Key Points:
Chokepoint Cascade: Houthis seize Perim Island → 17 undersea cables at risk → Market data delays widen retail spreads on every trade.
Digital Chokepoint: 17 fiber-optic cables running under the 16-mile-wide Bab el-Mandeb Strait carry 17% of global internet traffic and over 90% of Europe-Asia communications.
Fed Pressure: If the Fed hikes on September 16 as markets price at 90% probability, borrowing costs rise into a supply shock already pushing Brent above $104, with a peak of $107 this week.
Insurance Breakdown: Meta and its partners halted the 2Africa Gulf cable extension in March 2026 under force majeure, signaling that private capital already priced Red Sea infrastructure as uninsurable months before Perim fell.
Ninety feet under the water, seventeen cables run along the seafloor. They carry 17% of the world's internet traffic. On Friday, the fighters who blew up the Rubymar took the island that sits right on top of them.
The island is called Perim. It's a chunk of volcanic rock in the middle of a narrow strait between Yemen and Africa. Thirteen square kilometers. Smaller than most towns you'd drive through and forget. Now the Houthis own it.
There is no fresh water on Perim. No trees. A century-old lighthouse and some fishing huts. It was never supposed to matter to anyone. Now it might be the most important rock on earth.
Why’s This Robot Called Flippy? And How’s It Changing on 9/17?
A french-fry robot named Flippy? That doesn’t make sense.
Miso Robotics, whose share price changes on 9/17, has heard it all before.
But ask restaurant operators in the $1T fast-food industry like White Castle that deploy Miso’s Flippy Fry Station robot, and it sure makes a lot more sense.
Flippy FLIPS restaurant operator’s bottom lines, helping boost a location’s profits up to 4X.
And with Miso having a $4B/year US revenue opportunity for just the fry station alone and a special collaboration with NVIDIA, these french fries are way beyond small potatoes.
This year is when Flippy is really leaving its mark.
After Miso acquired two major new product assets, Flippy has become the star of a rapidly expanding ecosystem. Customers think of what Miso is building as a new operating system for modern restaurants.
And Miso just added big-name customers like Jersey Mike’s and Cinnabon…and grew its patent portfolio by ~10X to 300+. On top of that, they even started entering college campuses, NBA arenas, and a new national burger chain.
Everyday investors like you who don’t want to miss the robotics boom have already made more than 44,000 investments into Miso.
The strait itself is only sixteen miles wide. Perim sits in the middle and splits the water into two lanes. Every ship going from the Suez Canal to Asia squeezes through one of those lanes. Every barrel of oil. Every container of iPhones. Every dollar of goods.
I can't stop thinking about this. Not because of the oil, though Brent is above $100. Not because Saudi Arabia is scared, though it is. I'm thinking about the cables.
Those cables carry the market data. They carry the wire transfers between banks. They carry the cloud servers that Schwab and Fidelity and E*Trade run on. Ninety percent of all the internet traffic between Europe and Asia rides those seventeen wires. If they go dark, half the world can't call the other half.
Here's what worries me. In February 2024, a Houthi missile hit a cargo ship called the Rubymar in this same water. The ship sank slowly. As it went down, its anchor dragged across the seabed. In one pass, it cut three cables. Internet across the Red Sea slowed to a crawl for months.
That was an accident. The men who caused it now have missiles, a coastline, and an island sitting on top of the wires.
I don't think most people realize what happens when these cables degrade. The data still gets through. But it's slower. Milliseconds slower. That sounds like nothing. It isn't nothing.
Every time you place a trade in your brokerage account, the price you get depends on data flying through wires like these. When the pros can't trust the prices on their screens, they widen the spread. They quote a higher price to buy. They quote a lower price to sell. They protect themselves from what they don't know. Your order gets filled in that gap. You pay a little more. You sell for a little less. It never shows up on your statement.
You just get less money. Every trade. Quietly.
Last September, cables near Jeddah got cut. Microsoft's cloud slowed for hours. India and Pakistan and the Gulf slowed with it. Nobody in America noticed. But the machines that price your ETFs noticed.
By this spring, the insurance market for laying new cables in the Red Sea had broken. Meta stopped work on its big new cable project in March. Force majeure, they called it. That's a legal way of saying nobody will insure the risk anymore.
Now the same fighters have the high ground. Their spokesman, Yahya Saree, went on TV Thursday and banned all Saudi-flagged ships from the strait. On Friday, they raised their flag over Perim.
The Saudi crown prince called President Trump twice this week. He asked for our Navy. He asked for Marines. He asked for anything. Trump said no both times. He is not sending Americans to fight for Saudi ports.
So Riyadh is on its own. And Iran has already closed the Strait of Hormuz on the other side of the peninsula. Both of Saudi Arabia's main ways to ship oil are in enemy hands right now. That has never happened before. Not in my lifetime.
Where should you invest $100 right now?
Elon Musk just invented and patented this new AI technology…
And he's predicting it will launch a NEW industry that will grow more than 7 million percent in the coming years.
Even if he's only 10% right, that would still be enough to grow $100 into more than $700,000.
Meanwhile, the Fed meets Tuesday. The market thinks there is a 90% chance they raise rates again on Wednesday. Your mortgage. Your car loan. Your credit card. All of it gets more expensive.
I get it. This feels far away. Yemen is far away. A rock in a strait is far away. But your money is not far away. Your money moves through wires that pass under that rock. And the men who now own the rock have already proven, once, that they will cut those wires.
Here is the number I want you to remember. Seventeen percent. Seventeen percent of everything the internet carries passes through that one strait. Seventeen percent of the trades. Of the emails. Of the video calls. Of the market feeds. Of the bank transfers. All of it. Threaded through wires the width of a garden hose. Under an island the size of a small town. Guarded, now, by men who cheer when ships burn.
Nobody knows what happens next. I don't. The Navy doesn't. Riyadh doesn't. But I keep picturing that anchor from 2024. Scraping across the dark seabed. Snapping the cables one by one. And I keep picturing it happening again. On purpose this time.
More on this tomorrow.
— American Ledger
