Higgenbotham wrote: Wed Feb 07, 2018 10:49 pm
My more specific predictions would be:
- There will be a major global financial panic and crisis. Supply chains will break, resulting in unavailability of critical raw materials and components. Global trade will begin to shut down. As it begins to become apparent that the supply chain linkages are permanently broken, the global interlinked financial markets will shut down and cease to exist. This will all happen very quickly. It will not take years from the initial panic.
- The focus of governments will turn to controlling their panicked and hungry populations. Due to lack of availability of imported goods and adequate storage "sufficient to reconstitute" a system consistent with nation state government, this will prove to be too little too late and most government will devolve to the local level as populations lose faith in their national governments and the national governments lose the resources and ability to control their populations.
- There will be no large scale nuclear war. Instead, the population will be culled through starvation, local strife (including settling of long-standing scores) and disease. Wave after wave of pandemics will sweep the world.
- Similar to national economies and governments, centralized utilities will fail or become so decrepit as to be unsafe and unusable. All centralized utilities including the power grid will shut down permanently.
- The initial worldwide kill rate during the first couple decades following the financial panic will exceed 90%. The global population will be in the range of a few tens of millions when the bottom is hit in two or three centuries. Similar to the last dark age, the world's largest cities will have a population on the order of 25,000 and a large town will be 1,000.
- Life during the coming dark age will be similar to the last dark age but worse due to environmental damage and pollution.
Regarding the supply chains.
Lately there's been a lot of attention placed everywhere on inflation and the Federal Reserve's statements that "inflation is transitory". I think the Federal Reserve is really focused on the supply chain bottlenecks and are trying to get through them with additional "money printing" hoping that will alleviate the bottlenecks. The more appropriate statement would be for the Fed to say "supply chain bottlenecks are transitory" but they won't say that.
First, we can all recall back in 2006 or so that the Federal Reserve Chairman stated that "subprime is contained". It wasn't. Next, we can recall that when the Fed started QE and added trillions of junk assets to their balance sheet in exchange for money they "printed" and gave to the banks, the intent was to eventually "normalize" the balance sheet by selling the junk assets at a later date. We knew that was not going to happen. Now they have turned the US bond market into junk but interest rates are just starting to rise.
One way to consider what future supply chain bottlenecks might look like would be to look at the path of the Fed balance sheet since QE was started. This is what it looks like:
The path of future supply chain problems will only be for them to get worse with perhaps some slight improvements or abeyances until the financial system finally blows up along with the supply chains.
Regarding nuclear war and the pandemics.
I have believed that covid 19 was created in the Wuhan lab for the purpose of biowarfare against the US, but it was released by accident before it was perfected as a biowarfare agent and before it was intended to be released. Of course, that can't be known for certain.
I also believe that the Chinese and others have several other biowarfare agents that will be released in the future and that will only be one source of future pandemics. Of that, we can be almost certain.
I think China's preferred method to immobilize the US would be to first attack the financial system. That in my opinion is the US' Achilles Heel and where the Chinese will get the most bang for the buck, and they will do that first, even before they attack Taiwan. Then approximately concurrent with their attack on Taiwan they will use biowarfare to further immobilize the US.