For subscribers
The new age of geoeconomics
US President Donald Trump’s tariff threats are part of a much wider and longer-term intellectual pendulum swing.
Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox
One way to make sense of US actions is that America is trying to undercut China's industrial hegemony while protecting its own financial dominance.
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
Gillian Tett
Follow topic:
In January 2008, during the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, I was summoned to a conference room to meet Mr Ray Dalio, founder of the mighty Bridgewater hedge fund. His team handed me a vast report, the size of a Bible. This, I was solemnly told, represented Mr Dalio’s views on the credit cycle. I duly skimmed it – and then dumped it into a bin, since it was so heavy. That turned out to be a big mistake.
When the great financial crisis exploded later that year, Mr Dalio was hailed as one of its prophets, in large part because of the forecasts in that report I discarded. “I calculated the rate at which debt growth (is) going to occur and the supply and demand for credit, relative to economic fundamentals,” he recently told me by way of explanation.
