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Irving Fisher's unfortunate prediction from 1929 is a bit overquoted these days, but there you go: "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plat

Irving Fisher's unfortunate prediction from 1929 is a bit overquoted these days, but there you go: "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." My point is, economies have cycles and China won't be able to avoid its fate either. I don't know if it's going to happen tomorrow or in 20 years but I'm sure as hell that it is going to happen. The important question is not whether it is going to happen but if they're going to be able to recover from it eventually and honestly, I'm not sure if their opaque economic/political/social system will help them. In my view one of the reasons behind the West's wealth is that it always managed to recover eventually after economic / social meltdowns, one way or other. I'm no economist though, these are only my deductions based on my understanding of human history.

jacquesm 17y ago
Predicting the long term future of the markets is like being a dowser, there is always water, you just have to dig a little deeper. If you are wrong, wait a little longer and voila, now you are right. Anybody can predict the long term fall of any economic system, but the only interesting question when it comes to stuff like this is what it is going to do on the next trading day and there are companies that have spent small fortunes and that are not much closer to answering that than they were when they started out. 'The Oracle' or 'The Golden Hand' is the goal of every investor, and if anybody ever would figure out how to do that and play the market long enough they would find that market changing to the point that it no longer worked. China does not have much experience in this field so far, the people in power are scared to death (sometimes literally) of what would happen if the general population managed to get enough power to rise up against them. How China will respond to their (inevitable, in the longer term) economic crashes remains to be seen. So far the accent seems to be (even in relatively good times) on the control of the flow of information, which according to a German theorist in world war II was the means to controlling the people. It proved to be mostly right. But in this day and age it is not so simple to control the flow of information. If China would be covered by a mesh wireless network then no single firewall is going to stop people from communicating. In the former eastblock this was done slowly by Samizdat press, today that would probably be encrypted communications on wifi. What will happen once those final barriers dissolve is anybodies guess, but that could be quite a while off. Technically speaking the means have been in place since '95 or so, from what we can see that has not caused major upheavals. (the same goes for Iran, last year, in spite of a strong effort at it) So I'm thinking that the same rules that apply to our society apply to the Chinese one, as long as the economy isn't doing too bad the people in power will be given more time, if there ever would be a major famine due to crop failure or some other 'act of God' then you can expect all kinds of trouble.

jacquesm 17y ago

Predicting the long term future of the markets is like being a dowser, there is always water, you just have to dig a little deeper. If you are wrong, wait a little longer and voila, now you are right. Anybody can predict the long term fall of any economic system, but the only interesting question when it comes to stuff like this is what it is going to do on the next trading day and there are companies that have spent small fortunes and that are not much closer to answering that than they were when they started out. 'The Oracle' or 'The Golden Hand' is the goal of every investor, and if anybody ever would figure out how to do that and play the market long enough they would find that market changing to the point that it no longer worked. China does not have much experience in this field so far, the people in power are scared to death (sometimes literally) of what would happen if the general population managed to get enough power to rise up against them. How China will respond to their (inevitable, in the longer term) economic crashes remains to be seen. So far the accent seems to be (even in relatively good times) on the control of the flow of information, which according to a German theorist in world war II was the means to controlling the people. It proved to be mostly right. But in this day and age it is not so simple to control the flow of information. If China would be covered by a mesh wireless network then no single firewall is going to stop people from communicating. In the former eastblock this was done slowly by Samizdat press, today that would probably be encrypted communications on wifi. What will happen once those final barriers dissolve is anybodies guess, but that could be quite a while off. Technically speaking the means have been in place since '95 or so, from what we can see that has not caused major upheavals. (the same goes for Iran, last year, in spite of a strong effort at it) So I'm thinking that the same rules that apply to our society apply to the Chinese one, as long as the economy isn't doing too bad the people in power will be given more time, if there ever would be a major famine due to crop failure or some other 'act of God' then you can expect all kinds of trouble.