Time Waits For No One is the title of a mid-'70s Rolling Stones song featuring a mesmerising riff by guitarist Mick Taylor.
Forty years later, those words resonate more than ever. It is just 11 days since the United States election and two months before Donald Trump becomes the 45th American president, but the world already seems to have turned upside down.
Forecasts vary from a likely trade war between the US and China; a joint US-Russian push to extinguish the Islamic State terrorist group; expulsion of millions of undocumented migrants, particularly Mexicans, from the US; and tax cuts and an infrastructure-spending-generated boom in America followed by a global economic hangover.
So it's become a world of nascent panic and confusion. Some forecasts appear contradictory: a trade war coinciding with a boom. Predictions must also factor in the reasonable assumption that Trump himself is probably not sure yet about what he's actually going to do.
But there's a sense of what the French call fin de siecle – or "end of century" – about the post-Trump-election mood. We seem to have ended one story and are embarking on another, but we don't know the plot line.
A key assumption feeding this mood is that Donald Trump will halt, even reverse, the march of globalisation. Puncturing the globalisation balloon could, it's argued, result from abrogating the North America Free Trade Agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico, imposing a 45 per cent tariff on Chinese imports, or refusing to ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement, which includes Australia.
But this key assumption is flawed on two grounds. The first is, to use the phrase employed by one-time US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, that Trump is a "known unknown". He could carry out some, or all, of his more spectacular threats. On the other hand, and operating in what The Economist calls "post-fact" politics, Trump could also now view these campaign threats as nothing more than election rhetoric, or unrealistic ambit claims.
Trumpian "ambit claims" form a foreboding backdrop to this weekend's Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Lima, Peru. But Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is resolutely sunny about the meeting, seeing it as a growth-promotion "opportunity".
"Countries that have embraced open trade and investment policies have experienced significant gains in income, employment and living standards," Turnbull pointed out to a Business Council of Australia dinner in Sydney on Thursday night. But he acknowledged that "people are seeing things change around them; they are concerned that they could be left behind".
However, in a shot across the bows of a Trump era starting on January 20, Turnbull warned that "retreating from policies that have delivered us prosperity and opportunity is the wrong call. We would ignore the gains from openness at our peril." So his Lima mission is to "improve trade and investment flows in the region" and champion reforms that "enhance productivity and emphasise the benefits of open markets".
Can't turn back technology
Whatever happens at the APEC summit, the second flaw in the "abandon globalisation" scenario is a misunderstanding of the key drivers of globalisation. Its origins date back to a US-mandated, postwar promotion of a free-trade world, but it has been driven more recently by the technology revolution.
The Bretton Woods postwar system spawned the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, and led to the formation of the trade-promoting General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). It later changed its name to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and presided over an explosion in trade.
However, the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates collapsed in 1971, leading to floating currencies. Less than a decade later, the development of personal computers, followed by satellite TV, the internet, Wi-Fi, iPhones and social media outlets such as Facebook, provided the technological wherewithal for globalisation.
A floating currencies and freer trading regime morphed into a globalised system of instant trades registered around the world, almost routine mega transcontinental corporate takeovers, and global supply chains.
So a system that provided the global market to underwrite China's astonishing economic transformation finally granted the Middle Kingdom membership in the WTO in 2001. In the decade before it also expanded to cover former communist states in Eurasia after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November, 1989.
Trump can run a populist, trade-agreement-busting line to assuage his US rust-belt state supporters. But he can't become a modern American Luddite and smash the technology – much of its developed, if not invented, in the US – that underwrites globalisation.
In a surprising local twist to this putative tale, there are already signs that Australia could be the beneficiary of concerns about the approaching Trump era in the most globalised industry of them all – high-tech start-ups. Inquiries about moving to Australia are already increasing from people working in, for example, the Silicon Valley region on the outskirts of San Francisco.
It's early days but senior figures in the start-up industry in Australia detect a pattern that began with the shock June 23 Brexit vote in Britain. Interpreting Brexit – the referendum vote to leave the European Union – as meaning there would be fewer opportunities for start-ups in Europe, many in the industry, particularly Australian expats, have been inquiring about job opportunities in Australia.
They may have taken note of the words in that old Rolling Stones song: "And time waits for no one, and it won't wait for me."
