Ray CNBC Squawk Box Singapore - The 5 Big Forces

Over my 50 years, sometimes I've been surprised, often I suppose, um, by things that never happened before my lifetime. But when I studied history, I found they happened many times in history. Three forces that drew my attention and led me to study history were the enormous amount of debt that is being created by governments and monetized by central banks. Those magnitudes have never existed in my lifetime, so I went back and studied that.

The second force is the force of populism, of the left and the right, the political situation where we have now irreconcilable differences over wealth and values gaps. So we have a very important political election coming up. The third, of course, is the great power conflict. The world order, it used to be dominated—it's always dominated—by the winning power in the war, and then you come to the point where a rising power challenges.

We have this great geopolitical conflict, which of course affects us in many ways. Through that exercise of studying the last 500 years, because I needed to study the rises and declines of reserve currencies, I also saw that number four and number five, of course in importance, was that um, climate and drought, floods and pandemics have actually killed more people and toppled more orders than the first three I mentioned, and of course, that's a big influence now.

Number five, uh, throughout history, the Industrial Revolution and so on, has been technology, man's inventiveness of technology. So when we look at those five forces, any conversation we're going to have will be related to that. Any one of those forces we can drop into those forces, but the interrelationships of those forces is very important.

For example, the cost of climate R, roughly 8 trillion dollars a year, uh, is 8% of world GDP. So these relate to each other, and they tend to transpire in a cycle. Okay, there's a debt cycle, there's a geopolitical cycle, and so on. So those are the five forces.