Trading the War

Trading the War - Monday 1st October 2018

There is nothing worse than watching someone cause insufferable pain to their own body. The sheer trauma and experience of what one must be going through to ensure self-immolation satisfies the end result, must be so excruciating, that any alternative simply provides a lesser exit outcome, compensated only by the short-term "relief" of whatever resulting pain is replicated in another part of the body. Is there any other so saddening definition of desperation? One must surely feel for such an individual.

Or perhaps not...if that individual happens to be sat in an over-sized-leather-bound (somehow still not a Golden-Throne, for now) reclining chair in the Oval Office? That person is fulfilling a number of election promises to the US people, or someone else - hmm...please tell us already Mueller..stop teasing - with little regard for the incoming pain and suffering.

Shiller’s Irrational Exuberance dictated the ostentatious display of market wealth that would result in disaster back in the mid 00’s. Now, we have all but forgotten those days of “austerity” and had nothing but rapid growth and social-media friendly-super-sized-ostentatious spending, as well as accumulation of wealth - personally I blame the instagrammers and their enablers (read: advertising companies), those that know the cost of only "aspirational items" they probably cannot even correctly pronounce and nothing in between. 

Back to the pain - What must one be experiencing to decide it is easier to cut their nose rather than alleviate the actual problem? Given the latest salvo in the Trump-Trade-Tirade (this guy is amazing isn’t he?) there must be some serious pain being endured across the White House as we speak.

I am more interested in attempting to comprehend recent global economic necessities - China/US trade wars, tariffs, EU rate-freezes, market-IPO mania, the death of regulators, Gold miners hugging one another (do they know something we don't?), Oil acting squarely in the face of fundamentals (what's new)...even China moving to ensuring they elicit the next World War by doing what Saddam Hussein failed to do in 2003 and launch their own oil trading based in Renminbi. What about emerging markets..as the US increases rates, will anyone still want to invest in riskier jurisdictions or will we simply leave it once and for all to the Chinese, again. Will OBOR really flatten Pakistan into a nuclear-puddle of debt disaster or does the US realise it is almost too late and make up for lost time..perhaps they are slightly occupied attempting to kick-off the GCC conflict by stoking the reluctant Iranians into a confrontation with the might of US-military massively building itself-up on their doorstep in the guide of "arms sales" to Saudi+UAE. As ever, we are confronted with nothing but questions, all of which will eventually be answered, whether with discussion or aggression is the only main concern.

The reason I stopped writing was that my soul was quite literally shattered after Brexit and the Trump election victory - I know, I know..it was all “written on the wall” and we are experiencing a strong resurgence of nationalism with a sign of the times..blah…blah..but come on..where is the rationality of human logic and goodness? Have we learnt nothing from the last 6,000yrs of violence and hardship? Is humanity truly destined to continue to inflict pain on itself? Is Man as violent as we deep down believe, or are we capable of change and development? 

I really have no answers to these profound questions..and I apologise for the large number of question marks. Perhaps a sign of my exasperation and helplessness. When reading through my “blog” I am even shocked at the gradual erosion of optimism and an overriding belief in human goodness in less than a decade of writing. Are adults always doomed to pessimism? Oops, just did the question mark thing again, really sorry.

We once thought Martin Luther King (the 50th anniversary of his assassination passed earlier this year in April, he was only 39..39..most people have not even begun to fully mature before their 40th bdays) had all the answers, that we had finally succumbed at long-last to a pure, white and shining goodness within our very beings, eliciting desires of passive freedom and loving - borrowing heavily on the Zionist tales of freedom and escape from evil captors (the Jews being freed from the Pharaohs) - what have we achieved since then? False prophets abound, Twitter Trolls and Cambridge Analytica now rule supreme. Manipulation, deceit, privacy infringement, fabrication - oh how sad that we are accurately living in an Orwellian nightmare. Probably worse in fact. Technology has enslaved us. Similar to purchasing a pair of jeans in 1982 and awaiting its fashion revival (cyclicality is truly conveyed throughout nature and replicated by all within the animal kingdom) not having ever been on Facebook once saw me ostracised as a pariah and now lauded as some sort of foresight induced genius - able to understand the deeply concerning machinations of a globally connected US CIA fact book - see, I told you soooooo people! 

A presaging narrative penned by George Friedman back in 2009 (The Next 100years) has proven quite accurate with a number of its fore-tellings - none less so than Russia's renewed regional muscle-flexing, the rise of global populism, demise of oil-producing states and their politics due to US fracking etc., however it certainly feels that media pundits and a large number of “experts” are lost at sea - with little or no defining sense of the next 5yrs. Is that why they focus on frivolous matters and seem to report more gleefully the latest moves of Strictly/Dancing with the Stars - we're transatlantic darlings - happier to tussle over the immediacy of breaking news concerning butt-pinchers, anthem kneelers, lip-pouters, IOS release issues and of course, of courrrrseee, the all-important endless digestion of the real leaders in 2018...the #taggers. 

Let's hurry up, get through the mid-terms, move swiftly passed the Christmas festive season and reach the end of this year intact. Trump-willing.

Hani