Well written and well researched article that is neither alarmist nor hopeful. The question is going to be how this house of cards collapses and when. I was sure it was going to be evergrande and Chinese property? Instead will we sleepwalk into another middle east war and this then joins with the Ukraine Russia way through proxies.
Are we looking at a financial event or the finances forcing us into a different event?
Evergrande and chinese property are just shufflings of abstract information in the form of money . the real economy is biophysical.
Expect waves of stagflation of various sizes and duration to be the principal form of economic collapse experienced by the working class. It doesn’t have to come as a collapse just a slow grind across a lifetime of declining standards of living.
Maybe but I’m expecting some form of crash event as it snowballs. Staying with a slow steady decline seems less possible mathematically. Especially given levels of leverage
I also think there will be financial crashes, and likely more than one – just as the last leveraged bubbles collapsed in 2008 and 2020. Of course, he is right that this will lead to them adopting an inflationary model to “solve” it, which will result in a worse version of the same dynamic with time. Eventually I think we will get the dreaded hyperinflation if it goes on long enough.
The wild card is that the demographic collapse and energy descent trends will be highly deflationary no matter what government does, but that’s a longer term issue.
punctuated stairsteps down. sure there are crashes but its never that one crash that is the crash there is always the next one. 2008 was a crash , lots of people didnt really recover but we move on. the decline can still last a life time and we never cross the proverbial “collapse” where everyone busts out their bondage outfits and dunebuggies . People still go to work every day, people still need doctors , doctors still make more than day laborers , people still own stuff and parasitize those who dont etc…
Most people in collapse forums talk about collapse but have no real metric to measure by. I would look at global population , global “real” gdp, global institution size ie… supernational instituions like European union cracking up then later nations that were put together based on nonsense balkanizing. Life expectancy global and local. etc…
I was sure it was going to be evergrande and Chinese property?
It might have collapsed another economy, but I think China is relatively well-equipped for dealing with financial crises given the higher degree of state-planning and the lack of needing to be corporate capital havens. I think they were extremely wise to prioritize deleveraging individual investors like people buying homes for themselves (and wise to maintain a state that can facilitate such decision-making). In the end they got a surplus of housing and blew up some rent-seekers - pretty impressive imo!
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