The Chinese Success Story

While the credit flow in economies like that of the US and the major European countries got mugged up, looks like the same in China went the other way and heated up, and will drive up domestic demand just when China needs it.

News is China is now officially the third largest economy, set to take the number two spot from Japan in a few years.

The Chinese success story is remarkable. China as a nation has a long collective memory. 800 years ago China was the number one nation on earth, it was not America. To the Chinese it is not about claiming the prize, it is about reclaiming the prize, reclaiming what was once theirs.

But America has democracy, America has diversity. Take the Bush Brain out of the equation, and this economy will sizzle again.

But if there is competition, it is not a race to the bottom. It is to be a win win situation. I just wish China did lend more of its money to the poor countries, and less to a country wanting to wage war.

But then China has put a major focus on Africa recently.

Even on democracy I don't see China copying America. There is a middle ground somewhere where the two need to meet. The democracy in America is not one person one vote. Loot at all the White Males in the Senate. These are Greek Gods. These are not democrats.

But the Chinese did beat the Americans at the Olympics. They got the most gold for the first time. It is as if they were saying, we know how to get organized.

And as to democracy, it is near impossible to meet Chinese in America who think China needs a different political arrangement to what it has now. These are not people in fear of the Chinese Communist Party. They are in America. The CCP is their own NAACP, making them proud.







In The News

China overtakes Germany in terms of GDP China Daily The revised growth estimate for 2007 - from 11.9 percent to 13 percent, the fastest rate since 1994 - raised the country's GDP to 25.7 trillion yuan, ($3.5 trillion) at 2007 exchange rates ..... "I think it will take only three to four years for China to overtake Japan as the second-largest economy. The US is by far still the largest economy.
China overtakes Germany as third-largest economy Deutsche Welle
China revises 2007 GDP growth rate to 13% Xinhua the industrial sector achieved the fastest growth followed by the service and trade sector and then agriculture.
China's 2008 customs revenue up 21% to record high China Daily
China’s trade Economist in 2007 China overtook Germany to become the world’s third-biggest economy .... China’s trade surplus rose to a record $457 billion ..... The best way for China to support its economy—and to help unwind global trade imbalances—is instead to bolster domestic demand. .... Thanks to the healthier state of its banking system, China is perhaps the only big economy where credit has heated up rather than frozen in recent months. If sustained, this could help to support domestic spending—and hence imports. China’s economy certainly can not depend on exports over the next year.
China's exports, imports drop CNN International falling demand in the United States and the European Union.
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Google conquers 2008 search market in US CNET News
Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan rubbishes Slumdog Millionaire guardian.co.uk the film was a big winner at Sunday's Golden Globes and is seen as a frontrunner for the Oscars .... The film is based on a novel, Q&A, by the Indian writer and diplomat Vikas Swarup ..... an Indian director making a western-style film might not meet with the attention lavished on Slumdog Millionaire: "It's just that the SM idea, authored by an Indian and conceived and cinematically put together by a westerner, gets creative globe recognition. The other would perhaps not." .... he was the original host of the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, a show that resurrected his career.
Film review: Slumdog Millionaire the 2005 novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup
Amitabh blasts 'Slumdog Millionaire' on blog Economic Times
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Saviour of the Republicans New Statesman the best prospect for revitalising a Republican Party .... His rush of words is likely linked to the rush of his ambition, and his ambition - at 37, just two years above the minimum to be president - appears beyond restraint. ..... To understand why Republicans are so excited about Jindal (the conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh calls him "the next Ronald Reagan") .... white people are expected to become a minority by 2042. .... When John LaBruzzo, a Republican legislator in Louisiana, once asked a Jindal aide what the governor's hobby was, he says he was told it was "to read information". ...... Jindal's wonkishness could be as much a novelty as his ethnicity. ...... he has that technocratic edge to him that makes him palatable to moderates and independents ....... Jindal has sought more to find common cause with white Americans ....... some relatives in the Punjab complain that he downplays his ties to his ancestral homeland. ...... at 5ft 8in and 135lb, offers little in the way of physical presence. ....... earnest air and obvious intelligence
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New Voices in Congress Will Change the Tone of the Democratic Majority New York Times “You’re not going to see any wild, left-wing policymaking,” he added. “You’re not going to get the Berkeley wish-list out of this crowd.” ..... taxpayers have grown increasingly impatient with bailout after bailout. “There’s a level of frustration from people saying enough taking care of fat cats, the executives, the stockholders” ....... Steve Austria, a Republican from Ohio’s 7th Congressional District, is the first Filipino-American...... Anh (Joseph) Cao, the Republican who defeated William Jefferson in Louisiana, is the first Vietnamese-American ...... Jared Polis of Colorado is the first openly gay male candidate ...... Jews make up 13 percent of the Senate and 7 percent in the House, while Mormons are 5 percent in the Senate and 2 percent in the House. ........ The House now includes two Muslims

