Before he even took office, Donald Trump signaled that his policies toward China would differ drastically from his predecessor. They still do.Less than a month after his shocking 2016 election upset, the president-elect answered his phone in Trump Tower and had a pleasant 10-minute conversation with the president of China.Not Beijing, China. Taiwan, China, as in Republic of. It was the first time an American president or president-elect had talked with that country’s leader in nearly four decade

Calm down, the world’s biggest car market isn’t going to drive off a cliff. Sales to dealerships in China fell for a third month in September, dropping almost 12 percent from a year earlier, data showed Friday. Retail sales declined 13 percent. Total vehicle sales could now be on track for their first annual drop in more than two decades. Scary stuff. But much of this is a readjustment after years of outsize growth in an industry that churns out more than 20 million cars a year. It’s perhaps too

It was a busy last week for Brazilian yahoos. In Salvador, a seaside town in Bahia state, a martial arts master was stabbed to death. His offense? Admitting he’d voted for the candidate from the left-wing Workers’ Party. In Recife, a government employee wearing left-wing campaign buttons landed in the hospital after being set upon by sympathizers of right-wing presidential hopeful Jair Bolsonaro. An angry mob of his supporters in Rio de Janeiro also beat up a transgender singer; lesbian, gay, bi

It’s October, which means our televisions and theaters are full of stories of supernatural mayhem. More recently shows like “Black Mirror” and movies like “Ready Player One” portray mayhem wrought not by ghosts and monsters, but by out-of-control technology that feels just plausible enough to incite a different kind of fear. Even the news stokes worries of new, disruptive technologies: Robots will take our jobs, driverless cars will kills us and, for those who really want a scare, algorithms in

Climate change is a menace. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just issued a report showing how serious the situation is. If warming continues on its current trajectory, the report warns, then by the end of this century average temperatures will be 4 degrees Celsius higher than at the start of the Industrial Revolution.That may not sound like a big rise, but in fact the results will be catastrophic. Already, the world has warmed by 1 degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution star

The staggering tariffs being levied on China will almost certainly test President Donald Trump’s claim that “trade wars are easy to win.” He might be right, but the president doesn’t seem to have contemplated a different question: What happens when trade wars come to an end?When one country imposes tariffs on another, the eventual resolution of the conflict does not necessarily mean a return to the status quo. Instead, the penalties levied in the heat of a trade war can have destructive ripple e

Over the last decade, we have learned that a serious banking failure with risky balance sheets can feed into a major international financial crisis. That, in turn, is big enough to cause an economic crisis as we saw with the “Great Recession.” The downturn in growth, trade and productivity that followed also opened up the possibility of a new contagion today.The global financial crisis, which I confronted as governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand at that time, masked some very important dev

Most of all, I am disoriented by the speed at which major news events pass into the rearview mirror in contemporary America.　Last week a man was alleged to have mailed in letters to the Pentagon containing the raw material for ricin poison. No one seems to have been harmed, but if this had happened in, say, 2003, it would have been a major news story for weeks or months. Now I type “ricin” into Google and the top news results are a week old. There hasn’t been much coverage lately, nor have the 2

In different countries and for different reasons, university admissions policies are under attack. In a Boston courtroom on Oct. 15, a judge will begin hearing a lawsuit claiming that Harvard’s admission process discriminates against Asian-Americans. In the United Kingdom, Member of Parliament David Lammy described Oxford and Cambridge as “fiefdoms of entrenched privilege” because of the many students they admit from private schools. In Japan, Tokyo Medical University has apologized for manipula