The Progressive

Tariffs have historically been an important tool of industrial policy. They were used in the last century by east Asian nations to promote infant industries, and are being used today by the EU to help spur the energy transition. But do Donald Trump’s threats to impose a 25% across-the-board tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico, or his actual 10% tax rise on all imports from China, have any kind of thought-out policy rationale behind them? And should other countries respond in kind? 

To find out, the FT’s European economics commentator Martin Sandbu speaks to Dani Rodrik, professor of international political economy at Harvard. Rodrik is one of the world’s most acclaimed experts on industrial policy, and someone Martin first got to know as a PhD student in the 1990s.

Martin Sandbu writes a regular column for the Financial Times. You can find it here

Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Pocket Casts or wherever you listen.

Presented by Martin Sandbu. Produced by Laurence Knight and Edith Rousselot. Manuela Saragosa is the executive producer. Audio mix and original music by Breen Turner. The FT’s head of audio is Cheryl Brumley.

Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The global financial crisis of the late 2000s was marked by the failure of regulators to rein in risk-taking by banks. And yet regulatory issues varied from country to country, with some national financial regulatory systems proving more effective than others. 

In Visions of Financial Order: National Institutions and the Development of Banking Regulation (Princeton University Press, 2024), Dr. Kim Pernell traces the emergence of important national differences in financial regulation in the decades leading up to the crisis. To do so, she examines the cases of the United States, Canada, and Spain—three countries that subscribed to the same transnational regulatory framework (the Basel Capital Accord) but developed different regulatory policies in areas that would directly affect bank performance during the financial crisis.

In a broad historical analysis that extends from the rise of the first modern chartered banks in the 1780s through the major financial crises of the twentieth century and the Basel Capital Accord of 1988, Dr. Pernell shows how the different (and sometimes competing) principles of order embedded in each country’s regulatory and political institutions gave rise to distinctive visions of order and prosperity, which shaped subsequent financial regulatory design. Dr. Pernell argues that the different worldviews of national banking regulators reflected cultural beliefs about the ideal way to organize economic life to promote order, stability, and prosperity. Visions of Financial Order offers an innovative perspective on the persistent differences between regulatory institutions and the ways they shaped the unfolding of the 2008 global financial crisis.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

In the media, the importance of the legacies of empire and colonialism are often dismissed, with the public conversation often centring on the "culture war" elements of this history, from debates about statues to institutions like the National Trust becoming "woke". The implication of much of this discourse is that empire and colonialism are features of the past, and should be left there.In reality, it is far from that simple. Our guest for Episode 18 is legal scholar Kojo Koram, whose first book, Uncommon Wealth: Britain and the Aftermath of Empire, unpacks how the legacies of empire continue to structure every part of our unequal global economy, from international tribunals that protect corporate interests to the systems that leave countries trapped in cycles of debt. Rather than a thing of the past, Kojo expertly breaks down just how present empire really is, and critically, how it has shaped both the roots and impacts of climate and ecological crisis.

Politics is increasingly polarised, but if there’s one thing politicians of all major parties can agree on, it’s growth — that their political rivals failed to deliver growth, that we need more of it, and that getting it will solve all of our problems, from inequality and poverty to crumbling public services and stalling investment.

But not everyone agrees. For a growing movement of post-growth and degrowth economists, economic growth is neither neutral nor desirable. Instead, many increasingly call for the abandonment of our growth-dependent economic model on the basis that unfettered growth is driving our climate and ecosystems to the brink.

Our guest today, Hans Stegeman, is an unusual figure in this community — a banker who wants finance, and the wider economy, to move beyond growth for the sake of the planet. Hans is Chief Economist at Triodos Bank, as well as a leading writer and thinker on post-growth economics. In today’s episode, Hans and Adrienne discuss degrowth, the myth of green finance, and why breaking the rules of mainstream economics is the first step to a sustainable future.

Featuring Michael Denning on Stuart Hall’s Marxism—a Marxism without guarantees. This is a comprehensive introduction to Marxism as a method to analyze historically specific, complex and contradictory capitalist social formations, and what that means for making, rather than assuming the existence of, a working-class socialist politics. Next week Dan interviews Denning on Policing the Crisis, a 1978 book collectively authored by Hall and his colleagues; it’s a remarkable project that anticipates today’s politics around anti-immigrant xenophobia, mass incarceration, and Trumpism.

