Expect securities markets to bend toward increasingly menacing realities in the weeks ahead. The crazed spectacle of the FAANG stocks in particular ratcheting moonward as geopolitical events threaten to spin out of control has become too unsettling to last for even another day.  It’s one thing for shares to climb a wall of worry, but quite another for them to act as though the wall did not even exist.

A couple of months ago we could dismiss tariff threats as just Trump playing poker with our trading partners. Who knew the leader of the free world was going to go “all-in” every hand? And now he’s escalated a dispute with Turkey, catalyzing a collapse in the lira that had been coming since Erdogan started tampering with the central bank months ago. This has increased systemic risk in the global financial system simply because the players themselves think it has. And yet, until Thursday, the wack-jobs on Wall Street maintained their focus on corporate earnings, blithely ignoring the headlines in order to ballyhoo every instance where companies beat the estimates of the Street’s best and brightest pencil pushers. Investors’ perspective and priorities are about to change dramatically, and not because Turkey and China have come around.