China has now become the biggest risk to the world economy – Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, (bracketed insertions and emphasis mine)
These are headlines you won’t ever read, that to me are worthy of true news alerts.
“By holding the yuan to 6.83 to the dollar to boost exports, Beijing is dumping its unemployment abroad – ‘stealing American jobs’, says Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. As long as China does it, other tigers must do it too.
Western capitalists are complicit, of course. They rent cheap workers and cheap plant in Guangdong, then lobby Capitol Hill to prevent Congress doing anything about it. This is labour arbitrage.
At some point, American workers will rebel. US unemployment is already 17.5pc under the broad ‘U6‘ gauge followed by Barack Obama [the same gauge used to determine unemployment during the Great Depression if that is any indicator of where things actually stand]. Realty Track said that 332,000 properties were foreclosed in October alone. More Americans have lost their homes this year than during the entire decade of the Great Depression. A backlog of 7m homes is awaiting likely seizure by lenders. If you are not paying attention to this political time-bomb, perhaps you should.”
It’s worth noting that Evans-Pritchard is known for making overstatements, though he has been right most of the time to be sure. However, these numbers are not overstatements.