One story keeps coming back to me. Isaac Newton, one of the most brilliant minds in history, invested in the South Sea Company bubble of 1720. He sold early at a profit. Then, watching the stock double and triple, he bought back in at the top. He lost a fortune that would be worth several million today. He later confessed: “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”
Three hundred years later, the mechanics are identical. Only the scenery changes.
Why So Much Chaos Right Now
Chaos emerges when several cycles of different tempo converge at the same point in time. The system creaks; you see risk-on and risk-off simultaneously, euphoria and fear in the same week. Think of it as several clocks in one room: normally they tick at different rhythms, but suddenly they all point to the same zone on the calendar. That’s what’s happening now.
Seven Clocks, One Time
Kitchin cycle (3-5 years): the pulse of business inventories, orders, and production. A fast nerve. Small explosions. This is where you see businesses reacting to demand shifts, building or running down inventories, adjusting order flows. Short but sensitive.
Juglar cycle (7-11 years): credit expansion, investment boom, interest rate hit, banking caution. Debt switches on the turbo: businesses and households borrow and invest, everything grows until rates rise or credit conditions tighten. Then debt itself shuts the tap. Those who over-leveraged start cutting spending, investment drops, and the recovery phase begins.
Kondratiev cycle (40-60 years): technology and productivity epochs. Not just stocks but an entire era: energy, industry, demographics, innovation. We’ve passed through the railway age, the electricity age, the oil and automobile age, the computer and internet age. Now we’re entering the era of digital infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and energy transformation.
The 18.6-year real estate rhythm: the land and property cycle functions as a massive emotional amplifier in the economy. When real estate rises, everyone feels wealthy, borrows against home equity, spends more, invests more boldly. When real estate stalls or falls, everyone turns conservative overnight. The real estate cycle correlates with credit expansion because housing is typically the largest asset and the largest liability in an ordinary person’s life.
Benner cycle: an empirical observation that crowd behavior and price phases tend to repeat rhythmically. Not because anything is programmed by cosmic forces, but because humans repeat the same mistakes. Greed and fear, euphoria and panic, FOMO and capitulation, all of it moves in waves because human psychology doesn’t change. Benner reminds us: history doesn’t repeat exactly, but it rhymes.
Ray Dalio’s Big Cycle: the grand debt and hegemony cycle. When debt accumulates to the point where the system must choose what to sacrifice: price stability (inflation) or debt stability (deflation, bankruptcies). Then the rewriting begins, either through inflation or through deleveraging. Dalio also emphasizes that the rise and fall of empires is cyclical: a rising power challenges the dominant one, conflict ensues, and eventually a new world order regime emerges.
Generational cycles (Strauss-Howe): not just economics but sociology. Generational archetypes (Crisis, High, Awakening, Unraveling) shift society’s mood, politics, and values. We’re currently in the Crisis phase, analogous to the 1930s or 1940s. Old institutions are being questioned, old agreements rewritten, old leaders stop functioning, and new generations emerge to build a new order.
When all these clocks converge in time, you get a noise zone. You see a parabola and a collapse simultaneously. Innovation euphoria and regulatory fear at the same moment. An old system trying to maintain control and a new one trying to break through.
What’s Actually Happening: The Liquidity and Leverage Operation
Markets don’t move on headlines. They move on financing conditions and on how quickly (and at what price) risk can be transferred.
Everything can be simplified to one cold axis: a mechanism that repeats cycle after cycle. Belief is cultivated (narrative). Leverage is cultivated. Products are created (ETFs, funds, cheap entry points, convenient channels). The assembled mass becomes liquidity. The flush arrives. After the flush, safeguards emerge (rules, compliance, haircuts, margin requirements, reporting). A new regime begins.
That’s the mechanism. And this is precisely where the time axis through 2030 aligns with what’s happening right now.
The 2026 Peak: Rising Prices Prepare the Rewriting
My core thesis is simple: when prices are rising, many people imagine a “revolution” is underway. In reality, what’s usually happening is preparation for a rewriting.
During the ascent, several things typically occur. A narrative gets built: “new era,” “institutions are coming,” “regulation is settled.” Appetite grows: “this is just the beginning,” “you haven’t missed it yet.” Leverage builds: “I’ll take just a bit more, after all it’s going up.” Products multiply: ETFs, structures, institutional access platforms. And belief solidifies that “this time is different.”
During the ascent, everyone becomes smart. Everyone finds a chart that confirms their view. Everyone discovers a long-term thesis. Everyone starts talking about 2029–2030 as if they’d signed a contract with destiny.
