US tariffs have sent financial markets into a frenzy in recent weeks, but how much should central bankers be taking trade into account when setting monetary policy? To find out, Soumaya Keynes sits down with Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee member Swati Dhingra – one of the committee’s more dovish members. They discuss why the UK’s open economy makes it more vulnerable to trade shocks, what Dhingra saw in the data that her MPC colleagues didn’t, and why she didn’t vote for an (even) sha...
May 19, 2025•27 min
Donald Trump’s trade policies have put global markets through the mill in recent weeks. But his policies didn’t come from nowhere. Aspects of US protectionism preceded Trump’s second term – and countries across the world have been pushing for greater self-sufficiency for some time. Is this drive for greater self-sufficiency misguided? Is true self-sufficiency even possible? Or might the secret to economic security come from more co-operation, not less? The FT’s senior business writer Andrew Hill...
May 15, 2025•32 min
Over the past 25 years, the Gates foundation has given away more than $100bn. Much of that money has gone to healthcare and education projects outside the US – and the organisation plans to give $200bn more to various programmes in the next twenty years. But as Elon Musk and Doge feed USAID, a key partner of the foundation, “into the wood chipper,” how can Bill Gates press ahead? The FT’s Africa editor, David Pilling, speaks to Gates about running an apolitical, philanthropic entity in a politic...
May 12, 2025•28 min
The US dollar has been in slow decline for around a decade – so says Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard professor, and former chief economist of the IMF. Donald Trump’s trade policies have raised a lot of questions about the future of the dollar – and how its decline could affect the rest of the world’s currencies. Rogoff joins Martin Wolf to discuss how the decline of the dollar could empower China, capital flight from the US, and why cryptocurrency is a bigger threat to dollar hegemony than most people r...
May 05, 2025•30 min
Almost a month since ‘liberation day’, the potential impacts of President Donald Trump’s tariff regime are starting to sink in. US hard data isn’t yet showing much negative impact from changes to US trade policy – but economists are gloomy on US growth prospects. The IMF last week warned of an increased risk of US recession, and lopped nearly a full percentage point off its forecast for US growth this year. Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterpri...
Apr 28, 2025•31 min
When China joined the World Trade Organization at the start of this century, its surging exports rattled US manufacturing. Prices fell, jobs became less lucrative, and communities that relied on these jobs were hit hard. President Donald Trump seems determined to bring those jobs back to the US. Is that realistic or even desirable? The FT’s chief economics commentator Martin Wolf speaks to MIT economics professor David Autor about the "China shock" and the (potentially more significant) AI chall...
Apr 21, 2025•32 min
Former Bank of England governor Sir Mervyn King has never shied away from expressing his opinion. Here, he sits down with his friend Martin Wolf — the FT’s chief economics commentator — to discuss some of the thorniest problems central banks now face: Will rate-setters manage to stay independent in the era of Trump 2.0? What should they do about cryptocurrencies? And how can they regain credibility after getting inflation so wrong? Martin Wolf is chief economics commentator at the Financial Time...
Apr 14, 2025•31 min
As Donald Trump declares a trade war on the rest of the world, it’s time to learn about a field of economic research known as “weaponised interdependence”. The bad news is that the US president’s weapon of choice – imposing tariffs on goods imports – is a fairly outdated tool of economic warfare. Globalisation and advances in financial and communications technology have created an arsenal of additional weapons, which may yet be fired off by the US or by other big players such as China and the EU...
Apr 07, 2025•32 min
For the past few years, Germany has begun to look like the ‘sick man of Europe’ again. Its economy has barely grown since 2019, while its famous manufacturing sector has shrivelled. But earlier this month, financial markets were buoyed by a vote in the German parliament to relax the constitutional limit on government borrowing, the so-called debt brake. It means that Germany’s likely new conservative-led coalition government will be free to borrow unlimited amounts to fund a defence sector build...
Mar 31, 2025•32 min
The UK’s Labour government had already inherited a tricky fiscal situation when it came to power last July. But since then, growth has stagnated, borrowing costs have risen, and now the government has committed to a big increase in defence spending. Where will the money come from? The FT’s Sam Fleming interviews Paul Johnson, the long-time director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, an independent think-tank that has been adjudicating the UK’s public finances for more than half a century. As B...
