Good morning,
The chief economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development has a message for business leaders in the U.S. and Europe with protectionist measures and industrial policies on the rise: Be careful what you wish for.
Beata Javorcik doesn’t like restrictions to trade. The Yale-trained former World Bank economist is a rather conventional trade economist in that sense. So is her organization, the EBRD. But her observations are astute in this era of global AI and green tech competition. She reminded me this week that when the U.S. banned the export of advanced AI chips to China this fall, China responded in kind. It restricted Chinese exports of graphite to the U.S., adding to the bans of gallium and germanium exports Beijing had enacted in the summer.
