The other day I was listening to Raoul speak on Real Vision, and apart from his weird angle that crypto will survive this cycle (it wont), he mentions demographic time bomb that is about to hit our Western economy.

The basic gist is that baby boomers will drastically curtail their spending by 60% because of the retirement pension is broken. It is essentially a ponzi scheme that will not be able to pay out everybody without huge erosion to currency and its literally the last thing a world reserve currency like US is going to want (a hegemony is only as good as its status as a world reserve currency). so without a sound pension/retirement guarantee, the only way to hedge against future grey swan is to retain capital as much as possible by curtailing spending. This is similar to what happened to in Japan, they would drastically cut spending while increasing savings following the '89 asset bubble brust, followed by deflation. Now the situation is getting out of hand due to supply chain and energy supply issues but eventually the belief is that price inflation post-pandemic will not last. For example, the watch collectibles market appears to be showing signs of stress, as market values of previously inflated (on purpose?) watches have begun to come down in price as buyers tighten their wallets. The JM gold green dial daytona is a good example of the asset bubble. The first market usually to lead deflationary events is the luxury goods section, followed by mainstream consumer goods that simply cannot find enough buyers at the current inflated price.

Taking this a bit further then, there is a huge looming crisis to all sectors of the consumer/leisure economy. Pubs I think are on the decline as a result of inflation and warning signs of further curtailment of spending. This is a very nasty situation to be in because in the past we've been able to swing out of crisis by simply printing money and keeping the consumption rate constant, central banks simply have exhausted their monetary velocity, and could easily stand to lose control of the situation leading to Japan's near 40 year stagnation.

The common belief about grey/black swans is a zealous/elastic band like reaction the remotest idea that it could happen here. anti-fragile or not, a multi-decade change in consumption will set a country back for decades.

Perhaps it is this weakness that Putin saw, and EU's reliance on it's energy/commodities, that he chose to gamble on what he saw as a looming demographic crisis on his end (number of young males available for conscript has peaked and is on the decline). Unlike technologically advanced militaries like EU/US which can absorb this demographic decline, Russia's security guarantees besides its nuclear deterence is largely on numbers. For this reason I believe that Xi is going to emulate Putin to a certain degree in the Taiwan strait.

The US is in a better situation, but it also faces a decline in its population and must continue to increase immigration, one that it is increasingly unwilling to do as populism demand rise as cost of living increases.

We are in unprecedented territory now and the content of this article reads familiar to what we've seen in previous downturns, except that we have a huge monetary excess debt from '08 money print frenzy.

I am not convinced the US hegemony will go away any time soon but I am wary as to whether we are going through what South America did up until 90s, a series of populism that swung the country to authoritarianism and ugliness that rose from that.

This is the connections I made after reading this article and looking at consumption trends in other sectors.