Bubbles last until they feel like fundamentals, and until last week, investors believed that tech stocks could only head up and the Japanese yen could only head down. By Monday’s market opening, investors cowered for shelter as the two bubbles popped in unison. The Biden administration in Washington and the Kishida government in Tokyo both […]

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A jump in federal transfer payments, that is, cash outlays to individuals, unleashed the inflation of the 2020s. The Trump administration provided emergency subsidies to individuals during the Covid-19 collapse of 2020, but the incoming Biden administration doubled down on subsidies, even after the economy was in full recovery. In 2022 (“Supply-side inflation and its […]

The post Biden’s to blame for US inflation appeared first on Asia Times.

Orchestral music as a plea for peace is not a new idea. The 95-year-old Pablo Casals played his “Song of the Birds” before the United Nations in 1971, and Daniel Barenboim continues to conduct the West-East Divan Orchestra, scheduled for the BBC Proms in London on August 11. An orchestral work for peace composed and […]

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China’s June exports rose 8.6% year-on-year in US dollar terms and 10.7% in RMB, exceeding analysts’ expectations and pointing to higher-than-expected GDP growth for the second quarter. Shipments to Central Asia showed the biggest increase, reflecting China’s buildout of transport and other infrastructure through the Belt and Road Initiative. Exports to Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan and […]

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China reported higher-than-expected export growth in May of 11.2% in RMB terms and 7.6% in terms of US dollars year-on-year, indicating that the country is like to meet the government’s 5% growth target for 2024. All the export growth came from the Global South, while exports to developed markets remained sluggish at levels well below […]

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The Biden administration reportedly will slap a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicle (EV) imports, except that no Chinese cars presently are offered for sale in the United States.

If they were, they would crush the American competition, even with the present 25% tariff. Chevy’s Bolt, a starter EV with a US$29,000 sticker price, has the same size and less range than the Dongfeng Nammi 01 hatchback priced at just $11,000.

If China wanted to retaliate against the new American tariffs, it has a target-rich environment. General Motors last year sold 2.1 million cars in China. In most years, GM sells more cars in China than in the United States.

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China’s exports in April surged towards the Global South while shrinking in developed markets, following a pattern of geographic divergence that began four years ago.

Overall, exports rose 1.5% in dollar terms and 5% in terms of RMB. But the salient fact about China’s trade performance during the first four months of 2024 is the jump in trade with developing countries.

North Africa and the Persian Gulf showed the strongest growth.

The post China reaps geopolitical dividend in Middle East exports appeared first on Asia Times.

During the past four years, China shifted the preponderance of its exports to the Global South away from developed markets, and at the same time built production facilities across the Global South that re-export to developed markets—circumventing America’s 25% tariff on most Chinese goods and other developed-market trade barriers.

There must be some devilry behind China’s export achievement, according to the dark murmurings of Western economists: China is in deflation, so it’s selling goods on the cheap.

“Foreign officials worry about a repeat of the China shock of the early 2000s, when pro-market reforms in China and its entry into the World Trade Organization fueled an export boom that was a boon for consumers but crushed competing industries in the US and elsewhere,” warned the Wall Street Journal on May 4.

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Somewhere last weekend a few dozen former Cabinet members, senior military officers, academics and think tank analysts met to evaluate the world military situation.  I can say that I haven’t been so scared since the fall of 1983, when I was a junior contract researcher doing odd jobs for then Special Assistant to the President […]

The post America has no Ukraine Plan B except more war appeared first on Asia Times.

Gold continued to break price records on Friday, trading at US$2,183 an ounce at mid-afternoon, following a more dramatic rally in Bitcoin. Gold led Bitcoin in 2020 and 2021, during the Covid crisis. This time Bitcoin clearly led gold, suggesting that investors have more confidence in the high-tech alternative to the dollar.

The post Gold, Bitcoin surges show black swan risk rising appeared first on Asia Times.

