Skip to main content

Fun on Saturday: China

Whether the population of China is 1 billion or 1.4 billion is of little importance, what is important is the age bands.   Like Japan where the average age is now 50, which literally means that half the population is older than 50, 30% of the overall population is over 65 and retired.  No longer contributing to the economy.  They are consumers, not producers.

The latest figure for China is that the total population is probably just North of 1 billion.   More seriously, the nearly 400 million who have been erased from the population census (again the figure for China is "mobile") were NOT born after 1985, when China introduced the one-child policy.   It gets worse, China has been for that entire period self-selecting gender via abortion, in favour of boys, which means that the shortage of women is now catastrophic, and women are choosing not to have children.  In large cities (and there are many) the reproduction rate is now officially below 0.7 (2.1 is the replacement level).  

These three factors are a catastrophe for China.  Demographically it has been gutted, and there are no simple fixes, because the Chinese have adapted to the one-child policy (including their homes), so they have created a self-reinforcing spiral of demographic and economic decline.

How do we know, it's easy, salaries for assembly line workers have risen 15-fold in the past decade and a half. We don't need stats for that, the market shows the jobs and their rates.  We also know that China is facing deflationary pressures, again, prices on the streets are falling.

Finally, virtually all of China's 250 million middle class has all its savings in Chinese Real Estate.   The country has between 500 million and 1.5 billion surplus homes, unoccupied, often made of paper and certainly a drag on the economy.   Between 20% and 30% of China's economy is real estate.   Finally, all state and local governments are dependent on the sale of real estate to fund their ongoing operations.  

The pro-China lobby will say, there are solutions to these problems, and the answer is yes, but the more positive outlook on China is dependent on everything working out perfectly.  For the past decade and a half, the government has done nothing!  So unlikely outcome.

Finally, over the past five years capital investment has risen five-fold in the US, Mexico and Vietnam,  The three largest beneficiaries of the exodus from China.  Foreign manufacturers are leaving, and those remaining are doing so because of the sunk costs in plants and equipment.

The problem for the OECD is how messy will be the exit, we are dependent on mineral extraction, processing, assembly and a lot of machinery manufacturing.   The biggest "risk" is transformers.   That's the problem because the West has little physical exposure to China, and the capital markets are largely closed to foreigners.   


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

what people get wrong about tariffs

 The issue is simple. What percentage of the economy is dependent on tariff goods? The truth, is that the US economy is far more closed than people understand. People genuinely believe that all manufacturing has ceased to exist in the United States all given to China on the altar of woke policy the truth can be further from That statement. Only about 15% of US GDP is related to foreign trade. Of that amount, slightly more than half is from Canada in Mexico. And half of that is energy. What that means, is that about 7% of US GDP is tariff dependent. The proof in the pudding, is how little money tariff generates. People think that 30 or 50 billion is a lot it’s not in an economy that has $3 trillion. The impact on the US economy will be less visible but not absent. Inflation hasn’t occurred yet first because tests have hardly started to bite, but more importantly it’s such a small percent of the economy. Now certain things are critical. The rare earth metals from China were critical....

The end of Tesla?

 it takes a special kind of idiot, to think that he can antagonize his entire customer base, and think that it will not impact his business. When Elon Musk went to work for Donald Trump, and created the doge department, he antagonized every liberal, and these people represent 90% of his client base.That’s not a brilliant move. Now Elon Musk is worth hundreds of billions of dollar, so he shouldn’t care a great deal, however, he needs to care because of several other issues. The cyber truck has been a disaster, most have had to be recalled because of defective glue, it’s not a truck, it’s not a car, it’s noisy, relatively uncomfortable, but great as a development platform. What Tesla has learned in making car manufacturing more seamless is truly amazing. The problem was that Elon Musk was so pissed with the Democrats, and with Joe Biden, in particular because of some slight, which were just plain stupid too. By the way, that he decided to support with hundreds of millions of dollar, ...

Demographics

 I am preparing a kind of family tree for our children so that they know where they came from.  In my family I am the only survivor, although my brother and sister died recently they were both in their seventies (a story I told already).    It was a fun process, but it provided more than that.  First, I married relatively young I was 26 when I married and nearly 30 when our first child was born.   I was looking at my ancestors.  On my mother's side, she had 6 siblings, Four died before the age of 30, two in war, and two from illnesses.  Only she and a single sister survived.   The two boys had a child each but they died in WWII, and the other sister died as an infant.   what is interesting is that every one of my mother's siblings had children in their early 20s.   I know that my mom was hardly 20 when my brother was born.    What is remarkable is that among our friends, we are the only ones to have fou...