My favorite thing on Yahoo finance is how the headline for the day is re-written throughout the day to keep it current, frequently becoming the opposite of what it was in the beginning of the day.
My dad calls it the Financial deus-ex-machina. Every single financial newspaper does it. To be fair, they gotta report what happened with the market so the headline has to capture something in addition to simply "DOW down 300 points". It is not useless, quite the contrary - you get an idea about facts + some context in less than a second of reading the headline. That's efficiency! No one is going to make correlation-is-not-causation arguments off of a morning headline. But it is funny:
“DOW down 300 points as investors worry about Russian aggression”
Next day:
“DOW up 300 points as investors re-assess the Russian aggression”
The financial world cracks me up. Dial in any earnings call to play the headwinds, tailwinds, double-down, as we continue to, can you add color to that?, etc bingo.
Morning: DOW down 300 points because of Fed decision
Evening: DOW up 300 points because of (same) Fed decision
Context: most financial analysts at places like Bloomberg are literally some of the lowest paid employees. Most of them never traded any financial market in their entire life, which is quite short since they tend to be in their 20s.
Frontpage headlines are not written by interns. Those are analysts and developers you're talking about.
I take the contrarian stance - these headlines are for people that are busy on Wall Street. They just need to know quickly what+context, not what+how. what+how is the holygrail and no one is stupid enough to even complain about these headlines in the Financial world. It is a tidbit that is extremely useful.
There are plenty of stories from famous financial people who were initially hired as analysts at various banks/news agencies which go like this: so on my first day I was told "from today you cover Apple/Euro/gold market. But I don't know much about that. Doesn't matter, just give your best." And I'm not talking about the 80s, but even people doing this after 2007.
You are right about what+context, buy you don't really need analysts for that, to tell you what market moved and what economic event happened before that.
Don’t need AI, just string concatenation and an array of sentence types to randomly choose from when the article cron job starts
Used bing’s API to search for certain macro market events and used stocktwits api to see which stocks moved the most and would make headlines and aggregate articles about those
which it would post to twitter
which would drive people to the no-login no-password app and subscription service (used ids based on in-app subscription ID or something else if using a browser)
which was all populated with algorithmic trades lol
turned it off because I didn't like updating all the APIs and compute instances as the services they relied on kept changing, but yeah self advertising self operating money printer
They take market movements and append the most relevant piece of news to that movement. If you track any stock closely you'll find your daily Motleyfool article "Why is XYZ stock is moving because of [most recent relevant news for that company]"
The article is usually one paragraph stating the stock movement and a summary of the most recent news. You can get the same summary for different movements due to the automation here.
But they don't "have to" report it. It's become standard because it's free, guaranteed content. Finance and sports both follow the same model. Every trading day (or game, for sports) is guaranteed to have an article: Up or Down; Win, Loss or Tie. The content is filler as the articles' inclusion is justified regardless.
Apple’s stock app is awesome in that matter. “Why NASDAQ:_____ ticker is bound to go down in the next months” – the day after it gains 20% and doubles within the year…
> is the cheapest and least useful form of reporting known to mankind
Maybe not the most useful form of reporting.. but the least useful form known to mankind? After reading the article I think there's more to the analysis than just that.
I don't think this article is right on the cause. China's biggest problem is, imo, the continued slow motion train wreck of evergrande and its real estate market collapsing. So much of China's growth was money sloshing around due to things getting built. But that seems to be harshly falling. There's hundreds of billions of debt hovering around default and the best these companies can do seems to be to double down on building and selling more buildings, which I sort of expect people don't particularly want to buy. General supply chain issues and covid affect this too. Food availability due to lower exports of wheat from russia and ukraine could cause an issue too.
Yes, their entire real estate market has been in slow motion collapse for the better part of a year. Too many articles on the state of the economy are using the Russia crisis to drive their news cycle, when actually most of the turmoil was already happening.
> China's biggest problem is, imo, the continued slow motion train wreck of evergrande and its real estate market collapsing.
It's at least an order of magnitude larger of a problem for China than ties to Russia are.
For anyone unaware, nearly 2/3 of China's household wealth is tied up in real-estate assets (for the US it's < 30% of household assets in real-estate). That's a doubling over what it was a decade ago. China's socio-political stability is particularly bound to the condition of their real-estate market. A crash there would be devastating; if housing were to fall enough to revert back to that asset class being 1/3 of China's household asset base, maybe $30 trillion in national 'wealth' would have to vanish.
