There were fears that a tide of lending by Chinese banks to keep the economy going was building up a “bubble” of uncertain proportions. Beijing-based Fitch Ratings said that it was difficult to estimate just how large the bad debts were because the Chinese banking system was so opaque. One party trying to peer into China’s economic future was Japan. At the recent G7 conference in the artic city of Iqaluit, Japanese Finance Minister Naoto Kan said Japan is “paying attention to China’s economic conditions, and we’re concerned about [signs of] a bubble” in the mainland’s economy. Fitch Ratings were quoted as saying that:
“The agency views ‘bubble risk’ as greatest for Chinese banks given their 32 percent loan growth in 2009; this looks likely to be followed by a further 20 percent in 2010,” Fitch said in a statement.
“Credit growth of more than 50 percent over a two-year period in an economy where bank credit is already quite large relative to gross domestic product almost inevitably involves some misallocation of credit,” it added.
AdvertisementNew loans extended by China’s banks nearly doubled in 2009 from the previous year to 9.6 trillion yuan (1.4 trillion dollars) as banks heeded Beijing’s calls to pump up lending to keep the economy growing.
Fitch however noted the limited transparency of Chinese banks and said their tendency to reschedule loans meant any bad debt problems would surface slowly.
CNN’s Katie Brenner quotes a number of academic authorities who claim that even if a Chinese bubble popped its effects would be speedily managed by an authoritarian Communist Party which is far better than the West at managing such crises — or so the experts said. Beijing can prevent capital flight by draconian control; prices can simply be set by fiat, banks can be forced to extend credit whether they like it or not.
“The [Chinese] government can really push money into enterprises to keep them going even amid a crisis,” says Peter Morici, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland. “You wouldn’t see a credit shortage like the one we saw in the U.S.”
As for the rash of bad loans that could be made amid a period of forced lending, China has an answer to that, too. The government pushes debt problems off into the future and is notoriously opaque when it comes to reporting problems. For these reasons, bad debts would surface in a slow and hopefully orderly manner, Fitch wrote in its recent report.
But Brenner notes these measures “solve” the problem by widening it. They create huge resource distortions that ripple outward to foreign markets and pass risks on to the outside world and to the political system. An unmanaged bubble, Brenner says, is an existential risk to the Communist Party of China. Maybe a bubble in China isn’t a realistic possibility but if one does inflate it will be a sight to behold indeed.
Bubbles in China are about much more than finance. Economic upheaval is a source of potential mass unrest, threatening the Communist Party …
In fact, to keep things flowing, it might open the spigots on exports and try to grow its way back, doubling down on its main engine of growth — exactly what it did during the global meltdown. And that’s where the U.S. needs to worry. An even more export-focused China would mean ever less-expensive goods flowing into the biggest market in the world — the U.S.
“Because prices are so heavily managed, China could easily flood the U.S. and the world with extremely cheap stuff,” says Morici. If nearly everything America buys is made in China now, just wait. The trade imbalance would spiral further out of control; and manufacturers in other nations fighting China for market share would be at a greater disadvantage.
“Remember, when we talk about bubbles, the stakes are the future of the Communist Party,” says Morici. “They’ll try to survive no matter what; and it could mean destroying other economies to do it.”
With the ante set so high, in the worst case scenario a collapsing Chinese economy would essentially keep its cash flow going by selling underpriced goods at slave-labor wages to the outside world. It’s unsustainable strategem which in the process will destroy not just the Chinese economy but the economies of those who trade with it. Japan’s exports, now in the doldrums would go completely into the tank. American producers, faced with the last brilliant flare of a dying economic supernova, would be burned to a crisp. Then the Chinese bubble, no longer able to sustain itself from outward forces will shrivels on itself like a dwarft star, leaving only the cinders of a world economy in its radius of effect.
But Shaun Rein at Forbes says there is nothing to worry about. There will be no Chinese collapse in the foreseeable future. The reason he gives are that the high rate of Chinese savings means that the lending burst is based on a real basis, not airy discounted cash flows. Moreover, there is more money in China than Westerners think because they don’t understand Chinese accounting. Lastly, China is going to keep its currency low and keep exporting. With savings, a higher than reported income and a steely determination to keep on making money, China is safe, Rein says.
Whether you believe that or not, the WSJ says the key components of Beijing’s export strategy are provoking a kind of hidden protectionism among other economies and may fuel the inflationary forces internally. In other words, China’s exports are part of what is inflating the bubble not simply what is preventing the bubble from collapse.
Key elements of the strategy—including a cheap currency, regulated interest rates and low energy prices—are stoking discontent in fellow developing countries, not just Western capitals. … At the same time, many economists argue, China’s export-friendly policies are fueling inflationary pressures at home, placing a burden on the rest of the economy.
The economic downturn has forced consumers in the West to switch to cheaper — typically “made in China” products — creating an even greater demand for its export goods. “According to International Monetary Fund projections, if current trends continue, China’s share of world exports could reach 12% by 2014, a higher portion than Japan managed at the peak of its dominance in the 1980s.” Can it continue? Some researchers have their doubts.
But some researchers at the IMF say current trends aren’t likely to continue. A paper by IMF researchers published last year suggests that for China to continue the rapid export gains of recent years, it would need to boost its share of world exports to about 20% in coming decades, an unprecedented level. The fund’s researchers said China is unlikely to be able to do that without using even more government subsidies, which would further aggravate trade tensions and cause domestic economic problems.
In any event, huge global economic pressures with complex interrelationships are building up based on asserted information. Beijing, Brussels and Washington’s economic managers are embarking upon ambitious strategies. By setting values, concealing debts, accumulating toxic assets and acquiring obligations on the basis of almost fictional cash flows the world’s economic managers are setting up a series of bets may save the day or sink the ship; which it is will sooner or later will be judged by the market. An economy can only undervalue things and overborrow for so long. Eventually the laws of supply and demand, like gravity, reasserts their control over the situation and the entire edifice settles into an equilibrium that will leave those who bet on the wrong horse holding the bag. We certainly live in interesting times.
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Even more evidence, as if any was needed, that globalism is unsustainable. Just as the system of interlocking treaties in the Concert of Europe was unsustainable. The result of the latter was World War I and the rise of National Socialism. What will be the aftermath of the former?
“Moreover, there is more money in China than Westerners think because they don’t understand Chinese accounting.”
You don’t have to be a financial expert to spot the big problem sittin’ right out in the open there.
How can anyone write something like that with a straight face? He needs to take some time and watch “The Smartest Guys in the Room” – apparently he wasn’t paying attention then.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smartest_Guys_in_the_Room
Anytime anyone says “wait, you just don’t understand the accounting going on here” it’s time to grab your wallet and run for the hills.
What Rein actually writes is:
which I basically summarized as saying that “there is more money in China than Westerners think because they don’t understand Chinese accounting.”
WWS: “Moreover, there is more money in China than Westerners think because they don’t understand Chinese accounting.”
When so called “experts” use nebulous theories to explain away irrational economic numbers – such as 50% credit growth over two years in a time of global recession – two words come to mind: Ponzi Scheme.
Someone also had to explain Madoff’s 10% multi-year returns, and they relied on some black magic trading system..like the Chinese accounting not understood by us mere mortals. This is worse than a bubble – it is a scheme by the Chinese Government and is going to blow up in all our faces.
BD
I’m sure there will be a Chinese bubble, and it will pop, and it will be painful. If Ponzi schemes aren’t in human nature or Chinese culture, they will be “smart” enough to pick them up. When or how big, I dunno.
What I do know is that a fiat economy is not proof against the problem. You can’t keep a bubble from popping, by fiat. Or peugeot.
I still remember a report on how China rewarded its good employees, in new built cities, like in America’s protected villages for retireds
The workers have a millionaire way of living if they remain fidel to their enterprise they have swimming pools and so what goes with upper class winning persons in western societies, BUT, if they contest the enterprise policy, or if they want to move away because of personal reasons, (could be that their “love” partner was living elsewhere) then these super “workers” would loose all their advantages, and start a new life with nothing spared in the banks
We aren’t smart enough to understand Chinese accounting. And we aren’t smart enough to understand that nationalized health care is good for us.
We aren’t smart enough to know that a stimulus plan that isn’t stimulating anything, is actually a great idea.
We aren’t smart enough to know that rigged charts and graphs in a junk science attempt to scare us into spending trillions on a climate science that is “settled” by emails directing silence by veiled threat…is good for us as well.
We aren’t smart enough to realize that cooked books at Fannie and Freddie were for our own good.
But, then again…Aristotle said “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
So, maybe…just maybe…we aren’t designer lapdogs for the left. We won’t be appeased just by being patted on the head, and we don’t have a Pavlovian need to be “accepted” by the “masters”…bred for our mindless obedience to leftist causes.
We aren’t Liberadoodles.
Chinese credit bubble? Supernovas? White dwarfs? The mind boggles, the head hurts, the nerves tremble. Keep your money safe by betting on Waltradamus. It is time once again for Waltradamus’s mysteriously unerring predictions about the coming sport season. For those of you who bet on line, you can put your money where your mouse is.
The Super Bowl is not for dolts
The betting’s not for those with nightly faints
The smart guys give the points and take the Colts
The smarter guys lay down and take the Saints
The Final Four this year includes Kentucky
While Kansas has a shot to take it all
Though Villanova or the ‘Cuse just might get lucky
Don’t put your money down on Seton Hall
The baseball season surely is a long one
The Phillies seem the class of senior league
The Red Sox seem this year to be the wrong one
The Phillies trump the Yanks and win it big
The BCS is surely not the right way
To crown the champ of college football’s year
A playoff’s what we need is what the fan’s say
The winner is – dang my Chinese crystal ball’s unclear
In America we have endless economic trauma and market distortion because most of Health Care costs and almost all of retirement savings, whether through Social Security, Defined Benefits, or 401k type plans, are accounted for through the employer as a cost of labor. If they were all paid for like normal goods and services then the costs would be lower and the real wealth of the consumers would be higher. Businesses would also benefit by having an enormous non-core related drag on the firms assets, both financial and more important managerial, removed.
In China a vast array of other goods, housing, vacations, education, government obligations, etc, are also paid for and managed by the employer. That is the system that the Democrats like Thomas Friedman want to push us towards.
The Chinese Socialist model fails in two ways.
First is that it separates the individual from direct connection to and responsibility for their market choices. Whether in any of the goods purchased through the employer or in their relation to the government that does not tax them directly they become in fact de-socialized. They consume but have no direct relation to either the economic market nor to the political market. They become isolated and irresponsible units. It both infantalizes and alienates the people. The consequences of this are significant.
Second is the traditional accumulation of vices that authoritarian and socialized systems are prone to. These include corruption, intrigue, technical stagnation, misallocation of resources with wealth being drained from agriculture, and suppression of negative feedback.
The implication of Rein’s comment is that the Chinese government has little more idea of what is going on in China than we do. The data stream is corrupted.
Not that we are in any better condition in the West. Some are acclaiming the US 5.7% GDP growth in Q4 ’09 as evidence the recession is over; others say it is merely the consequence of the Government printing money and handing it out, presaging runaway inflation rather than real growth.
Then there is the anecdotal evidence of our own eyes. I tried to get a hotel reservation in Houston recently — a surprising number of hotels had no rooms available. Then there was the sight of apparently endless streams of mile-long trains thundering across the plains in both directions, draggging double-stacked shipping containers, grain hoppers, and tank cars filled with exotic chemicals. What is really going on with this economy?
What does seem clear is that the guys who think they are in charge don’t have the data to make smart decisions, even if they had the brain power and the intestinal fortitude to make those decisions. And that seems to be as true in China as it is in the West. When whatever is going to happen actually does happen, it is going to be a surprise to the underinformed global elite.
Beijing can prevent capital flight by draconian control; prices can simply be set by fiat, banks can be forced to extend credit whether they like it or not.
They’ve already started trying to do this. The Chinese government last month raised the amount of money banks are required to keep as reserves and re-imposed a sales tax on homes sold within five years of their purchase. They also told banks to raise interest rates on third mortgages and demand bigger down-payments.
(Third mortgages? What does China think this is, 2005?)
But none of that is relevant. We aren’t talking about the survival of China’s economy or the Communist Party, we’re talking about the effects that a collapse in the Chinese real estate market is going to have on the foreign investors who are deep into the biggest Ponzi Scheme in human history. Nobody is worried about what happens in Greece itself if they can’t pay their debts, they are worried about the domino effect knocking down Portugal and Spain and picking up steam from there. Dubai roiled the world economy when they became a Slow Payer, now multiply that effect by a thousand. China is sitting on $2.4 trillion dollars of dead money, just sitting there, so they’ve been loaning it to each other to build things far more stupid than the indoor ski slope in Do-Buy. Entire brand-new cities of empty houses that serve only as instruments of monetary value for foreign investors, with no chance of every being purchased by locals in this lifetime…and that has attracted investors who ride the price increase momentum up…up…until it exceeds every bound of logic. And all it will take is one stupid little thing to pop the bubble, like Israel launching airstrikes on Iran, triggering the closure of the Strait of Hormuz to tanker traffic.
