Maggern
Junior Member
Annoying vehicle fallacy. The title implies they've made big strides, while the article itself only refers to increasing investment....
Chinese Economics Thread
- Thread starter Norfolk
- Start date
Annoying vehicle fallacy. The title implies they've made big strides, while the article itself only refers to increasing investment....
Equation
Lieutenant General
LOL...If it doesn't happen I'm sure Gordon boy had already made a list of excuses about why did not happen. He'll blame the Chinese cooked the books for sure.
solarz
Brigadier
Nah, you see, Gordon decided to place his prediction in 2012 because he heard about the Mayan Apocalypse on Dec 21st, which would technically make him right.
Hendrik_2000
Lieutenant General
Corruption that will be the last nail that sealed the fate of CCP they say .It only happened in authoritarian state and only democracy can solve the problem. Well not so fast here is an interesting article that compare corruption both in US and China at similar stage of economic development
Study: China’s Corruption Doesn’t Match Gilded-Age America
In his first few weeks as Communist Party majordomo, Xi Jinping has made clear he is targeting corrupt officials. He hasn’t quite gone as far as Teddy Roosevelt did in 1900, when he said, “No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community.” But Mr. Xi’s expressed sentiments aren’t far from that.
There’s another reason Mr. Xi may want to take a look at Teddy Roosevelt for inspiration. The U.S. in Mr. Roosevelt’s time was a wildly corrupt place, which straightened later as incomes rose and citizens demanded cleaner government. According to George Mason University economist Carlos Ramirez, China may be on a similar path – and in fact may be roughly as corrupt now as the U.S. was at an equivalent state of development
Quantifying corruption is tough to do. Prof. Ramirez tries by running a computer search of the keywords “corruption” and either “U.S. government” or “Congress” in the Atlanta Constitution, Chicago Tribune, New York Times and Washington Post from 1870 to 1930, and the Los Angeles Times from 1881 to 1930, and seeing how many articles were spit out. (He says he didn’t include The Wall Street Journal because its issues weren’t available from the earliest period.)
He finds a big spike in political corruption in the early 1870s during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, which also saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. There’s another, though smaller, spike in the 1920s as the Teapot Dome bribery scandal involving leases for oil- rich lands dominated the news, as did stories about Prohibition-era crime.
Getty Images
U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt
Next he turns to China and does a search of the same newspapers from 1990 to 2011 using similar terms – “corruption” and either “China” or “Chinese corruption.”He finds relatively few reported cases in 1990 and a lot more over the following years. “This increase is consistent with the general perception among many scholars that the corruption situation in China has worsened over the last two decades,” he writes.
So how does the China compare with the U.S.? He looks at both countries when they were at similar levels of development as measured by per-capita income (in 2005 dollars; adjusted for inflation and differences in prices between the two nations).
When both countries were at a $2,800 per-capita income level — 1996 in China, early 1870s in the U.S. – newspaper-reported corruption was 7 to 9 times worse in the U.S. By the time, the two countries reached $7,500 per-capita income – 2009 in China; 1928 in the U.S.—the reported corruption was roughly similar in both countries. The significance, Mr. Ramirez, concludes, is that “while corruption in China is an issue that merits attention, it is not at alarmingly high levels, compared to the U.S. historical experience.”
Prof. Ramirez acknowledges that U.S. newspapers may not report as many incidences of corruption in China – particularly as foreign news staffs shrink – as they did in the past about domestic corruption. He tries to account for those discrepancies through statistical techniques and by comparing some outcomes with Transparency International’s corruption index. He also notes that U.S. newspapers pick up wire services accounts from around the world that report on China. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin, who was one of the first to use computer searches of newspaper articles to do economic analysis of corruption, says Mr. Ramirez appears to have been careful in his methodology and calls the findings “interesting.”
There’s more good news for China – Mr. Xi, are you listening? Mr. Ramirez argues that there is a “life-cycle” theory of corruption. Corruption rises in the early stages of development and then declines as a country reaches advanced-economy status. That’s roughly born out by Transparency International’s corruption rankings, where the worst grifters are, overwhelmingly, poor nations. China ranks number 80 on TI’s latest list of “perceived corruption.” That’s almost precisely in the middle of the pack, perhaps fitting for a middle-income country like China.
