Four Asian Tigers

But at the end of the 1940s, China went through a civil war that led to communist rule, and prompted the US and their allies to provide ample funding to set up strong, capitalist economies to reinforce and maintain a containment zone around Chinese communism.

Today, Taiwan still acts as a shatterbelt between China and the West, meaning it's strategically located between two large powers, the US's allies and China.

So by the 1980s, Taiwan was considered one of the Asian Tigers, which was a term used for Asian economies that experienced intense growth and industrialization after World War II.

That's a lot of land grabbing and economic movement.

And all that just in this one island.

I don't mean that in a negative sense, but household debt as a share of GDP has inched up, which means that buffer of savings available is shrinking.

So if we have to invest to grow and the likes of China, the East Asian Tigers, they had routinely massive amounts of capital had to go into before they would build up their manufacturing base.

Foreign capital is an obvious source, but that can't be the only source of capital that we'll get to grow ourselves way out of these challenges.

Where will all the money come from?

Um, The whole thing about the reason that the system survived 2008 comes down to three simple words, flight to safety.

The way that the US dollar system worked, say in the past tense, was basically that if a normal country, let's say like take the Asian tigers, which went into crisis in 1997.

They had many of the problems that the United States had in 2008.

They'd overborrowed on external markets to run a trade deficit, to prop up living standards artificially.

So their currency was too high, basically.

And that generated an internal bubble, a property bubble in the Asian Tigers.

It was very, very similar to the 2008 crisis.

And of course, when that property bubble blew up, their banks blew up in Indonesia and all these places.

So not only did the Soviet Union want to just be normal after 1991, but the process of catching up was at least taking place across Asia.

It was taking place in China, in India, in the so-called Asian Tigers, which were the smaller economies, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

It was taking place in Southeast Asia, though delayed by the Vietnam War and by the disasters that ensued from that.

And to my mind, that was completely natural.

Um, And he took a lot of these protectionist ideas back to Europe, and Germany ended up adopting heavy protectionist policies, arguably through the influence of List.

Then, of course, you had... you know, the Asian tigers and Japan also adopt these, uh, protectionist policies.

Now they're all a bit distinct in the exact system.

America, as we talked about in the internal market was probably a lot freer than those other economies, but you still get the sense of these other nations adopting, um, protectionist policies.