Pope Leo XIV, at his final general audience of 2025 on December 31, invited Catholics to look back on the year with both gratitude and repentance — to place everything before the Lord, entrusting themselves to his providence.
I am not going to do quite that here. But I am going to do a year-end assessment that is, I hope, more honest than the ones you will find in the financial and geopolitical press.
2025 was a year in which a great deal happened and very little was resolved. Let me go through what I think actually mattered.
On the Global Order
The most significant shift of 2025 was the acceleration of multipolarity. The American-led world order — the system of alliances, institutions, and norms that structured international relations from 1945 to roughly 2016 — is not dead. But it is no longer unchallenged, and the challengers are more capable than they were.
China demonstrated, in April and October, that it can weaponise its dominance of rare earth mineral supply chains in ways that impose genuine costs on the United States. That is new. Russia, despite losing roughly a thousand soldiers a day in Ukraine, has not collapsed. Japan is rearming. Poland is spending 4% of GDP on defence. The post-war peace dividend is over.
The world of 2025 is more dangerous than the world of 2020. Anyone who planned their financial and personal structures for the world of 2020 should be reviewing those plans.
On Western Politics
The most striking political story of the year was not Trump. It was the continued failure of the centre.
In France, in Germany, in the UK, in the Netherlands, in Australia, centrist and centre-left governments are struggling to produce results that ordinary voters find convincing. The cost of housing, the cost of energy, the erosion of public services, the sense that the system works for those already inside it — these are not conspiracy theories. They are lived experiences.
Zohran Mamdani winning New York on a socialist programme. The AfD's continued advance in Germany. Reform UK's polling numbers. These are all symptoms of the same disease: when the centre fails, the alternatives fill the vacuum.
What is not working is the assumption that the political establishment can continue to ask for trust it has not earned.
On the Economy
The tariff war has reshaped global trade flows in ways that are still being absorbed. The Tax Foundation estimates the average US household paid $1,100 more in 2025 as a result of Trump's tariffs. For European exporters, particularly in Germany, the combination of energy costs three times higher than the US, new tariffs on industrial goods, and an expanding ESG regulatory burden has made 2025 genuinely difficult.
Gold above $2,700 an ounce is not a coincidence. It is the market's assessment of sovereign creditworthiness across the major Western economies.
On What I Got Right and Wrong
I got the general direction right. The state's continued expansion, the erosion of privacy through digital infrastructure, the accelerating case for multi-jurisdictional structuring — these themes played out in 2025 exactly as I expected.
Where I underestimated was the pace. Things are moving faster than even a pessimist would have predicted.
The window I talk about — the period during which restructuring is still possible, still legal, still relatively straightforward — is closing faster than I would have said twelve months ago.
Looking at 2026
2026 will be more volatile, more complex, and more consequential than 2025. For those who have built genuine resilience — diversified jurisdictions, portable structures, multiple income streams, real assets — it will be navigable. For those who have not, the costs of delay are compounding.
The new year begins in two days. It is not too late to start.
Work with Sebastian
If 2025 was the year you thought about making changes but did not, let 2026 be the year you actually do. The first conversations of the new year are always the most important. Book a consultation.