Moggyzilla's guide to Modi's visit

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India: the coming superpower

Like I've been saying for some time; and now someone else thinks so, too.

Water wars

James Quinn raises another critical resource issue, namely, water.

Taking his list "Total Renewable Freshwater Supply, by Country" (which excludes Australia, though the situation there could easily become much more challenging), I divided the figures by population size to obtain a per capita water supply, as follows:

From this we note that Canada may have something to offer the USA (Al Capone would be into mineral water now, I guess), and that India may face an even more desperate shortage than China, unless and until desalination plants take off. And parts of South America may have their attractions.

But the Congo: no. I once taught a lad whose family trekked 1,000 miles to the coast to get away from the civil war, and he very nearly didn't make it, because of a blood-thirsty armed patrol. His father nominated him for the chop rather than the favourite son, but they eventually relented.

Any views from survivalists as to where to move the family for a long-term future?

How will the future look?

Thanks to the glacial catchup by the mainstream media, the public is finally worrying about economic depression, and consoling itself with the thought that we've messed it up for everyone, so at least the Chinese won't prosper and come over here as tourists, overdressed, overpaid and taking too many pictures for their digital photoframes at home.

Short-sighted, I think. On the CapitalistsatWork blog, I comment:

I think we should turn our eyes, not on the Depression, but how things will look afterwards. The East will generate demand as it aspires to the lifestyle we used to enjoy, and meantime we have been allowing them to transfer the means of production to their co-prosperity sphere. So the Chinese factories will re-open, perhaps after some of the light industry has relocated to Thailand, the poorer parts of India, and other neighbouring regions?

And I shouldn't discount India as potentially the real industrial powerhouse of the 21st Century, while China scrabbles about annexing territory for extra lebensraum, water and wood.

I think, by the way, that econinvestguru Marc Faber took up residence in Chiang Mai, northern Thailand, not to pursue a monastic existence (hardly characteristic of the formerly ponytailed playboy), but because he's close to "where it's at", or even better (and typical of this farsighted man), where it will be.

Utter stupidity

A silly gloat here, about China being dragged down when the overspending stops.

When will the experts understand that Chindia will have the tools and skilled workers to rebuild their fortune, AFTER the Crash? Why on Earth has the East been subsidising the improvident West for so long, if not as part of a plan to extract all the means of production it could?

Do the experts not realize we have been in a state of economic warfare for years?

Foreign powers are also battening the hatches

Jesse passes on a report from China Daily about China's decision to diversify out of dollar-denominated assets, and he notes that Japan and India are doing the same.

Prepare for a storm; they are.

‘Late late yestreen I saw the new moone,
Wi the auld moone in hir arme,
And I feir, I feir, my deir master,
That we will cum to harme.’

O our Scots nables wer richt laith
To weet their cork-heild schoone;
Bot lang owre a’ the play wer playd,
Their hats they swam aboone.

("Sir Patrick Spens")

And after Tibet?

This is the disputed territory of Arunachal Pradesh (red) - currently Indian, formerly part of Tibet, and included in Tibet on modern Chinese maps. See "Better Days" blog post (Nov 2004) here; a current Indian political comment here; Wikipedia entry on the region here. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Tibetans number an estimated 5 - 7 millions. The official Chinese 2000 Census has the Chinese Han population in the "Tibetan Autonomous Region" (TAR) as merely 6% of the total. However, as this illuminating BBC guide explains, the TAR is not Tibet as its government in exile defines it. The larger Tibetan area including Amdo and Kham contains 6.5 million Tibetans and 8.5 million Chinese immigrants. And there may be bigger plans: "Chinese demographers back in the 1980s estimated that Tibet could provide living space for 100 million Chinese."

Tibet is important because of timber, minerals, extra living space for Chinese - and it houses up to a third of China's nuclear arsenal. A major interest is water, because Western China is very dry; among other plans, one is a hydroelectric plant exploiting the Brahmaputra River, which further down flows through Bangladesh and ultimately joins the Ganges. The Chinese claim it will have twice the output of the Three Gorges Dam. "Work is tentatively scheduled to begin in 2009 but has been described as a 'declaration of war' against India and Bangladesh. One of Tibet's most sacred lakes, Yamdrok Tso, has already been mined, tunnelled and used for hydroelectric development."

The population of Arunachal Pradesh (formerly a part of the Indian state of Assam) is slightly over 1 million. The area was a lifeline to China in WW2 after the Burma Road was cut off by the Japanese in 1942. It is well watered and forested.

UPDATE

Climate change already threatens to reduce the great northern Indian rivers to "seasonal water flows", without further constriction by Chinese projects. The potential extra disruption is discussed in this Guardian article from a year ago.

China: a positive view - and a challenge to India

An old (Jan 2006) interview on Financial Sense with George Gu gives some more hopeful signs: progress towards the rule of law (as we in the West slide into bureaucratic authoritarianism); opening up the economy to outsiders; a reducing role for the military.

