Miscellaneous News

[siegecrossbow]

Politico has a different read:

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But from what I glanced from her speech it's somewhere in the middle. She basically said a lot of words and they didn't really mean anything and it felt like a waste of time.

Perhaps German industrialists put a lot of pressure on her to not do a VDL.

So she did a 360.

 

[coolgod]

Looks like corporate Germany had a stern conversation with her before her visit to China. It's going to be a long and hard road that has a high chance of failure, but a truly independent EU as a new pole would be a huge win for China. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. And the 5 eyes have a monopoly on salt and vinegar anyways, so it's not an option for China.

In China, Germany's Baerbock says EU on same page as Macron​

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Poland is a backwater with no future. They can get on the right page of history or stay that way.

Are we sure she didn't get confused again? Maybe the US told her to do a 180 on Macron's China policies and she thought 180 means no change.

 

[ansy1968]

Politico has a different read:

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But from what I glanced from her speech it's somewhere in the middle. She basically said a lot of words and they didn't really mean anything and it felt like a waste of time.

Perhaps German industrialists put a lot of pressure on her to not do a VDL.

Or maybe Cursula Von Der Lying told her the trauma of Chinese airport Custom and immigration....lol

 

[siegecrossbow]

Or maybe Cursula Von Der Lying told her the trauma of Chinese immigration....lol

Still no word from her on Twitter. Is she now catatonic?

 

[CMP]

Politico has a different read:

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But from what I glanced from her speech it's somewhere in the middle. She basically said a lot of words and they didn't really mean anything and it felt like a waste of time.

Perhaps German industrialists put a lot of pressure on her to not do a VDL.

Politico is literally the official CIA spin on everything and anything. You may as well get your news from a public toilet that hasn't been flushed since original installation decades ago.

 

[siegecrossbow]

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[H2O]

Politico is pretty much a direct feed from the US state department and CIA. I would treat what they say as the official imperialist line.

Most Western based media outlets are an extension of the US intelligence community.

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WTA woke up to the economic reality of their idiotic behavior. Follow the money.

What can China do to prevent Lula from getting Gaddafi'd?

In the short term, Brazil can either shutdown all diplomatic missions or convince the Chinese to establish a military base there. The long term solution is to ensure Brazil's economy is doing better than their adversaries.

 

[CMP]

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In other words, we're never going to see him on the board of directors of ANY company with Chinese/Chinese-adjacent supply chains or Chinese operations/sales. Nor will he be hired as an uber high paid consultant/speaker by any of those companies. I wonder if this will have an impact on lobbying too. China should work on trying to get Silicon Valley and Wall Street onboard with blacklisting this guy and others like him.

 

[sheogorath]

By getting Mexico and Argentina to flip right before CIA could launch an operation.

The issue with Mexico is that presidents only serve 1 6-years term, so Obrador is out no matter what and opens the gate for pro-US cucks to slide right back in.

 

[xypher]

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Interesting piece from AA, it essentially underscores the sheer magnitude of China's developmental achievement that many propagandized and uninformed Westerners often seek to trivialize ("oh, it's not miracle, just big population", etc.). It shows that the much lauded "global development" of the post-Cold War world order was actually a mirage with development primarily concentrating in East Asia:

The crux of the problem is this: despite attempts to find alternative models of economic development, there is no widely replicable strategy to develop a country—simply put, to turn it from poor to rich—that does not involve an economy becoming highly industrialized. But in recent decades, the growth of manufacturing sectors, and thus of economic development more broadly, has been overwhelmingly concentrated in East Asia, particularly in China. Across the bulk of the poor world—here we have in mind Latin America, South Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa—economies have been experiencing a more disturbing trajectory: simultaneous deagrarianization and deindustrialization, especially in the years after 1980.

As a matter of fact, since 80s there are basically only three growth miracles and all of them are located in East Asia - South Korea, China, Taiwan. China alone was responsible for the bulk of global poverty reduction that is often bragged by the WB and similar insitutions:

To say that China’s contributions to global poverty reduction statistics are outsized would be an understatement. China’s gains have contributed about 45 percent of the total reduction in the “extreme poverty” metric since 1981. But at higher levels of income—ones more representative of durable entrance into actual middle-income status—Chinese contributions are even stronger. At $5 a day, China is responsible for nearly 60 percent of total gains. At $10 a day, several dollars above the threshold of poverty for upper-middle-income countries—but still translating to an annual income of just $3,650—China is responsible for a full 70 percent of global poverty reduction since 1981.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has been moving to a different trajectory, including the "supapowa":

Most emerging markets have not found an engine of durable growth comparable to manufacturing—most have indeed grown over the last few decades, but dependence on services and commodities exports has not made them rich. Thus most “developing” countries—we are skeptical of that euphemistic label—are in a worse structural position than they were a few decades ago: less economically complex and more socially unstable, with their developmental coalitions, if they ever existed, badly frayed. For all the intermittent hype around “rising India” or “rising Africa,” systemic dynamics—deindustrialization, ecological disruption, demographic headwinds—will pose severe challenges to economic development over the coming decades. New waves of industrialization and meaningful development are unlikely in these parts of the world.

