How is it that a country with 7 million people
in it can absolutely scare the bejesus out of
a 90 million population country with 100 times
the land area? Well, that's what we just saw.
There are 7 million Jews just over that live
in Israel. If you count the entire population,
because it's 21 % Arab, it's 9 million people.
Iran has 90 million people, and they're shaking
in their boots. It's absolutely amazing what...
cultural and organizational differences can make.
This is Tim Eneking and this is episode 51 of
Art on a Limb. So suddenly Israel attacks seriously
Iran for the first time, which has been threatened
for a very long period of time. Iran sponsored
Hezbollah, Iran sponsored Hamas. Israel has taken
them out. And because it was easier than it expected,
it's gone after Iran. So what has the rest of
the world done? First of all, risk -on assets
have just not been wiped out, but seriously hurt,
3%, 4%, 5%, sometimes up to 10%. It's affected
fiat markets, StratFi markets. It's affected
crypto markets or digital assets. Everything
has gone down. And you can see here where BTC
went down because of that news, and then has
been fighting its way back up. The two commodities
that went up as a result of this, gold went up
a little bit, and oil went up a lot, obviously
because Karg Island, where 90 % of the oil from
Iran goes through, could be easily attacked.
It's a relatively small island, and Israel deliberately
didn't touch it, not trying to drag down the
world economy by attacking Iran. The other interesting
thing is Israel has barely touched Istafan. Didn't
touch it all in the first wave. Istafan is actually
one of the ancient capitals of Persia, of Iran.
And right now, it's the closest major city to
where the largest nuclear fuel depot is. Israel
attacked it in the second wave, but only laboratories.
They haven't attacked the fuel itself. And when
you think about it, the fuel is what you need
to develop a nuclear weapon. So it's really an
interesting choice that Israel has made. First,
in the first wave, it attacked people because
it didn't want to give anyone any warning. So
it attacked apartments and various places where
key personnel from its perspective lived. And
had to do that all right away because otherwise
everyone would hide. And now it's starting to
attack the infrastructure. Bitcoin is still in
never, never land as a haven. Every time you
think it's going to turn into a haven, something
like this happens. And it falls with all of the
other risk on assets. And it's not a haven. You
have gold going up a little bit and oil going
up a lot. I have a feeling, though, if things
turn out really badly in the Middle East, that
then Bitcoin will seriously turn into a haven
asset. And we've kind of seen that in the past.
but it really is trying to make the transition
from being just a normal risk on asset into a
haven asset. There's no reason for it to be correlated.
There's no reason for it not to be a haven, but
the rest of the world doesn't really quite believe
it. Again, this is Tim Edeking, and until next
time, this is Out on a Limb.