Once upon a time there were tigers in Japan. How many tigers will be left in the entire world in 100 years? Does anyone care?
The world is fastened on what will happen next week, next quarter, until the next election cycle, until the end of the ‘season’. How will the US function in 2510? Will there even be a USA? How about a human race? Does anyone bother to look that far ahead? Why not?
One aspect of nuclear engineering that should be exported to the rest of culture is that profession’s long- term world view. Many wastes and isotopes are long- lived such as Plutonium 239, Technetium 99 and Iodine 129.. Management of these materials must take place over long multi- decade or even multi- century – lifetimes. Keeping some nuclear energy around so that this mindset can be learned by others might be a worthwhile trade-off against the obvious risks. As Helen Keller so famously remarked, “Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature”. No state of being is free from risk. Possessing nuclear power is risky, more so is the establishment’s unmeasureably small time horizon.
The crisis of the next five minutes overwhelms any concern for tomorrow. The pursuit of instant profits and the avoidance of instant loss drives out all other claims. The non- financial claims of tigers and other life forms are priced to zero: creatures standing in the way of progress profits are driven to the edge of extinction even as they are conscripted into marketing duty.
Ironically, what we consider to be assets are really liabilities. Having more means having to manage more costs. One of the costs of this surplus management is the disappearance of tigers … bats, butterflies, bees, frogs, plants, trees, coral, fish, birds, elephants … what we don’t realize is that we depend utterly on all these things. They collectively colonized a more or less hostile world and made it safe for humans. Now, we have a world that is safe for box stores and automobiles.
A Local Official Argues for Forced Demolition
Following a gruesome accident after a forced government demolition, a local official gives his reasons for supporting forced evictions in a letter to Caixin.Housing demolitions in China have been a growing source of tension during China’s rapid urbanization. Local governments across the country have become the center of public scrutiny for abuse of law enforcement measures and one local government official has written a letter to Caixin, arguing in favor of forced demolitions for the continuation of urbanization in China.In September this year, the highly-publicized tragedy in Yihuang County, Jiangxi Province pushed the issue to the height of the public agenda. A demolition standoff outside the Zhong family’s home pitted nearly 200 local government workers against the Zhong family, and resulted in the death of one family member and two others severely injured. The bodily harm was not caused by demolition workers, but instead, they had set themselves on fire in attempted suicides.
Chinese greedsters are busy bulldozing every part of ‘old China’ they can in a race for yuan before the roof caves in. It’s looting on a scale that takes the breath away. Who says the Chinese cannot learn from their betters? Real estate bubble? What bubble?
China Has Been Covertly Funding A Housing Bubble Five Times Larger Than That Of The US: 65 Million Vacant Homes Uncovered
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 07/15/2010
China just announced that its Q2 GDP came in at 10.3%, just below a consensus estimate of 10.5%. Surprisingly, for some odd reason the market seems to believe this “data.” Although in retrospect, based on China’s bottom up GDP goalseeking, the number, which we will show in a second is completely irrelevant, could very easily be true, based on two just announced stunners about the Chinese economy. The first comes from Fitch, which in a report released today titled Informal Securitisation Increasingly Distorting Credit Data, uncovers that China has in fact been massively underrepresenting the actual amount of new loans in the first half of 2010, courtesy of precisely the kinds of securitization deals that blew up half of our own banking system:
“Adjusted for informal securitisation activity, Fitch estimates that the net amount of new CNY loans extended in H110 was closer to CNY5.9trn, or 28% above the official figure of CNY4.6trn…on a flow basis the volume of credit being shifted off balance sheets in recent times has been large and rising. Activity also is largely concentrated among just a few dozen banks, and institution?specific exposure is often much higher.”
And some are wondering why China’s AgBank was scrambling to raise $20 billion via a hurried IPO… Yet this data pales in comparison with disclosure from a recent article in South China Morning Post, in which an economist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences noted estimates from electricity meter readings that there are about 64.5 million empty apartments and houses in urban areas of the country! This number is five times larger than the roughly 12 million in total US public (3.89 million) and shadow (8 million as estimated by Morgan Stanley) home inventory available currently. Forget Stephen Roach – China is covertly funding and creating a housing bubble that is at least 5 times as big as that of the United States.
Fitch on Chinese Banks; 7/2010
We leave it up to you to imagine the consequences of that particular bubble’s bursting…
Hey! China is a big country, it needs a big bubble! If the defaults can be held off for a few more years the entire country can be turned into the grim and nasty version of Tarzana, California that the imbecilic and avaricious ‘Boss Men’ of that country admire so greatly. China’s 3,000 year old civilization had passed the tests of time … into the trash! The Chinese establishment grasps the nettle of American Andy Warholism just as it turns into a live hand grenade. Talk about reinforcing failure!
John Michael Greer considers the Chinese to be the ‘Empire Ascending’ with the USA sliding down the drain. Good grief! John Michael is the brilliant writer who produces The Archdruid Report. The ‘report’ moniker reads kind of Wall Street-y. I figured the druid angle was a kind of hippie pitch toward counterculture hard liners and dead enders from the Whole Earth Catalog era. I am wrong. There are many Druids.
