OpenAI – ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking

Short answer:

• A total, global, irreversible collapse of industrial civilization this century is not the most likely outcome.

• A messy, uneven, long-term degradation of safety, services, political capacity and ecosystems is already underway and is, in my view, more likely than not to deepen substantially.

• The window to keep that degradation in the "painful but manageable" range is narrow, closing, and depends on political choices that are currently not being made at the necessary scale.

So: there is still a chance to avoid a civilization-scale collapse in the sense you define -- but it is conditional, shrinking, and nowhere near guaranteed.

Below I'll treat this as a probability problem and walk through the main interacting risk clusters.

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1. What "collapse" means in this context

You defined collapse as: a protracted, disorderly simplification over decades, with large losses of:

• Political and social complexity and stability

• Food, energy and water availability

• Public services, health care, education, and basic security

That's roughly how collapse scholars (Tainter, Diamond, Turchin, etc.) use the term: systems lose complexity and capacity, not necessarily all people or all technology.

Historically:

• Complex societies do collapse (Western Roman Empire, classical Maya, many others).

• Collapse is often regional, not everywhere at once.

• It's typically a convergence of stressors (climate, war, elites extracting too much, trade disruption), not a single cause.

Modern industrial society differs in two crucial ways:

1. Unprecedented power & connectivity -- global supply chains, digital infrastructure, high energy per person.

2. Unprecedented common vulnerabilities -- shared atmosphere, shared biosphere limits, tightly coupled finance and trade.

That combination makes both resilience and systemic failure cascades more likely, depending on governance.

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2. Physical constraints: climate, energy, water, food, biosphere

2.1 Climate: locked-in damage and tail risks

Current best estimates from the UN Emissions Gap Reports and UNEP updates:

• With current policies and realistic implementation of existing pledges, the world is now on track for about 2.3--2.5°C of warming by 2100, with a plausible range up to ~3°C. (UNEP - UN Environment Programme)

• Passing 1.5°C in the next decade is now described as effectively inevitable without temporary overshoot. (UNEP - UN Environment Programme)

• Greenhouse gas emissions hit record highs in 2023--2024 and are still rising. (Open Access Government)

IPCC AR6 WG2 emphasizes that at these levels of warming:

• Risks are non-linear: 3°C is not "twice as bad" as 1.5°C; in many domains it is several times worse, especially for food, water and ecosystems. (IPCC)

• Multiple hazards increasingly compound and cascade across sectors and regions -- exactly the kind of interacting failures you're worried about. (IPCC)

Food specifically:

• Climate change has already reduced global yields of major crops by around 4--10% over recent decades. (IPCC)

• At 2--3°C, the risk of simultaneous crop failures in multiple breadbasket regions (US Midwest, Black Sea, India, etc.) increases sharply; for maize, multi-breadbasket failure risk rises from ~6% historically to ~40--54% under 1.5--2°C warming. (climate.ox.ac.uk)

This does not guarantee global famine, but it:

• Raises the odds of price spikes + export bans + riots + state failures.

• Hits import-dependent poorer countries hardest, with clear collapse potential at regional scale.

The "climate endgame" literature explicitly warns that high-end scenarios could amplify or trigger other catastrophic risks (conflict, pandemics, financial crises), even if they don't cause human extinction. (PNAS)

Conclusion:
Moderate-to-severe civilizational stress from climate is now baked in. The question is whether institutions stay functional enough to buffer it or whether cascading failures dominate.

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2.2 Energy and resource base

Industrial civilization exists because of high-density, cheap energy and large flows of materials.

Fossil fuels and the energy transition

Key facts from IEA and major energy outlooks:

• Fossil fuels still supplied about 80% of global primary energy in 2023. (IEA)

• IEA and multiple analyses project fossil demand peaking around 2030, but not collapsing; most scenarios still have fossil fuels at 40--55% of energy in 2050 under current policies. (IEA)

• Major energy companies and consultancies increasingly admit that net-zero by 2050 is no longer plausible on current trajectories. (Reuters)

So we get a messy overlap:

• Declining relative role of fossil fuels (peak demand, some depletion, geopolitical hoarding).

