Wordfest Presents Jeff Rubin

Wordfest Presents Jeff Rubin

Wordfest presents bestselling author and economist Jeff Rubin and his new book  A Map of the New Normal: How Inflation, War, and Sanctions Will Change Your World Forever. Tracking trade wars and kinetic wars, central banks and runs on banks, pipelines blown up and start-ups knocked down, Rubin gives us a glimpse of a near future that will look very different from the recent past. It reminds us that our mortgage rates and job security, our grocery bills and investments, are all tied to events set in motion by governments, corporations, and black swans around the world. 

The in-depth conversation, hosted by Shelley Youngblut, Wordfest’s CEO and Creative Ringleader, will include an audience Q & A and book signing. Thank you to Owl’s Nest Books, who will be on site with copies of Rubin's book, as well as his backlist. Ticket holders can also pre-order copies here for pick-up at the event.

We are grateful to Penguin Random House Canada for making it possible for Wordfest to connect you with Jeff Rubin.

About A MAP OF THE NEW NORMAL 

Bestselling author and economist Jeff Rubin looks ahead and warns that the inflation that took the world by surprise in 2021 is in fact the front of a perfect storm of war, supply-chain disruption, geopolitical realignment, domestic upheaval, and energy scarcity that will change everything.

During the pandemic, the borrowing patterns of the Canadian government inflated a national deficit by a factor of ten in just two years – and the time has come to pay for it. The ramifications of international Covid-19 spending could potentially last for decades, and inevitably one of the first manifestations of these consequences will be that central banks will lose control of interest rates, and therefore of growth and inflation targets. That is just the first symptom of a series of cascading upheavals. Supply-chain disruptions have already shown the vulnerability of the globalist model that has fueled growth for the past decades. War has not only shown the fragility of the status quo but has revealed diplomatic and economic rifts that promise to shift trading patterns, which means access to markets and to resources.

At the same time, the precarity of the U.S. dollar underlines the life-or-death importance of those resources, energy in particular. And consolidation of an Eurasian bloc, from Russia to China, and encompassing old enemies like Iran and former U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, hint that the upheaval of Covid was just the beginning. Tracking trade wars and kinetic wars, central banks and runs on banks, pipelines blown up and start-ups knocked down, A Map of the New Normal gives us a glimpse of a near future that will look very different from the recent past. 

About Jeff Rubin

Jeff Rubin is a Canadian economist and bestselling author. A world-leading expert on trade and energy, and former chief economist and chief strategist at CIBC World Markets, he served as a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance founded by Jim Balsillie. His first book, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller was a #1 bestseller and won the National Business Book Award and was longlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. Since then, he has written multiple bestsellers, including The End of Growth, The Carbon Bubble, and The Expendables. He lives in Toronto.  

About Host Shelley Youngblut

Shelley Youngblut is the CEO & Creative Ringleader of Wordfest. She was the recipient of the 2020 Calgary Award for Community Achievement in the Arts and the 2018 Rozsa Award for Arts Leadership. She also won the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Western Magazine Awards. Youngblut was the founding editor of Calgary’s award-winning Swerve magazine and has created magazines for ESPN, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Nickelodeon, Western Living, and The Globe and Mail. She was also a former pop-culture correspondent for ABC World News Now and Canada AM. Follow her on Facebook @ShelleyYoungblut and Instagram/Threads @youngblutshelley.

Be Curiouser

• How Globalization Destroyed the Middle Class. –TVOntario
• The Soaring Cost of Oil. –YouTube
• Will Covid-19 Kill Globalization? –The Globe and Mail