7 ms·

China's economic growth simply isn't sustainable, and that's even if it was true growth. There isn't a top economist alive who believes China's self-reported GD

China's economic growth simply isn't sustainable, and that's even if it was true growth. There isn't a top economist alive who believes China's self-reported GDP numbers aren't fudged in one way or another (source: http://www.businessinsider.com/economist-reactions-to-chinas-q3-gdp-results-2015-10?r=UK&IR=T http://www.businessinsider.com/economist-reactions-to-chinas...). Either one of those situations (an economic slowdown, China fudging the numbers, or the more likely situation: a combination of both) makes hedging against the Yuan a pretty solid bet. People and foolish investors think, "Well, China has more than a billion people so it will eventually have a robust and rich economy!" Only, it doesn't work like that (cue the "That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works" lady). Population size is only a tiny facet of a much larger picture. And it's not even a particularly important one, relatively speaking. There are some economists who are now starting to think that having a massive population size may have the opposite effect; it helps you reach a certain point but then your massive size begins to act as an anchor which keeps you from growing further.

memracom 11y ago
Last I looked, China was a big export economy. So the population size is irrelevant. Look elsewhere for indicators of China's future economic growth. And never forget, that big revolutionary wave of iPhones and iPads? It came from China manufacturers. In today's world, if you only look ahead, you will be blindsided from the rear. China is not China any more.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  Which markets in the world, besides the US, have a stable enough economy for China to rely on their consumption? Europe still has significant headwinds, Canada and the middle east...that's pretty obvious with $30/barrel oil prices, Russia of course not doing terribly great, capital flooding back to the US from Central and South America due to interest rates rising. Keep in mind, a lot of manufacturing is moving back to the US from China with automation being cheeper than (quickly rising) Chinese labor rates [1] [2] [3]. If China cannot stoke internal demand quickly enough (and I assure you, it cannot), it's going to slide into a deep recession. On the bright side, this is going to help cool off London, Toronto, Vancouver, SF/LA, Miami, and central Texas property markets (where a lot of Chinese money was flowing into). [1] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-flips-the-script-on-jobs-reshoring-finally-outpaced-offshoring-in-2014-2015-05-01 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-flips-the-script-on-jobs... [2] http://news.yahoo.com/manufacturing-moving-china-us-survey-065217238--finance.html http://news.yahoo.com/manufacturing-moving-china-us-survey-0... [3] http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21569570-growing-number-american-companies-are-moving-their-manufacturing-back-united http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21569570-growin...
  - meric 11y ago
    China has been conjuring demand for concrete buildings for 7 years. IMO "stoking internal demand" is harmful to the economy. There's always demand for what people really want. Clean air, comfortable, affordable, living spaces with readily access to transportation to quickly travel to where other people are, good food, etc. But then again, China can't step back from the current structure of the economy without risking collapse, which would endanger the Party's power.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - edwinnathaniel 11y ago
    > On the bright side, this is going to help cool off London, Toronto, Vancouver, SF/LA, Miami, and central Texas property markets (where a lot of Chinese money was flowing into). I really really really really really hope so but man... I don't know... the Mainlanders have waayy too much money and the existing owners of multiple properties won't let the properties go anyway so we may have a stagnant period (good) for a while until either China gets better or... well, I hope the market goes down a bit :D.
- khuey 11y ago
  You do realize that Apple is one making the realy money from iPhones and iPads, not the contract manufacturers, right?
  - gscott 11y ago
    This is not exactly true the contract manufacturers are being paid to learn to make their own phones and they are. http://www.wsj.com/articles/foxconn-aims-to-fashion-its-own-brands-1403907564 http://www.wsj.com/articles/foxconn-aims-to-fashion-its-own-...
    - rhizome 11y ago
      Now all they need is a billion dollar marketing department.
      - 1stop 11y ago
        It's called Huawei, or Xiaomi.
        adventured 11y ago
        Xiaomi isn't doing very well these days. Their growth fell off a cliff last year, and is very unlikely to recover to the brief glory days. The smartphone market is going to grow extremely slow from here forward. Xiaomi will end up as just another irrelevant smartphone maker, in a heap of dozens of them like HTC or Motorola. http://fortune.com/2016/01/15/xiaomi-smartphone-sales-fall-short/ http://fortune.com/2016/01/15/xiaomi-smartphone-sales-fall-s...
        gscott 11y ago
        The Chinese are definitely focused on markets with new growing cellphone adoption rather then the US where it is hyper competitive. I don't believe their success here is an indicator of there overall wellbeing.
