Friday Wrap-Up: A President's View on Global Power and Learning from Big Tech

Marthe Skaar (0:00)

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of Friday Wrap Up. I'm Stinele Marthe Skaar.

Nicolai Tangen (0:06)

Nicolai Tangen.

Marthe Skaar (0:07)

Where are you this week, Nicolai?

Nicolai Tangen (0:09)

Well, I've been on the West Coast of the US, Seattle, San Francisco, so I had a very interesting time here.

Marthe Skaar (0:17)

For sure. Okay, so we will come back to that in this episode, and then we will talk about this week's podcast guest, which was Alexander Stubb, President of Finland. And this is an extremely interesting episode.

So, first off, Stubb has become a really influential voice in geopolitics. And I would say he surely punches a bow his way. How has he achieved that?

Nicolai Tangen (0:54)

Well, it is, first of all, because he's a very, you know, smart, educated, articulated and clever person.

In Finland, they split the jobs so that the president is looking after the foreign policy and the defense policy and the prime minister is taking all the internal kind of matters. So I guess as a president, you have, you know, you've got quite a bit of time to spend on the, you know, with the other foreign leaders. And then he has very close relationships with a lot of the other leaders such as Carney, you know, the Norwegian prime minister and so on, and the European, a lot of the other European leaders. So he's really been extremely good at fostering those relationships. He's also vocal about it, both in media and in podcasts and so on. So it was really, really interesting to have him as a guest.

Marthe Skaar (1:45)

Yeah, for sure. And also Finland, for those who are not that familiar with the geography of the Nordics, it's then sits between Sweden and Russia on the side. And quite recently became a NATO member. But so if you go to his book, and one of the things that he starts talking about in the podcast is his argument that we are one of those really big turning points like 1918, 45, 89

And that he thinks that what who decides what comes next is the Global South. Yeah, what do you think listening to that?

Nicolai Tangen (2:24)

No, I think it makes a little sense. What we are seeing is of course that China is making very close relationships with countries in Africa, they are close to India, they are close to countries in South America. So the whole the whole scene here is changing. And I think what he's arguing is that the West has really ignored, you know, the whole African continent, a lot of these other countries and we are now paying the price by, you know, by being outside that development.

Marthe Skaar (2:54)

Yeah, for sure. And looking at some of the solutions, I think like his own preference coming from a small nation, exactly like Norway's. It's like a multinational system built around the UN, but only reform, so with more security council seats for the Global South. So he also says in a podcast that he would actually have renamed his book. He would call it the Rectangle of Power instead. And also he also talks about the US into this context.

Reflect on what he's saying here.

Nicolai Tangen (3:31)

Well, he's pointing to the fact that the technology companies are becoming a real force in itself. And of course, if you look at the market capitalization of these companies, they are indeed very, very powerful.

They are powerful, but they also have a lot of money. So as opposed to countries which have weak balance sheets, budget deficits, these companies have generally strong cash flows and are a new force to be reckoned with. And so he believes that we should look at them in a new way. He also believes that there are implications for democracies going forward. And that democracies have not really taken on board this new technological development. And that is just a really, really interesting argument.

Marthe Skaar (4:14)

Yeah, it sure is. So yeah, so then technology really comes into the power play here.

Shifting about then into what's going on in the fund and the market and what you learned this week. But first, we have an illustration here. You also described this in the podcast, where in market terms, we see that some companies are even larger than countries, and now we're talking about the big technology companies. Describe this landscape for us.

Nicolai Tangen (4:50)

It means that companies like NVIDIA is larger than the whole market capitalization of the stock exchange in Korea. It means that companies like Apple is larger than the countries such as France, Switzerland.