Economy

David Lesperance used to spend his time talking to clients about tax. Now the wealthy individuals seeking the immigration adviser’s help when weighing a move to the US have started asking about abortion, LGBT+ rights and the risk of violence.The “culture war” issues that loom large within the US are now “top of mind” for professionals thinking of moving there, Lesperance says. Rightwing extremists’ January 2021 attack on the US Capitol had a “visceral” effect on many would-be immigrants, he recalls. The Supreme Court’s overturning of federal abortion protections this year led to another “huge jump” in concern.

Foreign investment is in part a matter of corporate strategy and financial calculation. But there are social dimensions too, which are becoming a factor in states’ pursuit of overseas companies and the expatriates they bring with them.The exceptional and growing polarisation in the US has led to increasingly divisive legislation from politicians looking to animate their parties’ most passionate members. Those policies, and signs of growing partisan enmity, are being noticed in international corporations. Members of the Site Selectors Guild, for example, have seen such topics “weighing on the minds of our clients” as they help multinationals pick new US locations, says Gregg Wassmansdorf, the group’s chair. Companies choosing new locations weigh many quantitative and qualitative factors, he adds, but the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe vs Wade, states’ subsequent abortion restrictions and LGBT+ rights flashpoints such as Florida’s clash with Disney are “definitely capturing people’s attention in the boardroom”. Disney employees in California protest against Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill © Ringo Chiu/ReutersStudies of other countries have found that political polarisation can be an important factor in determining foreign investments. There is little research to show whether it is deterring international investments in the US, but companies that advise investors on “country risk” around the world now use that term about the US. One political risk analysis firm, GeoQuant, has cited rising social polarisation in explaining what it calls the “EM-ification” of the US: the world’s largest economy, it argues, is showing some of the characteristics of emerging markets.Polling data also provides clues to the country’s shifting reputation. Gallup, for example, regularly asks Indians who want to migrate which country they would choose first. In 2015, 40 per cent picked the US. By 2016, when Donald Trump’s election as president ushered in a harsher immigration debate, that figure collapsed to just 15 per cent. Gallup has not attributed that change definitively to social or political events, but by last year the percentage of emigrating Indians who put the US at the top of their list had fallen to just 3 per cent. Immigrant-friendly Canada is now the preferred choice.The polling firm Morning Consult similarly found that Chinese nationals interested in studying in the US are being deterred by gun violence, perceived anti-China bias and “the political climate”. Those students constitute “a huge pool of educated workers”, observes Sonnet Frisbie, a geopolitical risk analyst at the firm.Similarly, Frisbie found that the reputational boost the US had seen in Europe after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “evaporated nearly overnight” following the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and the Supreme Court’s abortion decision. What Americans consider domestic issues are being followed closely overseas, she concludes. Such concerns are challenging multinationals at a time when most are increasingly sensitive to their employees’ wellbeing and alert to the need for diversity and inclusion.A memorial for victims of the Uvalde school shooting in May, which claimed the lives of 19 children © Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images“We go above and beyond to make sure that, whatever is going on in the external environment, we take care of our people,” says Supriya Jha, SAP’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. The German software company assesses cultural, political and human rights issues in any country where it sends staff, she adds. After the Supreme Court ruling it offered to cover the costs of US-based employees who need to travel out of state for an abortion. SAP has seen little evidence of employees rejecting moves to states that have imposed abortion bans or restricted LGBT+ rights. But, Jha notes, it allows staff to work remotely. For companies without that flexibility, “there would be greater concerns”. International worries about discrimination are rising, with one UN human rights expert concluding that LGBT+ rights are being “deliberately undermined” by certain states. It is too soon to see such concerns appearing in data showing which states are attracting foreign investment, Wassmansdorf observes. He adds, however: “There’s reputational risk to the United States overall and to specific states which are pursuing certain legislative agendas.” Companies, too, face reputational risks if they invest somewhere deemed unfriendly to some employees. The preponderance of restrictive bills in Republican states such as Texas and Florida, which have typically been associated with lower taxes and business-friendly regulations, could make economically attractive states less appealing in other ways. For Frisbie, such concerns should be seen in context: “The US is still pretty popular around the world,” she says. But it is becoming clear that policies drawn up for domestic consumption are now echoing around the world, with implications for the future flow of investment and talent. More

In 1838, Charles Darwin was deciding whether to propose to his cousin Emma Wedgewood. To help make up his mind, he wrote down all of the reasons for and against marriage. Reasons in favour included “constant companion (and friend in old age)”, while reasons against included “forced to visit relatives” and “terrible loss of time”.Deciding which US cities are most attractive to foreign investors should be a less emotionally fraught exercise. But in one respect the decision is not that different from Darwin’s: it means choosing what matters, and how much.

To produce the FT-Nikkei Investing in America ranking, we compiled data on the economic, regulatory and social characteristics of US cities and the preferences of overseas investors. Combining that data into an overall ranking involved making judgments about what matters to a diverse group of people with different individual goals. Overall, we’re confident that our approach has created an interesting and meaningful index. But it is important to recognise that other people could have made different choices with the same data. So here we explain what we could have done differently, and why we made the choices that we did.Choosing the cities We limited our selection to cities in 50 states and DC with a population greater than 250,000, based on 2020 Census place data. Last year, these cities captured 45 per cent of all new foreign business projects in the US, roughly a fifth of the country’s greenfield foreign direct investment — that is, cross-border investments that create new jobs and facilities — according to fDi Markets, an information provider owned by the Financial Times. This doesn’t mean that rural areas are not attractive places for overseas investors. In fact, if you’re building a large warehouse, they might be more attractive than the cities we’ve chosen.But we wanted to look at places with a steady stream of FDI, places where any industry could find a home. We also wanted to look at places with larger and more diverse populations, which are more accessible and may feel more comfortable to people from all over the world.We looked at Census place data because many factors — business regulation, office rent, school quality — vary drastically within a metropolitan area. Many New Yorkers probably wish they paid the housing costs of Newark, New Jersey, where prices are 61 per cent cheaper.We used metropolitan-area data when city-level data was not available or when lines were more difficult to draw. Dallas and Fort Worth, for example, share the same international airport. The number of international flights out of Dallas-Fort Worth was assigned to both cities in our ranking. Choosing the categories The best place for foreign business is not one-size-fits-all. A fintech firm and a manufacturing plant will have very different priorities when it comes to what they’re looking for in a location. Through an analysis of press releases, interviews and surveys, we identified and measured some common features of any city that make it shine for international business. Apart from access to specific markets, we found that skilled workers and a friendly business environment were top of the list for foreign investors. Below is more information on each category and how we chose to measure it. Business environment This category looks at taxes, regulation and costs. We compared cities by their corporate income tax, sales tax, property tax, tax incentives, rent and utility costs. We also conducted a survey with the State International Development Organizations (Sido) on how well city and state business policies supported FDI objectives. Sources: Commercial Edge, FT-Nikkei and Sido Survey, GIS Planning, Sales Tax Clearinghouse, Tax Foundation, US Census, WavteqForeign business needsThis category looks at how much cities’ policies and infrastructure help international business. In this category, we compared cities by their number of international flights, distance to a port, internet connectivity, and FDI services. We partnered with Sido to track how many employees cities and states have dedicated to attracting FDI, if they have investor platforms, and if they assist with site selection, market strategy, supply chain procurement, regulation, and mergers and acquisitions. Sources: Broadband Now, FT-Nikkei and Sido survey, GIS Planning, OAGWorkforce and talentTalent is at the top of the list for foreign investors. Apart from proximity to customers, analysis by fDi Markets of corporate announcements showed that a skilled workforce was the most cited reason for FDI into the US in 2021. We compared cities by their share of college graduates, the size of their working age population, the number of nearby universities, and the freedom of their labour market. Labour market freedom refers to how much leeway the private sector has when it comes to hiring and remunerating workers. It is modelled after the economic freedom index compiled by Canadian think-tank the Fraser Institute and research by Dean Stansel, a professor at Southern Methodist University who also worked on the Fraser Institute’s index. Sources: Economic Policy Institute, GIS Planning, Minimum-Wage.org, Unionstats.com, US Census

