Category Archives: China

‘Taper Tantrum’ About Life With Less Quantitative Easing

China, Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation

Essentially, the monetary upheaval being experienced has come about because of a mere threat of the withdrawal of quantitative easing. The sell-off that “took the Dow Jones down more than 10 percent from its peak valuations” must be seen in the context of “seven years of zero percent interest rates,” avers fancier and Austrian Economist Peter Schiff. At work are gains that have come about likely not “from bona fide improvements in the economy,” but due to “the twin props of Quantitative Easing and zero percent interest rates.”

“The Fed has already removed one of the props, and it’s no accident that the markets have gained no ground whatsoever in the eight months since the QE program was officially wound down. As the market considers a world without the second prop, a free fall could ensue. …”

… Stock valuations [have been] extremely high and earnings are falling and the economy is clearly decelerating. The steady march upward in stock prices has been enabled by a wave of cheap financing and share buybacks. There are very few reasons to currently suspect that earnings, profits, and share prices will suddenly improve organically. This market is just about the Fed.

And Donald, “The Fed Is Spooking the Markets, Not China.”

UPDATED: Lee Kuan Yew Knew A Thing Or Two (Like When To Cane An American)

Asia, China, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence

Ah, intelligence: When last was I moved by the intelligence of an American public persona—the teletarts, the presstitutes, the egos in the anchor’s chair, the politicians? If you mean moved to vomit, then all the time. Conversely, I could not listen to Lee Kuan Yew without being impressed by his enormous intelligence. Singapore’s “prime minister for 31 years, widely respected as the architect of Singapore’s prosperity,” died at 91.

More than anything, Lee Kuan Yew, who retired in 1990, understood that human capital, not natural resources, makes a society thrive.

The Cambridge-educated lawyer led Singapore through merger with, and then separation from, Malaysia.
Speaking after the split in 1965, he pledged to build a meritocratic, multi-racial nation. But tiny Singapore – with no natural resources – needed a new economic model.
“We knew that if we were just like our neighbours, we would die,” Mr Lee told the New York Times in 2007.
“We had to produce something which is different and better than what they have.”

And:

Lee’s role as the founding father of Singapore [is what] he will be most remembered for and which gave him that global status in the first place. His success in turning Singapore from a tiny third-world country – at the time of its independence separated from Malaysia and under threat from neighboring Indonesia – into a first-world city state is a feat to behold. While few expected Singapore to survive, it has thrived far beyond the wildest dreams of many, including Lee himself who once reportedly dismissed small island states as a political joke.

Alas, there “was a darker side to the Singapore story” (said in Keith Morrison’s most ominous, Dateline voice).

But we won’t speak ill of a man who loved his people and was genuinely loved by them, who didn’t spread democracy by force to nobody, kept his military mitts to himself, and did Americans a great favor by inspiring the public paddling of a visiting truant teenager, Michael Fay, when he spray-painted cars in Singapore of 1994.

UPDATE (3/23): Facebook thread:

Kerry Crowel: I’ve used a quote of his (“In multicultural societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”) many times when arguing with open-border, amnesty advocates .
18 hrs · Unlike · 3

Myron Robert Pauli: While perhaps too authoritarian for my standards (but how much better are Bloomberg and Guiliani??), Lee improved a lot of things to make a modern Singapore. Another interesting comparison would be to compare Abe Lincoln (from when he took office to when he died) with Deng Xiaoping (from when he took power to when he died) and ask who freed more people or lifted them from poverty and who butchered more people (how does Tienanmien Square casualties compare with Antietam?).
9 hrs · Unlike · 1

Hastings Ragnarsson: “A leader is best when people barely know he exists; not so good when people obey and acclaim him; worst when they despise him.” ~ Laotzi /// Wo jing ni yi bei, Lingdao.

China News

China, Environmentalism & Animal Rights, Regulation, Socialism

Yesterday came the news that the Chinese allegedly hacked into the U.S. Postal Service computers, “compromising information about more than 800,000 workers.” Who cares? The real question is why does the dread USPS “employ” 800,000 people? The United States Postal Service should employ one person in charge of … dissolving this bureaucratic blight. No computers; no hacking.

