World 2150 – part I

Ladies and Gentlemen: Welcome to the Annual global conference on ‘How the businesses evolved in the last 150 years’. Let me present you a chronological order of how we have progressed.
2000:     The national boundaries were fast disappearing. To quote Nanadan Nilekani, the great Indian entrepreuneur, ‘The global field is being increasingly levelled’. How nostradamic that statement is!

Businessmen had increasingly moved away from competition to collaboration, the divide between the fat and small corporations were increasingly thinning. In fact the logic of economies of scale was increasingly being questioned. The fat corporations like Microsoft or GM weren’t revered anymore, with the exception of corporations like Toyota or Google which continued to innovate. They were instead seen as dinosaurs, whose might suddenly became its weakness. In its place were corporations like Tata motors, Acer or Hyndai or LG, those nimble footed Asian organizations who were suddenly growing bigger and started spreading their control. In fact the first signs were felt when Chinese hardware major Lennovo acquired IBM.

2020:     India and China had truly emerged by then. It had to be, considering how the once mighty US imperialism as now the historians call it, had fallen, just like the British imperialism of the 19th century! One empire succeeds other, now the Asian one. Let us see how.

For long, US dollar remained stable and was the backbone of world economy. Research and innovation sustained the US economy till 2000. But the fall can be attributed to one person- George W. Bush (Muhammad-bin-Tughlaq incarnate!).

He started one scheme after other- tax cuts which only made rich richer, flawed social security scheme that tried to wash the government’s hand off its responsibility, and the biggest mis-adventure of all time- Iraq war, and the then popular term bodybags.

But the US economy was resilient all through this, primarily because the Asians fed them with dollars by way of huge forex reserves. The interest rates remained benign, and the American consumers were borrowing like there is no tomorrow. But all through this US managed to grow at a great rate of 4-4.5% year after year. So when did this bubble burst?

We will see this in next issue.