John Stepek

And I'm John Stevick, Senior Reporter and Author of the Money Distilled Newsletter.

Morning, man.

Well, basically, I just look at what's happening in the market.

And the oil price today is up.

So it must be a war on day.

I suppose that's one way to put it.

A state of permanent hubbub.

Yeah, I mean, I guess the problem here is that everyone wants an off-ramp, but the two sides can't agree on a satisfactory off-ramp.

Yeah, I think that's a good description.

Everyone wants one.

Honestly, I think that's a little bit too upbeat.

I don't know, people love a bit of doom and gloom.

No, I think that, actually, I was looking at kind of markets this week, so the UK particularly.

And something I noticed was there was a couple of kind of significant sort of profit warnings.

And one was from Chris Nicholson, which is a house builder.

And basically last month they said it looked as if things were fine.

And, you know, the end of last month, so the war had been, you know, running for about a month.

And they said it's basically okay, you don't need to worry.

And then this month they came out with a trading update that basically said well actually no, things have actually turned down quite a bit and now it doesn't look as if we're going to sell any land this year and also our profit is going to be much lower than we expected because we're going to have to rein everything in.

And the share price fell something like 35% in the day.