Reckoning And Resurgence Summary
Reckoning And Resurgence Summary
Introduction: Summary Of The The Generational Reset 4
Stablecoins: The Trojan Horse for U.S. Financial and Geopolitical Supremacy 5
Starlink/Kuiper: The Invisible Backbone of the New Global Economic System 6
The Tokenization Layer – Turning Everything into Programmable, Networked Assets and Authenticated 7
AI & Compute – The U.S.-Controlled Intelligence Layer of the New Economy 8
Decentralized Commerce – The Explosion of Direct Economic Participation 8
Walking Away from the Old System – A Strategic Financial Reset 9
Conclusion: A Clean Slate That Skirts Collapse 11
Appeal To The Disaffected Classes 14
Military And Military Industrial Complex 14
Coup, Historical Perspective And Political Ideology 15
Decentralization Of Value-Based Issues 16
Decarbonization Goes On Overdrive 18
Is This What We Want? That Is Not The Right Question. 20
We Need Shock Moments To Act 24
Success In A Deglobalized World 25
America Emerges To Provide Adult Supervision 25
Base Case Timing and Results Summary 26
Alternate Case 1 Timing and Results Summary 26
Alternate Case 2 Timing and Results Summary 26
Where To Be To Survive And Thrive 27
Conventional Investing In The Old Economy Is a Trap 27
Skills, Career Paths & Where To Invest 27
More Perspectives On The Reckoning Period 29
Why Could We Be Building To A Calamitous Financial Event? 29
The Road Through Hell May Not Be A Straight Path 29
AI+Robotics Will Eliminate 25% of All Jobs Of Today 32
Middle Class Fails To Rebound 33
Wealth Inequality Gini Coefficient 34
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This document is part of my Future Map work that lives at https://eddiesoehnel.com/FutureMap
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As with all of my published working documents on the future, I’ll continue to update and refine this one as new insights emerge.
Groundbreaking research has emerged from pioneering futurists and other subject-matter experts which tells us that we move in 80-100 year cycles. In the Anglo-American era, we are currently in the sixth cycle.
A new cycle starts after a great tribulation and triumph. The cycle progresses as we rebuild,grow and prosper. Yet through the cycle imbalances and problems build until they become severe enough where we have to take dramatic steps to fix them, thus beginning a new cycle.
We are approaching the end of the sixth cycle that is characterized by increasing conflict and chaos. The end of this cycle, a period I am calling “The Reckoning” will be no less stressful and challenging than the end of our previous cycles, which were marked by the Great Depression and WWII, the Civil War and The American Revolution. Yet what follows will be a period of tremendous growth and prosperity, just like we experienced at the beginning of new eras in the past.
See here for more about secular cycle research.
Our current challenges can be simplified to the following:
We have to fix these core challenges, which the U.S. will, but not without great internal conflict that is ahead.
I’m piecing together what I see emerging across current ruling and non-ruling political and business circles, as well as among leading thinkers and influencers: a plan for what I call the Generational Reset—a three-stage transformation of the global system, led by the United States. It is audacious, nearly unbelievable in its scope, moving fast and in a word, could be brilliant. If executed with even partial success, it will reshape global power, economics, and individual opportunity for the rest of the 21st century, all controlled and managed by the U.S.
This transformation is not reactive; it is proactive and deeply strategic. It recognizes that the current system—financial and institutional—is unsustainable. Rather than try to fix what is fundamentally broken, the U.S. could be building something entirely new: a digitally-native, AI-coordinated, decentralized economic architecture. This new system bypasses failed institutions, collapses outdated models, and invites the world to opt in voluntarily—not through force, but through superiority of design and utility.
Each of the three stages is already underway at varying degrees:
Stage 1 resets the global financial infrastructure through stablecoins and Starlink/Kuiper. Stablecoins eliminate reliance on financial intermediaries, fragile currencies, and corrupt regimes by enabling peer-to-peer global finance directly tied to U.S. monetary strength. Starlink/Kuiper ensures that anyone, anywhere, can access this system, bypassing government censorship and infrastructure choke points. Together, they form a soft-power Trojan horse—monetarily linking the world by invitation, not coercion.
Stage 2 introduces the tokenization of everything: products, people, places, events, experiences—all authenticated, searchable, and programmable. This enables AI and quantum systems to coordinate commerce, logistics, governance, and identity at scale, transforming the world into a network of digital primitives. The U.S. controls the infrastructure, compute, models, and protocols that power this layer—ensuring that value creation flows through its ecosystem. This stage doesn’t just decentralize—it democratizes the tools of production and ownership, making entrepreneurship borderless and explosive.
Stage 3 is the strategic abandonment of the old. The U.S. begins walking away from the legacy system—letting zombie institutions collapse and selectively shedding sovereign debt that was accumulated to sustain them. In its place, a new economy is collateralized by exponential assets: AI infrastructure, quantum IP, tokenized innovation, and frontier resources. Revenue from taxation is now augmented by protocol-level monetization, fees on digital rails, and intelligence extracted from a fully transparent, on-chain world.
This three-stage transformation is not without risk. There will be pain, dislocation, and loss for those tied to the old system. But there is no viable path forward within the constraints of the past. The United States leads not because it must dominate—but because it is the only actor positioned to construct the next era’s operating system. And the rest of the world will follow—not because it is forced to, but because the alternative is collapse.
Stablecoins are more than a fintech upgrade—they are the quiet foundation of a new global financial operating system. By eliminating banks as intermediaries, stablecoins allow individuals to hold and control their own money, transact instantly and globally, and invest directly through tokenized assets and smart contracts. This dramatically reduces friction in financial interactions while replacing opaque, custodial institutions with transparent, user-controlled systems.
If adopted at scale, particularly by the U.S. Treasury, stablecoins introduce radical transparency. Every transaction is traceable. Government spending becomes fully auditable. Citizens can follow the money in real time, and AI systems can map global financial flows with precision. This gives the U.S. a strategic intelligence advantage and undermines off-ledger systems favored by rogue states and illicit actors.
