Tag: economics

The American Dream is Over

Forget the next generation living better lives than their parents did. That ended with Generation X, the 1986 Immigration Amnesty, and NAFTA. But the next two generations are seeing even the standard to which their great-great-grandparents were accustomed is now beyond them.

Recent analysis by Investopedia revealed that you now need a whopping $3.4 million to cover the costs of traditional American dream milestones such as marriage, raising children and owning a home. But most Americans fall short of that target by over a million dollars. The average lifetime earnings of Americans across all education levels is closer to $2.3 million, according to Investopedia, leaving a big financial gap that’s forcing people to reassess their life goals.

One look at the attainability of a basic element of the traditional American dream — homeownership — is telling.

According to real estate brokerage Redfin, 2023 was the least affordable year for home buying on record. To buy a median-priced home, worth $408,806, with the median U.S. income $78,642, you would’ve had to spend a record 41.4% of your earnings on housing costs, up from 38.7% in 2022 and 31.0% in 2021. To buy that same home without spending more than 30% of your income — a popular rule of thumb among personal finance experts — you would need an annual salary of $109,868, according to Redfin, which is $31,226 more than the typical household makes in a year.

It was a nice run. But Americans should have listened to Ben Franklin. Once the 1965 Immigration Act passed after 40 years of relentless agitation, the fate of the USA was sealed.

DISCUSS ON SG

The End of Economic Ideology

There is no more economic Left or Right in Clown World. Because once a government starts primarily distributing national resources on the basis of identity groups and foreign interests, everyone on both extremes of the ideological divide realizes that there is no more national interest, any appeal to it is pointless, and therefore there is absolutely no point in working toward anything but maximal distribution to their own identity groups.

On Sunday, 58.2% of Swiss voters, and a majority of cantons, backed the “Better living in retirement” initiativeExternal link, which will grant an additional 13th monthly pension payment to help retirees struggling to make ends meet in the face of rising living costs.

Support for the 13th monthly pension payment initiative was exceptionally high. What is your analysis of the Swiss vote?

This is the first time that Swiss voters have clearly accepted a left-wing initiative in the field of social policy. The success can be explained by the fact that it was not just a left-wing vote. The initiative also resonated widely with centre-right voters and, above all, the conservative right. And, in their case, it was less about solidarity and compensating for the poverty of pensioners and much more about ‘now it’s my turn’.

Where does this idea come from?

It is a protest against the past excesses of the economy – the fall of Credit Suisse, the high salaries of managers, the past rescue of UBS and the rescue plan for [the energy company] Axpo. There is a widespread sentiment that Switzerland is able to mobilise very large sums of money for crises like the Covid-19 pandemic for big businesses, while ordinary people do not benefit. The population has the impression that business readily helps itself to any profits while passing on losses to society. There is a now willingness to change this.

It was perhaps another argument, which was very popular in conservative circles, that helped to topple the country’s most conservative strongholds, particularly in German-speaking Switzerland: if the Swiss authorities are capable of spending billions of francs on development aid and welcoming refugees, then we should do the same for pensioners. Even the country’s most seasoned political scientists are at a loss. Never before has an initiative from the left and the unions sparked such sympathy among right-wing voters.

This is why both liberalism and conservatism are dead across the West, and have been replaced by globalism vs nationalism combined with international identity politics on the foreign policy side and pure identity politics on the domestic side.

What is the point of being fiscally conservative or not spending every last bit of money on yourself while it lasts if the politicians are just going to use it to import refugees, send the money to Israel or Ukraine, or bailing out failed corporations if you don’t? It’s an irrefutable argument, and this is why Clown World will inevitably, and necessarily, turn against its own sacred cow of democracy before it collapses.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Few Thoughts on Usury

First, it’s necessary to define usury, which is not synonymous with either “loan” or “interest”, although unsurprisingly, the modern definition has been corrupted and is incorrect. The American Heritage defines it thusly:

  • The practice of lending money and charging the borrower interest, especially at an exorbitant or illegally high rate.
  • An excessive or illegally high rate of interest charged on borrowed money.
  • Interest charged or paid on a loan.

