The Papua New Guinea Futurist

THE COMING APOCALYPSE The world has witnessed the largest creation of wealth ever in history since the industrial revolution. Especially in modern times, we have witnessed huge wealth being created by such great organisations as ExxonMobil, General Motors. There were only a handful of billionaires in the early 20 th century, now there are approximately 1,210 billionaires in the world. As an indication, the world’s largest asset manager is BlackRock Inc. with $3.65 trillion in assets under management. This huge growth has been funded by debt. Governments borrow to build infrastructure and fund social programs with the intent to pay back the borrowings from the future tax revenue streams. Consumers borrow to pay for homes (mortgage), house hold items (retail credit) and miscellaneous luxuries (credit card). This then feeds a vicious cycle whereby the investments from the borrowed funds creates more demand and although in the short term, this will be see as robust economic gro...

The future of the country looks bright with the LNG project coming on line, however if one looks closely at the horizon, there are dark clouds of crisis forming that the people of PNG need to be wary of (1) Upcoming elections (2) LNG (3) State Security Services (1) Upcoming Elections The recent Kandep elections is an indication of what will happen when you have determined candidates combined with large sums of money, high powered weapons & supporters determined to do whatever it takes to win the election. The resources of the State were stretched however it was able to manage because there were no other security issues happening concurrently. Now imagine if there were a minimum of 2 or 3 “Kandep” type elections at the same time in 2012. (2) LNG The money flowing into the Hela region as well as into the pockets of a few elite people in Government is huge. Some have been spent on purchasing of weapons. Combine this with frustrations regarding the perceived overbearing behavior of the...