Blogger Small Dead Animals lands a visit/comment from ZhengHui. Is it a troll/monitor from Mao China?
…-
“January 6, 2010
China’s Empty City
Via
Posted by Kate at January 6, 2010 12:23 AM
Comments
Hi
This is ZhengHui.
I agree that the spending in infrastructure programs contributes a lot in the increase of the GDP of China. It’s interesting that I haven’t heard about the city of New Ordos. However, I did see some empty buildings in cities of China. But I think this empty buildings are built by Real Estate companies not government. One of the main reasons that companies stop building them is because they lack investment money. The companies will continue to build them until they find money.
I think the benefits Chinese get from the spending in infrastructure programs are outweigh the disadvantages. Last year, the economics was really really bad. A lot factories in China were shut, especially the ones in export businesses. A large numbers of workers who worked in these export factories are from the poor areas of China and most of them are not well-educated. They earn money using their physical power. Infrastructure programs actually enable them to work in construction places. Therefore, they can afford their life.
What is more is Infrastructure programs makes the country more stable. Because if more people get jobs, there will be less crimes happened in the society.
There are some Infrastructure programs in my hometown. They are good for the local there. For example, the government built a special park for the old last year. My grandpa sometimes takes a walk there. Another example, the boss of my father is making a sewage treatment plant in a village now. It is known that methane gas is a better quality, cleaner and saver to fuel energy. This project is very valuable for the farmers who live there. And this project is Infrastructure programs too.
Posted by: ZhengHui at January 6, 2010 4:17 AM
…-
“No offence intended if I am off base here…but…
An obviously native-chinese-speaking poster, making the first comment on a posting that could be deemed critical of the Chinese government, at 4:17 in the morning.
Is ZhengHui employed by the Chinese government to whitewash any comments critical of the Chinese?
I don’t want to sound paranoid, but I have seen (on other sites out there) previously unknown commentors show up at a moments notice when the Chinese government is criticized.
My apologies if this is not the case…just my spidey sense is tingling…
Posted by: mecheng at January 6, 2010 4:44 AM”
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/013051.html
The situation in China is dire.
Jim Chanos explains this here.
To summarize:
1. China has overbuilt production capacity in steel, cement, and other areas, far more than they need internally or can export, via bubble lending.
2. China cannot grow any more (and its growth rate is likely phony “official” statistics) via marshaling resources and throwing money at the economy, productivity has to rise (as Krugman noted in 1994 predicting the fall of the Asian Tigers). Without rising productivity China will stay poor. There is no rising productivity.
3. China has overbuilt commercial real-estate, Dubai standards “plus” : there is a five foot by five foot square cubicle space for every Chinese person already built.
4. China has overbuilt residential real estate. It now costs about 50% of income to live in Beijing and Shanghai, a bit less in Central China.
5. Middle Class Chinese have spent their life savings buying investment apartments because there is no real formal savings industry that is trusted — the unrest from the middle class in the event of a collapse of the residential real estate market is a massive threat to the Chinese regime.
6. Dubai-style indicators: “World’s tallest village” outside Beijin, “new cities” being built (but empty) besides old ones in Western China, resorts in Tianjin built to resemble the continents, indoor ski slopes, etc. abound.
———————–
Timing is of course an issue, but clearly this bubble cannot go on forever and will not go on forever.
China thus faces huge disadavantages in unwinding the bubble:
A. It is now a net deficit nation, running about $200 billion a year in the hole.
B. It will find import restrictions in the US and EU and Japan over things like tires, or food, or various other aspects.
C. China produces “low value” goods that can be produced pretty much anywhere a factory is set up. China is known for poor quality and cheap, not high quality stuff.
D. China faces severe pressure to keep investment apartments at current valuations, while the renters/lease-holders want cheaper living.
E. Because China produces masses of cheap stuff, instead of manageable smaller quantities of high-quality stuff, it is extremely vulnerable to return to protectionism to protect local jobs in Japan, the US, EU, and elsewhere. Germany can ship a few thousand Leicas and Mercedes to say, Japan, and not disturb the local job nexus and STILL earn considerable export income. Not the same for China shipping millions of cheap cars and digital cameras.
F. Income remains very low in China, because productivity has not increased for decades. Capital investment in advanced, robotics driven factories that make each worker far more productive and valuable have not happened — instead masses of cheap semi-serf labor produce predictably shoddy goods.
G. A collapse in the Chinese bubble driven boom is likely to destroy export-driven resource economies and companies. Cement exporters, lumber exporters, and so on will be hit hard. Some countries and companies can have as much of 80% of their resources (Chile and Copper, for example) devoted to the Chinese building bubble.
H. China’s government driven command economy is likely to make things worse unwinding the bubble by protecting political insiders even more than elsewhere, reacting too slowly at first and over-steering later, likely causing a collapse of living standards very rapidly. China’s corrupt and inefficient banking system could wipe out the current cash economy, causing huge disruptions as all available cash is directed to propping up insider holdings.
I. Of course, when the Chinese are really pressed, they will sell off US securities, and various holdings in Europe, for whatever cash they can get, further depressing the market value of those securities (bonds, stocks) together. This will be the effect of going to the pawn shop to sell the family jewelry to keep the business afloat. The money achieved by selling current holdings is unlikely to plug the leaks or achieve social peace. But selling them is likely to cause plunging values for US debt and require huge tax increases to make up the difference, or an inflationary, near-worthless dollar.
Somewhere Do Ho is turning over in his grave!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MXgc8wzfC4
I won’t even pretend to pretend that I pretend to understand all that, Wretchard; however, it all sounds smelly.
What happens when the CCP wises up and starts chasing this money in whatever way – taxing expense accounts, cell phone bills, etc. I wonder what percent of GDP they actually get their hands on over there, and what they would like to.
What I’d like to know is whether the Chinese can, or think they can, wash some of this bad debt through US assets and in essence dump the baby on our doorstep.
I recall a Cold War fear that the USSR, having been a good borrower since the thirties and having racked up billions in debt over the years, would seek to destabilize the markets with some debt repudiation move of greater or lesser slickness – revaluing the ruble 10x, say, and paying off old-ruble debts at 10%. Not Armageddon, but as part of a ‘combined-arms’ integrated DIME strategy, it could carry punch.
Now, in Tom Clancy’s parlance, we have die-cast metal and injection-molded plastic toys, dog food, eyeglass frames, routers, steel, garlic and Cadillacs from China, and the Chinese have finely engraved pieces of green American paper. I’m still of the opinion that when you owe the bank $X trillion, you own the bank. We owe China and the world $X trillion.
China is riding this tiger because (as Ayn Rand would say) – blank-out. I don’t know why. At a guess it is worth giving us free stuff in a Ponzi scheme in order to modernize and industrialize their nation. The debt must be a writeoff in the councils of the mighty.
MUST be. They have to know that even if we can and will sweat mightily, loose all our creative engines, reinvent the wheel, in order to pay them, that it is the first trigger lying close at hand in case of any flareup bigger than an midair collision.
Too tempting to resist, especially in the hands of a weak leader – literally, it is free money. Just announce that we’ve “sequestered” the China debt, and that of any of its allies; that we have all the serial numbers, we know with whom they have and will buy/sell; that this time, money is NOT fungible; that maybe we’ll pay and maybe we won’t, but we just bet $X trillion that China loses this round. People tend to fold when you push $X trillion into the pot, especially when they can’t call. (Some Texas Hold ‘Em alchemy may apply here. I don’t pretend to understand the betting in Texas Hold ‘Em either.)
Will Soros buy up that debt at 10% – 1%? – of its value, and press harder on the buttons of the cattle-prod he’s got up the Left’s ass? Possible, though Soros is mortal too, after all. Talk about a high value target!
So circuit breakers must be popping over there twelve time zones away. What is the Chinese move to get out from under? Can they sink their dough into US assets, suck all the juice out of them, and leave dead dollar-denominated husks behind here?
If they haven’t thought of something – or at least aren’t trying to think of something – they’re not as clever as I think they are.
China has been playing the rest of the world for suckers for decades now.
They prop up manufacturing with government backing that would never fly in an economy with even the slightest transparency, even mega-corporations like Volkswagen or EADS in the EU, or among defense contractors in the U.S. can’t get the sweetheart handling with kid gloves treatment by every level of government common to most large manufacturers in China. Investment and insurance companies on the other hand may very well get the best treatment in the world at the hands of the current U.S. administration…
Chinese manufacturers operate in an environment free of regulation of any significant kind.
So long as the periodic dénouements arrive in the pockets of the proper party apparatchiks, the manufacturers need never fear an audit of their books or inspection by an environmental agency, or spot checks by the health and safety bureau, or paying their sewage or electricity bill on time. Etc.
The list of regulations standing in a U.S. or European manufacturers path is so intimidating that most companies employ entire departments or hire expensive consulting agencies just attempting to comply with the multiple and sometimes contradictory layers of local, state, national, and now, for the EU, those regulations as well.
In many cases, fully complying with the law is so burdensome and expensive that a decision is made to knowingly violate a certain number of regulations and to just go ahead and pay the fine if caught!
Imagine the profitability of almost any factory in the U.S. or Europe if they never had to comply with any of the hundreds of volumes of regulation governing everything from waste water emissions, to air pollution, to employee safety practices, to hazardous solid waste management, noise pollution control, etc.
Compensation for disabled or injured workers… They’ve never heard of it in most factories in China. Retirement pension funds… What are those?
I haven’t even touched on the difference in worker pay, which in some factories in China really is ZERO, they being political or criminal prisoners, and effectively slave labor.
We have a few prison factories in the U.S. They are prohibited by law from selling goods on the open market. The customers for their textiles, furniture, pencils and other low-tech stuff is exclusively the government, and mostly the military.
I also haven’t touched on Chinese currency manipulation or ridiculous government backed loans to questionable manufacturers that would never happen in a more transparent economy.
And the accounting, my G-d! In all honesty, most of it is closer to arithmetic propaganda, wishful thinking, and smoke and mirrors than anything that would be recognized as business, banking or cost accounting in the U.S. or Europe. Creative accounting at Enron had nothing on routine accounting practices at many large Chinese firms.
I’ve got to stop now, otherwise I’ll just go on and on, my blood pressure rising all the while.
To all you free trade crusaders out there who want to defend China: They’ve never had free trade since industrializing, EVER. The government has its thumbs in every sizable pie! Now it’s the reformed Communists, but before that it was the Nationalists, and before that the Japanese occupiers, and before that, the Imperial bureaucracy.
China’s method of business is the antithesis of free trade!
There’s more than one bubble in China. They are huge. They will deflate. Count on it!
Whiskey, I take it you think that the Chinese economic miracle ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
About all I can say is that we’ll find out. History is full of contingent events. Normally the best thing to do when you lack information or are waiting for fate to show its hand is you build up a reserve. That way when whatever it is shows up you can supply the reception committee. The worst place to be is out of ammo when the banzai shows up over the ridge, though I know I’m hopelessly mixing up my metaphors.
Some statesman once wrote (I think it was Churchill, but I’m not sure) that the most important duty of a politician is to do the common sense thing, because that is harder than it sounds. And sometimes I wonder why it is that governments or political alliances are driven to do almost anything except the common sense thing. Almost as if “it would be too easy” for them to do the reasonable thing. Barbara Tuchman once wrote a book called “The March of Folly” in which she tried to answer the question “how could they be so stupid”?
Every time I read about some Muslim guy stuffing a bomb up his butt I wonder about human nature. And then I think of Global Warming and wonder if any civilization is immune from self-induced imbecility. In the end maybe only providence will save us, if it does deign to. Some months ago someone asked me who would survive a total economic meltdown and I said “three countries, the USA, Canada and Australia”. Was it because the governments were smarter in these places? Their public policies any better? Did they have a greater amount of civic wisdom? I said no. It was simply because they had sufficient landmass to grow their own food and had oceans on either side of them. Humanity goes on, often in spite of itself.
The idea of hanging all the lawyers may have merit, but I think it pales behind hanging economists, bureaucrats, and politicians who believe in central economic planning. People are too stupid to handle anything that complex, especially since the parts of the “machine” consist of people who will change their behavior when the rules are changed on them in mid-game.
The “academic authorities” quoted by Katie Brenner are just such fools. Running economies by fiat from above has a rather disastrous history ranging from the USSR to wage and price controls elsewhere. Ignoring basic economic principles like the law of supply and demand or that you can’t continue selling something for less than it costs you is like ignoring gravity. You do so at your own peril.
Kinuachdrach @11:
One of the many virtues of a real free market economy is its self-correcting and self-regulating nature.
