The rise of digital platforms, cutting-edge forms of automation, and Big Data promises to transform labor markets and upend longstanding business models. It will also broaden our thinking about human wellbeing, much of which hinges on social and experiential factors that have little to do with standard measures of material welfare.
U.S. President Donald Trump at the G20 summit in Osaka. Photo/White House
The trade war is doing permanent damage to the Chinese economy every month since once production networks have been relocated to lower-cost countries in Southeast Asia, they are unlikely to return to China. The United States faces no such economic pressure.
President Donald Trump said negotiations with China are “right back on track” after meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Saturday in Japan. “We had a really good meeting,” Trump told reporters before talks with the Turkish president. “Perhaps better than expected.” The president did not specify whether he would pause his plan to impose additional tariffs on China, but Chinese state-run television was reporting that the U.S. would not impose any new duties on Chinese goods.
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Various countries in the region are under pressure to support Washington or Beijing as their tariff dispute bleeds into bigger issues. But wariness of putting one offside means most will try to wait for the two giants to work through their differences.
If the U.S.-China trade war develops into a broader cold war, as some observers fear, it will be nothing like the actual Cold War. Between civil war in Russia after World War I, the Great Depression in the United States and then the cataclysm of World War II, America and the Soviet Union never had a chance to develop a significant economic relationship before things hardened into a stark East-West divide. When Washington adopted a containment strategy that blocked most trade with the Soviets, including technology transfers, it had relatively little impact on either economy. The situation with China today is radically different.
The decoupling of investment is already clear. Last year, Chinese acquisitions of American companies plunged 95 per cent from its peak in 2017 after the US Congress gave the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US authority to broaden the scope of its reviews of Chinese acquisitions on national security grounds.
Policymakers need to ask what Wall Street’s mighty money machine exists for in the first place. Should the financial business exist primarily as an end in itself, or should it be, as in the original meaning of “finance,” a means to an end? …When finance becomes an end in itself, the public is liable to get angry. That’s one reason for the wave of populism that has washed over the globe since the crisis.
Trump is wrong about a lot of things when it comes to trade, including that the trade arrangements to which the United States is a party reflect poor negotiating skills. To the contrary, they overwhelmingly reflect U.S. negotiating preferences. But Trump does have a point that some of the negotiators’ priorities don’t reflect those of many Americans.
Beyond the US, the fragility of growth in debt-ridden China and some other emerging markets remains a concern, as do economic, policy, financial and political risks in Europe. Worse, across the advanced economies, the policy toolbox for responding to a crisis remains limited. The monetary and fiscal interventions and private-sector backstops used after the 2008 financial crisis simply cannot be deployed to the same effect today.
In the restaurants and coffee shops at the heart of southern China’s hi-tech powerhouse the main topics of conversation have shifted from industry gossip such as IPOs, mergers and innovations to the trade war with the US and Washington’s campaign against Huawei.
Read Here – South China Morning Post
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