An Interdisciplinary Reflection About Global Growth, Economic Cycles, and Great Power Competition
“If deep movements are in your favour, you will be served, pushed forward – beyond your merits, beyond even your reflections, and notwithstanding your intellectual abilities.”
Fernand Braudel
DANIEL NICOLAS FOUBERT
Geo-economist and founder of Excalibur Insight, a Warsaw-based international business consultancy and analysis firm.
Abstract
This paper is a reflection on deep historical cycles driving the global environment, analyzed through a transversal approach [1] and as a coherent structure, namely the Global System. Three key theses result from this analysis:
– There is a cycle of the Global System, which consists of the necessary renewal of its 4 pillars: institutions, the international trade system, the regime of accumulation, and connective infrastructure.
– Global growth is a function of the hierarchy of the Global System. The weakening of the international hierarchy leads to disorder and unproductivity.
– The US possesses all the necessary fundamentals and capabilities to stay at least on top of the international hierarchy, even though it needs to change its mode of governance.
Introduction
Does the economy have more influence on the course of history than politics? The fallacy of the “end of history” is the product of this flawed assumption. In reality, these have always been inextricable fields of activity, the two sides of the same coin: wealth is the fuel of power and power is the fuel of wealth. Nevertheless, the second proposition seems to be less well-known than the former and the purpose of this paper is to provide some insight into this matter.
Thinking that we are in a transition phase and looking for huge upheavals ahead is fashionable at the moment, and rightfully so. It seems true that we are at the end of a cycle, if not several. Economists sometimes speak about “secular cycles” without entering into many details, and not much actual work has been done on this topic.
For this purpose, I have explored the world-system theory, which seems to have been forgotten since the 2000s. It was developed on the basis of Fernand Braudel’s work, firstly by Immanuel Wallerstein, then mainly by Andre Gunder Frank and Giovanni Arrighi. Although it was also partly derived from the Marx-inspired dependency theory, it is necessary to distinguish between Marxian analysis and Marxist politics. If Marx had not written Capital, no one would know what capitalism is except a handful of financiers. Capital is one of the founding works of modern political economy, and this does not make every economist a zealot of the Communist Manifesto. The same is true for the World-System theory.
But, first of all, what is capitalism? It is a concept that is at the same time very widely used and deeply misunderstood. For most people, capitalism is confused with the free market. These are in fact two very different things. According to Max Weber, capitalism is a mode of production in which: most of the production is done for profit using privately-owned means of production, labour is hired, and coordination is decentralized. However, this is only the definition of industrial capitalism. From the perspective of history, the concept of capitalism was extended by Fernand Braudel to other ways of managing money on a large scale, which appeared in Italy in the late Middle Ages: merchant capitalism and financial capitalism. In this definition, the purest form of capitalism is the management of capital on a large scale, both geographically and quantitatively. This implies a high degree of capital centralization and often monopolies. It should be noted that the Dutch East India Company, the first large multinational enterprise, was a monopoly. The American economy was also built by monopolies (Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc.) and the large American multinational companies of today dominate their markets to a very large extent. This concentration of capital is the corollary of a greater capacity for diversification. Financial capitalism (i.e. high finance) is the most central and most powerful type of capitalism because it controls the other types and can seize them at any moment. In finance, the ability to diversify is the key to success: it reduces risk while multiplying the possible sources of profit. Besides, large companies are a necessary tool to dominate international trade. Global players need to have a global size.
This last definition of capitalism is at the heart of the World-System analysis, which consists of three powerful ideas:
– The World-System structure, theorized by Emmanuel Wallerstein in the 1970s as an international division of labour assuming that there is a politico-economic chain of command linking the core of the world economy – where high value-added activities are concentrated – to a semi-periphery and a periphery. In this view, the core of the world-economy [2] is the place where capitalism is the most developed. According to K. Ekholm and J. Friedman (The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand?, p. 61), “the center is the center of most advanced industrial production based on raw materials and semi-finished products imported from the periphery, which in exchange obtains some of the manufactures of the center. The very maintenance of the center depends on its ability to dominate a supralocal resource base”. In fact, the world-system analysis is the analysis of what is called the “value chain”.
