{"id":19826,"date":"2016-04-12T11:56:59","date_gmt":"2016-04-12T16:56:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19826"},"modified":"2016-04-12T11:56:59","modified_gmt":"2016-04-12T16:56:59","slug":"the-new-middle-kingdom-of-concrete-and-the-red-depression-ahead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19826","title":{"rendered":"The New Middle Kingdom Of Concrete And The Red Depression Ahead"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The New Middle Kingdom Of Concrete And The Red Depression Ahead<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n
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No wonder the Red Ponzi consumed more cement during three years (2011-2013)\u00a0than did the US during the entire twentieth century.\u00a0Enabled by an\u00a0endless $30 trillion\u00a0flow of credit from its state controlled banking apparatus and its shadow banking affiliates, China\u00a0went berserk building factories, warehouses, ports,\u00a0office towers, malls,\u00a0apartments, roads, airports, train stations, high speed railways, stadiums, monumental public buildings and much more.<\/p>\n

If you want an analogy, 6.6 gigatons of cement is 14.5 trillion pounds.\u00a0The Hoover dam used about\u00a01.8 billion pounds of cement. So\u00a0in 3 years China consumed\u00a0enough cement\u00a0to build\u00a0the Hoover dam\u00a08,000 times over\u2014-160 of them for every state in the union!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/center>Having spent\u00a0the last\u00a0ten days in China,\u00a0I can well and truly say that the Middle Kingdom is back. But its leitmotif\u00a0is the very opposite to\u00a0the\u00a0splendor of the Forbidden City.The Middle\u00a0Kingdom has been reborn in\u00a0towers of preformed concrete. They rise in their tens of thousands in every direction on the horizon. They are\u00a0connected with ribbons of highways which are\u00a0scalloped and molded to wind through the endless forest of concrete verticals. Some of them are\u00a0occupied. Alot, not.<\/p>\n

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The\u00a0\u201cbefore\u201d and \u201cafter\u201d contrast of\u00a0Shanghai\u2019s famous\u00a0Pudong waterfront is illustrative of the illusion.<\/p>\n

The first picture below is from about\u00a01990 at a time before Mr. Deng discovered the printing press in the basement of the People\u2019s Bank of China and proclaimed that it is glorious to be rich; and that if you\u00a0were 18 and\u00a0still in full possession of your digital dexterity and visual acuity it was even more glorious to work 12 hours per day 6 days per week in an export factory for 35 cents per hour.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The New Middle Kingdom Of Concrete And The Red Depression Ahead No wonder the Red Ponzi consumed more cement during three years (2011-2013)\u00a0than did the US during the entire twentieth century.\u00a0Enabled by an\u00a0endless $30 trillion\u00a0flow of credit from its state controlled banking apparatus and its shadow banking affiliates, China\u00a0went berserk building factories, warehouses, ports,\u00a0office towers, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[130,5979,2120,13417,2914,2615,11368],"class_list":["post-19826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-china","tag-contracorner","tag-david-stockman","tag-middle-kingdom","tag-pboc","tag-peoples-bank-of-china","tag-red-ponzi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19826"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19827,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19826\/revisions\/19827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}