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


To: Cogito Ergo Sum who wrote (164915)11/9/2020 4:21:17 AM
From: TobagoJack  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217838
 
who can know? maybe the boyz can play well together after all as the downside of not playing together had been delved into and found to be rather dark, perhaps

China does not have as many of the big rockets Team Russia has, but does have rare earths flavours that can sent to nasdaq towards zero but leave the people standing

As I have noted all along since before someone tried best to blow up the thread, everything is fine, and trending better, and the next several dozen years should be more of the same, asymptotic towards 35% of global GDP, and

as I also often noted, Trump is good for China
bloomberg.com

Biden, Like Trump, Will Deepen Integration With China

Over the past four years, economic ties between Beijing and the rest of the world have only strengthened. That’s likely to continue.

David Fickling
9 November 2020, 14:08 GMT+8



Been there. Done that. Got the t-shirt.

Photographer: Tim Rue/Bloomberg

David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering commodities, as well as industrial and consumer companies. He has been a reporter for Bloomberg News, Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and the Guardian.
Read more opinion Follow @davidfickling on Twitter

LISTEN TO ARTICLE
To look at the politics of it, you might think that four years of President Donald Trump’s trade war on China were just starting to bear fruit as he prepares to leave office.

Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga used his first foreign tour since taking office to visit Vietnam and Indonesia, notably China-skeptical allies, and push for a strengthening of bilateral supply chains that would avoid the region’s 800-pound gorilla. Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, who has been pursuing a similar policy, used a major investment by Microsoft Corp. last month to encourage allies to “re-imagine supply chains”:

Australian exporters should actively explore destinations other than China, Trade Minister Simon Birmingham told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio Monday, after Beijing was reported to have ordered a halt last week on imports of a swathe of Australian products including lobster, wine and coal.

Washington’s recent line on China looks likely to carry over into the next administration, too. President-elect Joe Biden will make China “play by the international rules,” he promised in the final presidential debate last month, arguing his position would, if anything, be tougher than Trump’s.

Over the Borderline

China's bilateral trade with the world has kept increasing through the Trump years
Source: China Customs General Administration



Despite all the apparent movement, the facts on the ground look rather different. Far from succeeding in isolating China over the past four years — and in spite of the autarkic fears raised by President Xi Jinping’s promotion of self-reliance — the Trump era has seen the country integrated ever more deeply into the global economy. As we’ve argued, the forces placing China in the middle of the world’s trade and investment flows are stronger than a pandemic or any one U.S. president.

Take trade. China’s exports grew at a faster-than-expected 11.4% in dollar terms in October, the country’s customs authorities reported over the weekend. Exports through the past four months alone have been roughly in line with their level during the whole of 2006, at a time when talk of China as the “world’s factory” hit an apex.

Imports have been improving to a lesser extent, too, after nearly two years of decline. Still, far from narrowing the trade surplus — as the Covid-free domestic economy has recovered faster than those of other countries — the past year has actually widened the gap. In dollar terms, four of the strongest months on record for China’s trade surplus have occurred since May.

For all that the likes of Suga and Trump have been promoting economic disengagement from China — and for all that China’s own more authoritarian turn has made the country a more challenging prospect for foreign investors — that love affair applies to investments as well as trade flows.

Buying Binge
Foreign direct investment in China has been climbing rapidly for six months
Source: China Ministry of Commerce


After plummeting in the early months of the Covid pandemic, foreign direct investment into China has been accelerating since April, with the sum of foreign capital utilized in September up 25% from a year earlier.

One visible example of that trend has been the well-publicized rush of Chinese companies into U.S. initial public offerings in recent months. It’s not the only instance, though. Indeed, 2020 looks on track to be the strongest year in history for inbound takeovers of mainland businesses, with 2019 and 2018 taking second and third place:

Urge to Merge
The value of inbound mergers and acquisitions in China this year is vastly greater than that of offshore IPOs
Source: Bloomberg



Note: Hong Kong IPOs not included in the total of offshore IPOs.

