BACK TO OUR FUTURE
The announcement of a tougher economy is not an easy message. But this reality does not imply
resignation nor desperate prophesy. This might be the message of this crisis: we are to reconsider our way of thinking, step out of our ideological and cultural reflexes and together redefine our country’s economic prosperity.
World growth zones are being recomposed, with a European zone with a very weak autonomous growth, as a result of a lack of innovation and capitalism finiteness characterised by debts and accumulation.
Over the past ten years, western economy growth has been limited thanks to expansionist monetary politics, with artificial and ephemeral consequences. When monetary expansion reaches its limit, European continental growth will be affected on the long term.
We will submerge in a more demanding - even predatory - market economy, in which states, intoxicated by four centuries of growing debts and lacking vision, will be forced to assure a monetary irrigation role. The upcoming years will sign the end of the welfare state and state credit stimulation models.
States will become banks and will have to organise, with different means, their debt deliquescence. The States, cornered by their debts, will take over financial sector control, placing the banks under a more constraining guardianship. The latter will oblige banks to canalise savings towards their debt financing. States will thus recapture the royalty to strike money, the Bretton Woods agreement scuttling had deprived them of in 1971.
This crisis monetization is likely to come with inflationary increases, themselves fuelled up by growing food resource scarcity. Hyperflation is an extremely little probable scenario, though it should in no way be excluded from a purely theoretical point of view. It would thus concern “Wordwide Weimar”, as drafted by Jacques Attali.
Raw material prices; energy, as well as food and industrial prices, could reach peaks that risk being
unimaginable, despite mankind’s progressive adaption to good rarefaction. At the same time, demographic and environmental constraints, which mankind will not have been able to control, will be ruled by market economy prices, i.e. the law of offer and demand, multiplied by fear and scarcity.
Eurozone leaders will be confronted with the schizophrenic dilemma of having to relaunch their economies, risking the Eurozone’s fragmentation. This is likely to result in inflationary increases. The
states, situated between Europe’s boundaries, will suffocate as a result of the unique monetary discipline.
Growth zone heterogeneity will be a fertile ferment for social unrest (which will be heavy in certain
countries), and even at extra European level for military friction, based on alimentary or energetic fluxes. Generational tensions will emerge and certain countries could face a socio-economic May 68 with reminiscent ultraviolent movements.
