Thankfully October has finished.

I read a fair bit of political, historical and economic articles/analysis and last month was rather grating for me, as it was nearly impossible to escape a myriad of articles going on about some kind of “October surprise”.

Now I’ve got a couple ‘theories’ myself, such as Turkey will annexe Northern Iraq, but at least I have a good basis for concluding that’s what will happen. Turkey has passed legislation on the ‘right’ to conduct operations in Northern Iraq, has permanent bases there, builds infrastructure(roads) there, and their history reveals the usual suspects in its founding. With regard to the ‘October surprise(s)’ on one or two occasions I’d give the benefit of the doubt to some article and then start to read it. Pretty soon it was clear the October surprise was some spun possibility dressed up into a surprise solely because it was October!

There was a fair bit last year too, but this year, oh man, it was bad. It turns out, there were no October surprises, which I guess to ‘October suprise’ pundits was actually quite surprising after all!

There’s nowt wrong with speculating – that’s a significant part of political and economic analysis of course, but why didn’t some of these articles actually have substance behind them?

Watch and wait for next year!

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