Mar 24, 2025•31 min
Modern industrial economies were made possible by automation and mass production, but also by something similar going on inside the world of management. Where once all the decisions were made by an identifiable boss, now they are farmed out to rule books, bureaucracies and computer algorithms — and nobody is individually accountable for them. The FT’s Andrew Hill speaks to Dan Davies, economist and author of The Unaccountability Machine , who explains how the industrialisation of management deci...
Mar 17, 2025•32 min
After decades of double-digit growth, China's economy has been expanding at less than half that since the pandemic. A property market crash, youth unemployment and now a trade war with the US are all adding to the country’s woes. So has the Chinese juggernaut finally run out of gas? Martin Wolf speaks to Keyu Jin, a Chinese economist who has lived and worked most of her life in the US and UK, and is currently a professor with the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, as well as at Harv...
Mar 10, 2025•31 min
The world economy is emitting carbon dioxide faster than ever before, meaning our planet is heating up faster than ever before. Martin Wolf speaks to someone who has spent much of the past two decades at the forefront of the climate debate. Lord Adair Turner chairs the Energy Transitions Commission, a think-tank focused on climate mitigation, and was previously the first chair of the UK government’s committee on climate change in 2008-12. While he fears that US President Donald Trump will act as...
Mar 03, 2025•31 min
US President Donald Trump has frozen all foreign aid payments, while Elon Musk is putting America’s biggest development agency, USAID, “through the woodchipper”. Meanwhile, the UK government has just announced it will slash its aid budget from 0.5% to 0.3% of GDP. So are the days of generous programmes to promote health and education in the poorest nations now over? And should we fear that rising authoritarian powers, most notably China, are stepping into the breach with their own funds and para...
Feb 27, 2025•33 min
Donald Trump’s tariffs are a twentieth century tool that simply won’t work in the 21st century global trading system. That’s the view of today’s guest, Richard Baldwin, professor of international economics at the IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland. Speaking to the FT’s Martin Wolf, Baldwin explains how the shift towards global manufacturing supply chains since the 1990s, and the more recent explosion in digital services exports, mean that the impact of across-the-board import taxes suc...
Feb 24, 2025•36 min
Birth rates are falling fast and not just in highly developed countries. And as populations age, it’s becoming harder to fund pensions or raise labour productivity. But falling fertility could also be harming social cohesion and impeding the innovation needed to solve problems such as climate change. Today on the show, John Burn-Murdoch talks to Alice Evans, a senior lecturer at King’s College, London, and the author of the newsletter, The Great Gender Divergence. Together, they try to figure ou...
Feb 21, 2025•34 min
The war in Ukraine is a humanitarian crisis. It is also an economic problem. Sanctions from the US and Europe are meant to make war too expensive for Russia to continue. President Vladimir Putin claims those sanctions have failed and his economy is strong. But what is propaganda and what is reality? Today on the show, host Martin Sandbu poses these questions to Sergei Guriev, dean of the London Business School, and an economic adviser to Russian opposition figures, as they try to figure out what...
Feb 17, 2025•42 min
Productivity growth in the developed world has been on a downward trend since the 1960s. Meanwhile, gains in life expectancy have also slowed. And yet the number of dollars and researchers dedicated to R&D grows every year. In today’s episode, the FT’s Chief Data Reporter, John Burn-Murdoch, asks whether western culture has lost its previous focus on human progress and become too risk-averse, or whether the problem is simply that the low-hanging fruit of scientific research has already been ...
Feb 10, 2025•35 min
Tariffs have historically been an important tool of industrial policy. They were used in the last century by east Asian nations to promote infant industries, and are being used today by the EU to help spur the energy transition. But do Donald Trump’s threats to impose a 25% across-the-board tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico, or his actual 10% tax rise on all imports from China, have any kind of thought-out policy rationale behind them? And should other countries respond in kind? To find o...
Feb 06, 2025•36 min
In an interview recorded before President Trump hit China, Mexico and Canada with steep tariffs that disrupt the global trading system, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director-general of the World Trade Organisation, speaks to the FT’s Senior Trade Writer, Alan Beattie, and defends her record and the WTO’s achievements. She outlines how she hopes to engage with the new US administration and how globalisation has been remarkably resilient despite shocks such as the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of US ...
