Here's our summary of key economic events overnight that affect New Zealand, with news bad corporate behaviour is in the news today.
But first in the US, there more evidence that American are restraining their spending. May consumer credit balances fell more than expected and taking the consecutive declines to three months. The May -5.3% drop has compounded to -30% in the past three months as wallets remain closed. This will is a core contributor to the US and worldwide recession and indicates it will be very deep and longer lasting than some analysts have assumed. While the June data is likely to show the decline hesitated, July data will almost certainly show it retreating again.
The OECD released updated corporate tax tracking data overnight and they say it shows there is a misalignment between the location where profits are reported and the location where economic activities occur. Revenues per employee tend to be higher where tax rates are zero, and in investment hubs (where the predominant business activity is “holding shares and other equity instruments”). On average, the share of related party revenues to total revenues is higher for multinationals in investment hubs. Visa and Mastercard are the icon businesses that show these traits.
A new report, which Facebook itself commissioned, says the social media network has not done enough to protect users from discrimination, falsehoods and incitement to violence. The findings come as the company gives a free-pass to the US President to post any false narrative and amplify divisive and unfounded rumours, and it will add to pressure on the company in the midst of an advertiser boycott which now is up to more than 900 major advertisers. There is little evidence however that New Zealand companies are boycotting the platform, despite one of the worst uses originating here (the Christchurch mosque shooting livestream). Basically, Facebook doesn't care. Facebook is also a company that uses the tax avoidance strategies identified by the OECD.
In Australia, regulators and bankers are colluding to sanitise bank financial results. When a customer can't pay a debt, it is impaired. If they can't pay when it is due, it is past due. But the ABA is extending the pandemic deferral program for many customers who can't pay by another four months. And APRA, in conjunction with ASIC, is actively encouraging the move, giving cover to bankers not to provision such loans. It is a twist on 'responsible lending' both regulators would prosecute if they weren't party to it. Deferring loans might be a good moneymaker, until the customer can't pay. Then the regulators will expect the shareholders to take the loss which will be much larger than it if was just recognised when it first occurred. It is amazingly irresponsible regulation - and banking. Both just recently signed up to responsible lending practices. You do wonder what the auditors will think.
Wall Street is pretty much unchanged today, up just +0.1% in early-afternoon trade. They follow European markets which were quite negative overnight, all down about -1%. Yesterday, Shanghai firmed sharply at the end of its trading day, up +1.7% to continue its heady bull run. Hong Kong up +0.6% but Tokyo was -0.8% lower. The ASX200 also had a down day, dropping -1.5% led by investors downgrading banks. Meanwhile the NZX50 Capital Index fell -0.3%.
The latest compilation of COVID-19 data is here. The global tally is 11,892,400 and that is up +244,000 since this time yesterday. Global deaths reported now exceed 545,000 (+5000).
A quarter of all reported cases globally are in the US, which is up +58,600 overnight to 3,120,500. US deaths now exceed 134,300. The number of active infections in the US is now up +22,000 to 1,613,100.
In Australia, there have been 8886 cases, another +131 since this time yesterday, and still concentrated in Melbourne which is now in a new lockdown. Their death count is unchanged at 106 and 8 people are now in ICU. Their recovery rate has slipped back further to 84%. There are now 1293 active cases in Australia (up +100 in a day).
The UST 10yr yield is marginally softer at just under 0.65%. Their 2-10 curve is unchanged at +49 bps. Their 1-5 curve is soft at +13 bps, and their 3m-10yr curve firm at +54 bps. The Aussie Govt 10yr yield is unchanged at 0.89%. The China Govt 10yr is up again, up another +3 bps at 3.12%. And the NZ Govt 10 yr yield is also unchanged at 0.98%.
The gold price is up by another +US$14 to US$1,811/oz a new nine year high and now within 5% of its all-time high.
Oil prices little-changed. They are still just over US$40.50/bbl in the US and the international price is still just under US$43.50/bbl.
And the Kiwi dollar has stayed firm at now just over 65.7 USc. On the cross rates we are unchanged at 94.2 AUc. Against the euro we hanging in at 58 euro cents. That means our TWI-5 is still at 70.3 and its highest since January.
The bitcoin price firmer overnight, up +1.4% to US$9,419. The bitcoin rate is charted in the exchange rate set below.
The easiest place to stay up with event risk today is by following our Economic Calendar here ».
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110 Comments
From my own limited Facebook observations, Facebook gives pretty free reign to all the TDS people . That will have to stop as well, of course. False narratives, divisiveness and unfounded rumours are their stock in trade. Classic examples, anything on CNN, anything said by BLM.
