[Unthinking Majority]

Thanks for the Mea Culpa.

Your song admits that the USA is a genocide-based institution dedicated to human enslavement.

This relates indirectly to China's economic recovery, but it is still useful information.

Mea culpa? I haven't done anything wrong.

The problem is, the USA hasn't acted unlike any other powerful country in human history. The problem is 1. human nature, and 2. the global system (which is anarchy and made up of different states, and therefore based on competition). China is part of it. It's zero-sum, which means inevitable butting heads with China.

[skinster]

The problem is, the USA hasn't acted unlike any other powerful country Empire in human history.

FTFY.

[Igor Antunov]

It's super fun infographic time.

[Atlantis]

The West has failed – US and Europe have made a mess of handling the crisis

The West has failed
US and Europe have made a mess of handling the crisis
Western leaders have been insular slow learners at every stage of the Covid pandemic

Sat, Oct 31, 2020, 01:30

Naomi O’Leary

The pandemic has not been easy anywhere. But as the citizens of the West brace for a winter largely confined to their homes, retirees in Australia throng the bars, the streets of Taipei are busy and the restaurants of Seoul are full. The United States and Europe are outliers in how badly they have managed the pandemic, managing to sacrifice public health and tank their economies to an extent that may affect the global balance of power for our lifetimes.

The pandemic response has been politicised and captured by tiresome culture warriors, while restrictions are blamed for economic damage that is an inevitable as long as coronavirus roams. Contain it, and normality returns. There is no normal economy with a virus that kills and debilitates the human beings that make it up.

How did we get here?

All kinds of absurd stereotypes about Asia were used to support the Western exceptionalism that underpinned our bad policies. All the successful pandemic control techniques, including mask-wearing, contact-tracing, and compulsory quarantine, were initially dismissed as authoritarian and culturally inappropriate for the West.

Rather than learning from what already worked, we chose Hail Mary technological fixes that didn’t exist yet, like contact-tracing apps and vaccines, to justify business as usual
They were categorised as something only China would do, ignoring that these techniques were central to the successful pandemic response of democracies from Taiwan, to Japan, to South Korea. Ever-protesting Hong Kong is the example that makes particularly hilarious the idea that Asian people are just more “compliant” or “don’t love freedom” like the West.

Australia and New Zealand are majority white ex-colonial societies that don’t fit into this confused thinking anyway. Their practices were dismissed as “cutting themselves off from the world”. Australia will soon open up with New Zealand, and Hong Kong with Singapore, gradually expanding the bubble of safety. It is we, the virus-riddled Westerners, who will be isolated indefinitely.

Behind all of this was exceptionalism. Infectious diseases were viewed as a developing-world problem that the West had outgrown. We underfunded and neglected pandemic response. Many leaders and influential people had an inappropriate lack of alarm and grasped at fairytales that minimised the threat of the virus, the kind of false sense of invulnerability of people too sheltered to fear things.

This exceptionalism often took the form of the “it only kills the sick and the old” mantra. This is false: one in 10 people under 50 suffer enduring damage from the virus and it has always killed randomly. It’s also cruel: it treats the lives of any happy retiree, any mother of four with ovarian cancer, any young man with cystic fibrosis as disposable.

Its iteration in policy is deciding not to eliminate the virus while telling the vulnerable to cocoon, which means confining about a third of the population to indefinite house arrest, a weird flex by the governments of the world’s oldest and sickest populations, who rely on the votes of those people to stay in power.

This false separation of the strong and the weak also misunderstands society. People share accommodation. Grandmothers raise children. And people at risk of death from the virus are the very same who run our healthcare systems.

Like 46-year-old Diego Bianco of Italy, an ambulance paramedic who died in bed after telling his wife not to worry. Or 28-year-old Dr Adeline Fagan, who died last month in Texas after working shifts in the coronavirus emergency ward. Or Boy Ettema (42) a nurse who died intubated in his own hospital in the Netherlands.