– Short systemic cycles of accumulation: these are successive ~110 years cycles that occurred during the last 4 centuries, each being driven by a capitalist hegemon replacing the former one or re-succeeding itself due to both its conquests and its update of the capitalist system. It is a cycle of the centre of gravity of economic power rather than a pure economic cycle. The first capitalist hegemon was the Netherlands (1580-1688, first stock exchange and first multinational company), then the UK during two cycles (1688-1792; 1792-1914) and finally the US (1914-?) [3]. Thus, the centre of capitalism and global power logically shifted along both successful politics and opportunities to generate larger profits: both are necessary. Industrial capitalism migrates first, often due to aggressive industrialization policies. It is then supported by offshoring and investments made by the capitalist center. At the peak of the cycle, international liberalism is particularly strong, with a very high level of fluidity and deregulation of international finance, which is called financialization. Then the world sinks very quickly into protectionism and war. These are the exact same cycles that the famous hedge fund manager and financial influencer Ray Dalio popularized lately under the “Big Cycles” denomination, without citing Giovanni Arrighi, who theorized them (The Long Twentieth Century, 1994).
– Long systemic cycles of accumulation, as theorized by Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills, are more ancient and longer (a few centuries) cycles that preceded the shorter cycles we just mentioned. However, it is unsure whether those cycles ever ended. They were based primarily, not on the rise and fall of a single hemegon, but on the development of a system of regional hegemons/empires that sustained an international system of trade, until a disruption of the international chain of command ended the cycle (for instance the 14th-century cataclysms [4] that wrecked global trade routes, plunging the whole Eurasian world-system into a turmoil, as did the global anarchy of the 17th century). Such a disruption generally happened because the system couldn’t grow further and reached the limits of what it could produce. The stalling productivity of the system prompted a negative feedback loop: the elites attempted to make profits in a more aggressive manner, the imperial institutions decayed because of their decreased usefulness, and the decentralization of global power happened due to the elites’ resulting weakened sense of belonging to their state.
These cycles’ lengths may vary considerably, but what matters is not how long they are, it is the order of their stages. They have always followed the same pattern. We do not know when the cycle is going to end, but we can find which stage of the cycle we are situated at.
There is no ecosystem without cycles. A system is born under certain conditions, to which its participants are perfectly adapted. Over time the different elements of the system evolve, until one day the changes are so great that the system can no longer function. The destruction of what does not work is then inevitable and a new system is born, based on new principles. The more rigid the system, the faster it bursts. It’s like a pomegranate. At the beginning of the cycle, the power is concentrated. Then it expands, and finally bursts and reconcentrates in other hands, or in the same hands (the UK’s second hegemonic cycle for instance). This phenomenon is so inexorable because no one can control it. Human societies often act more like swarms of bees that move around obeying their unconscious needs than like organisms capable of governing themselves strategically.
The different types of cycles also have different lengths. What causes these differences is the degree of historical importance of the elements they concern. According to the theory of Fernand Braudel, described in his History of Material Civilization, Economy and Capitalism, there are three times in history: a short time that concerns political and economic events, a long time that concerns social phenomena, and a very long time that concerns culture and civilization.
These are the theoretical foundations on which we will try to answer the big question everyone is asking today: towards which political and economic order our global system [5] is evolving? If I have the beginnings of an answer, I consider that providing a framework for thinking is a more important goal. I will therefore develop here an assessment of the respective currentness of the world-system cycles and an analysis of their implications for the evolution of the world-system.
I. Short Systemic Cycles
Since the Western economy is reaching its structural limits, the cycles that were unique to it may no longer apply, given that the reasons they developed as they did have disappeared. These reasons were as follows: the industrial revolution, the spread of capitalism and the relatively small size of capitalist hegemons.
A. The end of the industrial age
There is no “fourth industrial revolution”, which is an absurd concept because digitalization is not industrial. Industrial revolutions were driven by new ways to produce cheaper energy or to use it more efficiently. Green energy is certainly not and will not be cheaper than fossil fuels before a long time. There are still productivity gains today, but they are absolutely not comparable to those obtained thanks to the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, nuclear fission, etc. These technologies transformed our world in a dramatic manner and propelled economic activity in a way that IT will never achieve.
B. The stalling spread of global capitalism
There is no larger capitalist country than the US since the Chinese system is hardly a capitalistic one, which doesn’t make it an obvious successor to the US. The Chinese “free market for unfree people”[6] lacks the necessary liberal foundations that would allow it to be accepted as a global hegemon and project its soft power efficiently. Furthermore, it is terribly inefficient. If there is an “update of capitalism” somewhere, it is rather the US-led “digital capitalism” / “information capitalism”, which does not immensely increase productivity but reshapes economies as well as generates enormous profits for those who control it.
