Evolve or Evaporate

America’s Complex Relationship with Global Trade, Geopolitics and Economic Growth 

Jack Ma has a very compelling idea of how to generate explosive global trade growth.

On a single day, Single’s Day, (pardon the pun), Alibaba recorded sales of more than $70 billion. 

Coincidentally, Jack Ma’s Ant Group tried to launch the world’s largest IPO but it was cancelled 3 days before the launch by Xi Jinping, China’s Premier. 

Transformation

What we are witnessing is the transformation of Financial Logistics from a selfish and self-directed exercise in wealth creation to a more diversified one -globally. 

The Ant that roared. 

Comparative Processes

“If you don’t see what you’re doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” - Deming

Offshoring Spirits

Ever since FDR, the US realizes that global trade is the key to economic development and growth. 

FDR was taught this by his grandfather who made a fortune by trading opium with China. The opiate of the Chinese became opium, thanks to Jardine Matheson and Chinese corruption via the Canton System.  

During Prohibition in the US, booze was offloaded in hay bales offshore of Fire Island and young, capable swimmers swam out to gather the bales and delivered their contents to Speakeasies. I met one of the swimmers, Luigi, before he died. Prohibition had made him rich.

Warren Delano Jr. and the connections of John Jacob Astor defeated the Canton System by offloading opium offshore of the Chinese mainland and transshipping  the drugs via smaller vessels - up the Pearl River. 

The descendants of Astor and Delano, namely Brooke Astor and Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt had a more enlightened view of global trade. Brooke Astor, RIP, said;

and Eleanor Roosevelt helped to enable the public education of Blacks in the US and to create the UN.

Fast Forward

Comparative Emanations 0

EU

After the failure of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, an agreement whereby nations would no longer settle their disagreements through violence and war, was drawn up. The hubris of the regimes of Nazi Germany, Japan and communist Russia resulted in the devastation of WWII.  The Marshall Plan, conceived by FDR, Dwight D. Eisenhower, George C. Marshall and Eleanor Roosevelt;

rebuilt Europe. Eisenhower and Marshall understood the importance of logistics in achieving victory. Marshall also realized that without the cash of loans and grants provided by the Plan; its FinanciaL Logistics, the reconstruction of Europe would have failed. 

Eisenhower had surveyed the U.S. for the purpose of creating an interstate highway system which would unite America, facilitate communication and spur economic growth. Truman who was succeeded by Eisenhower as the American President, could not execute the plan to build an interstate highway system because of the diversion of funds caused by the Korean Conflict. Not only did Eisenhower succeed in building the U.S. Interstate Highway System, such massive infrastructure projects as Idlewild, now J F Kennedy Airport, would be constructed during his watch. 

Global Trade and Financial Logistics

The US and Europe were not alone in building their global trade infrastructures. MacArthur simplified the Japanese language and democratized its government and invited Deming and Juran who used statistical quality control and the cultural affinity of the Japanese for perfection, to remake Japan. 

US

After WWII, the U.S. grew rapidly and US multinational corporations dominated global trade. 

To compete with the American Challenge;

grew to encompass Incoterms 

and BPO, Bank Payment Obligations. 

The failure to democratiz e  BPO, led to its failure. 

In parallel, the US created the World Trade Organization, its response to the regional economic integration of Europe. The result of this attempt to harbor US Multinationals from taxation is the loss of millions of US manufacturing jobs. 

China and Geopolitics

Jack Ma famously said “We need government and we can dance with government, but we don’t have to get married.”Apparently, in China’s Communist and state-controlled economy, shotgun weddings prevail and politics, economics and financing are all about control , and the marriage of all. three is not optional. 

Jack Ma’s extraordinary success with Alibaba is evident with Singles Day. This marketing event which started as a way for singles to meet and for Chinese beer to be available in the Seattle where Ma worked as a tour guide, is unalterably linked to a state-directed economy and regime where control is everything. 

Chinese bankers sought this control and convinced the top Communist Party ??apparatchik; the elephant in the Chinese room, that they were losing control of the Ant. If you control the financial logistics, you control everything!

The prevalence of financial logistics; creating the infrastructure of lesser-developed countries to enable them to engage in global trade is evidenced by OBOR, China’s One Belt, One Road Geopolitical Plan. 

Unlike China, the US has an economic system of free enterprise which functions well in the ecosystem of Democracy. America’s recent flirtation with outright Demagoguery, the great fear of our founders, is ending. The  Apprentice is exiting left on the global stage and we can get down to business again. 

Russia

Machiavelli explained in his Discourses and in The Prince that the ruler must publicly display the good that he does while keeping private his heinous acts. Putin and Trump have staged their own versions of Machiavellian theater and have arranged the Art of the Geostrategic Deal. They have built Odessa on the Intercoastal, organized the massive cybersecurity hacking of the US government and corporations and arranged for Trump to overturn the US sanctions on Nordstream by supporting his run for the US presidency via collateral held in German banks. Trump failed!

Next - The Great American Geopolitical Plan