This is an audio transcript of The Economics Show podcast episode: ‘Martin Wolf talks to Richard Baldwin: What’s the future of global trade?’
Martin Wolf
Donald Trump and his team of trade advisers are approaching a 21st-century problem with 20th-century solutions. Those scornful words were penned by my guest today in an article he wrote in 2017. He was complaining about the US president’s penchant for imposing tariffs on America’s trade partners during his first term in office.
If that’s what he thought back then, I cannot wait to hear what he makes of the newly reinaugurated president’s latest round of import levies, not least because he’s one of the world’s most formidable and most eloquent and knowledgeable experts on international trade and globalisation. But what would be left of either trade or globalisation after four more years of Donald Trump?
[MUSIC PLAYING]
This is The Economics Show. I’m Martin Wolf, the FT’s chief economics commentator. Joining me is Richard E Baldwin down the line from Lausanne in Switzerland, where he’s professor of international economics at the IMD Business School. Richard is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Vox EU, which is a highly prestigious platform where leading European economists share policy analysis. And all these, despite being an American. Richard, welcome to the show.
Richard Baldwin
Happy to be here. Thank you, Martin.
Martin Wolf
Now, before we begin, I should mention that I think, uniquely among my friends who are leading international trade economists, your father was also an international trade economist. Indeed, one of enormous stature and influence. So I’ve always wondered, why did you decide to follow in your father’s really rather large footsteps?
Richard Baldwin
Yes. Well, my father was helping the US prepare for the Kennedy Round when I was in kindergarten. He was in the Kennedy Camelot administration, and I think I saw him travel all over the world. And our dinner table conversations were like a seminar or so. I knew all the terms and how to debate. And then when I got to university, I wanted to be a lawyer, but I found that I could get A’s in economics without studying. So I majored in economics. And then it turned out that I actually liked economics, and since I preferred micro to macro, and since my dad travelled so much, it had to be international. So I did international trade. It’s as easy as that. Although I think maybe a psychiatrist would find a much cleaner route between my father being a professor of international trade and me being a professor of international trade.
Martin Wolf
Well, it’s certainly a remarkable curriculum vitae, and I must say, very good for us, because you’ve done a wonderful job in recent years, indeed over many years, in explaining what is going on in world trade and contradicting a lot of conventional wisdom. So let’s start with this or the big picture, which is what’s actually happening to globalisation over the last few decades. Is there any truth in the conventional explanation that the financial crisis of 2007-09 just broke all the trends, and that’s why trade has been growing more slowly? What’s really been going on?
Richard Baldwin
Well, the assertion that you’re talking about is peak globalisation, that globalisation kind of soared up from the late ‘80s, early ‘90s to 2008. And then if you look at just the statistics, it falls after that at the world level. Now I like to call that a false peak because it’s a concatenation of China, which started falling well before 2008, and the other G7 countries, which started falling after 2008. So it’s a false peak, but it reflects a reality that globalisation is not growing as fast as it did in the 1990s.
So I interpret that as a phase transition. What we had was a brand-new type of globalisation opened up in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s, where we had offshoring and outsourcing of manufacturing, and that led to a rapid growth in two-way trade of parts and components in addition to final goods. And we reached kind of a plateau for that. A lot of that had to do with moving manufacturing to China. And that shift, although it’s continued, has been overwhelmed by China’s GDP growth, which has been even faster than its export growth. So China’s export to GDP ratio is falling. And since China’s so now important in the world economy, it’s dragging down the world peak as well.
Martin Wolf
This is obviously very important. And I’d like if you introduce as an intellectual framework your sort of notion of the three phases of world trade over the last couple of centuries. And this one, I think, is the second of your three.
Richard Baldwin
That’s right. So I wrote a book called The Great Convergence.
Martin Wolf
Wonderful book, which I cited in columns, a wonderful book.
Richard Baldwin
Absolutely. Thank you very much. I spend about 300 pages trying to explain what I meant to say. In one of your columns, you said there’s three phases: goods crossing borders; factory crossing borders; and the third one which we’re in now is offices crossing borders. So you’re exactly right. This idea of the back and forth trade in parts and components, exploding the export to output ratio in transition, is exactly what I was talking about. So I like to call it the second unbundling where factories started crossing borders in a big way.
