The oil market effects have been fascinating to see. I only vaguely paid attention to it in the past (back in the peak oil days) but it's interesting to see how the chain of things work. You can produce oil type A and it can be useless because you run refineries type B, but those type B refineries are more profitable to run because the byproducts are really valuable. So you sell oil A and buy oil B and everyone is happy but then one day you go and raise oil B prices and you end up selling cheap oil and buying expensive oil so even though you produce more than anyone else, you still suffer the consequences. In fact, you can process oil A through your things but then the fancy machinery you bought sits idle, and you raised the money to buy that on the assumption you could process oil B and get byproducts.
That and the constraint on GPUs and datacenters and all has really brought home to me what a globalized economy we live in and how much our prosperity has depended on us being peacefully happy to trade with each other. One of my favourite books on the general subject of trade is A Splendid Exchange which gives a cool directionally-correct view of how valuable trade is.
Funny to think that Pax Americana would be ended by America.
I think the best interpretation of the overall stock market valuation is as a barometer of the wealthy's feelings, i.e. expectations of future returns rather than true future returns... but doesn't it seem like feelings have completely unmoored from the baked-in damage to the global economy from the current shortage?
Or has GDP growth become so decoupled from energy use that I'm wrong and stock market valuations are completely OK, even as airlines brace for fewer flights due to energy shocks?
I wonder if some of this is because of the "prices are set on the margins" effect of markets. The price of anything is set by the folks who are actively transacting at any given time; if you're not buying and selling, your opinion doesn't matter.
Oftentimes, near a market top, the people who are value investors and actually care about price end up selling off all their holdings. But because they have already sold, and are not buying, they drop out of the market entirely. Prices get set by the people who are price insensitive, because they're the only ones willing to participate. As a result, you often get the "blow off top" right before a market crash, where the stock market moves sharply upwards even though fundamentals say it should crash. All the folks who believe it will crash have already left and no longer participate in price-setting.
> But because they have already sold, and are not buying, they drop out of the market entirely. Prices get set by the people who are price insensitive, because they're the only ones willing to participate.
The buy & hold value investor is also not participating in price discovery since they are just passively holding.
That makes sense, but something I've been wondering as of late... what if markets are just being... cornered? Surely, it can difficult to assess genuine market activity from not, no?
I mean I know it sounds absurd for something like the size of the stock market, but all you really need to do is have enough capital to consume floating demand, and you can control prices. Even easier with options, as they give leverage to do this. And arguably this essentially explains the behavior behind stocks like GME, AMC, AVIS, BIRD... heck even Tesla. If you look at Tesla, most of its stock price appreciation happened in 2020-2021, when SoftBank was allegedly controlling their options chain. And since its peak in 2021, when SoftBank stopped, Tesla has underperformed the S&P 500, and would probably would have fallen by now if it wasn't for all the passive inflows from being in the Mag 7. I mean, it could just be coincidence or genuine market activity, but how can we be certain that markets aren't just being cornered by coordinated groups?
Also, the oil market right now doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you compare futures and spot and what analyst estimates are giving even in the best case scenario. But Japan mentioned considering shorting over $1.4 trillion in oil futures, and if they actually are, then suddenly things make a bit more sense...
The stock market has stopped making sense since the 2008 financial meltdown. Many reasons for this. In part, ZIRP is to blame -- a ton of money flowed into stocks simply because they were the only way to tread water and get a return. In part, you can blame Bitcoin (which demonstrated at scale that you can have an "asset" with zero underlying value and net-negative social utility that still functions as an appreciating value token,) and the meme-stock.
The stock market is basically detached from the industrial manufacturing/production economy -- and even to some extent the services/insurance economy -- and is now vibes/feels based.
Regardless of individual stock performance, present-day total stock market liquidity is a proxy for expectations of future total stock market liquidity.
If people are keeping their money in the market (regardless of allocation inside the market) they are expecting that any other asset class will perform worse in the near future. If they expect that commodities are too volatile, spending won't pay off, monies and bonds will inflate away and land may face legal risks from populist, technocratic or extrajudiciary changes to the legal system then their least worst options are to go all in on stocks. Furthermore, the energy sector is going to have a windfall from filling up the VLCCs of the world and look for anywhere to dump the cash that helps escape taxes, driving future liquidity expectations even higher.
Right, and "monies and bonds will inflate away" is related to what I said re ZIRPs -- you can't expect a decent return by parking your money with the bank, either, as interest rates are low to nonexistent. The stock market's the only good option. This was no accident, it was an intentional policy move... And now, "the DOW's over 50,000!"
What's even more troubling is that there was once the pretense that valuations had something to do with fundamentals, but this has gone entirely out the window since about 2013.
So basically none of it makes any sense and you've just got to ride the tiger.
I’ve never looked at the numbers to see exactly how large of a pool it is but millions of Americans are effectively forced to buy into the market to fund our 401ks and future retirements. That’s billions of dollars of inflow every month that has to go somewhere, usually index funds.
it is exactly this. I am self-employed and have been managing my solo 401k for 15+ years now. while I am fully aware of market being overvalued I will still max out my 401k this year ($80k, I am over 50 :) ) and that money needs to go somewhere. I could theoretically sell and sit on the cash and wait on "crash" but I could have technically done that a year ago (this were similarly not very rosy) or even earlier and that obviously would have been a terrible financial decision. no one can time the market and therein lies the core issue, money will always be flowing in...
Thanks the second chart is more concerning than the first. The first has a variety of potential distortions at play first of all portion of industrial activity that's done by public vs private companies shifts over time and second of all a lot of these companies do 40 to 50% of their business overseas.
Whereas a historically low ratio of earnings to index value is a deeper concern to me
One of the explanations I've heard is that a lot of traders were caught out by how quickly the economy rebounded from COVID-19, so they're overcompensating by underreacting to the current situation.