“I think it is really important to recognise that there are two functioning legal systems in NZ. One is the Māori legal system. The other is our state legal system, which includes the common law. "
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/122056368/the-peter-ellis-case-and-mor…
It could be argued that NZ already has two legal systems in operation at a functional level - statute law and case law. Add to that the difficulty of enforcement compounded by discretion.
It has often been said that the law runs 20 years behind society - a notion that I shouldn't wonder if some on this forum find hard to grasp, not the least of which because the views expressed here seem to often correlate with what other demographs might describe as 'boomer', and all the 'pale, male and stale' connotations that word implies.
The difficulty is of course having a founding document that by international law must be interpreted by the principle of contra preferendum i.e. be understood from the perspective of the party whose language and culture was not the one by which such an agreement was made by in the first place. From an international law perspective, Tikanga Māori is the legitimate law here and not the adverserial Westminster system.
Obviously, the courts have a hard time reconciling this in practice and this gets played out in case law. Mā te wā.
Not two 'legal systems' - it is one integrated system. Statute is created by parliament, the legal system then develops the law by a process of interpretations and judgements which comes to comprise 'the law' as we know it. Which unavoidably takes time. The idea that parliament 'makes' the law as it ultimately applies is erroneous. Your gratuitous identity politics insult about boomers finding some concepts hard to grasp and the tiresome typecasting racial profiling nonsense belongs on other sites. Int.co is currently the most even handed and best moderated site where people of all political and philosophical views propose and consider provocative positions and exchange robust views in a civil fashion. Such as the claim that Tikanga Maori is the 'legitimate' legal law in NZ.
Think the ‘mild’ form of COVID-19 is nothing to worry about? Think again…..everything from months of fatigue (the ‘long tail’ effect) through to serious brain disorders now being recorded in individuals diagnosed with the ‘mild’ form of the disease.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/06/11/coronavirus-chronic/?a…
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/coronaviru…
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/08/warning-of-serious-brain-…
Going by the CDC provisional death counts by week Covid has burnt out in the US and we aren't going to see the death rates of the Asian flu in '57.
Click on the top left arrow by Table 1 to see chart.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm
NYC
https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data-deaths.page
Deaths peaked in mid April in the US. See linked chart. How much time do you need?
Excess deaths are trending back to normal.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm
Mate, I don't see how that is so hard to understand if you read the basic stats and follow it.
Somehow from the very beginning people clutched at straws and presented them as fact, now proven to be incorrect. Just the other day people on here were saying 'were are the ones that were social that we should not go to LD'.... they are back and half cocked as per usual.
It was 14 days from the first signs of infection till death. Medicail staff seam to have a better understanding now and that time may stretch out.
The latest spike in US infection rates was about two weeks ago, so in the next week we should have a better understanding.
Yeah that plateau... the stats from arround the US holiday period were put on the go slow and actually stopped in some States. It is irrational for figures to go from the mid to high 50k's to mid 40l's the next day. Maybe those lagging numbers will be added or they will be just set aside to keep the US population spending but they are still there and still going higher.
From the same page
"Number of deaths reported on this page are the total number of deaths received and coded as of the date of analysis and do not represent all deaths that occurred in that period. Data are incomplete because of the lag in time between when the death occurred and when the death certificate is completed, submitted to NCHS and processed for reporting purposes. This delay can range from 1 week to 8 weeks or more, depending on the jurisdiction and cause of death. "
So the fact it is tapering off in the last 8 weeks is not surprising.
"Low rates are not stimulus, they tell you the entire system wants to hold liquid stuff. Any liquid stuff. Realizing this, it isn’t that much of a leap to figure out why."
https://alhambrapartners.com/2020/07/07/dont-low-rates-on-junk-bonds-me…
Looks like Michael Levitt was bang on in early May: "If Sweden stops at about 5,000 or 6,000 deaths, we will know that they’ve reached herd immunity, and we didn’t need to do any kind of lockdown. My own feeling is that it will probably stop because of herd immunity. COVID is serious, it’s at least a serious flu. But it’s not going to destroy humanity as people thought. "
https://www.stanforddaily.com/2020/05/04/qa-nobel-laureate-says-covid-1…
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/
We're at 10 weeks and it looks a long way from peaking. Also Sweden has increased it's social distancing measures lately to try and reduce their deaths, so they're breaking his experiment.
"TSD: What is your prediction for when the rest of the world will reach a peak number of deaths?
