Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: The four horsemen of the apocalypse are coming for the global economy.
A perfect storm of wars in Iran and Ukraine, extreme weather and the AI bubble threatens disaster.
The Bloomberg commodity index has risen 48pc this year, accelerating in pace and spreading in breadth from energy to industrial metals and grains.
The futures markets are no longer pricing in a quick return to normal, as they were in those first insouciant weeks of the Iran war, when traders still believed in the all-conquering might of the US navy.
Brent futures contracts are over $90 a barrel all the way out to the spring of 2027.
The first two horsemen of this “apocalypse” – conquest, war, famine and death in the Book of Revelation – are the twin wars in Iran and Ukraine.
The headline price of oil drastically understates the gravity of what is happening. The stress has switched to diesel, petrol and jet fuel, the products that we consume and that matter for inflation.
The diesel “crack spread” in New York has quadrupled to levels never seen before, tantamount to oil at $190.
The third horseman is the super El Niño.
The fourth horseman, of course, is the investment blitz in AI, advanced chips and data centres, along with the electrical infrastructure, transformers, substations and gas turbines needed to sustain this $20tn nexus, leaving aside the little matter of whether it will soon annihilate humanity.
Cut-throat competition from cheaper Chinese AI start-ups will stop OpenAI or Anthropic generating anything close to the revenues that the market now supposes.
The US bubble will burst and trigger a recession, causing both bond yields and oil demand to plummet.
Rarely have I felt such deep foreboding heading into winter.
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Telegraph 15 September 2026
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