BREAKING: Carney’s Surprise Alliance Just Crushed Trump’s Trade Leverage | Buffett

[00:00:00]So, while Washington was watching Canada, Carney was building something Washington had no framework to see coming. Not another bilateral agreement.

[00:00:08]Not another layer added to the five-layer architecture that had already made the pressure campaign inoperable.

[00:00:14]Not another move in the existing game, a different game. Quietly assembled across four continents in languages other than English through diplomatic channels that the American intelligence apparatus tracks with a fraction of the attention that goes to the obvious theaters of great power competition, a new alliance had been taking shape.

[00:00:36]Not a military alliance. Not a formal treaty organization with a name and a headquarters and a secretary general.

[00:00:43]Something structurally different and strategically more significant for the specific purpose it was designed to serve.

[00:00:49]A coordinated economic block of nations that share three specific characteristics.

[00:00:55]Substantial natural resource endowments, significant American trade dependencies, and governments that had watched the Canada trade war with a focused attention of institutions running their own scenario planning about what they would do if the instrument that had been applied to Canada was applied to them next.

[00:01:14]The block had been assembling in silence for 11 weeks.

[00:01:18]Carney had been its architect.

[00:01:20]And when it became public, not through a dramatic announcement or a formal declaration of its existence, but through the simultaneous release of four documents in four capitals on a Thursday morning that no individual document alone would have identified as a coordinated action, the people in Washington who understood what they were reading took an average of 23 minutes to process what had been built.

[00:01:45]23 minutes to understand that the leverage architecture that the American side had spent 14 months constructing and refining and escalating was not merely insufficient to produce compliance from Canada.

[00:01:57]It was now facing a coordinated coalition of nations whose combined resource endowments, combined market access, and combined economic weight had made the entire pressure model the model that said economic coercion of dependent trading partners produces compliance structurally invalid at a scale beyond the bilateral. The Dow shed 1,047 points before the American close.

[00:02:20]Cross-border and multi-sector resource stocks lost $49 billion in combined market capitalization, the single largest resource sector decline since the 2008 financial crisis. The Canadian dollar moved in the manner that currency markets reserve for moments of structural recalibration, not incremental repricing.

[00:02:40]And Warren Buffett, who had known about the alliance's existence for 3 weeks through sources he described only as people who see the world more completely than most, issued a statement that was, for the first time in his 14 months of commentary on this crisis, not primarily about Canada. It was about what Canada had done to the world.

[00:03:00]"Canada didn't just escape a trade war," Buffett said.

[00:03:04]"Canada rewrote the rules of the game, not the rules of this game. This specific bilateral dispute. The rules of the game that every resource-dependent nation plays with every dominant economic power.

[00:03:16]That game has a new rule book now.

[00:03:18]Canada wrote it.

[00:03:20]And the nations that have signed on to it are not doing so because of sentiment for Canada. They are doing so because the rule book works. When you hear exactly who joined the alliance, what each of them brought to it, and what the combined architecture of their coordinated membership means for American economic leverage, not just over Canada, but over the full range of its trading relationships with resource-dependent nations, you will understand why analysts who have spent careers studying the architecture of international economic power are not describing what happened on Thursday as a development in the Canada trade war.

[00:03:56]They're describing it as a restructuring of the global economic order's fundamental leverage dynamics.

[00:04:02]Hit subscribe because what Carney built in 11 weeks will be reshaping how nations negotiate with dominant economics powers for decades. Let me give you the full context because the alliance did not emerge from the Canada trade war alone.

[00:04:16]It emerged from a convergence of conditions that the Canada trade war made visible, but that have been developing across the global economy for the better part of a decade.

[00:04:25]Conditions that created in a specific political moment produced by 14 months of American economic pressure on its closest ally, the precise alignment of incentives needed to bring together nations that would not ordinarily have found their way to the same table. The convergence began with a recognition that spread through the finance ministries and foreign affairs ministries of a specific category of nation following the first major application of American economic coercive tools in 2018. The category was nations that share a structural profile.

[00:04:57]Substantial natural resource endowments that dominant economic powers depend on, significant trade dependencies on those dominant powers, and a history of managing those dependencies through a combination of accommodation and careful bilateral relationship maintenance that had over decades become a kind of institutional habit.

[00:05:17]The recognition was this, the tools that the United States had developed and refined for applying economic pressure to nations that fell outside its alliance network, the tariff weapons, the financial infrastructure leverage, the sanctions instruments were being applied with increasing frequency and decreasing discrimination to nations that were inside the alliance network.