C. The incomparable power of the US compared to its predecessors
European powers formed a very peculiar eco-system of countries, which were structurally unable to sustain their domination over longer periods. Western hegemonies occurred as temporary disequilibria due to the European nations’ short-lived technological edge and the chaotic fragmentation of the European world-economy. It is impossible to compare the US to this. For instance, the Netherlands – due to its economic advance – could almost be considered a “hegemon” despite its GDP being 6 times smaller than that of France or Italy from 1410 to 1800:
The fact that the Netherlands and the UK (at least during the 18th century) could lead European trade and dominate Europe with such an unremarkable level of economic activity – measured quantitatively – is proof that GDP size is not as important a factor as it seems to many analysts of great-power competition. The US is then in a much stronger position than previous capitalist hegemons in terms of quantitatively measured economic activity. More importantly, like all its predecessors it prevails overwhelmingly when it comes to the quality of its economy – that is to say its position in the global value chain. The most striking part of this economic power lies in the control over the electronic chip business and the new kind of capitalism its tech companies are spreading over the world. It is a fact that the world-economy is more fragmented today than it was after the fall of the USSR, but the US cannot be compared to its predecessors. Its sovereignty still is undisputed and will not be disputed for a long time. The economic sovereignty of the capitalist hegemon is in fact based mainly on GDP per capita, as this is the best way to measure the centrality of an economy and its degree of wealth concentration. On this graph, we can clearly see the domination of the Netherlands and their passing of the baton to the United Kingdom:
The end of the industrial age, the stalling spread of global capitalism, and the incomparable strength of the US to its predecessors have changed the global system from a very fast-changing environment with short cycles into a more stable place. Short hegemonic cycles should then be regarded as a unique event in the history of mankind and no forecast should be based on them without questioning the currentness of their causes.
II. The Long Systemic Cycle
We are now dealing with long-term exhaustion of global growth (at first sight because of demographic saturation, natural resources scarcity/depletion and the absence of a game-changing energy generation technology), which results in growing global instability and regionalization. However, this exhaustion of global growth is rooted in a more profound factor: the system itself has become unable to allocate resources and exploit them in an efficient and sustainable manner. Could we solve the global growth problem by reorganizing the world in a completely different manner? This is the question that history will answer for us one day. Before it does, let’s assess the solidity of the system as it exists currently, through what I have identified as its 4 most important pillars: institutions, the international trade system, the regime of accumulation, and connective infrastructure.
A. Institutions
Institutions are the real backbone of any society, of any progress. The graph above shows clearly the runaway development of the UK even before the industrial revolution. This revolution was a consequence of the development of the UK and of the good functioning of its society, not a random discovery. To summarize the situation today: we are sawing off the branch we are sitting on. The West faces many internal disorders, two of which could be lethal:
1. Our nation-states’ societies are becoming increasingly similar to authoritarian ones, with the multicultural characteristics of empires. As we see today, the US was a multicultural country only to a certain degree, and the EU (a supranational bureaucracy) is encompassing so many different political sub-systems that it cannot evolve into a democratic federation. The increasing multiculturalism of Western societies – whether resulting from immigration or from the forced fusion of Western populations that do not share the same heritage, will create more difficulties to cooperate between people and more opportunities to force them to cooperate (which is a way to define authoritarianism). The ongoing transformation of the two major Western powerhouses will have rippling effects across the rest of the global system, starting from the very nature of societies, states and economies. This trend is inexorable since its logic pertains to the development of the global system: the cycle of lonely nation-states is finished because larger regional structures are now needed to produce growth. It does not mean that nation-states will disappear: it means that they will have to transform and regroup in a coherent fashion.
