“It is globalization, the latter defined as the process by which businesses or other organizations develop international influence or start operating on an international scale.

As the globalization paradigm sank in at about the time we crossed the millennium threshold, compelled by circumstance and the ever expanding World Wide Web, such seminal works from the apostles of Adam Smith like Milton Friedman, Nouriel Roubini to Nobel Prize laureate Joseph Stiglitz started populating the best-seller gondolas and shelves of bookstores. Their treatises translated from gobbledygook to English were sold alongside romance novels and Tom Clancy thrillers and had become bestsellers as well. As economics was in vogue, so did laymen start forming their own concepts of globalization.

The process of discovery was Socratic. Was globalization just a new term meaning the same as international trade? So, what’s in a buzzword? What about the new term was spawned by the strange letters “http:/www” that seemed to make the planet smaller and everyone closer?

For most, this new globalization paradigm simply involved international trade. Legions of the most graphic examples peppered the discourse. Connect the dots and the eventual image that jumps off the blank page is globalization.

A food and beverage manager planning the menu of a restaurant in Manila would like to theme the blue-plate special along distinctly oriental lines. From a nook inside his kitchen he flips open a laptop connected to the World Wide Web. Within a few clicks a complex train of events roll out and in the blink of an eye travel instantly through cyberspace.

Coconuts are grown in the plantations of Quezon Province south of Manila. Small households spawn a cottage industry and following heirloom recipes, old women transform these into a gelatin-like dessert and then sell the product to a food manufacturer in nearby Laguna who bottles the gelatin with syrup made from sugarcane grown in a Visayan plantation.

The bottled nata de coco, whose direct translation from Spanish means “coconut cream,” is then packed in bulk, sent to Manila and from there exported to Japan.

Still midway in the value chain, the Japanese use the nata de coco as raw material to create a sweet fruity base for candies or what are otherwise Japanese delicacies with distinctively Japanese designs, tastes and packaging generically called “wagashi.”

From there, globalization makes a 360-degree turn. The wagashi delicacies are then exported and some make their way back to Filipino tables, households and the kitchen that first ordered the dessert.

While the foregoing may seem as international trade, it is globalization, the latter defined as “the process by which businesses or other organizations develop international influence or start operating on an international scale.”

An important feature is the convergence of inputs facilitated by linkages established through the World Wide Web. The wagashi was not created by the Japanese alone. Filipino coconut farmers in Quezon had a lot to do with it.

The traditional definition of globalization however has not yet extended to the realm of finance despite the fact that it is in the financial intermediation universe where globalization travels the fastest. So fast in fact that it results in instantaneous reconciliations of accounts, remuneration, payments, debts and credits without coins and bills traveling from one bank to another as trade under globalization’s traditional definition is carried out.

One example is the notorious Central Bank of Bangladesh heist where financial globalization through a few debit and credit clicks transferred funds from Bangladesh to New York and from there to a universal bank in Makati and then eventually to a bank branch in Bel Air.

Our Philippine offshore gaming operators (POGO) is another example of financial globalization. A “triad” gangster in China wanting to evade criminal prosecution and launder the origins of ill-gotten wealth earned through drug trafficking can, from the comfort of his home and while in his underwear, simply hit a few keys on his laptop and place gambling bets through a POGO in Manila. Welcome to Huxley’s “Brave New World.”