[00:05:41]The categorical distinction between adversary and ally was becoming less reliable as a predictor of how American economic statecraft would be deployed.

[00:05:51]And nations for whom that categorical distinction had been the foundational assumption of their strategic planning were beginning to understand that they needed a different kind of insurance.

[00:06:01]Most nations, when they reached this recognition, responded individually.

[00:06:07]They strengthened specific bilateral relationships, diversified specific trade flows, built specific alternative financial mechanisms. Canada done all of these things and it done them with exceptional systematic rigor.

[00:06:23]But Carney's reading of the situation went further than the individual response. His reading, according to sources familiar with the strategic thinking that drove the alliance's construction, was that individual responses, no matter how well executed, leave the underlying structural vulnerability intact because the underlying structural vulnerability is not the dependency of any single nation on American economic relationships.

[00:06:49]It is the systematic nature of that dependency across a category of nations whose individual weight is insufficient to change the calculus of a dominant economic power but whose collective weight is not.

[00:07:02]The insight was simple. The execution was not. The alliance Carney built has nine members.

[00:07:09]Not the same seven nations whose coordination had been instrumental in addressing the sanctions threat and the 72-hour ultimatum.

[00:07:17]Those seven were part of the architecture. Their existing frameworks provided the foundation on which the broader structure was built.

[00:07:25]But nine members, including four that had not previously been part of the coordinated response mechanism and whose inclusion was the specific development that made the alliance something qualitatively different from the multilateral response framework that had preceded it.

[00:07:40]The first new member was Brazil.

[00:07:42]Brazil is the world's largest exporter of iron ore, soybeans, and several categories of agricultural commodity that American manufacturing and food processing industries depend on at the volumes that cannot be substituted from domestic American production or from the existing allied supply base without significant cost and timeline disruption.

[00:08:05]Brazil had been watching the Canada trade war with the attention of a nation that exports 31% of its goods to the United States and that has in its own recent history experienced the application of American economic pressure in context that its government found troubling.

[00:08:21]The Lula administration have been in quiet contact with Ottawa for months before the alliance was formally constructed.

[00:08:28]What the Canada trade war provided was the specific demonstration of vulnerability and the specific demonstration of response architecture that gave Brazil's government the evidence base it needed to justify internally and publicly the step of joining a coordinated economic block that carried implicit cost for its bilateral relationship with Washington.

[00:08:51]Brazil brought to the alliance its resource endowments, its market access, and something more strategically valuable than either.

[00:08:59]Its relationships.

[00:09:01]Brazil's diplomatic relationships across Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia are among the deepest of any middle power on Earth. Those relationships are the network through which the alliance's membership can expand beyond its founding nine. The second new member was Indonesia.

[00:09:18]Indonesia is the world's largest producer of nickel, the single most critical input for electric vehicle battery manufacturing, and a top five producer of coal, palm oil, tin, and bauxite. American technology companies, American automotive manufacturers, and American defense contractors have supply chain dependencies on Indonesian commodity outputs that have been managed for decades under the assumption that Indonesia's strategic positioning as a democracy and a critical Indo-Pacific location would ensure its continued accommodation of American commercial interests.

[00:09:55]That assumption was accurate when it was formed. What the Canada trade war demonstrated from Indonesia's perspective was that strategic positioning within the American Alliance network did not provide categorical protection against American economic coercive tools.

[00:10:12]Indonesia had been conducting its own diversification work for years driven by the same recognition that had driven Canada's.

[00:10:20]But the Canadian invitation provided was a coordinated framework in which Indonesia's individual diversification moves could be amplified by collective weight.

[00:10:30]Indonesia's president had communicated to Carney through diplomatic channels that Indonesia was prepared to join a framework that committed its members to treat economic coercion directed at any member as a shared concern provided that the framework's architecture was robust enough to make the commitment credible.

[00:10:48]The five-layer escape route and the 72-hour proof of performance were the evidence that made the commitment credible. The third new member was Chile.

[00:10:57]Chile is the world's largest producer of copper and lithium.

[00:11:01]The two minerals that sit at the absolute foundation of the global energy transition's material requirements, every electric vehicle battery every grid-scale energy storage system every advanced semiconductor package that the global economy will require over the next 30 years has copper and lithium at its core. Chile's resource position is not merely significant.