In the developing world, stablecoins could become an economic lifeline. In countries plagued by hyperinflation, capital controls, or corrupt banks, people can now turn to dollar-backed digital tokens as a store of value and tool of economic survival. These tokens are portable, censorship-resistant, and decentralized—opening access to the global economy in places where governments have shut the doors. What results is a parallel economy: dollar-denominated, stablecoin-settled, and organically adopted without need for military intervention or political mandates.
This system only works if people trust it. Fortunately, the U.S. is uniquely positioned to be that trust anchor. With stablecoins backed by U.S. Treasuries, issued by transparent entities, and verified on public blockchains, the traditional role of the bank and the FDIC shifts to a sovereign, verifiable system designed for stability. People don’t have to trust an institution—they can trust the code, the collateral, and the visibility.
Ultimately, stablecoins become the Trojan horse for reinforcing U.S. dollar supremacy. They allow for global dollarization without force, collapse demand for weak currencies and broken banks, and extend U.S. financial influence into every corner of the world. The cost is minimal. The reach is enormous. And unlike the old playbook, this one operates silently, voluntarily, and at scale. The result is that the U.S. doesn’t just issue the reserve currency—it builds and monetizes the rails for the global economy itself.
Stablecoins are only as useful as people’s ability to access them—and in many parts of the world, that access is deliberately blocked. Authoritarian regimes retain control not through ideology but through infrastructure. They shut down the internet during civil unrest, block access to international platforms, and trap their populations behind digital firewalls. In these environments, participating in the global financial system is not just hard—it’s illegal or impossible.
Starlink/Kuiper is the end-run around all of that. By providing plug-and-play satellite internet that operates beyond the reach of terrestrial censorship, Starlink/Kuiper allows people in even the most locked-down regimes to access uncensored information, stable financial tools, and global opportunities. Its decentralized infrastructure makes it nearly impossible to regulate or shut down. In failed states, remote areas, and authoritarian regimes alike, Starlink/Kuiper becomes the digital lifeline.
When paired with stablecoins, Starlink/Kuiper creates the ultimate decentralized onboarding stack. Where stablecoins offer monetary freedom, Starlink/Kuiper enables informational and infrastructural freedom. Together, they unshackle people from gatekeeper systems and transform them into global economic citizens—without protest, revolution, or violence. This isn’t a political movement. It’s a quiet, irreversible shift powered by superior tools.
Strategically, Starlink/Kuiper matters because it is U.S.-owned infrastructure. That means the United States doesn’t just export internet access—it exports ideological infrastructure.
With Starlink/Kuiper, the U.S. can deliver not just content, but connection to the entire economic stack: stablecoins, tokenized identity, AI-driven commerce, education, and healthcare. No embassies. No boots on the ground. Just packet-level soft power delivered from orbit. And that may prove to be the most influential export of the 21st century.
With stablecoins and Starlink/Kuiper setting the stage, the next phase is the tokenization of everything. Tokens are digital certificates of authenticity—dynamic containers that can represent any person, product, place, event, or experience.
Unlike static web2 objects, tokens can evolve, be reprogrammed, and connect with other tokens to form powerful networks. This unlocks exponential potential: physical products gain digital utility, experiences become programmable, and individuals can organize or monetize their data, work, or creativity.
Tokens shift value creation away from centralized platforms and into the hands of individuals and businesses—enabling new forms of commerce, authentication, and creativity. When combined with superintelligence AI+quantum (which searches, synthesizes, and coordinates tokens), this layer becomes the core of a decentralized, programmable economy. Read more about the token paradigm in my knowledge base.
As everything becomes tokenized and recorded on-chain—supported by stablecoins and global connectivity through Starlink/Kuiper—we unlock a powerful and often overlooked consequence: authentication becomes inherent to the system. Tokens no longer just represent assets, people, places, things, events or experiences; they serve as verifiable, trackable proofs of ownership, origin, and history. This creates a new baseline for trust across digital and physical systems, where the legitimacy of anything can be confirmed transparently and instantly.
In this environment, fraud, deception, and corruption become exponentially harder to sustain. Fake goods, forged credentials, and hidden ownership structures are exposed and invalidated by the very structure of the system. Identity theft becomes obsolete as individuals carry tokenized credentials and reputational histories.
Scams, shell companies, deepfakes, and ghost institutions struggle to operate when every interaction is cryptographically signed and publicly traceable. What’s more, we are moving towards Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), where all data - whether at rest in storage, in transit (like moving between servers) or being used (being processed in memory), is fully encrypted. Hacks and security breaches are inevitable, but if the data is encrypted, then it becomes potentially useless to a hacker that steals it. With tokenized transactions and FHE, what emerges is not just a safer digital economy, but a fundamentally more trustworthy civilization layer—where only the provable survives and truth is built into the infrastructure of daily life.
With stablecoins, Starlink/Kuiper, and tokenization forming the substrate, all authenticated and provable, AI and compute infrastructure become the orchestration layer—searching, sorting, authenticating, coordinating, and transacting across this new system. Every tokenized object becomes a data point. Every authenticated action becomes a signal. AI—trained on this structured, on-chain world—unlocks massive value by discovering patterns, building personalized networks, automating commerce, and making the system intelligent, adaptive, and exponentially scalable.
Critically, the U.S. dominates this layer: from chip design, cloud infrastructure, LLMs for inference engines, and to follow, chip manufacturing that is shifting to the U.S. This means that the intelligence layer powering the next economy—its search, its surveillance, its creative tools, and its autonomous agents—runs on U.S.-owned infrastructure, extending soft power, control, and monetization across the globe. This stack is well underway, which I discuss in more detail in my Future Growth Engines document.
Once everything is tokenized, authenticated, and made discoverable on-chain, a new kind of commerce becomes not only possible but inevitable—decentralized, direct, and global by design.
Unlike the Web2 era, where access to markets, customers, and capital was mediated by centralized platforms like Amazon, Meta, or Stripe, the token-based economy operates through synchronized, distributed blockchains. These networks are public, permissionless, and interoperable, meaning any product, person, or service is immediately findable—not through paid search or platform rankings, but by on-chain reputation, verified ownership, and programmable metadata.
