Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: China Page 10 of 12

The Trump China Showdown Aligns with Reality

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On December 12, 2016

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Trump received a phone call from the Taiwanese president. That was a violation of the One China policy, where in order to have diplomatic relations with China, one cannot have formal relations with China.

It is quite clear that Trump did this deliberately, it was not a gaffe, but planned.

China stated this was unacceptable, but was willing to pretend it was a gaffe.

Trump doubled down, accusing China of currency manipulation hurting the US (not true right now, but massive in the past), of not helping enough with North Korea, and of unacceptable behaviour in the South China Sea, where it has been building islands in order to seize control of the sea. He said he sees no reason to abide by One China if the US isn’t getting something in return.

China’s official response is that there will be no negotiations over anything without One China first.

A Chinese tabloid which is party associated said that if the US rescinded One China, China should invade Taiwan and arm American enemies.

And here we are.

Some basics. One power maximum; the potential power, of a modern state, is equal to its industrial power. Many nations may not have as much power as their industry allows, but this is the limiter.

China is now the world’s largest manufacturer. It is the world’s potentially most powerful nation. However, China’s policy has been (quite sensibly) to gain the base first, then arm, for classic guns or butter reasons.

China did manipulate its currency to gain their manufacturing base, but the US and other Western elites were entirely complicit. China offered large profits to individuals and corporations, and they took that money. It’s that simple.

China’s ascension did not just hurt the US, it hurt Japan, who is probably America’s most loyal ally (with the possible exception of the UK or Canada).

The manufacturing jobs performed in China would have been, in an alternate universe, done by the people who elected Trump in the Rust Belt.

Trump and his advisors do not believe that China and the US’s interests are aligned; they see China as the rising power, who is rising at the expense of the US.

This is not insane. In fact, it is accurate. It is possible to imagine a world in which that rise led to shared prosperity, but no one is offering such policies and no one ever has.

Now, I want you to turn your attention to Russia. Yes, Russia.

See, the problem with NATO expansion, the overthrow of the Ukrainian government, the color revolutions, and sanctions against Russia, and all that stuff, is that it was forcing Russia into China’s camp.

Russia does not want to be China’s ally. Russians (at least in the past, not so sure any more) would far rather have allied with Europe and the US, but Europe and the US would simply not allow it. Running on crazed fumes from the Cold War, the US and Europe feared Russia, who is no longer a threat to take first sport, rather than China, who is.

Note that Trump has also expressed great skepticism about NATO. He puts it in money terms: “Why should we pay for Europe’s defense?” But the end is the same, a NATO pointed at Russia doesn’t make sense to Trump or his advisors.

And Trump’s plans for the US involve a change in trade, anyway. People are scared of a trade war, and they should be.  Right now, what Trump is saying is at a meta-level which most people are too stupid to get: China is going to have to make a deal which helps American manufacturing, and everything is on the table in order to negotiate that. Everything.

Because Trump owes his election to the Rust Belt. He must deliver for them, in four years, or he will not be re-elected. His people, at least, will understand this. The election was too close. Trump must deliver.

And if China won’t cut a deal? Fine, slap tariffs on them. America is still America; American consumers can still consume, and if it turns into a trade war, manufacturing jobs may well come back to the US.

This is high stakes poker. It could cause a serious war, or it could send the world economy into a serious tailspin.

It is also a realignment moment. The US is pivoting from treating Russia as a big enemy, to treating China as the big threat. This is, whether you like it or not, rational: China is the actual threat to American hegemony.

I assume Trump thinks there is a deal to be made–perhaps he even thinks there is a way to make the deal into a win/win. We will see.

But do not think this is pure insanity, or that it is not well thought out. This is based on a world model in better accord with actual world conditions–more so than the world model under which Obama was operating.

If the status quo continues, the US will be superseded by China. At that point, if China and Russia are allies, options for the US are extremely limited. China is the rising power, Russia is a great power, but won’t a threat at the “super power” level again in the immediate future.

I will remind readers, once again, to stop assuming that Trump and his team are idiots just because they are doing things in new ways. I do not know if this pivot will work, and it could blow up spectacularly, but it is not prima facie stupid.