ML: Something between eight and 14 weeks. "
Santa Clara County cases peaked in May? Nope, still rising, and rising fast lately.
https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=Santa+Clara+Co…
"TSD: To end on a lighter question, what is your prediction for whether fall quarter will be held on campus?
ML: That’s an issue of politics, that’s an issue of state politics. I’m pretty sure we will be on campus for fall quarter. Santa Clara County, it looks to me, like cases have peaked, although deaths are fluctuating. It doesn’t look too bad. I would certainly hope that Stanford opens for the fall. "
So glad we're in NZ. BBC article: US surpasses three million coronavirus cases. "More than three million people in the US have now tested positive for Covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins University. Over 131,000 deaths have been reported, and on Tuesday the US broke its record for most new cases reported in one day. Despite the rise, the White House wants to press forward on some reopenings, including for schools."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53342222
with 130k deaths and IFR around 0.5% true number of infections is probably well over 20million. Mask adoption is continuing to improve: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/us-states-require-masks/story?id=71472434
Sweden has a compliant population who follow the governments advice on social distancing. This has slowed COVID19 there to a trickle.
They are however no where near herd immunity. To get herd immunity you need about 60% of the population infected & with antibodies with 10,000,000 people they would need 6,000,000 infections. This hasn't happened as with 6,000,000 infections you would expect 36,000 deaths "assuming an IFR of .6%. Their death toll is at 5,000. Further this all depends on people that have been infected developing adequate, long term immunity which is controversial at the moment.
One thing that's notable about Sweden is that if you have a population of people who socially distance COVID19 can all but be slowed to a trickle.
Read the Levitt link above on herd immunity - herd immunity could be as low as 10-20% of the population. Given Swedish death rates are down to single figures it is a big stretch to suggest deaths are going to increase six fold to 35k. It is also a stretch to suggest the Swedish population is better behaved than other countries.
Also from Sweden;
“One interesting observation was that it wasn’t just individuals with verified COVID-19 who showed T-cell immunity but also many of their exposed asymptomatic family members,” says Soo Aleman. “Moreover, roughly 30 per cent of the blood donors who’d given blood in May 2020 had COVID-19-specific T cells, a figure that’s much higher than previous antibody tests have shown.”
...“Our results indicate that public immunity to COVID-19 is probably significantly higher than antibody tests have suggested,” says Professor Hans-Gustaf Ljunggren at the Center for Infectious Medicine, Karolinska Institutet, and co-senior author. “If this is the case, it is of course very good news from a public health perspective.”
https://news.ki.se/immunity-to-covid-19-is-probably-higher-than-tests-h…
Trump is president, he should be able to say what he wants. If you start censoring the leader of your country I can see lots of bad outcomes.
We forget he was elected in a democracy, he represents a huge percentage of the electorate like it or not. Putin never gets the same criticism, perhaps the memory of what can happen if you get on the wrong side of the old USSR is still in the back of people minds.
History is not judging Obama that well.
So Trump was right the Wuflu is nothing to worry about. But wait that dose not add up to Trump being bad......
How many times do we have to go down the track of nothing to see here... BAU keep on spending.
At the start of the year we had several flash points that threatened to push the globe into financial hardship. Then we had the Wuflu, it is not the virus itself that is the issue, it is the global economic situation that is the issue.
Death rates may stay flat I give you that but it is still a guess at best. If the death rates stay low, there is still the issue of a hell of a lot of people being sick and not consuming / producing as before for several weeks. That adds up to an economy that is sick and struggling.
Agreed.
Getting pretty tired of David Chaston's biased opinion on America and Trump. "the company gives a free-pass to the US President to post any false narrative and amplify divisive and unfounded rumours". No, it's called freedom of speech. Who is the all knowing oracle who decides what is divisive and what is rumour?
We can all draw the line when there is incitement of violence but other than that, everything should be fair game and the public can determine there own conclusions. All politicians lie yet David is suggesting Facebook should moderate and "fact check" only one side of the political spectrum.
"Who is the all knowing oracle who decides what is divisive and what is rumour?"
During a global pandemic? If only there was some specialist workforce we could listen to instead of a repeatedly-failed property investor and pathological liar that people insist be exempted from basic scrutiny because he's President.
The point is that the other side is equally as bad.
We are constantly fed 'Trump is bad' day in day out. Where is the media on the Dem's, they have relentlessly attacked Trump to remove him and failed miserably time after time. The Dem's are a shambles of no delivery.