And the word of the Lord came unto me the second time, saying, What seest thou? And I said, I see a seething pot; and the face thereof is toward the north. Then the Lord said unto me, Out of the north an evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land. – Jeremiah 1:13-14 Strictly […]

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Budapest’s Opera House completed years of restoration in 2022 and now stands in its original 1884 glory, one of the grandest and most elaborately decorated structures of the 19th century. With only 1,000 seats, far fewer than the Vienna State Opera’s 2,200 or La Scala’s 1,800, it is an intimate theater with no bad seats […]

The post Puccini’s ‘Tosca’ shines at Budapest’s restored opera house appeared first on Asia Times.

Geert Wilders’ surprise victory in last week’s Dutch elections portends an upheaval in European politics long in the offing, but provoked by two pressing events. The first is the mass demonstrations in support of Hamas by Muslim migrants after October 7, a triumphalist assertion of power by a minority that believes that it may become […]

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The armed wing of Hamas, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, has an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 fighters. Israel’s careful and casualty-averse campaign in Northern Gaza can’t kill all of them. It doesn’t have to. In a 2016 study, I showed that even the most fanatical fighting forces crumble after 30% are dead. The 30% rule […]

The post Israel is winning and will prevail in Gaza war appeared first on Asia Times.

Last year I had the honor to write an introduction for Professor Wen Yang’s book The Logical of Chinese Civilization. An abridged version appeared in China Daily. How has Chinese civilization endured for 5,000 years while all the civilizations of Europe and Western Asia disappeared?  China, Professor Wen argues, created a sedentary culture thousands of years ago while […]

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NEW YORK – The US economy added an unexpectedly large 336,000 jobs in September, buoyed by the largest peacetime budget deficit in history and a flood of transfer payments in the form of federal hand-outs to individuals. Almost one-quarter of every dollar spent in the United States for personal consumption today comes from a federal […]

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TIANJIN – Watching the giant cranes glide across the longshore of this ancient port, a visitor has to pinch himself to remember that this is not a gigantic toy, but one of the world’s ten largest facilities, moving more than 20 million containers a year from ships to trucks without a single human in sight.

Built in just 19 months in 2020-2021, the automated Tianjin port isn’t just a means to send Chinese exports to the world. A high-definition video on an enormous curved screen in the visitor center reminds the visitor that the most important export item is the port itself. Tianjin was built to be cloned worldwide.

Call it the Sino-forming of world trade: Supply-chain bottlenecks due to port congestion, endemic in the Global South, can be alleviated by this artificial intelligence-driven system that dispatches cranes communicating on a 5G network, and empties a large container ship in just 45 minutes. At the biggest US port at Long Beach, California, unloading the same ship takes between 24 and 48 hours.

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The difficulty in comparing America’s and China’s influence in the Middle East is that the two operate on entirely different planes. [Note: The Chinese use the term Western Asia, rather than the Middle East, to refer to a region that includes the Levant, Iraq, the Gulf, Turkey and Iran.]  Despite China’s impressive naval construction program, […]

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A meme popular among American pundits claims that China’s economy is doomed by a slowly declining population. More important than the aggregate Chinese population is the technically proficient Chinese population.

That has grown 20-fold, or by 2,000%, in the past 40 years. Other Asian countries, notably South Korea, previously achieved record-shattering productivity gains with similar enhancement of skills.

We’ve heard this argument before, applied to the Asian Tigers. The doomsayers had their heyday just before East Asia’s growth went vertical. Perhaps the worst economic prediction in recorded history was Paul Krugman’s 1994 assertion that the Asian economic miracle was a myth, and that the Asian Tigers—Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan—would crumble like the Soviet Union.

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EU Commissioner Thierry Breton wants Germany and other European countries to stop dragging their feet and eliminate Chinese equipment from their 5G telecom networks. The European telecom industry and Huawei are pushing back. In a June 15 press conference, Breton cited European Union guidelines that ask member countries to evaluate “high risk vendors,” adding, “To […]

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