No Better Than Bric-a-Brac

On NPR yesterday morning the resident expert said all he knows is that “stocks go up and down,” which of course is all any of us really knows. But as I have been saying for quite a while now the U.S. economy and our property markets have been living off low interest rates with this government pump priming making us look better than we deserve and much better than just about anywhere else in the world. Indeed behind the veil of cheap money is a desultory jobs market. Yes, unemployment has gone down, but in absolute terms we haven’t grown our number of jobs appreciably–more people are working part time, in low paying jobs with sketchy benefits, or in jobs that don’t show much wage growth. And you wonder why consumer spending has not advanced, house buying is tepid, and people are trying to save more?

Now the China myth is finally being exposed… You could never believe the government numbers. The country’s infrastructure and housing has been built to gross overcapacity—much of it will crumble unused in place and the inflated property and stock markets have to correct significantly—that’s underway of course. Many Chinese investors—new to these markets and capitalist ways– will lose their shirts, while the public works and supporting manufacturing jobs which built all the empty cities and high speed trains to nowhere, are no longer necessary. So now how will people be put to work to support the new consumer economy everyone talks about? The government operates in crisis mode worrying about a disgruntled populace and doesn’t know how to respond—they devalue the currency after unsuccessfully buying into the stock market to prop up prices against a rout. It looks like amateur night. The experts say the government has so much money, but everything is leveraged there to the hilt—talk about pump priming. All those projects were built off money borrowed from itself. And the country’s corrupt industrial base is all run by the army with the corporate generals siphoning hundreds of billions of dollars into their own pockets and those in the government hierarchy. Can I sell you an apartment building on the outskirts of Beijing?