Home » Posts tagged '#PopeEncyclicalSeries'
Tag Archives: #PopeEncyclicalSeries
China: Doomed If You Do, Doomed If You Don’t
China: Doomed If You Do, Doomed If You Don’t
Whichever option China chooses, it loses.
Many commentators have ably explained the double-bind the central banks of the world find themselves in. Doing more of what’s failed is, well, failing to generate the desired results, but doing nothing also presents risks.
China’s double-bind is especially instructive. While there an abundance of complexity in China’s financial system and economy, we can boil down China’sdoomed if you do, doomed if you don’t double-bind to this simple dilemma:
If China raises interest rates to support the RMB ( a.k.a. yuan) and stem the flood tide of capital leaving China, then China’s exports lose ground to competing nations with weaker currencies.
This is the downside of maintaining a peg to the U.S. dollar. The peg provides valuable stability and more or less guarantees competitive exports to the U.S., but it ties the yuan to the soaring dollar, which has made the yuan stronger simply as a consequence of the peg.
But if China pushes interest rates down and floods its economy with cheap credit, the tide of capital exiting China increases, as everyone attempts to escape the loss of purchasing power as the yuan is devalued.
This is the double-bind China finds itself in: weakening the yuan to shore up exports incentivizes capital flow out of China, forcing the central bank to torch reserves to mediate the flood tide of capital fleeing China.
But efforts to support the yuan crush exports based on a cheap currency, creating the potential for mass layoffs in sectors with razor-thin margins and convoluted black box financing. Nobody knows how many times the stuff in warehouses has been pledged as collateral, or how much debt is floating around the shadow banking system in China.
Forget the Fake Statistics: China Is a Tinderbox (August 10, 2015)
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
How Pope Francis’s climate encyclical is liberating the world
How Pope Francis’s climate encyclical is liberating the world
In my life there are two things that have the effect of at least somewhat isolating me from others. The first is being a writer on climate change, peak oil, and the economic crises bound up with those modern predicaments. The other is being a Christian environmentalist.
In the first case, my essays, as well as my social media presence, fairly well run counter to the whole of my society and culture, even when a few outliers add concurring thoughts to the mix.
But in the end, by writing a write a blog about what people shouldn’t do, about the things we should give up and forsake for a concept of the greater good, about the ways our habits imperil the world and especially our children and future generations, I can kind of come off like a scold even in my most mild iteration. And forget about those times when I’ve lost all patience with the excuses and indifference to our shared world — then I’m sure I can be a real jerk.
By contrast, my friends who write blogs on the 40th new way to redecorate your home, the best new destination to jet off to, and the greatest products to try as a mommy blogger, are infinitely more popular and beloved than me.
I end up feeling like I stand alone, or at best with a small group of similarly-minded, possible loonies, who together are spitting into a hot and rancid wind.
Crossroads
As an eco-conscious Christian, my experience is not dissimilar.
While I love Christ unreservedly, and without wavering, and that relationship is the most meaningful and important in my life, still, in my life with fellow Christians and with the Church, I have found little immediate commonality on the issue of creation care.
– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2015/06/how-pope-francis-climate-encyclical-is-liberating-the-world/#sthash.SbPvipm7.dpuf