Study: China’s Corruption Doesn’t Match Gilded-Age America
In his first few weeks as Communist Party majordomo, Xi Jinping has made clear he is targeting corrupt officials. He hasn’t quite gone as far as Teddy Roosevelt did in 1900, when he said, “No man who is corrupt, no man who condones corruption in others, can possibly do his duty by the community.” But Mr. Xi’s expressed sentiments aren’t far from that.
There’s another reason Mr. Xi may want to take a look at Teddy Roosevelt for inspiration. The U.S. in Mr. Roosevelt’s time was a wildly corrupt place, which straightened later as incomes rose and citizens demanded cleaner government. According to George Mason University economist Carlos Ramirez, China may be on a similar path – and in fact may be roughly as corrupt now as the U.S. was at an equivalent state of development
Quantifying corruption is tough to do. Prof. Ramirez tries by running a computer search of the keywords “corruption” and either “U.S. government” or “Congress” in the Atlanta Constitution, Chicago Tribune, New York Times and Washington Post from 1870 to 1930, and the Los Angeles Times from 1881 to 1930, and seeing how many articles were spit out. (He says he didn’t include The Wall Street Journal because its issues weren’t available from the earliest period.)
He finds a big spike in political corruption in the early 1870s during the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant, which also saw the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. There’s another, though smaller, spike in the 1920s as the Teapot Dome bribery scandal involving leases for oil- rich lands dominated the news, as did stories about Prohibition-era crime.
Getty Images
U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt
Next he turns to China and does a search of the same newspapers from 1990 to 2011 using similar terms – “corruption” and either “China” or “Chinese corruption.”He finds relatively few reported cases in 1990 and a lot more over the following years. “This increase is consistent with the general perception among many scholars that the corruption situation in China has worsened over the last two decades,” he writes.
So how does the China compare with the U.S.? He looks at both countries when they were at similar levels of development as measured by per-capita income (in 2005 dollars; adjusted for inflation and differences in prices between the two nations).
When both countries were at a $2,800 per-capita income level — 1996 in China, early 1870s in the U.S. – newspaper-reported corruption was 7 to 9 times worse in the U.S. By the time, the two countries reached $7,500 per-capita income – 2009 in China; 1928 in the U.S.—the reported corruption was roughly similar in both countries. The significance, Mr. Ramirez, concludes, is that “while corruption in China is an issue that merits attention, it is not at alarmingly high levels, compared to the U.S. historical experience.”
Prof. Ramirez acknowledges that U.S. newspapers may not report as many incidences of corruption in China – particularly as foreign news staffs shrink – as they did in the past about domestic corruption. He tries to account for those discrepancies through statistical techniques and by comparing some outcomes with Transparency International’s corruption index. He also notes that U.S. newspapers pick up wire services accounts from around the world that report on China. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin, who was one of the first to use computer searches of newspaper articles to do economic analysis of corruption, says Mr. Ramirez appears to have been careful in his methodology and calls the findings “interesting.”
There’s more good news for China – Mr. Xi, are you listening? Mr. Ramirez argues that there is a “life-cycle” theory of corruption. Corruption rises in the early stages of development and then declines as a country reaches advanced-economy status. That’s roughly born out by Transparency International’s corruption rankings, where the worst grifters are, overwhelmingly, poor nations. China ranks number 80 on TI’s latest list of “perceived corruption.” That’s almost precisely in the middle of the pack, perhaps fitting for a middle-income country like China.
Last edited:
Just to put things into perspective.
