Why I don't think there can be a prolonged financial crisis.
Previously I wrote about:
- Gross Consent Product (GCP) - Treat a nation's aggregate "consent" as a measurable stock like GDP.
Consent is the cheapest enforcement input; when it's scarce, systems spend more on tech + law (think Palantir, Microsoft).
Here is a GCP (Gross Consent Product) - pre-Covid vs now table (directional, on a 0–100 scale).
| Region | 2019 (pre-Covid) | 2025 (now) |
| --------------------------- | -----------------------: | ----------------: |
| **United States | **60–65** | **40–45** |
| **United Kingdom | **55–60** | **35–40** |
| **EU core** | **55–65** | **35–45** |
| **Japan** | **65–70** | ** ~55** |
Before Covid: higher institutional trust, fewer emergency decrees, lower protest/strike cadence, less policy after-burn in 2019.
The inverse is true today.
* (China/Gulf are different beasts: consent is manufactured; enforcement is baseline, not a response.)
We’re in a low Gross Consent Product (GCP) regime. The realistic "resolution" isn't a return to high consent; it's institutionalizing control surfaces so that consent is less necessary.
If GCP doesn't lift - and there's no sign it will soon, the environment favors platforms that (1) fuse data, (2) encode policy as parameters, and (3) emit auditable decisions - Palantir first among them, with Microsoft as the compliance default.
Low consent + modern toolkits make long recessions politically too costly.
In a low consent environment, Governments prefer:
- Soft landings manufactured via liquidity windows, swap lines, fiscal patches
- A sharp shock used to justify new rails/controls; fast backstops prevent cascade.
Why the odds of a prolonged financial crisis in a low consent environment are low
- Long pain pushes people to off-system solutions (parallel money, shadow rails). They keep the crisis short enough to sell the solution, not long enough to birth alternatives.
- The high-probability path is a short, intense shock engineered to make the "new rails" look inevitable and desirable, then a quick pivot to stability with the ratchet left in place.
What the solution window looks like (Problem -> Reaction -> Solution)
1) Problem (day 0–7): spike in spreads, ETF discounts, funding breaks.
2) Reaction (week 1–3): guarantee tranches (deposits/collateral), facility on-ramps, selective short bans/uptick rules.
3) Solution (weeks 2–8): programmable rails pushed: tokenized deposits/stablecoin corridors, KYC wallet incentives, identity-bound disbursements; standards harmonized.
4) Ratchet (months 2–9): pilots become defaults, reporting hardens, emergency powers linger.
So my Base case (most likely) is: Acute/managed crisis 2–8 weeks.
The financial crisis has to be just long enough for people to start reacting and asking for the solution, but not long enough for people to start looking for the solution on their own.
Likely crisis triggers they'd use (or not waste)
- Collateral shock: Treasury market dysfunction.
- Payments shock: stablecoin depeg -> "need safer digital cash".
- Cyber/settlement incident: "operational resilience" -> centralized rules.
