The Capitalist

With Donald Trump back in the White House, tariffs have become front-page news, and advocates for free trade find themselves on the back foot. Soumaya Keynes and Chad P. Bown argue that with great powers now using trade as a weapon, there can be no simple return to the settled order of rules-based global trade that dominated the late twentieth century. Their new book, 'How to Win a Trade War', provides a tour through the toolkit of the trade warrior.
They join Marc Sidwell to discuss the new world of economic conflict, why tariffs are like a party drug – and how trade wars can still spiral out of control.


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Over £12 billion of taxpayer money flows to large charities every year – and 21 of them get 99% of their funding from government. So at what point does a charity stop being an independent voice for civil society and become, in effect, an arm of the state? In this piece by Benjamin Elks, published on CapX, he explores the blurry line between public service delivery and state-sponsored lobbying, what greater transparency and accountability could look like, and why getting this right matters for trust in British public life.
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From the progressive left to the nationalist right – in Washington or Westminster – a new consensus is forming. It argues that government should play a larger role in the economy, and that using industrial policy to achieve the economic outcomes we want is just common sense.
As president of the American Institute for Economic Research, Samuel Gregg has spent years making the case for free markets. But he knows that dismissing the new consensus is not enough. It has to be understood and engaged with on its own terms.
He joins Marc Sidwell to map how far the turn away from free markets has gone, why it’s proved so seductive across the political divide – and what those who disagree are going to have to do about it.


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Britain is paying more to borrow than any other major Western economy. So why is Labour preoccupied with internal power struggles? In a special live address, Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride delivers his account of Britain's fiscal predicament and the Conservative Party's plan to fix it.

Our borrowing costs are the highest in the G7, higher even than Portugal, Spain and Greece – not primarily because of the deficit or the debt stock, but because Britain has become an inflation outlier, and markets are pricing in the risk that the situation gets worse. 

When Josh Simons stepped aside for Andy Burnham on a single Friday, yields jumped 18 basis points. Stride puts a number on it:  Burnham penalty that if sustained would cost the equivalent of £300 per working household.

The broader charge sheet against the current government includes: a deficit that ran 75% above inherited plans in Labour's first year and again in its second; a quarter of a trillion pounds in additional borrowing across a single Parliament; fiscal rules changed to permit more borrowing the moment they became inconvenient; and a Prime Minister too weakened by his own MPsto make the welfare reforms even his Chancellor admits are needed.

Against this, Stride sets out the Conservatives' golden rule – for every pound of savings identified, at least half goes to deficit reduction – and makes the case that the Tories' plan is the only serious fiscal commitment on offer. Reform's numbers don't add up, he argues, and its representatives have said so themselves on air. Labour's leadership contenders are, in their different ways, each a version of the same problem.

Following his speech, the Shadow Chancellor takes questions on quantitative tightening, the triple lock, the OBR's limitations, defence investment and the EU.
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Andy Burnham is heading for a leadership bid, and he's arrived with a big idea: Manchesterism. Apparently a form of business-friendly socialism, it's built on borrowing, backed by the Manchester skyline, and presented as a credible alternative to both austerity and the hard left. There is just one problem: it doesn't add up.

Mani Basharzad of the Institute of Economic Affairs argues that the Manchester model rests on borrowing that bond markets are already pricing with suspicion, a council that is among the most indebted in the country, and a breezy confidence that infrastructure debt is categorically different from any other kind. (It isn't.) Then there is the welfare question: Burnham has shown no appetite for restraint. And the wealth taxes he has quietly signalled would do to capital what rent controls do to housing.

The deepest problem is one of logic. Burnham wants growth and expanded welfare. He wants business confidence and more borrowing. He wants reform and the preservation of every existing structure. As Ludwig von Mises observed, you cannot split the difference between the government and the market. There is no third solution – only planned chaos.

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