Quality of lifeWe focused here on the basics: cost of living, commute times, crime risk and school quality.Many things matter to people when deciding on a place to live and work—good weather, access to nature, political affiliation, proximity to family and friends. Many of the positive factors that we would have liked to include would be hard to measure or difficult to update every year. With other factors, even denoting them as positive or negative would in effect be a political decision. Sources: Applied Geographic Solutions, GIS Planning, NicheOpennessThis category looks at diversity. We measured cities by the size of their foreign-born population and their racial diversity score — the chance that people of different races will be selected in any random sample of two.Source: US CensusInvestment trendsThis category looks at how well cities attracted investment in 2021. We compared cities based on their greenfield foreign and domestic direct investment per capita. Source: fDi MarketsAftercareEnsuring companies are supported once they have been established can go a long way in attracting FDI. A quarter of all greenfield FDI projects in the US last year were expansions of existing investments. Through our partnership with Sido, we surveyed cities on whether they had officials dedicated to supporting companies’ long-term needs and communicating regulatory changes. We also tracked whether they helped relocate and integrate workers, advised on new investments, or provided export and promotion services. Sources: FT-Nikkei and SIDO surveyWhat about. . . ?There were many variables we wanted to include that didn’t make the cut. There were also many variables that we didn’t have the opportunity to explore that we might have used. Ultimately, we built our ranking with variables that were relevant, timely and readily available.We wanted to remain as objective as possible when measuring and ranking cities. The salience of issues in the political realm — abortion, gun control, marijuana legislation — is something that only individual businesses can decide. Combining the dataA key challenge we faced in constructing the index was deciding how to combine different types of data. The variables in our dataset represent different kinds of things: people, money, distance, time. Some of the variables are percentages, some are scores on other indices, others are ordinal scales, where some cities score higher than others.Each of these variables needs to be represented on the same scale, so that they can be added together. This is a different problem to deciding how much weight to give to different things. It’s about choosing how to represent different types of data in an equivalent way.A common approach to this sort of task is to measure, for each variable, how far each city’s score falls from the average score, relative to the variation in the scores. This works well for variables that are symmetrically centred around the average, but it works less well for variables that don’t have this “normal” shape.Imagine two variables where the scores fall between 0 and 100. In one, the average is 50 and most cities score between 30 and 70. In the other, most cities score between 0 and 20, but some cities score between 20 and 50, and a few outliers score between 50 and 100. In the first case, roughly half the cities score below the average. In the second, more than half the cities score below the average. The median city — the one in the middle if you list them from lowest to highest score — will score lower in the second case than the first, and the best city will score higher. Some cities would gain an unfair advantage because of differences in the shape of the variables.One way of dealing with this is to ignore the raw scores and instead use the ranks of the cities. This solves the problem of differently shaped data, but at a high cost, because you end up throwing away all of the information about the size of the differences between cities.Ideally, you would like to strike a balance between these two extremes, and the approach we have taken aims to do just that. First, we transform skewed variables so that they have a more normal shape. Second, we measure the variation of the scores around the median rather than around the mean. Third, we place a limit on the minimum and maximum standardised scores, so any cities whose scores fall outside this range have their scores pulled into the edges.This reduces the effect of differences in the distribution of variables, and stops outliers gaining a disproportionate advantage, while keeping much of the information about the size of the differences between the cities within each measure.The standardised scores for the variables within each category are combined as a weighted sum to create a category index. Each category index is scaled from 0 to 100, and the overall score is a weighted sum of the category indices. More

For much of the 21st century, the US has been the undisputed champion of attracting foreign investment. Despite a Great Recession and spates of political dysfunction, multinationals from around the globe continued to pour money into the world’s largest economy, an influx that swelled to a record $468bn in 2015.But in the pandemic-stricken year of 2020, the US nearly lost that crown, according to data compiled by the UN. China, which had been slowly gaining on its American competitors, came within $2bn of claiming the top slot, prompting hand-wringing in the US over whether the fast-growing, rising Asian power would permanently supplant its geopolitical rival.

“It really caused huge competitive issues for the United States,” says Patrick Dine, chief executive of PSD Global, an international business consultancy, adding that China’s rise sparked “political pressures” to reverse the trend. Last year, with China struggling to maintain its “zero Covid” strategy, the US was easily back on top, surging to $367bn in foreign inflows — more than double the $181bn taken in by the Chinese economy. And 2022 is shaping up to be another banner year, with at least 12 “megaprojects” — investments worth at least $1bn — announced by overseas investors in the US, totalling $34.9bn in capital expenditure, according to data from fDi Markets, an information provider owned by the Financial Times that tracks greenfield foreign direct investment, or cross-border investments that create new jobs and facilities.“There is definitely a lot of uncertainty right now in the United States,” says Nancy McLernon, head of the Global Business Alliance, a trade association representing the largest foreign multinationals in the US. “But when I talk to executives at my member companies, they’re feeling bullish.” 

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Still, the shock of 2020 has led many American cities and states to redouble their efforts to attract foreign capital, no longer complacent that the sheer size and dynamism of the country’s economy is enough to convince overseas executives to pick the US for their next investment dollar. That increasingly competitive scramble for foreign capital has prompted the FT and Nikkei — two of the world’s leading chroniclers of cross-border investment — to compile the inaugural Investing in America ranking, a data-driven tally of the best cities in the US for foreign companies to do business. Many of the metrics the FT and Nikkei used to measure cities are the same a domestic company would consider to decide where to invest: a skilled workforce, for instance, appeared in nearly a third of US project announcements from foreign investors last year, according to fDi Markets.“Every site we pay for, we want to make sure it’s successful — and that success starts with its labour force,” says Tim Ingle, chief financial officer of Toyota North America, which moved its US headquarters to the Dallas region in 2017 and this year broke ground on a $1.3bn battery plant near Greensboro, North Carolina — an investment that was supplemented by an additional $2.5bn announced in August. But the FT and Nikkei also examined attributes that would specifically attract overseas investors. How many international flights leave from nearby airports? How much do local economic development authorities help companies with requirements such as visas once they set up shop? How many foreign-born nationals live in the region? (For more details, read our methodology.) Unsung heroesThe top 20 cities in the FT-Nikkei ranking secured nearly a third of all new FDI projects announced in the US last year. Some have long been hailed as multinational hubs. Miami, the winning city, has been a gateway to Latin America for half a century and has secured more than 70 new projects from the region in the past decade, according to fDi Markets data. Other cities ranked surprisingly well despite not winning marquee projects — Jacksonville, Pittsburgh, Kansas City — because they have created a business environment where foreign companies can prosper. The Toyota investment is a sign that North Carolina has become something of a hub of such cities, joining others in the south-east with pro-business labour laws and low corporate taxes. The state has three in the FT-Nikkei ranking’s top 20 — Charlotte, Raleigh and Greensboro — with executives citing the state’s lower cost of living as a key driver. Kim Sneum Madsen, chief executive of Danish tech group Umbraco, says his company chose Charlotte for its US headquarters in 2020 after looking at five other cities, including Chicago, Austin and Philadelphia, because of a low cost of living as well as an airport with multiple nonstop flights to Europe and fewer large tech groups competing for talent. “I must admit, I didn’t know Charlotte beforehand,” Sneum Madsen says.

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Other, smaller US cities have become targets for foreign investors because of a low cost of living, including lower taxes and cheap rents. Louisville, Kentucky, which finished 30th on the FT-Nikkei list overall, came in first in our “business environment” category; office space in the city averaged $19.37 per square foot in 2021, less than a third of the cost of space in New York, Boston or San Francisco, according to data from CommercialEdge, a property information platform.Similarly, the small town of Taylor, Texas, secured last year’s largest FDI commitment: a $17bn chip deal with Samsung. The production site will span over 5mn sq m, making cheap real estate and low operating costs paramount.“The perfect location is probably something you’ve never even heard of,” says Didi Caldwell, president of Global Location Strategies, a site selection consultancy. Big is beautifulStill, the US’s biggest, most cosmopolitan cities performed well on the FT-Nikkei ranking. In addition to Miami, three of the five top finishers are among the US’s largest and most storied cities: New York, Boston and Houston.Despite higher costs for doing business, these metropolitan centres shine when it comes to deep talent pools, openness to expatriates, and other specific needs of foreign multinationals, like major ports and airports. New York, for example, has more than 320 universities within a 50 mile radius, according to GIS Planning, an FT-owned corporate location specialist, which means companies there have multiple pipelines for training and recruitment. Houston has the largest shipping port in the US by waterborne tonnage, and over half of Miami’s population is foreign born, the most of any large US city.“We have all of the infrastructure for international,” says Susan Davenport, senior vice-president and chief economic development officer at the Greater Houston Partnership, a business association. “We have that great talent base, and we love the fact that we’re an international city. We celebrate that.” Increasingly, though, cities and regional development agencies have been forced to become more proactive to secure the big foreign investments that, in the past, almost came unsolicited. Not only do foreign companies seek tax breaks and incentive packages, but they also are increasingly looking for “aftercare” — the term used to refer to a range of services, including help with visas and navigating unfamiliar regulatory hurdles, offered to companies once they arrive in the US — provided by some municipalities.Savannah, Georgia, is a case in point. In May, Hyundai announced it would build a $5.5bn electric vehicle plant in nearby Bryan County. But that deal was secured only after the state spent years wooing South Korean companies, including Kia, which built its first-ever US assembly plant in the city of West Point. In addition to identifying a large parcel of land for the plant, regional authorities had work-training programmes at the ready to ensure a skilled workforce.“FDI is about relationships,” says Pat Wilson, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Economic Development. “These are long-term relationships. They’re investments in the future.” More

This is part of a series, ‘Economists Exchange’, featuring conversations between top FT commentators and leading economistsIt is a critical juncture for the world economy, with the legacy of Covid, war in Ukraine, high inflation (especially soaring food and energy prices), tightening monetary policy and a strong dollar. This was the background when late last month, Kwasi Kwarteng, chancellor of the exchequer in Liz Truss’s new government, delivered his “mini” Budget. The statement included a costly energy plan as well as substantial permanent tax cuts, including an unexpected reduction in the top rate of income tax from 45p to 40p in the pound. This, he said, was the government’s new “growth plan”. He also offered no estimates of the cost nor implications for debt sustainability. The market reaction was devastating, causing a sharp fall in the value of the pound and the price of gilts. Early the following week the Bank of England was forced to intervene in the gilts market to limit the damage done to pension funds — some of which were threatened with bankruptcy as complex trades in derivatives came under market pressure. Substantial opposition emerged on the Conservative backbenches to the large, planned tax cut for those earning over £150,000 a year, which forced the government to back down. It was also forced to accept an early forecast of the fiscal implications from the Office for Budget Responsibility. So what impression has this astonishing episode had on informed outside observers? One who knows the UK and global macroeconomics well is Larry Summers, former US treasury secretary. I asked him for his view of these events in a discussion last weekend, just before the government’s U-turns on the proposed cut in the top rate of tax. Larry Summers: I think there’s an element of perfect storm in it. You had misguided fiscal policy coupled with lack of central bank credibility coupled with toxic leverage creating positive feedback loops that led cumulatively to a disastrous outcome. The UK did not have room for a massive ineffectual fiscal expansion. The uncontained energy subsidies were themselves substantially problematic and did not leave room for large, permanent tax cuts. That called the credibility of the government into substantial question. The government’s disregard for process on the fiscal policy, insistence on personnel change in the civil service at the Treasury and rhetoric of questioning the central bank called into question the credibility of the central bank. And all of this together raised the spectre of fiscal dominance, in which the central bank is effectively forced to finance the government.

