P!
Highways. One more fund used well outside its intent and raided by congress to pay for other crap.
Social Security’s twin sister.
Chinese Economic Face-Palm: When even Americans give China an economic face-palm, you know the fail is epic.
Maybe Chicoms figure that if the hi-speed trains are falling apart...then the concrete in the highways is waaaay below standard.....heads WILL roll..literally..
Mish (Mike Shedlock) publishes petroleum purchase and consumption statistics from Tim Wallace on a regular basis.
Wallace tracks this information as it is one of the basic numbers that indicate where the economy truly is.
Consumption has been down all year...way down, which indicates we’ve been in a recession most of the year (we all knew that anyway).
What this report indicates is that places like China — who were some of the higher consumers of petroleum (used to build and repair roads) — were doing so in a bubble environment.
What this means is that true consumption is even lower than the regular consumption statistics (that there was no real demand for it, only manufactured demand) and that the usage that was taking place was paid for by more borrow-and-spend economics but in this case pulling on a forward basis from the manufacturing (supply) side of the equation.
All in all, pretty bad news, and more evidence that what I’ve been saying for two years is true. China has been lying about their economic strength and they are in a huge bubble that is going to splatter ‘stuff’ all around the world when it bursts.