Oh, you think all of this is merely the consequence of the remarkable collection of crises the world happens to be experiencing?
You would be very wrong.
Make no mistake.
The ground itself is shifting beneath our feet.
Whatever you thought the global market was only five years ago already bears little resemblance to the one standing before us today. And over the next decade, it will change even more profoundly.
This is not simply a coincidence of crises.
It is not merely inflation, war, pandemics, supply-chain disruptions, or political instability.
Those events are accelerants.
They are not the fire.
What we are witnessing is a fundamental realignment of the global economy. A slow migration away from what I like to call vapour economics and back towards economies rooted in physical production, energy, manufacturing, logistics, engineering, and the stubborn realities that cannot be wished away by financial creativity.
That transition was never going to be clean.
The vapour economy runs astonishingly deep.
Entire industries, institutions, careers, and political philosophies have been built upon it. Vast fortunes depend upon maintaining the illusion that financial engineering can permanently substitute for productive capacity.
Such systems do not surrender gracefully.
They seize upon every crisis as evidence that they deserve even more influence. Every emergency becomes an argument for another intervention, another subsidy, another layer of financial abstraction, another postponement of reality.
And quite often they succeed.
For a while.
But something has changed.
The old autopilot no longer functions.
Governments are discovering that resources are finite.
Industries are rediscovering the importance of supply chains they once considered irrelevant.
Nations are beginning to ask uncomfortable questions about strategic autonomy, industrial capacity, energy security, and whether prosperity can truly rest upon an ever-expanding mountain of paper claims detached from physical production.
Reality is slowly reclaiming the conversation.
Economic decline, slower growth, and tighter public finances will force decisions that today still seem politically unimaginable.
Programmes will disappear.
Institutions will shrink.
Projects once considered untouchable will quietly be abandoned.
Not because anyone suddenly desires austerity.
But because arithmetic has a stubborn habit of defeating ideology.
The fairy tale of eternal growth will fade as well.
Much of that growth was statistical.
Much of it was financial.
Much of it existed only because we became extraordinarily skilled at inflating asset prices, expanding debt, and convincing ourselves that appreciating balance sheets were synonymous with increasing wealth.
They are not.
Eventually every civilisation reaches the point where it must distinguish between what it owns on paper and what it can actually produce.
That moment has arrived.
Time to clean the books.