That then led to the toxic correlation, this being a tendency for bond yields to rise as the currency was declining. And that in turn was followed, given the situation of the British pension funds, with a cascading deleveraging that led prices to disconnect from fundamentals and led to the phenomenon of positive feedback, which is at the root of all financial crises. And so, you went from a stable though not particularly desirable situation to a catastrophic one within a matter of a few days. It is frequently the case that financial crises have more to do with assets that were previously perceived as being completely safe becoming risky, than risky assets becoming riskier than was previously expected. And that’s what happened in the UK. It was less a situation of a single fatal act than a situation of several dangerous acts combining to produce catastrophe, and that is what happened. I think the Bank of England did the correct, or reasonable, thing in the extremely difficult situation it found itself in by engaging in a “market maker of last resort” operation. But nothing in my experience suggests that an operation of that kind will provide more than a temporary respite, unless there is more action to come.It is not, I believe, the case that British pension funds only owned pound-denominated assets. And there is, I think, the underestimated phenomenon of what others would call contagion and an economist might call “reputational externalities”, where seeing something happening in one place raises concerns about it happening in other places. And so, I think, the destabilisation wrought by British errors will not be confined to Britain. I was therefore glad when the IMF spoke up to express concern about the situation, though I felt the IMF comments underplayed the financial risk aspects of the situation and overplayed the regressiveness of the tax cuts. And while I agreed with the IMF’s judgment about that very much, I felt their appropriate role was more to focus on the macroeconomic and, particularly, the global financial stability implications. Martin Wolf: I agree. It’s my job as a British columnist to point out the consequences for inequality and social harmony. It’s not really the fund’s job. But let’s think about what can be done now to rectify this, because obviously they’ve opened Pandora’s box and it’s possibly not just a British box. We are concerned, and you’ve already touched on that, that the Bank of England promised that its new quantitative easing programme would last for just 13 days, and that started last Wednesday, so it doesn’t leave that much time. But if they just stop, there must be a serious risk that the crisis will reignite, and that might then force them back into supporting the market, which might look even worse. The situation, in other words, looks to me still very fragile and that might have some worrying implications for wider global stability. LS: Martin, I think the situation is indeed, as I suggested, very fragile. I suspect that the reputational externality aspect is the more important aspect for the global system, and that has already happened. And so, I’m not sure that just how well or poorly it plays out from here will have huge global implications. And I think it must be acknowledged that once investors are primarily watching other investors rather than judging the fundamentals for themselves, matters have become highly problematic in any financial crisis. And we are now at the stage where the focus is on the hydraulics rather than the economics. It’s on the flows and who is moving in what direction. It seemed to me surprising, given that it was going to reverse itself on QE versus QT, by engaging in this market maker of last resort operation, that the Bank of England gave such a firm time limit on its activity. I think in general that military interveners make a mistake when they promise a fixed date for withdrawal, because it emboldens the opposition.

And I think lenders of last resort make a mistake — well, financiers of last resort make a mistake — when they declare how time-limited their operation is going to be. And I would not be surprised if the Bank of England finds it necessary to adjust its position. I think it would surely be constructive if the government were to back off from its radical permanent tax-cutting, and it also seems to me that the geopolitical moment would provide something of an excuse for doing so: “in light of the extraordinary uncertainties created by what is happening in Ukraine, it is appropriate to defer consideration of fiscal measures beyond energy subsidies until after the war is over”. I frankly fear over the difficulty of quickly re-establishing full credibility in the Bank of England. The decision to move 50 basis points rather than 75 basis points was a credibility-challenging blunder. The existence of a vote for only 25 basis points further challenges credibility.To sum up, the bank is likely to have to open the possibility of a longer period as “market maker of last resort”. There must also be a retreat on fiscal policy and some signals from the Bank of England and the Treasury that will restore the former’s credibility. I think these steps would cumulatively offer the best prospect for success. I also think it’s important to remember that there is much that is functional in the British economy and especially in London, as one of the world’s leading global cities. And there is the prospect of attracting substantial capital inflows, which will lay the groundwork for recovery and re-stabilisation. MW: As far as we can see, the government is going to propose quite significant spending cuts in November as its way of restoring fiscal stability or credibility [since this discussion, there have been suggestions that the announcement will be brought forward]. And there is very real doubt whether they will be able to get these through parliament. And that will, of course, certainly not encourage the markets. The other striking feature is that this reversal on QE was carried out by the Financial Policy Committee of the Bank of England without the direct engagement of the Monetary Policy Committee. And so, in a way, what we’re seeing is not so much fiscal dominance, at least directly. We’re seeing financial sector worries override monetary policy concerns. And that’s a dreadful position for the institution to be in. So, I would suggest that the job of restoring credibility to British policymaking might turn out quite difficult. LS: One of the lessons one learns as one gets older is that not all problems can be solved. And I intended to offer suggestions as to best ways forward, not to imply, with confidence, that they would be successful. I hear you on the political exigencies, both with respect to spending and the internal dynamics of the Bank of England. My instincts tell me that those dynamics have a way of evolving in the face of serious crises, and so I suspect the range of possibility for what actors might do three weeks from now is rather broader than what those actors are currently proclaiming. And I think it is a good idea to recognise that. MW: We’ve got the IMF annual meetings coming up in just a little over a week. This looks an alarming backdrop for their discussions, and indeed for the sort of decisions that are being made by British policymakers. How worried should we be about this combination — what some people call a “perfect storm” for the world economy? LS: I disagree with the historian Adam Tooze about many things, but I think he has found an apt term in using the term “poly-crisis” to refer to the many aspects of this situation. I can remember previous moments of equal or even greater gravity for the world economy, but I cannot remember moments when there were as many separate aspects and as many cross-currents as there are right now. Look at what is going on in the world: a very significant inflation issue across much of the world, and certainly much of the developed world; a significant monetary tightening under way; a huge energy shock, especially in the European economy, which is both a real shock, obviously, and an inflation shock; growing concern about Chinese policymaking and Chinese economic performance, and indeed also concern about its intentions towards Taiwan; and then, of course, the ongoing war in Ukraine. Start with America. I remain convinced that a failure of central bank policy in the US to remain resolute will be very unlikely to bring about a return to inflation stability in the US and, therefore, to any foundation for healthy global growth. I am baffled by the many critics of the central bank who assert that they need not take substantial further actions because expectations are anchored, seeming to ignore that the only reason expectations have remained anchored is that the central bank has moved towards making clear their determination to move rates substantially.

It is an encouraging sign for the central bank that as bad inflation data has come in, the tendency has been for real rates to rise rather than market-based inflation expectations.But that is no argument at all for not doing what is necessary. And if the Fed were to heed the counsel of the diehards of “team transitory”, whose conclusions remain constant but whose arguments constantly evolve, I think that would be a prescription for much higher interest rates and a sustained and very difficult stagflation that would have serious global consequences.I think the Fed is now in the range of signalling appropriate monetary policy. My suspicion, but it is only a suspicion, is that they will have to raise rates ultimately a bit more than their “dot plot” forecasts suggest, or the market is now anticipating. My much stronger conviction is that there is still an underestimation of what the economic consequences of all of this will be. I would be very surprised if we were to simultaneously — as the Fed believes or the Fed forecasts — bring inflation down to something approaching the 2 per cent range and, at the same time, see unemployment rise no higher than 4.4 per cent. It continues to be my view that we are unlikely to achieve inflation stability without a recession of a magnitude that would take unemployment towards the 6 per cent range. To be crystal clear, I yield to no one in my hatred for unemployment, for its consequences for inequality, for its consequences for subsequent economic capacity. My earliest work as an academic was about the benefits of hot labour markets. I worked very hard with Olivier Blanchard on so-called hysteresis theories that emphasise the adverse effects of unemployment.The question is not some trade-off of inflation against unemployment. The question is what policy path would minimise the total amount of unemployment distress over time. And just as the patient who doesn’t complete his regimen of medicines does herself no favour, or the oncologist who prescribes too few courses of chemotherapy does their patient no favours, I believe the prospects for robust American and global growth will be greater if we do not allow inflation expectations to become fully entrenched.

