John Mauldin's Outside the Box : George Friedman, Geopolitics, Financial Crisis

The State of the World: A Framework

John Mauldin — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 18:11:00 GMT

Companies issue state of the enterprise addresses, and presidents issue state of the union addresses ... but you've got to be pretty confident to address the state of the world. Luckily for us, Stratfor founder and CEO George Friedman is just that confident – and it's well-deserved.

George is the expert in geopolitics, and his company is the best source out there for geopolitical analysis. Thus, his recent article, "The State of the World: A Framework," is well worth a thorough read. It identifies three distinct phenomena the world is facing: the European financial crisis, the Chinese export crisis, and Iran's rise to power in the Middle East.

One of his most interesting points, and one that I'm inclined to agree with, is that the most powerful country in the world– the United States – is currently unprepared to deal with this new reality. Something to keep in mind as we enter election season ...

Some of you may know that Stratfor was hacked several weeks ago. While they rebuild some infrastructure, they've got an open-house website – you can access the content that's usually only available to subscribers. You may want to take advantage of this opportunity by visiting www.stratfor.com before they lock up the house again. I particularly recommend their 2012 Annual Forecast.

Your wondering whether I'll have Greek, Chinese, or Iranian food tonight analyst,

John Mauldin, Editor
Outside the Box

The State of the World: A Framework

February 21, 2012

Editor's Note:This is the first installment of a new series on the national strategies of today's global power and other regional powers. This installment establishes a framework for understanding the current state of the world.

By George Friedman

The evolution of geopolitics is cyclical. Powers rise, fall and shift. Changes occur in every generation in an unending ballet. However, the period between 1989 and 1991 was unique in that a long cycle of human history spanning hundreds of years ended, and with it a shorter cycle also came to a close. The world is still reverberating from the events of that period.

On Dec. 25, 1991, an epoch ended. On that day the Soviet Union collapsed, and for the first time in almost 500 years no European power was a global power, meaning no European state integrated economic, military and political power on a global scale. What began in 1492 with Europe smashing its way into the world and creating a global imperial system had ended. For five centuries, one European power or another had dominated the world, whether Portugal, Spain, France, England or the Soviet Union. Even the lesser European powers at the time had some degree of global influence.

After 1991 the only global power left was the United States, which produced about 25 percent of the world's gross domestic product (GDP) each year and dominated the oceans. Never before had the United States been the dominant global power. Prior to World War II, American power had been growing from its place at the margins of the international system, but it was emerging on a multipolar stage. After World War II, it found itself in a bipolar world, facing off with the Soviet Union in a struggle in which American victory was hardly a foregone conclusion.

The United States has been the unchallenged global power for 20 years, but its ascendancy has left it off-balance for most of this time, and imbalance has been the fundamental characteristic of the global system in the past generation. Unprepared institutionally or psychologically for its position, the United States has swung from an excessive optimism in the 1990s that held that significant conflict was at an end to the wars against militant Islam after 9/11, wars that the United States could not avoid but also could not integrate into a multilayered global strategy. When the only global power becomes obsessed with a single region, the entire world is unbalanced. Imbalance remains the defining characteristic of the global system today.

While the collapse of the Soviet Union ended the European epoch, it also was the end of the era that began in 1945, and it was accompanied by a cluster of events that tend to accompany generational shifts. The 1989-1991 period marked the end of the Japanese economic miracle, the first time the world had marveled at an Asian power's sustained growth rate as the same power's financial system crumbled. The end of the Japanese miracle and the economic problem of integrating East and West Germany both changed the way the global economy worked. The 1991 Maastricht Treaty set the stage for Europe's attempt at integration and was the framework for Europe in the post-Cold War world. Tiananmen Square set the course for China in the next 20 years and was the Chinese answer to a collapsing Soviet empire. It created a structure that allowed for economic development but assured the dominance of the Communist Party. Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait was designed to change the balance of power in the Persian Gulf after the Iraq-Iran war and tested the United States' willingness to go to war after the Cold War.

In 1989-1991 the world changed the way it worked, whether measured in centuries or generations. It was an extraordinary period whose significance is only now emerging. It locked into place a long-term changing of the guard, where North America replaced Europe as the center of the international system. But generations come and go, and we are now in the middle of the first generational shift since the collapse of the European powers, a shift that began in 2008 but is only now working itself out in detail.

What happened in 2008 was one of the financial panics that the global capitalist system periodically suffers. As is frequently the case, these panics first generate political crises within nations, followed by changes in the relations among nations. Of these changes, three in particular are of importance, two of which are directly linked to the 2008 crisis. The first is the European financial crisis and its transformation into a political crisis. The second is the Chinese export crisis and its consequences. The third, indirectly linked to 2008, is the shift in the balance of power in the Middle East in favor of Iran.

The European Crisis

The European crisis represents the single most significant event that followed from the financial collapse of 2008. The vision of the European Union was that an institution that would bind France and Germany together would make the wars that had raged in Europe since 1871 impossible. The vision also assumed that economic integration would both join France and Germany together and create the foundations of a prosperous Europe. Within the context of Maastricht as it evolved, the European vision assumed that the European Union would become a way to democratize and integrate the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe into a single framework.

However, embedded in the idea of the European Union was the idea that Europe could at some point transcend nationalism and emerge as a United States of Europe, a single political federation with a constitution and a unified foreign and domestic policy. It would move from a free trade zone to a unified economic system to a single currency and then to further political integration built around the European Parliament, allowing Europe to emerge as a single country.

Long before this happened, of course, people began to speak of Europe as if it were a single entity. Regardless of the modesty of formal proposals, there was a powerful vision of an integrated European polity. There were two foundations for it. One was the apparent economic and social benefits of a united Europe. The other was that this was the only way that Europe could make its influence felt in the international system. Individually, the European states were not global players, but collectively they had the ability to become just that. In the post-Cold War world, where the United States was the sole and unfettered global power, this was an attractive opportunity.

