Windows users will know and fear Microsoft’s “blue screen of death”, a screen that appears when there’s a critical error with your operating system and which requires a restart to (hopefully) fix the problem. This error screen has been around since the early 1990’s but in a few months’ time it will be retired, never to plague our computers again, but it will be replaced with a new black error screen so we are not safe just yet.

The game has changed in the Middle East with America now being directly involved in the Isreal vs Iran conflict. The world is on tenterhooks as we wait to see what Iran’s response will be, but for the time being the reaction in the currency market has been surprisingly muted.

We wake this morning to major news out of the Middle East, news that will dominate headlines for the next few days at least while also putting pressure on the Rand as a risk asset. Israel has attacked Iran and a retaliation is all but certain.

It’s probably quite difficult to wipe the smirk off Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s face at the moment, this as the arrival of China’s Deepseek AI model in January was touted as the death knell for Nvidia’s rampant growth forecasts. But yesterday Saudi Arabia committed to buying “several hundred thousand” of their most advanced GPU’s over the next five years which is a monster of an order.