Why resilience is the new asset class...

The world economy is moving from an era in which uncertainty was treated as a temporary disturbance to one in which uncertainty itself has become an economic variable. Markets, companies and governments can no longer wait for geopolitical disputes to be resolved. They must price them, insure against them and carry on.
The Strait of Hormuz crisis illustrates the change. As of August 12, Brent is trading close to $90 a barrel as markets react almost hour by hour to prospects for a US-Iran agreement and the security of shipping. Yet the deeper shift predates the current crisis. From Ukraine and Gaza to US-China rivalry, sanctions, trade restrictions, climate shocks and technological disruption, uncertainty is becoming structural.
We are moving from pricing risk to pricing uncertainty — and from an economics of efficiency towards an economics of resilience.
Traditionally, markets responded to crises with an identifiable risk premium. War begins; oil rises. A ceasefire occurs; oil falls. A shipping lane closes; insurance costs rise. It reopens; they decline. Today’s premium is more complicated.
It has three layers. The first is the event premium. For example, Hormuz closes, war erupts, a tariff is imposed, or a pipeline is destroyed. This can disappear remarkably quickly when the event is resolved. The second is the structural uncertainty premium. Investors ask whether the disruption could happen again. They demand compensation for vulnerable shipping routes, sanctions exposure, concentrated supply chains and political volatility. A ceasefire does not eliminate these risks.
The third is the resilience premium. Companies deliberately accept higher costs to reduce dependence on single suppliers, countries or transport corridors. Governments accumulate inventories. Firms duplicate production. Banks hold additional liquidity. Shipping companies maintain alternative routes. Countries subsidise strategic industries.
Yesterday’s economics might have called this inefficient. Today’s economics increasingly calls it insurance. And insurance has a price.
If a credible Hormuz settlement were announced tomorrow, oil would probably fall, gold would weaken, tanker and war-risk premiums would compress, regional equities would strengthen and inflation expectations moderate. But normalisation would not mean returning to the old normal. Inventories must be rebuilt. Insurers reassess routes. Companies retain alternative suppliers. Governments maintain strategic stocks. Defence expenditure remains elevated. Supply chains already relocated may never return.
The event premium therefore falls quickly; the structural premium declines slowly; resilience expenditure remains.
There is a further paradox. Markets may sometimes underprice this uncertain world. Repeated crises produce habituation: another conflict erupts, markets recover, and investors conclude that the next one will be equally manageable. The BIS has warned that valuations remain stretched and risk premia compressed despite considerable geopolitical and macroeconomic vulnerabilities.
The danger, therefore, may not be permanently expensive markets but long periods of complacency interrupted by violent repricing.
Commodities in an age of uncertainty. The next five years are unlikely to produce a conventional commodity supercycle. Strategic divergence is more likely.
Oil will sit between two powerful forces. Geopolitics pushes prices upward; technological change, efficiency, alternative energy and non-OPEC supply constrain them. Oil could increasingly resemble a saw-tooth market: comfortable supply drives prices surprisingly low before geopolitical disruption sends them sharply higher.
Copper has perhaps the strongest structural case. Electrification, power grids, electric vehicles and renewable energy all require it. So does AI indirectly through its enormous electricity and data-centre infrastructure.
The IEA projects copper demand to be roughly 30 per cent higher by 2040, while existing mining projects could leave supply around 30 per cent below requirements by 2035. Copper may therefore become as strategically important to the emerging industrial economy as oil was to the twentieth century.
Food presents a different problem. Wheat and cereals need not become permanently expensive; productivity and production continue to improve. But food prices are becoming increasingly shock-prone because food security now connects energy, fertiliser, climate, shipping, insurance and geopolitics.
For importing countries, food security can therefore no longer mean simply having several wheat suppliers. It means securing the entire chain: energy, fertiliser, production, transport, insurance, ports and stocks.
For Oman, this changing world presents vulnerability and opportunity.
Hydrocarbons still account for a large share of export earnings, leaving the economy exposed to oil-price shocks. Yet Oman possesses strategic advantages that acquire greater value precisely as uncertainty rises.
Its major ports and infrastructure provide access to the Arabian Sea and the Sea of Oman outside the Strait of Hormuz. It possesses fiscal and sovereign assets, established energy and logistics expertise, and sits between the Gulf, Indian Ocean, South Asia and East Africa. Its diplomatic relationships cross geopolitical blocs. Renewable energy and hydrogen could eventually provide a second energy platform.
These should be viewed not merely as economic assets, but as geopolitical hedges.
The larger lesson is that resilience itself is becoming an asset class.
For three decades, governments and companies were rewarded primarily for efficiency: just-in-time inventories, concentrated supply chains, lowest-cost production, global sourcing and minimal redundancy.
The coming decades may reward something different: optionality. A second port. A second supplier. A second payment channel. Alternative energy. Strategic inventories. Fiscal space. Domestic skills. Cyber redundancy. Diplomatic relationships across competing blocs.
Each appears inefficient when nothing goes wrong. Each becomes extraordinarily valuable when something does. Markets are not telling us that the world has become permanently uninvestable. They are telling us that certainty has become scarce. And scarce things acquire value.
Gold attracts reserves. Copper attracts strategic investment. Secure energy commands a premium. Reliable jurisdictions attract capital. Skilled labour becomes more mobile. Countries capable of maintaining options become more valuable partners.
For Oman, that need not be bad news. Oman cannot control the global system, but it can position itself so that instability elsewhere increases rather than diminishes its strategic relevance. That requires broadening the meaning of diversification. The objective should no longer be simply diversification away from oil. It should be diversification away from vulnerability — across fiscal policy, financial markets, food, energy, shipping, technology, skills, diplomacy and infrastructure.
In an age of persistent uncertainty, what once looked like inefficiency may turn out to be the price of resilience.

Ahmed al Mukhaini The writer is a policy analyst