"Globalization Has Failed" Declaration By USA = MASSIVE Change Is Ahead | Michael Every

**Michael Every** (0:00)
What we call the liberal world order, which was not liberal, it wasn't the whole world and it wasn't very orderly, but that's what we like to call it, really is being reinvented in real time. And that means massive structural change in almost every dimension of our lives.

**Adam Taggart** (0:24)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. Today's guest predicted years in advance the shift away from globalization towards mercantilism by the world's major countries. With nationalist leaders rising to power over recent years and the US officially declaring at Davos last month that, quote, globalization has failed, what does he see coming next? Well, to find out, let's ask the man himself. We're very fortunate to sit down again today with Michael Every, global strategist at Rabobank. Michael, thanks so much for joining us all the way from Thailand.

**Michael Every** (0:59)
Oh, it's always a pleasure to be here and talking with you, Adam.

**Adam Taggart** (1:02)
Same here, my friend. It has been too long since we last talked. You look great. I'm just an avid follower of yours. You're doing great work out there. And as I said in the intro, you're the man who kind of called all this years in advance, a decade or more in advance.
And you have been validated 20 times over in the past recent years here. I think anybody who had any doubts pretty much about your shift from globalization to mercantilism worldwide, those doubts died on Liberation Day last year. So I'm very curious to hear your latest update on where things are going geopolitically. And I don't even really know where to start, Michael. I mean, we could start with the US and Greenland and Venezuela and the Don Roe Doctrine. We could talk about Canada starting to cozy up to China. We could talk about potential regime change in Iran, maybe the rebuilding of Gaza. We could talk about the potential for a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire, maybe even peace this year. Where do you want to start? In your view, what are the most important geopolitical trends going on right now?

**Michael Every** (2:16)
Well, thank you first of all for those very kind words and for remembering that I was saying these kind of things all those years ago, because you know what it's like in markets. Nobody saw it coming and then everybody saw it coming.
You've perfectly underlined just how difficult this kind of role is, because we didn't even talk about the Japanese election, which of course is significant and needs to be up there on the list too. And I will come to it. But I think the best way to address this, and it's what I try and do, is to look at the fundamental principles that are still playing out and which everything else then slot into. So all of the actions and reactions that you just described, and many others, are all a function of the fact that yes, what we call the liberal world order, which was not liberal, it wasn't the whole world, and it wasn't very orderly, but that's what we like to call it, really is being reinvented in real time. And that means massive structural change in almost every dimension of our lives around us, parallel with technological change, which is happening alongside it, as is often the way these things go historically. And so we can zoom in on any one of those touch points and see how they link to all the others, how they reflect it, how they amplify it, how they exacerbate it. But all of them are part of that same totality. It's extremely rare that you can point to any one global issue and say, this is happening just in a box, and it may be of interest or it may not, but what happens there won't flow back to affect everything else. So having given that particular introduction, why don't we actually talk about that Japanese election and start with that one? Go for it. OK, cool. So here in Asia, at time of recording, we've just had the election results from Japan. And Takeiichi, a former heavy metal drummer, female heavy metal drummer, so two pretty rare things in Japan and in politics in general, has now established herself firmly as like the Margaret Thatcher or the Iron Lady of Asia. She won such a comprehensive election victory that actually they had to turn down some seats within their electoral system, where they have a party list system, which allocates candidates based on what percentage share of the vote you get. And they got such a high percentage share of the vote, they ran out of candidates. So I believe it was 13 seats had to be given to opposition parties, just because there was no one left from her liberal democratic party to be allocated a seat. That's the scale of her victory. It's the largest post World War II. So people are probably thinking, why does that matter? Who cares about Japanese politics? Most of the time, we can't even remember who the Japanese prime minister is. And that's a fair comment.