Financial gain really at the heart of political policies

It does not take a global economist to realise that this week’s unfolding events have brought a clash of ideologies into dangerously opposed orbits.

At the World Economic Forum – lampooned as a meeting of the world’s richest people in Switzerland, where they debate on how to get even richer – China’s President Xi Jinping took the podium in his debut appearance to warn against blaming globalisation for the world’s financial ills.

This globalisation, Xi insisted, was inevitable and irreversible. He hinted that international companies may soon launch listings on the Beijing stock exchange. In short, an inclusive message.

By the end of this week, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the new American president. And while it is too soon to judge where his foreign policy will settle, his campaign sabre rattled over putting the US’s concerns over jobs as the prime consideration. Not really a blueprint for anything other than tearing down the existing order to build a theoretical fence and keeping the world at bay.

At London’s Lancaster House and, one must add, in a less confrontational fashion than Trump’s, Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May spelt out a vision for Brexit that would seek the “greatest possible access” to the market on the UK’s withdrawal, while holding a strong hand in the limiting of immigration.

It is interesting that May would espouse similar ideals as the Chinese president on one hand, while producing a soft-pedal version of Trump’s near xenophobia on the other. In other words, “lock the doors, but let the cheques in through the letterbox”.

But it is on such self-serving national nuances that political policies are forged. In essence, though, there is one certainty: at the root of the tangential rhetoric echoes the ringing tone of a cash register.

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