Elaine Meinel Supkis
The funniest thing on earth is how Japan is joining the USA in demanding China's yuan be much stronger than the yen. The USA is under assault from its own stupid 'free trade' philosophy and its need to exploit Chinese and Indian labor to keep inflation from appearing here but these schemes are destroying our trade balance totally and so our rulers thrash around trying to square this ruthless circle and it always comes down to demands that the yuan replace the dollar as the world's fiat currency. This will happen one fine day that we will regret forever.
Japan's economy expanded more than the government initially reported in the first quarter after better-than-expected spending by companies.The world's second-largest economy grew at an annual 3.3 percent rate in the three months ended March 31, the Cabinet Office said in Tokyo today, faster than the 2.4 percent preliminary number. The median estimate of 27 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News was for 3.2 percent.
Today's report adds to evidence the economy will keep expanding even as growth slows in the U.S., Japan's largest export market. Machinery orders rose for the first time in three months in April, a report showed last week, indicating business investment will keep driving growth.
Now will the USA's financial and political beasts finally decide that Japan isn't having a depression? Will this fiction finally change over to factual reality? What does it take to kill off that stupid propaganda point fed to us by the Bank of Japan? Well, the political configuration that Japan has foisted on us still remains set in cement! The fact that Japan is the party that is reaming us out in the higher value-added markets, that Japan, not China, is devastating our higher industries, the ones with the biggest profit margins, the biggest pay-backs. Japan, not China, has the world's biggest export profits by far. Japan, not China, is destroying our native auto industries as well as a host of others such as cameras, etc.
The political reasons for ignoring the party that is doing us the worst damage while focusing on the country that is exporting to us things like toys, dollar items, clothing, cheap furniture, etc, is insanity. The Japanese don't sell us tee shirts, they sell us Toyotas. And if our rulers can't figure out the greater danger here then it is hopeless.
This is why focusing not on just sheer numbers but on what is being sold where, matters. Why can't our government think in a more sophisticated way than a sea slug? Why can't they see subtle permutaions rather than seeing the world as a comic strip? Hell, they could look at my comics here and see the obvious!
China's trade surplus rose a bigger- than-estimated 73 percent in May from a year earlier, increasing pressure on the government to allow faster currency gains.The gap widened to $22.45 billion, the customs bureau said on its Web site. The median estimate of 18 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News was for a $19.5 billion surplus. For the first five months, the surplus grew 84 percent to $85.72 billion.
As the Fed prints money the need to have the Chinese clean out the inflation this causes is ever greater. And the Chinese are happy to perform this humble function. Desperate American workers of the lower half of our economic classes have enjoyed very little protection from this deliberate inflation and the inflation caused by the relentless rise in the price of energy thanks to American wars, is hammering the lower working classes here mercilessly so they shop for the cheapest bargains. As more Americans retire and have fixed incomes, this urge to save by buying cheap will rise relentlessly and the only way to do this is the classic depression spiral whereby cheap is rewarded and expensive is punished by buyers.
Even with the huge rise in value of housing assets this last 5 years, the entire thing was fuelled by super-cheap loans so everyone was bargain hunting with an eye on the monthly payments and when banks offered lower and lower monthly rates even if this meant the house was never paid off or the debt would even grow each year, people flocked to them because they looked 'cheap'. So our entire culture is on a 'looking for cheap whatever' mode and the Chinese are innocent when they exploit this.
Japanese cars and such are made 'cheap' relative to their true cost too, via the super-weak yen. And if the USA were to totally stop trade with China, this would merely mean our deficit with Japan would continue and our major industries will continue to die. The Japanese are exploiting American fears of the Chinese potential for power to manipulate us into letting Japan dominate not only Asia but the USA itself. No sovereign nation should allow this sort of trick. We should be triangulating between Japan and China and playing them off each other, not strangulating ourselves by letting Japan get a free ride off of us!
From the article above:
The yuan's rise has stalled since Chinese and U.S. officials met for trade talks in Washington last month. The currency dropped 0.11 percent to 7.6632 against the dollar in Shanghai today, bringing losses in the past three days to 0.36 percent.
Just as barking at Russia won't bring Putin one step closer to letting Europe and America exploit Russian resources and curb Russia's potential power, so it is here: the USA decided this year, it is time to join the country that is reaming our our higher industrial production and attack China. So the Chinese counter-attack. China has no intention of playing the role that Japan is playing with the USA. Japan is killing home consumption so they can look as if they are in this insidious depression and has the highest suicide rate and lowest birth rate in the modern world, bar none. It is a very unhappy society if you look at any statistics for family welfare or growth in anything. The whole place is slowly shutting down and Japan's government is in a tizzy trying to figure out how to keep the people from killing themselves or getting the female half to have at least two babies, heck, one baby! This is the backside of the Japanese scheme and it is dangerous because in 50 years, the old people of Japan will be eliminated and the country will be taken over by whoever invades, most likely it will be the Koreans will take the north half and the southern Asians the south half.