[00:11:24]It is for the specific category of materials that the energy transition requires irreplaceable at the time scales relevant to industrial planning. The Chilean government had been the most cautious of the alliance's new members in its approach to joining. Cautious because its relationship with the United States has historical dimensions that make open alignment against American trade policy politically complex in ways that Brazil and Indonesia do not face to the same degree.

[00:11:52]What changed the Chilean calculus, according to sources familiar with the internal deliberations, was the resource sovereignty architecture that Canada had built as the fifth layer of its escape route.

[00:12:06]The joint critical minerals framework with Australia and India, the domestic processing capacity investment, the coordinated resource supply statement that had reached the Pentagon during the 72-hour sequence, these demonstrated that resource sovereignty, actively exercised through coordinated multilateral architecture, was a viable and defensible strategic position.

[00:12:29]Chile's government arrived at the conclusion that its lithium and copper holdings were a strategic asset that could either be managed passively under the existing bilateral framework or actively through a coordinated framework that gave Chile the kind of collective backing that made active management sustainable.

[00:12:50]The alliance offered the collective backing. Chile joined. The fourth new member was Nigeria.

[00:12:56]Nigeria is Africa's largest economy and the continent's largest oil producer.

[00:13:01]With additional significant holdings in natural gas, iron ore, and agricultural commodities, Nigeria's membership was a development that carried the longest-range implications for the alliance's trajectory.

[00:13:13]Because Nigeria's membership is not primarily about Nigeria's own resource endowments, though those endowments are substantial, it is about what Nigeria represents in the architecture of African economic relationships.

[00:13:28]Nigeria is the anchor of West African economic integration.

[00:13:33]The most significant African member of the Commonwealth and the country whose diplomatic positioning most determines the direction of African engagement with the major global economic blocks.

[00:13:44]Nigerian membership in the alliance is the foundation for African engagement more broadly.

[00:13:51]It is the signal received immediately in every African capital that tracks these developments that the coordinated economic framework that Canada had built and that the original seven nations had joined and that Brazil, Indonesia and Chile had now extended was open to African participation and had the weight in the architecture to be worth joining.

[00:14:13]The implications of that signal will take years to fully materialize. They will not take years to begin. With the nine members assembled, the combined profile of the alliance is a number that requires a moment to absorb.

[00:14:26]Combined GDP $31 trillion.

[00:14:30]Combined critical mineral holdings of lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, rare earth and energy resources that the global industrial economy depends on for its transition to advanced manufacturing and clean energy.

[00:14:43]Approximately 63% of proven global reserves outside Russian and Chinese control. 63% The industries that depend on those resources, American automotive, American technology, American defense manufacturing, American energy infrastructure have no viable alternative supply base that does not run through the alliance's membership and the alliance's foundational commitment that economic coercion directed at any member triggers coordinated response from all members means that the calculus of applying coercive economic pressure to any one of the nine is now the calculus of applying coercive economic pressure to all nine simultaneously.

[00:15:29]The leverage model that the Americans sided built over 14 months, the model premised on isolating a single dependent trading partner and applying concentrated bilateral pressure until compliance was produced. Cannot function against nine nations whose combined resource endowments represent 63% of what American industry needs to operate.

[00:15:52]The model was not defeated by the alliance.

[00:15:55]The model was rendered categorically inapplicable by it. The four documents released simultaneously on Thursday morning were the public face of what had been built.

[00:16:03]The first was a joint declaration signed by all nine members establishing the resource sovereignty coordination framework, the alliance's formal institutional identity. It's charter, it's governance structure, and its founding commitment. The second was a technical annex specifying the coordinated response mechanisms, the settlement framework integration, the legal architecture participation, the resource supply review provisions that would be activated when any member faced economic coercion meeting the defined threshold.

[00:16:35]The third was a resource mapping document.

[00:16:38]The first publicly released comprehensive mapping of the alliance's combined critical mineral holdings with production capacity, processing capacity, and export capacity specified by commodity category.

[00:16:53]The number that appeared in that document, 63% of proven global reserves outside Russian and Chinese control, is the number that produced the 23 minutes of silence in Washington before the first internal calls began.

[00:17:05]The fourth document was a statement from Mark Carney, issued in his capacity as the framework's founding coordinator, that was three paragraphs long.

[00:17:13]The first paragraph described what had been built. The second described the framework's purpose. The third was the sentence that will be quoted in every account of this period written in the next 50 years.

