[HN Gopher] China markets in turmoil as Russia ties add to list ...
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China markets in turmoil as Russia ties add to list of risks
Author : mooreds
Score : 136 points
Date : 2022-03-12 15:46 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloombergquint.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloombergquint.com)
| beebmam wrote:
| With the major outbreak in COVID-19 in China right now, I think
| there will be massive lockdowns coming. That bodes poorly for the
| economic outlook for that country. It is truly incredible they
| are still locking down for a disease that, when vaccinated for,
| is far less deadly or harmful than the flu.
| [deleted]
| johndfsgdgdfg wrote:
| I feel bad for China. China has done everything in its power to
| stop COVID only the rest of the world to drop the ball. China
| has been blamed for origin of COVID even though WHO
| investigations found that COVID didn't originate in China. It's
| like China is in no-win situation, despite doing the right
| thing, because of propaganda spread by racist right wing
| politicians.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Animals spread Covid. Was anyone expecting the world to wait
| for every animal to be vaccinated as well?
|
| Lockdowns are a delay strategy until vaccines are available.
| celticninja wrote:
| What WHO investigation said it didn't originate in China?
|
| China have not allowed a proper investigation to take place
| i.e by people from outside of China. China originally tried
| to cover up the extent of the problem so I don't trust China
| to investigate China.
|
| China dropped the ball here, there is no reason they aren't
| in the same stage as the rest of the world, other than their
| own decisions. As an autocratic state they can lock down
| apartment blocks and just stop people moving around and
| people can't do anything about it. It has ended up being the
| reason they still need to lockdown now.
| redisman wrote:
| It's interesting how the totalitarian crackdown worked so well
| for the first two years but now the dirty free societies have
| everyone immunized by infections. As for China - I'm not sure
| they can crack down on omnicron as well since it's so much more
| infectious and they can't afford anymore economic shutdowns.
| Hong Kong already seems to have given up and following the rest
| of the world
| CyanBird wrote:
| > dirty free societies have everyone immunized by infections
|
| They don't, they really don't, they just stopped caring about
| people dying
| cf141q5325 wrote:
| Omicron is a lot less lethal then vanilla covid, thats just
| a reality. We started the pandemic with the threat of every
| 10th infected needing supplementary oxygen and the number
| of patients needing hospitalization went down with every
| mutation. By now the risk is a lot closer to the flu. You
| could of course say every death is one too many, but thats
| not the reality we live in. We do accept quite a lot of
| deaths as a cost of our daily life. And measures curbing
| the spread arent free either, they come with a death toll
| itself. So unless i am missing something here i am calling
| double standard.
| celticninja wrote:
| That's not true. We have vaccines now, that's the only
| solution, lockdowns were necessary until we had vaccines.
| We can't be expected to stay in lockdown for ever, covid
| will not go away, the best weapon we have is vaccination
| and a level of personal responsibility to stay home if you
| are ill (doesn't help with asymptomatic transmission). We
| didn't stop caring, we just aren't going to sit in our
| houses for another few years for no appreciable benefit.
| riffraff wrote:
| Not really, for example we had people dying in droves last
| winter in Italy, the numbers this time were much lower,
| even with less harsh measures, and the expectation is the
| I'll be lower still going forward.
| carom wrote:
| Did it work well or did China just stop reporting cases?
| deutschew wrote:
| Yes it is not covered by the media who is fixated on Ukraine at
| the moment but Shanghai is under lockdown.
| paganel wrote:
| > but Shanghai is under lockdown.
|
| Damn, I honestly didn't expect to read about this first on
| HN, you are indeed right, almost everyone seems fixated on
| the war (for understandable reasons, I would say).
|
| I remember posting on this forum 2+ years ago about the
| Chinese authorities locking down Tianjin and potentially
| Guangzhou/Shenzen in the South (in early February 2020, I
| think), I remember a HN-er from Shenzen telling me that
| things were just fine there. Time does fly fast.
| deutschew wrote:
| It's very worrying, the footages coming out of Shanghai
| reminds me a lot of that, and I recall that's when we had
| huge outbreaks that lead to the March 2020 financial dip.
|
| We are seeing a huge rise in covid detected in wastewater
| in SV offices who have more people returning to office now
| that the pandemic is suddenly over.
|
| Even more worrying is this war causing myopia. All of our
| attention is glued to Ukraine and we are completely
| discounting the risk. This is chaos.
