M. Kuznetsov

We are not "on the brink of a new crisis." We are already inside a rare convergence of several long-term economic cycles. This is less a catastrophe than a change in the rules of the game, one that most portfolios are not prepared for. The key question is not "when will it blow up," but who will manage to reposition before the old maps stop working.

The Winter Everyone Was Expecting

Italy in late 2026 is not "the sick man of Europe's economy." It is a patient who stubbornly pretends to be healthy, swallows painkillers from Brussels and takes selfies against the backdrop of record-low unemployment. The problem is that the X-ray looks bleaker by the day: debt is growing faster than GDP, energy is getting more expensive faster than wages, and the population is ageing faster than officials can dream up new taxes.

Eurocrats, in the name of climate targets, are systematically shrinking the EU's own agriculture and turning food independence into history. The key question is who will feed Europeans when the last tractor leaves for yet another protest in Brussels.

A Course of Self-Restriction

The prospects for Britain’s GCAP sixth-generation fighter program are extremely uncertain—not because the technology is impossible, but because a country unable to close the gap in its own defense budget is unlikely to shoulder tens of billions for an aircraft that may become obsolete before it ever takes off. This is not skepticism; it is arithmetic compounded by history.

The Budget Hole

Asset value on its own is not a diagnosis. It is only half of the equation. The other half is how those assets relate to revenue, debt, and equity. Without that relationship, even the most impressive balance-sheet numbers remain nothing more than attractive statistics. They soothe the eye but say nothing about a company's real financial health. Behind this observation lies an entire gallery of corporate skeletons that once looked like models of efficiency.

How Much It's Worth and How Much It Weighs

Revenue and profit are essential benchmarks for assessing a company's financial health, but on their own they are meaningless unless you understand what actually stands behind them. Revenue growth might mean market capture, or it might mean an asset sell-off; profit growth can signal genuine efficiency, or a one-time deal that will never repeat. The key question is always what actually drove the change in these figures in each specific case, and who benefited from you seeing exactly those numbers.

France's economy, over the period from early 2022 to September 2026, has traveled a path from post-pandemic recovery to a state that can only be described as troubling. Growth has shriveled to a statistical rounding error, debt has crossed 115% of GDP, and the political system seems to have forgotten what a stable government looks like. This is not a temporary setback—it is a structural shift that financial professionals cannot afford to ignore.

Corporate debt is like coffee for an office worker: in moderate doses it energizes and boosts productivity, but in excess it turns life into a thriller with a racing heart and the risk of a heart attack. The key thesis running through the entire history of corporate finance is this: debt is a critically important tool for growth, but its uncontrolled accumulation is a direct path to financial instability and the loss of control over one's own future.

Introduction

Market capitalization is not just a mirror of investor sentiment but also a convenient tool for manipulation, when top managers turn a company's valuation into their personal bonus plan. Tellingly, real business performance suffers in the chase for bigger numbers, while shareholders are often left holding badly overvalued paper.

Bonuses as the Engine of Fraud