Who will take on Obama in 2012?

He was talking about capitalism, not America.

The real threat to the American economy isn't Greece defaulting. The EU should disband and forget about propping up these minor country basket cases. It is China. They are headed for a crash and these stupid economists who think Chinese leaders can prevent one with their manipulation should have their degrees revoked.



News from The Globe and Mail
Five reasons to avoid China's unravelling economy


AVNER MANDELMAN0

00:00 EDT Friday, June 17, 2011

Avner Mandelman is the author of The Sleuth Investor.
[email protected]
Investors are fleeing from Sino-Forest and other companies with operations in China. Some people see this as a buying opportunity; I disagree.
In my opinion, China is slowly unravelling, and the imploding share prices of many Chinese companies are a symptom of deeper problems. This is a view I've held for some time and I believe the evidence is mounting that China's economy is on the verge of a slowdown. Let me list some reasons:
Banking problems:
As I've noted before in this space, China has been selling products at artificially low prices to keep its population employed and prevent social disorder.
Like Japan in the 1990s, China has kept its cost of capital depressed to help exporters generate jobs. That has fuelled a wave of indiscriminate lending, notably to local governments and the real estate sector.
As with Japan, loans that will never be repaid are now piling up in the banking system. This is by no means a new problem. McKinsey & Co., the consulting firm, warned back in 2005 of "the enormous stock of bad loans" in China's banking sector. This past year, the China Banking Regulatory Commission, the country's financial-system regulator, said the bad loans pose a "substantial" risk. The danger has only grown since then. Japan paid for its bad-loan sins with a decade of stagnation. China's stagnation is coming, too.
Currency pressure:
Following the G20 meeting in Toronto last year, China reluctantly let the yuan rise. This made Chinese goods less competitive, reduced employment, and caused social disorder.
Meanwhile, inflation is on the rise, particularly in food prices. To fight it, China is squeezing the money supply, raising margin requirements, and tightening up lending.
As a result, China's real estate bubble is starting to deflate and many residences stand vacant. Bloomberg News recently reported on the construction boom in Kangbashi, a city in China's Inner Mongolia that was originally designed to accommodate around one million people. It currently has about 30,000 residents.
Legal vacuum:
There's no property without property rights. My rule is never to invest in a country where there's no independent judiciary. Some of the latest riots in China erupted because bureaucrats have been confiscating land for projects in which they have a personal stake. Land owners have no recourse except violence.
Hard-line leaders:
China's leadership is implicitly admitting things will get tougher. The country's current leader, President Hu Jintao, could afford some openness, but the new leader who is scheduled to take power next year will probably have to clamp down harshly. Xi Jinping, the likely new leader, has a reputation as a hard liner. For me, his continued rise in the political hierarchy is a clear sign that China realizes the future will be grim.
Lack of transparency:
China is a dictatorship where analysts find it difficult to perform due diligence on prospective investments - just ask any analyst who has tried to research a Chinese company. What's more, official Chinese statistics are notoriously unreliable, leading some observers, such as Stratfor, a private intelligence consultant, to label the country's economy an unsustainable Ponzi scheme.
Even if China's economic miracle only proves to be overstated, the effects will be wide ranging. Much of the recent rise in commodity prices was the result of Chinese demand. If it tapers off, so will commodity prices. The good news? That will lower costs and liberate cash to eventually start a new bull market.
To my mind, the only question is when the Chinese economy will start to decisively slow down. Brockhouse Cooper, the Montreal investing firm, noted in a recent report that high electricity demand in China indicates the country's economy is still red hot.
The Brockhouse analysts, however, warned that Chinese authorities appear to be losing control over financial stability, with rates climbing in the "repo" market for short-term funds and banks growing increasingly cautious about lending to each other.
Those are telling signs of the growing tension in the Chinese economy. All the more reason for investors to keep away from the country's stock market.
© The Globe and Mail

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It reminds me of a toilet paper on the trees
- Paula

I think I might agree.

I owe some more replies but my thoughts are mostly dominated by a TV taping I have to do tonight so I'll hold off. I'll be interviewing Congressman Tim Murphy, if anyone's interested.

He some Republican Tea Party guy?

No. Some Tea Partiers are attempting to find someone to run against him in the primaries, in fact.

&feature=player_embedded#!

Do yourself a favor and watch this video!






Also, Yoda, I plan on responding when I get more than 5 spare minutes!

