Even with this "concession" or whatever the neighbour will be getting more limited and volatile access to my gunpoweder than he did like 8 months ago, when he still wanted to shoot me but before he started a economic attack theater that has and will hurt me less than it will him.

Trump wants to play tit for tat symbolic theater. China just cares about economic development. So long as people fixate on tit for tat scorekeeping they’ll continue to confuse themselves when China “loses” trade fights while gaining more economic dominance. Whether the US makes concessions or not is pretty irrelevant these days. There’s nothing China really needs from the US unless the US is willing to walk back export restrictions that China has already been working around for 6 years. If the US doesnt "conceed" in measures 50% tarrifs that hurt china but hurt the US more then who cares . How much someone will remember this moment as a big deal a year or five from now will be indicative if this changes anything in the relative balance of things. And no one will because it doesnt matter

Like, what concessions did he extract. The rare earth trade and access situation for US importers is still worse and much more volatile than it was 6/7 months ago even if this 6 months loosening takes place and actualy amounts to difference given the beuracratic export lisencing checks already in place. And i thought everyone agreed tarrifs were bad for the US economy more so.

Maybe im naive but the Trump administration, despite being staffed to the brim with insane China hawks, folding on its "anti-china economic warfare" before even starting it can be spinned into a more optimistic view on the prospects of hot US-China war. The murikans dont seem to have it in them. With the first sign of things getting tough, the US folded like a cheap tent. Just the prospect of things going to shit was enough. No prices have increased, nobody lost their job, nobody has been deprived of anything real. Some numbers on screens went up or down and the powers that be forced Trump’s hand. Even if instead of chaotic and incompetent it was some calculated and competent plan for a US-China clash, at some point most of these pressures and prospects would have arisen all the same and at the end of the day it wouldnt have much better chances to win against China. Will they really decide to destroy everything in a nuclear holocaust when the decision for a hot war is there when they couldnt even let the bond market freak out for more than 5 days ? Just as them losing the trade war (or at least not having the capacity to execute it without country breaking consequences) became obvious within days, the fact that they would lose any war close to China shores in 2028 or whenever will also sink in. Especially with the trajectory of both countries. It may still be possible to sustain that delusion in the big 2025 and rig war games to barely tie the engagement but its rapidly becoming less possible, especially after this whole debacle conlcudes

Since as far as i can tell China is still not selling UST and is holding it for the right momment, what if the chinese "plan" if all this continues is to wait as other UST holders keep this yield pressure on the bond market (since this situation continues pressuring asian-euro UST holding hedgefounds and BoJ given their currency and monetary state) then once the Fed is forced to do QE, China dumbs and exits USD. Inflation & rates would explode/ USD would devalue. US may not pay up or impose capital controls, but that means USD will lose GRC status

There were some 5d chess asumptions that a reason for Trump to purposely crash the markets is to be able to refinance the dept that matures in the next months (an immense amount, like 30% of total) with lower rates. But the 10 year yields have actualy been going up through the last week (rumors are that China dumped like 50 Billion in Treasuries, partly to resist pressure to depreciate the Yuan, partly to raise free cash for whatever stimulus they have coming up or to buy gold , partly because they see the writing of the wall for actual decoupling seeing Trump's teams moves and maybe to actualy fuck Trump over) and of course the enviroment created by Tarrifs aint very conductive to that plan. Trump may be yelling that Powell has to cut rates but with these numbers its not immediately likely either. If Tarrifs stand and If the market crashes then China can continue and time its dumping to force Trump to use higher rate debt to replace lower rate debt or inflation shocks. Yeah i know MMT and printing and stuff and of course this scheme will go on for a bit and the US cannot default or anything but there are large negative consequences, political and economical, for marching on with much worse dept terms, especially in this global enviroment

Just the BYD Zhengzhou Gigafactory, currently under expansion, compared to the biggest Tesla factory. It actualy can fit every single Tesla factory in it with room to spare. Its already like, a third of the size of Manhattan. The plant 70k workers in 2024.

An angle from the ground, dont know from when. Bunch of wind turbines on the background tho.

