The Price of Miracle
Sean King

For decades, Asia traded freedom for prosperity.

Its model — rapid industrialization, export-led growth, and iron-fisted governance — was held up as a new gold standard. Western elites applauded it. Economists wrote glowing case studies. CEOs lined up to outsource.

But behind the sleek GDP numbers and glittering skylines was a system built on suppressed wages, crushed dissent, and one crucial assumption…

The West (especially America) would keep buying.

That assumption no longer holds.

Now, The Donald is back. And he’s bringing the Asian “miracle” to a halt.

Asia’s Quest for Wealth, Power — and the Bill Coming Due

When I first touched down in Asia in 2009, I picked up Michael Schuman’s book The Miracle.

It isn’t just a chronicle of Asia’s rise. It’s a brutal, clear-eyed tour of how blood, discipline, and political control fueled Asia’s rise from post-war poverty to economic dominance.

Make no mistake… it’s not a feel-good story. It’s a story about grit. About autocrats with five-year plans and zero tolerance for dissent. About entrepreneurs who became national heroes. About governments that said, “We’re going to get rich, and we’ll worry about the costs later.”

Schuman captures this well. Countries like South Korea, China, and Malaysia turned themselves into factories for the world. But their miracle had a catch: it relied entirely on America playing along. On America staying open, dependent, and distracted.

Trump shattered that illusion.

A Personal Approach to a Grand Narrative

Asia’s economic rise wasn’t the result of market magic or democratic ideals, it was driven by individuals who used raw power, strategic vision, and unapologetic nationalism to reshape their nations.

Akio Morita of Sony helped redefine Japan’s image abroad. Park Chung Hee turned South Korea into a manufacturing titan by crushing dissent and demanding obedience. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms pulled hundreds of millions out of poverty, but only under the tight grip of a one-party state.

These weren’t free-market success stories. They were top-down revolutions in business suits.

For years, Western leaders looked the other way. Globalists mistook GDP growth for moral progress. But Trump doesn’t buy the narrative. He sees the model for what it is.

By slapping tariffs on China, reshoring supply chains, and challenging sacred cows like the WTO, Trump is doing something no U.S. president has dared to do — stress-testing the system that made Asia rich.

Asia’s strongmen built their miracles. Trump is the first Western leader willing to test how real they are. Human beings — flawed, ambitious, relentless — did it. And their fingerprints are all over the results.

The miracle, it turns out, was conditional.

The Myth of the “Asian Model”

Global institutions love to talk about the “Asian model” like it’s a formula: high savings, export surpluses, Confucian work ethic, state-led development.

But that’s a myth. Asia is not a monolith.

Japan’s bureaucratic capitalism looks nothing like India’s messy democracy. Singapore’s technocratic machine is a world apart from China’s authoritarian surveillance state. South Korea’s chaebol-dominated economy bears little resemblance to Malaysia’s resource play.

What unites them isn’t policy — it’s ambition. A relentless, state-driven hunger to beat the West at its own game. And the willingness to sacrifice liberties, balance, and even truth to do it.

That hunger built megacities, but also ignored rural poverty. It welcomed investment, but shielded domestic monopolies. It educated millions, but silenced millions more.

When the playbook is rewritten (or thrown out entirely), the question is no longer how Asia rose, but whether it can survive the disruption.

Cracks in the Foundation

The cracks are widening.

Wealth is concentrated at the top. Coastal elites flourish while rural regions decay. Urbanization has created housing crises and environmental collapse. Entire economies remain addicted to exports, just as global demand becomes less reliable and more politically charged.

When growth stalls, these systems don’t liberalize. They clamp down.

Schuman points to China’s response to downturns: more surveillance, more censorship, more nationalism. The miracle model doesn’t correct; it retrenches. And that’s the real vulnerability.

Trump’s challenge isn’t just economic. It’s existential. He’s forcing these regimes to prove they can thrive without Western indulgence. Without unlimited access to American consumers. Without the geopolitical blind spot that allowed them to rise unchecked.