> One of the explanations I've heard is that a lot of traders were caught out by how quickly the economy rebounded from COVID-19, so they're overcompensating by underreacting to the current situation.
Yikes.
The reason Covid wasn’t as bad as it could be was WFH.
There’s no equivalent for oil. You can’t grow food at scale without fertilizer.
WFH and a big dollop of "socialism" in the US. Supposedly the reason many voters felt that their lives were better under Trump 1.0 was due to the various subsidy and rent freeze measures taken by the US government during the pandemic.
Another explanation is that their expectation of the future value of money is very low. If money turns out to devalue 10X then owning stocks (call on the future income stream of companies selling presumably useful things/services in the future) that seem to be 10X overvalued makes sense.
It's a multi-layered question. On the one hand if energy is more expensive and you still consume roughly the same amount but actually that raises gdp. However you're assuming that there's demand destruction with the rise of energy was your reasonable assumption... but that's uneven and there's going to be an increase in demand for certain things that actually benefit from higher energy prices like anything in electric tech or green energy.
Probably most importantly the economy at this point is largely a digital economy rather than one centered on goods.. in other words GDP growth is no longer coupled to energy consumption. The fact that we're able to transition to a largely remote workforce around covid is a testament to this.
The implication is that in the event that these high prices sustain and there is some demand destruction a lot of fundamental parts of the economy will continue to function in an evolved way for example online.
And then of course there's AI which could be considered sort of an extension of this digital economy which is driving so much of the underlying growth.
That doesn't mean there won't be hot spots like this article is pointing out perhaps the UK is particularly exposed. On the other hand the fact that so much of the UK's economy is financial services and hence in a way benefits from all this volatility ... means it is not all so clear.
It would be easier to say that the real impact will be on the manufacturing powerhouses but even they will benefit from the transition to a solar and battery based energy system.
Now if you believe that it's inevitable that this bubble will have a slowdown and you speculate that the bubble might be partially punctured by these high energy prices that seems like a reasonable hypothesis... but it could also be the opposite.. In other words the demand destruction for energy could actually mean capital is looking for a place to invest fruitful elsewhere.
Counterintuitive as it all may seem, this system is simply not one anyone can reasonably expect to make predictions around at least any more reliably than walking into a casino and expecting to beat the house.
Similarly the experts and talking heads telling you the implications of this war or the Ukraine war are making one dimensional predictions that are simply not honest enough about how chaotic and reflexive these systems are
I can't see rationing - there is a fairly open market in jet fuel and if supply is short the price will go up and and people will fly less. At the moment jet fuel futures prices for the summer are similar to now so people can hedge if they want.
We haven't had fuel rationing in the UK since 1957 for the Suez crisis.
I see you can still get a London - Athens single flight for £39 in August which doesn't scream airline panic.
Already happening. UK airlines are desperately culling flights, and have been doing so for the past month. The pace of cancellations is also increasing, with the last week seeing cancellation waves that from the outside look quite paniccy.
Who do you think spends more? Your neighbor vacationing a few hours away from home? Or that international visitor who wants to see everything they can in their one week in the country?
So let me get this straight. Foreign tourist spend less money in your country than domestic tourists because the foreign tourist are driving in with an RV and living off of a fifty pound bag of rice during their vacation?
Let me set this straight: My point is you have an incorrect idea of how much space a month of food (and it needn't all be rice; that just illustrates the point) takes up. You can readily fit it in an RV, especially a big one.
Fwiw, there are a lot of highly frugal people in eg the surfer/kiting community (example!) which do indeed spend pretty much nothing where they're visiting for their hobby.
And they do often smell and leave trash behind.
So I can imagine that being true if you're living in one of those hotspots... It's a hard topic though
Tourism provides low quality, transitory jobs, with income flowing more to wealth holders (property owners etc) than to wealth creators. It distorts property markets and sucks the oxygen out of other kinds of business. About time the Med weaned itself off of it.
This doesn’t sound like they’ll be weaning off it, though: it’ll be cold turkey. That’s going to let wealth holders pick up more property at depressed prices and drive down wages.
>Tourism provides low quality, transitory jobs, with income flowing more to wealth holders (property owners etc) than to wealth creators
No. It's worse than that. The transient customer base rewards the worst people. The people who make the most money and have the most influence are basically scammers who manage to stay one season ahead of the bad reviews. They're screwing customers, shafting suppliers, employees, business partners, etc, everybody. By the time the 1-star reviews are pouring in they've pivoted, sold the businesses, under new management, etc, etc, and are on to the next venture.
So over time these people get rich you basically wind up with these sorts of people running everything including the government and it's all just shit.
And it permeates everything. Everyone starts screwing everyone and being scummy by default. And the time and money and effort of having to hedge against in literally everything makes everyone all substantially poorer
Source: Grew up in it. First world white people too, so spare me some patronizing BS about low trust societies or whatever
Right! I am currently living in a (relatively poor) Western European country that has recently experienced a tourism boom, and although the money pouring in has been nice for at least some, it has wrecked the existing social fabric in many ways - starting with housing.
On the flip side, at least the beaches are kept clean. In the UK (where I'm from) there is a big problem with sewage outflows. Meanwhile here an entire beach got washed away by the winter storms - so they are putting it all back! Maybe 100 000 m3 of sand!
If another country were causing all this trouble for the rest of world, we know what would have happend. But this is the US we're talking about, so that's OK, I guess. Just like the US made china pay for Covid, US is going to compesate all of us for these "little invconveniences", right? Right?
That might work if airlines bought most of their fuel in the spot market. But major airlines tend to hedge their fuel prices, buying fuel that doesn't exist yet for a guaranteed price. If the shortage is severe enough, that fuel might not be delivered, leading to worse disruption than high prices alone would have caused.
Jet fuel isn't exactly a consumer good. Storing large quantities of it isn't exactly easy. It doesn't strike me as a good that is likely to panic bought.
