Globalisation is dying
Good - pass me the shovel
So Trump has introduced his tariffs and the world has gone mad. I won’t bother joining the hysteria over the economic impacts or the ridiculous complaints about unfairness. No, I will just be clear here and now and say I support Trump on this and I love tariffs. But Dan I hear you cry tariffs are bad and free trade is wonderful. Sorry to burst everyone's bubble but I hate globalisation and I am happy to see the end of free trade and the return of tariffs.
Get. In. The. Bin.
I believe that as people we have a hierarchy of care which starts with our family and extends to our friends, to our local community etc and then to a national level and finally our common man. On that basis I put my family, friends and nation first and so globalisation can fuck right off. It has been a disaster for this country and for my people and or though I have worked for two decades in a globalised industry I am happy to trade that in if necessary for 1. A socially productive job 2. To have a fairer and more happy country around me.
What I find so sad has been the utter collapse of the left from leading the charge against globalisation into its biggest cheerleaders. From riots in Seattle in 1999 over the WTO to whining left wing people complaining about tariffs and more. You have never seen a bigger intellectual and moral collapse. The left is the movement of big capital, transnationals, transnationalism and globalisation. There is a reason I walked away from it nearly 10 years ago.
Get. In. The. Bin.
I mean in the UK the Labour party still moans about Maggie Thatcher and her closure of the mines and manufacturing but the party oversaw due to globalisation and the China shock a bigger collapse under Blair. Oh and after whining on and getting teary at the Durham Miners Gala each year they now want to close down the North sea as well. And yet and yet and yet they still make out that they are better or more moral - get the fuck out of here.
For the record no country has to run a trade policy for the benefit of others. No, seriously a nation's trade policy is a domestic issue. It is bluntly fuck all to do with anyone else. Sure they can change it nicely, they can communicate nicely but if it is their policy and their economy and their leaders represent their people. Certainly no country has an obligation to be the consumer of last resort for a series of countries and blocs globally who run unfair trade policies themselves - I am looking at you China, EU, Japan and more.
Mercantilist states whining on about the US imposing tariffs only have themselves to blame. They have for years used policy and currency manipulation to suppress domestic demand in order to promote exports. This has had the reverse impact on the receiving countries who have deindustrialised leaving behind an economic wasteland from the rust belt in the US, to the north of England through to the north of France and beyond. At some point there was going to be a political reaction and that is now. This is on you guys - look in the mirror. I mean the sheer audacity of these states pretending they are paragons of good economic and trade practice whilst complaining about the US is nauseating.
The sheer destruction globalisation has wrought in our countries and communities and the abject misery it has inflicted can’t be underestimated. Anne Case and Angus Deaton coined the term Deaths of despair to describe the horrific human destruction it has created across the West from the drug overdoses, alcohol-related deaths and suicides - all linked to feelings of despair due to social and economic hardship. In the UK alone between 2019 and 2024 some 46,000 deaths were linked to this phenomenon (Link) and the numbers in the US are far higher.
The impact on the working class has been horrific and made even worse by the left’s obsession with uncontrolled mass migration which has suppressed the wages for those at the very bottom of society. A two step punch to the face and gut to some of the vulnerable people in society. Yet here is the moral left bleating about tariffs and globalisation. Just fuck off you absolute embarrassment of a social movement - the sooner Labour dies taking with it most of the unions the better. These people hate this country, despise the working class and have done nothing but attack both for decades. Only when they are gone will there be space for the working people to create new institutions which actually represent them and not Tarquin and Augustus who work in the public sector.
So tariffs and more tariffs and hopefully this is the beginning of the end. Pass me the shotgun and I will happily shoot the system through the face and then we can bury it face down with a stake through its heart. I have no time for it or for its proponents, especially my former comrades. We need cheap energy and reindustrialisation. I want to see nice shiny factories being built across the wasteland which is much of the West and I want it yesterday. If the current crop of hand wringing liberals which make up most of the British and European political class won’t do this well no problem because it looks like they will get wiped out shortly.
We need this for our national security but also for our political security because people have had enough. Populism isn’t rising in a vacuum - it is not people being led astray from the wise ways by evil men and women. No, it is the understandable reaction of millions of people against an economic and political system which has failed them and their families for decades. They can see their countries and societies rotting into the ground and they have had enough. They want change and they want some sense of hope for the future which I can understand as I desperately want it myself.
I am bored of the excuses of a political class which could pull any number of levers to change things but choose not to as they like this system - they have done well out of it - frankly most of them are so intellectually stunted they couldn’t imagine a different one. Well bully for them - I have also done reasonably well out of this system but I guess I retain enough of my working class roots to see it is manifestly unfair and want it gone. This is a continuation of a process that started 10 years ago with Trump 1 and Brexit and so I welcome it with open arms.
Globalisation has been a disaster and it is time it fucked off into the distance and then fucked off a bit more, no no no keep going yes I know there is a cliff there - fuck off over it and just die.
Yours in anger
Daniel Salt
Hi Chris
Hopefully this will make sense - let me know if not
Two of the major ways you can suppress demand:
1. You suppress wages which means the labour input (i.e. wage bill) for products is lower - this is basically what Germany did post 2003 and the Hartz reforms - the unions agreed to restrict pay demands at effectively below inflation - German workers got poorer but exports got more competitive
2. You suppress the value of your currency which means people can buy more stuff from you cheaply but it means imports and foreign holidays are more expensive - China currently does this by pegging the Yuan (their currency) to the dollar i.e. they force it to stay at set value versus the dollar unless they want to move it
In both cases it means the population can less afford to consume and this compresses domestic consumption whilst in both cases increasing the profitability of your exporters
Worth noting that Germany and China actually use both models as do plenty of other countries to varying degrees
The end result is a big trade imbalance will build up with you exporting more than you import
This has knock on impacts including:
1. This suppresses over all global demand as you are artificially compressing your own and thus stealing other countries demand - imagine how much better the world economy would be if places like Germany and China consumed at the same level as the rest
2. You will build up increasing amounts of assets from the profit from the trade imbalance which has to go somewhere and this traditionally has flowed into the Anglophone countries but especially US financial assets i.e. the stock market but also the bond market - this causes stocks to go up but bond yields to fall which can helps to generate an even bigger debt bubble
There are also a myriad of other methods used
Just a rough idea though for you
Hi Dan, I've been a huge fan of your writing for some time now (years). In this piece there is a sentence I don't understand: "They have for years used policy and currency manipulation to suppress domestic demand in order to promote exports". To understand better, what would be the advantage of supressing domestic demand to promote exports? I mean why would anyone do that? Can you give me an example? The rest of the article is so powerful; we hear nothing now of the Northern Powerhouse. We don't have any capacity for manufacturing steel we may need to make weapons for this phoney war Starmer is edging towards. Please keep up the good work.