Written by: Jeff Park

Translated by: Saoirse, Foresight News

The global uncertainty index constructed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has recently hit its highest level since its establishment in 2008. There is a lack of clear direction and coordination in policy and trade, market sentiment has significantly worsened since its historical peak, and this trend is likely to further intensify—especially in the Middle East, where the once shaky old global alliance is being drawn into an unprecedented conflict.

At the same time, the accelerated proliferation of exponential technologies like artificial intelligence has left experts and ordinary people increasingly confused: how can deflation driven by productivity be reconciled with a credit-driven inflationary monetary system? To make matters worse, private credit is experiencing an epic collapse, having propped up this fragile capital supply chain by manipulating capital prices at the cost of liquidity.

In the past week alone, we have witnessed a series of events:

• Iran appointed Mojtaba Khamenei as the new Supreme Leader, while oil prices in the U.S. skyrocketed nearly 40%, marking the largest weekly gain since 1983;
• Artificial intelligence company Anthropic sued the U.S. Department of Defense on the grounds of "supply chain risk";
• BlackRock set the redemption cap for its $25 billion direct lending fund at 5%, while investor redemption requests are nearly double that ratio.

No one can accurately predict the direction of these complex issues, as they are unprecedented (notably, the three aforementioned events are not independent of each other, which I will elaborate on later). At such moments, we need to take a step back and clarify the core: it is not about getting bogged down in those unknowns, but anchoring on those facts that you are absolutely certain of, and that are indeed direct causes of the aforementioned events.

As Sherlock Holmes told Watson: "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." Therefore, our task is not to chase elusive unknowns but to root ourselves in those already existing and indisputable fundamental facts.

Based on this thinking, in the coming decade full of uncertainty, I believe there are three certain truths— and their certainty will only become more pronounced at this moment. When I say "certain," I mean these are events with a 100% probability of occurring. The only truly unknown aspects are the specific timing of occurrence and, to some extent, the severity; however, the catalysts for each event are bound to emerge in our lifetime. When we anchor on these indisputable facts, we can transform the pervasive sense of powerlessness into a firm belief in how to respond to the future.

Certain Truth One: The global population pyramid is toppling, and all asset classes built upon it will collapse as well.

In 2019, a statement from the World Economic Forum caused a great shock in institutional consensus: "The population aged 65 and older has surpassed the population under the age of 5 for the first time." Seven years later, after a devastating global pandemic, societies around the world are already feeling the heavy pressure and negative consequences of this trend, and all of this is just beginning.

Global fertility rates are dangerously approaching below replacement level, and in developed markets, this threshold has long been a thing of the past. The combination of declining birth rates and an aging population will create the highest dependency ratio in the history of human civilization. Worse still, the ruling class of the elderly in developed countries will ultimately need to liquidate their assets to fund their ever-lengthening lives. The result will be a grand intergenerational wealth transfer: the financial assets accumulated by an entire generation of aging individuals will have to exit the market through massive liquidity withdrawals.

The scale of this capital is astonishing: the total market capitalization of the U.S. stock market is about $69 trillion (with the Baby Boomer generation holding over $40 trillion), while the U.S. residential real estate market is valued at an additional $50 trillion (despite the Baby Boomer generation and preceding cohorts accounting for less than 20% of the population, they hold over $20-25 trillion in assets). This means nearly $60-70 trillion in wealth needs to withdraw from the capital asset system, while the income-generating capacity of the next younger generation is continuously weakening, and disposable wealth is very limited.

When this generation of aging individuals is finally forced to sell their assets, it will almost inevitably trigger long-term asset deflation.

The underlying logic of the stock market is essentially a reflection of demographic trends: when the cohort of savers accumulates assets steadily and approaches retirement, the market rises. The brutal collapse of "private credit" is the most direct example—this is another $2 trillion "time bomb," lurking in pension funds, endowments, and life insurance companies, masquerading as liquidity transitions for the young, but in reality, it is nearly fraudulent.

However, once the younger generation realizes that they are becoming the "exit liquidity buyers" for their parents' generation, they will choose not to enter the market. No one will voluntarily buy a long-declining asset. This explains why the Trump administration pushed for child investment accounts, why the U.S. is actively promoting stock tokenization (with the aim of allowing foreign capital to more easily take over U.S. stocks), and why registered investment advisors (RIAs) are adopting automated model portfolios en masse while avoiding asking the core question: "Why do this?"