From Zerohedge
75 Economic Numbers From 2012 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/21/2012 17:44 -0500
Compiled by Michael of Investment Watch blog,
What a year 2012 has been! The mainstream media continues to tell us what a “great job” the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are doing of managing the economy, but meanwhile things just continue to get even worse for the poor and the middle class. It is imperative that we educate the American people about the true condition of our economy and about why all of this is happening. If nothing is done, our debt problems will continue to get worse, millions of jobs will continue to leave the country, small businesses will continue to be suffocated, the middle class will continue to collapse, and poverty in the United States will continue to explode. Just “tweaking” things slightly is not going to fix our economy. We need a fundamental change in direction. Right now we are living in a bubble of debt-fueled false prosperity that allows us to continue to consume far more wealth than we produce, but when that bubble bursts we are going to experience the most painful economic “adjustment” that America has ever gone through. We need to be able to explain to our fellow Americans what is coming, why it is coming and what needs to be done. Hopefully the crazy economic numbers that I have included in this article will be shocking enough to wake some people up.
The end of the year is a time when people tend to gather with family and friends more than they do during the rest of the year. Hopefully many of you will use the list below as a tool to help start some conversations about the coming economic collapse with your loved ones. Sadly, most Americans still tend to doubt that we are heading into economic oblivion. So if you have someone among your family and friends that believes that everything is going to be “just fine”, just show them these numbers. They are a good summary of the problems that the U.S. economy is currently facing.
The following are 75 economic numbers from 2012 that are almost too crazy to believe...
#1 In December 2008, 31.6 million Americans were on food stamps. Today, a new all-time record of 47.7 million Americans are on food stamps. That number has increased by more than 50 percent over the past four years, and yet the mainstream media still has the gall to insist that “things are getting better”.
#2 Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today, about one out of every 6.5 Americans is on food stamps.
#3 According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”
#4 According to one recent survey, 55 percent of all Americans have received money from a safety net program run by the federal government at some point in their lives.
#5 For the first time ever, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless. That number has risen by 57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.
#6 Median household income in the U.S. has fallen for four consecutive years. Overall, it has declined by over $4000 during that time span.
#7 Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
#8 The percentage of working age Americans with a job has been under 59 percent for 39 months in a row.
#9 In September 2009, during the depths of the last economic crisis, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed. In November 2012, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed. It is more then 3 years later, and we are in the exact same place.
#10 When you total up all working age Americans that do not have a job in America today, it comes to more than 100 million.
#11 According to one recent survey, 55 percent of all small business owners in America “say they would not start a business today given what they know now and in the current environment.”
#12 The number of jobs at new small businesses continues to decline. According to economist Tim Kane, the following is how the decline in the number of startup jobs per 1000 Americans breaks down by presidential administration…
Bush Sr.: 11.3
Clinton: 11.2
Bush Jr.: 10.8
Obama: 7.8
#13 The U.S. share of global GDP has fallen from 31.8 percent in 2001 to 21.6 percent in 2011.
#14 The United States has fallen in the global economic competitiveness rankings compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.
#15 There are four major U.S. banks that each have more than 40 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives.
#16 In 2000, there were more than 17 million Americans working in manufacturing, but now there are less than 12 million.
#17 According to the Pew Research Center, 61 percent of all Americans were “middle income” back in 1971. Today, only 51 percent of all Americans are.
#18 The Pew Research Center has also found that 85 percent of all middle class Americans say that it is harder to maintain a middle class standard of living today than it was 10 years ago.
#19 62 percent of all middle class Americans say that they have had to reduce household spending over the past year.
#20 Right now, approximately 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty.
#21 Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be either “low income” or impoverished.
#22 According to one survey, 77 percent of all Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time.
#23 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, less than 65 percentof all men in the United States have jobs.
#24 The average amount of time that an unemployed worker stays out of work in the United States is 40 weeks.
#25 If you can believe it, approximately one out of every four American workers makes 10 dollars an hour or less.
#26 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, an all-time record 49 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives financial assistance from the federal government. Back in 1983, that number was less than 30 percent.
#27 Right now, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government. And that does not even count Social Security or Medicare. Overall, there are almost 80 different “means-tested welfare programs” that the federal government is currently running.
#28 When you account for all government transfer payments and all forms of government employment, more than half of all Americans are now at least partially financially dependent on the government.
