Sarah Paine: prediction

Transcript context

…The entire world benefits more from trading with them than the United States. There's more volume of trade with China than the United States globally. Then it would be difficult to coordinate a coalition to say, "Look, you’ve got to stop trading with the person you're trading most with." The story is about sanctions. They don't have to be leak proof. If you can knock off one or two percentage points of Chinese growth just because some people are sanctioning like war materiel, that would be a very likely thing. After Taiwan, maybe you're trading with China, but you're not doing certain categories of war materiel with them. The cumulative effects of doing that to a country over generations is the difference between North and South Korea. It adds right up. You could do the math better than I can. If you knock off 2% growth per annum, I think the doubling time of an economy… I don't know, if you knock a couple of percentage points off, it goes from 25 years to 75 years. You will be able to do the math better than I can rapidly. But it's very consequential and China's neighbors will be scared to death of this. Also, you're right that trade patterns don't go overnight. They go gradually over like a 10 year period in which China will find it's already happening, as supply chains are moving out of China. It’s slow. The larger thing I'm trying to get at is this. In the immediate term, it seems like the thing that mattered in World War II was the fact that the United States was outproducing all the Axis combined in planes and munitions and tanks. Who is in a comparable position today? You'd say it's China. Over the long run, perhaps we can cobble together a coalition which over many generations reduces China's growth or ability to compete. But I'm not even confident that the coalition would center around the United States rather than around China.…

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