Chrystia Freeland

Tony Hsieh and Sanjay Madan wrote the program to create LinkExchange over a weekend. Before the following weekend, they had more than a dozen websites participating in their ad-sharing network. Over the next several weeks they worked frantically on the project. They refined their business in real time, learning—quickly!—from their mistakes. Less than a year later, the Harvard grads were offered $1 million (U.S.) for the company. Less than a year after that, they sold it for $265 million.

That was 1996. Since then, this story of development on the run has become commonplace. Hacker culture is now part of the broader culture: “beta test” is in the dictionary, and we accept innovative, albeit imperfect, beta releases even from multibillion-dollar global behemoths such as Google. We’re prepared to accept flaws because the tech revolution is progressing so quickly that it is usually better to be fast, and possibly wrong, than to try to be perfect and end up being slow. By the time your flawless product is released, it will likely be obsolete.

Technologists aren’t the only people operating in a rapidly changing, uncertain environment. Thanks both to the tech revolution and to globalization, that is true of all of us, including our governments. But, as Nobel-Prize winning economist Michael Spence argued at a private equity conference in Quebec City this week, emerging-market governments seem to be better at dealing with an unpredictable, volatile world than Western ones. They are like Silicon Valley entrepreneurs—willing to act swiftly, even if it means making mistakes. Leaders in the West are more like Detroit, reluctant to make bold moves until it is too late.

Part of the problem is the way we judge various types of mistakes. Spence argues that we make two types of mistakes—implementing a bad idea, and failing to act on a good one. If you are religiously minded, you could think of these as sins of commission and sins of omission. In stable times, sins of commission are probably worse. If your industry isn’t changing very much or if your country’s economy and the world economy are on an even keel, launching an expensive new product or government program that fails is probably more damaging than missing out on a great opportunity.

But in times of radical change, making a mistake is less risky than doing nothing at all. Spence thinks that emerging-market leaders understand this better than Western ones do, and he cited the examples of China’s fast and big stimulus program after the financial crisis and the Indian government’s willingness to act to burst asset bubbles.

The effectiveness of China’s government—especially in contrast with the paralysis of some Western nations—is often understood as evidence of the greater agility and decisiveness of authoritarian states. Spence’s analysis suggests another phenomenon could be at work. Emerging-market leaders—both the democrats and the dictators—are more accustomed than their Western counterparts to fast and disruptive change: They’ve experienced revolution, hyperinflation and devaluation. That may give them an edge in today’s volatile global economy.

Speaking at the same conference, Glenn Hutchins, co-founder and co-CEO of private equity firm Silver Lake in New York, said that in the corporate world the heat is shifting from Western companies to ones in the emerging markets. In the past, he said, developed Western economies were “the best crucible” for coming up with the most appealing inventions and the most effective business practices that were then exported to the rest of the world. But Hutchins, argued that emerging markets, with their rapid growth and demanding, low-income consumers, were turning out to be a tougher—and therefore better—hothouse for pace-setting companies than the West.

“It used to be that to be a global company you had to forge your business model in the crucible of competition in North America,” Hutchins said. “Today what you are seeing is companies that are growing up … whose business models are being forged in the crucible of competition in the emerging markets.”

American financiers haven’t been getting a lot of praise lately for their skill at capital allocation. But the speed with which the smartest investors, such as Hutchins, have grasped the shift of ideas to the emerging markets is impressive. Western politicians could do worse than to follow their example.

Following her chat with Glenn Hutchins at the Quebec City Conference about how globalization is changing corporate strategy, Chrystia interviewed NYU Economics Professor A. Michael Spence about how globalization is bringing about structural change in the world’s leading economies.

Spence, a 2001 winner of the Nobel Prize, chairs the Commission on Growth and Development, a multilateral effort to determine the practical conditions developing nations need to implement in order to achieve high growth. Given his expertise in emerging markets, it comes as no surprise that he thinks their future is bright. Spence was impressed with emerging markets’, especially China’s, brisk comeback following the capital flight and collapse in world trade that resulted from the financial crisis, and he thought they would be able to sustain their current growth rates:

American policymakers — and other Nobel Prize winners – are far less impressed with China’s resurgence, which they view as the result of the malevolent Chinese policy of keeping the yuan undervalued. Spence, however, argued that a one-off revaluation of the sort Washington demands will not only be bad for China, since it will destabilize most of the country’s export-oriented businesses. But it would also be bad for the global economy, since China is the engine for growth in large parts of the world. Instead, he said, China should focus on finding a way to make necessary structural changes while sustaining growth:

China is in a complex set of transitions, and one of the objectives of Chinese policy in navigating through this next five years, is going to be to increase domestic consumption and domestic incomes and let that drive the economy. Part of that will involve a reduction in excess savings in China… That’s in China’s interest; it’s also in the global economy’s interest. But what the global economy wants from China is success in making these structural changes in such a way that the growth is sustained. Chinese growth is an enormously important factor in the global economy and especially in the emerging markets. I mean, I think it’s widely known that the growth in Latin America–which is running at a rate of 4.5% real–is dependent on the growth in Asia.

