Tag: economics

CIPS+SPFS

The alternative financial system linking the Chinese and Russian economies takes shape:

In 2015, approximately 90% of trade between Russia and China was settled in dollars, and by 2020, dollar-denominated trade between the two Eurasian giants had almost reduced by half, with only 46% of trade in dollars. Russia has also been leading the way in cutting the share of US dollars in its foreign reserves. The mechanisms for de-dollarizing China-Russia trade are also used to end the use of the greenback with third parties – with advancements being seen in places such as Latin America, Turkey, Iran, India, etc. The US has been pumping out dollars to the entire world for decades, and at some point, the tide will change as the sea of dollars return home with increasingly diminished value.

Financial transactions
The SWIFT system for financial transactions between banks worldwide was previously the only system for international payments. This central role for SWIFT began to erode when the US used it as a political weapon. The Americans first expelled Iran and North Korea, and in 2014, Washington began threatening to expel Russia from the system as well. Over the past few weeks, the threat of using SWIFT as a weapon against Russia has intensified.

China has responded by creating CIPS and Russia developed SPFS, both being alternatives to SWIFT. Even several other European countries have banded together with an alternative to SWIFT to curb Washington’s extra-territorial jurisdiction and thus continue trading with Iran. A new China-Russia financial architecture should integrate CIPS and SPFS, and make them more available to third parties. If the US expels Russia, then the decoupling from SWIFT would intensify further.

Development banks
The US-led IMF, World Bank and Asian Development Bank are renowned instruments of US economic statecraft. The launch of the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in 2015 became a watershed moment in the global financial architecture, as all the major allies of the US (except Japan) signed up in defiance of American warnings. The New Development Bank, formerly referred to as the BRICS Development Bank, was a further step towards decoupling from the US-led development banks. The Eurasian Development Bank and future SCO Development Bank are more nails in the coffin of US-controlled development banks.

Synergy effects
China and Russia have also developed their own rating agencies and replaced the dominant position of Visa and Mastercard in their respective countries. This new financial architecture is complemented with an energy partnership and a technological partnership as neither China nor Russia wants to be reliant on American high-tech industries as they move into the fourth industrial revolution.

For those who live outside the USA, it will be wise to find a bank that is utilizing both systems, which will limit one’s exposure to either deplatforming or a collapse of the self-styled “rules-based order” that is, in fact, neither rules-based nor orderly.

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The Supply-Chain Crisis

Well, that’s not going to help:

Waco, Texas-based Central Freight Lines has notified drivers, employees and customers that the less-than-truckload carrier plans to wind down operations on Monday after 96 years, the company’s president told FreightWaves on Saturday.

“It’s just horrible,” said CFL President Bruce Kalem.

A source close to CFL told FreightWaves that CFL had “too much debt and too many unpaid bills” to continue operating, despite exploring all available options to keep its doors open.

Kalem agreed.

“Years of operating losses and struggles for many years sapped our liquidity and we had no other place to go at this point,” Kalem told FreightWaves. “Nobody is going to make money on this closing, nobody.”

Central Freight will cease picking up new shipments effective Monday and expects to deliver substantially all freight in its system by Dec. 20, according to a company statement.

Denninger sees this as an early sign of deleveraging-based contraction of the money supply.

The simple man (or simple family) has decent reserves, no debt beyond a modest mortgage, paid-for vehicles and thus, while they won’t like a disruption of income or tough times, will be ok.

Nearly all of the so-called “betters” running around screwing you with this or that are the precise opposite.

Indeed, that “virtue signaling” is expensive. Those solar panels? They’re a lease, basically. That Tesla? It has a note on it. That nice, expensive house? It has both the original note and probably a HELOC too. That fabulous nearly-new boat? Anyone care to bet what the odds are the bank actually owns it?

Every one of these levered things has serious and unavoidable cost associated with it. So long as everything is fine in your world that’s ok, or so you think. It all pencils out; you can meet the cash flow requirements and in a low interest-rate environment those look reasonable and safe.

You’re wrong.

