Amid the mixture of reliable information and unfounded speculation, market analysts have scrambled to make sense of the situation and what it might mean for financial markets and the global economy.
The main theme that has emerged so far is that U.S. stocks would suffer unless the Russian military managed to quickly suppress the rebellion, as may have occurred with reports late Saturday that Prigozhin had halted a Wagner advance on Moscow and, in fact, might be relocating to neighboring Belarus. But how would something that could potentially cut short the war in Ukraine — which has been a bugbear for markets since the full-scale invasion by Russian forces in February 2022 — be a negative for stocks?
The answer is that chaos leads to uncertainty, and that uncertainty is anathema to markets — especially when it could disrupt global oil and food supplies.
