China's economic situation right now is worse than the US. They have incredible debt (accounting for provincial debt which is essentially state debt, China is not a federation), a massive housing asset bubble, and an aged population that is expensive to care for. Never mind also being stuck in a deflationary cycle with a high youth unemployment rate. And this is just working with the self-reported numbers from an authoritarian regime.
The biggest crunch to the US will be to the consumer, the biggest crunch to China will be the worker. People in the US will need to buy less shit, and pay more for what they do buy. People in China will need to work fewer hours and bring home less money.
Of course, the situation is fractal and ridden with unknowns. But I think a lot of people have this view of China as being a young slick economic powerhouse and the US being a weak economy with old decrepit money pile. That's far from the truth.
I'm sure that China will suffer greatly from any trade war, and I'm positive the US will blink first. Chinese consumer and workers are already significantly less likely to revolt, stop working, drag their country down. The second that dollar store becomes $10store in the US, it'll be pandemonium, and they only have a single person to blame for their troubles. China? They may be doing anti-competitive trade practices and haven't been put to task, but if you ask the Chinese citizen who to blame on the trade war, it'll be trump. If you ask a US citizen who to blame for this trade war, it'll be trump.
I actually have made it a personal rule to never sign up for TikTok. Instagram usually gets the stolen reposted content of whatever trends on TikTok a week ago. Browsing Instagram on the phone you are just swiping and taking in whatever the algorithm feeds you and unless you save it, that content might be gone forever. Who knows how much slop has just "drive by" messed up my brain.
Nevertheless I saved a couple pieces I found interesting or amusing:
I made a new TikTok account out of curiosity after Trump "saved" the platform. No exaggeration, half of the "For You" content was from "Team Trump" or Charlie Kirk. They are actively pushing propaganda, but I've seen no signs that it's Chinese propaganda, unless you assume that Bytedance is bowing to Trump, and that Bytedance is controlled by the Chinese Government, which just raises more questions.
Youtube Premium is the only "streaming service" I actually pay money for, and I use it quite a bit. Rarely ever does something off the wall get pushed to me. I do consume politics on YT, and occasionally something right wing shows up, but it's rare. I have no doubt that this stuff would be prioritized on a new account though.
The TikTok bill appeared to have died on the vine until it started to get a lot of Pro-Palestine content then all of a sudden it reappeared and the ban got put into law. I think Trump stopping the ban was actually the first major loss for pro Israel interests(certainly not the last we have seen so far).
I would say its not that extreme on the platform(I still see the week old TikTok posts sometimes reposted on other platforms) but regardless, the damage has been done. As they continue to lose this information war, their tactics become more and more unhinged. See the recent bill banning boycotting Israel products with a punishment of a million dollars fine. It was met with such backlash that politicians quickly withdrew it. Even MAGA jumped on board to block that.
Like it or not this is a competition between two nations. If they are going to push content that sways the populace by exploiting weaknesses why not the other way around?
You are acting like this started as soon as Trump opened his mouth, its been in the shadows for years but it really ramped up after he started this nonsense.
It's a competition between nations, but why support the political party that straight up says they hate you just because China also hates them?
Like, if I hate the idea of eating kittens, and someone I hate also says they hate the idea of eating kittens, I'm not going to say "oh hell no, I can't let them shittalk OUR kitten eaters!"
I'm just going to be like "yeah, they have a point on this one", accept that a broken clock is right twice a day, and move on. Nationalist/jingoist garbage just for the sake of it makes countries worse.
There are many ways you can look at this situation. In my view, I don't think its a matter of hate. You gotta separate the actions of the clown on top with the actions of the government. The government is tasked with protecting the people and ensuring their best future. To them, it does not matter if its competing against China or any other country. Its not personal, its business.
To that end, the US's rivals have long used its weaknesses against it. While there are unconfirmed reports that China and Russia helped to prop up BLM in 2020, we do know for a fact that the USSR fanned the flame of racial tensions during the cold war. The best way to fight this? Get as close as you can to a fix for the problem. In that regard the USSR's attacks could have been used against them as a motivation to improve things and the US has improved.
Likewise its questionable if pushing the lie flat movement would harm regular Chinese people. From the government's POV, it looks bad: Chinese people being worked to death, can't afford a one bedroom apartment and one couple has to take care of possibly four elderly people. Of course some will just decide to 'opt out'. Makes China look bad while also possibly helping regular Chinese people in the long run.
China faces many long-term headwinds but they're not in crisis yet. The Chinese housing bubble has been deflating since 2020. The state pension and healthcare systems are less than generous so care for the elderly is not that expensive (yet). And Chinese government debt is less than half the US despite being 5x the population.
At the end of the day, the US represents only 8% of China's exports and only 2% of China's GDP. Losing that will hurt, but China is far better placed to weather the loss than the US.
What is the difference between paying more for the item VS having less money to spend? Both to me seem like being unable to afford the things you need.
Americans buy a ludicrous amount of stuff they only think they need. American consumerism is unrivaled in the world.
