Through tax breaks, subsidies and export credit systems, not to mention China’s state capitalism, world trade was increasingly shaped not only by corporate value chains, but also by state intervention. A large part of America’s huge trade deficit was accounted for not only by Chinese trade discrimination, but also by lost export earnings siphoned through offshore tax havens, located not only in the Caribbean but also in the EU.122 In this respect too the once-robust assumption that globalization was an inevitable, natural process was losing its power to convince.