Western governments treated their healthcare workers like load-bearing infrastructure, with policy aimed to “not overwhelm” hospitals. But governments are not so all-powerful as they delude themselves, that they can precisely calibrate how many people get sick at once from a highly infectious virus according to how many beds are available. When they err, they gift their much-applauded healthcare workers the trauma of choosing between patients.

Excuses could be made for ill-preparedness at the start of the pandemic. But Western leaders have been insular slow learners at every stage. And the failure to act effectively when cases were brought down to low levels during the summer – an achievement hard won with sacrifices by every citizen – is hard to forgive.

In the name of 'freedom', Western governments would not contemplate mandatory quarantines. Taoiseach Micheál Martin recently dismissed such practices in the Dáil as 'statist'
Western governments now emphasise that individual responsibility will determine the course of the pandemic. “The path it takes depends on YOU,” as Minister for Further and Higher Education Simon Harris tweeted this month.

Societal co-operation is vital. But no individual citizen has the power to put in place an effective testing and tracing system.

All the self-delusion has been self-defeating, as in a kind of tragic irony, the pursuit of each aim has led to its defeat.

In the name of saving the economy, the strategy over the summer was to get rid of the restrictions, not the virus. The European Commission’s “Reopen EU” website, with its little cocktail glass icon that allowed users to see if bars were open in their holiday destination, appears an absurd folly now that the rush to save the tourism and catering industries has bought us a crushing new wave of infection so severe it threatens to make the EU’s vaunted €750 billion stimulus agreement obsolete.

In the name of “freedom”, Western governments would not contemplate mandatory quarantines. Taoiseach Micheál Martin recently dismissed such practices in the Dáil as “statist”. Targeted, enforced quarantines for a few were unthinkable for the West. So now there are blanket restrictions on us all. What is more free? Which is more statist?

All states involve a trade off between citizens and their rulers: taxes for services, common rules for safety. The point of a state is to create the conditions for its citizens to thrive.

The West has failed.

Hubris be thy name!

It's not the corona, it's right-wing populism that's eating the West from the inside like a pathogen. There is no vaccine against stupidity.

[Atlantis]

China has demonstrated that you need to beat the pandemic first if you want to have a strong economy.

Western populists who claimed that the pandemic is a hoax will be responsible for millions of deaths and tens of millions of long-term patients. In addition, they effectively destroyed their own economy. That's what populism and complacency do to a people.

China October exports surge, imports rise amid global recovery

BEIJING (Reuters) - China exports grew at the fastest pace in 19 months in October, while imports also rose, official data showed on Saturday, as the world’s second largest economy continued to recover after being hit hard by the coronavirus crisis earlier this year.

Exports in October rose 11.4% from a year earlier, beating analysts’ expectations of a 9.3% increase and quickening from a solid 9.9% increase in September.

The surge in exports pushed the trade surplus for October up to $58.44 billion, compared with the poll’s forecast for a $46 billion surplus and a $37 billion surplus in September.

China’s trade surplus with the United States widened to $31.37 billion in October from $30.75 billion in September.

China’s exports have stayed largely resilient amid the COVID-19 global pandemic, as strong demand for medical supplies and reduced manufacturing capacity elsewhere worked in China’s favour.

“Exports growth quickened further and significantly exceeded expectations, indicating a relatively strong momentum,” said Liu Xuezhi, an anlyst at Bank of Communications in Shanghai.

China’s exports could stay strong in the rest of 2020 as domestic firms resume production faster than global rivals and sell more COVID-19 related goods such as face masks, Liu said.

However, some analysts said exports could come under pressure in the coming months, as major European economies, including France, Germany and the United Kingdom, went back into lockdown as a second wave of coronavirus cases gathered strength. Factory activity accelerated at the fastest pace in nearly a decade in October, a private survey showed, although the official survey pointed to some slowdown in the expansion. Export orders expanded.

