Bruegel

[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to The Sound of Economics, the podcast from Bruegel, the Brussels-based economic think tank.

I'm your host, Rebecca Christie, and we are going to have a very special episode on the BRICS group of countries and economic concept.

My guests today are Jim O'Neill, former Bruegel board member and also former chief economist of Goldman Sachs, who came up with this way of talking about these collection of economies and countries.

We also have Bruegel's Suman Bery and Alicia Garcia Herrero.

You may know Alicia from the special China podcast stream that we have in addition to The Sound of Economics, our main show.

Very glad to have you all on here, and let's get right to it.

So let us remind ourselves that even for Europe, Jim talked earlier about floating exchange rates and, you know, the departure from Bretton Woods was '71.

But my reading of the history is that actually integration of European capital market, there was the Euro dollar into a kind of the global casino we have now, didn't take place till the 1980s.

So it's something that will be different from our usual content.

I am Yun Zhan, and I'm with Alicia Garcia Herrero of Bruegel, and also Matt's fellow, Christy Loki.

For listeners, you can find our research on China at bruegel.org, and sign up for Zhonghua Mundus, our monthly China podcast and newsletter, with link in the show notes.

Until next time, bye-bye.

Meanwhile, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in a September 21 phone call with his German counterpart Johann Weidfuhl that China and the EU are comprehensive strategic partners and that a trade war should not be waged between them.

Wang Yi is asking Berlin to keep the bloc from going harder on tariffs, Alicia Garcia Herrero, senior research fellow at Bruegel, told the Epoch Times.

China is also dealing with the United States at the same time and does not want a second front.

Garcia Herrero said Germany is the EU economy that matters most inside Brussels, and European leaders are due to review the China deficit and possible new measures in October.

The EU levied tariffs of up to 45% on Chinese-built electric vehicles in October 2024, and Beijing retaliated with duties on European cognac, pork and dairy products.

The EU accounts for about 25% of China's electric vehicle exports, making the bloc the main destination for these shipments, according to a Bruegel report published in September.

Tsai Ming-Fong, a professor of industrial economics at Tamkong University in Taiwan, said Brussels has repeatedly signalled plans to limit Chinese electric vehicles, leaving Beijing deeply concerned about further trade clashes with the bloc.

Once a trade war with the EU breaks out, China will lose yet another high-value market, Tsai told The Epoch Times.

Hello, and welcome to The

Sound of Economics, the podcast from Bruegel, the Brussels-based economic think tank.

I'm your host, Rebecca Christie.

I am joined today by Bruegel's director, Jeremy Zettelmeyer, and our special guest coming to us from Amsterdam, Olaf Sleipen, the governor of the Dutch Central Bank.

We are so delighted to have you on the show today, and we really want to talk about financial stability and what are the possible things that central bankers and that all the rest of us should be worried about.

Can you tell us a little bit about how you see the outlook right now and maybe what's most on your mind?

So the bottom line is international cooperation is needed for both the growth and the risk sides of the equation.

Thank you for that.

Canada, meanwhile, has less than 400 megawatts.

As for what the landscape will look like in about five years' time, well, the Bruegel think tank here in Europe recently came up with some estimates that if it follows through with all of its plans for AI gigafactories...

the EU will have about 21 gigawatts of capacity.

Reports in Canada suggest that if it follows through with all of its currently planned data centres, Canada will have, again, about 20 gigawatts of capacity at some point.

We will be talking about all of that and more.

My guests and colleagues today are Bruegel's director, Jeremy Zettelmeyer, Simone Italia Pietra, our deputy director at Bruegel.

First time in the new job.

Congratulations.

If I can just use one minute to complement what was said before on Canada.

I very much agree with Jeremy that energy and in particular clean tech and critical raw materials represent the prime area where collaboration between Canada and the EU can be deepened.

Before the summer at Bruegel, we hosted an event in partnership with the Clean Technology Partnerships Initiative, which released in July a wonderful report, very detailed, on how exactly our supply chains are structured and really finding all the possible interactions between the clean supply chains of Europe, Canada, and how we can really make the best of this collaboration.

And it turns out that critical raw materials and batteries are, for example, a sector where we can really start now to work together more and more On top of CETA, to be ratified, we can have a clean technology partnership between the EU and Canada in this space to kickstart immediately work.

This comes as European policymakers seek to shield the bloc's market from China amid heated trade negotiations as the EU grapples with a trade deficit with Beijing of roughly 1 billion euros a day.

For more on this, let's head over to Paris, where I'm joined by Alicia Garcia Herrero, a Spanish economist with the think tank Bruegel and an expert on Asian economies.

Good morning.

Good morning.

So this is why this international legislation supposedly protects us from this reality.

And the industrial select direct, our legislation now takes that on board, which we had not done in the past.

All right, Alicia Garcia Herrero from the think tank Bruegel, thank you for breaking it all down for us.

Now, Europe's housing crisis has reached emergency levels with ordinary people in ordinary jobs struggling to afford somewhere to live.

[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to The Sound of Economics, the podcast from Bruegel, the Brussels-based economic think tank.

I'm your host, Rebecca Christie.

I am here today with colleagues to talk about the very contentious trade situation between the US and Canada and what that might mean for the European Union.

My guests today are Phil Luck from CSIS.

We have two of my Bruegel colleagues, Ignacio Garcia Bercero and Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, both from Bruegel.

We are going to be talking about the past, present, and future of the transatlantic trade relationship and what it means that the US, which not so long ago had a trade deal with Canada and Mexico, now is blowing up even the, the trade arrangements it has made during the Trump administration's second term and what that's gonna mean for all of us going forward.

Phil, what has just happened, and how weird is this?

I think one should really start thinking what is politically feasible that could come after that.