Dairy prices fall again on low demand; US retail rises, US job openings fall; China releases fishing fleet into oceans; RBA raises rates, cuts growth forecast; UST 10yr 2.73%; gold stable and oil firm; NZ$1 = 62.7 USc; TWI-5 = 71.1

It's pretty provocative from a US foreign policy standpoint.  They recognise that Taiwan is part of China, kind of, when it suits them.  So is it a country or isn't it a country US? The US is clearly spoiling for war, just continuing to ratchet up tension until China have had enough.  Then it's all on.

“It is essential that America and our allies make clear that we never give in to autocrats,” she says.  They will freely trade with any country that are autocrats and even supply them with weapons they know are going to be used on civilians (Saudi Arabia), but apparently if your autocrat friend has oil and is supplying them with oil, you love them and will support their murder of thousands of others without any sort of reprimand.

Frankly American foreign policy appears to be run by corporations, if it benefits big US corporates, then that's what they will do.

The mother of all Jedi mind tricks?

Taiwan cannot exist without trade — especially without trade with China. If this is accurate, then Taiwan is screwed. And the Chinese won’t need a single landing craft to cripple the island. Link

USA sanctions on Russia from the construction of Nord Stream 2 perhaps?

Murray - if you start from a false premise (and you know I think you do), much of what you tack atop that, will also be false.

The fact is that there isn't enough planet, in a mineral, energy and spatial sense. Heck, Europeans were expanding because of crowding/competition, 200 years ago. They saw the places they arrived at, as empty. the incumbents saw them as full. Now, it's global. Nowhere else to go. But more pressing, not enough mineral, energy and sunlit space to go around.

So we will fight. Maybe a series of Iraq-type repressions, maybe one big all-in. Globalism has peaked, and the only question is the steepness of the downward trajectory. I thin the Neocons in the US (Nuland & Co) are well aware of this. They will be well aware that the later the US leaves it, the relatively weaker it will be. There's only one strategic move...

The United States is no longer capable of that since the financial elite deindustrialised the American Empire for its own benefits.

They're more than capable of that. They still make over 10 million vehicles a year, and there's always Mexico.

The US is in almost a perfect position, large industrial base, large agricultural base, and it's not surrounded by potential rivals. Anyone else has to spread out significantly to compete.

She is unelectable.Her husband has been charged with DUI and she is against politicians being unable to buy shares in companies and this is because her husband and family have made some purchases before news broke from the Govt regarding certain policies.

When asked by police to show ID he handed over a California Hiway Patrol Charity Foundation Card that supports officers and their children.

Don't most just work on commission?

I don't think the US has an immigration policy, whether at the state or federal level. In any event they have "refugees" aka illegal immigrants flooding into their country. Texas and Arizona state sending them to New York free of charge by bus where the Democrat mayor is squealing. Easy to shout the odds at a distance from New York about letting them in when you are not the state suffering.

Sleepy Joe completing part of Trumps wall on a safety pretext. I don't think too many were to concerned about  those that drowned crossing the Rio Grande.

At least NZ has the ability to come up with a decent immigration policy but doesn't.

A friend of mine just sailed to Fiji with his family, one of his daily updates included the following: "spending a great deal of time avoiding Chinese fishing boats, four of which belligerently refused to avoid a collision, had to deviate 30 degrees to get around them"

Self sufficiency.

Any bias you want to attach to that comment KW?

Keith - we could just triple down on a housing bubble - how about that?

We tried milking tourists, but they have been harder to herd than cows.

This is what I always struggle with. NZ barely has the capacity for a small handful of industrial ponies.

We can't be a freight and transport hub because we're the end of the line.

The "knowledge economy" has largely failed, because billions of others can and want to do the same.

Scale doesn't exist to make manufacturing viable.

If there was something else we could be doing that was lucrative and competitive, we'd already be doing it.

Once the Oceans are dead its game up folks

If you know how China scrubs data when it wants to, then you would know that they are pretty useless at it. Almost to the point where they know others will know it's bulldust.  Yes they used Chinese data (who else is going to give them it??) but if the data was highly modified by the Chinese government, the epicentre would have been virtually on the counter top of the place where the Chinese government had said it was from.  But it isn't even in the market, but it is nearby.  They also compare multiple data sources and find the results to be pretty well (but not exactly) correlated, that's not what someone would do who is scrubbing the data would do, particularly not the Chinese. They would make it exactly correlated thinking that would remove all doubt. But it's not, some is even contradictory, which causes doubt, which is why the authors still recommend further analysis. 

Regarding "Oh wait a minute, the Chinese have done that in thousands of locations and failed to find a source. So where is the source, oh great scientific minds of Interest?" - you don't find yourself contradicting yourself much? In the first piece you say would shouldn't trust any Chinese data, then jump into trusting Chinese data?

We know humans have been getting diseases from other animals for millions of years, reckoning that this is different because no evidence, puts you firmly in the conspiracy theory camp. I have been in these wild animal markets in China, they are exactly as bad as people think they are, lots of species huddled together all sharing similar spaces.