Oh, that’s the mantra now?
There once was a blissful equilibrium. A calm, balanced market humming along in quiet perfection—until the Iran war came along and shattered it. Before: harmony. After: chaos. Something precious lost, something we are now invited to mourn.
It’s a beautiful story.
It also belongs somewhere between a bedtime tale and a marketing brochure.
And the uncomfortable part is not that it is wrong—that happens all the time—but that it is conveniently wrong in a way that many will accept without much resistance. If this is to be taken seriously, then one might as well take the Grimm brothers at their word while we’re at it.
Because markets do not do equilibrium.
They cannot.
Equilibrium is a theoretical construct—useful for textbooks, for clean diagrams, for explaining how things might behave under conditions that rarely, if ever, exist in reality. But in actual markets, equilibrium is not stability.
It is stagnation.
And stagnation is death.
No movement. No price discovery. No opportunity. No reason for capital to deploy itself. Traders do not wake up in the morning hoping for equilibrium. They want volatility. They want dislocation. They want mismatches between supply and demand, between expectation and reality—because that is where margins live.
And reality, more often than not, is happy to oblige.
There is always friction. Always imbalance. Always something slightly off that can be exploited, arbitraged, corrected—until it overshoots again in the other direction.
That is the system.
So the idea that we had arrived at some serene, pre-war equilibrium that is now irretrievably lost is, at best, a misreading.
At worst, it is a narrative designed to simplify something that resists simplification.
Because the more important point is not what was disrupted.
It is what had been building long before.
The system has been accumulating tension for decades. Not in a single, easily identifiable fault line, but across multiple layers—financial, monetary, structural.
One could make a reasonable case that the inflection point lies far back, when the link between money and something tangible—gold, in this case—was severed. Not because gold itself is some mystical anchor of truth, but because it imposed a constraint.
Remove the constraint, and you introduce flexibility.
Flexibility, in moderation, is useful.
In excess, it becomes distortion.
We began to create value—nominal value—out of increasingly abstract mechanisms. Credit expanded. Financial instruments multiplied. Layers were added on top of layers, each one further removed from the underlying reality of production, of goods, of tangible services.
And for a while, it worked.
Or rather, it appeared to work.
Because the financial sector—the “meta layer” that was supposed to facilitate and support the real economy—began to grow in both size and influence. It did not just reflect the real world.
It started to shape it.
Capital allocation decisions, pricing signals, even strategic directions of entire industries began to respond not only to physical realities but to financial incentives that operated on their own logic.
The map began to influence the territory.
At a certain point, the relationship inverted.
The financial system was no longer merely serving the real economy.
It had developed a kind of semi-autonomy.
It could expand, contract, generate returns, absorb losses—sometimes with only a loose connection to what was happening on the ground. And because of its scale, its movements began to dictate conditions in the real economy rather than the other way around.
That is not a stable configuration.
It is, by definition, untenable.
Because a system that drifts too far from its underlying reality eventually encounters it again.
Not gently.
So the tension builds. Quietly at first, then more visibly. Imbalances accumulate. Corrections are deferred, softened, redirected—but not eliminated.
And eventually, something gives.
Now, whether the current conflict serves as the trigger is, in some sense, secondary. It could be this. It could be something else. These systems do not require a specific catalyst—only a sufficient one.
The pressure was already there.
The lid was already under strain.
The war, in this framing, is not the origin of disruption. It is a potential release mechanism.
If it lifts the lid now—if it forces adjustments that have long been postponed—then the damage, while real, may be contained relative to what would occur if the system were allowed to continue building pressure unchecked.
Because the later the release, the greater the stored energy.
And the greater the stored energy, the more violent the correction.
This is the part that tends to be omitted from the comforting narrative of “lost equilibrium.”
There was no equilibrium.
There was a buildup.
And buildups end.
So if something breaks the illusion sooner rather than later, it may not be something to mourn.
It may be something to be quietly grateful for.
Not because the outcome is pleasant.
But because it could have been worse.
Much worse.