Even in the precise wordings of the definition, we can see the ambiguity that is the red flag that a word spell has been cast. If both interest charged and paid on a loan are usury, then both the lender and the borrower are usurers. And if all interest paid is usury, then there is no need to bring the rate of interest into the equation at all, and any exorbitant, excessive, or illegal aspect is irrelevant.

Now, the history of economics, especially as recounted by Murray Rothbard, is essentially the history of relentlessly challenging the Catholic Church’s ban on usury. And in retrospect, it’s clear that this incoherence is the direct result of centuries of gradually chipping away at the concept through adulteration and expansion of the moral and legal permissibility of usury.

In order to determine if a proposed contract is usurious, only three questions need be asked. If the answers to all three questions are unanimously yes, then the contract is not usurious and it is a legitimate census agreement as opposed to an illegitimate and usurious mutuum agreement:

  1. Is interest charged on the loan?
  2. Has the borrower posted collateral providing security on the loan?
  3. Is the lender’s recourse for recovery of principal and interest, in a case of default, limited to the named collateral and only the named collateral?

The difference, as is made abundantly clear in this extremely useful and well-informed FAQ on the subject, depends upon the nature of the guarantee for the loan, and NOT the existence of any interest. This is why student loans, credit card loans, and even car and home loans that are backed by personal guarantees are wicked, whereas corporate bonds and convertible notes are not. It is also why usury is so uniformly destructive from an entirely secular sense, while allowing the usurers to hide behind the legitimate utility of debt that permits the healthy growth of agriculture and industry without inevitably giving way to a credit bubble and eventual economic collapse.

In fact, the etymological shift in the definitional focus from collateral to interest looks downright suspicious to me as a student of historical kakology.

When reading old books and documents on usury it is important to keep in mind that the word ‘loan’ in English translations is almost always a translation of ‘mutuum’ or the like. It refers specifically to loans secured by the personal guarantee of the borrower, sometimes called a ‘loan for consumption’. Not all modern ‘debt’ or ‘loans’ are secured by the personal guarantee of a borrower or borrowers…

St. Thomas Aquinas explains that usurious lending involves selling something which does not exist.  This is very counterintuitive to people indoctrinated in modernity, and yet obvious once you’ve set aside modern anti-realism about property and economic value. 

Another way to see that what is bought-and-sold in a mutuum does not exist is to observe that, under the terms of the contract, it is possible for the lender to fail to recover everything he is entitled to recover under the contract. The reason a full recourse lender is sometimes unable to recover what he is owed under the terms of the contract is because what he is owed under the terms of the contract does not exist…

Part of what made the usury doctrine clear to me when I first really began to grasp it (as opposed to – and I was as guilty of this as anyone – superficially dismissing caricatures rooted in anti-realist modernism) is that as an investor and entrepreneur, I see investment contracts involving peronal guarantees of repayment as inherently dysfunctional. If either the investor or the entrepreneur feels the need to throw personal guarantees into the mix in order to get the deal done, that is a major red flag that the proposed capital structure of the investment doesn’t make sense on its own terms. Usually this is because the property risks – the risks of partial or total loss of capital invested – in the investment are high enough to make a simple fixed-interest debt instrument inappropriate. Instead of personal guarantees the structure should be something like a convertible note, with equity upside, or it should be secured by a larger base of existing (though probably illiquid) capital. Basically, someone is trying to consume capital they don’t have and/or shift their own risks – the risks inherent in their own portfolios of property – onto third parties, personally.

Anyway, I haven’t really added anything new to the ancient understanding of usury here. I was just a guy who happened to be standing in the right spot to see what caused the train wreck, and I’m trying to explain what I saw in our common modern language as best I can. Like theft usury often does pay, at least in the short run, and it causes all sorts of damage that impacts different people differently and unfairly. Usury is inherently dysfunctional and morally evil, like theft. It may be mildly interesting sociologically that the Catholic Church was right for millennia about a simple core financial and moral truth that modern people, for all their putative economic and technical sophistication, have gotten completely wrong.

