Geopolitics in the 2020s.

[ICTChris]

US launch a helicopter raid on Qamishli in Syria, rumoured to target an IS member. One killed, several people captured apparently.

https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/syria/061020221

[jagfox]

 

[jagfox]

 

[DiegoDiego]

Haiti is deep in failed state territory. A gallon of petrol costs $40US on the black market in some parts of the country.

[ICTChris]

6 minutes ago, DiegoDiego said:

Haiti is deep in failed state territory.

You could have posted this at just about any point in the last forty years or more.

Apprentiy the official Haitian government website still lists Juvenal Moise at President, even though he was assassinated a year ago.

[ICTChris]

3 hours ago, jagfox said:

 

I think there a huge distance to go on this - there are still big hurdles in the way of a peaceful settlement.

Demarcating the border should help but it’s one small step in a very long process. Interesting that there seems to have been diplomatic progress when the initiative has been taken by France and the USA rather than Russia.

[jagfox]

9 minutes ago, ICTChris said:

I think there a huge distance to go on this - there are still big hurdles in the way of a peaceful settlement.

Demarcating the border should help but it’s one small step in a very long process. Interesting that there seems to have been diplomatic progress when the initiative has been taken by France and the USA rather than Russia.

NGK obviously not part of agreement. Deals with current borders apparently. Exclaves would take a lot more hours at the discussion table. 

[LongTimeLurker]

Armenia with no help coming from CSTO has very little leverage in all of this and basically has to lump it where losing "Artsakh" and accepting some sort of transport corridor between Nakhchivan and Azerbaijan proper is concerned. On the plus side for them if they can get the Turkish border opened to trade through to the EU via both road and rail their state has a future in economic terms.

[welshbairn]

1 hour ago, DiegoDiego said:

Haiti is deep in failed state territory. A gallon of petrol costs $40US on the black market in some parts of the country.

Toussaint L'Ouverture's legacy has been a great disappointment, perhaps a slave rebellion could never be permitted to succeed.

[LongTimeLurker]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiti_indemnity_controversy

[Detournement]

The USA officially moved away from Free Trade doctorine into an era of protectionism. It's a bit late.

As for Haiti the fact that Hillary Clinton's brother owns a goldmine there tells you everything you need to know. 

 

[coprolite]

57 minutes ago, Detournement said:

The USA officially moved away from Free Trade doctorine into an era of protectionism. It's a bit late.

As for Haiti the fact that Hillary Clinton's brother owns a goldmine there tells you everything you need to know. 

 

That’s really interesting.

I don’t think that the US has ever done more than pay lip service to the free trade doctrine though. It’s always insisted, through the world bank and IMF, that other countries open their economies while unilaterally protecting their own. 
 

Does look like they’re preparing to go toe to toe with China on IP.

The most impressive thing was getting an acronym for the semiconductor program that spell CHIPS. This sort of ingenuity is what keeps their tech ahead.

[Detournement]

15 minutes ago, coprolite said:

That’s really interesting.

I don’t think that the US has ever done more than pay lip service to the free trade doctrine though. It’s always insisted, through the world bank and IMF, that other countries open their economies while unilaterally protecting their own. 
 

Does look like they’re preparing to go toe to toe with China on IP.

The most impressive thing was getting an acronym for the semiconductor program that spell CHIPS. This sort of ingenuity is what keeps their tech ahead.

You are correct about them only playing lip service to free trade,the book Open Veins Of Latin America by Eduardo Gaelano goes into how they protect their domestic economy in great detail.

This seems different though as they seem to saying that they will try and force other nations to chose to trade with China or trade with the USA. We are heading towards a dollar zone Vs an economic zone based on the new currency for international trade China and Russia have been talking about.

Given that China already does the most trade with the vast majority of nations and on far, far fairer terms the Americans are going to have to have a big surprise up their sleeve to make this work.

Edited October 15, 2022 by Detournement

[coprolite]

2 minutes ago, Detournement said:

You are correct about them only playing lip service to free trade,the book Open Veins Of Latin America by Eduardo Gaelano goes into how they protect their domestic economy in great detail.

This seems different though as they seem to saying that they will try and force other nations to chose to trade with China or trade with the USA. We are heading towards a dollar zone Vs an economic zone based on the new currency for international trade China and Russia have been talking about.

Given that China already does the most trade with the vast majority of nations and on far, far fairer terms the Americans are going to have to have a big surprise up their sleeve to make this work.

That bit seems to be based on thinking that if they don’t sell tech to China or its allies then they won’t be able to get hold of US tech,l. Maybe I misunderstood but that seems dumb.

[jagfox]

On 15/10/2022 at 10:46, Detournement said:

You are correct about them only playing lip service to free trade,the book Open Veins Of Latin America by Eduardo Gaelano goes into how they protect their domestic economy in great detail.

