It's looking close to the worst case scenario in terms of the economy, the consequences of the Iran war.

That is the damning conclusion of my guest, a brilliant economist, a professor of economics, no less.

Joe Michelle. Great to speak to Joe. How you doing?

Not too bad under the circumstances. Nice to be here.

Yeah, it's, I guess, the apocalypse here on Speed Run at the moment. Let's nice to be here. Yeah, it's, I guess, the apocalypse here

on Speed Run at the moment. Let's just try and absorb just how bad this is. I saw last night

one economics broadcaster kind of tweeting quite a fevered fashion, I would say, about the sudden

spike in the oil prices. What happened? Just explain what, you know,

what the hell is going on with the oil prices just generally? Yeah. Because of the war.

Yeah. So last week, the markets were relatively calm. And I noticed that financial market

commentators were saying things like, when I talk to the oil analysts, they're freaking out. When I

talk to the macro strategists at the big banks, they're fine. They're saying, you know, the oil

price will be back to where it was in a couple of weeks. This whole thing will blow over will be

okay. This week, I think the reality has really struck. The images we saw over the weekend

of continued destruction

of oil facilities, oil storage in Tehran, tax on desalination plants, absolutely horrific stuff.

So I think that the reality on the ground has really sunk in and the reality that we could

be looking at higher energy prices, not just oil, but natural gas as well,

because a huge amount of natural gas comes from Qatar for a sustained period of time.

And the big question behind all of this in terms of kind of economics, global economics,

affecting people outside the region is really how long does it go on?

If there was a deal this week, if Trump, you know, changed his mind and there was a way out, and that's the big question here, is can you turn this off? And it doesn't look good, right? You can impose tariffs on the whole world. The stock market crashes and you go, and I'm sorry, I changed my mind. I'm going to go and play golf instead. The tariffs get turned off again and the markets recover. You set fire to the whole of the Middle East and destroy a fragile equilibrium, close to an equilibrium or whatever it was. And you're in real trouble. Once they can't get the oil onto the boats, then they have to stop even taking it out the ground. Saudi has already started, I think, capping some of the

...