Martin Wolf
Well, we’re going to move later to this third stage, which I think is immensely important. But let’s talk a bit more about this second stage before we start thinking about what Donald Trump might do to it. Is your basic view that factories, as it were, moved across borders basically as far as they could? We’ve done that. We’ve exploited the opportunity. Now we’re moving on.
Richard Baldwin
I think that’s exactly right. So the big trigger was information and communication technology. And that made it feasible to organise production of complex products, where, for example, you’re producing the tail of a Canadian Bombardier jet in central Mexico and the rest of it in Quebec. And the organisation is so good, you could put those together and make a plane, and it would fly. Before the internet, before email, before widespread cell phones, that kind of co-ordination was just not possible. So the way I think about it is what is happening is there’s been an arbitrage on labour cost, and that arbitrage was enabled by ICT, which allowed the co-ordination of having one stage of production, say, in Mexico and another stage in, say, the United States. And that arbitrage on labour cost didn’t apply to every single stage of production, because not every state uses the stuff where Mexican labour is cheapest. And so what we have got is most of the stuff that should be outsourced has been outsourced. So it looks like globalisation has plateaued. But the way I think of that is you were at one equilibrium in the ‘70s and ‘80s, then you jumped up in the ‘90s, 2000s, 2010s maybe, and then you’ve reached another one. What was unusual was the rapid rise, not the fact that it’s plateaued or is falling now.
Martin Wolf
So I suppose one of the reasons this has slowed is, as you said, a big part of it was labour cost arbitrage, as economists would say in their usual elegant way. And the big arbitrage, inevitably, was the opening of the Chinese economy in this vast quantity of cheap and hardworking labour. And the Chinese labour has got more expensive. And so that opportunity necessarily isn’t what it was. And that’s exactly what we all hoped would happen when the opening occurred.
Richard Baldwin
Exactly. That’s the way it’s supposed to work. And the Japanese call it the flying geese pattern, where back in the day it was Japan who was the lead goose. And as their wages and technology rose, they offshored things like lower unskilled labour, you know, furniture and textiles to the four dragons there: Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea. And then to the next four, etc. And now China’s doing exactly the same thing. China’s becoming a headquarter economy and are offshoring stages of production to countries with lower costs of unskilled labour.
But let me make one point, Martin, which I kind of forgot about, and that the other aspect of this, which is truly revolutionary, is the ICT has allowed G7 firms, manufacturing firms, to take their own manufacturing technology and combine it with low-cost labour abroad. And that was a huge change in the nature of globalisation. So that big arbitrage, the second one, is that the manufacturing technology, which used to be heavily concentrated in G7 countries, owned by the firms in those countries, has now moved to nearby emerging markets, above all China, and sparked an industrialisation take-off, in which they are now inventing their own technology. And that one-time switch is not going back. But it did lead also feeding into this very rapid shift of manufacturing from the G7 countries to a handful of emerging countries, above all, China.
Martin Wolf
And I suppose if we’re looking at the world today, you can see countries like Vietnam trying to pursue a similar strategy in the wild geese formation. But of course, compared to China, Vietnam is pretty small. So China clearly is going to have had historically the biggest impact in this way that any country is likely ever to have.
Richard Baldwin
Absolutely. China now accounts for 35 per cent of the gross production of manufacturing in the whole world, and Chinese gross production is now larger than the next nine countries put together. So if you take the entire G7 plus Korea and India, China’s output in gross terms is higher. In value-added terms, it’s almost as high. China is the world’s sole superpower in manufacturing, and a lot of what they export is intermediate inputs into the production processes of other countries, including the United States. So in some sense, the world has become linked, with a dependence on Chinese manufacturing, which will be very, very difficult to change.
Martin Wolf
There is, of course, an argument that what went on in China and between China and western firms wasn’t at all as benign as you describe it. It wasn’t just western and Japanese firms going to produce in China because there was cheap labour. But China from various means stole the know-how that you describe as the basis of what was going on. The western and Japanese firms’ know-how was what made Chinese labour so effective and valuable. And then the Chinese basically stole it.
And in addition, there is the argument that they pursued a policy of deliberate undervaluation of the exchange rate. So this wasn’t really a natural economic process at all. It was a predatory set of policies, and we are absolutely right to stop them.
