El hilo de China

[Rui Brennan]

Yo espío, tu espías, nosotros espiamos, vosotros espiais...

Chinese Hackers Hit U.S. Media - Wall Street Journal, New York Times Are Breached in Campaign That Stretches Back Several Years (url)
Hackers in China Attacked The Times for Last 4 Months - Chinese hackers infiltrated The New York Times’s computer systems, getting passwords for its reporters and others (url)

Me quedo con las siguientes frases de los artículos:

"The timing of the attacks coincided with the reporting for a (New York) Times investigation, published online on Oct. 25, that found that the relatives of Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings."

"Among the (Wall Street Journal) targets were a handful of journalists in the Beijing bureau, including Jeremy Page, who wrote articles about the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood in a scandal that helped bring down Chinese politician Bo Xilai, people familiar with the matter said. Beijing Bureau Chief Andrew Browne also was a target, they said."

"Last year, Bloomberg News was targeted by Chinese hackers, and some employees’ computers were infected, according to a person with knowledge of the company’s internal investigation, after Bloomberg published an article on June 29 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president at the time."

"The intelligence-gathering campaign, foreign policy experts and computer security researchers say, is as much about trying to control China’s public image, domestically and abroad, as it is about stealing trade secrets."

[pringaete]

Lo de las ciudades chinas no es contaminación, es una sagaz maniobra de sus mandatarios para apantallar la visibilidad de sus ciudades ante posibles ataques del enemigo, bárbaro ("lao wai") y demonios extranjeros ("quei lou") 

[Xoshe]

Nada que no sepamos y que no se haya posteado en el foro. China está mejor organizada para el liderazgo global que los EEUU en el presente paradigma...creado por los EEUU. Van a probar de su propia medicina. ¿No queríais globalización? Tomad taza y media. Fuera dólar y China hace más trade que vosotros.
Dudo sin embargo de que China vaya a por Japon. Les considero demasiado inteligentes para abrir un proceso bélico.

[dmar]

Nada que no sepamos y que no se haya posteado en el foro. China está mejor organizada para el liderazgo global que los EEUU en el presente paradigma...creado por los EEUU. Van a probar de su propia medicina. ¿No queríais globalización? Tomad taza y media. Fuera dólar y China hace más trade que vosotros.
Dudo sin embargo de que China vaya a por Japon. Les considero demasiado inteligentes para abrir un proceso bélico.

Esa es la gran incógnita...  Salvo que, como tantos otros conquistadores antes que ellos, alberguen la falsa esperanza de una victoria rápida.

Me pongo el capirote de albal: ¿Podría la amenaza de una guerra inminente en Asia precititar un cambio de pontífice?

[Currobena]

Análisis del milagro económico chino por Michael Pettis. Imprescindible.

