Well, we are coming progressively close to the end of this course. And in this episode, I will talk about some trends that have been observed in the markets recently that seem to contradict the global trend that we've observed before. Namely, we said that globalization clearly is the reigning trend in this world. We see that there are lots of great things concerned with globalization. People, goods and services, money, technology, ideas, they all travel freely. And the world is becoming sort of a, if we quote the book Funky Business that was written 20 years ago. But they said that we will be living in the global virtual village. Well, that is not exactly what happened. But we do see that there was a march of globalization over countries, markets, and societies. And that is great. However, unfortunately, in the wake of the latest crisis that, like I said the peak was in 2007 and 2008, we saw certain things that challenged this trend. And although they're only signs of this countering trend of deglobalization, if you will, I believe this is worthwhile mentioning that. Because most of the questions in this area are now unanswered, or sometimes even not posed. But it will influence significantly the shape of global capital markets in the years to come. Now the key story here is that, so I would put quoted deglobalization. Now the problem is that the crisis hit hard. Now you can say, so what? Why is it linked to this? The situation is as follows. When the market was not so globalized, when all countries or groups of countries were on their own, then they could use some instruments to reduce the negative impact of the crisis on their economies and their markets. However, when countries started to be members of one specific union, and clearly, this is taken to the extreme in the eurozone, where countries are very much different in their levels of development. One thing is Germany, the other thing is smaller countries, like Greece, or maybe, some Baltic countries. And clearly, their level of economic development and their level of economic power is drastically different. Still, they use the same currency, which is the Euro. And it can be shown, this goes beyond the scope of this course. It is studied in some economic courses that if you have more freedom over your own currency, then you can devalue. And by doing so, you can maybe reduce the negative influence of the crisis situation of crisis trends. The countries within the eurozone, they were no longer at this time equipped with these tools. Because like I said, they we're different, but they we're still using the same currency. So this tool was no longer available to them. Now that, in itself, unfortunately resulted in the next thing. People started to be sort of unsatisfied with what the authorities and the regulators do in order to fight against the crisis. And that, in itself, unfortunately resulted in the fact that sometimes people started to think, well, maybe something is going wrong here. Maybe our elites are not the ones who know the answer to these challenges. And all that resulted in the wave of anti-elite protests, if you will. It all started with the referendum is Scotland to leave the United Kingdom. And that was sort of a false alarm because the people voted to stay. But then soon after, it was the Brexit in the June of 2016. Well, now, Brexit is reality. It officially started in March 2017. And this is still the process that opens up some speculation in terms of what's going on, how that will influence the development of capital markets in Europe and globally. Again, so this, unfortunately, is the area when there are many more questions than answers. Then, to some extent, people said that the US election results, they were also sort of against the global trend, if you will. Well, now the situation is less clear, and maybe this is sort of more adapted, or will become more adapted, but that remains to be seen. Then there was also a referendum in Italy, in which of the majority of population basically voted against what was thought to be this global trend again. And all that sends some signals that people are not very much satisfied. And unfortunately, people and governments and regulators, they have a very vague idea what can be done. Because it doesn't seem to be that most of these societies and markets will go back to what was before. Again, you cannot enter a river twice. But it doesn't seem to be that this is such a huge challenge to reverse globalization. But clearly, some new answers to the challenges must be found. And that is also an important thing in our understanding of capital markets. Again, unfortunately, I cannot provide any positive answers. We are now witnessing that new challenges keep popping up. And they keep becoming potentially not only challenges, but I would say problematic issues. So it's important to incorporate that into the big picture. And oftentimes when people say, well, we can ignore that. This is just a temporary thing. But that temporary may stay for some time and may influence the development of markets significantly. So that was sort of a observation to keep that in mind too. And now we are coming to the next final episode of this course, in which I will wrap everything up. And we'll provide some positive messages for you.
