  Using the mechanics of creep in material sciences as a metaphor, we present a
general framework to understand the evolution of financial, economic and social
systems and to construct scenarios for the future. In a nutshell, highly
non-linear out-of-equilibrium systems subjected to exogenous perturbations tend
to exhibit a long phase of slow apparent stable evolution, which are nothing
but slow maturations towards instabilities, failures and changes of regimes.
With examples from history where a small event had a cataclysmic consequence,
we propose a novel view of the current state of the world via the logical
scenarios that derive, avoiding the traps of an illusionary stability and
simple linear extrapolation. The endogenous scenarios are "muddling along",
"managing through" and "blood red abyss". The exogenous scenarios are "painful
adjustment" and "golden east".
