|
I wouldn't count Turkey as part of ME because Turkey didn't want to be counted as part of ME. I probably will count Turkey as ME now because Turkey now wants to be part of ME, also Turkey is doing things to the minority blatantly only can be justified under ME value system. Iran is till more democratic than Turkey. Iran's check and balance between the Supreme Leader, the President and Revolutionary Guard still works IMO.
|
# ? Oct 22, 2014 16:11 |
|
|
# ? May 11, 2024 15:53 |
|
whatever7 posted:I wouldn't count Turkey as part of ME because Turkey didn't want to be counted as part of ME. I probably will count Turkey as ME now because Turkey now wants to be part of ME, also Turkey is doing things to the minority blatantly only can be justified under ME value system. What is a "ME value system"? No wait, I don't want to know. Arglebargle III posted:Also, someone mentioned the CPC cooking China's economic numbers. It's not that the CPC cooks the numbers, it's that everyone in the chain reports false numbers to each other for their own ulterior motives. The CPC doesn't know their own numbers because they can't trust their colleagues. Li Keqiang (Premier of the PRC State Council a.k.a. Xi's Number One) was caught on mic saying "China's numbers are all man-made" but he wasn't gloating that his government manages to fool the rest of the world but saying that he himself, China's #2 man, doesn't pay attention to the statistics because he knows they're rigged. In other words, China's #2 man doesn't have an exactly accurate number himself. That is still cooking the books, and I am skeptical there isn't state complicity involved. They "trust" them because not trusting them is a hazard to their career but it doesn't mean they aren't complicit is passing false statistics. Obviously, great economic data is good for everyone politically but it is very hard at least to me to give them a pass for it just because of the chaotic way it is done. At the end of the day they know they are passing off bad numbers even though they aren't the ones that actually added the extra zero to numbers.
|
# ? Oct 22, 2014 17:53 |
|
http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/chinese-economy-fall-off-cliffquote:The Conference Board, an international economic-research organization financed by donations from large corporations, is out with a new report claiming that the Chinese economic miracle is over, and that things are about to get sticky for what is now, by some measures, the world’s second-largest economy. During the next few years, China probably faces a period of turbulence and uncertainty, as well as the possibility of a serious financial crisis, the report says. And, over the long term, it will have to be content with annual G.D.P. growth of about four per cent—less than half the rate seen in recent decades. tl;dr : Maybe not.
|
# ? Oct 22, 2014 18:06 |
|
Ardennes posted:That is still cooking the books, and I am skeptical there isn't state complicity involved. They "trust" them because not trusting them is a hazard to their career but it doesn't mean they aren't complicit is passing false statistics. Obviously, great economic data is good for everyone politically but it is very hard at least to me to give them a pass for it just because of the chaotic way it is done. At the end of the day they know they are passing off bad numbers even though they aren't the ones that actually added the extra zero to numbers. I know how much I am fudging my numbers, and can guess how much my vassals fudged the numbers they gave me, but I don't really know how much their underlings fudged their numbers. My lord probably fudged them a bit too when he passed them along.
|
# ? Oct 22, 2014 18:32 |
|
http://www.economist.com/news/finan...ng_the_darknessquote:
|
# ? Oct 22, 2014 21:15 |
|
Cultural Imperial posted:http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/chinese-economy-fall-off-cliff Good article, matches up with what I've been hearing but add some details. Not too sure about the note of optimism at the end: "the Chinese invested heavily in infrastructure and education, particularly scientific education. This strategy provided a platform for rapid growth which, once China gets through its current problems, could well prove more durable than the Conference Board report acknowledges". I currently work with 13 Chinese universities and have taught professors from another 20 more and I have to say that if the hope is that scientific education and research will be the key to China's future growth then China's in deep poo poo.
