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President Joe Biden held a phone call on Tuesday with China’s genocidal dictator Xi Jinping in which the American leftist leader reportedly emphasized his distaste for a “new Cold War” or “conflict” with the Chinese Communist Party and assured Xi he would not pursue economic “decoupling.” Those details appeared in the flagship Chinese news outlet Xinhua, which paraphrased Xi’s remarks as berating Biden to deny the existence of the nation of Taiwan, reject pressure to limit China’s malignant influence in the United States, and endeavor to “coexist in peace.”

Neoliberalism is out and neo-mercantilism in as US decoupling from China abandons adherence to rules-based, free market trade Speaking at the Brookings Institution in April 2023, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan declared national security and industrial policy as the guiding lights for US trade. Sullivan couched his prescriptions in soft tones and catchy phrases. “Decoupling” is out, “de-risking” is in. The goal is to “forge a new consensus” — something different to the market-oriented Washington Consensus of yesteryear. National security restrictions have their limits set in a “small yard, high fence.” US security is not trying to engage in...

As the global economic intelligentsia debates how to “decouple” or “de-risk” from China, Elon Musk clearly didn’t get the memo. The Tesla founder was feted like a returning king in Beijing this week. From the moment his private jet arrived on Tuesday, Musk is reportedly being called “Brother Ma,” putting him in rarified league with Alibaba billionaire Jack Ma. There are many takeaways from Musk’s first China visit in three years. One is that not everyone is decoupling from China, least of all the globe’s most influential electric-vehicle (EV) evangelist and owner of Twitter. Another: the future of EV production...

India banned 118 more mostly Chinese apps on Wednesday, a move that could intensify simmering tensions between the two countries following a recent deadly skirmish at a disputed Himalayan border site, and raising concerns about the longer-term impact of $82 billion of trade. The latest apps include Tencent Holdings Ltd's popular videogame PUBG. India imported $65.3 billion worth of goods from China in the fiscal year ended March 2020, and exported $16.6 billion, according to the country's Commerce ministry... India has also been planning to impose higher trade barriers and raise import duties on around 300 products from China and...

China warned on Thursday that a “forced decoupling” of its economy with India, following a Himalayan border clash last month that killed 20 Indian soldiers, would hurt both countries. The statement came after New Delhi’s recent moves to ban or sideline Chinese business interests in one of the world’s biggest markets, even as the border remains tense with many more troops on the ground than usual. “China advocates win-win cooperation and opposes a zero-sum game,” Ambassador Sun Weidong wrote on Twitter. “Our economies are highly complementary, interwoven and interdependent. Forced decoupling is against the trend and will only lead to...

With all eyes on Trump's Tuesday evening Rose Garden speech which unveiled that he'll sign new and punitive measures indirectly targeting China — namely the Hong Kong Autonomy Act, a bipartisan measure to penalize banks that work with Chinese officials found to be interfering in Hong Kong affairs — it remains that arguably the most important recent statements out of China came not from current government officials, but from Zhou Li, the 65-year-old former deputy head of the Chinese Communist Party's International Liaison Department. He's considered an important voice who echoes the outside the box thinking and general "talk"...

I would re-name the malaise from which we suffer CHINA-19. The acronym might stand for something like China’s Highly Infectious National Arsenal -- readers can supply their own candidates -- though the 19 is only a very specific temporal designator. The problem of China dates from the time of Nixon’s reopening of diplomatic relations in 1972 to the present moment. One recalls the Bushes’ preoccupation with Iraq when the menace was always Jimmy Carter’s Iran. Similarly, the media and Democratic obsession with Russia Russia Russia! was not only wrong and meretricious but completely beside the point; the political and economic...

Perhaps the most momentous part of the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) was its acknowledgment that the U.S. government’s historical premise “that support for China’s rise and for its integration into the post-war international order would liberalize China” was wrong. Recent events indicate that not only was the theory underlying all U.S.-China policy for nearly 50 years incorrect, but that perhaps the opposite is true: Support for China’s rise and for its integration into the post-war international order has actually illiberalized America.Stated differently, there is a case to be made that since President Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 visit...

China aims to lay off 5 to 6 million state workers over the next two to three years as part of efforts to curb industrial overcapacity and pollution. The move is being seen as Beijing's boldest retrenchment program in almost two decades. China's leadership, obsessed with maintaining stability and making sure redundancies do not lead to unrest, will spend nearly 150 billion yuan ($23 billion) to cover layoffs in just the coal and steel sectors in the next 2-3 years. [...] The hugely inefficient state sector employed around 37 million people in 2013, and accounts for about 40 percent of...