Finally, Spence told Chrystia that as the United States looks for ways to pay for much-needed investments in education and infrastructure, it has much to learn China, particularly in the area of self-sacrifice:

I mean, look, I know people don’t get it in the Western world, so let me describe China thirty years ago. Thirty years ago China had a per capita income of $500, changed direction, and started saving at 35% and investing at 35%. OK? Now when you have a $400 income and you’re saving at 35%, that means you’re consuming 66% of $400. That is a huge commitment to the future as opposed to the present, right? Now you either make the commitment, as the Chinese did and all the other high-growth developing countries, or you don’t. And there’s lots of developing countries that haven’t made the commitment and the investment and savings rates are down around 15%, and you just can’t sustain high growth on that.

Posted by Peter Rudegeair

The theme of this year’s Quebec City Conference, a gathering of some of the world’s pre-eminent private-equity investors and venture capitalists, is innovation and globalization. Chrystia was in attendance earlier this morning and interviewed one of the event’s keynote speakers: Glenn Hutchins, co-founder of Silver Lake Partners, a $14 billion private-equity firm that focuses on the technology sector.

Hutchins’ remarks focused on the shift of economic power from the U.S. to China. He noted that as long as China grows much faster than the United States, multinational corporations will shift more of their business there. But his other insight was that for the first time businesses are tailoring products to the Chinese consumer rather than just selling the Chinese products developed for American consumers:

It used to be that to be a global company you had to forge your business model in the crucible of competition in North America–potentially Europe, but usually North America–where you define your business model, define your product set, define your customers, and then once you were successful there took it outside the world and essentially sold the same products and services to a strata of groups and people around the world who can consume it.  Today what you’re seeing is companies that are growing up–we talked a little earlier about Huawei being a very good example, but there are many, many others–whose business models are being forged in the crucible of competition in the emerging markets.

Hutchins gave an example from the mobile phone industry to illustrate his point. Americans are willing to pay upwards of $400 for Blackberries, iPhones, and other all-functional smartphones, but emerging-market consumers tend to spend only $20 on mobile phones. Instead of following the integrated business model of RIM or Apple, mobile-phone makers are forced to develop a new model that uses many small workshops across the developing world to keep phones both cheap and customizable.

Staying on the topic of mobile phones, Hutchins called the rapid development of mobile wireless broadband the “biggest technology trend of our lifetimes.” The technology revolution that took off with the PC and Microsoft, continued with the network and Cisco, and grew to include the internet and Google, has reached a new phase with today’s mobile phones. He gave some numbers to make his point:

Twenty-five or thirty years into the PC trend there are about a billion PCs in use in the world today. There are about 1.5 billion television sets, about 1.2 billion telephones. I think there are only 2 billion bank accounts.  There are already 5 billion subscrpitions to wireless handsets just in the nascent days of this.  So it’s three to five times the size of the addressable market of these technology trends that are twenty-five to thirty years in penetration.  It’s enormous potential.

Posted by Peter Rudegeair

While Laura Tyson thinks America has no intention to inflate away its debt, former World Bank President Jim Wolfensohn said in an interview today he believes inflation and a devaluation of the dollar are “inevitable”:

Countries that get into heavy debt find that other countries realize that their currency isn’t as valuable as it was because they owe so much money. So the currency devalues. As it devalues, you have an inflation. And it is my judgment that that is likely to be a very important element in how we unwind this whole issue of debt to income levels in the United States.

Wolfensohn has a similarly gloomy outlook for Africa, a continent whose development he championed during his tenure at the World Bank. African institutions and governance are less efficient and effective than their counterparts in India and China, he says, and growth will suffer as a result:

I think [a coming African miracle] will happen in some few countries, but I do not think it will be anywhere near the speed that it needs to be. And it worries me enormously that you’ll have 2 billion out of 9 billion people on the planet so far behind. And they’re not running around carrying spears and hunting — they all have cellular radios, they’re all linked with the rest of the world. It’s a very different Africa, and I think we spend far too little time thinking about our responsibilities to Africa but also the role that Africa is going to play in the world of my children.

Posted by Peter Rudegeair

U.S. monetary policy is flooding the world with cheap liquidity, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz said at the Canadian Consulate’s “Invest in Canada” luncheon yesterday. Our current policy, he explained, acts as a competitive devaluation against emerging-market currencies. Stiglitz added that he is worried about the prospect of a currency war but conceded that there’s not anything we can do about it.

Stiglitz went on to say that what the Fed is doing is not so different from China’s interventions in the foreign-exchange markets and accused the U.S. central bank of undermining global financial market integration and only acting out of a sense of guilt:

The Fed, having created the problem in the first place, feels guilty and says, ‘We should do something to get us out of the mess.’ [...]   [Emerging markets] see this as competitive devaluation of the United States.  We say, ‘No, no.  We’re not engaged in competitive devaluation.  That’s something China does.  We don’t do those kinds of things.  We don’t manipulate our currency.  All we do is ordinary monetary policy.’  But the consequence of ordinary monetary policy is competitive devaluation.

