At the opening ceremony of the ruling Communist Party of China’s 20th National Congress this weekend Chinese President Xi Jinping came right out with it.
The US has failed miserably in our attempt at foreign policy through sanctions. Once it became clear we would use the dollar as a club, it sealed the resolve of the BRIC group to move into an alternate system. Rather than lead through strength, moral resolve and financial responsibility, we have been profligate spenders, morally bankrupt and corrupt like some third world banana republic. Everyone knows Biden, his son and most of the deep state actors are nothing but grifting elites milking places like Ukraine for all it's worth. How do we look on the world stage? Like the clowns we have become.
What you describe as our country's problems have been going on through multiple administrations and both parties. Look in the mirror, the problem is us. No politician is magically going to change us, but we like to believe all of the solutions to our problems will be easily handled by someone else.
This is such a biased, myopic take. For you to not fully understand the the degree Russia is weakening itself is immense. Your failed attempts to understand because of your displeasure of West's policies hurts your overall message.
Russia is burning through all of its capital account surplus via oil revenue. The West is burning Russia's resources much like it did during the Afgahn War. There is no win for Russia, and for you to think China has some sort of strategic advantage is a joke.
This is such a short-sighted take. We are seeing the end of the hegemony of the economies of printed paper and the beginning of the economies of real stuff. This will take years to play out and has very little to do, long run, with the US proxy war in Ukraine. The West "burning Russia's resources" will have as little effect as did America burning through its own resources in Vietnam had to the last Cold War, which took 50 years to fully play out. To think that what happens on that tiny battle field today invalidates this global shift is missing the forrest for the trees. Putting a Ukrainian flag in a Twitter profile won't stop this. Talk about myopic.
Really well said. I wonder how much gold China really has? We know they hold $1 trillion in treasuries - and they also produce nearly everything we use in this country. But, yeah, what leverage?
I think that, for many decades, very poor and less sophisticated countries, which is the only way you could describe China in the 1970's through the 1990's, thought they could take their real stuff and sell it to the West for dollars and the dollars would make them rich. Over the past 20 years they've become far more sophisticated and, in becoming so, have realized that their real stuff is what makes them rich, not the dollars it can be sold for.
In specific reference to your point, I think the world will be blown away when they finally realize how much gold China has. Not a single ounce of gold leaves China. I think they they have a LOT more than what we or anyone else thinks. Like United States post-WW2 size or even larger.
I don't know who is burning whose resources, given that the US and the rest of the West have sent so much to Ukraine that they are now dangerously short of weapons and ammunition for any war THEY might have to fight. The Pentagon is looking for a company that can produce more missiles, we dare not send any more over, and we recently had to actually cancel a military exercise because we didn't have enough HIMARS missiles to expend in practice war games. And all this for a war that Ukraine (and the West, by proxy) is still losing.
Ukraine losing what exactly? They've been invaded and now the world knows how inept the Russian military is all while on a run rate of 12% of GDP on defense spending, double last year, as their economy implodes. They're now mobilizing almost 16% of those under 30. Not including the war, Russias population declined 430,000 in the first five months og 2022. Russia is fucked. Everyone knows it except those who think they're edgy by being anti-West. You can not agree with the West and still see how beyond fucked Russia is
You have your sources and I have mine. As they say, Truth is the first casualty in war, so ultimately time will tell which of us has the more accurate picture.
One thing I DO know is that Western legacy media and government have turned the gaslight up to full blast since Covid began, and Western social media mercilessly censors anything that doesn't support the "preferred" narrative coming from our Western "betters." I don't have the space or the time to list even a fraction of all the things they have said that have turned out to be provable lies.
Incidentally, I don't know where you're getting your numbers from:
1) There are economies imploding right now, but Russia's is not one of them. Russia's revenues are up since the war began, the Ruble is performing more strongly than virtually all other world currencies--it is the only one that has actually appreciated against the Dollar. Check out some numbers for the Western economies and see how they flange up.
2) The size of the recently announced Russian mobilization is 300,000. If they are all under 30 and that is 16% of them, that means there are only 1.8M people under 30 in Russia, out of a total of 145M people? Really? That means that less than 2% of the population is under 30. I don't think so.
3) Russia's population has been in demographic decline for quite a few years now, but if you are drawing on recent statistics, check those for other (Western) countries, and you will find a dramatic drop there as well. This decline has causes that are still being debated, but are clearly not associated with the war.
