While this puny war of a few million people is going on, there are big doings in Asia. The Chinese are holding the BOAO Forum. The are discussing the formation of the AIIB with many nations joining including Brazil, UK and Germany. The scope of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank is widespread and all encompassing and must not be ignored.
http://thediplomat.com/2015/03/what-the-aiib-means-for-the-us-china-power-transition/
The BAOA Forum has and extensive AGENDA covering many topics: http://www.boaoforum.org/enannual2015/15509.jhtml
I first became aware of all this earlier today watching a Chinese news program. They showed maps of what they call their Belt and Road, and Silk Road initiative. The land route shown traveled from Asian countries to Tehran, Istanbul, and as far west as Rotterdam. The sea route touched india, went through Suez, and branched to Africa. What surprised me was to see that Russia was not on their maps, so I decided to try to find their map. It turns out there are many proposed routes, but the bulk of them do NOT go through Russia.
So while Iran, Saudi Arabia and a few other countries squabble over peanuts, the Asians are planning to plant and harvest the forest, carefully and sustainably, by developing world wide patterns of trade and prosperity.
They say this will encompass more than 1/2 the world’s population, and 1/3 the world’s economics.
IS ANYONE HERE PAYING ATTENTION?? By all means read these links and then Google, AIIB, BAOA Forum, Silk Road Initiative, and Belt and Road.
Thanks glee’. China’s population is topheavy, meaning, inside of 25 years the only growth industry will be guest workers coming in to care for childless geriatrics, or geriatrics who outnumber their offspring 2:1. Many of their children will be unmarried men.
Meanwhile, the Chinese economy relies on exports, and most of that reliance is its trade surplus with the US. In order to maintain that surplus, China has to keep the Yuan stable against the US dollar, and one major part of that strategy is to buy federal gubmint debt. Interest rates in the US were deregulated 30 years ago, and floating rates have been around much longer than that — you probably recall the 22-23 percent money market rates during the Carter disaster. Like the Japanese before them, the Chinese are rats on a wheel, not in the driver’s seat.
With persistently low interest rates there’s little capital formation. Offshore investment is also driven by offshore investors, significantly lower labor costs, and no environmental impact rigamarole. The Demagogic Party leftists have been undermining employment to overload the system by fostering dependence and breaking down the family, and the economic tactics are part of that strategy.
In China, there’s a significant disconnect between factory production jobs and being able to afford the products produced in those factories. The Chinese have tried to build in other parts of the world (Latin America, Africa) in order to get even lower production costs and feed their own domestic demand for products. The Japanese went through the same crisis, shipping domestic production to the US market, while feeding their own demand with plants in South Korea, Taiwan, etc, until it was obvious that those offshore plants could just as easily sell to the US and undercut the Japanese.
Meanwhile the Chinese, like their Soviet predecessors, are blissfully unconcerned about environmental poisoning (hydroelectric projects salting up fields for miles around; heavy metal toxicity; air quality), while idealogically they pursue their hopeless dream of worldwide domination and overspend on military stuff.
They are probably going to implode, just as the USSR did, and in a similar timeframe; there were 69 years from Lenin’s to Yeltsin’s respective year ones, and since Mao took over China in1949, adding 69 is 2018, or a mere three years off. IOW, 69 is just an approximation. :’) OTOH, if Obama’s project of destroying the Middle East comes to fruition before he leaves office in 2017, the price of OPEC and other world crude is likely to rise again to $100 and beyond — imagine the impact on the Chinese, even worse than the impact on us.
Got my attention. Thanks.