The UK does already have salt cavern storage for crude and natural gas, so it would be possible to make sites for kerosene if not for the present shortage.
You can fly to the EU for 600 USD (retour), more in high season. Non business people are willing to spend 1200, 1400 USD. I assume around 2000 USD the demand will fall off significantly. At 5000 USD for economy it will be close to zero.
I just booked for the fall to London. Roundtrip was around $1200 from eastern US in economy with a couple of minor upgrades which is high but not ridiculous. The increment is basically a couple nights of hotels and meals. I've paid more; I've paid less. Was going to take ship back but it wasn't available for one person.
Unless there's a single buyer, or at least a coordinated decision of "above this price, we all buy nothing, and below this price we all buy our normal amounts", it truly does matter what the price is when there's not enough for sale.
The price is determined by who needs it the most and is willing to give up the most cash. Instead of rationing by lines, or fixed quantities, it's allocation to those who can either make the most out of the jet fuel, or those for whom money is the least valuable.
And when your supply of jet fuel is cut off? If you don't ration and let the free market decide how to allocate it, how long do you think it lasts until you say "jet fuel doesn't exist"?
Perhaps because oil is not a luxury good, but an absolute requirement for a functioning economy. I imagine the consequences of literally running out of jet fuel would cripple cargo transport, among other things.
It pains me to even bother taking this comment with anything in the vicinity of seriousness, but surely you understand that the problems with human civilization are in spite of, and not for lack of, the existence of intelligent people. Intelligence is not the bottleneck.
They'd set up systems to take the economic dependence on the activity of humans down to zero. No human contributions to GDP, no need to care about where they are able to move to.
The popular answer I've seen over the past few weeks is to just blame everything on the US, but that kind of thinking and lack of agency is exactly why countries like the UK are in the position they are.
Just constant burying heads in the sand, and believing in models where the prior assumptions are from a bygone era.
Not only do those particular prior assumptions date to 1957 in a way that makes deviating from them structurally dangerous, they involve very low military spending in a way that makes deviating from them politically dangerous.
Fixing the budget hole to pay for that spending without resorting to giving many people living in Monaco the Eichmann treatment as a side effect (which is untenable on account of French security guarantees to Monaco) would need some kind of government of hardcore believers who could also do math.
For decades the world has very reasonably operated on the assumption that the world’s primary superpower wouldn’t be dumb enough to do this without a proper plan.
Everyone except the Iranians and maybe the Israelis were flat-footed by this, and the things that can be done about it are largely on the years/decades scale.
The way i read the parent post, is that the uk decided to invest in other things than military. As a result they are at the whims of USA foreign policy and can't really do much about it. In an alternate world where UK spent more on hard power, they might not be subject to the whims of america to the same extent.
[To be clear, i dont 100% agree with this argument. I think there is a little truth to it but also things are much more complicated than that and it ignores the geopolitical tension in the region that was going to explode one way or another even without usa]
Reason dictates having redundancy in place. Having prepared scenarios for what to do. A lot of countries clearly don't have that and they are operating on the assumption that no major disruption is going to happen.
Depending on resources coming from historically unstable locations and not having plans to prepare for such instability is just foolish.
USA is proximally to blame, but Iran in its current borders is an entity that is largely the brain child of Britain. It ended up encompassing the Baloch and Kurds, who could have helped check Persian power and make Persian borders more penetrable, which was probably a geopolitical mistake.
That only applies to Iranian traffic. It would in fact be an act of war for the U.S. to blockade maritime traffic of countries it's not already at war with.
Cuban tankers have hardly left the island’s shores for months. Oil-rich allies have halted shipments or declined to come to the rescue. The U.S. military has seized ships that have supported Cuba. And in recent days, vessels roaming the Caribbean Sea in search of fuel for Cuba have come up empty or been intercepted by the U.S. authorities.
Last week, a tanker linked to Cuba burned fuel for five days to get to the port in Curaçao but then left without cargo, according to ship-tracking data. Three days later, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted a tanker full of Colombian fuel oil en route to Cuba that had gotten within 70 miles of the island, the data showed.
While President Trump has pledged to halt any oil headed to Cuba, the Trump administration has stopped short of calling its policy a blockade.
But it is functioning as one.
Sure, economic sanctions have been in place for a long time, but the US has started seizing full ships.
Which in turn is also against international law (international law would let them retaliate against israel & usa. It doesn't let them target neutral shipping [edit: to clarify i mean neutral shipping going to neutral ports]).
Of course international law is not worth the paper its written on.
> Blockades restrict the trading rights of neutrals, who must submit for inspection for contraband, which the blockading power may define narrowly or broadly, sometimes including food and medicine.
To clarify, i meant shipping to neutral ports (article 99 of San Remo: "A blockade must not bar access to the ports and coasts of neutral States" https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/san-remo-manu... ). Oman seems neutral in all this but nonetheless affected.
They would be allowed to blockade neutral ships going to enemy ports (e.g. Israel) subject to a bunch of rules but that doesn't seem to be what they are doing.
I dont even think Iran is claiming this is a blockade. They are claiming its part of its territorial waters, and they are claiming that they dont recognize the UNCLOS which would give vessels transit rights (but at the same time they are claiming they recognize the part of UNCLOS that allows claiming 12 miles out as territorial waters). At least that is what i got from https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-legality-of-irans-closure-of-th...
> There are no neutral ports there. Every other country past the strait is a US ally with US military bases hosted on their territory.
I dont think hosting a US base would necessarily make them non neutral unless that base was used offensively. According to international law, Iran would also have to justify their exercise of self-defense rights was porportional, which even if you accept hosting a us base made that state non neutral, i think it would be difficult to justify their response against states simply hosting a us base met the porportionality requirements of int law.
However even if they were enemy states, Iran would have to declare all of these countries as being under blockade, which they haven't as far as i am aware.
> Oman is before the strait begins.
How is the Oman port of Khasab before the strait begins?
