The Oil Shock and the Coming Reset: A Dire Forecast
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In 1973, the world learned a terrible lesson. A 7 percent cut in global oil supplies, lasting barely six months, triggered a decade of economic agony. Stagflation—that crippling marriage of high inflation and high unemployment—took root across the industrialised West. Factories closed. Workers walked the streets. Governments lurched from one emergency to another, powerless to stop the bleeding. The 1973 oil shock was a small wound that became gangrenous. It was a warning that the modern world had built itself on a foundation of cheap energy, and that any interruption to that flow would produce consequences wildly disproportionate to the physical trigger.
That was then. This is now. And the lesson has not been learned.
The current war between the United States, Israel, and Iran has severed the Strait of Hormuz, a choke point for twenty to twenty-five percent of the world’s oil and gas. By early April of this year, roughly 17.7 million barrels of daily seaborne supply—approximately 17 percent of global demand—had been cut off. The Bab al-Mandab strait is threatened. Refineries lie damaged across the region. Production fields are landlocked, their output trapped behind closed straits and damaged infrastructure. Even if the fighting stopped tomorrow morning, restoring full flow would take months, perhaps years. Energy logistics do not work like a spigot. Tanks must be cleared. Routes must be re-established. Supply chains, once broken, do not simply snap back into place.
The consequences of this shock are already baked in. Not possible. Not likely. Baked in.
To understand why, we have to go back to 2008. When the financial system nearly collapsed, the proper response would have been a cleansing: debt write-downs, bank failures, a sharp but necessary recession that cleared out the rot. Instead, central banks chose zero interest rates and unlimited quantitative easing. They inflated asset bubbles, propped up zombie companies, and pushed global debt from $150 trillion to over $300 trillion. They forestalled the correction. For fifteen years, they refused to let the system cleanse itself. Now the system will cleanse itself anyway.
The current oil shock has landed on a system with no ammunition left. Interest rates are already low. Balance sheets are already bloated. Debt is everywhere, and nowhere more so than in the sovereign bonds of major economies. Some economists—not doomsayers, but serious modellers like Steve Keen, Michael Hudson, and Nouriel Roubini—believe the coming downturn could exceed the Great Depression. In the 1930s, debt was largely private and could be defaulted upon. Banks failed, yes, but the underlying productive capacity remained. Today, debt is sovereign, corporate, household, and shadow-banking intertwined. A cascade would cross borders instantly. There is no gold standard to re-anchor currencies. There is no Bretton Woods waiting in the wings. There is only a brittle, over-leveraged, profoundly fragile system about to be hit by an energy shock unlike anything the world has ever seen.
The 1970s comparison is actually optimistic. Because the 1970s did not have a coordinated elite planning to use the crisis for a permanent restructuring of money and power.
Let us step back for a moment, because the deeper background matters. Before primitive accumulation, before the enclosures, before the theft of the commons that created the modern world, human beings lived differently. The anthropological record is clear: for the vast majority of our existence, we lived in cooperative, gift-based economies. Not utopias—there was conflict, scarcity, hierarchy—but the baseline assumption was shared access to the means of survival. Land, water, game, shelter: these were common goods, not commodities. The band made decisions together. Surplus was shared. The idea that one person could own the land under another person’s feet would have been incomprehensible.
Primitive accumulation changed all of that. It was the original sin: the seizure of the commons by a minority, enforced by violence and codified by law. It created a class of landless, propertyless people who had no choice but to sell their labour to survive. Feudalism, capitalism, colonialism, industrialisation—all of these have been the working-out of that initial theft. Each crisis has been a further consolidation. Each depression, each famine, each war has been used to concentrate wealth and power into fewer hands.
The anarchist tradition, from Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid to the contemporary commons movements, has correctly identified that humans are capable of horizontal, cooperative organisation. The historical record supports them. Stateless societies functioned for millennia. The problem is not human nature. The problem is scale and capture. We have built a world of eight billion people that requires massive, centralised systems. Those systems have been captured. The anarchist prescription—build parallel institutions, opt out, create the new in the shell of the old—is beautiful and true at the village scale. It does not work for Shanghai, Lagos, or São Paulo. It does not feed cities. The anarchist critique is correct. The anarchist solution is insufficient. This is the tragedy at the heart of any hope for a decentralised alternative.
Now consider 2020. The global response to the COVID-19 pandemic was a full-spectrum dress rehearsal for the crisis now unfolding. Lockdowns, vaccine passports, emergency stimulus, digital contact tracing, the suspension of normal political process—every measure tested in 2020 translates directly to the management of a financial collapse. The infrastructure tested during the pandemic remains in place. Digital ID systems, centralised health databases, mass acceptance of surveillance and tracking—none of this was dismantled. It was mothballed. It is waiting for its next emergency. And the next emergency has arrived.
