Michael Pettis is a rare breed. A Wall street veteran-turned-academic who once owned a punk rock nightclub in Beijing, he has been teaching finance at Peking University since 2004, while being a prominent critic of Chinese economic policy. His latest book Trade Wars are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace, co-authored with Matthew Klein, questions almost everything we know about modern trade: the usefulness of the dollar’s reserve currency status to the US; the origins of the China-US trade war; and Germany’s much-celebrated trade surplus.…