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

To: Chas. who wrote (71909)	3/13/2011 3:29:59 PM
From: Cogito Ergo Sum	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 217736

Chas, problem is that in Spanish or Portuguese that is a perfectly acceptable word.. Guess though that he (elmat) could be more sensitive when posting in English.. I have commented on that before.. the racist aspect of that word could also be construed as US centric politically correct thought.. less of that needed going forward.. JMHO.. being a mongrel and going to a Chinese mission school when young (4 years).. I can tell you I know racism first hand, not as an experience I have read or heard about.. but in my face first hand.. (from both whites and Chinese)... what racism does and is... and I know my experience is far from the worst.. Looking at the total of Elmat's posts I doubt he is any more racist than I, Mq, TJ or CB.. (yes a list of my favourite contributors to the thread so far, which in itself may be odd :o) TBS EDIT: Do not think elmat is predisposed to 'tricky talk'..

To: Chas. who wrote (71909)	3/13/2011 9:36:19 PM
From: Proud Deplorable	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217736

Don't worry about racism. People need to have a thick skin on this planet or get off it. You cannot legislate likes and dislikes so if someone doesn't like a certain skin color and doesn't want to hire them, maybe they can be forced to but neither the employer or employee will like it. Political correctness is a pain in the ass By the way there is NOTHING wrong with the word Negro. If you think there is please explain.

To: Chas. who wrote (71909)	3/13/2011 9:40:22 PM
From: TobagoJack	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217736

i have good news, just in in-tray ft.com China noses ahead as top goods producer By Peter Marsh in London Published: March 13 2011 22:22 \| Last updated: March 13 2011 22:22 China has become the world’s top manufacturing country by output, returning the country to the position it occupied in the early 19th century and ending the US’s 110-year run as the largest goods producer. The change is revealed in a study released on Monday by IHS Global Insight, a US-based economics consultancy, which estimates that China last year accounted for 19.8 per cent of world manufacturing output, fractionally ahead of the US with 19.4 per cent. China’s reversion to the top position marked the “closing of a 500-year cycle in economic history”, said Robert Allen of Nuffield College, Oxford, a leading economic historian. Deborah Wince-Smith, chief executive of the Council on Competitiveness, a Washington-based business group, said the US “should be worried” by China taking over a position that the country had occupied since about 1895. “This shows the need for the US to compete in the future not on the basis of commodity manufacturing but on innovation and new kinds of services that are driven by production industries,” she said. The last time China was the world’s biggest goods producer was in about 1850 when the country was close to the end of a long period of population growth and technological ascendancy. Buoyed by the industrial revolution, the UK then became the top maker of factory goods and held this position for almost 50 years, following which the US began a long run as the world’s premier manufacturing nation. Nicholas Crafts of Warwick university, an expert on long-term economic change, said: “This marks a fundamental shift in the global division of labour [involving goods production] which is unlikely to be reversed in the near future.” Economic historians believe China’s share of world manufacturing output in 1830 was nearly 30 per cent, after which it fell to about 6 per cent in 1900 and half this figure in 1990. Since then, China has been rapidly catching up on the US, helped by low labour costs that have caused a massive shift of manufacturing to China, strong inward investment by foreign companies and a fast-expanding economy. Alan Tomelson, research fellow at the conservative US Business and Industry Council, a research group, described the switch in the top roles as a “wake-up call” for the US. He said it had been driven by China’s push over the past decade to transfer resources to a domestically based manufacturing sector helped by “unfair” government subsidies and an artificially weak renminbi. Mark Killion, IHS’s head of world industry services, said, however, that the findings from the latest data were far from bleak for US manufacturing. “The US has a huge productivity advantage in that it produced only slightly less than China’s manufacturing output in 2010 but with 11.5m workers compared to the 100m employed in the same sector in China.” Also, Mr Killion pointed out that much of China’s manufacturing output was driven by the Chinese subsidiaries of US companies and was based around US-derived technologies, especially in fields such as electronics. The IHS data – worked out on the basis of current-year dollars – show that world manufacturing output in 2010 was $10,078bn, which represents “real”, inflation-adjusted growth of 9.7 per cent on the equivalent number in 2009, indicating a strong recovery from the recession. The figures are derived from data gathered by national statistical agencies around the world and have been published several months ahead of the equivalent comparative figures that will come out from government bodies such as the UN and World Bank. China’s output figure in dollars in 2010 was boosted slightly by the 3 per cent appreciation of the renminbi against the dollar between 2009 and 2010.

