Schvets on the US “sputnik moment”

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The magnificent Viktor Schvets of Macquarie with the note:

No decoupling but supply chains will focus on competing blocks

•In Oct ’57, Soviets surprised the world by launching the first satellite (‘Sputnik’). While the US defence secretary dismissed it as a ‘useless hunk of iron’, Edward Teller (father of the hydrogen bomb)was more prescient, describing it as the technological Pearl Harbour. It did not help when early attempts to launch US satellites had all failed, and one of the more popular Soviet comic acts at the time involved an actor walking onto the stage with a small balloon and then exploding it and declaring it to be a Sputnik. When the Soviet audience gasped, he clarified-an ‘American Sputnik’.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.