The thesis
The next macro regime won’t be defined by a single recession, a single war, or a single inflation print. It will be defined by something more durable and more political: the public discovery that the last decade of policy created asset wealth and real-world scarcity at the same time.
That combination, paper asset inflation plus lived-cost inflation—doesnt end with a tidy mean reversion. It ends with backlash. And backlash doesn’t merely change headlines; it changes the rules that determine returns.
If the 2010s were an era where capital chased what was easy to buy, the 2020s–2030s look like an era where governments will force capital toward what is hard to build: power, grids, housing supply, industrial resilience. The market is still pricing a world where regulation is a nuisance and discount rates do the heavy lifting. The mispricing is that politics is becoming the discount rate.
How we got here: misallocation disguised as stability
The post-crisis era made a simple promise: suppress volatility, keep credit flowing, and let asset prices do some of the stabilizing work. That worked, if you define “worked” as a decade of rising financial asset prices and cheap funding.
But it quietly rewired incentives. When money is cheap and the state is slow, capital goes where it can move fastest. It doesn’t go into ten year permitting fights. It doesn’t go into projects whose payoff depends on local politics. It goes into existing stock, homes already built, equities already listed, assets already financialized.
So you get a world where balance sheets look better while the physical world gets tighter. Then shocks arrive, energy insecurity, supply chain fracture, migration pressures, AI’s power hunger, and the shortage isn’t theoretical anymore. It becomes lived reality: expensive rents, volatile electricity, failing infrastructure, angry voters.
The key point is not that “QE was bad” in some moral sense. The point is that it shifted the economy’s center of gravity away from building capacity and toward bidding up what already existed. That’s misallocation. And misallocation eventually becomes politics.
Where the backlash expresses itself
Backlash doesn’t show up as a single crash. It shows up as a pattern of interventions that steadily changes what is investable and what is not.
In Portugal, the crisis feels personal. Housing stopped being a place to live and became a collateral asset in a global market. The ECB’s cheap money pushed capital into property just as supply remained rigid. Then rates rose, and with variable-rate mortgages the adjustment hit households directly through cashflows. Politically, that produces a predictable response: rent controls, restrictions on short-term rentals, pressure on “speculators,” and constant tinkering with the rules. Even when the measures are modest, the signal is large: housing has become a political asset class, not just a financial one.
In Europe more broadly, energy is the same story in a different costume. Energy prices arent just an input; they’re a competitiveness regime. Volatility kills industrial confidence, and high fossil dependence becomes geopolitical vulnerability. In that environment, the state doesn’t simply “let markets work.” It coordinates storage, caps prices, subsidizes strategic sectors, and accelerates electrification, often imperfectly, but directionally relentlessly.
And now AI pours gasoline on the scarcity logic. Compute isn’t only a chip story; it’s a power-and-permits story. When top labs meter usage and throttle customers, you’re watching scarcity become explicit. That pushes capital toward the bottlenecks: megawatts, grid access, cooling, interconnects, siting, and reliability. In other words, the “future economy” ends up amplifying the importance of the oldest constraints: land, power, and time-to-build.
Backlash is what happens when these constraints collide with social legitimacy. The electorate wont tolerate a world where the young can’t rent, industry can’t compete, and electricity becomes a luxury, while asset owners remain insulated. So policy will lean harder into directing outcomes. That is the regime change.
What it means for investors: the winners are bottlenecks, the losers are targets
In a backlash regime, returns split into two categories.
First are assets that are politically easy to attack. These are the trades that worked when the state was an accommodator and now struggle when the state becomes an allocator. Housing-as-a-savings-account is the clearest example in many European markets. The state can’t print apartments, but it can cap rents, restrict rentals, penalize vacancy, increase taxes, and raise compliance burdens. That doesn’t guarantee a crash; it guarantees that the distribution of outcomes becomes uglier and more political.
Second are assets that the state cannot afford to starve. These are bottlenecks where “doing nothing” creates strategic vulnerability: grids, power, industrial capacity, security supply chains, and the physical infrastructure behind AI. These tend to gain a new kind of durability, not because they are risk-free, but because the political system increasingly treats them as must-build.
This is the contrarian part: many investors still think of political intervention as an undifferentiated negative. In a backlash regime, intervention can be a tax on some assets and a subsidy on others. The skill is to distinguish between “regulated to death” and “built at any cost.”
A practical scoreboard
You’ll know this regime is real when you stop hearing “markets will solve it” and start seeing the same policy reflex across domains:
- Housing: tightening of short-term rental rules, rent caps, foreign buyer restrictions, accelerated social housing mandates
- Energy: state coordination of storage and price measures, strategic procurement, grid fast-tracking, nuclear life-extension politics
- AI infrastructure: permitting reforms, state-supported power buildouts, “strategic compute” language, priority access to grid connections
- Corporate landscape: reshoring incentives, subsidy races, localization requirements, procurement nationalism
If those lines keep trending in one direction, the market’s old playbook, discount-rate math plus benign regulation, becomes less reliable. The portfolio has to adapt.
Closing thought
The non-consensus view isn’t a crash is coming or “central banks are evil.” It’s more sober and more useful: we are exiting a world where capital allocation was mostly financial and entering one where it is increasingly political. Misallocation created scarcity; scarcity created backlash; backlash will reprice which assets compound and which assets get capped.
In that world, the right question is: what is scarce, what is strategic, and what will the state be forced to build, versus what will it be tempted to punish?
Investment Gems 
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