Registered: Feb 2008
Location: With Juan Pachanga Eating Tacos. Ah Ha Si Mi Gusta.
delaying the inevitable will not make things better. You figure the damage that was done in the 80's would have taught you something by now. Continuous exponential growth is impossible to sustain, and now the floor has fallen out. Open your eyes, bailing out people who got too greedy will only make things worse in the long run.
Heh, China's current big GDP growth is deluding people into ignoring its huge amounts of corruption and bad loans, not to mention the fact that its population is aging at a rate even higher than in the socialized European economies with questionable futures.
[I like social democracies, by the way, but they just don't add up without some steady population growth.]
Whatever floats the boat of TA's "America last-ers," though.
Sep-25-2008 19:47
Zoso
Banging Gangs!
Registered: Mar 2006
Location: Dirty South, United States
Let us consult the great Alberto Falk!
Sep-25-2008 19:48
elFreak
Blood Diamonds and Salsa
Registered: Feb 2008
Location: With Juan Pachanga Eating Tacos. Ah Ha Si Mi Gusta.
it is not just about china.
asia as a whole is moving into a partnership via free trade and economic policies within it. A united asia financially is a very hard thing to compete with. Of course you only know of these policies outside of america because the media simply ignores it.
I agree, it's not just about China and its book-cooking voodoo: the whole of East Asia is aging just like Europe is, united or no. It all looks sunny until an increasingly sparse young generation has to care for parents in their dotage. Maybe they can follow Japan's lead and start investing in senior-care robots.
America might avoid this destiny due to a recent jump in the birthrate, but that's also questionable due to our insane practices in lending and CDS-gambling that have gone unregulated for far too long, and which are the root of the current crisis, possibly canceling out any demographic advantage we might have.
So what we're all going to see eventually is either a big push toward natalism, politico-economic collapse, or a bunch of old people sent out on the ice floes.
Sep-25-2008 20:03
Arbiter
Naked Power Organ
Registered: May 2002
Location:
quote:
Originally posted by elFreak
delaying the inevitable will not make things better. You figure the damage that was done in the 80's would have taught you something by now. Continuous exponential growth is impossible to sustain, and now the floor has fallen out. Open your eyes, bailing out people who got too greedy will only make things worse in the long run.
I agree. It looks like just about nobody learned anything from the savings and loan crisis. Lenders didn't learn anything; borrowers didn't learn anything; the government officials didn't learn anything; the media didn't learn anything; and the general public who are eating up this illusory $700 bn figure obviously didn't learn anything because we heard all the same complaints about the Resolution Trust Corporation and that ended up just about breaking even.
Sep-25-2008 20:04
elFreak
Blood Diamonds and Salsa
Registered: Feb 2008
Location: With Juan Pachanga Eating Tacos. Ah Ha Si Mi Gusta.
quote:
Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
I agree, it's not just about China and its book-cooking voodoo: the whole of East Asia is aging just like Europe is, united or no. It all looks sunny until an increasingly sparse young generation has to care for parents in their dotage. Maybe they can follow Japan's lead and start investing in senior-care robots.
America might avoid this destiny due to a recent jump in the birthrate, but that's also questionable due to our insane practices in lending and CDS-gambling that have gone unregulated for far too long, and which are the root of the current crisis, possibly canceling out any demographic advantage we might have.
So what we're all going to see eventually is either a big push toward natalism, politico-economic collapse, or a bunch of old people sent out on the ice floes.
where does aging fit into the equation when 1 in 5 world citizens are chinese...and they do not give a fuck about their own population for the sake of economic growth?
Originally posted by elFreak
where does aging fit into the equation when 1 in 5 world citizens are chinese...and they do not give a fuck about their own population for the sake of economic growth?
Do the math:
Working citizens / total citizens = proportion of population actually sustaining the economy. As a population ages, that ratio gets smaller and you have a larger proportion of workers to non-workers. Each productive person has to support more and more non-productive people.
Of course, China has the big "advantage" of being willing to utilize child labor, meaning it has a bigger range from start-of-working-age to retirement age, so this problem will be less severe there than in the more regulated European countries.
Sep-25-2008 20:12
elFreak
Blood Diamonds and Salsa
Registered: Feb 2008
Location: With Juan Pachanga Eating Tacos. Ah Ha Si Mi Gusta.
if you think this is america's life line you are severly deluded and buying the company line.
Originally posted by elFreak
if you think this is america's life line you are severly deluded and buying the company line.
enjoy your bullshit pancakes.
That's the thing, I don't think anybody has a "life line" here. America has its own shit to deal with, and so far it doesn't seem to be doing that too adequately.
I'm just doing my part to counter the fatuous sort of optimism that has dominated discussion of Asian economies for the last five years or so.
Sep-25-2008 20:16
elFreak
Blood Diamonds and Salsa
Registered: Feb 2008
Location: With Juan Pachanga Eating Tacos. Ah Ha Si Mi Gusta.
while i am not calling you out as completely wrong i do not think this will affect the situation as much as you believe it to. Show me a country that is not 3rd world where the birth rates have not gone down. This problem is a global one and not limited to china, so in the scope of things america will live this as well.