The only silver lining in this moment is, as Paul Krugman and others suggest, that long-term inflation expectations have not yet become entrenched. It is crucial that we take advantage of that by acting firmly to restrain inflation. The global situation is no less problematic. I think there is an increasing chance that when historians look back at the views that prevailed of China in 2020, they will compare them to the views that prevailed of Japan in 1990 or the views that prevailed of Russia in 1960 and find them almost as bizarre. The pressure for capital flight, the dependence on real estate, the magnitude of the demographic challenge, the complexity of running an economy in a way that both enforces political loyalty and spurs innovation, all of this suggests to me that there are likely to be very challenging years ahead in China. With a tendency to turn substantially inwards and the real prospect of economic weakness in both the US and China, and with a European economy that will be held back at best and hobbled at worst by high energy prices, it is difficult to be optimistic about the global prospect. My hope, but not my expectation, would be that there would be serious dialogue, led by the international financial institutions, on the need for a global stability strategy coming out of these meetings. That would involve an appropriate combination of policies in each of the major regions. It would involve the development of capacities to provide substantial additional resources to the developing countries and more satisfactory approaches than now exist for managing debt, for debt relief. It would involve a capacity for looking beyond the current moment, by providing large-scale financing of a green transition and for fortifying the world against the next pandemic, which I would guess will come within the next 15 years. This is a moment for the kind of signalling, albeit with very different problems, that took place at the London 2009 summit during the financial crisis. My fear is that the preoccupations will be with questions like whether the World Bank president is or is not a climate denier and with much more business-as-usual proposals about who will or will not contribute sums in the hundreds of millions of dollars to various funds that the global institutions are seeking to raise. It seems to me to be a moment for boldness and imagination. And while the ministers have not yet delivered their pre-meeting speeches and so one can remain hopeful, I can’t honestly say I am hugely optimistic that we will see substantial boldness coming forward at these meetings. MW: I think that’s a very good end and very appropriate. So, thank you very much. That was extremely helpful.The above transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity More

For decades, Miami has been known as the US’s gateway to Latin America. But spending even a few hours in the office of Francis Suarez, the city’s 45-year-old mayor, makes it clear the South Florida metropolis has become a magnet for investors from other corners of the globe as well. Seated in the waiting area on one recent sunny afternoon was Lech Walesa, the former Polish president and anti-communist crusader, patiently waiting his turn for an audience with the mayor. Aides excitedly discuss the possible arrival in the city of the Saudi-backed investment conference, dubbed “Davos in the desert”. “We are welcoming, and we want the best and the brightest, and the best-capitalised people here. Why? Because it’s going to strengthen us,” says Suarez, seated in his white-walled modernist office. “Our wages are growing faster than anyone else’s.”

Miami’s rising status as an international hub, which has helped land it in the top spot of the inaugural FT-Nikkei Investing in American ranking of the best US cities for foreign businesses, has coincided with a similar rise as a place of choice for domestic investors. Financiers from New York and tech entrepreneurs from California began moving to the city during the coronavirus pandemic, citing its light-touch lockdown measures and a warm climate that made working from home tolerable.Overseas investors followed suit. Even as foreign direct investment US-wide plummeted in 2020, it jumped 70 per cent for Miami, with the UK, Panama and Spain leading the way, according to data from fDi Markets, an information provider owned by the Financial Times that tracks greenfield FDI, or cross-border investments that create new jobs and facilities. “Miami has traditionally marketed itself as the gateway to the Americas, and it’s still true,” says Ilona Vega Jaramillo, vice-president at the Beacon Council, Miami’s economic development organisation. “But I would even say we are outgrowing that. I think we are a global city centre now.”Many locals give credit to Suarez, who put his city on the radar of new out-of-state investors with a playful four-word tweet in 2020: “How can I help?” (The tweet was in answer to a Silicon Valley executive’s suggestion that frustrated tech investors abandon Northern California for South Florida.)Suarez, who likes to call his city “the capital of capital”, followed up by creating more facilities to help businesses set up shop, including an office focused on assisting potential investors. For those from overseas, it didn’t hurt that more than half of Miami’s residents are foreign born, the highest proportion of any large US city. Suarez has been able to accomplish this repositioning almost entirely through the force of his personality; Miami’s mayor has limited executive powers, and the office is a part-time job. A Republican, he has managed to hew closely to the party’s historic reputation as a friend to business — local taxes remain low — while remaining openly critical of Donald Trump’s nativist, anti-immigrant policies. “The mayor’s done a really nice job of creating this snowball effect for us to take a look at it seriously,” says Kurt MacAlpine, chief executive of Canadian asset manager CI Financial. The company chose Miami for its US headquarters last year and recently doubled its lease at 830 Brickell, the newest office building in Miami’s financial district and home to other big names like Citadel, Microsoft, AerCap, and Thoma Bravo. The building is due for completion in January, and expected rent has nearly doubled to $120 per square foot in three years.

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Like many local leaders, Suarez is targeting technology groups as potential investors, betting that the high costs and political pressures in traditional tech hubs like San Francisco and New York will make South Florida more appealing.Suarez points to New York’s decision to abandon its offer to Amazon for its second headquarters location in Long Island City — the big tax breaks offered to the ecommerce group triggered furious local opposition in the Big Apple — as a turning point. He has made cryptocurrency groups a particular focus. Last August, Suarez launched MiamiCoin, making Miami the first municipality to have its own digital currency. The move came a few months after the world’s largest Bitcoin conference relocated from Los Angeles to Miami, and crypto exchange FTX paid $135mn for naming rights to the arena that is home to basketball team Miami Heat. Despite volatility in the crypto market — MiamiCoin has lost nearly all its market value since its launch — Suarez continues to receive part of his salary in Bitcoin. “A lot of the crypto ecosystem and energy was moving to Miami, and we wanted to be a part of that,” says Peter Smith, co-founder of UK-based Blockchain.com, who moved his company’s US headquarters from New York to Miami last year.The city has not been without growing pains. Property prices have increased 36 per cent and rents by 26 per cent over the past year, with Miami recording the highest rent growth among US cities for the 10th consecutive month in July, according to property website Realtor.com. “There was a tremendous increase in leases, whether commercial or residential, and that made it prohibitive to implement what we had planned originally,” says Luis Merchan, chief executive of Flora Growth, a global cannabis company that announced it would relocate its headquarters from Toronto to Miami last year. Population growth has also made it harder for outsiders to secure school places for their children. “The lack of housing inventory and school slots is a huge problem,” says Richard Florida, one of the world’s leading urbanists, who divides his time between Miami and Toronto, where he is a professor at the Rotman School of Management. Miami may soon face the same bifurcation issues that have bedevilled San Francisco and New York, with the super-rich living well but younger, lower-paid workers struggling to make ends meet. The city ranked second among the largest metropolitan areas in income inequality in 2020, behind New York, according to US Census data.

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In the longer-term, the city will have to deal with the impact of climate change, with some housing units at risk of flooding. According to property platform Zillow, more than a third of Miami’s housing stock stands at risk of being inundated as sea levels rise. Miami may also struggle to avoid the culture wars that have consumed the rest of the state, and vexed even corporations that have done business in Florida for decades, including Disney. Last month, Miami’s school board voted against a measure that would recognise October as LGBTQ History Month, a decision taken out of concern that the district would contravene Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law backed by Governor Ron DeSantis. The law, which bars classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in lower grade levels, has raised alarm in some quarters of a city that has historically taken pride in being one of the most tolerant in the US. Liane Ventura, senior vice-president at the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce, insists the culture wars have yet to affect investors, who still view the city as a business-friendly environment. “Here in South Florida, we don’t really elaborate on those things,” Ventura says. “We talk more about how to bring Bitcoin.” More

The San Francisco Bay area’s reputation as the world’s tech centre has become so ingrained globally that the number of regions attempting to name themselves after Silicon Valley appears to grow every year.In addition to Silicon Fen in Cambridge, England, and Silicon Allee in Berlin, Israelis boast of their Silicon Wadi and even Australian techies have attempted to christen Silicon Beach.But when it comes to the actual Silicon Valley, overseas investors have shown they have become increasingly unwilling to put their money where their nomenclature is.

Last year, foreign direct investment (FDI) into new projects in San Francisco slumped to its lowest level since 2009, raising doubts over the city’s ability to retain its heralded status as the world’s pre-eminent technology centre.Data from fDi Markets, an information provider owned by the Financial Times, show that the Northern California city, home to the likes of Uber, Twitter and Salesforce, attracted an estimated $222mn in greenfield FDI last year, down 87 per cent from its peak in 2016. Greenfield FDI refers to cross-border investments that create new jobs and facilities. Executives who provide location consulting advice to overseas companies say that local tax, social and regulatory policies have made it harder for businesses to operate in the city, leading to an exodus of both foreign and domestic tech investors to other parts of the US. “It makes my work very difficult,” says Darlene Chiu Bryant, executive director of GlobalSF, a non-profit that works to bring international investors to the city. “What I see in San Francisco is a political pendulum.”

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Advocates of the city insist it still has many of the same attributes that made it an international centre of innovation and entrepreneurship. It retains a diverse talent pool, strong transport and shipping links, and a well-established infrastructure for supporting FDI projects with matters such as site selection, visa assistance and regulatory guidance.The inaugural FT-Nikkei ranking of US cities’ attractiveness to foreign investors ranks San Francisco third in the country for workforce and talent, thanks to its large population of working-age, college-educated residents, and nearby universities such as Stanford and Berkeley. The city has a large foreign-born population, giving it a high score as a place welcoming to overseas talent. But Bryant says those attributes have, in many cases, been overshadowed by policies implemented by San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors — its legislative body — which have been viewed as “very anti-business”.In the FT-Nikkei ranking, San Francisco is third-to-last for “business environment”, a category which takes into account factors such as tax rates, incentives and office costs. The city has one of the highest corporate income tax and sales tax rates in the US, and ranks highest for utility payments and office and industrial costs.Some California companies have sought and found more favourable terms elsewhere, such as Regroup, a communications software company. “Texas provides a fertile business environment to grow and be supported by a world-class, talented workforce,” said Chris Utah, the company’s chief operating officer, in a statement about the move.San Francisco, which has a well-publicised homelessness crisis, also ranks second-to-last in the FT-Nikkei survey for quality of life, ahead of neighbouring Oakland. This metric looks at safety, cost of living, commute and access to good schools. Of the 89 cities studied, San Francisco has the highest costs for healthcare and housing.