To: Chas. who wrote (71909)	3/13/2011 9:41:47 PM
From: TobagoJack	1 Recommendation Respond to of 217736

good news is apparently underpinned by the obvious economist.com China's economy Bamboo capitalism China’s success owes more to its entrepreneurs than its bureaucrats. Time to bring them out of the shadows Mar 10th 2011 \| from the print edition FEW would deny that China has been the economic superstar of recent years. Thanks to its relentless double-digit annual growth, it has become the world’s second-largest economy and in many ways the most dynamic. Less obvious is quite what the secret of this success has been. It is often vaguely attributed to “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”–typically taken to mean that bureaucrats with heavy, visible hands have worked much of the magic. That, naturally, is a view that China’s government is happy to encourage. But is it true? Of course, the state’s activity has been vast and important. It has been effective in eradicating physical and technological obstacles: physical, through the construction of roads, power plants and bridges; technical, by facilitating (through means fair and foul) the transfer of foreign intellectual property. Yet China’s vigour owes much to what has been happening from the bottom up as well as from the top down. Just as Germany has its mighty Mittelstand, the backbone of its economy, so China has a multitude of vigorous, (very) private entrepreneurs: a fast-growing thicket of bamboo capitalism. These entrepreneurs often operate outside not only the powerful state-controlled companies, but outside the country’s laws. As a result, their significance cannot be well tracked by the state-generated statistics that serve as a flawed window into China’s economy. But as our briefing shows, they are an astonishing force. The Mittel Kingdom First, there is the scale of their activities. Three decades ago, pretty much all business in China was controlled by one level of the state or another. Now one estimate—and it can only be a stab—puts the share of GDP produced by enterprises that are not majority-owned by the state at 70%. Zheng Yumin, the Communist Party secretary for the commerce department of Zhejiang province, told a conference last year that more than 90% of China’s 43m companies were private. The heartland for entrepreneurial clusters is in regions, like Zhejiang, that have been relatively ignored by Beijing’s bureaucrats, but such businesses have now spread far and wide across the country. Second, there is their dynamism. Qiao Liu and Alan Siu of the University of Hong Kong calculate that the average return on equity of unlisted private firms is fully ten percentage points higher than the modest 4% achieved by wholly or partly state-owned enterprises. The number of registered private businesses grew at an average of 30% a year in 2000-09. Factories that spring up alongside new roads and railways operate round-the-clock to make whatever nuts and bolts are needed anywhere in the world. The people behind these businesses endlessly adjust what and how they produce in response to extraordinary (often local) competition and fluctuations in demand. Provincial politicians, whose career prospects are tied to growth, often let these outfits operate free not only of direct state management but also from many of the laws tied to land ownership, labour relations, taxation and licensing. Bamboo capitalism lives in a laissez-faire bubble. But this points to a third, more worrying, characteristic of such businesses: their vulnerability. Chinese regulation of its private sector is often referred to as “one eye open, one eye shut”. It is a wonderfully flexible system, but without a consistent rule of law, companies are prey to the predilections of bureaucrats. A crackdown could come at any time. It is also hard for them to mature into more permanent structures. Cultivate it, don’t cut it All this has big implications for China itself and for the wider world. The legal limbo creates ample scope for abuse: limited regard for labour laws, for example, encourages exploitation of workers. Rampant free enterprise also lives uncomfortably alongside the country’s official ideology. So far, China has managed this rather well. But over time, the contradictions between anarchic opportunism and state direction, both vital to China’s rise, will surely result in greater friction. Party conservatives will be tempted to hack away at bamboo capitalism. It would be much better if they tried instead to provide the entrepreneurs with a proper legal framework. Many entrepreneurs understandably fear such scrutiny: they hate standing out, lest their operations become the focus of an investigation. But without a solid legal basis (including intellectual-property laws), it is very hard to create great enterprises and brands. The legal uncertainty pushes capital-raising into the shadows, too. The result is a fantastically supple system of financing, but a very costly one. Collateral is suspect and the state-controlled financial system does not reward loan officers for assuming the risks that come with non-state-controlled companies. Instead, money often comes from unofficial sources, at great cost. The so-called Wenzhou rate (after the most famous city for this sort of finance) is said to begin at 18% and can even exceed 200%. A loan rarely extends beyond two years. Outsiders often marvel at the long-term planning tied to China’s economy, but many of its most dynamic manufacturers are limited to sowing and reaping within an agricultural season. So bamboo capitalism will have to change. But it is changing China. Competition from private companies has driven up wages and benefits more than any new law—helping to create the consumers China (and its firms) need. And behind numerous new businesses created on a shoestring are former factory employees who have seen the rewards that come from running an assembly line rather than merely working on one. In all these respects the private sector plays a vital role in raising living standards—and moving the Chinese economy towards consumption at home rather than just exports abroad. The West should be grateful for that. And it should also celebrate bamboo capitalism more broadly. Too many people—not just third-world dictators but Western business tycoons—have fallen for the Beijing consensus, the idea that state-directed capitalism and tight political control are the elixir of growth. In fact China has surged forward mainly where the state has stood back. “Capitalism with Chinese characteristics” works because of the capitalism, not the characteristics.