' “In North America and Europe, there is a recalibration, a wanting to engage on a more selective basis,” [Ian Goldin] said. ''The coronavirus that has seeped out of China, insinuating itself into at least 76 countries while killing more than 3,200 people, has effectively accelerated and intensified the pushback to global connection.
It has sown chaos in the global supply chain that links factories across borders and oceans, enabling plants that produce finished products to draw parts, components and raw materials from around the world. Many companies are now seeking alternative suppliers in countries that appear less vulnerable to disruption.
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“It reinforces all the fears about open borders,” said Ian Goldin, a professor of globalization and development at Oxford University and an author of a 2014 book that anticipated a backlash to liberalism via a pandemic, “The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It.”
“In North America and Europe, there is a recalibration, a wanting to engage on a more selective basis,” he said.
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Last week, Mr. Trump’s senior trade adviser, Peter Navarro, who wrote a book called “Death by China,” used the coronavirus as a stark reminder that the United States had allowed too much factory production to leave its shores.
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“People have understood from the trade war that they cannot rely too much on China,” said Sebastien Breteau, chief executive of Qima, a Hong Kong-based company that inspects factories that make clothing, electronics and other goods for major international brands.
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Just as the financial crisis demonstrated that banks were lending mind-bending sums of money without leaving enough in reserve to cover bad debts, the coronavirus has underscored how global manufacturing has been running too lean, operating in disregard of risks like earthquakes, epidemics and other disasters.
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“It costs to have a stock,” said Mr. Goldin, the Oxford expert. “You have the pressure of the market, and quarterly reporting, and analysts are breathing down your neck. You can’t say, ‘Well, we have lower profits, but more resilience.’”
In the political realm, the coronavirus has handed those who denounce immigration putative evidence for their warnings.'
- New York Times,
A Global Outbreak Is Fueling the Backlash to Globalization, March 5, 2020
Context'In 1965, CEOs in the US earned 20 times more than the average worker but by 2015 it had risen to 300 times..'(Banking Reform - English/Dutch) '..a truly stable financial and monetary system for the twenty-first century..''..a more interesting, human way of transforming yourself. It's about how you treat your employees.'(Corporate Rebels) - '..to learn how innovative businesses are changing how people work.''..the perils that China is inviting by turning away from substantive economic and political reform..'(BBC) - Coronavirus: White House concedes US lacks enough test kits(Bloomberg) - Faulty, limited testing in Japan, U.S., could worsen outbreak