Tag Archives: Slowdown

Climate scientists struggle to explain warming slowdown | Reuters

Posted by on April 21, 2013 Comments Off

Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions.

Often focused on century-long trends, most climate models failed to predict that the temperature rise would slow, starting around 2000. Scientists are now intent on figuring out the causes and determining whether the respite will be brief or a more lasting phenomenon.

Climate scientists struggle to explain warming slowdown | Reuters

So there are modeling problems. As I said a couple of years ago, when you calibrate a model based on data within a certain range, and then go outside of that range, then your model might not work correctly. When I heard scientists confidently explain how good their climate models were, I knew we were in for trouble. Because a real scientist would understand that moving into new territory is always dangerous.

Revolution in Russia: Putin’s Popularity Wanes as Russia’s Boom Ends

Posted by on April 18, 2013 Comments Off

Cracks are showing in Russia’s leadership as a slowdown in the economy is beginning to cause rifts at the heart of the government, with one academic telling CNBC on Thursday that the economy poses the biggest threat to the country’s leadership.

…

Putin Out?

Richard Edgar Pipes, professor of Russian History at Harvard University, told CNBC that there was a danger that prolonged weakness in the economy could harm Putin, whose popularity among the Russian electorate has been waning for some time.

Putin’s Popularity Wanes as Russia’s Boom Ends

Related article:

Revolution in China: Slowing growth could cause more internal instability

Revolution in China: Slowing growth could cause more internal instability

Posted by on April 18, 2013 Comments Off

For years, the conventional wisdom about China’s GDP was this: if the country didn’t meet its target of 8 percent annualized growth, political instability would result. The reasoning behind this wisdom is pretty simple: the Chinese Communist Party, having long ago forfeited its ideological legitimacy, depends solely on providing economic growth in order to stay in power. So long as enough people prosper, they’ll put up with a fair amount of repression and corruption. But as soon as economic growth slows, China could be in for a rude awakening.

Has the time come? …

Should China Worry About a GDP Slowdown? – Matt Schiavenza – The Atlantic

Is a revolution in China going to happen today? Of course not. What this means is that the probability of a revolution starts to increase. Chinese leaders will be sweating a little more. There will be more protests. But this could go on for a number of years. Or it could spiral out of control soon if an incident sets off the people. Nobody really knows, and most of all the Chinese leaders don’t really know either. That’s where the sweating comes in.

If you are a Chinese leader, then you need a plan B: Getting much of your money and family out of the country if it is feasible. Obviously, this won’t work for leaders who are too high up.

Eurozone slowdown no longer biggest threat to Asia growth – Telegraph

Posted by on April 10, 2013 Comments Off

Heightened political tensions have overtaken the eurozone debt crisis and US fiscal shock as the biggest threats to the developing economies in Asia,according the Asian Development Bank (ADB).

While “austerity fatigue” in the euro area and “unresolved fiscal drag” in the US remain significant risks to developing Asian economies, escalating border disputes in the region pose the largest menace to growth, said the Bank’s annual outlook report.

The Bank warned that “potential nationalistic passions”, such as those which led to a Chinese boycott on Japanese goods over the disputed sovereignty of eight small islands in the East China Sea last year, could drag on growth in the region.

“Political risk has emerged as the main threat to the global and regional outlook,” said the report.

Eurozone slowdown no longer biggest threat to Asia growth – Telegraph

Is China trying to implode Japan’s economy?

Posted by on November 30, 2012 Comments Off

The PRC’s high-profile, unyielding position on the Senkakus seems to reflect something other than reflexive nationalism, political weakness, or the blunderings of a disoriented and incapable elite. It appears that the Beijing leadership may have decided to edge beyond using the Senkaku dispute as a mere demonstration of its economic countermeasures to the US pivot into Asia, to thinking seriously about actually trying to kick a key prop out from under the US initiative – a vital, but weakened and vulnerable ally: Japan.

I previously argued that the PRC had decided that the best riposte to the
US/Japanese strategy of using maritime disputes to polarize East Asia diplomatically and militarily to China’s detriment was to eschew overt
government-ordered military or economic action – such as the counterproductive slowdown in rare earth exports to Japan during the 2010 Captain Zhan stand-off – in favor of “popular” but state-sanctioned economic retaliation against Japanese economic interests inside China.

There is every indication that this strategy is ongoing – and working.

Asia Times Online :: Is China trying to implode Japan’s economy?

Broken BRICs | Foreign Affairs

Posted by on November 5, 2012 Comments Off

THE NEW AND OLD ECONOMIC ORDER

In the decade to come, the United States, Europe, and Japan are likely to grow slowly. Their sluggishness, however, will look less worrisome compared with the even bigger story in the global economy, which will be the three to four percent slowdown in China, which is already under way, with a possibly deeper slowdown in store as the economy continues to mature. China’s population is simply too big and aging too quickly for its economy to continue growing as rapidly as it has. With over 50 percent of its people now living in cities, China is nearing what economists call “the Lewis turning point”: the point at which a country’s surplus labor from rural areas has been largely exhausted. This is the result of both heavy migration to cities over the past two decades and the shrinking work force that the one-child policy has produced. In due time, the sense of many Americans today that Asian juggernauts are swiftly overtaking the U.S. economy will be remembered as one of the country’s periodic bouts of paranoia, akin to the hype that accompanied Japan’s ascent in the 1980s.

