We’re All Soviets Now | Niall Ferguson | The Free Press

We’re All Soviets Now

A government with a permanent deficit and a bloated military. A bogus ideology pushed by elites. Poor health among ordinary people. Senescent leaders. Sound familiar?

India will soon overtake China to become the most populous country in the world

 

India will soon overtake China to become the most populous country in the world

China has been the world’s most populous country for a long time. But it’s soon to be overtaken by India.

Africa will be the second most populated area of the world followed by Latin America.

 

The UN projects that by 2024 India will be the world’s most populous country. What do future population trends look like around the world? 

Explore the data here:

India will soon overtake China to become the most populous country in the world:

#Caixin Goes All-In on #EverGrande’s Potential Fallout & Contagion

Evergrande has more than 800 billion yuan ($124 billion) due within one year—but it has only a 10th of that amount of cash on hand.

@UBS estimates $19 billion of Evergrande's liabilities are made up of outstanding offshore bonds. A potential default could spread to markets outside China as it has huge, high-interest offshore bonds— some with rates as high as 15%. 

Here are some basic numbers on Evergrande to give you an idea why many consider it to be #TBTF—Too Big To Fail.

• Current liabilities equivalent to ±2% of China's GDP. 
• It has more than 200,000 employees, who themselves and many of their families have invested billions of yuan in the company's WMPs. 
• More than 800 projects under construction, more than half of them halted due to its cash crunch. 
• Thousands of upstream & downstream companies rely on Evergrande for business, creating more than 3.8 million jobs every year

Here's Caixin’s take on the current situation. 

How Evergrande Could Turn Into 'China's Lehman Brothers'

For the past two months, hundreds of people have been gathering at the 43-floor Zhuoyue Houhai Center in Shenzhen, where China Evergrande Group's headquarters occupy 20 floors. They held banners demanding repayment of overdue loans and financial products. Police with riot shields had to be on site to keep things under control.

The demonstrators are construction workers at the property developer's housing projects, suppliers providing construction materials and investors in the company's wealth management products (WMPs).

#China’s Planning to Fine #Meituan, 3rd most valuable listed co, for oAbout $1BN

SINGAPORE—China's antitrust regulator is preparing to impose a roughly $1 billion fine on food-delivery giant Meituan for allegedly abusing its dominant market position to the detriment of merchants and rivals, according to people familiar with the matter.

The penalty could be announced in the coming weeks, and Meituan would be required to revamp its operations and end a practice that has been dubbed "er xuan yi"—literally, "choose one out of two," the people said. Such exclusivity arrangements have forced many small businesses to pick sides in China's competitive retail industry.

Meituan, with a mar­ket cap­i­tal­iza­tion of about $170 bil­lion, has raised bil­lions of dol­lars from global in­vestors and is Chi­na's third-most valu­able pub­licly listed in­ter­net com­pany af­ter Ten­cent Hold­ings Ltd. and Al­ibaba Group Hold­ing Ltd. The Bei­jing-head­quar­tered firm op­er­ates an on­line mar­ket­place for mil­lions of restau­rants and other mer-chants, and is the big­gest provider of food-de­liv­ery and re­lated ser­vices in China. It also of­fers ho­tel book­ings and sells gro­ceries on­line.

See the whole article on the WSJ here: 

China's Antitrust Regulator Planning to Fine Meituan About $1 Billion

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#Wokeism, #Illiberalism and the #China model: How the West has lost its way @nfergus

Niall Ferguson on the cultural despair in American institutions [as they] "increasingly succumb to the plague of 'wokeism' — an illiberal ideology that originated on elite campuses but is now prevalent everywhere from Californian public schools to the Central Intelligence Agency."

He continues, "I am not so gloomy, because I believe that woke ideas are profoundly unpopular with the electorate as a whole and that the Democrats' adoption of slogans such as 'anti-racism' and 'diversity, equity and inclusion' will ultimately backfire when it becomes clear to more people what they mean in practice."

"There is a kind of low-level totalitarianism detectable in many institutions today — from elite universities to newspapers, publishers and technology companies — which reveals that practices such as informing, denunciation and defamation can all flourish even in the absence of a one-party dictatorship."

