Apologies for the long delay in posting but life, and to a certain extent a rut in creativity, has got in the way recently.
Over the course of the last 6 years, I have extensively covered many themes on this blog, fine tuning and developing my thinking on how things will develop in the years and decades ahead.
For those who are new or need a reminder, in very short form, my case is we, at a macro global level, is tracking the Limits to Growth Business As Usual (“LTG BAU”) model developed in the 1970s. We peaked in 2019 and are now in a multi-generational Long Descent.
Specifically, this decade is when the global economy falls apart, global population levels peak by the end of the decade and rolls over, and per capita metrics decline rapidly. Its already happening. In the developing world hundreds of millions have fallen out of an emerging middle-class lifestyle, many more are facing malnutrition on the back of soaring energy and food costs (they are really the same) and even in the more insulated wealthy West, metrics are worsening.
My essential thesis is we peaked, and whilst certain countries and regions will face different decline dynamics at different times over the next decade, the overall global landscape is of contraction not growth. Energy is at the core of our problem and no technological solution is going to save us or return us to a pre-2020 world. That doesn’t mean we can’t mitigate, adapt and conserve some of our energy rich lifestyle in the years ahead, but its going to be a huge challenge.
I stumbled across the following YouTube video recently, the slides of which I captured. It neatly captures the themes I’ve been blogging about for years and the timeframe looks plausible and aligned with what other sources I use see coming.
What is also becoming increasingly clear, based on the “best in breed” thinkers I follow (with a good forecasting track record) is how much of a rollercoaster the 2020’s is going to be:
2023 is a deflationary moment, a lull, before the next big wave of inflation hits. Right now equity markets are soaring, inflation is falling (and is likely to fall much more this year). That’s the good news folks! Enjoy the bear market rally whilst it lasts.
The bad news is, enjoy this moment, it won’t last long. 2024 is looking increasingly dire, a major correction/crash in global markets, an incredibly tight oil market and the possibility of exploding energy prices triggering further economic and financial turmoil. At the same time, ERORI will carry on skyrocketing higher as the energy inputs required to extract energy gets worse.
2025 is likely to be the year inflation roars back, this time double digits and worse than 2022. That is bad news for nearly everyone and puts further pressures on a global economy. The only winners in a turbo-inflationary return will be those sectors that do well (e.g. gold and silver miners, mining companies and to a certain extent energy stocks). We are also looking at increasingly dire food insecurity for the developing world that will worsen geopolitical risks (the wildcard this decade)
The 2025-2029 period is looking to be a further cracking up of the global economy, de-globalisation and flaring up of geopolitical risks across the world.
Late 2020s is the likely time the modest post-2025 recovery in global markets comes to the end. A massive market crash is looming, probably the market waking up to the fact the global economy is unravelling and pricing in a post-global economic world. Its going to be brutal and most people will see their wealth evaporate in the process. If you want to get a reasonably accurate sense of what that type of world will be, read Peter Zeihan latest book and John Greer’s peak oil books.
That’s the big picture folks. Better get ready and enjoy the perks of a globalised economy whilst it still lasts (think global mass tourism. Its unlikely to survive much beyond 2030)…
What about 2023? Well, there are a few things I am tracking:
Excess deaths remain elevated across countries that used the mRNA vaccines. High levels of cancers, heart attacks and other nasty side effects that are correlated to the vaccines are also happening if largely ignored by the authorities. I expect that trend to continue (along with a modest but very real impact on long-term fertility) but this isn’t Armageddon, society will carry on but bear the costs for years to come.
The war in Ukraine is very much a war of attrition. At some point one side will run out of ammo and be unable to carry on the fight. Reports in the media now suggest NATO is really struggling and will not be able to carry on arming Ukraine to the extent we managed in 2022. If Russia does succeed in breaking Ukrainian resistance over the next 2 years or so, that will be a huge geopolitical moment for NATO.
A degrading infrastructure, in particular the grids, remains a major concern. Europe managed to avoid the blackouts you regularly see in places like South Africa (and even California) but there is no guarantee that next winter will be so accommodating. Building up resilience and self-sufficiency in your personal life remains good advice.
Demographic challenges are getting worse. The boomers are retiring, there aren’t enough young people to fund public pension schemes across the developed world so at some point the benefits need to get slashed. Its going to become a serious issue, certainly in the 2nd half of this decade but a few countries are already on the brink.
That’s it for now folks. Enjoy life because we only live life once!
“Since January 2022, the number of live births has fallen like never before in Switzerland and the canton of Bern,” reads an urgent report by canton legislators. A separate Swiss research study, meantime, reported a 10 percent decline in births in the first half of 2022 compared to the prior three-year average. Using statistical modelling, it found “a striking temporal correlation between the peak of first vaccination and the decline in births in Switzerland.”
At a civilizational level, the mountain peak, 2019/2020, is getting further away but the future, the descent down to a future deindustrial Dark Ages, remains for the vast majority of the hikers invisible.
Yet the hikers, keep on hoping that this is a mere short-term drop before we “return to normal” and carry on into the upward lands and peaks of progress. It is not going to happen. The stark reality is we are now in the “end of more” era as Peter Zeihan writes in his latest and brilliant book on the collapse of globalisation. I am still reading his book – a baby has a tendency to reduce your reading time! – but broadly speaking his outlook is similar to John Greer’s.
At a global level we face a twenty-year economic depression, the collapse of globalised supply chains, a return, at best, to local and regional economies for those parts of the world that don’t totally decivilize in the decades ahead. I have recently blogged on what steps we practically can do to adapt to this changing world and I recommend you read those if you have not already.
Some of the themes I will be discussing are responses to what is really the end of the civic myth of progress we are witnessing across the industrial world. One of them is the impact of the mass Covid vaccination campaign we saw across the developed world in 2021. Vaccines represented hope to many, after the collective trauma of the return of pandemic and the medieval policies of quarantines and lockdowns.
