Checks and Balance: Chain reaction
Checks and Balance from The Economist
The Economist
4.5 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2021
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A container ship stuck in the Suez canal, tensions with China, and the vaccine race have combined to make America’s supply chains look vulnerable. President Biden has ordered a security review and his infrastructure plan includes measures to protect them. What are the politics of this new mantra of resilience?
The Economist’s US business editor Vijay Vaitheeswaran and Soumaya Keynes, our trade and globalisation editor, join the discussion.
John Prideaux hosts with Charlotte Howard and Jon Fasman.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Picture this, static cars, idling engines, angry horns, now picture you, zooming past |
| 0:12.4 | it all, light and breezy, ah, the sweet feeling of whizzing past traffic. |
| 0:21.0 | Make your train journey via vantewescoast.co.uk, a vantewescoast, feel good travel. |
| 0:34.1 | In May 2010, when Apple was gearing up for the worldwide launch of the iPad, the company |
| 0:39.0 | became caught up in a scandal over outsourcing. |
| 0:42.8 | The pristine packaging around the new gizmos screamed designed in California, but it suddenly |
| 0:47.8 | became clear just how much the Cupertino computer maker relied on China for production. |
| 0:53.4 | A spate of suicides among employees of Foxconn, an Apple supplier, triggered protests and |
| 0:58.6 | demands for a boycott. |
| 1:00.6 | It's not clear that the death toll among Foxconn workers in Chenzhen was any higher than |
| 1:04.5 | that of the general population in China, but the dent in Apple's brushed aluminium machine |
| 1:09.4 | remained. |
| 1:10.4 | It looked little less like an all-american success story. |
| 1:14.2 | The endless outsourcing had to stop. |
| 1:17.0 | When Apple started production of the top of the range Mac Pro in 2012, it moved assembly |
| 1:22.0 | to Texas. |
| 1:24.0 | It soon hit a snack. |
| 1:26.0 | In China, Apple could turn to any number of factories to produce tiny custom screws. |
| 1:31.3 | Texas had almost none. |
| 1:33.6 | Apple had to import the screws from China, and in 2019, Mac Pro production shifted back |
| 1:39.5 | there. |
| 1:41.3 | How will Joe Biden change America's supply chain saga? |
... |
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