🌍 Wall Street’s geopol bets

Your Insider’s briefing:
— Wall Street’s geopol bets
— Why Putin’s island visit irked Japan
— Nuclear reactor vs jellyfish

🚤 This is our last briefing for the week but we’ll be back Monday! Intrigue Insiders will get a weekend recap and horizon scan, so why not join today!

294km (183mi)

That’s how wide yesterday’s solar eclipse ‘path of totality’ was at its maximum — a thin dark strip of the Moon’s shadow racing across Greenland, Iceland, and northern Spain, plunging millions into complete darkness for around two minutes at a time. Much of broader Europe still saw a ‘deep partial’ (80-90%+) eclipse.

Imagine if you were sitting on $15.3 trillion — that’s bigger than the GDPs of Germany, Japan, and the UK (combined).

You can afford the best advice so, as well as becoming an Intrigue Insider, you hire a former US national security advisor, a Swiss central banker, and let’s throw a top Canadian central banker in there too because who doesn’t love Canada, right? Actually, don’t answer that.

Anyway, what would this crack team advise you on geopolitics?

Well we don’t have to guess because BlackRock — the world's largest asset manager — literally just did all that then burped out its latest Geopolitical Risk Dashboard.

Here are their top four predictions, starting with… 

This one’s less of a spicy forecast and more an example of basic pattern recognition, but that doesn’t mean it's not a sound observation.

The world has now shrugged off a historic disruption to a fifth of its oil supply like a mild hangover — we’ve explored the how, including a mix of aspirin alternative supply routes, emergency releases, demand destruction, and China tapping its own vast-if-secret reserves. In a note released yesterday, the International Energy Agency now sees total 2026 oil demand dropping for the first time since Covid.

Even the latest Houthi hits on Saudi Red Sea assets are getting treated as incremental rather than systemic. But maybe that brings us back to the underlying value of BlackRock’s point: this is no longer a Hormuz story, but a structural story — deal or no deal, prices will now keep trading a broader, residual risk as economies pay a premium for secure supply.

This one is heating up faster than your laptop on a Zoom call, and the numbers themselves are alarming… but not surprising: we always warned Trump’s tariff wall against China’s subsidised overcapacity would send that wave of low-cost and often high-quality goods crashing elsewhere. And now it’s crashed:

In practice that means jobs vanishing, towns declining, and populists surging.

Brussels understands the problem, but Beijing understands Brussels: Europe talking tough on EVs? China suddenly probes French cognac. Escalate further? Well now Spanish pork gets investigated. Oh you think you can double-down? Bam — ask Europe’s dairy farmers how they’ll feel about losing China access. And so on.

The only way to survive this divide-and-conquer might be a country-wide levy like DC’s Section 301 tariffs, though that requires something Europe struggles to find (common ground) and risks something China loves to dish (retaliation). Ideally the EU and US would confront this together, but US-EU ties are toxic.

Considering the State Department just posted a video captioned “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again”, this feels like another safe bet from BlackRock.

Cuba is the obvious adversary, though US economic pressure alone doesn’t seem to be budging the regime, and DC doesn’t seem to have any appetite to go sharper yet.

Nicaragua’s own ailing dictator (Ortega) is also weirdly raising his own head above the parapet with moves like cancelling future elections, but his Nicaragua isn’t as ideologically symbolic as Cuba, nor as rich or antagonistic as Maduro’s Venezuela.

So the more immediate spice might come via Brazil’s October elections, pitting the left-leaning President Lula against Trump’s more ideologically aligned Bolsonaro Jr. The US president has already wielded tariffs, visa restrictions, and even cartel terrorist designations in a presumed attempt to nudge things, so watch for an incremental dial-up ahead of October.

Sure, frontier AI is hardly friendship bracelet territory, so this is a room-temperature take (which we share). But we’d just note a narrow lane for cooperation has now opened: May’s Trump-Xi summit led to a new dialogue on AI ‘best practices’, with a first round due next month (just ahead of Xi’s planned reciprocal US visit).

And again, they’re not exchanging lab notes like best buds at college, so much as just trying to avoid their historic AI race inadvertently empowering crims or terrorists. And there’s reason to be hopeful — it was right at the Cold War peak that the US and the Soviets managed to curb existential risks via nuke treaties.

So okay, maybe there’s nothing in there you didn’t know already, but consider two things…

So okay, maybe there’s nothing in there you didn’t know already, but consider two things: first, from our old days on the inside, we’re reminded that sometimes a national security classification is less about what’s just been said, and more about who just said it.

And so second, sometimes big corporates pay top dollar for a geopolitical outlook not necessarily because it will reveal something they didn’t already know, but because the act of paying top dollar is itself an act of assurance: dear shareholders, we literally hired the best team that money can buy, so what more could we do?

But yes, BlackRock folks are clearly sharp, and we leave their latest report with three key takeaways:

First, they’re basically declaring that the age of clean globalisation is over, but that the age of clean decoupling hasn’t arrived yet either. We’re now stuck in the messy middle, which leads us to…

Second, global risks aren’t all necessarily spiking higher, but they’re becoming more structural and embedded: higher baselines, stickier frictions, tighter margins of error. And that’s all happening as…

Third, the ways we’ve traditionally tried to manage these risks — the WTO, the UN, wherever — are increasingly getting bypassed for raw bilateral leverage.

So welcome to the messy middle, dear Intriguers. But you don’t need a $15T balance sheet to navigate it — just a sharp eye, a flexible strategy, and a strong cup of coffee.

Shout-out:

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It feels like Europe’s climate is doing an improvisational history class this week.

First on the Danube, record-low water levels in Budapest have coughed up a near-perfectly preserved Wehrmacht motorcycle, the remains of two WWII soldiers, a wedding ring, and a scattering of anti-tank mines. All undisturbed for 80 years. It’s like the river decided it was time for a WWII pop-up exhibit opposite parliament.

Then second, on the exact same calendar date as last year (11 August), tonnes of gelatinous jellyfish invaders yet again clogged the cooling pumps at France’s Gravelines nuclear plant and forced reactors offline! The funniest wildest bit is that France’s state-owned energy giant had burnt serious coin on boats and cameras to avoid this exact scenario, but it seems jellyfish care not for our contingency plans (and apparently reproduce faster and form denser swarms in warmer seas).

History lesson in one river, some nuclear slapstick in the other.

Wait, that’s the wrong day for quizzes? Per our annual August schedule we’ll be off each Friday this month, so enjoy your earlier-than-expected quiz!

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