Rob’s comments below are in italics.Derek’s comments below are in normal font.

We thought we’d do a bit of a roundup of recent goings-on today. What do people need to know?

Well, in the week since our last recording, there have been more or less daily reversals in the apparent American stance regarding the discussions with Iran.

It was more or less a surprise that we actually got the memorandum of understanding signed by Trump. No sooner was it signed than Israel continued the fighting in Lebanon, despite the fact that the number one item on the memorandum is a complete cessation of hostilities, including in Lebanon.

The strait was reopened, but it’s already been shut again in response to that. As of today, this is what I mean by the rapidity of reversals. The moment you think one thing has actually developed, the next minute, we’re back to where we were before. Each time there’s a failure to live up to what has already been explicitly agreed, it erodes the credibility of the United States even further.

It just makes it appear like a circus, doesn’t it? All done to probably manipulate the stock value of certain companies, I would suspect.

Yeah. Originally, there was going to be a signing ceremony, initially in Islamabad, then it was moved to Geneva. It has since become apparent that there was a Mossad plot to assassinate the Iranian negotiators. That’s why the agreement was actually signed in separate locations.

The Iranian side signed separately, and Donald Trump signed in Versailles. That is ironic, because that’s where Germany agreed to the humiliating terms that ended the First World War, which of course was responsible 20 years later for the outbreak of the Second World War. So a slightly ironic gesture.

Even though it’s been signed, and even though the Iranian Supreme Leader expressed his reservations about whether America would continue with it, he agreed to go along because a majority of the governing council had decided this was the best way forward. Because of the immediate reopening of hostilities by Israel in Lebanon and the subsequent closure of the strait almost as soon as it was opened, apparently about a dozen tankers got out, nearly all Iranian ones. Now we’re back to square one as far as the Strait is concerned.

The negotiations are now about how to reaffirm America’s seriousness about this agreement so that the strait can be reopened. We’re still in this phoney war state, which has gone on far longer than you or I would ever have imagined. Certainly in this country, we’re not yet seeing actual shortages at the pumps. We are seeing price rises in the shops, which is more or less inevitable given the rise in diesel fuel prices, which is much sharper than the petrol price rises.

In America it varies by state, but price increases have been quite painful and will continue. One reason we’ve been insulated from actual shortages, rather than just price changes, is that there was obviously a lot of petroleum in transit on tankers when the straits were closed. These have taken time to reach their destinations and be discharged, providing something of a buffer.

All countries have also been drawing down their reserve stocks - to the point that these are now close to exhaustion. Some people reckon there’s less than a couple of weeks before there’s nothing left from that source, and then the pain on the world economy will really begin to bite.

Even if the strait opened tomorrow and production from the mothballed oil fields was ramped up to full capacity with shipping going flat out, those who understand these matters better than I do estimate it would take three times as long to recover as the three months the strait was shut. So it’d be nine months before we got back to where we were before.

Which is essentially what we’d said back in February and March, wasn’t it? It may just have taken a bit longer than we thought to become apparent.

Yeah. Once again, there’s been a complete asymmetry between the seriousness with which the Iranians are approaching these negotiations in Geneva and the frivolousness the Americans are displaying. Foreign Secretary Agarci and parliament speaker Cardibuff simply walked past Vance, Witkoff, Kushner and all the photographers sitting there waiting for a photo opportunity, all set up to show them grinning and shaking hands. They just weren’t going to go along with that pantomime.

Some people are depicting this as a deliberate snub, but it was simply that they wouldn’t stoop to that masquerade. They then walked into another room, where they were greeted by the Prime Minister of Pakistan, who warmly embraced them. They continued to ignore the Americans, and Vance looked completely disconcerted, clearly out of his depth.

The Iranians then refused to enter the discussion room until all reporters had been cleared out. All of this was entirely predictable. It’s astounding that the Americans didn’t realise they could have avoided all of that public embarrassment by treating them with the respect they deserved. They could have kept the press circus out entirely.

Yeah. I was thinking about Caitlin Johnston’s comment the other day. The US Empire seems to think the entire world is its property. Anyone living in those places who responds to US naval bases or whatever is deemed to be committing an act of aggression, even though it’s in their part of the world. Until that mindset changes, the US Empire’s attitude towards these negotiations won’t change.

Yeah. So it’s going to be a rocky few months. We just have to watch this unfolding day by day.

The approval ratings of the Israeli regime amongst the American public have been plummeting, and this is likely to continue. Particularly when the full effects of this conflict feed through to affect people’s own day-to-day lives and financial stability. Trump is in a difficult position.

He doesn’t seem capable of controlling himself. Part of the reason the talks got off to such an appalling start is that he published yet more rants on social media before proceedings had even begun, almost like dealing with someone who can’t control what they blurt out.

Yeah, it all feels like a big show. I was reflecting last night on the fact that the Iranian football team played two World Cup matches in America. Surely that reflects the fact that some elements of this are theatrical. If you were genuinely at war with someone, would you have that country’s football team playing on your home turf?

Even that was done incredibly incompetently. They made life as difficult as possible for those players, with delays, harassment, and so on. If you’re going to allow it, you could at least do it properly.

So sometime soon we’ll get back to the original idea of this podcast: to provide an outline of how the money system works, how to get to grips with it, and how to apply that understanding to working within it to your own best advantage. We didn’t intend this to be a current affairs channel, but we didn’t expect world events to unfold quite like this. These events will affect the financial position of all of us and the options available to us in life.

That’s right. Would you say, for someone thinking of starting a business, it is worth hanging fire for a month or two and seeing how things play out? What kind of volatility do we think is going to come up?

It depends on what your business is. I’d been working on developing various electronic devices and audio effects for musicians. I’d projected quite considerably forward with plans to have things manufactured in China. I’d got prototypes done that way and opened negotiations with suppliers about scaling things up if it worked out well. I’ve just put all of that on ice because of the uncertainty.

Not knowing how much you’ll be affected by events entirely beyond your control is unsettling. The best business would be something local, providing services to people immediately around you, face-to-face, offering things they’d find harder to get or much more expensive to get through the larger corporate structures we’ve taken for granted.

Things they can’t just buy on Amazon.

Yeah exactly. OK, until next week.

Good thoughts. Thanks.

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