• Rapid rise of renewables and storage -- solar and wind are now the cheapest new electricity in most regions, and China is scaling them at enormous speed. (IEA)

• But still huge residual dependence on fossil fuels for transport, petrochemicals, fertilizers, heavy industry, military power.

Risks:

• A disorderly transition -- price spikes, supply crunches, geopolitical conflict over remaining oil and gas, especially if producer states restrict exports.

• Critical minerals (lithium, cobalt, rare earths, copper) bottlenecks for the green transition; these are solvable with substitution, recycling and new mining, but not without environmental costs and geopolitical bargaining.

However, from a purely physical standpoint there is more than enough renewable energy potential (solar, wind, some nuclear) to support a high-energy civilization indefinitely. The limiting factor is politics, capital allocation, and time, not basic physics.

So energy is a transition-risk and inequality problem, not an absolute "we run out and the lights go off everywhere" problem.

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2.3 Water, soil, biodiversity, pollution

• The IPCC and IPBES both stress that biodiversity loss and climate change are co-crises, with each making the other harder to manage. Roughly 1 million species face extinction, and ecosystem services (pollination, fisheries, forests, wetlands) are deteriorating worldwide. (lp.panda.org)

• Freshwater stress is rising in many basins; climate change will greatly intensify droughts and floods, especially in already dry regions. (IPCC)

• Soil erosion and degradation, combined with intensive fertilizer use, are steadily eating into the biophysical resilience of food systems.

We also have long-lived pollutants:

• Endocrine disruptors, PFAS, microplastics, heavy metals, massive nutrient loads causing dead zones, plus legacy nuclear and chemical wastes.

• Most of these are long-term health and ecosystem drag factors, not single-shot collapse triggers, but they reduce margins of safety.

None of this alone forces a global collapse; together, they make everything else harder: food, health, adaptation.

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2.4 Pandemics and antimicrobial resistance

Two separate but interacting issues:

1. Emerging infectious diseases / climate-linked pandemics -- Habitat change, wildlife trade, and climate all increase spillover risks.

2. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) -- The WHO and recent Lancet analyses estimate that AMR already directly kills about 1.27 million people per year, associated with ~5 million deaths, and is on track for ~1.9 million attributable deaths annually by 2050 without major action. (World Health Organization)

AMR is particularly dangerous for industrial civilization because:

• Modern medicine (surgery, chemotherapy, intensive care, many chronic treatments) assumes effective antibiotics.

• Widespread AMR could push mortality from routine infections back towards pre-antibiotic levels, while we also face more climate-driven disease stress.

We know what to do (stewardship, surveillance, R&D incentives, sanitation, reduced overuse in livestock), but implementation is fragmented and underfunded. (World Health Organization)

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3. Social, political, and informational fractures

3.1 Democracy, trust, and polarization

Global measures (V-Dem, EIU democracy index, UN reports) show:

• 25+ years of net autocratization -- more countries are becoming less democratic than more democratic. (V-Dem)

• The 2024/2025 democracy indices show global democracy at its lowest level since these series began, with more than a third of humanity under outright authoritarian rule. (Economist Intelligence Unit)

• Freedom of expression and press freedom are declining in a record number of countries. (V-Dem)

• Social inequality and perceived economic insecurity are very high; UN social reports estimate around 60% of people feel economically insecure, with rising distrust in institutions. (DESA Publications)

This directly ties to your points:

• Loss of trust in institutions and politics due to scandals, corruption, and failure to deliver.

• Rising far-right and other extremisms, and breakdown of deliberative politics -- again, well documented. (Taylor & Francis Online)

That makes:

• Coordinated, painful long-term action (e.g., carbon pricing, consumption reduction, redistribution) politically very hard.

• Propensity for scapegoating, ethnic/religious polarization, and internal conflict higher when shocks (migration, inflation, climate disasters) hit.