If you’re not in debt, you’ll be fine. If you’ve got cash, there will be bargains available. But if you’re leveraged, you can’t control when the loans will be called.

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We’re Not Locked Out, You’re Locked Out

As I anticipated on a recent Darkstream, China and Russia are collaborating to provide the world with an alternative payment infrastructure that will compete, most likely favorably, with SWIFT and the US dollar.

Russia and China will develop shared financial structures to enable them to deepen economic ties in a way that foreign states will be unable to influence, the Kremlin has announced following talks between the countries’ leaders. The move appears to be a response to a series of warnings that Western nations could push to disconnect Russia from the Brussels-based SWIFT financial system as a form of sanctions.

The payment platform underpins the vast majority of international transactions. During the talks on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping called for increasing the share of national currencies in mutual settlements and expanding cooperation to provide Russian and Chinese investors with access to stock markets, said Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy advisor.

Ushakov said “particular attention was paid to the need to intensify efforts to form an independent financial infrastructure to service trade operations between Russia and China.”

“We mean creating an infrastructure that cannot be influenced by third countries,” the Kremlin aide added.

Ahead of the video summit, Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov hinted that economic discussions were likely to be on the agenda for the two heads of state.

Both Russia and China are said to be increasingly looking to move away from using the US dollar as the main currency of international trade, instead using their own denominations to underpin the booming volume of Moscow-Beijing trade.

It’s probably not a bad time to get an Alipay account, if you don’t have one already.

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The Exception Proves the Nobel

The bankrupt state of modern economics is revealed by the most recent pseudo-Nobel prize award:

This year’s Laureates – David Card, Joshua Angrist and Guido Imbens – have shown that natural experiments can be used to answer central questions for society, such as how minimum wages and immigration affect the labour market. …

Another important issue is how the labour market is affected by immigration. To answer this question, we need to know what would have happened if there had not been any immigration. Because immigrants are likely to settle in regions with a growing labour market, simply comparing regions with and without many migrants is not enough to establish a causal relationship. A unique event in the history of the US gave rise to a natural experiment, which David Card used to investigate how immigration affects the labour market. In April 1980, Fidel Castro unexpectedly allowed all Cubans who wished to leave the country to do so. Between May and September, 125,000 Cubans emigrated to the US. Many of them settled in Miami, which entailed an increase in the Miami labour force of around seven per cent. To examine how this huge influx of workers affected the labour market in Miami, David Card compared the wage and employment trends in Miami with the evolution of wages and employment in four comparison cities.

Despite the enormous increase in labour supply, Card found no negative effects for Miami residents with low levels of education. Wages did not fall and unemployment did not increase relative to the other cities. This study generated large amounts of new empirical work, and we now have a better understanding of the effects of immigration.

After all, who ever heard of Miami’s economy in 1980-1984 being in any way different than in the four comparison cities? Surely, the only economic difference among the five cities was Miami’s labor supply shock. Nobody with a Ph.D. in economics has ever noticed that there was a demand shock in Miami in 1980-84.

The economics profession would like to remind everybody that one annoying unmentionable — who has been pointing out for a decade and a half that in 1980 there was a simultaneous demand shock in Miami known as History’s Most Flagrant Cocaine Boom that invalidated Card’s celebrated “natural experiment” by boosting demand in Miami for labor (whether construction workers, maitre d’s, escorts, ethically challenged bankers, drug mules, Jeb Bush, kingpins, or henchmen) — that Scarface, Miami Vice, Cocaine Cowboys, and Narcos were not published in peer-reviewed journals, so, as far as we are concerned, they don’t exist: ergo, nyaah-nyaah-nu-nyaah-nyaah, we economists have our fingers stuck in our ears so we can’t hear you!

The study was utterly idiotic, as it purported to prove that there was no decline in labor prices due to a massive increase in the labor supply, which it did through the application of the Ricardian Vice and ignoring the simultaneous increase in the demand for labor that was fueled by the cocaine industry.

But that’s what passes for the best of mainstream economics today.

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Migration is BAD for the Economy

The statistics from Denmark conclusively prove it:

The net cost of non-western immigration to Denmark, after tax contributions have been deducted, has been revealed to be nearly $5 billion a year.

