Destroy people’s hopes for a better life and you make riot, revolution, anarchy, and war inevitable. There is no way to predict which spark sets off which conflagration, but the world’s $200 trillion-plus debt load will provide abundant kindling. It’s hard to hold out much hope for the future when your future has been mortgaged. What we are seeing now—the refugee crisis, commodity collapse, financial perturbations, Greece, China, Catalonia, the rise of Putin, the US’s Syrian fiasco, Marine Le Pen, Donald Trump, and Bernie Sanders—are mild pre-tremors before a massive seismic shock. When the big one arrives, upended political orders in Washington, Ottawa, Tokyo, Beijing, Moscow, Riyadh, Berlin, Brussels, Paris, London, and Brasilia are conceivable aftershocks. Few of their billions of long-suffering victims will mourn the fates of powers that be who become powers that were. Now unthinkable, judicial proceedings, disgrace, imprisonment, and even worse will be the order of the day.

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