Unlike liberal democracies, Beijing has more room to act in crisis. China has extractive institutions that will ultimately be a growth limiting factor, but I don't see it limiting their crisis responses.
* There will be no political gridlock between left and right that can be solved only with half measures. Decisions are done in small groups of 30 people at most, with several hundred people having some influence.
* They don't have ideological fear of meddling with the markets or private property. It's all about being practical.
Beijing can make mistakes when handling the crisis. After they realize their error, they can take as big hammer as needed to fix it.
Everything you said might be right, I don't know. I think though that your facts are just as political as the facts the western countries use to justify market-based deregulation.
I've spent some time near Washington politics. It gave me the opionion that our system is purposefully designed to create gridlock in order to tie up political energies. Political energies that would have otherwise been used to create rapid change. I think the entire point is to create a relatively stable climate for business investment.
So that's the exact opposite philosophy as how you described the Chinese system. Central planning and proactive decisions made by a few vs. market driven and reactive desisions made by many.
I'm not even sure if it's possible to determine which system is better or what the exact best middle ground would be. It may have complexity beyond our scientific tools' ability to study.
There's a lot of truth in this. However, there is also the fact that their ability to keep the lid on things means they may also suppress feedback mechanisms which in a democracy may prevent wrong things from going on too long.
Something like this has been seen in the one child policy which went too far and the government is now scrambling. Also, the clumsy attempts to prop up the stock exchanges a couple of years ago have ultimately come undone. So we will see whether we have true resilience in the system, or is it actually brittle.
The problem for China won't be dealing with private property, it will be dealing with government owned property. Just because the average Joe doesn't get to vote doesn't mean the system isn't geared to preserve the status quo. I think you are quite naive if you think vested interests and political corruption is a smaller problem than having to respect private property.
This is wrong. China can’t defy gravity and the laws of economics especially in a global economy. It boils down to the fact that Chinese govt continues to abuse the labor without meaningfully increasing their standard of living. This can’t continue. What they’re doing is akin to engineering growth for the sake of showing growth.
That's true at the micro scale, not the macro. Tienanmen may be fading from memory, but it happened before and it'll happen again. Those 30-person decisions have winners and losers, and the losers not being in the room doesn't mean they'll just shut up and go quietly. Nor does it mean that those 30 people are going to be insensitive to or unwilling to accommodate their needs in all cases. They know what the stakes are if they mess up, and it goes farther than poverty.
Basically: "political gridlock" looks bad, but it's a safety valve that democracies use to avoid unrest, which is a far worse problem in the long run than a debt crisis.
That all depends on how powerful the leader is. If you look into the quite recent past this comment would be absolutely untrue. There was massive gridlock between factions it was just so opaque that we could only guess what was going on.
Also, How do you get the bureaucracy to actually do what you want?(A major recurring problem in Chinese History).
Unlike liberal democracies, Beijing has also mostly absolved its people of moral hazard, creating a situation where they have to act and fix things up because they have basically taken complete responsibility for the health of the economy. In a liberal democracy, one can just vote the turkeys out when something economically bad happens (whether or not it’s their fault), but that is obviously not an option in China.
The second point about dismissing markets was actually the downfall of many authoritarian governments. You can't defy the law of economics with executive orders.
At the moment, China is only strengthening private property rights, looks like they learned that lesson.
I wonder if part of the problem is that democracies don't really work well when for example Americans care about only themselves. One classic example is NIMBYs in cities. Of course, the debt-based economy only compounds the problem.
The soviets and Mao's regimes had ample powers to do what they wanted, yet it resulted in mass murder and complete catastrophe at unprecedented scale because they made very, very poor decisions. Having leverage does not mean it fits prosperity nor crisis. Look at how soviets encouraged the killing of Kulaks which led to the great starvation (dozens of millions of deaths) in Ukraine in the following years.
> Unlike liberal democracies, Beijing has more room to act in crisis.
I strongly disagree; the above is an old shibboleth of dictators and other anti-democrats. Mussolini promised to make the train runs on time.