Historically, when societies are under multiple simultaneous stresses and elites keep extracting short-term benefits, you often get:

• Democratic backsliding

• Regional civil conflicts

• Sometimes outright state failure

--- rather than the kind of long-term, cooperative planning that would mitigate collapse risks.

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3.2 Information integrity: deepfakes, AI and epistemic fragmentation

The World Economic Forum's 2024 Global Risks Report ranked AI-driven misinformation and disinformation as the top short-term global risk, tightly coupled with social and political polarization. (World Economic Forum)

This interacts with all your concerns:

• Conspiracy theories about vaccines, climate, elections

• Deepfakes that can fabricate scandals, incite violence, or delegitimize any inconvenient truth

• States and non-state actors using information warfare to paralyze adversaries' decision-making

When you have:

1. Objective need for strong, sometimes harsh, coordinated measures (e.g., rationing, relocation, curbing high-emitting consumption), and

2. Information systems that make it cheap to manufacture outrage and confusion,

the probability that democracies actually implement those measures drops sharply.

So: we often know what to do technically, but cannot get collective consent.

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3.3 Education and long-run human capital

Global education quality is trending the wrong way in many places:

• PISA 2022 showed an unprecedented drop in maths and reading performance across OECD countries; maths fell by nearly 15 points on average, much more than any previous test interval. (World Economic Forum)

• COVID-era school closures caused significant learning losses, especially in math and science and especially among poorer children; some of this loss appears persistent. (UNESCO)

This is not an immediate collapse trigger, but it has a slow-burn effect: a world that is more complex, volatile and technologically demanding is being populated by cohorts with weaker basic skills and higher inequality in education.

That erodes:

• The capacity to understand long-term risks

• The quality of governance

• The productivity needed to service debts, pay for adaptation, etc.

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4. War, nuclear weapons, and advanced biotechnologies

4.1 Nuclear risk

According to SIPRI's 2025 Yearbook:

• There are about 12,241 nuclear warheads globally, ~9,600 in military stockpiles and ~2,100 on high alert. (SIPRI)

• All nine nuclear-armed states are modernizing and/or expanding their arsenals; disarmament has stalled and reversed.

• China is adding ~100 warheads per year and building out large ICBM fields, shifting from minimum deterrence towards great-power parity. (The Guardian)

The risk is not just "global thermonuclear war tomorrow." It's:

• Increased probability of regional nuclear exchanges (e.g., India--Pakistan, NATO--Russia, US--China) under high stress.

• Growing concerns about AI integration into nuclear command and control, which SIPRI explicitly warns could be dangerously destabilizing. (The Economic Times)

Nuclear war is one of the few single-event risks that genuinely could drive a rapid, global collapse (or at least a brutal truncation of industrial capacity) if it escalated far enough.

4.2 Bioengineering and catastrophic biological risks

• Advances in biotechnology and AI-assisted design are lowering barriers to creating or modifying pathogens, while governance and surveillance lag. (Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security)

Well-informed experts do not agree on exact probabilities, but there is broad consensus that:

• A deliberately engineered pathogen, or a catastrophic accident, could exceed COVID-19 by orders of magnitude in lethality and socioeconomic disruption. (The Nuclear Threat Initiative)

Again: this is not deterministic collapse, but it's a fat-tailed risk that stacks on top of everything else.

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5. Economy, finance, and supply chains

5.1 Integrative fragility: "just in time" meets polycrisis

Global trade and supply chain research since COVID and the Ukraine war shows:

• Highly globalized, "just-in-time" supply chains were efficient but brittle; disruptions spread quickly and shutdowns in one node stalled whole sectors. (Journal of Marketing & Social Research)

• WEF's Global Risks Reports now emphasize disruptions to critical infrastructure and systemically important supply chains as central systemic risks, closely coupled to climate extremes and geopolitical conflict. (World Economic Forum)

Attempts at reshoring or weaponizing supply chains (US--China decoupling, export controls, etc.) are themselves risky: OECD modelling shows aggressive reshoring could cut trade by ~18% and GDP by up to 12% in affected economies, without necessarily improving resilience.

