Gillian Tett

And to my mind, the best way to understand the global economy today is that we're in a phase of what might be called geoeconomics, in the sense that

Economic policymaking is driven by national security and statecraft dynamics, which means that economics has become a derivative of politics, a consequence of politics, not the other way around, which is the story of our neoliberal globalizing period for the last few decades, when economics was seen as a self-independent thing, which could be so separated from politics that you could actually use tools from physics or maths to model it.

You can't do that anymore because politics keeps getting in the way.

And within that framework, the world is really shaped by a hegemonic fight, a fight between two hegemons' dominant powers, the US and China, over who's going to control the global economic system.

China has hegemonic power by virtue of controlling key supply chain nodes in industry and manufacturing, like rare earth minerals.

America has hegemonic power because it controls the dollar as the world's reserve currency in finance.

tech hegemony, AI hegemony is still being contested.

And to some degree, energy hegemony too, which is why we have this fight in the Middle East.

But that is the reality.

And it means that small countries, mid-sized countries need to get very smart about who they're going to ally with.

And if they're not going to ally with anyone and become a vassal state of China or the US, how they're going to build alliances with other small to medium countries to protect themselves.

That's a very good question.

And I think we're going to be seeing two things happening.

And by the way, I should say that David McWilliams, a great columnist here in Ireland, has written a lot about that as well.

And I'm hoping to do a podcast with him at some point soon.

Two things I think are going to be the story of the future.

Firstly, growing automation and AI usage, which hopefully will be developed safely.

But there's a battle going on around that right now.

But haven't Alicor been around forever, Gillian?

They have been around forever.