Topic: History Reveals There Is No Going Back for the Economy (Read 343 times)

Surely, these are admirable sentiments, thanks.

My purpose here, rather than to predict if humanity will pull through in some sense (and BTW I think humanity will survive fine,) is to view the current crisis within the context of the nature of the modern Western system, which made its start in the Renaissance of the 1400s.

I would absolutely agree that change is natural and necessary.  But there is also the change and suffering that is due to the 'design' of this system, above and beyond that.

For example, if we had a truly free-market system as we are told to assume we basically live in, the economic dislocations due to a shutdown for a virus should be reversed when the virus problem is solved.  People would always need the same products and services, and demand and jobs would bounce back to pre-crisis conditions (and people would also have been incentivized to save enough to endure the crisis.)

But, alas, we live in a fundamentally different world, that is colored everywhere by the state control of money.  The nature of this system is to use state power to inflate bubbles that primarily benefit the rich and powerful, and to make sure the pain falls mostly on the public when the bubbles burst.  A key by-product of this system is economic distortion.  A lot of jobs are related to unnecessary but nice-to-have products and services for the lucky winners of this system.  When financial asset values go down, the lucky cut back spending, and everyone suffers.  The difference to the super-rich will be flying first class rather than private jets, but the difference to many will be loss of livelihood.  And these people will cut back and cause demand to shrink further.

That is the real, basic reason we're not going back to the old conditions any time soon.

Since the nature of the system is to use government power to blow bubbles that always burst or deflate, and both big and small bubbles as well as core vs peripheral bubbles are blown all the time, often simultaneously, I guess it's somewhat arbitrary as to which events we use to draw the line between two major phases.

That said, I have tried to draw the major lines around the life cycles of the big bubbles involving core financial assets.  The events around these tend to have the most lasting effect.  For example, the start of Great Depression saw the collapse of bank deposits, and the 1971-82 weak phase was primarily driven by the loss of confidence in dollars and Treasuries around the world.

I have made something of an exception for the weak phase starting in 2000.  The phase started only with the dot-com stock market bust, but it appears that some structural weakness was triggered at that point, because, ever since, the Fed has seemed to find it necessary to blow bubble after bubble to keep the system afloat, without the system finding time or strength to address the fundamental imbalances (e.g. long-term dependence by financial stability on central bank easing, ie money printing, which only furthered inequality and moral hazard, thus making the system even more unstable financially, politically, etc.)  This phase came in with a whimper rather than a roar, but can be identified by the basically continuous growth of imbalances, over the long years between 2000 and today.

While this is certainly true in the big-picture, I think that Hitler was objectively correct in saying that the Allies aimed to suppress German strength to the best of their ability during the 20s.

Before 1923, the mode of attack was to squeeze money from Germany using reparations.  After the head of the German central bank engineered a reset of the system via hyperinflation, the attack suddenly changed to lending money to Germany to inflate a bubble.  Either way, the result was economic and financial instability in Germany.  This bubble burst with the Great Depression by 1931, and that was when the fringe Nazi party won a significant share of the vote for the first time.

My theory for the reason to squeeze Germany is that, similar to fighting World War I, the UK and US were on a mission to ensure the safe transfer of the global money bubble from the UK to the US, by ensuring that Germany was decidedly out of the running for global hegemony.  History has shown this plan to be a success.

Yes, I totally agree that we need to take a positive attitude and do our best for our fellow humans.  Also, we'll probably survive this.

That said, while change is always happening in nature and society, the point I was trying to make is that state-controlled money systems will make the cycle more extreme.  This is because the system pretends to be a free market system, and uses deception to make people think everything is OK and continue to buy and borrow.  When the imbalances eventually prove too much, this causes the crash to be harder.  This is just objectively what we have today.

Today, the economic situation in every country is very difficult, and I also believe and hope in the right decisions of our governments And that people will be able to survive all the difficulties associated with the crisis and the problems of the coronavirus pandemic.  But statistics show that the world economy today is in worse condition than even during the time of the great depression.  Today, the main problem is the development of the coronavirus and in order to restrain the spread of the virus, it is necessary to maintain strict quarantine, but hard quarantine will not allow the economy to develop or at least maintain it in working order anyway.  We are in a stalemate.

