Definitely, China’s economy is strong enough that they can resist multiple waves of onslaught (it all depends on how it plays out in the longer term), the developing countries won’t be so lucky as you said.
They say this will be the last election in America if Trump wins.
China will be “fine”, but it needs to be noted that the “Keynesian” approach during the 2009 GFC by printing 4 trillion yuan stimulus can no longer be replicated today. It gave rise to the many problems that China is facing today.
The reason was that the stimulus was pumped into the economy when the real sector went into a slump (reduced consumption from America which was served by the Chinese export industries). As a result, most of the stimulus money went into infrastructure building and real estate market (which did not exist in China before 2008).
This is why you see so many infrastructures like high speed rails and new cities (“ghost cities”) cropping up across China in the 2010s. It directly stimulated the utilization of raw materials like concrete production, as well as infrastructure building sectors. It also allowed the local governments, whose finances had been hit hard by the GFC and the slump in the real sector, to make quick cash by selling land to property developers. It also drove up GDP numbers so many local governments would compete with one another by selling more and more lands, building more and more properties even knowing that they can not be filled in the long run. It was a way of “gaming” the system to get promoted and receive more funding from the central government.
These actions would eventually precipitate in the real estate bubble and the local government debt crisis that China is facing today.
But today’s China has a very different problem: the problem of excess housing and “ghost cities”. There are many housing properties that could not be sold, and will not be sold, and will be left empty for a long time. You might have heard stories about the ghost cities being filled up eventually, but many of those cities were actually planned around the early 2000s (for example, Binhai New Area in Tianjin, Zhengdong New Area in Zhengzhou etc.), and also rare exceptions like Pudong New Area in Shanghai that benefits from being a prime location. There are many new cities that were initiated in the 2010s that will never see their properties filled up.
So now the infrastructure building route is a dead end. Building more properties would be a waste of resources because nobody is ever going to live in them, and many infrastructures like high speed rails are good but they are not strong enough stimulus to drive the entire economy. You need people to consume (buy stuff) to drive the local economy.
This is why transitioning into a domestic consumption economy, and abandoning the export oriented economy, is the most straightforward way of decoupling from the US. It’s painful to radically re-orientate the industries you have built up over the decades, and it’s painful to abandon the export revenues, but the US imperialists are betting precisely on China procrastinating on initiating a transformative change to its own economic system.
There are two types of Belt and Road loans: Infrastructure loans and Rescue loans.
Infrastructure loans are lent out for infrastructure projects, and are mostly in USD.
The reason is that by around 2013, China realized that accumulating US dollars through their huge trade surplus is the equivalent of collecting junk papers. The US doesn’t allow China (or any other country) to purchase critical assets and industries, so the surplus earnings are recycled back into US Treasuries to buy US debt (think of the Treasuries as a sink to absorb all the excess dollars America has spent overseas). China realized that instead of buying US bonds, they can lend out those dollars to other developing countries to build infrastructure, accumulate good will and utilize those dollars in a productive manner. However, in terms of de-dollarization, the outcome is the same: now it is the Belt and Road recipient countries that owe Chinese creditors in dollars, meaning that they have to earn dollars (by selling stuff to Americans or dollar-paying customers) to pay back their Chinese creditors. As long as China does not offer bailouts or debt cancellation, it makes no difference whether those dollars are kept in US Treasuries or circulated outside as infrastructure loans.
On the other hand, the Emergency Rescue loans are given out for countries in financial distress and can no longer pay back their debt in dollar, and are mostly in Chinese yuan. The prime example here is Argentina, whose dollar debt is so heavy that there is no way they can make their timely payments. So what China has been doing is to give out these Rescue loans in yuan (also sometimes using the IMF Special Drawing Rights) to rollover the dollar debt and keep refinancing and praying that something miraculous will happen by itself. It’s essentially the same as kicking the can down the road and trying to avoid the inevitable for as long as possible.
The exact proportion of Belt and Road loans in dollars is not made public, although I have seen from both English and Chinese sources (independent parties who did the calculations) that it’s about 70% USD.
On one hand, you can understand why China does this: unlike IMF or any America controlled institutions which the US can “print” an infinite amount of dollars and lend them out at any amount at will, the dollars held by the Chinese creditors came from the hard work of Chinese labor and resources and selling these goods and services to dollar-paying customers ($300 billion trade surplus from America every year), so it is understandable that China is not willing to give away their labor and resources for free.
On the other, China also needs to understand that there is no way these dollar debt can ever be repaid by the Global South countries. All these lending is only going to make the Belt and Road countries becoming ever more dependent on the US, who can create the dollars out of thin air, unlike China who has to earn them. The only way out is debt cancellation - cut your heavy losses and radically shift your position, and forget about being an exporter to the American economy. China is still unwilling to turn away from the US who has been their main source of wealth and prosperity over the years, and this is what gives the US such a strong hold over them.
Trump is selling a dream. It’s a delusional dream (bringing the jobs back? deporting the immigrants who “stole” your jobs?) that will never be fulfilled, but at least it’s a dream to indulge in for many desperate people while it lasted.