This opens the door to a radically more open and efficient economic system. Entrepreneurs can connect directly with customers, partners, suppliers, and investors—without gatekeepers, without middlemen, and without censorship. Transactions are automated through smart contracts, eliminating delays, paperwork, and platform fees. Commerce becomes composable: anyone can build apps, marketplaces, or services that plug into the same open token infrastructure and work seamlessly together.
As this structure matures, the traditional dominance of centralized platforms begins to fade. They don’t disappear—but their monopoly power weakens as the open economy becomes more dynamic, inclusive, and efficient.
What emerges is a new ecosystem where value creation flows to individuals, small teams, and networks of collaborators. It is decentralized capitalism in action: a world where anyone, anywhere can issue, exchange, and grow value—without permission, and with global reach from day one. Entrepreneurship doesn’t just expand—it becomes explosive.
With the infrastructure of the new economy in place—stablecoins, Starlink/Kuiper, tokenization, authentication, AI, and decentralized commerce—the final and most consequential stage begins: the United States walks away from the legacy financial system, including the unsustainable sovereign debt that has long underpinned it. This isn’t a crash or a collapse. It’s a deliberate exit, enabled by the strength of the replacement system.
The current system is bloated with debt created not to build new productivity, but to mask deep structural failures.
In short, much of the U.S. national debt - even state and local - was never intended to build the future—only to keep the old system on life support.
As capital flows out of the traditional financial system—banks, pension funds, brokerages, insurance companies, mutual funds, ETFs, and other vehicles rooted in the legacy model—and into self-custodied stablecoin wallets, these institutions begin to lose their foundational deposit and capital base. This marks the start of a controlled demolition. There are no bailouts, no quantitative easing, and no institutional lifelines. The losses are absorbed by those still anchored to the old system. But this isn’t a default in the conventional sense—it’s a strategic offloading of obligations tied to a financial architecture in terminal decline.
To enable this transition, several tactics are in play. First, there is a silent collapse—zombie assets and institutions are allowed to fail quietly. Second, the U.S. can segment its debt, allowing legacy Treasuries to become devalued paper while new “digital Treasuries” tied to stablecoins gain favor. Third, the government can allow inflation to erode old debt in real terms—paying back in dollars worth far less. Fourth, the U.S. can selectively default on portions of its debt—not by announcing default, but by refusing to repay obligations tied to past bailouts and institutional subsidies. This could be positioned as a sovereign moral decision: “We’re done propping you up. You’re on your own.” With the new system up and running, the old system can fall without taking the economy down with it.
In this new paradigm, the U.S. doesn’t just walk away—it walks into a better financial model. Instead of borrowing to fund bailouts, it earns from the infrastructure itself. Every stablecoin transaction can carry a small fee, set at the protocol or wallet level and collected by issuers regulated or backed by the Treasury. Conversion fees function like FX spreads, creating a revenue stream as money flows in and out. The float on stablecoins—backed 1:1 with U.S. Treasuries—generates sovereign interest income. And most powerfully, the data layer becomes a strategic asset. On-chain financial data provides real-time visibility for taxation, anti-money laundering, and economic intelligence. This is protocol-level monetization: a global economic engine that generates recurring revenue simply by operating the rails. In this system, since everything is tracked and settled in real-time, we move away from taxation of income and towards taxation on economic activity via token transactions.
As the U.S. frees itself from debts backed by yesterday’s liabilities, it begins to re-anchor its economy to the assets of tomorrow. The new system is backed not by GDP inflated through credit, but by exponential, emerging-value primitives:
The moral and strategic framing is simple but profound: “We’re no longer going to use taxpayer dollars to sustain failed institutions, foreign manipulation, or unfair debt structures. We are restarting the economy, rewarding real productivity, and aligning our obligations with our values.” The old system isn’t seized or destroyed. It’s simply left behind. The new system is offered directly to the people—transparent, tokenized, efficient, and built for growth. It’s a walk away from decline and a walk toward the future.
Yes, there will be pain. There will be dislocation. But the new system is designed to act as a stabilizing anchor amidst the unraveling of the old. The legacy world—its concentrated wealth, institutional expertise, cultural norms, outdated assumptions and many of its leaders—will not survive this transition intact. Many who are deeply entangled in the old structure will experience spectacular losses, especially those whose wealth and power depend on the continuation of a system that can no longer sustain itself.
But this may be the only viable path forward. There may be no way to pay back the old or uphold promises that were made in a different era, under a fundamentally broken model. What is coming is a clean slate—one that doesn’t destroy civilization, but resets it on new rails. This three-stage transformation may be the only path that avoids collapse while enabling renewal.
The United States leads the way—because it must. And the world will follow—not because it’s forced to, but because the alternative is decay, fragmentation, and chaos. What’s being built now is not just a new system. It’s the foundation of the next era.
More on the mechanics of the Generation Reset here.
This section outlines the tactical and institutional responses the U.S. will likely deploy as cascading shocks hit—spanning finance, politics, culture, environment, and geopolitics—providing the ground-level mechanics and crisis responses that The Generational Reset section will rely on to unfold.
We are at critical states - or tipping points - across politics/geopolitics, finance/economics, the environment, and technology with the unprecedented rise of AI. Our financial imbalances are so stretched that we have little room left to absorb more shocks. As we progress through the 2020’s we will be hit with more shock events. Shocks could come from anywhere - we do not know.
I discuss the severity and timing of these shocks in the Timing section. But let’s first cover the response we should expect across different perspectives as a result of shock events that we will be experiencing.
The financial response will be extreme and some elements will be unprecedented, but will be needed to save our union. Here’s a laundry list of measures that could be employed:
There are hundreds of tactics in which federal, state and local governments will engage to help resurrect the economy. The ones listed above are just the big ones. Engaging in any of the above will depend upon how fast and aggressively we can reenergize the economy through our new growth engines, discussed further in this document. We cannot underestimate the creativity that will be employed.
The political leaders that will emerge to get us through this will appeal to the disaffected classes that saw their livelihoods decimated when we de-industrialized from 1970 through 2020 (blue collar, African Americans, service workers and all their kids). Manufacturing as share of employment declined from 30% in the 1970s to 8% today. They got left out of the American dream while their white collar, service-oriented counterparts got the American dream. These blue collar classes will be most important to our economy because they are vital for reindustrialization and they comprise 44% of the union.