There's really a big difference of its value in the past compared to the current as inflation hits us.
But today, the government have already spend a lot of money but still no idea how to stop this pandemic, and like us printed trillions of money, we don't know if it would be enough to combat this battle.

We have been into different calamity that government has to spend money but we were able to rise, the world will be back to normal, it might not happen instantly but it will happen as the time passes, with this, it teaches us a lesson not to focus on strengthening our military based only but also on our doctors and scientist so by next time if another virus will distract the world, it will be find a vaccine on a timely manner.

I am not an economist but I truly believe we can get pass through this as long as we have a good government.

Apparently the world population has not been into negative growth forever it means people needed to work hard to satisfy their day-to-day needs which means there are more workers than the past always and obviously more efforts to produce more things which is always referred as continuous growth of economy. In simple words: going back of economy may not happen when there are enough people to survive.

If you take per capita kind of things for calculations then we will observe big ups and downs in the history of human economy. I believe that current corona outbreak is not a big threat for human life as the death rate is calculated around 2% and we have seen bigger disasters in the past with death rate more than 25%. So, we can assume world economy may resume its progress in very near future regardless of vaccine for corona will be invented or not.

Looking at the 1987 crash numbers, wikipedia says that it was around 1.7 trillion dollars lost just the October month when it first happened, and that is the money that was lost, plus considering 1987 was 33 years ago, 1.7 trillion was MUCH bigger than today's 1.7 trillion dollars as well.

I am not saying it didn't recovered fast but at the same time we are talking about movement stopping as well, so as well as looking at money lost, you should also try to look at money unearned as well.

The 1987 crash was an anomaly. It wasn't associated with an economic recession at all. It's still not 100% known what even triggered it, but it's generally accepted that computerized/algorithmic trading caused some sort of black swan event.

It definitely did not take years to recover from. It was one of the fastest stock market recoveries in history.

Exactly, it will be a global reset, geo-political, geo-economics. So it will be different when this whole pandemic crisis end. But what history tells us is that it will be repeat itself. And after the pandemic, we might enter a new state of weak-phase. Everyone is trying to recover but we really don't know how long this recovery or how long the weak-phase will go. I think it will be a decade and in 2030 we will see a new economic world order, but it will still be the same player, i.e. US and China, UK.

How the hell can you name 1982 to 2000 as the strong phase when we had the huge 1987 crisis? I mean that was one of the worst ones that really screwed everyone over and economy took years to recover even to a normal phase let alone get better, from 1987 to 1992 was a huge trouble all around the world and only got back to normal and started to be good again after 1992 so that is not really a strong phase. You can divide it into two with 1982 to 1987 strong, 1987 to 1992 weak and 1992 to 2000 as strong again.

Also, what you consider strong is not really clear, I would say between 2010 to 2017 or so we were quite strong all over the world, those were some good years, the 2000 to 2010 was the bad weak part, and 2017 to 2020 was a bit muddy, not awesome and not like today, and now we are in weak again. So you can reshuffle those years to showcase that if you want.

Exactly it is going to change a lot and probably worse place for us to live because the unemployment will be the biggest problem the human race to face even after corona ends, Many companies are going to get closed down, inflation will get increases, and huge shock in supply and demand which will affect every economy in the world.

This "weak phase" is going to be the longest one. And it will cause some noticeable changes. I suppose the world will be different when the pandemic and global crisis end.

History also reveals that , people will always survive the catastrophic situation they are in no matter what , it might happen that there will be few bumps on the way and inflation might create a problem for everyone but at the same time , a great scientist once said that
Change is the nature of Nature and key to evolution

Well it was a famous botanist but I do think it applies everywhere , therefore what we should look forward to is making our contribution and caring about the things we do take for granted .

Survival can never be done alone , Therefore if we work with each other erasing the boundaries , we might just rewrite a few Chapters for upcoming generation to read.

Also China might be emerging as a superpower but at the same time we cannot disregard the fact that people I'm Wuhan are not taking things seriously when they know for a fact that the virus infact can hide within the body and reemerge , therefore the country will be right from where it started off from if they do not take appropriate measures.