Today we hear that Obama, dressed in Mao garb, has committed Americans ” to “reducing carbon emissions by 26-28 percent,” while agreeing that China will begin to cut back its carbon emissions in … 2030.

Media Matters excoriates conservatives for questioning the deal, but did not appear to question the facts just stated.

As part of the new agreement, Obama announced that the U.S. would move much faster in cutting pollution, with a goal to reduce emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent by 2025, compared with 2005 levels. Xi, whose country’s emissions are still growing as it builds new coal plants, didn’t commit to cut emissions by a specific amount. Rather, he set a target for China’s emissions to peak by 2030, or earlier if possible.

UPDATED: Hollywood: The No-Good, The Bad & The Beastly

Celebrity, China, Film, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Sex, Technology

“Hollywood: The No-Good, The Bad & The Beastly” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“Glenn Close’s remarks, In Memoriam, at the 86th Academy Awards ceremony, captured the delusions of grandeur held by the “tarts and tards of Hollywood,” and helped by their fans.

The actress (or is it “actor”?) did not thank the dearly departed for merely entertaining the masses, which is all actors and directors are capable of doing. Oh no. Her deities were, instead, acknowledged for “mentoring us, challenging us, elevating us”; “they made us want to be better, and gave us a greater understanding of the human condition and the human heart,” language that should be reserved for the likes of Ayn Rand and Aristotle.

Where a motion picture has indeed transported anyone—it is because it cleaved to a decent script, usually a good book. “Gone With the Wind,” “Doctor Zhivago,” “Midnight Express,” and “Papillon,” are examples.

Still, Hollywood is quite capable of reducing great literature to schmaltzy jingles, belted out by shrill starlets. This was the fate of “Les Misérables,” last year. Lost in the din were a lot of lessons about “the human condition.” The Victor-Hugo masterpiece I read as a kid was about France’s unfathomably cruel and unjust penal system, and the prototypical obedient functionary who worked a lifetime to enforce the system’s depredations—a lot like the powers that hounded Aaron Swartz, the co-founder of Reddit.com, to death, in 2013, and are intent on doing the same to the heroic Edward Snowden.

The dead were deified, but what of the walking dead?

To the Chinese, who appreciate the value of experience, the greater the ratio in a team of “grey hairs and no-hairs” to “black hairs”—the faster and better a task will be completed. The opposite assumption obtains in the youth-obsessed U.S.

On the old, Hollywood performs professional geronticide.

Aging actors are put out to pasture, retired into buffoonish, badly scripted roles (“Nebraska”). The annual Oscar Awards will see at least one old actor trotted out (in 2011, the “distinction” went to Kirk Douglas) from retirement. From the sympathetic thunder clap received by Harrison Ford, 71, this year, I’d say he’s ready to be retired.

Yes, a silly society is a youth-obsessed society. Duly, a precocious kid actor will typically cameo. This year, viewers were spared the spectacle. Tykes did, however, twerk and twirl with the adults in a Pharrell Williams routine, conjuring the current crop of Walt Disney cartoon characters (“Rio 1”). Once-upon-a-time, our beloved cartoons were cute, innocent and mischievous. Think Disney’s Donald Duck, Warner Brothers’ Bugs-Bunny and Amblimation’s Fievel of “An American Tail” fame.

Alas, like The Kids, the animated characters that festoon film nowadays sound and act as if created by another Victor (Frankenstein), combining pixelated bits of the putrefying Bethenny Frankel, and some “Mob Wives,” “Real Housewives,” and “Dance Moms,” for good measure. …

Read on. The complete column is “Hollywood: The No-Good, The Bad & The Beastly”” now on WND.

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* For his help, I thank my young friend, movie maven Kerry Crowel.

UPDATED (3/7): Anyone who praises the Titanic idiocy as a “classic” is lacking critical faculties (see Facebook thread). The scenes of the ship going down are fun and well done. But as to the “story”: It includes the use of “Freudian slip,” before the term was known, among other Americanized inaccuracies, and the upstairs-downstairs dynamic and proletarian insurrection: Whence does that rot come? But then, if you read the comments @ WND Comments (http://www.wnd.com/…/hollywood-the-no-good-the-bad-and…/), you get that our readers are more comfortable with Bill O’Reilly’s “output” or that of Maureen Dowd at the NYT.