AmPhoenixTrade
@amphoenixtrade.bsky.social
22 followers 36 following 78 posts
Trade policy architect.
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amphoenixtrade.bsky.social
The 1948 Democratic vision for multilateral trade was to internationalize the New Deal, including labor and antimonopoly rules. What we got with the WTO in 1995 was internationalized Reaganomics instead.
mjs0112.bsky.social
Reaganism - market liberalism without restraint or populism and incitement of race prejudice - is surely what helped get us to this moment. It is an unappealing dream to believe that the democratic future is fundamentally “unpopulist”. Abundance must be populist to work as a re-democratizing force.
Reposted by AmPhoenixTrade
sandertordoir.bsky.social
Anders is right. German industry matters hugely for the upstream value chains in CEE.

There’s a reason Czechia has stagnated alongside the German economy.
thisisanders.bsky.social
And people forget that despite all the anti-German sentiment the German car industry is a primary driver of (economic) integration, employment, and export growth for CEE MS. If it doesn't modernize with an eye to the marketplace of the 21stC it will be one giant multinational Nokia
sandertordoir.bsky.social
If Germany doesn’t put in place a pro-competitive industrial policy for cars, centred on market building, the country may well end up down the line giving messy bailouts, regulatory rollbacks in response to mounting political and union pressure - only for the sector to wither anyway.
Reposted by AmPhoenixTrade
superwuster.bsky.social
Finalized my 2025 book tour!

Coming through New York, DC, Chicago, Toronto, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, Oxford and Cambridge. Click here for details:
timwu.net#booktour
Reposted by AmPhoenixTrade
feps-europe.eu
The Policy Conference moves to the conversation “Trade policy and #Competitiveness: Friends or foes?”

With
🔺Elizabeth Baltzan, US Trade Representative
🔺 @bernd-lange.bsky.social @socialistsanddemocrats.eu
🔺László Andor, @feps-europe.eu

Tune in LIVE
🔴 webstreaming.cor.europa.eu/en/cor/a-cle...
Reposted by AmPhoenixTrade
sandertordoir.bsky.social
The IMF too long assumed imbalances would recede.

The Fund is now - thankfully - marching back into the global imbalance part of its mandate.

IMF staff just released an interesting new paper.

“Do trade imbalances boost incomes in surplus economies at the expense of deficit economies?

1/
amphoenixtrade.bsky.social
Similarly in Africa - one of the reasons the Biden Administration shifted away from FTA negotiations with Kenya toward something more modular was out of respect for continental integration efforts across Africa, and to avoid undermining the AfCFTA. Colonial patterns persist.
michaelpettis.bsky.social
2/6
If Chinese infrastructure investment is designed to maximize trade and transportation links across the region, it could provide a major boost to overall Latin American productivity growth by turning many fragmented Latin American markets into a much larger single market.
Reposted by AmPhoenixTrade
sandertordoir.bsky.social
Folks reach too quickly for the 'Europe should pivot to China' line in response to Trump’s tariffs. It’s a vibes argument that shatters on contact with reality.

China’s market isn’t growing for EU exporters – it’s shrinking. At home, competition is getting fiercer as China exports its way...

1/
sandertordoir.bsky.social
Good Bloomberg piece.

And agree with JP Morgan: “Some of this is the fact that China has very cleverly found other export markets, including Europe, which has been a key hedge to slowing exports to the US.”

High time the IMF puts this at the top of the agenda.

www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...
China Floods the World With Cheap Exports After Trump’s Tariffs
Shipments have soared outside the US this year, but countries dealing with the glut appear reluctant to take on another trade war — for now.
www.bloomberg.com
amphoenixtrade.bsky.social
This is what unites workers in places like Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and West Virginia with workers in developing economies: they object to the model of extractive economic governance we've had for 40 years.
superwuster.bsky.social
The Extraction Imperative: that the highest purpose of business lies not in creating value but finding novel ways to take more money and intangible assets from everyone else; i.e., achieving full use of every iota of market power.
amphoenixtrade.bsky.social
This is where you find common ground between workers in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, West Virginia -- resource-rich states -- and workers in developing economies. They feel exploited.
superwuster.bsky.social
The Extraction Imperative: that the highest purpose of business lies not in creating value but finding novel ways to take more money and intangible assets from everyone else; i.e., achieving full use of every iota of market power.
Reposted by AmPhoenixTrade
sandertordoir.bsky.social
The ASML-Mistral move is a bet on a sovereign EU tech ecosystem. So my take in Bloomberg aligns with Jefferies - this is more than a narrow ASML business decision.