Richard Baldwin
But let me put a little perspective on that. So first of all, if you go back in history, China was one of the largest manufacturing countries in the world. In the early parts of the 1800s, the output of China in manufacturing was larger than the UK, for example, partly because it’s so large. And so what we had was a deindustrialisation of China during the long 19th century when British manufacturing went up, and then American and then German and France. China was then pushed into a situation, at least in part, by colonial wars, where they were forced to open themselves to foreign manufacturing, having themselves decided to close off in the Ming dynasty. So in some sense, especially in China, they view this as setting the clock back to the correct hour, where China was a large player in the world market. So let me just get that right.
And second, is because I think the word “stole” is probably appropriate in a few things, but the vast majority of China’s productivity advance is a much more tacit knowledge about how to organise things, how to manage things. And so I think when Japanese, American and German companies went to China, they were hoping to keep their proprietary technology to themselves. And by hook or by crook, some of that leaked out. But a lot of the spillover wasn’t really in like a blueprint or a patent or industrial secret. A lot of it was just how do you organise manufacturing and how do you train managers, how do you train workers? And that knowledge seeped over into the general economy as the G7 companies actually trained managers, local managers and trained workers. And then they started to be hired by Chinese. So I think the vast majority of it is really just a general knowledge of how you do manufacturing and the organisational aspects it spilled over. The second thing is China is a planned economy and undervaluation of the exchange rate for a very long time was an important part of that. So I agree with . . . This was directed by China. But on the other hand, you have to say that the loss of manufacturing from the G7, especially the US, was due to a lack of a plan. One of the quips I like is that if you don’t have an industrial policy, then you’re following China’s industrial policy.
Martin Wolf
I guess that’s a nice comment. Well, I agree with most of that. And I pointed out in one of my columns quite a long time ago that the US started stealing intellectual property from Britain, more or less as soon as the Industrial Revolution started. So what are they complaining about? As it were, this is all part of history. But now we have a president who does have a plan. Well, it’s sort of a plan. He thinks that by using tariffs that he is going to rectify all this. Is he right?
Richard Baldwin
No, I think it’s absolutely . . . He is not understanding the modern economy. I don’t know when he first read about tariffs, but surely it was when the world was a simpler place before all these global supply chains got put up.
So let me just give you an example. He put 10 per cent tariff on all Chinese inputs. And what that means is, since about 40 per cent of China exports to the United States are in intermediate goods, which are used by American-based companies to produce other stuff. So now what he’s done is made those inputs 10 per cent more expensive if you make it in the US, but not more expensive if you make it in Canada or Mexico. So this idea that putting tariffs on China will move industry to the United States might have worked in the old world, where the United States was making cars almost entirely in the United States. But now, since American cars are made with parts and components from all over the place, including China, and then putting a tax on it, makes the location of other countries higher. And so he’s just relatively ill-informed.
The second point is that the US doesn’t have the workers willing to work in factories with sufficient skills to ramp up industrial production in the United States by a substantial amount. But what Biden did, which was a little bit more informed, I think, by economic reasoning, was he decided that certain products like, say, semiconductors, advanced AI, advanced chips, those should be made in the United States, at least in part for national security reasons. And he targeted those industries and had conscious policies to bring more of that production to the United States. Trump’s approach really is just ill-informed about the modern realities of the global supply chain and international trade.
Martin Wolf
It rather reminds me of the debates that I was engaged in (inaudible) a very long time ago when I worked on developing countries, because the arguments that Trump has been making, basically very similar to the arguments people in India and Brazil, big economies, made that if we have high tariffs, then we’re going to create the whole industrial chain from beginning to end within our country, and we are quite big enough to do that. Now, obviously, the US is bigger than they were, but in practice in quite a few industries, the US market is by no means the dominant market of the world. One of the comments I made in one of my columns is that if you look at electric vehicles, for example, the Chinese market is more than twice the size of the American market. So this Trumpian view of the self-sufficient import-substituting economy, as we would call, is a really foolish throwback because the US isn’t big enough to be competitive in all these industries if it shifts everything in this way inside the borders.
Richard Baldwin
Yes, I agree with that. And no country, not Germany, not Japan, not China makes everything themselves. We’re in a world where to be competitive in the final product, you have to source your parts and components from the most competitive sources. And given scale economies, no one economy’s big enough to do that whole thing.