All these initiatives are aimed at delaying the inevitable: when the Baby Boomer generation sells assets at inelastic prices, unless the young generation, foreign capital, or machines are compelled to buy, the market will have no buyers. Just look at the very design of Trump's child accounts: these accounts prohibit any form of diversification, explicitly excluding bonds, international stocks, and alternative investments, allowing only allocations to U.S. stock indices. After turning 18, the account will also convert into an individual retirement account (IRA) with heavy redemption penalties— a stark contrast to the standard Uniform Transfers to Minors Act (UTMA) accounts, which allow for full redemption freedom upon reaching adulthood. It is evident that this is not a wealth appreciation tool designed for children, but a one-way closed channel lasting over 40 years, intentionally or not, aimed at turning an entire generation into "passive exit liquidity" for their predecessors.

This phenomenon will be even more pronounced in the real estate sector, which is at the center of the largest asset bubble in history. One generation has deliberately stockpiled fixed-supply assets over decades, utilizing duration effects to completely sever the connection between housing prices and the potential economic productivity of communities. For most residential and commercial real estate (excluding high-quality assets operating in a different economic system), "affordability" has long been a false proposition. The younger generation, whose wages have never kept pace with home prices, will never buy homes at current prices. For the fortunate ones, many properties will eventually be naturally passed down to their children; if there are no children to inherit, they will ultimately be sold into a market where both the number of home buyers and families are structurally decreasing. Once again, the mathematical logic is cruel and inevitable: significant deflation in real estate is not a question of possibility, but a conclusion of necessity.

To accelerate this liquidity event, the transformation of real estate from an investment asset to a consumption good will create a vicious overlay with rising property taxes— housing prices will increasingly be linked to government expenditure inflation, including public schools, social services, municipal infrastructure, and the overall trend of service costs being generally higher than goods costs. The mere fiscal pressure will compel the market into sell-off behavior that it cannot bear. New York City Mayor Mamdani pushing for higher property taxes is not an isolated case but a harbinger of the grand transaction marking the era of "lazy capital asset taxes"; in cities where wealth inequality has risen to a level where the status quo is politically unsustainable, this trend will be particularly pronounced. This leads to my second certain truth.

Certain Truth Two: Wealth inequality will hit a breaking point, and a wealth tax will become an unforeseen answer.

The aforementioned demographic challenge is essentially a vertical collapse: the population pyramid is slowly toppling, the lower population is shrinking, while the weight of the upper elderly dependency group becomes unbearable. In addition to this vertical demographic collapse, there exists a more troubling horizontal crack globally— income inequality.

When we see headlines like "The top 10% of the global population owns 76% of the world's wealth" (source: United Nations 2022 World Inequality Report), we need to understand a crucial distinction: this is not a story of some countries getting rich first while others lag behind, but a situation occurring within each country globally: the wealth gap is widening everywhere and accelerating across all measurable time dimensions.

More precisely, the issue extends beyond income inequality to wealth inequality. Historically, there has never been such a high proportion of wealth concentrated in the top 1%. In the United States, the share of net worth held by the top 1% continues to rise, currently approaching one-third of the country's total wealth.

The distinction between income and wealth is critical. Income is a transactional concept, or "liquid currency," serving as a market pricing measure of productivity; wealth is not. Non-capital wealth is "static currency": it lacks intrinsic productivity, and in a credit-driven zero-sum game, it slows the velocity of money necessary for economic functioning. When wealth is as highly concentrated as it is today, it stops flowing, and the velocity of circulation supporting broad economic activity quietly suffocates.

In this context, in the absence of significant productivity growth to create new resources, despite the ongoing debates surrounding wealth taxes, they will inevitably become a result of fiscal nihilism. The reason is that the only feasible mechanism for rebalancing this situation is to tax wealth itself— no matter how crude its design or how logically unsound it may be. A wealth tax can be viewed as a mirror of social security: the former takes funds from the bottom to subsidize survival, while the latter takes funds from the top to maintain survival. Both are fundamentally taxes on unrealized value, with the only distinction being direction: the former vertically (i.e., extracting from the young) and the latter horizontally (i.e., extracting from the wealthy).

