Since the Davos Summit just ended, I thought we should educate the corrupt and callous attendees of the "Summit" as to why globalization has failed and was always doomed to fail...
It's not that complicated really...Economies, like any other form of ecosystem, need to maintain a healthy balance between their inputs and outputs in order to be sustainable. The impact of globalization was to upset that equalization by allowing companies to source from anywhere and sell to anywhere under the "fire and forget" model I wrote about previously which does not hold companies responsible for their own externalities. Nor does it contribute to the health and sustainability of the end market aka. the "consumer".
And all that does of course is turn all factors of production into commoditized widgets and force every country to vie for the investment of the global multinationals that jump from country to country looking for the cheapest location.
Jack Welch, the former General Electric CEO once said, he would like to "have every factory on a barge", so he could move his factories at whim to whichever locale offered the lowest costs at that point in time. That's what globalization has done - it has put every factory on a virtual barge.
It's all been one big race to the bottom, and here we are. We are only waiting for the stooges in charge of this shit show to realize we have already arrived and they can stop pretending the "barge" is still underway.
As I also wrote recently, this entire globalization strategy was premised under the specious Ricardian Comparative Advantage model which has turned out to be just another failed economic theory. Unfortunately, a lot of economists will be personally bankrupt by the time it dawns on them that they drank their own Kool-Aid.
The only good news is that on the other side of the impending asset crash, when standards of living truly do equalize across the globe, far sooner than expected, there won't be any factories on barges. We can say that with 100% certainty.
p.s.