Exactly. The dissolving of consensus reality is the greatest threat of our times. I'm no fan of the mainstream media, but when people start trusting random loonies on the Internet more than actual journalists -- and the President encourages that, because it's convenient -- yes, we have a problem. There are many people, some on this site, who will reject any criticism of Trump as lies regardless of how legitimate the outlet is. At that point, there's no point even having the discussion because any criticism is just met with 'CNN!' and 'Killary!' It's a religious cult.
Based on the *mountains* of available evidence, if you are unable to conclude that Trump is a truly reprehensible person, then it's worth making a note-to-self that your brain may lack certain moral-judgment functions. I'm not even insulting you, I find it truly fascinating.
Assuming he was elected because the good people of the USA actually like him, rather than just see him as better than the truly awful alternatives. The US has been at war for 20 years, so there are many families of maimed and broken men and women who fell for the lies of both Democrats and Republicans and served in pointless foreign wars. They hate what the political establishment has done to them. They see the political establishment as the destructive force that has exported their jobs to China and impoverished their communities.
I'm not disputing that the Democratic establishment is a hideously corrupt machine. The American people, unfortunately, are left with extremely poor choices. If there were any justice in this world, then at least Bernie Sanders might have won the democratic nomination. I just find it difficult to stomach that anybody could actually like such a horrible person (Trump).
That's the thing, at present Trump hasn't filled any of his election promises; Not the wall, not increasing jobs and certainly not protecting the people from coronavirus. People have long seen past the lies, it's only the uneducated old white men that still back Trump. Ah well, the coronavirus will weed them out in the next few months before they get a chance to vote for him.
It's also worth taking a look at Trumps approval polls which are very much on the decline, now just 38% approve of the job Donald Trump is doing as president. Gallup poll article: Trump's Job Approval Rating Steady at Lower Level. https://news.gallup.com/poll/313454/trump-job-approval-rating-steady-lo…
I thought they were being called out? We are not talking about that. Go wild with the "calling out"It is the call for corporations to censor dialogue that we question. Even Meghan and Harry are trying to get things erased from the Internet and protect us from ourselves.
Did I attack the "private commercial platforms"? I thought people were tyrannizing Facebook by pressuring their advertisers. I'm more attacking activists and pressure groups pressing companies to change their terms and conditions and definitions. Zuckerberg gets what's happening and is valiantly trying to keep Facebook reasonably a platform of free speech but he will likely fail. The people and his workers seem to be mostly against him. I suspect most people are just doing it because they are offended by Zuckerberg's wealth. I hope they enjoy their dystopia, I know I am.
Where is the media on the Dem's, they have relentlessly attacked Trump to remove him and failed miserably time after time.
He's the 3rd president ever to be impeached. The senate failed to convict, but that's not the fault of democrats. There was enough evidence presented that they should have convicted - Romney voted for it.
John Bolton deliberately didn't testify and is now releasing a book that goes on to document even worse transgressions than what Trump was impeached for. Again not the democrats' fault.
If you haven't watched "Active Measures" I thoroughly recommend it. Chilling and almost unbelievable in today's age. All road lead to Putin and Trump is just a puppet for him.
Even if 10% of it is true (and there is a lot of smoke) the world should be very scared.
I follow Trump on twitter , and all I can say is that's the way Trump sees things , he is full of bluster , bravado and insensitive comments, but that's about the sum of it .
And quite often the things he says or tweets are right in my view.
Last year I spent 2 months in the US with my wife, and I attended a conference of members of the profession I practice . I was quite surprised how many educated professionals and ordinary hard-working folk in the US support Trump.
I cam e away realizing that we here in NZ are too influenced by the Herald , and TV news which has a distinctly anti- Trump agenda .
God only knows why .
Americans have every right to be concerned about China gutting their industries, or the EU having unfettered access to US markets from regulations that were invoked after WW2 to help Europe recover from the war , and have no bearing on today's situation .
Imagine if we had 20,000,000 illegal immigrants living here in New Zealand ? Or if people started hacking down statues here ?
I used to watch CNN until I realized that the US media can say anything they like , even if its untrue , under the guise of "free speech ".
Their standards of US journalism would not wash elsewhere , they run stories that are wild and untrue and simply FAKE, and its good that Trump calls it for what it is "fake news " . Sometimes the left media's interpretation or slant on what he says makes me wonder if the journalists writing this crap speak some language other than English , or have issues with basic comprehension .
The US media are all in a tizz , because they think as the "4th Estate " they are a law unto themselves over there, and no one has ever treated them like this.
