This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 60%. (I'm a bot)

> German Chancellor Olaf Scholz held an annual meeting with the leaders of a number of multilateral global financial and political organizations - the IMF, WTO, ILO, OECD and World Bank - in Berlin on Tuesday, where a range of issues tied to international economic policy were discussed.

> Okonjo-Iweala cited a WTO estimate predicting a 5% long-term reduction in global GDP should the world break into two trading blocks - one based on China, the other on the US. International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told those gathered that with the coronavirus pandemic and Russia's attack on Ukraine, globalization was facing its biggest challenges since World War Two.

> IMF Managing Director Georgieva said economic growth in the world's two largest economies - the US and China - was slowing, suggesting that IMF global growth estimates for 2023 would likely have to be adjusted down from 2.7% as had been projected in October.

Extended Summary | FAQ | Feedback | Top keywords: World^#1 global^#2 Georgieva^#3 Scholz^#4 IMF^#5

Germany is dependent on exports, so of course, they would be against decoupling.

I like how it's always about the money, not about morals or lives. People in China are stomped down and denied basic rights but let's keep trading like normal and ensure the CCP never has to improve

Germany never learns eh?

I think that in the long run our civilization will be more resilient with a number of regional economies that have only modest interconnections that one big global economy where a single shock can disrupt everything. It will take time and considerable thought to make the transition, but in the end it will likely be better for both cultural diversity and local economies.

There is a brief description of of what a sustainable, resilient and ethical civilization could look like in the Aspen Proposal. www.aspenproposal.org

Germany is still betting on PRC not escalating the conflict with the West.

The bluff could be called soon.

If it was about morals or lives trade with world powers, specially the US would be impossible. Reality is that at the end of the day, moral arguments are just a tool used in economic conflicts to justify whatever is convenient to the accuser.

Why stop trading with Russias ally China?

That be wise policy for SGT. Scholz but I don’t have to answer to the German business lobby that the SPD is beholden to.

i think it's more nuanced than that

i think the point is that interdependence was supposed to make us need eachother so much that war would be impossible because of our shared reliance on one another

since recent events have shown that to be inacurate, it's tempting to want to go back to a time when supply chains were mostly internal.

the thing is it did work to an extent, war is now a much rarer thing than it used to be thanks in part to this interdependence...

the fault in our current setup, i think, is that it's a network much like a minimum spanning tree where each node is a single point of failure and there are no loops that would allow for redundancy. so if hungary or russia or china or the uk or whoever decides to throw a tantrum - we're all boned

we should aim for global supply chains to look more like a delaunay triangulation where while some vertices have more edges than others, the loss of (or shunning of for misbehaving) one player doesn't drag everyone down with them - it would not only make it easier to punish those who would try to bully their neighbors but also spread the economic benefits on more people

Please don't compare the conditions of human rights between the two. It's night and day

Within the countries? Yes, China is the worst. In relation to the world? The US is the big bad without even real competition. Also the core of the argument was that the world is full of crimes and violations of human rights perpetrated by a lot of countries, it's only when it's convenient to the West that morals and principles become important, but for any sanctioned country there is 1 that does the same and is safe, because they are aligned with the West, or worst, because they are not considered strategic or important and are ignored in consequence.