Welcome. My name is Glenn Dyson and I'm joined by Alexander McCurris and Professor Michael Hudson.

And, yeah, welcome to the both of you. And today, I really wanted to discuss the decoupling or fragmentation of the international economy and also now the alternative economic architecture emerging,

I would say primarily in the East, but also in other parts of the world.

So I thought we can start off by discussing the defining economic challenges of our time.

For those of us who are studying economics in the 90s and 2000s, the big talk was always

economic interdependence. This was supposed to be the recipe for prosperity and peace. But these days,

the rhetoric obviously has changed. Now, the main talk in town will be a new international division of power.

So, while in the early 2000, the idea was, you know, the United States would invent the iPhone

and the Chinese could assemble it.

This was the distribution of labor.

But now, of course, China has climbed up these global value chains, and it can effectively

do both the invention of it and

assembly.

Meanwhile, Biden recently argued that if something is invented in the US, it should also be produced there.

So it's a dismantling or repatriation of the supply chains going on.

And we also see economic dependence being weaponized, I would say,

hijacking of Iranian oil tankers, seizing the Russian central bank assets, or simply trying to cut off

or cripple China's access to technology. So I guess my first question, what does all of this mean?

What are the main trends and what does it mean not just for the United States and China, but also

the wider world? Well, countries such as Germany, which was very much tied into this

very liberal economic system, be crushed under the new political economy?

Or what do you see coming?

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