I think the right word here is 'cycle'?

I made lots of money during the dot com bubble, eventually lost it recovers. Really hard lessons to me then, but when the whole economic collapse started in 2008-2009, was also affected. So history really tell us something. And then looking at today's situation, it's just a repeat but with different actors, specially China rising in the last 10 years or so. Or maybe we can see some nations spring out of this chaos and became an influencing factors in terms of geopolitics and finance. Yes, it will be very interesting what path are we going to take in 10 years, will US still dominates? Or China taking over? Or maybe India or even Brazil showing strong in the next decade?

economic despair leads to xenophobia and right wing nationalism. people are struggling economically, so they desperately seek out leaders (nationalistic demagogues) who tell them what they want to hear: they incessantly blame foreign devils like china for causing all of their economic misery. these demagogues channel this economic despair into patriotism and racism. this prevents any sort of national revolution to mitigate the economic suffering and ensures the state maintains firm control over the population.

it's the same exact path taken by post-WWI germany.

the recovery from the 2008 recession was incredibly unequal in its distribution. silicon valley and the coasts boomed while the rust belt eroded. this is what ultimately led to the election of donald trump on an utterly right wing nationalist platform, which greatly contrasted to the neo-conservatism of george w bush and his father. the trump election (and brexit) were obvious indications that we were already on the same path as post-WWI germany.

we are simply continuing that path now. it'll be interesting to see where we are in 10 years. lots of people seem to be predicting that china will emerge as the global hegemon. i dunno, maybe. it really depends how protectionist and nationalistic other countries become, because that will act as a ceiling on china's export-based growth model.

china's cheap labor and manufacturing costs? those can become very expensive under heavy tariffs and trade restrictions.

True, China is the 2nd biggest economy in the world and has a lot of influence.  But what I meant by 'the superpower' is a country that dominates the global reserves and the geopolitical and trade agendas of most countries.  Also, the superpower has the skills to make these different elements work together in concert (i.e. use monetary power to enhance geopolitical power, and vice versa.)

If you look at history, there is a 'winner take all' property to this title.  A country is either on or not on the throne.  And this has been the case at least since Britain defeated France for global dominance in the early 1800s.

It is a terrible system, really, especially the winner-take-all part, but it's what we have.

I wouldn't say country won't have eye in globalization: without globalization, all the countries will have hard times to maintain the economic balance. You can't produce an 'X' in US what can be produced in India & vice versa. If anyone wants not to following the comparative advantage method and want to focus on increasing internal production, they will have to spend a few times more cost than the country with comparative advantage. It's true that the pandemic may force country to think more and more self dependency but at the end of the day, they can't. It's all about atmosphere, lifestyle, cost etc.

China has already been the number one country in the world in terms of export way before this pandemic even came out. The export value of China is much larger than the US, which comes second. Moreover, the world's supply of raw materials is largely coming from China. If there is some drastic change that would happen post this pandemic, it would be that the countries around the world would try to be less dependent on China. As a matter of fact, this pandemic itself is a good reason for a more massive exodus of factories from China. Well, it has already been happening for quite some time, albeit in a much slower pace.  

The mobile industry is part of such exodus. As a matter of fact, the big trend of technological products following this pandemic would be not made in China.^[1] And rightly so, not just in terms of tech products but also of health products. This might take standards a notch higher. We have seen how some countries such as Spain, Netherlands, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and more are rushing to China for medical supplies in the face of the deadly COVID-19 but only to end up putting more risk to their people's health by receiving sub-standard, non-functioning, and faulty health supplies.^[2][3]

The Chinese superpower is already existing in a way but this current crisis is more of a reminder of its negative consequences. And this will certainly bring countries to ponder profoundly and start weaning themselves off from China's breasts.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-31/supply-chains-latest-not-made-in-china-is-tech-s-next-move?utm_content=business&utm_source=twitter&cmpid=socialflow-twitter-business&utm_campaign=socialflow-organic&utm_medium=social
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/china-support-coronavirus-hit-europe-stirs-controversy-200404160742616.html
[3] https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/faulty-chinese-medical-supplies-will-kill-people-during-covid-19-pandemic-expert-tells-fox-news

I sorta agree with this. I think mainly countries will try to bounce themselves back as many see themselves as world leaders. Maybe this is off-topic, but I feel like countries have started to become more nationalistic than before. It almost feels like so many countries think they are the best and building up arms like before WW1. Of course I could be totally wrong and over analyzing.