The US ranks 9th whereas china ranks 34th. They're not going to famine or anything but food prices, or really just inflation more broadly, could be an issue. The reason china stockpiles grain is because it doesn't produce enough for itself.
Sure. Does every sentence in a discussion of X really require a disclaimer that the thing mentioned is not necessarily unique to X and can also be the case for not-X?
I've never claimed otherwise, since you didn't claim that it wasn't relevant to Chinese markets, but only attacked an imagined claim about it not being relevant to other markets.
Can China just not let Evergrande fail? I'm assuming the debt is largely held in China, the buildings are in China, and debt holders who expected to be able to get their money back are going to be disappointed but in an authoritarian government can you just force people to take the loss without letting that loss transmit to the larger economy?
A lot of it is tied in with local government. The central Chinese government inadequately funds local governments. The local governments close the funding gap by selling/leasing land to developers (often kicking citizens off their land without proper compensation). Chinese citizens buy the properties due to a number of cultural and financial factors. There is not much else to invest in. Savings interest rates are very low. Chinese citizens often distrust the local stock market due to corruption issues and shared memory of previous crashes. Ordinary Chinese citizens are not permitted to invest overseas. Local property is the only reasonable investment to many. Many of these properties are never even lived in. However Chinese citizens are going to stop buying eventually as property prices are already well into greater fool territory. When that happens, local government will be in trouble.
Sometimes as short as 20 I believe, although 70 is common. They do own the building, but yes the land is always on leasehold terms I believe. Will the government renew it? They say yes, but ...
It's not just evergrande, it's all property developers pretty much. It's a real estate bubble popping when an immense portion of wealth and growth is in real estate.
Yes, much higher portion of wealth is in real estate in China than other countries, this is key to understanding the problem. Real estate is basically a savings account for many people.
YEAH! Those chinese amateurs should do what we do in the USA ; just print more money and bail them out, and let their competitors acquire the company for pennies on the dollar after our government employees have had the opportunity to let all the people in their family know that trillions in bailouts is n the way -- oh yeah, and dont forget to setup an LLC in your spouses name to slurp off such bailout funds as well.
They're carefully trying to change ownership of the hot potatoes so that as many of them are in foreign hands as possible.
If Evergrande defaults, foreign bondholders will claim their collateral.
So instead, for example, they have state-owned companies buying up Evergrande's assets, then Evergrande using that money to pay back local creditors, so that Evergrande is eventually left owning neither money nor assets to pay back foreign bondholders. Nothing left to seize in court.
Meanwhile, they are trying not to create a shock in real-estate prices that would undermine the other overleveraged developers, such as would occur if Evergrande unloaded all of their assets at once. Each developer is balancing their debt-to-asset ratio, so if their real estate assets drop in paper value, they end up in Evergrande's position.
Foreign bondholders appear to be playing along with this, which is fascinating; it suggests that either those bondholders are, too, looking to offload their hot potatoes and want to preserve the appearance that they're still worth something as they search for buyers, or else they're using those bonds as collateral for their own loans. As long as credit rating agencies play along and don't drop the credit rating to full default, they may be able to do so.
Evergrande (real estate in general) is undergoing intentional, controlled unwinding initiated by CCP kicked off by "three red lines". It was never going to collapse, the entire point of Evergrande was to avoid an Lehman moment by preempting it.
Too big to fail combined with an autocratic government ostensibly built upon stability. Who dares push it into bankruptcy and risk the certain wrath of that government?
To be fair the same happened to Freddie Mae and Fannie Mac, which were bailed out at the start of the 2008 financial crisis. Eventually they repaid their bail-out money and then some, but back then (2008-2009) that was not seen as a possibility.
At a more general level, I'd say it's very tough to let companies like Evergrande/Freddie Mae&Fannie Mac go down the drain because you risk the whole system going down, no matter if you're a de facto autocracy (like China) or a not so perfect democracy, like the US.
If these companies have been accurately summarized in the media, I would consider these very different. The mortgage companies were holding loans on a lot of individual houses, etc with concrete utility that were in actual use, where replacement stock was unavailable.
In Evergrande's case they seem to have giant projects that are earmarked as investment speculation as opposed to intended primary dwellings or immediately rentable. It is entirely possible that whole districts of buildings are never of enough utility to draw residents at any price above maintenance.
