Kaplya [none/use name]

This always needs to be done, the question is how do you handle this delicate balance without screwing things up, because way too much capital investments are now tied up in the real estate sector.

According to some calculations, the real estate sector now weights >20% of the GDP growth in China if you take into account all the other non-related companies that have also invested in real estate. One false step and a lot of those companies will go insolvent.

I wrote an entire comment here about China’s real estate bubble and why it is such a challenging problem for China (spoiler: no, it won’t collapse lol, but there’s no easy solution either).

This is why China staying as a net exporter country (instead of an internal circulation i.e. domestic consumption model) always going to be a dead end. If they had transitioned decades earlier, they wouldn’t be in this situation right now.

The Wire

I have said this on the news mega the other day: there will be a lot of austerity budget coming soon all across Europe this year. Lots of cuts in welfare and social services, education, healthcare, climate etc.

News like this is just to prime the people to accept why their lives are going to be shitty from this point onwards. Blame the evil Russkies. Certainly not the capitalists. (In case this is not clear, yes, that’s fascism in the making)

I understand what you wrote but it still doesn’t answer the question of how to finance the very expensive undertakings of transitioning into renewable energy.

The US subprime mortgage crisis really fucked everyone up during the 2009 global recession. The EU was only able to recover through the acquisition of cheap Russian gas, which allowed them to manufacture products at a competitive price while retaining a high living wages for European workers.

The European economy could not have recovered to the extent they had in the 2010s without Russian gas, which, as I had emphasized, is crucial for the investment in green technologies. European wealth didn’t come out of nowhere you know. You need the surplus/profit so they can be re-invested in new technologies.

Rather than replace Russian fuel with next-generation renewables, the continent has increasingly turned to American natural gas. But it’s risky, too.

I keep hearing this argument about transitioning to renewables, but can anyone provide a convincing source about how Europe can achieve this exactly?

Transitioning into green energy is very expensive at this stage and cheap Russian natural gas was the intermediate step taken for that to happen - to lower the production cost to obtain adequate export revenues to finance renewable technologies. This chain is already broken, and European trade has suffered tremendously from expensive production cost, while they are being cornered by both China and Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. Who’s going to finance the renewables? The private industries see no prospect for long-term profit especially when China has already outproduced everyone else in the world.

The European Commission is not concerned about a growing dependency on US LNG because there aren’t the same levels of political risks as with Russia, said a senior EU official who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly.

Sorry but this is just cope. At 28500 sanctions imposed against Russia (which makes Russia the most sanctioned country in history) and not even producing the tiniest of splash, the Europeans have lost so much more compared to Russia since 2022.

What are you basing this on?

The lines are going up everywhere for the rich people. The economy is seriously doing very well if you belong to the top 1-5% in America right now. They all tried to fantasize about how Biden would screw up the economy but it never happened lol. It only made them far richer than when they were under Trump. Now, nobody wants the gravy train to stop.

The most impressive part is that Biden managed to make rich people richer while screwing poor people along the way. Biden gave them the satisfaction of being able to see poor people suffering while their numbers go up. That’s something they had wanted Trump to deliver but didn’t happen.

Worth noting that Hillary pulled in more funds than Trump did in 2016 and she still got washed

Which is exactly why they won’t let this happen a second time.

Your average Republican voter, sure, I 100% agree with you. But I am talking about the donor class, the only class that matters when it comes to deciding what’s going on under the American democracy. Even the Republican donor class is starting to be sold on Biden being the better qualified president.

On the other hand, it is funny to see Republican boomers who wanted to hate Biden so much by blaming “inflation” on him and “predicting a Biden recession all over the last 2 years” only to see their asset wealth shot through the roof, far more than they could have imagined than under Trump. Must be a cognitive dissonant moment for them.

Once again, the DPRK was NOT an impoverished country even after it was being bombed to shit! It was one of the fastest growing economies in Asia and fared closely with post-war Japan’s reconstruction. The DPRK in the 1960s had higher living standards than China, South Korea and other Asian economies that rose in the 1980s.

I wrote an entire comment here if you’re interested.

The reason the DPRK couldn’t pay off the Volvo debt was because of the 1972 drought in Europe that caused short falls in Soviet crop harvest. The “Russian wheat deal” resulted in the USSR spending heavily to purchase grain abroad on the international market, causing global grain prices prices to be inflated everywhere else. The DPRK, which as I had written on the linked comment, was severely lacking in food security and depleted much of its foreign reserves purchasing food in the early 70s with highly inflated price.

This was the reason why the DPRK couldn’t pay back Volvo. This was the reason why the DPRK would spend the next few decades going after a self-reliance policy (Juche can be roughly translated to something like “self-reliance”), trying to conquer nature and increase food production on a very cursed land that is the Korean peninsula, to much disastrous consequences.

