China: last economy to slow, first to recover
China: last economy to slow, first to recover
It is somewhat misleading to talk about China's “economic recovery” - since it never slid into negative growth (i.e. a recession). Officially, the robust growth never slowed below a 6% annual rate – although some have suggested those numbers are somewhat “padded”.
Nevertheless, what is unequivocal is that China's economy has actually turned up – something which no other major economy has been able to achieve. There are many reasons why China has experienced the least disruption from the global recession, and the quickest “recovery”.
First of all, China has the world's strongest domestic economy. This is in contrast with the U.S. domestic economy, which is still the world's largest – but is obviously terminally ill. There are many reasons why China's domestic economy is expanding at a phenomenal rate, and has already passed the U.S. as the world's largest automobile market (after already passing the U.S. in automobile manufacturing).
First, Chinese consumers never carried much debt. Indeed, like many Asian economies, the Chinese have a massive pool of savings – thanks to a savings rate which never dips below double-digits. Thus, when China's “stimulus package” buoyed Chinese optimism, they had the buying-power to immediately stoke their domestic consumption (see “Chinese consumers BEGIN flexing economic muscle”).
It must be noted that supposed “weakness” of the Chinese economy, based on falling exports was never more than a disinformation campaign from U.S. propagandists. China's domestic economy has been growing by more than 20% per year for most of this decade. When you have a population of 1.2 BILLION, a growth rate of that magnitude, and consumers with a HUGE savings-rate, it should have been apparent to anyone capable of operating a calculator that China's domestic strength would quickly offset temporary weakness in exports.
With China now the growth-engine of the global economy, its rapid recovery will immediately begin strengthening neighbouring Asian economies – with the exception of Japan's zombie-economy – along with large commodity-exporters like Canada, Australia, and Brazil.
However, there is another reason why it's interesting to note that China's economy was the first to turn higher, despite being the last to weaken. For the last year and a half, U.S. propagandists have continued to advance the totally absurd argument that because the U.S. was the first economy to crash, it would be the first to strengthen.
China has already partially repudiated that argument, but there was never any rationality to this. The U.S. economy was first to weaken not because it was simply “ahead” of other countries in the business cycle, but because there were numerous terminal weaknesses in this economy (mostly based on grossly excessive debt levels), which were exacerbated by the bursting of the largest asset “bubble” in history – Wall Street's multi-trillion dollar “Ponzi scheme” based on the U.S. housing sector.
Since the U.S. economy began plummeting downward, the U.S. government has spent or pledged over $12 TRILLION – however only 2 - 3% of that money has actually been spent on anything remotely resembling “stimulus”. Almost all the money has been spent propping-up failed businesses, with the vast majority of those dollars spent on keeping the U.S. financial crime syndicate out of bankruptcy.
In other words, despite countless denials to the contrary, the U.S. has been duplicating Japan's economic policies – where the economic trough into which that country plunged has now lasted for roughly two decades. Yet despite following a strategy they knew was doomed from the beginning, U.S. officials (notably Ben “the Buffoon” Bernanke) have continually predicted one “economic recovery” after another – based on the flimsiest of arguments.
Currently, in the 5th “economic recovery” which Bernanke has personally predicted, his entire justification for yet another empty lie is simply that the U.S.'s heavily-doctored economic “statistics” (i.e. propaganda) are plummeting downward at a slightly slower rate.
To summarize the situation, the argument that the U.S. would “recover first” because it “slowed first” was always nonsense – and has already been repudiated by the example of China. This leaves the U.S. government in the position of still predicting a rapid “recovery” as they duplicate the economic blunders which Japan made twenty years ago.
With U.S. unemployment plummeting downward, government spending totally out of control, over $50 TRILLION in total public and private debt, another $50 TRILLION in unfunded liabilities – and a totally corrupt government doing absolutely nothing to address its massive, structural problems, the U.S. economy is rapidly headed toward bankruptcy, not “recovery”.
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