The powers that be are making too much money out of the Middle East conflict for there ever to be peace in the Middle East!

 

From our breakfast table it looks like the TCC make too much money out of war for there ever to be true peace.

 The BBC ran a story entitled Follow the Money. If I could have got a transcript I would have used that story in my blog because it's so much better than anything I could have put up. However, that was not to be. The following presentation comes from Anthropic Claude who's also much better at this type of research and writing than I am.

"The conflict timeline: US-Israeli strikes on Iran ("Operation Epic Fury") launched February 28, 2026. Iran retaliated, closed the Strait of Hormuz, and struck energy infrastructure across the Gulf. A ceasefire negotiation is ongoing as of mid-June 2026, with the Strait's status still uncertain.

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Global Economic Cost — Conservative Estimate

The Dallas Fed's model found that the Hormuz closure — removing roughly 20% of global oil from the market — lowered global real GDP growth by an annualized 2.9 percentage points in Q2 2026 alone. Global GDP in 2026 was tracking around $110 trillion, so 2.9 points off that baseline is in the range of $3 trillion in lost output for the year if the disruption persists through Q3.

Wood Mackenzie's "Summer Settlement" scenario — which assumes the Strait remains largely closed until September — projects global GDP growth falling below 2% in 2026, with what it calls modest but permanent economic scarring relative to the pre-war baseline.

Oil prices surged from $72/barrel before the strikes to over $106/barrel within weeks, a 40%+ jump, while jet fuel costs for airlines climbed from roughly $85–90/barrel to $150–200/barrel.

Asian spot LNG prices hit a three-year high of $25.40 per MMBtu in early March, then surged another 140% after Iran's renewed attacks on March 18. About 110 billion cubic meters of annual LNG exports through the Strait — roughly 19% of global LNG trade — were halted.

Conservative floor estimate for total global economic damage: $1.5–3 trillion, mostly in lost growth, energy cost inflation, and supply chain disruption. If the Strait remains partially closed through year-end, the upper range climbs well beyond that.

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Who Made Money

Defense Contractors — the clearest winners:

Major American defense contractors gained an estimated $120 billion during the war, with continued upside through arms sales to Middle Eastern countries seeking US protection.

The CEOs of RTX (formerly Raytheon), Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, L3Harris, and Honeywell Aerospace met at the White House and agreed to "quadruple production" of key weapons systems — all sitting on order backlogs that dwarf the GDPs of several nations.

Between 2020 and 2025, these top contractors spent $110 billion on buybacks and dividends — more than double their capital expenditures — and now face an unprecedented surge in orders.

Israel's Elbit Systems briefly became the highest-valued company on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. Israel's three main defense firms — Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries, and Elbit Systems — all saw major demand spikes. On the US side, over 1,200 Patriot missile-defense systems from RTX, hundreds of Tomahawk cruise missiles, and more than 300 THAAD interceptors from Lockheed were deployed.

Congressional stock trading disclosures under the STOCK Act reveal dozens of lawmakers made buys in Lockheed Martin, RTX, GE Aerospace, Howmet Aerospace, L3Harris, and Northrop Grumman throughout 2025 — many of which appreciated 50–100%+ by early March 2026. No proof of insider trading has surfaced, but the pattern of lawmakers with intelligence and defense committee oversight making these buys is, as the report puts it, "hard to ignore."

Energy sector: Oil majors with non-Hormuz production — US shale, Norwegian shelf, West African producers — benefited directly from the price spike, though this is diffuse across the sector rather than concentrated in named winners.

The structural point your TCC framework would flag: The defense industry's consolidation from 51 prime Pentagon contractors in the 1990s down to 5 today means the war's financial benefits are extraordinarily concentrated. The same five firms dominate, the same investor class holds them, and — per the congressional trading pattern — some of the same people who authorized the war held the stocks".

 

It doesn't matter where in the world you go. You'll find the same reality. The poor people, the people who actually live in the cities and in the countryside are the ones who bleed and suffer. While the TCC get richer.

Brian