Trump throwing a lot of people under the bus because of stock markets?

[mids2019]

When you start a war you finish it in my opinion. There has been no other war that has been stopped because of a slide on the Dow Jones or an oil price spike. For Trump to now prematurely call an end to the war simply because of economics will simply mean IIrans drone terrorism has worked.

The people of Iran will be left with a job half done without the space needed for an uprising.

A new leader with good reason to ideological hate Israel and the US will realise the only method of future deterrence of Iran is through acquiring a nuclear weapon as their conventional weapons were obliterated. Iran will now do everything possible to acquire such a weapon.

This is a time for resolve Mr. President. There is still a chance to destroy this regime maybe with limited target ground troop assaults. The world actually will be safer if you continue.

I like your positivity.

The attempts at scaremongering are pathetic and remind me of all the scare mongering that happened at the start of Covid, leading to panic buying of essentials and people getting upset over others having a visitor not in their "bubble", or stockpiling loo rolls.

Not great for mental health and not proportionate to the actual situation.

Yes, I think it hasn't registered yet and won't until people are personally affected. I also think that most people place a huge amount of faith in governments to make good plans, despite all evidence to the contrary.

It feels very like it did in Feb/early March 2020 when we were all reading about COVID but still watching flights coming and going and the UK govt doing nothing

I think we'd need to establish where jet fuel vs. Road/heating oil is refined and how it's imported before calling for the UK Gov's job to directly intervene in the aviation fuel supply chain.

Jet Fuel/Avtur is not the same as petrol/diesel fuel/heating oil so it's not automatically a case that flights refuelling at, say Heathrow, are stealing fuel that could instead have gone to UK motorists or householders, but it's true to say they're using a portion of the crude that's refined somewhere...

TBH as far as aviation goes the markets will probably do a better job of rationing than HMG could do.

Exactly what I was just thinking. Pricing is more effective. If airlines ramp up prices people will opt out.

Russia has aligned with the east more than the west, you may have noticed the brutal fluctuation in it's western borders in past decades.
Countries on the borders of China have some concerns about it's government intentions.

I wonder how many people choose to migrate to Russia or China compared to US, and why.

I agree that any interventions or restrictions need to be well thought out.

I am not saying all planes must be grounded, just noticing that the "vibe" feels the same for me now as it did in 2020, when we could see that the government needed to take some action but they weren't. Flights were still ferrying travellers in and out despite seeing more and more outbreaks across the world of a largely unknown virus.

Now we are watching other countries start to cancel flights, run low on motor fuel, plan for "energy lockdowns" etc but there isn't much coming out of government about it. We are just watching, like in March 2020.

I wasn't necessarily advocating for all summer holidays to be cancelled, but I do think the government could be preparing the country. Hopefully it is taking them time as they are planning thoroughly and considering all the impacts.

Any restrictions will likely damage the economy and panicking people serves no one. So I do see that they need to be careful.

What happens to flights booked months ago for the summer, I wonder? Will the airlines stand by their £40 flight to France?

It's complicated but aviation fuel is typically refined from the same light and sweet crude oil that produces diesel and petrol for cars. Heating oil is more of a grey area and can be produced from light and sweet or heavy and sour crude but the UK does not have suitable refineries for heavy sour crude.

Athough that may change in the future.
We should probably get back to the topic of the thread...

I don’t think they will change the price after people have paid, but not sure on cancellations.

You asked if I considered Russia as part of Asia, I answered.
You expressed your admiration of Russia & China, me too, but wouldn't want to emigrate there. Makes me wonder, if 'the west' is so awful why people don't choose to emigrate to successful 'eastern' societies like China & Russia. As you say, perhaps that will change and it will be interesting to see how that works out. People I know who lived under Russian rule are much happier now their countries are independent but anecdote is not the plural of data of course.

"Refined from" the various crudes yep,

Having seen the kicking airlines got over Covid, some of it very misinformed, I'm just wary of people thinking that the airlines are stealing their heating oil/petrol/diesel...."look at that lot, still going on holiday, using our fuel"..

