Outside In | Apple, Donald Trump, and why it’s hard to finger blame for America’s manufacturing decline
Donald Trump’s claim that China is responsible for stealing US manufacturing jobs are little more than empty campaign rhetoric
So 2016 is very definitely a year of living dangerously. Brexit warned us that in a “fact-free”, anecdote-fuelled political campaign, improbable and potentially ruinous outcomes are possible. Britain’s grumpy voters are only now beginning to taste the awfulness of the medicine they have prescribed for their perceived ills.
And on November 8, we will discover whether American’s voters can inflict similar self-harm. The problem is that the Brexit catastrophe inflicts harm mainly locally. This US “election from hell” has the potential to inflict harm on us all. And I mean not just irritating patience-testing harm, but the kind of harm that so many suffered across the world a century ago.
Most of his hallucinatory allegations justifying trade “punishments” have inevitably been targeted at China, always an easy electoral bogeyman in US Presidential elections
Whatever the result Tuesday, there is certain harm that has already been irreversibly inflicted. At home, both leading parties in the US have torn themselves to shreds, and the journey back to any kind of political cohesion in the country is set to be long and hard. Overseas, the US has punctured the faith and confidence of its allies and put in jeopardy institutions that have framed peace, stability and relative prosperity for a huge proportion of the world’s population for the past seven decades.
For those of us convinced that the liberalising trade and investment initiatives led by the US over those decades have been primary contributors to that wealth and stability, one of the gloomiest realities on the eve of the election is that no matter whether Clinton or Trump wins, that liberalising leadership has evaporated.
The first casualty will of course be the Trans-Pacific Partnership forged over seven years by 12 economies in the Asia Pacific region. Perhaps even as early as the APEC Leaders meeting in Lima in two weeks’ time, Barak Obama is likely to concede that the US will be unable to ratify the deal. The next casualty is likely to be the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) which if agreed between the US and the EU would be the world’s largest “bilateral” trade deal.
Unnoticed, but equally important for Hong Kong, a further casualty may be the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA). Almost no one pays any attention to this 23-country plurilateral negotiation that has been going swimmingly for the past two years, but for services economies like Hong Kong, this is hugely significant.