Outside of outright fraud in markets - which is occurring almost everywhere, but especially in commodity markets, gold, silver, and WTI crude oil - there is little to impede the coming events fomented by the irrational attacks on Iran by the brutal Israeli and U.S. militaries.
Much of what's occurred thus far in the 20-day war was entirely avoidable. The senseless killings, indiscriminate bombings and missile assaults are firmly attached to the bloodthirsty regimes in power by the aggressors. Iran's equally lethal responses against Israel and U.S. interests in the Gulf nations were widely anticipated after the various murders of their spiritual, political and military leaders.
The proximate cause of the war had little to do with Iran's nuclear capabilities. Iran's development of a nuclear deterrent had been outlawed by the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei that had been in effect for at least the past 20 years.
According to Gareth Porter, the fatwa was issued for the first time in the mid-1990s in a letter that was never publicly released. The fatwa was issued "without any fanfare" responding to a request from an official "for his religious opinion on nuclear weapons".[2]In October 2003, Khamenei issued an oral fatwa that forbade the production and using any form of weapon of mass destruction.[4] Two years later, in August 2005, the fatwa was cited in an official statement by the Iranian government at a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. It stated that the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons were forbidden under Islam.
Israel's president, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is now likely dead or severely incapacitated, had been making the false claim that Iran was just weeks or months away from having a nuclear weapon for the last 20 or 30 years. Many reporters in the news media and high U.S. government positions (neocons) have been making the same or similar claims for decades. Truthfully, Iran was no closer to having a nuclear weapon than they were six months, six years or 20 years ago, which brings into question the ultimate motive of the Israelis and U.S. political leaders.
Speculation has been swirling around President Trump's association with Jeffrey Epstein as a cause, the war started to deflect attention away from sex crimes committed prior to Trump's ascension to the presidency. While that may have played a part in the planning and execution of the military assault, there are deeper, more profound, and frightening reasons the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran. These issues have been bubbling under the surface for many years and are mostly involved with the geopolitics of China, BRICS, U.S. global hegemony, the U.S. dollar, and the legitimacy of the state of Israel.
America has been losing its grip on political power for most of the last four or five decades. After then-president Richard . Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, the value of the U.S. dollar has been pressured, but its viability as the world's reseve currency has been under extreme assault in the past 15 years and especially since the COVID crisis in 2020-21. It's become obvious that the dollar is not a survivable currency, and, with its ultimate demise, the rest of the world's fiat issuance will suffer the same fate of extinction, or, at best, severe loss of purchasing power. The world is now clearly on a path toward revulsion and a complete reordering of priorities, including, and especially, the monetary order. The fiat system is clearly failing; the war the Middle East and Ukraine are nothing less than manifestations of failed policies, beginning with monetary leadership.
Just three weeks into the conflict, the Middle East is already in complete turmoil. By its brazen assault of Iran, the United States and Israel have bitten off more then they can chew. Iran's military capabilities have wreaked extensive damage on U.S. bases in the region and on the Israeli cities of Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa, along with Hezbollah's relentless attacks from Lebanon, which Israel foolishly thought they could capture with the world focused on Iran.
If there's any clarity at all in the current fog of war, it is that the U.S. military has been out-maneuvered by Iran and that President Trump may well have been persuaded (or strong-armed) into thinking that Iran would capitulate quickly once the war started. The U.S. has - intentionally or by incompetence - vastly underestimated the will of the Iranian people and the depth of their missile arsenal. U.S. and Israeli defenses have been obliterated by precision Iranian missile strikes. The U.S. Navy doesn't have a ship within 700 kilometers of Iran's borders and two of America's aircraft carriers - the USS Ford and USS Abraham Lincoln - have been damaged and departed from the theater of war.
What's ahead - now that Israel has broken every unwritten rule of war by attacking oil and energy infrastructure - is a maelstrom of destruction to regional assets, the end of the sultanates of Oman, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, UAE, and other oil-producers, which, in addition to causing massive human, military, and industrial losses, and a global depression. Without energy, economies die. While the U.S. may have seen this development as a positive since it is a major oil producer, it will be no less devastating in America as elsewhere because of the intertwining nature of the global system.
All anybody outside of government can do is hope and pray for a reasonable solution. While prayer may provide some degree of relief from te daily bombardments, hope will do little to salvage a portfolio or retirement account from the eventual market crash. There's almost no doubt that the "big one" is well on its way, the only questions being "when"? and "how long"? Individuals and businesses must consider asset allocations and investment horizons with clear-eyed realism. It's easy to hope for the best of conclusions; hard decisions take courage and quite possibly a large dose of pessimism.
Whatever happens over the next year to five years, it's likely to be epochal.
To get an idea of just how exteme matters may become, one has to look no further than yesterday's stock indices, all of which headed straigt into the tank, and today's gold, silver, and oil prices.
This morning, gold was quoted on the spot market as low as $4,502, and silver at $65.45. This is unprecedented. At no other time have precious metals dropped so rapidly during a war-time event. The opposite has always been the norm. It is only because the mechanisms of price discovery on the COMEX and by the CME are corrupt and dominated by insiders and government meddlers. The same is true of the price of WTI crude oil, which adamantly refuses to price above $100 even though there's every indication that the world is facing a severe reckoning. Corruption, manipulation, and the allure of massive war profits are at the heart of the conflict and current mis-pricing of, well, practically everything. In six months, nothing will be recognizable. It's almost that way today.
With markets about to open in the U.S., Dow futures are off 305, NASDAQ futures are down 181, and S&P futures are off by 43. All of the major indices have recently broken below their leading 50-day moving averages and are approaching the 200-day MA. Nothing good can be said about this development. Today, tomorrow or early next week, the major indices will drop into correction territory, a clear sign that further deterioration lay ahead.
President Trump will be impeached early next year if he doesn't take dramatic action very, very soon, and by that, meaning a complete cessation of hostilities and the end of militarism by Israel. That's not likely to happen, so...
Brace for impact!
At the Close, Wednesday, March 18, 2026:
Dow: 46,225.15, -768.11 (-1.63%)
NASDAQ: 22,152.42, -327.11 (-1.46%)
S&P 500: 6,624.70, -91.39 (-1.36%)
NYSE Composite: 21,996.60, -318.94 (-1.43%)
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