WTO director-general on trade wars and "understatement of the century"

Fortune

World Trade Director-General Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala told the Fortune Global Forum that it's the "understatement of the century to say that global trade is facing the greatest disruption in 80 years."

Transcript

00:00It's maybe understatement of the century to say that global trade is facing the greatest disruption

00:06in 80 years. Of course, it's functioning not in the way it used to function before, but

00:13we also must know that the U.S. is 13% of total world imports. So 87% of that trade is going on

00:21outside the U.S. The good news is that we avoided what happened in the 1930s. We've been there

00:28before, where there were tit-for-tat tariffs, protectionism that led to the Great Depression,

00:34and then, you know, the Second World War came, and it was catastrophic, and this system was built.

00:39What we see now is the fact that we've talked with our members to avoid tit-for-tat. They've not done

00:47that. I'm very proud of them. 166 members of the WTO. Second, they're all still trading with themselves,

00:54mostly on WTO rules.

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