Kevin McCarthy, Republican speaker of the US House of Representatives, speaking in late May after striking a deal on the US debt ceiling.

No country has more neighbours than China, with 14 land borders. It is a difficult group to get along with under any circumstances, but China’s flawed diplomacy is making the task even harder.

The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a trade deal which includes ASEAN, China, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea, is quietly making big inroads.

"It helps that the area where RCEP has made most progress—harmonising rules of origin for goods exports—matters a lot to the complex supply chain that runs across the world’s biggest manufacturing hub. The deal, in effect, creates a single market in the intermediate goods that go into final products, helping RCEP to prevent the so-called “noodle-bowl” of dozens of overlapping trade deals that exporters struggle to digest."

The US has historically championed the WTO (and its predecessor the GATT), as an important part of the US-led rules-based international order. But over the past decade, this support has frayed. Nowadays, the US is even quietly sabotaging the WTO by blocking the appointment of new appellate judges, preventing the WTO from resolving trade disputes between WTO members. Notably, this policy is being carried over unchanged from the Trump administration to the Biden administration.

Larry Summers gave a keynote speech at a Peterson Institute workshop on fiscal policy a couple of weeks ago. The take-home message: the long run US fiscal deficit is becoming a matter of very real, not manufactured, concern.

During the 2010s, many left and center-left people got used to ignoring worries about the deficit. Paul Krugman, for instance, frequently called out conservatives for concern trolling the deficit with the goal of pushing spending cuts.

But today, with a 10-year-ahead deficit forecast of 7.3 percent, including a 3.6 percent primary deficit (conservative CBO estimates), high interest rates amplifying debt service costs for the forseeable future, and no political will on either side of the aisle to reduce spending or raise taxes, such concerns can no longer be dismissed.

Summers isn't everyone's cup of tea, but he's really good at synthesizing big picture economic problems.