Posted on 10/07/2008 8:30:25 PM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
October 8, 2008
Why globalisation will yield to regional fiefdoms
While we watch the drama of the global banking system slashing its own wrists, the real economy has just arrived at outpatients with headaches
Carl Mortished: World Business Briefing
While we watch the grotesque drama of the global banking system slashing its own wrists, the real economy has just arrived at outpatients with headaches. There is tummy upset in the West, while a mysterious rash has broken out in the East.
In China, steelmakers are in deep trouble, the Olympics are over and the building sector, inflated by huge injections of public money, is subsiding. The symptoms of too much capacity and too little demand are beginning to show up in disputes with iron ore suppliers and sudden export surges to the United States as the Chinese resources industry chases dwindling demand for metal in Western markets.
The price of steel is tumbling worldwide as construction markets sag and motor manufacturers cut volume targets. ArcelorMittal, the world's biggest steelmaker, has cut back production from Kazakhstan and Ukraine, big steel exporters, by up to 20 per cent. In London, the price of steel billets on the London Metal Exchange, a gauge of the temperature in the Asian and Mediterranean construction markets, has fallen by 60 per cent since July. Corus, the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker recently acquired by Tata, of India, gave warning this week that European markets were soggy.
In the past China might have muddled through a period of soggy markets, grabbing market share from rustbucket American and European steelmakers. They could shift product at prices that barely cover costs while blustering their way through the protests and anti-dumping litigation.
(Excerpt) Read more at business.timesonline.co.uk ...
This could be certainly the near-term prospect. Would it lead to some major power to blowing its top? Such as China?
Ping!
Most interesting.
The cost of transportation is an important aspect of determing where to build. In the beer industry, many beers from around the world are now brewed closer to the US, and some in the US, as specified in licensing agreements. This is not regionalization, but rather, streamlining in a global economy.
I don't see us moving to regionalization in the longer term. There will be some countries that will place large tariffs on goods that will cause small pockets of regionalization, but that will be to their detriment. Rather, we will see more streamlining within the global marketplace. The current stock prices will cause a number of mergers and acquisitions that will have a long term benefit.
Regionalization sounds like a good thing to me.
Interesting. This is what is predicted in the book The Sovereign Individual. The authors believe there might even be a return to city-states and other forms of political organization. The nation-state hasn’t been around that long, and I don’t see why it would last forever.
Regions of freedom loving conservatives? The idea has certainly been discussed.
It isn’t “regionalism”. That is a false argument of the internationalist, who claims that the opposite of international blocs is regionalism. As if that is the only situation that can exist.
The reality is that nations exist for very good reasons, and they have existed for 6,000 years for very good reasons. That nations have a life cycle in the vast majority of cases in no way undermines this reality.
Only since the 19th Century have people foolishly believed that they could eventually sweep aside nations and replace them with multi-national blocs, eventually to form a world government. And like with most other aspects of this belief system, it has no real justification, only starry-eyed admirers.
Even blocs are a silly notion. They either represent a core, dominant nation, with subordinate allies or subordinate colonies, or they are thoroughly independent nations united only by having a common enemy. Canada and the US are very friendly, but the idea of sharing a government is mutually repulsive. The single result of this would be Canadians becoming Americans and Canada ceasing to exist. Not a bloc, but the last gasp of Manifest Destiny.
France and Germany are trying very hard to act like a single nation, but scratch the surface, and they are French and German, and see the other as always and forever foreigners.
Could even Taiwan and China reunify, or has a brief difference of years made them forever separate? Germany reunited, but Germany had always been German. While the Chinese on Taiwan think of themselves as Chinese, the Taiwanese do not share that view.
So don’t assume regionalism will prevail. It might be an intermediate step in the breakup of the EU, as groups of nations band up against other groups of nations. But don’t assume it has any more cohesion than the Holy Roman Empire, which existed for a thousand years, yet only ruled for less than 20, right at the start.
Because there were very good reasons for the nations within it to be nations.
That is all. I don't see Koreas, Japan, and China becoming one big superstate, even though to Westerners, "They are all same over in E. Asia."
Intellectuals cannot impose world government top-down, according to their taste. That has been their dream for close to 200 years, and it is not going to survive. The only way that this could emerge would be centuries of political and economic forces consistently pushing states close together. That is, it would be the natural end product of evolution over long time, not willful actions of small band of human beings. That is the only way this can come about.
“France and Germany are trying very hard to act like a single nation, but scratch the surface, and they are French and German, and see the other as always and forever foreigners.....”
The current financial illustrates this point.
A pan-European rescue package was vetoed by Germany because, essentially, they don’t want to pay for the profligacy of Italians.
So much for the European “moment”.
Real bastions of the people's will.
This was the case 50-60 years ago in the US. Then, corporations sucked up the competition to centralize operations, distribution, raw material contracts, etc.
In a sense, the best plan at the time due to the abundance of cheap energy.
That, my FRiend, is no longer the case.
Global markets are 'cooling', 'correcting', way too fast at this time....it's gonna get much worse....the controls and attempts to prop up aren't working other than for the government here seizing more control.
Thanks for the ping.
Well, yes, but there could certainly be cities or regions that consist of groups of like-minded conservatives. It would be wonderful if San Francisco, Berkeley, Boulder, and Madison became city-states. Then they could sink on their own.
Could be, or could be the start of a one world Empire attempt.
Either way is possible if this keeps up.
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