#29 Barack Obama has been president for less than four years, and during that time the number of Americans “not in the labor force” has increased by nearly 8.5 million. Something seems really “off” about that number, because during the entire decade of the 1980s the number of Americans “not in the labor force” only rose by about 2.5 million.
#30 Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.
#31 According to USA Today, many Americans have actually seen their water bills triple over the past 12 years.
#32 There are now 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing. That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001.
#33 Right now, approximately 25 million American adults are living with their parents.
#34 As the economy has slowed down, so has the number of marriages. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, only 51 percent of all Americans that are at least 18 years old are currently married. Back in 1960, 72 percent of all U.S. adults were married.
#35 At this point, only 24.6 percent of all jobs in the United States are good jobs.
#36 In 1999, 64.1 percent of all Americans were covered by employment-based health insurance. Today, only 55.1 percent are covered by employment-based health insurance.
#37 Recently it was announced that total student loan debt in the United States has passed the one trillion dollar mark.
#38 If you can believe it, one out of every seven Americans has at least 10 credit cards.
#39 One survey of business executives has ranked California as the worst state in America to do business for 8 years in a row.
#40 In the city of Detroit today, more than 50 percent of all children are living in poverty, and close to 50 percent of all adults are functionally illiterate.
#41 It is being projected that half of all American children will be on food stamps at least once before they turn 18 years of age.
#42 More than three times as many new homes were sold in the United States in 2005 as will be sold in 2012.
#43 If you can believe it, 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor’s degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed last year.
#44 The U.S. economy continues to trade good paying jobs for low paying jobs. 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.
#45 Our trade deficit with China in 2011 was $295.5 billion. That was the largest trade deficit that one country has had with another country in the history of the planet.
#46 The United States has lost an average of approximately 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
#47 According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.
#48 The U.S. tax code is now more than 3.8 million words long. If you took all of William Shakespeare’s works and collected them together, the entire collection would only be about 900,000 words long.
#49 According to the IMF, the global elite are holding a total of 18 trillion dollars in offshore banking havens such as the Cayman Islands.
#50 The value of the U.S. dollar has declined by more than 96 percent since the Federal Reserve was first created.
#51 2012 was the third year in a row that the yield for corn has declined in the United States.
#52 Experts are telling us that global food reserves have reached their lowest level in almost 40 years.
#53 One recent survey discovered that 40 percent of all Americans have $500 or less in savings.
#54 If you can believe it, one recent survey found that 28 percent of all Americans do not have a single penny saved for emergencies.
#55 Medical costs related to obesity in the United States are estimated to be approximately $147 billion a year.
#56 Corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high. Meanwhile, wages as a percentage of GDP are near an all-time low.
#57 Today, the wealthiest 1 percent of all Americans own more wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined.
#58 The wealthiest 400 families in the United States have about as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of all Americans combined.
#59 The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have a net worth that is roughly equal to the bottom 30 percentof all Americans combined.
#60 At this point, the poorest 50 percent of all Americans collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.
#61 Nearly 500,000 federal employees now make at least $100,000 a year.
#62 In 2006, only 12 percent of all federal workers made $100,000 or more per year. Now, approximately 22 percent of all federal workers do.
#63 If you can believe it, there are 77,000 federal workers that make more than the governors of their own states do.
#64 Nearly 15,000 retired federal workers are collecting federal pensions for life worth at least $100,000 annually. The list includes such names as Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Trent Lott, Dick Gephardt and Dick Cheney.
#65 U.S. taxpayers spend more than 20 times as much on the Obamas as British taxpayers spend on the royal family.
#66 Family homelessness in the Washington D.C. region (one of the wealthiest regions in the entire country) has risen 23 percent since the last recession began.
#67 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for about 15 days.
#68 During fiscal year 2012, 62 percent of the federal budget was spent on entitlements.
#69 Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, approximately one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid.
#70 It is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.
#71 Medicare is also growing by leaps and bounds. As I wrote about recently, it is being projected that the number of Americans on Medicare will grow from 50.7 million in 2012 to 73.2 million in 2025.
