China\’s glorious growth shows how infrastructure spending through state owned banks is glorious.
Alternatively we could note that GDP per capita (at PPP) in the US is $47,200 a year, in China $7,600 a year.
Catching up after decades of insane economic policy is generally thought to be easier than growing when you\’re already at the technological production frontier.
Two minutes with google would show Seamus how China’s State-led State Bank lending is not working out all that well. How local authorities are in debt to the value of trillions – much of it stolen through corruption. How people are building empty cities in Inner Mongolia. How maybe a third of all houses in China are empty.
And how it was ever thus – all over China there are massive, usually pointless, construction programmes from the Great Leap or the Cultural Revolution. Beijing’s Underground started out as a way to re-use tunnels built in case of nuclear war with Russia.
I’m fascinated to know what sort of people actually read the hot air that comes from regular newspaper hacks like Seumas Milne, David Aaronovitch, etc. These hacks aren’t stupid – it’s just that no one can turn out articles of that length every other day AND make them interesting, original, factually correct, etc etc. So I just ignore them 99% of the time.
Was it a cruel joke by his father to call him Seamus? Did he realise that his boy would grow up to say stupid things in the papers, and thus, with his Oirish name, reinforce an old stereotype? It’s so unfair. He’s not Irish at all – his stupidity is all his own doing.
He’s quite an advert for the familial principle in the media, though.
“He’s quite an advert for the familial principle in the media, though”: as is Polly, of course.
One to file and wait for the future article when he announces that it was obvious all along that China’s growth was just a huge bubble.
China’s growth is threatened by a tremendous property bubble: as was Japan’s; Ireland’s,Spain’s ,the USA’s….. you name it.Strange how all these brainy people with degrees in Economics ,paid oodles and oodles of money can’t think of any way to stop this happening .
I keep reading about some severe malinvestments in China. No doubt, if there is a “hard landing” in the Chinese mainland economy, it will be blamed by Milne and his fellows on the West, or somesuch.
“Strange how all these brainy people …”
Because they’re not tedious monomaniacs?
Seumas Milne denying the Chinese property bubble?
I hope the Guardian doesn’t have a wiping policy in case its star idiots get shown up so comprehensively.
DBC Reed
Ah well, that would be because governments really like to encourage construction and property speculation. Creates the illusion of prosperity, which makes them feel very good.
@FC
Agreed and it also gets them elected.The hard decision the politicians would have to make, if they really believed their own valiant bullshit, would be to stop cheap interest rates inflating property prices while still stimulating goods and services.But far ,far too hard for the fluffies .
And another leftist rag, the FT, comes to point out what is wrong with Seamus’ argument:
http://ftalphaville.ft.com/blog/2012/01/17/837421/a-picture-tells-a-thousand-words-chinese-steel-edition/
He is always a little late to every party isn’t he? Embracing Communism when it was dying, Islamism when it was blowing itself to kingdom come, and now the Chinese model.
It is scary just how much some people talking about China sound exactly like people talking like Japan in 1990, and in fact some Chinese manage to sound patronising to the was of the world in much the same way some Japanese did in 1990.
Except, China is far poorer, has a far scarier demographic future and has far less social cohesion and far less rule of law.