|
# ? Oct 23, 2014 02:17 |
|
Daduzi posted:Good article, matches up with what I've been hearing but add some details. Not too sure about the note of optimism at the end: "the Chinese invested heavily in infrastructure and education, particularly scientific education. This strategy provided a platform for rapid growth which, once China gets through its current problems, could well prove more durable than the Conference Board report acknowledges". I currently work with 13 Chinese universities and have taught professors from another 20 more and I have to say that if the hope is that scientific education and research will be the key to China's future growth then China's in deep poo poo. Hahah Ok don't leave us hanging. Why do you think this?
|
# ? Oct 23, 2014 02:21 |
|
Cultural Imperial posted:Many trust loans are secured with property Isn't this similar to what happened in Japan? Using property as collateral for loans furthering a property bubble (in a business/corporate world), which then popped horribly? If the loans are secured with property that is highly speculative and in reality isn't worth anywhere near as much as the loan acts like they are, then the loans don't actually have much backing since the collateral will devalue in the event of a general downturn.
|
# ? Oct 23, 2014 03:35 |
|
Pervis posted:Isn't this similar to what happened in Japan? Using property as collateral for loans furthering a property bubble (in a business/corporate world), which then popped horribly? If the loans are secured with property that is highly speculative and in reality isn't worth anywhere near as much as the loan acts like they are, then the loans don't actually have much backing since the collateral will devalue in the event of a general downturn. I believe Iceland's banking industry was using speculative acquisitions as collateral for loans for further speculative acquistitions, on their way to 2008 as well.
|
# ? Oct 23, 2014 03:38 |
|
Yes
|
# ? Oct 23, 2014 03:43 |
|
Daduzi posted:Good article, matches up with what I've been hearing but add some details. Not too sure about the note of optimism at the end: "the Chinese invested heavily in infrastructure and education, particularly scientific education. This strategy provided a platform for rapid growth which, once China gets through its current problems, could well prove more durable than the Conference Board report acknowledges". I currently work with 13 Chinese universities and have taught professors from another 20 more and I have to say that if the hope is that scientific education and research will be the key to China's future growth then China's in deep poo poo. China also used Keynesian spending on steroids as a way to avoid the 2009 recession and continue its rapid GNP growth. Of course bubbles never last forever.
|
# ? Oct 23, 2014 03:46 |
|
Cultural Imperial posted:Hahah Well the main problems are: 1. Most university faculty don't actually give a poo poo about the subject they are studying. When I was teaching professors I was astonished how many confessed they actually weren't remotely interested in structural engineering/molecular biology/polymers/whatever they were researching. They'd basically been railroaded into the career path by their parents and had stuck it out strictly as a way to get the requisite signifiers of success in China (wife/husband, car, house, kid who will be educated anywhere except China). There were definitely some who were passionate, but they made up at most 50% and the ratio only gets worse the higher you move up the administrative ladder. 2. The quality of research being produced is pretty horrible. Most university faculty have never been properly trained in research methodology. PhD programs here are something of a joke, and masters programs a really unfunny joke. To make things worse, Hu Jintao's brainchild of funding universities purely on the basis of research output has created serious perverse incentives. Since universities are funded on how much research they produce, departments are funded on how much research they produce, so staff are promoted on how much research they produce. The result is that it's not uncommon for faculty to need to publish 6 papers a year to get/keep professorial positions. And anyone who's ever done research will tell you that at that rate the research isn't going to be much good. Corners are cut left right and centre, topics are chosen on the basis of how easy they will be to churn out (rather than how important they might be), and blatant academic dishonesty is commonplace. Most of the research being made is either replicating results from elsewhere, putting existing research into a "China context", collating someone else's data, or doing reviews or summaries of research. Now all of these can be useful, but they're not likely to lead to a revolution in innovation in China 3. Because of 2) the teaching at universities is farcically bad. Many of the staff are really bad teachers to begin with (because of 1) and the poor teaching quality at schools when they graduated) but even those who are really good at and passionate about teaching simply don't have time to devote to it because of the pressure to produce borderline garbage research papers. As a result, even though the younger generation are much more promising than the current crop of academic staff, they're simply not getting adequate training and whatever passion they might have for the subject is killed by terrible lecturing. 4) Lack of academic freedom. Now this most obviously hurts social sciences the most, but even in the hard sciences I've heard stories of professors being forbidden from publishing their findings because the results could embarrass the CCP. Said professors either stop giving a poo poo about their work entirely, or else emigrate and publish overseas. This leads to a big problem where because of 1), 2) and 3) the government is relying increasingly on foreign universities to train their faculty, but most who are half-competent won't return from their foreign sojourns. So there's the whole brain-drain effect on top of everything else. Now this is all based on my own personal experience, mind, but I've heard similar complaints from many of my Chinese friends, in particular those who work in R&D-intensive industries. By and large they don't even bother working with professors from Chinese universities and instead work solely with academics whose experience lies chiefly overseas. The only hope China has of switching to an innovation-based economy is to seriously overhaul higher education. Scrapping the system of evaluating universities solely by research output would be a big start. However this government is showing no signs of doing so, and to be honest even if they did it would probably be too late: the reform needed to begin 10 years ago, not today.
