In the past few days, Henry Paulson has come up with his US$700B proposal to save the major lending institutions which made bad decisions re CDOs, with all the bad loans being covered by the US taxpayer. This is happening at a time when the US middle class is under unprecedented pressure already.
Over the next year, all the bad decisions made by China’s economic planners over the past 30 years will show through. These include:
- The decision to become overly dependent on the US as an export market, and buying US treasuries to effectively buy this single captive market and continue to sell it goods far beyond its capacity to pay for China’s exports.
- Somewhere along the line, a decision was made to jumpstart China’s economy and put it on the fast-track of economic development. To a large extent, this has happened. But China’s economy is like a body builder whose upper body strength is massive, but has toothpick legs. More incidents like the melamine milk incidents will become common, simply because the government is not equipped to handle incidents of this kind.
- China, unfortunately, has a reputation for cheap, low-quality products, in spite of the successful Beijing Olympics. For the most part, Chinese companies do not have the talent to work up the value chain creating better products. (There are some, but they are too few to make a significant difference.) This takes time to build.
- Exports will slow, and the Chinese domestic market will not pick up the slack fast enough to prevent major unemployment problems, especially among university graduates.
- The wealth gap between the rich and poor will widen dangerously, and real estate prices, which are already falling, will fall even more.
China became addicted to US orders and the US dollar the same way Americans became addicted to Chinese junk products. (This is a generalization; many goods are not junk. But the general image is of, well, junk.) For both sides, it was a dream which was too good to be true.
Now it’s over, and the Beijing Olympics are turning into the final hurrah for that period.
If you would like a well-presented systematic presentation, my friend Corbett Wall has written an interesting piece.
The fat days are over, and we are in for a tough 20-30 years ahead.
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