2. A relative way nation-states are being alienated is the neoliberal movement that has developed worldwide since the time the US outcompeted the USSR. The end of the USSR, the beginning of the Liberal World Order and the spread of the globalist ideology have meant, from a business as well as geopolitical viewpoint, a transition from system-building to system-milking. Delocalizations, tax havens, low corporate tax rates, the still ongoing financial globalization, and the primacy of economic interests over political ones have all weakened the alliance between capital and the state, which has always been the cornerstone of the development of strong nations. A phenomenon that is less talked about is corruption: it has increased considerably. The links between politics and money have always existed, will always exist, and are inevitable. Only there are different ways to organize them. We must not forget that corruption works in two ways: it can also be a way for statesmen to buy their opponents. For example, Richelieu, Mazarin, Fouquet or Colbert amassed huge personal fortunes by embezzling public funds, which allowed them to finance their fight against the opponents of the construction of the modern French state. In the opposite situation, when the statesmen are bought by the adversaries of their nation, there is nothing left to save.
B. The International trade system
The main characteristic of the evolution of the international trade system is increasing cutthroat competition, like during the 15th and the 17th centuries, when transformations of the system happened.
1. The most tangible manifestations of cutthroat competition are:
– Supply-side mercantilism in Germany and China.
– The booking of American companies’ profits in tax havens (~50% of all profits booked abroad, Zucman).
– Ferocious neoliberal fiscal competition through falling corporate income tax rates.
– Increasingly protectionist policies and the rise of economic nationalism (Brexit, Marine Le Pen, Trump, etc.)
– Trade wars and financial wars (the US/China competition, the Russian energy war), aggravated by the corruption of certain Western elites (Schröder, Fillon, and other such cases), which makes them more difficult to win for the West.
2. The most problematic consequences of cutthroat competition are:
– The fact that resources are no longer allocated purposefully by the system in order to produce global growth
– The growing reluctance and inability of the US to maintain the Liberal World Order, since it is becoming increasingly expensive to maintain, given the rise of the competition. The covid crisis has shown us their inability to intervene to prevent the global supply chain from fracturing.
– The influence of neoliberalism on long-term investment worldwide, which subdues the economy to the monopoly of 5-year business plans. While low interest rates should have propelled long-term investments, what has happened is the exact contrary: they have been used for short-term financial leverage.
– A global dislocation of the trade system, the main symptom of which is inflation, a phenomenon caused by the rise in the price of raw materials and products (given wages growth) produced by the countries of the periphery.
C. The regime of accumulation
1. Western capitalism has been morphing into “rentier capitalism”[7]:
a. First of all, it cannot be ignored that income distribution was skewed in favour of the wealthy during the 2010s (especially in the US). The dominant position of companies, the sky-high return on equity requirement, anaemic interest rates which allowed proportionally huge financial leverage and low corporate tax rates were the main characteristics of this new economic paradigm. This explains the fact that inflation remained stagnant, despite all the public deficit monetization. Wages will not increase as long as the four conditions above stayed in place. On the other hand, hard assets inflation went on, because these assets were bought by those whose income rose at the fastest pace. This resulted in the consumer society on which the system was built no longer contributing to its growth the way it used to. Today, the widening of inequalities continues in an even more brutal way, with the inflation of the price of consumer products, which is proving to be faster than that of wages. Here we see the dramatic impoverishment of European wage earners:
b. Hard assets inflation can be also called “wealth inflation”, which brings into light another aspect of the same problem. In one of his very straightforward and quirky Flash Economics, Patrick Artus[8] pointed out that increasing the money supply results in increased wealth rather than inflation if it pours into the “investment money” stock – as opposed to the “transaction money” stock. “Wealth” too can increase artificially then, as consumer prices would. But it does not make us richer; it only means that wealth valuations are now deeply fictional. This is proportionally resulting in and comparable to consumer goods deflation, notwithstanding nominal prices. This phenomenon is new because until now we knew only exceptional cases of asset prices inflation that we called “bubbles”; it is hard to recall a situation where all hard asset prices – from real estate to precious metals – were in a bubble. It is also worth noting that if asset prices rise, GDP rises too. And hard assets inflation is not taken into account into official inflation metrics. Thus, an increasing GDP does not necessarily mean that there is an increase in economic activity. I will not elaborate on the artificial growth topic, but I think there is also a question that can be asked: if GDP growth is 2% and the public deficit is 3% (as a % of GPD), what GDP growth could be expected if there was no public deficit?
Rentier capitalism, thus, fosters artificial ways of accumulation and weakens the market economy.
