Every Asian Tycoon we’ve examined got their start in a world with tariffs. If they could thrive in that world and adapt to uncertainty, so can we. Here’s how to calibrate that properly.
I focused this essay on the calibration piece of doing business in a changing world order, with less free trade and with more tariffs.
But the concrete recommendations, are, I think, fairly straightforward:
I should note that investor-types are more on the ball on these sorts of things, and I welcome further recommendations. But, assuming you do international business as an operator, these things matter more in more uncertain times.
tariffs, especially high tariffs, mean smuggling and other forms of illegal activity. People pay 10% tariffs but not 100% tariffs. You will get more signal from the cocaine trade and the smuggling of Nvidia chips to China via Singapore I suspect.
Sssh … not so loud!
Joking aside, the Nvidia chips issue is interesting. The US must’ve leaned on Singapore, because MTI acted:
Typically, such background information is incidental to the primary narrative of the biography or case. It’s only after you read multiple biographies that all occur in the same period that the background begins to adds up.
One way to accelerate the adding up of background information is to look at historical timelines for pointers to relevant events
Those used to be recorded in oversized paper reference books, but now there are Gregorian calendar year entries on Wikipedia
Here’s 1973:
I might point out that the torrent of iconic pop albums in the early 70s is a great signal. A lot of people, most in a narrow age range, were recording pop albums. That they were willing to do so and that they had so many fans implies a lot about the underlying economic conditions: the opportunity cost of bombing around in a VW van and playing bars was low enough to pay. It’s usually not in strong economic times, or when the average demographic skews much older or younger. The 1920s, a decade that rhymes in many ways with the early 70s, was another explosively creative time for art and literature.
Well, that explains a LOT. I used to complain to friends that they don’t make music like they used to — that maybe you needed a shitty world to write good songs about.
I’m glad to see there’s a more … systems based explanation for why 70s music was so good.
Another possibly significant development: the kind of live music clubs that used to work like semi-pro leagues for up-and-coming US musicians are nearly all defunct. Better opportunities, probably.
You might want to take a look at the fine business book “The Manual” (1988) by the KLF, which tells you how to have a number one hit single, full refund if you don’t.
It starts by saying you must be unmployed, back when you could just about live on unemployment benefits in the UK. Even earlier than that in the 1970s there was a raggae band called “USB40” after the unemployment benefit form you had to fill in.
Shitty world, and time and some money…
I really want to second this recommendation — I just went through all the Wikipedia pages for the 70s and realise it’s way more effective in putting together a picture of the events of the decade.
With one caveat: I think that one thing that’s missing is that it doesn’t capture some aspects of the lived experience. For instance, I didn’t realised until Sarah Paine mentioned (roughly at the timestamp below) that “the Soviets were really good at putting out propaganda and keeping bad news hidden, and the West always seemed like it was in chaos, given we had a free press, so it felt like we were losing for most of the Cold War.”
This makes perfect sense now that she said it, but I had never thought about that aspect of the Cold War.
Another example of this: I didn’t realise, until @shawn told me that his grandfather in Singapore stocked up on canned food, that much of the region was scared of Communist Vietnam post-Vietnam war.
Seconded. Event lists are just pointers. To get to lived experience one needs contemporaneous correspondence and diaries, like the letter from Wilbur Wright to his sister in law I pointed to a while back
Biography alone won’t get there because it’s retrospective and doesn’t capture the uncertainty of a moment, but a good or better biography will have a good bibliography with pointers to these contemporaneous sources. And more and more of these sources are digitized and available to find
That, and world events lists are just that, world events. Whereas the lived experience is heavily localized, a very locally filtered experience of such events. My parents were in their late teens and early twenties in the 1970s, but their lived experience in communist East Germany behind the Iron Curtain was very different from those of the parents of my West German friends. Which again is quite different from what Americans at the time would have experienced, or again from folks in Singapore.
The Wikipedia-EN page for 1973 also is quite different from the Wikipedia-DE page (i.e. the German Wikipedia). Oddly enough, it doesn’t just leave out events with mostly relevance to German-speaking countries, but also Anglosphere events, such as the US Supreme Court decision of Roe vs. Wade on abortion rights on Jan 22.
Yeah, events that are connected to things where public discourse is “hot” in the U.S. often get vandalized on higher traffic Wikipedia-EN pages. The Roe decision is on the month/day index page for January 1973, and will be on and off the year page over time
UB40 was on the bands that was randomly popular in India - in the 90s 
what a fascinating backstory!
Dunno if this should be a new thread or something but I found this line fascinating:
The liquid portion of the capital he holds in gold, because he fears counter-party risk.
Specifically, my naive understanding is that unless he physically custodies the gold himself (very difficult and costly due to the security and internal abuse ramifications) then ipso facto he’s taking on counter-party risk since whoever custodies the gold on his behalf is his counter-party…
What am I missing here?
Yep, he leases a vault and custodies the gold there. 
It’s in Switzerland, I think. Sometimes he visits. I think he’s still exposed to whoever it is who actually custodies that gold for him, but I’m sure it’s some Swiss institution run by a fifth generation family member as chairman who eats fondue with him once every year or something.
(I made that last one up but you get the gist; everything he does has this flavour to it).