FISHING FOR TRUTH, WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT YEAR AND BEYOND?
So far, we’ve been experiencing crisis upon crisis: pandemic, war, inflation, supply chain, climate change....
Governments and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are flooding Ukraine and other developing countries with hundreds of billions and printing money like there is no tomorrow resulting in devaluation and the rise of interest rates and price of goods (CPI +8.6%). The bottlenecked supply chain is also not helping the inflated price of goods and energy.
According to Kristalina Georgieva, director of the IMF, the solutions are to prioritize ending the Ukraine/Russia war, confront COVID, and tackle inflation and debt. As if we were not already aware of the urgency?
Oh sorry, she also mentioned the solution will come from technology and a green transition. Speaking of a green transition, the European parliament just proposed a law to ban gasoline fueled cars by 2025. Soon after, Biden announced that the US will probably do the same in 2030 but in reality, private cars only account for 20% of the entire petrol engines. Trucks, ships and planes transporting food mostly from one side of the planet to another are the largest part of the equation to be resolved and yet nothing has been proposed so far.
Now regarding technology transitions, COVID has already accelerated the process, and even small to medium entrepreneurs are racing to update their technology to get a data-driven organization. Everyone is trying to guess the outcome of the Russia Ukraine war and the big question that comes to mind is: “will the conflict escalate into a nuclear war?” A month ago, prior to reading a book about Vladimir Putin, I would have said not likely but today I am not so sure. In any case, NATO will sooner or later have to intervene.
About confronting COVID, this obviously means doing better than we have done so far by preventing more spread, boosting our healthcare system, and starting to produce medical devices and supplies locally, but most importantly taking drastic measures to avoid repeating history in the future by imposing more control and transparency on bio research related to human created viruses that could start global pandemics, or simply ban them (not sure what they were looking for?).
About tackling inflation and debt, now that’s a good one. If they had found a solution, we would know about it. At Davos, someone even proposed to go back to the gold standard but I don’t think the gold reserve nor the actual gold production would suffice anyway.
Thank you for reading and let me know in the comments what you predict for the next year or so. If you like this blog, I invite you to read the next one, “HOW TECHNOLOGY CAN HELP YOUR BUSINESS RIDE THE GLOBAL CRISIS”.