Happy to be corrected but about the only area of overlap I'm aware of is that some paraffins are very similar to Jet Fuel aka Avtur.

Nobody knows.

Those airlines that have hedged fuel contracts into maybe the autumn might be able to hold fares for now...but that doesn't mean they can get the fuel if the supply stops.

Airlines that haven't hedged could be in difficulty v quickly...

I've heard of retrospective fuel levies on existing bookings in the past but not sure if that is allowed now.

Looks like the cyclical nature of the airline industry is about to strike again, but that might be a relatively trivial matter in the grand scheme of things.

The point I'm making is that it's a choice what products you refine crude into.

Ok...I only burnt the stuff so that confuses me a bit.

I thought the idea of refining was you split the crude down into it's component fractions, and the fractions in the different types of crude vary...so some crudes are more suitable if your emphasis is certain products..

Are you saying you can take a generic crude and refine it you have a free hand, or almost, in what comes out the far end of the process...e.g. in this case you perhaps an select how much avtur you get out of a bulk of crude verses how much petrol?

Full disclosure: I'm no expert either.

It's not a free hand but the processes and complexity of the refinery determine what final products can be made. So yes, depending on the refinery set up and the specific chemical processes used you can convert raw crude into various products. It's not a case of distilling it into component parts which become suitable for processing into different products. I don't think you can turn heavy/sour into aviation fuel (if you can I suspect it's too costly and complicated to make it worthwhile) so that flexibility doesn't exist but light/sweet and heavy/sour each have a range of different products they can be made into.

I've just done some more research and got different information which agrees with your understanding of the refining process but a lot seems to depend on the complexity of the refinery.

If mass starvation was on the cards loads of countries would pile in and help Trump secure the vital areas, Bloomberg this morning (who are now running a weekend live desk instead of the usual endless repeats of old content) giving very sobering predictions for the pricing/inflation/shortages that are heading our way in the coming weeks. Something as simple as basic food packaging being unavailable could wreak havoc.

As someone else said, if there are fuel shortages planes are going to get grounded, not sure you will get the £40 back in that case?

This is completely different to Covid, during Covid the factories were still running, now the basic ingredient of many "essentials" isn"t running, the government had the printing press running full tilt to bail everyone out, this is an inflation shock event, interest rates and inflation are going to go way up, many people with debt will be wiped out.

Of course it's a different situation to Covid but the similarity is people who love to scaremonger and create drama arounds worst case scenarios.

I"m quoting Bloomberg news, they have been squealing for rate cuts for the last few years so are not prone to "scaremongering", there was a hush in the studio today when the facts of how bad this is were being laid out by one of the guests.

I think the countries staying out of it are doing it for good reasons, they don't want to lose their people or assets. Also if they need goods that pass through the straits (or potentially Bab El Mandab) staying out of it is the best position.

Even Merz (the most pro American German Chancellor since the 1960s) said that Trump did not have a plan and reiterated that NATO was a defensive alliance and complained about not being notified.

Trump doesn't have the conventional power to secure anything and his increasingly incoherent rambling and petty threats are just isolating him. He chose to listen to Yes men like former Fox News presenter Hegseth and unelected Witkoff.

The asymmetric warfare that Iran is waging, means that no assets (including personnel) are safe, the intelligence that they are getting through their own sources and allies is outstanding.

From a purely selfish POV, it makes sense to watch how this plays out. If America is weakened, then they'll have more leverage.

The parsmount objective of this war has now become reopening the Strait of Hormuz

Undoing the consequences of this war

Talking of which, the International Atomic Energy Agency says Iran’s heavy water plant at Khondab, which the country said was attacked on March 27th, has suffered severe damage and is no longer operational.

The installation contains no declared nuclear material, the UN nuclear watchdog adds in a social media post on X.

Source: Times of Israel.