This dispatch is coming from 35,000 feet over the Pacific, comfortably settled into my Cathay seat enroute to Hong Kong for the umpteenth time. This particular trip is actually a transit through Hong Kong on my way to Guangzhou, where I will be participating in the...
For me, Thanksgiving is always a time of appreciation—not just for family and food but also for the deeper issues afflicting all of us. With the world in turmoil, that latter point is an especially tough task today. But a few minutes ago, the first tranche of...
My October 26 piece for Project Syndicate was titled, “A Better Biden-Xi Summit?” The emphasis was on the question mark. The Bali summit of a year ago was a flop in many respects—poor preparation, too much emphasis on slogans (putting a “floor” on a conflicted...
Predictably, both the United States and China are engaged in a flurry of diplomatic activity ahead of next week’s summit between US President Joe Biden and China’s President Xi Jinping. As of this writing, the actual date and venue have yet to be formally announced by...
The pessimism on China is well in excess of anything I have encountered in my 25 years as a China watcher. There are a few scattered holdouts but even I threw in the towel nearly a year ago after being pretty much of a perma-bull on China since the late 1990s. But...
A three-day visit to Washington by Wang Yi, China’s senior foreign policy leader, pretty much seals the deal. All signs now point to a summit meeting between US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of the upcoming APEC Meetings to be...
Back in China for the first time in nearly seven months to speak at a forum at Nankai University in Tianjin, I set aside some time to meet with a small group of economics and international relations grad students. I was particularly curious to hear what was on their...
The Israeli-Hamas War has not occurred in a vacuum. How do we assess the implications of this tragic development for the global economy? We are at a pivotal moment in the post-World War II era. A US-led globalization into a unipolar world is now fragmenting into the...
The Teflon-like US dollar continues to defy gravity. While off a bit from its recent October 2022 highs, the broad dollar indexes have resumed their sharp upward momentum over the course of this summer. As of this August, the dollar’s real effective exchange rate...
With Joe Biden on the picket line this week in Michigan—an unprecedented action for a US president—my memory bank lit up. I immediately thought of an historic GM-UAW settlement in September 1979 that was a critical milestone in the Great Inflation. Back then, the...