| dirtyid wrote:
| > far less deadly or harmful than the flu
|
| % of severe cases even after vax is enough to overwhelm PRC
| medical system, especially in less developed regions, leading
| to potentially millions of death considering size PRC
| population and gen pop lack of exposure. Covid-zero is still
| preferable if it can be maintained, vaccines (including mRNA)
| have completely failed to contain spread of omicron, which
| doesn't leave many options except waiting for an even less
| deadly variant + mass produce and distribute treatment drugs to
| take pressure off medical system.
|
| I'm guessing this is omicron catching up / experimenting with
| dynamic-zero now that Two Sessions is over.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| American Saber Rattling, greatly overestimating China's
| dependence on the West. $128B/yr investment can easily be secured
| from Russia. And what? The West is going to stop buying Chinese
| finished good and make their own? LOL
| celticninja wrote:
| $128bn a year investment from Russia? That's a lot of roubles
| and the number of roubles required will only go up. Russia are
| going to need every penny they have to rebuild the army that is
| currently being pummeled.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Euh, Russia was similar to the US 30 years ago.
|
| US grew x14 and Russia literally stayed the same.
|
| You're claiming a country with the GDP of Italy can replace the
| entire west. While they are already spending 6% on military and
| everyone can see how that turned out...
|
| Big LOL
| danielovichdk wrote:
| This is politics in its finest.
|
| China will not be able to handle the rise in fossil fuel prices
| and will perhaps be the country to ask Russia to stop it's
| invasion of Ukraine because it hurts China too much because of
| this.
|
| USA wants this. It's not something that had just happened. This
| is a coordinated effort based on good intelligence work. Imo.
|
| Xi Jinping is also running for election soon and is under massive
| internal pressure. So he has to act.
|
| Not sure where this will leave Russia but they will be the one
| who lose because the pressure from the outside is to much. But
| sanctions will likely continue and Russia will be doomed.
| trasz wrote:
| For China, Russian oil price goes down, because Russia got no
| other buyers. And even before war Russia was selling that oil
| at loss. The more they sell to China, the better to the west.
| FpUser wrote:
| Or Russia could just say this is a price and either swallow
| it or fuck off. Oil price is already high and due to West not
| buying it from Russia competition increases. So China can
| either pay exorbitant prices to compete with the western
| buyers or just take some reasonable price from Russia. Win
| win for either. The West of course can get mad and start
| sanctioning China but nobody can really predict how / when /
| if this is going to play.
| deutschew wrote:
| Putin promised Xi the war in Ukraine would be over very quickly
| but what has transpired is that China is part of the blowback
| against Russia as a result of knowing beforehand that Putin
| would invade Russia.
|
| The US now has every excuse to coerce China, from everything
| ranging to Taiwan, trade issues.
|
| In large, Putin's war with Ukraine ended up raising fossil,
| food prices which puts real pressure on Xi's regime.
|
| I do not think Russia has the same level of worry as China
| because it has endless amount of oil and food that China does
| not. If China is suddenly no longer allowed to import these
| from other countries, it would be forced to trade with Russia
| under Putin's terms.
|
| The last time we did this to a country, they launched a war
| instead of waiting for the inevitable internal collapse. All of
| this is creating an uncertain and volatile future.
|
| TLDR: Putin's war and looming US sanctions against China will
| cause a volatile reaction.
| adventured wrote:
| Russia's primary problem is going to be the instability that
| comes out of the reveal that Putin is a typical incompetent
| authoritarian and Russia's military is weak (and there's
| nothing they can do about it, clearly, or the past decade of
| 'modernization' and spending would have). To the extent
| Russia has had some limited stability under Putin, it has
| been built on the image of Putin's competency as a command &
| control operator of the Russian state and Russia's supposed
| potent military strength in particular - the projection of
| strength generally, all the fake imagery the propaganda
| machine has dished out regarding Putin over two decades.
| Naturally, as it turns out, the truth is closer to the
| opposite. It always seemed a distinct aberration that Russia
| would manage to somehow maintain a competent, potent,
| relatively well-organized military while everything else was
| so subpar and rotting. Everything makes sense again, their
| military looks like the rest of the nation.
|
| The knives will come out for Putin now that everybody knows
| he's weak and fragile. His recent moves to punish powerful
| internal figures will force him to go even further. Being
| likely paranoid as dictators commonly are, Putin will likely
| do as much damage to Russia's internal functioning as
| sanctions do from the outside to its economy. Putin is likely
| to elevate the fascism to the point where their system stops
| functioning much at all, including their domestic economy.
