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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (26006)	12/11/2002 10:09:26 AM
From: LLCF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

12 scuds a flying, 11 pipers piping.... 5 handle on gold........ 1 market crashing? DAK

To: TobagoJack who wrote (26006)	12/11/2002 4:49:47 PM
From: carranza2	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Jay, a good friend located in Central America who competes with the Chinese in a niche natural resource market let me have this article which I think you'll enjoy: >>>Are we prepared for the Rise of China? By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF GAOSHAN, China. This is the story of the Dai family in China's remote Dabie Mountains, and a reminder that we're not doing much to prepare for perhaps the most important long-term trend in the world - the rise of China. The Dais live here in Gaoshan, a hamlet in central China's Hubei Province. I met them in 1990, when their eldest child, an excellent sixth-grade student named Dai Manju, had just dropped out of school because the family could not afford $13 in annual school fees. Gaoshan had no electricity and was a two-hour hike from the nearest dirt road. The Dais shared their mud-brick house with their pig, and they owned nothing: no watch, no bicycle, no change of clothes. I wrote about Dai Manju back then, and a reader sent her $100 to help, but Morgan Guaranty Trust Company missed a decimal point and sent $10,000 instead. The villagers were mightily impressed by American generosity - and carelessness. The money went not to the villagers but to the county authorities, who used it to cover school fees for Dai Manju and other pupils and, mostly, to build a desperately needed school in another district. Since then, gaps between rich and poor have worsened in China, and so I decided to seek out the Dai family again. I thought that I would find them still living amid desperate poverty and official indifference, allowing me to write a reality-check column about how the Chinese boom has boosted coastal areas but left the vast interior little changed. But then I came to the end of the old dirt road - and found that the path had been extended a few years ago so that now it is possible to drive all the way to Gaoshan. Every home in the village now has electricity. Two families even have telephones. As for the Dais, they are living in a new six-room house, made of concrete. The pig lives outside. The parents proudly showed me their stove, television and electric fan. Dai Manju turned out to have graduated from high school and then from technical school in accounting, and such lofty academic credentials are no longer uncommon in Gaoshan. She and her two siblings are working in Guangdong Province, all earning $125 a month or more - what her father earned in a year. These inland rural areas lag behind the coastal regions, and so the income gaps are growing. But lives are unmistakably getting better almost everywhere. (The only exception I saw was Henan Province, where AIDS is impoverishing villages.) Partly gains come because peasants in villages like Gaoshan go south to work in those sweatshops denounced by American students but treasured by Chinese workers. The lesson, for me, is that China's transformation is trickling even into the poor interior, dragging all 1.3 billion people into the world economy. When historians look back on our time, I think they'll focus on the resurgence of China after 500 years of weakness - and the way America was oblivious as this happened. Plenty can still go wrong in China, from a banking crisis (national banks are insolvent) to labor riots (laid-off workers are grumbling everywhere). The government is often brutal and is catastrophically mismanaging an AIDS crisis. But it's possible for China simultaneously to torture people and enrich them. Human and financial capital are growing and being deployed more sensibly, and a ferocious drive and work ethic are galvanizing even remote nooks like Gaoshan. For most of human history, China was the world's largest economy and most advanced civilization. Then it stagnated after about 1450, but some estimates are that even as late as 1820 China amounted to 32 percent of the world's G.D.P. - and then it utterly collapsed. Now, with the Dais and a billion people like them emerging from subsistence, China is on course eventually to recover its traditional pre-eminence. And just as China at its peak was blindsided by the rise of the West, we're likely to be blindsided by the rise of China. You want a Thanksgiving example of that drive I mentioned? Some years ago, a friend was among a group of Americans teaching English in Sichuan Province, and when they couldn't locate a turkey for Thanksgiving they asked a government official for help. Eager to please the Americans, he arranged a feast that included, amazingly, two turkeys. Later it turned out that he'd confiscated them from the local zoo.

To: TobagoJack who wrote (26006)	12/12/2002 1:31:43 AM
From: Step1	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Jay, we have talked a bit before here on SI, a while back though, think it was on the average age of private cars on J roads. Anyway, i suspect you keep track of what`s happening here through the news so i am not going to go in too much details. You are fully aware that deflation in Japan has been brutal, through a number of channels and methods sometimes self-inflicted, sometimes through outside factors and yet sometimes through bad luck. So pretty much everything has been affected, starting with land prices at first, golf memberships down to clothing and food (mostly due to Chinese imports). I just bought a pair of nice corduroy pants last week and they cost me an unbelievable low price of 498 yen. 5 bucks and some change, don`t even have to use a paper bill for that, loose change will do. Made in China of course. The next big issue this year is a double whammy for the economy though: steep tax revenue shortfalls for all levels of governments (-28% in my prefecture) and across the board pay reductions in public servants` pay (1.5% on average i think). This sets the tone for large union negotiations in the spring, this year the theme will be to stay at 0 loss as opposed to accepting pay cuts. We escaped a 5% pay cut on our pay readjustments last June (equivalent to 5.1 months of pay, so less than two percent in total reductions) but are not likely to be so lucky next ... So the big picture is that at all levels competition is ever harsher, prices cannot rise, and all you have to do is wait for things to be cheaper leading to more of the same. I find at least the media and the government is a bit more candid after 10+ years of this, at least they know they had a bubble, there was even a TV drama on it about a year ago and the word deflation is heard half a dozen times on tv and in the news. The same reductions in tax income for government is also reducing a lot (thank God ) of the unneeded spending on public works, to the tune of 10% for state funded projects and 3% for national gov funded projects in my prefecture, so overall, same old, same old report as last one (dont know if i posted it here or somewhere else or maybe it was a pm) Still, if you have a job, life is sweet, convenient, crime although having gone up , is much lower than anywhere i have lived before and there still seems to be a lot of gravy around. over and out step1