A company can go broke with either mistake but if a government knows the need for the collateral mortgaged actually exists then bounds from the macroeconomic situation apply so their shoveling of money will have an end.
China will not be able to handle the rise in fossil fuel prices and will perhaps be the country to ask Russia to stop it's invasion of Ukraine because it hurts China too much because of this.
USA wants this. It's not something that had just happened. This is a coordinated effort based on good intelligence work. Imo.
Xi Jinping is also running for election soon and is under massive internal pressure. So he has to act.
Not sure where this will leave Russia but they will be the one who lose because the pressure from the outside is to much. But sanctions will likely continue and Russia will be doomed.
China is buying Russian oil at a significant discount. Since such a huge portion of the cost of goods is embodied energy, this gives them a huge advantage.
or "there is no free lunch" but I like the Russian one better. It's really fascinating to see the differences in how two cultures express essentially the same idea.
Yes, but what will China do with the goods it manufactures? If they have the internal demand to consume them, that's good. If their plan is to sell exports to Western nations then they need to be strategic. TFA is about sanctions being extended to Chinese firms that invest in Russian energy firms, but one could imagine a spiral where the sanctions expand to other Chinese firms that produce manufactured goods ("embodied energy") as well. We're not there yet, but it is a possibility.
It will raise the cost of goods to the point which will be forced upon the consumer which will not be able to afford it. Already unemployment is rising rapidly in China as is inflation, when Chinese people find they can no longer afford a roof or basic foods, they will have nothing to lose.
For China, Russian oil price goes down, because Russia got no other buyers. And even before war Russia was selling that oil at loss. The more they sell to China, the better to the west.
Or Russia could just say this is a price and either swallow it or fuck off. Oil price is already high and due to West not buying it from Russia competition increases. So China can either pay exorbitant prices to compete with the western buyers or just take some reasonable price from Russia. Win win for either. The West of course can get mad and start sanctioning China but nobody can really predict how / when / if this is going to play.
Putin promised Xi the war in Ukraine would be over very quickly but what has transpired is that China is part of the blowback against Russia as a result of knowing beforehand that Putin would invade Russia.
The US now has every excuse to coerce China, from everything ranging to Taiwan, trade issues.
In large, Putin's war with Ukraine ended up raising fossil, food prices which puts real pressure on Xi's regime.
I do not think Russia has the same level of worry as China because it has endless amount of oil and food that China does not. If China is suddenly no longer allowed to import these from other countries, it would be forced to trade with Russia under Putin's terms.
The last time we did this to a country, they launched a war instead of waiting for the inevitable internal collapse. All of this is creating an uncertain and volatile future.
TLDR: Putin's war and looming US sanctions against China will cause a volatile reaction.
Russia's primary problem is going to be the instability that comes out of the reveal that Putin is a typical incompetent authoritarian and Russia's military is weak (and there's nothing they can do about it, clearly, or the past decade of 'modernization' and spending would have). To the extent Russia has had some limited stability under Putin, it has been built on the image of Putin's competency as a command & control operator of the Russian state and Russia's supposed potent military strength in particular - the projection of strength generally, all the fake imagery the propaganda machine has dished out regarding Putin over two decades. Naturally, as it turns out, the truth is closer to the opposite. It always seemed a distinct aberration that Russia would manage to somehow maintain a competent, potent, relatively well-organized military while everything else was so subpar and rotting. Everything makes sense again, their military looks like the rest of the nation.
The knives will come out for Putin now that everybody knows he's weak and fragile. His recent moves to punish powerful internal figures will force him to go even further. Being likely paranoid as dictators commonly are, Putin will likely do as much damage to Russia's internal functioning as sanctions do from the outside to its economy. Putin is likely to elevate the fascism to the point where their system stops functioning much at all, including their domestic economy. Purges, gulags, genocide, things typical of later stage statist regimes, it's all on the table if Putin's intention is to retain his present power. Putin only has two choices: give it up, or kill lots of people to try to fend off the sharks that will inevitably come for him and challenge his position. The considerable, fake image of strength was previously making it largely unnecessary to go as far as most dictators do to retain control, that luxury will now vanish and it'll dramatically damage Russia. People fleeing Russia are making the right choice, get out while you can.
The only exception I see with this analysis is that a lot of people really genuinely seem to hold Putin in high regard. His supporters really, really support him. It's like a cult, similar to what we had in the US recently. Therefor I conjecture anyone who replaces Putin forcibly will have a rough time. Time will tell.
