2025: The Year Ahead

It is never easy to predict what is going to happen in the next twelve months, and very rarely do the best efforts of economists, sociologists and market pundits of all stripes get it all right (you can generally toss away all those specific numbers the big banks and securities firms come up with about where the S&P 500 or Nikkei 225 will be come New Year’s Eve 2025, and they will all be revised multiple times anyway between now and then).

It is especially hard this year, because the world is in a profound state of transition. What we have more or less accepted as the norms of what is still quaintly called the “postwar order” – the war in question having ended eighty years ago in 1945 – no longer seem to be the permanent backdrop for the shorter-term cycles of economic, social and political ebbs and flows. Nor is there anything like a clear-cut “new order” in anyone’s line of sight; what we are going through instead is a transition on many levels.