Optimism is the best long term bet.
In my mind, long term potential of an economy or even a global system is the availability of energy and other resources. With plentiful energy, we can purify oceans worth of water and extract minerals from plentiful low density ores. We can obtain food security, especially when we start building infrastructure for ocean farms in earnest. We have enough land to easily support a quadrupling of the world’s population, in my opinion.
We have so much energy potential, we are purposely not fully utilizing various energy sources such as coal, nuclear energy including uranium and thorium based power plants, and crude. We have epic amounts of shale based oil and methane clatherates in the oceans.
As far as ballooning debt levels, it ultimately comes down to accounting and adjustments. In other words, as a world, we owe the money to ourselves.
The key is management. We need our leaders to have vision and cooperate with one another. They also need to consider human nature and avoid the moral hazard of making things too easy or predictable or risk counterproductive misallocation of resources.
For me, it come down to whether a company has above average prospects and whether it’s current price is above an simple average of 65, 30 minutes bars, among other things.
. I honestly think it might depend on what happens with Trump over the weekend. 
