The Next Big Thing  

In 2008, I created The Crash Course.  If you haven’t seen it, well, you really should.  It’s both very outdated and still spot on.

In it I made the case that by looking through a resource lens we could come to this conclusion:  The next twenty years are going to be completely unlike the past twenty years.

There are lots of ways to look at the world – geopolitically, spiritually, ecologically – but I’ve found that resources have both power predictive and explanatory powers.

Now that we’re more than half-way through that 20-year period it’s fair to ask how the Crash Course predictions have held up.

Well, like any big set of future predictions, the record is spotty.  Got some right, got some wrong.  Got some directionally right but really missed the magnitude of the move.  A few were more or less correct.

Money

This is the area I got directionally right but badly underestimated the magnitude of the printing.  Yes, I expected printing, and I expected that printing to exacerbate an already large wealth gap, but I never thought things would go this far.

I first used this quote the original crash course back in 2008, and I now repeat it almost weekly.  I hope someone is listening.

Never in my wildest dreams did I think that we’d be facing the situation we’re in.  I literally have no words for any of this.  So maybe a chart of currency creation will do:

That hefty 65% increase in total money stock in just one year has mainly flooded over to the already rich.  The wealth gaps that I thought too far and too much back in 2008 is now an order of magnitude worse.

Of course, that’s just one problem.  The larger problem is that money isn’t a real thing.  It’s an intangible.  A marker.  It’s a social contract.  More of an agreement than actual wealth.

As you probably know, I consider real wealth to consist of real things like land, oil, trees, water, finished products, houses, and valuable intellectual property.  Money, or currency, is a claim on those things.  Not wealth itself.

Accordingly, there always has to be a balance between the real things and the claims.