Paul, thanks a ton for dropping in. Great article, and I look forward to reading the rest of your coming series. Living in Detroit, I'm keenly interested in this:

I haven’t mentioned the revolution underway with electric cars, where Tesla is valued at more than half of GM – despite the latter producing 300 times as many cars! Do you think the market knows where that is going?

This is a hugely complicated issue in the auto industry. Firstly, there's a bit of market irrationality in Tesla's market cap compared to GM's, but that's not really the issue here. GM has to deal with global politics, whereas Tesla doesn't. Anyone who doesn't think that global politics hasn't hampered the traditional auto companies' ability to compete on electric cars, isn't really paying attention. For example, Buick spent years developing an electric car for sale in China (where a huge number of Buicks are sold). Everything from the design to the engineering was in place, prototyped and ready to go. That is, until the Chinese government said, "Thanks, we'll take it from here." To which Buick kindly replied, "Go f--k yourself," so to speak. Problem is, they can't make enough money just selling the cars in the US, so the project was scrapped. Tesla has no such trouble, given that they're just selling expensive toys to rich people. 'Expensive toys' isn't a real global market and never will be, no matter what the product.

We see the same thing with solar, if I'm not mistaken. China has been undercutting US production for years (of course it doesn't help that the GOP here tries relentlessly to score political points by hoping that our home grown companies fail).

So, I guess my question to you is, how does the world deal with China? They're the elephant in the room when it comes to international trade. They help to create the race to the bottom economically and environmentally. If there's not global political agreement in place (as you suggest is unnecessary), then how do American and European companies compete with them?