Finance adds another layer:

• High global debt levels, complex derivatives, and tight coupling mean that sudden repricing of climate or geopolitical risk can trigger cascading crises, as 2008 already showed on a smaller set of triggers.

• A large climate or war-induced supply shock could coincide with financial stress, forcing austerity and undermining the very investments needed for adaptation and transition.

This is the classic "the system is efficient but has thin buffers" problem: it can absorb small shocks but is vulnerable to correlated, multi-sector hits -- exactly what climate change and geopolitics are generating.

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6. Where we do know what to do -- and mostly don't do it

Across many domains (climate, AMR, inequality, basic resilience) the technical playbook is clear enough:

• Rapid decarbonization: renewables + grid upgrades + electrification + efficiency + cutting methane.

• Climate adaptation: flood defenses, heat action plans, drought-tolerant crops, early-warning systems, planned relocation from uninhabitable zones.

• Social stabilization: progressive taxation, social safety nets, education and health investments, anti-corruption measures.

• Health security: One Health AMR strategies, pandemic surveillance, healthcare system strengthening.

• Digital/AI governance: platform rules, provenance and watermarking, election protection, AI safety labs and oversight.

IPCC WG2, UNEP, WHO, and many others spend thousands of pages detailing workable interventions. (IPCC)

Why isn't it happening at scale?

• Collective action problems -- benefits are diffuse and long-term, costs are concentrated and immediate.

• Vested interests -- fossil fuel lobbies, oligarchic elites, companies that profit from externalities.

• Short political time horizons -- election cycles, unstable governments, lack of accountability mechanisms beyond the nation state.

• Mistrust and misinformation -- citizens often no longer believe either the science or the elites conveying it.

Your point about citizens in democracies rarely accepting permanent reductions in living standards is empirically justified. Historically, major sacrifices (rationing, conscription) have been accepted mainly when there is:

1. An immediate, visible enemy or crisis (e.g., world wars), and

2. A relatively high level of trust that sacrifices are shared fairly.

We currently have the opposite: slow and abstract threats + low trust + visible inequality. That is a bad combination for proactive, painful mitigation.

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7. Where we don't yet know what to do

There are also domains where the problem is not just political will:

• Maintaining information integrity in an open, global digital ecosystem where anyone can generate extremely convincing synthetic media at scale. There is no proven institutional architecture for this. (Investopedia)

• Governing dual-use AI + biotech globally in a world of geopolitical rivalry. Even if you design good norms, enforcement is hard when some actors see advantage in breaking them. (councilonstrategicrisks.org)

• Managing geoengineering (solar radiation management, large-scale carbon dioxide removal) if climate damages escalate and political pressure rises to "do something fast," despite profound uncertainty and geopolitical implications. (PNAS)

• Deep social polarization -- we have some partial tools (citizens' assemblies, electoral reforms), but no robust, scalable recipe for depolarizing societies once they are heavily segmented and algorithmically siloed.

These are frontier governance problems. We may find workable regimes, but we are not there yet, and we're trying to do it under time pressure and worsening material conditions.

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8. Interactions, feedbacks, and ratchets

The most important point is how these risks interlock.

Some examples:

• Climate → food → migration → politics → conflict

  • Hotter world → more crop failures, water stress. (IPCC)

  • This drives food price spikes and internal displacement, spilling across borders as migration.

  • Host societies already polarized respond with more extremism and securitization, eroding democratic norms. (Taylor & Francis Online)

  • Conflicts then further destroy infrastructure, accelerate emissions (military), and divert resources from adaptation and mitigation.

• Polycrisis ratchet (per IPCC and WEF framing): each crisis consumes fiscal and political capacity, making the next one harder to manage. (IPCC)

• Economic stress → underinvestment in resilience

  • Debt + austerity → cuts to maintenance, health systems, and education, which then lowers future adaptive capacity.