The China model: why is the West imitating Beijing?

Niall Ferguson

#China Beat Back Covid-19, but It’s Come at a Cost—Growing #Inequality

"Wei He, an analyst at Gavekal Research, estimates that China's bottom 60% of households lost about $200 billion in income during the first half of 2020."

Yet at the same time, 

"China added 145 new bil­lionaires be­tween the start of 2019 and July 2020, ac­cord­ing to a re­port by UBS Group AG and Price­wa­ter­house­C­oop­ers LLP. A rank­ing of Chi­na's rich­est in­di­vid­u­als, re­leased this week by the Hu­run Re­search In­sti­tute, found 2,398 peo­ple had wealth of at least 2 bil­lion yuan, the equiv­a­lent of about $300 mil­lion, in 2020—up 32% on the pre­vi­ous year. Chi­na's rich­est co­hort gained more wealth this year than in any other in the Hu­run list's 22-year his­tory, bol­stered by a stock-mar­ket boom and a wave of new list­ings." 

Read the whole story on The Wall Street Journal here: China Beat Back Covid-19, but It's Come at a Cost—Growing Inequality

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Niall Ferguson warns, “Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,”—Beware of Greeks bearing gifts

Niall Ferguson warns, "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes," aka, "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts."

Here are some excerpts from his piece on Bloomberg this week.

Joe Biden Could End Up Being a Wartime President

Notwithstanding his pledges of uplift and healing, history suggests post-pandemic peace is rare, and Democratic wars are not.

Successful Democratic candidates for the presidency of the United States invariably campaign with promises of domestic largesse and moral uplift. They nearly always end up taking their country to war. Can Joe Biden be a rare exception to that rule, if he succeeds in defeating Donald Trump on November 3? That will depend not just on how well he and his national security team conduct U.S. foreign policy. It will also depend on how stable the world around them is. The bad news is that post-pandemic peace is another historical rarity.

...

Joe Biden's speech on Thursday night was the continuation of a very long tradition in lofty Democratic rhetoric, traceable all the way back to Thomas Jefferson. "If you entrust me with the presidency," declared Biden, "I will draw on the best of us not the worst. I will be an ally of the light not of the darkness. It's time for us, for We the People, to come together. For make no mistake. United we can, and will, overcome this season of darkness in America. We will choose hope over fear, facts over fiction, fairness over privilege." Whoever wrote that speech had done their homework.  At times I wondered if an algorithm had mashed it up on the basis of all previous Democratic acceptance speeches.

...

One disaster begets another.

In #China, “#TrackAndTrace” means exactly that... China Collecting DNA From Tens of Millions of Men and Boys



The police say they need the database to catch criminals and that donors consent to handing over their DNA. Some officials within China, as well as human rights groups outside its borders, warn that a national DNA database could invade privacy and tempt officials to punish the relatives of dissidents and activists. Rights activists argue that the collection is being done without consent because citizens living in an authoritarian state have virtually no right to refuse.

What Will #China’s Relations with the Rest of the World Be Like After the #Coronacrisis?

China After the Pandemic, is the subject of the latest issue of Strategika  (https://www.hoover.org/publications/strategika ), the Hoover Institution's International Security focused publication. It provides some excellent analysis on the future of China's relationships with the rest of the world in the wake of its actions during the coronavirus pandemic. 

Here is the first thought piece from the latest issue. 

The Coronacrisis Will Simply Exacerbate The Geo-Strategic Competition Between Beijing And Washington

by Michael R. Auslin

Poster CC 194, Poster collection, Hoover Institution Archives.

Even before the outbreak of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China late last year, the Sino-U.S. relationship had been in a period of flux. Since coming to office in 2017, President Trump made rebalancing ties with China the centerpiece of his foreign policy. Claiming that it would no longer be business as usual with Beijing, Trump began to respond more forcefully to what he had long claimed were unfair Chinese trade practices, cyberespionage, military intimidation, and global propaganda campaigns. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic raised even more fundamental questions about the state of U.S.-China relations and how the two appear to be locked into a more antagonistic dynamic for the foreseeable future.

