Is China actually bankrupt?
articles.moneycentral.msn.com
articles.moneycentral.msn.com
Thus, China's "bankrupcy" is nonsense as long as the government is willing to up taxes.
Also, just as you have to evaluate the P/E ratio of a company in the light of its growth rate, you have to evaluate the debt of any entity in terms of its growth rate.
E.g.: would I be happy to loan $100k to someone earning $25k/yr ?
No.
...but what if I knew for a fact that the person's income was going to double every year for the next 10 years?
Well, that's a different story: in 10 years, the person's income will be $25 mill/year, and the debt will be trivially easy to repay.
China has had a 10% GDP growth rate for a decade now. That means that every decade their GDP is 2.5x higher than before.
A "high" debt load (measured in % of current GDP) seems a lot less worrying in that context.
To really nail the issue down, you need to figure out if they're going to keep up that growth rate, and China won't grow at that rate forever ... but another 10 or 20 years sounds like a safe bet.
In the USA, we stopped publishing our M3 figures 7 or 8 years ago -- a stunning lack of transparency, but as the article says, all governments lie about their finances.
The fact they picked China gives it a high propaganda rating in my eyes.
Anyone really know?
What exactly is there to find calming about this smoke-screen information? That China might not be in as much trouble as us? I guess considering the incredible amounts of Dollars they hold that might be comforting incase they start to sell them off. Or that if they aren't in so much trouble then perhaps we aren't either? I can assure you that that isn't the case whatever the truth about China.
The question at hand is essentially: What is the truth about China? I am not sure why you are bringing up US and UK finances and itching to make the comparison.
Sure, making China look bad might further interests in the west, but it says nothing as to the article's accuracy. It is good to note that the article may be biased against China, but I think the focus should be on the facts and analysis provided.
> What exactly is there to find calming about this smoke-screen information?
I don't think berntb was saying the article made him feel calm -- I think he was calling into question your credibility, just as you have called into question the journalist's:
>> I would have felt calmer if that assuring voice wasn't the third comment from a month old account.
Right, I meant that weego's comment were calming, since China and the West are connected economically. If one gets big problems it will probably spread to the other.
I've just seen too many new accounts argue positions like defending China's behavior in Tibet, etc to trust unknown voices about things that can look bad for China's government.
I'll take that -4 as a notice to try to write better/clearer. :-)
I thought China is trying to maintain an exchange rate (or rate "band") with the USD.
What about interest payments? What about the risk of having the debt called in, or the risk of using up all of one's credit?
If your doing business in China, massive debt heightens the risk that you simply won't be paid. The real risk here is ever tightening controls on Chinese borrowing and investment dollars flowing in. That would have a crippling effect on overall growth.
Articles like this always strike as being not only fuzzy from an economic perspective, but also willfully blind to the political implications.
I have VS2008 and SQLProfiler, even the Windows Task manager open in the background and they all have parts flickering every ~4 seconds when this page is opened in chrome.
For example in Visual studio the Solution Explorer is refreshing every four seconds.
anybody have any ideas? it's kind of unnerving. Or maybe it's just me.
With Chrome and VS2008 with a project open I at least get the Solution Explorer refreshes you described. I don't have time to investigate further right now but my first reaction was that it was a bit scary that a webpage would be able to influence a separate application like that... But a more likely scenario is that VS has hooked up a debugger to the thread and it triggers this behavior.
I don't have any experience with .NET on the web, so I can't say for sure. But I am for sure going to bookmark this and have a look at it later.
Thanks! :)
If you go to the chrome options page, and look at the under the hood tab, that whole scroll region flickers too.
Chrome's task manager shows that silverlight is loaded somewhere on that page. maybe that is it.
We're going to be explaining to school children how every sovereign entity in the world can be in crippling debt simultaneously for centuries. Here's hoping those next societies actually learn something from this. With a bit of luck and a whole lot of making hard choices, perhaps ours will be one of them.