Like James Kynge, Gu makes the point that the big profits are made by the multinationals - the cheap labour input from China is only a small factor. (Surely this shows that there is a very strong incentive for China to develop its own marketing and management class.)

Gu explains that although India's labour costs are even lower than China's, India hasn't yet developed its supply chain and infrastructure to the same degree:

... China, over the last 26 years has gotten all of them in one place. For example, in consumer electronics you can set up your shop in Guangdong, then you get more than 10,000 component makers.

So, the gauntlet is thrown at India's feet.

Marc Faber: India rather than the USA

Here is a quote from Marc Faber and a bit of bio info, extracted from INR News:

"If a gun were put to my head and I was asked to choose between two options - putting all my assets into the US or into India - I would choose Indian equities, Indian real estate, and Indian art. The reason behind this choice is partly my strong conviction that US assets will continue to decline relative to assets overseas, and partly because I can see that India may be at the beginning of a lasting economic take-off phase" ...

...From 1978 to February 1990, Marc Faber was the Managing Director of Drexel Burnham Lambert (HK) Ltd. In June 1990, he set up his own business, MARC FABER LIMITED which acts as an investment advisor and fund manager.(Marc Faber - A Simpleton's Guide to Economics and Investment Markets, part II )

By INRnews Correspondent

Dr Faber's comments on Indian urbanisation, the need for new infrastructure, and comparison with China, are also very interesting.

Globalisation - a race we can't win

To put it another way, how much more does a Chinese have to earn, to live well and still undercut America?

In the sheet below, I compare six countries in terms of nominal per capita GDP (in US dollars equivalent). These have to be reinterpreted in terms of purchasing power parity, i.e. if local prices are lower, you can enjoy the same things for less money. (Nominal and PPP terms are taken from slightly different IMF surveys, but you get the idea.)

The last couple of columns answer the question, "How much income would each national need, to match America's standard of living?"

Doubtless there's problems with the methodology - PPP may well change as each country's nominal GDP increases. And it seems clear that the whole world can't live exactly like Americans do today. (It's also interesting to note that pricey, high-tax countries like the UK and Japan can't catch up with the USA without exceeding the latter's per capita GDP.)

But on these figures, China could match American living standards, on a quarter the income. So the low-pay trading advantage it enjoys is huge now, and is likely to remain so.

And look at India and Vietnam - they'd only need about one-fifth American per capita income to have the same in PPP terms. In fact, they could out-compete China in labour costs, which is one reason for China to move away from labour-intensive work like trainer-stitching, and towards heavy industry.

So Vietnam undercuts China undercuts America...

And given India's enormous population, its higher proportion of cultivatable land (compared with China), its well-established political and legal institutions, and its many millions of English-language speakers, it may be that India is the economy to watch this century.

IMF per capita GDP figures quoted from Wikipedia here (nominal) and here (PPP).

Futurology

Continuing the argument about sovereign wealth funds, what might this portend for US Treasury securities?

If foreign governments pull the rug out, there could be a run on the dollar on a scale that the US government wouldn't dare correct with proportionately high interest rates, seeing how indebted everyone is. The doomsters are probably right that it could happen, which is why everybody will make sure it doesn't.

And such a fall wouldn't be in the interest of creditor nations who still value the trade surpluses they enjoy with Uncle Sam. Many Chinese light manufacturing industries are working on narrow margins and don't want to see their profits disappear through foreign exchange movements (though their State is sufficiently powerful and ruthless to go that way if it wants to). I suspect that China will continue to develop towards heavier industries and gradually allow the trainer-stitching work to go to even poorer countries like Vietnam. Meanwhile, it's in no hurry to kill the US cow while she's still giving milk.

So here's my bet:

1. For domestic political reasons, the US will not do what is needed to get the economy back on the level. It will continue to borrow but, fearful of its vulnerability to potentially unfriendly foreigners, lean on its friends for more finance.
2. The US Treasury securities held by China will remain much the same, or even gradually increase in dollar terms, but "ally nations" will increase their holdings proportionately faster. There's not much an emotionally or politically vulnerable British PM won't do for a pat on the back at G8 summits, Bilderberg tie-looseners etc. Goodness knows how much of our future has been sacrificed to the last one's ego.
3. Creditor nations will increase their sovereign wealth funds, favouring investments that are involved in the supply lines from their manufacturing concerns to our end purchasers. Marxism has moved on: you have to have control of the means of production, but even more so of the means of distribution.
4. They will also invest in the lines leading towards their industries: energy, industrial metals and infrastructure. I also guess China will explore healthcare, energy-efficiency, food-oriented genetic research and environmental protection. And water. And foreign farmland (Bill Bonner and Marc Faber are really smart). City planning in all its aspects could become really important.
5. If these countries were private investors, we'd be seeing their portfolios alter their balance between bonds and equities, in the direction of higher risk, higher returns. And like good long-term investors, they will get richer. Maybe eventually, as James Kynge says, demographics and healthcare will eat into this wealth, but it's not going to benefit the West much either way.
6. In the US and the UK, our collective concern will be how to handle the social disruption in our own societies; our concern as individuals will be how to save and invest while we still can, and how to set up our own children in relative security.

