How Xi Jinping is reshaping the world order

We publish this week’s issue as I am in China, attending the China Development Forum. Plenty of Americans and Europeans will be here, in spite of the tensions. Deng Xiaoping urged China to “hide your capacities, bide your time”, but his successor, Xi Jinping, wants to reshape the post-1945 world order. His ambition has been on display in Moscow this week, where he has visited his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin. Mr Xi believes in the inexorable decline of the Amer­ican-led world order, with its professed concern for rules and human rights. He aims to twist it into a more transactional system of deals between great powers. Do not underestimate the perils of this vision—or its appeal around the world. Our other concern has been the banking crisis, which over the weekend claimed the independence of Credit Suisse. By midweek the focus was on America, where the Federal Reserve faced an excruciating decision on whether to raise interest rates–then did so, by a quarter of a percentage point. That did not dispel all the confusion. Deposits above $250,000 per customer are not formally insured by the American government. But nobody is sure which larger depositors would be bailed out if a bank failed. Answering a question from Simon Rabinovitch, our US economics editor, Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Fed, said depositors “should assume” they are safe. Around the same time Janet Yellen, the treasury secretary, said that expanding insurance to all depositors is not under consideration. They can’t both be right! By Zanny Minton Beddoes Editor-in-chief The Economist