Who Benefits from the Burning World and Why We Fund It

Why This Matters Now

There is a cruel irony at the center of every major geopolitical crisis of the last three decades: the populations most affected by war, famine, and economic collapse are frequently the same populations that have underwritten, through consumption, investment, and political loyalty, the systems that produced the crisis. This is not coincidence. It is a structural feature of the modern global economy, built into the architecture of shareholder capitalism, financial intermediation, and resource extraction.

The 2026 Hormuz crisis has made this architecture visible in ways that peacetime abstracts away. When oil prices spike from $67 to $98 per barrel, Exxon Mobil's quarterly earnings expand. When fertilizer shortages send urea prices soaring by 43%, CF Industries' stock rises. When insurance markets tighten around war-risk premiums, Lloyd's syndicates profit from the fear. When semiconductors become scarce because Gulf shipping is disrupted, the margins on remaining inventory improve. The defense contractors, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, see their order books swell when conflict escalates. The private military contractors that provide logistics to forward-deployed forces bill by the hour. This is not a conspiracy. It is a feature. Modern capitalist economies are designed to route capital toward shortage and scarcity. When war creates shortage, capital flows to those who control the scarce resource.

The Beneficiary Class

The beneficiary class of global destabilization is diffuse and largely invisible. It is pension funds holding energy company shares. It is sovereign wealth funds weighted toward defense. It is index funds that automatically increase their allocation to oil majors when those companies outperform. We are all, in some measure, invested in the infrastructure of conflict. A retirement account tracking the S&P 500 shifts toward defense and energy stocks during crises without the account holder making any active decision. The fiduciary duty that governs pension fund management requires maximizing returns, not evaluating the moral provenance of those returns.

The concentration of crisis benefits is measurable. SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, documented global military expenditure reaching $2.44 trillion in 2025, with the five largest defense contractors, Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, and General Dynamics, commanding combined revenue exceeding $200 billion. These companies are widely held by institutional investors: Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street collectively hold significant positions in every major defense contractor, meaning that index fund investors are defense industry shareholders by default.

Technology Companies: The Dual-Use Problem

The platforms that connect us, Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, operate the cloud infrastructure for military logistics, the AI systems for surveillance, the payment rails for sanctioned transactions, and the advertising ecosystems that fund political propaganda. They do not choose sides in the wars they enable; they provide infrastructure to all comers. When governments purchase cloud computing for drone targeting systems, when social media platforms allow coordination of militia activity, when payment processors facilitate sanctions evasion through cryptocurrency intermediaries, the shareholders of those platforms benefit from the activity they host. The entanglement is nearly total.

Amazon Web Services holds contracts with defense and intelligence agencies across multiple NATO countries. Microsoft Azure operates classified cloud environments for the US Department of Defense. Google's Project Maven, initially controversial within the company, established a precedent for AI-military collaboration that has since been normalized across the industry. The revenue from these contracts is not separately disclosed in a way that allows investors to evaluate their exposure to military applications specifically, meaning that holding shares in any major technology company includes undisclosed defense revenue.

Financial Institutions: The Lubrication of Power

No war is fought without financial infrastructure. The dollar clearing system, operated through correspondent banking relationships anchored by major US and European banks, processes the transactions that fund military procurement on both sides of most conflicts. Banks provide the credit facilities that allow defense contractors to scale production. Insurance markets underwrite the shipping routes through conflict zones, and profit from the risk premiums that conflict generates. Investment banks structure the sovereign debt that finances wartime spending.

The mechanism is not hidden. It is simply so pervasive that it becomes invisible. Every barrel of oil purchased through the international market, every container shipped through a war-risk zone, every government bond issued to fund military operations passes through the financial system. The banks that facilitate these transactions earn fees on volume, meaning their revenue increases when geopolitical instability drives more hedging, more insurance, more emergency financing, and more commodity speculation. JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup all reported increased trading revenue during periods of geopolitical volatility in 2022, 2023, and 2024.

Food Companies: The Inflation Merchants

When input costs rise, whether from fertilizer shortages, fuel surcharges, or supply chain disruptions, agribusiness companies pass those costs to consumers and often expand their margins in the process. The academic literature on greedflation, the tendency of corporations to use supply shocks as cover for price increases that exceed their cost increases, is now robust. The 2022 agricultural crisis following the Russia-Ukraine war saw major food companies report record profits while food banks ran dry. The 2026 Hormuz crisis is producing an encore. Grocery prices rising 12 to 18% annually benefit the shareholders of Archer-Daniels-Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and their peers while impoverishing the households at the end of the supply chain.

The market concentration that enables greedflation is structural. Four companies control approximately 70% of global grain trading. Three companies dominate US meat processing. Two companies control the majority of agricultural seed supply. This concentration means that supply disruptions create pricing power that exceeds the underlying cost pressure, because consumers cannot switch to competitors offering lower prices when there are no meaningful competitors. The antitrust enforcement that might constrain this concentration has been weakened by decades of regulatory capture and political lobbying.

The Entrapment of Global Citizens

Here is the bind: to survive within the modern economy is to participate in these systems. Your retirement account holds shares in weapons manufacturers and oil companies. Your smartphone contains minerals extracted under conditions of labor exploitation. Your food was grown with fertilizers whose production emits as much CO2 as Germany. Your bank lends to companies that drill in wildlife refuges and finance deforestation. Opting out entirely requires a level of asceticism that most people cannot afford, in the most literal sense: the premium on ethical consumption falls disproportionately on wealthier consumers who can absorb it.

The structural entrapment operates at every level of consumption and investment. A teacher in Ohio whose pension is managed by the State Teachers Retirement System holds indirect positions in Lockheed Martin, ExxonMobil, and Archer-Daniels-Midland through index fund allocations. That teacher has no mechanism to direct their pension away from these holdings without forgoing the pension entirely. A family choosing between organic locally grown produce and conventionally grown imports makes a decision constrained by income, geography, and the time required to research supply chains. The system is designed to make complicity the path of least resistance.

What Happens If Citizens Wake Up

The scenario of mass consumer and investor divestment from systems of destabilization is not merely theoretical. The tobacco divestment campaigns of the 1990s reduced tobacco industry capital access and preceded major regulatory action. The fossil fuel divestment movement, while incomplete, has materially increased the cost of capital for some coal producers. ESG investing, however imperfect and susceptible to greenwashing, has begun to embed sustainability metrics into institutional capital allocation. These are slow-moving forces. But the compounding effect of changed consumer preferences, shareholder activism, regulatory pressure, and alternative investment frameworks can, over decades, reshape which activities receive capital and which do not.

The more immediate lever is political: citizens who understand how their consumption and investment choices connect to geopolitical outcomes can vote for representatives who impose accountability on corporations, can support regulatory frameworks that price externalities, and can organize boycotts and divestment campaigns that impose reputational and financial costs on bad actors. The chilling effect of coordinated consumer withdrawal on large corporations has been demonstrated repeatedly. What has not been demonstrated yet is the capacity to sustain such withdrawal across the full system simultaneously. The scale of the entanglement is the obstacle. We are so deeply inside the machine that we cannot see its shape.