But the new disaffected class rapidly coming online will be large parts of the other side of the economy - white collar, knowledge-based workers, who will see their jobs disappear as AI comes online. They, too, will join the blue collar segment looking to take control and engineer a reset.
These political leaders will combine with a deep state of government insiders: long-time senior level career government employees in all various branches of the government who are smart, know these problems have been coming, have thought a lot about these problems and have had decades to war game and test tools to counter these problems.
When we hit the wall, the deep state will emerge and partner with elected officials, or bring them to heel, because elected officials will realize there is no other choice but to engage in drastic actions to save the union.
This means that politically we get autocratic rule that allows the government to make decisions, suspending certain freedoms and due process to win the wars. There will be winners and losers, and the losers will have no recourse.
The political leaders + the deep state will leverage the military to ensure control of the union. These three will exert their influence to get backing from the military industrial complex (the primes, which are the old economy companies who are fading, and the neos, the upstart new economy military industrial companies that are supplanting the primes), which is a large component of the private sector.
The military industrial complex drives a great deal of innovation and the high tech sector of the U.S. is actually becoming the new military industrial complex (the neos), which will then also feed into all parts of the economy. The high tech sector is already being leveraged more and more by local, state and federal governments, which will increase exponentially as AI becomes more powerful. And, we are already seeing tech leaders get more deeply involved in politics, government and the military to more deeply leverage technologies.
This combination above is good because it will save our union:
The political leader or leaders who emerge are the ones who will be able to effectively appeal and leverage these above key constituents. Coupling this leader or leaders with the combination above and a juggernaut will emerge that has the gravity, heft, resources and numbers to hold the country together and push it through the difficult times.
Will this be a coup d'état? Yes, possibly. When you are talking about using the military to hold the union together and suspending certain freedoms and due process, that could be considered a coup if you look at it in context of our constitution. But if a majority of the public agrees with it (and most probably will because they will be hurting economically and want someone - anyone- to act decisively), then maybe it is not a coup.
What does history tell us about our situation? The 1930’s and 1940’s saw a supermajority control of Congress and the executive branch from the same party, allowing them to pass legislation with minimal opposition. Any opposition from the Supreme Court could be dealt with by adding more justices favorable to the administration, but that was never enacted as the threat brought the court in line. Both the treasury and the Federal Reserve worked together to control interest rates, rather than having an independent Fed. The Fed held short term rates barely above zero, and long-term rates at 2.5%, as price inflation hit 19% (talk about massive financial repression!). Further, actions such as the internment of Japanese Americans and gold confiscation showed the extent of control from the executive brand, which was supported by Congress, the Supreme Court and all branches of government. The magnitude of the outcomes laid out in this document are not necessarily unprecedented for the U.S.
Will the dominant political class be democrat, republican, or perhaps fascist or communist? Unknown the first two, and I don’t think it will matter because both parties are on a path to looking the same and doing the same things. It will be the leader or leaders who emerge and appeal to the right segments identified above and the party is secondary. It could be a 3rd party entirely. Many of our current problems were the same in the 1930’s and 1940’s. How we solved them then gives us clues to how we might solve existing challenges. Taking this to a logical conclusion, we will see an autocratic government with leanings toward fascism, just like we saw in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Communism is a political ideology that seeks to establish a classless, stateless society where the means of production are owned collectively. I do not see us going there at all.
Society will go along because they will have no other choice; the alternative is an economy that sinks to depression levels and societal violence that splits the country. No one wants this.
We will see group cooperation, civic activity, public consensus and solidarity return as society seeks to solve these problems and get back to harmony and peace. We will seek to help each other more. We’ll be called on to pick up the slack where government services are available at reduced levels or not at all, due to budget reductions from reduced tax revenue because of less public spending and consumption. Think maintaining parks and public areas, road repairs, volunteer staffing for government services.
We will see some decision-making decentralized to states around values, such as abortion, gun rights, DEI, the Ten Commandments. States can decide on their own what they want to do with respect to these hot-button issues and citizens can move to the states that support their view. This will help diffuse tensions along value-based issues. But these issues may not cause much conflict because they will take a back seat to the more pressing needs associated with jobs and income.
Any groups that push values, morals or any other cultural issues will fall flat; people won’t care about that when their jobs are at stake.
But there will also be Incumbent backlash that could be severe by the younger generations against those of the old order who will be blamed for all our problems and did not do enough when they were in power to fix them. This will lead to significant taxation of the wealthy and punishing anyone of the old order, including companies and leaders. Does not matter if it is wrong or those in the old order actually did good, perception is reality, and the perception is that the old order gave us all these problems so they must be punished. Think McCarthyism but on a much bigger scale.
Geopolitically we will turn inwards to deal with our own problems, letting the world partially run amok.
If we think we have it bad, it is nothing compared to most of the rest of the planet, which will turn into dumpster fires all over the place.
The Axis powers may surge, but will quickly implode because they do not have the resources like us to stabilize their economies. They are dependent upon the U.S. economy and as we turn inward, they will suffer significantly.
Climate change and environmental catastrophes may very well be the proverbial grain of sand that causes our economy to come crashing down. They are dramatically increasing in frequency and severity, with seemingly nothing to stop them. We likely have gone past tipping points such that even with draconian and extreme measures to control carbon output, they will not reverse their effects for a long time - decades at least, if not a century or longer. Our modern society, economic system and food system is all at risk.
Adaptation on a massive scale will be required. Massive migrations away from large swaths of southern states, lower and central midwest states and low lying coastal areas that will become very challenging to live in or even uninhabitable. This will require mammoth building of new houses in areas north and associated infrastructure and services to handle the migration.
We’ll continue efforts to decarbonize our energy grid, but it will go on overdrive. All forms of renewables will be used, but nuclear in particular will stage a colossal comeback. We will build small, versatile, modular, portable reactors and drop them in place of coal and natural gas plants. Where regulatory processes took 20-years to install a reactor, now they will get approved inside weeks and be installed just as fast, with installation costs dropping to equal that of solar. But because nuclear provides always on baseload electricity, its costs will drop below that of solar.