Can these societies transition from miracle to maturity? Can they rebalance their economies, build robust social safety nets, and move toward political openness without collapsing under the weight of their contradictions?

That’s the next chapter, and it’s still unwritten.

Relevance to Today’s Investor

Why should a reader of Morning Reckoning care about The Miracle?

Simple. Asia is no longer a sideshow. It’s center stage.

At publication, China was the world’s second-largest economy, but it’s now the largest by some measures, and India is the fastest-growing. Southeast Asia is a battleground for geopolitical influence and supply chain realignment. Japan remains a technology giant, and Taiwan is the global memory chip hub.

Understanding how these economies were built — who shaped them, what values they emphasized, and what risks they took — is critical for anyone making capital allocation decisions in the 21st century.

I’m not here to romanticize anything, either.

Asia’s rise was impressive, yeah. But it was never sustainable. It was a power play dressed up as an economic model. And now, that house of cards is shaking. Hard.

Trump’s not just poking at it, he’s kicking the damn thing over. He’s reminding the world that America doesn’t exist to bankroll someone else’s miracle.

This isn’t protectionism. It’s reality.

Asia got rich playing a game where we took the losses, they took the margins, and everyone pretended it was fair.

So here’s the deal: if you’re allocating capital, thinking about the future, or just trying to understand the world we’re walking into… stop listening to the people who still think it’s 2005.

The globalist fantasy is over. The old game is done. This is a new cycle. A new playing field.

The Miracle is a useful read — not because it tells you what to do, but because it shows you what was. And once you understand that, you’ll have a much clearer view of what’s coming next.

It’ll be what separates you, the informed investor, from the sucker holding the bag.

 

My story starts in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey, where I grew up. My childhood was idyllic. I never thought I'd leave the Heights. Well, maybe just for college. When I was searching for colleges, I only looked within a hundred miles or so. I wound up going to Villanova. I stayed there for four years and earned — their word, not mine — a finance degree with a minor in political science. After that, I went to work on Wall Street. I had a menial job at Paine Webber to start, but then I got my first real Wall Street job at Lehman Bros. (before its collapse, of course). I worked there in Global Corporate Equity Derivatives as an accountant, believe it or not. Honestly, I hated the job back then. I didn't know how spreadsheets worked — yes, even with a finance degree. (Now I'm a Microsoft Excel nut. I think it’s one of the most extraordinary things ever invented.) After that, I moved to Credit Suisse, who sent me to London — the center of global operations for banking. I was young. Not only did I love the city for being a Candyland for alcoholics, but I also needed the international experience to cancel out my mediocre grade point average to get into a top 25 U.S. business school. Somehow, though, I stayed for a decade, until I discovered London Business School. There I earned a master’s (HA!) degree in finance. My next job was as a futures broker, which I utterly loathed. When I had enough, I took a year off — pub crawling around London and pissing away my bonus money. Then I figured out that I needed a new job. So I went to work for a company called 7city Learning, where all of the best finance trainers were working. I had no idea about any of that, but imagine walking into the 1927 Yankees locker room and being taught how to hit. I spent my time teaching all the traders exams, the graduate programs of the various big banks and then the CFA Level 1 review courses. Yes, that's the only level I've passed. I hate that exam. I never really wanted to run money anyway. In 2009, my boss asked me to move to Singapore to help build the business in Asia. Then I went to work for another financial training company where all of my friends had migrated. Around the time I was getting bored of Singapore, my old bank asked me to work at talent development for them in Hong Kong. Nearly three years later, I moved to the Philippines, where I started an EdTech startup called Finlingo. Along the way, I’ve racked up a ton of qualifications — I am a CAIA, FRM and CMT, amongst a few other things — but they don't mean anything. All that matters are my experience, my connections and my takes on things. So every day I'm going to do my snarky best to inform and entertain you.

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