Still in the Danger Zone

In December 2017, we posted a RWERB entry, titled ‘Profit warning: there will be blood’. We warned that, although the Weapondollar-Petrodollar Coalition might no longer be in the Middle East driver’s seat, the oil and armament companies, the region’s oil-exporting autocracies and various non-state groups were all keen on seeing their oil incomes rise from record lows. And we ob-served that, in this context, ‘the prospects of a new energy conflict, whether premeditated or co-incidental, seem extremely high’. [. . .] We can only hope that the current round of Middle East hostilities won’t be proportional to the size of its current danger zone.