This morning before I download and listen to yesterday’s Podcast files from Davos Forum website, I listened to the podcast of the panel titled Update 2007: The Global Economy again, I was impressed by those panelists’ insights. While most of those panelists are favoring the prospect of a soft landing, there is at least one panelist insists a hard landing might be inevitable. Whether soft landing, hard landing, or even no landing, the toughest challenge is the unbalancing, and the gap is becoming wider and wider, I shall address the solution on how to close the gap in my next post. For now, let me elaborate to you why we should be extremely cautious on the challenge ahead

When we consider economical issues that may impact our growth, such as growing trade deficits of those developed countries, energy conservation problems in those emerging countries and developing countries, please do not forget there are quite a few hot spots in the world, such as Middle East, East Asia and Part of Africa, which instability might trigger bigger regional wars or even the next war. If that kind of incidents happens, forget about soft landing and hard landing at all, since there will be no landing at all, no matter how skilled your pilots are, and no matter which advanced space shuttle you are riding with. No doubt politics is one of the most important drivers of economics in any country under any system, without political stability, talking about economic growth is like joking around at a cocktail party during weekends. Let me give you an example on how weak the New Economy we are working with is, several weeks ago, several earthquake occurred at Taiwan Straight, and that broke quite a few backbones made in fibers that connecting the US and China. Our outsourcing business relies on the Internet very much, since most of our clients are headquartered in the US, so you may imagine the significant reduction of our staffs’ productivity during past several weeks. Just only because the Internet connection becomes much slower, since the same amount of Internet traffic has to go through from less fiber connections due to the damage made by the recent earthquake. As of today, while I am composing this post, our Internet connection is back to normal speed, and I am glad to this recovery. Now for those transnationals, such as FedEx, UPS, eBay, Paypal, avis, American Airliners among others, how much was the impact to their daily business practice? Can you imagine what will happen if wars occur instead of natural disasters anywhere in the world? Your Internet connection will be lost, your car cannot find gas supplies, even worse, and your grocery stores may not supply enough foods to you and your family.

In my life so far, I personally experienced two wars, one was in 1979, when I was still in my elementary school, a war occurred between China and Vietnam, and that only lasted a couple of weeks, it did not impact our daily life that much. But I still remember all of our neighbors gathered together to watch TV on gathering the latest of the war. The second war I experienced was right on the morning of 9/11/2001, when I got up and open up my home computer screen, I found there were 2 photos at the very first page of AOL website, with 2 jets hitting 2 skyrockets (the World Trade Tower), I was thinking it might be a Fool’s Day type trick. Now when I turned on my TV, I found it was indeed a war triggered by those terrorists. I think most of you might feel the impact of the war against terrorists since 9/11.

As I mentioned in one of my prev. posts, any one who is rational would like to experience any war, would you like to risk your own life, or your fellow citizens’ life to fight in the battlefields. In human society, through long history, conflicts are inevitable, all of us shall sit down calmly, and find viable solutions to resolve conflicts and make our life peaceful and beautiful. How? Please check up my next post titled: The Solution – Closing the Gap. So stay turned

Ed Y. Zhang
Frontier Blog – Making History of High-tech Industry