In fact, politicians who actually put the US’s real interests first would have never allowed China into the WTO, and certainly would have gone out of their way to make sure that China’s ascendence was a win/win, rather than a win/lose OR (if they were ruthless and slightly less smart) they would have done everything they could to prevent it. (I would not have favored that, to be clear).

Certainly, the US should have pivoted East years ago. This is a move which is made much more dangerous and problematic than it could have been by the fact that it wasn’t done when it should have been, enabled by an absolutely deranged policy towards Russia, which schizophrenically treated Russia as if it were both powerless and a huge threat.*

The world is getting a lot more dangerous, fast. But it was going to anyway. This may not be the best China policy possible, but it at least acknowledges reality.

(*I understand the impulse to prevent Russia from turning back into a huge threat, but that could have been managed with far less difficulty and in ways that wouldn’t have estranged Russia.)

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What Chinese Market Turmoil Tells Us About 2016

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On January 13, 2016

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Since the last financial crisis, I have repeatedly said that the most important economy in the world was now China. China is the world’s largest manufacturing nation. It is probably the world’s largest economy. It is the largest market for commodities, which many of the world’s nations rely on as their primary exports. Because we have gone to a world system which encourages manufacturing overseas for First World nations, this is unsurprising.

China has been creating, publicly and privately, more money than the US, Japan, and Europe combined. Multitudes of it.

Even when it hasn’t been the strongest growing economy, it has driven the growth of many other nations; direct trade with China might not dominate trade for some nations (for example, Brazil), but China determines the price of key commodities which many nations sell.

Some economists will argue that because trade is a small percentage of a particular country’s economy, it does not matter. This is like saying that since the food I eat is a small percentage of my body weight, eating less and worse food doesn’t matter.

Activities at the margins determine prices, economic growth, and employment/unemployment. China is the lynchpin economy which determines these things for much of the world.

So, we’ve had an ongoing commodities price crash, ongoing for some time, with most of the attention on the price of oil (now down to 2003, Pre-Iraq war prices). But commodities overall have crashed, and even countries which have maintained GDP growth (like Australia) have taken huge hits in their labor markets.

With prices down, growth stagnant or down, there is simply much less demand. This is your standard vicious cycle: The Chinese can sell less manufactured goods to the rest of the world, therefore need less commodities, etc.

The Yuan is becoming a reserve currency, and that means it is being unpegged from the dollar, regardless of whether most people can admit this or not. So the decreased exports are putting pressure on the Yuan, everyone’s money is running to the currency of last resort (the US dollar), and people are trying to get out of volatile Yuan denominated assets.

All of that is a long way of saying: This is the year the shit hits the fan.

We never left the depression after the financial crisis. We did, however, still have a business cycle. There was a recovery, expansion, and so on. Now we’re (and by “we,” I mean the entire world, with some exceptions) heading into recession.

That’s a recession within a depression, wherein many First World nations’ median income actually fell, and where employment in core nations never recovered in terms of population percentage.

This is going to hurt.

This is going to really, really hurt.

I’ll discuss specific consequences later, and what you can do. Do not assume this won’t come home to the US. A lot of the pain is being concealed in the US by the flight to the dollar and the oil price collapse, but it’s still going to hit and the pain is still going to hurt.

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As the Dow Jones Drops

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On August 24, 2015

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Down about 1,000 as of this writing. (Since mostly recovered.)

Let’s review: First, various “emerging economy” exchanges lost value, then China, then Wall Street.

The actual economic contagion started with resource prices. That was driven by reduced demand, primarily from China. Oil prices (only one commodity), already under pressure from moderately increased supply (it was less than boosters make out), were crashed by Saudi Arabia’s decision to increase production rather than cutting it back. There’s plenty of speculation why, the practical result was to trash multiple exchange rates and economies and to encourage everyone to overproduce, breaking OPEC solidarity. I don’t think Saudi Arabia is going to win this bet, whether it was to crush specific countries (Russia, Iran) or to crush American high cost oil production.

During this period we had repeated currency devaluations in an attempt to increase the competitiveness of exports. These devaluations had marginal effect at best, didn’t work at least.

