You can’t print molecules

https://arab.news/5wdzb

A phrase is making the rounds in global financial markets that Pakistan’s policymakers would do well to memorize. Surprisingly, it does not come from an economist or from an IMF technical note, but from Jeff Currie of the Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest private equity and investment firms: you can’t print molecules. 

It sounds deceptively simple. In fact, it cuts to the heart of the intellectual framework that has governed Pakistan’s economic policy for more than three decades.

What Pakistan was told to prepare for was a world of open markets, integrated supply chains, and price signals that efficiently allocated resources across borders. Liberalize. Privatise. Trust the market. The assumption was that the global system was essentially neutral — that goods, capital, and energy would find their way to wherever they were most productively deployed. Pakistan dutifully followed much of this advice but found itself, again and again, holding the bill when those assumptions fell apart.

The recent conflict in the Middle East has demolished these assumptions once again. We are not witnessing a market failure in the technical sense. It is something older and more elemental— the return of........

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