As a late thought - i would also add that the idea that this is an aggressive war against Iran relies on the idea that iran and hamas are separate enough that israel striking iran is not self-defense from when hamas struck Israel. But the relationship between Hamas and Iran is a lot closer than usa and the gulf countries. So i think its difficult to say that Iran striking gulf countries that host USA bases but are otherwise uninvolved is legitament self-defense without also saying that Israel striking iran was legitament self-defense from the proxies they fund. I feel like logically you cant have it both ways. Either both are valid self defense or neither are.
Did you miss the part about contraband? You quoted it, after all.
Firing on neutral shipping is not the same as intercepting it and inspecting it for war materiel or other contraband. Preventing shipping from reaching or leaving Kuwaiti ports is not the same as inspecting it for war materiel or other contraband.
Iran has been requiring shipping to submit to inspection and tolls via an adjusted route through the strait. And they can certainly deem oil contraband if they are allowed to do food and medicine, as quoted.
Ships that don’t stop get fired upon. That’s what happens in a blockade.
Kuwait is a US ally and hosts American military bases. Stopping shipping to there is very clearly legitimate.
> And they can certainly deem oil contraband if they are allowed to do food and medicine, as quoted.
Wikipedia is defining what the term blockade means not what constitutes a legal blockade.
Medicine is not allowed to be blockaded. Food is not allowed to be blockaded if there is a shortage.
Relavent parts of the san remo manual:
> 102 The declaration or establishment of a blockade is prohibited if:
> (a) it has the sole purpose of starving the civilian population or denying it other objects essential for its survival; or
> (b) the damage to the civilian population is, or may be expected to be, excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated from the blockade.
> 103. If the civilian population of the blockaded territory is inadequately provided with food and other objects essential for its survival, the blockading party must provide for free passage of such foodstuffs and other essential supplies, subject to...
> 104. The blockading belligerent shall allow the passage of medical supplies for the civilian population or for the wounded and sick members of armed forces,...
You're correct that blocking oil would be allowed (barring situations where the civilian population needs it to survive, which doesnt apply here) if this was a legal blockade. However Iran is not complying with the other rules around blockades, which is the issue.
I guess nobody likes hearing that their country is unethically invading other countries. As much as I hate defending Iran, I don't think there's much of a difference between what the US is doing to Iran and what Russia is doing to Ukraine.
We in Europe negotiated the JCPOA. Read its terms. Understand its lead negotiatior was the EU representative. That was our codified relationship with Iran. Now compare that to the best case after what you geniuses started.
Own up to it. This is solely on the US. The rest of us had it handled until you came along.
The Soviet Union gave the equivalent of about 80-100 million USD in support to the ANC in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. As soon as they got power, the ANC turned around and aligned with the west, wasting every rouble Moscow spent.
Since the inauguration Trump has supported physical seizures of many different kinds of Russia-aligned merchant shipping and the economic degradation of Russia's allies. Given all of this, we can assume that the Russian asset angle is a much less accurate explanation for Trump's behavior than the alternative theory where he is highly suggestible to the most recent person to heavily compliment him in-person which used to be Putin and has subsequently changed to some mix of Rubio, Vance, Hegseth, Netanyahu and the Trump family.
Couldn't agree more. Our Navy is a joke. We can barely muster a single destroyer. Burning goodwill with Trump is foolish when europe is completely dependant on the US to defend them from Russia. I don't know what the strategic thinking is here. Demonstrate to the entire world that we are pathetic weaklings and the us that we're useless dependants?
This war might be dumb but it was also predictable. Why were these no contingencies? Or to quote Churchill "If you want peace you have to prepare for war".
The oil market effects have been fascinating to see. I only vaguely paid attention to it in the past (back in the peak oil days) but it's interesting to see how the chain of things work. You can produce oil type A and it can be useless because you run refineries type B, but those type B refineries are more profitable to run because the byproducts are really valuable. So you sell oil A and buy oil B and everyone is happy but then one day you go and raise oil B prices and you end up selling cheap oil and buying expensive oil so even though you produce more than anyone else, you still suffer the consequences. In fact, you can process oil A through your things but then the fancy machinery you bought sits idle, and you raised the money to buy that on the assumption you could process oil B and get byproducts.
That and the constraint on GPUs and datacenters and all has really brought home to me what a globalized economy we live in and how much our prosperity has depended on us being peacefully happy to trade with each other. One of my favourite books on the general subject of trade is A Splendid Exchange which gives a cool directionally-correct view of how valuable trade is.
Funny to think that Pax Americana would be ended by America.
I think the best interpretation of the overall stock market valuation is as a barometer of the wealthy's feelings, i.e. expectations of future returns rather than true future returns... but doesn't it seem like feelings have completely unmoored from the baked-in damage to the global economy from the current shortage?
Or has GDP growth become so decoupled from energy use that I'm wrong and stock market valuations are completely OK, even as airlines brace for fewer flights due to energy shocks?
I wonder if some of this is because of the "prices are set on the margins" effect of markets. The price of anything is set by the folks who are actively transacting at any given time; if you're not buying and selling, your opinion doesn't matter.
Oftentimes, near a market top, the people who are value investors and actually care about price end up selling off all their holdings. But because they have already sold, and are not buying, they drop out of the market entirely. Prices get set by the people who are price insensitive, because they're the only ones willing to participate. As a result, you often get the "blow off top" right before a market crash, where the stock market moves sharply upwards even though fundamentals say it should crash. All the folks who believe it will crash have already left and no longer participate in price-setting.
> But because they have already sold, and are not buying, they drop out of the market entirely. Prices get set by the people who are price insensitive, because they're the only ones willing to participate.
The buy & hold value investor is also not participating in price discovery since they are just passively holding.
That makes sense, but something I've been wondering as of late... what if markets are just being... cornered? Surely, it can difficult to assess genuine market activity from not, no?
