Tag: United States Economy

The Next China Shock Is Here

Media Library

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts. The biggest economic story in the world right now is China’s growing dominance across advanced manufacturing sector after advanced manufacturing sector — from electric vehicles to batteries to solar panels to software like A.I. and open models, where they’ve become a world leader. What is happening here is very different than what we call the first China Shock, when China became a big exporter of things that were not…

Trump Prepares Yet Another Strategy to Resurrect Global Tariffs

Media Library

The Trump administration has cycled through trade law after trade law as it tries to find a sound legal basis to impose the steep tariffs on foreign products that President Trump wants. It is poised to try yet another approach. A global 10 percent tariff that Mr. Trump imposed in February after the Supreme Court struck down his earlier global tariffs is set to lapse at 12:01 a.m. on Friday. The administration has a new batch of tariffs ready to go to replace it, which could be announced as soon…

Russia Bill Broadens Sanctions but Could Fuel Fears Over the Dollar

Media Library

A Russia sanctions bill is posing a dilemma for the Trump administration: Lawmakers are pushing to wage further financial warfare just as the administration worries that heavy use of sanctions may erode the U.S. dollar’s supremacy. The bill, which was the brainchild of Senator Lindsey Graham before his death, aims to impose mandatory sanctions on Russia and its allies and potentially broaden the reach of penalties to include tariffs on buyers of Russian energy. The White House has said that the scope of the sanctions could broaden to include Iran…

Why the U.S. Could Beat China

Media Library

And there’s been a new phenomenon in the U.S. called Chinamaxxing. Have you heard of this, Natasha? No, what is Chinamaxxing? Chinamaxxing is mostly a social media phantasm, but a lot of people have been looking at these videos of the skyline of Shanghai or the skyline of Chongqing, which is really amazing. There’s these drone shows out there, and people are feeling like, “Oh, you’re meeting me at a very Chinese time of my life.” You’re drinking tea more. You’re wearing slippers inside the house. People are playing mahjong…

The American Economy Isn’t as Bad as You Might Think

Media Library

I’m Natasha Saran, I’m a professor at Yale Law School and a co-founder of the Yale Budget Lab. I’m Dan Wang, I’m a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. And Dan and I are friends and also colleagues. And we’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the United States and our economy over the course of the last many years, and particularly of recent of this narrative about the idea that the United States is in some substantial decline, much like the decline of the Roman Empire…

America Was Being Played. The Bessent Doctrine Says Those Days Are Over.

Media Library

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent delivered a remarkably important speech on June 23 at the Economic Club of New York. Yet neither Wall Street nor most of the economic profession seems to have paid it enough attention. By laying out what until now seemed more like haphazard policy measures, Mr. Bessent put down a marker for how the United States plans to operate in a changing global economic system. In the process, he elevated both the scale and the scope of a systemic change that started in earnest during President Trump’s…

Why America Is Its Own Biggest Geopolitical Risk

Media Library

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts. Over the past month, there have been two dominant stories in American foreign policy. One, of course, is the war with Iran. The other is the much-anticipated summit between President Trump and Xi Jinping of China. If you look closely at both of these stories, you see that our foreign policy has entered into a period of absolute incoherence. Trump said that the point of the war with Iran…

Trump’s ‘Learning Curve’ on China Ends With Conciliation at Summit

Media Library

In 2024, Donald J. Trump said China was “killing us as a country.” Last year, he complained that President Xi Jinping of China was “very tough, and extremely hard to make a deal with.” His tariffs on China reached 145 percent at one point. The whiplash that followed culminated in the pageantry in Beijing this week. As Air Force One took off from the Chinese capital on Friday, it remained unclear what deals, if any, President Trump had clinched with Mr. Xi. But the two-day summit in Beijing underscored how…

How the U.S. Is Trying to Ensure the Dollar’s Dominance During Economic Turmoil

Media Library

The summit between President Trump and China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, in Beijing this week is likely to include tense discussions about tariffs, Taiwan, Iran and sanctions. But simmering below the surface is another battle between the United States and China: an intensifying currency war. Concerns about America’s mounting debt load and its aggressive use of sanctions to cut adversaries off from the Western financial system have raised doubts about the safety of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Those fears have led to growing demand for gold and…

Tim Cook Did Wonders for Apple. He Also Did a Lot for Xi Jinping.

Media Library

Tim Cook is ending his illustrious stint as chief executive of Apple. The soft-spoken operator accomplished the near impossible, filling the shoes of the visionary co-founder Steve Jobs, turning the iPhone from a cultural phenomenon into a financial juggernaut and transforming his company into a $4 trillion goliath — growing its market value by $682 million per day, on average, for 15 years. By the metrics investors care about, Mr. Cook is nothing short of a rock star. But when one considers his role in the sweep of American history,…