A video of the immense construction going on for the expansion as well

While Russia-China trade reached a record US$240 billion (A$360 billion) in 2023, it has slowed so far this year

1. Russia-China trade absolutely exploded in 2021-2023. Some plateauing is expected considering Russian domestic consumption and non military manufacturing arent too conductive for huge trade growth and Chinese EV and renewables craze reduces their needs for foreign energy imputs, much of which came and comes from Russia.
2. China seems to have started using the STANs as middle men in some of their trade with Russia to circumvent some sanctions. Europe jumped to it early on but China basicaly ignored it for the first 2 years of the war and traded with Russia like nothing happened. But over the last 4-5 months the YoY export growth to Kazakhstan, Kyrgizstan, Armenia, Ajerbaijan etc has been >35%. With some months hitting 80-100% for some of these countries. Its fishy as shit and its obvious that a lot of it is trade with Russia

As for the rest of the comment this seems like half baked Pekingology to me. Psychoanalysing Xi's tone and word choice. Finding some lib professors and analysts from Shanghai saying their own shit and doing the "they werent cencored by the ever cencoring no freeze peach 1984 CCP so that indicates a change in attitude state wide". Like, there are probably hundreds of thousands of west loving libs both in the CPC and in chinese univercities and commentators, there are thousands of talks, forums and articles every week across China and China always had reasonable tolerance for these people saying their minds no matter the actual shifts and trends in domestic and foreign policy. We all know these things. Gathering 5, 10 or even 50 quotes from them to make any point isnt too hard. Im 100% sure they could have written the same article last year, and the year before. Hell im sure someone else did.

Weird for someone as knowledgable as you to continue posting low quality stuff like this along with "ohhhh its so over" commentary. On your 4th account in 5 months no less

Fun fact: The chinese province of Guangdong alone has more active factories than the number of total cruise missiles ever built by the US since 1980. Roughly by about an order of magnitude.

Just something to think about and laught when you see Americans jerking off to war with China and the mighty american military superiority

Funny to remember how widespread making fun of the "Soviet Gerontocracy" was in the 70s and 80s in western media and politics. This is so so so much worse. Suslov, Brezhnev and Chernenko at their worst and most decrepit state were monsters of vitality and intellect compared to what we are seeing from Amerikkka these days.

You can put renal failure induced encephalopathy Andropov on the debate stage 5 minutes before he died and Biden would still seem barely sentient comperatively

One of the major disconnects between China’s financial class and the central govt right now is that the former got the message that the govt would protect them from the side effects of the controlled demolition of the real estate bubble through a surge of state financial support. They think that just because Xi wants to shift the financial system toward a more developed equities and bonds market to cover the finances of local governments that they would be the recipients of that restructuring and that measure for progress should be how quickly the govt directly pumps liquidity in their direction.

The chinese financial class thought that they could win the govt’s efforts to pivot the financial system because they believed the govt would have to bail them out with fresh credit injections while RE finance was dismantled. That the CPC was line brained enough that they wouldnt do anything too disruptive that would kill vibes for the stock market while also leavung them unprotected. And that fantasy being jilted is at the root of prevailing anger toward the govt. Every rich chinese's financial positions were built around real estate bets with those RE bets backing their equities portfolios, and since real estate based assets are getting repriced downward across the board in the correction they are becoming the main losers from multiple angles. They saw themselves as indispensable actors who the govt could not deny needing in this pivotal moment. What they forgot is the govt is engineering this transition for a future economy. And not for those who’ve already made enough money to gamble on stocks or speculate on real estate beyond owning the house they reside in. The hard reality for the financial class is the Chinese govt does not in fact consider incumbent financial actors as indispensable or in any way the focus group towards which future growth and prosperity will be directed towards. And since the whole restructuring has many years to go still they have to accept that this is the way things are gonna be from now on. Its maybe only just begining and they arent offered a "well just become somewhat less rich and restricted for only a couple of years and then things will again go your way and you will have new opportunities to do the same thing you were doing before in maybe a different way" deal.

Seeing the once "empty" slogan of "paying lip service to the ghost of socialism" - now being so materialy present that is held "responsible for China's malaise" is a remarkable change, isn't it?

He does have one

Greece Weather report with hidden commie W

So right now the Thessaly erea (Center of Greece) is being hit with probably the heaviest rainfall in recent years in Europe. Already at 100-500mm in the last ~12 hours in large ereas and cities and it wiil probably rain ~1000mm in overall till Thursday, maybe even more in places. Naturaly things have started to get fucked up and floods have hit the second largest city in the erea (Volos, 80k population). No one can do anything against such rainfall, its not the politicians fault right?

Well the largest city in the erea is Larisa (200k population) , and it is situated basicaly in a hole and bellow sea level and with a major river going through it. Seems like an apocalypse ready to happen. But it wont. Larisa had regural floods at every other downpour and river surge but it also had a communist mayor from 1980 to 1994. Former ELAS captain, imprisoned tortured and exiled for decades and all. Aristidis Lambroulis. He got his hand on any European and state found he could find, brought over Soviet engineers and technicians and basicaly dug up most of the city for years instaling the largest stormwater drainage system in Greece and also split and redirected the river bed inside the city to decrease volume and make flooding less likely. And Larisa hasnt flooded since and is unbothered even by the heaviest rains. Now this one will be a real test and historicaly big but still. It will pull through thanks to the legacy and struggle of a communist administration