The world is experiencing a worldwide systemic crisis due to the COVID-19 epidemic, the geopolitical crisis, the division in the global production, supply, and value chains, and the abrupt change in monetary policy in the US and other developed nations. Since World War II, there haven’t been many global systemic crises with the magnitude and impact of this one. 

Today, most people focus on the war in Ukraine – not only military but a hybrid economic and financial one. As for its effects, they are already painful for the West: inflation, higher commodity prices, collapse of supply chains, exploding costs of living, impoverishment of the middle classes, starvation of the low, and, sadly, misery for large swaths of the global South – in where absolute poverty and hunger prevail. As is now inferred from the recent “gross inflation,” the West is facing a systemic economic and social crisis- clearly shown by the riots in multicultural France, which, in no time, spread to the majority of the French cities across the country. There were thousands of arson attacks in public places, thousands of vehicles set on fire, and hundreds of buildings burnt – including town halls and schools, police offices, municipal police stations, and gendarmerie barracks were attacked. The West, however, seems to have only a few solutions other than more and more money printing and war. None of this will help, though – especially when the rest of the world is ganging up on her.

Understandably, unfortunately, since 1945, after the implementation of Bretton Woods, the planet has been held hostage by a financial system designed to help a small minority become more affluent and prosperous. The unilateral abolition of the gold standard in 1971 from the USA and the extreme rise of extreme neoliberalism in the 1980s also impacted IMF; after 1990, it changed all its methods and practices.

Thus it evolved into a system that trades in human pain and misery – while a new colonialism began, this time mainly with economic weapons. The elites of powerful states have fed their militaries with significant resources and created a global system – but with benefits only for local elites and those of their close allies. However, such a system cannot survive in perpetuity – something already evident today, even if it is far from easy to defeat.

Georgios Ardavanis – 17/07/2023