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1 week ago | 
linkedin.com | Richard Baldwin
By Richard Baldwin, @IMD, Factful Friday, 20 June 2025On 2 April 2025, President Trump announced a surprise attack on the world. His weapon of choice? "Carpet bombing" tariffs. Everything foreigners sold to the US would be hit with new tariffs. Didn't matter whether it was spare parts for US airliners or fine wine for billionaires. Most of America's trade partners were shocked. Reactions were delayed. Not China's.
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1 week ago | 
imd.org | David Bach |Richard Baldwin |Simon J Evenett
Geopolitics has returned to the top of international business concerns, exacerbated by Donald Trump’s return to the White House. The President’s on-again, off-again confrontational trade policy is a case in point. “Liberation Day” on 2 April will be hard to forget. Despite its intensity and relevance for business leaders, geopolitics’ re-emergence is widely misunderstood and treated as a continuation of traditional political or country risk. That is a mistake.
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Mar 24, 2025 | 
imd.org | Richard Baldwin
During the Cold War, geopolitics was like checkers with two players and simple rules. The game was so straightforward that almost every match ended in a draw. Some countries stood behind the eastern player, the Soviets, while others supported the western player, led by the US. They were two worlds with their own rules, banking systems, supply chains, and economic philosophies. The Soviet Union’s collapse triggered a new phase of geopolitics that was more like bingo.
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Mar 3, 2025 | 
linkedin.com | Richard Baldwin
By Richard Baldwin IMD #IMD_Geo, 3 March 2025. This is the first sentence of the report. I am not making this up.
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Feb 7, 2025 | 
linkedin.com | Richard Baldwin
Richard Baldwin, IMD , 7 February 2025, Factful Friday. Introduction: Is 10% on China the dumbest tariff ever? This week’s daily episodes of The Trump Tariff Show, Season 2, are golden. Each was loaded with plot-twists and cliffhangers aplenty. Did you see the car chase featuring Mexico and Canada escaping the man with the gun? (Spoiler alert: they got away—phew, I was on the edge of my seat all of Tuesday, supersized box of popcorn at my elbow!) But China didn’t escape.
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Nov 6, 2024 | 
imd.org | Richard Baldwin
Donald Trump has been elected President of the United States in a historic comeback. His party will control the Senate and likely the lower house as well. It is too early to share fully joined-up thinking about the implications, but a few things are clear. The Trump victory and sweep of the two houses of Congress will have massive effects inside America. The majority of what he talked about during his campaign were domestic matters, so I will not comment on those.
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Sep 25, 2024 | 
thenationalnews.com | Richard Baldwin
Geopolitics has become an increasingly pressing issue for businesses as the global power dynamics continue to evolve. The rise of a multipolar world and emergence of countries such as China, India and Russia have resulted in companies being increasingly entangled in political tensions. This shift in the global landscape has forced businesses to navigate how they will approach new complex geopolitical challenges. However, it also offers valuable lessons for them.
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Sep 17, 2024 | 
imd.org | Richard Baldwin
“Super Mario” is back. Europe has called on Mario Draghi, former Italian prime minister and president of the European Central Bank, to help inject some dynamism back into the continent’s sputtering economy. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen last year appointed Draghi as a special advisor to develop a report on the future of European competitiveness, which was published last week.
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Aug 26, 2024 | 
thenationalnews.com | Richard Baldwin
European companies are increasing efforts to curb their dependence on Chinese goods. Some are looking to shift at least 30 per cent of their production outside of China, and some are even pushing to exit the country entirely. And it’s not just because of long-standing concerns about supply chain vulnerabilities. It’s also because the European Commission is looking much more closely at goods coming into the continent from China.
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Aug 20, 2024 | 
rb.gy | Richard Baldwin
Richard Baldwin, IMD 16 August 2024, Factful Friday. While the world income distribution is incredibly unequal, inequality has been falling since about 1990 when the Great Divergence flipped over into the Great Convergence. Most of the extra equality, however, comes from a convergence of inter-nation differences. Income inequality within many nations, especially the US and Britain, is rising, but not fast enough to offset the massive inter-nation convergence in average incomes. Introduction.
