Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

ARTICLE; "G-8 Warns Loans By Rising Nations May Swamp Poor," by Michael M. Phillips, Wall Street Journal, 12 June 2006, p. A3.

What goes around comes around. For decades, the Old Core kept Gap states impoverished by offering developing states there loans they could never hope to repay.

Now the Old Core (and largely reformed) pot calls the New Core kettle black:

At a meeting here over the weekend, finance ministers from the Group of Eight leading nations warned China, India, Brazil and South Korea against promoting exports to poor countries with trade credits the borrowers can ill-afford.

Lower your G-damn ag subsidies Old Core and then get back to me on the aggressive market-making strategies of the New Core.

Still, the article reaffirms a pet projection of mine: the Old Core will make most of its money off the New Core in coming years (selling them all that high-tech stuff and services that we're already saturated with) while the New Core will make most of its money selling to the Gap (the bottom of the pyramid that we typically eschew as markets of meaning.

Still, a good thing to worry about and only right for the Old Core to propose new rule sets to modulate the Gap's exposure--truly, a bit of Phase 0 thinking in the financial realm.

Less Clausewitz, more Sun Tzu.
Less Snow, more Rubin.