I am the one who thinks that the end of the trade war is the beginning of a military war. The national interest of the United States of America lies in the interests of capitalism which rules the United States of America, namely maintaining global hegemony. Meanwhile, China with 1.4 billion inhabitants at present and whose population will grow in the next few years requires greater natural and energy resources to feed its people.

Not that it is not friendly to Europe, but the trade war with America made European countries realize that they began to act like America and reduce the portion of trade with China. The OBOR or BRI program is a grand strategy implemented by China to expand its territory non-physically. So all projects in the OBOR country belong to China, raw materials from China and labor from the labor level to skilled experts also from China. This means that most of the money is only and continues to revolve in China even though the project is in another country.

China also carried out a strategy carried out by the United States in the 2000s in China, but this time China-bound the OBOR countries so as not to escape the mistakes made by America against China. Investments are made in OBOR partner countries with the aim of being exported to other countries thereby increasing China's foreign exchange reserves. Meanwhile, torch partner countries only seem to have good growth due to a lot of development when in reality the money flowing is not too significant.

The 21st century saw a geopolitical shift from the Atlantic to the Asia Pacific. Australia and the United States have agreed to establish a US military base in Papua New Guinea, with the aim of compensating for the Chinese military in the Asia Pacific sea, especially in the South China sea. Where this region is rich in oil and mineral resources for renewable energy in the future which is predicted to be sufficient to overcome the problem of China's food security and reduce China's dependence on energy supply from other countries.

https://nusantaranews.co/assets/uploads/2017/10/222222.jpg

China is a superpower, maybe not as powerful as the US, but they're still a global superpower with  MASSIVE amount of influence in the world. China won't be friendly to the west, and that is true. But China has FORCED its way into the global stage by leveraging their cheap manufacturing to take over the global stage.

Further, China is investing HEAVILY in other countries that are developing and are forcing their influence on these other countries later on. Here's a list I found online of Chinese investments - https://chinapower.csis.org/china-foreign-direct-investment/

I totally agree with the factual information you present, and some of it was implicit in my original piece.  

However, when the markets and economy are 'doing great,' I like to dig beneath the surface and see what forces are driving the prosperity on the surface.  A building can be close to collapse due to rotting from the core, or be totally sound.  It feels the same standing at the top, today.

The 'debt problem' you mention is one that eventually plagues all economies in the modern Western system.  There are way too many claims to wealth (financial assets) issued, as compared to real wealth (goods and services,) at current prices.  This state is prone to sudden collapse as holders of the claims rush to redeem them.  (The claims have been over-issued by the elites to benefit themselves at the expense of destabilizing the economy, but that's what the incentives of this system drive them to do.)

The only ways out of this condition are default and deflation, inflation, financial repression, and more imperial robbery, or a combination.  Somehow, the imbalance between the claims and the actual wealth must eventually be brought down.  Anyway you do it, there will be pain and disruption.

So it makes a big difference what stage this rot (i.e. imbalance between financial assets and real wealth) has reached.  Is it early days yet?  Or on last legs?  It looks much the same on the surface, because the politicians, top bankers, and corporate media want to project peace and prosperity in both scenarios, in order to help them maintain or inflate the bubbles that benefit them.

I don't really fear this scenario.  It takes a lot more than what China has to become the global superpower, and the US and its allies will make sure China doesn't achieve it.

When you can print the main global reserve currency, and other countries' economies are addicted to you buying from them with that currency, you have a lot of power.  Not to mention that you still have more soft power than China (even in the era of Trump!)

As I mentioned, the main reason the West will keep China out of world leadership is that China will not be friendly enough to help ease the West into its decline, in the same way the US helped Britain, and Britain helped the Netherlands in their respective periods of decline from superpower status.

