Trump's turn to industrial capitalism matters more to Pakistan than any phone call

The question behind the title

Donald Trump has won the US election, and Pakistan is full of speculation. Will Imran Khan be released? Will one call from Washington change everything?

Muzamil describes two camps in Pakistani media. One calls Trump a fascist, populist, sexist, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim leader who will wreck the world order. The other, close to PTI or soft on it, expects a call from Washington to shake Pakistan and free Imran Khan “with a snap of the fingers.”

He warns viewers up front that the title has no quick answer. He is not a journalist with inside sources, he says. He offers his view on geopolitics and economics instead, which he says comes from about a year and a half of research and roughly 150 to 200 pages of notes.

What “populist” means, and why America matters

Muzamil notes that many Pakistani commentators repeat one line: Trump is a populist, Imran Khan was a populist, and populists wreck their countries. So he looked up the word. The Oxford dictionary defines a populist as a person, especially a politician, who strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.

By that definition, he argues, most people would want a populist leader. Left-leaning commentators who speak for farmers and workers still use the word as an insult. In his view, they inherited that negative spin from Western media, which served elite interests. Trump, he says, represents a power struggle inside America between the existing status quo and an alternative system.

He adds a caveat he repeats through the episode. He is not taking a moral stance on Trump or saying he has no faults. “I am not praising him. I am only telling you what strategy he is coming with.”

Some viewers will say Pakistanis should stop watching America and look inward. Muzamil agrees with the spirit of that, but gives his reasons for paying attention. America is the world’s largest economy, with about 25 percent of global GDP. It is Pakistan’s largest export market, taking more than 5 billion dollars of goods a year. It is also the only superpower, involved in geopolitics everywhere.

“If you want to understand Trump, you have to understand America,” he says. “And if you want to understand America, you have to understand the biggest conflict in America right now.” That conflict, in his view, is between finance capitalism and industrial capitalism.

Finance capitalism and industrial capitalism

Muzamil treats these as two branches of capitalism with different results.

Finance capitalism is a system where financial markets and institutions run the economy. Money is made through lending, investing, stock trading and real estate more than through making and selling goods. Short-term profit and speculation dominate, and banks, hedge funds and financial institutions hold the most power. He gives a Pakistani picture of it: a banker appointed finance minister, the stock market and bank profits high, and factory owners losing money. Under this model, he says, a carmaker that earns more by renting its factory out as a hotel would do so.

He says this model spread from the late 20th century with deregulation, globalisation and easier financial technology. A narrow elite gets richer while most people do not. He points to the 2008 crash in America, when speculation wrecked savings and banks were bailed out. That, in his reading, planted the resentment that brought industrial capitalism back into the fight.

Industrial capitalism, which he calls the original form, grew out of the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. It focuses on production, economies of scale and efficiency. It uses a lot of labour and puts money into machinery and infrastructure. His shorthand: a finance capitalist buys land, markets it and sells it on with nothing built. An industrial capitalist buys land, installs machines, hires people and sells what they make.

How America rose, and how finance took over

America rose as an industrial power, Muzamil argues. It is cut off from the rest of the world and hard to attack. It has its own energy and food, which he contrasts with the Middle East, rich in oil but short of water, and Pakistan, which grows food but lacks energy. In his view it also has the world’s best intellectual capital and system of governance. For a long time it stayed out of world affairs, made cars and planes, and traded with anyone.

Meanwhile, he says, finance capitalists grew powerful in Europe, lending to rival empires at war. After the world wars, he says, much of that financial power moved from London to New York, which became Wall Street. America then took a lead role in the UN and helped create the IMF and World Bank, and the Bretton Woods agreement made the dollar the world’s reserve currency. Any country that wanted to trade needed dollars first, so American dollars could buy things anywhere.

He contrasts this with how America first stayed out of the League of Nations. A century ago it kept to itself. Today, he says, it inserts itself into conflicts everywhere. He describes decades of regime changes and interventions that he says are now documented and declassified.

The loop with China, and why it broke

The arrangement, as Muzamil describes it, let America consume far more than it produced. “Notice this: about 4 percent of the world’s population, and 25 percent of the world’s consumption.”