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Those difficulties have begun to influence investment decisions by overseas executives, the data show. In fact, San Francisco has become an outlier in the US, seeing a sustained FDI slump even as other big American cities have enjoyed a strong post-pandemic recovery. Although greenfield FDI plummeted in 2020 across the US, the country attracted an estimated $84bn in FDI last year, up from $62bn in 2020 and higher than its 2015-2019 average of $74bn.FDI in San Francisco, however, remains low. The $222mn in greenfield FDI in 2021 was down from $581mn in 2020, and represents roughly a fifth of its 2015-2019 yearly average of $1bn. As of July 2022, an estimated $194mn from 21 projects has come in from foreign investors.A spokesperson for London Breed, the city’s mayor, says she is “very focused” on improving the picture in San Francisco, with greater public safety a priority. Breed’s office has launched a study into the business environment, saying tax incentives and tax structures could be amended as a result. “Our hope is that there will be support from the legislative branch to make these changes,” the spokesperson says. “All of that work is happening now.”Experts note that the drop in investment is not entirely due to factors within the city’s control; tensions between the US and China have sharply reduced inflows from China, which had been a significant driver of growth during the past decade. But San Francisco’s struggles have opened the door to other parts of the US that are touting their credentials as tech hubs, like Denver.“What we’ve heard from many companies [is] they find it a super competitive environment,” says Stephanie Garnica, global business development director at Denver Economic Development & Opportunity. “It’s not easy to retain employees. The cost of living is very high, and they don’t get a lot of that kind of soft, warm support from government officials.” Denver, she adds, has benefited from San Francisco’s leavers. According to data from the US Census Bureau, San Francisco experienced a historic population decline — equivalent to the fall over the preceding decade — during the pandemic.While similar demographic shifts were evident in much of the country, particularly in the tech sector, where workers moved out of city centres for more remote-friendly jobs, the change has been particularly pronounced in San Francisco. Cities like Phoenix have sought to attract would-be homebuyers from Northern California. “Like the rest of the country, we’ve seen an increase in cost but we remain a very cost-effective place,” says Todd Sanders, chief executive of the Greater Phoenix Chamber, a business advocacy group. “When you see some of the numbers that we’re seeing out of places like San Francisco or Los Angeles, where it’s almost becoming an impossibility to own a home, Phoenix becomes a really important and attractive place for workers to explore and to hopefully relocate to.”San Francisco advocates hope that the trend will reverse as remote tech workers get tired of the isolation of working by themselves. But some one-time Bay Area diehards warn the trend may become permanent. “When I first moved to Silicon Valley, I used to think it was the centre of the universe for innovative start-ups,” says Han Shen, a founding partner at venture capital group iFly.vc. Shen moved the company from San Francisco to Austin, Texas, in late 2020. “As a venture capitalist, I have to care about the ongoing trend.” More

It was easily the biggest economic security crisis of the pandemic: the supply chain disruptions that plagued the industrialised world brought into sharp relief how reliant the global economy was on a handful of microchip manufacturers in East Asia. Surging demand as homebound workers upgraded their electronics and public transport-averse commuters ordered new cars led to shortages and bottlenecks — and triggered hand-wringing in the Pentagon and other national security agencies, whose high-tech weaponry needed chips made close to the shores of the west’s emerging geostrategic rival, China. No company was more central to those fears than Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which not only produces nearly 90 per cent of chips made using the most advanced technologies, but also has most of its production on a home island that has become the target of increasingly belligerent Chinese threats.With the White House and the US Congress putting domestic production of microchips at the centre of their economic policymaking, TSMC’s decision in May 2020 to build a new $12bn fabrication plant in Phoenix has emerged as possibly the most-watched foreign investment in the US in decades. State of the art: a worker at a plant owned by TSMC, which dominates manufacturing of the world’s most advanced microchips Phoenix’s ability to secure the fab, which broke ground in its burgeoning northern suburbs last year, was based, in part, on business-friendly taxes, a skilled workforce and existing support programmes for overseas companies — all qualities that helped put the Arizona capital in the top 20 of the FT-Nikkei Investing in America rankings.

But Phoenix also benefited from its history as a home to many of America’s domestic chipmakers, which have long been overtaken by Taiwanese and South Korean rivals. The city also leaned on decades-long ties to Taipei, which has been a “sister city” of Phoenix since 1979.“Phoenix has always had a very strong relationship with Taiwan,” says Christine Mackay, the city’s community and economic development director. Mackay and Kate Gallego, Phoenix’s Democratic mayor, met TSMC executives during a trip to Taiwan in early 2019 to celebrate the 40-year sister city relationship.“When we talk to companies like TSMC, they say they really felt that we appreciated what they were doing and knew that they would be a priority for us,” says Gallego.TSMC says it started evaluating US locations in earnest in 2019 after Mark Liu, the company’s chair, attended a Washington, DC, conference for foreign investors sponsored by SelectUSA, the US commerce department’s programme for attracting overseas capital. Rick Cassidy, chief executive of TSMC Arizona, says the company was looking for many of the same qualities that other investors, both foreign and domestic, are looking for: low costs, a talented workforce and a reliable supply chain.

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“In terms of cost economics, our consideration was the cost difference between the United States and Taiwan — how we could level the playing field between the potential investment site and the locations where we are already operating,” Cassidy says.But he adds that, because of the chip industry’s large and complex network of suppliers, TSMC leaned towards locations with a history in the semiconductor sector. Phoenix emerged as an obvious choice, with the city tracing its semiconductor heritage back to the first Motorola facility there in 1949. Thirty years later, Intel began operating in neighbouring Chandler, and Arizona State University continues to churn out semiconductor specialists even though the US offshored most of its production in the 1990s. “There’s been a lot of thorough conversations with TSMC: how do we network into your programmes? How do we raise awareness among your students?” says Kyle Squires, dean of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU. The schools began meeting TSMC in mid-2019 to discuss recruitment.

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Politics also played a role, according to Dick Thurston, a former senior vice-president and general counsel at TSMC, who worked with several government agencies eager to attract the chipmaker in the US.Thurston says aides to then-President Donald Trump were eager to steer foreign investment to so-called “swing” states, where polling showed the incumbent president was in a tough fight for re-election. In addition to the traditional northern battleground states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Arizona had become key to Trump’s campaign efforts. “When Mark Liu was visiting DC in 2019, the White House was suggesting Arizona,” Thurston says, adding that among those delivering the message was Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, and Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary.Although Texas was also one of Trump’s targets, two people familiar with the TSMC decision say it shied away from the state because rival Samsung had already invested there, and would go on to build its own advanced fab in the small town of Taylor. City and state leaders made wooing TSMC a priority. In addition to Gallego and Mackay, the November 2019 delegation to Taipei included leaders of universities like ASU, local utilities and Arizona-based engineers. The co-ordinated campaign drew notice in Taiwan. “There is a lot of investment in Texas coming from the semiconductor industry as well. [But] being such a big state, they have more of a decentralised way of going about it, attracting investment, and that actually causes a little bit of confusion,” says an official at the American Institute in Taiwan, the US government’s quasi-embassy in Taipei.“I’ll give a compliment to Arizona: the state-run [economic development agency] and the Phoenix one, which is quasi public-private, have a great working relationship,” the official adds. The state and city also vowed to continue to support the company once it broke ground in Phoenix, providing expat employees with Mandarin-language resources and connecting their families to local school districts, Mackay says.

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“From the start of our selection process, they were very supportive and enthusiastic about our planned growth,” Cassidy says. “They were always very proactive in answering our questions and giving us resources.” Mackay says at least 40 suppliers have come to the Phoenix area since TSMC’s announcement. In June, the Bank of Taiwan announced that it would open an office in the city to serve Taiwanese firms. “The story is just starting,” says Grace O’Sullivan, vice-president at ASU and TSMC’s point of contact at the university, adding that the real work will be building a long-lasting partnership with the company. More