Unlike in the early months of the pandemic, it is now increasingly accepted that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its local officials ordered a cover-up of what was happening in Wuhan. From intimidating whistleblowing doctors to a silencing of social media, and from destroying laboratory samples to buying up billions of pieces of personal protective equipment such as masks and gloves from around the world, the common wisdom now sees that the CCP prioritized protecting its own reputation and forestalling any domestic or international criticism of the kind that damaged it during the 2003 SARS cover-up. Most egregiously, Beijing lied to the World Health Organization about the nature of the virus in Wuhan, falsely claiming that there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission. This, and the decision not to restrict Chinese travel abroad during the Lunar New Year, destroyed any meaningful attempts to contain the virus inside China, and instead allowed it to ravage the globe.

As the scale of the catastrophe became clear, the party-state orchestrated a worldwide propaganda campaign to portray Beijing as successful in its battle against the coronavirus and as having selflessly helped the rest of the world, from "donating" medical supplies to sharing scientific information. Indeed, Chinese officials went so far as to claim that the United States created the disease and planted it in China.

Beijing's propaganda campaign, while designed to divert any criticism of the regime, has poisoned relations with Washington, not to mention other countries, and is likely to result in an intensified bout of counter-campaigning from the United States. As Beijing steadfastly refuses to acknowledge any shortcomings in its response to the coronacrisis, voices across the globe are understandably questioning how it can be trusted as an international actor. The new dynamic in China's relations with the world will be a deep-seated distrust of Beijing's statements.

Moreover, Beijing is slowly reaping the fruits of its decision to denude the world of needed medical supplies and then sell defective masks and virus tests to numerous countries. Across Europe and Asia, governments are returning shoddy equipment and useless tests, sometimes after having paid tens of millions of dollars for them, as in the case of Spain, which bought $497 million dollars-worth of items that it declared were unusable. In the case of Great Britain, all 3.5 million antibody test kits the government ordered failed to work properly, and were returned. The ill-will that Beijing has engendered by selling back items that were sometimes donated by countries, as in the case of Italy, or providing defective equipment will further drive a wedge between China and those countries that now see it as an untrusty partner with whom a buyer must beware when doing business.

“We view $CAN as the latest US-listed Chinese company to have deceived investors about its business”

One of the world's largest manufacturers of the ASIC devices that are used to "mine" cryptocurrency looks like a total Scam. 

"investigation of this bitcoin mining machine maker reveals undisclosed related party transactions, irregularities involving many customers and distributors, as well as a business model that we view as broken. Regardless of your outlook on the future of Bitcoin, we believe that CAN's business is simply far worse than promoted. "

"In the three months or so since listing, [$CAN]  has seen its share price collapse by almost half, from $9 to around $4.70 at pixel time (despite a rather unusual 80 per cent one-day surge in the middle of last month). And that's in a period during which bitcoin has climbed about 15 per cent."

See the story on FT Alphaville here: Canaan you believe this crypto stock got listed on the Nasdaq?

#SocialMedia being used to manipulate public opinion in more than 70 countries says New report from Oxford Internet Institute

"social networking technologies – algorithms, automation and big data – vastly changes the scale, scope, and precision of how [mis]information is transmitted in the digital age."

• Organized social media manipulation has more than doubled since 2017
•  70 countries using computational propaganda to manipulate public opinion.
• In 45 democracies, politicians and political parties have used computational propaganda tools by amassing fake followers or spreading manipulated media to garner voter support.
• In 26 authoritarian states, government entities have used computational propaganda as a tool of information control to suppress public opinion and press freedom, discredit criticism and oppositional voices, and drown out political dissent.
• Foreign influence operations, primarily over Facebook and Twitter, have been attributed to cyber troop activities in seven countries: China, India, Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

"The manipulation of public opinion over social media remains a critical threat to democracy, as computational propaganda becomes a pervasive part of everyday life. Government agencies and political parties around the world are using social media to spread disinformation and other forms of manipulated media. Although propaganda has always been a part of politics, the wide-ranging scope of these campaigns raises critical concerns for modern democracy."