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If I had a dollar for every existential crisis I've ever had, does money really even matter?

Look how hard Texas makes it to get an exemption for a vaccine. It is automatic, but look at all the hoops you have to go through to get it and if you do anything wrong by leaving a minor detail out of the affadavit form it will be denied. You can apply again, but they sure make it diificult.

http://vaccineinfo.net/exemptions/index.shtml



This clearly was special interest legislation to benefit a contributor. Religious conservatives don't think a vaccine like that should even be made availble by the state because they think it encourages adolescent sexual activity, but even most liberals think it should only be made available, not mandatory.

There are what I consider horror stories about special interest legislation under Perry designed to help one contributor and use regualtory rules to exclude other non contributor bidders. His ethics stinks.

Here is the reality all you Republicans. None of these are going to run. Christie isn't running. Juliani is dreaming. Palin's comments makes it clear she won't run (man, she sounds stupid), and Trump isn't running as an independent, he just loves to get attention:









Non-candidates are keeping presidential buzz alive


Updated: Sep 28, 2011 - 16:55PM

Text Size
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Beth Fouhy
AP
NEW YORK -Chris Christie isn't running for president but says he's listening to those who want him to. Donald Trump opted out of a bid for the Republican nomination but hasn't ruled out running as an independent. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's aides are courting New Hampshire activists. And Sarah Palin says she'll decide soon whether to join the field, even as she worries the White House might be "too shackling."

Welcome to The Big Tease, when political stars stoke the hopes of supporters by hinting they just might join the presidential fray.

A few do succumb to the temptation — most recently Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who joined the GOP field in August after months of insisting absolutely he had no interest. Others milk their moment in the spotlight, boosting their national stature, broadening their fundraising base and laying the foundation for a possible future run.

It happens in many presidential years. Democrats swooned, for a while, for New York Gov. Mario Cuomo in 1992; there was a Gen. Wesley Clark boomlet in 2004 and a drumbeat around former Republican Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee in 2008.

Cuomo stayed out, but his prolonged indecision earned him the nickname Hamlet on the Hudson. Clark and Thompson both jumped in late, only to flame out quickly.

Perry, for his part, has already learned the perils of a late entry.

After joining the race with great fanfare and rocketing to the top of the polls, Perry's shaky performance in two nationally televised debates have left many GOP activists worried he isn't prepared to be the party's standard bearer against President Barack Obama. But many also remain skeptical of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. He's had a relatively smooth run this time after losing the nomination in 2008, but he still hasn't fired up much passionate support.

All of which explains why Christie mania was at full boil Tuesday, when the New Jersey governor delivered a long-planned speech at the Reagan Presidential Library in California.

He turned in a stinging indictment of both parties' leadership in Washington. And while he restated his refusal to enter the race, he told a woman begging him to reconsider that he was "touched" by her plea.

"The reason has to reside inside me," he said. "My answer to you is just this: I take it in, and I'm listening to every word of it and I feel it."

Palin, the former Alaska governor who was the GOP vice-presidential nominee in 2008, was also pressed on her presidential ambitions Tuesday in an interview on Fox News. She said — again — she hadn't made a decision, but did indicate she had concerns about going forward.

"Is a title worth it? Does a title shackle a person?" Palin asked. "Are they — someone like me, maverick, you know, I do go rogue, and I call it like I see it, and I don't mind stirring it up. ... Is a title and is a campaign too shackling?"

Ari Fleischer, a former press secretary for President George W. Bush, said it's "plain and simple too late" for anyone to join the GOP field. But he said different candidates have different reasons for keeping the speculation alive.

"Chris Christie has a future and needs to be protective of his future. All this interest helps him raise money for Republican candidates and enjoy one last flirtation," Fleischer said. "Palin beats to a different drum, so this just keeps her in the game longer. She likes being the center of attention and the focus."

APNewsBreak: Christie to decide soon on 2012 bid


My prediction: Christie stays out.


BREAKING: Fox News reporting that Chris Christie has decided not to run for president.


He decided pretty fast if Fox is right.


That breaking news was broke as it has disappeared.


I don't know why Republicans are panicking. Romney is probably toast, not because he is a far right nut, but because it turned out he isn't far right enough nuts for the Tea Party on illegal immigration. Romney is actually to the right to him on that issue. But Christie also is a moderate on illegal immigrants so why do these conservative pundits think Christie could save them from Mitt Romney, who is still their best candidate to go against Obama? Why are they acting like they are going to lose when the economy stinks and Romney is a good speaker and debater? Romneycare is not going to be an important issue in the national election.