I mean I know it sounds absurd for something like the size of the stock market, but all you really need to do is have enough capital to consume floating demand, and you can control prices. Even easier with options, as they give leverage to do this. And arguably this essentially explains the behavior behind stocks like GME, AMC, AVIS, BIRD... heck even Tesla. If you look at Tesla, most of its stock price appreciation happened in 2020-2021, when SoftBank was allegedly controlling their options chain. And since its peak in 2021, when SoftBank stopped, Tesla has underperformed the S&P 500, and would probably would have fallen by now if it wasn't for all the passive inflows from being in the Mag 7. I mean, it could just be coincidence or genuine market activity, but how can we be certain that markets aren't just being cornered by coordinated groups?
Also, the oil market right now doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you compare futures and spot and what analyst estimates are giving even in the best case scenario. But Japan mentioned considering shorting over $1.4 trillion in oil futures, and if they actually are, then suddenly things make a bit more sense...
The stock market has stopped making sense since the 2008 financial meltdown. Many reasons for this. In part, ZIRP is to blame -- a ton of money flowed into stocks simply because they were the only way to tread water and get a return. In part, you can blame Bitcoin (which demonstrated at scale that you can have an "asset" with zero underlying value and net-negative social utility that still functions as an appreciating value token,) and the meme-stock.
The stock market is basically detached from the industrial manufacturing/production economy -- and even to some extent the services/insurance economy -- and is now vibes/feels based.
Regardless of individual stock performance, present-day total stock market liquidity is a proxy for expectations of future total stock market liquidity.
If people are keeping their money in the market (regardless of allocation inside the market) they are expecting that any other asset class will perform worse in the near future. If they expect that commodities are too volatile, spending won't pay off, monies and bonds will inflate away and land may face legal risks from populist, technocratic or extrajudiciary changes to the legal system then their least worst options are to go all in on stocks. Furthermore, the energy sector is going to have a windfall from filling up the VLCCs of the world and look for anywhere to dump the cash that helps escape taxes, driving future liquidity expectations even higher.
Right, and "monies and bonds will inflate away" is related to what I said re ZIRPs -- you can't expect a decent return by parking your money with the bank, either, as interest rates are low to nonexistent. The stock market's the only good option. This was no accident, it was an intentional policy move... And now, "the DOW's over 50,000!"
What's even more troubling is that there was once the pretense that valuations had something to do with fundamentals, but this has gone entirely out the window since about 2013.
So basically none of it makes any sense and you've just got to ride the tiger.
Yeah, stock valuations seem pretty high, eg: https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe , https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/buffett-indica... , https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-earnings-yield
I’ve never looked at the numbers to see exactly how large of a pool it is but millions of Americans are effectively forced to buy into the market to fund our 401ks and future retirements. That’s billions of dollars of inflow every month that has to go somewhere, usually index funds.
it is exactly this. I am self-employed and have been managing my solo 401k for 15+ years now. while I am fully aware of market being overvalued I will still max out my 401k this year ($80k, I am over 50 :) ) and that money needs to go somewhere. I could theoretically sell and sit on the cash and wait on "crash" but I could have technically done that a year ago (this were similarly not very rosy) or even earlier and that obviously would have been a terrible financial decision. no one can time the market and therein lies the core issue, money will always be flowing in...
Thanks the second chart is more concerning than the first. The first has a variety of potential distortions at play first of all portion of industrial activity that's done by public vs private companies shifts over time and second of all a lot of these companies do 40 to 50% of their business overseas.
Whereas a historically low ratio of earnings to index value is a deeper concern to me
One of the explanations I've heard is that a lot of traders were caught out by how quickly the economy rebounded from COVID-19, so they're overcompensating by underreacting to the current situation.
> One of the explanations I've heard is that a lot of traders were caught out by how quickly the economy rebounded from COVID-19, so they're overcompensating by underreacting to the current situation.
Yikes.
The reason Covid wasn’t as bad as it could be was WFH.
There’s no equivalent for oil. You can’t grow food at scale without fertilizer.
WFH and a big dollop of "socialism" in the US. Supposedly the reason many voters felt that their lives were better under Trump 1.0 was due to the various subsidy and rent freeze measures taken by the US government during the pandemic.
Probably markets expect the situation to be resolved soon.
You can check the term structure of oil to confirm: https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/energy/crude-oil/light-swee...
Equities are (in theory) priced on net-present-value of future cash flows, so a temporary <1 year disruption is important but not massively so.
Is it possible that a lot of people are hoping for a dot-com bubble 2.0 so they can sell at the market peak before it pops?
That would explain why they're ignoring fundamentals.
They could think that OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs will drive prices higher, and it still isn't time to sell.
Another explanation is that their expectation of the future value of money is very low. If money turns out to devalue 10X then owning stocks (call on the future income stream of companies selling presumably useful things/services in the future) that seem to be 10X overvalued makes sense.
It's a multi-layered question. On the one hand if energy is more expensive and you still consume roughly the same amount but actually that raises gdp. However you're assuming that there's demand destruction with the rise of energy was your reasonable assumption... but that's uneven and there's going to be an increase in demand for certain things that actually benefit from higher energy prices like anything in electric tech or green energy.
Probably most importantly the economy at this point is largely a digital economy rather than one centered on goods.. in other words GDP growth is no longer coupled to energy consumption. The fact that we're able to transition to a largely remote workforce around covid is a testament to this.
The implication is that in the event that these high prices sustain and there is some demand destruction a lot of fundamental parts of the economy will continue to function in an evolved way for example online.
And then of course there's AI which could be considered sort of an extension of this digital economy which is driving so much of the underlying growth.
That doesn't mean there won't be hot spots like this article is pointing out perhaps the UK is particularly exposed. On the other hand the fact that so much of the UK's economy is financial services and hence in a way benefits from all this volatility ... means it is not all so clear.
It would be easier to say that the real impact will be on the manufacturing powerhouses but even they will benefit from the transition to a solar and battery based energy system.
