Abstract:

Real estate has long been central to China’s growth model, yet since 2018 its contribution has declined sharply, turning the sector from a key engine of expansion into a major drag on economic activity. While policy tightening triggered the downturn, it reflects deeper structural imbalances in a sector that, together with its upstream and downstream linkages and infrastructure, accounts for nearly…

Are there financial determinants of great-power decline and fall? This paper proposes “Ferguson’s Law,” which states that any great power that spends more on debt servicing than on defense risks ceasing to be a great power.

States have endeavoured, in some instances, by pawning their credit, instead of employing their capital, to disguise the hazards they ran. They have found, in the loans they raised,…

Source: Adam Tooze's Substack

Alvin hansen had been one of the principal economic advisers to the New Deal for nearly three years when he traveled to Cincinnati in March 1940 to speak to a group of businessmen. After his address, someone in the audience asked him what must have seemed a perfectly reasonable question: “In your opinion…

A New Age of Nations: Power and Advantage in the AI Era (Jan 2026) | Michael J. Mazarr | RAND | (Clcik Source)

Overall Strategic Conclusion

We are entering a structurally more fragmented global system where:

• Economic policy is weaponised
• Defence spending structurally higher
• Financial networks politicised
• Commodity control strategic
• Tech stack dominance decisive
• Dollar dominant but gradually diversifying
• Europe structurally behind
• EM volatility structurally higher

"The central analytical move in The Sovereignty Spread in Copper is the reclassification of refined copper from a traded commodity into a system input whose price is subordinate to industrial throughput and state objectives." - Craig Tindale (Explaining the core thesis of the report)

"**In the Chinese system, refined copper is treated as a non-substitutable industrial utility, comparable to electricity…

"What follows is an autopsy of a systemic breakdown in the conversion of financial power into physical capacity." - Craig Tindale (Context: Opening thesis on the divergence between money and real-world assets)

"The West faces an adversary who understands that the Financial Ledger is subordinate to the Material Ledger." - Craig Tindale (Context: Explaining the geopolitical shift toward controlling…

"The global industrial system is currently navigating a profound structural bifurcation, a phenomenon best described as the 'Return of Matter.'" - Craig Tindale (Context: Describing the end of the post-Cold War era of assumed "infinite materiality")

"**We have entered an era of complex constraints, where the physical availability of matter, not the availability of credit, sets the limit on national…

"To ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful, and most successful country for decades to come, our country needs a coherent, focused strategy for how we interact with the world." - United States National Security Strategy (Quoted in report) (Context: frames reverse perestroika as national-security-led economic strategy).

"**The purpose of the American government is to…

"Mercantilism is back: the new version focuses not on accumulating silver or gold but national productive power - and it's thriving." - Michael Every

"The principle of comparative advantage... would be greatly modified if capital and population were perfectly mobile... the tendency of capitalists to move their funds to the most profitable employment would counteract the benefits..." - **David…

Ultimately, history shows the solution might be a more permanent devaluation. > The Roman Empire serves is the archetypal example of what lies ahead. By the late second century, Rome faced rising military costs to defend its vast borders, while the tax base stagnated. Rather than cutting spending, Emperors began shaving coins or diluting the purity of the denarius. Under Augustus, the coin was nearly…