The European vision was smashed in the aftermath of 2008, when the fundamental instability of the European experiment revealed itself. That vision was built around Germany, the world's second-largest exporter, but Europe's periphery remained too weak to weather the crisis. It was not so much this particular crisis; Europe was not built to withstand any financial crisis. Sooner or later one would come and the unity of Europe would be severely strained as each nation, driven by different economic and social realities, maneuvered in its own interest rather than in the interest of Europe.

There is no question that the Europe of 2012 operates in a very different way than it did in 2007. There is an expectation in some parts that Europe will, in due course, return to its old post-Cold War state, but that is unlikely. The underlying contradictions of the European enterprise are now revealed, and while some European entity will likely survive, it probably will not resemble the Europe envisioned by Maastricht, let alone the grander visions of a United States of Europe. Thus, the only potential counterweight to the United States will not emerge in this generation.

China and the Asian Model

China was similarly struck by the 2008 crisis. Apart from the inevitably cyclical nature of all economies, the Asian model, as seen in Japan and then in 1997 in East and Southeast Asia, provides for prolonged growth followed by profound financial dislocation. Indeed, growth rates do not indicate economic health. Just as it was for Europe, the 2008 financial crisis was the trigger for China.

China's core problem is that more than a billion people live in households earning less than $6 a day, and the majority of those earn less than $3 a day. Social tensions aside, the economic consequence is that China's large industrial plant outstrips Chinese consumer demand. As a result, China must export. However, the recessions after 2008 cut heavily into China's exports, severely affecting GDP growth and threatening the stability of the political system. China confronted the problem with a massive surge in bank lending, driving new investment and supporting GDP growth but also fueling rampant inflation. Inflation created upward pressure on labor costs until China began to lose its main competitive advantage over other countries.

For a generation, Chinese growth has been the engine of the global economic system, just as Japan was in the previous generation. China is not collapsing any more than Japan did. However, it is changing its behavior, and with it the behavior of the international system.

Looking Ahead

If we look at the international system as having three major economic engines, two of them -- Europe and China -- are changing their behavior to be less assertive and less influential in the international system. The events of 2008 did not create these changes; they merely triggered processes that revealed the underlying weaknesses of these two entities.

Somewhat outside the main processes of the international system, the Middle East is undergoing a fundamental shift in its balance of power. The driver in this is not the crisis of 2008 but the consequences of the U.S. wars in the region and their termination. With the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, Iran has emerged as the major conventional power in the Persian Gulf and the major influence over Iraq. In addition, with the continued survival of the al Assad regime in Syria through the support of Iran, there is the potential for Iranian influence to stretch from western Afghanistan to the Mediterranean Sea. Even if the al Assad regime fell, Iran would still be well-positioned to assert its claims for primacy in the Persian Gulf.

Just as the processes unleashed in 1989-1991 defined the next 20 years, so, too, will the processes that are being generated now dominate the next generation. Still powerful but acutely off-balance in its domestic and foreign policies, the United States is confronting a changing world without yet having a clear understanding of how to deal with this world or, for that matter, how the shifts in the global system will affect it. For the United States strategically, the fragmentation of Europe, the transformation of global production in the wake of the Chinese economy's climax, and the dramatically increased power of Iran appear as abstract events not directly affecting the United States.

Each of these events will create dangers and opportunities for the United States that it is unprepared to manage. The fragmentation of Europe raises the question of the future of Germany and its relationship with Russia. The movement of production to low-wage countries will create booms in countries hitherto regarded as beyond help (as China was in 1980) and potential zones of instability created by rapid and uneven growth. And, of course, the idea that the Iranian issue can be managed through sanctions is a form of denial rather than a strategy.

Three major areas of the world are in flux: Europe, China and the Persian Gulf. Every country in the world will have to devise a strategy to deal with the new reality, just as 1989-1991 required new strategies. The most important country, the United States, had no strategy after 1991 and has no strategy today. This is the single most important reality of the world. Like the Spaniards, who, in the generation after Columbus' voyage, lacked a clear sense of the reality they had created, Americans have no clear sense of the world they find themselves in. This fact continues to define how the world works.

Therefore, we next turn to American strategy in the next 20 years and consider how it will reshape itself.

Eyeing Opportunities in the Global Financial Crisis

John Mauldin — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 17:37:25 GMT

As various companies go hat in hand to Washington for a bailout, a recurring topic is what guaranty do the taxpayers get that they're not just throwing more money down a hole. Good question. Who wants warrants or preferred shares if the company is doomed anyway? What you're seeing take place are negotiated backstops between the US Government and pools of capital. A couple of examples:

The Big 3 may get a bailout. Financially the US taxpayer will get a stake - in what will surely be radically reshaped companies. Citibank just got a large infusion from Saudi Arabia's Prince al-Waleed bin Talal al-Saud - just days before a US government orchestrated rescue helped rocket the share price. Maybe these are just coincidental moves. Maybe not.

What we're witnessing isn't finance or investment as usual. We're watching a shift to a managed economic structure, where government officials determine who will live and who will die. It's a shift from investments to agreements, where having access to large pools of ready cash is the ultimately persuasive argument. And lacking access means doing whatever you're told.

I've long been encouraging you to read George Friedman's work at Stratfor, but it becomes more important every day. Stratfor is producing a series on Countries in Crisis, and I've enclosed the latest piece which is the exception to the rule, the Gulf Cooperation Council countries. This series is a fascinating look at how those with the gold get to make the rules. Unless you've got your own sovereign wealth fund, you'll probably want to read it...

As you're structuring your own portfolios, understanding the geopolitical drivers behind where the markets are going is now more important than ever. Because these insights are so important, I've arranged a special deal for you on a Stratfor Membership which also includes a free copy of George's new book, The Next 100 Years. Click here to take advantage of this offer today. These are the drivers for the coming year, and I encourage you to factor them in today.

Yours,
John Mauldin

GCC States: Eyeing Opportunities in the Global Financial Crisis

Editor's Note: This article is part of a series on the geopolitics of the global financial crisis. Here we examine how the global financial crisis will affect the Persian Gulf states.

