In this week’s Frankly, I’d like to highlight the importance of the Strait of Hormuz, a global supply chain choke point where nearly half of the world’s oil available for export travels through on a daily basis. In the midst of high-stakes geo-political events where threats (and misery) from warring nations dominate the discourse, we remain (mostly) energy blind to the bottlenecks that lie at the center of these conflicts, which if disrupted could send our liquid-combustible-fuel dependent economies crashing.
How could the threat of expanding regional wars – especially Iran’s potential response in the Strait of Hormuz – impact the world’s reliance on the flow of oil? Who are the people making world-altering decisions – and do they have the best interest of the future in mind? Can a heightened awareness of our global system’s dependency on fragile energy supply chains shift our focus away from escalating risks towards deconfliction and peace?
In case you missed it…
Last week, I was joined by Luther Krueger to discuss one example of a category of innovation that I’ve taken to calling ‘Goldilocks tech’ – which uses accessible and abundant materials to achieve important tasks for human societies with less or considerably less energy and material throughput. In the western world, most of us are used to indoor, gas or electric stoves, typically powered by fossil fuels, and in a third of the world, people are still using solid fuels – wood, coal, or dung – which come with many health and environmental risks. Solar ovens are an alternative which makes use of passive solar energy at a range of temperatures and can be made from basic or reused materials.
Exactly one week ago, Iranian commandos seized a container ship affiliated with Israel as it passed through the Strait of Hormuz. This action sparked new fears of another maritime chokepoint becoming disrupted as the crisis in the Middle East escalated. It also prompted a plea by the international shipping industry to the United Nations, urging an increase in military patrols along key shipping routes.
First reported by the maritime news website gGaptain, an open letter co-signed by 16 maritime industry associations and social partners, calls for urgent assistance and reminds countries about their responsibilities under international law.
“However, the incident this weekend, when the vessel MSC Aries was seized by Iranian forces at 06.37 UTC – 50 nautical miles north-east of Fujairah, United Arab Emirates on Saturday 13 April, has once again highlighted the intolerable situation where shipping has become a target. This is unacceptable,” the signatories of the letter stated.
“Given the continually evolving and severe threat profile within the area, we call on you for enhanced coordinated military presence, missions and patrols in the region, to protect our seafarers against any further possible aggression,” they said, adding, “The industry associations ask that all member states be formally reminded of their responsibilities under international law. And we ask that all efforts possible are brought to bear to release the seafarers and protect the safe transit of ships.”
After the MSC Aries seizure in the Strait of Hormuz, we published a note titled “Heading For Supply Shock? Four Maritime Chokepoints Flash Red As Escalating Conflict Looms,” outlining the maritime chokepoints, including the Suez Canal, Bab-El Mandeb Strait, and Strait of Hormuz, through which a quarter of all global trade flows, that are experiencing increased conflict.
In a recent note, MUFG provided a global snapshot of the world’s maritime chokepoints.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Carbon monoxide emissions from industrial production have serious consequences for human health and are a strong indicator of overall air pollution levels. Many countries aim to reduce their emissions, but they cannot control air flows originating in other regions. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign looks at global flows of air pollution and how they relate to economic activity in the global supply chain.
“Our study is unique in combining atmospheric transport of air pollution with supply chain analysis as it tells us where the pollution is coming from and who is ultimately responsible for it,” said lead author Sandy Dall’erba, professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics (ACE) and director of the Center for Climate, Regional, Environmental and Trade Economics (CREATE), both part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at Illinois.
“There is a direct link between a country’s level of production and how much air pollution is emitted. However, production may be driven by demand from consumers in other countries. We use supply chain analysis to quantify the links between production and consumption. This helps us to understand how production in one country is linked to domestic and foreign demand,” he added.
The researchers traced the movement of pollutants through the atmosphere to understand the flow of emissions, using simulations developed by Nicole Riemer, professor in the Department of Climate, Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at Illinois; for analytical purposes, they divided the world into five sections: the United States, Europe, China, South Korea, and the rest of the world. South Korea is located downwind of China, and it serves as an example of how a small country can be affected by pollution from a much larger upwind neighbor.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
(Bloomberg) — The combined forces of El Niño and La Niña have crippled Latin American soy output. Ukrainian and Russian grain farmers have gone to war. Indonesia has banned shipments of palm oil to Europe, while China is hungry for crops. The Mediterranean region is getting more like a desert.