Highly emotional opinions won't change overnight in terms of the cultural adoration of Putin. It was built up over decades of lies, fake projections of strength and promises of a better future for Russia. It'll take time to erode. Observers outside of Russia can rapidly change their estimation of Putin because very little of it is rooted in emotionalism, nationalism, cultural bindings - whereas for people inside of Russia the exact opposite is true. It's like the joke that half of the time spent in a failed relationship is on exiting it - that's because the emotional erosion can take a long time (whereas scientific, rational type estimations are more often very fast).
Interestingly it was George W. Bush and an American war that provided Putin with his image foundation: high oil prices, sparked by the US debasing its dollar via outlandish spending (post 9/11 and up to the great recession crash), and the Middle East chaos including the Iraq invasion. Those high oil prices, which Putin had little to do with, made him look like a hyper competent manager of the Russia state, and he has been riding on the lifestyle improvements delivered to the Russian people from those good years ever since.
Don’t forget the big problem China will eventually have to deal with: their single child policy is coming to a head with their aging workforce.
When the chickens come home to roost, they’re going to have to figure out who is going to replace the retired population, and nobody’s in a rush to immigrate to China.
Why replace anyone? The alternative is to ramp down to a lower population baseline and deal with the transition. 800M Chinese by 2100 is still plenty. Reality is right now there's 100s of million undereducated/undertrained Chinese who can't be integrated into modern economy - they're net drains. And even current system is struggling to employ millions of STEM graduates. PRC doesn't need immigration, just clamp down on top level brain drain and setup foreign worker program to take care of the aging - plenty of cheap ASEAN labour. Bonus side effect of less people = more self sufficiency and freedom to conduct assertive foreign policy. There's few upsides to maintaining and trying to increase living standards of 1.4B people with PRC resources.
That's the correct answer. I never cease to be astounded that so many people don't seem to grasp that you can increase output per capita, productivity per capita, as the population contracts.
The focus should be on improving the quality of life of the people, not on expanding the economy in absolute terms.
China would be better off with 1/2 the people at the same GDP (ie ~700m people at ~$24,000 per capita GDP).
Population contraction is desirable in many cases, so long as you can continue to increase productivity per capita. China has a long ways to go yet in terms of potential to raise their per capita economic output, if they're willing to pair that with a contracting population. And the lightening (from depopulation) on their resource needs is a huge help, it makes their situation so much easier.
As the population ages, will older people be able to retire? In that case their productivity transforms to a negative, needing to be supported by the remaining workers.
China's output per capita is so mediocre (~$12k GDP per capita) there is a lot of room to outrun the worker contraction and retirement context. Although I'm skeptical their increasingly rigid economy, courtesy of Xi transporting them back in time to a worse system of stricter command & control (vs a more liberalized approach), will be capable of it.
Their productivity doesn't transform into a negative. To deal with more aged persons, they need to bolster output and taxation on that output, such that society builds a social safety net for the retired. China has room for increased taxation on various aspects of wealth and income in their nation (their wealth has ballooned massively in the last 10-20 years obviously), along with higher personal income tax rates in general.
Increasing productivity and automation frees labor to be devoted to other things that society needs. For example their farming system is very ineffecient, they have far too many people working in farming producing far too little (compare it to the US, South Korea or Japan). If you bring that up to where it should be, some of that labor becomes available to take care of the elderly, paid for via taxes. Now apply that to everything else in China that still needs modernized, made more efficient, automated.
This very much depends on the ratio of retirees to workers.
Also automation may not play out so well for Chinese production, as it's more sensible for other nations to bring automated manufacturing onshore for a combination of reasons including reduced transport, supply chain certainty, stabler internal economics. Onshoring automated manufacturing could still use a significant amount of international remote labour, but the hosting country would capture more of the taxation from the manufacturing, which you mention as going to pay for the Chinese retirees.
There are quite a lot of people who try to immigrate to China. If China opened up, they wouldn't have a shortage of immigrants. There are immigrant communities from all over already there.
China is dealing with their one child policy, they have put the cap at 3 children iirc currently, and are also making policies against things like abortion and divorce. Which may not be the correct move, but I do see more laws incentivizing children coming.
There are 1.4 billion people in China, and ~1 million immigrants pre pandemic. The number of new migrants required would be astronomical in a country already struggling with food and energy insecurity.
It takes 20 years to make a 20 year old consumer while the rest of the population ages 20 years.
Seems a bit optimistic and wishy washy to say the least.