Yes, the economy is orders of magnitude more complex than the best computer models of it. There is no way that the worlds best trained, wisest, smartest and most talented minds can control it effectively. It just can’t be done.
That’s one reason everything is swirling down the economic commode at the moment.
We have a bunch of over confident academic blowhard trying to perform cute parlor tricks with sizable portions of the world’s largest national economy.
Many people who know about investing, banking, or business in general are afraid the charming but inebriated amateur magicians are going to dump the best crystal and silver on the floor when they try to pull the tablecloth off!
Consequently, they’ve removed their place settings for safekeeping, and are waiting for someone to eject the disruptive drunks before sitting down to dine and converse in a civilized manner once again.
If the statists would just get out of the way of the free market, and confine government intervention in the economy to ensuring that trusts and monopolies don’t rape consumers, much of this current mess would self correct in 18-36 months. It wouldn’t be pretty, but it’s going to happen sooner or later anyway.
A return to free markets gets the pain over quickly, so we can endure what we must and get to building for the future.
It is hard to see what is right in front of your face, but if you want to see what is right in front of your face, here is a video of New Ordos, a city that China constructed for one million people – a city that is entirely empty.
http://dailyqi.com/?p=11649
i once knew a lady from China
whose beauty near gave me angina
a magnetic Isis
she kept me in crisis
wanting to probe her financial accounting procedures
Speaking of contingent events, maybe this is simple-minded, but it seems to me unless China figures out a way to make “sustainable” test-tube babies on a mass scale, all this talk about their economy is somewhat academic, isn’t it? Mother Nature will not tolerate a vacuum.
#22 Buddy Larson
“financial accounting procedures?” –I’ve never heard it being called that before. Shame on you. Children might be reading these comments.
Buddy/22
Not taking that one on, though I do remember a beautiful Chinese lady once asked me if Waltradamus had crystal balls, and I told her, no, he uses tarot cards.
re #13: That’s a fascinating thought, Maz2. Does seem like more than coincidence that he would take such an interest. And not unheard of – David Axelrod made his name by doing this commercially for candidates and companies, he and his team were so successful that now he’s Obama’s right hand man, of course. And then there Cass Sunstein, Obama’s internet advisor who openly advocates covert government intervention on the blogs in order to push opinion in a “proper” direction.
http://palestinethinktank.com/2010/01/13/got-fascism-obama-advisor-promotes-cognitive-infiltration/
So, is Obama taking lessons from the Chinese or are the Chinese taking lessons from Obama and his team? Interesting question.
But I wonder what grabs their attention – probably keywords like Economy China Growth Encouraging Questions, things like that. Support Business Strong. But you know, if they were reading, I would tell them that you know, it’s a lot better if you were to gain the sympathy of someone who wasn’t an outsider. Shanghai Export Investment. It can’t be that hard. The arrangements would have to be private, but – umm, a couple hundred a month would probably be fine, I’m just sayin’. Hypothetically, of course. Of course.
I heard from a guy last week say that you don’t ever want to invest in vertically integrated chinese companies–or an of the russian republics–for that matter. That is, companies that get their own raw materials internally and then turn them into widgets. Because whatever cost they put on their balance sheets for their raw materials is wildly over inflated. The difference between the real cost of raw materials and the reported cost is pocketed by company officials. Investors come up empty handed.
I used to travel to China frequently. It’s my observation that things in China are not always as they seem.
I was a big short seller during the Japanese bubble. But, it lasted much longer that I anticipated. Thus, I only recouped my losses at the collapse. Further, I have to use derivatives to do so – which is always dicy. I think the same applies to China.
To be even-handed, Obama, is trashing the dollar and his “federal budget accounting methods” are probably just as bad as Chinese accounting methods – just look at our “Social Security Fund” (Now, the Federal Reserve still has some credibility).
In 1995, I was in Hong Kong which was soon to turned over to the PRC as the British left and it was booming (and loads of British Chinese were heading for the UK) . I felt sure that the real estate was over heated. To my amazement the government drastically slowed new building projects and the bubble bled-off in a somewhat orderly fashion.
When I would travel to China proper (Shanghai, Bejing and cities in Zhejiang province) the yaun was pegged to the Hong Kong dollar and the Hong Kong dollar pegged to the US dollar at eight to one (the net yaun exchange was about 8.14 to 8.2 for each US dollar).
During that time foreigners to China had to use different colored bills for commerce (and they still had paper jiao bills and tin fen coins) which was ridiculous because as soon a I would buy a meal the foreigner’s yaun bill would be spent and I would receive regular colored yaun bills in change. So, my foreign bill soon became regular yaun bills. The Chinese government did away with that system.
Because Hong Kong restaurants and other business did not accept the yaun foreign travelers just spend as much of their yaun currency before the left China – making a win-win situation for China (sure, I kept a few yaun bills for future trips but very few).
To invest in Chinese stocks in the mid nineties was a contorted process where the stock had to trade in Hong Kong or be based on a off-shore island. I bought some Chinese stocks such as China Telecom and some oil stocks that did well. But, it was cumbersome. What helped these foreign stocks was the fact that they paid dividends in US dollars. That caused clever Chinese speculators to register as foreigners and buy the foreign version of said stocks just for the US dollar dividend – which increase the demand for said stocks.
Toward 2000 the real estate in China appeared to over heat. In 2002 the Chinese were accepting foreign investments in housing developments and in my mind appeared very over heated (further, I did not invest because I was unsure of the land ownership issue). In 2004 I was seeing huge developments that seemed unjustified – yet they still kept building.
I had a relative in China and he was hearing fantastic stories of locals becoming rich in real estate. I knew a nurse who bought a house in a run-down area in Zhejiang province only to see the value skyrocket as an “urban renewal” program was instituted in her area. She basically quit nursing and lived off the value of the house.
Further, I ask an other nurse about the house her parents were refurbishing and she indicated that it had seven stories. Since, my Chinese was not so good I re-asked the question and the answer was the same – seven stories high. So, I kindly ask her see the seven story house. She was happy to show me.
The house was concrete structure with seven stories. The interior was high quality and the floors were hard wood (modern glass sinks and toilets of hotel quality and exterior metal fire escapes). The family rented out the floors not used by them (kind of large vertical “duplex or triplex”).
The real estate was booming at that time and I did not see any slow down. The central government tried to put the breaks on the economy by tightening lending standards – but the clever Chinese found ways around that.
From my discussions with locals the big cities such as Shanghai, Beijing and so on actually had more control economically that the central government. The taxation process was basically a national sales tax which was embedded into the price of items. But, after the sun went down, street bazaars open up and tax-less business transactions were done at a fast pace – including the adult service sector.
From what I can see, the Bank of China (which also serves as the central bank to a large extent) is still opaque. The actual reserves and reserve requirements are not precisely known. I believe that to be a weak link in the Chinese system.
On the other hand our Federal government’s budget accounting seems fairly opaque (they spit out numbers but one can only judge by the actual increase in outstanding debt).
As for measuring economic activity on the Chinese version of “GDP” that is akin to measuring Corporation’s net income by Gross Revenue. It doesn’t really work well. Until China (PRC) and its central bank become more transparent I would be somewhat leery about speculating China’s economic future.
China could be in a bubble situation as the Al Jazeera film clip depicts – or hidden entities are waiting for the younger generation to pay full price for those empty houses.
I will say that there is open talk that the younger generation is interested in building wealth – opposed to the older generation which is wielded to the communism and the communist party.
The Chinese still use the ‘Good old Boy’ buddy system. With the yaun in a semi-floating environment the Chinese can be very clever and very deceptive. I have a feeling that it would be difficult to successfully short their economy. So, pay your money and take your chances.
China has been engaging in classic mercantilism
but on a much grander scale than has ever been
seen before.
Thus the consequences will probably be on a grander scale as well. The idea that an authoritarian government can overcome natural law be decrees and draconian punishments is ludicrous.
Usual outcome is something approaching a currency destruction. This is why Buddy’s
favorite panglossian picked the Yuan as one that would “go Weimar”.
Euro is looking a little pale around the gills too. Another one of Pritchard-Evans
predictions.
In other words, it looks like those other folks have made the same mistakes we have, made them in even larger degree, and have less ability to correct than we do.
We got us a world-wide wringout going. And like Wretch noted, we are the ones who can ride it out the best without going into outright deprivation.
I am particularly amused by the nail-biting
over what would happen in the Chinese decided they wanted to—or had to—ditch all those T-Bonds they have bought.
Why, the consequences would be that (don’t tell anybody now) all of us could buy Treasuries at steep discounts, thereby assuring eventual capital gains and giving us a respectable cash flow in the meantime.
What a revolting development! Herbert Hoover Obama does not like it one bit.
marymcl: Good point you make. Why do people see what they want to see and nothing else.
Maybe that can be explained by the story of the two Irishmen digging a ditch.
Across from their workplace was a house of ill repute. As they worked they noticed a Rabbi entering said establishment.
“Tsk. Tsk. And he a Man of the Cloth.”
“Ah, them Jews. They never were any good.”
Next person to enter was a Minister.
“Tsk Tsk. And he a Man of the Cloth.”
“Ah them Protestants. Hypocrites, every Mother’s Son of them.”
Digging away they next saw a Priest make his entrance. Both of them then stood at attention, held their hats over their hearts and exclaimed in unison: “Ah, The Noble Father! Sure and somebody must have died.”
I believe it is called “conditioning”.
The money quote is the CNN article, that “a number of academic authorities … claim that even if a Chinese bubble popped its effects would be speedily managed by an authoritarian Communist Party which is far better than the West at managing such crises…”
These undoubtedly are the same academic authorities who crown themselves and their colleagues in op-eds and with Federal appointments as our Platonic Masters of the Universe. “If only we had more authority over every aspect of the commoners’ lives we would, in our infinite wisdom, make the rubes see the light and follow the right path to economic prosperity and social justice.”
Meanwhile, back in Rubesville, an amorphous, growing mass of graybeards, small business owners, tradesmen, and apprehensive 30-somethings are stuffing pocket sized copies of the U.S. Constitution into their handbags and pockets while expressing their opinions that the government has it all wrong with its massive Federal spending.
We are in the early stages of a whopping clash of values that will transform America in ways never intended or even imagined by Messrs. Obama and Stern in their many private conversations.
King George had a higher favorability rating in 1776 than does the U.S. Congress today (about 30 to 20). Although you will never see it in the New York Times any sentence that begins with the words “Scientists say” is now being read as “Political hack Professor X is being paid to say.” The unholy alliance of scientist, politician and the tax-man in the global warming fraud has turned the light of science into a penumbra of perturbation. I could go further and say that the Enlightenment has officially ended with the last detour from the road of reason and logic into the wall of patrician self-interest. Maybe it’s just a restart, but that’s another story.
We The People don’t like politicians, holier-than-thou academics, or a colossal Federal government. I don’t know how this is going to play out but when we have already arrived at a time when Joe Sixpack has started to actually read and discuss the Constitution while getting screwed with higher taxes and falling house prices – watch out. Times, they are a changin’.
You gotta’ believe that there is no such thing as coincidence when The Who appear out of nowhere to headline a Super Bowl halftime with “We Won’t Be Fooled Again.”
Ledger @ 28:
)
I have visited China and our company does a lot of business in China, and I have to say a lot of what you say rings true (as if you needed some affirmation!
The Chinese are pretty shrewd as a people about money and their lives, somewhat like Americans USED to be (but the majority of us are no longer).
A friend who used to travel to China constantly remarked that the Chinese he met in a battery factory (his well known company bought cell phone batteries from a Chinese factory) were all looking to save enough money to start their own companies. They didn’t care that much about “security” of keeping a good job, they wanted to gamble on “prosperity”, by becoming entrepeneurs.
China has an ostensibly “communist” government, which tries to manage the national economy, but underneath is a level of hard-core capitalism, which is the real energy driving China.
China may have big unpleasant economic upheavals in the near future. A quick read of the political history of China over the last 500-600 years shows that every dynasty ended in a violent upheaval. Right now, China is in the middle of the “Mao-communist” dynasty, which has had plenty of detours since the Red Brigades and Cultural Revolution of the ’60′s.
But I don’t believe that the Chinese economy will evaporate in a puff of smoke next week, or in the next five years.
A friend of mine who works (or did, he got laid off) for a company that builds machine tools told me an interesting story about just how understandably strange things are in China.
Briggs and Stratton built a factory in China to make their small engines for use in China. It ran 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and was quite successful, there being a big demand for the engines. They sold 50,000 engines in the first year. In the second year Briggs decided to figure out what their engines were being used for; they had very limited insight into that.
A study showed that there were 165,000 of those engines in use in China. Briggs management was shocked; they had sold only about a third as many by that time.
Investigation revealed that when the Briggs factory shut down at the end of an 8 hour day, the Chinese started it right back up again with a different labor force, using a different set of electric meters to conceal the fact. They were running 3 shifts a day, with two of them being for the Chinese Briggs plant and one being for the American Briggs plant, with profits flowing accordingly.
