Leftfield

U.S. vs. China: Has Trade War Begun?

Noting the rise of pharmaceutical and healthcare stocks since Obama's plan foundered, I also think it's important to draw attention to congresspeople's investments. They are ultimate insider traders whose investments are put into the proper vehicles to appreciate in upcoming legislation and are a primary reason they hold $100,000 offices and they all leave Washington (if they ever do) as millionaires. Imagine the money they've made selling out American industry to China and multinational corporations.
It once meant something to speak of "godless communism." Now, we've sold out to them via soulless corporations without a peep from bought-out MSM.

China Becoming a 'Middle-Class' Nation

It's hard to know which among the reams of toiletpaper statistics to believe, but every criticism of China is increasingly, sadly true of the US except excessive debt.
I grew up in a country where you expected better every year as a birthright. We have sold out to rent-seekers and have lost so much real productivity that it requires ludicrous assignments of economic value to digging holes and filling them up again. Only phony statistics ginned up by sold-out suits papers over our real decline. In China, you mostly have to measure the gains. Nice problem.
Bottom line, as the article says, is that we "need to focus our attention on our own domestic economies."

The Great Bubble of China: Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?

Gifted that China is in many ways, I think we underestimate how stifling and error-prone the jackboot of state control is. They squelch the masses so they don't have to hear unpleasant ideas and realities. This also squelches great ideas.
Here we have had a middle class culture that has produced the greatest prosperity ever known (up to about 40 years ago). The freedom allowed Edison, the Wright brothers and countless other tinkerers who weren't beholden as beholden to the state as we are now the leeway to be independent and create. Steve Jobs is a great recent example.
Now we have oppressive government fraudulently controlling us via out-of-control rules, laws, procedures and taxes which threatens to extinguish the greater freedom we mostly had to be individuals. With that, we lose the creativity that comes, not from state-sanctioned narrow channels of thinking but by experiment and accident.
The idea of wildly excessive lending for consumption has paralleled the rise of out-of-control government and the same bubble paradigm cannot be restarted. Either we face the pain of shrinking the gross misallocation we've allowed in our economy and for government, or we will let the spark that has made us unique, go out.

Economic Talks with China: Not Likely to Accomplish Much

Washington would continue with cap & trade even if it were proven C02 emissions cool the planet. It's too good for their bent of controlling and shaking down everybody and for Wall St. That's how Washington is now. Let no facts interfere with their plans.
Which is dangerous as their grotesque over-involvement has brought us very low now and the world's players are not their subject citizenry.
It is the false economy of overindebtedness for consumption that gave rise to a super-sized financial sector and bloated government. They are desperately trying to reflate the failed engines from the collapse along with their surreal agendas built on decades of rising hubris.
They can't forestall reality forever. They are meanwhile inflicting vast damage on the former middle class here and endangering us with their humiliating antics abroad.

China at the G8 (Or, What Happens When Your Banker Says No)

What a shame Washington has so much power. Their subjects (us) are stuck with the most arrogant hypocrites I know of, along with their cronies, Wall St.
But, watch Obama bow before the Saudi prince and tell Russia while traveling there that "we have can have no defense against a mighty armada of missiles" like theirs. Perhaps true, but the cravenness of Obama before power is noticeably disgusting when compared with the contempt he has for any citizens with two brain cells to rub together.
Washington and the political elites in our country are so detached from the real world that the world is frantically detaching with them as fast and as much as possible. When the pain of continuing along the same path is greater than change, change comes. Our elites make Mari Antoinette look practical. They have parasitically perpetuated themselves to the point of bankrupting the most successful nation ever devised and now destroying our overseas credibility as completely. Those that can separate are the most fortunate now.