The year is 2024. “Food shortage in Europe? The only question is when, but they don’t listen,” says an unidentified voice in a video broadcast. The audience sits quietly — listening.
The dramatic collision of events, of course, hasn’t yet come to pass. But over two days in central Brussels last month, some 60 European Union and government officials, food security experts, industry representatives and a few journalists gathered to confront the possibility of something barely on the radar a few years ago: a full-blown food crisis.
The group sat down in a refurbished art deco Shell building to simulate what might happen, and help design policies aimed at prevention and response. A few streets away, farmers were stepping up their protests against the EU, disrupting supplies to supermarkets as if to sharpen the focus of the participants.
The plush co-working space was hardly a bunker or secure basement in a warzone. But the video images of drought, floods and civil unrest to the pounding beat of ominous music created a sense of urgency.
“Expect a level of chaos,” warned Piotr Magnuszewski, a systems modeler and game designer who has worked with the United Nations. “You may be confused at times and not have enough information. There will be time travel.”
To watch one of the best-fed regions in the world stress test its food system underscores a growing level of alarm among governments over securing supplies for their populations. In the space of four years, multiple shocks have shaken up the way food is grown, distributed and consumed.
Governments of the European Union are engaged in wargames which simulate and foresee a global food crisis. A mix of major factors including the Russia-Ukraine war and impact on grain supplies there, as well as weather events like El Niño and La Niña and their impact on Latin American soy output, and the anti-EU farmers’ protests which have disrupted supermarket supply chains, have been cause for alarm, European officials say. Of course there’s also the example of how drastically a pandemic can interfere with supply chains. Panic buying was a trend and constant fear within the early months of the coronavirus crisis.
Bloomberg details of a conference held in Brussels last month that envisioned a 2024 to 2025 food shortage in Europe: “…over two days in central Brussels last month, some 60 European Union and government officials, food security experts, industry representatives and a few journalists gathered to confront the possibility of something barely on the radar a few years ago: a full-blown food crisis.”
Getty Images
Piotr Magnuszewski, a systems modeler and game designer who helped put the conference gaming scenario together told participants to “Expect a level of chaos” and cautioned, “You may be confused at times and not have enough information.”
As the report underscores, what’s remarkable about this is the fact that a continent which stands out as among the best-fed regions in the world is now busy stress testing its food system.
Below are some of the scenarios put before participants in the wargaming event last month:
* * *
Harvest failures:
“And so, it’s 2025 and there are more harvest failures. They impact animal feed prices, which curbs livestock and fish production. Some ships carrying crops turn away from Europe to cater to higher bidders elsewhere.”
If there is one reality that Americans need to accept, it’s that every system has a breaking point and there are no exceptions. Human beings are built to adapt and this has given us incredible resilience, but it also means we have a tendency to wait too long to fix the parts of our society that are broken. Instead, we let the problems build and fester until, sadly, the final straw falls and everything comes crashing down.
Sometimes this collapse is by chance and sometimes it’s by design. In either case the catalyst is the same – The public does not prepare and they don’t take action to correct the people creating the crisis until it’s too late.
In our modern era of invasive technology, economic weakness, nuclear weapons and biowarfare, this is an unsustainable model. We can no longer ignore threats on instability in the hopes that they will go away or that governments will defuse the danger, nor can we simply pick up the pieces over and over again after each calamity. There may come a time when the mess is so big we won’t be able to clean it up. People must plan ahead, and they must stop tolerating the notion of passive involvement in the mechanisms that influence their lives and future.
I write often about hypothetical trigger events and breakdown scenarios because a large number of people still need to be educated on how fragile the western world truly is right now. For example, any significant disruption to supply chains and logistics at this time would be devastating for a large number of Americans (or Europeans).
By now the impacts of supply chain disruption are becoming all too familiar: shortages, inflation, factory closures, goods waiting at ports to be unloaded. All these impacts are serious enough, but another more-hidden concern lurks just beneath the surface: the impact of supply chain failure on national security, broadly defined as a nation’s ability to protect and ensure the well-being of its population.
