In February 1999, Time put three men on its cover: Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, and Lawrence Summers. The magazine dubbed them “the Committee to Save the World,” lauding the three Americans for fighting crisis after crisis in global finance and trade. Bert Hofman writes in today’s Hinrich Thought Leadership that, while controversies have dogged their careers, there’s no doubt they represented a time when the US played a decisive role in pulling the world together. Now, the time may have come for a “Committee to Save the Rest of the World,” Bert says. For more than a decade, China has had a singular demon it just can’t defeat: rebalancing its economy toward the consumption-led growth that Beijing desperately needs. Stewart Paterson examines why it’s almost impossible to reengineer China’s political economy. For years, Samsung was one of the first movers to profit from exporting to and then directly investing in China. The Korean tech giant became the largest investor in China by 2011. Then things, as Michael Enright writes, began to go terribly awry for Samsung. Plus, register here for the Chatham House Global Trade 2025 conference featuring Keith Rockwell, check out our latest discussion guide on how data got tangled in geopolitics and climate, and a McKinsey Global Institute piece on the trade-offs in shifting global trade patterns.
POLICY INSIGHT
Responding to Trump 2.0: A Committee to Save the Rest of the World
Bert Hofman 18 March 2025
In February 1999, Time put three men on its cover: Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, and Lawrence Summers. The magazine dubbed the trio “the Committee to Save the World,” lauding the three Americans for fighting crisis after crisis in global finance and trade. Bert Hofman, longtime director and now professor at Singapore’s East Asian Institute and Senior Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute and MERICS, observes in a guest editorial for the Hinrich Foundation that, while controversies have dogged their careers, there’s no doubt the trio represented a time when the US pulled the world together. Now that the US has turned the great disruptor of the international system, the time may have come for a “Committee to Save the Rest of the World,” Bert writes.
It’s no secret that China cannot sustain its investment-led growth model. Not even Xi Jinping disagrees with the breadth of economic analysis that show the limits of the declining returns on China’s investment, at the expense of the economy’s abnormally and persistently low consumer spending. For years, Beijing has vowed to rebalance the economy. But it can’t do so without heavy political cost. Senior Research Fellow Stewart Paterson explores why.
Samsung’s experiences in China show that even a world-leading company, one that had been a first mover in China, can see its pole position evaporate in the face of increasing competition from Chinese firms, Beijing’s geopolitical agenda, and a fickle Chinese regulatory environment. FDI expert Michael Enright details how Samsung’s China venture fell to market realities in China and its Chinese hosts.
Global trade is at a turning point, with geopolitical changes, trade wars, and outdated policies reshaping the landscape. Join our Senior Research Fellow Keith Rockwell at the 2025 Chatham House Conference for a panel on the fragmentation of global trade. Key topics of discussion include geopolitical risks, WTO reform, and strategies for economic resilience.
Data centers and undersea cables tangle in geopolitics and climate
The future of the digital economy now hangs on an increasingly fractious competition for energy and space. For the first time since the internet’s inception, global geopolitics and climate imperatives are threatening the physical backbone of the internet that underpins trade and the modern interconnected economy. As a key battleground between China and the US, Southeast Asia will feel these effects first. Read our discussion guide on a paper by Kieran Thompson.
In January, the McKinsey Global Institute published a feature on how global trade patterns are shifting and the trade-offs that businesses need to be aware of. The piece shows how trade in concentrated products binds geopolitically distant economies, illustrates how trade reconfiguration is underway, and how policy makers and business leaders can position their economies and organizations against uncertainty and change.
