The Great Debate UK
Ten years on – is it the end of the 9/11 moment?
-Sir Robert Fry is chairman of McKinney Rogers. His career in the British military includes being director of operations in the Ministry of Defence, advising then prime minister Tony Blair on the military strategic direction of the UK’s response to the September 11 attacks. The opinions expressed are his own.-
In his recent book “On China”, Henry Kissinger rather immodestly, but entirely knowingly, echoes the title of Clausewitz’s seminal work, “On War”. If you’re Henry Kissinger, you can do that. If you’re Henry Kissinger you can also offer a view of unrivalled authority on the politico/strategic landscape of the modern era, which is why his suggestion that China in the 21st Century might reprise the role of Germany in the 20th demands some attention. After the pre-occupation with terrorism of the last 10 years, this sounds rather different. Political ends may be timeless, but the means to prosecute them are rapidly changing, and currency, water, cyber and nuclear instruments may be the weapons of the post 9/11 era.
Chinese maritime capability now includes a missile inventory with the capacity to deny sea control in the Asian littoral to U.S. carrier groups, but why would China pick a conventional fight when its ownership of U.S. foreign debt offers profound strategic leverage without a shot ever being fired?
Timothy Geithner, speaking after the fall of Lehman Brothers, first raised the spectre of currency wars with charges that China was manipulating the yuan in a form of exchange rate mercantilism. But this is a complex and ambiguous area and Sino/American relations are underwritten by what looks like a re-run of the Cold War concept of mutually assured destruction, with the greenback playing the role of nuclear weapons: any large scale dumping of Chinese dollar holdings would not only torpedo its role as a reserve currency, but also devalue remaining Chinese reserves, leaving both nations in a mutually dependent financial embrace.
from Reuters Investigates:
Intrigue in China’s U.S. Treasury buying
A Reuters exclusive today describes a method China used recently to hide some of its U.S. Treasury purchases - "US caught China buying more Treasuries than disclosed."
Treasury officials said they were simply modernizing outdated procedures two years ago when they revamped the rules for participating in government bond auctions.
from MacroScope:
Give me liberty and give me cash!
Come back Mr Fukuyama, all is forgiven.
In his 1992 book "The End of History and the Last Man", American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously argued that all states were moving inexorably towards liberal democracy. His thesis that democracy is the pinnacle of political evolution has since been challenged by the violent eruption of radical Islam as well as the economic success of authoritarian countries such as China and Russia.
Now a study by Russian investment bank Renaissance Capital into the link between economic wealth and democracy seems to back Fukuyama.
Nuclear plants aren’t the only meltdown worry in Germany
Having just got back from a couple of days in Hannover, I couldn’t help but be struck by the dominance of the local news agenda by two topics – and the almost complete absence of a third. Taking the British media at face value, I might have expected a city in near-panic, with people nervously scanning menus for safe dishes to order and maybe antiseptic handwashing facilities being hurriedly installed in public places. In fact, the town looked exactly as I remembered it from my last visit a few years ago, with E.coli rarely mentioned either in conversation or on the 24-hour TV news channels.
In fact, apart from endless replays of the goals from Tuesday night’s football (Germany versus Azerbaijan, a real clash of the Titans that must have been!), the news was all about the remote risk of a meltdown in the country’s nuclear power plants, and the anything-but-remote risk of meltdown in what is left of the Greek economy.
from MacroScope:
The iPod – the iCon of Chinese capitalism
Walking past Apple's sleek shop along London's Regent Street on Sunday, my wife asked me what I wanted for Father's Day.
"An iPad?" I ventured, half-jokingly.
"Are you sure you want one? Don't you care how they're made?" came her disapproving reply.
Superstar economics: It’s all showbiz now
By Laurence Copeland. The opinions expressed are his own.
It seems barely a week goes by without another shock report about the ever-widening gap between those at the top of the earnings distribution and the rest of us. The facts are by now well-established. Throughout the Western world, but most noticeably in Britain and America, the earnings of the top one or two percent are accelerating into the stratosphere, leaving the middle class a long way behind, and the working class completely out of sight. How can one explain this global phenomenon?
Academic economics seems to be taking a surprisingly long time to reach a definitive answer, but I suspect there will turn out to be two long term trends at work here.
Aid: In favour of zero-tolerance
By Laurance Copeland
After one year, the progress report on the Coalition reads “Moving in the right direction, but with a lot more to do”.
Nonetheless, it is a prisoner of its commitment at the outset to leave two departmental budgets untouched: the NHS and international aid. It is not simply the amounts of money involved (colossal in the case of the NHS, relatively small for aid). It is also the signal it sends that there is such a status as sacrosanct, which immediately begs the question from policemen, firemen, teachers, the legal system, the armed forces: why isn’t our budget sacrosanct too?
from The Great Debate:
What are China’s next steps?
By Michael Spence
China has weathered the present financial crisis better than most countries, for a number of reasons. It reacted very quickly to the collapse of external demand with a domestic stimulus package of 9 percent of GDP in both 2008 and 2009. The stimulus package in China was heavily weighted toward investment, especially in infrastructure, which is something they know how to do. To some extent, the Chinese relied on past experience in the ’97–’98 currency crisis in Asia, a storm they weathered without depreciating the currency but instead with what was then a large domestic stimulus pro-gram. China also eased credit quickly, and used their massive reserves to stabilize the currency.
The result is a rapid transition to high growth, with projections for 2010 in the 9 percent and above range. On the other hand, as with other countries, the stimulus and other dimensions of the emergency response are not a permanent solution. There is a growing concern among knowledgeable Chinese policy makers and academics with regard to two things. One is a return to the old ways, meaning the strategies and policies of the past thirty years that focused on investment and labor-intensive exports, policies that worked well but have outlived their usefulness. The influence of those in government and in the labor-intensive sectors that are set to decline is still substantial. Their hand has been at least temporarily strengthened by the crisis.
China – accidental imperialist
-Laurence Copeland is a professor of finance at Cardiff University Business School and a co-author of “Verdict on the Crash” published by the Institute of Economic Affairs. The opinions expressed are his own.-
China is an emerging imperial power. We can be sure of that fact, even though the Chinese Government may well have been absolutely genuine in repeating that it feels no urge for empire-building or for intervention in the affairs of other countries. It is simply the case that, if trade follows the flag, the opposite is also often true.
