Alexandru Georgescu

Economist, Research Fellow with the EURISC Foundation, studying geopolitics, international security issues and critical infrastructure protection, currently in a Ph.D. research program on the latter subject

Evergrande – a Test of China

Alexandru Georgescu

For several months, the financial world has been watching with concern the evolution of Evergrande Group in China, whose financial problems have conjured up the specter of an economic contagion that can destabilize not only China's opaque financial system but also that of a world in which China has assumed a central role of the economic engine. China's biggest real estate company is, in some ways, emblematic of its explosive business model in the world's most dynamic economy. The company has more than 770 projects in 200 Chinese cities and has nearly two million apartments to deliver to buyers who, in some cases, have pre-paid the delivery price in the overheated real estate market of this country. The non-delivery of these units could generate social disturbances and affect the trust of the population in the economic governance of the country provided by the Communist Party, whose "Chinese dream" and "national regeneration" have an important economic component based on ensuring the prosperity of the common Chinese. After a series of delays in due bond payments, Evergrande found last-minute resources to make some payments and resume construction, sparking theories of government involvement. At the same time, even policies of the government precipitated this crisis against the background of the attempt to restore financial order in an economy characterized by speculative bubbles, primarily in real estate. More

Italy’s New Populist Government, in Context

Alexandru Georgescu

Contrary to many pundits, many of them hysterics with crypto-fascist hallucinations, I do not believe the victory of Giorgia Meloni has a meaningful significance at the European level. There were many voices anticipating an advance of populist political movements in the context of economic difficulties and the energy crisis. The same voices are certainly right in a way – voters tend to lean towards anti-system, radical or just populist parties when they are not satisfied with the existing situation and pessimistic about the future. However, the mania of the European mainstream for populist prediction is an artifact of the media cycle, since any event must be exploited to the maximum for sensationalism and to introduce an anxious sense of vertigo in the public, to maximize clicks and views. More

Global Initiatives and Supply Chains

Alexandru Georgescu

The security of global supply chains is a topic that the global public is actively debating for the first time since the OPEC crisis of 1973.There have been incidents since then that have highlighted the vulnerabilities produced by this stage of globalization, but none with universal and widespread impact until the coronavirus pandemic, which was followed up by the war in Ukraine starting in February 2022 and the sanctions levied against Russia. Two contradictory phenomena occurred during the pandemic – on the one hand, border closures and measures to reserve domestic production of medical supplies and equipment produced supply crises. On the other side, when restrictions were eased, global transportation thawed and the economy recovered, several nations experienced a crisis in both domestic and global logistical capacity (the USA and the UK being the best-known cases). Notable recent examples from 2020-2022 include: the oil tanker crisis waiting off the US coast due to a lack of oil storage capacity in the context of declining demand (leading to negative oil prices in futures markets); the international freight transport capacity crisis; the semiconductor crisis, which forced production cuts in the automotive industry, including in Romania; the raw materials crisis for the pharmaceutical industry, felt for example in India; the plastics production crisis; domestic fuel and freight supply crises in countries such as the UK; US problems in unloading container ships and ensuring multimodal transport, etc. There are several causes for these events, including government restrictions, consumer elasticity, the influence of economic uncertainty on business decisions to cut back on transportation fleets (especially road freight), the pandemic’s effects on employee health, and more. They all have one thing in common: the pandemic’s role as a persistent source of uncertainty and a force disrupting international and domestic economic connections. More

Trump and the Paris Agreement

Alexandru Georgescu

The negotiations for the Paris Agreement were concluded at the 21st Conference of Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in December 2015, and it entered into force in October 2016. It has been signed by 195 countries and ratified by 144. President Trump has repeatedly spoken out against the Paris Agreement and the “climate change industry” and made it a campaign plank to exit the Agreement. For all of its apparent randomness, there is one obvious trend in his Cabinet appointments, past and present, which is to appoint people who exhibit an ideological break from the policies of the past Administration or who are skeptical of the worldview of their respective agencies. Naming a “climate change skeptic” and pro-business advocate, Scott Pruitt, to the Environmental Protection Agency was one such move. Naming a China and free trade skeptic, Robert Lighthizer, to be US Trade Representative (a Cabinet level appointment) was another. And there are still more examples, such as the failed nomination of fast-food CEO Andrew Puzder as Secretary of Labor. More

Ethnogenesis in Davos

Alexandru Georgescu

The Davos World Economic Forum, established in 1971, is emblematic of our era for its courtship of notoriety, as opposed to the old Bilderberg Group’s more discrete operation, along with a calculated transparency regarding the power of those attending and the topics of high interest on a global level that are discussed (among some trivial diversions). If you are rich and affluent, then you will be present at Davos, and if you are present at Davos, then it is confirmed that you are rich and affluent. The fact that Davos is a phenomenon in itself, which transcends its components, is confirmed by the emergence of numerous events that imitate the Davos style or that take place simultaneously, just three streets away, in the ghetto of the millionaires in the alpine resort, so that the striving classes can also experience a counterfeit Davos for signalling their social status. When the famous Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington were silently confronting each other, the former with the theory of “the end of history” and the latter arguing for “an end of the beginning” (in Winston Churchill’s words) through the clash of civilizations, Huntington was the one proven right by history, not only through the rise of militant Islamism, but also after inventing the atavistic formula of the “Davos Man”. This subspecies of Homo sapiens sapiens has no national loyalties; he is able to consider himself a citizen of the world and to be inclined towards thinking globally and acting in this direction. More

