President Donald Trump announced that the United States will impose a 10 percent duty on an additional $200 billion of Chinese imports as of next week, quickly escalating a trade war that has hit broad swaths of the global economy.
Also Read: U.S. China Trade War: Analysis of Latest Developments
The United States’ use of sanctions has exploded over the past decade. An analysis by the law firm Gibson Dunn found that President Donald Trump’s administration added nearly 1,000 people, companies, and entities to U.S. sanctions lists during 2017, nearly 30 percent more than the number added during former President Barack Obama’s last year in office.
Ten years ago this week, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, and the world suddenly changed. That date, Sept. 15, 2008, was hardly the starting point of the Depression-sized financial crisis that would soon threaten to sink the entire world economy; it had begun more than a year earlier. But most scholars agree Lehman’s failure marked the moment when everyone realized at once that the so-called experts had no idea how deep the interconnections ran.
Are America and Pakistan finally breaking up? The short answer is no. As much as both states are fed up with each other, they remain far too co-dependent to simply walk away. What we are seeing instead is a tough and protracted re-negotiation over the terms of the relationship. The question of Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan is not necessarily the hardest issue…The far bigger question… is what India and Pakistan’s role will be in the emerging cold war between the US and China.
Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash
In the decade since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the start of the global financial crisis, the world economy has registered stronger growth than many realize, owing in large part to China. But in the years ahead, global economic imbalances and troubling trends in the business world will continue to pose economic as well as political risks.
Never before has China’s fast-growing middle class confronted such daunting economic challenges, which mainly stem from domestic causes but have expanded to include escalating tensions with the United States. As a result, the members of this crucial group have developed an acute sense of anxiety.
China’s chances of escaping the trade conflict with the US with only minor damage to its economy just got slimmer. On Friday, US President Donald Trump doubled down on his threats to impose higher tariffs on the nation’s goods, saying he’s ready to tax all imports “at short notice”.
Is the GDP true? Of course, it isn’t. But that isn’t really important in some ways. Almost all numbers in China are open for debate. As anyone who spends time dealing with the place knows, China is full of data and numbers, and while some may be true, that doesn’t mean the data set being described is complete.
Why is this boom happening? That’s an almost impossible question to answer. Fundamentally, economists don’t know why booms happen. It’s possible that there’s not even such a thing as a “boom” at all — that this is just how the economy works under normal circumstances, when there isn’t a recession or crisis to throw it off its game.