Obama says trillion-dollar deficits may last years
CNN: Gupta approached about surgeon general post
Panetta choice as CIA chief draws Democrats’ concerns

Deficits As Far As The Eyes Can See

Barack has come out saying he sees trillion dollar deficits for at least a few years. That worries me.

Possible Pitfalls In Barack's Way

I can see the rationale behind the trillion dollar stimulus package. If you don't do it, you risk a deep recession, a global recession. Better a trillion now than two trillion tomorrow.

But to rely totally on the stimulus package would be to miss the mark. White collar crime style irresponsible behavior brought this about. The number one would be the Iraq War. The Iraq War has been the biggest white collar crime in history. Hitler killed six million Jews, Bush killed a million and a half Iraqis. After a half century of further civilization, a million and a half today probably is equivalent to six million back then. The white collar crime of the Iraq War - a trillion or so dollars - got mirrored in bad Wall Street behavior.

But the number one lesson to be learnt is that global finance is just like global warming, just like global terrorism, there is no national solution, not even by the mighty power of America. So the number one solution can not be the trillion dollar stimulus package, necessary as it is. The real challenge is, so how do you create a new global financial architecture? Minor tinkering with the IMF and the World Bank will not do.

When the dust on this financial mess settles, more of the global power is expected to have shifted to China. There is no free lunch.






In The News

Dossier From India Gives New Details of Mumbai Attacks New York Times In the beginning, they were 32. A squad of suicide bombers raised in Pakistan, they were taught how to make bombs, withstand interrogation, and fight to their death. ....... they set sail from Karachi with coordinates plotted on a global positioning set ...... all the while receiving detailed instructions and pep talks from their handlers across the border ...... training the commando-style fighters ..... a steady exchange between the attackers in Mumbai and their counselors. ....... they are told how to damage India’s standing with a key ally, Israel. ..... “If the hostages are killed, it will spoil relations between India and Israel,” Wassi continues. ....... The leader of the crew, identified by Indian investigators as Ismail Khan, 25, from a town called Dera Ismail Khan in the Northwest Frontier Province, contacted their handlers and received instructions. ....... five teams of two ...... targets: the city’s busiest railway station known as Victoria Terminus, a tourist haunt called Café Leopold, the Jewish center in Nariman House, and two luxury hotels, the Taj and Oberoi. ........ they kept a safe distance of at least 60 kilometers from Indian shore until they got closer to Mumbai. ........ “Brother you have to fight,” says the caller. “This is a matter of the prestige of Islam.” ......... Ten were kept in isolation for more than three months, in a house near Karachi, until they were instructed to go to Mumbai.
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Concerns of civilian deaths rise in Sri Lanka The Associated Press
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The Evil of Google is Steeped in Perception, Potential eWeek