  A brief history of the Chinese growth model
                     Posted by Michael on February 21, 2013                   
               As regular readers know I have often argued that the Chinese development model is an old one, and can trace its roots at least as far back as the “American System” of the 1820s and 1830s. This “system” was itself based primarily on the works of the brilliant first US Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton (see especially his report to the Congress on manufacturing and his two reports on public credit and banks).
This development model was also implicitly part of the debate in France that led to one of the most important financial innovations of the 19^th Century, the creation of the Crédit Mobilier in France in 1852. The debate concerned one of the great economic questions in France, especially after the defeat of Napoleon: why had England, a country that one hundred years earlier had been poorer than France, managed to surpass France and all other countries economically and technologically, even though in the pure sciences and engineering the French were at least the equal to the British and perhaps superior?
One obvious reason had to do with the financing of the commercial application of new technology. The French banking system, dominated by rentiers and the landed aristocracy, seemed to specialize in protecting savers, in part by mobilizing capital and investing in gold or in government obligations. The English banking system did this too, but it also seemed much more willing to finance infrastructure and manufacturing capacity.
In fact more generally I have argued that the main reason “industrial revolutions” have occurred largely in England and the United States is because industrial revolutions are not driven by scientific developments but rather by the commercial application of scientific developments. For this to happen it seems that a robust financing system is key. England, and the US later, benefitted from a financial system that seemed to do better than others in financing new infrastructure and technological ventures.
A well-functioning financial system, one that allocates capital to new ventures, in other words, may have been the key difference between England and France at the end of the 18^th Century, and for this some historians blame the brilliant but erratic John Law and his Mississippi Bubble. This concern about the inefficient French banking system led to the creation of Crédit Mobilier, whose role was to break the constraints of the existing Rothschild-dominated financial system, mobilize the savings of the middle classes, and allocate these savings towards financial projects, such as infrastructure development, that would, over the longer term lead to more rapid economic development.
I will come back to this issue of the financial system, but the point here is that there have been many versions of this development model, and at least two major economic theoreticians – the German Friedrich List in the 19^thCentury and the Ukrainian-American Alexander Gershenkron in the 20^th – have formally described variations on the investment-driven growth model. Michael Hudson, one of my favorite economic thinkers, wrote twenty years ago a brilliant and provocative book (Trade, Development and Foreign Debt), which traces many aspects of this model to debates in England at the end of the 18^th Century.
Aside from Alexander Hamilton, its intellectual and political godfather, the main proponents of the American System were figures like Henry Clay, Henry and Matthew Cary, John Calhoun, and even Abraham Lincoln himself. Their vision of economic policymaking was looked down upon as naïve and even foolish by most American academic economists – schooled as they were in the laissez faire doctrines then fashionable in England – but I think it is hard for any economic historian not to feel relieved that neither the academics nor the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian factions had the clout to force “good” economic policy onto US development. America got rich in part by doing the wrong things.
Many countries in which the academics had real influence at the time – Chile in the 1860s under the tutelage of the famous French economist Jean Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil, for example, or Mexico at the turn of the century under the expert guidance of José Y. Limantour, finance minister under President Porfirio Díaz – never achieved the kind of growth that the less capable student-countries experienced. I write about some of these cases in my 1996 article for Foreign Affairs, for anyone who might be interested.
To get back to the main story, in another, also brilliant and provocative, book (America’s Protectionist Take-off, 1815-1914) Michael Hudson refers to a leading member of the second generation of proponents of the American System, a Columbia University graduate by the name of E. Pechine Smith. What is especially interesting about Smith in the context of China is that in 1872 he was invited to Japan to serve as advisor to the Mikado, becoming the first of a stream of economists and lawyers – most of them proponents of the American System – to advise and help shape Japanese development after the Meiji restoration.
Smith thus creates a direct link between the American System and the Chinese development model. It was of course the post-War Japanese development model, itself based on Japan’s experience of economic development during and after the Meiji restoration, that became the standard for policymakers throughout East Asia and China. I think of China’s growth model as merely a more muscular version of the Japanese or East Asian growth model, which is itself partly based on the American experience.
There were three key elements of the American System. Historian Michael Lind, in one of his economic histories of the United States, described them as:
·      infant industry tariffs
·      internal improvements, and
·      a sound system of national finance
These three elements are at the heart, explicitly or implicitly, of every variation of the investment-led development model adopted by number of countries in the last century – including Germany in the 1930s, the USSR in the early Cold War period, Brazil during the Brazilian miracle, South Korea after the Korean War, Japan before 1990, and China today, to name just the most important and obvious cases. For this reason I think it makes sense to discuss each of them in a little more detail.
Infant industry tariffs
The “infant industry” argument is fairly well known. I believe Alexander Hamilton was the first person to use the phrase, and the reasoning behind his thinking was straightforward. American manufacturing could not compete with the far superior British, and according to the then- (and now) fashionable economic theories based on Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the implications for trade policy were obvious. Americans should specialize in areas where they were economically superior to the British – agriculture, for the most part – and economic policy should consist of converting US agriculture to the production of cash crops – tobacco, rice, sugar, wheat and, most importantly, cotton – maximizing that production and exchanging them for cheaper and superior British manufactured items.
In this way, as Ricardo brilliantly proved, and assuming a static distribution of comparative advantages, with each country specializing in its comparative advantage, global production would be maximized and through trade both the British and the Americans would be better off. While most academic US economists and the commodity-producing South embraced free trade, Alexander Hamilton and his followers, mainly in the northeast, did not (in fact differing views over free trade as well as over slavery and state rights were at the heart of the North-South conflict that led eventually to the Civil War).
Hamilton was convinced that it was important for the US to develop its own manufacturing base because, as he explained in his Congressional report in 1791, he believed that productivity growth was likely to be much higher in manufacturing than in agriculture or mineral extraction. Contrary to David Ricardo, in other words, Hamilton believed that comparative advantage was not static and could be forced to change in ways that benefitted less productive countries. What is more, he thought manufacturing could employ a greater variety of people and was not subject to seasonal fluctuations or fluctuations in access to minerals.
Given much higher British efficiency and productivity, which translated into much lower prices even with higher transportation costs, how could Americans compete? They could do it the same way the British did to compete with the superior Dutch a century earlier. The US had to impose tariffs and other measures to raise the cost of foreign manufacturers sufficiently to allow their American counterparts to undersell them in the US market. In addition Americans had to acquire as much British technological expertise and capacity as possible (which usually happened, I should add, in the form of intellectual property theft).
This the US did, and in fact I believe every country that has managed the transition from underdeveloped to developed country status (with, perhaps, the exception of one or two trading entrepôts like Singapore and Hong Kong, although even this is debatable), including Germany, Japan, and Korea, has done it behind high explicit or implicit trade tariffs and stolen intellectual property. The idea that countries get rich under conditions of free trade has very little historical support, and it is far more likely that rich countries discover the benefits of free trade only after they get rich, while poor countries that embrace free trade too eagerly (think of Colombia and Chile in the late 19^th century, who were stellar students of economic orthodoxy) almost never get rich unless, like Haiti in the 18^th Century or Kuwait today, they are massive exporters of a very valuable commodity (sugar, in the case of Haiti, which was the richest country in the world per capita during a good part of the late 18^th Century).
But rather than just embrace protection I would add that there is one very important caveat. Many countries have protected their infant industries, and often for many decades, and yet very few have made the transition to developed country status. Understanding why protection “works” in some cases and not in others might have very important implications for China. I won’t pretend to have answered this question fully but I suspect the difference between the countries that saw such rapid productivity growth behind infant industry protection that they were eventually able to compete on their own, and those that didn’t, may have had to do with the structure of domestic competition.
Specifically, it is not enough to protect industry from foreign competition. There must be a spur to domestic innovation, and this spur is probably competition that leads to advances in productivity and management organization. I would argue, for example, that countries that protected domestic industry but allowed their domestic markets to be captured and dominated by national champions were never likely to develop in the way the United States in the 19^th Century.
I would also argue that companies that receive substantial subsidies from the state also fail to develop in the necessary way because rather than force management to improve economic efficiency as a way of overcoming their domestic rivals, these countries encourage managers to compete by trying to gain greater access to those subsidies. Why innovate when it is far more profitable to demand greater subsidies, especially when subsidized companies can easily put innovative companies out of business? Last April, for example, I wrote about plans by Wuhan Iron & Steel, China’s fourth-largest steel producer, to invest $4.7 billion in the pork production industry.
The company’s management argued that they could compete with traditional agro-businesses not because steel makers were somehow more efficient than farmers, but rather because their size and clout made it easier for them to get cheap capital and to get government approvals. They were able to invest in an industry they knew little about, in other words, because they knew they could extract economic rent. This clearly is not a good use of protection.
The lessons for China, if I am right, are that China should forego the idea of nurturing national champions and should instead encourage brutal domestic competition. Beijing should also eliminate subsidies to production, the most important being cheap and unlimited credit, because senior managers of Chinese companies rationally spend more time on increasing access to these subsidies than on innovation, a subject on which, in spite of the almost absurd hype of recent years, China fares very, very poorly.
There is nothing wrong with protecting domestic industry, but the point is to create an incentive structure that forces increasing efficiency behind barriers of protection. The difficulty, of course, is that trade barriers and other forms of subsidy and protection can become highly addictive, and the beneficiaries, especially if they are national champions, can become politically very powerful. In that case they are likely to work actively both to maintain protection and to limit efficiency-enhancing domestic competition. It was Friedrich Engels, not often seen as a champion of capitalist competition, writing to Edward Bernstein in 1881, who said that “the worst of protection is that when you once have got it you cannot easily get rid of it.”
Internal improvements
The second element of the American System was internal improvement, which today we would probably call infrastructure spending. Proponents of the American System demanded that the national and state governments design, finance and construct canals, bridges, ports, railroads, toll roads, and a wide variety of communication and transportation facilities that would allow businesses to operate more efficiently and profitably. In some cases these projects were paid for directly (tolls, for example) and in other cases they were paid for tax revenues generated by higher levels of economic activity.
It is easy to make a case for state involvement in infrastructure investment. The costs of infrastructure can be very high, while even if the benefits are much higher they are likely to be diffused throughout the economy, making it hard for any individual company to justify absorbing the costs of investment. In this case the state should fund infrastructure investment and pay for it through the higher taxes generated by greater economic activity.
For me the interesting question, especially in the Chinese context, is not whether the state should build infrastructure but rather how much it should build. In fact this is one of the greatest sources of confusion in the whole China debate. Most China bulls implicitly assume that infrastructure spending is always good and the optimal amount of infrastructure is more or less the same for every country, which is what allows them to compare China’s per capita capital stock with that of the US and Japan and conclude that China still has a huge amount of investing to do because its capital stock per capita is so much lower.
But this is completely wrong, and even nonsensical. Infrastructure investment is like any other investment in that it is only economically justified if the total economic value created by the investment exceeds the total economic cost associated with that investment If a country spends more on infrastructure than the resulting increase in productivity, more infrastructure makes it poorer, not richer.
In China we have problems with both sides of the equation. First, we don’t know what the true economic cost of investment in China might be. In order to calculate the true cost we need to add not just the direct costs but also all the implicit and explicit subsidies, most of which are hidden or hard to calculate.
The most important of these subsidies tends to be the interest rate subsidy, and this can be substantial. If interest rates in China are set artificially low by 5 percentage points, for example, which is a reasonable estimate, an investment of $100 million receives an additional subsidy of $5 million for every year that the loan funding the investment is outstanding – and loans are almost never repaid in China. Over ten to twenty years of outstanding debt this can add 30-40% to the initial cost of the investment. This means that the recognized cost of an infrastructure project is much lower than the true economic cost, with the difference being buried in explicit and implicit subsidies.
But the bigger problem is in the value created by the investment. We can think of the value of infrastructure primarily as a function of the value of labor saved. In countries with very low levels of productivity, each hour of labor saved is less valuable than each hour saved in countries with high levels of productivity. For this reason less productive countries should have much lower capital stock per capita than more productive countries.
This should be obvious, but it seems that often it isn’t. When analysts point to high quality infrastructure in China whose quality exceeds comparable infrastructure in rich countries, this is not necessarily a good thing. It might just be an example of the amount of waste you can achieve when spending is heavily subsidized, when there are strong political (or pecuniary) incentives for expanding investment, and when there is limited transparency and accountability.
Other things matter too. If a country has low levels of social capital – if it is hard to set up a business, if less efficient businesses with government connections can successfully compete with more efficient businesses without government connections, if the legal and political structure creates problems in corporate governance (the “agency” problem, especially), if the legal framework is weak, if property rights are not respected, if intellectual property can easily be lost – then much infrastructure spending is likely to be wasted.
In fact it turns that it may be far more efficient to focus on improving, say, the legal framework than to build more airports, even though (and perhaps because) building airports generates more growth (and wealth for the politically connected) today. Weak social capital becomes a constraint on the ability to extract value from infrastructure, and this constraint is very high in poor countries with weak institutional frameworks,
Journey to the West
This issue of how much investment is enough is a very important topic that deserves much more discussion, but I think there is a very good example of why we need to be worried about how useful additional infrastructure investment in China might be. This shows up most clearly in China’s push to create development in the western part of the country.
Often when I question the economic value of China’s push to the western, poorer parts of the country (by the way economic value is not the same as social or political value, the latter of which may nonetheless justify projects that are not economically viable) I am almost always treated with the story of the American West. In the 19^th Century, as everyone knows, the US went west, and most economists agree that this made economic sense for the country and was an important part of the process that led it to becoming the wealthiest and most productive country in history.
But we must be very careful about drawing lessons from the American experience. The US is not the only country in history that “went West”. Several other countries did so too, but for some reason we ignore their experiences altogether when we discuss China. Brazil, for example, went west and north in the 1950s and 1960s as it expanded from the rich southern coastal areas into the Amazon and the Caribbean. The Soviet Union did something similar after the Second World War as it went east into Siberia.
Most economists today agree that the Brazilian and Soviet experiences were economically unsuccessful and left those countries burdened with such enormous debts that they were at least partly to blame for Brazil’s debt crisis in the 1980s and the collapse of the Soviet economy in the 1970s. It turns out, in other words, that there are both successful and unsuccessful precedents for China’s going west.
What are the differences and how do they apply to China? Again, I can’t say that I can fully understand or explain them, but one major difference leaps out. In the US it was private individuals, seeking profitable opportunities, that led the move into the American West, and government investment followed. In Brazil and the Soviet Union, however, there was little incentive for private individuals to lead the process. It was the government that led, and private businesses followed only because government spending created great opportunities for profit. Once government spending stopped, so did business.
My very preliminary conclusion is that large-scale government ambitions allied to strong political motivation and funded by cheap and easy access to credit can lead very easily to the wrong kinds of investment programs. The US experiences of government investment in the 19^th Century, in other words, may be a very poor precedent for understanding China’s current policy of increasing investment spending, especially in the poor western part of the country.
Brazil and the Soviet Union may be much better precedents. At the very least these gloomier experiences should not be ignored when we think of China’s policies. “Going West” isn’t always a great idea from an economic point of view and has led to at least as many, and probably more, bad outcomes as good outcomes. It is not clear why these lessons cannot possibly be applied to China.
A sound system of national finance
The third pillar of the American System was the creation of an appropriate financial system. But what does that mean? It is hard to describe the American financial system in the 19^th Century as stable and well-functioning. In fact the American banking system was chaotic, prone to crises, mismanaged, and often fraudulent, and yet the US grew very rapidly during that time.
China’s banking system, on the other hand, is far more stable – in fact the favorite cliché of Chinese bankers is that while the system may not be efficient, it is very stable. What makes the Chinese banking system stable, of course, is that it is widely believed that the government stands fully behind the banks. It makes no difference, in other words, how weak the credit allocation decision is, because by controlling credit and the deposit rate, and by limiting alternatives for Chinese savers, the government guarantees both the liquidity and solvency of the banking system. As long as government credibility is intact, the banking system is unlikely to fail.
In that sense you can easily make the case the Chinese banks today are sounder than American banks in the 19^th century. This might bode well for the future of the financial system in the short term, but in the long term it is not clear to me that monetary soundness and financial stability are necessarily correlated with more rapid growth.
I say this because I have seen no evidence that countries with sound and conservative financial systems grow faster than countries with looser and riskier financial systems (although they do seem to have fewer financial crises). In fact I have more than once made reference to Belgian bank historian Raymond de Roover’s provocative and profound comment that “perhaps one could say that reckless banking, while causing many losses to creditors, speeded up the economic development of the United States, while sound banking may have retarded the economic development of Canada.”  Canada was blessed (or cursed, according to de Roover) in the 19^thCentury with being part of the Britain, and so inheriting England’s much better managed financial system.
“Reckless” banking is hard to define, and certainly it is easy to make the case the Chinese banking has been reckless, especially in recent years, but it is a very different type of recklessness. Once again I cannot say with complete confidence how China’s version of its development model differs meaningfully with the American System on the subject of banking, but I would suggest there are at least two very important differences.
First, the American financial system then (and now) has been very good at providing money to risky new ventures. It provides capital on the basis not only of asset value but, more importantly, on future growth expectations, and risk-taking has been actively rewarded In China it isn’t clear that this is the case at all. Chinese banks favor large, well-connected, and often inefficient giants at the expense of risk-takers.
Second, although both systems were prone to bad lending, the American banking system tended to correct very quickly – in the form of a crisis – and bad loans were written down and liquidated almost immediately. This was certainly painful in the sort term – especially if you were a depositor in the affected bank – but by writing down loans and liquidating assets three important objectives were achieved. Financial distress costs were quickly eliminated (writing down debt does that in ways I won’t get into because they are well-known and much discussed in corporate finance theory), capital allocation was driven by profitability, not by implicit guarantees, and assets were returned to economic usefulness quickly.
A classic example of the last of these objectives may be the response to the railway bubble of the 1860s. During and after the 1873 crisis, a number of railroads went bankrupt, including major lines like the Union Pacific and the Northern Pacific, the latter of which even brought down Jay Cooke & Company, the leading financier of the US government during the Civil War. After the crisis some major railway bonds traded as low as 15-20% of their original face value, and so they were purchased and reorganized at huge discounts. The new buyers were consequently able to cut freight and passenger costs dramatically, in some cases by over 50%, while still earning more than enough to cover the costs of buying the railroads, and this led to a collapse in transportation costs in the US.
Liquidation, in other words, provides an important economic value to the economy. It allows assets to be re-priced, which creates a boost to the economy and prevents those assets from acting as a deadweight loss. If the railroads hadn’t been liquidated, in other words, any reduction in costs was likely to be minimal and the railroads would have been far less useful to the development of the US economy.
Comparing development models
This issue of the newsletter is long, and I plan to write about this a lot more in the future, but for now I think it makes sense to summarize some of the important points about the American System and other similar growth models, like the Chinese version.
1.      Infant industry protection has worked to promote long-term development under certain conditions and has not worked under other conditions. I would argue that the key difference is that in the former case there were powerful forces that drove managerial and technological innovation and rapid growth in efficiency.
In the US case this seems to have been brutal domestic competition. If China wants to benefit from its own protection of infant industry, it is important that there be similar domestic drivers of innovation and efficiency. Note that access to cheap capital cannot be such a driver, even though it is one of the main sources of Chinese competitiveness. Access to cheap capital is just another way to protect infant industries from foreign competition.
2.      Every country that has become sustainably rich has had significant government investment in infrastructure, but not every country that has had significant government investment in infrastructure has become sustainably rich.On the contrary there are many cases of countries with extraordinarily high levels of infrastructure investment that have grown for a period and then faltered.
I would argue that the difference is almost certainly the extent of capital misallocation. In some countries it has been much easier for policymakers to drive capital expenditures, and in those countries it seems to have been relatively easy to waste investment. If this is the case in China, as I believe it is, the key issue for China is to rein in its spending and develop an alternative and better way to allocate capital.
The point is that there is a natural limit to infrastructure spending, and this limit is often imposed by institutional distortions in the market economy. When this natural limit is reached, more investment in infrastructure can be wealth destroying, not wealth enhancing, in which case it is far better to cut back on investment and to focus on reducing the institutional constraints to more productive use of capital, such as weak corporate governance and a weak legal framework. The pace of infrastructure investment cannot exceed the pace of institutional reform for very long without itself becoming a problem.
3.      Any economy looking to achieve sustainable long-term growth must have a “good” financial system that allocates capital efficiently and rewards the correct level of risk-taking. It is hard to determine what the characteristics of a “good” financial system are, but we shouldn’t be too quick to assume that this has to do with stability.
 
