Youth and the future

Four years ago this week the first essay from The Polycrisis came out on Phenomenal World. The world we saw in October 2022 was one of interconnected and mutually reinforcing emergencies: a pandemic that had drained the foreign earnings of dozens of low-income countries; sovereign debt crises that creditors mostly declined to address; an energy shock, sparked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, that had priced poorer countries out of the global gas market and led to lengthy blackouts affecting tens of millions of people in Pakistan and Bangladesh. 

The emergence of mass-market AI/large language models and worsening climate change both suggest a possible future that’s viscerally bleak; and that is against a backdrop of painful but more reversible phenomena like pandemics, financialization, rising inequality and the increasingly common spectre of authoritarian and/or openly kleptocratic governments.

We warned back in 2022 that “none of this will sort itself out” – thinking partly about the newest wave of Global South debt crisis, which was the result of well-known but perennially unaddressed gaps in the world’s financial architecture. Since then the problems have become more acute, and – perhaps helpfully, at least in some cases – harder to deny. Some of the developments we’ve been following past week – youth protests, the Brazil elections and the coming US mid-terms – are either progressions or reversions of what we saw back then. So this week we’re looking at all of those topics plus another one that’s defined this year: the inchoate new normal in oil markets thanks to the Strait of Hormuz.

BRAZIL

Brazil’s run-off elections are this weekend and it does not look good for Lula and his party, the PT, which lost ground in most regions except for the north-east. Not long after the first-round vote, government statistics showed Brazil’s Amazon deforestation rate fell to its lowest ever level last year; (while Cerrado or grasslands deforestation to its lowest level since 2001) – something that will reverse, perhaps catastrophically, under a Flavio Bolsonaro government, along with Brazil’s status as a global south solidarity leader, which Lula championed.

Last week the government won a court case against Meta, which had been favouring the opposition party. Brazilian disinformation researchers say that, for example, Lula’s campaign was suspended from the platform for an entire day; that Meta AI agents would respond to questions for appraisals of Bolsonaro’s but not Lula’s platforms; and pro-PT posters reported widespread banning and shadow-banning. But Verso Books' Maikel da Silveira argues that blaming disinformation and foreign interference might distract from some deep shortcoming of the third Lula administration. "In many cases, the government managed to address concrete needs, but struggled far more to bring those responses together in a recognizable project of social transformation capable of generating a new horizon of expectations."

YOUTH

Dramatic protests by young people in France have received far more headlines than events in India that are at least as consequential. The “cockroach” movement protests of a couple of months ago were about exam leaks that devastated university students, but the new wave of protests is about the government’s voter deregistration drive. More than 130mn people have been removed from electoral rolls by a Modi government that’s enthusiastically embraced the tagline of the world’s biggest democracy. The protests now are being led by young women in a country that’s still heavily patriarchal. 

Looking at India, and European protests (which are also in Portugal, Italy, Spain and Belgium) and even across the Gen Z protests in middle-income countries over the last three years, there are some common themes: living costs, democracy, and opportunities for young people.

Elites everywhere are doubling down and pushing up inequality; energy and food systems are becoming increasingly frequently disrupted. Many of the jobs that do exist are not attractive. In Brazil, despite pro-labour reforms under the current government, "almost 2mn people, mostly men, now work full-time for transport or delivery apps — around 2% of the workforce — with driver numbers climbing 37 percent in three years". As Chris Shaw points out, why would anyone be motivated to support political forces which only offer the promise of the same algorithmically-directed and insecure work; only with an electric vehicle instead of one with an internal combustion engine? This is what Isabella Weber argues is avoidable; her new book Anti-Fascist Economics says adherence by governments to free market ideas leads to the deprivation and frustration that brings extremists to power. Instead, governments can choose to deploy measures that ensure people's survival and protects their dignity.

In the UK – a country which isn’t currently experiencing youth protests, but is currently seeing a very popular far-right party making big political inroads – authors of a recent expert review into the high incidence of ADHD, autism and mental health diagnoses remarked that young people were suffering loneliness, stress about living costs and, “more importantly a lack of hope amongst young people that their lives will be better than their parents’”. 

And yet in so many locations – largely outside the anglosphere – young people are demonstrating with anger and courage.

Neha Vora has sparked defiance in Modi's India. Her movement has shown the emperor has no clothes @shreedaisy.bsky.social “They fear/that the defenceless & common people will stop fearing them” “Now, that day has come. We do not fear you” www.straitstimes.com/asia/south-a... x.com/newslaundry/...

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— Albert Pinto (@70sbachchan.bsky.social) 11 October 2026 at 10:09

OIL

Only a few days ago, chatter about yet another ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran briefly saw prices dip below $100 a barrel. As a Deutsche Bank oil strategist wrote at the time, though, “Markets have heard this [ceasefire] story before and will take a lot to believe it”. As I write, Brent is back above $113 and rising. It is hard to untangle the market chatter from questions about whether Trump intends to escalate strikes against Iran after the U.S. midterms. No matter; over the course of Trump’s term it has become demonstrably clear that he makes announcements like these with a view to calming markets. A volatile market right now is, after all, one of many severe threats facing his governing coalition.

As Rory Johnston has explained, oil prices could have been a lot higher this year. American oil exports combined with Chinese demand destruction and strategic reserve releases helped keep a lid on prices at first. But, in June, Johnston clarified that Trump’s repeated ceasefire suggestions put immense risk on oil traders who might ordinarily speculate on oil prices as high as $200 a barrel:

They [oil traders] have their own models that show them fair value. They keep saying all their models say this is a raging buy, but they got so blown out repeatedly in that kind of March and April period, all their risk management limits have been throttled down by 90 per cent. The quote was, “Everyone's bullish, but no one's buying”. And I think one thing I also deeply misappreciated going into this crisis was the potential power of Trump himself, more broadly Trump administration, to inject so much downside volatility that it kind of arrested the normal melt up process.

Much has changed since June, but not this dynamic. Trump essentially prevented oil market traders from making leveraged bets on sharply rising oil prices. To be sure, Brent crude prices reached $135 a barrel earlier this month, almost as high as they were in early April when Trump threatened to “end a civilization” and days before the first announcement of ceasefire negotiations. But the dynamic at play has now happened twice ― first with U.S. tariffs, then with oil ― suggesting that a novel playbook for American global governance is being built in real time, even if unintentionally. It looks like this: The President gins up uncertainty over the true outcome of what is, in effect, a binary set of possibilities (tariff wall or no tariff wall, ceasefire or no ceasefire) that ultimately only he has the power to control. In doing so, he severely throttles the usefulness of private investors’ probabilistic risk management models, which cannot adjust between drastically different states of the world. JP Morgan’s commodities team said the bank can no longer model oil prices; their Q3 forecasts were wrong when the U.S. administration cruised straight through what JPM had assumed were the three political “red lines” of $100 per barrel; 5 per cent interest rates, and $5 per gallon gasoline. 

 For importing oil countries, this situation has a small, short-term silver lining: at least for now, oil remains cheaper than it perhaps should be. But governments are stuck in the same place investors are: muddling through a world where a more stable policy environment is always just on the horizon, contingent on the achievement of a miraculous eleventh-hour policy shift in the United States. But market quiescence is not market stability. Even though more oil is now exiting the Strait of Hormuz than before the war started, global oil stocks are far smaller than they were even a year ago ― meaning that any near-term whiplash in oil prices and oil supply availability will hit a much more brittle market. Increasingly cash-strapped oil-importing countries can only be the losers in this scenario. This is not a tenable position to remain in ― especially when diversifying away from oil is increasingly plausible.

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