| Purges, gulags, genocide, things typical of later stage
| statist regimes, it's all on the table if Putin's intention
| is to retain his present power. Putin only has two choices:
| give it up, or kill lots of people to try to fend off the
| sharks that will inevitably come for him and challenge his
| position. The considerable, fake image of strength was
| previously making it largely unnecessary to go as far as most
| dictators do to retain control, that luxury will now vanish
| and it'll dramatically damage Russia. People fleeing Russia
| are making the right choice, get out while you can.
| [deleted]
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| China is buying Russian oil at a significant discount. Since
| such a huge portion of the cost of goods is embodied energy,
| this gives them a huge advantage.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Yes, but what will China do with the goods it manufactures?
| If they have the internal demand to consume them, that's
| good. If their plan is to sell exports to Western nations
| then they need to be strategic. TFA is about sanctions being
| extended to Chinese firms that _invest_ in Russian energy
| firms, but one could imagine a spiral where the sanctions
| expand to other Chinese firms that produce manufactured goods
| ( "embodied energy") as well. We're not there yet, but it is
| a possibility.
| deutschew wrote:
| It will raise the cost of goods to the point which will be
| forced upon the consumer which will not be able to afford
| it. Already unemployment is rising rapidly in China as is
| inflation, when Chinese people find they can no longer
| afford a roof or basic foods, they will have nothing to
| lose.
|
| This is what Xi fears, death of domestic demand.
| deutschew wrote:
| For now ;) or as the old proverb goes:
|
| Besplatnyi syr tol'ko v myshelovke
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| Google translate from russian shows: Free mouse only in
| mouse. Perhaps someone could kindly offer a non-marsupial
| translation?
| vl wrote:
| Cheese is free only in mousetrap.
| [deleted]
| huhtenberg wrote:
| Try https://deepl.com instead.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| I don't think this article is right on the cause. China's biggest
| problem is, imo, the continued slow motion train wreck of
| evergrande and its real estate market collapsing. So much of
| China's growth was money sloshing around due to things getting
| built. But that seems to be harshly falling. There's hundreds of
| billions of debt hovering around default and the best these
| companies can do seems to be to double down on building and
| selling more buildings, which I sort of expect people don't
| particularly want to buy. General supply chain issues and covid
| affect this too. Food availability due to lower exports of wheat
| from russia and ukraine could cause an issue too.
| alephnan wrote:
| > Food availability due to lower exports of wheat from russia
| and ukraine could cause an issue too.
|
| Why is this an issue for China anymore than the West?
|
| In fact, China has the majority of the world's grain stash.
| https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Datawatch/China-hoards-ove...
| detaro wrote:
| Where did the comment say that its more of a problem for
| China than the west?
| alephnan wrote:
| "China's biggest problem is.... food availability due to
| lower exports of wheat from russia and ukraine could cause
| an issue too."
|
| The same logical structured can be applied to not China:
|
| "X country's biggest problem is ... food availability due
| to lower exports of wheat from russia and ukraine could
| cause an issue too."
| detaro wrote:
| Sure. Does every sentence in a discussion of X really
| require a disclaimer that the thing mentioned is not
| necessarily unique to X and can also be the case for
| not-X?
| alephnan wrote:
| Sure. Does saying "China has a border." add value then?
| It's not necessarily unique to China and can also be the
| case for not-China?
| detaro wrote:
| Depends if it's relevant to the topic at hand or not.
| alephnan wrote:
| So you concede that it's about relevancy and not logical
| structure then.
| detaro wrote:
| I've never claimed otherwise, since you didn't claim that
| it wasn't relevant to Chinese markets, but only attacked
| an imagined claim about it not being relevant to other
| markets.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Chinese food security is generally lower than that of the
| west
|
| https://impact.economist.com/sustainability/project/food-
| sec...
|
| The US ranks 9th whereas china ranks 34th. They're not going
| to famine or anything but food prices, or really just
| inflation more broadly, could be an issue. The reason china
| stockpiles grain is because it doesn't produce enough for
| itself.
| mahkeiro wrote:
| Because China is not food independent. Most of western
| countries are.
| alephnan wrote:
| Based on what ranking ?
|
| Calories/per resident? There's many ways in which that is
| flawed.
| ratsmack wrote:
| Yes, their entire real estate market has been in slow motion
| collapse for the better part of a year. Too many articles on
| the state of the economy are using the Russia crisis to drive
| their news cycle, when actually most of the turmoil was already
| happening.