This may be useful in the current economic hard times, as those who are wise stewards of their resources are likely to have friends, families, and acquaintances coming to them and asking them for help that goes beyond the usual charity that does not require deciding between one serious opportunity and another. The thing that is important to understand is that while one can provide a loan, and one can legitimately receive interest on that loan, the collateral provided as a guarantee against default on it must be real, specific, and, of course, proportional to the value of the combined principle and scheduled interest of the loan.

For example, if a farmer who owns ten acres of land worth 60k borrows 10k from you, you cannot hold him responsible for repaying it. And while you can require him to put up his land as collateral as a condition for the loan, you can’t legitimately have him provide all ten acres he owns as a guarantee since the land is worth 6k per acre. In that case, two acres is sufficient backing for the principle and interest; a proper census contract tends to look a lot more like a normal sale with a time delay than a bank loan full of terms and conditions that are manifestly one-sided and predatory.

Now, all this being said, it is still possible that the traditional distinction made by Christendom between mutuum and census is insufficient without a periodic jubilee, as this selection from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica shows:

In Athens about the time of Solon’s legislation (594 B.C.) the bulk of the population, who had originally been small proprietors or metayers, became gradually indebted to the rich to such an extent that they were practically slaves. Those who still kept their property nominally were in the position of Irish cottiers: they owed more than they could pay, and stone pillars erected on their land showed the amount of the debts and the names of the lenders. Usury had given all the power of the state to a small plutocracy.

The remedy which Solon adopted was of a kind that we are accustomed to consider as purely modern. In the first place, it is true that according to ancient practice he proclaimed a general seisachtheia, or shaking off of burdens: he cancelled all the debts made on the security of the land or the person of the debtor. This measure alone would, however, have been of little service had he not at the same time enacted that henceforth no loans could be made on the bodily security of the debtor, and the creditor was confined to a share of the property. The consequence of this simple but effective reform was that Athens was never again disturbed by the agitation of insolvent debtors. Solon left the rate of interest to be determined by free contract, and sometimes the rate was exceedingly high, but none of the evils so generally prevalent in antiquity were experienced.

It is informative to observe that Solon’s successful solution to the problem of usury-based plutocracy of the sort that we are presently observing all across the West was very similar, though not identical, to the later teachings of Aquinas on the subject. And it’s interesting to note that the Solonic imposition of a limit to the share on the property serving as collateral is exactly the same conclusion that I independently reached in the paragraph above, while his proclamation of a general seisachtheia is exactly what Michael Hudson prescribes for the global economy.

DISCUSS ON SG

Mailvox: The Logic of the Cult of Free

I thought this exchange with a member of the Cult of Free who is upset over Torba’s very sensible decision to stop permitting users who pay nothing for Gab’s services to utilize them at considerable expense to Gab was informative, as it raised a basic philosophical issue that some people obviously fail to understand.

You might want to check and see how many of the “free cult” are among YOUR followers. Most paid users rely on their “free” followers to make people like you more “relevant” and give people like you a reason to pay to be here. The “free cult” also brings other people to Gab and some spend their money on products being sold on Gab. THAT is the REAL WORLD. Andrew Torba, paid users and “attention seekers” like yourself, are NOTHING without the “free cult”!

Totally wrong. I don’t care at all about the “free followers”. We have a community of more than 10,000, all of whom have skin in the game and are not only supportive, but reliable. Free followers are, by and large, useless cowards who abandon ship whenever their feelings get hurt.

I do hope all of the “free followers” read this and realize that they are considered “nothing” to people like you. Have fun in your imagined “important” world!

So, do all of the so-called “free followers” here at VP realize that you are considered nothing to me? Have I failed to make that sufficiently clear to all and sundry? Are you fully cognizant of the fact that this blog existed before you were here, exists without any help or support from you now, and will continue to exist long after you cease visiting here?

Is everyone perfectly clear on that?

While I have nothing against people who read this site, or Sigma Game, or Castalia Library, or Castalia House, or the Arkhaven blog, or Arktoons, and still decide not to participate in or support any of our community’s various projects for what are no doubt very good reasons, I don’t regard them as being important, I don’t rely upon them in any way, and, in fact, I don’t think about them at all. They’re not on my radar.

