Unveiling the Dark Code Behind 60 Years of Global Wealth Reshuffling 1. Kondratiev and the Discovery of the Kondratiev Wave ◦ In 1938, the brilliant economist Kondratiev was secretly executed in a concentration camp for discovering the "Kondratiev wave." Through manual calculations, he discovered that capitalist economies have a cyclical pattern of 50-60 years (prosperity, recession, depression, and recovery), which can precisely manipulate the global wealth distribution. He boldly predicted the Great Depression of 1929, which was later formally named the "Kondratiev wave" (Kondratiev cycle) by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter. 2. The Driving Engine of the Kondratiev Wave: The cycle is driven by underlying technological revolutions, with each cycle corresponding to a technology that disrupts human production methods. ◦ 1780s: Steam engine, textile machine ◦ 1840s: Railway, steel ◦ 1890s: Electrification, heavy chemical industry ◦ 1940s: Automobile, petrochemical industry ◦ 1980s: Information technology, Internet ◦ The cycle of technology from "laboratory inspiration" to "widespread adoption" and then to "profit depletion" is about 50-60 years, which highly overlaps with the human life cycle (the wealth creation period from the 20s to the 60s). An individual's wealth destiny is anchored at the stage of the cycle at birth. 3. Zhou Jintao's "Making Money in Life Depends on Kondratiev Waves" Zhou Jintao, the "King of Cycles," asserts that ordinary people only have three opportunities to build wealth in their lifetime; missing these opportunities will lead to mediocrity. ◦ Verify using data backtracking: ◦ The first opportunity (around 1999): The commercialization of real estate in China and the explosion of the Internet allowed people to achieve a leap in wealth by buying a house or joining early companies such as Alibaba. ◦ The second opportunity (2008): The asset trough after the subprime crisis, those who buy the dips core assets at the bottom saw their wealth expand exponentially over the next decade. ◦ The third opportunity (2019): Technology stocks, new energy, Bitcoin, etc., at their lows on the eve of a breakout. 4. 2026: A Historical Watershed in the Kondratiev Wave ◦ Zhou Jintao predicts that the fifth Kondratiev wave (driven by information technology) will reach its peak in 2015, enter a recessionary period from 2018 to 2025, and reach its nadir in 2025-2026. This explains the "involution" and economic difficulties in various industries in recent years, which is an inevitable result of the exhaustion of old technological dividends and the collapse of old business models. ◦ 2026 marks a turning point in the cycle, ushering in the dawn of the sixth Kondratiev wave recovery. Top global capital is employing a "dumbbell strategy": one end is hard assets such as gold and upstream commodities; the other end is betting on a new generation of underlying technological revolution led by artificial intelligence (AI), coupled with new energy and biomedicine. AI technology has moved beyond the "text toy" stage and entered a stage of cost collapse and restructuring of the real economy, and will become the wealth engine of the sixth Kondratiev wave. 5. Coping and Opportunities for Ordinary People ◦ Abandon old path dependence (such as blindly leveraging to buy a house or doing traditional homogeneous business). Embrace the AI ​​era, combine your skills with AI, or use AI tools to reduce customer acquisition costs and improve service efficiency, seize the opportunities of the sixth Kondratiev wave, and achieve upward mobility.