Our unregulated global marketplace is a fantastic conduit for warfare since it is...
- extremely complex (nobody understands it, least of all economists),
- tightly coupled (information travels at the speed, measured in milliseconds, of programmed trading),
- highly leveraged (perched precariously on a mountain of debt),
- and vast (more than two orders of magnitude larger than the US government, aka add two zeros to the end of any metric of measurement).
Better than all of the above, in a blindingly fast transition to relativism over the last few decades, the global marketplace is now completely dominated by participants without a moral compass. These participants are completely free of any internal constraints on behavior and hold wealth as the only true metric of success. The only constraint on means is: don't get caught (although the current permissive environment of regulatory and ideological capture makes this VERY unlikely).
As a result of the marketplace's characteristics and the shift in participant behavior, small actions aimed at disrupting and materially harming countries, corporations, and industries is now aided and abetted by the marketplace. Even a small amount of disruptive contagion that:
- increases risk/uncertainty,
- reduces prospects for long term profitability,
- and reduces trust
can rapidly spread throughout the market system, jumping from specialized market to market through complex mutual interdependencies. Worse, market participants will amplify these negative changes in attempts to make money regardless of the consequences, generating positive feedback loops that push and hold markets in turbulent territory.
They key takeaway for those interested in 21st Century warfare is this: the global marketplace, like the Internet, is your friend/ally. Don't disrupt it directly, use it to amplify disruption. Learning how to do this effectively is the way to convert the returns on investment (ROI) from vanilla systems disruption from millions to one into billions or trillions to one.
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