Archive for 2020

July 16, 2020

FROM THE AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE: China’s global investment vanishes under Covid-19. That’s the title of the study.

A key point:

As expected given COVID-19, China’s construction and, especially, investment around the world plunged in the first half of 2020. The decline may be exaggerated by Chinese firms not wanting to report global activity, but Beijing’s happy numbers are not credible.

Another:

The data show decline in the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) global activity predates the pandemic. Activity peaked in 2016–17. The peak was an unsustainable drain on China’s foreign currency reserves, and Beijing belatedly tightened controls on capital outflow.2 A second blow, starting in 2018, stemmed from growing foreign doubts about benefits of Chinese investment.3 This trend is evident in both CGIT and government numbers.

The CGIT stands for China Global Investment Tracker, an analytic tool used by the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation.

A slice from the 12-page long pdf:

Beijing recognized in 2017 that it did not have the money to buy all it wanted. A foreign exchange squeeze has limited and will continue to limit China’s global investment and construction. Foreign currency holdings remain the highest in the world yet are also insecure. Reserves hit $4 trillion in spring 2014 but tested $3 trillion lows in early 2017 and have held steady near $3.1 trillion since (say official data). This is why tight controls on out-bound capital were imposed and remain in place. Foreign exchange is required because no one wants the RMB. Its share in global reserves is 2 percent, not far ahead of the Canadian dollar. A steady $3 trillion is more than enough to cover basic import needs, but not enough for constant acquisitions in developed economies and engineering projects in more than 140 developing economies. Over the past few years, Beijing’s choice about where to concentrate its reduced resources was preempted by first the US and then other rich countries. Most of the developed world has become more hostile to Chinese enterprises, a hostility the COVID-19 outbreak is almost certain to intensify.

Economic push back — and so richly deserved.

RELATED: When the Chinese Communist Party declared war on international order. (bumped)

Posted at 2:28 pm by Austin Bay on Jul 16th, 2020

CHANGE: Amazon extends work from home order until January 8. “It comes after Amazon in May said employees who could do their jobs remotely are permitted to do so until at least Oct. 2.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if most of those “temporary” work-from-home positions become permanent.

Posted at 1:56 pm by Stephen Green on Jul 16th, 2020

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO EPISTEMIC CLOSURE:

The resignations of New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss and New York Magazine writer Andrew Sullivan effectively punctuated a week in which the center-left press went to war with itself over the notion that the atmosphere they’d cultivated might not be the most conducive to free and open debate.

Both writers—centrist but heterodox insofar as they wrote for liberal publications while being sharply critical of the identitarian excesses and groupthink to which the left has succumbed—are frequent objects of abuse. Their views, which remain well represented within the Democratic coalition, are regularly anathematized by their “very online” colleagues in opinion journalism as “controversial,” “bigoted,” “racist” “reactionary”—even targets of the left’s “hate.” As Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo revealingly wrote, Weiss’s conventionally liberal “commentary often appeals to conservatives”—an unforgivable sin.

Criticism of their work bordered on (and regularly veered into) ad hominem. The suppression of their work within their institutions and the internal harassment to which they were subjected simply became too much. So, they will be taking their considerable talents elsewhere.

This mounting pile of dead canaries within the liberal coal mine has inspired not introspection but withering mockery and derision. You see, goes this response, there really is no such thing as “cancel culture.” These voices are free to go wherever they want, just so long as it’s somewhere they can be easily ignored.

There is a sickness settling over the center-left intellectual landscape. It is one the left could recognize when its symptoms were observed in their political rivals: the plague of “epistemic closure.” Bruce Bartlett described it as the condition in which an intellectual movement abstains from the necessary work of questioning itself. Rachel Maddow blamed the Republican Party’s 2012 losses on the “factual bubble” in which the conservative movement was cocooned. As the right’s more self-critical voices became “marginalized, even self-marginalizing,” Marc Armbinder observed, it would only settle deeper into a self-reinforcing feedback loop that would foreclose on the prospect of representing a majority constituency.

So, lefty projection on a massive scale, in other words.

Posted at 1:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Jul 16th, 2020

TODAY’S INSANITY WRAP: Vote-by-Mail Madness and the Riveting Body Cam Video You Can’t Miss. “Knife-wielding baddy — who had allegedly just stabbed a 77-year-old man at a convenience store — was pulled over on Tuesday by a Michigan sheriff’s deputy and told to drop the knife. Instead, he just kept coming at her.”

Posted at 1:32 pm by Stephen Green on Jul 16th, 2020
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