Another aspect of the US size is I think President Trump is totally overestimating the leverage he has over the entire world. So US imports are only about 11 per cent of world imports overall, and the US economy is only about 25 per cent of the world economy, so it’s not like it was in the old days when he was a young man, where the US dominated the world economy, and I think he still has that in mind.
So I think President Trump has found himself in a presidential promise pickle with tariffs. If he puts it on final goods, it’ll show up in the aisles of Walmart, especially on China. In other words, the price that the Maga base pays for the stuff they buy in Walmart will be much higher. And that is something he promised wouldn’t happen. He promised, actually, he would lower prices.
If he puts the tariff on intermediate goods, but not final goods, which was a lot of what he did in his last administration, then he’s crippling the competitiveness of American manufacturing since in Mexico and Canada, they don’t face these kinds of tariffs or Europe or Japan. So that would break another promise, which is to reinvigorate US manufacturing. So he’s stuck. And I think that’s part of the reason he’s been very hesitant to actually go ahead with all the threats he’s made.
Martin Wolf
So if the rest of the world looks at this extraordinary performance that we are seeing by Donald Trump — but mostly it’s a performance, smoke and mirrors sort of thing — would it be the best thing to just sort of ignore it? Or should they retaliate? What would you advise the Europeans, the rest of the world, to do? Should they take this really seriously? Or actually say he’s not going to destroy world trade, it’s not big enough, it’s not important enough. The US market even is not that important. We’re just going to go on trade with one another. Behave like grown-ups. And at some point, the Americans will come to their senses.
Richard Baldwin
OK, so let me take that in three batches. So the classic is that you have to retaliate when people do unfair, unusual things in trade. That is the basis even of the World Trade Organization system. For instance, if you subsidise your exports, I put on a duty against your exports countervailing duties. That retaliation is the core of what maintains the peace, to start with.
Now, what the Chinese did in the Trump first administration is they retaliated, but always a little bit less than he did. And so it was a de-escalatory kind of retaliation. But if nothing else, it allowed them to hold their heads high in front of their citizens and saying, we’re not being bullied by this guy. So that’s the classic take is to retaliate. And I think basically every country has to go that way because this is a man who does not respect weakness.
The second part of it is, I think you got to realise that what this guy wants is to look good. And so I think, for instance, in Mexico and Canada, when Trump threatened them with 25 per cent tariffs, which was not credible, they gave some visuals that made it look like Trump won, but essentially things they were doing already and they were recast as a big win for the negotiations. And you can see an element of this because when Trump negotiates, he’s very vague about what the negotiations are about. He muddies the water. So at any point he can declare victory and say, see, they made a concession. But the important part there is not to make him look like a fool and to go along with the face-saving at the end of the whole thing. And I think a lot of foreign leaders have figured this out. And there’s also, you know, venal things, like helping his family with deals around the world, for instance.
So the third take on it, is I think what we got to do is stop viewing Trump as playing a standard game of international relations power. You know, give and take, retaliation, threats, mutually assured destruction. And realise what he’s playing is what we call the mad-dog strategy. And that is you come across the street and there’s this mad dog, absolutely wild, so wild it may be that the dog engages in things that are bad for him, and so you can’t predict what they’re going to do by looking at their self-interest. The dog could run across the street despite the traffic, and then bite you just because it’s a mad dog.
Now, the strategy for a mad dog is to be calm and not concede to whatever he wants. And in this case, if Trump gets one thing from the Europeans, he’s going to want another thing from the Europeans. So you can’t give in to the mad-dog strategy.
The key there is to realise he really isn’t mad, and he has the political constraint of keeping his base happy, which means not really putting on tariffs too much. He has the political constraint of not really disrupting American manufacturing by raising the cost of imported intermediates in the US, making the US a high-cost island. So I put all those three things together, and I think to a certain extent, the way especially the Mexican president played it, was very careful. She was harsh to start with in claiming that sovereignty, national pride, retaliation, etc. And then at the end, made some face-saving concessions that Trump could then say, look, I won this. I forced them into these concessions, even though they weren’t very big concessions.
Martin Wolf
Thank you very much. I think that’s a very good overview. So we’re going to take a break now. And when we get back, I’m going to ask Richard about the one area of trade that is still growing really rapidly. And yet it is often overlooked because, as economists like to say, it is invisible.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
We’re back from the break, and now we’re going to be talking about invisibles, the extraordinary growth of trade in things that we used not to measure.
