Things fall apart.
I came across a quote a while ago. It was "Meanwhile the poison was still working its way to the heart of the banks”. Sounds contemporary, doesn’t it? The sort of thing that might have been written about the failure of the Dutch bank Dexia a few years ago, or the Italian banking system right now. But it isn’t. It was actually written about the
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I started writing this back in february when I hit that 1771 quote and wish I'd made faster progress as i'd've been quite prophetic if I'd just cracked on and done it at the time.
As it was I got two wrong this year - called Brexit wrong (and lost money), and was ambivalent about which way the US would go and so I came back and finished this at least in part to try and thrash out my own thinking. I don't like being wrong, and when I am i'm obviously working from incorrect ideas so i need to change them.
I don't think we can make a prediction about where we're going until we've an idea how things are going to shake out, and I've not the first clue about that. A few general speculative ideas, but nothing I could work from.
If I can find it, a few years back I wrote a piece about China and the trade war they started with the US back in the 1990s'. I'm thinking that to an extent the US is about to take them on directly, and China will lose it. Pragmatists as they are they know they'll lose so they'll accomodate and get the best outcome they can out of that. What that will look like, though, I dunno.
i've seen people close to trump vaguely suggesting that a grand bargain might be struck - the US agrees not to interfere internally in China and China agrees in return not to mess with the regional structure. Who knows though?
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