Yves here. It’s mind-boggling to think that the US is confronting China as a hostile power. We are deeply integrated with them economically, so it’s hard to see how this makes any sense. And it reveals classic American short-sightedness, since by letting them become our preferred vendor (as in exporting US jobs to them), we […]
Read more...Why is it Groundhog Day? Back in 2011, I wrote a seriously messy blog post about dodgy New Zealand FSPs (Financial Services Providers), their dodgy web sites and people and addresses, and the evidently nonexistent oversight of all of this by the NZ Ministry of Economic Development and the NZ Companies Office. To my surprise, […]
Read more...China has made a concerted effort to expand energy links in Latin America, especially in form of oil-backed loans.
Read more...China’s oil consumption is a bigger part of global demand than most analysts acknowledge. A slowdown in buying after China stopped stockpiling diesel for the summer Olympics was a proximate cause of the 2008 oil bust. China is again in a stockpiling phase, which could precede another not-well-anticipated demand drop.
Read more...America’s current leadership has failed to grasp the significance of a radical global change underway inside the Eurasian land mass. If China succeeds in linking its rising industries to the vast natural resources of the Eurasian heartland, then quite possibly, as Sir Halford Mackinder predicted on that cold London night in 1904, “the empire of the world would be in sight.”
Read more...How US superpower overreach has hit the breaking point, yet the officialdom acts as if somehow doing more will succeed.
Read more...The Fed disavows responsibility for the way US interest rate policy sends money sloshing around the world. It’s a huge mistake intellectually and politically.
Read more...Even though China’s Silk Road initiative is in its early stages and still opportunistic, traditional rivalries could impede progress. Even so, the US is concerned about how China has gotten and is making countermoves.
Read more...The sausage-making on the TPP has gotten messier…..
Read more...I suspect readers will draw suitably concerned environmental conclusions from this forecast, that the oil era has at least another 30 years to run.
Read more...As many other central banks in the Asian region, the People Bank of China (PBoC) has been on an easing mode for a few months now and more seems to be in the store. The once relatively polarized debate on what the PBoC monetary policy stance should be has increasingly leaned towards additional easing. Some analysts are even proposing full-fledged quantitative easing (QE), in the form of US Treasury sales to raise funds for assets locally, such as local government bonds and other hardly–performing assets. There is no doubt that the PBoC could, thereby, bring another big stimulus into the already heavily massaged Chinese economy as it would help debt-saddled local governments to clean their balance sheets and, at the same time, allow banks’ to lend further. As if this were not enough, any additional easing – capital controls permitting- would also push the RMB to a more depreciated level, bringing thereby an additional push to external demand.
Read more...Weak demand in the Eurozone; inventory build-up in the U.S., and free money meant carriers added more and more ships. How does the movie end?
Read more...Obama’s bribe to Abe, of a more muscular Japanese military, has won him over but won’t play as well in Japan and will go down worse in China.
Read more...By Lindsay David, Australia, author of Print: The Central Bankers Bubble, founder of LF Economics. Originally published at Wolf Street. Australia, you have officially run out of luck. While leveraged property investors in Sydney and Melbourne are desperately hunting for a senseless “net-yield” that makes the yield on a German 2-year bund look rewarding, the […]
Read more...The financial media has attributed considerable importance to the fact that many of America’s close allies, including the UK, Australia, and Israel, have joined China’s new infrastructure bank against the clearly-stated desires of the US. While these moves seem to signal America’s declining influence, it does not necessarily follow that the infrastructure bank is destined to become a major international institution any time soon.
Michael Pettis deflates some of the hype surrounding this initiative, arguing that it is less significant from a geopolitical and practical perspective than virtually all commentators assume. China is simply not about to become the issuer of the reserve currency any time soon, and that limits how much financial clout it will have.
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