2. Not only is capitalism changing in nature, but it also seems to be at the end of a cycle
a. The less growth there is, the lower the interest rates, and the more we borrow. Debt is one of the few levers left to produce growth. There is a bubble in sovereign debt, and this should lead at least – someday in a very distant future… – to currency debasement if not to a financial crisis of tremendous magnitude, unless a new growth lever is found, which is unlikely. However, this is a well-known and well-discussed topic, on which I shall not dwell.
b. Because of globalization, there is now a decorrelation between global value chains and political systems, since there is no corresponding global political system of control, only soft global governance – which is not about control – and the American influence is facing the Chinese challenge. This is problematic, given that the development of the capitalist system has always been sustained by the simultaneous development of the state, and the alliance between capital and the state has always been indispensable for growth. The Liberal World Order does not suffice to maintain control over international value chains on a global scale.
Western capitalism is undergoing a crisis, not because it doesn’t work anymore, but because it does not produce enough growth, and we are progressively destroying it by trying to get this growth anyway in an artificial manner.
D. Connective infrastructure
Connective infrastructure is transforming worldwide under the effect of two fundamental revolutions:
1. However largely finished from a technological perspective, many effects of the information revolution upon the world are still to be awaited. The Covid crisis has recently generated a good instance of the power of this transformation. It has brought a dramatic wave of dematerialization, which has enabled the delocalization of more qualified work, further transforming the international chain of command.
2. The other, maybe even more profound revolution underway, is the reconstitution of a Cohesive Asian Heartland, which could reshape global trade routes[9]. There was a cohesive Asian heartland for several millenaries, based on a few empires, which formed a coherent trade system. The current maritime trade system results mainly from two historical facts:
– the Silk Road was hugely damaged, first by the Plague, then by Mongol destructions, and finally by the collapse of the Mongols themselves. This created an opportunity for Europe to create its own alternative trade routes.
– American precious metals and colonial plunders gave Europe a liquidity boost that allowed it to take advantage of the situation at the right time and to solve the international trade problem by multiplying long-haul enterprises, thus also developing capitalism and becoming the centre of the trade system.
If the Russian economy is connected to Europe (unlikely for obvious reasons) and local hegemons are allowed to rise in the Middle East, then the long-term perspective is that Eurasian trade will be brought back to life and the US will become marginalised. The centre of gravity of the world is moving towards Asia, and it is a commonplace statement to say so. However, this shift is based on certain trends that are of organizational nature, and for this reason is not irreversible.
The decay of Western institutions, the deteriorating state of the trade system, very fast changes in the way the world is connected, and a crisis of capitalism are signs that we are at the end of a long systemic cycle. The system is transforming, because it has to transform. The changes that take place are not characteristic of the end of a short hegemonic cycle, as we have explained in the first part. These changes have much more to do with the end of a long structural cycle, which calls into question the very structures of institutions, trade, infrastructure and accumulation patterns of our global system.
III. Our Bankrupt World and the Emergence of a New Global System
A. An increasingly brutal environment and the new Long Systemic Cycle
Global instability is in the logic of the long systemic cycle. Indeed, we are for now witnessing a relative decentralization of the system through global capitalism, as increasing fragmentation and instability are in the logic of its development. Capitalism paradoxically tends towards the flattening of the international structure, less inequality between the centre and the periphery, and between states, as capital spreads faster to underdeveloped regions than it develops the already developed ones.
Any further weakening of the US may result in a multiplication of regional powers, which will cause the breakdown of the global system, given the weak growth and the cutthroat competition that the absence of leadership will cause. Like in long pre-capitalist systemic cycles, we could witness the creation of a system of hegemonies, but an accepted hierarchy would need to emerge, which normally takes place at the end of a period of cutthroat competition.
China is not strong enough to become the dominant power. The US is solid enough to stay the dominant power, but it is not strong enough to maintain order in the face of the crisis the global system is undergoing. Today’s international relations are less and less about virtuously outcompeting the opponent, and increasingly about cutthroat competition. Global powers will seek to achieve their goals in a coercive manner, that is to say in a manner that violates the rules of the system.
As we can see on the graph below, global growth does not date from the industrial revolution, even if it wasn’t as strong back then. The long systemic cycle can therefore very well continue to apply to the capitalist period as well.
B. The Future is American
Since Short Systemic Cycles no longer seem relevant, the US still has the possibility to grow and to create a brand new Global System. Here are several arguments supporting the hypothesis that the US could stay the dominant power or exert even greater influence over the world:
1. US federal institutions have been weakened for the last 50 years. However, the US is of course a federal republic, which is made of 50 sovereign jurisdictions. This provides room for resistance.
