Great financial map

ARTICLE: "World's Assets Hit Record Value Of $140 Trillion," by Joanna Slater, Wall Street Journal, 10 January 2006, p. C8.

McKinsey report generates map of financial assets flows and holdings among world's great regions.

One missrepresentation, IMHO, is showing Singapore and Hong Kong like some isolated offshoot of Euro/UK (colonial habit, one imagines), when all that money flowing into both also overwhelmingly flies right out again to developing Asia and especially China (something the map seems to ignore, but I know happens in bulk because FDI flows outward as a percentage of GDP in these two financial hubs is virtually as high as the inward flow percentages).

Other than that weird bit, a cool map very much like ones I drew for the FDI "economic security exercise" with Cantor Fitzgerald atop the World Trade Center back in 2000 (see here for details).

Factoid of note: America attracts 85 percentage of all money put on the table by asset-exporting regions.

The future? Asset flows are expected to grow 50 percent faster than goods and services in coming years.

Total financial flows in 2005 were $6T, twice the flow in 2002 and significantly higher than in 1999, the height of the bubble.

Yes, yes, globalization is "in retreat" and soon to "end." Light up your doobie on that one, because as you know (he pauses while holding his lungs for effect), "those damn terrorists are running everything maaaaaaaaaan!"

There are those who understand the force and those who only see the friction.

There are those who see only war and those who get the "everything else.

Want to be a grand strategist?

Or do you want to live out your lives in fear, letting others define your nightmares while you give up on your dreams?

Morning glory indeed. Globalization's greatest push is just beginning...

Comments

[Paracelsus]

No, I do not want to be a grand strategist. It would be nice to smoke a doobie, but I would hate to risk 10 years in prison for it. Do I have to agree with you to post here?

[Anonymous]

P: you don't have to agree to post here, but you do have to aide by the comment policy. in short: be brief, be civil, don't only disagree. welcome.

[Mike]

Is there a link to this FDI map?

[Thomas Pamelia]

"There are those who understand the force and those who only see the friction"

I need permission to use this phrase. I just had coffee spray all over my keyboard.

It's priceless - but it also says a lot. No, those damn terrorists don't control everything - but things certainly work to their advantage regarding our dependence on foreign oil.I can agree that we can and should use Iran as an example in diplomacy to continue GW's big bang to the fullest effect.

I can't say that I want to be a grand strategist - but working towards understanding war in the context of everything else sure does help to make sense of what we read in the news everyday.

[TM Lutas]

Thomas Pamelia - Terrorists extract a form of indirect monopoly rent on the natural monopoly that is our oil driven industrial and transport infrastructure. But natural monopolies have a limit, the price the next best indirect competitor can charge to substitute the monopoly provider's goods/services. Lower that price and you've limited the terrorist income and influence.

The price can be lowered in two ways, directly by pouring money into making alternative energy more practical without government subsidy and by reducing the transition cost and enabling a multi-fuel infrastructure that can move in and out of oil on a whim so that a huge player like the KSA can't drive its indirect competitors out of business by dropping oil prices far below what the alternative energy boys could possibly handle.

All of these things are happening, without much commentary, in today's administration policies and it's been going on for several years. The next decade should see the end of the age of oil and the beginning of the multifuel age.