Whilst I see some people in my circles now saying they never wanted to get vaccinated, the truth is most people seemed quite happy to get jabbed in 2021. Whilst some resisted until restrictions on travel were introduced, most either passively or enthusiastically embraced getting vaccinated.
There are more and more alarming data signals coming through on the potential impact of the vaccination programme.
Excess deaths are soaring across the vaccinated world and the independent statisticians crunching the numbers see a strong correlation between the vaccines and excess deaths. This article by the blogger John Paul goes into the excess numbers recently here.
Something very weird is happening, since the experts expected lower deaths in 2022, given so many vulnerable elderly folks had sadly died during the Covid pandemic.
My own view is there is a correlation between excess deaths and vaccinations, but it isn’t the only factor. It is a major factor, among other issues including Covid itself, massive backlog in treating people who are ill and the lasting impacts of lockdowns on society. Teasing out those drivers in the excess deaths is nearly impossible.
My hunch, and it remains a hunch, is that the mRNA vaccines (and to a lesser extent the RNA vaccines) are the main driver for the excess deaths but of course that might be wrong. There should be an honest and open debate with the authorities fully investigating what is going on, but instead, there is a weird silence going on. That, in itself, is suspicious.
What is even more alarming than the excess death data signal is the massive and very unusual drop in the birth rates. This article goes into it in detail here.
Interestingly, and I track the mainstream media closely, there has been zero acknowledgement of what is going on for 2022. Again, the statistical analysis suggests a strong correlation between vaccines and dropping birth rates although I’m sure some will challenge that.
If, and it remains a big if, the vaccines really are impacting fertility, we potentially face a very serious issue if this trend continues into 2023 and beyond. The industrial world, as Zeihan writes so eloquently in his book, faces severe demographic challenges from an aging society. A society that, due to the rushed vaccination of its fertile young, accelerates the baby bust in the 2020s is facing an even greater crisis in the future.
Should word leak out that the inability of some of the vaccinated youth to have babies is the result of the Covid vaccines they were pushed to get in 2021, the blowback, in time, with the medical and political establishment will be enormous. From that perspective, the decision by Twitter, now privately owned by the billionaire Elon Musk, to end all Covid “misinformation” censoring is a huge danger to the authorities. If dissident scientists are able to tweet and bring into mainstream circulation these issues, at some point, the media or the populace will become aware and start asking hard questions.
I don’t think we are near that tipping point yet, but if these horrifying trends continue, it will, at some point.
Best case for the authorities, assuming that there is a connection between the excess deaths and the falling birth-rates with the Covid vaccines, is it is time limited and over time, whatever is causing this will fade away. In that case, the authorities will probably get away with it. I will be put down as a weird Covid/lockdown quirk in the data or simply dismissed as unknown.
I don’t have a crystal ball but I wouldn’t be surprised if these issues don’t fade away but if anything, get worse over the next 5 to 10 years. We can only wait and see.
“Robert, for starters, the unraveling of the global economy, a significant worldwide depression while regional economies get started up again, shortages of energy, food, and consumer goods, and wars in various corners of the planet, not all of them far from the industrial nations. Oh, and the collapse of at least a few democracies into autocracy. Hang on to your hat…”
John Michael Greer
Back in 2019, when I posted here on my nervousness about the coming peak in our industrial civilisation, I did wonder, at the back of my mind, that maybe, the LTG BAU modelling was wrong and we would carry on enjoying economic growth, prosperity and stability in global trade into the early 2020s.
I think we can now safely assume that the LTG BAU model is very much tracking real life back on planet earth.
For those that need a refresher on the current state of play, I strongly recommend reading John Greer’s recent blog post on the subject here. It covers, again, topics that I have been blogging about for years but in a succinct format. The very short summary is the reserves of cheap, economically viable and non-renewable fossil fuels critical to the functioning of our industrial civilisation is slowly running dry and we are now in the era of stagflation, economic contraction and the crumbling of the edifice of our elaborate industrial civilisation; that was built on absurdly cheap fossil fuels. Managing that long-term predicament will be the central fact for the rest of our lifetimes (and our children and grandchildren thereafter).
It’s also important to differentiate what I consider short-to-medium term investing opportunities (e.g. green energy stocks, uranium etc) that will see a huge burst of public and private investment and the longer term macro/fundamental outlook on these technologies. For example, there is currently a renewed buzz around nuclear power and how it can get us out of the energy crisis we face with the very real risk of blackouts in Europe, Japan, China and even North America within a few years.
If nuclear was such a great technology and viable economically, we wouldn’t have such a small amount of energy derived by the atom in the 21st century. It’s extremely expensive, takes years, if not decades to open an atomic plant and issues around the radioactive waste have never been properly resolved. It does, once open, ensure base load power to the grid – something that is vital if you expand your reliance on solar and wind which are intermittent – and that is why it is back in the news. So, expect to see a surge of government subsidies into this sector this decade which should benefit, potentially spectacularly, beaten down uranium stocks.
Renewable energies and their related stocks are even more of a rollercoaster ride but during the euphoric cycles these clean energy related stocks can soar. Again, as this superb article in Financial Sense notes, there are huge problems with green energy and how it can be scaled up over this decade. Again, I do expect a big push this decade, but how far it goes before it hits the bottlenecks remains to be seen.
I agree with the thinkers Peter Zeihan and John Greer, that the energy most likely to be used up in the coming generation is King Coal. It is widely available across the world, is relatively economical to mine and has the advantage, unlike nuclear, of not needing highly skilled labour to keep it going. A few years ago, when the “experts” were talking on Bloomberg about fossil fuels being stranded assets and how oil demand had peaked, I expected ESG trend to abruptly switch to energy security as the main challenge, and at some point in the future, a “just do anything to keep the lights on” approach to energy.
