Is Economic Collapse Imminent?

Lebanon is currently experiencing a massive economic collapse. Is it possible other countries including the USA will follow? And why do most people deny that collapse is a possibility?Show more

Being a good investor, requires being informed. Most importantly, listening to topics that may be counter to your own intrinsic beliefs.
For example, a turkey, based on it's generally happy environment, might think, hey, for the past 364 days, every day, humans come in, they feed me, they let me wander around, I am completely safe. And the more days that go by with no danger, the more complacent and convinced the Turkey becomes. On Thanksgiving, the Turkey learns otherwise.
We do this with our environment, investing, life decisions, planning, and there are multiple examples of entire civilizations that think because nothing bad happened yesterday, nothing bad will happen tomorrow. We tend to think things will always continue the way they are. We are hardwired to think this way.
This is a fascinating chart created by Luke Kemp, who studies civilization collapses and existential risk. This chart tracked the lifespan of civilizations throughout history and found the average expiry date before complete collapse of entire civilizations is 336 years. The Mayans collapsed, the Romans collapsed, the Egyptians collapsed with cyclical regularity.
If you had asked a Roman citizen with most of the world under Rome's command, scientific innovations, high standard of living, if they could ever fail, they would have laughed at the suggestion anything could happen. Yet the greatest economy in the world at the time collapsed. And collapsed quickly.
Another timely example is Pandemics. This isn't anything new. We have had pandemics with cyclical regularity throughout history. Bubonic plague, wiped out 200 million in 1351, Smallpox wiped out 56 million in 1520, 17th century plagues 3 million, 18th century plagues 600k, Cholera 1 million in 1817, 12 million in 1855, Russian Flu, Spanish Flu, Asian Flu, Hong Kong Flu in 1968 took 1 million. And I can guarantee the day before Covid if I asked you "will we ever see another Pandemic?" you would have called me an idiot, we are so technologically advanced, we will never see another pandemic. Why do we think like this? Like the turkey, because we didnt see a pandemic yesterday, our minds are programmed to expect no pandemic tomorrow.
Due to our highly globalized economy many people suggest we may see the first global economic collapse, but we've had multiple empire economic collapses going back to 1177 BC, over 3,000 years ago where multiple empires crumbled leading to an extended dark age for hundreds of years, and there have been many more collapses since then. Ill post a link above to a a great presentation by Eric Cline on that specific collapse above and at the end of this video.
Here is the Dow Jones chart from day one. A one sided investor will tell you "it always goes up" yes, but within the times of growth were corrections, with cyclical regularity. You can see here some recoveries took only 6 years in our recent history, while others took 19 to 25 years to recover, like the great depression. Investors need to be aware that these long periods of financial collapse and recovery have happened before and are likely to happen again.

Can we predict when these things might happen? There are some theories like the Strauss Howe generational theory, fascinating topic, Social cycle theory, and we can explore what economic scenarios in the past led to collapse, like wealth inequality, societal unrest, debt. But these things dont really tell us when a collapse might actually occur.

But we do know we have had wars, famines, droughts, corrections, recessions, depressions, and previous collapses with cyclical regularity, and always to the great surprise of the population as a whole. We did not see this one coming, despite the fact we have seen this repeatedly for over 4,000 years. To not consider the possibility these things may happen again is irresponsible.

In times of collapse, recessions or depressions, there is still opportunity. Being prepared in the key. We can prioritize wealth preservation over growth. Invest in businesses that are resilient to economic turbulence. We can hold hard assets like precious metals, we can hold some Bitcoin, just in case. We can use the time to learn new skills, and invest with a priority of risk mitigation. Nobody knows when these things will happen, but we can say with relative certainty, based on history, they will absolutely happen again. Dont be the person who was unprepared and in denial!

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190218-are-we-on-the-road-to-civilisation-collapse

https://youtu.be/bRcu-ysocX4

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-dows-tumultuous-120-year-history-in-one-chart-2017-03-23

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/history-of-pandemics-deadliest/