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Our full discussion transcribed below:
by Rod D. Martin
August 12, 2026
I appeared on NTD Newsroom with Don Ma to discuss how Iran’s Hormuz gamble is shifting energy power from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America, while Blue State socialists are driving global finance south.
We discuss:
Why Iran’s deal with Oman cannot overcome American naval dominance in the Strait of Hormuz
How new pipelines, maritime insurance, and continued shipping are steadily destroying Iran’s remaining leverage
Why the disruption is moving long-term energy contracts and capital from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America
How the new Texas Stock Exchange and Texas business courts offer companies an escape from New York and Delaware
PLUS why even BlackRock, Nasdaq, and the New York Stock Exchange are preparing for a financial future centered in Texas
It’s 20 minutes of in-depth analysis you need. Watch the interview, and pass it along!
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Our full discussion:
Iran’s Oman Gambit and Midterm Elections Strategy
Don Ma: The newest stock exchange in the United States is now up and running in Texas. Joining us to share his insights on the Texas Stock Exchange and what it could mean for America’s financial markets is Rod Martin, founder and CEO of Martin Capital.
Rod, it’s always great to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us today.
Before we talk about the Texas Stock Exchange, let me get your quick thoughts on the latest developing situation with the Iran war.
Apparently, Iran is talking with Oman to try to open the Strait of Hormuz. It seems to me that this says the United States and its actions, whether you think about the blockade or anything else, are working. Iran wants the Strait open.
Why is Iran talking to Oman?
Rod D. Martin: Of course, they’re across the Strait from each other. In a perfect world, from Iran’s point of view, it would get the Omanis to join it in making the Strait the national territorial waters of Iran and Oman. They would set up a joint tollbooth.
That is just not going to happen. They don’t have any way to enforce that, and nobody is going to stand for it.
Can they make trouble for a while? Yes. Is this the best leverage Iran has right now? Yes.
But is it really all that effective? As you know, we’ve moved around a thousand commercial ships through the Strait in the last few weeks with very little incident. Every day the blockade seals Iran’s ports is a day they’re losing $400 million to $500 million in a relatively poor country.
This is a bit of a waiting game. They think they’re going to wait Trump out through the midterms. I think they’re very much mistaken about where we are right now, especially after the Michigan primary last week.
I think we stand a very good chance of not just a Republican Senate, but at least the possibility of a Republican pickup in the Senate. On the House side, generic ballot notwithstanding, the Democrats would have to win two-thirds of the seriously contested races on the ballot in November to get a majority. Then they wouldn’t have enough seats to actually be able to legislate.
I think our chances are pretty good. More to the point, I think Donald Trump thinks our chances are pretty good. The Iranians trying to wait that out isn’t going to get them anywhere. Eventually, we’re going to bankrupt them.
Who Controls the Strait?
Don Ma: There are a couple of democratic socialists running against Republicans. Some people say this is good for Republicans because they believe the majority of Americans aren’t that far left. We’ll have to see what happens.
But to your point, this deal Iran is making with Oman really is irrelevant because the United States controls the Strait of Hormuz. Whatever happens with the Strait, at the end of the day, is what the United States decides. Iran still has to get approval from the United States.
Rod D. Martin: If we had elected Kamala, I guess this could work for them. Short of that, there’s just no way an American government is going to allow a chokepoint like this to become national territorial waters.
It’s against international law. It’s against U.S. principles going back to the Revolutionary War era. There’s just no way that’s going to happen.
The U.S. Navy is absolutely dominant. Iran can harass shipping, but it can’t stop it. It can raise people’s maritime-risk insurance. It can certainly do that.
But even there, the president has created a facility through the Development Finance Corporation that backstops the insurance. They assigned Chubb to take the lead on the private side. The more we do that, first of all, the more business we transfer here from London, and the more the insurance risk goes down. You’re not going to be able to price that the way Iran would like.
Within 18 to 24 months, you’re going to be able to route almost 75 percent of the prewar volume of oil through pipelines going to other seas. That doesn’t leave Iran much leverage at all.
Don Ma: That’s another great point. The longer the Strait of Hormuz is “closed,” the more irrelevant it becomes because people will find other ways.
One thing I see Iran doing with this deal with Oman is that it could potentially give Iran a way to cause trouble without accountability. Iran could say, “We never had a deal with the United States, so we’re free to do whatever we want. Our deal is with Oman.” It has that excuse. What do you think?
Rod D. Martin: They’re not free to break international law. These are international waters. They don’t get to annex them. That’s silly.