In Europe we seem to be very close, if not already in, that latter panicky stage of policymaking. The reason we aren’t there yet is the energy literate crowd are still pinning their hope on nuclear saving us and so are not incredibly bullish about coal. Coal is a disaster for the environment but, given a choice between keeping the grid on and burning dirty coal, everyone will burn the coal (like us Europeans are already doing). So, I think that coal shares are probably a good long-term investment, particularly if markets crash in 2024.
My main message is do not rely on the politicians. They are, in general, energy clueless and so are many of the experts who advise them. If you are fortunate enough, you should invest personally and at a community level, on steps to reduce your reliance on the grid and the wider corporate supply chains.
There are a number of “buckets” involved in this. The first is reducing your energy expenses, so to speak. Insulate your home, delay turning the heating on in the winter, cycle more, drive less and other relatively easy wins to reduce your energy footprint.
A second strand is to take advantage of certain goods and services when they are still relatively economical and available. I have been on record before to predict that global tourism and the wider global airline industry will unlikely be around on a large scale beyond 2030. I don’t know if that prediction will pass or not but given the world has largely reopened after the Covid lockdowns (a reminder, after all, how the world could close down most tourism if we wanted to again), if you do wish to travel, in particularly to far flung destinations, it’s probably best to do it now when you still can.
Amazon will probably be spoken about in near mythical terms generations from now. People will talk about how once, when fossil fuels were plenty, that folks ordered stuff on a phone and it was delivered to your door within a few days. And you order nearly anything you wanted! So, take my advice and order whatever you think might be useful now, when you can, before it becomes either unavailable or too expensive. I have stockpiled lots of stuff that I know that I will need in the future years which is quite literally at a click of a button. As globalisation and the wider globalised supply chains unravel this decade, that luxury will fade away so better get whatever you need now when you still easily can.
There are more capital-intensive things you can do to prepare for the future, depending upon your situation and wealth. For those with homes, consider solar thermal (this provides hot water to your house via the sun), greenhouses (so you can grow your own food), investing in businesses that will do well in our new scarcity economy and reducing your energy footprint. If you have sufficient capital, consider buying local arable land that can be rented to farmers or to grow food yourself, something I would love to do if I had the means.
To summarise, even for those who can’t consider solar thermal or buying land, taking even small steps to reduce your energy consumption is a good start, whether that is driving less, insulating the house, wearing jumpers in the winter, cycling and walking more and growing a few lettuces and tomatoes in the summer months. Anything is better than nothing and will help you in the decades ahead.
“What I’m suggesting is reducing your expenditures and your use of energy and nonrenewable resources sharply, so that you can be prepared to deal with the soaring prices and economic dysfunctions to come. Anyone in the US who’s not desperately poor can do that; my wife and I did, back when we were living well below the poverty line, and that’s part of what enabled us to extract ourselves from that situation.”
John Michael Greer
It has been a while since I last posted on this blog. For those that have been patiently waiting for an update, my apologies but I have been very busy with my personal life, as I will be having a baby soon!
However, whilst that is the main reason why I have not provided an update, the other factor is I have not really felt an overwhelming urge to blog over the last few months.
I have discussed the issues now dominating the news headlines on this blog since I launched it in 2016. Blackouts, energy crises, climate related heatwaves across southern Europe and the rising intra and global instability as food and energy costs soar across the planet. Just look at what is happening in Sri Lanka right now, where soaring costs of critical imports, coupled with a corrupt and incompetent government, threw the economy into hyperinflation, shortages, rationing and finally economic and political collapse.
The president has now fled the country and enraged mobs swim in the presidential palace pool. Will we see scenes similar to this in other places in the years and decades ahead? You bet! Moreover, not just in places like Pakistan but quite possibly in Europe and North America as well. The developed world is not immune to what is happening to the more troubled parts of the developing world.
All this is quite normal in what we are now in, the era of the Long Descent, which can be summarised as economic contraction and a ruthless scramble for the remaining resource assets around the world. Therefore, the reason I am not blogging about the ins and outs of Sri Lanka, or the unrest by the farmers in Netherlands or the looming energy rationing and industrial lockdowns in Germany, is this is what we should be seeing as we descend the curves of depletion as modelled by Limits to Growth in 1972.
I remain confident that by the end of this decade, the global economy will either have already unravelled or be fast progressing to that fate as globalised supply chains implode under the pressures of the rolling energy and resource crisis now facing us. I have covered before what needs to be done by all of us, and that is primarily reduce your energy consumption, clear any debt you have, adopt a more sustainable lifestyle and learn skills/hobbies that will have more validity in a deglobalised and deindustrialised world that we are transitioning into this century. None of these things is easy but as long as you make steady progress, year by year, you should be fine.
This is a process, decades long, not an event. The sooner you start downgrading your expectations for the future and start making practical steps to make yourself and your family more self-reliant and less dependent upon globalised supply chains and the industrial economy, the better.
Still, for reasons that remain baffling to me, most people do not want to acknowledge that vaccines may have higher side effects than the regulators have officially admitted to date and if you raise this issue, most people look at you with disgust. There are some very troubling reports circulating in the dissident/vaccine hesitant community online about the apparent appearance of strange protein clot structures from the vaccinated dead. These are not normal blood clots but something quite different and they appear to be causing the rising wave of heart attacks and sudden deaths we have been seeing ever since the mass vaccination programme.
We are also seeing unprecedented levels of Covid infections across the highly vaccinated world, which concerns me hugely. Are the vaccinated unable to build long-term and lasting immunity if vaccinated? If so, what impact is that going to have on the vaccinated immune system and overall health, particularly, if we get nastier variants of Covid-19 in the future? I do not know the answers to these questions but my recommendation is to look after your health, stay safe and ensure you have your personal supplies of medical products at home because relying on industrialised healthcare systems may prove unreliable.