Romney is far right? That's almost as funny as saying Obama is a centrist.

I meant Perry, not Romney.

But now on to the next Republican messiah:

More trouble for Rick Perry...NH Ranch. And his claim his father painted over the sign shortly after leasing the property in the early eighties is contradicted by witnesses who said they saw it well into the nineties and possibly as late as 2007.

Chris Christie will not run for president.

What I felt was the right decision remains the right decision," Christie said. "Today is not my time.

"I will not abandon my commitment to New Jersey. I will fix a broken New Jersey. I'm proud of the work we've done, but I know I'm not nearly done."

"I've made this commitment to my state," the governor said. "I'm just not prepared to walk away. Not everyone agrees with my decision, but my loyalty to my state is what it is."

I like Chris Christie. For those conservative people who know, what is so attractive about Chris Christie that makes a half term governor with no other political experience the savior of the Republican party? What has he done in New Jersey that has been so wonderful? He was a state's attorney, then ran for governor, and has been there a year and a half. What are his accomplishments?

I completely understand the personal appeal. He appears to be blunt, direct, straight forward, and honest. What I am asking is what accomplishments does he have that made him such a political force so early into his political life?

Please explain. Thank you!

The funny thing is all these people who were begging Christie to run know little about him. He is a moderate to the left of Mitt Romney. Well, the Mitt Romney running for President, not the one who was Governor of Massachusetts. And those comments he made why he isn't running was bull. He was reconsidering because he wanted to run, knowing with Perry tanking there was a window of opportunity for a blunt guy like him going against the super slick, buttoned down Romney. He stayed out because it is too late to do all the things necessary to mount a viable campaign(which is why Sarah Palin will stay out).

David Letterman and his writers are unhappy. Fat jokes get big laughs

Sure, there are millions of Americans who either die from preventable illnesses, or are indentured by medical debt, but at least upper, middle-class suburbanites can afford a new flatscreen tv, and the CEO of a major medical firm can enjoy tax breaks and refunds, you see, it all works out.

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...uh the post is up there...

Rick Perry is sinking like a stone in the latest polls. Good. He is the nastiest piece of work I have ever seen in a major party presidential candidate. He can go back to his racial slur ranch.

Nope, wrong. I've explained the problems with this sarcastic claim here, here, here, and here. In my last reply to you, I specifically challenged you to back something up. You completely ignored that, too.

The problem is not that we disagree, or that you don't seem to "get" these arguments. The problem is that you're not even trying to. It could not be clearer that you just don't actually want to think about this at all. Which isn't a problem, except for the fact that you insist on talking about it all the time anyway.

If you want to wallow in ignorance of important issues, that's your business, just don't make other people listen to it, please.

Stop right here. This is the whole problem: you're starting with the assumption that there is no such thing as being right, and that the only real thing is political power. That's crazy wrong for a variety of reasons.

First, you're basically contradicting yourself, because as you point out, thinking something doesn't make it right. But that fact, applied to the electorate, also means that convincing the people something is a good idea doesn't make it so, either.

How do you define right? It's what works. It's what's true. There are, certainly, some political issues on which this sort of thing cannot be resolved, or for which people have fundamentally different goals. In those instances, it doesn't really work to say someone is "right" in an objective sense. But many, many political disputes are about facts. For example: do you spur more economic growth cutting taxes for the rich, or the middle class? Are certain entitlement levels sustainable? Etc. These are factual questions that you can, indeed, be RIGHT or WRONG about.

Being right matters for at least two reasons. The first one I shouldn't even have to explain: being right is better than being wrong. Duh. It leads to better decision-making and better outcomes, all other things being equal. Accurate conclusions are more useful than inaccurate ones. The second reason is that, even if you somehow decide that being right doesn't matter in this way, most people think it does, anyway, so even if you go with the "political power is all that matters" route, people are more likely to come to a right decision, eventually, given enough people and enough time. In other words, we might dispute now whether an economic policy does this or that, but the more times we do it, the clearer the evidence becomes, so the smart bet is always on the RIGHT policy gaining over time, insofar as it refers to something which can be observed or measured.