The process of implementing wealth taxes has already begun. On February 12, 2026, the Dutch House of Representatives passed a landmark bill imposing a uniform 36% tax on the annual appreciation of stocks, bonds, and cryptocurrencies, regardless of whether these assets have been sold. The bill is currently awaiting approval from the Senate, where the supporting parties already hold a majority, making its approval virtually assured. Whether this policy is morally justifiable, mathematically rigorous, or legally enforceable is irrelevant—those who dwell on these issues will completely overlook the larger core. The truly critical question, simple yet far-reaching, is: what will happen when other countries around the globe follow suit?

Consider the birthplace and final bastion of capitalism— the United States. A poll by The New York Times on public attitudes toward wealth taxes shows that, except for college-educated men (a rapidly shrinking demographic), support for wealth taxes is nearly uniform across all population groups.

This is the core of understanding capital "citizenship." People widely believe that the liberalization of capital accounts is an inherent feature of the modern world, but the vulnerable populations know well that when nations choose, capital can be restricted at any time— as evidenced by China, Russia, and others. Historically, the problem has been "betrayal": any single country imposing a wealth tax sees capital simply flow to other jurisdictions. However, as global fiscal nihilism intensifies, the political will of countries is gradually aligning toward a singular choice; collective bargaining arrangements will become inevitable, and those havens that have long profited from the prisoner's dilemma will no longer be allowed to stand aloof.

After the Netherlands made this decision, the EU has been actively coordinating tax frameworks aimed at preventing capital outflows between member states. By the middle of the 21st century, the global passport for capital will be revoked, replaced by a type of "Schrödinger's visa"— effective and ineffective simultaneously in the eyes of different regulators. Local restrictions on capital will only heighten the demand for "external funds" that can circumvent compliance layers. Welcome to the era of price-species economic revival supported by hard currency.

According to the framework proposed by David Hume in his 1752 paper "On the Balance of Trade," modern investors have long taken "external funds" to be assets like gold and bitcoin— assets that are stateless, not tied to any jurisdiction or sovereign. But four centuries later, a new class of "external funds" is emerging, fundamentally redefining the concept of comparative advantage. It is time to write a new paper on international relations: "On Intelligent Balancing."

As Hume stated, trade surpluses and the flow of gold determine a nation’s relative strength; today, the new determinants of comparative advantage will be the concentration of productive AI infrastructure—who controls computing power, who manages data, and who sets the model rules for all other systems to operate. Capital will flow toward intelligent hegemony just as it once did toward manufacturing supremacy. Those countries, institutions, and individuals that grasp this trend early will define a new wealth hierarchy. This leads to my third certain truth.

Certain Truth Three: Artificial intelligence will destroy the relative value of labor and redefine capital value in an intention-driven economy.

Karl Marx described capital in "Capital" as "dead labor, like a vampire, only able to survive by sucking living labor, the more it sucks, the longer it lives." This famous quote highlights the socialist view: capital, which exists in the form of accumulated labor, will continuously appreciate by consuming the living labor of workers.

However, a critical error in Marx's analysis lies in his assumption that capital itself is inherently lifeless and must continuously consume human labor to be profitable. But with the rise of credit and now the explosion of artificial intelligence, we are about to enter an entirely new paradigm— "vampires" that not only possess complete agency but can even bypass human labor, merely requiring continual consumption of kinetic energy to be profitable. As shown in the following graph, the trend of capital income's share rising and labor income's share declining has been brewing for over a decade, and AI will push this trend past an irreversible inflection point.

Since 1980, the proportion of labor income in the U.S. GDP has dropped from about 65% to below 55%, and this was before the widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs). Goldman Sachs has estimated that generative AI may put 300 million full-time jobs at risk of automation.

In other words, artificial intelligence is not merely a capital-intensive technology but also a technology that destroys labor. The rise of AI will permanently alter the underlying economic principles governing social operations, reshaping the irreversible relationship between capital and labor. More specifically, when labor and computing costs converge, a new "capital war" will erupt globally, necessitating unprecedented subsidies and radical industrial and fiscal policies from governments. In this world, capital will reign supreme: asset ownership will become the only barrier between dignity and the permanent underclass. This is the prediction made by the IMF: in an AI-dominated economy, the federal tax base will shift from labor income to corporate income tax and capital gains tax.

