Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Category: Uncategorized Page 15 of 95
Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – January 28, 2024
by Tony Wikrent
Global power shift
Maersk ships in US Navy convoy forced to retreat under Houthi missile attack
[Trade Winds, via Naked Capitalism 01-26-2024]
As Armchair Warlord noted on X(Twitter): “Lost amid all the other news breaking in the last 24 hours is one particularly disturbing story: the United States Navy lost a battle at sea yesterday.”
[X-Twitter, via Naked Capitalism 01-25-2024]
Suez Canal container ship volume pic.twitter.com/kIZ7imkMPj
— Joe Weisenthal (@TheStalwart) January 24, 2024
.
The Reason China Can’t Stop Its Decline
Among specialists who follow China most closely, the two main causes cited for this new conventional wisdom have been known for years. The first is that China’s growth model has been overreliant on policies such as financial repression and extraordinary levels of investment. Here, repression has nothing to do with the usual political usage of the word. It means, rather, that the state controls domestic interest, exchange rates, and capital outflows in such a way that citizens receive little accrual or benefit from their high rates of savings. Instead, these are captured by the state and channeled into industries that are favored or prioritized by bureaucrats, including many that are state-owned.
Some of the problems that might arise from financial repression can seem apparent even to lay people. Bureaucrats tend to know little about business and are unlikely to be in the best position to make the smartest and nimblest economic bets about the industrial future. Some features of this setup may be less than obvious, though. When the state captures and invests the nation’s savings according to its own whims, capital becomes scarcer and more expensive for private investors. This also suppresses the domestic consumption that most mature economies depend on for growth. Finally, as the state channels more and more investment into industries of its choosing, average return on investment falls. China is now at the point where it must invest huge amounts of capital to produce each new dollar of economic growth, and everything points to this continuing to worsen….
[TW: I included this because of its use of the term “financial repression” in an example of clumsy and terribly inaccurate Western analysis of China. In fact, financial predators are the very reason the USA industrial base was “hollowed out” inevitably resulting in the inability to produce enough ammunition. or to build safe and cost-effective aircraft.]
Why the World Is Betting Against American Democracy
[Politico, via The Big Picture 01-21-2024]
Ambassadors to Washington warn that the GOP-Democratic divide is endangering America’s national security.
by Tony Wikrent
Global power shift
China Is the World’s Sole Manufacturing Superpower
Richard Baldwin [VoxEU, via Naked Capitalism 01-17-2024]
…The US is the world’s sole military superpower. It spends more on its military than the ten next highest spending countries combined. China is now the world’s sole manufacturing superpower. Its production exceeds that of the nine next largest manufacturers combined. This column uses the recently released 2023 update of the OECD TiVA database to paint an eight-chart portrait of China’s journey to superpower status and the asymmetric impact that its dominance has had on global supply chains….
When it comes to gross production, China’s share is three times the US’ share, six times Japan’s, and nine times Germany’s. Taiwan, Mexico, Russia, and Brazil now have higher gross output than the UK. Canada is further down the ranking, in 15th place….
China’s dominance is less stark in exports (Figure 3), though the rise is equally amazing. In 1995 China had just 3% of world manufacturing exports, By 2020, its share had risen to 20%. The corresponding fall in the G7 share was less dramatic than for its share of production….
Figure 4, left panel, shows that the US relies far more on Chinese manufacturing production than vice versa. 2 While shocking at first sight, this should not be unexpected. It is natural that a country with 11% of the world output buys more from a country that produces 35% than vice versa, but the numbers are astounding. China was more exposed to US inputs before 2002, but the US has had greater exposure since then. In 2020, the US was about three times more exposed to Chinese manufacturing production than vice versa….
Robust growth in 2023: China maintains top position in global shipbuilding sector for 14 years
[news.cgtn.com, via Naked Capitalism comments 01-17-2024]
In the past 12 months, China’s shipbuilding output reached 42.32 million deadweight tonnes (dwt), a year-on-year increase of 11.8 percent, accounting for 50.2 percent of the world’s total.
The new orders rose 56.4 percent year on year to 71.2 million dwt during the period, taking up 66.6 percent of the world’s total.
By the end of December, the volume of orders on hand was 139.39 million dwt, up 32 percent year on year, accounting for 55 percent of the world’s total.
