What would distinguish genuine structural diversification from displacement or rerouting? I

mean, you started off with the data availability point and also then then honed in, I think, quite rightly on why those data gaps matter.

I think one of the takeaways from the COVID period and onwards is we know remarkably, and I say we as in third parties, whether it's government or analysts or including, of course, the specialists in the media, we know very little about how companies are actually organizing their cross-border operations.

And of course, those companies often want to, they've built fantastic business models around these cross-border operations and may not want to share too much of that information.

and so we are left reading the tea leaves which i think is exactly where you're going with this right which is we have a partial picture we have to read the tea leaves about you know what what we're actually seeing in the data and then i think the other thing of course in any situation like this is um go and talk to the key decision makers and ask them how they see the world and the decisions that they expect to take.

So let me try and unpack for you what I hear, what I see in the data and then what I hear as well.

So when it comes to the movement of factories back to, say, the United States, I see very little of this in the data.

So when policymakers say they are, quote unquote, de-risking from China, how do we distinguish genuine reduction of vulnerability from geopolitical rerouting while also avoiding the opposite mistake of responding to the fear of Chinese exposure faster than the evidence warrants?

Mm

... uh, given this task? And that then leads me to the third part of my answer, which is the appetite for transparency, um, has greatly diminished over time.

And we're not in the era where we were after World War II when we set up all these technocratic institutions and it was recognized that, uh, you know, we can fight about many things, but let's not fight about the facts.We are not in that era now.

Why are we not in that era? Because I think governments have, have, in, in this time put a much greater, uh, premium on, uh, being able to reserve action, independent action, unilateral action by themselves, and they don't want people looking over their shoulders as they do it.

So then that begs the question, why is it that the case? And it's because, of course, we live in a much more contested era where we have essentially a, a race for global primacy between the United States and China.

We have distrust e- even within the West, certainly as, as the US has gone off the reservation as far as economic policy is concerned.

Mm

... which we will see.