Jonathan Derbyshire: President Donald Trump’s determination to abandon the tenets of 70-odd years of US foreign policy has caused foreboding in capitals around the world. Nowhere more so, perhaps, than in Beijing. Only this week we learned that Mr Trump is proposing to double tariffs on more than $200bn of Chinese imports to the US.
As Philip Stephens points out in his column, Xi Jinping’s China is unaccustomed to such pressure. For a decade or so, it has largely been left alone, so keen were western governments to have a slice of the Chinese market. But, Philip argues, the short-term pain Mr Trump is inflicting disguises the likely long-term strategic gains for Beijing.
Chinese policymakers have long had a grand design for global primacy. In launching his all-out assault on the postwar multilateral order, Mr Trump is inadvertently lending them a helping hand.
Megan Greene, argues that profound structural changes in financial markets over the past decade, particularly the growth of passive investing, are storing up trouble.
Chris Giles gets into the summer spirit by drawing our attention to the “graph of doom”, which pinpoints the moment when UK public spending on essential services will make other expenditure impossible.
Elizabeth Pollitzer notes that the vast bulk of medical research is done on men and argues that this is a problem, given what we now know about the role of sex difference in the aetiology of various diseases. – Financial Times
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