Cluster Family Office Blog

It seems clear that the financial system is going to be saved by the mother of all bailout plans. But that doesn’t mean the mother of all crises It is going to ease off. Let no one be under any illusion: this multi-crisis has countless social side-effects that are difficult to prevent. We’ve squandered our future in the most irresponsible and absurd way. And now we have to cross the desert after having poured the water from our last canteen over our heads.

But faced with the possibility that this bailout might avert financial collapse, we find ourselves in the position of someone who knows that a family member has been in a serious accident and is fearing the worst. And when the doctor emerges from the ICU and tells us that the patient has come out of the operating theatre alive, the seriousness of their condition seems like a lesser evil compared to the thought of never seeing them again. The financial system will survive thanks to the Democratic-Republican bailout that will be approved come what may, but the patient’s prognosis remains extremely serious, reserved. I think it would be interesting to read the article again: The American Patient, which, dated December 2007, gives us a glimpse of the situation as it stood nine months ago – an eternity in this turbulent era in which we find ourselves living in such peril.

As we said at the outset, although the system will survive, the socio-economic outlook is devastating. We are set to suffer a decline in wealth and social welfare equivalent to several decades. And anyone who downplays the situation by saying that this is merely a cyclical crisis like so many others we have seen is either mistaken, deluded or lying in a politically correct manner. The locomotive that has been pulling the rest of the world along since the Second World War will no longer be able to do so in the coming years. The million-dollar question is: who is going to replace it? And we’re not talking about who is going to be the world’s leading power in the coming years, because the Chinese have no intention of ousting anyone, let alone the economic system as we know it. It is an unknown whose answer will undoubtedly shape the New World Order.

We can no longer talk about tightening our belts, but rather about a substantial change in lifestyle that hundreds or thousands of millions of people will have to make in the coming years. A dramatic yet gradual situation, in which opportunities, hidden amongst the devastation that the crisis will leave in its wake, will abound more than ever before.

I can’t help but feel strangely surprised when I reread Once upon a time… at the end of the 20th century, an article we wrote over half a year ago. A light-hearted exercise in economic fiction that is taking on an increasingly grim reality with each passing day. It has only been seven years since 9/11 (WTC), and the world is a different place. But this is only the beginning of what is yet to come. A historic, thrilling and uncertain future unlike anything we have ever seen, the result of the virtual wealth accumulated, globalisation and our own foolishness, respectively.