16-05-2025
Tariffs Got You Down? Brush Off the 1930s Playbook.
Now that Donald Trump has rendered irrelevant the iconic books that guided corporate thinking in recent decades — who still believes that the world is flat? — businesspeople are desperately casting about for guidance. In a recent column, I argued that US managers have much to learn from emerging markets. Today, I want to add that managers everywhere have much to learn from the interwar years.
The interwar period — marked by the turmoil of the 1920s and the depression of the 1930s — was the last great period of deglobalization. The century between the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 was an era of pell-mell globalization. International trade grew by 3.5% a year. The gaps in commodity prices between continents declined by four-fifths. Sixty million Europeans migrated to the US. In 1913, foreign direct investment was 9% of world output, a proportion that wasn't equaled until the 1990s.