It’s even sillier when you consider that it’s basically as if, 10 minutes after the Soviets took Berlin in 1945, the Nazis had said, “And now Russia has to surrender.” It’s ridiculous.
They are posturing. A lot of that is for their own domestic audience. A lot of it is because they’re used to America doing stupid things, as we did at the end in Afghanistan and at the end in Vietnam. We win wars and then lose the peace. They figure that, if they can outlast us, they might get to that.
I don’t think that’s going to work for them here. I don’t think Oman is going to be able to get very far with this either, because it has neighbors that are awfully well armed. I don’t think the UAE is going to put up with it. I don’t think Saudi Arabia is going to put up with it.
The only thing that might work in Oman’s favor is that the UAE is doubling pipeline capacity across Oman to its port of Fujairah. They might like to see the Strait closed a little longer so they have more financial advantage that way.
However cynical it may sound, the United States is benefiting immensely from the semi-closure of the Strait. The rest of the world may be sucking wind, but the United States is selling more oil and liquefied natural gas from the Gulf of America than you can shake a stick at. In many cases, those are 20-year contracts.
We are shifting energy’s capital from the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of America, and it’s going to last.
Don Ma: Let me make one more comment on the Oman and Iran situation, and then I’ll ask you about the stock exchange.
At the end of the day, do you think Oman will stand with the United States in this Iran war, or is Oman more of a wild card?
Rod D. Martin: I don’t think Oman is that much of a wild card. It may mess with us a little bit, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t want the Saudis down its throat. It doesn’t want the UAE down its throat.
This disrupts Oman’s other relationships in favor of a country that can’t make any of this stick. Oman doesn’t have a navy worth mentioning, so it’s not as though it can go fight the USS George H.W. Bush or something. That’s not going to happen.
Premises considered, I think this is a tempest in a teapot. I think it’s maneuvering mostly for the domestic audience in Iran.
The truth is that every day this goes on, they’re losing, as I said, about half a billion dollars that they can’t afford to lose. Yes, they’re fanatics, and yes, they’re going to hang on to the death. But at some point, the lower-level guys aren’t getting paid.
When enough of that happens, armies have disintegrated for thousands of years. This isn’t going to be different.
Texas Challenges New York
Don Ma: Let’s move on to another important topic: the latest with the Texas Stock Exchange. Why is this significant?
Rod D. Martin: Your prior segment actually showed it very well. We’ve got all these democratic socialists winning all these primaries. We’ve elected a few. Zohran Mamdani, of course, is the poster child for all this in New York.
He’s doing everything in his power to drive capital out of the city. As long as I have been vaguely familiar with the field of economics, I have heard liberal economists tell me that changing tax rates doesn’t really affect behavior: They can take as much out of your pocket as they want, and you won’t do anything about it.
That is never, ever true.
There’s a reason East Germany had to build the Berlin Wall. It had to keep its people in. Trump is building a wall on the southern border to keep people out. The Germans had to build a wall to keep them in because they were confiscating everything they had.
New York, and for that matter California, Michigan, Illinois, New Jersey, and Delaware, are all doing the same thing. But they can’t build a wall to keep anybody in. So where are people going? They’re going to Florida. They’re going to Texas.
This new development in Texas is really quite remarkable. New York has been the financial center of the globe for a century. It’s absolutely unassailable, except by shooting itself in the foot. That’s exactly what’s happening here.
It’s not just the Texas Stock Exchange, which fully opened at the end of July. That’s an extraordinary thing. The two lead partners are BlackRock on the left and Citadel on the right. They put in probably about $100 million between them. The total raise has been $275 million.
This is a well-capitalized exchange. It’s a good business. The Texas government in Austin has gone out of its way to roll out the red carpet and keep regulations really low.
You have national trading on that exchange. Two-thirds of the public companies in this country can be traded on the Texas Stock Exchange.
But wait, there’s more, because Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange have now opened branches in Texas. In fact, one of those was a different exchange in Illinois. They rebranded it and moved it to Dallas.
Even the New York exchanges are now planning their exit route. If New York becomes impossible to do business in — and there’s no question it’s doing everything it can to ruin itself — you’re going to see an exodus.
You’ve already seen, since the beginning of COVID, a tremendous movement of highly qualified personnel and capital into South Florida and North Texas. It could become a flood very quickly.
You’re seeing the same thing with incorporations coming out of Delaware and headquarters coming out of Illinois and California. This is a huge development in the history of global finance, and it’s not going away.
Texas’s New Financial and Legal Operating System
Don Ma: Is there any reason capital markets must be centered in New York? Is there anything stopping the current status quo from moving from New York to Texas?