When should we start to expect the "unexpected"? Every economic datum released in the last month has been dutifully reported as "worse than expected," from the various Federal Reserve regional economic surveys, initial claims for unemployment, plus every measure of housing activity, just to mention a few.

Second-quarter earnings reports are coming in, and they’re making Wall Street smile. Corporate profits are up. And big American companies are sitting on a gigantic pile of money. The 500 largest non-financial firms held almost a trillion dollars in the second quarter, and that money pile is growing larger this quarter. Profits that plummeted in the recession have bounced back. Big businesses have recovered almost 90 percent of what they lost. So with all this money and profit, they’ll start hiring again, right? Wrong – for three reasons. First, lots of their profits are coming from their overseas operations. So...

Incoming White House energy-environment czar Carol Browner was recently discovered to be a commissioner in Socialist International. While that revelation has been ignored by the mainstream media and blithely dismissed by her supporters, you may soon be paying the cost of Browner’s political beliefs in your electricity bill. So what does all this have to do with your electricity bill? In late-December, Carbon Control News reported that Browner was a “strong backer” of utility “decoupling,” which had emerged as a “key climate policy priority for Obama.” How would decoupling actually function in practice? There are several different schemes for decoupling,...

Panic In China Over Jobs, Economy, Cotton The Telegraph is reporting China slashes interest rates as panic spreads. Factory workers surround a damaged police car during a protest outside Kai Da toy factory in Dongguan, China. Photo: REUTERS The People's Bank of China cut interest rates by more than 1pc point as the economy crumbles and millions of jobs are predicted to go ahead of Christmas. The move came just one day after the World Bank predicted that China would grow by 7.5pc next year. The level of growth may appear robust by Western standards, but it would represent the...

Dark days see warnings of worse to come By Alan Beattie in London Published: November 21 2008 17:03 | Last updated: November 21 2008 17:03 The weekly newsletter sent out on Friday by Fathom, a London-based economic consultancy, said it all. “It’s getting really ugly out there,” it said. “It may be true that we have passed the first phase of this crisis, but that does not mean the next phase will not be worse, perhaps very much worse.” The investors reading those dire warnings will already have spent their week seeing a heap of evidence piling up that the...

/Begin Excerpt Now the myth that was floating around for many years was that the United States was going to go into its own abyss while the world somehow boomed on its own.  According to many of these people, the United States was contained.  Did Ben Bernanke give them his early 2007 speech about the subprime market being contained?  The recent turn of events are as follows:(a)  U.S. Dollar rally(b)  Commodities falling(c)  Inflation moderating(d)  Housing still decliningThese events are occurring because the world has not decoupled.  That is, we are still very much intertwined and when the larger economies sneeze,...

Commentary: BRIC is broke, and emerging markets are discouraging By John Prestbo Last update: 7:29 p.m. EDT Sept. 17, 2008 NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Many investors turned to emerging markets last year because those economies kept sizzling even as developed economies began cooling. Some pundits opined that emerging markets were the new global growth engine and that their momentum could save developed economies from sliding into recession. Indeed, that view held up for a while. In 2007, the Dow Jones Wilshire Emerging Markets Index rocketed up 45.4% on a total-return basis, while the DJ Wilshire Developed Markets Index gained 9.5%....

The Short View: Chinese bubble By John Authers, Investment Editor Published: March 12 2008 17:47 | Last updated: March 12 2008 17:47 As the year turned, the world’s fears were invested in the US. All its hopes were turned to China. That has changed. Anxiety about China has suddenly spiked. This is partly because the bubble in its domestic equity market has burst. The Shanghai Composite is down 31.6 per cent from its October peak – more than the Nasdaq Composite had dropped at the same stage after the tech bubble burst. Hong Kong-quoted H-shares and New York-quoted ADRs are...

Insight: Decoupling gives way to recoupling By Jim O’Neill Published: February 25 2008 17:01 | Last updated: February 25 2008 17:01 We have completed seven full weeks of 2008. At the close of business on Friday, many stock markets around the world, including some of the best performers of 2006 and 2007, had dropped much more than the US, whether developed or developing. For example, the previously high-flying DAX was down 15.6 per cent, virtually double the year-to-date decline in the S&P 500. So are both the high-flyers of the previous two years, China and India. Brazil, the cheapest valued...

Ins and outs of ups and downs: shaken markets face up to 'recoupling' By John Authers and Gillian Tett Thu Jan 24, 3:05 PM ET This has been no happy new year for the world's equity markets. US stocks have had their worst January in more than a century - and this sell-off has prompted both a wave of selling across the world and a truly extraordinary response by the Federal Reserve, with America's central bank making an emergency cut in target interest rates of 0.75 percentage points. By the time news of a historic trading loss at France's Société...