Province. Xi himself later described living in “earth caves,” sleeping on “earth beds,” and sometimes going months without meat. Xi’s 2015 account of Liangjiahe My February argument was that the experience helped shape a political temperament built around endurance. I contrasted it with Donald Trump’s lifetime of dealmaking and, after Butler…
- Dear Charlie #48: An Eye Chart Chose for Both of Us, and a Student Failed the Quiz Four Minutes After He Opened the Book.
- Trump's Greenland "Infinite Life Agreement" Arrived Six Days Before Xi. That's the Point.
The Mischief Library is closed today. Every Saturday I bring you books. Today a president brought me a treaty he says he just invented, six days before Xi Jinping walks into the White House. The books can wait. The 1951 Defense Agreement has been waiting 75 years for someone to read it. This is that reading. The Library reopens next Saturday. Assuming nobody buys another island. THE INFINITE LIFE AGREEMENT HAS A SHELF LIFE. IT EXPIRES NOVEMBER 10. On September 24, five days from now, Xi Jinping walks into the White House for the first time in a decade. In his pocket is the one card that…
- I Ruined My Eyes Reading Under the Covers at Eighteen. That Flashlight Cost Me My Wings and Bought Me Six Presidents
I Got Grounded for Life by a Two Dollar Flashlight, and It Was the Best Trade Anybody Ever Offered Me Let me tell you about the flashlight. Lights out at the Air Force Academy was midnight. That was not a suggestion. It was a rule enforced by men who considered sleep a logistics problem. So I read under the covers with a flashlight, the way you do when something in you is louder than the rule. Four years of that and my eyes went from 20/20 to 20/200. I lost my pilot qualification. The one thing an eighteen year old goes to that school for, I read my way out of. Here is what nobody tells you…
- Fed Rate Hike: The One Industry That Gets Paid, Not Billed
The Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates today because inflation has returned, oil is above $100 and central bankers remain constitutionally incapable of repairing pipelines. Higher rates will make mortgages more expensive. They will squeeze consumers carrying credit-card balances, increase corporate refinancing costs and force private-equity firms to discover that adjusted EBITDA cannot actually make an interest payment. But one industry occupies the opposite side of the transaction. Its customers provide billions of dollars in capital. The companies invest that capital before…
- THE FED BROUGHT ASPIRIN TO A KNIFE FIGHT
THE FIRE EXITS ARE ON FIRE Last Wednesday I sat in this chair and told you that a single molecule of diesel fuel was quietly mugging your grocery bill, kneecapping a Frankfurt mortgage banker, and giving the Federal Reserve a nervous condition it would rather not discuss in public. Two hundred and four of you hit the heart button. A hundred and nine of you wrote comments. Fifty-seven of you restacked it to your own subscribers. Here is what happened while you were liking, commenting, and swearing. Somebody locked every door the mugger could escape through. Not one door. All three. In 72…
- Dear Charlie #47: A Reader Found the Inflation Washington Cannot Measure, and It Was Sitting on a Shelf in His Garage.
← All trending finance newsletters
Data: Substack public leaderboards and publication archives, refreshed nightly, plus public beehiiv sitemaps and recommendation pages, refreshed weekly. Source for this page: Capital Mischief. Subscriber counts are Substack’s own rounded public figures, so week-on-week changes move in steps. beehiiv audience sizes are self-reported by the publisher and are not verified. Last snapshot: Sep 30, 2026.