#72 Thanks to our foolish politicians (including Obama), Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars over the next 75 years. That comes to approximately $328,404 for each and every household in the United States.
#73 Amazingly, the U.S. national debt is now up to 16.3 trillion dollars. When Barack Obama first took office the national debt was just 10.6 trillion dollars.
#74 During the first four years of the Obama administration, the U.S. government accumulated about as much debt as it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that George W. Bush took office.
#75 Today, the U.S. national debt is more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was originally created back in 1913.
From Zerohedge
75 Economic Numbers From 2012 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/21/2012 17:44 -0500
Compiled by Michael of Investment Watch blog,
What a year 2012 has been! The mainstream media continues to tell us what a “great job” the Obama administration and the Federal Reserve are doing of managing the economy, but meanwhile things just continue to get even worse for the poor and the middle class. It is imperative that we educate the American people about the true condition of our economy and about why all of this is happening. If nothing is done, our debt problems will continue to get worse, millions of jobs will continue to leave the country, small businesses will continue to be suffocated, the middle class will continue to collapse, and poverty in the United States will continue to explode. Just “tweaking” things slightly is not going to fix our economy. We need a fundamental change in direction. Right now we are living in a bubble of debt-fueled false prosperity that allows us to continue to consume far more wealth than we produce, but when that bubble bursts we are going to experience the most painful economic “adjustment” that America has ever gone through. We need to be able to explain to our fellow Americans what is coming, why it is coming and what needs to be done. Hopefully the crazy economic numbers that I have included in this article will be shocking enough to wake some people up.
The end of the year is a time when people tend to gather with family and friends more than they do during the rest of the year. Hopefully many of you will use the list below as a tool to help start some conversations about the coming economic collapse with your loved ones. Sadly, most Americans still tend to doubt that we are heading into economic oblivion. So if you have someone among your family and friends that believes that everything is going to be “just fine”, just show them these numbers. They are a good summary of the problems that the U.S. economy is currently facing.
The following are 75 economic numbers from 2012 that are almost too crazy to believe...
#1 In December 2008, 31.6 million Americans were on food stamps. Today, a new all-time record of 47.7 million Americans are on food stamps. That number has increased by more than 50 percent over the past four years, and yet the mainstream media still has the gall to insist that “things are getting better”.
#2 Back in the 1970s, about one out of every 50 Americans was on food stamps. Today, about one out of every 6.5 Americans is on food stamps.
#3 According to one calculation, the number of Americans on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of “Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.”
#4 According to one recent survey, 55 percent of all Americans have received money from a safety net program run by the federal government at some point in their lives.
#5 For the first time ever, more than a million public school students in the United States are homeless. That number has risen by 57 percent since the 2006-2007 school year.
#6 Median household income in the U.S. has fallen for four consecutive years. Overall, it has declined by over $4000 during that time span.
#7 Families that have a head of household under the age of 30 have a poverty rate of 37 percent.
#8 The percentage of working age Americans with a job has been under 59 percent for 39 months in a row.
#9 In September 2009, during the depths of the last economic crisis, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed. In November 2012, 58.7 percent of all working age Americans were employed. It is more then 3 years later, and we are in the exact same place.
#10 When you total up all working age Americans that do not have a job in America today, it comes to more than 100 million.
#11 According to one recent survey, 55 percent of all small business owners in America “say they would not start a business today given what they know now and in the current environment.”
#12 The number of jobs at new small businesses continues to decline. According to economist Tim Kane, the following is how the decline in the number of startup jobs per 1000 Americans breaks down by presidential administration…
Bush Sr.: 11.3
Clinton: 11.2
Bush Jr.: 10.8
Obama: 7.8
#13 The U.S. share of global GDP has fallen from 31.8 percent in 2001 to 21.6 percent in 2011.
#14 The United States has fallen in the global economic competitiveness rankings compiled by the World Economic Forum for four years in a row.
#15 There are four major U.S. banks that each have more than 40 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives.
#16 In 2000, there were more than 17 million Americans working in manufacturing, but now there are less than 12 million.
