Why US Taxpayers Will Bail Out Foreign Auto Suppliers

Today we take for granted the remarkable and resilient interconnected world of global commerce and the nearly invisible supply chains that allow for a mind-boggling movement of goods: From Wal-Mart's major-league logistics and demand-sensing applications, to Kimberly-Clark's RFID tags on its Kleenex and Huggies products, to your local grocer's everpresent display of tulips from Holland and bananas from South America.

The fruits of this seamless global supply chain are obvious and important: cheaper prices and a wider selection of products to choose from.

Kevin O'Marah, chief strategy officer at AMR Research, says today's global supply chains operate so robustly and efficiently because they are all connected by real-time information -- production, logistics and pricing data, to name but a few.

"You can get a bid to build a machine part from a little foundry in India as well as a foundry in Indiana, and you can get that in 20 minutes," O'Marah says. "So you can connect yourself in completely unimaginable ways from even 10 years ago, let alone 20 or 30 years when the supply chain started to really emerge from the old factory work."

But as a result of this interconnectedness, really bad things can happen to nearly everyone. Ripples in one country can wind up being tsunamis in another located half a world away.

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