• zifnab25 [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    Not to be all obama-medal but the markets have never been performing better. We just got off a 30% jump in equity prices in 2023, when the running annual average is around 6-8%. This, after the tickle of a downturn during COVID, followed by a sold four-year bull run.

    It is absolutely crazy to see anyone complain about how the US economic system is supposed to perform into the future. Yeah, China’s steady durable growth built on long term investment in infrastructure, commitment to universal publicly financed higher education, and publicly available amenities like housing and health care and high speed mass transit have dramatically improved the fundamentals of their market over the last 20 years.

    But who are we kidding? We’re not going to do any of that soy commie bullshit! No, we’re going balls deep into speculative assets like Bitcoin and make-work automation practices like AI. We’re building giant machines to gobble up all our natural resources, assigning those machines market prices, and telling everyone that our productivity is through the roof. And it’s working! BIG. NUMBER. GO. UP!!! stonks-up

    In light of that fact, who cares what China does? We put up a scoreboard and started ringing the “We scored a point” bell and its been ringing off the hook for half a decade. We won at our own game! Why are we complaining now?

  • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    Recently read a DW article about the US ‘successfully’ blocking the sale of advanced chips to China, but also how it’s unfair that China is the biggest producer of everyday chips used by consumers, professionals, and even the military, and how it’s a security threat because they could block the sale of those chips to the west any time lol.

    Westerners conflate Chinese self reliance and/or contingency with MUH AUTHORITARIANISM all while continuing to rely on their enemy to produce cheap slop to consume, then they write 500 articles and complain loudly and threaten war because they realized they got played

  • SkingradGuard [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    This part really exposes why the whole “socialism never works” thing from the cold war is so bullshit, because without sanctions, or a cold war, this is how well it performs on the global stage. It’s pure cope by the imperialists that now they have to go to outright war with China because they’re afraid that a different economic model controlled by the working masses is so successful.

    • RyanGosling [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      You would think as head of national security, you would dismiss horoscopes from Wall Street and Chicago and focus on material reality to push your agenda since you have access to intelligence, satellites, infiltrated groups, hacked systems, etc.

      US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan criticised the “old assumption” held by previous administrations that “that markets always allocate capital productively and efficiently-no matter what our competitors did”

      Reads Marx

      Xi: Oh, egads! Capitalism is terrible! But what if… I were to absorb capitalists’ production and disguise my economy as their own? [chuckles] Delightfully devilish, Jinping.

      Americans: This is the reason why college is filled with blue haired women and why we should give all our money to corporations to make our lives better

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmy.mlOP
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      8 months ago

      I still love that Jake Sullivan talk where he admits that the whole free market bullshit they’ve been promoting can’t actually compete with what China is doing. It’s an absolutely incredible read, Sullivan claims that the American economy lacks public investment, as it did after World War II. And that China is actively using this tool.

      last few decades revealed cracks in those foundations. A shifting global economy left many working Americans and their communities behind.

      The People’s Republic of China continued to subsidize at a massive scale both traditional industrial sectors, like steel, as well as key industries of the future, like clean energy, digital infrastructure, and advanced biotechnologies. America didn’t just lose manufacturing—we eroded our competitiveness in critical technologies that would define the future.

      He also opined that the market is far from being able to regulate everything, and “in the name of overly simplified market efficiency, entire supply chains of strategic goods, along with the industries and jobs that produced them, were moved abroad.”

      Another problem he identified is the growth of the financial sector to the detriment of the industrial and infrastructure sectors, which is why many industries “atrophied” and industrial capacities “seriously suffered.”

      Finally, he admitted that colonization and westernization of countries through globalization has failed:

      Much of the international economic policy of the last few decades had relied upon the premise that economic integration would make nations more responsible and open, and that the global order would be more peaceful and cooperative—that bringing countries into the rules-based order would incentivize them to adhere to its rules.

      Sullivan cited China as an example:

      By the time President Biden came into office, we had to contend with the reality that a large non-market economy had been integrated into the international economic order in a way that posed considerable challenges.

      The People’s Republic of China continued to subsidize at a massive scale both traditional industrial sectors, like steel, as well as key industries of the future, like clean energy, digital infrastructure, and advanced biotechnologies. America didn’t just lose manufacturing—we eroded our competitiveness in critical technologies that would define the future.

      In his opinion, all this has led to dangerous consequences for the US led hegemony:

      And ignoring economic dependencies that had built up over the decades of liberalization had become really perilous—from energy uncertainty in Europe to supply-chain vulnerabilities in medical equipment, semiconductors, and critical minerals. These were the kinds of dependencies that could be exploited for economic or geopolitical leverage.

      Today, the United States produces only 4 percent of the lithium, 13 percent of the cobalt, 0 percent of the nickel, and 0 percent of the graphite required to meet current demand for electric vehicles. Meanwhile, more than 80 percent of critical minerals are processed by one country, China.

      America now manufactures only around 10 percent of the world’s semiconductors, and production—in general and especially when it comes to the most advanced chips—is geographically concentrated elsewhere.

      At the same time, according to him, the United States does not intend to isolate itself from China.

      Our export controls will remain narrowly focused on technology that could tilt the military balance. We are simply ensuring that U.S. and allied technology is not used against us. We are not cutting off trade.

      And then there’s another talk he gave this year.

      We also saw something that really stood out, which is that the PRC believed the United States was in terminal decline — that our industrial base had been hollowed out, that our commitment to our allies and partners had been undercut, that the United States was struggling to manage a once-in-a-century pandemic, and that many in Beijing were openly proclaiming that “the East was rising and the West was falling.”

      We’ve all heard how Russian GDP is the size of Italy, that Russia is a gas station with nukes, and so on. When the war started, there were countless predictions regarding Russian economy collapsing, and Russia running out of ammunition.

      It was a huge surprise for a lot of people in the west when none of these things happened, and it turned out that Russian economy was able to survive the economic war with the west while continuing to produce weapons and ammunition.

      What’s more is that now we see that it’s the west that has find ways to ramp up industrial production to keep the war going.

      This is a great illustration of why it’s so misguided to use GDP as a general measure for the strength of the economy. What actually matters is productive activity of the country.

      The notion of using GDP as a measure has been promoted by neoliberal ideologues who claim that the type of the economy doesn’t matter. The reality is that majority of the GDP in western economies comes from ephemeral things such as law practice, service industry, lobby groups, and so on.

      Some of the sectors of the economy are even explicitly harmful to society. A great example of that is the health insurance industry in US. On paper, this is increasing the GDP because it employs a ton of people working in this sector, but in practice it just makes people living in US more poor and lowers their quality of life.

      So, what does the actual productive economy in US look like?

      We can look at steel production volumes to get an idea of the size of the productive industry in US.

      According to official data, US produced 6.8 million metric tons of steel in June this year https://www.trade.gov/data-visualization/us-steel-executive-summary

      Meanwhile, Russia produced 5.8 million metric tons https://www.statista.com/statistics/1079878/russia-steel-production-volume/

      All of a sudden we can see why the west has trouble keeping up. US is the most industrialized western economy, but turns out it’s steel production is only slightly higher than in Russia. And it’s important to keep in mind that Russia has a much smaller population, so per capita production is far higher than in US.

      And then there’s China where 90 million metric tons of steel is produced in a month https://www.reuters.com/markets/asia/china-june-crude-steel-output-up-04-yy-stats-bureau-2023-07-17/

      China’s productive industry is a whole order of magnitude larger than US. This shows just how absurd the notion that US could ever have a direct conflict with China is.