One of the most influential aspects of the global financial crisis, which has taken many forms around the world, is the shrinking and increasingly risk-averse global capital pool. As investors around the world began to experience heavy losses in the wake of, and partially triggered by, the U.S. subprime crisis, capital around the world began to dry up. At the same time, those who retained access to capital became increasingly risk-averse and have, in effect, begun to hoard capital.

For the time being, this means that risky borrowers or capital-intensive projects around the world are desperately in need of loans that are nowhere to be found. The impact in the short term is that major projects -- such as Brazil's development of its massive offshore oil fields -- will have to be postponed. In the long term, this lack of willing investment will mean a slowdown in growth in the areas of the world that are dependent on foreign capital for the development of infrastructure and industry, such as Latin America, emerging Europe and the Balkans.

A secondary impact of the shortage of capital is the devastating effect it can have on banking sectors. As the capital pool shrinks, liquidity becomes a serious problem for banks as they struggle to meet reserve requirements and avoid contagion. Banks all around the world have been hit by a shortage of credit but nowhere harder than in Europe, where the banking sector is so heavily intertwined with its industrial sectors that the entire underpinning of the economy relies on a highly liquid and supportive (critics would say "too supportive") banking industry. The U.S. market, by comparison, relies primarily on securities markets for external financing needs, and the kind of reciprocal, slightly incestuous relationships between banks and industries that characterize Europe do not exist in the United States. Furthermore, the common monetary policies of the eurozone have left many European states with over-stimulated economic sectors -- such as Spain's real estate sector -- that have been pushed forward by extremely low consumer lending rates (relative to what these countries experienced prior to joining the eurozone) backed by the stability and strength of the euro.

Yet another challenge facing world economies is the global slowdown of growth, which means a decline in demand for goods and a resulting decline in manufacturing. This will mean a slowdown in the Asian countries -- particularly China -- that are home to much of the world's manufacturing. The secondary impact will be on commodity-producing states, which provide the basic materials used in the construction of manufactured goods. These states (including most of Latin America) are facing an export crisis as the markets dry up.

Financial Crisis and the GCC

Fortunately for the Persian Gulf states that constitute the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) -- Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar and Oman -- these financial challenges are mitigated, or entirely eliminated, by enormous oil wealth and economies that have been carefully managed.

The GCC states are largely insulated from the global credit crunch because they are the proud owners of some of the world's largest oil deposits. Saudi Arabia alone boasts the largest oil reserves in the world, at well over 250 billion barrels, and all of the GCC states -- with the exception of Bahrain -- are ranked in the top 20 of world oil producers, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE leading the pack. Saudi Arabia alone made $194 billion from oil exports in 2007, and $212 billion (in real dollars) between January and October 2008. The GCC states are so capital-rich that their usual financial management strategy involves attempting to soak up as much liquidity as possible in order to contain inflation.

Indeed, with massive current account surpluses, the six GCC states are creditor nations -- meaning they supply capital to the rest of the world. As net providers of capital, these countries remain much less vulnerable to a shrinking global capital pool than net capital importers, as they can simply let up on the outflows for a bit to recapitalize their systems.

Given that this wealth is controlled for the most part by the GCC monarchies, much of this cash flow goes first into government coffers. This granted every single one of the GCC states a budget surplus, reaching as high as Kuwait's 42 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), in 2007 (this was before the oil price spike of 2008, so while the fall in oil revenue will affect budgets in 2009, the impact will not be as drastic as it would be using 2008 as a baseline). This gives Kuwait a great deal of flexibility in dealing with financial issues as they arise. Qatar, Oman and Bahrain all have surpluses, but they were less than 7 percent of GDP in 2007, so although they do maintain flexibility, they are much more limited than Kuwait.

Despite their budget surpluses and status as net capital exporters, the GCC states do maintain external debt -- used to finance corporate projects and government functions. However, public-sector external debt amounts to less than 30 percent of GDP for most GCC states. The outlying state is Bahrain, which has a public-sector external debt of around 36 percent of GDP. While this is not an insignificant level of debt, it is far outweighed by their sources of wealth. Measures of total external debt paint a different picture, however, and both Bahrain and Qatar have net external debt (which includes both public and private foreign capital borrowing) at between 50 and 60 percent of GDP. Although the UAE does not appear to be in trouble, the Dubai emirate has incurred a massive amount of debt in the process of overheating its real estate sector. The net impact of this high level of borrowing is to put the emirate at a disadvantage when it comes to seeking short-term capital to adjust to the international financial crisis.

Much of this debt has been caused by massive infrastructure and development projects such as Qatar's liquefied natural gas facilities, Dubai's fanciful real estate explosion and Bahrain's attempts to convert itself into a financial mecca. Indeed, the GCC states have used the past several decades of oil wealth to engineer massive development projects and have become, in the process, quite reliant on foreign direct investment (FDI) and the technology and expertise that accompany it. Though Qatar and Kuwait are net exporters of FDI, the other four states are importers of FDI, from Bahrain's modest 0.51 percent of GDP to Oman's more substantial 4.67 percent of GDP.

Offsetting this debt (and just about every other problem they might encounter) are the pools of capital that the GCC states maintain. One of the most important mechanisms for this capital accumulation -- because of its political and financial implications -- is the sovereign wealth fund (SWF). These SWFs are massive investment funds that make strategic investment choices for the GCC states. GCC SWFs maintain holdings that range from Saudi Arabia's relatively modest $5.3 billion to Abu Dhabi's massive $875 billion nest egg (and Abu Dhabi has even more money socked away in other SWFs). These SWFs are invested primarily in the equity markets of developed nations, and some have taken sizable stakes in Western businesses. In addition to the SWFs, the GCC states also maintain large caches of reserves. In Saudi Arabia, the state-owned bank SAMA (in addition to the kingdom's SWF) has $365.2 billion of foreign holdings, and the elite of the al-Saud family has reportedly stashed away somewhere around $1 trillion, though exact figures are difficult to track.

These pools of capital allow the GCC states to exercise great flexibility, especially during credit crunches. Gulf oil is controlled by the monarchies that rule each state, and these strong governments not only can draw on their large reserves but also can run their yearly budgets with substantial built-in surpluses. This gives the governments a great deal of room to intervene in the local markets to compensate for the effects of the financial crisis.