In 2023, five Chinese shipbuilding enterprises ranked in the global top 10 in output, seven in top 10 for new order volume, and six for holding orders, said the MIIT.
John Helmer [via Naked Capitalism 01-17-2024]
Oligarchy
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
Has been brilliantly presented by the South African lawyers, with some assists.
I don’t want to waste your time, though. Israel is committing genocide. Everyone knows it and yes, it meets the legal definition.
But the case is a thing of beauty, because whatever the ICJ decides way the outcome is almost the same:
If the ICJ orders an restraining order America, Israel and most of Europe will ignore the order. This will discredit the post-war “rules based international order”. It will be seen as a joke.
If the ICJ doesn’t order a restraining order when everyone can see, in real time, the genocide happening, the post-war rules based international order will be discredited.
The only difference is is that if the ICJ does its job, the ICJ itself may survive into the new order.
It’s interesting to me that the current order is in this “no win” situation. They feel they must support Israel, but doing so is losing them massive legitimacy. They have no way out.
There will be no weekly roundup today or next Sunday. It should return on the 21st of January.
Hezbollah just hit Meron airbase hard, in retaliation for Israel assassinating a Hamas leader in Lebanon. This was a major intelligence center, commanding drones and connecting other radar centers.
They have recently withdrawn two brigades from Gaza and intend to pull back more. They don’t control even the land in Gaza they claim to control, and are being bled white by an insurgency they can’t come to grip with and which is outfighting them.
Hezbollah has forced hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers to leave their homes near the Lebanese border. They’re systematically dismantling Israeli surveillance systems. If there’s a real war: if Israel tries to bomb the hell out Lebanon, they’ll strike Israel’s air bases with vast numbers of missiles. Without an air-force, well, Israel has nothing but terrible ground troops and some nukes.
(This is a reader supported Blog. Your subscriptions and donations make it possible for me to continue writing, and this is my annual fundraiser, which will determine how much I write next year. Please subscribe or donate if you can.)
Meanwhile, the US (no one else matters) has not been able to stop the Houthis from attacking Israeli shipping. It matters less than people make it out to, they can go around the cape and much of Israel’s supplies come from Europe and North America anyway, but the sheer powerlessness, the inability to bigfoot, is instructional: American missiles cost millions, the resistance’s cost tens of thousands most.
What Israel is trying to do is to hold on and let famine do the work. Right now, 80% of the people starving in the world are in Gaza. They can’t win militarily, they’re too incompetent and their enemies are no longer punching bags, but if they can keep the blockade of Gaza going, they can still ethnically cleanse.
It’s worth pointing out that historically, Israelis have been very good at ethnic cleansing: after all, almost everything in Palestine was Palestinian less than a hundred years ago, and now almost nothing is. This is the last gasp, the attempt to finish the job.
But Israel has systematically trained up its enemies. Hezbollah is their creation, it would not exist if they had not invaded and occupied Lebanon. Hamas was actively supported by them in order to undercut the PLA and fragment resistance.
Israel taught its enemies how to fight against overwhelming force; how to hide from assassinations and shrug them off when they inevitably happen; how to operate against air superiority and American style electronic intelligence.
EU Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borell, has met a delegation from Hezbollah, in a last ditch effort to contain tensions on the Lebanese Israeli border and prevent a full-scale war Hezbollah informed Borell that there will be no discussions regarding the Lebanese front until the war on Gaza is stopped, and reiterated that they will not retreat a single inch from Lebanese territory.
Israel has been a US dependency for a long time, but right now, if it weren’t for the US, it would probably collapse economically and militarily.
This war an embarassment for the Israelis. It shows they can’t protect the settlers, they can’t win against Hamas and they can’t stop Hezbollah from striking settlements. It’s just embarassment all around. They want to widen the war and get Iran and the US into it, but they overestimate the US: the US can’t send ships into the Gulf and expect to leave. Most of its regional allies would be unwilling to let it run its airforce off their airfields, and the US can devastate Lebanon but it can’t stop Hezbollah from devastating Tel Aviv.
Israel’s on its way down. I don’t know how this mess will turn out, in the end, but US and Israeli weakness has been made clear. Neither are what they were. Add this to the humiliation of Ukraine and it’s clear the American century is all but over and that its allies are no longer safe.
As for a peace, if it’s negotiated, it’ll be done under Chinese auspices. Think about that a little.
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.