Today's podcast guest is a fellow Chicagoan, best-selling author Michele Wucker. Her thought-provoking book, the Gray Rhino, was published in 2016 and has been quoted by President Xi Jinping of China.  Michele’s key insight is that even when we see the future charging at us, we often fail to act. 

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In 1919 John Maynard Keynes wrote the first best-seller in economics, The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The title is a bit misleading, since it is really about the cost of war. He railed against the Treaty of Versailles, correctly predicting that inequitable conditions of peace made another world war inevitable. 

Our subject is health - both the health of the global economy, and the health of its global citizens. Each is dependent on the other, especially in a world where healthcare expenditures continue to rise. According to the World Bank, they average ten percent of GDP and are nearly double that in the US. 

EconVue interviews Kathryn Ibata-Arens, Vincent de Paul Professor of Political Science & Director of the Global Asian Studies Program at DePaul University.  Her new book has just been published by Stanford Press: Beyond Technonationalism, Biomedical Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Asia.

The Trump administration’s zero-sum approach to international relations is now spilling over from trade to currency wars.  After spending the best part of his 2016 campaign and the first three years of his presidency railing against foreign countries taking advantage of the United States on trade, Trump and his administration have started complaining in the past few months about currency manipulation.  In doing so, it is bringing us back to the 1990s, or even the 1930s. 

There are two reports I always look forward to reading each June: the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, and analyst Mary Meeker’s annual report on Internet trends. For those interested in the art of investment prognostication, a stroll through the archives of Meeker’s reports since 1996 is fascinating. They chart the growth of the Internet and the disruption of global communications that have impacted nearly everything.

As some of my more patient friends know, I have been toiling away at a book on Chinese monetary history during the Interwar period off and on for some years.  Immersing myself in the public and private words of the historic figures of the 1930’s has perhaps sensitized me to the propensity of even well-intentioned leaders to glide into chaos.  That which is unthinkable inexorably becomes inevitable.