      - deleted 11y ago
ken47 11y ago
I would shy away from the word "fudged," but almost every country's gdp numbers are the result of subjective interpretation.
- aminorex 11y ago
  China is an exceptional case. It has a long tradition that way.
  - neximo4 11y ago
    Recently someone at Davos asked a PRC rep about this and he mentioned the number is close but is often different due to smoothening. He did mention it is close and showed that tax revenues grew quite close to the GDP rate. This is something that does not typically happen when GDP decreases or is far off from the actual numbers.
    - simonh 11y ago
      There are many economic indicators that correlate to GDP growth, but are also influenced by other factors and so the strength of the correlation can be strong or weak at any given time. This means at any given moment you can probably pick or chose one or more other indicators to back up any particular contention about GDP, but that doesn't really prove anything. To get a good picture you need to look at a wide variety of indicators. If the vast majority of them indicate the GDP growth measure is wrong, then even if a few of them back it up it's still likely that the growth measure is being fiddled.
      - neximo4 11y ago
        There are many but wouldn't you agree tax revenues are a rather hard indicator to fudge if GDP decreases? Tax revenues are very well correlated to GDP, in downturns too. 6% is also a rather large increase YoY for the Chinese MoF's tax receipts. It is difficult to make hard cash of such a large number up. I think what has happened is China actually grew faster than the claimed 7-9% in the past decade and now the amount is smoothened to reflect this I've always noticed a sway on HN to downplay China's growth, given the large American audience this is quite expected. But it is good to be impartial to understand the changes a bit better.
tim333 11y ago
>China's economic growth simply isn't sustainable, and that's even if it was true growth People have been naysaying China for a while but it's kept merrily growing. Mostly it's because the Chinese tend culturally to be pro education and hard working but in China were reduced to very low incomes by Mao's communism and have since been recovering and getting back towards the kind of economy they have in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and the like. GDP per capita in China is $6,800 (up from $951 in 2000) against $32k in Taiwan and $55k in Singapore so there's a way to go. A housing crash will probably just be a blip for a while. They'd have to turn back to Mao to really muck things up.
- hackuser 11y ago
  > People have been naysaying China for a while but it's kept merrily growing. That's characteristic of both bubbles and genuine exceptional performance, and in many situations in addition to national economies. Look at rapidly growing startups, for example.
  - tim333 11y ago
    I think China has both bubbles and genuine exceptional performance. The property market there is pretty bubbly. And I don't know if you'd even call the stock market thing a bubble when it was deliberate government hyping.
- mooreds 11y ago
  China recently and Japan from 1960-1990 took very similar paths to prosperity: Click on the max timeframe for the first charts below to see the similar growth curves: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp http://www.tradingeconomics.com/china/gdp http://www.tradingeconomics.com/china/gdp
  - tim333 11y ago
    I think Japan stopped growing rapidly partly because they'd caught up with the west and couldn't keep transforming by copying more developed countries. I don't think China's there yet. Maybe if their gdp/capita goes from $6.8k (China) to $39k (Japan) that will be the case but there's a way to go.
maxthegeek1 11y ago
Any nation with a large rural population with access to easy credit has the potential for massive growth. The majority of China's population still consists of subsistence farmers. China should be able to maintain rapid growth until those farmers are integrated into a modern industrialized economy at which point the returns on investment will start to diminish like it has for every other industrialized nation.
- adventured 11y ago
  China can't integrate those farmers, there are no jobs for them. And that's before China has to lay off tens of millions of industrial workers they no longer need, and that's before robotics completely decimates low-value manufacturing. Those subsistence farmers are kept that way because there's nothing else for them to do and there never will be. China can't allow the productivity of their farming to rise - it's among the lowest on earth - because of the social chaos that would occur. Unless you can find another three to four billion global consumers equal to your typical US or European consumer, such that China can then employ 450 million more people in jobs.
fspeech 11y ago
It is not necessarily about the sustainability of the Chinese economy. No matter how much capital the hedge funds can muster it will be puny compared to PBoC resources. The real threat to the yuan is if regular Chinese become convinced of the trade. Hedge funds bet against the yuan because right now it is one-sided: meaning they don't need to worry about short squeezes as typical shorters would have to. If yuan were to sharply rise it is pretty certain that PBoC would intervene. This makes the bet against the yuan relatively safe. The only way the PBoC can stop the shorts is to make borrowing cost high. But it is also trying to make the yuan more widely used so it is loathe to do that as well over any extended time.
