So, the pipeline to the world’s consumerism got clogged. As high winds off the Sinai desert veered a cargo ship a-slant, which blocked off the greatest single venue of trade since the silk road. Woops. Bummer.
So, despite how much fun the internet has had over this, it’s actually kinda bad news for global trade. Some 13% of the world’s trade goes through the Suez Canal. 13% might not sound like much, but it is. It really, really is. As of Saturday, 321 boats are waiting for passage. With goods going bad, so warehouses are going empty, so companies are bleeding.
Personally, my schadenfreude is dancing a jig on those poor international conglomerates’ graves, but even I (with my widely documented anti-consumerism stance) understand that the big wigs of global business won’t be the one holding the bill. Ordinary people probably will, in the end, with higher prices, lapsed orders, and heavens’ knows, maybe even another recession.
But whether you’re sweating blood over the trade embolism, or you’re cheering for the death of globalism, take a moment and appreciate just how fragile a world order can be. A world order that currently runs on commercialism. Trade. Tit-for-tat, across oceans and continents. Where the incentivised way of doing business is to take raw resources from continent A, to refine them on continent B, to manufacture with them on continent C, only to ship them right back to be sold sometime in the same place that the resources came from. If you just hold your breath and think about that for a second; that’s absolutely insane. Insane, massive, incomprehensibly big, and ever-so-fragile.
Einstein once said that “any darn fool can make something complex; it takes a genius to make something simple”. And the world and its furnace of global trade isn’t run by geniuses, but by greedy fools. And the more complex something gets, the easier it is to gum up the works. Our system of global trade, egged on by the frenzy of economic growth, has grown so immense that it might feel like an unstoppable juggernaut.
But it isn’t. It’s big, sure, and there’s a lot of money and power invested in keeping the beast going, but it isn’t unstoppable by any degree. Right now, it’s gotten hamstrung by the Sinai passing a strong wind at the right time. That’s all it took. Previously, it’s gotten crippled by houses becoming too expensive for anyone to want to buy ’em. This beast isn’t some behemoth Tarasque. It’s a sickly old thing on life support, gasping away to supply our demand, and some poorly managed, conveniently flagged ship just plugged the aorta.
Of course the global economy isn’t going to die because of this. Shipping accidents happen all the time. Everything is fine! But this, along with pretty much every other disaster and economic crisis, should serve as a wake-up call. For every disaster that the global economy bounces back from, there’s a chance that it won’t. And eventually, that time will come. Just like rolling snake-eyes isn’t likely, it will inevitably happen if you roll the dice enough times.
This probably isn’t the end of the world. But this, our reliance on such a fragile world order as global capitalism, is how you get there. And if a sickly old man comes into the hospital with a blood clot in his lung, the doctor is going to strongly encourage some life-style changes. Maybe we should take the same advice now.
/Sebastian Lindberg 30/3-2021
WastedWords 