18 September 2017 Long•Term Asset Return Study: The Next Financial Crisis Nevertheless, although a return to a Gold Standard type system is not the right policy today, if we continue to see more and more money printing over the next few years, there will likely be a slow romanticising of the perceived stability of the pre-1971 world. Indeed if we do eventually muddle through and get to a more sustainable, less imbalanced and less indebted global economy, there may well be moves towards some kind of new global monetary world order simply to prevent the excesses of the last four and a half decades from happening again. Such a debate would be sensible but needs to happen after we work through the tremendous amounts of excesses in the system. If we can in the future benefit from the disciplines similar to those seen during the period where currencies were linked to precious metals, whilst maintaining some kind of genuine safety valve/flexibility, then we could have a more stable global financial system to that seen since 1971. This will be easier said than done but expect this debate to build. Inflation still the most lO ely outcome until new global financial system found Figure 31 shows median global inflation first from 1209 (left) and then from 1900 (right). As we've discussed in previous notes inflation took on a totally different persona after the start of the twentieth century. The charts are again on a log scale to allow us to easily see the near exponential increase in inflation over the last 100 years or so, especially relative to what occurred before. Note that had we used the median instead of the average, the chart would look almost absurd given the extreme levels of hyperinflation seen in several countries over the last century. The data behind the right hand graph is based on a full set of 24 countries where we have inflation data back to 1900. Prior to this, many countries have data that goes back several decades with some back