Ray Dalio wrote an interesting piece entitled The World has Gone Mad and The System is broken. He highlights a few unsustainable conflating factors that can affect the global economy:

Investors at all levels are flush with cheap money (because of low interest), and are pouring it into investments that will yield no and sometimes known negative returns. This bad decision making is . This is happening across asset classes but pronounced in private equity and venture. One note here is that the excess capital Large governments have rising deficits, and while raising interest rates is the best way to keep them in check, governments would sooner print money to keep markets and economies in growth mode. Pension funds won’t be able to meet their investment targets and pensions will fall short. This will also happen to healthcare. This will result in cutting benefits, raising taxes or printing even more money to meet the obligations - all of which will widen the wealth gap. The wealth gap will be exacerbated by poor losing creditworthiness, and the rich getting even richer because money is free. This brings into question the viability of trickle down economics - making it clear that this breed of capitalism doesn’t work for most people.

This is a really interesting set of changes taking place that will likely have massive impacts. I’ll examine some of the second order effects in a later post.