Whether or not you believe in a single cabal with a fifty-year plan, the observable behaviour of central banks, the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements, and forums like Bilderberg and the World Economic Forum converges toward the same outcome. A post-crisis monetary reset built on digital infrastructure. Central bank digital currencies. Digital identity. Programmable money. These are not speculative technologies. They are ready. They are deployed in pilot programs across dozens of countries. The technical standards have been written. The legal frameworks have been drafted. The only missing ingredient is the crisis that makes their rollout seem not merely necessary but inevitable.
The logical conclusion is inescapable. The elite are not planning to prevent the crash. They are planning to use it. The elite understand the old maxim: never let a good crisis go to waste. The coming crash will be their opportunity to roll out measures that would be impossible in stable times. Spending limits on currency. Expiry dates on digital cash. Behavioural conditioning baked into the code. Access to food, shelter, and medicine contingent on compliance with digital rules. This is not speculation. This is the stated agenda of documents like the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” and the Bank for International Settlements’ annual reports. They call it resilience. They call it inclusion. They call it modernisation. What it actually means is control.
This is already a dark picture. But it is not yet complete. Because if the reset requires a smaller, more controllable population—and the elite’s own planning documents have long assumed one—then the conclusion becomes darker still. The convergence of energy collapse, debt defaults, and climate breakdown will not merely bankrupt economies. It will kill people. The question is whether anyone intends to stop it.
The evidence suggests they do not. If the reset is planned, if depopulation is a functional requirement of a smaller, more manageable population for a digital feudal system, then the elite do not need to kill anyone actively. They only need to do nothing while the convergence does the work for them. The Deagel forecasts, whatever their ultimate provenance, are not predictions but planning scenarios. They model what happens if existing crises are allowed to run their course. A United States reduced from 330 million to 110 million. A Germany of 50 million. A Japan of 40 million. Whether these numbers are literal or merely directional, they point to a truth that respectable discourse refuses to name: the next decade will see mass death, not as a bug of the system, but as a feature. The digital infrastructure ensures that those who remain can be controlled. The rest are simply written off.
All of this is happening while the public has been trained to watch a different show. The on-again, off-again war with Iran. The stock market’s spasms. The manipulation of geopolitical tensions for personal trading gain. Figures like Donald Trump and his circle—making hay, cashing out, treating national security as a market-moving signal—are not the architects of the coming system. They are the old guard enjoying a last hurrah before the stage is rebuilt beneath their feet. Their corruption is a sideshow. Do not mistake it for the main event. The real game is being played in rooms the cameras never enter, by people who do not seek publicity, who do not tweet, who do not need to win elections.
Is there another way? The Leninist gambit offers the only theoretical parallel: seize the state apparatus—now the digital infrastructure—as it is being built and redirect it against its architects. That is what Lenin understood in 1917. The armchair critics who say that his ‘authoritarianism’ betrayed socialism miss the material reality. To seize the means of production, you must first seize the state, because the state controls the army, the police, the courts, the currency, the railroads, the telegraph. Without state power, any factory occupation is just a matter of time before the Cossacks arrive. Lenin’s ruthlessness was not a preference. It was a response to material conditions: civil war, foreign intervention, famine, collapse.
The tragedy, of course, is that the instrument of liberation can easily become the instrument of oppression. The Bolsheviks won, and the experiment that followed was less than perfect – that much can be acknowledged. But the critics who say there was another way have never had to actually feed a city during a blockade. The question for today is whether a similar gambit is possible with digital infrastructure. Can a coordinated, clandestine movement infiltrate the institutions building the new systems? Can they insert backdoors, democratic override mechanisms, or transparency protocols into the code before it is locked in? When the crisis hits and the system deploys, could they flip the switch—turning surveillance into mutual aid, turning digital ID into participatory governance?
Theoretically, yes. Practically, there is no evidence that anyone is organising it. The left is fragmented, captured by identity politics and performative activism. The anarchists are building gardens while the world burns. The general population is exhausted, medicated, and entertained into submission. The elite have learned the lessons of 1917. They will not leave a revolutionary opening. The surveillance infrastructure is already in place. The algorithms are already watching.
What is coming, then, is not a recession or even a depression. It is a permanent reset of the relationship between human beings, their money, and their ability to move and transact freely. Digital currency will be presented as the only option—and it will be the only option. Not because of conspiracy alone, but because of anthropology. We have built a world that cannot function without hierarchical systems. Those systems have been captured. The reset is already planned. The trigger has been pulled.
I do not offer hope. False hope is worse than none. What is left is clarity: the ability to see what is coming, to name it, and to refuse the comforting lies that this is just another cycle. The crisis is baked in. The response is baked in. The only question is whether, in the darkness that follows, enough people remember that things could have been otherwise—and whether that memory can translate into action. History offers no guarantees. But history does offer warnings. This is one of them.