I could go on, but I'll give it a rest. Many have a considerable emotion invested in their opinions on this matter, and presenting them with hard facts doesn't work any more.
Lol west is losing? Funny, morale and fighting for freedom (which was completely underestimated how motivated and cunning Ukraine’s forces are) is winning in addition to more advanced western weaponry, lol at Russia buying weapons from Iran, what a joke of the “world’s 2nd strongest military”, maybe you should follow some key pro Russia telegram channels sharing how new divisions of conscripts are getting absolutely obliterated on the battlefield.
I don’t get this whole anti-west propaganda they are eating up. It’s like they want the US to fail and yet don’t acknowledge the MUCH LARGER short comings of Russia and China, lol, it’s so funny. They mention US debt, have they looked into China’s debt problem?! Their worst real estate market and central planning inefficiencies and corruption there. Banks are going to fail in China while US banks have never been in such a strong position since 2008. Also China has a big problem with 20% youth unemployment and over the next 100 years it’s population will decline from 1.4 billion to 1 billion.
People are so uneducated when it comes to macro economics and international relations (what I studied and majored in) it’s pretty sad this whole anti US. You can be unhappy with the US, so help improve her, don’t put Russia and China on a damn pedestal and look down on the US when that isn’t even close to the reality.
Yes the US has problems but have they seen or been to Russia and China? It’s like mind blowing the information disparity and bias coming out from some readers.
No one wants the US to "lose". It seems like you see the West continuing on the current path as "winning". THAT view is the propaganda machine at work. The current economic system based on printed dollars has been enormously destructive to the West, where the manufacturing base is practically gone and the printed dollars increasingly flow into the hands at the top while those in the middle get destroyed. The US is on a completely unsustainable path. Diverting from that path is a win, not loss. Short term pain, yes, but better in the long run. At current spending, our debt will be $40 Trillion just 4 years from today and $47 Trillion 8-years from today. We added the last trillion $ to the debt in just 8 months. At current spending we will add the next trillion in just 6.5 months and we'll be printing $2Trillion+ deficits. Completely unsustainable. There are over $600 Trillion in notional derivatives held almost entirely by banks. That's ludicrous. The longer this continues the worse the pain will be when it crumbles. The only way out of this debt death spiral is draconian cuts to government spending along with massive tax increases or massive inflation, both of which are a death sentence to the middle class. That is not "winning."
You are correct to point out the enormous headwinds facing the BRIC nations. China's real estate market, at $55 Trillion, is the largest market in the world. When, not if, it implodes it will cripple the Chinese economy. You are 100% correct about that. No one will be unscathed in the coming shift from this financial system to the next. The difference is China's manufacturing base will allow them to emerge far stronger than the West. The US would be well advised to rebuild our manufacturing base as well, but that is not possible under the current system of printed money. In fact, China is likely counting on that collapse to rewrite their entire financial system to work on a CBDC backed by gold and leave the current dollar/ UST system entirely. I think they're banking on it at this point (pun intended). Short-sighted people will look at the few years of extreme pain felt by China and forget that they are still an ascendant nation.
We are not currently an ascendant nation, but we can be. The world is shifting to economies of real stuff instead of economies of printed paper. The US is enormously wealthy in natural resources and is still the world leader in real innovation. We can absolutely be A or THE global power in an economy of real stuff, but not as long as we cling to the status quo economy of printed paper.
I don't want to see the US "lose," as you put it. On the contrary. I'm an optimist and I believe our country's best days are ahead of us. I think we're going to go through a crucible and come out stronger on the other side. I want to see the US be the "shining city on the hill" I have always believed it to be, but there is ZERO path from here to there in the current system of useless printed dollars.
I didn’t say the US is winning as we have never been weaker. But even if China backs their currency to gold, they are an authoritarian state and still have a lot of time to catch up to US in technology and military which is what really backs a nation’s currency. Debt is a problem for every country and yes we benefitted heavily from being the world’s reserve currency so we need to be careful and more financially prudent by enacting fiscal austerity which means pain and higher prices as we bring back advanced manufacturing to the US. A lot of US companies are working on onshore manufacturing- it will take time.