Trouble Spots

There are a couple of notable exceptions to this relatively rosy picture. Saudi Arabia has postponed bids on two major refinery projects until sometime in late 2009. The projects include a $6 billion, 400,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) refinery in the Red Sea port city of Yanbu to be built by Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil company Saudi Arabian Oil Co. (Aramco) and ConocoPhillips and a $12 billion joint venture with French energy company Total for another 400,000-bpd facility in Jubail. But these projects are hardly an issue of economic survival. Instead they are a part of Saudi Arabia's effort to move up the energy supply chain -- from crude production to refined products - - and while these facilities would be nice to have, their delay will not cause any sleepless nights for Saudi Arabia.

A more serious issue for GCC states is that many of them have young banking sectors that have trembled at tightening global liquidity and disappearing capital. Bahrain, an island nation, has capitalized greatly on its location at the heart of the oil-rich Persian Gulf region and has used its proximity to massive capital flows to build a powerful banking sector. This proliferation of banks has been shaken by the financial crisis, but true crisis is not on the horizon because the GCC states have avoided incurring massive amounts of debt.

The impact of the financial crisis on the oil markets is unquestionably a concern for GCC states, and oil prices have fallen to nearly $50 a barrel after reaching highs of over $140 per barrel earlier in 2008. But their cash reserves have given the GCC states a great deal of staying power in the medium term. Saudi Arabia alone raked in more than $1 billion per day when oil prices spiked. With the global slowdown, there will certainly be a decline in the rate of cash flowing in to the GCC states, so they will have to spend what they have wisely. In some respects, this slowdown in cash inflow is a blessing. Until the financial crisis broke, the biggest financial worry for these states was high inflation, and the slowdown in growth will reduce inflationary pressure.

Among the GCC states there are a few with their own unique challenges. In the UAE, for example, there has been a rapid increase in corporate borrowing over the past two years. Most of that borrowing has been to fund massive development projects in the emirate of Dubai. These fantastical projects have included the construction of islands in the shape of palm trees and the continents of the world. Dubai has been planning to build the world's largest suspension bridge across the entire city of Dubai (connecting one suburb to another) that was to be completed in 2012. The real estate sector in Dubai, which sports the world's only seven-star hotel, has reached unprecedented heights of growth.

Its 10-year growth spurt has come to an end, however, as the heavily overheated real estate sector readjusts to something closer to reality and as bank stability is in question, although the UAE has set up a task force to address the problem. According to the head of the task force, Mohammed al-Abbar, state-owned and affiliated companies owe approximately $80 billion in debts, while the government's assets stand at $90 billion, and state-associated companies hold about $260 billion in assets. In addition to across-the-board needs for refinancing, Dubai companies have suffered huge losses in the Dubai Financial Market, which has taken the biggest hit of the GCC-state stock markets so far this year, with losses of up to 66 percent.

Qatari firms have also borrowed some $40 billion over the past two years to finance hydrocarbon projects such as the construction of natural gas liquefaction plants -- though these will certainly pay for themselves as demand for liquefied natural gas rises amid very tight market conditions. A massive outflow of equity investments sent the Doha Securities Market for a spin as it lost 22 percent in the first half of September. Though this serves to tighten Qatar's credit options, it will not have catastrophic consequences.

The massive credit expansion in Qatar and the UAE has put the banking sectors of both countries in a delicate position. Liquidity crises will, as a rule, hit first in the place where commercial banking and lending has exploded the quickest. The relatively young Qatari banking sector has been affected by this phenomenon, and the government intervened in the banking sector by offering a $5.3 billion investment package on Oct. 12. Similarly, the Abu Dhabi Central Bank has intervened with $32.7 billion to ensure the liquidity of UAE banks.

According to reports from Bahrain, the country's Islamic lending facilities appear to be faring better than interest-based lending facilities. The Central Bank of Bahrain is controlling the sector's involvement in the volatile real estate market, as a precaution, and has been adjusting interest rates to maintain liquidity, which appears to be holding. Similar moves have been made in Oman, although the kingdom appears to have weathered the storm with high levels of capitalization.

As these market fluctuations demonstrate, depending on how bad things get, the GCC states may be forced to cut back on programs -- such as Dubai's development projects and Saudi Arabia's refineries. But in the end, the massive reserves they have built up, as well as their relative financial discipline, have made the decline in commodity prices a concern but hardly a crisis. And ongoing hydrocarbon production capacity improvements in Saudi Arabia and other GCC states mean that as soon as the price of oil rises again, these states will once again be positioned to rake in stratospheric levels of oil revenue. In fact, the financial crisis for the GCC states can be viewed as an opportunity for the GCC states to exploit this moment of relative economic power, both internally and on the international stage.

Geopolitical Implications

The strongest player in the region, by far, is Saudi Arabia, and Riyadh uses its massive oil wealth to exert political pressure throughout the region and the world. The kingdom's primary objective in the region is the containment of Iran and Shiite influence as Iran tries to assert dominance over Iraq. The financial crisis has been a huge boon in this endeavor. As a major oil exporter that has failed to achieve the kinds of financial solvency that the GCC states have secured, Iran is staring down the barrel of a gun as oil prices sink. Without a buffer of cash, Iran is very poorly positioned to handle a fall in oil prices.

Though the fall in oil prices threatens Saudi Arabia as well, the Saudi budget is set for an oil price of $45 per barrel, and oil prices have not dropped to levels that would threaten Saudi stability. Saudi Arabia maintains the ability to manipulate oil prices for its own foreign policy objectives and could use them against Iran. (Saudi Arabia is poised to assume an even more powerful position when prices rise again if an ambitious $129 billion project to raise its oil production capacity to 12.5 million bpd comes through as planned in 2009.)

If Saudi Arabia chooses to pursue macro-level adjustments to oil prices in order to target Iran, it will certainly do so cautiously. Though the kingdom has a solid cushion of petrodollars, it still relies on oil for 75 percent of government income. That income is necessary to meet a variety of domestic needs and to counter Iranian moves in the region by bribing political parties and militant groups in places like Iraq and Lebanon.

