“The Butterfly Effect” is a term coined by Edward Lorenz that describes the nature of a highly interconnected system such as the global environment or the global economy. A butterfly beats its wings in Brazil, the story goes, setting off a chain reaction that indirectly results in a tornado thousands of miles away in Texas.

The Butterfly Effect was on my mind last month when I spoke at the annual meeting of the California Association of Winegrape Growers in Napa, California. Part of my presentation outlined several indirect global threats to the California and U.S. wine industries. Two of these are in the news this week.

China Market Meltdown and Contagion

The financial crisis in China was one of the threats that I highlighted. “I know what you are thinking,” I told the group, “Mike, we don’t have a lot of money in the Chinese stock market and we don’t really sell too much wine in China, so I don’t see how falling Chinese stock prices are a threat to our business.” Well, they aren’t much of a direct threat, it’s that Butterfly Effect that you need to worry about.

Economists have a name for the Butterfly Effect of a financial crisis — we call it contagion and it takes several forms. Exchange rates are one way that economic effects are transmitted from country to country.  The Chinese crisis drives down raw material prices on global markets and this has pushed down the foreign currency values of many natural resource producing countries including Australia, New Zealand and Chile.

These three countries are important wine exporters to the U.S. and lower exchange rates for their currencies means increased competition for U.S. producers. When you find that a Chilean producer has undercut your price for bulk Cabernet Sauvignon, for example, there might be a Butterfly Effect at the root of the problem.

Oil is another potential contagion vector. As China slumps, oil prices do, too. This has a disproportionate impact on certain countries such as Russia, which relies on oil exports to China more than in the past due to the current international  sanction regime. When Russia also slumps due to falling oil sales wine producers in Spain, for example, find themselves stuck with excess stocks earmarked for the Russian market. If they try to sell them off here in the U.S. at a bargain price that’s another Butterfly Effect to consider.

The Contagion-Busters

Contagion occurs in other ways and I highlighted the group that I think of as  “The Committee to Save the World” (shown above) in my Napa talk (you might prefer to call them the Contagion-Busters). The “Committee’s” job is to stop contagion or at least minimize its effects and it is a difficult task. They have been focused on Greece in recent months, but now it is impossible for them to ignore China.

Hopefully they can prevent the Chinese crisis from having real impacts on other large economies. It is already clear that there have been substantial financial effects (the U.S. stock market “correction,” for example) but the real economy of jobs and output is slower to react and sometimes is less affected. Fingers crossed.

Certainly the Chinese crisis adds risk to the whole world economic system and puts constraints on policy. If the Federal Reserve now goes forward with its widely anticipated plan to raise interest rates in September, for example, the result is likely to be a big spike in the value of the U.S. dollar on foreign exchange markets, putting U.S. wine producers at a further competitive disadvantage. Another beat of the butterfly’s wings?

Keep an eye on China. The impacts could be both bigger and different than you otherwise expect.