Authoritarian governments are actually starkly limited by the individuals with power - by their ability, their vision, their own greed and interests, and their political limitations (authoritarian power structures are not democracies; the limits are not voters and law but other power bases). When those leaders are incapable, the country fails - rule of man, not rule of law and by the people. In a democracy, the pluralism in people and inputs creates great flexibility: This especially applies to vision, a reason market economies, which factor in the vision of all, work so much better than command economies, limited to the cognitive processing of a few; it's the reason why micromanaging CEOs fail while delegating and empowering ones are so much more successful. Democracies are much more innovative politically and economically.
More generally, when one person can't do it, in a democracy others can; either others in the broad power structure do it, or the people in power are replaced. IMHO, that exact problem explains the lack of dynamism in authoritarian government, and the reason by imperial China fell so far behind the 'West' - when the emperor failed to adapt, the country was stuck with him (and his progeny) for another century. In a democracy, he'd be gone within months or at worst a few years.
Finally, corruption is an enormous problem and impediment in non-democracies, a fact long-established in Chinese histories. (IIRC, in Chinese histories the standard model of the long-term political cycle is the ascendancy of a new power, then its decline due to corruption, then chaos, then it repeats.) Policy is not driven by serving the voters, a necessity in democracies, but by those in power serving themselves.
Finally, reality does not bear out the strong-man theory: Without question the best performing economies historically are liberal democracies. China remains - and many believe will remain without liberal democracy - a poor country compared with the liberal democracies. Everything the Chinese dictatorship does well economically, from monetary policy to market capitalism to universal education, are innovations of liberal democracies. The most economically successful parts of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, are liberal democracies (speaking very broadly about Hong Kong - the complexities there are out of scope in this comment).
(This is not a knock on the people of China. I dream of the day they will be set free to run their own lives - it's hard to imagine the innovation of a billion people set free with those incredible cultural resources at their disposal.)
I don’t get this article. China exceeded their economic growth target for 2018 in April when their economy hit 6.8% growth. Their wages are steadily increasing. Their internal market is the healthiest of any g20 economy. Investments both internally and internationally are up and their population has little dept.
On top of that they haven’t touched retirement age, so they have a lot of leverage there.
I think Michael Pettis is probably worth quoting here :
"In most economies, GDP growth is a measure of economic output generated by the performance of the underlying economy. In China, however, Beijing sets annual GDP growth targets it expects to meet. Turning GDP growth into an economic input, rather than an output, radically changes its meaning and interpretation."
I’m no economist, but I think the point is that they’re collecting debt at a high rate too. If they continue to grow faster than that debt, all is well. Once their growth starts to revert to the G20 mean, they’ll need to change their strategies dramatically.
I don't know what their "real" gdp growth was, but the larger point is that GDP growth occurred because of an even larger increase in debt. That debt likely went to wasteful/non-productive projects. That isn't healthy or sustainable.
And did you forget China is about to be hit with tariffs from US on 200B worth, soon to be 500B? when their economy is export oriented?
> Investments both internally and internationally are up
Wrong. Yuan has lost 12% this year. Chinese stock market has crashed 30% this year. That's not a sign of increasing FDI. that's FDI leaving and screaming
> On top of that they haven’t touched retirement age
Wrong. Chinese demographics looks horrible, and will reach peak in 2025. Their population will shrink 1/3 in the next 60 years.
Studying economics for some time, I think economists often ask wrong questions. So let's say trade war occurs, and china will lose some of its exports. The main question is not whether savings would decrease or investment rise, the main question is how all the spare capacity left will be utilised. Yeah, if it won't be utilised then there will be unemployment, well pointed by the author. If domestic consumer will consume what was produced for exports, then consumption would increase and savings would fall. If Chinese will find a way to use spare capacity to produce something else what is in higher demand (high tech let's say) then investment would rise. And let me assure you that strong Chinese government will find a way to use all the freed up labour/capital resources, so any downfalls would be temporary. On the other side are democracies like US which don't have that much control over production side and whose economies are not that robust to shocks that China may face now.
How can you be so naive as to state that a dictatorship is a "strong" government?
Having one man and his clique at the helm is extreme weakness. Any strength the government may have at any time is wholly incidental, not structural or systemic like what a well-functioning democracy of the people for the people produces.
In many way the current state of governance in China is worse than what an established hereditary monarchy would provide.
Any way this all will be tested soon enough.
