No April's Fool

Daily Thoughts 1 Apr 2025

At the beginning of November, we noted in the Weekly Forecasts of GnS Economics:

So, in the Middle East President Trump will face some brutal realities. These include that fact that attacking Iranian nuclear facilities would, most likely, engulf the region into a darkness, freeze Europe, plunge the world into an economic depression of never-before-seen scale and possibly even set the world ablaze. Essentially, the changed realities imply that to achieve peace in the Middle East, President Trump would be forced to engage in direct talks with Tehran. This would be a monumental task considering that he ordered the killing of Qasem Soleimani, a commander of the Quds Force (one of five branches of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), with a drone strike while travelling to meet then Iraq Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi. Tehran has been unlikely to forget this.

So, a judgement failure in the Middle East leading to an eruption of a regional war and to the collapse of the global economy is probably the largest possible Black Swan risk in President Trump’s second term.

We took a major step towards this yesterday.