"I know that China is booming. I know that every time I go to China, and I've been going to China for 26 years -- the first time I went it was 1984 -- and I assure you China is growing very rapidly and doing a lot of things right. Whether it's 8% or 12%, I mean you look at the Indians. Who can believe the Indian number; certainly not me.
I've been going to India for many years, too, and I know they're not growing as fast as China, but they claim to be. The Indians wait for the Chinese to announce their growth numbers and then they announce theirs. They want to make sure they are in the same league. But all of these numbers are made up; you must understand that by now."
Jim Rogers
China’s Innovative Beggar-thy-neighbor Strategy!
ReplyDeleteMark Twain is credited with an early use of the cliché "more than one way to skin a cat" in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, as follows: “she was wise, subtle, and knew more than one way to skin a cat, that is, more than one way to get what she wanted”. Thefreedictionary.com defines beggar-thy-neighbor as: an international trade policy of competitive devaluations and increased protective barriers that one country institutes to gain at the expense of its trading partners. Under the guise of fostering ‘indigenous innovation’, the Chinese government has creatively used a non-conventional, subtle version of beggar-thy-neighbor. Its version doesn’t entail the competitive devaluation of its own currency, which would enhance China’s exports and inhibits its trading partners’ exports to China. China’s version perpetrates an over-valuation of the currencies of one or more of its trading partners. This negatively affects all the trade of the pegged trading partner(s), not just trade with China. During the recent period China pegged its currency to the U.S. Dollar, its version of beggar-thy-neighbor was 8 times as damaging to the U.S. economy as what the media refers to as “China keeping it currency undervalued”.