. . . and people forget that it wasn’t that long ago (late 1980’s) that China was threatening to nuke Los Angeles and other cities on the west coast - now all of a sudden China is a good bud?
Economically, so much has changed for China. They really do need us in terms of keeping their bicycle economy afloat. They still have 29 ghost cities, where the entire city has been built, and nobody is living there.
They are a creditor of ours, but they have been selling off US debt for a while.
Xi is a different cat. China should be a world power, but they have 1.2 billion people to employ. They can’t print enough money to keep all those people fed and happy, which is why quite a few are trying to leave before it blows up.
Russia is holding a pair of 2’s economically as well. Balance sheet is a mess, and they are essentially a petrostate in a market where fracking has put many of their customers in a place where they can engage in something called tapered integration, where you continue to buy from your supplier until you no longer need them.
France has started fracking, for instance. So has Germany.
2008 did no favors. All of it was sparked by taking the Community Reinvestment Act to an obscene extreme. The CRA literally puts a gun to banks heads and makes them provide bad loans to diverse people and companies with little chance of paying it back. The audits are unbelievable, and very detailed. If a bank fails, not only are they fined, the news leaks and hits the bank’s goodwill. Not kidding.
2008 was such an avoidable affliction, and not much has been written or filmed about the effect of the meltdown on the rest of the world’s economy. It was bad here, it was so much worse everywhere else.
Then we had the temerity of suing Deutche Bank to the point of potentially closing their doors.
The rest of the world has a legitimate beef with the US. It explains some of the Obama apology tour, the immigration, and the rolling over that happened in the last eight years. I wouldn’t have done that. I would have crucified Warren Buffett and others in the public square instead, but that’s me.