Japan facing Freezing Hell

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Japan has in the past few days, been buffeted by 

• Earthquakes, including the 3rd strongest ever recorded
• A devastating tsunami and several tsunami warnings
• Three nuclear reactors melting down and exploding, with the possibility of upto three more going the same way
• Homes succumbing to earthquakes, with some heroically surviving due to man's ingenuity in designing and building them 
• Homes being washed away
• People fleeing homes dues to radioactivity - if Tokyo has to be evacuated, it would be the largest evacuation in world history
• Public transport being affected because of roads, bridges, even trains being washed away
• A volcano in a different part of Japan spewing ash 4 km into the sky
• Power supply being disrupted indefinitely in several cities
• Talk about nuclear power option being reviewed and many more plants possibly closing at a later date for an extensive safety review
• A huge stock-market crash, more than 20% down in less than a week 
• Rising prices of coal due to a supplier-oligopoly
• Near-record pre-existing price levels for crude oil (both, spot and futures)
• Civil ferment in Bahrain, which is in the heart of the Persian Gulf  which supplies 100% of Japan's oil. If shipping lanes through the narrow Strait of Hormuz are blocked, Japan literally has nowhere to source the oil from - at any price.  
• Icy cold winds and weather settling over most of Japan - coinciding with record homelessness

All-in-all, Japan will need all their resolve and resilience, and more, to survive these tough times. I would not wish such bad times upon even my sworn enemies.
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It's deja vu all over again!

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We saw what Nick Leeson did to Barings Bank. We have also seen how a Japanese brokerage house was brought to its knees by a single trade where the quantities and rates were mixed, in Japanese yen!

We now have the strange, bizarre case of Steve Perkins of PVM Oil Futures who bought 7m barrels of crude past midnight from a laptop at his home while in a drunken stupor. He accounted for 69% of all oil futures trades between midnight and 4 am on June 30, during which time, the oil prices rose by $1.50 within a 30-minute time span!

As Yogi Berra said, it's deja vu all over again!
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