Connect with us

International

China-US relations are at rock bottom, but new trade talks will happen eventually

China-US relations are at rock bottom, but new trade talks will happen eventually

Published

on

Senior trade negotiators from the US and China are due to have a virtual call to check the progress of the “phase one” deal reached by the two nations in January, aimed at overcoming the trade war that has dragged on for the past several years.

All eyes will be looking for positive signs to pave the way to a second phase of negotiations. Yet Donald Trump recently said he was not thinking about holding more talks, telling journalists: “We made a great trade deal. But as soon as the deal was done, the ink wasn’t even dry, and they hit us with the plague.”

So with tensions running particularly high between Washington and Beijing, is there any chance of a breakthrough?

Progress so far

It seems a long time ago that the phase one deal was signed. It was always intended as a mini-deal to be followed by a second phase. The main commitment, effective from February, was a promise by China to purchase US$63.9 billion (£48.9 billion) more US goods and services in 2020 than in 2017. Further targets for 2021 require China to purchase an additional US$200 billion of goods and services over the two years.

The chart below shows that progress is poor. Exports from China to the US have gone up in spite of COVID-19 (per the top dotted line), but the amount it is importing from the US (the bottom dotted line) has not picked up to the levels envisioned.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimates that China imported less than 50% of what it should have done in the year to June. Barring a large upswing in the second half of the year, hitting the 2020 target looks unlikely.

Chinese trade with the US

Graph of Chinese trade with US
COMTRADE for 2017 and General Administration of Customs of China for 2018-2020

US exports covered in the agreement include machinery, pharmaceuticals, aircraft, iron, steel, agricultural products, gas, oil and services. The deal was particularly important for US agriculture, whose barriers to trade have also been reduced through relaxing Chinese health and safety standards and other bureaucratic obstacles.

Meanwhile, the US pharmaceuticals sector was afforded additional protection through a commitment from Beijing to do more to enforce intellectual property rights against copycat manufacturers. However, other commitments such as access for financial-services providers were left vague and may be harder to enforce.

The next chart looks at some specific market segments. It shows a dramatic decline in Chinese imports of US aircraft and soya beans, while imports of mechanical appliances, electrical equipment and electronics are flat. The Peterson Institute’s data suggests that China had achieved around 24%, 27% and 5% of the end-of-year commitments in agriculture, manufacturing and energy respectively by June.

Chinese US imports by sector

Graph showing Chinese imports of certain US goods.
COMTRADE for 2017 and General Administration of Customs of China for 2018-2020

China’s failure is not entirely surprising, given the collapse in global trade due to COVID-19. According to our calculations based on General Administration of Customs of China statistics, Chinese total exports to the rest of the world in May-June 2020 were only 1.2% lower compared to the same period of 2019, but their exports to the US were 6.9% lower. This may be because China has controlled the pandemic more successfully than the US.

Fresh impetus, perhaps through phase-two talks, is needed to get phase-one implementation back on track. Yet thanks to the wider disagreements that have engulfed the China-US relationship, talks look unlikely right now.

China-US tensions

From an American perspective, the upcoming elections are key. Polling suggests that both Republican and Democratic voters are increasingly negative about China, not least because of the pandemic. Trump’s tough stance is therefore politically savvy in an election year.

The Americans had expected to use phase two to negotiate over other trade concerns, such as Chinese tech. We have seen the US pressurising other countries such as the UK to follow suit on banning Huawei, while more recently Trump has turned up the heat on the likes of WeChat and TikTok.

There is also a plethora of divisive non-trade issues. Alex Azar, the US health secretary, visited Taiwan earlier in August. This was one of the highest-level US delegations in decades, and followed a recent Taiwanese delegation being hosted at the US state department. There are also increasing military tensions in the Taiwan Strait, and the US and China have been closing consolates in one another’s countries.

There is also the fallout from China imposing national security legislation on Hong Kong, prompting a US executive order that Hong Kong will be treated the same as mainland China for trade purposes. This means goods labelled “Made in Hong Kong” will no longer receive preferential treatment.

The US is Hong Kong’s second largest trading partner, and the territory will now endure the same tariffs imposed on Chinese goods. These are currently six times higher than before the trade war. The row over Hong Kong has also led to the US and China imposing sanctions on certain citizens from each other’s countries.

These tensions are very important, though many of them are longstanding. When the phase one agreement was signed, both the US and China were willing to put aside differences to improve trade. Tensions have undoubtedly escalated since then, but the tide may yet turn in favour of negotiations to implement phase one and explore phase two.

There are important matters to discuss in phase two, including bringing tariffs down to pre-trade-war levels. The US retained the restrictions as leverage last time around. There is also the question of imports after 2021, and China’s subsidies to state-owned enterprises. And with cyber-security a high priority for the US, the actions against WeChat and TikTok could be part of the negotiating strategy.

