"Doug Casey on 2025’s Defining Events and What Comes Next"
by International Man
"International Man: As we step back and look at 2025 - politically, economically, technologically, and culturally - which developments mattered the most?
Doug Casey: Politically, and in every other way, it’s all about Trump. As Shakespeare said of Julius Caesar, “he doth bestride the narrow world. Like a Colossus, and we petty men. Walk under his huge legs and peep about. To find ourselves dishonorable graves.”
Trump has his finger in everything, in all countries, all spheres of enterprise, everywhere. He’s a political phenomenon with authoritarian tendencies. Which is a natural consequence of an unstable “democracy.” In fact, Caesar rose to power because of the late Roman Republic’s chronic political instability - much of which he caused. Trump could be America’s answer to Caesar.
I made that observation to a friend who, like me, is prone to classical references. He countered that perhaps Trump sees himself as a Cincinnatus lookalike. Cincinnatus, you’ll recall, was a patrician citizen appointed dictator in about 458 BC to deal with a military emergency. He quickly did so. Instead of serving out the rest of his six-month term, he handed back his power and returned to his farm.
Trump sees that the US is on the cusp of a cultural crisis, and wants to avert it. He’s certainly a cultural conservative who wants to return the country to the halcyon days of yesteryear, the way it was in “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best.” But he’s also a narcissist and a megalomaniac, trying to reorder the world by signing hundreds of Executive Orders, creating chaos with his tariffs, subsidies, threats, attacks, and arbitrary blustering. At heart, Trump is a Caesar, not a Cincinnatus,
Economically, the U.S. is imitating Argentina. His actions are pretty much those of Perón, who was responsible for the destruction of the Argentine economy: tariffs to protect domestic industries, lots of arbitrary regulations, and government “partnerships” with corporations. Both Peron and Trump are reminiscent of Mussolini. It’s a slippery slope.
He’s surrounded himself with sycophants and lickspittles. His tariffs have an excellent chance of upending both the domestic and world economies. He claims that he will replace the income tax with tariffs, which sounds great. It’s true that tariffs paid for over 75% of government expenditures up to 1916. But that was when Federal spending was tiny, about 1.5% of GDP. Today, the only way to reduce taxes is to reduce spending - but Trump loves spending. DOGE is long forgotten. I predict he’ll outdo FDR by every measure in spending.
He claims to have ended eight wars around the world: Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the DRC and Rwanda, Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Israel and Gaza. In each and every case, there’s been zero change in the fundamentals. Any ceasefires were the result of threats and bribery. By intervening, the US is likely to involve itself militarily in these places. Not to mention that he’s at the point of starting a war with Venezuela. Trump loves hyperbole, prevarication, and half-truths. His word is approaching zero value, both inside and outside the US.
There’s so much more. Will ICE ever be disbanded? Will it deport 30 million illegal aliens? Will tourism from advanced countries, worth about $250 billion a year, collapse with Trump’s new demands for vast amounts of personal data? Even though Zelensky can be shown to have personally looted several billion dollars, will he be reinstated as Ukraine’s president? What will the consequences be of Trump’s promiscuously granting pardons to friendly billionaires? Will he get away with the billion-dollar rug pull on his and Melania’s worthless cryptocoins?
We’re in a state of political chaos. Financially, the destruction of the currency can only accelerate when Trump gets his new Fed chairman.
Technologically, we’re in an AI bubble. I don’t doubt that AI will enable huge scientific advances, but I wonder if the hundreds of billions going into AI will ever show an economic return. If not, the losses could result in real upset. The amounts are so large that—apart from the deleterious ways it can be used - they might cause a real drop in the general standard of living. Or at least catalyze a stock market collapse. The old saying “high-tech, big wreck” will likely once again prove true, even if AI changes the world for the better - which is not a certainty.
On the bright side, SpaceX can build giant rockets with large payloads and reuse them multiple times, cutting costs by a factor of 10 or 100. Bezos’ Blue Origin is doing the same. As are the Chinese. Technologically, 2025 was a great year, and in the long run, technology is what drives civilization. Loads of civilizations, governments, religions, and ideologies have risen and fallen in the 12,000 years since the end of the last Ice Age. The one thing that’s progressed on an accelerating curve, bringing mankind out of the mud, is technology.
There’s cause for long-term optimism, even if some bad things happen. However, technology needs more capital than ever. And if the economic, financial, political, and cultural problems -including Wokism and the resurgence of Islam - make it impossible to accumulate adequate capital, even the great flywheel of technology could slow down.
The biggest problem is cultural Wokeism. Maybe the election of Trump signals peak Wokeism; many sensible people are reacting against it. But its underlying causes in the educational system, and the hive mind of Boobus americanus, are still there. The optimist in me says that 2025 probably signals a turning point.
International Man: 2025 seemed to accelerate the delegitimization of major institutions - the media, academia, government, and even central banks. Has the loss of trust reached the point of no return? What does that imply for the stability of the US and other countries going forward?
Doug Casey: Not so long ago, the electronic media meant CBS, NBC, and ABC. I’m not saying they were particularly truthful, but newsmen like Huntley and Brinkley, Edward R Murrow, and Walter Cronkite were thoughtful and independent. Their spoken words had more credibility than the writing in manipulative newspaper behemoths like those of Pulitzer and Hearst. Print publishers were replaced by electronic networks. Now, blow-dried lookalike corporate newscasters have lost credibility. They’ve been replaced by independent media, podcasts, and blogs. It’s true that the old institutions have been delegitimized. It’s much as Buckminster Fuller said: “You don’t change things by destroying the old order; you change the old order by making it irrelevant.”
The same thing is happening with academia. It’s become obvious to almost everybody that college is a negative value. Parents are aware that, starting in grade school, their kids are subjected to standardized indoctrination. Schools have become corrupt babysitters that enrich administrators while impoverishing their customers.
Let me draw your attention to a current series called "The Chair "about a totally woke mid-level Ivy League university on the edge of chaos. I mention it because I had trouble figuring out whether it was a spoof of the educational system or a semi-documentary description of it.
As for government, I suppose people are genetically programmed to want leaders. Just in my lifetime, governments have become vastly more powerful and coercive. On the other hand, the concepts of libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism have gone from things that nobody had even heard of to being widely discussed. And people are even starting to understand how central banks create fiat money, and that an increase in the money supply is what causes inflation. Even that meme is getting traction.
So there’s some cause for optimism regarding the delegitimization of corrupt old institutions. But if trust collapses too far, and everywhere, that implies bad things for the stability of society.
The U.S. used to be a high-trust culture with shared values and long-term time preferences. But now, with the mass immigration of vastly different cultures with conflicting values and very short-term time preferences, that’s changing - and not for the better. The new migrants sense that traditional American institutions in the U.S. are washing away, and they’re taking advantage of it.
International Man: Economically, 2025 was a paradox: financial markets hit new highs while the average household struggled under rising debt and falling real wages. What does this divergence tell you about the underlying state of the economy - and where does it lead from here?
Doug Casey: The health and direction of the stock market and the economy are two different things. The massive money creation that’s gone on in the U.S. for decades, but especially over the last 10 years, has found its way into the stock market as a place to hide, out of self-preservation. I think both the stock market and the economy are riding for a fall.
International Man: It seems to many that the US is approaching a period of major political, social, and institutional upheaval. Do you think the country is at the beginning of a broader historical shift?
Doug Casey: Strauss and Howe’s book, "The Fourth Turning," predicted a major upset would occur about now. But they didn’t predict who would win. I agree. My only prediction is that the US will be a different place in 10 years. Whether it will be “better” or “worse” is an open question."
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