11 publications
A complete portrait of Japan built entirely from our database — the land and the people, how it got rich, the bubble and the bust, what it makes now, its trade and its energy, the state's balance sheet, and where it stands against every other country and inside its own economic cycle.
by Game Of Francs Research Team
Three stories dominate the macro tape: an American fiscal position that no longer stabilises on its own, a world rearming faster than at any point since the Cold War, and a gold price that has quadrupled in a decade. Markets file them separately. They are the same story, told from three angles, and the data now says where in the long debt cycle we are standing.
by Game Of Francs Research Team
Markets are addicted to the short term, but the forces that decide whether a currency keeps its crown, whether a debt load stays sustainable, or whether a great power holds together move on a timescale of decades. Through Ray Dalio's Big Cycles lens — the long debt and money cycle, the internal cycle of order and disorder, and the external rise and fall of great powers — this is an attempt to zoom out from the headline and ask a single question: where in the long arc are we actually standing?
by Game Of Francs Research Team
The age structure of a population is one of the most powerful and most consistently overlooked forces in the modern economy — quietly shaping pensions, labour markets, asset prices and sovereign debt across the developed world. From Japan, the country that arrived first, to Switzerland's June 2026 referendum on capping its population, this is the fiscal arithmetic of ageing: a pay-as-you-go promise made under demographic assumptions that no longer hold, and the intergenerational transfer every ageing society must eventually confront.
by Game Of Francs Research Team
The interest rate is the price of time — the cost of capital, the discount rate on every future cash flow, and the signal coordinating every intertemporal decision in the economy. Rooted in human time preference, it is the one price that underlies every other. When set by markets it encodes truth; when set by committee it encodes fiction, with consequences that compound silently until they cannot be ignored.
by Game Of Francs Research Team
Edward Chancellor's capital cycle framework — high returns attract capital, capital floods the industry, supply expands, returns compress — applied to the 2025–2026 AI infrastructure buildout, where venture and hyperscaler capex have reached a magnitude that historically precedes deeply disappointing returns.
by Game Of Francs Research Team
Central bank independence is presented as a constitutional firewall between democratic politics and monetary stability — written into founding statutes, defended by Nobel laureates, and repeated as if it were a law of nature. Examined against the historical record and the actual behaviour of the Fed, ECB, BoE, BoJ, and SNB, it is largely a fiction.
by Game Of Francs Research Team
How a number with no theoretical foundation — picked in 1990 by a New Zealand central banker as a reasonable guess at "close enough to zero" — came to govern monetary policy worldwide, and the quiet redefinition of inflation itself that made it possible.
by Game Of Francs Research Team
Measuring the world in fiat is like measuring distance with an elastic band — both the object and the ruler move. Pricing commodities, equities, and housing in gold changes the ruler and reveals a different macro picture, with August 15, 1971 as the inflection point.
by Game Of Francs Research Team
A macro reading of Vaclav Smil's How the World Really Works — energy as the master variable, the four pillars of civilization, and the physical foundations behind inflation, deglobalization, and the energy transition.
by Game Of Francs Research Team
First issue of the Game Of Francs article series: a deep dive into the Swiss Franc.
by Game Of Francs Research Team
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