Spekulatius

21. FU - is the American way!

Finding matching charts when you can move timescales and starting points around is very dump and a stupid fallacy.

COBF Politics Derangement syndrome. It can afflict the best of us.

I think the plan is to get the Iran to hand over this material as part of a deal.

Who is worse - Trump rambling about pens in a cabinet meeting no less, or the idiots laughing about his jokes? If your dad rambles like this (and repeats the same story 3 times) it’s time to take the car keys away and get his financial affairs in order.

Tourism’s is going to be down there, I think:

I would not be surprised if OpenAI never IPO’s at all. If it doesn’t IPO this year, while AI sells like hotcakes, I think it’s going to take a long time.

Oh boy. The Thai economy is in trouble. These shortages are not going to be great advertisement for tourism either. Again, the rich economies will be dented but not damaged all that much. However, when you have 10-20% less crude available, the demand destruction is occurring somewhere and that somewhere are the poorer countries. Some goods there will simply not get produced which leads to results from inconvenience to people starving. In Europe or the NA, you simply pay 20-30% more at the gas pump, shrug and call it a day.

Straight of Trump means he wants to control it. In order to control it, a constant presence is required Maybe he charges a fee too for passage, just like the Iranians are trying to do. The issue with a large presence in lot of places means attack vectors from everywhere for the US forces policing these things we are trying to protect. This means a huge military complex. What we will next in the way of the Trump crusade - Cuba was dropped as a target. Cuba has no oil though and little of value, but cigars. Squishing Russia would be a worthwhile project (imo) but Trump likes Putin too much. Not necessarily because of what Putin is doing but how he is doing it and acting with impunity.

Agreed on the nuclear bomb. Whether the current path taken really prevents this is another question. In a way the regime is incentivized to finish the job more than ever. The range of outcomes in this war is wide. Militarily, the war has gone well and seems relatively easy (unless we go with boots on the ground) politically not so much.

Why don’t you ask AI:

So, the Iranian charge $2M for a large tanker passage , ain’t that a bargain? A large tanker VLCC carries ~2M brl, so it’s just a $1b brl surcharge - sort of like a traffic ticket. Oil fetches more than $20/ brl more then just a few week ago, why don’t the producers pay the small fine and call it a day - serious question? I suspect that’s what Japan and other countries are doing. If the IRGC had McKinsey advising them, they would charge 10x more. No wonder Iran got nowhere economically, they don’t even know how to run a racket. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-29/strait-of-hormuz-iran-control-oil-gas-us-war-israel/106491634

Yes, but I would like to know how many Americans were killed by Iranians. Even if you count Hezbollah as Iranian the largest casualty was the no Ning of the Us embassy which was 23 people. That was more than 40 years ago and Reagan didn’t go to war for that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_US_embassy_bombing_in_Beirut

You could be right, it’s the second option I i have in mind. The problem is that those islands are not worth much and they don’t allow for controlling the straight either. Of course the US could block Iranian exports but they actually did the opposite and de- sanction Iran oil together with Russian oil, to prevent prices from shooting up even more. Mind boggling and I doubt this was all planned. My guess is that Trump never thought that Iran would close Hormuz when he started this thing.

Nukes are a Pandora’s box. You don’t know what is happening after you open it. There is no way that Trump goes there unless Iran uses Nukes first (which they are not likely to have at this point). For investment purposes, I think the thing to keep in mind is the the war is going to go longer - at least until the end of April. Straight of Hormuz remains closed. Next escalation is Marines occupying Kharg island. I don’t think threats work with Iran, he will need to actually sent them in. Then the question is what the Iranians are going to do. It should take about 4 weeks to get to the point where this next deck of cards is a going to be played.

To be honest, I have no idea what’s up with the German power grid other than wind energy is mostly produced in the North and hence there is a large need for North - South transportation capacity. I guess the whole thing wasn’t really planned well and takes too long to build? The usually problems. News sources: Spiegel is left leaning nut has some good articles as well as a channel (SpiegelTV on YouTube). FAZ is the German version of the WSJ but they limit what you can read unless you pay up. https://www.faz.net/aktuell/ There is this offbeat YouTube channel from Prof Rieck who comments on many things with a Game theory background : This is for advanced German speakers only as he talks quite fast, but his takes are quite thoughtful. I also watch DW.DE (Deutsche Welle) which also has news in English

I think the list of losers artet with the gulf states, then goes to poorer countries, developing countries, then Europe and last energy producers like the USA. Net exporters like Norway, Brazil, Guyana that are not located in the Gulf are benefiting.

Marines likely target is Kharg Island, They can land there and hold it, that’s what the Marines corps was designed for. Then using Kharg island as leverage to get Iran to open the straight of Hormuz for everyone. The question is will Iran play along? Maybe the Marines on Kharg are sitting ducks for incoming drones and missiles if the Irans escalate too. Any real ground invasion in the Iranian heartland will require hundreds of thousand of troops and I don’t think Trump will go there. The straight of Hormuz would also need to be open to get that much materials in for such a large number of troops so this would be a catch 22 type situation.

I agree on all parts here. It is what it is. There is no federation of Europe. There are benefits of diversity and disadvantages. Europe played the cards they have poorly so far. They can and need to do better.

How many US soldiers did Iran kill? I think we are talking about a few hundred troops killed by Iran proxies, mostly in the Iraq war where the US frankly had no business to be in. If you take out this adventure at Irans borders, the number of Americans killed by Iran is very small. Iran for sure kills less Americans than Americans kill fellow Americans in Chicago alone.

Almost 50% of Germany NG comes from Norway now. Norway has largest replaced Russian NG.

Yes, I agree but if the journey is long you better start going. I think nuclear deterrence is the biggest issue and could be plugged fairly quickly since France has already nuclear weapons and many countries have the basically tech to produce them quickly (Germany, UK etc). The other holes can be plugged later. The problem with relying on France alone for nuclear deterrence is that any country can flip into putinophile power when the right wing parties win out (Le Pen is actually better than the AFD on that end) so relying on one country isn’t going to do the job either.

The war will end when both parties agree to it. If you want read up history of wars, try Barbara Tuchman’s books. Distant Mirror (medieval) and Guns of August (WW1) , March of Folly (Vietnam) are fantastic reads. She writes like a journalist day by day so you see the history unfolding page by page.

I thought the US took care of the nuclear part? I don’t recall anyone sticking up for the regime in Iran in Europe either except a few left wing nuts.. Anyway, Europe has already plenty of nuclear weapons pointed at them from Russia, a much bigger concern. Putin even has threatened to use them unlike Iran. I don’t think Europe can rely on article 5 for nuclear deterrence either. To be frank, I think it would be better for Europe if the US leaves NATO. It forces Europe to fill gaps in defense (logistics are too depended on US) and get their own nuclear deterrence. The current ambiguity is not really helping Europe and leaves it unprotected, imo. Both Trump and the Europeans so far have shied away from a divorce but I think it’s getting likelier by the day.

Note that US fleet is floating far away from the action and I think moved even further out (~1000km from the straight of Hormuz). They are afraid of taking fire from Iranian missiles or drones and having to do evasive maneuvers lead to the loss of some expensive airplanes when they were operating closer to the action bombing the Houthis. It’s a good indication that operating to straight of Hormuz with naval forces is quite dangerous. The US navy doesn’t do 2000km of extra flight distance (back and forth) for each sortie for nothing.