By No Bullshit Bitcoin in Research — Aug 28, 2022

Zoltan Pozsar: Credit Suisse Economics: War and Industrial Policy

Wars cannot be fought with supply chains that crisscross a globalized world, where production happens on faraway, little islands in the South China Sea, from where chips can be transported only if airspaces and straits remain open...
Global supply chains work only in peacetime, but not when the world is at war, be it a hot war or an economic war. The low inflation world had three pillars: cheap immigrant labor keeping nominal wage growth “stagnant” in the U.S., cheap Chinese goods raising real wages amid stagnant nominal wages, and cheap Russian natural gas fueling German industry and Europe more broadly. Implicit in this “trinity” were two giant geo-strategic and geo-economic blocks: Niall Ferguson called the first one “Chimerica”. I will call the other one “Eurussia”.
Wars, like the currently unfolding economic war, are about control. The control of technologies (chips), commodities (gas), production (zero-Covid), and straits – chokepoints like the Taiwan Strait, the Strait of Hormuz, or the Bosporus Strait.