After Saudi Arabia, Kuwait is perhaps the GCC state best positioned to weather the financial storm. With a SWF of $264 billion, the country is very capital-rich and the government has a huge budget surplus. There has been turmoil in Kuwait's equity markets and banking sector, which has prompted the kingdom to repatriate some $3.66 billion worth of SWF investments, but the government's resources are substantial enough to handily offset these problems. Kuwait stands to gain from the decline of Iranian influence in the region, in terms of limiting both the influence of its own Shiite minorities and Iran's entrenchment in neighboring Iraq. Kuwait's foreign policy goals are thus in line with Saudi Arabia's, and Kuwait will follow the Saudi lead.

Abu Dhabi, the largest emirate of the UAE, is the wealthiest and most tightly run ship in the country. The UAE's problems lie in Dubai and its excessive real estate boom of the past decade. Dubai's financial indiscretions have put it in a position where it will need to be underwritten (to a certain extent) by Abu Dhabi. This presents a strategic opportunity for Abu Dhabi to rein in the political power and excesses of the al-Maktoum family, which rules Dubai and holds the UAE prime ministerial post. Dubai has so far remained staunchly uninterested in Abu Dhabi's offers of aid, declaring that there are no negotiations between the emirates.

Though Qatar has found itself mildly vulnerable to the international financial crisis because of its large debt burden, it is still in a reasonably safe financial position. Qatar's regional and global goals are quite ambitious, as it seeks to increase its holdings overseas and serve as a diplomatic hub for the Middle East. Qatar has already made moves toward acquiring major stakes in companies overseas -- including Citibank -- and these kinds of activities will likely continue. For Qatar, the danger may be in overextending itself in a time of depressed markets and relatively little competition.

For Bahrain and Oman, the smallest of the GCC states, their ability to take advantage of the financial crisis is relatively limited. Bahrain is constrained by domestic political factors as it seeks to balance the needs of active opposition elements with its economic outlook. This will limit Bahrain's ability to use the economic crisis as a stepping-stone toward a larger geopolitical role in the region. Oman, for its part, maintains a very low profile in the region and is very unlikely to make any moves at this time.

For all of the GCC states, the global slowdown offers investment opportunities the world over. On the political stage, the Western states are crying out for capital injections as their economies slow down. In fact, on a tour of the region, Deputy U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Kimmitt called on the Persian Gulf Arab states to continue investing in the United States to help restore financial stability. This represents an excellent opportunity for GCC states to charge to the rescue -- with hefty expectations for future cooperation, of course.

The United Kingdom has also asked the GCC states to help the International Monetary Fund (IMF) assist countries in desperate need of a bailout. Herein lies an opportunity for the GCC states to engage in long-term financial positioning. By giving money to the IMF, the GCC states could enhance their say in the affairs of the lending institution and, by extension, in the geopolitical arena.

For the moment, however, the GCC states have not responded enthusiastically to these pleas (although Saudi Prince Walid bin Talal did announce that he would boost his stake in Citibank just days before a U.S.-announced government bailout of the company). Countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (which have other options and a variety of needs to balance) see only limited direct political benefit from bailing out the West instead of investing that money at home. This is an outlook that could change once the new U.S. administration is up and running and able to make political deals and security guarantees.

As these openings demonstrate, the GCC states are among few in the world that can view the current crisis and see potential opportunities. While there will certainly be bumps in the road as these relatively young economies settle and shift in the face of a turbulent world economy, responsible management of vast oil wealth has put the GCC states in a position to weather the financial crisis, and weather it well.

On G-20 and GM: Economics, Politics and Social Stability

John Mauldin — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:32:36 GMT

The Big Three have a new customer, and it isn't you. As Detroit's former heavyweights fight for a slice of a $25 billion bailout package, more than humble pie is being eaten. If the automakers fail and take their companies into bankruptcy, Michigan as we know it ceases to exist economically. The trickle-down impact could rapidly become a waterfall: the seat supplier in Georgia loses three major customers. The factory worker who makes seats is out of a job. The bank who holds his mortgage takes another hickey. Commercial lending at that bank dries up. Ad nauseum. In the best of economic times, this would be a troublesome scenario. In today's economy, it's easy to see how policymakers are as worried about social stability as they are economics.

No astute person thinks that the Big Three will be able to return to the business practices of last year. And no intelligent investor should be trying to evaluate portfolio decisions the same way this year either. We have moved from the realm of finance to political economy, and for that you need a different set of tools and a different mindset.

I've enclosed an article by my friend George Friedman, the founder of global intelligence firm Stratfor. This is a fascinating, must-read piece that examines US policy options by looking at the Chinese as an example. The parallels are illuminating. I've stressed before the importance of reading Stratfor's intelligence in order to gain a clear understanding of the political and economic landscape you're investing in, but you need it now more than ever.

George has arranged a special offer just for my readers. And I'm excited to tell you that in addition to a Stratfor Membership, you'll also get a copy of his new book, The Next 100 Years.

Click here to take advantage of this special offer. You'll find George's new book as fascinating and insightful as Stratfor's daily work.

Yours,
John Mauldin

On G-20 and GM: Economics, Politics and Social Stability

November 17, 2008 | 1840 GMT

By George Friedman

From Financial Crisis to Cyclical Recession

The financial crisis has been mitigated, if not solved. The problem now is that we are in a cyclical recession, and that every country is trying to figure out how to cope with the recession. Unlike the past two recessions, this one is more global than local. But unlike the 1970s, when recession was global, this one is not accompanied by soaring inflation and interest rates.

All recessions have different dynamics, but all have one thing in common: They impose punishment and discipline on economies run wild. This is happening around the world.

