Monday, March 07, 2005

The Liquidity Conundrum

China, the global wages dynamic and the global resources dynamic - is this all the story or is this a much more complex dynamic? My answer to this is one you may never have thought of. I've recently been involved with many academic and intellectual groups pouring over the world's problems, and mainly from economic perspectives. What has struck me as novel is the fact the U.S. and many western nations preached for the downfall of Marxist pholosophy nations for over 75 years, yet never penned hardly a word about what the world would be like if their dream came true - what the economic, ie., wage, inflation and resource dynamics set in play would truly be. By this I mean Marxist nations for all these years had barely any inflation in wages and internal resource prices compared to the western world. Then I got thinking about colonialism and imperialism exerting a very similar economic dynamic in the countries where practiced for centuries - and then them also re-entering the free capitalist system mostly after WWII. Most of the colonial nations didn't experience the rates of inflation their host countries did either, much the same as the Marxist countries, since they were manipulated low - kind of like capitalism's socialist surrogates. This means that a huge, more than huge, economic dynamic has been released on the world, first by the post colonial period after WWII, and then by the post Marxist period since the early `90's.

After thinking about the above I got thinking about what my grandfather had told me about time - ie., empire time and timing of nations' integrations and re-integrations. Looking back over history we all recognize the many great, and not so great empires that have existed. They all existed for a time - time and the timing of empires and nations' existence is key to my thinking. If we boil this down to a basic model of ET=WIR, or empire time equals wages, inflation and resources, I think we can see quite a simple example of otherwise complex data. It matters not which empire or nation we use as our model as all work the same to these four factors - time, wages, inflation and resources, since these four items can represent everything present in any and all empires and nations. Nations and empires all started out with cheap wages, low inflation and cheap reasources. Time, there it is again, time changes this dynamic and only time does. Now, that may seem quite obvious but, over time any empire or nation, such as the U.S., starting out with practically free for the taking resources, which in itself would have created cheap wages, was a huge dynamic on the then existing capitalist world. Defining this further, we were a mercantilist nation entering the hegemonic capitalist world of the European empires. By us haveing such cheap wages and resources we couldn't help but accidentally grow into the greatest power and wealth nation the world has ever known, but now we face the same problem from China that we then posed on the capitalist hegemonic world of 1791. We are now the hegemon and China is the mercantilist with the cheap wages and internal resources - not to mention her mercantilist minions all over the globe.

This timing dynamics has been going on since the dawn of economic time. Any one nation or potential empire starts out with the cheapest wages and resources, whether it be Egypt or the Myan's, and over time inflates to higher levels than the periphery, and at some point the periphery becomes a new center. This happens due to nothing more than the time and timing growths and integrations of wage prices, inflation rates and resource prices. Low price nations and empires become high price nations and empires over time, and thus trade places one after another through the process of perpetual economic suzerainty - the never ending cycly of the circle of nations' time cycles. So time and re-timing the global cycles into and by global re-balancing through sliding time scale law structures is the only way this author sees to solving this greatest of history's global problem.

Andy Xie "The End Is Debt Deflation":

The global economy is experiencing the biggest bubble ever. The bubble began with the Asian Financial Crisis and went through the tech bubble, the property bubble and, finally, the China bubble. It has been one big and long bubble. The main reason is because the major central banks have been targeting inflation in a fundamentally deflationary environment, releasing too much liquidity into the global economy. How is it going to end?

There are two obvious trends in this bubble: Anglo-Saxon consumers have been borrowing a lot against their rising property values to support consumption, and Chinese companies (actually, government-related entities) have been borrowing a lot to create production capacities. To mirror the surge in liquidity, the indebtedness of Anglo-Saxon consumers and Chinese investors has risen sharply. The current boom, therefore, is debt-funded. Debt levels can continue to rise as long as asset prices keep rising.

Whatever triggers the collapse, it will show up first in declining asset prices. Property is the likely candidate. Property prices in New York, London, and Shanghai could decline at the same time. When property prices begin to decline, it would cause the global economy to weaken. The weakening economy would decrease the cash-flow of property speculators who would have to sell to unwind. The unwinding would lead global asset prices to collapse in general.

The major central banks may try to ease aggressively to fight the unwinding spiral. However, it would be too late to revive money demand. Most speculators who are driving demand for money today would have been cut down already. The global economy is likely to experience a period of debt deflation."

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