WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

This is on point. I'm Megna Chakrabarty.

The United States still has the world's largest economy.

Its GDP is approximately $30.5 trillion.

China is number two, with a GDP of $19.5 trillion.

Then there's a huge gap, a drop of some $15 trillion before you find Germany, Japan, and India,

with GDPs between $4 and $5 trillion.

Now, the thing about China is,

it wasn't even in the top 10 a mere 25 years ago.

It's really astonishing.

And more remarkable still,

some economic forecasts predict China could surpass the United States

and become the world's largest economy just 15 years from now,

sometime in the 2040s. Now, there are, of course, a lot of reasons for this. But what if I told you

that one of those reasons is how an American company helped build up China. Now this company has a market cap of

$3.2 trillion. So if this company were a country, it would have the seventh largest economy in the

world. And by 2015, this company was investing $55 billion every year in China.

That's almost four times as much as the 2022 Chips and Science Act here in the United States,

which then Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo called, quote,

a once-in-a-generation investment that would, quote,

usher in a new era of American leadership and advanced

semiconductor manufacturing, end quote. That was the celebration for this one-time Chips Act.

...