It’s all about China, stupid: Lessons for Canada from geopolitical finance oracle David Woo

Upon meeting polymath David Woo ten years ago, I realized how narrow my world had been.
I was running a data firm, fresh off assertively predicting Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, and voracious to learn about the new rules of geopolitical finance.
I emailed David, then a fixture on the U.S. morning business shows, hunting for the connective tissue between our data and his panoramic view.
We had the raw numbers that exposed a fracturing American rust belt. But Woo was the Wall Street titan, a mega ‘Trump trader’ who had pioneered the art of making money from the chaos.
These traders knew how a less than one per cent victory in Wisconsin would ripple through the liquidity pools of Shanghai, forcing an immediate, vast reallocation of global capital.
Now, as Prime Minister Mark Carney courts Chinese electric vehicles and steers the ship of state toward Beijing, I find myself looking back to the Woo playbook.
I caught up with David recently to ask him the question that haunts Bay Street and Canada-watchers across the world: “Is Canada’s future now all about China?”
The answer, with a caveat, is yes.
“A pivot toward China does not mean crossing the Rubicon,” Woo cautions. “In a multipolar world, alliances will become more fluid. Middle powers like Canada should be clear-eyed, pragmatic, and ready to adjust as the balance of power evolves.”
One has to wonder if the same geopolitical soothsayer who was voted by Business Insider as one of the ‘smartest people on Wall Street’ — lionized for legendary, out-of-consensus calls like initiating institutional coverage on bitcoin in 2013 and betting against the yuan in 2015 — is dangerously miscalculating the costs of Canada breaking alignment with Washington.
David Woo’s predictions carry serious heft among thousands of active institutional investors, sovereign wealth fund managers, and retail traders who hang on every word of his “David Woo Unbound podcast” and popular YouTube channel. That same commercial appetite recently propelled “Merry-Go-Round Broke Down,” a new globalization thriller he co-authored with his wife, Margalit Shinar, straight onto the USA Today bestseller list.
For Woo, the romantic era of Canadian foreign policy is dead.
“Under Trudeau, Canadian foreign policy was rooted largely in ideology and values-based diplomacy. I always thought that was a mistake,” he says. “The fact that Trump has cut Canada no slack despite the deep historical ties between the two countries should be a wake-up call for Canadians. In a dog-eat-dog world, ideological alignment is no substitute for leverage.”
Ideology is a luxury denied to this economist whose currency is the unsparing scoreboard. “I am an American,” he says. “My parents fled China at the start of the Communist Revolution. I was raised to believe that democracy is superior to authoritarianism. Yet I have to admit that China is now either outperforming the United States or catching up rapidly in most strategic races.”
To any critic who views Carney’s recent decision to slash tariffs on tens of thousands of Chinese-made EVs as an invitation to a Trojan Horse, Woo offers a macroeconomic shrug. If you can’t beat them, join them. Canada has no real domestic EV manufacturer to protect. The priority is getting cheap, elite tech into the hands of consumers. The U.K. did it. Why shouldn’t Ottawa?
Hence, the Carney-China “New Strategic Partnership.”
Carney is using China’s manufacturing-heavy economy as a natural, complementary jigsaw piece to Canada’s resource wealth. He is trying to build “strategic autonomy” ahead of the brutal, mandatory USMCA review this summer with a potentially vengeful Trump.
Can Canada realistically pull this off without vicious economic retaliation from the U.S. president?
Woo believes Trump will play tough, attempting to bully Ottawa into submission. But Canada holds cards — critical minerals and energy.
The real move for Carney, Woo suggests, is far removed from Beijing. It’s spending a lot more time in Mexico City to build a unified northern-southern front that prevents Washington from playing its preferred move of divide-and-rule.
It is a dizzying, hyper-transactional vision of the future. It means accepting that China is not interested in exporting its political model — only its balance sheets.
As Sun Tzu long ago observed in “The Art of War”: “Rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him.”
In the calculus of geopolitical finance, Carney is betting that national readiness looks much like a driveway crowded with subsidized Chinese hatchbacks and a direct line to Beijing.
I am skeptical of the sheer, unblinking confidence behind this cross-Pacific trade.
But looking at Woo’s scoreboard, I know better than to look askance.