John Mauldin’s recent article, Late Summer Sandpile, is one of his best–thought-provoking and very timely. As an investment advisor, his primary concern is with financial markets and systems, but the academic research findings in complexity and systems theory have a broader relevance. Thinking about systems as sand piles, academics can examine the dimensions of stability and instability as they occur in a wide variety of systems. After reading the article, I felt inclined to respond. Here below is what his article evoked in me.

Our civilization “sand pile” is comprised of many diverse but related fingers of instability, some small, some large, and many interconnected; that puts our entire civilization at risk. Among the most worrisome features are the astronomical growth of debt, religious, and cultural conflicts, competing political ideologies, and international intrigues and violence involving players that are now in command of unprecedented destructive power. If the conflict between Ukraine/NATO and Russia doesn’t trigger a nuclear war in the near term as Peter Koenig expects, the mountains of debt being built up will trigger a global financial collapse in the not-too-distant future. Markets are much more centralized than they used to be and are increasingly dominated by a few major players which tosses free market theories of market behavior out the window. Virtually all markets today are manipulated by huge corporations, investment funds, and asset management firms. But the biggest manipulators are the national governments of the major powers and their partners who run the global banking cartel. The top dog among them is the US government which has greatly abused the status of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It doles out privileges not only via legislation and executive orders, but increasingly by the preferential expenditure of massive amounts of legalized counterfeit money to favored clients and proxy governments in a desperate attempt to preserve and extend its “full spectrum dominance,” and replace democratic national governments with a One-World neo-feudal world order. The US and its allies are pushing the limits in the hope and expectation that there will not be a reaction big enough to upset their apple cart. But as Mauldin reminds us, one small grain of sand is often all it takes.

#   #   #