Ray Dalio really isnt making me feel too excited

profuscious · 2025-04-14T11:34:13.427Z

About the next three years. He says he studied the history, that’s the main thing. Monetary policy, trade policy, international relations, conflict resolution with China……it isn’t looking good if he is right. On the other hand, I came across a Chinese watcher on YouTube who seems to have a bead on the inner workings of the CCP, she is a little awkward, but once you get past that, she seems very knowledgeable. https://www.youtube.com/live/R5uevGSG9cU?si=8OIxct7MBYar0imt

China's a lot like the Soviet Union was around 1989 but far worse. I don't think people understand how bad things are over there, how hard the CCP is juggling to avoid absolute disaster that could come from any one of about a dozen directions, from population crash to overwhelming debt to bank failure to wide-scale water shortage on a Malthusian scale. Once one starts going - and any number of them are teetering - the whole house of cards is going to come thundering down.

The Cantonese triad of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and Macao might make it...if they can jettison the CCP. Their demographics and water situation are far better and they've got a long history of being outward-facing and having highly successful (and stable!) financial and trade interactions with the West. Hong Kong can do the finance, Macao the culture, and Shenzhen the tech (they're the Silicon Valley of the East.)

The rest of the country looks truly and completely effed unless a miracle happens, like the Fountain of Youth being discovered tomorrow, or a half-billion young Chinese suddenly springing fully-grown from the Earth. It's just a matter of when.

It is beginning to resemble the USSR circa 1986

Re: Ray Dalio really isnt making me feel too excited

If its true that the image of China is an Ozian ruse

quozzel

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Re: If its true that the image of China is an Ozian ruse

Apr 15, 2025, 8:33 AM

It might be worse than all that. A lot worse.

For instance, let's start with the "1.4 billion Chinese." There actually aren't 1.4 billion Chinese. We really don't know how many, but this Chinese-American fertility expert from the University of Wisconsin did the math and figured there could only be, at an absolute maximum, 1.28 billion Chinese, given their reported birth and mortality rates. There's a lot of reason to expect it's a lot worse than that. I've seen some other Chinese-American observers claiming with a straight face, and possibly credibly, that the number could actually be as low as 900 million...or half a billion people less than they claim. There's been a massive cottage industry going in China for fake birth certificates so parents can claim benefits from Beijing - families are allotted money from the government based on family size. And since the various prefectures in turn are also allotted money based on population, the state governments have every incentive to allow the fraud to stand. The real number is probably somewhere between that 900 million I've seen claimed and the 1.28 billion we know is an absolute ceiling. And the missing people would all be under the age of 40, and apparently 2/3's of those are girls. (Snuffing girls since One Child Only got to be a thing in the 1970's is a cottage industry in China too...they all want boys to carry on the family name.)

Take a look at the pictures of the workers in their factories sometime. You'll quickly notice the vast majority of them are older than 50. I wonder why?

Or what about GDP growth? GDP growth targets are similarly set by Beijing, so what you see is the various prefectures basically pencil-whipping it in systemic fashion. Of course we made goal, Comrade! Don't shoot! And if you do that by even a couple percentage points a year for 30 years, and you wind up with a GDP only 40% the size that's claimed. Which means their debt-to-GDP ratio could be far, far worse than they're actually letting on...and we already know it's appalling. Then there's the fact that at least 30% of their GDP growth has been in housing. They have absolutely thrown up housing for decades now...and have built entire cities that are almost completely unoccupied.

But wait! There's more! Just in case building dozens of "ghost cities" that are even now moldering away unoccupied (and will never be occupied, because the Chinese population is plummeting like a stone), consider the fact that around 80% of the Chinese population's investment wealth is tied up in...housing. China keeps its capital at home so the government can play Sim City with it. Their people aren't allowed to buy foreign stocks or commodities, so they invest at home in stuff like the bond market...and housing. Buying second and third and fourth homes as investment properties has long been the Chinese norm for successful households. Which is a problem when what you own is this:

What happens when the population starts realizing all that is completely worthless?

And don't even get me started on their water situation, particular in the west and north. It's brutal and getting worse every year.

I could go on, but I think you get the point.

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Re: Ray Dalio really isnt making me feel too excited

Re: Ray Dalio really isnt making me feel too excited

It is beginning to resemble the USSR circa 1986

Re: It is beginning to resemble the USSR circa 1986

If its true that the image of China is an Ozian ruse

Re: If its true that the image of China is an Ozian ruse

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