China’s growth had been slowing (thus the reduction in their demand for commodities), they encouraged a stock market bubble as consumers were proving reluctant to continue piling into real-estate. They printed vast amounts of money, at least twenty times as much as Europe, Japan, and the US combined, but exports were no longer leading growth. Regular Chinese and private firms have massive amounts of debt.

To put it simply, China had reached the point where export-led mercantilism was no longer working. They needed to shift to domestic consumer demand.  They chose to try and inflate bubbles instead.

Virtually every country in the world was either rolling off a cliff, or struggling to keep their head above water. Most of the South of Europe had never really recovered (Ireland is a partial exception). Latin America was diving, Turkey’s real-estate driven, neo-liberal growth was stalling, India’s “miracle” was always more of a paper tiger than most made out, being concentrated to a minority even as the average number of calories consumed in the country dived.

But this started in China, which is important.

We are now in a situation analogous to the late 19th and early 20th century. America is the global hegemon (as Britain was then), and China is the world’s most important economy (America was then.) China is the global manufacturer. It buys the most resources, which is what most of the world sells, since most countries have given up manufacturing most goods for themselves. It prints the most money, dwarfing America and Europe. Its rich people are driving up real-estate prices all over the globe.

Yes, yes, by some measures the US economy is still “bigger,” but those measures are even more inflated than inflated and bogus Chinese ones. China is the key maker of goods. There are a few other countries that also make goods as the most important (not largest, most important) part of their economy. Everyone else is a commodity producer, a financier, or trying to sell intangibles (intellectual property, whether inventions or fiction or branding).

So what and how China does now matters most, economically. The contagion started in China, spread to emerging economies, money fled to the US and a few other safe havens, China’s economy continued to stall, its stock market fell despite radical attempts to keep it inflated, and that has now come home to New York.

Some are worried this is 1929, but in China. I have been stating for years that the big one would start in China. Whether this is it, we won’t know for a while (just as they did not know in 1929 that it was 1929).

Welcome to the new world. The US and Europe put a LOT of effort into moving as much industrial production as possible to China. China just promised that a very few people would get very rich doing it, and those people made sure it happened. (Look up the profit margins on iPhones.)

I will note that there are still bubbles. Real-estate bubbles (Canada, Britain, a few important US cities, Australia, etc.) and a vast amount of highly leveraged derivatives have been pumped back out since the 2008 crash, since no one actually bothered to regulate or forbid them. And banks and financial companies are now larger and fewer, making the economy and financial markets both more subject to contagion.

The elites learned from 2008 that the important thing to do in a financial crisis is to just print enough money and relax enough accounting rules–extend and pretend. That will be the play again this time if this contagion turns truly serious. I would guess that it will work, sort of: More zombies will be created, they will need higher profits, the real economy will be even more stagnant. And people like Corbyn, Trump, Sanders, and so on will reap the rewards electorally.

Printing money is a viable strategy only as long as the elites control the regulatory apparatus (including prosecutors, finance departments/treasuries, and central banks), legislators, and executives. The reason people are screaming so loudly about Corbyn is not because he can’t win in England, it’s because if he did, and he’s serious about his policies, he will inevitably have to confront them. And an English PM with a majority he controls is pretty much a dictator.

A lot is at stake here. Our elites are losing control over the electoral apparatus and the common narrative. In both cases, the signs aren’t terrible yet, but they are there; the rise of the old right and the old left is visible.

So, there is more pain to come, but there always was. The decision was made in 2008 and 2009 to not allow an actual recovery and to protect the rich at all costs. There was a cost, it has been paid for the last six years, and this is yet and simply another one of those costs. China, as an exporting power, cannot carry the world economy when the people to whom it exports insist on various levels of austerity (be clear, the US is in austerity too, just not as bad an austerity as Europe).

The way the Chinese are fumbling this crisis also convinces me that they are now past the point where enough competent people who remember poverty and fear remain in power.

We continue to live in interesting times.

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Chinese Stock Market Woes and the Pre-War World

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On July 9, 2015

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Bloomberg:

China is bolstering efforts to arrest a selloff that has rippled through risk assets globally, banning major stockholders from selling stakes as more than half the country’s listed companies are suspended from trading.

Expect some ripple effects, given that a LOT of people can’t sell formerly liquid assets—if they need money they will need to sell offshore assets.

