On May 13, award-winning author, economist, and alumnus Jeff Rubin (BA ’77 Innis) is back with a bold and provocative new book, A Map of the New Normal: How Inflation, War, and Sanctions Will Change Your World Forever.
Jeff is a world-leading expert on trade and energy. He has been the chief economist and chief strategist at CIBC World Markets and a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance.
The ramifications of international COVID-19 spending could potentially last for decades, and inevitably one of the first manifestations of these consequences will be that central banks will lose control of interest rates, and therefore of growth and inflation targets. That is just the first symptom of a series of cascading upheavals.
Supply-chain disruptions have already shown the vulnerability of the globalist model that has fueled growth for the past decades. War has not only shown the fragility of the status quo, but has revealed diplomatic and economic rifts that promise to shift trading patterns, which means access to markets and to resources.
At the same time, the precarity of the US dollar underlines the life-or-death importance of those resources, energy in particular. And consolidation of a Eurasian bloc, from Russia to China, and encompassing old enemies like Iran and former US ally Saudi Arabia, hint that the upheaval of COVID-19 was just the beginning.
Tracking trade wars and kinetic wars, central banks and runs on banks, pipelines blown up and startups knocked down, A Map of the New Normal gives us a glimpse of a near future that will look very different from the recent past. It reminds us that our mortgage rates and job security, our grocery bills and investments, are all tied to events set in motion by governments, corporations, and black swans around the world.
Jeff Rubin is a Canadian economist and bestselling author. A world-leading expert on trade and energy, and former chief economist and chief strategist at CIBC World Markets, he served as a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance founded by Jim Balsillie. His first book, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller, was a Number 1 bestseller, won the National Business Book Award, and was longlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. Since then, he has written multiple bestsellers, including The End of Growth, The Carbon Bubble, and The Expendables.
Jeff graduated from Innis College in 1977. He lives in Toronto.
Photo of Jeff Rubin, above, by Brian Summers
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