Pete Hegseth Accused of Trying to Profit Before Iran War as Markets Spiral

The simple truth is Pete Hegseth is spectacularly stupid. This is not a political opinion. This is a factual statement supported by evidence, and the evidence just landed in the Financial Times. According to the report, a broker for the US War Secretary attempted to make a multimillion-dollar investment in major defense companies in the weeks leading up to the US-Israeli attack on Iran. The target? BlackRock’s iShares Defense Industrials Active ETF. The timing? February. The strikes began on February 28.

So Pete Hegseth, a former Rupert Murdoch employee who now oversees the Pentagon and has access to the nation’s most sensitive security information, allegedly used that access to bet on defense stocks before the bombs dropped. His broker at Morgan Stanley contacted BlackRock. The trade was set. Millions of dollars were about to flow into companies that would inevitably profit from the conflict he was helping to orchestrate.

It looks like insider trading. It reads as corruption. In any functioning country, conduct like this would trigger immediate resignation, a criminal investigation, and likely a long stretch in federal prison. But because this is America in 2026, and because Pete Hegseth is a Donald Trump appointee, we are instead treated to the farce of watching him fail at his own corruption.

The Irony Is Almost Too Perfect

Here is the detail that turns an ugly story into an embarrassing one. The ETF Hegseth reportedly tried to buy did not soar. It fell, and not by a trivial margin. Amid the very conflict he may have assumed would lift defence stocks, the fund dropped 14.65 per cent.

The US War Secretary allegedly had advance knowledge of a coming war, appears to have tried to position himself financially, and still contrived to lose money.

It is hard to decide what is more shocking: the apparent attempt to profit from looming military action or the sheer ineptitude of it. This is the man Donald Trump put in charge of the Pentagon. This is the official presiding over a war now in its fifth week, with oil above $110 a barrel, the Strait of Hormuz closed, and Congress staring at a $200 billion supplemental funding request.

He seems to have looked at a gathering catastrophe, seen an opportunity for personal gain and still got it wrong. Even the market, for once, appeared unimpressed.

The Reverse Indicator That Keeps Giving

While Hegseth was busy losing money on his insider trade, something else was happening in the markets. Something that should terrify everyone paying attention.

Iran’s Parliament Speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, offered a piece of trading advice that has proven almost prophetic. He called pre-market news a “reverse indicator.” If they pump it, he said, short it. If they dump it, go long. It was a cynical observation about how the Trump administration’s statements on the war have become untethered from reality. But it has also been astonishingly accurate.

Consider what happened on Sunday. At 4:12 PM ET, Ghalibaf made his comment. By 10:00 PM, S&P 500 futures had fallen nearly 1 percent on mounting war concerns. By midnight, they had reversed all losses and turned green. Then, at 7:25 AM Monday, Donald Trump posted that “great progress” was being made on peace talks. The S&P 500 rallied, adding billions in market cap. By 3:00 PM, the index had turned red again and was down 100 points from its high.

That is a nearly $2 trillion swing in less than 24 hours. And it is not an anomaly. According to Axios, Trump has falsely signaled that the Iran war was about to end 12 times since the conflict began a month ago. He has claimed victory was imminent 12 times. Each promise sparked a brief market rally. Reality, meanwhile, has cut through every one of them. This is the conduct of men sowing chaos, either through staggering incompetence or through market manipulation that should draw scrutiny from every regulator in the country.

The Damage Nobody Is Talking About

Here is what gets lost in the circus of Hegseth’s failed insider trade and Trump’s endless market-moving statements: the global economy is already broken. People just haven’t realized it yet.

The Strait of Hormuz has been closed for over 30 days. That means 20 percent of the world’s oil supply is offline. Thirty percent of global fertilizer production is gone. Thirty percent of the world’s helium supply is gone. These are not abstract numbers. These are the building blocks of modern industrial society. Fertilizer shortages mean food shortages. Helium shortages mean medical supply chains collapse. Oil at $110 a barrel means the price of everything goes up.

The last time oil spiked like this was 2008, when it hit $147 a barrel. Everyone remembers the crash that followed. But what people forget is that the crash did not happen immediately. It took about 60 days for the ripple effects to fully manifest. Gasoline prices surged. Purchasing power evaporated. Food riots broke out in 22 countries. And then, on September 29, 2008, the Dow dropped 777 points in a single day. We are in that window right now. The damage has been done. We are simply waiting to feel it.

Hegseth Is Not Alone. The Entire Administration Is a Family Enterprise.

Pete Hegseth tried to insider trade his way to war profits. He failed, lost money, and proved himself so dumb that even his corruption is incompetent.

But Hegseth is not alone. He is merely the most cartoonish example of an administration that has turned national security into a family business. According to the Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are investors in a new drone company actively pursuing Pentagon contracts. The same sons tasked with “draining the swamp” are now positioning themselves to profit from the very military spending their father oversees.

The Wall Street Journal also revealed that a UAE-linked firm tied to the “spy sheikh” quietly purchased a 49 percent stake in the Trump family’s crypto venture for half a billion dollars, months before the Emirates won access to tightly guarded American AI chips. Jared Kushner, meanwhile, has his private equity firm in talks with the Saudi sovereign wealth fund for a $55 billion buyout of Electronic Arts, a deal that would enrich the president’s son-in-law at the hands of a foreign government the administration courts for influence.

And then there are the oil futures. According to the Financial Times, $580 million in suspicious trades occurred in a single minute just before Trump’s Iran reversal. Nobel laureate Paul Krugman called it “treason.” The pattern is unmistakable: insider access, foreign money, and a family treating the levers of power as their personal portfolio.

Final Thoughts

Do not let the comedy of Hegseth’s incompetence distract you from the tragedy. A War Secretary who attempts to profit from a war he is overseeing is not merely corrupt. He is a national security threat. And he is not an outlier. He is the logical product of an administration that has treated the markets as a personal playground and the truth as optional.

Trump has signaled the war is ending 12 times. He has danced, spouted nonsense, and claimed Iran is “all gone” while the conflict grinds into its second month. The global economy is teetering on a precipice, oil is at $110 a barrel, and the people running the country are busy losing money on insider trades that should land them in prison.

They say never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. But here, we have both. The malice of profiting from war. The incompetence of failing at it.

Pete Hegseth is spectacularly stupid. The same label applies to Trump’s son, who is investing in defense contractors. Nor does the son-in-law escape it, given his willingness to take Saudi money. And let us not forget the administration itself, which lets foreign powers buy stakes in family businesses while the world burns. The damage they have wrought will be felt for years. And the best they could do was lose money on the trade.