Rod D. Martin: Historically, yes, because that’s where all the finance professionals were: all the guys who knew how to do this stuff, who had the money, and who had the relationships.
New York has been the nerve center of the world. If you’re going to do that kind of business, of course you go to New York to do it. That’s a no-brainer.
Well, not so much anymore.
When New York — not just the city, but the state government as well — does everything it can to make itself inhospitable to capital and its free flow, people start looking around for alternatives.
I think the most remarkable thing about the Texas Stock Exchange is not that it has big backers, but that one of those big backers is BlackRock, the absolute tip of the spear in pushing ESG regulations on all of us. Yet it, too, sees the need for an escape hatch.
You’re getting an accumulation not just of capital, but of financial infrastructure and, crucially, legal infrastructure.
Texas has rolled out a separate court of chancery, just as Delaware has, that is exclusively for business. You can get predictable results in a Texas court focused entirely on the specialized needs of large businesses.
That’s a huge development. It was one of the main reasons to incorporate in Delaware. Delaware shot itself in the foot.
The more you have the legal infrastructure, the more you have the capital already there, because Texas is becoming the global center of energy. Then you throw in the financial infrastructure and the financial people - the personnel who understand it and make it happen.
No, New York has absolutely no barrier to its own demise. There are plenty of qualified people in Texas, and that was the principal thing keeping New York a global financial capital.
Don Ma: You mentioned fair courts in Texas. What does the Texas exchange offer that’s different from other existing exchanges?
Rod D. Martin: The exchange itself is really quite well constructed.
They went in and said, “What are all the things that would make somebody not want to list in New York? Let’s do the opposite.”
They don’t have all this ESG stuff. They don’t have all these state mandates that force public companies, whose shareholders want a completely different result, to do what politicians in New York force them to do. Texas has taken an incredibly hands-off position on all of that.
I come back to the new Texas business-court system because it really is a huge feature. Business is an incredibly specialized thing. If it’s just the corner grocery, maybe not. But if you’re talking about multinational corporations operating in 100 countries, with really complex issues coming before judges, you need judges who understand them.
Your normal local judge who mostly hears divorces and dog-bite cases isn’t the guy. That was always a huge advantage Delaware had over everybody else: its unique court of chancery for hearing these very high-end business cases.
Now Texas has it, and Texas isn’t in the business of just voiding your pay plan, as Delaware did to Elon Musk. There were two different shareholder votes at Tesla, and a single activist judge blocked the man from being paid for five years of extraordinary work.
That eventually got overturned by the Supreme Court in Delaware, but by then the damage was done.
There’s an exodus of those incorporations from Delaware. Delaware, another blue state, makes a shocking percentage of its state budget from franchise taxes on corporations that are domiciled there but not headquartered there.
That is a huge blow to Delaware. If this starts accelerating, as I said, it will be a flood. You’re going to see all these companies move to Texas, and it’s going to be really good for the U.S. economy.
Socialists’ Problem: Capital Votes With Its Feet
Don Ma: One final question: Does the Texas exchange have the depth of liquidity? Is it growing, and how fast is it growing?
Rod D. Martin: It’s growing really fast. They represent right now about two-thirds of the public liquidity in the United States. That’s a very big deal.
They’ve just started. They’ve been fully open for a little over a week. The exchange itself is well capitalized and extremely well run. They’ve got top-quality people. They’re actively recruiting, and they’ve got the state government doing everything in its considerable power to help them recruit because it’s good for Texas.
It’s great for Texas’s tax base. It’s great for Texas’s roads and schools. All of these things are working together in a way that you’ll never get out of New York anymore.
Kathy Hochul is not going to do what Rick Perry or Greg Abbott are willing to do. She’s too busy trying to destroy business, and so is Mamdani.
We saw that from another direction in the Trump cases, where they absolutely made up new law out of the blue. In one case, the state legislature passed a law that applied only to Donald Trump so they could prosecute him.
If you’re sitting in a bar in New York and you flirt with the wrong waitress, and it turns out she’s the niece of a Democrat prosecuting attorney, you’re going to lose your pay package. You’re going to get bankrupted by the courts. That isn’t okay.
That’s why Trump has moved as much of his business as possible out of New York and changed his domicile. He is a resident of Florida. No one ever imagined that, least of all Donald Trump.
New York is creating inhospitable circumstances. Those circumstances drive people and capital to vote with their feet, and they’re going to Texas.
Don Ma: Rod, that sounds good. Great conversation today. As always, thank you for your time.
Rod D. Martin: Thank you.