Decline is unfortunately inevitable under this system, where, over the decades of unearned wealth and power, your cost structure has become too high, and your 'spoiled' people are too used to their money enjoying an artificially high value.  There's just no way for a country like this to maintain its comfortable status quo.  The only question is hard vs soft landing.

This cycle is just the boom and bust business cycle that we've seen for hundreds of years now. Some years we're doing great, and other years there are financial problems. But you're calling these the weak years of the economy (your claim regarding 2000-2020) -- disregarding the fact that the stock market has been up 106 percent since 2000.  Unemployment (before the coronavirus) was the lowest it's been in awhile, businesses were thriving, pay was rising, etc.

Inflation hasn't been too bad during this period, I'd say the average for the last two decades is around 2-3 percent. Yes, debt had risen VERY largely and that is something countries must start to control. But I don't think we're in a weak phase right now (obviously disregarding corona)

Boom and bust is all this is.

Nationalism and isolationism are certainly on the rise now.  Also, when the monetary reset happens, prices in US, for example, will become cheaper and China more expensive, relative to today, and so there will be some movement to moving manufacturing back to the US.

However, for the longer term, just based on history, it's hard to see how trade and globalization won't be a good part of the landscape.  Going back even before the American century, to the British and Dutch empires, and the Renaissance Italian city states, a globalized money and trade system had always been a major support for the imperial system.  Value was generated by combining the financial expertise at the center, and the hard work and artificially cheap labor and/or natural resources at the periphery, of the imperial system.  To deviate from that, we'd have to have a dramatically different system as compared to centuries of imperial experience.

Now, it's possible that the flow of goods happens to go in the OTHER direction.  British imperial power, for example, worked to force exports of British goods onto India for a while, for example.  But however it's configured, globalization seems to provide a major piece of the imperial puzzle.

The current geo-economical, geopolitical condition is indeed completely erratic, marked by waning US hegemony and unilateral US foreign policy with the slogan American first and make America great again. Trump's unilateralism has provoked many countries to replace America's position in the regional economic and political arena.

Political constellation indeed leads to war escalation, almost all types of modern warfare have started from combatant wars, trade wars, currency wars, dominance wars, technological wars, media wars and finally bio-technology wars.

The injustice that occurs in the global economic system that causes the exploitation of some groups to other groups. The emergence of banks that provide loans with gold guarantees or gold ownership letters is the beginning of greed in a subtle way. The end of Bretton Woods is the key to the grip of capitalist hegemony throughout the world. A culture of debt for business and profit is made a culture by capitalism to encourage speculative action to flourish.



At present China only dominates trade, but has not yet dominated currency, hegemony, influence, and to legitimize all military forces is the most important thing. So for decades, China will remain a great power, it is still very difficult to shift the position of America as a superpower. India China will only take up the position the United States has left in the region as the new regional leader.

In the next few years, the political constellation in the Pacific region and Southeast Asia will heat up due to the emergence of new regional powers and the interests of many developed countries towards renewable energy sources in the region.

I don't really agree with it and that's a bigger risk for the countries to maintain their economic power. Post this pandemic, more and more countries will try to be self-dependent and focus on their internal market to maintain their finances, rather than focusing on global market. But that may have a disastrous effect on many countries who don't have a big internal market, especially smaller but technically advanced countries.

There's a big chance that China will try to become the world leader in exports post this pandemic. China will try to flood the international markets with their cheap and sub-standard quality goods. When the deep-pocket companies will see this happening, they will rush to China to open their factories so that they can continue with their business and take benefit from cheap labor force of China. We have already seen this happening in Mobile industry. All global mobile brands are manufacturing their phones in China only!

This will have a ripple effect on all markets and there's a good chance that China will become the next superpower of the world. That can in turn bring financial doomsday to many countries solely dependent on the global exports.

So becoming a nationalist is not a preferred choice you can make post this pandemic. Becoming aggressive in capturing the global business - must be the survival strategy post this time so maintain the finances. 