No, it wasn't. It was directly the opposite. Webster literally said not to cherry-pick Bible verses that say "She should submit to me" and Grayson edited it so he was just saying "She should submit to me." He removed the "Don't pick" part, which completely, literally flips the meaning of the statement.

This isn't even arguable, man. Grayson is in a class by himself when it comes to political distortion. Pretending Perry is in the same stratosphere as this guy is the kind of thing you'd only do if Perry were triggering some deep, irrational hatred in you. Which he clearly has.

He doesn't have too many yet, because he hasn't been in office that long. If I were going to play partisan games, I would point out that Obama hadn't held office any longer (and his was not an executive position, either) when he decided to run for President, however, so Democrats certainly wouldn't have a leg to stand on if they chose to criticize him on this front.

The excitement about Christie is partly due to what you mentioned: he's very straightfoward. He is unafraid of unions and political interests and he is being very blunt about New Jersey's fiscal problems. He's not floating band-aid solutions, he's actually tackling problems even when it's unpopular. That's very hard to do; conservatives end up caving on stuff like this all the time, in fact.

So the excitement about Christie is that he seems very strong on a major conservative issue which is also the single most important issue facing the country over the next couple of years. And, of course, he's quite personable and seems very talented, politically. So it's a mix of both what he seems best at, coupled with the fact that what he's best at is what we need most right now: brutal honesty and fearlessness about spending.

I would've been fine with him running if he'd done so earlier, but getting in late would've hampered him significantly, so I'm fine with his decision. He was never going to be a savior or anything, though people always think that way. It's easy to idealize the candidates who aren't actually out there, making the standard mistakes and staking out hard positions that are bound to upset someone. They all look more human when they have to start doing that.

Promised to sorta-kinda reply to this. Sorry for the delay.

While I agree with most of this, and I certainly agree that many politicians have their priorities out of whack, I do not think that the arguing is always indicative of this. There are genuine disagreements about how to respond to the financial crisis and prevent other crisis from coming to a head, and there's no other (or better) way to deal with them than to have people hash it out. It may be ugly, but it's not new, and it's a process that has served us well in the long run. There are loads of problems, of course, but we'd still have a lot of this fighting even if all the people involved were honest, principled people.

What cuts are you referring to? I'm not aware of any. Though if there are some, I don't see how it's the "first" thing. And it comes at the tail end of several decades of dramatic increases in funding, none of which has correlated with an increase in quality. So my response is 1) what cuts? 2) putting more money into the system as it is currently constituted doesn't appear to help, 3) education funding has grown like crazy, so we certainly haven't been starving the system, whether we're making some cuts now or not.

Well, first off, that's an untenably high starting salary. Almost nobody makes that much money starting in any job, except in rare cases of ridiculously high finance, acting, sports, etc. Any proposal like this needs to be accompanied by some pretty major cuts in other programs right off the bat.

You also haven't specific benefits, and that's the key when discussing teacher salaries. The starting salaries a pretty modest (often around $30,000 to $40,000, depending on specifics), but they're just starting salaries, after all, and they don't take into account the job security (which is unrivaled compared to the private sector) or benefits (which are often huge). In fact, pretty much any time you hear someone arguing that teacher's don't make enough, you can bet that they're comparing salaries alone, and leaving out benefits.

This may not sound like a big deal, because in many private sector jobs benefits are significant, but not a huge part of the appeal of the job. Most of the compensation comes in the form of salary. But with public union jobs, particularly teachers, that's not always the case. Teachers in Wisconsin, for example, were until recently making 75 cents in benefits for every dollar they made in salary, effectively almost doubling the actual value of their compensation compared to their listed salary. That's huge.

Also, if a huge part of getting a good education is on the salary of the teachers, why do private schools routinely pay their teachers less, yet often produce better results? It seems to me private schools suggest that the culture and curriculum have a lot more to do with better teaching outcomes than simple teacher salaries do.


Agreed. But good luck finding someone who believes that teachers should be paid more AND that we should be able to more easily evaluate and dismiss them if necessary. Such people are very rare.

Anyway, I'm sure we all agree that attracting better teachers will lead to better teaching, but as you say, we need to be able to distinguish between them more easily. It's one thing to attract someone capable; it's quite another for them to perform well. High salaries will widen the talent pool, but if it remains incredibly hard to dismiss a teacher, you have conflicting incentives that will mitigate that talent expansion.


