*The money, the jobs, and the tourists that cross borders to get here are all being renegotiated at once. Here’s what that means for the Grand Strand.*
What Is Transnational Capital? Why It May Be Coming to an End. And What It Means for Canadian Tourists Myrtle Beach in Horry County’s Future.
—
Canadian tourists Myrtle Beach saw a significant change in visitation, with numbers falling roughly 30 percent ahead of the 65th Can-Am Days celebration in early 2026, according to WMBF News [WMBF News, 2026]. A Longwoods International survey found 59 percent of Canadian respondents blamed U.S. government policies and trade tariffs for their decision to stay home [Longwoods International, 2026].
Stuart Butler, president of Visit Myrtle Beach, told The Post and Courier the forecast projecting another 3-percent occupancy decline in 2026 is a worst-case scenario and the city is working to combat it [Post and Courier, 2025]. Grand Strand tourism already fell roughly 3 percent in 2025, after the region drew 18.2 million visitors and $13.2 billion in spending the year before [Visit Myrtle Beach, 2024].
The numbers are local. The cause is global. This is what the retreat of transnational capital looks like on Ocean Boulevard.
—
1. What “transnational capital” actually means
UC Santa Barbara sociologist William I. Robinson coined the modern usage in the late 1990s: money, productive assets, and financial flows that move across borders, controlled by actors whose loyalties are organized globally rather than nationally [Robinson, 2004]. His companion concept — the transnational capitalist class — named the executives, financiers, and policy planners whose working lives revolve around the World Economic Forum, the IMF, and multinational boards [Robinson and Harris, 2000].
Strip the jargon. For three decades, capital was rewarded for ignoring borders. A pension fund in Toronto bought a condo tower in North Myrtle Beach. A shipyard in Dubai chose Conway. A retiree from Ontario paid cash for a villa in Little River. The money did not ask permission at customs.
The International Monetary Fund uses a cooler phrase — “geoeconomic fragmentation,” meaning policy-driven changes in where cross-border flows start and end, often steered by national-security logic [Gopinath / IMF, 2023]. The scale matters. Global trade now equals roughly 60 percent of global GDP. During the original Cold War, it was 24 percent [Gopinath / IMF, 2024].
**So what does this mean for you?** You live in a county whose economy has been built, paycheck by paycheck, on money and people crossing borders to get here. Canadian snowbirds, Dubai boatbuilders, import containers — these are the payroll at your favorite restaurant. When the global rules change, your shift changes with them.
2. Why the model is cracking
The cracks are visible in the data. New trade and foreign-direct-investment restrictions imposed worldwide have tripled since 2018, per IMF tracking [IMF Working Paper, 2024]. New foreign direct investment into the United States fell to $151 billion in 2024 — down 14.2 percent from 2023 and well below the $277 billion annual average of the preceding decade [BEA, 2025].
The triggers are easy to list. The 2022 sanctions package froze roughly $300 billion in Russian central-bank reserves and expelled major Russian banks from SWIFT [Atlantic Council, 2025] — persuading finance ministers from Beijing to Riyadh that dollar-clearing infrastructure was now a weapon. Ruble-yuan trade grew roughly 80-fold between 2022 and 2024 as the two routed around the dollar [FIIA, 2024]. The CHIPS and Science Act put $52 billion of federal money behind domestic semiconductor manufacturing, catalyzing $160 to $200 billion in private investment and tens of thousands of jobs [PIIE, 2025]. Tariffs — the ones keeping Canadians off the beach — are the new normal.
The intellectual scaffolding predates the moment. Harvard’s Dani Rodrik argued two decades ago that democracy, national sovereignty, and unrestricted globalization cannot all coexist — pick two [Rodrik, 2011]. Thomas Piketty warned in 2014 that when the return on capital runs ahead of growth, wealth concentrates into a hereditary oligarchy, and the corrective requires transnational cooperation governments are now walking away from [Piketty, 2014]. Larry Fink of BlackRock — who oversees roughly $10 trillion in assets — declared in his March 2022 shareholder letter that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had ended the globalization of the past three decades [Fink / BlackRock, 2022].
Add the domestic policy wave. **South Carolina’s H.3566 advanced out of a House panel on April 3, 2026, prohibiting entities tied to China, Iran, North Korea, Russia, and Cuba from acquiring agricultural land anywhere in the state, with a prospective effective date of July 1, 2026** [SC Legislature / Fox Carolina, 2026]. The bill does not force divestiture. It does signal that the old assumption — money is money, wherever it comes from — is dead at the state capital.
**So what does this mean for you?** The rules your retirement account, your employer, and your county’s tax base have operated under for your entire adult life are being rewritten in real time. Some of the rewriting is necessary. Some will cost you before it helps anyone. Nobody in Columbia or Washington is going to ask you first.
3. The counter-case
An honest argument requires its opposition. The strong-form thesis — globalization is ending — is contested, and the contest is not fringe. The Bureau of Economic Analysis reports the total stock of foreign direct investment in the United States rose by $332 billion in 2024 to $5.71 trillion, with Japan, the UK, Canada, and the Netherlands each holding positions above $725 billion [BEA, 2025]. Europe supplied 64 percent of all new FDI into the U.S. last year, led by Ireland and Canada [BEA, 2025]. Flows slowed. Stocks kept growing. A Federal Reserve Board analysis in April 2025 concluded we are seeing reconfiguration of global capital, not retreat [Federal Reserve Board, 2025].
