Days after the United States announced a seven-year restriction on American companies doing business with the Chinese telecom giant ZTE, Chinese President Xi Jinping responded in defiance by laying out a broad vision to build China as a cyber and technology superpower.
The institutions that oversee the global economy – the IMF, the World Band, and the World Trading Organization – have all derived their authority from the support of the world’s economic hegemon, the United States. With the US under Donald Trump rapidly dumping its leadership role, how will the resulting vacuum be filled?
As Cui, China’s man in Washington, suggests, Xi’s team is now “looking at all options.” While Trump doing his worst with tariffs is worrying, the idea of Xi pulling the plug on the dollar is positively terrifying. Trump must remember that even though he runs the biggest economy, Xi holds the deed.
For its entire history, Silicon Valley has deflected skepticism, building itself a filter bubble that largely protected it from tough questions about its grand plans for remaking humanity and capitalism, about its bulldozing of privacy and media. Tomorrow will be the day Zuckerberg raises his hand before Congress, and it will be the day Silicon Valley no longer floats above the world.
Over the past five decades or so, Asia’s economies have relied largely on an export-oriented development model to support rapid economic transformation and growth. But with US President Donald Trump fulfilling his promise to adopt a more protectionist approach to trade — an effort that could spur retaliatory measures by other countries — that model is coming under increasing strain.
China is the world’s biggest importer of soybeans, most of which are used for animal feed. In 2017, it was also the second-largest importer of US agricultural products, buying US$19.6 billion of goods, with 63 per cent of that money going on soybeans. Any punitive tariffs on soybeans would have a huge impact on American farmers, many of whom in the nation’s Midwest were big supporters of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
Read Here – South China Morning Post
Also Read: Apple, Boeing, Qualcomm would be biggest losers in a China-US trade war
Whether Bitcoin’s value goes up or Bitcoin’s value goes down, people around the world are asking the same question: What exactly is the potential of crypto-assets? The technology behind these assets—including blockchain—is an exciting advancement that could help revolutionize fields beyond finance. It could, for example, power financial inclusion by providing new, low-cost payment methods to those who lack bank accounts and in the process empower millions in low-income countries. The possible benefits have even led some central banks to consider the idea of issuing central bank digital currencies. Before we get there, however, we should take a step back and understand the peril that comes along with the promise.
One inconvenient feature of the global trading system is that efforts to protect the jobs of voting workers in one country risk affecting jobs, and perhaps votes, in another. Thus President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs on imported aluminium and steel, offered with the rationale that American metalworkers had been losing jobs to foreign competition, alarmed Europe—the continent has its own metalworkers to worry about, whose jobs to some extent depend on access to markets like America’s.
Last week, President Donald Trump’s announcement that he would be slapping steep tariffs on imported steel and aluminium set off fears of a global trade war. But in reality, the international trading system has been unraveling for some time. After taking a quick glance at the World Trade Organization today, one might be excused for believing that it is a dead man walking.
The United States has thrown a spanner into the works of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the successor multilateral trade agreement to the once US-backed TPP. The liberalising pact is expected to be formally signed this week without America.
