China to America: Stop the "auto-sadism" - Page 11

On January 05 2013 05:09 Holy_AT wrote:
Money is illogical, it can be made without putting work or effort in it, on the otherhand some work hard 24/7 and just get enough to pull through the day.
One one hand emplyees work as much as their bosses, solve more complex problems then they do or do much manual labour work then their bosses but dont earn more.
This does not make sense as a physical law. Money and financial systems are a comupter program running in the heads of people, we dont have it from birth, at least not in the way it is practiced now, it is very rudementary.
People have to be thought it, the financial system is like a childrens song that we learn from day one and continue to sing till the end of our days without thinking of the meaning of the words.

The republicans are using this debate to make cheap politics, if they would be interessted in a constructive intelligent way of solving problems they would do and act accordingly. I really had a high opinion of americans, all my life, they were the heroes the good guys, the guys of moral freedom, intelligence, the saviours and liberators of the world, here to enlighten us and bring peace. And now there are no visions no moral debates, america has gown complacent and I dare to say that the america I used to look up to, started to decay the day the Soviet Union broke down and collapsed.
Today there are clowns like Palin, for which every american should be deeply ashamed, stars like Justin Bieber, I mean come on america, you were cool once ! What has happened ?

On January 05 2013 05:13 farvacola wrote:

Isn't this entire thread about a Chinese dude leveling ad-hominems against the US?

On January 05 2013 05:13 farvacola wrote:

Isn't this entire thread about a Chinese dude leveling ad-hominems against the US?

On January 05 2013 05:13 farvacola wrote:

Isn't this entire thread about a Chinese dude leveling ad-hominems against the US?

On January 05 2013 03:30 Rassy wrote:
Japan has a huge debt
200%+ of gdp.
Yet japan is the most advanced country in the world by far and they are maintaining their wealth even with zero economic growth while going through a huge transition with their changing demographic.
Even with 200% debt of its gdp, it is japan who acts as the worlds bank.

Usa has been in debt for over 100 years, the debt has been steadily rising for over 100 years.
Yet the past 100 years where the most succesfull in american history.
Somewhere down the line all this debt is not a bad thing, its even inherent to the current system.
The system is verry difficult to understand though, and it is not realy teached or explained at businesschools either.

On January 05 2013 04:13 Shady Sands wrote:

Most of the Japanese public debt has exceedingly low interest rates and is held by domestic savers, who are happy to take said low interest rates as inflation is negative, which means that real interest rates are substantially higher than they appear.

Unfortunately, Shinzo Abe appears hell-bent on re-inflating the economy (installing a lackey at the helm of the BoJ), so this cycle may not continue for much longer. Given the relatively front-loaded maturity timeline of Japanese government debt (about 6 years, on average), if interest rates rise, a substantial part of the debt will need to be refinanced fairly quickly at higher interest rates. Since a lot of the debt is legacy overhang from when Japan had a larger nominal GDP, from a macro fundamentals standpoint, it will be relatively harder for a smaller current Japanese economy to shoulder the debt burden (imagine a retiree trying to pay down large debts accumulated in his forties with his social security checks). This makes the Japanese debt market uniquely vulnerable to a cascading failure of confidence.

Of course, given that most Japanese bond market investors are Japanese institutions, the government could resort to administrative measures to keep the game rolling for longer than it should by swallowing losses and remaining tethered to the public bond market. This will push the cost down to Japanese savers, who suddenly will be receiving less and less from the savings they've put in while the economy experiences inflation around them. This may lead to social unrest, especially among the elderly, as medical care gets more and more expensive the longer people live (and Japanese life expectancy is really high). We may see protest marches composed of the 65-and-up segment marching down Shinjuku in the future, but whether that will actually make an impact remains to be seen.

On January 05 2013 04:45 REDBLUEGREEN wrote:

Yeah. Even the US itself used to have much higher tax rates, up to 94% in 1944, for the biggest part of the last century until the 80s. Despite financing two world wars, being in dept with 120% of GDP after WW2, helping to rebuild Germany and Europe after the 2nd world war and burning a lot of money during the arms race with Russia and cold war they still experienced something like a golden age during that time.
I must admit I don't know a lot about the US economic history and surely there are other factors, but can this be pure coincidence?

