2025 is going to be a bumpy year
By the Editor
The start of January is the customary time for pundits and platforms of all kinds to publish their speculations about what the new year will bring.
Only a brave or foolish person would try to forecast events in 2025 in any detail, but we can already see that the global landscape of corporate power will be shaped in unpredictable ways by:
Trump and trade wars
Donald Trump plans to use US trade policy as a weapon against other countries: he’s already threatened trade tariffs on China, Canada and Mexico, as well as the European Union. Countries facing US tariffs can be expected to respond in kind, with uncertain effects on international trade and investment, while other countries try to steer their own way between the economic giants.
Trump slashed US taxes on corporate profits last time he was in office and he will presumably do so again. His government may also attack US domestic regulations which protect public health and nature, as well as encouraging more US fossil fuel production.
The governments of big economies in the global North are worrying, not just about trade with each other but increasingly about peer competition from Chinese firms in certain industries. The electric vehicle maker BYD, for example, is now a global rival to Elon Musk’s Tesla as well as nervous European and Japanese carmakers.
Business lobbyists will no doubt exploit all these worries to argue for more public subsidies and regulatory easements for Northern corporations. Some trade unionists in Northern countries may also favour some such measures, to protect jobs at home. This will pose a hard-to-answer question: are some public subsidies necessary and if so, which ones?
By the standards of recent US history, the Biden government was unusually assertive against corporate monopolies and even took Google to court over its dominance of internet search. Trump seems less likely to take on US big business, provided that they pay homage to him. This analysis suggests, however, that US regulators could continue to go after Big Tech. No doubt that’s why America’s tech billionaires are busy sucking up to Trump.
The Trump government can be expected to scorn anything that comes out of the United Nations, including instruments on climate, taxation and human rights. Even so, the UN will continue to be a vital space for civil society to defend universal principles.
The climate crisis and “critical minerals”
The ugly alliance of Big Oil and petrostates will certainly keep working hard in 2025 to slow down the global transition from fossil fuels, even as the evidence of catastrophic harm to our climate continues to mount.
This alliance may have a powerful new member in Trump’s United States, though it is worth remembering that US oil and gas output grew steadily under Biden. Too much official thinking around the world still rests on the perilous hope that market forces, backed by subsidies for renewable energy, will put fossil fuels out of business by themselves (rather than, for example, taking action to shrink the oil and gas industry).
There’s likely to be be growing commercial and geopolitical pressure on countries with deposits of “critical minerals”. The International Energy Agency forecasts that world demand for copper, lithium, nickel and rare earths will triple by 2030.
On the positive side, countries in the global South may be able to exploit the increasingly open rivalry between economic great powers to strike better deals for themselves, not just in granting access to their own minerals but also in infrastructure, trade deals and technology transfer.
Artificial Intelligence
There’s much debate among pundits about how the spread of AI will influence our societies and to whose benefit. This comment in the UK’s Observer newspaper considers some of the arguments, including the question of what corporations themselves will use AI for.
It’s not clear yet whether AI will make enough profit to recoup the tens of billions of dollars that Big Tech has invested in it. If not, then some commentators speculate about a crash in tech companies’ share prices at some point. Since the biggest tech and platform companies are valued in the trillions of dollars, a stock market crash would drop a big rock into the choppy waters of the global economy.
There’s always speculation about stock market crashes, however, which may or may not turn out to be accurate. Either way, the deeper question will still be: what forms of governance (and ownership) are needed to ensure that powerful new technologies serve the interests of justice and democracy, rather than those of corporations run by super-wealthy megalomaniacs?
The threat of the far right
We can expect the grip of neoliberal thinking to weaken further in 2025 and popular demands to grow for states to do more to protect their citizens from global instability. This shift away from free-market ideas could create openings for policies which improve people’s lives, such as curbs on corporate price-gouging and increased public spending, paid for by higher taxes on the wealthy.
But as we’ve seen in the US, such demands can also shift mainstream politics in a more reactionary direction. In some countries of the global North, there is a danger that arguments for curbing corporate power are co-opted by the far right and blended into a racist, autocratic politics which influences these countries' economic and foreign policies and makes them even less humane.
This danger makes it all the more important to elaborate a positive and detailed vision for what the economy would look like, in a more just world, and this includes rethinking the power of multinational corporations. This year, Critical Takes hopes to play a small and useful part in supporting that discussion.
What do you think will happen with corporate power in 2025? If you have thoughts to express, get in touch!