Dragoš Vučković, president of the economics committee of the Center for geostrategic studies
At the end of April this year my text of the five World processes that will mark this year was published on this website (here Dragoš Vučković: five World processes that will mark this year – center for geostrategic studies), in which I tried to justify, at least in traces, all the accumulated fear of us ordinary people, of all the adversity that has otherwise happened or is still happening in the world this year. The above five World processes in this year, meanwhile, may have escalated beyond the expected scope, instilling in us the added fear that an even worse and more uncertain year is in store for us. In it, of which I am quite sure, the contours of the new multipolar world, in which we already live, will certainly be clearly discerned. It is obvious that after five centuries, Western hegemony is slowly but surely coming to an end, and the whole world will soon reset itself, under completely different conditions. All the odds are that next year will be one of those decisive in the overall history of the world, a kind of stone medjas, from which the stages of the development of humanity, like those of the newer date, will be counted., 1929, 1941, 1945, 1991, 2008, 2022, which will mark the very end of this Western neoliberal moment, as Alexander Dugin calls it. In the world, especially in the world economy, these mentioned processes have really gone far, to become simply truly unsustainable to the point that fundamental structural changes throughout the world are necessary. Unfortunately, according to the current situation, they will not occur peacefully and in agreement, but will be followed by terrible escalations and fractures at the world level, which we are witnessing in full swing.
I
For this, a little more than half a year since my stated text, the economic situation in general in the West or in the countries of the collective West, primarily in America and the EU, has additionally deteriorated and compounded according to the general assessment of the leading, both Western and Russian, as well as our experts. There is almost a general belief that the U.S. economy only seems generally normal, but that it has been on the brink of recession for two years. Projections are already being made that this recession would lead to a decline in the world economy of 4-5%, the EU as much as 6-8%, and the Eastern economies significantly less, Russia about 2%. A whole series of bad economic indicators that have escalated in the meantime clearly confirm this, from the escalation of public debt to the US already over ус 36 trillion, which is realistically over 120% of the GDP of America. It has become a country that allocates more than the military budget only on interest, overburdened by mortgage debts and the construction crisis, an inflated bubble of stakes in the shouted sector of "artificial intelligence", to a lack of money for infrastructure facilities, a decline and changes in the structure of employment, to the end of an unsustainable fiscal policies and deficits reaching, according to some data, up to 8% of GDP, the highest in its peacetime history. The near bankruptcy of about 500 banks in the US and their merger with giant banks in the US financial system are already predicted, as well as the bursting of a bubble of overinvested "artificial intelligence" sector, which will set off an entire avalanche of stock sales and stock market crashes. More and more in the West, the harsh truth about America as a drunken hegemony, which has long been gambling with its fate. If, according to the G-20 data, every Russian citizen has owed just over ус 2,000 since the middle of this year, and the American citizen has owed 50 times more or over ус 100,000, then these expectations are quite justified. The economic situation in the EU is currently, by the mass of indicators, perhaps worse, and what is most devastating is the lack of sovereignty and readiness to defend their own companies from American competition, so the EU is definitely losing the technological war with the US and China, which I have written about several times before. The EU is simply now in a game where it is constantly "chasing its tail", while the rules are written by someone else. The recession of the collective West is therefore imposed as inevitable, according to experts, by the end of next year, with a new inflationary blow, the shadow of which is already felt at the door. The real confusion on the world's stock markets at the beginning of August this year, which was ridiculously christened in the West as a "downward correction", was only a dangerous warning and a kind of proof that those same stock markets were over-inflated and that there was a latent danger of a much more severe snap. As I have repeatedly pointed out in earlier texts, after this expected Western recession, with new bankruptcies of banks and big companies, and stock market crashes, there would inevitably be an escalation of the New impact of the world economic crisis, since it would now be caused by the joint action of several negative causes. This, in addition to the previous one, would very likely be unfavorable to the West, the end of the war in Ukraine and further escalation of dangerous customs wars in the world, primarily the one between the US and China, for which, for a long time in the West, the term "black swans"has been popular. This would inevitably lead to the US losing its status as a world leader and hegemon, because it would be faced with a situation either to settle accumulated debts, which is impossible, or to declare bankruptcy and simply play out all the owners of the USD, with the reasoning that repayment of debt is impossible because it would pose a threat to the stability of the entire world economy. The second option always remains a new Great World War, the preparations of which, unfortunately, are well underway.
