China Sliding Into Not Recession, But Worse? 1930s-Style Trade Wars Loom.

[cieldumort]

Times Online:Violent unrest rocks China as crisis hits
The collapse of the export trade has left millions without work and
set off a wave of social instability, writes Michael Sheridan in Hong Kong.Bankruptcies, unemployment and social unrest are spreading more widely in China than officially reported, according to independent research that paints

Comments

[mcfnord]

What are they gonna do? Turn Communist?

[volksjager]

really...

Barbarians

[theheretic]

Ya know, I'm real curious to see if they go with tariffs, the USA I mean. With this new president and all his advisors and the collapse of the dollar and rising unemployment, the urge for bread and circuses must be rather strong. It worked for the Romans, so long as they needed a distraction. We've got that Stuporbowl for the circuses, and we grow enough food to feed 2 billion people so that's covered as well. Just a matter of employing enough people to there's no civil uprising, at least not one that can't be sectioned up with commercial breaks to sell antacids and headache pills

Re: Barbarians

[fischlehrer]

Optimist.

Re: Barbarians

[cieldumort]

We shall see. I really didn't care for that saber rattling from Geithner.

[fischlehrer]

So reading all this above, I find the Newsweek article on the stability of China's economy to be confusing. Is Newsweek completely wrong? Or are they just buying the Chinese party line too easily? Or does China have more overall economic stability that the unrest indicates? Hmm,

http://www.newsweek.com/id/178810/page/1

One thing I find interesting is that in China, when the boss did not pay his workers, officials actually took a gun to his head and made him go to the bank and get payroll for his workers. In the US, if a boss does not pay his workers, he gets to lay them all off, get a huge bailout from the government and remodel his private bathroom.

What saves China then, apparently, is the lack of extensive indoor plumbing.

[cieldumort]

That's great. lol@newsweek

China is the only major economy that is likely to show significant growth this year, because it is the only one that routinely breaks every rule in the economic textbook. There is no truly free market in China, where the state doctors statistics, manipulates the stock markets, fixes prices in key industries, owns many strategic industries outright, and staffs key bank posts with Communist Party members and tells them to whom they should lend, and in what they should invest. In fact, the main reason China is not slowing as fast as the other big five economies is its capacity for what economists ridicule, in normal times, as state meddling: it limited foreign investment in the banking sector and didn't embrace the exotic financial innovations that are the melting core of the global credit crisis.I think in a way, Newsweek is right. And in a more garden-variety recession, this take would probably make some more sense

[fischlehrer]

But isn't Newsweek a fantastically credible news source? Don't they do investigative journalism and all that? Don't they have paid professional reporters?

He he he

[cieldumort]

::snort::

[nebris]

I have long believed that China was literally a paper tiger and would come undone at the first serious economic downturn and do so in a most unpleasant fashion, you know, revolutionary civil war with nukes!

~M~

[cieldumort]

Very comforting thought