| adventured wrote:
| > China's biggest problem is, imo, the continued slow motion
| train wreck of evergrande and its real estate market
| collapsing.
|
| It's at least an order of magnitude larger of a problem for
| China than ties to Russia are.
|
| For anyone unaware, nearly 2/3 of China's household wealth is
| tied up in real-estate assets (for the US it's < 30% of
| household assets in real-estate). That's a doubling over what
| it was a decade ago. China's socio-political stability is
| particularly bound to the condition of their real-estate
| market. A crash there would be devastating; if housing were to
| fall enough to revert back to that asset class being 1/3 of
| China's household asset base, maybe $30 trillion in national
| 'wealth' would have to vanish.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Well, that's to be concluded.
|
| An additional stress on the system could make the problem
| exponentially worse.
| ianbicking wrote:
| Can China just not let Evergrande fail? I'm assuming the debt
| is largely held in China, the buildings are in China, and debt
| holders who expected to be able to get their money back are
| going to be disappointed but in an authoritarian government can
| you just force people to take the loss without letting that
| loss transmit to the larger economy?
| IMSAI8080 wrote:
| A lot of it is tied in with local government. The central
| Chinese government inadequately funds local governments. The
| local governments close the funding gap by selling/leasing
| land to developers (often kicking citizens off their land
| without proper compensation). Chinese citizens buy the
| properties due to a number of cultural and financial factors.
| There is not much else to invest in. Savings interest rates
| are very low. Chinese citizens often distrust the local stock
| market due to corruption issues and shared memory of previous
| crashes. Ordinary Chinese citizens are not permitted to
| invest overseas. Local property is the only reasonable
| investment to many. Many of these properties are never even
| lived in. However Chinese citizens are going to stop buying
| eventually as property prices are already well into greater
| fool territory. When that happens, local government will be
| in trouble.
| samstave wrote:
| YEAH! Those chinese amateurs should do what we do in the USA
| ; just print more money and bail them out, and let their
| competitors acquire the company for pennies on the dollar
| after our government employees have had the opportunity to
| let all the people in their family know that trillions in
| bailouts is n the way -- oh yeah, and dont forget to setup an
| LLC in your spouses name to slurp off such bailout funds as
| well.
|
| (This seriously happened BTW, if you dont recall)
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| It's not just evergrande, it's all property developers pretty
| much. It's a real estate bubble popping when an immense
| portion of wealth and growth is in real estate.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Yes, much higher portion of wealth is in real estate in
| China than other countries, this is key to understanding
| the problem. Real estate is basically a savings account for
| many people.
| dgellow wrote:
| could someone explain in a few sentences why it takes so long
| for Evergrande to collapse?
| deutschew wrote:
| A large source of CCP elite's wealth comes from Evergrande,
| Sunac, Country Garden.
|
| A large chunk of Chinese savings is tied to it. If they
| allowed people to sell or liquidate their shares, it would
| cause real instability.
| voisin wrote:
| Too big to fail combined with an autocratic government
| ostensibly built upon stability. Who dares push it into
| bankruptcy and risk the certain wrath of that government?
| paganel wrote:
| To be fair the same happened to Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac,
| which were bailed out at the start of the 2008 financial
| crisis. Eventually they repaid their bail-out money and
| then some, but back then (2008-2009) that was not seen as a
| possibility.
|
| At a more general level, I'd say it's very tough to let
| companies like Evergrande/Freddie Mae&Fannie Mac go down
| the drain because you risk the whole system going down, no
| matter if you're a de facto autocracy (like China) or a not
| so perfect democracy, like the US.
| yakak wrote:
| If these companies have been accurately summarized in the
| media, I would consider these very different. The
| mortgage companies were holding loans on a lot of
| individual houses, etc with concrete utility that were in
| actual use, where replacement stock was unavailable.
|
| In Evergrande's case they seem to have giant projects
| that are earmarked as investment speculation as opposed
| to intended primary dwellings or immediately rentable. It
| is entirely possible that whole districts of buildings
| are never of enough utility to draw residents at any
| price above maintenance.
|
| A company can go broke with either mistake but if a
| government knows the need for the collateral mortgaged
| actually exists then bounds from the macroeconomic
| situation apply so their shoveling of money will have an
| end.
| jbay808 wrote:
| They're carefully trying to change ownership of the hot
| potatoes so that as many of them are in foreign hands as
| possible.
|
| If Evergrande defaults, foreign bondholders will claim their
| collateral.
