... The issue was the US recovery and the end of The Great Recession. Those are facts. ... The US economy is almost twice the size of Mother China's economy. ... one outside of China's government really knows what China's economic growth rate is because China isn't transparent and is known to fudge its economic data. So you cannot know what China's economic growth rate really is. You only know what the Chinese government wants you to believe about its economic growth rate.
Yes, growing the Fed's balance sheet by about three trillion dollars did have a stimulus effect, especially on aggregate stock prices, which some take as "increased wealth." Yes China strongly controls banks, and stock market too.
I agree both the US and China, manipulate their increase in wealth and make GDP comparisons via the also manipulated exchange rates. IMO if you want to more accurately compare two economies you should not do that by manipulated exchange rates. The PPI is a better means, but still a quite flawed approach. What is more accurate is to compare how much the economies are actually producing - items that can not be so easily manipulated. For example, Tons of food, passenger or ton miles by rail, plane, car and trucks, KWHs of power generation, and trade balances and most importantly HOW THEY HAVE GROWN each year recently.
China is at least half way finished with by far the largest and fastest urbanization of a rural population in human history. New cities, new rail system, new planes, trucks and cars - the world's largest and fastest growing expansion. Also China is the world's largest maker and market for modern items like cars, cell phones, computers, digital electronics, including cameras, etc. (real items, not stock prices) as a population several times larger than the US urbanizes with real purchasing power of salaries growing by double digits annually. - A rapidly expanding "middle class" of "urbanites."
Yes with comparison via manipulated factors like exchange rates you can make China's GDP half or twice that of the US, but when compared by real production, a more accurate picture emerges.
For example, China has in the last decade built more miles of high speed rail than the rest of the world, US included, and in last five decades; more housing, more airports, more water transport systems (Their NS water systems moves half the annual flow of the Nile River from the water rich SE to the NE Beijing region, which is dryer than US's SW.) That is real productivity, California can only dream of. That, and many other great boost in Chinese productivity, is not recognized in comparison of economies via manipulated exchanges rates.
Sadly, the US can not even keep AM Track's road bed in good repair - there are less than design speed limits for safety reasons in many stretches. High-way bridges in US collapse, too. China's global influence is increasing, not declining. Average Chinese is 100% sure his life will be materially much better than his parents was. Unfortunately, the typical American expects the opposite.
There is a reason why China has rapidly grown from a defeated WWII nation to the world's largest importer and exporter of goods. China is also the world's largest producer of gold and often the largest importer of gold too, but some times is 2nd to India. China is the world's largest "creditor nation" and the US is the world's largest "debtor nation." China is reducing the dollar denominated paper assets in its reserves mainly by buying up real /physical assets, even in the US. For example, bought Smithfield Hams, the world's largest vertically integrated producer of pork products (That US company owned of hog farms, processing plants, and distribution network) a couple of years ago, but generally China prefers ownership of energy and mineral resources, still mainly in the ground.
... Unfortunately for you BillyT there is a difference between economic growth and how the economic pie is sliced up. Now you may not be able to understand that rather elementary fact, but it is a fact. And you seem to be contradicting yourself. That "increased wealth" is he result of a growing economy.
I understand that difference well. If I did not I could not have noted the fact that wealth is concentrating; However I now also note that most of the US's wealth increase is in the values of stocks, not new production facilities. Paper assets (and their "wealth effect"), unlike physical assets, can nearly vanish in a "black week" as they have in the past; so I am not much impressed by the ~200% gain stocks have enjoyed by / during the QEs /Fed's balance sheet expansion.
I tend to look at real achievements, like moving half the Nile's annual water flow to China's very dry NE, a greater separation than between water rich Washington State and water rationing California.
http://www.internationalrivers.org/campaigns/south-north-water-transfer-project said:
... a $62 billion South-North Water Transfer Project. The project would divert 44.8 billion cubic meters of water per year from the Yangtze River in southern China to the Yellow River Basin in arid northern China. This is equivalent to nearly half the amount of water consumed in California annually.
How is this real difference* reflected in your exchange rate based comparison of China and the US?
You need to look at real achievements, not just wall-street's growing wealth, pumped up by Fed's growing holdings of US treasury's paper promises.
... "increased wealth" is the result of a growing economy.
Nonsense if that wealth is mainly associated with Wall Street's paper assets. Their value can change by + or - 3% in an hour - but true wealth in the economy only slowly changes - on time scale of weeks if not longer. Typically caused by technological innovation. For example the introduction of "containers" made the economy truly richer by reducing shipping cost. Or Hall's invention of electrolytic refining of Aluminum, converted that metal from much more expensive than gold, into soft-drink cans many just throw in the trash.
BTW Hall did that after the Washington Monument in DC was completed so its top is a very tiny pyramid of very expensive chemically refined aluminum.
Stock values changing are NOT real changes in society's wealth.
SUMMARY: Make a real comparison, not one made by manipulated exchange rates.
- - - - - - - -
* Another "real difference" is US's rail system, which is still running with engines and cars that belong in museums, instead of the world's largest network of highest speed trains and rails.
i think buffet knows his effective tax rate better than a partisan hack opinion writer. more to the point your making a very different claim than the one buffet is making. buffet is specifically taking about income taxes what you and your source are doing is adding in other taxes to conceal what the income tax rate is. note this line
