George Hahn

Sometimes the canary in the coal mine is an early warning system.

Other times a dead canary is a false positive that causes panicked miners to stampede to the surface, crushing each other in the rush for air that was never poisoned.

The panic is the poison.

Currently, global markets are pricing in the economic fallout of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran and the near closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a choke point for 21% of the world's oil and 20% of global liquefied natural gas.

Equity markets in the EU, India, Japan, South Korea, and the UAE have declined 8% to 17% since February 28th.

Oil hit $127 a barrel.

The VIX spiked to 42.

Anything above 30 signals panic.

Former Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld would have called this a known known.

We saw it coming.

We just didn't stop it.

But known knowns don't kill markets.

Unknown unknowns do.

September 11th wasn't on anyone's risk model.

The 2008 subprime mortgage crisis was contained to subprime until Lehman collapsed and nearly took the global financial system with it.

COVID-19 was just a flu until we shut down the world economy for two years.

The pattern is always the same.

We're staring at the obvious threat – oil prices, inflation, recession –

while the real contagion is hiding in plain sight, waiting to metastasize.

So let's talk about the market collapse scenario nobody's pricing in, the one that doesn't show up in Bloomberg terminals or Goldman Sachs reports until it's already eating the global financial system from the inside out.