- neximo4 11y ago
  > No matter how much capital the hedge funds can muster it will be puny compared to PBoC resources This is incorrect. Hedge funds borrow and create temporary money by writing derivative contracts such as options, futures & swaps. It is by this logic they can actually muster more funds than the PBOC in aggregate. Quite simply the market for currencies is bigger than the PBOC and the hedge funds, but there are more hedge funds that are richer than the 3T in reserves the PBOC has access to. This is partly why the PBOC uses the overnight rate to limit resources (such as to affect the interest rate of the derivatives instead of the Yuan prices they bear). It would be possible to profit by arbitraging the interest rate so this would make using derivatives expensive too. Of course affecting interest rates affects the entire economy as a whole and is unsustainable.
  - fspeech 11y ago
    There is relative little rmb outside the country. Not everyone can just go inside China and borrow yuan and buy USD. If you are talking about non deliverables, who will be your counter party if everyone wants to go short?
    - neximo4 11y ago
      > There is relative little rmb outside the country. There doesn't need to be any, so long as the counter currency exists (the USD, EUR, JPY, etc) there can be a control against the onshore yuan, whether it trades or not. There is always a counter party, It can be created using swaps to other currencies and to other companies actual cash flows. I wouldn't want to argue against this topic excessively because its a fairly clear cut case of 'this time its different' with China, primarily through marketing. I'd point out that on previous occasions in history, the gold & silver pegs, various cross currency pegs. It has always been the case the price setter has assumed they were bigger than the market and it has always turned out the opposite. It is also because the market can stand the test of time. This combined with today's use of leverage & derivatives is an even more dangerous combination. Markets always assume the correct rate, because if not there is something that can be profited from. None of what I say precipitates bias, I'm not against China's rise. I even believe the GDP numbers out of China, as I mention in another comment on this page. This is just the basis of how markets work. The predicate of your assumption is the PBOC is bigger than the market for Yuan trade and this is incorrect. In something as liquid as a currency a counter party will always be available.
legulere 11y ago
Printing tons of US Dollars to finance an enormous deficit in the balance of trade [1] seems way more unsustainable to me. The only reason it has been holding up until now is actually the US Dollar reserves of China [2]. [1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Handelsbilanzen_Deutschland%2C_Japan%2C_USA%2C_Vereinigtes_Königreich.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Handelsb... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_reserves_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_reserves_of_C...
- simonh 11y ago
  Reserves which fell by half a billion dollars last year, and still falling. This is why the funds are betting against the Yuan. How far is China willing to see it's reserves fall before it blinks? http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-foreign-exchange-reserves-fall-107-92-billion-in-december-1452161583 http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-foreign-exchange-reserves...
  - dingo_bat 11y ago
    Did you mean half a Trillion and not Billion? Because it seems to me that China has $1.5 trillion+ reserves, and half a billion drop would not be cause for surprise.
    - simonh 11y ago
      Oops yes Trillion, not Billion thanks. Too late to edit.
    - dragandj 11y ago
      He probably means "european billion". In French and other European languages, milliard is a billion and bilion is a trillion.
vox_mollis 11y ago
There isn't a top economist alive who believes China's self-reported GDP numbers aren't fudged in one way or another Meta: Why is it SOP on HN to downvote/chastise those who claim US economic numbers are fabricated, or post zerohedge/shadowstats links, yet fully embrace the notion of the PRC is doing it? What makes the US so special in its sainthood?
- mahranch 11y ago
  > Why is it SOP on HN to downvote/chastise those who claim US economic numbers are fabricated, or post zerohedge/shadowstats links, yet fully embrace the notion of the PRC is doing it? Because even if the U.S was doing it, it would be minor fudging. If China is doing it, it's almost wholly fabricated and un-reflective of reality. The U.S has plenty of independent verification of its numbers, and tons of channels for oversight. China literally has no oversight. Their government is the end-all, be-all. The alpha and omega. They don't have any oversight whatsoever. Their government runs the media (that's not an exaggeration, they literally own the news agencies) as well, so you don't get for-profit news organizations who would love nothing more than an economic controversy of that scale to come out so they could report on it and make loads of cash. Basically, the entire premise is silly if you just use a little critical thinking.

