Harry Broadman Navigating Global Markets to Capitalize on Growth Opportunities and Fend Off Risks

• Sustainability Is Far More Than Just A Corporate Aspiration
• Biden’s Antitrust Policy Mustn’t Throw Out The Baby With The Bathwater
• The Road to Reinventing “Corporate Purpose” is Full of Reckless Stakeholders and Potholes
• COVID Is Notthe End of Globalization; It Will Even Spur Newer Global Supply Chains
• When Too Much Corporate Social Responsibility Is Too Good To Be True
• Naiveté About CFIUS' National Security Policy Towards Foreign Investment In The U.S.
• Just Where Is The Growth in the Global Economy?
• Corporate Boards' Oversight Of Cyber Risks Is Too Passive
• Will China's 'One-Belt, One Road' Become 'A Bridge to Nowhere’?
• Infrastructure May Not Be Sexy; But Bring Sexy Back!
• India Is The Tortoise To China’s Hare
• Brexit Could Be The UK's Gift To A Revitalized EU
• Africa, The Continent Of Economic Misperceptions
• Will Putin Succeed in Recreating the Soviet Empire?

Decisions to block foreign investments in the US on national security grounds by CFIUS have been relatively rare, but are now rapidly increasing under a new law and an aggressive Executive Branch. CFIUS decisions are highly subject to political pressures and tactics by corporate rivals. It is not a legal issue and law firms are increasingly only partially adept at CFIUS strategic advice. Many investors and advisors—at home and abroad, especially in China—are surprisingly naive about the process.

Traditional CSR activities are becoming a dying breed. And the faster the better. Rarely do the deeds match the words.  Worse still, in some cases, beneficiaries actually are made worse off. Moreover, the same is beginning to happen to CSR sponsors.  In fact, some companies are become more ingenious concealing overseas bribes through disguised ESG spending and CSR initiatives. It is past the time for a comprehensive "CSR Reset." 

Trump's tariff threats with Beijing ignore the 1.3-billion-ton ‘Gorilla in the Room’: China hasn't lived up to it most fundamental commitments made in 2001 when the country sought and was granted accession to the WTO. It's time for a U.S.-led coalition to challenge China frontally on this.  Tariffs are the wrong weapons to produce the hoped for results inside China, and dealing with China bilaterally, rather than multilaterally with all the major trading partners taking on China collectively, is puny ammo.  

A long-run structural transformation—not a transitory cyclical change—in the global economy has been underway for a decade and a half. Rather than the United States, it is the emerging markets that have become the engines of world economic growth.  Growth in emerging markets has been running at twice the rate of the advanced countries. And this pattern is unlikely to change any time soon. These facts are surprising to most American—if not to most European and Japanese—businesses and investors. And for those whom they are not, it will be contended that the risks of doing business in these locales are far too high. However, the risk-adjusted returns in many of these cases are actually—or could be made to be—far higher than generally perceived. The real risk is not understanding what is happening in these markets and ignoring the opportunities for growth they represent.

The recent global financial crisis and the ongoing softness in much of the advanced countries—the EU, Japan and the U.S.—have shaken businesses’, investors’ and policymakers’ perceptions and confidence of a return to historic levels of stable growth. The fact that many emerging markets have been growing at annual rates two to three times those of the industrialized economies over the past two decades appears to confirm that the world marketplace is actually undergoing a structural transformation. What are the fundamental sources of these phenomena? Is this a one-time change, owning to a longer than normal business cycle that has yet to run its full course, or is it part of a long-term secular change?  What new risks and opportunities are presented? Harry Broadman’s on-the-ground insights about the genesis and implications of these shifts—and his surprising bullish view—will alter how audiences think about the future of the U.S. and the world economies and will shape the decisions they make.