This seems different though as they seem to saying that they will try and force other nations to chose to trade with China or trade with the USA. We are heading towards a dollar zone Vs an economic zone based on the new currency for international trade China and Russia have been talking about.

Given that China already does the most trade with the vast majority of nations and on far, far fairer terms the Americans are going to have to have a big surprise up their sleeve to make this work.

I actually read that one day in the library. An eye opener.

[jagfox]

 

[dorlomin]

There is not a China specific thread that I could find, but events in the worlds second largest economy have been extraordinary over the past week. They are likely to be among the more important for our world in the remainder of the decade. Xi has pretty much purged the last faction counter to his own from serious power. His politburo is mostly hawks on defence and internal security the growth orientated liberals are gone and the clamp down on  public statistics has now hit GDP figures that are delayed. 

 

Now this:

https://www.ft.com/content/3e2376bf-24ef-407f-b0b0-c60bed4ec97b

 

Quote

Wealthy Chinese are pulling the trigger on exit plans from their homeland as pessimism builds over the future of the world’s second-largest economy under Xi Jinping and the ruling Chinese Communist party. At the weekend, Xi cemented his position as the most powerful leader since Mao Zedong, staying on as head of the Chinese Communist party and its powerful central military commission for another five years. Following the quinquennial CCP congress, the 69-year-old now has an ironclad grip on power and the potential to rule for the rest of his life. David Lesperance, a Europe-based lawyer who has worked with wealthy families in Hong Kong and China, says Xi extending his rule beyond two terms is a tipping point for China’s business elite, who thrived for decades as China’s economy boomed. “Now that ‘the chairman’ is firmly in place . . . I have already received three ‘proceed’ instructions from various ultra-high net worth Chinese business families to execute their fire escape plans,” said Lesperance. In the months leading up to the congress, there had been speculation that Xi was under pressure inside the 97mn-member CCP to pivot from controversial policies, including his zero-Covid controls, support for Vladimir Putin and reassertion of party control across the business landscape.

However, Kia Meng Loh, a Singapore-based senior partner at Dentons Rodyk, a global law firm which has 6,000 employees in China, said inquiries and instructions for setting up “family offices” — private entities used to manage a family’s wealth — had also been building in the city-state “for months”. “The clients I work with saw [Xi’s] third term as a foregone conclusion much earlier than this week,” Loh said. He added that Hong Kong, long a favoured destination for Chinese wealth and elite families, had become less attractive as Beijing increased control over the territory. The number of family offices in Singapore jumped fivefold between 2017 and 2019, and almost doubled from 400 at the end of 2020 to 700 a year later, according to Citi Private Bank. Ryan Lin, director of Singapore-based Bayfront Law, said he was approached by five families during China’s party congress last week to establish a Singapore family office, three of which are proceeding. Lin, who has set up around 30 family offices in Singapore in the past year, said most Chinese hoped to relocate there, as well as move their money. Lesperance said many of his clients spent years preparing their exit from China, legally moving capital to safe offshore jurisdictions and arranging alternative residences and new citizenships outside China for their families. China’s rich, he said, are not only worried about rumours of an official wealth tax that would replace informal “common prosperity” donations. They are also increasingly concerned for their personal safety, even once they have left. Those fears have deepened following a series of temporary or longer term disappearances of high-profile people from public view over recent years, including Alibaba founder Jack Ma, tennis star Peng Shuai, elite financier Xiao Jianhua and real estate mogul Whitney Duan. “The family motto has always been: ‘Keep a fast junk in the harbour with gold bars and a second set of papers’. The modern equivalent would be a private jet, a couple of passports and foreign bank accounts,” Lesperance says. “That is the world we are in . . . it is tough stuff.” Others, however, appear less well prepared. The founder of a US real estate platform for wealthy Chinese said he is struggling to handle the flood of inquiries as most clients were in a hurry to leave the country and had not planned carefully. Meanwhile, immigration firms in Shanghai and Beijing have reported a spike in applications for US green cards for people with “extraordinary ability”, as the wait time is less than for investment-based green cards often used by the ultra wealthy.

The US enacted new laws forcing all dual citizenship persons employed in the chip industry to either quit China or break US law,  i.e. forcing them out of China. This was last week and a huge under reported story. 

Hard to know with the FT story as to how many and how serious it is. Certainly some will be moving, the collapsing real estate bubble probably marks a good time for many in that sector to retire to sunnier climes under new names. 

The brewing European financial crisis and US recession are other major events that are in the offing. 

Demographics dictates stagnation to retraction in GDP for much of the developed world and only really the capacity for follower model productivity gains being a driver for growth in the better developing world economies. Seems the major powers are moving their pieces to be readier for the new world of the 2020s and beyond. 