What is Apple Inc.'s plan if CEO Steve Jobs dies? Los Angeles Times No American CEO is more intimately identified with his company's success. Jobs is deeply involved in every facet of Apple development and design, and he's justly admired for his instinct for the human-factor engineering of Apple products. He is Apple's visionary and carnival barker. ..... The Jobs role that Apple may find hardest to fill is that of one-man Supreme Court, settling disputes between warring engineering camps by decree. There have been countless battles at Apple over such things as how many buttons a mouse should have and what keys should be on its keyboards. The ultimate authority belongs to Jobs. ..... Google and its Android mobile phone operating system. ......... a CEO whose talents and personality are so inextricably entwined with a signature American brand.
Writing the Web’s Future in Numerous Languages The next chapter of the World Wide Web will not be written in English alone. Asia already has twice as many Internet users as North America, and by 2012 it will have three times as many. Already, more than half of the search queries on Google come from outside the United States. ....... Quillpad, an online service for typing in 10 South Asian languages. Users spell out words of local languages phonetically in Roman letters, and Quillpad’s predictive engine converts them into local-language script. ...... India, whose online population Jupiter says is poised to become the third-largest in the world after China and the United States by 2012 ....... Wikipedia now has more entries in Indian local languages than in Korean. ...... Even among the largely English-speaking base of around 50 million Web users in India today, nearly three-quarters prefer to read in a local language ..... “Localization is the key to success in countries like India" ....... Google engineers are also plugging away on voice recognition, translation, transliteration and digital text reading that it plans to apply to other developing countries.

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Google Hopes to Open a Trove of Little-Seen Books New York Times Revenue will be generated through advertising sales on pages where previews of scanned books appear, through subscriptions by libraries and others to a database of all the scanned books in Google’s collection, and through sales to consumers of digital access to copyrighted books. Google will take 37 percent of this revenue, leaving 63 percent for publishers and authors. ........ The settlement may give new life to copyrighted out-of-print books in a digital form and allow writers to make money from titles that had been out of commercial circulation for years. Of the seven million books Google has scanned so far, about five million are in this category. ........ Even if Google had gone to trial and won the suits, said Alexander Macgillivray, associate general counsel for products and intellectual property at the company, it would have won the right to show only previews of these books’ contents. “What people want to do is read the book” ......... When the agreement was announced in October, all sides hailed it as a landmark settlement .......... In May, Microsoft ended its book scanning project, effectively leaving Google as a monopoly corporate player....... Students and faculty at universities who subscribe to the database will be able to get the full contents of all the books free. ......... a lot of reading is going to happen on screens
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Chicago to take over at the White House guardian.co.uk Obama brings with him the baggage of Chicago's political culture - the roughest in the US. ......... the sharp suits, naked ambition and political trading ..... 50 elected officials from Illinois jailed over the past 30 years. ...... It has been a long time since we have had an urban president. Kennedy would be the last. ...... It would have been hard for Obama to have risen without engaging in the city's rough-house politics. ....... Obama has managed to be above the fray on the local political scene. ...... Emanuel, in a tactic that Al Capone might have applauded, once sent a political opponent a rotting fish. ....... "DC has its own culture and absorbs other cultures. When people try to behave differently, it bounces off, like Teflon. The Clintons were outcasts for trying to bring their culture to DC."
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The time has come: Can Barack Obama really make a difference? Independent Never, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, have so many invested so much hope in a single individual. ..... He has run nothing of note, except an admittedly brilliantly conducted campaign for the White House. ...... a federal budget of three trillion dollars ..... a moment when Americans look more intensely to government for solutions than at any time since the Great Depression. ...... the US remains the world's supplier of last resort of hope, the belief against the odds that the human condition can be improved. America's struggles, excesses, failures and triumphs are those of all of us. ......... the 95 per cent of human beings who are not American. ....... The US car industry remains on the brink of collapse. The interlocking crises of the Middle East, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan look, if anything, more intractable than they did 12 months ago. ...... he embodies the magic of America, its endless ability to reinvent itself ..... Barack Obama is but the latest proof that in America, everything is possible.
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Sri Lankan army captures Tamil Tigers' capital, Kilinochchi Times Online Civil rights activists believe that the Government’s military successes have come at an unacceptable human cost. An estimated 250,000 civilians were forced to flee their homes as the Army advanced. in the past the Tigers, who pioneered the use of suicide bombers, have been at their most dangerous after enduring some of the worst defeats. .... Velupillai Prabhakaran, who remains free, suggested that the rebels would revert to terrorism. “No sane voice is being raised to abandon war or to seek a peaceful resolution to the conflict”
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