You don't need to look far to see that plenty of NZers are also concerned about too high a volume of immigration, too much transferring of wealth to asset holders, exploitation of taxpayers, and a smaller and smaller share of the pie going to productive workers.
Trump was right about those being problems, just as people are right about them here.
Unfortunately Trump has not followed through, and his removing of transparency of where money is being handed out at the moment is just another sign that he played the electorate for his own gain, and is not delivering. He's clearly corrupt, useless, a rapist (hey, so was Clinton) and racist, and not delivering, but he was right about people facing massive problems and the establishment being one of them.
(John Key disappointed so many by doing the same: campaigning on real issues then ignoring them and pretending they didn't exist.)
The findings come as the company gives a free-pass to the US President to post any false narrative and amplify divisive and unfounded rumours, ...
Anything Trump says is lies, anything the Dem's say is correct? Sure Trump is a nutter but the Dem's are equally as bad if not worse. I don't see the US coming out of this in one piece.
There's a big difference between the American electoral college system of democracy where the popular vote can be swamped by structural mechanisms, and what we here in Aotearoa-New Zealand consider to be democracy in terms of proportional representation.
I don't think that David Chaston's comments are censoring so much as opinion. And last time I checked, opinion is perfectly fine in the democracy we live in here.
History is not judging Obama that well.
History never judges fading empires well.
Every empire is a dictatorship.
Pritsker said that US imperialism abroad is linked to poverty in the US itself. “It’s the same issue, and that’s what [Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.] said. Some of the listeners might know that in the late years of his life, Dr. King was an ardent critic of the Vietnam War, and he supported the antiwar movement,” he said, noting it lost the civil rights leader much of his mainstream liberal base.
“He was talking about radical things. He said the bombs that drop in Vietnam explode in the inner cities of the United States. What he meant is that we spend billions, hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars now, today, destroying, killing poor people overseas. And the people we send - poor Black and brown kids - overseas to kill even poorer people, they come back, and they come home to communities that are completely underfunded, underdeveloped, where the police are let loose like monsters and set [upon] these kids.”Link
A man ahead of his time. Sadly anyone who sticks their head up against the war US machine ends up dead. Very surprised that Trump is still alive but that killing would be more see through than Epstein stringing himself up and managing to turn the video cameras off beforehand.
He can say whatever he wants. But that doesn't mean websites / news sites / etc need to display it.
I have no issue with Trump saying the world is flat (which he no doubt believes), but if a website or news feed then displays that as fact because he said it that is a different thing. Not saying the website can't do that, but if they do then users and advertisers may find them less relevant.
The general obsession with not letting businesses and people fail and supporting them at all cost (literally), is unbelievable, latest example the OZ banking system, DC is absolutely right, not calling bad loans what they are and calling them in, only makes matters worse but no one seems to care because matters will be worse "later on"
In history, there are many more slow declines and/or cultural & economic relocations than there are huge immediate resets. The way we think about history is to focus on the dramatic singular events and neglect looking at the complex systemic issues that slowly change the world.
If in 150 years, the world has moved in a very different direction to the one we have all been assuming it would go in then the future historians may look back on us and in their attempts to understand why the world changed course, they may see the GFC as the beginning of the end, or even the 1987 stock market crash, or the dot.com bubble or Nixon detaching from the Gold Standard. Maybe the Western World will have some kind of renaissance and they will look back and say that this pandemic was the kick up the butt that spurred new innovation? We cannot know.
We live in an ever changing and volatile world. Our brains trick us into keep recreating comforting narratives that we are in control, that the world is stable and predictable, but it never ever has been. There are certainly repeating patterns and themes in our own behaviours but it's impossible to guess where and when they might pop up. We are always in a flux of building up to some kind of conflict. The seeds of each conflict are usually sown decades prior. And as far as we are aware, an age old battle between "conservatives" and "progressives" has always existed. ALWAYS. It isn't unique to our modern times. What we consider conservative and progressive of course constantly changes too. Hindsight distorts our thinking and we apply biases or a frame of inevitability to outcomes (one of our brains tricks to comfort us that the world is safer and more predictable than it really is again).
This could be the great reset, but the great reset might take a century and who knows what it is resetting to? Not I.
But no.
It's good but it misses the exponential bit.
https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy.h…
an oldie but a goodie
I'm perplexed that you can post this but miss the same principle when it comes to health. I was exposed to a different pathway so I've known the slow decline was in place. More refined and junk foods, a more compromised food chain from factory farming, more drugs to keep sick people alive longer, less activity, greater obesity and other diseases relating to all these lifestyle choices. 72% of people admitted to ICU with CV in the UK are obese. This is why Covid-19 is not an event to be survived but the start of a trend. A slow suicide that you can't manage away.