So there is a lot, a whole lot of stuff going on in China under the radar. We may not appreciate how much money there is in the country but we also don’t appreciate the way that money is being used, either.
And what if, fed up with the professional experts of academia, government and the media, a nativist streak takes hold in the Tea Party or Tea Party like movement, perhaps triggered by a Taiwan gambit played from Beijing. Who’s going to buy “Made in China”? What happens, as with the Stamp Act, enough Americans refuse to buy at any cost?
Don51,
All the IT done in the US is underpinned by low-cost components from China. Ditto telecoms, electronics. We Americans may “talk tough” about China, but we are totally hooked on buying all kinds of merchandise from them.
I look at my desktop in from of me, and what do I see?
A Kodak color printer, made in China.
A flat panel display, made in China.
A Canon laser printer, made in China.
A Dell computer, with half the components inside made in Asia or China.
A cordless phone, made in China.
Tell me again about this refusal to buy things made in China? We are so over a barrel with these guys.
We have China right where we want it and they have to be worried and fuming(see Saturday Night live skit with “Obama,” “Chinese head of state,” and diminutive lady translator).
Normally the creditor controls the debtor, but if the debt gets lethally large the creditor controls the debtor.
The moment the mainland initiates provocative acts against Taiwan, the President by fiat cancels all debts of US citizens to China.
We will thereupon add one Latin phrase and one English word to the Mandarin vocabulary: “quid pro quo,” and “bankruptcy.”
No matter what stresses impact Chinas’ economy, they’ve positioned themselves to be a Producer Nation, with an Educated Citizenry, focused on Tangible Skills and Achievement. I think of them as the polar opposite of Amerikwa – the New Center of Cultimulcheral PC BS
Yes, yes they have an authoritarian central government, and we are moving that way …. as can be seen by conscious observer.
The difference is that we are increasingly a devolved nation, focused on ephemera. Today ? … never mind study, work, or Productivity …. SuperBowl !
A perfect paradigm for what we’ve become.
ledger @ 28: On the other hand our Federal government’s budget accounting seems fairly opaque (they spit out numbers but one can only judge by the actual increase in outstanding debt).
Sure. Tell me about the accounting of the social security trust fund. Tell me what the fed is now holding after spending a trillion dollars to buy up bad assets, and wtf it is currently worth. I guess it’s officially public knowledge where the TARP money has gone, but show me a summary.
Not to mention numbers like the CPI and (un)employment figures. Greenspan was one who started fiddling the CPI twenty years ago. I’m not saying it’s easy or straightforward, but I suspect it has underreported inflation by about a third, since then. “Saves” on social security payments – and union contract increases. And of course the (un)employment numbers never tracked a lot of legit small business activities much less grey and black markets, and has this big hole for “discouraged” workers, and has huge fudge factors anyway. That’s not opaqueness, it’s noise, which is just about as bad.
E. Nigma: what are the life expectancies of those items?
For the record, seeing Don Ho sing Tiny Bubbles was the worst part of my honeymoon.
I read the thread. I read the comments.
What did I read?
Well, that there is no transparency in Chinese economics and of course we know obama has shut down any transparency in this country with the help of Goldman Sachs, The Fed & Treasury.
In other words the man & woman on the street really don’t have the foggiest idea what’s what in global economics. The “experts” don’t really know either. So we seem to be back at the Melian dialogue, where Thucydides stated.
“The strong do what they have to do and the weak accept what they have to accept”
http://www.thalassa.france3.fr/ (video of the 5/02/2010)
a beautiful and interesting report on Djibouti, and how this place is becoming the most busy harbour of the African corn, by being the only door for trades, that are benefitful to Ethiopia and Erythrea
How Addis Abeba is becoming a copy of the “Chineses inhabitations bubbles”
China’s sphere expands
America’s bubble bursts
All things go around
Josh, I believe it was Volcker who fiddled with the CPI. The huge run-up in housing prices in the 80′s, during the late Volcker term, was not reflected in the CPI.
About hard data, freight measures are available. Rail is revealing because it moves raw materials predominantly but also finished goods. The hundreds of trains mentioned above cumulatively for the year are still below 2009 (-.7) though minerals and ores are trending up. Note that Canada has greater growth than US carloads.
http://www.aar.org/NewsAndEvents/PressReleases/2010/02/~/media/AAR/Weekly_Traffic_Reports/trf1004.ashx
George Will weighs in on the topic. George will be depressing.
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/93334/
nut grafs:
two large possibilities anticipated by Robert Fogel, a Nobel Prize-winning economist. They concern the rise of American health spending and the even more dramatic rise of China’s economy…Writing last September for the online journal The American, published by the American Enterprise Institute, Fogel warned that spending on health care is going to surge, for two reasons: By living longer, Americans will become susceptible to more health problems. By becoming richer they will be able to purchase more biotechnologies that make health interventions more effective.
(…skipping much explanation)
This demographic destiny might entail starving every other sector of society — including national defense, at great cost to America’s international standing. It had better not, given what Fogel argues in another essay, this one in the current issue of Foreign Policy. It is titled “$123,000,000,000,000.” Fogel’s subtitle is: “China’s estimated economy by the year 2040. Be warned.”
He expects that by 2040 China’s GDP will be $123 trillion, or three times the entire world’s economic output in 2000. He says China’s per capita income will be more than double what is forecast for the European Union. China’s 40 percent share of global GDP will be almost triple that of the United States’ 14 percent.
Fogel finds many reasons for this, including the increased productivity of the 700 million (55 percent) rural Chinese. But he especially stresses “the enormous investment China is making in education.”
While China increasingly invests in its future, America increasingly invests in its past, the elderly. China’s ascent to global economic hegemony could be slowed or derailed by unforeseen scarcities or social fissures. America’s destiny is demographic, and therefore is inexorable and predictable, which makes the nation’s fiscal mismanagement, by both parties, especially shocking.
***
Meanwhile, David Walker said in a FoxNews interview the other day that the reason Obama assumed on our behalf five plus trillion in contingent liabilities by essentially turning F&F bonds into US Treasuries last Christmas Eve, is because China and Japan demanded it, demanded (a special pleading?) dollar-for-dollar return on their holdings in F&F, or else, presumably, they go on the market for whatever they’d bring now.
We can do one of two things, in my estimation: bring in a new financial team (i like Steve Forbes and John Turner), or just go ahead and cede California to China. Well not all of it, just the counties already lost to the public-employee unions. We’d want to negotiate a first right of refusal, so China can’t resurvey and sell plots to unscrupulous developers, possibly from Texas, which is loaded with dough because it only lets its legislature meet every two years, and even then only for four months (the state constitution holds that the people need this attenuation in order to minimize opportunities for what it terms “legislative mischief”).
Flash –Yulia Tymoshenko assassinated in Ukraine! oh jesus –
Unsk @ 44: Josh, I believe it was Volcker who fiddled with the CPI. The huge run-up in housing prices in the 80’s, during the late Volcker term, was not reflected in the CPI.
Could be, sounds right. I suppose it’s been fiddled from day one, but wasn’t it Greenspan who started the quality of life / substitution arguments?
I mean, even the Dow 30 and SP500 have to change members now and then, but my recollection is to Greenspan in the early 90s and again in the late 90s, and recall the impression even then was that this was to offset the inflation his own policies were causing.
–
buddy, link? Yulia being presidential contender in Ukraine.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/07/AR2010020701454.html
KIEV (Reuters) – Ukrainian presidential contender Yulia Tymoshenko’s campaign team cried foul as voting was under way in Sunday’s election, saying it would contest results in the region which is the base of her rival Viktor Yanukovich.
Prime Minister Tymoshenko, who led the 2004 street protests which propelled her to prominence and humiliated Yanukovich by denying him victory in a rigged poll, has vowed to call people onto the streets again if the current poll is falsified.
http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=1z&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=ukraine+news&oq=ukraine
nothing yet on google news –i just caught the end of a foxnews crawler “…tymoshenko killed…supporters blame opposition” …(then the crawler shifted to a kleenex plant in CT which had a big industrial accident …)
WTF ???
LINK BUDDY! I see nothing on Drudge,Tass,AP??
Akatsukami @ 39
“What are the life expectancies of those items?”
3 -5 years. Which means we (that’s us Americans) will want to/need to replace them. In a business model, that is a recurring market sale. Which means we will continue to buy this stuff from the Chinese to replace the obsolescent/broken stuff we bought 3-4 years ago.
As I said, we are so over a barrel with these guys.
It was a power plant in CT named Kleen energy. Under construction/rehabilitation work. No word on what caused explosion.
As far as the debtor/creditor relationship we have with China goes. It works like this. When you owe a man a thousand dollars and can’t pay it is your problem. When you owe a man 14 trillion dollars and can’t pay THAT is his problem.
The real fly in the ointment here is the quickly increasing pressure on China to do something with the men and material that they have amassed. With so much over productive capacity and no way to move it China has the same options as Japan in 1941…
It was a campaign staffer –one of Tymoshenko’s campaign staffers murdered –(whew) –sorry for hollering ‘fire’ in a crowded theater –damn –
it’s the general election there –today –nerve city –
Nothing on Kiev Post either, although they are sporting this update:
National Exit Poll: Yanukovych has been elected the next Ukraine’s president. Change Yanukovych to Putin and that would be about right.
FWIW Russia + Ukraine is very close in combined military power to the old Soviet Union.
Thge west stimulated the Orange Revolution, then made for the exits. Such a black eye for electoral systems vs the continuity of the alternative. or i should say, vs the continuity, plus enough oil to export.
Well, elections –real ones –are something Ukrainians won’t have to deal with anymore. KGB can put the Dioxin back in the fridge, too.
***
Meant to add this into my #46 above, in the last para –re the topic of our weakness vz China. Some of you saw it weeks ago the first time thru, but here tis again –it’s important i think.
http://reason.com/archives/2010/01/12/class-war/print
Even Tymoshenko wants closer ties with Russia. The people of Ukraine have spoken. It was anything but a black eye for democracy.
The only thing I see is that Timoshenko tried to throw out results from 1,000 polling stations in eastern Ukraine.
And to claim that Yanukovich is stuffing ballot boxes…please, as if her thugs and the Banderisti in Lvov aren’t? They didn’t try to seize the ballot printing warehouse with her interior minister’s backing?
I know, I know, the Democrats in the U.S. always use ‘the Republicans rig the voting machines and tell ‘our (gullible) people’ that the election’s on Thursday’ as excuse for padding their total with the dead and motor-multi voters circulated in union vans from New Orleans to Chicago to Miami. So what’s different about this case? Why should the U.S. give a crap if either one wins? Why is Ukraine our problem?
Other than…we get in to a shouting match with the Chinese over Google (which Uncle Sam was probably using to spy on the Chinese Finance Ministry to see how serious they are about buying less Treasuries) and piss them off with arms sales to Taiwan; we place SAM ships between Israel and Iran and now the WSJ/WaPost/Economist usual anti-Russia suspects are going to be calling for America to once again stand up to those evil Putinists and back the poor democrat Timoshenko. And meanwhile, Yanukovich’s last advisory firm in 2008 was led by a guy who advised the McCain campaign, with no contradiction whatsoever between his work and that of Saakashvili hired flack Randy Scheunemann.
Does anybody else smell some weirdness here? Who needs to beat the war drums right now to distract their people from the fact that the government is going bankrupt?
I’ve done several searches, checked AP and Reuters headlines – not a word. I finally sent a message to Drudge – “Ukraine Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko reported assassinated?” or some such wording. (There’s a box at the bottom of Drudgereport.com page inviting readers to mention breaking news tips.)
I’m sure some Belmont reader or host will come up with information. We’ve seen plenty of examples that we’d best not wait around for the U.S. alleged News Media to acquaint us with anything of actual importance.
(“Boy, you sure are a cynical guy!”)
From Yulia Tymoshenko’s personal website:
“February 7, 11:30am – Yulia Tymoshenko’s campaign manager Oleksandr Turchynov will give a briefing. Location: 13 Turivska St., Kyiv” [i.e., "Kiev" as we spell it...]
Evidently the second round of voting in the election/vote to select Ukraine President is scheduled for Feb 7, with results to be announced within the next 24 hours or so, and Tymoshenko has been a candidate seen as having a good chance of winning. (She received second-highest total in previous election.)
http://www.tymoshenko.ua/en/
I’ve noticed several times that when some person of note dies, that person’s entry in Wikipedia is one of the first places the notation appears, simultaneously with breaking news flashes.
For what it’s worth…
At least with Putin there is no distracting song and dance. He wants your stuff. He tells you he wants your stuff. He will take your stuff unless you are bad enough to stop him from taking your stuff.
