get latest news from West Africa

Very insightful piece! Trump and Biden foolishly thought the cards for global technological dominance were in US hands. They forgot that the US had long ceded to China control of the basic resources that power technological innovation in modern economies—rare earths.
Investment Opportunities
Investment Opportunities
Global Trade Insights
International trade law services
Economic Forecasts
International Trade Law
High tech manufacturing tools
Policy papers on trade wars
Rare earth processing equipment
Global economic forecasting services
Conflict Resolution Services
The US not only stopped extracting these minerals, which it believed had high negative impacts on the environment, but also abandoned to China their processing and conversion into basic tools for high end manufacturing enterprises.
Now China seems ready to flex its muscle in a field in which it enjoys almost total control and hegemony.
Emerging markets investment seminars
Rare earth minerals investment guide
US China relations webinars
Geopolitical Risk Advisory
Critical minerals market analysis
Trade War Analysis
Geopolitical strategy courses
Economic Forecasts
Investment Opportunities
Rare Earth Reports
Trump, in his usual erratic style of responding to perceived adversaries, announced a few days ago that it would slam 100% tariffs on China ‘’over and above any Tariff that they are currently paying’’.
When the stock market reacted negatively to his announcement, he quickly and characteristically changed course and started praising China and Xi. This is what Trump posted on his social media page:
Policy papers on trade wars
Geopolitical risk analysis subscription
Geopolitical strategy courses
Geopolitical Risk Advisory
Rare earth minerals investment guide
Supply Chain Management
Trade War Analysis
Global economic forecasting services
US China relations webinars
Economics of globalization books
‘’Don’t worry about China, it will all be fine! Highly respected President Xi just had a bad moment. He doesn’t want Depression for his country, and neither do I. The U.S.A. wants to help China, not hurt it!!! President DJT’’.
Paul Krugman, the American Nobel economist, reckoned that Trump changed his mind because one of the sectors that suffered the most in the stock market was Bitcoin. Bitcoin’s price fell by an astonishing 20%.
Trump and his family have heavily invested in bitcoin, whose price surged in the market after he won the presidency last year. Krugman has accused him of suffering from ‘’CBS—Cowardly Bully Syndrome’’!
Economists such as Krugman and this article by Global Geo Politics are convinced that the US will lose a trade war with China. For one thing, the Chinese economy is now larger than that of the US in purchasing power parity terms, and less than 15% of Chinese exports go to the U.S.
Even though China still wants to export to the US market, it can substitute that market by stimulating domestic demand. On the other hand, as the Global Geo Political article demonstrates, the US is almost totally dependent on China’s rare earths for its digital economy. It would take years for the US to drastically reduce that dependence.
Looking back, it seems to me that the US and the West have been trapped by their own dogma of neoliberalism and globalisation, which they aggressively pushed to the world in the 1980s and 1990s.
The West’s imposition of neoliberal structural adjustment programmes in Africa and Latin America in the 1980s was followed by the fall of the communist systems in Eastern Europe and their full embrace, under Western tutelage, of market reforms in the 1990s.
Western governments believed that the only game in town was open or free markets and democracy. The buzz word was globalisation. In a world in which the West seemed totally dominant after the Cold War and Bipolarity that underpinned the post-World War Two global order, nation states and protectionist barriers came to be seen as anachronistic.
US companies reasoned that they could make huge profits by treating the world as a single market and shifting production facilities to countries where labour costs were low. They also believed that some types of production, which were hazardous or at the low end of the technological frontier, could be abandoned to newly industrialising countries.
American companies could focus instead on high end tech activities, which commanded higher profits. Rising China saw an opening and took full advantage of it by becoming the world’s workshop or leader in manufacturing as well as producer of rare earth minerals and their derivatives.
The US is now coming to the painful realisation that its embrace of unfettered neoliberalism and lack of attention to geopolitical interests in its trade and investment policies was a huge strategic blunder. So Mr. Trump has to be nice to Mr. Xi for the health of the US economy and Mr. Trump’s own pocket.
Import Export Services
Buy vitamins and supplements
The Global Geo Politics article has a sobering conclusion: ‘’The global order is shifting not because of war or diplomacy but because of extraction, processing, and transformation. In the contest between thermodynamics and financial engineering, the former always wins.
Material systems do not respond to spin. They respond to heat, pressure, knowledge, and time. China controls those systems now. The West must decide whether it is willing to rebuild from the ground up or continue mistaking leverage for power. There is no middle ground.’’