Is this to do with your Climate Change thread?

dude we're not their sidekicks... they're gonna bypass us altogether by buying up the AUS raw material companies (mission already begun).

No. Just some strategic daydreaming after a first-rate milkshake.

duder...

is this a scientology thread?

so how did Japan end up the second largest economy in the world if they were hampered by an over stretched military?

when you say 'termited by delusional extremists' are you saying that America is a more conservative nation than Australia?

enrols in mandarin lessons

goodbye fried chicken, hello fried rice?

Have you asked the Japanese what they think Australia slutty trans-national ways? Or the Indians?

will they be three-feet tall like in Slapstick?

It's Ju Hintao, not L. Ron, Matt. Can't see the connection.

Don't get your Japan reference, Charles. As for delusional extremists, I'm just saying their political divide is so ugly and deep that no serious change will likely eventuate. Look at the health care debate.

chinese foods better anyway

I'd still rather a stealth bomber but.

best of both worlds~!

We used to have two superpowers in the second half of the 20th century. Then the USSR fell in a heap and for 20 years the Americans had the playing field to themselves. Now they're being eclipsed by the Chinese and it will, in various ways, change the world and our individual lives.

also i wouldn't rule out the US just yet - the bonds the chinese hold in the US alone give China a reason to 'help a bruva out', effectively scratching their own backs as well. Plus the size of the US military's planes in 'hybernation' alone is enough to frighten the fuck out of anyone, let alone the active army.

well japan was in this think called WW2 and they got pretty severely fucked by it.. yet still managed to end up with an economy far bigger than China's.

listen to your typical shock jock. we have that divide too. people just focus on the obvious things. they have states with full blown gay marriage, massive porn industries, legalised weed, better climate change outcomes than we'll ever get, reparations for slavery..

if Australia had 300 million people you'd bet a sizeable proportion of people would unfortunately be represented in the political-whacko camp.

I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords.

Just some strategic daydreaming after a first-rate milkshake.

damn you. now i have to get a milkshake.

does anyone really care? ignorance is bliss my peoples.

**Alan Kohler

America is being outplayed**

Barnaby Joyce said in a wild interview with The Age last week that the United States might default on its debt soon. But was the L-plate shadow minister revealing a truth normally unspoken by those in authority?

No – the US is not about to default. Greece, yes; Japan, maybe. But the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency, which means America can service its debts for quite a while with the money it prints. Japan, don’t forget, had its crisis in 1989 and even now, 20 years later, has not defaulted, even though debt is 200 per cent of GDP.

But that doesn’t mean the US out of the woods – far from it.

If you print more money, inflation makes each existing dollar worth less. That’s not a problem at the moment because the US is only now just being pulled out of recession by government debt and money printing, so prices are not rising. In fact many commentators are more worried about deflation.

When countries have to choose between the impoverishment of hyperinflation and defaulting on their debts, they frequently choose default.

And while it is hard to imagine the US facing such a choice, it has certainly taken a few steps down that path. What’s more, it seems not only mired in debt but also in the expensive obligations of global leadership.

It is borrowing money to send 40,000 extra troops to Afghanistan to try to win a war from which it will gain no real benefit.

And now China is openly gaming the climate change conference in Copenhagen to further impoverish and encircle the United States.

China, the world’s largest carbon polluter, is now holding the Copenhagen conference to ransom. To get an agreement, the US will have to borrow more money and 'compensate' China and other developed nations for its own past emissions so that China can keep increasing its own pollution.

The combination of its military obligations in Iraq and Afghanistan and the looming obligation of financing action on climate change with massive subsidies to the developing world are crushing burdens for a government already in deficit this year to the tune of $US1.4 trillion.

As things stand – even without any extra debt from a climate change deal – the US will never have another balanced budget unless taxes are raised or spending is cut. Congressional Budget Office forecasts show the budget deficit falling from 11.2 per cent of GDP in 2009 to 3.7 per cent in 2012 and then staying above 3 per cent forever.

Last week, Nobel Prize wining economist Paul Krugman, who has been calling for more debt-funded fiscal stimulus in the United States, made a sobering assessment of the employment situation following what was reported by most economists to be a turning point for the economy – a decline in the unemployment rate.

“It was basically a terrible report,” wrote Krugman. “If we want to see America return to anything that feels like full employment … My back of the envelope calculation says that we need to add around 18 million jobs over the next five years, or 300,000 jobs a month. This puts last week’s employment report, which showed job losses of 'only' 11,000 in November, in perspective.”

In an interview published in Germany’s Der Spiegel on Saturday, former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker said: “We have not yet achieved self-reinforcing recovery. We are heavily dependent upon government support so far. We are on a government support system, both in the financial markets and in the economy.”

Der Spiegel: ''Should Americans prepare themselves for a tax increase?''

Volcker: “Not at the moment, but I think we would have to think about it. The present tax system historically has transferred about 18 to 19 per cent of the GNP to the government. And we are going to come out of all this with an expenditure relationship to GNP very substantially above that. We either have to cut expenditures and that means reducing entitlements, and certainly defence expenditures, by an amount that may not be possible. If you can do it, fine. If we can't do it, then we have to think about taxes.”

Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson, wrote an article in Newsweek at the end of November headed 'An empire at risk'. In it he said: “Under no plausible scenario does the debt burden decline. Under one of two plausible scenarios it explodes by a factor of nearly five in relation to economic output.”

Who is buying US government debt? Well not households and US banks. This year they have both been net sellers.

The Federal Reserve is buying most of the bonds and foreign governments, led by China, are buying the rest in an attempt to stop their own currencies rising against the US dollar – so they can continue to sell cheap products to indebted American consumers.

Morgan Stanley predicts a shortfall in demand for US Treasury bonds of close to $US600 billion by June 2010.

In light of that, it is hard not to see bond yields rising next year, especially if the US dollar continues to decline. Foreign bond buyers are going to require higher yields to compensate for both currency and default risk.

In other words, as China screws America over climate change, it will be screwing it on the interest on its debt as the largest creditor, and watching from afar with its own massive military machine idle, while the US tries to defeat global terrorism using borrowed money.

Bond rates have more impact on the interest rates on consumer and business debt in the US than the Fed funds rate. The Federal Reserve is currently staying at 0-0.25 per cent to try to boost the economy. If bond yields rose next year it would more than offset the equivalent cash rate cut, but in any case the Fed can’t cut rates any more – it is 'zero bound'.

So a bond demand shortfall will make it even harder for the US to create the new 300,000 jobs a month that Paul Krugman says it needs.

The US is beleaguered, truly an empire at risk. And although China is happily turning the screws and using the opportunity to gain ascendancy, America is the author of its own misery.

''China, the world’s largest carbon polluter...''

is this correct? i thought the US was still ahead when it came to pollution? (or is this specifically 'carbon pollution' as opposed to total pollutants?)

Alan Kohler knows the score (edited for length from Business Spectator)

China – America's terrible enemy

When thinking about 2010, you should keep in mind two things:

1. Reflation on the scale attempted by the United States has only been tried once before, by Japan, and didn’t work; and

2. China is kicking sand in America’s face.

Notwithstanding the current dollar rally, the US is in deep trouble and China is ascendant. This generally gradual process had one of its periodic lurches last week when China sabotaged the Copenhagen talks to advance its own interests.

But on the whole it’s as much about America’s self-destruction as China’s relentless and ruthless progress.

In my view this will be the key theme of the next decade.

The only asset bubble likely to crack next year is in US government bonds, although the rise in US bond yields is more likely to be gradual than sharp because America is now the dairy cow of its largest creditor, China, to be milked and eventually slaughtered.

Gold, commodities and stocks all have further to go, and are not anywhere near bubble extremes, although stocks will likely correct savagely at some point.

For Australia, the March of China is generally good news, but as our Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister found this year, it is a difficult customer. The close diplomatic friendships and ANZUS treaty that underpin Australia’s commercial dealings with the US seem impossible with China – they are more wary, more easily offended.

But back to my first point – America’s Great Reflation. The only time such a thing has been tried before in peacetime was Japan in 1989, after the collapse of its property and stockmarket bubble.

Since then, Japan has had 20 years of less than 1 per cent real economic growth, with zero real interest rates. As an economic force – in fact any kind of force at all – it is entirely spent and going nowhere but backwards (see The spectre of stasis, December 23).

The result of virtually zero growth for two decades is a debt to GDP ratio in Japan of 200 per cent; there is no prospect of paying this back and at some point it will become unserviceable. Watch Japanese credit default swaps for clues about when that might happen.

I’m not suggesting the US is in for 20 years of deflation and zero growth (although that can’t be ruled out). But the lesson of Japan is that the easy way out is an illusion.

The result of this year’s liquidity-driven rescue of the US economy from the brink of disaster is first, a combination of excessive, homeless liquidity. Second, a likely government debt spiral and third, national moral hazard on an unimaginable scale.

In his most recent newsletter, the former editor of the Bank Credit Analyst, Tony Boeckh says there is an air of unreality in the US.

“We barely survived a near-death experience nine months ago. However, the pain and the fear for most people were brief. It was not like the 10-year depression in the 1930s that changed attitudes for two generations. The recent experience probably won't change many peoples' attitudes at all, and may even have a perverse moral hazard effect. If the US and other governments are always going to bail out the banks and other over-indebted, overleveraged, reckless players, and stick the costs onto the sober and prudent, why not join the former?”

The Wall Street Journal recently interviewed people who deliberately defaulted on their mortgages, often by the simple expedience of stopping their loan repayments and saving the money until the bank kicks them out. One family used the money for a trip to Disneyland; another took a carnival cruise to Mexico.

“It’s a better life, it really is,” said schoolteacher Shana Richey, who now rents a luxurious villa in Club Rancho Drive Palmdale, California, having defaulted on the mortgage at the family’s previous home.