 What’s more, while obviously the capital allocation process is vitally important, I would also suggest that the liquidation of bad loans is just as important. Bad loans, as Japan showed us in the past two decades, can become a serious impediment to growth in part because financial distress distorts management incentives in the way widely understood and described in corporate finance theory and in part because they retard the process by which bad investment is absorbed by the economy.
 
 4.      One thing I have not discussed above is the role of wages. The American System was developed in opposition to the then-dominant economic theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, in part because classic British economic theory seemed to imply that reductions in wages were positive for economic growth by making manufacturing more competitive in the international markets. A main focus of the American System, however, was to explain what policies the United States, with its much higher wages than in Europe at the time, had to engineer to generate rapid growth Sustaining high wages, in fact, became one of the key aspects of the American System.
 
 The Japanese version of this development model, as well as many of the various versions implemented in other countries throughout the 20th Century, shared its view of wages not with the American System but rather with classic British economic theory. Rather than take steps to force up wages and keep them high – thereby both driving productivity growth and creating a large domestic consumption market for American producers – many of the later versions of the American System sought to repress growth in household income relative to total production as a way of improving international competitiveness. This is perhaps the main reason why the United Sates, unlike many other countries that have implemented similar development strategies in the 20th Century, tended to run large current account deficits for much of the 19^th Century
 
 This different focus on whether high wages are to be encouraged or discouraged is, I believe – although very little discussed in the theoretical literature as far as I know – nonetheless perhaps the most important difference between the American development model and its many descendants in the 20th and 21st centuries. I would even argue, although I cannot prove it, that one consequence of this difference is that growth in demand tends to be more sustainable when it is balanced between growth in both consumption and investment.
In analyzing China’s growth in the past three decades we seem to forget that there have been many growth “miracles” in the past two hundred years. Some have been sustainable and have led to developed country status but many, if not most, were ultimately unsustainable. Nearly all of the various versions have had some similar characteristics – most obviously infant industry protection, state-led investment in infrastructure, and a financial system that disproportionately favored producers at the expense of savers – but the way these characteristics played out were very different, in large part because the institutional structure of the economy and the financial sector created a very different set of incentives.
I would argue that in understanding China’s growth and its sustainability we need to have a clear understanding of why these characteristics worked in some cases and not in others. Most economists who focus on China seem to know little about economic history, and when they do, their knowledge tends to be limited to a very superficial understanding of US economic history. But there are many precedents for what is happening in China and not all suggest that further Chinese growth is inevitable.
On the contrary, the historical precedents should worry us. In most cases they suggest that China has a very difficult adjustment ahead of it and the closest parallels to its decades of miracle growth suggest unfavorable outcomes. Understanding why the growth model has succeeded in some few cases and failed in most will help us enormously in understanding China’s prospects.