As of this writing, the stock market is slightly up–but yeah, that’s with over half the companies frozen and with vast efforts by the government to funnel money into those that aren’t frozen. A ton of investors are still selling what they can.

Let’s talk China for a bit. I’ve long said that China is the place to watch: It is now a larger real economy than America’s, with a larger population, and it is the largest industrial country in the world. Making stuff, real material stuff, still matters. Americans trumpet innovation, but Britain was still producing more patents than America for years after America was the biggest economy in the world; the stuff just wasn’t made in Britain.

Commodity prices have been dropping in virtually every commodity, not just oil. This is driven by, yes, China, and it affects every commodity exporting country in the world.

(Insert ritual cursing out of Canadian Prime Minister Harper for his policy of doubling down on oil and abandoning manufacturing, thus critically damaging a mixed economy policy well over 100 years old.)

China has been vastly overbuilding infrastructure and real-estate for some time. The media is replete with stories of vast tracts of uninhabited high-rises and so on. Much of what has been built is of dubious quality (not necessarily entirely bad, if it has to be rebuilt, from an economic viewpoint, but disastrous from an environmental one). Peasants in China love their lives; workers hate theirs, even though workers have much more money. This is a direct analogue of Western industrialization, by the way, people had to be forced off the land. Early industrialization makes life much worse for most people directly involved.

I can’t speak directly to Chinese leadership, but I’d guess that we’re now reaching the point where the last competent people are near the end of their careers.  Soon the Communist party will be run largely by princelings: entitled, greedy, and short-sighted.

China is a violent nation. Huge industrial protests happen all the time, entire villages fight (and sometimes win) against army units, etc. The violence is often savage—hand-to-hand melee with iron rods and so on.

One wonders why the Communist party keeps cracking down, installing more surveillance, etc, etc. If they lose control, or if they don’t make it to the airport before the mob, they and their entire families will die, and die messily, or worse.

If things go really pear-shaped in China, the Communist party WILL blame foreigners. You can bet every cent you have on it. War is possible. China is making the necessary preparations and pre-war blocs are forming.

Now, this stock market crash isn’t necessarily the precipitating event. I doubt it is, and even if we look back in 20 years, in the midst of the sweet nuclear glow, and conclude it was, we won’t know for some time that it is.

But we are in a world which is a ton more dangerous than most people, many of whom buy into this “the world is getting less violent” stuff, are willing to believe. Yeah, the world is less violent than it was for most of the post-WWII period, but such periods, well, they end, when the conditions which made them possible end.

The Chinese can still print a ton of money. The lesson the elites took from the Financial Crisis has been “just print money if people who matter are hurting.” The Chinese and Westerners put different groups of people into their “who matters” categories, but both are willing to run the virtual printing presses.

What This Means: It’s likely that the situation won’t go really pear-shaped until such time as running the printing presses stops working as a preventative to staving off disaster. Unless until someone gets stupid and doesn’t run the presses when they should because they think the people suffering don’t matter enough to bother with.

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Meanwhile, in China, There’s a Huge Stock Market Crash

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On July 6, 2015

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It has dropped about 30 percent in the past three weeks, and today:

BREAKING: CHINA’S NATIONAL SOCIAL SECURITY FUND (PENSION FUND) ORDERS ALL ITS ASSET MANAGERS “NOT TO SELL A SINGLE STOCK” – CAIJING MAGAZINE

Yeah.

And this:

In an extraordinary weekend of policy moves, brokerages and fund managers vowed to buy massive amounts of stocks, helped by China’s state-backed margin finance company which in turn would be aided by a direct line of liquidity from the central bank.

China has also orchestrated a halt to new share issues, with dozens of firms scrapping their IPO plans in separate but similarly worded statements over the weekend, in a tactic authorities have used before to support markets.

Do I need to explain that this is really, really stupid? The Chinext had higher price-to-earnings ratios than Nasdaq when it crashed. These valuations are insane; they do not make sense. This is stock market as ponzi scheme.

Stock markets are socially useful for only three things:

1) IPOs—so that companies can get money unencumbered by debt to undertake large projects. (These days, usually so the founders can cash out, which is at best a limited social good.)

2) Secondary stock offerings; same thing.

3) As Keynes pointed out, to give sociopaths something to do.

