U.S. decline, China's ascension

[dmcowen674]

Originally Posted by Red Dawn
They still have small dicks

really, really uncalled for

Hey hey hey, apparently he has experience in this area.

 

[Karl Agathon]

Thank goodness for SSBNs

EDIT: I meant that only as a deterence/defensive option.

 

[Zebo]

The very reason why 'too big to fail' was a problem was SPECIFICALLY because it was a free market problem. Banks were allowed to overleverage themselves since there was no (or weak) government regulations stopping them from doing so and wall street was able to hold a gun to the collective heads of the government and every American. You had either 2 options a) Let the banks fail and take down the world economy or b) Pay off the banksters and keep the economy afloat.

Now contrast this with, say, Canadian banks which were heavily regulated and not allowed to leverage themselves like American banks and they also had MUCH stricter lending requirements than American banks. Their subprime problem was negligible.

In any case, the banks present a big problem for Americans because they rob us of our wealth, but the banking sector has little to nothing to do with the fact that not only is our industrial base being hollowed out, but now our white collar jobs in the service sector are being destroyed as well.

This. And it's shocking to me people who literally control who gets loans, at what rate, at what supply, and basically controls entire economy should be a cartel of private bankers. The whole system is not merit based and a feudal dynasty holding nation in their hands. So much so fraud and asset stripping millions goes uninvestigated and unprosecuted.

 

[MovingTarget]

This dynamic may or may not be inevitable. Sure, our infrastructure is aging, debt and income inequality rising, and middle class shrinking. The question is will the US government commit itself to long-term financial planning at the expense of short-term political expediency? Even if that means raising taxes, cutting spending (especially military), reforming the financial markets and institutions, or trade laws? If so, then China isn't really something to worry about. If not, well, start learning to speak mandarin.

 

[bamacre]

Might as well listen to the man who called it years ago...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRjUVmMZv-g

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fX1EWYaKOck

 

[werepossum]

They still have small dicks

There's always a need for fluffers no matter the language.

Both made me laugh out loud, thanks!

 

[JulesMaximus]

When do you think a country of 1.2 billion with hundreds of millions in poverty will pass us?

Not to mention the fact that their economy is largely dependent on ours.

 

[PsiStar]

I think someone once said all the world is a stage. (Don't tell me, I am being facetious and paraphrasing.)

After WWII, the US excelled in manufacturing over all of the rest of the world. In perspective, all of the rest of the world was bombed to near oblivion. Given the intelligence, inherent motivation, AND survival of all infrastructure, at the time, the US could not fail.

Now. Things look to be leveling out ... looking out to the next few decades.

EVERY US citizen needs to study, read, think and work smarter for life. We are now competing with every burgeoning economy. We need to have the opportunity to learn Mandarin AND German in our elementary & high school years. My only choice was Spanish. ¿Cómo está usted?

 

[Genx87]

It's not a matter of passing us, it's a matter of the first generation in US history with the real possibility of living a lower standard of living than those before them...and who knows, maybe downhill from there. Keep ripping out the foundation and the building will eventually fall....

Can't keep building the country on bubbles....and people wonder why 50%+ of the people now fall below the income line to pay federal income taxes....?!?!

By which standard are you deciding we will be worse off? What is the avg home size in the 1970s compared to today? What about the technological advances we have seen that make our lives easier? Think dad was able to telecommute to work in his factory job in 1973?

They fall below the threshold because since the 1950s when the lowest bracket paid 20% of their income. Politicians have been lowering the lowest brackets while increasing the deductions to the point where 50% of us dont qualify. The govt could go back to 1950 and have the bottom bracket start at 20% and get rid of deductions to the point where 80% of the population pays taxes if you like.

I dont think standard of living really has much to do with our income tax structure.

 

[Infohawk]

In 2020 people will still see the world economy as a zero-sum game. Does the average German care that America has a bigger economy? No. They have similar wealth as we do. As long as we don't get poorer per capita there's nothing to cry about.

Although we will need to rely on military alliances more.

 

[Genx87]

who cares about the poor? If there middle class ends up being 500 million strong who wins?

How are they going to convert hundreds of millions in poverty to middle class? And define middle class? Their poverty line is considered 125\year. I make more than that in a day.

 

[wirednuts]

Chinese people work hard and save money. Americans don't.

americans work more hours per year then anyone in the modern world. period. i can attest to this personally.

 

[bfdd]

The very reason why 'too big to fail' was a problem was SPECIFICALLY because it was a free market problem. Banks were allowed to overleverage themselves since there was no (or weak) government regulations stopping them from doing so and wall street was able to hold a gun to the collective heads of the government and every American. You had either 2 options a) Let the banks fail and take down the world economy or b) Pay off the banksters and keep the economy afloat.

Now contrast this with, say, Canadian banks which were heavily regulated and not allowed to leverage themselves like American banks and they also had MUCH stricter lending requirements than American banks. Their subprime problem was negligible.

