What Else Can Happen?

The world economic situation keeps getting worse with commentators and people in compromised positions claiming that 'no one could have foreseen this!'. However, there were some who pointed out that the world was heading toward a financial disaster due to loose credit driven over-investment and a semi deregulated environment where financial recklessness and malfeasance were never punished by the market as bailouts from the government were guaranteed as soon an organisation became too big to fail.

With hindsight vision it is relatively easy for most people to see that the warnings and actions were quite obvious. So the world has arrived at an expected bad place as the logical result of previous actions. So from where we are now what other malignant events could occur to shake an already fragile system.

The obvious candidates, outside of some planetary external such as a large asteroid hitting at speed, that have to be considered are (and I try to put an order on this):

1) India and Pakistan. There are calls on the streets of India now to wipe out Pakistan. As an Indian colleague of mine said about the sentiment “Pakistan must be taught a fitting lesson – a nuclear strike and it will be a desert in minutes”

2) Related to 1) of course – with capitalism on its knees, it must be clear to any fundamentalist opponents, that now is a good time for terrorist strikes at key economic targets.

3) China. Peasant risings in times of economic hardship have happened before and with calamitous results. With urban joblessness in China already at 12% there is already a high risk. In the non technological past China was not part of the global economic system and did not have a ton of nuclear weapons so this time around the negative outcomes come could be far more severe.

4) Russia – with the cheap money from oil that allowed Putin paper over cracks now gone he’ll be looking for new wall paper and nationalism is the usual paper of choice.

5) Environmental tensions – in an ever more populated high consumption world, technology appears to be demanding more from the environment than it is saving through new efficient and clean innovations. A collapse in the environment would surely lead to some dystopian hell.

The other consideration to all of this is completely unforeseen events. Something positive (or mainly positive depending on how you view it) could happen like the invention of the Internet browser that happened in the early 1990s at the CERN institute which spawned the technology boom. However, some negative, completely unforeseen, event can happen which could have an incredibly disruptive effect. The best bet about what could happen can only relate to the area (the problem with things that are completely unexpected!) and for me that has to be something to do with some cultural shift on account of the break down in the capitalist grand narrative intermingled with economic hardship.