I’m not normally a pessimist (joking), but my KEEN ON guests this week have made me seriously worried about our future. Here are five reasons, then, why you should sell everything and camp out in your garden shed until the turn of the 22nd century:
In the KEEN ON interview above, I talked to the American journalist Christopher Leonard about his new book The Lords of Easy Money. Leonard’s argument about Jay Powell’s profound financial irresponsibility in printing money to benefit the rich is compelling. The book’s subtitle is How the Federal Reserve Broke the American Economy and, as Leonard explained, the Fed is now caught between the economic rock of inflation and the political hard place of significant interest rate hikes. The scariest thing of all, however, remains the surreal US debt which, as Leonard explains, is now maintained by the Fed essentially lending to itself. Terrifying.
The US financial crisis will eventually happen. But probably not tomorrow. Tomorrow, however, Russia might invade the Ukraine. In a conversation yesterday with the distinguished geopolitical analyst, Daniel Yergin, he suggested that we might indeed be stumbling into a war which nobody really wants. We are back in August 1914, Yergin fears, in a dysfunctional multipolar international system that nobody quite understands. The Taiwan and Ukranian crises are entangled, he believes. And both are bound up in the dramatic decline of the US as a global economic and political power.
The apocalypse arrived for some in Silicon Valley last week with the $225 billion Facebook public market debacle. And that was the good news. The bad news is that nobody still has any idea to deal with the enormously destructive power of big tech. Last week, I spoke with the NBC tech correspondent Jacob Ward about how artificial intelligence is about to destroy humanity. That’s bad enough, but what’s even more depressing is Ward’s complete failure to come up with a coherent political strategy to confront Silicon Valley. Ward isn’t alone. Nobody really knows how to deal with multi-trillion dollar companies that are significantly more powerful and agile than any national government.
As the great Anglo-Indian historian William Dalrymple told me today, there’s nothing particularly new about the unaccountable power of Google, Apple or Amazon (whose stock all rose sharply last week). In his new book, The Anarchy, Dalrymple explains that the British East India Company quite literally looted the South Asian continent for more than three centuries. Today’s digital looting, while more complex, is equally problematic. “Four hundred and twenty years after its founding, the story of the East India Company has never been more current,” Dalrymple concludes The Anarchy. Exactly.
So, with the trinitarian threat of war in the Ukraine, a structural financial crisis & the unaccountability of Big Tech, what is everyone here talking about? Trump, of course. In conversation after conversation after conversation, the American intelligentsia remains preoccupied with what, they warn, is the reappearance of Adolf Hitler in the form of the Donald Trump Show and its cast of Republican freaks. The problem is that when everything is reduced to such an absurdly simplistic problem, then the solution is equally idiotic. In other words, if Trump’s Republican Party represents National Socialism, then the fix is the equally unrealizable nostalgia of the New Deal. And that’s my biggest worry of all. Where are the new ideas for fixing the future? I don’t see them anywhere.
Sleep well everyone.
5 Reasons Why We Might Be Fu*ked