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2017-01-21

The Observer: "Globalisation once made the world go around. Is it about to grind to a halt?"


"The denizens of Davos reassured themselves that free trade would go on in the Trump era, but they had for years done little about the losers such a system creates"

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"This is not the first era of globalisation. What might be called Globalisation 1.0 was alive and well at the end of the 19th century, an era of free trade, mass migration and liberalised capital flows.

"It was described by John Maynard Keynes in the following way:
'The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole Earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages.'
"What's the difference between Keynes's Londoner sipping his tea and today's Londoner slurping a latte while using a smartphone to buy something from Amazon? Sure, technology is faster and the global networks are more integrated. But in Edwardian Britain there was exactly the same confidence that the globalised world would continue uninterrupted as there is today.

"Yet the first era of globalisation did end. What’s more, a precise date can be put on the day it died: 28 June 1914, the day the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand set off the chain reaction that led to the outbreak of the first world war six weeks later. The unspoken question in Davos was whether 20 January 2017 will be another day that will go down in history for all the wrong reasons."

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