This definition of “national security” is broader than just the defense industry or military-related efforts; it also could encompass the very ability of a nation to ensure economic well-being, public health, and protection of a nation’s key infrastructure. Supply chain disruptions cause general economic disruption and key commodity shortages, which then in turn can, in fact, drive aggressive national behavior and international instability. And ironically, this reactive aggressive national behavior can happen even if the health of a national economy itself depends upon continued international economic interdependence. Indeed, this very interdependence can create vulnerabilities. So a systematic effort, cutting across agencies and public and private sectors, could be one way to ensure these vulnerabilities are understood and mitigated.
Supply Chain Disruption and Conflict
Dispersed supply chains develop because actors find it’s economically advantageous to seek the least-expensive and most-productive sources of supply. These dispersed chains develop for good reasons, but they create complicated interdependencies whose risks and vulnerabilities are sometimes not even understood, let alone mitigated.
While the reasons for creating these chains lie largely with private interest, the effects of disruption—which can come from sources ranging from malign human action to natural disaster—are rarely localized. When shortages occur in one industry, the disruptions in one area nearly always spill into adjacent companies and sectors. Whole economies feel the impact, not isolated actors.
Shipping faces lengthy disruptions as Middle East fallout worsens
Analysts see more upside for container shipping and tanker stocks
The fire on the product tanker Marlin Luanda was extinguished on Saturday. (Photo: French Navy)
The Red Sea crisis — and the Middle East situation in general — is worsening. There’s growing conviction that shipping diversions around the Cape of Good Hope will increase in scope and last much longer than initially expected. That should be good news for shipping stocks over time, due to durably longer voyage distances.
The Houthis hit the JP Morgan-owned product tanker Marlin Luanda with a ballistic missile on Friday, setting a cargo tank on fire. The tanker was chartered by trading house Trafigura and loaded with Russian naphtha. The fire was extinguished on Saturday, with all crew safe.
On Sunday, a drone attack by an Iranian-backed militia killed three U.S. service members and injured at least 40 more at a U.S. military site in Jordan. The Biden administration has vowed to respond, raising the specter of a wider Middle East conflict.
“Red Sea diversions are on the rise as continued attacks on vessels in the region are prompting more shipping companies to avoid transiting the area,” said Jefferies shipping analyst Omar Nokta in a client note on Monday.
The vast majority of larger container ships already avoid the Red Sea, and detours are rapidly spreading to bulk commodity shipping.
Citing data from Clarksons, Nokta said that crude tanker transits of the region are now down 22% versus their 2023 average; at the beginning of this year, they were down 5% from last year’s average. Product tanker transits are down 51% versus 2023, after being down 29% versus last year’s average at the beginning of the year, with liquefied natural gas carrier transits down 87% (from 36%) and liquefied petroleum gas carrier transits down 62% (from 23%).
President Biden’s second week of military strikes against Iran-backed Houthi anti-ship missile bases and continued attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea by the rebels have raised serious concerns about supply bottlenecks jeopardizing global growth.
On Thursday, top container shipper AP Moller-Maersk sent a memo to customers, warning how the global shipping network is fracturing because of the elevated risks in the Red Sea:
“While we hope for a sustainable resolution in the near-future and do all we can to contribute towards it, we do encourage customers to prepare for complications in the area to persist and for there to be significant disruption to the global network.”
Major shipping companies like Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd have diverted hundreds of vessels on lengthier and costlier routes around the Cape of Good Hope to avoid Houthi rebels. Shell was the latest company to suspend all Red Sea shipments earlier this week.
Maersk CEO Vincent Clerc told Reuters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday that global shipping networks will be disrupted for at least a few months:
“So for us this will mean longer transit times and probably disruptions of the supply chain for a few months at least, hopefully shorter, but it could also be longer because it’s so unpredictable how this situation is actually developing.”
The knock-on effects of Red Sea disruptions have pushed companies to rent more vessels, thus reducing capacity, which has increased shipping rates in recent weeks.
“This week saw a scramble for prompt tonnage,” said MB Shipbrokers (formerly Maersk Broker) in a market report on Friday, referring to ships that can be chartered immediately.
Global transport and logistics company Kuehne + Nagel International AG reports more than 100 container ships have been rerouted from the Red Sea around Africa to avoid Iran-backed Houthi militants in Yemen who attack commercial vessels with missiles and drones.
