Posted on 11/08/2011 5:37:21 PM PST by Kaslin
Global Crisis: The news these days is filled with stories about the euro zone economies and their ongoing crisis. But another, potentially bigger and even more important crisis is brewing — this one in China.
Amid seemingly endless stories about the Chinese Miracle and how China's soaring economy is about to overtake the U.S. comes news that suggests the death of America as No. 1 may be exaggerated — and, in fact, may be dead wrong.
Indeed, China's economy may be on the cusp of a major growth reversal.
The cause: China's imploding real estate market. Since late summer, Chinese home prices have tumbled, partly a result of Chinese government policies intended to keep the economy from overheating.
Barclays Capital Research, the venerable British bank, predicts China's home prices will fall 10% to 30% next year, hitting the economy hard — and putting at risk the Chinese economy's 20-year string of 10% average GDP growth.
But that's only the beginning of the Big Cooldown.
Much of China's growth over the past three years has been fueled by a massive pile of debt. Chinese banks have lent an astounding $8 trillion since 2008 — an amount that dwarfs the Eurozone's $4 trillion in debt.
That debt binge is now abruptly ending as China begins to ratchet up interest rates and limit home-buying to keep prices in line. An epic bust is coming.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
Goodbye, Taiwan.
very dire.
a global slow down at least.
I thought these guys invented the abacus?
Pei-Ping
May I suggest “The Coming Collapse of China.” by Gordon R. Chang?
Just the end of another Dynasty - move along nothing to see here.
I’ll read that FOR SURE!
I vaguely recall having read a North Korea-related book by an author who had a similar name.
I’m not sure what was to be expected otherwise. Were in the tank which means were not buying as much of their crap which means they go in the tank too. I know we are not the only buyers; but we did define the top tier.
You could indeed be right about Taiwan. I think it might be a race though between Taiwan and widespread and possibly high tech coordinated riots through out rural and Urban China. Especially if there is a major drought.
Because of all of the now polluted former farmland by Factories with no pollution controls the amount of arable land in China has decreased greatly.
And those factories were permitted because anything that reduced manufacturing costs was desirable in the need to reduce or eliminate competing factories or industries in the United States.
Now... Now it is coming back to bite them in the buttocks. In my opinion the great gamble they made is going to go bust on them.
Not sure how this will play out. China’s economy is nowhere near as hollowed out as ours. They’re more reliant on investment and trade economically, whereas gummint and housing were our economic bedrock when the crisis hit.
Very informative.
I don’t think they’ll go peacefully.
bttt
It was hard to keep up their fake accounting I guess.
I think the Spratly Islands might come first though. As a warm up?
Many of the factories and corporations in China are owned by government. The PLA owns a bunch of them too. ALso many industries in China are owned 49% by government.
They had their own “stimulus” building many new cities that sit empty and will crumble before anyone could expect to be able to afford them. Their domestic economy is still pretty much controlled by government. Outside of the major cities I wonder how many residents will even feel any collapse?
My info is that outside the major cities, they are 90% subsistence farming, though they have started to modernize their ag sector in the last 5 years. Ag will probably stay solid and I agree with you that most rural farmers probably wouldn’t skip a beat if Beijing burned to the ground.
I’m curious as to whether they’ll let the ghost cities crumble, or if they’ll actually act like commies for a change and just assign the houses on a lottery basis or something.
Along with being the world’s largest steel & chemical producer by a pretty wide margin, there are a few light manufacturing industries that are practically Chinese monopolies at this point. That gives them some resistance to downturns. I think the big question is whether or not that part of their economy will just soldier on with or without the west and pull them through the other side like it did back in 2008.
Quite a few pundits thought that a US recession necessarily meant they were doomed too. Not so. They had 1-2 quarters of slow growth, and it was pretty much back to business as usual for them.
We live in interesting times. =P
Demanding payment for our debts held by the Chinese in the form of food is not unlikely.
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