Tag: Globalization

Globalization crashes

Coronavirus has spread internationally

That a rugby match in Dublin between Italy and Ireland can be cancelled because of a virus that germinated in a market in a Chinese city, may be a chain of events that appeals to amateur chaos theorists.

In my view, the panic caused by the coronavirus illustrates how easily interconnected the world has become, how fluidly people move from one location to another, and how national infrastructure and policy systems are still so very different.

Having written about the coronavirus a few weeks ago (‘Humanity and Adversity’, Feb 2, https://thelevelling.blog/2020/02/02/humanity-and-adversity/) I thought that markets at least would quickly work through the implications. That it has not been the case owes much to another form of sickness – overexuberance in financial marketplace. The catalysts provided by the coronavirus are now treating this (in the short run the sell-off is nearly complete, and we will rally mid next week).

Ironically, in an age of machines, and where social media companies are dominant in many senses, markets are responding to the risk that humans will have less physical interaction with each other and will enjoy less physical forms of consumption (travel, shopping and consumption).

As I write, it appears at least from official numbers that the virus is somewhat contained in China, and globally the number of cases looks to have peaked. Here though, the risk is that the Chinese authorities rush people back to work and, like the Spanish flu in 1918, there is a bigger second (and third) wave of the virus.

The passage of the virus across the world has, even at what might be an early stage, revealed and further provoked a number of changes in our world.

The first relates to trust. There is widespread suspicion inside and beyond China that the authorities there have not been upfront about the true extent of the virus. Some, like US Senator Tom Cotton even believe that the virus is man-made. To that end, while China’s handling of the crisis will on one hand reinforce the sense that it can marshal huge swathes of its population, on the other the trust of outsiders in the Chinese authorities will diminish. The Belt and Road Initiative may be a casualty here. Distrust can also channel itself in other ways. If in the future China has a debt crisis, investors are likely to sell first than wait for a true picture to emerge.

Within China this episode has clearly damaged the Communist Party, though it is very hard to see how this will play out in public life, or even through social media discourse. My sense is that the Chinese authorities will react in at least two ways. One is a fiscal stimulus made up of tax breaks, support for small businesses and an acceleration of infrastructure programs.

The other more interesting one is to take what has been done in the domain of social control and social credit scoring and apply this to healthcare. I can envisage a sharp rise in self-diagnosis, tech based medicine and a related set of incentives for people to allow their health data be monitored by the state. If it happens, many in the West would consider it insidious, though given the fear created by the virus, many Chinese might acquiesce.

The second effect of the coronavirus crisis is that it is yet another event that makes visible the arteries of globalization and leaves them atrophied. That there has been little to no coordination between nations speaks to a sense of a fractured world, and the performance of the WHO reinforces the view that like the WTO, its time has come.

There will be a sharp short-term hit to world trade from the coronavirus (hotels, airlines are the obvious ‘victim’ industries though I think that ‘elite’ forms of travel and healthcare will continue to thrive), but in the longer-term it will also reinforce the sense in governments and some companies that security of production is increasingly important.

To that end, the rise of national champions and the relocation of production to ‘home’ countries (pharmaceuticals is an example) will continue. In many different ways, the coronavirus, like the 2019 trade war, will force a rethinking of globalization by corporates.

Other megatrends may also be rethought. India and many parts of Africa are the only parts of the world where urbanization rates are still relatively low, though where the rate of urbanization is now picking up. The coronavirus crisis is a very clear reminder of ‘smart’ urbanization is terms of the health, data gathering and communication implications, and in this way the lessons for Wuhan are yet to be learnt. For example, it is only emerging that 40% of the coronavirus cases in Wuhan were transmitted in hospitals – and the same may be true of both Italy and Iran. 

As this adjustment process happens, there will likely be one constant, which is the vogue of central banks to meet any threat to growth and attendant dip in markets with more liquidity. Liquidity provision and rate cuts will not solve the process of adjustment away from globalization, and in the long run they may channel this process down the wrong path because cheap money increases the risk that investment decisions are badly made.

Have a great week ahead,

Mike

A World of Patriots and Dreamers

China marching on, obstacles ahead

Last week’s UN General Assembly reflected a number of emerging trends – the miring of public life in older democracies (US and the UK) in banality and controversy, and the flourishing of climate change as a mainstream political issue, are just two.

These trends are part of the fracturing of the old-world order, and pointers as to where the new order may lie. Underlying each of them is the contentious issue of how political debate is conducted.

One striking statement at the UN was President Trump’s remark that ‘The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots’. Practically, coming from the leader of the world’s superpower it is another nail in the coffin of globalization, in addition to being an embarrassing conflation of the meaning of nationalism with patriotism.