memracom 11y ago

Last I looked, China was a big export economy. So the population size is irrelevant. Look elsewhere for indicators of China's future economic growth. And never forget, that big revolutionary wave of iPhones and iPads? It came from China manufacturers. In today's world, if you only look ahead, you will be blindsided from the rear. China is not China any more.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
Which markets in the world, besides the US, have a stable enough economy for China to rely on their consumption? Europe still has significant headwinds, Canada and the middle east...that's pretty obvious with $30/barrel oil prices, Russia of course not doing terribly great, capital flooding back to the US from Central and South America due to interest rates rising. Keep in mind, a lot of manufacturing is moving back to the US from China with automation being cheeper than (quickly rising) Chinese labor rates [1] [2] [3]. If China cannot stoke internal demand quickly enough (and I assure you, it cannot), it's going to slide into a deep recession. On the bright side, this is going to help cool off London, Toronto, Vancouver, SF/LA, Miami, and central Texas property markets (where a lot of Chinese money was flowing into). [1] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-flips-the-script-on-jobs-reshoring-finally-outpaced-offshoring-in-2014-2015-05-01 http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-flips-the-script-on-jobs... [2] http://news.yahoo.com/manufacturing-moving-china-us-survey-065217238--finance.html http://news.yahoo.com/manufacturing-moving-china-us-survey-0... [3] http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21569570-growing-number-american-companies-are-moving-their-manufacturing-back-united http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21569570-growin...
- meric 11y ago
  China has been conjuring demand for concrete buildings for 7 years. IMO "stoking internal demand" is harmful to the economy. There's always demand for what people really want. Clean air, comfortable, affordable, living spaces with readily access to transportation to quickly travel to where other people are, good food, etc. But then again, China can't step back from the current structure of the economy without risking collapse, which would endanger the Party's power.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- edwinnathaniel 11y ago
  > On the bright side, this is going to help cool off London, Toronto, Vancouver, SF/LA, Miami, and central Texas property markets (where a lot of Chinese money was flowing into). I really really really really really hope so but man... I don't know... the Mainlanders have waayy too much money and the existing owners of multiple properties won't let the properties go anyway so we may have a stagnant period (good) for a while until either China gets better or... well, I hope the market goes down a bit :D.
khuey 11y ago
You do realize that Apple is one making the realy money from iPhones and iPads, not the contract manufacturers, right?
- gscott 11y ago
  This is not exactly true the contract manufacturers are being paid to learn to make their own phones and they are. http://www.wsj.com/articles/foxconn-aims-to-fashion-its-own-brands-1403907564 http://www.wsj.com/articles/foxconn-aims-to-fashion-its-own-...
  - rhizome 11y ago
    Now all they need is a billion dollar marketing department.
    - 1stop 11y ago
      It's called Huawei, or Xiaomi.
      - adventured 11y ago
        Xiaomi isn't doing very well these days. Their growth fell off a cliff last year, and is very unlikely to recover to the brief glory days. The smartphone market is going to grow extremely slow from here forward. Xiaomi will end up as just another irrelevant smartphone maker, in a heap of dozens of them like HTC or Motorola. http://fortune.com/2016/01/15/xiaomi-smartphone-sales-fall-short/ http://fortune.com/2016/01/15/xiaomi-smartphone-sales-fall-s...
        gscott 11y ago
        The Chinese are definitely focused on markets with new growing cellphone adoption rather then the US where it is hyper competitive. I don't believe their success here is an indicator of there overall wellbeing.
    - deleted 11y ago

ken47 11y ago

I would shy away from the word "fudged," but almost every country's gdp numbers are the result of subjective interpretation.

