Ukraine v Russia is not a proxy war - Ukraine is a banana republic set up to launder money from US tax payers to US Politicians/'oligarchs' via the military industrial complex. Remember that Joe Biden phone call when he was VP about a billion in foreign aid? USA Taxpayer money -> Ukraine 'foreign aid' -> weapons sales (mostly missile oriented products) -> pockets of oligarchs via board seats, consulting fees etc. The amount of children sitting on company boards for energy companies is appalling - Biden, Pelosi, Romney, Kerry, to name a few.
Russia is merely the 'boogeyman' to justify sales for weapons, as all these geriatric politicians still think they're still in the cold war.
Crimea, Donbas have literally been shelled for the past 7 years by Kiev as they are essentially independent states with ethnic Russian people. Ukraine has historically been Russian, only chopped up not many years ago by the Bolsheviks (and didn't they do a number on Russia!!)
Regarding markets - geopolitics is a harder game than it looks. It's not just about being diplomatic and friendly and buying stuff off each other. Biden has just totally undermined the US world power strength and has exposed so many Western nations being TOTALLY dependent on unfriendly to outright hostile other nations. Gas & oil make the world go around, and oops, looks like we will starve without fertiliser and grain.
USA will potentially put Europe totally offside, as Europe relies on cheap Russian Gas (especially after their ludicrous green energy policies shutting down reliable nuclear energy). It gets COLD in winter, and a lot of farming relies on gas in their greenhouses. This doesn't even consider the totally ridiculous 'carbon budgets' from the EU, crap like that is why we had Brexit. Did you see the Dutch Farmer protests over the past few years due to being restricted with fertiliser?). Trump was totally across this, calling out powerhouse Germany for being in NATO but economically holding up Russia. And not contributing to the NATO budget!
Worse, however, is not only has Biden pushed China and Russia together, but other players like India want a piece of the pie. I'm starting to think that China was the baby of Western neocons, to outsource and deindustrialise our nations... but the baby has grown and is rebelling on mum and dad. All those sanctions on Russia just means that they have been able to develop a parallel financial system... and it may rival the US. We all know how powerful a gold-backed currency can be. People have died for trying it recently (Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein).
Meanwhile, Western nations have printed trillions of dollars in credit (borrowed from privately owned reserve banks) and inflation is raging. globalised JIT supply chains are inelastic and failing. Human population is overcrowded and we are not as self sufficient as we were 100 years ago. We are in Japanese style debt traps. Meanwhile, politicians all over the world keep saying "New World Order". We could genuinely see a paradigm shift soon in global financial markets.
Question for those older fellas in the room - has it always been this bad? Civilization on a precipice? Or have things always looked terrible yet just teetered along?
(20min delay)