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This is a power struggle. And right now, corporations control all the power. When enough stars align, when enough bad things happen all at once that the food system is at risk, we will know it, and the pain will be acute. I really couldn’t think of responsible and effective ways to mitigate those risks short of reinventing the food system. If there’s any upside to Covid, it’s that everyone in this country experienced the downside of the hyperglobalisation regime. The system that the monopolists had built was built to fail. It was built to break. You control your money, you control your destiny. The one thing that I would love to see is for government and policies to be shaped around people. Globalisation, as we’ve known it for the last 40 years, has failed. Hyper-efficient systems were designed to drive down the costs of goods and services, but Covid and the war in Ukraine showed the vulnerability of our supply chains. And now, real people and policymakers alike are rethinking what those should look like. In this film we’re going to look at globalisation and its impact on farming and food. Nothing is more crucial than agriculture, and yet crops like these have become commodities, with a handful of global companies controlling everything from meat processing to grain production. All around us you see cash crops like corn, for example, most of which is grown not to feed people, but to feed cattle that contribute to global emissions, obesity, and other systemic problems. I want to show you why cheap food, which is what the system is designed to produce, isn’t cheap when you count the cost to people, the planet, and our food security, and what some of the solutions might be in a deglobalising world. So I grew up in rural Indiana, and I feel really at home on the farm. But I do think that farming in America is changing. It’s at a pivot point. And so I wanted to take a road trip and really understand and meet the farmers, the people, the policymakers, the communities that are part of this change. We travel through Iowa, the biggest corn-producing state in the US. And for the most part this is how farming looks in the US – endless rows of corn and soy. But I was heading for the south to Missouri because I wanted to meet some farmers who were trying to do things differently. These farmers have a long history with the land, and they see the future in sustainable, community-focused farming. I’m Joe Maxwell. I’m the president and co-founder of Farm Action. The Maxwell family came in in covered waggons and settled a large part of this region. The farms have been in the family for over 100 years. My name is Chelsea Davis. I’m the owner of The Root Cellar, which is a local food hub located in Columbia, Missouri. Something that’s really important to me is making sure that family farmers have a voice. I was a cook in the military. And the one time everybody gets together it’s at the chow line. Nothing brings people together like good food. Wow! Here, sheep! There’s not a lot of diversified farms left across the countryside, but we raise corn, soybeans, wheat, some alfalfa, and then we have livestock. On this farm, we have sheep. You grew up in Indiana. Unlike on most US farms, Joe isn’t locked into a contract to sell his corn to a big grain corporation. He tells me that he uses manure from a neighbour’s cattle farm rather than just chemical fertilisers. That’s a resilient local supply chain right there. Now, all of us, unfortunately, are beginning to get more and more squeezed, and we’re really farming more and more for what the government subsidies are. Joe says deregulation means that the big corporations who buy the crops have all the power, and smaller-scale independent farming is increasingly difficult. The thing that we’re really focusing on is looking at food, and not just feed. Yeah. Now, I’m not suggesting that we should quit raising corn and soybeans. I’m not saying that at all. But it shouldn’t be all we’re doing. And raising it for a price that’s below production cost, and depending on taxpayers to hold us up, while we see Brazil’s JBS, or China’s Smithfield, or US Cargill, it’s corporate power around the world, has a lock on it. And they push farmers to raise corn and soybeans, corn and soybeans, corn and soybeans. The big agriculture companies argue that the huge scale of their operations helps to mitigate volatility in a complex and cyclical market. They point to how they’ve helped agriculture to become efficient. And US agriculture has become incredibly efficient. Just look at how output has almost tripled in the last 70 years while inputs have remained the same. So this kind of efficiency is really what globalisation is all about – the idea that companies can move jobs and goods all around the world, and that makes it ever cheaper for consumers to buy all types of products and services. In the past century global trade has not only grown, with exports around 40 times larger, it’s grown as a proportion of GDP. But if you look more closely, the growth has mostly benefited emerging market countries like China, where cheap capital has supported cheap labour, and it’s the top 1 per cent in rich countries like the US, who’ve captured 27 per cent of the growth. That 1 per cent is the asset-owning class in America, the people in the C-suites and on Wall Street who pushed for the outsourcing that lowers costs for companies and raises share prices. But that concentration of wealth and power has a tremendous effect on how and what we farm. It doesn’t matter how good of a businesswoman or man that you are on the farm, because you have no control over that market. Big meat and their feed meat complex buddies – the Cargills, ADMs, and Bunges, they control the grain trade in this country. I believe economic justice was what the fight was always about. I think the one thing that I would love to see is for government and policies to be shaped around people, not industrial ag that’s talking in their ear all the time. They have the money, and a lot of time that feeds what policies we create. You see it every day. And so we really need to be working with producers who produce what I would consider real food, not just commodities. Control your money, you control your destiny. The way these large corporations, they control what you plant, and when you plant, and what you get paid. Basically, that puts them in charge of everything. So what does that concentration of power and that ‘efficiency’ mean in practise? Well, big companies want cheap corn. So they lobby the government, which provides subsidies to farmers, in part via preferential crop insurance. But the corn is not really destined for your dinner table. Instead, it mostly goes into cattle feed, biofuel like ethanol, and other exports, and the sorts of filler calories that go into fast and frozen foods. It also means farmers aren’t growing crops that might be more useful to society like, say, fruits and vegetables. Instead, much of it is imported, picked pre-ripe, with fewer nutrients to withstand the shipping. And by the way, US consumption of all vegetables, dairy, and fruit is below the recommended guidelines. Also, agriculture is already a big contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, with the concentration on cattle only worsening the situation. Oh, and monocultures? They’re bad for the soil. So this whole system makes big profits for big agricultural companies, which then plough some of that money back into more corporate lobbying, which just fuels the entire dysfunctional cycle. And so you’ve got the system where these globalised, very fragile, highly ‘efficient’ supply chains are enriching Wall Street but starving Main Street and driving small farmers out of business. Just because we can do something as a human doesn’t mean we should. Government owes the people, in my opinion. We build the economy of a country, we people. There’s a lot of things happening behind the scenes that they don’t want you to see. So they can bring beef in from Argentina. They can cut it up, repackage it, now it’s product of the USA. That’s incredibly deceiving to a consumer. Corporation, as a good friend of mine says, it’s not a living thing. Right. It doesn’t have a soul to save or an ass to kick. Their whole purpose in life is to make all they can for a shareholder, for the investor. That’s why we have to have government. We need safeguards. We need safeguards in place that allow the market to work so that opportunity exists for people. Thank you. So President Joe Biden has been making a lot of the right noises. And in July of 2021 he actually signed a very important Executive Order that marked a really profound economic shift away from consumers and rising asset prices and more towards income-led growth and workers. Thank, everyone. Earlier this year he talked specifically about competition and farming, noting that four big corporations control more than half of the markets in beef, pork, and poultry. Over the years their grip on the market has only tightened. And while their profits and prices go up, farmers are getting less. Capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism, it’s exploitation. That’s what we’re seeing in meat and poultry, in those industries now. Small, independent farmers and ranchers are being driven out of business, sometimes businesses that have been around for generations. Mr MacLennan. Big Ag denies abusing its position. Cargill’s meat operation employs 28,000 people in 19 states. We are providing a consistent food supply and strengthening the resilience of the food system to mitigate disruptions. We welcome competition to the industry and support the dynamics of a free market. Farming has long been an icon of American politics, and when I grew up we all saw Dorothea Lange’s photos of Dust Bowl migrants. And in the 1980s, the Farm Aid concerts raising money for family farmers were really big news. Rain on the scarecrow, blood on the plough. But here are some the bare facts about farming today. In 2020, US farm output was $134.7bn, accounting for 2.6mn jobs, or 1.4 per cent of US employment. But if you count agriculture, food, and related industries, it has a much bigger impact: $1.055tn, and 19.7mn full and part-time jobs. Americans spend almost 12 per cent of their household budget on food. That number is biggest for those at the bottom, who are suffering most from food inflation right now. On the next step of my journey, I wanted to talk to experts on globalisation, trade, and agriculture and see how the challenges to the status quo are playing out at the highest level. What we did for 200 years is we said any concentration of power, any concentration of control, and any concentration of capacity is dangerous. It’s dangerous politically, dangerous to our personal liberty. So we used competition policy, anti-monopoly, to break things up. But as the 20th century went on, we saw play out in agriculture the same thing that played out in other parts of the market, which is faith that markets will solve it all, faith that we can let the big get bigger. The neoliberals came along and they said there’s waste in competition, and what we need to do is we need to concentrate all of this production, all of this control in the hands of a few people, because that will allow us to drive down the price. And so you saw over time gradual deregulation, weakening of antitrust, pullback of the investments that USDA used to provide to support farmers and ranchers. They revolutionised the entire structure of just about every sector of business on which we depend. So who are ‘they,’ and how did ‘they’ do this, exactly? Lori Wallach blames the creation of the WTO on the thinking of the Reagan/Thatcher era. So on the surface it was all about free trade, but underneath that it was about the deregulation of markets. So this entire thing is like some Trojan horse, where everyone’s like, trade agreements. Smart people are for free trade. But what was under the hood was an entirely different agenda. They were basically being handcuffed with these one-size-fits-all rules. So for the first time ever there would be trade sanctions if you didn’t deregulate services, or broke up a monopoly, or set a floor of decency of labour standards or environmental standards, or you wanted to have domestic or local business procurement preferences. This is now a ‘trade barrier.’ Ronald Reagan comes in and you couldn’t do enough for business. America would be lifted up. You know, trickle down. Give to big, big is what we need. Don’t need regulations; we need to free these companies. The WTO started up in 1995, but it was a Democrat, Bill Clinton, that actually lobbied for China’s entry into the WTO, which happened in 2001. And the way he sells it is he says, listen, the future is about the service sector. The future is about having global rules that actually bring countries like China into our system. So economically, the case is clear and compelling. But I would also like to emphasise here the national security aspects of this, and the human and political rights aspects. Kind of the final nail in the coffin for rural America and many working families. But to them it was kind of like the shining moment of globalisation, right? So we focused on trade. The WTO, World Trade Organization, Nafta – doing these big deals, which ultimately only advanced Big Ag. What would be the reason we would like not be allowed to ban DDT and other pesticides coming into our country against our laws? What, exactly, would be the reason to rollback Buy American? What does that have to do with trade? I’m for trade. Lori wasn’t the only one raising a red flag. Remember all those anti-globalisation, anti-WTO protests like this one from Seattle in 1999? What we had was really the perfect storm for the destruction of rural America, this new advancement within the Democrat party of the neoliberal. It was this political argument of, are you backwards? Are you a protectionist? Are you someone stuck in the past? The abandonment of democracy as it existed through economic prosperity and hope of opportunity that caused this country to thrive, both parties abandoned that and went for globalisation, and big. People are furious at Big Pharma. They’re furious at Big Tech. They think their food system has gone to hell, and they are really mad about feeling disempowered on a trans-partisan basis. I have done… Your husband signed Nafta, which was one of the worst things that ever happened to the manufacturing industry. Well, that is your opinion. You go to New England, you go to Ohio, Pennsylvania, you go anywhere you want, Secretary Clinton, and you will see devastation. So now, the public is struggling to find who represents us out here in rural America. And Trump was doing his best to make a broad divide between those elitists, sell you out, working class people, Democrats, versus me. The whole thing was farcical. The guy’s a walking, talking multinational corporation. But he pulled it off. And really threw states like Missouri from purple to just deep red. So you can draw a direct line between globalisation and the election of Donald Trump. But let’s get back to food security and the debate about efficiency versus resiliency. The development of these markets have faith that, well, extreme efficiency will solve all the problems. Well, efficiency that’s a short-term efficiency doesn’t respond well to shocks, and surprises, and unexpected pivots. If there’s any upside to Covid, it’s that everyone in this country actually saw, personally lived, experienced the downside of the hyperglobalisation regime. The pandemic brought it home. This is why we have to make things. This obsession with single-sourcing, hyper-globalised efficiency, just in time, super corporations, is simply not reliable for supply chains. We need more diversified production. And we see concentration at every level of the food system – at processing, at retail, at the level of fertiliser, and energy, and people just ripping off the farmer and ripping off the eater. Everywhere you look in America, you see a monopolist who has got us by the neck. So the global financial crisis, global warming, Covid, conflict, cyber attacks, all of these things all happening at once, all of them are threats to our food security. Food systems today have been optimised for efficiency and low cost, relatively stable environmental conditions – which we enjoyed for several decades before climate change really began to take hold within the last decade or two – and they were optimised for peacetime and globalised trade regimes. For a while it seemed like they had opened a door into this amazing new world. And we could all make a massive amount of money, and we could all have cheap stuff. And then one day we woke up and we realised the system that the monopolist had built was built to fail. It was built to break. About 2015, we saw a really consequential shift from relatively steady gains in food security to an inflexion. And from 2015 till now, we have seen, in fact, in general a trend towards degradation of food security, globally speaking. So that’s Molly Jahn, a world-leading expert on food security. We’ll come back to her and all the amazing things she’s doing later. But right now. I want to head back to Missouri, where all this big thinking meets the reality on the ground, and where past, present, and future are sharing the same porch. This is the Shoemyer farm, where family farming goes back for generations. If you’re going to be anything aside from a big multinational company trying to do this, you have to have family, or you have to have a community. Is that fair? I would say so. Started in some tough times, and just been a lot of hard work to get to where we’re at today. And you’ve been farming for? 75 years. I started when I was in high school. Had a crop of wheat, and had 15 acres. I don’t really think I ever thought about doing anything different. But I had to grow into it, I guess. And there’s no better place to raise a family or live a life than out here in God’s country. It’s clear to me that farming, like life, is about more than economics and economic theory. Place matters to people, and these things are not accounted for in our existing economic models. But I’m interested to know how a recent commodity boom has helped these farmers, and whether it will keep them locked into the old way of doing things or help them transition to something new. I hop on board Wes’s tractor as he plants some beans. They’re destined for ADM, one of the big grain corporations. Wes says at least they can provide a stable market. Well, obviously, we’re ecstatic about the high commodity prices because that’s how we make our living. We don’t seem to usually get to enjoy that for very long. So you try to get ahead of it. And I mean, buy early, make a move that you probably wouldn’t have made this year, an investment that… don’t put it off. So they know you’ve got a little jingle in your pocket. And when the commodity prices are really good, the guys that sell you the inputs or sell you the equipment, they want to get their share of it. The other people that saw the farmers were going to have more money was fertiliser companies. They just jacked up the prices. We saw fertiliser almost triple in price. The farmer’s not getting that extra money. Yes, Putin invaded Ukraine and only exasperated this problem. It only made it worse. But this was going on three or four months pre-invasion. Food inflation only adds to all the existing problems already in our agricultural system. So you wouldn’t expect to find food deserts, for example, in the middle of farm country, but I was really struck by how little of what’s produced on farms in Missouri actually ends up on local plates. In some cases, farmers can’t even sell to local schools or hospitals without going through big financial middlemen hundreds or even thousands of miles away, which seems incredibly illogical. Covid showed us how important local supply chains are for food security, environmental resilience and even nutrition. Chelsea’s food hub, The Root Cellar, doubled its subscriptions at the start of the pandemic. When we have a crisis it wasn’t the big corporations who fed its communities, right? It was a local food system. For example, my shelves never went bare at The Root Cellar. I didn’t run out of meat. I didn’t run out of produce. I was able to supply all of the people who are shopping with me currently, and I was able to exceed that. It made an impact on some people. It made them remember that I should be supporting the local folks here producing the food that I should be consuming, right? RANA FOROOHAR: Farm-to-table. It’s a movement that was pioneered on the West Coast, and our next stop is San Francisco. I’ve got to check out apricots. These are my favourite. At the Ferry Plaza Farmer’s Market, farmers have been selling direct to consumers for 30 years. They figured out how to make it scalable and affordable. Oh, I have to eat another one. They’re so juicy. We have a whole group of urbanites, urban dwellers, who don’t understand where their food is coming from, how it’s grown, how much work and effort goes into it. And yet the care that those farmers spend on their soil affects water quality, air quality, even the resilience of our food system in the time of the pandemic, where we had large-scale infrastructure breaking down, supply chain issues. And what we really need to see is a regional, local food economy that can be far more adaptive to the needs of their communities. So when it’s localised and smaller it is more responsive and it is more nimble. And farmer’s markets play a key role in that local food system. Adaptive local markets, that’s what I want to find out about because farmer’s markets are one thing, but we’re in San Francisco, the home of high-tech. So we’re going to meet someone with a more radical vision. He thinks his company can be the ultimate in local because instead of exporting food, he is exporting the environment in which we grow the food. All right, let’s do this. So this is the farm. OK. This is our seeding area. So we bring in raw materials, coconut core. We crush the bricks down into particle sizes we can use. We fill trays here. I wanted to be involved in ag, but the price of land was outrageous, and I realised there’s no chance that I could ever farm traditionally, simply because I couldn’t afford to buy the land or lease the land. As we have fewer younger people engaging in agriculture, not to be ageist, but we have less innovation. We have less people applying their brains to the problems that we’re trying to solve. And we have an industry that becomes stagnant, that holds still, that doesn’t grow. We have this three-dimensional space. Imagine a cube, a box, and we’re doing agriculture inside of this box in a greenhouse. But all of our output is on a square-foot basis. I thought, that’s weird. That’s odd. Why aren’t we doing three-dimensional production in three-dimensional space? Fresh is the thing that matters to consumers. So you look at all these folks, and they’re all very motivated to have a stable supply. They’re all very motivated to have stable price. They’re all very motivated to have a predictable system. And it’s just this continuous evolution up the spectrum of control to something that’s more predictable, less risky. So the trays will come out of germ, and they’ll get loaded into our seedling system over here. So we’ll go stick our heads in there. This is kind of cool, the lights there. It looks like an art gallery. Oh, wow, amazing. So what are you growing right here? This is lettuce. And you had to invent some of the lights, and the plastics, and things like that, right? No one built lights that did what we needed them to do for the price that we needed them to do it. Yeah. So we had to design a lot of our own lighting. The sensors, we had to design sensors because no one really built sensors that did what we needed sensors to do. Yeah, there are people that say, oh, this is really unnatural. And you’re like, do you know how your food is grown now? Right? You go to this go to the Central Valley, and they’re flat, sandy fields. It’s been laser-levelled with heavy equipment. The reality is we live in an unnatural world. And it’s our job to exist with as light an impact as possible on that natural world and to influence the evolution of our planet as minimally as possible. And so that’s the thing that we solve for, right? All of that land used to be full of native species, and butterflies, and deer, and wonderful things that lived a natural life, and it’s not that way anymore. It is completely tamed. We tilled it over. We dumped the carbon in the atmosphere. And now we use that land to serve the cities, to serve the people that consume the food. Once this tower is transplanted, it will roll out. So you’re going to see it zip out here. And our pick-up robot will swing over. See that big boom arm comes down? Yeah. It grabs the tower and then hangs the whole thing up. OK. We have globalism, which has caused people all over the world to want the same things. The question is, how do you grow a strawberry in Saudi Arabia, or Singapore, or these… like places completely unsuited to this very finicky fruit? The answer is, well, you can’t. You can’t do it outside. In order to give people the best possible quality