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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

And that's why you can't have truly capitalist systems with authoritarian, corrupt government. China and Russia both learning this lessons the hard ways as we speak. The core requirement for "free markets" to work is to have transparent, leveled playing field.

And while a lot of criticism against US financial system is completely valid (of course HN is bashing US first — because HN readers live there and it makes more sense to criticize something that you're more familiar with), it's 10s, 100s times healthier, just because the political competition between a multitude of actors guarantees that power will not be centralized in single hands.

My (completely idiotic and unprofessional) prognosis for the next decade: global financial system will repeat the same mistakes with India boom.

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The one difference between China and India is that of Democracy. Even though both the nations boast of a corrupt governance system, yet the fact that in India, a non functioning government is more likely to get kicked out by an increasingly well aware population, makes it a safer bet in the long term I guess.

To Quote Thomas Friedman[0]:

"If India and China were both highways, the Chinese highway would be a six-lane, perfectly paved road, but with a huge speed bump off in the distance labeled "Political reform: how in the world do we get from Communism to a more open society?" When 1.3 billion people going 80 miles an hour hit a speed bump, one of two things happens: Either the car flies into the air and slams down, and all the parts hold together and it keeps on moving -- or the car flies into the air, slams down and all the wheels fall off. Which it will be with China, I don't know. India, by contrast, is like a highway full of potholes, with no sidewalks and half the streetlamps broken. But off in the distance, the road seems to smooth out, and if it does, this country will be a dynamo. The question is: Is that smoother road in the distance a mirage or the real thing?"

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/opinion/bangalore-hot-and-...

I agree completely. Personally, I'm really optimistic about India and excited to see the progress that they had lately.

But at the same time, investor's optimism has a positive feedback right until the crash, so investors will inevitably get _more_ optimistic about India than they should.

India has a long ways to go before it catches up to China. Have you ever been? The differences in development are pretty stark.... even more so when you compare secondary cities. It's really night and day... not at all even comparable. Many Indian cities still lack decent plumbing. Westerners seem to equate India with China, some even seem to think that India is more developed on account of the english language skills and the growth of their services based economy. Couldn't be further from the truth.

Indians I know that have been to both are always surprised by how developed China is.

Westerners should travel more. It'll really open your eyes...

I have not been to China, have been to india. Something gives me hope for india: http://forum.hindivichar.com Looks like the Hindi speaking part of the country is finally discovering the internet.

Agreed. Have visited both and driven all over India and across southern / SE China.

China is cleaner, more developed, more organised, things work, better roads / facilities and generally less chaotic with less signs of extreme poverty.

I've heard this view echoed by friends who've visited China (I'm Indian). A major reason for this difference might be the fact that China opened up its markets in the late 1970's while India's market liberalization happened only in 1991.

Actually, there are a lot more differences than democracy

Modi, the current prime minister of India got into power with big majority as the coalition govt(UPA coalition) at the was too corrupt. Modi promised big reforms, like Obama when he got first elected, but nothing positive yet for the majority of population. He is some what pro business, but not enough pro business or pro masses to worth any applause. I don't think pro business and pro masses policy is mutually exclusive. So far it looks like his election campaign was just a marketing campaign to get elected.

See gas price, crude oil price and rupee/dollar rate over last few years. *sorry about the formatting as this is html doesn't care about white spaces and <pre> tags doesn't work here

year 10 11 12 13 14 15 today

$ Crude 74 109 90 99 108 61 33

Rs.gas 51 63 71 63 71 66 64

$ vs Rs 46.2 44.7 57.1 59.2 60.2 63.4 66.8

The prices are deregulated. But still even though crude prices has fallen so much, govt keeps retail gas prices costlier by increasing taxes. Taxes form the majority of retail gas price.

Taxes vary between states, which is detrimental for business due to the amount of paperwork. Unified tax rate named GST was to be introduced(its not a law yet). The outrageous statement made by someone was that even though GST will charge uniform tax rate somewhere in the range of 14-18% gas prices will be kept out of its purview for the time being. The horror!

But things are bright for India in the long term as youth have high education. All most all have college degree. There are press or internet censorship.

I meant no press/internet censorship

Keeping gas prices high isn't a bad thing. It helps India not fall into the trap of consumption increasing when prices are low and crying for subsidies when they go back up.

India used to have subsidies on retail gas prices. Now it doesn't since complete price deregulation and so whenever global crude price changes those was supposed to reflect on retail prices. As expected prices increase whenever crude price increases, but whenever crude prices decreases central govt is increasing taxes. Current govt has raised taxes on gas/diesel almost every two weeks and yet again last week.

I wrote a script to calculate what the prices should be, factoring in the exchange rate and crude price prevailing at the time and these are the results I got.