Kamala and Biden are selling fear (Trump is worse than Hitler) while not bringing anything to the table. You’re not getting anything unless you belong to the affluent upper middle class segment of the population. It’s living in fear knowing that Trump could become a president again.
Trump’s charisma, like Obama’s, lies in knowing how to weave together a dream-like story and sell it to their credulous audience. But a dream is still a dream, and deep inside the subconscious, everyone knows that it has to end at some point. That’s when dreams turn into nightmares - the harsh reality that awaits them when they finally wake up.
Old cover ran its course when he went viral getting punched in the face, so the higher ups issued him a new assignment and retired the old cover. It’s just another day working for the feds.
He’s rebranded himself as a Democrat for a few years already
Time will tell, my friend. Time will tell.
Fed seen on track for 25-basis-point rate cuts next week and in December
Traders of futures that settle to the Fed's policy rate instead moved to price in about a 99% chance that the central bank on Nov. 7 would cut its policy rate by a quarter of a percentage point to the 4.50%-4.75% range, compared with 92% before the release of the jobs data. They see about an 83% chance that the policy rate will be in the 4.25%-4.50% range by the end of this year, compared with 69% earlier.
Fed policymakers will begin their next two-day policy meeting a day after the U.S. presidential election on Tuesday, and though the result is not expected to directly factor into their decision two days later, many analysts see election uncertainty as an added temporary weight on the labor market in October that could be reversed in coming months.
Financial markets currently see the Fed lowering its policy rate to the 3.50%-3.75% range by September of next year.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: September’s first rate cut really marked the commencing of Phase 2 of US imperialist war against the rest of the world. This is quite possible the most evil plan that the US is about to pull.
As I’ve said before, the rate cuts will do two things: first, all the dollars sucked into the US capital market will flow into the foreign sector again, to make the Global South countries become addicted to the dollar again; and second, the rate cut will dry up the interest payment that had a huge contribution in the US deficit spending over the past two years, which can only mean a recession.
Remember when all the economics pundits crying about how Biden’s interest rate hike will cause a recession from 2022-2024? Well, they were all wrong. I’ve always said that the recession will happen after they start to cut the rate, and this is well timed to happen until months after the election (we won’t see the consequences until at least 6-9 months from now, depending on how fast the interest rate is being cut and how much deficit the Treasury is creating to compensate for that).
What to expect: many export-dependent countries are going to be economically crippled when the US goes into recession, as consumption and demands for goods and services slump. If the US can replicate the Global Financial Crisis of 2009, expect to see an explosion of IMF loans and waves of mass privatization across the Global South over the next few years.
These countries have been hit very hard since Covid, then the fallout of sanctions against Russia (commodity price increase), US fed rate hike (debt interest went up, investment capital outflows), they cannot sustain another shockwave like this.
The US will then exploit the crippled global economy to reshape the global supply chain to its own interest in its big fight against China. The economy over the next decade is likely going to be bad, and the outcome will be decided by a race to see who - the US or China - will get to reshape the global supply chain over the coming decades.
Fuck, this is so evil I cannot even begin to comprehend how ghoulish it must be to weaponize the global economy to retain its hegemony over the world. Unless China has some trump cards (I’m not seeing them), there’s no way we can escape from this. China’s monetary easing that was timed just after the US fed rate cut was a sign that even China, the strongest economy in the world in real terms, is afraid of what the US recession is going to do. This is the power of monetary imperialism.
The US is about to take a “big bite” on the globe.
(also BRICS has turned into a joke now, we shouldn’t expect to see a real challenge against US hegemony on that front as well)
nothing if the feds don’t want something to happen. Jan 6 was as controlled as you can get.
The Bush family has very strong ties with the oil and gas tycoons in Texas. He can help the Democrats making inroad into the fossil fuel industries in the south that is traditionally a Republican stronghold.
For context, Trump pissed off too many oil and gas investors from 2016-2020. A lot of people who went all in on the shale revolution under Obama in 2013-2014 lost billions of investments because Trump stupidly wanted to keep gasoline price low. The whole oil drilling sector was in a slump going into Covid as consumption reduced further. It took Biden’s Ukraine war to restore the oil and gas profit margin.
There’s also Trump making his genius move of forcing America’s number one enemy, China, into signing long term LNG contract with American suppliers. Genius move for a genius businessman. Then Biden’s Ukraine war happened and the price of the LNG shot through the roof because Europe ran out of gas. The American LNG suppliers were already locked into long term contracts with China, so they could only see their own LNG being resold by the Chinese to Europe with huge profits.
The upshot is that Trump has pissed off a lot of people in the oil and gas sector that the Democrats now have a real shot at making inroads into the Texas oil and gas people that are traditionally the Republican base.
The Bush family is the key to making this happen. It’s all a calculated maneuver. Many Republican donor class hates Trump and really really do not want to see him coming back, but still could not cut their lifelong ties with the GOP itself. Will the domino start to fall? If the Democrats can pull this off, they can even get Texas in the future.
Repeating my question from last week: somebody tell me what to look out for during the election! I want to impress my friends about how I am an expert in American politics. Which states have the most likely chance to have a huge upset? Which counties are going to be the deciders in this tight race? Which places do Kamala need to win? Which ones do Trump need to secure? I need a crash course on this election.