One of the ironies in Trump’s many grand statements is the way they echo in China. In fact, China is well ahead of Trump in conceiving of how to put the ‘country ahead of the global’. A memorable example was the 2017 World Economic Forum when the Chinese leader Xi Jinping made a speech that claimed the mantle of globalization for China (from the USA).

The curious aspect of this is that while China is a large spigot in the world economy, it is one of the least globalized countries in the world (it ranks in the bottom quarter of nations according to my own measure of globalization). In his own way, Trump is reacting to this, but his crude view of China does not do justice to its history nor the amplitude of its ambition.

Well before MAGA (Make America Great Again) Xi Jinping coined the term ‘China Dream’ in a speech when visiting the National Museum of China in November 2012, having taken the office of general secretary of the Communist Party. The 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic which occurs next Tuesday 1st October, will bring this into sharper focus.

China’s view of itself in the future, or the Chinese Dream, is colored by past generations of economic and cultural greatness. Recall that at the time of the Founding Fathers, the United States was but an emerging, even frontier economy and that at that time China accounted for nearly 40 percent of the world economy. By 1950, 150 years later, America made up a third of world economy, and China’s share had shrunk to 10 percent.

Given this backdrop China wants to elevate itself to a position of economic power (perhaps regional dominance) and of policy power in Asia with its own regionally relevant rule-based order so that it is, at the very least, not subject to the domination of Western countries and institutions (the film Amazing China, to be found on Youtube,gives a sense of this and of what is ahead).

China’s rise over the past thirty years has not been given enough credit by commentators and politicians in the West. Few of them are really curious about Chinese history and the Chinese approach to economics, politics and society. Mike Pence’s speech to the Hudson Institute last October was a sign of this, and one of the great challenges China will face in coming years is the realization in Washington and Brussels that China is pulling level with them in some domains.

Looking ahead, the great risk for China is that the ‘Dream’ runs out of momentum, economically in that growth slows, and politically in that people in China question a model that exchanges liberty for stability. The underlying risk is that not having experienced a formal recession in close to twenty years there is a great deal of inefficient capacity built up in China and that a downturn will expose this. If it does, rising unemployment will create a new political challenge for the all-powerful Xi Jinping.

In this respect, the manner in which China manages the protests in Hong Kong will provide a clue as to how the Communist Party will manage emerging political challenges. A physical, confrontational approach will open up many risks – political contagion, sanctions on the Hong Kong economy and a loss of soft power. A more drawn out approach that contests the legitimacy of the ‘two systems’ and that penalizes locals in Hong Kong by slowing the local economy may well dampen the crisis from a Chinese perspective. It must then confront the tenor of elections in Taiwan in early 2020.

Political volatility is thought to be the preserve of the West. One of the great surprises of the early 2020’s may be the way it spreads across emerging countries, with China as no exception.

Have a great week ahead,

Mike

How Britain can address the end of globalization – today’s Times

Moving on through the end of globalization

Note this oped was published in today’s Times, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/business/britain-needs-to-find-its-place-in-the-era-of-post-globalisation-f20sjksvn

Most Britons have had enough of Brexit, many will think it can’t get any worse. They may be wrong. Once the Tory leadership contest is over the Brexit circus will start over again. When it does, the risk is that any forbearance the EU showed Theresa May evaporates, and that it takes a tougher line on financial services for example. This will come as little comfort to business people, workers and the Treasury.

There is a glimmer of hope however, which is that in the Dante’s inferno that is world politics, Britain is not alone. Many other countries are suffering political or even democratic recessions, and a good number of others are at the wrong end of an accelerated cycle in the rise and fall of nations. In this context, Brexit is not an event, or the event, but rather part of a global process.  

This ‘levelling’ process is the end phase of the period of globalization that has carried so much with it over the past thirty years, and the fallow period that will follow as a new ‘order’ is built up. It is no surprise that the most acute political debates today relate to aspects of globalization – wealth inequality, migration and the role of technology in our societies for instance.

Neither is it a surprise that the two countries that have delivered the most significant political shocks in recent years (Brexit and the election of Donald Trump) are those that have been in the vanguard of globalization.  

In this respect Westminster, and much of the British media, need to look up and string together the many strands of change occurring in economics, foreign policy and politics around the world. Brexit has allowed many politicians a ‘policy holiday’ in that it has permitted them to engage in parlour games while neglecting both domestic policy and what can be described as a paradigm shift in world affairs.

This paradigm shift may offer some avenues for a post-Brexit Britain, though it may well be that the next generation of politicians, rather than the current one, makes this journey. Several trends are worth flagging.