However, capital itself will also be redefined— because ownership of assets will no longer be limited to financial assets. The vast AI industry relies on another factor whose value is perhaps more precious and irreplaceable than pure energy: data. Specifically, the data footprint you leave daily provides context for models to infer and learn. The world is moving toward a new paradigm: human thoughts, behaviors, commands, preferences, particularly intentions, will become immensely valuable. When intention itself becomes capital, an entirely different economic order will emerge— asset ownership will exhibit a strange form of "non-custodial," existing outside the framework of the KYC/AML financial institutions that we know. Intelligent agent systems are beginning to be equipped with cryptocurrency wallets, autonomously paying for computing resources, APIs, and data. In a world where value needs to flow seamlessly between intelligent agent systems and preferences are overtly transactional, this is a practical necessity— in which labor and capital will be in a superimposed "Schrödinger state."

Historically, financial assets have always been clearly delineated within the regulatory boundaries set by the SEC, CFTC, FINRA, FASB, and other financial regulatory bodies. But as assets evolve into forms with "active attributes"—your data footprint becomes collateral, and intention becomes a realizable output (pricing models based on consumption will be achieved through open, API-based products embedded in context)— AI systems will blur regulatory boundaries from all directions. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has jurisdiction because your cognitive information is transmitted via spectrum; the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has jurisdiction because intent collection falls under consumer protection; the Department of Defense (DoD) has jurisdiction because data sovereignty is a national security issue.

In other words, this overlay effect does not just stay at the asset level but will also seep up through the entire regulatory system. When no single entity can define clear boundaries for "financial assets," the definition of currency (who issues it, who protects it, who confiscates it) will become the most contentious geopolitical issue of this century.

Welcome to the era of intelligent currency.

Three Certain Truths, Two Convergences, One Conclusion

If you've read this far, you may feel unsettled— perhaps find yourself ensnared once more in immense uncertainty. But remember: the entire purpose of this article is to find clear answers. Let us reaffirm the most core conclusion: the three powers of demographic collapse, wealth inequality, and AI-driven labor substitution will inevitably occur. They are not independent risks to be weighed and hedged separately, but they are logically converging simultaneously. The population pyramid is collapsing vertically, while wealth levels at the bottom are tearing apart, simultaneously amplified by a technological revolution that favors capital.

Many investors attempt to address this uncertainty by responding to local problems with piecemeal solutions: rotating assets here, hedging there, betting on theme investments in AI infrastructure, or clinging to blind hope in cryptocurrencies. The most enticing and likely perspective to keep traditional investors complacent is the rebuttal of technological optimism's "escape pod": that AI-driven productivity growth will rapidly expand the wealth pie enough to surpass the effects of demographic collapse. This view sounds persuasive but is fundamentally a logically misguided diversion from the core.

Throughout human history, the pace of productivity gains and fairness has never been fast enough or sufficient to avoid the political and social divisions provoked by inequality. The Industrial Revolution not only failed to halt labor uprisings but became a trigger for them— even as it created unprecedented aggregate wealth. The key point is that AI is not a neutral productivity multiplier: from its architecture, it is itself a concentration point for capital. Every unit of productivity it creates will first and foremost and most lasting归属于那些掌握算力、数据和模型的人. The optimists are not mistaken in thinking that the wealth pie won't grow; rather, they are mistaken in who will get to eat from that pie— and this is the crux of the entire debate.

When you examine these truly irreversible global phenomena from a sufficiently macro perspective, the unwavering direction becomes surprisingly clear:

• Global population aging and contraction will inevitably worsen, which is 100% certain;
• Wealth inequality will expand to the point of triggering capital restrictions globally— whether across borders or domestically, this is also 100% certain;
• AI will structurally favor capital, spawning a new type of transitional capital that the global economy has never seen before, which is also 100% certain.

