‘The book explores the close link between technological changes on the one side and our dangerous addiction to debt on the other. I described it as a Fujiwara Effect (or two hurricanes merging and reinforcing each other). Technological evolution is the outgrowth of human ingenuity but its pace critically depends on the cost of capital. The lower the cost of capital, the faster technologies proliferate. The book traces the beginning of our modern debt addiction to declining productivity, which started to impact Western societies from the late 1970s and the rest of the world over the last ten-to-fifteen years. Bringing future consumption to the present through ever-higher debt and using assets and leverage emerged as the only socially acceptable political compromise. But, our desire for wealth and perpetual growth has many highly toxic side effects. I explore these deformities, from income and wealth inequalities to proliferation of zombie companies, from erosion of marginal pricing power of labour to strong disinflationary pressures with Central Banks emerging as slaves of their own system. The Fujiwara effect (or merger of technology and financialization) is accelerating our descent towards the event frontier and the Black Hole.’
