Not Worried about North Korea

Here is the best summary I could find of the North Korea situation:

North Korea Finalizing Test Missile Launches Aimed Toward Guam

North Korea said Thursday it is finalizing a plan to launch a salvo of four ballistic missiles off the shores of the U.S. territory of Guam, the newest provocation in the war of words between Pyongyang and Washington.

State media said the missiles would land 30 to 40 kilometers off the shores of Guam, where 163,000 people live and the U.S. has 7,000 military personnel at a naval installation and an air base.

Their plan, assuming they even carry it out, is to plunk some missiles 40 kilometers off the shore of Guam, far enough from mainland to avoid causing harm. That’s a far cry from the news two days ago that they were going ‘nuke Guam’.

World stock markets, averse to the uncertainty of the standoff, slid for the second day in a row, with stock indexes in Asia, Europe and the United States all falling a fraction of a percentage point or, at some exchanges, more than 1 percent.

Odds are this will just blow over and the stock market will resume its rally, probably next week or so.

The worse case scenario is they hit civilian and or military targets, and if so that will probably be the end of Kim Jong-un, and he knows this. An invasion of North Korea shouldn’t be much harder than Operation Desert Storm or Operation Iraqi Freedom, yet for some reason the stock market and media seems unusually heightened. Part of the problem I’m guessing is how North Korea is situated in the middle of three economic superpowers: Japan, China, and South Korea.

Overall, not worried, but all we can do is wait.