The 2020 crisis is the accumulation of the demographic problem which will entail a financial and economic disaster. The world’s most productive populations are ageing and will subsequently disappear.
Politicians, journalists and the financial press are ignoring the flashing warning signs. Economic mavericks like Max Keiser, financial critics like Steve Keen and mainstream economists like Paul Krugman are debating financial repression, monetary and fiscal intervention or allowing for more free markets and more real capitalism. None of them seems to touch on what is plain to see for us all: the youth in the most productive countries is disappearing at a breathtaking pace. States like the US, France and the UK are attempting to make up for it with the acceptance of unprecedented large numbers of unskilled and even undocumented migrants. The 2008 financial crisis and the 2011 euro crisis are portents of what has yet to come.
The US trade deficit is growing at a staggering pace
No changes on the Moskva River. Forecast of Russian policy after the presidential election
A turn towards Asia and the Middle East
The American president is trying to stimulate the economy with a fiscal Keynesian plan. In the coming ten years US federal spending will grow by a stunning 60%, which is a result of increasing social security liabilities and further implementation of the Paul Wolfowitz doctrine of keeping the US as the sole world superpower. This growth of spending has to be financed by taxpayers. Since the US mainstream media are in cahoots with the Trump administration, they are talking about massive tax cuts, all this despite the fact that the US federal government expects tax income to increase by 5% annually, which appears to be wishful thinking.
Even if the US federal government income increases by a staggering 60% over the next ten years, the national spending plan will lead to an unprecedented shortage.
The US deficit will have reached 1 trillion by 2020 while during the same time the FED will be reducing its balance sheet by selling its treasuries. In the coming years, there will be a tsunami of treasuries flooding the market, as both the FED and the US treasury sell US government bonds, without there being a buyer of the last resort, that is the FED.
The US has become less dependent on foreign oil, and net-oil imports have contracted, and in spite of that the US trade deficit is at an all-time high. And that situation is only going to worsen.
US export products are cars, especially German brands manufactured in the USA, weapons and aircraft, but last year the Germans began to export German vehicles from China. To top it all the Chinese aircraft manufacturer COMAC will have rolled out an airplane that might successfully compete with Boeing 737, and by 2019 another one is planned that might push Boeing 787 out of the Chinese market. These developments will harm the US exports even further. With soybeans as their prime export product the US is becoming a Third World economy. True, since the election of Donald Trump the US economy has begun the grow, but so has its structural problems.
In Europe, the situation is not much better. President Macron’s plans to reform the European Union are already disapproved by the Germans. Macron is not even able to restructure France. The little economic growth in Europe and in particular France is caused by record low interest rates and massive monetary stimulus. There will be no European integration, and by 2019 the ECB will have stopped its money printing programme, and by 2020 the markets will have understood that Macron is not capable of solving any problems of France or Europe. By that time the Germans will have realized that they have a demographic problem so much so that the outflow of labor has already begun to accelerate.
Europe is too diverse and divided to form a federation, which also means that the euro is doomed to failure. The Italians are playing with an idea of introducing a parallel currency in a disguised form so as to bypass the mandatory use of the euro.
Interest is on the rise, the US thirty-year mortgage rate has hit a four-year high while the US is selling T-bills at highest interest rates since August 2008. British families would struggle if interest rates rose to 2% or more. The soaring mortgage debt has accumulated during years of rock-bottom borrowing costs.
The oil price is climbing steadily, however far below the price that consumers paid in 2014. If the oil price hits the 90 dollar mark by 2019, we expect consumers to feel the pain.
Western countries will face a double demographic problem. On the one hand the influx of an incompatible migration population that is primarily a liability, and on the other an increasing population of retirees who expect a decent return from their mandatory pension savings. Ignoring the real problems and pretending that our economies resemble the American of the Reagan years will be a grave error.
By 2020 the next financial crisis will be around the corner, the large Central Banks will resort to buying bonds and other securities suppressing interest rates further. While the interest rate is climbing a little, the idea of negative interest rates is still on the table.
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The Gefira financial bulletin is a monthly periodical that the Gefira team releases ten times a year. We give a clear projection of the future of energy and politics.From Trump’s election to the steep incline in oil price and the value of bitcoin, it was all in the Gefira before it happened.
According to the Gefira team, the next systemic crisis will happen around 2020 as the oil price is back at 100 dollar and German mass retirement begin. There is a high risk of war on the Old Continent. However, it is not Russia but Turkey that is the most prominent threat.
It is not the emerging markets, nor public or private debt that should be of interest to investors but instead the shrinking populations in the developed world. Japan is the first country that experiences a declining people, and for that reason, it pursued extraordinary monetary and fiscal policies. The decrease in the European and US population will have dire economic consequence, and after 2025 China will join the club of dying nations.
Apart from China and Russia, economic growth in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia is dependent on the developed countries which see a dramatic decline in their populations.
In the Gefira bulletin we provide investment suggestions and give a coherent vision of the time ahead from a macroeconomic perspective.
On our Website, we have articles from our research team whereas in the Gefira Financial Bulletin we give a comprehensive explanation of the coming world. We focus primarily on economic, investment and strategic subjects. We focus on 2020 as the financial breaking point.
Geopolitical risks
Demographics
Private and public debt
Assets bubbles
Cryptocurrencies
Energy security
5/1/2018
Gefira