Broken BRICs | Foreign Affairs

China’s Shadow Banks Are Collapsing – Business Insider

Posted by on September 13, 2012 Comments Off

A collapse of property schemes, commodity schemes, and other investments schemes in China is well underway. …

Well, the pool of greater fools finally ran out, and Shadow Bankers Vanished Leaving China Victims Seeing Scams

China’s slowest economic growth in three years and a slumping property market, where many so-called shadow-banking investments are parked, are squeezing millions of Chinese who have invested the money of friends and acquaintances chasing higher yields to honor those payments. The slowdown also is putting pressure on the government to rein in private lending to avoid a spate of defaults that could increase the number of victims and lead to social unrest.

China’s Shadow Banks Are Collapsing – Business Insider

Everything You Think You Know About China Is Wrong – By Minxin Pei | Foreign Policy

Posted by on August 30, 2012 Comments Off

Are we obsessing about its rise when we should be worried about its fall?

For the last 40 years, Americans have lagged in recognizing the declining fortunes of their foreign rivals. In the 1970s they thought the Soviet Union was 10 feet tall — ascendant even though corruption and inefficiency were destroying the vital organs of a decaying communist regime. In the late 1980s, they feared that Japan was going to economically overtake the United States, yet the crony capitalism, speculative madness, and political corruption evident throughout the 1980s led to the collapse of the Japanese economy in 1991.

Could the same malady have struck Americans when it comes to China? The latest news from Beijing is indicative of Chinese weakness: a persistent slowdown of economic growth, a glut of unsold goods, rising bad bank loans, a bursting real estate bubble, and a vicious power struggle at the top, coupled with unending political scandals. Many factors that have powered China’s rise, such as the demographic dividend, disregard for the environment, supercheap labor, and virtually unlimited access to external markets, are either receding or disappearing.

Everything You Think You Know About China Is Wrong – By Minxin Pei | Foreign Policy

The seeds of destruction are sown during the good times. Any society heavily focused on growth and stability will surely crash. Bad thinking, bad decisions and corruption will all grow exceedingly great during the good times in these societies. Then a crash will come.

You want a messy society with lots of small economic recessions to burn out the problems on a regular basis. Think of these small recessions as democratic elections. You want lots of elections to keep things on track. Suppressing elections will lead to revolutions – the big collapse. Suppressing recessions leads to – the big collapse.

China Trade Decelerates in Sign of Global Weakness – ABC News

Posted by on August 10, 2012 Comments Off

The slowdown is politically dangerous for the Communist Party because it raises the risk of job losses and unrest at a time when the ruling party is trying to enforce calm ahead of a handover of power this year to younger leaders. Export industries employ millions of workers and weak sales, coupled with higher costs, have led to a wave of bankruptcies.

China’s trade growth has fallen steadily this year as global demand for its exports cooled and efforts to boost domestic consumption have failed to gain traction as fast as the government hoped.

China Trade Decelerates in Sign of Global Weakness – ABC News

The Communist party is concerned that a slowdown could eventually lead to a revolution in China and most likely their deaths.

The Fiscal Cliff: Congress’ Imminent Armageddon – ABC News

Posted by on July 18, 2012 Comments Off

It’s “a life threatening problem,” a “crisis,” the “single greatest long-term threat to [business'] ability to compete the global marketplace” that risks “squandering a legacy of over 200 years,” making America go “broke” and slamming “the breaks on the global economy.”

The way debt reduction experts, advocates and former lawmakers describe it, stepping off the fiscal cliff that looms at the end of this year — when a cocktail of expiring tax cuts and automatic spending cuts will strap taxpayers with a $600 billion bill in 2013 – is like stepping into the final scene of Armageddon. Except Bruce Willis never volunteers to blow up the asteroid.

The Fiscal Cliff: Congress’ Imminent Armageddon – ABC News

U.S. economic fears shift from Europe toward ‘fiscal cliff’ – The Washington Post

The main threat to the economy is shifting from what others may do to us to what we are doing to ourselves.

For much of the year, economists worried about the impact of the slowdown in Europe on the U.S. economy. Now, analysts say anxiety about the impact of the fast-approaching fiscal cliff — the series of federal spending cuts and tax hikes set to take effect at the beginning of 2013 if Congress and the Obama administration do not act — is displacing Europe as the primary threat to the nation’s sputtering economy.

U.S. economic fears shift from Europe toward ‘fiscal cliff’ – The Washington Post