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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Chas. who wrote (39517)	9/3/2008 3:47:10 PM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 217855

They've been making progress. Want to keep old regime AND grow, that forces the process to be slower than it could be. Demand is too big and need time to lift them out of poverty into Middle Class. Permit me please to make a comparison with Brazil. Here we need only to upgrade. In China they need to demolish and build on top. For instance, we need to extend the runway to accommodate a Jumbo jet, but the airport is already there. Need to duplicate a highway, since the road is already there. That makes it easy to privatize this infrastructure any time. Dredge the harbour and expand it. Interconnect the electricity grid. Build railways by passes. Basically starting from where we stopped in the late 70's China needs to start anew and that's why the growth is so robust. and that is why it will take longer.

To: Chas. who wrote (39517)	9/4/2008 12:21:43 AM
From: energyplay	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217855

I don't think the number is still that high (800 million) Out of 1,300 million people, I think there under 400-500 million in serious poverty. Most of them are located away from the coastal areas. Per capita income on a PPP (purchasing power parity) basis is about $7,800. Anything over $12-15k becomes middle class, or close to it. I expect about 25 to 40 million people move out of serious poverty each year. Most of them move to something we would consider "tight" or maybe "okay", maybe with the first factory job for two family members, then make moderate progress from there. en.wikipedia.org Deng Xiaopeng and friends (and lots of hard work) moved over 500 million people out of poverty. I expect even with moderate growth, another 200+ million will move out of poverty. The people who maybe left out might be too isolated (at >$5.00 gasoline) too old, sick, injured, and/or not skilled enough to compete with Viet Nam or Thailand or India. The good news is that higher food prices = higher farm prices, and this has started to speard some money to places that are too remote for factories.

To: Chas. who wrote (39517)	9/6/2008 10:16:28 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 217855

Frugality: Now Europeans Are Slower to Spend, and It Shows This points to what I was saying. Less consumption in one side of the world, more consumption elsewhere. The European Union’s statistical agency, Eurostat, reported this week that total retail sales in the 15 nations that use the euro were down in July for the third consecutive month. Now Europeans Are Slower to Spend, and It Shows By FLOYD NORRIS Published: September 5, 2008 It’s not easy to keep buying when the prices of necessities are soaring. For the first time in more than a decade, consumers in much of Europe are buying less than they did a year earlier, and that is helping to slow economies that may have fallen into recession. The European Union’s statistical agency, Eurostat, reported this week that total retail sales in the 15 nations that use the euro were down in July for the third consecutive month. Those statistics are based on the volume of sales, not the price, and reflects in part the inflationary trends that have hurt consumers around the world. But the data also provided additional evidence of an economic slowdown in Europe. The gross domestic product for the euro area declined in the second quarter — something that has not happened since the euro was created in the late 1990s — and many economists forecast there will be another decline in the current quarter. The accompanying chart shows the trend in retail sales volumes on a year-over-year basis, using three-month moving averages to smooth the data. The latest figure shows a decline of 1.8 percent, the largest fall since the data began to be collected in 1995. There is some reason to hope that the decline is a temporary one, said Jennifer McKeown, an economist at Capital Economics in London. She points out that while volumes are down, consumers are spending more euros than ever. The amount spent on purchases is rising at a rate of 1.9 percent a year, which is lower than it was a few months ago but is still close to historical averages. “Sales values have continued to grow at pretty healthy rates, suggesting that sales volumes growth should pick up as inflation falls,” she said. Around the euro zone, the variations in sales growth are stark. with the healthiest gains in countries on the periphery of the zone. Sales in Cyprus were up almost 11 percent through May, the latest data available, and sales in Slovenia rose more than 5 percent through July. Sales in Finland gained 3.3 percent, although that was the smallest 12-month gain in the country since 2005. On the negative side, some of the largest declines came in countries where real estate prices have fallen off after soaring for several years. Sales volume in Spain was down 6 percent, while the figure in Ireland was a negative 2 percent through June. Of the four largest economies in the euro zone, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, only France is showing a gain in sales, and it is a small one. Those four countries account for three times as much economic activity as the other 11 countries put together. In Italy, where the property market was not as inflated but the economy is now weak, sales were down almost 5 percent through June. Germany, the largest economy in the zone, shows a smaller loss, of 1.3 percent. That figure may be worse than it first appears, because German sales have been declining for more than a year.