Yes, really.

The Danish Ministry of Finance revealed in its annual report that the cost amounted to DKK 31 billion ($4.8 billion) in 2018, a figure that leader of the opposition Danish People’s Party, Kristian Thulesen Dahl described as “astronomical.”

“The figure is based on state spending for public services related to immigration and welfare benefits received by immigrants and included state expenditures on healthcare, child care, education, and culture,” reports Sputnik.

“By contrast, tax contributions were deducted from the total.”

Apparently, diversity isn’t a strength, it’s actually a huge drain on public resources.

The lie that “immigration is good for the economy”, and its big brother “immigration is necessary for the economy” was always a complete deception. The truth is that some immigration is beneficial to a society, but most of it is detrimental, even when it is beneficial to the economy. This is because it usually represents a permanent transfer of wealth from the native population to the parasitical newcomers.

All those Boomers who hate communism and wax eloquent and teary-eyed over immigrants should reflect upon the fact that immigration is, quite literally, demographic communism.

And quality matters far more than quantity. Mexicans create Mexico wherever they go in sufficient numbers, just as Scandinavians bring along their competence and naive cucketry wherever they settle. This is no secret to anyone, but it is a truth that has been ruthlessly obscured by relentless lies.

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Independence is Not Imperialism

The ignorant Chi-Com haters, whose perspective on China is literally 43 years out of date and who stubbornly project their own imperialism on the world’s largest nation, have now managed to completely misunderstand Xi Jinping’s policy of pursuing economic independence:

The Financial Times reported that the head of the U.S. business lobbying agency in China warned that as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) tightens its control of COVID-19, Western executives are withdrawing from the world’s largest consumer market.

Today, as the rest of the world has reopened, American business leaders, including Mr. Ker Gibbs and Alan Beebe, Presidents of the American Chambers of Commerce in Shanghai and Beijing, are warning the CCP that the evacuation of foreigners from China may accelerate.

The British Financial Times also cites a recent survey of 338 American Chamber of Commerce members in Shanghai. The survey shows that more than 70% of companies have difficulty in attracting and retaining foreign talent. “Restrictions related to travel visas,” have become the main issue.

China’s strict entry quarantine policies include the abolition of tax incentives enjoyed by foreigners for decades; the rising cost of living in Chinese cities. Power shortages, power cuts, and increases in electricity prices, along with the CCP’s relentless surveillance, are also essential factors in driving foreign executives to return to their home countries.

China is still conducting a policy of “Zero COVID-19”. Anxious foreigners, uncertain of how long they would be locked up in their houses, quickly fled.

TFI Global points out that the flight of investors from China is due to the strict blockade by COVID-19, government surveillance, and a series of repressive economic policies implemented by the authorities.

Since last November, China has launched an all-out attack against businesses, companies, and entrepreneurs. The technology industry, education and training, private schools, and most private companies are “harvested” by the government. In the face of such anti-trade measures, investors will inevitably flee from China to escape the dictatorship.

Foreigners flee China, the separation is almost complete?, 3 November 2021

This has very little, if anything, to do with “Covid-19”. That’s merely a code word for the international financial regime, in both China and the West. And the self-deportation of foreigners is a feature, not a bug. Literally every nation in the West, beginning with America, would benefit greatly from the same behavior on the part of the foreign peoples who have invaded them. How anyone can look at the ongoing collapse of the USA due to its evil policies of mass immigration, free trade, and free speech and conclude that the failing state provides a functional model worthy of imitation, much less an ideal model that morally requires installation by force, completely mystifies me.

China is voluntarily choosing the fate that was imposed upon Russia by angry neocon imperialists who wished to punish the Putin regime for expelling its elite servants who were financializing and parasitizing the Russian economy. China is doing so because it has seen the way in which the Russian people and the Russian economy have greatly benefited from being expelled from the evil and vampiric neo-liberal world order, which in any event is in the process of collapsing. Hence all the “Great Reset” talk, which is the financial elite’s attempt to succeed itself in the aftermath of their own failure.