Recently, we attended the end of the American presidential election, the end of a spectacle of entertainment for the broad popular masses around the world. The world's top, the "secret Western government", the "Masters of history", the "Masters Of The Great Game", the rulers of the "Deep State", the "global Princes", the "puppeteers", although I like to call them the self-proclaimed western rulers of the world ( SZVS ), the generally known set of megabankar families, industrialists ' families, certain monarchist families and of course the Vatican this time, they overwhelmingly evaluated and named the new-old President Donald Trump as the new president of the United States. This clearly shows us that the SFS will not allow any changes to its agenda, except perhaps those of a cosmetic nature, through its relatively new executors of this agenda. This only means that they will endure to the end in the sick striving of their self-proclaimed exceptionalism to make the whole world a single great empire with a common religion and culture. This inevitably foresees the dissolution of nation-states and the creation of new ones, with revision, to the complete resetting of existing national borders, which will be achieved by expanding existing ones and causing new wars in the world. They will focus especially on China, Russia and Iran, because each of them, by their own resistance, directly threatened the Western inviolable sovereignty in the world. For the realization of this agenda, the SFS will engage literally all available forces, and therefore it is funny that Trump's announcements that, as soon as he is appointed, he will stop the Ukrainian war or even more ridiculous to place it partially under the control of the Fed (US Federal Reserve), otherwise owned by the leading families of the SFS. Any possible derailment of Trump or any of his appointees from the core agenda will be severely punished, as evidenced by American history. Hence, Trump has already embarked on a major preparation for the economic recovery of America, which of course will not entail root structural changes in the economy, because they would entail the automatic loss of the power of the SFS, but will probably end up drastically raising tariffs on China, Mexico and Canada, and additional economic rape of the EU, with probably an unwise attempt to ease sanctions.Russia, in terms of its "softening", which will inevitably lead to a new inflationary blow in the United States and deepening, already large, economic problems.
II
Not wanting to deal more with the situation of the economies of the eastern giants (China, Russia and India) this time, it can only be pointed out that these economies continued the expected and planned growth, much higher than the Western countries, although significantly revised, due to the negative effects of those already mentioned five World processes from the previous text. China, as, by many indicators, the world's largest economy, meanwhile, is recording new successes in the scientific and technological war with America. U.S. sanctions on Russia, on the other hand, have changed the entire global financial system, its very structure, and the fate of foreign exchange reserves in many countries is now at great risk. Thus, in this period, the process of "escape" from the USD, primarily to gold, gained even more momentum, thus the process of de-dollarization is gaining more and more momentum. In addition to Russia, where it has long been the most visible, China and India are actively working to internationalize their currencies in order to facilitate trade transactions. With this, the global financial system is entering its new phase, in which more and more countries will resort to different forms of de-dollarization, crowning the increasingly inviolable status of the USD. Hence the realistic expectation that it will eventually lose its status as the world's main reserve currency, with all the far-reaching consequences, not only for the American, but for the entire world economy. Russia's increasingly stable growth, despite the ongoing war and historic sanctions, and India's massive infrastructure momentum, despite having so far managed to exploit only a small fraction of the new opportunities created by China's economic slowdown, and Mexico's rebirth through the " fourth transformation," primarily of transportation corridors and the oil industry, are clear indications that non-Western the world or the world majority, as it is popularly called, is much more successful than Western economies fighting in the current world economic situation.
The collective West reacted very nervously on the eve and during the BRICS+ Summit in Kazan October this year, not so much because, according to many economic indicators, even a few years ago, in the old composition, it overtook the popular G-7, but mostly because of the announcement of the BRICS+ establishment of its own financial system, i.e. the non-cash "basket" of national currencies towards the real economy.countries, which will determine the mutual values of national currencies, beyond the reach of the USD and the euro. Before the summit, it became clear to everyone that BRICS was already on its way to becoming a roof structure, an ideological leader, along with the key and already well-institutionalized Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), of new non-Western integration in the world. Its basis is in the struggle with the Western neoliberal colonial economic system, and with the main goal of its de-dollarisation, as some of our authors have well assessed. The Western media, according to the old custom, hastily proclaimed the very idea of creating the BRICS bridge payment system, and the already active BRICS - clear, as a system of calculation, payment and settlement of mutual claims on a multilateral basis, with really great potential, as "Putin's plan of victory over the dollar". The BRICS New Development Bank (NDB), with the main goal of supporting investments in infrastructure and sustainable projects in developing countries, with as much as possible in local currencies, is planned as a carrier of the dedolarisation process. It is certain that it will take a long time for all this to come to life and to integrate into the existing financial and payment systems, but it is also even more certain that the West will be less and less able to influence it. After the Kazan Summit, however, there remained a real bitter impression that, regardless of the adopted common agenda, the Russian agenda of full economic confrontation with the West was not expected to pass, regardless of the unequivocal support of Iran. The disagreements of China, and especially India, as well as some other countries that have been afraid of Western sanctions, which has certainly led to certain cracks, which are not dangerous for now. This, however, seemed to the Western media to be a cure for the sore throat, and they immediately began to prove that this hypothetical common currency, BRICS+, had little chance of being a dangerous challenger to the dollar at least in the foreseeable future. But what is real, BRICS+ will slowly, but surely, scale and gradually build its institutional structure, methods of work and just expand, gaining more and more power in the world. Didn't Trump himself already recognize that when he started openly threatening BRICS+ economies these days, by imposing insane tariffs, if they continued to de-dollarize?