Richard Baldwin
Martin, do you know where that ‘invisible’ term came from?
Martin Wolf
No.
Richard Baldwin
So in the old days of fixed exchange rates, foreign exchange had to go through the official accounts, right? That was the way it was. And foreign exchange would show up in the Treasury account and they’d go like, what the hell is this? And, well, it’s invisible trade.
Martin Wolf
Yes.
Richard Baldwin
Because it didn’t . . . the customs data . . .
Martin Wolf
Because there were no customs data. Yes.
Richard Baldwin
Right. They called it trade in invisibles because, you know, they didn’t know where it was.
Martin Wolf
Wonderful. I didn’t know that. Now, how important, if at all, are tariffs on goods when the fastest growth in trade is in services and particularly digital services. And tariffs have really nothing to do with that at all. You can’t use a tariff to stop that. So are we just as Trump is fixated with the past, the really deep past, most analysts are also fixated with what is really the past and not the present and future of world trade.
Richard Baldwin
Yes, I think that’s absolutely true. And I would make a couple comments. One is China is making a mistake by focusing so much on manufacturing, when all the good jobs in the future economy are going to be in sophisticated services. So that’s point one.
But the second thing is about it’s not just its services are growing faster than goods trade. I think there’s a systemic, long-term technological reason why trade, especially in manufactured goods, is declining. And that’s got to do with the automation of manufacturing. So the real reason it’s more cost-effective to produce things in China or Vietnam or Mexico is because the cost of labour. But as automation takes the labour out of manufacturing, then the incentive to make it far away diminishes. And on the services side, the technology is moving exactly the opposite way. The wage differences between skilled service sector workers across countries is enormous. Something like, you know, over 1,000 per cent differences. And as digital technology makes it easier for us to work from home, we will see more of this arbitrage where offices in high-wage, rich countries start to use more and more professionals, highly qualified, skilled people located in developing countries or emerging markets, high-education, low-wage emerging markets. So that’s where I think we are.
The second thing you said was about tariffs. And that I think is really interesting. All the discussion about geopolitics, the vast majority of it is US-China in manufactured goods. There is tiny bits in services like TikTok or the services in electric vehicles in the United States and things like that. But as you pointed out, it’s basically impossible to put a tariff on a service that crosses borders because it doesn’t go through customs. In fact, it’s often not recorded. One of the most remarkable things about service statistics is that they’re terrible, because it’s hard to gather statistics on, for example, when if an American consulting firm hires somebody in Poland to fix up their PowerPoint slides and then brings it back. In principle, that’s trade. But you can be almost positive that that did not enter into US trade in services statistics. And the reasons why it’s hard to gather statistics are exactly the reason it’s hard to put on tariffs. It’s hard to know how much they’re worth. No country has really figured out how to put tariffs on trade in services, and I think it’s a technological thing. Now let me do a slight side, because if you talk to most analysts, they’ll tell you that trade in services is incredibly protected. There’s even something called the OECD Services Trade Restrictiveness Index, which shows enormous barriers in trade in services.
But here’s the key: those barriers affect B2C, business to consumer. So for example, architectural services. If you want to hire an architect to design a house or a building, that’s from B2C and it’s incredibly heavily regulated. Same for medicine, law, accounting, all sorts of things like that. But if it’s B2B, for instance, if the architect who’s based in America and accredited in America wants to hire an Indian architect to design, say, the stairwell blocks, there is no barrier on that. So the idea is that this explosion is in intermediate services or B2B services, not in final services. So what we’re seeing is an explosion of global service value chains now, like we saw in the 1990s with manufacturing. And that’s where your wonderful phrase was, I use all the time now, that we have offices crossing borders, not just factories and goods. In other words, people organising remote teams that include low-cost, high-quality foreign workers in the supply chain. And by the way, I just would note that that’s what we’re doing now since I’m in Switzerland and you’re in the UK. I’m actually exporting services to the UK, but I’m pretty sure it won’t show up either in the Swiss statistics or in the UK statistics. Of course, none of us are getting paid for this, so maybe it shouldn’t. But that’s the kind of example. Think about how difficult it would be to tax the transmission we’re doing right now. Making the recording with a tariff, it would be almost impossible.