There is nothing to go back. I guess the normal that we will reach after this will be different from the normal that we once knew before this. We might make another B.C. as a new time label for this, Before COVID-19. But still, we are going to reach that normal stage sooner or later when this crisis will finally end. Yes, we are "in the middle of a major transition." The world after this will never be the same. Well, we are constantly evolving, anyway. I guess the new paradigm that will arise after this will be more nationalistic, more focused inward, on building a more independent country, rather than eyeing a more globalized position.   

What we have today is a pandemic, economic depression, and world war, all rolled into one.  We may become nostalgic for the old days when they came one at a time.

(I say world war, because we have multiple conditions that resemble or simulate war.  There is a geopolitical battle between the US and China that runs barely in the background.  There is a suspension of trade.  Free-market economic forces are on lock-down, and we're being asked to unite, sacrifice, and work for 'victory.'  Extraordinary regulation, surveillance, and control by the government are now conceivable even in the West.  Last but not least, if you're careless or unlucky, you can become one of the casualties, anywhere in the world.)

The key reason to doubt a return to any 'normalcy' is that, just as happened across the two world wars of the past, the world system is in the middle of a major transition.

History may be viewed as a series of strong and weak phases of the US-led world system.  (This is a simple but IMO effective framework for people with limited inside information, that is, all of us.)  During a strong phase, the system is confidently leading and imposing its will on the world.  During a weak phase, the system must retrench, re-organize itself, and transition to something different in order to survive and thrive again.  During this phase, extremely 'crazy' things always seem to happen.

1918 - 1929: Strong Phase.  This was a period of fixed exchange rates, but with the dollar beginning to replace gold as global reserves.  The supports for the system were US growth and financial strength, with Germany having decidedly been neutralized as a threat to the system by World War I.  The results were renewed globalization and a general condition of prosperity and peace across the West.

1929 - 1945: Weak Phase.  Financial asset values and economic demand collapsed and the dollar had to be devalued against gold.  Even this had to be coupled with a ban on private gold ownership in the US to keep the system stable.  To keep peace with a shocked and suffering public in the US, fiscal stimulus on a large scale was used, with limited effect.  Globalization collapsed and political extremism took root abroad under even worse economic conditions.  All of this, eventually, took a second world war to resolve.

1945 - 1971: Strong Phase. Another period of fixed exchange rates, but with the dollar totally dominating global reserves.  A major factor of stability was that the world had decided to give unconditional love to the dollar, in concert with the Bretton Woods foundational institutions, whose terms were dictated by the US as the biggest victor of the war.  Another major support was pulling a Western middle class into the winning alliance, with advances in educational and other social-democratic benefits.  This formed a strong political consensus in favor of the West's dealings with the developing world and the Soviet Union.  Financial-institution excesses were contained by strong regulation.  Globalization proceeded economically but not financially (but this proved eventually unsustainable.)  Even with the Soviet Union as a constant threat to the system, the result was a prosperity in the West that reached the majority of the public.

(I chose 1971 somewhat arbitrarily as the end of this period.  The system had been gradually weakening during the 1960s.  The US, as is human nature, took advantage of its strength to live beyond its means via the dollar system and its trade with Western Europe and Japan.  1971 was a symbolic end-of-era because, that year, a run on US gold by European governments finally forced the US to default on the dollar's convertibility to gold at a fixed rate.)

1971 - 1982: Weak Phase. In effect, the dollar was vastly devalued against gold, and the West entered a floating exchange rate system.  Financial assets performed poorly.  Economic pain was shared between stagnation and inflation, as the system adjusted to the reality of yet another loss of faith in its foundation, the dollar.  Support from the new petro-dollar system forced on Saudi Arabian rulers and other oil producers proved insufficient, and eventually the US had to endure a serious bout of high interest rates and recession to restore faith in the dollar.  This decade of 'malaise' also saw the loss of the Vietnam War, as well as the peaking of educational attainment by the US public.

