MSI

The news last week that a trade agreement with China was finalized, and that similar deals would soon be reached with ten major trade partners, drove American stock market valuations to their record high level. That is exactly the opposite of what happened in early February when Washington announced...

Driven by an exceptionally strong fiscal stimulus and a supportive monetary policy, American domestic demand (consisting of household consumption, residential investments, business investments and government spending) soared 3.5% in the first three months of this year from the same period of 2024. T...

Malaysia chaired last week (May 26, 2025), an ASEAN (ten South-East Asian nations) annual summit in Kuala Lumpur. That was followed by a trilateral summit with China and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC, consisting of Bahrein, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates). What’s at...

Unlike some other major global powers, China has always treated trade and investments as part of its fundamental development strategy. In that context, political and security considerations played a crucial role in guiding the direction and volume of its business transactions. Beijing has, therefore...

Long years of China’s excessive and systematic surpluses on its U.S. trades are part of Washington’s negligence and political miscalculations. But they are also a surprisingly blind spot of Beijing’s economic development strategy. To his credit, President Trump warned about those trade deficit...

Writing last year about the expected economic policies of a newly elected president, I thought that the Federal Reserve (aka the Fed, U.S. central bank) would have to see the direction of the fiscal policy before any new decisions on interest rates. Things, however, turned out considerably more comp...

U.S. trade problems are an old story with deep roots in the international monetary system where America, serving as a banker to the world, allegedly got addicted to “deficits without tears.“ The French pinned that original “sin” to the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference in Bret...

More than one-third of China’s $18.3 trillion economy is generated by its foreign trade. Although that is well below the world average of 59% of GDP, China’s exports and imports still present a policy challenge because their dynamics are mainly determined by external demand and price fluctuation...

The state of the U.S. economy will determine (a) the outcome of next year’s midterm elections on November 3, 2026, and (b) President Trump’s ability to govern effectively during the rest of his mandate. Republicans now have a thin majority of 218 seats (with two vacancies currently being filled)...

Washington is now where it wanted to be at the beginning of President Trump’s first term of office on January 20, 2016. Watching Obama administration’s futile “pivot to Asia” in November 2011 to contain China, and the violent government change in Ukraine in February 2014, followed by the fai...