Rabobank Global Strategist Michael Every: Current Inflation is Structural, Post-1945 and Post-1989 Orders are Collapsing
Rabobank global strategist Michael Every stated in a macro program that the current environment can no longer be termed cyclical inflation; until a decisive path to end the two wars is presented geopolitically, inflation is structural. His inference is that interest rate traders must now also act as oil traders.
The two wars refer to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and the Iran situation along the Strait of Hormuz. Every believes that central bank models have been disrupted by exogenous supply shocks, and using an old manual for global interest rate management of total demand is no longer valid in a world where supply chains are dismantled for national security. The fiscal pressures of defense, reshoring, supply chain security, and infrastructure will push the interest rate center higher, with key security sectors potentially receiving cheaper financing than speculative sectors.
The energy structure is more critical than crude oil spot prices. He emphasized that viewing "oil prices" as a single variable when looking at CPI would lead to misjudgment: the real bottleneck is in diesel and refined oil refining capacity, with shocks transmitting from upstream to downstream inflation. Even if the Strait of Hormuz sees temporary passage, dark ships, transshipment, and mine clearance will prevent the channel from returning to its old normal; the market has overestimated normalization pricing before autumn. Rabobank's commodity team has linked prolonged disruptions to cumulative losses of approximately 2.5 to 2.8 billion barrels of supply, and discussed Brent's quarterly forecast at around $103 before falling back to the $90 range.
The implication for interest rates is that the long end is under pressure. Under the risk of war, the cost of inaction may be higher than making a wrong move: the European Central Bank is caught in the logic of "upgrading inflation, downgrading growth, and still possibly raising by 25 basis points again." The U.S. Treasury must simultaneously pay for military expenses and re-industrialization, with short-term government bond issuance and stablecoins included in the same picture of dollar settlement transition, rather than the traditional Fed cycle chart.
He has long argued that the post-1945 and post-1989 orders are collapsing, with economic governance replacing pure market equilibrium. If Iran loses its oil leverage, it may escalate again after the U.S. midterm elections to regain attention; the Strait of Hormuz "will never fully normalize" as countries will repair alternative routes. Energy may shift from unified pricing to blocks divided by security alliances, settlement currencies, and swap quotas.
In market mechanisms, sellers are constrained by crude oil and tighter refining capacity, while buyers are governments that must roll over national debt and rate accounts that must price inflation. Funds are shifting from "watching employment and core services to trade rate cuts" to "watching the Strait, diesel inventories, and war duration to price duration." Beneficiaries are commodities that can turn energy volatility into curve trading—interest rate cross trades; those under pressure are bond bulls still trading rate cuts based on cyclical recession and energy-intensive Eurasian industries. Event-driven factors stem from wars that cannot be endogenized in models.
Additionally, he did not provide a verifiable military timeline for a "decisive end" nor did he define structural inflation as a specific new equilibrium point; crude oil spot prices sometimes react less sensitively to news from the Strait of Hormuz than refined oil and freight rates.
Source: Public Information
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Every is not a newly bearish oil trader but someone within Rabobank who writes geopolitics as a macro main variable. After the pandemic, he mentioned that whether central banks raise, cut, or do nothing, it is disastrous; we must replace long Asian chains with reshoring and inventory buffers. In 2026, he applied the same framework to the two hot wars: supply shocks are no longer "temporary items" but permanent items in fiscal and security budgets. Historical parallels include the first time interest rate trading was forced to read oil tankers and the Strait of Hormuz after 1973, and the period in the 1980s when Volcker used interest rates to suppress demand but could not eliminate geopolitical premiums.
The capital path is that re-industrialization and military spending thicken the supply of government bonds, while energy security raises the discount rate. Money is shifting from global arbitrage duration trading to defense contracting, refining, alternative routes, and short-term treasury bills. Stablecoins are seen as a transitional bridge to petrodollars, not a crypto narrative. The motivation is clear: whoever controls diesel and the Strait controls the non-removable part of nominal interest rates.
This is analogous to the stagflation pricing after the 1970s oil crisis, the misjudgment of supply chain inflation post-COVID as temporary, and the rewriting of the ECB's response function after the Ukraine war. The market is transitioning from "globalization reducing inflation" to "safety premium entering pricing." China's automation replaces labor, while Europe loses leverage against both the U.S. and China, representing two sides of the same reconstruction.
Structural judgments belong to regulatory changes layered with shifts in pricing power. The mechanism is that wars turn energy from substitutable commodities into national quotas, and central banks cannot simultaneously suppress demand and manage Strait risks with a single policy rate. Thus, the anchor of the interest rate curve shifts from employment data to whether oil tankers can set sail. Until one side can forcibly end the two fronts, cyclical rate cut trading will only be done on structural premiums.