In this Frankly, Nate shares some context about how he thinks about the recent global banking and financial market news. How do the catalysts triggering the SVB collapse compare to the 2008 financial crisis? What might world financial market reactions indicate as we move closer to The Great Simplification? What can we learn and proactively plan for by taking a balanced, comprehensive view of the global financial system and banking? One thing to be sure of: world governments and central banks “are gonna need bigger boats” as more and more entities require bailouts and guarantees. Eventually that ‘boat’ may become so big that it will be “Too Big to Save”.
Teaser photo credit: By kees torn – MAERSK MC KINNEY MÖLLER & MARSEILLE MAERSK, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=82090447
Nate Hagens is the Director of The Institute for the Study of Energy & Our Future (ISEOF) an organization focused on educating and preparing society for the coming cultural transition. Allied with leading ecologists, energy experts, politicians and systems thinkers ISEOF assembles road-maps and off-ramps for how human societies can adapt to lower throughput lifestyles.
Nate holds a Masters Degree in Finance with Honors from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. He teaches an Honors course, Reality 101, at the University of Minnesota.
Tags: banking system, financial bailouts
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After the financial crash of 2008-9, I started to discover tools and ideas that I thought were promising, but discrete and disconnected. But they’re not: they can be (and are being) used together to form networks that have the potential to grow exponentially to challenge the status quo – to build a commons economy, a commons society, a commons world.
The 24-mile-wide Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, through which roughly 20 percent of world oil shipments pass, is an obvious pinch point for a vital industrial resource. But it also serves as an apt metaphor for the brittle global supply chains upon which the entire economy depends.
In this installment, Nate addresses the U.S. and Israeli military offensive against Iran and traces the reverberating effects that extend far beyond the conflict itself, starting with what the closure of the Strait of Hormuz means for a civilization that routes a massive share of its physical economy through a single maritime corridor.
March 11, 2026
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