Trumponomics

As Chinese President Xi Jinping meets with US President Donald Trump in Washington, this week's episode of Trumponomics asks whether the world’s leading AI powers can move beyond summit pageantry and start managing the dangers created by their technological rivalry. Host Stephanie Flanders speaks with Bloomberg Executive Editor Dan Ten Kate and Geoeconomics analyst Michael Deng about why distrust over chips, model distillation and open-source AI is making meaningful cooperation so difficult—and why rare earths and deeply intertwined supply chains mean neither country can truly decouple from the other.
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The US 10-year Treasury yield has breached 5%, but the forces pushing borrowing costs higher may run much deeper than the latest economic shocks. Stephanie Flanders is joined by Bloomberg Opinion columnist John Authers and Jamie Rush of Bloomberg Economics to discuss how demographics, rising government debt and the artificial intelligence investment boom are reshaping the price of money — and why 5% could prove to be a floor rather than a ceiling.
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Artificial intelligence companies are spending extraordinary sums on the promise that their technology will transform the global economy. Author and technology critic Cory Doctorow joins Trumponomics host Stephanie Flanders to challenge that sales pitch, arguing that AI may be useful without delivering the cost savings or profits investors expect — and warning of the consequences for workers, markets and the wider economy if the boom ends badly.
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In the US-China trade conflict, rare earth metals are Beijing's ultimate trump card. Last year, China ramped up restrictions on these key industrial elements, spooking industry, and forcing the US toclimb down. Since that wake-up call, the US has worked hard to reduce its dependence on China. It has spent huge sums backing mining companies, penned eye-catching deals and moved to collaborate with allies. But after a little more than a year, how much progress has it made in breaking China’s hold on the rare earths supply chain?
Featuring: Abigail Hunter of the SAFE Center for Critical Minerals Strategy; Gracelin Baskaran of the Critical Minerals Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Cory Combs of Trivium China; and FT commodities correspondent Camilla Hodgson.
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With tensions rising between Canada and the US over the latest broadsides in President Donald Trump's trade war, the White House is threatening even more levies following Prime Minister Mark Carney's announced dollar-for-dollar retaliation. The rupture between Ottawa and Washington is becoming harder to dismiss as temporary, with the war of words increasingly implicating the broader relationship between the once-close allies.

But as more countries seek to put distance between themselves and the US, will they really move closer to China? In a conversation recorded Aug. 20, before the latest US-Canada skirmish, Stephanie Flanders is joined by Bloomberg’s Dan Ten Kate and Chris Kennedy to explore how the so-called middle powers are trying to diversify their economic and security relationships — and why Beijing’s export dominance, strategic ambitions and trust deficit mean there may be no easy alternative to an economically belligerent America.
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