There are therefore numerous incentives to resume negotiations, even if they may not happen immediately. Ultimately, new negotiations will heavily depend on the result of the US elections and the post-COVID-19 economic recovery of both countries.

Les auteurs ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne possèdent pas de parts, ne reçoivent pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'ont déclaré aucune autre affiliation que leur poste universitaire.

Read More

Continue Reading

International

Watch Yield Curve For When Stocks Begin To Price Recession Risk

Watch Yield Curve For When Stocks Begin To Price Recession Risk

Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,

US large-cap indices…

Published

on

Watch Yield Curve For When Stocks Begin To Price Recession Risk

Authored by Simon White, Bloomberg macro strategist,

US large-cap indices are currently diverging from recessionary leading economic data. However, a decisive steepening in the yield curve leaves growth stocks and therefore the overall index facing lower prices.

Leading economic data has been signalling a recession for several months. Typically stocks closely follow the ratio between leading and coincident economic data.

As the chart below shows, equities have recently emphatically diverged from the ratio, indicating they are supremely indifferent to very high US recession risk.

What gives? Much of the recent outperformance of the S&P has been driven by a tiny number of tech stocks. The top five S&P stocks’ mean return this year is over 60% versus 0% for the average return of the remaining 498 stocks.

The belief that generative AI is imminently about to radically change the economy and that Nvidia especially is positioned to benefit from this has been behind much of this narrow leadership.

Regardless on your views whether this is overdone or not, it has re-established growth’s dominance over value. Energy had been spearheading the value trade up until around March, but since then tech –- the vessel for many of the largest growth stocks –- has been leading the S&P higher.

The yield curve’s behaviour will be key to watch for a reversion of this trend, and therefore a heightened risk of S&P 500 underperformance. Growth stocks tend to outperform value stocks when the curve flattens. This is because growth companies often have a relative advantage over typically smaller value firms by being able to borrow for longer terms. And vice-versa when the curve steepens, growth firms lose this relative advantage and tend to underperform.

The chart below shows the relationship, which was disrupted through the pandemic. Nonetheless, if it re-establishes itself then the curve beginning to durably re-steepen would be a sign growth stocks will start to underperform again, taking the index lower in the process.

Equivalently, a re-acceleration in US inflation (whose timing depends on China’s halting recovery) is more likely to put steepening pressure on the curve as the Fed has to balance economic growth more with inflation risks. Given the growth segment’s outperformance is an indication of the market’s intensely relaxed attitude to inflation, its resurgence would be a high risk for sending growth stocks lower.

Tyler Durden Wed, 05/31/2023 - 13:20

Read More

Continue Reading

International

COVID-19 lockdowns linked to less accurate recollection of event timing

Participants in a survey study made a relatively high number of errors when asked to recollect the timing of major events that took place in 2021, providing…

Published

on

Participants in a survey study made a relatively high number of errors when asked to recollect the timing of major events that took place in 2021, providing new insights into how COVID-19 lockdowns impacted perception of time. Daria Pawlak and Arash Sahraie of the University of Aberdeen, UK, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on May 31, 2023.

Credit: Arianna Sahraie Photography, CC-BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Participants in a survey study made a relatively high number of errors when asked to recollect the timing of major events that took place in 2021, providing new insights into how COVID-19 lockdowns impacted perception of time. Daria Pawlak and Arash Sahraie of the University of Aberdeen, UK, present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on May 31, 2023.

Remembering when past events occurred becomes more difficult as more time passes. In addition, people’s activities and emotions can influence their perception of the passage of time. The social isolation resulting from COVID-19 lockdowns significantly impacted people’s activities and emotions, and prior research has shown that the pandemic triggered distortions in people’s perception of time.

Inspired by that earlier research and clinical reports that patients have become less able to report accurate timelines of their medical conditions, Pawlak and Sahraie set out to deepen understanding of the pandemic’s impact on time perception.

In May 2022, the researchers conducted an online survey in which they asked 277 participants to give the year in which several notable recent events occurred, such as when Brexit was finalized or when Meghan Markle joined the British royal family. Participants also completed standard evaluations for factors related to mental health, including levels of boredom, depression, and resilience.

As expected, participants’ recollection of events that occurred further in the past was less accurate. However, their perception of the timing of events that occurred in 2021—one year prior to the survey—was just an inaccurate as for events that occurred three to four years earlier. In other words, many participants had difficulty recalling the timing of events coinciding with COVID-19 lockdowns.

Additionally, participants who made more errors in event timing were also more likely to show greater levels of depression, anxiety, and physical mental demands during the pandemic, but had less resilience. Boredom was not significantly associated with timeline accuracy.

These findings are similar to those previously reported for prison inmates. The authors suggest that accurate recollection of event timing requires “anchoring” life events, such as birthday celebrations and vacations, which were lacking during COVID-19 lockdowns.

