Rumours of industrial policy in America have been greatly exaggerated. This may come as a surprise to some. The Biden administration has, after all, reasserted the role of the state in the US economy in ways we haven’t seen for half a century: supporting re-industrialisation, subsidising strategic industries, boosting unions, rethinking trade relations and rebooting competition policy.
Yet those are separate policies, not a fundamentally new operating system. At an intellectual level, it’s quite clear that there’s a big pendulum shift happening on the political left in America, and to a certain extent, on the right as well. Both have embraced tariffs, subsidies and other government interventions. The state will certainly be more dominant no matter who wins the United States presidential election in November.
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