===============

         Brett   February 21, 2013 at 15:27                                                     <blockquote>A well-functioning financial system, one that allocates capital to new ventures, in other words, may have been the key difference between England and France at the end of the 18th Century, and for this some historians blame the brilliant but erratic John Law and his Mississippi Bubble.</blockquote> This primarily consisted of individual merchants and landowners, plus workers themselves using their own saved capital to purchase machines. Banks and more organized centers of finance in Britain largely did not lend to industrial concerns until the next wave of industrialization in the 1820s and 1830s.
 <blockquote>The US had to impose tariffs and other measures to raise the cost of foreign manufacturers sufficiently to allow their American counterparts to undersell them in the US market. In addition Americans had to acquire as much British technological expertise and capacity as possible (which usually happened, I should add, in the form of intellectual property theft).</blockquote> The latter was far, far more important than the former, since tariff rates tended to be erratic and never high enough to really shut out British goods (many of which were so cheap that they could be competitive even with tariffs). What made American industry succeed was that they took the British technology they stole, then modified it and combined it with local innovations centering around mass production, which they then proceeded to do better than the British. It’s sort of like how the post-war Japanese pioneered “Just In Time” manufacturing and business, plus utilization of new technologies.

http://www.mpettis.com/2013/02/21/a-brief-history-of-the-chinese-growth-model/

[dmar]

Other things matter too. If a country has low levels of social capital – if it is hard to set up a business, if less efficient businesses with government connections can successfully compete with more efficient businesses without government connections, if the legal and political structure creates problems in corporate governance (the “agency” problem, especially), if the legal framework is weak, if property rights are not respected, if intellectual property can easily be lost – then much infrastructure spending is likely to be wasted.
In fact it turns that it may be far more efficient to focus on improving, say, the legal framework than to build more airports, even though (and perhaps because) building airports generates more growth (and wealth for the politically connected) today. Weak social capital becomes a constraint on the ability to extract value from infrastructure, and this constraint is very high in poor countries with weak institutional frameworks

A classic example of the last of these objectives may be the response to the railway bubble of the 1860s. During and after the 1873 crisis, a number of railroads went bankrupt, including major lines like the Union Pacific and the Northern Pacific, the latter of which even brought down Jay Cooke & Company, the leading financier of the US government during the Civil War. After the crisis some major railway bonds traded as low as 15-20% of their original face value, and so they were purchased and reorganized at huge discounts. The new buyers were consequently able to cut freight and passenger costs dramatically, in some cases by over 50%, while still earning more than enough to cover the costs of buying the railroads, and this led to a collapse in transportation costs in the US.
Liquidation, in other words, provides an important economic value to the economy. It allows assets to be re-priced, which creates a boost to the economy and prevents those assets from acting as a deadweight loss. If the railroads hadn’t been liquidated, in other words, any reduction in costs was likely to be minimal and the railroads would have been far less useful to the development of the US economy.

¿Seguro que esto va de China? 

4.      One thing I have not discussed above is the role of wages. The American System was developed in opposition to the then-dominant economic theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, in part because classic British economic theory seemed to imply that reductions in wages were positive for economic growth by making manufacturing more competitive in the international markets. A main focus of the American System, however, was to explain what policies the United States, with its much higher wages than in Europe at the time, had to engineer to generate rapid growth Sustaining high wages, in fact, became one of the key aspects of the American System.

Esto es una auténtica iluminación: forzar salarios hacia arriba para forzar aumentos de producción (mientras se procura que los costes de infraestructura/activos se mantengan bajos).  Y de rebote generas consumo.
Ayer estaba discutiendo lo siguiente, algo que observo en España: no importa repetir una tarea dos veces, no importa hacer las cosas por el método más tortuoso.  Como la mano de obra no se valora, dado su bajo coste, alto paro y la facilidad de obligar a hacer horas extras no remuneradas, ¿para qué inventar?  Por supuesto, esto repercute en el trato al empleado.

[Lego]

Ya... lo malo es que eso de producir mucho y que se consuma mucho estaba muy bien en el s XIX.

Ahora va de otra cosa.  La economía basada en el crecimiento está finiquitando.

Eso sí, parte de ese razonamiento es extrapolable a una economía basada en la optimización/reducción.  Por supuesto. De aquellas  optimizaron para "producir 3x gastando 2x", buscando "ser felices consumiendo más". 

La optimización ya NO puede tener como objetivo "producir más"  realmente cambia el paradigma.  En el futuro se tratará más bien de "ser felices consumiendo menos" y "producir lo necesario consumiendo lo mínimo".  Telita.

Por cierto, tremendo texto, Currobena. Después de cenar lo termino.

[Starkiller]

Eso es un economista. Pensé que no había.

EsquenotengoTDT: No se trata de eso, necesarimanete. Simplemente define que para que un proteccionismo sobre industrias en su infancia funcione, son importantes tanto una fuerte competencia interna (Ya que no la hay externa) como un fuerte consumo interno.

Me da la sensación de que, de alguna manera, estais enfocando esto como si ese aumento de salarios fuera algún minus para el país. Pero no es eso. Se trata de , en el reparto de riqueza, smplemente, permitir que el pueblo se lleve más, en lugar de llevarselo el capital. Esto aumenta la demanda, lo que a su vez crea más oportunidades de inversión, lo que a su vez haec atractiva la inversión del ahorro particular...

...lo que se denomina un círculo virtuoso, y me da igual que sea en una economía en crecimiento en edecrecimiento, es igualmente válido.

Yo siempre pongo a parir a los economistas que estan todo el dia con la "Demanda agregada", porque es una sarta de gilipolleces. Vestir a un santo para desvestir a otro, sin decir cual es cual. Pero esto tiene sentido. Estimular la demanda interna, aumentando salarios, extrayendo ese aumento del reparto de riquezas.

Creo que ahí hay cosas que es muy importante tener en cuenta.

[CHOSEN]

Acabo de leer cuidadosamente el artículo.
Ha habido varias cosas a lo largo de su desarrollo que me han ido llamando la atención y las he ido anotando para comentarlas luego. Al final del artículo he hecho una cosa (la digo luego) y todo ha encajado como un puzzle.

Cabe preguntarse varias cosas;
La primera, porqué compara el sistema chino -según sus propias palabras basado en subsidios- con el sistema norteamericano del XIX, cuando obviamente están basados en dos formas distintas de entender el desarrollo empresarial. Uno es comunista y basado en subsidios, contra otro liberal-proteccionista ¿ ? en sus propias palabras.
No entiendo muy bien a que viene esto, pero lo hace.
Mosca tras la oreja.

Americans had to acquire as much British technological expertise and capacity as possible (which usually happened, I should add, in the form of intellectual property theft).
This the US did, and in fact I believe every country that has managed the transition from underdeveloped to developed country status (with, perhaps, the exception of one or two trading entrepôts like Singapore and Hong Kong, although even this is debatable), including Germany, Japan, and Korea, has done it behind high explicit or implicit trade tariffs and stolen intellectual property.

Es como criticar el desarrollo babilonio con el persa porque uno no pagó royalties por utilizar ruedas. Las primeras patentes son de 1800. El "robo de propiedad intelectual" dificilmente podría aplicarse como penalización cuando se desarrolló el sistema productivo norteamericano. Máxime cuando el secreto industrial (lo contrario a la patente) sigue siendo la medida preferida de protección. Y muchísimo más antes que ahora.
De verdad, según leía no entendía a que venía meter esta merina con el resto de churras. Lo entendí luego.


A continuación, lo de siempre, meter a calzador recetas neoliberales en un país abiertamente comunista

The lessons for China, if I am right, are that China should forego the idea of nurturing national champions and should instead encourage brutal domestic competition. Beijing should also eliminate subsidies to production, the most important being cheap and unlimited credit, because senior managers of Chinese companies rationally spend more time on increasing access to these subsidies than on innovation, a subject on which, in spite of the almost absurd hype of recent years, China fares very, very poorly.

País el cual, dicho sea de paso, es el banquero de los Estados unidos y la -probablemente- primera potencia mundial. Un poco tarde para dar consejos a los economistas chinos -que los hay, y bastantes-; No entiendo esta manía, máxime cuando el nuevo paradigma de las nacionalizaciones son los USA.

