🚀  2025 through the looking glass  🚀
article by Marius Ghenea

The World was a complicated place in the end of 2024, with a couple of wars raging on, both of them with a regionally or even globally deadly potential, doubled by various economic challenges in some of its major economies.

Zooming in on Romania, with the war still at its borders, the unprecedented decision to cancel the presidential elections and the recession in its most important export market, Germany, all this amounted to a dangerous context for the country towards 2025, and already both Fitch and S&P have signaled that by changing the outlook to negative.

Anyway, the year started with all eyes focused on the US presidential inauguration, as we were trying to decipher what would be the major American policy decisions and heading changes with Donald Trump coming in office. And we had plenty to take in from the very first day: clearly, Europe will face new challenges coming from these policy changes from across the Atlantic, starting with the renewed NATO financing issue, a NATO which is paramount particularly for the members in the Eastern front, like Romania, the Baltics or Poland.

And then some more issues with tariffs and protectionism which might lead to isolationist economic policies, in an era where most nations already had adhered fully to globalism, with its good and bad. Davos did not bring much light this year, in my opinion, the whole thing was a bit blurred by major events happening anywhere else but in the center of Europe. So, what should we really expect from 2025?

–          For one, hopefully an end to existing wars and conflicts, as the conflict in Gaza seems to be coming to a halt, if not to an end, while the war in Ukraine should not last for another year, if there is finally an interest to put an end to it

 –          Of course, we should also hope that no new conflicts are starting in 2025, even though there is much tension and way too many trigger-happy political leaders in some parts of the world 

–          Economy will be a mere reflection of this political instability and waters will be muddy already before the second half of the year, if we are to believe a number of economists from all schools of thought

–          The economic battle between the global superpowers is on and, lo and behold, Europe is not even in it anymore, it looks like now the last two fighters standing are US and China

 –          And an important turf of this battle of the worlds is the AI, were US is certainly ahead of the pack and the presidential announcement of the Stargate project sounds a bit like an obscenely large budget Hollywood Sci-fi movie, but China has developed the art of copying to perfection, so they might catch up to the American big tech pretty soon

 –          In the meantime, in Europe, the bureaucrats in Brussels have already created a regulatory environment for AI, even before having real AI technology on the continent, exactly what the Draghi Report very recently strongly advised against, the overregulation which inevitably stifle innovation

–          We could foresee another EU blunder similar or greater to the one resulting from the GDPR regulations a few years ago, which were meant to protect the little guy in EU against US big-tech, but instead created useless cost and burden on EU struggling SME’s, with no impact for the US big-tech!

–          But not only AI is at an inflection point: Electric Vehicles, the Green Deal and climate policies, cooperation around World Health Organization and generally in the UN, they are all now under question, scrutiny, or facing serious setbacks and we will probably see, in 2025, if these are just some bumps in the existing road, or the road itself is taking a sharp turn to a new direction, to the new world order where it’s everybody for oneself and then it’s deluge after us!