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What’s the long-term price of the Wuhan virus? It’s hard to gauge, but we’re still paying it. Our economy, from top to bottom, is a dysfunctional mess. China appeared to have come out of it better than we did, but that’s another ‘Potemkin village’.
The Chinese economy’s decades-long run of tremendous growth has finally found its end, Ruchir Sharma wrote in the Financial Times.
Now, the world’s second-largest economy accounts for a smaller share of global GDP.
In nominal dollar terms — which Sharma argues is the most accurate measure of an economy’s relative strength — China’s share of world GDP began slipping in 2022 as strict zero-COVID measures remained in place for most of the year.
Despite expectations for a blowout rebound, China’s share will fall further in 2023, hitting 17%. That puts China on pace for a two-year drop of 1.4 percentage points, a slide not seen since the 1960s and 1970s, when Mao Zedong presided over a weak economy, he added.
17% is still massive, but the real issue is growth. China was already hitting all sorts of limits, urban, agricultural, resources, and land in its effort to transition from manufacturing products for wealthier countries to building its own robust economy.
Defaults are rising and the Evergrande mess is emblematic of a phantom economy. Even Chinese manufacturing is struggling.
Still, COVID lockdowns damaged China’s economy by applying pressure to many of these fault lines.
As for China, it “was held back by strict adherence to its zero Covid policy, resulting in a lack of immunity via infection and lockdowns that stifled activity,” Lupton and Parrish wrote
The moral of the story is that it’s easier to wreck a country than it is to fix it.
Lockdowns exposed fragilities and instability in both our economy and China’s economy. Not to mention both of our societies. As stress tests go, lockdowns were revelatory in similar and different ways.
Both China and America’s social controls proved more vulnerable than expected. There came a point when Chinese and Americans wouldn’t put up with lockdowns anymore. But where our economy faltered due to massive welfare, fraud and the failure of ‘smart’ systems, China’s economy faltered because everything depended on a forward momentum that had collapsed.
Where our economy all too often runs on trends, China’s is a war machine. It works until everyone stops for a moment and then it’s much harder to get started again. While our economy chases trends (back to the office, away from the office, AI, metaverse), China depends on smoothly turning resources into products, filling orders and then trying to grow its domestic economy.
China destabilized us, but in doing so it also destabilized itself and its lockdowns set back its momentum. Its economy is still growing, but the momentum has faltered.
One hell of a trend.
A trend that’s good news for the rest of the world. The snapper heads are a bane on humanity.
I don’t understand the Chinese economy, but some of Xi’s economic policies, over the last few years, seemed very bad, from the economic point of view.
Interesting article! China will continue to get its hands on rare metals and earth resources , copy technology. Etc…
So true. When it comes to underhanded and ruinous behavior, the CCP is on a parity with the Douchebagocrat party.
I see we have Sinophile Douchebagocrat who likes to down vote pesky facts.
Did you catch the hammer and sickle symbol on Xi Ping Pong’s podium? As if the most rapacious money grubbers on the planet are actually commies. The CCP uses Commie tactics such as oppression, spying, social control, identity politics and a two class society but nobody in that greedy country shares their wealth and property, just like the fake commies here such as Bernout Sanders.
Yeah, I often think about that. Communism is a big scam, designed to enrich the Commie Elite by exploiting the rest of society.
That’s a very good description of communism. Succinct and revelatory for all the people who think big government control and making the population dependent on government is communism. They confuse underhanded and repressive commie tactics and select Commie practices with actual communism, which would entail workers to “own the means of production” and possess no private property. In our current society, “the means of production” are goods and services, mainly services. The vast majority of physical production is agricultural in America, the vast majority of goods are foreign made and services are the main “industry” in America, by far.
It’s impossible for the government to own all those things or even control them. If the Douchebagocrats and their left-wing cadres were to take control of the government as they intend, they could regulate the shit out of companies and farmers they disfavor and reward the ones they collude with but they could never impose communism or even socialism and they don’t want to. They want us sweaty masses to keep making money for them and stay content enough that we won’t revolt against them.
All the conservatives who think the hardcore Douchebagocrats and “woke” lefties are commies and socialists are fooling themselves and don’t know what those contradictory and crackpot ideologies really are. Not even the morons who claim to be commies and socialists understand and they’re all hypocrites. Bernout Sanders, the founders of Black Lies Murder, Ocrazio Cortez, et Al. They and their fellow travelers are all wealthy, flat out filthy rich and the usual useful idiots who enrich them.
“Communism is a big scam, designed to enrich the Commie Elite by exploiting the rest of society.” The sooner misguided conservatives learn that, the better.
The linkage between China, their manufactured virus and globalist’s use of it to control populations through draconian measures has yet to be fully explained to my satisfaction, but it would appear they aren’t finished yet.
A coalition of US Senators recently sent Biden a letter urging an immediate travel ban from China in response to an unknown respiratory illness spreading throughout China with “pneumonia-like symptoms”. Dubbed the ‘White Lung Syndrome’, 142 cases were reported in Ohio alone by last Wednesday.
Add to that the predictions by one of the left’s favorite virus promoters, Dr. Peter Hotez (who never met a TV camera he didn’t like), who basically wanted to strap Americans down and force the jab on them. He was one of the leading “medical” voices that called COVID “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” and since that statement was proven demonstrably false, he’s been aggressively promoting ‘Disease X’ that is said to be 20 times worse than COVID. I guess only 13% of the population getting the new, improved boosters wasn’t enough…so the fear porn must continue.
