Nepal needs five billion dollars to rebuild after floods. The finance minister said this to Reuters. Floods happened in the mountains. Water went down. Buildings did not survive the journey.
The Himalayan nation called for specialist foreign assistance. Specialist assistance. As opposed to the regular kind where someone shows up and shrugs. You need the specialists for this one. The guys who know that when a mountain dumps several feet of water on your infrastructure in a day, you cannot simply ask it to stop.
Five billion dollars. The finance minister has a number. He told Reuters. Reuters told you. Now you know what Nepal needs to fix the thing that water already fixed. The technical help they are seeking probably involves someone explaining that rivers do whatever the f*ck they want and your opinion on the matter scores somewhere between irrelevant and cute.
Retail traders read this headline and immediately started scanning for the Nepal ETF. Does Nepal have publicly traded reconstruction bonds? Can you get leveraged exposure to Himalayan disaster relief? The answer is no but that will not stop someone from asking their Robinhood account why $NEPAL is not auto-completing.
Rescue operations resumed. They had stopped. Now they started again. People need rescuing from the water that came from the sky and then from the mountains. The water does not care about your calls expiring Friday.
The specialist foreign assistance will arrive. Someone will write a check. The infrastructure will get rebuilt in the exact same place. And in five or ten or fifteen years the mountain will send more water down to say hello again because gravity remains undefeated and Nepal remains exactly where it has always been.
Photo by Calum Hill on Unsplash
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