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The Demoralization is just Beginning

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Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#191

Post by csomar »

ryandamm wrote: post #171
csomar wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since the pandemic China on Western TVs is about to "collapse". However, what I saw is new EVs, new Phones, record high exports, record high solar panels installations, new metros/airports etc... Something must be very wrong in your assessment, right?

https://carnegieendowment.org/china-financial-markets/2023/0... I like Michael Pettis's analysis, though I'll grant you that the distortions he cites in the Chinese economy have gone on longer than he predicted possible. But the health of the Chinese economy is not just the visible things you cite, but also the distribution of assets and balance sheets in the economy. Per Pettis (and other sources), the banking syste…

See the reason why I have a problem with these analysts is because I don't think that China is an export-oriented country at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_exports_p...

China exports, per capita, around as much as Tunisia where I am from. It does, however, have a way higher gdp per capita. Per capita, China ranks at 104 far from most developed and developing countries. For some Chinese, exports are their bread and butter but for most Chinese, they are only dealing locally.

This does, in some opinions, explain the surge in their exports. As their internal market (which is their primary market) slowed down, they turned to exports. This might suggest that something is wrong with their economy, however: 1. it's not clear if it is as bad as the 2008 crisis in the US. and 2. the 2008 crisis was bad but not the end of the world. The US had a rather good decade afterward.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#192

Post by consp »

matwood wrote: post #165
Spartan-S63 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But solution point 1 — brain drain the rest of the world — is an absolutely first rate policy. The fact that the US requires newly-minted PhDs educated here to get a different visa or leave is absolutely self-defeating. We should be welcoming skilled immigration from everywhere. Even better, let them keep their visa and if they revoke their citizenship, we'll relocate their entire family if they come from a repress…

> Brain-draining the world is really the key to cementing American Hegemony in a post-Cold War world. One of the keys. Others are the USD as the defacto world reserve currency, the ability to project military might anywhere, and the US's ability to keep other countries from growing their militaries too much (making the other items in this list easier to manage). The US is quickly throwing all this away though.

Not the any% speedrun I think I was going to see but definitely the top runner right now.

While the USD is still the de facto reserve currency for some, many larger countries and blocks have made sure they are not reliant on it. Up to the point where weakening or strengthening the value of the dollar is far less than a power it used to be.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#193

Post by suraci »

kawaiikouhai wrote: post #128
lxgr wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My suspicion is that for a lot of people that grew up in and only know the US, there's a sense of impending doom if "American hegemony" ever were to be replaced by something else. But since there's no real practical experience of how that would actually feel (or rather, how a very high quality of life and subjective happiness are possible without an US salary in many other countries), they instead project from someth…

Exactly. I had this exact thought experiment of "What if America were no longer Hegemon". So, I looked at other historic examples. The British, Dutch, and Spanish. (You can add German/Austrian and the French, close contenders). They're all still very well-off!

The British, Dutch, and Spanish

All whites, all allies of the Hegemon, and most importantly, all colonizers, what a coincidence

if this is a satire, I have to say it's a brilliant one

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#194

Post by pfannkuchen »

This feels too all over the place and contains a lot of assertions without evidence.

I say this as a person who is very bearish about America.

> The sun never set on the British empire. Now they put you in jail for memes.

I’m pretty sure they put people in jail for the equivalent of memes during the imperial days, no? The king couldn’t put you away for speaking against him?

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#195

Post by suraci »

nextworddev wrote: post #53

He is pretty clueless about a few things, namely 1) China inflated an even bigger asset bubble in the form of real estate and they are using dumping and aggressive trade to keep afloat, and 2)the regime can be ended in a few months without importing food since it’s not self sufficient in terms of food supply

> the regime can be ended in a few months without importing food since it’s not self sufficient in terms of food supply

let's do it!

starve these commies to death, 'a few months' later they'll enter a brighter future without communism!

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#197

Post by pfannkuchen »

lxgr wrote: post #28

> Back the dollar by gold [...] The second will prevent a lot of the scams. Oh boy... Bitcoin in many ways is idealized gold (unlike the real one, its supply is actually limited), yet there is no shortage of scams around it. On the contrary, a gold standard would remove one of the most essential tools modern governments have: That of monetary policy. That sounds like a good idea if and only if there's an extreme shor…

Monetary policy is a form of central planning.

Central planning suffers from several issues, primarily due to insufficient ability to model the economy in a way that can reliably make valid predictions, but also due to being a single point of failure due to either incompetence or capture.

Speculation bubbles seem to be the main cause of economic collapses prior to centralized currency. Could we perhaps address that in a more targeted way, rather than jumping straight to handing government control of money?

Side note: Government controlling money not being necessary and furthermore not even being the American historical norm may be surprising to many readers. I would encourage you to look that up, it’s quite interesting.

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#198

Post by suraci »

ryandamm wrote: post #173
ryandamm wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://carnegieendowment.org/china-financial-markets/2023/0... I like Michael Pettis's analysis, though I'll grant you that the distortions he cites in the Chinese economy have gone on longer than he predicted possible. But the health of the Chinese economy is not just the visible things you cite, but also the distribution of assets and balance sheets in the economy. Per Pettis (and other sources), the banking syste…

A more succinct point: the US economy looked really strong in mid-2008. Consumption was very strong, but it turns out that consumption was fueled by unsustainable debt. China has a serious debt problem in its economy. Not government debt like in the US, but shadow banking debt. My fear, based on reading Pettis primarily, is that the Chinese people will end up paying for that debt. Households that have expensive secon…

so the deadline is this September?

is there anything I can do to survive from it?

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#199

Post by ryandamm »

logicchains wrote: post #183
ryandamm wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think economics itself has gone wrong -- I think the US economy in particular has done a poor job of distributing the wealth it has created. Ironically, that has created a populist backlash that has vaulted even worse economic ideas into power. Anyone read "Capitalism in the 21st Century"? It's long and dense, but it does make some excellent, well-supported points about the structure of an economy that explai…

> I think the US economy in particular has done a poor job of distributing the wealth it has created. The US financial system is structurally orientated towards distributing wealth poorly. It's an unavoidable economic fact that when someone spends newly created money there's a wealth transfer from currency holders to them (that's why counterfeiting is illegal), and in the US means there's a persistent, systematic tra…

I think this comment is a little bit reductive and conspiratorial, even if it gets first-order correlations correct.

You don’t need a conspiracy, you just need a philosophy of small government and low regulation to let grifts expand through the financial parts of the economy. The history of financial regulation in the US is the banking industry finding new ways to evade regulation, which lead to moral hazards and privatized gains / socialized losses.

But it’s not that the “system” is explicitly designed that way; instead, it’s an adversarial system and the US in particular (for cultural reasons) has long favored the vigilante over the regulator.

The story works even without simple Hollywood villains. The system isn’t malicious, it’s just stupid.

Which is a long way of mostly agreeing with you.

(Oh, except on printing money. That’s a surprisingly deep subject that’s often misunderstood. You’re spot on about government-sponsored wealth redistribution, though. Fully on board with that.)

Re: The Demoralization is just Beginning

#200

Post by monero-xmr »

necubi wrote: post #150
hot_gril wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The monetary policy we have coerces people into passive investing, creating bubbles. When rates are low, you see bogus "tech" plays like wifi water dispensers, that's the scam the author means. Also makes taxes weird, e.g. why capital gains aren't the same as income (today USD ≠ past USD). Gold standard is wasteful though; Fed could just keep a steady money supply instead. But it's our scam. The Fed isn't only diluti…

I think it's probably worth learning a little bit about economic history before talking about the benefits of the gold standard. Before the fed was created, the US economy was constantly booming and busting. There were recessions every few years in the 19th century [0]. Why folks are so eager to return to that era is beyond me. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...

The economy is still booming and busting, we just paper over it with debt like good Keynesians.

The macro world is extremely nuanced. I’m someone who likes experiments. If we could give every American instant access to convert savings to gold (or bitcoin), directly in their savings accounts, it would certainly be an interesting experiment.

If you have significant assets, inflation isn’t a big deal. If you are like most peasants, instant access to an asset easily protected from inflation would remove the tendency to fuck the peasants in the ass the moment the macro world gets shaky

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