xiaohongshu [none/use name] @ xiaohongshu @hexbear.net

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11 mo. ago

Actually China is already trying to take advantage of the situation and offer positions to American scientists.

But read my comment here - the Chinese academia is way harsher for foreigners to survive the environment and work culture. Most Americans are probably more suited to the more relaxed European academic culture than in China.

To Understand the Economy, This Fed President Is Ditching His Desk WSJ

When the conversation turned to inflation, the Richmond Fed president extracted an uncomfortably honest answer about how President Trump’s tariffs have some firms thinking about their power to raise prices.

“You can probably appreciate this from your McKinsey background: We’re raising prices where we can,” said Jim Datin, a Chapel Hill-based life-sciences executive and partner at a private-equity firm.

And what convinced Datin his company still had pricing power, Barkin asked, when conventional wisdom said it had evaporated?

“Some of it’s opportunistic with the supply chain right now,” Datin offered.

“In other words, tariffs,” Barkin said, translating the corporate-speak. Then the management consultant-turned-central banker cut to the chase: Are those price increases for tariff-related costs or are his businesses using “tariff noise” as “air cover to raise prices”?

“It’s both,” said Datin. “And I feel a little guilty saying that.” A regional banker chimed in: Some of his customers were reporting the same thing.

It’s this kind of candor that is keeping Barkin on edge—businesses raising prices not because they have to, but because they think they can get away with it. For Fed officials who fought hard to bring inflation down, such admissions make them uneasy.

There you have it, folks. Tariffs are not inherently inflationary, especially since the US runs on a free-floating exchange rate system.

The price hikes come from businesses thinking they can get away with it, not because they have to.

Bold of them to admit it.

What is the range of the F-16s? I suppose they take off from Western Ukraine, and could potentially conduct a very short period bombing run before returning to base? Clearly they cannot do mid-air refueling on the Ukrainian airspace.

To be clear, I don’t disagree with you.

However, you have to understand that China has no permanent allies. Its only two allies are the People’s Liberation Army and the PLA Navy.

China has no problem allying with the imperialist America to destroy the USSR when it perceives itself to be under threat from Soviet encirclement, and it has also no problem with helping Russia but only to the extent of turning Russia into a cannon fodder while distracting the US empire attention away from China itself.

Say whatever you want of China, but the strategy of playing both sides and win has served China very well over the past 50 years, and turned it from one of the poorest countries to one of the wealthiest in the world.

How the heck did the Ukrainian Air Force manage to make a come back? Didn’t Ukraine receive the old F-16 variants and had trouble with their pilot training? How did they manage to evade Russian air defenses?

And there are still Ukrainian MiGs and Sus with their pilots around? I don’t know if that’s an indictment against the Soviet air defenses system (often boasted to be the best in the world) or a commendation to the build quality of Soviet jets.

China doesn’t need Russia lol. But Russia would be useful as a cannon fodder to keep the imperialist attention away from China.

On Chinese internet, a popular phrase is “a half-dead bear is a good bear”. Understand what it means?

Support for socialism (and a nostalgia for the USSR) is still fairly high across the board among Russians. If Russia were to suddenly adopt socialism tomorrow, most people would accept it. They may not like it, they may even be critical of communism, but most would still accept it over the current system. The same cannot be said for any of the Western capitalist countries.

The biggest hurdle is how are you going to convince the people that a second USSR won’t turn into another disaster.

Remember that most people today who have lived through the USSR period also lived through its most corrupt and inept period during the late USSR. The older generations who grew up in the 50s-early 70s had great memories of it, but many people growing up in the 80s have a very different view of what the USSR meant to them.

Besides, and perhaps even more importantly, those who lived through the nightmare of the 1990s do not want to return to that period any longer. They would rather have stability, even if it meant a more deteriorated material condition but still rather comfortable and safe, than to risk plunging the country into another mass poverty and crime-ridden era. Putin played a very important role in stopping that madness, which is a fact that many have come to accept despite criticisms of him.

Read up what happened to Russia in the 1990s and you will very quickly understand that the living memories of the period still haunt every Russian to this day.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re both extremely bad, it’s just one is more blatant than the other.

Initially I didn’t believe they would let Trump win, but now it’s even more clear what the intention is.

Trump is going to do all the unpopular policies that the Democrats want but are too afraid to do on their own. If any of these cause a backlash, Trump and the Republicans will be the ones to face the consequences.

Meanwhile, the neocons firmly have Trump in control now. The MAGA clowns have retreated into obscurity. The first Trump term was a surprise, but after 8 years, the bourgeois elite surely have found more than one way to keep him on a leash.

they would rather lose than win with a socialist

It’s just priorities. Would they rather lose the voter base or lose the billionaire Zionist donors? The choice is simple.

I mean, Biden’s interest rate hike is arguably even more regressive in terms of wealth transfer ($1 trillion free interest to the rich every year, higher than the annual defense spending, while the poor have to endure even more expensive debt repayment burden) than Trump’s massive tax cuts and welfare cuts.

It’s just that interest rate operates “invisibly” so people don’t notice as much as the blatant Republican policies, but if you look into the data, it’s just as regressive, if not more so.

Just to point out it’s still the Israeli model though: have to register overseas.

Helping real estate moguls like the Pritzkers to gentrify black neighborhoods around Chicago.

There is no going back to the 90s.

The lavishness of the 90s was fueled by credit expansion under the financial deregulation by Reagan and later further deregulated under Clinton, as well as the vast amount of finance capital that flowed back to the US from stripping the Soviet industrial assets and monetizing them into financial assets.

Turns out, when it is easy to borrow, you can consume lots of stuff, invest a fortune in the stock market and giving the appearance of higher living standards. But it also turns out that debt has to be repaid somehow.

