Sometimes someone writes a paragraph that cuts straight to the heart of an issue, like this one from blog commentator Matt Usselmann yesterday:
Here we are, the UK having a GDP per person which is 5 times bigger than China, but we cannot build our own high speed railway line or nuclear power station without going to the Chinese cap in hand? Is that some kind of post-modernist joke?
I wish it were.
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The joke is that Osbourne is ok about a command economy that can intervene in it’s own stock market, imprison speculators that damage the economy (not bad that one!) while he keeps saying, Britain needs to live within its ‘means.’ No irony is every brought out. In his speech to the Chinese, Osbourne’s soundbite phrase was ‘let’s stick together….’we need to stick together….we should stick together’…it takes a great education to reach such rhetorical heights.
The post-modern joke lies in the irony that the Chinese Communists have used government deficit spending like there’s no tomorrow over the last thirty odd years. This together with currency rigging and encouraging Western capital and know-how into the country has resulted in the number of Chinese with “middle class” incomes now exceeding those in the United States in purchasing power parity terms:-
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/oct/13/half-world-wealth-in-hands-population-inequality-report
GDP-per-person…
But how much of it is criminal-GDP?
“Keith Bristow, director general of the National Crime Agency, said money laundering by banks and their other well-documented criminal activities risked undermining the “reputation of the UK” and could trigger a sharp fall in the tax revenues generated by the City”
http://rowans-blog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/money-laundering-figures-prove-banks.html
I wonder how much dodgy Chinese dosh is floating-around in the City?
Billions
They are the biggest users of the BVI
It is a joke, but it is one that is far from funny. Economic illiteracy at it’s worst.
If capital investment from China were to materialize, what form would the return on the invetsment take, evermore gilts further worsening the current account balance?
Worse: they could just close it
If they invested in our gilts they could not do that
We are taking the worst option for dogmatic reasons
It has been reported that the electronics/software/firmware of Chinese constructed/designed parts of the aforesaid power stations are to be examined for backdoors….
George has probably given them the front door key anyway..