Most critically, the common core characteristic of these three points points to one word: global. Intergenerational population structures, asset allocations, capital costs, have never been as highly correlated as they are now in history, and this correlation is continually strengthening. Additionally, this correlation spans not only space but time— because the evolution of wealth's population structure is unilateral and irreversible. This means that this convergence is not only global but also synchronous.

In summary, this forms what I see as the most core collective bargaining issue of the modern century: the intergenerational exit from the liquidity prisoner's dilemma. It raises the following questions:

• When the younger generation also feels that the government's directive is to "take over the liquidity from their parents," will they voluntarily participate in "the ownership of American capitalism"?
• When wealthy friends turn to "tax-efficient" planning, will the top wealthy voluntarily assume high tax burdens?
• When profit-driven competitors ignore capital costs and continue to expand, will AI companies voluntarily slow their development pace?

A Nash equilibrium will thus form: all participants will choose to betray this rationally dominant strategy— regardless of what others choose, because the cost of inaction is too heavy. Thus, when critical moments arrive, everyone will rationally seek to exit liquidity simultaneously.

This Faustian deal of liquidity must not be seen as a potential risk or a tail risk that needs hedging or modeling, but rather as the most predictable large-scale collaborative event in the history of human capital markets. Some may suggest that in a deflationary environment, you should hold nominal interest-bearing instruments like bonds, or take advantage of ascending AI stocks. Perhaps that is so. But my core principle is simpler and more structural: you need to hold assets that will not compel you to become someone else's exit liquidity buyer. Within this framework, the assets you should least hold are, in order: real estate, bonds, U.S. stocks. These are all manipulated tools of duration that, whether designed intentionally or not, stand as the most significant intergenerational wealth predation in history.

In contrast, your ideal assets should simultaneously meet three opposing conditions:

1. Currently have the lowest holding rate in the population structure, but are expected to become the highest holding rate asset in the future;
2. Are the most likely to become a safe haven without jurisdiction when capital liquidity is heavily taxed, restricted, or confiscated;
3. Are the closest to a capital form that can seamlessly replace human labor with productive functions in an autonomous intelligent world without intermediaries.

When the Ottoman Empire breached the walls of Constantinople in the 15th century, the Byzantine merchant class lost all assets valued in imperial credit: land, titles, government bonds. None were spared. But those young and ambitious scholars and enterprising merchants migrated their portable wealth— manuscripts, gold, knowledge— west to Florence, eventually igniting what would later be termed the Renaissance.

Among this group was a young Byzantine scholar named Johannes Bessarion. Born in Trabzon on the Black Sea in 1403, he fled Constantinople with boxes of irreplaceable Greek manuscripts that contained nearly the entirety of the ancient world's intellectual heritage. He was the person who provided the most books and manuscripts to the West in the 15th century, thereby creating one of the earliest forms of "information technology": the Marciana Library— the first open-source knowledge repository in Latin European history (i.e., a public library). This collection, housed in Venice, became the direct material for Aldus Manutius. He printed the complete works of Aristotle and dozens of Greek classics, triggering the printing revolution, which subsequently catalyzed the Reformation, Scientific Revolution, and Enlightenment. The movable, autonomous, jurisdiction-free capital that Bessarion carried with him ultimately nurtured Western civilization across five centuries.

The capital that can traverse time and space will survive; that which cannot will face extinction.

This leads to our ultimate conclusion— the only radical decision worth considering in the face of numerous traditional choice traps:

What you truly need to hold is nomadic capital. This capital can migrate freely within intergenerational population structures, political boundaries, and the native ecology of artificial intelligence; it can bypass the monetary "Strait of Hormuz." In the 21st century, nomadism is digital. Specific investment tools vary among individuals; radical investment theory provides a feasible framework: allocate 60% compliant assets and 40% risk-averse assets. But if you make prudent decisions strictly following the three aforementioned conditions— holding assets that will be needed by the younger generation, holding assets that governments find difficult to touch, holding assets that are tradable in an autonomous economic system— the outcome will no longer be a prediction, but a necessity. Uncertainty will ultimately be transformed into a constant.

After all, throughout history, there has only been one disruptive asset that has simultaneously satisfied these three conditions from the moment of its inception in code. For those with high agency, this step is already sufficiently simple.

The rest is merely a matter of timing.