How the Modest will Inherit Global Trade - Part III:

  • William Laraque, Managing Director at US-International Trade Services

  • 31.07.2015 01:00 am
  • undisclosed
Democracy is essential to economic growth because it makes entrepreneurship exportable. I will elaborate on this shortly. The universal search for higher ROI is rewarded by investment in global trade. The reward comes not only as a result of a higher quality of life for the importing and exporting countries. The exporting country creates jobs, high paying jobs as a result of investment at the entrepreneurial level. Most of the new businesses created in the U.S., in 2014, were created by Latinas, Latino women. These women created an average of 2.9 jobs in the process of creating their own enterprises. The immigrant provides the overarching cultural connection to international trade and to global economic development, provided that capital, education, respect and democracy are added to the "secret sauce."
 
Capital can be provided through credit unions but first they must organize so that as an operations consortium of the combined credit unions can afford to access SWIFT funds transfer, trade settlement and other export control compliance services. 
 
Honore'de Balzac said that there is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come. "The time has come the walrus said..."
 
Freud said that all of humanity shares two basic desires; love and work. As society has evolved, a third and concomitant desire has evolved as well. It is the desire for wealth in the pursuit of happiness. This fundamental desire if not guided by moral principles, turns into greed. Joseph Stiglitz expresses this in economic terms. To paraphrase Stiglitz, in the U.S., the creation of wealth is mainly the result of market distortions which consist of taking wealth from others. This is of course also true of oligarchies, other plutocracies, dictatorships, tyrannies and nations where corruption trumps market efficiency. Democracy empowers the investor to assist the modest, the immigrant entrepreneur whose cultural connections give rise to global trade opportunities. Corruption and greed impede the fulfillment of these opportunities. The culturally-connected entrepreneur is already financially underserved. Just as propaganda and noise impede the flow of information, greed, corruption and oligarchy impede the flow of capital to where it does the most good.
 
Technological advances provide an opportunity to bring economically transformative products to every part of the globe. Cell phones and mobile banking means that my NY based client can process orders placed in Kenya through WhatsApp, can receive payment via M-Pesa and communicate seamlessly during the entire trade process by cell phone. 
Financing the local entrepreneur makes possible the transfer of beneficial technologies and services to the foreign countries to which they are culturally attached. Importantly, this transfer gives rise to entrepreneurship in the target country and the fostering of bilateral trade. This import/export trade makes currency manipulation unnecessary. 
 
Morality and selflessness in global trade are ideas whose time has come. 
The ROI of international companies is much higher than that of purely domestic businesses.
 
By investing in credit unions, the investor can do better than well by doing good. By investing in global trade in such a way that political, economic, cybersecurity risks as well as the distortive risks of greed and corruption are covered provides for enhanced and secure ROI.

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