Russ Mould

Good morning to you, Sabri, from foggy London.

I think everybody's been pleasantly surprised, although if you're a Korean investor, you probably don't think things have been quite so calm because their headline stock market index has gone down 12% in a day and a little bit as there's been a degree of panic there, though there are probably some local technical factors related to that.

But overall, the feeling or probably hope that this is a short conflict where a resolution can be reached of some kind fairly quickly.

I think a lot of that will relate to what happens to oil and gas output, what happens to oil and gas flows through the Straits of Hormuz.

And also maybe if the war does start to drag a little bit, what are the pain points in terms of America and Israel, particularly America?

President Trump does have midterm elections coming up.

He has campaigned on the basis of setting up the Board of Peace, getting inflation down, getting the cost of gasoline down, and the current actions don't really sit with that three-point agenda.

If it works, I think it could do.

I'm not entirely convinced.

We're not wishing to look to the dark side of things.

If I was Iranian, I'd let an awful lot of ships into the Straits of Hormuz and then start getting really busy with them on a military basis.

So actually, it could be a bit of a...

Something we need to be very careful what we wish for.

I think to accentuate the positive, the world is less reliant on oil as a percentage of its total energy needs than it was, say, in the 1970s and the 73 and 79 oil price shocks, even if global oil demand has gone up since then.

And also, we're not as reliant upon the Middle East as a source of that, given the rise and rise of US production.

I think it's now the world's largest hydrocarbon producer.

So in that respect, the risks are perhaps lower than they were 50 odd years ago.

To be fair, they're not very good at measuring geopolitical activity or risk because it's really, really hard to quantify and second guess what's going to come next.

But we've certainly had a very soft start to the week after the American Martin Luther King Day on Monday.

We've had the U.S.