The authors add: “Our paper reports on altered timescapes during the pandemic. In a landscape, if features are not clearly discernible, it is harder to place objects/yourself in relation to other features. Restrictions imposed during the pandemic have impoverished our timescape, affecting the perception of event timelines. We can recall that events happened, we just don’t remember when.

#####

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0278250

Citation: Pawlak DA, Sahraie A (2023) Lost time: Perception of events timeline affected by the COVID pandemic. PLoS ONE 18(5): e0278250. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278250

Author Countries: UK

Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.


Read More

Continue Reading

International

Hyro secures $20M for its AI-powered, healthcare-focused conversational platform

Israel Krush and Rom Cohen first met in an AI course at Cornell Tech, where they bonded over a shared desire to apply AI voice technologies to the healthcare…

Published

on

Israel Krush and Rom Cohen first met in an AI course at Cornell Tech, where they bonded over a shared desire to apply AI voice technologies to the healthcare sector. Specifically, they sought to automate the routine messages and calls that often lead to administrative burnout, like calls about scheduling, prescription refills and searching through physician directories.

Several years after graduating, Krush and Cohen productized their ideas with Hyro, which uses AI to facilitate text and voice conversations across the web, call centers and apps between healthcare organizations and their clients. Hyro today announced that it raised $20 million in a Series B round led by Liberty Mutual, Macquarie Capital and Black Opal, bringing the startup’s total raised to $35 million.

Krush says that the new cash will be put toward expanding Hyro’s go-to-market teams and R&D.

“When we searched for a domain that would benefit from transforming these technologies most, we discovered and validated that healthcare, with staffing shortages and antiquated processes, had the greatest need and pain points, and have continued to focus on this particular vertical,” Krush told TechCrunch in an email interview.

To Krush’s point, the healthcare industry faces a major staffing shortfall, exacerbated by the logistical complications that arose during the pandemic. In a recent interview with Keona Health, Halee Fischer-Wright, CEO of Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), said that MGMA’s heard that 88% of medical practices have had difficulties recruiting front-of-office staff over the last year. By another estimates, the healthcare field has lost 20% of its workforce.

Hyro doesn’t attempt to replace staffers. But it does inject automation into the equation. The platform is essentially a drop-in replacement for traditional IVR systems, handling calls and texts automatically using conversational AI.

Hyro can answer common questions and handle tasks like booking or rescheduling an appointment, providing engagement and conversion metrics on the backend as it does so.

Plenty of platforms do — or at least claim to. See RedRoute, a voice-based conversational AI startup that delivers an “Alexa-like” customer service experience over the phone. Elsewhere, there’s Omilia, which provides a conversational solution that works on all platforms (e.g. phone, web chat, social networks, SMS and more) and integrates with existing customer support systems.

But Krush claims that Hyro is differentiated. For one, he says, it offers an AI-powered search feature that scrapes up-to-date information from a customer’s website — ostensibly preventing wrong answers to questions (a notorious problem with text-generating AI). Hyro also boasts “smart routing,” which enables it to “intelligently” decide whether to complete a task automatically, send a link to self-serve via SMS or route a request to the right department.

A bot created using Hyro’s development tools. Image Credits: Hyro

“Our AI assistants have been used by tens of millions of patients, automating conversations on various channels,” Krush said. “Hyro creates a feedback loop by identifying missing knowledge gaps, basically mimicking the operations of a call center agent. It also shows within a conversation exactly how the AI assistant deduced the correct response to a patient or customer query, meaning that if incorrect answers were given, an enterprise can understand exactly which piece of content or dataset is labeled incorrectly and fix accordingly.”

Of course, no technology’s perfect, and Hyro’s likely isn’t an exception to the rule. But the startup’s sales pitch was enough to win over dozens of healthcare networks, providers and hospitals as clients, including Weill Cornell Medicine. Annual recurring revenue has doubled since Hyro went to market in 2019, Krush claims.

Hyro’s future plans entail expanding to industries adjacent to healthcare, including real estate and the public sector, as well as rounding out the platform with more customization options, business optimization recommendations and “variety” in the AI skills that Hyro supports.

“The pandemic expedited digital transformation for healthcare and made the problems we’re solving very clear and obvious (e.g. the spike in calls surrounding information, access to testing, etc.),” Krush said. “We were one of the first to offer a COVID-19 virtual assistant that deployed in under 48 hours based on trusted information from the health system and trusted resources such as the CDC and World Health Organization …. Hyro is well funded, with good growth and momentum, and we’ve always managed a responsible budget, so we’re actually looking to expand and gather more market share while competitors are slowing down.”

Hyro secures $20M for its AI-powered, healthcare-focused conversational platform by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Read More

Continue Reading

Trending