But it fits with ASML's tradition of ensuring a diversified, stable supplier ecosystem, now adding in geopolitics
Reposted by AmPhoenixTrade
sandertordoir.bsky.social
The most obvious place to start is to reinstate Germanys EV consumer subsidies, which were scrapped to comply with the debt brake.

And align them with France’s Ecobonus scheme, which de facto rules Chinese built vehicles out for support.

Then the rest of Europe hopefully bandwagons.

6/
Reposted by AmPhoenixTrade
sandertordoir.bsky.social
Europe's car industry will shrink, inevitably, but can be helped with support.

There's also an opportunity for Europe, which unlike China is open to imports, to collaborate with emerging and developing countries.

But it'd require more creative responses than tying ourselves to the WTO cross.
aphclarkson.bsky.social
Europe's car industry probably overcomes this, but a massive wave of overcapacity dumping is likely to destroy the ability of many states in Africa or Asia to develop their own successful manufacturing export sectors.

China replicating all the same patterns US and EU were condemned for.
sandertordoir.bsky.social
Woah. China now exporting cars at a staggering clip of 9 million vehicles annually.

For comparison: Germany’s pre-Diesel scandal peak was 4.5m.
And Germany was always far less one-sided: it imports 2x+ as many cars as China (in absolutes).

What happened to the idea this would self-extinguish?

1/
Reposted by AmPhoenixTrade
sandertordoir.bsky.social
If it were not so sad, it would be entertaining: Brussels and Berlin blame today’s car sector crisis on regulation that only bites in 2035—while Germany has already lost half its net car exports.

Missing a forest of nine million by staring at a tree.
sandertordoir.bsky.social
Woah. China now exporting cars at a staggering clip of 9 million vehicles annually.

For comparison: Germany’s pre-Diesel scandal peak was 4.5m.
And Germany was always far less one-sided: it imports 2x+ as many cars as China (in absolutes).

What happened to the idea this would self-extinguish?

1/
Reposted by AmPhoenixTrade
michaelpettis.bsky.social
1/7
For all the talk of rebalancing domestic demand in China, Chinese exports continue to climb much faster than imports in 2025. In the first seven months of 2025, exports were up 6.9% in RMB terms, while imports were up 1.2%.
english.news.cn/20250908/e41...
China's foreign trade up 3.5 pct in August
english.news.cn
amphoenixtrade.bsky.social
Michael, are you referring to the clearing union (bancor)?
amphoenixtrade.bsky.social
They still don’t want to confront the *substantive* problems with their trade deals.
Reposted by AmPhoenixTrade
rooseveltinstitute.org
Manufacturing was gaining ground under Biden, with 610k new jobs.

As @toddntucker.com puts it, under Trump, tariffs and policy whiplash have “basically collapsed” that growth. michiganadvance.com/2025/09/01/l...
The fledgling growth of domestic manufacturing that had created more than 610,000 manufacturing jobs during the Biden administration and laid the groundwork for many more has “basically collapsed,” said Todd Tucker, director of industrial policy and trade at the Roosevelt Institute, a Washington-based, left-leaning think tank.

In fact, Trump was so dissatisfied with the weak July jobs report — which showed that the U.S. manufacturing sector had lost 37,000 jobs over three straight months — that he fired the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in early August, alleging on his social media platform Truth Social that the less-than-stellar job numbers were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
amphoenixtrade.bsky.social
Adam Smith 250 yrs ago on public servants who resist monopoly capture: [nothing] "can protect [a public servant] from the most infamous abuse and retraction, from personal insults, nor sometimes from real danger, arising from the insolent outrage of furious and disappointed monopolists."
amphoenixtrade.bsky.social
Great paper. Revolving door->cultural consensus->ppl in govt often *don't know they're captured.* Some lose the ability to think critically. If told x may be good for a company/industry but not the country, they literally can't understand the difference. Correlates strongly w/ monopolized sectors.
wendyyli.bsky.social
Very excited to share my new paper in Socius, "Unicorns and Hacks": Revolving Door Lobbyists and the Cultivation of Political Credibility ! And it's open access!!

Many thanks to my respondents, research assistants, and colleagues for making this paper possible.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
Sage Journals: Discover world-class research
Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.
journals.sagepub.com
Reposted by AmPhoenixTrade
matthewdownhour.bsky.social
One of the biggest problems with corporate consolidation is that even where it leads, on a day to day basis, to more efficiency, it leaves the whole system much more vulnerable to 'animal spirits' because only a few animals have to be wrong
andrewqmr.bsky.social
wow is it possible for seven people to all be wrong about something?

www.axios.com/2025/09/02/a...
We're clear-eyed: Every AI company and investor has massive incentive to hype the most glorious AI case. So the technology might never live up to its promise.

    But this would require every CEO of America's seven biggest companies to be collectively delusional about where they're spending trillions in combined capital.