From the above article:
European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said last week that China should make its currency more flexible, a view echoed today by Japan's Finance Minister Koji Omi. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has criticized the Chinese government for the pace of yuan appreciation.Some U.S. lawmakers said last month that the yuan was undervalued by 40 percent to make China's exports cheap and pledged trade sanctions as punishment.
Do note that Japan's Finance Minister joins the barking dogs! They must have some fun times at night when they go out drinking. As the yen collapses, the Japanese demand the yuan should rise? HAHAHA. Because the ruling elitest of Europe and America make huge profits off of the 'carry trade' whereby they recycle Japanese yen earned from selling Americans lots of high-profit industrial products and then use this to fuel the financial take-overs of each other's companies, etc. This money stream feeds into our own economic systems lowering interest rates for everyone even as ALL the national banks are printing money like mad. And the Chinese don't do this anymore because they now have the world's biggest FOREX reserves bar none as well as the second largest holding of US bonds so they can now focus on building their own internal economy and this is totally different from the Japanese who are strangling their own home economy.
Indeed, the fact that Japan had any growth at all and that it is far, far bigger than the USA's own growth means....we are buying more and more Japanese goods! It is just that we are also buying much more Chinese goods. The USA had better deal with this swiftly, it is now so qrotesque, we look really stupid. There is nothing worse than losing face in Asia and if this isn't 'losing face' then what is?
The cruelty of this system is, workers in the auto industries here are being fired at tremendous rates and all the businesses that cluster around the auto business are dying rapidly as the automakers go to China for cheap labor while the Japanese also use China for cheap labor and then import into the USA the stuff they have the Chinese make in China and then they pretend it is China's fault! They use the exact same methods as we use to hide inflation! And then can use the servant working for them as a whipping boy even as our industrialists do the same.
Both entities are cruel and vicious and they don't care if the Chinese, Japanese or American workers suffer. They want to be rich and to rule us!
The result? BusinessWeek's analysis of the import price data reveals offshoring to low-cost countries is in fact creating "phantom GDP"--reported gains in GDP that don't correspond to any actual domestic production. The only question is the magnitude of the disconnect. "There's something real here, but we don't know how much," says J. Steven Landefeld, director of the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), which puts together the GDP figures. Adds Matthew J. Slaughter, an economist at the Amos Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College who until last February was on President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers: "There are potentially big implications. I worry about how pervasive this is."By BusinessWeek's admittedly rough estimate, offshoring may have created about $66 billion in phantom GDP gains since 2003 (page 31). That would lower real GDP today by about half of 1%, which is substantial but not huge. But put another way, $66 billion would wipe out as much as 40% of the gains in manufacturing output over the same period.
This story is important because it shows how these same rulers who are working with the owners of various industries, to undermine us, lie to us and to hide their games from us. The flood of propaganda churned out by these clowns is awesome. Investors who read or listen to the propaganda can make money off of it themselves but this has a huge, gigantic, hideous downside: it leads to massive depressions and bubbles and it is also destroying the USA's industrial and economic base. This destruction is being hidden by our rulers who want us to think the USA, the world's biggest debtor nation, is actually rich. Just as the French King built many palaces and dressed in gold and silk while leading a life of pleasure was actually a bankrupt begging for money and making lousy deals behind everyone's backs so he could keep up appearances. This lead to a revolution. The Russian aristocrats did the same thing. The biggest palaces and the purchases of diamond-encrusted Easter eggs and other joys happened right on the verge of the Russian Revolution.
There is a connection here that is obvious to any historian: if a goverment goes deeply into debt while running up huge military bills and building palaces and playgrounds for the rich while destroying the economic welfare of the working and peasant classes, they get revolutions. And world wars if they are major empires.
The US government is supposed to have cold statistics and our history is based on an army of anonymous clerks assembling numbers and I use these all the time, the honesty there is great but not when the top officers order the clerks to lie or they arrange the rules of analysis so the truth won't appear such as our fake inflation statistics that leaves out food and oil, for example. The GNP stats are important and arriving at a number means facing reality and this, they won't do. Recently the Federal Reserve, one of our most corrupt institutions (note how they fuelled the stock and asset bubbles!) has gone so far as to eliminate figuring out the M3 numbers, these are the statistics that show real inflation of the money supply created by the Federal Reserves itself and its influence on pricing! They simply announced that no one wanted to know this information and when we all gave a loud shout online, they simply ignored this. And this is how financial disasters happen: the rulers ignore everyone while they print money like crazy and spend it like mad and then blame the people who are selling them stuff for it all.
EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy has said that China's financial services have been "considerably" opened up and he would not press China to further open the sector during his upcoming China tour.
Here is one bank officer who told the truth. The European Union hasn't pressured Japan yet about the yen but this is because Europe still has a major trade surplus with the USA. But the minute that disappears, they will join with China to attack Japan's policies but that will be much too late. Coupled with Europe's problems with Russia, the clever Chinese will probably triangulate Russia and Europe off of the USA and this is the best of all worlds: not alliances that are lopsided but to be able to play off all other parties on each other and to be the one who resolves all difficulties! The US is trapped in a net it made itself. Note how Bush is in Albania and is making all sorts of unsupportable and dangerous pledges! He is doing this all over eastern Europe and this is enraging Russia which means Russia is mad at the EU and the USA which means Russia is NOT mad at China so China gets to play with Russia even more as Bush promises Kosovo to Albania which is a country that has absolutely nothing to give us, we gain nothing at all from all this except to push Russia further into China's clutches! And this is how we play the game: stupidly.
Bush's desire for cheers overwhelmed careful diplomacy which is in stark contrast with China's leaders who go about the world making deals that benefit CHINA not making things worse for China. England did this, by the way. The deal they had with Eastern Europe who were all anxious to balance Russia and Germany's territorial interests, lead to WWI and WWII. And our similar actions will cause WWIII. Economic and diplomatic matters are always intertwined with each other and ignoring one or the other while analyzing things leads to an inability to see the future.
China has been in a high growth mode since it started economic reforms in the late 70s. Its almost three decades of high growth is the longest among the 11 high-growth economies in the world and part of "a recent, post-World War II phenomenon". And the Chinese economy will sustain its fast growth for at least two more decades.These are the words of no less a person than Stanford University professor Michael Spence, who shared the 2001 Nobel Prize for Economics with Columbia University professor and former senior vice-president of World Bank Joseph E. Stiglitz and University of California (Berkeley) professor George A. Akerlof.
In the post-War period, 11 economies have recorded high growth, with eight of them being in Asia: the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia and Thailand, Spence says. Going by gross domestic product (GDP) figures, "high growth" means above 7 percent expansion, and an economy is said to have "sustained growth" if it keeps growing for 25 years or more. Growth at such rates produces very substantial changes in income and wealth.
And this is the scary news for the Japan/USA co-prosperity sphere, hell, one sided-prosperity sphere. Japan has made its own people poorer in order to fatten up the Americans for the final results which will be Japanese bosses ruling the American workingclass. But China's interior growth is a menace to this plan of Japan's. If the Chinese were merely exporting, this wouldn't bother them except as competitors but China is growing stronger internally as Japan's industrial rulers bleed Japan white, sucking the blood of the workers there, so they must do something to stop this.
Why we must cooperate with them in this mad scheme baffles me. We gain nothing if we are forced to be Japan's navy. They won't pay half a trillion a year for this very expensive service. Our navy must protect oil ships sailing from the Gulf of Persia all the way to Japan! And in return, we let them run a giant trade surplus with us so where is our benefit here? I see none at all.
Weakening China so we can rule Asia at our own expense so Japan can have a huge trade surplus with us is suicide. We push China away, the Chinese merely do business with someone else and they calculate that we are a milk cow that is going dry anyway. The USA can't take on debts at the present rate forever. At some point, we will collapse into bankruptcy. And China holds many cards in this game, they are, along with Japan, the biggest holders of our debts and we are in serious trouble because of this. But joining with Japan is as stupid as ignoring the Chinese dangers.
They are one and the same. And the European Union isn't making us stronger, they are also running trade surpluses with us! We should be angry about this. And the euro is strong! So it is obvious, the problem isn't the relative strengths of weaknesses of individual currencies, it is the USA's stupid 'free trade' policies that lie at the root of our woes. And the real, real problem is, we love this. It makes us look super-rich as we buy on credit from the entire world!
And the real, real, real problem is, China hopes we keep doing this because this will destroy us as it has destroyed all other empires before us.
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For this statement, Jochen Zeitz argued that a considerable part of the product had being through wind and rain to counter the trend of fail for decades
Posted by: red bottom shoes | October 03, 2011 at 06:18 PM