Appearing alongside Stiglitz was BMO chief economist Sherry Cooper, who forecasted that the U.S. would see moderate growth of 2-2.5 percent in the second half of 2010. She was encouraged by recent indications that the deleveraging process for households and businesses is beginning to slow, but noted that that would not be enough to restore job growth. “Fiscal stimulus is essential,” Cooper said. She thought no new government spending in the U.S. would be passed, though, as deficits have become the focal concern of Washington, even as the Treasury is able to borrow at rock-bottom rates.

Stiglitz weighed in that it was a “total mystery” to him why the Democrats are not pursuing fiscal stimulus. “I am disappointed,” in President Obama, he said. In his view the Republicans’ invoking the language of deficits “captured the public’s mind.” Ultimately, he thinks that efforts to downsize the government by reducing deficits will backfire as the slower growth will shrink tax revenues and necessitate more government borrowing to keep basic services running.

Get ready for the next wave of globalization. The emergence of the emerging markets is old news, of course: after all, Tom Friedman discovered that the world was flat back in 2005. But even as much of the developed world is struggling with weak consumer demand and stubbornly high levels of unemployment, the emerging market countries are writing a new chapter in the story of the global economy.

We are accustomed to thinking of our economic relationship with the countries Fareed Zakaria describes as “the rest” as a two-way exchange between west and east or north and south: western companies setting up call centers in India or manufacturing their goods in China, for instance; and, more recently, savings-rich emerging market economies, especially China, investing in US treasuries, or Russian oligarchs buying London mansions.

That was Globalisation 1.0. In the next stage, some of the biggest deals and some of the most important capital flows will be between emerging markets, with no need to stop-over at Heathrow or JFK. Forget the last decade’s race-to-the-bottom rivalry between Wall Street and the City of London to be the world’s financial capital; the new motto of the moneymen, as one Manhattan banker put it to me this week, is “Mumbai, Dubai, Shanghai or goodbye.”

One place you can watch Globalisation 2.0 gathering pace is on the 49th floor of the ‘C’ tower in the high-tech high-rise complex the locals call Moskva City, on the banks of the Moskva river, half a mile downstream from Russia’s White House, where Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is currently installed. The fancy modern furniture (the “Ziricote veneer,” a sign informs visitors, is “sourced in Chile”) and contemporary art are standard New York hedge fund decor. But Stephen Jennings, the 50 year-old New Zealander who receives visitors here, is betting on a world that by-passes the west altogether.

Jennings is a founder and CEO of the Renaissance Group, a Moscow-based financial company with ambitions to be the premier investment bank for intra-emerging market capital flows. As Jennings put it, he wants Renaissance “to provide the plumbing”.

Last year, Jennings went home to Wellington to deliver the annual Trotter lecture, a stage he used to lay out his vision of the rise of indigenous emerging market players. “Multinationals’ advantages in terms of know-how and capital have been neutralized by their inability or reluctance to grow explosively in complex, foreign environments,” he argued. “In many emerging markets and in an increasing number of industries, the market leaders have local roots. The largest metals group in the world is Indian. The largest aluminum group in the world is Russian … The fastest-growing and largest banks in China, Russia and Nigeria are all domestic.”

Jennings knows that emerging markets are “highly idiosyncratic.” But, he told me, some of the savviest emerging market champions seem to be discovering they have more in common with each other than with their erstwhile tutors in the west: “they have analogous business models and states of development … they are all culturally attuned to these fast-growing markets.”

One of the best examples is eight floors above Jennings’ office: DST, or Digital Sky Technologies, the Moscow-based internet investor which made a global splash with a landmark deal with Facebook. Earlier this year, DST formed a three-way partnership with Naspers, the South African media company, and Tencent, the Chinese internet firm. Together the three hope to dominate the emerging market internet space. Another seminal intra-emerging market deal was the acquisition by Bharti, the Indian telecom giant, of most of the African properties of Kuwait-based Zain.

A high-tech executive who lives in California and has close ties to Bharti told me the Indian firm has a competitive advantage over western rivals in what he believes will be the explosively growing African market: “They know how to provide mobile phones so much more cheaply than we do. In a place like Africa, how can western firms compete?”

It would be wrong, of course, to count the west out. Multinational behemoths like GE, Coca Cola and HSBC have been quick to understand the opportunity emerging markets represent and agile in adapting to local conditions. The reliability and the reputation of these global brands can make them appealing partners for even the most aggressive emerging market entrepreneurs. And when it comes to paradigm-shifting innovation, western companies like Apple and Facebook are still setting the international agenda.

In fact, it may be western politicians rather than western CEOs who will be blindsided by this coming wave of globalization. Lackluster economic growth and persistent unemployment are fueling protectionist sentiment in many developed countries, especially the US. At a time when emerging market countries and companies are getting better and better at doing business with one another, that impulse may not only be self-destructive. Even worse, it could be futile.