🔔 The Fog Of War

Brought to you by:

In pandemics or wars, the spread of both accurate and inaccurate information playing on emotions and sentiment is fundamental to mass media sales.

This usually will come in the form of inaccurate information.

~Jim Osman @EdgeCGroup

This tweet/sentiment summed up a lot of what we've been seeing over the past few days: A bull market in emotion and moralising.

Everything that Putin does is terrible. Any calls for NATO to directly intervene are incredibly reckless. Social media commentary (everyone's an expert) is far worse than usual.

And it's incredibly easy to get sucked in.

I watched the first five minutes of this absolute horror show on Sky News yesterday 👇

The live virtual audience were incredibly emotional, and everyone applauded and gave their thumbs up to the idea that NATO should intervene, with boots on the ground in Ukraine.

Until the panelist (a retired General I think) pointed out that this would definitely lead to World War 3. Boring spoilsport.

Public opinion just isn't a good place to get information. As a rule of thumb, the more emotive and dramatic the messaging, the less you should pay attention to it.

To have any hope of analysing this type of situation with a clear mind, morals and emotions have to be set to one side.

It's not just the media that are waging an attention war either

Nope. Policymakers are at it too.

On both sides. Eye-catching soundbites and declarations are often intended to provoke responses from allies or enemies. Sometimes, they are intended to win the hearts and minds of the public.

Posturing helps maintain the public's sense of (relative) order too. It's playground stuff.

  • NATO Warns...

  • Russia Warns...

"If you do that, I'll tell my mates and we'll all batter you after school"

You can't trust anything you hear in the fog of war. It's usually deliberate or unintentional propaganda.

Syscoin: Combining the security of btc & the smart contracts of eth, you get a scalable, fast, low gas platform to build your next idea

Politicians and policymakers are people too (it might not always seem like it, but I promise you they are). Fears of doing the wrong thing as decision-makers play on their minds. Mis-steps and emotions affect them too.

Especially for many of the public-facing voices that don't necessarily have the background knowledge...

Which makes the moral high-ground an irrelevant, but tempting battlefield for them to engage in. But it's mostly noise.

And the range of possible outcomes in these scenarios seems so huge that highly improbable stories and scenarios are given a free pass in the media.

In the heat of the moment, it certainly seems like anything's possible.

But what's probable?

To decipher this, you probably need some degree of historical/geopolitical knowledge to assess the potential motives of the parties involved.

Putin hasn't suddenly gone mad and attacked on a whim.

In my non-expert opinion, this tweet from President Zelensky in June 2021 could well have been the final straw...

 Commend @NATO partners' understanding of all the risks and challenges we face. NATO leaders confirmed that 🇺🇦 will become a member of the Alliance & the #MAP is an integral part of the membership process. 🇺🇦 deserves due appreciation of its role in ensuring Euro-Atlantic security— Володимир Зеленський (@ZelenskyyUa) June 14, 2021 

Russia responded...

And just three months ago...

Utrust: Easily accept payments in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and major digital currencies with Utrust

What's the context?

Russia has never been happy with NATO's expansion eastward. It doesn't really matter if you 'blame' NATO expansion or Russian imperialism.

Ukraine's stuck in the middle.

Why is Ukraine a red line for Russia?

Some excellent background in the following links... From 2015 👇

What if Putin’s motives aren’t so mysterious after all?

What if you can read them clearly on a map?

2016

And this is an excellent read from 2014 (before Putin annexed Crimea) ...

I'm not arguing necessarily that Ukraine should split up. I am saying, however, that were it to split, were something like that to occur, and especially if those three problematic provinces—the two in the [eastern region of the] Donbas, Luhansk and Donetsk, and arguably even the Crimea—were to leave, Ukraine frankly would be better off.

And in my non-expert opinion, a divided Ukraine seems like the most probable outcome when the dust settles.

Putin knows that aggression towards NATO members and any attempts to reclaim those states is a red line for the West.

NATO directly intervening on Ukranian soil is a red line for Russia (which is why NATO have promised support rather than "boots on the ground".

Which means some kind of compromise is most likely...

 Likely the Russians will want all the territory east of the Dnieper, north to south, with the west probably handed over as a DMZ with maybe some token UN presence. Who is going to seriously contest this claim? Specifically, who has the power to? /51— Defence With A 'C' (@defencewithac) February 28, 2022 

The entire thread is well worth a read. If nothing else, it's thought-provoking and cuts right through the noise.

Anything can happen in times of conflict, but chasing every headline really isn't worth it. Step back, try to fill in the blanks and take the long view.

Nobody likes a myopic hyperbolic discounter anyway...

 Our default state is to be reactive & prioritize the present (in the jargon of my trade: we are “myopic hyperbolic discounters”).

Occasionally public-spirited souls try to nudge us to commit cognitively unnatural acts: to take the long view. https://t.co/C4wWN2sJOZ— Philip E. Tetlock (@PTetlock) March 1, 2022 

Don't know what financial news stories are important and what is complete bullsh*t? Hop onto our filtered news channel.

It's completely free 👇👇👇

Subscribe to our YouTube Channel and stay up to date with all of our videos as they're posted. We'll keep expanding and adding more formats as we go!

And if you really want to get to grips with how global markets and economics work, with trade ideas to give you actionable context, then come and join us as a premium member where you're likely going to get a nice Market IQ boost. 👇

Check out our reviews on TrustPilot 👇👇👇