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If we don’t grow up, and I don’t see much sign of it at the moment in either the West or in China, I think we are going to blow up the world. So in a way the book is a paean to praise democracy and capitalism, but it’s equally as much a plea for stepping back to say what we are fighting about isn’t important enough to blow up the world.

My guest for the 41st episode of the Hale Report is Brad Setser, an economist and Whitney Shepardson senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. I’ve long admired Brad for his deep knowledge of global economic data, and his ability to interpret that information.  I am sure you will soon hear what I mean.

·      Brad Setser is one of our country’s most highly respected analysts of global capital flows, national tax competition, and trade imbalances and sovereign debt restructuring.

Listen here.

Welcome to the Hale Report. My guest for our 39th episode is Shannon O’Neil of the Council on Foreign Relations, speaking with us from New York.

In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Henry Kissinger said that we are now living in a totally new era. The G20 meeting in Bali this week reflected that reality. Putin did not attend, but Xi Jinping and Joe Biden had a long meeting that seemed to offer some hope for lessening tensions between the world’s two largest economies.

Ali Wyne immediately confesses that he is a hopeless optimist. He is also the author of a new book America's Great-Power Opportunity: Revitalizing U.S. Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition which is the perfect antidote to the current spate of election doomsaying in the US. A sample from our podcast, which I have been saving up for this week:

First and foremost is for us to avoid the 2027 scenario. Many people are saying that the PLA will have the capability and willingness to invade Taiwan in 2027. So for the next five years we will have to avoid that happening.

In corporate governance and in movies, it's really all the same thing. I'm very interested in why things don't work. Everybody wants them to work, everybody wants the movie to work, and when it doesn’t it's very interesting to think about why... It’s the same thing in the business world and in the regulatory world. There are a lot of people involved who work very hard and try to predict the future, and when they don't it's very interesting to think about why.

I’m a great believer that diplomacy is extremely important, that we have a number of issues where we can work with China, and they will be beneficial to both of us, and that we ought to have regular high-level meetings between our two Presidents, and that we ought to have working groups that report to them that meet perhaps quarterly and begin to pick the low-hanging fruit. You mentioned tariffs. That’s hurting our workers, our businesses, our farmers. And it’s hurting China.

The Hale Report is available on Substack, Spotify, Apple, and all of the usual places. To listen on Substack, please click here.

Dear Readers,