Welcome to the Jungle

Every major candidate in 2016 is running against trade. Every central banker is cutting rates and weakening currency. Every institution is moving in the same direction at once, not because they coordinated, but because they have no choice. The shift from global cooperation to global competition isn't a policy debate. It's a structural inevitability, and it changes everything about how the next phase unfolds.

• Global trade is no longer positive-sum. Debt and inequality have flipped incentives. Nations now benefit from defection instead of cooperation. This isn't accidental. It's the predictable outcome of conditions that triggered protectionism in the 1870s and 1930s.

• Central bankers have lost control of outcomes but not process. Each rate cut and currency devaluation triggers responses from others. It's a spiral where rational moves collectively make things worse, yet stopping means immediate defeat.

• Currency intervention has become the primary weapon of national self-interest. It hits export competitiveness immediately. The problem is that when everyone does it, they're fighting over a shrinking pie instead of growing it together.

• China is in an existential position that forces escalation. Slowing exports and trade dependence mean they can't afford restraint. At some point they'll go all-in through yuan devaluation, triggering atomic deflationary pressure.

• Negative rates in the US aren't what the Federal Reserve wants. They're what it must do. Once one central bank introduces a strategy, all others must follow or lose immediately. The comparison to mortgage securitization in 2008 is apt, not reassuring.