Hah, that's a funny article. Almost like it was written by a bunch of bankers who believe that reality must bend to reflect their abstract manipulations of money they think they're so good at.
Money is a useful tool, and it can
influence reality, sometimes, under some conditions. But it cannot, and will never be able to, entirely create reality based on the whims of the money lever wielders. The IMF and various bankers seem to regularly forget this minor inconvenience.
I just wish I knew how many years to expect to be bad. Its not reasonable to expect to know, but the thought of 7 years of this or something is daunting.
Oh... I think it's going to be far longer, in that we're on the way down from our civlization peak for a range of reasons I'll expand on, and there will be no "back to normal" - just various periods of calmer times.
And I recognize this is a contrarian viewpoint on this forum, certainly, but I'll try to defend it somewhat.
Our current civilization is broadly based around exponential growth - "1% annual growth" is exponential, even if the exponent is fairly small. We generally see this growth in terms of growth of materials, energy, etc. The problem is that we're on a finite planet - and, no, asteroid mining and such doesn't solve this problem for long. So, exponential growth on a finite planet will eventually run into problems. My assertion is that we're running
squarely into a huge wide range of those problems - and "solving one" doesn't mean that we can magically solve the rest. Not that we're making any real progress on solving any, at a serious level.
We're screwing up the climate by using the atmosphere as a sewer for a wide range of gasses. And if that's fine, we've done a solid job of screwing up ecosystems with that whole "exponential growth" thing - in what we're building, or where we're mining, etc. We neglect what the ecosystems provide as free services, and instead level them for something we can put a dollar amount on, forgetting that we can't eat or breathe money.
Of course, with the whole exponential growth of energy thing, we're now running ourselves largely out of the fuels we've built our civilization on - the assorted fossil fuels. The current explored reserves are dwindling, and are more and more uneconomic to recover, because we used all the easy stuff first. We don't do fracking on short-lived wells (1-2 years to depletion) and deepwater drilling because it's fun, we do it because we've run out of other places. To borrow a turn of phrase I quite like, fracking is scraping the muck off the bottom of the barrel and using it to claim the barrel is still full. It's not economically viable long term, and it's increasingly not energetically useful - EROEI metrics for fracking, tar sands, and other such technologies
suck.
That's before you get into the minor issue of Europe having had their energy pipelines literally blown to hell. We'll see how well "streaming storage" works for "raw supply of gas," but people more familiar with the issue than I am (in terms of the technical details of storage and how to extract from it and such) sort of laugh when asked about the feasibility of it, talk about how the existing storage facilities are designed, the various corner case behaviors of methane and associated gasses as you cool them, and suggest a good sweater.
And one can point to ever-growing debt as well, as something that can't be sustained - there is an endgame for it, but we know what happens when nations default on their debt and it's not pretty. When most of the western world does it, that's also not going to be pretty.
It goes on down - pick your area, it's probably hitting limits. We've grown pretty much as far as we can on this planet, with no useful plans to get off it (the worst, least-hospitable place on Earth is still orders of magnitude easier to live on than any other planet), and no real plan other than stumble ahead and figure out what happens as we go. That it might not work isn't something commoly considered.
So we have an economy that
must grow, facing an increasingly impossible path to growth. Again, doesn't end very well. And we're seeing some of the stuff starting to crack, yet again, because we didn't fix the problems back in 2008, we just kicked that can another... oh, 14-15 years, seems like. Couple other people in office, hopefully the other team gets the blame, etc.
My view is that the future, to again borrow from an author I read who makes a lot of sense, will consist of LESS - Less Energy, Stimulation, Stuff. So, one ought to spend some time trying to work out the details of that now - use the surpluses to ensure we have the slack to deal with a lot of what's coming, and perhaps consider downshifting our energy use and such now, before the issue is forced. It's
far easier to play with alternative ways to heat a home when the furnace still works, as opposed to when the natural gas pipelines are empty or unaffordable. Same goes for growing useful stuff (there's yet another supermarket merger in progress, so one can safely predict the usual "higher prices" and "crappier food" out of that, same as every other time it happens). You can afford garden failures when there's still some working supply chains.
But very little "looks good going forward." And so I think it's well past time to recognize the ways the winds are blowing, and start doing something useful about it. Build the locally resilient groups, start looking at how to best prepare people in them for that which is likely to come, etc. One can't predict the specific details of the decline of nations or civilizations, but one can notice that most of them pass the same signposts in roughly the same way - and overshooting the resource base, badly, while the ruling class refuses to acknowledge it, is a pretty typical way to get the ball rolling.
Done carefully, I think that there's a lot useful that can be done by people in the FIRE movement - they generally
have the sort of spare resources and slack that can go to working out the best solutions for their local area in terms of lower energy living, local systems, etc. But I don't have particularly high hopes of that, since the attitude of a movement that has largely existed for 15 years, in a "The Fed Ensures The Markets Will Rise!" sort of environment, is that this is just a speedbump, a buying opportunity, etc. There's less willingness to discuss the fact that we're hitting, at yet more speed, a wide range of very real issues that aren't papered over by pulling the levers of money. We can't eat money, we can't breathe money, and we can't fuel our steel furnaces on money (at least the purely digital kind that tends to make up most of the monetary supply anymore - though I don't think paper currency will run a steel mill very well either).
I try to do useful things, both for myself and others, on the way down. I've got my own solar arrays running that, funny enough, are easily converted to a more standalone, off-grid type system if I have some reason to do so. I
hope I won't have to, but if I do, all the solar I've helped people with can be fairly trivially turned into a good off-grid system. Design feature. And it frees up at least some resources to do other useful things. I'm currently helping some people in my local circles stockpile firewood for the years to come, and at the same time looking at how we can reduce firewood use in the shoulder seasons (mini splits) to keep the wood piles lasting longer for the real cold or such. I've been experimenting quite a bit with the state of kerosene lighting and heating, because it's a useful thing to be able to kick out some heat and light with the grid down in the winter - which happens often enough one ought to consider it.
My "map of the world" is that the US specifically is a dying empire, doing that sort of thing dying empires tend to do, and also dealing with being on the backside of the arc of the civilization - which, again, is a common enough shape that one can get a basic map for what's ahead and do something useful about it. At this point, people usually accuse me of being a pessimist, which... fine, I am, I know it, but I also remain generally unsurprised by the shape of the world and what's going on with it, which says my map is a bit more useful than "This is just a temporary speedbump on our clear path to the stars." Spoiler: We aren't.
Anyway. I broadly agree with the IMF, but I try to ground myself a bit closer to the actual concrete realities of energy and materials than the more abstract world of "money" they use to try and trick developing nations into remaining debt slaves. They used to be good at it, though I understand more and more targets of that have grown wise to the game. Their concern is just "How do we get back to growth?" I tend to think "Growth is mostly over, so let's do something useful for the way down."
