Adam Tooze

Senate.

I remember Michael Bennett, still a senator from Colorado, saying in that piece, and I'm paraphrasing him here, but not by much.

that he sits in the Senate and looks around at all that they are not doing, and he thinks, I wonder what China is doing right now.

And I felt in that period, and then escalating from there, a sense that our society was becoming sclerotic.

And yet you could see this incredible rapidity, like cities coming up in China, what felt like overnight.

Now the thinking is about

from a standing start how rapidly advanced manufacturing companies can change pace and change what they're doing and but a sense that china is fast and now we are slow china makes things and now we just skim money off of the top that china can govern you know even if brutally and we just argue with each other that that fundamental insecurity corroding america's confidence in itself has actually been around now for quite some time

I say it in the conclusion.

Well, the answer you often hear about this in America, put aside fracking for a minute, which has some distinctive qualities, but tech and financial engineering reflects this reality of our system now, which is that we move very freely around.

with bits and bytes and very sluggishly around atoms.

It's funny, I think that's in a way too harsh on the U.S.

Okay, fair enough.

Two reasons.

One, I think about Donald Trump, who has reinvented an entire political party and is governing in a very different way.

But two, during the financial crisis and after, and you've tracked a lot of this, I mean, we did some...

very aggressive things in terms of debt issuance and what the Fed is doing.

So there's something strange about this conception of China, because it has moved very fast back and forth the last couple of years.

You just mentioned Biden.

End of the Biden administration, after many years of China hype and China fear, there is a sense that actually China might now be in decline.

Xi is wielding terrible authoritarian power.