1 - The Three Murders - Introduction

 

(This post is a personal post which will not be publicized on social medias.) 

 

When I started writing this blog, the aim was to write about data and if possible give an original approach to common subject from a different view point to offer perspective and food for thought. 

That was then, a long, long time ago, almost two years now. Since of course Covid-19 happened and everything changed. More than 9/11, it seems that this is the event that will define the future direction of this new century and unfortunately, the omens are not favorable.

Looking back, we knew from early in the 1970s that the current trajectory was unsustainable. The limits to growth from the Club of Rome in 1972 was an early and premonitious warning that in the long term, exponential always bump into the limits of reality. Only now can we understand how accurate they were when predicting that the inflection point would arrive in 2020.   

10 years later, all this was forgotten when Ronald Reagan was elected with a #Good Morning America!" launching the money splurge that would soon morph into the full scale financialization of the US economy. Japan was first to fall into the trap with its bubble economy of the later 1980s but was soon followed by all the former capitalist economies of the developed world. So much so that today, the stock markets all over the world are but a shadow of their former selves with their zero percent interest rates, infinite QE and activist central banks buying almost everything that moves. The best example is the JGB (Japan Government Bonds) market, the most liquid market 30 years ago which can now go days without a single trade. 

But an inflection point is not the end of the road, it is simply the end of a line. For a society, this means the end of a paradigm. And in our particular case, the end of the world order which was built in the ruins of the second world war.

This is the well known process of creative destruction. Except that although the destruction phase is upon us, we have no clue what will or even may be constructed in its stead. Earlier times were bubbling with new ideas: the scientific method, democracy, the enlightenment and many other concepts around which a lose consensus could coalesce for a new order to emerge. No such luck this time!

Meanwhile, the Forth Turning, a concept highlighted by William Strauss and Neil Howe in the late 1990s is gathering pace and slowly devouring our institutions and our lives. Islands of tranquility may survive in the highlands of Papua New Guinea but for the average citizen of the modern world, there will be no escape. As the institutions are slowly undermined from the inside, darker aspects and trends are emerging, each of which presage of a much somber short term future than the recent and rather long period of prosperity we have been accustomed to.  

"The Three Murders", the title of this post refers to the murder of our economy as explained by David Stockman in the second post of this series, the murder of liberty as explained by Paul Craig Roberts in the third post and finally the potential murder of peace between nations which most of the Western World has enjoyed over the last 70 years.

 

Beyond the current, relatively secondary discussions, these are the fundamental subjects which should be on top of our agenda as they will constrain the world we live in in the coming years.