Sumaya Keynes

Yeah.

And I think that's for a couple of reasons, right?

I mean, the obvious one is that President Trump is not a rule-abiding guy, right?

It's not his personality type.

Uh-huh.

But also we've got China's system and there are certain aspects of it that are just not really compatible with the rules that we have now.

The rules of the trading system are supposed to constrain the way that governments give money to their companies, to give them handouts, to give them a competitive advantage.

Now the problem is that the way China gives out subsidies is incredibly opaque, incredibly hard to pin down.

And so those old rules just didn't work.

And for a while we tried, but we just have to accept the world we're in right now.

Just to jump on that, in an ideal situation, the US would say, look, we're going to borrow less money.

We're going to do policies at home.

That means that the trade deficit would fall.

The Chinese would spend a bit more themselves.

They would import a bit more.

But

For that to happen, both Trump and Xi would need to have personality transplants, I think was the line in the New York Times piece, right?

It's not going to happen.

And so, again, we can't wish that we were in that perfect world.

We've got to be pragmatic.