To summarise, due mainly to the lack of monitoring by medical authorities around the world, we are largely blind to what the implications of the mass Covid vaccination programme is having on overall health, the virus and fertility of the jabbed. We are in the dark, trying to interpret the best we can the odd scrap of data and trends coming in from highly vaccinated countries. It does not look good but until we have a bit more time and data to analyse, I do not feel confident writing an authoritative blog post on it, just yet.
A friend of mine, who is well versed with my LTG influenced world, recently asked me whether I thought the “collapse”, we are seeing is going faster than expected. My response is it is largely what I expected, if you study the LTG decline curves in detail. We are in 2022, roughly two years into a contraction of the global economy, so the problems building up are the early stages of the wider collapse of our globalised economy.
Stay safe out their folks and remember to enjoy life as well! Many people throughout history have lived through a Long Decline era of civilisation, and it’s not the end of the world. You will need to keep your wits about you though.
I watched the bulk of the French election debate on Wednesday evening. Overall, I felt that Marine Le Pen (MLP) edged in overall performance, coming across as softer, more human and focused on the economic and cultural suffering of the working to lower middle classes.
President Macron, was aloof, arrogant, technocratic and in his own way brilliant. He understands numbers, holds his own in highly technical debates and during certain policy debates, clearly had the upper hand. What he lacked was empathy towards ordinary people and it shined through over and over again. He performed ok, he didn’t implode but nor did he help his image as a president of the rich.
The snap polls suggested that Macron had won the debate. Well, I’m not so sure about that, but did the debates move the needle sufficiently to get MLP the final votes to win the election? Probably not in my view.
Reviewing the final polls, one out suggests that Macron is extending his lead against MLP.
The final Opinionway tracking poll of the French presidential campaign gives Macron a 14 point lead – up 2 points on yesterday. He is shown as beating Le Pen on Sunday by 57% to 43% (only slightly less than the 15 point lead in the Ipsos tracker last night) 1/2 pic.twitter.com/ismiESqKX9
It’s within the margin of error, but one has to include that the clear and likely winner is Emmanuel Macron, in line with my forecast at the beginning of the year.
There is a chance that she can pull off the political shock of the 21st century but it strikes me as unlikely. For the record, I cashed out of my MLP bet a few days ago based on the fact that all pollsters have shown a consolidation of support for Macron and away from MLP.
My overall forecast is that Emmanuel Macron will win the French presidential election, probably narrowly.
The 1st round of the French presidential elections are coming this weekend and I thought I will give a short update on the state of play.
I predicted, at the beginning of the year, with a moderate degree of conviction, that Emmanuel Macron will narrowly win the election in the 2nd round. However, I noted that there was a good chance that Le Pen could win against the odds given the fact that she was within striking distance of winning according to the polls back in January 2022.
Well since then, the polling has tightened further, and the most recent set of polls show Le Pen within the margin of error in the late 40’s versus Macron in the early 50’s in 2nd round polling. Indeed, one poll, on Thursday from a very reputable and reliable pollster, shows Marine Le Pen defeating Macron by 50.5% to 49.50%!
That may, or may not be a rogue poll, we shall see, but it is looking very likely that Le Pen will face off Macron in the 2nd round elections in two weeks.
Right now, the election is too close to call and whilst I will stick with my forecast of a Macron win, the chances of a Le Pen upset grow by the day as ordinary French voters, crushed by inflationary price surges triggered by the war and the Western sanctions on Russia turn on Macron.
On a final note, those who took my advice and placed a exchange bet on Le Pen’s odds will be laughing now. I got in at 12 to 1 odds and these have now shrunk to nearly 4 to 1. I am already sitting on a modest profit and that should grow should Le Pen get into the 2nd round this Sunday.
I was brought up as a child of the 1990s and I can just about remember the Berlin Wall coming down in 1990 (my parents told me history was happening. The 5-year-old version of me barely registered it at the time).
The collapse of Communism heralded a new, post-Cold War era where the West was dominant, liberal and democratic values spread around the world and in the industrialised world at least, we lived in a largely peaceful and prosperous time.
Of course, there were wars and as discussed on my blog before, the living standards for the majority in the industrialised world were slowly declining, leading to the political revolts of the 2010’s. But, in historical terms and compared to the situation in the majority of the world where famine, civil war, revolutions and dictatorships are more common, it was a golden age to be growing up.
I first became aware of the wider issue of peak oil, resource scarcity and Limits to Growth in the early 2000s, around the time of the Iraq War. I came to a realisation that this strange, rather ahistorical moment of peace and abundance was not going to last forever. Indeed, the LTG BAU model suggested that after 2020, it would start to fall apart as resources declined, food costs soared and economies crumbled under the pressure of worsening fossil fuel scarcity.
FI
We also know, from history, that as critical and strategic resources get scarcer, the risks of wars increase. Therefore, you don’t need to be a genius to work out, looking at the LTG graph, that the probability of conflicts, whether internal (different factions of a population or elites fighting over a stagnant or shrinking economic pie) or external (countries fighting over water, fossil fuels or arable land) was always going to increase.
On a personal note, I loath war and as a child of the post-Cold War era, find it personally hard to imagine a world of endless bloodshed and wars in the future. I certainly hope we can avoid such an outcome, even if it is the historical norm.
On an intellectual level though, the recent invasion by Russia of Ukraine hasn’t come as a huge shock to me. The Russians have certain strategic objectives and President Putin has decided, that invading Ukraine is the only way to achieve these strategic goals.
Peter Zeihan, a top geopolitical writer, has published before why successive Russian Tsars and Soviet era dictators have pursued the same geopolitical goals. In the map below, he explains why Russia will always seek to reach defensible borders and control the gaps between these to ensure the internal security of the Russian heartland.
