Category: china
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Xi Jinping and Chinese hegemony.
Xi Jinping is one tough nut to crack. The inscrutable leader who demonstrates no emotion and has no equity in any emotional outcome challenges anybody who has to face him. Behind the veneer are life lessons of being an outsider within the establishment, but he can also be characterised as being an insider. The poverty…
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Russia’s push to a revanchalist future
Russia is going to set out its demands for a cessation to the hostilities in Ukraine in the coming week. The ideas, thoughts and arguments whether there is any workable argument that means Ukraine can accept an agreement is likely to be negated by the smattering of arguments coming from Washington. Whether Trump knows what…
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Ninety days before Trump returns with economics 101
Once the stock exchanges around the world crashed last week, the US Treasury secretary argued that most of the investors in the exchange whose pensions were on the line were down only 40 percent, but the majority of those with pensions on the line were hammered by US bonds failure to sell. It was argued…
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The price of tariffs
Trump’s determination to get the garment industry back into the US is just one of the arguments around tariffs, but it is the failure of Trump to realise that good jobs reflect the states evolving industrial capabilities. The concept that the US will be manufacturing jeans and t-shirts and exporting them around the world is…
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A step to far
Trump wants the trade deficit reduced and by putting tariffs on imports Trump believes he can reduce the US trade deficit. But tariffs are a tax on the consumer and an added tax for articles that will be entering the US market. It really is a question of whether the President understands what a tariff…
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The fiscal aims of the US under Trump 2.0
America is in a tiny bit of a mess, however hard it tries the deficit will not lessen and it is the idea of tariffs pushed by Trump during the election, which is meant to manage the deficit. But the idea that tariffs themselves are the b-all to the management of the US economy is…
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Christmas News Letter
Welcome to the final newsletter of 2024 from WorldThoughts.UK This year has been extraordinary, from a continuation of the war in Ukraine to the war in Gaza and finally the collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. The argument that has been at the forefront of most conversations has been who will be the next…
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The Japanifacation of China, or not
There is an argument that China’s economy is entering a difficult phase dependent on growth. The worries concern prime industries but especially the property market and high end manufacturing, but the arguments in the FT and elsewhere is that China is entering a bubble where stocks, property and currency are overvalued, which doesn’t quite tally…
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China has not quite weaned itself off the black stuff
There is an argument in China that there should be harmony between nature and industry. But the fossil fuel that has industrialised China has been coal. China to its credit has argued that by 2060 it should be carbon neutral, but that does not explain the investment in coal powered power stations and as such,…
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Is US intelligence being undone by the isolationists in US Congress.
The rise of intelligence agencies activities is not much of a surprise, but the movement into the realm of technology is a spate that worries those who remember Edward Snowdon and Julian Assange’s warnings of mission creep. That William Burns, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency is writing in this weeks Foreign Affairs, tells…
Current Affairs 