The Global Uncertainty Index, constructed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), has recently reached its highest level since its inception in 2008. A lack of clarity and coordination in policy and trade has significantly deteriorated market sentiment—and this trend is highly likely to intensify further, especially in the Middle East, where a previously fragile global alliance is being drawn into an unprecedented conflict.

Meanwhile, the accelerating adoption of exponential technologies—such as artificial intelligence—is leaving both experts and ordinary people increasingly bewildered: How can productivity-driven deflation be reconciled with a credit-driven inflationary monetary system? Compounding the crisis, private credit is undergoing an epic collapse—having previously propped up this fragile capital supply chain by manipulating capital prices at the expense of liquidity.

Just over the past week, we’ve witnessed a cascade of events: Iran appointed Mojtaba Khamenei as its new Supreme Leader; U.S. crude oil prices surged nearly 40%, marking the largest weekly gain since 1983; AI company Anthropic sued the U.S. Department of Defense citing “supply chain risk”; and BlackRock capped redemptions from its $25 billion direct-lending fund at 5%, while investor redemption requests were nearly double that limit.

No one can precisely forecast how these complex issues will unfold—because they are unprecedented. At such a moment, we must step back and refocus on fundamentals: not obsessing over the unknown, but anchoring ourselves to what we know for certain—facts that are direct, undeniable causes of the very events unfolding before us. As Sherlock Holmes told Dr. Watson: “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

Guided by this principle, I believe there are three certain truths that will define the next decade of uncertainty—and their certainty will only grow more pronounced in the present moment. By “certain,” I mean events with a 100% probability of occurrence. The only genuine unknowns are their precise timing—and, to some extent, their severity.

Certain Truth #1: The global population pyramid is inverting—and every asset class built upon it will collapse accordingly. In 2019, the World Economic Forum issued a statement that sent shockwaves through institutional consensus: “For the first time in history, the number of people aged 65 and older exceeded the number of children under age 5.” Seven years later, societies worldwide are already feeling the heavy pressure and adverse consequences of this trend—and this is only the beginning.

Global fertility rates are perilously approaching—and in many regions falling below—the replacement level. The convergence of declining birth rates and aging populations will produce the highest dependency ratio in human history. Worse still, aging ruling elites in advanced economies will ultimately need to monetize liquidity to finance ever-lengthening lifespans. The result is a massive intergenerational wealth transfer: the financial assets accumulated by an entire aging generation must exit markets en masse via large-scale liquidity withdrawals.

When this aging cohort is finally forced to sell assets, prolonged asset deflation will almost certainly follow. The stock market’s underlying logic is, at its core, merely a reflection of demographic trends: markets rise when the cohort of savers accumulating assets steadily grows toward retirement. The catastrophic collapse of “private credit” is the most direct evidence of this—it lurks within pensions, endowments, and life insurance companies, disguised as liquidity conversion for younger generations, yet bordering on fraud.

This phenomenon will be even more pronounced in real estate—the epicenter of the largest asset bubble in history. One generation has deliberately hoarded fixed-supply assets for decades, leveraging duration effects to completely decouple home prices from the underlying economic productivity of communities. A generation whose wages have persistently failed to keep pace with housing costs will not buy homes at today’s prices. Significant real estate deflation is not a possibility—it is an inevitability.

Certain Truth #2: Wealth inequality will reach a breaking point—and wealth taxation will emerge as the unanticipated solution. Beyond the demographic challenge lies an even more alarming horizontal fissure: income inequality. Never before in human history has such a high proportion of wealth been concentrated in the top 1% of the population. When wealth becomes this concentrated, it ceases to flow—and the velocity of consumption sustaining broad-based economic activity quietly suffocates.

In this context—and absent significant productivity growth to generate new resources—wealth taxation, despite ongoing controversy, will inevitably become the fiscal corollary of monetary nihilism. A wealth tax can be viewed as the mirror image of social security: the latter extracts funds from the bottom to subsidize survival; the former extracts funds from the top to sustain survival. The rollout of wealth taxation has already begun: the Dutch House of Representatives passed legislation imposing a flat 36% annual tax on unrealized gains from stocks, bonds, and cryptocurrencies.

By mid-century, capital’s global passport will be revoked—replaced by a “Schrödinger visa.” Local capital restrictions will only increase demand for “offshore capital” capable of bypassing compliance layers. The new determinant of comparative advantage will be the concentration of productive AI infrastructure—who controls compute, who owns data, and who sets the model rules governing all other systems.

Certain Truth #3: Artificial intelligence will destroy labor’s relative value—and redefine capital’s value in an intent-driven economy. Karl Marx argued capital must continuously consume human labor to generate profit—but with the explosion of AI, we’re entering a new paradigm where the “vampire” is not only fully agentic, but can bypass human labor entirely, profiting solely by consuming energy. AI is not just capital-intensive—it is labor-destroying.

AI’s rise will permanently alter the foundational economic principles governing society, irreversibly reshaping the relationship between capital and labor. In this world, capital reigns supreme: asset ownership becomes the sole barrier between dignity and permanent underclass status. This is precisely what the IMF forecasts—that in an AI-dominated economy, the federal tax base will shift away from labor income toward corporate income tax and capital gains tax.

When no single institution can clearly define the boundaries of “financial assets,” the definition of money itself will become the century’s most contested geopolitical issue. Welcome to the era of intelligent money.

Taken together, this forms what I see as the modern century’s central collective bargaining problem: the intergenerational liquidity prisoner’s dilemma. A Nash equilibrium will emerge: all participants will rationally choose to defect—because the cost of inaction is simply too high. Thus, at the critical inflection point, everyone will rationally seek liquidity exit simultaneously.

You should hold only those assets that won’t force you to become the liquidity buyer-of-last-resort for others’ exits. Under this framework, the assets you should least hold—ranked in order—are: real estate, bonds, and U.S. equities. Conversely, your ideal asset must satisfy three inverse criteria:
1) It currently has the lowest ownership rate across demographic cohorts—but is poised to achieve the highest future ownership rate;
2) It is most likely to serve as a jurisdictionally neutral safe haven when capital liquidity is heavily taxed, restricted, or confiscated;
3) It most closely approximates the capital form that autonomous intelligent systems will seamlessly use—without intermediaries—to replace human labor in delivering productive functions.

What you truly need to hold is nomadic capital: capital that migrates freely across generational demographics, political borders, and AI-native ecosystems. In the 21st century, nomadism is digitization. If you rigorously apply these three criteria to your decisions, the outcome ceases to be a forecast—it becomes inevitable. Uncertainty crystallizes into certainty. After all, history has produced only one disruptive asset that—from its very first line of code—satisfied all three conditions.

[Foresight News]