彭博社印度论坛：美债收益率上升与AI重塑全球资本流向

[music] Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. I think the biggest thing when we look back in history, when we look back 10, 20 years from now, will be the technology because I think that's the thing that's going to define this era that we're moving from a place like we did in the US from 1870 to 1900 with the industrial revolution that when you bring this super intelligence to the entire world that it's going to profoundly change how we live, how consumers live, how businesses are impacted and how governments oversee societies.

And to me, that's the big thing. [music] [music] I'm Stephanie Vlanders, head of government and economics at Bloomberg, and this is Trumpomics, the podcast that looks at everything in the economic world of Donald Trump. And this week I'm in India where Bloomberg is holding its annual new economy forum for the first time in New Delhi. There have been a slew of luminaries here from the world of business and finance along with many government ministers from around the world.

I counted at least a dozen um recording this on Wednesday which is day two after a very grand opening session yesterday featuring a barntorming speech from the prime minister Narendra Modi. I'm not going to play that to you because frankly I I don't think it would come across but we did have the president and chief operating officer of Blackstone the world's biggest private equity investor and the chairman of Tata and Suns India's biggest multinational in the opening panel session along with the former UK prime minister Rishi Sunnak.

Now, I know panels aren't always exciting, but this one I thought really told you how the world looked right now to people at that level. And as you'll hear, it's not necessarily the way it looks to you and me, or indeed people in the White House. That's in a minute. But first, I also wanted to give you a taste of another section of that first morning. In fact, a few minutes after Prime Minister Modi spoke, we had a presentation from our very own global chief economist Tom Olri, who you've heard regularly on this podcast. [music] And he had decided to go back to that summer hit Christopher Nolan's film of The Odyssey to enliven his presentation around the global economy.

Tom, thank you very much for being here.

Great to be here, Stephanie. Now, I was thinking back Elon Musk, I seem to remember, accused Christopher Nolan of trashing Homer's grave. That film was a woke cry of pain for the end of the rule-based global order, which obviously Elon Musk didn't like. Ezra Klene, the columnist for the New York Times, thought that was precisely why it was, in his words, the political movie of the decade. Everybody found something in that film.

Tom, you saw lessons for economic policy in it.

I'm sure classics scholars would tell me that this is off base, Stephanie, but it seems to me that one of the themes that comes through in the Odyssey is this idea of a world where the rules of hospitality have broken down. You see it in Polyphimas, the Cyclops, a host who eats his guests. You see it in Penelopey's suitors, guests in Adysius's house, eating his food, drinking his wine, trying to steal his wife. I thought this idea of the Odyssey and a world where the rules of hospitality have been have broken down will be a kind of neat framing for a presentation to the audience.

So what are some of the consequences from an economic standpoint of this world where the rules of hospitality are broken down? So I think one of the places where we're seeing this dynamic play out is in the US bond market. If we think about the cost of borrowing for the US Treasury back in 1980 that was around 15%. Over many decades the cost of borrowing for the US Treasury fell and fell until by 2020 it was close to zero.

Now, in the last few years, that trajectory has changed and the cost of borrowing for the US isn't falling anymore. It's rising. The 10-year rate is now north of 5%. And I think that's a reflection of some of these big dynamics that we're seeing, a world where war is more likely, and so companies have to borrow more to pay for defense. a world where there's been rupture between the US and China, the US and Russia, the US and the Petra states.

So these countries which in the past were willing to put their savings to work in the US Treasury market are now not doing that anymore. And a world where geopolitical shocks like the Iran war are pushing inflation higher and of course bond investors need to be compensated for higher inflation. So in this world where the rules of hospitality have broken down, the US Treasury has to pay more to borrow. And of course when the US Treasury has to pay more to borrow, everybody has to pay more to borrow.

A fact which is pretty consequential for our hosts here in India hoping to attract more FDI to finance the buildout of their infrastructure and their manufacturing base. One of the other themes that came through which obviously has been much discussed in this conference is AI is actually something that might surprise some people that we have seen with the buildout of AI in many ways a kind of reassertion of global supply chains at least in a certain part of the economy and reanimation of globalization and trade and with that the return of very large global imbalances.

So despite Donald Trump's best efforts, China exporting more than it ever has, we actually had new record trade surplus numbers coming out of China this week. And the US, despite Donald Trump's efforts, importing, we reckon $500 billion more a year than in 2016. That's allowing for inflation. not all from China, but it has in many ways become more dependent on the rest of the world as a result of in part AI and other things about the way the world has gone.

But as you pointed out, the flip side of that is big trade surplus and surplus revenues for China, Korea, Taiwan. We've seen those before. They used to be invested via central banks into US treasuries often. What's different this time?

It's strange. President Trump imposed these sweeping tariffs to try and reduce the US trade deficit, reduce the Chinese trade surplus. In fact, what we've seen in the last couple of years is actually those surpluses and deficits have exploded higher. Right? We've now got surpluses in China, Taiwan, Korea, and deficits in the US that are bigger in dollar terms than they were back in the early 2000s before the global financial crisis.

But as you note, Stephanie, there's also a different dynamic at work. In the early 2000s, let's take China as an example, the trade surplus meant a huge pileup of dollar savings in the economy. Those dollar savings were managed by the People's Bank of China central bank, a very conservative buy and hold investor. And the PBAC put those dollars into the US Treasury market, the most stable, safest asset in the world. This time around, the savings piling up in East Asian countries, they're not being managed by central banks.

They're being managed by private investors. much more nimble, much more focused on returns. And when we look at the data, what we see is they're not going into the Treasury market anymore. That's one of the reasons the Treasury is having to pay more to borrow. They're going into stocks. They're going into corporate bonds. The pretty clear signal is that they're going into the AI revolution, right? So you've got this circular flow of funds where the US is importing a huge amount of chips to build out its data centers and the countries making those chips are taking the dollars the US is paying them and turning around and investing them back in the US AI companies.

Now if you're an AI optimist and there's lots of reasons to be an AI optimist that's all good, right? AI is going to make us better off. This is accelerating the AI revolution which is going to make us all better off. But if you're an AI pessimist and you think the profits from AI might turn up a day late and a dollar short and there's g