|
# ? Oct 23, 2014 04:06 |
|
That's awesome, thanks daduzi
|
# ? Oct 23, 2014 04:09 |
|
X number of papers per year is a measurable metric, while quality of papers produced is subjective, so you get stuff like wow China is producing the second largest number of patents per year, or the most scientific papers per year, but the people in charge are worried about the face of the matter, not the substance. From people I know in academia, there is absolutely no benefit to publishing even in partnership with Chinese universities or colleagues, it just casts aspersions on the topic you're writing about. If you see joint ventures it's purely a money for legitimacy transfer, but I think western universities are finding out that the problems that come along with that are not what they imagined.
|
# ? Oct 23, 2014 05:03 |
|
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/3a23...l#axzz3HVbtPYAcquote:Inflated Chinese export data are back. quote:
|
# ? Oct 30, 2014 04:33 |
|
Any recent good reads from the end of last month, or accurate sites providing un-bias analysis of China's economy and RMB liquidity markets?
|
# ? Nov 2, 2014 04:42 |
|
My Imaginary GF posted:Any recent good reads from the end of last month, or accurate sites providing un-bias analysis of China's economy and RMB liquidity markets? FT alphaville. It's free if you register with ft.com.
|
# ? Nov 2, 2014 05:46 |
|
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/ccb7...l#axzz3HssszqENquote:
|
# ? Nov 2, 2014 17:23 |
|
Fall Sick and Die posted:X number of papers per year is a measurable metric, while quality of papers produced is subjective, so you get stuff like wow China is producing the second largest number of patents per year, or the most scientific papers per year, but the people in charge are worried about the face of the matter, not the substance. From people I know in academia, there is absolutely no benefit to publishing even in partnership with Chinese universities or colleagues, it just casts aspersions on the topic you're writing about.
|
# ? Nov 3, 2014 05:21 |
|
So, one of the contributing factors to the continued decline in energy prices has been China's over-production of supertankers. The international energy shipping market cannot afford to ship more than refinement capacity is able to handle, while excess capacity in shipment capabilities is forcing energy-producing nations to deeply discount their energy exports. This is driving up inflation in those nations and driving down consumption. This driving down of consumption has a knock-on effect of freezing liquidity markets in other market sectors, which further strengthens global reserve currencies and drives down manufacturing equipment exports. In turn, demand for lower-chain manufactured goods and products, such as steel or cargo ships, is driven down even further, increasing inventories in China despite attempts to subsidize the use of these resources for production of goods up the value chain, such as cargo ships, railroad engines and rails, wind turbines, and mass construction projects. However, the rate at which these projects and export-orientated goods are being produced and utilized is vastly below the rate at which stockpiles are gathering and at which further systemic pressure is exerted that results in an acceleration of inventory accumulation secured with state and subprime loans. Is that understanding of current dynamics correct or a bit too simplified?
