Chapter Four, in production complexes, dependent on inputs from outside and links to distribution networks. If a firm sets up a car plant, it has to ensure there are secure sources of nuts and bolts, steel of the right quality, a labour force with the right level of training, reliable electricity and water supplies, a trustworthy financial system, friendly bankers, and a road and rail network capable of shifting its finished products. It has to persuade other people, other firms or governments to provide these things, and the process of assembling them can take months or even years of bargaining, involving trial and error as well as forward planning. For this reason, when restructuring firms usually prefer the road of "gradualism"-moving piecemeal from old plant to new, keeping intact old supply and distribution networks, minimising the dislocation to the "complex" around them. So it took Ford nearly two years to implement its decision in 2000 to close down its assembly plant in Dagenham and move production elsewhere in Europe. When Cadbury Schweppes announced the "rationalisation" of its global operation including closures in June 2007, it said it expected it to take three years to implement.
Even with money capital there is no pure mobility. As Suzanne de Brunhof noted:
Even though huge financial flows of mobile capital are daily circulating round the globe, a global single market of capital does not exist. There is no single world rate of interest and there are no single world prices for produced goods . . . Financial assets are denominated in different currencies which are not "perfect substitutes". <sup>18</sup>
Professor Dick Bryan made a similar point:
International finance provides a clear illustration of the centrality of nationality within global accumulation. The combination of satellite and computer technology has provided . . . all the technical preconditions for the neoclassical "perfect market" of financial flows to equalise rates of return, transcending national boundaries. Yet . . . finance maintains national characteristics. It does not move systematically so as to equalise savings and investment . . . A global financial system comprised of nationally-designated currencies signals that globalisation cannot be devoid of a national dimension.19
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