Martin Wolf
These are very important points I’ve been arguing for quite a long time, actually. That is very, very clear from the data that manufacturing is going the way of agriculture, which is that essentially we feed ourselves across the world astoundingly well with a tiny fraction of the labour force in farming that we used to have 100 years, or 200 years ago, because productivity in agriculture has completely transformed. It’s not very difficult to imagine a world, and it may not be very far away in which in factories everywhere, there won’t be any workers. I mean, essentially it’s all going to be done by robots of various kinds, because robots are so good at this. So this idea that we’re going to recreate huge labour forces in manufacturing is completely undermined by the most fundamental technological changes of our time.
There is a security reason, perhaps, for having semiconductors made in the United States, but we’re never going to have a million people making chips. We’re going to have machines making chips. But there is an argument that the labour arbitrage in services that you mention could be undermined really rather dramatically by artificial intelligence. Let me give you an example which I’ve actually come across. You could send X-ray images to India and you would get Indian radiologists to look at these. Much, much cheaper than American radiologists, perfectly well trained and they would tell you what they’d seen. But now AI is really good at pattern recognition, better than humans and probably will get better and better. And therefore there is an alternative for your American firm. They’re just going to have it done at home by a computer. Now of course, that means the employment goes anyway, so it doesn’t make any difference to all the people in our jobs with high skills, which are being reduced in value very dramatically. But it would have a different impact on trade, wouldn’t it?
Richard Baldwin
Yes. So I’ve written an article published last year which looks at the globotics quadrant. So we take on the vertical axis the degree of automatability of a particular profession. And on the horizontal axis we put the teleworkability of the occupation, and then we plot all the US occupations. And the ones up here in the north-east are both highly automatable and highly offshoreable, so to speak. And that’s where your substitutions come in. But there are other quadrants where it’s offshoreable, but not automatable; where it’s neither; where it’s automatable, but not offshoreable. There’s jobs in all four quadrants. And the point that remote intelligence and artificial intelligence are substitutes is true, but only for some jobs.
So the classic example is in chatbots versus call centres. So call centres on employment is going down in places like the Philippines and India because chatbots are taking over a lot of it. But there are other things where AI is making the foreign workers even more competitive. And a paper that we just published, we found that GenAI made South African workers better substitutes for Americans when both were using GenAI. And then afterwards, we asked American-based online people to guess whether the work product that they did was done by an American or by a South African. And when they were using GenAI, it was random. They could not identify who was South African, which indicated that GenAI is actually making foreign workers better substitutes because not only does it affect their productivity, it also allows them to be more culturally adapted to their audience. GenAI is fluent in cultural differences and nuances, so they’re not writing in South African English. They’re writing in American English when they use the GenAI. So I think it cuts both ways. But certainly there are occupations where AI is going to undermine international trade in services, but there are other ones where it’s actually going to amplify it. And I think on the whole, GenAI will make foreign workers better substitutes for workers in rich countries.
Martin Wolf
I think the big conclusion here is that our politics are focusing on jobs in manufacturing, which is sort of ancient history. But what is really going to come our way, and that I’ve got this from much of your writing, is a huge upheaval in jobs, in services, and particularly in relatively sophisticated jobs. And that will affect the middle and upper-middle classes of our societies, and the politics of that are really going to be something.
Richard Baldwin
Well, that’s absolutely true. Service and professional workers are facing pressures from globalisation, direct wage competition and automation threatening their jobs. So just as automation and globalisation threaten manufacturing jobs and led to a backlash in manufacturing sectors, I think that’s coming to the service sector. So I couldn’t agree more.
Martin Wolf
So thank you very much. We’ve had a wonderful overview of what’s been happening to trade. What is happening to trade now with Donald Trump and what is likely to happen to trade, because the revolutions we have been seeing in the last 30, 40 years, particularly within manufacturing, are now coming to services. Richard Baldwin, thank you very much.
Richard Baldwin
My pleasure. Any time.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Martin Wolf
That’s all for this week. You’ve been listening to The Economics Show from the FT. This episode was produced by Laurence Knight, with original music and sound engineering by Breen Turner. Our executive producer is Manuela Saragosa. The broadcast engineers are Andrew Georgiades and Rod Fitzgerald. Cheryl Brumley is the FT’s global head of audio. I’m Martin Wolf. Thanks for listening.