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

To: TobagoJack who wrote (44059)	12/30/2003 8:29:30 PM
From: elmatador	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Jay, China and SEA pulled the world out of the doldrums this year. Only that was enough to bring basic metals and commodities to record prices. I am thinking what will happen if, concomitantly, Euro zone, LATAM and a little of Japan, start growing next year. Just to make sure pezz don't read I will make it longer than three lines: Japan MoF will sell to the Bank of Japan USD93bi to boost its chest to buy USD to protect the Yen in 2004.

To: TobagoJack who wrote (44059)	12/30/2003 9:12:24 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (8) \| Respond to of 74559

Jay, <outside China, I often hear the old biases talking, year after year, with China forever at the precipice (as in the opposite of recovery just around the corner), but otherwise making no intuitive sense. > Most people's general rule of thinking is that things will stay the same, whereas in fact, Major Paradigm Shift Happens and it is happening right here in Beijing and places north east, as inspected by me. I guess the production rate of concrete is higher within 20 km of me than in any other country. There are concrete trucks going night and day. There are more cranes in the sky per km2 than there were in Auckland in 1988 during the financial leveraging boom of the 1980s. Here though, there are real economic underpinnings to the construction. Made in China is the major paradigm shift which has happened. The borders are opened at least somewhat and capital has come charging in to a billion people who are ready to put in some effort to improve their lives. With $1 trillion in trade in 2004 [up from $850 billion or so] and foreign direct investment of some $70 billion, there's serious cash flow fueling the day and night efforts. This doesn't look like a flash in the pan or a hula hoop economy to me. This is for real. 1 billion people turned loose, more or less, and funny flag protecting and hiding ceremonies notwithstanding. And, it's just getting going. This is the Amazon River of cash flow! Everyone is down at the river with their buckets, pipes and pumps. They are wanting to irrigate their own little plots. This is elastoquidynamics writ large. I haven't seen anyone messing around with Aztec stuff. Gold has too much inertia for a start, falls out of pockets and gets stolen. The folding stuff is everywhere. When they get going with pixelated money, things will speed up more. What a party! North San Diego and San Jose in the late 1990s were a bigger party, but this one has just got started. In two years, the skyline of Beijing will look substantially different from today. They could do with some highway engineers who know how to build road foundations though. A huge new road which is collapsing. I wonder how well the structural engineers have designed and the contractors have built the tall buildings. Construction looks much the same as when I was building scaffolding and pouring concrete in the 1960s and 70s. Clean air would be good. Improved transport would be good. Superconducting, levitated, linear-motor propelled, electronically controlled, gpsOne managed autotransporters would be great. WiFi and 1xEV-DO with iPAQ would be good. Okay, outa this disgustingly polluted cybercafe to another clear blue day [apart from foul smog]. No wonder they have sars and they are all coughing, sneezing and hoiking...and spitting... gross.... Mqurice

To: TobagoJack who wrote (44059)	12/30/2003 9:12:34 PM
From: Ramsey Su	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

Jay, Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley sent a team to China about a year or so ago to see for themselves where this growth number came from. He wrote about the experience and was surprised that the Chinese were quite open in giving him, not the BS, but the raw data. The team concluded the numbers were real and if anything, they were on the conservative side. I am not suggesting that the MS team is absolutely flawless but their opinion is at least based on some real due diligence, instead all the random mouthing off we see on cnbc everyday. My opinion of China's growth is slight different. While I have been to China about a dozen times since 1986, I feel like one of the blind guys describing the elephant. One felt the trunk, one felt the leg, one felt the tail ...... China is not only a big country, the gap is huge. So is it meaningful to combine the growth of Shanghai with that of Guizhou province? The growth of China is more like a wild fire that spreads. This growth is real. Now how is the growth financed? That is what led me to question this "bad debt" number. I am not sure if anyone knows the answer. What if China takes a chapter from Greenbubble's book and just print a ton of RMB. Give that to banks and call all the debt to SOEs Federal projects. Bad debt problem gone? Ramsey