Legendary Economist Who Predicted the Housing Crisis Says the US Will Win the Trade War

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The Legendary Economist Who Predicted the Housing Crisis Says the US Will Win the Trade War
by Kara Chin, Jacqui Frank and Sara Silverstein
May 20, 2019

• The trade war between the US and China continues to heat up as the US plans to increase tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods on Friday.

• Economist Dr. Gary Shilling says that when it comes to trade, the buyer has the upper hand when there's plenty of supply. And in the scenario of the global trade war, the US is the buyer.

• Shilling says it's possible that China will "go to the mat" and things could get nasty.

• But ultimately, he believes the US will end up winning the trade war.

Dr. Gary Shilling, the president of A. Gary Shilling & Co., spoke to Business Insider editor-at-large Sara Silverstein about the escalating trade tensions between the US and China.

Sara Silverstein: And what do you think about Trump's trade war? What's the outcome going to be?

Gary Shilling: Here's the point that I continue to make. When you've got plenty of supply in the world, and I think you do — plenty of industrial capability, plenty of raw materials and so on — it's the buyer that has the upper hand not the seller. The buyer has the ultimate power and who's the buyer? US is the buyer, China is the seller. And besides that, if you say, if we weren't buying all those consumer goods from China, and you and I enjoy them, they're cheap, they're great. But if we weren't buying them, where would China sell them? They have no other place to sell them, and in the meanwhile, China's growth is slowing.

They've got a problem of huge debt expansion they're trying to curb, they're trying to deal with a shadow lending — a shadow banking system and so on and so forth. China isn't going to collapse obviously, but I think in this trade war, that the US has the upper hand.

If you look at how this whole thing developed, after World War II, the rest of the world was pretty much in ashes and we were promptly into the Cold War, so I think that implicitly or explicitly, we basically said, "We will let Japan and Europe export freely into the US," because that gave them the growth to revive ...

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