We agree. There are many things I believe that reasonable people can disagree on, to be sure, but I don't know if school choice is one of them. It feels incredibly, obviously fair, and I'm not sure I've ever heard an argument against it that withstood scrutiny. It's a winning issue for conservatives that has produced great results when tried, and I hope we get more of it.

It also, speaking in a purely political sense, really helps reveal where the union's priorities are. It forces them to take a stance between what's best for unionized teachers and what's proven to be best for students, and it's illuminating to see them come down ont he side of the former every single time.

Transportation funding, like education funding, has increased significantly over the last few decades. I know people make reference to things "crumbling" or "falling apart," but I don't know if there's a lot of evidence for that. But whether there is not, we spend a great deal on it, and we spend a great deal more than we used to.

Aye, but a lot of it is wasted. There are some fascinating news reports out there about "ghost towns" that China simply declared must be built, even though people had not expressed a demand for them. Unsurprisingly, almost nobody's living in them.

We won't compete with China by just building things. It's about what you build and where. Building indiscriminately is the problem, and I have little faith in a centralized government to tell the difference between the two most of the time.

And, really, when you think about it, while we need dependable infrastructure, there's no serious way to claim that that's holding us back right now. Nobody's failing to innovate because of our infrastructure. There's no octo-core processor development that's being held up because someone from an R&D department tried to drive to work but a bridge had collapsed. People aren't unemployed because of potholes. Infrastructure spending will keep workers of a certain industry (construction, obviously) busy, but it'll be temporary, and it'll just be a holding pattern. It's not the kind of thing that sparks long-term growth unless the infrastructure is so bad that it's actually impeding basic commerce on a regular basis.


If there were demand for it, it would have already happened. Other countries have done exactly this, and the projects have invariably lost scads of money. And they're very expensive both to build and maintain. I doubt there is any serious evidence to suggest that it has net economic benefit.

There are lots of people out there trying to come up with ways to make money, and when they don't do something, it's usually because there isn't a net benefit to it.

And, on a less tangible level, I don't love the idea itself. It feels like playing Sim City with reality. "Hey, that would be cool! And sometimes convenient!" Doesn't make it necessary or cost effective, though. We have that problem out here in Pittsburgh, where politicians loved the idea of brand new convention centers and sports stadiums so much that they helped fund them. The city sure looks nice as a result, at least when flying over it or glancing over while crossing a bridge, but it hasn't spurred the kind of economic growth they promised it would deliver, either. Same thing happened in Cleveland and Baltimore with their ballparks. I think politicians fall in love with how their city could look in those mockup drawings and try to retrofit economic arguments to achieve that end. They know that--more than the debt and lack of growth--will be their legacy.


Stop right there. Couldn't being trillions of dollars in debt have something to do with the fact that our economy is still in crisis? You're framing it as a tradeoff, as in "I know we have a lot of debt, but the economy's in bad shape so we need more debt." Shouldn't it be "I know we have a lot of debt...and the result is that the economy's in bad shape."


It is also an entity which can create circumstances under which people will not want to hire each other for awhile. The fact that the government can invest in our future (though it's not the only one with that capacity, at all) does not mean it's a good investor.


True, but that's what Reagan meant: that government had grown to take on responsibilities it could not handle, and had started trying to do things it was not effective at doing. Reagan's argument (and I think it's pretty well-nigh inarguable at this point) was that government has never been particularly effective, and therefore we must decrease its scope. He wasn't ignoring the idea that government could be better, he was simply taking the position that in certain areas, it can't.

You can safely assume that when someone says government is too big, they don't just mean it does too much; they mean that, in trying to do more, it has branched out into areas it is not effective in. That's implicit in the accusation.


Somewhat agree. They're definitely paying their fair share, as you say--anyone who says otherwise is simply ignorant of the data. And I think it's safe to say that simply asking people to pay more in taxes won't work.

I also don't feel the wealthy need to pick between helping us or doing what they do. I think we should simply implore them to keep expanding, hiring new people, and investing. For all the talk about investment in our future, the wealthy do the overwhelming majority of actual investment, which is inarguably tied to long-term growth. So if we want them to help, and do more of this, we should remove more of the impediments and penalties towards doing so.


Obviously, we agree on some of this.

Anyway, many thanks for the thoughtful post. I hope this reply illuminates some of my disagreements. Sorry it took so long.