And then the market does one thing: it reveals that you weren’t smart, you were just sitting on the wave. If you didn’t have a plan, you become liquidity.
Why July–September 2026 Looks Like the Probable Peak Window
The timing logic works like this: the April 2024 Bitcoin halving historically sees its price climax 12–18 months later (pointing to summer through early autumn 2026). If that window coincides with regulatory clarity and renewed retail FOMO, an IPO wave becomes a real, visible indicator that euphoria has reached the masses. M2 money supply shows a peak according to the Kitchin cycle precisely in this window.
If the IPO wave doesn’t materialize in 2026 or shifts to 2027–2028, that’s a signal my time axis may be premature, and the bubble peak might not arrive when even the biggest fantasy fans expect it.
The IPO Wave: When Icons Go Public, the Peak Is Close
One of the strongest signals that a peak is approaching isn’t a chart pattern or a technical indicator. It’s an IPO wave of iconic companies.
When Stripe, OpenAI, SpaceX, and companies of similar caliber start talking about IPOs, it usually means not “the beginning of growth” but an attempt to exit at the peak, when investor appetite is maximal and valuations are barely questioned.
The historical pattern repeats. The 2000 dot-com boom: waves of IPOs on euphoria, followed by mass collapses. Blackstone’s IPO in June 2007, just before the financial crisis. Coinbase’s IPO in April 2021 and others, ahead of the next major crypto correction.
The model typically looks like this: market in euphoria, valuations extreme, an iconic company announces an IPO, the crowd pours in money, early investors exit at the peak, and within 6–12 months the flush begins. This isn’t coincidence. It’s the early investor exit mechanism, not a new growth phase.
What This Peak Still Needs
A clearer regulatory framework, so institutions feel safe and can explain to their boards: “this isn’t the Wild West, this is regulated space” (e.g., the Clarity Act and similar processes). Convenient products and channels through which traditional investors can enter without technical complexity: ETFs, custody, platforms. A narrative that “infrastructure is ready,” with settlement rails through stablecoins, tokenization, settlement systems, and professional custody solutions. And the crowd that once again believes “everything only goes up,” where FOMO becomes the fear of missing an epoch, not just a trade.
We’re at an interesting point right now (early 2026): there’s already movement, already enthusiasm, but still too much skepticism and too many hangovers from previous cycles. And a hangover isn’t the finale’s climax. A hangover more often precedes “one more” last party.
Trump: Why He Might Succeed Where Others Wouldn’t
Systemic rewriting often requires three qualities that many leaders lack: tolerance for conflict, fast decision-pushing, and willingness to pressure allies. Trump has an advantage: he’s not afraid of being unpleasant. During a crisis and rewriting period, that sometimes becomes a tool.
His logic typically consists of several theses: Europe must pay more seriously for its security. Industry must return closer to home. America must maintain the dollar’s centrality while renewing infrastructure. Rules must be clear and allow big money to operate, because otherwise hegemony hollows out.
The risk is obvious: this style means volatility. Sometimes it accelerates the rewriting, sometimes it creates additional chaos. But the alternative, gentle diplomats, also has a cost: dragging decisions until it’s too late.
What Comes Next
This article is the first of a four-part series laying out my thesis about what’s happening in the macro world and why the next five years won’t be a sequence of events but a switching of regimes.
In the following parts: why the dollar won’t surrender (and how it renews through stablecoins), gold and XRP as bridge logic in a segmented world, and what comes after Q4 2026, the shakeout, new rules, and the next cycle.
Sources ▸
Data: FRED M2 money supply. Bitcoin halving dates (April 2024). S&P 500 and NASDAQ historical data, IPO wave chronology (2000, 2007, 2021). Blackstone IPO (June 2007), Coinbase IPO (April 2021) as peak signal examples.
Analysis: Ray Dalio, “Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order” (2021). Henrik Zeberg, “The Monetary House of Cards” (2025), business cycle model and deflationary break. Neil Howe and William Strauss, “The Fourth Turning,” generational cycles and Crisis phase. Nikolai Kondratiev, long wave theory (40–60 year technological cycles). Clément Juglar, credit expansion and contraction cycle (7–11 years). Joseph Kitchin, short business inventory cycle (3–5 years). Fred Harrison, 18.6-year real estate rhythm. Samuel Benner, empirical price cycle model.
Context: Historical IPO wave examples: dot-com (2000), Blackstone (2007), Coinbase (2021). Bitcoin halving cycle history and correlation with price peaks. Note: this is my opinion and my thesis. It may play out this way, or it may play out entirely differently and I may be wrong. The mechanism simply aligns this way for me right now, though I always keep at least several alternative scenarios in mind.