If you’re not involved, you are irrelevant. There’s nothing wrong, or even negative, about being irrelevant. You’re not a problem, you’re simply not a factor at all. For better or for worse, you don’t matter any more than some random individual in Ghana or Myanmar who has never heard of me.

Everyone is welcome to read this site for free. That’s literally what it’s here for. I would write here and post here even if there were only two or three people visiting the site every day instead of 30,000; it gives me no more and no less pleasure to go through the discipline of articulating my thoughts on a regular basis now than when there were only a few thousand pageviews a month back in 2003. But this site is just something I do for my own reasons, it is not a business, it employs no one, and it does not require any resources to make it work. Die Gedanken, sie sind frei.

The Cult of Free was created by the false application of an outmoded business model to a series of government-funded data-mining platforms. It’s not a surprise that so many people were misled by this; even 30 years after Roland T. Rust and Richard W. Oliver published “The Death of Advertising” in Vol. 23, Issue No. 4 of the Journal of Advertising, the Cult of Free retards still think that sites like Gab can be funded by nonexistent advertising revenue.

They don’t realize that X has never, ever, made a profit. They aren’t aware that Google loses $2 billion or more on YouTube every year. And they have no idea how Meta actually makes its money. Silicon Valley’s One Million Eyeballs and Exit model was always fraudulent, on every single conceptual level, even though it appeared to work well for certain favored ticket-takers.

What is necessary, what is vital, what is absolutely required for an operation that is going to survive and thrive over the long haul is to build a community of 10,000 or more people and provide them with enough value for them to justify their moral and material support. We are very, very fortunate to have been able to do that, and it is my goal, every single day, to provide an excuse, a reason, or a justification for all of our supporters to continue with their support.

I don’t have the time or the bandwidth to think about those who not only don’t have skin in the game, they simply aren’t in the game at all. The value of the free content they create is zero. I know this for a fact, because when I shut down comments at this blog, all the same stupid arguments were mustered against it. I was “killing the blog” by shutting down the discourse here, or so they claimed. “Just as many people come to read the comments as read your posts,” they argued. The result: absolutely no change in traffic at all.

And here is how you know the so-called “support” of freeloaders is worthless: they never even do the free and easy things they could be doing to benefit the community without spending a single dime.

This isn’t a request for anyone to do anything at all. It is merely an philosophical explanation.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Price of Belligerence

The Swiss politicians are belatedly beginning to discover that the benefits of strict neutrality were considerably greater than they’d believed possible when they were being wined and dined by the diplomats of Clown World:

We don’t expect Switzerland to be directly attacked in the next six months. But we must prepare ourselves for a new range of threats, while the old, conventional threats have not diminished. The likelihood of Switzerland being attacked has increased over the last two years.
– Viola Amherd, President of Switzerland

This is precisely why General Henri Guisan, the hero of Switzerland in World War II, made it very, very clear to all the politicians of his day that surrendering to Nazi Germany would be an effective death sentence for themselves, and that their actions would be irrelevant anyhow. When the then-President of Switzerland was cozying up to the Nazis, in much the same way that the current Swiss administration is now cozying up to the European Union and NATO, he “punished” two young officers who were caught planning to assassinate the president by promoting them, then announced that no government authority, including the Head of State, had the power to surrender to any foreign power on behalf of the Swiss nation.

The current Swiss government is the party solely responsible for increasing the likelihood of Switzerland being attacked over the last two years. It very foolishly, unnecessarily, and very, very stupidly, chose to violate the nation’s historic neutrality in order to take sides against Russia on behalf of NATO, the EU, and the United States. Now Russia, China, and the BRICSIA nations now regard it as “a hostile entity” and, quite reasonably, no longer recognize Switzerland as an impartial party capable of hosting the sort of peace talks it has traditionally hosted for generations.

Now the government is at an important nexus. Having taken the first step into belligerence, it is now being forced to choose whether to join the EU, the UK, and the USA in their sanctions on China or not, which would be a much more serious step in economic terms than the sanctions on Russia were. One sincerely hopes that the politicians will learn from their previous mistake of violating the nation’s precious neutrality, and have the wisdom to step back from the brink and staunchly refuse to join the denizens of Clown World in leaping into the inevitable abyss of the military and economic ruin that is already in process.

