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.

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.

One thing is correct though that UK security services have not anticipated such outcome and politicians have not done anything about it.

Own up to it. This is solely on the US. The rest of us had it handled until you came along.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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