China, for example, faces a serious problem. China is an export-oriented economy whose primary market is the United States. As the United States goes into recession, demand for Chinese goods declines. Chinese businesses have always operated on very tight - sometimes invisible - profit margins designed to emphasize cash flow and to pay off debts to banks. As U.S. demand contracts, many Chinese firms find themselves in untenable positions, without room to decrease prices, lacking operating reserves and insufficiently capitalized. Recessions are designed to cull the weak from the herd, and a huge swath of the Chinese economy is ripe for the culling.

If the world were all about economics, culling is what the Chinese would do. But the world is more complex than that. A culling would lead to massive unemployment. Many Chinese employees live on Third World wages; indeed, the vast majority of Chinese have incomes of less than $1,000 a year. To them, unemployment doesn't mean problems with their 401k. It means malnutrition and desperation - neither of which is unknown in 20th century Chinese history, including the Communist period. The Chinese government is rightly worried about the social and political consequences of rational economic policies: They might work in the long run, but only if you live that long.

Economic Restructuring vs. Stability

The Chinese have therefore prepared a massive stimulus package that is more of a development program to make up for declining U.S. demand. It aims to keep businesses from failing and spilling millions of angry and hungry workers into the street. For the Chinese, the economic problem creates a much larger and more serious issue. It is also an issue that must be solved quickly, and the amount of time needed outstrips the amount of time available.

This is not only a Chinese problem. Wherever there is an economic downturn, politicians must decide whether society - and their own political futures - can withstand the rigors recessions impose. Recessions occur when, as is inevitable, inefficiencies and irrationalities build up in the financial and economic system. The resulting economic downturn imposes a harsh discipline that destroys the inefficient, encourages everyone to become more efficient, and opens the doors to new businesses using new technologies and business models. The year 2001 smashed the technology sector in the United States, opening the door for Google Inc.

The business cycle works well, but the human costs can be daunting. The collapse of inefficient businesses leaves workers without jobs, investors without money and society less stable than before. The pain needed to rectify China's economy would be enormous, with devastating consequences for hundreds of millions of Chinese, and probably would lead to social chaos. Beijing is prepared to accept a high degree of economic inefficiency to avoid, or at least postpone, the reckoning. The reckoning always comes, but for most of us, later is better than sooner. Economic rationality takes a back seat to social necessity and political common sense.

Every country in the world is looking inward at the impact of the recession on its economy and measuring its resources. Countries are deciding whether they have the ability to prop up business that should fail, what the social consequences of business failure would be, and whether they should try to use their resources to avoid the immediate pain of recession. This is why the G-20 ended in meaningless platitudes.

Each country is also trying to answer the question of how much pain it - and its regime - can endure. The more pain imposed, the healthier countries will emerge economically - unless of course the pain kills them. Ultimately, the rationality of economics and the reality of society frequently diverge.

Recession and the U.S. Auto Industry

For the United States, this choice has been posed in stark terms with regard to the dilemma of whether the U.S. government should use its resources to rescue the American auto industry. The American auto industry was once the centerpiece of the U.S. economy. That hasn't been true for a generation, as other industries and services have supplanted it and other countries' auto industries have surpassed it. Nevertheless, the U.S. auto industry remains important. It might drain the U.S. economy by losing vast amounts of money and destroying the equity held by its investors, but it employs large numbers of people. Perhaps more important, it purchases supplies from literally thousands of U.S. companies.

There can be endless discussions of why the U.S. auto industry is in such trouble. The answer lies not in one place but in many, from the decisions and makeup of management to the unions that control much of the workforce, and from the cost structure inherent in producing cars in the American economy to a simple systemic inability to produce outstanding vehicles. There might be varying degrees of truth to all or some of this, but the fact remains that each of the U.S. carmakers is on the verge of financial collapse.

This is what recessions are supposed to do. As in China and everywhere else, recessions reveal weak businesses and destroy them, freeing up resources for new enterprises. This recession has hit the auto industry hard, and it is unlikely that it is going to survive. The ultimate reason is the same one that destroyed the U.S. steel industry a generation ago: Given U.S. cost structures, producing commodity products is best left to countries with lower wage rates, while more expensive U.S. labor is deployed in more specialized products requiring greater expertise. Thus, there is still steel production in the United States, but it is specialty steel production, not commodity steel. Similarly, there will be specialty auto production in the United States, but commodity auto production will come from other countries.

That sounds easy, but the transition actually will be a bloodletting. Current employees of both the automakers and suppliers will be devastated. Institutions that have lent money to the automakers will suffer massive or total losses. Pensioners might lose pensions and health care benefits, and an entire region of the United States - the industrial Midwest - will be devastated. Something stronger will grow eventually, but not in time for many of the current employees, shareholders and creditors.

Here the economic answer, cull, meets the social answer, stabilize. Policymakers have a decision to make. If the automakers fail now, their drain on the economy will end; the pain will be shorter, if more intense; and new industries would emerge more quickly. But though their drain on the economy would end, the impact of the automakers' failure on the economy would be seismic. Unemployment would surge, as would bankruptcies of many auto suppliers. Defaults on loans would hit the credit markets. In the Midwest, home prices would plummet and foreclosures would skyrocket. And heaven only knows what the impact on equity markets would be.

In the U.S. case, the healthful purgative of a recession could potentially put the patient in a coma. Few if any believe the U.S. auto industry can survive in its current form. But there is an emerging consensus in Washington that the auto industry must not be allowed to fail now. The argument for spending money on the auto industry is not to save it, but to postpone its failure until a less devastating and inconvenient time. In other words, fearing the social and political consequences of a recession working itself through to its logical conclusion, Washington - like Beijing - wants to spend money it probably won't recover to postpone the failure. Indeed, governments around the world are considering what failures to tolerate, what failures to postpone, and how much to spend on the latter. General Motors is merely the American case in point.

The Recession in Context

The people arguing for postponement aren't foolish. The financial system is still working its way through a massive crisis that had little to do with the auto industry. Some traction appears to be occurring; certainly there was no crisis atmosphere at the G-20 meeting. The economy is in recession, but in spite of the inevitable claims that we have never seen anything like this one before, we have. There is always some variable that swings to an extreme - this time, it is consumer spending - but we are still well within the framework of recent recessions.

