White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met this weekend in Malta. The aim is to pave the way for a meeting between Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping expected to take place in November. The two governors may have the opportunity to meet at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum in San Francisco. The Chinese minister said the two sides had agreed to hold…
Banca March: More than 60 developing countries from Latin America, Africa and Asia are attending the meeting, which has been running since Tuesday and will continue until Thursday. During these days, the BRICS are considering adding new members from among 23 possible candidates that have not yet been revealed, although there is speculation about countries such as Iran, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, among others. The terms of admission remain undefined,…
BancaMarch| US President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed an executive order that effectively limits US investment in several Chinese tech firms. According to Biden, China’s strategy facilitates and supports “advances in sensitive technologies and products that are critical to the military, intelligence, surveillance or cyber capabilities of other countries”. The ban is limited to three key sectors of the Asian giant: semiconductors, quantum computing and artificial intelligence. At the same…
The US Treasury Secretary began a visit to China yesterday that is likely to last until Sunday. The expectation is that these meetings will lead to an easing of tensions between the world’s two largest economies given that, in Janet Yellen’s own words: “A disengagement of the world’s two largest economies would be destabilising for the global economy”. Today she also met with Premier Li Qiang. On the other hand,…
Banca March| The European Union and Mercosur – Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay – reached a free trade agreement in 2019 but it has since not been ratified owing to unresolved differences between the parties. Now the Mercosur members, who are meeting in Argentina, want to close the agreement “once and for all”, although they also warn that it will not be at any price. On the European side, reticence…
Intermoney| That the recovery is weaker in China is a reality, but certain issues should not be magnified, because as has been seen, there is a certain boost to domestic demand and it would be a problem of confidence among Chinese citizens that could be reversed. For the moment, the politburo does not seem to be taking any more generous measures than might be expected. Moreover, yesterday the OECD’s forecast…
Franck Dixmier, Global CIO Fixed Income (Allianz GI) | Investors could be forgiven for thinking they have been here before. As the clock ticks down on the US debt limit deadline, markets are once again getting familiar with the intricacies of US politics. In what has become a semi-regular partisan wrangle, politicians in Washington are in talks over raising the federal debt limit before June, the month when the government…
Alicia García herrero (Natixis) | During the past fifteen months after the outbreak of the Ukraine war, China and Russia’s trade value increased by 36.5% compared to pre-war levels, showing their much-enhanced ties in merchandise trade. Meanwhile, in addition to the upswing of the headline amount, some new patterns in their trade structure are also worth watching. For example, Russia has moved up rapidly in the rank of China’s external…
Alicia García Herrero (Natixis) | The strategic competition between the US and China started in early 2018 when the Trump administration implemented untargeted import tariffs and reoriented most of its trade efforts towards widening the technology gap between China and the US with a special focus on deep tech, such as semiconductors. The Biden administration has pushed even further in that direction. However, one should not forget that well before…
Alicia García Herrero (Natixis) | Almost a decade has passed since President Xi Jinping announced the launch of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), originally titled ‘One Belt One Road’. The BRI has since expanded into one of China’s most important tools for the build-up of soft power and the implementation of its overseas activities (Dadabaev, 2018). Simultaneously, however, the initiative has attracted controversy in the international media, particularly after…