Quote:Thefinance in China is one that is rarely discussed in western media or even academia, whereas knowing it would explain much about both China’s stunning economic rise over the past 70 years, as well as certainly seemingly rising tensions between China and the US today. It’s hard to tell if there is genuine tension and enmity because of credible rivalry status between the US and China, or if everything is proceeding according to wider, deeper, much longer-term planning based on desired, durable and thus political coordination. Large US, UK and EU investment banks are new entrants into China’s nascent bond sector, yet also retain longstanding presences pertaining to China’s financial and economic development. Such factors should be weighed alongside other historical details in evaluating China’s recent threats to ‘dump US Treasury bonds’, as well as to ultimately view any sense of symbiosis which the US and China are serving, and why. Are banks such as JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Standard Chartered, BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank and others necessarily against a ‘bond run’ and wider trashing of US debt? Or not so much? Who benefits? More specifically, who profits?

In this episode of Money & Fear, we’ll review some monetary and political history involving Wall Street and Beijing in order to weigh the mentioned factors. Details not shared, let alone analyzed, by mainstream corporate business press supposedly reporting on US-China trade, tariffs and/or currency wars, even.

If you’re not a Newsbud member yet, please join and tell others. It costs practically nothing, yet gives you information you’re not supposed to know, thus empowering you to stay ahead of the herd and think like Establishment planners think.

mapoui post=381664 Wrote:In this episode of Money & Fear, we’ll review some monetary and political history
involving Wall Street and Beijing in order to weigh the mentioned factors. Details not shared, let alone analyzed, by mainstream corporate business press supposedly reporting on US-China trade, tariffs and/or currency wars, even.

Quote:What do we make of it all? I just read an article in the New York Times that reports that President Trump lied and hid from the public the severity of the Covid-19 pandemic https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/28/opinion/coronavirus-trump-coverup.html . On the other side, I encounter endless Internet rage that Covid-19 is a hoax, that New York city’s hospitals are empty and no one has died. It is nothing but a Rothschild-Rockefeller-Bill Gates plot. Perhaps the most stunningly inconsistent claim of all is that it is a bioweapon that is so harmless that there should have been no lockdown. Why make a harmless bioweapon?

Where one stands on the closedown depends on where one stands on other issues. If you are a libertarian, you oppose the closedown because it interferes with your freedom and keeps useless old people alive who cost you payroll tax dollars. It you are a Trump-hater like the New York Times you blame trump for understating the threat and not closing down soon enough. If you are a Trump supporter you blame China and expect China to pay for it by forfeiting their trillion dollar holding of US government bonds.

Those decrying the closedown are unaware of the mischief they are making. They have set it up for the elites, who have taken us for another “bailout the one percent ride,” to blame the resulting economic depression on the closedown. The US economy has been in a long-term recession. Growth in income and wealth has accrued to the top few percent who own the majority of stocks and bonds driven up in price by the Fed’s money printing. The rest of the population has been hurt by the offshoring of their jobs and by the financialization of the economy that leaves them little or no discretionary income after they pay their rent or mortgage, car payment, credit card payment and student debt.

The economy was already in a debt deflation with 40% of the population unable to raise $400 cash according to the Federal Reserve. The inevitable consequence of a debt deflation is economic depression as debt deflation precludes sufficient consumer aggregate demand to drive the economy. GDP growth has received no help from business investment, because corporations have used their profits to buy back their own shares.

Quote:The closedown is not responsible for the debt deflation, the foundations of which were already in place. But the closedown has given it a push. Small businesses were not bailed out like larger ones such as Boeing. For small businesses the closedown represents a period when their costs exceed their revenues. For the unemployed that resulted from the closedown, their living expenses continued but their pay checks did not. The Trump checks help as do temporary moratoriums on evictions to dely the inevitable, but for the majority of the already heavily indebted, the closedown adds to their debt.


Michael Hudson and I believe that an economic system that enriches the rentier class by converting as much of personal income as possible to the service of debt is an economic system that is dead in the water. One possible way out is a debt writedown in order to create some discretionary income. Keep in mind that when the replacement of offshored manufacturing jobs with Walmart jobs stopped US GDP growth, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan subsituted growth in consumer debt for the missing income growth, and by this substitution created discretionary income by loading up the consumer with debt.

That load is now full. We are in the unenviable position of having very high stock prices in an economy that has no growth potential. The high stock prices are the product of trillions of dollars injected into financial asset prices. If the reopening spreads the virus and produces a second wave that overwhelms the health care system on a broader basis, the economy could be shutdown again, or if kept open could be disrupted by widespread illness or reluctance to accept exposure to the virus. On the other hand, if the virus has run its course, or the threat was exaggerated, the existing stifling debt burden remains.

The danger in the shouting and finger-pointing is that a sick economy will be blamed on the closedown, not on the debt burden. Reopening the economy does not make the debt burden disappear. Michael Hudson and I have tried to focus the public and policymakers on the real problem. So far we have been unsuccessful.

VillageBelle post=384442 Wrote:I think Maps is gone for good this time!