One is that globalization is ceding to a multipolar world, made up of three large regions – the US, EU and China each of whom have increasingly distinct approaches to things like technology, democracy, war, economics and politics. These ‘poles’ will increasingly do business with each other, to the detriment of twentieth century institutions like the IMF and World Trade organization. The opportunity for mid-sized nations like Britain is to first arbitrage the differences between these large regions in say law and finance, and to become more distinctive in terms of national identity.

A second trend relates to economics. The world is replete with economic imbalances like record indebtedness, very high inequality and inordinately powerful central banks. Like climate change these represent growing, though unchallenged risks in terms of the policy response. There is a potential advantage to countries who tackle these issues early rather than in the midst of a crisis. Britain should act here, and where possible lead other countries.

The other aspect of economics that is vital is the need for countries like Britain, most of Europe and increasingly the emerging world, to rediscover the ingredients of organic growth. In the last decade economic growth has become heavily financialized, and this creates obvious risks. The majority of the non-London UK economy is in bad need of a framework that will focus on increasingly Britain’s economic potential, and coherently drawing together areas like taxation, education and finance. This is the kind of response that Brexit requires.

Michael O’Sullivan is the author of The Levelling (PublicAffairs),

From the Banquet at Hongmen to Hong Kong

…as I was saying…regular readers of the Sunday letter will know that I have taken a break from it in recent weeks to recast the note around my forthcoming book ‘The Levelling’, and I hope that some will be happy it is back.

For those of you who are new to my list (please let me know if I should not have you on the list, or if you have colleagues or friends who would like to join it) I will send out a letter each Sunday morning (the one time people have a chance to read something) that mixes history, politics, markets, geopolitics and economics.

Given the intersection of these factors a good place to start this week is the Banquet at Hongmen, which occurred in China in 206 BC. In an age that is in Game of Thrones overdrive the story of Hongmen will appeal to many (indeed there is already a film about it called White Vengeance (2012)). In China, the tale is short-hand for duplicity and assassination and it featured in the Chinese press last week as part of the more popular response to President Trump’s tariff increase on China.

As an anchor point, ‘Hongmen’ serves a number of purposes that of course effortlessly dovetail into the themes of The Levelling. The first is that internal politics matter – Hongmen occurred at a time when the Qin and Han dynasties were contesting power. In this regard, for all that we hear today about the 2020 Presidential election campaign, we hear equally little about political debate within the Communist Party on topics like trade and relations with the USA.

Second, the cycles of the rise and fall of nations matter a lot. China has had many such cycles and America has effectively to complete a full cycle. Some may feel that this comes across in the bravoura of America’s interaction with other countries, but we should also bear in mind the context and patience that China’s history affords its leadership.

A third related point here is that China’s long history has given it a deep culture and sense of civilization. This is lost on some. Kiron Skinner a State Department official has recently tried to cast US-China relations as a ‘Clash of Civilisations’.  This is a lazy use of Samuel Huntington’s work. A better parsing of the situation is multipolarity, where the world moves away from globalization towards a system driven by three large regions (US, EU and China) who do things in distinctly different ways.

In this context, the trade dispute is a marker of China’s rise and the belated realization of America’s elite as to how it should curb this. Tariffs are not at all the apt tool. There are better avenues. For example, America is extremely powerful financially, in terms of the usage of the dollar, depth and centrality of its markets and the power of its banks. Indeed, one could argue that the US is more hegemonic in finance than it is militarily.

Another avenue is leadership in international rules and standards. Many new fields such as artificial intelligence, genetic editing and cyber war have grown so quickly that they have bypassed international laws, philosophies and norms regarding them. One challenge for the US is to take the lead in outlining new standards and laws in these areas. Unfortunately this is something it does not appear prepared to do, especially in areas like climate change. If anything the US is ceding soft power to China.

To jump to finance, the market view of the trade dispute is that some form of resolution will be forthcoming. The drop in volatility on Friday suggested that US markets are moving from being positioned for a risky outcome, to one that is more sanguine. Other Asia centric ones like the KOSPI index South Korea and the Australian dollar will need to strengthen in order to give the all clear.

If a trade deal is struck, it will mark the beginning of a formal rivalry between the US and China, the start of more ‘nation first’ patterns in consumption and corporate investment and the end of bodies like the World Trade Organisation. There may be many more flash points.

Here, many tend to focus on great naval battles of the future in the South China Sea. In my view, one looming touchpoint is Hong Kong, where there is a fierce debate ongoing around a proposal to permit the imprisonment in China of those sentenced by courts in Hong Kong. For a city-state with a very expensive housing market, dollar currency peg and large stock market, this may be one area where geopolitics again ripples through markets.  

Have a great week ahead,

Mike