Among several subjects I find fascinating, I chose to begin with this one for its relevance to everyone's financial health and because it comes from my strongest area of interest, financial analysis.
Based on information I have been gathering for years and vetting through my own research, western society may be reaching the end stage of a cycle in human ecosystems, typified by rising asymmetry in the access to Relative & Financing Value. As the asymmetry grows, it allows power elites (military, religious, political, financial, etc.) to manipulate the price and time-dimension of money as a means to seize the bulk of the system’s Net Present Value and with it, a sizable ownership of its assets. At its highest point, system bias returns to the most prevalent resource-competition dynamics among pre-capitalist societies: oligopoly.
Given its ecosystemic roots, the dynamics of the cycle are best described by a pair of ordinary differential equations, first used to model Predator-Prey dynamics in 1925. This explains why a modified version of the Lotka–Volterra equations fits the 40-year path traced by US Debt (predator) and GDP (prey), as anticipated by Minsky’s Long Cycle (see chart in my 2015 post at http://bit.ly/2cusv31).
At a global scale, the BIS chart proves why servicing global debt has long since become "central-bank-dependent" (via persistent rate-intervention, QE, LTRO, negative rates, etc.): The ratio of growth in predator size (global debt) to prey size (global income*) turned exponentially unstable since 1987.
*MZM-detrended GDP (see page 3 of my 2014 post at http://bit.ly/2cLlHhO)