Whatever your views on Syria (a terrible tragedy, I think we would all agree) and the UK parliamentary reaction, the latest troubles in the Middle East cannot be a welcome development for investors as they return from their long summer holidays.
The canary in the coal mine has to be the price of oil, which has been inching up lately. Strangely, all those oil bears who have been banging on about shale gas and how it will transform international energy dynamics have gone quiet. What is clear is that oil prices are highly susceptible to changes at the margin, and the Syrian affair – along with the Egyptian fiasco – is having a rather nasty series of marginal side effects. This geopolitical uncertainty also comes at a rather unfortunate moment as the Libyan and Iraqi oil sectors suffer from infrastructure problems, strikes, and s...
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