> The number of new migrants required would be astronomical in a country already struggling with food and energy insecurity.
Interesting. You could be referring to several European countries, including the UK.
Also interesting: the Plague was largely responsible for the ending of serfdom, by greatly increasing the bargaining-power of peasants. I have wondered whether COVID might eventually precipitate similar tectonic social changes.
It's simple. 90% of people feeing know English to at least some extent, but almost no one know Chinese.
Also regardless of what Russian regime propoganda trying to sell we all grown on western culture and want to live in western world. People who wanted to live in Asia moved to Thailand / Vietnam / Bali long ago.
Considering that Europe/Japan haven't completely collapsed it is a solvable problem. Increasing automation, moving people away from agriculture an d moving low value labour intensive work to South East Asia and Africa are obvious steps.
Those of you who seem to think a nation has to grow populations indefinitely or fail, what is the long term end game in your mind? Hope that your nation wins the inevitable global resource war?
As someone who doesn't care about the markets, I see sudden/sharp price increases for food, fuel, gas, wood, metals, paint, and a few other things. A real mess.
Come August when Xi will take an unusual 3rd term he was supposed to be celebrating the advantages of their form of government in dealing with covid. Instead he may be dealing with a persistent covid battle or worse an overflowing healthcare system while the rest of the world has moved on.
For giggles, the US should organize an unprecedented NBA post-covid celebration all-star thing with packed stadiums a week before the congress.
It's a bit more than an unusual 3rd term. He pretty much declared himself a dictator for life last time with the alteration of the constitution. I guess it's just my opinion, but I doubt any dictator for life is going to let go of that status regardless of any party politics. He already disapeared most of his opposition last time. The facts that he's bad for China will have no influence on his dictorial control this time. That's what being a dictator is all about.
I of course might be wrong, but it seems Taiwan will not be invaded until the TSMC/UMC is no longer dominating the global supply of semiconductors. The rules changed for Hong Kong, for example, because it went from being 15% of China GDP in 2000 to <2.5% today.
Luckily, due to the structure of the CCP, even Xi won’t be able to unilaterally do it alone. If it happens, it will have to be the will of the CCP as a whole (basically, Xi + 6 other high ranking members)
Why are people still saying this? This statistic has been unmasked to be quite useless and only used for fear mongering so politicians/bureaucrats can cling to their emergency powers.
These “Thousands of deaths” are where the deceased happened to also test positive for COVID. Most of the deaths were people who were already very sick and likely not caused by COVID.
If you just look at excess deaths, thousands still seems correct. The Economist doesn't have recent numbers (I'm sure they are lower), but their last numbers showed ~16k excess deaths in a week.
Recency of numbers is very important here. Due to the contagiousness of Omicron, new cases seems to have ramped up very quickly, and dissipated very quickly as well.
How many of these are due to suicide? Failing heath due to lack of socialization? Inability to get exercise? Poor diet? Depression?
We’re now so far past thinking the cost of the pointless lockdowns was worth the benefit.
Luckily, those who used COVID to seize power now have only a few easily influenced and perpetually fearful people still willing to cede control of their lives.
I'm extremely critical of how governments have handled the pandemic, but I don't think underplaying the deadliness of Covid is the best position to make that case.
Utah barely locked down, has their kids in school, no mask requirements but has also one of the lowest death rates in the country.
A lot of southern states had the same policy, but have some of the highest death rates in the country. [1]
Utah is also one of the youngest and fittest states in the country while Mississippi (#1 for deaths per capita) is consistently ranked one of the most obese[2]. As far as I'm concerned, Covid should be encouraging the US to talk about their longest lasting health crisis - an obesity epidemic, but for some reason that hasn't materialized.
> Why are people still saying this? This statistic has been unmasked to be quite useless and only used for fear mongering so politicians/bureaucrats can cling to their emergency powers.
Maybe it's fine for you guys that the a part of the population get eliminated because they are not strong enough against a disaster and "they are going to die anyway"...
But no, thank you. That's not the place/mindset I'd like to live in.
Good luck, and stay safe.
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Edit.
Just think of it.
Say Bob is a programmer so addicted to coding. He code and code, day and night, ignored necessary exercises, skipping meals, drinking too much soda.
And then omicron hit and he didn't make it.
"He deserves it" you say? Why should not him get another chance to pull out of the rushing sessions and get better at taking care of himself?
