In Episode 328 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Brad Setser, the Whitney Shepardson Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations where he specializes in global trade and capital flows, financial vulnerability analysis, and sovereign debt restructuring. Brad has also served in multiple Democrat administrations as a senior advisor to the U.S. Trade Representative, as deputy assistant secretary for international economic analysis at the U.S. Treasury Department, and as a director for international economics on the staff of the National Economic and the National Security Councils.

Brad and Demetri spend the first hour of their conversation discussing what Brad has described as “the new geopolitics of global finance,” how the political and national security assumptions and priorities that were taken for granted during the unipolar period are undergoing a series of transformations, and how these transformations are increasingly informing economic policymaking and driving changes in the global economy and financial markets.

In the second hour, they focus our attention on China’s economy, what a viable macroeconomic equilibrium could look like for China given its extraordinarily high savings rate and export-driven growth model, and whether the country can continue to grow without making significant reforms that would increase domestic consumption and reduce the country’s structurally high current account surpluses. They also discuss the state of the German economy, the growth of China’s export market for electric vehicles, the progress that’s been made to de-risk supply chains, industrial policy in the United States and Europe, and much more.

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Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

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Episode Recorded on 09/26/2023