2025-04-15
23 分钟The Economist Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist.
I'm your host, Jason Palmer.
Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.
For years the discussion about France's hard right centered on Marine Le Pen,
but for some time she has been cultivating a protégé,
a young man with a polished social media presence named Jordan Bardella.
We ask what makes him tick?
And one of the things Hong Kong is famous for it would like to do away with, cranky cab drivers.
As part of a tourism push they're being told to smile and be nice or else.
But first, I always say tariffs is the most beautiful word to me in the dictionary.
All I have to do is impose a tariff.
The more, the faster they move it.
The higher the tariff, the more it's inversely proportional.
The higher the tariff, the faster they come.
Don't worry,
we're not here to pick through another word salad about tariffs and discuss how counterproductive they are and how the pain will disproportionately fall on the Americans who are allegedly being saved by them and how economies around the world are being rattled by the capricious ways they've been applied and repealed and delayed.
I'm here with our economics editor, Henry Kerr, to talk about something far worse than all of that.
So there's been this generalized sell-off in American assets that suggests maybe there is some threat to the status of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency,
which means potentially a lot of financial disruption for America and for the world
if the worst-case scenario was to materialize.