How Martin Wolf Understands This Global Economic Moment
About this episode
Guest host Rogé Karma asks Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf to make sense of a fracturing global economy. Wolf organizes his answer around shifts (China's rise, deglobalization), shocks (the pandemic, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, inflation), and fragilities (debt, political dysfunction). He argues China's growth model is stalling — weighed down by a property overhang and the costs of Xi Jinping's zero-Covid policy and anti-corruption purges — and that US-China 'de-risking' will be expensive but is probably unavoidable. On deglobalization, Wolf is sympathetic to the Biden administration's industrial-policy diagnosis but skeptical it will create many jobs. He defends the Federal Reserve's 2 percent inflation target and argues the larger threat is political: democracies may lack the capacity to manage economic disappointment. He closes by sketching cautiously optimistic and pessimistic scenarios for the decade ahead.