[00:17:24]"Canada did not build this because it was afraid," Harney said.

[00:17:29]"Canada built this because it understood that the rules of engagement between dominant economic powers and resource dependent nations had not been written to serve the resource dependent nations, and that the moment had arrived and the partners had assembled to write better rules." The West Wing's response to the four documents was the fastest it had been since the trade war began.

[00:17:50]And the fastest response was also, in its specific content, the most revealing.

[00:17:57]Within 40 minutes of the document's release, a statement was issued characterizing the resource sovereignty coordination framework as a protectionist arrangement inconsistent with the principles of free trade and the obligations of WTO membership. The statement was legally inaccurate.

[00:18:14]The framework had been designed with the participation of seven jurisdictions' most sophisticated international trade lawyers to be entirely consistent with WTO obligations.

[00:18:25]But its legal accuracy was secondary to what its speed revealed.

[00:18:30]The 40-minute response time meant the statement had been prepared in advance.

[00:18:35]It had been prepared in advance, which meant the framework's existence had been known to the American side before Thursday morning.

[00:18:43]It had been known and the advance preparation of a response had been deemed the appropriate reaction to its anticipated public release.

[00:18:51]Which meant the American side had decided in advance of the release that characterizing the framework as protectionist was preferable to engaging with its substance.

[00:19:02]That decision and its 40-minute execution told every government that was reading the sequence carefully what the American side had concluded internally about the framework's actual significance.

[00:19:15]You do not prepare a rapid public dismissal of something you believe is genuinely dismissible. You prepare for things you find threatening and want to contain before they gain more attention than the dismissal can manage. The markets did not find the dismissal containable.

[00:19:30]The Dow's 1,047 point decline before the close was the joint product of two recognitions landing simultaneously in institutional investor models.

[00:19:41]The first recognition was that the resource sovereign coordination framework 63% resource coverage number meant that American industry supply chain planning assumptions needed to be rebuilt from the foundation.

[00:19:53]The second recognition was that the alliances architecture, the coordinated response commitment, the settlement framework integration, the legal architecture participation meant that the American economic coercion toolkit, which had been the implicit backstop for American trade negotiating leverage across a wide range of bilateral relationships, was now facing a collective resistance architecture at a scale that made the toolkit's deployment against any the alliance member.

[00:20:24]The $49 billion in resource sector market capitalization that evaporated before the close was not a specific consequence of a specific policy change.

[00:20:33]It was the repricing of a structural assumption that had been embedded in resource sector valuations for decades.

[00:20:41]The assumption that American leverage over resource dependent trading partners was sufficient to ensure preferred access to critical inputs on commercially favorable terms. That assumption, as of Thursday morning, had a 63% exception attached to it.

[00:20:56]Warren Buffett had been aware of the alliance's construction for 3 weeks.

[00:21:00]Suffice to say he spent those 3 weeks doing what he always does when he becomes aware of something whose significance is not yet publicly visible.

[00:21:09]Thinking about it carefully, discussing it with a small number of people whose judgment he trusts on matters of structural economic change, and constructing his public formulation of its significance before the moment of public disclosure, the formulation he arrived at was different from anything he had said in the preceding 14 months of commentary.

[00:21:30]Different not in its conviction.

[00:21:32]His commentary had always been certain about the direction things were moving minus.

[00:21:37]But in its scope, the pre- the previous statements had been about the Canada-United States bilateral relationship, this statement was about the world. In 94 years on this earth, he began, I have watched three structural transformations in the architecture of global economic power.

[00:21:53]The first was the construction of the post-war institutional order, the Bretton Woods system, the GATT, the World Bank and IMF, which created the framework within which dominant economic powers and smaller trading nations would negotiate their relationships over the next eight decades.

[00:22:09]The second was the emergence of China as a structural counterweight to American economic dominance in the early 21st century.

[00:22:16]A shift that took decades to fully materialize and that is still being absorbed by the institutions built around the assumption of American primacy. The third is what I watched take shape in the past 11 weeks and become public this morning.

[00:22:29]It is different from the first two.

[00:22:31]The first two were shifts in who holds dominant economic power. What happened this morning is a shift in how dominant economic power can be applied against nations that do not hold it.

[00:22:42]That is a different kind of structural transformation.

[00:22:46]It is in some ways the more consequential one.

[00:22:49]He delivered the economic translation with the precision that comes from having thought about a thing for 3 weeks before speaking publicly about it.