You can go through a simple two-stage exercise. But it comes down to how China can churn out tech and this is exactly why they are not allowing the Big Silicon Valley to do business there (and understandably so). To be honest, the tech baton will stay in the US until someone can put up a comparable education and research ecosystem. I don’t see that happening for at least another 50 years. China is at a crucial point in their economy and my bet is they will do whatever they can to generate growth in the WRONG (and easy) areas.
As a non-expert, it seems likely that of the 3 options, wealth transfer will be the main solution to China's debt problems. (It's worth noting, China's high corporate debt levels are, like Japan's, owed to mainly to domestic creditors, and I believe also denominated in the local currency.)
In a totalitarian dictatorship, "political opposition from so-called vested interests" is not that strong a barrier when political and economic stability is at stake.
I think while some unsustainable debt will continue to be allowed to default, a lot of debt will eventually be painfully bailed out by taxpayers (both households and corporations) over time.
This mean lower health, education, and social welfare spending affecting people who didn't cause the debt problem in the first place. That's just the unfortunate price of accumulating large amounts of non-productive debt.
There is no Zhu Rongji in current generation of party leaders.
From my personal observations, the leeching of public debt through borderline fraudulent projects barely ceased under Xi. This is an elephant in the room. Only the moment they will lift a knife on it, will we be assured that they began an actual move on that front.
Do you know why Xi raised his hand on his closest supporters in the reactionary camp he leads - Bo and Co?
He did so because he was too afraid that Bo as a much more charismatic person will take over the lead of reactionaries from him.
Now, he needs to pay his supporters in the party lavishly in form of state sanctioned corruption - all kinds of unsupervised small local projects where money vanish using long lending chains, or simply stratospheric remunerations for offsprings of party officials employed somewhere in the chain.
I've tried reading this piece a couple times, but despite the bullet points and numbered lists, I can't make any sense out of it. I presume this is because I lack essential background knowledge. Can someone please help explain the context?
When he says "China's debt problems", what exactly is he referring to?
When he says "there are also only four ways that Beijing can respond", what are they responding to and what is the goal of their response?
Pettis writes extensively about China and its internal debt problem. The best primer, though lengthy, is to slog through his posts dating back to the mid-2000s.
Briefly, though: China has had artificially cheap credit in its corporate sector due to explicit government policies restricting the growth of household spending. This cheap credit caused a lot of malinvestment ("bridges to nowhere"), and there hasn't been an accounting reckoning yet.
To continue to grow, China needs its household sector to grow, both in consumption and share of the economy. This is a classic shift from middle-income to developed economy. Because right now continued growth from the corporate (generally export-driven) sector has topped out, and getting more growth out of it is costly in terms of debt.
I think those are the broad strokes. To summarize: the Beijing is responding to the explosive growth of internal debt in the economy, and the goal is to continue growing. That growth must come from the household sector, but must also include dealing with the massive debt overhang. (I suppose you could also say that Beijing's goal is to stay in power, which requires economic growth to keep the populace happy.)
>When he says "China's debt problems", what exactly is he referring to?
China’s response to the financial crisis was to loosen credit and “encourage” banks to lend. The result was that debt started rising faster than GPD and total debt now stands at 300% of GDP.
Since GDP is the income needed to pay off debt there is a point where it is no longer sustainable. If there were no limit it would be possible to eliminate poverty by simply giving poor people loans.
> When he says "there are also only four ways that Beijing can respond", what are they responding to and what is the goal of their response?
With a looming trade war it is unlikely that China will be able to sustain the trade deficits with the US like it has in the past. It is also unlikely that China can find any other viable markets that could absorb exports that are currently destined for the US. China will want to mitigate the domestic impact of the outcome in a way that preserves domestic stability.
I'm assuming the debt problems are the corporate defaults on bond payments [0] for 2018 until July, were close to equal to the entire year of 2016. There's also consumer debt stuff that's blowing up as well (the whole p2p loan companies going bankrupt was linked on HN recently).
As for the what are they responding to is the engine for economic growth is stalling out from knock on effects behind whats going on above, and I can only speculate that the "goal" of any kind of response will be to maintain some kind of economic "stability".
It's not you, it's just that he's answering the question by using a macro framework. I don't necessarily agree with his approach because China has unprecedented scale in modern economics.