Vaccinations don't have to be forced. I wasn't forced to get mine, I got it because I'm not an idiot.
Children are vaccinated all over the world every day for multiple different diseases.
Are boosters required for ever? What's your research on this? Where did you get your time machine?
Again the use of forever, masks and social distancing become nice to have options for people but after vaccination these are guidelines rather than mandates.
Dropping in my area, but still plenty of deaths attributed to it. Citation needed. Regardless of the deaths, there are more disabling side effects than you can shake a stick at.
With the major outbreak in COVID-19 in China right now, I think there will be massive lockdowns coming. That bodes poorly for the economic outlook for that country. It is truly incredible they are still locking down for a disease that, when vaccinated for, is far less deadly or harmful than the flu.
Damn, I honestly didn't expect to read about this first on HN, you are indeed right, almost everyone seems fixated on the war (for understandable reasons, I would say).
I remember posting on this forum 2+ years ago about the Chinese authorities locking down Tianjin and potentially Guangzhou/Shenzen in the South (in early February 2020, I think), I remember a HN-er from Shenzen telling me that things were just fine there. Time does fly fast.
It's very worrying, the footages coming out of Shanghai reminds me a lot of that, and I recall that's when we had huge outbreaks that lead to the March 2020 financial dip.
We are seeing a huge rise in covid detected in wastewater in SV offices who have more people returning to office now that the pandemic is suddenly over.
Even more worrying is this war causing myopia. All of our attention is glued to Ukraine and we are completely discounting the risk. This is chaos.
It’s interesting how the totalitarian crackdown worked so well for the first two years but now the dirty free societies have everyone immunized by infections. As for China - I’m not sure they can crack down on omnicron as well since it’s so much more infectious and they can’t afford anymore economic shutdowns. Hong Kong already seems to have given up and following the rest of the world
Not really, for example we had people dying in droves last winter in Italy, the numbers this time were much lower, even with less harsh measures, and the expectation is the I'll be lower still going forward.
That's not true. We have vaccines now, that's the only solution, lockdowns were necessary until we had vaccines. We can't be expected to stay in lockdown for ever, covid will not go away, the best weapon we have is vaccination and a level of personal responsibility to stay home if you are ill (doesn't help with asymptomatic transmission). We didn't stop caring, we just aren't going to sit in our houses for another few years for no appreciable benefit.
Omicron is a lot less lethal then vanilla covid, thats just a reality. We started the pandemic with the threat of every 10th infected needing supplementary oxygen and the number of patients needing hospitalization went down with every mutation. By now the risk is a lot closer to the flu. You could of course say every death is one too many, but thats not the reality we live in. We do accept quite a lot of deaths as a cost of our daily life. And measures curbing the spread arent free either, they come with a death toll itself. So unless i am missing something here i am calling double standard.
% of severe cases even after vax is enough to overwhelm PRC medical system, especially in less developed regions, leading to potentially millions of death considering size PRC population and gen pop lack of exposure. Covid-zero is still preferable if it can be maintained, vaccines (including mRNA) have completely failed to contain spread of omicron, which doesn't leave many options except waiting for an even less deadly variant + mass produce and distribute treatment drugs to take pressure off medical system.
I'm guessing this is omicron catching up / experimenting with dynamic-zero now that Two Sessions is over.
I feel bad for China. China has done everything in its power to stop COVID only the rest of the world to drop the ball. China has been blamed for origin of COVID even though WHO investigations found that COVID didn't originate in China. It's like China is in no-win situation, despite doing the right thing, because of propaganda spread by racist right wing politicians.
What WHO investigation said it didn't originate in China?
China have not allowed a proper investigation to take place i.e by people from outside of China. China originally tried to cover up the extent of the problem so I don't trust China to investigate China.
China dropped the ball here, there is no reason they aren't in the same stage as the rest of the world, other than their own decisions. As an autocratic state they can lock down apartment blocks and just stop people moving around and people can't do anything about it. It has ended up being the reason they still need to lockdown now.
American Saber Rattling, greatly overestimating China’s dependence on the West. $128B/yr investment can easily be secured from Russia. And what? The West is going to stop buying Chinese finished good and make their own? LOL
$128bn a year investment from Russia? That's a lot of roubles and the number of roubles required will only go up. Russia are going to need every penny they have to rebuild the army that is currently being pummeled.
You're claiming a country with the GDP of Italy can replace the entire west. While they are already spending 6% on military and everyone can see how that turned out...
