Part I
Thirty years ago, economists still spoke confidently about “cycles.” Today, such vocabulary feels quaint. The world has entered what Professor Rudy Aernoud tcalls the perma-crisis - a state of continuous, overlapping disruptionsin which every new shock emerges before the previous one has faded. Financial markets no longer recover before the next tremor arrives; supply chains remain fragile; geopolitical tensions have become a permanent feature of the global landscape.
Professor Rudy Aernoudt is one of Europe’s rare hybrid thinkers - both an academic and a practitioner. He teaches at the Universities of Ghent and Nancy, co-leads executive programs at BMI Executive Institute in the Baltics, and has served as chief economist at the European Commission and Secretary-General for Economy and Innovation in Belgium. A prolific author of more than forty-five books and hundreds of articles in Trends, Made In and FD Magazine, Aernoudt haslong argued that Europe must shift its focus from short-term profits to the architecture of resilience.
The data bear him out. Before 2000, the world faced a major economic shock roughly every seven years - from the dot-com bubble to the Asian financial crisis. Now, disruptions strike every three to five years, and their cost is rising sharply. A month-long supply chain breakdown can erase 3–5 percent of a company’s EBITDA. Over a decade, accumulated disruptions can wipe out nearly half of annual profits. McKinsey and Swiss Re estimate that supply chain instability now costs businesses around 184 billion dollars per year - and climbing.
Against this backdrop, the logic of traditional business planning is collapsing. “Most executives still live by the rhythm of quarterly results,” Aernoudt says, “but in a world where crises recur every three years, short-sightedness is fatal. Today, resilience matters more than profit.” This is not metaphor, he adds, but strategy: “The question is no longer how much you’ll earn next month, but whether your company will survive the next crisis.”
Out of this reality emerges a new term - resilience capitalism. It is an economic paradigm where short-term efficiency gives way to long-term survivability. In practice, it means moving away from the world of “Excel thinking,” where only next quarter’s numbers matter, toward foresight -the art of anticipating scenarios rather than forecasting outcomes. “Forecasting assumes the future will behave as planned,” Aernoudt explains. “Foresight begins with the recognition that it won’t.”
The energy industry offers an early lesson. In the 1970s, Shell developed scenarios about a potential global oil shortage. When the oil crisis struck, Shell was one of the few companies prepared - and it pulled far ahead of its competitors. That mindset, once visionary, is now essential for survival - whether you build cars in Stuttgart or software in Vilnius.
Globalization has intensified the stakes. U.S. tariff wars have driven consumer prices up by 1.7 percent and cost the average household about 2,800 dollars a year. Meanwhile, Chinese deflation of nearly 4 percent in the B2B sector grants Chinese producers a six-percent annual competitiveness edge over their Europeanrivals. In Russia, corporate lending has surged by 38 percent since 2022, creating what Bloomberg warns could be a “credible risk of systemic bankingcrisis within twelve months.” None of these phenomena remain contained; each reverberates across Europe - and deep into the Baltics.
“Every decision made in Washington or Beijing now affects your EBITDA in Vilnius or Amsterdam,” Aernoudt notes. “One click in Asia can shrink your profits in Europe. The world is fragile - and irreversibly interconnected.”
This interdependence demands a new kind of leadership. The question “How much will we earn this quarter?” is being replaced by “How long can our ecosystem endure?” It’s a cultural as much as a financial transformation: leaders must learn to read geopolitical signals, map vulnerabilities, and invest in long-term resilience.
Theperma-crisis is not a temporary disorder; it is the new normal. If the economy once resembled a sine wave, today it looks more like a seismograph. Yet, as Professor Aernoudt insists, “Instability is not a verdict - it’s an invitation to rethink the paradigm.”
Continue to Part II Macroeconomic Turbulence: How Everything Connects
