Close your eyes and try to imagine what Germany, Japan and China will look like 30 years from now, that is, when a newly-issued long-term bond will mature…

… Imagination fails in the case of Europe and Japan. One out of every four Germans today is older than 60, and in 30 years the proportion will rise to two-fifths. Japan is even worse: 30% of Japanese today are above 60, and in 30 years the number will be almost half. What does a national economy look like when the demographics are so skewed to pensioners?

… But America’s future is not hard to visualize in 2040. In fact, America in 1979 was not much different from America in 2009. Minor adjustments await Americans over the next generation compared with the great changes affecting its prospective competitors … Nothing can compete with the United States as a safe-haven investment for the long term. German petulance about America’s domination of world markets rises in inverse proportion to the German birth rate.

Who else but Spengler? And read this gripping pessimistic passage on the psychological mess in Iran:

Modernity implies choice, and the efforts of the Iranian mullahs to prolong the strictures of traditional society appear to have backfired. The cause of Iran’s collapsing fertility is not literacy as such, but extreme pessimism about the future and an endemic materialism that leads educated Iranian women to turn their own sexuality into a salable commodity …

… Iran is a dying country, and it is very difficult to have a rational dialogue with a nation all of whose available choices terminate in oblivion.

A new world is busily unfolding as part of these trends.

The USA buys China’s stuff – China buys US debt?