Saturday, May 20, 2017

The Great Unravellng: Nafeez Ahamd

Some people see a world in crisis as a business opportunity.


The New York-based Jewish magazine Forward ran a lengthy piece examining my story forecasting a potential scenario of a major financial crash in or shortly after 2018 (the one that was picked up by the New York Observer). The article is authored by Andrew Eil, a  coordinator of climate assistance programs for the US Department of State from 2010 to 2014. He now runs his own consultancy and his clients include the World Bank, the UN Environment Programme, Bloomberg LLP, among others. 
The piece is worth reading for the profound insight it provides into the way some sectors of the establishment tend to view the prospect of a global convergence of systemic crises. Eil's basic argument is that, it doesn't matter if the entire world experiences a series of cascading synchronous failures because of a major convergence of oil, food and financial crises driven by fundamental systemic and structural processes. It doesn't matter because Israel, he thinks, will be largely insulated from the worst impacts of these crises, and therefore will potentially even benefit from the resulting chaos. 
While the Middle East and other parts of the world become weaker, Eil suggests that if my worst-case scenario indeed transpires (and I hasten to add that it is only one potential scenario - there are others, and here's another I've outlined), Israel will be left standing. Eil points out some compelling facts that highlight how Israel could be relatively insulated from the worst impacts of a global crisis scenario. Unfortunately, his argument also highlights the sort of myopic, frankly, self-serving elitist thinking very much associated with the very paradigm that has made the global system so vulnerable to crisis:
The Great Unravelling

No comments: