Category Archives: Economics

April 9, 2022 · 12:20 pm

The Evidence is In: The Spike in Oil Prices Helps Putin Finance His War in Ukraine

This week I’ve been pretty busy! A couple of days ago, I co-authored an article on Odessa with my friend Richard Seifman, an American diplomat and World Bank health expert, you can find the article here: Odessa: A City Crucial Now and Not Just for Ukraine

And now I just published a new article on Impakter, all the truth about sanctions, exploring why they don’t work as expected:

How Russia is Financing the War in Ukraine

With the hike in fuel prices caused by the war, Russia has been the main beneficiary, able to finance its war with an extra $100 billion earned from oil and gas exports

Ukrainian searching for victims after a bombing (screenshot)

Historically, sanctions have rarely if ever worked. US history of sanctions is an eye-opener and shows that most have never achieved their intended goal. Countries hit by sanctions have always found roundabout ways to mitigate sanctions or even cancel their impact with clever countermoves. And, unsurprisingly, it’s beginning to look like this umpteenth round of sanctions against Russia – we are up to round number five of EU sanctions now, the latest target being coal imports from Russia – is unlikely to help stop the war.

Bloomberg Economics experts have found that, as they put it, despite multiple rounds of sanctions, there are “plenty of signs that Russia is finding ways to prop up its economy”.  Russia, they have calculated, will earn about $320 billion from energy exports this year, up by more than a third from 2021. Russian oil is snapped up in Asia and the ruble is back to the level it was before the start of the war in Ukraine.

At the same time, Russian coal exports banned in Europe are finding their way in China: Reportedly there are several Chinese firms buying Russian coal with local currency.

In other words, from an economic standpoint, Russia is the great beneficiary of the war, having earned an extra $100 billion in just one month, enough to carry on with the invasion.  At least, so far but things could change if the West changes its policies and reviews its approach to sanctions. Because the evidence is now in: 

Sanctions do not work. Putin’s wily war plans: A clever way to finance the regardless of sanctions

One may well wonder what exactly were Putin’s real aims when he invaded the whole of Ukraine six weeks ago.

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Read the rest on Impakter, click here.

Let me know what you think!

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May 16, 2021 · 8:57 am

A Serious Idea the G20 Should Consider: A Sustainable World Commission to Achieve the 17 SDGs

It took me weeks to develop the idea and many, many discussions with friends willing to listen to me and read all my various drafts. Here is the result, just published on Impakter:

A (Non) Modest Proposal for the G20: A Sustainable World Commission to Achieve the SDGs 

by Claude Forthomme – Senior Editor

The next G20 Summit Meeting of heads of state will be held in Rome on Oct. 30 and 31, 2021, under the Italian G20 Presidency. The agenda, with the title “People, Planet, Prosperity”, addresses major obstacles to achieving a sustainable world; a series of lower-level “working” meetings prepares the Summit, including, most recently: G20 Empower to identify measures to accelerate women’s empowerment; the Youth 20 Inception Meeting to open a two-month (virtual) dialogue for young delegates (between 20 and 30 years of age) to discuss global challenges; the G20 TechSprint Initiative under the sponsorship of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Hub and the Bank of Italy focusing on the most pressing challenges in green and sustainable finance.

With “People, Planet, and Prosperity” focused on achieving a sustainable world, the G-20 agenda is fully in line with the United Nations 2030 Agenda and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that covers the whole gamut of sustainability issues from environment/climate change to social justice issues and economic development. The hope is that this G20 meeting will be powerful enough to move us toward a more sustainable world as defined by the SDGs – something we all seek, including advanced industrialized countries, according to the latest OECD paper calling for a “Green Transition”.

But how to get there? The time has come to decide not what should be done – the UN 2030 Agenda tells us that – but how to do it.

No doubt, there are many possible solutions, but here, I offer a (non) modest proposal. Not modest because it is very ambitious. But it has the advantage of being practical. And it is addressed to the G20 and everyone involved in the run-up to the upcoming Summit. 

Why the G20? Because today this is the one international organism most representative of the world’s geopolitical composition, as it includes both the most important leaders and the largest economies. 

The idea is simple and could be summarized in five points:

  • The goal of a sustainable world has been clearly spelled out in the UN 2030 Agenda and the 17 SDGs but the implementation – how to get there – has been left in the hands of national governments: 
  • No international organization as presently organized is equipped to carry through the necessary coordination to achieve the 17 SDGs; the UN cannot deliver, it has no coercive authority over its member states and in the hands of geopolitical powers;
  • A new governance system needs to be set up to achieve the 17 SDGs, an international institution able to coordinate national governments in a way that the United Nations system cannot: Strong, independent, and innovative, it could be modeled after a successful government agency such as NASA was after it was tasked by President Kennedy to take a man to the moon ;
  • Call it the Commission for a Sustainable World (CSW); while it could follow the NASA model, it would be mandated to achieve a far bigger task – namely, to make the world sustainable for eight billion people – and therefore require adequate funding and regulatory powers;  
  • The CSW must be independent like the European Commission is in its relations with EU member states; it would report on progress to the UN General Assembly and the G20, subject to review, say every 3-5 years, and limited in duration by a “sunset clause” to ensure that once the SDGs are achieved, the CSW would be terminated.

The key idea here is that the CSW is a hybrid institution, modeled after the European Commission but anchored in the UN system, yet much stronger than the UN. 

But it should not become a permanent new international organization or replace the UN.

Also, the CSW would pose no threat to national sovereignty as it would only operate in the areas agreed to by the UN General Assembly: UN 2030 Agenda and the SDGs. That means only two broad areas: The environment (which includes Climate Change) and social justice. And the CSW would regularly report to the UN and the G20 (should the G20 take it upon itself to promote and fund it) and be subject to review to ensure that management flexibility does not cause it to sink into corruption and that it remains within its mandate.

A note of caution: Some flexibility will be needed as the SDGs’ general timeframe is 2030 except for SDG13 (Climate Action) that includes the Paris Climate Agreement’s target to achieve zero-net emissions set at 2050. Also, problems evolve and unexpected events occur – for example, the COVID pandemic was barely mentioned under SDG#3. It would seem wise therefore to have the Commission established for at least 10-15 years. By going for even 10 years you have it running beyond the 2030 Agenda’s current life.

The goal is to give the new governance system a chance to show its worth and, if need be, adapt it to new circumstances. Here is what it would take to create such an institution. And it starts with our changing view of the role of government.

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Sounds like a good idea? Interested in finding out more about the Sustainable World Commission? Click here to read the rest.

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February 13, 2021 · 6:09 am

They are ALL lying to you: The world’s top brands are NOT going green

 This is one major article, published on Impakter, that I don’t want you, my dear readers, to miss:

For the World’s Top 100 Brands, Sustainability Is Elusive Despite Claims

by Claude Forthomme – Senior Editor

For the 2020 Top 100 Global Brands, a list derived from Forbes World’s Most Valuable Brands, the goal of sustainability continues to be out of reach, despite their many claims to the contrary. This is what the findings of a three-month analysis carried out by the Impakter Index team has just revealed (results published on 18 December 2020). 

The conclusion is clear: Most companies have a long way to go before they achieve full sustainability in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and targets pertaining to their area of activity – if ever. 

A high level of “greenwashing” is still prevalent among major household names. Some of them haven’t even started on the road to sustainability, others can never make it because of the very nature of their activities (based on/using fossil fuels or dangerous chemicals). Most are doing an average job though they claim otherwise, and none is one-hundred-percent sustainable. Not one. 

I know that many of my readers who’ve read my article when the Index was launched this summer (31 July), or saw Common Place editor, Quincy Childs’ endorsement, will want to go directly to the Impakter Index and check out their favorite brand (go to the Impakter home page or click here to see). You may well be surprised (or perhaps not) to find that in most cases, there is a stunning gap between what companies claim and what they actually deliver in terms of sustainability and social responsibility. 

Look at the findings, the table provides a summary view of the ratings obtained by the top 100 brands:

To find out how they are rated by the Impakter Index, go to my article, click here.

I promise you, you’ll be surprised (I know I was)!

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February 11, 2021 · 10:49 am

The World After COVID: Back to Capitalism as We Know it or Something New?

 Last week I reviewed two amazing books that propose a new world after COVID, doing away with capitalism as we know it but using radically different means to achieve this goal. Both my reviews were published on Impakter. Here’s the opening of my article:

Post-COVID: Blueprints to End Capitalism As We Know It

Capitalism as we know it is morphing into an “awful kind of techno feudalism” that only deserves to die, says Yanis Varoufakis. A radical statement but coming from the former finance minister of Greece who famously battled the European Troika for the Greek cause at the height of the debt crisis in 2015, it is no surprise.

Can activists in their battle against shareholder capitalism use financial engineering to bring Wall Street to its knees? That is the scenario Varoufakis proposes in his latest book Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present (published in September 2020 by Vintage), arguing that finance is the Achilles heel of capitalism.  And here’s the other must-read book I reviewed:

How To Reform Capitalism – Mariana Mazzucato’s Moonshots

The Trojan horse comes from another economist, an Italo-American, a woman, Mariana Mazzucato who has already shaken up the academic world of economics with her bestselling The Entrepreneurial State, published in 2015 with the subtitle: “Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths”. 

Her solution for post-Covid reconstruction? Work from inside the system. 

Give back to the state the role it played back in the 1960s when America, engaged in a space race with the Soviet Union, unleashed the power of the Federal Government.

She lays it out in her new book, just out, January 28, 2021: Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism (published by Penguin).

Mazzucato is Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL) where she is also Founder and Director of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. And her ideas have already been adopted both by the European Commission and the Scottish government. 

Both are highly recommended reads! Curious? Take a look at my article, click here.

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November 10, 2019 · 3:05 pm

What Sustainable Finance Means and What it Can Do

Just published my latest article on Impakter magazine, here’s the opening:

SUSTAINABLE FINANCE: HOW TO ADDRESS NATURE RISKS AND CLIMATE CHANGE

As our environment is undergoing ever faster collapse, with the rainforest burning in the Amazon, the ice melting in the Arctic and now California ravaged by fires, the goal of achieving sustainable finance appears ever more elusive. It is obvious that nature risks directly translate into financial risks. And with climate change accelerating, it is equally obvious that growing natural risks is the cause of equally growing financial instability.

While the relation between nature, climate and sustainable finance is obvious, the exact impact is not so clear. Natural disasters, from floods to air pollution events to wildlife species extinction, can impact businesses and whole economic sectors in variable ways, some more than others. And a small further rise in global warming, as small as a half degree centigrade, can make a stunningly huge difference:

To illustrate with the famous case of a highly valuable wildlife species threatened by extinction, i.e. bees whose pollination activities are fundamental for agricultural production. A prosperous European pharmaceutical company suddenly faced catastrophic financial losses after it had acquired in 2018 an agrochemical company accused of causing adverse impacts on bee populations that led to a series of health-related trials. Suddenly, it lost almost 40% of its market capitalization in less than one year, causing shareholders billions in losses.

To put a name on these firms: the pharmaceutical company is Bayer, the agrochemical is Monsanto and the cause of the bee-killing is, of course, a pesticide, the infamous “Roundup”. In short, Bayer is worth less today than the $63 billion it paid for Monsanto about a year ago.

As a first step to ascertain what the effects of nature risks are on the finance industry, a number of academics at the University of Hamburg have formed a Research Group on Sustainable Finance and analysed for the first time the existing academic literature which highlighted the relationship between nature risks and financial risks. The study has been financed by WWF Switzerland and will be uploaded to their website this month.

They identified 154 peer-reviewed articles published between 1966 and 2019. These articles covered four areas: banking, insurance, real estate, and stock markets; and nine nature risks: disease, drought, erosion, flooding, invasive species, oil spills, pollution/environmental contamination – of air, groundwater, soil/land and surface water -, solid waste, and bushfires.

“Destruction of ecosystems results in financial risks”

Overall, the articles confirmed that the destruction of ecosystems results in financial risks. They also found that nature risks are not adequately reflected in current risk models of financial institutions and therefore not priced correctly.

Incorrect pricing is a major concern. It means that financial institutions urgently need to identify how the activities they finance impact the natural world. Developing a framework for investors to analyse nature risks and integrating these systematically in their valuation models is crucial. It would be the first indispensable step to achieve sustainable finance.

What is interesting is how the literature reviewed by the Research Group on Sustainable Finance identified variable impacts depending on the sector and the kind of nature risk. The sector that tends to suffer the most from nature risks is real estate. The greatest threats to valuation in the real estate sector include flooding followed by air pollution (and environmental contamination in general) and bushfires.

That of course, is a massive financial problem – but it is a problem for individual property owners too. The house you just bought, or that you inherited from your parents, could be worth next to nothing in just a few short years.

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To find out how other sectors in the economy will be impacted and what should be done, read the rest on Impakter, click here: https://impakter.com/sustainable-finance-address-nature-risks-climate-change/ 

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May 16, 2019 · 6:01 pm

Should Robots Be Built To Feel Pain?

My latest article on Impakter, just published, about AI and how we should organize our future with sentient machines. Should we build them to feel pain and other emotions? What is the point of it? What are the dangers?

 Neku – Robot Lover Song (Featuring Aline) in Youtube video

What is the role of pain in our lives?  Pain, we can all agree, is unpleasant, both physically and emotionally. Pain acts as an alarm when faced with danger. Pain can be excruciating, tragic, the forerunner of death. In short, when we feel pain, we feel more alive than ever. Now that robots play an increasing role in our society, should we design robots as sentient machines with the ability to feel pain?  

Robots are everywhere in manufacturing, in agriculture, in transport and distribution, in communications, in the home. And they appear not just as androids like the famous science fiction author Isaac Asimov visualized 75 years ago, but in a vast range of devices, from autonomous vacuum cleaners to whole factory production lines and military drones.

Arguably, it might make sense to endow some of them with the capacity to feel pain in situations where it could help the machine foresee a threat and save itself from possible damage. But should it be endowed with merely a series of physical reactions demonstrating pain or should it feel it as an emotion the way we humans feel it?

When a machine feels pain, will it cry?

Or an equally valid question: should it cry?

The question of whether robots should feel pain may sound futile, but it’s not. With advances in computing power, particularly with quantum computing just around the corner, we are close to being able to create robots with General Artificial Intelligence. Not just a specific ability like beating human champions at difficult games like chess and Go, but a “general” intelligence that could lead soon to the dreaded Singularity, the point where Artificial Intelligence will surpass human intelligence.

In short, we are headed towards a world where science fiction meets reality, where our planet hosts two types of “sentient machines”, us and the robots.

How to Organize a World full of Sentient Machines

Scientists have been working on this for several years, notably Beth Singler  and Ewan St John Smith, both at Cambridge University.

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Read the rest on Impakter, click here. 

Find out about our future with robots. Should love and sex be part of it? Let me know what you think!

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May 5, 2019 · 3:00 pm

Universal Basic Income: Why It’s Not The Solution


My latest article on Impakter, here’s the start:

M-Pesa station in Kenya, 2019. This mobile service greatly facilitated GiveDirectly’s experiment

It’s become conventional wisdom that technological progress destroys jobs but also creates new ones balancing out the loss after a painful period of adjustment. Painful for those out of a job who are too old or unable to learn new skills. It’s also conventional wisdom that with the tech revolution unleashed by Silicon Valley, this time will be different. That the jobs destroyed by Artificial Intelligence (AI), by computers and robots, will never be replaced. Tech entrepreneurs, like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Sam Altman in the lead, and a growing number of politicians and social scientists, are however confident that they have a solution: Universal Basic Income (UBI).

Is UBI really a solution? And how serious is the disruption caused by automation of tasks and are most jobs left for humans only the low-paid ones in personal services? Is there another, better solution?

Here, I will argue that the disruption is not likely to be as devastating as predicted in most current studies with scary titles like “How The Robots Will Take Away Your Jobs and Kill The Economy”. And in any case, there’s another, better solution than UBI: Supplementary income to top up the difference and make non-automated jobs pay better. Call it: Utility-Added Income (UAI) – because it would recognize the utility (the value, the usefulness) to the whole community of jobs that are undervalued by the market in an AI-filled world, like personal services, nurses, care-givers, teachers.

So, in an AI-filled world, are we facing a devastating disruption in the job market, with permanent unemployment for the majority of humans? To be fair, not all tech titans and artificial intelligence experts think a tech Armageddon is around the corner.

One famous scientist, Fai Ku Lee, thinks otherwise. He developed the world’s first speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system as his Ph.D thesis at Carnegie Mellon. This is a man worth listening to, he knows what he’s talking about, he once worked for Apple and Google and is now a successful Chinese venture capitalist based in Beijing, helping China become a leader in AI. He is also a best selling author and in the closing section of his latest book, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, he explains how  creativity and compassion are the key to creating lasting and non-replacement jobs in an AI-filled future.

The Explosion in UBI Experiments

Fai Ku Lee’s reassuring words notwithstanding, people are in a panic. There is a plethora of UBI experiments around the world, as this map (updated to 3 April 2019) illustrates:


UBI experiments in progress and planned around the world April 2019

In the U.S., UBI research is fast becoming serious business. Four Stanford graduate researchers are currently setting up a platform to map UBI research that should come online soon in 2019. The aim, as they explain,  is “to provide pertinent summaries of articles, research papers, books produced on UBI to date, highlighting important findings from each and ensuring that core areas such as health, crime, stigma, childhood poverty and gender equity are covered”.

There is even a UBI Cities Toolkit called Basic Income In Cities: A Guide to City Experiments and Pilot Projects. Launched in early November 2018 at the National League of Cities annual meeting, the toolkit highlights emerging practices and shares insights on the process of designing UBI experiments “in ways that are ethical, rigorous, informative and consequential for local and national policymaking”.

Unquestionably, even if some people like Fai Ku Lee see a silver lining in the AI revolution, most experts do not and the world is on a UBI research binge.

The most advanced experiments are in Finland and Kenya. Let’s take a look at both. Note that I’m not including here the “redditto di cittadinanza” (citizen’s income) that the populist Italian government started distributing last month because  it hasn’t been set up as a UBI experiment with a control group. It’s merely political pork to fill a 5 Star Movement electoral promise. But even the best of UBI experiments have not given satisfactory results, and here’s why.

What’s Wrong with UBI Experiments

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To find out what’s wrong with UBI and what my proposed solution is, please go to Impakter, click here. If you have a minute to write a comment either here or on Impakter, please do, I’d love to hear what you think!

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July 6, 2018 · 7:07 pm

Trump’s Trade Wars: The End of American Supremacy?

Today Trump opened another battlefront in his trade wars, with duties slammed on Chinese goods worth $34 billion. Expect China to retaliate with counter tariffs on US imports. China’s commerce minister was quick to announce: “China promised to not fire the first shot, but to defend national core interests and the interests of the people, it has no choice but to strike back as necessary”. A few hours later, China filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization, its second one.

Conventional wisdom has it that nobody wins from a trade war. Is it wise to ignore it? Trump has no doubts, he is convinced his trade wars will Make America Great Again.

This reminds me of the Italian captain who sank his own boat out of bravado. Remember Captain Francesco Schettino who famously sank the Costa Concordia cruise ship off the Italian island of Giglio in January 2012? He did this serenading a pretty lady in the dead of night, showing off his ability to sail close to the rocks. The ship hit the shore, capsized and 32 passengers and crew died.

Think of that beautiful cruise ship as a metaphor for the international order that America built after World War II, ensuring peace and prosperity through, inter alia, global trade. Now, Trump, like Captain Schettino, is steering the world ship towards the rocks while serenading his base:

Extraordinary. Watch how Trump’s audience looks enraptured, captivated by his show. And the numbers Trump throws around are totally out of context. Consider what he says of Canada, referring in a tone of outrage to a 275% tariff barrier. As if US farmers don’t have access to Canada’s markets because of it.

Is that the case? The fact is that 275% tariff barrier (which is indeed outrageous) only concerns a very small section of the market, milk and milk products. On average, trade barriers with Canada, as with all other advanced countries, are very low, around 2% to 5%. Not really enough to drive imbalances in trade.

The Real Causes of US Trade Deficits

US trade deficits have other causes, and they are nothing new. They’ve been going on since the 1960s, arising mainly from:

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The rest on Impakter, click here and let me know what you think!

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June 19, 2018 · 4:21 pm

Trade War with China: Who Wins?

We are now facing an escalating trade war between the US and China – started by the US. The question is: can the US win? And what will it cost the world?

It is worth listening to Carlos Gutierrez, co-chairman at Albright Stonebridge Group, a major global corporation and former U.S. Commerce Secretary who spoke on 18 June on “Bloomberg Daybreak: Americas”:

He reminds us that the free-trade agreements that have been brokered since the 1980s are not as bad as Trump would have it: they have consistently given the US a surplus. The point is: There never was a similar agreement with China. And he doesn’t mince words in describing the dangers for the whole world. He urges restraint.

Clearly Trump is not listening. A few hours after Gutierrez talked to Bloomberg, Trump had threatened an additional 10% tariffs on another $200 billions worth of goods:

Trying to answer the question of “who wins a trade war”, Bloomberg has rounded some major experts asking them what they thought. While the answers are interesting, they all focus on the short term and unfortunately don’t go beyond are the framework of classical economic analysis which overlooks geo-political factors:

  • China has limited room to retaliate in a trade war escalation: It only buys $130 billion worth of American goods while the US deficit with China runs to $375 billion; this is a “high stakes game of poker” and “China will run out of U.S. imports that it can hit with tariff countermeasures long before the U.S. does” (Rajiv Biswas, IHS Markit Singapore);
  • China needs to open up to global innovation and investment: “both China and the U.S. and other countries can really benefit from this Made-in-China 2025 strategy” (William Zarit, chairman of American Chamber of Commerce in China);
  • This is creating a “perfect storm” for China’s export Industry: it’s not just Trump’s tariff war but also the probable US Senate ban on ZTE, the Chinese electronic producer that Trump wanted to save; such a ban would  stop it from importing the American chips it needs for its phones and other products, hitting at the very heart of Made-in-China 2025 strategy;
  • There will be winners and losers, for example, China will need to buy agricultural goods from other sources than the US and that will benefit countries like Australia and Brazil; many Asian countries that are part of the China value chain will be hit.

Instead, to evaluate the dangers from a trade war, we need to look at the longer term and more broadly to geo-political factors. And here, the picture is not so reassuring.

The trade war with the US is but a battle in a much larger war. A battle that surely hurts in the short run, but will leave China victorious in the long run. Because China has acquired the “soft power” weapons to win.

Forget the Trade War: China’s Soft Power is Poised to Conquer the World

What has been happening since Trump took over the White House is this: A political void has been created, a void in world leadership that China is eager to fill, and most likely will.

Consider the facts.

Read the rest on Impakter, click here.

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June 11, 2018 · 12:11 pm

Trump Watch: G7, the Gig is Up!

The G7 fiasco was not entirely a surprise, but the extent of the damage done is stunning. Here’s my assessment of the future of the G7 (it’s coming up against China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization that met at the same time as the G7!). The article is on Impakter, here is the opening:

This G7 was like no G7 ever since it was founded in 1997.  Even before leaving for Canada, Trump rocked the boat, suggesting the G7 should be a G8, with Russia back in – conveniently forgetting why Russia was kicked out in 2014 (for invading Crimea and abetting rebels in Eastern Ukraine).

Then he turned up late. A bilateral meeting with Macron had to be postponed. He missed most of a working breakfast on the issue of women, he skipped the climate change meeting. He left nearly a whole day early to fly to Singapore for his “historic nuclear summit” with North Korea’s dictator – even though this meeting is still two days off.

In the end, Trump blew it up, refusing to sign onto a joint communiqué he had agreed to before leaving. Expect the G7 never to be the same again – at least not until America produces another President.

In his news conference before leaving, Trump was his usual aggressive self, grousing about unfair tariffs slapped on the United States by its closest allies – a claim roundly rejected by economists. Far from being huge as Trump claims, average trade-weighed tariffs are marginal: the latest WTO data (2015) shows that for the EU they stood at 3 percent, Canada at 3.1 percent and the US was slightly lower, at 2.4 percent.

The problem is that they vary by product and in the US, states slam on additional barriers. Not to mention Buy American laws that keeps foreigners out of US government procurement. Moreover, it appears that Trump confuses the European VAT for a tariff. In short, the US trade deficit is not caused by tariffs but by Americans’ purchasing preferences.

Once on the plane, he tweeted his withdrawal, threatening future tariffs on automobiles and accusing Trudeau of “false statements”:

Then he doubled down with insults, calling Trudeau “very dishonest and weak”:

Something like this has never happened before, and the fact that the American President did it makes it a watershed event. It’s not just a matter of being astonishingly rude to democratically elected colleagues. It’s a matter of starting a trade war with allies that jeopardizes America’s leadership and threatens global prosperity. World politics won’t ever be the same again.

Read the rest on Impakter, click here.

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