Imports rose 4.7% year-on-year in October, slower than September’s 13.2% growth, and underperforming expectations in a Reuters poll for a 9.5% increase, but still marking a second straight month of growth.

Chinese airlines are shunning some deliveries of Airbus AIR.PA aircraft, citing fears of coronavirus infection for their staff in the latest tussle over efforts to keep delayed deliveries on track despite the pandemic, industry sources said.

Analysts said the solid trade performance could provide a boost to China’s broader economic recovery, which has gained steam after suffering from a deep slump earlier this year.

China’s economy grew 4.9% in the third-quarter from a year earlier, but growth could slow to just over 2% this year - the weakest in over three decades but still much stronger than other major economies.

“China has a better recovery from the pandemic and has a comparative advantage, so it has gained a larger market,” said Zhou Hao, an economist at Commerzbank in Singapore.

“Of course, this advantage is also temporary and may last until the end of the year.”

[Igor Antunov]

China’s share of global exports has actually increased to about 30% this year.

This even though Yuan has strengthened by 8% against US dollar in the last six months.

This while all other major economies have experienced contraction in domestic activity, imports and exports.

I hope you're all dusting off your Mandarin 101 textbooks. Or continue to get left behind.

[Black Consequense]

it's right-wing populism that's eating the West from the inside like a pathogen

Yes cause clearly bringing more refugees and immigrants would save the west.

[Atlantis]

Yes cause clearly bringing more refugees and immigrants would save the west.

The Jews can't be made responsible for the holocaust and the refugees can't be made responsible for anti-establishment populism and conspiracy theories. That is homegrown.

[ckaihatsu]

China’s share of global exports has actually increased to about 30% this year.

This even though Yuan has strengthened by 8% against US dollar in the last six months.

This while all other major economies have experienced contraction in domestic activity, imports and exports.

I hope you're all dusting off your Mandarin 101 textbooks. Or continue to get left behind.

Because everyone's incomes are indexed to the foreign exchange rate.


x D

[JohnRawls]

So far, China is the only country to successfully combat the pandemic even without a vaccine. Due to a combination of containment measures and a hard lockdown in Wuhan, the country has been so successful that Chinese pharmaceutical companies now have to test their vaccine outside of China.

As the Chinese economy rebounds and life goes back to normal, China also shows that there is no trade-off between saving lives and and saving the economy. The latter requires the former as indispensable condition.

While the West keeps on stagnating, alternating between half-measures, tentative re-opening, followed by more half-measures, the Chinese economy has gone back to growth because the pandemic has been dealt with.

If democracy is damaged because democratic regimes are incapable of coping with the pandemic, it won't be because of China. It'll be because democratic leaders can't tell unpopular truth to people at a time of rampant populism. Democracy can't survive without a degree of political maturity. Populism is the death of democracy.

And people started analysing the data from that report. Numbers don't add up. The Chinese removed around 2.5 trillion Yuan from the previous years totals investment for example to make it look like that investment grew and they had larger recovery then they actually had.

The question is why they did that? Nobody would fault them for decline during Corona. It seems that over regulation of Chinese economy and inability for local and foreign firms to move money out of China has killed a lot of the investment from abroad and they are starved for Cash and Credit. The Governments capacity for credit and loans is not enough anymore not to mention that the current credit and loans might explode at any time.

Don't get me wrong though, there is recovery because people are not in the lockdown anymore and at least factories started working. The rate of that recovery though is probably under or on par with Europe and US. It is hard to say for now. The problem is that we have no solid data about Corona in China. So it is hard to say what the fuck is going on there.

[Rancid]

And people started analysing the data from that report. Numbers don't add up. The Chinese removed around 2.5 trillion Yuan from the previous years totals investment for example to make it look like that investment grew and they had larger recovery then they actually had.

