Martin Wolf

Well, I'm very glad to fill a niche I didn't know you had.

Well, I suppose there's so many different things, aspects of this.

I've been thinking of this wonderful Shakespearean line, life being a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

So one feels that when markets are looking at this, they feel this is full of sound and fury, but it doesn't signify anything.

And there are, I think, two possible reasons for that.

One is the famous taco line from my dear colleague, Robert Armstrong, that Trump always chickens out.

So in the end, he's not going to blow up the world.

He's going to find a way out of this, which will have done some damage.

It will make, I think, the US look fairly ridiculous.

But it can...

it can be forgotten, declare victory and stop.

And I think that's still perfectly possible, a perfectly reasonable view, because he's already sort of stopped the fighting and it feels like he's looking desperately for an end game.

The question is whether the other side will play ball.

And that is still to be seen.

And then there's the other possibility that in the end,

If the oil were lost, as it were, forever, the world will adjust to that.

Yes, the output that goes through the straits is very large, but in the longer run, a lot of it can go through pipelines.

They can build these.

It will take quite a while, and the world can compress this demand in time.

It might take a few years, the world growth will be lower, but what we're losing is about a fifth world output.