Readers will be able to add to the list. In each case, we were assured the world had changed dramatically and permanently. In each case, it didn’t, though to be fair the jury is still out on AI and the new world order.
Has received wisdom always been so excitable, so volatile? Or is it the result of faster communications and greater media competition? The idea that “we live in special times” is not new, but a well-established cognitive fallacy, closely related to the mistaken notion that “the future has never been so uncertain”. Maybe, however, there were not as many opportunities previously to indulge it.
Whatever, the key investment point – apologies for the repetition – is that such proclamations are usually best kept at arm’s length. “Don’t just do something, stand there”, indeed.
In this latest alleged paradigm shift, a postwar world in which a collectivist “East” (China, Russia, North Korea, Cuba) faced an individualist “West” (Europe and the US), is said to be transforming, at President Trump’s hands, into a world of “East”, “America” and “Europe”. (This is of course an oversimplification, with lots of countries not fitting neatly into any of these blocs, and much collectivism has been reversed.)
On this reading, to a dedicated geopolitical analyst, a relatively predictable, stable “two-body problem” may have become a potentially chaotic “three body problem” (as per the physics of gravitational attraction, in which the addition of an extra body results in indeterminacy, and no single solution). This could indeed be a new world for them.
But the world of investing, as we note so often, has many, many moving parts to begin with. It is always potentially chaotic and indeterminate, with the existence of multiple solutions or none always readily imaginable. It is also an impersonal world: many of the things which concern us as voters and citizens do not directly affect the global economy or discount rates (world trade, for example, seems to have been still growing healthily in late 2025). Our world, then, may not face such a transformation – if the geopolitical world order has indeed changed to begin with.
Because as suggested above, it may not have. As we have said so often – and to be clear, this does not mean that we are fans – Mr Trump uses words differently to other public figures. He raises serious issues, but his comments are not always to be taken literally. He can be provocative, capricious, inconsistent – you can almost see him thinking, at the Davos lectern, how far he can stretch the point he is making to best annoy his listeners. And European listeners in particular are not slow to take offence.
Policy-wonks grappling with the end of the “rules-based-order” may be worrying prematurely. Not that they told us that those were the “good old days” at the time.
We read that Mr Trump’s America still seems to be engaging with the Middle East, for example, and that his tariffs – when he has finally decided what they will be anyway – are far from fixed points in a newly autarkic and insular new world (and if that world is indeed so autarkic, why is world trade not more profoundly affected yet?). November’s mid-term elections seem set to reduce his authority, and the Democrats may yet find a credible presidential candidate by 2028 – not that Mr Trump can stand again anyway.
For sure, not all “paradigm shifts” will be non-events. But if/when the world order – if there is such a thing – changes, we may not hear about it first in our favourite broadsheets, magazines and podcasts. And other things may continue to matter more.
Conclusion? Our portfolio advice continues to focus more on the evolving business cycle – in particular, on the outlook for interest rates and earnings growth – than on this latest reported new world. There’ll be another one along shortly anyway.