Bloomberg released two headlines early Wednesday detailing Kuehne + Nagel’s update on the Red Sea. The logistics firm said 103 container ships have detoured around the Cape of Good Hope, lengthening travel time by 1 to 2 weeks. It expects the number of detours to rise in the coming days.
For commercial vessels still transiting the vital waterway that connects to the Suez Canal, Bloomberg noted in a separate report that the cost of insuring jumped this week from about .1% to .2% of the hull value to .5%. A $100 million vessel must pay about $500,000 per voyage.
Increased insurance costs plus more extended travel around the Cape of Good Hope only suggest snarled supply chains and increased prices of goods.
“Both options of increased premiums and rerouting around Africa will see a knock-on effect on the price of goods,” said Toby Vallance, Executive Committee Member of the London Forum of Insurance Lawyers.
Euronav NV Chief Executive Officer Alexander Saverys told Bloomberg TV that the disruption in the Red Sea “will slow down the trade because we will have to wait for a convoy to pass through.” The petroleum tanker giant halted shipments through the Red Sea early this week and won’t transit the region unless there are military escorts. Several other major shipping firms stopped traveling through the area this week (read: here).
Called “Operation Prosperity Guardian,” the Pentagon hasn’t released exact details on how it plans to escort commercial vessels through the conflict region. Vincent Clerc, the chief executive of container shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S, said it could take several weeks for the task force to become operational.
Energy-Averaging Systems and Complexity: A Recipe For Collapse
Supply chain disruptions and the product shortages that result have become a growing concern over the past couple of years and the reasons for these are as varied as the people providing the ‘analysis’. Production delays. Covid-19 pandemic. Pent-up consumer demand. Central bank monetary policy. Government economic stimulus. Consumer hoarding. Supply versus demand basics. Labour woes. Vaccination mandates. Union strikes. The number and variety of competing narratives is almost endless.
I have been once again reminded of the vagaries of our supply chains, the disruptions that can result, and our increasing dependence upon them with the unprecedented torrential rain and flood damage across many parts of British Columbia, Canada; and, of course, similar disruptions have occurred across the planet.
Instead of a recognition that perhaps a rethinking is needed of the complexities of our current systems and the dependencies that result from them, particularly in light of this increasingly problematic supply situation, we have politicians (and many in the media) doubling-down on the very systems that have helped to put us in the various predicaments we are encountering.
Our growing reliance on intensive-energy and other resource systems is not viewed as any type of dependency that places us in the crosshairs of ecological overshoot and unforeseen circumstances, but as a supply and demand conundrum that can be best addressed via our ingenuity and technology. Once again the primacy of a political and/or economic worldview, as opposed to an ecological one, shines through in our interpretation of world events; and of course the subsequent ‘solutions’ proposed.
Our dependence upon complex and thus fragile long-distance supply chains (over which we may have little control whatsoever) is not perceived as a consequence of resource constraints manifesting themselves on a finite planet with a growing population and concomitant resource requirements but as a result of ‘organisational’ weaknesses that can be overcome with the right political and/or economic ‘solutions’. Greater centralisation. More money ‘printing’. Increased taxes. Significant investment in ‘green’ energy. Massive wealth ‘redistribution’. Expansive infrastructure construction. Higher wages. Rationing. Forced vaccinations. The proposed ‘solutions’ are almost endless in nature and scope.
All of these ‘solutions’ have one thing in common: they attempt to ‘tweak’ our current economic/political systems. They fail to recognise that perhaps the weakness or ‘problem’ is with the system itself. A system that has built-in constraints that pre/history, and population biology, would suggest result in eventual failure.
Archaeologist Joseph Tainter discusses the benefits and vulnerabilities of ‘energy averaging systems’ (i.e., trade) that contributed to the collapse of the Chacoan society in his seminal text The Collapse of Complex Societies.
He argued that the energy averaging system employed early on took advantage of the Chacoan Basin’s diversity, distributing environmental vagaries of food production in a mutually-supportive network that increased subsistence security and accommodated population growth. At the beginning, this system was improved by adding more participants and increasing diversity but as time passed duplication of resource bases increased and less productive areas were added causing the buffering effect to decline.
