Sep 20, 2011
“February 2012. It’s a cold blustery morning in Washington. The newly inaugurated president of the United States is on his way to the office of the Chinese managing director of the IMF to sign the agreement under which the IMF will provide 3 trillion dollars in emergency financing to the U.S. and the conditionality to which the U.S. will have to adhere.”
Sound like science fiction? To Arvind Subramanian, a joint-fellow at the Peterson Institute and the Center for Global Development, it’s more like economic inevitability – a world in which the United States has no choice but to cede global leadership to China—and accept it’s terms, which in this imaginary case includes withdrawal from the Western Pacific. Arvind joins me on this week’s Wonkcast to explain the careful quantitative analysis that underpins that startling opening passage from his new book Eclipse: Learning to Live With China’s Economic Dominance.
Read a full description of the Wonkcast at www.cgdev.org/wonkcast.