The IMF itself — the institution warning about fragmentation — notes that a 60-percent trade-to-GDP ratio versus 24 percent in Cold War I means the cost of actual decoupling is now far higher than during the last great-power standoff [Gopinath / IMF, 2024]. That is an argument for slow, partial adjustment, not Fink’s clean break.
Both can be true. Money still crosses borders. Less of it crosses freely.
**So what does this mean for you?** Do not buy the cleanest version of either story. The people telling you globalization is finished are often selling domestic stocks. The people telling you nothing has changed are often selling the index fund. The truth is messier, and Horry County sits on the fault line.
4. What this means for Horry County
Start with the tourists who aren’t coming. Canadian buyers accounted for 13 percent of all foreign U.S. home purchases in the year ending March 2024, spending $5.9 billion at an average price of $834,000 — and 69 percent paid all cash [NAR, 2024]. The National Association of Realtors does not break out South Carolina in its top-10 tier, but the snowbird presence on Ocean Boulevard is on the ground. When tariffs push 59 percent of Canadians to skip the trip, the hit lands on our hoteliers, bartenders, and property-tax rolls.
Now the counter-story. In December 2025, Dubai-headquartered Asis Boats — operating as Ocean Craft Marine — selected Bucksport Marine Park in Conway for its U.S. manufacturing headquarters: $10.8 million, 93 jobs, online by end of 2026 [S.C. Commerce / Governor’s Office, 2025]. The Myrtle Beach Regional Economic Development Corporation counts roughly 25 international companies already operating here [MBREDC]. The Myrtle Beach–Conway–North Myrtle Beach metro area moved $206 million in goods exports in 2023 [USTR, 2024]. South Carolina recruited $8.19 billion in industrial investment and 5,500 promised jobs in 2024 — the state’s third-highest year on record [SC Daily Gazette, 2025]. Transnational capital is still walking in the front door.
Then the exposure. The South Carolina Ports Authority handled 225,532 TEUs in February 2026, an 11-percent year-over-year increase driven by imports [SC Ports Authority, 2026]. Horry County’s goods move through Charleston — our umbilical cord to global trade, squeezed by every tariff round. Foreign investors held interests in roughly 45.8 million acres of U.S. agricultural land as of December 31, 2023, with Canada the single largest holder at roughly 15.35 million acres [USDA AFIDA, 2024]. South Carolina carries a roughly 800-acre Chinese-owned farmland footprint in Sumter County, near Shaw Air Force Base — the most-cited data point in Columbia’s debate [USDA AFIDA / Fox Carolina, 2026]. Horry is part of USDA’s tracking; the county-specific figure is not yet on public record in a citable form. It should be.
Just up the road, International Paper closed its Georgetown pulp-and-paper mill in late 2024, eliminating 674 jobs, and will close its remaining Georgetown container plant by year-end 2026 — another 126 jobs gone [WMBF News, 2026]. Georgetown is not Horry. The labor market is.
**So what does this mean for you?** Your livelihood is cross-threaded with the flows of money, tourists, and containers that reach us. When Washington reshuffles the global deck, Horry County pays some of the first bills — and collects some of the first paychecks when a Dubai firm picks Conway. Whether the ledger closes black or red depends on what local leaders demand in return.
—
Ask harder questions. Ask the Myrtle Beach Area Chamber of Commerce what it is doing to replace Canadian room-nights with demand that does not hinge on a trade truce. Ask Horry County Council and MBREDC to publish which of those 25 international firms carry claw-back clauses if promised jobs do not arrive. Ask your state representative and state senator whether H.3566 will come with a public, searchable, county-level registry. Demand specifics on Bucksport’s timeline and the 93 jobs. Follow the budget, not the speech.
The era of frictionless global capital may be ending. The era of paying attention to whose capital is buying what, and on what terms, has to start.
—
### Further Reading
– William I. Robinson, *A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World* (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)
– Dani Rodrik, *The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy* (W.W. Norton, 2011)
– Thomas Piketty, *Capital in the Twenty-First Century* (Harvard University Press, 2014)
– Gita Gopinath, “Cold War II? Preserving Economic Cooperation Amid Geoeconomic Fragmentation,” IMF (December 2023)
– Peterson Institute for International Economics, “Industrial Policy through the CHIPS and Science Act: A Preliminary Report” (2025)
– Larry Fink, 2022 Chairman’s Letter to BlackRock Shareholders (via CNBC, March 24, 2022)
– U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, “Direct Investment by Country and Industry, 2024″ and “New Foreign Direct Investment in the United States, 2024″
– Federal Reserve Board, “How Is Geopolitical Fragmentation Reshaping U.S. Foreign Direct Investment?” (April 2025)
– USDA Farm Service Agency, AFIDA Annual Reports (2023 data)
– National Association of Realtors, “2024 International Transactions in U.S. Residential Real Estate“
– South Carolina Legislature Online, H.3566
