China

China's Quest for Oil

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Is China trying to capture the oil market?

From Fueling the Dragon:

With 1.3 billion people, the People's Republic of China is the world's most populous country and the second largest oil consumer, behind the U.S. In recent years, China has been undergoing a process of industrialization and is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. With real gross domestic product growing at a rate of 8-10% a year, China's need for energy is projected to increase by 150 percent by 2020. to sustain its growth China requires increasing amounts of oil. Its oil consumption grows by 7.5% per year, seven times faster than the U.S.

China and the Dollar

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China is at it once again, to remove the dollar as the world reserve currency and they are bringing their pals, India and Russia to join in.

China will push reform of the international currency system to make it more diversified and reasonable, and to reduce excessive reliance on the current reserve currencies, the People's Bank of China said Friday.

"To avoid the shortcomings of sovereign credit currencies acting as reserve currencies, we need to create an ... international reserve currency that can maintain the long-term stability of its value," the PBOC said.

Manufacturing Tuesday: Week of 12.02.08


(editor's note: I was planning on publishing this morning, but some major personal business involving a sick wiener dog to one of those emergency vets had to take precedence. )
Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to another edition of Manufacturing Monday...er Tuesday! Originally I wanted to post this on Monday morning, but I wanted to include the latest development from the Boeing SPEEA talks. Outside of this we got news from the steel industry, unfortunately not the good kind. Sticking with steel for a moment, there's an op-ed piece I wish to highlight that I thought you should look at. We have news or alarm bells I should say about pensions. Of course we also have some Green news, some ominous, but some good.

But before we get to those, let's take a look at the Numbers!

The Numbers

It's a Dangerous Business, Pat Choate Chronicles America's Globalization Follies

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Dangerous Business - Pat Choate

 

Pat Choate's new book, Dangerous Business: The Risks of Globalization for America
 is a must read book on the realities of globalization, trade, the lobbyists surrounding D.C., corporatism and China's modern mercantilism. Choate not only describes some of the corruption, insanity and erosion of the United States through bad trade deals, elitism and globalization, he prescribes solutions.

 

In the below talk on his book, Choate details massive intellectual property theft, biased trade deal provisions, emerging markets, deficits with minute detail :

When Band-Aids No Longer Work

Manufacturing Monday: Week of 10.20.08

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Happy Monday, folks, I do hope you all had a good weekend!  Welcome to another installment of Manufacturing Monday!  Now things are looking bad out there, as many of you probably already know.  We start out with more dire jobs news at GM. Turning to some good news, it seems economic forces that made us "costly" has now turned the tables of sorts, with ironically the biggest pusher of China, Wal-mart (or is it Walmart?  I've seen this store both ways.) forcing suppliers to look domestically.  Lastly, we got Honda moving more work to North America. But first, as is par for the course, we get to the latest economic info related to manufacturing.  So without further adieu...

The Numbers!

Global economic tipping point: at the intersection of China and Oil

The US is no longer the engine, or at least the sole engine, of global economic growth. That mantle is shared, at least, with Europe, and even moreso with emerging Asia, and nowhere so much as China, now the world's 4th largest economy and 47wallst.com/2008/07/china-a-10-gdp.html">growing at a rate of 10% a year.
That growth has run smack up against at least short term limits on the availability of resources -- metals, livestock, rice, and more than anything else, Oil.
While growth in the US peaked about two years ago and has been generally declining since, most recently measured at about 1.9% (but perhaps in a year or three retroactively to be revised into negative territory, as Q4 2007 just was), China in particular has continued to boom, as I described in China's Out of Control Inflationary Boom.

Is China's bubble bursting?

If I simply showed you the following graph of a stock market losing nearly 60% of its value in 9 months, you'd probably conclude that a bubble had burst, and that the country whose companies it represented was probably in for some big Hurting:

So why has China been immune from such analysis? Presumably because the "story" behind China's growth is so compelling. Just about everybody seems to agree that China is the emerging economic world superpower.
Well, it's difficult to imagine now what life would be like without the internet, and yet that didn't stop the dot-bomb crash of 2000-2002. And the Mississippi Land Bubble was based on the accurate belief that what is now the US midwest would someday be the breadbasket of the world. Unfortunately they were off by 150 or so years.

Investing in the Nation - China that is

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You've probably never heard of the United States-China Economic and Security Review Commission, or USCC. Created in 2000, they research and review economic and security ties with China. Yes, someone, somewhere is trying to monitor the situation.

Today this commission held a hearing, " Research and Development, Technological Advances in Key Industries, and Changing Trade Flows with China".

Guess what folks! China doesn't want those low end jobs or even manufacturing as a long term economic strategy. Nope, they are going for high end research and development in key technical areas!

Walsh open statement:

Manufacturing Monday: Steel looks chirpy, while China faces some woes

Some interesting stuff happening in the manufacturing sector. The US Dollar, despite the President's claim today that he wants a strong currency, continues to drop. Rising material costs, be it ore or petroleum, has had some unintended consequences. I noted on Daily Kos last week, that many businesses are starting to take a second look at the US given the rise in transportation costs.

Domestic steel looking not too shabby

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