Zeihan on Geopolitics
Now, there is a legitimate debate, within Russian circles, on the best tactics to achieve these goals, and clearly there are some factions within the Russian elite who think Putin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine is reckless. But the overall concept that Russia secures its borders from any current and future invasion threat would be a core of any Russian foreign policy, irrespective of whether President Putin was leader or not.
Not only that, Ukraine is a major exporter of wheat and fertiliser, strategic commodities that literally feed the world population. A neo-Russian Empire that controls a quarter of the world’s wheat production would be a serious global player in a world of rising food scarcity.
In terms of the actual conflict, I broadly agree with this analysis, click here and here, on the conflict. My view is that Russia made some tactical mistakes at the beginning of the war, underestimating the Ukrainian resistance, but they are now regrouping, and will use to the maximize their military capability to seize key areas of Ukraine, encircle the major cities and force the Ukrainian political leadership to surrender.
In other words, Russia will win the war (albeit at high cost both reputationally and in terms of casualties). In terms of sanctions, clearly, they will have a negative impact on the Russian economy but I don’t think it will “move the dial” fundamentally. You won’t hear it much from the Western media, but the majority of the world has not imposed economic sanctions on Russia.
Daily Mail
US allies, including India, UAE, Saudi Arabia and even Israel have refused to impose crippling sanctions on Russia. These countries have their different reasons to continue to engage with Russia and do not want to be dragged into what some view as an intra-European war.
This is just one example of how Western influence and ability to impose their will on the rest of the world is shrinking fast. Something that John Greer comments in his latest blog post.
What I want to focus on today, is not so much the war itself, which I have outlined above my view on the outcome (a Russian victory with the majority of Ukraine neutralised over the coming weeks and months) but the wider impact.
Peter Zeihan has recently posted about the impact on global agriculture from this war. It is worth quoting his words in full; “Keeping the global population alive requires global peace and global supply chains. In the former Soviet world, that peace and those supply chains are gone forever. I’ve long said that we will never reach a global population of 9 billion. That future deglobalization will result in the death of a billion people by starvation. The future is here. The leading edge of the famines of tomorrow begin in 2022.
The breaking of trade relationships, spasms in energy pricing, and most certainly the Ukraine War will limit sharply what is possible in the world of agriculture, and do so more quickly than I have ever feared.”
Zeihan on Geopolitics
And this Bloomberg article on the impact of soaring fertilizers costs of farmers in America. The short version, there will be less food next year. The same dynamics are happening across the world. Costs are soaring and production is going to slump, leading to hundreds of millions dying of starvation this decade.
Already, the UN is warning that millions in Afghanistan are starving and that was before the outbreak of war in the Ukraine and the ending of wheat and fertilizer exports. The most vulnerable countries are in the MENA region, already under growing pressure due to water shortages, loss of arable land and climate change caused extreme weather. Egypt is one to watch.
The last time food price soared was in 2010, which triggered the mass unrest, revolution which the Western media rather naively called the “Arab Spring”. There is a risk that something similar could happen again. Should soaring food prices tip large parts of the developing world into famine, expect to see massive social and political upheaval across the world.
Within a few years, I wouldn’t be surprised if new and far bigger waves of migrations start to impact the southern borders of the European Union. This is the nightmare facing the increasingly vulnerable core of European states surrounded by a growing sea of chaos. Europe chose to effectively disarm since the end of the Cold War and is now incredibly vulnerable to military incursions from any serious state actor, whether that is Russia, Turkey or even Egypt. That isn’t a prediction, but a statement of fact. Without American military support, European countries are unable to defend their countries (with the exception of France, Switzerland, UK and probably Poland).
The war in Ukraine is a wake-up call to the Europeans to get serious about their defence. In that sense, the announcement by Germany to spend billions in re-arming is a good thing and we are likely to see similar moves by other European countries. But I fear that it is all too little, too late given the worsening global security situation facing the world.
North America, protected by the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, is in a far more secure place to handle the massive challenges coming down the line. John Greer has warned in previous posts that western and central Europe, will by the end of this century, be a demographic, cultural and military extension of the Maghrib region of North Africa.
The states of Eastern Europe will likely be within the sphere of influence of a revived Russian Empire. In other words, Western Europe is doomed to collapse, fuelled by massive waves of armed invasions from the global south in the coming decades just as the Western half of the Roman Empire collapsed.
For those readers of this blog who are based in Europe, we face a terrible choice. Do we stay, hope for the best and go down fighting if the worst happens? Or, do we, like those wealthy elites who fled Europe before Hitler invaded during World War 2, pack our bags and quietly flee before the horror, death and destruction visits our friends, family and neighbours.
It is something that myself and my wife are now talking about. We have provisionally agreed that the United States is the most logical place to prepare our second home, should Europe descend into savage warfare and violence in the decades to come. Other people are certainly thinking along the same lines.
If history is any guide, the signals build up over years – and only a few take the hint and make their plans to escape – until the dam breaks and mass panic occurs. For those interested, I recommend my blog post on how the wealthy survived (or in some cases didn’t) the brutal wars of the World War 2.
Hope you all had a great New Year and an enjoyable Christmas!
It is that now traditional rite of passage where I review last year’s predictions and grade myself on how well I did.
Looking back at my post, which you can read here, the thing that struck me was how cautious I was about the prospect that the mass vaccination would return us to a 2019 world without restrictions, lockdowns and public health rules through vaccine induced herd immunity.
As I wrote at the end of my blog post, “So, to summarise, 2021 will probably “feel” more like 2020 than 2019. Lockdowns in many parts of the world till Spring, a semi-normal Summer and the risk of things going terribly wrong again in the war against Covid during the second half of the year.”
