Justin Fox, Columnist

Civilization Hasn’t Ended But It Sure Has Changed

Whether the ceasefire holds or not, there’s no going back to the way things were in the Persian Gulf.

April 8, 2026 at 8:35 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

A cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz, February 25, 2026. — A cargo ship in the Strait of Hormuz, February 25, 2026.
Photographer: Giuseppe Cacace/AFP/Getty Images

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“No civilizations have ended tonight,” is how John Authers put it a little after midnight in his chart-filled recounting of one of the strangest and most alarming days in recent history. But the world is certainly looking different from how it did before commencement of the hostilities that were temporarily kinda-sorta-maybe (or maybe not?) halted by last night’s ceasefire between Iran and the US.