Worrying about Wetware

Alexandru Georgescu

There is a silent revolution taking place in robotics, and automation in general. It is related not just the capabilities, but also the accessibility and affordability of the new means of production. Greater productivity is one of the results and the one most robo-evangelists cling to. The other is uncertainty. Our entire social and economic systems are predicated on working for income. This affects not just the life rhythms which human redundancy purports to improve, but also social status, consumption capacity and self-esteem. We will have to see if the revolution actually delivers on its promises, but even a partial result could lead to a hair-raising social upheaval, regardless of whether the final result is a net positive or not. In discussing past industrial revolutions, we often gloss over decades of labor unrest, migrations, community destruction and uncertainty in a few lines, with an intellectual carelessness more appropriate to Communist rationalizing of the piles of dead than humanist interest in the general welfare. More

The Course of Empire

Alexandru Georgescu

We no longer cultivate an understanding of history and art. Western democracies are increasingly relentless in denying their ancestors. The present sneers at the past with a sense of superiority that comes from simply being the present, with the ancient dead having no recourse or appeal against judgment rooted in contemporary bias. No other kind of ignorance indulges in current Western levels of self-flattery. More

Plato’s Cave, American Edition

Alexandru Georgescu

Plato’s cave is a place where people sit chained seeing the shadows cast on the wall by a fire and thinking that that is reality. Escaping the cave requires a rough ascent into sunlight to experience reality as it is. A weird and troubling phenomenon is taking place in the political battles surrounding Donald Trump’s Presidency that will reverberate beyond this embattled term, as it sets a new low of public discourse which future political leaders and scandalmongers will find it easier to match. While there is a necessity for strategic ambiguity in politics, it has become impossible to distinguish reality from theater, especially since the media has decided to become a player and not an arbiter. More

Considerations on North Korea

Alexandru Georgescu

The “hermit kingdom” of North Korea is back in the news, at the center of a new round of exchanges of bellicose declarations, underpinned by failed tests for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that, nevertheless, show the impressive progress of the country’s indigenous program. The missile capabilities are meant to provide a delivery device for the country’s nuclear weapons, the other great program beset by a string of failures and shoestring successes. Western observers are now attempting to “read the tea leaves” in order to predict when the country will have achieved the ability to threaten the continental United States, while the threat to its immediate neighbors, South Korea and Japan, remains real but uncertain. The weapon systems involved are complex and, as has been suggested of the recent failed test, prone to cyber-attacks and sabotage through the component supply chain. Rather, the immediate threat to a country like South Korea is all of the conventional artillery pointed at its capital, which would make flattening Seoul in a matter of hours a foregone proposition. With Donald Trump at the helm of the US and sending carrier groups in the vicinity, a man given to grand gestures as negotiating bids, the latest tensions with North Korea seem momentous, as if some form of denouement to the regime in Pyongyang is looming. The form it would take is critical to its neighbors, who fear both the ways in which the country can lash out violently, as well as the consequences of a collapse of power, such as millions of refugees trying to cross land borders or internecine warfare. More

The Genesis of a President and the Four Horsemen of the Establishment's Trumpocalypse

Alexandru Georgescu

Donald Trump’s stunning electoral upset presages a new political realignment within the United States’ two-party system. Hopefully, the end of such a process will be a more competitive system, in which the preferences of the large and increasingly heterogenous American population are better aggregated and reflected in the resulting public policies. More

Henderson’s Last Warning – in Victory, Possible Defeat

Alexandru Georgescu

The death of Dr. Donald Henderson in August 2016 went largely unremarked by the wider world. Instead of the evening news, I learned of it from an Economist obituary but, by rights, the event should have been a global opportunity to meditate on his life’s work, which involved saving at least a hundred million people from death by smallpox and another three hundred million from the disfiguring effects of infection. In 1966, the World Health Organization (WHO) was given the task of getting rid of smallpox. Donald Henderson had already been studying the disease in over 50 countries. By 1977, Henderson was observing the last natural recorded case of smallpox and, by 1980, the WHO had announced the success of the Smallpox Eradication Program (SEP), something previously thought unachievable. More

Obama’s Last Hurrahs

Alexandru Georgescu

With just a few weeks to go until the inauguration of President-Elect Trump’s Administration and his destined-to-be-controversial cabinet, President-Eject Obama (as political pundit Steve Sailer put it) has been and is challenging notions of what a “lame duck” President should do with his time. He has been extraordinarily active in taking actions which Donald Trump would not entertain so lightly. In this, he is hoping to either buttress a lackluster political legacy or to force Trump’s hand with a series of “fait accompli”. More