Spekulatius

First 6 days of the war in Iran costs $11.3B. I am guessing that subsequent weeks get cheaper but if this war last, it will create a severe, hundred billion budget hole. https://www.csis.org/analysis/iran-war-cost-estimate-update-113-billion-day-6-165-billion-day-12#:~:text=The U.S. Department of Defense,first days of the war.

The gulf states are huge losers because the aura of stability from the region is gone. UAE and other states vision was to be a finance/ trade /tourisms hub with the underlying basis of being tax haven and modern infrastructure. Now all these tax refuges return back or are getting evacuated to their home countries and it’s unclear if they will come back. In the end it’s safety first and if a place isn’t safe, then taxes matter very little.

Block/ xyz could do this, because they both have a merchant facing business (payment systems) and customer facing apps (cash, debit cards). They could create a closed circuit payment rail without Visa/MC theoretically (via stablecoins)and nudge customer to use it. This implied in their last investor presentation and that how I became aware of this. PYPL could do the same thing.

Replacing V&MA only makes sense if you replacing the entire stack and the 185bps swipe fee going to banks and what not. Thats the risk to V and MA and also the rest of the current payment system. Whatever replaces it needs to be way cheaper than 200bps, otherwise why bother? I think there is a chance that V&MA can latch onto new payment infrastructure but in this case the other payment players like stripe, banks etc would be screwed.

Next chapter is assymetrical warfare and the play is outlasting the US on patience. The Iran could well be as toasty as Vietnam was in 1966 and I think the regime can take a punch. I sure hope boots on the ground won’t happen because then we are going to see coffins with flags coming back as a regular cadence. I also expect to see terror acts against US assets and possibly on US soil. I hope I am wrong on all the above.

Welk that name change certainly meant something, that for sure.

I guess it’s the same “stability” that Putin and Kim Jong Un provide. All of the above are killing their own people by the ten thousands , so they are not regimes any more, they are a tyrannies . They deserve to get removed but that’s easier said than done. I think most people will lose you when you are supporting this religious demagogues and tyrants. Thats not to say that I think Trump’s approach is a great one here, however it if it works, it’s great outcome. Most Iranian people in the diaspora and probably in Iran itself will agree. Although I do think the regime has quite a bit of support from a significant part of the population in Iran even at this point..

OK, went Polymarket to check the odds of the straight of Hormuz reopening. Chance is 33% by the end of April. Sounds like a disaster if the hive mind there is right.

BP and Shell have their headquarter in the UK (still) but they are multinationals and only a small fraction of their assets are in the UK. Starmer has no leverage. I do think he is calling them in to prevent price gouging with fuel prices rising more than is justified by rising input costs.You see some of this happening already on the US with diesel potentially. I expect Trump to make some similar noises pretty soon.

Iranians oil export are already disrupted , nothing goes out. The Iranians best chance to exert leverage is make sure that anyone else can’t export oil and LNG either through the straight of Hormuz.

Straight of Hormuz is open, the only thing prohibiting transit is Iran shooting at ships.

Yes, I think this is the correct assessment. Getting ships very close to the Iranian coast which is necessary to protect merchant ships there will make them vulnerable to attacks. On the other hand, the straight of Hormuz needs to be opened or the war will be lost politically.

They could have hit Kharg Island from the get go. It is just sitting sitting there, hard to protect a d easy to hit with air power. However I think the idea was not to destroy the energy infrastructure, but that concept was abandoned as our military had hit refineries and other targets already. So this is an indication of escalation , not an indication of winning either. Same with moving 3500 marines ( a ground invasion force) that may well be to secure Kharg Island. But think about this- if this escalation had been part of the plan from beginning, the Marines had been assembled with the initial force to begin with and Kharg Island had been hit during the first days (this was actually discussed upthread here). In other words, we are now getting into round 2 of this conflict and it looks like this will go on for a while.

I invest in anything, if it’s cheap enough.

So Avocado is toast. Google’s AI eats Meta’s for breakfast.

Istanbul can’t be a long haul airplane hub, that airport is such a mess. They also had security incidences on their own about a decade ago. I happened to fly there a couple of weeks after a bomb went off. The Gulf states like UAE will take damage due to image loss. they seemed like emerging western tax havens and all of a sudden they became the front line again.

I suggested to Jeff Bezos too to move $1 Billion in my checking account but that son of a bitch has no inclination of doing so.

I was looking at that one too. I sort of don’t know why it has declined that much. Yes there is some margin pressure but still. Seems more like disinterest than any fundamental reasons. I think I am going to buy some too. AI is not going to disintermediate that one.

Why do dishwasher jobs still exist? just to load and unload the dishwashing machines? I doubt that’s future proof. same with transportation . Once they figure out how to self drive drugs on highways, a lot of truck drivers could lose their jobs as they are only needed for the last miles, at least for a while.

I ended up watching Station Eleven again and I think it’s one of the best Miniseries of this decade so far. I think the script is superb with the story and timelines woven together with a Comic book as the thread.

$CRBG (AIG spinoff) hs been eating itself at a raid clip since 2022

This is not correct. Iran gave Russian the blueprint for their drones (Shahed) and helped them set up their manufacturing lines. However Russia is now independent of Iran and in fact modified and improved the Shahed drones already. The higher tech parts come from China for both Russian and Iranian drones and are mostly relatively low tech electronics (GPS ) anyways.

Well Trump is the most proliferate name caller of all politicians. Nobody comes even close.

Reducing PBR A a bit. Still cheap, but again this is Brazil and run up due to Iran war.

Whether they are religious fanatics or have their own ideology (like the nihilistic views that Putin has) does not make all that much of a difference- they are all fanatics. Hitler was not religious at all (he actually was atheist) but was the worst demagogue of all times (so far). And no Putin actually places no value on human life whatsoever as he sent hundred of thousand of his own people into a meat grinder with little to show for. Same with Kim Jong Un in North Korea.