and the best possible price anywhere in the world, in any environment that isn’t suitable for the production of these products, you build an indoor farm, and you import the environment. So maybe one way to think about it is you’re manufacturing ideal growing land. That is a step towards decentralisation. We’re free to go anywhere. We’re free to grow anywhere. When you think about land, it should be priced at what it can produce, not what some Wall Street investor thinks it will produce 50 years from now that’s completely divorced from the productive value of the land. And really, what we’re doing is the purest form of land manufacturing, where we say, you price the asset at what it can produce, at its value to people – real value. It just rolls right through and just gets cut, just like that. So you see those spinning blades? They just cut the product right off. Hey, awesome. All right, so we’re going to do a taste test of your various varieties of lettuce. So tell us what we’ve got here. Yeah, so we’ve got kale, arugula, our crispy lettuce, and then our mizuna mix down here. The bok choy has kind of this nutty, umami kind of flavour, and then the mizuna comes with a little heat. It’s a really nice combo. All right, let’s do it. Wow. That literally tastes like you just picked it out of somebody’s garden. Mm-hmm. Which, I guess you did. Yeah. Off your wall. Came right off, probably this morning. OK, so the kale is something that we’ve worked on for a while, and it’s a really nice, mild, grassy kale. Some of it has a very sweet kind of flavour to it. Interesting. It’s actually milder than a lot of the kale that I would buy in my local grocery store. So if we have crops today that don’t taste great, they’re probably a shadow. They’re a version of something that was much better in the past. Yeah. And so the question is, how do we get back to that past? How do we get back to that first experience with whatever kale was 100 years ago? It’s so interesting, the idea that you go high-tech, you go extremely futuristic to get back to the past. That’s right. In terms of taste. Very cool. I’m definitely… my kids would for sure eat this. There are some of these risks that you have in the business. And you say, well, why do I need a back-up generator for a farm, right? It’s a lot of cost to just run this thing once a year. But the catastrophic risk is high enough that you make the investment. When enough stars align, when enough bad things happen all at once that the food system is at risk, we will know it, and the pain will be acute. I was fascinated by what Nate had to say, but vertical farms are still a blip when it comes to agricultural production, and some people say that their own energy needs are actually problematic from an emissions standpoint. Emissions and costs are eventually going to come down, but the bottom line is that these farms aren’t yet a silver bullet. We need something more transformative. And in Wisconsin I found the seeds of it. Molly Jahn made her name as a plant breeder growing new disease-resistant varieties of fruits and vegetables. But ultimately, she wants to make food from air. …species that grow here anyway. This is melons. This is Hannah’s Choice, named after my daughter Hannah. Oh, my gosh! Who is now grown up, but when she was little she could put away a cantaloupe all by herself. The way in which you’re growing here, how would it differ from, say, traditional farming of vegetables? Large-scale fields, for example, in the major production areas like Central Valley in California, Florida, you would see much more intensive use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Ah. And one of the things that I emphasised throughout all my breeding programmes was disease resistance. By genetically manipulating, you can make it possible to use less of the chemicals. Or none. Really? Or none. We find those plants that are still standing in the face of that disease and then move the gene that controls that disease into a cultivated type… usually with bigger fruit and tastier fruit. And then, pesticides are not necessary. Agriculture is the dominant way human beings interact with the terrestrial landmass, and it does tremendous damage to resources we all depend on – climate, water, air, and health. So it’s clear that, if we allow ourselves the concept of a food system, that the food system we have today is failing those who depend on it, and it is at the heart of this binge on energy that links to climate change, links to water pollution, air pollution, soil degradation. Molly and her colleagues want to go much further and use microbes to change the entire nature of food production and farming. I did this big 180 in my work, from being a natural scientist to really trying to articulate and frame out the classes of risk in food systems. One of the tricks I learned from the financial community is the use of scenarios. You create an extreme, plausible scenario. Nobody had ever tried to put scenarios together about risk in a food system, so I tried. It isn’t just conflict. It isn’t just weather. It isn’t just supply chain issues. It’s all of the above. There were some risks that were so large I really couldn’t think of responsible and effective ways to mitigate those risks short of reinventing the food system. Jean-Michel is looking at how to help plants fertilise themselves without chemicals. So what are we looking at right here? So what you can see here are all these dots. These are plant cells. And inside of the plant cells they are filled with bacteria. And these bacteria are these nitrogen-fixing bacteria that give nitrogen to the legume. And so that’s the system that works in legumes that we would like to recapitulate in non-legumes – either cereals, but also biologic crops like poplar. Let me just make sure. These guys here are bacteria that within this legume, within this plant, can actually produce their own fertiliser? Absolutely. So they help the plant to grow. A true and very famous symbiosis. We spoke to some farmers, American farmers, that were saying they’re under pressure to try and increase their crop yields because of what’s happened in Ukraine. But at the same time fertiliser prices are going up, so they’re having to decrease what they’re using for fertiliser. Otherwise, they’ll cut into their own profit margins. So could this work circumvent some of that problem? Absolutely. That’s the goal, is to be able to grow crops with fewer chemical inputs. And so here the idea is to use microbes to replace chemicals. Is this a way, ultimately, to just change the entire calculus of food, water, energy, and how things get grown, and what it takes to do that? Our agricultural systems developed in a frame where energy was considered essentially unlimited and very cheap. So we have substituted fossil energy for human labour, animal labour. The important thing to realise about this work is it really reshapes the energy budget of agriculture. When you think of the Tree of Life, most people think of the things we can see, because we’re visual creatures. But the vast majority of the world’s biology is invisible. It’s too small to be seen. And those are microbes. And we eat lots of microbes every day, and we are lots of microbes. Our bodies are filled with microbial cells. When we domesticated plants and animals, we pulled along lots of microbes that came with them, but we couldn’t see microbes, so we didn’t domesticate microbes for direct consumption. So Molly is also contracted by DARPA, the government’s Defence Advanced Research Project Agency, to do just that in the hope that one day, we may have gizmos that you and I can roll into the sun when the power goes off, or you’ve no money in your account, and they could produce a microbe milkshake, or a bar, or a pudding on the spot, from almost nothing. Essentially, we’re revisiting what humans did 10,000 years ago, but this time we have microscopes. So we can look at organisms that have tremendously versatile metabolisms. They can grow off air, water, and electricity. They create protein, fats, starches, and fibre, which is what humans need to eat. It’s not a big step to imagine that we would simply grow the microbes directly for consumption. And our dream at DARPA is that no human being would be greater than a 30-minute walk from a source of food. And so in some ways this is the ultimate in deglobalisation. Instead of one country and a handful of companies making most of the world’s cash crops in these highly efficient but very fragile supply chains, you might have a paradigm in which everyone everywhere can make food on site, locally, from almost nothing. This is a long way from where we are now, but economic pendulums tend to swing. And right now, the pendulum is swinging away from globalisation and neoliberal economic models. I’m Webster Davis, and I wrote a little poem about the hollowing-out of my hometown. My little poem goes like this. My hometown of Wallace, Missouri, went from being able to support four family-owned grocery stores to not being able to support one. Where, oh where, has prosperity gone? We had a drugstore. Now, we have to go to Walmart to get mum’s medicine. We had two Black churches. Now, we travel to pray. We had two feed stores. Now, we travel to buy hay. Where, oh where has prosperity gone? One of the most fascinating things that the neoliberals pulled on us, they basically said, competition leads to higher prices. And the way to achieve lower prices is through monopolisation. I mean, this is a fantastic lie, a breathtaking lie. So we’re in an epic fight. We’re in an epic fight between monopoly and a lot more rich diversity of smaller and competing businesses. We’re in an epic fight between shareholders who own stock and are looking for every quarter to maximise the profit and stakeholders. We’re very fortunate in America that we have the leading agricultural market in the world. We want to make sure that our farmers and ranchers can compete in a global market, but we also recognise the importance of resiliency here at home. I think we don’t usually give ourselves much credit as a species. We tend to think that we’re a foolish species. We’re generally pretty wise, right? And so our job now is to make sure that we impact this planet as little as possible as we grow and develop as a species, as we expand human consciousness, we’re not shrinking the natural world. We’re not destroying the planet that we live on. America and its ideals that it was founded on is the greatest country. It’s struggling. It’s struggling to remember its foundation, its foundational values, that everyone in the United States has an opportunity and a hope for prosperity. We’re struggling because for 40 years we’ve slowly given over to the world’s largest corporations all the power. And now, government has to wrestle that back – has to wrestle that back in the name of opportunity, and hope, and democracy. If we don’t, we will lose this country. Our democracy is on the chopping block. There was a Tea Party. I am not talking about the political one. I’m talking about when a bunch of business folks got together and threw the tea in the water. Why? Because England – their country at the time – had granted a monopoly to the East India Company and shut out all those little business teahouses. That’s how we started. We’ve got to wrestle that away. We may need to throw some tea in the water. But we’re on the cusp, and our very democracy is at stake, because you can’t grant that much power – economic power – to just a handful of companies. And that’s what our government’s done. So we’ve come to the end of our tour through America’s food system. What have we learned? Well, I think that we’ve learned that we’re at a pivot point. For 40 years, we’ve have a system, an economic system in this country that prioritised efficiency over resilience, lower prices above higher wages, and global above local. We’re rebalancing now, and we see that from antitrust and monopoly cases being brought in Washington, to scientists that are experimenting with more sustainable food production systems and agricultural methods, to high-tech solutions to really bring local farming that’s being done in places like California to the masses in vertical farms. All of it is about local that can be made global. It’s about decentralisation versus centralisation. And it’s about a new sort of economic system that may bring us to a better balance between consumption and production. I’m hopeful about what this means for America, and I’m hopeful about what it means, ultimately, for the world. This is the first of a three-part series of films on globalisation. So look out for the next two, and please like, comment and share. More