Things are not looking good for the world financial system.

In China, the crises at Evergrande and Country Garden are just the highest profile examples to hit the press, as more than 50 Chinese are have defaulted on their debts, as reported by The New York Times.

A major financial collapse in China will inevitably produce fall-out around the world.

There are some other significant threats that have not yet come to pass.

Many doomsayers are warning of societal collapse due to climate change, with financial collapse being just one symptom. For more on societal collapse, see the environment thread of this blog. It seems that humanity is unable to muster the collective will to stop climate change, so the consequences of it, including societal collapse, seem more inevitable with each passing day.

Another threat is AI, as reported by Gizmodo. AI is penetrating all areas of life, including trading and financial institutions, and one of the problems with that is the lack of diversity of AI models in AI, leading to every institution making the same choices. This has led one expert, Gary Gensler (Chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission), to predict that AI will cause a financial meltdown in the next 10 years unless there is comprehensive regulation of this use of AI very soon.

Using AI for trading decisions is inherently dangerous, since it is not so different from algorithmic automated trading systems, which have already caused so much instability in the markets that their use has been heavily regulated. AI will simply bring more of the same, with the added complication that no-one knows how AI works.