Read the excerpt for the report, 'The Global Disinformation Order: 2019 Global Inventory of Organised Social Media Manipulation', here: https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news/releases/use-of-social-media-to-manipulate-public-opinion-now-a-global-problem-says-new-report/

Download the Full Report here.

How a #Chinese venture in #Venezuela made millions while locals grew hungry - @Reuters SPECIAL REPORT

#Chavez's promises, "seemed like a revolutionary idea. Now we're starving."

Great investigative piece from Reuters on the corruption that developed from / led to the alliance between Venezuela and China... 

"The diversification [into Food production] made PDVSA the conduit through which contracts, and a growing sum of money administered by Venezuela's national development bank, were awarded. By 2010, the filings say, the bank had received $32 billion from the China Development Bank and another $6 billion from an infrastructure fund created by Chavez."

https://www.reuters.com/article/venezuela-china-food/special-report-how-a-chinese-venture-in-venezuela-made-millions-while-locals-grew-hungry-idUSL1N22D1E7

SPECIAL REPORT-How a Chinese venture in Venezuela made millions while locals grew hungry

(For more Reuters Special Reports, click on)

By Angus Berwick

TUCUPITA, Venezuela, May 7 (Reuters) - The project was meant to feed millions.

In Delta Amacuro, a remote Venezuelan state on the Caribbean Sea, a Chinese construction giant struck a bold agreement with the late President Hugo Chavez. The state-run firm would build new bridges and roads, a food laboratory, and the largest rice-processing plant in Latin America.

The 2010 pact, with China CAMC Engineering Co Ltd , would develop rice paddies twice the size of Manhattan and create jobs for the area's 110,000 residents, according to a copy of the contract seen by Reuters.

The underdeveloped state was an ideal locale to demonstrate the Socialist Venezuelan government's commitment to empower the poor. And the deal would show how Chavez and his eventual hand-picked successor, President Nicolas Maduro, could work with China and other allies to develop areas beyond Venezuela's bounteous oil beds.

"Rice Power! Agricultural power!" Chavez tweeted at the time.

Nine years later, locals are hungry. Few jobs have materialized and the plant is only half-built, running at less than one percent its projected output. It hasn't yielded a single grain of locally grown rice, according to a dozen people involved in or familiar with the development.

Yet CAMC and a select few Venezuelan partners prospered.

Venezuela paid CAMC at least $100 million for the stalled development, according to project contracts and sealed court documents from an investigation by prosecutors in Europe.

Niall Ferguson @NFergus on the state of Western Civilization in Conversation with @JohnAndersonAO

Don't miss this excellent interview with Niall Ferguson by Former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia John Anderson on the state of Western Civilisation, its history and current trajectory, the evils of Totalitarianism, the takeover of Western universities & colleges by the Left, Social Media and much more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Re0Mu8Tq4fE&feature=share

A wave of #Asianization is set to follow the 20th century’s #Americanization & 19th century’s #Europeanization of the world

Of Asia's nearly 5bn people, 3.5bn are not Chinese. China's huge debts, rapidly ageing population and the crowding out of foreign competition from its domestic market is pulling global attention toward other Asian sub-regions, such as South Asia and south-east Asia. 

The whole Asia region — which Khanna defines as stretching from the Arabian Peninsula and Turkey in the west to Japan and New Zealand in the east, and from Russia in the north to Australia in the south — is already a behemoth. It accounts for about 50 per cent of global gross domestic product and two-thirds of its economic growth. But the most arresting statistic in the 433-page tome is this: of an estimated "$30tn in global middle-class consumption growth between 2015 and 2030, only $1tn is expected to come from today's western economies". 

As this vast undertow of spending power emerges, it will tilt the world. In spite of some "pockets of haughty ignorance centred around London and Washington", the west appears certain to play a vastly diminished role in global affairs. A wave of Asianisation is set to follow the 20th century's Americanisation and 19th century's Europeanisation of the world, argues Khanna.