|
| So instead, for example, they have state-owned companies
| buying up Evergrande's assets, then Evergrande using that
| money to pay back local creditors, so that Evergrande is
| eventually left owning neither money nor assets to pay back
| foreign bondholders. Nothing left to seize in court.
|
| Meanwhile, they are trying not to create a shock in real-
| estate prices that would undermine the other overleveraged
| developers, such as would occur if Evergrande unloaded all of
| their assets at once. Each developer is balancing their debt-
| to-asset ratio, so if their real estate assets drop in paper
| value, they end up in Evergrande's position.
|
| Foreign bondholders appear to be playing along with this,
| which is fascinating; it suggests that either those
| bondholders are, too, looking to offload their hot potatoes
| and want to preserve the appearance that they're still worth
| something as they search for buyers, or else they're using
| those bonds as collateral for their own loans. As long as
| credit rating agencies play along and don't drop the credit
| rating to full default, they may be able to do so.
| dirtyid wrote:
| Evergrande (real estate in general) is undergoing
| intentional, controlled unwinding initiated by CCP kicked off
| by "three red lines". It was never going to collapse, the
| entire point of Evergrande was to avoid an Lehman moment by
| preempting it.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| That was the intention, yes. It remains to be seen if it
| can be pulled off.
| trhway wrote:
| China expressed interest in buying on the cheap the stock of
| those large Russian corporations most of which are doing resource
| extraction.
| jcampbell1 wrote:
| Come August when Xi will take an unusual 3rd term he was supposed
| to be celebrating the advantages of their form of government in
| dealing with covid. Instead he may be dealing with a persistent
| covid battle or worse an overflowing healthcare system while the
| rest of the world has moved on.
|
| For giggles, the US should organize an unprecedented NBA post-
| covid celebration all-star thing with packed stadiums a week
| before the congress.
| v-yadli wrote:
| > the rest of the world has moved on.
|
| (Looking at thousands of deaths per day in the US alone)
|
| `This is fine.jpg`
| bequanna wrote:
| Why are people still saying this? This statistic has been
| unmasked to be quite useless and only used for fear mongering
| so politicians/bureaucrats can cling to their emergency
| powers.
|
| These "Thousands of deaths" are where the deceased happened
| to also test positive for COVID. Most of the deaths were
| people who were already very sick and likely not caused by
| COVID.
| monetus wrote:
| Dropping in my area, but still plenty of deaths attributed
| to it. Citation needed. Regardless of the deaths, there are
| more disabling side effects than you can shake a stick at.
| meowfly wrote:
| If you just look at excess deaths, thousands still seems
| correct. The Economist doesn't have recent numbers (I'm
| sure they are lower), but their last numbers showed ~16k
| excess deaths in a week.
|
| https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-
| excess-...
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| Recency of numbers is very important here. Due to the
| contagiousness of Omicron, new cases seems to have ramped
| up very quickly, and dissipated very quickly as well.
| bequanna wrote:
| How many of these are due to suicide? Failing heath due
| to lack of socialization? Inability to get exercise? Poor
| diet? Depression?
|
| We're now so far past thinking the cost of the pointless
| lockdowns was worth the benefit.
|
| Luckily, those who used COVID to seize power now have
| only a few easily influenced and perpetually fearful
| people still willing to cede control of their lives.
| meowfly wrote:
| I'm extremely critical of how governments have handled
| the pandemic, but I don't think underplaying the
| deadliness of Covid is the best position to make that
| case.
|
| Utah barely locked down, has their kids in school, no
| mask requirements but has also one of the lowest death
| rates in the country.
|
| A lot of southern states had the same policy, but have
| some of the highest death rates in the country. [1]
|
| Utah is also one of the youngest and fittest states in
| the country while Mississippi (#1 for deaths per capita)
| is consistently ranked one of the most obese[2]. As far
| as I'm concerned, Covid should be encouraging the US to
| talk about their longest lasting health crisis - an
| obesity epidemic, but for some reason that hasn't
| materialized.
|
| 1.
