The last 100 years have been like no other century in history. Global human-life expectancy at birth was virtually unchanged for 2,000 years. Between 1900 and 2010, it more than doubled from 31 years to 67 years. It took 123 years for global population to go from 1 billion to 2 billion and 32 years to gain another billion people. Currently, it is taking 12 to 13 years to add 1 billion humans.
Not too long ago, the world was a much simpler place. There were two superpowers, “super” because of their massive military and their capability to buy or bully other countries into being their respective allies.
The world used to be neatly divided into categories of “First World Capitalist Paradise”, “Second World People’s Paradise” and “Third World Hellhole”. The last category included nations that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union wanted to pay all the bills for, except as might suit an immediate need. The Philippines was sort of in that third group during the US-Vietnam War.
Countries that were too big to ignore, like India, Indonesia and China, tried to chart their own independent course. Indonesia massacred about 1 million of their citizens to fight communism; China executed many millions to advance communism. India went with “socialism,” which was kind of a lukewarm version of both Communism and Capitalism. That way India was able to play both superpowers against the middle.
But now, everything is confused and the old labels do not mean what they used to mean. What does it matter what the economic system might be as long as you can use your MasterCard? A Third World Hellhole is now a country that doesn’t have a Novotel, Hilton, or Sheraton hotel.
A “superpower” had to have the ability to project military might to any corner of the globe through the latest weapon technology. Now someone with a third-grade education, an automatic rifle produced 70 years ago, and explosives made in someone’s kitchen can promote an ideology almost as effectively as a naval task force.
This is not your father’s geopolitical world. Neither is it your father’s geoeconomic world. In less than a decade, the entire global banking and financial system has been turned upside down.
This is 21st Century banking/government monetary policy. You go into Jollibee to order your one-piece ChickenJoy and are given your meal and P50. If you order a two-piece meal, you receive P100 with your food. You must pay the Japanese, German, Swiss and Swedish governments to loan them money. One of the largest Dutch banks, ABN Amro, has now warned its business clients a negative interest rate on the business accounts is in the works.
It is just as unrealistic to believe that the banking system can survive under these conditions anymore than Jollibee can survive by paying you to eat its food.
But here is where the wheels fall off the car. This is not happening in the previously designated Third World Hellholes. This is going down in the First World Capitalist Paradises. The economic zombie apocalypse is still way down the road. But it is coming.
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