Old world politics are easy. The East never got washed and spun in the gentle suds of political correctness.
fiddler –see 54 above –im really sorry for going off half cocked like that –i caught the end of a trailer –the part i missed said ” a staffer of ” Tymoshenko assassinated –and so forth –i panicked and jumped the gun –i feel like a wuss –have to go outside and do some chain sawin’ now –get me a terbacky chaw goin’
***
MrX/59; yes that worries me too. if FDR is the model for this bunch –look into Hopkins and Ickes, FDR’s war-wanters in the background eyeing Japan. Ickes’ son for gosh sakes is a high up policy man for hillary –
PB/62; i agree re Putin –i wish we could have the hard-ass SOB ourselves for a term or two.
I find it strange that one or two posters have talked disparagingly about the “Banderists” and Stefan Bandera.
The Ukrainian Partisan Army was in the unlucky situation of having to fight the Nazis and the Communists at the same time. Since at the beginning of WWII Stalin had starved 19 million Ukrainians to death, would it be likely that the Communists would brand anyone resisting them “Nazi-collaborationists?” Anyone recall Russians being moved wholesale into the Ukraine’s black earth region to cement Soviet control?
After declaring an independent Ukrainian state in 1941, Bandera was locked up in a Nazi prison camp. In 1959, he was poisoned by a KGB assassin.
Don’t you guys read any Alan Furst?
Why do so many Ukrainians react positively to Bandera?
China’s economic woes are nothing compared to the demographic time-bomb it has. While the bubble will surely burst within the next two years, the sheer industry and hunger of the Chinese will probably get them back on track.
Whether or not they can break away from the boom-bust cycle will depend on whether they’re going to continue sticking with fiat currency and central bank controls.
Commenting about Coity @.58 and Mr.X@.59 -
Tymoshenko’s team had announced that they would “not recognize” (i.e., contest) the results of polling stations where she had no representatives.
It seems a little far-fetched to assume Yanukovych has paid bloggers waiting to pounce and sway opinions in Belmont.
But I suppose it is possible that there are expat Ukraine readers who favor one candidate over the other.
I guess my preference for someone like Tymoshenko would be that I prefer an independent Ukraine as counterpoise to a re-constituted Russian Behemoth. As far as I can tell, Russia under Putin is just as aggressive and expansionist as Tsarist & Soviet era, just hasn’t “hit its stride” yet.
limpet/64; you’re right –someone should’ve called that out –well someone did –you. I’m just accustomed to Mr X –he habitually marbles in the Putin case as asides in amongst his major points. Nothing personal, Mr. X –you’re friendly and a good writer, and an excellent indicator of what we should look at –that being, whatever you say we shouldn’t look at –LOL –
i still hope against hope that Russia and USA can team up against chaos –people like Sharansky and Kasparov give me great hope –Russia prob needed Putin –existentially –but may not need Putinism –aggressive nationalism approaching xenophobia –in the future. “Where there’s life there’s hope” –
nothing here about Tymoshenko “assassination” too
Wobbledy, Are you saying that China’s acutely delineated MULTI-CULTURALITY could be as toxic to Chinese stability as, say, the unassimilated multicults in UK, Quebec, CCCP, India, Thailand, and many other regions????
Heavens FORFEND!
Hey! Wait a minute!
Isn’t that multi-cultural phrase a code word for ISLAMIC JIHADISTS????
“19 million Ukrainians” that’s a huge number, cuz the recorded deaths becuz of Stalin are 25 millions, so why alone so many Ukrainians ?
But a violent gaz explosion in a Connecticut electric centrale
Mad Fiddler, I was actually referring to the male-female imbalance. That IS considered a demographic issue, isn’t it?
“The Ukrainian Partisan Army was in the unlucky situation of having to fight the Nazis and the Communists at the same time.” They were pretty crappy at fighting the Nazis, if they tried at all. The link I posted talks about them being recruited by the Abwehr prior to Barbarossa. Yuschenko tried to make them national heroes of Ukraine dropping his popularity from 5% to 3%. But pointing these stats out is a ‘Putin’ thing, right?
And what makes you think Timoshenko is so independent? She wasn’t until she started losing elections but I think even in Washington they’re getting tired of her opportunism and long for a cleaner alternative. Ditto for a non-tie eater in Georgia.
Sharansky is a citizen of Israel now – which also has visa free travel to Russia
I’m sure buddy remembers that slogan, “everytime we have a Republican president we have a Depression, every time we have a Democrat president we have a war…(WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Kosovo).” There are some Dems who don’t mind the war president label for sure. I’m old enough to remember the anti-Serb propaganda in the 90s.
Mr. X
I have no doubt that when the Nazis rolled in they were treated as heroes. I have no doubt that some Ukrainian resistance fighters assisted the Nazis. Stalin they knew and who was to help them, FDR?
Marie Claude
Tin-Tin knew Stalin for what he was. The estimates are Stalin killed somewhere between 25 million and 65 million. He made Hitler seem like the tooth fairy. The number I have for the Ukrainina famine (which is crediting with driving Mrs. Stalin, a nurse, into an insane asylum) was 19 million. The below figures say only 7 million. Numbers of this magnitude are impossible to verify. They are just estimates, but there can be no doubt that magnitude did not deter Stalin.
Below from: http://markhumphrys.com/soviet.html
The Stalin period, 1924-53
[The Black Book of Communism, Ch.7] shows that even in 1930 there was still heroic peasant resistance to collectivization. Brave peasants even managed to kill hundreds of Soviet officials. But the Soviet state slaughtered 6 million of them.
The Ukrainian Famine (and here)
In 1932-3, Stalin and his butchers deliberately starved to death around 7 million utterly innocent men, women and little children, mainly in the Ukraine. Their food was stolen by the government, and every measure was taken to prevent them obtaining any food.
In World War Two, the west was allied with this sick genocidal monster – the worst case of realpolitik in the history of the free world.
The Stalin terror (and here)
The Great Terror, Robert Conquest, 1968 – estimates that 5 million people were murdered in 1935-8 alone.
Rudolph J. Rummel (and here) estimates 4 million people murdered, with a possible high of 11 million people (see here and here), in 1935-8 alone.
Genocide
The staggering cruelty of the monster Stalin
World War Two
Not so well known, and hard to believe, is that even in World War Two, the Soviet state was still the no.1 killer of Soviet citizens, with the Nazis no.2. Even in wartime, Stalin’s regime was killing more of its own people than even an invading barbaric army could.
In general, totalitarian government is more murderous than all-out war.
It is also often forgotten that the Soviet Union was allied with the Nazis for the first 2 years of the war.
The Soviet famine of 1946-7 (1 to 1.5 million dead) was again caused by the Soviet government.
Pravda was founded in 1912 and became the official state newspaper after 1917 when freedom of the press was abolished. Pravda (which, comically, means “Truth”) supported everything the Soviet butchers did from 1917 to 1989.
The comic book Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1930) sounds pretty accurate in its description of the brutal Soviet state. Bizarrely, the Tintin author was later embarrassed by it. I don’t see why. He got it right first time.
Poll: Yanukovych wins Ukraine election http://bit.ly/98m9ym
MrX, you must keep two things in mind –
one, the nazis before the murdering started had a different image in eastern Europe, than later, after they went berserk. this is quite critical a distinction –it contains a universe, so to speak.
two, with the Holmodor so fresh in the Ukraine, the memories of the Red Guards from Moscow ‘ethnic-cleansing’ open some settler space for Russian-speakers, how COULD you mock the Ukrainian nazi-sympathizers (bearing in mind point #1 of course)?
Don’t you think most anyone would be ‘for’ whomever was ‘against’ Stalin, in that time before the nazi murder porn entered the picture?
I know you don’t realize how close you are coming to saying that Ukraine shared the Himmler/Hitler ubermenscen religion. This would be a cruel slander of the victim if it’s not true, and if it IS true, then you would have to account for how a Slavic people could share that ubermenschenism, which included the Slavs as the heart of the undsermenschen?
Some of us have read extensively about Stalin’s brutal liquidation (“Murder”) of the Kulaks in Ukraine in his efforts to impose collectivization on the agricultural industry of the Soviet Union.
Agriculture, because that had been and continued to be the PRIMARY productive industry in agrarian Russia and its subject territories.
Ukraine’s Kulaks were targeted because they were vocal and visible in their resistance to collectivization. The Kulaks were the middle-class merchant-farmers, who owned their own fields, and employed others in all sorts of agribusiness activities, or even small-scale family cheesemaking, herding and gardening. When Stalin’s big-brains in Moscow announced that the central government would only pay so many kopeks for a dressed hog carcass, and so many rubles for a carload of milk, the Kulaks chorused, “Drop Dead!” shot their hogs and poured their milk upon the ground, and refused to do business with the central government agents.
Stalin sent in the secret police to begin terrorizing and murdering resistors. A Farm owner would be arrested, taken to the police station, ostensibly for questioning; in reality, to be shot and buried without announcement. The Farmer’s gray-haired mother would come to the police station to inquire about her son, and SHE would be taken out back and shot.
Meanwhile, Thousands of Red Army troops were arriving by train. They began circulating among the farms, confiscating all grain, vegetables, animals – anything edible. The foodstuffs were loaded onto railway cars and taken away. Stalin sealed the borders of the targeted region (“Oblast?”), withdrew the troops, and let the inhabitants starve.
As many times as I’ve read about this and pondered it, I still can’t wrap my brain around this.
But Stalin could.
Evidently this program was continued through the 1920′s and into the 1930′s, resulting in the deaths of tens of MILLIONS of Ukrainians. This was not done secretly; it was Stalin’s purpose to be certain that the rest of the subject peoples saw precisely what to expect should they resist.
Presumably, the people of the Ukraine reasoned they might get a better deal from the invading Germans.
Oh, well…
(Dear Mr. X, I’m one of those folks who suspects Clinton was cravenly trying to buy “good will” from the world and domestic Muslim community by painting the Serbs as the enemy. All the reports I saw at the time seemed to indicate that both sides were employing genocidal “ethnic cleansing” programs against each other.)
My understanding is from my own fairly haphazard research, not any scholarly rigorous program. I would welcome correction, especially with references or citations of sources.
Limpet6
Seems that some Russians forgot what kind of butcher was Stalin, they still think that in the balance the good things of stalin era are the heaviests
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/21/russian-communists-please_n_399872.html
“For some, Russians Stalin was a cruel tyrant who sent millions to their deaths as he built a totalitarian system that corrupted the ideals of the 1917 revolution. But recent Russian teachers’ manuals have described Stalin as an effective manager whose terror campaigns were necessary to turn the Soviet Union into a superpower. One pupil at a school in Volvograd, formerly Stalingrad, the scene of one of the Second World War’s bloodiest battles, said: “For me, Stalin was not a hero but as far as I know he was a very good person.”
http://www.euronews.net/2009/10/30/medvedev-laments-russian-youth-views-of-stalin/
agree, USA/NATO went off the rails for the first time in the Bosnian War –in that new ground was broken using the power of a compliant press to push personal power agendas where they could not have otherwise gone. the first modern instance of the now-oh-so-familiar combine we fight today. Clinton was good with innovations from hell.
I don’t think anybody has to apologize for the Ukrainians siding with anybody to get rid of the Russians. You can count the years of authentic Ukrainian independence on your fingers and toes.
That being said there are so many Russians in the Ukraine that it’s difficult to say that it’s not already part of Russia. Culturally it already is and has been since almost the first Duchy.
My own DNA was scrubbed with some Ukrainian soil from around the time of Dostoevsky. My uncle, who speaks fluent Russian, has researched the matter and he cannot say to a certainty if our ancestors are Ukrainian or Russian.
So now, at a minimum, the world’s Most Powerful Crime Syndicate gets to add a few million more button men.
Brother Larsen
Clinton the draft-dodger wanted to be bellicose to counterbalance his personal history. Senior officers I knew were perplexed by his style. As far as they could figure the reason we went anywhere was it was someplace we had NO national interest. If we had no national interest, the conflict was pure and virtuous.
Clinton wouldn’t have dodged the draft if only he had been offered a pure conflict.
I have no doubt he would have risen to field marshal if only we’d engaged in a war with the Amazons (provided no national interest was evident, only prurient interest).
Chinese banker worries about a bubble:
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2010/02/central-banker-chinas-economy-is-too.html
Chinese real estate is in a massive bubble and the signs of a meltdown are already evident:
http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/2010/01/china-is-bubbling.html
BTW China has pushed $2.4 trillion into their economy in 1 year. Their problems will get really bad when they run out of foreign exchange.
Wretchard, when I was in China (briefly) I toured a GE-part owned Cement plant. As part of the partnership with the State, the plant recruited rural Chinese as their workers. It was a constant battle to keep the workers from relieving themselves in stairwells and using the bathrooms as kitchens. They were functionally illiterate, and while it was not mentioned much, it was strongly implied they were low-IQ.
