news

Russians looking after ethnically russian children left behind by Ukraine in war-zones and sending them to safety in Russia = bad, ethnic cleansing, genocide, brainwashing, child kidnapping, abuse and trafficking

US and "Israel" straight up wanting to permanently deport all palestinians, willing or not, from the Gaza Strip into other countries= relocation, complex issue and history, not genocide or ethnic cleansing, safety etc...

Under Trump’s plan, Gaza’s more than 2 million people would be permanently sent elsewhere. He has proposed the U.S. would take ownership of the territory, oversee a lengthy cleanup process and develop it as a real estate project.

more like ethnic cleanup

this journalist is complicit and should be held accountable like the nazi propagandists were in 1946

Classic negotiation tactic of starting out strong (we will annex Greenland) and then negotiating down to your intended goal (can I please have a case of eggs)

Masterful gambit

Supply and demand, fuckers. Supply and demand.

and people still think i'm crazy when i say i refuse to travel to the US

Amerikkka doing the Hitler thing of turning the imperial apparatus on white people &c &c &c, guess this is why NYT suddenly cares about ICE torture

Vladimir Putin go on cumtown

Russian humor strikes again. I do hope they get the Ukraninians in the pocket to surrender, though.

Then he keeps Witkoff in the anteroom for eight hours

That is some serious Lord Vetinari energy right there.

Putin the other day also said this:

"For 500 years [Western elites] have been leeching off other nations. They tore apart the people of Africa, exploited Latin America and the countries of Asia. For centuries they have grown accustomed to stuffing their bellies with human flesh and their pockets with money. But they must understand that their vampire feast is coming to an end."

Yet users here really thought he had been "played" by Trump and would agree to an unfavorable deal to Russia, come on. Yet again, westerners make arrogant predictions without listening to what Putin and the Russians are actually saying. Just like the lead up the Ukraine war, where every single western leftist was wrong because they all ignored Putin and the Russians.

do they rise sequentially or are their numbers chosen?

Yes, this is pretty much the same as the NPC work report that I posted the summary of ~2 weeks ago.

First of all, there is undeniably a low consumption problem (I still get some Westerner leftists trying to argue with me that there is no consumption problem in China, which is very strange considering all levels of government have already placed it on their top economic priority) and equally undeniable that there is a strong political will to solve this problem. It is also undeniable that the Dual Circulation strategy (balancing external circulation i.e. trade with internal circulation i.e. consumption) that the government proposed a few years ago has failed: we ended 2024 with record trade surplus and slumping consumption.

A key difference from this year’s expenditure from the standard IMF recommendation of 3% to 4% (+1.6T yuan deficit spending), which will almost certainly improve the spending deficiencies we’ve had in the last couple years, but the question is if this amount is adequate to restore consumption confidence (for the record, the US has been deficit spending 6-7% annually in the past couple years, which is the main reason that the US hasn’t gone into recession yet, even taking into account that a lot of the spending went into the top 10%, who has now made up of ~50% of consumption in the US today).

Furthermore, we still don’t know if this increase in deficit spending is a temporary measure or will they permanently enlarge the deficit and keep it above 3%. Many countries temporarily increase deficit spending during recession (Keynesian-esque policy) but will go back into austerity as soon as the situation stabilizes. And honestly, 4% is still too conservative compared to what the US has been spending, so only time will tell if this measure will actually work.

Perhaps more important is the fact that all these spending are still financed by issuing debt, especially special government bonds and special long-term government bonds. In other words, the deficit spending does not come from the creation of net new financial assets (direct money creation by the central bank), but that the central government “borrow” from financial institutions and the private sector and promise to pay back interests in the long term.

Why a government that issues its own currency needs to “borrow” from the private sector? The only logical answer is ideological indoctrination rooted in IMF-style policymaking.

This will always be a critical problem for China because it still hasn’t found a way to resolve its debt issue through cancelation. The 12T yuan “debt settlement” plan from last November revealed this mentality as much: 1) raise the debt ceiling of local governments by 6T yuan so local governments can borrow 6T yuan more from the banks at lower interest rate to pay back their outstanding high interest hidden debt; 2) issue more bonds (0.8T yuan for the next 5 years = 4T yuan) for debt servicing; and 3) the last 2T yuan of debt due by 2029 will be repaid according to the original contract.

As you can see, the measure relies heavily on “borrowing new to repay the old” mechanism and this makes the entire economy vulnerable to the Fed rate. As long as the Fed doesn’t lower its rate (which Trump can weaponize), then the local governments in China will not have access to lower interest loans to pay back their outstanding debt. It is also not clear what is the “true” size of the hidden debt since so much of that is off the books and maybe only the central government knows (or maybe even the central government could no longer keep track of that).

If you know what I have been advocating for, you will know that the central bank can always create the money needed to cancel the debt, as long as they are owed in the currency it issues (yuan). However, because China’s monetary base is heavily reliant on accumulating foreign reserves and collateralizing existing assets, the fiscal expansion will still be tied to the dollar and it will have to earn more dollars (either through exports, or attracting foreign investments) in order to create the money needed to resolve the debt.

The way out is an ideological shift away from the Chicago school neoclassical economics and actually assume full monetary sovereignty. Instead of local government borrowing billions of yuan from the commercial banks to build infrastructure/high speed rails, and bet on the rising land value to repay its debt at some point in the future (spoiler: the property prices crashed, and hence the land value as well), the central bank can simply issue the currency needed to finance the infrastructure building, cutting out all the financial institutions middle men etc:

Central bank creates reserves on commercial banks -> commercial banks create deposits on bank accounts of contractors -> contractors build infrastructure -> central bank then sells government debt to soak up the excess liquidity of commercial bank reserves (pumped into by the central bank itself) to prevent the interest rate from being driven down to 0% (and only if the central bank chooses to target a specific rate, otherwise they can just let the reserves build up without issuing any debt at all)

This bypasses the entire earning foreign currencies, collateralize existing assets, borrowing from banks, borrowing from private/foreign sector through government bonds to build infrastructures etc.

Feel free to read my long post where I explained in more detail how China’s government financing works responding to one of our posters’ question the other day, and it will become clear why China’s local governments are mired in so much debt that it can’t repay today.