Also tangentially related: Putins bid to add 44 million white, Russian speakers is stuck in the mud around Luhansk and Kherson. His 20 something male demographic was only 6 million warm bodies before the war started, so given high end figures for the war he may have lost 1% of that KIA and 5% now in other countries fled the conscription. 

[dorlomin]

Adam Tooze introduces the concept of the polycrisis. It does not reach conclusions but it does map some of the issues but more importantly how we now are in something of an era of constant crisis. 

https://www.ft.com/content/498398e7-11b1-494b-9cd3-6d669dc3de33

Quote

 

Pandemic, drought, floods, mega storms and wildfires, threats of a third world war — how rapidly we have become inured to the list of shocks. So much so that, from time to time, it is worth standing back to consider the sheer strangeness of our situation. As former US Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers recently remarked: “This is the most complex, disparate and cross-cutting set of challenges that I can remember in the 40 years that I have been paying attention to such things.”

Of course, familiar economic mechanisms still have huge power. A bond market panic felled an incompetent British government. It was, you might say, a textbook case of market discipline. But why were the gilt markets so jumpy to begin with? The backdrop was the mammoth energy subsidy bill and the Bank of England’s determination to unwind the huge portfolio of bonds that it had piled up fighting the Covid-19 pandemic. 

With economic and non-economic shocks entangled all the way down, it is little wonder that an unfamiliar term is gaining currency — the polycrisis. A problem becomes a crisis when it challenges our ability to cope and thus threatens our identity. In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts. At times one feels as if one is losing one’s sense of reality. Is the mighty Mississippi really running dry and threatening to cut off the farms of the Midwest from the world economy? Did the January 6 riots really threaten the US Capitol? Are we really on the point of uncoupling the economies of the west from China? Things that would once have seemed fanciful are now facts.

  This comes as a shock. But how new is it really? Think back to 2008-2009. Vladimir Putin invaded Georgia. John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate. The banks were toppling. The Doha World Trade Organization round came to grief, as did the climate talks in Copenhagen the following year. And, to top it all, swine flu was on the loose. 

Former European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, to whom we owe the currency of the term polycrisis, borrowed it in 2016 from the French theorist of complexity Edgar Morin, who first used it in the 1990s. As Morin himself insisted, it was with the ecological alert of the early 1970s that a new sense of overarching global risk entered public consciousness. 

So have we been living in a polycrisis all along? We should beware complacency.

  In the 1970s, whether you were a Eurocommunist, an ecologist or an angst-ridden conservative, you could still attribute your worries to a single cause — late capitalism, too much or too little economic growth, or an excess of entitlement. A single cause also meant that one could imagine a sweeping solution, be it social revolution or neoliberalism. 

What makes the crises of the past 15 years so disorientating is that it no longer seems plausible to point to a single cause and, by implication, a single fix. Whereas in the 1980s you might still have believed that “the market” would efficiently steer the economy, deliver growth, defuse contentious political issues and win the cold war, who would make the same claim today? It turns out that democracy is fragile. Sustainable development will require contentious industrial policy. And the new cold war between Beijing and Washington is only just getting going. 

Meanwhile, the diversity of problems is compounded by the growing anxiety that economic and social development are hurtling us towards catastrophic ecological tipping points.

The pace of change is staggering. In the early 1970s the global population was less than half what it is today, and China and India were desperately poor. Today the world is organised for the most part into powerful states that have gone a long way towards abolishing absolute poverty, generates total global gross domestic product of $90tn and maintains a combined arsenal of 12,705 nuclear weapons, while depleting the carbon budget at the rate of 35bn metric tonnes of CO₂ a year. To imagine that our future problems will be those of 50 years ago is to fail to grasp the speed and scale of historical transformation. 

So, what is the outlook? In a world that one could envisage being dominated by a single fundamental source of tension, you could imagine a climactic crisis from which resolution might emerge. But that kind of Wagnerian scenario no longer seems plausible. Modern history appears as a tale of progress by way of improvisation, innovation, reform and crisis-management. We have dodged several great depressions, devised vaccines to stop disease and avoided nuclear war. Perhaps innovation will also allow us to master the environmental crises looming ahead. 

Perhaps. But it is an unrelenting foot race, because what crisis-fighting and technological fixes all too rarely do is address the underlying trends. The more successful we are at coping, the more the tension builds. If you have found the past few years stressful and disorientating, if your life has already been disrupted, it is time to brace. Our tightrope walk with no end is only going to become more precarious and nerve-racking. 

 

 

[dorlomin]

How we got here (financial) I should drag out some Mark Blythe here. 

 

[Detournement]

Are the wealthy Chinese fleeing the country going to stick their fortunes up their arse like Dustin Hoffman in Pappilion?

The one thing that Capitalists and Marxists have in common is that they understand capitalism. You cannot take productive capital out of China.