This is why I'm monitoring the real estate dilemma in China currently; not only are they short on bread and Mao 2 is cracking down on circuses but their next tuesday has a chance at being another black one. If they fly apart fast that will send shockwaves globally and considering how pissed the US is right now, it's easy to see where that leads to.
The way things were heading anyway, even if this isn't the big shock, it's practically inevitable by 2024 that something major shatters.
There were already so many issues coming over the horizon that the old way of doing things was going to end in the 2020s regardless.
Aging with reduced birthrates as always going to fuck up westernised pension/welfare systems.
The global demographics that made global trade so profitable were going to end (developed countries and developing countries were in a perfect balance of young consumers to older producers at the peak of their careers since around 1990 until 2015, but aging and urbanization has declined birthrates faster than we predicted, and as a result the world is running out of growth opportunities)
Europe's population has likely entered decline (assuming Russian population data is somewhat unreliable) or will enter decline by 2023. It will not recover in our lifetime and it's likely some European economies will never recover to pre-covid levels or go much higher than them.
Asia's population was always going to enter decline in the 2030s. Japan's GDP in 2000 was 4.9T$. twenty years later it was still the exact same, 4.9T$. And Japan was a large very advanced country that had the technology to automate vast amounts of workforce. Many other countries won't have that as an option.
Underground Aquafers were always going to run dry in the US and China by 2030, crop yields will likely eat shit. If China's still a functional state by then, God help us, that famines going to be fucking horrifying.
The great recession exposed a massive illusion of how wealth creation in the west had stagnated for the lower classes. Radicalism will certainly brew from this.
The green switch is a nice idea but runs up against logic quickly, complete with the US losing interest in the middle east, Russia's only real export being oil, energy security is likely to collapse in a world crisis.
There were so many problems far off in the distance that people have just written off. Except now they're right on our doorstep. I feel like history is on the cusp of "thawing" so to speak.