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-
| covi...
|
| 2. https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/prevalence-maps.html
| v-yadli wrote:
| Maybe it's fine for you guys that the a part of the
| population get eliminated because they are not strong
| enough against a disaster and "they are going to die
| anyway"...
|
| But no, thank you. That's not the place/mindset I'd like to
| live in.
|
| Good luck, and stay safe.
|
| ----------------------------
|
| Edit.
|
| Just think of it.
|
| Say Bob is a programmer so addicted to coding. He code and
| code, day and night, ignored necessary exercises, skipping
| meals, drinking too much soda. And then omicron hit and he
| didn't make it.
|
| "He deserves it" you say? Why should not him get another
| chance to pull out of the rushing sessions and get better
| at taking care of himself?
| the_doctah wrote:
| Here's the alternative:
|
| - Forced vaccinations/vax passes
|
| - Children vaccinated
|
| - Boosters forever
|
| - Mask mandates forever
|
| - Social distancing forever
|
| That's not a place/mindset I'd like to live in.
| celticninja wrote:
| Vaccinations don't have to be forced. I wasn't forced to
| get mine, I got it because I'm not an idiot.
|
| Children are vaccinated all over the world every day for
| multiple different diseases.
|
| Are boosters required for ever? What's your research on
| this? Where did you get your time machine?
|
| Again the use of forever, masks and social distancing
| become nice to have options for people but after
| vaccination these are guidelines rather than mandates.
| slabity wrote:
| > Why are people still saying this? This statistic has been
| unmasked to be quite useless and only used for fear
| mongering so politicians/bureaucrats can cling to their
| emergency powers.
|
| Can you post the source you used for this?
| superkuh wrote:
| It's a bit more than an unusual 3rd term. He pretty much
| declared himself a dictator for life last time with the
| alteration of the constitution. I guess it's just my opinion,
| but I doubt any dictator for life is going to let go of that
| status regardless of any party politics. He already disapeared
| most of his opposition last time. The facts that he's bad for
| China will have no influence on his dictorial control this
| time. That's what being a dictator is all about.
| jotm wrote:
| So I guess everyone's preparing for when he _surprisingly_
| loses his mind and decides to invade Taiwan? Can 't say we
| didn't see it coming then.
| stickfigure wrote:
| The PLA cannot simply march to Taiwan. There will be no
| surprises there.
| NhanH wrote:
| Luckily, due to the structure of the CCP, even Xi won't be
| able to unilaterally do it alone. If it happens, it will
| have to be the will of the CCP as a whole (basically, Xi +
| 6 other high ranking members)
| meowfly wrote:
| I of course might be wrong, but it seems Taiwan will not be
| invaded until the TSMC/UMC is no longer dominating the
| global supply of semiconductors. The rules changed for Hong
| Kong, for example, because it went from being 15% of China
| GDP in 2000 to <2.5% today.
| vondur wrote:
| No dictator is absolute. I'm sure a lot of politics is
| happening behind the scenes.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Not many of them seem to die of old age, either.
| jasonjei wrote:
| Don't forget the big problem China will eventually have to deal
| with: their single child policy is coming to a head with their
| aging workforce.
|
| When the chickens come home to roost, they're going to have to
| figure out who is going to replace the retired population, and
| nobody's in a rush to immigrate to China.
| NicoJuicy wrote:
| Indeed. There's a large telegram group of engineers fleeing out
| of Russia.
|
| Almost all want to flee/relocate Europe/US/Canada.
|
| Turkey, Georgia, ... Come in after.
|
| I literally saw 0 requests for China.
| dirtyid wrote:
| >replace the retired population
|
| Why replace anyone? The alternative is to ramp down to a lower
| population baseline and deal with the transition. 800M Chinese
| by 2100 is still plenty. Reality is right now there's 100s of
| million undereducated/undertrained Chinese who can't be
| integrated into modern economy - they're net drains. And even
| current system is struggling to employ millions of STEM
| graduates. PRC doesn't need immigration, just clamp down on top
| level brain drain and setup foreign worker program to take care
| of the aging - plenty of cheap ASEAN labour. Bonus side effect
| of less people = more self sufficiency and freedom to conduct
| assertive foreign policy. There's few upsides to maintaining
| and trying to increase living standards of 1.4B people with PRC
| resources.
| adventured wrote:
| That's the correct answer. I never cease to be astounded that
| so many people don't seem to grasp that you can increase
| output per capita, productivity per capita, as the population
| contracts.
|
| The focus should be on improving the quality of life of the
| people, not on expanding the economy in absolute terms.
|
| China would be better off with 1/2 the people at the same GDP
| (ie ~700m people at ~$24,000 per capita GDP).
|
| Population contraction is desirable in many cases, so long as
| you can continue to increase productivity per capita. China
| has a long ways to go yet in terms of potential to raise
| their per capita economic output, if they're willing to pair
| that with a contracting population. And the lightening (from
| depopulation) on their resource needs is a huge help, it
| makes their situation so much easier.