This then is the reality of China. The great mass impoverished, still, with little education or prospect of the same (particularly with a corrupt government unable to marshal great resources in education to bring productivity boosts by giving the rural poor the equivalent of High School educations). The coastal elite a thin veneer of educated, westernized, and affluent consumers. The mass of Chinese production very inefficient and based on lowest cost — there is always someone cheaper. No real intellectual property rights or rule of law (hindering both native Chinese inventions and foreign direct investment as that bubble cools off).
Google, and a few others pulling out of China for various reasons (mostly they were not making money) is significant. China has not gotten rich enough to justify the expense of operating in that nation.
The fake city of Ordos, empty and ridiculous, is chilling.
Unfortunately we have not kept our powder dry or kept reserves. Obama has spent all the margins, and will keep spending.
IMHO, we face a confluence of events that will likely have a Chinese collapse along with Iranian nukes, a mid-East War, mass terror attacks on Western cities, collapsing both trans-Oceanic container trade and the international financial system. As Mark Steyn points out, if a system is unsustainable, it is not sustained. Greek Tax collectors may go out on strike as he notes, but that just hastens the collapse of Greece (and pushes Germany and France to kick Greece out of the Eurozone to focus on Spain). Indeed I would not be shocked if the Turks, in the throes of Islamization again, simply seized the rest of Cyprus and maybe a good part of the Aegean, including Crete. Weak and laughable Greeks could do nothing about it, nor could weak and laughable EU or Obama. Seizing the land would bring great approval to the Islamist Government and it could set about to recreate the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans by moving on first Greece then the rest, all of which are weak.
In turn this pretty much guarantees a tight embrace with Russia (as the Balkans protector) and nuking up against the regional threat of Turkey and the Turks. The Turkish regime in turn can pretend to “solve” the crisis of a moribund economy and refusal of Europe to admit it into the EU plus a big youth wave by conquest and exploitation.
As you point out, in the collapse of a global financial and trade system, the US, Australia, and Canada provide their own food, have energy resources, a good bit of mineral and other resources, are isolated by oceans (though threatened by migrants) and also have Gold & Silver reserves. IF paper money is so discredited and distrusted, silver coins have a long history of an acceptable means of exchange.
But what is just as likely is the emergence of the “Scott Brown” figures, in these countries. Veterans who have “got things done” by doing the common-sense things that are critical. Not tied to party and activists and lobbyists by long political careers. More trusted by voters who sense they have the same “skin in the game” as they themselves. Essentially replacing the Newt Gingrich, Nancy Pelosi, Obama figures.
“it was someplace we had NO national interest”
except Soro, who was aegering to buy Serbs gold mines at a lower price
MC, Limpet; Habu believes Clinton was ‘turned’ –if only a little, a favor’s worth — when as an Oxford student he spent some weeks in USSR as part of a student visit –which was actually an anti-Vietnam War student visit. Habu says it was KGB SOP to make a run at western students who looked like they might be helpful someday (Young Clinton is gonna resist one of those sloe-eyed beauties?). Then look at what many Russians will tell you, that when a military machine appears out the west and starts killing off Slavs, then Slavs will start looking for a war leader. What was the elapsed time between Bosnian War and Putin election –a year?
Whiskey,
I have also been toying with your Ottoman resurgence scenario. For a time I was scanning the regional newspapers a few times a week for some evidence of local concern. Other than Turkey itself Islaming up there were few stories to suggest that it was enough of a legitimate near term scenario to keep paying attention.
Perhaps events within Turkey itself coupled with the maturing Iranian threat to everybody else in the region justifies another look. It’s not like we don’t have centuries of history to guide us.
“Turn” a Yale student of the ‘Sixties?
Wouldn’t have been cheaper and easier just to stay out of his way?
doubt if it cost ‘em much, Limpet –”Look, Natasha, just walk past that big red-faced dumbass and see what happens.”
Late coming but relevant:
Watch this trailer: Soviet Story
From a review:
It fills in the missing pieces. Among these are the philosophical and strategic documents that linked the Nazis and Soviets, the Soviet holocausts, Putin’s communism, and more –, events which generally only the most astute historian ever learns about. But they are all here, in a presentation that is certain to educate.
Maybe we should dig up Howard Zinn and make him watch it.
Peter, traditionally the Persian Shahs and the Ottoman Sultans were at each others throats as the “legitimate” successors to the Abbassid Caliphate destroyed by the Mongols. Turkey always had to watch its back, so to speak.
Recently, the Turkish and Iranian regimes have reached rapprochement about Central Asia, spheres of influence, Syria (and the Kurds), all issues of fairly great importance to the former Turkish regimes that had deep suspicions about the Iranians.
Read of that what you may. To me it seems that Turkey has ambitions, at least in Cyprus and perhaps sensing Greek, European, and American weakness, in Greece itself. They certainly have a lot of young, poor, male supporters who will turn on them shortly if they don’t have something to do and a future they invest in. Traditionally this has been solved by Turkish regimes through conquest. It is not as though Greece could even fight back, or NATO would act: NATO is a few good special forces from various European nations, comprising about 5,000 men in total, plus a few brigades of men marching in uniforms with no weapons or ammo or anything else, and the Americans. The latter of which is headed by Barack Hussein Obama.
Turkey has generally bad relations with the Iraqi regime, for what it is worth.
“In fact, to keep things flowing, it might open the spigots on exports and try to grow its way back, doubling down on its main engine of growth”
China cannot solve its problems by selling us stuff we cannot afford at prices lower than production costs. The market is a force ofnature and the day of reckonong eventually comes. What we are seeing now is a variations on the trade barriers countries erected in a vain effort to protect domestic jobs and markets during the Great Depression onlynowinstead of tariffs the predatory trade practices involve currency manipulation.
Keep the bubble rolling by keeping the Yuan cheap and the dollar high. Sellthe USA crap at less cost or less then use the dollars to buy American Treasury debt to keep the cycle running for one more revolution, one more revolution because otherwise there willbe a revolution. But Obama is creating so much debt that the US is going broke much faster than anyone imagined was possible.
The end game in all this is not going to be pretty as the countries of the world try to screw each other to buy themselves a little more time. Somebody has to eat the loses of these bubbles and if the markets are not going to be allowed tooperate in their own efficient manner then all their foce will be built up behind a damn or a levee until finally it all breaks out at once in giant cataclysmic flood.
In the late 1970′s a shirttail relative Navy Captain visited us before heading to Athens to start his new duty as commander of a U.S. communications facility. At a long relaxed dinner, he and a man who’d immigrated from Cyprus discussed the relations among Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus since the British partition and withdrawal. One thing they agreed upon: recently discovered oil deposits in the Aegean would figure into the future contests among those parties.
Since that time, I haven’t heard a peep in U.S. sources about Aegean Petroleum.
Well, I guess there have been a few peeps…
Here’s an article indicating pollution of the Mediterranean (and Aegean) waters by oil tankers – according to figures cited in the article, the sheer volume of oil dumped in clearing the bilges of bulk tankers beggars the spill of the Exxon Valdez.
And here’s a New York Times article dated 24 March 1987 describing mounting tensions at that time between Turkey and Greece over territorial limits surrounding the myriad of islands in the Aegean.
An excerpt:
“Greece said over the weekend that it had sent letters to the NATO Secretary General, Lord Carrington, and Secretary of State George P. Shultz after Turkey sent an oceanographic research vessel accompanied by warships close to Greek islands in the Aegean.
Turkish press reports said Greek warplanes flew over the vessel before it headed for the Turkish port of Canakkale late last week.
The Turkish action, a Greek statement said, constituted ”a grave provocation which the Greek Goverment is not prepared to tolerate.”
A Sharp Protest
The tone of a Greek protest delivered Friday night to the Turkish Ambassador, Nazmih Akiman, was sharper than usual in the long dispute between the two nations, Western diplomats said. The two are partners in NATO but are mutually hostile.
Turkey rejected the Greek protest, a Government spokesman in Ankara said on Saturday, adding that it was determined to continue oceanographic research because it was not in breach of international law. The spokesman denied Greek charges of provocation.
In the Greek account, the research vessel, the Piri Reis, accompanied by two Turkish naval vessels, sailed around the islands of Lemnos, Samothrace and Thasos.
A Canadian-led consortium including American and West German companies has said it believes there are major oil deposits 11 miles east of Thasos.“[my bolding]
Here’s a link to an academic site examining the conflict. “Disputing the Continental Shelf Region in the Aegean Sea: The Environmental Implications of the The Greek — Turkish Standoff” Seems to be based on data from as late as about 1996.
Here’s an article from the end of 2008 titled Greece, Cyprus, and Turkey: of gunboats and oil.
Lots of powder kegs, lots of open flames about.
Off Topic:
I am late to the party here and must say that Wretchard has once again outdone himself.
While reading of the G7 meeting, I stopped like I had hit a brick wall. The meeting was held in Iqaluit? You have GOT to be kidding. Have any of you ever been there? What was the problem? Was Hell already booked? I had to overnight there once while ferrying an aircraft from the U.S. to Sweden. Minus 43 degrees celcius. Howling wind driving the wind chill index to minus 100 degrees celcius. Blinding, driving, snow. Few services. The only hotel was part of an enclosed shopping center. Believe me, seeing foot-long strands of Inuit hair on the floor, from the barfights in the hotel, at 0430 is not the best way to start your day.
Sorry for the rant but, I am flabbergasted that the G7 would inflict Iqaluit on its members.
Iqaluit was chosen to keep protesters away.
Whiskey,
You might have hit the nail on the head. Tie-dyed T-shirts would not be suitable for the environmment. Besides, all the throwable rocks, etc., are frozen to the ground.
On an even further off-topic, try the Muk-tuk at the hotel. It’s frozen seal fat. Delicious — if you are an Inuit!
‘e just didn’t know
where anarkos won’t go
but after asking an Eskimo
Inuit!
94. whiskey:
Yeah–the ones who seek “social justice” at any cost to anyone and everyone else (themselves excepted) will not go anywhere where there are not five star hotels for them to stay.
Good point.
Josh,
You’re probably right about the CPI being fiddled with from the beginning. Most of the Fed Chairman of the last few decades didn’t distinguish themselves. As for Greenspan, ya he had his share of screw-ups, but compared to Bernacke, I’d take him back in a heartbeat.
A few posts back Buddy speculated that there was a backroom deal between the TBTF Banks and the Clinton guys/Dem Finance guys to push the CRA in exchange for some extreme regulatory favors for the banks. In hindsight, that looks highly probable. It explains a lot of things. But where was the Fed in all of this? The Fed had to be involved which soils both Greenspan and Bernacke. The Fed looked the other way, when Fannie and Freddie, the CDS and the derivatives crowds were running amok. Too many things went wrong to say that the regulators just weren’t minding the store.
“Yes to Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia, but What About Turkey?
What is more, within the same context, the condition of Bosnia Herzegovina and Albania, which are not supplied with the same opportunity, also supports it. That is, I wonder if these countries are kept out of this application just because they are Muslim”
http://www.turkishweekly.net/columnist/3275/yes-to-serbia-montenegro-and-macedonia-but-what-about-turkey.html
Well Turkey, morally, can’t have such a project of invading greec islands, as it is still a candidate for the EU membership, the above article is interesting, it gives many reasons why Turkey’s accession to EU is frozen though.
Now, Germany and France have already manifested their intention to slow down the new candidatures to EU membership, cuz of the constraingnant economical charges, and Greece is becoming a nightmire, so, for sure EU progression is going to stop for a while.
hey
two thoughts.
1-jack belch…err welch. how many millions has that a-hole made on pumping the fairy tales of China Inc. how much suffering has he caused with his out and out lies.
2-tommy freidman who like the putz he is took on all serious short sellers and defended the gold plated future of the middle kingdom in the near future. another a-hole raking in the seminar fees…vomit.
had a great debate this afternoon with a friend that felt the next faux-science bubble to burst was AID funding and the related HIV/AIDS industry, which is a total sham. had some doubts.
thoughts…
So much to comment on in one thread.
Regardless of whether if is merely a matter of complexity, or if there is deliberate opacity and a swindle in progress; the lack of understanding between Chinese and Western business practices means that someone gets taken and hurt badly. It is similar to the theory of deterrence in warfare. Both parties have to share enough values and concepts so that they mean the same things, so each side can rationally calculate the other’s reactions and have some hope of being correct. If there is a difference, especially one that pops up without warning, then really nasty things are going to happen.
If you add in the extremely high likelihood that the Chinese have goals and means in play that we do not, then it IS going to get nasty and we are going to be holding the wrong end of the stirring stick. #4 bdavis has it right.
#11 Kinuachdrach
Complicating any evaluation of the economy is the painfully obvious fact that the figures coming out of the government are suitable for composting just at first glance. The growth of the GDP does not match tax collections or employment data. The employment data is dependent on the most blatant fudging imaginable, and indeed if we use the regime’s methodology of dropping unemployed people off of the statistics; 6 months after the last privately employed person loses his job we will be at statistical full employment. And the figures themselves are dependably subject to revision, always downward, after people stop looking. The BLS is beginning to resemble Tokyo Rose in reporting massive victories as the retreats continue.