Unlike the Boomer-tier China critics, I have read the writings of Lee Kuan Yew, Xi Jinping, and Wang Huning. They are not only far more intelligent than their critics, they are great and admirable men who have taken on incredibly challenging burdens on behalf of their people that bear an almost unfathomable degree of difficulty. Xi and Wang may fail, like Donald Trump, or they may succeed, like Vladimir Putin. But the entire world should wish them well in their endeavors.

China does not seek world dominance any more than Russia does. That is pure projection on the part of people who not only want to rule the world, but believe it is their Satan-given right to do so. When you read stories of Chinese hunger for global domination in the media, consider the fucking source! Both Russia and China simply seek to be powerful enough to rule themselves and keep the evil globalists at bay; both countries have already suffered at their hands and both countries already possess sufficient military power to invade and occupy their neighbors more easily than the USA invaded and occupied Iraq.

What China is doing is exactly what Americans should be doing as a nation, but can’t because they have been the victims of the largest invasion in world history, and because they are demoralized, denationalized, and subjected. And it should be obvious to even the most slow-witted right now that the USA is currently on a path that will, if it is not abandoned, lead to the same horrors that both China and Russia endured in the 20th century.

UPDATE: China experts recognize that China is beginning to utilize its increasingly formidable economic power in pursuit of its geostrategic ends.

Beijing is using legislative power to punish supporters of “Taiwan independence” (again, deliberately undefined) with travel bans and prosecutions. Some people might argue back, “Well, just don’t go to China”- but it’s not as simple as that. On a business and organizational level, this is a move with huge ramifications. If you have a business, you could lose access to the huge Chinese market and never has that been more relevant in Taiwan, whose largest economic and trading partner is China. Both geography and commerce talk.

In addition, China has extradition treaties with 59 countries. While the majority of those are outside the West, this creates a legal reach stretching beyond China’s borders. Certain countries near China are willing to comply with this kind of request due to their own mutual interests in anti-separatism and unrest. Consider, for example, how Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong was banned from both Thailand and Malaysia. This means that vocal supporters of Taiwan who end up blacklisted should not assume they are safe just because they do not have a stake in China or Hong Kong, or wish to go there. Beijing is using long-arm jurisdiction.

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Now It’s Their Turn

The media hasn’t been so much indifferent as sneeringly amused by the complaints of American workers whose jobs have been eliminated by the financial rapine of Wall Street under a false flag of creative destruction. But they aren’t sneering or laughing anymore now that the financial parasites have figured out how to prey upon their industry:

The scene was somehow even grimmer than I’d imagined. Here was one of America’s most storied newspapers—a publication that had endorsed Abraham Lincoln and scooped the Treaty of Versailles, that had toppled political bosses and tangled with crooked mayors and collected dozens of Pulitzer Prizes—reduced to a newsroom the size of a Chipotle.

Spend some time around the shell-shocked journalists at the Tribune these days, and you’ll hear the same question over and over: How did it come to this? On the surface, the answer might seem obvious. Craigslist killed the Classified section, Google and Facebook swallowed up the ad market, and a procession of hapless newspaper owners failed to adapt to the digital-media age, making obsolescence inevitable. This is the story we’ve been telling for decades about the dying local-news industry, and it’s not without truth. But what’s happening in Chicago is different.

In May, the Tribune was acquired by Alden Global Capital, a secretive hedge fund that has quickly, and with remarkable ease, become one of the largest newspaper operators in the country. The new owners did not fly to Chicago to address the staff, nor did they bother with paeans to the vital civic role of journalism. Instead, they gutted the place.

Two days after the deal was finalized, Alden announced an aggressive round of buyouts. In the ensuing exodus, the paper lost the Metro columnist who had championed the occupants of a troubled public-housing complex, and the editor who maintained a homicide database that the police couldn’t manipulate, and the photographer who had produced beautiful portraits of the state’s undocumented immigrants, and the investigative reporter who’d helped expose the governor’s offshore shell companies. When it was over, a quarter of the newsroom was gone….

