Wile. E. Coyote

In my recollection, it was Slavoj Zizek (twenty-five years ago?) that first used Wiley and the road runner cartoon as a metaphor for our current reality, such as it is. Now I am watching Adam Tooze appropriate the same image of that goofy coyote lured off the edge of the cliff, suspended there as he realizes his predicament, not wishing to look down. As if magically, by not looking down, he will somehow escape his fate. Welcome to modern progress! For Tooze, the coyote is the financial and stock markets, oblivious to the overwhelming evidence of the polycrisis, assuming tomorrow will be like today. That there will always be a bailout, that the economy is too big to fail. But what about "pricing in the risk"? For instance, the type of brinkmanship that we are seeing in Iran, with the Revolutionary Guard daring Trump to invade or start more bombing. China daring the US to interdict one of its ships. And oh yeah, the planet heating past 1.5 degrees, bring super-storms and draught and mass migration. How would you actually price in that risk? You can't, obviously, so best to ignore it, pretend it will all work out. Pretend that you haven't run off a cliff. Just don't look down. After following the saga of The Straight of Hormuz for weeks now, I have decided it basically exists in a quantum state, a superposition, where it is both open and closed at the same time. This presents a dilemma for the Market, which has been bouncing like The Wham-O Super Ball, a famously high-bouncing toy invented in 1964 by Norman Stingley, made from a durable, synthetic rubber compound called Zectron. We citizens, however, are required to believe The Market is the best vehicle for pricing in risk, that insurance actuaries can tell us the future. What we know is that the longer this stalemate lasts, the less storgae capacity Gulf petro states have, forcing them to shut down wells. Some of which will be extremely difficult to get back online.The best strategy for investors is to just not look down. At some point I suppose we will have to open the box and see if Shrodinger's cat is alive or dead, but we can put it off as long as possible.