In any case, the banks present a big problem for Americans because they rob us of our wealth, but the banking sector has little to nothing to do with the fact that not only is our industrial base being hollowed out, but now our white collar jobs in the service sector are being destroyed as well.

there would be no such thing as to big to fail in a free market because everything fails period. nothing is forever fool

 

[ShawnD1]

They still have small dicks

That's what the Africans said right before we enslaved their asses :awe:

EVERY US citizen needs to study, read, think and work smarter for life. We are now competing with every burgeoning economy. We need to have the opportunity to learn Mandarin AND German in our elementary & high school years. My only choice was Spanish. ¿Cómo está usted?

That is kinda whack. Today I was downloading a ton of shit for AutoCAD and it seems like the second language they focus on most is German. That makes sense. Germans make a lot of stuff. Learning Mexican in school seems pointless since it's not really used by anyone important.

 

[Engineer]

By which standard are you deciding we will be worse off? What is the avg home size in the 1970s compared to today? What about the technological advances we have seen that make our lives easier? Think dad was able to telecommute to work in his factory job in 1973?

They fall below the threshold because since the 1950s when the lowest bracket paid 20% of their income. Politicians have been lowering the lowest brackets while increasing the deductions to the point where 50% of us dont qualify. The govt could go back to 1950 and have the bottom bracket start at 20% and get rid of deductions to the point where 80% of the population pays taxes if you like.

I dont think standard of living really has much to do with our income tax structure.

Not talking about you and your dad, I'm talking about me and my kids. It's no secret that the decade of the 2000's was the first decade in US history that showed a decline in wages for BOTH college grads as well as high school grads for the entire decade after inflation. Standard of living is being propped up simply by bubbles, not the creation of something...something that creates wealth in itself. Maybe we can hurry up and get that college thing in for everyone....good luck with that.

While I agree that lowering rates and more credits have contributed to a portion of those that have fallen out of paying federal taxes, lower wages have also contributed, not to mention the highest US poverty (I know it's a higher standard than poverty around the world) rate in over a generation. With global wage pressures, I highly doubt that the average US worker, if he or she can even get a job, will have a rising wage, on average, for quite some time (until equilibrium in global jobs vs global labor perhaps)?!

 

[bamacre]

americans work more hours per year then anyone in the modern world. period. i can attest to this personally.

Too many of them live well beyond their means, while most Chinese live below their means. That was my point. Capital comes from savings, so opportunity comes with savings. That's why opportunity is leaving the US and heading toward Asia.

 

[cyclohexane]

Not talking about you and your dad, I'm talking about me and my kids. It's no secret that the decade of the 2000's was the first decade in US history that showed a decline in wages for BOTH college grads as well as high school grads for the entire decade after inflation. Standard of living is being propped up simply by bubbles, not the creation of something...something that creates wealth in itself. Maybe we can hurry up and get that college thing in for everyone....good luck with that.

While I agree that lowering rates and more credits have contributed to a portion of those that have fallen out of paying federal taxes, lower wages have also contributed, not to mention the highest US poverty (I know it's a higher standard than poverty around the world) rate in over a generation. With global wage pressures, I highly doubt that the average US worker, if he or she can even get a job, will have a rising wage, on average, for quite some time (until equilibrium in global jobs vs global labor perhaps)?!

what's with all the doom and gloom? Let's all go grab a beer, watch some reality tv, and post on twitter/facebook. America, fuck yea!

 

[Engineer]

what's with all the doom and gloom? Let's all go grab a beer, watch some reality tv, and post on twitter/facebook. America, fuck yea!

I don't have a facebook or myspace. I do have a twitter and have used it about 4 times. I have never drank a drop in my life and I, for the most part, hate reality tv. I'm an old, cranky fuck just waiting for springtime so I can tell the neighborhood kids to get the hell off my dirt.D:

 

[iGas]

Over the past 7 yrs or so, there's been lots of talk about China overtaking the US this century in terms of world influnence/importance and it looks like the nay-sayers are in for surprise. The financial crisis of '08 seems to have accelerated or maybe even the catalyst for the decline of US power/influence in this new century. Then again, these are economists talking ....

"The (Chinese) Yuan will be the world's reserve currency within two decades."

This is a disaster. I was hopping that it is not going to happen in my lifetime. There goes my retirement funds.

 

[ShawnD1]

"The (Chinese) Yuan will be the world's reserve currency within two decades."

This is a disaster. I was hopping that it is not going to happen in my lifetime. There goes my retirement funds.

????

 

[iGas]

????

Roughly 50% of Canadian market is invested by American.

US dollar would be worthless if the Yuan become the world reserve currency, because the American have been printing more money than it worth for decades.

The tie between the US and Canada would mean that the US will take us down with them in an unstop able implosion.

 

[CycloWizard]

The very reason why 'too big to fail' was a problem was SPECIFICALLY because it was a free market problem. Banks were allowed to overleverage themselves since there was no (or weak) government regulations stopping them from doing so and wall street was able to hold a gun to the collective heads of the government and every American. You had either 2 options a) Let the banks fail and take down the world economy or b) Pay off the banksters and keep the economy afloat.

Now contrast this with, say, Canadian banks which were heavily regulated and not allowed to leverage themselves like American banks and they also had MUCH stricter lending requirements than American banks. Their subprime problem was negligible.