I have been reading his blog for years (ever since Calculated Risk, another great economics blog, pointed to him). He has been beating the same drum the entire time. His point is that the mechanics of how an economy work at the macro level reduce to a simple set of equations between investment, savings and consumption. And that those equations force hard choices that have political implications.
I have passed some articles to economics professors I know, but haven't heard whether Pettis' ideas make sense from a theoretical perspective. I know they make sense to me, a layman.
> Notice that all four paths either raise investment or reduce savings, thereby reducing the country’s excess of savings over investment.
Or...a fifth path would be to entice people to convert "unproductive" savings into investment. If only there were some mechanism where people could tell if this was a viable route like, say, a market based interest rate.
Quite surprisingly, it turns out that "saving" and "investing" are nearly synonymous.
Put differently, over the longer run, Beijing can only avoid a sharp rise in unemployment or stagnant wage growth to the extent that it has managed to achieve significant wealth transfers.
Isn't this exactly what the Communist Party or socialism (fake capitalism) with Chinese characteristics is supposed to have retained the option to do?
To be more specific, a charitable interpretation of affairs is that Xi or whoever is engineering Xi's policies has made sharp left turn, and is taking authoritarian measures to carry out exactly this.
[+] [-] Nokinside|7 years ago|reply
* There will be no political gridlock between left and right that can be solved only with half measures. Decisions are done in small groups of 30 people at most, with several hundred people having some influence.
* They don't have ideological fear of meddling with the markets or private property. It's all about being practical.
Beijing can make mistakes when handling the crisis. After they realize their error, they can take as big hammer as needed to fix it.
[+] [-] dougmwne|7 years ago|reply
I've spent some time near Washington politics. It gave me the opionion that our system is purposefully designed to create gridlock in order to tie up political energies. Political energies that would have otherwise been used to create rapid change. I think the entire point is to create a relatively stable climate for business investment.
So that's the exact opposite philosophy as how you described the Chinese system. Central planning and proactive decisions made by a few vs. market driven and reactive desisions made by many.
I'm not even sure if it's possible to determine which system is better or what the exact best middle ground would be. It may have complexity beyond our scientific tools' ability to study.
[+] [-] sseth|7 years ago|reply
Something like this has been seen in the one child policy which went too far and the government is now scrambling. Also, the clumsy attempts to prop up the stock exchanges a couple of years ago have ultimately come undone. So we will see whether we have true resilience in the system, or is it actually brittle.
[+] [-] crwalker|7 years ago|reply
If you believe complex economic systems follow simple, well-known control laws, then yes. But I haven't seen much evidence for this.
[+] [-] yxhuvud|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitxbit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajross|7 years ago|reply
That's true at the micro scale, not the macro. Tienanmen may be fading from memory, but it happened before and it'll happen again. Those 30-person decisions have winners and losers, and the losers not being in the room doesn't mean they'll just shut up and go quietly. Nor does it mean that those 30 people are going to be insensitive to or unwilling to accommodate their needs in all cases. They know what the stakes are if they mess up, and it goes farther than poverty.
Basically: "political gridlock" looks bad, but it's a safety valve that democracies use to avoid unrest, which is a far worse problem in the long run than a debt crisis.
[+] [-] schuke|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulsutter|7 years ago|reply
> Decisions are done in small groups of 30 people at most, with several hundred people having some influence.
To all the ideological responses to nokinside: don’t underestimate China. China isn’t perfect but is an incredible story.
[+] [-] doombolt|7 years ago|reply
Think Greece vs. Venezuela.
[+] [-] galuggus|7 years ago|reply
Also, How do you get the bureaucracy to actually do what you want?(A major recurring problem in Chinese History).
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monort|7 years ago|reply
At the moment, China is only strengthening private property rights, looks like they learned that lesson.
[+] [-] yuhong|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekianjo|7 years ago|reply
The soviets and Mao's regimes had ample powers to do what they wanted, yet it resulted in mass murder and complete catastrophe at unprecedented scale because they made very, very poor decisions. Having leverage does not mean it fits prosperity nor crisis. Look at how soviets encouraged the killing of Kulaks which led to the great starvation (dozens of millions of deaths) in Ukraine in the following years.
[+] [-] forapurpose|7 years ago|reply
I strongly disagree; the above is an old shibboleth of dictators and other anti-democrats. Mussolini promised to make the train runs on time.
