When power starts pricing itself, civilisation pays the bill

By Ravishankar Kalyanasundaram

When Warren Buffett speaks, the world pauses — if only for a moment.
In his latest letter, the Oracle of Omaha didn’t raise his voice. He simply reminded us that “trade should not be a weapon.” In a week when capital sounded like a carnival, his words arrived like a whisper from a saner age — one that believed commerce was meant to connect before it conquered.

It was a small sentence with the weight of a lifetime behind it. Buffett has built fortunes on the unsexy virtues of patience, proportion, and prudence. To him, markets are not casinos and nations are not poker players; they are networks of trust. Strip away that trust, and all that remains is leverage.

And yet, trust is what the modern market now trades most cheaply.
When the richest man on earth can hold his company to ransom and the most powerful politician can keep the world on edge — and both are rewarded for it — one has to ask: what have we become?

The old promise of capitalism was that competition civilised greed. The new reality is that greed has outsmarted competition. We live in an era where valuation trumps value, where the market cheers the audacious and forgets the accountable.

At Tesla, the courtiers merely nodded as the crown was raised — not because they were convinced, but because resistance had become bad for the stock.

So when we look at Musk’s trillion-dollar theatre, Trump’s tariff diplomacy, and Buffett’s weary caution, we must ask not who won the week’s headlines, but what kind of world we are normalising.

Because if this is what passes for leadership — and if markets continue to mistake muscle for genius — then perhaps “business as usual” is the most dangerous phrase in the modern economy.

Echoes from the Past

History has seen such hubris before.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the Robber Barons built railroads and refineries so vast that governments bent before them. It took a Roosevelt — with his trust-busting zeal — to remind industry that capitalism survives only if society consents.

In the 1980s, the Reagan–Thatcher revolution promised liberation through deregulation. It unleashed creativity, yes, but also speculation — the seed of every crash since. Then came the dot-coms and the housing bubble, when optimism became a narcotic and prudence an insult.

Each era believed it had found a smarter formula for ambition. Each ended with the same reckoning: greed without governance is gravity-blind.

Buffett’s Whisper in a Shouting Match

Amid Musk’s theatre and Trump’s brinkmanship, Buffett stands almost monastic — a solitary figure of restraint in a century that rewards spectacle.

He doesn’t defend the old order; he defends the moral logic that made capitalism tolerable — that prosperity must be earned, not extorted. His reminder is not nostalgia. It is a warning. Because a market that prizes audacity over accountability eventually forgets the meaning of consequence.

The Age of Unaccountable Power

What is new today is not greed — it is its immunity.

When shareholders cheer a trillion-dollar payout, they are not rewarding performance; they are pledging allegiance. When nations accept tariffs as negotiation tools, they concede that might is market.

We have reached a strange frontier where the invisible hand has learned to clench its fist. Technology magnifies it, politics sanctifies it, and the crowd — dizzy with spectacle — calls it genius.

But history whispers a warning: every empire built on exception collapses under its own audacity. Whether that empire is a corporation, a currency, or a cult of personality makes little difference.

Where Are the Guardrails?

The true crisis of our age is not inflation or inequality, but accountability fatigue.
Institutions — parliaments, boards, regulators, the press — were meant to be the speed-breakers of ambition. Today they behave like applause machines.

When oversight becomes optional and power self-certifies, society quietly trades its freedoms for fascination. We tell ourselves the market will correct, the voters will recall, the law will intervene — until they don’t.

So perhaps the harder question is not what have we come to, but how do we come back?

How do we rebuild the guardrails of reason in a world that celebrates disruption more than discipline?

Protecting Our Foreheads from Gunpoints

The gunpoint today is not physical but financial; not aimed at borders, but at balance sheets. Tariffs, tweets, sanctions, and stock crashes have replaced bullets — yet the intimidation feels eerily familiar.

To protect ourselves, we may need less genius and more geometry — clear lines, fair rules, and limits that even success must obey. The next great innovation may not be a rocket or a robot, but a renewed social contract — one that remembers that markets were made for man, not the other way around.

Because when wealth can buy impunity and politics can sell fear, it is no longer business as usual.

It is business without a conscience.

And that, as Buffett would remind us, has never ended well.