They are the masters now - or will be soon

The BBC Ten o' Clock News last night featured an article about China's purchase of a share in Barclays Bank. I have posted a video of part of Chris Mayer's speech at Vancouver (see below), where he discusses "sovereign wealth funds".

China, India and Japan have enormous surpluses of money from their trade. They have bought US Treasury securities (bonds, i.e. loans to the US), but this is a thing governments do to park money that they might need back in year or two, when the trading balance has altered. Since the US/UK (etc) trade deficits are long-running, these eastern countries can now start thinking like young private investors, in which case equities become attractive - offering income from dividends AND the potential for capital growth.

These countries are turning our debt into their ownership, like an old Punch cartoon where a plumber took his customer's house in payment for his work.

This issue is big.

Marc Faber: "Buy early, exit early"

Marc Faber gave us his approach in the Financial Express on Sunday, and his currently bearish outlook on most classes of asset. Like Sir John Templeton, he believes in buying when the pessimism is at its height. He's also quite dismissive of fund managers' performance.

Marc Faber bullish on Indian real estate

See here for Moneycontrol.com's interview with Marc Faber, where he expresses enthusiasm for Indian realty:

...I think that is a no-brainer in the long run. It is a problem for people who will have very high borrowings, against their realty because of interest rates. Realty has always been a cyclical industry, where prices move up or down. But by and large if I look at the world, the reason so many families are rich, that came out of realty, is that the money was tied up in realty. They did not do anything more stupid with their money like buying Internet stocks in 2000 and then losing 90% of their money as prices went down.

So, my advice essentially for people, if you are not an expert in financial matters, to own realty - a safer avenue to wealth.

Faber also predicts a near-future stockmarket correction in the US of more than 10%, and in the longer term:

I expect over the next 20 years interest rates in the US will go much higher than it is perceived by the market place as I think inflation in the US will accelerate on the upside partly because of the rise in the prices of commodity, energy and food. This is also partly because of the weakness in the dollar that will eventually lift import prices.

Is modernisation good for India?

I am grateful to a respondent to my earlier post, "Have we overlooked India?" and I think the exchange is relevant to India's future generally. The visitor says:

I am wondering where we are heading in so called modern era. Example in textile machinery, one airjet can replace 100 handlooms, this means 100 peolple are displaced by a single machine. I am from Handloom city of Panipat (India). Earlier a person with 20 handlooms was happy and feeded his family well. Now even 50 looms are not enough because of the increased cost of living in so called modern era and people are getting trapped in vicious cycle of high cost, loans and increasing capacity.

My reply:

Yes, I am sure that this is extremely difficult and in fact English weavers suffered the same way nearly 200 years ago, which is why some of them turned to wrecking the machines that were harming their trade. But it didn't succeed in halting the changes. On the other hand, people in Britain are now materially much better off, so in the long run industrialisation is to everyone's advantage.

I suppose that the best thing that can be done is for government to support people who have been affected by modernisation, and help them to re-train in new areas of work. If you look at the post after the one you commented on, I give a link to Cafe Hayek. That writer points out that if saris can be made more cheaply, then sari-buyers will have more money left over to buy other things, so there will be demand for items that they could not have afforded before.

I think you cannot stop change happening, but governments can help manage the transition and far-sighted individuals can take advantage of new business opportunities.

Should India move away from hand-made goods?

Speaking of the potential benefits of industrial capital, I note an article today in Cafe Hayek about machine-made saris, balancing the loss to the traditional weaver with the gain to many buyers.

Have we overlooked India?

Indian respondents to Mr Venkatesh's article worry about the movement of the dollar relative to the rupee. But just as America's problem is not the dollar but its national economic fundamentals, so perhaps India should raise her eyes to a more distant prospect. The country has a well-established democracy and an independent judiciary; respect for law, family and property rights; many millions of fluent English speakers (don't worry, the call centres will eventually overcome problems of Western vernacular); and a famously entrepreneurial culture.

India may not be sitting on a vast coalmine, like China, but natural resources aren't everything. It's not natural resources (other than mountain ranges) that preserved Swiss independence, but the history and character of the Swiss. As to commerce, I forget which mega-businessman said he could lose all he had, but so long as he kept his staff he'd get it all back again.

If India avoids over-reliance on its low wage advantage and continues towards more intensively capitalised production, then it too can be a powerhouse in the new world economy. Remember that recently, the British Swan Hunter shipyard has itself been shipped to India.

India rises fast

Chuck Butler at the Daily Reckoning is bullish on India - and Europe.

"The second fastest economic growth in the world resides in India. Interest rates are at good levels, and their relative attractiveness as a country is high, and therefore investors are willing to invest in India."