Transportation is the largest emitter of carbon, and we will be severely restricted from using ICE vehicles; work from home will be rigorously enforced.
We will have to engage in climate engineering like stratospheric aerosol injection, even though there will likely be many unintended consequences that we cannot foresee.
The losers will be the carbon-based energy complex, which thinks it has many decades of life left. As stated, in war, there are no rules; you win at all costs, especially when your existence is at risk. Carbon emissions represent a substantial risk to our existence. As a result, the speed at which we move to arrest our carbon output will shock everyone, simply because we have no other choice. We'll focus efforts on the U.S. during The Reckoning period, but as we climb out into the resurgence, we will turn our attention to helping (and forcing) the world to also decarbonize at a lightning fast rate.
The future is a surveilled and controlled state, powered by artificial intelligence. There will be no privacy—none.
Even cryptocurrencies, once hailed by blockchain evangelists as decentralized and immune to government overreach, are not beyond the reach of control. As stablecoins become the foundation of the digital financial system, every transaction—down to the fraction of a cent—will be recorded, categorized, and analyzed.
Now layer on the tokenization of everything: people, products, places, events, even memories. When everything is represented on-chain, everything becomes trackable. Every interaction, every movement, every purchase—forever stored, searchable, and attributable.
The beauty of blockchain is that it is public but anonymous, or so people think, and that is what the surveilled state wants. However, in our surveilled state, it won’t matter, because superintelligent AI+quantum computing will be able to associate anonymous transactions and wallets to people’s identity.
This surveillance architecture is already here, accelerating toward total saturation. The coming Generational Reset, when combined with superintelligent AI and quantum computing, won’t just watch. It will understand. It will predict. It will preempt.
Consider what’s already in play:
And then there’s Palantir’s Lavender, an AI system that fuses metadata from phones, social media, biometric markers, and surveillance feeds to assign a probability score of whether someone is a militant. It doesn’t just surveil—it labels.
As AI capabilities go exponential and become a superintelligence - augmented by quantum computing comes online - surveillance will transcend detection. It will become prediction. It will be preemptive.
There will be no opting out. Even choosing to disconnect will be interpreted, categorized, and tracked—flagged as a psychological anomaly. "Off-grid" won’t signal freedom; it will signal suspicion.
The surveilled state will not be something we live under. It will be something that lives through us.
Do we want all of the above? Of course not! But we are in times where it does not matter what we think or what we want; the only thing that matters is, what is and how we respond to get through it intact and stronger on the other side.
The question becomes: what do we need to do to prosper? Prospering comes down to leveraging our assets and then extending that leverage to not just help the world, but extending a measure of control over it, because without the U.S., the world becomes a dumpster fire. No other country has the resources that we do to help maintain some semblance of order. Helping the world and maintaining some semblance of order will be very good for the U.S.
I offer the following perspective from Alexander Fraser Tytler, and 18th century historian:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”
The U.S. has clearly drifted into an apathetic and dependence stage. Does that mean our democracy is over? Not necessarily.
I believe we are at the cusp of at least one more era of economic miracles, which will be anchored in the Generational Reset and new growth engines.
I think this will allow us to persevere as a democracy; not perfectly and we will have less freedom than we have now. But if we can successfully reset through The Reckoning period through many of the actions described in this document, I think we can emerge once again into a phase of reasonable liberty (although extensively surveilled) and great abundance that Tytler talks about.
We did it successfully after WWII. During the depression and WWII we were for all intents and purposes an autocratic, slightly fascist leaning government, yet we pivoted out of that back to full democracy following the war. We can certainly do it again.
I want to offer some perspective on wealth inequality, which at present is massive and the source of all of our political polarization.
“The Great Leveler is a good book on the history of inequality that (at least per the author) has survived its critiques fairly well. Its conclusion is that past large reductions in inequality have all been driven by one of the "Four Horsemen of Leveling":
Leveling income differences has historically been hard enough to basically never happen through conscious political choice.” Source
The above is a sobering conclusion about solving wealth inequality. Is the U.S. headed toward one or a combination of these Four Horseman? I think not.
I have yet to read this book and am curious how the author handles the wealth inequality in the U.S. during the 1910’s and 1920’s, because when you look at the data, the wealth inequality then mirrored the levels we see today. See more here in the Other section of this document.
Yet, during this period, the U.S. was able to successfully navigate its way out of wealth inequality because the ruling political and wealth classes at the time created programs and legislation to help return the U.S. back to balance. These policies and programs coupled with the innovation realized through WWII, which was adapted to the private sector following the war, ushered in the rise of the middle class that became the source of our peace, wealth and prosperity.
I believe we can do it again and avoid the Four Horsemen through our new growth engines.
In 2027-2034, the above responses will all take place, which I call The Reckoning.
If we had to pick a date when we hit the wall: December 2029. Why? Because the new president/congress that entered office in January 2029, promising to fix all these problems, will run out of time when the problems do not get fixed and the public suddenly has had enough.
Or, it will happen from some other crisis that is the last proverbial grain of sand to fall on the pile that causes the avalanche? We don’t know for sure, but from 2027 and thereafter, we are hitting critical states across political/geopolitical, financial/economic and environmental dimensions, so our slide into The Reckoning period can come from anywhere.
I believe we are more likely to suffer cascading crises across many areas because one or two, we might normally absorb, but because we are at critical states - or tipping points - across social/cultural, political/geopolitical, financial/economic and environmental dimensions, we don’t have the ability to absorb one or two crises. One crisis is all that is needed to push everything over the edge.
There are futurists I follow who believe that our biggest tipping point - our national debt - won’t be a problem for maybe another few decades, if not longer. They cite Japan, South Korea, China, Germany, Italy, Spain and other countries, whose debt, unfunded liabilities and declining demographics are decades ahead of the U.S. and thus, in far worse shape, yet they have not yet experienced a reckoning.
This may be the case, but I tend to not think so because those countries had the benefit of postponing their reckoning for decades under a world economy that has been strong.
