Andrei Polgar – Accepting Unsustainable as Status Quo, World is Comfortably Unaware of Approaching Disaster

Best-selling author of “The Age of Anomaly,” economist Andrei Polgar predicts, “The next crash will be the worst the world has ever seen . . . because problems have kept accumulating. Now, we have come to accept the unsustainable as status quo. We look at the GDP ratio of Japan that is over 200% and we say it’s all fine. We look at Italy with 130% debt to GDP and say it’s fine. We look at France, Belgium and the United States with debt to GDP at around 100%, and we say it’s fine . . . they’re going to do more of the same and hopefully that’s going to work. That’s what keeps me up at night. What happens when that chain breaks? . . . . If things are this bad right now when, for better or worse, nothing is burning, what do you think is going to happen when we are going to have to deal with all our problems, when we have to deal with the unsustainable nature of our system? Things are already unbelievably bad here in Europe. We are buried under excessive bureaucracy. We have, for the most part, a pretty spoiled population, and this is true for other Western populations. . . . In Romania, at least we understand that sometimes systems fail, whereas in the Western world . . . way too many individuals are just getting by as it is. They are overly indebted. They are overly dependent on the system functioning flawlessly. If a small crack appears, then these people will not be able to cope with it.”