I would watch the U6 employment data, tax collections, and both domestic and overseas shipping rates and utilization. Given that we do not manufacture much anymore, the lease rates for shipping containers and utilization to and from our ports are telling. A few months ago, container companies were giving major functional rebates on charges, just to avoid finding somewhere to stack the unused containers. That means we are not importing, which means we are not buying. We are no where near the bottom of this.
#13 maz2 and #26 wws:
I would give it a high probability that it was a paid troll/minder/agent. The Peoples Liberation Army has what is functionally a cyberwarfare branch that is all over the net. We are constantly under hack attacks at both military and critical civilian sites. The use of direct intervention into discussions online would be a logical follow on in keeping with their desire to shape the discussion and future battlefields, and in fact is a tactic used by the Russian FSB/SVR/GRU today, directly and by proxy.
All officers and officer candidates in the PLA are required to read a book titled in English, “Unrestricted Warfare” [the Chinese title actually comes out better as "Warfare Without Bounds"] by two Col’s, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. It is published as an official textbook by the PLA’s in house publishers. Here is access to an edition [4 parts] in English under the links “PLA Colonels Unrestricted Warfare”, and it is available elsewhere online and in printed editions.
Here is a link to a list of some of the modalities used:
http://www.defensetech.org/images/coleman-unrestricted.jpg
Yeah, our country’s enemies are all over the net.
———–
A number of people have already set the record straight here in the thread about the Russian genocide of Ukrainians. I would just add that much of the seized food was exported as “proof” that the Soviet system worked and created plenty. An American hack named Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for himself and the New York Times for a series of articles praising the collectivization process, lying directly about the famine, and covering it up. Duranty’s superiors at the NYT knew he was lying and yet were proud of publishing it.
#83 and #90 whiskey:
May I add to the mix that much of Turkey’s past moderation of conduct and/or shaping its conduct to match the desires of the EU was in hopes of being allowed to join the EU as a full member. This is probably not going to happen, and they know it. The grounds are in reality based on culture and religion. In fact, France, Germany, and Austria are at the forefront of the opposition.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8241543.stm
Since there is realistically no chance of them ever advancing from candidate membership to full membership, there is no reason for further moderation. I would not be surprised to see Turkey try to take over the rest of Cyprus, which will have some very interesting complications.
*Greece and Turkey are both members of NATO.
*Greece is a full member of the EU and Turkey is a candidate member.
*Greece is part of the “PIGS” group of countries whose finances are subject to EU sanctions and it is not yet properly subservient to Brussels.
*While it is not widely known, Turkey is a fairly major regional military power. They have the most capable and professional Muslim military force, and have powerful out of area force projection capabilities. On does not take on the Turks lightly.
Which side does NATO come down on [noting that the US will either keep out completely or under Buraq's regime side with the Muslims]? Which side does the EU come down on …. and by what means? What complications will this have in the Middle East? And what does the Bear do?
More popcorn.
Subotai Bahadur
OH, BOTHER!
Forgot to insert a link in #101 above:
Here is access to an edition [4 parts] in English under the links “PLA Colonels Unrestricted Warfare”, and it is available elsewhere online and in printed editions.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/report/1999/index.html
Subotai Bahadur
The Russians are taking it for granted that the Ukrainians will go quietly back into the fold. Russia is a country that has its hands full with Chechnya, a place smaller than New Jersey and with a quarter the population. That is fewer people than Maine. If the “Little Russians” start logging shells at the ships in Sevastopol or otherwise committing mayhem this could unravel very quickly. Putin is building a ring of resentful neighbors both outside and now within his tent. Five years ago Russia was poised to become a normal nation with trade and energy resources and some post imperial issues to unravel. Now they are once again finding themselves surrounded by the enemies that they are creating.
Granted that the opposition to Stalin was in an impossible position but that does not excuse cooperation with the Nazis. If the Ukrainian nationalists had established themselves as genuine partisans fighting the invaders they might have established stronger roots among the people.
To be blogged as “Yanukovych Leading.”
I always like to point out that the financial crash here was timed with the immediate end of the Olympics in China.
With the end of the Olympics, there was a coincident drop in Chinese importing of goods and services.
All of it was the smoke and mirrors to make the Olympics look good to Western ideas. As soon as that was over, and the illusion had worked, pop! No more demand for nothing! No more building fantastically expensive infrastructure for nothing! Pop!
It was just a small pebble but that decline started an avalanche. There are more pebbles when China is forced to stop pretending in other places too. Even the tiniest change in their workforce employment, importation of goods, or other props will facilitate it.
And finally, my conspiratorial brain suggests that the reason no one will tell us what happened to the original pre TARP funds used to supposedly bail out our banks is because we gave them to China.
http://www.rfi.fr/actufr/articles/109/article_77549.asp
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,615041,00.html
Turkey ain’t going to invade any greec small islands or whatever spot in Mediterranea, she doen’t need to, cuz that would tell the countries that she had worked so cautiously with since a couple of years, that she isn’t faithful, included her role as a mediator in the ME conflicts.
Now, it’s sure that she had turned to the Russian side, and Arabs countries, but mostly because she want to improve its economy and international position as a potential “leader” of the region in solving conflicts
Erdogan has much more to worry with his inner policy than to plan an invasion, the army party is said to plot a “coup d’état”, at 56% in the last poll in Turkey
Also she’s got the plain and definitive voice at the UN in 2009, and certainly doesn’t want to loose its new credibility
This is an excellent blog that explains Turkey’s policies to the Dummies, but, sorry, in French
http://ovipot.blogspot.com/2010/01/2009-le-bilan-de-la-politique-etrangere.html
I dunno where Michael Steyn took his ideas, certainly not in reading turkish or european papers, probaly from Apocalypse scenarists, that work on PC models like the global warmists
who said Canada was a safe place ?
Canada Fears Housing Bubble http://on.wsj.com/aSDd9U
The Met Office told them that Iqualit would be warm in February due to that global warming thing. They held it there to prove to everyone how warm it was getting.
You probably think I’m kidding.
@108 wws
I hope you’re right about that, ’cause right now it’s 9 below zero with a wind chill of -37
http://tinyurl.com/yamxhup
marymcl; ww; I don’t know about Iqualit, but for sure there are frigid conditions in the nether regions.
THE SAINTS WON THE SUPER BOWL!
Ukrain. So, Sunday morning a go to brunch…9ish. Our waitress is an absolutely stunning 20-year old 5’8″ blonde. An eleven. Brunchmate and I are both smitten. From a grandfatherly POV of course.
She’s got a real presence. She’s a topnotch waitress. We find out She graduates CU Boulder in June. BSEE. I’m thinking where were these goddesses when I did the same thing 45 years ago, when the first E dealt with vacuum tubes? She wants to get her masters in materials design. Couple of questions and it’s obvious she’s the real deal regarding nanotubes, chipmaking, telecom, etc.
Her tag says Stasia. I ask if it’s short for Anastasia, and she nods yes. I’m wondering about what nationality(s) could produce such a rare combination in one package, so I ask if by any chance she’s Ukrainian.
She’s says, “Yes I am! I’ve been here 8 years. I just got my US citizenship last week.” Natrually, both of us congradulated and welcomed her aboard.
Blame BC, but I asked her what, when she was in school back in Ukrain, did they teach about the Holodor? Blank.
How about kulaks? Blank.
I said if you rather not discuss it, it’s perfectly okay. She said in her perfect English, No, I just don’t know those terms. ??????
Is this a “memory hole”?
Downtowndubai @100,
I certainly hope the HIV/AIDS bubble is the next to go poof. Anybody with a basic understanding of scientific process and logic will realize there are huge holes in the current construction of HIV and the evidence for the entire artifice.
I remember looking at the directivity of China a couple of years ago and the handwriting was on the wall, even then. China has taken in a significant number of Non-Performing Loans to underwrite their industrial sector in the 1990′s. They moved those into loan vehicles backed by the government and put into a 5-year schedule to be paid off. Then refloated those 5 years later. Now, ten years after the original float, those investors want their money. Back then it was speculated that at least 30% to as high as 60% of the Chinese economy was underwritten by bad loans.
The crony capitalism of the State lending money to its friends who then go into NPL status, walk away and then seek new loans is amazing. I am not surprised at other problems appearing when cash is readily flowing and not accounted for and bundled into securitized loan vehicles for overseas consumption. What has got to be chilling is that the secured loan vehicles that the Chinese paid into, in the west, are going belly-up due to the same sorts of finagling, like in the US home mortgage market. Without the flow of western hard currency China has little to keep its economy floated…
And as it sought so many people to leave the farms for the factories, it will have a problem feeding those people unless they return to the extremely low productivity farms that have had zero investment in them. Soon too many men, too few women, too few farmers, huge debt burdens, no hard cash coming in… this is not the prescription for good times ahead. And when you look to the western part of China, we can remember that the old Taliban was staging insurgencies there and that a new ethnic problem is fomenting. Something is going to give in China and it won’t be pretty.
Then there is the demographic bomb of too many old old people and the shortage of women starting to bite in China.
In Asia the businessman may have studied accounting but he reads “The Art of War” and/or
“The Book Of Five Rings.” It is nothing to be shafted on a business deal by a relative. It gets shrugged off as “just business.” You might say that business is war by other means in Asia. If you gripe about getting the shaft you can lose face and people will try to shaft you harder.
G/111; The young Ukrainians –i know a few young adults –Univ of Texas students (daughter majored in Russian language) –who came here as youngsters, with parents and grandparents, when Gorby opened the door –they’re a little bit uncomfortable with the topic –actually with the whole topic of Stalin, dictatorship, repression, Communism –it’s definitely not a favorite subject –the kids will look down, look away, and you can almost hear them thinking, ‘don’t want to go there’ and ‘this is now that was then’. Another thing, if the young lady was a Russian-speaker she was probably from Kiev and may not’ve had or known any old folk relatives among the Ukrainian-speakers from the rural farmlands that took the brunt of it. Anyhoo here’s a couple vids produced by remembrance organizations:
http://www.wntube.net/play.php?vid=1643
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=33350184
If there is more money in China than reported, how come the worlds biggest mall there is empty? Watch the video. In it Chinese workers say they’re happy to see Westerner’s there. I wonder why? Because Chinese are not buying stuff!
http://www.piggynannan.com/2009/12/22/south-china-mall-dongguans-world-largest-ghost-mall/
Buddy, impressing images
MC/117; i wish i didn’t believe it but i do. There’s just too much evidence –too many witnesses –not to.
Buddy – glad you recognized it wasn’t Russia that turned a previously defensive alliance into an offensive one, ordered its forces to fire on peacekeepers (why I could never support that Clinton crony Gen. Wesley Clark, God bless Gen. Jackson for refusing to start WWIII for him and blood and guts Albright back in 99) or armed Saakashvili to the teeth to a far greater per capita extent than Moscow ever armed Chavez. As for LOTM – I keep telling him half of Ukrainians consider themselves to be Russian, go to Crimea and ask, McCainiac Orangeist dreams aside…
LOL on Anastasia…yes there are many. And I doubt the undergrad Clinton would have failed to notice one like her back in the USSR, much like Obama who stood next to Sarkozy eye-ing the Brazilian beauty. No offense to Teresita or other American ladies who frequent BC, but there’s a whole world out there and if Whiskey is so angry with American women I hope he meets a foreign lady who would change his mind about women chasing Big Men in general and that it’s not too late for him once he gets out of California.
No offense to Teresita or Marie Claude here, but since I’m protected by pseudo anonymity (Wretchard knows who I am but keeps his confidence) – Slavic women just try harder to look nice, take care of men who take care of them rather than camping out like zombies in front of the TV etc. And having travelled to Paris, Prague, Warsaw and Moscow, I can testify to being far more impressed by the Slavic ladies (though Czech women also show strong German influence as they like the Teutons are simply taller and bigger than the smaller Frenchwomen). When I was a single man even the American ladies who worked out and had nice jobs weren’t nearly as attractive as foreign women, for the simple reason that the rock climbing chicks with ‘big guns’ looked as quick to dump you for half of Whiskey’s older Big Man as to love you.
Ukrainian women, of course, are known in Russia for being very practical, even more so at times than the Russian ladies. While else would you accept proposals from a man twice your age that you have known for two weeks? Yet I cannot blame them anymore than Wretchard can blame the Filipinas, who at least still like America and Americans in general despite horror stories about abuse at the hands of U.S. husbands. The flip side in recent years of course is psycho women who jump on a man then go after him with a knife or club once stateside knowing they can get an easy divorce plus green card.