We no longer have that luxury as the world economy is in a precarious position with no growth engines left to power it through its problems and massive environmental changes that are increasing in frequency and severity.
It is possible some issues like our national debt won’t become a problem for decades. But other major issues such as resource constraints from climate change and deglobalization and wealth inequality are ones we cannot push off for decades.
As we go past tipping points in these areas, the cascading effects may mount financially, which pushes our national debt higher, faster, which then makes it become a problem much sooner.
Could our new growth engines start to materialize to help power us financially out of our problems sooner rather than later? Absolutely.
Could an epic wave of wealth and smart people come to the U.S. in time before many of our problems hit? Absolutely.
Could we start to compromise politically to help fix our wealth inequality to help solve our political polarization? Absolutely.
This may all be possible and may come in time to counteract shocks and keep a deep recessionary period at bay.
But because we are at tipping points across many areas with much less ability to absorb shocks, the risk of a deep recessionary period is substantial, so we need to prepare for this. We hope for the best and strive for it, but plan for the worse.
We were vastly unprepared for WWII when Pearl Harbor struck. We were financially bankrupt from the depression, demoralized from its toll on our communities, and isolated from the world that was turning into a dumpster fire with no adult supervision.
Despite this, it only took us 3.5 years from Pearl Harbor to emerge victorious, not on one massive front, but two (Pacific and Europe/Africa) and as the undisputed financial, industrial, political and military leader of the world. Despite the massive unpreparation, we came together on a titanic scale to muster our resources and decisively win in a short period of time.
Consider this:
“The period between 1940- 1944 saw the greatest expansion of industrial production that the U.S. had ever experienced. The volume of output was increasing at an annual rate of over 15 percent between these years. Traditional growth rates between 1896 and 1939 averaged 4 percent per year. Also, from 1940 to 1944, total output of manufactured goods increased by 300 percent. Investments by the U.S. government, and to a lesser extent private enterprise, increased America's productive capacity by 50 percent.
The average productivity of labor in industry was increased by about 25 percent between 1939 and 1944. America had twice the productive output per person than Germany and five times that of Japan. All these gains in the productivity of labor were due to new capital equipment, an increase in the hours of the workweek, pooling of industrial information and the common cause of winning the war, which was deeply important to nearly every American.
Although war production was the main driving force of the U.S. economy during 1941-1944, consumers at home also benefited from the increased productivity. Despite shortages of particular items and a general decline in the quality of some goods, consumer's expenditures increased in virtually all non-war industries with the exception of printing, publishing and clothing. Expansion of war and non-war output together led to consumer purchases of goods and services to increase by 12 percent between 1939 and 1944.
Measured in 1939 constant dollars, the Gross National Product of the United States rose from $88.6 billion in 1939 to $135 billion in 1944 (+53%, or 7.6% per year). The increased productivity of the war years not only ended the Great Depression but also set the economic and cultural foundations for America's peacetime prosperity, which began just immediately after the end of the war in 1945." Source, via TXMC
The Axis powers of the time thought Pearl Harbor would be the decapitating blow, but what it did instead was finally shock us into action. It poked the bear that finally came out in full force, and the Axis powers had no chance after that. Pearl Harbor forced us to finally take the gloves off and win at all costs
What we did in such a short amount of time was remarkable. And that remarkableness continued in the ensuing decades, where we rebuilt Europe and the Pacific and created a globalized financial world order that allowed tremendous progress and prosperity for much of the planet.
Like the dawn of WWII, we are vastly unprepared now to handle our problems because we don’t have any financial cushion left. The Axis of Rogues (China/Russia/Iran/N. Korea) are coordinating efforts to stretch and break us financially. They are hoping we collapse economically, which is the decapitating blow that ends us as a superpower. It won’t work.
Whether you call it a feature or a bug of America, we need shock moments to get us to act.
There have been many shock moments since Pearl Harbor that awakened the bear:
Once we get shocked into action, nothing and no one can stand in our way.
I am not here to debate whether our actions from these shock events were good or bad or too much.
The point I am making is that when we get shock moments that threaten our existence, we act with overwhelming and unprecedented force that no foe can match. That is a unique trait about America.
We will need one or several Pearl Harbor’s to shock us into action. There will be a financial breaking point when we will finally have no choice but to take the gloves off to do what we need to do.
We'll start to win our wars and rise from the ashes to resurge, as no other country has the critical combination of assets to really succeed and dominate, which are listed below.
We will want to watch what other countries do who are further along than us with respect to debt, demographics and wealth inequality/polarization. How they handle these problems and the outcome could be instructive for us.
The U.S. stands alone as the only country uniquely equipped with the following elements—vital components for thriving in a deglobalizing world:
As we resurge, the world's money and wealth will want to come here because we are the only economy that is back on a growth footing. The flow of money and smart people out of many parts of the world will be epic, and it will want to come to the U.S.
Layer on our massive new growth engines and the benefits of AI and robotics, the U.S. will experience a multi-decade economic boom never before seen in the history of this country. Average long-term GDP growth year-over-year for the U.S. is 3%; we could see 6-8% growth year-over-year for decades to come.
Our previous era - 1945 ~2015 - was one where we had excellent demographics and a proverbial empty room waiting to be filled with products. Coupled with prosperity, ample discretionary income and a globalizing world, and we experienced a tremendous era of growth and success. That era ended because demographics progressed to a less favorable state and we saturated the empty room with product.
The era ahead will duplicate that past, where we rebuild our middle class that we will need for our new growth engines, which will serve as the new empty room waiting to be filled with products.
As we resurge, we will turn outward again and start deploying our military, technology and wealth to arrest some of the chaos throughout the world. The world will start to see the U.S. provide adult supervision once again, just like we did during and after WWII
We will do this because it is in our best interests. Letting a world run amok will end up hurting us far more than the cost of interceding.
The U.S. is the world’s consumer economy and we will use this as leverage to bring countries into line who want to sell to us.
We are already the largest producer and exporter of arms worldwide, and that will only increase, which we can use as leverage with other countries as they will need arms to protect themselves against a chaotic world.