In the US the poor are the ones who suffer from obesity. From having too many calories available cheaply. Let that sink in. The US is so much further from "needs not being met" than anyone understands.
The US has one of the largest agricultural sectors in the world, it should be no surprise that food is not in short supply. But we don't live in an era where people live in homes built from local gathered sticks and rocks and just need food to survive, our modern lives depend on far more than just food. Poor people are fat because we made extremely calorie dense foods the cheapest foods, poor people often shop by calorie per dollar, not because they have extra cash to throw around.
Try living on the US median wage only and let me know how much ludicrous amount of stuff you can afford.
<< Try living on the US median wage only and let me know how much ludicrous amount of stuff you can afford.
The question is not what you can afford. The question is what you can get. And whatever else you want to say about US system, it made the ability to show that you have $desired_item257 relatively easy to obtain even at low income level. It is genuinely not impossible to own status luxury items with aggressive financing.
It's more expensive to buy and prepare fresh food than shelf stable ultra processed foods and requires more time. Poor people have access to 'poor' calories. I would wager that children would also inherit the eating habits of poor parents.
right, but so far the consumerism has been the only thing doing bread and circuses away from the real problems of housing and whatnot.
it's interesting that many things like televisions and phones went from being multiples of rent or mortgage payments, to the reverse, so now cutting back on consumer spending to afford necessities wouldn't do a whole lot.
I'm not worried about the consumer aspect at all. It will be painful and maybe pull the wool off all the trumpets eyes, reveling his idiocy. But people are not going to be starving. Maybe starving for new clothes and iPhones like they get all the time.
I do worry though about embedded costs up the supply chain the depend on Chinese made things. The parts of parts that go into machines that are made domestically. I think that has potential to be the real knife in the back. Most things need all the pieces to work, and even though the machine is 90% made in USA, the last 10% that is a Chinese export is going to cause pain in all sorts o unexpected places.
Long term savings, productivity increases, and infrastructure investments. Buy less today to have more tomorrow. The us individual hardly saves at all, the US gov/society has financed decades of deficit spending n the outcome of ww2, 20th century global industrialization, and the “exorbitant privilege” of financing/coordinating it.
Common opinion is that china has the opposite problem, with massive productivity outputs being shipped overseas and a population base who cant/wont consume their own outputs.
While this is all true, China knows all the economic levers to cause lots of pain to the US (eg selling t-bills) whereas the leadership in the US is so economically illiterate that it thinks trade deficits are theft and that tariffs are free tax money that will strengthen the US.
The US's current leadership is so economically illiterate that most of the people who backed Trump thought he was just joking about his economic policy. When the stock market finally realized that he was so stupid as to follow through on campaign promises the stock market tanked. It is currently only held up at current depressed levels because it is assumed that Trump will back away from the trade war.
Though the US economy is the strongest and healthiest on the planet by a large margin, and while typically the president of the US has minimal impact, we find ourselves in a strange situation where the president has found a way to throw all that supremacy away.
In some sense Trump and co would want China to sell their t-bills. It will weaken the dollar (increasing competitiveness of US exports) and strengthen the yuan (decrease competitiveness of Chinese exports).
To some degree is it possible to frame this whole situation as America intentionally tanking the dollar because it is too strong (which has happened twice before, albeit in more diplomatic ways). The hard part though is getting our economic allies to go along with it while also not abandoning dollar supremacy.
How does the strongest boxer ever intentionally get weaker to avoid permanent injury, while also keeping bettors confident in his winning streak? It kind of needs to be done, but man I cannot think of a worse person to execute this than Trump.
>China knows all the economic levers to cause lots of pain to the US (eg selling t-bills)
China has been divesting itself of treasuries for a long time: a) because they create coupling between the two economies, and b) they know that the US will simply freeze them if China invades Taiwan. If China dumped all of its treasuries at once, it would hurt a little, but not that much.
A small amount of selling T-bills from bond vigilantes already caused Trump to drastically pull back his plan once. If a holder as large as China started a big dump of T-bills it would cause a massive financial disaster. China would feel some pain too, but the US having far higher interest rates as it rolls over new debt into new T-bills would be extremely difficult for us. We are at economic Mutually Assured Destruction levels this is still a lever that China can pull that is in their favor.
Almost all of US debt is internal. Social security and the federal reserve are the two biggest holders. Only 25% is in other countries, and the largest single other country is Japan at 3%.
If there is a secret Trump plan to devalue the dollar and force us treasury holders to accept cheaper longer term debt, the biggest plenary will be to social security.
(Though on the last numbers I saw had the UK and China with far more similar amounts of holdings.$
Calling T-bills debt is only half the picture. They function more like dollars, whose value can be deflated or increased after issuance merely by changing interest rates.
The biggest crunch to the US will be to the consumer, the biggest crunch to China will be the worker. People in the US will need to buy less shit, and pay more for what they do buy. People in China will need to work fewer hours and bring home less money.
Of course, the situation is fractal and ridden with unknowns. But I think a lot of people have this view of China as being a young slick economic powerhouse and the US being a weak economy with old decrepit money pile. That's far from the truth.