|
# ? Nov 3, 2014 07:34 |
|
I'm not an expert but I would add the shale oil boom, OPEC overproduction to the list of causes driving down the price of oil.
|
# ? Nov 3, 2014 15:02 |
|
Daduzi posted:
I'd like to echo this, but worse, for the social sciences. Obviously, hard sciences are centrally important for an industrialized society, but social sciences contributed a lot to Western economic growth, too. Stuff like Frank and Lillian Gilbreth's studies on efficiency, studies on consumer behavior, on urban living, had a lot of effect in the US. Studies like this in China are nearly impossible, partially because of problems with academia already stated by you, but also because of the intense political pressures around such studies and the firm idea that Chinese people/culture is fundamentally different from all other cultures, and so social learning from other contexts can't be applied. I seriously think that China could fill an amazing and needed slot in research just by reproducing work done otherwise, and knocking down all those P=.05 studies that just hit the random chance lottery. This would be a great way for them to actually mature into a real scientific power.
|
# ? Nov 3, 2014 15:03 |
|
Increased shipping capacity doesn't mean you have to ship more, it just means that you can ship more and it's cheaper to do so. But otherwise yeah that sounds right to me.
|
# ? Nov 3, 2014 23:09 |
|
FrozenVent posted:Increased shipping capacity doesn't mean you have to ship more, it just means that you can ship more and it's cheaper to do so. Ship more for less, which means petro economies that depend on energy exports as their sole reliable source of government revenue have to produce more energy to maintain current revenue levels, which in turn means they have to ship more energy, and to do so need more discounts financed by energy exports.... Global logistics chains are so tight that a 1% change in production will cause a 10% change in price; eventually, it'll become too expensive to subsidize energy exports and shipments will freeze and you've got a global liquidity crisis for any state which relies upon tarriffs to fuel economic growth. So yeah, I'm pretty certain China is in a downward economic spiral that is intensifying global conflicts and threatening the stability of the entire world. The only other time the world experienced such a boon in shipping capacity was coupled with uncontrolled population growth in all nations. Pretty sure, economically speaking, China is entering uncharted territory and will have to raise net effective tax rates or wind up in a situation where foreign policy forces Chinese troop deployments or national reform in the face of systemic collapse as a nation. I'm going to bet that the central committee will be more willing to deploy troops than it will be to enact effective tax reform, especially since effective tax reform has only been known to work when coupled with systemic social reform and empowerment of lower-class citizens. Unless there is a time in Chinese history when an emperor or warring prince expanded citizenship to all Chinese and charged them accordingly? Would certainly be interesting if China made every Han a party member to charge them party dues. E: Cultural Imperial posted:I'm not an expert but I would add the shale oil boom, OPEC overproduction to the list of causes driving down the price of oil. If OPEC lowers production, OPEC states can either institute democratic reforms with austerity measures or commit genocide against the disenfranchised portions of their population. Bit of a rock and a hard place they find themselves between: Fight internal ISIS groups, or hope to god that things improve. My Imaginary GF fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Nov 4, 2014 |
# ? Nov 4, 2014 04:08 |
|
http://www.apec-china.org.cn/ It's down
|
# ? Nov 6, 2014 01:41 |
|
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/15/us-g20-summit-china-banks-idUSKCN0IZ06S20141115quote:
|
# ? Nov 15, 2014 17:40 |
|
http://online.wsj.com/articles/in-china-coal-hub-city-struggles-to-survive-amid-economic-slowdown-1416778046quote:In China Coal Hub, City Struggles to Survive Amid Economic Slowdown quote:Coal-mining centers such as Jixi and other resource-dependent cities—from steel-dependent Tangshan near Beijing to iron-ore-rich Linfen in central China and across the northeast—have been hit particularly hard by the slowdown.
|
# ? Nov 24, 2014 06:31 |
|
Good, China can do with less loving coal burning everywhere!
