Look, if a US president is facing the decision on: 1. Wage another war with a large nuclear power like Russia or China 2. Give up another "democracy" or "ally" like Ukraine or Taiwan I'm 100% certain that any US president would choose to sacrifice the "ally" to avoid any World War. Both Ukraine and Taiwan are clear redlines or lifelines to either Russia or China. But US is so far away. Ukraine or Taiwan will be just another Vietnam, Korea, Iraq or Afghanistan. This is why both Russia and China have been working to de-couple from the Western block for years. The current conflicts will speed up the de-coupling even faster. They want to develop their own financial system and the technology. And control strategic assets. There will be more future tensions and hot spots. Super powers will pick up fights in Africa, South America and rest of Asia. Look at Argentina. Who knows what will be the next? There will more market volatilities.....
Just a warning to all the LONGS who are stupidly overleveraging here on bets that OIL prices will spike etc. First of all, no war may even happen. What then? Second of all, having a war may result in the opposite results that you intended. It was not that long ago, I remember the West going to war in the Gulf, and within 48-hours of that theater, oil prices CRASHED hard. This affected from upstream right down to prices at the PUMPs. Many longs got liquidated in those first two days. So good luck to all the market-timers thinking this will be an easy road-to-riches.
Not really. The conflict will persist. There won't be any significant "war". If there is any Russian invasion of Ukraine, it will be short lived. Just like the Russian invasion of Georgia. Or even Ukraine crisis in 2014. It is nothing like Iraq War or any war related to oil supply. So people will live like usual, like nothing really happens. There won't be oil "collapsing". But certainly if oil traders want to take some profit, we can see oil price drop $3 or so. But oil price will be bided up again. I do not see anything at this level or $100 is in any danger. $120 is not sustained at current level. World will have a scramble for control of any strategic assets like energy, metal and rare mineral. China certainly controls a big part of the rare earth. It can certainly weaponize it just like what happening to Huawei. TSLA can be crushed if China decides to do so. Clearly that is not at its best interest right now.
i'm just going to focus on market volatility, gold and oil bear instruments: UVXY SCO DUST bull: SOXL OXY UCO GDX
Look back at the Lithuania and China relationship. China always maintains friendly relationship for all former Eastern European countries in the Soviet block due to the historical ties and the sympathies for a small country. Even after the collapse of the Soviet block, there have been no conflicts between China and Lithuania. They are so remote. China has refrained from any interferences to Lithuanian internal affairs and its relationship with Russia. Yet, Lithuania decided to challenge China on the Taiwan front. For such a small country, it tries to leverage its membership in EU and NATO. It tries to bring entire EU and NATO as its backing and to challenge China. But other EU and NATO members have their own interests with China. Same thing with both Estonia and Latvia challenging Russia. On their own, both have no strength challenging Russia. They both use its membership of EU and NATO as backing. They are like thorns on Russia's West side. I do not think Russia has ever tried to engage both small countries. Certainly those things are alarming to both Russia and China.
Europe will be viewed as risky, so currency likely to be weak and can be sold off against other pairs.
Totally make sense Kcalhoun, given the positive correlation of commodity currencies and oil prices, a rise in oil prices could be a great indicator of energy trading.