The question is why they did that? Nobody would fault them for decline during Corona. It seems that over regulation of Chinese economy and inability for local and foreign firms to move money out of China has killed a lot of the investment from abroad and they are starved for Cash and Credit. The Governments capacity for credit and loans is not enough anymore not to mention that the current credit and loans might explode at any time.

Don't get me wrong though, there is recovery because people are not in the lockdown anymore and at least factories started working. The rate of that recovery though is probably under or on par with Europe and US. It is hard to say for now. The problem is that we have no solid data about Corona in China. So it is hard to say what the fuck is going on there.

It's baffling how some of the people on this forum will wholeheartedly believe anything china puts out, when it's known that they always fudge their numbers. Always, even before COVID. Anyway, my guess is like you, that they recovering, but probably at a similar pace as everyone else.

[Atlantis]

@JohnRawls, @Rancid, it's really amazing how you guys keep on saying that everything coming from China must be a lie. At this point, nobody can deny that China had a remarkable success in beating the pandemic and that the half-measures adopted by the West are making the pandemic worse while destroying our economy at the same time. There is only so far you can go with denialism until the facts bite you in the behind. German car makers are now set for a recovery BECAUSE of the Chinese market and even though sales are declining elsewhere.

[Atlantis]

Because everyone's incomes are indexed to the foreign exchange rate.

You have no idea how true that is even though you mean to be ironic.

[ckaihatsu]

And people started analysing the data from that report. Numbers don't add up. The Chinese removed around 2.5 trillion Yuan from the previous years totals investment for example to make it look like that investment grew and they had larger recovery then they actually had.

That's the ongoing currency war, in which *no* country wants their currency to increase in value relative to international currencies, because that shrivels markets abroad, for export, because all goods will be relatively *more expensive* to others, by pricing, when the domestic currency appreciates.

[JohnRawls]

That's the ongoing currency war, in which *no* country wants their currency to increase in value relative to international currencies, because that shrivels markets abroad, for export, because all goods will be relatively *more expensive* to others, by pricing, when the domestic currency appreciates.

This is an oversimplification. Most of European and American markets are internalised. More so for America than Europe. Your ideas might work for 3rd world countries or countries who depend on resource exports like oil, minerals etc but it won't work that well for service based economies. You are just lowering the salaries and basically the purchasing power along with the whole economic activity in the country by doing so. While there is an argument to be made for that not mattering if ALL the goods, resources and services are produced in a country but this literally NEVER happened in the history of manking before.

[JohnRawls]

@JohnRawls, @Rancid, it's really amazing how you guys keep on saying that everything coming from China must be a lie. At this point, nobody can deny that China had a remarkable success in beating the pandemic and that the half-measures adopted by the West are making the pandemic worse while destroying our economy at the same time. There is only so far you can go with denialism until the facts bite you in the behind. German car makers are now set for a recovery BECAUSE of the Chinese market and even though sales are declining elsewhere.

As Rancid said, I would take things coming from China with a grain of salt. They have been cought fixing the numbers before and this time also. But do not take this as if China is not recovering, it is. As for Corona virus, they have stopped reporting any real numbers since february, march this year and hence there is the distrust problem for me and China. How can I trust a country saying we are fine when all the evidence in the world point to the contrary and I don't have any specific evidence of it being the other way around in China itself?

[ckaihatsu]

This is an oversimplification. Most of European and American markets are internalised. More so for America than Europe. Your ideas might work for 3rd world countries or countries who depend on resource exports like oil, minerals etc but it won't work that well for service based economies. You are just lowering the salaries and basically the purchasing power along with the whole economic activity in the country by doing so. While there is an argument to be made for that not mattering if ALL the goods, resources and services are produced in a country but this literally NEVER happened in the history of manking before.

And yet here we are....

