I think there will never be an inflection point, unless the worst happens and all this populism leads to war. If God forbid that happens, it could be extremely bloody, and we'll go into it with the world looking one way, and we either destroy ourselves completely or we recover into a world that looks totally different.

Otherwise, I don't think there will ever be an identifiable "inflection" just like there wasn't with Japan. The economic threat posed by Japan was overstated for many, many years, and really more than anything, all that happened was we got into the 1990s and eventually said "remember how Japan was buying up all of Manhattan and was about to take over the world? Whatever happened to that?"

Read Michael Crichton's "Rising Sun", written back in the early 1990s. Made into a Sean Connery movie. The book in particular is almost comical now. It was a purveyor of doom and gloom about this grand Japanese worldwide takeover, when Japan's economy was already into its stagnation - we just couldn't see that yet.

There isn't going to be some massive instantaneous transformation now. The transition is undoubtedly already underway in ways we can't yet see. 15, 20, 50 years from now, we'll be able to make more sense of it all in the rear view mirror.