Between roughly 1990 and the mid-2010s, the global economy operated under a coherent, mutually reinforcing macroeconomic policy framework -- fiscal discipline, independent inflation-targeting central banks, deep trade globalisation, and open capital markets -- known in its stability dimension as the Great Moderation. This paper argues that the world is not experiencing a sequence of unrelated shocks (the Global Financial Crisis, the eurozone debt crisis, COVID-19, the 2021-2023 inflation surge, the return of great-power competition) but a structural transition from one internally consistent policy regime to another, driven by the accumulation of vulnerabilities beneath decades of apparent stability, the exhaustion of globalisation-driven disinflationary tailwinds, and a shift toward security-maximising statecraft. It traces this evolution chronologically and sets out four long-term scenarios for how the transition may resolve, laying the foundation for the nine research papers that follow in this series.
23 July 2026 · 42 min read