Now if you believe that it's inevitable that this bubble will have a slowdown and you speculate that the bubble might be partially punctured by these high energy prices that seems like a reasonable hypothesis... but it could also be the opposite.. In other words the demand destruction for energy could actually mean capital is looking for a place to invest fruitful elsewhere.
Counterintuitive as it all may seem, this system is simply not one anyone can reasonably expect to make predictions around at least any more reliably than walking into a casino and expecting to beat the house.
Similarly the experts and talking heads telling you the implications of this war or the Ukraine war are making one dimensional predictions that are simply not honest enough about how chaotic and reflexive these systems are
Probably people are betting that the situation resolves itself before shit hits the fan.
And there is a bunch of plausible reasons that this belief is not crazy (of course nobody really knows).
- trump literally is called TACO
- the war is really unpopular in usa and midterms are getting closer. There is domestic usa pressure to wrap this up.
- Iran's ecconomy was a mess before all this and is now a disaster. The blockade goes both ways and it seems unlikely iran can keep it up long term
- As shortages approach international pressure from uninvolved parties to resolve the situation one way or another will mount.
I can't see rationing - there is a fairly open market in jet fuel and if supply is short the price will go up and and people will fly less. At the moment jet fuel futures prices for the summer are similar to now so people can hedge if they want.
We haven't had fuel rationing in the UK since 1957 for the Suez crisis.
I see you can still get a London - Athens single flight for £39 in August which doesn't scream airline panic.
I feel like the headline is a tad misleading. It makes it sound like rationing will start next week. Where as article actually says.
> Fuel suppliers have indicated that May should remain manageable but have flagged “mid to late June as the potential start of disruptions”
So there is about 2 months before things run out.
Before that flights will start being canceled, as prices will be prohibitively high.
Already happening. UK airlines are desperately culling flights, and have been doing so for the past month. The pace of cancellations is also increasing, with the last week seeing cancellation waves that from the outside look quite paniccy.
You need to start rationing before you run empty. Give yourself more runway.
This probably has direct implications for Mediterranean countries as well. UK tourists are a significant money source.
otoh it's probably great for internal tourism. We get to keep more money in the country.
Who do you think spends more? Your neighbor vacationing a few hours away from home? Or that international visitor who wants to see everything they can in their one week in the country?
Depends. If they arrive in an RV and just do one grocery run in a German chain during the their entire month of vacay, we could skip them.
I'd like to know more about this RV that can store an entire month of food. Sounds pretty fancy.
You can’t find a spot for a 50 pound sack of rice or two?
So let me get this straight. Foreign tourist spend less money in your country than domestic tourists because the foreign tourist are driving in with an RV and living off of a fifty pound bag of rice during their vacation?
Let me set this straight: My point is you have an incorrect idea of how much space a month of food (and it needn't all be rice; that just illustrates the point) takes up. You can readily fit it in an RV, especially a big one.
Fwiw, there are a lot of highly frugal people in eg the surfer/kiting community (example!) which do indeed spend pretty much nothing where they're visiting for their hobby.
And they do often smell and leave trash behind.
So I can imagine that being true if you're living in one of those hotspots... It's a hard topic though
Right, however over-tourism is a real problem.
Tourism provides low quality, transitory jobs, with income flowing more to wealth holders (property owners etc) than to wealth creators. It distorts property markets and sucks the oxygen out of other kinds of business. About time the Med weaned itself off of it.
This doesn’t sound like they’ll be weaning off it, though: it’ll be cold turkey. That’s going to let wealth holders pick up more property at depressed prices and drive down wages.
Relative to what? Its certainly better than resource extraction (oil).
The obvious question is, what jobs will replace them?
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>Tourism provides low quality, transitory jobs, with income flowing more to wealth holders (property owners etc) than to wealth creators
No. It's worse than that. The transient customer base rewards the worst people. The people who make the most money and have the most influence are basically scammers who manage to stay one season ahead of the bad reviews. They're screwing customers, shafting suppliers, employees, business partners, etc, everybody. By the time the 1-star reviews are pouring in they've pivoted, sold the businesses, under new management, etc, etc, and are on to the next venture.
So over time these people get rich you basically wind up with these sorts of people running everything including the government and it's all just shit.
And it permeates everything. Everyone starts screwing everyone and being scummy by default. And the time and money and effort of having to hedge against in literally everything makes everyone all substantially poorer
Source: Grew up in it. First world white people too, so spare me some patronizing BS about low trust societies or whatever
Right! I am currently living in a (relatively poor) Western European country that has recently experienced a tourism boom, and although the money pouring in has been nice for at least some, it has wrecked the existing social fabric in many ways - starting with housing.
On the flip side, at least the beaches are kept clean. In the UK (where I'm from) there is a big problem with sewage outflows. Meanwhile here an entire beach got washed away by the winter storms - so they are putting it all back! Maybe 100 000 m3 of sand!
If another country were causing all this trouble for the rest of world, we know what would have happend. But this is the US we're talking about, so that's OK, I guess. Just like the US made china pay for Covid, US is going to compesate all of us for these "little invconveniences", right? Right?
Modern slavery takes many forms.
Why ration rather than raising the price to whatever balances supply and demand?
That might work if airlines bought most of their fuel in the spot market. But major airlines tend to hedge their fuel prices, buying fuel that doesn't exist yet for a guaranteed price. If the shortage is severe enough, that fuel might not be delivered, leading to worse disruption than high prices alone would have caused.
Massive price jumps in fuel enables panic buying. Fuel prices will be driven by both fear and scarcity, and prices go even higher.
Jet fuel isn't exactly a consumer good. Storing large quantities of it isn't exactly easy. It doesn't strike me as a good that is likely to panic bought.
Right - more of a danger of bullwhip effect than a consumer panic purchase. Still it is best to ease the spikes for everyone with rationing.
