Bessent is not wrong. I talked to Rhodium Group's Logan Wright about why getting China to appreciate its currency is a pipe dream on this week's Geopolitics Decanted by Silverado episode 👇

🎙️ Watch full episode on YouTube: 🎧 Or listen:

@rhodium_group @GeopolDecanted Why don't you suggest that the United States devalue the dollar? After all, it is the world's largest deficit nation.😂😂😂

@rhodium_group @GeopolDecanted Warren Buffett published a article in Fortune in 2003 about this sort of issue, along with the "savings/consumption balance" issue. His idea about seeking a balanced trade idea might be worth talking about again.

logical f-up question; assuming Logan is largely right (consistent also with work by M. Pettis & others), doesn't the deteriorating Chinese economic situation represent a strong incentive for Xi to use non-peaceful tactics against Taiwan sooner rather than later? The RoW is awakening against Chinese trade imbalances, therefore the window of opportunity for Xi is narrowing

@rhodium_group @GeopolDecanted No because Xi doesn’t believe he’s got a problem

Respectfully (big fan of your activity on this social media); but how do we know what he really thinks? We have some access to party documents of various nature, but as far as I understand there is broad agreement among scholars and experts (see among the others Rush Doshi, Kevin Rudd and Eyck Freymann) that we don’t really know how Xi thinks. Is it really likely that he does not understand such dynamics, especially considering that one of the main experts in this regard is M. Pettis, who is very well known and read in China?

@rhodium_group @GeopolDecanted All his actions and past history indicate that he is not very interested in economics and acts as if China’s rise is inevitable

@rhodium_group @GeopolDecanted It's also a simplistic and misconceived idea Counterintuitively at a first glance, but actually quite obviously when you look at the deflationary debt trap where China finds itself, the Yuan is actually overvalued