Thursday, October 2, 2008

Jim Rogers on the Fed, the US Dollar, and China

When I first started my BComm at Dalhousie, I had the intention of focusing on international business and wanted to use every opportunity to study China. In a history class I was taking, I even decided to write my term paper on the increasing influence China has been gaining in the world since the end of the cultural revolution.

We all have regrets in life. I will never regret leaving engineering, but sometimes I regret not "staying the course" with my BComm. A wave of reality would hit me then and I remember I would be $50k in debt right now, and probably not making much more money than I am now.

As I steadily work through my BMgmt at MSVU, I think I might start focusing my studies towards China again. If the US dollar does collapse, I imagine the Bank of Canada will let ours destruct as well. At that point, either the Amero will become a reality, or we will be using a diversified one world currency, as suggested by the People's Daily (the official paper of the Communist Part of China).

Watch Jim Rogers give his perspective:

31 comments:

Douglas Porter said...

If you think the government in China is still communist, you are living in a fantasy land.

Douglas Porter said...

He said "China is the wave of the future". I.E. authoritarian dictatorships are the wave of the future?

Douglas Porter said...

http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/bp219

2.3 million high paying jobs lost.. the real cause of the sub prime housing crisis.

Douglas Porter said...

A major cause of the rapidly growing U.S. trade deficit with China is currency manipulation. China has tightly pegged its currency to the dollar at a rate that encourages a large bilateral surplus with the United States. Maintaining this peg required the purchase of about $460 billion in U.S. treasury bills and other securities in 2007 alone.2 This intervention makes the yuan artificially cheap and provides an effective subsidy on Chinese exports. The best estimates place this effective subsidy at roughly 30%, even after recent appreciation in the yuan(Cline and Williamson 2008).3

China also engages in extensive suppression of labor rights. An AFL-CIO study estimated that repression of labor rights by the Chinese government has lowered manufacturing wages by 47% to 86% (AFL-CIO 2006, 138). China has also been accused of massive direct subsidization of export production in many key industries (see, e.g., Haley 2007). Finally, it maintains strict, non-tariff barriers to imports. As a result, China’s exports to the United States of $323 billion in 2007 were more than five times greater than U.S. exports to China, which totaled only $61 billion (Table 1). China’s trade surplus was responsible for 52.3% of the U.S. total non-oil trade deficit in 2007, making the China trade relationship this country’s most imbalanced by far. Unless China raises the real value of the yuan by an additional 30% and eliminates these other trade distortions, the U.S. trade deficit and job losses will continue to grow rapidly in the future.

Josh said...

You could at least site the text you're using instead of pretending its your own material.

I didn't really say anything in particular about what I thought about China's government. Their economy is the fastest growing economy in the world and has been for 20-30 years. So whatever their authoritarian government is doing, its generating a lot of wealth and turning the country into an industrial powerhouse which is partially why the world economy will be centered around China.

Chris said...

http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/bp219

Read the whole thing, stupid.

Chris said...

And you support this state of affairs? China is a rights violating party dictatorship! Has been since Mao lost touch with reality! Supporting China would make you a hypocrite.

Josh said...

I don't support China. I'm not sure where you it is that I say I support the Chinese government. I'm just making an observation.

Chris said...

I said would.

:)

I hope you are not going to be buying any Walmart products or products made in China in the near future, because that would make you a hypocrite!

Josh said...

Why would buying walmart products make me a hypocrite?

Christopher said...

Because they were produced by people without freedom, OBVIOUSLY.

Christopher said...

Because they were produced by people without freedom, OBVIOUSLY.

Josh said...

I'm not one to determine how one people chooses their government.

Douglas Porter said...

Again, you should be against products produced in China, because it is a dictatorship.

Josh said...

I'm neutral towards China

Douglas Porter said...

You can't be. Your political ideology is prescriptive/moral. You have to be against Chinese production or you are a hypocrite.

Josh said...

You like to call be a hypocrite a lot when I'm really not one. Calling me names isn't productive anyhow.

Douglas Porter said...

Hypocrisy only comes into play if you are espousing a moral theory. You are espousing a moral theory. Therefore, I can call you a hypocrite if you argue for freedom, but support production in China.