Trump was right to bring critical manufacturing back to the US but I wish he was less talk and more walk by enacting legislation and supporting fiscal policies to make that advanced manufacturing transformation happen. Focus on innovation in manufacturing not trying to please voters and bring the dead rust belt back.
Trump like Bernie Sanders is a symptom of populism, if you really want to see how countries decline is when they get around a cult of personality like Putin to Xi. The funny thing is China reforms stopped at making their institutions less susceptible to corruption and consolidation of power from Xi. The Chinese didn’t want another Mao and cult of personality yet they are allowing the very thing they wished to avoid happen with Xi consolidating power. This is why China cannot be successful long term, like Russia’s huge corruption problems seen throughout its military, China has never been tested in true modern warfare. I don’t want to see it happen during my lifetime but so far communist/kleptocracy countries are pretty bad at conventional war and reveals the deep corruption that undermines their military apparatus.
Also, China failed massive investments into semiconductor due to misappropriation of funds. If ppl think the US is corrupt or lead by “elite globalists” (LMAO stupid conspiracies) they are often blind to the real corruption happening in Russia to China and why these countries just cannot compete with the US anytime soon. China is definitely our biggest challenge to date because they embraced authoritarian capitalism, so we have to prevent them from building a military capable of defeating US military 10 years from now.
You're 100% correct about Trump and populism. Although, I believe that Trump was probably the first populist president of our era, but won't be the last. I also agree that an authoritarian economy, by its nature, is probably not to be successful over the long run, although China's "long run" is probably a lot longer than we think. However, I do think you discount the level to which our own economy is centrally planned these days. For 70 years we told the Soviets that large, central command bureaucracies don't work and we were right, but we're not willing to take our own advice. I'm happy to just agree to disagree on that.
Regardless, China is going to do what China is going to do. I honestly don't care too much about China and their own internal challenges. I'm far more concerned about America politically, economically, socially, and as individuals. Ultimately, the only way out of America's current debt spiral is default. Either Argentine-style (not likely) or through inflation (more likely). We're not going to pay back $30 or $40 trillion in debt at current valuations. Certainly not when there are still $172 trillion of unfunded liabilities over the next 50 years (and that's just at the federal level, don't get me started on state-level pension scams).
The current system is doomed and we should welcome the end of the current system, because ultimately it is that system that has led us to this unsustainable point. The sooner we get it over with, dismantle our empire, and embrace an economy of real stuff the better. I still think there are ways to land this flying pig softly, but the longer we weaponize the currency, print tens of billions to prop up the empire through proxy wars, ignore our own energy capabilities, and pit our own people against one another; well, let's just say the window of good outcomes is closing rapidly.
It's still baffling to me that you continue to take the doomed nation of China seriously to any capacity. This is Wolf Warrior talk, Xi talks tough and threatens war literally every other day to satiate the populace who are being crippled faster than anywhere else in the world and watching their quality of life return back to Maoist China. You don't seem to understand Face saving culture in Asia or that all news from China is inherently fake.
China is a doomed country and it's not even worth taking seriously. You should take it about as seriously as you do I don't know...some random mid-African country.
China does not exist without US support. The US just singlehandedly sent China's manufacturing back to the stone age. We MADE China. We CREATED China. All we have to do is just leave them alone and the entire nation (what's left of it) will collapse virtually overnight.
China does not and cannot exist without US support and protection. That's gone now. They will shut themselves off and devolve into civil war and widespread famine like they've been doing OVER AND OVER again for the past 5,000 years whenever they've experienced a modicum of success on the global stage.
China is the second largest economy in the world by GDP after the US. Imports from China were $542 billion in 2021. Leave them alone? Always take anyone with nukes seriously. The Bidens will continue to support and protect China as long as the money keeps rolling into their pockets.
The Biden administration just sent China's technology sector back to the fucking stone age, dude. What on earth are you talking about?
Here's China in a nuthsell...
* No capacity to manufacture high-end chips past anything akin to a coffee maker
* The fastest aging population in world history and the fastest collapsing demographics history has ever known
* The fastest rising labor costs in the world
* Surrounded on all sides by enemies with no access to oceans or international water routes unless SECURED by the US Navy
* A 5,000 year history of devolving into civil war (the last one of which was only like 70 years ago)
* Drought
* Famine
* Zero energy independence
China is the biggest nothingburger in the world. Second largest economy my ass. Nobody knows the real stats out of China because everything is a lie. And now they don't even have access to chips lol.