2. The centre of gravity of global infrastructure is not necessarily shifting towards Eurasia, given that American strategists are perfectly aware of the necessity to impeach the formation of a cohesive Asian Heartland. It can be noticed that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have not resulted in the creation of powerful Afghan and Iraqi states able to develop or even manage large infrastructural projects, to say the least.
3. While the World has become more fragmented, the US share of global GDP has been around 23% for the last 10 years, which is the same as in 1995 and in 1980. There is no decline from this viewpoint, even relative. The Great Convergence is actually more about a transfer of power from Europe to Asia than from the US to any other part of the world.
4. In a world where growth is no longer generated by increasing production but by digital domination, the US is of course far ahead of its competitors, and its technological monopolies are the right tool for it to stay this way.
5. The buds of a new accumulation regime are appearing in the US, although in a very rough fashion. The evolution of capitalism has consisted in companies becoming able to internalize increasingly greater costs, making the system more efficient[10]. The first to be internalized by the free enterprise were protection costs, then production costs, and the latest were transaction costs (the integration of the whole international supply chain). Automatization and digitalization are now allowing for what could be called “society internalization”: the customer himself becomes partly a worker of the companies from which he buys products, for instance by giving his data for free or by using self-service checkouts. The alliance between capital and the state has been weakened, but the power exerted by capital over society has never been greater, which would make the revival of this alliance much stronger than it ever was.
6. The slowdown of growth and the dislocation of our world will have to be remedied. This is done through international competition. A reset should occur, resulting in a new, more integrated international hierarchy, which will solve the global growth problem. Global growth will slow down until the losers go bust, allowing for a survivor to emerge. This operation will probably require the US to reorganize its alliances and to become more assertive on the global stage, projecting its global power through means not pertaining to the globalist ideology[11]. Some will be well integrated into the new international order, others will lose their status and others will remain on the sidelines. It is good to keep in mind that some of the most solid allies of the US include Japan, Poland, South Korea, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Romania, and Ireland.
Since there is now a single integrated world-economy, it should be organized by one hegemon. All the new means of control have been created to make this occur, which has never been the case before. Only the US could be in a position to do so. If it does not, the world will be plunged into a situation of chaos, no global hegemon will emerge from the constant international fight and the global economy will dislocate. I do not believe in this scenario; we always finally figured out new ways to make the Global System work for the last 2500 years, despite periods of global disorder.
[1] Making use of geopolitics, history, economics and finance
[2] A concept coined by Braudel. World-economy: “an economy that is a world in itself” (the European or the Asian world-economies for instance).
[3] George Modelski, Long Cycles in World Politics.
[4] Overpopulation caused depletion of the soils and famines, the Mongol destructions almost cut the Silk Road, the plague ravaged already exhausted populations and the collapse of the Mongol empire itself plunged the world into anarchy.
[5] I prefer to talk about the ‘global system’ rather than about the ‘world-system’ since I consider the word ‘global’ to be better adapted to a transversal approach, independent from any school of thought.
[6] Andrew Michta, 16/11/2020, China’s Promise: ‘A Free Market for Unfree People’, Politico
[7] As defined by Patrick Artus in his Flash Economics from the 08/06/2021: “It is normal for ‘rentier’ capitalism to lead to a loss of growth”
[8] Patrick Artus, Flash Economics, 24/12/2020: “Asset price bubbles are not only the consequence of expansionary monetary policies, but also the only way to ensure fiscal solvency in the longer term?”
[9] Andrew Michta, 13/09/2020, “Can China Turn Europe Against America?”, Wall Street Journal
[10] Giovanni Arrighi, The Long 21st Century
[11] Andrew Michta, 08/03/2021, The Chimera of a Globalist Empire, National Review
Daniel Nicolas Foubert
Born into a four-generation Franco-Polish family, geo-economist and founder of the Warsaw-based international analysis firm Excalibur Insight. He started as a Business Developer for Europe in the French fintech Lemon Way, and then worked as a Merger & Acquisition Analyst for Suez Poland and Mazars Poland, where he participated in the due diligence carried out by Accor during the sale of its stake in Orbis for €1.06bn. He holds a Master’s degree in Finance from Neoma Business School as well as a Master’s degree in International Relations and a Bachelor’s degree in History from Paris-Sorbonne University.