aminorex 11y ago
China is an exceptional case. It has a long tradition that way.
- neximo4 11y ago
  Recently someone at Davos asked a PRC rep about this and he mentioned the number is close but is often different due to smoothening. He did mention it is close and showed that tax revenues grew quite close to the GDP rate. This is something that does not typically happen when GDP decreases or is far off from the actual numbers.
  - simonh 11y ago
    There are many economic indicators that correlate to GDP growth, but are also influenced by other factors and so the strength of the correlation can be strong or weak at any given time. This means at any given moment you can probably pick or chose one or more other indicators to back up any particular contention about GDP, but that doesn't really prove anything. To get a good picture you need to look at a wide variety of indicators. If the vast majority of them indicate the GDP growth measure is wrong, then even if a few of them back it up it's still likely that the growth measure is being fiddled.
    - neximo4 11y ago
      There are many but wouldn't you agree tax revenues are a rather hard indicator to fudge if GDP decreases? Tax revenues are very well correlated to GDP, in downturns too. 6% is also a rather large increase YoY for the Chinese MoF's tax receipts. It is difficult to make hard cash of such a large number up. I think what has happened is China actually grew faster than the claimed 7-9% in the past decade and now the amount is smoothened to reflect this I've always noticed a sway on HN to downplay China's growth, given the large American audience this is quite expected. But it is good to be impartial to understand the changes a bit better.

tim333 11y ago

>China's economic growth simply isn't sustainable, and that's even if it was true growth People have been naysaying China for a while but it's kept merrily growing. Mostly it's because the Chinese tend culturally to be pro education and hard working but in China were reduced to very low incomes by Mao's communism and have since been recovering and getting back towards the kind of economy they have in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and the like. GDP per capita in China is $6,800 (up from $951 in 2000) against $32k in Taiwan and $55k in Singapore so there's a way to go. A housing crash will probably just be a blip for a while. They'd have to turn back to Mao to really muck things up.

hackuser 11y ago
> People have been naysaying China for a while but it's kept merrily growing. That's characteristic of both bubbles and genuine exceptional performance, and in many situations in addition to national economies. Look at rapidly growing startups, for example.
- tim333 11y ago
  I think China has both bubbles and genuine exceptional performance. The property market there is pretty bubbly. And I don't know if you'd even call the stock market thing a bubble when it was deliberate government hyping.
mooreds 11y ago
China recently and Japan from 1960-1990 took very similar paths to prosperity: Click on the max timeframe for the first charts below to see the similar growth curves: http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp http://www.tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp http://www.tradingeconomics.com/china/gdp http://www.tradingeconomics.com/china/gdp
- tim333 11y ago
  I think Japan stopped growing rapidly partly because they'd caught up with the west and couldn't keep transforming by copying more developed countries. I don't think China's there yet. Maybe if their gdp/capita goes from $6.8k (China) to $39k (Japan) that will be the case but there's a way to go.

maxthegeek1 11y ago

Any nation with a large rural population with access to easy credit has the potential for massive growth. The majority of China's population still consists of subsistence farmers. China should be able to maintain rapid growth until those farmers are integrated into a modern industrialized economy at which point the returns on investment will start to diminish like it has for every other industrialized nation.

adventured 11y ago
China can't integrate those farmers, there are no jobs for them. And that's before China has to lay off tens of millions of industrial workers they no longer need, and that's before robotics completely decimates low-value manufacturing. Those subsistence farmers are kept that way because there's nothing else for them to do and there never will be. China can't allow the productivity of their farming to rise - it's among the lowest on earth - because of the social chaos that would occur. Unless you can find another three to four billion global consumers equal to your typical US or European consumer, such that China can then employ 450 million more people in jobs.

fspeech 11y ago

It is not necessarily about the sustainability of the Chinese economy. No matter how much capital the hedge funds can muster it will be puny compared to PBoC resources. The real threat to the yuan is if regular Chinese become convinced of the trade. Hedge funds bet against the yuan because right now it is one-sided: meaning they don't need to worry about short squeezes as typical shorters would have to. If yuan were to sharply rise it is pretty certain that PBoC would intervene. This makes the bet against the yuan relatively safe. The only way the PBoC can stop the shorts is to make borrowing cost high. But it is also trying to make the yuan more widely used so it is loathe to do that as well over any extended time.