China is done. The US giveth and the US just tooketh away.
Paul are you dense or something? Biden administration has been way more anti China than any other administration. Stop reading propaganda and your blind bias is showing. Trump wasn’t this tough against China, his foreign policy was more rhetoric and had not coherent strategy, it was haphazardly done. And have you read into the details of the semiconductor ban. It’s straight economic warfare.
Well, not so fast my friends...the Petrodollar and SWIFT are not going to fall like Afghanistan after our very overdue departure. Everyone thought the "Soviet Union" was 7 feet tall in the 50's to the fall of the Berlin wall, Japan was in the 80's, Muslims into aught, and so on. The US is the best situated to onshore almost everything once we get past the financial raccoons. Assuming we do... I wouldn't bet against us. What's the over/under on our collapse? I'll take over....
Even the Indian navy possesses the assets necessary to interdict oil flows from the Persian Gulf to China, and Russian pipelines are nowhere near adequate as a replacement.
If China takes Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, and India, even without US encouragement or assistance, would strangle China's oil lifeline.
Xi Jinping can pose and preen all he wants, but he can't avoid the strategic vulnerability of needing to import almost all industrial raw materials. Just ask the Japanese how well that worked for them prior to 1941.
While it was relatively easy for Putin to invade Ukraine, it would be much harder for China to cross 100 miles of sea. Quite risky operation I would say. Should China decide to go for it, they may get those islands, which are practically attached to China mainland, but to get Thaiwan would be much harder.
We also should not forget, that legally, there is only one China and it is not the PRC. So Bejing should technically merge with the government of Taiwan, not the other way around..
Their anti ship missiles depend on ground based radar and relay installations for in flight targeting updates. Installations which are very vulnerable to cruise missile attack, which the US Navy can launch from submarines.
Anti ship missiles are a potent coastal defense weapon but are utterly incapable of power projection, a capacity China needs (and does not have) if wants to make a serious play for Taiwan.
"Terrain image-matching" for a weapon that's going out over open water?
GPS is great for putting a missile at a fixed target. An aircraft carrier is a moving target--and at 35 knots even if the cruise missile only takes ten minutes to get to the target it still has to figure out where in about 140 square miles of ocean the target actually is. GPS and inertial guidance don't help with that at all.
And "close" still only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
Not to mention that a carrier only has to get close enough to deliver aircraft to Taiwan, which, just like Midway in 1942, would be quite capable of functioning as a stand-in for an additional carrier. Yes, China could use cruise missiles to take out Taiwanese air strips, but not without revealing where their cruise missile batteries are located, which would make them vulnerable to counter-battery type cruise missile attacks via an SSGN or two.
While the US Navy is organized around its carriers, carriers are far from the only ships in the fleet able to project power overseas.
Which gets back to the reality that land-based cruise missiles are not a power projection capability. For that a blue-water navy is required, and China does not have that (nor any other effective means of power projection).
We need to increased and go all out into oil and transitioning plan to focus on nuclear and better energy transformation. Why I will hold $SMR long term.
Also, agree that the past 30 years World order is breaking down, globalization is dying and all the far right and leftists fools wanting it to die will see the pain this will result, less global trade, less peace, higher prices, economic warfare, a new kind of Cold War — that semiconductor ban is the canary in the coal mine. I’ve been warning about this and also predicted this semiconductor ban and 20th China Congress would be a risk event that I hedged against.
Humans are doomed to repeat mistakes of history, now we are going more nationalistic and populist — most countries into hard times. Because the democratic world order the greatest country the world has ever seen is starting to crack. US superpower and democracy has given us “good times” and those good times created some weak leadership.
BRICS won’t matter because no global order will rely on authoritarian countries - if the US falls it’s going to be very bad times for everyone around the world. This is why I can’t stand the infighting and division- Lincoln said it best that we would fall as a country internally and never externally. To the extent foreign adversaries are trying to destabilize and divide us is the big question I want to dig more into.
QQQ is my priority short now and I’ll hedge against every rally I see in tech.
The US has failed miserably in our attempt at foreign policy through sanctions. Once it became clear we would use the dollar as a club, it sealed the resolve of the BRIC group to move into an alternate system. Rather than lead through strength, moral resolve and financial responsibility, we have been profligate spenders, morally bankrupt and corrupt like some third world banana republic. Everyone knows Biden, his son and most of the deep state actors are nothing but grifting elites milking places like Ukraine for all it's worth. How do we look on the world stage? Like the clowns we have become.