|
# ? Nov 24, 2014 13:38 |
|
Also GDP growth
|
# ? Nov 24, 2014 13:42 |
|
quote:
|
# ? Nov 24, 2014 15:50 |
|
Cultural Imperial posted:http://online.wsj.com/articles/in-china-coal-hub-city-struggles-to-survive-amid-economic-slowdown-1416778046 My girlfriend is from Jixi, and told me that this is news to nobody. Basically everyone knows that the local government is falsifying data, all the while the number of visible ultra-rich is booming. She specifically mentioned that the local government put together a kind of "fancy chart" to convince everyone things were going great recently.
|
# ? Nov 24, 2014 17:34 |
|
Ceciltron posted:My girlfriend is from Jixi, and told me that this is news to nobody. Basically everyone knows that the local government is falsifying data, all the while the number of visible ultra-rich is booming. She specifically mentioned that the local government put together a kind of "fancy chart" to convince everyone things were going great recently. That's awesome. So what exactly is the rate of China's gdp growth?
|
# ? Nov 25, 2014 07:09 |
|
Let me see if I got this straight. A large portion of the Chinese economy is made up of constructing and producing things no one actually buys or uses. And they pay for this by taking loans that aren't regulated. On top off that all of the numbers they have, and presumably also base decisions off of to some extent, are so fudged the whole country could look like Detroit and still be in an economic growth? Please tell me I'm understanding this wrong.
|
# ? Nov 25, 2014 14:23 |
|
Poil posted:Let me see if I got this straight. "Look like Detroit" is a bit of an exaggeration but yes. This is sort of the opposite of what happened in the US/Europe, where the Chinese just decided to say "build all the infrastructure for stimulus" and didn't stop.
|
# ? Nov 25, 2014 14:28 |
|
So its sounds fairly analogous to the credit default swaps from '07/08. Except some how more opaque and a poo poo ton more money at stake. That is impressive.
|
# ? Nov 25, 2014 16:16 |
|
computer parts posted:"Look like Detroit" is a bit of an exaggeration but yes. This is sort of the opposite of what happened in the US/Europe, where the Chinese just decided to say "build all the infrastructure for stimulus" and didn't stop. Yeah, I don't know if I expect Detroit, Chinese labor costs are still so low that I doubt manufacturing would disappear but there is going to have be a large correction that is going to impact their growth for a while. Basically, the whole GDP growth project has most likely gone awry and China may very well be caught in a lower-middle trap while having to deal with a rapidly aging population, and some truly impressive environmental damage. The whole build up fantasy of the Chinese "taking over the world" just isn't going to be happen for a long while if ever. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTSQozWP-rM Ardennes fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Nov 25, 2014 |
# ? Nov 25, 2014 17:06 |
|
Chinese labour costs are going up and China is losing its competitive advantage believe it or not.
|
# ? Nov 25, 2014 17:25 |
|
Cultural Imperial posted:Chinese labour costs are going up and China is losing its competitive advantage believe it or not. It is to an extent, and exports will be squeezed but at the same time they still export a very large amount of the world's manufactured goods.The Chinese economy isn't going to dry up but growth will simply because there is no way to really sustain it. Also, almost certainly reported growth and thus reported total GDP is likely significantly lower than official numbers. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Nov 25, 2014 |
# ? Nov 25, 2014 17:44 |
|
A lot of Detroit's manufacturing just moved to lower cost of living states too, it didn't go out of country.
|
# ? Nov 25, 2014 17:49 |
|
|
# ? May 11, 2024 15:53 |
|
computer parts posted:A lot of Detroit's manufacturing just moved to lower cost of living states too, it didn't go out of country. A big part of it is also simply the racial history of the United States, and you don't have the similar issues expect in Tibet/Xinjiang. In the case of China, wages are lower in the interior and the countryside than the coast, but the coast also has immediate access to shipping routes so I don't know if you are going to have the same dynamics.
|
# ? Nov 25, 2014 18:12 |