The easiest way to end the war is by forcing a coup. There's no way Ukrainian citizens are desperate to keep throwing people at the meat grinder to please their overlords in Kiev. I'm fairly confident that's why Zaluzhny got sent away and Zelensky has been cleaning house in his security detail.
Props where they're due, Zelensky's an absolute monster for staying in power and surviving this long into the conflict.
Russia is about to become China's Canada and... I think that's ok?
An interesting article showing an interesting phenomenon.
Mao Zedong may have been the father of modern China, but Deng Xiaoping is the architect. The economic liberalization strategies adopted by him have enabled China to navigate the perils of capitalism without relinquishing power to the bourgeoisie. This is ideology in the making.
So did the US just dissolve the prestige of the USD for $6 billion?
Seems... Short-sighted?
Is power consumption a leading metric for economic growth? China notched 7.4% electricity consumption growth in March YoY. They've been fairly correlated in the past, with the caveat that growth in services generally leads to contraction in electricity consumption.
I'm notching up my GDP growth estimates for this year from barely above 5% to a healthy 5.5%+. There's a lot of internal development that's not getting reflected, and so something is clearly happening in China. But what?
996 is a tech thing. It's unsurprising that, in fields where China is widely recognized as lagging behind the US, more work and longer hours are valued over workers' rights.
China’s economy grew 5.3% in the first quarter, beating expectations
Real estate continues deleveraging, and yet 5.3% GDP growth YoY.
Retail sales growth continues to be sluggish (3.1% vs. 4.6% predicted) and CPI is coming in cool (0.1% vs. 0.3% predicted). My theory for this is that China is actually seeing costs drop more quickly than CPI metrics can keep up. Traditional big-ticket household spending categories are housing, transportation, and education. Housing prices are obviously on the decline, but transportation costs are also decreasing due to the combination of cheaper EVs and an expanding HSR network. Education costs have been clamped down on after the crackdown on private tutoring, while average education outcomes have been raised by the crackdown on gaming. Meanwhile, traditional recurring costs like food and energy have been pushed downward by increasing trade with Russia as well as the rise of cheap solar.
It may be time to revisit the notion of ever-increasing consumption value as being important for economic growth. In this case, you can get the same quality of life with substantially less money. Why spend more to pad the top line retail sales number?
A shower thought on "Chinese vassalage":
The DPRK, whose dependence on China is extensive and extremely well-documented, still has an absurd amount of flexibility, self-determination, and independence from Chinese policy. It's essentially the "worst case scenario" in terms of Chinese influence... And the DPRK was still allowed to develop it's own nuclear weapons despite Chinese opposition. What are the odds that Canada would be allowed to develop an independent nuclear weapons program today? Cuba? Mexico?
Zero.
I don't understand why everyone is so obsessed with "China manufacturing overcapacity."
This isn't new. We saw the same thing with Japan, and the solution was simply to deflate the value of the USD/EUR relative to the Yen. Do the same thing relative to the RMB and you would solve all of these overcapacity issues.
Of course, the West likes the benefits of having a strong currency without appreciating the costs.
Legitimate expressions of grievance do not preclude outside agitators, though.
Everyone's discontent, but not all issues end up organizing.