What is Bolstering the Chinese Economy?

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Thomas J. DiLorenzo
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On October 23, 2024, Tom DiLorenzo appeared NOW with Stacy Washington, to explain how the Chinese Communist Party is imitating what the Federal Reserve did in the early 2000s.

The original episode is available on SalemNewsChannel.com.

Stacy Washington (SW): Welcome back to Salem News Channel. There’s no room for argument when it comes to which candidate in this election will fix our economy. We know what both plans are, and John Paulson wrapped it up nicely on Fox Business.

Fox Business: And I feel like it’s so disingenuous of Kamala Harris to talk about plans to rein in inflation by, you know, getting corporations to admit that they’ve been price gouging. It’s so disingenuous to not recognize the $7 trillion in spending on how we got there. Yeah, that’s because they don’t really have an economic plan. Their plan is spend, increase government spending, increase taxes, increase the deficit. That doesn’t work.

SW: Mm-hmm. So when business people talk about the economy in conjunction with the election, you get analysis like that, not, oh, he can’t be my babysitter, so he can’t be my president. We turn now to China’s economy, trying to bolster it’s standing by citizens investing in stocks. Joining me now to break this down is president of the Mises Institute, Thomas DiLorenzo. Thomas, welcome back to the program.

Tom DiLorenzo (TD): Thanks for having me again, Stacy.

SW: It’s good to have you here. So talk to us about this. You have China’s economy and they’re allowing investments? What’s going on here?

TD: Well, I think what’s going on is the Chinese Communist Party decided they basically want to imitate what our Federal Reserve did in the early 2000s. They’re dropping interest rates and they do have allow private investment over there. And so they’re claiming that the reduction in interest rates that is being caused by a flooding more money into the Chinese economy is going to stimulate their economy. That’s the exact same argument that our Federal Reserve made in the early 2000s. They said they wanted to create a housing bubble. One of their advisors, Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist, said after the stock market crash of 2000, he said in the New York Times, we need to create a housing market bubble. Well, they did. And the Chinese economists, or Chinese government, I just read today, said the same thing. They said they want to create, they didn’t call it a bubble, they want to create “investment in housing”. But that’s what will happen. They’re flooding their economy with money and lowering interest rates, creating some sort of housing bubble. So investors are looking at this and they’re saying, well, if the Chinese economy picks up and maybe doubles the GDP growth, well, people are going to be wealthy enough to be gambling, again, in Macau, where all these American casinos are located. That’s where the investment is going now. The speculative investment is going into these mostly American-owned casinos in Macau, part of China, and the price of the stocks of these casinos has been going up very, very strongly in the last day or two because of that. But bubbles always burst. And so they’ll probably create some temporary prosperity, but the bubble will burst and no one can predict when the bubble will burst, but it will. And then that’s what happens when the central banks create too much money.

SW: So what happens in conjunction with our economy? Because like it or not, the American economy is impacted by what happens in China because they’re a major trading partner for us. When their bubble bursts, what will we see happening here?

TD: Well, when China or any country becomes more prosperous, they have a better ability to buy American goods, American exports. And so it wouldn’t be good in general for them to become poorer when the bubble bursts. But in the meantime, the American casino companies will do very well and everything related to the casino companies in Las Vegas, because they have these very big businesses in Macau now, very big casinos, some much bigger than the ones in Las Vegas. And so that part of the US economy will be prospering temporarily, but it’ll create a bust in China, just like it creates a bust in America or England or France or Mexico or anywhere else, whenever the central bank, ours is called the Federal Reserve, steps on the gas and prints too much money. That’s what happened in 2008. We had the bubble in real estate that burst. It was right after a bubble that was created in a stock market, yet again, in 2000, that bubble burst and we had a recession thereafter. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the ‘08 recession, but it was a recession, very deep recession. And that’s what’s going to happen in the economy in China, I believe.

SW: So the thing that we’re concerned with is obviously, I mean, it’s a little bit of a flex that they’re copying something that our Federal Reserve did years and years ago, but the end result will not be exactly what they’re hoping for. So have they really looked at this? What do we know about their thought process for implementing this, knowing that the possibility, the end of it could be bad?

TD: Well, it’s interesting. Our politicians are always short-sighted because they’re always looking to make themselves look good before the next election. But you’ve got a dictatorship in China, but they still want to be popular. They don’t want to be overthrown, even if you’re a dictator, especially in a country with over a billion people. And so what our politicians and politicians all over the world do is they know this. They can study the history as well as you or I can. And they know that they can pump up the economy, especially before an election, like in our economy, and which is what they’re doing now, which is sort of a feeble attempt to cut interest rates a couple of weeks ago by the Federal Reserve to help the Kamala Harris campaign. But that seems to have backfired because mortgage rates are going back up this week. And so they know that, but the game is to make themselves look good temporarily. And then when the crash happens, they blame somebody else. It was like the Biden administration created all this inflation with the help of the Federal Reserve, printing money to finance all of their endless spending programs. And now they’re blaming corporations for price gouging, which is very silly. It’s sort of the propaganda tool that Democrats always use. You know, if these corporations have the ability to just willy-nilly raise prices like they do now, why don’t they do it all the time? All of a sudden, Kamala Harris is running for president. All of a sudden, they decide, let’s make more money with price gouging. And it makes no sense at all. So it’s just a rhetorical mumbo jumbo. They’re hoping that American voters are so ignorant that they will fall for this, the price gouging thing. And Chinese communist politicians are politicians. They don’t want to make the public too angry with them. There’s always a threat of a revolution or a revolt, even in communist countries like China, which has moved away from pure communism, of course, but their government still is a communist party of China. I think they’re doing the same thing, basically, that our politicians do, trying to make themselves look good temporarily. And, from their perspective, they probably think, well, maybe that’ll invite more foreign investment in China, if they can brag that their economy is growing. more robustly, there might be more foreign investment in China.

SW: Well, I think what they’re missing is that there is no shortcut to economic prosperity. Good policy year over year brings good prospects. It’s actually a complex mix. You can’t just have good policy. You also have to have a business environment, a regulatory environment, and you have to have people who are producing products, goods, and services. And then you have to have people who are earning money to be able to purchase it. So, you know, the communist paradigm goes against the free market system. And it’s kind of hard for them to, you know, kind of pick and choose little bits of it that they wanna stick into their communist reality. I think it’s interesting that they’re at least acknowledging. This is an acknowledgement that their system doesn’t really work and ours does. As flawed as ours is, it’s far better than what they’re working with. And I think that’s the big takeaway here among the other details that you shared. Thomas DiLorenzo, president of the Mises Institute. Thank you, sir, for joining me today. 

TD: Thank you for having me.