Given that, large parts of Europe are in quasi-lockdown, and in the Netherlands case, an actual March 2020 style lockdown, that seems like a remarkably prescient prediction. The prospect of herd immunity once 60%, then 70% and then over 80% of the population were vaccinated faded away as breakthrough cases surged and vaccine resistant variants become dominant across the world by the end of 2021.
Whilst thing have improved substantially, and the vaccines seem to be holding the line, so far, in terms of protecting the vulnerable populations from severe illness or death, in terms of everything else, they have proved a failure. They have failed to achieve the grand hope of herd immunity and therefore even Bill Gates is now talking about the need for 2nd generation vaccines.
The great elephant in the room is vaccine related adverse reactions in 2021. If you wish to read some of the heart breaking stories, you can at this website here.
My own view is that the authorities, the media and the bulk of the population consider a certain degree of vaccine caused injuries and deaths from a fast-tracked vaccine approval process a price worth paying for getting us out of the nightmare of lockdowns, restrictions and overwhelmed health systems. That does not mean they want to acknowledge or know about those who have suffered or died.
The treatment of those and their families who have suffered, in some cases terribly, from the heart attacks, life-changing injuries, accelerated cancers and autoimmune diseases triggered by the DNA/mNRA vaccines has been shocking.
The closest comparison I can make is the treatment by European societies after the Great War of those physically, mentally damaged or disabled by the wars. Just think about those poor young men left physically disabled, disfigured or unable to live normally after the horrific experiences of the trenches. They were effectively left to rot by post-war societies that just wanted to forget the war and enjoy the Swinging Twenties.
BBC
I think the same will happen to those unlucky enough to get injured, permanently sick or die from the mass vaccination programmes of 2021 (a prime example being the tragic case of 12 year old Maddie De Garay, permanently disabled after taking part in the Pfizer trial). So far, the numbers impacted, even based on the figures modelled by the vaccine-hesitant community – e.g., Jessica Rose – are a relatively small fraction of the overall vaccinated population. Although these numbers continue to surge higher and will certainly get even higher in 2022 now that we have had a 3rd booster vaccine programme.
Fox News
In terms of what we can reasonably assume, medically speaking about the DNA/mRNA vaccines, I strongly recommend reading this blog post by a scientifically trained researcher called Mark. It’s a fair assessment, after 1 year, of the vaccine rollout and he does acknowledge for those over-70’s, that it still makes sense to get vaccinated given the risks posed to the elderly of Covid.
I have also covered the issues developing, specifically the bio toxic nature of the spike protein and the growing issues around immune dysfunction among the vaccinated, in my last post here.
What we do not know is how bad it will get in 2022; given that the majority of the vaccinated have now had a 3rd shot of the genetic spike-protein based vaccines over the last few months. I will attempt to forecast this once I get into my 2022 predictions later on in this post.
In terms of my 2021 forecasts, my first prediction was swiftly proven wrong. The Republicans failed to keep their majority in the Senate and the Democratic managed to win on tiny margins in the end. The irony is that in the end this doesn’t seem to have made much difference as the conservative Democratic Jo Manchin has prevented the more radical elements of the Biden Administration agenda from getting through the Senate.
Given how quickly the poll ratings for President Biden are collapsing, there is even less incentive for Manchin and his fellow conservatives to surrender to the increasingly electorally toxic progressive wing of the Democrats.
My second prediction, that an approved Covid-19 vaccine would be withdrawn for safety reasons has been partially proven correct. Many countries partially or fully stopped the usage of the AstraZeneca vaccine due to concerns about rare blood clots. Similar issues bedevilled the US Johnson and Johnson vaccine that uses the same technology as AstraZeneca.
Other countries have more recently restricted or banned the usage of Moderna given the rates of myocarditis among vaccinated younger men. So, overall, I will give myself a win for this prediction.
My final prediction was that ether, the second largest crypto after bitcoin, would soar in 2021 to $1,500. Well, this proved a bullseye as prices actually went far beyond that during the bull market in crypto-assets after their collapse in March 2020 with Ethereum reaching the heights of $4,735. We saw substantial institutional funding going into Ethereum in 2021 and this trend is likely to surge in 2022 as more family offices, hedge funds, private equity, venture capital and HNW individuals start investing in the crypto space.
coinmarketcap
So, what is my prognosis for 2022? Overall, I think that from a purely Covid pandemic perspective, the worst is probably over now that omicron is sweeping the planet. We appear to be getting closer to herd immunity via waves of natural infections as well as, to a lesser extent, vaccinations.
My first prediction is that countries will start downgrading their public health approaches to treating Covid from an emergency to an endemic approach, similar to how we treat winter flu. That means, in practise, an end to mass testing, mandatory quarantines, domestic vaccine mandates to access bars, restaurants and larger scale events and to a lesser extent a removal of much of the red tape and testing required for international travel. Vaccinations will be voluntary and targeted at the vulnerable e.g., the elderly and immune-compromised.
I suspect the United Kingdom will be the first country to go down this path, and others, particularly those countries that depend upon mass tourism, will follow (like Spain, Turkey and Greece). Not all countries will embrace this libertarian approach to Covid and I’m sure other parts of the world, whether zero-Covid China, Australia and parts of central Europe will deviate from this path.
My second prediction is that President Macron will, just, win the French presidency in April 2022. This has been a hard call to make. If you look at the opinion polls on 2nd round voter preferences, the centre-right President Macron is consistently ahead in the polls. However, he is not overwhelmingly ahead, and is only 10% ahead of Marine Le Pen (MLP), for example. Should MLP get into the second round of the presidential race, she only needs to gain 5% or so of the electorate to just win the election.
Wikipedia
So, whilst my official prediction is that President Macron will win, I do not discount the possibility of a shock loss to either the Republican candidate Pecresse or MLP. The betting odds online have completely given up on MLP winning in 2022, probably due to her implosion in 2017 with her odds being 12 to 1 to win the presidency. Given she is consistently around 45% in the polls, this looks like mispriced odds that a calculated gambler might take advantage. For the record, I have placed a small bet on MLP winning the presidency on betfair exchange, which allows me to sell with a profit should those odds compress in the next few months.