All of this ended first with the dotcom crash and then the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis. The middle class and the working class in America never recovered following the 2008 global financial crisis. The only people who made it are the top 1%.

Hong Kong Proposes System to Recognize Same-Sex Partnerships Bloomberg

Hong Kong has proposed a framework to grant legal recognition for same-sex partnerships, marking a major step forward for the LGBTQ community.

The city’s top court ordered the government to establish laws for such relationships two years ago. Legal recognition would allow same-sex couples rights including participation in each other’s healthcare matters and handling of post-mortem affairs, according to a proposal dated on Thursday and submitted earlier to legislature.

To gain recognition, couples must first register for legal marriage, partnership or other forms of union outside Hong Kong, according to the proposal. Registration in the city would also require at least one of the partners to be a resident.

Establishing a legal framework for same-sex unions could help Hong Kong improve its reputation. The financial hub saw an exodus of capital and white-collar workers after pro-democracy protests in 2019 followed by three years of Covid isolationist policies. Multinational companies in the city are increasingly showing support for LGBTQ rights, widely seen crucial in attracting talent.

But the government’s proposal noted that society still holds differing views on the matter. “We must carefully consider these perspectives and judiciously strike a balance to avoid division and maintain harmony in the society,” it said.

The top court had told the government to comply with its ruling by October 2025. The original case was brought by jailed pro-democracy activist Jimmy Sham, who has been seeking to have his New York-registered marriage recognized in the former British colony. It was the first time the city’s highest court directly addressed the issue of same-sex marriage.

The judgment followed a series of court rulings in the past several years that helped advance LGBTQ rights. The government recognized the overseas unions of couples in specific circumstances, including foreigners seeking spousal visas, in a Court of Final Appeal decision in 2018.

Vietnam stood on the “wrong” side during the Cold War and paid for it. American capital went into China and not Vietnam, and as a result, China gained access to the US consumer market, while Vietnam went down with the USSR.

But Vietnam could just turn to China for the same development without capitulating to the US, and it would likely benefit much more.

They have both listened to the IMF and oriented their economies to rely heavily on export oriented growth, so they are competitors. Who in China is going to buy Vietnam’s surplus goods that it cannot sell to the Americans? And why should the Chinese government favor Vietnamese products over its own domestic products?

When Chinese businesses invest in Vietnam, they want to take advantage of Vietnam’s status to circumvent the US tariffs put up by Trump during his first term. This is why Trump is levying a heavy tariff against Vietnam and several other countries like Mexico that Chinese exporters have used to evade tariffs.

Funnily enough, Vietnam actually has a much more stringent labor law and restricts overtime to less than 200 hours per year (no limit in China). So there have been cases where Chinese businesses only realized they couldn’t exploit the Vietnamese workers as hard after they have set up shop there lol.

Only when China reduces its trade surplus and starts importing from these countries, displacing the role of American consumers, can countries like Vietnam really benefit from China. Otherwise it’s going to be pure mercantilism while the US hides behind tariffs and waiting for these countries to kill off each other’s economies.

You misunderstood what I’m saying. I am specifically talking about China opening up its market to foreign capital vs other countries trying to play the same game.

Many of the other problems you are describing were legit Western anti-China propaganda.

It went from 46% to 20%.

As I have explained before, America has been running a permanent trade deficit for the past 40 years (last year, it was $900+ billion) to absorb the global surplus capacity of the exporting countries. This ensures that the world is always running in an over-supply mode, keeping prices of the goods cheap while the workers in the exporting countries employed.

When Trump suddenly threatens to slash this massive trade deficit, while many people focus on Americans having to pay higher prices and consume less, the corresponding effect is that the exporting countries in the Global South also faces a slump in consumption demand, which will inevitably lead to production downscale, unemployment and finally recession.

This is what some of those pro-BRICS commentators who confidently said “American imports only comprised a small fraction of world trade! Nobody cares!” don’t understand about international trade, especially since the world is no longer running in a fixed exchange rate regime in the past. Well, turns out the Global South exporting countries care.

The export goods have to go somewhere, and if not, assuming constant global demand, you’re going to be competing with the other exporting countries to dump them somewhere else, and how are you going to compete with the Chinese goods? If you can’t compete with China, then you will go into recession, and maybe looking for an IMF bailout in the near future. So, they still have to sell to America, and what Trump is doing is simply waiting to see what concessions these countries would give. And those exporting countries now compete with one another to see who can be the first to sell their goods to the US to maintain their competitive advantage.

Re-industrialization is a scam. The real goal is to reshape the global supply chain to America’s interest.

This is also why I always say that the only way to counter-attack is for China to ramp up its import to absorb all these exports from the Global South. This means China will have to give up its export industries and transition into a domestic consumption economy (should have done that like 10 years ago). This will automatically render the dollar hegemony useless because those countries will no longer have to sell their goods to the US.

Let’s not pretend like China didn’t open up its market to the Americans in order to kill the Soviet Union, whom they perceive as attempting to encircle China through Vietnam. Both Mao and Deng were fully on board with it.

We only didn’t criticize China because it ends up becoming very successful and reaping quite a lot of benefit out of it (and part of the reason why China isn’t going to give up the status quo anytime soon), but when other countries try to play the same game, they get labeled as compradors.

This. At this point, Russia taking Ukraine simply means that the European leaders can scaremonger their people into accepting the austerity and fascism even more easily. All in the name of preventing Russian threat, while the capitalists profit from it.

They know that Russia has no interest nor is it capable of invading Europe, but the people would be scared enough into accepting the hardship they’d have to undertake to stop Putin’s madness.