    Month/Year    [retail_price vs would_be_price(if taxes were not increased) ]

    June 2014    (Rs 71.51 vs Rs 71.51) - taxes when he got into power

    June 2015    (Rs 66.93 vs Rs 39.89)

    Jan 11, 2016 (Rs 64 vs 36.27)

Also the tax on gas prices are really complicated. Oil marketing companies refines and their selling price includes their markup. On that selling price there are a couple of central govt taxes. Now on that price(including the central govt taxes), there are couple of state taxes. Current cost of petrol/gasoline including markup of refineries is around Rs.25 Rest are taxes.

I don't understand how keeping taxes on gas prices meant that he is all marketing gimmicks? Did he promise that he'll keep gas prices low? Gas is neither cheap nor costly with the current price in India[1]. It's midway compared to most of the countries and almost the same as China. India is not a oil producing country and keeping it cheap will hurt its economy. Btw INR/USD in 2010 was way stronger than today.

[1] http://www.globalpetrolprices.com/gasoline_prices/

What I hate about the guy is the increasing religious intolerance that is happening because of this party, and him doing not much about it. He gained a lot of votes by promising to fix corruption and telling "good days are coming". People are actually frustrated as "good days are not coming".

India imports majority of crude and refines all petroleum within the country. Business aren't paying international wages for their refinery workers, they get paid normal wages like for any other Indian. Yet when it comes to selling the petroleum products refined within the country, oil marketing companies used to say they were selling at loss. Not real loss, but hypothetical loss if they weren't selling at international prices -the companies were always making profit. These are listed companies and their annual reports are public.

Now Modi may have not promised he'll keep gas prices low, but is keeping it artificially high what he should do?

Keeping it cheap will not hurt economy as it has a direct impact on prices of food and transportation. People would've been able to save more.

If you pre-pend each line with four spaces, those lines act like they are <pre>.

    year    10   11   12   13   14   15   today
    $ Crude 74  109   90   99  108   61   33
    Rs.gas  51   63   71   63   71   66   64
    $ vs Rs 46.2 44.7 57.1 59.2 60.2 63.4 66.8

> just because the political competition between a multitude of actors

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-politics-dynasties-idU...

In the west we're just better at faking being transparent, having been in the game for longer.

Let me know when China prints a few trillion dollars in currency and does not have to pay a dime for doing so and we'll discuss free markets and leveled playing fields... and corruption.

You have a very optimistic view on the US. Not one I can share unfortunately. The system is broken everywhere. The sooner we can accept that the better for everyone but if nothing changed after 2008 there is little hope.

I think the right thing to do is to discuss the issues with system(applies for all countries) with your peers on a regular basis. It will increase awareness about the problems and things will eventually get better. Taking it silently will only cause things to get worse.

The problem with that is that Americans are so irrational and polarized that you can't discuss anything with anyone. If you try discussing issues with one person, they'll start ranting about FEMA concentration camps and mass graves and how Obama is going to declare martial law any day now, but with another person they'll rant about microagressions and safe spaces.

a lot changed since 2008. fixing the last problem doesn't prevent the next one.

It is broken indeed.

It's just less broken than almost any other.

> it's 10s, 100s times healthier

You mean, except in 2008?!

No, exactly _including_ 2008.

Of course, you think that 2008 was BAD. But this is not usable data. Compare how BAD was it compared to 1998 in Russia, for example.

Not that I believe the Russian economy to be better-run than the American, but right now the US does have the big advantage over just about everyone else of being able to print the world's reserve currency, which makes it easier to make the rest of the world pay to solve its problems, and I think the US did use that trick a lot after 2008 (QE being debt monetization, and the Fed's balance sheet having grown with no clear date when it'll shrink back.) So it's a bit hard to compare the US to others.

As to how well markets functioned wrt the 2008 crisis - one question concerns credit rating agencies. If you believe that they didn't do their jobs well, then it should be troubling that they didn't go out of business, quite the contrary, it's the same small number of firms which still operate in this business. If you believe that they did do their jobs well, because the government bail-out resulted in most junk debt being repaid to creditors, then you essentially don't believe that markets function very well, as they seem to have made a correct calculation that they can extract money out of taxpayers through this junk paper, and that is not what any economist would praise as markets functioning for the benefit of society.

(Two counterarguments to the above that I heard are, the government caused the housing bubble in the first place, or alternatively the government helped smooth/stabilize asset prices, including housing prices, which is a proper use of monetary policy, and the paper was never "really" junk since housing prices rebounded later. Dean Baker argues against the latter based essentially on buying homes getting costlier relatively to renting them in bubble years. The former counterargument is voiced more rarely which is perhaps why I haven't heard a counter-counterargument. Anyway, I think this whole thing is a bit muddy...)

