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Society: COVID-19: ‘I-told-you-so’ crisis and social fragmentation

 “In 2020, a global pandemic called COVID-19 brought the world economy to a virtual standstill for several months. To contain the epidemic, governments had to take radical measures to contain populations, reducing activity to the essentials: health, food and certain basic services (telecommunications, water, electricity, financial systems, etc.). It was during these few weeks of […]

2008-2020: Twelve Years of Global Systemic Crisis

Since 2008, the GEAB has been talking about the ‘world after’. Now everyone is using this expression. It is therefore time to archive the ‘global systemic crisis of 2008-2020’.[1] The ‘historian of the future’ is the one who will have described what happened over this 12-year period. Now that a chapter of history is coming […]

A Historian’s view of the COVID-19 Crisis

Political anticipation is LEAP’s method of “rationalisation of the future”.[1] In fact, it is very close to the “historical method” [2] in the sense that it is accessible to all and aids the social actor in adapting to the complex world which constitutes his new environment. Because of this, its practitioners have often been defined […]

Investments, trends and recommendations (March 2020)

Markets/financial products – Do we really need to mention this?  You don’t need our insight to realise this, but for the sake of clarity: it’s time to stay away from the financial markets. The strength of the evidence for this says a lot about the psychology of investors and its outlook for the market. Don’t […]

The financial system is facing a whole new world of pain in 2020

2019 was a bumper year for US stocks and, while much of Europe and the Far East faced tougher growth conditions brought on by more local concerns (Brexit, Hong-Kong etc.), full steam ahead was the order of the day. As the year reached an end, dollars continued to flood home and indirect stimulus through the […]

Middle East 2020: Towards a New Political Deal

Wars have undoubtedly generated plagues. But do plagues generate wars? From a systemic point of view, the pandemic should be enough to seal the fate of the old system, inaugurate the next one and save us from going down the “war” route… that is if, indeed, this route has really been avoided. Let us remember […]

What will post-COVID-19 Europe look like?

Reduced mobility,[1] the tourism crisis,[2] the green economy,[3] dematerialisation of the economy,[4] Euroland,[5] digitalisation of central bank currencies,[6] a radical reform of the international financial system, disruption of the European banking system,[7] the end of liberalism, a paradigm shift and, even, our anticipation of a stabilisation phase in 2020[8]… As we entered this new decade, […]

“Precious metals” special recommendations

Gold: ready to shine even brighter? 2019 was a big year in Precious Metals (PMs). After two years of declining prices following the 2016 peak, a floor was reached around $1180 in August 2018 and the bull market ensued in line with our anticipations outlined in January 2019.[1] The summer saw a gain of over […]

Special report – Pensions: an inevitable paradigm shift

For the last ten years we have been told that, while the world economy took a hit during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008/9, it is now recovering well. Mario Draghi did his magic, the Fed saved the day and American securities, in particular, are now going from strength to strength. Climbing well above […]

Spill-over section… items which we don’t have the space to develop, but which we definitely want to talk to you about…

Oil/Libya: War or US shale collapse? In Libya, General Haftar, mainly supported by the Americans, is not giving up. The reason is simple: he is acting under orders to block the oil wells of a country which is seeing its production collapsing, thus giving some support to the plunging prices of crude oil… and slowing […]

Decade 2020 – “Futuritis”: From a crisis of the future to totalitarianism

With the neologism futuritis, we wish to denote a disease of the future – a disease whose development process begins with a deficiency, followed by an eruption and ending with high fever. Future deficiency in the 2000s: The Internet was already here, as well as supranational levels of governance to be completed (the EU in […]

Investments, trends and recommendations (Jan 2020)

Bitcoin: Digital Gold The fairly sharp rise in the price of Bitcoin at the time of the Iranian-American crisis confirms the intuition we had in June: Bitcoin is acting as a safe haven. This observation leads us to recommend that you keep your Bitcoin, or even add moderately to them, in the light of the […]

Geopolitics: 2020, a year under the sign of Mars

A non-exhaustive review of global risk by continents/regions Geopolitical tensions will dominate the year 2020. From the most structural to the most cyclical, the reasons are: The multipolar world is no longer content just doing business and now wishes to defend its trade routes and hunting grounds (Europe, China, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran […]

Panorama 2020: 32 key trends

As we do every year, GEAB by LEAP is presenting a landscape of the key trends for the coming year. Besides the intellectual value of this LEAP contribution, which, of course, reflects many of the analyses of our researchers over the last few months, we aim to provide a better understanding of the main issues […]

Calendar 2020 – Some key dates

Briefly annotated, here are some important dates to keep in mind as we look ahead to 2020. 31st January: EU – Official exit of the UK The beginning of some clarification, but negotiation is still needed to establish the nature of future EU-UK relations. This is an important step, but not the end of the […]

Overview 2020: The “phoney year”

As an introduction to our traditional January “key trends”, here are the main guiding lines that we have identified for this “phoney year [1]”. This first year of the new decade promises us a journey through dangerous waters. And the financial crisis announced two years ago by a desperate world of finance could be the […]

Investments, trends and recommendations (Dec 2019)

Corporate: Watch your back!  The world is realigning itself according to its major regions. This trend, identified a long time ago by the GEAB and repeatedly validated, obviously doesn’t only concern government dynamics. It has direct consequences for companies as well. Particularly this one: don’t abandon your foundations! Certainly, a company needs to grow. And […]

An evaluation of our anticipations for 2019 (drawn from GEAB No 131 of January 2019): 70.5% successful (27.5/39)

As we do every December, we have completed an evaluation of the trend anticipations we published last January. This time, we have ended up with a final score of 27.5 over 39 key trends, or a 70.5% success rate, 2.5 points higher than last year (68%). We organised the “up & down” trends for 2019 […]