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Comment by brap | Hacker News Reader

The number of people in this thread living in the West and saying "let's blindly copy an authoritarian policy made by an authoritarian regime", without considering any 2nd or 3rd order effects this might have, is alarming.

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I'm not hearing any of the "blindly" stuff. It's more like "China has done to their monopolies what I've wished would happen to ours for a while now".

Like strong arming US companies into putting party shills onto their boards? Disappearing CEO's for months at a time? I'm glad the US doesn't have to resort to CCP corporate facism and thugery. We're all doomed if they do.

Similarly outrageous things could be said about any country. <faux outrage> Would you prefer politicians who are in the pockets of lobbyists? Politicians who repeal regulation that keeps a bank with subpar risk management from getting too big to fail? </faux outrage>

No one has to blindly copy anyone. However, nuance seems to missing in western discussions these days (I say western because these are the discussions I'm mostly aware of). Nuance is difficult. When everything becomes hyperbole, it gets harder to learn best practices from other countries.

Edit: Added <faux outrage> tags

It's ironic that you say "nuance seems to missing in western discussions these days" after making a sweeping allegation about politicians and lobbyists.

Oh come on. I don’t have a dog in this particular fight, but if you can’t accept politicians being in the pockets of lobbyists as a premise for an argument you are either being naïve or intellectually dishonest.

I was merely trying to show how such strawman statements could be made for anybody and any country. I keep forgetting how tone and subtext can be lost in text format :)

He said that those kinds of statements would be outrageous.

> Similarly outrageous things could be said about any country.

Not truthfully, they can't.

The US is already a corporate fascist state. The difference between the US and CCP is that in the US, the corporations control the government.

Straw man. Please don't do this.

Is any of that required to break up a monopoly?

Has any of that ever happened in the US in the past to break up monopolies?

GP is confused about the distinction of systems where bad actors exploit the system, with systems where bad actors are the system. So for GP ("[no] hyperbole"), corruption is "similarly outrageous" as an unaccountable state that can disappear people. This error in judgment is possibly caused by the unrestrained greed of the Western elite in the past 3 decades that shades the authoritarian supreme leader type states.

You would think the distinction between "rule of law" and "leader knows best" type of approaches would be clear at this late date. Apparently not.

If you had a leg to stand on you’d argue against the view that OP has actually expressed. I get that you hate China or whatever, but don’t air your dirty laundry here.

The Sherman Antitrust Act is authoritarian policy? Nobody is saying to blindly copy China.

So just because China is doing it, we shouldn't break up monopolies, even though they by their own nature weaken democracy?

Also, people here REALLY misunderstand why China is doing the things it's doing.

Their FX reserves are running perilously low. They are looking for ANYTHING they can do to get foreign cash. I'm hearing rumors that they are the ones who tapped out the FIMA facility. Could get ugly.

I know somebody is going to @ me with the 3T number, but the only data I trust is China's holding of Treasuries. That's been falling quickly.

How did China even managed to run out of foreign cash?

This is huge news for me. They were always swimming in export profits / probably still are / travel limits since COVID means that obvious leak of travelling and spending abroad is plugged.

How could they run out of cash?

They didnt. He is just making it up. China has been dumping US treasuries recently. Maybe he is confusing that with China's foreign reserves drying up.

...

In any case, Yuan is the new foreign currency. And China has, well, all of it...

For clarity, China de-prioritizes T-bills in favor of US Federal agency bonds which are nearly the same risk but slightly higher returns/interest rates. They currently hold $1.2 trillion in federal USD Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/SBA/FHA bonds.

Higher reward, similar risk, still perfectly reasonable USD FX reserves.

The last point is all that matters. It will be painful and take a while for Americans to come to grips with it, or we will all die in an apocalypse when they can't accept it.

Remains to be seen. It is not clear that China has the rule of law that the world needs in a foreign currency. Even the US has been pushing their luck on this front but they are better than China.

Economically, demographics are insanely against China and it is not clear that immigration is a viable way for them to close that gap.

Finally, their unique political system has not been tested during a period of low growth. It is not clear they have the political stability to be a reserve currency. Again, the US has been pushing their luck.

https://www.cfr.org/blog/chinas-rising-holdings-us-agency-bo...

> the only data I trust is China's holding of Treasuries

- Do you not trust China's holding of US Federal Agency bonds? like Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/FHA/SBA? China holds $1.2 Trillion of these, slightly higher interest rates than T-bills.

- Even at their peak, T-bills only formed <7% of China's USD reserves. You really think China only needed $200 billion of FX reserves and everything else is probably faked?

<7%? You must be REALLY misreading the data. China now holds <$900B in treasuries. Their official reserve number is over $3T, I'd argue it's probably $1.5T. It's never gone as low as 7%, not even close lol

Source on china Treasury holdings - https://ticdata.treasury.gov/Publish/mfh.txt

Source on offical China reserves - https://tradingeconomics.com/china/foreign-exchange-reserves but as I mention, I don't trust this

Like, for real, look at the chart in your link. It shows agency debt as being much smaller than Treasury notes and bonds.

That is a gross misrepresentation. "A broken clock is right twice a day." Antitrust is not an inherently authoritarian policy. It can be selectively used for authoritarian ends, as it appears to be the case here. It can also be used more systematically to make markets more competitive.

Just because you haven't been thinking about this kind of thing for a while, doesn't mean others haven't.

Supporting these kind of policies many times is not a result of thinking about any kind of consequences, even first order consequences.

They just want to get back at something they don't like. Unfortunately this is the basis of too many policies, regardless of whether they are a net positive or not.

Game theory wise what do you see as some of these 2nd3rd order effects?

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