This fits entirely with Tainter’s basic thesis that as problem-solving organisations, complex societies gravitate towards the easiest-to-implement and most beneficial ‘solutions’ to begin with. As time passes, the ‘solutions’ become more costly to society in terms of ‘investments’ (e.g., time, energy, resources, etc.) and the beneficial returns accrued diminish. This is the law of marginal utility, or diminishing returns, in action.
As return on investment dropped for those in the Chacoan Basin that were involved in the agricultural trade system, communities began to withdraw their participation in it. The collapse of the Chacoan society was not due primarily to environmental deterioration (although that did influence behaviour) but because the population choose to disengage when the challenge of another drought raised the costs of participation to a level that was more than the benefits of remaining. In other words, the benefits amassed by participation in the system declined over time and environmental inconsistencies finally pushed regions to remove themselves from a system that no longer provided them security of supplies; participants either moved out of the area or relocalised their economies. The return to a more simplified and local dependence emerged as supply chains could no longer provide security.
Having just completed rereading William Catton Jr.’s Overshoot, I can’t help but take a slightly different perspective than the mainstream ones that are being offered through our various media; what Catton terms an ecological perspective. And one that is influenced by Tainter’s thesis: our supply chain disruptions are increasingly coming under strain from our being in overshoot and encountering diminishing returns on our investments in them (and this is particularly true for one of the most fundamental resources that underpin our global industrial societies: fossil fuels).
What should we do? It’s one of the things I’ve stressed for some years in my local community (not that it seems to be having much impact, if any): we need to use what dwindling resources remain to relocalise as much as possible but particularly food production, procurement of potable water, and supplies of shelter needs for the regional climate so that supply disruptions do not result in a massive ‘collapse’ (an additional priority should also be to ‘decommission’ some of our more ‘dangerous’ creations such as nuclear power plants and biosafety labs).
Pre/history shows that relocalisation is going to happen eventually anyways, and in order to avert a sudden loss of important supplies that would have devastating consequences (especially food, water, and shelter), we should prepare ourselves now while we have the opportunity and resources to do so.
Instead, what I’ve observed is a doubling-down as it were of the processes that have created our predicament: pursuit of perpetual growth on a finite planet, using political/economic mechanisms along with hopes of future technologies to rationalise/justify this approach. While such a path may help to reduce the stress of growing cognitive dissonance, it does nothing to help mitigate the coming ‘storms’ that will increasingly disrupt supply chains.
The inability of our ‘leaders’ to view the world through anything but a political/economic paradigm and its built-in short-term focus has blinded them to the reality that we do not stand above and outside of nature or its biological principles and systems. We are as prone to overshoot and the consequences that come with it as any other species. And because of their blindness (and most people’s uncritical acceptance of their narratives) we are rushing towards a cliff that is directly ahead. In fact, perhaps we’ve already left solid ground but just haven’t realised it yet because, after all, denial is an extremely powerful drug.
The El Niño weather pattern has sparked a drought this year across Central America that is creating extreme congestion at the Panama Canal, prompting some ships to turn around and seek alternative routes.
New shipping data from Bloomberg shows two liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) carriers, Pyxis Pioneer and Sunny Bright, recently turned around within 10 miles (16 kilometers) of the canal before sailing away.
Both vessels have a capacity of 158,000 cubic meters of LPG and were en route to major LPG facilities in the US Gulf. Their current destination, however, remains to be determined.
The canal relies on rainwater from Gatun Lake, a nearby artificial reservoir, to feed the lock system. The lack of rainfall this year because of El Nino has led canal authorities to impose draft and sailing restrictions.
One week ago, the Panama Canal Authority (PCA) said October was “the driest since the earliest registers, 73 years ago” and “caused by the El Nino phenomenon continues to impact the Panama Canal’s reservoir system and, as a result, water availability has been reduced.”
PCA has reduced the number of booking slots for vessels to transit the canal from 31 to 25 this month and will be reduced by nearly 30% to 18 by Feb. 1, 2024. In comparison, the maximum number of sustainable bookings is between 38-40 per day.
The most common vessels transiting the crucial waterway are dry bulk, containers, chemicals, and LPG vessels.
While the major supply chain disruptions from the pandemic have declined, new challenges are arising due to the low water levels at the Panama Canal, causing fresh supply chain issues.