If you choose to enter the ring, you cannot be surprised when you get punched in the face. And if you choose to enter the ring against a massive opponent who is four times larger than you and all your supposed friends combined, you are absolutely, 100 percent, going to lose, and you are going to lose badly.

The winning strategy, as generations of Swiss leaders have known, is to stay the hell out of the ring.

DISCUSS ON SG

Gab Ends the Cult of Free

Andrew Torba makes a wise and long-overdue business decision, which I support 100 percent:

Starting in March, media uploads on Gab will be a privilege reserved for GabPRO, Verified, Donor, and Investor users. We will no longer be supporting free media uploads and hosting huge amounts of data for free. Let me explain why.

As you all know Gab has to maintain our own in-house infrastructure because we have been banned from all cloud hosting providers. Over the past year we’ve had so much data uploaded, largely from free users, that we have to purchase more storage and spend our precious and limited engineering resources trying to expand our infrastructure storage. We’ve also faced an onslaught of bot accounts over the past few months that we believe are purposely uploading tons of media files on purpose to flood our storage space.

Finally, there are many real users who have been here for years and posted tens of thousands of times and have 10-100GB+ of media stored on Gab’s drives for free. Add those all up and it becomes extremely costly to maintain.

We can’t do it anymore. Every user will be able to speak freely with words, but if you want the privilege of Gab hosting and an endless stream of large images and videos you’ll need to help support the service. It’s just that simple. PRO, Verified, Donor, and Investor users will notice no change when this happens, things will continue as normal for you. Everyone else will need to upgrade to PRO to unlock the privilege of posting media files on Gab.

Freeloaders have nothing to offer a community except drama, expense, and trouble. Their uselessness is highlighted by their reaction to the news that they won’t be able to make use of Gab’s infrastructure any longer for their own purposes, which in many cases are directly in opposition to Torba’s own objectives.

One of the reasons this community is strong is that everyone has an amount of skin in the game. Everyone is willing to contribute time, energy, and resources toward our collective vision, toward advancing the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. And any resources that are diverted to those who are unwilling to even contribute the modern equivalent of the widow’s mite are almost certainly wasted.

It’s not about greed. Right now, UATV is operating without having a single subscriber, advertiser, or revenue stream. And that’s fine, because it’s part of the mission and it’s important to the community that it carry on without interruption. It never occurred to a single member of the team to reduce access or temporarily shut things down until subscriptions are opened again in March. We aren’t even going to bother with a crowdfund or anything else, because we never operate anywhere close to the edge.

But you can’t run an operation without resources, and you have to be wise about where you devote those resources. Spending them on people who are unwilling to make even the smallest commitment to the operation is a fool’s game, which is why I have been predicting the end of the cult of free for some time now, and why we never set up any operation on that model.

In fact, Torba will probably see a bonus effect of eradicating the larger part of the trolls and paid propagandists, because the former won’t pay to play and he just increased the cost of doing business for the latter. So, it’s a very smart decision on his part.

If you care more about a Macchiato Grande from Starbucks than supporting the platform on which you spend hours every day, you don’t deserve to have access to it.

DISCUSS ON SG

False Metrics, False Conclusions

As has been repeatedly pointed out by Owen and others, the more one lies, the more one loses the ability to recognize the truth even when it is staring one right in the face. The idea that China’s economy is collapsing, and therefore the Chinese Communist Party is on the verge of succumbing to a populist color revolution that will produce a neoliberal democratic government subservient to Clown World, has been floated persistently ever since Xi Jinping cancelled the planned “Jump to China” in 2015. A recent Washington Post article is only the latest example of this economic illiteracy:

Economists have started revising their predictions on when China might overtake the U.S. economically — and if it ever will. Despite Mr. Xi lifting the world’s most draconian covid-19 restrictions at the end of 2022, construction in China has slowed, manufacturing prices have declined and consumer spending has flattened. China’s stock market has lost $6 trillion in value in three years. A dozen cities and provinces have been told to halt construction of infrastructure projects — cutting into their main source of revenue.

