Bitcoin shirks its job as a haven during war and sinks to $63,000 as the US and Israel begin bombing Iran.

Photo below – Screencap from the World War 2 film “Catch 22”. Jon Voight explains to Martin Balsam how wholesale eggs prices can be manipulated to their personal advantage, depending on the selection of bombing targets.

It’s not as if we didn’t see this coming. The White House has been warning us for weeks that an Iran operation was imminent. Bitcoin had plenty of time to bake in the bad news, as financial markets are theoretically supposed to do. It's tanking today.

Gold got the message. It has been rising steadily since early February. And this morning's bombing attacks were timed to protect the US equities markets. They didn't start until after the close of trading yesterday.

I am so NOT falling for this again. Not predicting a stock market pullback. I did that last time, when America took Venezuela's cartel head/president into custody. The markets actually went up when trading resumed the next day.

The president used Truth Social – one of his Trump Media properties - to share 8 minutes of combat video. And then urged Iranian civilians to take to the streets and overthrow the guys with guns. No video available on that, but I’m guessing civilians are sheltering in place.

A list of targets being bombed is not available, but I’m pretty sure that nothing on this list would be of interest to the families of dead protestors. Not any of the Ayatollah's palaces, not any of the prisons their children died in, not the headquarters of the Republican guard. Nobody is running into the street shouting “Now we have hope – some centrifuge 2 hours away just got bombed!”

But this is not about Iranian human rights. Just as keeping NATO jets in their hangers was not about stopping Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine. Thousands of civilians died in Gaza recently. What do you expect when military timing and decisions are made after consulting Wall Street investors and political donors?

Let’s give Trump credit in one regard though. He appears unperturbed by the continuing alienation of his Maga base. The people he’s been promising – for years – to have America halt its foreign wars. Trump is also a believer in the inevitability of Bitcoin's rise, as the president seems willing to endure – and originate – crises which might erode his personal crypto wealth.

My crazy niece is staying with me. I’m a bad aunt, but she thinks I’m an idiot because I’m not buying Bitcoin every day. When I asked her last week if she thought bombing Iran would send Bitcoin up or down, she appeared caught off guard at the question. Hadn’t read anything about this. Her immediate answer? “It doesn’t matter. Bitcoin is going up over the long term anyway. This could be a great time to buy.”

That encapsulates the faith of Bitcoin investors, even if the amount of crypto they hold amounts to what sane people would call pocket change. And it illuminates modern day military strategy. This is 1941 all over again, when. Europeans were being sent to the gas chambers by the millions. And nobody bombed the gas chambers. The targets were Dresden, London, and anyplace that made planes or tanks or ships. Someone could have bombed the Dachau and the rail lines supporting it, if they had sent a couple of spare planes over one day after the stock market closed.

I’m just sayin’ . . .

Bitcoin drops to $63,000 as U.S. and Israel launch strikes on Iran