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VoxTalks Economics

VoxTalks Economics

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Learn about groundbreaking new research, commentary and policy ideas from the world's leading economists. Presented by Tim Phillips.

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  • S9 Ep22: World War Trade

    S9 Ep22: World War Trade
    Apr 2 2026
    On 2 April 2025, the United States imposed tariffs on almost every country on earth. The next day, China responded with export controls on the entire world. In the space of one week, world trade had been weaponised as it has never been in peacetime.Richard Baldwin of IMD Business School, the founder of VoxEU and a former president of the Centre for Economic Policy Research, wrote World War Trade to make sense of the events of the last 12 months. The dramatic April salvos have settled into a trade Cold War; US tariffs and Chinese export controls are lodged in place, with neither side expecting the other to back down. And yet world trade grew in 2025; exports from every country rose except from the US, which recorded its largest trade deficit. The rest of the world is self-organising a new order. When one country joins a rules-based regional agreement, the cost of staying out rises for the next. EU-Mercosur and EU-Australia deals, stalled for years, crossed the line. An expanding CPTPP and early alignment talks between the EU and CPTPP blocs are pulling more partners in. The old system was a cathedral built and maintained largely by the US; the architect burned it down. Something else is being built in its place.The book discussed in this episode:Baldwin, Richard. 2026. World War Trade: Conflict, Containment, and the Emergent World Trading Order. Rapid Response Economics 6. CEPR Press. Free to download from CEPR Press.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Richard Baldwin. 2026. "World War Trade." VoxTalks Economics (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestRichard Baldwin is Professor of International Economics at IMD Business School in Lausanne. He founded VoxEU, the Centre for Economic Policy Research's policy portal, and served as president of CEPR. His research spans trade policy, globalisation, and the political economy of trade; he is one of the architects of modern thinking on global value chains and the "second unbundling" of production. World War Trade is the sixth book in the CEPR Press Rapid Response Economics series.Research cited in this episodeTACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) began as a joke in finance markets as a description of the pattern in which the US president announces aggressive trade measures and then partially or fully reverses them when markets react or negotiations begin. Baldwin argues that financial markets eventually priced in a TACO floor; once they believed Trump would back down before a full market meltdown, they stopped reacting to his escalations as if they were terminal. The dynamic makes tariff threats simultaneously more frequent and less credible.Domino regionalism describes the self-reinforcing logic by which regional trade agreements attract new members. When one economy gains preferential access to a large market, the cost of staying outside that agreement rises for its trading partners; that pressure brings in the next country, which raises the cost for the next, and so on. Baldwin identified this mechanism in the regional trade wave of the 1990s and argues it is now operating again, accelerated by the uncertainty created by US and Chinese trade weapons. The EU-Mercosur deal unblocking was the trigger; EU-Australia followed within weeks.G-0 world is a concept developed by political scientist Ian Bremmer to describe a world in which no single country or group of countries provides consistent global leadership. Baldwin draws on this framework to explain why regional conflicts and trade disputes have become harder to contain since the US began stepping back from its hegemonic role; the trade cold war is one expression of that leadership vacuum, but so is the reduced capacity to broker deals in the Middle East or manage the Black Sea grain corridor.CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) is a rules-based regional trade agreement covering eleven countries across Asia and the Pacific, including Japan, Canada, Australia, Vietnam, and the United Kingdom. It operates without US or Chinese membership and maintains deep disciplines on intellectual property, investment, and trade in services. Baldwin identifies it, alongside the EU, as one of the two main "pools of predictability" around which the new post-war trading order is forming. The two blocs have opened alignment discussions that, if concluded, would bring a very large share of world trade under compatible rules.RCEP (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership) is a large but shallower regional agreement covering much of Asia, including China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the ten ASEAN nations. It involves Chinese leadership and does not carry the depth of disciplines found in CPTPP. Baldwin notes that it is rules-based and that as long as China plays by those rules it could enlarge; but it has not attracted the same wave of new joiners as CPTPP and the EU framework.The EU ...
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    27 m
  • S9 Ep21: The Bank of England's capital mistake?

