Late-Cycle Investment Theory & Future Decade 📈

In Episode 455 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Nicolas Colin, a former French Treasury official and the co-founder of a European startup accelerator whose work sits at the intersection of technology, markets, geopolitics, and global finance.

In the first hour of their conversation, Kofinas and Colin break down Colin’s “Late Cycle Investment Theory” and the framework behind it. They draw on Carlota Perez’s model of technological revolutions and techno-economic paradigms, explore the role of speculative manias and market concentration, and examine why Colin argues that AI is less a brand-new technological revolution than an intensification of the computing-and-network paradigm that has been unfolding for the past 50 years. They also compare the current moment to the 1970s as a historical analogue and discuss why Colin believes financial systems are often the last piece to be rebuilt after a major paradigm shift.

In the second hour, Kofinas and Colin explore what this late-cycle thesis means for investors, the public, and the geostrategic competition between the United States and China. They discuss how tokenization and programmable money could reshape the global financial system's infrastructure, and how today’s “Trump Shock” might be the opening move in a broader financial reset.

They also examine what financial fragmentation between two competing spheres—one led by China and one by the U.S.—may look like in practice, why programmable grid infrastructure and a new scale of electrification may be leading candidates for the next technological revolution, and what all of this implies for public debt servicing, inflation, financial repression, and wealth redistribution as proximity services replace the factory floor as the central battleground over which a new social contract will be formed.

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00:00 Introduction
06:09 Nicola's Writing Journey
07:37 Writing and Research Balance
13:03 European Economic Development
15:03 Strengthening Societies and Economies
16:02 Late Cycle Investment Theory Paper
16:41 AI and Technological Continuity
20:32 Carlota Perez's Framework
27:03 Historical Cycles and Technological Revolutions
33:20 Financial System Reset
36:55 Gold Standard and Bretton Woods
45:06 Topic for the Second Hour

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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas

Episode Recorded on 12/22/2025