Otra más.

Infrastructure investment is like any other investment in that it is only economically justified if the total economic value created by the investment exceeds the total economic cost associated with that investment If a country spends more on infrastructure than the resulting increase in productivity, more infrastructure makes it poorer, not richer.

Ya se demostró falso con el hiperdesarrollo de la industria espacial durante la guerra fría, la cual por cierto ganó EEUU yendo en contra de esta premisa.
Y diré mas: ¿Cual fue el gasto realizado, o el posterior valor económico aportado por las pirámides de Egipto?
Que la realidad NO SE MIDE EN TÉRMINOS ECONÓMICOS.
No, no y mil veces NO.
Es un puro mensaje de los sacerdotes economistas neoliberales.
Quieren que todo gire en torno a sus tablas de la ley, por erróneos que se hayan demostrado sus dogmas. Aplican los mismos valores al partenón y al acueducto de Segovia. Cuando obviamente no son comparables. No son ni fueron solo piedras configuradas de ésta o aquella forma.

Al final confiesa, una patada hacia adelante.

The American System was developed in opposition to the then-dominant economic theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, in part because classic British economic theory seemed to imply that reductions in wages were positive for economic growth by making manufacturing more competitive in the international markets.

Erróneamente le otorga TODO el desarrollo de USA de los últimos 100 años a 4 neorecetas. Como si la WW2 no hubiese significado nada. Y tan pancho.
USA es el país más endeudado del globo, en quiebra de facto, y SOMETIDO a disciplina China desde hace años: Fiscal Cliff y fin de invasiones en medio oriente son pruebas irrefutables de ello.
¿Donde quedó la guerra contra el terror de la que dependía la supervivencia de occidente? Pero si se han retirado!!! (el gasto, ahí los neosacerdotes no lo cuentan). Este señor vende recetas viejas, erróneas y mezcla churras con merinas en un ascuasrdinismo obsceno, es otro representante de la nueva escuela que intentó matar al padre y no pudo.

Curro, me sorprende cómo has podido traer un artículo así ¿?

------------

Después de haber leído el artículo he visto el CV del que lo ha escrito.
Ex Wall Street trader, Ex JP-Morgan, Ex Bear Stearn, etc, etc.
El típico conflicto de intereses: mis recetas son mejores, pero hay que ver los comunistas cómo nos estais comiendo la tostada.

Pettis has worked on Wall Street in trading, capital markets, and corporate finance since 1987, when he joined the Sovereign Debt trading team at Manufacturers Hanover (now JP Morgan). Most recently, from 1996 to 2001, Pettis worked at Bear Stearns, where he was Managing Director-Principal heading the Latin American Capital Markets and the Liability Management groups. He has also worked as a partner in a merchant banking boutique that specialized in securitizing Latin American assets and at Credit Suisse First Boston, where he headed the emerging markets trading team. Besides trading and capital markets, Pettis has been involved in sovereign advisory work, including for the Mexican government on the privatization of its banking system, the Republic of Macedonia on the restructuring of its international bank debt, and the South Korean Ministry of Finance on the restructuring of the country’s commercial bank debt.

No me ha gustado.
Estoy a favor de medidas concretas (pej:libertad de empresa) pero el papermaker las utiliza torticeramente para atacar el sistema socioeconomico chino. El trasfondo del artículo es YANKISMO pero del malo, malo, malo.
USA es. USA hace. USA dice.
Y a la historia reciente que le den por culo, me la invento.


TODOS, y digo TODOS los grandes imperios de la humanidad se han forjado por la fuerza. De ahí mi mención a la ww2, que el papermaker ni siquiera menciona arruinando su argumentación en el punto 3. TODOS los imperios se han hecho invadiendo y conquistando. Con esclavos y haciendo trabajar a las personas, a aser posible por la fuerza. Así lo hicieorn los USA, aunque ahora les encante decir que fue gracias al desarrollo de su sistema bancario, y así lo está haciendo China.

[Currobena]

Acabo de leer cuidadosamente el artículo.
Ha habido varias cosas a lo largo de su desarrollo que me han ido llamando la atención y las he ido anotando para comentarlas luego. Al final del artículo he hecho una cosa (la digo luego) y todo ha encajado como un puzzle.

Cabe preguntarse varias cosas;
La primera, porqué compara el sistema chino -según sus propias palabras basado en subsidios- con el sistema norteamericano del XIX, cuando obviamente están basados en dos formas distintas de entender el desarrollo empresarial. Uno es comunista y basado en subsidios, contra otro liberal-proteccionista ¿ ? en sus propias palabras.
No entiendo muy bien a que viene esto, pero lo hace.
Mosca tras la oreja.

Americans had to acquire as much British technological expertise and capacity as possible (which usually happened, I should add, in the form of intellectual property theft).
This the US did, and in fact I believe every country that has managed the transition from underdeveloped to developed country status (with, perhaps, the exception of one or two trading entrepôts like Singapore and Hong Kong, although even this is debatable), including Germany, Japan, and Korea, has done it behind high explicit or implicit trade tariffs and stolen intellectual property.

Es como criticar el desarrollo babilonio con el persa porque uno no pagó royalties por utilizar ruedas. Las primeras patentes son de 1800. El "robo de propiedad intelectual" dificilmente podría aplicarse como penalización cuando se desarrolló el sistema productivo norteamericano. Máxime cuando el secreto industrial (lo contrario a la patente) sigue siendo la medida preferida de protección. Y muchísimo más antes que ahora.
De verdad, según leía no entendía a que venía meter esta merina con el resto de churras. Lo entendí luego.


A continuación, lo de siempre, meter a calzador recetas neoliberales en un país abiertamente comunista

The lessons for China, if I am right, are that China should forego the idea of nurturing national champions and should instead encourage brutal domestic competition. Beijing should also eliminate subsidies to production, the most important being cheap and unlimited credit, because senior managers of Chinese companies rationally spend more time on increasing access to these subsidies than on innovation, a subject on which, in spite of the almost absurd hype of recent years, China fares very, very poorly.

País el cual, dicho sea de paso, es el banquero de los Estados unidos y la -probablemente- primera potencia mundial. Un poco tarde para dar consejos a los economistas chinos -que los hay, y bastantes-; No entiendo esta manía, máxime cuando el nuevo paradigma de las nacionalizaciones son los USA.

Otra más.

Infrastructure investment is like any other investment in that it is only economically justified if the total economic value created by the investment exceeds the total economic cost associated with that investment If a country spends more on infrastructure than the resulting increase in productivity, more infrastructure makes it poorer, not richer.

Ya se demostró falso con el hiperdesarrollo de la industria espacial durante la guerra fría, la cual por cierto ganó EEUU yendo en contra de esta premisa.
Y diré mas: ¿Cual fue el gasto realizado, o el posterior valor económico aportado por las pirámides de Egipto?
Que la realidad NO SE MIDE EN TÉRMINOS ECONÓMICOS.
No, no y mil veces NO.
Es un puro mensaje de los sacerdotes economistas neoliberales.
Quieren que todo gire en torno a sus tablas de la ley, por erróneos que se hayan demostrado sus dogmas. Aplican los mismos valores al partenón y al acueducto de Segovia. Cuando obviamente no son comparables. No son ni fueron solo piedras configuradas de ésta o aquella forma.

Al final confiesa, una patada hacia adelante.

The American System was developed in opposition to the then-dominant economic theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, in part because classic British economic theory seemed to imply that reductions in wages were positive for economic growth by making manufacturing more competitive in the international markets.

Erróneamente le otorga TODO el desarrollo de USA de los últimos 100 años a 4 neorecetas. Como si la WW2 no hubiese significado nada. Y tan pancho.
USA es el país más endeudado del globo, en quiebra de facto, y SOMETIDO a disciplina China desde hace años: Fiscal Cliff y fin de invasiones en medio oriente son pruebas irrefutables de ello.
¿Donde quedó la guerra contra el terror de la que dependía la supervivencia de occidente? Pero si se han retirado!!! (el gasto, ahí los neosacerdotes no lo cuentan). Este señor vende recetas viejas, erróneas y mezcla churras con merinas en un ascuasrdinismo obsceno, es otro representante de la nueva escuela que intentó matar al padre y no pudo.

Curro, me sorprende cómo has podido traer un artículo así ¿?

------------

Después de haber leído el artículo he visto el CV del que lo ha escrito.
Ex Wall Street trader, Ex JP-Morgan, Ex Bear Stearn, etc, etc.
El típico conflicto de intereses: mis recetas son mejores, pero hay que ver los comunistas cómo nos estais comiendo la tostada.