    S9 Ep21: The Bank of England's capital mistake?
    Mar 27 2026
    "When you look at the world now, does it look more uncertain or less uncertain?" In December 2025, the Bank of England's Financial Policy Committee (FPC) answered that question by cutting the equity capital requirement for UK banks. David Aikman (NIESR) and John Vickers (University of Oxford), two former senior Bank insiders who helped to design the regulatory framework post-GFC, think the committee got it wrong.The FPC lowered the benchmark capital requirement from 14% to 13% of risk-weighted assets, a move that could free up roughly £30 billion of capital across the UK banking system. Aikman and Vickers see no compelling economic reason for the change. They argue that the 2015 benchmark was already set too low, built on questionable assumptions about how well resolution frameworks would work. Since 2015, Brexit, the pandemic, and a sharply stretched fiscal position have all increased the likely cost of a future crisis. The practical effect of the loosening may not even be more lending, but higher dividends and share buybacks. And the December decision may signal a weakening of the leverage ratio backstop, the constraint that limits bank borrowing regardless of how risk weights are applied.The research behind this episode:Aikman, David, and John Vickers. 2026. "The Bank of England's Capital Mistake." VoxEU, 15 January 2026. [Please confirm URL — published on cepr.org/voxeu]To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, David Aikman, and John Vickers. 2026. "The Bank of England's Capital Mistake." VoxTalks Economics (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestsDavid Aikman is Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR). He worked at the Bank of England from 2003 to 2020, where he served as Technical Head of Division in Financial Stability and was centrally involved in the creation of the Financial Policy Committee. His research spanning macroprudential regulation, systemic risk, and the macroeconomics of financial crises has made him one of the leading academic voices on bank capital policy in the UK.Sir John Vickers is Warden of All Souls College and Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford. He served as Chief Economist and a member of the Monetary Policy Committee at the Bank of England, and chaired the Independent Commission on Banking from 2010 to 2011, which recommended substantially higher capital requirements than those subsequently adopted. His research spanning industrial economics, competition policy, and financial regulation has shaped UK banking policy for two decades.Research cited in this episodeEquity capital requirements specify the minimum proportion of a bank's assets that must be funded by shareholders' equity rather than borrowed money. Equity is the only form of funding that can absorb losses without triggering insolvency: if a bank suffers unexpected losses, its shareholders bear them first. In the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, some large institutions held equity equivalent to as little as two or three percent of their total exposures, implying leverage of up to forty times; a small shock was enough to render them insolvent. The post-crisis repair effort was designed to ensure that could not happen again.Risk-weighted assets (RWAs) are the denominator against which capital requirements are measured. Rather than applying the capital ratio to the raw value of all assets, the framework deflates each asset by an estimated risk factor: a mortgage backed by collateral is treated as less risky than an unsecured corporate loan, for example. Capital requirements are then expressed as a percentage of this risk-adjusted total. The approach creates significant complexity and depends heavily on the accuracy of the risk weights; much of the story of 2008 was that regulators allowed banks to attach implausibly low risk weights to their exposures, understating the true leverage in the system.The Financial Policy Committee (FPC) is the Bank of England body responsible for macroprudential oversight of the UK financial system. Created in 2013, it sits above the individual regulators to take a system-wide view of whether risks are building and whether the financial system as a whole has adequate resilience. One of its primary tools is setting the overall capital requirement benchmark for UK banks. In 2015 it set that benchmark at 14% of risk-weighted assets; in December 2025 it reduced it to 13%.The leverage ratio is an alternative measure of bank capitalisation that does not apply risk weights. It expresses equity as a simple percentage of total assets, regardless of what those assets are. The UK leverage ratio backstop currently stands at around 3 to 4%, implying maximum leverage of roughly twenty-five to thirty times for systemically important banks. Vickers and Aikman note that for some UK banks the backstop has become the binding constraint, which they regard as a warning ...
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    25 m
  • S9 Ep20: What triggered January 6?

