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

To: TobagoJack who wrote (42545)	12/6/2003 12:18:22 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Jay, while it's true that finding a causal relationship between Hong Kong's woes and Jiang Zemin's takeover is harder than finding a causal relationship between sucking tobacco smoke and lung cancer, due to a large and indecipherable swarm of confounding variables, I say that where there's smoke there's fire. Now that the borders are down around China with vast flows of money and goods and services, it's not surprising that financial water is finding its own level to quench the thirst for profit. The pressure difference between a billion low cost people in China and high cost people in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea and the USA has got a means of relief now that China is open. Pipelines bigger than in human history have been and are being built between said places. There is a little eddy off towards NZ too - even Hu Jintao deigned to stop by on his recent expedition, which surprised me only somewhat. For some reason, big time people seem to stop by here. I suspect it's a bit like Gorby and Reagan met in Iceland - a convenient stepping stone between two worlds. Okay, it's true I was unreasonably attributing Hong Kong's glitches to nefarious and inscrutable Zeministic processes rather than the much more obvious natural process of money flowing downhill, like water, seeking its natural level. Similarly, the USA has got money gushing to China and many Americans are whining like a fleet of CDMA royalty paying Koreans. China hasn't even nominally taken over the USA. As the tide rises in China, the process will slow, as it did to other countries where there were once huge and profitable investment opportunities before they became too wealthy and lazy and demanding of pay rates [Belgium, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea]. But it'll take a while to fill up China! The Three Gorges dam is tiny by comparison with what's needed to fill China. Just as Taiwan is still nominally independent, but there is huge capital flow and goods and services movement between Taiwan and China, the same process would have happened to Hong Kong, whoever nominally owns the place. Similarly, NZ is being taken over by China - the part that hasn't already been taken over by Oz and USA anyway. It does seem weird though for China to rant about murdering Taiwanese if they declare themselves independent. It would be like NZ declaring itself independent of Oz. We used to be part of Oz, became independent, but are really increasingly dependent. Swarms of Kiwis are in Oz, just as swarms of Taiwanese are in China. I suspect that Taiwan is more keen to not be independent than China is to maintain Taiwanese dependency. I'd have thought Taiwan would want tighter bonds with China and China would want Taiwanese to run their own show. Just as many countries seek trade relationships with the USA but the USA doesn't want swarms of dependents hanging on. The obverse of the relationship is trade. The reverse is war. Just to use those words again. After lots of casus bellyaching, belligerence, threats and ranting, I'm sure that they'll find cash flow beats blowing each other up. But then again, some people just like to fight. Maybe Hu and his sidekick are like that. My guess though is that this is Jiang Zemin's last hurrah before Hu promotes him to powerless sainthood. On the other hand, the German cannibal looked very presentable. Maybe Hu Jintao is more than meets the eye. I'm betting he's more of a Gorby than a Stalin. Mqurice