Pettis has worked on Wall Street in trading, capital markets, and corporate finance since 1987, when he joined the Sovereign Debt trading team at Manufacturers Hanover (now JP Morgan). Most recently, from 1996 to 2001, Pettis worked at Bear Stearns, where he was Managing Director-Principal heading the Latin American Capital Markets and the Liability Management groups. He has also worked as a partner in a merchant banking boutique that specialized in securitizing Latin American assets and at Credit Suisse First Boston, where he headed the emerging markets trading team. Besides trading and capital markets, Pettis has been involved in sovereign advisory work, including for the Mexican government on the privatization of its banking system, the Republic of Macedonia on the restructuring of its international bank debt, and the South Korean Ministry of Finance on the restructuring of the country’s commercial bank debt.

No me ha gustado.
Estoy a favor de medidas concretas (pej:libertad de empresa) pero el papermaker las utiliza torticeramente para atacar el sistema socioeconomico chino. El trasfondo del artículo es YANKISMO pero del malo, malo, malo.
USA es. USA hace. USA dice.
Y a la historia reciente que le den por culo, me la invento.


TODOS, y digo TODOS los grandes imperios de la humanidad se han forjado por la fuerza. De ahí mi mención a la ww2, que el papermaker ni siquiera menciona arruinando su argumentación en el punto 3. TODOS los imperios se han hecho invadiendo y conquistando. Con esclavos y haciendo trabajar a las personas, a aser posible por la fuerza. Así lo hicieorn los USA, aunque ahora les encante decir que fue gracias al desarrollo de su sistema bancario, y así lo está haciendo China.

Por partes.

Acabo de leer cuidadosamente el artículo.
Ha habido varias cosas a lo largo de su desarrollo que me han ido llamando la atención y las he ido anotando para comentarlas luego. Al final del artículo he hecho una cosa (la digo luego) y todo ha encajado como un puzzle.

Cabe preguntarse varias cosas;
La primera, porqué compara el sistema chino -según sus propias palabras basado en subsidios- con el sistema norteamericano del XIX, cuando obviamente están basados en dos formas distintas de entender el desarrollo empresarial. Uno es comunista y basado en subsidios, contra otro liberal-proteccionista ¿ ? en sus propias palabras.
No entiendo muy bien a que viene esto, pero lo hace.
Mosca tras la oreja.

El sistema chino no es comunista porque hay propiedad privada a gran escala. El sistema soviético sí era comunista. El proteccionismo es una forma más de subsidio, sólo que en vez de darlo directamente vía impuestos se da indirectamente vía precios más altos para los consumidores finales. Ambos son subsidios, sólo que uno se ve y otro no.

Americans had to acquire as much British technological expertise and capacity as possible (which usually happened, I should add, in the form of intellectual property theft).
This the US did, and in fact I believe every country that has managed the transition from underdeveloped to developed country status (with, perhaps, the exception of one or two trading entrepôts like Singapore and Hong Kong, although even this is debatable), including Germany, Japan, and Korea, has done it behind high explicit or implicit trade tariffs and stolen intellectual property.

Es como criticar el desarrollo babilonio con el persa porque uno no pagó royalties por utilizar ruedas. Las primeras patentes son de 1800. El "robo de propiedad intelectual" dificilmente podría aplicarse como penalización cuando se desarrolló el sistema productivo norteamericano. Máxime cuando el secreto industrial (lo contrario a la patente) sigue siendo la medida preferida de protección. Y muchísimo más antes que ahora.
De verdad, según leía no entendía a que venía meter esta merina con el resto de churras. Lo entendí luego.

La transmisión de tecnología entre sociedades es la base del desarrollo tecnológico. Pettis lo llama robo de propiedad intelectual, con lo que no estoy de acuerdo porque, como dijo Newton: «somos enanos, pero subidos a los hombros de los gigantes vemos más lejos que ellos». Por lo que todo desarrollo tecnológico se basa en el progreso anterior y, siguiendo la lógica del robo, todo el que inventa algo nuevo está robando en parte a los anteriores, lo que tomado al pie de la letra haría imposible desarrollar cualquier tipo de creatividad o innovación.

Pero ello no quita para que su análisis sea correcto. Uno de las condiciones clave del crecimiento económico es la adopción de medidas que aumenten la productividad, en la inmensa mayoría de los casos por imitación. Esto ha sido así a lo largo de la Historia.

A continuación, lo de siempre, meter a calzador recetas neoliberales en un país abiertamente comunista

The lessons for China, if I am right, are that China should forego the idea of nurturing national champions and should instead encourage brutal domestic competition. Beijing should also eliminate subsidies to production, the most important being cheap and unlimited credit, because senior managers of Chinese companies rationally spend more time on increasing access to these subsidies than on innovation, a subject on which, in spite of the almost absurd hype of recent years, China fares very, very poorly.

País el cual, dicho sea de paso, es el banquero de los Estados unidos y la -probablemente- primera potencia mundial. Un poco tarde para dar consejos a los economistas chinos -que los hay, y bastantes-; No entiendo esta manía, máxime cuando el nuevo paradigma de las nacionalizaciones son los USA.

No has entendido nada. Las que llamas recetas neoliberales (un anacronismo en el siglo XIX) se apoyan en el libre comercio sin tarifas, justo lo contrario de lo que dice Pettis. Lo que sí dice es que hay que evitar los campeones nacionales (como nuestra Telefónica) porque evitan la competición y, por tanto, reducen la productividad local. Si ya tengo un monopolio, ¿para qué investigar e invertir? gano lo mismo o más a corto plazo ordeñando a mis conciudadanos en un mercado cautivo. Las tarifas aduaneras son para ganar tiempo y permitir a las empresas que compiten localmente ponerse al nivel de las mundiales, lo que han de hacer porque la competencia les obliga en el mercado interior.

Lo que recomienda Pettis haría a las empresas chinas más fuertes, no menos. En vez de competir por subsidios directos del estado, competirían en un mercado cerrado a competición mundial pero con competición local, lo que las forzaría a competir por dicho subsidio indirecto en una forma que satisfaga a sus clientes, y no a los políticos locales. Lo contrario tiene los efectos que todos conocemos en España.

Otra más.

Infrastructure investment is like any other investment in that it is only economically justified if the total economic value created by the investment exceeds the total economic cost associated with that investment If a country spends more on infrastructure than the resulting increase in productivity, more infrastructure makes it poorer, not richer.

Ya se demostró falso con el hiperdesarrollo de la industria espacial durante la guerra fría, la cual por cierto ganó EEUU yendo en contra de esta premisa.
Y diré mas: ¿Cual fue el gasto realizado, o el posterior valor económico aportado por las pirámides de Egipto?
Que la realidad NO SE MIDE EN TÉRMINOS ECONÓMICOS.
No, no y mil veces NO.
Es un puro mensaje de los sacerdotes economistas neoliberales.
Quieren que todo gire en torno a sus tablas de la ley, por erróneos que se hayan demostrado sus dogmas. Aplican los mismos valores al partenón y al acueducto de Segovia. Cuando obviamente no son comparables. No son ni fueron solo piedras configuradas de ésta o aquella forma.

Lo que dice es que la inversión en infraestructura es como las vitaminas, muy beneficiosa al principio, a medida que aumenta se reduce su utilidad marginal para un tamaño determinado de tu economía. Si se continúa, se llega a un punto donde destruye riqueza. Creo que nadie discute que llenar toda España de carreteras y de AVEs incluyendo los parques naturales y los picos de las montañas sería perjudicial, y sin embargo construir una cierta cantidad de carreteras y AVEs en los sitios adecuados genera un rendimiento económico y social elevado.

El último párrafo no lo entiendo. ¿Qué tiene que ver una comparación del partenón y el acueducto de Segovia con la economía? Naturalmente que la economía es parte importante pero no lo es todo, ¿y qué? ¿qué tiene que ver con el artículo?

Al final confiesa, una patada hacia adelante.

The American System was developed in opposition to the then-dominant economic theories of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, in part because classic British economic theory seemed to imply that reductions in wages were positive for economic growth by making manufacturing more competitive in the international markets.

Erróneamente le otorga TODO el desarrollo de USA de los últimos 100 años a 4 neorecetas. Como si la WW2 no hubiese significado nada. Y tan pancho.
USA es el país más endeudado del globo, en quiebra de facto, y SOMETIDO a disciplina China desde hace años: Fiscal Cliff y fin de invasiones en medio oriente son pruebas irrefutables de ello.
¿Donde quedó la guerra contra el terror de la que dependía la supervivencia de occidente? Pero si se han retirado!!! (el gasto, ahí los neosacerdotes no lo cuentan). Este señor vende recetas viejas, erróneas y mezcla churras con merinas en un ascuasrdinismo obsceno, es otro representante de la nueva escuela que intentó matar al padre y no pudo.

