Category: europe

Warning: Environmentalism, or the preservation of the environment in an overpopulated world, largely deserves enlightened debate, intelligent policies and effective investments. However, we are using the word “climatism” (in the absence of a better word) in the more extreme ideological sense, where environmental preservation becomes the clothing of a war machine against rationality and liberty […]

History tends to remember the 1920s as the “roaring twenties”, dominated by joie de vivre, jazz and the Charleston. But this is the story as told by the Americans. On the European side, the population had just experienced the absolute horror of the First World War and was living through an immense post-traumatic shock, of which […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

(what the GEAB said in September 2019) In reality, the IMF is not up to the refinancing challenge implemented by its creators. Indeed, how can it face the 22 trillion US public debt and repeated threats of US non-payment? Nor is it able to cope with the debt problems of the major European states or, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

After two months focused on the turn of the year (a review of 2019 in December and a preview of 2020 in January), in this next issue we will broaden our outlook. Our team takes a sombre look at the decade ahead. After 20 years of a “crisis of the future”, we believe that 2020 […]

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 […]

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 […]

So January of the famous year 2020 has come! And with it comes our global panorama of trends and expectations. The task of presenting this is, perhaps, even harder than usual, at the dawn of a year capable of delivering the worst as well as the best, or even the worst in anticipation of the best […]

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 […]

This in-depth assessment of our anticipations for the year will be used to update our map of major global transformational trends. We present here a synthesis of a year of anticipations tested against reality and placed in a more classical temporal continuum (past and present). This meticulous work is specially intended to enable everyone to […]

The coming year is not just any year, but 2020! LEAP is one of the offshoots of Franck Biancheri’s Reinventing Europe project inaugurated in Athens in 1998,[1] which gave birth shortly afterwards to the think-tank Europe2020, the immediate predecessor of the European Laboratory for Political Anticipation (LEAP). For 21 years, 2020 has been the time […]

Popular protests are growing and multiplying: from Arab spring, Occupy Wall Street, Indignados, Maidan, populist votes, to the yellow vests, Iraq, Algeria, demonstrations against global warming, Hong Kong, Lebanon, Venezuela, Chile, Ecuador, Bolivia… The streets are on fire, the markets are faltering and the only explanations being given are poverty, increasing disparity, taxes – “the […]

Social unrest is beginning to be perceived by the financial markets and economy as a possible trigger for the famous 2020 crisis: Demonstrations, increased public debt, budgetary crises, the redirection of debt from private to public, austerity, loss of confidence of economic and financial players, bankruptcies etc… In a context of economic slowdown, rising discontent […]