Seems like our betters have all decided that a Japan situation -- supporting asset prices at any cost, even if it means no growth for decades -- is better than allowing a crash. Given the social perils of mass unemployment, I'm not sure they're wrong, but a crash would probably suit me better as a young(ish) person with no assets but future earning capacity. I also wonder how long institutions will pretend growth is just around the corner, and at what point they lose all credibility with the public and decision-makers.
True, but to act this way you must either decide that what you leave to your children, grandchildren and great grandchildren does not matter a jot, or convince yourself that the scientific community is wrong, corrupt etc. and the right-wing blogosphere and Fox News are the only ones telling the truth. Both ridiculous.
More bad news for Chinese trade. From the FT
Indian companies are racing to find alternatives to Chinese imports after a deadly border clash prompted a popular backlash and raised the risk of official action against goods from its geopolitical rival.
China has become a vital supplier to Indian industry, with its share of total imports rising from less than 3 per cent in 2000 to 14 per cent this year, according to brokerage Motilal Oswal.
As I have said before, economically China is shooting itself in the foot. What I think makes their current regime so scary is they don't seem to care - aggressive actions despite international opinion now take centre stage over a *slightly* more subtle approach (ie. China in the first decade and a bit of the 21st century)
It's got a very Japan 1930s feel to it...
Does anyone know of any reading that rationalizes their current behaviour? Because it seems quite irrational and dangerous to me.
Japan didn't care in the 1930s because they planned to expand their empire across the asia-pacific region in short order. Their military actions in the latter half of the '30s were that plan being put to action. You aren't concerned about how your actions are perceived when you will shortly be the boot that crushes any opposition.
I think your comparison to Japan in the 1930s is apt, and offers it's own rationalisation of their behaviour.
'You aren't concerned about how your actions are perceived when you will shortly be the boot that crushes any opposition.'
Exactly. The CCP seem to have wiped the word 'Diplomacy' from their dictionary.
It's very similar to Japan in the 30s. Japan committed aggressive atrocity after aggressive atrocity, and incrementally economic sanctions from the West piled up in response. This only made Japan more determined and aggressive, and the sanctions acted as a further incentive to invade other nations (to attain some of the resources they couldn't access because of the sanctions).
Like Japan in the 30s, there is a sense that China is trying to prove a point to The West, that it is a nation / civilization on at least equal footing (actually both Japan then, and China today, see themselves as superior to the West). That fires them up even more.
Thus far the key difference between China today and Japan in the 30s is that China has not invaded anyone. Rather, they are resortnig to 21st century economic and political tactics.
So the tactics are very different, but the underlying psychology is very similar.
I wouldn't say the tactics are all that different. China did annex Tibet, and has effectively annexed Hong Kong. They have also taken about 20 square km in Ladakh, Indian Kashmir in the last month. Perhaps not on the same scale as the Japanese occupation of Korea & Manchuria, but they're doing it.
I would be interested in revisiting historians theories about how the Japanese front could have been avoided. Were they simply too imperialistic, and war inevitable? Or were the sanctions the final straw? Should we have struck decisively first?
According to more and more people on this site the economy is fine, the virus is nothing to worry about, etc.
Desperation is sinking in that bill's need to be paid and the money is not flowing in. The economy must start at all costs.... is what I hearing.
How people take in and process the info is largely dependant on what they want to hear in regards to their money flow. It has a huge bearing on which way they will swing in their comments.
Maybe it is desperation that the economy must start for them not to sink. The opposite is also correct that some people are ready for a crash to profit from it.
Here's a challenge .
Can anyone cite any US law that Trump has broken OR flouted since he has been in office ?
Name ANY one , just one .
For all his bluster and bravado and sometimes insensitive remarks , he is yet to have done anything legally wrong , and it has not been from a lack of the Dems trying every desperate ruse and stretch of their warped imaginations to try and pins something on him
Boatman. Trump is bad!
You are not to question or use your own brain in regards to that. You must be a muppet and follow blindly, conform or be shouted down until you conform.
Funny how comments today say Trump is bad, he is a liar..... followed by the virus is not as bad as we are lead to believe. WTF Trump said it was nothing to worry about but apparently that was crap from a nutter but now they are spouting it and they are correct but Trump is still wrong.
Fake news imploding on itself...
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