neximo4 11y ago
> No matter how much capital the hedge funds can muster it will be puny compared to PBoC resources This is incorrect. Hedge funds borrow and create temporary money by writing derivative contracts such as options, futures & swaps. It is by this logic they can actually muster more funds than the PBOC in aggregate. Quite simply the market for currencies is bigger than the PBOC and the hedge funds, but there are more hedge funds that are richer than the 3T in reserves the PBOC has access to. This is partly why the PBOC uses the overnight rate to limit resources (such as to affect the interest rate of the derivatives instead of the Yuan prices they bear). It would be possible to profit by arbitraging the interest rate so this would make using derivatives expensive too. Of course affecting interest rates affects the entire economy as a whole and is unsustainable.
- fspeech 11y ago
  There is relative little rmb outside the country. Not everyone can just go inside China and borrow yuan and buy USD. If you are talking about non deliverables, who will be your counter party if everyone wants to go short?
  - neximo4 11y ago
    > There is relative little rmb outside the country. There doesn't need to be any, so long as the counter currency exists (the USD, EUR, JPY, etc) there can be a control against the onshore yuan, whether it trades or not. There is always a counter party, It can be created using swaps to other currencies and to other companies actual cash flows. I wouldn't want to argue against this topic excessively because its a fairly clear cut case of 'this time its different' with China, primarily through marketing. I'd point out that on previous occasions in history, the gold & silver pegs, various cross currency pegs. It has always been the case the price setter has assumed they were bigger than the market and it has always turned out the opposite. It is also because the market can stand the test of time. This combined with today's use of leverage & derivatives is an even more dangerous combination. Markets always assume the correct rate, because if not there is something that can be profited from. None of what I say precipitates bias, I'm not against China's rise. I even believe the GDP numbers out of China, as I mention in another comment on this page. This is just the basis of how markets work. The predicate of your assumption is the PBOC is bigger than the market for Yuan trade and this is incorrect. In something as liquid as a currency a counter party will always be available.

legulere 11y ago

Printing tons of US Dollars to finance an enormous deficit in the balance of trade [1] seems way more unsustainable to me. The only reason it has been holding up until now is actually the US Dollar reserves of China [2]. [1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Handelsbilanzen_Deutschland%2C_Japan%2C_USA%2C_Vereinigtes_Königreich.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Handelsb... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_reserves_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_reserves_of_C...

simonh 11y ago
Reserves which fell by half a billion dollars last year, and still falling. This is why the funds are betting against the Yuan. How far is China willing to see it's reserves fall before it blinks? http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-foreign-exchange-reserves-fall-107-92-billion-in-december-1452161583 http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-foreign-exchange-reserves...
- dingo_bat 11y ago
  Did you mean half a Trillion and not Billion? Because it seems to me that China has $1.5 trillion+ reserves, and half a billion drop would not be cause for surprise.
  - simonh 11y ago
    Oops yes Trillion, not Billion thanks. Too late to edit.
  - dragandj 11y ago
    He probably means "european billion". In French and other European languages, milliard is a billion and bilion is a trillion.

vox_mollis 11y ago

There isn't a top economist alive who believes China's self-reported GDP numbers aren't fudged in one way or another Meta: Why is it SOP on HN to downvote/chastise those who claim US economic numbers are fabricated, or post zerohedge/shadowstats links, yet fully embrace the notion of the PRC is doing it? What makes the US so special in its sainthood?

mahranch 11y ago
> Why is it SOP on HN to downvote/chastise those who claim US economic numbers are fabricated, or post zerohedge/shadowstats links, yet fully embrace the notion of the PRC is doing it? Because even if the U.S was doing it, it would be minor fudging. If China is doing it, it's almost wholly fabricated and un-reflective of reality. The U.S has plenty of independent verification of its numbers, and tons of channels for oversight. China literally has no oversight. Their government is the end-all, be-all. The alpha and omega. They don't have any oversight whatsoever. Their government runs the media (that's not an exaggeration, they literally own the news agencies) as well, so you don't get for-profit news organizations who would love nothing more than an economic controversy of that scale to come out so they could report on it and make loads of cash. Basically, the entire premise is silly if you just use a little critical thinking.