BC CHINA
Saved by @Alex1Powell

1/9

China is aging so rapidly that it urgently needs to address the problem of a rapidly declining work force in a slowly declining population. To give an idea of relative population changes among the three most populous countries, today

 2/9

are 4.3 Chinese for every American and 4.7 Chinese of working age (ages 15-64), while there is just over 1 Chinese for every Indian and 1.1 Chinese of working age.

By the end of the century, however, there are expected to be 2.5 Chinese for every American and...
3/9

just 2.4 Chinese of working age, while there will be 1.4 Indians for every Chinese and 1.5 Indians of working age. Over the rest of this century, in other words, while China’s population declines quite rapidly relative to that of the two other most populous countries, it...
4/9

also switches from having a much better dependency ratio than either to having a worse one than either, with far more of its dependents being the elderly rather than children. In effect its working age population will drop by half relative to those of the other two.
5/9

This is going to be a very tough problem to resolve, although to the extent China succeeds, it will be very useful as an example for other countries. I am not sure they are going about it the right way, however. Making seniors make better use of smart technology sounds...
6/9

very exciting and high tech, and might even help a little, as will lifting the retirement age, but the former is likely to have little effect on the overall economy or on the underlying imbalances, and the latter mostly catches China up to other urban economies.
7/9

What is more, the idea that getting seniors jobs will boost consumption and help rebalance the economy is, of course, not true. While it might raise per capita GDP (slightly), it only increases consumption indirectly, by increasing production more. Without seriously...
8/9

reforming the way income is distributed, this would only make the imbalances worse. The best way to rebalance the economy in this case would be to increase pensions and social benefits for the elderly. It would also be politically popular, and while at first it might be...
9/9

opposed by local governments, who would be forced to foot the bill, it would eventually allow them to reduce spending on non-productive investment as it is replaced by an increase in productive business investment encouraged by higher direct and indirect consumption.

More from Michael Pettis

Michael Pettis
Michael Pettis
@michaelxpettis
1/10

The latest IMF report on China was released yesterday and provides a lot of good information and intelligent insight on the Chinese economy. The IMF’s measure of China’s adjusted fiscal deficit (including estimated off-budget

2/10

spending) is projected to rise to 18.2% of GDP in 2020 from 12.6% in 2019. The authors correctly note the worrying surge in debt and warn that Beijing must continue to try to contain financial stability risks, but I notice that they are projecting average GDP...

3/10

growth of just over 6% between 2012 and 2025, including a downward revision of their 2021 forecast from 8.2% to 7.9% (which I still think is a little high).

As I’ve long argued, it will be impossible for China both to control the surge in debt and to achieve growth...

4/10

targets above the real underlying growth rate of the economy, which I suspect is 2-3% at best. I know the IMF is constrained in what it is able to say about the Chinese economy if it wants to remain part of the advisory process, but I do think that after 10 years...

5/10

of watching this game we should be a lot more explicit about the relationship between unreasonably high GDP growth targets and high credit growth. There really is no point in advising Beijing to get financial risks under control while at the same time approving...
WORLD
Michael Pettis
Michael Pettis
@michaelxpettis
1/9

While debt-to-GDP ratios already have a limited but very misunderstood use, it seems economists are finding bright new ways of misunderstanding them. Now we say that when nominal interest rates are lower than nominal growth rates, the

2/9

downward pressure on the debt-to-GDP ratio makes rising government debt and larger government deficits more sustainable and more easily justified.

This is totally confused. When the nominal interest rate is lower than the nominal GDP growth rate, it only means that net...

3/9

borrowers are getting a disproportionate share of growth relative to net lenders. This in and of itself changes the comparability of the debt-to-GDP ratio, so the fact that the ratio may decline tells us nothing about its sustainability which, I'm glad to say, isn't...

4/9

a mistake Olivier Blanchard makes in this article.

At least three things matter. First, whether or not rising debt is sustainable depends almost wholly on underlying conditions in the real economy, and only trivially on the arithmetical relationship between...

5/9

the interest rate and the growth rate. Second, this approach simply assumes away financial distress costs, in which case debt capacity is infinite anyway and the interest rate becomes irrelevant. And third, it assumes that the nominal debt level matters independently...
GOVERNMENT
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Michael Pettis
Michael Pettis
@michaelxpettis
1/9

Good article. But while growing international criticism and rising trade tensions may have had some impact, as the article suggests, I don’t think they really explain the great reversal in BRI lending of the past few years.

2/9

As I have been writing since 2011, China’s development lending was always likely to follow the pattern of other countries when they first “went out” (e.g. the US in the 1920s, USSR in the 1950s, Japan in the late 1970s). Because of little historical...

3/9

knowledge and no previous experience, an early rapid rise in development lending would be driven mainly by underestimating risk and an overestimation of their own business "success" in making loans, and would of course be further supported by geopolitical ambitions.

4/9

This combination would inevitably lead to bad lending decisions, followed just as inevitably by debt restructuring, loan losses, and a contraction in development lending. In the 1920s, for example, the US set off quite explicitly and aggressively to displace England in...

5/9

Latin America, and American businesses and banks assumed they “understood” Latin America much better than the English did, in spite of the vast English experience there, but their early displacement of British lending only resulted in the huge loan losses of the 1930s.
ECONOMY
Michael Pettis
Michael Pettis
@michaelxpettis
1/10

This is a really tough problem to resolve, especially if the massive increase in inflows from the trade and financial accounts are sustained, as I expect they will be well into 2021.

Clearly the PBoC would like to see the RMB gradually...

2/10

strengthen. This would keep financial markets stable and promote rebalancing, but the RMB has already strengthened a lot, and this puts unwanted pressure on exporters and “international circulation”.

Although PBoC reserves have been flat, other state-controlled Chinese...

3/10

banks have bought large amounts of dollars, but this is expensive. If these banks have half a trillion dollars of exposure, for example, they are losing at least $15-17 billion annually on negative carry, plus another $20-30 billion just this year from the rise of the RMB.

4/10

Beijing seems also to be trying other measures to slow the rise. The regulators are relaxing capital controls on outflows. In mid October the PBoC cut to zero the reserve requirement ratio for banks doing FX forward trading. This requirement was created in 2018 to reduce...

5/10

downward pressure on the RMB. In late October it suspended the counter-cyclical factor in RMB fixing, which was introduced in 2017 also to reduce downward currency pressure. But in both cases while the RMB dropped a few pips on the news, it quickly resumed its upward climb.
ECONOMY
Michael Pettis
Michael Pettis
@michaelxpettis
1/16

It is a little frustrating to see the response many analysts had to the GDP growth data Chinese released today. These numbers aren’t especially good, and they certainly shouldn’t have been surprising. Back in April and May, when most

2/16

were projecting negative or barely positive GDP growth for China in 2020 (the OECD, for example, expected China’s GDP to contract by 3.7%), I insisted that GDP growth for 2020 would be positive, and probably between 2% and 3%.

Today, it was reported as 2.3%. How did...

3/16

I know? Because I knew that while most of the healthy sources of Chinese growth would contract (except for exports, which would expand given Beijing’s intense supply-side response to the impact of Covid-19), Beijing was going to respond to a significant...

4/16

worsening of the healthy parts of its economy by unleashing enough of the unhealthy, non-productive growth it has long tried to constrain – basically real estate and infrastructure investment – in order to achieve as much economic activity as it...

5/16

needed for domestic political ends.

And that’s exactly what happened. While GDP grew by 6.5% in the fourth quarter, even with substantial tailwinds its retail sales measure – a proxy for consumption – was only up 4.6%, and it was down 3.9% overall in 2020.
ECONOMY

More from China

\u937e\u7fd4\u5b87 Xiangyu
鍾翔宇 Xiangyu...
@notXiangyu
Thread:

1. Who runs Taiwan's media? For the longest time, I've said that Taiwanese media is just US MSM translated into Chinese, regardless of whether it is pan-blue (KMT-leaning) or pan-green (DPP-leaning). Below is a breakdown of some shareholder information.

2. Significant shareholders of Eastern Media International Corp (東森國際), which runs ETTV, a pan-blue station, include Dimensional Fund Advisors, Mackenzie Financial, and Northern Trust Investments. They would never lie about US imperialism, right?

3. One of the biggest shareholders of pan-green Sanlih E-Television (三立電視) is Daniel Tsai (蔡明忠), who runs Fubon Financial Holdings (富邦金控). You might know Fubon as the bank that bought up Taipei city government-controlled Taipeibank.

4. Fubon's shareholders include Vanguard Group, BlackRock, and Dimensional Fund Advisors. Look these companies up. They would certainly never want TV stations they control to lie about what bourgeois governments do, right?

5. The biggest shareholder of Formosa Television (民視), which was founded by the DPP, is managing dir. Chen Ching-fu (陳清福), who is incidentally the CEO of Ve Wong Corporation (味王), a food company, whose sharehldrs include Dimensional Fund Advisors & SSgA Funds Management
CHINA
Warren C.\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8 45th POTUS = G.O.A.T. \U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8 \u271d\ufe0f
Warren C.🇺🇸 45th POTUS...
@808TeslaY
🇨🇳 🇨🇳 Situation Update, Dec. 6th –China owns DOMINION, and controls all the officials who run the machines at every level of government.

✅ Dominion is owned by communist China,which also runs the tech giants, the left-wing media and most of the Democrats in Congress
[M. Adams]


1. “Dominion’s Parent Company Arranges $400 Million Placement 1 Month Before Election: SEC Filing” – The Epoch Times:

2. A filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) shows that UBS Securities LLC arranged a private placement of $400 million with Staple Street Capital III, L.P. on October 8, 2020.

Staple Street Capital, a private equity firm located in New York, purchased

3. Dominion Voting systems on July 17, 2018, for an undisclosed amount.

The securities firm that arranged the transaction, UBS Securities LLC, is a division of UBS Americas Inc, which ultimately falls under UBS Group AG, a company listed on the SIX Swiss stock exchange.

4. Three of four board members of UBS Securities LLC are Chinese according to Bloomberg, at least one of whom appears to reside in Hong Kong.

One of them is Ye Xiang, a Chinese national who also served as a board member of the Beijing-based UBS subsidiary.
CHINA
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David Paulk \u6ce2\u5927\u536b
David Paulk 波大卫...
@davidpaulk
THREAD: Last week, China’s Cabinet announced that, for the first time, fees will be charged for “excessive” freedom of information requests, potentially meaning huge out-of-pocket expenses for lawyers and others who rely heavily on public information from the Chinese government.

According to a notice published Dec. 1, government offices will be able to choose from two different rate schemes: one based on frequency, one based on size. https://t.co/KxUSE3dXEu


The “size” route is especially problematic. Here’s why:

If you’re an activist or a lawyer seeking a copy of an 800-page environmental impact assessment report, it’s going to cost you around $4,000 under this scheme.

In the past, disclosure requests were essentially free in China because there were no rules for charging fees.

In fact, last December an administrative agency in Shenzhen was ordered to reimburse an applicant after sending him a pay-on-delivery parcel.

According to the State Council’s Dec. 1 notice, the aim of adding the fees isn’t to generate revenue, but to “guide applicants to exercise their rights reasonably.”

Regardless of intention, however, the new costs will likely be a hindrance to those seeking public information.
CHINA
ShanghaiPanda
ShanghaiPanda
@thinking_panda
The CCTV's program is discussing China's eliminating poverty.
Today's theme is that govt should provide more sports facilities for remote areas and advocate healthier lifestyle.
China's experience is that eliminating poverty ≠ giving money, but providing sustainable solutions.


By the end of December 2019, China's rural poor people's participation in medical insurance rate has reached 99.99%.
More than 16 million poor people in China have received basic treatment services.

The China govt has formulated a three-year action plan to achieve the overall goal of ensuring basic medical care for the rural poor.
There are three main goals, six special actions and ten working standards.
It's called "health poverty alleviation plan".


Since 2016, China's Health Commission, poverty alleviation Bureau and other govt departments have organized nearly one million staff to investigate the prevalence of poverty people in all rural areas, and establish data platform to achieve accurate management.


China has constructed a mechanism of basic medical insurance, serious illness medical insurance and medical assistance linkage system.
All the insurance level has been improved.
Within three years, the govt has subsidized more than 10 billion yuan.
CHINA
John Hayward
John Hayward
@Doc_0
Xi Jinping's speech at Davos boiled down to: The world has no choice but to do business with China, and if you want to do business with China, you need to stop criticizing our tyranny and questioning our lies about the

Xi's address to the World Economic Forum will serve as well as any other moment for historians to mark the beginning of the Authoritarian Era. He said nothing new, but he restated the narratives and demands of Chinese fascism from a post-pandemic position of aggressive strength.

For the first time, Xi spoke to a world that is beginning to accept the tenets of authoritarianism, thanks to the incredible political and economic damage from China's coronavirus. China's ideals have become as viral as Covid-19.

Thanks to the pandemic, the political elites of the world now universally see their citizens as dangerous mobs that must be tightly controlled for their own good. Most of them always thought that way, but now they can say it openly and act aggressively on their prejudices.

Xi clearly stated that China will not be contained, censured, or judged for its actions. He denounced Western ideals of human rights as "arrogance" and imperialism. After Covid and Biden's inauguration, he sees no nation with the strength or will to thwart China's ambitions.
WORLD , CHINA

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Vibhu Vashisth
Vibhu Vashisth
@VIBHU_Tweet
Did you know?

When Saudi Arabia's King visited India in 1955, PM Nehru ordered all the Hindu Temples and Idols of Hindu Deities that came in Saudi King's way to be covered up.
Our temples are the architectural marvels in their own league.


Each of our temples tells the story of our rich history and cultural heritage. Was Nehru that ashamed of his own nation's heritage that he had to cover them up or there was some other reason? The answer would be best known to him only.

PM Nehru invited the then Saudi King Saud bin Abdul Aziz to India who accepted the invitation and planned a 17 day long official visit to India in 1955. Saudi King had brought a large delegation with him and he had to visit various Indian cities like Mumbai, Hyderabad, Agra,


Aligarh, Shimla, Mysore and Varanasi. However, when Saudi King reached Varanasi, Nehru ordered to cover all the temples and Idols with curtains that came in the way of the Royal Convoy. During his stay in Varanasi, Govt buildings were painted with the words "Kalma Tayyiba".


'Kalma Tayyiba' means 'There is not God but only Allah and Mohammed is his messenger'. In addition to it, Pooja and Aartis were also stopped at temples. I can call it the appeasement politics of the highest order and Nehru was indeed the greatest appeaser of all times.
ALL
Filippo Valsorda
Filippo Valsorda
@FiloSottile
“We don’t negotiate salaries” is a negotiation tactic.

Always. No, your company is not an exception.

A tactic I don’t appreciate at all because of how unfairly it penalizes low-leverage, junior employees, and those loyal enough not to question it, but that’s negotiation for you after all. Weaponized information asymmetry.

Listen to Aditya


And by the way, you should never be worried that an offer would be withdrawn if you politely negotiate.

I have seen this happen *extremely* rarely, mostly to women, and anyway is a giant red flag. It suggests you probably didn’t want to work there.

You wish there was no negotiating so it would all be more fair? I feel you, but it’s not happening.

Instead, negotiate hard, use your privilege, and then go and share numbers with your underrepresented and underpaid colleagues. […]
LIFE
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Novid Houellebecq (That's Hollaback)
Novid Houellebecq (Tha...
@GarouGothic
Ok, here is a thread for you.
What happens when you have:
Netflix
Apple
Amazon
WarnerMedia +
Disney+
SonyCrackle (Reboot)
Verizon All Access (after they buy CBS/Viacom)
UniversalSkyMedia
By 2021
Answer? Internet Slows To A Craw and Dies.
Why?
Bandwidth.

Netflix's gets 35% of all internet traffic.
Now we all know Apple Coming to Netflix Corner.
We know that WarnerMedia Planning One
We Know about Disney+
Now how will the net handle 8 Streaming Platforms all at once?
Answer - IT CANT.

But Novid, the speed, the 4K the all everything?
NOOOOO BUDDY.
Even if you could do it and even if AWS ran six million clouds, The Net Will still slow to a crawl. 35%, goes to nearly 90% if any of the 8 or all of the 8 eat at netflix's numbers.

Oh, they wouldn't be running at once.
FOOL. You forget how bad things were when game of thrones season premieres came around. HBO SERVERS FALL DOWN GO BOOM!

Now see if a season like 2021 come around and they air shows on a same day. It gets crazy. AT&T and others gonna realize they cant build out forever. Something will give and it might be your entertainment consumption big time.
TECH
Anshul Pandey
Anshul Pandey
@Anshulspiritual
BRAHMA VAIVARTA PURAN: IMPORTANCE AND CHARACTERISTICS.

This Puran introduces us to way of Vedas. On the request of Narad Muni Bhagwan Saavarni had preached this Puran. It is a summary of Dharma, Arth, Moksha etc.


Listening to this Puran one gets automatically attached to Vishnu and Shiva and realize that there is no difference between them. Vyasji divided this book into four parts. It has eighteen thousand shlokas. This whole book is in the form of dialogue between Suutji and Maharishi's.

The first part Brahmkhand, consists of Shrishti description. Here Shri is known as Para Brahma and description of Gokul is also mentioned, It also narrates the argument between Brahma and Narad in which both were defeated, and then Narad went to Shiva to attain more gyan.

Shivji advised him to go to Bhagwan Saavarni for this. Narad goes to Saavarni ashram to seek Knowledge and is totally amazed by the sorroundings.

Next is Prakriti khand which consists of dialogue between Narad and Saavarni where they discuss the

Importance of Shri Krishna through various stories. Then there is the discussion of Prakriti and its various hues. Listening to this gets you wealth.
Next is Ganesh Khand which describes the Punyak vrat done by Parvati ji. After this it narrates the birth of Kartikeya and Ganesh.
RELIGION
Kirsti Miller
Kirsti Miller
@KirstiMiller30
@FionaPearman @ScottMorrisonMP Morrison is our statue of unempathic neoliberalism - erected by evangelical and corporate Australia to celebrate their victory over compassion, equality and secular humanism. 

Hopefully it gets pulled down like the statues of dubious heroes of oppression from an earlier age.


@ScottMorrisonMP The two-party-preferred system in 
Australia politics isn’t working for people, and it sure isn’t working for the planet.

@ScottMorrisonMP My collapse of faith in our democracies isn’t an accident. It’s one of the central victories of the neoliberal project, delivered through two generations of privatisation, outsourcing and deregulation, underfunding of government services (locked in by tax cuts),...

@ScottMorrisonMP restricting freedom of information, targeting whistleblowers and raiding the media who report on them, delegitimising and gagging public interest advocacy, and criminalising protest.

@ScottMorrisonMP Politics in Australia today relies hugely on the fact that most people don’t know most of what’s going on so as to get away with stuff that couldn’t be done under real scrutiny we have seen a clear example of this with the National Coronvirus Cabinet.
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