By: Editorial Team, StoneX Media
When the pandemic arrived, Western governments found they could not source masks and antibiotics at scale, because the productive capacity to make them had been systematically relocated to lower-cost countries over three decades. The semiconductor shortage that followed exposed the same structural fragility running through automotive, defense and consumer electronics manufacturing. The war in Ukraine then severed energy and agricultural supply chains that markets had treated as permanent fixtures of the global order. A fourth disruption, Strait of Hormuz tensions restricting oil, helium, fertilizers and industrial byproducts, compressed what might have been a generational rethinking into four consecutive years of systemic shock.
Vincent Deluard, Director of Global Macro Strategy at StoneX Group, tracks the policy decisions that reshape trade flows and asset prices before they reach consensus view. His deglobalization research frames the central question for investors. Are four clustered crises cyclical bad luck, or a structural break in how the global economy is organized?
"We were running out of masks and antibiotics and pretty much everything. It just showed the world how dependent we were on India, China and other places," notes Deluard. Three decades of offshoring had left the most advanced economies unable to produce essential goods at the moment of greatest need. What followed, semiconductor shortages, the war in Ukraine, Strait of Hormuz disruptions, was a sequence that exposed a different layer of the same structural dependency each time. By the fourth shock, the pattern had become impossible to dismiss. As Deluard puts it, "when you have four major crises within four years of each other, it seems like the beginning of a different era."
When the first Trump-era chip restrictions arrived in 2018, China was underprepared and had to negotiate. That experience catalyzed a state-directed push to build domestic semiconductor capacity, expected to take 20 years. It took six, and Deluard is direct about what that means. "The next time Trump tried the same trick, the Chinese said we produced our own, maybe not 100% good, but 90% good, and in most cases that was enough." That threshold covers the vast majority of industrial and consumer applications, stripping the US of the containment leverage it had relied on since 2018.
Deluard identifies two coherent responses to the China shock and places Europe in neither camp. The US path is confrontational, built around tariffs and domestic reindustrialization. However, across the Global South, cheap Chinese goods are treated as an opportunity. "Cheap tools, cheap cars, cheap solar panels. Let me get it and focus on what I do best." Meanwhile, Europe has no such clarity. China has been its primary export growth market for two decades, and as he adds, "you still sell a lot to China, whether it's the German cars or the French luxury goods, so we kind of end up with the short end of the stick."
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--- Written by Gus Farrow, Senior Manager, StoneX TV
--- Expert: Vincent Deluard, Director of Global Macro Strategy, StoneX Group
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Four major disruptions clustered within four years have forced governments worldwide to replace efficiency with resilience as the organizing principle of global trade. Vincent Deluard, StoneX Group Director of Global Macro Strategy, argues the global economy is now fragmenting into competing economic blocs, with Europe facing the most precarious position of all.
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