  • Underinvestment in infrastructure increases the probability that the next climate shock or cyberattack causes catastrophic rather than manageable damage.

• AMR + climate + health system overload -- hotter world, more disasters, more wounded and sick, plus less effective antibiotics and underfunded health systems; a sizeable share of deaths in such a world are from infections that would be trivial in a well-resourced, low-AMR system. (World Health Organization)

• Nuclear and conflict feedbacks -- intensifying competition over resources and status (in a hotter, more unequal world) increases the chance of large wars; large wars in turn disrupt climate action and increase famine risks.

These are ratcheting mechanisms: once certain thresholds are passed (trust, fiscal capacity, ecosystem damage), it is very hard to climb back up.

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9. Historical perspective: do we usually collapse or adapt?

Historical record:

• Many complex societies have experienced sharp drops in complexity (collapse in your sense).

• But humanity as a whole has been remarkably adaptive and inventive, often finding substitutions (new crops, new energy, new institutions) under pressure.

Differences today:

• Global scale -- there is effectively one integrated industrial civilization; fewer "off-world" refuges.

• Higher destructive power -- nuclear weapons, engineered pathogens.

• Higher knowledge and coordination potential -- global science, communication, and (in principle) the ability to learn from each other fast.

The best reading is that:

• Regional collapses are common and, at this point, likely in some regions under 2--3°C warming and persistent inequality.

• Global systemic collapse is neither inevitable nor ruled out; its probability depends heavily on governance and luck over the next 50--75 years.

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10. Probabilistic outlook to 2100

These are necessarily rough, but I'll be explicit and conservative.

Conditioning on:

• Warming in the ~2--3°C range by 2100 under current pledge dynamics (UNEP - UN Environment Programme)

• No deliberate, global civilizational suicide (e.g., full-scale nuclear exchange)

• No unexpected, planet-wide positive miracle (e.g., AGI that solves governance and climate for us)

I would roughly apportion probabilities like this:

Scenario A -- "Muddling through with heavy damage" (~30--40%)

• Industrial civilization persists globally; most people still live in states with functioning governments and complex economies.

• However:

  • Climate impacts are severe: regular megadisasters, major coastal loss, significant agricultural losses, many uninhabitable hot-spots.

  • Inequality is extreme; large parts of the Global South suffer chronic crisis, but global core regions maintain high-tech lifestyles behind stronger borders.

  • Politics is more authoritarian in many places; surveillance and control technologies are widely used.

• This is not a non-collapse world for everyone; it's a world where some regions avoid full collapse at the cost of others.

Scenario B -- "Patchwork collapse / regional dark ages" (~40--55%)

• Multiple major regions (some combination of parts of Africa, South Asia, the Middle East, parts of Latin America, maybe parts of Southeast Asia) see persistent state failure, major depopulation or outward migration, and long-term loss of industrial capacity.

• Global trade splinters; high-tech production is concentrated in a few blocs (e.g. North America, parts of Europe, East Asia), which themselves are periodically destabilized but retain overall system continuity.

• Think of a world of large semi-functional techno-fortresses surrounded by zones of chronic crisis.

• This would qualify as a collapse of industrial civilization in your sense globally, even if pockets remain highly complex.

I currently regard this as the single most likely broad pattern unless there is a major, deliberate course correction.

Scenario C -- "Global industrial crash" (~10--20%)

• One or more large, abrupt shocks overwhelm the system:

  • Large-scale nuclear war

  • Global catastrophic biological event

  • Very high-end climate + food + war cascade

  • Or a combination of "smaller" catastrophes piling up faster than institutions can respond.

• Result:

  • Collapse of global trade and most advanced manufacturing

  • Massive population decline

  • Long-term loss of ability to maintain complex technologies (e.g., semiconductors, global internet).

I don't see this as the central expectation, but a 10--20% tail risk over ~75 years is not negligible. It's roughly in the same order as expert assessments of nuclear and catastrophic bio risk in the global catastrophic risk literature. (globalchallenges.org)

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11. So, is there still a realistic chance to prevent collapse?