Pettis da varias de las razones del crecimiento económico de los Estados Unidos en el siglo XIX y las compara con la China actual. No dice nada de que TODO el desarrollo de USA de los últimos 100 años se deba a dichas razones. No sé por qué las llamas neorecetas cuando son del siglo XIX y estamos en el XXI.

Luego metes un poutporri de cosas (Segunda Guerra Mundial, precipicio fiscal, etc.) que no tienen nada que ver con el artículo y hablas de churras y merinas y de matar al padre de alguien. Lo que escribes se comenta solo.

Acabo de leer cuidadosamente el artículo.
Ha habido varias cosas a lo largo de su desarrollo que me han ido llamando la atención y las he ido anotando para comentarlas luego. Al final del artículo he hecho una cosa (la digo luego) y todo ha encajado como un puzzle.

...

Curro, me sorprende cómo has podido traer un artículo así ¿?

------------

Después de haber leído el artículo he visto el CV del que lo ha escrito.
Ex Wall Street trader, Ex JP-Morgan, Ex Bear Stearn, etc, etc.
El típico conflicto de intereses: mis recetas son mejores, pero hay que ver los comunistas cómo nos estais comiendo la tostada.

Pettis has worked on Wall Street in trading, capital markets, and corporate finance since 1987, when he joined the Sovereign Debt trading team at Manufacturers Hanover (now JP Morgan). Most recently, from 1996 to 2001, Pettis worked at Bear Stearns, where he was Managing Director-Principal heading the Latin American Capital Markets and the Liability Management groups. He has also worked as a partner in a merchant banking boutique that specialized in securitizing Latin American assets and at Credit Suisse First Boston, where he headed the emerging markets trading team. Besides trading and capital markets, Pettis has been involved in sovereign advisory work, including for the Mexican government on the privatization of its banking system, the Republic of Macedonia on the restructuring of its international bank debt, and the South Korean Ministry of Finance on the restructuring of the country’s commercial bank debt.

No me ha gustado.
Estoy a favor de medidas concretas (pej:libertad de empresa) pero el papermaker las utiliza torticeramente para atacar el sistema socioeconomico chino. El trasfondo del artículo es YANKISMO pero del malo, malo, malo.
USA es. USA hace. USA dice.
Y a la historia reciente que le den por culo, me la invento.


TODOS, y digo TODOS los grandes imperios de la humanidad se han forjado por la fuerza. De ahí mi mención a la ww2, que el papermaker ni siquiera menciona arruinando su argumentación en el punto 3. TODOS los imperios se han hecho invadiendo y conquistando. Con esclavos y haciendo trabajar a las personas, a aser posible por la fuerza. Así lo hicieorn los USA, aunque ahora les encante decir que fue gracias al desarrollo de su sistema bancario, y así lo está haciendo China.

Todos los imperios han crecido por la fuerza, pero el artículo explica parte de las razones del crecimiento económico de los Estados Unidos antes de que se convirtiese en un imperio mundial, cuando Inglaterra era la gran potencia imperial. Es decir, no habla de la creación de imperios mundiales, sino que toma la historia económica USA del siglo XIX como modelo para explicar el crecimiento chino actual.

Por último, si has leído el artículo, no ha sido cuidadosamente, como se deduce de tus comentarios. Me sorprende que además, recurras al ad-hominem en lugar de a argumentos razonados. 2+2 son cuatro, aunque lo digan Rajoy y Zapatero, por ejemplo. Y si Anguita dice que 2+2 son cinco estaría equivocado, aunque lo creyera de verdad. Así que decir que un argumento no es verdad porque lo escribe alguien que ha trabajado en finanzas en USA es falaz y no forma parte de un debate honesto y razonado.

Chosen, me sorprende, ¿cómo has podido escribir un comentario así?

[polov]

http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/03/14/actualidad/1363240449_569237.html

Xi Jinping es elegido presidente de China

Xi Jinping ha culminado su ascenso a la cumbre. El líder chino, que ocupó en noviembre pasado la secretaría general del Partido Comunista Chino (PCCh) y la presidencia de la Comisión Militar Central —los dos cargos de verdadero poder en el país—, ha sido nombrado este jueves presidente del país. Se hace así con el tercero de los títulos que tenía su predecesor, Hu Jintao, con lo que se cierra la transición de poder a la quinta generación de dirigentes, tras las de Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin y el propio Hu.

La designación de Xi como presidente —con 2.952 votos a favor y uno en contra— se ha producido en el marco de la sesión anual del Parlamento en el Gran Palacio del Pueblo, en Pekín, en la que se prevé que mañana viernes el viceprimer ministro Li Keqiang ascienda a la jefatura de Gobierno, en sustitución de Wen Jiabao.

La secretaría del PCCh es la fuente real de poder en China, pero el puesto de presidente incrementará el papel y la proyección internacional de Xi, ya que al igual que Hu y Jiang no solo es el jefe del partido sino también el jefe de Estado.

El nombramiento de Xi como presidente —oficialmente por cinco años, aunque, salvo grandes sorpresas, mantendrá el cargo 10 años— estaba sellado desde que llegó a la cúpula del PCCh en el congreso del partido en noviembre pasado. En los meses transcurridos, el mandatario se ha comprometido a conservar el gobierno único comunista, mejorar la vida de la población, implementar ambiciosas reformas económicas y poner freno a la corrupción, una lacra que se ha convertido en una de las principales fuentes de malestar social y en un peligro para la supervivencia del PCCh, según han reconocido sus dirigentes. Desde que Xi tomó el poder, han salido a la luz una ristra de casos de corrupción de funcionarios de nivel medio y bajo, que han sido aireados con profusión por los medios de comunicación estatales.

El nuevo presidente ha asegurado que no solo irá a por “las moscas” sino también a por “los tigres” de alto rango, una declaración que ha sido recibida con escepticismo por un sector de la población, que considera que un puesto de poder en China es sinónimo de corrupción. La agencia estadounidense Bloomberg publicó el año pasado que la familia de Xi había acumulado cientos de millones de dólares en activos, lo que plantea dudas sobre su capacidad para llevar a cabo reformas que puedan amenazar sus intereses empresariales. El informe no mencionaba ningún delito por parte de Xi Jinping.

La corrupción está arraigada en muchos ámbitos de la sociedad china, y existe una resistencia a la puesta en marcha de medidas contra la corrupción entre quienes se han beneficiado de sus conexiones políticas para enriquecerse.

El ascenso de Xi marca la segunda transferencia de poder pacífica, tras la de Hu, en las más de seis décadas de gobierno comunista. Este jueves, ha sido nombrado también el vicepresidente chino: Li Yuanchao, un reformista liberal y aliado del ya expresidente Hu Jintao. Su designación rompe con la tradición de los últimos años, porque Li no forma parte del Comité Permanente del Politburó, el órgano de máximo poder del país, compuesto por siete miembros, aunque sí está en el Politburó.

Xi se hace con las riendas del país poblado y segunda economía del mundo en un momento especialmente delicado: cuando el modelo de desarrollo que ha permitido sacar a cientos de millones de personas de la pobreza está agotado, las desigualdades sociales han alcanzado un nivel peligroso, la degradación ambiental es fuente creciente de protestas, y la población, cada vez más informada y conectada, reclama mayores derechos sociales y políticos.
Xi Jinping, un ingeniero químico de 59 años y poseedor de un doctorado en teoría marxista, es hijo de Xi Zhongxun, uno de los grandes revolucionarios chinos. Considerado un reformista cauto, forma parte de la generación de los ‘príncipes’, término con el que son conocidos los descendientes de los altos líderes y exlíderes del PCCh.

Los diputados han aprobado también el plan de reestructuración gubernamental anunciado el domingo pasado, con el que el nuevo Gobierno quiere mejorar la eficiencia y luchar contra la corrupción. El plan implica la reducción del número de ministerios y agencias de nivel similar de 27 a 25 y la supresión del poderoso Ministerio de Ferrocarriles.

Gracias por sus posts
Saludos

[NosTrasladamus]

http://elpais.com/elpais/2013/03/16/opinion/1363463724_284929.html

Groenlandia sí que importa
Los groenlandeses temen ver destruido su entorno y su modo de vida, basado en la pesca y en la caza

Unas elecciones en un país de 57.000 habitantes, cubierto por el hielo y cuya capital funciona con solo dos semáforos, tienen todas las papeletas para pasar inadvertidas en los medios. Y así ha sido. Sin embargo, los comicios celebrados el pasado martes en Groenlandia fueron monitoreados con preocupación en Washington, Bruselas y Pekín. Y es que de los habitantes de la mayor isla del planeta, cuatro veces el tamaño de España, dependía no solo su futuro Gobierno, sino la geopolítica mundial.

