All At Sea...

My eye was drawn to a piece in today's Financial Times - yes, I'm still buying analogue print media: use it or lose it, folks, the alternatives don't bear thinking about in my book - by Rana Foroohar, on the repetition of history that the current, war-induced global financial panic represents. Stating at the outset that the current conflict has exposed the vulnerability of the U.S at sea, she points out out rightly that the world and particularly Trump's America has been wrong-footed by the scale of the economic domino tumble that ensued from the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. How can this be, when we have effectively been rehearsing these same conditions for, in her words, almost the last thirty years? Forgive me if I choke a little on that rather youthful overview of political and economic history, but only thirty years? Oh, how were are destined to think only a generation deep, if we're not careful or mindful enough:

Many of us are still alive that remember, at least in aftermath, The Suez Crisis, forty years before that. And growing up in the sixties and particularly the seventies, we were assaulted regularly by geopolitical upheavals to the global economy: oil crisis, three-day-week, power cuts, anyone? All precipitated by similar events and/or politics. The mechanisms of global 'free' markets and the innate fragility that they bring to the world economy are known and historically established - the stock market crash and the Great Depression should have been a warning to the world about the vagaries of untrammelled and unregulated capitalism, but it eventually fell on the deaf ears of a history unremarked, otherwise why would we revisit the same stony ground, again and again? How many more reminders do we need that stable world trade and peace are incompatible with the forces of imperialism; indeed with 'the markets' themselves?