There are better ways to deal with these and all of the other supposed advantages of stock markets. (For example, if you want people to be able to share in the success of companies, just tax them and distribute. We would be hard-pressed for a more uneven method than the one we’re using today.)

Stock markets are largely useless to the real economy at this point. But when they go wrong, they can do immense damage to the real economy IF regulators and politicians and central bankers treat them as anything but a game in which money is moved from one set of hands (investors), to another set of hands (brokers, bankers, and since the introduction of stock options as the main way of paying executives, high ranking corporate wankers). Stock markets are snake pits of fraud and conflict of interest and everyone professionally involved in them must be treated as “a criminal the second they can get away with it.”

It’s time to change stock markets entirely so that they are useful again for raising funds for new companies or major new projects without debt and are not so dangerous to the rest of the economy. I suspect the best way to do this is to shut the entire current racket down, mandate dividends and controlled buybacks for all remaining stock companies (public stock companies in the US have dropped by half in the last 20 years anyway), and move to a new model, whatever that will be.

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Fourteen Points on the World Economy as the US GDP Drops .7 Percent

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On May 29, 2015

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So, while it generally takes two quarters for a recession to be so-called, it may be that the recession is here.

Let us recap the non-recessionary period:

  • The percentage of people employed in the US never recovered;
  • More than the total amount of growth went to the top four percent or so, with most of that going to the top one percent and most of that going to the top .1 percent;
  • The stock market had a huge bull market, even though the economy wasn’t working for anyone but the top few;
  • Outside America, the “south” of Europe never recovered in any meaningful way, and most European nations generally did badly for most of their citizens;
  • Various resource nations did well for a time, but their success was based on demand from developed nations or, more commonly, from China;
  • Chinese demand collapsed some time ago;
  • China has been printing more money than either Japan or the US; much more;
  • Japan’s “unconventional monetary policy” has been a roaring failure–if its intention was to get the Japanese economy going again;
  • The collapse in oil prices last year helped the US briefly, but because the rest of the world has rolled off a cliff and because those gains couldn’t go widespread, it was only briefly (this is as I predicted at the time);
  • Canada’s economy was hurt badly by the oil price crash, and because the mixed economy has been critically injured, there is very little else to hold up the economy;
  • Both Britain (or London…almost the same thing) and Canada have huge housing bubbles, and those bubbles, with the addition of financial games, are all that holds those economies together at this point;
  • Britain never actually recovered either, for the majority of its citizens–just a large enough minority to elect Cameron;
  • Australia has tied itself massively to resource extraction on the back of Chinese demand. There is no meaningful Australian economy whose fate is not tied to China.
  • India’s development is hollow neo-liberalism, and has seen an actual decrease in per capita calories. It is consumptive and limited to a few key areas.

Let me put this another way: The developed world is in depression. It has been in depression since 2007. It never left depression. Within that depression, there is still a business cycle: There are expansions, and recessions, and so on. Better times and worse times.

While cheap solar is a big deal, it is not yet deployed sufficiently to break the “widespread demand will crash the economy through oil price increases” problem, and this is exacerbated the by the deadlock rich elites have on most of the world’s politics and economic policies, since it is not in their interest to solve problems, but only to become more rich.  Not that solving problems is something they mind, if it makes them richer and keeps everyone else poor.

The world still has very few problems we couldn’t solve if we acted on them in a productive way (though some, like climate change and the great die-off, are beyond the point of no return for catastrophic damage), but that’s largely irrelevant while public policy remains in the hands of oligarchs. There is some reason for hope, as left-wing parties rise in Europe, but those green shoots are still nothing but green shoots.

I suggest that my readers who are able to make money do so now, you may soon find that you can’t. This is especially important if your employment is precarious.  Take care of yourselves, and take care of each other, unless you are lucky enough to live in the few rich, social democratic states left, you cannot expect much aid from your governments.

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Why We Should Want the Return of a Two World System

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On February 16, 2015

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Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a two-world system. If you didn’t like the deal that US was offering you, you could go the USSR.  If you didn’t like the deal Russia was offering you could go to the US.

While the US probably offered a better deal, especially in later years, you could have a pretty decent life as a client state to the Soviets.  Cuba under Castro had a higher standard of living in practically every way than it did pre-Castro, when it was an American client state.