Seethe whole book review and essay on the FT Here: https://www.ft.com/content/452df746-f880-11e8-af46-2022a0b02a6c

The Startling Plight of #China’s Leftover Ladies | #ShengNu @ForeignPolicy

Interesting article on how China's young professional women are remaining single for longer. I guess it's just a fact of having gone through this recent very rapid industrialization, and the fact that the men have not kept up with their demands! Just listen to this:

"your spouse may be the largest single factor determining whether, in the words of one infamous female contestant on Fei Cheng Wu Rao, you ride home on the back of a bicycle or in a BMW"[!!!]

There is also this, however:

 the plight of its sheng nu, or "leftover ladies." In popular parlance, sheng nu refers to women above a certain age — some say 27, others 30 — who are unmarried and presumably "left over," too old to be desirable

The Startling Plight of China’s Leftover Ladies

The Spicy Love Doctor was running late. A well-heeled crowd one recent Sunday afternoon had packed into the second-floor lounge of Beijing’s Trends Building — home to the publishing offices of several glossy magazines, including the Chinese editions of Cosmopolitan, Esquire, and Harper’s Bazaar — to hear Wu Di, a contributor to China’s Cosmopolitan and author of an alluring new book, I Know Why You’re Left. The poised, professional crowd, outfitted in black blazers, leather boots, and trendy thick-framed glasses, was composed mostly of women in their mid-20s to mid-30s — prime Cosmo readers and all there waiting patiently to hear Wu, who typically charges $160 an hour for "private romance counseling," explain their surprising plight: being single women in a country with a startling excess of men.

When at last she sauntered to the front of the room, microphone in hand, Wu, a pert, married 43-year-old who resembles a brunette Suze Orman (and whose chief advertised credential, it turns out, is an MBA from the University of Houston), surveyed her audience. Then she broke out into a practiced grin and, in the relentlessly chipper staccato common to Chinese public speakers, launched into her talk: a mix of sisterly homily, lovemaking tips, and economics lecture. It’s unrealistic to expect that you will be madly in love with one person forever, she warned, or even that passion can be the right guide to marriage. Her authority? No less than the wandering eye of Bill Clinton, which, she told her solemnly attentive audience, "proves that there is no method to sustain feverish lust between long-married couples."

The majority of her talk was devoted not to such timeless aphorisms, but to describing a new conundrum in China: the plight of its sheng nu, or "leftover ladies." In popular parlance, sheng nu refers to women above a certain age — some say 27, others 30 — who are unmarried and presumably "left over," too old to be desirable. Increasingly, sheng nu are a topic of alternating humor and alarm for Chinese newspaper columnists, TV sitcoms, reality dating shows, and studies by government bodies like the All-China Women’s Federation; according to its 2010 survey, more than 90 percent of male respondents agreed that women should marry before age 27 or risk being forever undesired. 

What’s most startling about this national obsession with China’s Bridget Joneses is that sheer numbers would seem to say it couldn’t possibly be so. China has far too few women, not too many. This is a country where 118 boys were born for every 100 girls in 2010, and by 2020 the number of men unable to find partners is expected to reach 24 million. So how could any women possibly be left over?

Sudden Plunge in #Venezuela Reserves Alarms Creditors @Business

BofA estimated Venezuela had $77bn of assets available for sale or securitization at the end of the first quarter, down from $81 billion in 2014.

Venezuela’s reserves are dwindling after the price of oil, which accounts for 95 percent of the nation’s export revenue, fell 44 percent in the past year. Traders now see a 44 percent chance the country will default in the next year, the highest in the world and up from 34 percent a month ago.

Facing an ever-worsening shortage of hard currency, President Nicolas Maduro has pulled an average of $65 million a day from central bank reserves since the end of March.