What threatens local newspapers now is not just digital disruption or abstract market forces. They’re being targeted by investors who have figured out how to get rich by strip-mining local-news outfits. The model is simple: Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self.

Hey, it’s just capitalism, right? It’s just capitalists maximizing efficiency, right? Besides, all those journalists can just learn to code, right?

After all, these days, people don’t need newspapers any more than they need buggy whips.

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COVID and Climate Change

A three-way conversation between Daniel Sanderson, Steve Keen and me, in which we somehow manage to avoid discussing either COVID or climate change.

DS: That’s a project that we’re releasing in January and I wanted to include in that academy, a course from Steve as well on economics.

VD: That’s going to be intriguing because Steve is not generally what one would consider to be Econ 101 material.

DS: No, it’s not, but we’ve talked a little bit about the show and I think the best thing is to try and summarize what he’s saying and then build off of that. That’s kind of the idea and the course just takes shape.

VD: I can write that for you in five minutes. In 30 seconds, I can summarize everything you need to know about Steve Keen’s work in economics.

DS: Okay here we go! Yeah, here we go.

VD: It’s very simple. Everything you’ve ever read is wrong.

To be clear, I still don’t do interviews. But I absolutely will make the occasional exception on behalf of requests from Castalia and Arkhaven authors, particularly if the Castalia/Arkhaven author happens to be the greatest living economist.

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Shortages Due to CA Law

In which we’re informed of the real reason for all the shipping shortages that preceded the vaxx mandates:

The NEWS says the California port situation is caused by a driver shortage.

Not so fast: It is in part caused by a California Truck Ban which says all trucks must be 2011 or newer and a law called AB 5 which prohibits Owner Operators.

Interesting and theoretically plausible. Newsom is exactly the sort of governor, and the CA legislature is made up primarily of the sort of politicians, who don’t bother to worry about the obvious consequences of their posturing.

Kneecapping the Tech Giants

The Prometheans are furious with Xi and the CCP for refusing to permit the financialization of the Chinese economy. Because, um, they’re afraid of losing power to Alibaba, Huawei, and TenCent or something:

Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China, is currently kneecapping his country’s most successful private companies.

Until very recently, the CPC permitted the growth of domestic tech giants, including Alibaba , a Chinese analog of Amazon ; Tencent , a massive tech conglomerate; Xiaomi, an artificial intelligence company tied to the military but better known for its smartphones; Huawei, a controversial global leader in 5G networks; and Baidu, one of the world’s largest AI companies. Leaders watched these firms create massive numbers of jobs and improve consumers’ lives, and challenge their American and European competitors.

But now, the CPC fears them. In late 2020, Beijing’s regulators abruptly scuttled the initial public offering of Ant, an internet payments company that spun out of Alibaba. The stock offering was poised to be the largest IPO in history, giving China the sort of bragging rights you would have expected party bosses to relish.

This wasn’t a one-off. In spring 2021, Chinese regulators issued a $2.8 billion antitrust fine to Alibaba. And regulators have cracked down on the ability of Chinese firms to list their shares in the United States—once a rite of passage for Chinese companies that signaled international legitimacy.

That very legitimacy has become a problem for the CPC, which is cracking down on China’s Big Tech precisely because they present an alternative governance structure in Chinese society—one that knows the people of China better than the CCP itself. The Communist Party of China has always insisted on a paramount rule—the party’s own absolute hegemony—and these Big Tech companies threaten that.

For years, China-watchers in the West clung to the conviction that the CPC needed strong economic growth from the private sector to survive in power. Growth meant increasing prosperity, and prosperity bought domestic peace: It implied proof that the Party provided for the people. Now, the Party fears that that legitimacy will rest with its true source—the technology companies that have become billboards for Chinese pride and the governance structures that made them so.