The biggest economic threat has come from the slowdown in the property market. Building has slowed, and more than 50 major developers are either out of cash or have defaulted. Fears abound of insolvencies leaving millions of unfinished housing projects… China recorded a respectable 5.2 percent economic growth rate last year, but the real rate is lower when adjusted for falling prices. Rather than being an economic juggernaut, China seems likely to be entering a period of deflation, the sorts of conditions that led to Japan’s “lost decade.”

Xi is Taking China’s Economy, WASHINGTON POST, 21 February 2024

Translation into Sane Economics: China is doing exactly what the USA should have done back in 2008 or sooner. It is clearing the bad debt out of its economy, refusing to prop up bankrupt corporations, and preventing further malinvestment from taking place.

This isn’t merely feel-good propaganda for neoclowns in Washington, it’s economic illiteracy and evidence that the Washington Post can’t even get its neo-Samuelsonian economics right. Note that the real economic growth rate is not LOWER than 5.2 percent when adjusted for falling prices, it is HIGHER. Growth rates measure GDP, which are priced in currency. So when prices increase, the real GDP and the real growth rate are lower. When prices fall, the real GDP and the real growth rate are higher.

Remember, modern neo-Samuelsonian economics do not take debt into account, not even when the vast majority of the money supply is comprised of credit-money rather than gold or paper money. Which is why, in Clown World economics, borrowing and spending money that is created out of thin air counts as economic growth, and writing off bad debt counts as economic contraction.

Just as trade wars are GDP-beneficial for nations with trade deficits, deflation is real growth rate-beneficial for nations with credit money. Russia Today knows better too:

If there’s one thoroughly unoriginal strand of thought on China present in the mainstream media today, it is the idea that China’s economy has been wrecked, and that Xi Jinping’s policies are to blame. Such commentary, pushed by every major mainstream outlet on a weekly basis, frequently promotes a narrative of the “end” of China’s rise, often talks about “decline” and squarely places responsibility on Xi Jinping, who supposedly ended the dynamic of an open and prosperous China for increasingly centralized, authoritarian rule and a return to communist fundamentals.

Such an article was pushed this week by the editorial board of the Washington Post, in a piece titled “Xi is tanking China’s economy. That’s bad for the US”. The article was hardly original in its premise, stating the above argument pretty much word for word…

First, what is always, always ignored is that Xi Jinping deliberately set about changing the structure of China’s economy in order to end a growth boom based solely on real estate and debt. The newspapers love to waffle on about the “real estate crisis” and Evergrande, but can you imagine how big the problem would have been had previous policies been continued and China pushed for obscene 10% growth targets based on an explosion of debt? Xi Jinping ended this and initiated a process of deleveraging which deliberately slowed down China’s economic growth to around 6% when he came to power. Why? Because debt is not a sustainable mechanism and his policy has been literally to push the real estate industry into a managed recession, even if that has short-term repercussions.

Secondly, Xi Jinping’s policy has been to reinvent China’s economy to meet upcoming challenges by transforming it from a low end, export, real estate boom economy, into a high-end technological powerhouse. Instead of investing aimlessly in local government real estate booms, China has redirected state money to building up high-value industries including renewable energy, computing, semiconductors, automobiles, aviation, among other things. It is primarily this bid to become the global technological leader (by default of size) that has triggered the backlash from the US on an economic level and thus the bid to try and cripple China’s technological advance through export controls, which in fact show little evidence of working.

Xi isn’t destroying China’s economy – he’s changing it, RUSSIA TODAY, 26 February 2024

Just as everything looks like a nail to the man whose only tool is a hammer, the Neo-Samuelsonians of Clown World do not understand any economic policy that does not rely upon expanding the money supply and increasing GDP through the issuance of more debt. Which, of course, is why they neither see nor understand that China’s economy is neither contracting nor collapsing, it is rather being cleansed of bad debt and reconfigured into a more realistic economy capable of providing genuine economic growth as measured in production, real goods, and manufacturing capacity rather than in money, fake services, and ever-increasing credit.

