Not satire

In short, it does not look anything like the panic you might expect if the odds of the world entering into war were edging higher. The brightest conclusion is that such odds really are close to zero. A darker one is that, like the investors of 1914, today’s may soon be blindsided. History points to a third possibility: that even if investors expect a major war, there is little they can do to reliably profit from it.

The easiest way to understand this is to imagine yourself in 1914, knowing that the first world war was about to arrive. You would need to place your bets quickly—within weeks, the main exchanges in London, New York and continental Europe would be closed. They would stay that way for months. Would you be able to guess how many, and which way the war might have turned by then? If you wisely judged American stocks to be a good bet, would you have managed to trade with a broker who avoided bankruptcy amid a liquidity crisis? You might have decided, again wisely, to trim positions in soon-to-be war-strained government debt. Would you have guessed that Russian bonds, which would experience a communist revolution and Bolshevik-driven default, were the ones to dump completely?