Things to come.... and CHINA! (Obviously)

I don't know about you, but to me, it feels like the past couple of years have been, or will be, significant turning points in world history.

Let's take the future of work, for instance.  A depressing Deloitte report from April suggests that, in essence, there will be more work for the same (or less) pay going forward.  Looking from my own personal perspective, as a (finance) professional working in Indonesia for 15+ years, I'm already seeing big changes.  As long as I can remember, every engineering student's dream is to have a comfy career at a foreign oil company; nowadays, the likes of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, and Schlumberger have mostly pulled out of the country, thanks to mismanagement/bad policy domestically, and more interesting shale developments in other parts of the world.  Just ten years ago, management/MBA students all flocked to investment banks, management consulting, or private equity jobs.  Today, those IB shops have shuttered their Jakarta offices, and PE outfits have stayed quiet (maybe unexciting IRR numbers are part of the reason?).  Consulting is still around, but in a much smaller scale: mostly serving government contracts.  The dream jobs today? Startups!  Wonder how long this trend will last (/cough WeWork) -- so let's all enjoy this Softbank subsidy while it's still there.

Don't forget BREXIT -- yes it's still in the news, and it's still happening...someday?  We've grown tired of the (usually racist) rhetoric, failed House of Commons votes, and endless delays -- basically all the bad stuff that leads to Boris Johnson.  But when the dust settles, Brexit will most likely be the biggest moment in European history since the WWII.  There will be dislocation regardless of what happens end of this month, and who knows what/where dominoes will fall next.  Grexit was an over-hyped dud, but London is Europe's financial powerhouse!

.@EUCouncil will meet this week (17-18 October) for the last scheduled #EU leaders’ meeting before 31 October.

What different #Brexit scenarios could unfold after the meeting? Find out from our chart ⬇️ and explainer ➡️ https://t.co/Nekk2lvo68 pic.twitter.com/ekx50XZyr5

— Commons Library (@commonslibrary) October 14, 2019

At least it's made a celebrity out of John Bercow.

Also don't forget CHINA!

Hong Kong has been Asia's financial capital for my entire lifetime.  I've only been there only 3 times in the past 20 years on brief business trips, but I found the city safe, welcoming, easy to navigate -- always familiar.  Back in 1997, I was too young to understand what the handover meant, but looking at it now after 5 months of unrelenting protests -- and no sign of Beijing giving in -- in all likelihood, Hong Kong's stature will be forever diminished.  Bigly.  All the locals with means have already fled, bringing along their fortune outside the reach of CCP's grabby hands.  China will be pained by this, given its insurmountable homemade economic problems.  And the rest of Asia will not escape unharmed.  Even Lebron James feels the pain.

Dear lebron James @KingJame welcome join #BeijingLickers ！ I hope you like your new fit and tatoo.
Oh I also select ur new favorite number 11. You know 11 for XI in Roman numerals.
My toon on Leborn‘s kowtow statement about NBA and China. #StandwithHK #FreedomHK pic.twitter.com/w63S96EitJ

— 巴丢草 Badiucao (@badiucao) October 15, 2019

Anyway, love this Zeynep Tufekci article on the NBA-Apple-godknowswhoelse brouhaha, and why Beijing has been so quick to punish Western companies:

[You may think] China has a Streisand-effect problem, in which trying to censor an event creates even more publicity. But that assumes the Chinese government doesn’t understand the Streisand effect, and that can’t be right, because if one government understands attention dynamics online, it’s China’s. [...] the Chinese government has been very good at burying important news by distracting from it with other, flashy but unrelated news. This shows a subtle and powerful understanding of the Streisand effect: Instead of censoring, China diverts attention. It’s actually a myth that everything is censored in mainland China. The government  tends to let some things circulate, partly as a means to gauge public opinion, which helps solve the problem that plagues all authoritarian governments: They become blind to trouble spots.

[...] maybe we are entering a new age when China will push around Western companies to make its point. For all we know, Xi Jinping is looking across the Pacific at the crumbling governance, the failing infrastructure, the hollowed-out manufacturing capacity, the myriad elite failures, and the general decay in Western societies and has decided that the time is here to confidently declare that if you want to do business with China, its China’s way or the (crumbling) highway. He might have decided that the time when it needed to deploy strategic silence on the divergence in stated values is over, essentially telling us “Free speech, free shmeech” and getting away with it.

Or, alternatively, in this truly global and interconnected world, China might be experiencing its own form of failure and weakness, with a more and more centralized rule pushing a cult of personality around the leader. After all, China has its own problems with decadence, corruption, and inequality. Many high-level officials have families with multiple passports and expansive overseas wealth. A mixture of authoritarian malaise and loss of agility might be causing the country to lash out, without proper strategic analysis. This same dynamic seems to be at work in China’s approach to the Hong Kong protests, which could have been defused early through a few symbolic concessions. It’s as though China doesn’t even understand a city that is under its own jurisdiction.