18 April 2017

Bassanese Bites: Sabre Rattling Helps Gold – Week beginning: 18 April 2017

Geo-political tensions were the main theme of last week, with concerns over a possible US-Russia dispute arising out of the Syrian missile strike giving way to heightened tensions over North Korea. US President Trump seems to have adopted a “it’s time to clean this mess up once and for all” approach, and the world is now awaiting to see if he can convince China to convince North Korea to throttle back on its belligerence. Hopefully, should the US feel forced to act on its own, this could be limited to cyber attacks which destroy – or at least persistently hobble – North Korea’s military threat. The ultimate risk, of course, is that North Korea is capable of killing millions of South Koreans quite quickly through a conventional missile strike if it retaliates – in which case we can expect some form of immediate retaliatory military strike and invasion. Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail.