1/11

An article worth thinking about: “As changes to the world structure accelerate, China’s rule is in sharp contrast with the turmoil in the West,” says Beijing.

I agree, but I draw a different conclusion. The world is certainly currently

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.

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.

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...

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...

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...

1/ Happy #SocialistSunday - and welcome to the weekly #SocialistSundayMegaList!

Please sign & widely share my petition for an emergency UBI and alleviate pandemic poverty. https://t.co/dilMlYxCCG

The following list is 100% randomised.

2/ If you're included but don't want to be, feel free to let me know - ideally by DM, because I'm much more likely to actually see that. This thread gets a lot of notifications!

(Stats as ever will follow the list of names)

Megalist commences:

3/ @HarmonyPartyUK
@EastBerksLabGND
@tallulahportsmo
@Tish1931
@jackie32859121
@NorthernLefty
@margellais
@Cumbria4Corbyn
@IceManTiti1
@MaxRobertFinch
@rickwookie
@iloireadas
@tinakalinen
@VeeBrien
@bbqshirt
@realhippohollow
@ageof_jess
@Jennyfurfuls
@BDT_Services

4/ @Greyfalcon6
@Soc_Sciences
@Hello_2022
@wepaidinupayout
@keithjames351
@Giacie
@Bliadhnaichean
@Walshicus1
@koffeelover41
@electikk
@JOHNSTA05030416
@Ed_Forest
@suzyseeitall
@LittleV33244419
@Rhubarb00
@EmbitteredThe
@hftaman
@mellors_karen
@sabuniray
@amk262
@GloryBS

5/ @AggieRyan
@steveniskra
@sev_kudu
@dominicwatts1
@teodora_hansen
@Ms_Nichola
@NeilJamesPeter1
@tiffanyjewel10
@allmodcons79
@ptomandpaul
@sturitchie2010
@kellsley
@nickystar911
@MMaureen01
@King4ADay_UK
@edwebb98843090
@DBFole13
@lorraine_teuten

Declassified:
SELECT COMMITTEE re:ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT
JOHN F. KENNEDY
DALLAS, TX., NOVEMBER 22, 1963

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the fourth victim of Presidential
assassination, preceded by Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James A. Garfield in 1881, and William McKinley in 1901

1. President Kennedy was struck by two rifle shots fired from
behind him.

2.The shots that struck President Kennedy from behind him
were fired

Interesting parapo meeting today, anger, lots of 'THEY' vs 'US'. The zoom meeting was well attended. People threatening fire, thunder, tagging those of us calling for calm "Traitors".

Then I asked, how many of your children were involved in the Ibadan killings today? SILENCE!

Then one of my "Comrade" himself and his wife are always jumping from @channelstv to @ARISEtv. I asked him, aside your television rounds, have you ever handled an AK47? Simple question, he called me a bastard.
I asked will your Ibadan radio station host 100 Eso's? SILENCE!

Then another one, he was Afenifere lackeys, during the Ajegunle crisis, the same one who chopped money meant for young Yoruba who were defending their streets, mane died needlessly. I asked when last he visited Eso zones across Yoruba land. SILENCE! He kept ranting Fulani bla bla

Then practical questions to another, do we have a list of our vulnerable settlements? Any attempt to activate our fighting organisations so that all manner of people don't go about attacking innocent non Yoruba. SILENCE!

That one pretended he had poor network. No answer!

Then another one, he said I had 'changed'. I told him, you cant have witnessed a wicked Yoruba ruling elite, hype up sons and daughters of the poor and personally attended the burial of many of those unsung heroes and not call for extreme caution and the need to truly be prepared

Keir Starmer who worked with Theresa May as DPP said '“Whether you agree with her or you don’t, this was a woman broken who had tried to genuinely deliver on what she thought she had to do … I can’t pretend I didn’t feel something.”: #StarmerOut https://t.co/0NzX7Ouv2a

Sir Keir Starmer was elected as an MP for Holborn and St Pancras in 2015. Before that he worked with May as director of public prosecutions when she was home secretary. #StarmerOut #LabourLeaks #Collusion #CONLAB

May was someone who was always straight with him, who always phoned him to ask whether she could use something he had said. “A lot of politicians didn’t do that. She never double dealt. She said what she would do and she did what she said.” #StarmerOut #LabourLeaks

At the end of his term as DPP in 2013, she invited Sir Starmer to dinner at an Italian restaurant in Westminster to say thank you.
“It was a difficult 90 minutes. Both of us were pleased to see the hour and a half was up.” #StarmerOut #LabourLeaks

''Keir Starmer credentials as a former director of public prosecutions (2008 to 2013) placed Starmer a cut above the rest of Labour's frontbench in the eyes of many Conservatives.''. He became acquainted with several senior Tories.