There was a bright spot in 00-15 which was fuelled by the commodity supercycle due to Chinese demand but as all resource-driven development cycles, it eventually ended in a bust:

Income growth in the poor world outside of China appears weaker still when one considers how much was the result of the 2000–15 commodities boom—and thus, indirectly, of Chinese growth. Hot commodities markets in those years allowed Latin American, Southeast Asian, and some African nations to increase incomes and reduce poverty. But those income gains, dependent as they were on the knock-on effects of Chinese growth, masked a more disturbing trend: the structural weakening of these countries’ development potential. Incomes are higher and poverty is lower today than in the past. But the type of development takeoff seen in China is more out of reach for poor countries now than it was a few decades ago.

The real golden age of the GLOBAL development was actually during the period from 1950 to 1980:

For the countries of the poor world, this meant three decades of vigorous growth, with rapid industrial expansion underwritten by an upswing in the commodities supercycle. An international financial regime built on the Bretton Woods model placed limits on capital mobility, and allowed a degree of financial stability that helped emerging markets pursue aggressive economic development strategies without the boom-bust dynamics that would later become so common. It is now hard to recall the optimism of that period: as Rodrik has written, in a large number of developing countries—including Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico, Iran, Pakistan, Tunisia, the Ivory Coast, and Kenya—average economic growth exceeded 2.5 percent per capita per year during the 1945–75 period, translating to a doubling of incomes roughly every three decades. An optimistic, state-centered national developmentalism was in vogue...

For the relatively richer economies of the poor world, like Brazil or Mexico, growth was so strong as to place them on trajectories of rapid convergence with Europe and the United States. Had Brazil’s per capita GDP continued to grow at its 1970–75 average rate for twenty-five more years, it would have been richer than France and the United Kingdom by the year 2000. With the ineluctable march of progress and growth so evident, everything seemed to be going according to plan. It was these strong performances that allowed the modernization theorist Rostow to predict, as he did to John F. Kennedy in 1961, that nations like Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, India, the Philippines, Taiwan, Turkey, and Greece would “attain self-sustaining growth by 1970,” along with “possibly” Egypt, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan.

Even the poorer nations of the Third World were remarkably ambitious during this developmental golden age. Places like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire), Libya, and Zambia were growing rapidly thanks to demand for their natural resources, and seemed intent on using the proceeds to support speedy catch-up modernization, symbolized by novel infrastructure like Mobutu’s trico nuclear reactor or Gaddafi’s “Great Man-Made River.” The Ivory Coast, of all places, was considered a poster child for economic development, the namesake of the now-forgotten “Ivorian miracle.”

This period has ended with the death of the Bretton Woods system and introduction of the fiat dollar (Nixon shock), followed by oil shocks of the 70s. Those events led to rapidly rising inflation which culminated in the Volcker shock:

Between 1979 and 1982, the average price for lumber fell by 40 percent, copper by 25 percent, coffee by more than 20 percent, and sugar by about 10 percent. But the pain in the poor world was arguably much greater. The booming commodity cycle met its chaotic death, and dozens of economies screeched to a halt; expansionary fiscal programs that had been built on the assumption of strong growth soon found themselves in crisis, while higher borrowing rates significantly increased the cost of servicing dollar-denominated debts. Brazil is paradigmatic: while from 1960 to 1980 real per capita GDP increased by more than 140 percent, from 1980 to 2000 it grew by less than 20 percent. Similar decelerations, recessions, or depressions occurred all over the poor world, leaving lasting damage. Guatemala’s per capita GDP in 2018 was only 20 percent higher than its 1978 level; the Ivory Coast’s only 16 percent higher. Some places never recovered. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, Niger, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the Central African Republic, per capita output was significantly lower in 2018 than it had been forty years earlier.

The Western ideological mantra of "liberalization = development" could not be further from truth - not only it did not help to the economies back on track, in many cases it resulted in the total governmental collapse:

The “structural adjustment” programs that the IMF required for debt relief, or which were advocated independently by enthusiastic liberalizers like Hernando de Soto, further diminished state capacity through privatizations, deregulation, and government layoffs. In desperation, many poor-world governments began to liberalize their capital accounts in order to spur foreign investment, increasing volatility and culminating in a series of financial crises—in Mexico in 1994, in various Asian economies in 1997, and in Russia in 1998. Yet all these “reforms,” despite the support they received from Western economists or foreign acolytes like de Soto or Anatoly Chubais, did little to improve growth fundamentals. Instead, they gave the poor world the hollowed-out states with which they would enter the new century. Many public sectors had been so desiccated by the chaos that they were simply unable to manage the societies over which they presided; in the worst-hit places—like Somalia, where state collapse in the 1990s led to the return of customary law—what little remained can be termed, in the words of the Nigerien historian Rahmane Idrissa, “government by means of the aid industry,” with exenterated states surrendering core governmental functions to the organs of the international humanitarian complex.

I will stop there because of the character limit but it is only a half or so of the article, so recommend reading it when you have time.