The Coronavirus Crisis Could Lead To The Mother Of All Trade Imbalances
Odd Lots
Bloomberg
4.5 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 14 May 2020
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With the acute phase of the health crisis having faded in China, factory activity has ramped up again. One big problem though: With the economy so depressed everywhere else, demand for the goods made in those factories has fallen off a cliff. This is just one way in which the virus is massively exacerbating trade imbalances that existed prior to this crisis, and which are now shaking the global economic order. On this episode, we speak with Matt Klein, an economics columnist at Barron’s, and the co-author of the new book Trade Wars Are Class Wars about the interplay of the crisis, world trade, geopolitics, and domestic political tensions.
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| 0:00.0 | Join us in New York on November 29th for the Bloomberg Canadian Finance Conference, |
| 0:04.6 | proudly sponsored by National Bank of Canada Financial Markets. |
| 0:07.8 | 2023 marks the 11 year anniversary of our Canada focused event and continues the tradition of providing timely |
| 0:13.8 | insights and actionable strategies. We'll have senior government |
| 0:17.1 | officials from Saskatchewan, Quebec, British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario as well |
| 0:21.9 | as speakers from Northland Power, World Bank, Transolta, and many more. |
| 0:26.0 | Register at Bloomberg Live.com slash Canadian Finance slash radio. Hello and |
| 0:45.0 | I'm Tracy Allaway. |
| 0:47.0 | So Tracy, something that you've been writing about lately |
| 0:51.0 | and of course we're still in the middle of this extraordinary global crisis. |
| 0:56.0 | The story has taken on a new dimension and I feel like you being positioned in Hong Kong covering the story from Asia is going to really |
| 1:07.2 | an area that you can appreciate. Oh what's that? Well I mean mean, in the last few days, and we're recording this on May 4th, 2020, so important to note, |
| 1:20.0 | the idea of the trade war, China US trade tensions has really sort of |
| 1:25.7 | re-emerged as one of the subplots so to speak within this crisis. |
| 1:30.3 | Oh yeah so after a relatively long hiatus we have Deng Trump once again |
| 1:36.5 | threatening tariffs on China and of course there are political dimensions to what |
| 1:40.9 | he's doing China is sort of an easy distraction or an easy |
| 1:44.4 | scapegoat for the coronavirus chaos, but yeah it's definitely interesting to |
| 1:49.8 | see the trade war pop up again in the midst of what is arguably the biggest global |
| 1:55.9 | recession that we have had for a long time. Yeah and it's interesting too because |
| 2:01.7 | obviously the trade war, trade tensions dominated really the second half of last year, and you would have expected that sort of perhaps very early on in this crisis that due to the |
| 2:16.1 | origin of the virus that Trump would have taken an extremely hard line against China |
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