Chapter 1: What unexpected events disrupt Barb's morning?
Once upon a mundane morning, Barb's day got busy without warning. A realtor in need of an open house sign. No, 50 of them. And designed before nine. My head hurts. Any mighty tools to help with this plight? Ah-ha! Barb made her move. She opened Canada and got in the groove. While creating Canva sheets, create 50 signs fit for suburban streets.
Chapter 2: How does Barb utilize Canva to solve her problem?
Done in a click, all complete. Sweet! Now, imagine what your dreams can become when you put imagination to work at Canva.com. Once upon a dismal day, Bob's ice cream van looked gloomy and gray. Although he had big ambitions, his socials lacked creative vision. Ugh, that bad? Maybe vamp it up a tad? I have an idea. Bob launched Canva and got into gear.
Create a video in the vampire theme and make it the funniest I mean. It went viral. Bob's business, a revival. Now, imagine what your dreams can become when you put imagination to work at Canva.com.
Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, we've got two insiders to help us unpack the WNBA's new CBA, three-time champion and WNBPA Vice President Alicia Clark, a.k.a. AC, and ESPN basketball analyst Andrea Carter. We're also going to take a look at our NCAA brackets and check out what's next in March Madness.
Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
I'm Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice. The things you aren't thinking about are the things that cause the most damage.
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Chapter 3: What challenges does Bob face with his ice cream van?
I believe emerging markets, specifically Bangladesh, Egypt, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, could be patience zero for the next market collapse. Patience zero, as read by George Hahn.
Sometimes the canary in the coal mine is an early warning system. Other times a dead canary is a false positive that causes panicked miners to stampede to the surface, crushing each other in the rush for air that was never poisoned. The panic is the poison.
Currently, global markets are pricing in the economic fallout of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran and the near closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a choke point for 21% of the world's oil and 20% of global liquefied natural gas. Equity markets in the EU, India, Japan, South Korea, and the UAE have declined 8% to 17% since February 28th. Oil hit $127 a barrel. The VIX spiked to 42.
Anything above 30 signals panic. Former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld would have called this a known known. We saw it coming. We just didn't stop it. But known knowns don't kill markets. Unknown unknowns do. September 11th wasn't on anyone's risk model. The 2008 subprime mortgage crisis was contained to subprime until Lehman collapsed and nearly took the global financial system with it.
COVID-19 was just a flu until we shut down the world economy for two years. The pattern is always the same. We're staring at the obvious threat ā oil prices, inflation, recession ā
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Chapter 4: How does Bob's video go viral and revive his business?
while the real contagion is hiding in plain sight, waiting to metastasize. So let's talk about the market collapse scenario nobody's pricing in, the one that doesn't show up in Bloomberg terminals or Goldman Sachs reports until it's already eating the global financial system from the inside out.
On the Paramount Plus show Landman, oil fixer Tommy Norris, Billy Bob Thornton, describes the oil market's Goldilocks nature. You want oil to live above $60 a barrel but below $90. Gas gets up over $3.50 a gallon, it starts to pinch. Oil hits $100, every product in America has to readjust its price. U.S.
gas prices reached $3.70 per gallon this week, prompting fears of 1970s-style stagflation and anxiety among Republicans, as the party in power typically pays a political price in an economic downturn. Neither of these outcomes is likely to lead to additional economic shocks, as the markets have already priced in these scenarios.
American leadership looks out the window and sees itself and a world that reacts as we'd hope or expect. First off, the Trump administration is just so incredibly incompetent as to not recognize in war, the enemy gets a say. Another blind spot, A, the rest of the world, specifically emerging economies where governments are already rationing fuel.
The question isn't where oil prices peak, but how long they remain elevated. As one analyst told Bloomberg, the biggest risk in the market is the Strait of Hormuz remaining constrained for a longer stretch and the market feeling the U.S. and its allies have a limited capacity to alter the dynamic. Some signs that risk may be underappreciated? Last week, the U.S.
and other international energy agency members released 400 million barrels of oil from their reserves, the largest distribution in history. This week, Trump asked NATO, Japan, South Korea, and even China to send their navies to help open the strait. They declined. Turns out showing a total lack of respect for your allies weakens an alliance.
Meanwhile, Trump added shavings of shit to his shit salad by suspending sanctions on Russian oil, undermining Ukraine's war effort. Finally, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant told CNBC the U.S. is letting Iran continue to ship its oil via the Strait to supply the rest of the world. If it sounds like Trump is flailing, trust your instincts. Above 26,000 feet, the human body cannot acclimatize.