I think you've got it nailed. I'm not sure why it's so hard for some to see this...
because the mask is still over their eyes, in addition to their mouth and nose...
What you describe as our country's problems have been going on through multiple administrations and both parties. Look in the mirror, the problem is us. No politician is magically going to change us, but we like to believe all of the solutions to our problems will be easily handled by someone else.
You can bet that he will do so while Biden is in office.
This is such a biased, myopic take. For you to not fully understand the the degree Russia is weakening itself is immense. Your failed attempts to understand because of your displeasure of West's policies hurts your overall message.
Russia is burning through all of its capital account surplus via oil revenue. The West is burning Russia's resources much like it did during the Afgahn War. There is no win for Russia, and for you to think China has some sort of strategic advantage is a joke.
This is such a short-sighted take. We are seeing the end of the hegemony of the economies of printed paper and the beginning of the economies of real stuff. This will take years to play out and has very little to do, long run, with the US proxy war in Ukraine. The West "burning Russia's resources" will have as little effect as did America burning through its own resources in Vietnam had to the last Cold War, which took 50 years to fully play out. To think that what happens on that tiny battle field today invalidates this global shift is missing the forrest for the trees. Putting a Ukrainian flag in a Twitter profile won't stop this. Talk about myopic.
Really well said. I wonder how much gold China really has? We know they hold $1 trillion in treasuries - and they also produce nearly everything we use in this country. But, yeah, what leverage?
I'm sure they were just spying on the Fed for no reason at all: https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/china-spied-on-the-fed-and-detained
I think that, for many decades, very poor and less sophisticated countries, which is the only way you could describe China in the 1970's through the 1990's, thought they could take their real stuff and sell it to the West for dollars and the dollars would make them rich. Over the past 20 years they've become far more sophisticated and, in becoming so, have realized that their real stuff is what makes them rich, not the dollars it can be sold for.
In specific reference to your point, I think the world will be blown away when they finally realize how much gold China has. Not a single ounce of gold leaves China. I think they they have a LOT more than what we or anyone else thinks. Like United States post-WW2 size or even larger.
I don't know who is burning whose resources, given that the US and the rest of the West have sent so much to Ukraine that they are now dangerously short of weapons and ammunition for any war THEY might have to fight. The Pentagon is looking for a company that can produce more missiles, we dare not send any more over, and we recently had to actually cancel a military exercise because we didn't have enough HIMARS missiles to expend in practice war games. And all this for a war that Ukraine (and the West, by proxy) is still losing.
Ukraine losing what exactly? They've been invaded and now the world knows how inept the Russian military is all while on a run rate of 12% of GDP on defense spending, double last year, as their economy implodes. They're now mobilizing almost 16% of those under 30. Not including the war, Russias population declined 430,000 in the first five months og 2022. Russia is fucked. Everyone knows it except those who think they're edgy by being anti-West. You can not agree with the West and still see how beyond fucked Russia is
You have your sources and I have mine. As they say, Truth is the first casualty in war, so ultimately time will tell which of us has the more accurate picture.
One thing I DO know is that Western legacy media and government have turned the gaslight up to full blast since Covid began, and Western social media mercilessly censors anything that doesn't support the "preferred" narrative coming from our Western "betters." I don't have the space or the time to list even a fraction of all the things they have said that have turned out to be provable lies.
Incidentally, I don't know where you're getting your numbers from:
1) There are economies imploding right now, but Russia's is not one of them. Russia's revenues are up since the war began, the Ruble is performing more strongly than virtually all other world currencies--it is the only one that has actually appreciated against the Dollar. Check out some numbers for the Western economies and see how they flange up.
2) The size of the recently announced Russian mobilization is 300,000. If they are all under 30 and that is 16% of them, that means there are only 1.8M people under 30 in Russia, out of a total of 145M people? Really? That means that less than 2% of the population is under 30. I don't think so.
3) Russia's population has been in demographic decline for quite a few years now, but if you are drawing on recent statistics, check those for other (Western) countries, and you will find a dramatic drop there as well. This decline has causes that are still being debated, but are clearly not associated with the war.
I could go on, but I'll give it a rest. Many have a considerable emotion invested in their opinions on this matter, and presenting them with hard facts doesn't work any more.
Ok, enjoy. USDRUB 89 by Q1-23, 110 by Q2
Hope you didn't bet the farm on this one!
Lol west is losing? Funny, morale and fighting for freedom (which was completely underestimated how motivated and cunning Ukraine’s forces are) is winning in addition to more advanced western weaponry, lol at Russia buying weapons from Iran, what a joke of the “world’s 2nd strongest military”, maybe you should follow some key pro Russia telegram channels sharing how new divisions of conscripts are getting absolutely obliterated on the battlefield.
I don’t get this whole anti-west propaganda they are eating up. It’s like they want the US to fail and yet don’t acknowledge the MUCH LARGER short comings of Russia and China, lol, it’s so funny. They mention US debt, have they looked into China’s debt problem?! Their worst real estate market and central planning inefficiencies and corruption there. Banks are going to fail in China while US banks have never been in such a strong position since 2008. Also China has a big problem with 20% youth unemployment and over the next 100 years it’s population will decline from 1.4 billion to 1 billion.
People are so uneducated when it comes to macro economics and international relations (what I studied and majored in) it’s pretty sad this whole anti US. You can be unhappy with the US, so help improve her, don’t put Russia and China on a damn pedestal and look down on the US when that isn’t even close to the reality.
Yes the US has problems but have they seen or been to Russia and China? It’s like mind blowing the information disparity and bias coming out from some readers.
No one wants the US to "lose". It seems like you see the West continuing on the current path as "winning". THAT view is the propaganda machine at work. The current economic system based on printed dollars has been enormously destructive to the West, where the manufacturing base is practically gone and the printed dollars increasingly flow into the hands at the top while those in the middle get destroyed. The US is on a completely unsustainable path. Diverting from that path is a win, not loss. Short term pain, yes, but better in the long run. At current spending, our debt will be $40 Trillion just 4 years from today and $47 Trillion 8-years from today. We added the last trillion $ to the debt in just 8 months. At current spending we will add the next trillion in just 6.5 months and we'll be printing $2Trillion+ deficits. Completely unsustainable. There are over $600 Trillion in notional derivatives held almost entirely by banks. That's ludicrous. The longer this continues the worse the pain will be when it crumbles. The only way out of this debt death spiral is draconian cuts to government spending along with massive tax increases or massive inflation, both of which are a death sentence to the middle class. That is not "winning."
You are correct to point out the enormous headwinds facing the BRIC nations. China's real estate market, at $55 Trillion, is the largest market in the world. When, not if, it implodes it will cripple the Chinese economy. You are 100% correct about that. No one will be unscathed in the coming shift from this financial system to the next. The difference is China's manufacturing base will allow them to emerge far stronger than the West. The US would be well advised to rebuild our manufacturing base as well, but that is not possible under the current system of printed money. In fact, China is likely counting on that collapse to rewrite their entire financial system to work on a CBDC backed by gold and leave the current dollar/ UST system entirely. I think they're banking on it at this point (pun intended). Short-sighted people will look at the few years of extreme pain felt by China and forget that they are still an ascendant nation.
We are not currently an ascendant nation, but we can be. The world is shifting to economies of real stuff instead of economies of printed paper. The US is enormously wealthy in natural resources and is still the world leader in real innovation. We can absolutely be A or THE global power in an economy of real stuff, but not as long as we cling to the status quo economy of printed paper.
I don't want to see the US "lose," as you put it. On the contrary. I'm an optimist and I believe our country's best days are ahead of us. I think we're going to go through a crucible and come out stronger on the other side. I want to see the US be the "shining city on the hill" I have always believed it to be, but there is ZERO path from here to there in the current system of useless printed dollars.
I didn’t say the US is winning as we have never been weaker. But even if China backs their currency to gold, they are an authoritarian state and still have a lot of time to catch up to US in technology and military which is what really backs a nation’s currency. Debt is a problem for every country and yes we benefitted heavily from being the world’s reserve currency so we need to be careful and more financially prudent by enacting fiscal austerity which means pain and higher prices as we bring back advanced manufacturing to the US. A lot of US companies are working on onshore manufacturing- it will take time.
Trump was right to bring critical manufacturing back to the US but I wish he was less talk and more walk by enacting legislation and supporting fiscal policies to make that advanced manufacturing transformation happen. Focus on innovation in manufacturing not trying to please voters and bring the dead rust belt back.
Trump like Bernie Sanders is a symptom of populism, if you really want to see how countries decline is when they get around a cult of personality like Putin to Xi. The funny thing is China reforms stopped at making their institutions less susceptible to corruption and consolidation of power from Xi. The Chinese didn’t want another Mao and cult of personality yet they are allowing the very thing they wished to avoid happen with Xi consolidating power. This is why China cannot be successful long term, like Russia’s huge corruption problems seen throughout its military, China has never been tested in true modern warfare. I don’t want to see it happen during my lifetime but so far communist/kleptocracy countries are pretty bad at conventional war and reveals the deep corruption that undermines their military apparatus.
Also, China failed massive investments into semiconductor due to misappropriation of funds. If ppl think the US is corrupt or lead by “elite globalists” (LMAO stupid conspiracies) they are often blind to the real corruption happening in Russia to China and why these countries just cannot compete with the US anytime soon. China is definitely our biggest challenge to date because they embraced authoritarian capitalism, so we have to prevent them from building a military capable of defeating US military 10 years from now.
You're 100% correct about Trump and populism. Although, I believe that Trump was probably the first populist president of our era, but won't be the last. I also agree that an authoritarian economy, by its nature, is probably not to be successful over the long run, although China's "long run" is probably a lot longer than we think. However, I do think you discount the level to which our own economy is centrally planned these days. For 70 years we told the Soviets that large, central command bureaucracies don't work and we were right, but we're not willing to take our own advice. I'm happy to just agree to disagree on that.
Regardless, China is going to do what China is going to do. I honestly don't care too much about China and their own internal challenges. I'm far more concerned about America politically, economically, socially, and as individuals. Ultimately, the only way out of America's current debt spiral is default. Either Argentine-style (not likely) or through inflation (more likely). We're not going to pay back $30 or $40 trillion in debt at current valuations. Certainly not when there are still $172 trillion of unfunded liabilities over the next 50 years (and that's just at the federal level, don't get me started on state-level pension scams).
The current system is doomed and we should welcome the end of the current system, because ultimately it is that system that has led us to this unsustainable point. The sooner we get it over with, dismantle our empire, and embrace an economy of real stuff the better. I still think there are ways to land this flying pig softly, but the longer we weaponize the currency, print tens of billions to prop up the empire through proxy wars, ignore our own energy capabilities, and pit our own people against one another; well, let's just say the window of good outcomes is closing rapidly.
Good talk. Good luck to you.
It's still baffling to me that you continue to take the doomed nation of China seriously to any capacity. This is Wolf Warrior talk, Xi talks tough and threatens war literally every other day to satiate the populace who are being crippled faster than anywhere else in the world and watching their quality of life return back to Maoist China. You don't seem to understand Face saving culture in Asia or that all news from China is inherently fake.
China is a doomed country and it's not even worth taking seriously. You should take it about as seriously as you do I don't know...some random mid-African country.
China does not exist without US support. The US just singlehandedly sent China's manufacturing back to the stone age. We MADE China. We CREATED China. All we have to do is just leave them alone and the entire nation (what's left of it) will collapse virtually overnight.
China does not and cannot exist without US support and protection. That's gone now. They will shut themselves off and devolve into civil war and widespread famine like they've been doing OVER AND OVER again for the past 5,000 years whenever they've experienced a modicum of success on the global stage.
China is the second largest economy in the world by GDP after the US. Imports from China were $542 billion in 2021. Leave them alone? Always take anyone with nukes seriously. The Bidens will continue to support and protect China as long as the money keeps rolling into their pockets.
The Biden administration just sent China's technology sector back to the fucking stone age, dude. What on earth are you talking about?
Here's China in a nuthsell...
* No capacity to manufacture high-end chips past anything akin to a coffee maker
* The fastest aging population in world history and the fastest collapsing demographics history has ever known
* The fastest rising labor costs in the world
* Surrounded on all sides by enemies with no access to oceans or international water routes unless SECURED by the US Navy
* A 5,000 year history of devolving into civil war (the last one of which was only like 70 years ago)
* Drought
* Famine
* Zero energy independence
China is the biggest nothingburger in the world. Second largest economy my ass. Nobody knows the real stats out of China because everything is a lie. And now they don't even have access to chips lol.
China is done. The US giveth and the US just tooketh away.
Paul are you dense or something? Biden administration has been way more anti China than any other administration. Stop reading propaganda and your blind bias is showing. Trump wasn’t this tough against China, his foreign policy was more rhetoric and had not coherent strategy, it was haphazardly done. And have you read into the details of the semiconductor ban. It’s straight economic warfare.
by the end of Q1-23. he should but then again he thinks gold is an inflation hedge 🤷🏻♂️
Well, not so fast my friends...the Petrodollar and SWIFT are not going to fall like Afghanistan after our very overdue departure. Everyone thought the "Soviet Union" was 7 feet tall in the 50's to the fall of the Berlin wall, Japan was in the 80's, Muslims into aught, and so on. The US is the best situated to onshore almost everything once we get past the financial raccoons. Assuming we do... I wouldn't bet against us. What's the over/under on our collapse? I'll take over....
China can take Taiwan.
China can't hold Taiwan.
Even the Indian navy possesses the assets necessary to interdict oil flows from the Persian Gulf to China, and Russian pipelines are nowhere near adequate as a replacement.
If China takes Taiwan, Japan, the Philippines, and India, even without US encouragement or assistance, would strangle China's oil lifeline.
Xi Jinping can pose and preen all he wants, but he can't avoid the strategic vulnerability of needing to import almost all industrial raw materials. Just ask the Japanese how well that worked for them prior to 1941.
While it was relatively easy for Putin to invade Ukraine, it would be much harder for China to cross 100 miles of sea. Quite risky operation I would say. Should China decide to go for it, they may get those islands, which are practically attached to China mainland, but to get Thaiwan would be much harder.
We also should not forget, that legally, there is only one China and it is not the PRC. So Bejing should technically merge with the government of Taiwan, not the other way around..
Their anti ship missiles depend on ground based radar and relay installations for in flight targeting updates. Installations which are very vulnerable to cruise missile attack, which the US Navy can launch from submarines.
Anti ship missiles are a potent coastal defense weapon but are utterly incapable of power projection, a capacity China needs (and does not have) if wants to make a serious play for Taiwan.
"Terrain image-matching" for a weapon that's going out over open water?
GPS is great for putting a missile at a fixed target. An aircraft carrier is a moving target--and at 35 knots even if the cruise missile only takes ten minutes to get to the target it still has to figure out where in about 140 square miles of ocean the target actually is. GPS and inertial guidance don't help with that at all.
And "close" still only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.
Not to mention that a carrier only has to get close enough to deliver aircraft to Taiwan, which, just like Midway in 1942, would be quite capable of functioning as a stand-in for an additional carrier. Yes, China could use cruise missiles to take out Taiwanese air strips, but not without revealing where their cruise missile batteries are located, which would make them vulnerable to counter-battery type cruise missile attacks via an SSGN or two.
While the US Navy is organized around its carriers, carriers are far from the only ships in the fleet able to project power overseas.
Which gets back to the reality that land-based cruise missiles are not a power projection capability. For that a blue-water navy is required, and China does not have that (nor any other effective means of power projection).
We need to increased and go all out into oil and transitioning plan to focus on nuclear and better energy transformation. Why I will hold $SMR long term.
Also, agree that the past 30 years World order is breaking down, globalization is dying and all the far right and leftists fools wanting it to die will see the pain this will result, less global trade, less peace, higher prices, economic warfare, a new kind of Cold War — that semiconductor ban is the canary in the coal mine. I’ve been warning about this and also predicted this semiconductor ban and 20th China Congress would be a risk event that I hedged against.
Humans are doomed to repeat mistakes of history, now we are going more nationalistic and populist — most countries into hard times. Because the democratic world order the greatest country the world has ever seen is starting to crack. US superpower and democracy has given us “good times” and those good times created some weak leadership.
BRICS won’t matter because no global order will rely on authoritarian countries - if the US falls it’s going to be very bad times for everyone around the world. This is why I can’t stand the infighting and division- Lincoln said it best that we would fall as a country internally and never externally. To the extent foreign adversaries are trying to destabilize and divide us is the big question I want to dig more into.
QQQ is my priority short now and I’ll hedge against every rally I see in tech.
The territorial issue is settled.What made it confusing was the movement of the US.Capital never dies.Slow down and Be prepared.