the amazing thing is that they just frittered away all that wealth. they couldn’t figure out a way to reinvest it in a new industries so that spain would not be a one trick pony.
The same crises is going to come to the gulf states in about 15-20 years.
We are in the early years a new energy revolution that’s coming in from all sides. The end result will be that energy prices in 15-20 years are just going to be crushed.
The walls are going to close in on the countries that have lived on oil revenues alone—and have not bothered to diversify.
There’s a bunch of countries in that category. Including Venezuela and Russia and the north African states.
I'm not as critical of Golden Age Spain. Markets were poorly understood then and mercantilism was the economic theory of the day. Even in Western Europe economies were overwhelmingly agricultural. The conventional wisdom how to build a wealthy empire was to accumulate land by conquest or diplomacy. When the money ran out Spain lost its European possessions and limited to the Iberian peninsula Spain didn't have the population or wealth to be a great power.
An alternative path would have been for Spain to follow Britain and use its colonies and navy to build up into a great trading nation. But that would have required Spain to support private enterprise and not just government fleets. It would have had Spain act contrary to the way the Spanish were.