Consider the equity markets, which we regard as a long-term measure of the market's evaluation of the state of the economy. In March 2000, the S&P 500 peaked at 1530. This was the top of the market. In October 2002, 18 months later, the S&P bottomed out at 777. Over the next five years it rose to 1562 in October 2007, the height for this cycle. It fell from this point until Nov. 12, 2008, when it closed at 852.30. This past Friday, it was at 873.29.

We do not know what the market will do in the future. There are people much smarter than we are who claim to know that. What we do know is what it has done. And what it has done this time - so far - is almost exactly what it did last time, except that in 2000-2002 it took 18 months to do it, while this time it was done in about 16 and a half months (assuming it bottomed out Nov. 12). But even if the market didn't bottom out then, and it falls to 775, for example, it will have lost 50 percent of its value from the peak. This would be more than in 2000-2002, but not unprecedented.

The point we are making here is that if we regard the equity markets as a long-term seismograph of the economy, then so far, despite all the storm and stress, the markets - and therefore the economy - remain within the general pattern of the 2000-2002 market at the 2001 recession. That recession certainly was unpleasant, what with the devastation of the tech sector, but the economy survived. At the same time, however, it is clear that things are balanced on a knife's edge. Another hundred points' fall on the S&P, and the markets will be telling us that the world is in a very different place indeed.

A massive bankruptcy in the automotive sector could certainly set the stage for an economic renaissance in the next generation. But at this particular moment in time (it's no coincidence that the crisis in the U.S. automotive industry comes as we enter a recession), a wave of bankruptcies would dramatically deepen the recession. This probably would be reflected by the destruction of trillions more in net worth in the equity markets.

There is a powerful counterargument to bailing out the U.S. auto industry. This argument holds that the auto industry is a drain on the U.S. economy, that it will never be globally competitive, and that if it is dragged back from the edge, no one will then say it is time to push it to the edge and over. The next time it will be on the brink will be during the next recession, and the same argument to save it will be used. In due course, the United States, like China, will be so terrified of the social and political consequences of business failure that it will maintain Chinese-like state owned enterprises, full of employees and generation-old plants and business models. Clearly, short-run solutions can easily become long-term albatrosses.

The only possible solution would be a bailout followed by a Washington-administered restructuring of the auto industry. This causes us to imagine a collaboration between the auto industry's current management and Washington administrators that would finally put Detroit on a path to where it can compete with Toyota. Frankly, the mind boggles at this. But boggle though we might, hitting the economy with another massive financial default, a wave of bankruptcies, massive unemployment surges and another blow to housing prices boggles our mind even more.

The geopolitical problem confronting the world at the moment is that it has been forced to offer massive support to the global financial system with sovereign wealth - e.g., via taxes and currency printing presses. The world might just have squeaked through that crisis. Now, the world is in an inevitable recession and businesses are on the brink of failure. A wave of massive business failures on top of the financial crisis might well move the global system to a very different place. Therefore, each nation, by itself and indifferent to others, is in the process of figuring out how to postpone these failures to a more opportune time - or to never. This will build in long-term inefficiencies to the global economy, but right now everyone will be quite content with that.

Thus the financial crisis became a recession, and the recession triggered bankruptcies. And because no one wants bankruptcies right now, everyone who can is using taxpayer dollars to protect the taxpayer from the consequences of mismanagement. And the last thing any one cared about was the G-20 concept for the future of the economic system.

The International Economic Crisis and Stratfor's Methodology

John Mauldin — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 18:08:48 GMT

Dear Friends:

Exhale for a moment, forget your losses for the time being, and try to appreciate the fact that you're living through the single most important development in global finance since Bretton Woods. This is a "tell the grandkids about it" moment, when governments all around the world have essentially decided in unison that it's time to rewrite the rules, the very framework, in which financial transactions take place. Stock trading, interbank lending, commercial paper, the very concept of private sector ownership are all up in the air right now.

The only thing I can tell you with certainty is that if you try to evaluate your investments using the same metrics you've always relied on - P/E ratios, market share, interest rates, etc. - you're going to be as successful as a football-turned-baseball coach evaluating a pitcher by the number of touchdowns he throws. The rules are changing, gentle reader, changing at least for awhile from market-driven inputs to government-driven inputs. If you try to apply what you know from the "old game" without understanding that you're playing a "new game," the rules might not make sense.

I'm sending you today a piece from my friend George Friedman on how his company Stratfor looks at economics. More precisely, this piece explains how they look at Political Economy. And from here on out, it's political economy that's going to be driving markets. If the old rule was "Never fight the Fed." It's now, "Never fight the Fed. And the Treasury. And the ECB. And the Bank of England. And the Bank of Japan...." You get my point.

George has very kindly arranged for a special offer on a Stratfor Membership for my readers. I strongly encourage you to click here to take advantage of this offer. Now more than ever, you need the kinds of insights that you can't get from traditional finance sources. You need a wider lens, and there's no one better than George and his team at Stratfor at this kind of analysis. I know you'll find them as valuable as I do.

Your Taking-It-All-In Analyst,
John Mauldin

The International Economic Crisis and Stratfor's Methodology

By George Friedman

Stratfor's focus is on geopolitics. That means that it focuses on the behavior of human societies organized into complex, geographically defined systems. In our time, that means that we study nation-states. In order to understand the behavior of nation-states, it is necessary to focus on three major dimensions: economics, war and politics. The nation has to be studied in terms of producing wealth, defending (and stealing) wealth, and the internal and external relations by which humans shape their lives.

Economics, war and politics are not separate spheres. They are a single entity together constituting the reality of the nation-state. There are those who argue that economic life should be left alone, not interfered with by political or military power. We won't engage in that argument. What we know, empirically, is that political and military power constantly impinge on economic life, and vice versa. It is impossible to imagine war without taking into account politics and economics. It is impossible to think of domestic or foreign policy without considering economic and military issues. By the same token, it is also impossible to think about economics without thinking about military and political matters. If it can be made otherwise, then someone will do so and then we will change our opinion. Until then, we cannot think of the free market as a meaningful independent reality. It is always shaped by other factors. Perhaps it should be otherwise. It isn't.