The UK does already have salt cavern storage for crude and natural gas, so it would be possible to make sites for kerosene if not for the present shortage.
They have the data already of the max price customers will pay
Why the downvote?
You can fly to the EU for 600 USD (retour), more in high season. Non business people are willing to spend 1200, 1400 USD. I assume around 2000 USD the demand will fall off significantly. At 5000 USD for economy it will be close to zero.
I just booked for the fall to London. Roundtrip was around $1200 from eastern US in economy with a couple of minor upgrades which is high but not ridiculous. The increment is basically a couple nights of hotels and meals. I've paid more; I've paid less. Was going to take ship back but it wasn't available for one person.
Doesn't matter what the price is if there isn't enough for sale
Unless there's a single buyer, or at least a coordinated decision of "above this price, we all buy nothing, and below this price we all buy our normal amounts", it truly does matter what the price is when there's not enough for sale.
The price is determined by who needs it the most and is willing to give up the most cash. Instead of rationing by lines, or fixed quantities, it's allocation to those who can either make the most out of the jet fuel, or those for whom money is the least valuable.
That's not how supply and demand works.
Thats exactly how supply works. Unless you're saying I can still buy fresh wooly mammoth meat somewhere if I just offer enough money
Mammoth meat does not exist. Fuel does exist.
And when your supply of jet fuel is cut off? If you don't ration and let the free market decide how to allocate it, how long do you think it lasts until you say "jet fuel doesn't exist"?
Perhaps because oil is not a luxury good, but an absolute requirement for a functioning economy. I imagine the consequences of literally running out of jet fuel would cripple cargo transport, among other things.
Then the price will go up a lot.
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It pains me to even bother taking this comment with anything in the vicinity of seriousness, but surely you understand that the problems with human civilization are in spite of, and not for lack of, the existence of intelligent people. Intelligence is not the bottleneck.
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They'd set up systems to take the economic dependence on the activity of humans down to zero. No human contributions to GDP, no need to care about where they are able to move to.
Only if you completely ignore what drives people.
Bender would have said “kill all humans”.
Yup [1]
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUjXhsaX06Y [video][17 seconds]
It would have launched nukes already and then made the survivors take the mark of the beast.
1) Invent time machine
2) Use it to elect somebody else POTUS. Anybody else.
He's just a symptom, not the disease
Sure, but sometimes treating a bad symptom buys you time to fight the disease.
The people who voted for him said they didn't want more foreign wars. But they got a couple anyway.
Since they're cultists, though, it took them about 10 minutes to make their peace with it.
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The popular answer I've seen over the past few weeks is to just blame everything on the US, but that kind of thinking and lack of agency is exactly why countries like the UK are in the position they are.
Just constant burying heads in the sand, and believing in models where the prior assumptions are from a bygone era.
Not only do those particular prior assumptions date to 1957 in a way that makes deviating from them structurally dangerous, they involve very low military spending in a way that makes deviating from them politically dangerous.
Fixing the budget hole to pay for that spending without resorting to giving many people living in Monaco the Eichmann treatment as a side effect (which is untenable on account of French security guarantees to Monaco) would need some kind of government of hardcore believers who could also do math.
Why would one not blame the US for this situation?
I think the OP is saying that it's ok to blame, but it is not ok to just blame. It is preferable to also act in some sort.
For decades the world has very reasonably operated on the assumption that the world’s primary superpower wouldn’t be dumb enough to do this without a proper plan.
Everyone except the Iranians and maybe the Israelis were flat-footed by this, and the things that can be done about it are largely on the years/decades scale.
The way i read the parent post, is that the uk decided to invest in other things than military. As a result they are at the whims of USA foreign policy and can't really do much about it. In an alternate world where UK spent more on hard power, they might not be subject to the whims of america to the same extent.
[To be clear, i dont 100% agree with this argument. I think there is a little truth to it but also things are much more complicated than that and it ignores the geopolitical tension in the region that was going to explode one way or another even without usa]
Because a competent country/government should plan ahead for shortages of any vital resource it depends on.
Within reason.
Until quite recently, “the US sticks its dick in the chainsaw” wasn’t a “within reason” scenario.
> Within reason
Reason dictates having redundancy in place. Having prepared scenarios for what to do. A lot of countries clearly don't have that and they are operating on the assumption that no major disruption is going to happen.
Depending on resources coming from historically unstable locations and not having plans to prepare for such instability is just foolish.
> Reason dictates having redundancy in place.
The UK doesn’t have a strategic oxygen reserve in case the atmosphere disappears.
It’s both implausible and not really something they can do much about.
Trump is that sort of scenario.
The middle east explodes is an eventuality that is within reason to prepare for. Its famously a geopolitical powder-keg.
To be fair this is not the first time a US President stuck their dock in something and got bitten
USA is proximally to blame, but Iran in its current borders is an entity that is largely the brain child of Britain. It ended up encompassing the Baloch and Kurds, who could have helped check Persian power and make Persian borders more penetrable, which was probably a geopolitical mistake.
the Baloch and the Kurds are ethnic Persians, they speak Persian languages.
>the Baloch and the Kurds are ethnic Persians,
Wut
> they speak Persian languages
As a lingua franca, sure. By some very twisted semantics maybe, but really, no.
The only state preventing free commerce through the strait is Iran.
The only reason Iran is playing that sole card they hold is their two core enemies launched a war of aggression.
The US is running a blockade of their own in the strait.
That only applies to Iranian traffic. It would in fact be an act of war for the U.S. to blockade maritime traffic of countries it's not already at war with.
So, where does that leave Cuba?
Cuba is sanctioned, not blockaded.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/world/americas/cuba-oil-b...
Not presently. They relented back in March.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/30/americas/us-russian-oil-tanke...
So just a limited duration war and breaking of international law. Barely counts for those impacted.
An act of war is not necessarily a war. They happen all the time.
Yes, as retaliation of a US/Israel invasion that is against international law.