Deutsche Bank expects 21 million American families to owe more than their houses are worth in 2010. A large proportion of those will deliberately default and move to a rental.

The loan losses on this process, says Deutsche, could run to US$400 billion – more than the savings and loan collapses of the late 1980s. Although, as the WSJ points out, the flip side of this is massive relief for the defaulting families, who will get billions a month in extra cash flow, and feel like the crisis was just fine. Their attitude to taking on debt in the future will be far relaxed.

Meanwhile, the US government is mired in debt and on official forecasts, unless something changes, will never return to a surplus budget.

President Obama’s attempts to reform health care have become a display of the dysfunctional polarization of American politics and the chief economist of Denmark’s Saxo Bank, David Karsboel, predicts that the US Social Security Fund will go into deficit, and technical bankruptcy, next year.

And by the way, it’s not just the US. Fitch Ratings yesterday issued its bluntest warning yet about the debt levels in Britain, France and Spain, saying they must “articulate credible fiscal consolidation programmes over the coming year, given the budgetary challenges they face in stabilising public debt. Failure to do so will greatly intensify pressure on their sovereign ratings.”

A lot of people, including David Karsboel of Saxo Bank, believe China is over-investing and that over-capacity will cause a crash.

I disagree. The over-investment this time is in infrastructure – we’ve all seen pictures of empty eight-lane freeways – which is fundamentally different, in my view, to over-investment in factories, which was the pre-2007 problem.

What’s more, China’s high level of investment is more or less matched by its savings rate. It’s true that the savings are due to what we might call negatives – the lack of social safety net and hoarding of cash by government-owned companies that don’t pay dividends – but it’s there nevertheless.

The medium term implications of this year’s massive infrastructure investment in China are positive, not negative: it will facilitate future urbanisation and lay the foundations for a consumption boom.

In addition, the Communist Party is becoming more, not less, effective at self-preservation and pushing its own and China’s interests on the world stage.

Last week’s performance in Copenhagen was truly shocking. It rejected not only any carbon reduction targets for itself, it sabotaged all attempts by other countries to agree on targets among themselves.

The only conclusion to be drawn from this is that China does not care about global warming and wants to ensure that nothing restrains its coal-based economic growth. If other countries that are concerned about global warming want to restrain their own growth to deal with it, then all the better.

China’s ruthless one-party state is at least the second most potent economic force the world has ever known, and it might yet prove to be more potent than American-style free market capitalism in the golden years between 1950 and 2000.

But since 2000, the flywheel of that force – Wall Street – has had its worst decade in history, worse than the 1930s.

But this time, at the end of a horrible decade, America faces a far more intelligent and terrible enemy than it did in 1939, whose weapons are not bombs at Pearl Harbour, or even the self-destructive nuclear threats of the Cold War, but the drip, drip, drip of a suppressed foreign exchange rate and the gradually tightening screws of the flint-eyed creditor.

Looks like they're gonna destroy the world before they get a chance to run it.

the art of war.

My girlfriend currently has the job of designing a prison for a group of government officials who were busted taking bribes.
The specs provided were 'make it like a 4 star hotel'.

haha. Shanghai visit time.

Get on it to it Goblin.
We can tour the prison hotel and go to Angels.
Also, I found Shanghai's 'The Pub' except it has a beer garden, so it has one up'd Uncle Gav.

The Tea Party and co. have realised that the Chinese make a great scare tactic - check the TV ad by Citizens Against Government Waste.

Hillary Clinton sums up the American-Chinese relationship to Kevin Rudd: ''How do you deal toughly with your banker?''

mathieson said about 1 month ago:
The Tea Party and co. have realised that the Chinese make a great scare tactic - check the TV ad by Citizens Against Government Waste.

That advert is hilarious. Assuming this is rehashed from an old cold war era advert (or a Bond film minus the scantily clad chicks) and they've updated the script by inserting 'evil chinese' in place of 'evil russians.'

America's public debt is now a record US$14,308,385,181,650 and 10 cents.

The interest bill must be astronomical.

US should check their old bank accounts - I found $25 in a State Bank Passbook account

mathieson said 35 minutes ago:
America's public debt is now a record US$14,308,385,181,650 and 10 cents.

but they got bin laden!

Compelling argument presented, but only appear to have one source. Post grad studies you'd get a fail and a please explain.

FUCK THE FAKE ASS COMMIES!

I really want to share this with non-Chinese speaking people even the video is in Cantonese.

So, the Vice Premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China is
visiting the best University in Hong Kong.

you can see tons of police pushing this skinny Uni student, who was wearing a t-shirt with political message (89/06/04), to the room. It was in front of all the reporters and media

He was detained for an hour and said it is for the student's safety.... He was very disgusted with the police force and felt very sad with the undignified manner of his own university.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCmJnnS5454&feature=share

censorship soon coming to the uk!

Nice punch on by the basketball team against the USA in a ''friendship'' match. HA!

faces!

oh mine..

Patrick Bateman PWNed by evil commies

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pvRpcdTShY