III
The observed half-year since my last text in Serbia has brought almost nothing promising positive, but, on the contrary, otherwise bad economic indicators have only deteriorated further in the meantime. Simply put, in Serbia we live a real economic provisory, based solely on a false image of macroeconomic stability, in which the alleged acquisition of an investment rating was declared as the main success, which will only allow us to borrow more quickly and perhaps a little more painlessly in the world. This time I will present only a few brief facts in support of this picture, which surely lead us to the near economic collapse. Our public debt is fake below 50% of GDP, because the GDP itself rises whenever the government needs it by changing the calculation method, so it is now over 80 billion euros. I have no doubt that it will soon go to the whole 100, as the borrowing pace has rapidly gained on acceleration in the last few years. For a whole decade, we do not repay loans, but simply refinance them popularly, take new ones to repay old ones, but of course each time at higher interest rates. They are now up to 8%, more than the planned growth for this and next year, which are also almost regularly unrealistic and inflated. We will pay only for interest, this 1.6, and the next, almost two billion euros, or 8% of the budget, which exceeds the allocations for Social Security and social protection, and also reaches the total expenditures of the state for all subsidies, including those for agriculture, economy, railways, culture, tourism, air and Road Transport. On the other hand, this insane borrowing does not reflect on the position of ordinary citizens at all, so we are better in purchasing power in Europe only than BiH, Albania and Macedonia, since the real median salary is only just over 600 euros, and the prices of food and soft drinks are almost 96% of the EU average. In addition to all this, as well as the mass assessment of our economic situation in the earlier texts on this site, which have mostly, in the meantime, deteriorated, the current domestic political situation, which is about to be shot, is jointly going. The neocolonial Authority, which is in a precipitous decline, in a stage where it is collapsing itself, wants to be replaced by another, perhaps somewhat less colonial, but still weak, divided and unprepared for this step. In this situation, almost all the recommendations of our reputable authors, which I strongly support, related to the urgent reduction of exposure to the dollar and the euro, on the sale of all positions in securities under the influence of the United States, also to force Joint Operations for non-Western companies, to urgently develop our companies for performance in the markets of developing countries, to it urgently resets our existing banking system, with the forcing of domestic banking, with the change of regulations for the implementation of full-capacity monetary policy. This simply means that we need more than a complete change in the economic model, which I am so persistently advocating in almost every aspect of this site. It will not really be possible without the end of these tectonic, both economic and political, changes that have already begun in the whole world, with which the replacement of the ruling elites will inevitably come. This applies not only to us, but also to all the other, very similar, Balkan despots, which the wave will also hit. Isn't it about time we met him?
