An economic tsunami is sweeping across the world.

That's the direct result, of course, of the war on Iran launched by the US and Israel,

which has plunged not just the region, but the world into ever growing turmoil.

Just how big a disaster is approaching us, just how bad things are going to get.

Who's profiting out of this crisis, out of war?

And where next?

I'm really delighted to be joined by the brilliant economist,

in fact, Professor of Economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst,

Isabella Weber, whose work I have been following for a long time.

Great to speak to you. How you doing?

Thanks so much for having me, Owen. I'm great, but I wish the word was in a different state.

Yeah, strong same, strong same. Just give it to us straight. Just how bad on an economic level is this? How big a catastrophe is about to hit all of us?

Yeah, so I think tsunami is the right word. And we have a bit like in this moment, you know, when you can see the tsunami wave already coming, but it hasn't quite hit the shore yet.

So we are like kind of in this between moment. I've been comparing it also to the moment right

in the beginning of 2020 when we already knew that COVID was around, the Wuhan outbreak was happening,

but it hadn't quite interrupted most of our lives in the West yet. So it's that kind of a moment. How bad exactly

it will become? Of course, depends on how long this war will last. So the most effective thing

to stop the tsunami is to stop the war. Nevertheless, there's already a lot in the pipeline.

And basically what we see is that around 10% of global oil supply is missing, but it's not just about oil, it's also about LNG, about NAFTA, a key feedstock for plastics, helium, which is a key input for computer chips, fertilizers, and the list goes on, aluminum as a very energy-intensive metal.

So it's all this upstream stuff, not just oil and gas, but all that upstream stuff that

is basically in everything.

You just put out your water bottle, which I see has some plastic on it.

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