One thing I have noticed on some forums for U.S.-Russian marriages is that the often well meaning but clueless 50something U.S. husbands get humored by their twentysomething wives, who out of tradition aren’t going to contradict their men. For instance, a 50something Chicagoian saying that there was a greater selection at Jewel Osco than for his bride back in Moscow (really Moscow region, although if she travelled on the electrishka she probably could find more than in Chicago), that there are no automatic car washes in Moscow (snicker, not true since at least mid-90s even in the regional towns), that the Illinois Tollway Authority (this was the part that most annoyed me) is so advanced and nice compared to Russina roads (when in fact in Moscow there are fewer potholes than in Obama’s Chicago, and that even the local bratvas would never dream of ripping ordinary people off to the extent that the ‘public-private partnership’ ITA does) etc. Luzkhkov also gets stuff done whatever else you want to say about him. This is of course, part and parcel with James Fallows’ experience in China. When did Americans become so bad at building stuff, on time and on budget, and start accepting substandard Internet and cellphone service at prices they would never dream of charging in Moscow or Shanghai where there is more competition?
I can assure BCers that although you or more likely to run out of certain things at a ‘just in time’ inventory Moscow grocery store, you will also pay five to seven times less for potatoes and tomatoes in season than you will at Jewel or Whole Foods. And I doubt the difference comes from Mexican pickers getting paid so much better than Turkish or Morroccan pickers. And don’t get me started on the King Corn cartel putting corn syrup in everything in America, ballooning the American ladies (with Mexicans being the hardest hit population), and buckwheat being an exotic health food in the U.S. as opposed to a staple like in Russia…
Two vignettes about China and business.
My wife works for a Chinese clothing exporter. Their process works like this: First, find somebody who wants clothing manufactured cheap. 2. Get the parameters for the item to be made, ie: thread count, thickness, cut, etc. 3. Create a sample that exactly meets every requirement. 4. Get the order for several hundred thousand units. 5. Manufacture said units with substandard materials, lower thread counts, to save money. 6. Customer refuses to accept the order, complains bitterly and never does business with them again. 7. Sell the product at a loss. 8. Get the rich sister to pay to cover the losses, keep the company open, including buying expensive new machinery. 9. Wonder why they aren’t profitable. 10. Rinse and repeat.
This cycle has gone on for years. The idea of actually not trying to cheat the buyers never occurs to them, I don’t know why.
2. My wife is Chinese from a part of China famous for beautiful silver products that would sell well in the US. I have repeatedly proposed the creation of a business venture to do so. She has consistently refused because it would involve depending on people outside the family to provide goods and services on a contractual basis, and she just can’t trust them.
The big reason China will never be a true competitor to the US is that there are no bonds of social trust outside the family. You can’t build a strong anything in China in the long term because there is a fundamental refusal to trust anything outside the family. Yes, there is a lot of hoopla about greater China based partly on national pride and the threat of foreign enemies, but get right down to it a sense of national unity is not in their hearts. They’ll say the right things and do the right things so long as they are being watched by the authorities. Absent direct supervision, poof! it all dissolves into chaos.
Interesting insight, Tamquam.
Though an American, I was an officer of a Canadian company for several years in the late-’Eighties.
At board meetings, one director would hold court. He was also on the board of a Chinese venture that made jeep tires. He felt like the next Marco Polo and on the crest of the next wave. He’d tell us about the grand board meeting in China and we were all jealous.
Two years later he go very quiet about the whole matter. Eventually someone asked him why.
Here’s what we learned. The Canadians got the company going and for a while everything was hunky-dory. Then suddenly the Chinese told their Canadian partners they were making too much money. The Canadians pointed to the percentages laid out in the contract. The Canadians pointed out that they took a risk and that they provided the technology. The Chinese were unrelenting. The Chinese simply hammered that the Canadian partners were making “too much money.”
The Canadians held their ground.
Suddenly the Canadian managing director in China was arrested on a trumped up charge. It was clearly a ploy. After that the Canadian directors would not go to board meetings in China for fear they would be arrested. I don’t know how it all ended up, but I don’t think the Canadian partners prospered.
Another problem with doing business in China, beyond the family level of trust, is it isn’t pure capitalism. The government will interfere when it finds interference useful. You aren’t just dealing with the business entity across the table. You are dealing with a government that views business as the moral equivalent of war. You are dealing with a government that will use its police and intelligence services to gain a commercial advantage.
Mr X
are you in love with a russian girl, like in the movie “The Russia House” ? which,BTW, I watch yesterday night, and I’m still jaelous of that beautiful Kathia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Russia_House_(film)
But I had my times when russian girls weren’t fashionable yet, even in St Petersburg, in the seventies, we, the French girls, (and boys) were some kind of “models” that they envied
here is a beautiful commercial with matrioshkas, in the same vein of “the house of Russia” movie atmosphere
http://www.coloribus.com/adsarchive/tv-commercials/smirnoff-red-matrioshka-144967/
some funny videos about the “crazy” slavic souls”
http://mysoupis.blogspot.com/2007/03/slavic-vodka-party.html
http://mysoupis.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-make-russian-movie.html
heh –i was reading MC and MrX’s posts and remembering that the Day the Hormones Hit, i looked up, and there she was, climbing the charts in the south Louisiana preteen sticky page men’s magazine underground market, BRIDGETTE BARDOT, usually in black & white, not bare but wearing something about to slip off or blow away, and looking into the camera with (a look thitherto, but no longer, associated with idiocy) eyes half closed and mouth half open.
American gals –then –dare not have that look on their face in public, not down south anyways. Then for the longest, it seemed the French look was the thing –delicate, carnal, mysterious –oooo la la
Limpet/121; FoxBizNews just had some guy on the tube talking the Chinese auto market. half-listening i missed his angle, but did note –and paraphrase below –a couple stats and an observation along the lines of yourn:
“in 2001 there were 40 million driver’s licenses issued, now there’s almost 140 million”
“in one 2 year period lately, more road was paved than in the previous 50 years –when the government wants to do something, it just does it, and fast, too”
“Boone Pickens estimates that just for the asphalt alone, for roadway China has already planned out, will need one billion barrels of oil”
“Boone Pickens estimates that just for the asphalt alone, for roadway China has already planned out, will need one billion barrels of oil” All the more reason to switch to gas, since the Chinese wouldn’t be so uppity if they depended on the northern countries for something for a change. Though one could argue they are really at our mercy since we can inflate away their $2 trillion in a few months.
This is why Russia’s Ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin revived Gorby/Bush 41′s idea of a free trade/security zone from Vancouver to Vladivostok. He also mixed in some Solzhenitsyn Harvard speech material about the due from the ‘South’ coming due, which in his context meant NATO bailing out of Afghanistan like the Soviets did and Russia having to fight the jihadis with only its allies left in Central Asia to help.
Rogozin also, BTW, has a mean streak rebounding on the paint versus American and Belgian ballers at NATO headquarters in Brussells. I’d like to see him go up against Obama
haven’t read it yet, mr X, but Drudge has a fresh header up high, saying Chinese Military wants to sell USA bonds –to “punish” USA for something or other, maybe Taiwan or Tibet. but, doesn’t sound like they’re overly concerned about inflation in USA –I’m sure they’re seeing the deflation overwhelming it –or Obamanomics keeping the greenback print in the banks and not M2.
Re free trade/security zone w/ Canada –Russia’s already replacing USDollar with Loonie wherever she can in reserves –may be trying to flank China’s move into Canada. But –Russia needs to get its message on point –all that saber-rattling re the North Pole, the Siberian Shelf, the flag planting at the Pole undersea, the press releases about ”Russian military expecting a war over polar resources” –suddenly the Canadians are modernizing their navy and i think even old Uncle Sam is thinking another big icebreaker or two. So, now it looks like the new line is because the old one backfired!
“black & white” pics ? uh, then you’re an “old boy”
here the BB site:
http://brigittebardot.unblog.fr/
there were some big differences of style with me though:
http://bokedou-an-hanv.blogspot.com/2010/02/in-sixties.html
Wow –MC you’re a doll alright –but you should’ve been watching your step instead of the camera –all that pigeon caca –LOL –
yeh –old boy –”front boomer” –before long we’ll need a new appellation –maybe from ‘boomers’ to ‘wheezers’ –or ‘groaners’
yes I was a doll and took profit of it as such, until I found the right person ; uh, there were not such “cacas” on italian tourists places by pigeons, as in Paris with dogs “cacas”
MC: Krasiviya!
Buddy – correct on the Canada stuff, they have dialed back the polar martial glory since slapping down the tie-eater in 2008.
If there’s abundant gas in less brutal climes south of Yamal (including likely shale/recovery gas in the Urals) then the great north will be more valuable as a highway than as an offshore drilling site once the Arctic coast gets ice free.
If Murmansk and Archangelsk can become great rail hubs for cargo from East Asia to EU (compare the sailing times and Suez fees) and Solzhenitsyn’s dream of making the Russian Arctic bloom might come partially true. But I don’t think it will all really happen before the Mother of All Engineering Projects, the St. Herman bridge between Chuhotka and Alaska gets built cerca 2050.
Remember they just got the big rigs built in the Caspian, and that’s a sunny paradise compared to the Arctic continental shelf. So likely no blood for oil on the ice.
MrX, hmm, so it WAS all about Bush –well then now that he’s out of office, Georgia gets the real estate back?
–S Ossetia, the south of the winter-impassable mountains strategic military jump-off goes back, as long the tie-eater stays exiled an hour up the road from me in Crawford?
–and the Sevastopol supporting, NATO de-Turkifying, Abkhazia naval base doesn’t get built, as long as Bush keeps the Sabine River between him and the Potomac??
–and Alaska, yes, i’ve tossed back a few vodkas with more than a few Russian ex-pats, who as much as they love America –and they do –still can’t talk candidates & Sarah Palin without mentioning, “you know, Alaska was only leased, not sold”.
i DO think there’s a deal there –Russia reclaims all the way down to Russian Hill and the Russian River and takes ALL those Democrats –Pelosi too –in the deal. That’s Chinatown too –whose people are sure to be wanting their nine time zones back, whoops, including the eastern slope of the Urals –but what the hey, probably plenty of shale gas on the western slope too, right? Lessee, what else…St Petersburg for Denmark’s share of the polar shelf, check, Sakhalin to Japan for that illegal Kurile Islands occupation, check, Chechnya to the jihadis for Grozny, oops there went the Caspian Basin! Damn, that was fast…and meanwhile, who but Lief Ericsson is drilling the Black Sea for oil for Turkey and … Brazil???
(in the Alphabet War, the dense extremes –the Mandarin and the Latin –both trade profitably with each other and share little of border nor power node, separated as they are by a spotty and non-dense middle –and mutually shared alphabetical incomprehensibility –the Cyrillic)
Say there Buddy: How come Mr X did not tell anybody about the great advantage of having a Ukranian wife?
You know, it sure is nice to be able to read in bed without turning on the light.
And do not forget the job creation coming from
that Chernobyl, Ukrain janitorial service.
Whaddya mean, you never heard of “Mop and Glow”? Why they are about to have a great IPO—–Irradiated Public Offing.
Don’t forget, it is a little too chilly up there for any naked shorting.
(PS) See if you can find Rich Galen’s observations on the political goings on.
ok, that’s all about oil, but the Wall steet buddies don’t care, it’s all about virtual gains !
Russland has a short set to play in these big aftermaths, uh we can transform H2O into energy, if some big trades companies let us do it !
MC: Mix Dihydrogen Monoxide with Sodium Borahydride. Pass the mixture over a grid and the hydrogen atoms split off. Combine these with oxygen from the atmosphere and you
then generate quantities of electricity.
A minivan powered this way was demonstrated in Boron CA and tested in Death Valley 10 years ago.
Limitations on this for automotive purposes but I can certainly see it being used for some stationary applications and even on heavy-duty locomotives.
Dave, I have heard of the “project” here too, up to now, it wasn’t developped, probably that it did dragg much financiers that would bet on it, and more probably because it didn’t interest our government, say, how to tax a natural element ! while transported oil has such state revenues possibilities.
it didn’t dragg much
The WaPo article, dave ? i’ll assume it –that’s his most recent –i think –
MC: Main cost barrier was that refining borax
into sodium borahydride is rather expensive.
Per gallon cost quite a bit more than diesel or gasoline.
Main engineering objection was that the depleted sodium borahydride AND the H2O used
both had to be directed to an auxillary tank
which had to be drained and the contents sent back to the refinery before the main tank could be replinished.
However, I imagine somebody will make use of the concept some way or other some day or other.
And it did illustrate the great advantage of the fuel cell. They can generate in increments using proportionate quantities of fuel. That way when demand is down, fuel consumption can be reduced to match.
Buddy: It was on Townhall. Be dated now but check for his next output and then look for past columns.
Earth Hour in 2010 comes about on Saturday 27 March and can be a global call to action to every single individual, each business enterprise along with every single community throughout the world.
Are going to you participate?