Tag Archives: Xi Jinping

It’s a broken a record, the macro stylus stuck unable to move on, just skipping and repeating the same spot on the vinyl. Since Xi Jinping’s lockdowns broke it, as it’s said, when Xi is satisfied there’s zero COVID he’ll release the restrictions and that will fix everything. The economy will go right back to good, like flipping a switch. Where have we heard that before? Everywhere, actually, but especially in China. Whether early last year, last August, and now again...

What everyone is saying, because it’s convenient, is that China’s zero-COVID policies are going to harm the economy. No. Economic harm of the past is the reason for the zero-COVID policies. As I showed yesterday, the cracking down didn’t just show up around 2020, begun right out in the open years beforehand, born from the scattering ashes of globally synchronized growth. Xi Jinping saw how a very different post-2008 global economy without any recovery was going to...

The first chapters to China’s new story now playing out in Shanghai were written down in October 2017. Planning for them had begun years earlier, their author Xi Jinping requiring more research before committing them to paper. Communist authorities there had grown increasingly concerned about the lack of growth potential for its political system by then utterly dependent for a quarter-century on the economy growing. So long as other places around the world wanted...

The guy said this was going to be the future. Not just of China, for or really from the rest of the world. Way back in October 2017, at the 19th Communist Party Congress newly-made Emperor Xi Jinping blurted out his grand redesign for Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. A country once committed to quantity of economic growth above everything else would, moving forward, come to prioritize instead the quality of it. This message was a clear signal, way back when,...

Chinese run media, the Global Times, blatantly tweeted an homage to China’s late leader Mao Zedong commemorating his 128th birthday. Fully understanding the storm of controversy this would create, with the Communist government’s full approval, such a provocation has been taken in the West as if just one more chess piece played in its geopolitical game against the United States in particular. No. The Communists really mean it. Mao’s their guy again. No. Let’s recall...

The economic news recently has been better than expected and in most cases just pretty darn good. That isn’t true on a global basis as Europe continues to experience a pretty sluggish recovery from COVID. And China is busy shooting itself in the foot as Xi pursues the re-Maoing of Chinese society, damn the economic costs. But here in the US, the rebound from the Q3 slowdown is in full bloom. Just last week we had pending home sales, ADP employment, both ISM reports,...

The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s was a comprehensive effort by Mao Zedong to regulate how people think and behave. Citizens were forced to read the “Red Bible” and honor the Communist Party with quasi-religious rituals. Mutual supervision was encouraged throughout all of society. People were told that the way of thinking and behavior advocated by Mao Zedong was the only correct one. Sixty years later, China is undergoing another Cultural Revolution, the goal...

In mid-December 2019, before the world had heard of COVID, China’s Central Economic Work Conference had released a rather startling statement for the world to consume. In the West, everything was said to be on the up. Central banks had responded, forcefully, many claimed, more than enough to deal with that year’s “unexpected” globally synchronized downturn. This view had been punctuated by Fed Vice Chairman Richard Clarida, among many others, who in early January...

It does seem, at first, a huge contradiction. On the one hand, what we know so far of China’s 14th 5-year plan apparently will lean heavily on new technologies not-yet invented to rescue the country’s economy from the pit of de-globalization the eurodollar system had thrown it into years ago. If the global economy isn’t going to recover, and there’s absolutely no sign that it will, then the one seemingly logical (though far-fetched) way forward would be if the...

One day short of one year ago, on September 16, 2019, China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) reported its updated monthly estimates for the Big 3 accounts. Industrial Production (IP) is a closely-watched indicator as it is relatively decent proxy for the entire goods economy around the world. Retail Sales in the post-Euro$ #2 context give us a sense of the Chinese economy’s persistent struggle to try to “rebalance” without the pre-2008 boost China had obtained...