Remarkably, this inbound flood of foreign capital isn’t even the most dramatic part of the investment picture. As China’s trade and current account surpluses have risen, the financial and capital account has balanced with a sharp move in the opposite direction. The deficit on those accounts in the third quarter — the extent to which Chinese purchases of foreign net assets exceeded reverse flows — came to $94.2 billion, the widest such figure since 2008, according to preliminary data reported last week. Even if part of that number gets reclassified as “errors and omissions” in the final reckoning, the mix of official capital outflows and ones disguised as “errors” will still be among the largest on record:

Capital Drought
China's capital and financial account deficit has hit its deepest level in a decade
Source: State Administration of Foreign Exchange of China


This shouldn’t be too much of a surprise. Years of accumulated investments in China’s trade capacity aren't going to stop their buying-and-selling activity across borders just because of some tough political rhetoric. At most, any vaunted pivot in the world’s supply chains will only see China take a declining share of a rising volume of cross-border flows, and such a shift may take years. An absolute decline in Chinese trade with the world remains an extremely unlikely prospect. That's probably a good thing, given the way commercial ties buff away the sharp edges of international relations and reduce the chance of conflict.

In the meantime, China has one of the world’s biggest domestic markets, an array of tax and land incentives for inbound investors, and a labor force that is still denied the ability to push for better conditions. For global capital, this mix is as attractive as it was before Donald Trump had ever uttered the word “China.”

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:
David Fickling at dfickling@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Rachel Rosenthal at rrosenthal21@bloomberg.net

Before it's here, it's on the Bloomberg Terminal.
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To: Cogito Ergo Sum who wrote (164915)11/9/2020 4:55:45 AM
From: TobagoJack  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 217838
 
The economic tide might and should trump political hogwash

Jeremy sounds worried. Am guessing he is correct on being worried but wrong on wanting Germany to feel fear.

Stuck in their own past assumptions of hegemony, Americans seem to have forgotten that powerful countries such as Germany do not make radical changes in policy out of fairness to others. They do so out of necessity or fear. Until Berlin is made to feel one or the other, Germany’s “new direction” on China will likely remain cosmetic.

let us see if Germany betters Brazil in welcoming Huawei, that which might put it far ahead of any domain not-Huawei-ed

foreignpolicy.com

Merkel’s China Reset Is Mostly Hollow

Washington shouldn’t expect—and may not need—a coordinated policy with Berlin.

Jeremy Stern
October 13, 2020, 5:22 PM
German Chancellor Angela Merkel gives a speech during a press conference at the end of a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing on Sept. 6, 2019. Andrea Verdelli/Pool/Getty Image

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is enjoying praise for her cabinet’s recent volte-face on China, including a de facto ban of Huawei, a fresh strategy for the Indo-Pacific, and a newfound willingness to call out Beijing’s human rights abuses. Germany’s apparent shift is welcome news in Washington, which has subjected Merkel to extraordinary pressure on ties with Beijing. But Germany’s dependence on China goes far deeper than its recent efforts can address, and there are reasons to doubt the sincerity of its supposed reset.

Germany’s new information-technology security bill, for example, stops short of excluding Huawei from the country’s wireless network by imposing a dual-track approval process. The first track involves technical certification by Germany’s pro-Huawei Federal Office for Information Security. The second track requires a “declaration of trustworthiness” to be assessed by various ministries, some of which—like the influential Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy—are headed by vocal China doves.

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In theory, the legislation gives Merkel the ability to outlaw Huawei by citing security concerns and consigning the Chinese telecommunications giant to regulatory perdition. But if Beijing threatens to retaliate against any number of German business interests in China—from Merkel’s coveted European Union-China investment treaty to BASF’s $10 billion plastics factory in Zhanjiang and Volkswagen’s $17.5 billion electric-vehicle deal—it is unclear how much pain Berlin will be willing to take over Huawei’s security issues.

Indeed, soon after Berlin announced its IT security bill, news broke that in 2018, a high-ranking official suppressed intelligence on China’s influence operations at all levels of German government, society, and business for fear it would damage economic ties. According to Axios, the chancellor personally reviewed the report before visiting Beijing the following year amid a crackdown on Hong Kong democracy protests. The result was 13 business deals between German and Chinese executives, signed in the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square and overseen by Merkel.