The Druid Tradition is ancient, and represents one of the wellsprings of inspiration of the Western Spiritual Tradition. But even though it is ancient, it is as relevant and alive today as it ever has been. All spiritualities grow and change – and Druidism, or Druidry as it is also known, has changed too – and now it is experiencing a Renaissance.
Druidry has become a vital and dynamic Nature-based spirituality that is flourishing all over the world, and that unites our love of the Earth with our love of creativity and the Arts. And flowing through all the exciting new developments in modern Druidism is the power of an ancient tradition: the love of land, sea and sky – the love of the Earth our home.
A member writes: ‘Druidry is a spirituality of simple things – of place and time, existence and imagination. It teaches the appreciation of sunrises and the sound of water. We are free to express divinity as we experience it. To those who are willing to learn, it teaches love and compassion, to listen to the song of our hearts and the music of the earth. And sometimes, hugging trees is in order!’
I don’t know what to make of this. China ‘ascendant’ in any way shape or form can only be inimical to everything Druidry represents! How does it reconcile with China’s embrace of American- style car culture and freeway building, American- style cheap- ugly development, American- style finance and American- style waste? What outcome is possible other than system failure as fuel supplies run short? Both China and America are hostage to large flows of goods, money and energy. Neither can long endure slowdowns in the rates of flow for which everything else is sacrificed.
Failure of one actor equals failure of the other. Chimerica’s binary components are handcuffed together around a pipe in the boiler room of the Titanic. Out with the tigers and in with the hyper- polluted Blade Runner cities, toxic waste, imagination- defying traffic jams, expanding deserts, vanishing farmland paved over for ‘progress’; the whole run by a cabal no less hesitant than its Wall Street mentors to sacrifice any sort of long- term future for fashion.
According to the World Bank pollution and related health costs eat up more than half of China’s GDP.
Greer suggests that a new Chinese empire is in the making. How will China manage the costs? All empires fail for cost reasons, the stillborn empires that nobody considers as such fail for cost reasons as well. Europe is the graveyard of ambitious tyrants, empires that flickered briefly in their own twilight then vanished. Ditto Japan.
Nobody wants to trade with a bully. The more belligerent the Chinese become the faster their influence evaporates. Repression in Tibet or Xinjiang rebounds against China’s mercantile advantage. The Soviet empire collapsed at the bank, it ran out of means to earn hard currency, then ran out of means, period.
Greer measures China greatness by mercantilism: hot- money flows from the US as speculators use cost- free Fed cash to chase shadows via the carry trade. The US exports Planet Bernanke’s inflation while importing China’s waste driven deflation in return. China is shackled by a yuan pegged to a dollar becoming harder as fuel grows more scarce and by the hot money their (obsolete) business plan stimulates. Sterilizing hot dollars by massively printing yuan and building empty cities makes that country a currency trap. What happens when the great bubble deflates? Reduce interest rates to zero?
That’s a ‘finance joke’.
Will China’s government sit idly by while its ruling elites are ruined by the collapse of these elites’ real estate ‘investments’? Or will the PBOC print and ruin China’s citizens instead?
Three guesses!
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Social Security Administration announced a zero- percent cost of living adjustment for beneficiaries. SSA could have been considered a player in Planet Bernanke’s reflation strategy. The SSA is the closest thing to a money- helicopter the establishment possesses. Everyone gets a check, right? COLA’s would have pumped a lot more Treasury cash into peeps’ pockets … and thence to banks. Not now.
The deflationistas are right; the Fed cannot shovel cash down the rathole as fast as debt is destroyed in other ratholes. Sez the estimable Bruce Krasting:
Economists who forecast growth will have to knock down their numbers by at least ¼% as a result. There would have been some multiplier affect from the extra spending, now there won’t be any. Between the cumulative impact of two years of no increases and the multiplier this could be a drag on GDP by 1/2% for 2011 versus what has been assumed.We don’t know what Ben B will do in a few weeks, but we can sort of guess about what is coming. It will be a longer-term commitment to acquire Treasury bonds. The high-end estimates are about $100b per month for a year. Something over a trillion in all. Using those kinds of numbers, I have seen estimates that the impact will be a positive to GDP to the tune of a lousy ½%.
So for those that have been believing that Bernanke has written the economy a put, look again. You just got trumped, by of all things, Social Security. Big Ben can’t row quick enough on this river. The water against him is moving too fast.
Does somebody want to tell me again how the ‘markets’ are pricing inflation in this? This is the big news of the day, alongside the unwinding foreclosure farce. Like the latter, the COLAs that aren’t will loom large as time passes. The establishment is desperate for growth. Moratoria of all kinds are poison. They interfere with the flows. At the same time the slowing down of deleveraging that the halting of foreclosures represent will show up on government statistics as a rise in GDP. What is lost to the COLAs is gained by forbearance elsewhere.
All of this is meaningless to the tigers and bears who have nothing to comfort them as they race toward their own twilight and vanish like forgotten empires.