Blain’s Morning Porridge Feb 2, 2026 – Skating on very thin ice…
Let’s paint the town, we’ll shut it down….
Just how thick is the ice? Everything juddered last week – from AI to perceptions of Geopolitics. There are so many take aways. Are markets vulnerable to an AI/Credit Cascade event? How vulnerable are The Middle Nations (J-CAKE). China is a rising risk. Just how well will the USA handle a crisis? Is it time to exit Gold? But go where?
As has been said many times before: “there are decades when nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen.” The World is a complex place. I got a feeling… we are skating on very thin ice indeed.
Apologies for the lack of Morning Porridge last week. I was at the annual Interbourse Ski Week with some 400 other market folk. There was plenty to talk about. I listened, watched, and now I’m trying to draw some conclusions – which ain’t easy when there is so much to consider.
Experience teaches wobbles and crashes are exciting and often expensive… but markets swiftly bounce back stronger. Since 2010 a whole market generation has grown up believing in the Fed Put, convinced any market threat will be averted by bailouts and support, thus every price tumble isn’t analysed for lessons to be learnt, but is simply seen as a buy-the-dip opportunity.
If we are in for a correction…. this time might be different. In the past traders, investors, governments, treasuries, central banks have all been professionally aligned and determined to create solutions and foster stability. That’s no longer a given. There is less sense of doing the right thing for the sake of doing that right thing… Today it feels more about self-interest, which is incompatible with trust – a fundamental driver of stable markets.
What are the critical points for markets to think about:
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