Jason Douglas
Appearances
WSJ What’s News
Bonds Sell Off as New U.S. Tariffs Upend Global Trade
I think you can see in stock markets across Asia that there's real concerns now about growth. We've seen central banks in New Zealand and India today cut interest rates. We're starting to see all sorts of little support packages being thrown to exporters in the region by countries like South Korea and their auto industry, Japan and Taiwan.
WSJ What’s News
Bonds Sell Off as New U.S. Tariffs Upend Global Trade
There's real anxiety in Asia now about what all this means for growth, for sure, yeah.
WSJ What’s News
Bonds Sell Off as New U.S. Tariffs Upend Global Trade
Yeah, that's right. We've seen some forecasts from investment banks and from consultancies out here suggesting that Chinese exports exports to the US could drop by as much as half in light of Trump's tariffs of 104% plus, depending on exactly how you calculate it. We're already starting to see the yuan weaken.
WSJ What’s News
Bonds Sell Off as New U.S. Tariffs Upend Global Trade
It's tightly controlled by the central bank and the government, but they are starting to let it weaken a little bit. It's a bit unclear if that'll be the start of a sustained depreciation or something more controlled. But you're right for all the economies out here, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, these are all very heavily export dependent economies and the US is by far their biggest market. So
WSJ What’s News
Bonds Sell Off as New U.S. Tariffs Upend Global Trade
They really are bracing for a great deal of disruption.
WSJ What’s News
Bonds Sell Off as New U.S. Tariffs Upend Global Trade
Well, if the EU is a carrot and a stick approach, then we have countries like Japan and South Korea that underneath the security umbrella that are mostly doing the carrot bit, they are basically making a beeline to the White House. in the hope of getting a trade deal very quickly. And China thinks, at any rate, that it has a great big stick.
WSJ What’s News
Bonds Sell Off as New U.S. Tariffs Upend Global Trade
And so it has retaliated hard, and it will probably continue to do so. Both sides, US and China, just do not seem to be very close to a negotiation at all at the minute, and neither side seems willing to back down.
WSJ What’s News
Bonds Sell Off as New U.S. Tariffs Upend Global Trade
Yeah, I think that's right. We're all trying to wrap our heads around what this means for globalization, what this means for the global trading system as it stands, as it stood for 30 odd years. In the short term, I think the economic worry is recession. These recession fears are just getting bigger and bigger.