We are all Slave now.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I said this back in 2008: Until emerging market labor costs approach domestic labor costs, we will shed jobs and wages will lag. Hardly revelatory, I know. But worth repeating.

Investors see a timeline emerging where they'll have another 40 or so years to exploit cheap foreign labor (including frontier markets) while creating consumers as emerging markets become developed economies.

They're leaving the American consumer behind. They don't care about him. They figure he's fucked, and there'll be some populism, maybe some socialism, at home. But the CEOs' bet remains:

I can keep depressing labor costs domestically (to the extent I must have them at all), arbitraging labor costs abroad, and developing new consumers abroad to eclipse those I'm losing domestically.

This gets incredibly ugly in the next twenty years. Trump is but an hors d'oeuvre.

Oddly, this leaves open the possibility that having a few billion people enter the market will shrink its total size in dollar terms. Which may well happen.