Posted on 12/16/2008 8:24:46 PM PST by TigerLikesRooster
China’s economy hits the wall
By Gideon Rachman
Published: December 15 2008 18:50 | Last updated: December 15 2008 18:50
There was a distinct whiff of triumphalism in Beijing in the weeks after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Chinese officials speculated aloud about whether it would be wise to lend the Americans the money they needed to bail out their sinking banks. There was tut-tutting about American profligacy. The famous prediction by Goldman Sachs that the Chinese economy would be larger than that of the US by 2027 was revisited – perhaps it would happen even sooner than that?
But two months into the global financial crisis, things look much grimmer for China. In fact the only recent examples of social unrest in one of the world’s main economies have come there, not in the west. Laid-off workers in factories in southern China have staged protests that had to be contained by riot police. There have also been strikes and violent protests by taxi drivers in some cities across the country. The notion that the Chinese economy has so much momentum that it has “decoupled” from the US looks like a myth.
The economic statistics tell their own story. Last week the Chinese government announced that the country’s exports fell in November, compared with a year earlier, in the first such monthly drop for seven years. There are said to be 1m new graduates looking for work. It is generally held that the Chinese economy needs to grow at 8 per cent a year to absorb all the new workers coming on to the market. But new projections suggest that Chinese growth next year will be lower than that – possibly much lower.
(Excerpt) Read more at ft.com ...
Ping!
s/t like this started conflicts major ones like the 39’s give people something else to worry about
wuddaya mean, it’s not growing by 25% a quarter no more?
I see 50 million “excess” Chinese males marching across Asia to take what they need.
I wonder if China and Russia will go into a militaristic mode to deal with this. This happened in the past with other recessions/depressions, and massive wars happened as a result.
I see countries like China, Russia (and its Soviet satellites), and others embracing their communist past and going very militaristic in the very near future.
I’ve been predicting this for some time. The Chinese economy is tremendously distorted, as all central command economies are. There was admittedly at least $500 billion in bad loans from the government central bank—probably closer to $1 trillion if the truth were known. There has been zero effort to clean up pollution, which is worse that it was in East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell. And Chairman Mao pretty much destroyed the traditional Chinese culture that had stabilized the country in the past.
That was before the economic tsunami hit. With their overseas customers drying up, what will China do now? My guess is that we’ll see the country break up, as it did sometimes in the past when the emperors grew weak.
According to recent meetings my company is still willing to go big-time into China next year. My personal responsibility will double. We’ll see.
In fact, I can really see uncounted numbers of rotting Chinese leaders corpses when the peasantry is no longer fooled by the Marxist line.
Yeah, we know that sort of financial problems, however catastrophic it is, would not make its full impact until economy goes south, based on what has transpired in U.S. economy for last several years. Chinese and U.S. economies have been tied up closely. If one goes down, the other, too. It was not a healthy coupling, though. It is ending.
That, frankly, worries me far more than any economic pitfalls. Not so much for us as much as for China’s neighbours. If China decides to go on an “adventure”, millions could perish in Asia.
'Zactly. There are not enough wives for them anyhow. I could also see them in sudan and zimbabwe which "zero" would get us into in a heartbeat.
Possibly. It would be logistically easier for them to pick more local fights like SE Asia. Possibly a clash with India or a move to take bits of Siberia. Who knows? I just sense some baaaaad mogambo comin’.
I could see them marching into the Middle East.
We are in the management of industrial power consumption.
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