“Roaring 1920s” in the US, “1930s Crisis” in Europe!
This column was previoulsy published in Sans doute on January 24, 2025
While Trump’s America wants to rewrite the script of the 1920s, old Europe is getting stuck into a remake of the following decade.
At the start of Donald Trump’s second term in office, the United States is preparing to rewrite the same script a century later: as in the 1920s, a disruptive technological revolution wants to secure global hegemony for Uncle Sam. The rise of electricity and the car — symbols of the Roaring Twenties — finds its equivalent today in the emergence of generative artificial intelligence, which is ready to reshape the transmission of knowledge. Deregulation, particularly of the banking sector, will artificially boost growth through accelerated financialisation, enabling the financing of bottomless public deficits.
At the same time, the reduction in public spending, which will finance tax cuts no doubt aimed primarily at the wealthiest, should help to stimulate consumption, but should also increase inequalities. The arbitrary use of tariffs will lead to an unprecedented transfer of value from the rest of the world to the US, albeit to the detriment of international trade. A systemic plutocracy will seek to reinforce its domination, even if this means ignoring conflicts of interest and the rule of law. The absence of moderation on social networks, from Meta to X, is likely to format minds to an ideology at the extreme opposite of the previous ‘wokism’, due to control not only of the distribution, but also of the creation of information…
Welcome to an America that openly proclaims its ambition — through its Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the fund manager who brought down the pound sterling in 1992 — to reorganise a world order that has become insufficiently favourable to American interests. Uncle Sam seems determined to strengthen his grip beyond the 70% of the world’s stock market capitalisation that he already holds, in particular by favouring the best American unicorns. Yet half of them owe their creation to the continued successful immigration of the world’s best talent.
Europe’s inability to defend itself will condemn its ambitions for sovereignty to failure in the face of an unlikely Chinamerica
Faced with this new situation, Europe is preparing to take a leap back in time and plunge straight back into the crisis of the 1930s. Brussels is continuing to miss out on the digital revolution, with half of Europe’s private R&D still devoted to the automotive sector alone — which the Strasbourg Parliament has decided to self-destruct through absurd regulation. Its energy policy will continue to indulge in growing dependence on two fronts: manufacturing, with regard to China, for renewable equipment; and financial, with regard to the United States, for imports of liquefied natural gas. Its inability to defend itself will condemn its ambitions for sovereignty to failure in the face of an unlikely ‘Chinamerica’, where the simultaneous alliance of exported Chinese deflation and imported American inflation will complete the dismantling of its industrial base.
Faced with the ‘second China shock’, fuelled by the export of subsidised industrial overcapacity, Brussels will continue to prefer artificially maintaining voters’ purchasing power to the detriment of local production, which was at the heart of the initial European project of the European Coal and Steel Community. The resulting impoverishment will ultimately result, as it did in the 1930s, in monetary adjustment, providing a breeding ground for extreme political parties.
So Europe’s salvation can only come from Germany — where the memory of the 1930s is still most haunting — and its future Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Marking the generational break in 2022, history may well decide that Europe will be rebuilt, this time without France and only thanks to Berlin… and its new alliances: with Italy for exports, no longer to China, but to Latin America and South-East Asia; with Scandinavia for the productivity gains of the artificial intelligence revolution; with Spain in renewable energies combined with gigabattery storage; and with Poland and the United Kingdom in the defence industry.
After the year of rupture in 2002, the year of denial in 2023 and the year of acknowledgment in 2024, President Trump 2.0 leaves us with no doubt that 2025 will mark an accelerated entry into a war economy!
“Because nobody listens to people with things to say anymore”.
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