If MLP gets into the 2nd round, and her polling remains in the high 40’s, I’m sure those 12 to 1 odd will dramatically shrink and I can exit with a modest profit, even if she doesn’t end up winning the presidency. Of course, it might be the case that MLP will out-perform the clearly abysmal expectations during the debates, TV interviews and wider campaigning and prove a stronger than expected challenge to President Macron. One to watch is whether MLP will pick up civil liberties vote from the unvaccinated and double jabbed population that refuses to get the booster shot. Should Macron extend the definition of fully vaccinated to include 3 shots to the rest of the population prior to the election, that could exclude a substantial chunk of the population from society.
If enough of those voters, and even those who are triple jabbed but dislike the vaccine mandates, switch or vote for the first time for MLP, that could theoretically push MLP over the 50% line. It’s the wildcard factor that could unexpectedly influence the presidential election and one to watch in the coming months.
My third prediction is the grimmest and one I fervently hope I’m proven wrong. I expect to see rising mortality rates in highly vaccinated populations that have used the DNA/mRNA vaccines on their populations. Cases of cancers, strokes, clots, autoimmune diseases are going to rise among the vaccinated populations and potentially, other viruses or diseases will cause unusual levels of mortality in 2022 should they circulate among the population.
Hopefully the numbers should not be that huge, and I’m sure when it is covered by the mainstream media, it will either be ignored or written off as an impact on the two-year Covid measures that prevented or put of people from going to hospitals. The possibility that it is caused by the vaccines will be ignored by the medical, media and political establishments even if word of the potential negative impact of the immune system will circulate more and more among the population.
If the pressures on healthcare systems are severe enough, there is a risk that burnt out healthcare staff will struggle to cope this winter and countries may face the difficult choice of re-imposing restrictions on society to help buckling healthcare systems.
The financial markets are increasingly cottoning on to the fact that energy shortages are imposing increasingly dire impacts on globalised supply chains and industries. I expect to see oil to surge at some point in 2022 above 100 dollars given these supply constraints. Oil won’t be the only resource to see price spikes and scarcity, but it is the big driver of our industrial civilisation and therefore the one to watch.
So, there you go, those are my predictions for 2022.
“I do not subscribe at all to “vaccines are making people sicker than they’d be if they’d gotten COVID”. However – some very hard truths are beginning to emerge – this is an organic from the ground up kind of thing and will take months/years to sort out. I was at a medical staff meeting at my own hospital in the past week. We all on the medical staff know that we have been very very busy in the early fall. Usually that time of year is very quiet around here. But we were all horrified to learn that the actual numbers of the patients in the hospital for non-covid non-OB non-peds related issues had literally gone up by double digits – many of the diagnoses had increased by upwards of 50%.
These included all the bread and butter medical problems, like CVA, MI, CHF, PE, DVT, pneumonia and most prominently – a huge surge in type I diabetes and other diabetic complications. These numbers on all of these diagnoses were literally off the chart compared to 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017. The abstractor had even done a population based per capita study – and the numbers held.
Very strange that all of these diagnoses would be astronomically increasing all at once in OCT 2021.
That kind of across the board increase would be unique in my entire career at any hospital. The cancer registry is also through the roof – interestingly we are having a major increase in malignant melanoma and renal cell carcinoma. Again – no obvious explanation. Breast cancers were also really elevated compared to their incidence in past Octobers. There had been a slow gradual increase in all of these issues during the months of July August and September – but October blew it out of the water.
The abstractor herself noted that this increase could NOT be attributed to the old line of “people were just holding on to things and not going into the doctor because of the pandemic.” That is just not the case – that may have been true a year ago – but we can tell by office and ER visits that were completely normal since SEP of 2020 that this is no longer the case.”
IM doctor (who works in a major US hospital), naked capitalism
I have been planning to write an update on the vaccine situation for months now, but each time I felt I was nearly ready to put pen on paper, new developments would emerge that would postpone the inevitable act.
Well, the good news, after reading a vast amount of medical literature, listening to podcasts of worried scientists and lurking on the internet sites that cater to those worried about the impact of the mass vaccination programmes, I am now ready to write where I think we are and more importantly where we are going.
I will be the first to admit that as someone without a scientific/medical background I could be wrong in my prognosis on where we are going on this. However, unlike the vaccinated colleagues, friends and family members who know very little about the vaccines they have injected themselves with, I have done a huge amount of reading and learning over the last 12 months so think I have a certain degree of layman knowledge now.
For those who struggle with the notion that some people may get sick or die in the coming years, I strongly advice that you don’t read any further. This article is for those brave and strong enough to contemplate the potentially horrifying impact of these vaccines.
So, what do we know so far? As discussed in my last post, the VAERS US database of adverse vaccine events recorded by doctors and nurses across the country is our best system to identifying concerning side effects of the vaccines.
Dr Jessica Rose last published her review of the data – that she collects weekly – on this YouTube recording in August 2021.
Her findings are consistent with the earlier data coming back in April 2021 that I referenced in my last blog post. There has been a sustained and shocking rise in cardiovascular, neurological and immunological adverse event (AE) reactions as the mass population was vaccinated with the 1st and 2nd shots of either the DNA/mRNA vaccines (e.g., Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and Moderna).
Dr Jessica Rose has also, using Pfizer’s own trial data, tried to work out the real rate of AE in the population, which she has calculated as a multiplication factor of 31.
Using that conversion ratio, as at August 2021, she was able to calculate the potential real rate of the various type of AE’s occurring in the wider population.
I think you can agree that these numbers are starting to look quite scary, and the actual numbers will have grown since August. The fertility/reproductive cases are particularly alarming and those who wish to read more about the potential link between vaccines and the spike in miscarriages and fertility issues will find the articles here and here interesting.