Currency war, also known as competitive devaluations, is a condition in international affairs where countries seek to gain a trade advantage over other countries by causing the exchange rate of their currency to fall in relation to other currencies. As the exchange rate of a country's currency falls, exports become more competitive in other countries, and imports into the country become more and more expensive. Both effects benefit the domestic industry, and thus employment, which receives a boost in demand from both domestic and foreign markets. However, the price increases for import goods (as well as in the cost of foreign travel) are unpopular as they harm citizens' purchasing power; and when all countries adopt a similar strategy, it can lead to a general decline in international trade, harming all countries.

Currency war in the Great Depression

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, most countries abandoned the gold standard. With widespread high unemployment, devaluations became common, a policy that has frequently been described as "beggar thy neighbour",[28] in which countries purportedly compete to export unemployment. However, because the effects of a devaluation would soon be offset by a corresponding devaluation and in many cases retaliatory tariffs or other barriers by trading partners, few nations would gain an enduring advantage.

The exact starting date of the 1930s currency war is open to debate.[21] The three principal parties were Britain, France, and the United States. For most of the 1920s the three generally had coinciding interests; both the US and France supported Britain's efforts to raise Sterling's value against market forces. Collaboration was aided by strong personal friendships among the nations' central bankers, especially between Britain's Montagu Norman and America's Benjamin Strong until the latter's early death in 1928. Soon after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, France lost faith in Sterling as a source of value and begun selling it heavily on the markets. From Britain's perspective both France and the US were no longer playing by the rules of the gold standard. Instead of allowing gold inflows to increase their money supplies (which would have expanded those economies but reduced their trade surpluses) France and the US began sterilising the inflows, building up hoards of gold. These factors contributed to the Sterling crises of 1931; in September of that year Britain substantially devalued and took the pound off the gold standard. For several years after this global trade was disrupted by competitive devaluation and by retaliatory tariffs. The currency war of the 1930s is generally considered to have ended with the Tripartite monetary agreement of 1936.[21][29][30][31][32][33]

Bretton Woods era

From the end of World War II until about 1971, the Bretton Woods system of semi-fixed exchange rates meant that competitive devaluation was not an option, which was one of the design objectives of the systems' architects. Additionally, global growth was generally very high in this period, so there was little incentive for currency war even if it had been possible.[34]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency_war

---

The China–United States trade war (Chinese: 中美贸易战; pinyin: Zhōngměi Màoyìzhàn) is an ongoing economic conflict between China and the United States. President Donald Trump in 2018 began setting tariffs and other trade barriers on China with the goal of forcing it to make changes to what the U.S. says are "unfair trade practices".[1] Among those trade practices and their effects are the growing trade deficit, and alleged theft of intellectual property and forced transfer of American technology to China.[2] In response to US trade measures, the Chinese government has accused the Trump administration of engaging in protectionism.[3] On January 15, 2020, the two sides reached a phase one agreement, but tensions persisted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2% ... _trade_war

[JohnRawls]

And yet here we are....









---

What has the trade policies durring the great depression have to do with Modern times?

[ckaihatsu]

What has the trade policies durring the great depression have to do with Modern times?

I'm saying that Trump's trade-war protectionist tariffs are akin to nationalist currency devaluations -- with tariffs it's just *increasing* the competitor's prices, for *imports*, instead of *decreasing* one's own currency, for an edge in competitive *exports*.

[ckaihatsu]

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/artic ... -like-1933


Trump’s Currency War Smacks of the 1930s

Too many have forgotten the searing pain of the last “uncoordinated break-up” of the world’s currency regime.

By Stephen Mihm

August 12, 2019, 10:35 AM CDT

A trade war between China and the U.S. has become something bigger: a currency war. Beijing’s weakening of the yuan prompted the Treasury Department to brand it a “currency manipulator.” Central banks around the world, including Thailand, India and New Zealand, promptly followed China’s lead nonetheless.

This isn’t the first time that protectionism became entangled in exchange rates. In fact, what we’re seeing has an eerie resemblance to a back-and-forth volley of currency devaluations and retaliatory tariffs that ripped apart the global economy in the 1930s. There’s no reason something similar won’t happen again.