China is not following the Japanese example; to the contrary, it is doing the precise opposite and refusing to prop up its zombie banks and overleveraged corporations. The fact that Xi Jinping has the wits and the courage to do what neither Ben Bernanke nor any US President has had the wisdom to do should not concern the neoclowns. It should absolutely terrify them, because it means that Clown World will have absolutely no chance whatsoever to even begin to make up its massive steel-production and manufacturing-capacity disadvantages vis-a-vis China.

Remember, the economists who are telling you that China’s economy is collapsing are the same economists who told you Western sanctions were going to cripple the Russian economy. Their axioms are incorrect, their metrics are false, and therefore, their conclusions are guaranteed to be wrong.

Unlike the USA, China is dumping its bad debt.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Great Bifurcation Widens

Both China and India are making it very clear that they will not stop doing business with Russia, and more importantly, that they are neither impressed nor dissuaded by the additional sanctions being imposed upon them by the EU, the UK, and the USA.

The EU last week agreed on a new package of sanctions against Russia that for the first time targets Chinese and Indian companies accused of “supporting Moscow’s war efforts,” the Financial Times reported on Thursday.

The measures of the EU, which will be its 13th package of sanctions imposed in response to Russia’s military operation against Ukraine, were followed by the UK and the US. Britain announced a new package of sanctions against Russia that includes three electronics companies in China, Reuters reported on Friday.

Then, the Biden administration announced on Friday more than 500 new sanctions against targets in Russia, which reportedly include measures against Russia’s main card payment system, financial and military institutions and entities outside of Russia…

When it comes to the Ukraine crisis, China’s position has always been consistent. China is not a party directly involved, and it did not choose to be a bystander or add fuel to the fire. China will continue to play a constructive role in bringing an early end to the conflict and restoring peace in Ukraine.

There is nothing to criticize regarding the pursuit of peace, and it is believed that this thinking is shared by many other emerging countries.

Fundamentally speaking, Western sanctions against Russia are actually illegal and unilateral actions, which have not been approved by the UN. The US and its European allies, regardless of how powerful they are, do not represent the entire international community. It makes no sense for them to escalate sanctions and exert pressure on other countries by targeting normal economic exchanges between Russia and other countries.

What Indian External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar said recently on the sidelines of the Munich conference may just show the view of all those who have not participated in Western sanctions against Russia.

Jaishankar said, “If I am smart enough to have multiple options, you should be admiring me.” He said that India should not be criticized for having multiple options and reaffirmed its stand and commitment to buying Russian oil.

The world is not ruled by the US and its European allies only. Their goal of containing Russia is their own business, and they have no right to demand other countries sacrifice their development opportunities to serve Western strategies. When it comes to how to deal with Russia, emerging economies should have the right to consider and choose from their own interests.

What has happened over the past two years has proved that unilateral sanctions and extreme pressure have not only done great harm to the global economy, but have also disrupted the international order the West has been trying to maintain.

Including Chinese, Indian firms in Russia sanctions unreasonable, GLOBAL TIMES, 25 February 2024

It’s going to be a difficult year for everyone in the West, and things are going to continue to get more difficult as the flow of free money continues to dwindle away to nothing and the ability of the Fed to export inflation to the rest of the world disappears as the majority of the global population exits Clown World’s economy.

But with these harder times comes opportunity, as those organizations that are not built on debt and have genuine success based on genuine customers will have the opportunity to grow steadily as their competitors continue to fail. Just to give one example, think about how many alternatives to this blog have vanished over time, while the traffic here is steady and offshoots such as Sigma Game are already averaging 7,500 views per day in its first month.

Just as success isn’t distributed evenly during credit bubbles, failure isn’t distributed evenly during economic contractions. The key is to focus ruthlessly on your core market, be persistent in your performance, and constantly strive to improve your quality while your competitors are cutting corners and trying to raise their margins to make up for their declining sales.

DISCUSS ON SG

Fake Success, Real Failure

Vice has filed for bankruptcy and its content management system was shut down yesterday:

Vice.com has stopped publishing new content and laid off several hundred employees, its CEO announced late on Thursday. The outlet once valued at billions of dollars had to be rescued from bankruptcy last year, by a consortium including George Soros.

