Last night, as I was about to hit the sack, I took a last peek at Bitcoin’s chart (since I’m long the inverse fund BITI) and was intrigued to see a plunge out of the blue. Uncharacteristically, I thought to myself, hey, that’s cool, and promptly went to sleep without investigating the situation any further.
Of course, upon waking at 4:30 this morning (thanks, Meesh!) I saw the reason why.
The reaction from the very thin weekend markets is unsurprising: falling equities, surging precious metals, and absolutely roaring crude oil. (Of my 34 short positions, I am delighted to report ZERO related to energy).
Of course, who knows what Monday will hold. Only hours into this, there’s already chatter of Iran raising the white flag and saying they’re ready to do what needs to be done to stop the bombing, so there’s already modest relief happening in markets. Who knows, we could even (Allah forbid) be green on Monday.
What’s interesting to me is that even super-right-wing sites like ZeroHedge are condemning what’s happening. I mean, honestly, the community section there makes the surprisingly conservative Slope community look like a DSA convention.
See, their comments section is usually slavishly supportive of anything General Bonespurs does, but enough has happened that even THEY are turning on him…………
And, as you might expect, the memes being left in the wake of this tell the story better than any three-thousand-word piece you’ll find anywhere else.
I’m in the prediction business, so I offer unto you my predictions about all of this:
- The Middle East will continue hating and killing each other until the end of time;
- The Iranian people are not going to magically rush in to fill a power vacuum and form some kind of democratic, peaceful government, any more than Iraq did;
- This entire effort is going to be so transformative and long-lasting that we’ll be talking about something entirely different by next weekend, and Operation Epic Fury will be as forgotten as Operation Midnight Hammer (which, umm, “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability)
At least we’re virtually guaranteed a really interesting market opening on Monday morning.