Groenlandia tiene grandes yacimientos intactos de hierro, uranio y tierras raras. Tiene reservas de petróleo y gas. Y tiene también afanes independentistas. En 2008, esta provincia danesa logró, merced a un referéndum, más competencias y el derecho a la autodeterminación, aunque Copenhague sigue subsidiando la mitad de su presupuesto. Y en 2009, los groenlandeses llevaron al poder al partido Inuit Ataqatigiit, izquierdista y proindependencia. Su líder, Kuupid Kleist, se puso manos a la obra. Para financiar la futura emancipación, Kleist abrió Groenlandia a las compañías mineras. Las licencias de exploración se multiplicaron.

Y allí desembarcó China, justo a tiempo de ver aprobada la “ley a gran escala”, que permite importar mano de obra extranjera barata y sin protección laboral. Lo ideal para su gigantesco proyecto de explotación de hierro en Isua, que prevé la llegada de 3.000 obreros chinos para construir la mina y un puerto. Y mal asunto para la UE y EE UU, que observan alarmados el avance chino en el Ártico, donde el deshielo está abriendo rutas de navegación y el acceso a las riquezas del subsuelo.

Pero el martes llegó la sorpresa. Contra todo pronóstico, los groenlandeses (el 80% son inuit, o esquimales) dijeron basta. Temen ver destruido su entorno y su modo de vida, basado en la pesca y en la caza. Los socialdemócratas ganaron con un 42% de los votos, frente al 34% de los independentistas. Aleqa Hammond, una risueña inuit, hija de un cazador, políglota y experta en turismo, será primera ministra. Habla de derechos humanos y de medio ambiente. Ha prometido derogar la “ley a gran escala” y revisar los contratos mineros. ¿Dejar Dinamarca para acabar en manos de China? No, gracias. El sueño emancipador de Groenlandia está congelado. Como sus tierras.

[bruto]

http://actualidad.rt.com/actualidad/view/89696-rascacielos-china-peligro-colapso-hormigon

“Castillos de arena”: Numerosos rascacielos podrían colapsarse en China
 
 
 
La utilización de arena de baja calidad podría provocar un escándalo en el sector de la construcción en China, donde hormigón defectuoso habría sido usado en la edificación de muchos rascacielos, poniéndolos en riesgo de colapso.

Inspectores estatales han descubierto arena marina cruda en al menos 15 edificios en construcción en la ciudad sureña de Shenzhen, incluido un rascacielos que debe convertirse en el más alto del país al terminar las obras.

El centro financiero Ping An medirá 660 metros y será la segunda edificación más alta del mundo tras la torre Burj Khalifa de Dubái. Pero los trabajos han sido suspendidos al nivel de 80 metros al revelarse que el hormigón utilizado contenía arena marina no procesada.

Este tipo de arena contiene cloro y sal, que provocan corrosión. La arena fluvial, en cambio, es ampliamente utilizada en construcción, pero resulta más cara.

Expertos creen que es el aspecto financiero lo que llevó a las empresas constructoras a usar arena ilegal.

Según el Comité para Construcción y Viviendas de Shenzhen, 31 compañías han visto suspendidas sus licencias durante al menos medio año.

Los edificios construidos con el hormigón defectuoso podrían tardar pocas décadas en suponer peligros, incluida la posibilidad de derrumbe.

Teniendo en cuenta el auge de la construcción que vive China actualmente (hay más de 200 rascacielos en construcción y se erigirán 800 en los próximos cinco años) es muy posible que el escándalo se extienda más allá de los límites de Shenzhen.

[polov]

http://lacartadelabolsa.com/leer/articulo/saltan_las_alarmas_en_china_la_deuda_de_los_gobiernos_locales_esta_fuera_de

Saltan las alarmas en China: “La deuda de los gobiernos locales está fuera de control”

La montaña de deuda que acumulan los gobiernos locales chinos ha alcanzado dimensiones estratosféricas y amenaza con causar una crisis financiera aún mayor al gigante asiático. Según ha revelado un auditor al diario británico Financial Times, se estima que las ciudades y provincias chinas deben entre 10 y 20 billones de yuanes (de 1,6 a 3,2 billones de dólares), lo que equivaldría a entre el 20 y el 40% del PIB del país, recoge elEconomista
"Ya está fuera de control", ha afirmado Zhang Ke, de la auditora ShineWing. Según explica, su firma ha auditado a algunos gobiernos locales y ha encontrado que muchas de sus emisiones de deuda son "muy peligrosas". "China tiene más de 2.800 ayuntamientos. Si cada uno de ellos ha emitido deuda, llevará a una crisis que podría ser mayor que la crisis inmobiliaria de EEUU", añade.
Los planes de estímulo aplicado por China en 2008, en respuesta a la crisis financiera global, y puestos en marcha a lo largo y ancho del país asiático en los últimos años han hundido a los gobiernos locales chinos en una deuda creciente.
En febrero del año pasado, Pekín instó a los bancos a refinanciar los préstamos concedidos para evitar que las autoridades incurriesen en impagos, ante el hecho de que la mayor parte de ellos créditos no podía ser devuelto. La respuesta de las entidades fue ofrecer aplazamientos en los vencimientos de dichos créditos y esquivar una oleada de quiebras municipales.

Bomba de relojería
Más de un año después, esta maniobra podría tener consecuencias desastrosas para China. "La crisis es posible. Y desde que se alargaron los plazos de la deuda y se pasó al largo plazo, el momento de la explosión es incierto", apostilla el auditor en sus declaraciones al rotativo.
De acuerdo con el FT, las sociedades de inversión a través de las que los gobiernos locales emiten sus bonos adjudicaron títulos por valor de unos 283.000 millones de yuanes en el primer trimestre de 2013, más del doble que en el mismo periodo del año pasado. "Lo único que pueden hacer es emitir nueva deuda para pagar la antigua, pero llegará un día en el que esto no pueda continuar", apunta el Zhang Ke.
Hace tiempo que analistas y expertos advierten de que la refinanciación solamente pospone el problema. Nouriel Roubini auguraba en mayo del año pasado que la situación acabaría derivando en un rescate parcial en 2013, cuyo peso se repartiría entre los gobiernos locales, los bancos y, en último término, las familias.
Por su parte, desde Pekín confían en encontrar una solución permanente y argumentan que muchos de los proyectos en los que las autoridades han invertido durante la crisis financiera serán rentables y servirán para devolver los préstamos. Además, Pekín ha tomado alguna precaución al respecto, como aumentar el control sobre las emisiones de bonos.

Gracias por sus posts

[dmar]

Pues parece que el burbujón resucita en china... y nos encontramos con problemas que resultarán familiares:

http://www.economist.com/news/china/21577118-soaring-house-prices-continue-pose-political-problem-chinas-leaders-cat-and-house?fsrc=scn/tw/te/pe/catandhouse

The alarm bells are being rung in unexpected quarters. Wang Shi, the charismatic boss of Vanke, China’s biggest property developer, would seem to have more to gain than most from further price rises, yet he too warns of a looming “disaster.” The plunge in prices that would result from a pricking of this bubble, he declared on “60 Minutes”, an American television programme, could lead to popular protests on the scale of the recent Arab uprisings

China’s new leaders are keenly attuned to such concerns and are trying hard to head off the danger. The ruling State Council and the country’s central bank have issued numerous decrees in recent weeks designed to dampen the market and to crack down on speculation. Among these are larger down-payments and higher mortgage rates for people buying second homes and a reminder to local governments that a 20% capital-gains tax on second-home sales must be enforced.

But plenty of central-government edicts are ignored. The capital-gains tax on resales, for example, was only rarely levied in the past. Ren Zhiqiang, boss of Hua Yuan Real Estate Group, another property giant, recently denounced the country’s policies. The central government’s message to local officials, he claimed, could be described as: “We hope prices won’t continue rising; you go and fix them; and if you don’t fix them, we will punish you.”

Most local officials do not want to implement such curbs with any rigour. On the contrary, encouraging a property boom keeps much-needed tax revenues flowing and puffs up the local economic growth figures on which their chances of promotion hang. This misalignment of incentives, argues Mr Thornton, explains why “it’s always a cat-and-mouse game between local and central authorities”.
...

The perverse incentives the party clings to and the absence of policies to discourage speculation often end up crushing the dreams of would-be home owners. The solution probably starts with the central government recognising that local officials have their dreams, too.