If by "prevent collapse" you mean "avoid any large-scale, long-term simplification for most of humanity", my answer is:

• No, that is no longer realistic.

  • Too much climate damage and biosphere degradation are already locked in. (IPCC)

  • Inequality, AMR, and institutional erosion are too far advanced to avoid serious, enduring harm and instability in a significant fraction of the world.

If you instead mean "avoid a global, multi-decade collapse of industrial civilization as a whole" -- i.e., preserve functioning complex societies somewhere on Earth, and avoid a return to pre-industrial or quasi-feudal conditions everywhere -- my answer is:

• Yes, there is still a substantial chance -- but not a comfortable one.

• A rough, order-of-magnitude statement:

  • Maybe 50--70% that we end up in something like Scenario A or the less severe edge of Scenario B -- ugly, deeply unjust, but not a universal dark age.

  • Maybe 10--20% that we see a much more thorough global crash.

  • The rest is the uncertainty between those sketches.

The key point: the default under current trends is not "everything basically fine," and it is also not "guaranteed global apocalypse." It's stratified collapse and enduring crisis, with some islands of high complexity and order.

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12. What realistically can still bend the trajectory?

Given the political and material constraints you emphasized, what remains plausible?

Not:

• A smooth, globally coordinated, 1.5°C-compatible transition with equal sacrifice and shared prosperity. That's gone.

Still plausible, but hard:

1. Aggressive decarbonization where it's cheapest and fastest

   • Lean into the fact that renewables + storage are now economically competitive or superior, especially in China, the EU and many emerging markets. (IEA)

   • That can cap warming closer to 2--2.3°C than 2.8--3°C, which matters enormously for food and habitability.

2. Targeted protection of critical systems

   • Hardening grids, communications, key industrial facilities and hospitals against cyberattacks, extreme weather, and geomagnetic storms. (World Economic Forum Reports)

   • Building redundancies and local buffers in food, energy and medical supply chains, even at some economic cost.

3. Preventing worst-case war and bio scenarios

   • Reviving or reinventing arms control and crisis-management channels among nuclear powers. (SIPRI)

   • Stronger global norms and verification on biosecurity and AI-bio convergence. (The Nuclear Threat Initiative)

4. Selective social reforms that buy resilience

   • You're right that mass electorates resist permanent "having less of everything." But high-emitting elites and upper-middle classes are a small fraction of humanity producing a huge fraction of emissions; redistributive and regulatory measures here can meaningfully cut emissions and increase resilience without impoverishing everyone. (DESA Publications)

5. Adaptation triage

   • Accept that not every region and coastal city can be saved in situ; invest heavily in adaptation where it's most cost-effective and humane, and plan organized, legal migration or relocation rather than leaving it to chaotic flight.

All of this requires political coalitions that currently do not exist at sufficient strength -- but politics is path-dependent and can change rapidly under visible crisis. The triple run of hottest-ever years and visible disasters is already shifting attitudes in some countries. (The Guardian)

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13. Bottom line

• Industrial civilization is not on a path to a stable, comfortable equilibrium. A long, rough period of crises and partial collapses is more likely than not.

• However, physics and ecology do not yet force a total global collapse. There is still enough time, energy and knowledge to keep large parts of the world in a high-complexity, high-technology state, albeit altered and scarred.

• The decisive constraints are institutional and political, not purely technical. And those constraints are tightening as trust erodes, inequality grows, and environmental damage accumulates.

So, answering your question as bluntly as possible:

As of late 2025, there is still a serious chance to avoid the global collapse of industrial civilization -- but the most probable outcome is a century of deepening, uneven crisis, with regional collapses and a long-term simplification of human societies compared to today.

The "best case" that remains is not pleasant; the "worst case" is still on the table and non-trivial. Which of these we get depends primarily on political decisions and collective behavior in the next 1--3 decades, made under increasingly hostile conditions.

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• Reuters
• Financial Times
• Reuters
• Financial Times
• The Guardian
• Investopedia