Idle musings for a foggy Sunday morning (well it's foggy here in deepest Surrey anyway) in the run up to Hallow'een.
We're probably all familiar with the notion in Chaos Theory that potentially the biggest events can be set off by the most trivial of root causes (the classic example being a distant butterfly wing beat setting off a hurricane or something like that). Likewise, there is a similar aphorism that a Black Swan event (i.e. an occurrence that deviates substantially from the normally expected and is therefore very difficult to predict) is potentially the catalyst that sets off a significant market correction.
Putting 2 + 2 together and getting 16, I wonder whether the peculiar intervention by the FBI Director, James Comey, in the US Presidential election on Friday (shock, horror, Clinton E-mail scandal - but no facts to back it up at the moment), might just be such a collusion of events that sets off the often mooted global market sell off?
It all seems so trivial from this side of the Pond, but if the opinion polls are to be believed this has given Trump a big stick to beat Mrs. C. with (and more importantly has diverted attention from the myriad sticks available and being used to beat Trump with). If this rolls up into a Trump shock election win two weeks from now (after all the Brexit vote swung against the pollsters at the last minute) do the markets take fright and everything globally goes to hell in a hand basket? Strange to think of Comey as the butterfly wing in all this ...
Probably too much of a sugar rush from the toffee apples and late night horror movies. I'll go back to sleep now .... although we have been warned!
Gus.