[00:22:59]The arithmetic of the resource sovereignty coordination framework is straightforward.

[00:23:04]He said, "63% of proven global critical mineral reserves outside Russian and Chinese control held by nine nations committed to collective response when any one of them faces economic coercion. The industries that depend on those reserves, automotive, technology, defense, energy infrastructure, have no alternative supply base at the volumes and timelines that their capital expenditure to planning requires.

[00:23:30]Which means the economic coercion toolkit the dominant powers have deployed against resource-dependent nations has, as of this morning, a 63% coverage gap.

[00:23:41]You cannot coerce a supplier you cannot replace. You cannot leverage dependency that has been converted into coordinated collective supply.

[00:23:50]And 60 years of investing, I've learned one thing about leverage that applies without exception at every scale.

[00:23:56]Leverage requires the other side to have no good alternative.

[00:24:00]When you've assembled nine nations whose combined resource position means that you have no good alternative to their supply, you have not merely reduced leverage, you have inverted it.

[00:24:11]The party with no good alternative is not the nine nations this morning. It is the party whose industrial base cannot function without what the nine nations hold. The philosophical authority arrived in the measured cadence of someone reaching for a principle that he believes will outlast the specific circumstances producing it.

[00:24:28]In 60 years of deal making, Buffett said, "I've watched dominant parties make a specific mistake with remarkable consistency.

[00:24:36]The mistake is to treat structural advantages permanent rather than as contingent.

[00:24:41]Structural advantage, the advantage that comes from size, from market access, from control of financial infrastructure, from the gravitational pull of a dominant economy is real. It has real effects on the negotiations of smaller parties for long periods of time, but it is contingent on the smaller parties remaining atomized.

[00:25:06]It is contingent on each smaller party calculating its situation individually and concluding that individual resistance is insufficient to overcome the dominant party's structural advantage.

[00:25:18]The moment smaller parties cease to be atomized, the moment they find the leadership and the architecture to coordinate their individual positions into a collective position, structural advantage does not gradually diminish.

[00:25:33]It evaporates.

[00:25:35]Because structural advantage over atomized parties and structural advantage over a coordinated block are not the same calculation.

[00:25:42]Canada understood this.

[00:25:44]Canada built the coordination.

[00:25:47]And what I watched happen this morning is the moment that the nine nations of the resource sovereignty coordination framework cease to be atomized, their individual structural vulnerabilities are still real.

[00:25:58]Their collective structural position is something entirely different. The dominant party's advantage over the collective is not what it was over the individuals.

[00:26:05]It is not even close. The verdict arrived in the voice Buffett reserves for the moments he is most certain of.

[00:26:12]"In 94 years," he said, "I watched a great many games change rules mid-play.

[00:26:17]Some rule changes favor the dominant party, some favor the less dominant.

[00:26:23]What happened this morning favors the less dominant parties in a way that I have not seen in the architecture of global economic relationships in my lifetime.

[00:26:33]The rules that have governed how dominant economic powers engage with the resource dependent trading nations since the post-war order was constructed have assumed the atomization of those nations, their individual isolation, their individual dependency, their individual insufficiency as counterweights to dominant economic power.

[00:26:51]Those rules have produced the trade relationships of the past eight decades.

[00:26:55]This morning, nine nations signed a document that is the beginning of the end of those rules. Not because the document itself ends them, because the document creates the architecture through which those nations and the nations that will join them can collectively enforce better ones.

[00:27:15]Canada wrote the rule book.

[00:27:17]The question now is not whether the rule book works. Thursday answered that question. The question is how many nations will sign it before the dominant parties find a way to adapt.

[00:27:27]My assessment is more than enough. The cascading consequences of a nine-nation resource sovereignty coordination framework with 63% critical mineral coverage are consequences that operate simultaneously at four distinct levels of the global economic system. And at each level, they operate with a compounding quality of structural changes rather than the reversible quality of policy changes.

[00:27:51]At the level of American industrial supply chains, the immediate consequence is a requirement to rebuild capital expenditure planning across every sector with material critical mineral dependencies, which is to say every sector of the advanced economy.

[00:28:06]The automotive manufacturers rebuilding around electric vehicle production have copper and lithium projections built into their 15-year capital plans.

[00:28:15]Those projections assumed access to Chilean copper and lithium at commercially competitive prices under bilateral trade frameworks that did not carry coordinated response provisions.

