In this special episode, we sat down with China economic analyst Antonio Graceffo. He talks about the current inflation, if China is involved, and how China’s economic outlook would be felt by U.S. consumers.
Graceffo said: “First of all, if we have supply chain disruption, this increases the price of goods. And of course, we import a tremendous number of our goods, or percentage of our goods, from China. So anything that’s been disrupted, of course, the price is going go up. One of the things a lot of people miss with China is that they look at the trade between the United States and China in finished goods and finished services. But what they forget is that China does a lot of processing. So a lot of minerals and raw materials that are extracted, maybe from Africa or Latin America or elsewhere, and even from the United States—there are minerals we extract here that we send to China for processing—so if the zero-COVID policies are shutting down those processing plants, or the shipping and things like that, it drives up the prices of those things. And it’s not just finished products, it’s also what we call ‘inputs.’ So you might have components that are made in China. Even goods that you typically believe are made in America might have components from China.”…