Whether it’s just a reprisal of Rahm Emanuel’s “Never let a crisis go to waste” or it goes much deeper than that, the destruction of global economies, not just China’s, seems to be what’s on the menu, by design or otherwise.
Yeah, now that they destroyed confidence in new style “vaccines”, what will happen when a disease comes along where a real *vaccine* (in the old sense) is needed?
Great point! All the “pure blood are so proud that they rebelled but were oddly unconcerned about vote fraud, open borders, and now psycho blood thirsty killer terrorists.
The propaganda goes in all directions. Was Covid a killer in 2020? In my area- was it ever! Did vaccines work? Apparently not! Did lies permeate mainstream media? You betcha! Are other vaccines helpful?. Yes, sure. Will pure bloods avoid them? I’m sure. Hello, polio.
I doubt I will ever trust Big Pharma again, with a fake “vaccine” to begin with, then add to that contamination of extremely large batches with everything from millions of broken strands of DNA per dose to heavy metals. Then, when medical researchers finally put 2 and 2 together and track down these “polluted” batches and correlate them to high death rates for the recipients, they’re silenced, as recently happened to the New Zealand researchers. Then the final coup de grace, legal indemnity via “emergency use authorization”.
There’s no denying who’s in charge here…and it isn’t the public. The only power I have is to choose not to be a lab rat. May we all choose wisely in the future.
“By design or otherwise.”
It sure seems like both to me.
Many foreign powers definitely want America’s economy and society to collapse but it seems obvious that many American fools do too, particularly the “woke” mutants on the extreme left. (Woke is a verb not an adjective but those people are too stupid and ignorant to know the difference. If they had any brains they would claim to be awake.)
And is it just me or are the Alzheimer Joe administration and Douchebagacrat/RINO coalition in Congress incompetent?
Yes, the fans of the Covid measures are wetting their pants to have an return to it all.
I remember thinking at the time, if they’ll shut down the economy and quarantine the population over something with a 0.13%(13 in 10,000) mortality rate, what are they going to do if something with just a 1% mortality rate hits? 20X covid mortality would be 2.6%. I also remember laughing in disgust at the ignorant fools comparing covid to the Bubonic Plague, which had a mortality rate of around 50% when it hit.
Well, Cowboy, they compared January 6 guided tour of the capital to civil war pearl harbor and Hiroshima.
And 911, too. The same scumbags refer to 10/6 resistance to the Jewish “occupation” and Israels self defense as “genocide.”
All those scumbags should be banished from America but that’s just a dream of mine.
The effects of lockdowns were obvious from the start, and the desired outcome was achieved, and I believe exceeded their expectations in terms of compliance. Of course, the final objective is permanent lockdown, and they are still building our prison as we speak.
Yes, the federal and many state governments are pushing multiple jabs per year, starting with babies, and do everything in their power to exaggerate the number of Wuhan virus infections.
It won’t work. Even the vast majority of weak willed authority worshipers and morons are sick and tired of lockdowns, especially considering lockdowns only affect the middle class and poor, not the elites, particularly the political elites.
That’s what I think, anyway.
Aw, the poor snapper heads in the CCP. They deliberately unleashed the Wuhan virus on the world but it hurt them worse than it hurt us. They lie about their economic growth shamelessly but it’s actually shrinking. Go eat some bat soup, you scumbags.
The Bloomberg writers are obviously right about China but it’s wise to note that they also think tens of millions of illegal aliens are going to strengthen and increase America’s economy, when of course they’e doing the exact opposite, and don’t get me started on the millions of criminals of all types. And then there are the jihadis who are instant sleeper agents bent on Moslem murder of unarmed civilians.
Lupton and Parrish are right that the CCP’s Zero COVID (Wuhan virus) policy “stifled activity” but their claim that infection imparts immunity is ridiculous, asinine and idiotic. Multiple infections are very common.
Good news about the CCP and China. though. Setbacks and suffering are exactly what they deserve.
“The moral of the story is that it’s easier to wreck a country than it is to fix it.”
Thank you for that groundbreaking bit of analysis. I bet you were patting yourself on the back after exhibiting such wisdom.
The moral of your comment is once a douchebag, always a douchebag.
Indeed, while the whole of the world received damage from Covid (mostly due to load-down measures) China appears to be receiving its damage for its quite terrible choices of and with Covid. In addition, mainland China appears to be hurting now from this communist culture that loves all the worst of the past with a heavy addition of all the bad of communist social policy. From what I am hearing – few know just how bad the situation is with China, and with the Chinese people.
Trust the communist to be the expert in destruction.
These illnesses China is developing and releasing primarily affect the elderly and those in compromised health. China’s 35 year one-child policy has left them with a severely aging population, which has to be supported, and Western lifestyles and birth decline has put us in much the same boat. Western governments have spent the money they owe these elderly people, and the bill is coming due.
As to why the Chicoms locked down their economy for so long, it shut the growing unrest there right on down. The dems needed to shut down the economy (Which was growing much better than obama ever managed), and needed unrest here so they made a rare exception to the lockdowns for “protests,” not church, not funerals, not deathbeds, but for democrat mobs.