Yen Holds: Patriot Gap Prices 71% Escalation
71%. Ukraine's air defense inventory is the number I keep returning to. Patriot interceptor stocks are depleting faster than resupply lanes can replenish them, and Washington is simultaneously running a bilateral currency intervention that consumed diplomatic bandwidth Kyiv needed. The structural read: when the Joint Chiefs are publicly threading an Iran off-ramp while Ukraine's shield thins, you are watching two theaters compete for the same finite pile of ordnance and attention. Markets are pricing neither risk together — they are treating yen stabilization as resolution and the Patriot gap as a procurement footnote. That is a category error. The assumption beneath the assumption is that escalation in one theater stays contained. I do not find that assumption supportable. I am wrong if resupply accelerates materially within sixty days or if the Iran channel holds.
