Hacker News Reader

Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

There is also geopolitical reasons for this. There is a high chance that east asia will be embroiled with some war coming soon, which will disrupt both manufacturing (either in china or Taiwan), or transports of goods.

Even if the North Korea problem gets solved, the China problem is still there and it wont be solved anytime soon.

If you have some streamlined manufacturing here, it is easier to fork it in case the main area of supplies goes offline due to regional wars/embargoes/troubles.

Right now relying only on east asian manufacturing is a single point of failure for apple.

View on HN

I don't understand why this is being so heavily down voted. It's a major risk theme amongst asset managers: what happens if a major war in the South China Sea disrupts ASEAN and Chinese supply chains and/or trade relations.

Seems like a wild bet to make when the region has been embroiled in conflict far worse. People were still manufacturing in China during the American (Vietnam) war.

Not many. China in the 60s and 70s had a very poor manufacturing base compared to today.

Yeah I think just a bit more stuff is being manufactured in China today versus 50ish years ago.

I believe that in the 60s, Japan was the source of many of the kinds of imports that we're now getting from China.

Sorry, I guess I haven't been following the news that closely.

Apart from NK, what's the China problem?

South China Sea.

Debt. Look at the financials in China and you'll see a huge bubble that's just beginning to burst. Going to take a year to fully materialize but it will be ugly.

People have been making that same claim for a couple of decades already [0], and it still hasn't happened.

I mean, I'm sure it will happen eventually and then all the naysayers will be 'right', but not really (broken clock, twice a day, yadda, yadda, yadda).

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coming_Collapse_of_China

Just remember people said the housing crisis would never happen in the US.

'"Someone Is Blowing Up": RBC Warns China-Induced Unwinds Are Escalating'

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-04/someone-blowing-rbc...

Just realize it's not all sunshine and rainbows in China.

They may have a recession at some point but just as recessions in the rest of the world, they usually end and the country goes back to some trendline.

I've been hearing people say that there are signs that the bubble is bursting in China for the last several years now. This time it's for real, though, right?

edit: I had a hunch you'd be the kind of person who would cite a zerohedge article as a source on this. They have been gleefully predicting the collapse of China's economy since the site's inception. No doubt, they will gleefully take credit for "predicting" its collapse, too (should it actually happen), despite all of the failed predictions year after year.

Not to support zerohedge citations but isn't it totally expected that people who see a collapse coming wouldn't be able to time it exactly? You know the common refrain, the markets can stay irrational longer than you stay solvent, doesn't that go both ways? That if I see the markets are being irrational, it may take quite a long time for the bust to actually happen? But that doesn't mean they weren't irrational and it doesn't mean I didn't see it.

Market economies go through boom-bust cycles. Predicting timing for the next bust is much more impressive than predicting that there will be a bust, eventually.

If you predict in 2016 that an apparently healthy economy will suffer a severe downturn, and it happens in 2017, that's impressive.

If you predict a severe downturn in 2009 and it only happens in 2017, that's significantly less impressive.

If you predict a severe downturn every year since 2009, that's zerohedge.

It reminds me of the peak oil prophets who went from predicting collapse by 2012 to predicting collapse, uh... eventually. Remaining pessimistic in the face of contrary data doesn't make them any smarter than being irrationally optimistic.

In that case, the market demand would sink. Everything needs recalculated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com