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Looking through the glass darkly, JP Morgan sees shipping going through a rough patch
The big difference between today's virtual closing of the Suez Canal, and its full closure in the 1967 Six Day War is the more risk averse world we now inhabit.
It doesn't take much more than a whiff of danger for a longstanding practice to come to a full stop today.
One might well regard such a development as a good thing as it lowers the level of threat and results in greater safety. For the safety-first-and-always crowd such a development is a triumph.
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Replacing quality control with political correctness through equity and diversity
In the official drive to become more woke, each of us is to become more guiltily aware of the disparities in outcome of those on the Official Pity List, women, blacks, sexual deviants etc. A byproduct of this trend, has been an assault on competence and quality as these are deemed the deplorable characteristics of "whiteness".
To replace hard work and determination to create an environment of diversity, equity and inclusion, the corporate aim is to recruit members of underperforming groups, who have been weeded out through testing and give the second and third rate first rate treatment.
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If China won't play, is it time for India to step up and send troops to beat the Houthis?
The Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEF), a gestating US-sponsored pan Pacific-Indian Ocean trade deal, is different things to different people.
To the Biden administration, it is a counter measure to whatever rival Donald Trump did or would do, as well as countering any deal China might have to snatch Indo-Pacific dominance from America.
What emerges as the geo-political fog lifts is the US does not have the skin in the game China, India and Europe does in the Western Pacific and the Red Sea. And perhaps it is time for these three to do the heavy lifting in dealing with the Houthi blockade of the Red Sea and the Suez Canal.
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As the regulatory state grows larger, the entrepreneurial spirit is extinguished
As China sinks into the economic morass that usually afflicts communist projects, so too has its major role in the western economies, though more so in the Americas than in Europe. This has been accelerated by the decoupling in which as foreign direct investment in China fades, no longer is it or will it be the engine of growth it once was.
What the increasingly socialist Western world ignores is the degree to which China became more prosperous in direct proportion to the degree it became less socialist. Thus, its export-led economy generated riches because the West bought what China made. This is no longer the case and nor is it likely to be the case in future given the tighter communist control and shrinking business confidence.
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Intra Asia Trade Specialists |
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