Equally, you could play the two off against each other, looking for the best deal.  This made it harder for them to screw you over.

As the USSR weakened, the deals became worse.  The USSR of the 80s could not offer what the USSR of 50s could.  Still, the ability to tell the superpower of your choice, who feared and hated the other superpower, that they had to treat you at least slightly right had benefits.

I certainly don’t want to romanticize the cold-war period.  There were ugly coups, torture regimes and wars.  There was famine.  But while we have less of that today, we don’t have less of it because of the end of the cold war.  Indeed, we have more failed states than we did during the cold war, because it is in no one’s particular interest to pick them up.

So one of the events that I have been tracking since the early 2000’s (as has Stirling) is when a viable second bloc would emerge.

To be viable, a bloc must be able to:

  • Provide relatively high technology;
  • Provide development: power, roads, railways, etc;
  • Provide the consumer goods people want;
  • Provide credit;
  • Feed countries which need food;
  • Provide energy (which still means oil and other hydrocarbons, though that’s changing);
  • Provide some sort of credible military aid or umbrella.

Yesterday I wrote about Russia creating its own bank payments system to compete with the West’s SWIFT. This is important, because since the fall of the USSR, the West (or more accurately, America) has increasingly used this to punish those nations it does not like.  Piss off Washington and they will shut down your ability engage with global credit markets, and even the ability of your citizens to use credit cards.  Pretty soon you can’t buy what you want, even if you have the money, or you pay a huge premium.

So the creation of a Russian SWIFT, while woefully inadequate by itself, was a first step towards meeting one of the needs of a new bloc with rivals the West.

The linchpin nation in any new bloc would be China.  China can credibly provide development, credit and consumer goods (they make much of them anyway.)  But China will also need countries which can supply oil and raw materials: Russia, Venezuela, Iran,  Argentina, and so on.  Much of South America would rather sell food and raw materials to China (or Russia, or whoever) than to the US, because they remember, well, not being treated very well by America during and after the Cold War.

Russia’s military technology, while not as good as America’s, is good enough for most purposes, and China, as is usually the case, has vast amounts of shipbuilding capacity for those who want a navy.  America’s space program is charging forward (mostly privately) but Russia still has plenty of lift capacity for satellites, and China is working hard on its space program.

The BRICS have created their own development bank, as well, so combined with an expansion of the new SWIFT, credit which can be used to buy almost anything you want, or need, will be available.

This, my friends, is the configuration in which the unipolar moment (which has lasted two and a half decades so far) ends.

It was always going to end, for all things do, the question was how soon.  American actions have accelerated what should have taken a couple decades more, significantly, by marginalizing too many countries.  Marginalizing or destroying the occasional country was acceptable, but the number marginalized is just too high, and they have too many resources.  Combined with a great manufacturing nation, they have essentially everything they need: they don’t need the West.

And they may be wondering why they are paying intellectual property taxes (that’s what they are) and interest fees to the West, when the West clearly isn’t acting in their interest.  Why have America and Britain gain all this, when they can reap the money themselves.

Oh, there are still some areas where the West is clearly ahead, from turbines to aerospace.  But they tighten by the year, and they aren’t anything necessary any more. Virtually everything you want, save a few luxury items, you can get without America or Europe being involved.

The question now, then, is the timing and the exact events.  But the broad outline is visible and will accelerate, because it is in too many countries self-interest.

The Great Game, the Great Game never ends.

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How Ebola Aerosolized in Pigs Could Kill Millions

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On October 17, 2014

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Up until today I’ve been moderately sanguine about Ebola outside of some poverty struck African countries with compromised health care systems (and places like Greece.)  The main danger is incompetence and austerity, as with the CDC and Texas fumbling their Ebola cases.

No more.

Ebola is aerosolized in pigs.  This may not seem like a big deal, but in many countries, like China, pigs live in very close proximity to humans.  If Ebola gets into South China and the Chinese do get right on it, it really could kill millions.  In any country where large numbers of people live cheek and jowl with their pigs,  this is potentially explosive.

And if it does explode that way, well, some of those people will wind up traveling to your first world country while asymptomatic (or while with a light fever).

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