Read the whole article online on Bloomberg here:  The Sudden Plunge in Venezuela Dollar Reserves Alarms Creditors - Bloomberg Business

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Spain backtracks on China investment claim

What fools they look like, but then again, this is nothing new for Zapatero

Spain backtracks on China investment claim

By Miles Johnson in Madrid
Published: April 14 2011 13:57 | Last updated: April 14 2011 13:57

The Spanish government has been forced into an embarrassing reversal after claims that Spain had secured up to €9bn in investment in its troubled savings banks from China were denied by Beijing.
Spanish government officials said an “error of communication” had led to claims that China Investment Corporation, one of the country’s sovereign wealth funds, was considering the €9bn investment after José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s prime minister, met Chinese leaders this week.
“China has said it will continue to buy Spanish government debt, and is interested in participating in the restructuring of the savings banks, but it is too early to name specific amounts of investments,” the Spanish government said.
Mr Zapatero is on an official visit to China and Singapore to meet Asian investors to promote Spain’s government debt and financial sector.
A CIC official earlier told Reuters that reports in the Spanish media of the investment were false. CIC is known to no longer have available funds to invest abroad, and the €9bn ($13.5bn) figure would dwarf its largest previous investment which was a $5bn stake in Morgan Stanley made in 2007.
The admission of error came as Spain’s central bank was finalising its approval of plans submitted by the country’s regional savings banks, known as cajas, to raise new capital to meet a €15bn shortfall that has shaken investor confidence in the stability of the Spanish economy.
The previously little-known and privately held cajas were left gasping for new capital after loans made during Spain’s property bubble began to sour and its economy fell into recession.
Tough economic reforms led by Mr Zapatero’s socialist government, including freezing civil service pay and slashing Spain’s budget deficit, have helped the country partially regain the confidence of financial markets after some investors had started to view Spain as being at risk of following Greece, Ireland and Portugal into taking European Union rescue funds.
The interest investors demand to hold Spanish government debt over German bonds has fallen sharply since the start of the year.
On Thursday, however, after the confusion over Chinese investment in the cajas and ahead of the finalisation of their own capital raising plans, the spread between Spanish and German 10-year debt rose by 9 basis points to 190bp.
Spain’s outreach to China for investment comes after the prime minister of Qatar said in February that his country would invest €300m in Spanish banks after expressing confidence in the Spanish economy during a visit to Madrid.
Since then there have been no further details about which institutions Qatar would invest in, nor what form any investment would take.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011.

FT.com / Europe - Spain backtracks on China investment claim

China: Lightning Audit Ordered for Local Governments

China: Lightning Audit Ordered for Local Governments WordPress Tags: China,Government
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Lightning Audit Ordered for Local Governments
Caixin
Auditors are fanning out to examine more than a decade of local government-related lending – and report by summer

(Beijing) – Central government auditors launched March 1 a strict, nationwide survey of provincial and municipal government debt programs, looking closely at risks involved in direct and indirect loans backed by local governments.

Auditors participating in the lightning campaign will trace loans issued over a 13-year period from 1997, when China rolled out an expansive fiscal policy to counteract a financial crisis spreading from Southeast Asia, through 2010, the second full year of an economic stimulus initiative that successfully spared China the worst of the global financial crisis.

The State Council recently ordered auditors to study local finances and return to Beijing in four months with a full report.

Ni Hongri, a research fellow at the State Council Development and Research Center, has several questions on his plate. 'How much debt did local governments and their (financial) platforms assume after the recent stimulus plan?' he asked. 'How much banking and fiscal risk might these debts incur?

'Policymakers need a clear picture before making the next moves on macroeconomic management or fiscal allocations,' Ni said.

The National Audit Office dispatched 18 teams and mobilized 37 local audit bureaus to examine government books in 31 provinces and municipalities. They're looking at loans made to, guaranteed by, or indirectly backed by local governments.

Funds for loans with indirect government backing usually come from local government financing platforms (LGFPs), government-affiliated agencies, and government-backed non-profit organizations. Credit agreements may not expressly say so, but local governments are generally expected to bail out borrowers that default.

Estimates vary for the amount of money loaned to local governments, with official and non-official institutions weighing in.

But outstanding loans to LGFPs alone had risen to 7.66 trillion yuan as of last June, exceeding the 7.1 trillion yuan raised through central government bonds. In addition, local governments have issued bonds worth 400 billion yuan via the finance ministry since 2008.
Lightning Audit Ordered for Local Governments_English_Caixin:

A full story will be published soon on Caixin Online.

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