Future of Trade

Will Islamic Finance dominate economics and eventually global trade? Will this dominance of Islamic Finance be faster than the dominance of China and India in the future? Will Islamic Finance dictate the next global currency?

The full document can be found at: http://www.iftf.org/system/files/deliverables/SR-1140+IFTF+TYF+2008+Perspectives_sm.pdf

For your reading pleasure.

There’s this interesting article referenced from http://zerohedge.blogspot.com/2009/06/goldman-sachs-engineering-every-major.html, which pinned all the major market bubbles and busts to a major two-named investment bank, Goldman Sachs. It may somewhat exaggerate the role of Goldman Sachs, but it highlights the ways by which large financial institutions, or big entities for the matter, can manoeuvre itself to exploit/plunder by creating opportunities to do so or by taking advantage of current circumstances.

Now, the question is whether there really are some unnoticed, unknown and hidden manipulations of the economy that are taking place right now or will/can take place in the future, that will affect not just trade but also anything else that links to the economy… (essentially everything, I mean).

You may all have seen this, but here is a compilation of short essays mostly revolving around trade and global trade governance.

I haven’t read them all, and some of the ones I’ve read haven’t resonated that much with me, but there are some useful insights sprinkled in there.  One of my favourite essays is this one, which builds into the meta-question we talked about yesterday – the one that challenges the primacy of trade, our “trade-above-all” position.

The point that Tandon makes about the salience of power and how the West has been able to define the terms with which we view trade is interesting in the possibilities it throws up.  Perhaps one of the issues we ought to look at is the definition of tradable commodities and this idea of the value chain.  Who decides what gets commoditised and what is a “higher value-add” product or service? This has historically been defined by the West and the theory of comparative advantage.  Is this landscape going to shift in the future? Certainly the fallout from any food crisis would be instructive here.

Thoughts welcomed.