Welcome to the Maelstrom

Amid the murky timezones in which covert forces operate on 15/3/11 Israeli forces intercepted a Liberian flagged ship on route from Iran to Egypt via Turkey. On boarding the vessel the Israeli commandos found it to be carrying a significant but undisclosed cargo of weapons believed to be bound for Palestinian militants in Gaza. Everyone is now trying to work out if Israeli intelligence have successfully infiltrated a Iranian weapons smuggling operation or whether Iranian intelligence tipped off the Israelis about a one off shipment in order to promote discussion with their friends and enemy's because there are similarities between this incident and Qaddafi's attempts to arm the IRA.

Added to this incident there is the deteriorating security situation in Bahrain and other oil producing Gulf states along with the ongoing international debate over whether to intervene in Libya to overthrow Colonel Qaddafi.

Meanwhile Japan has experienced a huge earthquake that has killed 200 and a tsunami that has killed an estimated 8000. These two natural disaster combined have caused an estimated US$180bn worth of damage. To make matters worse there is also some sort of meltdown going on at one of Japan's nuclear power stations. Although I still think everyone is being overly dramatic about the radiation risk this incident has had an immediate and dramatic impact on Japan's capacity to generate electricity. This has led to a series of rolling black outs to make sure that any available electricity is directed to essential services such as hospitals, water treatment plants and disaster co-ordination centres. To hamper the rescue effort further it has also started to snow in Japan.

Against this backdrop of chaos I think the Japanese government should start to seriously think about temporarily shutting down Japan's stock market. With so many global unknowns and the situation in Japan changing constantly the Japanese stock market is running the risk of becoming the global economic whipping boy being forced to absorb losses that have nothing to do with them and may not even exist. This will obviously have a negative impact on Japan's long term reconstruction effort.