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| As the population ages, will older people be able to
| retire? In that case their productivity transforms to a
| negative, needing to be supported by the remaining workers.
| adventured wrote:
| China's output per capita is so mediocre (~$12k GDP per
| capita) there is a lot of room to outrun the worker
| contraction and retirement context. Although I'm
| skeptical their increasingly rigid economy, courtesy of
| Xi transporting them back in time to a worse system of
| stricter command & control (vs a more liberalized
| approach), will be capable of it.
|
| Their productivity doesn't transform into a negative. To
| deal with more aged persons, they need to bolster output
| and taxation on that output, such that society builds a
| social safety net for the retired. China has room for
| increased taxation on various aspects of wealth and
| income in their nation (their wealth has ballooned
| massively in the last 10-20 years obviously), along with
| higher personal income tax rates in general.
|
| Increasing productivity and automation frees labor to be
| devoted to other things that society needs. For example
| their farming system is very ineffecient, they have far
| too many people working in farming producing far too
| little (compare it to the US, South Korea or Japan). If
| you bring that up to where it should be, some of that
| labor becomes available to take care of the elderly, paid
| for via taxes. Now apply that to everything else in China
| that still needs modernized, made more efficient,
| automated.
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| This very much depends on the ratio of retirees to
| workers.
|
| Also automation may not play out so well for Chinese
| production, as it's more sensible for other nations to
| bring automated manufacturing onshore for a combination
| of reasons including reduced transport, supply chain
| certainty, stabler internal economics. Onshoring
| automated manufacturing could still use a significant
| amount of international remote labour, but the hosting
| country would capture more of the taxation from the
| manufacturing, which you mention as going to pay for the
| Chinese retirees.
| blackoil wrote:
| Considering that Europe/Japan haven't completely collapsed it
| is a solvable problem. Increasing automation, moving people
| away from agriculture an d moving low value labour intensive
| work to South East Asia and Africa are obvious steps.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| Those of you who seem to think a nation has to grow populations
| indefinitely or fail, what is the long term end game in your
| mind? Hope that your nation wins the inevitable global resource
| war?
| ecshafer wrote:
| There are quite a lot of people who try to immigrate to China.
| If China opened up, they wouldn't have a shortage of
| immigrants. There are immigrant communities from all over
| already there.
|
| China is dealing with their one child policy, they have put the
| cap at 3 children iirc currently, and are also making policies
| against things like abortion and divorce. Which may not be the
| correct move, but I do see more laws incentivizing children
| coming.
| finiteseries wrote:
| There are 1.4 billion people in China, and ~1 million
| immigrants pre pandemic. The number of new migrants required
| would be astronomical in a country already struggling with
| food and energy insecurity.
|
| It takes 20 years to make a 20 year old consumer while the
| rest of the population ages 20 years.
|
| Seems a bit optimistic and wishy washy to say the least.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| China struggling with food insecurities? IIRC China have
| taken over the Netherlands as the world's largest producer
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > The number of new migrants required would be astronomical
| in a country already struggling with food and energy
| insecurity.
|
| Interesting. You could be referring to several European
| countries, including the UK.
|
| Also interesting: the Plague was largely responsible for
| the ending of serfdom, by greatly increasing the
| bargaining-power of peasants. I have wondered whether COVID
| might eventually precipitate similar tectonic social
| changes.
| finiteseries wrote:
| The UK doesn't suffer from either of food or energy
| insecurity and only has 68 million people with decent
| demographics.
|
| There are more people over the age of 65 in China than
| the total population of the UK and France combined.
| riffraff wrote:
| > There are quite a lot of people who try to immigrate to
| China.
|
| Do you have a source i can read about that? I'd be interested
| to know more about this.
| H8crilA wrote:
| Friendly reminder that " _X market [up /down] as investors digest
| Y_" is the cheapest and least useful form of reporting known to
| mankind.
| dbsmith83 wrote:
| > is the cheapest and least useful form of reporting known to
| mankind
|
| Maybe not the most useful form of reporting.. but the least
| useful form known to mankind? After reading the article I think
| there's more to the analysis than just that.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| My dad calls it the Financial deus-ex-machina. Every single
| financial newspaper does it. To be fair, they gotta report what
| happened with the market so the headline has to capture
| something in addition to simply "DOW down 300 points". It is
| not useless, quite the contrary - you get an idea about facts +
| some context in less than a second of reading the headline.
