The Chinese government is just completing its annual ‘two sessions’ or lianghui, where China’s political elite approve the economic policy agenda for the coming year. The ‘two sessions’ refers to two major political gatherings: the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a political advisory committee; and the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s top legislative body ..read more

Speaking to the US Congress yesterday after 100 days in office, President Donald Trump claimed that the new tariffs on imports from the US’s biggest trading partners would cause “a little disturbance”. But soon that would be over and “tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again,” he said. “It’s happening ..read more

Trump sees the United States as just a big capitalist corporation of which he is chief executive. Just as he did when he was the boss in the TV show, the Apprentice, he thinks he is running a business and so can employ and fire people at his whim. He has a board of directors ..read more

Ukraine: a human disasterToday marks the end of the third year of the Ukraine-Russia war. After three years of war, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has caused staggering losses to Ukraine’s people and economy. There are various estimates of the number of Ukrainian civilians and military casualties (deaths plus injuries): 46,000 civilians and maybe 500,000 soldiers ..read more

Germany holds a snap election on Sunday and the current coalition government of Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and the Free Democrats (FDP) is heading for a heavy defeat. The main opposition conservative Christian Democrat-Christian Social Union alliance is polling about 30% in voting intentions, while the SPD is down to 16% (from 26% last time ..read more

US consumer price inflation reached 3% year-on-year in January 2025. Energy prices rose for the first time in five months and food price inflation stood at its highest rate in a year. Food prices have leapt back up, as the cost of eggs rose 15.2%, the largest increase since June 2015, driven by an avian ..read more

In an important new development, the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma has launched a new Center for Heterodox Economics (CHE). Led by Clara Mattei as Director of the Center for Heterodox Economics, its mission statement says: “The CHE has the ambitious goal of becoming a hub for achieving economic justice and a more humane society. We ..read more

Michael Pettis is an American professor of finance at Guanghua School of Management at Peking University in Beijing and a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He has become a popular media source on China’s economy but also on global trade and investment trends. In the wake of Donald Trump’s announcement ..read more

Over the weekend President Donald Trump announced a batch of tariff increases on US imports of goods from the closest partners of US trade, Canada and Mexico. He proposed a 25% rise in tariffs (with a lower rate for oil imports from Canada). Then he announced a 10% rise in tariffs on all Chinese imports ..read more

Most readers will know the news by now. DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, released an AI model called R1 that is comparable in ability to the best models from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, but was trained at a radically lower cost and using less than state-of-the art GPU chips. DeepSeek also made ..read more