#17 According to the Pew Research Center, 61 percent of all Americans were “middle income” back in 1971. Today, only 51 percent of all Americans are.
#18 The Pew Research Center has also found that 85 percent of all middle class Americans say that it is harder to maintain a middle class standard of living today than it was 10 years ago.
#19 62 percent of all middle class Americans say that they have had to reduce household spending over the past year.
#20 Right now, approximately 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty.
#21 Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be either “low income” or impoverished.
#22 According to one survey, 77 percent of all Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck at least part of the time.
#23 Back in 1950, more than 80 percent of all men in the United States had jobs. Today, less than 65 percentof all men in the United States have jobs.
#24 The average amount of time that an unemployed worker stays out of work in the United States is 40 weeks.
#25 If you can believe it, approximately one out of every four American workers makes 10 dollars an hour or less.
#26 According to the U.S. Census Bureau, an all-time record 49 percent of all Americans live in a home where at least one person receives financial assistance from the federal government. Back in 1983, that number was less than 30 percent.
#27 Right now, more than 100 million Americans are enrolled in at least one welfare program run by the federal government. And that does not even count Social Security or Medicare. Overall, there are almost 80 different “means-tested welfare programs” that the federal government is currently running.
#28 When you account for all government transfer payments and all forms of government employment, more than half of all Americans are now at least partially financially dependent on the government.
#29 Barack Obama has been president for less than four years, and during that time the number of Americans “not in the labor force” has increased by nearly 8.5 million. Something seems really “off” about that number, because during the entire decade of the 1980s the number of Americans “not in the labor force” only rose by about 2.5 million.
#30 Electricity bills in the United States have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation for five years in a row.
#31 According to USA Today, many Americans have actually seen their water bills triple over the past 12 years.
#32 There are now 20.2 million Americans that spend more than half of their incomes on housing. That represents a 46 percent increase from 2001.
#33 Right now, approximately 25 million American adults are living with their parents.
#34 As the economy has slowed down, so has the number of marriages. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, only 51 percent of all Americans that are at least 18 years old are currently married. Back in 1960, 72 percent of all U.S. adults were married.
#35 At this point, only 24.6 percent of all jobs in the United States are good jobs.
#36 In 1999, 64.1 percent of all Americans were covered by employment-based health insurance. Today, only 55.1 percent are covered by employment-based health insurance.
#37 Recently it was announced that total student loan debt in the United States has passed the one trillion dollar mark.
#38 If you can believe it, one out of every seven Americans has at least 10 credit cards.
#39 One survey of business executives has ranked California as the worst state in America to do business for 8 years in a row.
#40 In the city of Detroit today, more than 50 percent of all children are living in poverty, and close to 50 percent of all adults are functionally illiterate.
#41 It is being projected that half of all American children will be on food stamps at least once before they turn 18 years of age.
#42 More than three times as many new homes were sold in the United States in 2005 as will be sold in 2012.
#43 If you can believe it, 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor’s degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed last year.
#44 The U.S. economy continues to trade good paying jobs for low paying jobs. 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.
#45 Our trade deficit with China in 2011 was $295.5 billion. That was the largest trade deficit that one country has had with another country in the history of the planet.
#46 The United States has lost an average of approximately 50,000 manufacturing jobs a month since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001.
#47 According to the Economic Policy Institute, America is losing half a million jobs to China every single year.
#48 The U.S. tax code is now more than 3.8 million words long. If you took all of William Shakespeare’s works and collected them together, the entire collection would only be about 900,000 words long.
#49 According to the IMF, the global elite are holding a total of 18 trillion dollars in offshore banking havens such as the Cayman Islands.
#50 The value of the U.S. dollar has declined by more than 96 percent since the Federal Reserve was first created.
#51 2012 was the third year in a row that the yield for corn has declined in the United States.
#52 Experts are telling us that global food reserves have reached their lowest level in almost 40 years.
#53 One recent survey discovered that 40 percent of all Americans have $500 or less in savings.
#54 If you can believe it, one recent survey found that 28 percent of all Americans do not have a single penny saved for emergencies.