| That's efficiency! No one is going to make correlation-is-not-
| causation arguments off of a morning headline. But it is funny:
|
| "DOW down 300 points as investors worry about Russian
| aggression"
|
| Next day:
|
| "DOW up 300 points as investors re-assess the Russian
| aggression"
|
| The financial world cracks me up. Dial in any earnings call to
| play the headwinds, tailwinds, double-down, as we continue to,
| can you add color to that?, etc bingo.
| kkfx wrote:
| Beware that -300 a day, +300 the next one still means a -, a
| thing too many forget...
| ac29 wrote:
| Only in percent. In points, its net zero.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| These are pretty much all automated.
|
| They take market movements and append the most relevant piece
| of news to that movement. If you track any stock closely
| you'll find your daily Motleyfool article "Why is XYZ stock
| is moving because of [most recent relevant news for that
| company]"
|
| The article is usually one paragraph stating the stock
| movement and a summary of the most recent news. You can get
| the same summary for different movements due to the
| automation here.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| But they don't "have to" report it. It's become standard
| because it's free, guaranteed content. Finance and sports
| both follow the same model. Every trading day (or game, for
| sports) is guaranteed to have an article: Up or Down; Win,
| Loss or Tie. The content is filler as the articles' inclusion
| is justified regardless.
| tkinom wrote:
| Fog of war.
| 323 wrote:
| I've seen it done even in the same day.
|
| Morning: DOW down 300 points because of Fed decision
|
| Evening: DOW up 300 points because of (same) Fed decision
|
| Context: most financial analysts at places like Bloomberg are
| literally some of the lowest paid employees. Most of them
| never traded any financial market in their entire life, which
| is quite short since they tend to be in their 20s.
| redisman wrote:
| I suspect those articles are written by "AI" / some script
| doing a find-replace.
| vmception wrote:
| I did that on a solo fintech project 8 years ago
|
| Don't need AI, just string concatenation and an array of
| sentence types to randomly choose from when the article
| cron job starts
|
| Used bing's API to search for certain macro market events
| and used stocktwits api to see which stocks moved the
| most and would make headlines and aggregate articles
| about those
|
| which it would post to twitter
|
| which would drive people to the no-login no-password app
| and subscription service (used ids based on in-app
| subscription ID or something else if using a browser)
|
| which was all populated with algorithmic trades lol
|
| turned it off because I didn't like updating all the APIs
| and compute instances as the services they relied on kept
| changing, but yeah self advertising self operating money
| printer
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Frontpage headlines are not written by interns. Those are
| analysts and developers you're talking about.
|
| I take the contrarian stance - these headlines are for
| people that are busy on Wall Street. They just need to know
| quickly what+context, not what+how. what+how is the
| holygrail and no one is stupid enough to even complain
| about these headlines in the Financial world. It is a
| tidbit that is extremely useful.
| [deleted]
| 323 wrote:
| There are plenty of stories from famous financial people
| who were initially hired as analysts at various
| banks/news agencies which go like this: so on my first
| day I was told "from today you cover Apple/Euro/gold
| market. But I don't know much about that. Doesn't matter,
| just give your best." And I'm not talking about the 80s,
| but even people doing this after 2007.
|
| You are right about what+context, buy you don't really
| need analysts for that, to tell you what market moved and
| what economic event happened before that.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Apple's stock app is awesome in that matter. "Why
| NASDAQ:_____ ticker is bound to go down in the next months" -
| the day after it gains 20% and doubles within the year...
| cptnapalm wrote:
| My favorite thing on Yahoo finance is how the headline for the
| day is re-written throughout the day to keep it current,
| frequently becoming the opposite of what it was in the
| beginning of the day.
| rekoil wrote:
| StopDarkPattern wrote:
| Same with "tweeter is blowing up" - "tweeter is upset" -
| "spytok users say".
| pojzon wrote:
| Dave Chappelle famous words explain pretty well why we really
| should stop caring about twittokbooktagram.
| tclover wrote:
| All markets are not stable right now, but EU and US are a mess
| indeed https://i.imgur.com/l8Hgsnm.png
| jotm wrote:
| As someone who doesn't care about the markets, I see
| sudden/sharp price increases for food, fuel, gas, wood, metals,
| paint, and a few other things. A real mess.
| schleck8 wrote:
| Looks like some European ones are already recovering quickly
| though
| tclover wrote:
| Yeah, up and down constantly. I'm following markets and the
| worst I've seen was almost -20% YTD for DAX recently, this is
| scary
| hackerfromthefu wrote:
| Oversold? Good short term buy opportunity? But more
| downside risk in medium term?
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