If there are reasons to question the efficacy of Berlin’s new IT policy, the same goes for its other China initiatives. For all the publicity about a “ new direction” in Germany’s China strategy, the Foreign Office’s recent Indo-Pacific guidelines shun the U.S.-led security order in Asia in favor of what it calls “entanglement” through trade, investment, and development aid. As for human rights, Merkel has clarified that “solutions” to problems like Hong Kong “can only be achieved through dialogue,” while even more hawkish officials such as Omid Nouripour, a Green member of the parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs, have claimed that Berlin must take a “much clearer stance” on human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Tibet but that it must stop short of “full confrontation.”

The German government’s tendency to close ranks behind business interests has also been demonstrated by the international financial scandal around Wirecard, the German payments company. A recent Financial Times report detailed the failure of Germany’s regulators, market watchdog, anti-money laundering agency, and other government bodies to play any role in uncovering the largest case of financial fraud in postwar German history, despite numerous tipoffs. Tellingly, while the German finance minister was reportedly aware of explosive investigations into Wirecard last September, he did not stop Merkel from lobbying for the German company on her business trip to China.

To be fair, behind what can seem like a ruthless pursuit of German economic interests in China is a serious strategy for stability.

To be fair, behind what can seem like a ruthless pursuit of German economic interests in China is a serious strategy for stability.Berlin is at pains to stave off the mass losses in manufacturing and economic dislocation that have rocked the United States, United Kingdom, and Southern Europe in recent years. German officials believe the kind of economically driven nationalist populism which led to Brexit and the election of U.S. President Donald Trump must be avoided in Germany at all costs, and Germany’s neighbors might be the first to agree. As the engine of German export growth, the destination of $100 billion worth of German goods last year, and Germany’s biggest overall trading partner, China is not just a large and profitable market. Germans see China as the mechanism for sustaining the only prolonged era of domestic harmony their country has ever known.

German leaders do not help their own case by coupling seemingly pitiless economic nationalism with soaring rhetoric about human rights and multilateralism. But on any issue impacting Germany’s economic well-being, Berlin’s actual decision-making is remarkably consistent. In addition to securing ties with China, Merkel is currently defending the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline with Russia against threatened sanctions from the U.S. Senate, and low levels of defense spending against White House plans to withdraw 12,000 U.S. troops from German soil. As far as Berlin is concerned, Americans can list the sacrifices they’ve made for German security and prosperity until they’re blue in the face. The benefits to domestic stability of economic cooperation with strategic rivals remain a core German national interest.

As long as that is the case, the German government will continue to irritate U.S. officials by showing less interest in its own security than the United States does, and by giving the impression that it would be worse for Washington than for Berlin if Germany ever became a Chinese dependency. But recognizing the consistency of Germany’s foreign-policy decisions should help Americans ask better questions than they have in the past. How much alignment with Germany does U.S. China policy require? How much German autonomy can Washington tolerate? What economic incentives and backstops can the United States offer Germany to reduce the existential risk it sees in confronting China?

Washington and Berlin can still form a community of interests around issues such as trade and climate policy, but until Americans come up with answers to these questions, a comprehensive consensus on China is unlikely to emerge any time soon. Appeals to Xinjiang and the Taiwan Strait will not supply the impetus, because most Germans simply do not perceive immediate threats to their security or prosperity there. Nor will reports of Chinese espionage and surveillance, which Berlin will continue to view as the unpleasant but necessary price of political stability at home.

The United States likes to criticize Germany for being stuck in the past on everything from infrastructure and energy to technology and geopolitics. But after being stifled on so many issues by a country over which it supposedly has so much leverage, U.S. officials should take a look in the mirror. Stuck in their own past assumptions of hegemony, Americans seem to have forgotten that powerful countries such as Germany do not make radical changes in policy out of fairness to others. They do so out of necessity or fear. Until Berlin is made to feel one or the other, Germany’s “new direction” on China will likely remain cosmetic.

Jeremy Stern is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council's Future Europe Initiative and was previously a senior advisor at the U.S. Embassy in Berlin.