Michael Pettis is a nonresident senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His most recent book, coauthored with Matthew Klein, is Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace.
Few economists have had a greater impact on the way we talk about global trade and China’s role in the world economy than Michael Pettis. He spoke to Jacobin about Donald Trump’s tariffs and why inequality is at the heart of the trade war.