#55 Medical costs related to obesity in the United States are estimated to be approximately $147 billion a year.
#56 Corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high. Meanwhile, wages as a percentage of GDP are near an all-time low.
#57 Today, the wealthiest 1 percent of all Americans own more wealth than the bottom 95 percent combined.
#58 The wealthiest 400 families in the United States have about as much wealth as the bottom 50 percent of all Americans combined.
#59 The six heirs of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton have a net worth that is roughly equal to the bottom 30 percentof all Americans combined.
#60 At this point, the poorest 50 percent of all Americans collectively own just 2.5% of all the wealth in the United States.
#61 Nearly 500,000 federal employees now make at least $100,000 a year.
#62 In 2006, only 12 percent of all federal workers made $100,000 or more per year. Now, approximately 22 percent of all federal workers do.
#63 If you can believe it, there are 77,000 federal workers that make more than the governors of their own states do.
#64 Nearly 15,000 retired federal workers are collecting federal pensions for life worth at least $100,000 annually. The list includes such names as Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole, Trent Lott, Dick Gephardt and Dick Cheney.
#65 U.S. taxpayers spend more than 20 times as much on the Obamas as British taxpayers spend on the royal family.
#66 Family homelessness in the Washington D.C. region (one of the wealthiest regions in the entire country) has risen 23 percent since the last recession began.
#67 If Bill Gates gave every single penny of his fortune to the U.S. government, it would only cover the U.S. budget deficit for about 15 days.
#68 During fiscal year 2012, 62 percent of the federal budget was spent on entitlements.
#69 Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, approximately one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid.
#70 It is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americans to the Medicaid rolls.
#71 Medicare is also growing by leaps and bounds. As I wrote about recently, it is being projected that the number of Americans on Medicare will grow from 50.7 million in 2012 to 73.2 million in 2025.
#72 Thanks to our foolish politicians (including Obama), Medicare is facing unfunded liabilities of more than 38 trillion dollars over the next 75 years. That comes to approximately $328,404 for each and every household in the United States.
#73 Amazingly, the U.S. national debt is now up to 16.3 trillion dollars. When Barack Obama first took office the national debt was just 10.6 trillion dollars.
#74 During the first four years of the Obama administration, the U.S. government accumulated about as much debt as it did from the time that George Washington took office to the time that George W. Bush took office.
#75 Today, the U.S. national debt is more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was originally created back in 1913.
AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
I love how everyone is saying China will never have high growth anymore. Isn't that what was suppose to happen with a soft landing in order to create a stable economy? Now all of the sudden the glory days of "overheating" are over. Some are already predicting China growing at 8.3% in 2013. That's already over 1% more than they said would never again rise above.
I wonder what happened to those that said 'China will have banking crisis' when growth slows. The banking crisis argument has been there since 1978. China has now recovered alot and even the Shanghai Composite is up for the year. Hopefully it will end positive for the year. People that shorted Chinese banks are getting crushed. Good to see guys like Jim Chanos, Michael Pettis, Patrick Chovanec and Gordan Chang being proven wrong again by China.
China has the most resilient economy in the world, and China don't have the luxury of the global reserve currency like the US.
AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
Chanos and his kind on Wall Street couldn't short Chinese companies directly which then they targeted Western companies that did business with China instead. This is why it was good China did not follow with the kind of financial reforms the West was demanding. China certainly would've have been in a dire position if reforms the West wanted were carried out. They would've bled China dry because of the 2008 finacial crisis. It's what Bernie Madoff wanted to do to China but at a larger scale. In the end to cover up his crime and pay-off investors, he was searching around the world including China for new investors to his once exclusive fund. The whole stock market is one giant Ponzi scheme.
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broadsword
Brigadier
Pakistan sees growing investment by China
New city 100km from Karachi, the financial capital, likely to draw much Chinese interest
by Ashraf Khan
04:45 AM Jan 10, 2013
KARACHI - It was once a small fishing town on Pakistan's south-west coast, notable only because of a local legend that Alexander the Great stayed at its coast while retreating to Greece after his attack on the Indian subcontinent was fended off.