For timing, 5+ years after the start of The Reckoning period we will have won our wars (the exception is climate change) and emerge again as the undisputed financial, industrial, political and military leader of the world.
We experience the full force of the reckoning period and the possibility for a deep and damaging recession in the 2027-2032 period, and emerge 5 years after the start as the undisputed financial, industrial, political and military leader of the world. This scenario assumes a 10% fall in GDP for the U.S. For reference point: the COVID shock was a 10% fall in GDP, but in only 3-months time; the GFC of 2008 was a 3% fall; and, the Great Depression of the 1930’s was a 29% fall.
The elephant in the room will be how we deal with our national debt. As the U.S. spending is 20-25% of the U.S. economy, decreases will be impactful. If we do a lot of other things right, already discussed, and get lucky along the way, maybe we are able to smooth out our debt increase and eventually reverse it so that it goes down. Maybe we experience a more mild recession or series of recessions that see a 2-3% drop in GDP.
There’s a lot of reasons why this alternate case is the more likely path rather than my base case. But we should plan for the base case path in case it does come to pass.
Considering history, the 1930’s depression, which really began in 1926 when we had serious cracks forming and things starting to go off the rails, and WWII, this arduous period lasted 19 years (1926-1945). Could we see something like this? I don’t believe so because we must reindustrialize due to resource constraints and deglobalization and we are at the start of another technological revolution in AI and automation, all of which portends massive growth. I am defaulting to my base case and hold out hope for alternate case 1.
If The Generational Reset is truly at work - or even if it is not, it might be our only option, then any kind of conventional investing in the old economy is a trap. It will implode and dissolve as investing shifts to the new economy that is underpinned by stablecoins and backed by new era assets.
In the post-reset system, cash via stablecoins will become captive capital—redirected, limited, and maybe even devalued by design. Your purchasing power will not just erode through inflation. It will be actively managed through financial repression: a policy in which inflation is kept intentionally above interest rates to slowly destroy debt burdens. That means any cash you hold will lose value steadily—and predictably.
This however, depends on how much debt of the old system that governments choose to walk away from and selectively default on.
We’ve seen this before. In 1934, the U.S. government outlawed private gold ownership and revalued gold upwards—effectively confiscating wealth. In the Generational Reset, similar playbooks could apply to cash. Expect the potential for conversion limits, withdrawal controls, even forced "investment" of idle cash into state-sanctioned bonds or projects.
The key is to put your capital into what you want before the system decides what it wants from you. Keep minimal reserves. Shift toward productive, inflation-resilient assets—not speculative bets, but tangible, utility-rich holdings tied to real economic function. Read the next section to see what that may look like.
In the new economy, cash won’t be king. It will be a captive subject.
As follows:
Build in redundancies to everything because infrastructure will break a lot until it is transformed into an new and electrified society.
The safest, most prudent action is:
Invest in hard assets, that are scarce, and which earn an income.
Traditional hard assets are land and material resources, but think of proprietary data, network effects and extreme brand loyalty that offer formidable competitive barriers.
Since the 1990’s, our leaders have engaged in political and financial actions to prevent the business cycle from working properly, where recessions and busts are a natural way to help clean out excess and correct imbalances. Instead, they have engaged in actions that let underlying problems persist and get bigger over time.
The analogy is sandpiles which when they have many small avalanches, they prevent larger and more massive avalanches from happening. The more small, unpleasant events we allow to help correct imbalances, the fewer large and, eventually, massive events will build up.
Efforts by our leaders to prevent small losses actually create the large fingers of instability that bring down whole systems and spark global recessions. And, increasingly, giant debt and the unfunded liabilities of government promises are becoming the most massively unstable finger.
And it is not just our leaders, but society as a whole that kicks the proverbial can down the road. Each of us is OK if someone else feels the pain of sacrifice to correct problems, but not us individually, or our family, group, interest group, etc. As a result, no one wants to sacrifice, so nothing gets fixed, and problems just fester and get worse.
We also have to consider that many people are doing fine and want things as is or change to happen slowly. This is the wealthy and older people, both groups that tend to dominate our leadership and political classes and thus, exert more control to keep things as is.
The above lays out an orderly path through The Reckoning. That never happens and won’t this time. Expect maximum pain to get through our problems and in the worst ways possible.
We may end up what is laid out above, because it's the only path available to survive, but we will do a lot of other things along the way that will only make things worse, until we swing back to the above path.
There is a great quote from Raoul Pal, a successful, well-known hedge fund manager:
MARKETS TEND TO TAKE THE PATH OF MOST PAIN
We need to expect the same as we go through The Reckoning.
I offer another interesting quote attributed to Winston Churchill, which while there is no historical record of this quote, is likely more of a paraphrasing of his views and a popular quote that has emerged to capture his sentiment:
AMERICANS CAN ALWAYS BE TRUSTED TO DO THE RIGHT THING, ONCE ALL
OTHER POSSIBILITIES HAVE BEEN EXHAUSTED.
We will likely exhaust all other possibilities as we painfully wind our way through The Reckoning, but in the end, we will do the right thing to get this country back on track. We’ve done it five times before, considering the long-term secular cycle of the Anglo-American period, and we should expect to do it again as our sixth era comes to a close.
The U.S. has the wealth and resources to push through The Reckoning. The Reckoning period will redistribute those resources to more effective uses to get us out of the hole we have dug ourselves into. Most other countries, however, do not have the resources we do, and will not experience a resurgence. In fact, they will continue to decline, if not outright implode.
When I look at all the areas that make up The Reckoning and The Resurgence, the ones that have outsized effects on everything else and which we have a harder time controlling and/or responding to, include:
Our biggest threat to prosperity are the resources we need to reindustrialize. As the world deglobalizes and conflicts arise, it will be harder to get resources. The resources around producing computer chips and building more energy production is especially critical because our AI-driven future depends heavily on these two resources. Having enough labor to reindustrialize is also a problem but could be partially solved when robotics for manufacturing, retail/restaurant and personal uses is widespread (mid 2030’s). It's not that we cannot get the resources - we have the world’s most powerful military coupled with the expertise to help us do that; the challenge is setting up supply chains for those resources in a timely manner before existing supply chains fall apart. It takes time to bring on new mines and industrial processing.
