{"id":60181,"date":"2021-10-31T15:41:59","date_gmt":"2021-10-31T20:41:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60181"},"modified":"2021-10-31T15:41:59","modified_gmt":"2021-10-31T20:41:59","slug":"will-china-pop-the-global-everything-bubble-yes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=60181","title":{"rendered":"Will China Pop the Global Everything Bubble? Yes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Will China Pop the Global Everything Bubble? Yes<\/a><\/h3>\n

The line of dominoes that is already toppling extends around the entire global economy and financial system. Plan accordingly.<\/i><\/p>\n

That China faces structural problems is well-recognized.<\/b>\u00a0The list of articles in the August issue of\u00a0Foreign Affairs<\/i>\u00a0dedicated to China reflects this:<\/p>\n

Xi’s Gamble: the Race to Consolidate Power and Stave Off Disaster<\/p>\n

China’s Economic Reckoning: The Price of Failed Reforms<\/p>\n

The Robber Barons of Beijing: Can China Survive its Gilded Age?<\/p>\n

Life of the Party: How Secure Is the CCP? (Chinese Communist Party)<\/i><\/p>\n

These are thorny, difficult issues:<\/b>\u00a0a demographic cliff resulting from the one-child policy, soaring wealth-income inequality, pervasive corruption, public health issues (diabesity, etc.), environmental damage and a slowing economy.<\/p>\n

What the conventional analysts do not fully grasp, in my view, are<\/b>\u00a01) the existential threat to the CCP and China’s economy posed by its unprecedented, metastasizing credit-asset bubble and 2) its incipient energy crisis.<\/p>\n

As I explained in a recent blog post,\u00a0What’s Really Going On in China?<\/a>, the CCP and the government informally institutionalized moral hazard (the disconnection of risk and consequence) as a core economic policy.<\/p>\n

Every financial loss, no matter how risky or debt-ridden, was covered by the state (via bail-out, refinancing debt, new loans, etc.) as a “cost of rapid development,” a reflection of the view that some inefficiency and waste was inevitable in the rapid development of industry, housing, infrastructure and a consumer economy.<\/p>\n

What China’s leaders did not fully understand was this implicit guarantee of bail-outs–the equivalent of “The Fed has our backs”–incentivized debt-funded speculation as the lowest-risk, highest-return “investment,” especially when compared to low-profit, risky investments in low-margin export industries. (Recall the average profit margins of Chinese exporting enterprises is 1% to 3%.)<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Will China Pop the Global Everything Bubble? Yes The line of dominoes that is already toppling extends around the entire global economy and financial system. Plan accordingly. That China faces structural problems is well-recognized.\u00a0The list of articles in the August issue of\u00a0Foreign Affairs\u00a0dedicated to China reflects this: Xi’s Gamble: the Race to Consolidate Power and […]<\/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":[24078,130,175,195,17853,534,587],"class_list":["post-60181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-charles-hugh-smith-2","tag-china","tag-credit","tag-debt","tag-everything-bubble","tag-monetary-policy","tag-of-two-minds"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60181","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=60181"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60182,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60181\/revisions\/60182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}