IV
Behind all these great and disturbing intensifications in the world, where they are most visible on the political, and probably even more so on the military, i.e. war scene, are hidden, in my deep conviction, those fundamental, related to the struggle for the supremacy of economic models, and in close connection with that, the conflict of ideologies. This has almost become an unavoidable point that I normally deal with in all my texts dealing with this problem in the long term. All economic and political life in the world over the past few decades, and all of it until the global recession of 2008, was almost entirely created by the Western neoliberal order, based on the belief that unrestrained markets are the most effective means of achieving optimal results. Nevertheless, in the opinion of eminent Western economists, which he was burdened with the harsh truth that unregulated markets were inefficient and unstable and in fact unsuitable for generating socially acceptable income distribution, this model of development was rapidly spreading around the world, with an unrestrained desire to become convincingly dominant. Today, the neoliberal concept seems quite broken, according to the world's leading economists, who emphasize that today, in fact, the main Western countries that defined its rules are renouncing it, and that it has simply renounced itself, self-destructing. In the West, we can already clearly discern two sharply opposing groups, one very compact, with the headquarters in the famous Davos, which will persevere to the very end on the defense of this model, according to which the whole future will be based on new technologies such as artificial intelligence and Bioengineering, where most people will actually be superfluous. The main challenge, according to them, will be to offer the world a "new religion" or a new philosophy, which of course will be created by the same artificial intelligence by "recycling" existing religious writings. The second, but quite diverse, but deeply aware of the approaching economic crisis, has been looking for a way out for a long time, mainly in changes or more, cosmetic changes to this already existing model, and much less often in completely new models of economic development, dictated by modern reality. Their basic message is if you can't change the laws of physics, you can change the rules of the economic game, with some of them advocating the return of morality to the economy, new forms of ownership structures in companies, others seeing the point of larger, exponential taxation of big capital and drastic reduction of inequality in society, while others advocate so-called. ecological "non-growth", that is, progress without growth, as a radically different economic system, because so far we have exceeded four, by others even five or six, of the nine planetary boundaries that define a planet suitable for life. However, we will hardly find among them anyone who dared to strike at the very roots of the neoliberal model, who began to deal more seriously with its basic structural changes, in terms of looking for an appropriate alternative. I am deeply convinced that they will not be seriously sought or studied any time soon, until the angry and harsh reality of the new world economic crisis forces them to do so.
On the other hand, in the East, as I have repeatedly stressed, there is a real search for new economic models and ideologies. Russia has long advocated a new nationalism, neo-dogmatic and Orthodox Russian socialism, with a strong idea of social justice, a powerful superpower and a New Monarchy, relying on traditional civilization and Eurasianism. At the moment in Russia, there is a fierce struggle with the neoliberal remnants in their ranks, but who continue to offer fierce resistance with the wholehearted help of the West. The Chinese economic model, the socialist political order and the capitalist economy, along with the Russian state and spiritual awakening terrified the already mentioned team of the SFS, because they threatened them not only materially and geopolitically, but also hit the very foundations of their legitimacy, that is, their neoliberal concept, which is failing. The Chinese model, where the state has maintained dominance over capital, keeping profits in the service of society, is becoming increasingly accepted in the West. In the middle of this year, a revised law on enterprises entered into force in China, which provides for workers ' participation in their companies, making Democratic corporate governance a legal obligation. Didn't the Chinese accept the ideas of Thomas Piketty and the like of the West? On this occasion, I also mention India, which is trying to implement an ideological project that combines the Hindu awakening with industrialization, looking for a model in the Japanese model – modern in the industrial sense, and "non-Western" in the cultural one. The world is simply entering a postliberal era, where, by breaking free from neoliberal dogma, the door to unlimited possibilities is gradually opened. The West is losing hegemony, which is primarily in the interest of not only non-Western civilizations, but of itself, which becomes only one of the poles of the multipolar world. Whether the world will go more towards multipolarity or more towards polycentricity, where one or two powerful actors dominate each macro-region, as M. Stepic nicely explains, is an osteoarthritis to be seen. But what will be important for us, as geopolitical episodes, is that the chances of neutrality will be minimal, since positions in the contact belts of macro-regions or internal spheres will become more delicate and risky over time.
V
In the end, the answer to the question from the title of the text only imposes itself. Next year, unfortunately, brings us even more fear and uncertainty, the prolongation of a severe crisis in the countries of the collective West, which will likely lead to the beginning of a recession of their economies, which will open the door to a new world economic crisis. The strong processes of economic separation and division will unfortunately accelerate even further, which will, however, help the East and the entire non-Western world more easily cope with the global crisis. Military conflicts around the world will intensify and multiply, very likely to the point of simmering, as this is a unique way for the West to delay its political and economic decline. Economists will continue to search for suitable new models of growth, but I am deeply convinced that in the end these models themselves will be multipolar colored, since each sphere will tend to some self-consistent and appropriate. We, on the periphery of world events, are facing a really difficult year, full of political and economic turmoil with quite uncertain results. We will hardly be able to defend our "neutrality" and even more difficult to avoid economic decline, but if we do this in the next year, it will be a great success.
Source: Center for Geostrategic Studies
6. December 2024.