He explains the loop with a simple example. America pays China 100 dollars for goods. China spends a little on raw materials and has about 80 dollars left. America offers interest if China lends it back, so the dollars return, and America buys more goods the next year. American consumers became the world’s top buyers. China, he says, has grown its economy about 11 times since 1991 and at one point held more than a trillion dollars of US debt. Saudi Arabia, India and Japan parked their earnings the same way.

Then China changed course. In Muzamil’s reading, it saw the arrangement as unsustainable and launched One Belt One Road to invest its surplus in power plants, roads and development around the world, building future customers beyond America. He says China has been steadily selling US Treasuries, faster in the last two years, and that China, India and Saudi Arabia are buying gold.

If those dollars stop coming back, he argues, America has to print more, which weakens the dollar and risks hyperinflation, as he says has happened to past reserve currencies. America now carries about 35 trillion dollars in debt. He expects China to become the world’s largest economy within three to four years, growing on an industrial base, and notes BRICS and Russia talking about alternative financial systems.

Trump’s bet: retreat, tariffs and factories

Muzamil sees two answers inside America to this pressure. The first, which he associates with Joe Biden and the existing establishment, is to keep fighting: contain China and Russia, impose sanctions, and do what worked for 50 years. The second says that approach can no longer be sustained. It says America overplayed its hand and should accept some loss of power, then spend five to 10 years rebuilding industrial capacity behind its natural strengths.

That second view, he argues, explains Trump’s positions: end wars, ask why America pays for NATO, bring troops home from South Korea and Germany, end the Russia-Ukraine war. In his reading, the old model funnelled tax money into wars and to a handful of defence firms charging prices nobody can check.

He also reads Elon Musk’s support for Trump through this lens. When Musk unveiled robots, Muzamil says, the first use he named was factories. American labour costs too much to compete with China, so automation could close the gap. Tariffs, in turn, make imports expensive and push private capital into local manufacturing. “Economics is what drives results,” he says. He expects great-power competition to move from military rivalry toward manufacturing and business.

What it means for Pakistan

Muzamil argues that America’s finance-led model was implemented almost everywhere except the countries America has problems with, such as Russia, North Korea, Iran and China. Pakistan, in his view, runs on it too. Genuine productive work has no business case. Money is made by importing and reselling, playing the stock market, and speculating on plots. “The commission agent makes the agriculture money, the banker makes the business money, the importer makes the exporter’s money.”

If the system’s main patron is leaving that model behind, he asks, what happens below? “It doesn’t matter which individual knows whom, or whom Trump will call,” he says. “The bottom line is that the world is changing. Pakistan has to change too.”

He addresses Pakistan’s leaders across parties and urges them to study the difference between the two models. Pakistan keeps inviting bankers, investors, fund managers and the IMF to present its future, he says, and not its businesspeople or exporters. In his view, the country will have to open up toward a real free market and away from a licence raj where only well-connected people can do business. He believes the finance-capitalist interests in Pakistan are worried by the idea Trump represents more than by Trump himself. He expects the next four years to be hard, and expects the country’s political economy, regional alliances and personal aspirations to change over the next two to four years.

Predictions, on the record

Muzamil closes with predictions he says he wants on the internet to be checked later.

On America, he expects a sharp fall in the US stock market and a move toward recession, either just before Trump takes office or within about six months of it, because Trump is pulling back American power.

On Pakistan, he predicts that Imran Khan will come back to power. He may not become prime minister, Muzamil says, perhaps by choice, but he expects him to return to power directly or through some other arrangement. He also expects that, within a few months, the negotiation he sees between Imran Khan and the other side will reverse, with Khan offering the deal this time. He presents all of this as his own analysis and asks viewers to judge it in six months.

He ends by pushing back on being labelled a supporter whenever he relays what ordinary people are saying. Those were the nation’s talking points, he argues. He compares it to Pakistani intellectuals who expected Kamala Harris to win because they followed CNN and the BBC, which he describes as a kind of intellectual colonialism.