Authoritarian governments are actually starkly limited by the individuals with power - by their ability, their vision, their own greed and interests, and their political limitations (authoritarian power structures are not democracies; the limits are not voters and law but other power bases). When those leaders are incapable, the country fails - rule of man, not rule of law and by the people. In a democracy, the pluralism in people and inputs creates great flexibility: This especially applies to vision, a reason market economies, which factor in the vision of all, work so much better than command economies, limited to the cognitive processing of a few; it's the reason why micromanaging CEOs fail while delegating and empowering ones are so much more successful. Democracies are much more innovative politically and economically.
More generally, when one person can't do it, in a democracy others can; either others in the broad power structure do it, or the people in power are replaced. IMHO, that exact problem explains the lack of dynamism in authoritarian government, and the reason by imperial China fell so far behind the 'West' - when the emperor failed to adapt, the country was stuck with him (and his progeny) for another century. In a democracy, he'd be gone within months or at worst a few years.
Finally, corruption is an enormous problem and impediment in non-democracies, a fact long-established in Chinese histories. (IIRC, in Chinese histories the standard model of the long-term political cycle is the ascendancy of a new power, then its decline due to corruption, then chaos, then it repeats.) Policy is not driven by serving the voters, a necessity in democracies, but by those in power serving themselves.
Finally, reality does not bear out the strong-man theory: Without question the best performing economies historically are liberal democracies. China remains - and many believe will remain without liberal democracy - a poor country compared with the liberal democracies. Everything the Chinese dictatorship does well economically, from monetary policy to market capitalism to universal education, are innovations of liberal democracies. The most economically successful parts of China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, are liberal democracies (speaking very broadly about Hong Kong - the complexities there are out of scope in this comment).
(This is not a knock on the people of China. I dream of the day they will be set free to run their own lives - it's hard to imagine the innovation of a billion people set free with those incredible cultural resources at their disposal.)
[+] [-] eksemplar|7 years ago|reply
On top of that they haven’t touched retirement age, so they have a lot of leverage there.
[+] [-] sseth|7 years ago|reply
See http://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/75355
[+] [-] village-idiot|7 years ago|reply
But I’m not an economist.
[+] [-] tonyedgecombe|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AJ007|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsuabing2|7 years ago|reply
Wrong. Fake GDP. It's estimated that 1/3 of their GDP is wasteful government spending. Many of their provinces also have confessed to 20-30% fake GDP, thus another 1/3 of their gdp is fake. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-19/this-is-h... https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/new-study-shin... so we're looking at maybe 1-2% gdp growth, and maybe their GDP is only about 70% of what they claim (9T vs 13T)
> Their wages are steadily increasing.
Wrong. Chinese graduates salaries have fallen for second year in a row. https://www.ft.com/content/fb5865e4-4993-11e7-919a-1e14ce4af....
> Their internal market is the healthiest of any g20 economy
Wrong. Consumer spending growth declined. https://www.google.com/search?q=chinese+spending+down&rlz=1C... . Beijing rent increased 25% !!! in july year over year. That's not a healthy sign of any economy. https://www.ft.com/content/6324fc2a-a445-11e8-8ecf-a7ae1beff... . and now we know Chinese consumers are taking on too much personal debt https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-02-15/chinese-c...
And did you forget China is about to be hit with tariffs from US on 200B worth, soon to be 500B? when their economy is export oriented?
> Investments both internally and internationally are up
Wrong. Yuan has lost 12% this year. Chinese stock market has crashed 30% this year. That's not a sign of increasing FDI. that's FDI leaving and screaming
> On top of that they haven’t touched retirement age
Wrong. Chinese demographics looks horrible, and will reach peak in 2025. Their population will shrink 1/3 in the next 60 years.
[+] [-] andygoo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polotics|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] doombolt|7 years ago|reply
You're telling us that they have found The Holy Grail. Let me stay confident that it isn't the case.
[+] [-] bitxbit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baybal2|7 years ago|reply
Undifferentiated low end products are more price elastic than brand goods. China will do fine even if USA will declare a 100% embargo.
Edit: specified that I talk about price elasticity
[+] [-] shasheene|7 years ago|reply
In a totalitarian dictatorship, "political opposition from so-called vested interests" is not that strong a barrier when political and economic stability is at stake.