This is a bizarre and self-serving interpretation of why the CCP is preventing China’s biggest companies from growing in paper terms rather than industrial terms. It’s not the tech companies they fear, but rather, the banks behind them. Michael Hudson, one of the few economists in the world who actually understands the significance of debt, explains the real reason China is preventing its business interests from expanding freely in an interview:

Michael Hudson: Well, George Soros’ dream is that China would do what Yeltsin did to Russia – that it would privatise the economy, really carve it up and let US investors buy control of the most profitable heights. In that way, the foreign investors would be able to sort of get the profits of Chinese industry, Chinese labour, and it would become the darling stock market of the world, just like Russia’s stock market was the leading booming stock market of 1994-96. China would be run to benefit US investment bankers. Soros is furious that China is not following the neoliberal policy that the United States is following. It’s following a socialist policy wanting to keep its economic surplus at home to benefit its own citizens, not American financial investors. For Soros, this is a clash of civilisations. His proposed strategy is to stifle the Chinese economy by putting sanctions against it, to stop investing in it so as to force it to do to itself what Yeltsin did to Russia.

Ross: Let’s hear it in his words. He says: ‘The BlackRock initiative imperils the national security interests of the US and other democracies because the money invested in China will help prop up President Xi’s regime, which is repressive at home and aggressive abroad. Congress should pass legislation empowering the Securities and Exchange Commission to limit the flow of funds to China. The effort ought to enjoy bipartisan support’. He’s not mincing his words, is he?

Michael Hudson: He thinks that China actually needs American dollars to build its factories and invest. He thinks that somehow China’s balance of payments is going to fall apart without the US market, without US investors telling President Xi what to do. The Chinese government won’t have a clue as to what to invest in and how to let the ‘free market’, meaning George Soros and BlackRock and other companies, operate. So he’s living in a dream world where other people need us. It’s like a guy who doesn’t realise his girlfriend doesn’t need him anymore….

The United States is driving Europe, Asia and now Africa as well, into a unified, consolidated unit outside of itself. It’s very self-destructive. It thinks like George Soros, that if we stop investing in Asia and other countries, that will force them to knuckle under to the US. But what it’s doing is it’s driving them altogether into the Belt and Road Initiative.

What China’s doing is creating a precondition for a profitable industrial economy over a large area to benefit from. It’s participants are going to need transportation. You’re going to need ports. You’re going to need roads. You’re going to need pipelines and is focusing on the interconnections, on the infrastructure.

America doesn’t build infrastructure these days unless it’s monopolised. This is the political fight going on in the United States now. President Biden has a infrastructure plan that he’s scaled down from six and a half trillion to three and a half trillion. And essentially the bulk of the Democratic and Republican Party said if we can’t privatise infrastructure and make it a rent-extracting monopoly, we’re not going to do it, and we’re going to block the government from doing it. So in the United States, they’re going to have high priced infrastructure, high-priced health care and high-priced education while China is going to have low-priced transportation, low-cost infrastructure, free education, public health care. And you’re going to have a very high-cost United States unable to compete with the rest of the world. All it can do is make military threats or financial threats. If it tries to impose sanctions as it’s imposed on Russia, China and other countries, these are going to serve as protective tariffs for foreign countries.

When President Trump put sanctions on agricultural exports to Russia, it was a windfall for Russia. They developed their own agriculture and Russia is now the largest grain exporter in the world. Senator McCain characterised Russia as a gas station of atom bombs, but it’s a gas station with the largest farm sector in the world, and is developing an industrial integration with China and the rest of Asia. It’s a Eurasian world island as Mackinder called it a century ago, and it is becoming the economic focus of the world, leaving the United States as the high cost economy with no visible means of support, because we’re not doing our own industry anymore. We’re not competing with China. We’re letting China do all of the industry, and all of a sudden we’re dependent on it. This does not bode good for prosperity in the United States or Europe and other areas that are satellites of the US economy.

There isn’t any conflict between the USA, Russia, and China. The real conflict, the real war that is probably the true cause of the Covid plandemic and the vaccine regimes, is a global one between the One World Prometheans and the nationalists. But whereas the nationalists were successfully suppressed in North America and Europe by 70 years of relentless propaganda and immigration, they have the upper hand in China and Russia. And they have learned from what was done to the American people. Taking economic advice from globalists is about as good an idea as taking candy from a creepy middle-aged man driving a van with no windows in the back.

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