What appears to be happening is that prolonged spike protein exposure from repeated vaccine shots and immune suppression/dysregulation are causing harm as shown in the numbers above.
The spike protein is driving the blood clots, heart attacks and miscarriages among the vaccinated.
And if that isn’t bad enough, the gene-based vaccines also appear to be messing with our immune system and making the vaccinated more vulnerable to viruses and diseases, including autoimmune diseases. This medical paper focuses on the potential link between the disabling of the immune system, post-jabbed, that allows cancerous cells to spread.
If you read, again, the report from the IM doctor based in the US, you can see that rates of cancer are starting to soar now across the United States. This is likely to be driven by vaccine caused AE.
The negative impact of the DNA/mRNA vaccines on the vaccinated immune system has also been identified by other medical/scientific experts.
This doctor warned of the alarming results he has been seeing at his clinic recently, see here.
He explains, in the short video, that the impact on the immune system is like Reverse HIV.
Dr Vincent Giampapa, speaking in this podcast, was nominated in 2014 for a Nobel Prize for his ground-breaking-research into cellular restoration technology, as well as the Edison Award for the Healthycell nutritional supplement for cell health.
In this recording, which you can watch from 13 minutes onwards for 5 minutes, Dr Giampapa discusses how the DNA/mRNA vaccines will destroy, over time should we get repeated boosters, our immune system. And, it also could destroy the ability of the child rearing age population to have children over time, if repeatedly vaccinated.
What Dr Giampapa describes is happening to the vaccinated population is equivalent to Reverse HIV and warns that he is very worried about the impact on the vaccinated population over the next 2 to 5 years.
To summarise, Reverse HIV/AID’s is where the multiple vaccinated immune system is progressively destroyed by the DNA/mRNA vaccines, making them effectively immune-compromised and vulnerable to any type of virus or disease circulating in society. That means those that are impacted by Reverse HIV/AID are highly vulnerable to getting seriously ill or dying.
The tipping point where a vaccinated individual immune system tips into dysfunction will vary between one individual and another. Those that had a robust and strong innate immune system may find that they will take longer to succumb than an already immune-compromised individual with existing underlying health conditions.
For what its worth, John Paul thinks the trigger point for Reverse HIV/AID’s for the mass of the vaccinated kicks in after a 4th vaccine but it’s a guessing game at this point.
The growing evidence indicates that the DNA/mRNA vaccines are damaging the immune systems of the jabbed and each successive booster campaign increases the risks of widespread illness and mortality among the vaccinated populations in the coming years.
In my previous post I discussed the risks of Antibody Dependent Enhancement (ADE). ADE is a risk but so far, with 12 months of data to go on, there is no evidence that ADE is occurring among the vaccinated population to my knowledge.
That indicates that this risk is diminishing as a factor to be worried about in this mass vaccination rollout. However, I would be much more confident asserting this time next year, given that it remains a possibility and something that Dr Geert Vanden Bossche has recently warned about. You can read his full interview here but he is concerned that a rollout of an omicron-specific vaccine could trigger ADE among the vaccinated population.
Dr Bossche has had a reasonably good record of forecasting the evolution of this virus – in March he was predicting that the vaccination rollout would lead to more infectious variants – something, that has been proven right with Delta and Omicron.
Dr Bossche warnings that ADE remains a risk should be something we are mindful of but if, after a rollout of a 4th booster campaign targeting the omicron variant, we see no evidence of ADE, the chances of it happening will look increasingly implausible.
So, to summarise, my outlook – and I could certainly be wrong – is that in the developed world, where we have only used spike protein-based DNA/mDNA vaccines, we will continue to see a continued rise of the vaccinated exhibiting the AE issues shown in the VAERS, Yellow Cards and other equivalent databases in Europe over the coming months and years.
At the same time, the majority of the public, fearful of the virus and unaware of the scale of the side effects and deaths being triggered by these vaccines, will continue to get their booster shots in 2022, increasing the odds of a disastrous medical blowback on the vaccinated population.
A rising tide of sick and dying vaccinated patients will put intolerable pressures on a crumbling healthcare system already on the brink from vaccine mandates, exhausted staff and patient demands. There is a very real risk, and to a certain extent we are already seeing it in the Netherlands lockdown, that every winter going forward, national lockdowns will be required across the developed world to avoid to a total collapse of our healthcare systems.
Should a significant portion of the multi-vaccinated start getting seriously ill or die from the horrendous cocktail of diseases mentioned in the VAERS database, that will increase the pressures on healthcare staff.
There is a very real risk that our key infrastructure in the West, maintained by largely vaccinated employees, will collapse should enough workers get sick or die. That includes our logistic and supply chains, healthcare, IT, transport and electricity systems.
I strongly recommend that you start preparing for shortages and temporary disruption of key goods important to you in the future.
It’s impossible to know how bad its going to get from here. We may find that it is the more immune-compromised and vulnerable populations that are worst affected by what is coming, those who are elderly, ill or in the margins of our society.
Or, it will develop in waves, with the clinically vulnerable worst hit next winter, but the greater (and previously healthy) mass vaccinated population getting ill and, in some cases, dying, in the winters of 2023 to 2025.
My advice to you, whether you are vaccinated or not, is to do whatever you can to naturally boost your immune system. Take vitamin supplements, exercise, embrace a healthy diet and drink moderately. If you are overweight or obese, do whatever you can to get to a healthier body shape.
Whether you choose to take any further vaccines will depend upon your individual situation and perceptions of your risk of Covid. But if you are worried about the longer-term side effects, hopefully some of the links I have provided may be of interest to you. And if you think I’m being alarmist, that’s fine with me. I certainly hope you are right and I am wrong, but time will tell.
forecastingintelligence 