Monday, November 23, 2015

Is China Heading to a 1930s-Style Crash?

Gatestone Institute
Facebook  Twitter  RSS
Donate

In this mailing:

Is China Heading to a 1930s-Style Crash?

by Gordon G. Chang  •  November 22, 2015 at 5:00 am
  • One statistic summarizes the situation: in Q3, there was $460.6 billion of net capital outflow. No economy can survive outflows of that size. The Chinese economy has never made sense, but confidence held it together. Now, the confidence is gone.
  • There are indications that China's economic growth rate is, in reality, close to zero. Take the most reliable indicator of Chinese economic activity, the consumption of electricity.
  • China's Communist Party has been closing off the Chinese market to foreigners, recombining large state enterprises back into formal monopolies, increasing state ownership of enterprises, and shoveling more state subsidies to favored market participants.
  • Just about everyone correctly agrees that a new round of structural economic reform could restart growth.
"On conservative growth projections, China's economy could well be bigger than the sum of all the G7 economies in real terms within the next decade," writes Peter Drysdale, the editor of the popular East Asia Forum website.
Not everyone is as optimistic as Drysdale, but the general view is that China will work through a transitory period and enter a new phase of growth powered by consumer spending.
Are China's economic problems merely temporary -- a year or two at most -- as the majority view suggests?
Perhaps, but there are also reasons to believe the country will have to endure prolonged hardship, either two or so decades of recession and stagnation or, more probably, a sharp 1930s-style crash followed by years of deep contraction.

Turkey's Oppression Machine

by Burak Bekdil  •  November 22, 2015 at 4:00 am
  • The law stated that the homes and workplaces of those non-Muslims who could not afford the tax would be sequestered.
  • Under the AKP rule, Turkey's dwindling Jewish community, now at around a mere 17,000, as well as other non-Muslims, have come under systematic intimidation from government politicians and bureaucrats. These non-Muslim minorities are also often the targets of racist attacks.
Ishak Alaton (left), a 90-year-old Turkish Jewish industrialist, is being investigated on charges of "supporting terror," for providing financial and moral support to Fethullah Gulen (right), a U.S.-based Muslim cleric who is a political rival of Turkey's president.
It was 1942 when, one day, Hayim Alaton, a Jewish yarn importer in Istanbul, received two payment notices from the tax office: He was asked to pay 80,000 liras in total -- a fortune at that time. He ran to the tax office to object, but was told to pay the whole amount within 15 days. It was the infamous Wealth Tax, passed on Nov. 11, 1942 and it remained in effect for a year and a half until it was repealed on March 14, 1944.
The Wealth Tax exclusively targeted Turkey's non-Muslims at a time when 300,000 Orthodox Greeks and 100,000 Jews were living in Istanbul (where total population was one million). The law stated that the homes and workplaces of those non-Muslims who could not afford the tax would be sequestered. Alaton was able to pay no more than 11,000 liras. That was the start of "black years," as Alaton's son, 15 years old at that time, would later recall.

To subscribe to the this mailing list, go to http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/list_subscribe.php
14 East 60 St., Suite 1001, New York, NY 10022

No comments:

Post a Comment