Made In China boycott
val189
made in China and the better half is on a personal boycott. Not even a
drop in the ocean, but made him feel better. Appealed to my frugal
bone too.
Bernardo Gui
wrote:
Be careful. PaPaPeng is watching you. The defender of all corrupted
Chinese products will not take kindly to your boycott.
Rod Speed
> We passed up three nonessential items at Home Depot today, all
> being made in China and the better half is on a personal boycott.
That cant last for long.
> Not even a drop in the ocean, but made him feel better.
More fool him.
> Appealed to my frugal bone too.
More fool you.
PaPaPeng
Fame at last.
PaPaPeng
A timely article on the things to come. Soon you won't ba able to
afford anything except Chinese crap.
Western grasshoppers and Chinese ants
By Spengler
Sep 5, 2007
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/II05Dj01.html
A major theme is missing from the central bankers' annual retreat at
Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Everyone is talking about collapse of the US
home-price bubble and the danger of recession, but no one is talking
about the suckers who financed the bubble, namely the savers of Asia.
Asia will do so no longer. If the United States wants Asian investors
to continue to take risk on its shores, it will have to allow them to
buy solid US companies, rather than the sort of debt derivatives that
blew up this summer.
One exceptional fact accounts for the instability in financial markets
during recent weeks: the Chinese and many other Asians save about half
their income, while Americans save none of their income at all.
Foreigners, mainly Asians, invest US$1 trillion a year in the United
States, because their home economies cannot absorb so much investment,
or because the political risk attached to local investments is too
great.
In the present iteration of Aesop's fable, American consumers are the
grasshoppers and Chinese (and other Asian) savers are the ants. The
trouble is that Asians have put their savings into the balance sheet
of US consumers.
Outside the US, it seems incomprehensible that the average family
would save nothing for retirement or against a rainy day. But God
takes care of drunks, small children and the United States of America.
In other words, the typical American family expected the value of its
house to keep appreciating at nearly 10% a year indefinitely,
eventually turning into a retirement fund. US home prices appreciated
by 86% between 1996 and 2006; like the Cargo Cults that proliferated
in New Guinea after World War II, Americans seemed to think that this
would go on forever.
Delusional expectations about home prices justified a trillion dollars
of loans to borrowers with poor credit or inadequate income
("subprime" loans), and that is the proximate cause of the bubble.
World markets have swooned in response to what the media call a credit
crunch - the reluctance of investors to accept the Frankenstein
monsters of financial engineering. In the case of US mortgages of poor
credit quality ("subprime"), derivatives technology sought to make a
silk purse out of a sow's ear, but it is a purse that still goes
"oink" when opened. This has produced consternation across Asia, where
many financial institutions invested heavily in obscure and complex
instruments that cannot be sold today except at a severe loss.
When the world throws money at a national economy, large or small,
credit is easy and stupid investments are made. America's
subprime-mortgage problem uncannily resembles the Asian financial
crisis of 1997. Ten years ago, investors couldn't put enough money
into high-yielding investments in Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea and
so forth, and financed an enormous real-estate bubble. When the bubble
popped in the spring of 1997, Asian stock markets and currencies
crashed. Asians have not forgotten the pious lectures about profligacy
they suffered from the West just 10 years ago.
Many of the economists who offered opinions at Jackson Hole warned
that the bursting of the home-price bubble might lead to a severe
recession. If the rout on financial markets turns into economic
distress, Western governments will have no one but themselves, and
nothing but their own hypocrisy, to blame. After instructing China for
years on the benefits of free markets, Washington, Brussels and other
Western governments have imposed the strictest sort of mercantilist
barriers upon the free movement of capital.
It seems obvious to ask why Asians should have bought exotic debt
instruments, rather than buy brick, mortar and machinery in the United
States and Europe. The answer is that the US and European governments
will not allow them to do so. The specter haunting Western financial
markets is not proletarian revolution, but the sovereign funds of
China, Singapore, the Persian Gulf states and others, ready to invest
hundreds of billions of dollars a year. But the West does not want to
allow Asians to control major companies. The Chinese have told the US
government that they will buy virtually any large US firm that the
government allows them to - but the US government fears the political
fallout.
Of course, one feels sorry for autoworkers in the US state of
Michigan, who earn $30 per hour and expected to do so in perpetuity.
Sadly for them, workers earning a tenth of that amount can assemble
cars just as well. If I were a sovereign investment fund, I would buy
Ford Motor Co, shut down all of its production facilities in the US,
and keep the nameplate as an emerging-markets and European brand. But
that sort of rationalization is precisely what any US government will
try to prevent.
The excuse Washington and Brussels offer for ring-fencing their
companies against Asian investors is that the prospective purchasers
are sovereign funds, that is, agencies of the state, rather than
private individuals. With the poor development of Chinese and other
Asian capital governments, the state becomes the only entity capable
of supporting national savings. Singapore created the model for this
in its admirable pension program. China has no real pension program,
but its more than $1 trillion of foreign-exchange reserves constitutes
the rainy-day savings of the Chinese people. The Chinese authorities
have begun to permit Chinese citizens to buy foreign securities, but
for the moment the savings of the Chinese people are held in large
measure by the government.
Why have Americans tolerated China's penetration of its market for
manufactured goods, at the expense of US manufacturing employment?
Part of the answer, of course, lies in the fact that Americans are
able to buy much cheaper goods. But a more important part of the
answer, perhaps, is that China's reinvestment of its export earnings
in US debt instruments forced down the cost of capital in the United
States, as Federal Reserve Board chairman Benjamin Bernanke has
observed over the years. Cheap capital fueled an asset-price bubble in
the US, generating capital gains for US households that made savings
seem unnecessary.
If, as some of the voices from Jackson Hole predict, US employment
falls as a result, protectionist measures against Chinese exports
become quite probable. Cheap Chinese goods at Wal-Mart and cheap loans
from the banks make a convincing case for free markets only when one
has a job, and a house; if enough people lose their jobs and their
homes, their first instinct will be to blame the Chinese. Democratic
presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has already embraced
protectionism against China, an ominous sign.
China may have to shift economic gears in a hurry, spending more on
its internal market and infrastructure, using if need be some of the
foreign-exchange reserves accumulated during the past several years.
It will have to seek markets outside the United States, especially in
the emerging world. The transition may be painful in the short run for
China, but I do not expect the Chinese economy to collapse even if the
US throws up protectionist barriers against Chinese imports. China
already has moved most of its young people out of the countryside into
the cities, and there are reports of a shortage of young workers in
Chinese cities.
Americans will have to work harder and save more. If the US wants to
remain the magnet for world capital flows it became during the 1990s,
it will have to allow the savers of the world to become partners in
the US economy, that is, to buy into its first-rank companies. This is
not a matter of US discretion; at some point, the United States will
have no choice but to allow more foreign ownership. If Washington
delays the inevitable, the price of US companies will fall, and
Chinese and other sovereign investors will buy them cheaper.
Bernardo Gui
Well, in today's world, notoriety is just as good.
wlloow
> On Tue, 04 Sep 2007 12:33:41 GMT, PaPaPeng <PaPa...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 03 Sep 2007 21:46:29 -0400, Bernardo Gui
>> <wail...@mypacks.net> wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, 03 Sep 2007 17:21:58 -0700, val189 <gweh...@bellsouth.net>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> We passed up three nonessential items at Home Depot today, all
>>>> being made in China and the better half is on a personal boycott.
>>>> Not even a drop in the ocean, but made him feel better. Appealed
>>>> to my frugal bone too.
>>>
>>> Be careful. PaPaPeng is watching you. The defender of all corrupted
>>> Chinese products will not take kindly to your boycott.
>>
>>
>> Fame at last.
>
> A timely article on the things to come. Soon you won't ba able to
> afford anything except Chinese crap.
Fantasy.
> Western grasshoppers and Chinese ants
> By Spengler
> Sep 5, 2007
> http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/II05Dj01.html
> A major theme is missing from the central bankers' annual retreat at
> Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Everyone is talking about collapse of the US
> home-price bubble and the danger of recession, but no one is talking
> about the suckers who financed the bubble, namely the savers of Asia.
Because they have no real alternative available to them.
> Asia will do so no longer.
Fantasy. They will do so for the same reason they have up till now, they have no alternative.
> If the United States wants Asian investors to continue to take risk
> on its shores, it will have to allow them to buy solid US companies,
Made no difference when the Japs started to do that for a while.
> rather than the sort of debt derivatives that blew up this summer.
They arent forced to buy those.
> One exceptional fact accounts for the instability in financial markets
> during recent weeks: the Chinese and many other Asians save about
> half their income, while Americans save none of their income at all.
That last is a mindless lie. Those who claim that arent counting house
purchase or the tax favoured savings.
> Foreigners, mainly Asians, invest US$1 trillion a year in the United States,
> because their home economies cannot absorb so much investment,
Thats not the reason. The real reason is the pathetic interest
rate paid in their country, most obviously with the Japs.
> or because the political risk attached to local investments is too great.
Mindlessly silly with china.
> In the present iteration of Aesop's fable, American consumers are
> the grasshoppers and Chinese (and other Asian) savers are the ants.
Typical mindless journalistic crap.
> The trouble is that Asians have put their savings
> into the balance sheet of US consumers.
Nope.
> Outside the US, it seems incomprehensible that the average
> family would save nothing for retirement or against a rainy day.
Doesnt happen in the US, where the savings in the family home leaves that in asia for dead.
> But God takes care of drunks, small children and the United States
> of America. In other words, the typical American family expected the
> value of its house to keep appreciating at nearly 10% a year indefinitely,
> eventually turning into a retirement fund.
Doesnt need to appreciate at that rate to be real savings.
> US home prices appreciated by 86% between 1996 and 2006;
So everyone except the stupid renters have real savings, in spite of the mindless claim above.
> like the Cargo Cults that proliferated in New Guinea after World
> War II, Americans seemed to think that this would go on forever.
It does go on forever in modern first world countrys, the rate just varies.
> Delusional expectations about home prices justified a trillion dollars
> of loans to borrowers with poor credit or inadequate income
> ("subprime" loans), and that is the proximate cause of the bubble.
Different matter entirely. The vast bulk of the loans arent sub prime.
<none of the rest of this even more mindless crap worth bothering with>
Dennis
<wail...@mypacks.net> wrote:
>Be careful. PaPaPeng is watching you. The defender of all corrupted
>Chinese products will not take kindly to your boycott.
Ever wonder why his words (staunchly defending everything Chinese)
seem to be contradicted by his actions (continuing to live in North
America) ?
Dennis (evil)
--
"There is a fine line between participation and mockery" - Wally
Don
I was there this morning and passed up THOUSANDS of *nonessential* items.
I also bought some stuff.
Don't care where they came from.
Just another day.......