1982 - 2000: Strong Phase The dollar advanced or held steady against gold.  Advertised as a return to free-market policies, Western bankers were invited back into the winning alliance, and the Western middle class 'invited' out.  Also invited in are developing-world producers and governments, in the form of full-blown globalization, with a big US asset bubble as side effect.  The fighting and winning of the Cold War also became a major support and boost to the system.  In particular, China's vast labor pool and cheap currency became one of the great supports.  Inequality and financialization (the buildup of financial assets and their values) had begun, but this period is remembered for the 'goldilocks' conditions of low interest rates, low inflation, and high GDP, in the West.  Most Westerners were at least able to enjoy stable or declining prices, as a result of globalization.

2000 - ?: Weak Phase. The dollar was 'devalued' against gold several fold.  Competitive devaluations among major currencies occurred (especially after the 2008 crisis.)  Major declines of asset values occurred in 2000-1, 2008-9, and 2020.  On the surface, low interest, low inflation and decent GDP numbers were maintained in the US, but without the energetic zeitgeist of the previous period.  Economically it's been a period of muddling through, with Western central banks loosening money to stave off crisis and buy time, while blowing serial bubbles.  Geopolitically and politically, the US-led system suffered a series of setbacks, as against Iran and Russia, with China eventually becoming hostile (though after helping with post-2008 crisis management) and with unhelpful nationalist and isolationist populism growing in the West itself.  In 2020, a coronavirus global pandemic shut down the entire economy.

Since this is the stage set for the 2020 pandemic, it's hard to see how things can 'return to normal' after it completes its course.  At best, the authorities will patch things up as they did in 2001 and 2009, for some more muddling through.  But this will only further increase the imbalances currently in the system (one of which is that inequality and financial instability have been reinforcing each other,) and set the stage for an even bigger crisis, perhaps a decade down the road.  (We note that each crisis has been worse than the previous one during this period.)  Since part of the core nature of the Western system is that the elites are incentivized to destabilize their own system, the more imbalance there is, the more perverse the incentives will become, and the bigger the next crisis.

However, an alternative outcome after 2020 is that an entirely new global order will emerge.  Any economic pain and authoritarianism necessary to transition to this world can be blamed on the pandemic.  With China, Russia, and other more or less independent centers of power likely still standing, the new arrangements will likely be negotiated rather than dictated.  I can only speculate that the following are possible features of a new 'strong phase:'

For the economy, technology will take center stage as the new engine of growth.  This will both preserve the West's pre-eminent seat at the economic table and have the 'desired' side effect of enabling more regulation and control by the state for maintaining the system (see below.)

For money and finance, there will be a big move towards a cashless system in the West, which will enable meaningfully negative interest rates -- a major new tool for authorities to deal with crises in the future.  In addition, it's possible that the totally fiat money system since 1971 will be blamed for the financial instability since then, and overt exchange-rate targets (or ranges) will be set against non-state monies by Western central banks.  Either way, there should be a big 'devaluation' against these monies to stabilize the system to start with.

In politics, surveillance and regulation by the state (to keep the system stable) will become stronger and will be rationalized as necessary for avoiding economic pain from a crisis (as evidenced by the severe economic pain from the pandemic.)  This will be stronger in China and Russia than in the West, but all countries will go in this direction, with the West having 'private' entities like Google and Facebook do this work.

Geopolitical developments are difficult to predict at this time.  The only guess I can make is that major rivals of the West will be handled more or less peacefully for a number of decades, until India has matured enough to take over as the new superpower while allowing the US and Europe to have a soft landing.  All efforts will be made to avoid Chinese world leadership, as it will likely not be friendly enough to the West to allow a gentle decline.

So, a century's pattern reveals that the system is inherently unstable.  When the system is strong, it tends to allow itself to be exploited by its beneficiaries, until eventually it becomes unstable and weak.  At those times, it tends to try out different things or bide its time, until it finds the right winning alliance and becomes stable again, for now.  Thus, not only does it alternate between strong and weak phases, but each period has quite different features from all the others (even when comparing one strong phase against another.)  The severe dislocations we're experiencing now strongly suggest we are at a key transition point.  In any case, this will be a good opportunity for the system to make a transition to a new, stable phase, since any economic pain of the transition can be blamed on the virus.  Certainly, the serious imbalances of 2019 and the decade before did not make for stability.  There's every likelihood that we will not return to that period.