It's more of a strategy to maximise short-term gains, and the downsides aren't considered - because they don't need to be.

Public shareholders have absolutely no loyalty to any company they extract wealth from, and they can move their capital elsewhere in seconds. And CxO/execs are typically awarded bonuses on share price movements.

So any action that moves the needle on the share price is a good thing. If this has bad long-term consequences, CxO/execs can always try to bail if they see incoming. They don't always succeed, but they have a fair chance. Employees are more likely to be left without lifeboats in the sinking ship.

This still seems like foolish thing to do long term.

What happens if we move all the profits and manufacturing capacity to markets Western investors are locked out of?

Who cares? I don't mean it in a snarky way, more so I am curious as which groups of people actually get affected. Workers? Certainly. Capitalists? Not so sure. Somebody in charge is making these decisions and they deem them to be good decision, otherwise they wouldn't make them

The shareholders need to be put in the dark otherwise the stock would drop since there is a explicit short term pump and dump scheme. Surely it has to be at executive and board level to maximize bonuses not in the interest of the stock holders.

Sound like most other shorttermist problems we are suffering, i.e. climate change, debt, etc.

I think your terms are spot on.

John Sterman used to say something very similar going back to at least the 2000 and the trend has only accelerated since then.

At the time I remember him giving lectures on System Dynamics models to demonstrate the effects.

Thanks, I'll have a look at his works