And, no, the Chinese people did not "choose" Mao's dictatorship and then Deng's dictatorship. Those men seized power or were the result of a seizure of power. Stalin liquidated 85% of his fellow Bolsheviks in his famous coup. The people had no control over this. If they indeed did support the Bolsheviks, then Stalin de facto assassinated the will of the people and replaced it with his own.

Josh said...

The people have a responsibility to decided their governance. I can not view the Chinese poorly anymore than I can view my fellow Canadians poorly for choosing a method of governance that I do not agree with.

The Chinese might have to spill blood to change their governance, but so did the French and the Americans.

Change in governance comes from within and I respect that the Chinese people as whole are not so bad off that they have decided to openly revolt.

The people do make these decisions. Stalin wasn't put into power because EVERYONE hated him. And neither was Deng.

I do not know enough, but some would argue Deng could be considered the man of the 20th century for the prosperity he has brought and continues to bring to China since the end of the cultural revolution.

Douglas Porter said...

Pish-posh. The Chinese government is a dictatorship that uses force to subvert its population. It has done so. If so, and if the current leadership was not elected, you can not say that the people "decided" to have a dictatorship.

Douglas Porter said...

"The people do make these decisions. Stalin wasn't put into power because EVERYONE hated him. And neither was Deng."

Again, we return to the brute force of the government versus life. Deng and Stalin were not CHOOSEN by the people. Not at all. They gained power through power politics and a coup. The Chinese people did not choose them. They choose to not die.

Douglas Porter said...

"I do not know enough, but some would argue Deng could be considered the man of the 20th century for the prosperity he has brought and continues to bring to China since the end of the cultural revolution."

500 bucks a year is prosperity? LOL. Okay, Josh.

If you think Deng was the man of the century, then what you are really saying is that Richard Nixon was the man of the century.

Josh said...

"500 bucks a year is prosperity? LOL. Okay, Josh."

Its all perspective. You cannot argue that China's middle class hasn't grown over the past 30 years.

I didn't say Deng should be man of the century, I just know I've seen it suggested before. I don't know enough about him.

The US government has used force to subvert the people as well. The recent democratic and republican conventions are perfect examples of this.

The problem here is that we are spending so much time arguing about governments when the true culprit is the central banks because EVERYONE is in debt to the central banks.

Douglas Porter said...

It is not all perspective. The Chinese make subsistence wages, while American have been making comfort wages. There is no way around this. The 500 dollars (I am quoting this from a senate PDF I found on the net while Canada; unfortunately I cant find it now) spending money per year isn't much more than what they made during Maoist communism in terms of real wages.

Douglas Porter said...

While I was in China, I visited a downtown shopping strip in Guangzhou. The strip had all the major brands, was well lit, had nice trees and even benches! But it was surreal. Although many people were walking around, looking in the windows, no one was in the stores buying.

Douglas Porter said...

"I didn't say Deng should be man of the century, I just know I've seen it suggested before. I don't know enough about him."

I didn't say you did. I said "if".

Douglas Porter said...

"You cannot argue that China's middle class hasn't grown over the past 30 years."

Actually, yes I can, because it depends on what you mean by "middle class" and "grown". I define "middle class" as the ability of middle income earners to purchase products beyond the necessities. The Chinese middle class can't purchase beyond the necessities and is thus not middle class.

Douglas Porter said...

"The problem here is that we are spending so much time arguing about governments when the true culprit is the central banks because EVERYONE is in debt to the central banks."

The banks are government organizations. If people really wanted them out, they would elected politicians who would eliminate them. Again, you are ignoring the boom and bust cycle that stretches back in time well before the central banks.

Douglas Porter said...

I really do wish blogger.com would add an edit function to comments.

Douglas Porter said...

"All this suggests that the Reagan era should have ended some time ago. It didn't partly because the Democratic Party failed to come up with convincing candidates and arguments, but also because of a particular aspect of America that makes our country very different from Europe. There, less-educated, working-class citizens vote reliably for socialist, communist and other left-learning parties, based on their economic interests. In the United States, they can swing either left or right. They were part of Roosevelt's grand Democratic coalition during the New Deal, a coalition that held through Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s. But they started voting Republican during the Nixon and Reagan years, swung to Clinton in the 1990s, and returned to the Republican fold under George W. Bush. When they vote Republican, it's because cultural issues like religion, patriotism, family values and gun ownership trump economic ones."

http://www.newsweek.com/id/162401/output/print

Josh said...

This is why the President is not chosen by popular vote.