The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

by Peter Zeihan

That feeling you have in the pit of your stomach that we’re all making up finance as we go? Listen to that feeling. It is dead-on.

The entire European system is now doing little more than going through the motions until the common currency inevitably shatters.

without the subprime pulse, America’s housing issues in the 2020s would be far, far worse.

supply of yuan has increased by more than eight hundred percent.

China has been on this path to destruction for nearly a half century. This is not the sort of iceberg-on-the-horizon disaster that any tightly controlled, forward-thinking, competently led government should fall prey to.

Raise the interest rate on a standard mortgage loan by 2.5 percent—which would make mortgage rates still well below the half-century average—and your monthly payment increases by half.

we’re not looking down the maw of a return to 1950s-style government services—at that point there was relative balance between young workers, mature workers, and retirees. For much of the world, we’re looking down the maw of 1850s-style government services before most governments even offered services, but without the attendant economic growth that would allow populations a chance to take care of themselves.

highly questionable whether capitalism can exist without ongoing economic growth.

And oil’s absence for a few weeks, never mind a few decades, would be more than enough to crash modern civilization as we know it.

no matter what happens politically or technologically, we are nowhere near being “done” with oil.

If only solar and wind are doing the lifting, they would need a ninefold buildout to fully displace fossil fuels.

Run the math: switching all transport from internal combustion to electric would necessitate a doubling of humanity’s capacity to generate electricity. Again, hydro and nuclear couldn’t help, so that ninefold increase in solar and wind is now a twenty-fold increase.

Specifically, in most locations peak electricity demand is between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m., with higher demand rates in the winter. However, peak solar supply is between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., with higher supply profiles in the summer.