    S9 Ep20: What triggered January 6?
    Mar 20 2026
    Two explanations circulated immediately after the March to Save America on January 6, 2021 turned into a riot: a mob manipulated by a demagogue, or ordinary citizens defending democracy against a stolen election. Konstantin Sonin, David Van Dijcke, and Austin Wright have used anonymised location data from forty million mobile devices to investigate why the protests escalated so dramatically.No surprise: partisanship was the strongest predictor of attendance, proximity to Proud Boys chapters and use of the far-right social network Parler also increased participation. But political isolation amplified the movement: the communities most over-represented among those who traveled to Washington were small Republican enclaves surrounded by Democrat-leaning areas, politically and socially cut off from their neighbours. And participation also spiked in counties that experienced a "midnight swing," where the reported vote count favoured Trump on election night before shifting to Biden as mail-in ballots were counted. These were precisely the counties where the "Stop the Steal" narrative landed hardest. The research behind this episode:Sonin, Konstantin, David Van Dijcke, and Austin L. Wright. 2023. "Isolation and Insurrection: How Partisanship and Political Geography Fueled January 6, 2021." CEPR DP18209. To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Konstantin Sonin. 2026. “What triggered January 6?” VoxTalks Economics (podcast). Assign this as extra listening. The citation above is formatted and ready for a reading list or VLE.About the guestKonstantin Sonin is the John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Born in the Soviet Union, he has spent his career studying how political institutions work under stress, with particular attention to how information and misinformation shape political behaviour, elections, and collective action. He is one of the leading economists working on the political economy of authoritarian and democratic governance, and his research on protest, polarisation, and political geography has made him a central figure in the study of democratic backsliding.Research cited in this episodeRegression discontinuity design is a statistical method used to identify causal effects by exploiting a threshold or cutoff. Sonin, Van Dijcke, and Wright use two regression discontinuity designs: one exploiting the narrow margins by which Trump lost certain states, and one exploiting the gap between the election-night vote tally and the final certified result in individual counties. In both cases, the design allows them to isolate the effect of a specific trigger on protest participation, separating it from the general background of partisan feeling.The "midnight swing" refers to the shift in reported vote tallies that occurred in many counties on election night 2020 as large batches of mail-in ballots were counted. Because mail-in voters skewed heavily Democratic, counties where in-person votes were reported first showed strong Trump leads that reversed overnight as the mail-in totals arrived. For professional observers and election administrators, this pattern was entirely expected; it followed directly from the different rules different states used to count mail-in ballots during the pandemic. For many voters, particularly those already primed to distrust the electoral process, it read as suspicious. The paper finds that communities exposed to larger swings sent disproportionately more participants to Washington on January 6.Network Exposure design is a methodological innovation introduced in this paper. It measures how much exposure a given community had to election-denial signals flowing through its social networks, and distinguishes this from exposure arising simply through geographic proximity to other communities. Isolated communities proved hypersensitive to information traveling through their social networks, but not to information spreading through neighbouring areas. This suggests the amplification mechanism was social, not spatial.Political isolation in this paper refers to being a minority political community within a larger, differently-leaning area. A small Republican-voting enclave inside a Democrat-leaning county or district is politically isolated in this sense. The paper finds that isolation of this kind was a strong amplifier of partisanship in predicting participation. Two other measures of isolation, one based on mobile device travel patterns ("locational isolation") and one based on Facebook connections ("social media isolation"), produce consistent results, suggesting the effect is not an artefact of how isolation is measured.The Proud Boys are a far-right extremist organisation active in the United States. The paper finds that communities with a local Proud Boys chapter were over-represented among those who traveled to Washington on January 6, making proximity to the organisation a robust correlate of ...
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    21 m
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