China

This will be the biggest challenge for developed nations over the next hundred years: depopulation.

Expect strange things to happen in the western world and developed nations in Asia over the next fifty years --  marked by unusual foreign policy moves --  and a craven, almost desperate clamoring for middle eastern, south american and african migrants to replace their withering and decadent societies.

Why?

Credit expansion, or at a minimum, stasis.

Over three years ago, in November 2013, when the world's attention was still largely focused on what the "Big 4" central banks would do with QE and/or interest rates, we wrote an article showing in one simple chart  "How In Five Short Years, China Humiliated The World's Central Banks", and noted that in just the brief period since the financial crisis "Chinese bank assets (and by implication liabilities) have grown by an astounding $15 trillion, bringing the total to over $24 trillion.

One and a half years after the Chinese government violently burst the stock market bubble, leading the massive losses among retail investors, and months after China's third housing bubble since the financial crisis appeared to have peaked, also China has found itself with yet another hot-money funded bubble: commodities.

Ye Jianming isn’t a name that rings many bells... yet. But, according to SCMP, it will, considering what he’s achieved so far in a country where the state firms take all. As Fortune recently wrote, when it ranked Ye #2 in its "40 Under 40" list, he runs a $42-billion-a-year oil business in China, (No. 229 on the Fortune Global 500), yet few in China know anything about the mysterious tycoon or the firm he created, CEFC.

One month ago, in delightful, if anticipated, confirmation that much if not all of China's data has been cooked and fabricated as so many skeptics suspected, we reported that according to the People's Daily, the rust-belt province of Liaoning had admitted to fabricating fiscal numbers from 2011 to 2014.