My original comment:

> a lot of criticism against US financial system is completely valid

> as they seem to have made a correct calculation that they can extract money out of taxpayers through this junk paper, and that is not what any economist would praise as markets functioning for the benefit of society.

Well, it's not like the credit agencies bailed out the banks themselves. The version of the criticism I have heard was that the banks (and credit agencies) knew that the taxpayers will bail them out if they fail, and therefore they took unnecessary risk - making investments just as useless as the nails made by Soviet nail factories.

Compare a US problem that caused global recession, to a single countries recession!?

Or even better compare to china that might have to down grade its growth to "normal"...

I forgot what your point was...

> Compare a US problem that caused global recession, to a single countries recession!?

It wasn't a single country's recession, it was connected to the Asia's earlier crisis and oil price plummeting.

> I forgot what your point was...

You can read it above.

2008 was connected to 97? How?

Last I checked it had nothing to do with oil, so please explain.

1998

1stop asked for an explanation. You corrected the year, but that doesn't actually explain how you think the two are connected.

>Compare a US problem that caused global recession

Its an extreme oversimplification to say that 2008 was a US problem. It was a problem of international finance, the bulk of which (maybe unwisely) is done via US financial institutions and with US financial products. That a problem with international finance was linked to recessions globally is not surprising.

Similarly, if some systematic problem in international manufacturing appeared, the bulk of which (perhaps unwisely) is done in China, we would expect it to also have global ramifications.

It turns out that a financial problem in China is currently contained because it is not a major player in international finance (yet).

Deregulation of US financial markets was the fuel that fed the fire. A simplification maybe but a stretch to call it an extreme simplification.

Well, even if that's true, we can't pretend that 2008 wasn't caused by unlevel playing field, intransparent markets, faulty regulation, corruption and great concentration of power (in the hands of banks and rating agencies).

Was it caused by those things? Or was it just a speculative bubble popping, which has happened countless times in the history of the republic, long before the modern regulatory state and modern banks ever existed?

The Market cannot fail. It can only be failed.

Poe's law applies here

Started Googling about markets being treated as religion, found this 1999 article from the Atlantic:

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm

"The East Asians' troubles, votaries argue, derive from their heretical deviation from free-market orthodoxy -- they were practitioners of "crony capitalism," of "ethnocapitalism," of "statist capitalism," not of the one true faith."

Interesting reading.

Very much speculative bubbles being popped. One of the most interesting things was what Dr. Michael Burry (one of the main characters in Michael Lewis' The Big Short) noted in a recent interview:

"The biggest hope I had was that we would enter a new era of personal responsibility. Instead, we doubled down on blaming others, and this is long-term tragic."

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/12/big-short-geniu...

And having seen that things like interest only loans are still a thing, and very much still offered and applied for, I would tend to agree.

Huge amounts of fraud too. Wall street is basically a pyramid scheme at this point where everyone thinks they'll get out on time to get rich.... mirroring symptoms of a serious gambling addiction.

Would agree, but I think greed doesn't fully capture the culture. Incompetence plays a large part in this, on the part of the regulators and the actual banks.

The regulators refused to downgrade the credit ratings of products as the banks would go to their competitors if they did, and they would lose money. Corruption, greed, incompetence... call it what you like, it still falls under fraud. If there is one snapshot of behaviour in a capitalist system that highlights the flaw of the system it has to be this. Why do regulators need to make money? An absurd conflict of interest.

It's my hypothesis that the authoritarian actions leading to 2008 and the authoritarian responses to 2008 made it worse than it should have been.

A better structured economy would have more competition and more bankruptcies. And fewer bailouts and government-arranged mergers.

The capitalist system must be able to purge bad decisions and investments naturally or it will eventually calcify like a centrally planned economy.

Totally agree. The idea that the laws of gravity shouldn't apply if you're "big enough" seems like it could throw the planets out of alignment.

It's not quite that simple. The law of gravity will not be permitted to apply to you if doing so will cause too much damage to too many people.

But several times the "bailout" kept the institution alive, but wiped out the shareholders. I thought that was at least somewhat reasonable. Wipe out the senior management too (which I don't recall whether that was done), and that might be about as good as can be achieved.

Just read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine and consider that the US didn't have anything like this even in the depths of the depression.

Well it has been proven over and over, government managed economies are not a good idea. You can hide problems longer by working the numbers but eventually it catches up with them.

China likely has earned itself a buffer because of its growth and development of many good businesses but the danger is all the propped up businesses that are state owned or owned by cronies

Which is nothing like the US, where Congress and the Senate are giant pork distribution machines?

There hasn't been a single period anywhere in the world in the last few centuries where markets haven't imploded cyclically.

In this, China is just aping business-as-usual on Wall St.

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