Feb 03, 2025•31 min
India is the world’s most populous nation, and since the 1990s it has maintained almost Chinese levels of rapid economic growth. Prime Minister Narendra Modi aims to make India a high income country and, by implication, an economic superpower by 2047. But is that achievable? This week’s guest, Arvind Subramanian, is a former chief economic adviser to Modi’s government. He is sceptical that the necessary growth rate can be sustained. Instead, he tells Martin Wolf how he thinks the government has ...
Jan 27, 2025•31 min
Sam Fleming is the FT’s Economics Editor, and this week he is reporting from the World Economic Forum at Davos, where much of the talk is about protectionism and industrial policy. Today on the show, Sam speaks to Beata Javorcik, the chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. They discuss the history of industrial policy -- and what it takes to get it right. Subscribe to The Economics show on Apple , Spotify , Pocket Casts or wherever you listen. Read a transcript o...
Jan 24, 2025•30 min
Doug Irwin is a professor at Dartmouth College and the author of several books on trade. Today on The Economics Show, he joins the FT’s Senior Trade Writer Alan Beattie to discuss the history of tariffs in the US, and what that history might tell us about the next round of tariffs. Alan writes the Trade Secrets newsletter. You can sign up here . He is on Bluesky at @alanbeattie.bsky.social. Subscribe on Apple , Spotify , Pocket Casts or wherever you listen. Read a transcript of this episode on F...
Jan 20, 2025•43 min
Increasingly elderly populations seen in countries such as Japan and Italy are set to become the norm everywhere in the coming decades. But will a more senior demographic make the cost of state pensions and healthcare unaffordable? And will it kill economic growth? Not necessarily so, according to today’s guest, Andrew J Scott, director of economics at the Ellison Institute of Technology Oxford. He believes that the rapidly growing cohort of over-65s is something to celebrate. But he also warns ...
Jan 13, 2025•33 min
In 1962, then US president John F Kennedy committed his nation to reaching the Moon before the decade was up. It was a huge undertaking, but one that ultimately succeeded, and also produced technologies such as camera phones and baby formula along the way. But have governments today lost the confidence and knowhow needed to undertake such ambitious challenges? That’s the contention of today’s guest, Mariana Mazzucato, professor in the economics of innovation and public value at University Colleg...
Dec 30, 2024•31 min
The Eurozone’s economic recovery from Covid-19 has been anaemic compared with America’s, despite achieving a soft landing from double-digit inflation. Indeed, Europe’s relative underperformance stretches back even longer, perhaps 30 years, in terms of productivity and GDP growth. Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, gives her assessment of the past few turbulent years of monetary policy and explains what she thinks Europe needs to do next if it is to close the gap with the ...
Dec 23, 2024•40 min
Mass immigration is demographically essential but politically impossible – so argues Lant Pritchett, development economist and visiting professor at the London School of Economics. As populations age in the rich developed countries, immigrant workers will be needed to help with the burden of providing for the elderly. Removing the barriers might also be the quickest way to raise living standards for people in the developing world. But doing so would require swimming against a rising tide of anti...
Dec 17, 2024•30 min
The US has just overcome one abrupt spike in inflation, which may have cost Kamala Harris her bid for the presidency. But now President-elect Donald Trump’s policy agenda threatens to cause another one. That’s according to Larry Summers, the former US Treasury Secretary and President Emeritus of Harvard University. He speaks to the FT’s Martin Wolf – who is standing in for Soumaya Keynes while she is on maternity leave – about the risks to economic stability posed by Trump’s proposed tax cuts, t...
Dec 10, 2024•32 min
It’s a treacherous time for the Eurozone. Inflation is falling, yes, but at the same time signs of real economic weakness are growing. And there are risks on the horizon, from rising debt to trade wars to real wars. It’s a perfect time to speak to our guest Philip Lane, chief economist of the ECB and a member of its executive board. And this week we have a co-host as well, Frankfurt bureau chief and ECB correspondent Olaf Storbeck. For Philip Lane’s recent speech on monetary policy uncertainty, ...
Dec 02, 2024•27 min
The UK is lagging behind its peers in the Eurozone. Its per capita GDP trails that of France and Germany, and yet its housing and energy is scarcer and more expensive. A recent essay by Sam Bowman, co-authored with Ben Southwood and Samuel Hughes, argues that Britain has struggled over the past 15 years because it has “banned the investment in housing, transport and energy that it most vitally needs.” Sam Bowman is a founding editor of Works in Progress, has served as director of competition pol...
Nov 28, 2024•37 min
