The Mortality Crisis

Where geopolitics, demographics, and fiscal mathematics collide

1. Zero Hour

In 2030, Japan’s elderly will start spending more than the country saves. For eight decades, Japanese households have been the reliable buyers of their government’s debt – funding endless deficits whilst asking little about returns. That arrangement ends when the savers become the spenders.

Sanae Takaichi, who won the Liberal Democratic Party leadership in early October 2025 and is poised to become prime minister, promises a return to Abenomics – aggressive deficit spending to fund economic stimulus – just as the people who made that possible die off.

Don’t be lulled into thinking this is simply a Japanese budget crisis. It’s the leading edge of a pan-Asian demographic collapse that will reshape global power, dissolve the postwar development model and force a brutal reckoning between geopolitical ambitions and fiscal mathematics. Japan simply arrived first.

The creditor generation whose savings enabled impossible debt loads is mortal. We are living through the inflection point when that mortality becomes mathematically decisive.