Good for china , bad for most of us, because there is a hidden cost to all these cheap stuffs , it's called debt.
We could build stuff so people can actually afford it, instead of working at McDonalds or Walmart for a minimum wage, but it's not profitable enough in a world of short term profit.
China is not 1,1 billion new consumers. It's a 200 million people extension of the western economy with 900 million people in Africa level poverty.
And despite this massive human surplus wages keep rising because even assembling an iPhone is relatively hard.
And soon other Asian countries will start doing it cheaper. If that happens, China has a huge industrial plant with no internal market to afford it.
Also, the average profit of Chinese exports is just 1.7%. So basically the Chinese made massive investments based on a projection of export demand that lasts long enough for sustainable internal demand to catch up. When the discount rate turns out to be a bit higher than expected, the house of cards falls.
Think of China as the Groupon of nations.
The smart Chinese elite is also buying foreign assets as fast as they can. Like insider stock trades, when a management of a country starts divesting, that's a sign of troubles, not of wealth.
This is not to say the Chinese elite was wrong to grow via market liberation and exports. What I do say is that the bulls on China conflate revenues with profits, and activity with lasting competitive advantages.
It also means the Chinese are buying US debt not to enslave the US (hard to do that with zero procent interest rates!), but as a favor to their largest client base.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2043026/foxconn-to-speed-up-r...
What is the average net profit margin on American exports? Due to the nature of much of what the Chinese export, we can assume low profit margins, but we need some context for this.
>when a management of a country starts divesting, that's a sign of troubles, not of wealth.
Wealthy countries own vast amounts of foreign assets.
>but as a favor to their largest client base
It isn't a "favor"; Americans purchase Chinese exports with dollars. What else are the Chinese to do with all those dollars? They purchase "risk-free" government bonds. There's no magical arrangement. It's mutually beneficial.
What "stuff" are you talking about? Manufacturing? Because the US actually makes a lot of "stuff", it just doesn't need people to do it, thanks to a lot of engineers like us who have automated it to hell.
http://www.nam.org/Statistics-And-Data/Facts-About-Manufactu...
That's just 5 I could think of off the top of my head. Tried to mix it up with regards to industries too.
[1] http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2008-03-01/business/36793...
[2]http://cagematch.dvorak.org/index.php?topic=3751.0
And last I knew, Intel did a lot of its chip work in Mexico, though the supply chain issues they had (counterfeits) may have changed that.
And Intel's 22nm chips are made in Chandler, AZ.
Even/especially the ones that proudly claim to be "Made in the USA". It doesn't reflect the reality of the global market.
Hell, I know a guy with a gun business who gets all of his parts manufactured overseas, but he's allowed to put "Made in the USA" on them and it's a huge selling point to his customers just because he assembles them in his warehouse himself.
Headquarters couldn't figure out why the BOM was costing so much, so they flew an engineer down there to figure out what the problem was.
Turns out most of the locally sourced parts and raw materials were being purchased at a significant premium - from friends of some of the local managers.
Ie. giving a contract for small civil engineering works to your mate for kickbacks.
Of course in Mexico you run the risk of ending up dead if you dont go along with the scam.
It's not bad for the US because China owns treasuries. They never gave China any leverage over the US.
It's bad because buying those treasuries pushed the value of the dollar up and the yuan down. That's why the pearl river delta is the richest conglomeration of manufacturing industries in the world, and factories are being closed left, right and center in the US.
And one day it will be as hard for the US to bring that manufacturing base home as it was for China to build it up in the first place. That's when the US is really screwed.
I seem to have heard this exact same thing 25 years ago with Japan (that is @camus2's comment, not the FA). At least when Japan was our counterparty they bought real estate and companies and were not so foolish as to buy Treasury bonds.
http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/ti...
As I can't find any stats to back that up, I guess I'll leave it as my possibly untrue impression...
Let me fix that for you:
"Good for the communist party leaders, bad for China and the majority of Chinese people"
This is selling the democracy movement down the river. :-(