Yesterday, Time magazine proclaimed “hold my avocado” to be the catchphrase millennials needed, a welcome input that millennials everywhere stopped texting each other long enough to say, with the sort of eye contact and resolution rare among their generation, “Thanks!” While some might’ve found this to be a glib overstatement on the magazine’s part, turning a sardonic tweet about generational rift, late capitalism, and the looming threat of nuclear war into a gabby “viral” article, real millennials knew that, like, whatever, retweet.
Today, the Wall Street Journal told Time to hold their avocado, as it were, with this barnbuster of a headline:
Yes, with the same chatty sense of joie de vivre, they’ve recast The Sound Of Music’s chirpy “How Do You Solve A Problem Like Maria” to cleverly rib our current unsolvable pickle, in which an unstable, insecure man with dictatorial tendencies and access to a nuclear arsenal has gotten into a shouting match with Kim Jong Un, who is, well, you get the idea. But let’s get to the radiated meat of the matter here, which is that they’re finally asking the important question: How will the markets react? When, oh when, will someone think of the ticker?
This same tone pervades the article itself, which begins:
Here’s a question that’s probably not on the CFA exam: What happens to financial markets if two nuclear-armed nations go to war?
After a week of escalating tensions between the U.S. and North Korea, some financial analysts are now taking a stab at it.
Thank fucking god that even as we tiptoe dangerously close to what would invariably be the stupidest possible reason for untold millions of people to die—that is, Donald Trump got mad—the people for whom Trump’s election seemed like an unsavory necessity are still carefully corralling their assets, eyeing the bottom line, either unaware of the shall we say human costs of “two nuclear-armed nations going to war” or euphemizing it, such that they don’t have to think about it. The cognitive dissonance oozes out of almost every graf:
Strategists at Nordea Markets estimate that in the unlikely event of “a potentially uncontained military conflict” in which global superpowers like China and Russia get involved, the European Central Bank would have to implement “highly dovish forward guidance” and the yield curve would likely flatten due to weaker risk appetite.