In other words, to develop an understanding of what is happening now and might happen over the next few years, I needed to study the mechanics be- hind similar cases in history-e.g., the 1930–45 period, the rise and fall of the Dutch and British empires, the rise and fall of Chinese dynasties, and others. I knew that I couldn’t really understand what was happening and deal with what would be coming at me unless I studied past analogous periods, which led to this study of the rises and declines of empires, their reserve currencies, and their markets. The most recent analogous time was the period from 1930 to 1945. Most importantly, I was seeing the confluence of huge debts and zero or near-zero interest rates that led to massive printing of money in the world’s three major reserve currencies big political and social conflicts within countries, especially the US, due to the largest wealth, political, and values gaps in roughly a century and the rising of a new world power (China) to challenge the existing world power (the US) and the existing world order. That gave me principles for dealing with them well.Ī few years ago, I observed the emergence of a number of big developments that hadn’t happened before in my lifetime but had occurred numerous times in history. I learned that to anticipate and handle situations that I had never faced before I needed to study as many analogous historical cases as possible to understand the mechanics of how they transpired.
Over the last 50 or so years, in order to handle my responsibilities well, I have needed to understand the most important factors that go into making countries and their markets succeed and fail. How do I know that? Because they always have been. The times ahead will be radically different from those we’ve experienced in our lifetimes, though similar to many times in history.
0 kommentar(er)