On January 05 2013 05:08 czylu wrote:


Frankly you should just blame america(or more specifically american investment banks that underwrote mortgage backed assets). If it wasn't for america, none of those "problem" countries would have trouble defaulting except maybe Greece(which if you looked @ the problem closely enough, you can trace back go Goldman Sachs)

On January 05 2013 06:16 JonnyBNoHo wrote:

Very few were affected by those high rates and rebuilding Europe helped the economy - lots for our factories to do and no competitors. There were also demographics at play. The working age population was booming whereas now the retired population is booming.

On January 05 2013 06:51 czylu wrote:


The main causes of our current deficit can be traced back to the policies of 2 presidents, LBJ and Reagan. LBJ's Great Society created a literal shit ton of government agencies designed to protect the poor and needy, such as Medicare(and later Medicaid) along with a broad spectrum of educational and social initiatives designed to improve social mobility. Back then, because of the massive scope of these programs, they were often poorly implemented and barely fit with in the government budget. Flash forward to Reagan, in an effort to kill the cold war, Reagan followed the policy of deficit spending by upping the spending on Military, while diminishing taxes on the wealthiest Americans(which in practice is basically just corporations). This massive influx of capital into both government military research and private enterprise is what ultimately killed the Soviet Union, because they(under the rules of a balanced budget) did not have the resources to support both a military arms race and maintain a first world standard of living, while fighting a losing war in Afghanistan. If Khrushchev had a similar idea when the US was sinking resources into Vietnam, I'm sure we'd all be singing praises to the Soviet Union today. By reducing revenue while upping spending to kill the Soviets, Reagan put the deficit in a downward spiral that has grown into the fiscal cliff we know today.

Anyway, flash forward to today, and we see the modern iterations of both parties fighting to the death over the policies of LBJ and Reagan. The democrats want their social programs like it was still 1960 and Republicans want their tax breaks like it was still 1980, and in the crossfire lies the american people and the global financial system.

On January 05 2013 04:12 RvB wrote:


Japans does have debt problems which is why their rating isn't AAA and they've been warned by the IMF for example for it too... Anyway why Japan can sustain such a large debt burden is because 90% of it is domestically held, for the US it is 30% which is actually one of the reasons the US public debt isn't nearly as bad as its made up to be. It's already discussed in the US politics thread too.

Debt indeed isn't a bad thing but too much debt can be crippling and with the growth of the GDP like it is now you're just putting it off for the next generations to fix.

And really just printing money like you advocated earlier isn't a solution either, you're causing massive inflation which hits everyone's savings including pension funds etc. It also reduces your competitiveness severly because of the higher prices which is exactly the opposite you wanted to accomplish with the devaluation of the dollar.

On January 05 2013 05:21 czylu wrote:


honestly, fiscal irresponsibility is a far more serious problem then lack of a democracy. We've all seen the repercussions of what happens when certain financial institutions can make up value out of thin air. Now china is not w/o its criticisms, but w/ regards to democracy, i think we've all seen how effective and brutally efficient its government can be in the modern world compared to its democratic counterparts.

On January 05 2013 03:10 coverpunch wrote:

You're alive today. I'm alive today. I guess that means we'll never die.

On January 05 2013 13:24 Alex1Sun wrote:

No person is eternal and it likely applies to countries too. The question is how long, how healthy and how pleasant this life is. Countries with higher taxes and larger social programs on average have smaller crime rates, higher living standards and more stable economies. That's just statistics. Low tax countries however may support faster growing economies, so there is always a trade off.

On January 05 2013 10:08 RinconH wrote:
lol why wouldn't the U.S. print money?

They have the license to print gold.

U.S. currency is Gold. The entire world depends on it and that's not going to change any time soon.

China can keep complaining... and keep buying billions of treasuries.

On January 05 2013 13:41 smokeyhoodoo wrote:


You've got the causation reversed.

On January 05 2013 13:45 docvoc wrote:

It really isn't umm.. what we aren't on the gold standard anymore dude. We let out currency float long ago, that is why you can buy US$ futures.