Listen to Hall’s full 1983 Inaugural Karl Marx Memorial Lecture in Sheffield youtube.com/watch?v=IP_OWahR-Gc

Our two-part series on Gramsci with Denning:

Buy Set the Earth on Fire at Haymarketbooks.com

Use code “DIG” for 30% off a subscription to The-Syllabus.com

This is the first episode in a miniseries on heterodox economists—people who embrace completely different approaches to economics than the standard thinkers. Adam and Cameron begin with Michal Kalecki, a Polish economist born in the late 19th century who believed that capitalism was not the solution to the human condition but the problem itself.

Listen until the end to hear Adam’s message from the ICU after his open-heart surgery.

Brought to you by:

betterhelp.com/onestooze

acorns.com/ones

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rohan Grey, who taught us to understand money as a creature of law, is back for his tenth appearance on Macro N Cheese. 

Steve and Rohan dissect the humor and horror of the political landscape. They make a realistic assessment of the Biden administration and look at figures like Elon Musk and Ramaswamy as part of a new wave of governance setting out to undermine the fabric of federal institutions.  

The conversation touches on the absurdity of contemporary American politics, where a ‘meme president’ can emerge amidst a cacophony of discontent and confusion. All this against a background of imperialist atrocities and genocide.  

As always, Rohan warns against viewing political and economic developments through a simplistic lens and suggests a nuanced understanding of these realities within their historical context 

Rohan looks at the alternating and sometimes contradictory positions taken by conservatives and progressives on several issues. Judicial activism was once identified with the left – Thurgood Marshall, for example. Today judicial activism is synonymous with Samuel Alito. What has it meant to conservatives in the past to have an independent Fed? What does it mean today? In what ways do Trump’s interests align with Main Street instead of Wall Street? 

Part of the episode is devoted to cryptocurrency. Rohan explains why he refers to 2024 as the ‘crypto election’ and then talks about some of the fears and predictions about the Trump administration. 

Instead of comparing bitcoin to the US dollar, Rohan suggests we compare it to oil: 

We're not talking about holding Bitcoin. We're not talking about internalizing Bitcoin into the payments architecture of the United States government. We are talking about taking an interest in stabilizing the price of something that is otherwise functioning as a commodity. 

No Rohan Grey episode is complete without a couple of references to popular culture. Speaking of the broader issue of crytocurrency, he says it’s as if the digital dollar looked in the mirror and fell in love with itself. He compares it to a certain episode of Seinfeld. 

Rohan Grey is an assistant professor at Willamette University College of Law, where he teaches contracts, business associations, financial institutions, and a seminar on law, money and technology.  

Find his work and an expanded bio at rohangrey.net 

@rohangrey on Twitter 

In Episode 392 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with author, investor, and financial historian Russell Napier, about how to navigate a seminal transition in the global trade and monetary order. This episode aims to provide you with the tools to understand, value, and manage the assets, exposures, and risks in your portfolios and to capitalize on opportunities that come along only once every hundred years.

In the first hour, Demetri and Russell Napier discuss the origins of the non-system that came to shape international trade and finance in the decades after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods international system of fixed exchange rates. They discuss the de-pegging of the RMB from the USD, the closing of the gap between the discount rate and the growth rate in developed economies, and the implications of America's escalating economic war against China.

In the second hour, which is available to premium subscribers only, Russell Napier and Kofinas focus most of their time on the implications of this breakdown in the international trade and monetary system for investors. They discuss how developed world governments are likely to repress capital, what you want to own in such a world, what you don't want to own, and how to tell the difference. They also discuss what a new Chinese monetary order might look like, which countries would participate, and how such a system would build off China's efforts to digitize the Yuan and create a Chinese-built digital payments infrastructure that extends beyond China's borders as part of the Digital Silk Road initiative. They also discuss the prospects for a strategic Bitcoin fund, the use of stablecoins as an extension of Dollar hegemony, and the fate of the Euro in a world torn between Beijing and Washington.

You can subscribe to our premium content and access our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.

If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe.

If you enjoyed listening to today's episode of Hidden Forces, you can help support the show by doing the following:

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed

Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify

Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/

Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas

Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou

Subscribe and Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io

Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod

Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas

Episode Recorded on 11/27/2024

What are the effects of political instability on the banking sector?

In this episode, Juan Flores Zendejas (Geneva) and Carmen Hofmann (eabh) explore the impact of political instability on the banking sector, focusing on Mexico in the 1920s—a decade ravaged by civil unrest and political violence. How did banks and their customers respond during times of armed conflict? What were the lasting effects of this turbulence on the financial landscape? Tune in for a deep dive into the fascinating history of banking in Latin America during one of its most tumultuous periods.