Originally published May 2023.

Emergence of new currency blocs will change everything

There is a growing feeling that the economies of the west are going through some form of Paradigm shift, but that it isn’t going to be the one envisaged by the men of Davos with their notion of ‘The Great Reset’ and a Fourth Industrial Revolution, where we will apparently “own nothing and be happy”. The technocracy required for their so called ‘New Normal’ is foundering against popular protests, while the emergence of a new cold war between the US and China under Trump has been transformed over the last 12 months under Biden to include Russia and crucially, thanks to the ‘freezing’ of Russia’s FX reserves by the US, has effectively put an end to the PetroDollar system. This is of enormous significance, even if right now the financial markets remain obsessed with the fine print about exactly how many basis points the Fed are going to tighten. Indeed, I believe we have not seen something so important to the western financial system since the US came off gold in 1971 and the PetroDollar system was created.