Somewhere right now, a couple is looking at their money market statement and feeling good. The balance is up. The yield is 3.5%. The war news is loud and scary, and at least this one decision feels smart.
I can't stop thinking about what happens the day the news changes.
Here's what worries me. Americans are now sitting on $5.08 trillion in money market funds. That number is a record. It got there because people did exactly what made sense — they watched the market swing, they got nervous, they moved to safety. I get it. I understand every single one of those decisions.
The Lithium Boom
Did you know it takes 10,000 iPhone batteries worth of lithium to make one EV battery pack? With 350M+ EVs projected to be sold globally by 2030, lithium demand is looking steep.
Current recovery methods involve waiting for liquids to evaporate in ponds the size of 100 football fields. This inefficiency can’t keep up with forecasted demand. But EnergyX’s technology can recover up to 3X more lithium than traditional methods.
Investors are taking note. EnergyX has $130M+ of investments from General Motors and others. They even earned a $5M DOE grant.
Now, they’re scaling their 100,000-acre Chilean project, which has a potential target annual revenue of $1.1B.
This reflects the significant progress we've made across our business, including:
Project Lonestar's Demonstration Plant commissioned in Texarkana, the largest DLE production plant in the U.S., now producing battery-grade lithium and validating GET-Lit™ at industrial scale
At full production scale, Project Lonestar will produce up to 50,000 tons per year of Lithium.
Based on current Lithium prices, the commercial plant will generate approximately $1billion a year in revenue.
But here is the part most people haven't thought through. That 3.5% yield doesn't exist in a vacuum. It exists because the Federal Reserve has kept rates high. And the Fed has kept rates high because oil prices stayed elevated. And oil prices stayed elevated because of the war.
"The problem with going to cash is that you have to make two separate decisions correctly — when to get in, and when to get back out."
Right now, markets are pricing in zero rate cuts for the rest of the year. Zero. That's the assumption baked into every money market yield you see today. It assumes the world stays exactly as tense as it is right now, indefinitely.
Nobody knows if a ceasefire happens next week or next year. I'm not going to pretend I do. But I will tell you this: traders on prediction markets are putting the odds of a deal by April 30 at somewhere between 18% and 24%. That's not a long shot. That's a coin flip with bad odds — and the consequences are not symmetrical.
If peace breaks out, oil drops. Inflation cools. The Fed starts cutting. And those money market yields — the ones that feel like income — start falling faster than most people expect. I don't think most people realize how quickly that math changes once the first cut comes through.
$180 billion - the households earn annually at current MMF yields of ~3.5% — but only if rates don't fall.
That is the number I keep coming back to. One hundred and eighty billion dollars a year in interest — if nothing changes. It sounds like a windfall. It is actually a countdown clock.
Meanwhile, the S&P 500 put up 3.4% in a single week last week. Just on peace hopes. Nobody needed to predict a deal. They just needed to not be sitting on the sidelines when the rumor hit.
The advisor I keep quoting in my head said it plainly. "The world is not coming to an end just yet." And he's right. But I think there is a version of this where a lot of careful, thoughtful people — people who made a completely rational decision to protect themselves — end up watching a rally from the outside because they were waiting for certainty that never comes.
That's the trap. Not the money market itself. The assumption that the exit will be obvious. It won't be. The Fed doesn't announce cuts on a Tuesday afternoon with enough lead time for you to move first. By the time the rate path is clear, the rates are already falling. And the money that moved early already moved.
Americans poured $583 billion into money market funds in 2025 alone. Most of that happened during stress. Most of those people feel smart right now. Very few of them have a written answer to the question: what do I do when the yield drops to 2%? To 1.5%?
I'm not saying run back into stocks tomorrow. I'm saying know what you're waiting for. Because "I'll know it when I see it" is not a plan. It's how you end up watching.
More on this tomorrow.
— Lauren
Editor, American Ledger
*Disclaimer: This is a paid advertisement for EnergyX’s Regulation A+ Offering. Please read the offering circular at invest.energyx.com. Under Regulation A+, a company has the ability to change its share price by up to 20%, without requalifying the offering with the SEC.
