Bigworld, On the financial front, we'll see what happens next week. The stock market should tank to some extent, but we'll see if the PPT / Plunge Protection Team comes to the rescue. When the Middle East blew up last October, the Fed quickly did a dovish pivot to support the financial markets, and that could be repeated. But the war risks are broader now than in Oct, and the current market is higher and more vulnerable.
I figure the US dollar surge from last week could continue into next week, so that night mute further upside for gold / silver (?), but just a guess. The market has a way of doing what we don't expect, but at minimum I figure a pullback to 5000 for the S+P 500 seems likely. The market was in need of a pullback / consolidation anyway.
As I see it, the big question now is to what extent Netanyahu continues trying to gin up the 'US bombs Iran' scenario. The main goal is to disable the underground nuclear enrichment sites at Natanz (which are deep under a mountain), which will presumably require tactical nuclear bunker buster bombs, so that means the US will have to do it, unless Israel has acquired some of these for their arsenal. They've had hundreds of nuclear tipped ballistic missiles for decades, but probably only have conventional bunker busters. Netanyahu could decide to go it alone if the alternative is a nuclear armed Iran by this time next year. For him it's a huge existential problem, which makes the alternative of waiting impossible.
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