In any case, the banks present a big problem for Americans because they rob us of our wealth, but the banking sector has little to nothing to do with the fact that not only is our industrial base being hollowed out, but now our white collar jobs in the service sector are being destroyed as well

I keep hearing this nonsense over and over again. If this were the case, banks would have failed long ago. Instead, idiot regulators told banks to ignore what their actuaries told them about risk and lend to people who didn't deserve a loan. To allow for the insane risk new regulations forced on them, they played Russian Roulette with the obvious, predictable outcome. There's a bit more to it obviously, but it's dishonest and/or idiotic to say that regulation is the solution to the problems arising due to the free market.

I'll also ask: how did the banks become so large and powerful that they were propping up the entire world economy? I'm not a banking expert, but based on my experience with other industries, I can speculate that it's due to the huge regulatory barrier to entry.

 

[Phokus]

Too many of them live well beyond their means, while most Chinese live below their means. That was my point. Capital comes from savings, so opportunity comes with savings. That's why opportunity is leaving the US and heading toward Asia.

LOL, where do you libertarians come up with this crap? The US could have a high savings rate and it wouldn't make a LICK of difference. The reason capital is fleeing is because, in the eye of the capitalist, the American standard of living is 'too high'.

 

[ShawnD1]

LOL, where do you libertarians come up with this crap? The US could have a high savings rate and it wouldn't make a LICK of difference. The reason capital is fleeing is because, in the eye of the capitalist, the American standard of living is 'too high'.

It's basically a fact that living on debt greatly increases your standard of living.

My city is doing this huge enormous expansion of the train system, and it's awesome, but we don't have money for it. We'll be paying this off for decades. If we only paid cash for everything, we probably wouldn't even have a train system. We probably wouldn't have those nice overpasses either. Building just a regular overpass for cars is unbelievably expensive. Arrgg and highways. Hundreds of miles of roads are crazy expensive.

But that's government projects. On a personal level, living on debt would mean buying a new car right now rather than buying a shit car right now then driving that piece of shit for 5 years until you can afford a real car. When you live on debt, you get things RIGHT NOW then pay it off in 5 years. Without debt, you live like a peasant for 5 years then you buy the car that you could have purchased 5 years ago

 

[Phokus]

I keep hearing this nonsense over and over again. If this were the case, banks would have failed long ago. Instead, idiot regulators told banks to ignore what their actuaries told them about risk and lend to people who didn't deserve a loan. To allow for the insane risk new regulations forced on them, they played Russian Roulette with the obvious, predictable outcome. There's a bit more to it obviously, but it's dishonest and/or idiotic to say that regulation is the solution to the problems arising due to the free market.

I'll also ask: how did the banks become so large and powerful that they were propping up the entire world economy? I'm not a banking expert, but based on my experience with other industries, I can speculate that it's due to the huge regulatory barrier to entry.

So then why didn't Canada experience a similar near failure and they're MUCH more regulated than we are? In fact, they have most of their banking consolidated into 5 large banks and a handful of second tier banks. Talk about too big to fail? They're considered to have one of the soundest banking systems in the world.

You don't understand the history of banks. The suggestion that the government told them to take on too much risk = LOL. Give me a break. Nobody told them they had to take on excessive risk to make a TON of money. It used to be that some banks were formed as partnerships where the top bankers owned significant portions of the bank. Of course when that happens, they're less likely to take on excessive risk because it's the president's money you're fucking with. Goldman Sachs used to be run as a partnership.

When banks went public, it wasn't really the CEO's money you're fucking with, it was the shareholders. Not only that, but many of these asshole banksters were smart enough to not hold onto the subprime mortgages themselves, instead, they sold them off to some pension fund in Iceland or something. Do you now understand why it makes perfect rational sense to take on excessive risk on wall street now? If *I* were in their position, I would do the exact same thing, not because government told me to, but because i'm going to get *PAID*. In the absence of government this still makes sense. If not, here's one: In finance, people move around a LOT and also retire very young (comparably speaking to the rest of the workforce). There's a wall street saying, IBGYBG "I'll be gone, you'll be gone". Who cares if you're taking on excessive risk? You get your bonus, and you move on to another bank. Or you retire (see Joseph Casano, patient zero of the CDO debacle, yet he made several hundred million doing so. Oh no, he's out of work. So fucking what, he's living the high life. Who picks up the tab for your fuckup when the piper comes calling? It's the shareholder (and if the fuckup is big enough, the taxpayer).

You had systemic fraud throughout the WHOLE system. Mortgage brokers were helping create fraudlent mortgages, appraisers were appraising houses for more money than they should have been appraising them for (otherwise they won't get a call back from those brokers again), ratings agencies were rating crap they knew to be garbage AAA, and the mortgages kept getting passed on and on and everyone got a cut of their commission until it hit the aforementioned pension fund and they were stuck with the hot potato.

In an ideal world, every bank would have kept the mortgages they originated and all those banks would have been partnerships where the presidents had significant skin in the game and actually cared about risk management , but that's not how you make the big bucks.... you become a public company, merge with other banks and become huge, and collect your risk free 7/8/9 figure bonus, and leave it to the shareholders/taxpayers to pay for your fuckup.