Which in turn is also against international law (international law would let them retaliate against israel & usa. It doesn't let them target neutral shipping [edit: to clarify i mean neutral shipping going to neutral ports]).
Of course international law is not worth the paper its written on.
No, defensive blockades are explicitly permitted under international law, including neutral parties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade
> Blockades restrict the trading rights of neutrals, who must submit for inspection for contraband, which the blockading power may define narrowly or broadly, sometimes including food and medicine.
To clarify, i meant shipping to neutral ports (article 99 of San Remo: "A blockade must not bar access to the ports and coasts of neutral States" https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/san-remo-manu... ). Oman seems neutral in all this but nonetheless affected.
They would be allowed to blockade neutral ships going to enemy ports (e.g. Israel) subject to a bunch of rules but that doesn't seem to be what they are doing.
I dont even think Iran is claiming this is a blockade. They are claiming its part of its territorial waters, and they are claiming that they dont recognize the UNCLOS which would give vessels transit rights (but at the same time they are claiming they recognize the part of UNCLOS that allows claiming 12 miles out as territorial waters). At least that is what i got from https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-legality-of-irans-closure-of-th...
There are no neutral ports there. Every other country past the strait is a US ally with US military bases hosted on their territory.
Oman is before the strait begins.
> There are no neutral ports there. Every other country past the strait is a US ally with US military bases hosted on their territory.
I dont think hosting a US base would necessarily make them non neutral unless that base was used offensively. According to international law, Iran would also have to justify their exercise of self-defense rights was porportional, which even if you accept hosting a us base made that state non neutral, i think it would be difficult to justify their response against states simply hosting a us base met the porportionality requirements of int law.
However even if they were enemy states, Iran would have to declare all of these countries as being under blockade, which they haven't as far as i am aware.
> Oman is before the strait begins.
How is the Oman port of Khasab before the strait begins?
As a late thought - i would also add that the idea that this is an aggressive war against Iran relies on the idea that iran and hamas are separate enough that israel striking iran is not self-defense from when hamas struck Israel. But the relationship between Hamas and Iran is a lot closer than usa and the gulf countries. So i think its difficult to say that Iran striking gulf countries that host USA bases but are otherwise uninvolved is legitament self-defense without also saying that Israel striking iran was legitament self-defense from the proxies they fund. I feel like logically you cant have it both ways. Either both are valid self defense or neither are.
Did you miss the part about contraband? You quoted it, after all.
Firing on neutral shipping is not the same as intercepting it and inspecting it for war materiel or other contraband. Preventing shipping from reaching or leaving Kuwaiti ports is not the same as inspecting it for war materiel or other contraband.
Iran has been requiring shipping to submit to inspection and tolls via an adjusted route through the strait. And they can certainly deem oil contraband if they are allowed to do food and medicine, as quoted.
Ships that don’t stop get fired upon. That’s what happens in a blockade.
Kuwait is a US ally and hosts American military bases. Stopping shipping to there is very clearly legitimate.
> And they can certainly deem oil contraband if they are allowed to do food and medicine, as quoted.
Wikipedia is defining what the term blockade means not what constitutes a legal blockade.
Medicine is not allowed to be blockaded. Food is not allowed to be blockaded if there is a shortage.
Relavent parts of the san remo manual:
> 102 The declaration or establishment of a blockade is prohibited if:
> (a) it has the sole purpose of starving the civilian population or denying it other objects essential for its survival; or
> (b) the damage to the civilian population is, or may be expected to be, excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated from the blockade.
> 103. If the civilian population of the blockaded territory is inadequately provided with food and other objects essential for its survival, the blockading party must provide for free passage of such foodstuffs and other essential supplies, subject to...
> 104. The blockading belligerent shall allow the passage of medical supplies for the civilian population or for the wounded and sick members of armed forces,...
https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/san-remo-manu...
You're correct that blocking oil would be allowed (barring situations where the civilian population needs it to survive, which doesnt apply here) if this was a legal blockade. However Iran is not complying with the other rules around blockades, which is the issue.
I'm very concerned about people downvoting the observation that this war is illegal and unnecessary even to achieve its stated goals.
I guess nobody likes hearing that their country is unethically invading other countries. As much as I hate defending Iran, I don't think there's much of a difference between what the US is doing to Iran and what Russia is doing to Ukraine.
You could look to what the ICC has charged Putin with to see some key differences.
The US is 100% without a doubt responsible for the shitshow we're in now.
We had a good thing going, and you fucked it up.
We in Europe negotiated the JCPOA. Read its terms. Understand its lead negotiatior was the EU representative. That was our codified relationship with Iran. Now compare that to the best case after what you geniuses started.
Own up to it. This is solely on the US. The rest of us had it handled until you came along.
You have Russian asset as president who acts like chaos monkey for the Putin's entertainment.
One thing is correct though that UK security services have not anticipated such outcome and politicians have not done anything about it.
The Soviet Union gave the equivalent of about 80-100 million USD in support to the ANC in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. As soon as they got power, the ANC turned around and aligned with the west, wasting every rouble Moscow spent.
Since the inauguration Trump has supported physical seizures of many different kinds of Russia-aligned merchant shipping and the economic degradation of Russia's allies. Given all of this, we can assume that the Russian asset angle is a much less accurate explanation for Trump's behavior than the alternative theory where he is highly suggestible to the most recent person to heavily compliment him in-person which used to be Putin and has subsequently changed to some mix of Rubio, Vance, Hegseth, Netanyahu and the Trump family.
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Couldn't agree more. Our Navy is a joke. We can barely muster a single destroyer. Burning goodwill with Trump is foolish when europe is completely dependant on the US to defend them from Russia. I don't know what the strategic thinking is here. Demonstrate to the entire world that we are pathetic weaklings and the us that we're useless dependants?
This war might be dumb but it was also predictable. Why were these no contingencies? Or to quote Churchill "If you want peace you have to prepare for war".