This is the question investors must consider in deciding whether the Ukraine crisis is a Rothschild-style buying opportunity or a last chance to bail out of equities and other risky assets before it is too late. The balance of probabilities in such situations is usually tilted towards a peaceful solution — in this case, Western acquiescence in the Russian annexation of Crimea and the creation of a new national unity government in Kiev that is acceptable to Putin.
To resolve the confrontation, such a government would probably have to guarantee the official status of the Russian language and preserve Russia’s effective veto over Ukrainian relations with NATO and the European Union. This is indeed the most likely scenario, and the one most investors and businesses are effectively assuming will happen by the end of the week.
The trouble is that the alternative, a civil war in Ukraine, while far less likely, would have far greater impact on European and global economies, on energy prices and on stock-market prices around the world that are setting record highs.
In the 1991 and 2003 Iraq wars, for example, investors did well to “buy on the sound of gunfire,” but only after the outcome of the engagement was clear. In 2002, the Standard & Poors 500 index fell by 25 percent during the run-up to war. It only turned decisively in March, when the U.S. attack on Iraq began, gaining 35 percent by the end of the year.
Similarly in 1990 and 1991, it was only six months after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, when victory for the U.S.-led forces in Iraq had become inevitable, that equities advanced strongly. They gained 25 percent over the next four months.
A better analogy for the current confrontation may be the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. After a summer of nervous speculation in which stock markets around the world fell by 20 percent, President John F. Kennedy confronted Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev with a nuclear ultimatum to remove Soviet missiles from Cuba. Within a week, Wall Street started rising and ultimately gained almost 30 percent in six months.
But the 1962 rebound only started once it became clear that Khrushchev was backing down and Kennedy had won the war of nerves. A logical explanation for this week’s stock market movements is that investors now see a similar outcome in Ukraine.
But this time with Russia as the winner .
Source: Reuters