The website is still available, but its content management system was shut down minutes before midnight, according to one employee. The VICE company will “transition to a studio model,” CEO Bruce Dixon said in a message sent to the staff, as part of “fundamental changes to our strategic vision.”

“We create and produce outstanding original content true to the Vice brand. However, it is no longer cost-effective for us to distribute our digital content the way we have done previously,” Dixon wrote. Going forward, Vice will partner with “established media companies” to distribute its digital content on their platforms instead.

Funded by major corporations and venture capital throughout the 2010s, Vice was valued at $5.7 billion in 2017.

It’s fascinating to compare the fragility of a large, massively-well funded operation like Vice with the antifragility of small, independent operations like UATV. While UATV can survive multiple hits that reduce its revenue to zero for as long as it takes to build the subscriber base back again… and again, the use of debt means that not even a bailout from George Soros is sufficient to keep a Clown World institution like Vice afloat.

Everything about Clown World is fake, pride, and short-lived.

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Bambi Sanctions Godzilla

The EU leaders are subjecting their economies to the same savage attrition that the Kiev regime is subjecting all the men of Ukraine. Only Kiev hasn’t been stupid enough to declare war on China as well as Russia.

Beijing rejects “illegal sanctions” and will defend the interests of its companies, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has said following a report that the EU could blacklist some of the country’s firms for allegedly helping Russia to evade the bloc’s restrictions.

The EU is planning to place restrictions on three Chinese businesses and one Indian company as part of its 13th round of sanctions on Russia over its conflict with Ukraine, the Financial Times reported on Monday.

Brussels believes the firms in question are helping Moscow to circumvent existing restrictions, especially through the supply of electronic components that can be repurposed for use in drones and other weapons systems. If the plan is approved by member states, it will see the EU sanction companies from mainland China and India – two of the bloc’s key trading partners – for the first time.

”We are aware of the relevant reports,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Tuesday. “China firmly opposes illegal sanctions or ‘long-arm jurisdiction’ against China on the grounds of cooperation between China and Russia. Chinese and Russian companies carry out normal exchanges and cooperation and do not target third parties, nor should they be interfered with or influenced by third parties,” the ministry said.

Beijing “will take necessary measures to resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises.”

This decision to sanction Chinese companies goes so far beyond stupid as to genuinely raise the question if the Europeans are intentionally destroying their own economies and industrial capabilities at the orders of Washington in order to prevent their companies from being able to compete with the USA once the Great Bifurcation is complete and the West no longer has the ability to trade with Asia, Africa, or Araby.

Every single one of the twelve rounds of Russian sanctions has not only failed, but made the Russian economy stronger. Given that the Chinese economy is much larger, not only than Russia, but also than the combined economies of the European Union, what are the chances that this expansive thirteenth round will be any less disastrous.

It’s never been more clear that the post-WWII occupation of Western Europe by the United States never ended, or that the dirty sixties hippies were essentially correct and the good old conservative Republicans were totally wrong. The USA truly is an empire imposed by military force, it was never an armed force of charitable do-gooders just trying to help everyone by spreading peace and democracy around the world.

In the meantime, the Chinese have just demonstrated what they think of Switzerland’s now-defunct neutrality.

Bloomberg: The Swiss government is going to hold a peace conference for the Ukraine-Russia war soon. Does China have any intention to attend that?

Wang Wenbin: China’s position on the Ukraine crisis is consistent and clear. We have played a constructive role in advocating an end to the fight and a political settlement of the crisis. We will continue to promote peace talks and work for a political settlement of the crisis in our own way.

Bloomberg: Did you say you will use this forum to promote the settlement or you said you’ll use any forum to promote the settlement of the crisis?

Wang Wenbin: We will continue to play a constructive role in promoting the political settlement of the crisis in our own way.

Translation: No, we will not attend, participate, or promote any attempt by a pro-NATO government to play arbiter. You’re not neutral, you took Ukraine’s side, and you’re not fooling anyone. Also, don’t even think about trying to sanction our companies or we will sanction you right back, and you need our market more than we need yours.

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