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The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself

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Re: The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself

#111

Post by nonethewiser »

davoneus wrote: post #77
lainga wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was Bush Senior, Clinton (with PNTR), Bush Junior. The story of why the US thought PNTR was a good move is long, and has to do with the events of 1989. Also... Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao were both very different from who we have today. China was not necessarily friendly, but they thought there was a good chance of them becoming friendly, especially if their market opened up. For several years after Tiananmen, the D…

I'd blame the prevailing economic mantra that "profits are the only things that matter" more than any set of UD presidents.

Its both though.

Re: The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself

#112

Post by nonethewiser »

whats_a_quasar wrote: post #92
8note wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If china declared Puerto Rico to be it's ally and started building military bases there without US permission, the US would do more than threaten to invade Puerto Rico, it'd do it immediately

Dude, this is blatant whataboutism. Puerto Rico is in no way equivalent to Taiwan, and I suspect you know that. Taiwan is a sovereign, independent, democratic nation. The Chinese Communist Party has never had political control over Taiwan. It just claims the right to overrule the right to self-determination of 23 million people because it feels like it. The Commonwealth of Puerto Rico is an unincorporated U.S. territ…

The US also doesn’t have bases in Puerto Rico so I have no idea what that analogy is supposed to do.

Re: The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself

#113

Post by sdfghswe »

cjblomqvist wrote: post #75
sdfghswe wrote: post #12

> Biden’s “friend-shoring” initiatives What's CRAZY to me is why this hasn't always been the case. Who thought it was a good idea to depend on unfriendly countries like China? Right, I know who thought that. Those who also claimed "if we trade with them enough, they'll like us" did. Fuck depending on China, or Russia, for that matter. The West should have all its critical dependencies within it. At most we could get…

The whole existence of EU is to prevent war between countries within the union through making all depend economically on each other. So far it's been quite successful (0 wars so far AFAIK), but of course it's quite early to say. Many of the countries in EU have quite the war history with each other. It's easy to forget that countries like Denmark and Sweden, France and Germany, etc etc used to be bitter enemies with…

Sure.

So in your opinion why is it that it worked the countries in Europe, but not for West vs China/Russia?

Re: The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself

#114

Post by soligern »

yorwba wrote: post #40
soligern wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s step one. Then the other developing companies will need to climb the dependency tree to make more and more of the materials locally. It’s what India did with car manufacturing, eventually building the entire vehicle in country. They are now the biggest exporter of tractors in the world. Same thing with pharmaceutical manufacturing as well. The space industry was the same way with imported tech from the Soviet…

It seems like in 2021 Germany was the biggest exporter of Tractors in the world, with 16.2% of the total https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/tractors But maybe you have more up-to-date or different data showing India ahead.

Mahindra is the largest producers of tractors by volume in the world. This may be on the company level and not national level

https://www.mahindrafarmequipment.com/services/tractors#:~:t....

Re: The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself

#115

Post by bsder »

davoneus wrote: post #64
bluGill wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GM traces all their dependency trees down to the mines or other sources of raw materials. This is often 6-7 levels deep. However they know what to watch for in the news and so when something happens they can jump to find an alternate, which often gives them 3 months before the production lines stop. They also do this so that they know nobody is using slave labor.

Yeah, I'm not convinced, given GM's (and most automakers) reaction to Covid and the continuing chip shortage. Maybe things have changed; I'd certainly be glad to hear it. But we all know of Wall Street's long history of hatred towards physical inventory.

> Yeah, I'm not convinced, given GM's (and most automakers) reaction to Covid and the continuing chip shortage.

Automakers (and everybody else) reacted very quickly and shut down/decreased staff almost immediately.

Where they got caught out was in assuming that the semiconductor industry would return to normal quickly. That was a huge mistake.

Everything in business is so hyper-optimized to hold no inventory that nobody can absorb demand increase shocks of any amount, anymore. In addition, the fact the companies actively downsized during Covid meant that things couldn't even go back to pre-Covid levels quickly.

Re: The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself

#116

Post by throwawaymaths »

woooooo wrote: post #23
throwawaymaths wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but it's not like deciding to make china unfriendly wasn't provoked by china. The US was making legitimate attempt at "bringing china into the fold". Since xi jinping came into power, lots of sketchy stuff has happened on their end that made this strategy less tenable. For example: being invited to rimpac and then sending uninvited ships (2014)

It's possible to be perfectly cordial without being a US client state. Why should they have to be "in the fold"?

By the the fold I meant a country that generally plays by internationally accepted customs and cordiality, not a "US client state". If a country invites you to their joint military exercise, you don't spy on them during the exercise. This is basic common sense.

Re: The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself

#117

Post by throwawaymaths »

projectazorian wrote: post #87
reisse wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you go, hope US government is reliable enough for you https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/c5700.html

This data shows that imports from China are down significantly year on year, though?

Seems like it.

Re: The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself

#118

Post by fnordpiglet »

CoolestBeans wrote: post #96
nonethewiser wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the thinking in the 1980s when the US invited China into their global trade network. The thinking was they would move away from communism and Russia and towards an open Democracy. That happened in some small ways but has since been completely undone. Such as the Democracy movements in the 80s that were ultimately crushed in Tiananmen square. Or more recently, market reforms undone by Xi. Basically we are bac…

Despite the hope for a more democratic China in the 80s being mostly dead, contemporary China must still reckon with the immediate economic disaster being an military agressor and being sharply cut off from American trade would entail. By slowly decoupling US-China trade, we remove that economic risk for Chinese strategists, making agression more viable.

I think China also needs to reckon with confronting adversaries with continuous deployment and a seasoned veteran force from the line to the top generals, while Chinas military hasn’t been meaningfully deployed beyond exercises in 60 years. No one - not a single person - has any meaningful warfare experience in China - while the US and it’s allies, for better or worse, is highly skilled and experienced in continuous warfare for the last 60 years.

Re: The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself

#119

Post by onemoresoop »

yorwba wrote: post #81
lefstathiou wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think decoupling is the right word. These south East Asian countries were unindustrialized nations before the hundreds of billions of foreign direct investment and hundreds of billions of intellectual property that transferred from the West to the East. America exported its manufacturing know how for decades, and now it is taking it back as the trade is no longer as favorable. Seems rational to me. SE Asia came out…

"Decoupling" mostly involves increasing investment in South and Southeast Asia to set up alternatives to Chinese suppliers. America is hardly going to take back much of the low-skill, low-wage, long-hours manufacturing of cheap consumer products that was offshored decades ago.

It doesn't have to be for cheap stuff aka textiles and other plasticky things. But for tech, modern electronics and so on it could go in another directions.

And maybe we stop using these cheap things anyway since they're garbage anyway. Perhaps it's time to re-start building things to last, or at least that's my wish...

Re: The global trading system is starting to rearrange itself

#120

Post by jacooper »

edgyquant wrote: post #110
jacooper wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is the U.S. never cared about Democratic countries, and often destroyed them(CIA backed coups and so on.

This isn’t true, they always preferred them. They did a number of misguided things in the name of containing communism but all of that was 1. over fifty years ago or more at this point 2. Unpopular with the public so it doesn’t seem like a good faith stance to pretend that’s current Us doctrine. It’s an ignorant whataboutism used by defenders of brutal regimes.

As if 2. Changes anything.

Heck they even did a coup not too long ago because a country rich with lithium elected a socialist government.

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