How to Win a Trade War | Chad Bown
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What's up everybody? My name is Dmitry Grafinas, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest in this episode of Hidden Forces is Chad Bound, a trade economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a former chief economist at the US State Department, the host of the popular Trade Talks podcast, and the co author of the recently published book, How to Win a Trade War. Chad and I spend the fir
Thanks for having me.
It's great having you on Chad. You and your co author Sumayya have been on a bit of a tear lately in terms of doing media for your book, How to Win a Trade War, including a recent appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Before we get into the book or your background, what was the origin of your collaboration and how long have you two known one another?
Yeah. Sami and I have known each other about ten years. She was, at the time, this was 2016, she was the main trade correspondent at The Economist newspaper working out of London. I was here at the Peterson Institute doing work on trade policy at the time. President Trump comes along, wins the twenty sixteen election, and all of a sudden trade becomes part of the headlines every day in ways that had never been seen before in media history. So she was covering it every day from London. I was covering it every day from Washington, DC, and we decided to start a podcast together. And we did a podc
Yeah. I'm glad that you concede that it's a boring topic because I think that's how most people feel about it. And yet it is one of the most important aspects of the modern economy that investors and businesses need to understand. You guys have done a great job making it feel both accessible and interesting by taking a rather unorthodox approach to how you cover it in the book, which is written as a kind of battlefield manual for fighting a trade war. I should mention that we're recording this on the same week that Trump announced 50% tariffs on certain Canadian goods, including electrical equ
The audience is you and your listeners. So you hit the nail exactly on the head, right? So this stuff usually is so boring that the general public doesn't need to pay attention to the details, right? The challenge is President Trump has made it really, really, really, really exciting, But at the same time, he's made it incredibly confusing, and it's really difficult to track all the details. So, you know, what we try to do in this book, and I think it's worth talking about, you know, what the conceit of the book is. So imagine, Dmitry, you're an aspiring trade warrior. That's kind of our audie
So are trade wars more about trade, or are they more about war?
They're a little about both. I mean, we haven't had war between the major powers, right, in a very long time, right, since, you know, the second world war of the 1940s. And there is this longstanding question, argument that trade can help perhaps facilitate peace, right? That you get more trade between countries, and perhaps they're less likely to go to war with one another. One of the architects of the postwar trading system, the rules based trading system that we've been living under since the end of World War II in the 1940s, was FDR's Secretary of State Cordell Hall, and he was very much o
I did a bad job setting that question up, because while you do make a distinction in the book between economic and geostrategic arguments for fighting a tr
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