Multipolarity

Peter Zeihan is a big noise these days. He put in a stellar appearance on Joe Rogan. He's got a new book out: The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization. Zeihan is making big-picture geopolitics cool, creating a mass audience for the kinds of things we do at Multipolarity. But the lads also have some issues with PZ. His takes can seem awfully deterministic. A...

In the week after the Bank of England once again raised rates, our geopolitics lads are entertaining the theory that this is about more than just crushing inflation. Britain is being forced to shadow the Fed, as 'carry' becomes ever-more important in an unsettled global forex market. Andrew Collingwood sees Zungzwang in Britain's future: the unpleasant consequences of stagnation and debt overhang...

Interest rates policy has bedevilled the West ever since Alan Greenspan first put the Fed on the floor in the wake of 9/11. With rates finally returning to realistic levels, we're seeing the impact of what you might call a two decade bubble: banks being squeezed to breaking point. Philip Pilkington is angry at what he sees as central banks using their rates policy as a thermostat 'to turn consumer...

This week, our lads find themselves in the presence of Professor Stephen Walt. A professor of politics at the Harvard Kennedy School, Walt is the arch neo-realist, often bracketed alongside John Mearsheimer. Walt made his name opposing the Iraq War. He has long taken a cautious approach to US and Western foreign policy. He recently wrote that he sees a role for a Sino-American peace plan in Ukrain...

This week, ordinary geopolitics lads Andrew Collingwood and Philip Pilkington are back on the case of Janet Yellen. A week ago, she made incoherent comments about American foreign policy. Now, she's giving a big speech about China, and the results are only marginally better. Is Yellen being given contradictory objectives by her boss? Or is it simply the case that, with US hegemony haemorrhaging aw...

This week, the lads have been heartened and dismayed by public statements from the two most eminent female economists of our time. Christine Lagarde and Janet Yellen. But while Yellen fell back onto tired old State Department talking points, Lagarde gave a pitch-perfect introduction to the multipolar age. Does the global elite finally get it? And if so, how will they trim their sheets from here on...

This week, the lads are trying not to speculate on the exact nature of the Pentagon 'leak' that came out over the Easter weekend. Is it disinfo or just someone with an axe to grind? It's unclear, which is why we're casting out to what may happen beyond the summer - what if catastrophic collapse does indeed come to Ukraine's teetering defences? Who wins what, and how do we keep the fragile world or...

After years of carping from the Remain establishment, Britain has finally come to its senses and joined a big trading bloc. But no - not that one. Will life in Asia’s CPTPP allow the UK to export their famous services economy? And what will Brits do with all the cheap leggings they get in return? As China leans ever-further into an eventual Ukrainian peace, France is looking to broker the brokerin...

This week, our boys are on the trail of the continuing fallout from SVB. With Credit Suisse the next domino in what is looking increasingly like a chain, Philip Pilkington has been doing some digging on system liquidity, and his findings are hair-raising. This, it would seem, is already the biggest run since 1980. And with a new suite of consumer-facing digital banking products that make removing...

As part of our tenth episode celebrations, we've taken soundings from the loyal listeners, and come up with a list of questions to ask Andrew Collingwood and Philip Pilkington. The boys cover all the ground in the world. The Mexican cartel wars. The potential for Polish supremacy in Eastern Europe. What to do about foreign aid. Declining Western living standards. And the prospects for Multipolarit...

This week, we're celebrating our recent tenth show with a double-header. Breaking out of the usual format, we have an interview with a thought leader, plus a special listener Q&A with Ladsie & Boysie themselves, Andrew Collingwood and Philip Pilkington, featuring another very unusual guest. Today is part one of that double-header. We're delighted to welcome Samo Burja to the pod. Samo is a...

The Multipolarity group chat exploded over the weekend, as news of the Silicon Valley Bank implosion began to break. Andrew Collingwood is angry at what amounts to a subsidy for rich depositors. Philip Pilkington reminds us that simple deposit insurance could have solved this - and warns that this rule change is now effectively permanent. What does the world of banking look like, now that the rule...

Tech-wise, lithium is in everything from electric vehicles to mobile phones. And for an element so high up the periodic table, it's surprisingly hard to find. So, much like oil in the 1970s, are we on the brink of the major lithium miners forming their own cartel? Who's holding the cards here? Which nation might be about to become the next Saudi Arabia? And how will this changing strategic resourc...

This week, Philip Pilkington is hammering a term he claims will soon be everywhere: "The Great Divergence". What becomes of the global balance of power when, as seems likely in 2023, there is simultaneously a recession in the West, and a boom in the East? It's never happened before. So how will we learn to live on a two speed planet? Meanwhile, the chip ban has failed. Touted only months ago as a...

Turkey has the best performing stock market in the world this year. In part, this is to do with how it has under-performed in previous years. But, as our duo point out, it's also to do with a country taking advantage of the present multipolar fracture. The classic trade and politics hinge-nation, Erdogan's Turkey is finally in a position to exploit its rich advantages. What makes an army powerful?...

In the week that Ireland is gripped by widespread anti-migrant protests, resident Celt Phil Pilkington explains why the present wave of populist sentiment might no longer be containable by the political elite. As Andrew Collingwood points out, the 1950s migration treaties that still run our world were designed for a post-WW2 world long consigned to history. Yet to national bureaucracies, they're s...

Like so many other social media addicts, our duo were in thrall to the rogue Chinese weather balloon over the weekend. But while the rest of the commentariat were fuming at the security implications, Philip Pilkington and Andrew Collingwood are far more mystified at all the performative screeching. As Collingwood points out: "A balloon is a hundred year old technology..." In Nigeria, an attempt to...

Philip Pilkington came of age in the shadow of the great Irish property bust of 2008 - it was one of the key reasons he became a macro-economist. Now, as he warns, history is about to repeat itself. The market indicators are flashing red on both sides of the Atlantic. As we hurtle down the real estate rollercoaster for a long-overdue correction, can the West deal with this reversal? Or are we now...

Latin America's giants have come together. The Brazilian Real and the Argentinian Peso are to be joined together in a prospective currency union - or at least a “regional unit of account". The prospect of one of the world's most consistent debt defaulters coming together with the often chaotic Brazilian economy has been greeted by some European economists as 'a terrible idea'. But as Philip Pilkin...

Andrew Collingwood and Philip Pilkington soldier gamely on in the second episode of Multipolarity - charting the rise of the new multipolar world order. This week: A new report suggests the Chinese might be about to bankroll a naval base in Argentina.  As the green revolution takes hold, can the West even build the supply lines for the huge quantities of metals and minerals we’ll need for all...

Philip Pilkington and Andrew Collingwood christen the pod by hashing over some of the week's biggest geopolitics stories. Just who is the enormous whale biting chunks out of the global gold market? Is China about to find a way to leapfrog the US advantage in high-end silicon chips?  And then: most pundit predictions for 2023 seem to involve a minor recession - but are those analyses even over...