Nothing Ever Happens: will 2024 be chaotic or another stagnant year?
“Nothing ever happens” is a meme to mock the accelerationists, collapse bros. The two big events of last year were the banking crisis in Spring and then the Hamas terror attack in October. However, 2023 overall felt like another stagnant year, especially towards the end with market bullishness and an apparent strength of the soft landing narrative.
While obviously the presidential election will be volatile, so far the big events of 2024 have been the new war against Yemen’s Houthi rebels, and signs of conflict escalating between Israel and Hezbollah. Plus new CPI data shows a resurgence in inflation, on top of recessionary signals. It is notable that the war is inflationary. All of these trends were in my predictions for 2024.
The inflation resurgence will hamper a Fed pivot, elevating chances of either high inflation and or a severe recession. Not to mention civil unrest breaking out in nations like Ecuador, which is part of the broader crisis that will hit the Global South. 2024 will likely be more chaotic than previous years, but overall the trend seems to be managed decline and stagnation rather than total chaos and collapse.
A war making half a million dead (no one knows exactly how many) in a couple of years in Europe out of all places is currently out of main news cycle as if by now it's totally routine. We get to actually discover how contemporary warfare pans out between two big conventional armies. No airstrike overkill of local peasants with Ak47 and IEDs as in Iraq.
Another "war" is being waged in Gaza under guidelines that would have been familiar to Assyrians when setting Tyre and Sidon and all the Fertile Crescent ablaze.
"A phrase oft-repeated by Assyrian kings in their inscriptions regarding military conquests is "I destroyed, devastated, and burned with fire" those cities, towns, and regions which resisted Assyrian rule."
from https://www.worldhistory.org/Assyrian_Warfare/
Again very different from Iraq. The Js actually want to win and they are willing to do what has been shown since time immemorial you need to do in order to win. Not that I'm justifying them, it's more of a critique against the Us "war on terror".
Not much is going to happen to the economy this year I am afraid, the Dems want to win the elections after all. Americans will progressively move back their production lines to the US and Mexico in the coming years as a response to the decline of globalisation. More reliance on Anglo countries like Canada and Australia for raw materials, UK will become de-facto NAFTA.