I think while some unsustainable debt will continue to be allowed to default, a lot of debt will eventually be painfully bailed out by taxpayers (both households and corporations) over time.
This mean lower health, education, and social welfare spending affecting people who didn't cause the debt problem in the first place. That's just the unfortunate price of accumulating large amounts of non-productive debt.
[+] [-] baybal2|7 years ago|reply
From my personal observations, the leeching of public debt through borderline fraudulent projects barely ceased under Xi. This is an elephant in the room. Only the moment they will lift a knife on it, will we be assured that they began an actual move on that front.
Do you know why Xi raised his hand on his closest supporters in the reactionary camp he leads - Bo and Co?
He did so because he was too afraid that Bo as a much more charismatic person will take over the lead of reactionaries from him.
Now, he needs to pay his supporters in the party lavishly in form of state sanctioned corruption - all kinds of unsupervised small local projects where money vanish using long lending chains, or simply stratospheric remunerations for offsprings of party officials employed somewhere in the chain.
[+] [-] nkurz|7 years ago|reply
When he says "China's debt problems", what exactly is he referring to?
When he says "there are also only four ways that Beijing can respond", what are they responding to and what is the goal of their response?
[+] [-] ryandamm|7 years ago|reply
Briefly, though: China has had artificially cheap credit in its corporate sector due to explicit government policies restricting the growth of household spending. This cheap credit caused a lot of malinvestment ("bridges to nowhere"), and there hasn't been an accounting reckoning yet.
To continue to grow, China needs its household sector to grow, both in consumption and share of the economy. This is a classic shift from middle-income to developed economy. Because right now continued growth from the corporate (generally export-driven) sector has topped out, and getting more growth out of it is costly in terms of debt.
I think those are the broad strokes. To summarize: the Beijing is responding to the explosive growth of internal debt in the economy, and the goal is to continue growing. That growth must come from the household sector, but must also include dealing with the massive debt overhang. (I suppose you could also say that Beijing's goal is to stay in power, which requires economic growth to keep the populace happy.)
[+] [-] slv77|7 years ago|reply
China’s response to the financial crisis was to loosen credit and “encourage” banks to lend. The result was that debt started rising faster than GPD and total debt now stands at 300% of GDP.
Since GDP is the income needed to pay off debt there is a point where it is no longer sustainable. If there were no limit it would be possible to eliminate poverty by simply giving poor people loans.
> When he says "there are also only four ways that Beijing can respond", what are they responding to and what is the goal of their response?
With a looming trade war it is unlikely that China will be able to sustain the trade deficits with the US like it has in the past. It is also unlikely that China can find any other viable markets that could absorb exports that are currently destined for the US. China will want to mitigate the domestic impact of the outcome in a way that preserves domestic stability.
[+] [-] cinquemb|7 years ago|reply
As for the what are they responding to is the engine for economic growth is stalling out from knock on effects behind whats going on above, and I can only speculate that the "goal" of any kind of response will be to maintain some kind of economic "stability".
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-02/china-hea...
[+] [-] bitxbit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simplecomplex|7 years ago|reply
Economists are impotent at predicting the future effects of monetary policy so it’d be great if they stopped pretending.
[+] [-] baybal2|7 years ago|reply
China is about to hit its Brezhnev era. That's my fear.
But for as long as Yi Da Yi Lu and state contracts rain gold, I see no personal reasons to worry
[+] [-] mooreds|7 years ago|reply
I have passed some articles to economics professors I know, but haven't heard whether Pettis' ideas make sense from a theoretical perspective. I know they make sense to me, a layman.
[+] [-] UncleEntity|7 years ago|reply
Or...a fifth path would be to entice people to convert "unproductive" savings into investment. If only there were some mechanism where people could tell if this was a viable route like, say, a market based interest rate.
Quite surprisingly, it turns out that "saving" and "investing" are nearly synonymous.
[+] [-] tomohawk|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pishpash|7 years ago|reply
Isn't this exactly what the Communist Party or socialism (fake capitalism) with Chinese characteristics is supposed to have retained the option to do?
To be more specific, a charitable interpretation of affairs is that Xi or whoever is engineering Xi's policies has made sharp left turn, and is taking authoritarian measures to carry out exactly this.
[+] [-] juanitox|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]