Economic security

George Friedman: A US Recession Is Imminent, So Watch Germany

“We have to wait for Germany to make its move,” George Friedman declared at the 2017 CFA Institute European Investment Conference.

Friedman, the founder and chair of Geopolitical Futures, has a history of being right when others are wrong and being predictive when others are reactive. He has spent his career navigating the convergence of geography with history, politics, economics, and societal imperatives.

In his presentation to financial professionals in Berlin, he explained that “there is one last piece” of the global financial crisis that must play out “before we can move on.”

Friedman challenged the definition of “normal” for the global financial system. “The period between 1991 and 2008 was an anomaly,” he said. A growing interdependence among nations, along with an unprecedented degree of connectedness, eroded the safeguards that had protected individual countries from the global crises of the past.

As Friedman sees it, individual nations had built and configured their banking and legal systems for their own interest and benefit — and for their own protection. That work was abandoned “in an interesting fantasy that nations are not relevant.”