[00:28:25]They now need to be rebuilt under the assumption that Chilean resource access is subject to a collective response architecture that makes coercive pricing pressure on Chile trigger responses from eight other nations whose resource outputs are also embedded in American supply chain planning.

[00:28:41]The rebuild is not optional.

[00:28:43]It is the foundation of every future capital allocation decision in sectors that represent approximately 38% of American GDP. The rebuild will take time.

[00:28:53]While it is underway, the uncertainty it represents is priced into the valuations of the companies conducting it. The 49 billion dollars that evaporated from resource sector market capitalization on Thursday is the first installment of that repricing.

[00:29:08]It is not the last. At the level of American trade negotiating leverage, the consequences of restructuring of the bilateral negotiating framework with each of the nine alliance members to account for the collective backstop their membership provides. Negotiations that the American side has conducted with Brazil, Indonesia, Chile, and Nigeria individually extracting bilateral accommodations through the application of market access leverage against nations whose individual dependency made the leverage effective will now be conducted with the knowledge that the nation across the table has a coordinated response architecture behind it.

[00:29:44]The bilateral leverage that produced bilateral accommodations was calibrated for atomized parties. It has not been recalibrated for coordinated parties.

[00:29:53]The recalibration will produce different negotiating outcomes than the uncalibrated bilateral model produced.

[00:29:59]Those different outcomes will be visible in the trade balances, the investment flows, and the resource access terms that emerge from negotiations conducted over the next several years with nations that are for the first time in the history of those bilateral relationships, negotiating from within a collective architecture.

[00:30:19]At the level of allied strategic planning, the consequence is the updating of every government's assessment of what is achievable through the kind of coordinated multilateral architecture that Canada demonstrated was viable. The proof of concept was Canada's five-layer escape route.

[00:30:38]The proof of performance was the 72-hour sequence.

[00:30:41]The proof of scale is a resource sovereignty coordination frameworks nine nation founding membership and a 63% critical mineral coverage.

[00:30:50]The three proofs together constitute an evidence-based that every government managing resource dependent bilateral relationships with dominant economic powers is now working through. The working through will produce new strategies, new frameworks, new institutional architectures built on the Canadian model.

[00:31:09]Canada's not the only nation that understood that the rules needed to be rewritten. It was the first nation with the institutional capacity, the leadership, patience, and the specific triggering conditions to begin rewriting them.

[00:31:23]Others will follow. The framework's governance structure has been explicitly designed to accommodate expansion.

[00:31:29]Brazil's diplomatic networks across Africa and Latin America are the expansion pathway.

[00:31:35]Nigeria's Accra position in African economic integration is the expansion pathway's African component.

[00:31:42]The resource sovereignty coordination framework that was nine nations on Thursday morning will not be nine nations indefinitely at the level of the global economic order.

[00:31:52]The consequence is the beginning of a period of structural adjustment whose full dimensions will not be visible for years, but its direction is now established.

[00:32:00]The adjustment is from a model of global resource trade in which dominant economic powers hold decisive leverage over atomized Now, resource dependent suppliers to a model in which coordinated supplier blocks hold collective leverage that changes the terms of engagement at the fundamental level of who sets the rules of the relationship. That shift does not happen in a single Thursday morning announcement.

[00:32:23]It happens in the accumulation of framework memberships and coordinated responses and negotiating outcomes and capital flow redirections that flow from the architectural foundation that Thursday established.

[00:32:34]But it begins on Thursday.

[00:32:36]It begins with nine nations and 63% of the reserves of the global advanced economy needs to function. And beginnings of this quality structural, architecturally grounded, institutionally designed to compound rather than to peak and diminish, do not reverse.

[00:32:50]They develop. Warren Buffett's closing line was the one he'd been working towards since he described this as the third structural transformation in global economic power he had witnessed in 94 years. He delivered it without emphasis in the flat declarative voice of someone stating a fact rather than making an argument.

[00:33:09]The game that was played for eight decades under rules written in the late 1940s is not the game being played this morning.

[00:33:18]He said to The rules written this morning were written by nations that the rules written in the late 1940s were written about, written without their participation, written to serve the interests of the dominant parties whose negotiating leverage over resource-dependent suppliers the rules were designed to preserve.

[00:33:35]This morning, the resource-dependent suppliers wrote their own rules. 63% of what the advanced economy runs on is now governed by rules written by the people who hold it.

[00:33:52]Nine nations signed it.

[00:33:55]The world will spend the next several decades working out what it means.