It can only deteriorate. The world's most fragile economies have been living in the financial equivalent of the death zone for years. Unstable debt, thin reserves, and no margin for error. When oil prices spike, energy-dependent emerging economies get hit from three directions at once.
the cost of importing energy rises, their currencies weaken against the dollar, oil is priced in dollars and everyone needs more of them, and the investors who lent the money start doing the math. That last part is the killer, as dollar-denominated debt is a hidden oil bet. When a country borrows in dollars, it's implicitly betting that its local currency won't weaken.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the U.S.-Israel war on global markets?
dictating health policy to an unvaccinated population. A week into the war, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said his country is in a state of near emergency. Domestic fuel prices have spiked 17%, the Egyptian pound has declined 11% against the dollar, and traders have sold an estimated $5 billion to $8 billion in Egyptian bonds.
A Goldman Sachs analyst told Bloomberg that Egypt is "...exposed but more resilient than in previous crises," citing the country's $52 billion in currency reserves.
But according to Khalid Azim at the Atlantic Council, Egypt holds enough economic and geopolitical importance that if financing conditions tighten or external shocks intensify, stress in Egypt could serve as an early signal that broader financial instability is beginning to emerge across the region. Pakistan may be the most symptomatic patient on the ward.
Just six days after the war's start, the Pakistani government raised fuel prices 20% to stop hoarding. Meanwhile, the country carries external debt equal to 315% of its export revenue. meaning for every dollar of value created abroad, it's already promised three to a foreign creditor. That's not an economy.
Chapter 6: How do emerging markets like Bangladesh and Egypt relate to market collapses?
It's a pawn shop selling grandma's fillings. Pakistan's equity markets are down 21% year-to-date, while its dollar bonds are down 5% since the start of the war. Exacerbating the problem, long-running border tensions with Afghanistan erupted into war last month. As one analyst told Bloomberg, Pakistan is experiencing the double shock of a military and an oil price surge.
According to Pakistan's army chief, the border war could end just as soon as the Taliban ceases to support militants. Good luck with that. None of this is new for Pakistan, however. The IMF is less a lender of last resort to the country than a permanent fixture of its financial architecture, having provided 24 bailouts since 1958. The 25th check may already be in the mail.
Sri Lanka is the ghost of Christmas future. It already completed the full cycle, dollar debt, energy dependence, currency collapse, IMF bailout, political implosion, and is being asked to absorb another generational shock before it's recovered from the last one. the island nation is also recovering from a 2025 cyclone that caused $3.5 billion in damage.
On the positive side, Sri Lanka has 1% to 2% inflation and is predicted to see GDP grow by 5% this year. Central Bank Governor Nandalal Wirasinghe told Bloomberg Sri Lanka is in a good position to absorb price shocks from the Middle East war, assuming the conflict ends in five or six weeks. In the meantime, the country is rationing fuel. Then there's Bangladesh, which imports 95% of its energy.
The government lifted fuel restrictions after nine days of rationing, not because the situation had improved, but to celebrate the end of Ramadan. That doesn't make economic sense, as Bangladesh risks blackouts and the collapse of its garment industry, the source of 85% of its exports.
But in a country fresh off a 2024 student-led revolution that leveraged outrage over a previous financial crisis, the political options are a choice between awful and worse. It can use the military to guard fuel depots or placate the population and hope the crisis in Iran ends before the summer heat spikes energy demand. In 1997, the Thai bot collapsed.
On its face, Thailand's economic meltdown was containable. Until it wasn't. Within months, the crisis had spread across Asia, wiping out equities by 70% and sending $80 billion in foreign capital fleeing the region. The pathogen was fear. Banks didn't stop to calculate losses in each country. They chose instead to pull back all at once.
Thirteen years later, Greece, representing just 2% of Eurozone GDP, threatened the entire European economy, not because it was too big to fail, but because European banks had pledged Greek debt as collateral, packaged it with other assets, and built a financial architecture that had no firewall once the first bond was written down.
The question markets asked wasn't, how much Greek debt does Deutsche Bank hold? It was, what else is on their balance sheet that we don't know about? I believe Bangladesh, Egypt, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka each have the potential to be patient zero. Among European banks, HSBC and Standard Chartered are most exposed.
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