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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  474 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: China’s Deflation Danger Isn’t What You Think

    Undeterred, investors now are fretting about price declines in China, although probably for the wrong reasons.

I see no one fretting about this and I spend an hour or two each day standing on the street corner where the fretters would walk by (figuratively speaking). What I see people fretting about is the implosion of their bond market because

(A) it was built on graft

(B) that graft is unraveling

(C) the only reason you bother with China is to get a piece of that graft

(D) Xi rightly believes China would be better if it didn't build things on graft

What investors freak out about is the Toll Brothers & Quadrant Homes of China, namely Country Garden, Evergrande and their ilk. That's primarily because local governments were given a fuckton of money by the central government to build a middle class out in the hinterlands and it turns out the middle class isn't interested in living in the hinterlands. It's like if Stalin tried to get people to move to Siberia by building theme parks there. So all that money is gonna get written off, except it won't, because China is a command economy pretending to be a capitalist economy and Xi doesn't see the point in pretending.

I should buy some servopaks while Xi is still paying for them