An integrated approach to social reality requires that these distinctions, so important in the organization of a university or a newspaper, be overcome. They were created in order to organize human activities into manageable pieces. Our argument is that in so doing, reality is only apparently made more manageable, and in fact is falsified. The standard approach to these issues creates distinctions that don't exist and complexities that conceal rather than reveal the nature of the problem at hand. A general who tries to wage war without consideration of political ends and economic means is going to fail. An economist who tries to understand and predict the behavior of the economy without a comprehensive understanding of the political and military realities which shape the economy will not do particularly well.

Geopolitics is in one sense also an abstraction, but it has the virtue of not creating artificial distinctions. The price that the geopolitician pays for a comprehensive view of reality is a forced simplification: there is just too much happening to state it comprehensively. Geopolitics is the search for the center of gravity of reality, those overwhelming forces that drive the system in the direction it is going to take. These forces are never solely political, military or economic in nature. Usually, they are in plain sight and are overlooked because, being simple, they appear insufficient. Indeed, they may be insufficient, but others can add the details. Our goal is to lay bare the essentials and identify the general direction in which things are moving.

Take, for example, our recent analysis of the Russo-Georgian war. It derived from this central reality: Russia by the 19th century had achieved the borders essentially held by the Soviet Union. In 1992 it had collapsed to a position in which it had not been since perhaps the 17th century. That condition was untenable. Either Russia would implode or it would reassert itself fairly quickly. By early 2000s, it was our view that it would choose to assert itself. When the United States tried to make an ally of Ukraine, which Russia sees as crucial for its economic, military and political well-being, we became certain that Russia would push back. As the Americans got bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, a window of opportunity opened up and the Russians began the process of reassertion.

There are, obviously, endless things left out of this analysis. People of every discipline could rip it apart as being insufficiently sophisticated. In one sense they would be right. By avoiding the complexity of sophistication, we could see the fundamental shape of things -- which was that the Russian collapse, if halted, would have to reverse itself for economic, military and political reasons. There were obviously many details we could not predict and some we didn't know. But we captured the essential geopolitical condition of Russia in order to understand what it had to do. We left it to others to do the important work of mapping the complexity. Our task was to capture the simplicity.

In our analysis of the current financial crisis in the United States -- and the world as a whole -- we have sought the center of gravity of the problem. We approached that simply by asking one question: is what is going on simply another inflection point in the business cycles that have occurred since World War II, or does it represent a systemic failure such as that which happened during the Great Depression? This struck us as the urgent issue.

We noted that in the Great Depression, the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by nearly 50 percent over three years. It was an unprecedented calamity. Bearing this in mind, we compared the current situation to other events since World War II to see if there was a framework for measuring it. We found that framework in the Savings and Loan crisis of 1989, when an entire sector of the U.S. financial system collapsed and the federal government intervened -- essentially guaranteeing or purchasing commercial real estate, whose price decline had triggered the crisis. We noted that the total amount allocated by the federal government in that crisis was about 6.5 percent of the GDP (and the amount actually spent, before recouping of costs via sales, was less than 3 percent). We noted also that in the current crisis another sector of the financial system -- the investment banks -- were devastated, and that the federal government intervened, this time at about 5 percent of GDP. Meanwhile, the equity markets had not declined as much as they did in 2000-2001, and as of the second quarter of this year the economy was still growing by more than 2 percent. From this we concluded that the U.S. economy was moving into a recession but that the recession would not break the framework of the postwar economy, although clearly the degree of government intervention will reshape the financial markets.

From the point of view of many Russian experts in 2001, our analysis of the future of Russia was seen as simplistic and naïve. From the standpoint of professional economists and traders in the markets, the same is being said of our current analysis. But just as our critics among Russian experts failed to see the main thrust of Russian history, many economists fail to see the main thrust of what is now happening. The United States is a $14 trillion economy with a potential problem amounting to $1-2 trillion (and probably far less than that). If the government intervenes, it will create inequities and imbalances in the system. But between the size of the economy and the government printing press, the problem will be managed -- particularly because there are underlying assets -- houses -- that can be monetized in the long run. The gridlock in the financial system will undoubtedly create a recession, but there hasn't been one for seven years and it's high time.

One can like or dislike the outcome, and we certainly agree that this will cause long-term dislocations and imbalances. But we also know that America as a nation-state has the resources to manage its way through this crisis if the government intervenes. And that intervention is as hard-wired into the American political-economic-military system as the law of supply and demand.

We do not speak the language of economics. There are numerous economists who can do that. And we certainly don't speak the language of the financial markets. We speak our own language, designed to reveal the elegant essence of the problem rather than its enormous complexity. Certainly, if our analysis is wrong because we failed to identify a crucial problem, then we haven't identified the center of gravity properly. And we will be wrong, which is far worse. But as in February 2000, when we published a piece called "Recession Time?" which forecast the market collapse that happened a few weeks later and the recession that followed it, we will be criticized for not understanding some essential point -- in 2000 it was that we had no understanding of the impact of increased productivity on the business cycle. They were right. We didn't understand it and we were right not to. The complexities of productivity did not trump the obvious, which was that the NASDAQ had reached unsupportable levels and there had been no recession in nine years and that was way too long.

So, too, we are criticized for our failure to understand the spread between T-Bills and LIBOR or myriad other things. But we do understand this: The political reality is that the size of the American economy, deployed by the state, trumps the financial problems created by the fall of the housing markets. It will be ugly and painful for some and there will be a recession, but things are always ugly and painful when there is a recession.

This series is about the economic problem, therefore, but is not written about the economy and certainly not by economists. Their work is valuable but it differs from ours. Rather this is about geopolitics and therefore about the different regions and nation-states of the world. It is a geopolitical analysis subsuming economics, politics and military affairs in a single system. And it is designed to extract the obvious rather than drill into the complexity.

We hope this series has some value to our readers in clarifying the current moment. That is its intention: to highlight the main tendency, not to detail the complexity. Understanding the trees has value, but seeing the forest clearly has value as well.