In a world of growing inequalities, the intergenerational gap is likely to trigger the reconstruction of the social-economic and political structures, reshaping the future and founding a whole new era. This is what Deutsche Bank’s Jim Ried defended on his latest study “Age of Disorder”. The piece caused shocked gasps across the financial world, revealing Millenials’ and Gen Z’s discontentment with the current configuration of the world economy endorsed by the Boomers, and highlighting their willingness to engage in a stronger political presence with the aim of minimizing wealth disparities, allowing them to turn the page and build a new age, “one that will be characterized initially by disorder,” according to Ried. So in today’s video, we will be taking a closer look at his observations to grasp what is coming in the next chapters of the collapse of society as we know.
As a banker, Ried focused on the market aspects that such extensive socio-economic and political implications will have at the coming “new age”, more specifically on how current record-high global valuations are threatened, outlining eight major global themes that will boost the transition to this new phase, such as the deterioration of US-China relations, the explosion of global debt levels, to the imminent runaway inflation, the worsening of wealth and income inequality, and, of course, the looming generational conflict between Millennials and Gen-Zers, and Boomers.
In his study, the author identifies five different economic cycles over the last 160 years: from 1860 to 1914 – the first era of globalization; 1914 to 1945 – the Great Wars and the Depression; 1945 to 1971 – Bretton Woods and the return to a gold-based monetary system; 1971 to 1980 – the start of fiat money and the high-inflation era of the 1970s; 1980 to 2020 – the second era of globalization; and from 2020 on – The Age of Disorder, which will be the moment we, as a society, will face a sharp shift in the global financial world and social organization. The expert asserts that economic cycles come and go, “but sitting above them are the wider structural super-cycles that shape everything from economies to asset prices, politics, and our general way of life.”
In that sense, when considering that inequality is a multifaceted area, one of the sub-areas that could emerge out of it, causing a critical disorder in the system is the intergenerational divide that has been expanding recently, which is likely to develop and receive even more attention in the immediate future. At the moment, the generational divergencies are at extreme levels, because the study points that, over the last decade, those who’ve graduated into the labor market have already experienced two massive shocks: the Global Financial Crisis and, currently, the global virus outbreak, both of which are considered to be the two worst economic collapse since the 1930s Great Depression. Meaning that young people have been left behind economically compared to the past generation, on issues that come from homeownership to student debt levels.
For now, what we know is that the prospects to the 2020 decade indicate that Gen Zers and Millennials are going to gradually take the electoral base from the hands of the older generation. An electoral victory in favor of the Millenials could mean all-round redistributive policies, starting with the feared redistribution of wealth of the rich amongst the less favored classes, higher corporate and property taxes, more preference to commodities rather than stocks, and more tolerance of inflation “insofar as it will erode the debt burden it is inheriting and put the pain on bondholders, which tend to have a bias towards the pensioner generation,” according to Ried.
In this direction, with increasingly high disparities and a world scenery in crisis, while an economic collapse is still unfolding, the younger generations are likely to keep fueling this force of reaction to the oppressive policies that have been enacted over the course of the past decades. As they are elected into positions of power, they will disrupt society as we know it, rebuilding it and shifting the world’s attention to topics that were once left aside, such as the consumption model and the level of carbon emissions. The more our leaders suppress the necessities of this group, the larger the reacting force becomes. The Age of Disorder is on the horizon and will transform reality in unprecedented ways. With all that said, don’t expect this transition to happen smoothly. Much more turbulence will come with it. Are you ready? Please feel free to share your thoughts on the comment section down below and don’t forget to hit the like and subscribe button if you haven’t already.