Historically, U.S. electricity demand has grown at less than 1% annually. During boom periods, this growth may double to around 1.5%. While we are currently in such a boom, our energy needs are now far outpacing even this elevated demand.
Consider the compounding demands on energy:
The result is a compounding cycle: we need more energy to produce the resources and infrastructure that allow us to generate even more energy. Current estimates suggest we must double electricity production within the next decade—a 10% annual growth rate—far beyond historical trends and current forecasts. Achieving this requires vast improvements in grid infrastructure, sourcing skilled labor, and scaling production capacity, each of which is itself energy-intensive.
See the vicious cycle at work?
The likelihood of an energy shortage could be high, forcing us to make difficult choices about energy allocation.
Despite these challenges, there is significant momentum in addressing energy supply constraints. Innovations in energy production and infrastructure development are underway, offering hope that we can meet these demands.
I remain optimistic and believe we can scale energy production to meet future goals.
China is collapsing from many factors; this can’t be reversed at the scale we need from the world’s second largest economy. What happens to the world economy when it collapses? China is the world’s provider of intermediate processing for countless metals and goods. Over decades we can adjust, but if collapse happens suddenly before we have ramped up manufacturing in the U.S. and elsewhere, that will put a significant strain on future prosperity. There is strong evidence that China could collapse by 2035. WIll be be able to reshore before then?
China’s collapse does not mean it is not a geopolitical threat. Quite the contrary. I am quoting others here to drive home the point:
Gardels: Why, then, is it so important, as someone like Alex Karp argues, to so ferociously build up hard power superiority in AI and technology if the Chinese system is bound to unravel?
Ferguson: Because the lesson of 20th-century history is very clear: Totalitarian regimes are capable of wreaking catastrophic damage, even if they’re ultimately unable to sustain themselves. It is in the period of their greatest strength that they’re at their most dangerous. Nazi Germany certainly proved that point. So did the Soviet Union. Unlike in say, the 1990s, China is more than a military match for the United States in the Indo-Pacific region. It has a larger navy. It’s accumulated a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons as well as non-nuclear weapons, including advanced missiles that can sink American aircraft carriers. This dramatic race for military parity has produced a grave threat not only to the United States, but to its allies. I agree with Alex Karp: A world in which China won would be a world in which individual liberty would be quite quickly snuffed out. Source
As Russia, China, Pakistan and North Korea implode, could they decide to use their nuclear weapons because they have nothing left to lose? Could these weapons find themselves in the hands of other nefarious countries and groups?
We need to massively grow the use of nuclear energy, but the systems and processes to store spent nuclear fuel may not appropriately develop due to NIMBYizm and safe transport of spent fuel to final locations.
Even with draconian measures to arrest carbon output, climate change takes decades if not a century to adjust. Can we survive that long while we continue to see greater havoc?
AI+Robotics is a production revolution, dramatically reducing the need for human labor. I fear that companies will use these technologies to cut costs before the full measure of our next economic supercycle takes hold.
It is already gaining strength in certain industries and I fear that it will explode towards mass layoffs with no corresponding increase in new jobs.
We can’t stop AI’s progress, so we have to work hard to realize our prosperous future to offset this coming jobs decimation.
I cover more about AI and job elimination in my working document Skills And Jobs Of A Future With AI Dominating
If the exponential growth of satellite debris makes satellite orbits unusable (called the Kessler effect), that is catastrophic in terms of mapping, weather and defense applications and GPS (which the financial markets also rely on), all of which are of enormous importance to our modern way of life.
Studies indicate that satellite debris (even those satellites that have burned up into their atomized components that remain at the edge of our atmosphere) degrades our ozone and our magnetic field, which threatens all life on earth.
I have no doubt that we can figure out how to remove satellite debris to minimize the kessler effect, but if it burns up into its atomized components and remains at the edge of our atmosphere, destroying our ozone layer and magnetic field, how do we clean that up?
AI is truly remarkable, and also very concerning. It’s capabilities are evolving such that it will gain enough intelligence, capabilities, reach and access to turn on humans and harm us. A not insignificant number of AI researchers believe AI will end human life through kinetic conflict with us. The infamous Skynet in the Terminator movie series is entirely possible. Will we have to turn off AI to save ourselves? If so, this will be catastrophic on its own because the key to solving many of our challenges and advancing our existence is inextricably linked to using AI.
Revitalizing the middle class is, in my view, the single most important key to solving nearly all of our core challenges. A strong, spending middle class fuels a high-growth economy—and without it, everything else stalls. As I dig into the root causes behind our current problems, this emerges as the critical lever: if we can fix the middle class, we can fix everything else. As I outline in my Future Growth Engines document, the U.S. is on the brink of its next major economic supercycle. The growth is coming—the real question is who benefits. Will the gains be broadly shared, helping to rebuild a vibrant and resilient middle class? Or will they concentrate at the top, deepening inequality and eroding long-term growth? If it’s the latter, future economic gains will be short-lived and fragile—and our systemic problems will only intensify.
The Gini coefficient is a measure of income inequality within a population. It ranges from 0 to 1, where:
So:
While Gini shows high inequality, it’s not inequality alone that historically triggered societal or state-level crises. Instead, it’s when elites capture nearly all the surplus value — meaning, not just income inequality, but resource hoarding, opportunity strangling, and systemic extractions that leave little for the broader population.
Even with Gini in the 0.48–0.52 range today, we may not see immediate breakdowns, because the total economic "pie" is much larger than in previous historical periods. In other words, the absolute levels of wealth and access are higher for more people today than they were in, say, the 1930s or 1970s. So even if the distribution is lopsided, many still have enough to maintain social stability.
The U.S. Gini coefficient wasn't formally tracked until the mid-20th century, so estimates for the 1910s and 1920s rely on retrospective economic reconstructions. That said, here’s what we know from economic historians and inequality researchers:
These are estimates based on studies of income concentration, tax records, and national accounts — especially from researchers like Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and others who reconstructed pre-WWII inequality.
This work by Eddie Soehnel is licensed under Attribution 4.0 International