As you should. I try to raise awareness about how dangerous the dollar can be because too many people think that the US empire is on the brink of collapse just because it is losing a few wars currently, forgetting that the US has lost near every war since 1945 except maybe for the 1991 Gulf War and still managed to dominate the world like nothing has happened.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I have been saying this for a long time: the Democrats are going to eat the Republican’s lunches. Racism, immigration, warmongering, support for police brutality - whatever that used to be the pillars of the Republican platform, the Democrats are doing them so much better and the libs are cheerfully clapping for “four more years!”

MAGA Republicans really only have “woke culture” and “transgenderism” to cry about these days. Their desperation is a sign of losing grounds, as was evident when their anti-abortion stunt backfired. But the smart Republicans, who want a competent leadership that passes conservative legislations but not too overt about it, are noticing what Biden has done for them.

highlight its importance in lib world building and ideology anyway

So they’re saying this is the Mueller Report of the left?

RUSSIA>CHINA

BRICS Bank Aims to Increase Local-Currency Borrowing to 30%

• Dollar funding will continue to dominate, CFO Maasdorp says

But the majority of the bank’s funding — about 70% — will continue to be denominated in dollars, he said.

“The bank’s capital is in US dollars. Our reporting currency is US dollars. So the dollar is hot-coded in the DNA of the bank,” he said.

No shot. Everyone’s dragging their feet about de-dollarization at BRICS. My biggest disappointment of 2023, after all the encouraging talks about doing it during the 2022 summit.

I actually anticipated a war in Ukraine (because I had been listening to Alex Mercouris and for months throughout 2021 he was very pessimistic about the various diplomatic negotiations leading up to February 2022), I simply did not expect it to happen this soon. I thought it would be another year or so, but those who had been following closely the US-Russia summit in 2021 knew that the US was dead set on provoking a war in Ukraine.

If the dollar loses its hegemony status, then likely. But it’s going to be a while away, probably decades like you said.

The Germans were also living through hyperinflation and severe currency devaluation as they were being forced to pay reparations. This is not even remotely the same situation. For all we know the American bourgeoisie just got off record profits and stock market performance under Biden. Nobody is going to give that up lol.

This is just the equivalent of rich kids who live off their parents’ wealth throwing tantrum. At the end of the day, nobody dares to cut ties from the family wealth. Sure, some might be crazy enough to do it, but most of the time it doesn’t end well for them.

No country is ever going to give up the dollar just to trade with Texas. Literally nobody. This is how the US impose its sanctions and embargo against Cuba and all the Bad Countries.

I can guarantee you that no balkanization is going to happen in the US.

Why? Because this is no longer the time period where individual states can build up their gold reserves as a store of their wealth. No, the US dollar is unparalleled in history in the sense that it allows the US to get “free lunches” from all over the world with junk papers.

I love quoting from this article from 2022 because the Californian finance department accidentally revealed a very crucial fact:

If you look at all of the personal income tax returns that were filed in California in the year 2020, just 1% of the total number of income tax returns that were filed were responsible for more than 49% of all of the personal income tax that was paid in that year. And unlike most of us who get our income from wages and salaries, that very narrow band of taxpayers derives a lot of their income from things like capital gains, stock markets [and] bonuses that are tied to corporate or stock performance. So when the markets are doing very well, those individuals are doing very well and state revenues are doing very well. Conversely, when the markets go south, their fortunes don’t do very well and the state’s revenues decline as a result.

Let’s parse this paragraph: California, the richest state in the US, derives much of its tax revenues from capital gains such as stocks and bonds. Yeah, good luck losing access to the dollar, if any US state even dares to contemplate about seceding for real. Their wealth and living standards are going to plunge overnight. Good luck with that.

Read my response to the other user.

Biden’s proposed corporate tax is supposed to take in $222 billion over 10 years, and his billionaire tax $440 billion over 10 years, so let’s make that $66 billion per year.

Biden’s Fed rate hike has pumped out $1 TRILLION dollars to the rich people in 2023 alone.

You can tax corporations and billionaires all you want, but the rich people all know who benefit them the most. The numbers don’t lie.

Trump’s tax cut is a joke compared to Biden’s Fed rate hike that has pumped out $1 TRILLION dollars to the rich people in 2023 alone.

Biden’s proposed billionaire tax is supposed to rake in $440 billion over 10 years, and the corporate tax $222 billion over 10 years, that’s $66 billion per year, while $1 trillion is given back to the rich. How is it even comparable between the two?

Biden made S&P500 gone up 50% higher than Trump’s highest point in just 2 years. If you owned stocks and bonds like most rich people do, you’ve just been made much much more wealthier than during Trump’s era.

We’re not even talking about all the wars that have massively benefited the military industrial complex, the oil and gas industries, and the financial sector.

What’s more, Biden made white people richer and black people poorer:

Source: Federal Reserve, 2023

This matters a lot to the white racist conservatives. Trump knows how to talk big but he cannot deliver. Biden proves that he can get things done.