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Business Daily: Trump and the Rust Belt Robots

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11/11/2016 GMT

Trump and the Rust Belt Robots

BBC World Service - Business Daily, Trump and the Rust Belt Robots

Why Robots, not Chinese or Mexicans, may be mostly to blame for US factory job losses

The President-Elect's potential conflicts of interest, and why robots, not Chinese or Mexicans, may be mostly to blame for US factory job losses.

We examine two potential headaches for Donald Trump. Firstly, how does a billionaire businessman with a global property portfolio avoid conflicts of interest in the White House? We hear from senior US lawyer, Ken Gross, a partner with the firm Skadden Arps in Washington DC, who has advised other politicians on similar issues, notably that other political billionaire, Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor of New York. The conflicts, he says, seem almost impossible to resolve. 

Also in the programme, we speak to Michael Hicks, an economics professor and director of business research at Ball State University in rust-belt Indiana. He argues that Donald Trump's pledge to restore factory jobs to Middle America will prove very difficult since, he says, most of them never went abroad in the first place. More than 80% of manufacturing job losses since the 1970s, he's found, have actually been taken by robots and other forms of automation. 

Away from the United States, we speak to economic analyst Vivek Kaul in New Delhi about the shock move by the Indian government to remove 500 and 1,000 rupee notes from circulation. It's meant to stop corruption and money laundering, and to encourage more Indians to open bank accounts. But will the move actually work?

(Picture: Robots at the Fiat Chrysler factory in Warren, Michigan; Credit: Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

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