This is an awesome piece. Really good break down of the current geopolitical and financial situation.
The world is being broken in the US led west versus sanctioned countries. He calls them Tricks. Turkey, Russia, Iran, China, North Korea. He also sees South Korea as a potentially more tenuous ally than i would’ve thought.
https://plus2.credit-suisse.com/17ce71b5-5f54-4f5c-95a0-f35e70fd54d9
Too long to spoiler even but the ending sums it up pretty well. I’ve edited some content out in between these excerpts.
“To ensure that the West wins the economic war – to overcome the risks posed by “our commodities, your problem”; “chips from our backyard, your problem”; and “our straits, your problem” – the West will have to pour trillions into four types of projects starting “yesterday”:
(1) re-arm (to defend the world order) (2) re-shore (to get around blockades) (3) re-stock and invest (commodities) (4) re-wire the grid (energy transition)”
“I think that the above four themes (re-arm, re-shore, re-stock, and re-wire the electric grid) will be the defining aims of industrial policy over the next five years. How much the G7 will spend on these items is an open question, but given that the global order is at stake, they will likely not be penny pinching. If Tim Geithner were in charge, he’d put “a lot of money in the window” to show who’s in charge.
And hopefully it will be like that...
...and if so, any investor will have to be mindful that the above to-do-list is:
(1) commodity intensive
(2) capital intensive
(3) interest rate insensitive (4) uninvestable for the East”
“Finally, uninvestability means that for certain large countries in the global East, it makes absolutely and categorically no logical sense to roll their investments in G7 debt claims. Not just because of what happened to Russia’s FX reserves, but also because rolling a $1 trillion portfolio of U.S. Treasury securities means that you will fund the West’s effort to re-arm, re-shore, re-stock, and re-wire...
...against the East.
And we are back to where we started on the cover page: Dale Copeland’s theory of trade expectations is the right frame to think about world from here, and sadly things make no sense to continue like they used to, be either from a real (trade/production) perspective or a financial (FX reserves) perspective...
...which is why Bretton Woods III is destined to happen. It’s already happening, and we will explore the Bretton Woods III topic in detail in our upcoming dispatch:”