Gwadar, which lies along the mouth of the Persian Gulf in the Arabian Sea, has now been transformed into a site for a deep-sea port. Work began in 2002 at the cost of US$400 million (S$490 million), a major chunk of which was funded by China.
An insurgency of ethnic Balochs in the restive of Balochistan, where the port is located, led to the deaths of three Chinese engineers after an attack in 2004. But China remained committed to finishing the project, which some analysts and political scientists say points to the advent of a "new Great Game" or battle for influence in Central Asia.
Some 700km east of Gwadar, a new mega project that envisages the development of a city along the marshy southern coast is also likely to attract big Chinese investment. The new city of Zulfiqarabad is the brainchild of President Asif Ali Zardari.
Some 4,000 sq km of land have been earmarked near Keti Bandar, a coastal town in south-eastern Thatta district. The city is named after late Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who was known for sporting a Mao cap and pioneering the Sino-Pakistan friendship.
There are plans for hotels, seaside resorts and high-speed trains in the proposed city that might be less than 100km east of the port city of Karachi, the financial capital.
Mr Zardari and his Chinese counterpart, Mr Hu Jintao, witnessed the signing of a memorandum of understanding in July aimed at developing a special economic zone in the proposed city.
The understanding was reached at the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit last year. Chinese entrepreneurs would, under the agreement, act as advisers, consultant, facilitators as well as investors.
"Since long, China has invested in a big way in the region including Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Nepal," said Professor Moonis Ahmar, an eminent scholar and analyst who heads the International Relations Department at state-run Karachi University.
"But their investment in Pakistan is quite different in strategic and economic terms," he added, referring to Chinese investment in infrastructure projects in Gwadar and in the Karakoram Highway, which connects China and Pakistan, as well as Chinese help in developing Pakistan's nuclear power projects and military industries.
Pakistan's state-run Board of Investment data says that around 83 Chinese companies and corporations run businesses in the country.
These companies have been engaged in a number of large projects in the energy sector, mining, electronic and telecommunications and infrastructure projects.
In the fiscal year ended in June, the terror-hit country received meagre foreign investment of US$812 million, of which China alone contributed US$201 million, a quarter of the total.
"Whether it's with the democratic government or military regime, our relations with China have always been good," Mr Sartaj Aziz, a former Foreign and Finance Minister of Pakistan told TODAY.
GREAT GAME
Many believe Gwadar port could one day become a major trade and energy hub, serving as an energy corridor for Iran, South and Central Asian states, western China and Russia, and that it would be irresistible for the United States to keep itself away from this "new Great Game".
Currently lying almost idle due to outstanding issues between stakeholders, the deep-sea port of Gwadar has enormous potential to help boost Pakistan's strategic importance and China's ability to reach new markets.
"Their investment at Gwadar port is quite significant for them as it gives China accessibility to the Arabian Sea," Dr Ahmar said.
Some analysts believe that the US has been worried about the rapidly growing influence of China in the region. They say the Pentagon fears that China could monitor US naval movements in the Persian Gulf by possibly turning Gwadar into its naval base.
But investment-centric analysts shrugged off such theories.
"I don't think China has been interested in any military or naval base outside its own country, there is none so far," said Mr Zia Banday, a senior executive of Pakistani-China Investment Company.
Dr Ahmar agreed, noting that "China has been using a soft path to increase its influence and outreach in the region instead of military force".
Nevertheless, a huge trading bloc may emerge - from China to neighbouring countries and Russia - once peace returns to war-torn Afghanistan after the withdrawal of American and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces next year.
Roads already connect the western Chinese province of Xinjiang with Pakistan through the Karakoram Highway. It would run from north to west, through Gwadar and further west to Kandahar in Afghanistan and then Turkmenistan and Russia - tapping the historic Silk Road which helped develop the civilisations of China, India, Iran, Middle East and Europe.
"Once Afghanistan is politically stable, there will be a new horizon of growth, economic development and cooperation in the region," said Mr Aziz, the former Pakistani Foreign Minister.