Global food prices increased the most in 1.5 years as trade disruptions from the El Nino weather phenomenon battered agricultural-producing countries, and Russia’s exit from a crucial UN-backed agriculture deal stoked supply concerns.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) reported Friday that the global food index, which tracks monthly changes in the international prices of globally-traded food commodities, averaged 123.9 in July, up 1.3% from the previous month.
The FAO Food Price Index’s July print was the largest monthly gain since March 2022.
FAO explained the FAO Vegetable Oil Price subcomponent of the index was responsible for the monthly increase:
The increase was driven by a sharp jump in the FAO Vegetable Oil Price Index, which rose 12.1 percent from June after seven months of consecutive declines. International sunflower oil prices rebounded by more than 15 percent in the month, due mostly to renewed uncertainties surrounding the exportable supplies after the Russian Federation’s decision to end implementation of the Black Sea Grain Initiative. World prices for palm, soy and rapeseed oils increased on concerns over output prospects in leading producing countries.
Also, the FAO All Rice Price Index increased 2.8% on the month and 19.7% on the year due to “India’s 20 July prohibition of non-parboiled Indica exports fostered expectations of greater sales in other origins, amplifying upward pressure already exerted on prices by seasonally tighter supplies and Asian purchases,” the report said.
This upward pressure on rice prices “raises substantial food security concerns for a large swathe of the world population, especially those that are most poor and who dedicate a larger share of their incomes to purchase food,” FAO warned.
A survival garden isn’t a doom’s day garden. It’s a garden built around a mix of permanent agriculture, or permaculture, and annual vegetable and fruit plants. It’s designed to help you avoid supply chain issues, and provide nutritious food for yourself, and your family. It is a garden of abundance.
There are many concerns about supply chain issues, especially after the floods, disasters, and challenges of the past few years. A survival garden is a garden designed to be low maintenance, and high yield. It is a garden built on sustainable principles, with a healthy mix of annual plants and perennial plants. While many survivalist gardeners focus on calories and food yield, calorie dense food can be bland without the addition of herbs for flavor and vegetables for variety and nutrition. Victory gardens are a type of survival garden, with an emphasis on vegetables, but not necessarily calories. (You can read more about victory gardens here). Calories offer energy that is necessary in a survival situation.
Your survival garden should focus on the plants and fruits you enjoy. Maybe the ones that are expensive to procure where you are. Maybe you want to focus on the “dirty dozen” to have the cleanest strawberries, carrots, onions, and garlic possible. This garden can be a vegetable garden, or it can be a permaculture garden, or it can have hybrid elements of both.
I started my garden as an annual vegetable garden with perennial fruit along with culinary and medicinal herbs, but I am slowly adding more and more perennials: Perennial vegetables, fruit trees, nuts, and berries. Every year I add a few more perennial fruit and nuts.
As the price of everything, including debt, continues to soar, life is getting harder and harder for the UK’s heavily indebted businesses.
Business insolvencies in the UK surged by 57% in 2022, to 22,109, according to the latest data from the Insolvency Service, a UK government agency that deals with bankruptcies and companies in liquidation. It is the highest number of insolvencies registered annually since 2009, at the height of the Global Financial Crisis.
Last year “was the year the insolvency dam burst,” said Christina Fitzgerald, the president of R3, the insolvency and restructuring trade body. Insolvencies peaked in the fourth quarter, underscoring the compounding pressures on companies grappling with surging costs and rapidly slowing economic activity.
“Supply-chain pressures, rising inflation and high energy prices have created a ‘trilemma’ of headwinds which many management teams will be experiencing simultaneously for the first time,” Samantha Keen, UK turnround and restructuring strategy partner at EY-Parthenon and president of the Insolvency Practitioners Association (IPA), told the Financial Times. “This stress is now deepening and spreading to all sectors of the economy as falling confidence affects investment decisions, contract renewals and access to credit.”
Other headwinds include soaring interest rates, falling consumer demand, nationwide strikes, lingering Brexit-induced supply chain issues, an epidemic of quiet quitting and both chronic and acutely bad government.
Closest to the Edge
None of this, of course, should come as a surprise. Of all the large economies in Europe, the UK’s is arguably closest to the cliff edge. As newspaper headlines trumpeted this week, the UK economy this year will probably fare worse than Russia’s sanction-hit economy, according to the IMF’s latest forecasts. But then the same could be said of many other European economies, including Germany and Italy.
